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Pakistan To Remove Border Installations After Afghan Objections
By RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan April 16, 2013
KABUL -- A senior Afghan military official says Pakistan has promised to remove controversial installations along the disputed border line between the two countries.
Afzal Aman, the Afghan National Army's chief of military operations, said Pakistan would remove the structures on April 16.
Aman told RFE/RL that the agreement was reached during a meeting with his Pakistani counterpart in Islamabad on April 15.
One day earlier, Afghan President Hamid Karzai had reportedly instructed his top security officials to take "immediate action" regarding the removal of a border gate and checkpoint recently installed by Pakistan along the British-drawn Durand Line.
An Afghan Defense Ministry spokesman had suggested that "all options" were open in Kabul to ensure the installations were removed.
Pakistan and the United States view the Durand Line, created in the 19th century, as an international border.
Kabul, however, has consistently refused to recognize the Durand Line, a boundary that cuts through the ethnic Pashtun heartland.
Senior Militant Commander Arrested In Eastern Afghanistan
April 16, 2013 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
NATO says Afghan and coalition forces have arrested a senior commander of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e Taiba (LeT) group in the eastern Afghan province of Ghazni.
A NATO statement said a number of other insurgents were detained during the joint operation in Ghazni’s volatile Andar district on April 15.
The militant commander is believed to have planned and participated in multiple attacks against Afghan and coalition forces in the Kunar, Kandahar, and Ghazni provinces.
NATO's statement did not disclose the commander’s name.
NATO says the commander is known to have links to foreign fighters, and that he was actively planning a high-profile attack at the time of his arrest.
Lashkar-e Taiba, which is banned in Pakistan, is blamed for the November 2008 attacks in Mumbai, India that killed 166 people.
Based on reporting by AP and Radio Free Afghanistan
Taliban ambush kills 5 Afghan police
MAIDAN SHAHR, Afghanistan, April 16 (Xinhua)-- Taliban militants fighting the government ambushed a convoy of Police Public Protection Force in Wardak province 35 km west of Kabul on Monday night leaving five personnel of the body dead and another injured, spokesman for Wardak's provincial administration said Tuesday.
"A team of Public Protection Force of Police was on patrol in Haft Asiab area of Sayed Abad district last night when a group of Taliban rebels laid ambush killing five personnel of the entity and injuring another," Attaullah Khogyani told Xinhua.
He also added that the police returned fire killing a Taliban fighter and injuring few others.
Wardak which connects the restive Kandahar and Ghazni provinces to the capital city Kabul has been the scene of increasing militancy over the past couple of years.
Bomb scare forces return of Turkish passenger plane
ANKARA, April 16 (Xinhua) -- A Turkish Airlines plane en route to Afghanistan returned to Istanbul early Tuesday morning over bomb scare due to an abandoned mobile phone found on the plane, local media reported.
The Airbus 320, on flight number TK-706 for the Afghan capital Kabul, left Istanbul's Ataturk airport with 135 passengers onboard, but cabin crew found an abandoned mobile phone just after takeoff. The captain informed the airport traffic control tower on suspicion of bomb and decided to return. Police searched the aircraft without finding any suspicions.
Afghan president condemns Boston terrorist attacks
KABUL, April 16 (Xinhua) -- Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai has strongly condemned that bomb attacks by terrorists in the Boston city of the United States, which reportedly left three people dead and over 140 others injured, a statement released by Karzai's office said Tuesday.
"President Hamid Karzai expressed grief over the civilian casualties caused by two bomb explosions in the Boston city of America," the statement said.
Denouncing the terrorist attacks in the strongest possible terms, President Karzai said in the statement". Having suffered from terrorist attacks and civilian casualties for years, our people feel better the pain and suffering arising from such incidents".
The president also offered condolences and expressed sympathies to the families of the victims and the people of the United States, the statement added.
Taliban in Pakistan denies involvement in Boston Marathon blasts
By SADAF SHINWARI - 16 Apr 2013, 12:16 pm Khaama Press
The Pakistani Taliban group — Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) on Tuesday denied its involvement in Boston Marathon bombings that killed at least three people and injured over 100 others.
TTP spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan quoted by AFP said, “We believe in attacking US and its allies but we are not involved in this attack.”
Ehsan further added, “We have no connection to this bombing but we will continue to target them wherever possible.”
Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) claimed responsibility behind Times Square bombing plot back in 2010 where the bombing plotter, a Pakistani-American citizen Faisal Shahzad was jailed for life.
However a TTP spokesman later denied that the faction had trained or recruited Shahzad.
The explosion in Boston Marathon finish line on Monday afternoon orced cities from New York to Los Angeles to go on high alert.
Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) based in northwestern Pakistan tribal belt on the Afgahn border is accused for some of the deadliest attacks in Pakistan.
No group has so far claimed responsibility behind the attack in Boston Marathon however US president Barack Obama without uttering the word “terror” said that the perpetrators would pay.
The Last Remnant
The story of how the Afghans defeated the British.
The Daily Beast By Michael Korda Apr 15, 2013
Nations, like people, seldom learn from their own experience, still less from the experience of others. It is a huge tribute to the tact of the distinguished British historian William Dalrymple that it is not until page 435 of his dramatic, richly peopled, and spell-binding history of Shah Shuja and the first British battle for Afghanistan, when he at last draws the inevitable parallel between the British attempt to subdue and control Afghanistan in the mid-19th-century and America’s own disastrous war there over the past decade.
Our own effort is due to come to an inglorious and unlamented end next year, when we plan to leave the Afghans once again to their own devices, having failed to produce in them any desire to achieve Jeffersonian democracy or accept modern social causes, any more than they were about to accept the British imposition of a king in the mid-19th-century.
In both cases the British and Americans, though our experiences are separated by 170 years, wielded fearsome destruction on the people, cities, and landscape of a proud and fiercely independent country, and got nothing back in return.
Perhaps the most famous military painting in the history of British art is Lady Elizabeth Butler’s The Last Remnant, an immense Victorian tear-jerker of a picture that depicts the approach of the alleged last survivor of the British army sent to Kabul, Dr. Brydon, to the gates of Jalalabad, slumped on an exhausted pony and bearing the news of the British Army’s total destruction (nearly 20,000 killed).
In a nation that has often sought pride as much in heroic defeats as in victories, the haunting scene of the Last Stand of the 44th Foot at Gandamak—the soldiers forming a square and defending themselves with their bayonets until every one of them was slaughtered by howling, ferocious Afghans—remains as well remembered in Britain as Custer’s Last Stand is in the United States.One might have hoped that the virtual annihilation of a whole British army in 1842, as Britain’s imperial power waxed, would have discouraged the United States from trying to impose its will on Afghanistan, or at least persuaded the United States government and military establishment to study the past before committing us to the longest military adventure in American history, but no such luck.
Just like the British (and the Russians in the 20th) we have constantly underestimated the political sophistication, the taste for duplicity and treachery disguised by perfect manners and subtle charm, the stubbornness, and the sheer love of fighting that have characterized the long history of Afghanistan.
Here is a people that for a time successfully resisted Alexander the Great, for God’s sake! Afghanistan is not a “primitive” country, after all, it is the crossroads of commerce between Asia and Europe, a place of enormous complexity and an ancient and deeply rich culture, in which, like in most societies, acquiring power has always been a lethal game, where maintaining the delicate balance between competing tribes and ethnic groups requires a combination of Tammany Hall politics and brute force, and in which the only thing that unites the country’s mutually hostile groups is ferocious resistance to the presence of foreigners.
The last time the Afghans rose against British influence was in 1928, when the tribes fought against King Amanullah, who had tried to introduce schools for girls, abolish the burqa for women, and whose wife and her friends were seen playing tennis in unsuitable Western garments in the palace gardens, showing that divisive social issues have not changed much in 85 years.
The former Lawrence of Arabia, then serving in the Royal Air Force as Airman Shaw and stationed across the border in India, was blamed for the uprising, and accused by the British press of leading or possibly fighting the tribes, dressed in flowing robes like Greenmantle in John Buchan’s novel, and was hurriedly sent home to the United Kingdom, to his indignation, since he had been at the time lying on his bunk peacefully translating The Odyssey into English. That episode perfectly epitomizes how Afghanistan can provoke normally sane politicians into foolish action, and the general fog of legend and myth that obscure the realities of Afghan life to foreigners.
The place of the British in Afghan life was taken for a time by the Russians, with disastrous results that contributed to the downfall of the Soviet Union (and led the United States to support and finance the mujahedin through Pakistan, a policy that backfired stupendously), and now it has been the turn of the Americans, who are still struggling with familiar questions like the education of women, the wearing of the burqa, and the suave, subtle duplicity of the Afghan president, in place of the Afghan kings.
Dalrymple, though the reverse of a cynic, ends his book with a comment from an Afghan that the next contenders for control of Afghanistan will be the Chinese, who are already making great (and profitable) inroads in the eastern part of the country in a mineral rush for the country’s vast untapped resources.
One day it seems that the Americans might recede into the past on the lengthy list of those who have tried and failed to reshape Afghanistan.It is impossible to summarize the huge slice of history Dalrymple has carved out in such loving detail and with such a gift for narrative.
He reminds me of Barbara Tuchman: nothing daunts him, nothing resists his patient research, he is terrific at re-creating characters, and never manages to let detail slow down his story. He does not stand upon a soapbox, but in his quiet way he demonstrates how dangerous it is, even for a great and powerful empire, to meddle with a society you don’t understand, and whose values and traditions you don’t share.
But this book is not just valuable for the lessons it teaches (or rather, infers); it never shortchanges the reader. Very usefully, it begins with a list of the major characters on both sides, British and Afghan, each of whom comes to life in the book, starting with the central figure, Shah Shuja, whose whole life was spent in the bloody melodrama of Afghan politics and tribal warfare, and who after being defeated by his half brother fled to safety in India, carrying with him the famous Koh-i-Noor diamond.
Shah Shuja then staged three unsuccessful attempts to regain his throne, and was finally put back on it by the British—a mistake that the British compounded by trying to turn him into a puppet king. Even more fascinating is Shuja’s formidable rival, the ruthless and brilliant Dost Mohammad Khan.Those who find President Karzai’s behavior toward the country that has placed him in power baffling, would do well to study these two fascinating personalities, and their relationship to the British—and perhaps to recall the famous remark of the Austro-Hungarian foreign minister when asked how Austria would ever repay Russia for her help in suppressing the 1848 Hungarian revolution: “Austria will astonish the world by the depth of her ingratitude.”
Much the same attitude prevailed in Kabul toward the British, and seems to be present today toward the United States. As for the British characters in Dalrymple’s book they are eccentric, fascinating, and some of them are daring predecessors of later adventurers like T.E.
Lawrence. Particular highlights include Maj. Gen. William Elphinstone, the commander in Kabul, who had fought at Waterloo; the ambitious and energetic proconsul Sir Alexander Barnes, whose behavior in Kabul led to his own “gruesome” death; and the formidable Lady Sale, worthy of her own book detailing her escape from Kabul, a testament to the sheer toughness and (unlike some of their husbands) common sense of Victorian women on the outskirts of the Empire.
