Afghanistan

Recent history (19th-21st Century)
kmaherali
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Post by kmaherali »

July 19, 2008
Op-Ed Contributor
Rebuilding Afghanistan, One Book at a Time
By NANCY HATCH DUPREE
Kabul, Afghanistan

SINCE 2001, when the Taliban were dislodged from power in Afghanistan, the international community has spent many billions of dollars toward the nation’s reconstruction. Yet not much progress can be seen. Poor management and lack of coordination among aid agencies are the major reasons for this dismal record, but another very simple problem has been a failure to make sure that the Afghan people have access to books and other printed materials with the information they need to move forward.

This is a serious flaw that affects health care, education and government itself. Now, as fighting intensifies in eastern and southwestern Afghanistan, it is especially important that we address the problem.

Afghanistan’s high mortality rates among infants, children and mothers have fallen in recent years, thanks in part to the deployment of trained community health workers to remote provinces. It is unrealistic, however, to expect these workers to remain for extended periods. Because most deaths are caused by preventable illnesses, it is important that written materials are left behind to remind patients of health workers’ oral instructions. Only then can health messages be strengthened and improvements sustained.

Afghanistan’s enrollment of four to six million children in primary school is also something to be proud of. And much money and effort is spent on adult literacy programs.

But these achievements obscure a quality problem: the lack of basic reading materials needed to make education effective. Rural students have little or no access to books for supplementary reading on farming, household management and other subjects germane to their lives. And graduates soon lose their newly won literacy because they have nothing to read.

The introduction of democracy in post-Taliban Afghanistan is also considered to be a major success story. For the elections in 2004 and 2005, thousands of newly trained election workers, both men and women, traveled the countryside, sometimes by horse or donkey. Posters urging citizens to vote appeared in almost every bazaar. There were daily radio messages. And voter turnout was unprecedented.

Yet most voters were, and still are, unaware that for democracy to work, they must go beyond simply voting and participate in the decision-making of provincial councils and community groups. The Afghan people need basic information about how democracy works, and especially about their own nascent democratic institutions, to transform their budding political structure into a system for good governance. This is especially urgent because national elections are scheduled for 2009.

Afghanistan’s radio network is growing, and an estimated 70 percent of the population listens at least three days a week, but radio messages are ephemeral. Some people scoff at the idea of distributing books to a population that is barely 28 percent literate. But 28 percent amounts to nearly 9 million people out of a population of 32 million, and that is certainly a worthy beginning.

It is important that a high government body like the Ministry of Education endorse the concept of distributing books to the population. Money is needed, too, ideally from both foreign governments and the Afghan government. And experts are needed to write the simple, accurate texts that Afghans need — on subjects from health care and household management to science, culture, history and the environment.

A pilot project called the Box Library Extension, which we operate at the Afghanistan Center, has placed more than 100,000 books in 160 libraries in 32 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces. The communities have welcomed the books with enthusiasm.

Afghans possess a remarkable inner strength that has carried them through two decades of war and displacement. If they are given the knowledge they need to fully participate in reconstruction efforts, their country will move forward steadily, to the benefit of all.

Nancy Hatch Dupree is the director of the Afghanistan Center at Kabul University.
kmaherali
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Aid agencies reconsider role in Afghanistan
IRC suspends operations after deadly attack

Scott Deveau
Canwest News Service


Saturday, August 16, 2008


Those benefiting from development work in Afghanistan are urging foreign aid agencies to stay the course in the war-torn region despite a rash of targeted killings against Western aid workers in recent months.

Earlier this week four aid workers, including two Canadians -- Jacqueline Kirk and Shirley Case -- were gunned down in a brazen midday attack on a dangerous stretch of road outside Kabul.

The aid workers were in the country with the New York-based International Rescue Committee, which has been doing development work in Afghanistan since 1979, just weeks after the Soviet-led invasion of the country.

It was the second time in a little more than a year IRC workers were targeted in such an attack. The aid group said it would cease its operations in the country temporarily in order to assess the Afghan security situation.

That move has some in Afghanistan worried other aid agencies will pull out of the country as well.

The escalating violence has already forced the closure of a number of schools and hospitals in the south and has hindered the development of projects in other regions.

Local aid officials said it would be a mistake to let the Taliban's intimidation tactics gain the upper hand.

"The enemy is always trying to stop aid projects by targeting aid worker(s), either through killings or intimidation," said a spokesman for the Afghan-Canadian Community Center in Kandahar. "If the donor countries decrease or stop aid projects it means the enemy has succeeded."

Most NGOs operating in the country refuse to hire protection for their workers because they want to remain neutral in the conflict and feel travelling with armoured guards might invite attacks.

The Taliban, however, has begun targeting these unarmed aid workers in its ongoing effort to undermine development work in the country and, in turn, the Karzai government's ability to bring stability to the region.

The murders this week add to the 19 other NGO workers who have already been killed by insurgents this year -- more than were killed in all of 2007.

"Most people believe these are terrible things carried out by Taliban," said Ghulam Haider, a teacher in Kandahar whose school receives Canadian foreign aid. "It's a big loss for ordinary Afghans, people who benefit from those aid projects."

Mohammad Hashim Mayar, deputy director of Agency Co-ordinating Body for Afghan Relief, said there is concern security in the country is rapidly deteriorating. "Areas that were secure last year are no longer secure," he said.

ACBAR represents more than 100 NGOs operating in Afghanistan and Mayar noted insurgent attacks against civilians and foreign workers hit their highest point in July since the major offensive began in 2001.

Mayar said it is no longer safe for aid workers to travel further than 35 kilometres outside Kabul, which poses a serious challenge to the much-needed work they are doing in rural areas.

A Taliban spokesman was quick to take credit for Wednesday's attack, saying they "don't value" aid projects in the country and accusing Western aid workers of training spies.

While the attacks have forced some agencies, such as IRC, to scale back or move their operations, Mayar said it is unlikely most agencies operating in the country will abandon their efforts.

"This is not the first time they have been attacked. All NGOs have been making sacrifices," he said. "This year has been worse, but aid agencies will continue their work in Afghanistan."

© The Calgary Herald 2008
kmaherali
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Post by kmaherali »

Stay the course in Afghanistan

Calgary Herald


Sunday, August 17, 2008


The murder of three aid workers and their driver in Afghanistan this past week is a tragedy and one that should make all decent people the world over both melancholic and angry. The aid workers and escort -- including Canadians Jackie Kirk of Outremont, Que., and Shirley Case of Williams Lake, B.C. -- died when Taliban terrorists attacked their convoy southeast of Kabul.

Kirk was in Afghanistan to help with teacher-training programs; Case was in the country to help manage education programs for children with disabilities. The killings bring to 23 the number of aid workers killed in Afghanistan this year in addition to the 15 employees of non-governmental organizations who died last year at the hands of the Taliban. But such facts should not be used as an excuse by some in this country to ramp up their rhetoric about a need to withdraw from Afghanistan. Nor should the murder deter Canada or other nations from keeping firm in their commitments to Afghanistan. Absent our soldiers and those from other countries, Afghanistan would fall back into the abyss.

Recall the repression under Taliban rule, including the desecration of other religions -- such as when Taliban militants used rocket launchers to blast two sandstone Buddha statues into the historical oblivion. Those statues, at 36.5 metres high and 53.3 metres high, were the remnants of a thriving Buddhist community in Afghanistan at the time of the statues' carving in about the third to fifth centuries.

Beyond cultural terror, there were other attacks upon the dignity of the Afghan people. In 1992, eight thousand undergraduates -- all women -- were dismissed from Kabul University; a similar number of female teachers in Afghanistan were fired and all female civil servants were dismissed from their government jobs. In addition to such misogyny, any Canadian who advocates an end to the Afghan mission should remember the Taliban's many murders. Recall the infamous scene in November 1999, of a woman in a pale blue burqa kneeling in the centre of the Kabul soccer stadium with a Kalashnikov rifle to her head. The woman, identified only as Zarmeena, was a mother of seven and was executed in front of cameras and a chanting crowd.

In addition to the mayhem and murder in Afghanistan as a result of Taliban rule, the rest of the world also paid a price. The Taliban's sheltering of al-Qaeda allowed the terrorist organization to prepare for 9/11, with the resulting deaths of 2,974 people from more than 90 countries, including 24 Canadians.

Since the U.S. ousted the Taliban, and since Canadian troops and others are striving to provide a modicum of security for the majority of Afghans who have no wish to see the Taliban return, Canada has helped feed more than 6.7 million Afghans.

Then there is the future: by the end of 2009, Canada's goal in Afghanistan is to eradicate polio by immunizing seven million children under the age of five.

In June, Ottawa announced a $550 million commitment to Afghanistan, including more aid for women's and girls' initiatives. Jackie Kirk and Shirley Case were part of such efforts. Their deaths would be in vain if their murders lead to our withdrawal. Canada must stay the course in Afghanistan.

© The Calgary Herald 2008
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October 4, 2008
Governor of Afghan Opium Capital Pushes for Crop Replacement
By CARLOTTA GALL

KABUL, Afghanistan — As the new planting season for opium poppy draws near, the governor of Helmand, Afghanistan’s largest poppy-producing province, says that this year he is determined to beat the illicit crop that is a major source of money for drug lords and insurgents alike.

To do that, the governor, Gulab Mangal, says he plans to try something that has worked in more peaceful parts of Afghanistan, but which remains untested in lawless Helmand. He hopes to persuade farmers not to plant poppy at all, rather than eradicating the crop once it has already been planted, a policy he blames for sowing greater strife in Helmand.

Mr. Mangal’s solution may seem easy enough, but the task before him is formidable. He says it will take new seeds for farmers, new roads to get their legal crops to the market, reconstruction money, strict enforcement of laws against poppy growing and, perhaps most difficult of all, the elimination of the official corruption that has fueled the drug trade.

So far, Mr. Mangal has secured more than $8 million from the United States and Britain for seeds and fertilizer for 26,000 farmers, as well as for a public information campaign to let farmers know of his plans. But just weeks before the planting season, he was still fretting that they would not arrive in time.

“Four months ago I raised my voice, but we have been delayed by bureaucracy,” he said. “We have to get to the farmers within one month.”

Helmand is the most extreme example of Afghanistan’s embattled state, in which the drug trade has become a major part of how the Taliban keep their insurgency running. The director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Antonio Maria Costa, estimated this year that the Taliban earned some $100 million from the opium trade in 2007.

In Helmand, the Taliban insurgency is strongest and the poppy crop is the largest, and the insurgents and powerful drug smugglers feed off and protect one another.

The drug business has developed from poppy growing to include the much more lucrative refining and smuggling of heroin. One of the most fertile regions of Afghanistan, Helmand produces some 50 percent of Afghanistan’s poppy crop. If it were a country, it would lead the world in opium poppy production all by itself.

The population, caught among the insurgents, drug lords and foreign forces, is deeply suspicious and often openly hostile to foreign forces.

Five districts of 13 are outside government hands and controlled by the insurgents, and three more districts have only a token government presence and foreign troops in the district centers.

Some 8,000 British troops are stationed in Helmand as part of the NATO force, along with hundreds of Afghan Army soldiers, police officers and border forces. Yet this year they have not managed to extend their hold on territory.

Just five months into a job he accepted reluctantly on President Hamid Karzai’s orders, Mr. Mangal, 51, a former army officer, says he is well aware of the challenges of tackling drugs, corruption and militancy all at once.

A wealthy businessman, he has already served under Mr. Karzai as governor of two other provinces, Paktika and Laghman. In two recent interviews in the Afghan capital, Kabul, he laid out his plan for Helmand.

“I expect to reduce the rate of poppy cultivation by as much as it increased recently,” he said hopefully. Helmand’s production has nearly doubled since 2006, when the Taliban staged their resurgence. “But whatever the case, to decrease it,” he said.

He said he was determined to eliminate what he called “endemic internal corruption” and to accelerate the delivery of reconstruction money.

“In my view it is better to provide everything before the planting season — public awareness that growing poppy is punishable under the Constitution, and that with the seeds, there comes an obligation not to grow poppy,” he said.

“We should also let them know that if they grow poppy, they will face serious enforcement of the law,” he said.

If all that can be done, he believes that people will cooperate. Many were growing poppy often under duress from landlords and the Taliban, he said, and this year many found themselves short of flour as wheat prices skyrocketed.

The farmers remain poor, while the smugglers make most of the profit. Meanwhile local addiction rates are soaring, he added.

“People are not happy with this, and they don’t want to grow poppy anymore,” he said. “But we should reassure the people. On the military side, we should carry out strong operations against the big leaders, to weaken all those powerful smugglers and reduce the risk for the ordinary farmers.”

The government has to be seen to be fighting high-level corruption and the powerful landlords and drug smugglers, he said. Mr. Mangal is particularly proud of the arrests of several high-level drug smugglers, made soon after he took up his post.

One was that of Hajji Yakub, who was living in a government house near the main police station in the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah.

An Iranian suspected of smuggling was detained with him. The police found more than 40 pounds of heroin, 44 pounds of morphine, opium and other drugs, and weapons, one of Mr. Mangal’s aides said, asking not to be identified.

According to the governor’s aides, two other high-level smugglers were caught with large hauls of drugs, and a third was narrowly missed, but his cache of drugs was seized.

They also exposed a case of high-level government corruption, which involved selling off sacks of flour that had been donated to the poor. Stricter rules for the police are reducing petty crime and putting an end to many off-duty police officers’ moonlighting as criminals, the governor said.

