[Afghan News] January 18, 2013

[یاسمینه]

Pakistan says it will free all Afghan Taliban detainees
By Stanley Carvalho
ABU DHABI (Reuters) - Pakistan plans to release all Afghan Taliban prisoners still in its detention, including the group's former second-in-command, an official said on Friday, in the clearest signal yet that it backs reconciliation efforts.

Regional power Pakistan is seen as critical to the success of U.S. and Afghan efforts to bring stability to Afghanistan, a task gaining urgency as the end of the U.S. combat mission in 2014 draws closer.

Afghanistan has been pressing its neighbor, home to an allied Taliban movement of its own, to free Taliban members who could help promote its tentative reconciliation efforts.

"The remaining detainees, we are coordinating, and they will be released subsequently," Jalil Jilani, Pakistan's foreign secretary, the foreign ministry's top bureaucrat, told a news conference in Abu Dhabi.

Asked if the former Taliban deputy leader, Mullah Baradar, would be among those released, he said "The aim is to release all", but did not elaborate further.

Jilani was speaking after meeting the acting U.S. special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, David Pearce, and Afghan Deputy Foreign Minister Jawed Luddin at the Afghan embassy in Abu Dhabi.

Luddin told reporters the purpose of the meeting was to discuss "security and political dimensions of bilateral relationships" between the three countries.

The Taliban seized power in Afghanistan in 1996 and were toppled by U.S.-backed forces in 2001. Many Afghans fear they will make a renewed push to seize power once Western forces pull out.

Mutual suspicions between Afghanistan and its nuclear-armed neighbor have hampered efforts to tackle militancy in one of the world's most explosive regions.

Luddin said the peace process had gained momentum in recent weeks with the release of some Taliban detainees by Pakistan, preparations by the Afghan Taliban movement to open a political office in Doha, and Afghan President Hamid Karzai's visit to Washington.

"Steps have been taken forward in an environment of cooperation and shared concerns ... 2013 is a very crucial year and we agreed we need to maintain the momentum," he said.

"2013 will see concrete outcomes in the peace process."

At their meeting a week ago, Karzai and U.S. President Barack Obama agreed to speed up the handover of combat operations in Afghanistan to Afghan forces, raising the prospect of an accelerated U.S. withdrawal.

Karzai also appeared to give ground on U.S. demands for immunity from prosecution for any American troops who stay in Afghanistan beyond 2014, a concession that could allow Obama to keep at least a small residual force there.

(Reporting by Stanley Carvalho; Writing by Raissa Kasolowsky; Editing by Kevin Liffey)


Afghan peace process 'hasn't even begun', says US envoy
Islamabad, Jan. 18 (ANI): A real peace process in Afghanistan has not begun and the US does not know what has happened to the Taliban prisoners released by Pakistan, said James Cunningham, US envoy to Kabul.

Pakistan said 26 prisoners were freed late last year in a bid to kick-start peace talks ahead of the withdrawal of US-led NATO troops from Afghanistan, whose government is under pressure from an 11-year Taliban insurgency, reports The Express Tribune.

With the control of prisoners in Afghanistan a major issue between the US and the government of President Hamid Karzai, Cunningham said some freed prisoners had returned to Taliban ranks in senior positions in the past.

Cunningham said the goal is to begin a serious process on peace and reconciliation as soon as possible - but it hasn't been proven possible so far.

Washington began tentative moves towards peace with the Taliban a year ago. But the Taliban broke off talks a few months later, apparently over the failure of the US to free Taliban prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay.

Now the US is negotiating its exit from its longest war, pledging continued support for the Afghan government against an undefeated insurgency. (ANI)


U.S. soldier charged in Afghan massacre had PTSD: lawyer
By Laura L. Myers
TACOMA, Washington (Reuters) - A U.S. soldier charged with slaying 16 civilians, most of them women and children, near his Army post in Afghanistan was diagnosed before his deployment as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and a brain injury, his lawyer said on Thursday.

Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty against Robert Bales, a decorated veteran of four combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan who is accused of gunning down the villagers in cold blood during two rampages through their family compounds in Kandahar province last March.

Military justice experts say the post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) diagnosis, if substantiated, may prove of limited value in helping Bales' attorneys pursue an insanity defense but could make it more difficult for prosecutors to obtain the death penalty, even if they can prove premeditation.

The disclosure that Bales had been diagnosed with PTSD followed a hearing in which defense lawyers told a military judge they were preparing a possible "mental health defense" for Bales, who appeared in court wearing a green military dress uniform.

The judge, Colonel Jeffery Nance, said such a defense would require a formal psychiatric evaluation and that he would order a "sanity board" of independent doctors to review Bales' mental condition.

During Thursday's 90-minute hearing at Joint Base Lewis-McChord near Tacoma, where Bales is being held, defense lawyers also deferred entering a plea on behalf of their client and waived a formal reading of the charges against him.

Asked by the judge whether he understood that the case against him could result in the death penalty, Bales, 39, an Army staff sergeant, replied, "Sir, yes sir."

Under the military justice system, a plea is commonly postponed at this stage to preserve legal options for the defense, whose ability to make additional motions is severely restricted once a plea is entered, experts say.

Civilian defense lawyer John Henry Browne told the judge that Bales' legal team would need at least a year and a half to prepare its case.

Prosecutors say Bales, a father of two from Lake Tapps, Washington, acted alone and with "chilling premeditation" when, armed with a pistol, a rifle and a grenade launcher, he left his base twice, returning in the middle of his rampage to tell a fellow soldier: "I just shot up some people."

The shootings, which occurred over a five-hour period in March, marked one of the deadliest incidents the military has blamed on a rogue U.S. soldier since the Vietnam War, and strained U.S.-Afghan relations.

BRAIN INJURY DIAGNOSIS

Browne said he had government documentation showing that personnel at Lewis-McChord's Madigan Medical Center had found his client to be suffering from both post-traumatic stress disorder and a traumatic brain injury.

He said the diagnosis was made before Bales was deployed in November 2011 to Afghanistan on a tour of duty that ended abruptly with the events for which he is charged.

Defense lawyers have previously said that Bales, who faces 16 first-degree murder charges among other offenses, had suffered a possible concussion from a bomb blast during a prior tour of duty in Iraq.

Legal experts said evidence of PTSD or a brain injury might be used by the defense to bolster an insanity claim, but they doubted such a diagnosis could convince jurors that the accused was unable to appreciate the nature and consequences of his actions - the definition of insanity under military law.

"My research has not revealed a single case in which any person mounted a successful insanity defense in a court-martial based on a PTSD claim," said Eugene Fidell, who teaches military justice at Yale Law School.

But the defense could argue that Bales' PTSD and brain injury were severe enough to cause "diminished mental capacity," making it harder for prosecutors to prove premeditation, which is necessary for him to be eligible for capital punishment, experts said.

Even if the jury finds Bales guilty of premeditated murder, a PTSD claim might be enough to sway just one member of the panel to vote against the death penalty during the sentencing phase of the court-martial. The panel must be unanimous in approving the death sentence.

"That's probably where this evidence would be the strongest and have the most impact on a capital case," said Victor Hansen, a former Army attorney who is now vice president of the National Institute of Military Justice and a professor at the New England School of Law in Boston.

Experts doubted that jurors, all members of the military themselves, would be sympathetic to an overt argument that the military was to blame for deploying a soldier suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.

Defense attorney Emma Scanlan said Bales would participate in a review of his mental state, but wanted him to be examined by a neuropsychologist with expertise in traumatic brain injuries. She also wanted defense attorneys to be present at the examination, which the defense wants recorded.

