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Afghanistan and Norway ink long term strategic pact
By Sajad - 06 Feb 2013, 9:11 am Khaama Press
Afghanistan signed a long term strategic cooperation agreement with Norway on Tuesday.
The agreement was signed by Afghan president Hamid Karzai and Norwegian prime minister Jens Stoltenberg in Oslo capital city of Norway.
According to a statement released by presidential palace media office, the strategic pact will specify frame work for security economic and development cooperation between the two nations.
This comes as Afghanistan signed similar strategic cooperation agreements with US, Italy, UK, France, Germany, Australia and India.
Afghan foreign ministry earlier also announced to sign long term strategic cooperation agreement with all the NATO member countries.
The strategic cooperation agreements will focus on equipment and training for Afghan national security forces and economic cooperation for the reconstruction of Afghanistan.
In the meantime Norwegian prime minister Jens Stoltenberg told reporters after inking the strategic pact with Afghanistan, Norway remains committed to assist Afghanistan in military and civil sectors.
Afghan president Hamid Karzai also praised Norway’s cooperation with Afghanistan during the past ten years.
The statement released by presidential palace added that Norway will also assist Afghanistan in health and education sectors that will also cover programs to support in reducing the children and maternal mortality.
White House Defends Drone Strikes As 'Legal, Ethical, Wise'
February 6, 2013 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
The White House has defended the United States' use of drone missile strikes to kill Al-Qaeda-linked terrorist suspects, even if they are U.S. citizens who have not been convicted in court.
White House spokesman James Carney said the Obama administration viewed the strikes as legal, ethical, and wise.
"We conduct those strikes because they are necessary to mitigate ongoing actual threats, to stop plots, to prevent future attacks and, again, save American lives," Carney said. "These strikes are legal, they are ethical, and they are wise."
Carney noted that Congress has authorized the use of "all necessary military force" in the fight against Al-Qaeda, the Islamist militant organization blamed for the September 11, 2001, attacks that killed some 3,000 people in the United States.
The White House statement on February 5 came after the U.S. television network NBC reported on an unclassified Justice Department memo that says high-level U.S. officials could order the killing of suspected terrorists, including Americans, even if there is no clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. interests will take place in the immediate future.
The document says U.S. citizens can be targeted if they are evaluated by these high-level officials as having "recently" been involved in "activities" posing a possible threat.
The document stops short of directly stating what types of activities or behavior could make a suspect the target of a drone strike.
Rights Being Violated?
Critics have accused the Obama administration of an abuse of executive power, saying the policy infringes on the constitutional rights of Americans to due process and could lead to human rights violations.
Some critics also point to the 2011 drone strikes in Yemen that killed Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son Samir Khan -- both U.S. citizens who had never been charged with a crime by U.S. authorities.
Officials have said Awlaki was linked to the planning of a series of attacks, including the attempted Christmas 2009 bombing of an airliner over Detroit.
The United States has used missile strikes by unmanned aircraft to target suspected militants, most notably in Pakistan and Yemen but also elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa.
The attacks, which have killed civilians alongside militants, have strained relations between Washington and governments in countries where the attacks have occurred.
President Barack Obama’s choice to be the new head of the CIA, John Brennan, is expected to be questioned about the drone program on February 7 when his nomination goes before the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Brennan, the current White House counterterrorism chief, is considered a key architect of the drone program.
The use of drone strikes began under the administration of President George W. Bush but their frequency has increased sharply since Obama took office in early 2009.
With reporting by AFP, AP, Reuters, and dpa
Afghan Youth Orchestra Prepares to Play US Venues
Brian Allen VOA News February 05, 2013
In embattled Afghanistan, music is making an appearance after having been banned outright under the Taliban in the late 1990s. The Afghanistan Youth Orchestra was created in 2010, the first orchestra formed in that country in more than 30 years. Today, its musicians are preparing their debut performances in famous American concert halls.
The Afghanistan Youth Orchestra performed for the Afghan community in Alexandria, Virginia, where the venue was intimate, the audience small.
But within days, these Afghan musicians will play in two famous concert halls: the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. and Carnegie Hall in New York.
Ahmad Sarmast, who founded the orchestra, says his group is ready to play on the world’s biggest stages.
“Our young kids are getting this opportunity in the very, very first days of their career as musicians," he said. "Everyone is extremely excited, and they are very much looking forward to this performance."
The group travelled from Kabul to the United States on a tour funded largely by the U.S. embassy in Kabul.
When the Taliban took power in 1996, it banned music entirely.
But since 2010, Sarmast has kept the small National Institute of Music in Kabul running. The orchestra grew out of the school.
“The entire idea of this trip, and the project from the beginning, was to show a different face of Afghanistan; to change the perception of Afghanistan," he said.
The musicians are between the ages of 10 and 22 and most are orphans or street children. The ensemble includes girls, who under the Taliban were not allowed to be educated after the age of eight.
Nazira, a cellist, says she's excited to play in America.
“This year is very good for us because we are going to perform in concerts in the U.S.," she said. "We are at the music school from 8:00 a.m. till 3:00 p.m. and studying.”
On Monday, the orchestra was welcomed to Washington by Secretary of State John Kerry.
“So we’re happy to welcome you here as ambassadors of peace,” he said.
Now, the musicians are rehearsing for their big debut at the Kennedy Center. Then it’s on to New York and Carnegie Hall, before returning to Kabul and a life full of music.
Young Afghan musicians meet American peers in D.C.
Washington Post By Katherine Boyle Wednesday, February 6, 2013
The barefoot boys sit cross-legged on the stage, tuning their instruments to the droning A of the lutelike rubab. Behind them hangs a poster of Mickey and Minnie Mouse, shaking hands underneath the word “Cooperation.” Before them is an audience of mostly African American boys and girls, listening to Afghan instruments they’ve never before seen up close.
As the visitors play a set of four traditional songs, heads begin to bob in the auditorium at William E. Doar Jr. Public Charter School for the Performing Arts, in Northeast Washington, where children of two countries irrevocably affected by the Taliban’s brutality are meeting each other for the first time.
Only 48 hours after touching down at Dulles International Airport, the Afghan Youth Orchestra, visiting the United States this week, had begun its packed diplomatic tour. The young musicians have already played at the Afghan Embassy and the World Bank, institutions that, along with the State Department, are funding the $500,000 tour. Secretary of State John F. Kerry dropped in when they performed Monday at the State Department, calling them “ambassadors of peace.” It wasn’t until Tuesday that they met their American peers and exchanged more than songs and pleasantries.
“Why was music forbidden?’ asked Timon Lawson, 9, during a question-and-answer session after the traditional ensemble’s performance. Samir Zafar, 14, explained through an interpreter that music was banned during the Taliban’s rule because the militant group believed that it went against the dictates of Islam.
“Do you believe in the laws” of the Taliban? another boy in the audience asked.
“No,” Samir answered in his native Dari. “Music is a universal language of the heart.”
The questions may seem tough for a goodwill tour, but the children, many of whom have no memory of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks or the Taliban’s regime, asked each other questions that pushed beyond the confines of music. The children seemed to enjoy their encounter, learning about each other’s music schools along the way.
“I’m very glad I made this trip,” said Samim Rafighzadeh, 19, a tabla player in the ensemble. “Our school is new, and we are just getting organized. It is good to visit a school like this and see what the next step is.”
The Afghanistan National Institute of Music, founded in 2010, is the only such school in the country. With 141 students, 35 of whom are girls, it brings music education back to a country that once banned instruments and women’s education. This is the school’s longest and largest tour, with 48 students and 12 teachers traveling to the United States for two weeks. And for many of the students, it’s a tour of firsts: first airplane ride, first visa. Teachers noted that the ensemble has never seen another music school, let alone one with 24 pianos in one room.
“It’s so new to them to see schools where people learn piano, violin and music,” said Allegra Boggess, 28, a piano teacher from Colorado who has been teaching at the Afghanistan National Institute of Music for 18 months. William E. Doar “is the same kind of music school we are trying to create,” she said.
