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Taliban threaten Germany over decision to stay in Afghanistan
April 20, 2013 at 10:09 AM
KABUL, Afghanistan, April 20 (UPI) -- The Afghanistan Taliban say they "strongly condemn" Germany's decision to keep troops in the country after most NATO combat troops leave next year.
Zabiullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesman, said in a statement, "We strongly condemn" Germany's decision "to prolong its occupation as well as the killing and oppression of the persecuted Afghan nation," Khaama Press reported.
He cautioned Germany's continued involvement in "America's war of fancy" would cause the Taliban to "take a harsh stand against it by targeting it with special tactical and jihadi operations which will force them to regret their illogical decision."
The German government, which has the third-largest deployment of foreign troops in Afghanistan, announced Thursday it would keep 800 military trainers in the country after NATO combat operations end in 2014.
It has 4,200 soldiers in Afghanistan, down from an initial deployment of more than 5,000.
NATO plans to keep 8,000 to 12,000 troops in the country after 2014 to train and assist the Afghan army.
Gun battle leaves 12 Afghan Taliban dead
GHAZNI, Afghanistan, April 20 (Xinhua) -- Twelve Taliban militants were killed as they came in contact with police in Ghazni province 125 km south of Kabul Friday night, a local official Mohammad Nazif Sultani said Saturday.
"The personnel of local police were on routine patrol when they came in contact with Taliban rebels in Waziri village of Muqar district last night during which 12 rebels were killed," Sultani told Xinhua.
However, he refused to say if there were any casualties on the security personnel.
Taliban militants fighting the government are yet to make comment.
Premature blast kills 2 Taliban in N. Afghanistan
PUL-E-KHUMRI, Afghanistan, April 20 (Xinhua) -- Two Taliban militants were killed as their explosive device exploded prematurely in Baghlan province 160 km north of Kabul Friday night, police said Saturday.
"Three Taliban rebels were busy in making mine inside a house in Baghlan-e-Markazi district last night but the device went off prematurely killing two on the spot and injuring another," district police chief Ghulam Sakhi Rustaqi told newsmen in a press briefing here.
Two members of the house have been arrested in this regard, he added.
Taliban militants who are largely relaying on suicide and roadside bombings and often use the homemade bombs to target security forces have yet to make comment.
Young Afghans determined to rebuild war-torn country
AFP April 19, 2013
Kabul - While others make plans to flee, a new generation of educated young Afghans who have tasted new freedoms in post-Taliban times are determined to stay and rebuild their war-ravaged nation.
With the vast majority of foreign troops withdrawing by the end of next year, many predict a resurgence of the hardline religious groups or a return to the civil war of the 1990s.
But a host of young professionals — including entrepreneurs, journalists, activists and artists — say they plan to stay to build a better future for a country that has suffered more than three decades of war.
More globally connected than any generation before them, more aware of the outside world and more urban, this new young elite will be the key driver of change in a land where half the population is under 18, said analyst Omar Sharifi.
“I have a passion for Afghanistan. I love it and I have responsibilities to it,” said businessman Jamshid Ibrahimi, 29, who spoke to AFP on the roof of one of 11 buildings constructed by one of his three companies.
Ibrahimi has already achieved his main goal. After starting out with $3,000 in his pocket in 2003, he has taken advantage of the billions of dollars that flowed into Afghanistan and become a rich man.
But he wants more.
“I was not only thinking about becoming rich and making money, but also about how I can play my part in rebuilding my country,” he said.
“When I’m building my flats, it’s changing the view in Kabul and I employ people, I create jobs.”
Alka Sadat, a documentary-maker who has won awards overseas, hopes to improve her country by forcing it to confront the problems suffered by everyday Afghans — including suicide attacks and the hardship women face.
She said her work often moves her to tears but she perseveres.
“I chose this job. I choose to see these problems. It’s my choice. I want to speak about these problems. I want to make films about this,” she said.
In March the 25-year-old organised an international film festival focusing on women in the western province of Herat, the first event of its kind in the country.
Analyst Sharifi said the young generation’s experience of war, and of exile in some cases, had shaped their desire to create a better Afghanistan.
“That generation grew up in the 1980s and 1990s. They experienced extreme-left and extreme-right, communism and the Taliban, refugee camps,” he said.
“That generation grew up either inside or outside Afghanistan, with the idea of survival.”
Corruption plagues every aspect of life in Afghanistan but through the country’s vibrant young media, the old ways are being challenged.
Sharif Hassanyar, the 28-year-old editor in chief of Tolo News, Afghanistan’s leading TV news channel, says freedom of expression is one of the greatest achievements since the fall of the Taliban in 2001.
The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists says, however, that Afghanistan remains a dangerous place for journalists and many international and domestic journalists reported threats in 2012.
Last year, the manager of a radio station was beheaded in the eastern province of Paktika.
The street housing Tolo bristles with rifle-toting guards. But Hassanyar said it was vital that his journalists — young men and women “full of energy, familiar with the Internet and computers” who represent “the new face of Afghanistan” — braved the dangers.
“Our journalists work very hard, they criticise, they do a lot of stories about corruption in the government,” he said.
“We are Afghans, we live in Afghanistan, so we should do it for our country. It’s our job. It’s our country. We must work here for a better life, a better democracy in Afghanistan.”
Shaharzad Akbar, 25, heads a political movement called 1400, a reference to the year 1400 in the Persian calendar used in Afghanistan which corresponds to 2021.
The group is a collection of 250 people, mostly young, who want to influence Afghanistan’s future.
“We need to realise our power, the potential that has been created, the power that we can have. We are part of the new Afghanistan, which is in the process of being built,” she said.
“In the past 10 years a new generation of Afghans has been educated. They have international standards of education. They are capable, motivated, they want to work for Afghanistan.”
But even among the optimists there are doubts about what the withdrawal of international forces in 2014 will bring.
Many young people fear losing everything in another civil war. Though Akbar, Sadat and Hassanyar say they will stay, Ibrahimi is less certain.
“I want to stay and do my part in rebuilding the country, but if the situation gets worse, you can’t put a lot of things at risk. It’s not only about money but also about life,” he said.
14 anti-government militants lay down arms in N. Afghanistan
PUL-E-KHUMRI, Afghanistan, April 20 (Xinhua) -- More than a dozen armed militants laid down arms and resumed normal life in Baghlan province 160 km north of Kabul on Saturday.
"Today we are welcoming 14 armed militants who have given fighting and resumed normal life within their community in Baghlan- e-Markazi district," provincial police chief Assadullah Shirzad said, while welcoming the former militants in a ceremony here.
The former fighters also handed over their weapons to police. The group commander Mohammad Reza in his short speech called on government to accelerate reconstruction process and create job oppurtunities.
These people, he said had linked with the radical Islamic party the Hekmatyar-led Hizb-e-Islami and were active against government in Charshanba Tapa area, adding with joining these people the security will be further stabilized in the province.
Hizb-e-Islami, a smaller gorup than Taliban, which has been fighting against government and NATO-led force in Afghanistan has yet to make comment.
Last New Zealand troops return from Afghanistan
WELLINGTON, April 20 (Xinhua) -- Sixty members of the New Zealand Provincial Reconstruction Team arrived at Christchurch airport from Afghanistan on Saturday, marking the end of New Zealand's decade long deployment of troops in the war-torn country.
New Zealand Defence Minister Jonathan Coleman was among the first to greet the troops.
He said he is enormously proud of the work that has been carried out and is confident the region is stable enough for the Afghani's to govern alone, Radio New Zealand reported.
Militants kill 13 Afghan pro-government fighters
BBC News April 19 2013
At least 13 Afghan pro-government fighters have been killed in a militant attack on their checkpoint in Ghazni province, officials say.
Details of the attack are sketchy with unconfirmed reports some of the men may have been drugged before the assault.
The Taliban have said they carried out the attack. They also seized weapons and a vehicle.
Al-Qaeda are also thought to operate in Ghazni. In February an attack on a police post there left 17 dead.
A roadside bomb in the province earlier this week killed five government security force men guarding a convoy of trucks in Qarabagh district.
The provincial capital was declared a city of Islamic culture last week, despite concerns that the continuing instability might make it difficult for Afghans and foreigners to visit its sites and monuments.
Reports say that some of the fighters may have been members of the Afghan Local Police, a local militia force formed to provide security in areas where the national police and army are scarce.
Hamid Karzai seeks to curb CIA operations in Afghanistan
President believes battle in which 10 children and a US agent died was fought by illegal militia working for spy agency
The Guardian By Emma Graham-Harrison 19 April 2013
President Hamid Karzai is determined to curb CIA operations in Afghanistan after the death of a US agent and 10 Afghan children in a battle he believes was fought by an illegal militia working for the US spy agency.
The campaign sets the Afghan leader up for another heated showdown with the US government, and will reignite questions about the CIA's extensive but highly secretive operations in the country.
Karzai's spokesman Aimal Faizi said the CIA controlled large commando-like units, some of whom operated under the nominal stamp of the Afghan government's intelligence agency, the National Directorate of Security (NDS), but were not actually under its control.
"Some of them are said to be working with the NDS, but they are not armed by the NDS, not paid by the NDS, and not sent to operations by the NDS. Sometimes they only inform the NDS minutes before the operation," Faizi said. "They are conducting operations without informing local authorities and when something goes wrong it is called a joint operation."
