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Bombing hits sports fans in Afghanistan
Associated Press – Wed, Mar 13, 2013.
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Afghan officials say several people have been killed and injured when a suicide bomber blew himself up in a crowd of sports fans watching a buzkashi game in northern Afghanistan.
Amanddin Quriashi, a senior official in the Imam Sahib district of Kunduz province, says the district police chief is among the wounded in Wednesday's bombing.
Kunduz province police chief Gen. Mohammad Khalil Andarabi says the father of the speaker of the Afghan parliament was among those killed in the attack.
The provincial police chief's Sayed Sarwar Hussaini has confirmed the suicide attack but says the number of casualties is still being determined.
The crowd was watching a game of buzkashi, a traditional Afghan sport akin to polo, where players on horseback use a headless goat carcass instead of a ball.
Afghan Parliament Speaker's Relatives Among Dead In Konduz Bombing
By RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan March 14, 2013
KABUL -- Afghan officials say relatives of the speaker of the Afghan parliament's lower house might have been targeted by a suicide bomber in Konduz Province.
The governor of the Imam Sahib district said on March 13 that the speaker, Abdul Rauf Ibrahimi, who is an ethnic Uzbek, lost his brother, father, nephew, and possibly a cousin in the attack.
The March 13 bombing killed 11 people and injured at least 13.
The district police chief was also among the wounded.
The suicide bomber struck after a buzkashi match, an Afghan and Central Asian sport similar to polo but played with a goat carcass instead of a ball.
Buzkashi tournaments are held across northern Afghan regions close to Central Asian countries on the eve of Norouz, the Persian New Year marked in March on the spring equinox.
What Vali Nasr Gets Wrong
A former State Department insider has written a blistering account of the Obama administration’s missteps in Afghanistan. But is he right?
Foreign Policy BY SARAH CHAYES MARCH 12, 2013
Former State Department Advisor Vali Nasr has set Washington abuzz with his gloves-off denunciation of the Obama administration's conduct of foreign policy, in particular the war in Afghanistan. Rarely does a recently former government official let loose with such an unalloyed vilification of the administration he served -- especially when it is still in power.
But "The Inside Story of how the White House Let Diplomacy Fail in Afghanistan" is more conventional than it may at first appear. Nasr's is merely the latest salvo in ongoing interagency skirmishing to define the narrative on Afghanistan, to tell a story that lays the blame for the policy's failure at someone else's door.
In this case, the originality is that the tale's main villain is not the military, but the White House (albeit described as bewitched by the military). The hounded victims are former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, the late Richard Holbrooke -- who happen to have been Nasr's friends and bosses.
What this account is missing -- what so many such accounts are missing -- is the humility and intellectual honesty to take a candid look inward, to strive for a nuanced assessment of our shared missteps, in what I, like Nasr, believe will be a grim outcome for Afghanistan, and ultimately for international security.
When Nasr was senior advisor to Holbrooke, I was serving in a similar capacity, first for two commanders of the international troops in Afghanistan, and then for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I took up these positions on the heels of seven years working in downtown Kandahar, where I ran an NGO and then a manufacturing cooperative.
So my perspective on the events Nasr describes, and in which I participated, differs from his in two respects. I came to them bathed in the aspirations of ordinary Afghans, in their attitudes to what was happening in their country, and to the international intervention. And I was privy to the actual views of senior military officials regarding the appropriate balance between military and civilian instruments of power in conducting the Afghanistan mission.
Like many civilians, Nasr paints the military in primary colors, as a monolithic, power-hungry leviathan. "The military," he declares, "wanted to stay in charge." Somewhat more remarkably, he depicts President Barak Obama as enthralled by the Pentagon, "not keen on showing daylight between the White House and the military."
That is not how many officers I worked with experienced it. I myself remember a White House skepticism of top military officers and their recommendations that, while perhaps justified, was every bit as visceral as Holbrooke's. The instantaneous firing of one of the Army's most prized officers, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, after offensive remarks by his staff were featured in a Rolling Stone article, does not attest to a president welded to the military. (Regardless, again, of how justified McChrystal's recall may have been.)
Far from railroading the bureaucracy to gain unfettered control of the Afghanistan campaign, military officers I encountered, to a one, called for more civilian input, not less. At every echelon -- from battalion commanders who begged the State Department officials sharing their bases for a better picture of local political dynamics, to senior officers and Defense Department officials who pushed for (and offered to help fund) a civilian surge, to the top brass in Kabul and Washington waiting in vain for a coherent strategic policy to emerge from U.S. civilian leadership -- I saw military officers dismayed, not delighted, at being the lead, and sometimes the only, actors.
In the first half of 2009, for example, Holbrooke and U.S. Embassy officials pooh-poohed the notion that fraud might characterize the upcoming presidential election. I would whip out the 10 voter registration cards I had bought in Kandahar in a vain effort to attract their attention. The diplomatic leadership persistently refrained from imagining any steps that might deter the electoral violations before it was too late.
Increasingly alarmed, as evidence mounted that the fraud would be so massive, so egregious, and so humiliating to Afghan voters as to risk undermining the credibility of the entire mission, some colleagues and I drew up a list of ways the thousands of international soldiers and officers under NATO command (ISAF) might make a positive impact. I will never forget the look on then-ISAF commander Gen. David McKiernan's face when presented with that list. A dull ache clouded his eyes. I have to fight a war, it conveyed. And I have to secure an election in the midst of it. And you want me to see to its credibility, too?
This type of reaction, versions of which I got from numerous officers over the years, points to one of the shortcomings in the standard military analysis. There was a tendency among many of my colleagues in uniform to see military and civilian action as unconnected, a notion that the military could enter a zone, "bring" security, and then stand aside while an army of civilians swarmed in and "brought" development and governance. (That view of hermetically divided spheres of activity, note, was shared by many civilians.)
Of course, Afghan dynamics were more interconnected than that. But it was hard for military commanders to take accurate stock of the impact their relationships with Afghan counterparts, military and civilian, might have on security and good governance. Officers contracted for work and supplies, delivered development resources through local agents, purchased intelligence and gravel and gasoline -- without thinking through the potentially distorting impact of these arrangements.
I don't disagree, in other words, -- and not a single military officer I know would disagree -- with Nasr's contention that the Afghanistan mission suffered perhaps fatally from a lack of input by diplomatic leaders. But the real question is, input to what end? What was, and what should have been, the content of that input?
Nasr narrates the gleeful launch of Holbrooke's SRAP office at Foggy Bottom, the "creative chaos" of eager young men and women spawning designs for the placement of cell-phone towers or the use of virtual bank accounts for Afghan National Police salaries. A lot of those ideas were good, many made a difference. But they were, to a large extent, hopelessly lost in the weeds.
So was much of Holbrooke's input to interagency debate. Nasr decries his boss's exclusion from important meetings. But while the girth of the folders Holbrooke regularly table-dropped at such meetings is accurately recorded, Nasr misses the takeaway. The SRAP office's contributions to policy debates were so compendious, so full of arcane, not to say loony, detail on the specifics of, for instance, how instant messaging should be used for information operations, or how a specific agricultural development project should be structured, as to be completely impenetrable.
This type of detail is inappropriate to senior national security decisionmaking. It is the level of programming the embassy should have been hammering out for execution in the field. Perhaps it's no wonder Amb. Karl Eikenberry, or other participants in those meetings, grew irritated. Holbrooke and Clinton should have been aiming their thinking at a much more strategic level.
They should have been considering two fundamental drivers that had been fueling the burgeoning conflict in Afghanistan.
One was the increasingly bald, abusive, and structured corruption of the Afghan government. The notion that Afghans would take risks on behalf of such a government, when they were "slapped on one cheek by the Taliban, and on the other by [that] government," as several put it to me, when they were shaken down, with a literal or figurative kick in the teeth, just about every time they encountered a government official, when they watched President Hamid Karzai protect government officials from repercussions for egregious crimes, release them from jail, or demote police officers or prosecutors who took action against them, simply defies logic.
The other and somewhat related driver of the conflict has been the Pakistani military's policy of helping the Taliban to regroup, retrain, and plan and execute attacks inside of Afghanistan, and the exploitation of this growing Afghan disaffection with the Karzai regime to help the Taliban and allied extremist groups regain a foothold inside the country. The objective of this policy was to regain, most probably through eventual negotiations, a degree of the proxy control of Afghanistan that Pakistan had enjoyed before 2001.
Both of those problems are diplomatic, not military. But neither Holbrooke nor Clinton ever produced a serious analysis of them, or put their staffs to work developing coherent approaches for addressing them. Instead, the diplomats joined other civilian officials in the generalized obsession over what number of men and women in uniform -- American and Afghan -- should be deployed where and on what timeline.
Endless hours of the extended 2009 interagency debate Nasr alludes to were taken up with such military tactics. All the key civilian leaders had their considered opinions, but seemed less enthusiastic about discussing the issues that fell in their lane. Eikenberry ultimately dispatched cables that quite accurately diagnosed many of the problems with the Karzai regime. But still he failed to provide any policy options for addressing them, beyond "don't order a troop surge."
In this regard, I agree with Nasr that President Obama failed to press for the right options. He failed to get his diplomats to do their jobs and generate a strategic framework within which military action, whatever its size, might make sense.
It was military officials who, to a degree, tried to expand the aperture. According to the New York Times, Gen. David Petraeus, who was CENTCOM commander at the time, compared the Karzai government to a "crime syndicate" during that 2009 debate. He and others urged then National Security Advisor James Jones to allocate more time at Principals' Committee meetings to discussing the civilian dimensions of the policy. A strategic review of the campaign, produced by McChrystal's headquarters, identified, alongside the violent insurgency, a "crisis in confidence in the Afghan government" as a threat to mission success.
Where these and other senior military officers might be reproached is in their prideful unwillingness to take their own logic to its natural conclusion. In the end, they predictably defaulted to the traditional military "can-do" attitude -- and perhaps to a reckless appetite to try. Despite their reservations, they insisted that given enough men and materiel, they could make this mission work anyway.
How much more valuable would their advice have been if they had explicitly tied their troop request to a viable political strategy -- if they had argued that without a policy on Pakistan, without a policy on Afghan government corruption, they did not want that troop surge after all because the sacrifice would quite likely be for naught. But that kind of moral courage failed them.
Nasr's depiction of vicious personal conflicts and turf wars within the executive branch is delectably lurid. Far be it from me to deny their reality. Or to deny that the Obama White House may have exercised an excessive or insular grip on foreign policy, linking it too closely to domestic electoral considerations.
