Tweet
18 Killed in Afghan Attacks During Hagel's Visit
Sharon Behn VOA News March 9, 2013
ISLAMABAD — A suicide bomber riding a bicycle blew himself up outside the Afghan Defense Ministry Saturday while U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel was in Kabul, but the Pentagon chief was nowhere near the scene. Another suicide bomber in the eastern city of Khost killed a policeman, children and other civilians. Together, the two incidents claimed 18 lives, and highlighted serious concerns about security in Afghanistan.
A spokesman for the international forces in Afghanistan, Charlie Stadtlander, said Hagel was not in the defense ministry at the time. He said there was no apparent connection between the bombing and the Pentagon chief's visit to the Afghan capital.
"I don't see any link at all. He was inside... a briefing and continued with his briefing," he said. "If you want to talk about the intentions of the attack, you're going to have to talk to the Taliban. We can't speak for their intentions."
The Taliban said it carried out the blast as a "message" for Hagel, who arrived Friday on his first visit to Afghanistan since taking over as President Barack Obama's defense secretary. The United States and Afghanistan are trying to hammer out an agreement on how many international forces will remain in the country after U.S. troops and other NATO forces leave in 2014.
A Defense Ministry spokesman, General Zahir Azimi, told reporters that all bomb casualties were civilians.
He said a suicide bomber riding a bicycle detonated an explosives-filled vest he was wearing. The blast "unfortunately caused a number of civilian casualties," the spokesman said, but "no military personnel were killed."
A witness to the attack, Kamaludden described the scene outside the ministry Saturday morning:
He said, "I was walking when the explosion happened. There were dead bodies and wounded people everywhere. And there were people firing, too."
There are concerns in Afghanistan about the nation's future after the end of 2014, the time when all international forces are due to have departed.
Despite an increase in the number of security forces Afghanistan has deployed, the latest incident highlights the fragility of security, even in protected areas of the capital.
Spring is beginning in Afghanistan, and the end of winter usually marks an increase in insurgent activity by Taliban fighters.
Pentagon chief Hagel makes 1st trip to Afghanistan
By LOLITA C. BALDOR | Associated Press – Fri, Mar 8, 2013.
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel arrived in Afghanistan Friday for his first visit as Pentagon chief, saying that there are plenty of challenges ahead as NATO hands over the country's security to the Afghans.
"We are still at war," Hagel said, warning the U.S. and its allies to remain focused on the mission while noting that the U.S. never intended to stay in Afghanistan indefinitely.
"That transition has to be done right, it has to be done in partnership with the Afghans, with our allies," said Hagel, who took over the Pentagon job a little more than a week ago. "Our country as well as Afghanistan, the region, and the allies have a lot at stake here. And our continued focus and energy and attention on Afghanistan is going to be very important."
He said it was vital to remember why the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in the days after the 9/11 attacks, including the need to rid the country of terrorists and a hostile government.
On the day of Hagel's arrival, there was a fresh reminder of the conflict. Defense officials said three men wearing Afghan army uniforms and driving an Afghan army vehicle forced their way onto a U.S. base in eastern Afghanistan at midday and opened fire, killing one civilian contractor and wounding other U.S. troops.
Hagel told reporters traveling with him that he plans to talk to Afghan President Hamid Karzai about the recent order expelling U.S. commandos from Wardak Province. He would not say what his message to Karzai might be.
Karzai ordered that U.S. special operations forces leave within two weeks because of allegations that Afghans working with the commandos were involved in abusive behavior and torture.
The order comes despite worries that it could leave the region more vulnerable to al-Qaida and other insurgents. U.S. officials have said they have seen no evidence that American forces were involved in the abuse of Afghan civilians. Hagel is slated to meet with U.S. commanders and Afghan leaders and plans to make his first detailed assessment of the increasingly unpopular war.
His unannounced visit comes at a turning point in the conflict, as U.S. and NATO allies set their timetable for the withdrawal of combat troops and pressure mounts on the U.S.-led effort to train the Afghan forces. Hagel must manage the transition as the U.S. steps up what will be a difficult and expensive extraction of equipment from the country even as Congress slashes billions of dollars from the defense budget.
"I need to better understand what's going on there," Hagel told reporters during the flight to Kabul. He said he wants an assessment on the progress of the Afghan forces as they prepare to take over the security of their own country.
Hagel traveled to Afghanistan four times during his two terms as senator for Nebraska, including once in 2002 shortly after the war began, in 2006 and twice in 2008. His final two visits were in 2008, once in February with then Sens. Joe Biden and John Kerry — now the vice president and secretary of state, and in July with then-Sen. Barack Obama.
While Hagel initially supported the Afghanistan war when he was senator, his enthusiasm diminished as the conflict dragged on for more than 10 years. He pointedly observed that militaries are "built to fight and win wars, not bind together failing nations." And in a radio interview this year, he acknowledged the nation's growing weariness with the war that has claimed the lives of more than 2,000 U.S. troops and wounded another 18,000, saying that "the American people want out" of Afghanistan.
His review of the war will likely be colored in part by his own military service. Hagel is the first Vietnam veteran to lead the Pentagon, and the first man to become defense secretary after serving only in the enlisted ranks. All the other secretaries with military service eventually served as officers. Hagel served in Vietnam alongside his brother, was wounded twice and was awarded two Purple Hearts.
There are currently about 66,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, down from a peak of about 100,000 in 2010. The U.S. troop total is scheduled to drop to about 32,000 by early next year, with the bulk of the decline coming over the winter months.
And, while there has been no final decision on the size of the post-2014 force, U.S. and NATO leaders say they are considering a range between 8,000 and 12,000. The size of that residual force is sharply smaller than what the top U.S. commander in the Middle East recommended. Gen. James Mattis, head of U.S. Central Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee earlier this week that his personal recommendation was for a U.S. force of 13,600, with the expectation that NATO allies would contribute another 6,000 to 7,000.
Hagel would not say what his assessment of the final post-2014 numbers is yet. But, he added that, "it is the Afghan people who need to make, and will make, their own decisions about their future. We can help. We have helped, as well as our allies. But there does come a time when that should be transitioned."
And the transition, he said, is happening in a way that gives the Afghan people "a very hopeful future."
The U.S. is currently in the early stages of negotiating a bilateral security agreement with Kabul that would set the legal parameters for America's continued military and diplomatic involvement with the nation.
Another source of anxiety among the allies is Afghanistan's 2014 presidential election; Karzai, who has led the country since U.S. forces toppled the Taliban in late 2001, is not running and there is no obvious successor.
Transfer of US Prison to Afghans Delayed
VOA News March 9, 2013
A ceremony marking the long-awaited, complete transfer of a controversial detention center from U.S. to Afghan control has been abruptly canceled.
The event at Bagram prison, which had been announced by Afghan President Hamid Karzai, was canceled Saturday, the same day the milestone transfer was scheduled to take place.
U.S. military officials said the ceremony was canceled because they could not finalize the agreement with the Afghans.
A NATO spokesman said the transfer will proceed once the two sides have reached a "full agreement."
More than 3,000 Bagram prisoners were transferred to Afghan officials in September.
U.S. Cancels Transfer of Bagram Prison to Afghans
New York Times By ROD NORDLAND March 9, 2013
KABUL, Afghanistan - A ceremony in which the American military had planned to hand over full control of the Bagram Prison to Afghanistan was canceled Saturday, throwing into doubt an agreement between the two countries on custody of the remaining Afghan prisoners still being held by American forces.
The cancellation was likely to be an embarrassment to President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, and comes at an awkward time, when the new secretary of defense, Chuck Hagel, is on his first visit to the country.
There was no official word on why the transfer was canceled, but American officials were known to be upset with Mr. Karzai over remarks he made in a speech on Wednesday in which he criticized the Americans’ slowness on the detention issue and promised to release many of the prisoners as soon as the transfer was complete.
The two countries agreed a year ago to transfer all prisoners detained on the battlefield from American to Afghan custody, and Mr. Karzai has made it a cornerstone of his efforts to demonstrate that his government is regaining full sovereignty. But disputes emerged over how the Afghans would handle the prisoners, many of them dangerous insurgents detained during raids by Special Operations units.
In September, when the accord called for the full transfer to the Afghans, the Americans boycotted a transfer ceremony and canceled the transfer of all prisoners to the Afghans because the two sides could not agree on how to handle the releases. The Americans wanted the prisoners held without trial indefinitely, and the Afghans insisted on holding trials for them.
But last month Mr. Karzai met with President Obama in Washington, and American officials said they had been assured that the Afghans would hold some of the prisoners without trial. Mr. Karzai’s remarks on Wednesday cast doubt on whether the two sides had really reached an understanding on the issue.
“As soon as it takes place, we know there are innocent people in these jails, and I will order their release, as much as I am criticized for it,” he said.
On Saturday, just hours after Mr. Hagel arrived in Afghanistan, a bomb exploded near the entrance to the Afghan Defense Ministry, an area that has come under attack before. Mr. Hagel was not in the area that was attacked, although the blast seemed timed to coincide with his visit and underscored that people intent on setting off bombs can reach the heavily secured capital.
The explosion occurred at about 9 a.m. and was followed by heavy gunfire just as Kabul residents were going to work. A defense ministry spokesman, Gen. Dawlat Waziri, confirmed the attack and said there were casualties but he did not know how many. He said it was probably a car bomb but could not confirm whether it was a suicide bomb or an empty car laden with explosives.
As soon as the bomb exploded, the Defense Ministry locked down its large compound and even employees could not go out to see the damage, said a colonel in the operations department who was reached by telephone. He said the explosion was right at the gate used by employees and visitors, which is normally crowded with people trying to get into the compound.
Alissa J. Rubin contributed reporting.
Afghan parliamentary board voting ended with no result
By Mirwais Adeel - 09 Mar 2013, 8:26 pm Khaama Press
The voting process of the Afghan parliament to elect chairman of the administrative board, first and second deputy speakers and secretary along with deputy secretary for the board ended with no result on Saturday.