One of these groups was involved in a battle with insurgents in a remote corner of eastern Kunar province in early April that left several Afghan children dead, Faizi said. Karzai has fired the provincial head of intelligence in connection with the incident.
The US citizen who died during the battle was advising the Afghan intelligence service, and the airstrike that killed the children is believed to have been called in after he was fatally injured.
The US embassy declined to comment on CIA issues, but sources with knowledge of the battle said he was an agent, and his name has not been released, usually an indication of intelligence work.
Bob Woodward in his 2010 book Obama's Wars described a 3,000-strong Afghan militia working for the CIA, and Faizi said the Afghan government had little information about the teams. "There is a lack of clarity about their numbers and movement," he said when asked how many men the CIA had on their payroll, or where these large teams might be based.
Woodward said the unofficial commando units were known as counter-terrorism pursuit teams, and described them as "a paid, trained and functioning tool of the CIA", authorised by President George W Bush.
They were sent on operations to kill or capture insurgent leaders, but also went into lawless areas to try to pacify them and win support for the Afghan government and its foreign backers. Woodward said the units even conducted cross-border raids into Pakistan.
In the wake of the Kunar battle, Karzai has also ordered his security officials to step up implementation of a presidential decree issued in late February abolishing "parallel structures". Faizi said this order was aimed primarily at dismantling CIA-controlled teams.
"The use of these parallel structures run by the CIA and US special forces is an issue of concern for the Afghan people and the Afghan government," he said.
For Karzai the move is another step towards reasserting Afghan sovereignty, part of a long campaign waged against US forces and their allies. He has already won control of the main US-run prison in the country, and ended unilateral night raids on insurgent hideouts that coalition commanders once described as critical to the war.
But Karzai's move comes at a critical time for an already volatile relationship, when Washington and Kabul are trying to negotiate what, if any, military presence the US will have in Afghanistan beyond 2014, and curbing the CIA's reach could strike at the heart of US strategic interests there.
Barack Obama has been clear that the US does not plan to fight the Taliban after next year. Instead some foreign troops will train Afghan soldiers to fight the insurgency while US special forces pursue groups such as al-Qaida hiding along the lawless border with Pakistan.
While the US is expected to keep a few thousand soldiers in Afghanistan, bolstered by troops from Nato allies, Obama has also made clear there is "zero option" of a complete US withdrawal, as happened in Iraq.
Taliban attacks increased by 47 percent in 1st quarter of 2013
By ANI
New York, Apr.20 (ANI): According to an Afghanistan NGO, there has been a sharp increase in the number of attacks in this year's first quarter, a recent study has revealed.
The Afghanistan NGO Safety Office has let out that the first quarter saw 2331 attacks by armed opposition groups compared to 1581 during the same time last year, with a statistical increase of 47 percent in the crime rate, the New York Times reports.
The director of the NGO office Tomas Muzik has said that 2013 will follow the marks of 2011 in becoming the most violent year, with the most attacks and victims.
While Afghanistan army soldiers along with their American counterparts are planning to take over the security duties across the country as Taliban steps up for attacks, the American military has not sent any figures this year compared to last year's report on enemy attacks along with bar graphs.
The spokesperson for American military Col. Thomas W. Collins said that they will not be releasing any statistics anymore, adding that Afghan Ministry can reveal some related information.
The ministry too preferred to remain quiet in this regard, however a ministry official on condition of anonymity has said that ministry data reveal 40 percent increase in violence this year with 1,183 attacks as compared to 841 last year.
The study has further shown that insurgent attacks on the international forces make up for only four percent of the total attacks and 73 percent against the Afghan security forces, while the attacks on civilians have been much more quantitatively.
With 1,00,000 international combat forces starting to withdraw from the group, the Afghan forces will have to face the Talibans alone by the end of 2014.
According to the study report, the insurgent violence has mostly affected areas where the foreign military forces are not available.
The Afghan national security forces need to show their capability to deal with the Taliban in these violence-prone areas to fill the gap left by the international military forces, the report added. (ANI)
When The U.S. Cracks Down On Afghan Heroin, It Aids The Taliban
Forbes By Stan Veuger 4/19/2013
A new report from the United Nations shows that opium production in Afghanistan is up. This, despite efforts on the part of the United States to sharply limit opium production in the country. America’s efforts, while well intentioned, have fallen victim to the law of unintended consequences. When the United States leans on the Afghani government to crack down on opium, they are effectively funding the Taliban, our Afghani opponent in the war on terror.
The U.S. should stop these efforts immediately. The United Nations Office on Drug and Crime, in collaboration with the Afghani Ministry of Counter Narcotics, just released its annual Afghanistan Opium Risk Assessment, predicting yet another rise in Afghani opium production in 2013. Poppy cultivation rose from 131,000 hectares in 2011 to 154,000 hectares in 2012 — an 18 percent increase; this trend that is unlikely to stop. This is bad news for an obvious reason: as a part of the broader War on Drugs, the U.S. and its UN allies have been striving to suppress opium production since the mid-2000s.
It is even worse news for a different reason: much more of this production now takes place in Taliban-controlled areas, out of reach of the Afghani government and its international allies. Eradication and interdiction programs have shifted production from secure, government-controlled parts of the country to those controlled by opposition forces. As the UN report puts it, “a strong association between insecurity (..) and opium cultivation continues to exist.” In retrospect this should not be surprising; it is difficult if not impossible to enforce prohibitions in regions of the country where the government has little control.
Opium has been produced in Afghanistan for centuries, and generates about half of the country’s GDP. Nowadays it is, of course, typically converted into heroin to satisfy the requirements of often heavily addicted users. The fact that many of these users are heavily addicted is important, as it makes them quite willing to forego all other consumption — an economist would say that their demand for opium is very inelastic.
The same turns out to be true for the total demand for Afghani opium, according to a new research paper from economist Jeffrey Clemens of the University of California at San Diego. This means that when the supply of Afghani opium drops, its price rises rapidly, and the quantity of opium rebounds quickly in response. This is not surprising, as Afghanistan is one of the very few primary sources of opium for these users. It also has important policy implications. When the U.S. attempts to combat poppy cultivation in the parts of Afghanistan it fully controls, it drives up the price producers in the rest of the country receive: and it’s the latter group of producers that pays taxes to the Taliban, in Hilmand, Farah, and Kandahar.
Cutting off funding to the Taliban has been the second major justification for opium suppression efforts by the U.S. in Afghanistan, next to combating heroin addiction and consumption. What Professor Clemens shows is that these efforts have had the opposite effect. Anti-opium efforts increased the flow of opium income to farmers in Taliban-heavy districts from some $240 million in 2004 to $580 million in 2010, or double in both absolute numbers and share of total opium production. That’s a lot of money in a country with a GDP per capita of about $1,000. The Taliban take an important cut from all of this business. They impose a 2 to 10 percent tax on farmers, the ushr, and they provide protection services to traffickers.
Whether you believe in the effectiveness of the War on Drugs in terms of consumption levels or not, making more resources available to your enemy in a decade-long armed conflict is not a great idea. And then the question becomes, as it is for other anti-narcotics policies: should ending the consumption and production of illegal drugs be the be-all and end-all of all public policy, or are there important trade-offs that may not be receiving the attention they deserve?
Afghanistan, Turkmenistan collaborate on railroad
By H. Hasanov Trend News Agency, Baku, Azerbaijan April 20, 2013 Stars and Stripes
ASHGABAT, Turkmenistan - Afghanistan offered Turkmenistan to construct a railroad line Imamnazar-Akina on Afghan territory, the State Information Agency Turkmen Dovlet Khabarlary reported on Friday.
According to the report, authorized representatives of the two countries are negotiating in Ashgabat recent days.
"Representatives of the Afghan delegations suggested the participation of Turkmen specialists in the development of a feasibility study and construction of Imamnazar-Akin railway line in Afghanistan," the report says.
In May, 2011, during the official visit of the President of Afghanistan to Turkmenistan the parties signed an inter-governmental framework agreement on the construction of Atamyrat-Imamnazar-Akina-Andhoi railroad.
The state information agency of Turkmenistan notes that at that time President Gurbanguly Berdimuhammedov offered to realize the project of the railway construction from Turkmenistan to Afghanistan with the perspective of its further extension in Afghan territory.
It was about the construction of two railway sections: 85-kilometer Atamyrat-Imamnazar line in Turkmenistan and 38-kilometer line from Imamnazar to to Andhoi settlement in Afghanistan.
Turkmenistan has informed the Afghan colleagues that almost all the design work on the construction of Atamyrat-Imamnazar section had been completed," the report says. The construction of this branch will be conducted by the structures of the Ministry of Railway Transport of Turkmenistan.
According to the report, participants of the meeting noted that realization of joint infrastructure projects will be a powerful impetus to further development of Afghan economy, successful solution of important social issues, including those related to employment, investment attraction and will have a positive impact on the situation in the country as a whole.
Who Lost Afghanistan?
Something funny happened to Richard Holbrooke on the way to the negotiating table
The Wall Street Journal By James Traub April 19, 2013
Richard Holbrooke, the late, great American diplomat and broker of the 1995 Dayton peace accords that ended the Balkans war, has had his posthumous revenge—whether he wanted it or not. Holbrooke served as President Barack Obama's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, or SRAP, from January 2009 until his sudden death in December 2010. But "AfPak" proved to be a Rubik's Cube too hard even for Holbrooke to solve. Or so it has seemed until now: In "The Dispensable Nation," Vali Nasr, a former senior adviser to the SRAP office, insists that Holbrooke had the answer for both countries but was ignored and even humiliated by a White House that feared and despised him—and by a president too craven to make tough, politically unpopular decisions.
