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Taliban set conditions to release foreigners held in Logar
By MEENA HASEEB - 25 Apr 2013, 4:34 pm Khaama Press
According to local authorities in eastern Logar province of Afghanistan, Taliban group has for the first time set conditions for the release of kidnapped foreigners who were held following an emergency landing of a helicopter in this province.
Provincial council chief Dr. Abdul Wali Wakil said they have held talks with the local Taliban commanders regarding the foreign hostages and Taliban group is demanding prisoners exchange to release the hostages.
The foreigners including Turkish engineers were kidnapped by Taliban militants in Azra district on Sunday evening after they helicopter made an emergency landing.
In the meantime deputy provincial governor Mohammad Hashim Faizi says that they have not been able to achieve a satisfactory result despite ongoing talks with the Taliban militants during the past five days.
Mr. Faizi also added that Taliban militants have shifted the hostages back to Azra district after they were temporarily taken to Hesarak district in Nangarhar province.
8 Pakistani Taliban militants arrested in Kandahar
By SAYED JAWAD - 25 Apr 2013, 4:07 pm Khaama Press
According to local authorities in southern Kandahar province of Afghanistan, Afghan security forces arrested at least 8 Pakistani Taliban militants in Panjwai district.
District governor for Panjwai, Haji Fazal Ahmad confirming the report said the Pakistani Taliban militants were sent to suppress anti-Taliban uprising forces.
Mr. Fazal Ahmad further added Taliban district governor for Zherai was also among those arrested.
In the meantime local officials in Panjwai district said militants attacked Afghan security forces while they were eradicating opium from the fields in this district.
The officials further added at least one Afghan police officer was injured and their equipments were set on fire by militants during the gun battle.
Afghanistan Jails US Government Employee
By SADAF SHINWARI - 25 Apr 2013, 12:09 pm Khaama Press
A former contractor for a recently completed U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) project in Afghanistan has been sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison and a $9,500 fine.
Noor Anwarzai, 36, was sentenced by Afghanistan’s Special Anti-Corruption Tribunal on April 8, 2013. The Tribunal found Mr. Anwarzai guilty of violating Afghan Penal Code Article 268, regarding embezzlement of funds and Article 310 regarding the forgery of official documents.
Abdul Khabir Kakar, another former contractor accused in the case, was acquitted and subsequently released. He was not found to have been involved in the fraud.
The sentencing came as part of what U.S. Government officials described as an ongoing campaign against fraud and waste in reconstruction and development activities in Afghanistan. The investigation was conducted jointly by the Afghanistan Attorney General’s Office Anti-Corruption Unit and USAID’s Office of Inspector General.
Commenting on the Anti-Corruption Tribunal’s ruling, USAID’s Deputy Inspector General Michael G. Carroll expressed his appreciation for the strong partnership between USAID’s OIG investigators and Afghan law enforcement officials that led to the recent ruling. “Partnerships with law enforcement agencies overseas are critical to our efforts to combat waste, fraud, and abuse in development activities worldwide. This sentencing demonstrates how effective these partnerships can be,” he said.
Noor Anwarzai and Abdul Khabir Kakar are former employees of the recently concluded Afghanistan Farm Service Alliance project implemented by Citizen’s Network for Foreign Affairs (CNFA). The two were arrested by the Afghan National Police in November 2012 on charges of conspiring to embezzle approximately $10,000 of USAID funds. They were accused of falsifying official documentation from the Afghan Ministry of Finance, indicating that CNFA had paid the appropriate local property taxes for the office building when they had not.
Afghanistan quake, floods kills at least 33
ReutersReuters – Wed, Apr 24, 2013.
JALALABAD, Afghanistan (Reuters) - An earthquake in Afghanistan's east and flash floods in the north killed at least 33 people on Wednesday as hundreds of traditional mud-brick homes collapsed, officials said.
The 5.7 magnitude quake, which hit before 2 p.m. (10:30 p.m. British time) was felt as far away as the Indian capital New Delhi and was the latest in a spate of tremors to shake Asia this month.
The quake was 65 km (40 miles) deep with an epicentre 11 km (seven miles) from Mehtar Lam, capital of the eastern province of Laghman, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
At least 18 people were killed in adjacent Nangarhar and Kunar provinces and the death toll was expected to rise, a spokesman for the Afghan Red Crescent Society said. Some 70 people were injured in Nangarhar alone.
Hundreds of homes collapsed across Kunar and Nangarhar.
Wednesday saw steady rain across most of Afghanistan, which would have weakened the mud-brick dwellings many Afghans live in, according to the National Disaster Management Authority.
The agency did not yet have its own casualty figures.
Rain also caused flash-flooding in the northern province of Balkh earlier on Wednesday, killing 15 people, provincial council member Fazel Hadidi said.
Buildings swayed in New Delhi and panicky people ran into the street in the disputed northern region of Kashmir, where an quake killed about 75,000 people in 2005, most on the Pakistan side. Wednesday's quake was also felt in the Pakistani capital Islamabad.
Last week, a 6.6 magnitude earthquake killed nearly 200 people in southwest China, a few days after another powerful tremor killed 35 people in Pakistan near the border with Iran.
(Reporting by Rafiq Sherad in Jalalabad, Mohammad Anwar in Asababad, Satarupa Bhattacharjya in New Delhi, Fayaz Bukhari in Srinagar and Kathryn Houreld in Islamabad; writing by Frank Jack Daniel and Dylan Welch, editing by Mark Heinrich)
Prince Harry to be deployed with Australian Army
CANBERRA, April 25 (Xinhua) -- Prince Harry will spend six months on secondment with the Australian Army as royal aides and security officials assess the risks of such a deployment, The Australian reported on Thursday.
According to the report, Australian Department of Defence, British Army and Clarence House in London are discussing where and when the deployment would occur, and whether Prince Harry would serve on the frontline.
Prince Harry, the 28-year-old Apache attack helicopter co-pilot in Afghanistan, could be formally embedded with an Australian army unit or make an extended visit as an observer under the plan.
He has already had two deployments in Afghanistan. In 2008 he served as a forward air controller as part of the NATO force in Helmand Province. He then spent 20 weeks in Afghanistan serving the Army Air Corps.
Kerry: Pakistan-Afghanistan meetings end ‘on a good track’
Washington Post By Karen DeYoung April 24, 2013
BRUSSELS - After meeting for more than three hours here Wednesday with Afghan and Pakistani leaders, Secretary of State John F. Kerry reported progress in relaunching negotiations but warned, “We’re not going to raise expectations or promise results that can’t be delivered.”
Instead, Kerry said before boarding a plane to return to Washington, the leaders agreed to “underpromise but deliver.”
“We’re all going to go home and do our homework,” he said, flanked by Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, Pakistan’s army chief. The trio had eaten lunch together and walked the grounds of a secluded estate outside Brussels as part of their meeting.
Karzai and Kayani, who had eyed each other warily at the beginning of the session, standing stiffly before a row of reporters, shook hands warmly at the end. Kerry promised that they would continue the dialogue in hopes of finding a way to work together on peace negotiations with the Taliban.
“We agreed we are committed to try to find stability and peace for both countries and the region,” Kerry said. “I think we’re on a good track,” he added, but “results will tell the story.”
The meeting was held amid a new round of recriminations between the two governments and rising nervousness on both sides of their shared border over the fast-approaching departure of U.S. combat troops from Afghanistan.
Obama administration officials, who have long said that a negotiated settlement with the Taliban was the only way to truly end the Afghanistan war, see the window for talks closing. Kerry called “the road forward” a “crucial transformation period.”
The Taliban walked out of preliminary talks with the United States more than a year ago, alleging bad faith in negotiations over a possible prisoner swap in which five Taliban detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, would be released in exchange for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the U.S. soldier held by the group in Pakistan since 2009.
With this year’s fighting season well underway, U.S. intelligence officials think that the Taliban’s senior, Pakistan-based leaders and its ground commanders inside Afghanistan are divided over whether to wait out the U.S. departure or to join the Afghan political process in hopes of winning influence at the ballot box next year.
Afghanistan has accused Pakistan of playing a double game, saying publicly that it favors talks between the Taliban and Karzai’s government while privately keeping the Taliban leadership on a tight leash to prevent the negotiations from getting off the ground.
Pakistan insists that it does not control the Taliban. But it fears that post-withdrawal chaos next door will undermine its security and wants to preserve its leverage over events in Afghanistan.
The Obama administration has tried for several years to bring the two governments together in tripartite talks. Although there has been some progress, with an increase in cross-border trade and pledges of further cooperation, both sides remain mutually suspicious and occasionally hostile.
Afghanistan has accused the Pakistani military of firing across the border in the rugged mountain region where militants operate on both sides, and it alleged that Pakistan aided insurgents who killed 13 Afghan soldiers this month in Konar province.
Pakistan accuses Afghanistan and the U.S. military of failing to pursue members of the Pakistani Taliban, a separate group that it says has sanctuaries on the Afghan side.
A Pakistani agreement to host a meeting between top religious leaders from both countries remains unfulfilled. Pakistan holds a number of top Taliban leaders in detention and agreed, in earlier U.S.-sponsored talks, to release them to Afghanistan’s High Peace Council so they could participate in peace talks. Although some were released late last year, U.S. and Afghan officials said they were not placed in official Afghan hands but were simply let go. Those Taliban members at the top of the Afghan list remain in Pakistani custody.
The border between the two countries has long been disputed, and Afghanistan does not recognize the Durand Line drawn by the British last century. This month, Karzai angrily alleged encroachment when Pakistan constructed a border gate in mountainous territory that he insisted belongs to Afghanistan. Hundreds of Afghan students in the city of Jalalabad, near the frontier, demonstrated and shouted anti-Pakistan slogans.
The Obama administration is juggling its relationships with both governments. Kerry, who interacted with senior Afghan and Pakistani leaders for years as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, clearly hoped his participation in Wednesday’s talks would break the ice.
“We are going to have a trilateral and try to talk about how we can advance this process in the simplest, most cooperative, most cogent way, so that we wind up with both Pakistan’s and Afghanistan’s interests being satisfied — but, most importantly, with a stable and peaceful Afghanistan,” Kerry told diplomats Tuesday at a NATO meeting here at which the alliance discussed its plans for withdrawal from the country in 2014.
Karzai also used that meeting as an opportunity to invite the participation of Kayani, who maintains tight control over Pakistan’s foreign and defense policies.
Pakistan has only a transitional government at the moment, with elections scheduled for next month. Although there is no foreign minister in place, Kayani was accompanied by Foreign Secretary Jalil Abbas Jilani.
In model Afghan city, kidnappings surge
Washington Post By Kevin Sieff Thursday, April 25, 2013
HERAT, Afghanistan - Nine-year-old Ali Sena Nowruzee’s disappearance was disturbingly predictable, even in a city largely untouched by the Taliban and often held up as an example of what a peaceful Afghanistan might look like.
As in dozens of other kidnappings targeting Herat’s burgeoning middle class, residents assumed that he would be released once his family delivered tens of thousands of dollars in ransom. Instead, the rosy-cheeked third-grader became famous here after the discovery of his body, hastily buried on the city’s outskirts.
In death, he has become a poster child for an unlikely crisis in an unlikely place.
In this modern city far from the battlefields, the growing epidemic of abductions has raised a troubling question about Afghanistan’s future: What if eradicating the insurgency only creates space for a new generation of criminal networks?