Around 11 Afghan lawmakers had participated in the internal election process however none of them managed to achieve 50 plus votes to qualify for the posts.
Under the Afghan constitution house speaker is elected for a period of five years however the other members of the board is selected on yearly basis during the start of the year.
Afghan house speaker Abdul Rauf Ibrahimi said, “The two candidates including Haji Zahir Qadir and Mirwais Yasini could not achieve 50 plus votes and were not selected therefore the two lawmakers can not participate in the second round of the election.”
For the board’s first chairman Haji Zahir Qadir achieve 90 votes while Mirwais Yasini received 99 votes from 221 lawmakers present during the Saturday’s session and the two candidates could not achieve 111 plus votes to qualify.
In the meantime for the board’s vice chairman post, lawmakers Ahmad Shah Ramazan achieve 327 votes while Naimatullah acehived 70 votes and the the other participants for the board’s second vice chairman included Amanullah Paiman who received 61 votes and Asadullah Sadat achieved 36 votes for the same post.
On the other hand for the board’s deputy secretary, Afghan lawmaker from Balkh province and Nilofar Ibrahimi representing Badakhshan province standed for the polling. It is yet not clear if the two candidates have received enough votes to qualify for the board’s deputy secretary.
Attack highlights how a corner of Afghanistan is falling apart
The ambush and killing of 16 Afghan soldiers last weekend is one of the worst setbacks for the country's military in years.
Christian Science Monitor By Ben Arnoldy, Staff writer March 8, 2013
Glance at a map of Afghanistan and the first thing you notice is the long finger of land jutting out of the country’s northeast – the Wakkan Corridor. The government’s ability to reach that area just became more questionable after an attack this weekend that killed 16 Afghan soldiers on the one road that connects it to Afghanistan proper.
I traveled that road in 2010. The area of the ambush – claimed by the Taliban – scared my driver then, who warned me that the next 15 minutes through the ominously-named Warduj district were going to be risky. Outside the windows of our jeep, we left a lightly-forested riparian village and struck east toward an open landscape ringed by the snowy mountains of the Pamir range, whose peaks form the roof of the world and whose slopes tumble into Pakistan, China, and Tajikistan.
Eyes in the jeep weren’t looking up but darting from rock to rock as the road twisted and turned through a giant uninhabited boulder field. The driver pointed out a scorch on the pavement from a recent attack on a police vehicle. The gunmen had hid behind the boulders to waylay the police, miles from any help.
Efforts at putting checkpoints around this area have gone badly, with the Taliban abducting 16 Afghan policemen and killing four others from one checkpoint in an incident last year a few months after German troops handed over security responsibility for the province.
This is Badakshan Province, one of the safest in Afghanistan – safety being a relative metric. Even here, local thugs are carving off chunks of territory for drug profits and power, aided by missteps from the international community and Afghanistan’s pre-existing divisions. To the extent the central government exercises control, it's to decide who gets to profit illegally from government posts.
Once out of the boulder field, prayers passed the lips of my driver and our eyes looked ahead towards Ishkashim, a city on the Afghan border with Tajikistan and gateway to the fabled Wakkan Corridor that juts out from Afghanistan’s borders like a stiletto. Ishkashim is one of two main border crossings that landlocked Afghanistan has with Tajikistan – the other passing through the more violent province of Kunduz. As such, it’s a lifeline of trade and supplies, and a big conduit for illicit drugs.
The United Nations estimates that Afghan smugglers sent 80 tons of heroin and 20 tons of opium into Tajikistan in 2010. In recent years, turf wars have erupted over control of the road to Ishkashim.
Security analyst Thomas Ruttig detailed some of those fights in an alarming writeup last August. At the time, a short-lived armed rebellion had broke out across the border in Tajikistan, led by the commander of the Tajik border police post at Ishkashim – a lucrative post if one is involved in smuggling. Mr. Ruttig argues the rebellion had its roots in the Afghan drug economy, as it appeared to touch off political infighting on the Afghanistan side which implied “rearrangements in drug-trafficking networks.”
One of those rearrangements came when Afghan officials arrested a district police chief named Qari Wadud that summer. According to Ruttig, Mr. Wadud had drug processing factories and was moving a lot of product out to Tajikstan. Tajik officials convinced their Afghan counterparts that Wadud was also playing a role in the unrest on the Tajik side of the border.
Uprooting such officials can touch off conflict for the Afghan government. During my visit to the province in 2010, I was woken one night in the city of Baharak by the steadily approaching sound of gunfire. Militants attacked the district government headquarters, destroying a portion of the building with a rocket. The source of the fighting might have been a disgruntled former official, according to a 2011 report from the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit (AREU):
Recent security incidents in Baharak District were attributed to the replacement of the long-serving district police chief. In Baharak, the position is a lucrative one given its central position to trade in opium in the province, and the displaced chief is assumed by many to be behind the sudden rise in insecurity.
Baharak is the last major settlement on the road heading east to Ishkasham. Between lies the boulder field of Warduj, a district that has a significant number of insurgents. The pocket of fighters there is a puzzling development considering that the entire province contains almost no ethnic Pashtuns, who make up the vast majority of the insurgency elsewhere, and Badakshan was a last redoubt for the Northern Alliance during their darkest hours fighting the former Taliban government in Kabul. The insurgents in Warduj appear to be supporting themselves by infiltration routes from nearby Pakistan and possibly the drug trade that they allow to flow along the same road that they deny to police and army personnel.
From Ruttig’s report:
the insurgents – who, since November [2011], regularly seem to have been positioning checkpoints on a key road leading from the provincial capital Faizabad to Baharak, Warduj and further on to Zebak, Ishkashem and Tajikistan – are also cooperating in the safe passage for drug convoys coming from Darayem and Baharak, as a ‘contribution to jehad’, namely by ‘sending drugs to the enemies of Islam’.
The gradual slide of Badakshan into a scrum for a piece of the poppy trade goes hand-in-hand with the return of poppy cultivation to the province. In the late 2000s, the province was considered nearly “poppy-free” as the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) promised to bring development to the province.
USAID would ultimately spend $60 million over four years, but spend it badly. Hydroelectric projects were left incomplete, newly-paved roads fell apart in months, and a pricey veterinary lab shut down when the government couldn’t keep paying salaries, according to an investigation I did for the Monitor.
Residents of Badakshan cite the failed promises as a reason for restarting the cultivation of poppy, according to the AREU report:
The informants in [Badakshan] were blunt about how far such efforts had fallen below their expectations. [M]ost of the money that had been promised did not arrive, and the projects that did take place were not seen as bringing long-term benefits: “we have given up our weapons, given up poppy but there is nothing for income, the government has done nothing.”
The report found other reason that residents returned to poppy: Their sons who joined the Afghan military and served in southern provinces like Helmand noticed that the Afghan government and the US Marines there openly allowed farmers to cultivate poppy. At the same time, the southern Pashtun-dominated provinces were getting more development aid.
Both gripes are absolutely true. On an embed to the US mission’s southernmost outpost in 2010, the Marines in Helmand explained to me that the counterinsurgency thinking in vogue at the time meant that their mission was to win over the support of local residents. Nothing angered farmers working that ditch-scarred desert more than eradicating their poppy crops, so the Marines said they wouldn’t do that.
Instead, the US showered development money on the insurgency-ridden southern regions in the hope of shoring up support for the US-backed government. In Helmand, too, the projects are incomplete: The US just announced it won’t finish work on restoring the Kajaki dam, a projected needed to power the south; instead, money will be given to the Afghans to finish it.
Can the Afghan government keep control over such corners of a difficult and drug-fueled country to take up the work of nation-building? The news out of Badakshan isn't encouraging.
Pakistan supply routes open, but move gear slowly into Afghanistan
Reuters By Phil Stewart and David Alexander Sat Mar 9, 2013
WASHINGTON - It is the least expensive way to get food and fuel to U.S. troops in Afghanistan. But eight months after Pakistan reopened its ground supply routes for the NATO war effort, hardly any new cargo has taken that path into the landlocked country.
Instead, supplies have been moving almost entirely along far more expensive routes, one of several factors that have prompted senior Pentagon officials to warn that Afghan war costs are higher than projected at a time of increasingly tight budgets.
In what was hailed as diplomatic breakthrough, the United States and Pakistan agreed to reopen the supply lines last July after Washington issued a reluctant apology for an air attack that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers along the Afghan border in November 2011.
But restoring the Pakistani supply routes to full service after a seven-month closure has taken time. The United States has cleared upward of 5,000 of the 7,000 pieces of backlogged cargo in the supply routes.
But data from the U.S. Military's Transportation Command show that only 40 containers of new cargo have moved across Pakistani ground routes since July. At the same time, about 28,000 20-foot containers came through alternate pathways, known as the Northern Distribution Network, into Afghanistan from July 2012 through last month.
General William Fraser, head of Transcom, said the situation was improving. After months of working to clear a backlog of supplies and deal with procedural issues, cargo movement on the Pakistani supply lines has improved and officials are ready to use them more heavily, he said.
"It's all moving in the right direction," Fraser told Reuters. "Now we've just got to up the rate."
VITAL ROUTES
Reopening the routes was considered vital to the U.S. war effort. Beyond being cheaper, they are seen as the best way to remove military equipment from Afghanistan as the 11-year-old conflict draws to a close.
Last year, then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta estimated the closure of Pakistan's supply routes cost U.S. taxpayers about $100 million more a month for the use of alternatives - either by air or through the NDN, a series of complicated pathways across Europe, Russia, and Central Asia.
That cost has come down as the size of the U.S. force in Afghanistan has fallen to about 66,000 today from 94,000 when Pakistan closed the routes. But it still costs about $61 million more a month to use the NDN and other alternatives rather than Pakistan, Pentagon spokesman Mark Wright said.
Fraser said there were several reasons for the slow start-up. They included the need to work through a backlog of cargo; reach agreement on how to re-export equipment that was no longer needed; obtain new rates from contractors; and decide on the process for bringing military cargo out of Afghanistan.