“All these activities made people involved in corruption and drug smuggling angry,” he said. “They got angry and they accelerated their plotting,” he said, referring to controversies that have since dogged him.

The trouble began in mid-August when the market town of Marja, in Nadali District, fell to the Taliban. Marja was equally valuable to the drug smugglers and the Taliban, both of whom had been looking for a new base of operation since American marines uprooted them in May from a base farther south, in Garmser.

It remains unclear exactly why Marja fell. The governor blamed British troops for maneuvers that panicked the police, who abandoned their posts.

His aides have blamed political rivals, in particular the former provincial police chief Abdul Rahman Jan and his patron, the former governor Sher Muhammad Akhundzada, for encouraging the police to leave. Mr. Akhundzada had been forced out after American and Afghan drug agents found nine tons of opium in his office.

Both men have adamantly denied interfering, but they have been vociferous in their complaints that Mr. Mangal was incapable of running the province and should be removed.

As rumors spread that Mr. Karzai would dismiss him, the governor traveled to Kabul at the end of August, but had to wait 10 days for an audience with the president.

Finally, the crisis has seemed to pass, and Mr. Mangal has kept his job.

Despite the attacks, the governor says he remains undeterred, and still hopes his seeds and fertilizer will arrive on time. “As far as I go forward, I will face more and more problems,” he said. “I will show some flexibility in tactics, but generally I will go forward.”
kmaherali
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Post by kmaherali »

Canada funds wheat seed as Afghan poppy alternative

Ethan Baron
Canwest News Service


Sunday, November 09, 2008


Canada is providing $1.2 million to buy wheat seeds and fertilizer for thousands of Afghan farmers, but the Taliban warn they may attack any foreigners who attempt to distribute the seeds.

The money will pay for 293 tonnes of wheat seed, to supply more than 5,000 farmers with 50 kilograms each, and plant a total of 2,000 hectares of land.

"We look forward to working with the governor of Kandahar to sow these seeds of peace," said Elissa Golberg, head of Canadian development operations in Kandahar province.

The project is intended to raise farm yields and give growers an alternative to the lucrative poppy trade, said Kandahar Gov. Rahmatullah Raoufi.

Farmers have good reasons to switch from growing poppies to growing wheat, said Abdul Hai Niamati, director of agriculture for Kandahar province.

Pressure from other nations concerned about opium production, and from the Afghan government, provides a disincentive, Niamati said.

Also, wheat prices are increasing and "that is why people are wanting to grow wheat," Niamati said.

Poppy cultivation also takes more time, labour and water than growing wheat, Niamati said.

The Taliban won't target farmers who switch from poppies to wheat, but may take violent action if it's done by the wrong people, said Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid.

"We are not against wheat growing. There will be no threat or concern for farmers who are sowing wheat in their lands," Mujahid said. "However if the government authority or foreigners come down to the districts for the purpose of distributing wheat seeds, we might attack them.

"If the seeds are being distributed by local community people or tribal elders or through ordinary people, it doesn't matter, there will be no problem."

Seeds will go to farmers who meet the minimum farm-size requirement, have the ability to irrigate, and are in need.

© The Calgary Herald 2008
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February 8, 2009
Afghan Leader Finds Himself Hero No More
By DEXTER FILKINS

KABUL, Afghanistan — A foretaste of what would be in store for President Hamid Karzai after the election of a new American administration came last February, when Joseph R. Biden Jr., then a senator, sat down to a formal dinner at the palace during a visit here.

Between platters of lamb and rice, Mr. Biden and two other American senators questioned Mr. Karzai about corruption in his government, which, by many estimates, is among the worst in the world. Mr. Karzai assured Mr. Biden and the other senators that there was no corruption at all and that, in any case, it was not his fault.

The senators gaped in astonishment. After 45 minutes, Mr. Biden threw down his napkin and stood up.

“This dinner is over,” Mr. Biden announced, according to one of the people in the room at the time. And the three senators walked out, long before the appointed time.

Today, of course, Mr. Biden is the vice president.

The world has changed for Mr. Karzai, and for Afghanistan, too. A White House favorite — a celebrity in flowing cape and dark gray fez — in each of the seven years that he has led this country since the fall of the Taliban, Mr. Karzai now finds himself not so favored at all. Not by Washington, and not by his own.

In the White House, President Obama said he regarded Mr. Karzai as unreliable and ineffective. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said he presided over a “narco-state.” The Americans making Afghan policy, worried that the war is being lost, are vowing to bypass Mr. Karzai and deal directly with the governors in the countryside.

At home, Mr. Karzai faces a widening insurgency and a population that blames him for the manifest lack of economic progress and the corrupt officials that seem to stand at every doorway of his government. His face, which once adorned the walls of tea shops across the country, is today much less visible.

Now, perhaps crucially, an election looms. Mr. Karzai says he will ask the voters to return him to the palace for another five-year term. The election is set for Aug. 20, after what promises to be a violent and eventful summer. In a poll commissioned by a group of private Afghans, 85 percent of those surveyed said they intended to vote for someone other than Mr. Karzai.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration will have to decide what it wants from Mr. Karzai as it tries to make good on its promise to reverse the course of the war. Or whether it wants him at all.

With the insurgency rising, corruption soaring and opium blooming across the land, it perhaps is not surprising that so many Afghans, and so many in Washington, see President Karzai’s removal as a precondition for reversing the country’s downward surge.

“Under President Karzai, we have gone from a better situation to a good situation to a not-so-bad situation to a bad situation — and now are going to worse,” said Abdullah, a former foreign minister in Mr. Karzai’s government who may now challenge him for the presidency (and who, like many Afghans, has only one name). “That is the trend.

“So let us say Karzai stays in power through the summer and that nothing serious happens and then he wins re-election,” Dr. Abdullah said. “Then there will be two scenarios, and only two scenarios — a rapid collapse or a slow unraveling.”

People close to Mr. Karzai say the man is exhausted, wary of his enemies and worried for his physical safety. He feels embattled and underappreciated, they say, but is utterly determined, in spite of it all, to run again and win. In recent weeks, the growing American dissatisfaction with Mr. Karzai, coupled with a simmering frustration among Afghans over what they regard as the reckless killing of civilians by American forces, has prompted extraordinary reactions from Mr. Karzai.

At a news conference on Tuesday at his marble-floored palace, Mr. Karzai appeared side-by-side with Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general. Mr. Karzai wore his signature outfit of fez and cape, but his visage was wan and slack. Asked by an Afghan reporter about his relations with American leaders, Mr. Karzai sprang to life, accusing unnamed people in the American government of trying to “pressure” him to stay silent over the deaths of Afghan civilians in attacks by Americans.

“Our demands are clear — to stop the civilian casualties, the searching of Afghan homes and the arresting Afghans,” Mr. Karzai said of the Americans. “And of course, the Americans pressured us to be quiet and to make us retreat from our demands. But that is impossible. Afghanistan and its president are not going to retreat from their demands.”

Mr. Karzai did not touch on larger frustrations, which Afghan and Western officials here say he harbors, about the overall American effort, namely, the relegation of Afghanistan to second-tier status after the invasion of Iraq. Many Afghans and Western officials here believe that it was the Iraq war, more than any other factor, that deprived Mr. Karzai of the resources he needed to help the Afghan state stand on its own, and to prevent the resurgence of the Taliban that Mr. Obama is now vowing to contain.

Yet for all the doubts about Mr. Karzai — and for all the strains he labors under — he remains by far the strongest politician in the country. He commands the resources of the Afghan state, including the army and the police, and billions of dollars in American and other aid that flows into the treasury.

In his seven years in office, Mr. Karzai has successfully presided over the transition of the Afghan state from the devastated, pre-modern institution it was under the Taliban to the deeply troubled but largely democratic one it is today. Perhaps most important for his future, Mr. Karzai has assembled a team of senior administrators whose competence and experience would be difficult for any challenger to match.

Perhaps for that reason, of the many prominent Afghans who have hinted that they may run against him, including Dr. Abdullah and a former finance minister, Ashraf Ghani, only a handful of Afghans have so far declared their intentions. Some Afghan leaders say they will announce their candidacies soon, but it seems just as likely that they are waiting to see if Mr. Karzai stumbles.

As for the members of Mr. Obama’s team, they may yet discover that Mr. Karzai is the man they will be forced to deal with, whether they like him or not.

At the palace news conference, Mr. Karzai acknowledged his own unpopularity, and then offered a vigorous defense of his record. He declined to be interviewed for this article.

“Well, I have been in government for seven years. It’s natural that I would not be as popular now as I was seven years ago,” Mr. Karzai said.

“The institutions of Afghanistan have worked very well,” he added. “The Afghan people participated in the election for president. They participated in elections for Parliament. The parliamentary system has been functioning a lot better than some established parliaments in the world. They have been making laws, approving laws. The government institutions are increasingly in progress — the economy, the national army, the growth of education. We went from almost two or three universities in 2002 to 17 universities, to the freedom of the press, hundreds of newspapers and radios and all that. I and the Afghan people are proud of our achievements.”

And, he might also have said, six million Afghan children attending school, a quarter of whom are girls, whose education was prohibited by the Taliban.

One of the people with the most generous words for Mr. Karzai is William Wood, the American ambassador. Under the ambassador’s former boss, President Bush, Mr. Karzai enjoyed a favored personal status, even if his state did not. That special relationship was symbolized by the videoconferences in which the two men participated regularly.

“The guy works very hard,” Mr. Wood said of Mr. Karzai. “He faces a problem set every day that would daunt anyone. He’s got an insurgency based outside the country, and a level of poverty and criminality inside the country that feeds the insurgency. He’s got an army that had to be built from zero following the ouster of the Taliban. He’s got a police force that had to be reformed.

Speaking in an interview at his office in Kabul, Mr. Wood added: “Yeah, I think he’s tired. And I think frankly that everyone — the international community, the United States, the United Nations, Western Europe, the international press — were unrealistically optimistic about the problem of Afghanistan following the ouster of the Taliban.”

Mr. Wood will soon be replaced by Lt. Gen. Karl W. Eikenberry, a former commander of American forces here.

In his last tour, which ended in 2007, General Eikenberry enjoyed good relations with Mr. Karzai. Given Mr. Karzai’s mood these days, that is probably a good thing.

At a ceremony last month for the first graduates of Afghanistan’s National Military Academy, Mr. Karzai stood and addressed the assembled 84 cadets as well as a group of diplomats, including Mr. Wood. Mr. Karzai turned the occasion into a populist barnburner.

“I told America and the world to give us aircraft — otherwise we will get them from the other place!” Mr. Karzai roared, prompting applause. “I told them to give us the planes soon, that we have no more patience, and that we cannot get along without military aircraft!

“Give us the aircraft sooner or we will get them from the others!” Mr. Karzai roared again. “We told them to bring us tanks, too — otherwise we will get them from other place!”

Mr. Karzai never said what the “other place” was.

Abdul Waheed Wafa contributed reporting from Kabul, and Peter Baker from Washington.
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Deputy calls Karzai a stooge


Canwest News ServiceFebruary 22, 2009

Afghanistan's president and vice-president accused each other of being American stooges during angry exchanges at a cabinet meeting.

In a clash which showed how fragile the Western-backed government has become, President Hamid Karzai was labelled a corrupt incompetent by his own understudy, Ahmad Zia Massoud. Karzai responded by saying Massoud was part of a U.S. conspiracy to oust him.

The infighting reflects a collapse in support for Karzai, both within the Afghan coalitions that have supported him since his election in 2004 and among his backers in NATO and the European Union. In Kabul last week, British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said Karzai's government had to raise its game to secure continued British financial and military support.

Tempers flared after Massoud made a speech blaming greed and corruption in the Karzai administration for hunger and poverty in the country. The subsequent row lasted for 10 minutes and had to be broken up by cabinet colleagues.

© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
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March 27, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
The Winnable War
By DAVID BROOKS
Khyber Pass, Afghanistan

I came to Afghanistan skeptical of American efforts to transform this country. Afghanistan is one of the poorest, least-educated and most-corrupt nations on earth. It is an infinitely complex and fractured society. It has powerful enemies in Pakistan, Iran and the drug networks working hard to foment chaos. The ground is littered with the ruins of great powers that tried to change this place.

Moreover, we simply do not know how to modernize nations. Western aid workers seem to spend most of their time drawing up flow charts for each other. They’re so worried about their inspectors general that they can’t really immerse themselves in the messy world of local reality. They insist on making most of the spending decisions themselves so the “recipients” of their largess end up passive, dependent and resentful.

Every element of my skepticism was reinforced during a six-day tour of the country. Yet the people who work here make an overwhelming case that Afghanistan can become a functional, terror-fighting society and that it is worth sending our sons and daughters into danger to achieve this.

In the first place, the Afghan people want what we want. They are, as Lord Byron put it, one of the few people in the region without an inferiority complex. They think they did us a big favor by destroying the Soviet Union and we repaid them with abandonment. They think we owe them all this.

That makes relations between Afghans and foreigners relatively straightforward. Most military leaders here prefer working with the Afghans to the Iraqis. The Afghans are warm and welcoming. They detest the insurgents and root for American success. “The Afghans have treated you as friends, allies and liberators from the very beginning,” says Afghanistan’s defense minister, Abdul Rahim Wardak.

Second, we’re already well through the screwing-up phase of our operation. At first, the Western nations underestimated the insurgency. They tried to centralize power in Kabul. They tried to fight a hodgepodge, multilateral war.