Last year, nearly 500 people in Herat were arrested on kidnapping charges, compared with about a dozen five years ago, according to Afghan officials. Perpetrators asked for millions in ransom, targeting the families of industrialists, politicians and bankers, who typically remain quiet about the cases and often flee the country after they are resolved.
Other relatively peaceful parts of the country, including Kabul and Jalalabad, also have experienced a surge in abductions that weak police forces have been unable to stem, causing top U.S. and Afghan officials to worry about a threat to stability as insidious as any insurgency but with financial, not ideological, objectives.
The trend has been particularly alarming in Herat, Afghanistan’s third-largest city, which has been a relative haven as war raged in other parts of the nation over the past decade. Cross-border trade with Iran and Turkmenistan and a thriving marble industry — as well as distance from the insurgency’s southern and eastern strongholds — have aided Herat’s prosperity since the fall of the Taliban, in 2001. Its economy, with more than 20 percent annual growth over most of the past decade, has outpaced that of every other Afghan city.
Today, the city that led an early revolt against a communist government in the late 1970s is unmistakably progressive by Afghan standards, with women driving unaccompanied along leafy avenues and quiet parks full of picnicking families.
Police investigations have yielded little insight into the character of the kidnapping networks that are plaguing Herat. There are mixed views about whether they are vast, well-connected enterprises or small-scale operations. Some Afghan officials contend that part of the ransoms end up in the hands of the Taliban, hundreds of miles away. Others say high-level government officials are involved.
The only consensus is that the crime spree has been a blow to growth and security in Herat, which U.S. Deputy Secretary of State William J. Burns praised last year for its “considerable economic potential.”
“These are crimes that undermine the legitimacy of the government and could even lead to its toppling,” Abdul Raziq Nejrabi, the head of Herat’s national security tribunal, which deals with kidnapping cases, said of the city and provincial administrations.
A trusted protector turns
Ali Sena vanished in December while on his way to school, a short walk from his home in an upper-middle-class residential neighborhood. His father, Naseer Ahmad Nowruzee, 41, who owns construction and money-exchange businesses, called the police and was told to wait — a request for ransom would come soon, as it always did.
“It was our greatest fear come true,” Nowruzee said.
Hours later, a man called to say that Ali Sena would be released for $400,000. Even for a successful Herat businessman, it was an extraordinary sum, more than 500 times the average yearly income in Afghanistan.
It took three weeks for Nowruzee to negotiate the ransom down to $65,000, an amount he could barely afford. In that time, the police traced phone calls and pursued leads in an unsuccessful attempt to identify and locate the kidnappers.
Soon, Nowruzee would learn that the man behind his son’s disappearance was the very person he had trusted to protect his family from the growing kidnapping threat, the man Ali Sena called “my uncle,” whose picture the boy kept on a family cellphone — his bodyguard, Abdul Samir.
In an interview at Herat’s provincial prison, Samir said he was inspired by kidnapping reports he had heard on local television and radio. It seemed like an easy way to make money, he said.
On that day in December, before Ali Sena reached school, Samir told the boy to hop on his motorcycle. Then he raced to a friend’s house, where Ali Sena would be kept as a prisoner for five weeks.
“Once we arrived there, he started to cry,” said Samir, who said he planned to free Ali Sena when Nowruzee delivered the money.
That’s typically how kidnappings in Herat end.
In November, the son of the former mayor was left on the outskirts of the city, bloody and bruised, after his father paid $200,000 for his release. A physician’s son was freed last month after nearly $100,000 was paid. Ghulam Sakhi Zurmati, a trader from Herat province, spent 72 days in a hole in the ground until his family came up with $150,000 late last year.
But days after Nowruzee’s associate deposited bags full of $100 bills in an alley specified by kidnappers — after Ali Sena’s mother prepared his favorite meal, in anticipation of his return — there was still no sign of the boy.
A city in shock
There would be no sign until early February, when police located the home where he had been kept, in a closet-size room that now held little more than a blanket and empty juice boxes. One of the kidnappers confessed and told authorities where to begin digging.
When they found Ali Sena’s body, police saw that he had been bludgeoned in the back of the head. According to forensic tests, he was buried alive. It was the kind of brutality that Afghans in the insurgent-dominated south and east are accustomed to, but a level of violence new to Herat.
Word spread rapidly across Herat. The next day, more than 10,000 people closed their businesses and marched across the city behind Nowruzee, who held his son’s body.
“The death of human rights,” the crowd screamed.
The family refused to bury Ali Sena until the government gave assurance that his killers would be executed.
“We needed to send a message,” Nowruzee said. “This can’t continue happening. The Taliban never permitted this kind of criminal activity.”
A day later, as protests paralyzed the city, Afghan President Hamid Karzai called Nowruzee on his cellphone. He asked: Was there anything the government could do to help?
Nowruzee had only one demand: He wanted his son’s killers to be executed.
“You bury the child,” Karzai said in the conversation, which Nowruzee recorded and shared with a Washington Post reporter. (Officials from the presidential palace who insisted on anonymity confirmed that the account was accurate.) “I will issue the decree immediately and will speak with the chief justice.”
Nowruzee accepted the president’s pledge and buried his son.
In early March, a court sentenced Samir and an accomplice to death. Four others involved in the kidnapping were given six to 20 years in prison. The other defendants said Samir ordered Ali Sena to be killed because the boy would be able to identify his kidnappers. Samir, in the interview, said another collaborator ordered the killing without his permission.
It appeared that Ali Sena’s death had become a tipping point, an outlet for public anger over an escalating problem that many here say has been ignored by the Afghan government and Western forces because of the Taliban’s apparent lack of involvement.
“We worked hard for what we have, and now anyone with money is a target,” said Alhaj Siroos Allaf, the deputy chairman of Herat’s chamber of commerce. “People are tired of being scared and receiving no help from the government. They are leaving Herat.”
Kidnappings continue despite outcry
Since February, photos and posters of Ali Sena’s face, many printed with the words “May his memory endure in our hearts,” have become ubiquitous across the city. A group of businessmen started the National Assembly of the People, an anti-kidnapping group aimed at pressuring the government into action.
The police chief, Rahmatullah Safi, has countered by plastering billboards with photos of himself returning kidnapped children to their parents.
“Police in the service of the people,” the billboards read.
But other government officials have been implicated in kidnapping schemes. The police chief of Injeel district, outside Herat city, has also been charged in Ali Sena’s kidnapping, accused of helping orchestrate the crime. Saleem Shah, the district police chief, has not yet been sentenced.
Despite the public outcry, the kidnappings have not stopped. Last month, five employees of a marble extraction company were abducted. Last week, a teenage girl was kidnapped and raped.
Nowruzee has hired four new bodyguards, whom he acknowledged he does not entirely trust. But he and his family don’t leave the house, which is plastered with billboard-size images of Ali Sena, unless they have to. His wife, Nafisa Nabizada, is afraid to visit her son’s grave.
“I used to love my city and my country,” she said. “Now I’ve had enough of Afghanistan.”
Sayed Salahuddin contributed to this report
A Superheroic Caped Crusade to Keep Troops Safe in Afghanistan
Bagram Batman TV Spots Educate Military; 'He Acts Just as Well as Adam West Did'
Wall Street Journal By NATHAN HODGE April 24, 2013
BAGRAM AIR FIELD, Afghanistan - In fictional Gotham City, Batman protects citizens from crime. Here, at the largest U.S. base in Afghanistan, another Dark Knight is on a different kind of crusade: making sure soldiers carry their rifles and don't get run over at night.
"Bagram Batman" is the star of a recent series of public-service announcements broadcast to troops deployed in and around Afghanistan. The camouflaged superhero—and his catchphrase, "SWEAR TO ME!"— have become an unlikely hit, winning a cult following among soldiers, and going viral on the Internet.
"He acts just as well as Adam West did," marvels Maj. Crispin Burke, an Army officer and military blogger, referring to the star of the original Batman movie and TV series in the 1960s.
While his do-it-yourself costume—rubber Batman mask, black cape and reflective belt over combat fatigues—may look like a joke, Bagram Batman has a very real mission: reminding the troops about the do's and don'ts of life on a forward operating base like Bagram, a small American town planted in the middle of a war zone.
Well, mostly the don'ts. Don't forget your weapon; don't wear headphones while jogging; and don't shoplift at the base exchange. Bagram Batman also enforces the most important rule of all: Don't forget your reflective belt, lest you be hit by the hulking Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected vehicles that roar in darkness through the base's main drag.
Bagram Batman debuted in early March with a 30-second TV ad on smoking safety. In the American Forces Network spot, the caped crusader catches a soldier sneaking a cigarette near a fuel tank and wrestles the offender to the ground.
"I swear, Batman, I'll never do it again!" the soldier protests. "SWEAR TO ME!" barks Bagram Batman.
DC Entertainment, the Warner Bros. Entertainment company that owns the Batman character, had no official statement regarding the videos.
The man behind the masked military version is an Army broadcast journalist, a military specialty known under its code 46 Romeo. Bagram Batman recently agreed to let a reporter accompany him on his rounds as he prowled the base for soldiers committing uniform violations.
"I'm glad to see you've got your eye-pro on," he growled at one group of soldiers, noting their ballistic eyewear.
A sprawling base in a high plain north of Kabul, Bagram is the ideal Gotham for a rules-enforcing Caped Crusader. Built by the Soviets, the base was severely battered during Afghanistan's civil war in the 1990s. Rebuilt by the U.S. military after the fall of the Taliban, Bagram now resembles a highly fortified strip mall—a brightly lighted, well-paved outpost of America, complete with posted speed limits and mandatory seat-belt regulations.
It is also a hat-and-salute zone. An amused-looking soldier saluted Bagram Batman as he walked past, as he would a superior officer.
"What's your rank?" a reporter asked.
Bagram Batman pegs his rank at "O-6 and half," giving himself a fictional rank between full colonel (O-6) and brigadier general. "There's lieutenant colonel, then full-bird colonel, then me."
Bagram Batman also pokes gentle fun at one of the military's biggest obsessions—the dreaded reflective belt. For many service members, the reflective belt is the symbol of the military's overzealous enforcement of safety rules. A missing glow-belt is the surest way to invite a reprimand from a command sergeant major.
"Heck, wear two or three!" Bagram Batman suggests on his Facebook FB +0.50% page. "It's like a CSM forcefield!"
The Bagram Batcave is hidden inside the nondescript Building 415, where Bagram Batman and his sidekicks in uniform plot their public-safety campaigns. That is where the crime-fighter agreed to unmask. By day, Bagram Batman is Staff Sgt. Jesse Dyer, a 36-year-old Army broadcast journalist from Robbins, N.C.
Sgt. Dyer oversees a small team that shoots television spots that air on the Freedom Channel, an Afghanistan-specific American Forces Network channel, and helps run an FM radio station. A self-confessed Batman fanatic, Sgt. Dyer owns a full Dark Knight costume that he bought from UD Replicas, a company that makes licensed studio-quality costumes. At his home station in Vicenza, Italy, he dresses in the costume to volunteer at a children's hospital.
The idea for Bagram Batman emerged from a brainstorming session in the bullpen, the small office where military broadcast journalists think up ideas for public-service announcements.
"We were joking about how you should get your Batman suit out here," said Petty Officer First Class Xander Gamble, 28, a Navy mass communication specialist.
