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US Afghan commander cleared by Pentagon in Petraeus case involving emails to civilian woman
By Robert Burns, The Associated Press
WASHINGTON - A Pentagon investigation has cleared Gen. John Allen, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, of professional misconduct in exchanging emails with a civilian woman linked to the sex scandal that led retired Gen. David Petraeus to resign as CIA director.
Pentagon press secretary George Little said Tuesday that Defence Secretary Leon Panetta was informed of the conclusion by the Pentagon's inspector general.
"The secretary was pleased to learn that allegations of professional misconduct were not substantiated by the investigation," Little said, adding that Panetta has "complete confidence in the continued leadership" of Allen.
The matter had been referred to the Pentagon in November by the FBI during the course of its investigation of emails between Petraeus and his biographer-turned-paramour, Paula Broadwell. The FBI turned up thousands of emails between Allen and Jill Kelley, who was said to have received threatening emails from Broadwell.
At the time, officials said 20,000 to 30,000 pages of emails and other documents from Allen's communications with Kelley between 2010 and 2012 were in question. None of the emails have been made public.
Shortly after being contacted by the FBI, Panetta referred the matter to the Pentagon's inspector general, while expressing confidence in Allen and deciding that he would remain in Kabul as commander of all allied forces in Afghanistan.
At the same time, Allen's nomination to be the next U.S. commander of NATO forces in Europe was put on hold. The officials said Tuesday the White House had not decided whether to go forward with the nomination.
Maj. David Nevers, a spokesman for Allen, said he had no immediate comment on reports of his being exonerated.
Allen's successor in Kabul, Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, has been confirmed by the Senate and is scheduled to take over on Feb. 10.
Allen had maintained he did nothing wrong in the Kelley communications, but he has not spoken publicly about the specifics of his email exchanges with her. She served as a sort of social ambassador for U.S. Central Command in Tampa, Florida.
Petraeus is a former Central Command commander, and Allen is a former deputy commander there.
Shortly after he referred the emails to the inspector general, Panetta asked the Joint Chiefs of Staff to review ethics training and to brainstorm on ways to steer officers away from trouble. The move was a reflection of the depth of concern triggered by a series of misconduct cases in a military that prides itself on integrity and honour.
Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, has not released the results of his review but has said he found that ethics training for senior leaders, while adequate, should begin earlier in an officer's career and be reinforced more frequently.
Afghanistan calls for election support
Jan. 22, 2013 at 1:22 PM
KABUL, Afghanistan, Jan. 22 (UPI) -- The United Nations said it was responding to a request from the Afghan Independent Election Commission for assistance.
The IEC stated it was calling on the United Nations to undertake "as soon as possible" a needs-assessment mission for Afghanistan given the preparations needed for next year's vote.
A four-member U.N. team arrived Friday in Kabul for a 10-day visit to assess Afghanistan's electoral needs.
"The purpose of the needs-assessment mission is to assess the electoral environment and make recommendations on the nature of future U.N. support to the elections, which will be Afghan managed and Afghan led," a statement from the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan read.
Widespread allegations of fraud in favor of Afghan President Hamid Karzai in 2009 prompted former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah to withdraw from a second round of voting in his challenge against the incumbent.
Afghan forces are taking a greater role in security operations in the country as international forces wrap up their mission.
Jan Kubis, U.N. special envoy to Afghanistan, told the U.N. Security Council last month that development benchmarks for Afghanistan are at risk, however, "because of weak and inadequate systems of sub-national governance, lack of support from the central level, capacity constraints and insufficient planning on the civilian side."
Afghanistan: No outright winner, says Hammond
23 January 2013 BBC News
The Afghan government is unlikely to "win outright" against the Taliban once foreign troops leave, Defence Secretary Philip Hammond has said.
He said there was a "growing realisation on both sides of this fight that neither would win".
But he expected the Afghan government would hold the main population centres after troops left by 2014.
Responsibility for security is being handed to Afghan forces, who now oversee 80% of the population.
Mr Hammond, appearing before the defence select committee to talk about securing the future of Afghanistan, said: "I would expect attempts at dialogue, at groping towards a peace process to continue.
"I would expect the situation to be messier than it is today with Isaf at present on the ground, but I sense that there is a growing recognition on both sides of this fight that neither side can win outright."
Britain's national interests
He said the handing over of security to Afghan forces was a "process", with British troops leading initially, gradually moving to the Afghans being in control.
"We have a plan - which is quite an ambitious plan - to transfer security responsibility to the Afghan national security forces... in a way that allows the Afghans to maintain control of their territory and deny it to international terrorists of the type we that we have recently had a reminder of in another part of the world."
He said: "Because, effectively, Afghanistan is not now on any scale harbouring international terrorists, it is easy to forget that just a few years ago we were looking at these kind of threats coming from Afghanistan.
"We have a process here that is very much driven by Britain's own national security interests. We can't cut and run before we've completed that process."
He described the Taliban as still being "a significant force" but one that "is struggling to maintain the momentum of the insurgency".
He dismissed criticism that the presence of foreign troops was the cause of violence, saying that the mission's role was to clear al-Qaeda, help the Afghan state establish itself and then to train security forces.
Unwanted equipment
Mr Hammond said the Ministry of Defence would only bring back equipment from Afghanistan which it needed. Unwanted military equipment would be sold, gifted or destroyed.
It was too early to say what equipment might be left behind but he said there were the equivalent of 11,000 container units of kit in Afghanistan and that around 6,500 containers would be brought back to the UK.
British troop numbers were reduced from 9,500 to 9,000 before Christmas and numbers are set to fall to 5,200 by the end of 2013.
The remainder will leave by the end of 2014, when all Nato operations are due to finish, although a small number will remain after that, working at an officer training academy and in other support roles.
1 Afghan policeman killed in blast in western province
HERAT, Afghanistan, Jan. 23 (Xinhua) -- One Afghan policeman was killed and five were wounded when a bicycle bomb hit a police van in the country's western province of Herat Wednesday, acting- provincial police chief said.
"One service man with Fast-Reaction police forces were killed and five policemen were wounded as explosive attached to a bicycle went off in Muslakh area along the main road from provincial capital Heart city to bordering city of Islam Qala at about 12:30 p.m. local time," General Abdul Hamid Hamidi told Xinhua.
He said the police vehicle was running in the road when the blast took place. The injured, some in critical conditions, were shifted to a nearby hospital.
He also said no civilian casualties were reported in the incident in the province 640 km west of capital Kabul.
Security forces have cordoned off the area for precautionary measures.
No group claimed responsibility for the attacks, but Taliban suspects routinely claim responsibility for such attacks. The Taliban, who ruled the country before they were ousted by a U.S.- led invasion in late 2001, renewed armed insurgency, staging ambush and suicide attacks, killing combatants as well as civilians.
On Monday, three unarmed traffic policemen were killed and 12 others including eight civilians were wounded when Taliban launched a coordinated attack against traffic police office building in Kabul, sparking an eight-hour gunbattle which left all five militants dead.
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.
Afghanistan's colossal intelligence failure
Foreign Policy (blog) By Candace Rondeaux Tuesday, January 22, 2013
Close observers of Afghanistan are not likely to be surprised by recent allegations contained in a United Nations report that the Afghan National Security Directorate, the CIA's leading counterterrorism partner in South Asia, used whips and electric shocks to squeeze confessions out of suspected insurgent detainees. There are many ways to describe the directorate, or NDS as it is locally known, but a model of modern intelligence gathering and investigative efficiency is not one of them.
The report, which was quietly published on the website of the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan on Sunday, details a grim pattern of abuse and mistreatment in NDS prisons, and has put yet another dent in NDS's reputation at a time when the Afghan intelligence agency has never been more vulnerable. A key partner in the ongoing U.S. quest to contain transnational terrorism in South and Central Asia, NDS seems to have fallen on very hard times of late. Yet, few in Washington appear ready to confront the implications of NDS's downward spiral, a trend that seems to be accelerating as NATO marches toward the exit.
Last week, in an unprecedented show of force at least half a dozen Taliban fighters charged the gates of NDS headquarters in central Kabul, set off a suicide truck bomb and nearly blasted their way straight into the central nervous system of the Afghan intelligence agency. Some 32 civilians and security personnel were injured, and at least one NDS officer was killed on the spot. The attack might have been a little less demoralizing, however, had it not been for another purported Taliban assault in Kabul only a month earlier on an alleged NDS safe house in central Kabul that severely wounded the agency's well-known chief, Asadullah Khalid.
Both incidents beg a couple of questions that US, NATO and Afghan officials must all be asking themselves these days. First, just how safe is an Afghan intelligence agency safe house if a suicide bomber can gain entry and blow up the director of said intelligence agency? And, what do the latest assaults mean for NATO's transition out of the country? Like many things in Afghanistan, the answer is both simple and complex.
In the "simple" column: Asadullah Khalid, the newly ordained head of Afghanistan's National Directorate of Security, probably has about as many enemies-personal and political-as he does friends. The December 6 attack on Khalid was the fifth in as many years. A two-time governor who served in the volatile and politically pivotal provinces of Kandahar and Ghazni, Khalid is a high roller with deep ties to mujahideen elites. His close associates run the gamut from hardcore Islamist conservative Afghan elites such as Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, a cagey Pashtun commander who trained 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, to Ahmed Wali Karzai, the late and legendary glad-handing southern brother of President Hamid Karzai.
Originally from Ghazni, a part of Afghanistan whose political, ethnic and religious paroxysms most closely parallel that of Florida, Khalid has counted coup in innumerable Afghan skirmishes spanning from the late 1980's to the present. Before President Karzai appointed him governor of Ghazni in 2002, Khalid served as head of NDS's provincial affairs department, and, several of his colleagues aver, was a first runner up to replace NDS's first director, Engineer Arif Sarwary when Sarwary stepped down in 2004. Instead, however, Karzai's inner circle eventually decided in 2005 that Khalid would be a better fit as governor of the president's home province, Kandahar.
It was in Kandahar that Khalid burnished a reputation for applying tough tactics to insurgent detainees after Canadian diplomat Richard Colvin alleged in testimony before the Canadian parliament in November 2009 that Khalid "personally tortured people" in a "dungeon" beneath his residence. Khalid has repeatedly denied the Canadian claims.
An ethnic Pashtun who also briefly served as minister of borders and tribal affairs before his appointment to NDS, Khalid has rejected similar allegations lodged in the British high court late last year. Khalid's denials aside, the most recent UN report on NDS torture practices would certainly seem to bear out a persistent pattern in the Afghan presidential palace of ignoring the obvious when it is convenient to do so.