Those and other errors have been exposed, and coalition forces are learning. When you interview impressive leaders here, like Brig. Gen. John Nicholson of Regional Command South, Col. John Agoglia of the Counterinsurgency Training Center and Chris Alexander of the U.N., you see how relentless they are at criticizing their own operations. Thanks to people like that, the coalition will stumble toward success, having tried the alternatives.

Third, we’ve got our priorities right. Armies love killing bad guys. Aid agencies love building schools. But the most important part of any aid effort is governance and law and order. It’s reforming the police, improving the courts, training local civil servants and building prisons.

In Afghanistan, every Western agency is finally focused on this issue, from a Canadian reconstruction camp in Kandahar to the top U.S. general, David McKiernan.

Fourth, the quality of Afghan leadership is improving. This is a relative thing. President Hamid Karzai is detested by much of the U.S. military. Some provincial governors are drug dealers on the side. But as the U.N.’s Kai Eide told the Security Council, “The Afghan government is today better and more competent than ever before.” Reformers now lead the most important ministries and competent governors run key provinces.

Fifth, the U.S. is finally taking this war seriously. Up until now, insurgents have had free rein in vast areas of southern Afghanistan. The infusion of 17,000 more U.S. troops will change that. The Obama administration also promises a civilian surge to balance the military push.

Sixth, Pakistan is finally on the agenda. For the past few years, the U.S. has let Pakistan get away with murder. The insurgents train, organize and get support from there. “It’s very hard to deal with a cross-border insurgency on only one side of the border,” says Mr. Alexander of the U.N. The Obama strategic review recognizes this.

Finally, it is simply wrong to say that Afghanistan is a hopeless 14th-century basket case. This country had decent institutions before the Communist takeover. It hasn’t fallen into chaos, the way Iraq did, because it has a culture of communal discussion and a respect for village elders. The Afghans have embraced the democratic process with enthusiasm.

I finish this trip still skeptical but also infected by the optimism of the truly impressive people who are working here. And one other thing:

After the trauma in Iraq, it would have been easy for the U.S. to withdraw into exhaustion and realism. Instead, President Obama is doubling down on the very principles that some dismiss as neocon fantasy: the idea that this nation has the capacity to use military and civilian power to promote democracy, nurture civil society and rebuild failed states.

Foreign policy experts can promote one doctrine or another, but this energetic and ambitious response — amid economic crisis and war weariness — says something profound about America’s DNA.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/27/opini ... nted=print
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Post by kmaherali »

This is what you get when you negotiate with taliban

By Susan Martinuk, Calgary HeraldApril 3, 2009 9:55 AM

Interesting. Just as western leaders are publicly mulling a strategy of reconciling with moderate Taliban leaders to draw them over to the side of good, Afghan President Hamid Karzai has reminded us of why that can never happen.

In an effort to secure political support for upcoming elections, Karzai approved a law that will strip away hard-won gains for the rights of Afghan women and return them to a sub-human existence as chattel, just as they were under the Taliban. A Shia minority woman won't be able to leave home without her husband's permission, decline his sexual advances or gain custody of any children.

Canadians and other members of the 42-country NATO group that is fighting to bring security and freedom to all Afghans are rightly outraged. We have collectively paid the financial and human cost for their freedom (Canadians more than most) and, in response, Karzai has thumbed his nose at western values in favour of his own political expediency. The law will win Karzai the support of the religious Shia group that may hold the balance of power in this summer's election. No doubt, it will also secure the support of pro-Taliban extremists and anyone else who seeks power by oppressing others.

In theory, the West has installed a democratic government. But most similarities to our governments end there. In Afghanistan, female members of government routinely face death threats and cries of "kill her"when they address parliament. No male parliamentarian-- including Karzai--has dared to defend or protect them. Other high-ranking women have been intimidated or even assassinated.

In practice, it's obvious that religious traditions still have considerable power over the decisions the government makes and how it acts. For centuries, Afghanistan had no central government. Its regions were governed by leaders of tribal factions (warlords), religious extremists, drug lords and basically anyone with enough money and/or fire power to gain local influence. Their factional fighting is associated with atrocities such as mass rape, torture and murder, and it's estimated that they still exploit and oppress about 75 per cent of the population-- mostly through the opium drug trade.

According to one Afghan, there is nothing to differentiate any of these leaders from the Taliban or al-Qaeda-- they are one and the same. They use corruption and intimidation to manipulate government action and they want it to govern with Islamic--not democratic-- traditions. In short, Karzai's government (which is composed of many former warlords and religious leaders) will never be free to govern democratically as long as these corrupt influences are at hand.

Perhaps that's why there's a growing consensus that the only way a central Afghan government can assert its control is to eliminate the opium trade--the very thing that gives warlords/ Taliban/terrorists their power over the Afghan people and government. Afghanistan supplies more than 90 per cent of the world's opium, producing enough cash to account for over onethird of Afghanistan's gross domestic product. These profits are then used to support terrorism and anti-government activities.

In October 2008, NATO's top commander in Afghanistan asked for a mandate to go after the opium trade, saying it was the only way to defeat the Taliban. Several months later, in February 2009, President Barack Obama announced that he would send additional troops to Afghanistan and a majority of them will be charged with eradicating the poppy trade that supports the insurgents.

Destroying the fuel that feeds the monster is the only way to victory. But it will be a difficult task, since many of the drug kingpins are members of government or have close friends in government. It's a commonly reported fact that government officials accept bribes to allow opium to be moved around--and out of--the country. Farmers also rely on opium crops to sustain them, even if it keeps them under the heavy foot of drug lords. Targeting them (at the lowest level of the opium chain) will destroy their livelihood and generate more discontent for the Taliban to feed upon.

There are no easy answers, but this week's events have shown us who pulls the political strings in Afghanistan. Beyond that, it's been made abundantly clear that abandoning this fight will result in terrible repercussions for Afghan women.

Martinuk's column appears every Friday

© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
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Post by kmaherali »

Here's why the fight in afghanistan is worth it


By Licia Corbella, Calgary HeraldApril 4, 2009

Every day when I come in to work and hang my coat on the hook behind the door of my office, I'm reminded of why Canada has troops in Afghanistan.

Hanging on that same hook is a burka. The sky-blue rayon fabric with its elaborate pleating, machine embroidery and mesh that covers the eyes, is a reminder to me of the suffocating oppression the women of Afghanistan suffered through under Taliban rule, but also of the amazing women and girls I met when I spent two weeks there in December 2003.

Earlier this week, news broke that Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai has betrayed the Shi'a women of his country by signing a law that will force the women of this minority to seek permission from their husbands before leaving their home. The law would also mean that only fathers and grandfathers could gain custody of children and that women could never deny sex to their husbands. As a result of this atrocious news, Canadians are rightly asking, what are we fighting for?Why are we there?

The best way I know to answer that question is by changing it to WHO are we fighting for.

Let me introduce you to Sabria Boostani and her daughter Tahmina, who was 14 when I met her but would be 20 now.

In the courtyard of the small Kabul orphanage she ran with little resources but a lot of love and patience, Sabria told me a hair-raising story of the Taliban's murderous ways.

On Aug. 29, 1999, Sabria was in her comfortable house in a good neighbourhood of Kabul along with her husband, their 24-year-old son and Tahmina, who was then 10 years old.

The Taliban, which means religious students, were in control of most of the country, which meant Sabria, an active, educated teacher, was essentially under house arrest for years, venturing out only with a male relative, and only under the cover of the tent-like burka that is still the predominant form of covering for women throughout Afghanistan.

Her daughter, like all girls, was no longer allowed to go to school, so Sabria secretly taught her all she could. Life was not pleasant, but it was soon to get much worse.

"At about 2 o'clock in the afternoon, two Taliban kicked in our front door," said the then 44-year-old woman, who looked more like she was 64. "They started to beat us and curse us and they locked us all in a room, and then they just shot my husband and my son in front of me and my daughter."

Sabria said she and her daughter sat clutching one another, scarcely breathing until morning, unable to move.

"The next morning, my hair was white and my daughter couldn't speak for many, many days--more than one week," she explained of the extreme trauma they suffered.

Why did the Taliban murder her husband and son? Sabria can only speculate.

"My husband and son were physicians and helped anyone who needed help, even women, which the Taliban did not allow. Maybe that's why.

"But really, the Taliban hate any educated people. They wanted to keep people as ignorant as possible. It was the only way for them to keep power."

When I met her, Sabria was teaching school to 21 girls at the Mirmum Orphanage in Kabul, which our Canadian soldiers stumbled upon and then took under their wing.

"I live my life only for my daughter now, to support her," explained Sabria, "but I am dead, though I walk and talk."

If Afghanistan is not a country entirely filled with dead men and women walking, then it certainly is a country of the walking wounded.

Virtually every Afghan who didn't flee this landlocked country during the Taliban's rule, which ran from September 1996 to November 2001, has lived through trauma few of us can comprehend. And, of course, before the Taliban, there was war--altogether, 23 years of it.

So, while Sabria barely could find the will to live, she said the kindness in the form of smiles, food, fuel, bedding, school supplies and repairs shown to her and the children by Canadian troops, as well as the lifting of Taliban rule from many parts of the country, gave her and the dozens of other women I met in Afghanistan much hope.

The reason why our brave soldiers "believe" in the mission they're on and why grieving families of the 116 Canadian soldiers who have given their lives in that brutal country say so too, is because our soldiers have all met people like Sabria and Tahmina--millions of them--who have suffered so much and deserve so much more. That's who and what we're fighting for. They're worth it. They really are.

lcorbella@theherald.canwest.com

© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
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Shiite cleric defends restrictions on women


By Sharif Khoram, Agence France-PresseApril 12, 2009 7:50 AM

Afghanistan's top Shiite cleric on Saturday defended legislation said to oppress women and accused western critics of"cultural invasion" and violating the very democracy they are promoting.

Mohammad Asif Mohseni also rejected a Ministry of Justice review ordered by President Hamid Karzai, saying any changes would violate a constitutional provision for Shiites to have their own legal system.

Karzai last week ordered a review of Shiite Personal Status Law, which he signed in March, after a storm of criticism that it imposes Taliban-style harsh restrictions on women.

"This political pressure is a cultural invasion, thinking one's culture better than others," Mohseni told a gathering of more than 200 followers and journalists at the Khatemi Nabien University, which he heads.

Mohseni accused critics --which include the United States, United Nations and Canada--of not respecting the democracy they were helping Afghanistan to install after the 2001 removal of the extremist Taliban regime.

The law was reached on the basis of "the same democracy that the West is emphasizing" in Afghanistan, he said.

© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
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Post by kmaherali »

What democracy isn't


Calgary HeraldApril 14, 2009

Mohammad Asif Mohseni needs a crash course in the meaning of democracy. Mohseni, the leading Shiite cleric in Afghanistan, says when the West expresses its firm disapproval of a new law that would, among other things, allow husbands to rape their wives, it constitutes a "cultural invasion" and violates the democratic principles the West promulgates. Mohseni said the West's disapprobation is a reflection of its belief that western culture is "better than others."

A culture that promotes and defends human rights for women is decidedly "better" than one that doesn't. Nor is democracy about allowing a culture to enact autocratic laws to oppress half that culture's citizens. Democracy is about choosing freedom for all. Oppression chosen"democratically" is not democracy. Mohseni's comments, coming with news of the shocking assassination of Sitara Achakzai, a women's rights advocate, as she rode in a rickshaw through the Kandahar streets, sadly show how far Afghanistan has to go before it can rightly call itself democratic. As long as the status of women in that country remains so precarious, and women are second-class citizens whose daily activities are legally controlled by males --and as long as those advocating for women's rights risk losing their lives--Afghanistan is not a democracy.

Democratization is not an overnight development. Ingrained attitudes take years to metamorphose into some-thing more progressive. And hyperbole uttered by fanatics is still just that--hyperbole. When it masquerades under the cloak of "democracy," it is simply obscene.

© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
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Post by kmaherali »

There is a related multimedia at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/29/world ... &th&emc=th

April 29, 2009
U.S. Sets Fight in the Poppies to Halt Taliban Cash Flow
By DEXTER FILKINS

ZANGABAD, Afghanistan — American commanders are planning to cut off the Taliban’s main source of money, the country’s multimillion-dollar opium crop, by pouring thousands of troops into the three provinces that bankroll much of the group’s operations.

The plan to send 20,000 Marines and soldiers into Helmand, Kandahar and Zabul Provinces this summer promises weeks and perhaps months of heavy fighting, since American officers expect the Taliban to vigorously defend what makes up the economic engine for the insurgency. The additional troops, the centerpiece of President Obama’s effort to reverse the course of the seven-year war, will roughly double the number already in southern Afghanistan. The troops already fighting there are universally seen as overwhelmed. In many cases, the Americans will be pushing into areas where few or no troops have been before.

Through extortion and taxation, the Taliban are believed to reap as much as $300 million a year from Afghanistan’s opium trade, which now makes up 90 percent of the world’s total. That is enough, the Americans say, to sustain all of the Taliban’s military operations in southern Afghanistan for an entire year.

“Opium is their financial engine,” said Brig. Gen. John Nicholson, the deputy commander of NATO forces in southern Afghanistan. “That is why we think he will fight for these areas.”

The Americans say that their main goal this summer will be to provide security for the Afghan population, and thereby isolate the insurgents.

But because the opium is tilled in heavily populated areas, and because the Taliban are spread among the people, the Americans say they will have to break the group’s hold on poppy cultivation to be successful.

No one here thinks that is going to be easy.

Only 10 minutes inside the tiny village of Zangabad, 20 miles southwest of Kandahar, a platoon of American soldiers stepped into a poppy field in full bloom on Monday. Taliban fighters opened fire from three sides.