The Bagram Batman spots are a lively contrast to the typical fare that airs on military television. Military public-service announcements are legendary for hit-or-miss production values and scripts that often seem lifted from classroom scare films. Classic PSAs include exhortations to stay healthy while deployed ("Make sure you wash your hands thoroughly before going into the dining facility"), steer clear of Christmas-tree conflagrations ("Make sure to get a freshly cut tree") and avoid hypothermia while swimming ("¡El agua fría mata!")
So, after the U.S. Army posted a link to the weapons-carrying video—featuring Bagram Batman yelling "WHERE'S YOUR WEAPON?" at a clueless soldier—on an official Twitter account, @USArmy, Bagram Batman went viral.
When a Twitter parody, called @BagramBatman, surfaced, Sgt. Dyer responded by creating his own Twitter handle, @IamBagramBatman. The name is an homage to the campy television series. His profile has a thumbnail portrait of Bagram Batman knocking out a rule-breaking trooper with a "POW!"
Bagram Batman also started to attract a crowd here on base. Senior Airman Stephanie Palmisano, 24, an Air Force broadcaster who works with Sgt. Dyer, said public service announcement shoots usually drew a crowd of 20 or 25 people standing around watching and taking cellphone videos.
"That's why it's so important for him to stay in character the whole time," she said.
Despite the lighthearted approach, the risks of living and working in a combat zone are real. One of Bagram Batman's public safety spots features a soldier cranking up Taylor Swift tunes on his headphones before going out for a run. In doing so, he fails to hear the message over the base public address system warning of incoming fire. Batman pounces. "Never wear your headphones while you're running!" he exhorts. "I'm sorry Batman, I swear I'll never do it again!" the soldier says. Bagram Batman's response: "SWEAR TO ME!"
When shooting that segment, Sgt. Dyer said it finally hit home that Bagram Batman had achieved celebrity status.
"There were some guys who were about 100 meters away or so, and they were like, 'SWEAR TO ME!'"
"That's my line!" Bagram Batman replied.
Write to Nathan Hodge at nathan.hodge@wsj.com
Female Afghan police officers face sexual harassment: HRW
By SAYED JAWAD - 25 Apr 2013, 12:19 pm Khaama Press
The Human Righsts Watch (HRW) expressing concerns towards sexual harassment of female police officers, urged the government of Afghanistan to take immediate action to ensure that the country’s female police officers have access to separate, safe, and lockable restroom facilities in police stations.
HRW following a statement on Thursday said workplace sexual harassment is a serious problem in the public and private sectors in Afghanistan and female police officers are frequently the targets of harassment and assault.
The statement by HRW comes amid numerous media reports of rape of female police officers by male colleagues.
The lack of safe and separate toilets makes women particularly vulnerable, according to Human Rights Watch despite Kabul’s police chief issued an order on April 10, 2013, for the province’s police stations to provide separate toilets and change rooms for women, but similar orders have been ignored in the past, leaving all but a few of Afghanistan’s 1,500 women officers without suitable and safe facilities.
Human Rights Watch Asia Director, Brad Adams said, “The Afghan government’s failure to provide female police officers with safe, secure facilities makes them more vulnerable to abuse.”
He said, “This is not just about toilets. It’s about the government’s recognition that women have a crucial role to play in law enforcement in Afghanistan.”
“Harassment and abuse is an everyday experience for many Afghan women,” Adams said, adding that, “Without the consistent presence of female police officers across the country, legal protections for women will remain an unfulfilled promise.”
The report also comes amid Afghanistan Interior Ministry’s goal to hire 5,000 women in Afghan police by the end of 2014, which is currently very small and forms 1 percent of police officers across the country.
The Afghan government, with the support of international advisors and donors, has tried to address this problem through the creation of specialized units in police stations called Family Response Units (FRUs), the report concluded. However their effectiveness has been seriously hampered by the lack of female police officers available to staff them.
HRW in its report also urged Afghan authorities should take various measures to prevent and punish workplace sexual harassment of female police officers.
Afghanistan's female police officers fight for women-only toilets
Female police officers often suffer harassment from colleagues amid lack of dedicated facilities, says Human Rights Watch
The Guardian By Emma Graham-Harrison 24 April 2013
Kabul - It is the smallest but most telling of details that reveals Afghanistan's real attitude towards the women it claims to want at the heart of the national police force.
There are recruitment advertisements and public information films, western funding for training and special uniforms. But when female officers turn up to work most of them discover there are no dedicated female facilities, according to a report from Human Rights Watch (HRW). That also means they have nowhere private to change into the uniform that would identify them as a Taliban target if they wore them on a daily commute.
"We have to use male facilities. Toilets and changing rooms are an absolute necessity for women working in the police," said a senior officer who asked not to be named because her superiors had not authorised an interview.
The often filthy, flooded stalls have no locks, so women stand guard for each other when they need to use them.
"The Afghan government's failure to provide female police officers with safe, secure facilities makes them more vulnerable to abuse," said Brad Adams, Asia director at HRW. "This is not just about toilets. It's about the government's recognition that women have a crucial role to play in law enforcement in Afghanistan."
Women are often targeted by predatory colleagues while using shared toilets in isolated corners of stations, said an international adviser to the police force. "Those facilities that women do have access to often have peepholes or doors which don't lock. Women have to go in pairs. Toilets are a site of harassment," the adviser told HRW.
Afghan and foreign women say the lack of basic facilities is just one part of a wider culture of disrespect that discourages prospective police officers. It also has wider, societal implications, because without female officers, there are concerns there may not be much progress on promises to tackle rampant violence against women.
Only 1% of the country's police officers are women, according to HRW figures. The interior ministry, which oversees the force, admitted its goal of to recruit 5,000 women by the end of 2014 might be optimistic.
"Men whose rank is junior to me won't salute me. They don't value women as they should," said the senior officer. "I am supposed to recruit women, but people say they can't send their daughters because it is not safe."
Even in the capital, Kabul, the focus of the western effort to modernise Afghanistan and bolster its government, the only female stalls are in the force's national headquarters, the women say.
This month, the city police chief, Ayoub Salangi, ordered the construction of toilets for women in its stations. But when contacted by the Guardian, he denied there was a shortage of facilities and refused to give reporters permission to speak to officers.
In other Afghan cities, the situation is similar. HRW said it had been able to confirm the existence of only three dedicated female facilities nationwide. In rural police outposts and small substations, there are sometimes no toilets, forcing officers to seek secluded areas in the countryside, which is arguably riskier and more humiliating for women.
Most of the funding for Afghanistan's police force comes through a UN-run trust fund, which has included plans for female toilets in this year's planning, HRW said. But it needs approval from the interior minister and a dedicated cashflow, and 12 years after the overthrow of the Taliban, the most basic facilities for female police staff do not appear to be a priority.
Honor killing: Public execution of 25-year-old woman in Badghis
By MEENA HASEEB - 25 Apr 2013, 10:28 am Khaama Press
According to reports, a 25-year-old woman was killed during a public execution carried out by religious clerics and local council in western Badghis province of Afghanistan.
Local authorities in Badghis province said the woman was executed for escaping from her home.
Head of the provincial media department for Badghis province, Mirwais Mirzakwal said the woman was 25-year-old and had escaped from her home with a stranger man in Ab-Kamari district.
Mr. Mirzakwal further added, the woman was sentenced to death by religious clerics and local council after she was found by her father in law family.
He said the woman was shot dead by her father after the religious clerics ordered her execution.
There are no reports regarding the fate of the man who had taken the woman with her.
Police officials are saying that investigations have been started in this regard and no suspect has been arrested so far.
Violence against women in Afghanistan continues to rise despite government efforts to implement the law on elimination of violence and the establishment of a High Commission for the Prevention of Violence against Women, according to officials in ministry of women’s affairs of Afghanistan.
The Americans and Europeans have put a special emphasis on programs to help Afghan women and raise awareness of their rights however as the Western money and presence are dwindling, women’s advocates fear that even the limited gains will erode and a more tribal and Taliban culture will prevail.
Afghan Army Bruised by Long Battle
Wall Street Journal By NATHAN HODGE and HABIB KHAN TOTAKHIL April 24, 2013
KABUL - New details about an ambush on Afghan troops in March and the army's stumbles in the monthlong battle that followed illustrate the challenges Afghanistan faces in taking over security around the country.
Afghan and coalition officials said recently concluded operations in the usually peaceful northeastern province of Badakhshan laid bare a range of problems faced by Afghan security forces throughout the country, from lack of advance planning and communication to inadequate supply and logistics.
What began as a simple resupply mission turned into a prolonged fight to reclaim a remote mountainous district. It also illustrated Afghanistan's reliance on coalition air power: In the final week of the operation, the Afghans had to call for backup from North Atlantic Treaty Organization aircraft—support that won't be available once foreign forces withdraw by the end of next year.
The fighting took place in Warduj district, along a highway used by insurgents and traffickers as a conduit for weapons and narcotics. The highway links the rest of Badakhshan with the Wakhan corridor, a sliver of land that shares borders with China, Pakistan and Tajikistan.
The mountain passes of the district, one of the most isolated parts of Afghanistan, offer easy concealment and natural fighting positions, said Fabrizio Foschini, a political analyst at the Kabul-based Afghan Analysts Network. "The terrain is a nightmare," he said.
On March 4, a group of well-armed and well-organized insurgents staged a surprise attack on an army convoy resupplying a police outpost in Warduj, Afghan officials said. Around 60 Afghan military personal were trapped; the insurgents killed 14 troops and took a number of soldiers hostage, Maj. Gen. Afzal Aman, the operations chief of the Afghan defense ministry, told The Wall Street Journal.
"It was a big blow to the Afghan army units," Gen. Aman said.
Government forces responded immediately by launching a military operation—dubbed Ghashai, or Arrow,in Pashto—to clear the road and drive the insurgents from their fighting positions.
That phase initially faltered: Gen. Aman said Afghan forces lacked adequate supplies and had poor contacts with the locals, something seen as vital for collecting timely intelligence on the enemy.
They also needed more firepower. Footage released to local television by the military showed Afghan troops attacking insurgents with truck-mounted machine guns. After launching a third, more intense offensive push later in the month, the Afghans brought in heavy weaponry, including their Soviet-designed howitzers. Gen. Aman said the army at the height of the fighting fired around 50 to 60 artillery rounds in a single day.
Some of the captured Afghan troops were freed in an early prisoner exchange. In the final week of the operation, which ended on April 5, the NATO coalition provided close air support and deployed medical evacuation aircraft. Around 200 coalition ground troops, mostly from Germany, also took part, said Lt. Col. Marco Schmidl, a spokesman for the coalition's northern command.
Five troops remain in the insurgents' custody, Afghan officials said. Over 45 insurgent fighters were killed in the operation, and no civilians were hurt, the officials said.
Afghan officials also issued contradictory information: Two days after the initial firefight, provincial officials claimed the insurgents had executed 16 prisoners seized in the ambush, but senior Afghan officials later said the men were killed in the initial exchange of fire.
Badakhshan, inhabited mostly by ethnic Tajiks, was one of the few parts of the country that remained outside Taliban control before the 2001 U.S.-led invasion. Afghan soldiers and police have been responsible for the province's security since NATO forces formally handed over the province early last year.
Afghan and coalition officials say well-armed criminal groups have found common cause with Islamic militants in the region. Criminal groups have often allied with insurgents to obtain "a costume of legitimacy," said U.S. Army Col. Nicholas Scopellite, who oversees police development in Afghanistan.
