President Karzai Congratulates Women on International Women's Day – Excerpts from President's Speech –

Date of Release: 08 March 2005 Presidential Palace, Kabul - H.E. Hamid Karzai, President of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, congratulates today the women of Afghanistan and the world on the International Women's Day. Addressing a celebration of Women's Day Ceremony organized this morning by the Ministry of Women's Affairs in the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul, the President said: Women's Day I am very happy that we are celebrating Women's Day in Afghanistan today. During the last three years, the Afghan women saw tremendous progress and strengthened their position in society. Afghan women showed that they know their rights and that they can make use of them in the best way possible in accordance to our religion and culture. Achievements in Women's Rights Today, Women play an important role in Afghanistan: In the last two Loya Jirgas, women's participation was in many ways more active than men's. 42% of voters taking part in the Presidential Elections were women. We have 3 women Ministers in the Cabinet; we have women Deputy Ministers and women as Heads of Departments in the government institutions. According to our Constitution, at least 25% of the seats of our Parliament will be occupied by women. Early Marriages Of course, women in Afghanistan still encounter challenges. Girls are married in their childhood or married off to resolve disputes. These practices are cruel, against our religion, and no longer acceptable. Afghanistan Is Every Afghan's Home Afghanistan does not belong to the four or five major ethnic groups. Smaller ethnic groups, such as Qirghiz and others, have as much right to this country as the four or five major ethnic groups. The people of Afghanistan are the owners of their country. Child Kidnapping Ever since terrorists were defeated in Afghanistan, they've tried to harm our people in whatever way possible. But every time, they have lost and we have overcome the threat. The biggest defeat of terrorists in Afghanistan was the elections in October 2004. One horrible method that terrorists have used is to kidnap our children from the streets. This is a heinous crime and it is the Government's responsibility to fight this crime and ensure the safety of its people. I have sent the Minister of the Interior to Kandahar today to investigate the recent cases of child kidnapping in Kandahar and the demonstrations by our people yesterday. Commitment to Administrative Reform The solution to our problems lies in bringing real reform in our dministration, and in this regard, I will not accept friendships, connections, or any other considerations. I won't have regard for whether people have supported my elections campaign. By voting for me as their President, people are expecting me to improve their Government for them and I will not stop at personal or political connections to do this.

Released by the Office of the Spokesman to the President Islamic Republic of Afghanistan

Briton working for Afghan ministry killed in Kabul

KABUL (AFP) - A British man working as an advisor to the Afghan government has been shot dead in a drive-by attack in the embassy district of the capital Kabul.

Steven MacQueen, who was aiding the war-torn country's Ministry of Rural Development and Rehabilitation, was killed by a single shot fired from a moving vehicle while driving late Monday, British and Afghan officials told AFP on Tuesday.

It is the first fatal attack on a foreign civilian in Afghanistan (news - web sites) since the start of the year. It was not clear if it was linked to militants such as those from the ousted Taliban militia, or even to the country's drug trade.

MacQueen was killed near the United Nations (news - web sites) International Community Association guesthouse, a landmark in the city, and the Dutch embassy, officials said.

"The Afghan police are investigating the shooting. His next of kin have been informed and our thoughts are with the family," British embassy press officer Colin Ball told AFP.

MacQueen had been working as the director of the World Bank (news - web sites)-backed MicroFinance Investment and Support Facility for Afghanistan, a project to boost private investment in the devastated Central Asian nation.

He was driving alone on a road flanked by the Dutch Embassy and the UN guesthouse when he was killed by a shot fired from another vehicle, a senior police official told AFP on condition of anonymity. "The attackers managed to escape the scene," he said.

The Briton was driving a Toyota Land Cruiser owned by the Afghan ministry and was fired on by attackers driving a similar-type vehicle, the police official added.

The official said that Afghan police were investigating the incident and had taken the body to hospital for a post-mortem examination but the reason behind the attack remained unclear.

Foreigners in Kabul have been on guard following a series of incidents late last year which raised fears that Afghanistan could be hit by a wave of Iraq (news - web sites)-style kidnappings and killings.

On October 28 three United Nations workers overseeing Afghanistan's first presidential election were seized in Kabul and held for 27 days until being released unharmed.

It remains unclear whether a ransom was paid for the release of the hostages, a Filipino man, a Northern Irish woman and a Kosovan woman. The abductions were thought to have been carried out by a criminal gang in league with Islamic militants.

On December 15 a Turkish engineer in eastern Afghanistan was kidnapped and murdered shortly after the inauguration of US-backed Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

In October 2004 an American woman and an Afghan girl were killed in a weekend suicide bombing on a popular shopping strip. The bombing in Chicken Street, a narrow road crammed with carpet and antique shops, also injured three Icelandic peacekeepers and five local people.

The suicide bombing and abductions sent shockwaves through the foreign community in Afghanistan and led to many aid agencies and companies bolstering security measures for their staff.

