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Afghan 'Buzkashi Boys' Make It To Hollywood
February 21, 2013 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
LOS ANGELES, United States -- Thanks to an Internet campaign that raised enough funds to pay for their travel, Afghan actors Fawad Mohammadi and Jawanmard Paiz will walk the red carpet and rub shoulders with Hollywood's brightest stars at the Oscars on February 24.
The teenage stars of the Oscar-nominated short film "Buzkashi Boys" are in California to attend the 85th annual Academy Awards.
The film focuses on two children growing up in Kabul who dream of becoming Buzkashi riders, horsemen who compete in the dangerous Afghan national sport similar to polo in which riders try to carry a headless goat across a goal line.
The film garnered U.S. director Sam French an Oscar nomination for Best Live Action Short Film. Its producers launched the Internet campaign to bring the film's 14-year old stars to attend the awards because they said they lacked a travel budget.
Mohammadi could hardly contain his enthusiasm after landing at Los Angeles airport on February 20.
"I am so excited and so happy,” he said, adding that “lots of pictures” would be taken.
A Life-Changing Event
Mohammadi, an amateur actor with piercing green eyes, gained international attention following the film's release last year for his personal story as a fatherless youth who grew up selling maps of Kabul to tourists in its Chicken Street market.
One of the boys in the film is a street kid like Mohammadi, the other the son of a blacksmith forced to spend long hours in his father's dark workshop sharpening ax heads.
According to Mohammadi, the film has altered his life.
"It has changed a lot,” he says. On Chicken Street lots of people recognize me, and also lots of people take pictures with me and they encourage me a lot."
Paiz maintains that he has forged a real-life friendship with Mohammadi since the film was made.
"We became really good friends on the set, helping each other out,” he says. “And we have managed to maintain a relationship since the movie was filmed. We're really happy we stayed friends. We plan to continue our friendship."
Both teens said they wanted to see all the actors during their week in Hollywood in which they also plan to visit Disneyland and Universal Studios.
Mohammadi hopes to see Sylvester Stallone and Paiz wants to meet Al Pacino.
‘A Huge Step Forward’
French, the director, suggests that the goal is to make the weeklong trip culturally relevant for the teens.
"Well I just think, just the fact that we're talking about something other than the war, other than bombs and bullets, I think is a huge step forward,” he says. “And hopefully we can show that these kids are like normal kids everywhere and that is huge. And that's what we want to try to do with Buzkashi Boys is to show that, you know, kids here are no different than kids there, and people are no different. And if that comes across in any way, that would be great."
French and other "Buzkashi Boys" producers raised funds in an Internet campaign to pay for Mohammadi's and Paiz's journey from the Afghan capital Kabul.
Some 237 people donated money to the travel fund, which raised $11,751, eclipsing its $10,000 goal, according to the fundraising website rally.org. Donations were received from 13 countries, including the United States, Afghanistan, India, and Germany. Turkish Airlines donated the tickets for Mohammadi, Paiz, as well as a chaperone.
Mohammadi and Paiz will fly to Washington, D.C., for screenings of the film on February 27 and begin their journey back to Kabul on March 1.
"Buzkashi Boys," which runs for just 28 minutes, is the first film to be produced by the Afghan Film Project, a nonprofit group that aims to train filmmakers in Afghanistan.
Based on a Reuters report
State Department Has a Horse in Oscar Race
Government Project Supplied Funding for 'Buzkashi Boys,' First Movie Shot in Afghanistan to Get an Academy Nomination
Wall Street Journal By DION NISSENBAUM February 20, 2013
WASHINGTON - American director Sam French helped make history this year when his film "Buzkashi Boys" became the first movie shot in Afghanistan to receive an Oscar nomination.
But the 29-minute film holds another unusual distinction: It was funded almost entirely out of a $150 million State Department campaign to combat extremism, support Afghan media and burnish the U.S. image in Afghanistan.
As part of the public-diplomacy project, the U.S. Embassy in Kabul gave Mr. French and his Afghan Film Project more than $220,000 in 2010 to make "Buzkashi Boys" and use the production to train aspiring Afghan filmmakers.
The embassy campaign sought to counter anti-American sentiment and nurture sympathetic Afghan partners at a time when President Barack Obama was dispatching 30,000 extra American forces to the country.
David Ensor, the head of Voice of America who oversaw the embassy's public-diplomacy fund at the time, said it was a use of "soft power."
"I was in the hope business, and we were making investments in Afghanistan and its people that were designed to make life better and create a perception of change in the right direction," he said.
"Buzkashi Boys" isn't the only government-funded film nominated for an Oscar this year. "Five Broken Cameras," a documentary about Palestinian activists challenging the Israeli military, relied on funding from the Israeli and Canadian governments, and has received criticism from Israelis.
U.S. government funding for Oscar-nominated films is unusual, although an Academy spokeswoman said rules don't restrict eligibility based on funding.
From 2010 to 2012, Mr. Ensor and other embassy officials handed out more than 550 grants to an eclectic group of projects. They financed private Afghan television programs like "Eagle Four," a show about the Afghan police force; organized conferences with moderate Islamic leaders; and financed radio programs to combat Islamic extremism.
But the State Department had difficulty filling positions at the embassy in Kabul as money surged into Afghanistan, creating a shortage in staff able to oversee the sharp increase in projects.
Recipients of the funds said some people took advantage of spotty oversight. "I think the embassy grants managers were so overwhelmed that very few of them were effective, so a lot of money was misspent or poorly tracked," said one recipient.
Such concerns were echoed last summer in an audit by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, which reviewed 20 of the largest recipients. Auditors concluded the embassy was short of staff and lacked documents to show that recipients weren't overcharging the U.S. government.
As problems emerged, embassy officials worked to shut down ineffective programs and establish more oversight to ensure money wasn't misspent.
"When you're trying to do things quickly in a conflict zone, some things will work well while others may not," said Mr. Ensor.
One of the smaller embassy grants went to Mr. French, 36 years old, and Ariel Nasr, a 34-year-old Afghan-Canadian filmmaker, who wanted to make a short film built around Afghanistan's national sport: Buzkashi.
The film—which secured a nomination for best-live action short film—focuses on two poor Afghan boys who fantasize about becoming national heroes by playing the polo-like sport featuring riders on horseback who drag a calf carcass around a field.
"We are writing a different narrative about Afghanistan and raising awareness about another side of the story you don't see on the news," said Mr. French.
Mr. French and Mr. Nasr pulled together a small international team to work with a group from Afghanistan, including 12-year-old Fawad Mohammadi, one of the film's two young stars who was making money for his family selling maps on the streets of Kabul.
The project hired 12 Afghans who shadowed Mr. French, Mr. Nasr and other Westerners on the project. The experience has helped the Afghan trainees gain the experience to pursue their own work in television and film, said Mr. Nasr.
Even with U.S. funding, the filmmakers had to raise $25,000 on Kickstarter, the fundraising website, to complete the film. They also raised funds to bring their two stars to Los Angeles for the Oscars this Sunday, and continue to raise money for Mr. Mohammadi's college fund. "We want to give back whatever we can," said Mr. French. —Ben Fritz contributed to this article.
Corrections & Amplifications An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of the film.
Write to Dion Nissenbaum at dion.nissenbaum@wsj.com
NATO may hold mid-2013 summit to mark Afghan handover
Reuters By Adrian Croft February 20, 2013
BRUSSELS - NATO is considering holding a summit in mid-2013 to mark a milestone in the handover of security responsibilities in Afghanistan to local forces, alliance Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said on Wednesday.
NATO-led forces are expected to cede the lead role for security in Afghanistan this spring to Afghan soldiers, 12 years after the United States invaded Afghanistan to oust the Taliban government harboring Osama bin Laden, the al Qaeda leader who masterminded the September 11 attacks on U.S. cities. "No decision has been made but it is an idea that is being considered," Rasmussen told Reuters in an interview, when asked about the possibility of a June summit.
"A summit in mid-2013 could be a good idea to mark the milestone in Afghanistan, the fact that we will have handed over lead responsibility to the Afghans all over Afghanistan," he said.
NATO diplomats say there is talk of organizing a one-day summit in Brussels, possibly around the time that U.S. President Barack Obama travels to Northern Ireland for the G8 summit in June, but say no decision has been taken.
Obama announced last week that 34,000 troops, about half the U.S. force in Afghanistan, would withdraw by early 2014, bringing the United States close to wrapping up the costly, unpopular war.
The international force plans to hand over full responsibility for security to the Afghans by the end of 2014, with most international combat forces being withdrawn, leaving a smaller mission to train Afghan soldiers.
Rasmussen said a mid-year summit could also be an opportunity for NATO allies to discuss military capabilities and defense investment, hit in many countries by budget cuts, and to take decisions on the NATO-led training mission planned for Afghanistan after 2014.
Former U.S. President George W. Bush, who ordered the U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan in 2001, came to Brussels for NATO meetings in June 2001 and again in February 2005. NATO leaders last met in Chicago in May last year.
TROOP NUMBERS
Rasmussen, speaking on the eve of a NATO defense ministers' meeting, also said Afghan security force numbers could be kept at a higher level for longer than expected.
Under current plans, the United States and its NATO allies will help build up the Afghan armed forces to 352,000 personnel, a number they are approaching, but the size of the force - which the allies will continue to fund - will be trimmed to 230,000 after 2015.
U.S. General Lloyd Austin, nominated to lead the U.S. military's Central Command which includes Afghanistan, last week backed keeping Afghan forces at peak strength.
Rasmussen said no final decision had been made as to how long Afghan security forces will remain at the high level.
"It may well be that the higher level will be kept for a longer time than previously expected. That will ... very much depend on the security situation on the ground," he said.
Rasmussen said he regretted that U.S. Marine General John Allen would not now become NATO's next supreme commander after he announced his retirement on Tuesday.
Allen, who led NATO forces in Afghanistan and was caught up but later cleared in the scandal that forced CIA chief David Petraeus to resign, cited his wife's health as the reason for his decision to forego his nomination to the NATO job.
"He could have done a great job as Supreme Allied Commander Europe but ... I also fully respect his decision," Rasmussen said.
(Editing by Michael Roddy)
Interview: History Shows You Invade Afghanistan At Your Peril
February 20, 2013 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
A new book, "Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan 1839-1842," draws on Afghanistan's violent history to provide lessons for its future.
RFE/RL correspondent Abubakar Siddique spoke with the book's author, Scottish historian William Dalrymple.
RFE/RL: Can you tell us about your recently published book, "Return of a King"?
William Dalrymple: "The Return of a King" is about the first British assault on Afghanistan. In 1839, 18,000 East India Company and British troops marched through the Bolan and Khojak passes and conquered Afghanistan and [placed] on the throne Shah Shuja-ul Mulk, the grandson of Ahmad Shah Durrani -- the first ruler of the first Afghan Empire -- and threw out Dost Mohammad Khan, who the British were worried was flirting with tsarist Russia.
RFE/RL: What essentially is the story of the First Anglo-Afghan War -- how did it start, what were its main events, and who won in the end?
Dalrymple: The story in a nutshell is that 18,000 troops march into Afghanistan. They install the puppet king, Shah Shuja, on the throne. An insurgency breaks out a year and a half later, and the British are catastrophically defeated. They are completely unprepared for the insurgency which breaks out. They are quickly surrounded. Their two leaders are killed. They surrender and they are promised safe passage back to India. In that retreat, 18,000 men, women, and children march out of the Kabul cantonment. Only one single survivor makes it through to the Jalalabad cantonment, Dr. [William] Brydon.
RFE/RL: How do the Afghans remember the First Anglo-Afghan War?
Dalrymple: Well, for the Afghans, this is a great national liberation struggle. What the Battle of Britain or Waterloo or Trafalgar is to the British or what the Easter Rising is to the Irish or what Gandhi and the freedom struggle is to the Indians, this is to the Afghans. This is their great supreme triumph because they take on the British at the very peak of the British [Empire]. And for the Afghans it is a miraculous [event] and to this day the diplomatic area in Kabul is called Wazir Akbar Khan after the main Barakzai leader [of the uprising against the British].
RFE/RL: What is your take on modern perceptions of Afghanistan after researching a war that took place 160 years ago?
Dalrymple: Just like a modern ignorant Fox News commentator in Afghanistan thinks that anyone who resists the Americans is a Taliban, thinks that he is a bigot or a fanatic, so the British at this period are apt to just see masses of bearded Afghans fighting them and assume that they are all religious fanatics.
But the Afghan sources allow you to go beyond that and allow you to understand individual motives, individual reasons, for taking up arms. And like a good reporter today who can give complexity to anything that happens, a good journalist working in Afghanistan today will be able to explain the motivations of every side.
RFE/RL: How relevant are the lessons of the First Anglo-Afghan War to the situation today?
Dalrymple: Well the most obvious lesson is that you will occupy and invade Afghanistan at your peril. It famously is a place which defends its independence very resolutely. It is also a place which is very expensive to occupy, and I think this is an underrated factor.