In Warduj, he said, the Afghan police showed adequate coordination with the Afghan army, despite long-standing criticism that the two forces often do not work well together. "Just like in any other country, if we [encounter] more firepower, we go to the people who have even more, which is [the] military, which is what happened there," he said.
Top Afghan officials have long complained that the U.S. and its allies failed to provide Kabul with enough high-end weaponry to tackle the insurgency. When Afghan President Hamid Karzai visited Washington earlier this year, he arrived with a wish list of military equipment. The recent fighting in the north could help bolster their argument that Kabul needs more warplanes, better artillery and sophisticated surveillance equipment before the coalition is no longer around to call on for support.
The monthlong battle in the northeast exposed the Afghan military's shortfalls at a moment when the government in Kabul has accused neighboring Pakistan over what it sees as interference in its sovereignty and indirect support for insurgents.
Top Afghan officials have also blamed Pakistan for military setbacks in the country, including a recent attack on an army outpost that was overrun by militants in eastern Kunar province. Maj. Gen. Zahir Azimi, spokesman for the Afghan Defense Ministry, told reporters last week that "foreign intelligence" had provided support to the insurgents in Badakhshan, a phrase Afghan officials often employ to refer indirectly to Pakistan's powerful spy agency.
Gen. Azimi didn't name the foreign power involved in the Badakhshan fighting, but made the statement following a lengthy condemnation of Pakistani activities along their shared border.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Wednesday that a meeting in Brussels with Afghan President Karzai and Pakistani Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani made progress. He said a dialogue on political and security issues was on a "good track," but declined to spell out what, if anything, had been achieved.
Before the meeting, Mr. Karzai's office said the meeting would focus on the Afghan peace process and recent tensions between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
With the conclusion of the army operation in Badakhshan, the army had managed to reassert government control in Warduj, Afghan and coalition officials said. A full army battalion is now stationed there.
"The road is open for traffic," said a spokesman for the provincial governor's office. —Saeed Shah in Islamabad and Stephen Fidler in Brussels contributed to this article.
Write to Nathan Hodge at nathan.hodge@wsj.com
Nato's Support to Afghan Troops Sustainment Takes Shape
TOLOnews.com 24 April 2013
The Nato Secretary General, Anders Fogh Rasmussen said Tuesday that "Nato's support to the Afghan troops sustainment takes shape."
Nato Foreign Ministers from Nato and Isaf partner nations made commitment in shaping Nato's long-term support to Afghanistan at a meeting in Brussels on Tuesday.
"Today we agreed on the means to ensure transparency and accountability in our future funding mechanisms of the Afghan security forces. This is an important pillar of the international community's wider commitment to sustaining Afghanistan in the years to come," General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said.
The Nato's contribution to the long-term sustainment of the Afghan national army is one aspect of Nato's engagement in Afghanistan after the Isaf mission is completed at the end of 2014.
It is an integral part of the broader International Community's efforts to support the long-term financial sustainment of the Afghan security forces. A new mission to continue to train, advise and assist the Afghan national army and police after 2014 will complement Nato's long-term commitment in the country.
"Our engagement will enter a new and different chapter, with a mission to train, advise and assist the Afghan security forces," Rasmussen said. "Planning for this mission is currently underway."
"The range of our commitment to Afghanistan is unprecedented. We have provided resources, and skills to the Afghan forces along with time and space so they can grow strong", he said, while stressing that much work remain to be done. "We will not walk away."
"The Government of Afghanistan has made clear commitments to hold credible elections; to fight corruption; to uphold human rights; and to enforce the rule of law. We commend the efforts made so far, and the continued efforts of the Government of Afghanistan will pave the way for our continued support for years to come," the Secretary General said.
In a meeting with President Karzai, Rasmussen also said that, soon we will see Afghan troops and police take the lead for security across the country, as Isaf shifts its role from combat to support.
The foreign troops will leave Afghanistan by the end of 2014, after the Afghan security forces take over full security responsibility.
There are around 100,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan helping over 300,000 Afghan security forces fight insurgency.
Target Of Taliban Justice Tells Of Brutal Amputation
By Ron Synovitz April 24, 2013 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
HERAT, Afghanistan -- Faiz Ahmad says his life has become meaningless since the Taliban robbed him of his ability to work last week by chopping off his right hand and his left foot.
The 25-year-old driver from western Afghanistan is now recovering at Herat Regional Hospital after a hellish, monthlong ordeal as a captive of the Taliban.
"I have become useless," he says. "I can't do anything with my life anymore. I can't be involved in any professions as I could before when I was able to do anything. I used to be able to farm and I was very good at driving."
Taliban spokesman Qari Yousaf Ahmadi has confirmed that Taliban militants abducted Faiz and his friend, 22-year-old driver Zarin, a month ago from their village in the province's Rabat Sangi district.
He also has confirmed that Taliban militants cut off the right hand and left foot of each man after holding them captive for four weeks.
The Taliban spokesman claims that the two were punished as "thieves" under the Taliban's strict interpretation of Islamic law. He says the verdict was delivered against them by a Shari'a court after they confessed that they had stolen money, motorcycles, and other valuables from Muslims over a lengthy period of time.
But Faiz and his relatives tell a different story.
Both Faiz and Zarin worked as drivers for a private security company that escorts NATO supply convoys in western Afghanistan. Their relatives see the amputations as punishment and a warning for anyone cooperating with NATO forces.
Now both men are recovering at Herat Regional Hospital where Faiz, who has been married for three years, lives with his wife and 18-month-old son.
"The Taliban wanted us to cooperate with them and take explosives inside the company that we worked for and detonate them," he told RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan. "They asked us more than 20 times, saying that if we did it we would be freed."
No Anesthesia
Faiz claims that when he and Zarin continued to refuse to carry out the bomb attack, his captors told them that they should never work for their security firm again.
Esmatullah, a cousin of Zarin, says the Taliban also demanded that the drivers' relatives pay a ransom to secure their release. But Esmatullah said both families are impoverished and could not afford to pay the money.
Faiz said his ordeal began one afternoon in mid-March as he was resting at his home. He said Taliban fighters in six cars arrived, surrounding his house and storming inside to kidnap him.
By Faiz's reckoning, he was a prisoner of the Taliban for 27 days before they were beaten with chains and the amputations were carried out. He maintains that he never testified before any council, mullah, or trial judge -- and that the militants didn't try to justify the punishment under Islamic principles.
"On the 28th day, they cut off our hands and feet in some desert area and threw them there before my very eyes," he says. "They didn't even give us anesthesia before they cut off our hands. I was blindfolded but I could see through a hole."
The Taliban then dumped both men on the side of the highway that links the city of Herat with Turkmenistan farther to the north.
Loose Interpretation Of Islamic Law
Herat Regional Hospital spokesman Mohammad Rafiq Shirzai said Faiz and Zarin were unconscious when a local villager found them and drove them to the medical facility for treatment.
Amputations were a common form of punishment in Afghanistan when the Taliban was in power. But since the collapse of their regime in late 2001, there have been few known cases of Taliban amputations.
In most instances where the Taliban has carried out its interpretation of Islamic Shari'a law since late 2001, individuals have been killed -- by being shot, beheaded, or stoned to death.
Mussa Mahmoudi, executive director of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, told RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan that even if the Taliban did conduct a trial against Faiz and Zarin, the punishment would have been carried out on the basis of an illegal tribal court decision -- a ruling based on a loose interpretation of Islamic law and local tribal customs without a certified Islamic judge.
"It is an illegal violation of judicial process and it is not Islamic," he says. "No one has the right to take such actions against other people based on their own judgment. This kind of punishment is against all the principles of human rights as well as against Islamic edicts and teachings."
Mahmoudi maintains that ultimately it is the responsibility of Afghanistan's central government to ensure that laws are properly enforced and that tribal courts stop carrying out their own interpretation of Islamic law.
Written by Ron Synovitz, with reporting by RFE/RL Radio Free Afghanistan correspondents Shapoor Saber in Herat and Norias Nori in Prague
Afghan Troops Able to Defend Country: Official
TOLOnews.com By Azem Arash 24 April 2013
The Afghan deputy chief of staff Lieutenant General Mohammad Akram said Wednesday that the army forces have now gained good incentive and are able to defend the country.
Speaking at a graduation ceremony of army Special Forces in Kabul, General Mohammad Akram said that the forces have been trained professionally and people's trust is increasing.
He stressed on professionalising the army for improvement of security in the country.
His comment comes as, today 700 of army special forces gained graduation certificates and were deployed to insecure areas for clean-up operations.
Women were also among these Special Forces who have been trained professionally and today are going on mission into insecure areas and look happy.
"I assure that these forces will perform their task successfully alongside other security forces," General Mohammad Akram said.
Meanwhile, the commander of the special operations of the Ministry of Defence, General Sayed Abdul Kareem said that "we promise to the people that army forces have gained ability to maintain security of their homeland".
It comes as, the Nato Secretary General, Anders Fogh Rasmussen said Tuesday that "Nato's support to the Afghan army sustainment takes shape."
Nato Foreign Ministers from Nato and Isaf partner nations made commitment in shaping Nato's long-term support to Afghanistan at a meeting in Brussels on Tuesday.
"Today we agreed on the means to ensure transparency and accountability in our future funding mechanisms of the Afghan security forces. This is an important pillar of the international community's wider commitment to sustaining Afghanistan in the years to come," General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said.
The Afghan security forces will take over full security responsibility of the country by the end of 2014, as the foreign troops will leave Afghanistan.
There are around 100,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan helping over 300,000 Afghan security forces fight insurgency.
Nato to Keep Drone for Post-2014 Support of Afghan Forces
TOLOnews By Saleha Soadat 24 April 2013
Following withdrawal of international troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2014, Washington and London will keep their drones to support Afghan security forces continue fighting against insurgency, Nato's air force General Jake Polumbo said Wednesday.
Present challenges against Afghan air force requires using the unmanned aerial vehicles beyond the end of 2014, Polumbo said.
"It will take time for the Afghan air force to end up as a full operational capability as we call it FOC, and that will take into the end of 2016 timeframe at best, and we understand that. That is exactly how we have partnered with the Afghan security forces, in particular the air force, is to be committed to that duration, to bring on these aircrafts, these training mechanisms, and the like," the senior Nato and US airman said.
The US general added that there are currently 6,000 for the Afghan air force, yet only one percent of them are capable of carrying out air operations.
"The results are showing, not only in the training environment but more importantly on the battlefield, Afghan air force airmen have conducted winner resupply missions to remote Afghan national army locations in Nurestan province in the east, and they have provided direct support to Afghan border police in Paktika, Zabul province in the east, and also down in the south in Kandahar province," he said.
"During recent combat operations Afghan air force helicopters flew life-saving casualty evacuation flights, and they also conducted independent air assaults in the contested areas."
Afghan defence ministry, on the other hand, suggested that dialogues on post-2014 drones for Afghan air force are on-going between Kabul and Washington.
"There are matters that are related to agreements by the Afghan government. On issues related to after 2014, and activities, and other related issues, the government is discussing," said General Zahir Azimi, spokesman to Afghan defence ministry.
Nato has around 300 trainers for Afghan air force among whom a very few number are believed to leave the country after 2014.