“From the north!” one of the soldiers yelled, spinning and firing.

“West!” another screamed, turning and firing, too.

An hour passed and a thousand bullets whipped through the air. Ammunition was running low. The Taliban were circling.

Then the gunships arrived, swooping in, their bullet casings showering the ground beneath them, their rockets streaking and destroying. Behind a barrage of artillery, the soldiers shot their way out of Zangabad and moved into the cover of the vineyards.

“When are you going drop the bomb?” Capt. Chris Brawley said into his radio over the clatter of machine-gun fire. “I’m in a grape field.”

The bomb came, and after a time the shooting stopped.

The firefight offered a preview of the Americans’ summer in southern Afghanistan. By all accounts, it is going to be bloody.

Like the guerrillas they are, Taliban fighters often fade away when confronted by a conventional army. But in Afghanistan, as they did in Zangabad, the Taliban will probably stand and fight.

Among the ways the Taliban are believed to make money from the opium trade is by charging farmers for protection; if the Americans and British attack, the Taliban will be expected to make good on their side of that bargain.

Indeed, Taliban fighters have begun to fight any efforts by the Americans or the British to move into areas where poppy grows and opium is produced. Last month, a force of British marines moved into a district called Nad Ali in Helmand Province, the center of the country’s poppy cultivation. The Taliban were waiting. In a five-day battle, the British killed 120 Taliban fighters and wounded 150. Only one British soldier was wounded.

Many of the new American soldiers will fan out along southern Afghanistan’s largely unguarded 550-mile-long border with Pakistan. Among them will be soldiers deployed in the Stryker, a relatively quick, nimble armored vehicle that can roam across the vast areas that span the frontier.

All of the new troops are supposed to be in place by Aug. 20, in order to provide security for Afghanistan’s presidential election.

The presence of poppy and opium here has injected a huge measure of uncertainly into the war. Under NATO rules of engagement, American or other forces are prohibited from attacking targets or people related only to narcotics production. Those people are not considered combatants.

But American and other forces are allowed to attack drug smugglers or facilities that are assisting the Taliban. In an interview, General Nicholson said that opium production and the Taliban are so often intertwined that the rules do not usually inhibit American operations.

“We often come across a compound that has opium and I.E.D. materials side by side, and opium and explosive materials and weapons,” General Nicholson said, referring to improvised explosive devices. “It’s very common — more common than not.”

But the prospect of heavy fighting in populated areas could further alienate the Afghan population. In the firefight in Zangabad, the Americans covered their exit with a barrage of 20 155 millimeter high-explosive artillery shells — necessary to shield them from the Taliban, but also enough to inflict serious damage on people and property. A local Afghan interviewed by telephone after the firefight said that four homes had been damaged by the artillery strikes.

Then there is the problem of weaning poppy farmers from poppy farming — a task that has proved intractable in many countries, like Colombia, where the American government has tried to curtail poppy production. It is by far the most lucrative crop an Afghan can farm. The opium trade now makes up nearly 60 percent of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product, American officials say. The country’s opium traffickers typically offer incentives that no Afghan government official can: they can guarantee a farmer a minimum price for the crop as well as taking it to market, despite the horrendous condition of most of Afghanistan’s roads.

“The people don’t like to cultivate poppy, but they are desperate,” Mohammed Ashraf Naseri, the governor of Zabul Province, told a group of visitors this month.

To offer an alternative to poppy farming, the American military is setting aside $250 million for agriculture projects like irrigation improvements and wheat cultivation. General Nicholson said that a $200 million plan for infrastructure improvements, much of it for roads to help get crops to market, was also being prepared. The vision, General Nicholson said, is to try to restore the agricultural economy that flourished in Afghanistan in the 1970s. That, more than military force, will defeat the Taliban, he said.

“There is a significant portion of the enemy that we believe we can peel off with incentives,” the general said. “We can hire away many of these young men.”

Even if the Americans are able to cut production, shortages could drive up prices and not make a significant dent in the Taliban’s profits.

The foray into Zangabad suggested the difficulties that lie ahead. The terrain is a guerrilla’s dream. In addition to acres of shoulder-high poppy plants, rows and rows of hard-packed mud walls, used to stand up grape vines, offer ideal places for ambushes and defense.

But the trickiest thing will be winning over the Afghans themselves. The Taliban are entrenched in the villages and river valleys of southern Afghanistan. The locals, caught between the foes, seem, at best, to be waiting to see who prevails.

On their way to Zangabad, the soldiers stopped in a wheat field to talk to a local farmer. His name was Ahmetullah. The Americans spoke through a Pashto interpreter.

“I’m very happy to see you,” the farmer told the Americans.

“Really?” one of the soldiers asked.

“Yes,” the farmer said.

The interpreter sighed, and spoke in English.

“He’s a liar.”
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Post by kmaherali »

There is a related multimedia linked at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/06/world ... kabul.html

May 6, 2009
Kabul Journal
Drugs Hollow Out Afghan Lives in Cultural Center
By DEXTER FILKINS
KABUL, Afghanistan — The men, hollow-eyed and matted, start coming at dawn, shuffling into the remains of the old Soviet Cultural Center, which in its day staged films celebrating the glories of a new era.

These days, the shell of the abandoned building serves as perhaps the world’s largest gathering spot for men looking to satisfy their lust for heroin and opium. Stooping in the darkened caverns of the place, amid the waste and exhalations of hundreds of others, the men partake of the drug that has begun to wreak its deathly magic in the very country where it is produced.

One such man, who called himself Mohammed Ofzal, struck a match beneath a piece of foil and sucked in the blue smoke that rose from the liquefying little mass. Then he sat back in a crouch, legs shaking a little. His eyes, glazed and half-shut, stared blankly at the floor.

“My parents are fed up with me; they are telling me to quit,” Mr. Ofzal said. He said he was 18. His clothes, unlike nearly everyone else’s in the gathering post, were pressed and clean. He said he would go home soon; he would not be spending the night. “If you don’t take care of yourself, you could die here.”

Around him were a hundred other men, some crouching, some collapsed, some unconscious; some, perhaps, were dead. The visitors, though not the denizens, covered their faces from the smell. Mr. Ofzal lit another match and bent down to drink in the smoke.

Afghanistan, the world’s largest producer of opium, is drowning in a sea of its own making. While the country’s narco-traffickers ship vast quantities of the stuff to Europe and the United States, enough of it stays behind to offer a cheap and easy temptation to the people at home. A United Nations survey taken four years ago revealed 200,000 opium and heroin addicts in a population of about 35 million; a new study, to be completed in the summer, is expected to show even more.

Addiction in Afghanistan is rising along with the country’s opium production, which is cranking at something close to fever pitch. With much of its society and many of its institutions ruined by 30 years of fighting, Afghanistan produces more than 90 percent of the world’s opium. The money earned from narcotics accounts for more than half of the country’s gross domestic product. It feeds the Taliban insurgency.

The Soviet Culture Center is the most public of arenas in which to view the trade’s depredations on ordinary people. (For the men, that is; the center, like virtually every other public place in Afghanistan, is strictly segregated by sex.) The building sits in the Dehamatzang neighborhood of western Kabul, the scene of ferocious and prolonged fighting during the civil war that engulfed the country in the 1990s. The exterior walls are crumbled and pockmarked with bullet holes.

Inside is a landscape of extraordinary human wreckage. The rooms resemble catacombs; lightless and fetid and crammed with dozens, even hundreds, of bodies, each one clinging to his bit of space, his bit of elixir. Clouds of blue smoke rise, linger and dissolve. Almost no one speaks. In a corner, a man, seated on the floor, offers candy and cigarettes. In an ordinary day, 2,000 men pass through here. That’s on top of the nearly 600 who never leave. “Did you bring any money?” one of the men asked, as hunched and withered as a gargoyle.

“No,” said another, slipping his friend a tiny packet.

Next to them a body slumped in an improbable pose — curled, stiff, yet balanced, delicately, as if on the head of a pin. After a time the body fell over, as frozen as before. No one looked up.

Men and boys are not the only people who have fallen prey to the drug; women and girls are merely harder to find. Typically, females, prohibited from wandering the streets, stay indoors, which mitigates their helplessness but shields them from help.

A woman named Aziza, for instance, lives at home with her six children, who range in age from 18 months to 21. Aziza, who like many Afghans has only one name, is a gaunt and reduced figure, possibly beautiful once, but now a woman of papery skin and sunken cheeks and eyes sunk deep in her skull. For Aziza, as for many here, smoking opium is a way to escape a life without hope.

Two years ago, Aziza’s husband died in a car accident, and with no way of supporting her family on her own — women in this deeply conservative society do not generally work outside the home — she fell into despair. One day, a friend offered her a pipe and opium. She took it. Since then, Aziza has been smoking two or three times a day, sometimes in front of her children.

“Opium has been a good friend to me; it has taken away my sorrows,” Aziza said, seated in the corner of her one-room house, with her children looking on.

Kabul contains a tiny handful of clinics that treat drug abuse, but they have nowhere near the capacity to treat the number of people in need. About six months ago, the counselors from one clinic, alerted by the neighbors, found Aziza in her home and invited her to the clinic. Aziza stayed for 24 hours.

“When I need it, it is a kind of an attack,” she said afterward. “I can’t resist the opium; it is stronger than I am.”

With her children standing by, Aziza reached into a cloth bag and produced a filthy spoon, a bit of powder and a straw. Her 6-year-old son, Mirwais, stood to his mother’s left, 10-year-old Sonia stood to her right. Aziza, eyes glazed, struck a match but could produce no spark. She tried again and failed. Finally, Sonia took the box from her mother’s hands, struck a flame and handed the match to her mother.

Aziza bent over and breathed in the blue smoke.

*****

Afghanistan seeks to revive tourism industry
By Arno Maierbrugger, Staff Reporter
Published: May 04, 2009, 22:44


Dubai: After decades of war, Afghanistan makes another step towards normality and looks to revive its tourism industry.

With the help of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Afghanistan's first national park Band-e-Amir was opened in Bamyan province last week.

According to the USAID office in Kabul, the agency spent about $1 million (Dh3.67 million) to establish the park which is situated on a vast plateau in the Hindu Kush mountains, comprising six deep-blue lakes and a picturesque landscape dotted by snow-covered peaks.


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"The national park will draw visitors not only from all across Afghanistan, but all across the region and the world," US deputy ambassador Frank Ricciardone told the press after the opening ceremony, which was attended by the heads of Afghanistan's National Environmental Protection Agency and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS).

"It is a park created for the new Afghanistan," WCS president Steven Sanderson said. Besides improving Afghanistan's international image, the new national park is aimed to encourage economic development in the poverty-stricken region.

A local institution was founded to manage the area which covers 56.000 hectares. With the help of the WCS as well as the global environmental consultancy Ecodit and the Aga Khan Development Network, local small businesses are beginning to emerge in the 13 villages that are located within the park and small shops, restaurants, hotels and a campground are being built to serve the expected growing number of visitors.

Band-e-Amir, a former trading hub on the ancient Silk Road, has been a well-known destination for travellers since the late 1950s. It peaked in the 1960s and 1970s when the region was part of the so-called hippie trail, a term describing the route of the flower power kids hitchhiking from Europe to Central and East Asia at that time.

During the war years between 1979 and 2001, tourism was totally absent in the region and it won notoriety when the Taliban dynamited the 1,500-year-old Buddha statues in nearby Bamyan valley in 2001.

On the other hand, Bamyan had been relatively insulated from the violence that plagued other parts of the country during the war. At the moment, Band-e-Amir is visited by a few thousand Afghan tourists every year, but Western travel agencies are slowly rediscovering the exotic destination. Polish travel agency Logos Travel in Poznan is offering its first trip to Afghanistan this month, French travel book publisher Petit Futé recently released a new guide book for the country, and Afghanistan's private carrier Safi Airways is launching direct flights between Kabul and Frankfurt, Germany, on June 15.

However, the biggest problem the tourism entrepreneurs are facing is the generally poor security situation throughout the country. The foreign ministries of most western nations are still advising their citizens against travelling to Afghanistan, a move kept in perspective by Afghanistan's tourism minister Ghulam Farhai. "At the moment, security is our biggest challenge. When we get security, when we get good roads and hotels, Afghanistan will be a perfect travel destination," Farhai said.

http://www.gulfnews.com/business/Touris ... 10644.html
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Post by kmaherali »

May 8, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
Talked to Death
By HASSINA SHERJAN
Kabul, Afghanistan

FOR several years, President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan has been trying to negotiate and reconcile with supposedly moderate elements of the Taliban to end the insurgency. This approach has failed every time. Thus it is puzzling to many Afghans that President Obama has also been talking about negotiating with “moderates.” Let’s hope that when the two men met in Washington this week, along with President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan, the idea of reaching out to the Islamic extremists was shelved once and for all.

After all, President Karzai’s efforts have simply revealed the weakness of the Afghan government and its international allies. Taliban spokesman have repeatedly demanded unacceptable conditions for talks, including the departure of all foreign forces from Afghanistan and the establishment of Shariah law.

Indeed, shortly after Mr. Obama raised the subject of reconciliation, the Taliban rejected his proposal, stating there were no extremists or moderate groups within their ranks. On this point at least, the Taliban are right. Zabiullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesman, put it very clearly: “The Taliban were united under the leadership of Mullah Muhammad Omar. All the fighters follow and obey orders of one central command. The existence of moderates and extremist elements within the rank and file of Taliban is wishful thinking of the West and the Afghan government.”