But the notion that pre-existing partisan animosity toward Holbrooke was a main factor driving policy decisions verges on the paranoid. In fact, deep and passionate philosophical disagreements on the substance divided members of executive branch agencies over how the war should be conducted. And it was these differences of analysis and prescription that shaped the policy debate -- not personal rivalry.
Nasr does dwell on two of those. They are the only high-level issues his account takes up. Yet in both cases, for someone of his learning and experience, Nasr's recipes are startlingly simplistic. The obvious way to bring the war to a successful conclusion, he argues, was to negotiate with the Taliban, and to conciliate Pakistan's relevant leadership in order to change that country's longstanding policy of sponsoring violent extremism in pursuit of national security aims.
Nasr's prescription for negotiating with the Taliban neglects the implications of a basic fact he himself acknowledges: the militants' intensive, if often fraught, ties to Pakistan's all-powerful military intelligence agency, the ISI. Nasr writes of negotiations as though the United States would be engaging with an autonomous Afghan entity, not the heavily influenced Pakistani proxy most Taliban leaders constitute.
He refers to a moment in the summer of 2010, when, exasperated by her inability to get the issue on the interagency calendar, Clinton personally handed a memo on negotiation to Obama -- only to see his approval squelched by the National Security staff. In fact, more than six months earlier, U.S. government officials had been reaching out at least indirectly to a number of senior Taliban commanders. But almost immediately, the ISI arrested every one of them. Top Pakistani leaders had no intention of letting control of any potential negotiations slip from their grasp.
It is unlikely the ISI incurred the risk and expense of reconstituting the Taliban just for the fun of it. The objective was to ensure the Pakistani government a seat at the table whenever negotiations began -- as Islamabad predicted they inevitably would. Nasr's formula walks right into this trap. It would have the effect of rewarding Pakistan's policy of using extremist violence to advance its objectives -- a.k.a. its state sponsorship of terrorism.
It is for this reason, not because they wanted "to stay in charge," as Nasr puts it, that many military officers balked at the SRAP office's insistence on negotiation with the Taliban as the only path to salvation.
As the idea was formulated by Holbrooke's team, such negotiations, focused solely on the Taliban, would also have the effect of marginalizing all the other Afghan constituencies with legitimate grievances against the Karzai government. The result would be to reward violent extremism, and leave those who to date have opted against it no choice but to arm up in anticipation of a deal they were not consulted about, and whose terms (a return to indirect Pakistani control of much of Afghanistan) they could not live with. Even in their former stronghold of Kandahar, the Taliban are largely viewed with distaste, and are not considered to authentically represent the people. A much better formula for reconciliation would enlarge the scope to include all the significant forces in Afghan political life.
Nasr rightly derides some military officers' reflex to apply tactics that seemed to work in Iraq to vastly different Afghanistan. But he is less thoughtful about whether Holbrooke was seeking to apply tactics that seemed to work in the Balkans -- where Bosnian Muslims, Croats, and Serbs did in fact function as autonomous entities -- to Afghanistan, where a proxy relationship has been so key to the dynamics of the country's iterated waves of conflict.
As for "changing Pakistan," on that point Nasr echoes the George W. Bush administration's approach, which consisted of dispatching Secretary of State Colin Powell and a "with us or against us" ultimatum after 9/11/2001, and then blindly accepting Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf's profession that, looking at it that way, he allowed he was probably with us. For years, I watched his intelligence services deliver up an al Qaeda Arab once every few months, to U.S. accolades, while they were busily reweaving the threads of Taliban networks. Pakistani officials were warmly conciliated during that first half-decade of the war, but they did not abandon their steadfast policy of using asymmetric extremist violence to help them punch above their weight internationally.
Concretely and consistently confronting the Pakistani leadership on its use of extremist proxies, or President Karzai on the criminally extractive nature of his government -- and not just in occasional spurts of public huffing and puffing -- would have taken a significant investment of political courage and fortitude. And those are attributes that I did not see much in evidence among senior U.S. civilian officials.
Nasr is correct that civilian instruments of power, including intelligence and economic interaction as well as diplomacy, must play a more robust role in U.S. foreign policy. But for them to do so, it is not enough for the military's role to shrink, or for the White House to be nicer to the secretary of state. Diplomats have to up their game. And some candid introspection might be a good place to start. A joyous cacophony of talented youngsters is not sufficient to develop high-level policy on our country's longest war. Civilian agencies need to cultivate and empower deep area expertise. They need to shatter the brittle bureaucratic rigidities that characterize their systems, and provide graduated autonomy to rising leaders. They need to advocate aggressively and effectively for increased resources. But most of all, they need to be willing to take moral and political risks when it really matters.
Coordinated terrorist attacks foiled in Kabul city
By SADAF SHINWARI - 14 Mar 2013, 9:58 am Khaama Press
Afghan intelligence department — national directorate of security (NDS) officails announced at least five Haqqani network militants were during a gun battle in capital Kabul on Wednesday.
According to a statement released by national directorate of security (NDS) Afghan security forces prevented a coordinated attack by Haqqani network militants in kabul city.
The source further added at least two suspected Haqqani network militants were also arrested during the operation.
The militants were reportedly looking to carry out coordinated attacks on military institutions, NDS department said following the statement adding that Afghan security forces successfully managed to identify their location and carry out the operation in 16th district of kabul city.
NDS officials also added that Afghan security forces seized some weapons, ammunitions and explosives during the operation.
Anti-government armed militant groups yet to comment regarding the report.
Karzai Persists With Anti-U.S. Remarks
Wall Street Journal By YAROSLAV TROFIMOV March 12, 2013
KABUL - Afghan President Hamid Karzai repeated in a speech on Tuesday his provocative charge that the Taliban and the U.S. are conniving to perpetuate instability, ignoring a U.S. rebuttal in a deepening crisis in bilateral relations.
Mr. Karzai said on Sunday that the Taliban were killing Afghan civilians "in the service of America," hours before a tense meeting with visiting U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel. U.S. military and civilian officials forcefully rejected Mr. Karzai's tirade, with U.S. Ambassador James Cunnigham saying on Monday that "the thought that we would collude with the Taliban flies in the face of everything we have done here."
Mr. Karzai, however, persisted in a speech on Tuesday to tribal leaders and elders in Helmand province, the focus of President Barack Obama's troop surge, where 920 coalition troops lost their lives fighting the Taliban—more than anywhere else in the country.
A U.S. official in Kabul said afterward that Mr. Cunningham's response on Monday had already addressed the content of Mr. Karzai's allegations.
Mr. Karzai's harsh public pronouncements threaten to derail the talks between the U.S. and Afghanistan on what, if any, U.S. military presence will remain here after the coalition's mandate expires in late 2014.
Obama administration officials already have mooted the so-called zero option of withdrawing all troops, as the U.S. did in Iraq when the two sides failed to agree on the question of legal immunity for U.S. forces. It is a scenario that, analysts said, grows more attractive with every Karzai broadside.
"Karzai is skating on thin ice," said Brian Katulis, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a Washington think tank close to the administration. "The Obama administration wants to offer long-term support to Afghanistan, but these statements make it even harder for them to make the case to the public and U.S. Congress."
In Tuesday's speech, Mr. Karzai repeated his charges almost verbatim, as he rebuked the Taliban for suicide bombings over the weekend in Kabul and the eastern province of Khost.
"You announce that you show your power to America by killing an 8-year-old Muslim child and civilians," Mr. Karzai said. "I don't think so. You are serving for them."
He also suggested that recent Taliban propaganda footage of attacks in the strategic Wardak province near Kabul was likely filmed by foreign helicopters, and distributed by foreigners in order to exaggerate the insurgency's strength and justify a continued foreign presence.
Mr. Karzai last month ordered U.S. special-operations forces to leave Wardak because of alleged human-rights abuses, a decision with which the U.S. didn't comply by Monday's deadline. Two U.S. special-operations troops and several Afghans were killed in Wardak on Monday after an Afghan policeman opened fire on them with his mounted machine gun, officials said.
In Tuesday's speech, Mr. Karzai also blasted "secret" talks that he said Taliban leaders conduct with Western nations. The Taliban refuse to negotiate with Mr. Karzai's administration, but have held contacts with the U.S.
In December, authorized Taliban representatives for the first time also met an array of Afghan political leaders at a conference north of Paris.
"You eat chocolates in Paris, but in Kabul you kill a widow," Mr. Karzai said, addressing the Taliban. "It is very clear that you serve strangers and want to show that Afghanistan is a dangerous place."
Mr. Karzai's outbursts may be caused by the fact that he fears being left out amid the recent flurry of international and Afghan contacts with the Taliban, said political commentator and former Afghan lawmaker Daoud Sultanzoy. "As president, he feels frustrated he's being sidelined," Mr. Sultanzoy said.
Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at yaroslav.trofimov@wsj.com
US is Eyeing Afghanistan's Mines: Karzai
TOLOnews.com By Shakeela Ahbrimkhil Tuesday, 12 March 2013
President Hamid Karzai on Tuesday continued his criticism of US intentions in Afghanistan with a pointed speech claiming the Americans are eyeing off Afghan mines and warned that now the Afghan government knows.
"Americans have asked Afghans to give them Afghanistan's mining contracts, and I said 'Bring your contracts'... Lots of mines are hidden in Helmand and from the start they have been doing their investigations and finishing their photography. But now they understand that we know about them," Karzai said in a speech during an official visit to southern Helmand province Tuesday.
Karzai also repeated his condemnation of the Taliban's attacks as a backhanded support for the US military in Afghanistan because they only serve to prolong the US presence instead of removing it.
He also blasted the Taliban leaders for going outside Afghanistan and "drinking coffee" with foreigners, while in Afghanistan they kill civilians in the name of fighting foreigners.
"The Taliban leaders who are staying in Pakistan and Quetta are traveling daily to different countries in special planes and negotiating with foreigners. Two months ago in France they had a meeting with foreigners and with some Afghan opposition groups in Paris. There they are drinking tea and coffee and here in Kabul and Khost they are killing widows and trying to show their power to America. But it is not power as much as a service for America," Karzai said.
Karzai made similar remarks in a speech on Sunday in Kabul saying that the Taliban was colluding with the US to ensure an ongoing military presence in Afghanistan after 2014.
The new US Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel, who was in Kabul at the time, dismissed the comments as not making any sense, while US Ambassador to Afghanistan James Cunningham described them as "inconceivable".
