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AP INTERVIEW: Top US commander in Afghanistan says he’s working on issues that anger Karzai
Associated Press March 18 , 2013
KABUL, Afghanistan - The top U.S. military chief in Afghanistan said Monday that his team is working as fast as possible to resolve issues that have infuriated Afghan President Hamid Karzai, including the delay in handing over a U.S.-run detention center and the withdrawal of American special forces from a troubled province neighboring Kabul.
The efforts illustrate the growing tensions between the commander, Gen. Joseph Dunford, and an Afghan ally who is struggling to break free from international influence and establish independence after more than a decade relying on a foreign military force for security.
The two latest stumbling blocks in the relationship have delayed a round of talks on a pivotal U.S.-Afghan security agreement to govern the American troops expected to stay past the end of 2014, when the NATO-led coalition ends its combat mission. Talks on the unfinished pact were supposed to take place in Kabul last week.
“We’re working issues with a sense of urgency,” Dunford told The Associated Press in his first one-on-one interview since he took command. “But the issues are complex, and they’re fundamental ... so you have to get it right.”
Speaking in his office in the capital, Kabul, Dunford would not say when the detention center would be handed over.
Dunford is trying to address a series of increasingly strident decrees that Karzai has laid down since the commander took charge five weeks ago. It started just days after he arrived, when Karzai insisted that the coalition cease all airstrikes after another NATO airstrike caused civilian casualties. More recently, Karzai has demanded that U.S. special operations forces leave Wardak province, after allegations that U.S. commandos and their Afghan partners abused local citizens — a charge Dunford denies.
Dunford would not set a date for the withdrawal of U.S. commandos from Wardak province, just outside the capital, saying he’s working with the Afghan defense and interior ministers to come up with a plan.
Throughout, Karzai has kept up a steady stream of invective in public remarks, even accusing the U.S. of complicity with the Taliban in keeping the country unstable, as an excuse to stay longer. That has spurred anger on Capitol Hill.
“What to do about President Karzai? Isn’t he making success more problematic? He sure is,” said Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, a Democrat from Michigan, in a speech Monday to the Council on Foreign Relations. “Karzai’s absurd remarks weaken the support of the American people ... and they raise doubts in many if not most American minds about the wisdom of a long-term strategic relationship with Afghanistan, with all of its costs and risks.”
Last week, Dunford warned his commanders to raise their security levels, saying Karzai’s comments could stir more anti-American sentiment and spur more insider attacks.
But he has remained circumspect and studiously polite in public, seeking to use face-to-face meetings with Karzai to ease tension and temper Karzai’s angry demands for immediate change. Dunford, a Marine Corps general with a master’s degree in government from Georgetown University and another in international relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, said it’s simply a matter of “working the issues.”
“In all honesty, it hasn’t been that contentious on a personal level,” Dunford said.
To resolve the airstrike issue, Dunford agreed to limit but not end them, after 10 civilians were among the 14 Afghans killed in a coalition airstrike against insurgents on Feb. 13 in eastern Afghanistan.
In the case of the Parwan Detention Center, next to the huge U.S.-run Bagram Air Field, Dunford said that Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel had asked for a week to resolve the handover problems during a phone conversation with Karzai on Saturday, but the general said that did not mean there was a seven-day clock ticking to a new handover date.
Dunford said the U.S. must still figure out an acceptable way to monitor what happens to the detainees after the handover.
“We have to be assured that ... detainees will have humane treatment ... in accordance with international conventions,” he said.
“What we have to do is do that in a way that is consistent with Afghan sovereignty.”
U.S. officials also want to make sure that some 30 to 40 detainees they consider dangerous will not be set free. Dunford said Karzai has promised to comply, but the challenge has been “coming up with the right legal framework to do that.”
Dunford also insists the eventual transition of U.S. special operations forces from Wardak will happen, but only after he and Afghan security officials agree on a plan to safely hand over the province, considered a gateway for insurgents to stage attacks on Kabul.
Karzai’s deadline for the withdrawal of U.S. commandos from Wardak expired early last week, but the president relented temporarily when Dunford asked for more time.
“What I told the president was that I understood his intent and wanted to comply with it, and that we were going to draw down in Wardak in a manner that was consistent with transition,” Dunford said. “What I believe he agreed to let us do is work with the Afghan national security forces to make sure ... the security is maintained.”
“It’s not a question of we’re being recalcitrant and not coming out of Wardak. It’s just like everywhere else in Afghanistan, we’re in a process of transition,” he said.
But Karzai’s patience is wearing thin, according to his spokesman Aimal Faizi.
“There should be some sort of respect for the president of a country, but his demand is not being taken seriously,” Faizi told the AP on Monday.
Afghan officials contend that rogue Afghan militias in league with U.S. forces in Wardak province kidnapped nine local men, and they tortured and executed others.
U.S. officials reject charges of torture, kidnapping or extrajudicial killing. They said four of the men reported missing had been detained in joint U.S.-Afghan security force raids, but they don’t know what happened to the other five.
Faizi said the Afghan defense ministry further investigated the charges and concluded in a report to the National Security Council on Sunday that a man he described as an Afghan-American had conducted torture and extradition of locals on behalf of U.S. special operations forces. He said the man was videotaped torturing a suspect, with other Afghan forces watching the interrogation. Faizi said U.S. forces promised but failed to turn the man over to Afghan authorities.
Dunford said the Afghan-American in question did at one time work for U.S. special operations forces, but not at the time the alleged abuses occurred.
He said a senior military officer concluded a third U.S. investigation into these allegations on Sunday.
“I can tell you authoritatively, at the time of the incident, the detainees were not in a U.S. facility,” he said. “There were no U.S. forces in or around that incident, and the interpreter was not in our employ at the time of the incident.”
Dunford’s confrontations with the Afghan president are set against an early and ferocious start to the traditional Afghan spring fighting season. Unseasonably warm weather has melted snow on mountain passes and on dirt roads and paths in remote areas, making it easier for insurgents to plant roadside bombs.
U.S. officials say the Taliban already are focusing the majority of their firepower on Afghan forces — many of which are operating mostly independently across the country for the first time.
Dunford said he had confidence the Afghan forces would perform well.
“Can the Afghans this summer assume the lead? Yes,” he said, predicting they would emerge a more confident force by next fall.
Associated Press writer Donna Cassata contributed from Washington.
Follow Kimberly Dozier on Twitter at http://twitter.com/KimberlyDozier
US, Afghanistan Struggle to Agree on Special Forces
Mark Snowiss VOA News March 18, 2013
More than a week after Afghan President Hamid Karzai ordered U.S. special forces to leave a strategically key area near the capital, officials from both sides are still struggling to resolve the issue.
Karzai ordered the elite American units out of Wardak province after residents complained that they, and Afghans working with them, were torturing and killing civilians - an allegation strongly denied by the United States. At the same time, the Afghan leader also accused the U.S. and NATO of trying to forge an agreement between the Taliban and his political opponents.
The escalating tensions reached Brussels Monday, when NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen called the charges that international forces are colluding with the Taliban "an absolutely ridiculous idea."
Meanwhile, ISAF spokesman Günter Katz told reporters in Kabul that NATO will eventually hand over security responsibilities for Wardak province, but that the alliance's "Afghan partners" must take the lead on developing a transition plan.
"There will be a transition to the Afghan National Security Forces. The only issue is the timeline and the methodology, but there is no doubt that [the Afghans] will take over the lead of Wardak," said Katz.
The decision to expel U.S. forces from the province - with its predominantly Pashtun population, the same ethnic group as the Taliban - has angered American defense officials who worry an abrupt exit could allow insurgents to strengthen their presence in the area and use it as a base to attack Kabul, only 25 kilometers away.
But Interior Ministry spokesman Sediq Sediqi countered that Afghan forces are already fully capable of handling security operations nationally.
"The total number of Afghan troops nationwide is now 352,000, and that is in addition to the Afghan local police. We are ready to assume security responsibility from NATO anywhere in the country," Sediqi said.
"There is no reason to suggest that after NATO withdraws, a particular province or district will collapse and be taken over by the Taliban, the Haqqani network or al-Qaida," he said.
A possible deal
Reuters, citing a top Kabul official, reported that Afghanistan and the U.S. are working on a compromise deal that would allow American special forces to stay in Wardak in return for full Afghan control of the controversial Bagram prison.
The U.S. partly handed over the high-security jail and around 3,000 suspected Taliban fighters to Afghan control last year. But full control over the jail has been repeatedly delayed as Afghan and U.S. officials argue over concerns that hundreds more Taliban still under U.S. custody would be released.
During a phone call Saturday, Karzai and U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said they would work intensively over the next week "with a view to concluding an agreement" on Bagram.
Their discussion came the same day as several hundred Afghan demonstrators chanting "U.S. special forces out!" marched to the parliament building in Kabul demanding the elite commandos withdraw from Wardak.
Ulema Council Needs to be Independent: Abdullah
TOLOnews.com Monday, 18 March 2013
Afghanistan's Ulema Council needs to be independent and should not be politically influenced in its decisions, the National Coalition leader said Monday.
Head of National Coalition party Dr Abdullah Abdullah said that the Islamic clerics recent statement on the political situation between Afghanistan and the US was influenced by President Hamid Karzai.
"I hope that the Ulema Council should always act independently therefore such a position should be respected by the people as well," Abdullah said.
The Ulema Council released a statement Saturday calling for the US to obey Karzai's orders on handing over Bagram prison to full Afghan authority and for US special forces to leave Maidan Wardak province.
It also said that Muslims should never obey "infidels" – referring to the US.
Abdullah also said that the president's hostility towards the US over the issues were not in Afghanistan's interests.
"It is a political issue but Afghanistan's interests are an excuse. The main reason [for Karzai's statements] are personal," Abdullah said.
He added that he believed the president aimed to upset the current situation in order to avoid holding the presidential election next year.
Roadside bomb kills 2, wounds 3
HERAT, Afghanistan, March 19 (Xinhua) -- Two police including a senior officer were killed and three others sustained injuries as a roadside bomb struck police van in Shindand district of Herat province with Herat city as its capital 640 km west of Kabul on Tuesday, police said.
"A mine planted by militants on a road in Shindand district struck the vehicle of Nasir Ahmad the police chief of Herat-Farah highway today, killing him along with one of his bodyguards and injured three others," police chief of the western region Toryali Abdiak told Xinhua.
Those injured in the blast are also police personnel, he added. He did not furnish more details.
Taliban militants fighting the government have yet to make comment.
Afghan gov't launches poppy eradication campaign in Kandahar
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan, March 19 (Xinhua) -- The government of Afghanistan launched poppy eradication campaign in Taliban former stronghold Kandahar 450 km south of Kabul and have destroyed 2,800 acres of poppy fields, spokesman for provincial administration Jawed Faisal said Tuesday.