What can be the purpose of talks with the Taliban? These men deprive women of their rights, throw acid in the faces of schoolgirls, reject religious freedom and oppose constitutional democracy. They also threaten to kill any Afghans who have worked with Western militaries and nongovernmental groups or had other contact with foreigners.

Is it possible, as some have said, that the Taliban have mellowed since being toppled in 2001? Muhammad Ibrahim Hanafi, a top Taliban commander, answered that question in an interview in March with CNN: “Our law is still the same old law which was in place during our rule in Afghanistan.”

The more President Karzai and his Western allies talk about reconciliation, the farther their public support will plummet. I returned to Afghanistan in 2001 after more than two decades in America and founded a manufacturing company with the intention of using part of its profits to help young women get an education. In the early days, the discussions at our organization’s meetings were dominated by talk of building schools and other big plans. Lately, however, the main topic has been the future of us women in Afghanistan under another Taliban regime. We know that there is not, and will never be, any “moderate Taliban.” Extremists and ideologues do not compromise.

The atmosphere has been made worse by the president’s signing of a family law affecting Shiite Muslims that places restrictions on when a woman can leave her house and states the circumstances in which she is obliged to have sex with her husband. I was part of a group of civil-society representatives who recently met with President Karzai to express our concerns about the law; he replied that he hadn’t known the full details when he signed it and promised to “fight for us” to have it amended. We’ll see. But his later statement that “there are no reconciliation processes” going on with the Taliban, which seems at odds with the facts, did not inspire much hope.

The family law and other governmental efforts to appease religious extremists are having one effect that reminds me of the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of 1979: Afghanistan is being drained of the people who would be most effective at putting it back together. It seems as if every group of Afghans that attends training programs in the West now returns just a bit smaller. Last year, the accountant and the top administrator of my factory left for the Netherlands with their families. My new accountant recently went to Islamabad, Pakistan, to meet with German Embassy officials about a possible visa.

This is a far cry from the 1960s and ’70s, when many Afghans, including my father and five of my uncles, studied abroad on scholarships but returned to work in the government or to start businesses and create jobs. That sense of nationalism has disappeared; unless we rediscover it, Afghanistan will become a failed state.

The only “reconciliation” strategy that is going to work is one between the Kabul government and the Afghan people. The key is making changes at the community level. Many local mullahs and citizens who have tolerated the Taliban in the past are open to working with a government that can protect them and help them find livelihoods. The government and its allies can best weaken the insurgency by better protecting the population, organizing local citizens’ groups to cooperate on economic development, and hiring more people from every part of the country into the growing Afghan Army and police force.

This is the only way that the reconcilables will be separated from the irreconcilables. We need to understand where Afghanistan’s true moderates are to be found, and not look for them in leadership positions of one of the most repressive organizations on earth.

Hassina Sherjan is the president of Boumi, a manufacturer of decorative products for the home, and the director of Aid Afghanistan for Education, a nonprofit group.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/08/opini ... nted=print
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Post by kmaherali »

May 19, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
Take the War to the Drug Lords
By GRETCHEN PETERS

A SKINNY man opened the gate at the sprawling compound in Quetta, in western Pakistan. When I asked if the property belonged to Afghanistan’s most powerful drug smuggler, he smiled and nodded. “Haji Juma Khan has 200 houses,” he said. “And this is one of them.”

I had been trying to track down Mr. Khan for years when I found this residence on a dusty, garbage-strewn alley. It hardly seemed an auspicious address for a man who American officials say moved as much as $1 billion worth of opium every year, hiring the Taliban to protect his colossal narcotics shipments and paying corrupt officials in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran to look the other way.

I said I was a journalist and wanted to interview the boss. “He is on the run and we have not seen him,” said another man, who introduced himself as Mr. Khan’s clerk. “But please come inside and have a cup of tea.”

Even with the top man on the run, Mr. Khan’s network ran a string of heroin labs in the mountainous area where the borders of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran merge. He had built huge underground storage bunkers in remote deserts for his product. He came to the attention of Western law enforcement officials for sending drug convoys made up of dozens of S.U.V.’s packed with narcotics, which were then unloaded onto ships along Pakistan’s southern coast.

Last October, about three months after I drank tea with his colleagues in Quetta, Mr. Khan was arrested and extradited to the United States. He is now jailed at New York City’s Metropolitan Correctional Center, awaiting trial on charges of conspiracy to distribute narcotics with intent to support a terrorist organization. His capture was a major, if little noticed, victory in the war on drugs in Afghanistan, although my contacts in Quetta tell me his relatives are keeping the network going strong.

Studying Mr. Khan’s operations allowed me to understand the challenges of fighting Afghanistan’s opium trade, which at once benefits the Taliban, Al Qaeda and corrupt officials in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran. It also provided some insight on how to reshape our counternarcotics strategy.

So far, Western-led efforts to fight the opium trade in Afghanistan have focused mainly on eradicating poppy crops, a policy that has done little to hamper the drug lords and simply victimized poppy farmers and poor sharecroppers who work the land. As the Obama administration overhauls strategy in Afghanistan, installing Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal as the top commander, the focus of antidrug efforts should be on the smugglers and drug processors.

First, there must be stepped-up efforts to take down powerful traffickers like Mr. Khan and to cut off the Taliban’s opium profits, which the United Nations calculates to be worth $400 million a year. Their greatest earnings don’t come at the farming level, but from protecting shipments leaving farm areas and taxing drug refineries.

A good start would be using air attacks to destroy drug convoys carrying opium on smuggling trails toward the Pakistani border, using the same infrared technology employed along the Mexican border to avoid hitting civilian vehicles. Working with local law enforcement, NATO forces must also establish checkpoints along major arteries and border crossings and search all vehicles for drugs — even those belonging to senior Afghan government officials and their relatives. Taliban warriors may be able to slip over the mountainous borders in secret, but large drug shipments often go by road.

In October, NATO gave its commanders a mandate to destroy drug refineries, but many have been reluctant to do so. Not only should they take the offensive, but they should put an emphasis on arresting the chemists and other specialists operating the labs, who are difficult to replace. Some NATO nations in the Afghan coalition have placed restrictions on their troops that prevent them from participating in American-led counternarcotics operations. That’s short-sighted, given that Afghan heroin tends to end up on European streets. Until such restrictions are dropped, troops from those nations should be deployed to provide security, freeing up American and Afghan soldiers for combat linked to the opium trade.

In addition, until Afghanistan’s notoriously weak judiciary and police can be reformed, we should bring any major smugglers to the United States for trial, as was done with Mr. Khan.

Afghanistan’s drug problem extends beyond its borders. While Pakistan seems finally to be taking the fight to the Taliban elements in its northwestern frontier areas, it must simultaneously round up leaders of powerful cartels that operate from Baluchistan province in the southwest. These men supply insurgents with money, vehicles, communications equipment and weapons. Some even run guesthouses and hospitals that treat wounded Taliban soldiers. One alleged kingpin, Sakhi Dost Muhammad Notezai, has been wanted by American authorities since the late 1980s. Yet, despite evidence that his clan is still tied to smuggling opium, his son is the transportation minister for Baluchistan.

Stopping the drug flow is only half the battle: the money flows along separate routes from the opium, and disrupting financial flows may be tougher. To that end, Washington should subsidize efforts to regulate both Afghanistan’s bank transfers and the informal hawala network, the subcontinent’s unregulated version of the Western Union. Most hawala transfers are legitimate — Western aid groups in Afghanistan, for example, use it to send funds to rural field offices. But the system also moves drug money. The Treasury Department has put together a sound proposal that would not add costs for those using the hawala system but would allow the authorities to track who sent how much money, and to whom.

In the end, no counternarcotics program will make a difference in the war if Afghanistan and Pakistan fail to improve their governance. The Taliban are gaining ground not because they are well liked (they aren’t, in either place) but because the governments in both countries are seen as incompetent and corrupt. Many experts believe that corrupt officials on both sides of the border earn even more off the drug trade than the Taliban do.

As the Taliban and Al Qaeda become intertwined with smugglers like Haji Juma Khan, they swell in economic and military might. And then a drug problem that began as a regional headache becomes a global security nightmare: a two-headed monster of criminal smugglers and rich terrorist groups with deadly global ambitions.

Gretchen Peters is the author of “Seeds of Terror: How Heroin Is Bankrolling the Taliban and Al Qaeda.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/19/opini ... nted=print
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Post by kmaherali »

One good reason we fight in afghanistan


By Michael Gerson, For The Calgary Herald
July 11, 2009

Being an educated, professional woman in Afghanistan could not have been easy at any time during the last few decades. I recently met with a group of female government officials, brought to Washington by USAID and the U. S.-Afghan Women's Council. One, during the Taliban years, had run an underground school in her home for the criminal purpose of teaching girls. Another had built a community development program employing 25,000 Afghan women before she was put under close guard by the Taliban. Her home was looted, and her children were threatened with kidnapping.

Afghanistan is a country where women have made significant progress--but only compared to an oppressive past. Seven million children now attend school, compared to one million six years ago. The women I met now play public roles in education, public works and agriculture--unimaginable under the Taliban.

Yet Afghanistan is also a nation where girls have had acid thrown in their faces while walking to school and female police officers and public officials have been assassinated. Taliban and foreign extremists seem to take a particular interest in the intimidation, repression and humiliation of women.

And patriarchal attitudes are not confined to the fringes. The Shiite family law, recently passed by the Afghan parliament and signed by President Hamid Karzai, legalized marital rape and restricted the travel of women. (Under domestic and international pressure, the law is being revisited.)

Afghanistan remains one of the most difficult places on Earth to be a woman. A reaction of anger and militancy would be understandable. But the Afghan women I met take a different approach. Uniformly they argue that "education" is the most important response. By education, they do not mean only literacy. "People need to be educated in the values of our own religion," says Rahela Hashim Sidiqi, a senior adviser at Afghanistan's civil service commission. "They need to learn from other Islamic countries, such as Indonesia and Bangladesh. Even in Arab countries, education is not denied." The main challenge, says Sidiqi, is "the lack of education about Islam itself, particularly in rural areas where culture and Islam are mixed.

People don't see the difference between tradition and religion." These women talk of the Quran's teaching on property rights and respect for women as a source of progressive reform within Afghan culture. They speak with particular respect for Khadijah, Muhammad's wife, who, they argue, was educated and conducted business while married to the prophet. And they identify a number of prominent Afghan imams who defend these views. "They are the key," says Sidiqi. "We need a positive approach."

Clearly, this is a different kind of feminism. Rather than asserting an individualistic conception of rights, these women are arguing for respect and legal protection from within their religious tradition. They do not seek to overturn a cultural order, but to expand and humanize it. "If it shows respect to wear a scarf," says Sidiqi, "I wear a scarf. We respect other people--and we expect respect." The rights of Afghan women are not always seen at the forefront of American interests. Some foreign policy "realists" seem open to an accommodation with Islamist groups in Afghanistan that would sacrifice human rights in the cause of stability.

These women offer a practical rebuttal. They point out that the reconstruction of Afghanistan will not take place without the knowledge and skills of 52 per cent of its population. They believe women in Afghanistan possess the political advantage of being untainted by past warfare and corruption. And they have seen, according to Sidiqi, "that women are always fighting for the rule of law, because women and children are hurt most when there is no rule of law."

Why should America, in the midst of a costly war, care about the rights of Afghan women?Because Afghanistan, without the participation of women, will remain a failed and dangerous state.

And there is another reason-- because the betrayal of courage always matters, and always dishonours those who commit it. The dignity of women is not the only reason America and its NATO allies fight in Afghanistan-- but it is a good one.

Gerson is a columnist with Washington postwriters group

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Post by kmaherali »

Bright-eyed youth the hope of Afghanistan
By Nigel Hannaford, Calgary HeraldJuly 18, 2009

It is Kabul's SAIT, a vocational training school where 1,600 kids from all over Afghanistan with good high-school grades are getting, what is for them, the chance of a lifetime.

With papers in construction, computer technology, or auto mechanics, they are guaranteed jobs and will make as much as $500/ month--twice the national average wage.

I am here as a guest of the U. S. Mission to NATO. Their earnest young spokesmen take me with professional satisfaction to places where the international community, ultimately led by the U. S. State

Department through various agencies, has made a difference for good.

In front of me now in this austere, packed classroom is an earnest young man, who has risen to his feet as a mark of respect to visitors. It is that kind of a society, as well as one with a history of violence.

What are you going to do with your business diploma, I ask?

"I want to make Afghanistan a better place."

A canned response? "Come on, no PC answers, What do you really want to do?"

No, he's for real. He wants to work for the Independent Electoral Commission, now ramping up for the country's second presidential election. We were just there: 300 young men and women hacking away at PCs, updating the voters' list of 20 million, and looking dead serious about what they were doing.

"And you?" My target this time is a delightful young woman, dressed in the modern style with only a scarf over her head. "I want to make Afghanistan a better place." "How?" "I want to be a judge."

Such ambition, in a country where 10 years ago she would not have been allowed to go to school. Her instructor whispers in my ear, "She is married." "So how do your family feel about you being here?" "They support me fully," she says, in heavily accented but clear English.

Outside, private security guards with AK-47s patrol the grounds to make sure nobody assaults the dream, (and as the director jokes, to make sure the girls-only dorm stays girls-only.) Inside, dreams are gestating.

Likewise in an experimental farm that teaches simple ways to increase crop values.

