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Afghan president says CIA payments to continue
By PATRICK QUINN and RAHIM FAIEZ | Associated Press
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Afghan President Hamid Karzai said on Saturday that the CIA's station chief in Kabul has assured him that regular funding the U.S. intelligence agency gives his government will not be cut off.
He said the Afghan government had been receiving funds from CIA for more than a decade as part of regular monthly assistance from the U.S. government.
Karzai had earlier confirmed that his government had received such payments following a story published in The New York Times that said the CIA had given the Afghan National Security Council tens of millions of dollars in monthly payments delivered in suitcases, backpacks and plastic shopping bags.
"The help and assistance from the U.S. is for our National Directorate of Security. That is state-to-state, government-to-government regular assistance," Karzai said. "So that is a government institution helping another government institution, and we appreciate all this assistance and help, all this assistance is very useful for us. We have spent it in different areas (and) solved lots of our problems."
Karzai would not say how much assistance his government had received because it was being used for intelligence work, but acknowledged it was in cash and that "all the money which we have spent, receipts have been sent back to the intelligence service of the United States monthly."
He claimed that much of the money was used to care for wounded employees of the NDS, Afghanistan's intelligence service, and operational expenses.
"It is an official government deal between the two governments. This is happening all over the world — such deals between governments — and in Afghanistan, which is a needy country, these sorts of deals are very important and useful," he said at the news conference, held to announce the results of his recent trip to Europe.
Karzai confirmed the payments during a news conference earlier this week in Helsinki, Finland. After Karzai's confirmation in Europe, White House spokesman Jay Carney declined to comment on the newspaper report, referring questions to the CIA, which also declined comment.
In his gathering with reporters at the presidential palace, Karzai said he had met earlier in the day with the Kabul station chief of the CIA. "I told him because of all these rumors in the media, please do not cut all this money because we really need it," Karzai said. "We want to continue this sort of assistance and he promised that they are not going to cut this money."
He added that negotiations for a new bilateral security agreement with the United States had been delayed because of conditions that Afghanistan had placed on such a deal. The security agreement is to govern a U.S. military presence after 2014 when nearly all foreign combat troops are to have finished their withdrawal from Afghanistan. The talks, which started in late 2012, are set to last up to a year.
President Barack Obama has not said how many troops will remain, although there have been estimates ranging from 8,000 to 12,000. It is unlikely such an announcement will be made until the security agreement is signed. Those troops would help train Afghan forces and also carry out operations against al-Qaida and other militant groups.
Karzai said Afghanistan was ready to sign a deal as long as the American government in exchange for being able to stay on bases in the country agrees to terms of Afghan security, funding assistance and help with training and equipping Afghan security forces. It is thought that the contentious issue of providing U.S. troops immunity from Afghan law is a low priority for the Afghan government in the negotiations.
The Afghan government has not said how much rent it would want for three or four U.S. bases, but it is believed to be in the billions. Afghanistan is also thought to be seeking security guarantees to protect its porous borders, including the frontier with Pakistan that is the main infiltration route for insurgents who retain sanctuary in Pakistan's lawless tribal areas.
"The position of the United States about the security of Afghanistan and relations with neighboring countries, or whatever attacks are happening from the neighboring countries to Afghanistan, should be very clear," Karzai said. "So we are trying our best that the security of Afghanistan should be guaranteed, peace in Afghanistan should be guaranteed, a strengthening of the Afghan security forces should be guaranteed, as well the economy of Afghanistan should be guaranteed."
It was unclear how Karzai expected the United States or any of its allies to guarantee Afghanistan's borders against attack.
Relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan have been severely strained in recent months, especially over the delicate issue of the demarcation of their border.
Afghan and Pakistani forces engaged in a nearly five-hour exchange of fire last Tuesday along Afghanistan's eastern border. One Afghan border policeman was killed and two Pakistani soldiers were wounded in the fighting in eastern Nangarhar province.
The main problem is that Afghanistan does not recognize the disputed Durand Line, the 19th century demarcation between present-day Afghanistan and Pakistan, while Pakistan does.
"Since the Durand line has been imposed on Afghanistan, it was not acceptable to the Afghans and we cannot accept the Durand line," Karzai said. "No government in Afghanistan will accept the Durand Line."
Pakistan and Afghanistan have long been tense neighbors. Afghanistan has been deeply suspicious of the motives of a government that long backed the Taliban regime and has since seemed unable or unwilling to go after militant leaders taking refuge inside its borders. The killing of al-Qaida chief, Osama bin Laden, in Pakistan only strengthened Afghan wariness of the neighboring country.
In an effort to defuse tensions, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on April 24 brought Karzai and Pakistani military chief Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani together in Brussels for security talks. But he meeting apparently did little to ease the tension.
"We need Pakistan. They are our neighboring country," Karzai said. "While I'm president, I will continue to improve relations with Pakistan. But our position is clear, we don't accept the Durand Line and we will not accept it.
"Whatever the British empire imposed on Afghanistan, it was not acceptable in 1893 and it is not acceptable to us today."
NATO: 5 troops killed in southern Afghanistan
By PATRICK QUINN and RAHIM FAIEZ | Associated Press
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Five members of the U.S.-led international military coalition were killed on Saturday by a roadside bomb in southern Afghanistan, the latest deadly attack against foreign troops since the Taliban announced the start of their spring offensive this week.
The coalition did not disclose the location of the blast or confirm the nationalities of those killed. However, Javeed Faisal, a spokesman for the governor of Kandahar province, said a coalition patrol hit the roadside bomb in Maiwand district of the province, the spiritual birthplace of the Taliban.
The renewed violence came as Afghan President Hamid Karzai acknowledged that his government has been receiving funds from CIA for more than a decade as part of regular monthly assistance from the U.S. government.
Karzai told reporters at a news conference that the CIA's station chief in Kabul has assured him that regular funding the U.S. intelligence agency gives his government will not be cut off.
Karzai had earlier confirmed that his government had received such payments following a story published in The New York Times that said the CIA had given the Afghan National Security Council tens of millions of dollars in monthly payments delivered in suitcases, backpacks and plastic shopping bags.
"The help and assistance from the U.S. is for our National Directorate of Security. That is state-to-state, government-to-government regular assistance," Karzai said. "So that is a government institution helping another government institution, and we appreciate all this assistance and help, all this assistance is very useful for us. We have spent it in different areas (and) solved lots of our problems."
Karzai would not say how much assistance his government had received because it was being used for intelligence work, but acknowledged it was in cash and that "all the money which we have spent, receipts have been sent back to the intelligence service of the United States monthly."
He claimed that much of the money was used to care for wounded employees of the NDS, Afghanistan's intelligence service, and operational expenses.
"It is an official government deal between the two governments. This is happening all over the world — such deals between governments — and in Afghanistan, which is a needy country, these sorts of deals are very important and useful," he said.
Karzai confirmed the payments during a news conference earlier this week in Helsinki, Finland. After Karzai's confirmation in Europe, White House spokesman Jay Carney declined to comment on the newspaper report, referring questions to the CIA, which also declined comment.