The circumstances of drone missions of Afghanistan are reportedly part of the bilateral security agreement between Afghanistan and the United States, the agreement on which talks are yet not finalised.
www.afghaistannewscenter.com
By MEENA HASEEB - 25 Apr 2013, 4:34 pm Khaama Press
According to local authorities in eastern Logar province of Afghanistan, Taliban group has for the first time set conditions for the release of kidnapped foreigners who were held following an emergency landing of a helicopter in this province.
Provincial council chief Dr. Abdul Wali Wakil said they have held talks with the local Taliban commanders regarding the foreign hostages and Taliban group is demanding prisoners exchange to release the hostages.
The foreigners including Turkish engineers were kidnapped by Taliban militants in Azra district on Sunday evening after they helicopter made an emergency landing.
In the meantime deputy provincial governor Mohammad Hashim Faizi says that they have not been able to achieve a satisfactory result despite ongoing talks with the Taliban militants during the past five days.
Mr. Faizi also added that Taliban militants have shifted the hostages back to Azra district after they were temporarily taken to Hesarak district in Nangarhar province.
8 Pakistani Taliban militants arrested in Kandahar
By SAYED JAWAD - 25 Apr 2013, 4:07 pm Khaama Press
According to local authorities in southern Kandahar province of Afghanistan, Afghan security forces arrested at least 8 Pakistani Taliban militants in Panjwai district.
District governor for Panjwai, Haji Fazal Ahmad confirming the report said the Pakistani Taliban militants were sent to suppress anti-Taliban uprising forces.
Mr. Fazal Ahmad further added Taliban district governor for Zherai was also among those arrested.
In the meantime local officials in Panjwai district said militants attacked Afghan security forces while they were eradicating opium from the fields in this district.
The officials further added at least one Afghan police officer was injured and their equipments were set on fire by militants during the gun battle.
Afghanistan Jails US Government Employee
By SADAF SHINWARI - 25 Apr 2013, 12:09 pm Khaama Press
A former contractor for a recently completed U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) project in Afghanistan has been sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison and a $9,500 fine.
Noor Anwarzai, 36, was sentenced by Afghanistan’s Special Anti-Corruption Tribunal on April 8, 2013. The Tribunal found Mr. Anwarzai guilty of violating Afghan Penal Code Article 268, regarding embezzlement of funds and Article 310 regarding the forgery of official documents.
Abdul Khabir Kakar, another former contractor accused in the case, was acquitted and subsequently released. He was not found to have been involved in the fraud.
The sentencing came as part of what U.S. Government officials described as an ongoing campaign against fraud and waste in reconstruction and development activities in Afghanistan. The investigation was conducted jointly by the Afghanistan Attorney General’s Office Anti-Corruption Unit and USAID’s Office of Inspector General.
Commenting on the Anti-Corruption Tribunal’s ruling, USAID’s Deputy Inspector General Michael G. Carroll expressed his appreciation for the strong partnership between USAID’s OIG investigators and Afghan law enforcement officials that led to the recent ruling. “Partnerships with law enforcement agencies overseas are critical to our efforts to combat waste, fraud, and abuse in development activities worldwide. This sentencing demonstrates how effective these partnerships can be,” he said.
Noor Anwarzai and Abdul Khabir Kakar are former employees of the recently concluded Afghanistan Farm Service Alliance project implemented by Citizen’s Network for Foreign Affairs (CNFA). The two were arrested by the Afghan National Police in November 2012 on charges of conspiring to embezzle approximately $10,000 of USAID funds. They were accused of falsifying official documentation from the Afghan Ministry of Finance, indicating that CNFA had paid the appropriate local property taxes for the office building when they had not.
Afghanistan quake, floods kills at least 33
ReutersReuters – Wed, Apr 24, 2013.
JALALABAD, Afghanistan (Reuters) - An earthquake in Afghanistan's east and flash floods in the north killed at least 33 people on Wednesday as hundreds of traditional mud-brick homes collapsed, officials said.
The 5.7 magnitude quake, which hit before 2 p.m. (10:30 p.m. British time) was felt as far away as the Indian capital New Delhi and was the latest in a spate of tremors to shake Asia this month.
The quake was 65 km (40 miles) deep with an epicentre 11 km (seven miles) from Mehtar Lam, capital of the eastern province of Laghman, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
At least 18 people were killed in adjacent Nangarhar and Kunar provinces and the death toll was expected to rise, a spokesman for the Afghan Red Crescent Society said. Some 70 people were injured in Nangarhar alone.
Hundreds of homes collapsed across Kunar and Nangarhar.
Wednesday saw steady rain across most of Afghanistan, which would have weakened the mud-brick dwellings many Afghans live in, according to the National Disaster Management Authority.
The agency did not yet have its own casualty figures.
Rain also caused flash-flooding in the northern province of Balkh earlier on Wednesday, killing 15 people, provincial council member Fazel Hadidi said.
Buildings swayed in New Delhi and panicky people ran into the street in the disputed northern region of Kashmir, where an quake killed about 75,000 people in 2005, most on the Pakistan side. Wednesday's quake was also felt in the Pakistani capital Islamabad.
Last week, a 6.6 magnitude earthquake killed nearly 200 people in southwest China, a few days after another powerful tremor killed 35 people in Pakistan near the border with Iran.
(Reporting by Rafiq Sherad in Jalalabad, Mohammad Anwar in Asababad, Satarupa Bhattacharjya in New Delhi, Fayaz Bukhari in Srinagar and Kathryn Houreld in Islamabad; writing by Frank Jack Daniel and Dylan Welch, editing by Mark Heinrich)
Prince Harry to be deployed with Australian Army
CANBERRA, April 25 (Xinhua) -- Prince Harry will spend six months on secondment with the Australian Army as royal aides and security officials assess the risks of such a deployment, The Australian reported on Thursday.
According to the report, Australian Department of Defence, British Army and Clarence House in London are discussing where and when the deployment would occur, and whether Prince Harry would serve on the frontline.
Prince Harry, the 28-year-old Apache attack helicopter co-pilot in Afghanistan, could be formally embedded with an Australian army unit or make an extended visit as an observer under the plan.
He has already had two deployments in Afghanistan. In 2008 he served as a forward air controller as part of the NATO force in Helmand Province. He then spent 20 weeks in Afghanistan serving the Army Air Corps.
Kerry: Pakistan-Afghanistan meetings end ‘on a good track’
Washington Post By Karen DeYoung April 24, 2013
BRUSSELS - After meeting for more than three hours here Wednesday with Afghan and Pakistani leaders, Secretary of State John F. Kerry reported progress in relaunching negotiations but warned, “We’re not going to raise expectations or promise results that can’t be delivered.”
Instead, Kerry said before boarding a plane to return to Washington, the leaders agreed to “underpromise but deliver.”
“We’re all going to go home and do our homework,” he said, flanked by Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, Pakistan’s army chief. The trio had eaten lunch together and walked the grounds of a secluded estate outside Brussels as part of their meeting.
Karzai and Kayani, who had eyed each other warily at the beginning of the session, standing stiffly before a row of reporters, shook hands warmly at the end. Kerry promised that they would continue the dialogue in hopes of finding a way to work together on peace negotiations with the Taliban.
“We agreed we are committed to try to find stability and peace for both countries and the region,” Kerry said. “I think we’re on a good track,” he added, but “results will tell the story.”
The meeting was held amid a new round of recriminations between the two governments and rising nervousness on both sides of their shared border over the fast-approaching departure of U.S. combat troops from Afghanistan.
Obama administration officials, who have long said that a negotiated settlement with the Taliban was the only way to truly end the Afghanistan war, see the window for talks closing. Kerry called “the road forward” a “crucial transformation period.”
The Taliban walked out of preliminary talks with the United States more than a year ago, alleging bad faith in negotiations over a possible prisoner swap in which five Taliban detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, would be released in exchange for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the U.S. soldier held by the group in Pakistan since 2009.
With this year’s fighting season well underway, U.S. intelligence officials think that the Taliban’s senior, Pakistan-based leaders and its ground commanders inside Afghanistan are divided over whether to wait out the U.S. departure or to join the Afghan political process in hopes of winning influence at the ballot box next year.
Afghanistan has accused Pakistan of playing a double game, saying publicly that it favors talks between the Taliban and Karzai’s government while privately keeping the Taliban leadership on a tight leash to prevent the negotiations from getting off the ground.
Pakistan insists that it does not control the Taliban. But it fears that post-withdrawal chaos next door will undermine its security and wants to preserve its leverage over events in Afghanistan.
The Obama administration has tried for several years to bring the two governments together in tripartite talks. Although there has been some progress, with an increase in cross-border trade and pledges of further cooperation, both sides remain mutually suspicious and occasionally hostile.
Afghanistan has accused the Pakistani military of firing across the border in the rugged mountain region where militants operate on both sides, and it alleged that Pakistan aided insurgents who killed 13 Afghan soldiers this month in Konar province.
Pakistan accuses Afghanistan and the U.S. military of failing to pursue members of the Pakistani Taliban, a separate group that it says has sanctuaries on the Afghan side.
A Pakistani agreement to host a meeting between top religious leaders from both countries remains unfulfilled. Pakistan holds a number of top Taliban leaders in detention and agreed, in earlier U.S.-sponsored talks, to release them to Afghanistan’s High Peace Council so they could participate in peace talks. Although some were released late last year, U.S. and Afghan officials said they were not placed in official Afghan hands but were simply let go. Those Taliban members at the top of the Afghan list remain in Pakistani custody.
The border between the two countries has long been disputed, and Afghanistan does not recognize the Durand Line drawn by the British last century. This month, Karzai angrily alleged encroachment when Pakistan constructed a border gate in mountainous territory that he insisted belongs to Afghanistan. Hundreds of Afghan students in the city of Jalalabad, near the frontier, demonstrated and shouted anti-Pakistan slogans.
The Obama administration is juggling its relationships with both governments. Kerry, who interacted with senior Afghan and Pakistani leaders for years as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, clearly hoped his participation in Wednesday’s talks would break the ice.
“We are going to have a trilateral and try to talk about how we can advance this process in the simplest, most cooperative, most cogent way, so that we wind up with both Pakistan’s and Afghanistan’s interests being satisfied — but, most importantly, with a stable and peaceful Afghanistan,” Kerry told diplomats Tuesday at a NATO meeting here at which the alliance discussed its plans for withdrawal from the country in 2014.
Karzai also used that meeting as an opportunity to invite the participation of Kayani, who maintains tight control over Pakistan’s foreign and defense policies.
Pakistan has only a transitional government at the moment, with elections scheduled for next month. Although there is no foreign minister in place, Kayani was accompanied by Foreign Secretary Jalil Abbas Jilani.
In model Afghan city, kidnappings surge
Washington Post By Kevin Sieff Thursday, April 25, 2013
HERAT, Afghanistan - Nine-year-old Ali Sena Nowruzee’s disappearance was disturbingly predictable, even in a city largely untouched by the Taliban and often held up as an example of what a peaceful Afghanistan might look like.
As in dozens of other kidnappings targeting Herat’s burgeoning middle class, residents assumed that he would be released once his family delivered tens of thousands of dollars in ransom. Instead, the rosy-cheeked third-grader became famous here after the discovery of his body, hastily buried on the city’s outskirts.
In death, he has become a poster child for an unlikely crisis in an unlikely place.
In this modern city far from the battlefields, the growing epidemic of abductions has raised a troubling question about Afghanistan’s future: What if eradicating the insurgency only creates space for a new generation of criminal networks?