Or, in a civil service school that got electricity from a mini hydro generator courtesy of the Lithuanian government, (and immediately installed satellite TV.)

And so it goes on. We travel in armoured vehicles, wearing flak jackets and a Humvee with a machine gun turret riding shotgun. But wherever we are taken, whether around Kabul or in the Montana-like wilderness of Gohr province, we see that hope is popping up like fireweed after a forest fire. It may not be much, but for medieval Afghanistan --the people with the satellite TV still heat their stoves with dried dung, their own included with that of their animals--it's a reckless lunge toward modernity.

Yet, one has to ask:When all hell is breaking loose in Helmand province--where four U. S. Marines were killed a few days ago in IED attacks, and fighting rages between British troops and Taliban insurgents in temperatures above 50 degrees and in Kandahar where Canadian troops are living the same life--are successful examples of rehabilitation and development worth telling?

For, here is an uncomfortable truth: The Islamic Republic of Afghanistan is not economically viable. Its annual self-generated revenues are $750 million, but, the cost of the 134,000-man army it is building with foreign help will be three times that, before a road is paved or a clinic built. The place runs on outside money.

So, who are we deceiving? Ourselves? The Afghans who are so desperate for a better life that they take the considerable risk of co-operating with the foreigners, knowing that retribution awaits if it all goes wrong?

After a week in the country, I don't presume omniscience.

However, the reasons to press on are twofold.

First, it is foolhardy to suppose the embedded dysfunctions of the centuries can be vanquished in a few years. It will be a miracle if it is done in a few generations, although the bright-eyed enthusiasm of young, well-educated

Afghans suggests more may be possible than the cynics will ever concede.

Provide security, and development-- and therefore rising government revenues --will follow. Not for nothing does U. S. President Barack Obama pin his hopes on a civilian surge of development workers, to parallel the military surge now underway.

(And Canadian audiences should relish hearing him tout "defence, development and diplomacy" as the new best thing. It's what

Canadians have been doing for years in Afghanistan.)

This will take time. But it is possible.

Second, we must remember why we are there. Much as we admire the spirit of those Afghans who, wanting the same things we take for granted, lay it all on the line to get it, we are in Afghanistan to deny it to those who would hurt us and our way of life.

It's still cheap at the price.

That said, I have used the word "young" more often than I should in a single article. Yet, I confess I do hope that in serving our own best interests, we make life better for some really high-minded youngsters now setting forth on what will certainly be an adventurous life.

We just have to understand that our own best interests, really depend on them winning in the end --not the other guys.

Nigel haNNaford is travelliNg arouNd afghaNistaN.

NhaNNaford@theherald.

caNwest.com

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Post by kmaherali »

July 19, 2009
Teacher, Can We Leave Now? No.
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Pushghar, Afghanistan

I confess, I find it hard to come to Afghanistan and not ask: Why are we here? Who cares about the Taliban? Al Qaeda is gone. And if its leaders come back, well, that’s why God created cruise missiles.

But every time I start writing that column, something stills my hand. This week it was something very powerful. I watched Greg Mortenson, the famed author of “Three Cups of Tea,” open one of his schools for girls in this remote Afghan village in the Hindu Kush mountains. I must say, after witnessing the delight in the faces of those little Afghan girls crowded three to a desk waiting to learn, I found it very hard to write, “Let’s just get out of here.”

Indeed, Mortenson’s efforts remind us what the essence of the “war on terrorism” is about. It’s about the war of ideas within Islam — a war between religious zealots who glorify martyrdom and want to keep Islam untouched by modernity and isolated from other faiths, with its women disempowered, and those who want to embrace modernity, open Islam to new ideas and empower Muslim women as much as men. America’s invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were, in part, an effort to create the space for the Muslim progressives to fight and win so that the real engine of change, something that takes nine months and 21 years to produce — a new generation — can be educated and raised differently.

Which is why it was no accident that Adm. Mike Mullen, the U.S. chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — spent half a day in order to reach Mortenson’s newest school and cut the ribbon. Getting there was fun. Our Chinook helicopter threaded its way between mountain peaks, from Kabul up through the Panjshir Valley, before landing in a cloud of dust at the village of Pushghar. Imagine if someone put a new, one-story school on the moon, and you’ll appreciate the rocky desolateness of this landscape.

But there, out front, was Mortenson, dressed in traditional Afghan garb. He was surrounded by bearded village elders and scores of young Afghan boys and girls, who were agog at the helicopter, and not quite believing that America’s “warrior chief” — as Admiral Mullen’s title was loosely translated into Urdu — was coming to open the new school.

While the admiral passed out notebooks, Mortenson told me why he has devoted his life to building 131 secular schools for girls in Pakistan and another 48 in Afghanistan: “The money is money well spent. These are secular schools that will bring a new generation of kids that will have a broader view of the world. We focus on areas where there is no education. Religious extremism flourishes in areas of isolation and conflict.

“When a girl gets educated here and then becomes a mother, she will be much less likely to let her son become a militant or insurgent,” he added. “And she will have fewer children. When a girl learns how to read and write, one of the first things she does is teach her own mother. The girls will bring home meat and veggies, wrapped in newspapers, and the mother will ask the girl to read the newspaper to her and the mothers will learn about politics and about women who are exploited.”

It is no accident, Mortenson noted, that since 2007, the Taliban and its allies have bombed, burned or shut down more than 640 schools in Afghanistan and 350 schools in Pakistan, of which about 80 percent are schools for girls. This valley, controlled by Tajik fighters, is secure, but down south in Helmand Province, where the worst fighting is today, the deputy minister of education said that Taliban extremists have shut 75 of the 228 schools in the last year. This is the real war of ideas. The Taliban want public mosques, not public schools. The Muslim militants recruit among the illiterate and impoverished in society, so the more of them the better, said Mortenson.

This new school teaches grades one through six. I asked some girls through an interpreter what they wanted to be when they grow up: “Teacher,” shouted one. “Doctor,” shouted another. Living here, those are the only two educated role models these girls encounter. Where were they going to school before Mortenson’s Central Asia Institute and the U.S. State Department joined with the village elders to get this secular public school built? “The mosque,” the girls said.

Mortenson said he was originally critical of the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan, but he’s changed his views: “The U.S. military has gone through a huge learning curve. They really get it. It’s all about building relationships from the ground up, listening more and serving the people of Afghanistan.”

So there you have it. In grand strategic terms, I still don’t know if this Afghan war makes sense anymore. I was dubious before I arrived, and I still am. But when you see two little Afghan girls crouched on the front steps of their new school, clutching tightly with both arms the notebooks handed to them by a U.S. admiral — as if they were their first dolls — it’s hard to say: “Let’s just walk away.” Not yet.

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Post by kmaherali »

Democracy in the mud

By Nigel Hannaford,

Calgary HeraldJuly 21, 2009 10:20 AM

Afghanistan's mud is legendary. When wet, it's like paste. Dry, it turns rock hard.

Here at PRT 9 Chakhcharan, the Lithuanians-- following standard NATO practice--have made a fort out of it.

The Baltic soldiers are here as part of their government's NATO commitment, running a Provincial Reconstruction Team in Gohr province, one of 26 such teams in Afghanistan. In addition to its military effort, Canada has one in Kandahar, the British another in Helmand and the U. S. sponsors a dozen more.

At this provincial capital of Chakhcharan, hundreds of hard mud blocks --called hescos--enclose roughly 16 hectares, a hesco being a wire-framed, coarse fabric case about the size of a fridge. Filled with soft mud, allowed to dry, stacked two high and topped with razor wire, they're proof against bullet, RPG and explosive-filled vehicles.

They thus make the camp a reasonably secure base from which aid workers of several nations--Japanese, Danes, Georgians, a few Americans and the Lithuanians themselves--can set forth to do good works.

For, that is the whole purpose of a PRT.

However much of a frontier fort it might look like --and by the judicious use of field stone, the Lithuanians have achieved the feel of some castle overlooking their gloomy northern sea--no aggressive sortie departs its gates, just sufficient protection to make sure a civilian aid worker makes it where he is going, and back.

The purpose is entirely outreach to the community --which given the scarcity of PRTs, usually means reaching out a long way.

Specifically, the PRT is there to extend the reach of the Afghan government in Kabul, not that of NATO, explains U. S. political officer Brian Roraff, who for two years has been working out of PRT 9--a few kilometres out of Chakhcharan.

His life, and those of officers like him, is a round of meeting local administrators and coaching officials who, after 30 years of civil war, are rusty on administration skills: "It is our job to determine what community needs can be met, and feed the request to an agency willing and able to meet it."

Since 2002, the U. S. government has put $8.9 billion into building infrastructure. Other NATO governments and non-governmental organizations have followed suit: The result, 6,500 schools and 6,700 clinics, and 80 per cent of the population now within two hours of health care.

Seven years ago, it was a tenth of that. Give due credit for the road and bridge construction --there is a well-advanced plan to build a $1.7 billion ring road right around the country, where the security situation permits--and the appearance here and there of small power projects such as that in Sangbaar up the road from here that I spoke of in Saturday's column, and it's not hard to see why the PRT has become a popular institution in these parts.

Trouble is, it only looks like great progress until one looks at what remains to be done.

The country has about 27,000 villages. Local elected councils meet to decide priorities --a very elementary and apparently well-functioning form of representative government by Roraff's account--but most need everything.

And progress is also seasonal: Sangbaar, for instance, is only about 20 km from here, but in the winter months is completely cut off. Thousands of villages are in the same boat: Food security is an issue, health care at the mercy of the weather.

The country also struggles with perverse policies. Afghanistan has become a dumping ground for cheap imports and foodstuffs, that disincent local manufacturing and undermine native agriculture. Trace these situations to their roots, and one usually finds graft. Nor does it help the development of an economy in which loans are secured by property, that 30 years of war have destroyed many title records. Possession tends to be nine-tenths of the law

For every glimmer of hope, one thus finds a cloud of difficulty. Everything in Afghanistan has a long way to go: Progress seems intolerably slow and so easily interrupted.

However, one should not quite despair.

In the relative cool of dusk, I am summoned to the ramparts by the officer assigned to keep journalists from hurting themselves.

"Take a look at this," says Second Lieutenant Marius Varna.

"This" turns out to be a brand new village, not 100 metres from the walls of the fort. "That wasn't there four years ago. People just showed up one day and started building."

Now, there are dozens of the distinctive and noisy Afghan family compounds, with their own high mud walls and elaborate gates. They are there, says Varna, because they feel safe next to the PRT, rather as villages clustered around the bases of mediaeval strongholds in England, Germany or Lithuania.

Security and development; the one makes possible the other, the other gives point to the first, and the people have voted for both--with their feet.

Afghans want the same thing as everybody else. It's just a bit more difficult to make it happen.

nhannaford@theherald.canwest.com

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Post by kmaherali »

July 22, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
The Class Too Dumb to Quit
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Camp Leatherneck, Afghanistan

I’m here in Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan. This is the most dangerous part of the country. It’s where mafia and mullah meet. This is where the Taliban harvest the poppies that get turned into heroin that funds their insurgency. That’s why when President Obama announced the more than doubling of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, this is where the Marines landed to take the fight to the Taliban. It is 115 degrees in the sun, and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is addressing soldiers in a makeshift theater.

“Let me see a show of hands,” says Admiral Mullen, “how many of you are on your first deployment?” A couple dozen hands go up. “Second deployment?” More hands go up. “Third deployment?” Still lots of hands are raised. “Fourth deployment?” A good dozen hands go up. “Fifth deployment?” Still hands go up. “Sixth deployment?” One hand goes up. Admiral Mullen asks the soldier to step forward to shake his hand.

This scene is a reason for worry, for optimism and for questioning everything we are doing in Afghanistan. It is worrying because between the surges in Iraq and Afghanistan, we are grinding down our military. I don’t know how these people and their families put up with it. Never have so many asked so much of so few.

The reason for optimism? All those deployments have left us with a deep cadre of officers with experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, now running both wars — from generals to captains. They know every mistake that has been made, been told every lie, saw their own soldiers killed by stupidity, figured out solutions and built relationships with insurgents, sheikhs and imams on the ground that have given the best of them a granular understanding of the “real” Middle East that would rival any Middle East studies professor.

I’ve long argued that there should be a test for any officer who wants to serve in Iraq or Afghanistan — just one question: “Do you think the shortest distance between two points is a straight line?” If you answer “yes,” you can go to Germany, South Korea or Japan, but not to Iraq or Afghanistan. Well, this war has produced a class of officers who are very out-of-the-box thinkers. They learned everything the hard way — not in classes at Annapolis or West Point, but on the streets of Fallujah and Kandahar.

I call them: “The Class Too Dumb to Quit.” I say that with affection and respect. When all seemed lost in Iraq, they were just too stubborn to quit and figured out a new anti-insurgency strategy. It has not produced irreversible success yet — and may never. But it has kept the hope of a decent outcome alive. The same people are now trying to do the same thing in Afghanistan. Their biggest strategic insight? “We don’t count enemy killed in action anymore,” one of their officers told me.

Early in both Iraq and Afghanistan our troops did body counts, à la Vietnam. But the big change came when the officers running these wars understood that R.B.’s (“relationships built”) actually matter more than K.I.A.’s. One relationship built with an Iraqi or Afghan mayor or imam or insurgent was worth so much more than one K.I.A. Relationships bring intelligence; they bring cooperation. One good relationship can save the lives of dozens of soldiers and civilians. One reason torture and Abu Ghraib got out of control was because our soldiers had built so few relationships that they tried to beat information out of people instead. But relationship-building is painstaking.