Cultural exchanges between Afghan and American youths are a priority on the tour. At the Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage on Thursday, the Afghan orchestra will perform with the Maryland Classic Youth Orchestras. Members of both orchestras met at Strathmore for the first time Tuesday to practice for the Kennedy Center concert. The Afghan ensemble will perform with the Scarsdale High School Orchestra in New York and take classes with students from the New England Conservatory in Boston. The meetings give musicians from both countries a chance to compare instruments and facilities. And although thousands of miles apart, students and teachers at these publicly funded arts schools harbor the same hopes and aspirations. Like the Afghan youths, students at William E. Doar Jr. learn instruments that many picked up for the first time at the school.
“None of the children pay for the instruments,” said Kim Teachout, music coordinator at William E. Doar Jr. “Being in inner-city D.C., it gives them an opportunity to learn an instrument they may not have otherwise had. It brings joy to their lives. ‘Hope’ is a good word for it.”
Ahmad Sarmast, founder of the Afghanistan National Institute of Music, expresses the same sentiment: Music breeds hope.
Donors hope the tour shows the parents of Afghan students and the most conservative leaders in Afghanistan that learning traditional and Western orchestral music does not contradict the tenets of Islam. Overcoming the taboo of instructing students in music is a struggle for the Afghanistan school’s teachers.
“It’s a constant threat, to the girls especially,” Boggess said. “Some people in Afghanistan are very conservative, and they don’t know whether music is allowed in the context of Islam. They see Shakira on TV or see men and women dancing together and they think that is [Western] music. They don’t know about violin sonatas.”
But, most important, the tour is offering the students new perspectives on America and their American peers. Boggess emphasized that many of the younger students are overwhelmed by the sights and sounds.
“So many of the kids have never seen an elephant,” she said of their visit to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. “They asked, ‘Is it alive?’ They would have stayed all day. Some of the older students, though, did become a little depressed. They don’t have museums like this in Afghanistan. Maybe one day they’ll help build one.”
Afghan corruption, opium, and the strange case of Kam Air
Kam Air, an airline owned by a politically-connected Afghan businessman, was blacklisted by the US military in Afghanistan for opium smuggling. Then the Afghan government complained.
Christian Science Monitor By Dan Murphy, Staff writer February 5, 2013
In late January, the US military blacklisted Afghanistan's Kam Air from winning contracts with the US in Afghanistan, with the head of a US military anticorruption unit asserting that the airline was involved in bulk opium smuggling on commercial flights to Tajikistan.
The decision touched off a flurry of backroom lobbying, given the political connections of Kam Air's owner and the shadow it cast over efforts to merge the private airline carrier with the struggling Afghan government-owned airline Ariana.
The result? A few weeks later, the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan (ISAF) issued a terse statement announcing that Kam Air would be removed from the blacklist pending the results of an Afghan government investigation into the drug smuggling charges.
The release outlines a Feb. 2 meeting between senior officials in the Afghan government and the US military in Kabul. There, "US military officials explained why they had recommended the [blacklist] designation to the commander of CENTCOM," or the US Central Command based in Tampa, which is in operational control of the Afghanistan mission. The brief statement makes no explanation as to why the Afghan government's arguments were convincing, though it implies that questions of Afghan sovereignty were crucial.
"The CENTCOM commander made the decision to suspend the 841 designation because he believes it is an appropriate, logical course of action at this time for the sovereign Afghan Government to conduct a full investigation of Kam Air."
Perhaps. But why Afghan sovereignty should determine who the US military does business with isn't entirely clear. Nor is it clear why the position of Maj. Gen. Richard Longo, who commands a task force to combat contracting corruption in Afghanistan, has been ignored. He told The Wall Street Journal in January that "the U.S. will not do business with those who fund and support illicit activities. Kam Air is too large of a company not to know what has been going on within its organization.”
Making this story stranger still were the comments of ISAF spokesman Col. Thomas Collins to Stars and Stripes yesterday. He said, in the words of the Stars and Stripes reporter, that "the decision to rescind the blacklist decision did not call into question the evidence uncovered by the original US investigation."
An Afghan contact of mine, and a former senior adviser to the Afghan government, has an explanation. He alerted me to the ISAF press release with an e-mail headed "the fix is in!"
He asserted that essentially the US is doing a favor for President Hamid Karzai by protecting the business interests of Zamari Kamgar, the owner of Kam Air (Mr. Kamgar rejected allegations of any wrongdoing at the airline in an interview with The Wall Street Journal after the original designation was made, and the next day he told AFP he might seek "compensation" for the US military's "baseless, unbelievable and insulting allegation"). As with many operational decisions in Afghanistan, the press release exudes a strong odor of political calculations being made and acted on. The 'designation'
What is a Section 841 designation? The section is in the National Defense Authorization Act, and is designed to prevent US contract money from ending up in the hands of the Taliban or any other person or group "actively supporting an insurgency or otherwise actively opposing United States or coalition forces in a contingency operation in the United States Central Command theater of operations."
One of the bitter truths of the Afghan war is that huge amounts of American and European money have flowed via contractors into the hands of the insurgency, leaving the US and its coalition partners in the position of helping to pay for the bombs and bullets used to kill Afghan and foreign soldiers. The issue is not a new one, with trucking contractors paying protection money to groups connected to the insurgency in order to buy safe passage for US fuel, ammunition, and food deliveries to US bases.
The US also believes the drug business to be one of the principal money makers for the Taliban. The US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), which investigates corruption in US spending in Afghanistan, said in his latest report out this month that Afghanistan produces about 90 percent of the world's opium and that "the illicit drug trade also supports the insurgency."
The report also found persistent and high levels of corruption in the Afghan police, judiciary, and among its elected leaders. The Attorney General's office, which presumably would lead an investigation into Kam Air, is not spared.
While the ISAF press release said that US Forces-Afghanistan and the Afghan Government "remain mutually committed to transparency and combating corruption" that isn't the impression you'd get from reading the SIGAR report, which wrote the following about the Attorney General's office:
"Despite the importance the United States and the international community place on progress in punishing high-level officials guilty of corruption, the Afghan Attorney General Office (AGO) made no significant anti-corruption indictments or prosecutions this quarter... The AGO has claimed progress in his compliance with President Karzai’s anti-corruption and governance decree (PD45), but that claim does not reflect (the State Department's) understanding of events and omits important facts. For example, the Attorney General is responsible for issuing indictments on corruption, but two of the major stakeholders in the Kabul Bank scandal, President Karzai’s brother and Vice President Fahim’s brother, were not on the list of those indicted for crimes related to the bank’s collapse. The Attorney General also fired a reportedly reputable government whistleblower in the AGO because of the whistleblower’s determination to build corruption cases against government officials, according to State. The Attorney General bro
ught charges against the whistleblower for libeling ministries by accusing them of corruption in front of the Parliament."
The Afghan government's own track record at rooting out official corruption under President Karzai is probably best summed up as "awful." As the US winds down its military operations in Afghanistan, spending still remains very high. The US is expected to spend $10 billion on Afghan reconstruction and far more in directly supporting military operations. It's a fair bet that a chunk of the money will go into the hands of Afghan politicians, warlords, and the Taliban alike.
Retrograde Lessons: Learning from Afghanistan’s Logistical Nightmare
TIME By Nate Rawlings Feb. 05, 2013
Bagram Airbase - In dismantling and repatriating the U.S. presence in Afghanistan, guidelines for the next war – or humanitarian catastrophe
In a scene from the book Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Prof. Severus Snape describes potion-making as a “subtle science and exact art.” Those words could well describe military logistics.
Much has, of course, been written about the exact art and subtle science of moving troops great distances; of feeding them and housing them; of equipping, arming, and resupplying them while the fight rages; and of bringing them—and their material support—back home once hostilities draw to a close. Mention the topic to logisticians in uniform, and you’ll probably hear some version of the line, “Amateurs talk tactics, but professionals talk logistics,” a quote often attributed to General Robert H. Barrow, the 27th Commandant of the Marine Corps.
For the past 11 years, logisticians have had their hands full in Afghanistan. For one, the country is land locked and far from a seaport. The terrain, especially in the strategically important east, is covered with mountains; and the country’s road network is much less advanced than the one in Iraq. Over the years, the Air Force and Army airdropped supplies on remote bases, from large parts for military vehicles parachuted out of airplanes to “Speedballs,” body bags filled with water and ammunition, that could be tossed out of a helicopter to resupply troops under fire.