In the "complex" column, a combination of hubris, insouciance, and vanity peculiar to many of Kabul's leading powerbrokers seems to have left Khalid especially vulnerable to violent fissures that are slowly rendering the once relatively effective Afghan intelligence agency ineffective and deeply compromised. Shortly before the bombing, Khalid coupled his denials of involvement in torture with equally vehement and venomous anti-Taliban rhetoric. During his testimony before Afghanistan's lower house of parliament before his appointment was confirmed in September, he alternately promised to exterminate Taliban outliers who refuse to accept Karzai's reconciliation terms and to support cross border operations into Pakistan in response to cross border shelling by the Pakistani army along the country's eastern border.
Khalid at one point purportedly took control of the CIA-backed Kandahar Strike Force, an aggressive local militia that was accused in 2010 by Afghan officials of assassinating the southern province's local police chief. Not long after his adventures in Kandahar, Khalid got involved in backing a controversial anti-Taliban uprising in Ghazni by provincial locals. Not exactly the best way to win friends and influence people in a tough neighborhood where the biggest house on the block is owned by the Pakistani military, a key supporter of the Afghan Taliban.
All of the above without doubt made the NDS chief especially susceptible. But there are two other critical factors that also played important roles in the attack on Khalid and the one-two-punch assault on NDS headquarters a month later. The first factor is factionalism. Factionalism within the official state Afghan security services has been a fact of life since they were created, but the phenomenon has worsened considerably since the onset of NATO's transition out of the country, and it has not left Afghanistan's chief intelligence agency untouched. Karzai has hired and fired a total of four NDS chiefs since 2002, including two within the last two years -- Khalid and Karzai's former personal security chief Rahmatullah Nabil. Each changing of the guard has been followed by purge and counter-purge of various networks affiliated with the new chiefs, leaving deep wells of mistrust, particularly between the largely non-Pashtun retinue of NDS officers allied with the Northern Alliance and Pashtuns affiliated eithe
r with Sayyaf, warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar or others of a more Islamist bent.
Meanwhile, growing concerns among NDS leaders about increased infiltration of insurgents and Iranian and Pakistani double agents within their ranks has resulted in the reported arrests of a little more than a dozen NDS officials in the last year. These problems have been known for sometime but only really started turning heads at the headquarters of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) when in April 2012 the NDS failed to accurately analyze scads of tips about an impending attack on Kabul that was billed as one of the largest in the entire war. Conflicts between Pashtuns and the primarily Panjshiri Tajik dominated officer corps of the NDS have been cited as among the main reasons that information about that attack did not reach the right people at the right time in Kabul.
The second factor is Khalid's personal blind spot. At 43, Khalid cuts quite the dashing figure, and a one-time colleague of Khalid told me recently that he is known amongst his peers as having a predilection for a bit of flash and panache. Indeed, the guesthouse where the suicide bomber struck is situated in one of the tonier areas of the capital, and for several months before the incident in question and well before Khalid's appointment to NDS it was thought to be his personal playhouse. Neighbors recall hearing raucous music blaring out of the so-called NDS safe house Khalid had occupied and some distinctly recall the party until dawn atmosphere that the property frequently appeared to witness on Thursday nights. It is unclear whether the NDS chief was mixing business with pleasure at the house, but it is undeniable that his address, his presence and his seeming love of loud music was well known to most in the neighborhood well before the bombing.
Some of Khalid's associates also apparently knew in advance that the intelligence chief had been expecting a very special visitor the day of the bombing at the house. As one longtime friend of Khalid's explained -- and several media outlets have reported -- the suicide bomber was a former Taliban prisoner who was allegedly acting as a messenger for Mullah Omar's Quetta Shura.
Like his one time colleague and elder statesman, former president and High Peace Council chairman Burhanuddin Rabbani, it seems Khalid could not resist the temptation to amplify his political profile as leading dealmaker cum peace negotiator. So when the freed Taliban prisoner arrived at Khalid's guest house cum safe house in the Taimani neighborhood of Kabul Khalid hardly expected the young man to come bearing a bomb in his underpants. But, much like Rabbani's assassination in October 2011, it was that close "personal touch," that dealt the big blow.
All this will, of course, require a lot of chewing over in the coming weeks and months ahead as NATO continues its accelerated withdrawal from Afghanistan. As for Khalid, he'll have plenty of time to think it through while he convalesces at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. And, at least he won't be lonely while he's meditating on his future and the prospects for NDS; Khalid has already received visits from President Obama, Leon Panetta, and, naturally his old friend Hamid Karzai in recent weeks.
And, perhaps while Khalid gets some rest and everyone's giving the latest turn of evens with NDS good long think, NATO and U.S. officials will finally sit down to hash out what to do next with America's top partner in the fight against terrorism in South and Central Asia. The White House in particular, might want to consider whether it can continue to tie America's fortunes to intelligence outfits like NDS without first figuring out how (and whether it's possible) to help governments like Karzai's to clean these agencies up. The Obama administration might also want to calculate the overall impact of its continued uncritical support for regimes that employ torture to ensure state security and how that might in the long-term hinder its efforts to unring the bell rung by a panicked Bush administration the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. If anything the most recent series of attacks in Kabul should have demonstrated to Washington, it is time for a serious rollback and reset where NDS is concerned.
Candace Rondeaux lived and worked in Afghanistan for nearly five-years, first as the Afghanistan-Pakistan bureau chief for The Washington Post and more recently as senior analyst for the International Crisis Group in Kabul. She is a research fellow at the Center on National Security at Fordham University Law School in New York, and she is currently writing a political history of the Afghan security forces from 2001 to 2014.
New Threat Seen in Afghan Pullout
Wall Street Journal By NATHAN HODGE January 22, 2013
PUZEH, Afghanistan - Afghan rural areas will be at greater risk of falling to the Taliban if the U.S. accedes to Kabul's demands to speed up the withdrawal of special-operations teams working with Afghan village self-defense units, an internal report prepared for the U.S. military warned.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai, during talks with President Barack Obama in Washington this month, secured an agreement on withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghan villages this spring, months ahead of previous schedules. Afghan officials indicated they believe this commitment includes the special-operations teams working with village forces known as the Afghan Local Police. Coalition officials said the matter is under discussion.
The ALP have been built and trained by coalition special-operations units in rural areas that are usually beyond the reach of the Afghan army and regular police. Around 19,000 local police have been deployed since the program began in 2010.
The report, written by a research firm with ties to the Pentagon, warned that the ALP program is in danger of collapse—and that local leaders may be more vulnerable to assassination and intimidation—in case of a too-rapid U.S. pullout, according to excerpts viewed by The Wall Street Journal.
That conclusion echoes longstanding concerns aired by military commanders who prefer that a withdrawal be built around conditions on the ground, rather than deadlines.
"A lot of locals have put their necks out against the Taliban," said Seth Jones, associate director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center at the RAND Corp., who said he wasn't aware of the report but had spoken to Afghan officials about the issue. "If you pull [special-operations forces] outthe villagers are going to be the ones that pay the price."
Afghan and coalition officials are discussing how to adjust its timeline, said U.S. Army Lt. Col. Tom Bryant, a spokesman for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization Special Operations Component Command-Afghanistan, which is responsible for the ALP program.
"There obviously are consequencesif a precipitous departure from all villages is directed," he said. "Our headquarters is working to further define those [consequences] and develop mitigating strategies as a contingency."
Sediq Sediqqi, the spokesman for the Afghan Interior Ministry, which oversees ALP, declined to comment on the negotiations.
The U.S. military has long billed the ALP, a project that was implemented over Mr. Karzai's objections, as the centerpiece of its counterinsurgency campaign. At present, around 17% of Afghanistan's population—roughly 5 million people—are protected by ALP units, according to the Special Operations Command.
The ALP program is controversial: Officials in Kabul and human-rights advocates worry it could pave the way for the return of lawless militias once international forces go home. Some ALP members have been involved in extortion, murder and rape, according to the watchdog Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission.
"This is not a perfect program, by any stretch of the imagination," said U.S. Army Col. Don Bolduc, deputy commanding general for NATO Special Operations Component Command-Afghanistan. But, he added, "the misconduct is extremely low in comparison to the numbers that are out there."
Col. Bolduc said ALP members have been held accountable for misconduct, including a high-profile case in which four local police officers received lengthy convictions for sexual assault. The program, he said, provides better government oversight than unregulated militias.
The military-commissioned report reflects a major concern of U.S. special operations advisers: whether the ALP experiment in rural policing will survive, particularly in Afghan communities that have only a tenuous link to the central government.
One of those communities is Puzeh, an outpost in southern Helmand province, Afghanistan's prime opium-growing country and the Taliban's historic heartland. Two years ago, the Taliban "had complete freedom of movement here," said a Marine special-operations team sergeant working with the ALP in Puzeh. A year ago, the Marines and Afghan police fought raging gunbattles to reclaim the area.
Today, the U.S. advisers stroll outside their mud-brick compound without body armor. ALP members patrol in pickup trucks and on motorbikes and man checkpoints along Highway 611, the main road in the district.
On a recent day, a special-operations team leader, wearing traditional Afghan dress, stopped to visit a mosque under construction. Then, following a chat with an ALP patrol, he went for a spin on the village's unpaved road on a borrowed Afghan bicycle.
Military officials describe the ALP program as a tenuous experiment that depends on the effectiveness of the Afghan government, where corruption has helped drive support for the insurgency; in some areas, the Taliban have been able to offer dispute resolution and other services as an alternative to corrupt and ineffectual local bodies.
"We can help them all day long, but if they don't have confidence in their district government, then it's all for naught," said a Marine special operations company commander in Puzeh.
In another village outpost in Helmand, a U.S. Navy SEAL team leader described his worry that ALP units could collapse without serious backing from the Afghan state.
The most optimistic outcome, he said, is that ALP and the villagers "will have enough of a connection to government, they'll prefer the government to the Taliban."
But, the SEAL team leader reckoned, the locals "will probably make some sort of small deals with [the Taliban], and make sort of a peace treaty" once the Americans leave.
Write to Nathan Hodge at nathan.hodge@wsj.com
23 newly graduate women join Afghan army in western province
HERAT, Afghanistan, Jan. 23 (Xinhua) -- Nearly two dozen of newly graduate women were commissioned to Afghan National Army ( ANA) in western province of Herat on Wednesday, an army official said.
"Up to 23 women after completion of four-month training course received their certificates and commissioned to ANA," commander of Army Corps 207 Zafar, General Taj Mohammad Jahid, told Xinhua.
The female officers will serve in the Corps 207 Zafar which provide security for western provinces, he said.
More than 1,000 women have been serving in Afghan army across the country.
The Afghan government and NATO Training Mission in Afghanistan (NTM-A) have stepped up efforts to train and equip Afghan police and army as NATO-led forces have handed over to Afghan forces the security responsibilities of 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.