"In the anti-poppy drive which launched some two weeks ago across the province, so far 2,800 acres of poppy-cultivated farmlands have been destroyed by police," Faisal told Xinhua.
Covering several districts including Maiwand, Panjwai, Takhtapul, Khakriz, Shah Walikot and the restive Ghorak, the official said that the campaign will continue till the wiping out of the illegal crop from the province.
There were no conflicts during the campaign and no police personnel have been hurt, Faisal contended.
With producing 3,700 tons opium poppy in 2012, according to United Nations Office on Drug and Crime (UNODC) Afghanistan has topped the poppy producing nations.
The Afghan illegal product in 2012, according to the UN anti- drug body had fallen down 36 percent against 5,800 tons in 2011.
Afghanistan's southern provinces including Kandahar and the western region where Taliban-linked militancy has damaged security, according to UNODC report produced 90 percent of the whole illegal crop in 2012.
The conflict-ridden Afghanistan, reportedly is supplying 90 percent of the raw material used in manufacturing heroin to the world.
Afghans in Wardak province want U.S. forces out
by Farid Behbud
MAIDAN SHAR, Afghanistan, March 19 (Xinhua) -- War-weary residents of the eastern Afghan province of Wardak located near capital Kabul have called for the removal of the U.S. Special Forces from the province for alleged misconduct and crimes against them.
"We do not know why the U.S. Special Forces come to Wardak. They claim to provide security but why are they involved in harassing and torturing civilians?" Rahimullah Khan, a 53-year- old resident, told Xinhua in provincial capital Maidan Shar.
Khan said he is concerned over the security situation in Wardak. "We hope that after the withdrawal of U.S. forces, the security situation would get better. Because there would be no occupation and no pretext for insurgents to fight the government," Khan said.
On Feb. 24, Afghan President Hamid Karzai issued a two-week deadline for U.S. Special Forces to leave Wardak following reports that Americans and Afghans working for them were involved in harassing and torturing, or even murdering, civilians.
The president's order has yet to be implemented by the U.S. Special Forces.
"The Special Forces stop vehicles along main roads; Without any evidence they accuse people of having links with insurgents; They arrest innocent people. It is an oppression and injustice," said Mohammad Harif, a 38-year-old shop owner.
He said nine people disappeared recently in the Nirkh District following their arrest by the U.S. forces. In another case, a young student was taken away at night from his residence a couple of weeks ago and his tortured body was found later, Harif said.
Munir Ahmad, a 23-year-old baker, said "We do not want foreign forces to stay in Wardak anymore. You know, 11 years on, we haven' t seen any tangible changes in our life yet. There are still explosions and insurgent attacks similar to those in the past years. We want our local forces to secure Wardak."
"The U.S. and NATO troops have been deployed to secure Wardak over the past decade. But we never enjoy a peaceful environment," said Mohammad Musa, a 38-year-old farmer from Deh Afghanan village of Jalriz District.
Mohammad Shah, a resident of Jalriz District, said that after midday, people are afraid to walk in the streets."They do not have the freedom of movement. They are scared from the Taliban as well as from the U.S. troops. It is difficult particularly when a family member falls ill. They cannot bring the sick to the hospital in Maidan Shar for treatment," he said.
Shah, 34, who recently returned from neighboring Iran but could not find a decent job yet, went on to say that "it is in the fundamental interest of Afghanistan, its neighbors and the region to safeguard peace and security in the country."
According to local media reports, hundreds of Taliban fighters as well as members of Haqqani militant group are active in Wardak province from where they organize terror attacks on Kabul.
In November last year, three civilians were killed and 90 others were wounded when Taliban militants detonated a car bomb near a government office building in Maidan Shar. The blast also destroyed 30 government buildings and civilian houses around.
On Saturday, more than 500 people staged a peaceful demonstration in front of the parliament building in Kabul protesting the continued presence of U.S. Special Forces in Wardak province.
The protesters also demanded the release of nine locals whom they said have been detained by the U.S. forces. The protesters were carrying banners with slogans such as "Where is justice?" "Americans go out," and "I am a student, I am a farmer and why do you murder me by the name of terrorist?"
U.N. blames rise in violence against Afghan women on culture
Reuters By Michelle Nichols March 18, 2013
UNITED NATIONS - Violence linked to culture was the main reason for a 20 percent rise in deaths and injuries of females in Afghanistan last year, U.N. special envoy to Afghanistan Jan Kubis said on Monday.
Despite an overall fall in annual civilian casualties in Afghanistan for the first time in several years, the United Nations said last month that more than 300 women and girls were killed and more than 560 injured during 2012. "The majority is linked to domestic violence, tradition, culture of the country," Kubis told reporters at the United Nations in New York ahead of a debate on Afghanistan by the U.N. Security Council on Tuesday.
"Of course there are very clearly attacks on women's activists by the insurgency," he said. "Then there are unfortunate situations when indeed women are killed while doing their daily chores (by unexploded bombs)."
Western human rights advocates say cultural tradition is often used to justify abuse of women such as female genital mutilation and honor killings.
Afghanistan is a conservative Muslim country, where under Taliban rule between 1996 and 2001 women were forced to cover up and were banned from voting, most work and leaving their homes unless accompanied by a husband or male relative.
U.S.-backed Afghan forces toppled the Taliban in late 2001 for refusing to hand over al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.
As foreign forces prepare to withdraw by the end of 2014 after a more than decade-long war, the United Nations and rights groups are concerned human rights in Afghanistan, particularly those of women, will further deteriorate.
Afghan women have won back basic rights in education, voting and employment since the Taliban were ousted from power in 2001, but fears are mounting that such freedoms could be traded away as Kabul seeks peace talks with the group.
Activists and some lawmakers have blamed the rise in violence against women on what they say is waning interest in women's rights on the part of Afghan President Hamid Karzai's government, a claim Karzai denies.
The U.N. political mission in Afghanistan, led by Kubis, said in December that Afghanistan still had a long way to go in implementing the 2009 Law on the Elimination of Violence against Women, which made child marriage, forced marriage, rape and other violent acts criminal offenses.
"Our role as the U.N. will be very crucial in the post-2014 period," Kubis said on Monday. "We will be one of the promoters, advocates of what should be practices in a country that will be perhaps more traditional and will be coming back to its roots."
"The situation is of concern and will remain of concern," he said of violence against women and girls.
Women who pursue careers in conservative Afghanistan routinely face opposition in a society where often they are ostracized - or worse - for mixing with men other than husbands or relatives.
A U.N. policy-making body agreed on Friday to a declaration urging an end to violence against women and girls despite concerns from conservative Muslim countries and the Vatican about references to women's sexual and reproductive rights.
(Reporting by Michelle Nichols; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)
ADB Injects $200M into Electricity Sector
TOLOnews.com By Shahla Murtazaie Monday, 18 March 2013
The Asian Development Bank (ADB) has pledged a further $200 million towards the development of Afghanistan's electricity network, according to the state electric company Brishna.
Brishna officials Monday said the money will be used to build and improve the electricity network in Logar and Paktiya provinces, as well as help supply the transition of a 500 Kilowatt electricity cable project from neighbouring Turkmenistan to Afghanistan.
"The project includes a 500 kilowatts line from Turkmenistan to Jawzjan province and then to Mazar-e Sharif city. The line will go to Baghlan province in the future. The construction of a 220 kw substation in Logar and Gardiz is part of the project," Brishna chief Abdul Razaq Samadi said.
The head of Brishna also mentioned that another electricity project worth $120 million running from Pul-e Khomri, the capital of Baglan, to Kabul will be funded by the ADB and will be signed in a few months.
The ADB has agreed to fund $1.2 billion in Afghan development projects until 2016.
"The Asian Development Bank made a very strong commitment for the long term, engaging with Afghanistan as development partner. We have committed $1.2 billion up to 2016 and this is to be invested in the future. And together, all of us as partners in development for those who believe in the future of Afghanistan, we will need cooperation," ADB director for Afghanistan Joji Tokeshi said.
A partitioned Afghanistan is better than chaos
The Globe and Mail By BRAHMA CHELLANEY Monday, Mar. 18 2013
America’s war in Afghanistan, the longest and costliest in U.S. history, is finally drawing to an official close. How this shapes Afghanistan’s future will have a significant bearing on the security of countries far beyond the region. After all, Afghanistan is not Vietnam: The end of U.S.-led combat operations may not end the war because the enemy will seek to target Western interests wherever located.
Can the fate of Afghanistan be different from two other Muslim countries where the United States intervened militarily – Iraq and Libya? Iraq has been partitioned in all but name into Shia, Sunni and Kurdish sections, while Libya seems headed toward a similar three-way but tribal-based partition, underscoring that a foreign military intervention can effect regime change but not establish order. Will there be an Iraq-style “soft partition” of Afghanistan, with protracted strife eventually creating a “hard partition”?
Afghanistan’s large ethnic minorities already enjoy de facto autonomy, which they secured after their Northern Alliance played a central role in the U.S.-led ouster of the Afghan Taliban in late 2001. Having enjoyed autonomy for years, the minorities will resist coming under the sway of the ethnic Pashtuns, who long ruled the country.
For their part, the Pashtuns, despite their tribal divisions, won’t rest content with being in charge of just a rump Afghanistan made up of the eastern and southeastern provinces. Given the large Pashtun population resident across the British-drawn Durand Line that separates Afghanistan from Pakistan, they’re likely to revive their long-dormant campaign for a Greater Pashtunistan – a development that could affect the territorial unity of another artificial modern construct: Pakistan.
The fact that the ethnic minorities are actually ethnic majorities in distinct geographical zones in the north and the west makes Afghanistan’s partitioning organically doable and more likely to last, unlike the colonial-era geographical line-drawing that created states with no national identity or historical roots. The ethnic minorities account for more than half of Afghanistan – both in land area and population size.
The U.S. effort for an honourable exit by cutting a deal with the Pakistan-backed Afghan Taliban, paradoxically, is deepening Afghanistan’s ethnic fissures and increasing the partitioning risk. With President Barack Obama’s choosing his second-term national security team and his 2014 deadline to end all combat operations approaching, the U.S. effort to strike a deal with the Taliban is back on the front burner.
This effort, pursued in co-ordination with Afghan President Hamid Karzai amid a gradual withdrawal of U.S. and NATO troops, is stirring deep unease among the Afghan minorities, who fought the Taliban and its five-year rule fiercely and suffered greatly. The rupturing of Mr. Karzai’s political alliance with ethnic-minority leaders has also aided ethnic polarization. Some non-Pashtun power brokers remain with Mr. Karzai, but most others now lead the opposition National Front.
The minority communities are unlikely to accept any power-sharing arrangement that includes the Taliban. In fact, they suspect Mr. Karzai’s intention is to restore Pashtun dominance across Afghanistan.