He said that fewer than 2,000 pieces of cargo remained in the backlog left over from the closure. Some of that cargo belonged to military units no longer in Afghanistan, so it will be re-exported, which required developing new procedures.
Fraser said the Pakistani bureaucracy also had to work out its own procedures for issuing permits at the border to allow equipment to be imported into the country for the purposes of taking it to Karachi to be loaded on ships.
"Those are all in place now," Fraser said. "It just took time to work through that."
REVERSING THE FLOW
After reaching a memorandum of understanding on reopening the supply lines, the two sides negotiated terms for handling new shipments both to and from Afghanistan. Previously, cargo only moved into Afghanistan.
The Pentagon said it expected to start regular shipments bringing equipment out of Afghanistan along Pakistan's ground routes this month at about 100 pieces of cargo a week. That figure would gradually increase over the course of the spring and summer.
Fraser said his discussions with Pakistani officials last month were aimed at getting traffic on the supply lines back to the levels they were at before the closure last year - about 30 percent of all cargo.
"That ... would mean 50 to 60 pieces crossing daily," he said. "That's our goal right now and they understand that. They're in agreement, so let's work first to get back to those pre-closure levels of crossings."
Navy Commander Bill Speaks, another Pentagon spokesman, said the U.S. military planned to use the Pakistani ground routes for roughly 50 percent to 60 percent of the cargo removed from Afghanistan as part of the U.S. drawdown.
Ramping up the use of the Pakistan supply lines could help ease financial pressure on the military services, which have been hit with a number of financial constraints, including a $46 billion automatic spending cut that went into force on March 1.
Discussing budget difficulties, several senior Pentagon officials have cited the unexpectedly high war costs this fiscal year and attributed part of that to the slow reopening of the Pakistan supply lines.
"When we put that ... budget together almost two years ago, we didn't anticipate the same tempo of operations that are going on right now," Pentagon Comptroller Robert Hale told a conference this week. "And we're seeing higher transportation costs as we're flying goods in and out of Afghanistan." (Editing by Warren Strobel and Peter Cooney)
Malina Suliman, Afghanistan’s Graffiti Queen
Malina Suliman’s murals of skeletons in burqas are breaking down barriers in Afghanistan—and have prompted threats and attacks from the Taliban.
The Daily Beast By Zeenat Nagree Mar 9, 2013
These days, when Malina Suliman wakes up in the rented apartment that she shares with her family in Mumbai, she’s most concerned about hiding the newspapers. The 23-year-old artist from Afghanistan wants to conceal the attention she’s receiving in the Indian and international press for her bold graffiti, in the hope that when she returns to her country later this month, she’ll be allowed to continue making her art.
Suliman’s family arrived in India in early January for medical care after her father, a property developer, was injured in attack that, the family suspects, was planned by the Taliban. They’d received previous threats from the extremists, Suliman says. “I feel really bad that my father has to suffer because of me,” she says. “But I don’t regret what I have done. Why don’t women have freedom? Why don’t we have equal rights?”
Suliman—who was inspired by the political potential of graffiti in 2010 when she attended a workshop held by a visiting British artist—says her family has little knowledge of her work, which has outraged conservative groups in Afghanistan. The artist’s signature motif—a skeleton in a blue burqa, which she has sprayed on walls in Kabul and Kandahar—is a pointed metaphor for her own condition in her homeland and the inequality and repression that Afghan women face. Because of her graffiti art and its defiant political statements, Suliman says she has faced warnings and abuse from onlookers in Kandahar, where she is one of the few female artists. “People would say bad words and threaten to attack me,” she says. “Some even threw stones at me.” She says she’s grateful for the freedom she enjoys in Mumbai, where she doesn’t need to wear a veil.
Suliman’s burqa-clad skeletons have resonated worldwide but she says the work that first prompted threats from the Taliban was a sculpture of a disabled child exhibit at a gallery in Kandahar in November last year. Suliman kept her artwork from her parents until another intimidating letter arrived; this one blasted her graffiti panel depicting an ordinary Afghan caught between the Taliban and Westerners. A few days later, her father was attacked by unknown men and, out of fear for her family’s safety, she told them about her graffiti.
Trained in realism in an art school in Pakistan, Suliman’s education was cut short in 2009, when her family brought her back to Afghanistan before her final year of studies. “My family wanted me to leave art forever,” she said. Accustomed to the relative freedom of life in her hometown of Kabul, Suliman found Kandahar confining, and spent much of the next year cut off from her art. “In that year, there were many questions that arose in my mind about girls like me, who want to do something but are not allowed to do it,” Suliman said. In this time of ferment, Suliman found some support from inside her family. Among her nine siblings, she was able to rely on two of her sisters for inspiration. One of them took her to an art gallery in Kabul in 2010. “When I saw the paintings I couldn’t understand what I was feeling,” she said. “I was screaming and crying. I didn’t know if I was happy or not.”
“I don’t regret what I have done. Why don’t women have freedom? Why don’t we have equal rights?”
After that cataclysmic experience, the young artist decided to pursue her ambitions and has been prolific since. She has shown her paintings, sculptures and installations in several exhibitions in Kabul and Kandahar and has left her imprint anonymously on public walls in both cities. In Kandahar, she is part of the Kandahar Fine Art Association, founded in 2011 to promote art in the region. The government has been encouraging. Artists from the collective have succeeded in attracting state funding and have been given space for a gallery; they’ve even shown their work in the presidential palace in Kabul. In the capital city, Suliman is part of Berang, a well-versed network of artists, some of whom have shown abroad. Among the group, Shamsia Hassani works with the motif of the woman in the blue burqa as well, though her images tend to be less provocative than Suliman’s skeleton peeking through the veil.
“Malina makes strong motifs,” said Shreekant Khairnar, Suliman’s teacher at the Sir J.J. School of Art in Mumbai. “She is trying to learn a lot in a short time.” Indeed, time is running out. If Suliman doesn’t get a visa extension, she will have to return to Afghanistan by March 24. She is uncertain if she will be able to continue making art, an eventuality that is harder to accept in the liberal climate of Mumbai. Suliman would be happy in the more agreeable atmosphere of Kabul but she fears for her safety in Kandahar. “My family thinks that I should give up art,” she says. “They have seen the risks and they fear that it will be worse when we return. Just thinking about going back makes it difficult for me to breathe. But if I stop making art, what about other women? If I continue, some other women may join me.”
For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at editorial@thedailybeast.com.
Kabul debates women's law 'violating Sharia'
DW 08/03/2013
A draft law that would end violence against women is being debated in the Afghan Parliament. But it is finding little support among MPs, who feel that it violates traditional values.
It has been three years since Afghan President Hamid Karzai signed a decree to end violence against women. The draft law, which is supposed to allow women more freedom and protect them from violence, has yet to be adopted in parliament. But courts can use it as a basis for their work.
Opponents of the decree say it contradicts Sharia - the moral code and religious law of Islam. Most of the proponents, however, are among the 68 women in parliament, for whom a quarter of the seats are reserved. They are trying to reconcile a modern interpretation of Islam with the law.
"They are all fundamentalists and extremists," Member of Parliament (MP) Masooda Karochi told DW. "If a lunatic protests that this law is against Sharia, then you can imagine what consequences it can have." Sharia proponents make it impossible to have a constructive discussion, she noted.
Controversy over the age of marriage
For supporters of Sharia law, physical abuse should not be considered an act of violence against women, Masooda Karochi said. But because physical abuse of women is the norm in Afghanistan, Karzai's decree has allowed women to report incidences of domestic violence, leading to the break up of several families.
In the draft, the legal age of marriage is 16 - another thorn in the side of its opponents. Basing their argument on Islam, they say that the beginning of puberty determines when a girl can be married. Also, Sharia stipulates that fathers alone can make decisions on whom their daughters marry and when.
Law provokes violence
The draft law is also provoking its opponents because it says that women should be allowed to work. "Islam says that a woman cannot work outside the house unless she has her husband's permission. It is the responsibility of the man to fulfill all the needs of his wife," said MP Sayed Hossain Alemi Balkhi. "If this is the case, then the man certainly has the right to expect his wife to ask for his permission before she leaves the house."
Balkhi believes that it is all propaganda - an effort by activists and local media, who are trying to draw attention to violence against women. And instead of trying to curb violence against women, they are only fueling it, he said. "Let's say your husband beats you and you leave for a women's shelter. You leave your home because your husband beats you. Then you stay there waiting for him to come and take you back."
The MP believes the law would not end abuse. "The husband would definitely end up killing his wife the next time. Instead of curbing violence, the law provokes it further." This view is widespread among conservative MPs. And the arguments of the proponents of the draft law, especially the female MPs, fall on deaf ears.
A symbolic law
Even if the draft law to end violence against women were to be passed, it would hardly change their situation. Aziz Rafi, who heads the Afghanistan Civil Society Forum, believes the battle is lost.
"Afghan law is very problematic and complicated. There is a lot of corruption. We doubt that the law will help curb violence against women," he told DW.
Afghan women are not pinning their hopes on this draft law. Their continued support for it is more about sending a clear signal.
USAID to put $300 million into women's rights in Afghanistan
Can aid agencies and other foreign actors, even with $300 million, truly influence attitudes in a society that has so long treated women as second-class citizens?
Christian Science Monitor By Paige McClanahan, Correspondent March 8, 2013
Kabul, Afghanistan - To a visitor wandering through the streets of Kabul – a capital city with an international airport, a multi-story shopping mall, and a population of 3.2 million – the blue ghosts are hard to ignore. The city’s sidewalks are full of them: figures shrouded in burqas – long swathes of cloth that cover the wearer completely, apart from a small scrap of mesh fabric in front of the eyes that offers a window onto the world outside.
Those ghosts of Kabul, all of whom are women, are less common today than when Afghanistan was under the Taliban’s rule in the 1990s, when it was against the law for a woman to leave her house unless she was wearing a burqa. And today, there are almost as many women on the streets of Kabul who wear headscarves that leave their faces, if not their hair, exposed.