Sam French on Buzkashi Boys, his Oscar-Nominated Short About Afghanistan’s Brutal National Sport
Vanity Fair By Lesley M. M. Blume January 22 2013
Buzkashi–the national sport of Afghanistan–is essentially a lawless version of polo, played with a dead goat carcass instead of a ball. It’s a far cry from the Etonian “sport of kings” played on the crisp green fields of England or the Veuve Cliquot-sponsored charity matches of the Hamptons. Still, the sport creates royalty and icons of its own. A buzzy new live action short film Buzkashi Boys—nominated for an Oscar—is poised to bring the often-brutal Buzkashi world to audiences around the globe. Directed by American filmmaker Sam French and produced by Canadian Ariel Nasr, the movie depicts the lives of two young best friends—a street urchin and a blacksmith's son—determined to defy their fates by becoming Buzkashi heroes.
Shot on a $200,000 budget entirely on-location in Afghanistan, the 29-minute film is, according to French, the most ambitiousinternational film project to have come out of the country in at least a decade. The production constantly teetered on oblivion as French and his team negotiated their way through the notoriously corrupt Kabul bureaucracy, sourced their cast among locals who didn’t know what a film was, and ran out money during post-production before a frantic Kickstarter fundraising campaign saved their bacon. “This was a Hail Mary pass, but we threw it as hard and as far as we could,” says French.
Below, French talks with Vanity Fair about shooting a film amidst rocket fire, how to charm Afghan officials into granting police escorts, and the unlikely discovery he made on a Kabul road known as “Chicken Street.”
VF Daily: Since most Americans or westerners have never experienced—and will likely never experience—Buzkashi, describe it for us.
Sam French: The game itself is an incredible spectacle. Imagine fifty guys on horses thundering down a pitch—it’s pretty staggering and incredibly cinematic. The first time I saw it, there were snow-capped mountains in the background; there was no out-of-bounds, and the horses would just plunge through the crowd. It’s also a very brutal sport. But the goat is already dead, so I don’t think it’s brutal as a bullfight, for example.
So, one minute you’re at USC film school, and the next you’re shooting a soon-to-be-Oscar-nominated film about a blood sport in a war-torn country. What was the path from point A to point B?
I was a struggling filmmaker in Los Angeles. I fell in love with a woman and followed her to Kabul, and started a life there. It wasn’t an easy choice to make. Then, in 2009, my friend Martin Roe, who I went to USC with, came to visit me. He sat me down, and said, “You’re a narrative filmmaker, so why aren’t you writing a narrative script?” So we [went] all over Kabul, looking at locations, and wrote the script there. It only took us a week. We were inspired; it was an incredible creative process.
One of the lead partsin the film is an ambitious young Afghan street kid. How did you find your star?
Casting a film in Afghanistan is not that easy. You can’t just go out and say, we’re holding auditions and have people show up. Our producer Ariel Nasr went around to children’s shelters to find kids who could possibly be in the film. First of all, you have to explain what a film, and what auditions are. To cast the lead, we were searching for a long time. I kept coming back to a kid I’d met on Chicken Street, where expats go to buy souvenirs. [Fawad Mohammadi] was the most amazing kid I’d ever met; he had these huge beautiful green eyes. He was the character I wanted to portray.
How did you shoot the film? Was there any industry infrastructure for you to rely on?
Personnel, logistics, equipment: you can’t find much of that in Afghanistan. There are very few people there who can produce international quality productions. So, on Buzkashi Boys, we did on-the-job training. We brought over nine Western filmmakers and trained twelve Afghan film trainees on the production. It was very important to us to make this truly a film project that would train filmmakers.
We brought over the camera and all the supporting equipment. It wasn’t easy getting it into the country. Martin Roe sourced a lot of the crew and equipment in Los Angeles and had it shipped into Bagram Air Base. We needed a crane and a dolly: we found an old Russian crane that had been there for thirty years; it weighed a couple tons and needed four people to work it. We found guys there who could do it. We just made it work. A film production of this size, an international Afghan collaboration of this size, hasn’t really happened before; we definitely attracted a lot of interest on the ground.
Twenty-nine minutes is long for a short film. Were you tempted to expand it into a feature?
Well, one factor [in doing a short film instead of a feature] was security issues. With a feature film, you’re on location for weeks at a time. On a short film, you’re on location for days at a time. We definitely didn’t tell anyone where we’d be shooting the next day; we would change our schedule so people wouldn’t know what we were doing. The day after we shot in the market in the old city, a rocket fell in the area where we were filming the day before. There was a big bombing that happened in the city center during the middle of filming. Luckily, we had police protection and government approval for the production.
How did you secure that help?
[Producer] Ariel [Nasr] spent about a year in pre-production trying to get all of the permissions and approvals; it was definitely a long process. They say in Afghanistan you get nothing done until you’ve three cups of tea with someone. He had many, many cups of tea with many, many government officials.
How much of your already-tight budget had to be allotted for bribes?
Afghanistan is—by all metrics—one of the most corrupt countries in the world: that’s a fact. But we wanted to be totally above board, which is why it took us so long to get the production going. It took us a year, but we didn’t pay any bribes to anyone. We got people on our side, instead of going in and paying people off. We wanted the Afghans who worked on this film with us to be proud of it.
A couple of years ago, your twelve-year-old star, Fawad Mohammadi, was a street kid on Chicken Street in Kabul, and now he’s the star of an Oscar-nominated film. What will his life look like now?
We were aware that plucking someone off the street and casting him in a film was probably going to change his life. You want to change it for the better. He’s [now] being put through school by the generosity of certain foreigners living in Kabul – the best school in Afghanistan. He’s getting straight A’s.
What happened when he learned about the Oscar nomination?
I called him, and he started crying. I don’t think it had really sunk in yet that this film would be seen by everyone. He actually asked, “Is this up for the best Afghan film?” I said “No, Fawad; it’s up for the best film in the world.” He’s a street kid; he doesn’t have a TV at home. He doesn’t know what the Oscars are. It’s my dream to bring him to the Academy Awards ceremony if I can.
What does he want to do when he finishes school?
He wants to be an airline pilot, but he’s never flown in an airplane before.
What message about Afghanistan does your film convey?
You see the news headlines about Afghanistan, and people here in the west think that the whole country is full of terrorists and people who want to kill Americans. But it’s not true. Most of the people there have the same hopes and dreams as everyone else. Even here, we’re all human beings.
The choice to make the film about a street kid living in Kabul and this ancient sport—in some ways, it could be seen as a period piece. When we show Buzkashi Boys in Afghanistan, the reaction is, interestingly, “Why didn’t you make a film about an entrepreneur starting a business and being in the modern world?” They’re hungry for the future. The country is undergoing a massive transformation right now. There’s a whole new generation that wants to join the world. They have smartphones and they’re on Facebook; they want to be part of the international community. I actually chose to portray the other side of the coin, but that was my creative choice as a filmmaker.
Buzkashi Boys was produced through the non-profit NGO, Afghan Film Project, in association with Dirty Robber, an L.A.-based production company.
U.S. withdrawal is 'tough love' for disbelieving Afghans
By Douglas Wissing, Special for CNN January 22, 2013
Editor's note: Douglas Wissing is an independent journalist and author of Funding the Enemy: How US Taxpayers Bankroll the Taliban (Prometheus Books). He is embedded with U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
Forward Operating Base Salerno, Afghanistan (CNN) -- As Presidents Barack Obama and Hamid Karzai parry over troop levels and assistance, "retrograde" is the operant word I am hearing from U.S. commanders in Afghanistan. A nuanced military term for withdrawal, retrograde defines operations in this insurgency-plagued land.
After more than a decade of U.S.-led warfare, American commanders are now insisting their Afghan counterparts take over the fight.
The 101st Airborne Division's Rakkasan Brigade is the battle-space owner of eastern Afghanistan's restive Khost and Paktia provinces, both of which border Pakistan's anarchic tribal regions.
In the brigade headquarters at Forward Operating Base Salerno -- a building hardened against rocket and mortar attack -- Rakkasan Deputy Commander Colonel Tim Sullivan told me: "Our mission was to go from a partnered role with the ANSF (Afghan National Security Forces) to an advise and assist role. We kind of gave it the 'tough love' approach."
With the announced U.S. withdrawal in 2014, American officers have no choice but to push the Afghan security forces forward. It's a big change for Afghan commanders used to U.S. troops taking the lead, and accustomed to having the formidable U.S. firepower and air support.
Sullivan talked of turning down a cosseted Afghan commander who demanded helicopter transport to one of his bases. "We fly them nowhere," Sullivan told me. "It's a big transition. It has to happen. It's a clash of wills."
Sullivan is the right man for the job. A hulking, gravel-voiced Brooklynite from an Irish Catholic family of seven boys, Sullivan is a West Point graduate who has served in Somalia, Haiti, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Sullivan and other U.S. officers in Afghanistan talk about the need to transition to "Afghan Good Enough" -- a sustainable Afghan security force that does it the Afghan way.
The U.S. partnering strategy of "Shohna ba Shohna" (Shoulder to Shoulder) has abruptly given way to "After You," as Afghan security forces take the lead -- sometimes reluctantly.
"Across the A/O (Area of Operations), I wouldn't paint a rosy picture," Sullivan says. "We've had some very good success. We've had some moderate success. We have not encountered any nightmares."
Across the insurgent heartland of eastern and southern Afghanistan, there's a palletizing fever as U.S. equipment is packed for shipment.
In military briefings, U.S. bases scheduled for imminent closure are highlighted on Powerpoint maps.
Long convoys of armored vehicles are making their way back from forward bases as combat outposts are closed or transferred to Afghan security forces.
Remaining U.S. bases are groaning with the influx of transiting troops and contractors, housed in new barrios of Alaska tents and "tin-can" metal housing pods.
Some bases are being dismantled and returned to nature. Combat Outpost Tillman, named after the NFL star and special forces soldier Pat Tillman who died in an infamous friendly fire incident, was one of those closed.
"We scraped it clean," Sullivan said. U.S. anti-IED teams traveled north to blow up the watchtowers.
The base is now a soccer field, where Afghan boys play a wolfish style of football.
As Obama administration spokespersons float the big round trial balloon of zero troops in Afghanistan, soldiers here talk about the spring 2013 drawdown of 20 percent of the remaining 66,000 US troops, with another 50 percent to be gone soon after.
How are the Afghans responding to U.S. retrograde? Among some, there is clearly denial. They simply can't imagine a country rich enough, or foolish enough, to just walk away from the enormous investment poured into these bases, many just built during the boom that accompanied Obama's troop surge.
Aid and development money is drying up. I listened to one Afghan government farm worker in insecure Zabul Province insist a U.S. military development team needed to build a fence around a section of a U.S.-financed Afghan demonstration farm.