Last year, nearly 500 people in Herat were arrested on kidnapping charges, compared with about a dozen five years ago, according to Afghan officials. Perpetrators asked for millions in ransom, targeting the families of industrialists, politicians and bankers, who typically remain quiet about the cases and often flee the country after they are resolved.
Other relatively peaceful parts of the country, including Kabul and Jalalabad, also have experienced a surge in abductions that weak police forces have been unable to stem, causing top U.S. and Afghan officials to worry about a threat to stability as insidious as any insurgency but with financial, not ideological, objectives.
The trend has been particularly alarming in Herat, Afghanistan’s third-largest city, which has been a relative haven as war raged in other parts of the nation over the past decade. Cross-border trade with Iran and Turkmenistan and a thriving marble industry — as well as distance from the insurgency’s southern and eastern strongholds — have aided Herat’s prosperity since the fall of the Taliban, in 2001. Its economy, with more than 20 percent annual growth over most of the past decade, has outpaced that of every other Afghan city.
Today, the city that led an early revolt against a communist government in the late 1970s is unmistakably progressive by Afghan standards, with women driving unaccompanied along leafy avenues and quiet parks full of picnicking families.
Police investigations have yielded little insight into the character of the kidnapping networks that are plaguing Herat. There are mixed views about whether they are vast, well-connected enterprises or small-scale operations. Some Afghan officials contend that part of the ransoms end up in the hands of the Taliban, hundreds of miles away. Others say high-level government officials are involved.
The only consensus is that the crime spree has been a blow to growth and security in Herat, which U.S. Deputy Secretary of State William J. Burns praised last year for its “considerable economic potential.”
“These are crimes that undermine the legitimacy of the government and could even lead to its toppling,” Abdul Raziq Nejrabi, the head of Herat’s national security tribunal, which deals with kidnapping cases, said of the city and provincial administrations.
A trusted protector turns
Ali Sena vanished in December while on his way to school, a short walk from his home in an upper-middle-class residential neighborhood. His father, Naseer Ahmad Nowruzee, 41, who owns construction and money-exchange businesses, called the police and was told to wait — a request for ransom would come soon, as it always did.
“It was our greatest fear come true,” Nowruzee said.
Hours later, a man called to say that Ali Sena would be released for $400,000. Even for a successful Herat businessman, it was an extraordinary sum, more than 500 times the average yearly income in Afghanistan.
It took three weeks for Nowruzee to negotiate the ransom down to $65,000, an amount he could barely afford. In that time, the police traced phone calls and pursued leads in an unsuccessful attempt to identify and locate the kidnappers.
Soon, Nowruzee would learn that the man behind his son’s disappearance was the very person he had trusted to protect his family from the growing kidnapping threat, the man Ali Sena called “my uncle,” whose picture the boy kept on a family cellphone — his bodyguard, Abdul Samir.
In an interview at Herat’s provincial prison, Samir said he was inspired by kidnapping reports he had heard on local television and radio. It seemed like an easy way to make money, he said.
On that day in December, before Ali Sena reached school, Samir told the boy to hop on his motorcycle. Then he raced to a friend’s house, where Ali Sena would be kept as a prisoner for five weeks.
“Once we arrived there, he started to cry,” said Samir, who said he planned to free Ali Sena when Nowruzee delivered the money.
That’s typically how kidnappings in Herat end.
In November, the son of the former mayor was left on the outskirts of the city, bloody and bruised, after his father paid $200,000 for his release. A physician’s son was freed last month after nearly $100,000 was paid. Ghulam Sakhi Zurmati, a trader from Herat province, spent 72 days in a hole in the ground until his family came up with $150,000 late last year.
But days after Nowruzee’s associate deposited bags full of $100 bills in an alley specified by kidnappers — after Ali Sena’s mother prepared his favorite meal, in anticipation of his return — there was still no sign of the boy.
A city in shock
There would be no sign until early February, when police located the home where he had been kept, in a closet-size room that now held little more than a blanket and empty juice boxes. One of the kidnappers confessed and told authorities where to begin digging.
When they found Ali Sena’s body, police saw that he had been bludgeoned in the back of the head. According to forensic tests, he was buried alive. It was the kind of brutality that Afghans in the insurgent-dominated south and east are accustomed to, but a level of violence new to Herat.
Word spread rapidly across Herat. The next day, more than 10,000 people closed their businesses and marched across the city behind Nowruzee, who held his son’s body.
“The death of human rights,” the crowd screamed.
The family refused to bury Ali Sena until the government gave assurance that his killers would be executed.
“We needed to send a message,” Nowruzee said. “This can’t continue happening. The Taliban never permitted this kind of criminal activity.”
A day later, as protests paralyzed the city, Afghan President Hamid Karzai called Nowruzee on his cellphone. He asked: Was there anything the government could do to help?
Nowruzee had only one demand: He wanted his son’s killers to be executed.
“You bury the child,” Karzai said in the conversation, which Nowruzee recorded and shared with a Washington Post reporter. (Officials from the presidential palace who insisted on anonymity confirmed that the account was accurate.) “I will issue the decree immediately and will speak with the chief justice.”
Nowruzee accepted the president’s pledge and buried his son.
In early March, a court sentenced Samir and an accomplice to death. Four others involved in the kidnapping were given six to 20 years in prison. The other defendants said Samir ordered Ali Sena to be killed because the boy would be able to identify his kidnappers. Samir, in the interview, said another collaborator ordered the killing without his permission.
It appeared that Ali Sena’s death had become a tipping point, an outlet for public anger over an escalating problem that many here say has been ignored by the Afghan government and Western forces because of the Taliban’s apparent lack of involvement.
“We worked hard for what we have, and now anyone with money is a target,” said Alhaj Siroos Allaf, the deputy chairman of Herat’s chamber of commerce. “People are tired of being scared and receiving no help from the government. They are leaving Herat.”
Kidnappings continue despite outcry
Since February, photos and posters of Ali Sena’s face, many printed with the words “May his memory endure in our hearts,” have become ubiquitous across the city. A group of businessmen started the National Assembly of the People, an anti-kidnapping group aimed at pressuring the government into action.
The police chief, Rahmatullah Safi, has countered by plastering billboards with photos of himself returning kidnapped children to their parents.
“Police in the service of the people,” the billboards read.
But other government officials have been implicated in kidnapping schemes. The police chief of Injeel district, outside Herat city, has also been charged in Ali Sena’s kidnapping, accused of helping orchestrate the crime. Saleem Shah, the district police chief, has not yet been sentenced.
Despite the public outcry, the kidnappings have not stopped. Last month, five employees of a marble extraction company were abducted. Last week, a teenage girl was kidnapped and raped.
Nowruzee has hired four new bodyguards, whom he acknowledged he does not entirely trust. But he and his family don’t leave the house, which is plastered with billboard-size images of Ali Sena, unless they have to. His wife, Nafisa Nabizada, is afraid to visit her son’s grave.
“I used to love my city and my country,” she said. “Now I’ve had enough of Afghanistan.”
Sayed Salahuddin contributed to this report
A Superheroic Caped Crusade to Keep Troops Safe in Afghanistan
Bagram Batman TV Spots Educate Military; 'He Acts Just as Well as Adam West Did'
Wall Street Journal By NATHAN HODGE April 24, 2013
BAGRAM AIR FIELD, Afghanistan - In fictional Gotham City, Batman protects citizens from crime. Here, at the largest U.S. base in Afghanistan, another Dark Knight is on a different kind of crusade: making sure soldiers carry their rifles and don't get run over at night.
"Bagram Batman" is the star of a recent series of public-service announcements broadcast to troops deployed in and around Afghanistan. The camouflaged superhero—and his catchphrase, "SWEAR TO ME!"— have become an unlikely hit, winning a cult following among soldiers, and going viral on the Internet.
"He acts just as well as Adam West did," marvels Maj. Crispin Burke, an Army officer and military blogger, referring to the star of the original Batman movie and TV series in the 1960s.
While his do-it-yourself costume—rubber Batman mask, black cape and reflective belt over combat fatigues—may look like a joke, Bagram Batman has a very real mission: reminding the troops about the do's and don'ts of life on a forward operating base like Bagram, a small American town planted in the middle of a war zone.
Well, mostly the don'ts. Don't forget your weapon; don't wear headphones while jogging; and don't shoplift at the base exchange. Bagram Batman also enforces the most important rule of all: Don't forget your reflective belt, lest you be hit by the hulking Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected vehicles that roar in darkness through the base's main drag.
Bagram Batman debuted in early March with a 30-second TV ad on smoking safety. In the American Forces Network spot, the caped crusader catches a soldier sneaking a cigarette near a fuel tank and wrestles the offender to the ground.
"I swear, Batman, I'll never do it again!" the soldier protests. "SWEAR TO ME!" barks Bagram Batman.
DC Entertainment, the Warner Bros. Entertainment company that owns the Batman character, had no official statement regarding the videos.
The man behind the masked military version is an Army broadcast journalist, a military specialty known under its code 46 Romeo. Bagram Batman recently agreed to let a reporter accompany him on his rounds as he prowled the base for soldiers committing uniform violations.
"I'm glad to see you've got your eye-pro on," he growled at one group of soldiers, noting their ballistic eyewear.
A sprawling base in a high plain north of Kabul, Bagram is the ideal Gotham for a rules-enforcing Caped Crusader. Built by the Soviets, the base was severely battered during Afghanistan's civil war in the 1990s. Rebuilt by the U.S. military after the fall of the Taliban, Bagram now resembles a highly fortified strip mall—a brightly lighted, well-paved outpost of America, complete with posted speed limits and mandatory seat-belt regulations.
It is also a hat-and-salute zone. An amused-looking soldier saluted Bagram Batman as he walked past, as he would a superior officer.
"What's your rank?" a reporter asked.
Bagram Batman pegs his rank at "O-6 and half," giving himself a fictional rank between full colonel (O-6) and brigadier general. "There's lieutenant colonel, then full-bird colonel, then me."
Bagram Batman also pokes gentle fun at one of the military's biggest obsessions—the dreaded reflective belt. For many service members, the reflective belt is the symbol of the military's overzealous enforcement of safety rules. A missing glow-belt is the surest way to invite a reprimand from a command sergeant major.
"Heck, wear two or three!" Bagram Batman suggests on his Facebook FB +0.50% page. "It's like a CSM forcefield!"
The Bagram Batcave is hidden inside the nondescript Building 415, where Bagram Batman and his sidekicks in uniform plot their public-safety campaigns. That is where the crime-fighter agreed to unmask. By day, Bagram Batman is Staff Sgt. Jesse Dyer, a 36-year-old Army broadcast journalist from Robbins, N.C.
Sgt. Dyer oversees a small team that shoots television spots that air on the Freedom Channel, an Afghanistan-specific American Forces Network channel, and helps run an FM radio station. A self-confessed Batman fanatic, Sgt. Dyer owns a full Dark Knight costume that he bought from UD Replicas, a company that makes licensed studio-quality costumes. At his home station in Vicenza, Italy, he dresses in the costume to volunteer at a children's hospital.
The idea for Bagram Batman emerged from a brainstorming session in the bullpen, the small office where military broadcast journalists think up ideas for public-service announcements.
"We were joking about how you should get your Batman suit out here," said Petty Officer First Class Xander Gamble, 28, a Navy mass communication specialist.