The fact that the British, after they were driven out, returned and destroyed most of Kabul in revenge, should also warn us of the futility of using power against people who wish only to be left alone—when the British returned to fight once again in Afghanistan, in 1878, their experiences inspired Rudyard Kipling to write these famous lines:
“When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains, / And the women come out to cut up what remains, / Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains / An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.”
All told, there were three Anglo-Afghan wars, all equally futile, but in the expert hands of William Dalrymple the first takes on special importance for setting the pace for the others with its mix of British ignorance of local custom, British overconfidence and greed, and the endless misery for the Afghans and humiliation for the British.
It is a masterful work of history on what can only be described as “a war begun for no wise purpose.” Everyone who enjoys reading history will read this book with admiration and pleasure. Anyone who still has illusions about the value of fighting in Afghanistan will read it with rapidly mounting unease. Everything we have done has been done before—and failed. There could not be a more timely book to read.
All-cloaking Afghan burqa faces challenge on two fronts: Western dress codes, Chinese imports
Associated Press Tuesday, April 16, 2013
KABUL, Afghanistan - The homespun Afghan burqa is under siege from east and west these days — cut-price competition from China, and Western influences that are leading many urban women to exchange the full-body cloak for a simple headscarf.
The decline is most noticeable in Kabul, the capital, where women began joining the work force and adopting Western dress soon after the 2001 U.S.-led invasion that ousted the puritanical Taliban. Demand for burqas appears strongest in the provinces, where family pressures and the power of conservative warlords continue to enforce a stricter Islamic code.
Alim Nazery, who has traded in burqas in Kabul for 27 years, remembers selling at least 50 burqas a day when the Taliban were in charge. Now he says he sells 20 a day, mostly to women from the provinces.
On one wall of his store in the Old Town market hang Afghan-made burqas costing from 1,000 to 3,000 Afghanis (about $20-$60), and on the other wall Chinese-made robes for 500-800 Afghanis ($10-$15).
“We are selling more Chinese burqas because they are cheaper and people can buy more of them,” Nazery said, taking a break from haggling with a burqa-clad pregnant woman as her husband waited outside. Another woman emerged from a fitting room screened off by a row of burqas, asking for something with less embroidery.
In the countryside, where kidnapping and rape are a constant threat, a burqa gives its wearer the safety of anonymity.
But in Kabul, say clothiers, demand is declining as young women go to school and take office jobs — pursuits that were impossible during the six years that the Taliban ran the country. But women’s rights activists caution against reading too much into the burqa situation.
They say it’s the least of their problems as they continue to battle such issues as domestic violence and forced marriages.
“The current progress and the current achievements for Afghan women are very cosmetic and anything gained can be lost easily,” said Selay Ghaffar, executive director of the Humanitarian Assistance for Women and Children of Afghanistan (HAWACA), a non-governmental group. She said she herself wears a burqa when traveling in insecure areas.
“Freedom from ... the burqa does not mean the real liberalization of women. I should have rights according to the law. I should be equally treated in the main society,” she told The Associated Press.
The traditional burqa is sewn from cloth produced in Afghanistan, the embroidery stitched by seamstresses and the cap made by hand to render each garment unique — a touch of individuality for women otherwise indistinguishable beneath the robes.
Colors vary by region — light blue in the Kabul area, white up north in Mazar-i-Sharif and brown and green in Kandahar down south.
Haj Hussain, a 75-year-old dyer, says his biggest business nowadays is coloring men’s clothes. “We get fewer burqas,” he said. The reason is that most women are now going around with bare faces ... it’s not in fashion anymore.”
He said he dyed 80 burqas a day during Taliban rule and now is down to 30.
There are no official statistics for burqa sales.
China’s entry into the market in recent years makes a dramatic change. Even Afghan manufacturers are buying material from China or Pakistan, in part because it’s easier to pleat. Chinese burqas come pre-embroidered, leaving only the cap and veil in the hands of Afghan seamstresses.
“The Chinese have taken the market and there’s much less business for handmade burqas. That means less work for many poor women,” said Adila Sultani, a tailor in Mazar-i-Sharif.
Lal Mohammad Hemat, 58, who owns two burqa stores in the northern city, said demand is rising there as security deteriorates, and he sells about 1,500 burqas per month. “But Chinese-made burqas have cut into the Afghan-made business by about 60 percent,” he said.
In the southern city of Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban, store owners tell the same story: more sales, lower prices.
And if Mariam Ahmadi gets her way, the burqa may eventually be in even bigger trouble.
She donned her first burqa at 14 under family pressure. Now she can’t imagine leaving home without it. But she hopes she never has to buy one for her 8-month-old daughter.
“Now things are getting modern and I don’t want my daughter to wear the burqa,” Ahmadi said. “I want her to go to school and be educated.”
___
Associated Press writers Amir Shah in Kabul and Mirwais Khan in Kandahar contributed to this report.
Govt Asks Taliban to Introduce Members for Qatar Office
TOLOnews By Karim Amini 15 April 2013
The Afghan government has officially asked the Taliban to put forward members to open its political office in Qatar.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) on Sunday said that the government supports the plan to open the office, "but it's time for them [the Taliban] to announce their readiness for the peace talks."
"Now, it's the Taliban's turn to release a clear statement saying that they have cut their ties with Al Qaeda or that they are willing to cut it. The second thing is that the group should state its readiness for talks with the High Peace Council which represents all the political groups.
"The government of Afghanistan – at the level of foreign minister, High Peace Council, and even the president – has certainly stated its agreement to open such an office, under special conditions," MOFA spokesman Janan Mosazai said Sunday.
Earlier this month President Hamid Karzai visited Qatar to further plans to open the office in the capital city Doha.
Karzai met with the Qatari emir who agreed that the office will only be used for peace talks and not for any other purpose, according to a statement from Karzai's office.
The Taliban office is seen as a key step in bringing the insurgent group into negotiations for a peace deal with the Afghan government. Although the plan has its critics who doubt that it will make any difference.
Mosazai also said Sunday that talks about the security agreement between Afghanistan and US is continues.
"The delegations of the two countries have talked threes time in Kabul and advice between the two side is continuing," he said.
Afghan electric company struggles to make powerful customers pay
Reuters By Katharine Houreld April 15, 2013
How do you collect a $200,000 electricity bill from an Afghan warlord? Try cutting him off from the grid. Then turn off your cell phone so he can't yell at you.
General Rashid Dostum - one of Afghanistan's most powerful militia leaders - found someone else to reconnect him within hours, said Mirwais Alami, the chief commercial officer at Afghanistan's national power company.
"This will take years to collect," Alami said wryly. "But I am determined. If he doesn't pay, his son will pay."
Although Dostum is still holding out, others grudgingly paid up after the utility started cutting their power connections. The company cut off 1,000 defaulters last year and collected $230 million, a 40 percent increase in the last three years.
The approach is beginning to pay dividends. Three years ago, the company lost more than half its power to theft. Last year, that had fallen to a third. The utility is now breaking even in the capital. It's a small victory in an industry beset by woes.
Afghanistan desperately needs to build an electricity network to generate jobs, develop its trillion-dollar mineral deposits - a process that will take decades - and win support for a government that has delivered few tangible benefits to its citizens.
There has been progress, but it is slow. The national electricity utility, Da Afghanistan Breshna Sherkat (DABS), was set up in 2008. The next year, donors constructed power lines from neighboring Uzbekistan, which supplies most of Afghanistan's electricity, to the capital of Kabul.
The imports helped boost Afghanistan's power to 1,100 megawatts last year. It's about a quarter of what is needed, but a definite improvement on the 291 MW the country had a decade ago.
"(DABS) has shown striking progress for such a young organisation trying to run a national utility in a country that never had that before," said Roseann Casey, a top USAID official overseeing infrastructure in Afghanistan.
Around 80 percent of Afghan power is imported from neighboring countries, mainly Uzbekistan, so officials have to collect cash from customers if they don't want their country cut off. It's a struggle.
"We face a lot of problems. Some people think they should have free power, so when we try to collect they refuse to pay or get Parliament to call us in and give us problems," said Alami, brandishing letters he has sent to prominent Afghans and the attorney general's office.
FOREIGN HELP
Since DABS can't collect all its cash, foreign donors, led by the United States, Germany and India, are funding expansion. They hope to lay a power line down from Kabul to the southern city of Kandahar by 2016 - right through Taliban country.
Currently DABS in Kandahar is powered by U.S.-supplied diesel generators and U.S.-supplied diesel. The cost of the fuel alone is 400 percent of the revenue DABS collects in Kandahar, according to a report by the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR).
The city is one of Afghanistan's "power islands," urban centers electrified by generators, hydro plants or imports from Iran, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan or Uzbekistan. There's very little power in the countryside.
In total, donors are spending $1.6 billion in current projects for the power sector and have allocated $6.3 billion to improve electrical infrastructure until 2019, according to a recent World Bank report.
It doesn't always go smoothly. Last year the U.S. paid a contractor nearly $13 million for electrical meters to replace old, faulty meters in Kandahar. SIGAR auditors found the equipment stashed in a warehouse months later. DABS says the new meters are faulty.
The installation of a third turbine in Kajaki Dam in southern Helmand province, near Kandahar, should bump up capacity from 33 MW to 51.5 MW, but Kajaki has become another troubled project.
British troops fighting off insurgent attacks hauled the turbine to the dam five years ago but Chinese engineers dropped out after the area was attacked. A U.S. firm frequently criticized by U.S. government auditors was awarded the contract, but then Afghan President Hamid Karzai said he wanted DABS in charge.
Now another round of bidding is underway for the new contract. No one knows when the turbine will be installed.
Hydroelectric dams like Kajaki are the best way for Afghanistan to generate cheap power. It has no money to pay for imported fuel. But the dams are costly to build and infrastructure is vulnerable to attack.
Last month Afghan authorities discovered more than a ton of explosives at Salma Dam, a hydro project being built by Indian engineers in Herat province in the western region of the country and expected to produce 42 MW.
Days later, Taliban fighters in Pakistan killed seven people in an attack that destroyed the biggest power station in northern Khyber Paktunkwa province.
"(The Taliban) don't want people to be educated and to have light. They want them to be jobless, to be hopeless, to fight," said Alami.
Alami is hoping that rural Afghans will be happy enough to get electricity that they will protect new power lines in their area. For him, DABS's biggest challenge is not security, but collecting the cash to maintain the projects that donors build.
Last year DABS spent $12 million on maintenance, with USAID funding maintenance for some power plants.
Donors hope that improved revenue collection will help DABS pay for more costs.
"They will have the revenue they collect and then they can use that revenue for operations and maintenance," said Raouf Zia, a spokesman for the World Bank.
That might help save the power plants from the fate of many other donor-built projects that will have to be shut down as the NATO drawdown in 2014 approaches and aid dwindles.
Afghanistan would have to spend $1 billion a year just to operate and maintain all the infrastructure and buildings that foreign donors have constructed since 2001, the World Bank study found.