Everyone knows that the Afghans are fierce fighters. I think few people have taken in that each successive occupation of Afghanistan is undone ultimately by the cost. It's not that the Afghans can't be defeated -- they can be if you throw enough military might and money at it. But to do so you have to throw in thousands of troops. You have to garrison every valley. You have to supply the troops in every remote valley that you have a garrison there.
It's an expensive business. It broke the back of the East India Company. It breaks the back of the Soviets in 1970s and 1980s; their economy was wrecked by their invasion of Afghanistan. And finally, it has broken the back of the American balance of payments. Americans have lost a fortune in Afghanistan for very little gain.
RFE/RL: How relevant are the lessons of the First Anglo-Afghan War for Afghanistan's future, as another great power prepares to leave the country?
Dalrymple: One thing to state clearly is that Afghanistan is a difficult place to rule -- for anyone to rule. There are many different [ethnic] groups. The geography does not lend itself to centralized government based on one place. And there have been very few periods in history when Afghanistan has been successfully centralized and ruled from a strong center. In general, Afghanistan has been fractured, decentralized, and, as the Pashtun saying goes, "Every Afghan is a khan" -- is a king.
I think the most likely outcome of the next few years is again a period of decentralization -- when Kabul will [cease] to be as central to the affairs of Afghans on the periphery as it is today. And I fear we are in for another period of bloodshed and decentralization. And possibly warlordism again. I don't think many people are very optimistic about the future.
Balkanization of Afghanistan beckons
Asia Times By Derek Henry Flood Feb 20, '13
In his February 12 State of the Union address, President Barack Obama outlined the beginning of the end of American participation in Afghanistan's now decades long civil war. The US would endure a phased troop withdrawal meant to halve the presence of American soldiers within a year's time, reducing the present force of approximately 66,000 by 34,000.
The remainder are then theoretically going to make a rather hasty retreat between October 2014 and the start of 2015 with a possible residual force of several thousand soldiers staying on in a training and support capacity.
The precise number of troops, if there are to be any at all, will depend on the outcome of negotiations between Washington and Kabul. Obama did not provide any spoiler alerts in his annual speech most likely because timetables and logistics with America's Afghan counterparts simply have yet to be hammered out.
The message, however, was very clear: whether Afghanistan is ready or not, America's oversized military boot print in that country is already dissipating.
On February 10, a transfer of command took place in Kabul for the American-led NATO International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) troops waging a years-long fraught counterinsurgency campaign.
Marine General Joseph Dunford took over from his predecessor General John Allen. Allen, still nominated for the top NATO post of Supreme Allied Commander in Europe (SACEUR), played a tangential part in a petty sex scandal that felled the career of now former CIA Director David Petraeus last fall.
Though the Obama administration has yet to formally withdraw Allen's SACEUR nomination publicly, though Allen himself has opted out from the nomination process to avoid undue speculation regarding his role, however minimal, in the scandal that brought down his comrade Petraeus.
An ever quixotic President Karzai refused to dignify the locked down handover ceremony with his presence despite a recent pledge to continue efforts to wind down the war by negotiating a vaguely outlined peace accord with the Afghan Taliban. The Presidential Palace dispatched the Afghan defense minister and national security chief in lieu of his eminence.
During General Dunford's first full day on duty, the United States military began experimentally shipping a small quantity of voluminous metal containers stocked with war materiel through the contentious border gate at Torkham, signaling that the United States was beginning its drawdown under the stewardship of a man who Washington somewhat optimistically states will be its last major theater commander in Kabul.
The equipment will eventually make the long trek to Karachi's port facilities on the Arabian Sea from where it can be shipped onward to return to American military supply depots.
Though Afghanistan borders a total of six countries, in the eyes of the major Western players in the Afghan war, Pakistan is the sole meaningful border state. Sharing the 2,640-kilometer-long Durand Line (the de facto border), with its deep ties to the Taliban, Pakistan is deemed the state whose cooperation and influence is indispensable to ease the much-desired exit of virtually all NATO troops by the end of 2014.
Without access to the Pakistani trucking network's perilous land routes leading down to Karachi, NATO is forced to rely on the much more costly, incredibly laborious Northern Distribution Network (NDN) in order to send the equipment as far away as cold-water ports on the Baltic Sea.
After the deaths of 24 Pakistani soldiers in a coalition strike in November 2011, Islamabad enacted a seven month long blockade of NATO gear transiting Pakistani territory.
This tragic incident gave NATO logisticians planning their withdrawal pause for thought with their temporary total reliance on the NDN in the face of Pakistani anger. Pakistani drivers may face death at the hands of the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and NATO vehicles may be destroyed in the process, but the Pakistani transit corridor is simply considered far more efficient by the West.
The withdrawal of the Americans en masse from Afghanistan coincides with the end of President Hamid Kazai's wobbly reign over the country since he was installed as interim ruler in December 2001 and then elected twice in a series of terribly flawed electoral processes in 2004 and 2009.
Karzai has vowed to step down as Afghanistan's sole post-Taliban head of state but thus far he has no clear successor. The next presidential ballot is slated for April 2014 but prominent Afghan leaders are already maneuvering. Afghanistan appears to be at the edge of a cliff. Washington and its ISAF partners have been focused on the readiness of the Afghan National Army (ANA) and limiting the notorious corruption plaguing the Afghan National Police (ANP).
The question that must be asked at this time though is whether the men in these organizations can and will remain loyal to a centralized state in Kabul if it appears Afghanistan is reverting to its pre-9/11 self.
The wishful metrics of progress for Afghan security forces may be of little utility if powerful regional leaders begin openly reasserting themselves should the Taliban come back into measurable power in Nimruz, Helmand, Kandahar, Zabul, Paktia, Paktika, Khost, Nangarhar provinces.
If Taliban fighters then begin moving into vulnerable provinces like Herat, encircling the heavily Shi'ite Hazarajat region and applying military pressure in contested areas of northern Afghanistan's southern tier, as they did in the 1990s, Afghanistan will either Balkanize itself into distinct warlord-led enclaves or enter into civil war without the advantage of Western air support.
It was stipulated in the Bonn Agreement of December 2001 that Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR) initiatives would do away with the warlord armies while bringing former combatants into interim security forces which would later become the ANA and ANP. Whether Afghanistan will see a total unraveling of DDR efforts after 2014 will depend on whether the overly centralized government in Kabul can maintain a degree of control over the regions enmeshed with a high degree of warlord culture.
When United States forces began attacking Taliban and al-Qaeda positions in October 2001, the Americans - and later NATO - were essentially entering in an alliance with the losing side in a civil war. With a mix of overwhelming air power, suitcases full of cash handed over to anti-Taliban commanders popularly referred to as "warlords" in the press, and American Special Forces assisting ethnic-Tajik and Uzbek militias, the US reversed years of Taliban hard won military gains over the course of that fateful autumn.
Despite the George W Bush administration's stated desire to put an end to the "cruise missile diplomacy" emblematic of the Clinton era, there were very few American "boots on the ground" during the volatile weeks that the Taliban regime crumbled and melted away. The first Americans in Afghanistan were intelligence officers liaising with local Afghan strongmen hostile to the Taliban followed by small numbers of elite Special Forces detachments.
Central Intelligence Agency officers were helping to reinvigorate the stagnant fiefdoms of anti-Taliban military leaders while small detachments of the US Army's 5th Special Forces Group Operational Detachment Alpha units (ODA) operating out of Uzbekistan's Karshi-Khanabad airbase were quietly inserted by the dozen under the cover of darkness to assist northern Afghan power brokers eager to reclaim territory lost to the Taliban in previous retreats or defeats.
Groupings such as ODA 595 and 525 famously fought alongside General Abdul Rashid Dostum's Junbesh-i-Milli fighters and the mostly ethnic-Tajik forces under the command of Mohammed Atta Noor from Jamiat-i-Islami to eject the Taliban from Mazar-i-Sharif and other key northern cities facing Central Asia's soft underbelly.
The wrinkle in this strategy was that Langley and the Pentagon were partnering with men who were not only enemies of the Taliban but loathed by Pakistan's military and intelligence establishment.
This initial pairing of American Special Forces with Dostum, Atta, Mohaqiq, and others was deeply problematic from the start not only because of the less than stellar human rights record attributed to indigenous commanders documented by groups like Human Rights Watch dating back to the internecine fighting of the 1990s but because these men were sworn enemies of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate in headquartered in Islamabad's Aabpara area.
Northern warlords - each with their own unique set of interests backed by constellation of patrons - relied on ties with states like Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Iran, India, Turkey, and Russia for diplomatic succor (semi-hermetic Turkmenistan officially maintains a policy of "neutrality" in the region), refuge, and backing.
This put the individual leaders of the former United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan, known as the United Front for short, in a differing political and economic realm than the bulk of their Pashtun countrymen in the south and east in Pakistan's historic zone of influence.
The heavily personality driven parties of the country's north, northeast, west and center, with their often bellicose view of the Taliban, may greatly complicate both Pakistan's and the United States' schemes for a bloodless transition to a post-NATO, post-Karzai Afghanistan.
This contentious history put the legacy leaders of the United Front - long referred to in press accounts somewhat inarticulately as the "Northern Alliance" - in direct confrontation with Islamabad's interests on the Afghan battlefield. From late 2001 until now, the United States has tried to strike an impossible balance between the quarrelsome ethnic interest groups inside Afghanistan and its inherently frustrating alliance with the Pakistani security state and Islamabad's often wildly divergent localized regional strategic objectives.
It was ascribed to the point of cliche that regularly cited the need for a friendly regime in Afghanistan in order to provide the Pakistani state with "strategic depth" in its geopolitical struggle with India that centered on ownership of Kashmir dating back to the partition of the British Raj in 1947.
Pakistan's ambassador to the US, Sherry Rehman, insisted in mid-summer 2012 that Islamabad was already moving away from its failed strategic depth policy vis-a-vis Afghanistan.
Rehman's comments were immediately backed up by the US Ambassador to Pakistan Richard Olson, who cited Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar's apparent willingness to abandon Pakistan's strategic depth doctrine. Pakistani daily Dawn reported last March FM Khar stating that Pakistan was firmly abandoning its legacy Afghanistan policy which she referred to as "historical baggage" that represented a "hangover " from an earlier era that was no longer relevant.
While Pakistan's Taliban policy in Afghanistan caused Delhi to fret, outright frightened the authoritarian regimes in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan who feared for the creeping radicalization of their fragile societies, as well as nearly bringing Tehran to the brink of war with Islamabad's proxies after the execution of Iranian diplomats in Mazar-i-Sharif in 1998, Islamabad's fostering of the Afghan Taliban did the most damage within Pakistan.
For the Taliban are not merely an autochthonous Afghan movement, but one raised and shaped by activist Pakistani military officials influential during Benazir Bhutto's second prime ministership in the 1990s.
Rather than the Taliban becoming the jurists of an efficient client state, its pathetic governing period in Afghanistan led to increased destabilization deeply affecting Pakistan for years to come. The sponsoring of Mullah Omar's regime ultimately resulted in drawing in the 100,000 ISAF troops currently present on Afghan soil - an anathema to many Afghans - and the Talibanization of vulnerable sectors of Pakistani society.
The rise of the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) in 2007 has had severe consequences for Pakistan's entrenched political order. From the assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto in late 2007 to the tacit though denied complicity of ever increasing, deadly drone warfare in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), the physical destruction of the old militant nexus in Afghanistan has only metastasized militancy at the juncture of South and Central Asia over the long term.
Along with the troubles created by the TTP in the FATA and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province more broadly, Pakistanis - the Hazara minority in Balochistan in particular - are suffering increasingly under the savagery of virulently anti-Shi'ite groups like Lashkar-i-Jhangvi, Sipah-i-Sahaba Pakistan and Jaish-i-Muhammed, now known collectively as the "Punjabi Taliban".
On January 14, the state-run Qatar News Agency disseminated a statement from the Qatari Foreign Ministry that it was officially sanctioning the opening of some kind of liaison office for the Afghan Taliban at the behest of the White House and Kabul. The Peninsula, a Qatari English-language daily, categorizes the Taliban vaguely as a "movement" rather than the Pentagon and NATO preferred term of an "insurgency". Labeling the Taliban as a movement implies the grouping had concrete, terrestrial political goals unlike the al-Qaeda men it once harbored from 1996-2001.
The United States is eager to finally evolve from a poorly framed policy goal made by George W Bush on the evening of September 11, 2001 that told a global audience: "We will make no distinction between those who committed these acts and those who harbor them."
Thus well before American jets dropped their first ordinance on Afghan soil on October 7, 2001, the Bush administration conflated the Taliban which sought international recognition as Afghanistan's legitimate rulers with the transnational al-Qaeda whose aim was to sow terror among apostate government both near and far.
In fact the mostly provincial Afghan Taliban's initial aims were quite narrow. Under the leadership of a village preacher from rural Uruzgan Province called Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban was largely focused on consolidating its rule inside Afghanistan by defeating its domestic opponents in central and northern Afghanistan.
While in the process of imposing its parochial worldview among ordinary Afghans regardless of their sectarian or ethnic identities, Omar's group played host to an array of Sunni movements from across the Muslim world.