And that leads to my unease. America has just adopted Afghanistan as our new baby. The troop surge that President Obama ordered here early in his tenure has taken this mission from a limited intervention, with limited results, to a full nation-building project that will take a long time to succeed — if ever. We came here to destroy Al Qaeda, and now we’re in a long war with the Taliban. Is that really a good use of American power?

At least The Class Too Dumb to Quit is in charge, and they have a strategy: Clear areas of the Taliban, hold them in partnership with the Afghan Army, rebuild these areas by building relationships with district governors and local assemblies to help them upgrade their ability to deliver services to the Afghan people — particularly courts, schools and police — so they will support the Afghan government.

The bad news? This is State-Building 101, and our partners, the current Afghan police and government, are so corrupt that more than a few Afghans prefer the Taliban. With infinite time, money, soldiers and aid workers, we can probably reverse that. But we have none of these. I feel a gap building between our ends and our means and our time constraints. My heart says: Mission critical — help those Afghans who want decent government. My head says: Mission impossible.

Does Mr. Obama understand how much he’s bet his presidency on making Afghanistan a stable country? Too late now. So, here’s hoping that The Class Too Dumb to Quit can take all that it learned in Iraq and help rebuild The Country That’s Been Too Broken to Work.

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Post by kmaherali »

Sacrifices will be for naught if we flee Afghanistan

By Nigel Hannaford, Calgary HeraldJuly 28, 2009 9:28 AM

The unfortunate thing about Canada's military mission to Afghanistan is that Canadians are not being reminded daily of why we're really there.

It's a public relations issue, and totally understandable. But, in 2011 it's still going to box the government in, at a time when it wants the widest possible policy options.

For, the narrative from both government and opposition is that we are there doing good works. Canadians like that, as it fits our dominant self-image. Importantly, Canadian troops, some of whom express a genuine affection for the Afghan people they've met serving over there, also like it. There's something deeply rewarding in the knowledge that what you're doing makes a difference: It also helps when you're grieving a lost comrade, that it is not all for nothing.

However, it could turn out that way anyway if Canada doesn't stay the course.

That is, we do indeed build schools, inoculate children against polio and rehabilitate irrigation systems, but we're really there as part of a multilateral war-fighting mission to deny terrorists the use of a country slightly larger than Alberta. There are, after all, many places where we could be paving roads and building clinics. Afghanistan gets attention because that's where the 9/11 plot was hatched after which, as we were repeatedly told, "everything changed."

Development is part of the strategy, the hearts-and-minds part of the war, not an end in itself.

This ill-founded communications approach matters then, because as things stand when July 2011 rolls around, Parliament wants to declare a job well done, and end the military mission.

This, regardless of whether or not the Afghan government in Kabul sits sufficiently secure in the saddle that it can finish the job for us, that we went to do.

The odds are that it will not be ready, and will continue to need the support of NATO countries, Canada among them. To end the mission in 2011 would thus be like Ottawa unilaterally pulling out of the 1939-1945 War in 1943, and leaving the rest of the allies to put the boots to Hitler. We did not in fact do that then: We should not do it in 2011. But, the government's communications strategy leaves the way wide open for those who will say this country has done enough for Afghanistan's widows and orphans, when they were never the real issue and al-Qaeda, and its Taliban hosts, were.

None of this is to diminish the progress that has been made.

In a third-world kind of way, driving around Kabul is encouraging. Unless you have the right plates, you can't take a car within half a kilometre of the airport. (Smart travellers pack light.) But, the planes of seven airlines crowd the ramp. Commercial life is growing: Three cellphone companies compete for business. Five western-style hotels are full of Chinese businessmen. If traffic jams are a marker for prosperity--Toyota jams, to be precise, for there is little else on the road but trucks--Kabul's chamber of commerce must be delighted. (Yes, there is one.) Oppressed women? Burkas are seen, but not that often: More common is a shawl over the head. Girls go to school, some to higher education. (I met a couple training to be carpenters, which is about as untraditional as it gets in Afghanistan.) There are checkpoints everywhere, and private security is a huge business: Anybody of substance has to buy it. But, bomb outrages are sufficiently uncommon now that street life--the bazaars, the small shops, the stands, the throng--has returned.

None of this was true 10 years ago, when the country was in the Taliban's grip, and, it is the Afghan police and national army that now keeps this municipal peace, not NATO. (The Afghan National Army, now 90,000 strong on its way to 134,000, has emerged as a national institution capable of running its own search-and-destroy operations against the Taliban. The police force, whose role is far more about low-level security than criminal investigation, is a work in progress.)

It is also true that for all that some Afghan provinces labour on in corruption or open warfare--Helmand and Kandahar for instance --others are in the hands of reforming governors and peaceful by Afghan standards. (Even where the Taliban are hated, traditional banditry remains a scourge and kidnapping is big business.)

So, things are moving in the right direction. But they are right who say stable government will take generations. It will, in any case, take more than two years.

In Kabul, I asked a state department official the best way to really screw things up in Afghanistan.

"We all leave too soon," was the answer.

That is precisely what the Canadian Parliament is presently committed to doing.

The story needs to be retold. Development and diplomacy are vital, but until we have done all we can do to leave the Kabul government in charge of its own house, Canada has a job to do in Afghanistan that can only be done by its army. Canadians must understand that, or everything we have done will ultimately be for naught.

nhannaford@theherald. canwest.coM

© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald

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August 17, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
Afghanistan’s Tyranny of the Minority
By SELIG S. HARRISON
Washington

AS the debate intensifies within the Obama administration over how to stabilize Afghanistan, one major problem is conspicuously missing from the discussion: the growing alienation of the country’s largest ethnic group, the Pashtun tribes, who make up an estimated 42 percent of the population of 33 million. One of the basic reasons many Pashtuns support the Taliban insurgency is that their historic rivals, ethnic Tajiks, hold most of the key levers of power in the government.

Tajiks constitute only about 24 percent of the population, yet they largely control the armed forces and the intelligence and secret police agencies that loom over the daily lives of the Pashtuns. Little wonder that in the run-up to Thursday’s presidential election, much of the Taliban propaganda has focused on the fact that President Hamid Karzai’s top running mate is a hated symbol of Tajik power: the former defense minister Muhammad Fahim.

Mr. Fahim and his allies have been entrenched in Kabul since American forces overthrew the Taliban in 2001 with the help of his Tajik militia, the Northern Alliance, which was based in the Panjshir valley north of the capital. A clique of these Tajik officers, known as the Panjshiris, took control of the key security posts with American backing, and they have been there ever since. Washington pushed Mr. Karzai for the presidency to give a Pashtun face to the regime, but he has been derided from the start by his fellow Pashtuns with a play on his name, “Panjshir-zai.”

“They get the dollars, and we get the bullets,” is the common refrain among Pashtuns critical of the government. “Dollars” refers to the economic enrichment of Tajiks and allied minority ethnic groups through an inside track on aid contracts. The “bullets” are the anti-Taliban airstrikes and ground operations in Pashtun areas in the south and east of the country.

While Mr. Karzai has tried to soften the image of Tajik domination by appointing Pashtuns to nominally important positions, much of the real power continues to rest with Tajiks. For example, he appointed a Pashtun, Abdul Rahim Wardak, to replace Mr. Fahim as defense minister — but a trusted Panjshiri, Bismillah Khan, remained an army chief of staff and kept fellow Tajiks as his top corps commanders and in other vital spots, including director of military intelligence, army inspector general and director of counternarcotics forces.

The National Security Directorate, which oversees the civilian and military secret police and intelligence agencies, is headed by a Northern Alliance veteran, Amrullah Saleh. Michael Semple, a former adviser to the European Union representative in Kabul, told me that Mr. Saleh had appointed “some credible Pashtun provincial directors” but that “the intelligence services are still basically seen as anti-Pashtun and pro-Northern Alliance because the power structure in the directorate is still clearly dominated by the original Northern Alliance group,” and above all because “they also have control of the prosecution, judicial and detention branches of the security services.”

The Obama administration is pinning its hopes for an eventual exit from Afghanistan on building an Afghan National Army capable of defeating the insurgency. But a recent study by the RAND Corporation for the Pentagon, noting a “surplus of Tajiks in the A.N.A. officer and NCO corps,” warned of the “challenge of achieving ethnic balance, given the difficulty of recruiting in the Pashtun area.” The main reasons it is difficult to recruit Pashtuns, one United Nations official recently said, are that “70 percent of the army’s battalion commanders are Tajiks” and that the Taliban intimidates the families of recruits. It doesn’t help that many of the army units sent to the Pashtun areas consist primarily of Tajiks who do not speak Pashto.

Pashtun kings ruled Afghanistan from its inception in 1747 until the overthrow of the monarchy in 1973. Initially limited to the Pashtun heartland in the south and east, the Afghan state gradually incorporated the neighboring Tajik, Hazara and Uzbek areas to the north and west.

It was understandable, then, that Pashtun leaders tried to make the last king, Zahir Shah, the president of the interim government that ruled from 2002 until the first presidential election in 2004. The king, revered by the Pashtuns, was to have limited powers, with Mr. Karzai, as prime minister, in day-to-day control. The Tajiks, however, objected, and on the eve of the national assembly that set up the interim government, the Bush administration’s special envoy, Zalmay Khalilzad, sided with the Tajiks and had a bitter 40-minute showdown with the king, who then withdrew his candidacy.

Pashtun nationalism alone does not explain the Taliban’s strength, which is fueled by drug money, Islamist fervor, corrupt warlords, hatred of the American occupation and the hidden hand of Pakistani intelligence agencies. But the psychological cement that holds the disparate Taliban factions together is opposition to Tajik dominance in Kabul. Until the power of the Panjshiris is curbed, no amount of American money or manpower will bring the insurgency to an end.

Selig S. Harrison is the director of the Asia program at the Center for International Policy and a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/17/opini ... 0514962-dN oRwVzKgcLoPP/rHyMpg&pagewanted=print
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Afghans risk much to vote

Calgary HeraldAugust 21, 2009

They braved suicide bombers, rocket attacks, and countless threats to their lives, to exert their democratic right to vote in Afghanistan's second presidential election. The winner won't be declared for weeks but the clear victory is the election itself, testament to the will of the Afghan people and their clear desire for peace and good government.

Anyone still wondering what Canada and NATO forces are doing there need look no further for the answer than in the millions of Afghan men and women who turned out to vote, despite the many reasons to have stayed home. There is widespread disillusionment in the political system. The government is seen as corrupt, and incumbent, Hamid Karzai, has generally proven himself to be a weak leader unable to deliver upon his promises. Taliban insurgents vowed to disrupt the vote, threatening to cut off the fingers of anyone who had the ink-stained mark of having cast a ballot.

Dozens of violent incidents were reported around the country and innocent people killed and yet it's believed nearly 60 per cent of eligible voters showed up anyway, well above the 40 per cent of Albertans who bothered to vote in the last provincial election.

Afghans are a hopeful people, full of courage and conviction. They stood up to the oppressive Taliban militants by marching to the polls and forming lineups before they even opened. They voted with their feet and risked their lives for a shot at someday having a legitimate and truly representative government. The world must not abandon them now.

© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald

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August 23, 2009
A School Bus for Shamsia
By DEXTER FILKINS

EVEN BEFORE THE men with acid came, the Mirwais Mena School for Girls was surrounded by enemies. It stood on the outskirts of Kandahar, barely 20 miles from the hometown of Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban’s founder. Just down the road from the school, in an area known as Old Town, residents had built a shrine to Mullah Dadullah, the Taliban commander with the fiercest reputation, who made his name by massacring members of the Hazara minority. He was killed in an American-led operation in 2007. Also nearby sat the Sarposa Prison, where, in June 2008, Taliban fighters and suicide bombers attacked, freeing more than a thousand criminals and comrades. The area around the Mirwais Mena School is the Taliban heartland. Teaching girls to read was not something that would escape their notice. Across the country, the Taliban have made the destruction of schools, particularly schools for girls, a hallmark of their war.

The Mirwais Mena School — L-shaped, cement, two stories, with canvas tents donated by the United Nations — was built in 2004 with a grant from the Japanese government. A plaque out front gives the date; it hangs on the 10-foot-high cement wall built to shield the students. Kandahar’s Mirwais Mena neighborhood sits just off the national highway. A rutted mud path called Panjwai Road cuts through the center of the neighborhood and up an outcropping of bare rock that rises 500 feet. A single electrical wire runs into Mirwais Mena from a pole along the highway; no one can remember the last time it carried any current.

The attackers appeared in the morning on Nov. 12 of last year, as the girls were walking to school. The men came on three motorcycles, each one carrying a driver and a man on back. They wore masks. Each of the men riding on back carried a small container filled with battery acid. The masked men circled for several minutes as the girls streamed to school. Then they moved in.

Shamsia Husseini and her sister, Atifa, were walking along the highway when they spotted the men on the motorbikes. Shamsia, then 17, was old enough to be married; she was wearing a black scarf that covered most of her face. Shamsia had seen Taliban gunmen before and figured the men on the motorcycles would pass. Then one of the bikes pulled alongside her, and the man on back jumped off. Through the mask, he asked Shamsia what seemed like a strange question.

“Are you going to school?”

The masked man pulled the scarf away from Shamsia’s face and, with his other hand, pumped the trigger on his spray gun. Shamsia felt as if her face and eyes were on fire. As she screamed, the masked man reached for Atifa, who was already running. He pulled at her and tore her scarf away and pumped the spray into her back. The men sped off toward another group of girls. Shamsia lay in the street holding her burning face.