For most of the past decade, the logistical focus has been on getting equipment out to troops fighting in remote areas. “Doctrine states when you’re starting an operation, it’s always a push,” says Major Rosendo Pagan, executive officer of the 18th Combat Sustainment Support Battalion. But with less than 23 months before the vast majority of U.S. troops are out of Afghanistan, logisticians have focused much of their efforts on what Pagan calls “the pull phase”: bringing equipment back from far-flung outposts.
In addition to combat tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan, Pagan has served as a logistics advisor in U.S. Southern Command, working with militaries in Central and South America. He served as a logistician during the Haiti earthquake relief. Any humanitarian mission, he points out, is a giant logistics operation, and retrograde must play an earlier role.
Pagan is part of the CENTCOM Material Retrograde Element (CMRE), a group of logisticians and engineers designed to help combat units “retrograde”—military parlance for disassembling and repatriating–their equipment before they rotate home. They have base closure teams, which help units tear down outposts, and Forward Retrograde Elements who travel far out into the battlefield to help sort through what must be shipped home, destroyed or given to local Afghans. Still, much of the equipment from the field makes its way back to Bagram Airfield, where in a large open yard, Pagan’s troops oversee a small army of civilian contractors sorting and preparing gear for shipment.
One of the first considerations is cost: is it worth the trouble and expense to ship a given item home? A quick trip around the yard reveals hundreds of white four foot by four-foot cardboard containers called “kicker boxes,” each of which costs about $5,000. They are used to ship equipment back to the U.S. As Pagan rummaged through a random box, he pulled out several small pieces of gear worth about $20,000 each. Many of the boxes, he explained, can contain as much as $200,000 worth of equipment.
As retrograde has become a larger focus, these sorting operations have increased dramatically. When Pagan arrived in Afghanistan eight months ago, they were processing the equivalent of 250 twenty-foot containers of equipment each month; now they are averaging 278 per week, with shifts working 24-hours a day.
Similar operations are taking place on the other side of Bagram, where the 401st Army Field Sustainment Brigade handles Theater-Provided Equipment, known to the troops as TPE. For years in both Iraq and Afghanistan much of this class of equipment, especially armored vehicles, stayed behind and was handed off from unit to unit. Now, the TPE is finally going back.
After units close their bases in the Afghan countryside, many drive their vehicles to Bagram (for others who are farther out, the vehicles are hauled in by contracted truck drivers). Coming off the battlefield, most of the vehicles are filthy and stuffed with ammunition. Troops from the 401st clean the vehicles and check for ammunition four times, combing through the cracks and crevices with long metal tools and lipstick cameras, because if live ammunition is found later, it could shut down an entire port. At the end of January, the 401st estimated that it has shipped more than 400,000 pieces of equipment from the country: 1.3 million pieces worth $13.5 Billion were in use throughout the country, down from 1.7 million pieces worth $18 billion a few months ago.
The urgency of the retrograde is a reflection of both the scope and the time left on the clock. Logisticians talk about capacity and velocity–how much they can move at what speed. The CMRE is designed to increase velocity; with combat operations ongoing, planes and helicopters are still needed to sustain units advising Afghan troops, and the retrograde mission is not yet humming at full capacity. But the earliest piece of the puzzle is accountability. Property managers from the 401st estimate that 20% of their inventory is unaccounted for, that is, no field commander has signed for it. But as units pull out of bases, more and more of that equipment is resurfacing. In 2012, troops closing down bases found nearly 24,000 pieces of equipment valued at over $300 million previously unaccounted for. Some of that is being redistributed to other units, but most of it is being shipped home.
So how does the military do better next time? After every operation, both training and combat, units conduct an After Action Review and publish lessons learned from the campaign. Logisticians at all levels of the retrograde in eastern Afghanistan are beginning to synthesize what they’ve learned so far. For the 401st, which collected equipment from the 30,000 surge troops that left the country this year, moving from a 100 ft. by 100 ft. concrete pad to three 60,000 square ft. warehouses allowed them to process the material from those units in just a few weeks. The young enlisted soldiers tasked with tearing through the vehicles looking for errant ammunition redesigned some of their tools to better poke into cracks and crevices to find loose rounds.
For the CMRE, which handles greater numbers of smaller equipment, retrograding from Afghanistan provides obvious lessons for future campaigns. “Retrograde is nothing new,” says Col. Douglas McBride, commander of the CMRE. But starting to reduce equipment stockpiles earlier is “a culture shift,” he says. “If we’re knee-deep in combat operations, the natural tendency is to hold on to materiel for contingency operations, just in case.”
Pagan sees those lessons being written into future doctrine for logisticians. “I think we’ve learned a lot from this operation,” he says. “From now on, we’re going to integrate, very early in the stages of any operation, retrograde operations.”
Karzai Arrives in Norway to Sign Strategic Agreement
TOLOnews.com By Sonil Haidari Tuesday, 05 February 2013
President Hamid Karzai arrived in Oslo, the capital of Norway, Monday night to sign a long-term strategic agreement, Karzai's office said Tuesday.
"Karzai is to meet Norway's Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg today and will sign the strategic agreement between the two countries," the statement said.
After signing the agreement and meeting with Norwegian government officials, Karzai will fly to Egypt on an official trip, it said.
Norway has had around 97 troops in Afghanistan since 2003 with most of them based in the north of the country.
The trip to Norway comes on the heels of Karzai's visit to London where he met with UK and Pakistani leaders.
The trilateral summit hosted by UK Prime Minister David Cameron aimed to further the Afghan peace and reconciliation process amid growing fears for security deterioration when international troops leave Afghanistan in 2014.
Speaking in the press conference, Karzai thanked the UK Prime Minister for hosting the third summit between the three countries. He also called on the Taliban to take this opportunity to participate in the peace process so that all can participate in building their country's future.
The statement from Karzai's office said the President described the talks as "very frank and open discussion" and that hoped that the results will further improve the relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan as "very close, brotherly and good neighbourly".
Afghanistan - Taliban peace talks: Too many cooks in the kitchen
CBS News By Randall Joyce February 5, 2013
KABUL - The leaders of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Britain sat down in London this week to try and hammer out a single, coherent approach to an Afghan peace process which has been confused from the start.
The summit hosted by British Prime Minister David Cameron brought together Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistani President Asif Zardari, and yielded one result: a six-month deadline to work out concrete arrangements for the negotiations to move forward.
President Karzai's Press Office released a statement describing a "very frank and open discussion". In diplomatic code, that means there was some tough talk between the two neighbors, which routinely blame each other for violence inside their respective national borders.
Cameron was slightly more upbeat in his assessment, saying the two leaders had agreed to take their cooperation to, "an unprecedented level."
The next step should be, according to Karzai's office, the opening of a Taliban office in Doha, in the United Arab Emirates, to help facilitate talks between the Taliban and the Afghan High Peace Council. The problem with that approach is that, although the Taliban agreed to open an office in Doha, they have so far refused to speak to the Karzai government, which they routinely refer to as a puppet regime propped up by the U.S. and its allies.
U.S. diplomats, who stayed on the sidelines of this latest meeting, have had a series of secret talks with Taliban officials thought to represent Mullah Omar, the movement's formal leader. Those talks enraged President Karzai, who insists the peace process be "Afghan-led," and whose inner circle has voiced concerns about being left out in the cold when American forces leave in 2014.
The Taliban have also complained that the U.S. has thus far failed to release some high-level prisoners from Guantanamo Bay, as reportedly agreed. Pakistan has begun releasing some of its Afghan Taliban prisoners, but that has only complicated matters with the Afghans who are now complaining that no one is tracking those released prisoners and some may have rejoined the insurgency.
The peace process has been complicated by the number of parties taking it upon themselves to conduct sensitive negotiations in private. It's also been marred by confusion over whom they were talking to.
In 2010 NATO officials held talks with a man they believed was a top Taliban representative, only to have him disappear after being handed a large amount of cash. In September 2011, the confusion turned deadly when the head of the Afghan High Peace Council was assassinated by a man he believed was an envoy bringing a peace proposal from the Taliban.
Existential Fears in Afghanistan
Local experts say unchecked pressure from neighbours could fracture the state.
