In this bulletin:

• NATO Orders Taliban to Leave Afghan Districts
• Afghan army takes fight to Taliban's heartland
• " President Hamid Karzai Considers Human Rights Watch Report Incorrect 
• Taliban's 'ideological mentor' warns Musharaff
• Taliban Deny Receiving Backing From Pakistan
• We’re living on Afghans’ support, not Pakistan’s: Taliban
• Taliban ‘havens’ along border: US
• President Ahmadinejad confers with Afghan VP
• France will withdraw some forces from Afghanistan
• McCain Seeks Afghan Help From Europe
• 7 Afghans Return Home after Imprisonment
• Afghan president inaugurates new police command control centre
• Taleban say only two killed in NATO-led operation in southern Afghanistan
• Government report suggests rebuilding Afghanistan a tough slog
• Changing Afghan mission to reconstruction, not security, would fail: Hillier
• Rebuilding Afghanistan, one project at a time
• Afghan gov't to construct 1,000 schools
• Afghan daily says reopening door to Taleban is "to invite disaster"
• Waltzing With Warlords

NATO Orders Taliban to Leave Afghan Districts

Radio Free Europe Radio liberty - December 16, 2006 -- NATO-led forces in Afghanistan have ordered Taliban fighters to leave two southern districts or be forced out.

NATO spokesman Major Dominic Whyte said today that the orders, printed on leaflets, were dropped by air on the guerrillas' positions in the Panjwayi and Zahre districts of southern Kandahar Province on December 15.

The move was part of a major new anti-Taliban offensive launched on December 14 in the two heavily Taliban-dominated districts.

Hundreds of troops with the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, helped by Afghan forces, kicked off the operation on December 14 to clear the way for much-needed reconstruction work in the war-torn areas, which have seen heavy Taliban fighting this year.

The new operation has been code-named Operation Baaz Tsuka. ISAF carried out its biggest-ever operation in mid-September in the same region. More than 1,000 rebels were killed in the two-week Operation Medusa.

In other news, a roadside blast has killed one NATO soldier and wounded two others in eastern Afghanistan. A NATO statement said the explosion occurred in the Mehtar Lam district of Laghman Province on December 15. The statement did not identify the nationalities of the dead and wounded soldiers.

Most NATO troops in the country's east are American. Separately, a NATO soldier was wounded today when he stepped on a land mine while conducting a patrol with Afghan forces near Kandahar city.

Afghan army takes fight to Taliban's heartland

By Gethin Chamberlain, Sunday Telegraph 17/12/2006

The Taliban were out there, somewhere in the darkness to the north of the jagged peaks of Masum Gar, just the other side of the Arghandab river. They had fired one rocket. Now they were ready to fire again.

The light had faded about an hour earlier. Inside the compound only a few tiny chinks of light, spilling through the gaps in the doorway leading into the warren of vaulted underground cellars, betrayed the presence of the Afghan soldiers and their Canadian counterparts.

Suddenly, two huge explosions shook the night. And on the other side of the river to the north, where a moment earlier two men had been crouching down preparing the rocket, there was nothing left but the craters where the shells fired by the Leopard tank had detonated.

The Taliban are back. They were driven west from their traditional stronghold in the Panjvai area of southern Afghanistan by Afghan and Canadian troops in Operation Medusa three months ago. Now they have returned from neighbouring Helmand.

Afghan police and army commanders report that about 250 hard-core fighters have moved into the area, including men from Chechnya, Pakistan and Syria, and at least three suicide bombers are feared to be preparing attacks. The Afghans blame Pakistan for failing to secure its borders, but this was always the Taliban's heartland.

The Afghan army is determined to stop them and with the help of Canadian forces, it is finally taking the fight to the Taliban. Afghan and Nato forces are to launch Operation Falcon's Summit – or Baaz Tsuka – against them in the next few days in an attempt to show local people their determination to defeat the Taliban. The Sunday Telegraph travelled with units of the Afghan National Army (ANA) as it geared up for a new offensive.

About 250 Afghan soldiers and a similar number of Canadians are dug in at Masum Gar – 20 miles west of Kandahar and scene of the heaviest fighting during the opening phase of Medusa – bringing in tanks and setting up heavily armed observation posts on the hills around the forward operating base.

It was from one of those observation posts that Afghan soldiers managed to locate the Taliban fighters on Monday night, moments after a rocket had been fired in the direction of the main base.