The White House also responded saying that nobody believed his statement.
"That's categorically false, and nobody believes it," White House spokesman Jay Carney said about Karzai's remarks.
"The United States has spent enormous blood and treasure for the past 12 years supporting the Afghan people...in the effort to ensure stability and security in that country," he added.
However, Karzai seemed undeterred Tuesday repeating the claim that was rejected by US and Afghan leaders alike that the US and Taliban are secretly meeting while leaving the Afghan government out of negotiations.
Newly-elected first vice speaker of Parliament Mirwais Yasini told TOLOnews that Afghanistan's government needs to appreciate the assistance of the West and warned that Karzai risked pushing Afghanistan's relationship into an irreparable crisis.
"We must move forward conscientiously so our relations with the world, the West and our neighbors won't be damaged," Yasini said Tuesday.
MP Ahmad Bahzad agreed saying that Karzai's views should not affect the relationship.
"When the international community escorted Karzai into the presidential palace, they didn't come with his invitation. So too, they should not leave now with all these protests and accusations," he told TOLOnews.
"Afghanistan needs the support of the international community and obviously the Afghan people needs the help of the international community," he added.
Despite Karzais' remarks the White House has said that the US President's Barack Obama decision for a 2014 withdraw of soldiers from Afghanistan and helping build the Afghan security forces has not changed.
With aid to Afghanistan, past performance is a predictor of future returns
A lot of aid to Afghanistan has been squandered. The latest project indicates that the US still doesn't seem to understand the country's basic needs.
Christian Science Monitor By Dan Murphy, Staff writer March 12, 2013
In Afghanistan, it's not so much that the US is failing to learn from history. It's that it also seems to be failing to learn from the present.
During the past decade of war there, billions of dollars of US spending have been stolen, squandered, or have simply disappeared into well-intentioned projects that were inappropriate for Afghan needs.
So what is the US up to now? Planning more spending, even after US troops depart at the end of next year when it will have even less ability to monitor and account for spending than it does now.
This year the US is planning to spend $10 billion on Afghan "reconstruction" alone. While US plans for the country may begin to get some attention given the fight in Washington over slashing spending, raising taxes, or doing both, US plans for Afghanistan seem to be on auto-pilot. And some, frankly, seem utopian given its experiences there.
Take USAID's announced plan to spend some $300 million on Afghan women's rights over the next five years (which has been in the works for more than a year, with for-profit companies scrambling for the spoils). Considering past problems, the prospect that all this money will be spent wisely, or spent at all, is very low, with US and other foreign troops scheduled to leave the country by the end of 2014. At that point, traveling the country at the behest of the US telling Afghans they need to change their culture will become even more dangerous than it is today.
But even if every nickel was spent as the US government intended, it's still a bad idea. And it reveals the fact that the US, after a decade of war there, still doesn't seem to understand Afghanistan, either in terms of culture or its basic needs. The cart before the horse
After US forces drove the Taliban from power in 2002, Afghanistan remained a land where warlords wield power in their home districts, where the principal business of government officials is the collecting of rents and the direction of patronage to friends and family members, and where the massive US military presence is nothing so much as an ore-body to be mined, relentlessly, until it's tapped out.
In the absence of law and order, quality health care, and economic opportunity (Afghanistan's GDP is largely driven by aid spending and the opium trade), $300 million on women's rights in isolation seems like a folly. If you can't enforce basic order, or find a way to finance the government beyond foreign handouts, or make major inroads into high maternal and childhood mortality rates (US claims healthcare successes there to the contrary), how are hundreds of millions of dollars going to make any difference?
Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told Afghanistan's women "we will not abandon you." Well, members of Congress are probably not going to start tabling bills to allow Afghan women to emigrate to the US to escape harsh conditions in their home country. And when it becomes too dangerous for young, well-meaning foreigners to travel across Afghanistan explaining to local folk how they're leading their lives in the wrong fashion, what then?
Read this sentence from the USAID proposal and see if you can count the management-speak buzzwords: "WLD will enable women to develop urgently needed leadership competencies that will create a prominent group of female role models and change agents in all sectors who will serve as models for girls and younger women.”
"WLD" stands for "Women's Leadership Development," a $20 million chunk of the USAID plan, and it is highly unlikely it will "enable" much beyond the careers of a few aid workers. Huge hurdles
Positive role models are nice and all, but the problem for women and girls in Afghanistan isn’t that they’re unaware that women can have successful careers. It's that sometimes they get killed by their male family members for participating in programs like this, or are targeted by groups like the Taliban. In Afghanistan's Laghman Province, the local director of women's affairs, Naija Sediqi, was assassinated last December. She had been on the job for five months, following the assassination of her female predecessor Hanifa Safi.
The USAID document soliciting bids for this large women's rights project acknowledges it isn't just the Taliban that are hostile to their overall goals, noting that a clerical code of conduct for women endorsed by the government "condones wife beating under certain circumstances and aims to restrict women's mobility, causing many Afghan women to fear that transition will herald a reversal of their decade-long struggle for safety and rights." Afghan President Hamid Karzai last year defended his endorsement of the code, saying "it is the sharia law of all Muslims and all Afghans."
USAID's document makes clear that a primary goal of this effort is fundamental social and cultural change: "Achieving a critical mass of women in leadership roles in government, civil society and the economy will make the phenomenon of women seeking and acquiring such roles less unusual, less inappropriate and viewed as a more “new normal” pattern of behavior. When applied to women, the critical mass theory is quite specific about how the advantages of women’s leadership contributions accrue to and thus become apparent to and accepted by family, community, company, and country."
Are women treated appallingly in Afghan society? Clearly. But is USAID up to the task of rendering cultural change in a place that bristles at interference from foreigners?
Even in less contentious areas, aid spending in Afghanistan has a spotty track record, at best.
The Monitor's Ben Arnoldy reported in 2010 on the mismanagement of USAID in Afghanistan, a litany of failed promises: A claim that electricity had tripled for two communities that saw almost no increase in power at all; a road paved for $2.5 million that disintegrated back into a dirt track within three months; huge sums of aid money directed to the protection of engineers and other workers, a necessary response to insurgency, but on that so most goals for development fall short.
Will USAID's plan to use "small-group interventions [to] create large-scale social change through the impact that specific participants have on those within their personal and professional spheres of influence" work? Well, that's their theory.
From the perspective of women's rights, large-scale social change would be very welcome. But the Afghans may not agree. The one thing Afghanistan (and Iraq) should have taught the US by now is the limits of its own power.
Programs like this one show the US still hasn't learned that lesson.
US soldier accused of Afghan massacre undergoes sanity review
By MEENA HASEEB - 14 Mar 2013, 1:42 pm Khaama Press
A military official on Wednesday said, a U.S. soldier charged with slaying 16 civilians in Afghanistan will undergo a sanity review set to begin next week to determine his mental state during the killings and his ability to stand trial.
Robert Bales’ mental health has been expected to be a key part of his defense.
The military judge overseeing the case agreed that the results would not automatically be shared with prosecutors, the lawyers for Bales, said on Wednesday.
John Henry Browne said, the review of Staff Sgt. Robert Bales by Army doctors will start Sunday and could last three to seven days. He has not entered a plea. The Army is seeking the death penalty.
Bales, a father of 2, is accused of being drunk when he crept away from a remote U.S. combat post on foot in the predawn hours of March 11 and gunning down Afghans in their homes.
During his fourth combat deployment, he slipped away from his base in southern Afghanistan to attack two nearby villages and returned soaked in blood, prosecutors say.
Karzai’s anti-US remarks may fuel violence: Gen. Dunford
By GHANIZADA - 14 Mar 2013, 2:59 pm Khaama Press
NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) commander Gen. Joseph Dunford has warned of an increased threat of attack on coalition forces following a series of inflammatory anti-US comments by Afghan president Hamid Karzai.
ISAF on Thursday confirmed the contents of a strongly-worded advisory sent by US General Joseph Dunford to his senior commanders on Wednesday, the Global Post reported.
Afghan president Hamid Karzai on Sunday accused United States of colluding colluding with militants to justify its presence in Afghanistan.
Karzai also banned the international coalition security forces from university campuses due to unproven claims of harassment of students.
The advisory released by the US commander Gen. Joseph Dunford and obtained by The New York Times said, “Karzai’s remarks could be a catalyst for some to lash out against our forces — he may also issue orders that put our forces at risk.”
“This advisory was prudent given increased coalition casualties in recent days. General Dunford’s email is simply an example of this vigilance,” the statement added.
Dunford in his advisory also added, “We’re at a rough point in the relationship. (Militants) are also watching and will look for a way to exploit the situation — they have already ramped up for the spring.”
Karzai’s comments accusing US of collusion with the Taliban group comes amid on-going talks between the two nations to negotiate the framework that could allow some American troops to remain in Afghanistan when most NATO combat troops leave next year.
The allegations by president Karzai also provoked fury among the US officials besides political observers and a number of the political parties and movements expressed concerns regarding Karzai’s remarks.
Afghanistan moves to salvage ancient Buddhist city – and its economy
McClatchy Newspapers By Jay Price Tuesday, March 12, 2013
MES AYNAK, Afghanistan - It had the potential to be another Afghanistan Buddha disaster, recalling the Taliban’s destruction of two ancient statues that had stood for centuries in this country’s west: A buried Buddhist city lost to time was about to be obliterated by what promised to be one of the largest copper mines in the world.
Now, however, thanks to delays in construction of the massive mine and a hefty influx of cash from the World Bank, the 1.5-square-mile Mes Aynak complex is an archaeological triumph – though bittersweet.
An international team of archaeologists and more than 550 local laborers are now frantically excavating what turns out to be a unique window into Afghanistan’s role on the ancient Silk Road connecting China and India with the Mediterranean.
With its Buddhist city, a ring of perhaps a half-dozen monasteries and a striking complex of workshops and mine shafts built into a high mountain ridgeline at an altitude of 8,200 feet, the site shows the interplay of Buddhism, mining and trade during the years it was in operation, now thought to be from the fifth to the late eighth centuries.
It underscores the conflict between cultural preservation and Afghanistan’s desperate need to find a way to survive as the international community winds down its involvement in the country. The copper here may be worth $100 billion by some estimates, five times the estimated value of Afghanistan’s entire economy, in which the government and military are funded mainly by foreign countries. The best private-sector jobs are with foreign relief groups.