But while the standing of women in Afghan society has improved in some ways since the dark days of the Taliban, thanks in part to the work of international aid agencies and nongovernmental organizations, much is left to be done: Literacy rates among Afghan women hover around 12 percent; more than 90 percent of women here believe that their husbands are justified in beating them if they misbehave, and there are tremendous cultural hurdles to leap along the way.
The latest, biggest move on Afghan women’s issues is coming from the US government. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) announced in 2012 that it plans to spend $313 million to support the development of Afghan women over the next five years.
It is a massive undertaking in terms of the sheer amount of money, which is more, observers say, than anything that has been spent on women’s issues in the past in this country. But the project also faces serious challenges, in terms of security, management, and execution.
“It’s encouraging that the US is showing that kind of long-term commitment to Afghan women but nobody knows what’s going to happen over the next five years,” says Louise Hancock, the head of policy and advocacy at Oxfam Afghanistan. “It’s a shame that they didn’t look at doing this kind of project earlier when there would have been a greater chance of success.” Tenuous time for Afghanistan
With most international forces due to leave Afghanistan by the end of 2014, no one knows what the security situation will look like two years from now. The Taliban and other insurgent groups still control many rural areas of Afghanistan, and their suicide attacks have struck Kabul at a rate of at least once a month over the past few years.
Things could become even more complicated if Afghanistan’s government, which is currently led by President Hamid Karzai, reaches out to conservative groups to further the peace process after international forces leave.
Such considerations led one nongovernmental organization, the Afghanistan Human Rights and Democracy Organization, to conclude in a 2012 report that “most of women’s important achievements over the last decade are likely to be reversed” after 2014.
The USAID project, called Women in Transition, aims to further women’s rights at precisely this challenging time.
Supporting Afghan women could “greatly improve the country’s development prospects during and after Transition,” USAID said in a 300-page draft document that was released in January. “It is the ideal moment in time to substantiate the [US government’s] pledge to Afghan women that ‘we will not abandon you!’”
The project is certainly ambitious in scope: Among its many goals, it aims to place 7,500 young women in government internships; offer business training for women entrepreneurs; help Afghan universities develop women’s studies curricula; and give promising young women the chance to meet female leaders who might serve as role models. ‘Brilliant’ concept, but will it work?
“The concept is brilliant,” says Farkhundah Naderi, a female Afghan parliamentarian, after reviewing the USAID document that offers details on the project. “But I hope there is going to be very strong monitoring,” she added. “At the end of the day, effectiveness is so important.”
That’s an element that hasn’t always been present in previous foreign aid projects that have aimed to help Afghan women, Ms. Naderi says. At the same time, the constant push on women’s rights since the fall of the Taliban has left some Afghans with a bitter taste in their mouths.
“For 11 years they have heard ‘women’s rights, women’s rights, women’s rights,’ and they cannot see that much difference in their lives,” Naderi says, adding that “men are jealous” of the attention that has been showered on women.
That raises the larger question of whether aid agencies and other foreign actors can truly influence attitudes in a society that has so long treated women as second-class citizens.
Building long-term relationships at the community level is critical to changing people’s mindsets, says Chona Echavez, the deputy director for research at the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit, an NGO based in Kabul. Over time, Ms. Echavez says, she has seen Afghan men adjust their views on how women should be treated, especially when they have been presented with hard data on topics like women’s health.
“People should not just say because of tradition, because of culture, because of security, we cannot do this,” Echavez says. “It’s really a process there are no shortcuts.”
2014 could be turning point for Afghanistan: Experts
The Gulf Today By Raghib Hassan March 09, 2013
DUBAI - The year 2014 is a year of hope, courage, dream and development for the people of Afghanistan, since US President Barrack Obama has set a deadline to withdraw foreign troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2014.
However, experts have a different opinion. While some of them see it as a hope for the future, others have some reservations.
Deliberating on “Which Afghanistan?” during a panel discussion on the fourth day of the ongoing Emirates Airline Festival of Literature in Dubai, Middle East commentator and journalist Abdel Bari Atwan, who interviewed Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan in 1996, said, “America miscalculated Afghanistan. Billions of dollars would have been used in constructive development rather than only bombing the Taliban forces.”
Joining him in the discussion, travel-writer and historian William Dalrymple said, “Rather than bombing Taliban, we could have held elections. We could have constructed schools and hospitals or done some developmental work but we ended up spending only on security. Nothing has changed in Afghanistan in all these years, except for the fact that girls have started going to school,” said Dalrymple.
Criticising the role of the West, another panellist Sandy Gall, who has been reporting on Afghanistan for 30 years, said, “The West has lost the war in Afghanistan and now they just want a dignified exit.”
Responding to the question on who will take over Afghanistan, he said, “Taliban, which still constitutes 45 per cent of the population, will come back to power, but more wisely.”
Pressing on the need for development, he said, “There is a need to rebuild Afghanistan and we need to have a master plan. We can train Taliban for good governance.”
Sharing his views on the subject, Gall added that now Taliban won’t prevent women from going for education, which they have done in the past.
Summing up the West’s stand on Afghanistan, Gall said, “They have completely failed in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. The time has come to create a future model of democracy in Afghanistan.”
Talking about the impact of the Taliban in today’s Afghanistan, Dalrymple said, “They can bomb cities and can create panic only. Now Afghans have a hope despite all the troubles in the past. Now people are connected through Facebook and satellite channels have opened their minds. They are looking for development. People already have started moving from the valley to the city. Now the worst is over.”
Echoing his opinion, Gall said that there are hopes of democracy in Afghanistan. They already have the Jirga system in place (a form of tribal system) where elders take decisions.
Talking about the democracy, Atwan stressed that Afghanistan has enough forces and they are now longing for peace, development and stability.
“First we have to develop their country, democracy will automatically come into action,” he concluded.
Netherlands end Afghan police training mission in July
By Sayed Jawad - 09 Mar 2013, 8:39 pm Khaama Press
Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte on Friday announced to withdraw military trainers from Afghanistan earlier than planned.
While speaking during a weekly post-cabinet press conference Mark Rutte said, “We have decided to end the training mission on July 1.”
“The Afghans are ready sooner than planned to take responsibility for police training in Kunduz,” he said.
In the meantime he said around 200 other members of the 545-strong Dutch deployment in Afghanistan will remain as planned until next year, mainly at the northern base of Mazar-e-Sharif, where four Dutch F-16 fighter planes are stationed.
Dutch military F-16 jets are mainly used to find roadside bombs and boost security on the ground.
Netherlands deployed around 1,950 troops as part of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), mainly in the central Uruzgan province, for four years until their withdrawal in August 2010 after a mission that claimed the lives of 24 Dutch soldiers.
Police trainers were send to Afghanistan as part of the a new group of military personnel deployed in the country after Dutch lawmakers endorsed a proposal in early 2011.
Contractor Killed on a U.S. Base in Afghanistan
New York Times By AZAM AHMED March 8, 2013
KABUL, Afghanistan - A civilian contractor was killed on an American base Friday afternoon when three men wearing Afghan National Army uniforms stormed the gate and began firing, military officials said, in what appeared to be the second insider attack on Western troops this year.
The attack, at Forward Operating Base Tagab in the northern province of Kapisa, also wounded four coalition troops, two of them seriously, before the attackers were killed, officials said. Officials were unsure about whether the attackers were Afghan soldiers or impostors. Initial reports that two Afghan soldiers had been killed could not be immediately confirmed.
A sharp rise last year in insider attacks, in which Afghan security forces turn their guns on their Western allies, greatly strained relations and threatened the military and police training mission at the heart of the coalition’s plans to withdraw in 2014. Extensive new safeguards were put in place, including stricter security guidelines for American troops and tougher vetting of recruits by the Afghan forces.
The attack on Friday, however, served as a reminder of how difficult such violence is to prevent. The attack began around 1:30 p.m., when the three uniformed men slammed an Afghan Army vehicle into the main gate of the coalition base, officials said. A firefight then broke out, resulting in the deaths of the attackers and the civilian contractor, whose nationality was not immediately announced.
The reason for the assault was not clear, and the Taliban did not claim responsibility for it, which they are usually quick to do.
Such attacks are often the product of Taliban infiltrators who have gone through the military recruitment and training process. But cultural clashes, in which Afghan soldiers have responded violently to perceived mistreatment or slights by their American counterparts, have also been a factor.
Kapisa Province has been difficult to secure, and fighting in the Tagab district, where the American outpost is situated, has been especially fierce. The district has also been the scene of past insider attacks. In early 2012, four French soldiers were killed by an Afghan soldier while on patrol there, prompting threats from France to withdraw from Afghanistan sooner than promised. The last French troops left Afghanistan in December.
The government also noted on Friday that five Afghan police officers had been killed this week while carrying out a poppy eradication campaign in western Farah Province.
Three of the officers died when an improvised explosive device buried in the fields exploded on Tuesday, during the first day of a three-day mission in the Khak-e-Saped district. The other two died on Thursday, after a separate explosive planted by the Taliban detonated. In an ensuing firefight with insurgents, nine officers were wounded, and four Taliban fighters were killed, officials said.
The lure of profit from poppy cultivation has brought insurgents and poppy farmers together in many cases, finding common cause against haphazard government efforts to eradicate crops. Farmers can make far more cash growing poppies than almost any other crop, while insurgents impose lucrative taxes on poppy production, generating an estimated $155 million for the Taliban last year.
Eradication is controversial among aid groups. Many organizations see the destruction of crops without financial compensation as flawed policy.
“Opium eradication is never the solution,” said Jean-Luc Lemahieu, the chief of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime for Afghanistan. “It’s a blunt instrument, and if it is not connected to altered livelihoods, it proves not sustainable and oftentimes arbitrary.”