In the radio room of the headquarters, inside an old house set into the ground at the heart of the base, French, Dari, Pashtun and English voices spilled out of the radio sets stacked on the trestle tables lining one wall. Bare bulbs cast a dim yellow light across the room.

Over the radio came the message from the observation post that two men had been seen on the far bank of the river, apparently setting up another rocket. The Afghan signaller pulled on a cigarette while his senior officer spoke over the radio to the men on the hill.

In the Canadian headquarters about 50 yards away, they were also mulling over the information. The fighting had emptied civilians from the area; there was little doubt that the men were Taliban. The tank fired once, missed, and fired again. The second time it hit its target.

Only four days earlier, 14 Taliban had been killed when they attempted to ambush a joint Afghan and Canadian patrol in countryside to the west. The Afghans and Canadians work closely together, but the Afghans have begun taking the lead on operations only recently.

Previously they worked with and were trained by US special forces; now the Canadians have attached small teams of their soldiers to each Afghan unit, to offer advice and assistance. The Canadians say they have been impressed by the Afghan army's enthusiasm for the fight. They are led by experienced officers and make good individual soldiers, although there is still work to be done on co-ordinating their resources and establishing a reliable supply chain.

Relations between the Afghan security forces are more strained. At a meeting between the ANA and the local police chief, Col Hafizala Besmila, last week there was talk of working together to stop three suicide bombers thought to be preparing attacks in the town. But afterwards the ANA commander, Major Abdul Samad, told the Canadians he did not want police manning checkpoints into the town. "They will take money from people," he said.

One subject that unites everyone involved in the fight against the Taliban, however, is frustration at Pakistan. "Only once we have warned off Pakistan will we be safe," said Major Samad. "Pakistan is training Taliban in compounds there." The soldiers tell the same story. "Pakistan has the places to train the Taliban and then they send them to Afghanistan," said 20-year-old Sgt Naqib Ullah. "It is not a secret."

Capt Wali Gul, the veteran operations officer, said they had the evidence to back up their claims. "We have captured several Taliban and they told us that they were trained in Pakistan," he said. The men were sitting in the radio room, Sgt Ullah fresh-faced, a hat pulled over his ears to keep out the cold, AK47 clips stuffed into the pockets of his flak jacket; Capt Gul, 55, short and wiry, with a gold tooth that gleamed when he grinned. Neither man was from Kandahar; very few in the army are.

"When we capture the Taliban we punish them," said Capt Gul. "We punch and slap them. They are scared and they think we will kill them." Instead, he said, they handed them to Afghan military intelligence. He was not sure what happened afterwards.

"We have captured people from Chechnya and Arabs. We hand them to the government," he said. "Maybe they are in Cuba," he added referring to the US detention centre at Guantanamo Bay.

Capt Gul has been in the army for 25 years. He sees his wife and nine children once every two months when he goes home to Khost. Recently, he said, his men had caught a number of Taliban who admitted crossing into Kandahar from Pakistan and thought they were fighting a holy war.

On an outcrop overlooking Panjvai, Abdul Ghany was preparing to pack up work for the day. He and his friends had spent the past couple of days filling sandbags for a new Afghan army observation post for 500 Afghanis each (about £5). "When we finish our work we cover our faces," he said. "The Taliban have our names and they say if we work here they will slit our throats."

Most of the people did not want the Taliban, he said. But he had a wife and a baby to support: what could he do? "I go home and close the door and I don't go out at night, but I am a poor man and we must work for our families."

Last week Pakistan denied again that the Taliban were using its tribal areas as a safe haven, but one senior US diplomat in the region told The Sunday Telegraph that there were serious problems in the lawless areas of Waziristan, where the US believes Osama bin Laden is hiding. "We would like to see significant development so people think there is an alternative to the islamists, but security is a problem," the diplomat said. "We are building schools in the tribal areas but the Taliban kill the teachers and assassinate the tribal leaders who criticise them."

Standing next to the gun emplacement at his observation post, Capt Safil Ullah shrugged. "Most of the Taliban come from Pakistan," he said. "We want to find their bases but how can we? We can't go to Pakistan."

President Hamid Karzai Considers Human Rights Watch Report Incorrect 

Date of Release: 16 December 2006 

H.E. Hamid Karzai, President of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, considered the report published by Human Rights Watch on Tuesday incorrect and expressed his regret at its release. The report accuses some Jihadi leaders to have committed crimes against humanity.