The minorities’ misgivings have been strengthened by the recent “Peace Process Roadmap to 2015” issued by the Karzai-constituted Afghan High Peace Council, empowered to negotiate with the Taliban. The document sketches several striking concessions to the Taliban and to Islamabad, ranging from the Taliban’s recognition as a political party to a role for Pakistan in Afghan affairs. The roadmap dangles the carrot of cabinet posts and provincial governorships to prominent Taliban figures.
The ethnic tensions, which threaten to undermine cohesion in the fledgling Afghan National Army, are breaking along the same lines as when Soviet forces withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, an exit that led to civil war. This time, the minority communities are better armed and prepared to defend their interests after the U.S. exit. A new civil war, however, would likely tear Afghanistan apart, balkanizing the country into more distinct warlord-controlled zones than the situation prevailing today.
This raises a fundamental question: Is the territorial unity of Afghanistan essential for regional or international security? The sanctity of existing borders has become a powerful norm in world politics, yet this principle has allowed weak states to survive. Ungovernable states can be a serious threat to regional and global security. Outside forces, in any event, are hardly in a position to prevent Afghanistan’s partitioning along Iraqi or Yugoslav lines.
A weak, partitioned Afghanistan may not be the best or even a desirable outcome. Yet, it will be far better than an Afghanistan that dissolves into chaos. And infinitely better than one in which the medieval Taliban return to power. In this scenario – the best of the bad options – Pakistani generals, instead of continuing to sponsor Afghan Pashtun militant groups such as the Taliban and the Haqqani network, will be compelled to fend off a potent threat to Pakistan’s unity.
With American options in Afghanistan narrowing considerably and a deal with the Taliban appearing both uncertain and perilous, some sort of partition may also allow the U.S. and its allies to exit with honour intact.
Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research, is the author of Asian Juggernaut and Water, Peace, and War.
Afghanistan's Forests A Casualty Of Timber Smuggling
NPR By Sean Carberry and Sultan Faizy March 18, 2013
Despite Afghanistan's fierce winter, it's rare to find a house with insulation or a modern heating system. So Afghans rely on bukharis, stoves that look like an oil drum with a big rusty pipe growing out of the top that bends off into a hole in the wall.
That fact keeps the hundreds of wood vendors around Kabul quite happy. This winter, NPR staff fed several tons of firewood into their bukhari — and that's just one house in a city of about 5 million people.
The United Nations Environmental Program estimates that over the past three decades, Afghanistan's forest cover has decreased by about 50 percent.
Wali Modaqiq, deputy director of Afghanistan's environmental protection agency, says that today forests cover only about 2 percent of Afghanistan. He says years of war and drought have felled more trees than wood stoves, which generally burn scrap wood. The big killer of trees, though, is economics.
"There is a huge demand for Afghan timber in the international market," Modaqiq says.
Commercial timber harvesting is illegal in Afghanistan — which leaves a massive smuggling industry to satisfy international demand. The remaining forest is in places like Kunar province bordering Pakistan, which is the main outlet for Afghan timber now.
A Limited Economy
There is no business in Kunar but the timber business, says Haji Hamidullah, a businessman there.
"It's called Kunar, which means the homeland of mountains," he says. "Once upon a time when there was anarchy in here, people started cutting down the forest to make money."
That was during the 1980s war with the Soviets and the subsequent civil war. Now there is law — but law in Afghanistan often doesn't translate from paper to practice, and that applies to the timber business.
"There's a big business running [timber] during the night," Hamidullah says. "All top officials, including the governor, police chief and head of the provincial council, are involved and are paid their share."
Hamidullah knows, because he used to be in the business.
"When I was caught, all of my timber was put on sale by the government despite the fact that I paid a lot of money in bribes to many officials," he says.
A Well-Developed System
Ashaqullah, who goes by one name, is from Asadabad, the capital of Kunar. He is the head of the Youth Provincial Council, but even he acknowledges that he smuggles on the side. He says there is a clear system.
"A specific amount of tax is levied on each truckload of timber. The deal is made during the day between the officials and the smugglers," he says. "The cutting and transportation goes on at night."
He says dozens of trucks carry hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of timber to Pakistan each night.
Not surprisingly, Fazelullah Wahidi, the governor of Kunar, says this is all bunk.
"Smuggling is not possible now," he says.
"This is a very old story because this was happening in war time," he explains. "But now we have a strong military, we have strong border police, and we have strong national police."
But according to smugglers and residents of Kunar, those policemen are on the take. The governor was about the only person in Kunar who denied that timber is being illegally harvested and smuggled.
Modaqiq, with the national environmental protection agency, points out a Catch-22 that makes it difficult to stop the smuggling.
"Official policy is to involve the local communities to manage the natural resources, especially the forest," he says.
But the local people of Kunar have few ways to earn money other than working for smugglers.
"They are providing job opportunities for those people," Modaqiq says.
So the very people empowered to protect the forests have a strong economic incentive to cut them down. And with law enforcement officials complicit in the business, the remaining forest covering 2 percent of the country may not be standing for long.
Cyclical nature of Afghan fighting may mask deeper trends, experts warn
McClatchy Newspapers By Jay Price Monday, March 18, 2013
FORWARD OPERATING BASE APACHE, Afghanistan - On a blustery, subfreezing night in a sandbagged guard tower, Army Spc. Anthony Ross, 24, of Carson, Calif., twisted and spun in a brief dance. Sometimes Ross does push-ups on guard duty to stay alert, sometimes he dances.
His fellow boredom-fighter for the evening, Sgt. Ulisses Monteoncruz, 21, of Los Angeles, looked up, then went back to the tedium of scanning the rolling, muddy terrain behind the base through a night-vision device that rendered it in shades of gray.
Guard-tower duty is seldom exciting, and it’s particularly tedious in Afghanistan in winter, as hundreds of American soldiers in towers across the country that same night were painfully aware. And Ross knew that in a week or two, when he’d rotate off tower duty back to his regular job – patrolling the roads to clear them of improvised bombs – there probably wouldn’t be much action then, either.
For a little while.
Scholars debate whether the war in Afghanistan has been America’s longest, but as one last “combat season” is about to begin before most U.S. troops leave, there’s little doubt that this war has been America’s most cyclical.
For more than 11 years, U.S. and NATO troops have followed an odd annual rhythm, a pattern so obvious – whether measured in casualty figures or the number of insurgent attacks – that Pentagon officials, the soldiers on the ground and journalists alike casually refer to the annual “fighting season.” Generally, they describe it as beginning and ending with the warmer months. The winter lull is ascribed to snowbound mountain passes that prevent insurgents from moving between their refuges in Pakistan and the fighting grounds in Afghanistan.
But that common wisdom isn’t exactly true, and may have distorted the real picture of how the war has evolved, counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen says. He thinks that the Taliban, hit hard by U.S. and NATO forces in recent years, may have begun cautiously hoarding their fighters over the warm months, biding their time until the Americans leave. Having fighters in reserve will strengthen their bargaining position with the U.S.-backed Afghan government so that they can negotiate the best possible terms in a settlement.
“The insurgents have been in a kind of permanent winter mode since 2010, and because of the election next year and everything else, they’re on a different calculus now, where they basically are not thinking, ‘How do I gain the most possible military advantage?’ but instead, ‘How do I preserve the largest possible force while still staying sufficiently engaged so as to maintain pressure on my opposite number in any future negotiation?’ ”
Kilcullen, who’s been senior counterinsurgency adviser to Army Gen. David Petraeus in Afghanistan and Iraq, says the meaning of the combat lull is so misunderstood that he discourages the use of the term “fighting season” with anyone he works with on Afghanistan issues.
“It’s not as simple as in summer they fight and in winter they don’t,” he said. “If you live through more than a year or two there, you realize that there are a couple of lulls. There’s a lull that happens in sort of the April time frame. That’s the poppy harvest lull, where there is genuinely a reduction in the fighting because people go and harvest their poppy.”
The Taliban don’t stop fighting in winter, Kilcullen says. They simply turn their energies from combat in the rural areas to terrorism in the towns and cities, targeting important local and national officials.
“I would say a better description of the seasonality is that the insurgency doesn’t stop in the winter, it just goes urban,” he said.
Casualties are indeed much higher in the warm months, but Kilcullen said that to focus on sheer numbers was a mistake.
He cited the assassination attempt in December on Asadullah Khalid, the head of the Afghan domestic intelligence service, who was badly wounded. Khalid had built a reputation as a particularly aggressive foe of the Taliban.
“The sheer number of guys killed doesn’t track to the importance of any given hit,” he said. “If just three guys are killed in an attack, but those three guys killed were important Afghan ministers, that’s big, and Khalid, even though he wasn’t killed, that had a pretty significant political effect.”
The war’s characteristic cycles have another impact, said James Dobbins, a former U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan who’s now the director of the RAND International Security and Defense Policy Center: They make it hard for a commander to track progress.
“It can lead to sort of false positives, where violence starts to go down and one thinks one has made progress until one remembers it goes down every year at this time,” he said “So, instead of measuring yourself against a constant line, you have to measure yourself not against where you were last month, but where you were this same month last year. This means that each commander is not measuring his progress against his own previous experience, but against the previous commander’s experience.”
That also applies to combat troops, most of whom now serve a year or less in Afghanistan, and thus don’t ever see two winter lulls. That means they can’t build on their previous experience.
“People have described it as not being a 10-year war but rather 10 wars of one year each,” Dobbins said. “There’s something to that.”
Kilcullen, who now runs Caerus Associates, a consultancy in Washington, thinks the summer-winter pattern also masks broader changes and trends, including changes in the way the Taliban are approaching the war.
"Right now, you’ve got guys at ISAF” – the International Security Assistance Force, the NATO-led coalition – “saying, ‘Well, we’ve broken the back of the insurgency. The operational defeat of the Taliban is accomplished, because are not seeing the guerrilla groups out in the countryside like we were two or three years ago,’ ” Kilcullen said. "But that’s not necessarily true, right? It may be that they have gone to another mode of operating and we won’t know for sure until the drawdown takes place.”
As to the high mountain passes to Pakistan being closed by snow, Kilcullen doesn’t believe that’s the central reason for the winter drops in rural fighting. Pakistan aside, Afghans traditionally stay indoors as much as possible in the harsh winter months.
“Afghanistan, probably half of it is covered by snow every year for three or four months, and yet there is no evidence I have ever seen of any attempt at developing over-the-snow technology: no skis, no sleds, no skates, no snowshoes, nothing,” he said. “So for thousands of years, no one has said, ‘Hey, why don’t we figure out some way of moving over it?’ They all just basically sit down for four months.”