Mr. Nasr, who is now dean of the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, is a bold conceptualizer with a flair for seeing around corners. In his previous book, "The Shia Revival" (2006), he argued that the Sunni-Shiite split plays a much more salient and divisive role in defining identity in the Middle East than most people understand—and that, with Shiite power unleashed after the Iraq war, sectarianism would become an even greater source of conflict in the region.
Here he expands on that view, writing that the Arab Spring has provoked a "Sunni triumphalism" among resurgent Islamists, which could in turn cause Shiites in Sunni-dominated Gulf states like Bahrain and Saudi Arabia to seek the protection of Iran, thus risking a regionwide outbreak of sectarian conflict. He also observes that what is good for the U.S.—energy independence and reduced oil prices—could be a calamity for Saudi Arabia, a country the U.S. depends on to keep the regional peace. Whether right or wrong, Mr. Nasr is worth listening to.
But such global observations only constitute the second half of "The Dispensable Nation." The first half tells the tale of Good Sir Richard vanquished by the Dark Knight of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. That's the part that crashed into Washington like a minor meteor in March, when Mr. Nasr published an excerpt from his new book in Foreign Policy magazine, sending State Department officials scrambling to insist that they had an "excellent working relationship" with the White House despite Mr. Nasr's depiction of wholesale neglect.
Mr. Nasr tells us that Holbrooke understood from the outset that the massively ambitious counterinsurgency strategy that Gens. Stanley McChrystal and David Petraeus urged Mr. Obama to undertake in Afghanistan would never work—the government of Afghanistan was too corrupt to be reformed, and the Taliban was too deep-rooted to be vanquished. Another of Holbrooke's senior aides, Barnett Rubin, returned from a trip to the region in April 2009 to report that the Taliban was ready to negotiate. "If this thing works," Holbrooke told Mr. Rubin, "it may be the only way we will get out." The SRAP hoped to place "reconciliation" talks in the broader framework of a regional solution worked out with neighbors, including not just Pakistan but Iran.
Given his own professed belief in diplomacy, Mr. Obama should have embraced Holbrooke's case for engagement. Why didn't he? Because, Mr. Nasr says, diplomacy turns out to be bad politics. White House advisers were afraid that the president would be seen as "soft" for choosing diplomats over troops. And—here's the really nasty part—Mr. Obama himself was less concerned about the substance of his policies than he was about the perception of his politics.
The reason Mr. Obama gets "high marks on foreign policy," Mr. Nasr writes, is that "his policies' principal aim is not to make strategic decisions but to satisfy public opinion." Thus neither Holbrooke nor his boss, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, "the lonely voice making the case for diplomacy," as Mr. Nasr describes events here, stood a chance against the generals and their CIA counterparts. In fact, Mr. Nasr argues, by insisting that the U.S. do what was right, Holbrooke made himself the target of a nonstop White House campaign of vilification and obstruction. Since "talking to the Taliban would give Holbrooke a greater role," the author claims, the U.S. wouldn't talk to the Taliban.
This would be a narrative of revolting pettiness and cowardice if it was in fact true. But Mr. Nasr omits a few details. For starters, he neglects to mention the fact that Holbrooke did serious damage to his standing in the Obama administration when he openly backed the opposition in the 2009 Afghan election, thus outraging incumbent Afghan President Hamid Karzai—the eventual winner. According to Rajiv Chandrasekaran's in-depth account of the debate over and prosecution of the Afghan war, "Little America" (2012), "Karzai told his aides that he did not trust Holbrooke, and did not want to see him again. His aides conveyed the message to officials at the U.S. Embassy." This occurred in the middle of the debate over AfPak policy. Holbrooke, aware that he was on the outs with Mr. Obama, kept his advice uncharacteristically to himself during the protracted discussion.
At the time, Mrs. Clinton sided not with Holbrooke but with Defense Secretary Robert Gates and thus with the generals, a fact that Mr. Nasr concedes almost parenthetically. (He once heard her say that "she did not believe in cut and run.") She may have agreed with Gen. Petraeus that the U.S. had to knock the Taliban back on its heels before opening peace talks. Or perhaps, though Mr. Nasr would never say so of one he so evidently admires, she worried that by standing up to the hero of Iraq she would be running her future presidential ambitions through a wood-chipper. American political culture makes it perilous, and maybe suicidal, for Democrats to advocate statecraft over force. Either Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama are both spineless, or, as practicing politicians, they are both prudent.
The part about Holbrooke being hated is absolutely true and corroborated elsewhere, including in Mr. Chandrasekaran's book. But Mr. Chandrasekaran also alludes to the grandiosity and blatant big-footing that cost Holbrooke some would-be allies, including Karl Eikenberry, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, who was exhausted by the SRAP's incessant demands and vexed by his habit of bullying embassy staff. I am a fully pledged member of the Richard Holbrooke Fan Club, but I think it does neither him nor history any service to overlook his foibles.
While Holbrooke is the protagonist of "The Dispensible Nation," he is not the book's ultimate subject. Mr. Nasr's larger claim is that at a moment when America faces immense challenges from a rising China and an Arab world skittering toward chaos, the U.S. is surrendering its role as "the indispensable nation" (an expression Mr. Nasr attributes to Bill Clinton, though it should actually be credited to his secretary of state, Madeleine Albright). This would be a great talking point for a Republican rival if only there was a leading Republican who devoutly believed in diplomacy. Which there isn't.
And this raises a fundamental question, both about Mr. Obama's foreign policy and about how America should deploy its power in the world. Mr. Nasr puts extraordinary stock in the capacity of adroit and forceful diplomacy to shape positive outcomes in the world. In a chapter titled "Who Lost Pakistan?"—no points for getting the right answer—he insists that "the key to winning over Pakistan was simply giving Pakistan more (much more) aid for longer (much longer)." But Lyndon Johnson reincarnated couldn't have pushed such a Marshall Plan for Pakistan through Congress in 2009 as the country faced a severe economic downturn. And even if Mr. Obama could have, most of the American diplomats I talk to—including some of Holbrooke's closest colleagues—believe that the U.S. had already taken its best shot at bribing and flattering and cajoling the generals who run Pakistan into taking on the Afghan Taliban rather than using them as a cat's-paw—and failed. Husain Haqqani, the former Pakistani ambassador to the U.S., has
recently argued that the relationship is so irreparably broken that the two should stop calling one another allies.
It's not only in the AfPak region that Mr. Nasr faults Mr. Obama for adopting the quick fix of coercion over the hard work of diplomacy. On Iran, he faults Mr. Obama for following a Bush-lite policy of tightening the screws of sanctions in the mistaken hope that the ayatollahs will eventually cry uncle, rather than offering the Iranians real incentives to stop enriching uranium. Of course, conservatives—and many hawkish Democrats—would say that Mr. Obama hasn't turned the screws tightly enough, by making it perfectly clear that the U.S. will bomb Iran's nuclear facilities rather than permitting it to gain weapons capacity.
So is Mr. Obama too fond of the hammer of American power, or too wary of it? He is certainly not a "dove." The president isn't, ideologically or temperamentally, opposed to American military power or coercion. He shies away from the use of force where he doesn't think it will work—e.g., Syria. But he is quite prepared to sign off on drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen. He has largely followed in George W. Bush's footsteps on counterterror policy. And whatever one thinks of his bona fides, he has pledged himself to bomb Iran if it gains nuclear-weapons capacity.
The president is at bottom a very cautious man. He has a deep awareness—one that was once associated with neoconservatism—that great undertakings don't usually turn out as we hope and expect they will. We have all been taught that lesson. But you can overlearn it. I wish Mr. Obama had been prepared months ago to take the risk of arming the Syrian rebels. But I also wish he would take some of the diplomatic risks that Mr. Nasr urges upon him, for example by offering to cut a better deal with Iran. And I agree that it is probably politics as much as cautious statecraft that has made the president hesitate. Mr. Nasr reminds us that it takes every bit as much courage to choose a "soft" option as a hard one; politically, in fact, it takes more.
Afghanistan’s transformation decade: a bumpy road ahead
The Ottawa Citizen By Nipa Banerjee and Yiagadeesen Samy April 19, 2013
OTTAWA - Since early 2001, the international community has been awash with analysis, advice and actions on ways to stabilize Afghanistan. Most of these efforts have been inspired and driven by non-Afghans and many have failed.
Now, with the 2014 withdrawal of American and NATO troops on the horizon and the transition of control over governance and national security to Afghanistan underway, the need to stimulate debate and dialogue by examining Afghan views on the path to sovereignty and a safe society has taken on new importance.
In Canada, a transparent discussion is especially necessary after the recent announcement the Canadian International Development Agency is being folded into the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade. The news of the merger has created fears that Canada’s development aid, the main objective of which is poverty reduction and long-term development, will be diverted to serving Canadian short-term commercial and political interests.
These concerns are of special importance to fragile countries such as Afghanistan that are heavily dependent on aid but where Canada’s commercial interests are practically non-existent.
To hear and openly debate the Afghan side of the story, often absent in the Western media, the University of Ottawa social sciences faculty recently invited Afghan experts to a colloquium to share their views on both the changes that have taken place in their country over the decade since the fall of the Taliban and on the way forward.