Taimoor Shah contributed reporting from Kandahar, and Alissa J. Rubin from Kabul.
www.afghanistannewscenter.com
Sharon Behn VOA News March 9, 2013
ISLAMABAD — A suicide bomber riding a bicycle blew himself up outside the Afghan Defense Ministry Saturday while U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel was in Kabul, but the Pentagon chief was nowhere near the scene. Another suicide bomber in the eastern city of Khost killed a policeman, children and other civilians. Together, the two incidents claimed 18 lives, and highlighted serious concerns about security in Afghanistan.
A spokesman for the international forces in Afghanistan, Charlie Stadtlander, said Hagel was not in the defense ministry at the time. He said there was no apparent connection between the bombing and the Pentagon chief's visit to the Afghan capital.
"I don't see any link at all. He was inside... a briefing and continued with his briefing," he said. "If you want to talk about the intentions of the attack, you're going to have to talk to the Taliban. We can't speak for their intentions."
The Taliban said it carried out the blast as a "message" for Hagel, who arrived Friday on his first visit to Afghanistan since taking over as President Barack Obama's defense secretary. The United States and Afghanistan are trying to hammer out an agreement on how many international forces will remain in the country after U.S. troops and other NATO forces leave in 2014.
A Defense Ministry spokesman, General Zahir Azimi, told reporters that all bomb casualties were civilians.
He said a suicide bomber riding a bicycle detonated an explosives-filled vest he was wearing. The blast "unfortunately caused a number of civilian casualties," the spokesman said, but "no military personnel were killed."
A witness to the attack, Kamaludden described the scene outside the ministry Saturday morning:
He said, "I was walking when the explosion happened. There were dead bodies and wounded people everywhere. And there were people firing, too."
There are concerns in Afghanistan about the nation's future after the end of 2014, the time when all international forces are due to have departed.
Despite an increase in the number of security forces Afghanistan has deployed, the latest incident highlights the fragility of security, even in protected areas of the capital.
Spring is beginning in Afghanistan, and the end of winter usually marks an increase in insurgent activity by Taliban fighters.
Pentagon chief Hagel makes 1st trip to Afghanistan
By LOLITA C. BALDOR | Associated Press – Fri, Mar 8, 2013.
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel arrived in Afghanistan Friday for his first visit as Pentagon chief, saying that there are plenty of challenges ahead as NATO hands over the country's security to the Afghans.
"We are still at war," Hagel said, warning the U.S. and its allies to remain focused on the mission while noting that the U.S. never intended to stay in Afghanistan indefinitely.
"That transition has to be done right, it has to be done in partnership with the Afghans, with our allies," said Hagel, who took over the Pentagon job a little more than a week ago. "Our country as well as Afghanistan, the region, and the allies have a lot at stake here. And our continued focus and energy and attention on Afghanistan is going to be very important."
He said it was vital to remember why the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in the days after the 9/11 attacks, including the need to rid the country of terrorists and a hostile government.
On the day of Hagel's arrival, there was a fresh reminder of the conflict. Defense officials said three men wearing Afghan army uniforms and driving an Afghan army vehicle forced their way onto a U.S. base in eastern Afghanistan at midday and opened fire, killing one civilian contractor and wounding other U.S. troops.
Hagel told reporters traveling with him that he plans to talk to Afghan President Hamid Karzai about the recent order expelling U.S. commandos from Wardak Province. He would not say what his message to Karzai might be.
Karzai ordered that U.S. special operations forces leave within two weeks because of allegations that Afghans working with the commandos were involved in abusive behavior and torture.
The order comes despite worries that it could leave the region more vulnerable to al-Qaida and other insurgents. U.S. officials have said they have seen no evidence that American forces were involved in the abuse of Afghan civilians. Hagel is slated to meet with U.S. commanders and Afghan leaders and plans to make his first detailed assessment of the increasingly unpopular war.
His unannounced visit comes at a turning point in the conflict, as U.S. and NATO allies set their timetable for the withdrawal of combat troops and pressure mounts on the U.S.-led effort to train the Afghan forces. Hagel must manage the transition as the U.S. steps up what will be a difficult and expensive extraction of equipment from the country even as Congress slashes billions of dollars from the defense budget.
"I need to better understand what's going on there," Hagel told reporters during the flight to Kabul. He said he wants an assessment on the progress of the Afghan forces as they prepare to take over the security of their own country.
Hagel traveled to Afghanistan four times during his two terms as senator for Nebraska, including once in 2002 shortly after the war began, in 2006 and twice in 2008. His final two visits were in 2008, once in February with then Sens. Joe Biden and John Kerry — now the vice president and secretary of state, and in July with then-Sen. Barack Obama.
While Hagel initially supported the Afghanistan war when he was senator, his enthusiasm diminished as the conflict dragged on for more than 10 years. He pointedly observed that militaries are "built to fight and win wars, not bind together failing nations." And in a radio interview this year, he acknowledged the nation's growing weariness with the war that has claimed the lives of more than 2,000 U.S. troops and wounded another 18,000, saying that "the American people want out" of Afghanistan.
His review of the war will likely be colored in part by his own military service. Hagel is the first Vietnam veteran to lead the Pentagon, and the first man to become defense secretary after serving only in the enlisted ranks. All the other secretaries with military service eventually served as officers. Hagel served in Vietnam alongside his brother, was wounded twice and was awarded two Purple Hearts.
There are currently about 66,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, down from a peak of about 100,000 in 2010. The U.S. troop total is scheduled to drop to about 32,000 by early next year, with the bulk of the decline coming over the winter months.
And, while there has been no final decision on the size of the post-2014 force, U.S. and NATO leaders say they are considering a range between 8,000 and 12,000. The size of that residual force is sharply smaller than what the top U.S. commander in the Middle East recommended. Gen. James Mattis, head of U.S. Central Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee earlier this week that his personal recommendation was for a U.S. force of 13,600, with the expectation that NATO allies would contribute another 6,000 to 7,000.
Hagel would not say what his assessment of the final post-2014 numbers is yet. But, he added that, "it is the Afghan people who need to make, and will make, their own decisions about their future. We can help. We have helped, as well as our allies. But there does come a time when that should be transitioned."
And the transition, he said, is happening in a way that gives the Afghan people "a very hopeful future."
The U.S. is currently in the early stages of negotiating a bilateral security agreement with Kabul that would set the legal parameters for America's continued military and diplomatic involvement with the nation.
Another source of anxiety among the allies is Afghanistan's 2014 presidential election; Karzai, who has led the country since U.S. forces toppled the Taliban in late 2001, is not running and there is no obvious successor.
Transfer of US Prison to Afghans Delayed
VOA News March 9, 2013
A ceremony marking the long-awaited, complete transfer of a controversial detention center from U.S. to Afghan control has been abruptly canceled.
The event at Bagram prison, which had been announced by Afghan President Hamid Karzai, was canceled Saturday, the same day the milestone transfer was scheduled to take place.
U.S. military officials said the ceremony was canceled because they could not finalize the agreement with the Afghans.
A NATO spokesman said the transfer will proceed once the two sides have reached a "full agreement."
More than 3,000 Bagram prisoners were transferred to Afghan officials in September.
U.S. Cancels Transfer of Bagram Prison to Afghans
New York Times By ROD NORDLAND March 9, 2013
KABUL, Afghanistan - A ceremony in which the American military had planned to hand over full control of the Bagram Prison to Afghanistan was canceled Saturday, throwing into doubt an agreement between the two countries on custody of the remaining Afghan prisoners still being held by American forces.
The cancellation was likely to be an embarrassment to President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, and comes at an awkward time, when the new secretary of defense, Chuck Hagel, is on his first visit to the country.
There was no official word on why the transfer was canceled, but American officials were known to be upset with Mr. Karzai over remarks he made in a speech on Wednesday in which he criticized the Americans’ slowness on the detention issue and promised to release many of the prisoners as soon as the transfer was complete.
The two countries agreed a year ago to transfer all prisoners detained on the battlefield from American to Afghan custody, and Mr. Karzai has made it a cornerstone of his efforts to demonstrate that his government is regaining full sovereignty. But disputes emerged over how the Afghans would handle the prisoners, many of them dangerous insurgents detained during raids by Special Operations units.
In September, when the accord called for the full transfer to the Afghans, the Americans boycotted a transfer ceremony and canceled the transfer of all prisoners to the Afghans because the two sides could not agree on how to handle the releases. The Americans wanted the prisoners held without trial indefinitely, and the Afghans insisted on holding trials for them.
But last month Mr. Karzai met with President Obama in Washington, and American officials said they had been assured that the Afghans would hold some of the prisoners without trial. Mr. Karzai’s remarks on Wednesday cast doubt on whether the two sides had really reached an understanding on the issue.
“As soon as it takes place, we know there are innocent people in these jails, and I will order their release, as much as I am criticized for it,” he said.
On Saturday, just hours after Mr. Hagel arrived in Afghanistan, a bomb exploded near the entrance to the Afghan Defense Ministry, an area that has come under attack before. Mr. Hagel was not in the area that was attacked, although the blast seemed timed to coincide with his visit and underscored that people intent on setting off bombs can reach the heavily secured capital.
The explosion occurred at about 9 a.m. and was followed by heavy gunfire just as Kabul residents were going to work. A defense ministry spokesman, Gen. Dawlat Waziri, confirmed the attack and said there were casualties but he did not know how many. He said it was probably a car bomb but could not confirm whether it was a suicide bomb or an empty car laden with explosives.
As soon as the bomb exploded, the Defense Ministry locked down its large compound and even employees could not go out to see the damage, said a colonel in the operations department who was reached by telephone. He said the explosion was right at the gate used by employees and visitors, which is normally crowded with people trying to get into the compound.
Alissa J. Rubin contributed reporting.
Afghan parliamentary board voting ended with no result
By Mirwais Adeel - 09 Mar 2013, 8:26 pm Khaama Press
The voting process of the Afghan parliament to elect chairman of the administrative board, first and second deputy speakers and secretary along with deputy secretary for the board ended with no result on Saturday.