The first Western observation of a fighting season here referred only to the poppy harvest, Kilcullen said. It originated in the 1960s with Louis Dupree, an archaeologist and anthropologist from Greenville, N.C., who taught at Duke University and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, among other places, and was perhaps the best-known Western scholar of Afghanistan.
“One of the things he wrote about was how a rural society like Afghanistan can’t farm and fight at the same time, so when it’s harvest season or there are other major agricultural activities going on, you’ve go to stop fighting to do that,” Kilcullen said. “So he sort of invented this idea that there’s a fighting season and a farming season, and people tend to do one or the other, but it’s very hard to do both.”
For the record, the insurgents may fight more at some parts of the year and less at others, but the NATO-led coalition doesn’t, said its spokesman, German Brig. Gen. Gunter Katz.
"ISAF doesn’t have a fighting season," he said. "We pressure them 365 days a year, 24 hours a day.”
The predictable rhythms do have an upside, especially for new soldiers in rural Afghanistan who arrive in the quiet time. It gives them an opportunity to understand the environment they’re fighting in before they’re likely to have to engage in daily combat.
Spc. Ross and Sgt. Monteoncruz, who are serving as combat engineers with the 3rd Infantry Division in Zabul province, are among those.
"We arrived Jan. 25, for a nine-month tour, so we’re seeing the lull, and the rise and the peak and then the fall," Ross said, as he listened to routine radio traffic from the other towers. "It’s actually a pretty good thing, because this way the learning curve won’t be bad at all, like it might be if we got dropped in right in the middle of the fighting season and things were just crazy.”
He calls the lull “the Taliban’s biggest mistake.”
“It gives us time to learn what the routes are supposed to look like when everything is normal, and by extension what they shouldn’t look like,” he said.
Then he spun and peered intently into the darkness with his night-vision scope. Finally, some excitement: The tower door opened and the next guard shift stepped in, accompanied by one of the last frigid blasts of the quiet season.
Afghan Church Endures Amid War and Strife
Inside Italy's embassy, a Catholic priest operates Afghanistan's only church
Wall Street Journal By MARGHERITA STANCATI March 18, 2013
KABUL - Some 60 people gathered for a recent Sunday Mass in a white, boxy building behind the blast walls protecting the Italian Embassy in Kabul. Prayers were recited at first by a gray-haired nun in her 80s, then by a U.S. officer carrying a gun.
Welcome to Our Lady of Divine Providence, the only permanent church operating in the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.
Its existence largely unknown, the church has survived wars and upheavals and the Taliban in its mission to cater to the faithful from dozens of countries.
The Italian cleric who runs it, Rev. Giuseppe Moretti, 74 years old, is himself a Kabul institution. The Catholic priest has served his flock since 1977—save for a long break to recover from wounds that he sustained from a 1994 rocket explosion.
"It's always been a country that deeply fascinated me because it's shrouded in mystery," says Rev. Moretti. "I fell in love with it."
Behind the church's altar, Father Moretti placed a wooden cross showing mud huts and tall glass buildings as well as an outline of the country's map—"a symbol of the resurrection of Afghanistan," he says.
The Kabul church's origins date back to 1921, when Italy became one of the first Western nations to recognize Afghanistan as a sovereign country independent from Britain. As a goodwill gesture, the liberal government of King Amanullah Khan reciprocated by allowing Italy—also a kingdom at the time—to host a Christian place of worship within the grounds of its embassy in Kabul.
Under this understanding, no Afghans are allowed inside, and the priest is forbidden from trying to convert Muslims. In a country where apostasy is a crime punishable by death, Father Moretti says this has never crossed his mind.
These sensitivities are also reflected in the church's unusually austere architecture. Completed in 1960, the building has no bell tower, and its only mark of distinction is a cross on the facade—a concession that Afghanistan granted only after extensive lobbying by Rome.
"Building a Christian church was a very delicate matter that had to be handled with extreme caution," says Giuseppe Benedetti, the son of an Italian diplomat who oversaw negotiations with Kabul at the time. "My father told them: 'We'll put the cross, but it will be small and placed low, and trees will shield it from street view.' "
The peaceful 1970s, when Afghanistan was a tourist destination on the hippie trail, were a golden age for the church. Father Moretti recalls families among packed church services that were held in four languages: French, Spanish, English and German.
"It was a completely different world," he says. "A world of freedom."
Then came the Soviet invasion in 1979. Most foreigners left Afghanistan, and church attendance plummeted. Father Moretti recalls a hostile Communist leadership, and "a tank parked outside the embassy, pointing straight at us."
In 1990, Father Moretti became the church's sole caretaker. Two years later, U.S.-backed mujahedeen rebels overthrew the Communist regime—and began fighting each other over control of Kabul, reducing much of the Afghan capital to rubble.
The Italian Embassy was frequently caught in the crossfire. "Every morning we would pick up cartridges we found scattered around the garden," Father Moretti recalls.
In 1993, the embassy closed. Although the churchgoers weren't many—20 at most, says Father Moretti—the priest chose to stay on. Then, one morning, a rocket slammed into an embassy room where he had taken refuge.
The Italian priest made it out of the rubble with the help of his dog Benji, stumbling onto the church's Afghan watchman. "Judging by the look on his face, I was in really bad shape," Father Moretti says.
As Father Moretti recovered, three nuns living in Kabul continued to conduct prayers at the church, remaining even after the Taliban takeover in 1996. Even though the Taliban's religious police moved in next door, the Taliban didn't interfere.
The insurgent movement says its position on the matter hasn't changed. "Islam allows [Christians] to build their own places of worship, but they are forbidden to convert people," says Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid.
Once the U.S. ousted the Taliban regime in late 2001, a small team sent to reopen the embassy discovered the church's existence. "In a country ruled by religious extremists, I was struck to see the nuns there, and to learn that the Taliban respected them," says Lt. Gen. Giorgio Battisti, an Italian who formed part of the team when he was a colonel and is now the U.S.-led coalition's chief of staff. The church, he added "was clean, and there were no visible signs of damage."
Father Moretti resumed his service soon after. Two of the nuns who took care of the church during the Taliban, members of the Petites Soeurs de Jésus, a French order active in Muslim countries, are also still here.
Other nuns in blue-rimmed, white robes—members of the order set up by Mother Teresa to help the world's destitute—are Father Moretti's most loyal churchgoers. So are some coalition service members. Father Moretti says he is willing to allow soldiers to pray with their weapons, given the realities of wartime life in Kabul.
After all, this past September, a suicide bomber blew himself up on the street just outside the embassy, killing at least six Afghan civilians.
In response to the risks, the embassy set up blast barriers, Hesco walls and coils of razor wire. As a result, Father Moretti says fewer people attend church. "This church is like a catacomb," he laments.
The flock is likely to become even thinner once the coalition's military mission ends next year. Rev. Moretti may not be around to see that happen: This year in Afghanistan may be his last, as he is due to retire this fall when he is 75, in accordance with church rules. He is lobbying to stay on.
In any case, he adds wistfully, "the church will stay here—the way it always has." —Habib Khan Totakhil contributed to this article.
Write to Margherita Stancati at margherita.stancati@wsj.com
US Will Not Leave Afghanistan: Karzai
TOLOnews.com By Shakeela Abrahimkhail Monday, 18 March 2013
President Hamid Karzai said Monday that the US will not leave Afghanistan alone and described the recent tensions as media propaganda.
Speaking at a joint Afghan government and BBC Persian programme of "Jerga-e-Azad" which will be broadcast on government television Monday night, he said that the US wants to sign the Kabul-Washington security agreement in the upcoming three months, but the Afghan government will make its decision with careful accuracy.
"If they accept our demands and it is good for us, then we will sign it," he said.
"The US is not leaving. They will not leave and we should ask them all our demands," Karzai said in response to the question of whether the US will withdraw completely.
He said the talks with the US continue and he encouraged the Afghan people to trust and "don't worry about the future."
On the matter of the Afghan-US relationship being widely regarded as tense, Karzai labeled it propaganda of the western media.
"This is all media propaganda. You are watching my speeches and the US wants to put pressure on us, but we are trying to put them under pressure. But they were more agile in the media than we are," Karzai said.
His comments come after recent speeches where he accused the US of holding secret talks with the Taliban without Afghan involvement and of wanting to stay in Afghanistan to take advantage of its resource-rich mines.
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" given the "blood and treasure" that the US has poured into the country.
Bribery Rampant in Parliament Appointments: MPs
TOLOnews.com By Rafi Sediqi Monday, 18 March 2013
Afghan lawmaker Abdulrahman Rahmani said Monday that his fellow MPs asked him to buy their vote in his bid to be head of the parliamentary complaints commission.
Rahmani said during Monday's parliamentary session that other MPs have asked for thousands of dollars for their vote to appoint him, and said that other lawmakers have experienced similar requests to be voted onto other special parliamentary commissions.
"Corruption exists in the appointment of the head of the complaints commission. I was one of the candidates for the post and I have been asked for a bribe of $3000 [for a vote]. This action is very serious in the parliament," Abdulrahman Rahmani told the lower house.
MP Allah Gul Mujaheed said that there is document evidence of this abuse.
"Many parliament members are asking bribes to appoint people to the commissions. We have documents that those who are asking for bribes are those people who are calling themselves religious scholars," Mujaheed told the lawmakers.
Other parliamentary members who spoke in Monday's session stressed that until the lower house is not reformed from the inside, it will be difficult for it to fight the challenges which the country is facing, especially in terms of corruption.
MPs May Abolish the Administrative Reform Commission
TOLOnews.com Monday, 18 March 2013
The Independent Administrative Reform and Civil Service Commission should be abolished for its widespread corruption including bribes received for government appointments, lawmakers said Monday.
Calling for a serious evaluation of the commission's activities, Parliament's first vice speaker Mirwais Yasini said the competitive tests held by the commission should be discontinued.
"Tribalism at the ministries in the administrative reform commission alone show the corruption within this commission. There is large amounts of money spent by the commission, but there has been no impressive achievement," said MP Saranwal Abdulraouf.
Another MP said, "Every director for government offices are bribing large amounts of money, otherwise they would not be selected for the post."
"This commission is not a commission for administrative reform but a commission for corruption," added MP Ahmad Shah Ramazan.
MP Nazifa Zaki pointed out that many of the qualified young Afghans are not being selected for posts in government departments.
"The administrative reform commission should be abolished as most of the youth who refer to this commission are not being provided job opportunities and will remain with no destiny ahead," she said.
Meanwhile, the head of the commission Ahmad Moshahed was summoned to give an account before parliament. He said the commission has selected the government staff transparently and in accordance with the laws.
"The administrative reform commission is a policy-making organisation... It is prepared to bring change to its work by considering people's opinions and visions," he told the lawmakers.