In his gathering with reporters at the presidential palace, Karzai said he had met earlier in the day with the Kabul station chief of the CIA. "I told him because of all these rumors in the media, please do not cut all this money because we really need it," Karzai said. "We want to continue this sort of assistance and he promised that they are not going to cut this money."
He added that negotiations for a new bilateral security agreement with the United States had been delayed because of conditions that Afghanistan had placed on such a deal. The security agreement is to govern a U.S. military presence after 2014 when nearly all foreign combat troops are to have finished their withdrawal from Afghanistan. The talks, which started in late 2012, are set to last up to a year.
President Barack Obama has not said how many troops will remain, although there have been estimates ranging from 8,000 to 12,000. It is unlikely such an announcement will be made until the security agreement is signed. Those troops would help train Afghan forces and also carry out operations against al-Qaida and other militant groups.
Karzai said Afghanistan was ready to sign a deal as long as the American government in exchange for being able to stay on bases in the country agrees to terms of Afghan security, funding assistance and help with training and equipping Afghan security forces. It is thought that the contentious issue of providing U.S. troops immunity from Afghan law is a low priority for the Afghan government in the negotiations.
The Afghan government has not said how much rent it would want for three or four U.S. bases, but it is believed to be in the billions. Afghanistan is also thought to be seeking security guarantees to protect its porous borders, including the frontier with Pakistan that is the main infiltration route for insurgents who retain sanctuary in Pakistan's lawless tribal areas.
"The position of the United States about the security of Afghanistan and relations with neighboring countries, or whatever attacks are happening from the neighboring countries to Afghanistan, should be very clear," Karzai said. "So we are trying our best that the security of Afghanistan should be guaranteed, peace in Afghanistan should be guaranteed, a strengthening of the Afghan security forces should be guaranteed, as well the economy of Afghanistan should be guaranteed."
It was unclear how Karzai expected the United States or any of its allies to guarantee Afghanistan's borders against attack.
Relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan have been severely strained in recent months, especially over the delicate issue of the demarcation of their border.
Afghan and Pakistani forces engaged in a nearly five-hour exchange of fire last Tuesday along Afghanistan's eastern border. One Afghan border policeman was killed and two Pakistani soldiers were wounded in the fighting in eastern Nangarhar province.
The main problem is that Afghanistan does not recognize the disputed Durand Line, the 19th century demarcation between present-day Afghanistan and Pakistan, while Pakistan does.
"Since the Durand line has been imposed on Afghanistan, it was not acceptable to the Afghans and we cannot accept the Durand line," Karzai said. "No government in Afghanistan will accept the Durand Line."
Violence has spiked in recent weeks as temperatures have risen.
The deaths of the five coalition service members on Saturday was the second deadly attack since the insurgency announced their new offensive on April 27. Three British soldiers were killed on April 30 when their armored vehicle hit a bomb in southern Helmand province. With the deaths, 47 members of the coalition have been killed so far this year — including 32 Americans.
Karzai calls on Taliban to fight Afghanistan's enemies
Following Wednesday's clash on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border in which one Afghani was killed, and two Pakistanis were wounded, Afghan President Hamid Karzai called on Taliban forces to fight Afghanistan's enemies, 'instead of destroying their own country.'
By Amie Ferris-Rotman and Dylan Welch, Reuters / May 4, 2013 The Christian Science Monitor
Kabul - Afghan President Hamid Karzai called on the Taliban on Saturday to fight Afghanistan's enemies in what was widely seen as a swipe against Pakistan days after the neighbors' security forces clashed on their border.
Karzai's remarks are likely to unsettle already shaky ties with Pakistan and come as the United States wants Pakistan to help Afghanistan persuade the Taliban to engage in peace talks ahead of the withdrawal of most foreign troops by the end of next year.
"Instead of destroying their own country, they should turn their weapons against places where plots are made against Afghan prosperity," Karzai told reporters in the capital, Kabul, saying this was "a reminder for the Taliban."
"They should stand with this young man who was martyred and defend their soil," he said, referring to a border policeman who was killed in the Wednesday night clash on eastern Afghanistan's border with Pakistan. Two Pakistani soldiers were wounded.
Hundreds of men took to the streets of the eastern Afghan town of Asadabad on Saturday, near where the clash took place, to protest against both Pakistan and the United States.
A day earlier, thousands of men in Kabul rallied in support of the Afghan security forces.
Afghanistan and Pakistan have had testy relations since Pakistan was formed in 1947, at the end of British colonial rule over India. Afghanistan has never officially accepted the border between them.
Pakistan helped the Taliban take power in Afghanistan in the 1990s. Many Afghan leaders say Pakistan is still helping the militants, seeing them as a tool to counter the influence of its old rival, India, in Afghanistan.
Pakistan denies helping the militants and says it wants peace and stability in its western neighbour.
Karzai also revealed that he had spoken earlier on Saturday to the CIA's Kabul station chief, asking that the intelligence agency continue to provide payments to his country.
He was report in the New York Times late last month that said his office has been receiving so-called ghost money from the CIA for more than a decade.
"Just this morning I met with the station chief of the CIA in Kabul and I thanked him for the support given to us in the past 10 years and I asked him to continue the support," he said, adding that the money was "flowing to" Afghanistan's intelligence agency, the National Directorate of Security.
"In the situation of Afghanistan where there is so much need ... it proves extremely helpful."
The New York Times said the money was meant to buy influence for the CIA but instead fuelled corruption and empowered warlords, undermining Washington's exit strategy from Afghanistan.
Obama Names Veteran Troubleshooter to Afghanistan-Pakistan Post
By MARK LANDLER The New York Times May 3, 2013
WASHINGTON — President Obama on Friday named James F. Dobbins, a veteran diplomat who oversaw the return of the United States to Afghanistan after the defeat of the Taliban in 2001, as his third special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, an administration official said on Friday.
Mr. Dobbins, 70, a former assistant secretary of state for European affairs with a history of difficult assignments from Kosovo to Somalia, will confront a fraught relationship between Washington and Islamabad, as well as a rapidly dwindling American military presence in Afghanistan.
The special representative post was first held by Richard C. Holbrooke, a larger-than-life diplomat who assembled an extensive staff at the State Department and threw himself into a broad range of political and development issues in Afghanistan.
After Mr. Holbrooke’s death in December 2010, the job went to Marc Grossman, another career diplomat who devoted his tenure to efforts, ultimately fruitless, to negotiate a political settlement with the Taliban. Mr. Grossman deliberately cultivated a lower profile than Mr. Holbrooke, scaling back his staff and negotiating behind closed doors.
Mr. Dobbins, who is currently the director of the RAND International Security and Defense Policy Center, has plenty of experience with diplomatic troubleshooting, including in Afghanistan, where he watched the raising of the American flag over the reoccupied embassy in Kabul on Dec. 16, 2001.
During the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, he served as an envoy to Bosnia, Kosovo and Haiti, as well as to Somalia, where he oversaw the withdrawal of American troops.
After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, Mr. Bush appointed him as the American representative to the Afghan opposition, and he took part in the Bonn conference in late 2001, at which a new post-Taliban Afghan government was named.
The Afghan Bag Man
The foiled arrest that explains America’s failure in Afghanistan.