From the amorphous al-Qaeda to those with far less grandiose goals that involved the creation of separatist Muslim-majority homelands such as the Caucasian rebels from the "Chechen Republic of Ichkeria" or the forlorn Uighur militants from China's Xinjiang Province who desired to political secession from the Russian Federation and China respectively.
Though the Taliban harbored al-Qaeda during this period as it did many other radical Sunni movements, the two groups did not in fact share a common Islamist ideology.
The Taliban are a historically Deobandi movement under Islam's Hanafi school of jurisprudence whose ideations originate in the Daurl Uloom madrassa in what is today the state of Uttar Pradesh, India. The Arabs that dominated the political Islam espoused by al-Qaeda were Salafi-jihadi adherents of the Hanbali school of Islamic jurisprudence.
The Deobandi Hanafism of the Taliban with its ingrained Central and South Asian Islamic socio-cultural currents was traditionally at odds with the even more literalist Hanbalism of the Saudi and Egyptian Salafis who have always been at the upper echelon of al-Qaeda's thought cycles.
None of this is to say the two outfits certainly did not make common cause, particularly when facing external challengers such northern Afghan war-fighting groups or the foreign intervention forces suddenly present following 9/11. Though the two very different outfits at times maintained a sometimes mutually beneficial relationship, the working alliance between Mullah Omar's tin pot emirate and the stateless al-Qaeda leadership it hosted was laden with serious ideological and strategic disagreements.
Beyond this, there were schisms within al-Qaeda itself regarding the Taliban's merits in relation its deeply flawed implementation of Islamic law in Afghanistan. Bin Laden was considered by many to in fact be a fairly minor, though notable for his pedigree, player in the anti-Soviet jihad of the 1980s.
But with the attacks he ordered on the American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania on August 7, 1998, his presence and notoriety had begun to overshadow Mullah Omar outside Afghanistan. Bin Laden's fame heightened rapidly in neighboring Pakistan in particular when President Bill Clinton clumsily responded to the atrocities in East Africa with a barrage of Tomahawk missiles two weeks later on militant training camps in Khost Province in southeastern Afghanistan.
Bin Laden's relaxed defiance of the American military juggernaut gave him the air of a folk hero among supporters in Peshawar or sympathetic enlisted men in the Pakistani army but it greatly chafed the Taliban's shura council who were not appreciative of the kind of explosive attention al-Qaeda's activities outside Afghanistan were bringing to their desperately impoverished, agrarian nation.
The sort of comparatively abstract millenarian terrorism abroad espoused by bin Laden did not sync with the Taliban's attempts at nascent state re-formation in Kabul.
The Taliban were keenly interested in creating an Islamic state that had its rightful place among the internationally recognized community of nation-states.
To this end, the Taliban sought recognition as Afghanistan's rightful leaders at the UN headquarters in New York. Al-Qaeda was not interested in issues of statehood. Bin Laden's modus vivendi with the Taliban of the 1990s occurred partly to Afghanistan's pre-existing isolation after it was utterly abandoned by outside powers following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
While only their patrons in Islamabad, Abu Dhabi and Riyadh provided them with such diplomatic credentials, the Taliban desired political acceptance by the wider world. They continued to prosecute their war against the Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras of the north until they had pushed them back into a slice of Takhar Province and Badakhshan Province bordering Tajikistan.
The rump government of the late president Burhanuddin Rabbani - which still held Afghanistan's seat at the UN - maintained an internally exiled government in the Badakhshani capital of Faizabad.
Mullah Omar had the very earthly goal of destroying or coopting what remained of these ethnic war-fighting groups in order to wrest control of every square kilometer of Afghanistan from Rabbani's faction once and for all. The Taliban created facts on the ground as they battled fighters allied to Rabbani led by Ahmad Shah Massoud and other northern commanders harder and further into a remote corner of Afghanistan with little strategic relevance.
Now several of the state actors that seek to steer Afghanistan toward a quasi-peaceful post-NATO-era settlement suddenly view the Taliban as a legitimate negotiating partner. David Cameron recently hosted Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistan's President Asif Ali Zardari, at Chequers, the British prime minister's sprawling country estate northwest of London.
The transparent episode appeared borne out of desperate pragmatism from the NATO side of the aisle. In response to the talk of talks, Zabiullah Mujahid, the lugubrious Taliban spokesman, dismissed the premise as a political farce.
Mujahid told the Associated Press: "There is no change in the policy of the Islamic Emirate of not talking to the Karzai governmentthe Karzai regime is powerless and installed by others. Real parties to the conflict are those who have committed aggression."
Karzai and Zardari pledged to conclude a peace deal between Kabul and the Taliban within an astonishingly brief six-month period. Considering the existing mutual distrust between Islamabad and Kabul, the factionalization of the Taliban over the last decade, and the fact that since first proposed in January 2012, the Taliban's Doha office has yet to really materialize.
President Karzai's High Peace Council has borne little or no tangible fruit thus far. The brazen assassination by the Taliban of the former Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani in his role of head of Karzai's appointed council in September 2011 eroded the idea of the so-called "moderate Taliban" in the eyes of skeptics. Amrullah Saleh, the former head of the National Directorate of Security and outspoken Karzai critic, told the BBC's Hardtalk that the notion of Taliban members who had genuinely moderated their views or reformed their ideology was "an invention."
All considered, these factors add up to the notion of a peace deal by summer of this year as an unrealistic, herculean task. The High Peace Council is now led by Salahuddin Rabbani, the slain former president's son.
For its part, Qatar is meant to serve as a neutral space where the concerned parties can come to at least an ad hoc agreement. In many parts of the world, however, tiny Qatar's intentions are met with outright suspicion. Qatari officials operated alongside Libyan rebels during the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi, have been active in arming insurgent groups in Syria's bloody revolution turned civil war, and have been the subject of unsubstantiated reports of assisting Salafi-jihadis following the short-lived Islamist takeover of northern Mali.
Though no robed Qatari official appeared alongside the pro-peace troika of Karzai, Zardari and Cameron, the small Emirate is no stranger to hosting rogue Islamists of varying stripes. In the 1990s, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was out of the reach of American authorities while he quietly worked as an engineer at Qatar's Ministry of Electricity and Water.
On the small, lightly populated peninsula jutting forth from Saudi Arabia into the Persian Gulf, it is highly unlikely that Mohammed or other known al-Qaeda operatives were existing without both the knowledge and cooperation of government authorities such as Qatar's, then Minister of Islamic Affairs, Sheik Abdullah bin Khalid al-Thani on whose farm Mohammed was thought to have lived before fleeing to Pakistan in advance of a US dragnet. Al-Thani, currently interior minister would not likely object to the Taliban operating openly in the emirate.
So while Kabul, Islamabad, London, Washington and apparently Doha are myopically pushing for a settlement with the Afghan Taliban, the various other non-state groups are barely mentioned if at all as if the Taliban were the sole perpetrator of anti-state violence, presently or potentially.
Outlier Pashtun warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, believed to be sheltering in Pakistan, still commands a potent insurgent movement called Hezb-i-Islami Afghanistan that is not under the Taliban umbrella and which is opposed to the Afghan central government. Unlike the Taliban, HIG maintains a legal, tangible political office in Kabul and views itself as a hardline Islamist political party undergirded with strains of Pashtun nationalism.
The Haqqani Network, a familial cross-border hybrid criminal-insurgent group allied to the Taliban but autonomous in nature, has barley been mentioned in big-think public pronouncements about the possibility of creating a lasting peace in Afghanistan.
And then there are the previously mentioned war-fighting organizations whose allegiances lay primarily along ethnic and sectarian lines. Groups such as Jamiat-i-Islami, Junbesh-i-Milli, and Hezb-i-Wahdat can easily be reactivated in the event of a major Taliban resurgence in Afghanistan. The leaders of these groups have stores of weapons, cash, and bitter memories from a time when there were no Westerners present in their beleaguered Afghanistan.
It is not difficult then for them to posit darker future scenarios where identity-based warfare will return in the event of a full-scale collapse of the central government in Kabul which has an unhealthy dependency on wealthy donor nations dating back to the Bonn Agreement.
Though independent minded Afghans of all stripes have no desire for any form renewed Pakistani hegemony over Afghanistan, it is the recalcitrant northern-based leaders who fought so bitterly in the late 1990s, that feel their factions have the most to lose.
When the Taliban swiftly rose to power from Kandahar to Kabul from 1994-1996, ruling Afghanistan's Pashtun belt hugging the Pakistan border was insufficient. Mullah Omar's commanders envisioned themselves as the whole of the country's rightful, righteous rulers.
The minority ethnic factions originating in the anti-Soviet jihad may not want to but are prepared to retreat into their pre-Karzai era selves if push comes to shove.
In this context, having Pakistan and Qatar broker a settlement which reintegrates the Taliban into Kabul's spare ministry buildings or in the future formally cedes it territory in Pashtun-majority provinces in the south and east to the exclusion of all the other surrounding players in Eurasia may result in a future Afghanistan that resembles elements of the country's unfortunate past.
Derek Henry Flood is a freelance journalist focusing on the Africa, the Middle East and South and Central Asia. He has covered many of the world's conflicts-both major and minor-since 9/11 as a frontline reporter. He blogs at the-war-diaries.com. Follow Derek on Twitter @DerekHenryFlood
Mark Jacobson: The Karzai we need
By Mark Jacobson, Special to CNN February 20th, 2013
EDITOR'S NOTE: From 2009-2011, Mark R. Jacobson (Twitter: @markondefense) served as the Deputy NATO Senior Civilian Representative in Afghanistan. He is now a Senior Advisor to the Truman National Security Project and a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund.
Some senior diplomats have called Afghan President Hamid Karzai the most difficult leader the United States has dealt with in modern times. In fairness, Afghanistan itself may be one of the most complex and unforgiving political environments any leader can ever have to deal with.
And deal with him they must. Since 2010 when, at a NATO summit in Lisbon, Portugal, Karzai expressed the collective wish of the Afghan people for self-reliance, the United States and our allies have been moving toward Afghanistan, taking the lead on security. Both sides understood that this transition was neither going to be easy - nor completed - without disagreements about approach.
Karzai sensibly said that the "maturity" of the NATO-Afghan partnership would provide for the discussion of these anticipated difficult issues, such as detentions, civilian casualties and corruption, and that there was a premium on the need to resolve these disputes "in a spirit of collaboration and teamwork."
Unfortunately, he has continued to remain less committed to that spirit of collaboration and partnership. As a result, the international effort in support of the Afghan people may be weakening.
The planned and deliberate withdrawal of U.S. and International Security Assistance Force troops is in full swing. To his credit, Karzai has taken ownership of the conflict and pushed the international community toward doing less itself and more on increasing efforts to build Afghan capacity.
He has secured "strategic partnerships" with the NATO alliance and bilateral agreements with several nations - including India, Germany and Norway - to help Afghanistan over the long term.
But there is another Karzai: one who makes provocative and sometimes inaccurate statements that call into question the intentions and efforts of the international community. Karzai has unforgivingly attacked NATO over the issue of civilian casualties, and decried international economic and development aid as the sole cause of corruption in Afghanistan. He has claimed that it is the bureaucratic obstinacy of the coalition, and not any internal Afghan deficiencies, that have stunted progress in the fight against the insurgency. This is hardly the language of "cooperation and teamwork."
I witnessed this routine personally, time and time again, during my time as a senior official at ISAF headquarters. Karzai's attacks often follow a similar pattern: a hyperbolic statement, a clarification, and then a slight rollback on the initial position for the international media. Some have said that he is simply playing to his domestic base, particularly southern Pashtuns, who are concerned that Karzai only acts only at the bequest of the international community. This particular approach, whatever the calculus, harms the ability of the international community to maintain its already fragile parliamentary and public support for engagement in Afghanistan.
Karzai's most recent statement - that he will prohibit Afghan troops from calling in ISAF air support under "any circumstances" - reflects this problem. This move followed a joint Afghan-NATO operation, where Afghan forces called in air support that tragically resulted in the deaths of 10 Afghan civilians. Karzai, rather than seeking a "mature" discussion of the issues, acted reflexively and issued a decree barring Afghan forces from asking "for the foreigners' planes for carrying out operations on our homes and villages."
His unfair and irresponsible characterization that "foreigners" are the threat to the Afghan population, and that it is "foreigners" who wage war on Afghan homes, threatens to weaken the coalition that has helped build Afghanistan's capacity to secure its future.
Back in the coalition capitals, the perception is that not only is the international community not wanted, but that our troops, who fight side by side with Afghans, may be prohibited from taking actions to defend themselves. Karzai's statement comes a little over a month after his own chief of staff, Abdul Khurram, told international media that "the world needs us more than we need them."
This is a recipe for failure when populations are already on edge over stories of infiltrator attacks and the Afghan National Security Forces' inability to take over on its own. Nations have remained engaged in Afghanistan despite an ever increasing lack of support by their populations.
Statements like those from the Afghan palace could trigger an end to not just military aid but, in times of severe budget austerity, development assistance as well. In short, this is not the narrative Karzai wants. There are too many in the West who would be all too willing to call his bluff and leave him and the Afghan people on their own.