To be sure, the visiting Afghans delivered messages about major gains and achievements on the economic and political fronts. Mustafa Mastoor, the country’s deputy finance minister, talked about impressive growth rates — a per-capita GDP growth of nine per cent since 2003 — increases in domestic revenues and improvements in infrastructure, health services and education. Haneef Atmar, a former cabinet minister, founder of the Truth and Justice Party and a potential presidential candidate, spoke of unprecedented gains in democracy, state-building, human rights and development.
But the real question is whether the gains achieved are proportional to the staggering aid dollars — some $42 billion — disbursed by donors, including Canada, from 2002 to 2011.
Our assessment is that not enough progress has taken place. Millions of Afghans are still unable to meet their minimum basic needs and, according to World Bank data, the real per-capita growth figure over that decade has actually been closer to six per cent. Unfortunately, lack of data prevents us from examining the exact impact of aid on poverty, clearly an area where more work needs to be done.
But there is little doubt Afghanistan remains an extremely weak — some may even say a failed — state. It has been consistently ranked among the most fragile countries in the world over the last decade. The well-known Failed States Index produced by the Fund for Peace, a Washington-based think tank, shows that Afghanistan’s fragility score significantly deteriorated from 2004 to 2010.
Carleton University research (carleton.ca/cifp) on fragile states indicates a similar trend. In its recent Human Development Report, Afghanistan is ranked 175th out of 187 countries, below the average of countries in the low human development category, even if its score has improved marginally over time.
There’s more. On average, aid represents more than 40 per cent of the Afghanistan’s national income, and overall outside financial assistance is even higher when security-related expenses are added. Afghanistan remains a highly aid dependent country, and despite plans to increase revenue through improved tax collection and development of the mining sector, its financing gap is likely to persist for many years.
Yet presenting a balanced view of Afghanistan’s achievements requires an answer to a fair question: How many countries, with or without the enormous difficulties encountered by Afghanistan — a place where thousands of foreign soldiers failed to contain a decade of violence — can claim a growth rate of even six per cent over 10 years.
Certainly, the Afghan experts gathered at the recent Ottawa colloquium were justified in pointing out that nearly 80 per cent of foreign aid received in the last decade had not been allocated through the Afghan national budget, nor was the money always aligned with the government’s priorities. It is a problem to which donors, including Canada, have paid little attention.
Even so, given the high level of corruption in the country — Afghanistan tied North Korea and Somalia at the bottom of Transparency International’s 2012 Corruption Perceptions Index — it will be difficult to convince donors to flow aid dollars through the Afghan government’s budget. Corrective actions are required by both donors and the recipient to fix this situation.
Afghans’ appeal for aid to promote economic growth and development certainly needs donor support, especially when reform-minded Afghan leaders, such as those who spoke in Ottawa, do not deny the challenging issues their country is failing to meet.
In fact, it is precisely to make progress in these areas of deficiency that the Afghan speakers emphasized the need for international support after 2014 and for many years after. Indeed, the focus on transformation will be in vain if the quickly deteriorating situation now threatening the past decade’s gains in democracy, state building and development is not arrested with the help of international partners.
Atmar, one of Afghanistan’s most visionary leaders, spoke with succinct clarity of his country’s security concerns, the ineffective peace-and-reconciliation efforts, the potential for a marred political transition in the absence of electoral reforms, the deteriorating rule of law, increasing human rights violations, uncertain economic growth with deepening poverty conditions and of the dangers emanating from the increasingly strained partnership between the Afghan government and its helpful western partners, mainly the U.S. and NATO.
According to Atmar, security data show a 15-per-cent reduction in insurgent attacks in 2012 but a 10-per-cent increase in Afghan casualties. The loss of lives and territory to insurgents remains high despite troop surges, and an accelerated drawdown of international troops would intensify security challenges. In that respect, we believe that the retention of residual forces is needed.
Atmar gave a failing grade to the reconciliation efforts, which are basically stalled and reflect the insurgents’ lack of interest in negotiating with President Hamid Karzai. As well, there is an absence of the enabling factors needed to promote peace and reconciliation: national unity, state legitimacy and people’s support of the Afghan government. At the same time, the much-needed partnership between Afghanistan and the U.S. and NATO is tattered and support from Pakistani and other countries in the region is non-existent.
For a credible political transition to take place, the Afghan leaders emphasized the importance of serious electoral reform — replacing the Afghan government’s usual rhetoric about free and fair elections — along with assurances of security and confirmation of financing, the latter two requiring help from the international community that set the establishment of democracy as a key objective of its involvement in Afghanistan.
State building, another important focus of international engagement, has also posed an enormous challenge in the absence of formal government structures. The efforts of donor nations to build institutions for delivery of basic services to citizens have largely failed.
Afghans are also worried by the low impact of development assistance, arising out of “ineffective aid” by donors. That contradicts the principles that donor nations agreed to observe through the 2005 Paris Declaration on aid effectiveness, which called for donor investment in the recipient government’s priority development programs as well as accountability for those investments. A 2010 assessment of Afghan aid effectiveness practices suggested that donors failed to comply with the Paris agreement.
Little progress has been made in meeting the conditions agreed upon by Afghans and donors at a conference in Tokyo in 2012. Because concerns over corruption, patronage and the absence of a system of justice, especially for the protection of women, have not yet been addressed, reductions in aid flows, along with military cuts, are inevitable.
Atmar acknowledged the need for his own government to fight corruption and to focus on poverty reduction, an inclusive development process for women and the vulnerable, protection of human rights and the promotion of the rule of law.
At their Ottawa gathering, the Afghans also expressed concern about the increasingly strained partnership between the Afghan government and the Americans and NATO over counter-insurgency operations and sovereignty imperatives. Those strains have slowed the finalization of the U.S.-Afghan bilateral security agreement that would provide continued American security assistance after 2014. Atmar also said the extremely anti-Western stance adopted by Karzai in recent months is not only dangerous, it is not shared by all Afghan leaders nor ordinary Afghans.
In short, the initial high hopes for Afghanistan’s transformation decade — from 2015-2024 and beyond — are far from guaranteed. After more than 10 years of military and financial support, Western interest in Afghanistan is clearly on the decline and aid fatigue has begun to set in.
The security situation after the withdrawal of international troops in 2014, which will coincide with a political transition as the country holds presidential elections, can best be described as uncertain and volatile. It is far from clear that the Afghan National Security Forces will be able to guarantee security, making the presence of a residual military force extremely important.
We also do not recommend a quick reduction of aid levels that could lead to a collapse of the economy resulting from a large and unsustainable financial gap. That would further reduce the state’s capacity to deliver services, lead to a erosion of confidence and the loyalty of citizens and have a negative impact on state legitimacy.
There is, of course, a commensurate need for the Afghan government to exercise proper leadership, to fight corruption and to ensure the direction of aid flows towards poverty reduction, human rights protection and the rule of law. In fact, the transition outlook would improve if the international community supports the roles of reform-minded national actors for stabilization of the fragile state, bearing in mind that outside help can only provide a stimulus to stability — it cannot lead or drive the stabilization process.
Afghanistan, outside of the circle of the president and his advisers, is not empty of leadership and political will. That much was made clear by the delineation by the Afghan speakers of the list of actions considered essential in each of the areas of deficiency posing threats to the transition to stability. Those proposed actions certainly comply with the requirements identified by international analysts.
The next few years will present serious challenges, but we prefer to see this as an opportunity for donors, including Canada, to work more closely with the Afghans, recognizing the need for international assistance in all forms as insurance for defence, security, economic support and democracy. It is also imperative to deploy all the tools at our disposal to ensure that future aid dollars are being spent effectively.
Nipa Banerjee, former head of Canada’s aid program to Afghanistan, is a professor at the School of International Development and an associate at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs University of Ottawa. Yiagadeesen Samy is an associate professor of international affairs at Carleton University and a research associate at the Ottawa-based North-South Institute.
US court denies Beechcraft challenge on Afghan plane deal
Reuters 19 April 2013
Washington - The U.S. Air Force on Friday said U.S.-based Sierra Nevada Corp and Brazil's Embraer would continue work on a $428 million contract to build new attack planes for Afghanistan after a federal court rejected a challenge by rival Beechcraft.
U.S. Air Force spokesman Ed Gulick said the Court of Federal Claims denied Beechcraft's challenge, but the congressional Government Accountability Office (GAO) was still reviewing a separate protest that Beechcraft filed against the deal.
Continued work on the contract "honors the U.S. Air Force's critical and time-sensitive commitment to provide air support capability to the Afghan Air Force (AAF)," Gulick said.
Beechcraft, which emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection earlier this year, had sued the Air Force to halt work on the planes while federal auditors reviewed the company's protest. The Air Force had authorized Sierra Nevada and Embraer to keep working on the order, despite Beechcraft's protest.
A spokeswoman for the Kansas plane maker said the Witchita-based company was disappointed by the decision and planned to continue to contest the award through the GAO.
The court's decision was another twist in an ongoing battle over the Afghan plane orders - a dispute that has drawn the ire of the Brazilian government and which could complicate U.S. plans to withdraw from Afghanistan in 2014.