A Chinese consortium agreed in 2007 to pay $3 billion for a 30-year lease on the mine. It was the largest private investment in Afghan history, and Afghan officials hailed it as a key component in building an economy that one day won’t rely almost solely on donor nations and the opium trade. They said it would generate hundred of millions of dollars a year for the government eventually and would provide thousands of jobs.
The massive, open pit mine, though, would destroy most or all of the ruins, which were larded with well-preserved frescoes and more than 1,000 statues, including hundreds of Buddhas.
The specter of Buddhas being dynamited or bulldozed immediately sparked comparison with one of the greatest cultural disasters in Afghan history: the Taliban’s destruction in 2001 of the giant Buddhas set into cliff walls in Bamiyan province. But a small group of French and Afghan archaeologists cut an informal deal with the Ministry of Mines in 2009 for time to perform a "rescue excavation," to recover as many key artifacts and document the site to whatever degree possible before the mining begins.
When that will be, they don’t know. A December deadline came and went. Now they have until June to finish work on the primary sites, said Mossadiq Khalili, the Afghan deputy minister of cultural affairs. Work on some of the monasteries on the edge of the mine area could continue for several years, he said.
The archaeologists feel almost certain that they have until at least 2016, because so little progress has been made on the mine. There seem to be no firm plans yet for the necessary power plant, smelter and rail line, or for the mining operation itself.
"So, if that’s correct, it means that there is, I won’t say plenty of time, but a reasonable, good amount of time to work on this site," said Philippe Marquis, the director of the French Archaeological Delegation in Afghanistan, which has been operating in the country since 1922 and acts as an adviser to the Afghan government.
What makes the prospect of success even greater, Marquis said, is the international interest in getting the mine up and running. Afghanistan has long been desperately poor, but it’s thought to have untapped oil, gas and mineral reserves worth perhaps more than $1 trillion. The World Bank, keen to see the mine project succeed, committed $8 million last year to the archaeological project.
Without the copper mine, Mes Aynak and its artifacts very likely would have been destroyed anyway, Marquis and others think, looted by dealers in stolen antiquities, the fate of many Afghan archaeological sites. But with hopes for an economic boon, there’s a strong chance that the site will be documented and its artifacts preserved.
Many of the site’s statues and paintings have been removed, and the rest will soon follow, said Nicolas Engel, an assistant director of the French Archaeological Delegation in Afghanistan.
It’s an adventure just to visit the site, in Logar province about 25 miles south of Kabul. Al Qaida trained here before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the highway is still subject to occasional Taliban assaults. The massive copper mine site is fenced and heavily guarded. One tunnel, apparently dug by the Russians when they occupied Afghanistan in the 1980s, is thought to be booby-trapped, and land mines left from their presence are still a major hazard. One laborer was wounded last year when he struck a mine while digging, Engel said.
Everywhere are the telltale signs of copper mining going back centuries. Blankets of fused slag – the byproduct of the old copper-smelting operations – tint the mountainside black. In one place the slag was piled nearly 40 feet high, evidence of thousands of years of production.
Shovels and picks ring out against rock as local laborers dig. Large sections of the city have emerged, as have roads and alleys that cut across several neighborhoods. Several monasteries, each on a hill or mountain above the main city, have been excavated, and more than 1,000 sculptures have been found, including Buddhas more than twice life-sized. Ancient manuscripts and decorative woodwork also have been uncovered.
On a recent sunny day, British archaeologist Thomas Eley sat on a wall sketching the layout of a small building and pondering a small indentation beside a heavily scorched depression in the floor. More than 700 coins had been found in the building, and he said it appeared to be a place where coins had been made from the copper smelted atop the mountain.
Across an ancient street and several buildings away, another archaeologist was sketching the unusually thick walls and small, extra-secure doorways of what may have been a bank where copper and coins were stored. All around them, laborers were uncovering more buildings, more pieces of the puzzle of Mes Aynak.
"I’m an archaeologist, so of course I’m sad about what will happen here, but it’s also life, and life has to go on," said Usman Ishanzada, who’s from Tajikistan. "If this mine can bring some life and jobs for local people, why not?"
The site poses intriguing questions about the era when Buddhism was the dominant religion in Afghanistan, Marquis said.
"The odd thing is all these Buddhist monasteries," he said. "Monks are not supposed to be miners, because Buddhist monks are not supposed to be working.”
The way monasteries are arrayed around the city and mine creates almost a wall around the site, which almost suggests a type of military activity, too, which would be a previously unknown role for monks.
The success of the project from a scientific and economic standpoint is becoming a positive lesson for the Afghan population and once-skeptical officials in the government, who thought the archaeological efforts would slow the mine and cause problems. Instead they’ve pumped money into the local economy, improved security and made it clear that such work can coexist well with economic development projects.
It’s also showing that even projects unrelated to mines may have big benefits for local communities, Marquis said.
It seems unlikely, he said, that the Afghan government will stop work on the excavation without any mining. That not only would trigger an international uproar but also would make hundreds of workers jobless, a major security issue. Many workers here already acknowledge that they were part of a rocket attack last August that was staged to protest the destruction of villages that sat atop the mine, Marquis said. Their hostility, however, has turned into enthusiasm now that they’ve been hired on.
The plan is to remove all the artifacts, even the largest statues and the domed shrines called stupas. For now, some statues are being stored in shipping containers at the site, and some have been sent to the national museum in Kabul. Afghan officials hope to build a museum just north of Mes Aynak.
Marquis said it was possible that time wasn’t the major challenge now.
"Our biggest problem has become the long-term conservation of all these things that are being saved," he said. "We need to work on a plan for what to do with them."
Parliament First Vice Speaker Elected After 4 Days
TOLOnews.com By Haseeb Maudoodi Tuesday, 12 March 2013
Afghan lawmakers Tuesday elected Mirwais Yasini as first vice speaker of the lower house in their fourth vote after the previous three days of voting had failed to reach a majority.
Voting began for the fourth day in a row at around 09:00am and finished about 01:30pm with Mirwais Yasini receiving 129 votes to be first vice speaker and Sayed Ikram with 113 votes for secretary.
Obaidullah Klimzai who was also nominated for the post of the first vice speaker received only 75 votes.
Daoud Kalakani who was also nominated for the position of secretary received 88 votes.
"Finally after four days the lawmakers have elected those nominated for the post. I congratulate all of you [lawmakers] and I hope that they do a good job," Speaker of the House Abdul Raouf Ibrahimi said.
On Monday, the lawmakers elected Saleh Mohammad Saljoqi as the second vice speaker of the house.
Several lawmakers were nominated for posts on the parliament's administrative board, but most of them were rejected over the past three days.
The lawmakers first vote was held Saturday after parliament reconvened following the winter break.
Political parties have recently called for parliament to make the approval of the election law the top of its agenda.
The election law has been delayed because of disagreements between the parliament and senate on the nature of an independent election commission, specifically, whether or not two foreign observers can be part of the Electoral Complaints Commission.
Taliban Loyalists Plot in Govt Ranks: Massoud
TOLOnews.com By Abdul Wali Arian Tuesday, 12 March 2013
Afghanistan's former Jihadist leaders have been killed over the years by "special circles" in the government who are cooperating with the Taliban, the leader of the National Front has said.
Ahmad Zia Massoud used his speech on the second anniversary of the death of Gen Abdul Rahman Sayed Khili to warn that Afghanistan has Taliban loyalists in its political and military arms who have helped kill former Jihadi leaders such as Khili.
"You saw how many of our leaders were killed in the past five years? The Taliban in cooperation with special circles in the government killed them," Massoud said at the gathering in Parwan province on Monday.
"If the Taliban come to the power once more, believe me, they will kill all who had a part in Jihad [against them]," he added.
Khili was the police chief of northern Kunduz province when he was killed in a suicide attack March 2011 in the province.
Defence Minister Bismillah Khan Mohammadi also spoke at the commemoration and called for unity.
"All Afghans shared in the Jihad period. We are a great nation and we are all brothers," he said.
Massoud also said that the Taliban are often given better roles in politics.
"There are some contradictions in the government which again will see us put the country in political and economic isolation. The government wants a strong presence of Taliban in political and military matters," he said.
National Coalition leader Dr Abdullah Abdullah said that there are concerns among the former Jihadists of such plots against them.
"The people are really worried about what will happen and what plots are going to be made against them," he said.
Afghanistan's government repeatedly blamed Pakistan as being a safe haven for insurgency in the region, but rarely do political leaders talk openly about the Taliban supporters in the Afghan government ranks.
Taliban Threaten Nuristan Doctors Over Polio Vaccinations
TOLOnews.com Tuesday, 12 March 2013
Taliban insurgents have bashed doctors in eastern Nuristan province to threaten them against giving polio vaccinations, local officials said Tuesday.
Provincial governor Sayed Fazlullah Wahidi said that the polio vaccination campaign has been launched every year in the Waigal district, but this year the Taliban has stopped it.
"The campaign begins every year in the Waigal district which has been under Taliban control in the past two years. There wasn't any problem in the past year with the polio vaccinations, but this time they stopped it and have bashed several doctors," Wahidi said.
"The Taliban told the doctors that it's [polio vaccination] forbidden and you can't start it in the district," he added.
Wahidi said that they have started talking to tribal elders to start negotiating with the Taliban about allowing the polio vaccinations to continue.
The vaccination programme is underway in several other districts in the province "without any problems", he said.
Polio vaccinations have met with violent opposition in neighbouring Pakistan for some time. Afghanistan is one of the only three countries across the globe in which the disease still remains endemic; the other two are Pakistan and Nigeria.
New 300-Bed Hospital for Drug Addicts Opens in Kabul
TOLOnews.com By Shakeela Ahbrimkhil Tuesday, 12 March 2013
Afghanistan's Second Vice President Tuesday called on the country's judicial organs to place harsher penalties on drug smugglers as he inaugurated a hospital for drug addicts in the country's capital.
Mohammad Karim Khalili said that government anti-narcotic efforts will not have a positive result if the smugglers are not prosecuted in country.
"This is true that a number of smugglers have been arrested but the main smugglers and drug traders have not been prosecuted," Khalili said.
"I ask Afghanistan's Attorney General and High Court to prosecute the smugglers," he said.
Khalili inaugurated the new 300-bed hospital in south Kabul's Jangalak area which will have 24-hour treatment for addicts, built amid government concern over the high number of addicts in the country.
According to the Ministry of Public Health and United Nation's counter-narcotics office, Afghanistan now has over 1 million addicts.