As difficult as the challenges with the international community may appear to be now, the tests of a reconciliation process will prove equally, if not more, daunting.
Afghanistan needs Karzai the statesman: the Karzai who can work with both the international community and the Afghan people, not just play one against the other. This is Karzai's charge for the final year of his presidency. Failure may mean putting peace much further out of reach of the Afghan people who have already suffered so much for so long.
The Afghan Battle Over A Law To Protect Women
NPR By Sean Carberry February 20, 2013
Afghan President Hamid Karzai issued a decree in 2009 banning violence against women. But the parliament, which is currently on its winter recess, has been unable to pass it and give it permanence as a law.
There's major disagreement on key provisions where Islamic and secular law come into conflict. And activists say the gains made in women's rights since the fall of the Taliban in 2001 are slipping away.
Masooda Karokhi, a female member of parliament, has been pushing to get the proposal through the male-dominated legislature.
Karokhi says it's been a long and difficult battle, and one that Afghanistan's women can't afford to lose. That's why she and some of her colleagues continue to negotiate with religiously conservative members of parliament who oppose the law.
"We have made some changes in the proposed law," she says. "We have increased some punishments, decreased others and made some concessions."
The Afghan Constitution says that all laws must be in compliance with Islamic law, or Sharia. At issue are a range of provisions, such as whether a woman can pursue an education or even leave the house without her husband's permission, and also punishments for men who commit violence against women.
Hossein Balkhi is a member of parliament who says the law is necessary. But, he says, most of the proposed provisions violate Islam and need to be changed. He says Sharia is stricter in many of its punishments than the proposed law.
"In this law, it proposes that if a man commits a sexual assault, he will be sentenced to 16 years jail, while in Islam, that man should be executed," Balkhi says.
However, enforcement of existing laws is inconsistent at best, and very often women who are the victims of sexual assault end up jailed for adultery.
Different Interpretations
One of the more contentious issues is the age of marriage. Balkhi says that the international community is trying to push Western values on marriage. But under Islam, he says, a father decides when his daughter is ready to wed.
That notion doesn't sit well with Shukria Barakzai, the legislator who wrote the constitutional article on women's rights.
Marriage before the age of 16, she says, is a "crime."
Barakzai says the Afghan Supreme Court has ruled that 16 is the minimum age for marriage, and that it shouldn't be a subject of debate.
There are many views about what Islam says about women and their rights, says Enayatullah Balegh, an adviser to the president and a member of Afghanistan's Council of Religious Scholars.
"The interpretation and definition of violence against women is very different from here and the West," he says. He goes on to say that he considers a woman dancing or singing on TV to be "one of the most violent acts against a woman."
Balegh says Sharia already provides clear rules and punishments regarding violence against women, so the proposed law is unnecessary.
"This is a democratic thing being imposed on us," he says.
What makes matters more complicated is that Afghanistan has no clear procedure to evaluate whether proposed laws conform to Sharia.
Balkhi, the legislator, says parliament needs to form a committee of religious scholars to evaluate the provisions of the law and issue a majority decision. Barakzai, who is also a member of parliament, agrees in principle, but worries there are few legitimate Sharia scholars in the legislature.
"If we have religious scholars in the parliament who are interpreting all these religious issues for the benefit of [Afghans], that's different," she says. "Right now, we don't have it."
And that means it's doubtful the legislation will come to a vote anytime soon.
NPR's Aimal Yaqubi contributed to this report.
U.S. troop toll in Afghanistan falls with strategy shift
CNN By Mike Mount February 20th, 2013
For the past month, the U.S. military has experienced something not seen for five years in Afghanistan: No combat deaths.
Three U.S. troops have died from hostile fire injuries since Jan. 1, and one of them succumbed to wounds sustained in December.
The trend marks the longest period without a U.S. combat death in America's longest war since 2008, and clearly reflects a strategy shift that leaves much of the fighting to Afghan security forces, whose deaths are going up.
Afghans now lead more than 80% of combat operations and control areas covering more than three-quarters of the population, according to U.S. military officials.
The U.S. military has pulled back from direct combat operations into the less dangerous role of advising and assisting Afghan forces.
American military officials said a cut in the number of American forces is another reason for the decline.
There were about 100,000 forces in Afghanistan during the peak of the military's troop surge. But that number fell by almost 40 percent when the last of those troops left in September and remains at about that level today.
Attacks by Taliban insurgents also have declined, officials have said.
Just as the U.S. toll has dropped, Afghan security force deaths have risen sharply.
"The Taliban are targeting the Afghan Army and police to try and show the populous the Afghan Security Forces cannot adequately protect them," said Col. David Lapan, spokesman for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
"They are trying to undermine the future of the (Afghan Security Forces)," he said.
Having reached their peak of 352,000 last year, more Afghan security forces will also bring more casualties as well, according to defense officials.
"They really have taken on the bulk of the security responsibility and have been dying in very significant numbers as compared to their U.S. counterparts over the last three months," said Jeffrey Dressler, a senior analyst on Afghanistan with the Washington-based institute for the Study of War.
Last year was the deadliest so far for Afghan forces with more than 3,400 soldiers and police killed, up from 1,950 the previous year, according to a Brookings Institute study.
Some 237 U.S. troops were killed by hostile fire in 2012, down from 351 the previous year, according to Pentagon statistics.
While Afghan security force fatalities are up, a new report by the United Nations on Tuesday shows civilian deaths on the decline.
Civilian deaths in Afghanistan dropped 12% in 2012 - the first time that figure has fallen in six years, according to the U.N. Assistance Mission to Afghanistan (UNAMA).
The report credits the decline to fewer suicide bombings, a drop in aerial attacks and less ground fighting between pro-government and militant forces.
The U.S.-led NATO military force has put strict limits on air strikes by coalition aircraft called in by NATO troops.
Last week, Afghan President Hamid Karzai banned Afghan security forces from calling in allied air strikes after at least 10 civilians were killed during an Afghan-led operation in eastern Kunar province earlier this month.
Afghan Clerics Show Mixed Reaction to Refusal from Pakistani Counterparts
TOLOnews.com By Haseeb Maudoodi Wednesday, 20 February 2013
Afghanistan's Ulema Council has shown mixed reaction to their Pakistani counterparts' refusal to attend a joint summit, with some Afghan clergy blaming Pakistani's Ulema Council for supporting the Afghan Taliban.
Pakistan's council of religious clerics announced Tuesday that they wouldn't be attending a planned ulema summit between the two countries to build support against suicide bombings and facilitate the Afghan peace process.
In an official letter addressed to the Afghan clerics, Mutfi Abu Huraira Mohiuddin, head of the Pakistani Ulema Council, said they are not willing to criticize any of the Afghan Taliban's past activities, nor would they issue a fatwa against them. The Pakistani clerics had previously said that they wanted the Taliban to also attend the conference.
But some Afghan clerics remain hopeful that despite the refusal from Pakistan, the summit can still take place.
"We want the Pakistani ulema not to decide based on emotions. They should come to talk on this big issue. Even if the Taliban do not attend the conference, we should reach to a conclusion in their absence," said Sayed Hussain Alami Balkhi, member of the Afghan Ulema Council.
Other Afghan clerics expressed the determination to continue working toward peace even if their Pakistani counterparts refuse to meet.
"If the Pakistani ulema don't attend the conference, the path to peace will not be closed, and there are others to help us. We will continue our efforts to bring peace in Afghanistan," said Maulawi Shafiullah Shafi Noorestani of the Afghan Ulema Council.
But some Afghan clerics blamed their Pakistani counterparts for having sympathies for the Afghan insurgents.
"The Pakistani ulema still haven't cut their ties with the Taliban, so we must not expect them to issue a fatwa against them [Taliban] because of their own safety.... The Pakistani ulema aren't willing to take any step against the Taliban," Maulawi Abdulhadi Hedayad said.
A global ulema conference was originally planned, but the Afghan Ulema Council decided to convene a joint Afghanistan-Pakistan ulema summit first. This joint conference, which was to be held this Thursday in Kabul, was to focus on Taliban activities, in particular suicide attacks, declaring them haraam, or a sin.
Over 83,000 Afghan refugees repatriated from Pakistan in 2012: UNHCR
Xinhua Feb. 20, 2013
ISLAMABAD - The UN refugee agency (UNHCR) said on Wednesday that over 83,000 Afghan refugees were repatriated from Pakistan in 2012, which is its largest return operation in the world.
Last year's figures saw a 60 percent increase in the numbers of returning compared to 2011 when 52,000 Afghans returned home from Pakistan, the UNHCR said Wednesday.
There are 1.65 million registered Afghans currently living in Pakistan. Since 2002, UNHCR's voluntary repatriation program has assisted more than 3.8 million Afghan refugees to return home.
"UNHCR has supported the Government of Pakistan and provided hundreds of millions of dollars of assistance to refugees hosted on the sovereign territory of Pakistan over the past three decades, " said Neill Wright, UNHCR's Representative in Pakistan.
He added that "continuing the long tradition of hospitality by the people of Pakistan, the government continues to respect the fundamental principle that repatriation must be voluntary and with dignity, and that no refugee will be forced back."
In order to facilitate the returning refugees amid harsh winter conditions, UNHCR enhanced the return package and provided returning families with additional assistance, including free transportation from the Voluntary Repatriation Centres in Pakistan to the Encashment Centres inside Afghanistan, as well as non-food items in November and December 2012.
This assistance package was in addition to the 150 U.S. dollars cash grant ordinarily provided to returning families, a UNHCR statement said.
The Afghan war that started in 1979 displaced millions of people in the aftermath of the violent events, many took refuge in Pakistan, Iran and several other countries.
Jirga to Decide on Kabul-Washington Security Pact
TOLOnews.com By Shakila Abrahimkhil Wednesday, 20 February 2013
The government will consult with a broad cross-section of the country through a jirga to decided whether to ratify the security pact with Washington, the second vice president said Wednesday.
Vice President Khalili added that the jirga is expected to take place sometime in June this year.
"The government refers to the people to decide on some important issues. The signing of the strategic agreement [technically] allows us to sign the security pact, but to strengthen this matter the government wants to consult with the people," Khalili said.
Opposition political parties have strongly opposed the use of jirgas to decide important national matters.
"Often, meetings are held under them name of jirgas. With all due respect to attendees of such jirgas - my point isn't about the people - but according to the law, that's a misuse of jirgas, not an exercise to give people representation," said opposition leader Abdullah Abdullah.
The opposition parties believe Afghanistan faces significant security challenges as Isaf troops withdraw and should therefore prioritize the signing of the pact.
"A jirga means additional talk. The security pact is part of the long-term [strategic] cooperation agreement that was signed between the two countries. The jirga is, in a way, a misuse of the budget," said Astana Shirzad, head of the Afghan National Party.
The issue if legal immunity for US troops is one of the sticking points in the security pact, but some opposition parties are urging the government to ignore the issue. They believe that Afghanistan should follow the example of other countries that host US troops with legal immunity.
Taliban's Shadow District Governor Joins Peace Process
TOLOnews.com Wednesday, 20 February 2013
The Taliban shadow governor for the Dehdadi District of Balkh province and 15 of his fighters have joined the peace process after mediation by tribal elders and the provincial peace council.
Gul khan, the shadow governor, is believed to have trained in Pakistan and worked with insurgent groups in Balkh province for the last four years.
"We are tired of war, so we are joining the peace process. I ask all my disaffected brothers to join the peace process to bring lasting security in our country," Gul Khan said.
The provincial peace council asked the government to help those who join the peace process reintegrate into society.
"The relevant [government] organs should try to create job opportunities for people joining the peace process to prevent them from reverting to the insurgency," Akhtar Muhammad Ibrahimkhil said.
According to the provincial peace council, around 300 insurgents have laid down their weapons in Balkh over the last 18 months.
Tax Collection Key to Financial Self-Sufficiency: Gov't
TOLOnews.com By Zabihullah Jhanmal Wednesday, 20 February 2013
The Ministry of Finance said that broadening the tax net could be an important step toward financial self-sufficiency for Afghanistan, indicating that a large number of taxpayers evade taxes or don't pay taxes on time.
"We are endeavoring to make grounds for more tax payments and encourage taxpayers to pay their taxes on time," said Ahmad Shah Zamanzai, head of the ministry's General Revenues Department.
But a number of individuals and foreign companies, especially some US military contractors, are exempt from taxes. The government is trying to abolish those exemptions to increase tax revenues.
"We are endeavoring to remove these exemptions, as these incomes could increase our revenues. We have [already] made some progress in this regard," Zamanzai said.
The ministry classifies business into three categories of large, medium and small enterprises for tax purposes. There are currently 400 large, 12,000 medium, and 20,000 small companies in Kabul alone.
The tax law has set income tax rates between two to 20 percent, and sales tax rates of two, five, and 10 percent. Income taxes are two percent for salaries between $200 to $250, ten percent for salaries between $250 to $2,000, and 20 percent for salaries over $ 2,000 per month.
According to the Ministry of Finance, the biggest challenges to tax collection are insecurity, a lack of sufficient capacity for tax collection and tax evasion.