(Writing by Eric M. Johnson and Steve Gorman; Editing by Cynthia Johnston, Tim Dobbyn, Andrew Hay and Lisa Shumaker)


Corruption in Afghanistan: An introduction to one fine mess
Foreign Policy (blog) By Thomas E. Ricks Thursday, January 17, 2013 By Gary Anderson
Best Defense office of foreign ethics

In 2004-5, I did a study on the future of the Taliban for Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry, who was then the commander of coalition forces in Afghanistan. After the 2001 U.S.-led intervention, the Taliban had appeared on the run, but three years later, they were making a comeback. What I found in the study was that the Karzai government was the chief enabler of the resurgent Taliban movement. Afghan governmental corruption and incompetence was making the Taliban look good in comparison, despite years of misrule when that organization was in power. As a commander, and later as the U.S. ambassador in Kabul, Eikenberry angered Afghan President Karzai by urging reform, and ultimately failed in his attempts to get Karzai to clean up his government in a meaningful way. Today, the Taliban are back in spades. This has damaged every aspect of the U.S. war effort because it affects security, governance, rule of law, and development. These are the pillars of coalition strategy in that unhappy country.

Corruption is exacerbated by the highly centralized Afghan form of government. All provincial (state) and district (county) officials are appointed by the central government in Kabul. On paper, there is nothing wrong with centralization. Many highly-developed democracies such as Japan have basically the same system. It even semi-works in Iraq. Those countries have good transportation and reliable communication systems. This allows the central government to control things that go on in governance in the provinces. None of that is true in Afghanistan. Consequently, it is nearly impossible for the Kabul government to closely monitor the performance of governance and development in the provinces, much less remove incompetent or corrupt officials.

The most pernicious corruption in our province was caused by the provincial commander of the Afghanistan National Police, the provincial prosecutor, and the director of public health. The head cop was a competent administrator, and kept the provincial capital relatively secure; however, he did so by hoarding personnel and resources badly needed by the outlying districts that he was supposed to be supervising. Outside the provincial capital, he was making a handy side-living running a protection racket for drug dealers and smugglers. Some of his handpicked appointees in my district were running extortion and burglary rings.

The prosecutor was making his money by encouraging defense lawyers from all over Afghanistan to send their wealthy clients to our province where he could guarantee light sentences or mere fines for serious offenses. The director of public health for the province, one Dr. Tariq, is a real piece of work. Over three years, he managed to misspend or divert $9 million dollars of World Bank funding, the vast majority of which was U.S.-provided.

While working at the district level, I had success in purging the worst of the bad cops in mid-level leadership positions by threatening to invite Greg Jaffe of the Washington Post to report on police corruption. This did cause the chief to replace to purge eight of them. It was a small start, but a start.

Once I got to the provincial capital as the governance advisor for the entire province, we caught a few breaks; they were caused, not by blatant corruption, but by gender issues. What finally did in the police chief was his reported rape of three female officers who had the gall to file complaints. Although they were eventually forced to retract their charges, a national uproar ensued, and the Afghan national government was embarrassed enough to reassign the top cop. However, to the best of my knowledge, he has not been held accountable for the rest of the corruption he fostered.

The prosecutor became a target because there was national level focus on the fact that many of his client protection scams were related to so-called "honor killings." In these crimes, husbands or other relatives kill a woman or girl for embarrassing the family by such heinous crimes as demanding a divorce or working outside of the house. The scrutiny was encouraged by us, and allowed our local national security directorate commander to organize a sting operation that finally jailed him. However, before he could go to trial, the former prosecutor used his connections to get permission to travel to Saudi Arabia for the annual Haj religious pilgrimage. To the best of my knowledge, he is still on the loose.

Despite our compiling a package on Dr. Tariq and sending it to Kabul, he is still on the job. One of the most appalling charges is that at least 11 women died in childbirth for lack of midwives that World Bank funding had provided for the hiring of such medical personnel in the last year alone.

Almost everyone in the province knew that all three of these characters were bad actors, but no one could do anything about it because they were hired and paid by Kabul. It took outside action by foreigners and the public glare of the media to do what little that we could. Until the Afghan government allows some form of local public review of provincial and district officials, the government of Afghanistan will be its own worst enemy.

Gary Anderson, a retired Marine Corps colonel, was a district governance advisor in Afghanistan's Badghis Province. With transition of the district to Afghan security control, he became the provincial governance and rule of law advisor.


Karzai government accused of Taliban’s return to power
By Meena Haseeb - January 18 2013, 6:07 pm Khaama Press
The Taliban group regime was toppled down following US-led invasion in 2001 however the group once again increased its activities across the country three years back.

According to Foreign Policy Global, the main motive behind return of Taliban militants is the government of Afghanistan under the leadership of president Hamid Karzai.

The report published by Foreign Policy also says that the strangulation and mismanagement and corruption in the government organizations was considerably low as compared to the current government of Afghanistan, during the Taliban regime.

The Foreign Policy in its report further added that the situation has not only affected fight aganst the Taliban militants but had negative impacts over security, governance, law regulation and the strategy of the coalition forces in the country.

Afghan government’s formation and an ultimate focused system has further boosted graft in the country, the report said adding that the provincial and local officials are elected by the central government in Kabul. The bureaucracy is not a bad thing as similar procedures are followed in modern countries as well, according to the Foreign Policy however those countries have good and reliable system to have proper control and monitor on provincial governments.

The procedures according to the Foreign Policy does suit in Afghanistan and US officials have repeatedly called on the Afghan government to bring changes in its administration and fight against the growing corruption. Former US ambassador to Afghanistan Carl Eickenberry also urged president Karzai to seriously fight graft in Afghan government institutions.

The Foreign Policy in its report also said that president Hamid Karzai divided corruption in Afghanistan in two main categories back in December during the international anti-corruption day. He acknowledged graft in Afghan government however he said that major corruption was involved in foreign contracts which are signed with the relatives of high level Afghan government officials.

In the meantime chief of the Special Inspector General For Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) last week said that millions of Dollars were lost in Afghanistan and warned that further misuse was threatening the foreign in Afghanistan.

According to reports US has spent over 90 billion Dollars for the reconstruction of Afghanistan since 2009, which is considered to be largest foreign aid by Washington since the second world war.

Meanwhile SIGAR chief quoted by Washington Post said Washington detonated around $6.8 million to Afghan government for the maintenance and repair of 7000 vehicles of the Afghan national army which are either damaged or they are not in use any more.

The Special Inspector General For Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) following another report last year warned that the government of Afghanistan lacks capabilities to properly maintain military equipments beyond 2014.


U.S. paid to maintain inoperable Afghan police vehicles, audit finds
By Ernesto Londoño, Friday, January 18, 5:23 AM The Washington Post
The U.S. government paid $6.8 million for maintenance of more than 7,000 Afghan police vehicles that had been destroyed or were out of commission, according to an inspector general report released Thursday.

The report, prepared by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, cast further doubt on Afghanistan’s ability to run its nascent security forces after U.S. troops withdraw at the end of 2014.

The audit of a $350 million contract awarded to the Dubai-based firm Automotive Management Services highlights the challenges of keeping meaningful oversight of the United States’ $52 billion investment in Afghanistan’s security forces — a task that is likely to become harder as the American drawdown accelerates.

“The taxpayers and the success of our mission are at risk when contracts such as this are executed without proper planning and oversight,” SIGAR chief John F. Sopko said in a statement.