The Air Force is racing to get new planes to Afghanistan and train pilots to fly them as U.S. forces prepare to withdraw from the country after over a decade of war. (Reporting by Andrea Shalal-Esa; Editing by Leslie Gevirtz)
www.afghanistannewscenter.com
April 20, 2013 at 10:09 AM
KABUL, Afghanistan, April 20 (UPI) -- The Afghanistan Taliban say they "strongly condemn" Germany's decision to keep troops in the country after most NATO combat troops leave next year.
Zabiullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesman, said in a statement, "We strongly condemn" Germany's decision "to prolong its occupation as well as the killing and oppression of the persecuted Afghan nation," Khaama Press reported.
He cautioned Germany's continued involvement in "America's war of fancy" would cause the Taliban to "take a harsh stand against it by targeting it with special tactical and jihadi operations which will force them to regret their illogical decision."
The German government, which has the third-largest deployment of foreign troops in Afghanistan, announced Thursday it would keep 800 military trainers in the country after NATO combat operations end in 2014.
It has 4,200 soldiers in Afghanistan, down from an initial deployment of more than 5,000.
NATO plans to keep 8,000 to 12,000 troops in the country after 2014 to train and assist the Afghan army.
Gun battle leaves 12 Afghan Taliban dead
GHAZNI, Afghanistan, April 20 (Xinhua) -- Twelve Taliban militants were killed as they came in contact with police in Ghazni province 125 km south of Kabul Friday night, a local official Mohammad Nazif Sultani said Saturday.
"The personnel of local police were on routine patrol when they came in contact with Taliban rebels in Waziri village of Muqar district last night during which 12 rebels were killed," Sultani told Xinhua.
However, he refused to say if there were any casualties on the security personnel.
Taliban militants fighting the government are yet to make comment.
Premature blast kills 2 Taliban in N. Afghanistan
PUL-E-KHUMRI, Afghanistan, April 20 (Xinhua) -- Two Taliban militants were killed as their explosive device exploded prematurely in Baghlan province 160 km north of Kabul Friday night, police said Saturday.
"Three Taliban rebels were busy in making mine inside a house in Baghlan-e-Markazi district last night but the device went off prematurely killing two on the spot and injuring another," district police chief Ghulam Sakhi Rustaqi told newsmen in a press briefing here.
Two members of the house have been arrested in this regard, he added.
Taliban militants who are largely relaying on suicide and roadside bombings and often use the homemade bombs to target security forces have yet to make comment.
Young Afghans determined to rebuild war-torn country
AFP April 19, 2013
Kabul - While others make plans to flee, a new generation of educated young Afghans who have tasted new freedoms in post-Taliban times are determined to stay and rebuild their war-ravaged nation.
With the vast majority of foreign troops withdrawing by the end of next year, many predict a resurgence of the hardline religious groups or a return to the civil war of the 1990s.
But a host of young professionals — including entrepreneurs, journalists, activists and artists — say they plan to stay to build a better future for a country that has suffered more than three decades of war.
More globally connected than any generation before them, more aware of the outside world and more urban, this new young elite will be the key driver of change in a land where half the population is under 18, said analyst Omar Sharifi.
“I have a passion for Afghanistan. I love it and I have responsibilities to it,” said businessman Jamshid Ibrahimi, 29, who spoke to AFP on the roof of one of 11 buildings constructed by one of his three companies.
Ibrahimi has already achieved his main goal. After starting out with $3,000 in his pocket in 2003, he has taken advantage of the billions of dollars that flowed into Afghanistan and become a rich man.
But he wants more.
“I was not only thinking about becoming rich and making money, but also about how I can play my part in rebuilding my country,” he said.
“When I’m building my flats, it’s changing the view in Kabul and I employ people, I create jobs.”
Alka Sadat, a documentary-maker who has won awards overseas, hopes to improve her country by forcing it to confront the problems suffered by everyday Afghans — including suicide attacks and the hardship women face.
She said her work often moves her to tears but she perseveres.
“I chose this job. I choose to see these problems. It’s my choice. I want to speak about these problems. I want to make films about this,” she said.
In March the 25-year-old organised an international film festival focusing on women in the western province of Herat, the first event of its kind in the country.
Analyst Sharifi said the young generation’s experience of war, and of exile in some cases, had shaped their desire to create a better Afghanistan.
“That generation grew up in the 1980s and 1990s. They experienced extreme-left and extreme-right, communism and the Taliban, refugee camps,” he said.
“That generation grew up either inside or outside Afghanistan, with the idea of survival.”
Corruption plagues every aspect of life in Afghanistan but through the country’s vibrant young media, the old ways are being challenged.
Sharif Hassanyar, the 28-year-old editor in chief of Tolo News, Afghanistan’s leading TV news channel, says freedom of expression is one of the greatest achievements since the fall of the Taliban in 2001.
The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists says, however, that Afghanistan remains a dangerous place for journalists and many international and domestic journalists reported threats in 2012.
Last year, the manager of a radio station was beheaded in the eastern province of Paktika.
The street housing Tolo bristles with rifle-toting guards. But Hassanyar said it was vital that his journalists — young men and women “full of energy, familiar with the Internet and computers” who represent “the new face of Afghanistan” — braved the dangers.
“Our journalists work very hard, they criticise, they do a lot of stories about corruption in the government,” he said.
“We are Afghans, we live in Afghanistan, so we should do it for our country. It’s our job. It’s our country. We must work here for a better life, a better democracy in Afghanistan.”
Shaharzad Akbar, 25, heads a political movement called 1400, a reference to the year 1400 in the Persian calendar used in Afghanistan which corresponds to 2021.
The group is a collection of 250 people, mostly young, who want to influence Afghanistan’s future.
“We need to realise our power, the potential that has been created, the power that we can have. We are part of the new Afghanistan, which is in the process of being built,” she said.
“In the past 10 years a new generation of Afghans has been educated. They have international standards of education. They are capable, motivated, they want to work for Afghanistan.”
But even among the optimists there are doubts about what the withdrawal of international forces in 2014 will bring.
Many young people fear losing everything in another civil war. Though Akbar, Sadat and Hassanyar say they will stay, Ibrahimi is less certain.
“I want to stay and do my part in rebuilding the country, but if the situation gets worse, you can’t put a lot of things at risk. It’s not only about money but also about life,” he said.
14 anti-government militants lay down arms in N. Afghanistan
PUL-E-KHUMRI, Afghanistan, April 20 (Xinhua) -- More than a dozen armed militants laid down arms and resumed normal life in Baghlan province 160 km north of Kabul on Saturday.
"Today we are welcoming 14 armed militants who have given fighting and resumed normal life within their community in Baghlan- e-Markazi district," provincial police chief Assadullah Shirzad said, while welcoming the former militants in a ceremony here.
The former fighters also handed over their weapons to police. The group commander Mohammad Reza in his short speech called on government to accelerate reconstruction process and create job oppurtunities.
These people, he said had linked with the radical Islamic party the Hekmatyar-led Hizb-e-Islami and were active against government in Charshanba Tapa area, adding with joining these people the security will be further stabilized in the province.
Hizb-e-Islami, a smaller gorup than Taliban, which has been fighting against government and NATO-led force in Afghanistan has yet to make comment.
Last New Zealand troops return from Afghanistan
WELLINGTON, April 20 (Xinhua) -- Sixty members of the New Zealand Provincial Reconstruction Team arrived at Christchurch airport from Afghanistan on Saturday, marking the end of New Zealand's decade long deployment of troops in the war-torn country.
New Zealand Defence Minister Jonathan Coleman was among the first to greet the troops.
He said he is enormously proud of the work that has been carried out and is confident the region is stable enough for the Afghani's to govern alone, Radio New Zealand reported.
Militants kill 13 Afghan pro-government fighters
BBC News April 19 2013
At least 13 Afghan pro-government fighters have been killed in a militant attack on their checkpoint in Ghazni province, officials say.
Details of the attack are sketchy with unconfirmed reports some of the men may have been drugged before the assault.
The Taliban have said they carried out the attack. They also seized weapons and a vehicle.
Al-Qaeda are also thought to operate in Ghazni. In February an attack on a police post there left 17 dead.
A roadside bomb in the province earlier this week killed five government security force men guarding a convoy of trucks in Qarabagh district.
The provincial capital was declared a city of Islamic culture last week, despite concerns that the continuing instability might make it difficult for Afghans and foreigners to visit its sites and monuments.
Reports say that some of the fighters may have been members of the Afghan Local Police, a local militia force formed to provide security in areas where the national police and army are scarce.
Hamid Karzai seeks to curb CIA operations in Afghanistan
President believes battle in which 10 children and a US agent died was fought by illegal militia working for spy agency
The Guardian By Emma Graham-Harrison 19 April 2013
President Hamid Karzai is determined to curb CIA operations in Afghanistan after the death of a US agent and 10 Afghan children in a battle he believes was fought by an illegal militia working for the US spy agency.
The campaign sets the Afghan leader up for another heated showdown with the US government, and will reignite questions about the CIA's extensive but highly secretive operations in the country.
Karzai's spokesman Aimal Faizi said the CIA controlled large commando-like units, some of whom operated under the nominal stamp of the Afghan government's intelligence agency, the National Directorate of Security (NDS), but were not actually under its control.
"Some of them are said to be working with the NDS, but they are not armed by the NDS, not paid by the NDS, and not sent to operations by the NDS. Sometimes they only inform the NDS minutes before the operation," Faizi said. "They are conducting operations without informing local authorities and when something goes wrong it is called a joint operation."