The ministry has said that 81 percent of the addicts are men, 13 percent are women and 8 percent are children.
www.afghanistannewscenter.com
Associated Press – Wed, Mar 13, 2013.
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Afghan officials say several people have been killed and injured when a suicide bomber blew himself up in a crowd of sports fans watching a buzkashi game in northern Afghanistan.
Amanddin Quriashi, a senior official in the Imam Sahib district of Kunduz province, says the district police chief is among the wounded in Wednesday's bombing.
Kunduz province police chief Gen. Mohammad Khalil Andarabi says the father of the speaker of the Afghan parliament was among those killed in the attack.
The provincial police chief's Sayed Sarwar Hussaini has confirmed the suicide attack but says the number of casualties is still being determined.
The crowd was watching a game of buzkashi, a traditional Afghan sport akin to polo, where players on horseback use a headless goat carcass instead of a ball.
Afghan Parliament Speaker's Relatives Among Dead In Konduz Bombing
By RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan March 14, 2013
KABUL -- Afghan officials say relatives of the speaker of the Afghan parliament's lower house might have been targeted by a suicide bomber in Konduz Province.
The governor of the Imam Sahib district said on March 13 that the speaker, Abdul Rauf Ibrahimi, who is an ethnic Uzbek, lost his brother, father, nephew, and possibly a cousin in the attack.
The March 13 bombing killed 11 people and injured at least 13.
The district police chief was also among the wounded.
The suicide bomber struck after a buzkashi match, an Afghan and Central Asian sport similar to polo but played with a goat carcass instead of a ball.
Buzkashi tournaments are held across northern Afghan regions close to Central Asian countries on the eve of Norouz, the Persian New Year marked in March on the spring equinox.
What Vali Nasr Gets Wrong
A former State Department insider has written a blistering account of the Obama administration’s missteps in Afghanistan. But is he right?
Foreign Policy BY SARAH CHAYES MARCH 12, 2013
Former State Department Advisor Vali Nasr has set Washington abuzz with his gloves-off denunciation of the Obama administration's conduct of foreign policy, in particular the war in Afghanistan. Rarely does a recently former government official let loose with such an unalloyed vilification of the administration he served -- especially when it is still in power.
But "The Inside Story of how the White House Let Diplomacy Fail in Afghanistan" is more conventional than it may at first appear. Nasr's is merely the latest salvo in ongoing interagency skirmishing to define the narrative on Afghanistan, to tell a story that lays the blame for the policy's failure at someone else's door.
In this case, the originality is that the tale's main villain is not the military, but the White House (albeit described as bewitched by the military). The hounded victims are former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, the late Richard Holbrooke -- who happen to have been Nasr's friends and bosses.
What this account is missing -- what so many such accounts are missing -- is the humility and intellectual honesty to take a candid look inward, to strive for a nuanced assessment of our shared missteps, in what I, like Nasr, believe will be a grim outcome for Afghanistan, and ultimately for international security.
When Nasr was senior advisor to Holbrooke, I was serving in a similar capacity, first for two commanders of the international troops in Afghanistan, and then for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I took up these positions on the heels of seven years working in downtown Kandahar, where I ran an NGO and then a manufacturing cooperative.
So my perspective on the events Nasr describes, and in which I participated, differs from his in two respects. I came to them bathed in the aspirations of ordinary Afghans, in their attitudes to what was happening in their country, and to the international intervention. And I was privy to the actual views of senior military officials regarding the appropriate balance between military and civilian instruments of power in conducting the Afghanistan mission.
Like many civilians, Nasr paints the military in primary colors, as a monolithic, power-hungry leviathan. "The military," he declares, "wanted to stay in charge." Somewhat more remarkably, he depicts President Barak Obama as enthralled by the Pentagon, "not keen on showing daylight between the White House and the military."
That is not how many officers I worked with experienced it. I myself remember a White House skepticism of top military officers and their recommendations that, while perhaps justified, was every bit as visceral as Holbrooke's. The instantaneous firing of one of the Army's most prized officers, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, after offensive remarks by his staff were featured in a Rolling Stone article, does not attest to a president welded to the military. (Regardless, again, of how justified McChrystal's recall may have been.)
Far from railroading the bureaucracy to gain unfettered control of the Afghanistan campaign, military officers I encountered, to a one, called for more civilian input, not less. At every echelon -- from battalion commanders who begged the State Department officials sharing their bases for a better picture of local political dynamics, to senior officers and Defense Department officials who pushed for (and offered to help fund) a civilian surge, to the top brass in Kabul and Washington waiting in vain for a coherent strategic policy to emerge from U.S. civilian leadership -- I saw military officers dismayed, not delighted, at being the lead, and sometimes the only, actors.
In the first half of 2009, for example, Holbrooke and U.S. Embassy officials pooh-poohed the notion that fraud might characterize the upcoming presidential election. I would whip out the 10 voter registration cards I had bought in Kandahar in a vain effort to attract their attention. The diplomatic leadership persistently refrained from imagining any steps that might deter the electoral violations before it was too late.
Increasingly alarmed, as evidence mounted that the fraud would be so massive, so egregious, and so humiliating to Afghan voters as to risk undermining the credibility of the entire mission, some colleagues and I drew up a list of ways the thousands of international soldiers and officers under NATO command (ISAF) might make a positive impact. I will never forget the look on then-ISAF commander Gen. David McKiernan's face when presented with that list. A dull ache clouded his eyes. I have to fight a war, it conveyed. And I have to secure an election in the midst of it. And you want me to see to its credibility, too?
This type of reaction, versions of which I got from numerous officers over the years, points to one of the shortcomings in the standard military analysis. There was a tendency among many of my colleagues in uniform to see military and civilian action as unconnected, a notion that the military could enter a zone, "bring" security, and then stand aside while an army of civilians swarmed in and "brought" development and governance. (That view of hermetically divided spheres of activity, note, was shared by many civilians.)
Of course, Afghan dynamics were more interconnected than that. But it was hard for military commanders to take accurate stock of the impact their relationships with Afghan counterparts, military and civilian, might have on security and good governance. Officers contracted for work and supplies, delivered development resources through local agents, purchased intelligence and gravel and gasoline -- without thinking through the potentially distorting impact of these arrangements.
I don't disagree, in other words, -- and not a single military officer I know would disagree -- with Nasr's contention that the Afghanistan mission suffered perhaps fatally from a lack of input by diplomatic leaders. But the real question is, input to what end? What was, and what should have been, the content of that input?
Nasr narrates the gleeful launch of Holbrooke's SRAP office at Foggy Bottom, the "creative chaos" of eager young men and women spawning designs for the placement of cell-phone towers or the use of virtual bank accounts for Afghan National Police salaries. A lot of those ideas were good, many made a difference. But they were, to a large extent, hopelessly lost in the weeds.
So was much of Holbrooke's input to interagency debate. Nasr decries his boss's exclusion from important meetings. But while the girth of the folders Holbrooke regularly table-dropped at such meetings is accurately recorded, Nasr misses the takeaway. The SRAP office's contributions to policy debates were so compendious, so full of arcane, not to say loony, detail on the specifics of, for instance, how instant messaging should be used for information operations, or how a specific agricultural development project should be structured, as to be completely impenetrable.
This type of detail is inappropriate to senior national security decisionmaking. It is the level of programming the embassy should have been hammering out for execution in the field. Perhaps it's no wonder Amb. Karl Eikenberry, or other participants in those meetings, grew irritated. Holbrooke and Clinton should have been aiming their thinking at a much more strategic level.
They should have been considering two fundamental drivers that had been fueling the burgeoning conflict in Afghanistan.
One was the increasingly bald, abusive, and structured corruption of the Afghan government. The notion that Afghans would take risks on behalf of such a government, when they were "slapped on one cheek by the Taliban, and on the other by [that] government," as several put it to me, when they were shaken down, with a literal or figurative kick in the teeth, just about every time they encountered a government official, when they watched President Hamid Karzai protect government officials from repercussions for egregious crimes, release them from jail, or demote police officers or prosecutors who took action against them, simply defies logic.
The other and somewhat related driver of the conflict has been the Pakistani military's policy of helping the Taliban to regroup, retrain, and plan and execute attacks inside of Afghanistan, and the exploitation of this growing Afghan disaffection with the Karzai regime to help the Taliban and allied extremist groups regain a foothold inside the country. The objective of this policy was to regain, most probably through eventual negotiations, a degree of the proxy control of Afghanistan that Pakistan had enjoyed before 2001.
Both of those problems are diplomatic, not military. But neither Holbrooke nor Clinton ever produced a serious analysis of them, or put their staffs to work developing coherent approaches for addressing them. Instead, the diplomats joined other civilian officials in the generalized obsession over what number of men and women in uniform -- American and Afghan -- should be deployed where and on what timeline.
Endless hours of the extended 2009 interagency debate Nasr alludes to were taken up with such military tactics. All the key civilian leaders had their considered opinions, but seemed less enthusiastic about discussing the issues that fell in their lane. Eikenberry ultimately dispatched cables that quite accurately diagnosed many of the problems with the Karzai regime. But still he failed to provide any policy options for addressing them, beyond "don't order a troop surge."
In this regard, I agree with Nasr that President Obama failed to press for the right options. He failed to get his diplomats to do their jobs and generate a strategic framework within which military action, whatever its size, might make sense.
It was military officials who, to a degree, tried to expand the aperture. According to the New York Times, Gen. David Petraeus, who was CENTCOM commander at the time, compared the Karzai government to a "crime syndicate" during that 2009 debate. He and others urged then National Security Advisor James Jones to allocate more time at Principals' Committee meetings to discussing the civilian dimensions of the policy. A strategic review of the campaign, produced by McChrystal's headquarters, identified, alongside the violent insurgency, a "crisis in confidence in the Afghan government" as a threat to mission success.
Where these and other senior military officers might be reproached is in their prideful unwillingness to take their own logic to its natural conclusion. In the end, they predictably defaulted to the traditional military "can-do" attitude -- and perhaps to a reckless appetite to try. Despite their reservations, they insisted that given enough men and materiel, they could make this mission work anyway.
How much more valuable would their advice have been if they had explicitly tied their troop request to a viable political strategy -- if they had argued that without a policy on Pakistan, without a policy on Afghan government corruption, they did not want that troop surge after all because the sacrifice would quite likely be for naught. But that kind of moral courage failed them.
Nasr's depiction of vicious personal conflicts and turf wars within the executive branch is delectably lurid. Far be it from me to deny their reality. Or to deny that the Obama White House may have exercised an excessive or insular grip on foreign policy, linking it too closely to domestic electoral considerations.