Around 11 Afghan lawmakers had participated in the internal election process however none of them managed to achieve 50 plus votes to qualify for the posts.
Under the Afghan constitution house speaker is elected for a period of five years however the other members of the board is selected on yearly basis during the start of the year.
Afghan house speaker Abdul Rauf Ibrahimi said, “The two candidates including Haji Zahir Qadir and Mirwais Yasini could not achieve 50 plus votes and were not selected therefore the two lawmakers can not participate in the second round of the election.”
For the board’s first chairman Haji Zahir Qadir achieve 90 votes while Mirwais Yasini received 99 votes from 221 lawmakers present during the Saturday’s session and the two candidates could not achieve 111 plus votes to qualify.
In the meantime for the board’s vice chairman post, lawmakers Ahmad Shah Ramazan achieve 327 votes while Naimatullah acehived 70 votes and the the other participants for the board’s second vice chairman included Amanullah Paiman who received 61 votes and Asadullah Sadat achieved 36 votes for the same post.
On the other hand for the board’s deputy secretary, Afghan lawmaker from Balkh province and Nilofar Ibrahimi representing Badakhshan province standed for the polling. It is yet not clear if the two candidates have received enough votes to qualify for the board’s deputy secretary.
Attack highlights how a corner of Afghanistan is falling apart
The ambush and killing of 16 Afghan soldiers last weekend is one of the worst setbacks for the country's military in years.
Christian Science Monitor By Ben Arnoldy, Staff writer March 8, 2013
Glance at a map of Afghanistan and the first thing you notice is the long finger of land jutting out of the country’s northeast – the Wakkan Corridor. The government’s ability to reach that area just became more questionable after an attack this weekend that killed 16 Afghan soldiers on the one road that connects it to Afghanistan proper.
I traveled that road in 2010. The area of the ambush – claimed by the Taliban – scared my driver then, who warned me that the next 15 minutes through the ominously-named Warduj district were going to be risky. Outside the windows of our jeep, we left a lightly-forested riparian village and struck east toward an open landscape ringed by the snowy mountains of the Pamir range, whose peaks form the roof of the world and whose slopes tumble into Pakistan, China, and Tajikistan.
Eyes in the jeep weren’t looking up but darting from rock to rock as the road twisted and turned through a giant uninhabited boulder field. The driver pointed out a scorch on the pavement from a recent attack on a police vehicle. The gunmen had hid behind the boulders to waylay the police, miles from any help.
Efforts at putting checkpoints around this area have gone badly, with the Taliban abducting 16 Afghan policemen and killing four others from one checkpoint in an incident last year a few months after German troops handed over security responsibility for the province.
This is Badakshan Province, one of the safest in Afghanistan – safety being a relative metric. Even here, local thugs are carving off chunks of territory for drug profits and power, aided by missteps from the international community and Afghanistan’s pre-existing divisions. To the extent the central government exercises control, it's to decide who gets to profit illegally from government posts.
Once out of the boulder field, prayers passed the lips of my driver and our eyes looked ahead towards Ishkashim, a city on the Afghan border with Tajikistan and gateway to the fabled Wakkan Corridor that juts out from Afghanistan’s borders like a stiletto. Ishkashim is one of two main border crossings that landlocked Afghanistan has with Tajikistan – the other passing through the more violent province of Kunduz. As such, it’s a lifeline of trade and supplies, and a big conduit for illicit drugs.
The United Nations estimates that Afghan smugglers sent 80 tons of heroin and 20 tons of opium into Tajikistan in 2010. In recent years, turf wars have erupted over control of the road to Ishkashim.
Security analyst Thomas Ruttig detailed some of those fights in an alarming writeup last August. At the time, a short-lived armed rebellion had broke out across the border in Tajikistan, led by the commander of the Tajik border police post at Ishkashim – a lucrative post if one is involved in smuggling. Mr. Ruttig argues the rebellion had its roots in the Afghan drug economy, as it appeared to touch off political infighting on the Afghanistan side which implied “rearrangements in drug-trafficking networks.”
One of those rearrangements came when Afghan officials arrested a district police chief named Qari Wadud that summer. According to Ruttig, Mr. Wadud had drug processing factories and was moving a lot of product out to Tajikstan. Tajik officials convinced their Afghan counterparts that Wadud was also playing a role in the unrest on the Tajik side of the border.
Uprooting such officials can touch off conflict for the Afghan government. During my visit to the province in 2010, I was woken one night in the city of Baharak by the steadily approaching sound of gunfire. Militants attacked the district government headquarters, destroying a portion of the building with a rocket. The source of the fighting might have been a disgruntled former official, according to a 2011 report from the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit (AREU):
Recent security incidents in Baharak District were attributed to the replacement of the long-serving district police chief. In Baharak, the position is a lucrative one given its central position to trade in opium in the province, and the displaced chief is assumed by many to be behind the sudden rise in insecurity.
Baharak is the last major settlement on the road heading east to Ishkasham. Between lies the boulder field of Warduj, a district that has a significant number of insurgents. The pocket of fighters there is a puzzling development considering that the entire province contains almost no ethnic Pashtuns, who make up the vast majority of the insurgency elsewhere, and Badakshan was a last redoubt for the Northern Alliance during their darkest hours fighting the former Taliban government in Kabul. The insurgents in Warduj appear to be supporting themselves by infiltration routes from nearby Pakistan and possibly the drug trade that they allow to flow along the same road that they deny to police and army personnel.
From Ruttig’s report:
the insurgents – who, since November [2011], regularly seem to have been positioning checkpoints on a key road leading from the provincial capital Faizabad to Baharak, Warduj and further on to Zebak, Ishkashem and Tajikistan – are also cooperating in the safe passage for drug convoys coming from Darayem and Baharak, as a ‘contribution to jehad’, namely by ‘sending drugs to the enemies of Islam’.
The gradual slide of Badakshan into a scrum for a piece of the poppy trade goes hand-in-hand with the return of poppy cultivation to the province. In the late 2000s, the province was considered nearly “poppy-free” as the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) promised to bring development to the province.
USAID would ultimately spend $60 million over four years, but spend it badly. Hydroelectric projects were left incomplete, newly-paved roads fell apart in months, and a pricey veterinary lab shut down when the government couldn’t keep paying salaries, according to an investigation I did for the Monitor.
Residents of Badakshan cite the failed promises as a reason for restarting the cultivation of poppy, according to the AREU report:
The informants in [Badakshan] were blunt about how far such efforts had fallen below their expectations. [M]ost of the money that had been promised did not arrive, and the projects that did take place were not seen as bringing long-term benefits: “we have given up our weapons, given up poppy but there is nothing for income, the government has done nothing.”
The report found other reason that residents returned to poppy: Their sons who joined the Afghan military and served in southern provinces like Helmand noticed that the Afghan government and the US Marines there openly allowed farmers to cultivate poppy. At the same time, the southern Pashtun-dominated provinces were getting more development aid.
Both gripes are absolutely true. On an embed to the US mission’s southernmost outpost in 2010, the Marines in Helmand explained to me that the counterinsurgency thinking in vogue at the time meant that their mission was to win over the support of local residents. Nothing angered farmers working that ditch-scarred desert more than eradicating their poppy crops, so the Marines said they wouldn’t do that.
Instead, the US showered development money on the insurgency-ridden southern regions in the hope of shoring up support for the US-backed government. In Helmand, too, the projects are incomplete: The US just announced it won’t finish work on restoring the Kajaki dam, a projected needed to power the south; instead, money will be given to the Afghans to finish it.
Can the Afghan government keep control over such corners of a difficult and drug-fueled country to take up the work of nation-building? The news out of Badakshan isn't encouraging.
Pakistan supply routes open, but move gear slowly into Afghanistan
Reuters By Phil Stewart and David Alexander Sat Mar 9, 2013
WASHINGTON - It is the least expensive way to get food and fuel to U.S. troops in Afghanistan. But eight months after Pakistan reopened its ground supply routes for the NATO war effort, hardly any new cargo has taken that path into the landlocked country.
Instead, supplies have been moving almost entirely along far more expensive routes, one of several factors that have prompted senior Pentagon officials to warn that Afghan war costs are higher than projected at a time of increasingly tight budgets.
In what was hailed as diplomatic breakthrough, the United States and Pakistan agreed to reopen the supply lines last July after Washington issued a reluctant apology for an air attack that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers along the Afghan border in November 2011.
But restoring the Pakistani supply routes to full service after a seven-month closure has taken time. The United States has cleared upward of 5,000 of the 7,000 pieces of backlogged cargo in the supply routes.
But data from the U.S. Military's Transportation Command show that only 40 containers of new cargo have moved across Pakistani ground routes since July. At the same time, about 28,000 20-foot containers came through alternate pathways, known as the Northern Distribution Network, into Afghanistan from July 2012 through last month.
General William Fraser, head of Transcom, said the situation was improving. After months of working to clear a backlog of supplies and deal with procedural issues, cargo movement on the Pakistani supply lines has improved and officials are ready to use them more heavily, he said.
"It's all moving in the right direction," Fraser told Reuters. "Now we've just got to up the rate."
VITAL ROUTES
Reopening the routes was considered vital to the U.S. war effort. Beyond being cheaper, they are seen as the best way to remove military equipment from Afghanistan as the 11-year-old conflict draws to a close.
Last year, then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta estimated the closure of Pakistan's supply routes cost U.S. taxpayers about $100 million more a month for the use of alternatives - either by air or through the NDN, a series of complicated pathways across Europe, Russia, and Central Asia.
That cost has come down as the size of the U.S. force in Afghanistan has fallen to about 66,000 today from 94,000 when Pakistan closed the routes. But it still costs about $61 million more a month to use the NDN and other alternatives rather than Pakistan, Pentagon spokesman Mark Wright said.
Fraser said there were several reasons for the slow start-up. They included the need to work through a backlog of cargo; reach agreement on how to re-export equipment that was no longer needed; obtain new rates from contractors; and decide on the process for bringing military cargo out of Afghanistan.