One of these groups was involved in a battle with insurgents in a remote corner of eastern Kunar province in early April that left several Afghan children dead, Faizi said. Karzai has fired the provincial head of intelligence in connection with the incident.
The US citizen who died during the battle was advising the Afghan intelligence service, and the airstrike that killed the children is believed to have been called in after he was fatally injured.
The US embassy declined to comment on CIA issues, but sources with knowledge of the battle said he was an agent, and his name has not been released, usually an indication of intelligence work.
Bob Woodward in his 2010 book Obama's Wars described a 3,000-strong Afghan militia working for the CIA, and Faizi said the Afghan government had little information about the teams. "There is a lack of clarity about their numbers and movement," he said when asked how many men the CIA had on their payroll, or where these large teams might be based.
Woodward said the unofficial commando units were known as counter-terrorism pursuit teams, and described them as "a paid, trained and functioning tool of the CIA", authorised by President George W Bush.
They were sent on operations to kill or capture insurgent leaders, but also went into lawless areas to try to pacify them and win support for the Afghan government and its foreign backers. Woodward said the units even conducted cross-border raids into Pakistan.
In the wake of the Kunar battle, Karzai has also ordered his security officials to step up implementation of a presidential decree issued in late February abolishing "parallel structures". Faizi said this order was aimed primarily at dismantling CIA-controlled teams.
"The use of these parallel structures run by the CIA and US special forces is an issue of concern for the Afghan people and the Afghan government," he said.
For Karzai the move is another step towards reasserting Afghan sovereignty, part of a long campaign waged against US forces and their allies. He has already won control of the main US-run prison in the country, and ended unilateral night raids on insurgent hideouts that coalition commanders once described as critical to the war.
But Karzai's move comes at a critical time for an already volatile relationship, when Washington and Kabul are trying to negotiate what, if any, military presence the US will have in Afghanistan beyond 2014, and curbing the CIA's reach could strike at the heart of US strategic interests there.
Barack Obama has been clear that the US does not plan to fight the Taliban after next year. Instead some foreign troops will train Afghan soldiers to fight the insurgency while US special forces pursue groups such as al-Qaida hiding along the lawless border with Pakistan.
While the US is expected to keep a few thousand soldiers in Afghanistan, bolstered by troops from Nato allies, Obama has also made clear there is "zero option" of a complete US withdrawal, as happened in Iraq.
Taliban attacks increased by 47 percent in 1st quarter of 2013
By ANI
New York, Apr.20 (ANI): According to an Afghanistan NGO, there has been a sharp increase in the number of attacks in this year's first quarter, a recent study has revealed.
The Afghanistan NGO Safety Office has let out that the first quarter saw 2331 attacks by armed opposition groups compared to 1581 during the same time last year, with a statistical increase of 47 percent in the crime rate, the New York Times reports.
The director of the NGO office Tomas Muzik has said that 2013 will follow the marks of 2011 in becoming the most violent year, with the most attacks and victims.
While Afghanistan army soldiers along with their American counterparts are planning to take over the security duties across the country as Taliban steps up for attacks, the American military has not sent any figures this year compared to last year's report on enemy attacks along with bar graphs.
The spokesperson for American military Col. Thomas W. Collins said that they will not be releasing any statistics anymore, adding that Afghan Ministry can reveal some related information.
The ministry too preferred to remain quiet in this regard, however a ministry official on condition of anonymity has said that ministry data reveal 40 percent increase in violence this year with 1,183 attacks as compared to 841 last year.
The study has further shown that insurgent attacks on the international forces make up for only four percent of the total attacks and 73 percent against the Afghan security forces, while the attacks on civilians have been much more quantitatively.
With 1,00,000 international combat forces starting to withdraw from the group, the Afghan forces will have to face the Talibans alone by the end of 2014.
According to the study report, the insurgent violence has mostly affected areas where the foreign military forces are not available.
The Afghan national security forces need to show their capability to deal with the Taliban in these violence-prone areas to fill the gap left by the international military forces, the report added. (ANI)
When The U.S. Cracks Down On Afghan Heroin, It Aids The Taliban
Forbes By Stan Veuger 4/19/2013
A new report from the United Nations shows that opium production in Afghanistan is up. This, despite efforts on the part of the United States to sharply limit opium production in the country. America’s efforts, while well intentioned, have fallen victim to the law of unintended consequences. When the United States leans on the Afghani government to crack down on opium, they are effectively funding the Taliban, our Afghani opponent in the war on terror.
The U.S. should stop these efforts immediately. The United Nations Office on Drug and Crime, in collaboration with the Afghani Ministry of Counter Narcotics, just released its annual Afghanistan Opium Risk Assessment, predicting yet another rise in Afghani opium production in 2013. Poppy cultivation rose from 131,000 hectares in 2011 to 154,000 hectares in 2012 — an 18 percent increase; this trend that is unlikely to stop. This is bad news for an obvious reason: as a part of the broader War on Drugs, the U.S. and its UN allies have been striving to suppress opium production since the mid-2000s.
It is even worse news for a different reason: much more of this production now takes place in Taliban-controlled areas, out of reach of the Afghani government and its international allies. Eradication and interdiction programs have shifted production from secure, government-controlled parts of the country to those controlled by opposition forces. As the UN report puts it, “a strong association between insecurity (..) and opium cultivation continues to exist.” In retrospect this should not be surprising; it is difficult if not impossible to enforce prohibitions in regions of the country where the government has little control.
Opium has been produced in Afghanistan for centuries, and generates about half of the country’s GDP. Nowadays it is, of course, typically converted into heroin to satisfy the requirements of often heavily addicted users. The fact that many of these users are heavily addicted is important, as it makes them quite willing to forego all other consumption — an economist would say that their demand for opium is very inelastic.
The same turns out to be true for the total demand for Afghani opium, according to a new research paper from economist Jeffrey Clemens of the University of California at San Diego. This means that when the supply of Afghani opium drops, its price rises rapidly, and the quantity of opium rebounds quickly in response. This is not surprising, as Afghanistan is one of the very few primary sources of opium for these users. It also has important policy implications. When the U.S. attempts to combat poppy cultivation in the parts of Afghanistan it fully controls, it drives up the price producers in the rest of the country receive: and it’s the latter group of producers that pays taxes to the Taliban, in Hilmand, Farah, and Kandahar.
Cutting off funding to the Taliban has been the second major justification for opium suppression efforts by the U.S. in Afghanistan, next to combating heroin addiction and consumption. What Professor Clemens shows is that these efforts have had the opposite effect. Anti-opium efforts increased the flow of opium income to farmers in Taliban-heavy districts from some $240 million in 2004 to $580 million in 2010, or double in both absolute numbers and share of total opium production. That’s a lot of money in a country with a GDP per capita of about $1,000. The Taliban take an important cut from all of this business. They impose a 2 to 10 percent tax on farmers, the ushr, and they provide protection services to traffickers.
Whether you believe in the effectiveness of the War on Drugs in terms of consumption levels or not, making more resources available to your enemy in a decade-long armed conflict is not a great idea. And then the question becomes, as it is for other anti-narcotics policies: should ending the consumption and production of illegal drugs be the be-all and end-all of all public policy, or are there important trade-offs that may not be receiving the attention they deserve?
Afghanistan, Turkmenistan collaborate on railroad
By H. Hasanov Trend News Agency, Baku, Azerbaijan April 20, 2013 Stars and Stripes
ASHGABAT, Turkmenistan - Afghanistan offered Turkmenistan to construct a railroad line Imamnazar-Akina on Afghan territory, the State Information Agency Turkmen Dovlet Khabarlary reported on Friday.
According to the report, authorized representatives of the two countries are negotiating in Ashgabat recent days.
"Representatives of the Afghan delegations suggested the participation of Turkmen specialists in the development of a feasibility study and construction of Imamnazar-Akin railway line in Afghanistan," the report says.
In May, 2011, during the official visit of the President of Afghanistan to Turkmenistan the parties signed an inter-governmental framework agreement on the construction of Atamyrat-Imamnazar-Akina-Andhoi railroad.
The state information agency of Turkmenistan notes that at that time President Gurbanguly Berdimuhammedov offered to realize the project of the railway construction from Turkmenistan to Afghanistan with the perspective of its further extension in Afghan territory.
It was about the construction of two railway sections: 85-kilometer Atamyrat-Imamnazar line in Turkmenistan and 38-kilometer line from Imamnazar to to Andhoi settlement in Afghanistan.
Turkmenistan has informed the Afghan colleagues that almost all the design work on the construction of Atamyrat-Imamnazar section had been completed," the report says. The construction of this branch will be conducted by the structures of the Ministry of Railway Transport of Turkmenistan.
According to the report, participants of the meeting noted that realization of joint infrastructure projects will be a powerful impetus to further development of Afghan economy, successful solution of important social issues, including those related to employment, investment attraction and will have a positive impact on the situation in the country as a whole.
Who Lost Afghanistan?
Something funny happened to Richard Holbrooke on the way to the negotiating table
The Wall Street Journal By James Traub April 19, 2013
Richard Holbrooke, the late, great American diplomat and broker of the 1995 Dayton peace accords that ended the Balkans war, has had his posthumous revenge—whether he wanted it or not. Holbrooke served as President Barack Obama's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, or SRAP, from January 2009 until his sudden death in December 2010. But "AfPak" proved to be a Rubik's Cube too hard even for Holbrooke to solve. Or so it has seemed until now: In "The Dispensable Nation," Vali Nasr, a former senior adviser to the SRAP office, insists that Holbrooke had the answer for both countries but was ignored and even humiliated by a White House that feared and despised him—and by a president too craven to make tough, politically unpopular decisions.