More....

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/magaz ... &th&emc=th
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August 28, 2009
Afghan Youths Seek a New Life in Europe
By CAROLINE BROTHERS

PARIS — On the edges of a Salvation Army soup line in Paris, a soft-spoken Afghan boy told the story recently of how he ended up in Europe, alone.

The boy, who said he was 15 but looked younger, recounted how his family left Afghanistan after his mother lost her leg in an explosion in 2004. They spent three years in Iran, where he went to school for the first time, learning English and discovering the Internet. After his father suffered a back injury that made working difficult, the boy, who declined to give his name, headed west.

He spent two months working 11-hour days in a clothing sweatshop in Istanbul, he said. He was then smuggled into Greece, where he was forced to work on a potato and onion farm near Agros for nine months, finally escaping in the back of a truck. He reached Paris by train after nearly a year on the road.

“I want to go to school,” he said in English. “I would like it if I could be — it sounds like a lot to ask — an engineer of computing.”

Thousands of lone Afghan boys are making their way across Europe, a trend that has accelerated in the past two years as conditions for Afghan refugees become more difficult in countries like Iran and Pakistan. Although some are as young as 12, most are teenagers seeking an education and a future that is not possible in their own country, which is still struggling with poverty and violence eight years after the end of Taliban rule.

The boys pose a challenge for European countries, many of which have sent troops to fight in Afghanistan but whose publics question the rationale for the war. Though each country has an obligation under national and international law to provide for them, the cost of doing so is yet another problem for a continent already grappling with tens of thousands of migrants.

In Italy, 24 Afghan teenagers were discovered sleeping in a sewer in Rome this spring, and last year two adolescents died in Italian ports — one under a semitrailer in Venice and another inside a shipping container in Ancona. In Greece, which says it is overwhelmed by asylum seekers from many countries, there is no foster system for foreign minors; only 300 can be accommodated in the whole country, officials say.

And in Paris this year, Afghans for the first time outnumber sub-Saharan Africans as the biggest group of unaccompanied foreign minors to request admission to child protection services, said Charlotte Aveline, a senior adviser on child protection at City Hall.

“Some arrive very beaten, very tired, but if they stay put for just one week they very quickly become adolescents again,” said Jean-Michel Centres of Exilés10, a citizens’ organization that works with the mainly Afghan migrants who gather around Villemin Square, close to the Gare de l’Est.

“First they ask where they can go to have papers, then where they can go to school, and where after that they can get a job,” Mr. Centres said.

The European Union does not keep statistics on the number of foreign children who are wandering Europe without their families, and the records of aid groups and government agencies vary greatly. But requests for asylum by unaccompanied Afghan minors suggest that there are thousands across Europe. The requests provide a baseline, experts say, because many more youths do not seek refugee status.

Blanche Tax, a senior policy officer at the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Brussels, said that last year 3,090 Afghan minors requested asylum in Austria, Britain, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Germany — the European Union countries where their numbers rose the most sharply — more than double the 1,489 requests in those countries in 2007.

“Afghanistan is hemorrhaging its youth into Europe,” said Pierre Henry, director of France Terre d’Asile, an organization that works with the European Union, the United Nations refugee agency and the French government on asylum affairs.

The five Afghan boys interviewed for this article told of being exploited as under-age labor in Greece and Turkey and dodging beatings by the police. None would give his name in order to speak more freely.

A 17-year-old from the Afghan city of Ghazni said the police repeatedly tried to remove him and another boy from trucks in the port of Patras, Greece, where the authorities destroyed an Afghan squatter camp on July 12.

Once in France, the boys face more hardship. The Paris police have started conducting nightly searches to prevent Afghan migrants from sleeping in Villemin Square. The 15-year-old was placed in a cheap hotel, while others were put in temporary shelter in an unused subway station. Others find their own shelter under bridges and beside a canal.

The housing, financed by the state, is administered by France Terre d’Asile. The group helps guide the boys through the process of requesting assistance from the French child protection agency, registers their names and gives them French lessons.

“We have had some very good success stories,” said Ms. Aveline, the adviser at City Hall.

The boys interviewed for this article said they were in limbo, dreaming of going to school and having a normal life.

One teenager who has been in Paris for two months was deeply worried about what lies ahead. “How should I make a future?” he asked. “I’m 15 already. I’m on my own. What can I do?”

Yet a few days later, he was full of excitement because France Terre d’Asile had taken him to a swimming pool, the first time he had ever been to one. He was also taking French classes. From his pocket he produced a pencil and paper with pictures of fruits. “I like bananas,” he said in French. “I like apples.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/28/world ... nted=print
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September 11, 2009
Op-Ed Contributors
To Save Afghanistan, Look to Its Past
By ANSAR RAHEL and JON KRAKAUER

NO matter who is ultimately certified as the winner of Afghanistan’s presidential election, the vote was plagued by so much fraud and violence, and had such low turnout, that it is inconceivable the Afghan people will regard the victor as a legitimate leader. And if a majority of Afghans do not consider the president and his government to be legitimate, the military campaign now being waged by the United States and its allies is doomed to fail, regardless of the number of troops deployed.

Current discussions about cobbling together mistrustful factions into a new power-sharing government will produce neither enduring democracy nor short-term peace. The slate must be wiped clean. Afghans need to start again from scratch and choose their leader by a fresh process that restores legitimacy to the national government.

Fortunately, such a process already exists — one that is both highly respected by the Afghan people and recognized in the Afghan Constitution: the convening of an emergency loya jirga, or grand assembly. The loya jirga has been called in times of national crisis in Afghanistan for centuries. In 1747, such an assembly in Kandahar selected Ahmad Shah Durrani as the first king of Afghanistan, uniting a patchwork of contentious tribal entities into the modern Afghan state. The loya jirga, moreover, is not only deeply rooted in Pashtun tradition, but is also consistent with notions of Western representative democracy.

Afghan society remains predominantly illiterate, agrarian and tribal. Indeed, the last king of Afghanistan, Mohammad Zahir Shah, often referred to himself as the “chief of all tribes.” Local disputes are routinely resolved by tribal elders seated on the ground in a circle, a gathering known as a jirga (or a shura in non-Pashtun regions). A loya jirga is, essentially, the same process on a much grander scale: an immense assembly of esteemed tribal leaders designated to debate issues of utmost national importance. Unlike presidential elections, which strike most Afghans as alien and fundamentally suspect, jirgas of all sizes are trusted and utterly familiar institutions.

According to the Constitution (which was itself ratified by a loya jirga in 2004), such a council can be convened “to decide on issues related to independence, national sovereignty, territorial integrity as well as supreme national interests.” Doing so does not depend on the support of any particular individual or group, including the president. While historically it was the king who most often initiated the process, the House of People, one of the two houses of Parliament, can directly convene a loya jirga at any time.

The Constitution further states that neither the president nor his ministers nor members of the Supreme Court have voting rights in a loya jirga; those are reserved for members of both houses of the Parliament and the provincial and district leaders. While in session, it trumps all other bodies of government. As the Afghan Constitution unambiguously declares: “The loya jirga is the highest manifestation of the will of the people of Afghanistan.”

Afghanistan faces a number of crises, any one of which would alone justify convening a loya jirga as soon as possible. But the most compelling reason for doing so is to have Afghans from disparate tribes, regions and ethnicities come together, outside the acting government, to select a president who will be considered legitimate by the people. No other process — not a presidential decree, a special commission, a court ruling, an elections committee, an act of Parliament or an internationally sponsored conference — could accomplish this.

Certainly, a loya jirga is no panacea. The emphasis on achieving consensus can cause discussions to drag on interminably. The process may not be immune from political intimidation or even violence. During the loya jirga that considered the Constitution, ethnic factions argued so vehemently that some Westerners feared the nation would splinter. In the end, however, such worries proved groundless. The Constitution was ratified. The loya jirga worked.

The debacle of last month’s election underscores a basic flaw in the efforts by the United States and other Western nations to solve Afghanistan’s problems: the country is simply not ready for direct presidential elections or a presidential system of government transplanted from a Western model of democracy.

A political structure like India’s, with a prime minister, would be a much better fit. And the proper mechanism for converting the Afghan government along these or any other lines is the loya jirga, rather than ad hoc political appointments (like anointing a chief executive to serve under the president), as some have suggested.

Because it is a unifying, time-honored and uniquely Afghan mechanism, a loya jirga offers the best hope for hitting the reset button and rapidly transforming Afghanistan’s political landscape. This would give the Afghan people a badly needed dose of optimism about the future of their beautiful, ravaged country.

Ansar Rahel, a lawyer, advised King Mohammad Zahir Shah’s loya jirga committee. Jon Krakauer is the author of “Into Thin Air” and the forthcoming “Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman.”
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September 25, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
The Afghan Imperative
By DAVID BROOKS

Always there is the illusion of the easy path. Always there is the illusion, which gripped Donald Rumsfeld and now grips many Democrats, that you can fight a counterinsurgency war with a light footprint, with cruise missiles, with special forces operations and unmanned drones. Always there is the illusion, deep in the bones of the Pentagon’s Old Guard, that you can fight a force like the Taliban by keeping your troops mostly in bases, and then sending them out in well-armored convoys to kill bad guys.

There is simply no historical record to support these illusions. The historical evidence suggests that these middling strategies just create a situation in which you have enough forces to assume responsibility for a conflict, but not enough to prevail.

The record suggests what Gen. Stanley McChrystal clearly understands — that only the full counterinsurgency doctrine offers a chance of success. This is a doctrine, as General McChrystal wrote in his remarkable report, that puts population protection at the center of the Afghanistan mission, that acknowledges that insurgencies can only be defeated when local communities and military forces work together.

To put it concretely, this is a doctrine in which small groups of American men and women are outside the wire in dangerous places in remote valleys, providing security, gathering intelligence, helping to establish courts and building schools and roads.

These are the realistic choices for America’s Afghanistan policy — all out or all in, surrender the place to the Taliban or do armed nation-building. And we might as well acknowledge that it’s not an easy call. The costs and rewards are tightly balanced. But in the end, President Obama was right: “You don’t muddle through the central front on terror. ... You don’t muddle through stamping out the Taliban.”

Since 1979, we have been involved in a long, complex conflict against Islamic extremism. We’ve fought this ideology in many ways in many places, and we shouldn’t pretend we understand how this conflict will evolve. But we should understand that the conflict is unavoidable and that when extremism pushes, it’s in our long-term interests to push back — and that eventually, if we do so, extremism will wither.

Afghanistan is central to this effort partly because it could again become a safe haven to terrorists, but mostly because of its effects on the stability of Pakistan. As Stephen Biddle noted in a recent essay in The American Interest, the Taliban is a transnational Pashtun movement active in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is part of a complex insurgency trying to topple the Pakistani regime.

Pakistan has a fragile government with an estimated 50 or more nuclear weapons. A Taliban conquest in Afghanistan would endanger the Pakistani regime at best, create a regional crisis for certain and lead to a nuclear-armed Al Qaeda at worst.

A Taliban reconquest would also, it should be said, be a moral atrocity from which American self-respect would not soon recover.

Proponents of withdrawal often acknowledge the costs of defeat but argue that the cause is hopeless anyway. On this, let me note a certain pattern. When you interview people who know little about Afghanistan, they describe an anarchic place that is the graveyard of empires. When you interview people who live there or are experts, they think those stereotypes are rubbish. They usually take a hardened but guardedly optimistic view. Read Clare Lockhart’s Sept. 17 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to get a sense of the way many knowledgeable people view the situation.

Amidst all the problems, the NATO coalition has a few things going for it. First, American forces have become quite good at counterinsurgency. They have a battle-tested strategy, experienced troops and a superb new leadership team. According to the political scientists Andrew J. Enterline and Joseph Magagnoli, since World War II, counterinsurgency efforts that put population protection at their core have succeeded nearly 70 percent of the time.

Second, the enemy is wildly hated. Only 6 percent of Afghans want a Taliban return, while NATO is viewed with surprising favor. This is not Vietnam or even Iraq.

Third, while many Afghan institutions are now dysfunctional, there is a base on which to build. The Afghan Army is a successful institution. Local villages have their own centuries-old civic institutions. The National Solidarity Program was able to build development councils in 23,000 villages precisely because the remnants of civil society still exist.

We have tried to fight the Afghan war the easy way, and it hasn’t worked. Switching now to the McChrystal strategy is a difficult choice, and President Obama is right to take his time. But Obama was also right a few months ago when he declared, “This will not be quick, nor easy. But we must never forget: This is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. ... This is fundamental to the defense of our people.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/25/opini ... nted=print
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Post by Biryani »

Poverty?? LOL...Afghanistan is long gone…The End!

My father in law visited Afghanistan twice in last three years…and he was disgusted by what he saw there…he told me that he will never go back there again.

The death of Afghanistan - September 27, 1996.

This is where the concept of reincarnation comes to mind and gives hope to some people...until then, I’m gone fishing, somewhere in Quebec.
kmaherali
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Post by kmaherali »

Biryani wrote:Poverty?? LOL...Afghanistan is long gone…The End!

My father in law visited Afghanistan twice in last three years…and he was disgusted by what he saw there…he told me that he will never go back there again.

The death of Afghanistan - September 27, 1996.

This is where the concept of reincarnation comes to mind and gives hope to some people...until then, I’m gone fishing, somewhere in Quebec.
MHI at various occasions and through his actions has expressed great hope in the destiny of Afghanistan. I think as his murids we must be supportive of that vision and not articulate views that are not alligned to it.
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