The Islamic Republic of Afghanistan states that a number of Jihadi leaders have played a positive role in ensuring peace, system-building and strengthening our national institutions in the past five years.

The Government of Afghanistan, as a democratically elected body, believes in the principles of democracy, and abides by international human rights standards. The Afghan Government has taken significant steps to ensure the implementation of human rights and justice in the light of people’s wishes and realities. The launch of the Action Plan of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan on Peace, Justice and Reconciliation last week is a good example of the Government’s decisive action on this matter.

Untrue reports published by international organisations will not be beneficial to peace, stability and the strengthening of the Afghan Government.

The Government of Afghanistan believes that the Afghan people need peace and stability more than ever before. The Afghan Government wants Human Rights Watch to prepare its report on Afghanistan based on realities and realistic assessments.

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

Taliban's 'ideological mentor' warns Musharaff

By Isambard Wilkinson in Islamabad, Sunday Telegraph - 17/12/2006

The cleric accused of being the “ideological mentor” of the Taliban has issued a blunt warning to Pakistan’s president that he risks further radicalising his country if he alienates its religious leaders.

Fazlur Rehman, the maulana, or senior Muslim cleric who leads Pakistan’s powerful alliance of Islamic parties, used a rare interview with The Daily Telegraph to respond to a recent plea issued by General Pervez Musharraf for Pakistanis not to vote for “hypocrites” and “extremists”.

“With his poisonous propaganda against the religious parties, General Musharaff is trying to widen the gap between the religious circles and the liberals in the country,” said the influential cleric.

The military ruler’s call to Pakistanis to support moderates followed demands from the West to bring more secular parties into a broad-based political agreement in elections loosely scheduled for the end of next year.

But the maulana reminded the general that he holds the key to Pakistan’s controversial policy of bringing peace to the Afghan-Pakistan border where American and Nato troops are battling an increasingly virulent insurgency.

Gen Musharraf recently extricated Pakistan’s army from an unpopular and costly military campaign by brokering a peace agreement with pro-Taliban militants in North Waziristan.

“We have been helping create agreements throughout the tribal areas and what do we get in return? Musharraf calls us dangerous,” said Maulana Rehman.

The corpulent cleric, who is one of Pakistan’s most shrewd and able politicians and heads the opposition Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal (MMA) coalition, is central to the ambivalent policy that has frustrated coalition efforts to extinguish the Taliban.

Maulana Rehman’s own party, the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JUI), runs hundreds of madrassas, or Muslim seminaries, in areas bordering the Afghan-Pakistan border.

A new report by the Brussels-based think-tank, International Crisis Group, alleged that the schools are used as Taliban recruitment centres and identified the maulana as the Taliban’s “ideological mentor”.

Nato commanders, who believe that the Taliban have sanctuaries in Pakistan, have ordered the madrassas to be listed as part of intelligence gathering on the Taliban.

Along with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) the JUI helped form the Taliban in 1994 and catapult it top power in Afghanistan.

While the maulana denied that his seminaries are used by the Taliban as staging posts in their cross-border activities, he admitted that he directs his followers to support Taliban fighters in Afghanistan by providing “humanitarian aid”.

Pakistani jihad groups operating in Kashmir often used to describe their activities as humanitarian in nature.

“We support anyone who is struggling for the implementation of an Islamic government,” he said. He did not specify the type of assistance provided.

His coalition runs the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) government and is part of a ruling coalition in Balochistan, the other western border province. He is the son of a prominent religious scholar who has links with key Taliban commanders such as Jalaluddin Haqqani.

Maulana Rehman caused a storm last year when he struck back at accusations levelled by Gen Musharraf that his madrassas were sheltering Taliban fighters.

He announced that the Pakistani government continued to “deceive” the US and the West by helping militants to enter Afghanistan. During the interview the maulana accused Gen Musharaff of deceiving his allies in the war against terror.

“Dressed in uniform, the general is championing the cause of democracy but the nations of the world take no serious notice,” he said. “He has been fooling the Western world.”

In many ways the maulana’s policy towards Afghanistan is not that dissimilar from Gen Musharraf’s own.

Both men have called for the government of President Hamid Karzai to hold talks with the Taliban believing that the US-led military policy there has failed.

“There can only be peace if foreign forces leave Afghanistan and the Afghan government holds talks with the Taliban,” said the maulana. “They are the sons of the soil.”