Mr. Nasr, who is now dean of the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, is a bold conceptualizer with a flair for seeing around corners. In his previous book, "The Shia Revival" (2006), he argued that the Sunni-Shiite split plays a much more salient and divisive role in defining identity in the Middle East than most people understand—and that, with Shiite power unleashed after the Iraq war, sectarianism would become an even greater source of conflict in the region.
Here he expands on that view, writing that the Arab Spring has provoked a "Sunni triumphalism" among resurgent Islamists, which could in turn cause Shiites in Sunni-dominated Gulf states like Bahrain and Saudi Arabia to seek the protection of Iran, thus risking a regionwide outbreak of sectarian conflict. He also observes that what is good for the U.S.—energy independence and reduced oil prices—could be a calamity for Saudi Arabia, a country the U.S. depends on to keep the regional peace. Whether right or wrong, Mr. Nasr is worth listening to.
But such global observations only constitute the second half of "The Dispensable Nation." The first half tells the tale of Good Sir Richard vanquished by the Dark Knight of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. That's the part that crashed into Washington like a minor meteor in March, when Mr. Nasr published an excerpt from his new book in Foreign Policy magazine, sending State Department officials scrambling to insist that they had an "excellent working relationship" with the White House despite Mr. Nasr's depiction of wholesale neglect.
Mr. Nasr tells us that Holbrooke understood from the outset that the massively ambitious counterinsurgency strategy that Gens. Stanley McChrystal and David Petraeus urged Mr. Obama to undertake in Afghanistan would never work—the government of Afghanistan was too corrupt to be reformed, and the Taliban was too deep-rooted to be vanquished. Another of Holbrooke's senior aides, Barnett Rubin, returned from a trip to the region in April 2009 to report that the Taliban was ready to negotiate. "If this thing works," Holbrooke told Mr. Rubin, "it may be the only way we will get out." The SRAP hoped to place "reconciliation" talks in the broader framework of a regional solution worked out with neighbors, including not just Pakistan but Iran.
Given his own professed belief in diplomacy, Mr. Obama should have embraced Holbrooke's case for engagement. Why didn't he? Because, Mr. Nasr says, diplomacy turns out to be bad politics. White House advisers were afraid that the president would be seen as "soft" for choosing diplomats over troops. And—here's the really nasty part—Mr. Obama himself was less concerned about the substance of his policies than he was about the perception of his politics.
The reason Mr. Obama gets "high marks on foreign policy," Mr. Nasr writes, is that "his policies' principal aim is not to make strategic decisions but to satisfy public opinion." Thus neither Holbrooke nor his boss, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, "the lonely voice making the case for diplomacy," as Mr. Nasr describes events here, stood a chance against the generals and their CIA counterparts. In fact, Mr. Nasr argues, by insisting that the U.S. do what was right, Holbrooke made himself the target of a nonstop White House campaign of vilification and obstruction. Since "talking to the Taliban would give Holbrooke a greater role," the author claims, the U.S. wouldn't talk to the Taliban.
This would be a narrative of revolting pettiness and cowardice if it was in fact true. But Mr. Nasr omits a few details. For starters, he neglects to mention the fact that Holbrooke did serious damage to his standing in the Obama administration when he openly backed the opposition in the 2009 Afghan election, thus outraging incumbent Afghan President Hamid Karzai—the eventual winner. According to Rajiv Chandrasekaran's in-depth account of the debate over and prosecution of the Afghan war, "Little America" (2012), "Karzai told his aides that he did not trust Holbrooke, and did not want to see him again. His aides conveyed the message to officials at the U.S. Embassy." This occurred in the middle of the debate over AfPak policy. Holbrooke, aware that he was on the outs with Mr. Obama, kept his advice uncharacteristically to himself during the protracted discussion.
At the time, Mrs. Clinton sided not with Holbrooke but with Defense Secretary Robert Gates and thus with the generals, a fact that Mr. Nasr concedes almost parenthetically. (He once heard her say that "she did not believe in cut and run.") She may have agreed with Gen. Petraeus that the U.S. had to knock the Taliban back on its heels before opening peace talks. Or perhaps, though Mr. Nasr would never say so of one he so evidently admires, she worried that by standing up to the hero of Iraq she would be running her future presidential ambitions through a wood-chipper. American political culture makes it perilous, and maybe suicidal, for Democrats to advocate statecraft over force. Either Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama are both spineless, or, as practicing politicians, they are both prudent.
The part about Holbrooke being hated is absolutely true and corroborated elsewhere, including in Mr. Chandrasekaran's book. But Mr. Chandrasekaran also alludes to the grandiosity and blatant big-footing that cost Holbrooke some would-be allies, including Karl Eikenberry, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, who was exhausted by the SRAP's incessant demands and vexed by his habit of bullying embassy staff. I am a fully pledged member of the Richard Holbrooke Fan Club, but I think it does neither him nor history any service to overlook his foibles.
While Holbrooke is the protagonist of "The Dispensible Nation," he is not the book's ultimate subject. Mr. Nasr's larger claim is that at a moment when America faces immense challenges from a rising China and an Arab world skittering toward chaos, the U.S. is surrendering its role as "the indispensable nation" (an expression Mr. Nasr attributes to Bill Clinton, though it should actually be credited to his secretary of state, Madeleine Albright). This would be a great talking point for a Republican rival if only there was a leading Republican who devoutly believed in diplomacy. Which there isn't.
And this raises a fundamental question, both about Mr. Obama's foreign policy and about how America should deploy its power in the world. Mr. Nasr puts extraordinary stock in the capacity of adroit and forceful diplomacy to shape positive outcomes in the world. In a chapter titled "Who Lost Pakistan?"—no points for getting the right answer—he insists that "the key to winning over Pakistan was simply giving Pakistan more (much more) aid for longer (much longer)." But Lyndon Johnson reincarnated couldn't have pushed such a Marshall Plan for Pakistan through Congress in 2009 as the country faced a severe economic downturn. And even if Mr. Obama could have, most of the American diplomats I talk to—including some of Holbrooke's closest colleagues—believe that the U.S. had already taken its best shot at bribing and flattering and cajoling the generals who run Pakistan into taking on the Afghan Taliban rather than using them as a cat's-paw—and failed. Husain Haqqani, the former Pakistani ambassador to the U.S., has
recently argued that the relationship is so irreparably broken that the two should stop calling one another allies.
It's not only in the AfPak region that Mr. Nasr faults Mr. Obama for adopting the quick fix of coercion over the hard work of diplomacy. On Iran, he faults Mr. Obama for following a Bush-lite policy of tightening the screws of sanctions in the mistaken hope that the ayatollahs will eventually cry uncle, rather than offering the Iranians real incentives to stop enriching uranium. Of course, conservatives—and many hawkish Democrats—would say that Mr. Obama hasn't turned the screws tightly enough, by making it perfectly clear that the U.S. will bomb Iran's nuclear facilities rather than permitting it to gain weapons capacity.
So is Mr. Obama too fond of the hammer of American power, or too wary of it? He is certainly not a "dove." The president isn't, ideologically or temperamentally, opposed to American military power or coercion. He shies away from the use of force where he doesn't think it will work—e.g., Syria. But he is quite prepared to sign off on drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen. He has largely followed in George W. Bush's footsteps on counterterror policy. And whatever one thinks of his bona fides, he has pledged himself to bomb Iran if it gains nuclear-weapons capacity.
The president is at bottom a very cautious man. He has a deep awareness—one that was once associated with neoconservatism—that great undertakings don't usually turn out as we hope and expect they will. We have all been taught that lesson. But you can overlearn it. I wish Mr. Obama had been prepared months ago to take the risk of arming the Syrian rebels. But I also wish he would take some of the diplomatic risks that Mr. Nasr urges upon him, for example by offering to cut a better deal with Iran. And I agree that it is probably politics as much as cautious statecraft that has made the president hesitate. Mr. Nasr reminds us that it takes every bit as much courage to choose a "soft" option as a hard one; politically, in fact, it takes more.
Afghanistan’s transformation decade: a bumpy road ahead
The Ottawa Citizen By Nipa Banerjee and Yiagadeesen Samy April 19, 2013
OTTAWA - Since early 2001, the international community has been awash with analysis, advice and actions on ways to stabilize Afghanistan. Most of these efforts have been inspired and driven by non-Afghans and many have failed.
Now, with the 2014 withdrawal of American and NATO troops on the horizon and the transition of control over governance and national security to Afghanistan underway, the need to stimulate debate and dialogue by examining Afghan views on the path to sovereignty and a safe society has taken on new importance.
In Canada, a transparent discussion is especially necessary after the recent announcement the Canadian International Development Agency is being folded into the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade. The news of the merger has created fears that Canada’s development aid, the main objective of which is poverty reduction and long-term development, will be diverted to serving Canadian short-term commercial and political interests.
These concerns are of special importance to fragile countries such as Afghanistan that are heavily dependent on aid but where Canada’s commercial interests are practically non-existent.
To hear and openly debate the Afghan side of the story, often absent in the Western media, the University of Ottawa social sciences faculty recently invited Afghan experts to a colloquium to share their views on both the changes that have taken place in their country over the decade since the fall of the Taliban and on the way forward.