Foreign Policy BY SARAH CHAYES MAY 4, 2013
Buried in the recent New York Times revelation that the CIA has been delivering bags of cash to Afghan President Hamid Karzai is a nugget of information that tells the whole story about just how self-defeating U.S. Afghanistan policy has been. It solves some riddles that mystified a lot of us at the time -- and constitutes an object lesson for the future.
The CIA's bag man was Muhammad Zia Salehi.
In July 2010, this same Salehi was arrested by U.S.-mentored Afghan police officers, on charges of influence peddling. At the time, U.S. civilian and military officials had begun to grasp how damaging Afghan government corruption was to what they were trying to achieve in Afghanistan, and were beginning to take serious steps to counter it. Salehi's arrest was the climax of that process.
It was a dramatic success, an offshoot of months of painstaking investigation into a nearly billion-dollar sinkhole in Afghanistan's top private financial institution, Kabul Bank. The decision to develop the case had been run up the U.S. interagency flagpole. Senior U.S. officials, at last sensitized to the corruption problem and anxious for a test case, had approved it and were kept informed along the way. Afghan officials, too. Karzai himself had authorized the arrest.
But before nightfall, Salehi made a phone call and Karzai reversed course, ordering his release. Charges were quickly dropped. This episode ended any serious U.S. anti-corruption efforts in Afghanistan. Which in turn ensured that all other efforts, all the sacrifice, would be in vain.
Karzai was not shy about his interference with the judicial process on Salehi's behalf. "I intervened very, very strongly," he boasted to ABC's "This Week" program a month later, citing the conditions of the arrest. "This man was taken out of his house in the middle of the night by 30 Kalashnikov-toting masked men in the name of Afghan law enforcement. This is exactly reminiscent of the days of the Soviet Union, where people were taken away from their homes by armed people in the name of the state and thrown into obscure prisons and in some kind of kangaroo courts."
Nothing of the sort happened. At the time, I sat down separately with two law enforcement officers close to the investigation and reconstructed the sequence of events. Karzai had agreed to order the arrest on the basis of a judicially-authorized wiretap that U.S. officials had played for one of his key advisors, my sources explained. Salehi's voice could be heard demanding a payoff. The Afghan attorney general signed the arrest warrant, and the interior minister detailed a special police unit to execute it.
When the Afghan police officers arrived at Salehi's house, according to the team's chief U.S. mentor, they did not storm it or break down his door; they called him on his cell phone, identified themselves, and asked him to come out. Irate, Salehi phoned a different Afghan security service, whose men rushed to the scene, exchanged shots with the arresting officers, but eventually retreated. Next, Salehi dialed up the interior minister, who explained to him that Karzai in person had approved the arrest, and Salehi had better surrender.
But U.S. embassy officials -- to let Karzai "save face," as one of them explained internally at the time -- volunteered that perhaps the arrest was a bit heavy handed. U.S. officers, who had worked hard to foster professionalism in their Afghan trainees, not to mention the Afghans who had worked the case, disagreed, and expressed bitter disappointment at the fate of their hard work, and at the lack of support from the Americans who had put them up to it.
"I have seen many a U.S. arrest that was far less polite than this one," remarked the mentor, an FBI officer.
This drama unfolded less than a month after Gen. David Petraeus took command of the more than 140,000 international troops in Afghanistan. I was part of a small group of civilian advisors helping him transition in. At the top of our agenda was Afghan governance. We were convinced that the acute and abusive corruption of the Karzai government was playing a key role in motivating Afghans to join the Taliban insurgency. Without getting a handle on corruption, it would be impossible to durably pacify the country, we believed.
Several of these civilians had helped write a strategic assessment of the Afghanistan campaign for Petraeus's predecessor, Gen. Stanley McChrystal. It warned that a "crisis in confidence in the Afghan government" -- largely due to this corruption -- threatened the mission. I worked for McChrystal at the time, and with other members of the international military command, as well as U.S. and British rule-of-law officials and others, had helped design a comprehensive plan for countering runaway Afghan corruption and the international community's role in enabling it.
Our argument was practical: Systematic state corruption and abuse of power, we spelled out in internal planning documents, was discrediting the Afghan government. Afghans were outraged at it, and therefore increasingly susceptible to Taliban influence. The international community was becoming tainted by association. This dynamic was a key factor feeding the burgeoning violence and undermining the ability of either security or development efforts to reverse these trends. Fighting corruption, in other words, wasn't just a humanitarian or governance priority, it was key to winning the war. Without better governance, anything that might be achieved by extra U.S. troops or stepped-up special operations would be short-lived at best.
But by the summer of 2010, frustratingly little progress had been made in implementing the anti-corruption procedures we had developed. So Petraeus's team of civilian "directed telescopes," as he called us, set about updating the plan.
The result was a restatement of the argument, and a more sophisticated depiction of Afghan government corruption as the work of structured, vertically integrated criminal networks -- crime syndicates masquerading, in effect, as a government. Any approach to the problem had to be strategic, had to draw on techniques from the fight against organized crime. We expanded the toolbox of leverage that could be applied. We thought through likely risks, and ways of mitigating them. We emphasized the actions to be taken to protect and reinforce those officials who truly acted on behalf of the people, and who too often found themselves in mortal danger.
Our PowerPoint presentation spelling out this plan ran to more than 40 slides. We selected a dozen we really planned to brief, but at a meeting with the entire command staff, General Petraeus read through every one. With a calculated flourish, he marked a check on each page as he turned it over. Petraeus was on board.
Elated, the Directed Telescopes planned a command conference, at which he would explain this new approach to his subordinate officers, flown in from their headquarters around Afghanistan. We had already traveled out to some regions, to begin "socializing" the novel ideas.
But when he stood up to address the assembled brass, Petraeus seemed to skip past -- or even argue against -- the slides we had prepared explaining the new governance approach. We were stunned. What had happened? Had we misunderstood? Had he changed his mind?
For another month, we kept at it; I hammered out a detailed implementation of our general concept to be employed in Kandahar province, alongside the troop surge. But by mid-September 2010, it was clear to me that Petraeus had no intention of implementing it, or of pursuing any substantive anti-corruption initiative at all. Four months later, in an intense interagency struggle over the language of a document spelling out objectives for Afghanistan by 2015, the U.S. government, at the cabinet level, explicitly reached the same decision.
That was the moment I understood the Afghanistan mission could not succeed.
I spent weeks wracking my brain, trying to account for the about-face. Eventually, after a glance in my calendar to confirm the dates, it came to me. It was the Salehi arrest. The Salehi arrest had changed everything.
In those fervid days immediately after Salehi's release, Petraeus swung into energetic action. Karzai was blustering against the two special Afghan police teams, the Sensitive Investigations Unit (SIU), which had been developing the massive and complex Kabul Bank case, and the newer Major Crimes Task Force (MCTF), focused specifically on corruption, whose officers had executed the Salehi arrest warrant. Karzai would disband them both, he swore. Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry rallied much of the international community in defense of the two teams, and the red line held.