Independent analysts also point to other problems such as corruption inside tax offices and bribes by taxpayers to reduce tax payments.
www.afghanistannewscenter.com
February 21, 2013 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
LOS ANGELES, United States -- Thanks to an Internet campaign that raised enough funds to pay for their travel, Afghan actors Fawad Mohammadi and Jawanmard Paiz will walk the red carpet and rub shoulders with Hollywood's brightest stars at the Oscars on February 24.
The teenage stars of the Oscar-nominated short film "Buzkashi Boys" are in California to attend the 85th annual Academy Awards.
The film focuses on two children growing up in Kabul who dream of becoming Buzkashi riders, horsemen who compete in the dangerous Afghan national sport similar to polo in which riders try to carry a headless goat across a goal line.
The film garnered U.S. director Sam French an Oscar nomination for Best Live Action Short Film. Its producers launched the Internet campaign to bring the film's 14-year old stars to attend the awards because they said they lacked a travel budget.
Mohammadi could hardly contain his enthusiasm after landing at Los Angeles airport on February 20.
"I am so excited and so happy,” he said, adding that “lots of pictures” would be taken.
A Life-Changing Event
Mohammadi, an amateur actor with piercing green eyes, gained international attention following the film's release last year for his personal story as a fatherless youth who grew up selling maps of Kabul to tourists in its Chicken Street market.
One of the boys in the film is a street kid like Mohammadi, the other the son of a blacksmith forced to spend long hours in his father's dark workshop sharpening ax heads.
According to Mohammadi, the film has altered his life.
"It has changed a lot,” he says. On Chicken Street lots of people recognize me, and also lots of people take pictures with me and they encourage me a lot."
Paiz maintains that he has forged a real-life friendship with Mohammadi since the film was made.
"We became really good friends on the set, helping each other out,” he says. “And we have managed to maintain a relationship since the movie was filmed. We're really happy we stayed friends. We plan to continue our friendship."
Both teens said they wanted to see all the actors during their week in Hollywood in which they also plan to visit Disneyland and Universal Studios.
Mohammadi hopes to see Sylvester Stallone and Paiz wants to meet Al Pacino.
‘A Huge Step Forward’
French, the director, suggests that the goal is to make the weeklong trip culturally relevant for the teens.
"Well I just think, just the fact that we're talking about something other than the war, other than bombs and bullets, I think is a huge step forward,” he says. “And hopefully we can show that these kids are like normal kids everywhere and that is huge. And that's what we want to try to do with Buzkashi Boys is to show that, you know, kids here are no different than kids there, and people are no different. And if that comes across in any way, that would be great."
French and other "Buzkashi Boys" producers raised funds in an Internet campaign to pay for Mohammadi's and Paiz's journey from the Afghan capital Kabul.
Some 237 people donated money to the travel fund, which raised $11,751, eclipsing its $10,000 goal, according to the fundraising website rally.org. Donations were received from 13 countries, including the United States, Afghanistan, India, and Germany. Turkish Airlines donated the tickets for Mohammadi, Paiz, as well as a chaperone.
Mohammadi and Paiz will fly to Washington, D.C., for screenings of the film on February 27 and begin their journey back to Kabul on March 1.
"Buzkashi Boys," which runs for just 28 minutes, is the first film to be produced by the Afghan Film Project, a nonprofit group that aims to train filmmakers in Afghanistan.
Based on a Reuters report
State Department Has a Horse in Oscar Race
Government Project Supplied Funding for 'Buzkashi Boys,' First Movie Shot in Afghanistan to Get an Academy Nomination
Wall Street Journal By DION NISSENBAUM February 20, 2013
WASHINGTON - American director Sam French helped make history this year when his film "Buzkashi Boys" became the first movie shot in Afghanistan to receive an Oscar nomination.
But the 29-minute film holds another unusual distinction: It was funded almost entirely out of a $150 million State Department campaign to combat extremism, support Afghan media and burnish the U.S. image in Afghanistan.
As part of the public-diplomacy project, the U.S. Embassy in Kabul gave Mr. French and his Afghan Film Project more than $220,000 in 2010 to make "Buzkashi Boys" and use the production to train aspiring Afghan filmmakers.
The embassy campaign sought to counter anti-American sentiment and nurture sympathetic Afghan partners at a time when President Barack Obama was dispatching 30,000 extra American forces to the country.
David Ensor, the head of Voice of America who oversaw the embassy's public-diplomacy fund at the time, said it was a use of "soft power."
"I was in the hope business, and we were making investments in Afghanistan and its people that were designed to make life better and create a perception of change in the right direction," he said.
"Buzkashi Boys" isn't the only government-funded film nominated for an Oscar this year. "Five Broken Cameras," a documentary about Palestinian activists challenging the Israeli military, relied on funding from the Israeli and Canadian governments, and has received criticism from Israelis.
U.S. government funding for Oscar-nominated films is unusual, although an Academy spokeswoman said rules don't restrict eligibility based on funding.
From 2010 to 2012, Mr. Ensor and other embassy officials handed out more than 550 grants to an eclectic group of projects. They financed private Afghan television programs like "Eagle Four," a show about the Afghan police force; organized conferences with moderate Islamic leaders; and financed radio programs to combat Islamic extremism.
But the State Department had difficulty filling positions at the embassy in Kabul as money surged into Afghanistan, creating a shortage in staff able to oversee the sharp increase in projects.
Recipients of the funds said some people took advantage of spotty oversight. "I think the embassy grants managers were so overwhelmed that very few of them were effective, so a lot of money was misspent or poorly tracked," said one recipient.
Such concerns were echoed last summer in an audit by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, which reviewed 20 of the largest recipients. Auditors concluded the embassy was short of staff and lacked documents to show that recipients weren't overcharging the U.S. government.
As problems emerged, embassy officials worked to shut down ineffective programs and establish more oversight to ensure money wasn't misspent.
"When you're trying to do things quickly in a conflict zone, some things will work well while others may not," said Mr. Ensor.
One of the smaller embassy grants went to Mr. French, 36 years old, and Ariel Nasr, a 34-year-old Afghan-Canadian filmmaker, who wanted to make a short film built around Afghanistan's national sport: Buzkashi.
The film—which secured a nomination for best-live action short film—focuses on two poor Afghan boys who fantasize about becoming national heroes by playing the polo-like sport featuring riders on horseback who drag a calf carcass around a field.
"We are writing a different narrative about Afghanistan and raising awareness about another side of the story you don't see on the news," said Mr. French.
Mr. French and Mr. Nasr pulled together a small international team to work with a group from Afghanistan, including 12-year-old Fawad Mohammadi, one of the film's two young stars who was making money for his family selling maps on the streets of Kabul.
The project hired 12 Afghans who shadowed Mr. French, Mr. Nasr and other Westerners on the project. The experience has helped the Afghan trainees gain the experience to pursue their own work in television and film, said Mr. Nasr.
Even with U.S. funding, the filmmakers had to raise $25,000 on Kickstarter, the fundraising website, to complete the film. They also raised funds to bring their two stars to Los Angeles for the Oscars this Sunday, and continue to raise money for Mr. Mohammadi's college fund. "We want to give back whatever we can," said Mr. French. —Ben Fritz contributed to this article.
Corrections & Amplifications An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of the film.
Write to Dion Nissenbaum at dion.nissenbaum@wsj.com
NATO may hold mid-2013 summit to mark Afghan handover
Reuters By Adrian Croft February 20, 2013
BRUSSELS - NATO is considering holding a summit in mid-2013 to mark a milestone in the handover of security responsibilities in Afghanistan to local forces, alliance Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said on Wednesday.
NATO-led forces are expected to cede the lead role for security in Afghanistan this spring to Afghan soldiers, 12 years after the United States invaded Afghanistan to oust the Taliban government harboring Osama bin Laden, the al Qaeda leader who masterminded the September 11 attacks on U.S. cities. "No decision has been made but it is an idea that is being considered," Rasmussen told Reuters in an interview, when asked about the possibility of a June summit.
"A summit in mid-2013 could be a good idea to mark the milestone in Afghanistan, the fact that we will have handed over lead responsibility to the Afghans all over Afghanistan," he said.
NATO diplomats say there is talk of organizing a one-day summit in Brussels, possibly around the time that U.S. President Barack Obama travels to Northern Ireland for the G8 summit in June, but say no decision has been taken.
Obama announced last week that 34,000 troops, about half the U.S. force in Afghanistan, would withdraw by early 2014, bringing the United States close to wrapping up the costly, unpopular war.
The international force plans to hand over full responsibility for security to the Afghans by the end of 2014, with most international combat forces being withdrawn, leaving a smaller mission to train Afghan soldiers.
Rasmussen said a mid-year summit could also be an opportunity for NATO allies to discuss military capabilities and defense investment, hit in many countries by budget cuts, and to take decisions on the NATO-led training mission planned for Afghanistan after 2014.
Former U.S. President George W. Bush, who ordered the U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan in 2001, came to Brussels for NATO meetings in June 2001 and again in February 2005. NATO leaders last met in Chicago in May last year.
TROOP NUMBERS
Rasmussen, speaking on the eve of a NATO defense ministers' meeting, also said Afghan security force numbers could be kept at a higher level for longer than expected.
Under current plans, the United States and its NATO allies will help build up the Afghan armed forces to 352,000 personnel, a number they are approaching, but the size of the force - which the allies will continue to fund - will be trimmed to 230,000 after 2015.
U.S. General Lloyd Austin, nominated to lead the U.S. military's Central Command which includes Afghanistan, last week backed keeping Afghan forces at peak strength.
Rasmussen said no final decision had been made as to how long Afghan security forces will remain at the high level.
"It may well be that the higher level will be kept for a longer time than previously expected. That will ... very much depend on the security situation on the ground," he said.
Rasmussen said he regretted that U.S. Marine General John Allen would not now become NATO's next supreme commander after he announced his retirement on Tuesday.
Allen, who led NATO forces in Afghanistan and was caught up but later cleared in the scandal that forced CIA chief David Petraeus to resign, cited his wife's health as the reason for his decision to forego his nomination to the NATO job.
"He could have done a great job as Supreme Allied Commander Europe but ... I also fully respect his decision," Rasmussen said.
(Editing by Michael Roddy)
Interview: History Shows You Invade Afghanistan At Your Peril
February 20, 2013 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
A new book, "Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan 1839-1842," draws on Afghanistan's violent history to provide lessons for its future.
RFE/RL correspondent Abubakar Siddique spoke with the book's author, Scottish historian William Dalrymple.
RFE/RL: Can you tell us about your recently published book, "Return of a King"?
William Dalrymple: "The Return of a King" is about the first British assault on Afghanistan. In 1839, 18,000 East India Company and British troops marched through the Bolan and Khojak passes and conquered Afghanistan and [placed] on the throne Shah Shuja-ul Mulk, the grandson of Ahmad Shah Durrani -- the first ruler of the first Afghan Empire -- and threw out Dost Mohammad Khan, who the British were worried was flirting with tsarist Russia.
RFE/RL: What essentially is the story of the First Anglo-Afghan War -- how did it start, what were its main events, and who won in the end?
Dalrymple: The story in a nutshell is that 18,000 troops march into Afghanistan. They install the puppet king, Shah Shuja, on the throne. An insurgency breaks out a year and a half later, and the British are catastrophically defeated. They are completely unprepared for the insurgency which breaks out. They are quickly surrounded. Their two leaders are killed. They surrender and they are promised safe passage back to India. In that retreat, 18,000 men, women, and children march out of the Kabul cantonment. Only one single survivor makes it through to the Jalalabad cantonment, Dr. [William] Brydon.
RFE/RL: How do the Afghans remember the First Anglo-Afghan War?
Dalrymple: Well, for the Afghans, this is a great national liberation struggle. What the Battle of Britain or Waterloo or Trafalgar is to the British or what the Easter Rising is to the Irish or what Gandhi and the freedom struggle is to the Indians, this is to the Afghans. This is their great supreme triumph because they take on the British at the very peak of the British [Empire]. And for the Afghans it is a miraculous [event] and to this day the diplomatic area in Kabul is called Wazir Akbar Khan after the main Barakzai leader [of the uprising against the British].
RFE/RL: What is your take on modern perceptions of Afghanistan after researching a war that took place 160 years ago?
Dalrymple: Just like a modern ignorant Fox News commentator in Afghanistan thinks that anyone who resists the Americans is a Taliban, thinks that he is a bigot or a fanatic, so the British at this period are apt to just see masses of bearded Afghans fighting them and assume that they are all religious fanatics.
But the Afghan sources allow you to go beyond that and allow you to understand individual motives, individual reasons, for taking up arms. And like a good reporter today who can give complexity to anything that happens, a good journalist working in Afghanistan today will be able to explain the motivations of every side.
RFE/RL: How relevant are the lessons of the First Anglo-Afghan War to the situation today?
Dalrymple: Well the most obvious lesson is that you will occupy and invade Afghanistan at your peril. It famously is a place which defends its independence very resolutely. It is also a place which is very expensive to occupy, and I think this is an underrated factor.