The Bagram Batman spots are a lively contrast to the typical fare that airs on military television. Military public-service announcements are legendary for hit-or-miss production values and scripts that often seem lifted from classroom scare films. Classic PSAs include exhortations to stay healthy while deployed ("Make sure you wash your hands thoroughly before going into the dining facility"), steer clear of Christmas-tree conflagrations ("Make sure to get a freshly cut tree") and avoid hypothermia while swimming ("¡El agua fría mata!")
So, after the U.S. Army posted a link to the weapons-carrying video—featuring Bagram Batman yelling "WHERE'S YOUR WEAPON?" at a clueless soldier—on an official Twitter account, @USArmy, Bagram Batman went viral.
When a Twitter parody, called @BagramBatman, surfaced, Sgt. Dyer responded by creating his own Twitter handle, @IamBagramBatman. The name is an homage to the campy television series. His profile has a thumbnail portrait of Bagram Batman knocking out a rule-breaking trooper with a "POW!"
Bagram Batman also started to attract a crowd here on base. Senior Airman Stephanie Palmisano, 24, an Air Force broadcaster who works with Sgt. Dyer, said public service announcement shoots usually drew a crowd of 20 or 25 people standing around watching and taking cellphone videos.
"That's why it's so important for him to stay in character the whole time," she said.
Despite the lighthearted approach, the risks of living and working in a combat zone are real. One of Bagram Batman's public safety spots features a soldier cranking up Taylor Swift tunes on his headphones before going out for a run. In doing so, he fails to hear the message over the base public address system warning of incoming fire. Batman pounces. "Never wear your headphones while you're running!" he exhorts. "I'm sorry Batman, I swear I'll never do it again!" the soldier says. Bagram Batman's response: "SWEAR TO ME!"
When shooting that segment, Sgt. Dyer said it finally hit home that Bagram Batman had achieved celebrity status.
"There were some guys who were about 100 meters away or so, and they were like, 'SWEAR TO ME!'"
"That's my line!" Bagram Batman replied.
Write to Nathan Hodge at nathan.hodge@wsj.com
Female Afghan police officers face sexual harassment: HRW
By SAYED JAWAD - 25 Apr 2013, 12:19 pm Khaama Press
The Human Righsts Watch (HRW) expressing concerns towards sexual harassment of female police officers, urged the government of Afghanistan to take immediate action to ensure that the country’s female police officers have access to separate, safe, and lockable restroom facilities in police stations.
HRW following a statement on Thursday said workplace sexual harassment is a serious problem in the public and private sectors in Afghanistan and female police officers are frequently the targets of harassment and assault.
The statement by HRW comes amid numerous media reports of rape of female police officers by male colleagues.
The lack of safe and separate toilets makes women particularly vulnerable, according to Human Rights Watch despite Kabul’s police chief issued an order on April 10, 2013, for the province’s police stations to provide separate toilets and change rooms for women, but similar orders have been ignored in the past, leaving all but a few of Afghanistan’s 1,500 women officers without suitable and safe facilities.
Human Rights Watch Asia Director, Brad Adams said, “The Afghan government’s failure to provide female police officers with safe, secure facilities makes them more vulnerable to abuse.”
He said, “This is not just about toilets. It’s about the government’s recognition that women have a crucial role to play in law enforcement in Afghanistan.”
“Harassment and abuse is an everyday experience for many Afghan women,” Adams said, adding that, “Without the consistent presence of female police officers across the country, legal protections for women will remain an unfulfilled promise.”
The report also comes amid Afghanistan Interior Ministry’s goal to hire 5,000 women in Afghan police by the end of 2014, which is currently very small and forms 1 percent of police officers across the country.
The Afghan government, with the support of international advisors and donors, has tried to address this problem through the creation of specialized units in police stations called Family Response Units (FRUs), the report concluded. However their effectiveness has been seriously hampered by the lack of female police officers available to staff them.
HRW in its report also urged Afghan authorities should take various measures to prevent and punish workplace sexual harassment of female police officers.
Afghanistan's female police officers fight for women-only toilets
Female police officers often suffer harassment from colleagues amid lack of dedicated facilities, says Human Rights Watch
The Guardian By Emma Graham-Harrison 24 April 2013
Kabul - It is the smallest but most telling of details that reveals Afghanistan's real attitude towards the women it claims to want at the heart of the national police force.
There are recruitment advertisements and public information films, western funding for training and special uniforms. But when female officers turn up to work most of them discover there are no dedicated female facilities, according to a report from Human Rights Watch (HRW). That also means they have nowhere private to change into the uniform that would identify them as a Taliban target if they wore them on a daily commute.
"We have to use male facilities. Toilets and changing rooms are an absolute necessity for women working in the police," said a senior officer who asked not to be named because her superiors had not authorised an interview.
The often filthy, flooded stalls have no locks, so women stand guard for each other when they need to use them.
"The Afghan government's failure to provide female police officers with safe, secure facilities makes them more vulnerable to abuse," said Brad Adams, Asia director at HRW. "This is not just about toilets. It's about the government's recognition that women have a crucial role to play in law enforcement in Afghanistan."
Women are often targeted by predatory colleagues while using shared toilets in isolated corners of stations, said an international adviser to the police force. "Those facilities that women do have access to often have peepholes or doors which don't lock. Women have to go in pairs. Toilets are a site of harassment," the adviser told HRW.
Afghan and foreign women say the lack of basic facilities is just one part of a wider culture of disrespect that discourages prospective police officers. It also has wider, societal implications, because without female officers, there are concerns there may not be much progress on promises to tackle rampant violence against women.
Only 1% of the country's police officers are women, according to HRW figures. The interior ministry, which oversees the force, admitted its goal of to recruit 5,000 women by the end of 2014 might be optimistic.
"Men whose rank is junior to me won't salute me. They don't value women as they should," said the senior officer. "I am supposed to recruit women, but people say they can't send their daughters because it is not safe."
Even in the capital, Kabul, the focus of the western effort to modernise Afghanistan and bolster its government, the only female stalls are in the force's national headquarters, the women say.
This month, the city police chief, Ayoub Salangi, ordered the construction of toilets for women in its stations. But when contacted by the Guardian, he denied there was a shortage of facilities and refused to give reporters permission to speak to officers.
In other Afghan cities, the situation is similar. HRW said it had been able to confirm the existence of only three dedicated female facilities nationwide. In rural police outposts and small substations, there are sometimes no toilets, forcing officers to seek secluded areas in the countryside, which is arguably riskier and more humiliating for women.
Most of the funding for Afghanistan's police force comes through a UN-run trust fund, which has included plans for female toilets in this year's planning, HRW said. But it needs approval from the interior minister and a dedicated cashflow, and 12 years after the overthrow of the Taliban, the most basic facilities for female police staff do not appear to be a priority.
Honor killing: Public execution of 25-year-old woman in Badghis
By MEENA HASEEB - 25 Apr 2013, 10:28 am Khaama Press
According to reports, a 25-year-old woman was killed during a public execution carried out by religious clerics and local council in western Badghis province of Afghanistan.
Local authorities in Badghis province said the woman was executed for escaping from her home.
Head of the provincial media department for Badghis province, Mirwais Mirzakwal said the woman was 25-year-old and had escaped from her home with a stranger man in Ab-Kamari district.
Mr. Mirzakwal further added, the woman was sentenced to death by religious clerics and local council after she was found by her father in law family.
He said the woman was shot dead by her father after the religious clerics ordered her execution.
There are no reports regarding the fate of the man who had taken the woman with her.
Police officials are saying that investigations have been started in this regard and no suspect has been arrested so far.
Violence against women in Afghanistan continues to rise despite government efforts to implement the law on elimination of violence and the establishment of a High Commission for the Prevention of Violence against Women, according to officials in ministry of women’s affairs of Afghanistan.
The Americans and Europeans have put a special emphasis on programs to help Afghan women and raise awareness of their rights however as the Western money and presence are dwindling, women’s advocates fear that even the limited gains will erode and a more tribal and Taliban culture will prevail.
Afghan Army Bruised by Long Battle
Wall Street Journal By NATHAN HODGE and HABIB KHAN TOTAKHIL April 24, 2013
KABUL - New details about an ambush on Afghan troops in March and the army's stumbles in the monthlong battle that followed illustrate the challenges Afghanistan faces in taking over security around the country.
Afghan and coalition officials said recently concluded operations in the usually peaceful northeastern province of Badakhshan laid bare a range of problems faced by Afghan security forces throughout the country, from lack of advance planning and communication to inadequate supply and logistics.
What began as a simple resupply mission turned into a prolonged fight to reclaim a remote mountainous district. It also illustrated Afghanistan's reliance on coalition air power: In the final week of the operation, the Afghans had to call for backup from North Atlantic Treaty Organization aircraft—support that won't be available once foreign forces withdraw by the end of next year.
The fighting took place in Warduj district, along a highway used by insurgents and traffickers as a conduit for weapons and narcotics. The highway links the rest of Badakhshan with the Wakhan corridor, a sliver of land that shares borders with China, Pakistan and Tajikistan.
The mountain passes of the district, one of the most isolated parts of Afghanistan, offer easy concealment and natural fighting positions, said Fabrizio Foschini, a political analyst at the Kabul-based Afghan Analysts Network. "The terrain is a nightmare," he said.
On March 4, a group of well-armed and well-organized insurgents staged a surprise attack on an army convoy resupplying a police outpost in Warduj, Afghan officials said. Around 60 Afghan military personal were trapped; the insurgents killed 14 troops and took a number of soldiers hostage, Maj. Gen. Afzal Aman, the operations chief of the Afghan defense ministry, told The Wall Street Journal.
"It was a big blow to the Afghan army units," Gen. Aman said.
Government forces responded immediately by launching a military operation—dubbed Ghashai, or Arrow,in Pashto—to clear the road and drive the insurgents from their fighting positions.
That phase initially faltered: Gen. Aman said Afghan forces lacked adequate supplies and had poor contacts with the locals, something seen as vital for collecting timely intelligence on the enemy.
They also needed more firepower. Footage released to local television by the military showed Afghan troops attacking insurgents with truck-mounted machine guns. After launching a third, more intense offensive push later in the month, the Afghans brought in heavy weaponry, including their Soviet-designed howitzers. Gen. Aman said the army at the height of the fighting fired around 50 to 60 artillery rounds in a single day.
Some of the captured Afghan troops were freed in an early prisoner exchange. In the final week of the operation, which ended on April 5, the NATO coalition provided close air support and deployed medical evacuation aircraft. Around 200 coalition ground troops, mostly from Germany, also took part, said Lt. Col. Marco Schmidl, a spokesman for the coalition's northern command.
Five troops remain in the insurgents' custody, Afghan officials said. Over 45 insurgent fighters were killed in the operation, and no civilians were hurt, the officials said.
Afghan officials also issued contradictory information: Two days after the initial firefight, provincial officials claimed the insurgents had executed 16 prisoners seized in the ambush, but senior Afghan officials later said the men were killed in the initial exchange of fire.
Badakhshan, inhabited mostly by ethnic Tajiks, was one of the few parts of the country that remained outside Taliban control before the 2001 U.S.-led invasion. Afghan soldiers and police have been responsible for the province's security since NATO forces formally handed over the province early last year.
Afghan and coalition officials say well-armed criminal groups have found common cause with Islamic militants in the region. Criminal groups have often allied with insurgents to obtain "a costume of legitimacy," said U.S. Army Col. Nicholas Scopellite, who oversees police development in Afghanistan.