The U.S. commander patiently told the farmer he should ask his provincial agriculture minister to do it. "We don't do projects anymore," the commander repeatedly said. The farmer, who sported a bright gold wristwatch that signifies inordinate wealth (and sometimes indicates Taliban ties), retorted the ministry was "weak," so the American "friends" needed to do it.
Many Afghans tell me they are very pessimistic about post-2014 security. One Afghan who has translated for U.S. forces in Khost Province for nine years says: "The Afghan situation right now is kind of bad. If the American forces withdraw from Afghanistan, I don't think the Afghan army is strong enough to defend everybody."
He told me he hoped coalition forces would keep training the Afghan security forces. "Right now if the coalition forces would leave, it's going to be so hard for the Afghan people."
Like many of his colleagues, the educated interpreter, whose father was an Afghan National Police general, is applying for a special U.S. immigration visa.
Other Afghans are getting angry. One U.S. commander in southern Afghanistan told me about his Afghan counterpart flaring up when he learned American support was being quickly scaled back. It's a dictum that "retrograde under contact" (withdrawal under pressure) is among the most difficult of military operations. At some point when troop levels have dropped, all a force can do is protect itself.
As U.S. forces withdraw after well over a decade of war, the insurgents have responded in various ways. IEDs continue to be the weapon of choice. Media-magnet complex attacks, such as the spectacular attacks on Kabul and Camp Bastion when Prince Harry was stationed there, broadcast the insurgency is still thriving.
In some formerly insecure provinces such as Khost, insurgent attacks have diminished. I asked Col. Sullivan about the contention that attacks dropped because casualty-cautious U.S. commanders ordered fewer combat patrols.
Sullivan challenged the idea that U.S. soldiers are not "out there," saying soldiers constantly travel the roads on retrograde convoys.
"We're not finding the mother lodes of caches (insurgent military supplies) when we go out," he says. "We're not getting a fight."
Then I asked about the assessment that Afghan insurgents are just husbanding their forces while the U.S. withdraws. "Husbanding of forces," Sullivan quickly agrees. "I might buy that."
Amnesty: Afghanistan Must Improve Winter Aid to Displaced
VOA News January 22, 2013
Amnesty International said there is a "desperate and immediate need" for the Afghan government and its donor partners to improve aid delivery to displaced people during this year's winter, which has so far killed 17 people living in displacement camps.
The rights group said in a statement Tuesday that most of those who died in the first two weeks of this month were children. It also warned against a repeat of last winter, when 100 people died in camps due to a lack of assistance.
Amnesty's Deputy Asia-Pacific Director Polly Truscott called the deaths "a preventable tragedy" and blamed "inadequate coordination of winter assistance" to the hundreds of thousands of people living in displacement camps across the country.
The group reported that in one incident in the western province of Herat, the provincial government had not delivered aid to internally displaced people because officials feared the aid would encourage them to stay in the area rather than return home.
Meanwhile, President Hamid Karzai has ordered an investigation into this week's United Nations report alleging that torture remains widespread in Afghanistan's prisons and that the Afghan government appears to be trying to hide the mistreatment.
In the report issued Sunday, the U.N. mission to the country said it found "credible and reliable evidence" that more than half of the 635 "conflict-related detainees" interviewed at 89 facilities spread across the country had been tortured. The report criticized the government for refusing to prosecute those accused of torturing prisoners.
While the Afghan government has disputed the report's findings, Mr. Karzai on Tuesday ordered a fact finding team to report back within two weeks so that authorities can take follow-up measures.
Karzai Meets US Officials, Demands Bagram Transfer
TOLOnews.com Tuesday, 22 January 2013
President Hamid Karzai Monday emphasised the importance of the US transferring Bagram prison detainees to Afghan authorities in a meeting with David Pearce, the acting special representative of the US to Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The pair met to further discuss matters raised in the president's recent trip to Washington which Karzai described as very productive, according to a statement from the president's office.
"President Karzai once again thanked the US for the warm hospitality it extended to the Afghan delegation and noted that it was important that the US now puts into practice the agreements reached in Washington, in particular the full transfer of Bagram prison to Afghan authority and any delay, otherwise, may raise suspicion among the people of Afghanistan," it said.
The transfer of prisoners from US to Afghan authority was a key condition of Kabul when it signed last March a long-term strategic agreement with Washington.
Until now, the full transfer has not taken place although US President Barack Obama told Karzai during his US visit that it will happen soon.
However, fresh concerns over the treatment of prisoners in Afghan jails is likely to present a new obstacle for Karzai's demands.
Nato on Monday said that it is suspending transfer of detainees to Afghan prisons after a report this week from the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (Unama) revealed systemic torture of prisoners in more than 30 Afghan jails.
It is the second time Nato has banned transfers to address human rights concerns in Afghan prisons. It first did so after a similar Unama report in 2011 detailed widespread abuse, including the ripping out of detainees' toenails and the twisting of their genitals.
Nato halted prisoner transfers for several months and only resumed them after inspections and training. But the latest report has reignited concerns and Nato renewed its ban.
Karzai also discussed with Pearce the peace process and the Qatar office for the Taliban.
"On the issue of Qatar office to be opened for peace talks with the Taliban, President Karzai once again underlined Afghan government's position that those Taliban who take part in the peace negotiations must prove their credibility and hold verifiable authorisation of the Taliban leadership," the statement said.
The president added that there must be a clear and written understanding among Afghanistan, the US and Qatar on the Taliban office opening and follow up arrangements for the peace process, it said.
"President Karzai made it clear that only the High Peace Council can represent the people of Afghanistan at the peace talks, as it was authorized by the Peace Jirga and created by the will of the Afghan people," it added.
5.2-magnitude quake hits Hindu Kush region, Afghanistan -- USGS
NEW YORK, Jan. 22 (Xinhua) -- An earthquake measuring 5.2 on the Richter scale jolted Hindu Kush region, Afghanistan at 15:09: 22 GMT on Tuesday, the U.S. Geological Survey said.
The epicenter, with a depth of 51.60 km, was initially determined to be at 36.3227 degrees north latitude and 68.8486 degrees east longitude.
We Will End Trade Relations With Pakistan: ACCI
TOLOnews.com By Zabihullah Jhanmal Tuesday, 22 January 2013
The Afghan Chamber of Commerce and Industries (ACCI) Tuesday said that it will end trade relations with Pakistan following a long-running dispute over containers stalled in Karachi port.
ACCI officials said despite assurances made by Pakistani officials to release the 3000 containers belonging to Afghan traders, the issue is still not resolved.
"Despite so much effort, the government has now failed to resolve our problems with Pakistan and we are forced to end our relations with Pakistan," ACCI deputy Khan Jan Alokozay said.
Alokozay said traders were losing as much as US$600,000 a day over the matter and will encourage Afghan traders to discontinue doing business via Karachi.
ACCI officials have asked the Afghan government to prevent Pakistani-loaded vehicles from entering Afghanistan, even those whose destination is a different country.
Pakistan Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf earlier this month ordered the Afghan containers be released in one week following his meeting with the ACCI and the Afghan-Pak Joint Chamber of Commerce, but the ACCI said there has been no progress.
Nuristan Airstrike Kills 14 Insurgents: Local Officials
TOLOnews.com Tuesday, 22 January 2013
At least 14 Taliban insurgents including three foreigners have been killed and 21 other insurgents wounded in a US airstrike in eastern Nuristan province on Monday afternoon, Afghan local officials said Tuesday.
The airstrike happened in the Dahan Baz Gul area of Nuristan's Kamdish district when Taliban insurgents were at a gathering, provincial police chief Ghulaam Mullah told TOLOnews, adding that the strike was carried out by drone.
Isaf Joint Command told TOLOnews it had no operational reporting of any airstrike in Nuristan, and so could not confirm whether there had been a drone attack.
The police chief said there were no civilians casualties in the strike.
Chief of Kamdish border police Zone 7 Shamsuddin Nuristani confirmed the airstrike and the casualties: "Fourteen Taliban insurgents were killed and 21 others were injured."
Kamdish district shares a border with Pakistan and insurgents frequently target local troops.
Isaf said that recent military operations in the east that resulted in insurgent deaths were two separate operations in eastern Kunar on Sunday.
Joint Afghan and coalition forces conducted two operations in the Ghaz-e Abad district, and both operations resulted in the death of two insurgents, a spokesman told TOLOnews Tuesday.
Meanwhile, combined Afghan and coalition forces have captured three local Taliban commanders, Isaf's operational update said Tuesday.
A Taliban leader was arrested in the Lashkar Gah district of Helmand province and another was captured in the Spin Boldak district of Kandahar province on Tuesday.
A third leader was arrested on Sunday in Kandahar's Maiwand district although his identity as a Taliban leader was not confirmed until Tuesday, the statement said.
None of the leader's names were provided in the Isaf statement.
Beach Football Team Heads to Qatar for FIFA Qualifier
TOLOnews.com By Mir Sayed Sediqi Tuesday, 22 January 2013
Afghanistan's national beach football team will play Qatar in the first qualifying match for the 2013 FIFA Beach Football World Cup on Tuesday evening in Qatar.
"Our team has a high morale, and the players are well prepared to face the Qatar team," Beach Football committee member Rouhullah Rastagar told TOLOnews.
The Afghan team's starting lineup for the match is Kavosh, Jameel Naseeri, Ghulam Hazrat Baran, Mahmoud Azad, and Samiullah Mohammadi as the team's captain.
The Afghan ambassador to Qatar met with the players and is expected to attend tonight's match.
"The Ambassador's meeting with the players had a very good effect on their spirits," Rastagar said.
Afghanistan is hoping to qualify for one of three places up for grabs among 16 Asian teams.
Those three teams will then join 13 other teams from around the world in French Polynesia's Tahiti for the World Cup.
Afghanistan will face Oman, Qatar, and Australia in Group A.
"The team's two-day practice has been very good for the players to climatise to the place and the weather. Inshallah, we have come to succeed and we hope we will succeed," player Mahmoud Azad said.
The FIFA Beach Football World Cup is held every two years.
Russia won the cup in 2011, with Brazil, Portugal and El Salvador securing second, third and fourth respectively.
Afghanistan Appoints First Female District Governor
TOLOnews.com Tuesday, 22 January 2013
The Afghan government approved Sahra Shikeeb as district governor for Khaja Do Koh district in northern Jawizjan province, making her the Karzai regime's first female district governor.
"I am very happy to be given this chance," Shikeeb told TOLOnews Tuesday. "I want to start my work here to help my people in education, health, construction and in other fields."
Shikeeb will start her work officially today, provincial deputy governor Abdul Rahman told TOLOnews Tuesday.
Rahman said that around 40 percent of the province's government workers are women.