Then Karzai went after the special anti-corruption prosecutors. U.K.-financed top-up salaries, bringing their pay from $200 per month to $800 (for taking on some of the most ruthless and well-funded Afghan criminals), were cancelled by an Afghan government crying interference. Prosecutors on the Salehi case were demoted, sent to the provinces. The Afghan government barred U.S. Department of Justice attorneys from mentoring their Afghan counterparts on anti-corruption cases. This time, no one stepped up. No support came from the international community.
Anti-corruption efforts in Afghanistan collapsed. Prosecutions stalled. The Afghan Interior Ministry refused to authorize further investigations by the SIU or the MCTF. "We can't find a fish little enough to go after," complained the MCTF mentor in December 2010. Petraeus turned his focus to killing insurgents. U.S. interagency guidance approved in early 2011 as part of that "objectives" document actually barred the Justice Department from helping Afghan prosecutors on anti-corruption cases. The best, most constructive and courageous Afghan law enforcement professionals were left high and dry by Washington, alone against a hostile Afghan government. A draft anti-corruption plan -- in itself insufficient -- was never presented to President Obama for approval.
And no wonder. U.S. officials had blundered into a circular firing squad. Salehi, the subject of the U.S. government's corruption test case, was also the U.S. government's intermediary for covert cash payments to Karzai. A secret CIA agenda was in conflict with the agenda of much of the rest of the U.S. government. And with no one able to explicitly arbitrate this contradiction, the CIA's agenda won out.
Throughout the unfolding investigation, two senior U.S. officials have told me, through Salehi's arrest and release after a few hours of police detention, CIA personnel never mentioned their relationship with him. Even afterwards, despite pressure in Kabul and Washington, the CIA refused to provide the ambassador or the key cabinet officials a list of Afghans they were paying. The CIA station chief in Kabul continued to hold private meetings with Karzai, with no other U.S. officials present.
So whom did Salehi call from his jail cell the afternoon of his arrest? Was it Karzai, as many presumed at the time? Or was it the CIA station chief?
What began as a test case on Afghan corruption, in other words, turned into a test case in U.S. foreign-policy dysfunction, raising a number of further questions of deeper import to the United States. Just how connected are CIA activities to core United States goals abroad? Or to a concerted plan for achieving them? To what extent do CIA officials set their own agenda? Is that agenda always in the U.S. national interest? How often is it at cross-purposes with the goals of the president, the department of state, even the military? What is the appropriate degree of transparency and accountability to prevent the inadvertent sabotage of other U.S. efforts and investments? Who must call these shots?
Only if senior U.S. leaders have the courage to address these questions directly, to arbitrate them clearly, and enforce their decisions, can U.S. foreign policy hope in the future to avoid the tragic waste of lives and effort that has characterized the past decade.
Afghan father executes daughter in public over 'affair'
Agence France-Presse May 4, 2013
KABUL - In front of 300 villagers, Halima's father shot her in the head, stomach and waist - a public execution overseen by local religious leaders in Afghanistan to punish her for an alleged affair.
Halima, aged between 18 and 20 and a mother of two children, was killed for bringing dishonour on her family in a case that underlines how the country is still struggling to protect women more than 11 years after the fall of the Taliban regime.
Police in the north-west province of Badghis said Halima was accused of running away with a male cousin while her husband was in Iran, and her father sought advice from Taliban-backed imams on how to punish her.
"People in the mosque and village started taunting him about her escape with the cousin," said Sharafuddin Sharaf, the Badghis provincial police chief. "A local cleric who runs a madrassa told him that she must be punished with death, and the mullahs said she should be executed in public.
"The father killed his daughter with three shots as instructed by religious elders and in front of villagers. We went there two days later but he and his entire family had fled."
Amnesty International said the killing, which occurred on April 22 in the village of Kookchaheel in Badghis, was damning evidence of how little control Afghan police have over many areas of the country.
"Violence against women continues to be endemic in Afghanistan and those responsible very rarely face justice," said Amnesty's Afghanistan researcher, Horia Mosadiq.
"Not only do women face violence at the hands of family members for reasons of preserving so-called 'honour', but frequently women face human-rights abuses resulting from verdicts issued by traditional, informal justice systems."
Police in Baghdis, a remote and impoverished province that borders Turkmenistan, said Halima had run away with her cousin to a village 30 kilometres away.
Her father found her after 10 days and brought her back home, where imams told him he must kill her in front of the villagers to assuage his family's humiliation.
A Badghis-based women's rights activist said he had seen video footage of Hamila's execution.
"On the video, she is shot three times in front of 300-400 people. Her brother witnesses her death and breaks down in tears," said the activist.
"She is sitting on her knees in the dust, wearing a large chador veil. A mullah announces her funeral prayers first, then her father shoots her from behind with an AK-47 at a distance of about five metres.
"We have learnt that a Taliban shadow governor in the region asked the mullahs to issue the death penalty for her. The local religious council first said she should be stoned to death, but since the cousin was not there, they decided she should be shot."
It is not known what happened to the cousin with whom she ran away.
The activist also said that Halima's husband had objected to the killing and tried to return from Iran before the execution.
Mirwais Mirzakwal, head of the Badghis provincial government's media department, confirmed the accounts of how Halima died but gave no further details.
Women in male-dominated Afghanistan still suffer horrendous abuse after the fall of the 1996-2001 Taliban regime, which banned them from attending school or any form of public activity.
Under the Taliban, women risked being beaten if they did not wear full burqas or if they left the house without a male escort.
In 2009, Afghanistan passed a benchmark law criminalising forced marriage, rape, beatings and other violence against women, but Amnesty and other campaigning groups say it is rarely enforced.
With international troops withdrawing next year, many Afghan women fear any advances made since 2001 will evaporate as the Taliban exerts increasing influence at local and national levels.
Mr Sharaf, the Badghis police chief, said officers were investigating Halima's killing, but no one had yet been arrested.
"We are trying to bring the perpetrators to justice," he said, admitting that authorities had only limited power in villages such as Kookchaheel. "It is a volatile place and on the border between Badghis and Herat province, and the Taliban is also active."
* Agence France-Presse
Female Afghan journalist win ‘Courage in Journalism’ award
Khaama Press By Sadaf Shinwari 04 May 2013
An Afghan woman journlist is among the three women who have been awarded the 2013 Courage in Journlism Award from the International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF).
Najiba Ayubi, 45, managing director for The Killid Group in Afghanistan has been nominated for the award after risking her life to report the news.
Ayubi spent more than a decade working under anonymous threats and attacks from government entities for her reporting on politics and women’s rights. She leads a team of reporters working in print, broadcast and online media and has refused calls for censorship.
She remained committed to her work and rejected calls to limit her work despite facing direct threats from many sources including politicians who have sent gunmen to her home and other aggressors who have vowed to harm her family.
Najiba Ayubi follows Farida Nekzad and Sharif Akhlas and became the third IWMF Courage in Journalism Award winner from Afghanistan.
The other women journalists who will receive the awards includes Bopha Phorn, 28, reporter for The Cambodia Daily in Cambodia and Nour Kelze, 25, photojournalist for Reuters in Syria.