In Warduj, he said, the Afghan police showed adequate coordination with the Afghan army, despite long-standing criticism that the two forces often do not work well together. "Just like in any other country, if we [encounter] more firepower, we go to the people who have even more, which is [the] military, which is what happened there," he said.
Top Afghan officials have long complained that the U.S. and its allies failed to provide Kabul with enough high-end weaponry to tackle the insurgency. When Afghan President Hamid Karzai visited Washington earlier this year, he arrived with a wish list of military equipment. The recent fighting in the north could help bolster their argument that Kabul needs more warplanes, better artillery and sophisticated surveillance equipment before the coalition is no longer around to call on for support.
The monthlong battle in the northeast exposed the Afghan military's shortfalls at a moment when the government in Kabul has accused neighboring Pakistan over what it sees as interference in its sovereignty and indirect support for insurgents.
Top Afghan officials have also blamed Pakistan for military setbacks in the country, including a recent attack on an army outpost that was overrun by militants in eastern Kunar province. Maj. Gen. Zahir Azimi, spokesman for the Afghan Defense Ministry, told reporters last week that "foreign intelligence" had provided support to the insurgents in Badakhshan, a phrase Afghan officials often employ to refer indirectly to Pakistan's powerful spy agency.
Gen. Azimi didn't name the foreign power involved in the Badakhshan fighting, but made the statement following a lengthy condemnation of Pakistani activities along their shared border.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Wednesday that a meeting in Brussels with Afghan President Karzai and Pakistani Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani made progress. He said a dialogue on political and security issues was on a "good track," but declined to spell out what, if anything, had been achieved.
Before the meeting, Mr. Karzai's office said the meeting would focus on the Afghan peace process and recent tensions between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
With the conclusion of the army operation in Badakhshan, the army had managed to reassert government control in Warduj, Afghan and coalition officials said. A full army battalion is now stationed there.
"The road is open for traffic," said a spokesman for the provincial governor's office. —Saeed Shah in Islamabad and Stephen Fidler in Brussels contributed to this article.
Write to Nathan Hodge at nathan.hodge@wsj.com
Nato's Support to Afghan Troops Sustainment Takes Shape
TOLOnews.com 24 April 2013
The Nato Secretary General, Anders Fogh Rasmussen said Tuesday that "Nato's support to the Afghan troops sustainment takes shape."
Nato Foreign Ministers from Nato and Isaf partner nations made commitment in shaping Nato's long-term support to Afghanistan at a meeting in Brussels on Tuesday.
"Today we agreed on the means to ensure transparency and accountability in our future funding mechanisms of the Afghan security forces. This is an important pillar of the international community's wider commitment to sustaining Afghanistan in the years to come," General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said.
The Nato's contribution to the long-term sustainment of the Afghan national army is one aspect of Nato's engagement in Afghanistan after the Isaf mission is completed at the end of 2014.
It is an integral part of the broader International Community's efforts to support the long-term financial sustainment of the Afghan security forces. A new mission to continue to train, advise and assist the Afghan national army and police after 2014 will complement Nato's long-term commitment in the country.
"Our engagement will enter a new and different chapter, with a mission to train, advise and assist the Afghan security forces," Rasmussen said. "Planning for this mission is currently underway."
"The range of our commitment to Afghanistan is unprecedented. We have provided resources, and skills to the Afghan forces along with time and space so they can grow strong", he said, while stressing that much work remain to be done. "We will not walk away."
"The Government of Afghanistan has made clear commitments to hold credible elections; to fight corruption; to uphold human rights; and to enforce the rule of law. We commend the efforts made so far, and the continued efforts of the Government of Afghanistan will pave the way for our continued support for years to come," the Secretary General said.
In a meeting with President Karzai, Rasmussen also said that, soon we will see Afghan troops and police take the lead for security across the country, as Isaf shifts its role from combat to support.
The foreign troops will leave Afghanistan by the end of 2014, after the Afghan security forces take over full security responsibility.
There are around 100,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan helping over 300,000 Afghan security forces fight insurgency.
Target Of Taliban Justice Tells Of Brutal Amputation
By Ron Synovitz April 24, 2013 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
HERAT, Afghanistan -- Faiz Ahmad says his life has become meaningless since the Taliban robbed him of his ability to work last week by chopping off his right hand and his left foot.
The 25-year-old driver from western Afghanistan is now recovering at Herat Regional Hospital after a hellish, monthlong ordeal as a captive of the Taliban.
"I have become useless," he says. "I can't do anything with my life anymore. I can't be involved in any professions as I could before when I was able to do anything. I used to be able to farm and I was very good at driving."
Taliban spokesman Qari Yousaf Ahmadi has confirmed that Taliban militants abducted Faiz and his friend, 22-year-old driver Zarin, a month ago from their village in the province's Rabat Sangi district.
He also has confirmed that Taliban militants cut off the right hand and left foot of each man after holding them captive for four weeks.
The Taliban spokesman claims that the two were punished as "thieves" under the Taliban's strict interpretation of Islamic law. He says the verdict was delivered against them by a Shari'a court after they confessed that they had stolen money, motorcycles, and other valuables from Muslims over a lengthy period of time.
But Faiz and his relatives tell a different story.
Both Faiz and Zarin worked as drivers for a private security company that escorts NATO supply convoys in western Afghanistan. Their relatives see the amputations as punishment and a warning for anyone cooperating with NATO forces.
Now both men are recovering at Herat Regional Hospital where Faiz, who has been married for three years, lives with his wife and 18-month-old son.
"The Taliban wanted us to cooperate with them and take explosives inside the company that we worked for and detonate them," he told RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan. "They asked us more than 20 times, saying that if we did it we would be freed."
No Anesthesia
Faiz claims that when he and Zarin continued to refuse to carry out the bomb attack, his captors told them that they should never work for their security firm again.
Esmatullah, a cousin of Zarin, says the Taliban also demanded that the drivers' relatives pay a ransom to secure their release. But Esmatullah said both families are impoverished and could not afford to pay the money.
Faiz said his ordeal began one afternoon in mid-March as he was resting at his home. He said Taliban fighters in six cars arrived, surrounding his house and storming inside to kidnap him.
By Faiz's reckoning, he was a prisoner of the Taliban for 27 days before they were beaten with chains and the amputations were carried out. He maintains that he never testified before any council, mullah, or trial judge -- and that the militants didn't try to justify the punishment under Islamic principles.
"On the 28th day, they cut off our hands and feet in some desert area and threw them there before my very eyes," he says. "They didn't even give us anesthesia before they cut off our hands. I was blindfolded but I could see through a hole."
The Taliban then dumped both men on the side of the highway that links the city of Herat with Turkmenistan farther to the north.
Loose Interpretation Of Islamic Law
Herat Regional Hospital spokesman Mohammad Rafiq Shirzai said Faiz and Zarin were unconscious when a local villager found them and drove them to the medical facility for treatment.
Amputations were a common form of punishment in Afghanistan when the Taliban was in power. But since the collapse of their regime in late 2001, there have been few known cases of Taliban amputations.
In most instances where the Taliban has carried out its interpretation of Islamic Shari'a law since late 2001, individuals have been killed -- by being shot, beheaded, or stoned to death.
Mussa Mahmoudi, executive director of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, told RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan that even if the Taliban did conduct a trial against Faiz and Zarin, the punishment would have been carried out on the basis of an illegal tribal court decision -- a ruling based on a loose interpretation of Islamic law and local tribal customs without a certified Islamic judge.
"It is an illegal violation of judicial process and it is not Islamic," he says. "No one has the right to take such actions against other people based on their own judgment. This kind of punishment is against all the principles of human rights as well as against Islamic edicts and teachings."
Mahmoudi maintains that ultimately it is the responsibility of Afghanistan's central government to ensure that laws are properly enforced and that tribal courts stop carrying out their own interpretation of Islamic law.
Written by Ron Synovitz, with reporting by RFE/RL Radio Free Afghanistan correspondents Shapoor Saber in Herat and Norias Nori in Prague
Afghan Troops Able to Defend Country: Official
TOLOnews.com By Azem Arash 24 April 2013
The Afghan deputy chief of staff Lieutenant General Mohammad Akram said Wednesday that the army forces have now gained good incentive and are able to defend the country.
Speaking at a graduation ceremony of army Special Forces in Kabul, General Mohammad Akram said that the forces have been trained professionally and people's trust is increasing.
He stressed on professionalising the army for improvement of security in the country.
His comment comes as, today 700 of army special forces gained graduation certificates and were deployed to insecure areas for clean-up operations.
Women were also among these Special Forces who have been trained professionally and today are going on mission into insecure areas and look happy.
"I assure that these forces will perform their task successfully alongside other security forces," General Mohammad Akram said.
Meanwhile, the commander of the special operations of the Ministry of Defence, General Sayed Abdul Kareem said that "we promise to the people that army forces have gained ability to maintain security of their homeland".
It comes as, the Nato Secretary General, Anders Fogh Rasmussen said Tuesday that "Nato's support to the Afghan army sustainment takes shape."
Nato Foreign Ministers from Nato and Isaf partner nations made commitment in shaping Nato's long-term support to Afghanistan at a meeting in Brussels on Tuesday.
"Today we agreed on the means to ensure transparency and accountability in our future funding mechanisms of the Afghan security forces. This is an important pillar of the international community's wider commitment to sustaining Afghanistan in the years to come," General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said.
The Afghan security forces will take over full security responsibility of the country by the end of 2014, as the foreign troops will leave Afghanistan.
There are around 100,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan helping over 300,000 Afghan security forces fight insurgency.
Nato to Keep Drone for Post-2014 Support of Afghan Forces
TOLOnews By Saleha Soadat 24 April 2013
Following withdrawal of international troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2014, Washington and London will keep their drones to support Afghan security forces continue fighting against insurgency, Nato's air force General Jake Polumbo said Wednesday.
Present challenges against Afghan air force requires using the unmanned aerial vehicles beyond the end of 2014, Polumbo said.
"It will take time for the Afghan air force to end up as a full operational capability as we call it FOC, and that will take into the end of 2016 timeframe at best, and we understand that. That is exactly how we have partnered with the Afghan security forces, in particular the air force, is to be committed to that duration, to bring on these aircrafts, these training mechanisms, and the like," the senior Nato and US airman said.
The US general added that there are currently 6,000 for the Afghan air force, yet only one percent of them are capable of carrying out air operations.
"The results are showing, not only in the training environment but more importantly on the battlefield, Afghan air force airmen have conducted winner resupply missions to remote Afghan national army locations in Nurestan province in the east, and they have provided direct support to Afghan border police in Paktika, Zabul province in the east, and also down in the south in Kandahar province," he said.
"During recent combat operations Afghan air force helicopters flew life-saving casualty evacuation flights, and they also conducted independent air assaults in the contested areas."
Afghan defence ministry, on the other hand, suggested that dialogues on post-2014 drones for Afghan air force are on-going between Kabul and Washington.
"There are matters that are related to agreements by the Afghan government. On issues related to after 2014, and activities, and other related issues, the government is discussing," said General Zahir Azimi, spokesman to Afghan defence ministry.
Nato has around 300 trainers for Afghan air force among whom a very few number are believed to leave the country after 2014.
The circumstances of drone missions of Afghanistan are reportedly part of the bilateral security agreement between Afghanistan and the United States, the agreement on which talks are yet not finalised.
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