But the notion that pre-existing partisan animosity toward Holbrooke was a main factor driving policy decisions verges on the paranoid. In fact, deep and passionate philosophical disagreements on the substance divided members of executive branch agencies over how the war should be conducted. And it was these differences of analysis and prescription that shaped the policy debate -- not personal rivalry.
Nasr does dwell on two of those. They are the only high-level issues his account takes up. Yet in both cases, for someone of his learning and experience, Nasr's recipes are startlingly simplistic. The obvious way to bring the war to a successful conclusion, he argues, was to negotiate with the Taliban, and to conciliate Pakistan's relevant leadership in order to change that country's longstanding policy of sponsoring violent extremism in pursuit of national security aims.
Nasr's prescription for negotiating with the Taliban neglects the implications of a basic fact he himself acknowledges: the militants' intensive, if often fraught, ties to Pakistan's all-powerful military intelligence agency, the ISI. Nasr writes of negotiations as though the United States would be engaging with an autonomous Afghan entity, not the heavily influenced Pakistani proxy most Taliban leaders constitute.
He refers to a moment in the summer of 2010, when, exasperated by her inability to get the issue on the interagency calendar, Clinton personally handed a memo on negotiation to Obama -- only to see his approval squelched by the National Security staff. In fact, more than six months earlier, U.S. government officials had been reaching out at least indirectly to a number of senior Taliban commanders. But almost immediately, the ISI arrested every one of them. Top Pakistani leaders had no intention of letting control of any potential negotiations slip from their grasp.
It is unlikely the ISI incurred the risk and expense of reconstituting the Taliban just for the fun of it. The objective was to ensure the Pakistani government a seat at the table whenever negotiations began -- as Islamabad predicted they inevitably would. Nasr's formula walks right into this trap. It would have the effect of rewarding Pakistan's policy of using extremist violence to advance its objectives -- a.k.a. its state sponsorship of terrorism.
It is for this reason, not because they wanted "to stay in charge," as Nasr puts it, that many military officers balked at the SRAP office's insistence on negotiation with the Taliban as the only path to salvation.
As the idea was formulated by Holbrooke's team, such negotiations, focused solely on the Taliban, would also have the effect of marginalizing all the other Afghan constituencies with legitimate grievances against the Karzai government. The result would be to reward violent extremism, and leave those who to date have opted against it no choice but to arm up in anticipation of a deal they were not consulted about, and whose terms (a return to indirect Pakistani control of much of Afghanistan) they could not live with. Even in their former stronghold of Kandahar, the Taliban are largely viewed with distaste, and are not considered to authentically represent the people. A much better formula for reconciliation would enlarge the scope to include all the significant forces in Afghan political life.
Nasr rightly derides some military officers' reflex to apply tactics that seemed to work in Iraq to vastly different Afghanistan. But he is less thoughtful about whether Holbrooke was seeking to apply tactics that seemed to work in the Balkans -- where Bosnian Muslims, Croats, and Serbs did in fact function as autonomous entities -- to Afghanistan, where a proxy relationship has been so key to the dynamics of the country's iterated waves of conflict.
As for "changing Pakistan," on that point Nasr echoes the George W. Bush administration's approach, which consisted of dispatching Secretary of State Colin Powell and a "with us or against us" ultimatum after 9/11/2001, and then blindly accepting Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf's profession that, looking at it that way, he allowed he was probably with us. For years, I watched his intelligence services deliver up an al Qaeda Arab once every few months, to U.S. accolades, while they were busily reweaving the threads of Taliban networks. Pakistani officials were warmly conciliated during that first half-decade of the war, but they did not abandon their steadfast policy of using asymmetric extremist violence to help them punch above their weight internationally.
Concretely and consistently confronting the Pakistani leadership on its use of extremist proxies, or President Karzai on the criminally extractive nature of his government -- and not just in occasional spurts of public huffing and puffing -- would have taken a significant investment of political courage and fortitude. And those are attributes that I did not see much in evidence among senior U.S. civilian officials.
Nasr is correct that civilian instruments of power, including intelligence and economic interaction as well as diplomacy, must play a more robust role in U.S. foreign policy. But for them to do so, it is not enough for the military's role to shrink, or for the White House to be nicer to the secretary of state. Diplomats have to up their game. And some candid introspection might be a good place to start. A joyous cacophony of talented youngsters is not sufficient to develop high-level policy on our country's longest war. Civilian agencies need to cultivate and empower deep area expertise. They need to shatter the brittle bureaucratic rigidities that characterize their systems, and provide graduated autonomy to rising leaders. They need to advocate aggressively and effectively for increased resources. But most of all, they need to be willing to take moral and political risks when it really matters.
Coordinated terrorist attacks foiled in Kabul city
By SADAF SHINWARI - 14 Mar 2013, 9:58 am Khaama Press
Afghan intelligence department — national directorate of security (NDS) officails announced at least five Haqqani network militants were during a gun battle in capital Kabul on Wednesday.
According to a statement released by national directorate of security (NDS) Afghan security forces prevented a coordinated attack by Haqqani network militants in kabul city.
The source further added at least two suspected Haqqani network militants were also arrested during the operation.
The militants were reportedly looking to carry out coordinated attacks on military institutions, NDS department said following the statement adding that Afghan security forces successfully managed to identify their location and carry out the operation in 16th district of kabul city.
NDS officials also added that Afghan security forces seized some weapons, ammunitions and explosives during the operation.
Anti-government armed militant groups yet to comment regarding the report.
Karzai Persists With Anti-U.S. Remarks
Wall Street Journal By YAROSLAV TROFIMOV March 12, 2013
KABUL - Afghan President Hamid Karzai repeated in a speech on Tuesday his provocative charge that the Taliban and the U.S. are conniving to perpetuate instability, ignoring a U.S. rebuttal in a deepening crisis in bilateral relations.
Mr. Karzai said on Sunday that the Taliban were killing Afghan civilians "in the service of America," hours before a tense meeting with visiting U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel. U.S. military and civilian officials forcefully rejected Mr. Karzai's tirade, with U.S. Ambassador James Cunnigham saying on Monday that "the thought that we would collude with the Taliban flies in the face of everything we have done here."
Mr. Karzai, however, persisted in a speech on Tuesday to tribal leaders and elders in Helmand province, the focus of President Barack Obama's troop surge, where 920 coalition troops lost their lives fighting the Taliban—more than anywhere else in the country.
A U.S. official in Kabul said afterward that Mr. Cunningham's response on Monday had already addressed the content of Mr. Karzai's allegations.
Mr. Karzai's harsh public pronouncements threaten to derail the talks between the U.S. and Afghanistan on what, if any, U.S. military presence will remain here after the coalition's mandate expires in late 2014.
Obama administration officials already have mooted the so-called zero option of withdrawing all troops, as the U.S. did in Iraq when the two sides failed to agree on the question of legal immunity for U.S. forces. It is a scenario that, analysts said, grows more attractive with every Karzai broadside.
"Karzai is skating on thin ice," said Brian Katulis, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a Washington think tank close to the administration. "The Obama administration wants to offer long-term support to Afghanistan, but these statements make it even harder for them to make the case to the public and U.S. Congress."
In Tuesday's speech, Mr. Karzai repeated his charges almost verbatim, as he rebuked the Taliban for suicide bombings over the weekend in Kabul and the eastern province of Khost.
"You announce that you show your power to America by killing an 8-year-old Muslim child and civilians," Mr. Karzai said. "I don't think so. You are serving for them."
He also suggested that recent Taliban propaganda footage of attacks in the strategic Wardak province near Kabul was likely filmed by foreign helicopters, and distributed by foreigners in order to exaggerate the insurgency's strength and justify a continued foreign presence.
Mr. Karzai last month ordered U.S. special-operations forces to leave Wardak because of alleged human-rights abuses, a decision with which the U.S. didn't comply by Monday's deadline. Two U.S. special-operations troops and several Afghans were killed in Wardak on Monday after an Afghan policeman opened fire on them with his mounted machine gun, officials said.
In Tuesday's speech, Mr. Karzai also blasted "secret" talks that he said Taliban leaders conduct with Western nations. The Taliban refuse to negotiate with Mr. Karzai's administration, but have held contacts with the U.S.
In December, authorized Taliban representatives for the first time also met an array of Afghan political leaders at a conference north of Paris.
"You eat chocolates in Paris, but in Kabul you kill a widow," Mr. Karzai said, addressing the Taliban. "It is very clear that you serve strangers and want to show that Afghanistan is a dangerous place."
Mr. Karzai's outbursts may be caused by the fact that he fears being left out amid the recent flurry of international and Afghan contacts with the Taliban, said political commentator and former Afghan lawmaker Daoud Sultanzoy. "As president, he feels frustrated he's being sidelined," Mr. Sultanzoy said.
Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at yaroslav.trofimov@wsj.com
US is Eyeing Afghanistan's Mines: Karzai
TOLOnews.com By Shakeela Ahbrimkhil Tuesday, 12 March 2013
President Hamid Karzai on Tuesday continued his criticism of US intentions in Afghanistan with a pointed speech claiming the Americans are eyeing off Afghan mines and warned that now the Afghan government knows.
"Americans have asked Afghans to give them Afghanistan's mining contracts, and I said 'Bring your contracts'... Lots of mines are hidden in Helmand and from the start they have been doing their investigations and finishing their photography. But now they understand that we know about them," Karzai said in a speech during an official visit to southern Helmand province Tuesday.
Karzai also repeated his condemnation of the Taliban's attacks as a backhanded support for the US military in Afghanistan because they only serve to prolong the US presence instead of removing it.
He also blasted the Taliban leaders for going outside Afghanistan and "drinking coffee" with foreigners, while in Afghanistan they kill civilians in the name of fighting foreigners.
"The Taliban leaders who are staying in Pakistan and Quetta are traveling daily to different countries in special planes and negotiating with foreigners. Two months ago in France they had a meeting with foreigners and with some Afghan opposition groups in Paris. There they are drinking tea and coffee and here in Kabul and Khost they are killing widows and trying to show their power to America. But it is not power as much as a service for America," Karzai said.
Karzai made similar remarks in a speech on Sunday in Kabul saying that the Taliban was colluding with the US to ensure an ongoing military presence in Afghanistan after 2014.
The new US Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel, who was in Kabul at the time, dismissed the comments as not making any sense, while US Ambassador to Afghanistan James Cunningham described them as "inconceivable".