IWPR By Abdol Wahed Faramarz 5 Feb 13
Afghanistan - As the end date for the NATO combat troop presence approaches, some experts in Afghanistan fear their country will not withstand external pressures and could even disintegrate.
Last month, Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai, a former central banker who now heads the commission in charge of the security transition, told a private Afghan TV station that the next ten years would be a massive challenge.
"We face dangers to the survival of our nationhood in 2014,” he said in a January 5 interview. “Our neighbours, as well as some international commentators and others who do not hold us in high esteem, are waiting for a collapse."
In January, Afghanistan’s former intelligence chief Amrullah Saleh, issued dire predictions about his country’s post-2014 future. In interviews for the BBC in English and Pashtu, he warned of immediate threats posed by Pakistan and Iran.
Interviewed by the BBC’s Frank Gardner, Saleh said the West would “regret it one day” if it failed to “persuade, pressure or convince Pakistan to give up extremist militancy as tool for promotion of its foreign policy”.
For Afghans, he said, the result would be that “a lot of us will be killed, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people displaced. There will be images of an Afghanistan sinking into chaos, an Afghanistan not able to provide services for its population.”
Some politicians like parliamentarian Mohammad Hussein Fahimi argue that the influence of both Tehran and Islamabad already extends far inside Afghanistan, into the heart of government. Fahimi told IWPR that this leverage allowed these states to press home their advantage whenever they sensed that the Afghan leadership was vacillating.
Apart from the continuing Taleban insurgency, local analysts point to internal strains within central institutions including government, parliament and the security forces, with many politicians still more attached to old political and ethnic allegiances than to the nation state.
For some, the future is beginning to look alarmingly like the civil war period of the early 1990s.
Abdul Latif Pedram, leader of the National Congress Party, fears a resurgence in warlords reigning over mini-states within Afghanistan and engaging in conflict with neighbouring factions.
"Increasing tribal, ethnic, factional and regional prejudice presents a major risk that our nationhood will be destroyed,” he said. “Whenever Afghan politicians, rulers and leaders appear before the media, they mask their true faces behind talk of national unity, and behind claims that the Afghans are one united nation with no ethnic differences among them. But when they return to their homes, they talk of tribe and tribalism, race and racism."
Ghafur Lewal, director of the Afghanistan Centre for Regional Studies, says Afghanistan has faced similar existential crises on three or four occasions over the past century.
Despite the 11-year western presence, Iran and Pakistan have successfully ensconced themselves in the political, economic and cultural spheres and now enjoy what he calls “unlimited influence” in government, which he believes could ultimately lead to the destruction of the Afghan state.
While some argue that the Afghan security forces are now in a position to cope without international support, Lewal sees them as part of the problem – the military is just as weak and prone to collapse as the government.
He draws an analogy with the end of President Najibullah’s rule in 1992, when the regular army fell apart and a number of mujahedin factions embarked on years of civil war.
Pedram agreed, saying most recruits joined the security forces because they needed an income, not because they believed in a unitary Afghanistan. That could mean that if circumstances changed, they would simply walk away, leaving no force to defend the state.
The Afghan defence and interior ministries declined to comment on these claims, but a spokesman for President Hamed Karzai rejected both the warnings of state collapse and the claims that agents of neighbouring states had penetrated the institutions of government.
"There is no doubt that destructive individuals inside and outside Afghanistan are trying to destroy its nationhood, but they are incapable of doing so. It will never happen," spokesman Aimal Faizi told IWPR.
Faizi said the continued presence of international forces beyond the 2014 withdrawal would guarantee Afghanistan’s security, and noted in particular the security pact with the United States which President Karzai discussed on a recent trip to Washington.
"Once the security document is approved by the two countries, no threat will destroy Afghanistan's nationhood," he said.
Abdol Wahed Faramarz is an IWPR-trained reporter in Kabul.
Heavy Snowfall Blocks Parts of North Afghanistan
TOLOnews.com By Sonil Haidari Tuesday, 05 February 2013
Heavy snowfall has blocked roads into at least two districts of northern Samangan province, raising concerns for residents living in the cut-off villages, local officials said.
The roads into Dar-e-Souf Bala and Dara-e-Souf Payen have been blocked because of heavy snowfall and the residents are likely to face problems, provincial spokesman Mohammad Sediq Azizi said.
He asked government to help them to clear the roads.
"The people cannot come to the city of Samangan. The roads have been blocked and we need the help of government to clear the roads," he said.
It comes as a woman and her two children froze to death in central Logar province Sunday night as temperatures dropped below freezing, local officials said.
The deaths happened in Logar's Kharwar district after the cold weather worsened and the roads through the district closed.
Heavy snowfall has also closed the roads from the Azar, Charkh and Barak-e-Barck districts to the capital of Logar.
The major traffic route Salang Highway connecting the north and south of the country has been closed since Friday because of avalanche fears.
On Sunday, two men and a woman were killed and a woman was injured when avalanches struck the Shikh Ali district in northern Parwan province.
The snowfall is expected to continue until Tuesday, but there is no clear sign when the roads will reopen.
In early 2012, avalanches following an extreme storm in southern Salang killed 190 and left about 200 injured, an incident which raised criticism against the lack of preparedness of Afghan government departments.
Taliban Weakening Despite Increased Attacks: Officials
TOLOnews.com By Shakeela Ahbrimkhil Tuesday, 05 February 2013
Isaf and Afghan officials are seeking to reassure the people that the insurgency is weakening, despite an apparent increase in Taliban-led suicide attacks this winter season in Afghanistan's capital.
Isaf spokesman Gen. Günter Katz said that the increase in suicide attacks and planting of roadside bombs shows the weakness of the Taliban in engaging in any serious combat against the Afghan National Security Forces.
"They use the media, that is right, so they give a wrong sense of security. But overall, security – particularly in Kabul – is stable and we don't see any worries in terms of violence. And clearly they will continue to lose that fight and what they are doing is they continue their suicide attacks," Katz said at a press conference Monday.
The Ministry of Defense agreed saying that the insurgents no longer seek to fight face-to-face with Afghan security forces, instead opting for suicide attacks and hidden bombs which end up mostly killing civilians.
"The attacks launched in the past two months in Kabul and other provinces have mostly struck civilians. So the attacks don't benefit them because they mentally make people feel uncomfortable, but they launch such attacks [anyway]," spokesman Gen. Zahir Azimi told TOLOnews Monday.
Ministry of Interior spokesman said that the Taliban tactic was largely aimed at increasing fear and terror in the people more than actually inflicting damage to the security forces.
"In this winter, the Taliban has launched more suicide attacks [but] they only show more terror to the people," Sediq Seddiqi said TOLOnews Monday.
In the past, the winter season has had fewer insurgent attacks compared to the warmer months, however with three attacks executed or planned in Kabul in three weeks, this appears to be changing.
Two of the attacks were carried out in the second and third week of January on security offices in Kabul, but the third was foiled late Sunday night when six equipped suicide bombers were detained in Kabul's district 4.
IMF Unlocks Aid as Afghan Govt Pledges Reform
TOLOnews.com By Zabihullah Jhanmal Tuesday, 05 February 2013
The Afghan government has welcomed the IMF's move to reopen credit lines to Afghanistan two years after corruption fears surrounding the Kabul Bank crisis had stopped most funds being sent.
Ministry of Finance officials said the International Monetary Fund's restored aid will encourage other donors to give to Afghanistan.
"We are not concerned about the amount of aid, what is important is that the [renewed] aid will encourage others to help Afghanistan," Finance Ministry adviser Najibullah Manili told TOLOnews Tuesday.
The IMF on Monday released a statement saying it had reached an agreement with Afghanistan on what reforms were needed for the country to receive the next aid installment.
It granted Afghanistan a US$133.6 million line of credit in November 2011 but to date has only disbursed two installments of about US$18 million each.
The statement comes after a two-week IMF visit during which Afghan authorities agreed on key certain conditions for the release of funds, including a tightening of monetary policy, the implementation of key structural benchmarks for submission of laws to parliament and strengthening banks' capital, according to the IMF statement.
Afghan authorities also agreed on implementing a value-added tax (VAT) in 2014 and increasing revenues by strengthening customs measures, the IMF said.