While Maulana Rehman is powerful, he is a pragmatic - rather than fire-breathing - cleric when it comes to retaining his influence and sustaining his position in Pakistani society.

He decided not to risk Gen Musharraf’s displeasure by objecting too strongly to an “un-Islamic” bill that recently repealed Pakistan’s controversial rape laws.

Taliban Deny Receiving Backing From Pakistan

By REUTERS Published: December 16, 2006 - SPIN BOLDAK, Afghanistan (Reuters) - The Taliban on Saturday denied accusations by Afghan leaders the group was being sponsored by Pakistan, an issue souring relations between the two nations.

A senior rebel commander, Hayat Khan, said Afghan President Hamid Karzai was trying to hide his own failure and the Taliban movement lived only on the support of ordinary people.

``Karzai's allegations are baseless. We neither have any links with Pakistan nor is the country helping the Taliban,'' Khan told Reuters by satellite phone from a secret location. ``The Taliban movement is continuing only with the support of the Afghan people.

``Instead of shedding crocodile tears, Hamid Karzai should resign and join the Taliban ranks for jihad against the infidel occupiers to liberate Afghanistan,'' he added, referring to Karzai crying during a speech about civilian deaths this week.

The hardline Islamists have regrouped since their ouster in 2001, helped by safe havens and militant allies in Pakistan and money from the booming illegal opium industry.

About 4,000 people have died this year, a quarter of them civilians. Relations between the neighbours, both key allies in the U.S. war on terrorism, have deteriorated sharply this year over the question of cross-border incursions.

In his strongest comments yet, Karzai said this week ''terrorist nests'' operated from Pakistan. Pakistan was once the Taliban's main sponsor but officially dropped support for the group after the September 11 attacks on the United States.

Pakistan denies it supports the insurgents but acknowledges some militants are crossing the rugged, porous border. President Pervez Musharraf also said recently some retired security officers might be helping the militants.

But in talks with a European Union official in Islamabad on Friday, Musharraf repeated Pakistan's position that ``the militancy problem was essentially an Afghan problem.''

``Pakistan is committed to not allow its territory to be used by militants and had done all within its means to deal with this issue,'' the Pakistan Foreign Ministry cited Musharraf as telling the EU's Afghan representative, Francesc Vendrell.

Senior U.S. Senator John McCain, visiting Kabul ahead of a trip to Pakistan, on Saturday called on the two nations to ratchet up their efforts to fight the Taliban.

``The level of rhetoric needs to be lowered and the level of cooperation needs to be dramatically increased,'' he told reporters at a U.S. base in the Afghan capital.

McCain, a possible candidate for the 2008 U.S. presidential election, is a member of the Senate armed services committee.

We’re living on Afghans’ support, not Pakistan’s: Taliban

Daily Times 17 December 2006 - SPIN BOLDAK: The Taliban on Saturday denied accusations by Afghan leaders the group was being sponsored by Pakistan, an issue souring relations between the two nations.

A senior rebel commander, Hayat Khan, said Afghan President Hamid Karzai was trying to hide his own failure and the Taliban movement lived only on the support of ordinary people. “Karzai’s allegations are baseless. We neither have any links with Pakistan nor is the country helping the Taliban,” Khan told Reuters by satellite phone from a secret location.

“The Taliban movement is continuing only with the support of the Afghan people.

“Instead of shedding crocodile tears, Hamid Karzai should resign and join the Taliban ranks for jihad against the infidel occupiers to liberate Afghanistan,” he added, referring to Karzai crying during a speech about civilian deaths this week. The hardline Islamists have regrouped since their ouster in 2001, helped by safe havens and militant allies in Pakistan and money from the booming illegal opium industry.

About 4,000 people have died this year, a quarter of them civilians. Relations between the neighbours, both key allies in the US war on terrorism, have deteriorated sharply this year over the question of cross-border incursions.

In his strongest comments yet, Karzai said this week “terrorist nests” operated from Pakistan. Pakistan was once the Taliban’s main sponsor but officially dropped support for the group after the September 11 attacks on the United States. Pakistan denies it supports the insurgents but acknowledges some militants are crossing the rugged, porous border. Reuters

Taliban ‘havens’ along border: US

Dawn - By Anwar Iqbal - WASHINGTON, Dec 16: Key members of the US establishment — from Secretary of State to the national intelligence chief — are now backing claims that the Taliban have set up safe havens along the Pakistan-Afghan border.