This year the country's total collected revenue will be just under $2.5 billion. Only $80 million was allocated for maintenance. (Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)
All quiet in Helmand: but can we leave Afghanistan in peace? British soldiers speak ahead of next year's withdrawal
After years of bloodshed, relative calm has descended on Helmand. The soldiers preparing to go home tell Kim Sengupta their thoughts on the country’s future
The Independent By Kim Sengupta 15 April 2013
“The firing just would not stop. The bullets were so close I could see them flying past me, I knew if I moved one inch I’d have been hit. So I stayed still; I was in charge and I told the others to stay still as well, I told them that was the only way to stay alive,” recalled Cpl Sri Krishna Gurung.
He and his fellow soldiers were in a ‘sangar’ watchtower at a base in the town of NawZad. The night-vision equipment had been already been shot to pieces, making it impossible to hit back at the Taliban fighters hidden in the dark. The relentless attack went on for six hours. “I think they only stopped when they ran out of ammo,” said the corporal.
This was the summer of 2006, just after British forces had been deployed to Helmand by Tony Blair’s government in a two-year mission the then Defence Secretary John Reid hoped “would end without a shot being fired”. The aim was to tackle a growing insurgency and stop the flow of heroin from a province producing 24 per cent of Afghanistan’s total output.
Only now, seven years on, are the British preparing to leave Helmand and pull out of Afghanistan entirely next year. They leave a country that the Defence Secretary Philip Hammond admits is “not perfect”, with the UK “very limited” in its ability to leave any kind of lasting influence on life there. How did the mission veer so far off course?
General Sir David Richards, now the head of the British military, was at the time the head of Isaf (International Security Assistance Force) in Afghanistan. He had wanted the UK force in Helmand to focus on the ‘inkspot’ strategy of protecting major towns, allowing civic society to take root and development to take place. Instead the 16 Air Assault Brigade – following the wishes, it was claimed, of President Hamid Karzai – set off for remote areas, effectively inviting the enemy for a fight; the Taliban were happy to oblige.
Within weeks Helmand was aflame. According to the plans, 1st Battalion Royal Gurkha Rifles (1RGR) were meant to be guarding Camp Bastion, the newly constructed UK base. Instead they found themselves in NawZad under constant assault.
“The Taliban tried to overwhelm us. They would come so close to the base that we would throw grenades at them from the sangar when they were just 10 metres away, we could clearly see their faces,” said Cpl Gurung, who then was 23 years old. “We were stuck, pinned back. There was very little knowledge about the capabilities of the Taliban. They were well armed, they would fire RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades] from multiple points, they had snipers. This went on day after day.”
In the next two years, Helmand became one of the most violent places in the country – and heroin production shot up to 53 per cent of the national crop. The British troops fought tenaciously but were too few to counter the ever-increasing numbers of insurgents coming in from their sanctuaries in Pakistan. Territories taken, often at the cost of lives, could not be held because of a lack of boots on the ground.
This led to a major rethink of strategy. US forces arrived in large numbers and the British started on what Gen Richards had urged them to do in the first place: concentrating on protecting cities. There was also a focus on counter-insurgency doctrine, less talk of the ‘Northern Ireland Experience’ – an oft-repeated phrase which would make the Americans sigh – and more analysis of the war that was actually being fought.
Engagement with the community was seen as the key and the troops began to see the fruits of that.
Sgt Gobinder Gurung, who served alongside Sri Krishna in Helmand, became so trusted by the locals that they would ask him to adjudicate disputes; his nickname was ‘the mullah’. The sergeant, who is now on his fourth tour of Afghanistan, initiated a scheme which drastically reduced the number of attacks. “We knew about the ‘$10 Taliban’, young men who would plant IEDs [improvised explosive devices] for money. We offered them 250 Afghanis [around $5] a day to work in the farmland on a long-term basis. It was in their interest now to make sure that the money they were getting wouldn’t get interrupted by fighting. We were getting 16 attacks a day – this went down to one or two. After we left, the Paras took over and continued the same programme, and the attacks continued to remain very low.”
While overt insurgent attacks were reduced across Helmand, another more treacherous threat began to rise: ‘green on blue’ shootings of Western forces by their erstwhile Afghan comrades.
This was partly due to the scramble to get the numbers of the Afghan army and police up to a complement of 352,000, taking over security responsibilities and allowing Isaf to withdraw from the long and costly war. Officers from the NDS (National Directorate of Security), the country’s intelligence service, point out just how difficult it has been to vet the background of those applying to join at such a fast recruitment pace.
Nevertheless, the timetable for the West’s end-of-combat operations remain on track, with Afghan forces now carrying out the vast majority of operations, only occasionally asking for help from Isaf. The current mantra in Washington and London is that the government of Mohammed Najibullah survived for five years after his Russian backers left, only falling when a cash-strapped Moscow turned off the economic tap. The Afghan government, which will be in place after 2014, on the other hand, will continue to receive international funding and should not suffer the same fate.
The officer commanding 1RGR’s D Company was severely injured by an IED five years ago in Kandahar. After a recovery process which involved extensive surgery, he volunteered for two further tours. The major, who does not want his name publicised, said he was at first “extremely surprised” by the pace of the British drawdown; but he has been “highly impressed”, he said, by the progress made by the Afghan army.
The future, he believes, would be ‘an Afghan reality’ away from the Westernised concept of nation-building. “I think there will be stability; it will be a stability based on what’s established by the power-brokers of Afghan society, tribal elders, land owners, reintegrated insurgents and, yes, in some places, narco-barons. It will be an Afghan solution, which will probably work.”
Brigadier Bob Bruce, the commander of British troops in Helmand, stressed: “We know there’s no military solution to a campaign like this, and the role of the military is to displace the violence away from where people live so that the people have got the freedom, the space, the time to consider the offer that the government makes to it. They can weigh that offer up against what the insurgency is offering and decide. And when the people decide, of course, then that’s it, the insurgency has nowhere to go.”
The commander insisted that Afghan forces are fully capable of taking over the campaign. “We’ve still got a real job to do. We are definitely keeping an eye on the end of 2014. Where we have sensed that we can reduce our profile, we’ve done so. If at any stage the Afghan forces had wobbled, then we, all through this winter, would have been right with them to help them. Actually what we’ve found is that they’ve become really very good at it, and therefore we’ve been able to reduce our profile to such an extent that we’re not doing the sort of operations that we were doing 12 months ago. The critical ingredient at the moment in terms of this progress that I’ve seen is Afghan confidence and I know that they’re good enough to neutralise or even locally defeat the insurgency, I absolutely know it.”
Corporal Gurung, who took part in the first Helmand deployment and a subsequent one of equal violence, is now back as bases are being dismantled. “Now it is very quiet. Some of the younger soldiers are frustrated, but for me, I am very glad it’s coming to an end.”
US and coalition officials say Afghan army progressing faster than expected
Associated Press April 15 2013
CAMP THUNDER, Afghanistan - Gen. Mohammad Sharif Yaftali, commander of Afghanistan’s 203rd Thunder Corps, looked happy as he sat down for lunch in his eastern command post near the border with Pakistan.
He had every reason to be smiling, as did his U.S. advisers.
His troops, he said, had just successfully completed a large-scale operation — code-named Azadi, or “freedom” — aimed at securing strategic highways leading out of Kabul and at clearing a region around the capital. Over the course of the 13-day sweep, his forces battled Taliban and other insurgents 20 times, killing at least 20.
Along the way, his officers sat down with tribal elders to win support for the military and set up local police forces to defend their villages from the Taliban. Separately, his troops successfully freed two Afghan soldiers kidnapped by militants.
It was all done without international troops. “We did the planning and everything ourselves,” Yaftali beamed. “The coalition was there, but they did not fight with us. They just gave us advice. We are in the lead, we are no longer shoulder-to-shoulder.”
Unlike past operations where American and coalition forces were fighting alongside Afghan soldiers or going into the field alone, both sides expressed a confidence in Afghanistan’s army that was not present as little as one year ago.
There have been deep questions about the ability of the Afghan army to take the fight to the insurgency with international combat troops due to leave the country by the end of 2014.
It is not certain that the performance of the 203rd can be replicated in all the army corps around Afghanistan, or even at the brigade and battalion level. But if its ability to successfully carry out large-scale operations can be replicated across the army, then it offers hope the Afghans may be able to hold their own against the insurgency after 2014.
U.S. and coalition military officials say that overall, the nascent force is surpassing many of their expectations. They say it is far better prepared to fight alone than many people think and should be able to take over.
Canadian Brig. Gen. Thomas Putt, the director of the U.S.-led coalition’s program for development of the Afghan security forces, said the Afghan troops were accelerating in their preparedness and “we have to rush to keep up.”
“We are rushing to catch up in their rush to get at it,” he said. “We have the delicious problem of being behind them.”
Coalition officials point to continuing problems in logistics and equipment for the Afghan troops. But they say the forces’ ability to work on their own is speedily improving. Five of Afghanistan’s 26 brigades are now operating independently from the coalition, and 16 are working with only advisory support, said British Lt. Gen. Nick Carter, the second-in-command of the international coalition. Last year just one out of the 23 brigades then operational was able to operate independently.
The Afghan National Security Forces are supposed to finish taking the lead in security later this spring, with the coalition forces moving entirely to a training and advisory role. Already, Afghans are in the lead in more than 80 percent of the nation. According to NATO, the Afghan army now numbers over 175,000, about 12,000 shy of its goal, and has an annual attrition rate of 2.6 percent — higher than the target of 1.4 percent.
Jawed Kohistani, an Afghan political and military analyst, said morale is low in a military force made up mostly of soldiers who joined only for the steady salary. He added that a lack of modern military equipment also poses problems.
“The Afghan security forces will face more challenges and won’t be able to fulfill all the expectations of the international community or the Afghan people,” Kohistani said.
Many of the brigades that are now able to operate independently are in the eastern part of Afghanistan and many are under Yaftali’s command.
Yaftali’s 203rd Corps in Gardez, the capital of eastern Paktia province, numbers 19,000 soldiers in four brigades. It is one of the largest of the army’s six corps and is responsible for six eastern provinces, including two of the most active — Ghazni and Wardak.
The Azadi operation involved some 2,500 Afghan soldiers and police, operating in Ghazni and Zabol provinces, located on a strategic route connecting the capital, Kabul, with the southern province of Kandahar.
Nationwide, some 150,000 police are being trained by the coalition. They make up a large part of the 332,753-member Afghan National Security Forces but are gradually supposed to take the lead role in law enforcement and leave fighting the insurgency to the army.
During the Azadi operation, the army fought insurgents in more than 20 engagements, killing 20 of them and wounding 12. They also found 59 roadside mines. By comparison, two Afghan village police were killed and nine policemen and one soldier were wounded.
The coalition provided no combat support, said Col. Terry Cook, of the 4th Brigade, 1st Armored Division from Fort Bliss, Texas, and an adviser to Yaftali.
“They even did their own medical evacuations,” he said.
“We are pretty good, we are in a better place. We can take the fight to the insurgents,” Yaftali said.
Yaftali’s sprawling base in Gardez has a regional training center, a logistical one, the best military hospital in the country, and soon will have its own air support when MI-17 helicopters are based there. It will probably be one of the places where the U.S. military stations advisers after 2014.
“It is amazing the progress they have made,” said U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Clarence Chinn, the deputy commanding general. His advisers have been working with Yaftali and his senior officers, but no Americans are on the front lines fighting the insurgents — they have left that completely to the Afghans.