Indicating that growth and inflation were better than expected in 2012, the IMF said "the economic outlook for Afghanistan is broadly positive".
www.afghanistannewscenter.com
By Sajad - 06 Feb 2013, 9:11 am Khaama Press
Afghanistan signed a long term strategic cooperation agreement with Norway on Tuesday.
The agreement was signed by Afghan president Hamid Karzai and Norwegian prime minister Jens Stoltenberg in Oslo capital city of Norway.
According to a statement released by presidential palace media office, the strategic pact will specify frame work for security economic and development cooperation between the two nations.
This comes as Afghanistan signed similar strategic cooperation agreements with US, Italy, UK, France, Germany, Australia and India.
Afghan foreign ministry earlier also announced to sign long term strategic cooperation agreement with all the NATO member countries.
The strategic cooperation agreements will focus on equipment and training for Afghan national security forces and economic cooperation for the reconstruction of Afghanistan.
In the meantime Norwegian prime minister Jens Stoltenberg told reporters after inking the strategic pact with Afghanistan, Norway remains committed to assist Afghanistan in military and civil sectors.
Afghan president Hamid Karzai also praised Norway’s cooperation with Afghanistan during the past ten years.
The statement released by presidential palace added that Norway will also assist Afghanistan in health and education sectors that will also cover programs to support in reducing the children and maternal mortality.
White House Defends Drone Strikes As 'Legal, Ethical, Wise'
February 6, 2013 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
The White House has defended the United States' use of drone missile strikes to kill Al-Qaeda-linked terrorist suspects, even if they are U.S. citizens who have not been convicted in court.
White House spokesman James Carney said the Obama administration viewed the strikes as legal, ethical, and wise.
"We conduct those strikes because they are necessary to mitigate ongoing actual threats, to stop plots, to prevent future attacks and, again, save American lives," Carney said. "These strikes are legal, they are ethical, and they are wise."
Carney noted that Congress has authorized the use of "all necessary military force" in the fight against Al-Qaeda, the Islamist militant organization blamed for the September 11, 2001, attacks that killed some 3,000 people in the United States.
The White House statement on February 5 came after the U.S. television network NBC reported on an unclassified Justice Department memo that says high-level U.S. officials could order the killing of suspected terrorists, including Americans, even if there is no clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. interests will take place in the immediate future.
The document says U.S. citizens can be targeted if they are evaluated by these high-level officials as having "recently" been involved in "activities" posing a possible threat.
The document stops short of directly stating what types of activities or behavior could make a suspect the target of a drone strike.
Rights Being Violated?
Critics have accused the Obama administration of an abuse of executive power, saying the policy infringes on the constitutional rights of Americans to due process and could lead to human rights violations.
Some critics also point to the 2011 drone strikes in Yemen that killed Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son Samir Khan -- both U.S. citizens who had never been charged with a crime by U.S. authorities.
Officials have said Awlaki was linked to the planning of a series of attacks, including the attempted Christmas 2009 bombing of an airliner over Detroit.
The United States has used missile strikes by unmanned aircraft to target suspected militants, most notably in Pakistan and Yemen but also elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa.
The attacks, which have killed civilians alongside militants, have strained relations between Washington and governments in countries where the attacks have occurred.
President Barack Obama’s choice to be the new head of the CIA, John Brennan, is expected to be questioned about the drone program on February 7 when his nomination goes before the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Brennan, the current White House counterterrorism chief, is considered a key architect of the drone program.
The use of drone strikes began under the administration of President George W. Bush but their frequency has increased sharply since Obama took office in early 2009.
With reporting by AFP, AP, Reuters, and dpa
Afghan Youth Orchestra Prepares to Play US Venues
Brian Allen VOA News February 05, 2013
In embattled Afghanistan, music is making an appearance after having been banned outright under the Taliban in the late 1990s. The Afghanistan Youth Orchestra was created in 2010, the first orchestra formed in that country in more than 30 years. Today, its musicians are preparing their debut performances in famous American concert halls.
The Afghanistan Youth Orchestra performed for the Afghan community in Alexandria, Virginia, where the venue was intimate, the audience small.
But within days, these Afghan musicians will play in two famous concert halls: the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. and Carnegie Hall in New York.
Ahmad Sarmast, who founded the orchestra, says his group is ready to play on the world’s biggest stages.
“Our young kids are getting this opportunity in the very, very first days of their career as musicians," he said. "Everyone is extremely excited, and they are very much looking forward to this performance."
The group travelled from Kabul to the United States on a tour funded largely by the U.S. embassy in Kabul.
When the Taliban took power in 1996, it banned music entirely.
But since 2010, Sarmast has kept the small National Institute of Music in Kabul running. The orchestra grew out of the school.
“The entire idea of this trip, and the project from the beginning, was to show a different face of Afghanistan; to change the perception of Afghanistan," he said.
The musicians are between the ages of 10 and 22 and most are orphans or street children. The ensemble includes girls, who under the Taliban were not allowed to be educated after the age of eight.
Nazira, a cellist, says she's excited to play in America.
“This year is very good for us because we are going to perform in concerts in the U.S.," she said. "We are at the music school from 8:00 a.m. till 3:00 p.m. and studying.”
On Monday, the orchestra was welcomed to Washington by Secretary of State John Kerry.
“So we’re happy to welcome you here as ambassadors of peace,” he said.
Now, the musicians are rehearsing for their big debut at the Kennedy Center. Then it’s on to New York and Carnegie Hall, before returning to Kabul and a life full of music.
Young Afghan musicians meet American peers in D.C.
Washington Post By Katherine Boyle Wednesday, February 6, 2013
The barefoot boys sit cross-legged on the stage, tuning their instruments to the droning A of the lutelike rubab. Behind them hangs a poster of Mickey and Minnie Mouse, shaking hands underneath the word “Cooperation.” Before them is an audience of mostly African American boys and girls, listening to Afghan instruments they’ve never before seen up close.
As the visitors play a set of four traditional songs, heads begin to bob in the auditorium at William E. Doar Jr. Public Charter School for the Performing Arts, in Northeast Washington, where children of two countries irrevocably affected by the Taliban’s brutality are meeting each other for the first time.
Only 48 hours after touching down at Dulles International Airport, the Afghan Youth Orchestra, visiting the United States this week, had begun its packed diplomatic tour. The young musicians have already played at the Afghan Embassy and the World Bank, institutions that, along with the State Department, are funding the $500,000 tour. Secretary of State John F. Kerry dropped in when they performed Monday at the State Department, calling them “ambassadors of peace.” It wasn’t until Tuesday that they met their American peers and exchanged more than songs and pleasantries.
“Why was music forbidden?’ asked Timon Lawson, 9, during a question-and-answer session after the traditional ensemble’s performance. Samir Zafar, 14, explained through an interpreter that music was banned during the Taliban’s rule because the militant group believed that it went against the dictates of Islam.
“Do you believe in the laws” of the Taliban? another boy in the audience asked.
“No,” Samir answered in his native Dari. “Music is a universal language of the heart.”
The questions may seem tough for a goodwill tour, but the children, many of whom have no memory of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks or the Taliban’s regime, asked each other questions that pushed beyond the confines of music. The children seemed to enjoy their encounter, learning about each other’s music schools along the way.
“I’m very glad I made this trip,” said Samim Rafighzadeh, 19, a tabla player in the ensemble. “Our school is new, and we are just getting organized. It is good to visit a school like this and see what the next step is.”
The Afghanistan National Institute of Music, founded in 2010, is the only such school in the country. With 141 students, 35 of whom are girls, it brings music education back to a country that once banned instruments and women’s education. This is the school’s longest and largest tour, with 48 students and 12 teachers traveling to the United States for two weeks. And for many of the students, it’s a tour of firsts: first airplane ride, first visa. Teachers noted that the ensemble has never seen another music school, let alone one with 24 pianos in one room.
“It’s so new to them to see schools where people learn piano, violin and music,” said Allegra Boggess, 28, a piano teacher from Colorado who has been teaching at the Afghanistan National Institute of Music for 18 months. William E. Doar “is the same kind of music school we are trying to create,” she said.