The winners will receive their awards during ceremonies in New York and Los Angeles which are scheduled to be organized on October 23 and October 29 this year. The Courage in Journalism Awards and Lifetime Achievement Award will be sponsored by the Bank of America.
www.afghanistanewscenter.com
By PATRICK QUINN and RAHIM FAIEZ | Associated Press
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Afghan President Hamid Karzai said on Saturday that the CIA's station chief in Kabul has assured him that regular funding the U.S. intelligence agency gives his government will not be cut off.
He said the Afghan government had been receiving funds from CIA for more than a decade as part of regular monthly assistance from the U.S. government.
Karzai had earlier confirmed that his government had received such payments following a story published in The New York Times that said the CIA had given the Afghan National Security Council tens of millions of dollars in monthly payments delivered in suitcases, backpacks and plastic shopping bags.
"The help and assistance from the U.S. is for our National Directorate of Security. That is state-to-state, government-to-government regular assistance," Karzai said. "So that is a government institution helping another government institution, and we appreciate all this assistance and help, all this assistance is very useful for us. We have spent it in different areas (and) solved lots of our problems."
Karzai would not say how much assistance his government had received because it was being used for intelligence work, but acknowledged it was in cash and that "all the money which we have spent, receipts have been sent back to the intelligence service of the United States monthly."
He claimed that much of the money was used to care for wounded employees of the NDS, Afghanistan's intelligence service, and operational expenses.
"It is an official government deal between the two governments. This is happening all over the world — such deals between governments — and in Afghanistan, which is a needy country, these sorts of deals are very important and useful," he said at the news conference, held to announce the results of his recent trip to Europe.
Karzai confirmed the payments during a news conference earlier this week in Helsinki, Finland. After Karzai's confirmation in Europe, White House spokesman Jay Carney declined to comment on the newspaper report, referring questions to the CIA, which also declined comment.
In his gathering with reporters at the presidential palace, Karzai said he had met earlier in the day with the Kabul station chief of the CIA. "I told him because of all these rumors in the media, please do not cut all this money because we really need it," Karzai said. "We want to continue this sort of assistance and he promised that they are not going to cut this money."
He added that negotiations for a new bilateral security agreement with the United States had been delayed because of conditions that Afghanistan had placed on such a deal. The security agreement is to govern a U.S. military presence after 2014 when nearly all foreign combat troops are to have finished their withdrawal from Afghanistan. The talks, which started in late 2012, are set to last up to a year.
President Barack Obama has not said how many troops will remain, although there have been estimates ranging from 8,000 to 12,000. It is unlikely such an announcement will be made until the security agreement is signed. Those troops would help train Afghan forces and also carry out operations against al-Qaida and other militant groups.
Karzai said Afghanistan was ready to sign a deal as long as the American government in exchange for being able to stay on bases in the country agrees to terms of Afghan security, funding assistance and help with training and equipping Afghan security forces. It is thought that the contentious issue of providing U.S. troops immunity from Afghan law is a low priority for the Afghan government in the negotiations.
The Afghan government has not said how much rent it would want for three or four U.S. bases, but it is believed to be in the billions. Afghanistan is also thought to be seeking security guarantees to protect its porous borders, including the frontier with Pakistan that is the main infiltration route for insurgents who retain sanctuary in Pakistan's lawless tribal areas.
"The position of the United States about the security of Afghanistan and relations with neighboring countries, or whatever attacks are happening from the neighboring countries to Afghanistan, should be very clear," Karzai said. "So we are trying our best that the security of Afghanistan should be guaranteed, peace in Afghanistan should be guaranteed, a strengthening of the Afghan security forces should be guaranteed, as well the economy of Afghanistan should be guaranteed."
It was unclear how Karzai expected the United States or any of its allies to guarantee Afghanistan's borders against attack.
Relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan have been severely strained in recent months, especially over the delicate issue of the demarcation of their border.
Afghan and Pakistani forces engaged in a nearly five-hour exchange of fire last Tuesday along Afghanistan's eastern border. One Afghan border policeman was killed and two Pakistani soldiers were wounded in the fighting in eastern Nangarhar province.
The main problem is that Afghanistan does not recognize the disputed Durand Line, the 19th century demarcation between present-day Afghanistan and Pakistan, while Pakistan does.
"Since the Durand line has been imposed on Afghanistan, it was not acceptable to the Afghans and we cannot accept the Durand line," Karzai said. "No government in Afghanistan will accept the Durand Line."
Pakistan and Afghanistan have long been tense neighbors. Afghanistan has been deeply suspicious of the motives of a government that long backed the Taliban regime and has since seemed unable or unwilling to go after militant leaders taking refuge inside its borders. The killing of al-Qaida chief, Osama bin Laden, in Pakistan only strengthened Afghan wariness of the neighboring country.
In an effort to defuse tensions, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on April 24 brought Karzai and Pakistani military chief Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani together in Brussels for security talks. But he meeting apparently did little to ease the tension.
"We need Pakistan. They are our neighboring country," Karzai said. "While I'm president, I will continue to improve relations with Pakistan. But our position is clear, we don't accept the Durand Line and we will not accept it.
"Whatever the British empire imposed on Afghanistan, it was not acceptable in 1893 and it is not acceptable to us today."
NATO: 5 troops killed in southern Afghanistan
By PATRICK QUINN and RAHIM FAIEZ | Associated Press
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Five members of the U.S.-led international military coalition were killed on Saturday by a roadside bomb in southern Afghanistan, the latest deadly attack against foreign troops since the Taliban announced the start of their spring offensive this week.
The coalition did not disclose the location of the blast or confirm the nationalities of those killed. However, Javeed Faisal, a spokesman for the governor of Kandahar province, said a coalition patrol hit the roadside bomb in Maiwand district of the province, the spiritual birthplace of the Taliban.
The renewed violence came as Afghan President Hamid Karzai acknowledged that his government has been receiving funds from CIA for more than a decade as part of regular monthly assistance from the U.S. government.
Karzai told reporters at a news conference that the CIA's station chief in Kabul has assured him that regular funding the U.S. intelligence agency gives his government will not be cut off.
Karzai had earlier confirmed that his government had received such payments following a story published in The New York Times that said the CIA had given the Afghan National Security Council tens of millions of dollars in monthly payments delivered in suitcases, backpacks and plastic shopping bags.
"The help and assistance from the U.S. is for our National Directorate of Security. That is state-to-state, government-to-government regular assistance," Karzai said. "So that is a government institution helping another government institution, and we appreciate all this assistance and help, all this assistance is very useful for us. We have spent it in different areas (and) solved lots of our problems."
Karzai would not say how much assistance his government had received because it was being used for intelligence work, but acknowledged it was in cash and that "all the money which we have spent, receipts have been sent back to the intelligence service of the United States monthly."
He claimed that much of the money was used to care for wounded employees of the NDS, Afghanistan's intelligence service, and operational expenses.
"It is an official government deal between the two governments. This is happening all over the world — such deals between governments — and in Afghanistan, which is a needy country, these sorts of deals are very important and useful," he said.
Karzai confirmed the payments during a news conference earlier this week in Helsinki, Finland. After Karzai's confirmation in Europe, White House spokesman Jay Carney declined to comment on the newspaper report, referring questions to the CIA, which also declined comment.