“They are an extremely capable force and we are helping them with logistics and training. We are really shifting our effort,” Cook said.
Putt said the coalition is now focusing on getting Afghan troops the equipment they need to be more effective. They include mortars at the company and battalion levels, and howitzers at the brigade level. The U.S. also recently announced it would buy an additional 30 Russian made MI-17 helicopters, some with gunship capabilities, to supplement the nearly 50 already acquired.
They are also working on training them on logistics, or as Putt said, the problem of “how do you sustain thousands of troops.”
“If there is an Achilles heel, it is logistics, and we are working on it,” Putt said.
But the fighting is taking its toll on the Afghan army.
Last week Taliban militants stormed an Afghan army outpost in Kunar province, on the border with Pakistan, and killed 13 soldiers in a five-hour gunbattle. Insurgents have been stepping up their attacks this spring as they try to take advantage of the rapid withdrawal of foreign forces.
More than 1,200 Afghan soldiers died in 2012 compared to more than 550 in 2011, according to data compiled by the Washington-based Brookings Institution. By comparison, coalition casualties have declined as they take forces off the battlefield — with 32 so far this year, 394 in 2012 and 543 in 2011.
About 660 militants were reported to have been killed by coalition and Afghan forces so far this year, compared with close to 3,000 militants last year. The NATO command does not issue reports on the number of insurgents its troops have killed, and Afghan military figures, from which the AP compiles its data, cannot be independently verified.
“People say that 2014 will provide challenges,” Yaftali said. But, he predicted, the year the Afghan army takes the security lead will be far more important: “2013 is going to be the crucial year.”
Australia supports Afghan security transition
KABUL, April 15 (Xinhua) -- Afghan Deputy Foreign Minister Jawed Ludin on Monday met with the visiting Special Representative of Australian Prime Minister Angus Houston to discuss bilateral ties and issues of common concern.
"The two sides discussed the importance of cooperation between the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan and Australia. Mr. Houston expressed his country's support for the transition of security responsibilities, capacity building of state institutions and the peace process," the Afghan foreign ministry said in a statement.
The discussions also involved the issue of human smuggling, the statement said, adding the two sides discussed "the illegal immigration of some Afghan citizens who risk their lives by giving themselves to human smugglers. The two sides expressed concern over the horrific consequences of such immigration and considered the drowning of Afghans in Australian waters as tragic."
Calling human smuggling a major problem and termed it as a painful reality, Ludin said that some Afghan citizens are encouraged by the smugglers to illegally migrate to foreign countries which end with tragic consequences.
Transition of security responsibilities from NATO and U.S. forces to Afghan troops began in 2011 and lasts till 2014. Afghan army and police have already taken full control of areas where 75 percent of population lives.
More than 1,000 Australian forces have been serving within the framework of the NATO-led coalition troops in Afghanistan.
Political Players Divided on Removal of ECCs Foreign Advisers
TOLOnews By Abdul Wali Arian 15 April 2013
The absence of foreign advisers in Afghanistan's Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC) will pave the way for massive fraud in the upcoming presidential election, critics of the new law said on Monday.
A joint senate-parliament commission approved the law on Sunday regarding the structure and function of the ECC and the Independent Election Commission (IEC). After last year's heated debates over foreigners being part of the ECC, the commission decided to remove foreign observers altogether.
"The presence of these two foreign members in the Electoral Complaints Commission secured high levels of trust from the people in the election process. Now that their presence has been eliminated, this could remove the transparency and fairness of the elections," warned National Front member Fazil Rahman Orya.
But the IEC has dismissed the concerns that the lack of foreign members on the ECC will impact transparency because foreigners will still assist on some matters where needed.
"There are some issues where foreign advisers can work [with the ECC] as a member in order to have transparency because the commission is newly established and they do not have enough capacity and there are some other issues. So [the government's decision] will not have any negative impact on the election process," IEC spokesperson Noor Mohammad Noor said. Meanwhile, the Free and Fair Election Foundation of Afghanistan (FEFA) emphasised that the selection of the ECC members is more important than the presence of foreign advisers.
"If the qualifications of the ECC commissioners are taken seriously in that they must be professional and impartial, and they must be appointed via a mechanism not only by the president but also by civil and academic installations, then this will be more effective than two foreign members," FEFA executive director Jandad Spinghar said.
However, some political parties still regard this as insufficient.
"If there were two foreign members on the Electoral Complaints Commission, it would help the transparency of the elections. The Selection Committee can help the election process but not as much as the two foreign members on the Electoral Complaints Commission," Right and Justice party member Moeen Marastiyal said.
The presidential election is to be held 5 April 2014 and is seen as a crucial event in Afghanistan's political transition from President Hamid Karzai's 11-year leadership.
Afghan and US military officials say Afghan commandos kill 22 insurgents during raid
Associated Press By Rahim Faiez in Kabul and Mirwais Khan in Kandahar April 15, 2013
KABUL, Afghanistan - Afghan commandos killed 22 insurgents on Monday during an operation to capture a Taliban commander in eastern Afghanistan, police and the U.S. military said.
The raid was carried out in the Bati Kot district of Nangarhar when a team of commandos raided a village looking for the Taliban leader, the U.S.-led Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force said in an announcement.
During the raid, insurgents opened fire on the soldiers and 22 of the Taliban were killed, the task forces said.
Masoum Khan Hashimi, the deputy police chief of Nangarhar province, said there were no casualties among the security forces or civilians. He said the Taliban commander, Jamal Faroqi, was killed in the pre-dawn raid and 10 insurgents were captured.
In another operation, NATO said a team of Afghan and coalition special forces captured a senior leader of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba. The group, which is banned in Pakistan, is blamed for the November 2008 rampage in Mumbai, India, that killed 166 people. It said he was captured in the Anadar district of eastern Ghazni province — a lawless area that is a major infiltration point for insurgents travelling into Afghanistan from Pakistan.
“The leader is alleged to have planned and participated in multiple attacks against Afghan and coalition forces throughout Kunar, Kandahar and Ghazni provinces. He is known to have links to multiple foreign fighters, and was actively planning a high-profile attack at the time of his arrest,” NATO said in an announcement. It did not provide further details.
There have been increasing reports that insurgents from Pakistan, including members of the Pakistani Taliban, have joined Afghan insurgents in the fight against government and foreign forces. Many Afghan Taliban take sanctuary in Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas over the harsh winter months and come across the frontier during the spring thaw. Violence has increased in recent weeks as more and more Taliban join the fighting.
Relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan have deteriorated in recent months, with Afghanistan accusing Pakistan of trying to torpedo efforts to begin peace talks with the Taliban. Both countries have also accused each other of supporting insurgents fighting on their respective territories.
In the most recent exchange President Hamid Karzai charged late Sunday that Pakistan was setting up a border gate in eastern Afghanistan without asking Kabul. He ordered his ministries of foreign affairs, defense and interior to remove the gate and all installations around it. It was unclear how they would do that as Pakistan claims the facility is inside its border.
Defense Ministry spokesman Gen. Mohammad Zahir Azimi also said Afghanistan was investigating the participation of Pakistani Taliban in an attack last week that killed 13 Afghan soldiers at a small base in eastern Kunar province.
In other violence, Afghan officials said a roadside bomb killed at least seven members of a family travelling in a trailer towed by a tractor in southern Afghanistan.
The Interior Ministry said in a statement that the vehicle hit the bomb on a road in the Mali Zai region of Zabul province just after daybreak on Monday. It said four other people were wounded by the blast, which the ministry blamed on the Taliban.
A spokesman for the provincial governor, Shareef Nasari, says the death toll could be as high as eight. He says all the dead are members of the same family.
A roadside bomb also killed four Afghan police and wounded three overnight in southern Helmand province, Musa Qala district chief Enayamatullah Khan said.
Another two policemen were killed and six kidnapped during a Taliban attack on an outpost in northern Zawzjan province, according to Gen. Abdul Aziz Ghairat, the police chief.
Indonesia trains Afghanistani engineers to build road infrastructure
JAKARTA, April 16 (Xinhua) -- Indonesia provides training program for Afghanistani engineers to build roads and bridges in that country through South-South Cooperation, materializing Indonesia's commitments in supporting Afghanistan by providing sustainable capacity building program, a statement released by Indonesian Foreign Affairs Ministry said Tuesday.
The program, entitled"International Training Program on Infrastructure for Afghanistan: Focusing on Road Operation and maintenance"would be participated by 10 Afghan officials and engineers. It will be held at Public Works Ministry's Bridges and Road Development Center (Pusjatan) in West Java capital of Bandung.
Indonesia's assistance program that would begin on Wednesday fits to what Afghanistan needs as it now requires quick road infrastructure development to support its economy during its recovery after undergoing a long and weary war period.
Indonesia's commitment to help rebuild the war-torn Afghanistan had been voiced in several international forums on Afghanistan, among others in London international Conference on Afghanistan 2010 and Tokyo Conference on Afghanistan in 2012, the statement said.
The capacity building program for Afghanistan was part of Indonesia's soft-power diplomacy in order to push forward Afghanistan's efforts to rebuild the country that has been ransacked by political conflicts in the last three decades.
Afghan Commandos kill more than 20 insurgents in Nangarhar
Khaama Press By Sayed Jawad 15 April 2013
Afghan National Army 1st Special Operations Kandak (SOK) Commandos killed 22 insurgents during a unilateral operation in Bati Kot district, Nangarhar province, April 15.
The Commandos conducted the operation to locate a known Taliban commander and disrupt insurgent activity in Gundayn village.
As 1st SOK traveled toward the village, over 20 insurgents ambushed them with small arms and machine gun fire. The Commandos returned fire, killing 10 Taliban insurgents.
After 1st SOK arrived at the village to begin their search, insurgents attacked them repeatedly from within the compound. The Commandos cleared the compound, killing 12 insurgents and detaining several others.
The National Directorate of Security is currently holding the detainees for further questioning.
No civilian casualties or structural damage were reported during this operation.
Afghan National Army Commandos are an elite group whose main purpose is to conduct high-risk missions to disrupt insurgency networks. The Commandos conduct clearing operations that enable conditions for improved security, governance, and development in remote villages.
Kidnapped Chief of Balkh Private University Found Dead
TOLOnews By TOLOnews.com 15 April 2013
The chancellor of a private university in northern Balkh province was found dead Monday after being kidnapped two days ago by armed men, local officials said.
Mohammad Zarif Anwari, the head of Mawalana University was kidnapped on Saturday while travelling on the Balkh--Mazar-e-Sharif highway.
He was found by Afghan security forces in the Dihdadi district with gunshot wounds, Balkh police chief Gen Salim Hasaas said, adding that the reasons for his murder are unclear. "There was no request or contact for money from the kidnappers. Also Zarif Khan was not rich. But it is difficult to say anything before further investigation," Hasaas said.
Anwari's family called on the government to ensure justice, with his son claiming that his father was killed by three former Jihadi leaders.
"I request the honorable governor to charge the perpetrators. I know the actors behind this incident and they are in this city and they are former Jihadi leaders. Once again, I repeat, I know the perpetrators," Fardin Anwari said.