He said that fewer than 2,000 pieces of cargo remained in the backlog left over from the closure. Some of that cargo belonged to military units no longer in Afghanistan, so it will be re-exported, which required developing new procedures.
Fraser said the Pakistani bureaucracy also had to work out its own procedures for issuing permits at the border to allow equipment to be imported into the country for the purposes of taking it to Karachi to be loaded on ships.
"Those are all in place now," Fraser said. "It just took time to work through that."
REVERSING THE FLOW
After reaching a memorandum of understanding on reopening the supply lines, the two sides negotiated terms for handling new shipments both to and from Afghanistan. Previously, cargo only moved into Afghanistan.
The Pentagon said it expected to start regular shipments bringing equipment out of Afghanistan along Pakistan's ground routes this month at about 100 pieces of cargo a week. That figure would gradually increase over the course of the spring and summer.
Fraser said his discussions with Pakistani officials last month were aimed at getting traffic on the supply lines back to the levels they were at before the closure last year - about 30 percent of all cargo.
"That ... would mean 50 to 60 pieces crossing daily," he said. "That's our goal right now and they understand that. They're in agreement, so let's work first to get back to those pre-closure levels of crossings."
Navy Commander Bill Speaks, another Pentagon spokesman, said the U.S. military planned to use the Pakistani ground routes for roughly 50 percent to 60 percent of the cargo removed from Afghanistan as part of the U.S. drawdown.
Ramping up the use of the Pakistan supply lines could help ease financial pressure on the military services, which have been hit with a number of financial constraints, including a $46 billion automatic spending cut that went into force on March 1.
Discussing budget difficulties, several senior Pentagon officials have cited the unexpectedly high war costs this fiscal year and attributed part of that to the slow reopening of the Pakistan supply lines.
"When we put that ... budget together almost two years ago, we didn't anticipate the same tempo of operations that are going on right now," Pentagon Comptroller Robert Hale told a conference this week. "And we're seeing higher transportation costs as we're flying goods in and out of Afghanistan." (Editing by Warren Strobel and Peter Cooney)
Malina Suliman, Afghanistan’s Graffiti Queen
Malina Suliman’s murals of skeletons in burqas are breaking down barriers in Afghanistan—and have prompted threats and attacks from the Taliban.
The Daily Beast By Zeenat Nagree Mar 9, 2013
These days, when Malina Suliman wakes up in the rented apartment that she shares with her family in Mumbai, she’s most concerned about hiding the newspapers. The 23-year-old artist from Afghanistan wants to conceal the attention she’s receiving in the Indian and international press for her bold graffiti, in the hope that when she returns to her country later this month, she’ll be allowed to continue making her art.
Suliman’s family arrived in India in early January for medical care after her father, a property developer, was injured in attack that, the family suspects, was planned by the Taliban. They’d received previous threats from the extremists, Suliman says. “I feel really bad that my father has to suffer because of me,” she says. “But I don’t regret what I have done. Why don’t women have freedom? Why don’t we have equal rights?”
Suliman—who was inspired by the political potential of graffiti in 2010 when she attended a workshop held by a visiting British artist—says her family has little knowledge of her work, which has outraged conservative groups in Afghanistan. The artist’s signature motif—a skeleton in a blue burqa, which she has sprayed on walls in Kabul and Kandahar—is a pointed metaphor for her own condition in her homeland and the inequality and repression that Afghan women face. Because of her graffiti art and its defiant political statements, Suliman says she has faced warnings and abuse from onlookers in Kandahar, where she is one of the few female artists. “People would say bad words and threaten to attack me,” she says. “Some even threw stones at me.” She says she’s grateful for the freedom she enjoys in Mumbai, where she doesn’t need to wear a veil.
Suliman’s burqa-clad skeletons have resonated worldwide but she says the work that first prompted threats from the Taliban was a sculpture of a disabled child exhibit at a gallery in Kandahar in November last year. Suliman kept her artwork from her parents until another intimidating letter arrived; this one blasted her graffiti panel depicting an ordinary Afghan caught between the Taliban and Westerners. A few days later, her father was attacked by unknown men and, out of fear for her family’s safety, she told them about her graffiti.
Trained in realism in an art school in Pakistan, Suliman’s education was cut short in 2009, when her family brought her back to Afghanistan before her final year of studies. “My family wanted me to leave art forever,” she said. Accustomed to the relative freedom of life in her hometown of Kabul, Suliman found Kandahar confining, and spent much of the next year cut off from her art. “In that year, there were many questions that arose in my mind about girls like me, who want to do something but are not allowed to do it,” Suliman said. In this time of ferment, Suliman found some support from inside her family. Among her nine siblings, she was able to rely on two of her sisters for inspiration. One of them took her to an art gallery in Kabul in 2010. “When I saw the paintings I couldn’t understand what I was feeling,” she said. “I was screaming and crying. I didn’t know if I was happy or not.”
“I don’t regret what I have done. Why don’t women have freedom? Why don’t we have equal rights?”
After that cataclysmic experience, the young artist decided to pursue her ambitions and has been prolific since. She has shown her paintings, sculptures and installations in several exhibitions in Kabul and Kandahar and has left her imprint anonymously on public walls in both cities. In Kandahar, she is part of the Kandahar Fine Art Association, founded in 2011 to promote art in the region. The government has been encouraging. Artists from the collective have succeeded in attracting state funding and have been given space for a gallery; they’ve even shown their work in the presidential palace in Kabul. In the capital city, Suliman is part of Berang, a well-versed network of artists, some of whom have shown abroad. Among the group, Shamsia Hassani works with the motif of the woman in the blue burqa as well, though her images tend to be less provocative than Suliman’s skeleton peeking through the veil.
“Malina makes strong motifs,” said Shreekant Khairnar, Suliman’s teacher at the Sir J.J. School of Art in Mumbai. “She is trying to learn a lot in a short time.” Indeed, time is running out. If Suliman doesn’t get a visa extension, she will have to return to Afghanistan by March 24. She is uncertain if she will be able to continue making art, an eventuality that is harder to accept in the liberal climate of Mumbai. Suliman would be happy in the more agreeable atmosphere of Kabul but she fears for her safety in Kandahar. “My family thinks that I should give up art,” she says. “They have seen the risks and they fear that it will be worse when we return. Just thinking about going back makes it difficult for me to breathe. But if I stop making art, what about other women? If I continue, some other women may join me.”
For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at editorial@thedailybeast.com.
Kabul debates women's law 'violating Sharia'
DW 08/03/2013
A draft law that would end violence against women is being debated in the Afghan Parliament. But it is finding little support among MPs, who feel that it violates traditional values.
It has been three years since Afghan President Hamid Karzai signed a decree to end violence against women. The draft law, which is supposed to allow women more freedom and protect them from violence, has yet to be adopted in parliament. But courts can use it as a basis for their work.
Opponents of the decree say it contradicts Sharia - the moral code and religious law of Islam. Most of the proponents, however, are among the 68 women in parliament, for whom a quarter of the seats are reserved. They are trying to reconcile a modern interpretation of Islam with the law.
"They are all fundamentalists and extremists," Member of Parliament (MP) Masooda Karochi told DW. "If a lunatic protests that this law is against Sharia, then you can imagine what consequences it can have." Sharia proponents make it impossible to have a constructive discussion, she noted.
Controversy over the age of marriage
For supporters of Sharia law, physical abuse should not be considered an act of violence against women, Masooda Karochi said. But because physical abuse of women is the norm in Afghanistan, Karzai's decree has allowed women to report incidences of domestic violence, leading to the break up of several families.
In the draft, the legal age of marriage is 16 - another thorn in the side of its opponents. Basing their argument on Islam, they say that the beginning of puberty determines when a girl can be married. Also, Sharia stipulates that fathers alone can make decisions on whom their daughters marry and when.
Law provokes violence
The draft law is also provoking its opponents because it says that women should be allowed to work. "Islam says that a woman cannot work outside the house unless she has her husband's permission. It is the responsibility of the man to fulfill all the needs of his wife," said MP Sayed Hossain Alemi Balkhi. "If this is the case, then the man certainly has the right to expect his wife to ask for his permission before she leaves the house."
Balkhi believes that it is all propaganda - an effort by activists and local media, who are trying to draw attention to violence against women. And instead of trying to curb violence against women, they are only fueling it, he said. "Let's say your husband beats you and you leave for a women's shelter. You leave your home because your husband beats you. Then you stay there waiting for him to come and take you back."
The MP believes the law would not end abuse. "The husband would definitely end up killing his wife the next time. Instead of curbing violence, the law provokes it further." This view is widespread among conservative MPs. And the arguments of the proponents of the draft law, especially the female MPs, fall on deaf ears.
A symbolic law
Even if the draft law to end violence against women were to be passed, it would hardly change their situation. Aziz Rafi, who heads the Afghanistan Civil Society Forum, believes the battle is lost.
"Afghan law is very problematic and complicated. There is a lot of corruption. We doubt that the law will help curb violence against women," he told DW.
Afghan women are not pinning their hopes on this draft law. Their continued support for it is more about sending a clear signal.
USAID to put $300 million into women's rights in Afghanistan
Can aid agencies and other foreign actors, even with $300 million, truly influence attitudes in a society that has so long treated women as second-class citizens?
Christian Science Monitor By Paige McClanahan, Correspondent March 8, 2013
Kabul, Afghanistan - To a visitor wandering through the streets of Kabul – a capital city with an international airport, a multi-story shopping mall, and a population of 3.2 million – the blue ghosts are hard to ignore. The city’s sidewalks are full of them: figures shrouded in burqas – long swathes of cloth that cover the wearer completely, apart from a small scrap of mesh fabric in front of the eyes that offers a window onto the world outside.
Those ghosts of Kabul, all of whom are women, are less common today than when Afghanistan was under the Taliban’s rule in the 1990s, when it was against the law for a woman to leave her house unless she was wearing a burqa. And today, there are almost as many women on the streets of Kabul who wear headscarves that leave their faces, if not their hair, exposed.