Khaja Do Koh district is considered secure in Jawzjan in regards to insurgent activity.
www.afghanistannewscenter.com
By Robert Burns, The Associated Press
WASHINGTON - A Pentagon investigation has cleared Gen. John Allen, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, of professional misconduct in exchanging emails with a civilian woman linked to the sex scandal that led retired Gen. David Petraeus to resign as CIA director.
Pentagon press secretary George Little said Tuesday that Defence Secretary Leon Panetta was informed of the conclusion by the Pentagon's inspector general.
"The secretary was pleased to learn that allegations of professional misconduct were not substantiated by the investigation," Little said, adding that Panetta has "complete confidence in the continued leadership" of Allen.
The matter had been referred to the Pentagon in November by the FBI during the course of its investigation of emails between Petraeus and his biographer-turned-paramour, Paula Broadwell. The FBI turned up thousands of emails between Allen and Jill Kelley, who was said to have received threatening emails from Broadwell.
At the time, officials said 20,000 to 30,000 pages of emails and other documents from Allen's communications with Kelley between 2010 and 2012 were in question. None of the emails have been made public.
Shortly after being contacted by the FBI, Panetta referred the matter to the Pentagon's inspector general, while expressing confidence in Allen and deciding that he would remain in Kabul as commander of all allied forces in Afghanistan.
At the same time, Allen's nomination to be the next U.S. commander of NATO forces in Europe was put on hold. The officials said Tuesday the White House had not decided whether to go forward with the nomination.
Maj. David Nevers, a spokesman for Allen, said he had no immediate comment on reports of his being exonerated.
Allen's successor in Kabul, Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, has been confirmed by the Senate and is scheduled to take over on Feb. 10.
Allen had maintained he did nothing wrong in the Kelley communications, but he has not spoken publicly about the specifics of his email exchanges with her. She served as a sort of social ambassador for U.S. Central Command in Tampa, Florida.
Petraeus is a former Central Command commander, and Allen is a former deputy commander there.
Shortly after he referred the emails to the inspector general, Panetta asked the Joint Chiefs of Staff to review ethics training and to brainstorm on ways to steer officers away from trouble. The move was a reflection of the depth of concern triggered by a series of misconduct cases in a military that prides itself on integrity and honour.
Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, has not released the results of his review but has said he found that ethics training for senior leaders, while adequate, should begin earlier in an officer's career and be reinforced more frequently.
Afghanistan calls for election support
Jan. 22, 2013 at 1:22 PM
KABUL, Afghanistan, Jan. 22 (UPI) -- The United Nations said it was responding to a request from the Afghan Independent Election Commission for assistance.
The IEC stated it was calling on the United Nations to undertake "as soon as possible" a needs-assessment mission for Afghanistan given the preparations needed for next year's vote.
A four-member U.N. team arrived Friday in Kabul for a 10-day visit to assess Afghanistan's electoral needs.
"The purpose of the needs-assessment mission is to assess the electoral environment and make recommendations on the nature of future U.N. support to the elections, which will be Afghan managed and Afghan led," a statement from the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan read.
Widespread allegations of fraud in favor of Afghan President Hamid Karzai in 2009 prompted former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah to withdraw from a second round of voting in his challenge against the incumbent.
Afghan forces are taking a greater role in security operations in the country as international forces wrap up their mission.
Jan Kubis, U.N. special envoy to Afghanistan, told the U.N. Security Council last month that development benchmarks for Afghanistan are at risk, however, "because of weak and inadequate systems of sub-national governance, lack of support from the central level, capacity constraints and insufficient planning on the civilian side."
Afghanistan: No outright winner, says Hammond
23 January 2013 BBC News
The Afghan government is unlikely to "win outright" against the Taliban once foreign troops leave, Defence Secretary Philip Hammond has said.
He said there was a "growing realisation on both sides of this fight that neither would win".
But he expected the Afghan government would hold the main population centres after troops left by 2014.
Responsibility for security is being handed to Afghan forces, who now oversee 80% of the population.
Mr Hammond, appearing before the defence select committee to talk about securing the future of Afghanistan, said: "I would expect attempts at dialogue, at groping towards a peace process to continue.
"I would expect the situation to be messier than it is today with Isaf at present on the ground, but I sense that there is a growing recognition on both sides of this fight that neither side can win outright."
Britain's national interests
He said the handing over of security to Afghan forces was a "process", with British troops leading initially, gradually moving to the Afghans being in control.
"We have a plan - which is quite an ambitious plan - to transfer security responsibility to the Afghan national security forces... in a way that allows the Afghans to maintain control of their territory and deny it to international terrorists of the type we that we have recently had a reminder of in another part of the world."
He said: "Because, effectively, Afghanistan is not now on any scale harbouring international terrorists, it is easy to forget that just a few years ago we were looking at these kind of threats coming from Afghanistan.
"We have a process here that is very much driven by Britain's own national security interests. We can't cut and run before we've completed that process."
He described the Taliban as still being "a significant force" but one that "is struggling to maintain the momentum of the insurgency".
He dismissed criticism that the presence of foreign troops was the cause of violence, saying that the mission's role was to clear al-Qaeda, help the Afghan state establish itself and then to train security forces.
Unwanted equipment
Mr Hammond said the Ministry of Defence would only bring back equipment from Afghanistan which it needed. Unwanted military equipment would be sold, gifted or destroyed.
It was too early to say what equipment might be left behind but he said there were the equivalent of 11,000 container units of kit in Afghanistan and that around 6,500 containers would be brought back to the UK.
British troop numbers were reduced from 9,500 to 9,000 before Christmas and numbers are set to fall to 5,200 by the end of 2013.
The remainder will leave by the end of 2014, when all Nato operations are due to finish, although a small number will remain after that, working at an officer training academy and in other support roles.
1 Afghan policeman killed in blast in western province
HERAT, Afghanistan, Jan. 23 (Xinhua) -- One Afghan policeman was killed and five were wounded when a bicycle bomb hit a police van in the country's western province of Herat Wednesday, acting- provincial police chief said.
"One service man with Fast-Reaction police forces were killed and five policemen were wounded as explosive attached to a bicycle went off in Muslakh area along the main road from provincial capital Heart city to bordering city of Islam Qala at about 12:30 p.m. local time," General Abdul Hamid Hamidi told Xinhua.
He said the police vehicle was running in the road when the blast took place. The injured, some in critical conditions, were shifted to a nearby hospital.
He also said no civilian casualties were reported in the incident in the province 640 km west of capital Kabul.
Security forces have cordoned off the area for precautionary measures.
No group claimed responsibility for the attacks, but Taliban suspects routinely claim responsibility for such attacks. The Taliban, who ruled the country before they were ousted by a U.S.- led invasion in late 2001, renewed armed insurgency, staging ambush and suicide attacks, killing combatants as well as civilians.
On Monday, three unarmed traffic policemen were killed and 12 others including eight civilians were wounded when Taliban launched a coordinated attack against traffic police office building in Kabul, sparking an eight-hour gunbattle which left all five militants dead.
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.
Afghanistan's colossal intelligence failure
Foreign Policy (blog) By Candace Rondeaux Tuesday, January 22, 2013
Close observers of Afghanistan are not likely to be surprised by recent allegations contained in a United Nations report that the Afghan National Security Directorate, the CIA's leading counterterrorism partner in South Asia, used whips and electric shocks to squeeze confessions out of suspected insurgent detainees. There are many ways to describe the directorate, or NDS as it is locally known, but a model of modern intelligence gathering and investigative efficiency is not one of them.
The report, which was quietly published on the website of the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan on Sunday, details a grim pattern of abuse and mistreatment in NDS prisons, and has put yet another dent in NDS's reputation at a time when the Afghan intelligence agency has never been more vulnerable. A key partner in the ongoing U.S. quest to contain transnational terrorism in South and Central Asia, NDS seems to have fallen on very hard times of late. Yet, few in Washington appear ready to confront the implications of NDS's downward spiral, a trend that seems to be accelerating as NATO marches toward the exit.
Last week, in an unprecedented show of force at least half a dozen Taliban fighters charged the gates of NDS headquarters in central Kabul, set off a suicide truck bomb and nearly blasted their way straight into the central nervous system of the Afghan intelligence agency. Some 32 civilians and security personnel were injured, and at least one NDS officer was killed on the spot. The attack might have been a little less demoralizing, however, had it not been for another purported Taliban assault in Kabul only a month earlier on an alleged NDS safe house in central Kabul that severely wounded the agency's well-known chief, Asadullah Khalid.
Both incidents beg a couple of questions that US, NATO and Afghan officials must all be asking themselves these days. First, just how safe is an Afghan intelligence agency safe house if a suicide bomber can gain entry and blow up the director of said intelligence agency? And, what do the latest assaults mean for NATO's transition out of the country? Like many things in Afghanistan, the answer is both simple and complex.
In the "simple" column: Asadullah Khalid, the newly ordained head of Afghanistan's National Directorate of Security, probably has about as many enemies-personal and political-as he does friends. The December 6 attack on Khalid was the fifth in as many years. A two-time governor who served in the volatile and politically pivotal provinces of Kandahar and Ghazni, Khalid is a high roller with deep ties to mujahideen elites. His close associates run the gamut from hardcore Islamist conservative Afghan elites such as Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, a cagey Pashtun commander who trained 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, to Ahmed Wali Karzai, the late and legendary glad-handing southern brother of President Hamid Karzai.
Originally from Ghazni, a part of Afghanistan whose political, ethnic and religious paroxysms most closely parallel that of Florida, Khalid has counted coup in innumerable Afghan skirmishes spanning from the late 1980's to the present. Before President Karzai appointed him governor of Ghazni in 2002, Khalid served as head of NDS's provincial affairs department, and, several of his colleagues aver, was a first runner up to replace NDS's first director, Engineer Arif Sarwary when Sarwary stepped down in 2004. Instead, however, Karzai's inner circle eventually decided in 2005 that Khalid would be a better fit as governor of the president's home province, Kandahar.
It was in Kandahar that Khalid burnished a reputation for applying tough tactics to insurgent detainees after Canadian diplomat Richard Colvin alleged in testimony before the Canadian parliament in November 2009 that Khalid "personally tortured people" in a "dungeon" beneath his residence. Khalid has repeatedly denied the Canadian claims.
An ethnic Pashtun who also briefly served as minister of borders and tribal affairs before his appointment to NDS, Khalid has rejected similar allegations lodged in the British high court late last year. Khalid's denials aside, the most recent UN report on NDS torture practices would certainly seem to bear out a persistent pattern in the Afghan presidential palace of ignoring the obvious when it is convenient to do so.