The decision of whether or not to abolish the commission has been postponed because the number of MPs attending Monday's parliamentary session was not sufficient to take a vote.
www.afghanistannewscenter.com
Associated Press March 18 , 2013
KABUL, Afghanistan - The top U.S. military chief in Afghanistan said Monday that his team is working as fast as possible to resolve issues that have infuriated Afghan President Hamid Karzai, including the delay in handing over a U.S.-run detention center and the withdrawal of American special forces from a troubled province neighboring Kabul.
The efforts illustrate the growing tensions between the commander, Gen. Joseph Dunford, and an Afghan ally who is struggling to break free from international influence and establish independence after more than a decade relying on a foreign military force for security.
The two latest stumbling blocks in the relationship have delayed a round of talks on a pivotal U.S.-Afghan security agreement to govern the American troops expected to stay past the end of 2014, when the NATO-led coalition ends its combat mission. Talks on the unfinished pact were supposed to take place in Kabul last week.
“We’re working issues with a sense of urgency,” Dunford told The Associated Press in his first one-on-one interview since he took command. “But the issues are complex, and they’re fundamental ... so you have to get it right.”
Speaking in his office in the capital, Kabul, Dunford would not say when the detention center would be handed over.
Dunford is trying to address a series of increasingly strident decrees that Karzai has laid down since the commander took charge five weeks ago. It started just days after he arrived, when Karzai insisted that the coalition cease all airstrikes after another NATO airstrike caused civilian casualties. More recently, Karzai has demanded that U.S. special operations forces leave Wardak province, after allegations that U.S. commandos and their Afghan partners abused local citizens — a charge Dunford denies.
Dunford would not set a date for the withdrawal of U.S. commandos from Wardak province, just outside the capital, saying he’s working with the Afghan defense and interior ministers to come up with a plan.
Throughout, Karzai has kept up a steady stream of invective in public remarks, even accusing the U.S. of complicity with the Taliban in keeping the country unstable, as an excuse to stay longer. That has spurred anger on Capitol Hill.
“What to do about President Karzai? Isn’t he making success more problematic? He sure is,” said Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, a Democrat from Michigan, in a speech Monday to the Council on Foreign Relations. “Karzai’s absurd remarks weaken the support of the American people ... and they raise doubts in many if not most American minds about the wisdom of a long-term strategic relationship with Afghanistan, with all of its costs and risks.”
Last week, Dunford warned his commanders to raise their security levels, saying Karzai’s comments could stir more anti-American sentiment and spur more insider attacks.
But he has remained circumspect and studiously polite in public, seeking to use face-to-face meetings with Karzai to ease tension and temper Karzai’s angry demands for immediate change. Dunford, a Marine Corps general with a master’s degree in government from Georgetown University and another in international relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, said it’s simply a matter of “working the issues.”
“In all honesty, it hasn’t been that contentious on a personal level,” Dunford said.
To resolve the airstrike issue, Dunford agreed to limit but not end them, after 10 civilians were among the 14 Afghans killed in a coalition airstrike against insurgents on Feb. 13 in eastern Afghanistan.
In the case of the Parwan Detention Center, next to the huge U.S.-run Bagram Air Field, Dunford said that Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel had asked for a week to resolve the handover problems during a phone conversation with Karzai on Saturday, but the general said that did not mean there was a seven-day clock ticking to a new handover date.
Dunford said the U.S. must still figure out an acceptable way to monitor what happens to the detainees after the handover.
“We have to be assured that ... detainees will have humane treatment ... in accordance with international conventions,” he said.
“What we have to do is do that in a way that is consistent with Afghan sovereignty.”
U.S. officials also want to make sure that some 30 to 40 detainees they consider dangerous will not be set free. Dunford said Karzai has promised to comply, but the challenge has been “coming up with the right legal framework to do that.”
Dunford also insists the eventual transition of U.S. special operations forces from Wardak will happen, but only after he and Afghan security officials agree on a plan to safely hand over the province, considered a gateway for insurgents to stage attacks on Kabul.
Karzai’s deadline for the withdrawal of U.S. commandos from Wardak expired early last week, but the president relented temporarily when Dunford asked for more time.
“What I told the president was that I understood his intent and wanted to comply with it, and that we were going to draw down in Wardak in a manner that was consistent with transition,” Dunford said. “What I believe he agreed to let us do is work with the Afghan national security forces to make sure ... the security is maintained.”
“It’s not a question of we’re being recalcitrant and not coming out of Wardak. It’s just like everywhere else in Afghanistan, we’re in a process of transition,” he said.
But Karzai’s patience is wearing thin, according to his spokesman Aimal Faizi.
“There should be some sort of respect for the president of a country, but his demand is not being taken seriously,” Faizi told the AP on Monday.
Afghan officials contend that rogue Afghan militias in league with U.S. forces in Wardak province kidnapped nine local men, and they tortured and executed others.
U.S. officials reject charges of torture, kidnapping or extrajudicial killing. They said four of the men reported missing had been detained in joint U.S.-Afghan security force raids, but they don’t know what happened to the other five.
Faizi said the Afghan defense ministry further investigated the charges and concluded in a report to the National Security Council on Sunday that a man he described as an Afghan-American had conducted torture and extradition of locals on behalf of U.S. special operations forces. He said the man was videotaped torturing a suspect, with other Afghan forces watching the interrogation. Faizi said U.S. forces promised but failed to turn the man over to Afghan authorities.
Dunford said the Afghan-American in question did at one time work for U.S. special operations forces, but not at the time the alleged abuses occurred.
He said a senior military officer concluded a third U.S. investigation into these allegations on Sunday.
“I can tell you authoritatively, at the time of the incident, the detainees were not in a U.S. facility,” he said. “There were no U.S. forces in or around that incident, and the interpreter was not in our employ at the time of the incident.”
Dunford’s confrontations with the Afghan president are set against an early and ferocious start to the traditional Afghan spring fighting season. Unseasonably warm weather has melted snow on mountain passes and on dirt roads and paths in remote areas, making it easier for insurgents to plant roadside bombs.
U.S. officials say the Taliban already are focusing the majority of their firepower on Afghan forces — many of which are operating mostly independently across the country for the first time.
Dunford said he had confidence the Afghan forces would perform well.
“Can the Afghans this summer assume the lead? Yes,” he said, predicting they would emerge a more confident force by next fall.
Associated Press writer Donna Cassata contributed from Washington.
Follow Kimberly Dozier on Twitter at http://twitter.com/KimberlyDozier
US, Afghanistan Struggle to Agree on Special Forces
Mark Snowiss VOA News March 18, 2013
More than a week after Afghan President Hamid Karzai ordered U.S. special forces to leave a strategically key area near the capital, officials from both sides are still struggling to resolve the issue.
Karzai ordered the elite American units out of Wardak province after residents complained that they, and Afghans working with them, were torturing and killing civilians - an allegation strongly denied by the United States. At the same time, the Afghan leader also accused the U.S. and NATO of trying to forge an agreement between the Taliban and his political opponents.
The escalating tensions reached Brussels Monday, when NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen called the charges that international forces are colluding with the Taliban "an absolutely ridiculous idea."
Meanwhile, ISAF spokesman Günter Katz told reporters in Kabul that NATO will eventually hand over security responsibilities for Wardak province, but that the alliance's "Afghan partners" must take the lead on developing a transition plan.
"There will be a transition to the Afghan National Security Forces. The only issue is the timeline and the methodology, but there is no doubt that [the Afghans] will take over the lead of Wardak," said Katz.
The decision to expel U.S. forces from the province - with its predominantly Pashtun population, the same ethnic group as the Taliban - has angered American defense officials who worry an abrupt exit could allow insurgents to strengthen their presence in the area and use it as a base to attack Kabul, only 25 kilometers away.
But Interior Ministry spokesman Sediq Sediqi countered that Afghan forces are already fully capable of handling security operations nationally.
"The total number of Afghan troops nationwide is now 352,000, and that is in addition to the Afghan local police. We are ready to assume security responsibility from NATO anywhere in the country," Sediqi said.
"There is no reason to suggest that after NATO withdraws, a particular province or district will collapse and be taken over by the Taliban, the Haqqani network or al-Qaida," he said.
A possible deal
Reuters, citing a top Kabul official, reported that Afghanistan and the U.S. are working on a compromise deal that would allow American special forces to stay in Wardak in return for full Afghan control of the controversial Bagram prison.
The U.S. partly handed over the high-security jail and around 3,000 suspected Taliban fighters to Afghan control last year. But full control over the jail has been repeatedly delayed as Afghan and U.S. officials argue over concerns that hundreds more Taliban still under U.S. custody would be released.
During a phone call Saturday, Karzai and U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said they would work intensively over the next week "with a view to concluding an agreement" on Bagram.
Their discussion came the same day as several hundred Afghan demonstrators chanting "U.S. special forces out!" marched to the parliament building in Kabul demanding the elite commandos withdraw from Wardak.
Ulema Council Needs to be Independent: Abdullah
TOLOnews.com Monday, 18 March 2013
Afghanistan's Ulema Council needs to be independent and should not be politically influenced in its decisions, the National Coalition leader said Monday.
Head of National Coalition party Dr Abdullah Abdullah said that the Islamic clerics recent statement on the political situation between Afghanistan and the US was influenced by President Hamid Karzai.
"I hope that the Ulema Council should always act independently therefore such a position should be respected by the people as well," Abdullah said.
The Ulema Council released a statement Saturday calling for the US to obey Karzai's orders on handing over Bagram prison to full Afghan authority and for US special forces to leave Maidan Wardak province.
It also said that Muslims should never obey "infidels" – referring to the US.
Abdullah also said that the president's hostility towards the US over the issues were not in Afghanistan's interests.
"It is a political issue but Afghanistan's interests are an excuse. The main reason [for Karzai's statements] are personal," Abdullah said.
He added that he believed the president aimed to upset the current situation in order to avoid holding the presidential election next year.
Roadside bomb kills 2, wounds 3
HERAT, Afghanistan, March 19 (Xinhua) -- Two police including a senior officer were killed and three others sustained injuries as a roadside bomb struck police van in Shindand district of Herat province with Herat city as its capital 640 km west of Kabul on Tuesday, police said.
"A mine planted by militants on a road in Shindand district struck the vehicle of Nasir Ahmad the police chief of Herat-Farah highway today, killing him along with one of his bodyguards and injured three others," police chief of the western region Toryali Abdiak told Xinhua.
Those injured in the blast are also police personnel, he added. He did not furnish more details.
Taliban militants fighting the government have yet to make comment.
Afghan gov't launches poppy eradication campaign in Kandahar
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan, March 19 (Xinhua) -- The government of Afghanistan launched poppy eradication campaign in Taliban former stronghold Kandahar 450 km south of Kabul and have destroyed 2,800 acres of poppy fields, spokesman for provincial administration Jawed Faisal said Tuesday.