Taliban militants have been attacking mainly western and Afghan targets since they were ousted in late 2001 by US-led forces for refusing to hand over Osama bin Laden (news - web sites) after the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington.

However Afghanistan, the world's largest producer of opium, has also suffered from increasing violence associated with the booming drugs trade. The United Nations and US have warned that the country could become a narcotics-based state without more international help, while Karzai has promised a "holy war" on drugs.

Rebel Attacks Down Sharply in Afghanistan, U.S. General Says – New York Times By CARLOTTA GALL Published: March 8, 2005

KABUL, Afghanistan, March 7 - Attacks and firefights involving American forces in Afghanistan have decreased so much that violent contacts are now rare, the American general in charge of operations in Afghanistan said Monday. American casualties are also down for the last few months, he said.

Lt. Gen. Eric Olson, commander of Combined Joint Task Force 76, summed up American military activities in Afghanistan since he arrived a year ago, saying that many previously insecure areas of the country were now safe and that Afghans seem to have become increasingly cordial toward the Americans.

"When we arrived in the spring of 2004 we experienced 10 to 15 attacks against coalition forces each week," he said at a news briefing. "Now, at this point, we rarely receive more than five attacks per week." There have been 20 to 25 deaths among American troops in the last year, he said.

The biggest fall in insurgent activity was in the southern provinces of Zabul, Uruzgan and Kandahar, General Olson said, where supporters of the country's ousted Taliban rulers have been most active in the past two years.

"At the same time we are seeing Afghan security organizations being able to operate much more freely in some of these areas that used to be very violent," he said. Aid groups, which have suffered particularly from Taliban-led violence, are now venturing back into some of those regions, he said.

General Olson, who commands 18,000 troops, most of them American, said his forces had worn down the insurgency by Taliban supporters and some members of Al Qaeda with very focused attacks, based on intelligence, on small cells and their infrastructure. He said he believed that the Taliban leadership was no longer able to conduct a coordinated insurgency.

He said the millions of dollars in aid from other nations, for reconstruction projects and the support of the Afghan government, had been equally important in winning the acceptance of the population. "The people recognize that we are working in support of the Afghan government, and the popularity of the coalition is at an all-time high," he said. Winning over the population had been a crucial element in successfully fighting the insurgency, the general said, adding that members of the public had been increasingly cooperative about providing information on the location of weapons caches and roadside bombs. "This closeness between the Afghan people and the coalition has made the environment much less hospitable for the enemy to work in," he said.

The job of the American military in Afghanistan will remain a counterinsurgency operation, rather than a peacekeeping one, he said, but increasingly it has been able to turn its attention to reconstruction.

The military is also focusing on preventing any abuse of people it detains, he said. Fifteen allegations of detainee abuse in the past year had been investigated, some leading to punishment of individuals involved, and in a few cases judicial proceedings had been initiated, he said.

Despite General Olson's upbeat assessment, episodes of violence or conflict continue. On Monday, demonstrators protesting a spate of kidnappings of children threw rocks at government offices and the police in the city of Kandahar. An American patrol vehicle passing through was also stoned, and it hit and injured a demonstrator as it maneuvered away from the crowd. Seven police officers and five civilians were injured in the melee, said Gov. Gul Agha Sherzai of Kandahar. Some of the demonstrators were armed and several arrests were made, he said.

U.S. General: Omar Loses Control of Afghan Insurgency - Mar 7 Sayed Salahuddin

KABUL (Reuters) - Fugitive Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar has lost control of the insurgency in Afghanistan and the number of attacks has fallen dramatically, a senior U.S. general said Monday. Taliban spokesmen have said attacks will resume once the harsh Afghan winter is over.

But Major General Eric T. Olson told a news conference in Kabul that the Taliban lacked cohesion and were a fading force in the southern and southeast provinces that had been their strongholds.

"We believe that this spring there will be a number of factors combined to make this so-called spring offensive much less effective and much lesser scale than we've seen in the past in Afghanistan," said Olson.

Remnants of Mullah Omar's hard-line Islamist militia have kept up an insurgency since being driven from power in late 2001 for giving shelter to al Qaeda and its leader, Osama bin Laden, following the Sept. 11 suicide airliner attacks in the United States.

Olson, who last month warned U.S. policymakers against cutting troop levels in Afghanistan because the Taliban and al Qaeda posed a grave threat, now sees a "dramatic decrease" in the number of attacks.

President Hamid Karzai's government will soon announce an amnesty offer to rank-and-file Taliban fighters, Olson said, and he expected the number of diehards to dwindle further by the time parliamentary elections are held later this year.

The elections were due in April or May, but are now expected to be delayed until September. Many saw the Taliban's inability to mount an effective threat to last October's presidential election as a sign the movement was a spent and demoralized force. Olson said about 30 fighters, described as mid-level in the Taliban, had surrendered to U.S.-led forces recently.