In response to the report, the NATO training mission that awarded the contract agreed to improve the mechanism it uses to track how many of the more than 30,000 vehicles donated to the Afghan police force remain operable. Late last year, after reviewing the auditors’ preliminary conclusions, the training command removed 7,324 vehicles from its maintenance roster after confirming that they had either been destroyed or had not been serviced for more than a year.

In its written response to the findings, the training command said it expects the updated tracking system to help it save as much as $5.5 million a year.

The report does not say whether investigators found evidence of willful misreporting, a common occurrence in Afghanistan, which is among the world’s most corrupt countries. It said the firm hired to service the vehicles “generally performed and billed in accordance with the contract’s terms and conditions.”

Company employees, however, sometimes did not conduct site inspections as a result of logistical challenges and security concerns, auditors found. Additional U.S. money may have been siphoned because fuel allotments for Afghan police stations are based on the number of vehicles listed on the same roster, the report said.

SIGAR issued a separate report last fall warning that the Afghan government will be unable to adequately maintain army and police facilities after 2014, when the U.S.-led military coalition is set to disband. That report warned that the United States and its allies will have to continue paying hundreds of millions of dollars to operate Afghan bases and equipment.


Bulgaria To Withdraw Part Of Afghan Contingent
January 16, 2013 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
The Bulgarian government says it will pull a significant part of its troop contingent out of Afghanistan.

Bulgarian troops stationed at Kabul airport will be withdrawn on March 1, followed by a team of instructors on March 31.

The decision will mean that Bulgaria will withdraw some 40 percent of its 600-member contingent that is part of the International Security Assistance Force by the end of March.

According to a government press release, the remainder of the Bulgarian contingent will stay in Afghanistan until 2014, when the majority of NATO-led forces leave.

After 2014, Bulgaria will only have a team of advisers in the country.

Bulgaria, which joined NATO in 2004, has been participating in the NATO-led mission in Afghanistan since 2002.


Taliban deny participation in Dubai conference on Afghanistan
By Sajad - January 18 2013, 2:57 pm Khaama Press
The Taliban group in Afghanistan following a statement on Friday denied the group’s participation in Dubai conference.

The statement issued by the Taliban said, “A number of the media agencies have broadcasted reports regarding Taliban’s participation in a conference organized by an International organization in Dubai which has been attended by other groups as well.”

The source further added, “The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan has neither attended the conference and nor has sent any representative other, also those representing the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan is not our representatives. Everyone know that the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan has a political office which introduces representatives for the political sessions.”

“However the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan has not introduced or sent any representative for Dubai conference on Afghanistan”, the statement added.

The Dubai conference on Afghanistan was reportedly attended by various political groups including the main opposition party — national coalition of Afghanistan to discuss the future of the country.

The Taliban group however attended a similar conference hosted by France late December 2012. About 20 Afghans from President Hamid Karzai’s government, the Taliban, as well as the political opposition and the Islamist Hezb-e-Islami militant group met just try to foster a conversation after 11 years of war and consider what their country’s institutions and civil society will look like after 2020.

With much of the country still prey to fighting, Afghan President Hamid Karzai has stepped up attempts to persuade the Taliban to end the violence and join the political reconciliation.


Why Afghan Ghosts Haunt France’s Mali Intervention
TIME.com By Tony Karon Jan. 17, 2013
Comparisons with Afghanistan are inevitable when any Western country sends its military to war in a Muslim country where al-Qaeda has set up shop — and the comparison may be a particularly uncomfortable one for France’s mission in Mali. French officials initially drew the link themselves, explaining the air campaign and deployment of ground troops that began last week as a way to prevent al-Qaeda from turning a country twice the size of France into a West African equivalent of Afghanistan in the 1990s — a sanctuary and staging ground from which the jihadists projected terror into distant Western capitals. But Paris has just as quickly sought to squelch any association in the mind of its public with the NATO mission in Afghanistan now slowly drawing to an ambiguous conclusion more than 11 years after it began. After all, France withdrew its last combat troops from that mission last November, having lost faith in the Coalition’s exit strategy.

The problem facing Paris now is that some of the assumptions of its own exit strategy in Mali may be just as open to question as those that underlie the U.S. exit strategy in Afghanistan. First and foremost is the idea, common to both theaters, that local forces can be quickly stood up to hold the line against the militants. “Malians remember well that only a few months ago, insurgent forces ejected the army from northern Mali as if they were throwing a drunk from a bar,” noted Columbia University historian Gregory Mann earlier this week. “Timbuktu, Gao, and Kidal fell in a weekend. The army collapsed, and it has only been weakened by internal fighting since. Any other story is a fairytale,” he said. “Last week’s Islamist offensive put paid to the argument that the Malian army itself was capable of defending the country from further attack and of liberating territory over which it had lost control.”

It’s precisely that recognition that prompted last week’s French intervention. If the Islamists, who already control half the country in the north, overran the south, that would render redundant a U.N. plan to field a West African force that would have launched an offensive to recapture the north towards the end of 2013. “President Hollande had originally planned to support the West African force only by ‘leading from behind,’ providing training, intelligence, logistical support, and special forces to help reconquer the northern part of Mali by next summer,” explained Camille Grand, director of the Paris-based defense policy think tank Fondation pour la Recherche Stratégique. “The decision to act directly was only taken when it became clear that the original schedule would be difficult to meet and that most of Mali could fall into the hands of radical Islamist groups. France feared seeing the entire Sahel become another grey zone where terrorists could prosper and train, similar to Afghanistan or Somalia, but
just a few thousand kilometers away from Europe.”

Still, the French government has promised its public a short war. Foreign minister Laurent Fabius last weekend said the intervention would last “a matter of weeks” — although a second, unnamed official told the Financial Times it would, in fact, last “tens of weeks.” After three days of pummeling by French fighter planes failed to stop the rebels from capturing the key garrison town of Diabaly 250 miles north of Bamako on Monday, it was clear that the arrival of Western air power wasn’t going to scatter the insurgents, and that France’s war in Mali may not be as brief as its political leaders would prefer. There’s a limit to how much can be accomplished from the air across the vast desert terrain, with the insurgents able to embed with civilian populations. France currently has 1,700 ground troops in Mali, and plans to raise its deployment to 2,500 — close to the highest number it fielded in Afghanistan.

On Tuesday, President François Hollande, said the goal of the operation was “to ensure that when we leave, when we end our intervention, Mali is safe, has legitimate authorities, an electoral process and there are no more terrorists threatening its territory.” That’s an ambitious agenda given the conditions that prevail in Mali and its neighborhood, and the limited number of troops thus far committed by France and Mali’s African neighbors (who, under the rubric of the regional security federation ECOWAS, have collectively pledged a force 2,000-strong). And it puts a question-mark over French hopes of quickly transferring primary combat responsibility to others. Although Britain and the U.S. have offered logistical and intelligence support, no Western powers are currently offering to share in the combat, which puts France in a situation not dissimilar to the U.S.’s current status in Afghanistan.

Nor are the Malian and ECOWAS forces likely to decisively tip the balance. The former performed poorly against the insurgents and the latter still require extensive training for the mission As the Guardian’s West Africa contributor Andy Morgan noted, “The north of Mali is as alien to the average soldier from southern Mali as the Alaskan tundra is to a citizen of Massachusetts or Manchester. That sense of alienation will be felt even more keenly by troops from Nigeria, Senegal, Benin and Ivory Coast, used to jungle and savannah bush warfare, when they finally roll onto the vast treeless plains of the southern Sahara.”