In his gathering with reporters at the presidential palace, Karzai said he had met earlier in the day with the Kabul station chief of the CIA. "I told him because of all these rumors in the media, please do not cut all this money because we really need it," Karzai said. "We want to continue this sort of assistance and he promised that they are not going to cut this money."
He added that negotiations for a new bilateral security agreement with the United States had been delayed because of conditions that Afghanistan had placed on such a deal. The security agreement is to govern a U.S. military presence after 2014 when nearly all foreign combat troops are to have finished their withdrawal from Afghanistan. The talks, which started in late 2012, are set to last up to a year.
President Barack Obama has not said how many troops will remain, although there have been estimates ranging from 8,000 to 12,000. It is unlikely such an announcement will be made until the security agreement is signed. Those troops would help train Afghan forces and also carry out operations against al-Qaida and other militant groups.
Karzai said Afghanistan was ready to sign a deal as long as the American government in exchange for being able to stay on bases in the country agrees to terms of Afghan security, funding assistance and help with training and equipping Afghan security forces. It is thought that the contentious issue of providing U.S. troops immunity from Afghan law is a low priority for the Afghan government in the negotiations.
The Afghan government has not said how much rent it would want for three or four U.S. bases, but it is believed to be in the billions. Afghanistan is also thought to be seeking security guarantees to protect its porous borders, including the frontier with Pakistan that is the main infiltration route for insurgents who retain sanctuary in Pakistan's lawless tribal areas.
"The position of the United States about the security of Afghanistan and relations with neighboring countries, or whatever attacks are happening from the neighboring countries to Afghanistan, should be very clear," Karzai said. "So we are trying our best that the security of Afghanistan should be guaranteed, peace in Afghanistan should be guaranteed, a strengthening of the Afghan security forces should be guaranteed, as well the economy of Afghanistan should be guaranteed."
It was unclear how Karzai expected the United States or any of its allies to guarantee Afghanistan's borders against attack.
Relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan have been severely strained in recent months, especially over the delicate issue of the demarcation of their border.
Afghan and Pakistani forces engaged in a nearly five-hour exchange of fire last Tuesday along Afghanistan's eastern border. One Afghan border policeman was killed and two Pakistani soldiers were wounded in the fighting in eastern Nangarhar province.
The main problem is that Afghanistan does not recognize the disputed Durand Line, the 19th century demarcation between present-day Afghanistan and Pakistan, while Pakistan does.
"Since the Durand line has been imposed on Afghanistan, it was not acceptable to the Afghans and we cannot accept the Durand line," Karzai said. "No government in Afghanistan will accept the Durand Line."
Violence has spiked in recent weeks as temperatures have risen.
The deaths of the five coalition service members on Saturday was the second deadly attack since the insurgency announced their new offensive on April 27. Three British soldiers were killed on April 30 when their armored vehicle hit a bomb in southern Helmand province. With the deaths, 47 members of the coalition have been killed so far this year — including 32 Americans.
Karzai calls on Taliban to fight Afghanistan's enemies
Following Wednesday's clash on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border in which one Afghani was killed, and two Pakistanis were wounded, Afghan President Hamid Karzai called on Taliban forces to fight Afghanistan's enemies, 'instead of destroying their own country.'
By Amie Ferris-Rotman and Dylan Welch, Reuters / May 4, 2013 The Christian Science Monitor
Kabul - Afghan President Hamid Karzai called on the Taliban on Saturday to fight Afghanistan's enemies in what was widely seen as a swipe against Pakistan days after the neighbors' security forces clashed on their border.
Karzai's remarks are likely to unsettle already shaky ties with Pakistan and come as the United States wants Pakistan to help Afghanistan persuade the Taliban to engage in peace talks ahead of the withdrawal of most foreign troops by the end of next year.
"Instead of destroying their own country, they should turn their weapons against places where plots are made against Afghan prosperity," Karzai told reporters in the capital, Kabul, saying this was "a reminder for the Taliban."
"They should stand with this young man who was martyred and defend their soil," he said, referring to a border policeman who was killed in the Wednesday night clash on eastern Afghanistan's border with Pakistan. Two Pakistani soldiers were wounded.
Hundreds of men took to the streets of the eastern Afghan town of Asadabad on Saturday, near where the clash took place, to protest against both Pakistan and the United States.
A day earlier, thousands of men in Kabul rallied in support of the Afghan security forces.
Afghanistan and Pakistan have had testy relations since Pakistan was formed in 1947, at the end of British colonial rule over India. Afghanistan has never officially accepted the border between them.
Pakistan helped the Taliban take power in Afghanistan in the 1990s. Many Afghan leaders say Pakistan is still helping the militants, seeing them as a tool to counter the influence of its old rival, India, in Afghanistan.
Pakistan denies helping the militants and says it wants peace and stability in its western neighbour.
Karzai also revealed that he had spoken earlier on Saturday to the CIA's Kabul station chief, asking that the intelligence agency continue to provide payments to his country.
He was report in the New York Times late last month that said his office has been receiving so-called ghost money from the CIA for more than a decade.
"Just this morning I met with the station chief of the CIA in Kabul and I thanked him for the support given to us in the past 10 years and I asked him to continue the support," he said, adding that the money was "flowing to" Afghanistan's intelligence agency, the National Directorate of Security.
"In the situation of Afghanistan where there is so much need ... it proves extremely helpful."
The New York Times said the money was meant to buy influence for the CIA but instead fuelled corruption and empowered warlords, undermining Washington's exit strategy from Afghanistan.
Obama Names Veteran Troubleshooter to Afghanistan-Pakistan Post
By MARK LANDLER The New York Times May 3, 2013
WASHINGTON — President Obama on Friday named James F. Dobbins, a veteran diplomat who oversaw the return of the United States to Afghanistan after the defeat of the Taliban in 2001, as his third special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, an administration official said on Friday.
Mr. Dobbins, 70, a former assistant secretary of state for European affairs with a history of difficult assignments from Kosovo to Somalia, will confront a fraught relationship between Washington and Islamabad, as well as a rapidly dwindling American military presence in Afghanistan.
The special representative post was first held by Richard C. Holbrooke, a larger-than-life diplomat who assembled an extensive staff at the State Department and threw himself into a broad range of political and development issues in Afghanistan.
After Mr. Holbrooke’s death in December 2010, the job went to Marc Grossman, another career diplomat who devoted his tenure to efforts, ultimately fruitless, to negotiate a political settlement with the Taliban. Mr. Grossman deliberately cultivated a lower profile than Mr. Holbrooke, scaling back his staff and negotiating behind closed doors.
Mr. Dobbins, who is currently the director of the RAND International Security and Defense Policy Center, has plenty of experience with diplomatic troubleshooting, including in Afghanistan, where he watched the raising of the American flag over the reoccupied embassy in Kabul on Dec. 16, 2001.
During the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, he served as an envoy to Bosnia, Kosovo and Haiti, as well as to Somalia, where he oversaw the withdrawal of American troops.
After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, Mr. Bush appointed him as the American representative to the Afghan opposition, and he took part in the Bonn conference in late 2001, at which a new post-Taliban Afghan government was named.
The Afghan Bag Man
The foiled arrest that explains America’s failure in Afghanistan.