Karzai has said his government is in contact with Taliban members and the amnesty offer will not extend to Mullah Omar or up to 150 of his most hardened followers. Omar's whereabouts remains a mystery, said Olson, but the U.S. general was convinced that wherever he is, Omar no longer exerts control over the Taliban.

"It seems very clear to us, given the disjointed and uncoordinated effort that the Taliban has been able to launch, that those types of leaders, Mullah Omar specifically, are not exercising an effective command and control over Taliban operations in Afghanistan."

He put this down to the success of U.S.-led forces in both combat operations and in winning over support from local communities, leaving the insurgents isolated.

Nearly 1,100 people including militants, civilians, aid workers, and government and foreign forces have died in Taliban-linked violence since late 2003, when the guerrillas stepped up their campaign of violence.

Afghan Women Face Long Battle for Equality - By MATTHEW PENNINGTON, Associated Press Writer

KABUL, Afghanistan - Fifteen Afghan men, heads slightly bowed, file into a crowded living room to greet the new leader of Bamiyan province. They sip tea and listen patiently as the governor holds court.

Such a courtesy call is commonplace in this deeply hierarchical society when someone wins high office — but this time there's a critical difference: They are paying respect to a woman, the first female governor in the history of this Islamic nation.

Three years after the fall of the Taliban, Afghanistan (news - web sites) is casting off the fundamentalism that once barred women from public life and kept girls out of school. The selection of Habiba Sarobi to head the central province of Bamiyan is a milestone, but she is the first to acknowledge that it masks a sad reality.

"There are equal rights for women on paper. The challenge is to put it into practice ... Afghanistan is still a male-dominated society," Sarobi told The Associated Press as she received well-wishers last week at her Kabul apartment.

For most Afghan women, little has changed since the Taliban's ouster; most women's daily lives are still dominated by archaic traditions and grinding poverty.

Women's literacy rates are just 14 percent, far below the literacy rate for men, and maternal mortality is about 60 times higher than in industrialized countries, with an Afghan mother dying every half hour on average.

Before Afghanistan descended into war two decades ago, women held high office. As early as the 1950s, they served in parliament, and worked as judges and diplomats. In the 1970s, a woman was minister of health. During the Soviet occupation of the 1980s, up to 70 percent of teachers were women. A wave of fundamentalism swept the country after Muslim fighters ousted the Soviet army in 1989, and the Taliban came to power seven years later.

Since the hard-line regime's ouster by U.S.-led forces in late 2001, millions of girls have returned to school. And while women are still mostly on the periphery of public life, career opportunities have reopened for them, at least in the cities.

Women's rights were enshrined in a democratic constitution adopted in 2004, and women turned out in force to vote in presidential elections in October. A female presidential candidate is now the women's affairs minister.

President Hamid Karzai has given three women minor posts in his new, 30-member Cabinet, and named women to lead the Afghan Red Crescent Society and the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission. But skeptics — and even high-profile women appointees — concede they have little political clout.

"I still believe most of us are selected for these seats because they (the government) wants to give a good impression to the world," said Fatema Gailani, who has won praise for shaking up the Red Crescent since her appointment two months ago. "But we really want to achieve things," she said.

Malalai Joya, a 26-year-old woman who created a stir at last year's constitutional convention by calling Afghan warlords criminals, said progress in women's rights was only cosmetic.

"Women still live under the shadow of the gun," she said by telephone from her home in western Farah province. "In Kabul, some women now walk to work without a burqa (all-covering veil) ... In the villages, there's no change. Women are still victims of violence."

Joya has received death threats for her outspokenness at the convention, and has three bodyguards supplied by the government. And there are even disputes between conservatives and liberals over women's place in society — even whether women should sing and dance on television.

Abdul Hafiz Mansour, editor of the conservative Mujahedeen's Message newspaper said women have a right to hold political office. But he said he doubted whether there were enough educated women in some provinces to fill the quota of seats in parliament called for in the constitution.

Afghanistan's first female governor blazes trail for women

KABUL, (AFP) - Habiba Surabi hopes her appointment as Islamic Afghanistan (news - web sites)'s first female provincial governor will set a trend in a country whose cultural traditions, she says, "bind the hands of women like chains."

"My appointment has opened a door for other women," Surabi told AFP in an interview in her Kabul apartment as she prepared to move to the central highland province of Bamiyan to take up her post.

President Hamid Karzai made history last Wednesday when he appointed Surabi governor of the province, which is racked by poverty and drug trafficking. Surabi, wearing a smart black suit with a loosely tied white veil, believes Karzai by choosing her had sent a powerful signal that women were equal to men.

He also intended to break with Afghanistan's violent past where provinces were dominated by warlords and militia commanders, she said. Also, "Karzai chose me because I have good contacts with the international community and will be in a position to attract funds for reconstruction of Bamiyan which is a very big task."

Surabi, who belongs to the ethnic Hazara minority, was women's minister in Karzai's previous transitional government for almost three years during which time she learnt to speak fluent English.