Thus the “fairytale” of which Mann warned: No regional analysts familiar with the capabilities of the Malian and ECOWAS forces would bet the farm on their ability, without French combat assistance, to beat back the well-trained, well-armed, well-financed and highly motivated nomadic jihadists, who are well-versed in the hit and run tactics against which any conventional forces will struggle in the arid wastes of the Sahel.

If Hollande defines success as the elimination of an al-Qaeda threat to Mali, then, the likelihood is that this will be a long engagement. Even the goal of reestablishing an electoral process and a legitimate government in Bamako is far from simple: The current regime originates in a military coup last year when mid-level army officers — to the embarrassment of the U.S. military, which had been training the Malian armed forces — seized power from the civilian government. In the ensuing turmoil, at least one whole unit of the Malian forces defected, with its weapons and equipment, to the insurgent side. Even now, there’s considerable political turmoil and division between rival political camps in the capital, while suspicions persist in some quarters over the political agenda of the military leadership, and also over the benign intentions of some neighboring countries.

Of course, this will all sound somewhat familiar to those who have followed the war in Afghanistan. But despite misgivings, the French saw the alternative of staying passive as the militants overran much of Mali as too ghastly to contemplate. Still, warned European Council on Foreign Relations analyst Jonas Parello-Plesner, “The worst-case scenario is that France gets bogged down on the ground and then pulls out quickly in order to avoid a quagmire, leaving the mess to a semiprepared African military mission.” And as the U.S. discovered in Afghanistan, an intervention in a failing state can confound hopes for a brief and tidy war.


Two Girls Seek Justice in Multiple Rape Cases
TOLOnews.com By Karim Amini & Salaha Soadat Thursday, 17 January 2013
Two girls are seeking justice for two separate rape cases in Afghanistan's central and northern provinces, both accusing government personnel of raping them after they sought help from a previous rape.

In northern Baghlan province's Nahrin district, 13-year-old Zarbibi was allegedly raped by her cousin multiple times, and was subsequently raped by the police officer investigating her case.

Meanwhile in central Daykundi province, a teenager who was staying in a woman's shelter after her family expelled her for being raped has accused the guards at the shelter of gang-raping her.

According to Zarbibi, she was initially kidnapped by her cousin, who was helped by a group of men, and taken to the nearby Khost district where her cousin raped her several times.

When her uncle intervened and brought her back home, Nahrin district criminal investigation officer, Col. Barat Daqiq, took advantage of Zarbibi in his own home after asking her to come for questioning.

"After I was away from my cousin and brought home by my uncle, the investigation officer called my uncle and told him 'The girl should come to my house for investigations,' and my uncle told him 'The attorney has investigated and this is not necessary,'" Zarbibi told TOLOnews.

"The officer said the investigation had to be done again and took me to his place. Then he said 'I'm tired now – I will start the investigation tonight.' My uncle opposed it but he [Daqiq] didn't accept. He came to my bed at night and raped me. I screamed and he covered my mouth."

Zarbibi's family said Daqiq has not been charged, but Baghlan police chief Assadullah Shirzad refuted this saying both Daqiq and the cousin have been charged and referred for trial.

The group of men who kidnapped Zarbibi has also been arrested, he said.

But the family want Daqiq, who was released from jail, back behind bars until the trial.

Zarbibi's uncle said that following his release, Daqiq has threatened them more than once and told them "I will kill you all."

Zarbib is now in Kabul seeking to have her case addressed.

"I have come to Kabul for my case to be addressed and the men who did this to be arrested," she said. "Why does nobody hear me? It was my cousin who did this, and now this man."

Meanwhile, in Daykundi province, there are conflicting accounts of the teenage girl who claims she was raped by guards at the women's shelter.

The girl, whose name was not disclosed, went to the women's shelter because her family banished her after she was raped. The details of this first rape are not known.

She was given a bed in a room where six guards also slept, according to provincial officials.

"I confirm that she was kept in one building with six guards, but I reject that the girl was raped," said Habiba Shujaee, the head of the Women's Affairs Administration in Daykundi.

"There are claims by the girl herself that six people raped her, but sometimes it's one person. The inspections are being done," said Qurban Uruzgani, Daykundi provincial governor.

"We have arrested the six guards and Mrs. Shujaee based on the evidence we had. Mrs. Shujaee has been released on bail but will be presented to the attorney general for questioning," Uruzgani said.

The provincial human rights commission has confirmed that a forensic examination proved that the girl was raped, contrary to Shujaee's claim, and questioned the decision to give her a bed in the guards' quarters.

"The space for the girl to stay was not safe. Based on what logic should a girl be kept in one building with six guards?" said Mohammad Jawad Dadgar, head of the Human Rights Commission in Daykundi.

It comes after four women committed suicide in Daykundi last fortnight over family violence, forced marriage, and poverty, while a mullah is said to have raped two of his teenage students.


Behind the cult of Masoud
How Afghanistan’s Che Guevara still haunts Hamid Karzai
GULF NEWS By James Verini January 17, 2013
The first sign of officialdom you see when you drive from the Kabul airport car park is a government billboard looming above a traffic jam. It is the size of a highway billboard in the United States, but closer to the ground, so that you can make out every nuance of the faces on it. Those faces belong to, on the right of the coat of arms of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, President Hamid Karzai, and on the left, slain Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Masoud, dead some 11 years.

With Karzai, you note those tired eyes and that child’s chin, unaided by a trimmed grey beard. Masoud comes off vastly more dashing. He appears to be in conference with the paradises: The eyes smoulder from within, the strong chin and bushy goatee angle out like a divining rod. A pakol, the traditional hat of the Hindu Kush, sits like a column capital on his head.

The billboard calls to mind a prizefight poster, and the champ is obvious. It also happens to capture the attitude of many Afghans and foreigners working here.

In the years since Masoud was assassinated by Al Qaida, just two days before 9/11, and Karzai installed as Afghanistan’s interim president the following summer, their reputations have moved in inverse proportion.

Karzai’s popularity has steadily contracted, while Masoud’s legend in Afghanistan has grown. As though he had just been killed last week, Afghans still talk about what a great president the guerrilla leader would have made.

The implicit slight on Karzai, once dismissed as merely ineffectual and now as ineffectual, corrupt and deluded, is obvious. Abroad, after years of worshipful portrayals of him by foreign reporters and historians, Masoud has become the Che Guevara of Central Asia.

A young Norwegian woman staying in the same guest house as me here in Kabul went weak in the knees when she learnt the house’s driver fought under Masoud. “I want to meet him,” she breathed, referring to the driver, but really meaning the Lion of Panjshir.

Oddly, the billboard captures at least some portion of Afghan officialdom’s attitude, too. Lately, no one has promoted the cult of Masoud as much as Karzai’s government.

In October, a month after the 11th anniversary of his death, the barrier walls of ministry buildings and the homes of officials were covered with Masoud’s stoic visage, as were awnings, shop windows, street-food carts, car windshields and so on.

Wherever possible, as at the airport, Karzai is placed alongside Masoud, as though they were running mates in the 2014 election — an election for which Karzai is ineligible to run, though there is talk that he may be so oblivious to his unpopularity he will attempt to amend the constitution to allow himself a third term. (“Sure, if he wants to be killed,” one Kabuli friend responded when I asked if he thought Karzai might try it.)

In fact, Masoud has been a kind of unwelcome spectral running mate to Karzai all along, a Kalashnikov-slung Banquo, against whom, by comparison, the president is always falling short.

Karzai’s inability or unwillingness to rein in graft, his failure to halt the Taliban, his perceived timidity and indecision — Masoud’s ubiquitous image is a rebuke to all of it. His years spent fighting the Soviet invaders and then the Taliban from within Afghanistan contrast with the years Karzai spent safely in exile in Pakistan.