The White House also responded saying that nobody believed his statement.
"That's categorically false, and nobody believes it," White House spokesman Jay Carney said about Karzai's remarks.
"The United States has spent enormous blood and treasure for the past 12 years supporting the Afghan people...in the effort to ensure stability and security in that country," he added.
However, Karzai seemed undeterred Tuesday repeating the claim that was rejected by US and Afghan leaders alike that the US and Taliban are secretly meeting while leaving the Afghan government out of negotiations.
Newly-elected first vice speaker of Parliament Mirwais Yasini told TOLOnews that Afghanistan's government needs to appreciate the assistance of the West and warned that Karzai risked pushing Afghanistan's relationship into an irreparable crisis.
"We must move forward conscientiously so our relations with the world, the West and our neighbors won't be damaged," Yasini said Tuesday.
MP Ahmad Bahzad agreed saying that Karzai's views should not affect the relationship.
"When the international community escorted Karzai into the presidential palace, they didn't come with his invitation. So too, they should not leave now with all these protests and accusations," he told TOLOnews.
"Afghanistan needs the support of the international community and obviously the Afghan people needs the help of the international community," he added.
Despite Karzais' remarks the White House has said that the US President's Barack Obama decision for a 2014 withdraw of soldiers from Afghanistan and helping build the Afghan security forces has not changed.
With aid to Afghanistan, past performance is a predictor of future returns
A lot of aid to Afghanistan has been squandered. The latest project indicates that the US still doesn't seem to understand the country's basic needs.
Christian Science Monitor By Dan Murphy, Staff writer March 12, 2013
In Afghanistan, it's not so much that the US is failing to learn from history. It's that it also seems to be failing to learn from the present.
During the past decade of war there, billions of dollars of US spending have been stolen, squandered, or have simply disappeared into well-intentioned projects that were inappropriate for Afghan needs.
So what is the US up to now? Planning more spending, even after US troops depart at the end of next year when it will have even less ability to monitor and account for spending than it does now.
This year the US is planning to spend $10 billion on Afghan "reconstruction" alone. While US plans for the country may begin to get some attention given the fight in Washington over slashing spending, raising taxes, or doing both, US plans for Afghanistan seem to be on auto-pilot. And some, frankly, seem utopian given its experiences there.
Take USAID's announced plan to spend some $300 million on Afghan women's rights over the next five years (which has been in the works for more than a year, with for-profit companies scrambling for the spoils). Considering past problems, the prospect that all this money will be spent wisely, or spent at all, is very low, with US and other foreign troops scheduled to leave the country by the end of 2014. At that point, traveling the country at the behest of the US telling Afghans they need to change their culture will become even more dangerous than it is today.
But even if every nickel was spent as the US government intended, it's still a bad idea. And it reveals the fact that the US, after a decade of war there, still doesn't seem to understand Afghanistan, either in terms of culture or its basic needs. The cart before the horse
After US forces drove the Taliban from power in 2002, Afghanistan remained a land where warlords wield power in their home districts, where the principal business of government officials is the collecting of rents and the direction of patronage to friends and family members, and where the massive US military presence is nothing so much as an ore-body to be mined, relentlessly, until it's tapped out.
In the absence of law and order, quality health care, and economic opportunity (Afghanistan's GDP is largely driven by aid spending and the opium trade), $300 million on women's rights in isolation seems like a folly. If you can't enforce basic order, or find a way to finance the government beyond foreign handouts, or make major inroads into high maternal and childhood mortality rates (US claims healthcare successes there to the contrary), how are hundreds of millions of dollars going to make any difference?
Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told Afghanistan's women "we will not abandon you." Well, members of Congress are probably not going to start tabling bills to allow Afghan women to emigrate to the US to escape harsh conditions in their home country. And when it becomes too dangerous for young, well-meaning foreigners to travel across Afghanistan explaining to local folk how they're leading their lives in the wrong fashion, what then?
Read this sentence from the USAID proposal and see if you can count the management-speak buzzwords: "WLD will enable women to develop urgently needed leadership competencies that will create a prominent group of female role models and change agents in all sectors who will serve as models for girls and younger women.”
"WLD" stands for "Women's Leadership Development," a $20 million chunk of the USAID plan, and it is highly unlikely it will "enable" much beyond the careers of a few aid workers. Huge hurdles
Positive role models are nice and all, but the problem for women and girls in Afghanistan isn’t that they’re unaware that women can have successful careers. It's that sometimes they get killed by their male family members for participating in programs like this, or are targeted by groups like the Taliban. In Afghanistan's Laghman Province, the local director of women's affairs, Naija Sediqi, was assassinated last December. She had been on the job for five months, following the assassination of her female predecessor Hanifa Safi.
The USAID document soliciting bids for this large women's rights project acknowledges it isn't just the Taliban that are hostile to their overall goals, noting that a clerical code of conduct for women endorsed by the government "condones wife beating under certain circumstances and aims to restrict women's mobility, causing many Afghan women to fear that transition will herald a reversal of their decade-long struggle for safety and rights." Afghan President Hamid Karzai last year defended his endorsement of the code, saying "it is the sharia law of all Muslims and all Afghans."
USAID's document makes clear that a primary goal of this effort is fundamental social and cultural change: "Achieving a critical mass of women in leadership roles in government, civil society and the economy will make the phenomenon of women seeking and acquiring such roles less unusual, less inappropriate and viewed as a more “new normal” pattern of behavior. When applied to women, the critical mass theory is quite specific about how the advantages of women’s leadership contributions accrue to and thus become apparent to and accepted by family, community, company, and country."
Are women treated appallingly in Afghan society? Clearly. But is USAID up to the task of rendering cultural change in a place that bristles at interference from foreigners?
Even in less contentious areas, aid spending in Afghanistan has a spotty track record, at best.
The Monitor's Ben Arnoldy reported in 2010 on the mismanagement of USAID in Afghanistan, a litany of failed promises: A claim that electricity had tripled for two communities that saw almost no increase in power at all; a road paved for $2.5 million that disintegrated back into a dirt track within three months; huge sums of aid money directed to the protection of engineers and other workers, a necessary response to insurgency, but on that so most goals for development fall short.
Will USAID's plan to use "small-group interventions [to] create large-scale social change through the impact that specific participants have on those within their personal and professional spheres of influence" work? Well, that's their theory.
From the perspective of women's rights, large-scale social change would be very welcome. But the Afghans may not agree. The one thing Afghanistan (and Iraq) should have taught the US by now is the limits of its own power.
Programs like this one show the US still hasn't learned that lesson.
US soldier accused of Afghan massacre undergoes sanity review
By MEENA HASEEB - 14 Mar 2013, 1:42 pm Khaama Press
A military official on Wednesday said, a U.S. soldier charged with slaying 16 civilians in Afghanistan will undergo a sanity review set to begin next week to determine his mental state during the killings and his ability to stand trial.
Robert Bales’ mental health has been expected to be a key part of his defense.
The military judge overseeing the case agreed that the results would not automatically be shared with prosecutors, the lawyers for Bales, said on Wednesday.
John Henry Browne said, the review of Staff Sgt. Robert Bales by Army doctors will start Sunday and could last three to seven days. He has not entered a plea. The Army is seeking the death penalty.
Bales, a father of 2, is accused of being drunk when he crept away from a remote U.S. combat post on foot in the predawn hours of March 11 and gunning down Afghans in their homes.
During his fourth combat deployment, he slipped away from his base in southern Afghanistan to attack two nearby villages and returned soaked in blood, prosecutors say.
Karzai’s anti-US remarks may fuel violence: Gen. Dunford
By GHANIZADA - 14 Mar 2013, 2:59 pm Khaama Press
NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) commander Gen. Joseph Dunford has warned of an increased threat of attack on coalition forces following a series of inflammatory anti-US comments by Afghan president Hamid Karzai.
ISAF on Thursday confirmed the contents of a strongly-worded advisory sent by US General Joseph Dunford to his senior commanders on Wednesday, the Global Post reported.
Afghan president Hamid Karzai on Sunday accused United States of colluding colluding with militants to justify its presence in Afghanistan.
Karzai also banned the international coalition security forces from university campuses due to unproven claims of harassment of students.
The advisory released by the US commander Gen. Joseph Dunford and obtained by The New York Times said, “Karzai’s remarks could be a catalyst for some to lash out against our forces — he may also issue orders that put our forces at risk.”
“This advisory was prudent given increased coalition casualties in recent days. General Dunford’s email is simply an example of this vigilance,” the statement added.
Dunford in his advisory also added, “We’re at a rough point in the relationship. (Militants) are also watching and will look for a way to exploit the situation — they have already ramped up for the spring.”
Karzai’s comments accusing US of collusion with the Taliban group comes amid on-going talks between the two nations to negotiate the framework that could allow some American troops to remain in Afghanistan when most NATO combat troops leave next year.
The allegations by president Karzai also provoked fury among the US officials besides political observers and a number of the political parties and movements expressed concerns regarding Karzai’s remarks.
Afghanistan moves to salvage ancient Buddhist city – and its economy
McClatchy Newspapers By Jay Price Tuesday, March 12, 2013
MES AYNAK, Afghanistan - It had the potential to be another Afghanistan Buddha disaster, recalling the Taliban’s destruction of two ancient statues that had stood for centuries in this country’s west: A buried Buddhist city lost to time was about to be obliterated by what promised to be one of the largest copper mines in the world.
Now, however, thanks to delays in construction of the massive mine and a hefty influx of cash from the World Bank, the 1.5-square-mile Mes Aynak complex is an archaeological triumph – though bittersweet.
An international team of archaeologists and more than 550 local laborers are now frantically excavating what turns out to be a unique window into Afghanistan’s role on the ancient Silk Road connecting China and India with the Mediterranean.
With its Buddhist city, a ring of perhaps a half-dozen monasteries and a striking complex of workshops and mine shafts built into a high mountain ridgeline at an altitude of 8,200 feet, the site shows the interplay of Buddhism, mining and trade during the years it was in operation, now thought to be from the fifth to the late eighth centuries.
It underscores the conflict between cultural preservation and Afghanistan’s desperate need to find a way to survive as the international community winds down its involvement in the country. The copper here may be worth $100 billion by some estimates, five times the estimated value of Afghanistan’s entire economy, in which the government and military are funded mainly by foreign countries. The best private-sector jobs are with foreign relief groups.