"In the anti-poppy drive which launched some two weeks ago across the province, so far 2,800 acres of poppy-cultivated farmlands have been destroyed by police," Faisal told Xinhua.
Covering several districts including Maiwand, Panjwai, Takhtapul, Khakriz, Shah Walikot and the restive Ghorak, the official said that the campaign will continue till the wiping out of the illegal crop from the province.
There were no conflicts during the campaign and no police personnel have been hurt, Faisal contended.
With producing 3,700 tons opium poppy in 2012, according to United Nations Office on Drug and Crime (UNODC) Afghanistan has topped the poppy producing nations.
The Afghan illegal product in 2012, according to the UN anti- drug body had fallen down 36 percent against 5,800 tons in 2011.
Afghanistan's southern provinces including Kandahar and the western region where Taliban-linked militancy has damaged security, according to UNODC report produced 90 percent of the whole illegal crop in 2012.
The conflict-ridden Afghanistan, reportedly is supplying 90 percent of the raw material used in manufacturing heroin to the world.
Afghans in Wardak province want U.S. forces out
by Farid Behbud
MAIDAN SHAR, Afghanistan, March 19 (Xinhua) -- War-weary residents of the eastern Afghan province of Wardak located near capital Kabul have called for the removal of the U.S. Special Forces from the province for alleged misconduct and crimes against them.
"We do not know why the U.S. Special Forces come to Wardak. They claim to provide security but why are they involved in harassing and torturing civilians?" Rahimullah Khan, a 53-year- old resident, told Xinhua in provincial capital Maidan Shar.
Khan said he is concerned over the security situation in Wardak. "We hope that after the withdrawal of U.S. forces, the security situation would get better. Because there would be no occupation and no pretext for insurgents to fight the government," Khan said.
On Feb. 24, Afghan President Hamid Karzai issued a two-week deadline for U.S. Special Forces to leave Wardak following reports that Americans and Afghans working for them were involved in harassing and torturing, or even murdering, civilians.
The president's order has yet to be implemented by the U.S. Special Forces.
"The Special Forces stop vehicles along main roads; Without any evidence they accuse people of having links with insurgents; They arrest innocent people. It is an oppression and injustice," said Mohammad Harif, a 38-year-old shop owner.
He said nine people disappeared recently in the Nirkh District following their arrest by the U.S. forces. In another case, a young student was taken away at night from his residence a couple of weeks ago and his tortured body was found later, Harif said.
Munir Ahmad, a 23-year-old baker, said "We do not want foreign forces to stay in Wardak anymore. You know, 11 years on, we haven' t seen any tangible changes in our life yet. There are still explosions and insurgent attacks similar to those in the past years. We want our local forces to secure Wardak."
"The U.S. and NATO troops have been deployed to secure Wardak over the past decade. But we never enjoy a peaceful environment," said Mohammad Musa, a 38-year-old farmer from Deh Afghanan village of Jalriz District.
Mohammad Shah, a resident of Jalriz District, said that after midday, people are afraid to walk in the streets."They do not have the freedom of movement. They are scared from the Taliban as well as from the U.S. troops. It is difficult particularly when a family member falls ill. They cannot bring the sick to the hospital in Maidan Shar for treatment," he said.
Shah, 34, who recently returned from neighboring Iran but could not find a decent job yet, went on to say that "it is in the fundamental interest of Afghanistan, its neighbors and the region to safeguard peace and security in the country."
According to local media reports, hundreds of Taliban fighters as well as members of Haqqani militant group are active in Wardak province from where they organize terror attacks on Kabul.
In November last year, three civilians were killed and 90 others were wounded when Taliban militants detonated a car bomb near a government office building in Maidan Shar. The blast also destroyed 30 government buildings and civilian houses around.
On Saturday, more than 500 people staged a peaceful demonstration in front of the parliament building in Kabul protesting the continued presence of U.S. Special Forces in Wardak province.
The protesters also demanded the release of nine locals whom they said have been detained by the U.S. forces. The protesters were carrying banners with slogans such as "Where is justice?" "Americans go out," and "I am a student, I am a farmer and why do you murder me by the name of terrorist?"
U.N. blames rise in violence against Afghan women on culture
Reuters By Michelle Nichols March 18, 2013
UNITED NATIONS - Violence linked to culture was the main reason for a 20 percent rise in deaths and injuries of females in Afghanistan last year, U.N. special envoy to Afghanistan Jan Kubis said on Monday.
Despite an overall fall in annual civilian casualties in Afghanistan for the first time in several years, the United Nations said last month that more than 300 women and girls were killed and more than 560 injured during 2012. "The majority is linked to domestic violence, tradition, culture of the country," Kubis told reporters at the United Nations in New York ahead of a debate on Afghanistan by the U.N. Security Council on Tuesday.
"Of course there are very clearly attacks on women's activists by the insurgency," he said. "Then there are unfortunate situations when indeed women are killed while doing their daily chores (by unexploded bombs)."
Western human rights advocates say cultural tradition is often used to justify abuse of women such as female genital mutilation and honor killings.
Afghanistan is a conservative Muslim country, where under Taliban rule between 1996 and 2001 women were forced to cover up and were banned from voting, most work and leaving their homes unless accompanied by a husband or male relative.
U.S.-backed Afghan forces toppled the Taliban in late 2001 for refusing to hand over al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.
As foreign forces prepare to withdraw by the end of 2014 after a more than decade-long war, the United Nations and rights groups are concerned human rights in Afghanistan, particularly those of women, will further deteriorate.
Afghan women have won back basic rights in education, voting and employment since the Taliban were ousted from power in 2001, but fears are mounting that such freedoms could be traded away as Kabul seeks peace talks with the group.
Activists and some lawmakers have blamed the rise in violence against women on what they say is waning interest in women's rights on the part of Afghan President Hamid Karzai's government, a claim Karzai denies.
The U.N. political mission in Afghanistan, led by Kubis, said in December that Afghanistan still had a long way to go in implementing the 2009 Law on the Elimination of Violence against Women, which made child marriage, forced marriage, rape and other violent acts criminal offenses.
"Our role as the U.N. will be very crucial in the post-2014 period," Kubis said on Monday. "We will be one of the promoters, advocates of what should be practices in a country that will be perhaps more traditional and will be coming back to its roots."
"The situation is of concern and will remain of concern," he said of violence against women and girls.
Women who pursue careers in conservative Afghanistan routinely face opposition in a society where often they are ostracized - or worse - for mixing with men other than husbands or relatives.
A U.N. policy-making body agreed on Friday to a declaration urging an end to violence against women and girls despite concerns from conservative Muslim countries and the Vatican about references to women's sexual and reproductive rights.
(Reporting by Michelle Nichols; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)
ADB Injects $200M into Electricity Sector
TOLOnews.com By Shahla Murtazaie Monday, 18 March 2013
The Asian Development Bank (ADB) has pledged a further $200 million towards the development of Afghanistan's electricity network, according to the state electric company Brishna.
Brishna officials Monday said the money will be used to build and improve the electricity network in Logar and Paktiya provinces, as well as help supply the transition of a 500 Kilowatt electricity cable project from neighbouring Turkmenistan to Afghanistan.
"The project includes a 500 kilowatts line from Turkmenistan to Jawzjan province and then to Mazar-e Sharif city. The line will go to Baghlan province in the future. The construction of a 220 kw substation in Logar and Gardiz is part of the project," Brishna chief Abdul Razaq Samadi said.
The head of Brishna also mentioned that another electricity project worth $120 million running from Pul-e Khomri, the capital of Baglan, to Kabul will be funded by the ADB and will be signed in a few months.
The ADB has agreed to fund $1.2 billion in Afghan development projects until 2016.
"The Asian Development Bank made a very strong commitment for the long term, engaging with Afghanistan as development partner. We have committed $1.2 billion up to 2016 and this is to be invested in the future. And together, all of us as partners in development for those who believe in the future of Afghanistan, we will need cooperation," ADB director for Afghanistan Joji Tokeshi said.
A partitioned Afghanistan is better than chaos
The Globe and Mail By BRAHMA CHELLANEY Monday, Mar. 18 2013
America’s war in Afghanistan, the longest and costliest in U.S. history, is finally drawing to an official close. How this shapes Afghanistan’s future will have a significant bearing on the security of countries far beyond the region. After all, Afghanistan is not Vietnam: The end of U.S.-led combat operations may not end the war because the enemy will seek to target Western interests wherever located.
Can the fate of Afghanistan be different from two other Muslim countries where the United States intervened militarily – Iraq and Libya? Iraq has been partitioned in all but name into Shia, Sunni and Kurdish sections, while Libya seems headed toward a similar three-way but tribal-based partition, underscoring that a foreign military intervention can effect regime change but not establish order. Will there be an Iraq-style “soft partition” of Afghanistan, with protracted strife eventually creating a “hard partition”?
Afghanistan’s large ethnic minorities already enjoy de facto autonomy, which they secured after their Northern Alliance played a central role in the U.S.-led ouster of the Afghan Taliban in late 2001. Having enjoyed autonomy for years, the minorities will resist coming under the sway of the ethnic Pashtuns, who long ruled the country.
For their part, the Pashtuns, despite their tribal divisions, won’t rest content with being in charge of just a rump Afghanistan made up of the eastern and southeastern provinces. Given the large Pashtun population resident across the British-drawn Durand Line that separates Afghanistan from Pakistan, they’re likely to revive their long-dormant campaign for a Greater Pashtunistan – a development that could affect the territorial unity of another artificial modern construct: Pakistan.
The fact that the ethnic minorities are actually ethnic majorities in distinct geographical zones in the north and the west makes Afghanistan’s partitioning organically doable and more likely to last, unlike the colonial-era geographical line-drawing that created states with no national identity or historical roots. The ethnic minorities account for more than half of Afghanistan – both in land area and population size.
The U.S. effort for an honourable exit by cutting a deal with the Pakistan-backed Afghan Taliban, paradoxically, is deepening Afghanistan’s ethnic fissures and increasing the partitioning risk. With President Barack Obama’s choosing his second-term national security team and his 2014 deadline to end all combat operations approaching, the U.S. effort to strike a deal with the Taliban is back on the front burner.
This effort, pursued in co-ordination with Afghan President Hamid Karzai amid a gradual withdrawal of U.S. and NATO troops, is stirring deep unease among the Afghan minorities, who fought the Taliban and its five-year rule fiercely and suffered greatly. The rupturing of Mr. Karzai’s political alliance with ethnic-minority leaders has also aided ethnic polarization. Some non-Pashtun power brokers remain with Mr. Karzai, but most others now lead the opposition National Front.
The minority communities are unlikely to accept any power-sharing arrangement that includes the Taliban. In fact, they suspect Mr. Karzai’s intention is to restore Pashtun dominance across Afghanistan.