The exception is in the department of political survival, where Karzai is at least Masoud’s match, maybe his better. The president may venerate Masoud’s memory or he may not, but he knows he must appear to do so to keep ex-Mujahideen and ethnic hostilities in check.

In an Afghanistan largely managed by foreign governments and defined by internal division — most importantly the rivalry between the powerful Tajik minority, among whom Masoud is the favourite son, and the Pashtun majority, among whom Karzai is among the least favourite sons — Masoud is, regrettably, the closest thing Afghans have to a national hero.

I say regrettably, because, while many Afghans venerate him, many others see Masoud as a false idol — as just one in a rogue’s gallery of militia commanders, living and dead, with their own personal fan clubs. His legacy is a matter of bitter divisiveness. His most ardent admirers are confined largely to Tajik strongholds in the north and west and in the capital.

Recently, I visited Herat, Afghanistan’s second-largest city, and saw only a few Masoud photos around. That the Taliban had just staged a firing-squad execution of accused kidnappers outside the city was not, I was assured, the reason for this.

In many Pashtun-dominated areas in the south and east, and not just those where the Taliban is gaining control, Masoud is more of a national anti-hero. As one friend put it to me, “You can’t say in the north that he’s not a hero. People will kill you. And you can’t say in the south that he’s a hero. People will kill you.”

But even in Tajik-heavy Kabul, you need only to start speaking to residents to find that Masoud is a touchy matter. Part of this is opposition to his political party, Jamiat-e Islami, and part suspicion of foreign intelligence services with a history of designs on Afghanistan — Masoud took money from all of them, from the CIA, MI6 and Pakistan’s Inter-Intelligence Service (ISI), from the French, probably the KGB and even the Chinese.

Part is class resentment — Marxism has never entirely left Afghanistan. Masoud, whose father was a general in King Zahir Shah’s army, was raised in upper middle-class wealth and attended a lycée. There is a feeling, even among other Tajiks, that Tajiks from the Panshjir Valley, where Masoud is from, are an arrogant bunch.

When I asked him what he thought of Masoud, a Tajik taxi driver and former army officer when Masoud was defence minister, said “Panjshiris, they ...” and instead of finding an adjective, he hunched up his shoulders, puckered his face and snorted haughtily.

“They like British.” (That is an insult in Afghanistan.) The real scepticism about Masoud, though, arises from the facts of his life and what he eventually did to the city and people of Kabul.

Afghans of a certain age and education know, for instance, that far from starting out the conciliator he would later become, Masoud began his political career as an Islamist radical agitator at Kabul’s Polytechnic College.

He fled to Pakistan in 1975 with the Muslim Youth Organisation, years before the communist coup and Soviet invasion made this exodus a tragic necessity for millions of other Afghans.

There he didn’t teach himself to be a soldier, as the story goes, but rather was taught to be one by the ISI. It was under the direction of Ali Bhutto, who created Pakistan’s covert war in Afghanistan, and was, many would argue, the progenitor of the Taliban.

If there is anyone Afghan Pashtuns and Tajiks distrust more than one another, it is a Pakistani, and particularly a Bhutto. Afghans up on their history know, too, that Masoud began his fighting career as a failed agent provocateur — he was drafted by the ISI and its despised Afghan satrap, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, to start an uprising against the Afghan government in the Panjshir.

It didn’t work. According to some KGB memoirists, Masoud may have gone on to receive training from that agency in Lebanon. If that is true, it comes as little surprise that from the moment he became a Mujahid and began to do battle with Soviet soldiers, after they invaded Afghanistan in 1979, making his legend, Masoud was also bargaining with the Soviet authorities.

He made a series of truces with them in the early 1980s. This duplicity is now explained away as a typically shrewd move by Masoud — whose courage and battlefield brilliance cannot be questioned — to win respite for his weary troops and recruit more support.

No doubt it was. Nonetheless, the deals also helped bring the Soviet side hammer down on less-equipped Mujahideen, and provided Masoud the opportunity to pursue a private war with Hekmatyar in the 1990s. (By that point, Hekmatyar was using many of his American-taxpayer-bought weapons to try to kill his old protégé).

Talking to Kabulis who don’t buy into the hype, you learn that this is what what galls them the most about Masoud: the personal feud that played out in the streets of this city and caused incalculable destruction and loss of life.

Hekmatyar and his Uzbek sometime-helpmeet, Abdul Rashid Dostum, were the more wanton combatants, certainly, but Masoud brought his fair share of ruin, levelling whole districts of Kabul.

“Masoud is responsible for half the atrocities of this country,” said a prominent Afghan intellectual who did not want to named. Nor did the ruin end when he was elevated to defence minister in 1992.

Many members of Afghanistan’s second-largest ethnic minority, the Hazaras, will never forgive him for massacring Hazaras in south Kabul the next year. Masoud’s men abused residents and looted shops. In part for that reason, many Kabulis welcomed the Taliban takeover three years later.

“It’s a very difficult legacy,” the prominent Afghan said, because of “his stubbornness, his lack of will to dispense with remote political masters, and his lack of willingness to resolve the issue of division of power peacefully”.

Over a cup of coffee at Kabul University, a friend whose family stayed in Kabul through the Soviet occupation, civil wars, and Taliban years, explained to me there are three Masouds.

There is the Masoud who fought the Russians. Everybody loves him. There is the Masoud who fought the Taliban and held together the Northern Alliance. Many love him. “Then there is the Masoud who came to Kabul and lost control. No one loves that Masoud,” he said.

But when they compare him with the other brigands who built militias and made Afghanistan’s cities and villages their battlegrounds, he comes out the best of a bad lot. “That’s why a lot of people can use his name to be in power.”

Masoud learnt insurgent tradecraft not just from the enemies of Afghanistan, but from Mao and Che, whose books he toted from camp to camp and often quoted. The comparison to the Argentine revolutionary is apt: as with Che, the whitewashed legacy and the bloody reality overlap only in convenient corners.

Afghans have their own reasons for perpetuating the myth. Retirees from intelligence services and diplomat corps, now watching the United States and Nato flounder about in the provinces, regret not having backed him against the Taliban; for them, Masoud is a kind of tragic noble savage.

For the rest, cult membership comes with a predictable Byronic sentimentality. Not just Norwegian co-eds are susceptible. An American woman I know who has lived in Kabul since Masoud was a boy insisted to me, with a sigh, that he was “the only real patriot” among the civil war commanders.

When I pointed out that we happened to be near a neighbourhood Masoud destroyed, she said “War is a nasty business. They were all killers.” Indeed, they were. No one knows this better than Karzai, whose government is stocked with those killers — the “warlords,” as they’re now collectively known. Some took control of ministries after the Taliban’s fall, others he installed.

Opinions differ as to who is the keenest to use Masoud for propaganda purposes. Some say it is certain ministers, some Karzai. His picture hangs outside the ministries and the presidential palace. Some suggest officials put up portraits of Masoud precisely in order to humiliate Karzai.

Then there are Masoud’s five surviving brothers, a not-terribly accomplished crew but a rising political force. They nearly got the family name inserted into the national constitution. Whoever it is, their reasoning is sound: Every regime needs a hero, and if it doesn’t have one among its own ranks, it must pluck one from history.

Masoud’s image is an encouragement to the untold numbers of ex-Mujahideen and their families still living in poverty. It also serves as a sop to Tajiks, who feel more and more threatened as the Pashtun-dominated Taliban reasserts control around the country.