Secretary Condoleezza Rice acknowledged the existence of Taliban’s ‘safe havens’ in an interview she gave to the Washington Post earlier this week, urging Pakistan and Afghanistan to work with the coalition forces to destroy them.

The State Department released full text of the interview, containing her comments on the situation along the Pakistan-Afghan border, on Friday evening.

This is the first time that such a senior US official has mentioned the so-called Taliban safe havens in the area. Her statement follows the publication of a series of research papers, newspaper articles and statements by other officials, all blaming Pakistan for allowing these safe havens to function.

On Friday, America's top intelligence officer warned Pakistan that it will soon have to decide what it can do about those tribal leaders who failed to prevent the movement of Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters across the Afghan border.

Such claims have been published repeatedly in the US media since Washington invaded Afghanistan more than five years ago. But the first shot in the latest round was fired by The New York Times which published a 10,000-word article on Afghanistan last week.

In the report, the newspaper claimed the militants had created a “Taliban mini-state” in the tribal zone, vastly expanding their training of suicide bombers and other recruits.

Commenting on this report, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack agreed with a reporter that the situation along the Pakistan-Afghan border was “a mess” but said that “the key is cooperative working relationships among the Afghans, the Pakistanis, as well as coalition forces.”

In her interview to the Post, Ms Rice echoed similar sentiments. She said that a “more concerted effort” will have to be made to prevent this area from becoming a “safe haven” for terrorists. She acknowledged that this was “a very tough” area which has been “ungoverned forever.” But she also said that Pakistan and Afghanistan “are going to have to make and we are going to have to make a more concerted effort to prevent safe havens there.”

Ms Rice recalled that when President Musharraf and his Afghan counterpart met President Bush at the White House in September, they agreed to get the tribes on both sides together.

“They’re trying a lot of things. But I think that probably -- those problems, you know, the lack of an economy, the lack of an infrastructure and the ungoverned areas, are the real challenges,” she said.

On Friday, America’s Director of National Intelligence John D Negroponte said that the government of Pakistan would soon have to decide what it could do about the tribal authorities who have failed to prevent Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters from moving back and forth across the border.

“Sooner or later, the government will have to reckon with it,” he said.

But with elections in Pakistan coming, the United States understands that President Pervez Musharraf "has a domestic political balancing act to perform," he added.

In September, government representatives signed accords with tribal elders in North Waziristan in which those leaders agreed that they would not allow border crossings "for any kind of militancy."

In return, Pakistani army units withdrew from that area. Mr Negroponte said that the "tribal authorities are not living up to the deal" and that back-and-forth travel by the Taliban and others "causes serious problems."

At a recent diplomatic function in Washington, Pakistani diplomats were seen asking journalists what’s causing this “sudden blistering attack” on Pakistan.

Observers say that a combination of domestic and external pressures have suddenly brought Afghanistan in the spotlight. They say that from military and intelligence officials to journalists have all been reporting a sudden increase in Taliban attacks in Afghanistan and the situation has reached a point where the US administration feels that it cannot continue to defend the peace deal Pakistan signed with pro-Taliban tribesmen in North Waziristan.

After the failure of its strategy in Iraq, the Bush administration feels that it cannot afford to fail in Afghanistan as well, the observers argue.

In its report on Iraq, the bipartisan Iraq Study Group warned that Afghanistan’s porous borders could allow the Taliban to “control more of Afghanistan” and should that happen, “it could provide Al Qaeda the political space to conduct terrorist operations.”

President Ahmadinejad confers with Afghan VP

Dec 16, IRNA - President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad conferred with visiting Afghan First Vice-President Ahmad Zia Massoud Saturday. In the meeting, president said unity, tranquility, confidence and resistance are the key for victory of Afghan nation.

Referring to the Afghan nation's fight against colonialists and enemies of Afghan people, president said, "The Afghan government, nation and political groups must increase their awareness to provide appropriate ground for progress and development in the country.

Security and progress in Afghanistan is to the benefit of all countries in the region, Ahmadinejad said adding that Afghanistan neighbors must cooperate and help the Afghan government establish tranquility and security in the country.

He expressed Iran's readiness to transfer its experience and valuable achievements in different fields, such as supplying energy in order to rebuild Afghanistan.