But her appointment attracted some opposition. When it was announced between 150 to 200 demonstrators loyal to former governor and local militia commander Mohammed Rahim Ali Yar took to the street in Bamiyan town to protest.

They were quickly outnumbered by up to 1,000 people who came out in her support. "It shows how fed up people are with warlords and fundamentalists," she said. Surabi, 48, said she was not worried about threats of violence but women nationwide still face daily harassment and intimidation from armed groups.

"The biggest challenge for women generally in Afghanistan is safety from warlords and commanders. Security is very important for women to be able to come to court or visit rights associations," she said.

Afghan cultural tradition "binds the hands of women like chains," she said, pointing to forced marriage, child marriage and the trading of women between tribes to settle disputes over honour. "There is selling of women like cattle across Afghanistan. These things are not in Islam but in our cultural traditions which is very sad," she said.

Enforcing the rule of law in this deeply conservative country where tribal traditions predominate was difficult because "judges rule for the benefit of men, for the benefit of the tribe and women get pushed into a corner."

Bamiyan, where 48 percent of the voters in Afghanistan's first presidential election in October were female, was relatively liberal in its attitudes to women compared with other parts of Afghanistan. Surabi said many Hazaras, who are Shiite Muslims, had spent time in Iran (news - web sites) and had been exposed to a more modern way of life.

She said her greatest challenges were likely to be bringing reconstruction to the province which has virtually no power and no asphalt roads, and eventually to revive tourism in Bamiyan, famous as the site of the two giant Buddhas.

Members of the fundamentalist Islamic Taliban regime blew up the statues amid international outrage in spring 2001 before the hardline militia was ousted by US-led forces later that year.

"The dream of the people of Bamiyan is to have a lightbulb and that is my dream too," she said. Tackling the narcotics trade in the province which is a transit route for drugs from northern Afghanistan to Pakistan would be a tough job because trafficking was "a big problem in the province."

Afghanistan's opium poppy production reached record highs in 2004 and its drugs trade now poses a major threat to global stability, the US State Department warned in a report Friday.

The mother of three will move to Bamiyan later this month to live in a tumbledown rented house, leaving her two sons aged 12 and 17 behind in Kabul. Her 20-year-old daughter is in India studying political science.

And in Afghanistan, behind every great woman is a strong and liberal-minded man. "It would not be possible to do such a tough job without my husband's support," she said.

Two Tajik soldiers released from Afghan captivity

DUSHANBE, Tajikistan (AP)  Tajik and Afghan troops freed two Tajik soldiers who had been held captive for two months by alleged Afghan drug dealers, a border official said Monday.

The two were released Friday in the joint operation involving about 200 Tajik and Afghan troops, said Abdujabor Khamidov, Tajikistan's deputy border service chief

Khamidov said the soldiers, who were captured in Tajik territory on Jan. 8 and taken to Afghanistan, were freed without their captors' demands being met. He did not elaborate.

Tajikistan, an impoverished former Soviet republic, is a gateway for traffickers moving drugs from neighboring Afghanistan, the world's largest opium producer, to buyers in Russia and Europe.  

former Afghan king travels to Middle East for medical checkup – AP Mar. 5

Afghanistan's 90-year-old former king left Kabul on Saturday for a medical check-up in the United Arab Emirates, his spokesman said. Mohammed Zaher Shah, who ruled Afghanistan from 1933 to 1973, traveled to Dubai last May for treatment for an intestinal condition.

But spokesman Abdul Aziz Ahmad said this trip was for a routine, three-monthly checkup and Shah has no health problems. He was seen off at Kabul airport by his family and President Hamid Karzai. He is due to return in about a week. Shah returned from a three-decade exile in 2002 after the fall of the Taliban.

A constitution adopted last year declared Afghanistan an Islamic republic, consigning the monarchy to history but maintaining the former king in the role of "Father of the Nation."

Too many weapons in private hands – UN - [This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

KABUL, 7 March (IRIN) - In an episode that suggests Afghanistan is slowly becoming safer, Shir Alam a 50-year-old local commander, surrendered several hundred mt of arms to a United Nations ammunitions stockpile and collection group on Thursday outside the capital, Kabul.

Alam had amassed the arms over three decades of conflict, first fighting Soviet forces during 1980s and later against rival militia groups during the 1990s civil war in the capital. He also fought the hardline Taliban regime as part of the Northern Alliance.

"These [weapons] have cost the sacrifice of hundreds of Mujahideen, but now I do not foresee any further conflicts and now we have a national army, they are of no use," Alam told IRIN, as he opened a weapon cache to the weapons inspectors in Pajak village in the district of Paghman, close to the capital.

Alam’s arms depot - consisting of RPG launchers, machine guns, artillery pieces and hundreds of thousands of shells, mortar bombs and rifle rounds - is just a small portion of the weapons that the UN estimates are being held by different militia groups throughout the country.

Despite the commander’s gesture, the UN says it’s but a drop in the ocean. According to Afghanistan’s New Beginning Programme (ANBP), the official name of the UN-backed disarmament and weapons collection programme, huge amounts of ammunition and guns remain with local commanders and large militia forces and at ex-military bases and private stockpiles throughout Afghanistan.