A Chinese consortium agreed in 2007 to pay $3 billion for a 30-year lease on the mine. It was the largest private investment in Afghan history, and Afghan officials hailed it as a key component in building an economy that one day won’t rely almost solely on donor nations and the opium trade. They said it would generate hundred of millions of dollars a year for the government eventually and would provide thousands of jobs.
The massive, open pit mine, though, would destroy most or all of the ruins, which were larded with well-preserved frescoes and more than 1,000 statues, including hundreds of Buddhas.
The specter of Buddhas being dynamited or bulldozed immediately sparked comparison with one of the greatest cultural disasters in Afghan history: the Taliban’s destruction in 2001 of the giant Buddhas set into cliff walls in Bamiyan province. But a small group of French and Afghan archaeologists cut an informal deal with the Ministry of Mines in 2009 for time to perform a "rescue excavation," to recover as many key artifacts and document the site to whatever degree possible before the mining begins.
When that will be, they don’t know. A December deadline came and went. Now they have until June to finish work on the primary sites, said Mossadiq Khalili, the Afghan deputy minister of cultural affairs. Work on some of the monasteries on the edge of the mine area could continue for several years, he said.
The archaeologists feel almost certain that they have until at least 2016, because so little progress has been made on the mine. There seem to be no firm plans yet for the necessary power plant, smelter and rail line, or for the mining operation itself.
"So, if that’s correct, it means that there is, I won’t say plenty of time, but a reasonable, good amount of time to work on this site," said Philippe Marquis, the director of the French Archaeological Delegation in Afghanistan, which has been operating in the country since 1922 and acts as an adviser to the Afghan government.
What makes the prospect of success even greater, Marquis said, is the international interest in getting the mine up and running. Afghanistan has long been desperately poor, but it’s thought to have untapped oil, gas and mineral reserves worth perhaps more than $1 trillion. The World Bank, keen to see the mine project succeed, committed $8 million last year to the archaeological project.
Without the copper mine, Mes Aynak and its artifacts very likely would have been destroyed anyway, Marquis and others think, looted by dealers in stolen antiquities, the fate of many Afghan archaeological sites. But with hopes for an economic boon, there’s a strong chance that the site will be documented and its artifacts preserved.
Many of the site’s statues and paintings have been removed, and the rest will soon follow, said Nicolas Engel, an assistant director of the French Archaeological Delegation in Afghanistan.
It’s an adventure just to visit the site, in Logar province about 25 miles south of Kabul. Al Qaida trained here before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the highway is still subject to occasional Taliban assaults. The massive copper mine site is fenced and heavily guarded. One tunnel, apparently dug by the Russians when they occupied Afghanistan in the 1980s, is thought to be booby-trapped, and land mines left from their presence are still a major hazard. One laborer was wounded last year when he struck a mine while digging, Engel said.
Everywhere are the telltale signs of copper mining going back centuries. Blankets of fused slag – the byproduct of the old copper-smelting operations – tint the mountainside black. In one place the slag was piled nearly 40 feet high, evidence of thousands of years of production.
Shovels and picks ring out against rock as local laborers dig. Large sections of the city have emerged, as have roads and alleys that cut across several neighborhoods. Several monasteries, each on a hill or mountain above the main city, have been excavated, and more than 1,000 sculptures have been found, including Buddhas more than twice life-sized. Ancient manuscripts and decorative woodwork also have been uncovered.
On a recent sunny day, British archaeologist Thomas Eley sat on a wall sketching the layout of a small building and pondering a small indentation beside a heavily scorched depression in the floor. More than 700 coins had been found in the building, and he said it appeared to be a place where coins had been made from the copper smelted atop the mountain.
Across an ancient street and several buildings away, another archaeologist was sketching the unusually thick walls and small, extra-secure doorways of what may have been a bank where copper and coins were stored. All around them, laborers were uncovering more buildings, more pieces of the puzzle of Mes Aynak.
"I’m an archaeologist, so of course I’m sad about what will happen here, but it’s also life, and life has to go on," said Usman Ishanzada, who’s from Tajikistan. "If this mine can bring some life and jobs for local people, why not?"
The site poses intriguing questions about the era when Buddhism was the dominant religion in Afghanistan, Marquis said.
"The odd thing is all these Buddhist monasteries," he said. "Monks are not supposed to be miners, because Buddhist monks are not supposed to be working.”
The way monasteries are arrayed around the city and mine creates almost a wall around the site, which almost suggests a type of military activity, too, which would be a previously unknown role for monks.
The success of the project from a scientific and economic standpoint is becoming a positive lesson for the Afghan population and once-skeptical officials in the government, who thought the archaeological efforts would slow the mine and cause problems. Instead they’ve pumped money into the local economy, improved security and made it clear that such work can coexist well with economic development projects.
It’s also showing that even projects unrelated to mines may have big benefits for local communities, Marquis said.
It seems unlikely, he said, that the Afghan government will stop work on the excavation without any mining. That not only would trigger an international uproar but also would make hundreds of workers jobless, a major security issue. Many workers here already acknowledge that they were part of a rocket attack last August that was staged to protest the destruction of villages that sat atop the mine, Marquis said. Their hostility, however, has turned into enthusiasm now that they’ve been hired on.
The plan is to remove all the artifacts, even the largest statues and the domed shrines called stupas. For now, some statues are being stored in shipping containers at the site, and some have been sent to the national museum in Kabul. Afghan officials hope to build a museum just north of Mes Aynak.
Marquis said it was possible that time wasn’t the major challenge now.
"Our biggest problem has become the long-term conservation of all these things that are being saved," he said. "We need to work on a plan for what to do with them."
Parliament First Vice Speaker Elected After 4 Days
TOLOnews.com By Haseeb Maudoodi Tuesday, 12 March 2013
Afghan lawmakers Tuesday elected Mirwais Yasini as first vice speaker of the lower house in their fourth vote after the previous three days of voting had failed to reach a majority.
Voting began for the fourth day in a row at around 09:00am and finished about 01:30pm with Mirwais Yasini receiving 129 votes to be first vice speaker and Sayed Ikram with 113 votes for secretary.
Obaidullah Klimzai who was also nominated for the post of the first vice speaker received only 75 votes.
Daoud Kalakani who was also nominated for the position of secretary received 88 votes.
"Finally after four days the lawmakers have elected those nominated for the post. I congratulate all of you [lawmakers] and I hope that they do a good job," Speaker of the House Abdul Raouf Ibrahimi said.
On Monday, the lawmakers elected Saleh Mohammad Saljoqi as the second vice speaker of the house.
Several lawmakers were nominated for posts on the parliament's administrative board, but most of them were rejected over the past three days.
The lawmakers first vote was held Saturday after parliament reconvened following the winter break.
Political parties have recently called for parliament to make the approval of the election law the top of its agenda.
The election law has been delayed because of disagreements between the parliament and senate on the nature of an independent election commission, specifically, whether or not two foreign observers can be part of the Electoral Complaints Commission.
Taliban Loyalists Plot in Govt Ranks: Massoud
TOLOnews.com By Abdul Wali Arian Tuesday, 12 March 2013
Afghanistan's former Jihadist leaders have been killed over the years by "special circles" in the government who are cooperating with the Taliban, the leader of the National Front has said.
Ahmad Zia Massoud used his speech on the second anniversary of the death of Gen Abdul Rahman Sayed Khili to warn that Afghanistan has Taliban loyalists in its political and military arms who have helped kill former Jihadi leaders such as Khili.
"You saw how many of our leaders were killed in the past five years? The Taliban in cooperation with special circles in the government killed them," Massoud said at the gathering in Parwan province on Monday.
"If the Taliban come to the power once more, believe me, they will kill all who had a part in Jihad [against them]," he added.
Khili was the police chief of northern Kunduz province when he was killed in a suicide attack March 2011 in the province.
Defence Minister Bismillah Khan Mohammadi also spoke at the commemoration and called for unity.
"All Afghans shared in the Jihad period. We are a great nation and we are all brothers," he said.
Massoud also said that the Taliban are often given better roles in politics.
"There are some contradictions in the government which again will see us put the country in political and economic isolation. The government wants a strong presence of Taliban in political and military matters," he said.
National Coalition leader Dr Abdullah Abdullah said that there are concerns among the former Jihadists of such plots against them.
"The people are really worried about what will happen and what plots are going to be made against them," he said.
Afghanistan's government repeatedly blamed Pakistan as being a safe haven for insurgency in the region, but rarely do political leaders talk openly about the Taliban supporters in the Afghan government ranks.
Taliban Threaten Nuristan Doctors Over Polio Vaccinations
TOLOnews.com Tuesday, 12 March 2013
Taliban insurgents have bashed doctors in eastern Nuristan province to threaten them against giving polio vaccinations, local officials said Tuesday.
Provincial governor Sayed Fazlullah Wahidi said that the polio vaccination campaign has been launched every year in the Waigal district, but this year the Taliban has stopped it.
"The campaign begins every year in the Waigal district which has been under Taliban control in the past two years. There wasn't any problem in the past year with the polio vaccinations, but this time they stopped it and have bashed several doctors," Wahidi said.
"The Taliban told the doctors that it's [polio vaccination] forbidden and you can't start it in the district," he added.
Wahidi said that they have started talking to tribal elders to start negotiating with the Taliban about allowing the polio vaccinations to continue.
The vaccination programme is underway in several other districts in the province "without any problems", he said.
Polio vaccinations have met with violent opposition in neighbouring Pakistan for some time. Afghanistan is one of the only three countries across the globe in which the disease still remains endemic; the other two are Pakistan and Nigeria.
New 300-Bed Hospital for Drug Addicts Opens in Kabul
TOLOnews.com By Shakeela Ahbrimkhil Tuesday, 12 March 2013
Afghanistan's Second Vice President Tuesday called on the country's judicial organs to place harsher penalties on drug smugglers as he inaugurated a hospital for drug addicts in the country's capital.
Mohammad Karim Khalili said that government anti-narcotic efforts will not have a positive result if the smugglers are not prosecuted in country.
"This is true that a number of smugglers have been arrested but the main smugglers and drug traders have not been prosecuted," Khalili said.
"I ask Afghanistan's Attorney General and High Court to prosecute the smugglers," he said.
Khalili inaugurated the new 300-bed hospital in south Kabul's Jangalak area which will have 24-hour treatment for addicts, built amid government concern over the high number of addicts in the country.
According to the Ministry of Public Health and United Nation's counter-narcotics office, Afghanistan now has over 1 million addicts.
The ministry has said that 81 percent of the addicts are men, 13 percent are women and 8 percent are children.
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