Balkh police said that this is the first kidnapping case in the province for the solar year of 1392 (start 22 March 2013) and stressed that the security forces will take action against it.
www.afghanistannewscenter.com
By RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan April 16, 2013
KABUL -- A senior Afghan military official says Pakistan has promised to remove controversial installations along the disputed border line between the two countries.
Afzal Aman, the Afghan National Army's chief of military operations, said Pakistan would remove the structures on April 16.
Aman told RFE/RL that the agreement was reached during a meeting with his Pakistani counterpart in Islamabad on April 15.
One day earlier, Afghan President Hamid Karzai had reportedly instructed his top security officials to take "immediate action" regarding the removal of a border gate and checkpoint recently installed by Pakistan along the British-drawn Durand Line.
An Afghan Defense Ministry spokesman had suggested that "all options" were open in Kabul to ensure the installations were removed.
Pakistan and the United States view the Durand Line, created in the 19th century, as an international border.
Kabul, however, has consistently refused to recognize the Durand Line, a boundary that cuts through the ethnic Pashtun heartland.
Senior Militant Commander Arrested In Eastern Afghanistan
April 16, 2013 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
NATO says Afghan and coalition forces have arrested a senior commander of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e Taiba (LeT) group in the eastern Afghan province of Ghazni.
A NATO statement said a number of other insurgents were detained during the joint operation in Ghazni’s volatile Andar district on April 15.
The militant commander is believed to have planned and participated in multiple attacks against Afghan and coalition forces in the Kunar, Kandahar, and Ghazni provinces.
NATO's statement did not disclose the commander’s name.
NATO says the commander is known to have links to foreign fighters, and that he was actively planning a high-profile attack at the time of his arrest.
Lashkar-e Taiba, which is banned in Pakistan, is blamed for the November 2008 attacks in Mumbai, India that killed 166 people.
Based on reporting by AP and Radio Free Afghanistan
Taliban ambush kills 5 Afghan police
MAIDAN SHAHR, Afghanistan, April 16 (Xinhua)-- Taliban militants fighting the government ambushed a convoy of Police Public Protection Force in Wardak province 35 km west of Kabul on Monday night leaving five personnel of the body dead and another injured, spokesman for Wardak's provincial administration said Tuesday.
"A team of Public Protection Force of Police was on patrol in Haft Asiab area of Sayed Abad district last night when a group of Taliban rebels laid ambush killing five personnel of the entity and injuring another," Attaullah Khogyani told Xinhua.
He also added that the police returned fire killing a Taliban fighter and injuring few others.
Wardak which connects the restive Kandahar and Ghazni provinces to the capital city Kabul has been the scene of increasing militancy over the past couple of years.
Bomb scare forces return of Turkish passenger plane
ANKARA, April 16 (Xinhua) -- A Turkish Airlines plane en route to Afghanistan returned to Istanbul early Tuesday morning over bomb scare due to an abandoned mobile phone found on the plane, local media reported.
The Airbus 320, on flight number TK-706 for the Afghan capital Kabul, left Istanbul's Ataturk airport with 135 passengers onboard, but cabin crew found an abandoned mobile phone just after takeoff. The captain informed the airport traffic control tower on suspicion of bomb and decided to return. Police searched the aircraft without finding any suspicions.
Afghan president condemns Boston terrorist attacks
KABUL, April 16 (Xinhua) -- Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai has strongly condemned that bomb attacks by terrorists in the Boston city of the United States, which reportedly left three people dead and over 140 others injured, a statement released by Karzai's office said Tuesday.
"President Hamid Karzai expressed grief over the civilian casualties caused by two bomb explosions in the Boston city of America," the statement said.
Denouncing the terrorist attacks in the strongest possible terms, President Karzai said in the statement". Having suffered from terrorist attacks and civilian casualties for years, our people feel better the pain and suffering arising from such incidents".
The president also offered condolences and expressed sympathies to the families of the victims and the people of the United States, the statement added.
Taliban in Pakistan denies involvement in Boston Marathon blasts
By SADAF SHINWARI - 16 Apr 2013, 12:16 pm Khaama Press
The Pakistani Taliban group — Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) on Tuesday denied its involvement in Boston Marathon bombings that killed at least three people and injured over 100 others.
TTP spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan quoted by AFP said, “We believe in attacking US and its allies but we are not involved in this attack.”
Ehsan further added, “We have no connection to this bombing but we will continue to target them wherever possible.”
Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) claimed responsibility behind Times Square bombing plot back in 2010 where the bombing plotter, a Pakistani-American citizen Faisal Shahzad was jailed for life.
However a TTP spokesman later denied that the faction had trained or recruited Shahzad.
The explosion in Boston Marathon finish line on Monday afternoon orced cities from New York to Los Angeles to go on high alert.
Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) based in northwestern Pakistan tribal belt on the Afgahn border is accused for some of the deadliest attacks in Pakistan.
No group has so far claimed responsibility behind the attack in Boston Marathon however US president Barack Obama without uttering the word “terror” said that the perpetrators would pay.
The Last Remnant
The story of how the Afghans defeated the British.
The Daily Beast By Michael Korda Apr 15, 2013
Nations, like people, seldom learn from their own experience, still less from the experience of others. It is a huge tribute to the tact of the distinguished British historian William Dalrymple that it is not until page 435 of his dramatic, richly peopled, and spell-binding history of Shah Shuja and the first British battle for Afghanistan, when he at last draws the inevitable parallel between the British attempt to subdue and control Afghanistan in the mid-19th-century and America’s own disastrous war there over the past decade.
Our own effort is due to come to an inglorious and unlamented end next year, when we plan to leave the Afghans once again to their own devices, having failed to produce in them any desire to achieve Jeffersonian democracy or accept modern social causes, any more than they were about to accept the British imposition of a king in the mid-19th-century.
In both cases the British and Americans, though our experiences are separated by 170 years, wielded fearsome destruction on the people, cities, and landscape of a proud and fiercely independent country, and got nothing back in return.
Perhaps the most famous military painting in the history of British art is Lady Elizabeth Butler’s The Last Remnant, an immense Victorian tear-jerker of a picture that depicts the approach of the alleged last survivor of the British army sent to Kabul, Dr. Brydon, to the gates of Jalalabad, slumped on an exhausted pony and bearing the news of the British Army’s total destruction (nearly 20,000 killed).
In a nation that has often sought pride as much in heroic defeats as in victories, the haunting scene of the Last Stand of the 44th Foot at Gandamak—the soldiers forming a square and defending themselves with their bayonets until every one of them was slaughtered by howling, ferocious Afghans—remains as well remembered in Britain as Custer’s Last Stand is in the United States.One might have hoped that the virtual annihilation of a whole British army in 1842, as Britain’s imperial power waxed, would have discouraged the United States from trying to impose its will on Afghanistan, or at least persuaded the United States government and military establishment to study the past before committing us to the longest military adventure in American history, but no such luck.
Just like the British (and the Russians in the 20th) we have constantly underestimated the political sophistication, the taste for duplicity and treachery disguised by perfect manners and subtle charm, the stubbornness, and the sheer love of fighting that have characterized the long history of Afghanistan.
Here is a people that for a time successfully resisted Alexander the Great, for God’s sake! Afghanistan is not a “primitive” country, after all, it is the crossroads of commerce between Asia and Europe, a place of enormous complexity and an ancient and deeply rich culture, in which, like in most societies, acquiring power has always been a lethal game, where maintaining the delicate balance between competing tribes and ethnic groups requires a combination of Tammany Hall politics and brute force, and in which the only thing that unites the country’s mutually hostile groups is ferocious resistance to the presence of foreigners.
The last time the Afghans rose against British influence was in 1928, when the tribes fought against King Amanullah, who had tried to introduce schools for girls, abolish the burqa for women, and whose wife and her friends were seen playing tennis in unsuitable Western garments in the palace gardens, showing that divisive social issues have not changed much in 85 years.
The former Lawrence of Arabia, then serving in the Royal Air Force as Airman Shaw and stationed across the border in India, was blamed for the uprising, and accused by the British press of leading or possibly fighting the tribes, dressed in flowing robes like Greenmantle in John Buchan’s novel, and was hurriedly sent home to the United Kingdom, to his indignation, since he had been at the time lying on his bunk peacefully translating The Odyssey into English. That episode perfectly epitomizes how Afghanistan can provoke normally sane politicians into foolish action, and the general fog of legend and myth that obscure the realities of Afghan life to foreigners.
The place of the British in Afghan life was taken for a time by the Russians, with disastrous results that contributed to the downfall of the Soviet Union (and led the United States to support and finance the mujahedin through Pakistan, a policy that backfired stupendously), and now it has been the turn of the Americans, who are still struggling with familiar questions like the education of women, the wearing of the burqa, and the suave, subtle duplicity of the Afghan president, in place of the Afghan kings.
Dalrymple, though the reverse of a cynic, ends his book with a comment from an Afghan that the next contenders for control of Afghanistan will be the Chinese, who are already making great (and profitable) inroads in the eastern part of the country in a mineral rush for the country’s vast untapped resources.
One day it seems that the Americans might recede into the past on the lengthy list of those who have tried and failed to reshape Afghanistan.It is impossible to summarize the huge slice of history Dalrymple has carved out in such loving detail and with such a gift for narrative.
He reminds me of Barbara Tuchman: nothing daunts him, nothing resists his patient research, he is terrific at re-creating characters, and never manages to let detail slow down his story. He does not stand upon a soapbox, but in his quiet way he demonstrates how dangerous it is, even for a great and powerful empire, to meddle with a society you don’t understand, and whose values and traditions you don’t share.
But this book is not just valuable for the lessons it teaches (or rather, infers); it never shortchanges the reader. Very usefully, it begins with a list of the major characters on both sides, British and Afghan, each of whom comes to life in the book, starting with the central figure, Shah Shuja, whose whole life was spent in the bloody melodrama of Afghan politics and tribal warfare, and who after being defeated by his half brother fled to safety in India, carrying with him the famous Koh-i-Noor diamond.
Shah Shuja then staged three unsuccessful attempts to regain his throne, and was finally put back on it by the British—a mistake that the British compounded by trying to turn him into a puppet king. Even more fascinating is Shuja’s formidable rival, the ruthless and brilliant Dost Mohammad Khan.Those who find President Karzai’s behavior toward the country that has placed him in power baffling, would do well to study these two fascinating personalities, and their relationship to the British—and perhaps to recall the famous remark of the Austro-Hungarian foreign minister when asked how Austria would ever repay Russia for her help in suppressing the 1848 Hungarian revolution: “Austria will astonish the world by the depth of her ingratitude.”
Much the same attitude prevailed in Kabul toward the British, and seems to be present today toward the United States. As for the British characters in Dalrymple’s book they are eccentric, fascinating, and some of them are daring predecessors of later adventurers like T.E.
Lawrence. Particular highlights include Maj. Gen. William Elphinstone, the commander in Kabul, who had fought at Waterloo; the ambitious and energetic proconsul Sir Alexander Barnes, whose behavior in Kabul led to his own “gruesome” death; and the formidable Lady Sale, worthy of her own book detailing her escape from Kabul, a testament to the sheer toughness and (unlike some of their husbands) common sense of Victorian women on the outskirts of the Empire.