Foreign Policy BY SARAH CHAYES MAY 4, 2013
Buried in the recent New York Times revelation that the CIA has been delivering bags of cash to Afghan President Hamid Karzai is a nugget of information that tells the whole story about just how self-defeating U.S. Afghanistan policy has been. It solves some riddles that mystified a lot of us at the time -- and constitutes an object lesson for the future.
The CIA's bag man was Muhammad Zia Salehi.
In July 2010, this same Salehi was arrested by U.S.-mentored Afghan police officers, on charges of influence peddling. At the time, U.S. civilian and military officials had begun to grasp how damaging Afghan government corruption was to what they were trying to achieve in Afghanistan, and were beginning to take serious steps to counter it. Salehi's arrest was the climax of that process.
It was a dramatic success, an offshoot of months of painstaking investigation into a nearly billion-dollar sinkhole in Afghanistan's top private financial institution, Kabul Bank. The decision to develop the case had been run up the U.S. interagency flagpole. Senior U.S. officials, at last sensitized to the corruption problem and anxious for a test case, had approved it and were kept informed along the way. Afghan officials, too. Karzai himself had authorized the arrest.
But before nightfall, Salehi made a phone call and Karzai reversed course, ordering his release. Charges were quickly dropped. This episode ended any serious U.S. anti-corruption efforts in Afghanistan. Which in turn ensured that all other efforts, all the sacrifice, would be in vain.
Karzai was not shy about his interference with the judicial process on Salehi's behalf. "I intervened very, very strongly," he boasted to ABC's "This Week" program a month later, citing the conditions of the arrest. "This man was taken out of his house in the middle of the night by 30 Kalashnikov-toting masked men in the name of Afghan law enforcement. This is exactly reminiscent of the days of the Soviet Union, where people were taken away from their homes by armed people in the name of the state and thrown into obscure prisons and in some kind of kangaroo courts."
Nothing of the sort happened. At the time, I sat down separately with two law enforcement officers close to the investigation and reconstructed the sequence of events. Karzai had agreed to order the arrest on the basis of a judicially-authorized wiretap that U.S. officials had played for one of his key advisors, my sources explained. Salehi's voice could be heard demanding a payoff. The Afghan attorney general signed the arrest warrant, and the interior minister detailed a special police unit to execute it.
When the Afghan police officers arrived at Salehi's house, according to the team's chief U.S. mentor, they did not storm it or break down his door; they called him on his cell phone, identified themselves, and asked him to come out. Irate, Salehi phoned a different Afghan security service, whose men rushed to the scene, exchanged shots with the arresting officers, but eventually retreated. Next, Salehi dialed up the interior minister, who explained to him that Karzai in person had approved the arrest, and Salehi had better surrender.
But U.S. embassy officials -- to let Karzai "save face," as one of them explained internally at the time -- volunteered that perhaps the arrest was a bit heavy handed. U.S. officers, who had worked hard to foster professionalism in their Afghan trainees, not to mention the Afghans who had worked the case, disagreed, and expressed bitter disappointment at the fate of their hard work, and at the lack of support from the Americans who had put them up to it.
"I have seen many a U.S. arrest that was far less polite than this one," remarked the mentor, an FBI officer.
This drama unfolded less than a month after Gen. David Petraeus took command of the more than 140,000 international troops in Afghanistan. I was part of a small group of civilian advisors helping him transition in. At the top of our agenda was Afghan governance. We were convinced that the acute and abusive corruption of the Karzai government was playing a key role in motivating Afghans to join the Taliban insurgency. Without getting a handle on corruption, it would be impossible to durably pacify the country, we believed.
Several of these civilians had helped write a strategic assessment of the Afghanistan campaign for Petraeus's predecessor, Gen. Stanley McChrystal. It warned that a "crisis in confidence in the Afghan government" -- largely due to this corruption -- threatened the mission. I worked for McChrystal at the time, and with other members of the international military command, as well as U.S. and British rule-of-law officials and others, had helped design a comprehensive plan for countering runaway Afghan corruption and the international community's role in enabling it.
Our argument was practical: Systematic state corruption and abuse of power, we spelled out in internal planning documents, was discrediting the Afghan government. Afghans were outraged at it, and therefore increasingly susceptible to Taliban influence. The international community was becoming tainted by association. This dynamic was a key factor feeding the burgeoning violence and undermining the ability of either security or development efforts to reverse these trends. Fighting corruption, in other words, wasn't just a humanitarian or governance priority, it was key to winning the war. Without better governance, anything that might be achieved by extra U.S. troops or stepped-up special operations would be short-lived at best.
But by the summer of 2010, frustratingly little progress had been made in implementing the anti-corruption procedures we had developed. So Petraeus's team of civilian "directed telescopes," as he called us, set about updating the plan.
The result was a restatement of the argument, and a more sophisticated depiction of Afghan government corruption as the work of structured, vertically integrated criminal networks -- crime syndicates masquerading, in effect, as a government. Any approach to the problem had to be strategic, had to draw on techniques from the fight against organized crime. We expanded the toolbox of leverage that could be applied. We thought through likely risks, and ways of mitigating them. We emphasized the actions to be taken to protect and reinforce those officials who truly acted on behalf of the people, and who too often found themselves in mortal danger.
Our PowerPoint presentation spelling out this plan ran to more than 40 slides. We selected a dozen we really planned to brief, but at a meeting with the entire command staff, General Petraeus read through every one. With a calculated flourish, he marked a check on each page as he turned it over. Petraeus was on board.
Elated, the Directed Telescopes planned a command conference, at which he would explain this new approach to his subordinate officers, flown in from their headquarters around Afghanistan. We had already traveled out to some regions, to begin "socializing" the novel ideas.
But when he stood up to address the assembled brass, Petraeus seemed to skip past -- or even argue against -- the slides we had prepared explaining the new governance approach. We were stunned. What had happened? Had we misunderstood? Had he changed his mind?
For another month, we kept at it; I hammered out a detailed implementation of our general concept to be employed in Kandahar province, alongside the troop surge. But by mid-September 2010, it was clear to me that Petraeus had no intention of implementing it, or of pursuing any substantive anti-corruption initiative at all. Four months later, in an intense interagency struggle over the language of a document spelling out objectives for Afghanistan by 2015, the U.S. government, at the cabinet level, explicitly reached the same decision.
That was the moment I understood the Afghanistan mission could not succeed.
I spent weeks wracking my brain, trying to account for the about-face. Eventually, after a glance in my calendar to confirm the dates, it came to me. It was the Salehi arrest. The Salehi arrest had changed everything.
In those fervid days immediately after Salehi's release, Petraeus swung into energetic action. Karzai was blustering against the two special Afghan police teams, the Sensitive Investigations Unit (SIU), which had been developing the massive and complex Kabul Bank case, and the newer Major Crimes Task Force (MCTF), focused specifically on corruption, whose officers had executed the Salehi arrest warrant. Karzai would disband them both, he swore. Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry rallied much of the international community in defense of the two teams, and the red line held.