The minorities’ misgivings have been strengthened by the recent “Peace Process Roadmap to 2015” issued by the Karzai-constituted Afghan High Peace Council, empowered to negotiate with the Taliban. The document sketches several striking concessions to the Taliban and to Islamabad, ranging from the Taliban’s recognition as a political party to a role for Pakistan in Afghan affairs. The roadmap dangles the carrot of cabinet posts and provincial governorships to prominent Taliban figures.
The ethnic tensions, which threaten to undermine cohesion in the fledgling Afghan National Army, are breaking along the same lines as when Soviet forces withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, an exit that led to civil war. This time, the minority communities are better armed and prepared to defend their interests after the U.S. exit. A new civil war, however, would likely tear Afghanistan apart, balkanizing the country into more distinct warlord-controlled zones than the situation prevailing today.
This raises a fundamental question: Is the territorial unity of Afghanistan essential for regional or international security? The sanctity of existing borders has become a powerful norm in world politics, yet this principle has allowed weak states to survive. Ungovernable states can be a serious threat to regional and global security. Outside forces, in any event, are hardly in a position to prevent Afghanistan’s partitioning along Iraqi or Yugoslav lines.
A weak, partitioned Afghanistan may not be the best or even a desirable outcome. Yet, it will be far better than an Afghanistan that dissolves into chaos. And infinitely better than one in which the medieval Taliban return to power. In this scenario – the best of the bad options – Pakistani generals, instead of continuing to sponsor Afghan Pashtun militant groups such as the Taliban and the Haqqani network, will be compelled to fend off a potent threat to Pakistan’s unity.
With American options in Afghanistan narrowing considerably and a deal with the Taliban appearing both uncertain and perilous, some sort of partition may also allow the U.S. and its allies to exit with honour intact.
Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research, is the author of Asian Juggernaut and Water, Peace, and War.
Afghanistan's Forests A Casualty Of Timber Smuggling
NPR By Sean Carberry and Sultan Faizy March 18, 2013
Despite Afghanistan's fierce winter, it's rare to find a house with insulation or a modern heating system. So Afghans rely on bukharis, stoves that look like an oil drum with a big rusty pipe growing out of the top that bends off into a hole in the wall.
That fact keeps the hundreds of wood vendors around Kabul quite happy. This winter, NPR staff fed several tons of firewood into their bukhari — and that's just one house in a city of about 5 million people.
The United Nations Environmental Program estimates that over the past three decades, Afghanistan's forest cover has decreased by about 50 percent.
Wali Modaqiq, deputy director of Afghanistan's environmental protection agency, says that today forests cover only about 2 percent of Afghanistan. He says years of war and drought have felled more trees than wood stoves, which generally burn scrap wood. The big killer of trees, though, is economics.
"There is a huge demand for Afghan timber in the international market," Modaqiq says.
Commercial timber harvesting is illegal in Afghanistan — which leaves a massive smuggling industry to satisfy international demand. The remaining forest is in places like Kunar province bordering Pakistan, which is the main outlet for Afghan timber now.
A Limited Economy
There is no business in Kunar but the timber business, says Haji Hamidullah, a businessman there.
"It's called Kunar, which means the homeland of mountains," he says. "Once upon a time when there was anarchy in here, people started cutting down the forest to make money."
That was during the 1980s war with the Soviets and the subsequent civil war. Now there is law — but law in Afghanistan often doesn't translate from paper to practice, and that applies to the timber business.
"There's a big business running [timber] during the night," Hamidullah says. "All top officials, including the governor, police chief and head of the provincial council, are involved and are paid their share."
Hamidullah knows, because he used to be in the business.
"When I was caught, all of my timber was put on sale by the government despite the fact that I paid a lot of money in bribes to many officials," he says.
A Well-Developed System
Ashaqullah, who goes by one name, is from Asadabad, the capital of Kunar. He is the head of the Youth Provincial Council, but even he acknowledges that he smuggles on the side. He says there is a clear system.
"A specific amount of tax is levied on each truckload of timber. The deal is made during the day between the officials and the smugglers," he says. "The cutting and transportation goes on at night."
He says dozens of trucks carry hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of timber to Pakistan each night.
Not surprisingly, Fazelullah Wahidi, the governor of Kunar, says this is all bunk.
"Smuggling is not possible now," he says.
"This is a very old story because this was happening in war time," he explains. "But now we have a strong military, we have strong border police, and we have strong national police."
But according to smugglers and residents of Kunar, those policemen are on the take. The governor was about the only person in Kunar who denied that timber is being illegally harvested and smuggled.
Modaqiq, with the national environmental protection agency, points out a Catch-22 that makes it difficult to stop the smuggling.
"Official policy is to involve the local communities to manage the natural resources, especially the forest," he says.
But the local people of Kunar have few ways to earn money other than working for smugglers.
"They are providing job opportunities for those people," Modaqiq says.
So the very people empowered to protect the forests have a strong economic incentive to cut them down. And with law enforcement officials complicit in the business, the remaining forest covering 2 percent of the country may not be standing for long.
Cyclical nature of Afghan fighting may mask deeper trends, experts warn
McClatchy Newspapers By Jay Price Monday, March 18, 2013
FORWARD OPERATING BASE APACHE, Afghanistan - On a blustery, subfreezing night in a sandbagged guard tower, Army Spc. Anthony Ross, 24, of Carson, Calif., twisted and spun in a brief dance. Sometimes Ross does push-ups on guard duty to stay alert, sometimes he dances.
His fellow boredom-fighter for the evening, Sgt. Ulisses Monteoncruz, 21, of Los Angeles, looked up, then went back to the tedium of scanning the rolling, muddy terrain behind the base through a night-vision device that rendered it in shades of gray.
Guard-tower duty is seldom exciting, and it’s particularly tedious in Afghanistan in winter, as hundreds of American soldiers in towers across the country that same night were painfully aware. And Ross knew that in a week or two, when he’d rotate off tower duty back to his regular job – patrolling the roads to clear them of improvised bombs – there probably wouldn’t be much action then, either.
For a little while.
Scholars debate whether the war in Afghanistan has been America’s longest, but as one last “combat season” is about to begin before most U.S. troops leave, there’s little doubt that this war has been America’s most cyclical.
For more than 11 years, U.S. and NATO troops have followed an odd annual rhythm, a pattern so obvious – whether measured in casualty figures or the number of insurgent attacks – that Pentagon officials, the soldiers on the ground and journalists alike casually refer to the annual “fighting season.” Generally, they describe it as beginning and ending with the warmer months. The winter lull is ascribed to snowbound mountain passes that prevent insurgents from moving between their refuges in Pakistan and the fighting grounds in Afghanistan.
But that common wisdom isn’t exactly true, and may have distorted the real picture of how the war has evolved, counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen says. He thinks that the Taliban, hit hard by U.S. and NATO forces in recent years, may have begun cautiously hoarding their fighters over the warm months, biding their time until the Americans leave. Having fighters in reserve will strengthen their bargaining position with the U.S.-backed Afghan government so that they can negotiate the best possible terms in a settlement.
“The insurgents have been in a kind of permanent winter mode since 2010, and because of the election next year and everything else, they’re on a different calculus now, where they basically are not thinking, ‘How do I gain the most possible military advantage?’ but instead, ‘How do I preserve the largest possible force while still staying sufficiently engaged so as to maintain pressure on my opposite number in any future negotiation?’ ”
Kilcullen, who’s been senior counterinsurgency adviser to Army Gen. David Petraeus in Afghanistan and Iraq, says the meaning of the combat lull is so misunderstood that he discourages the use of the term “fighting season” with anyone he works with on Afghanistan issues.
“It’s not as simple as in summer they fight and in winter they don’t,” he said. “If you live through more than a year or two there, you realize that there are a couple of lulls. There’s a lull that happens in sort of the April time frame. That’s the poppy harvest lull, where there is genuinely a reduction in the fighting because people go and harvest their poppy.”
The Taliban don’t stop fighting in winter, Kilcullen says. They simply turn their energies from combat in the rural areas to terrorism in the towns and cities, targeting important local and national officials.
“I would say a better description of the seasonality is that the insurgency doesn’t stop in the winter, it just goes urban,” he said.
Casualties are indeed much higher in the warm months, but Kilcullen said that to focus on sheer numbers was a mistake.
He cited the assassination attempt in December on Asadullah Khalid, the head of the Afghan domestic intelligence service, who was badly wounded. Khalid had built a reputation as a particularly aggressive foe of the Taliban.
“The sheer number of guys killed doesn’t track to the importance of any given hit,” he said. “If just three guys are killed in an attack, but those three guys killed were important Afghan ministers, that’s big, and Khalid, even though he wasn’t killed, that had a pretty significant political effect.”
The war’s characteristic cycles have another impact, said James Dobbins, a former U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan who’s now the director of the RAND International Security and Defense Policy Center: They make it hard for a commander to track progress.
“It can lead to sort of false positives, where violence starts to go down and one thinks one has made progress until one remembers it goes down every year at this time,” he said “So, instead of measuring yourself against a constant line, you have to measure yourself not against where you were last month, but where you were this same month last year. This means that each commander is not measuring his progress against his own previous experience, but against the previous commander’s experience.”
That also applies to combat troops, most of whom now serve a year or less in Afghanistan, and thus don’t ever see two winter lulls. That means they can’t build on their previous experience.
“People have described it as not being a 10-year war but rather 10 wars of one year each,” Dobbins said. “There’s something to that.”
Kilcullen, who now runs Caerus Associates, a consultancy in Washington, thinks the summer-winter pattern also masks broader changes and trends, including changes in the way the Taliban are approaching the war.
"Right now, you’ve got guys at ISAF” – the International Security Assistance Force, the NATO-led coalition – “saying, ‘Well, we’ve broken the back of the insurgency. The operational defeat of the Taliban is accomplished, because are not seeing the guerrilla groups out in the countryside like we were two or three years ago,’ ” Kilcullen said. "But that’s not necessarily true, right? It may be that they have gone to another mode of operating and we won’t know for sure until the drawdown takes place.”
As to the high mountain passes to Pakistan being closed by snow, Kilcullen doesn’t believe that’s the central reason for the winter drops in rural fighting. Pakistan aside, Afghans traditionally stay indoors as much as possible in the harsh winter months.
“Afghanistan, probably half of it is covered by snow every year for three or four months, and yet there is no evidence I have ever seen of any attempt at developing over-the-snow technology: no skis, no sleds, no skates, no snowshoes, nothing,” he said. “So for thousands of years, no one has said, ‘Hey, why don’t we figure out some way of moving over it?’ They all just basically sit down for four months.”