The fact that the British, after they were driven out, returned and destroyed most of Kabul in revenge, should also warn us of the futility of using power against people who wish only to be left alone—when the British returned to fight once again in Afghanistan, in 1878, their experiences inspired Rudyard Kipling to write these famous lines:
“When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains, / And the women come out to cut up what remains, / Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains / An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.”
All told, there were three Anglo-Afghan wars, all equally futile, but in the expert hands of William Dalrymple the first takes on special importance for setting the pace for the others with its mix of British ignorance of local custom, British overconfidence and greed, and the endless misery for the Afghans and humiliation for the British.
It is a masterful work of history on what can only be described as “a war begun for no wise purpose.” Everyone who enjoys reading history will read this book with admiration and pleasure. Anyone who still has illusions about the value of fighting in Afghanistan will read it with rapidly mounting unease. Everything we have done has been done before—and failed. There could not be a more timely book to read.
All-cloaking Afghan burqa faces challenge on two fronts: Western dress codes, Chinese imports
Associated Press Tuesday, April 16, 2013
KABUL, Afghanistan - The homespun Afghan burqa is under siege from east and west these days — cut-price competition from China, and Western influences that are leading many urban women to exchange the full-body cloak for a simple headscarf.
The decline is most noticeable in Kabul, the capital, where women began joining the work force and adopting Western dress soon after the 2001 U.S.-led invasion that ousted the puritanical Taliban. Demand for burqas appears strongest in the provinces, where family pressures and the power of conservative warlords continue to enforce a stricter Islamic code.
Alim Nazery, who has traded in burqas in Kabul for 27 years, remembers selling at least 50 burqas a day when the Taliban were in charge. Now he says he sells 20 a day, mostly to women from the provinces.
On one wall of his store in the Old Town market hang Afghan-made burqas costing from 1,000 to 3,000 Afghanis (about $20-$60), and on the other wall Chinese-made robes for 500-800 Afghanis ($10-$15).
“We are selling more Chinese burqas because they are cheaper and people can buy more of them,” Nazery said, taking a break from haggling with a burqa-clad pregnant woman as her husband waited outside. Another woman emerged from a fitting room screened off by a row of burqas, asking for something with less embroidery.
In the countryside, where kidnapping and rape are a constant threat, a burqa gives its wearer the safety of anonymity.
But in Kabul, say clothiers, demand is declining as young women go to school and take office jobs — pursuits that were impossible during the six years that the Taliban ran the country. But women’s rights activists caution against reading too much into the burqa situation.
They say it’s the least of their problems as they continue to battle such issues as domestic violence and forced marriages.
“The current progress and the current achievements for Afghan women are very cosmetic and anything gained can be lost easily,” said Selay Ghaffar, executive director of the Humanitarian Assistance for Women and Children of Afghanistan (HAWACA), a non-governmental group. She said she herself wears a burqa when traveling in insecure areas.
“Freedom from ... the burqa does not mean the real liberalization of women. I should have rights according to the law. I should be equally treated in the main society,” she told The Associated Press.
The traditional burqa is sewn from cloth produced in Afghanistan, the embroidery stitched by seamstresses and the cap made by hand to render each garment unique — a touch of individuality for women otherwise indistinguishable beneath the robes.
Colors vary by region — light blue in the Kabul area, white up north in Mazar-i-Sharif and brown and green in Kandahar down south.
Haj Hussain, a 75-year-old dyer, says his biggest business nowadays is coloring men’s clothes. “We get fewer burqas,” he said. The reason is that most women are now going around with bare faces ... it’s not in fashion anymore.”
He said he dyed 80 burqas a day during Taliban rule and now is down to 30.
There are no official statistics for burqa sales.
China’s entry into the market in recent years makes a dramatic change. Even Afghan manufacturers are buying material from China or Pakistan, in part because it’s easier to pleat. Chinese burqas come pre-embroidered, leaving only the cap and veil in the hands of Afghan seamstresses.
“The Chinese have taken the market and there’s much less business for handmade burqas. That means less work for many poor women,” said Adila Sultani, a tailor in Mazar-i-Sharif.
Lal Mohammad Hemat, 58, who owns two burqa stores in the northern city, said demand is rising there as security deteriorates, and he sells about 1,500 burqas per month. “But Chinese-made burqas have cut into the Afghan-made business by about 60 percent,” he said.
In the southern city of Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban, store owners tell the same story: more sales, lower prices.
And if Mariam Ahmadi gets her way, the burqa may eventually be in even bigger trouble.
She donned her first burqa at 14 under family pressure. Now she can’t imagine leaving home without it. But she hopes she never has to buy one for her 8-month-old daughter.
“Now things are getting modern and I don’t want my daughter to wear the burqa,” Ahmadi said. “I want her to go to school and be educated.”
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Associated Press writers Amir Shah in Kabul and Mirwais Khan in Kandahar contributed to this report.
Govt Asks Taliban to Introduce Members for Qatar Office
TOLOnews By Karim Amini 15 April 2013
The Afghan government has officially asked the Taliban to put forward members to open its political office in Qatar.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) on Sunday said that the government supports the plan to open the office, "but it's time for them [the Taliban] to announce their readiness for the peace talks."
"Now, it's the Taliban's turn to release a clear statement saying that they have cut their ties with Al Qaeda or that they are willing to cut it. The second thing is that the group should state its readiness for talks with the High Peace Council which represents all the political groups.
"The government of Afghanistan – at the level of foreign minister, High Peace Council, and even the president – has certainly stated its agreement to open such an office, under special conditions," MOFA spokesman Janan Mosazai said Sunday.
Earlier this month President Hamid Karzai visited Qatar to further plans to open the office in the capital city Doha.
Karzai met with the Qatari emir who agreed that the office will only be used for peace talks and not for any other purpose, according to a statement from Karzai's office.
The Taliban office is seen as a key step in bringing the insurgent group into negotiations for a peace deal with the Afghan government. Although the plan has its critics who doubt that it will make any difference.
Mosazai also said Sunday that talks about the security agreement between Afghanistan and US is continues.
"The delegations of the two countries have talked threes time in Kabul and advice between the two side is continuing," he said.
Afghan electric company struggles to make powerful customers pay
Reuters By Katharine Houreld April 15, 2013
How do you collect a $200,000 electricity bill from an Afghan warlord? Try cutting him off from the grid. Then turn off your cell phone so he can't yell at you.
General Rashid Dostum - one of Afghanistan's most powerful militia leaders - found someone else to reconnect him within hours, said Mirwais Alami, the chief commercial officer at Afghanistan's national power company.
"This will take years to collect," Alami said wryly. "But I am determined. If he doesn't pay, his son will pay."
Although Dostum is still holding out, others grudgingly paid up after the utility started cutting their power connections. The company cut off 1,000 defaulters last year and collected $230 million, a 40 percent increase in the last three years.
The approach is beginning to pay dividends. Three years ago, the company lost more than half its power to theft. Last year, that had fallen to a third. The utility is now breaking even in the capital. It's a small victory in an industry beset by woes.
Afghanistan desperately needs to build an electricity network to generate jobs, develop its trillion-dollar mineral deposits - a process that will take decades - and win support for a government that has delivered few tangible benefits to its citizens.
There has been progress, but it is slow. The national electricity utility, Da Afghanistan Breshna Sherkat (DABS), was set up in 2008. The next year, donors constructed power lines from neighboring Uzbekistan, which supplies most of Afghanistan's electricity, to the capital of Kabul.
The imports helped boost Afghanistan's power to 1,100 megawatts last year. It's about a quarter of what is needed, but a definite improvement on the 291 MW the country had a decade ago.
"(DABS) has shown striking progress for such a young organisation trying to run a national utility in a country that never had that before," said Roseann Casey, a top USAID official overseeing infrastructure in Afghanistan.
Around 80 percent of Afghan power is imported from neighboring countries, mainly Uzbekistan, so officials have to collect cash from customers if they don't want their country cut off. It's a struggle.
"We face a lot of problems. Some people think they should have free power, so when we try to collect they refuse to pay or get Parliament to call us in and give us problems," said Alami, brandishing letters he has sent to prominent Afghans and the attorney general's office.
FOREIGN HELP
Since DABS can't collect all its cash, foreign donors, led by the United States, Germany and India, are funding expansion. They hope to lay a power line down from Kabul to the southern city of Kandahar by 2016 - right through Taliban country.
Currently DABS in Kandahar is powered by U.S.-supplied diesel generators and U.S.-supplied diesel. The cost of the fuel alone is 400 percent of the revenue DABS collects in Kandahar, according to a report by the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR).
The city is one of Afghanistan's "power islands," urban centers electrified by generators, hydro plants or imports from Iran, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan or Uzbekistan. There's very little power in the countryside.
In total, donors are spending $1.6 billion in current projects for the power sector and have allocated $6.3 billion to improve electrical infrastructure until 2019, according to a recent World Bank report.
It doesn't always go smoothly. Last year the U.S. paid a contractor nearly $13 million for electrical meters to replace old, faulty meters in Kandahar. SIGAR auditors found the equipment stashed in a warehouse months later. DABS says the new meters are faulty.
The installation of a third turbine in Kajaki Dam in southern Helmand province, near Kandahar, should bump up capacity from 33 MW to 51.5 MW, but Kajaki has become another troubled project.
British troops fighting off insurgent attacks hauled the turbine to the dam five years ago but Chinese engineers dropped out after the area was attacked. A U.S. firm frequently criticized by U.S. government auditors was awarded the contract, but then Afghan President Hamid Karzai said he wanted DABS in charge.
Now another round of bidding is underway for the new contract. No one knows when the turbine will be installed.
Hydroelectric dams like Kajaki are the best way for Afghanistan to generate cheap power. It has no money to pay for imported fuel. But the dams are costly to build and infrastructure is vulnerable to attack.
Last month Afghan authorities discovered more than a ton of explosives at Salma Dam, a hydro project being built by Indian engineers in Herat province in the western region of the country and expected to produce 42 MW.
Days later, Taliban fighters in Pakistan killed seven people in an attack that destroyed the biggest power station in northern Khyber Paktunkwa province.
"(The Taliban) don't want people to be educated and to have light. They want them to be jobless, to be hopeless, to fight," said Alami.
Alami is hoping that rural Afghans will be happy enough to get electricity that they will protect new power lines in their area. For him, DABS's biggest challenge is not security, but collecting the cash to maintain the projects that donors build.
Last year DABS spent $12 million on maintenance, with USAID funding maintenance for some power plants.
Donors hope that improved revenue collection will help DABS pay for more costs.
"They will have the revenue they collect and then they can use that revenue for operations and maintenance," said Raouf Zia, a spokesman for the World Bank.
That might help save the power plants from the fate of many other donor-built projects that will have to be shut down as the NATO drawdown in 2014 approaches and aid dwindles.
Afghanistan would have to spend $1 billion a year just to operate and maintain all the infrastructure and buildings that foreign donors have constructed since 2001, the World Bank study found.
This year the country's total collected revenue will be just under $2.5 billion. Only $80 million was allocated for maintenance. (Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)
All quiet in Helmand: but can we leave Afghanistan in peace? British soldiers speak ahead of next year's withdrawal
After years of bloodshed, relative calm has descended on Helmand. The soldiers preparing to go home tell Kim Sengupta their thoughts on the country’s future
The Independent By Kim Sengupta 15 April 2013
“The firing just would not stop. The bullets were so close I could see them flying past me, I knew if I moved one inch I’d have been hit. So I stayed still; I was in charge and I told the others to stay still as well, I told them that was the only way to stay alive,” recalled Cpl Sri Krishna Gurung.