This imperative is forcing Karzai into awkward positions. Ahead of the 2009 elections, he named the Tajik commander Mohammad Fahim vice-president — after Washington had convinced Karzai to remove Fahim, who is accused of human rights abuses and whom Karzai is known to distrust, from his cabinet. Fahim replaced Ahmad Zia Masoud — Masoud’s younger brother.

Whatever his own feelings about Masoud, Karzai at times seems to try to govern like the Lion at his worst: that is, as an embattled, self-regarding, and capricious general. He is ever more prey to paranoia and delusion, we are told, and increasingly given to outbursts against his foreign protectors, as in the recent flap over the Bagram prison.

One can’t help but wonder how much the burden of Masoud’s memory has driven him to this point. A shame, because Karzai has managed to do the one thing Masoud never could: He has stitched together Afghanistan’s ethnic threads into some semblance of a fabric.

Of course, he has done this in part by bringing a cast of unsavoury characters into the fold, creating a shaky coalition that has come at the cost of Augean corruption.

Ironically, that is one area where he really could use Masoud’s help. For all his opportunism, the Lion never cared about personal enrichment, unlike the other warlords. He was happiest on the front lines with his troops, on a cot in a cave reading a book.

Masoud didn’t make much of a politician, and probably wouldn’t have done much better than Karzai as a president. In fact, every Afghan I have spoken with about Masoud, including his most ardent admirers, agree that he probably couldn’t have been elected had he lived, even if he does look fantastic on a billboard. But he might have proved an exemplary Treasury secretary.

–Washington Post

James Verini is a Foreign Policy contributor based in Nairobi.


Mutiny in Kabul
An exclusive report on the troubled security team at America's most important embassy.
Foreign Policy BY ADAM ZAGORIN JANUARY 17, 2013
Private guards responsible for protecting what may be the most at-risk U.S. diplomatic mission in the world -- the embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan -- say security weaknesses have left it dangerously vulnerable to attack.

In interviews and written communications with the Project On Government Oversight (POGO), current and former guards said a variety of shortcomings, from inadequate weapons training to an overextended guard force, have compromised security there -- security provided under a half-a-billion-dollar contract with Aegis Defense Services LLC, the U.S. subsidiary of a British firm. "[I]f we ever got seriously hit [by terrorists], there is no doubt in my mind the guard force here would not be able to handle it, and mass casualties and mayhem would ensue," a guard serving at the embassy wrote in a late November message to POGO.

In July, dissatisfaction boiled over when more than 40 members of the embassy's Emergency Response Team signed a petition sounding an alarm about embassy security, people familiar with the document said. The petition, submitted to the U.S. State Department and Aegis, expressed a "vote of no confidence" in three of the guard force leaders, accusing them of "tactical incompetence" and "a dangerous lack of understanding of the operational environment." Two guards say they were quickly fired after organizing the petition, in what they called "retaliation."

A State Department document obtained by POGO describes a "mutiny" among guards who defend the Kabul embassy -- an apparent reference to the petition, though the document does not explicitly mention it. Dated July 18, 2012, and labeled "SENSITIVE BUT UNCLASSIFIED," the document says that the mutiny was "baseless" and that it "undermined the chain of command" and "put the security of the Embassy at risk."

The allegations that the Kabul guards made in their interviews with POGO are all the more disturbing in the wake of congressional and public outcry over the lax security that may have contributed to the deadly attack on Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three others in Benghazi, Libya, last September. The official postmortem released by the State Department's independent commission in December painted the Benghazi facility as a casualty of bureaucratic neglect, and the assistant secretary of state for diplomatic security resigned. But the situation described by guards in Kabul suggests that diplomatic security problems go far beyond a makeshift, overlooked outpost in eastern Libya.

Following the Benghazi attack, the State Department dispatched teams to assess security at a number of diplomatic posts -- but not to the Kabul embassy because, according to the department, security was already heightened there.

The guards' charges are simply the latest chapter in the ongoing saga of the Kabul embassy.

In 2009, Aegis's predecessor as the security contractor there, ArmorGroup North America (AGNA), became embroiled in controversy after POGO documented security shortcomings similar to those alleged by Aegis guards -- from a breakdown in the chain of command to long hours, low morale, and alleged retaliatory firings. The organization's investigation also brought to light lurid photographs of guards engaged in nude, apparently drunken revelry and sexual hazing.

Testifying before a federal commission in September 2009, an executive of AGNA's parent company, Wackenhut Services, said there were "no excuses" for the guards' "misbehavior" and he was "not here to defend the indefensible." Although AGNA "suffered from many contractual compliance issues," Wackenhut Services Vice President Samuel Brinkley said in written testimony, "the security of the Embassy was never at risk."

The State Department chose a replacement for AGNA in 2010 only to conclude months later that the replacement company would be unprepared to begin work on schedule. Aegis was awarded the task in July 2011 and finally took over Kabul embassy protection in June 2012. But according to the Aegis guards, it rapidly became clear that the security situation was untenable.

Aegis declined to answer questions for this report. "Per our contractual obligations, all questions and inquiries regarding this contract should be directed to the Department of State's Public Affairs Office," company spokesman Joshua C. Huminski wrote.

In a written response to questions, the State Department said that a regional security officer assessed operations at the embassy and "determined that security policies and procedures are sound."

The department said it takes seriously the concerns of Aegis personnel. After receiving the petition, the embassy conducted roundtable discussions "with those who wanted to voice their concerns." According to department, it "did not request the removal of any contract personnel for voicing their concerns or signing the petition." Some individuals, it said, "have been removed for other reasons."

An atmosphere of danger pervades everyday life for U.S. personnel in Kabul. Almost a year to the day before the Benghazi attack, insurgents fired rocket-propelled grenades at the U.S. compound in Kabul. And on Nov. 21, a Taliban suicide bomber claimed three victims only blocks from the U.S. Embassy. A former senior U.S. official who served at the embassy said that security is designed to defend the facility "against direct assaults, one or two or more. But a breach in the [embassy] wall followed by a group of suicide bombers, that would be a close call. That would be a bad day."

The sprawling, heavily fortified facility reflects the threat -- barbed wire, bomb-sniffing dogs, machine gun emplacements, perimeter walls, and towers. The lives of about 1,500 embassy employees -- American and local staff -- are on the line.

As in U.S. embassies around the world, there is a small contingent of U.S. Marines, but their main mission is to protect the chancery and destroy classified materials in the event of a breach. The embassy's defense falls principally to hundreds of American and foreign contract guards -- including approximately 100 members of the Emergency Response Team, according to guards POGO interviewed -- overseen by the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security.

In Kabul, the embassy guard force is run by Aegis Defense Services under a federal contract that the State Department said has a "current value" of $497 million. (The full scope of that contract, awarded in July 2011, is unclear; the State Department said it is for security services in Kabul "for one base year plus four option years," but the department has not responded to a request for clarification.) Aegis has also provided a variety of security services to U.S. efforts in Iraq.

In interviews and emails for this report over the past few months, about a dozen current or former ERT personnel -- all of whom said they are former law enforcement officials or U.S. military veterans who had served in Iraq or Afghanistan -- said they have been worried about the state of security at the embassy. They requested anonymity to avoid retaliation or career setbacks.

One of the biggest problems, guards say, is that their team has been stretched dangerously thin by long hours for days on end and too few people to do the job. Guards have worked 14- and 15-hour workdays, for six or even seven days a week, with limited days off or leave time, sources said. That, in turn, has led to high job turnover, low morale, and other problems, they said.