The first Western observation of a fighting season here referred only to the poppy harvest, Kilcullen said. It originated in the 1960s with Louis Dupree, an archaeologist and anthropologist from Greenville, N.C., who taught at Duke University and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, among other places, and was perhaps the best-known Western scholar of Afghanistan.
“One of the things he wrote about was how a rural society like Afghanistan can’t farm and fight at the same time, so when it’s harvest season or there are other major agricultural activities going on, you’ve go to stop fighting to do that,” Kilcullen said. “So he sort of invented this idea that there’s a fighting season and a farming season, and people tend to do one or the other, but it’s very hard to do both.”
For the record, the insurgents may fight more at some parts of the year and less at others, but the NATO-led coalition doesn’t, said its spokesman, German Brig. Gen. Gunter Katz.
"ISAF doesn’t have a fighting season," he said. "We pressure them 365 days a year, 24 hours a day.”
The predictable rhythms do have an upside, especially for new soldiers in rural Afghanistan who arrive in the quiet time. It gives them an opportunity to understand the environment they’re fighting in before they’re likely to have to engage in daily combat.
Spc. Ross and Sgt. Monteoncruz, who are serving as combat engineers with the 3rd Infantry Division in Zabul province, are among those.
"We arrived Jan. 25, for a nine-month tour, so we’re seeing the lull, and the rise and the peak and then the fall," Ross said, as he listened to routine radio traffic from the other towers. "It’s actually a pretty good thing, because this way the learning curve won’t be bad at all, like it might be if we got dropped in right in the middle of the fighting season and things were just crazy.”
He calls the lull “the Taliban’s biggest mistake.”
“It gives us time to learn what the routes are supposed to look like when everything is normal, and by extension what they shouldn’t look like,” he said.
Then he spun and peered intently into the darkness with his night-vision scope. Finally, some excitement: The tower door opened and the next guard shift stepped in, accompanied by one of the last frigid blasts of the quiet season.
Afghan Church Endures Amid War and Strife
Inside Italy's embassy, a Catholic priest operates Afghanistan's only church
Wall Street Journal By MARGHERITA STANCATI March 18, 2013
KABUL - Some 60 people gathered for a recent Sunday Mass in a white, boxy building behind the blast walls protecting the Italian Embassy in Kabul. Prayers were recited at first by a gray-haired nun in her 80s, then by a U.S. officer carrying a gun.
Welcome to Our Lady of Divine Providence, the only permanent church operating in the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.
Its existence largely unknown, the church has survived wars and upheavals and the Taliban in its mission to cater to the faithful from dozens of countries.
The Italian cleric who runs it, Rev. Giuseppe Moretti, 74 years old, is himself a Kabul institution. The Catholic priest has served his flock since 1977—save for a long break to recover from wounds that he sustained from a 1994 rocket explosion.
"It's always been a country that deeply fascinated me because it's shrouded in mystery," says Rev. Moretti. "I fell in love with it."
Behind the church's altar, Father Moretti placed a wooden cross showing mud huts and tall glass buildings as well as an outline of the country's map—"a symbol of the resurrection of Afghanistan," he says.
The Kabul church's origins date back to 1921, when Italy became one of the first Western nations to recognize Afghanistan as a sovereign country independent from Britain. As a goodwill gesture, the liberal government of King Amanullah Khan reciprocated by allowing Italy—also a kingdom at the time—to host a Christian place of worship within the grounds of its embassy in Kabul.
Under this understanding, no Afghans are allowed inside, and the priest is forbidden from trying to convert Muslims. In a country where apostasy is a crime punishable by death, Father Moretti says this has never crossed his mind.
These sensitivities are also reflected in the church's unusually austere architecture. Completed in 1960, the building has no bell tower, and its only mark of distinction is a cross on the facade—a concession that Afghanistan granted only after extensive lobbying by Rome.
"Building a Christian church was a very delicate matter that had to be handled with extreme caution," says Giuseppe Benedetti, the son of an Italian diplomat who oversaw negotiations with Kabul at the time. "My father told them: 'We'll put the cross, but it will be small and placed low, and trees will shield it from street view.' "
The peaceful 1970s, when Afghanistan was a tourist destination on the hippie trail, were a golden age for the church. Father Moretti recalls families among packed church services that were held in four languages: French, Spanish, English and German.
"It was a completely different world," he says. "A world of freedom."
Then came the Soviet invasion in 1979. Most foreigners left Afghanistan, and church attendance plummeted. Father Moretti recalls a hostile Communist leadership, and "a tank parked outside the embassy, pointing straight at us."
In 1990, Father Moretti became the church's sole caretaker. Two years later, U.S.-backed mujahedeen rebels overthrew the Communist regime—and began fighting each other over control of Kabul, reducing much of the Afghan capital to rubble.
The Italian Embassy was frequently caught in the crossfire. "Every morning we would pick up cartridges we found scattered around the garden," Father Moretti recalls.
In 1993, the embassy closed. Although the churchgoers weren't many—20 at most, says Father Moretti—the priest chose to stay on. Then, one morning, a rocket slammed into an embassy room where he had taken refuge.
The Italian priest made it out of the rubble with the help of his dog Benji, stumbling onto the church's Afghan watchman. "Judging by the look on his face, I was in really bad shape," Father Moretti says.
As Father Moretti recovered, three nuns living in Kabul continued to conduct prayers at the church, remaining even after the Taliban takeover in 1996. Even though the Taliban's religious police moved in next door, the Taliban didn't interfere.
The insurgent movement says its position on the matter hasn't changed. "Islam allows [Christians] to build their own places of worship, but they are forbidden to convert people," says Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid.
Once the U.S. ousted the Taliban regime in late 2001, a small team sent to reopen the embassy discovered the church's existence. "In a country ruled by religious extremists, I was struck to see the nuns there, and to learn that the Taliban respected them," says Lt. Gen. Giorgio Battisti, an Italian who formed part of the team when he was a colonel and is now the U.S.-led coalition's chief of staff. The church, he added "was clean, and there were no visible signs of damage."
Father Moretti resumed his service soon after. Two of the nuns who took care of the church during the Taliban, members of the Petites Soeurs de Jésus, a French order active in Muslim countries, are also still here.
Other nuns in blue-rimmed, white robes—members of the order set up by Mother Teresa to help the world's destitute—are Father Moretti's most loyal churchgoers. So are some coalition service members. Father Moretti says he is willing to allow soldiers to pray with their weapons, given the realities of wartime life in Kabul.
After all, this past September, a suicide bomber blew himself up on the street just outside the embassy, killing at least six Afghan civilians.
In response to the risks, the embassy set up blast barriers, Hesco walls and coils of razor wire. As a result, Father Moretti says fewer people attend church. "This church is like a catacomb," he laments.
The flock is likely to become even thinner once the coalition's military mission ends next year. Rev. Moretti may not be around to see that happen: This year in Afghanistan may be his last, as he is due to retire this fall when he is 75, in accordance with church rules. He is lobbying to stay on.
In any case, he adds wistfully, "the church will stay here—the way it always has." —Habib Khan Totakhil contributed to this article.
Write to Margherita Stancati at margherita.stancati@wsj.com
US Will Not Leave Afghanistan: Karzai
TOLOnews.com By Shakeela Abrahimkhail Monday, 18 March 2013
President Hamid Karzai said Monday that the US will not leave Afghanistan alone and described the recent tensions as media propaganda.
Speaking at a joint Afghan government and BBC Persian programme of "Jerga-e-Azad" which will be broadcast on government television Monday night, he said that the US wants to sign the Kabul-Washington security agreement in the upcoming three months, but the Afghan government will make its decision with careful accuracy.
"If they accept our demands and it is good for us, then we will sign it," he said.
"The US is not leaving. They will not leave and we should ask them all our demands," Karzai said in response to the question of whether the US will withdraw completely.
He said the talks with the US continue and he encouraged the Afghan people to trust and "don't worry about the future."
On the matter of the Afghan-US relationship being widely regarded as tense, Karzai labeled it propaganda of the western media.
"This is all media propaganda. You are watching my speeches and the US wants to put pressure on us, but we are trying to put them under pressure. But they were more agile in the media than we are," Karzai said.
His comments come after recent speeches where he accused the US of holding secret talks with the Taliban without Afghan involvement and of wanting to stay in Afghanistan to take advantage of its resource-rich mines.
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" given the "blood and treasure" that the US has poured into the country.
Bribery Rampant in Parliament Appointments: MPs
TOLOnews.com By Rafi Sediqi Monday, 18 March 2013
Afghan lawmaker Abdulrahman Rahmani said Monday that his fellow MPs asked him to buy their vote in his bid to be head of the parliamentary complaints commission.
Rahmani said during Monday's parliamentary session that other MPs have asked for thousands of dollars for their vote to appoint him, and said that other lawmakers have experienced similar requests to be voted onto other special parliamentary commissions.
"Corruption exists in the appointment of the head of the complaints commission. I was one of the candidates for the post and I have been asked for a bribe of $3000 [for a vote]. This action is very serious in the parliament," Abdulrahman Rahmani told the lower house.
MP Allah Gul Mujaheed said that there is document evidence of this abuse.
"Many parliament members are asking bribes to appoint people to the commissions. We have documents that those who are asking for bribes are those people who are calling themselves religious scholars," Mujaheed told the lawmakers.
Other parliamentary members who spoke in Monday's session stressed that until the lower house is not reformed from the inside, it will be difficult for it to fight the challenges which the country is facing, especially in terms of corruption.
MPs May Abolish the Administrative Reform Commission
TOLOnews.com Monday, 18 March 2013
The Independent Administrative Reform and Civil Service Commission should be abolished for its widespread corruption including bribes received for government appointments, lawmakers said Monday.
Calling for a serious evaluation of the commission's activities, Parliament's first vice speaker Mirwais Yasini said the competitive tests held by the commission should be discontinued.
"Tribalism at the ministries in the administrative reform commission alone show the corruption within this commission. There is large amounts of money spent by the commission, but there has been no impressive achievement," said MP Saranwal Abdulraouf.
Another MP said, "Every director for government offices are bribing large amounts of money, otherwise they would not be selected for the post."
"This commission is not a commission for administrative reform but a commission for corruption," added MP Ahmad Shah Ramazan.
MP Nazifa Zaki pointed out that many of the qualified young Afghans are not being selected for posts in government departments.
"The administrative reform commission should be abolished as most of the youth who refer to this commission are not being provided job opportunities and will remain with no destiny ahead," she said.
Meanwhile, the head of the commission Ahmad Moshahed was summoned to give an account before parliament. He said the commission has selected the government staff transparently and in accordance with the laws.
"The administrative reform commission is a policy-making organisation... It is prepared to bring change to its work by considering people's opinions and visions," he told the lawmakers.
The decision of whether or not to abolish the commission has been postponed because the number of MPs attending Monday's parliamentary session was not sufficient to take a vote.
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