In the "complex" column, a combination of hubris, insouciance, and vanity peculiar to many of Kabul's leading powerbrokers seems to have left Khalid especially vulnerable to violent fissures that are slowly rendering the once relatively effective Afghan intelligence agency ineffective and deeply compromised. Shortly before the bombing, Khalid coupled his denials of involvement in torture with equally vehement and venomous anti-Taliban rhetoric. During his testimony before Afghanistan's lower house of parliament before his appointment was confirmed in September, he alternately promised to exterminate Taliban outliers who refuse to accept Karzai's reconciliation terms and to support cross border operations into Pakistan in response to cross border shelling by the Pakistani army along the country's eastern border.
Khalid at one point purportedly took control of the CIA-backed Kandahar Strike Force, an aggressive local militia that was accused in 2010 by Afghan officials of assassinating the southern province's local police chief. Not long after his adventures in Kandahar, Khalid got involved in backing a controversial anti-Taliban uprising in Ghazni by provincial locals. Not exactly the best way to win friends and influence people in a tough neighborhood where the biggest house on the block is owned by the Pakistani military, a key supporter of the Afghan Taliban.
All of the above without doubt made the NDS chief especially susceptible. But there are two other critical factors that also played important roles in the attack on Khalid and the one-two-punch assault on NDS headquarters a month later. The first factor is factionalism. Factionalism within the official state Afghan security services has been a fact of life since they were created, but the phenomenon has worsened considerably since the onset of NATO's transition out of the country, and it has not left Afghanistan's chief intelligence agency untouched. Karzai has hired and fired a total of four NDS chiefs since 2002, including two within the last two years -- Khalid and Karzai's former personal security chief Rahmatullah Nabil. Each changing of the guard has been followed by purge and counter-purge of various networks affiliated with the new chiefs, leaving deep wells of mistrust, particularly between the largely non-Pashtun retinue of NDS officers allied with the Northern Alliance and Pashtuns affiliated eithe
r with Sayyaf, warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar or others of a more Islamist bent.
Meanwhile, growing concerns among NDS leaders about increased infiltration of insurgents and Iranian and Pakistani double agents within their ranks has resulted in the reported arrests of a little more than a dozen NDS officials in the last year. These problems have been known for sometime but only really started turning heads at the headquarters of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) when in April 2012 the NDS failed to accurately analyze scads of tips about an impending attack on Kabul that was billed as one of the largest in the entire war. Conflicts between Pashtuns and the primarily Panjshiri Tajik dominated officer corps of the NDS have been cited as among the main reasons that information about that attack did not reach the right people at the right time in Kabul.
The second factor is Khalid's personal blind spot. At 43, Khalid cuts quite the dashing figure, and a one-time colleague of Khalid told me recently that he is known amongst his peers as having a predilection for a bit of flash and panache. Indeed, the guesthouse where the suicide bomber struck is situated in one of the tonier areas of the capital, and for several months before the incident in question and well before Khalid's appointment to NDS it was thought to be his personal playhouse. Neighbors recall hearing raucous music blaring out of the so-called NDS safe house Khalid had occupied and some distinctly recall the party until dawn atmosphere that the property frequently appeared to witness on Thursday nights. It is unclear whether the NDS chief was mixing business with pleasure at the house, but it is undeniable that his address, his presence and his seeming love of loud music was well known to most in the neighborhood well before the bombing.
Some of Khalid's associates also apparently knew in advance that the intelligence chief had been expecting a very special visitor the day of the bombing at the house. As one longtime friend of Khalid's explained -- and several media outlets have reported -- the suicide bomber was a former Taliban prisoner who was allegedly acting as a messenger for Mullah Omar's Quetta Shura.
Like his one time colleague and elder statesman, former president and High Peace Council chairman Burhanuddin Rabbani, it seems Khalid could not resist the temptation to amplify his political profile as leading dealmaker cum peace negotiator. So when the freed Taliban prisoner arrived at Khalid's guest house cum safe house in the Taimani neighborhood of Kabul Khalid hardly expected the young man to come bearing a bomb in his underpants. But, much like Rabbani's assassination in October 2011, it was that close "personal touch," that dealt the big blow.
All this will, of course, require a lot of chewing over in the coming weeks and months ahead as NATO continues its accelerated withdrawal from Afghanistan. As for Khalid, he'll have plenty of time to think it through while he convalesces at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. And, at least he won't be lonely while he's meditating on his future and the prospects for NDS; Khalid has already received visits from President Obama, Leon Panetta, and, naturally his old friend Hamid Karzai in recent weeks.
And, perhaps while Khalid gets some rest and everyone's giving the latest turn of evens with NDS good long think, NATO and U.S. officials will finally sit down to hash out what to do next with America's top partner in the fight against terrorism in South and Central Asia. The White House in particular, might want to consider whether it can continue to tie America's fortunes to intelligence outfits like NDS without first figuring out how (and whether it's possible) to help governments like Karzai's to clean these agencies up. The Obama administration might also want to calculate the overall impact of its continued uncritical support for regimes that employ torture to ensure state security and how that might in the long-term hinder its efforts to unring the bell rung by a panicked Bush administration the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. If anything the most recent series of attacks in Kabul should have demonstrated to Washington, it is time for a serious rollback and reset where NDS is concerned.
Candace Rondeaux lived and worked in Afghanistan for nearly five-years, first as the Afghanistan-Pakistan bureau chief for The Washington Post and more recently as senior analyst for the International Crisis Group in Kabul. She is a research fellow at the Center on National Security at Fordham University Law School in New York, and she is currently writing a political history of the Afghan security forces from 2001 to 2014.
New Threat Seen in Afghan Pullout
Wall Street Journal By NATHAN HODGE January 22, 2013
PUZEH, Afghanistan - Afghan rural areas will be at greater risk of falling to the Taliban if the U.S. accedes to Kabul's demands to speed up the withdrawal of special-operations teams working with Afghan village self-defense units, an internal report prepared for the U.S. military warned.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai, during talks with President Barack Obama in Washington this month, secured an agreement on withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghan villages this spring, months ahead of previous schedules. Afghan officials indicated they believe this commitment includes the special-operations teams working with village forces known as the Afghan Local Police. Coalition officials said the matter is under discussion.
The ALP have been built and trained by coalition special-operations units in rural areas that are usually beyond the reach of the Afghan army and regular police. Around 19,000 local police have been deployed since the program began in 2010.
The report, written by a research firm with ties to the Pentagon, warned that the ALP program is in danger of collapse—and that local leaders may be more vulnerable to assassination and intimidation—in case of a too-rapid U.S. pullout, according to excerpts viewed by The Wall Street Journal.
That conclusion echoes longstanding concerns aired by military commanders who prefer that a withdrawal be built around conditions on the ground, rather than deadlines.
"A lot of locals have put their necks out against the Taliban," said Seth Jones, associate director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center at the RAND Corp., who said he wasn't aware of the report but had spoken to Afghan officials about the issue. "If you pull [special-operations forces] outthe villagers are going to be the ones that pay the price."
Afghan and coalition officials are discussing how to adjust its timeline, said U.S. Army Lt. Col. Tom Bryant, a spokesman for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization Special Operations Component Command-Afghanistan, which is responsible for the ALP program.
"There obviously are consequencesif a precipitous departure from all villages is directed," he said. "Our headquarters is working to further define those [consequences] and develop mitigating strategies as a contingency."
Sediq Sediqqi, the spokesman for the Afghan Interior Ministry, which oversees ALP, declined to comment on the negotiations.
The U.S. military has long billed the ALP, a project that was implemented over Mr. Karzai's objections, as the centerpiece of its counterinsurgency campaign. At present, around 17% of Afghanistan's population—roughly 5 million people—are protected by ALP units, according to the Special Operations Command.
The ALP program is controversial: Officials in Kabul and human-rights advocates worry it could pave the way for the return of lawless militias once international forces go home. Some ALP members have been involved in extortion, murder and rape, according to the watchdog Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission.
"This is not a perfect program, by any stretch of the imagination," said U.S. Army Col. Don Bolduc, deputy commanding general for NATO Special Operations Component Command-Afghanistan. But, he added, "the misconduct is extremely low in comparison to the numbers that are out there."
Col. Bolduc said ALP members have been held accountable for misconduct, including a high-profile case in which four local police officers received lengthy convictions for sexual assault. The program, he said, provides better government oversight than unregulated militias.
The military-commissioned report reflects a major concern of U.S. special operations advisers: whether the ALP experiment in rural policing will survive, particularly in Afghan communities that have only a tenuous link to the central government.
One of those communities is Puzeh, an outpost in southern Helmand province, Afghanistan's prime opium-growing country and the Taliban's historic heartland. Two years ago, the Taliban "had complete freedom of movement here," said a Marine special-operations team sergeant working with the ALP in Puzeh. A year ago, the Marines and Afghan police fought raging gunbattles to reclaim the area.
Today, the U.S. advisers stroll outside their mud-brick compound without body armor. ALP members patrol in pickup trucks and on motorbikes and man checkpoints along Highway 611, the main road in the district.
On a recent day, a special-operations team leader, wearing traditional Afghan dress, stopped to visit a mosque under construction. Then, following a chat with an ALP patrol, he went for a spin on the village's unpaved road on a borrowed Afghan bicycle.
Military officials describe the ALP program as a tenuous experiment that depends on the effectiveness of the Afghan government, where corruption has helped drive support for the insurgency; in some areas, the Taliban have been able to offer dispute resolution and other services as an alternative to corrupt and ineffectual local bodies.
"We can help them all day long, but if they don't have confidence in their district government, then it's all for naught," said a Marine special operations company commander in Puzeh.
In another village outpost in Helmand, a U.S. Navy SEAL team leader described his worry that ALP units could collapse without serious backing from the Afghan state.
The most optimistic outcome, he said, is that ALP and the villagers "will have enough of a connection to government, they'll prefer the government to the Taliban."
But, the SEAL team leader reckoned, the locals "will probably make some sort of small deals with [the Taliban], and make sort of a peace treaty" once the Americans leave.
Write to Nathan Hodge at nathan.hodge@wsj.com
23 newly graduate women join Afghan army in western province
HERAT, Afghanistan, Jan. 23 (Xinhua) -- Nearly two dozen of newly graduate women were commissioned to Afghan National Army ( ANA) in western province of Herat on Wednesday, an army official said.
"Up to 23 women after completion of four-month training course received their certificates and commissioned to ANA," commander of Army Corps 207 Zafar, General Taj Mohammad Jahid, told Xinhua.
The female officers will serve in the Corps 207 Zafar which provide security for western provinces, he said.
More than 1,000 women have been serving in Afghan army across the country.
The Afghan government and NATO Training Mission in Afghanistan (NTM-A) have stepped up efforts to train and equip Afghan police and army as NATO-led forces have handed over to Afghan forces the security responsibilities of 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.