He and his fellow soldiers were in a ‘sangar’ watchtower at a base in the town of NawZad. The night-vision equipment had been already been shot to pieces, making it impossible to hit back at the Taliban fighters hidden in the dark. The relentless attack went on for six hours. “I think they only stopped when they ran out of ammo,” said the corporal.
This was the summer of 2006, just after British forces had been deployed to Helmand by Tony Blair’s government in a two-year mission the then Defence Secretary John Reid hoped “would end without a shot being fired”. The aim was to tackle a growing insurgency and stop the flow of heroin from a province producing 24 per cent of Afghanistan’s total output.
Only now, seven years on, are the British preparing to leave Helmand and pull out of Afghanistan entirely next year. They leave a country that the Defence Secretary Philip Hammond admits is “not perfect”, with the UK “very limited” in its ability to leave any kind of lasting influence on life there. How did the mission veer so far off course?
General Sir David Richards, now the head of the British military, was at the time the head of Isaf (International Security Assistance Force) in Afghanistan. He had wanted the UK force in Helmand to focus on the ‘inkspot’ strategy of protecting major towns, allowing civic society to take root and development to take place. Instead the 16 Air Assault Brigade – following the wishes, it was claimed, of President Hamid Karzai – set off for remote areas, effectively inviting the enemy for a fight; the Taliban were happy to oblige.
Within weeks Helmand was aflame. According to the plans, 1st Battalion Royal Gurkha Rifles (1RGR) were meant to be guarding Camp Bastion, the newly constructed UK base. Instead they found themselves in NawZad under constant assault.
“The Taliban tried to overwhelm us. They would come so close to the base that we would throw grenades at them from the sangar when they were just 10 metres away, we could clearly see their faces,” said Cpl Gurung, who then was 23 years old. “We were stuck, pinned back. There was very little knowledge about the capabilities of the Taliban. They were well armed, they would fire RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades] from multiple points, they had snipers. This went on day after day.”
In the next two years, Helmand became one of the most violent places in the country – and heroin production shot up to 53 per cent of the national crop. The British troops fought tenaciously but were too few to counter the ever-increasing numbers of insurgents coming in from their sanctuaries in Pakistan. Territories taken, often at the cost of lives, could not be held because of a lack of boots on the ground.
This led to a major rethink of strategy. US forces arrived in large numbers and the British started on what Gen Richards had urged them to do in the first place: concentrating on protecting cities. There was also a focus on counter-insurgency doctrine, less talk of the ‘Northern Ireland Experience’ – an oft-repeated phrase which would make the Americans sigh – and more analysis of the war that was actually being fought.
Engagement with the community was seen as the key and the troops began to see the fruits of that.
Sgt Gobinder Gurung, who served alongside Sri Krishna in Helmand, became so trusted by the locals that they would ask him to adjudicate disputes; his nickname was ‘the mullah’. The sergeant, who is now on his fourth tour of Afghanistan, initiated a scheme which drastically reduced the number of attacks. “We knew about the ‘$10 Taliban’, young men who would plant IEDs [improvised explosive devices] for money. We offered them 250 Afghanis [around $5] a day to work in the farmland on a long-term basis. It was in their interest now to make sure that the money they were getting wouldn’t get interrupted by fighting. We were getting 16 attacks a day – this went down to one or two. After we left, the Paras took over and continued the same programme, and the attacks continued to remain very low.”
While overt insurgent attacks were reduced across Helmand, another more treacherous threat began to rise: ‘green on blue’ shootings of Western forces by their erstwhile Afghan comrades.
This was partly due to the scramble to get the numbers of the Afghan army and police up to a complement of 352,000, taking over security responsibilities and allowing Isaf to withdraw from the long and costly war. Officers from the NDS (National Directorate of Security), the country’s intelligence service, point out just how difficult it has been to vet the background of those applying to join at such a fast recruitment pace.
Nevertheless, the timetable for the West’s end-of-combat operations remain on track, with Afghan forces now carrying out the vast majority of operations, only occasionally asking for help from Isaf. The current mantra in Washington and London is that the government of Mohammed Najibullah survived for five years after his Russian backers left, only falling when a cash-strapped Moscow turned off the economic tap. The Afghan government, which will be in place after 2014, on the other hand, will continue to receive international funding and should not suffer the same fate.
The officer commanding 1RGR’s D Company was severely injured by an IED five years ago in Kandahar. After a recovery process which involved extensive surgery, he volunteered for two further tours. The major, who does not want his name publicised, said he was at first “extremely surprised” by the pace of the British drawdown; but he has been “highly impressed”, he said, by the progress made by the Afghan army.
The future, he believes, would be ‘an Afghan reality’ away from the Westernised concept of nation-building. “I think there will be stability; it will be a stability based on what’s established by the power-brokers of Afghan society, tribal elders, land owners, reintegrated insurgents and, yes, in some places, narco-barons. It will be an Afghan solution, which will probably work.”
Brigadier Bob Bruce, the commander of British troops in Helmand, stressed: “We know there’s no military solution to a campaign like this, and the role of the military is to displace the violence away from where people live so that the people have got the freedom, the space, the time to consider the offer that the government makes to it. They can weigh that offer up against what the insurgency is offering and decide. And when the people decide, of course, then that’s it, the insurgency has nowhere to go.”
The commander insisted that Afghan forces are fully capable of taking over the campaign. “We’ve still got a real job to do. We are definitely keeping an eye on the end of 2014. Where we have sensed that we can reduce our profile, we’ve done so. If at any stage the Afghan forces had wobbled, then we, all through this winter, would have been right with them to help them. Actually what we’ve found is that they’ve become really very good at it, and therefore we’ve been able to reduce our profile to such an extent that we’re not doing the sort of operations that we were doing 12 months ago. The critical ingredient at the moment in terms of this progress that I’ve seen is Afghan confidence and I know that they’re good enough to neutralise or even locally defeat the insurgency, I absolutely know it.”
Corporal Gurung, who took part in the first Helmand deployment and a subsequent one of equal violence, is now back as bases are being dismantled. “Now it is very quiet. Some of the younger soldiers are frustrated, but for me, I am very glad it’s coming to an end.”
US and coalition officials say Afghan army progressing faster than expected
Associated Press April 15 2013
CAMP THUNDER, Afghanistan - Gen. Mohammad Sharif Yaftali, commander of Afghanistan’s 203rd Thunder Corps, looked happy as he sat down for lunch in his eastern command post near the border with Pakistan.
He had every reason to be smiling, as did his U.S. advisers.
His troops, he said, had just successfully completed a large-scale operation — code-named Azadi, or “freedom” — aimed at securing strategic highways leading out of Kabul and at clearing a region around the capital. Over the course of the 13-day sweep, his forces battled Taliban and other insurgents 20 times, killing at least 20.
Along the way, his officers sat down with tribal elders to win support for the military and set up local police forces to defend their villages from the Taliban. Separately, his troops successfully freed two Afghan soldiers kidnapped by militants.
It was all done without international troops. “We did the planning and everything ourselves,” Yaftali beamed. “The coalition was there, but they did not fight with us. They just gave us advice. We are in the lead, we are no longer shoulder-to-shoulder.”
Unlike past operations where American and coalition forces were fighting alongside Afghan soldiers or going into the field alone, both sides expressed a confidence in Afghanistan’s army that was not present as little as one year ago.
There have been deep questions about the ability of the Afghan army to take the fight to the insurgency with international combat troops due to leave the country by the end of 2014.
It is not certain that the performance of the 203rd can be replicated in all the army corps around Afghanistan, or even at the brigade and battalion level. But if its ability to successfully carry out large-scale operations can be replicated across the army, then it offers hope the Afghans may be able to hold their own against the insurgency after 2014.
U.S. and coalition military officials say that overall, the nascent force is surpassing many of their expectations. They say it is far better prepared to fight alone than many people think and should be able to take over.
Canadian Brig. Gen. Thomas Putt, the director of the U.S.-led coalition’s program for development of the Afghan security forces, said the Afghan troops were accelerating in their preparedness and “we have to rush to keep up.”
“We are rushing to catch up in their rush to get at it,” he said. “We have the delicious problem of being behind them.”
Coalition officials point to continuing problems in logistics and equipment for the Afghan troops. But they say the forces’ ability to work on their own is speedily improving. Five of Afghanistan’s 26 brigades are now operating independently from the coalition, and 16 are working with only advisory support, said British Lt. Gen. Nick Carter, the second-in-command of the international coalition. Last year just one out of the 23 brigades then operational was able to operate independently.
The Afghan National Security Forces are supposed to finish taking the lead in security later this spring, with the coalition forces moving entirely to a training and advisory role. Already, Afghans are in the lead in more than 80 percent of the nation. According to NATO, the Afghan army now numbers over 175,000, about 12,000 shy of its goal, and has an annual attrition rate of 2.6 percent — higher than the target of 1.4 percent.
Jawed Kohistani, an Afghan political and military analyst, said morale is low in a military force made up mostly of soldiers who joined only for the steady salary. He added that a lack of modern military equipment also poses problems.
“The Afghan security forces will face more challenges and won’t be able to fulfill all the expectations of the international community or the Afghan people,” Kohistani said.
Many of the brigades that are now able to operate independently are in the eastern part of Afghanistan and many are under Yaftali’s command.
Yaftali’s 203rd Corps in Gardez, the capital of eastern Paktia province, numbers 19,000 soldiers in four brigades. It is one of the largest of the army’s six corps and is responsible for six eastern provinces, including two of the most active — Ghazni and Wardak.
The Azadi operation involved some 2,500 Afghan soldiers and police, operating in Ghazni and Zabol provinces, located on a strategic route connecting the capital, Kabul, with the southern province of Kandahar.
Nationwide, some 150,000 police are being trained by the coalition. They make up a large part of the 332,753-member Afghan National Security Forces but are gradually supposed to take the lead role in law enforcement and leave fighting the insurgency to the army.
During the Azadi operation, the army fought insurgents in more than 20 engagements, killing 20 of them and wounding 12. They also found 59 roadside mines. By comparison, two Afghan village police were killed and nine policemen and one soldier were wounded.
The coalition provided no combat support, said Col. Terry Cook, of the 4th Brigade, 1st Armored Division from Fort Bliss, Texas, and an adviser to Yaftali.
“They even did their own medical evacuations,” he said.
“We are pretty good, we are in a better place. We can take the fight to the insurgents,” Yaftali said.
Yaftali’s sprawling base in Gardez has a regional training center, a logistical one, the best military hospital in the country, and soon will have its own air support when MI-17 helicopters are based there. It will probably be one of the places where the U.S. military stations advisers after 2014.
“It is amazing the progress they have made,” said U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Clarence Chinn, the deputy commanding general. His advisers have been working with Yaftali and his senior officers, but no Americans are on the front lines fighting the insurgents — they have left that completely to the Afghans.