With many rural Afghan areas still under the rule of the gun, the existence of such quantities of ammunition and weapons in the hands of non-state actors means the danger of further conflict remains real.

"Most of the stockpiles are in the control of individual commanders and different paramilitary groups and they won’t give them up easily," Rick Grant, a spokesman for ANBP, told IRIN on Monday in Kabul.

He said the UN had launched a survey to identify the locations of weapons stockpiles. "The purpose of the survey is to find out where the stuff [weapons] is and the second phase is over to the Ministry of Defence to decide how to collect it."

UN surveyors have so far been to the western province of Herat, Mazar-e Sharif in the north, Nangarhar in the east and Kabul. More surveying teams are preparing to go to other areas of the country, Grant added.

Early findings indicate that there are around 600 Kamaz trucks (large Russian lorries) of ammunition in the northern city of Mazar-e Sharif alone. In the capital, where security is good, cooperation from local commanders has been positive "Here in Kabul individual commanders are voluntarily coming to us and say please take my ammunition," Grant said.

Another 5,000 mt of ammunition have recently been moved out of the western city of Herat, which accounts for only a third of the whole problem in Herat province, according to ANBP.

"In Jalalabad region the ammunition survey found almost no ammunition because the [US-led] coalition PRTs [Provincial Reconstruction Teams] were just blowing it up," he said, noting that in Sheberghan and Mazar-e Sharif they expected to come across further massive storages or arms.

Grant said so far the survey teams had discovered 168 different collections of arms and ammunition, comprising 194,076 boxed and 487,729 unboxed arms in nine provinces of the country.

"The distinction between boxed and unboxed ammunition is important because it gives an indication of how much ammunition is potentially unstable or dangerous," Grant noted. The first phase is to find the ammunition, separate out the good material, which can be used by the Afghan army, and then destroy that which is dangerous and unstable, Grant added.

Canada is the lead nation for the project, and so far has contributed some US $400,000 to conduct the survey. The whole programme, which is expected to take more than a year, will require much extra funding.

According to ANBP, more than 40,000 of an estimated 60,000 members of Afghan militia forces have been disarmed since the Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration (DDR) process started in late 2003. In addition, more than 98 percent of all heavy weapons - nearly 8,600 different types of active and in active heavy weapons - in Afghanistan have been collected.

On the problem of landmines, so far 2.8 million explosive devices, including mines and UXOs (unexploded ordnance), have been cleared from 320 million sq m of land. But 815 million sq m of land remain to be cleared to ensure the safe return of hundreds of thousands of internally displaced persons (IDPs) and refugees.

Power export to Kabul to be discussed - By Khalid Mustafa / Daily Times (Pak) / March 6, 2005

ISLAMABAD: A team of the Water and Power Development Authority (WAPDA) will leave for Afghanistan today (Sunday) to discuss the export of electricity to Afghanistan.

The survey team will enter into Afghanistan’s Khost region from Miran Shah and will examine the possibilities of laying transmission lines to export power.

WAPDA’s team comprises Chaudhry Ahmad Akhtar, director of Peshawar Electric Supply Corporation (PESCO), Iqbal Ali Shah, a senior engineer in PESCO, and Abdur Razzaq Cheema, chief engineer at the National Transmission Dispatch Company (NTDC).

WAPDA will lay transmission line from Miran Shah to Khost, sources said, and team of experts will finalise the modalities with Afghan authorities for the transmission of electricity.

A WAPDA official said Kabul would provide full security to the WAPDA team and escort them from Miran Shah to Khost. He said WAPDA would also lay down 132 kilovolt transmission lines from the Landikotal grid to the nearby areas in Afghanistan.

Pakistan agreed to help develop the electricity distribution network in war-ravaged Afghanistan, but WAPDA had first sought an assurance of safety measures for its staff. The official said Afghanistan had agreed to provide safety to Pakistani citizen and “WAPDA agreed to go ahead with these projects”.

“Afghanistan offered these projects to Pakistan when President Pervez Musharraf visited Kabul in April 2002 along with members of his cabinet including Lt Gen (r) Zulfiqar Ali Khan who was the chairman of WAPDA at the time.”

Afghanistan's bitter reality - Toronto Star 03/07/2005 By Harry Sterling

Three years after the Taliban was overthrown in Afghanistan, the government of President Hamid Karzai remains confronted by widespread poverty and hunger, millions of refugees and displaced persons living in squalid hovels, rampant drug trafficking and corruption, plus major deficiencies in health care and education.

This, despite billions of dollars poured into Afghanistan since the U.S. invasion in late 2001, $616 million dollars committed by Canada alone, this country's largest ever aid program.

Not surprisingly, many want to know why life for most Afghans remains so difficult and overall security is still a problem. This is particularly pertinent for countries like Canada that have played significant roles in providing peacekeepers and combat troops.