Cultural exchanges between Afghan and American youths are a priority on the tour. At the Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage on Thursday, the Afghan orchestra will perform with the Maryland Classic Youth Orchestras. Members of both orchestras met at Strathmore for the first time Tuesday to practice for the Kennedy Center concert. The Afghan ensemble will perform with the Scarsdale High School Orchestra in New York and take classes with students from the New England Conservatory in Boston. The meetings give musicians from both countries a chance to compare instruments and facilities. And although thousands of miles apart, students and teachers at these publicly funded arts schools harbor the same hopes and aspirations. Like the Afghan youths, students at William E. Doar Jr. learn instruments that many picked up for the first time at the school.
“None of the children pay for the instruments,” said Kim Teachout, music coordinator at William E. Doar Jr. “Being in inner-city D.C., it gives them an opportunity to learn an instrument they may not have otherwise had. It brings joy to their lives. ‘Hope’ is a good word for it.”
Ahmad Sarmast, founder of the Afghanistan National Institute of Music, expresses the same sentiment: Music breeds hope.
Donors hope the tour shows the parents of Afghan students and the most conservative leaders in Afghanistan that learning traditional and Western orchestral music does not contradict the tenets of Islam. Overcoming the taboo of instructing students in music is a struggle for the Afghanistan school’s teachers.
“It’s a constant threat, to the girls especially,” Boggess said. “Some people in Afghanistan are very conservative, and they don’t know whether music is allowed in the context of Islam. They see Shakira on TV or see men and women dancing together and they think that is [Western] music. They don’t know about violin sonatas.”
But, most important, the tour is offering the students new perspectives on America and their American peers. Boggess emphasized that many of the younger students are overwhelmed by the sights and sounds.
“So many of the kids have never seen an elephant,” she said of their visit to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. “They asked, ‘Is it alive?’ They would have stayed all day. Some of the older students, though, did become a little depressed. They don’t have museums like this in Afghanistan. Maybe one day they’ll help build one.”
Afghan corruption, opium, and the strange case of Kam Air
Kam Air, an airline owned by a politically-connected Afghan businessman, was blacklisted by the US military in Afghanistan for opium smuggling. Then the Afghan government complained.
Christian Science Monitor By Dan Murphy, Staff writer February 5, 2013
In late January, the US military blacklisted Afghanistan's Kam Air from winning contracts with the US in Afghanistan, with the head of a US military anticorruption unit asserting that the airline was involved in bulk opium smuggling on commercial flights to Tajikistan.
The decision touched off a flurry of backroom lobbying, given the political connections of Kam Air's owner and the shadow it cast over efforts to merge the private airline carrier with the struggling Afghan government-owned airline Ariana.
The result? A few weeks later, the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan (ISAF) issued a terse statement announcing that Kam Air would be removed from the blacklist pending the results of an Afghan government investigation into the drug smuggling charges.
The release outlines a Feb. 2 meeting between senior officials in the Afghan government and the US military in Kabul. There, "US military officials explained why they had recommended the [blacklist] designation to the commander of CENTCOM," or the US Central Command based in Tampa, which is in operational control of the Afghanistan mission. The brief statement makes no explanation as to why the Afghan government's arguments were convincing, though it implies that questions of Afghan sovereignty were crucial.
"The CENTCOM commander made the decision to suspend the 841 designation because he believes it is an appropriate, logical course of action at this time for the sovereign Afghan Government to conduct a full investigation of Kam Air."
Perhaps. But why Afghan sovereignty should determine who the US military does business with isn't entirely clear. Nor is it clear why the position of Maj. Gen. Richard Longo, who commands a task force to combat contracting corruption in Afghanistan, has been ignored. He told The Wall Street Journal in January that "the U.S. will not do business with those who fund and support illicit activities. Kam Air is too large of a company not to know what has been going on within its organization.”
Making this story stranger still were the comments of ISAF spokesman Col. Thomas Collins to Stars and Stripes yesterday. He said, in the words of the Stars and Stripes reporter, that "the decision to rescind the blacklist decision did not call into question the evidence uncovered by the original US investigation."
An Afghan contact of mine, and a former senior adviser to the Afghan government, has an explanation. He alerted me to the ISAF press release with an e-mail headed "the fix is in!"
He asserted that essentially the US is doing a favor for President Hamid Karzai by protecting the business interests of Zamari Kamgar, the owner of Kam Air (Mr. Kamgar rejected allegations of any wrongdoing at the airline in an interview with The Wall Street Journal after the original designation was made, and the next day he told AFP he might seek "compensation" for the US military's "baseless, unbelievable and insulting allegation"). As with many operational decisions in Afghanistan, the press release exudes a strong odor of political calculations being made and acted on. The 'designation'
What is a Section 841 designation? The section is in the National Defense Authorization Act, and is designed to prevent US contract money from ending up in the hands of the Taliban or any other person or group "actively supporting an insurgency or otherwise actively opposing United States or coalition forces in a contingency operation in the United States Central Command theater of operations."
One of the bitter truths of the Afghan war is that huge amounts of American and European money have flowed via contractors into the hands of the insurgency, leaving the US and its coalition partners in the position of helping to pay for the bombs and bullets used to kill Afghan and foreign soldiers. The issue is not a new one, with trucking contractors paying protection money to groups connected to the insurgency in order to buy safe passage for US fuel, ammunition, and food deliveries to US bases.
The US also believes the drug business to be one of the principal money makers for the Taliban. The US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), which investigates corruption in US spending in Afghanistan, said in his latest report out this month that Afghanistan produces about 90 percent of the world's opium and that "the illicit drug trade also supports the insurgency."
The report also found persistent and high levels of corruption in the Afghan police, judiciary, and among its elected leaders. The Attorney General's office, which presumably would lead an investigation into Kam Air, is not spared.
While the ISAF press release said that US Forces-Afghanistan and the Afghan Government "remain mutually committed to transparency and combating corruption" that isn't the impression you'd get from reading the SIGAR report, which wrote the following about the Attorney General's office:
"Despite the importance the United States and the international community place on progress in punishing high-level officials guilty of corruption, the Afghan Attorney General Office (AGO) made no significant anti-corruption indictments or prosecutions this quarter... The AGO has claimed progress in his compliance with President Karzai’s anti-corruption and governance decree (PD45), but that claim does not reflect (the State Department's) understanding of events and omits important facts. For example, the Attorney General is responsible for issuing indictments on corruption, but two of the major stakeholders in the Kabul Bank scandal, President Karzai’s brother and Vice President Fahim’s brother, were not on the list of those indicted for crimes related to the bank’s collapse. The Attorney General also fired a reportedly reputable government whistleblower in the AGO because of the whistleblower’s determination to build corruption cases against government officials, according to State. The Attorney General bro
ught charges against the whistleblower for libeling ministries by accusing them of corruption in front of the Parliament."
The Afghan government's own track record at rooting out official corruption under President Karzai is probably best summed up as "awful." As the US winds down its military operations in Afghanistan, spending still remains very high. The US is expected to spend $10 billion on Afghan reconstruction and far more in directly supporting military operations. It's a fair bet that a chunk of the money will go into the hands of Afghan politicians, warlords, and the Taliban alike.
Retrograde Lessons: Learning from Afghanistan’s Logistical Nightmare
TIME By Nate Rawlings Feb. 05, 2013
Bagram Airbase - In dismantling and repatriating the U.S. presence in Afghanistan, guidelines for the next war – or humanitarian catastrophe
In a scene from the book Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Prof. Severus Snape describes potion-making as a “subtle science and exact art.” Those words could well describe military logistics.
Much has, of course, been written about the exact art and subtle science of moving troops great distances; of feeding them and housing them; of equipping, arming, and resupplying them while the fight rages; and of bringing them—and their material support—back home once hostilities draw to a close. Mention the topic to logisticians in uniform, and you’ll probably hear some version of the line, “Amateurs talk tactics, but professionals talk logistics,” a quote often attributed to General Robert H. Barrow, the 27th Commandant of the Marine Corps.
For the past 11 years, logisticians have had their hands full in Afghanistan. For one, the country is land locked and far from a seaport. The terrain, especially in the strategically important east, is covered with mountains; and the country’s road network is much less advanced than the one in Iraq. Over the years, the Air Force and Army airdropped supplies on remote bases, from large parts for military vehicles parachuted out of airplanes to “Speedballs,” body bags filled with water and ammunition, that could be tossed out of a helicopter to resupply troops under fire.