But while the standing of women in Afghan society has improved in some ways since the dark days of the Taliban, thanks in part to the work of international aid agencies and nongovernmental organizations, much is left to be done: Literacy rates among Afghan women hover around 12 percent; more than 90 percent of women here believe that their husbands are justified in beating them if they misbehave, and there are tremendous cultural hurdles to leap along the way.
The latest, biggest move on Afghan women’s issues is coming from the US government. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) announced in 2012 that it plans to spend $313 million to support the development of Afghan women over the next five years.
It is a massive undertaking in terms of the sheer amount of money, which is more, observers say, than anything that has been spent on women’s issues in the past in this country. But the project also faces serious challenges, in terms of security, management, and execution.
“It’s encouraging that the US is showing that kind of long-term commitment to Afghan women but nobody knows what’s going to happen over the next five years,” says Louise Hancock, the head of policy and advocacy at Oxfam Afghanistan. “It’s a shame that they didn’t look at doing this kind of project earlier when there would have been a greater chance of success.” Tenuous time for Afghanistan
With most international forces due to leave Afghanistan by the end of 2014, no one knows what the security situation will look like two years from now. The Taliban and other insurgent groups still control many rural areas of Afghanistan, and their suicide attacks have struck Kabul at a rate of at least once a month over the past few years.
Things could become even more complicated if Afghanistan’s government, which is currently led by President Hamid Karzai, reaches out to conservative groups to further the peace process after international forces leave.
Such considerations led one nongovernmental organization, the Afghanistan Human Rights and Democracy Organization, to conclude in a 2012 report that “most of women’s important achievements over the last decade are likely to be reversed” after 2014.
The USAID project, called Women in Transition, aims to further women’s rights at precisely this challenging time.
Supporting Afghan women could “greatly improve the country’s development prospects during and after Transition,” USAID said in a 300-page draft document that was released in January. “It is the ideal moment in time to substantiate the [US government’s] pledge to Afghan women that ‘we will not abandon you!’”
The project is certainly ambitious in scope: Among its many goals, it aims to place 7,500 young women in government internships; offer business training for women entrepreneurs; help Afghan universities develop women’s studies curricula; and give promising young women the chance to meet female leaders who might serve as role models. ‘Brilliant’ concept, but will it work?
“The concept is brilliant,” says Farkhundah Naderi, a female Afghan parliamentarian, after reviewing the USAID document that offers details on the project. “But I hope there is going to be very strong monitoring,” she added. “At the end of the day, effectiveness is so important.”
That’s an element that hasn’t always been present in previous foreign aid projects that have aimed to help Afghan women, Ms. Naderi says. At the same time, the constant push on women’s rights since the fall of the Taliban has left some Afghans with a bitter taste in their mouths.
“For 11 years they have heard ‘women’s rights, women’s rights, women’s rights,’ and they cannot see that much difference in their lives,” Naderi says, adding that “men are jealous” of the attention that has been showered on women.
That raises the larger question of whether aid agencies and other foreign actors can truly influence attitudes in a society that has so long treated women as second-class citizens.
Building long-term relationships at the community level is critical to changing people’s mindsets, says Chona Echavez, the deputy director for research at the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit, an NGO based in Kabul. Over time, Ms. Echavez says, she has seen Afghan men adjust their views on how women should be treated, especially when they have been presented with hard data on topics like women’s health.
“People should not just say because of tradition, because of culture, because of security, we cannot do this,” Echavez says. “It’s really a process there are no shortcuts.”
2014 could be turning point for Afghanistan: Experts
The Gulf Today By Raghib Hassan March 09, 2013
DUBAI - The year 2014 is a year of hope, courage, dream and development for the people of Afghanistan, since US President Barrack Obama has set a deadline to withdraw foreign troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2014.
However, experts have a different opinion. While some of them see it as a hope for the future, others have some reservations.
Deliberating on “Which Afghanistan?” during a panel discussion on the fourth day of the ongoing Emirates Airline Festival of Literature in Dubai, Middle East commentator and journalist Abdel Bari Atwan, who interviewed Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan in 1996, said, “America miscalculated Afghanistan. Billions of dollars would have been used in constructive development rather than only bombing the Taliban forces.”
Joining him in the discussion, travel-writer and historian William Dalrymple said, “Rather than bombing Taliban, we could have held elections. We could have constructed schools and hospitals or done some developmental work but we ended up spending only on security. Nothing has changed in Afghanistan in all these years, except for the fact that girls have started going to school,” said Dalrymple.
Criticising the role of the West, another panellist Sandy Gall, who has been reporting on Afghanistan for 30 years, said, “The West has lost the war in Afghanistan and now they just want a dignified exit.”
Responding to the question on who will take over Afghanistan, he said, “Taliban, which still constitutes 45 per cent of the population, will come back to power, but more wisely.”
Pressing on the need for development, he said, “There is a need to rebuild Afghanistan and we need to have a master plan. We can train Taliban for good governance.”
Sharing his views on the subject, Gall added that now Taliban won’t prevent women from going for education, which they have done in the past.
Summing up the West’s stand on Afghanistan, Gall said, “They have completely failed in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. The time has come to create a future model of democracy in Afghanistan.”
Talking about the impact of the Taliban in today’s Afghanistan, Dalrymple said, “They can bomb cities and can create panic only. Now Afghans have a hope despite all the troubles in the past. Now people are connected through Facebook and satellite channels have opened their minds. They are looking for development. People already have started moving from the valley to the city. Now the worst is over.”
Echoing his opinion, Gall said that there are hopes of democracy in Afghanistan. They already have the Jirga system in place (a form of tribal system) where elders take decisions.
Talking about the democracy, Atwan stressed that Afghanistan has enough forces and they are now longing for peace, development and stability.
“First we have to develop their country, democracy will automatically come into action,” he concluded.
Netherlands end Afghan police training mission in July
By Sayed Jawad - 09 Mar 2013, 8:39 pm Khaama Press
Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte on Friday announced to withdraw military trainers from Afghanistan earlier than planned.
While speaking during a weekly post-cabinet press conference Mark Rutte said, “We have decided to end the training mission on July 1.”
“The Afghans are ready sooner than planned to take responsibility for police training in Kunduz,” he said.
In the meantime he said around 200 other members of the 545-strong Dutch deployment in Afghanistan will remain as planned until next year, mainly at the northern base of Mazar-e-Sharif, where four Dutch F-16 fighter planes are stationed.
Dutch military F-16 jets are mainly used to find roadside bombs and boost security on the ground.
Netherlands deployed around 1,950 troops as part of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), mainly in the central Uruzgan province, for four years until their withdrawal in August 2010 after a mission that claimed the lives of 24 Dutch soldiers.
Police trainers were send to Afghanistan as part of the a new group of military personnel deployed in the country after Dutch lawmakers endorsed a proposal in early 2011.
Contractor Killed on a U.S. Base in Afghanistan
New York Times By AZAM AHMED March 8, 2013
KABUL, Afghanistan - A civilian contractor was killed on an American base Friday afternoon when three men wearing Afghan National Army uniforms stormed the gate and began firing, military officials said, in what appeared to be the second insider attack on Western troops this year.
The attack, at Forward Operating Base Tagab in the northern province of Kapisa, also wounded four coalition troops, two of them seriously, before the attackers were killed, officials said. Officials were unsure about whether the attackers were Afghan soldiers or impostors. Initial reports that two Afghan soldiers had been killed could not be immediately confirmed.
A sharp rise last year in insider attacks, in which Afghan security forces turn their guns on their Western allies, greatly strained relations and threatened the military and police training mission at the heart of the coalition’s plans to withdraw in 2014. Extensive new safeguards were put in place, including stricter security guidelines for American troops and tougher vetting of recruits by the Afghan forces.
The attack on Friday, however, served as a reminder of how difficult such violence is to prevent. The attack began around 1:30 p.m., when the three uniformed men slammed an Afghan Army vehicle into the main gate of the coalition base, officials said. A firefight then broke out, resulting in the deaths of the attackers and the civilian contractor, whose nationality was not immediately announced.
The reason for the assault was not clear, and the Taliban did not claim responsibility for it, which they are usually quick to do.
Such attacks are often the product of Taliban infiltrators who have gone through the military recruitment and training process. But cultural clashes, in which Afghan soldiers have responded violently to perceived mistreatment or slights by their American counterparts, have also been a factor.
Kapisa Province has been difficult to secure, and fighting in the Tagab district, where the American outpost is situated, has been especially fierce. The district has also been the scene of past insider attacks. In early 2012, four French soldiers were killed by an Afghan soldier while on patrol there, prompting threats from France to withdraw from Afghanistan sooner than promised. The last French troops left Afghanistan in December.
The government also noted on Friday that five Afghan police officers had been killed this week while carrying out a poppy eradication campaign in western Farah Province.
Three of the officers died when an improvised explosive device buried in the fields exploded on Tuesday, during the first day of a three-day mission in the Khak-e-Saped district. The other two died on Thursday, after a separate explosive planted by the Taliban detonated. In an ensuing firefight with insurgents, nine officers were wounded, and four Taliban fighters were killed, officials said.
The lure of profit from poppy cultivation has brought insurgents and poppy farmers together in many cases, finding common cause against haphazard government efforts to eradicate crops. Farmers can make far more cash growing poppies than almost any other crop, while insurgents impose lucrative taxes on poppy production, generating an estimated $155 million for the Taliban last year.
Eradication is controversial among aid groups. Many organizations see the destruction of crops without financial compensation as flawed policy.
“Opium eradication is never the solution,” said Jean-Luc Lemahieu, the chief of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime for Afghanistan. “It’s a blunt instrument, and if it is not connected to altered livelihoods, it proves not sustainable and oftentimes arbitrary.”
Taimoor Shah contributed reporting from Kandahar, and Alissa J. Rubin from Kabul.
www.afghanistannewscenter.com