A just-released United Nations report attempts to answer such questions. In its survey National Human Development Report: Security With a Human Face, the U.N. concludes that while the U.S.-led coalition successfully ended the oppressive rule of Taliban religious zealots, inadequate attention has been paid to confronting the inherent socio-economic and cultural difficulties undermining Afghan society.

According to the report's authors, "human security" and "human development," rather than military force and diplomacy alone, are key to resolving Afghanistan's complex problems.

And those problems are staggering. Although the country's gross domestic product increased in 2003 by 16 per cent and should increase annually by 10 to 12 per cent over the next decade, that growth is unevenly shared. Half the population is classified as poor and 20 per cent of rural Afghans are undernourished. Afghanistan's poorest 30 per cent receive just 9 per cent of national income. Average annual income is only $190 dollars (U.S.) with 25 per cent of the labour force unemployed.

Although more than 54 per cent of school-age children are now in school, many areas still have no schools and adult literacy is only 28.7 per cent. Few girls attend school at all.

Inadequate health care remains a serious problem. One of every 15 women dies giving birth. Twenty per cent of children never reach their fifth birthday, 80 per cent perishing from preventable diseases. Recent immunization programs against measles, whooping cough and other childhood diseases are improving the situation. However, during recent unusually cold weather, more than 600 people have died, including children suffering from malnutrition, lack of proper shelter and medical care.

In the words of the report's authors, "Our team found the overwhelming majority of people hold a sense of pessimism and fear that reconstruction is bypassing them."

The report proposes government and donor-nation policies be more people-centred, taking into account the nature of Afghan society, with its ethnic, religious and regional differences.

But the continuing power of warlords and other power brokers, some involved in the lucrative drug trade, continues to threaten security, especially in areas where the government lacks effective control.

President Karzai's determination to eradicate the illegal growing of poppies for opium production remains a sensitive issue. While Washington is pressuring Afghanistan to destroy poppy fields, this could have a destabilizing effect unless impoverished farmers are given financial assistance to plant alternative crops.

Clearly, the challenges facing Karzai are daunting. He's trying both to unify and modernize a conservative and religious society, while marginalizing or co-opting powerful warlords.

(In a controversial move this week, Karzai appointed Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum as chief of staff to the armed forces commander, an appointment apparently intended to appease Dostum and win Uzbek support during forthcoming elections.)

As Karzai knows, even generous foreign aid cannot change a traditional society overnight or guarantee stability. It's a reality donors like Canada will have to live with as Afghanistan slowly tries to become a cohesive and unified nation, hopefully transforming itself eventually into an authentic democracy for the first time in its turbulent history. Harry Sterling, a former diplomat, is an Ottawa-based commentator

Afghanistan's National Human Development Report: Glass Half Full or Half Empty - RFE/RL 03/07/2005 By Amin Tarzi

When the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) on 21 February released Afghanistan's first-ever national development survey in a report, it was careful to state that while Afghanistan has "made remarkable progress" since the fall of the Taliban regime in late 2001, it warned that the country "could easily tumble back into chaos." Beyond listing and analyzing numbers, the report tackles the core issue of human security.

UNDP's report is titled "Afghanistan National Development Report 2004: Security with a Human Face, Challenges and Responsibilities" (http://www.undp.org.af). The statistical findings of the report, as "grim" as they are, to quote Afghan President Hamid Karzai, tell only part of the story. Providing long-term human security for the Afghan people will prove to be an ongoing challenge.

Afghanistan is virtually at the bottom of all human development indicators used in the report. In gender development, despite the progress since the demise of the Taliban regime, Afghanistan is ranked 175th -- just above Burundi and Mali -- among 177 countries surveyed.

The countries which are statistically clustered around Afghanistan are not its neighbors but states in Africa, making Afghanistan somewhat of an oddity in its own geographical zone. For example, life expectancy for Afghans is 44.5 years at birth, which not only is more than five years lower than the average for Least Developed Countries (LCDs) standing at 50.6 years, but far less than the life expectancy of any of Afghanistan's neighbors, the lowest of which is for Pakistan at 60.8 years. The numbers fare no better for infant mortality. Afghanistan's infant mortality stands at 115 per 1,000 live births as compared to 99 for LCDs. The highest infant-mortality figures among Afghanistan's neighbors is 83, again for Pakistan. The literacy rate among Afghans, according to the UNDP report, is 28.7 percent, while Afghanistan's northern neighbors enjoy much higher rates. Iran and Pakistan stand at 77.1 percent and 41.5 percent, respectively.

These numbers and others, as depressing as they are, are only part of the challenges faced by the Afghan government and its international supporters. These issues are also those which receive the greatest attention. However, what seems to pose the greatest long-term challenge and which has not been addressed fully in discussions or on the ground is the larger issue of human security, without which Afghanistan's glass would remain half empty for the foreseeable future.