Then Karzai went after the special anti-corruption prosecutors. U.K.-financed top-up salaries, bringing their pay from $200 per month to $800 (for taking on some of the most ruthless and well-funded Afghan criminals), were cancelled by an Afghan government crying interference. Prosecutors on the Salehi case were demoted, sent to the provinces. The Afghan government barred U.S. Department of Justice attorneys from mentoring their Afghan counterparts on anti-corruption cases. This time, no one stepped up. No support came from the international community.
Anti-corruption efforts in Afghanistan collapsed. Prosecutions stalled. The Afghan Interior Ministry refused to authorize further investigations by the SIU or the MCTF. "We can't find a fish little enough to go after," complained the MCTF mentor in December 2010. Petraeus turned his focus to killing insurgents. U.S. interagency guidance approved in early 2011 as part of that "objectives" document actually barred the Justice Department from helping Afghan prosecutors on anti-corruption cases. The best, most constructive and courageous Afghan law enforcement professionals were left high and dry by Washington, alone against a hostile Afghan government. A draft anti-corruption plan -- in itself insufficient -- was never presented to President Obama for approval.
And no wonder. U.S. officials had blundered into a circular firing squad. Salehi, the subject of the U.S. government's corruption test case, was also the U.S. government's intermediary for covert cash payments to Karzai. A secret CIA agenda was in conflict with the agenda of much of the rest of the U.S. government. And with no one able to explicitly arbitrate this contradiction, the CIA's agenda won out.
Throughout the unfolding investigation, two senior U.S. officials have told me, through Salehi's arrest and release after a few hours of police detention, CIA personnel never mentioned their relationship with him. Even afterwards, despite pressure in Kabul and Washington, the CIA refused to provide the ambassador or the key cabinet officials a list of Afghans they were paying. The CIA station chief in Kabul continued to hold private meetings with Karzai, with no other U.S. officials present.
So whom did Salehi call from his jail cell the afternoon of his arrest? Was it Karzai, as many presumed at the time? Or was it the CIA station chief?
What began as a test case on Afghan corruption, in other words, turned into a test case in U.S. foreign-policy dysfunction, raising a number of further questions of deeper import to the United States. Just how connected are CIA activities to core United States goals abroad? Or to a concerted plan for achieving them? To what extent do CIA officials set their own agenda? Is that agenda always in the U.S. national interest? How often is it at cross-purposes with the goals of the president, the department of state, even the military? What is the appropriate degree of transparency and accountability to prevent the inadvertent sabotage of other U.S. efforts and investments? Who must call these shots?
Only if senior U.S. leaders have the courage to address these questions directly, to arbitrate them clearly, and enforce their decisions, can U.S. foreign policy hope in the future to avoid the tragic waste of lives and effort that has characterized the past decade.
Afghan father executes daughter in public over 'affair'
Agence France-Presse May 4, 2013
KABUL - In front of 300 villagers, Halima's father shot her in the head, stomach and waist - a public execution overseen by local religious leaders in Afghanistan to punish her for an alleged affair.
Halima, aged between 18 and 20 and a mother of two children, was killed for bringing dishonour on her family in a case that underlines how the country is still struggling to protect women more than 11 years after the fall of the Taliban regime.
Police in the north-west province of Badghis said Halima was accused of running away with a male cousin while her husband was in Iran, and her father sought advice from Taliban-backed imams on how to punish her.
"People in the mosque and village started taunting him about her escape with the cousin," said Sharafuddin Sharaf, the Badghis provincial police chief. "A local cleric who runs a madrassa told him that she must be punished with death, and the mullahs said she should be executed in public.
"The father killed his daughter with three shots as instructed by religious elders and in front of villagers. We went there two days later but he and his entire family had fled."
Amnesty International said the killing, which occurred on April 22 in the village of Kookchaheel in Badghis, was damning evidence of how little control Afghan police have over many areas of the country.
"Violence against women continues to be endemic in Afghanistan and those responsible very rarely face justice," said Amnesty's Afghanistan researcher, Horia Mosadiq.
"Not only do women face violence at the hands of family members for reasons of preserving so-called 'honour', but frequently women face human-rights abuses resulting from verdicts issued by traditional, informal justice systems."
Police in Baghdis, a remote and impoverished province that borders Turkmenistan, said Halima had run away with her cousin to a village 30 kilometres away.
Her father found her after 10 days and brought her back home, where imams told him he must kill her in front of the villagers to assuage his family's humiliation.
A Badghis-based women's rights activist said he had seen video footage of Hamila's execution.
"On the video, she is shot three times in front of 300-400 people. Her brother witnesses her death and breaks down in tears," said the activist.
"She is sitting on her knees in the dust, wearing a large chador veil. A mullah announces her funeral prayers first, then her father shoots her from behind with an AK-47 at a distance of about five metres.
"We have learnt that a Taliban shadow governor in the region asked the mullahs to issue the death penalty for her. The local religious council first said she should be stoned to death, but since the cousin was not there, they decided she should be shot."
It is not known what happened to the cousin with whom she ran away.
The activist also said that Halima's husband had objected to the killing and tried to return from Iran before the execution.
Mirwais Mirzakwal, head of the Badghis provincial government's media department, confirmed the accounts of how Halima died but gave no further details.
Women in male-dominated Afghanistan still suffer horrendous abuse after the fall of the 1996-2001 Taliban regime, which banned them from attending school or any form of public activity.
Under the Taliban, women risked being beaten if they did not wear full burqas or if they left the house without a male escort.
In 2009, Afghanistan passed a benchmark law criminalising forced marriage, rape, beatings and other violence against women, but Amnesty and other campaigning groups say it is rarely enforced.
With international troops withdrawing next year, many Afghan women fear any advances made since 2001 will evaporate as the Taliban exerts increasing influence at local and national levels.
Mr Sharaf, the Badghis police chief, said officers were investigating Halima's killing, but no one had yet been arrested.
"We are trying to bring the perpetrators to justice," he said, admitting that authorities had only limited power in villages such as Kookchaheel. "It is a volatile place and on the border between Badghis and Herat province, and the Taliban is also active."
* Agence France-Presse
Female Afghan journalist win ‘Courage in Journalism’ award
Khaama Press By Sadaf Shinwari 04 May 2013
An Afghan woman journlist is among the three women who have been awarded the 2013 Courage in Journlism Award from the International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF).
Najiba Ayubi, 45, managing director for The Killid Group in Afghanistan has been nominated for the award after risking her life to report the news.
Ayubi spent more than a decade working under anonymous threats and attacks from government entities for her reporting on politics and women’s rights. She leads a team of reporters working in print, broadcast and online media and has refused calls for censorship.
She remained committed to her work and rejected calls to limit her work despite facing direct threats from many sources including politicians who have sent gunmen to her home and other aggressors who have vowed to harm her family.
Najiba Ayubi follows Farida Nekzad and Sharif Akhlas and became the third IWMF Courage in Journalism Award winner from Afghanistan.
The other women journalists who will receive the awards includes Bopha Phorn, 28, reporter for The Cambodia Daily in Cambodia and Nour Kelze, 25, photojournalist for Reuters in Syria.
The winners will receive their awards during ceremonies in New York and Los Angeles which are scheduled to be organized on October 23 and October 29 this year. The Courage in Journalism Awards and Lifetime Achievement Award will be sponsored by the Bank of America.
www.afghanistanewscenter.com