For most of the past decade, the logistical focus has been on getting equipment out to troops fighting in remote areas. “Doctrine states when you’re starting an operation, it’s always a push,” says Major Rosendo Pagan, executive officer of the 18th Combat Sustainment Support Battalion. But with less than 23 months before the vast majority of U.S. troops are out of Afghanistan, logisticians have focused much of their efforts on what Pagan calls “the pull phase”: bringing equipment back from far-flung outposts.
In addition to combat tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan, Pagan has served as a logistics advisor in U.S. Southern Command, working with militaries in Central and South America. He served as a logistician during the Haiti earthquake relief. Any humanitarian mission, he points out, is a giant logistics operation, and retrograde must play an earlier role.
Pagan is part of the CENTCOM Material Retrograde Element (CMRE), a group of logisticians and engineers designed to help combat units “retrograde”—military parlance for disassembling and repatriating–their equipment before they rotate home. They have base closure teams, which help units tear down outposts, and Forward Retrograde Elements who travel far out into the battlefield to help sort through what must be shipped home, destroyed or given to local Afghans. Still, much of the equipment from the field makes its way back to Bagram Airfield, where in a large open yard, Pagan’s troops oversee a small army of civilian contractors sorting and preparing gear for shipment.
One of the first considerations is cost: is it worth the trouble and expense to ship a given item home? A quick trip around the yard reveals hundreds of white four foot by four-foot cardboard containers called “kicker boxes,” each of which costs about $5,000. They are used to ship equipment back to the U.S. As Pagan rummaged through a random box, he pulled out several small pieces of gear worth about $20,000 each. Many of the boxes, he explained, can contain as much as $200,000 worth of equipment.
As retrograde has become a larger focus, these sorting operations have increased dramatically. When Pagan arrived in Afghanistan eight months ago, they were processing the equivalent of 250 twenty-foot containers of equipment each month; now they are averaging 278 per week, with shifts working 24-hours a day.
Similar operations are taking place on the other side of Bagram, where the 401st Army Field Sustainment Brigade handles Theater-Provided Equipment, known to the troops as TPE. For years in both Iraq and Afghanistan much of this class of equipment, especially armored vehicles, stayed behind and was handed off from unit to unit. Now, the TPE is finally going back.
After units close their bases in the Afghan countryside, many drive their vehicles to Bagram (for others who are farther out, the vehicles are hauled in by contracted truck drivers). Coming off the battlefield, most of the vehicles are filthy and stuffed with ammunition. Troops from the 401st clean the vehicles and check for ammunition four times, combing through the cracks and crevices with long metal tools and lipstick cameras, because if live ammunition is found later, it could shut down an entire port. At the end of January, the 401st estimated that it has shipped more than 400,000 pieces of equipment from the country: 1.3 million pieces worth $13.5 Billion were in use throughout the country, down from 1.7 million pieces worth $18 billion a few months ago.
The urgency of the retrograde is a reflection of both the scope and the time left on the clock. Logisticians talk about capacity and velocity–how much they can move at what speed. The CMRE is designed to increase velocity; with combat operations ongoing, planes and helicopters are still needed to sustain units advising Afghan troops, and the retrograde mission is not yet humming at full capacity. But the earliest piece of the puzzle is accountability. Property managers from the 401st estimate that 20% of their inventory is unaccounted for, that is, no field commander has signed for it. But as units pull out of bases, more and more of that equipment is resurfacing. In 2012, troops closing down bases found nearly 24,000 pieces of equipment valued at over $300 million previously unaccounted for. Some of that is being redistributed to other units, but most of it is being shipped home.
So how does the military do better next time? After every operation, both training and combat, units conduct an After Action Review and publish lessons learned from the campaign. Logisticians at all levels of the retrograde in eastern Afghanistan are beginning to synthesize what they’ve learned so far. For the 401st, which collected equipment from the 30,000 surge troops that left the country this year, moving from a 100 ft. by 100 ft. concrete pad to three 60,000 square ft. warehouses allowed them to process the material from those units in just a few weeks. The young enlisted soldiers tasked with tearing through the vehicles looking for errant ammunition redesigned some of their tools to better poke into cracks and crevices to find loose rounds.
For the CMRE, which handles greater numbers of smaller equipment, retrograding from Afghanistan provides obvious lessons for future campaigns. “Retrograde is nothing new,” says Col. Douglas McBride, commander of the CMRE. But starting to reduce equipment stockpiles earlier is “a culture shift,” he says. “If we’re knee-deep in combat operations, the natural tendency is to hold on to materiel for contingency operations, just in case.”
Pagan sees those lessons being written into future doctrine for logisticians. “I think we’ve learned a lot from this operation,” he says. “From now on, we’re going to integrate, very early in the stages of any operation, retrograde operations.”
Karzai Arrives in Norway to Sign Strategic Agreement
TOLOnews.com By Sonil Haidari Tuesday, 05 February 2013
President Hamid Karzai arrived in Oslo, the capital of Norway, Monday night to sign a long-term strategic agreement, Karzai's office said Tuesday.
"Karzai is to meet Norway's Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg today and will sign the strategic agreement between the two countries," the statement said.
After signing the agreement and meeting with Norwegian government officials, Karzai will fly to Egypt on an official trip, it said.
Norway has had around 97 troops in Afghanistan since 2003 with most of them based in the north of the country.
The trip to Norway comes on the heels of Karzai's visit to London where he met with UK and Pakistani leaders.
The trilateral summit hosted by UK Prime Minister David Cameron aimed to further the Afghan peace and reconciliation process amid growing fears for security deterioration when international troops leave Afghanistan in 2014.
Speaking in the press conference, Karzai thanked the UK Prime Minister for hosting the third summit between the three countries. He also called on the Taliban to take this opportunity to participate in the peace process so that all can participate in building their country's future.
The statement from Karzai's office said the President described the talks as "very frank and open discussion" and that hoped that the results will further improve the relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan as "very close, brotherly and good neighbourly".
Afghanistan - Taliban peace talks: Too many cooks in the kitchen
CBS News By Randall Joyce February 5, 2013
KABUL - The leaders of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Britain sat down in London this week to try and hammer out a single, coherent approach to an Afghan peace process which has been confused from the start.
The summit hosted by British Prime Minister David Cameron brought together Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistani President Asif Zardari, and yielded one result: a six-month deadline to work out concrete arrangements for the negotiations to move forward.
President Karzai's Press Office released a statement describing a "very frank and open discussion". In diplomatic code, that means there was some tough talk between the two neighbors, which routinely blame each other for violence inside their respective national borders.
Cameron was slightly more upbeat in his assessment, saying the two leaders had agreed to take their cooperation to, "an unprecedented level."
The next step should be, according to Karzai's office, the opening of a Taliban office in Doha, in the United Arab Emirates, to help facilitate talks between the Taliban and the Afghan High Peace Council. The problem with that approach is that, although the Taliban agreed to open an office in Doha, they have so far refused to speak to the Karzai government, which they routinely refer to as a puppet regime propped up by the U.S. and its allies.
U.S. diplomats, who stayed on the sidelines of this latest meeting, have had a series of secret talks with Taliban officials thought to represent Mullah Omar, the movement's formal leader. Those talks enraged President Karzai, who insists the peace process be "Afghan-led," and whose inner circle has voiced concerns about being left out in the cold when American forces leave in 2014.
The Taliban have also complained that the U.S. has thus far failed to release some high-level prisoners from Guantanamo Bay, as reportedly agreed. Pakistan has begun releasing some of its Afghan Taliban prisoners, but that has only complicated matters with the Afghans who are now complaining that no one is tracking those released prisoners and some may have rejoined the insurgency.
The peace process has been complicated by the number of parties taking it upon themselves to conduct sensitive negotiations in private. It's also been marred by confusion over whom they were talking to.
In 2010 NATO officials held talks with a man they believed was a top Taliban representative, only to have him disappear after being handed a large amount of cash. In September 2011, the confusion turned deadly when the head of the Afghan High Peace Council was assassinated by a man he believed was an envoy bringing a peace proposal from the Taliban.
Existential Fears in Afghanistan
Local experts say unchecked pressure from neighbours could fracture the state.