As the report points out, human security is "not a mere challenge of 'protection' and 'provision,' but of empowerment and participation. If the Afghan state, as it emerges from the ashes of its past, is to be "entrusted with the responsibility to provide public goods," the Afghan people must be able to engage the state and "hold it accountable."

"Security is not an objective good that can be delivered from the outside, but ultimately a public good and a subjective feeling that requires a conscious willingness to be 'provided' by the state and the capacity to be requested by the people."

Unless Afghans are granted the opportunity and the resources to build the capacity to become citizens of a state, rather than recipients of favors from overlords, government officials, local chiefs, and the like, it would be difficult for them to know their rights. Equally, until Afghans learn the responsibilities of citizenship, such as paying taxes and doing service for public good, it would be awkward to imagine their country as a functioning nation-state.

Thus, challenges and responsibilities are shared by the government of Afghanistan and its people. The UNDP, as an international organization, places more of the burden on the state. In the short term, to heal the wounds of the past quarter century of mayhem, the state, indeed, has the greater burden. It needs to allow Afghans to feel they are a unified, albeit diverse, nation while continuing the job of state building. Nation building cannot wait until the physical and political state is on its feet. They must grow together.

President Karzai, in a statement released on 22 February, said that his "government intends to use" the National Human Development Report "for policy guidance and as a yardstick with which to measure its future achievements." This is an excellent commitment.

If, in the first major challenge facing the country in the next few months -- with parliamentary, provincial, and local elections -- Afghans exercise their rights without intimidation and choose their representatives, their country's achievements could certainly be measured as a glass half full, despite the likely disagreements that will certainly be associated with these elections and among various elected representatives.

Heroin Cheap and Easy in Remote Afghan North – Reuters 03/06/2005
By Angie Ramos

FAIZABAD - One gram of heroin for $6. "And it's high-grade," smiles bleary eyed Abdul, 35, after taking a whiff of the white granules from the plastic pack he scored easily in the muddy back streets of Faizabad's main market.

In war-battered Afghanistan (news - web sites), finding heroin -- a derivative of opium, the country's main cash crop -- is both cheap and easy. Outside Afghanistan, the street price of heroin produced in remote provinces like Badakhshan, of which Faizabad is the capital, can range from $100-$300 per gram.

Profit margins like that help explain why, more than three years after U.S.-led forces overthrew the Taliban, Afghanistan is again the world's leading producer of opium and heroin.

According to U.N. estimates, drug exports, much of which end up in Europe, account for more than 60 percent of Afghanistan's economy. A U.N. report this month warned that record levels of illicit drug production threatened the country's stability.

The consequences are not only felt in the countries to which most Afghan heroin is exported. Experts warn that addiction, and production, is rising in places such as Badakhshan, a mountainous northern province bordering Tajikistan on a notorious drug-smuggling route to Central Asia and Europe.

There are no statistics on the number of heroin laboratories in the province, but the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) says it appears to be rising fast.
"Unless we deal with it now, Afghanistan will face a major drug-addiction or drug-use problem," said Doris Buddenberg, head of UNODC in Kabul.

One alarming trend is addiction among Afghan women, and their children, who use heroin as a cheap alternative to painkillers. "It gave me relief from my headache for about one or two hours ... but I didn't realize that that relief came with more pain," said Paree Naaz, 34, who was hooked on heroin for a year until she sought help from a local medical worker.

Her husband and 10-year-old son were also addicts. There are no official statistics on drug addiction in Badakhshan, but the numbers are high enough to prompt one local NGO to set up a detox center where men, and sometimes women, voluntarily check themselves in for a month-long treatment.

The UNODC's Opium Survey for 2004 found the area under opium poppy cultivation in Badakhshan has almost doubled since 2002 to more than 15,000 hectares (37,500 acres), making it the third largest producer in the country.

Despite threats of eradication, many poppy farmers in Badakhshan are now waiting for the snows to melt by the end of March to usher in this year's planting season.

"I know it's illegal, but what can a person do when he's hungry, his family's hungry?" said poppy farmer Abdul Raouf, 45. "They can rob or kill people to survive; we plant poppies."

Over the past four years Raouf has earned about $2,000 a year from his opium harvest, enough to feed not only his wife and three children but many other relatives too.

President Hamid Karzai has declared a jihad, or holy war, against drugs. Last month he unveiled a plan to beef up anti-narcotics forces, improve the justice system to enable prosecution of traffickers and run a "credible targeted and verified eradication campaign." While the government is resisting U.S. pressures for aerial spraying of poppy crops, which it fears could enrage whole swathes of the countryside and endanger health, some on the front line of the war on drugs say that too much focus on any form of eradication could backfire.

"Usually it has a short-term effect, it drives the prices up for opium, and thus provides the kind of perverse incentive to increased cultivation in the next planting season," said Buddenberg, citing 2001, when poppy cultivation fell to a low of 8,000 hectares (20,000 acres) after a Taliban ban.