Everyone knows that the Afghans are fierce fighters. I think few people have taken in that each successive occupation of Afghanistan is undone ultimately by the cost. It's not that the Afghans can't be defeated -- they can be if you throw enough military might and money at it. But to do so you have to throw in thousands of troops. You have to garrison every valley. You have to supply the troops in every remote valley that you have a garrison there.
It's an expensive business. It broke the back of the East India Company. It breaks the back of the Soviets in 1970s and 1980s; their economy was wrecked by their invasion of Afghanistan. And finally, it has broken the back of the American balance of payments. Americans have lost a fortune in Afghanistan for very little gain.
RFE/RL: How relevant are the lessons of the First Anglo-Afghan War for Afghanistan's future, as another great power prepares to leave the country?
Dalrymple: One thing to state clearly is that Afghanistan is a difficult place to rule -- for anyone to rule. There are many different [ethnic] groups. The geography does not lend itself to centralized government based on one place. And there have been very few periods in history when Afghanistan has been successfully centralized and ruled from a strong center. In general, Afghanistan has been fractured, decentralized, and, as the Pashtun saying goes, "Every Afghan is a khan" -- is a king.
I think the most likely outcome of the next few years is again a period of decentralization -- when Kabul will [cease] to be as central to the affairs of Afghans on the periphery as it is today. And I fear we are in for another period of bloodshed and decentralization. And possibly warlordism again. I don't think many people are very optimistic about the future.
Balkanization of Afghanistan beckons
Asia Times By Derek Henry Flood Feb 20, '13
In his February 12 State of the Union address, President Barack Obama outlined the beginning of the end of American participation in Afghanistan's now decades long civil war. The US would endure a phased troop withdrawal meant to halve the presence of American soldiers within a year's time, reducing the present force of approximately 66,000 by 34,000.
The remainder are then theoretically going to make a rather hasty retreat between October 2014 and the start of 2015 with a possible residual force of several thousand soldiers staying on in a training and support capacity.
The precise number of troops, if there are to be any at all, will depend on the outcome of negotiations between Washington and Kabul. Obama did not provide any spoiler alerts in his annual speech most likely because timetables and logistics with America's Afghan counterparts simply have yet to be hammered out.
The message, however, was very clear: whether Afghanistan is ready or not, America's oversized military boot print in that country is already dissipating.
On February 10, a transfer of command took place in Kabul for the American-led NATO International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) troops waging a years-long fraught counterinsurgency campaign.
Marine General Joseph Dunford took over from his predecessor General John Allen. Allen, still nominated for the top NATO post of Supreme Allied Commander in Europe (SACEUR), played a tangential part in a petty sex scandal that felled the career of now former CIA Director David Petraeus last fall.
Though the Obama administration has yet to formally withdraw Allen's SACEUR nomination publicly, though Allen himself has opted out from the nomination process to avoid undue speculation regarding his role, however minimal, in the scandal that brought down his comrade Petraeus.
An ever quixotic President Karzai refused to dignify the locked down handover ceremony with his presence despite a recent pledge to continue efforts to wind down the war by negotiating a vaguely outlined peace accord with the Afghan Taliban. The Presidential Palace dispatched the Afghan defense minister and national security chief in lieu of his eminence.
During General Dunford's first full day on duty, the United States military began experimentally shipping a small quantity of voluminous metal containers stocked with war materiel through the contentious border gate at Torkham, signaling that the United States was beginning its drawdown under the stewardship of a man who Washington somewhat optimistically states will be its last major theater commander in Kabul.
The equipment will eventually make the long trek to Karachi's port facilities on the Arabian Sea from where it can be shipped onward to return to American military supply depots.
Though Afghanistan borders a total of six countries, in the eyes of the major Western players in the Afghan war, Pakistan is the sole meaningful border state. Sharing the 2,640-kilometer-long Durand Line (the de facto border), with its deep ties to the Taliban, Pakistan is deemed the state whose cooperation and influence is indispensable to ease the much-desired exit of virtually all NATO troops by the end of 2014.
Without access to the Pakistani trucking network's perilous land routes leading down to Karachi, NATO is forced to rely on the much more costly, incredibly laborious Northern Distribution Network (NDN) in order to send the equipment as far away as cold-water ports on the Baltic Sea.
After the deaths of 24 Pakistani soldiers in a coalition strike in November 2011, Islamabad enacted a seven month long blockade of NATO gear transiting Pakistani territory.
This tragic incident gave NATO logisticians planning their withdrawal pause for thought with their temporary total reliance on the NDN in the face of Pakistani anger. Pakistani drivers may face death at the hands of the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and NATO vehicles may be destroyed in the process, but the Pakistani transit corridor is simply considered far more efficient by the West.
The withdrawal of the Americans en masse from Afghanistan coincides with the end of President Hamid Kazai's wobbly reign over the country since he was installed as interim ruler in December 2001 and then elected twice in a series of terribly flawed electoral processes in 2004 and 2009.
Karzai has vowed to step down as Afghanistan's sole post-Taliban head of state but thus far he has no clear successor. The next presidential ballot is slated for April 2014 but prominent Afghan leaders are already maneuvering. Afghanistan appears to be at the edge of a cliff. Washington and its ISAF partners have been focused on the readiness of the Afghan National Army (ANA) and limiting the notorious corruption plaguing the Afghan National Police (ANP).
The question that must be asked at this time though is whether the men in these organizations can and will remain loyal to a centralized state in Kabul if it appears Afghanistan is reverting to its pre-9/11 self.
The wishful metrics of progress for Afghan security forces may be of little utility if powerful regional leaders begin openly reasserting themselves should the Taliban come back into measurable power in Nimruz, Helmand, Kandahar, Zabul, Paktia, Paktika, Khost, Nangarhar provinces.
If Taliban fighters then begin moving into vulnerable provinces like Herat, encircling the heavily Shi'ite Hazarajat region and applying military pressure in contested areas of northern Afghanistan's southern tier, as they did in the 1990s, Afghanistan will either Balkanize itself into distinct warlord-led enclaves or enter into civil war without the advantage of Western air support.
It was stipulated in the Bonn Agreement of December 2001 that Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR) initiatives would do away with the warlord armies while bringing former combatants into interim security forces which would later become the ANA and ANP. Whether Afghanistan will see a total unraveling of DDR efforts after 2014 will depend on whether the overly centralized government in Kabul can maintain a degree of control over the regions enmeshed with a high degree of warlord culture.
When United States forces began attacking Taliban and al-Qaeda positions in October 2001, the Americans - and later NATO - were essentially entering in an alliance with the losing side in a civil war. With a mix of overwhelming air power, suitcases full of cash handed over to anti-Taliban commanders popularly referred to as "warlords" in the press, and American Special Forces assisting ethnic-Tajik and Uzbek militias, the US reversed years of Taliban hard won military gains over the course of that fateful autumn.
Despite the George W Bush administration's stated desire to put an end to the "cruise missile diplomacy" emblematic of the Clinton era, there were very few American "boots on the ground" during the volatile weeks that the Taliban regime crumbled and melted away. The first Americans in Afghanistan were intelligence officers liaising with local Afghan strongmen hostile to the Taliban followed by small numbers of elite Special Forces detachments.
Central Intelligence Agency officers were helping to reinvigorate the stagnant fiefdoms of anti-Taliban military leaders while small detachments of the US Army's 5th Special Forces Group Operational Detachment Alpha units (ODA) operating out of Uzbekistan's Karshi-Khanabad airbase were quietly inserted by the dozen under the cover of darkness to assist northern Afghan power brokers eager to reclaim territory lost to the Taliban in previous retreats or defeats.
Groupings such as ODA 595 and 525 famously fought alongside General Abdul Rashid Dostum's Junbesh-i-Milli fighters and the mostly ethnic-Tajik forces under the command of Mohammed Atta Noor from Jamiat-i-Islami to eject the Taliban from Mazar-i-Sharif and other key northern cities facing Central Asia's soft underbelly.
The wrinkle in this strategy was that Langley and the Pentagon were partnering with men who were not only enemies of the Taliban but loathed by Pakistan's military and intelligence establishment.
This initial pairing of American Special Forces with Dostum, Atta, Mohaqiq, and others was deeply problematic from the start not only because of the less than stellar human rights record attributed to indigenous commanders documented by groups like Human Rights Watch dating back to the internecine fighting of the 1990s but because these men were sworn enemies of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate in headquartered in Islamabad's Aabpara area.
Northern warlords - each with their own unique set of interests backed by constellation of patrons - relied on ties with states like Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Iran, India, Turkey, and Russia for diplomatic succor (semi-hermetic Turkmenistan officially maintains a policy of "neutrality" in the region), refuge, and backing.
This put the individual leaders of the former United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan, known as the United Front for short, in a differing political and economic realm than the bulk of their Pashtun countrymen in the south and east in Pakistan's historic zone of influence.
The heavily personality driven parties of the country's north, northeast, west and center, with their often bellicose view of the Taliban, may greatly complicate both Pakistan's and the United States' schemes for a bloodless transition to a post-NATO, post-Karzai Afghanistan.
This contentious history put the legacy leaders of the United Front - long referred to in press accounts somewhat inarticulately as the "Northern Alliance" - in direct confrontation with Islamabad's interests on the Afghan battlefield. From late 2001 until now, the United States has tried to strike an impossible balance between the quarrelsome ethnic interest groups inside Afghanistan and its inherently frustrating alliance with the Pakistani security state and Islamabad's often wildly divergent localized regional strategic objectives.
It was ascribed to the point of cliche that regularly cited the need for a friendly regime in Afghanistan in order to provide the Pakistani state with "strategic depth" in its geopolitical struggle with India that centered on ownership of Kashmir dating back to the partition of the British Raj in 1947.
Pakistan's ambassador to the US, Sherry Rehman, insisted in mid-summer 2012 that Islamabad was already moving away from its failed strategic depth policy vis-a-vis Afghanistan.
Rehman's comments were immediately backed up by the US Ambassador to Pakistan Richard Olson, who cited Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar's apparent willingness to abandon Pakistan's strategic depth doctrine. Pakistani daily Dawn reported last March FM Khar stating that Pakistan was firmly abandoning its legacy Afghanistan policy which she referred to as "historical baggage" that represented a "hangover " from an earlier era that was no longer relevant.
While Pakistan's Taliban policy in Afghanistan caused Delhi to fret, outright frightened the authoritarian regimes in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan who feared for the creeping radicalization of their fragile societies, as well as nearly bringing Tehran to the brink of war with Islamabad's proxies after the execution of Iranian diplomats in Mazar-i-Sharif in 1998, Islamabad's fostering of the Afghan Taliban did the most damage within Pakistan.
For the Taliban are not merely an autochthonous Afghan movement, but one raised and shaped by activist Pakistani military officials influential during Benazir Bhutto's second prime ministership in the 1990s.
Rather than the Taliban becoming the jurists of an efficient client state, its pathetic governing period in Afghanistan led to increased destabilization deeply affecting Pakistan for years to come. The sponsoring of Mullah Omar's regime ultimately resulted in drawing in the 100,000 ISAF troops currently present on Afghan soil - an anathema to many Afghans - and the Talibanization of vulnerable sectors of Pakistani society.
The rise of the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) in 2007 has had severe consequences for Pakistan's entrenched political order. From the assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto in late 2007 to the tacit though denied complicity of ever increasing, deadly drone warfare in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), the physical destruction of the old militant nexus in Afghanistan has only metastasized militancy at the juncture of South and Central Asia over the long term.
Along with the troubles created by the TTP in the FATA and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province more broadly, Pakistanis - the Hazara minority in Balochistan in particular - are suffering increasingly under the savagery of virulently anti-Shi'ite groups like Lashkar-i-Jhangvi, Sipah-i-Sahaba Pakistan and Jaish-i-Muhammed, now known collectively as the "Punjabi Taliban".
On January 14, the state-run Qatar News Agency disseminated a statement from the Qatari Foreign Ministry that it was officially sanctioning the opening of some kind of liaison office for the Afghan Taliban at the behest of the White House and Kabul. The Peninsula, a Qatari English-language daily, categorizes the Taliban vaguely as a "movement" rather than the Pentagon and NATO preferred term of an "insurgency". Labeling the Taliban as a movement implies the grouping had concrete, terrestrial political goals unlike the al-Qaeda men it once harbored from 1996-2001.
The United States is eager to finally evolve from a poorly framed policy goal made by George W Bush on the evening of September 11, 2001 that told a global audience: "We will make no distinction between those who committed these acts and those who harbor them."
Thus well before American jets dropped their first ordinance on Afghan soil on October 7, 2001, the Bush administration conflated the Taliban which sought international recognition as Afghanistan's legitimate rulers with the transnational al-Qaeda whose aim was to sow terror among apostate government both near and far.
In fact the mostly provincial Afghan Taliban's initial aims were quite narrow. Under the leadership of a village preacher from rural Uruzgan Province called Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban was largely focused on consolidating its rule inside Afghanistan by defeating its domestic opponents in central and northern Afghanistan.
While in the process of imposing its parochial worldview among ordinary Afghans regardless of their sectarian or ethnic identities, Omar's group played host to an array of Sunni movements from across the Muslim world.