Sam French on Buzkashi Boys, his Oscar-Nominated Short About Afghanistan’s Brutal National Sport
Vanity Fair By Lesley M. M. Blume January 22 2013
Buzkashi–the national sport of Afghanistan–is essentially a lawless version of polo, played with a dead goat carcass instead of a ball. It’s a far cry from the Etonian “sport of kings” played on the crisp green fields of England or the Veuve Cliquot-sponsored charity matches of the Hamptons. Still, the sport creates royalty and icons of its own. A buzzy new live action short film Buzkashi Boys—nominated for an Oscar—is poised to bring the often-brutal Buzkashi world to audiences around the globe. Directed by American filmmaker Sam French and produced by Canadian Ariel Nasr, the movie depicts the lives of two young best friends—a street urchin and a blacksmith's son—determined to defy their fates by becoming Buzkashi heroes.
Shot on a $200,000 budget entirely on-location in Afghanistan, the 29-minute film is, according to French, the most ambitiousinternational film project to have come out of the country in at least a decade. The production constantly teetered on oblivion as French and his team negotiated their way through the notoriously corrupt Kabul bureaucracy, sourced their cast among locals who didn’t know what a film was, and ran out money during post-production before a frantic Kickstarter fundraising campaign saved their bacon. “This was a Hail Mary pass, but we threw it as hard and as far as we could,” says French.
Below, French talks with Vanity Fair about shooting a film amidst rocket fire, how to charm Afghan officials into granting police escorts, and the unlikely discovery he made on a Kabul road known as “Chicken Street.”
VF Daily: Since most Americans or westerners have never experienced—and will likely never experience—Buzkashi, describe it for us.
Sam French: The game itself is an incredible spectacle. Imagine fifty guys on horses thundering down a pitch—it’s pretty staggering and incredibly cinematic. The first time I saw it, there were snow-capped mountains in the background; there was no out-of-bounds, and the horses would just plunge through the crowd. It’s also a very brutal sport. But the goat is already dead, so I don’t think it’s brutal as a bullfight, for example.
So, one minute you’re at USC film school, and the next you’re shooting a soon-to-be-Oscar-nominated film about a blood sport in a war-torn country. What was the path from point A to point B?
I was a struggling filmmaker in Los Angeles. I fell in love with a woman and followed her to Kabul, and started a life there. It wasn’t an easy choice to make. Then, in 2009, my friend Martin Roe, who I went to USC with, came to visit me. He sat me down, and said, “You’re a narrative filmmaker, so why aren’t you writing a narrative script?” So we [went] all over Kabul, looking at locations, and wrote the script there. It only took us a week. We were inspired; it was an incredible creative process.
One of the lead partsin the film is an ambitious young Afghan street kid. How did you find your star?
Casting a film in Afghanistan is not that easy. You can’t just go out and say, we’re holding auditions and have people show up. Our producer Ariel Nasr went around to children’s shelters to find kids who could possibly be in the film. First of all, you have to explain what a film, and what auditions are. To cast the lead, we were searching for a long time. I kept coming back to a kid I’d met on Chicken Street, where expats go to buy souvenirs. [Fawad Mohammadi] was the most amazing kid I’d ever met; he had these huge beautiful green eyes. He was the character I wanted to portray.
How did you shoot the film? Was there any industry infrastructure for you to rely on?
Personnel, logistics, equipment: you can’t find much of that in Afghanistan. There are very few people there who can produce international quality productions. So, on Buzkashi Boys, we did on-the-job training. We brought over nine Western filmmakers and trained twelve Afghan film trainees on the production. It was very important to us to make this truly a film project that would train filmmakers.
We brought over the camera and all the supporting equipment. It wasn’t easy getting it into the country. Martin Roe sourced a lot of the crew and equipment in Los Angeles and had it shipped into Bagram Air Base. We needed a crane and a dolly: we found an old Russian crane that had been there for thirty years; it weighed a couple tons and needed four people to work it. We found guys there who could do it. We just made it work. A film production of this size, an international Afghan collaboration of this size, hasn’t really happened before; we definitely attracted a lot of interest on the ground.
Twenty-nine minutes is long for a short film. Were you tempted to expand it into a feature?
Well, one factor [in doing a short film instead of a feature] was security issues. With a feature film, you’re on location for weeks at a time. On a short film, you’re on location for days at a time. We definitely didn’t tell anyone where we’d be shooting the next day; we would change our schedule so people wouldn’t know what we were doing. The day after we shot in the market in the old city, a rocket fell in the area where we were filming the day before. There was a big bombing that happened in the city center during the middle of filming. Luckily, we had police protection and government approval for the production.
How did you secure that help?
[Producer] Ariel [Nasr] spent about a year in pre-production trying to get all of the permissions and approvals; it was definitely a long process. They say in Afghanistan you get nothing done until you’ve three cups of tea with someone. He had many, many cups of tea with many, many government officials.
How much of your already-tight budget had to be allotted for bribes?
Afghanistan is—by all metrics—one of the most corrupt countries in the world: that’s a fact. But we wanted to be totally above board, which is why it took us so long to get the production going. It took us a year, but we didn’t pay any bribes to anyone. We got people on our side, instead of going in and paying people off. We wanted the Afghans who worked on this film with us to be proud of it.
A couple of years ago, your twelve-year-old star, Fawad Mohammadi, was a street kid on Chicken Street in Kabul, and now he’s the star of an Oscar-nominated film. What will his life look like now?
We were aware that plucking someone off the street and casting him in a film was probably going to change his life. You want to change it for the better. He’s [now] being put through school by the generosity of certain foreigners living in Kabul – the best school in Afghanistan. He’s getting straight A’s.
What happened when he learned about the Oscar nomination?
I called him, and he started crying. I don’t think it had really sunk in yet that this film would be seen by everyone. He actually asked, “Is this up for the best Afghan film?” I said “No, Fawad; it’s up for the best film in the world.” He’s a street kid; he doesn’t have a TV at home. He doesn’t know what the Oscars are. It’s my dream to bring him to the Academy Awards ceremony if I can.
What does he want to do when he finishes school?
He wants to be an airline pilot, but he’s never flown in an airplane before.
What message about Afghanistan does your film convey?
You see the news headlines about Afghanistan, and people here in the west think that the whole country is full of terrorists and people who want to kill Americans. But it’s not true. Most of the people there have the same hopes and dreams as everyone else. Even here, we’re all human beings.
The choice to make the film about a street kid living in Kabul and this ancient sport—in some ways, it could be seen as a period piece. When we show Buzkashi Boys in Afghanistan, the reaction is, interestingly, “Why didn’t you make a film about an entrepreneur starting a business and being in the modern world?” They’re hungry for the future. The country is undergoing a massive transformation right now. There’s a whole new generation that wants to join the world. They have smartphones and they’re on Facebook; they want to be part of the international community. I actually chose to portray the other side of the coin, but that was my creative choice as a filmmaker.
Buzkashi Boys was produced through the non-profit NGO, Afghan Film Project, in association with Dirty Robber, an L.A.-based production company.
U.S. withdrawal is 'tough love' for disbelieving Afghans
By Douglas Wissing, Special for CNN January 22, 2013
Editor's note: Douglas Wissing is an independent journalist and author of Funding the Enemy: How US Taxpayers Bankroll the Taliban (Prometheus Books). He is embedded with U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
Forward Operating Base Salerno, Afghanistan (CNN) -- As Presidents Barack Obama and Hamid Karzai parry over troop levels and assistance, "retrograde" is the operant word I am hearing from U.S. commanders in Afghanistan. A nuanced military term for withdrawal, retrograde defines operations in this insurgency-plagued land.
After more than a decade of U.S.-led warfare, American commanders are now insisting their Afghan counterparts take over the fight.
The 101st Airborne Division's Rakkasan Brigade is the battle-space owner of eastern Afghanistan's restive Khost and Paktia provinces, both of which border Pakistan's anarchic tribal regions.
In the brigade headquarters at Forward Operating Base Salerno -- a building hardened against rocket and mortar attack -- Rakkasan Deputy Commander Colonel Tim Sullivan told me: "Our mission was to go from a partnered role with the ANSF (Afghan National Security Forces) to an advise and assist role. We kind of gave it the 'tough love' approach."
With the announced U.S. withdrawal in 2014, American officers have no choice but to push the Afghan security forces forward. It's a big change for Afghan commanders used to U.S. troops taking the lead, and accustomed to having the formidable U.S. firepower and air support.
Sullivan talked of turning down a cosseted Afghan commander who demanded helicopter transport to one of his bases. "We fly them nowhere," Sullivan told me. "It's a big transition. It has to happen. It's a clash of wills."
Sullivan is the right man for the job. A hulking, gravel-voiced Brooklynite from an Irish Catholic family of seven boys, Sullivan is a West Point graduate who has served in Somalia, Haiti, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Sullivan and other U.S. officers in Afghanistan talk about the need to transition to "Afghan Good Enough" -- a sustainable Afghan security force that does it the Afghan way.
The U.S. partnering strategy of "Shohna ba Shohna" (Shoulder to Shoulder) has abruptly given way to "After You," as Afghan security forces take the lead -- sometimes reluctantly.
"Across the A/O (Area of Operations), I wouldn't paint a rosy picture," Sullivan says. "We've had some very good success. We've had some moderate success. We have not encountered any nightmares."
Across the insurgent heartland of eastern and southern Afghanistan, there's a palletizing fever as U.S. equipment is packed for shipment.
In military briefings, U.S. bases scheduled for imminent closure are highlighted on Powerpoint maps.
Long convoys of armored vehicles are making their way back from forward bases as combat outposts are closed or transferred to Afghan security forces.
Remaining U.S. bases are groaning with the influx of transiting troops and contractors, housed in new barrios of Alaska tents and "tin-can" metal housing pods.
Some bases are being dismantled and returned to nature. Combat Outpost Tillman, named after the NFL star and special forces soldier Pat Tillman who died in an infamous friendly fire incident, was one of those closed.
"We scraped it clean," Sullivan said. U.S. anti-IED teams traveled north to blow up the watchtowers.
The base is now a soccer field, where Afghan boys play a wolfish style of football.
As Obama administration spokespersons float the big round trial balloon of zero troops in Afghanistan, soldiers here talk about the spring 2013 drawdown of 20 percent of the remaining 66,000 US troops, with another 50 percent to be gone soon after.
How are the Afghans responding to U.S. retrograde? Among some, there is clearly denial. They simply can't imagine a country rich enough, or foolish enough, to just walk away from the enormous investment poured into these bases, many just built during the boom that accompanied Obama's troop surge.
Aid and development money is drying up. I listened to one Afghan government farm worker in insecure Zabul Province insist a U.S. military development team needed to build a fence around a section of a U.S.-financed Afghan demonstration farm.