"It wears you out," said a former guard and Special Forces veteran now in the United States. "People's concentration goes away. They can't maintain focus at all."

"The impact on security is that people are glazed over, and they can't protect the facility," he added.

A 2010 Bureau of Diplomatic Security document says that the normal government-prescribed workweek for private guards overseas is 72 hours -- 12 hours per day for six days per week. It said contractors were responsible for ensuring that their personnel did not exceed those standards -- except under emergency conditions and with authorization.

Guards said that they were directed to record 12-hour workdays, even though they actually worked for 14 hours or more per day. They said that after working a six-day week, they have often worked a seventh day without pay. In comparison, for Marine security guards, a State Department manual posted on the department's website contemplates "an individual guard workload factor of 36 to 42 hours per week."

The State Department told POGO that no Aegis guard is scheduled to work more than 12 hours per shift. However, during the initial transition from AGNA to Aegis, the department said, "some contract personnel were required to work additional days, partly due to the need for intensive in-service training."

"Through Government oversight, contract adjustments, and Aegis' adherence to contract requirements, the number of hours and days the guards worked were limited to contract requirements, and the Department maintained its primary objective of ensuring the safety and security of the Embassy," the department said.

Several members of the protective force also said they and other guards were rarely if ever given an opportunity to go to the firing range to "qualify" in their use of weapons -- in other words, demonstrate an ability to hit targets. In addition, they said they were often prevented from "zeroing" -- or properly sighting -- guns and optical scopes. One alleged that even "sharpshooters on the embassy roof did not have zeroed weapons."

"Without a zeroed weapon, I can't defend myself or the embassy," said a former guard.

According to one guard who left last summer, some of his colleagues had "never fired their own weapons."

Others said they were alarmed by a failure to properly inspect vehicles for explosives as they entered the embassy compound. "The whole bomb-detection operation at the embassy is disorganized and needs to be looked at to prevent a major incident," said a veteran dog handler who left Kabul in August. "This is a Pandora's box. The embassy is a target where they could have another Benghazi, or worse."

The State Department said all canine alerts are "backed-up by technical means" to determine what steps should be taken.

The department acknowledged that the number of "designated defensive marksmen" (DDM) -- sharpshooters -- declined at one point, adding that it "utilized alternate DDM assets to augment security."

As for time at the firing range, the department said that the availability of ranges in Kabul "is dependent on the security situation, and Aegis had to adjust scheduled re-qualifications." But the department denied that any Aegis personnel have been prevented from requalifying "on their assigned weapons systems."

"All weapon systems are calibrated before being put into service," the department said.

Guards said they voiced concerns about embassy security in regular daily meetings with State Department officials and Aegis supervisors.

In July -- about a month after Aegis had officially begun protecting the embassy -- they put their fears in writing, having quickly determined that the situation was unsafe.

Their petition, signed by some 40 guards, began by accusing leaders of creating "a hostile divided work place." For example, it alleges that guard force leaders live in comfort at the embassy while the rank and file are confined to Spartan barracks several miles away and forced to eat unhygienically prepared food that guards have told POGO regularly made them ill.

More significantly, the petition speaks broadly of leaders' "tactical incompetence" and "dangerous lack of understanding of the operational environment."

One of the most serious allegations in the petition describes a senior Aegis security supervisor who posted details about the embassy's defenses on the social media site LinkedIn. The disclosure included "exact force protection numbers," the petition says. The petition calls the disclosure "an operational security violation" that "threatens the lives" of the guards and "placed hundreds of American personnel at the Embassy in potential harm's way, should it end up in the hands of any anti-American extremist."

POGO obtained a copy of what was said to be the LinkedIn posting. If it was posted on the site, it has since been removed.

The petitioners pleaded for help from the government and their employer. "It is the duty of DOS [Department of State] and AEGIS to protect those Embassy personnel and the ERT [Emergency Response Team] that may have been placed in harm's way."

The petition does not explicitly discuss some of the fears that came across most forcefully in POGO's interviews with guards -- such as their assertion that the guard force has been stretched dangerously thin.

The text of the petition concludes by invoking the 1989 Whistleblower Protection Act, which, under certain circumstances, shields from retaliation government employees who expose mismanagement, abuse of authority, or danger. Unfortunately for the petitioners, only recently have federal whistle-blower protections been extended to State Department contractors.

One guard who helped organize the petition told POGO that shortly after the document reached the State Department and Aegis, he was summoned to appear in front of half a dozen Kabul-based Diplomatic Security officers and an Aegis supervisor. He said he was "grilled" for roughly 90 minutes about what had happened and his own role. That night, he said, he worked a regular shift, only to be awakened the next day and told he would be fired and had 90 minutes to get on a plane out of Kabul.

Roughly a week later, on July 18, the State Department addressed a "MEMORANDUM for Record" to Aegis calling for the "release" -- apparently meaning dismissal -- of another guard who has been described to POGO as a leader of the petition drive and a veteran of the U.S. Army and federal law enforcement.

That memo, a copy of which was obtained by POGO, said the guard held "a critical leadership position." It added that he "was instrumental in leading a baseless mutiny against the senior operational leadership of the guard force, which undermined the chain of command and ultimately put the security of the Embassy at risk."

"I was definitely retaliated against," the guard named in the memo said. "I was bringing up issues to the [State Department's] regional security officers that they did not want to hear about. They asked me, 'Did I sign the petition.' I said, 'Yes.' Then I got fired." The guard did not want to be named in this report to avoid professional repercussions.

Two guards who said they did not sign the petition but were nevertheless critical of embassy security at staff meetings say they were told that if they did not leave the Kabul guard force voluntarily, they would be fired. They have since returned to the United States. "I was terminated for telling the truth," one of them said.

Partly as a result of the scandal involving Aegis's predecessor, the congressionally mandated bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan held a hearing and warned in 2009 that the system was broken, in part because it called for approving the lowest acceptable bid. This in turn encouraged companies to "under-bid" to win awards and then "use every means possible to limit costs."

Although Congress subsequently allowed security contracts, including the Aegis contract, to be awarded on a more subjective basis, the allegations from the Kabul embassy guards suggest that problems with private contractors persist.

In December, as a review board reported its findings about the Benghazi fiasco, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wrote that after the attack "we took immediate steps to further protect our people and posts in high threat areas, working closely with the Department of Defense."

Deputy Secretary of State Thomas R. Nides later testified that some 225 Marines would be sent to so-called medium- and high-threat posts, "where they will serve as visible deterrents to hostile acts." The State Department is also seeking to hire more than 150 additional diplomatic security personnel, an increase of 5 percent, he said.

It remains unclear, however, what specific steps have been or will be taken to reinforce security at the embassy in Kabul. A State Department spokeswoman declined to say.

"We do not release details about our security procedures," the department said.

As part of the broader response to the Benghazi killings, Nides testified that the government dispatched teams to assess security at 19 posts in 13 countries.

Apparently, the embassy in Kabul was not one of them.

The State Department told POGO that security was already heightened at that post and therefore "it was determined that the inter-agency assessment teams would be best utilized at other locations."

When asked about increased security at the Kabul embassy, one guard wrote POGO on Dec. 21, saying, "No I have not seen an increase of security at all, in fact probably a decrease with everyone quitting and such."

Clinton, who has been recovering from a concussion and blood clot, is scheduled to testify about Benghazi to Congress next week.


Airbus to provide tactical transport Aircraft to Afghan army
By Sayed Jawad - January 18 2013, 7:38 pm Khaama Press
According to reports, Airbus Military is holding talks with the US officials to provide troop-transport aircraft for the Afghan national army.