From the amorphous al-Qaeda to those with far less grandiose goals that involved the creation of separatist Muslim-majority homelands such as the Caucasian rebels from the "Chechen Republic of Ichkeria" or the forlorn Uighur militants from China's Xinjiang Province who desired to political secession from the Russian Federation and China respectively.
Though the Taliban harbored al-Qaeda during this period as it did many other radical Sunni movements, the two groups did not in fact share a common Islamist ideology.
The Taliban are a historically Deobandi movement under Islam's Hanafi school of jurisprudence whose ideations originate in the Daurl Uloom madrassa in what is today the state of Uttar Pradesh, India. The Arabs that dominated the political Islam espoused by al-Qaeda were Salafi-jihadi adherents of the Hanbali school of Islamic jurisprudence.
The Deobandi Hanafism of the Taliban with its ingrained Central and South Asian Islamic socio-cultural currents was traditionally at odds with the even more literalist Hanbalism of the Saudi and Egyptian Salafis who have always been at the upper echelon of al-Qaeda's thought cycles.
None of this is to say the two outfits certainly did not make common cause, particularly when facing external challengers such northern Afghan war-fighting groups or the foreign intervention forces suddenly present following 9/11. Though the two very different outfits at times maintained a sometimes mutually beneficial relationship, the working alliance between Mullah Omar's tin pot emirate and the stateless al-Qaeda leadership it hosted was laden with serious ideological and strategic disagreements.
Beyond this, there were schisms within al-Qaeda itself regarding the Taliban's merits in relation its deeply flawed implementation of Islamic law in Afghanistan. Bin Laden was considered by many to in fact be a fairly minor, though notable for his pedigree, player in the anti-Soviet jihad of the 1980s.
But with the attacks he ordered on the American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania on August 7, 1998, his presence and notoriety had begun to overshadow Mullah Omar outside Afghanistan. Bin Laden's fame heightened rapidly in neighboring Pakistan in particular when President Bill Clinton clumsily responded to the atrocities in East Africa with a barrage of Tomahawk missiles two weeks later on militant training camps in Khost Province in southeastern Afghanistan.
Bin Laden's relaxed defiance of the American military juggernaut gave him the air of a folk hero among supporters in Peshawar or sympathetic enlisted men in the Pakistani army but it greatly chafed the Taliban's shura council who were not appreciative of the kind of explosive attention al-Qaeda's activities outside Afghanistan were bringing to their desperately impoverished, agrarian nation.
The sort of comparatively abstract millenarian terrorism abroad espoused by bin Laden did not sync with the Taliban's attempts at nascent state re-formation in Kabul.
The Taliban were keenly interested in creating an Islamic state that had its rightful place among the internationally recognized community of nation-states.
To this end, the Taliban sought recognition as Afghanistan's rightful leaders at the UN headquarters in New York. Al-Qaeda was not interested in issues of statehood. Bin Laden's modus vivendi with the Taliban of the 1990s occurred partly to Afghanistan's pre-existing isolation after it was utterly abandoned by outside powers following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
While only their patrons in Islamabad, Abu Dhabi and Riyadh provided them with such diplomatic credentials, the Taliban desired political acceptance by the wider world. They continued to prosecute their war against the Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras of the north until they had pushed them back into a slice of Takhar Province and Badakhshan Province bordering Tajikistan.
The rump government of the late president Burhanuddin Rabbani - which still held Afghanistan's seat at the UN - maintained an internally exiled government in the Badakhshani capital of Faizabad.
Mullah Omar had the very earthly goal of destroying or coopting what remained of these ethnic war-fighting groups in order to wrest control of every square kilometer of Afghanistan from Rabbani's faction once and for all. The Taliban created facts on the ground as they battled fighters allied to Rabbani led by Ahmad Shah Massoud and other northern commanders harder and further into a remote corner of Afghanistan with little strategic relevance.
Now several of the state actors that seek to steer Afghanistan toward a quasi-peaceful post-NATO-era settlement suddenly view the Taliban as a legitimate negotiating partner. David Cameron recently hosted Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistan's President Asif Ali Zardari, at Chequers, the British prime minister's sprawling country estate northwest of London.
The transparent episode appeared borne out of desperate pragmatism from the NATO side of the aisle. In response to the talk of talks, Zabiullah Mujahid, the lugubrious Taliban spokesman, dismissed the premise as a political farce.
Mujahid told the Associated Press: "There is no change in the policy of the Islamic Emirate of not talking to the Karzai governmentthe Karzai regime is powerless and installed by others. Real parties to the conflict are those who have committed aggression."
Karzai and Zardari pledged to conclude a peace deal between Kabul and the Taliban within an astonishingly brief six-month period. Considering the existing mutual distrust between Islamabad and Kabul, the factionalization of the Taliban over the last decade, and the fact that since first proposed in January 2012, the Taliban's Doha office has yet to really materialize.
President Karzai's High Peace Council has borne little or no tangible fruit thus far. The brazen assassination by the Taliban of the former Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani in his role of head of Karzai's appointed council in September 2011 eroded the idea of the so-called "moderate Taliban" in the eyes of skeptics. Amrullah Saleh, the former head of the National Directorate of Security and outspoken Karzai critic, told the BBC's Hardtalk that the notion of Taliban members who had genuinely moderated their views or reformed their ideology was "an invention."
All considered, these factors add up to the notion of a peace deal by summer of this year as an unrealistic, herculean task. The High Peace Council is now led by Salahuddin Rabbani, the slain former president's son.
For its part, Qatar is meant to serve as a neutral space where the concerned parties can come to at least an ad hoc agreement. In many parts of the world, however, tiny Qatar's intentions are met with outright suspicion. Qatari officials operated alongside Libyan rebels during the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi, have been active in arming insurgent groups in Syria's bloody revolution turned civil war, and have been the subject of unsubstantiated reports of assisting Salafi-jihadis following the short-lived Islamist takeover of northern Mali.
Though no robed Qatari official appeared alongside the pro-peace troika of Karzai, Zardari and Cameron, the small Emirate is no stranger to hosting rogue Islamists of varying stripes. In the 1990s, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was out of the reach of American authorities while he quietly worked as an engineer at Qatar's Ministry of Electricity and Water.
On the small, lightly populated peninsula jutting forth from Saudi Arabia into the Persian Gulf, it is highly unlikely that Mohammed or other known al-Qaeda operatives were existing without both the knowledge and cooperation of government authorities such as Qatar's, then Minister of Islamic Affairs, Sheik Abdullah bin Khalid al-Thani on whose farm Mohammed was thought to have lived before fleeing to Pakistan in advance of a US dragnet. Al-Thani, currently interior minister would not likely object to the Taliban operating openly in the emirate.
So while Kabul, Islamabad, London, Washington and apparently Doha are myopically pushing for a settlement with the Afghan Taliban, the various other non-state groups are barely mentioned if at all as if the Taliban were the sole perpetrator of anti-state violence, presently or potentially.
Outlier Pashtun warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, believed to be sheltering in Pakistan, still commands a potent insurgent movement called Hezb-i-Islami Afghanistan that is not under the Taliban umbrella and which is opposed to the Afghan central government. Unlike the Taliban, HIG maintains a legal, tangible political office in Kabul and views itself as a hardline Islamist political party undergirded with strains of Pashtun nationalism.
The Haqqani Network, a familial cross-border hybrid criminal-insurgent group allied to the Taliban but autonomous in nature, has barley been mentioned in big-think public pronouncements about the possibility of creating a lasting peace in Afghanistan.
And then there are the previously mentioned war-fighting organizations whose allegiances lay primarily along ethnic and sectarian lines. Groups such as Jamiat-i-Islami, Junbesh-i-Milli, and Hezb-i-Wahdat can easily be reactivated in the event of a major Taliban resurgence in Afghanistan. The leaders of these groups have stores of weapons, cash, and bitter memories from a time when there were no Westerners present in their beleaguered Afghanistan.
It is not difficult then for them to posit darker future scenarios where identity-based warfare will return in the event of a full-scale collapse of the central government in Kabul which has an unhealthy dependency on wealthy donor nations dating back to the Bonn Agreement.
Though independent minded Afghans of all stripes have no desire for any form renewed Pakistani hegemony over Afghanistan, it is the recalcitrant northern-based leaders who fought so bitterly in the late 1990s, that feel their factions have the most to lose.
When the Taliban swiftly rose to power from Kandahar to Kabul from 1994-1996, ruling Afghanistan's Pashtun belt hugging the Pakistan border was insufficient. Mullah Omar's commanders envisioned themselves as the whole of the country's rightful, righteous rulers.
The minority ethnic factions originating in the anti-Soviet jihad may not want to but are prepared to retreat into their pre-Karzai era selves if push comes to shove.
In this context, having Pakistan and Qatar broker a settlement which reintegrates the Taliban into Kabul's spare ministry buildings or in the future formally cedes it territory in Pashtun-majority provinces in the south and east to the exclusion of all the other surrounding players in Eurasia may result in a future Afghanistan that resembles elements of the country's unfortunate past.
Derek Henry Flood is a freelance journalist focusing on the Africa, the Middle East and South and Central Asia. He has covered many of the world's conflicts-both major and minor-since 9/11 as a frontline reporter. He blogs at the-war-diaries.com. Follow Derek on Twitter @DerekHenryFlood
Mark Jacobson: The Karzai we need
By Mark Jacobson, Special to CNN February 20th, 2013
EDITOR'S NOTE: From 2009-2011, Mark R. Jacobson (Twitter: @markondefense) served as the Deputy NATO Senior Civilian Representative in Afghanistan. He is now a Senior Advisor to the Truman National Security Project and a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund.
Some senior diplomats have called Afghan President Hamid Karzai the most difficult leader the United States has dealt with in modern times. In fairness, Afghanistan itself may be one of the most complex and unforgiving political environments any leader can ever have to deal with.
And deal with him they must. Since 2010 when, at a NATO summit in Lisbon, Portugal, Karzai expressed the collective wish of the Afghan people for self-reliance, the United States and our allies have been moving toward Afghanistan, taking the lead on security. Both sides understood that this transition was neither going to be easy - nor completed - without disagreements about approach.
Karzai sensibly said that the "maturity" of the NATO-Afghan partnership would provide for the discussion of these anticipated difficult issues, such as detentions, civilian casualties and corruption, and that there was a premium on the need to resolve these disputes "in a spirit of collaboration and teamwork."
Unfortunately, he has continued to remain less committed to that spirit of collaboration and partnership. As a result, the international effort in support of the Afghan people may be weakening.
The planned and deliberate withdrawal of U.S. and International Security Assistance Force troops is in full swing. To his credit, Karzai has taken ownership of the conflict and pushed the international community toward doing less itself and more on increasing efforts to build Afghan capacity.
He has secured "strategic partnerships" with the NATO alliance and bilateral agreements with several nations - including India, Germany and Norway - to help Afghanistan over the long term.
But there is another Karzai: one who makes provocative and sometimes inaccurate statements that call into question the intentions and efforts of the international community. Karzai has unforgivingly attacked NATO over the issue of civilian casualties, and decried international economic and development aid as the sole cause of corruption in Afghanistan. He has claimed that it is the bureaucratic obstinacy of the coalition, and not any internal Afghan deficiencies, that have stunted progress in the fight against the insurgency. This is hardly the language of "cooperation and teamwork."
I witnessed this routine personally, time and time again, during my time as a senior official at ISAF headquarters. Karzai's attacks often follow a similar pattern: a hyperbolic statement, a clarification, and then a slight rollback on the initial position for the international media. Some have said that he is simply playing to his domestic base, particularly southern Pashtuns, who are concerned that Karzai only acts only at the bequest of the international community. This particular approach, whatever the calculus, harms the ability of the international community to maintain its already fragile parliamentary and public support for engagement in Afghanistan.
Karzai's most recent statement - that he will prohibit Afghan troops from calling in ISAF air support under "any circumstances" - reflects this problem. This move followed a joint Afghan-NATO operation, where Afghan forces called in air support that tragically resulted in the deaths of 10 Afghan civilians. Karzai, rather than seeking a "mature" discussion of the issues, acted reflexively and issued a decree barring Afghan forces from asking "for the foreigners' planes for carrying out operations on our homes and villages."
His unfair and irresponsible characterization that "foreigners" are the threat to the Afghan population, and that it is "foreigners" who wage war on Afghan homes, threatens to weaken the coalition that has helped build Afghanistan's capacity to secure its future.
Back in the coalition capitals, the perception is that not only is the international community not wanted, but that our troops, who fight side by side with Afghans, may be prohibited from taking actions to defend themselves. Karzai's statement comes a little over a month after his own chief of staff, Abdul Khurram, told international media that "the world needs us more than we need them."
This is a recipe for failure when populations are already on edge over stories of infiltrator attacks and the Afghan National Security Forces' inability to take over on its own. Nations have remained engaged in Afghanistan despite an ever increasing lack of support by their populations.
Statements like those from the Afghan palace could trigger an end to not just military aid but, in times of severe budget austerity, development assistance as well. In short, this is not the narrative Karzai wants. There are too many in the West who would be all too willing to call his bluff and leave him and the Afghan people on their own.
As difficult as the challenges with the international community may appear to be now, the tests of a reconciliation process will prove equally, if not more, daunting.