To be sure, the visiting Afghans delivered messages about major gains and achievements on the economic and political fronts. Mustafa Mastoor, the country’s deputy finance minister, talked about impressive growth rates — a per-capita GDP growth of nine per cent since 2003 — increases in domestic revenues and improvements in infrastructure, health services and education. Haneef Atmar, a former cabinet minister, founder of the Truth and Justice Party and a potential presidential candidate, spoke of unprecedented gains in democracy, state-building, human rights and development.
But the real question is whether the gains achieved are proportional to the staggering aid dollars — some $42 billion — disbursed by donors, including Canada, from 2002 to 2011.
Our assessment is that not enough progress has taken place. Millions of Afghans are still unable to meet their minimum basic needs and, according to World Bank data, the real per-capita growth figure over that decade has actually been closer to six per cent. Unfortunately, lack of data prevents us from examining the exact impact of aid on poverty, clearly an area where more work needs to be done.
But there is little doubt Afghanistan remains an extremely weak — some may even say a failed — state. It has been consistently ranked among the most fragile countries in the world over the last decade. The well-known Failed States Index produced by the Fund for Peace, a Washington-based think tank, shows that Afghanistan’s fragility score significantly deteriorated from 2004 to 2010.
Carleton University research (carleton.ca/cifp) on fragile states indicates a similar trend. In its recent Human Development Report, Afghanistan is ranked 175th out of 187 countries, below the average of countries in the low human development category, even if its score has improved marginally over time.
There’s more. On average, aid represents more than 40 per cent of the Afghanistan’s national income, and overall outside financial assistance is even higher when security-related expenses are added. Afghanistan remains a highly aid dependent country, and despite plans to increase revenue through improved tax collection and development of the mining sector, its financing gap is likely to persist for many years.
Yet presenting a balanced view of Afghanistan’s achievements requires an answer to a fair question: How many countries, with or without the enormous difficulties encountered by Afghanistan — a place where thousands of foreign soldiers failed to contain a decade of violence — can claim a growth rate of even six per cent over 10 years.
Certainly, the Afghan experts gathered at the recent Ottawa colloquium were justified in pointing out that nearly 80 per cent of foreign aid received in the last decade had not been allocated through the Afghan national budget, nor was the money always aligned with the government’s priorities. It is a problem to which donors, including Canada, have paid little attention.
Even so, given the high level of corruption in the country — Afghanistan tied North Korea and Somalia at the bottom of Transparency International’s 2012 Corruption Perceptions Index — it will be difficult to convince donors to flow aid dollars through the Afghan government’s budget. Corrective actions are required by both donors and the recipient to fix this situation.
Afghans’ appeal for aid to promote economic growth and development certainly needs donor support, especially when reform-minded Afghan leaders, such as those who spoke in Ottawa, do not deny the challenging issues their country is failing to meet.
In fact, it is precisely to make progress in these areas of deficiency that the Afghan speakers emphasized the need for international support after 2014 and for many years after. Indeed, the focus on transformation will be in vain if the quickly deteriorating situation now threatening the past decade’s gains in democracy, state building and development is not arrested with the help of international partners.
Atmar, one of Afghanistan’s most visionary leaders, spoke with succinct clarity of his country’s security concerns, the ineffective peace-and-reconciliation efforts, the potential for a marred political transition in the absence of electoral reforms, the deteriorating rule of law, increasing human rights violations, uncertain economic growth with deepening poverty conditions and of the dangers emanating from the increasingly strained partnership between the Afghan government and its helpful western partners, mainly the U.S. and NATO.
According to Atmar, security data show a 15-per-cent reduction in insurgent attacks in 2012 but a 10-per-cent increase in Afghan casualties. The loss of lives and territory to insurgents remains high despite troop surges, and an accelerated drawdown of international troops would intensify security challenges. In that respect, we believe that the retention of residual forces is needed.
Atmar gave a failing grade to the reconciliation efforts, which are basically stalled and reflect the insurgents’ lack of interest in negotiating with President Hamid Karzai. As well, there is an absence of the enabling factors needed to promote peace and reconciliation: national unity, state legitimacy and people’s support of the Afghan government. At the same time, the much-needed partnership between Afghanistan and the U.S. and NATO is tattered and support from Pakistani and other countries in the region is non-existent.
For a credible political transition to take place, the Afghan leaders emphasized the importance of serious electoral reform — replacing the Afghan government’s usual rhetoric about free and fair elections — along with assurances of security and confirmation of financing, the latter two requiring help from the international community that set the establishment of democracy as a key objective of its involvement in Afghanistan.
State building, another important focus of international engagement, has also posed an enormous challenge in the absence of formal government structures. The efforts of donor nations to build institutions for delivery of basic services to citizens have largely failed.
Afghans are also worried by the low impact of development assistance, arising out of “ineffective aid” by donors. That contradicts the principles that donor nations agreed to observe through the 2005 Paris Declaration on aid effectiveness, which called for donor investment in the recipient government’s priority development programs as well as accountability for those investments. A 2010 assessment of Afghan aid effectiveness practices suggested that donors failed to comply with the Paris agreement.
Little progress has been made in meeting the conditions agreed upon by Afghans and donors at a conference in Tokyo in 2012. Because concerns over corruption, patronage and the absence of a system of justice, especially for the protection of women, have not yet been addressed, reductions in aid flows, along with military cuts, are inevitable.
Atmar acknowledged the need for his own government to fight corruption and to focus on poverty reduction, an inclusive development process for women and the vulnerable, protection of human rights and the promotion of the rule of law.
At their Ottawa gathering, the Afghans also expressed concern about the increasingly strained partnership between the Afghan government and the Americans and NATO over counter-insurgency operations and sovereignty imperatives. Those strains have slowed the finalization of the U.S.-Afghan bilateral security agreement that would provide continued American security assistance after 2014. Atmar also said the extremely anti-Western stance adopted by Karzai in recent months is not only dangerous, it is not shared by all Afghan leaders nor ordinary Afghans.
In short, the initial high hopes for Afghanistan’s transformation decade — from 2015-2024 and beyond — are far from guaranteed. After more than 10 years of military and financial support, Western interest in Afghanistan is clearly on the decline and aid fatigue has begun to set in.
The security situation after the withdrawal of international troops in 2014, which will coincide with a political transition as the country holds presidential elections, can best be described as uncertain and volatile. It is far from clear that the Afghan National Security Forces will be able to guarantee security, making the presence of a residual military force extremely important.
We also do not recommend a quick reduction of aid levels that could lead to a collapse of the economy resulting from a large and unsustainable financial gap. That would further reduce the state’s capacity to deliver services, lead to a erosion of confidence and the loyalty of citizens and have a negative impact on state legitimacy.
There is, of course, a commensurate need for the Afghan government to exercise proper leadership, to fight corruption and to ensure the direction of aid flows towards poverty reduction, human rights protection and the rule of law. In fact, the transition outlook would improve if the international community supports the roles of reform-minded national actors for stabilization of the fragile state, bearing in mind that outside help can only provide a stimulus to stability — it cannot lead or drive the stabilization process.
Afghanistan, outside of the circle of the president and his advisers, is not empty of leadership and political will. That much was made clear by the delineation by the Afghan speakers of the list of actions considered essential in each of the areas of deficiency posing threats to the transition to stability. Those proposed actions certainly comply with the requirements identified by international analysts.
The next few years will present serious challenges, but we prefer to see this as an opportunity for donors, including Canada, to work more closely with the Afghans, recognizing the need for international assistance in all forms as insurance for defence, security, economic support and democracy. It is also imperative to deploy all the tools at our disposal to ensure that future aid dollars are being spent effectively.
Nipa Banerjee, former head of Canada’s aid program to Afghanistan, is a professor at the School of International Development and an associate at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs University of Ottawa. Yiagadeesen Samy is an associate professor of international affairs at Carleton University and a research associate at the Ottawa-based North-South Institute.
US court denies Beechcraft challenge on Afghan plane deal
Reuters 19 April 2013
Washington - The U.S. Air Force on Friday said U.S.-based Sierra Nevada Corp and Brazil's Embraer would continue work on a $428 million contract to build new attack planes for Afghanistan after a federal court rejected a challenge by rival Beechcraft.
U.S. Air Force spokesman Ed Gulick said the Court of Federal Claims denied Beechcraft's challenge, but the congressional Government Accountability Office (GAO) was still reviewing a separate protest that Beechcraft filed against the deal.
Continued work on the contract "honors the U.S. Air Force's critical and time-sensitive commitment to provide air support capability to the Afghan Air Force (AAF)," Gulick said.
Beechcraft, which emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection earlier this year, had sued the Air Force to halt work on the planes while federal auditors reviewed the company's protest. The Air Force had authorized Sierra Nevada and Embraer to keep working on the order, despite Beechcraft's protest.
A spokeswoman for the Kansas plane maker said the Witchita-based company was disappointed by the decision and planned to continue to contest the award through the GAO.
The court's decision was another twist in an ongoing battle over the Afghan plane orders - a dispute that has drawn the ire of the Brazilian government and which could complicate U.S. plans to withdraw from Afghanistan in 2014.
The Air Force is racing to get new planes to Afghanistan and train pilots to fly them as U.S. forces prepare to withdraw from the country after over a decade of war. (Reporting by Andrea Shalal-Esa; Editing by Leslie Gevirtz)
www.afghanistannewscenter.com