IWPR By Abdol Wahed Faramarz 5 Feb 13
Afghanistan - As the end date for the NATO combat troop presence approaches, some experts in Afghanistan fear their country will not withstand external pressures and could even disintegrate.
Last month, Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai, a former central banker who now heads the commission in charge of the security transition, told a private Afghan TV station that the next ten years would be a massive challenge.
"We face dangers to the survival of our nationhood in 2014,” he said in a January 5 interview. “Our neighbours, as well as some international commentators and others who do not hold us in high esteem, are waiting for a collapse."
In January, Afghanistan’s former intelligence chief Amrullah Saleh, issued dire predictions about his country’s post-2014 future. In interviews for the BBC in English and Pashtu, he warned of immediate threats posed by Pakistan and Iran.
Interviewed by the BBC’s Frank Gardner, Saleh said the West would “regret it one day” if it failed to “persuade, pressure or convince Pakistan to give up extremist militancy as tool for promotion of its foreign policy”.
For Afghans, he said, the result would be that “a lot of us will be killed, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people displaced. There will be images of an Afghanistan sinking into chaos, an Afghanistan not able to provide services for its population.”
Some politicians like parliamentarian Mohammad Hussein Fahimi argue that the influence of both Tehran and Islamabad already extends far inside Afghanistan, into the heart of government. Fahimi told IWPR that this leverage allowed these states to press home their advantage whenever they sensed that the Afghan leadership was vacillating.
Apart from the continuing Taleban insurgency, local analysts point to internal strains within central institutions including government, parliament and the security forces, with many politicians still more attached to old political and ethnic allegiances than to the nation state.
For some, the future is beginning to look alarmingly like the civil war period of the early 1990s.
Abdul Latif Pedram, leader of the National Congress Party, fears a resurgence in warlords reigning over mini-states within Afghanistan and engaging in conflict with neighbouring factions.
"Increasing tribal, ethnic, factional and regional prejudice presents a major risk that our nationhood will be destroyed,” he said. “Whenever Afghan politicians, rulers and leaders appear before the media, they mask their true faces behind talk of national unity, and behind claims that the Afghans are one united nation with no ethnic differences among them. But when they return to their homes, they talk of tribe and tribalism, race and racism."
Ghafur Lewal, director of the Afghanistan Centre for Regional Studies, says Afghanistan has faced similar existential crises on three or four occasions over the past century.
Despite the 11-year western presence, Iran and Pakistan have successfully ensconced themselves in the political, economic and cultural spheres and now enjoy what he calls “unlimited influence” in government, which he believes could ultimately lead to the destruction of the Afghan state.
While some argue that the Afghan security forces are now in a position to cope without international support, Lewal sees them as part of the problem – the military is just as weak and prone to collapse as the government.
He draws an analogy with the end of President Najibullah’s rule in 1992, when the regular army fell apart and a number of mujahedin factions embarked on years of civil war.
Pedram agreed, saying most recruits joined the security forces because they needed an income, not because they believed in a unitary Afghanistan. That could mean that if circumstances changed, they would simply walk away, leaving no force to defend the state.
The Afghan defence and interior ministries declined to comment on these claims, but a spokesman for President Hamed Karzai rejected both the warnings of state collapse and the claims that agents of neighbouring states had penetrated the institutions of government.
"There is no doubt that destructive individuals inside and outside Afghanistan are trying to destroy its nationhood, but they are incapable of doing so. It will never happen," spokesman Aimal Faizi told IWPR.
Faizi said the continued presence of international forces beyond the 2014 withdrawal would guarantee Afghanistan’s security, and noted in particular the security pact with the United States which President Karzai discussed on a recent trip to Washington.
"Once the security document is approved by the two countries, no threat will destroy Afghanistan's nationhood," he said.
Abdol Wahed Faramarz is an IWPR-trained reporter in Kabul.
Heavy Snowfall Blocks Parts of North Afghanistan
TOLOnews.com By Sonil Haidari Tuesday, 05 February 2013
Heavy snowfall has blocked roads into at least two districts of northern Samangan province, raising concerns for residents living in the cut-off villages, local officials said.
The roads into Dar-e-Souf Bala and Dara-e-Souf Payen have been blocked because of heavy snowfall and the residents are likely to face problems, provincial spokesman Mohammad Sediq Azizi said.
He asked government to help them to clear the roads.
"The people cannot come to the city of Samangan. The roads have been blocked and we need the help of government to clear the roads," he said.
It comes as a woman and her two children froze to death in central Logar province Sunday night as temperatures dropped below freezing, local officials said.
The deaths happened in Logar's Kharwar district after the cold weather worsened and the roads through the district closed.
Heavy snowfall has also closed the roads from the Azar, Charkh and Barak-e-Barck districts to the capital of Logar.
The major traffic route Salang Highway connecting the north and south of the country has been closed since Friday because of avalanche fears.
On Sunday, two men and a woman were killed and a woman was injured when avalanches struck the Shikh Ali district in northern Parwan province.
The snowfall is expected to continue until Tuesday, but there is no clear sign when the roads will reopen.
In early 2012, avalanches following an extreme storm in southern Salang killed 190 and left about 200 injured, an incident which raised criticism against the lack of preparedness of Afghan government departments.
Taliban Weakening Despite Increased Attacks: Officials
TOLOnews.com By Shakeela Ahbrimkhil Tuesday, 05 February 2013
Isaf and Afghan officials are seeking to reassure the people that the insurgency is weakening, despite an apparent increase in Taliban-led suicide attacks this winter season in Afghanistan's capital.
Isaf spokesman Gen. Günter Katz said that the increase in suicide attacks and planting of roadside bombs shows the weakness of the Taliban in engaging in any serious combat against the Afghan National Security Forces.
"They use the media, that is right, so they give a wrong sense of security. But overall, security – particularly in Kabul – is stable and we don't see any worries in terms of violence. And clearly they will continue to lose that fight and what they are doing is they continue their suicide attacks," Katz said at a press conference Monday.
The Ministry of Defense agreed saying that the insurgents no longer seek to fight face-to-face with Afghan security forces, instead opting for suicide attacks and hidden bombs which end up mostly killing civilians.
"The attacks launched in the past two months in Kabul and other provinces have mostly struck civilians. So the attacks don't benefit them because they mentally make people feel uncomfortable, but they launch such attacks [anyway]," spokesman Gen. Zahir Azimi told TOLOnews Monday.
Ministry of Interior spokesman said that the Taliban tactic was largely aimed at increasing fear and terror in the people more than actually inflicting damage to the security forces.
"In this winter, the Taliban has launched more suicide attacks [but] they only show more terror to the people," Sediq Seddiqi said TOLOnews Monday.
In the past, the winter season has had fewer insurgent attacks compared to the warmer months, however with three attacks executed or planned in Kabul in three weeks, this appears to be changing.
Two of the attacks were carried out in the second and third week of January on security offices in Kabul, but the third was foiled late Sunday night when six equipped suicide bombers were detained in Kabul's district 4.
IMF Unlocks Aid as Afghan Govt Pledges Reform
TOLOnews.com By Zabihullah Jhanmal Tuesday, 05 February 2013
The Afghan government has welcomed the IMF's move to reopen credit lines to Afghanistan two years after corruption fears surrounding the Kabul Bank crisis had stopped most funds being sent.
Ministry of Finance officials said the International Monetary Fund's restored aid will encourage other donors to give to Afghanistan.
"We are not concerned about the amount of aid, what is important is that the [renewed] aid will encourage others to help Afghanistan," Finance Ministry adviser Najibullah Manili told TOLOnews Tuesday.
The IMF on Monday released a statement saying it had reached an agreement with Afghanistan on what reforms were needed for the country to receive the next aid installment.
It granted Afghanistan a US$133.6 million line of credit in November 2011 but to date has only disbursed two installments of about US$18 million each.
The statement comes after a two-week IMF visit during which Afghan authorities agreed on key certain conditions for the release of funds, including a tightening of monetary policy, the implementation of key structural benchmarks for submission of laws to parliament and strengthening banks' capital, according to the IMF statement.
Afghan authorities also agreed on implementing a value-added tax (VAT) in 2014 and increasing revenues by strengthening customs measures, the IMF said.
Indicating that growth and inflation were better than expected in 2012, the IMF said "the economic outlook for Afghanistan is broadly positive".
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