Afghanistan needs Karzai the statesman: the Karzai who can work with both the international community and the Afghan people, not just play one against the other. This is Karzai's charge for the final year of his presidency. Failure may mean putting peace much further out of reach of the Afghan people who have already suffered so much for so long.
The Afghan Battle Over A Law To Protect Women
NPR By Sean Carberry February 20, 2013
Afghan President Hamid Karzai issued a decree in 2009 banning violence against women. But the parliament, which is currently on its winter recess, has been unable to pass it and give it permanence as a law.
There's major disagreement on key provisions where Islamic and secular law come into conflict. And activists say the gains made in women's rights since the fall of the Taliban in 2001 are slipping away.
Masooda Karokhi, a female member of parliament, has been pushing to get the proposal through the male-dominated legislature.
Karokhi says it's been a long and difficult battle, and one that Afghanistan's women can't afford to lose. That's why she and some of her colleagues continue to negotiate with religiously conservative members of parliament who oppose the law.
"We have made some changes in the proposed law," she says. "We have increased some punishments, decreased others and made some concessions."
The Afghan Constitution says that all laws must be in compliance with Islamic law, or Sharia. At issue are a range of provisions, such as whether a woman can pursue an education or even leave the house without her husband's permission, and also punishments for men who commit violence against women.
Hossein Balkhi is a member of parliament who says the law is necessary. But, he says, most of the proposed provisions violate Islam and need to be changed. He says Sharia is stricter in many of its punishments than the proposed law.
"In this law, it proposes that if a man commits a sexual assault, he will be sentenced to 16 years jail, while in Islam, that man should be executed," Balkhi says.
However, enforcement of existing laws is inconsistent at best, and very often women who are the victims of sexual assault end up jailed for adultery.
Different Interpretations
One of the more contentious issues is the age of marriage. Balkhi says that the international community is trying to push Western values on marriage. But under Islam, he says, a father decides when his daughter is ready to wed.
That notion doesn't sit well with Shukria Barakzai, the legislator who wrote the constitutional article on women's rights.
Marriage before the age of 16, she says, is a "crime."
Barakzai says the Afghan Supreme Court has ruled that 16 is the minimum age for marriage, and that it shouldn't be a subject of debate.
There are many views about what Islam says about women and their rights, says Enayatullah Balegh, an adviser to the president and a member of Afghanistan's Council of Religious Scholars.
"The interpretation and definition of violence against women is very different from here and the West," he says. He goes on to say that he considers a woman dancing or singing on TV to be "one of the most violent acts against a woman."
Balegh says Sharia already provides clear rules and punishments regarding violence against women, so the proposed law is unnecessary.
"This is a democratic thing being imposed on us," he says.
What makes matters more complicated is that Afghanistan has no clear procedure to evaluate whether proposed laws conform to Sharia.
Balkhi, the legislator, says parliament needs to form a committee of religious scholars to evaluate the provisions of the law and issue a majority decision. Barakzai, who is also a member of parliament, agrees in principle, but worries there are few legitimate Sharia scholars in the legislature.
"If we have religious scholars in the parliament who are interpreting all these religious issues for the benefit of [Afghans], that's different," she says. "Right now, we don't have it."
And that means it's doubtful the legislation will come to a vote anytime soon.
NPR's Aimal Yaqubi contributed to this report.
U.S. troop toll in Afghanistan falls with strategy shift
CNN By Mike Mount February 20th, 2013
For the past month, the U.S. military has experienced something not seen for five years in Afghanistan: No combat deaths.
Three U.S. troops have died from hostile fire injuries since Jan. 1, and one of them succumbed to wounds sustained in December.
The trend marks the longest period without a U.S. combat death in America's longest war since 2008, and clearly reflects a strategy shift that leaves much of the fighting to Afghan security forces, whose deaths are going up.
Afghans now lead more than 80% of combat operations and control areas covering more than three-quarters of the population, according to U.S. military officials.
The U.S. military has pulled back from direct combat operations into the less dangerous role of advising and assisting Afghan forces.
American military officials said a cut in the number of American forces is another reason for the decline.
There were about 100,000 forces in Afghanistan during the peak of the military's troop surge. But that number fell by almost 40 percent when the last of those troops left in September and remains at about that level today.
Attacks by Taliban insurgents also have declined, officials have said.
Just as the U.S. toll has dropped, Afghan security force deaths have risen sharply.
"The Taliban are targeting the Afghan Army and police to try and show the populous the Afghan Security Forces cannot adequately protect them," said Col. David Lapan, spokesman for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
"They are trying to undermine the future of the (Afghan Security Forces)," he said.
Having reached their peak of 352,000 last year, more Afghan security forces will also bring more casualties as well, according to defense officials.
"They really have taken on the bulk of the security responsibility and have been dying in very significant numbers as compared to their U.S. counterparts over the last three months," said Jeffrey Dressler, a senior analyst on Afghanistan with the Washington-based institute for the Study of War.
Last year was the deadliest so far for Afghan forces with more than 3,400 soldiers and police killed, up from 1,950 the previous year, according to a Brookings Institute study.
Some 237 U.S. troops were killed by hostile fire in 2012, down from 351 the previous year, according to Pentagon statistics.
While Afghan security force fatalities are up, a new report by the United Nations on Tuesday shows civilian deaths on the decline.
Civilian deaths in Afghanistan dropped 12% in 2012 - the first time that figure has fallen in six years, according to the U.N. Assistance Mission to Afghanistan (UNAMA).
The report credits the decline to fewer suicide bombings, a drop in aerial attacks and less ground fighting between pro-government and militant forces.
The U.S.-led NATO military force has put strict limits on air strikes by coalition aircraft called in by NATO troops.
Last week, Afghan President Hamid Karzai banned Afghan security forces from calling in allied air strikes after at least 10 civilians were killed during an Afghan-led operation in eastern Kunar province earlier this month.
Afghan Clerics Show Mixed Reaction to Refusal from Pakistani Counterparts
TOLOnews.com By Haseeb Maudoodi Wednesday, 20 February 2013
Afghanistan's Ulema Council has shown mixed reaction to their Pakistani counterparts' refusal to attend a joint summit, with some Afghan clergy blaming Pakistani's Ulema Council for supporting the Afghan Taliban.
Pakistan's council of religious clerics announced Tuesday that they wouldn't be attending a planned ulema summit between the two countries to build support against suicide bombings and facilitate the Afghan peace process.
In an official letter addressed to the Afghan clerics, Mutfi Abu Huraira Mohiuddin, head of the Pakistani Ulema Council, said they are not willing to criticize any of the Afghan Taliban's past activities, nor would they issue a fatwa against them. The Pakistani clerics had previously said that they wanted the Taliban to also attend the conference.
But some Afghan clerics remain hopeful that despite the refusal from Pakistan, the summit can still take place.
"We want the Pakistani ulema not to decide based on emotions. They should come to talk on this big issue. Even if the Taliban do not attend the conference, we should reach to a conclusion in their absence," said Sayed Hussain Alami Balkhi, member of the Afghan Ulema Council.
Other Afghan clerics expressed the determination to continue working toward peace even if their Pakistani counterparts refuse to meet.
"If the Pakistani ulema don't attend the conference, the path to peace will not be closed, and there are others to help us. We will continue our efforts to bring peace in Afghanistan," said Maulawi Shafiullah Shafi Noorestani of the Afghan Ulema Council.
But some Afghan clerics blamed their Pakistani counterparts for having sympathies for the Afghan insurgents.
"The Pakistani ulema still haven't cut their ties with the Taliban, so we must not expect them to issue a fatwa against them [Taliban] because of their own safety.... The Pakistani ulema aren't willing to take any step against the Taliban," Maulawi Abdulhadi Hedayad said.
A global ulema conference was originally planned, but the Afghan Ulema Council decided to convene a joint Afghanistan-Pakistan ulema summit first. This joint conference, which was to be held this Thursday in Kabul, was to focus on Taliban activities, in particular suicide attacks, declaring them haraam, or a sin.
Over 83,000 Afghan refugees repatriated from Pakistan in 2012: UNHCR
Xinhua Feb. 20, 2013
ISLAMABAD - The UN refugee agency (UNHCR) said on Wednesday that over 83,000 Afghan refugees were repatriated from Pakistan in 2012, which is its largest return operation in the world.
Last year's figures saw a 60 percent increase in the numbers of returning compared to 2011 when 52,000 Afghans returned home from Pakistan, the UNHCR said Wednesday.
There are 1.65 million registered Afghans currently living in Pakistan. Since 2002, UNHCR's voluntary repatriation program has assisted more than 3.8 million Afghan refugees to return home.
"UNHCR has supported the Government of Pakistan and provided hundreds of millions of dollars of assistance to refugees hosted on the sovereign territory of Pakistan over the past three decades, " said Neill Wright, UNHCR's Representative in Pakistan.
He added that "continuing the long tradition of hospitality by the people of Pakistan, the government continues to respect the fundamental principle that repatriation must be voluntary and with dignity, and that no refugee will be forced back."
In order to facilitate the returning refugees amid harsh winter conditions, UNHCR enhanced the return package and provided returning families with additional assistance, including free transportation from the Voluntary Repatriation Centres in Pakistan to the Encashment Centres inside Afghanistan, as well as non-food items in November and December 2012.
This assistance package was in addition to the 150 U.S. dollars cash grant ordinarily provided to returning families, a UNHCR statement said.
The Afghan war that started in 1979 displaced millions of people in the aftermath of the violent events, many took refuge in Pakistan, Iran and several other countries.
Jirga to Decide on Kabul-Washington Security Pact
TOLOnews.com By Shakila Abrahimkhil Wednesday, 20 February 2013
The government will consult with a broad cross-section of the country through a jirga to decided whether to ratify the security pact with Washington, the second vice president said Wednesday.
Vice President Khalili added that the jirga is expected to take place sometime in June this year.
"The government refers to the people to decide on some important issues. The signing of the strategic agreement [technically] allows us to sign the security pact, but to strengthen this matter the government wants to consult with the people," Khalili said.
Opposition political parties have strongly opposed the use of jirgas to decide important national matters.
"Often, meetings are held under them name of jirgas. With all due respect to attendees of such jirgas - my point isn't about the people - but according to the law, that's a misuse of jirgas, not an exercise to give people representation," said opposition leader Abdullah Abdullah.
The opposition parties believe Afghanistan faces significant security challenges as Isaf troops withdraw and should therefore prioritize the signing of the pact.
"A jirga means additional talk. The security pact is part of the long-term [strategic] cooperation agreement that was signed between the two countries. The jirga is, in a way, a misuse of the budget," said Astana Shirzad, head of the Afghan National Party.
The issue if legal immunity for US troops is one of the sticking points in the security pact, but some opposition parties are urging the government to ignore the issue. They believe that Afghanistan should follow the example of other countries that host US troops with legal immunity.
Taliban's Shadow District Governor Joins Peace Process
TOLOnews.com Wednesday, 20 February 2013
The Taliban shadow governor for the Dehdadi District of Balkh province and 15 of his fighters have joined the peace process after mediation by tribal elders and the provincial peace council.
Gul khan, the shadow governor, is believed to have trained in Pakistan and worked with insurgent groups in Balkh province for the last four years.
"We are tired of war, so we are joining the peace process. I ask all my disaffected brothers to join the peace process to bring lasting security in our country," Gul Khan said.
The provincial peace council asked the government to help those who join the peace process reintegrate into society.
"The relevant [government] organs should try to create job opportunities for people joining the peace process to prevent them from reverting to the insurgency," Akhtar Muhammad Ibrahimkhil said.
According to the provincial peace council, around 300 insurgents have laid down their weapons in Balkh over the last 18 months.
Tax Collection Key to Financial Self-Sufficiency: Gov't
TOLOnews.com By Zabihullah Jhanmal Wednesday, 20 February 2013
The Ministry of Finance said that broadening the tax net could be an important step toward financial self-sufficiency for Afghanistan, indicating that a large number of taxpayers evade taxes or don't pay taxes on time.
"We are endeavoring to make grounds for more tax payments and encourage taxpayers to pay their taxes on time," said Ahmad Shah Zamanzai, head of the ministry's General Revenues Department.
But a number of individuals and foreign companies, especially some US military contractors, are exempt from taxes. The government is trying to abolish those exemptions to increase tax revenues.
"We are endeavoring to remove these exemptions, as these incomes could increase our revenues. We have [already] made some progress in this regard," Zamanzai said.
The ministry classifies business into three categories of large, medium and small enterprises for tax purposes. There are currently 400 large, 12,000 medium, and 20,000 small companies in Kabul alone.
The tax law has set income tax rates between two to 20 percent, and sales tax rates of two, five, and 10 percent. Income taxes are two percent for salaries between $200 to $250, ten percent for salaries between $250 to $2,000, and 20 percent for salaries over $ 2,000 per month.
According to the Ministry of Finance, the biggest challenges to tax collection are insecurity, a lack of sufficient capacity for tax collection and tax evasion.
Independent analysts also point to other problems such as corruption inside tax offices and bribes by taxpayers to reduce tax payments.
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