“They are an extremely capable force and we are helping them with logistics and training. We are really shifting our effort,” Cook said.
Putt said the coalition is now focusing on getting Afghan troops the equipment they need to be more effective. They include mortars at the company and battalion levels, and howitzers at the brigade level. The U.S. also recently announced it would buy an additional 30 Russian made MI-17 helicopters, some with gunship capabilities, to supplement the nearly 50 already acquired.
They are also working on training them on logistics, or as Putt said, the problem of “how do you sustain thousands of troops.”
“If there is an Achilles heel, it is logistics, and we are working on it,” Putt said.
But the fighting is taking its toll on the Afghan army.
Last week Taliban militants stormed an Afghan army outpost in Kunar province, on the border with Pakistan, and killed 13 soldiers in a five-hour gunbattle. Insurgents have been stepping up their attacks this spring as they try to take advantage of the rapid withdrawal of foreign forces.
More than 1,200 Afghan soldiers died in 2012 compared to more than 550 in 2011, according to data compiled by the Washington-based Brookings Institution. By comparison, coalition casualties have declined as they take forces off the battlefield — with 32 so far this year, 394 in 2012 and 543 in 2011.
About 660 militants were reported to have been killed by coalition and Afghan forces so far this year, compared with close to 3,000 militants last year. The NATO command does not issue reports on the number of insurgents its troops have killed, and Afghan military figures, from which the AP compiles its data, cannot be independently verified.
“People say that 2014 will provide challenges,” Yaftali said. But, he predicted, the year the Afghan army takes the security lead will be far more important: “2013 is going to be the crucial year.”
Australia supports Afghan security transition
KABUL, April 15 (Xinhua) -- Afghan Deputy Foreign Minister Jawed Ludin on Monday met with the visiting Special Representative of Australian Prime Minister Angus Houston to discuss bilateral ties and issues of common concern.
"The two sides discussed the importance of cooperation between the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan and Australia. Mr. Houston expressed his country's support for the transition of security responsibilities, capacity building of state institutions and the peace process," the Afghan foreign ministry said in a statement.
The discussions also involved the issue of human smuggling, the statement said, adding the two sides discussed "the illegal immigration of some Afghan citizens who risk their lives by giving themselves to human smugglers. The two sides expressed concern over the horrific consequences of such immigration and considered the drowning of Afghans in Australian waters as tragic."
Calling human smuggling a major problem and termed it as a painful reality, Ludin said that some Afghan citizens are encouraged by the smugglers to illegally migrate to foreign countries which end with tragic consequences.
Transition of security responsibilities from NATO and U.S. forces to Afghan troops began in 2011 and lasts till 2014. Afghan army and police have already taken full control of areas where 75 percent of population lives.
More than 1,000 Australian forces have been serving within the framework of the NATO-led coalition troops in Afghanistan.
Political Players Divided on Removal of ECCs Foreign Advisers
TOLOnews By Abdul Wali Arian 15 April 2013
The absence of foreign advisers in Afghanistan's Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC) will pave the way for massive fraud in the upcoming presidential election, critics of the new law said on Monday.
A joint senate-parliament commission approved the law on Sunday regarding the structure and function of the ECC and the Independent Election Commission (IEC). After last year's heated debates over foreigners being part of the ECC, the commission decided to remove foreign observers altogether.
"The presence of these two foreign members in the Electoral Complaints Commission secured high levels of trust from the people in the election process. Now that their presence has been eliminated, this could remove the transparency and fairness of the elections," warned National Front member Fazil Rahman Orya.
But the IEC has dismissed the concerns that the lack of foreign members on the ECC will impact transparency because foreigners will still assist on some matters where needed.
"There are some issues where foreign advisers can work [with the ECC] as a member in order to have transparency because the commission is newly established and they do not have enough capacity and there are some other issues. So [the government's decision] will not have any negative impact on the election process," IEC spokesperson Noor Mohammad Noor said. Meanwhile, the Free and Fair Election Foundation of Afghanistan (FEFA) emphasised that the selection of the ECC members is more important than the presence of foreign advisers.
"If the qualifications of the ECC commissioners are taken seriously in that they must be professional and impartial, and they must be appointed via a mechanism not only by the president but also by civil and academic installations, then this will be more effective than two foreign members," FEFA executive director Jandad Spinghar said.
However, some political parties still regard this as insufficient.
"If there were two foreign members on the Electoral Complaints Commission, it would help the transparency of the elections. The Selection Committee can help the election process but not as much as the two foreign members on the Electoral Complaints Commission," Right and Justice party member Moeen Marastiyal said.
The presidential election is to be held 5 April 2014 and is seen as a crucial event in Afghanistan's political transition from President Hamid Karzai's 11-year leadership.
Afghan and US military officials say Afghan commandos kill 22 insurgents during raid
Associated Press By Rahim Faiez in Kabul and Mirwais Khan in Kandahar April 15, 2013
KABUL, Afghanistan - Afghan commandos killed 22 insurgents on Monday during an operation to capture a Taliban commander in eastern Afghanistan, police and the U.S. military said.
The raid was carried out in the Bati Kot district of Nangarhar when a team of commandos raided a village looking for the Taliban leader, the U.S.-led Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force said in an announcement.
During the raid, insurgents opened fire on the soldiers and 22 of the Taliban were killed, the task forces said.
Masoum Khan Hashimi, the deputy police chief of Nangarhar province, said there were no casualties among the security forces or civilians. He said the Taliban commander, Jamal Faroqi, was killed in the pre-dawn raid and 10 insurgents were captured.
In another operation, NATO said a team of Afghan and coalition special forces captured a senior leader of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba. The group, which is banned in Pakistan, is blamed for the November 2008 rampage in Mumbai, India, that killed 166 people. It said he was captured in the Anadar district of eastern Ghazni province — a lawless area that is a major infiltration point for insurgents travelling into Afghanistan from Pakistan.
“The leader is alleged to have planned and participated in multiple attacks against Afghan and coalition forces throughout Kunar, Kandahar and Ghazni provinces. He is known to have links to multiple foreign fighters, and was actively planning a high-profile attack at the time of his arrest,” NATO said in an announcement. It did not provide further details.
There have been increasing reports that insurgents from Pakistan, including members of the Pakistani Taliban, have joined Afghan insurgents in the fight against government and foreign forces. Many Afghan Taliban take sanctuary in Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas over the harsh winter months and come across the frontier during the spring thaw. Violence has increased in recent weeks as more and more Taliban join the fighting.
Relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan have deteriorated in recent months, with Afghanistan accusing Pakistan of trying to torpedo efforts to begin peace talks with the Taliban. Both countries have also accused each other of supporting insurgents fighting on their respective territories.
In the most recent exchange President Hamid Karzai charged late Sunday that Pakistan was setting up a border gate in eastern Afghanistan without asking Kabul. He ordered his ministries of foreign affairs, defense and interior to remove the gate and all installations around it. It was unclear how they would do that as Pakistan claims the facility is inside its border.
Defense Ministry spokesman Gen. Mohammad Zahir Azimi also said Afghanistan was investigating the participation of Pakistani Taliban in an attack last week that killed 13 Afghan soldiers at a small base in eastern Kunar province.
In other violence, Afghan officials said a roadside bomb killed at least seven members of a family travelling in a trailer towed by a tractor in southern Afghanistan.
The Interior Ministry said in a statement that the vehicle hit the bomb on a road in the Mali Zai region of Zabul province just after daybreak on Monday. It said four other people were wounded by the blast, which the ministry blamed on the Taliban.
A spokesman for the provincial governor, Shareef Nasari, says the death toll could be as high as eight. He says all the dead are members of the same family.
A roadside bomb also killed four Afghan police and wounded three overnight in southern Helmand province, Musa Qala district chief Enayamatullah Khan said.
Another two policemen were killed and six kidnapped during a Taliban attack on an outpost in northern Zawzjan province, according to Gen. Abdul Aziz Ghairat, the police chief.
Indonesia trains Afghanistani engineers to build road infrastructure
JAKARTA, April 16 (Xinhua) -- Indonesia provides training program for Afghanistani engineers to build roads and bridges in that country through South-South Cooperation, materializing Indonesia's commitments in supporting Afghanistan by providing sustainable capacity building program, a statement released by Indonesian Foreign Affairs Ministry said Tuesday.
The program, entitled"International Training Program on Infrastructure for Afghanistan: Focusing on Road Operation and maintenance"would be participated by 10 Afghan officials and engineers. It will be held at Public Works Ministry's Bridges and Road Development Center (Pusjatan) in West Java capital of Bandung.
Indonesia's assistance program that would begin on Wednesday fits to what Afghanistan needs as it now requires quick road infrastructure development to support its economy during its recovery after undergoing a long and weary war period.
Indonesia's commitment to help rebuild the war-torn Afghanistan had been voiced in several international forums on Afghanistan, among others in London international Conference on Afghanistan 2010 and Tokyo Conference on Afghanistan in 2012, the statement said.
The capacity building program for Afghanistan was part of Indonesia's soft-power diplomacy in order to push forward Afghanistan's efforts to rebuild the country that has been ransacked by political conflicts in the last three decades.
Afghan Commandos kill more than 20 insurgents in Nangarhar
Khaama Press By Sayed Jawad 15 April 2013
Afghan National Army 1st Special Operations Kandak (SOK) Commandos killed 22 insurgents during a unilateral operation in Bati Kot district, Nangarhar province, April 15.
The Commandos conducted the operation to locate a known Taliban commander and disrupt insurgent activity in Gundayn village.
As 1st SOK traveled toward the village, over 20 insurgents ambushed them with small arms and machine gun fire. The Commandos returned fire, killing 10 Taliban insurgents.
After 1st SOK arrived at the village to begin their search, insurgents attacked them repeatedly from within the compound. The Commandos cleared the compound, killing 12 insurgents and detaining several others.
The National Directorate of Security is currently holding the detainees for further questioning.
No civilian casualties or structural damage were reported during this operation.
Afghan National Army Commandos are an elite group whose main purpose is to conduct high-risk missions to disrupt insurgency networks. The Commandos conduct clearing operations that enable conditions for improved security, governance, and development in remote villages.
Kidnapped Chief of Balkh Private University Found Dead
TOLOnews By TOLOnews.com 15 April 2013
The chancellor of a private university in northern Balkh province was found dead Monday after being kidnapped two days ago by armed men, local officials said.
Mohammad Zarif Anwari, the head of Mawalana University was kidnapped on Saturday while travelling on the Balkh--Mazar-e-Sharif highway.
He was found by Afghan security forces in the Dihdadi district with gunshot wounds, Balkh police chief Gen Salim Hasaas said, adding that the reasons for his murder are unclear. "There was no request or contact for money from the kidnappers. Also Zarif Khan was not rich. But it is difficult to say anything before further investigation," Hasaas said.
Anwari's family called on the government to ensure justice, with his son claiming that his father was killed by three former Jihadi leaders.
"I request the honorable governor to charge the perpetrators. I know the actors behind this incident and they are in this city and they are former Jihadi leaders. Once again, I repeat, I know the perpetrators," Fardin Anwari said.
Balkh police said that this is the first kidnapping case in the province for the solar year of 1392 (start 22 March 2013) and stressed that the security forces will take action against it.
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