The U.S. commander patiently told the farmer he should ask his provincial agriculture minister to do it. "We don't do projects anymore," the commander repeatedly said. The farmer, who sported a bright gold wristwatch that signifies inordinate wealth (and sometimes indicates Taliban ties), retorted the ministry was "weak," so the American "friends" needed to do it.
Many Afghans tell me they are very pessimistic about post-2014 security. One Afghan who has translated for U.S. forces in Khost Province for nine years says: "The Afghan situation right now is kind of bad. If the American forces withdraw from Afghanistan, I don't think the Afghan army is strong enough to defend everybody."
He told me he hoped coalition forces would keep training the Afghan security forces. "Right now if the coalition forces would leave, it's going to be so hard for the Afghan people."
Like many of his colleagues, the educated interpreter, whose father was an Afghan National Police general, is applying for a special U.S. immigration visa.
Other Afghans are getting angry. One U.S. commander in southern Afghanistan told me about his Afghan counterpart flaring up when he learned American support was being quickly scaled back. It's a dictum that "retrograde under contact" (withdrawal under pressure) is among the most difficult of military operations. At some point when troop levels have dropped, all a force can do is protect itself.
As U.S. forces withdraw after well over a decade of war, the insurgents have responded in various ways. IEDs continue to be the weapon of choice. Media-magnet complex attacks, such as the spectacular attacks on Kabul and Camp Bastion when Prince Harry was stationed there, broadcast the insurgency is still thriving.
In some formerly insecure provinces such as Khost, insurgent attacks have diminished. I asked Col. Sullivan about the contention that attacks dropped because casualty-cautious U.S. commanders ordered fewer combat patrols.
Sullivan challenged the idea that U.S. soldiers are not "out there," saying soldiers constantly travel the roads on retrograde convoys.
"We're not finding the mother lodes of caches (insurgent military supplies) when we go out," he says. "We're not getting a fight."
Then I asked about the assessment that Afghan insurgents are just husbanding their forces while the U.S. withdraws. "Husbanding of forces," Sullivan quickly agrees. "I might buy that."
Amnesty: Afghanistan Must Improve Winter Aid to Displaced
VOA News January 22, 2013
Amnesty International said there is a "desperate and immediate need" for the Afghan government and its donor partners to improve aid delivery to displaced people during this year's winter, which has so far killed 17 people living in displacement camps.
The rights group said in a statement Tuesday that most of those who died in the first two weeks of this month were children. It also warned against a repeat of last winter, when 100 people died in camps due to a lack of assistance.
Amnesty's Deputy Asia-Pacific Director Polly Truscott called the deaths "a preventable tragedy" and blamed "inadequate coordination of winter assistance" to the hundreds of thousands of people living in displacement camps across the country.
The group reported that in one incident in the western province of Herat, the provincial government had not delivered aid to internally displaced people because officials feared the aid would encourage them to stay in the area rather than return home.
Meanwhile, President Hamid Karzai has ordered an investigation into this week's United Nations report alleging that torture remains widespread in Afghanistan's prisons and that the Afghan government appears to be trying to hide the mistreatment.
In the report issued Sunday, the U.N. mission to the country said it found "credible and reliable evidence" that more than half of the 635 "conflict-related detainees" interviewed at 89 facilities spread across the country had been tortured. The report criticized the government for refusing to prosecute those accused of torturing prisoners.
While the Afghan government has disputed the report's findings, Mr. Karzai on Tuesday ordered a fact finding team to report back within two weeks so that authorities can take follow-up measures.
Karzai Meets US Officials, Demands Bagram Transfer
TOLOnews.com Tuesday, 22 January 2013
President Hamid Karzai Monday emphasised the importance of the US transferring Bagram prison detainees to Afghan authorities in a meeting with David Pearce, the acting special representative of the US to Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The pair met to further discuss matters raised in the president's recent trip to Washington which Karzai described as very productive, according to a statement from the president's office.
"President Karzai once again thanked the US for the warm hospitality it extended to the Afghan delegation and noted that it was important that the US now puts into practice the agreements reached in Washington, in particular the full transfer of Bagram prison to Afghan authority and any delay, otherwise, may raise suspicion among the people of Afghanistan," it said.
The transfer of prisoners from US to Afghan authority was a key condition of Kabul when it signed last March a long-term strategic agreement with Washington.
Until now, the full transfer has not taken place although US President Barack Obama told Karzai during his US visit that it will happen soon.
However, fresh concerns over the treatment of prisoners in Afghan jails is likely to present a new obstacle for Karzai's demands.
Nato on Monday said that it is suspending transfer of detainees to Afghan prisons after a report this week from the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (Unama) revealed systemic torture of prisoners in more than 30 Afghan jails.
It is the second time Nato has banned transfers to address human rights concerns in Afghan prisons. It first did so after a similar Unama report in 2011 detailed widespread abuse, including the ripping out of detainees' toenails and the twisting of their genitals.
Nato halted prisoner transfers for several months and only resumed them after inspections and training. But the latest report has reignited concerns and Nato renewed its ban.
Karzai also discussed with Pearce the peace process and the Qatar office for the Taliban.
"On the issue of Qatar office to be opened for peace talks with the Taliban, President Karzai once again underlined Afghan government's position that those Taliban who take part in the peace negotiations must prove their credibility and hold verifiable authorisation of the Taliban leadership," the statement said.
The president added that there must be a clear and written understanding among Afghanistan, the US and Qatar on the Taliban office opening and follow up arrangements for the peace process, it said.
"President Karzai made it clear that only the High Peace Council can represent the people of Afghanistan at the peace talks, as it was authorized by the Peace Jirga and created by the will of the Afghan people," it added.
5.2-magnitude quake hits Hindu Kush region, Afghanistan -- USGS
NEW YORK, Jan. 22 (Xinhua) -- An earthquake measuring 5.2 on the Richter scale jolted Hindu Kush region, Afghanistan at 15:09: 22 GMT on Tuesday, the U.S. Geological Survey said.
The epicenter, with a depth of 51.60 km, was initially determined to be at 36.3227 degrees north latitude and 68.8486 degrees east longitude.
We Will End Trade Relations With Pakistan: ACCI
TOLOnews.com By Zabihullah Jhanmal Tuesday, 22 January 2013
The Afghan Chamber of Commerce and Industries (ACCI) Tuesday said that it will end trade relations with Pakistan following a long-running dispute over containers stalled in Karachi port.
ACCI officials said despite assurances made by Pakistani officials to release the 3000 containers belonging to Afghan traders, the issue is still not resolved.
"Despite so much effort, the government has now failed to resolve our problems with Pakistan and we are forced to end our relations with Pakistan," ACCI deputy Khan Jan Alokozay said.
Alokozay said traders were losing as much as US$600,000 a day over the matter and will encourage Afghan traders to discontinue doing business via Karachi.
ACCI officials have asked the Afghan government to prevent Pakistani-loaded vehicles from entering Afghanistan, even those whose destination is a different country.
Pakistan Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf earlier this month ordered the Afghan containers be released in one week following his meeting with the ACCI and the Afghan-Pak Joint Chamber of Commerce, but the ACCI said there has been no progress.
Nuristan Airstrike Kills 14 Insurgents: Local Officials
TOLOnews.com Tuesday, 22 January 2013
At least 14 Taliban insurgents including three foreigners have been killed and 21 other insurgents wounded in a US airstrike in eastern Nuristan province on Monday afternoon, Afghan local officials said Tuesday.
The airstrike happened in the Dahan Baz Gul area of Nuristan's Kamdish district when Taliban insurgents were at a gathering, provincial police chief Ghulaam Mullah told TOLOnews, adding that the strike was carried out by drone.
Isaf Joint Command told TOLOnews it had no operational reporting of any airstrike in Nuristan, and so could not confirm whether there had been a drone attack.
The police chief said there were no civilians casualties in the strike.
Chief of Kamdish border police Zone 7 Shamsuddin Nuristani confirmed the airstrike and the casualties: "Fourteen Taliban insurgents were killed and 21 others were injured."
Kamdish district shares a border with Pakistan and insurgents frequently target local troops.
Isaf said that recent military operations in the east that resulted in insurgent deaths were two separate operations in eastern Kunar on Sunday.
Joint Afghan and coalition forces conducted two operations in the Ghaz-e Abad district, and both operations resulted in the death of two insurgents, a spokesman told TOLOnews Tuesday.
Meanwhile, combined Afghan and coalition forces have captured three local Taliban commanders, Isaf's operational update said Tuesday.
A Taliban leader was arrested in the Lashkar Gah district of Helmand province and another was captured in the Spin Boldak district of Kandahar province on Tuesday.
A third leader was arrested on Sunday in Kandahar's Maiwand district although his identity as a Taliban leader was not confirmed until Tuesday, the statement said.
None of the leader's names were provided in the Isaf statement.
Beach Football Team Heads to Qatar for FIFA Qualifier
TOLOnews.com By Mir Sayed Sediqi Tuesday, 22 January 2013
Afghanistan's national beach football team will play Qatar in the first qualifying match for the 2013 FIFA Beach Football World Cup on Tuesday evening in Qatar.
"Our team has a high morale, and the players are well prepared to face the Qatar team," Beach Football committee member Rouhullah Rastagar told TOLOnews.
The Afghan team's starting lineup for the match is Kavosh, Jameel Naseeri, Ghulam Hazrat Baran, Mahmoud Azad, and Samiullah Mohammadi as the team's captain.
The Afghan ambassador to Qatar met with the players and is expected to attend tonight's match.
"The Ambassador's meeting with the players had a very good effect on their spirits," Rastagar said.
Afghanistan is hoping to qualify for one of three places up for grabs among 16 Asian teams.
Those three teams will then join 13 other teams from around the world in French Polynesia's Tahiti for the World Cup.
Afghanistan will face Oman, Qatar, and Australia in Group A.
"The team's two-day practice has been very good for the players to climatise to the place and the weather. Inshallah, we have come to succeed and we hope we will succeed," player Mahmoud Azad said.
The FIFA Beach Football World Cup is held every two years.
Russia won the cup in 2011, with Brazil, Portugal and El Salvador securing second, third and fourth respectively.
Afghanistan Appoints First Female District Governor
TOLOnews.com Tuesday, 22 January 2013
The Afghan government approved Sahra Shikeeb as district governor for Khaja Do Koh district in northern Jawizjan province, making her the Karzai regime's first female district governor.
"I am very happy to be given this chance," Shikeeb told TOLOnews Tuesday. "I want to start my work here to help my people in education, health, construction and in other fields."
Shikeeb will start her work officially today, provincial deputy governor Abdul Rahman told TOLOnews Tuesday.
Rahman said that around 40 percent of the province's government workers are women.
Khaja Do Koh district is considered secure in Jawzjan in regards to insurgent activity.
www.afghanistannewscenter.com