The next year, after the fall of the harsh regime, production soared to 74,000 hectares (185,000 acres) and last year's UN survey showed 131,000 hectares (327,000 acres) were planted with poppies by no less than 10 percent of the country's population.

The UN says the solution lies in a long-term development package that includes alternative crops, ensuring a market for those crops, building roads and proper irrigation systems and instituting health and education support. It also urges consumer countries to put a lid on the demand for opium and heroin.

"As long as demand for heroin worldwide continues, and in some countries continue to increase, there will be production," said Buddenberg. "The profit margins on this kind of business are just very high so many people will be tempted and will take the risk to do this kind of business."

Meanwhile, for some Afghans, heroin has become a lifeline. "If the anxiety attacks do come back, I may have to use heroin again because nothing else works," said farmer Mohammad Sadiq, 28, as he struggles to detox at Faizabad treatment center.

Information Minister asks media to respect Islamic values

KABUL, Mar. 07, (Pajhwok Afghan News) – The Information and Culture Ministry's call to Afghan audio-visual media to respect Islamic and cultural values, has evoked mixed reactions. While most of the TV stations insisted that they were maintaining the necessary respect for Islamic values, others including Islamic scholars and the judiciary emphasized the need for staying within the bounds of Islamic culture.

A statement issued on March 2 by the Ministry of Information and Culture said the audio-visual media was responsible for shaping the younger generation. The Minister for Information and Culture, Syed Makhdoom Raheen told Pajhwok Afghan News that the call for taking into account Islamic and traditional values was a friendly request and based on law. He added that cultures imported into Afghanistan should not be allowed to damage the historic roots of the national culture. He also said the purpose of the call given by his Ministry was to prevent corruptive films and pictures from being telecast.

Ahmad Shah Afghanzai, head of Afghan Television in Kabul, said that his channel's programs were in line with Islamic rules, the law and cultural values.

Habibullah Rafi, head of the Aryana Encyclopedia in Afghanistan's Academy of Sciences, criticized the programs of Tolo TV, a Kabul-based private television, and said its programs were partially at odds with Islam. Rafi said the channel telecast uncensored foreign films and video clips with women dancing provocatively, which was un Islamic.

Hamid Haidari of Tolo TV however said that foreign films were censored, though the songs were not. "As censoring songs reduces their importance we cannot edit or censor them," he told Pajhwok.

Nasreen Ahmadi, a Kabul schoolgirl said she liked both Afghan TV and Tolo TV and their programs. Alina Shaheen a freelance journalist said that both these TV channels were commercial and their telecasts were open but added that everyone should respect Islamic law.

Abdul Fatah Rasikh, a professor of Islamic law in Kabul University who is also an Imam in a Kabul mosque, said TV channels often broadcast wicked films and dances and were a bad influence. He said they did not respect Islamic values and instead harmed Islamic culture. He said a commission was required to exercise control over TV telecasts.

Shah Zaman Wriz Stanizai, head of the publications department in the ministry of information and culture, said that a commission led by Minister Raheen was working to ensure that none of the TV channels were violating the law. The commission's members include a judge of the Supreme Court, the head of Afghan films and a former spokesman of Karzai. Stanikzai said one person who had violated the law through cable TV transmission was fined and 200 pornographic videocassettes were collected from shops and burnt.

Abdul Wakil Omari, a spokesman for the Supreme Court, welcomed the suggestion by Raheen and said respecting Islamic and traditional values was a basic responsibility of the media, especially television channels. Sayed Nader Ahmadi, deputy director of the Radio TV Afghanistan, said: "We are opposed to films and songs which are in contradiction to Islamic traditions."

Wali Ahmad, a former provincial judge, said broadcasting songs of women in television was unlawful in Islam. "Singing by women and listening to their songs is not lawful in Islam and is regarded as haram," Wali Ahmad said.

Mohammad Sabir, a shopkeeper said that while the program content did not matter so much for the older generation, it was important for the youth and TV channels needed to keep the moral perspective in mind while telecasting their programs. Reported by Pajhwok Staffer Mohammad Younus Merhin

Obituary: Pahlawan Abdul Rahim

Gen Abdul Rashid Dostum's father to be laid at rest at Jawzjan province, Tuesday 8th March - Father of the famous northern commander Gen Dostum has passed away at the age of 89. He will be laid down to rest in his ancestral graveyard in Jawzjan province on the 8th of March.

According to Azizullah, the leader of Afghanistan Youths' Movement, closely affiliated with Junbish e milli, the father of Dostum, Pahlawan Abdul Rahim died at his home yesterday in Jawzjan province in Khaja Doko district, at about 9:00 in the morning. He was not suffering from any illness. Azizullah told Pajhwok in Jawzjan province that Dostum's father held no government post and lived among his people as a respected elder of his tribe.

[Disclaimer: The content of this news bulletin does not necessarily reflect the view or policy of the Afghan Government, unless specifically stated as such. The collection of articles and commentaries from Afghan and international news sources is provided for informational purposes, and accuracy of the news is the responsibility of the original source.]