This comes as Pentagon recently decided to scrap a contract to use planes built by Finmeccanica SpA.

Domingo Urena-Raso Chief Executive Officer of Airbus Military said the discussions include provision of CN235s ad large C295s aircraft.

The Pentagon late last year said it would not extend a contract with Finmeccanica’s Alenia Aermacchi to provide 20 G222 cargo turbo-propeller aircraft to the Afghan forces, citing reliability concerns, Bloomberg reported. Alenia, with its C-27 that replaced the G222, and Airbus Military dominate the market for small military transport planes.

Airbus Military CEO Urena-Raso said Airbus won 75 percent of light transport plane orders last year. It booked deals for 28 C295s and four CN235s last year.

Sales of smaller planes will dominate also this year even as the company ramps up export efforts for the A400M Atlas, Europe’s largest airlifter, he said. The first A400M is scheduled to go to the French Air Force in the second quarter.

“We are now in the phase when we are switching from A400M development to production,” Urena-Raso quoted by Bloomberg said. Airbus expects to hand over four A400Ms this year, three to France and one to the Turkish air force. It plans to produce 10 aircraft next year and 21 in 2015.


Kabul's Illegal Car Racket Involves Top Officials
TOLOnews.com By Saleha Soadat Friday, 18 January 2013
It is well known that throughout the Afghan capital city of Kabul there are many vehicles without legal license plates.

What is lesser known is that some of these vehicles belong to the country's top officials, especially representatives in the two houses of the National Assembly.

According to Kabul Traffic Department, having no number plates or illegal plates is a crime. Furthermore, not paying the vehicle tax – which is the reality for most of these cars – is also a crime. But that hasn't stopped most government officials.

Kabul Traffic Department says that only 10 cars belonging to members of the administrative boards of the two houses are authorised to carry initials on their number plates to represent their standing:

"W.J." for the Parliament (Wolesi Jirga) and "M.J." for the Senate (Mishrano Jirga). However, many more government cars are sporting the initials.

"We have only allowed the cars of 10 members of the administrative board of the National Assembly which travel around the city by numbers starting with W.J. and M.J. The rest which have such number plates are illegal," says Assadullah, Kabul Traffic chief.

The Ministry of Finance says that those who drive cars with fake number plates or no number plates at all are usually smugglers, and it is a criminal offence.

"The cars which travel in the city with fake documents are those not paying their taxes, and are called the smugglers' cars. This is considered a crime," said Najibullah Manalai, Media Advisor at the Ministry of Finance.

One MP says he knows of colleagues who buy the unregistered cars because of their cheap prices.

"You know that internationals are leaving the country and they sell their cars at very low prices. MPs will buy these cars for a little price, and they use these cars for personal use – cars that have not gone through the customs process and have no number plate," Bashar Tayanj says.

Despite unregistered, un-plated cars being linked to more crimes such as robbery and kidnapping, usually the cars are not stopped by police at checkpoints and so the practice continues.

"How could those who do not believe in laws enforce the [vehicle] laws on themselves? You know that there are drug smugglers, weapon smugglers, and human smugglers [using these cars] as well as warlords who do not believe in the law at all," says Senator Belqais Roshan.

MP Fatima Aziz says the use of illegal cars by government representatives and the failure of officials to register their cars are serious concerns.

"If someone considers themselves a representative of the people, why would they hide in tinted-window cars with no number plates?" She says.

The real question is why is such a recognisable offence, acknowledged by the Kabul Traffic Department and the Ministry of Finance, being completely ignored by law enforcers?


Afghan-US Security Pact Poses No Threat: US Envoy
TOLnews.com By Shakeela Ahbrimkhil Thursday, 17 January 2013
There is no reason for anyone to be fearful of an Afghan-US security agreement unless they favor instability in the region, the US envoy to Afghanistan said Thursday.

James Cunningham said that the Afghan government should make it clear to its neighbors that the pact will not threaten countries in the region, but rather will bring more stability.

"There will be a task for the diplomacy of the United States and its partners, and very importantly for your government, to make that clear to your neighbors that this not about a kind of threat or destabilisation of the region on the contrary," Cunningham said at a press conference in Kabul.

"It's about helping to build a region that will benefit everybody that's in it and there is no reason for anyone to be fearful that this partnership that we are building with Afghanistan is somehow going to disadvantage them unless they favor instability."

The US will have two important roles after 2014 which includes training, equipping and assisting the Afghan security forces and also continuing its counterterrorism mission in Afghanistan, he told reporters.

"After 2014...in what we are calling it an enduring presence in our long-term security relationship, US forces will have two missions: one will be to train, advise and assist the Afghan security forces.

"And in that role, we will be continuing to help Afghan security forces provide security for the Afghan people. The other role will be counterterrorism missions, including supporting Afghan forces in counterterrorism mission against Al Qaeda and its affiliates," Cunningham said, adding that the US will focus on Al Qaeda but the Afghan forces will pursue the Taliban themselves.

The US forces will interfere in the Afghan conflict with the Taliban if a peace deal is not reached, he said.

Also, the US and its partners are keen on building a strong voting system.

"So, there is a lot of work being done on this by the donors, by the Election commission and the government. The UN [United Nations] is assisting with technical advice on how we can help Afghanistan create a better voting system for this election and we are very committed to helping to make this work as best we can," the Ambassador said.


MOI to Form ALP ‘Coordination Centres’
TOLOnews.com By Azim Arash Thursday, 17 January 2013
Afghan Local Police (ALP) coordinator centres will be formed in eight provinces to monitor their activities and improve mutual relations between local police and the public, the Ministry of Interior (MOI) said Thursday.

MOI Minister Ghulam Mujtaba Patang said the ALP are doing a very important job in the country to protect the civilians from any kind of insurgent threat, but acknowledged that there were some trust problems which the government is seeking to address.

"We are planning to form ALP coordination centres in eight key provinces of the country to improve the relations between ALP and the public," Patang said at a press conference in Kabul.

Local councils can also play a vital role in boosting coordination between the public and police forces, he added.

The ALP was formed in 2010 with the support of the US forces in Afghanistan with the aim of helping the foreign troops and Afghan National Security Forces fight against insurgency.

However, the force has been plagued with problems. Most recently some of the ALP forces have reportedly terrorised their local communities by taking liberties with their privileges, committing crimes of extortion and rape, and using their power for their own interests.

ALP has more than 10,000 members mostly in southern and eastern regions of the country where the Taliban are more active.


Solar Experts See Strong Potential in Afghanistan
TOLOnews.com By Zabihullah Jhanmal Thursday, 17 January 2013
Afghanistan's Ministry of Energy and Water has not worked sufficiently on supporting solar power in Afghanistan despite its strong potential, solar companies said in Kabul Wednesday.

A number of solar power analysts have indicated that Afghanistan's wide, sunlit deserts may be able to produce thousands of megawatts (MW) of power but there has not been much interest from the government so far.

"Afghanistan has possibility of creating solar parks with the capacity to produce 150 MW of energy, but nothing is being done in this area," Sharifullah Mohammadi, head of solar power company Zularistan, said.

The Ministry of Energy and Water said it has acknowledged Afghanistan's potential to produce over 100,000 MW of solar energy, but the hurdle is the cost of setting up such solar parks.

"We are optimistic about solar energy in the country but the main problem is its high price to produce it," Deputy Minister Shujauddin Ziaee said.

However, Mohammadi disagreed.

"On the contrary, the price is low and also solar parks do not require batteries [to be run]. Because of this, the price is low," Mohammadi added.

www.afghanistannewscenter.com