Ahmad Zia Massoud appreciated Iran's assistance and efforts for rebuilding Afghanistan and said, "Afghans are always thankful for Iran's help, especially in difficult days of its history and added, "we intend to use Iran's experience in different fields like supplying energy and construction of power plants."
The roots of instability and insecurity in Afghanistan is the conspiracies of foreign powers, Zia Masoud said adding that with security and stability in Afghanistan the grounds for rebuilding the country and progress will be prepared.

France will withdraw some forces from Afghanistan

The Associated Press - Sunday, December 17, 2006

Paris- France will withdraw its 200- soldier special-forces unit from Afghanistan, all of its ground troops engaged in the U.S anti-terror operation code-named Enduring Freedom, the authorities announced Sunday.

"There is a general reorganization" of troops, Defense Minister Michèle Alliot-Marie said during a visit to Afghanistan. The minister's remarks were aired on France-Info radio.

Among the planned changes is a "withdrawal of special forces from Jalalabad in the coming weeks," she said, referring to the southeastern city.

France's 1,100 troops working with the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force will remain in Afghanistan, Captain Sebastien Caron, a Defense Ministry spokesman, said in Paris.

The French troops are in charge of the sector based in Kabul, the capital. Except for its elite troops in southeastern Jalalabad, France has balked at deploying its soldiers outside Kabul.

Violence has been mounting in Afghanistan, where the Taliban is working to return to the fore despite the 32,800 troops in NATO's International Security Assistance Force.

Taliban militants have exploded more than 100 suicide bombs in the country this year, a more than fivefold increase from 2005. They often target NATO forces in armored personnel carriers and jeeps.

The 200 special-forces soldiers will be withdrawn at the start of 2007, Caron said. The decision was made "in concert with our partners, notably the Americans," he said by telephone.

The elite troops have been deployed in southeastern Afghanistan since July 2003 to help bolster the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban and to search for the Qaeda leader, Osama bin Laden. They have been combing the Afghan border with Pakistan as part of the U.S.- led operation.

Alliot-Marie, who was on her ninth trip to Afghanistan, said France planned to train Afghan special forces "because it appears important to us that the Afghans see that it is their own forces which are retaking the theater" of war.

France-Info reported that Paris planned to send in 50 special-forces soldiers to carry out the training program. That number could not be immediately confirmed.

No explanation was provided for the special forces' withdrawal. Le Journal du Dimanche reported a week ago that a withdrawal of the special forces was in the offing.

The Sunday newspaper suggested that the worsening security situation was a possible reason for the decision. Nine elite troops have been killed in combat.

Despite the pullout, Alliot-Marie said France intended to keep its air forces in operation in the region, "which has backed up coalition forces numerous times," and is adding two helicopters in the zone between Jalalabad and Kabul.

President Jacques Chirac advised France's NATO partners of the planned changes at a summit meeting in Riga, Latvia, on Nov. 29.

McCain Seeks Afghan Help From Europe

By REUTERS Published: December 16, 2006

KABUL (Reuters) - Senior U.S. senator John McCain on Saturday urged European nations to shoulder more of the burden in Afghanistan, by doing more to fight the booming illegal opium trade and easing fighting restrictions on their soldiers.

McCain, a Republican from Arizona who sits on the Senate armed services committee, also called on Afghanistan and Pakistan end their war of words and to ratchet up their cooperation to fight a resurgent Taliban.

In Kabul ahead of a visit to Pakistan, he told reporters at a U.S. base much of the fighting in the bloodiest year since the Taliban's ouster in 2001 had been done by U.S., British, Canadian and Dutch troops.

``Our European friends must understand that we all share a difficult burden and national caveats make it very difficult to work together as a team,'' he said, referring to conditions some nations put on where and how their troops can be deployed.

``It's also important that our European friends and allies do more in the effort that has to be made to counter narcotics,'' he added, calling for more money from Europe. ``We are indeed in danger of having Afghanistan becoming Europe's Colombia.''

Afghanistan is the world's largest producer of opium, the raw material for heroin, and output jumped about 60 percent this year. Afghan, U.S. and other officials say money from the industry is helping to fund the Taliban.

McCain, an early favorite in what promises to be a crowded Republican field for the 2008 U.S. presidential race, is in Afghanistan with fellow Republicans Susan Collins, John Thune and Mark Kirk.

They are meeting officials, including President Hamid Karzai, and being briefed on the situation by U.S. and NATO generals. Collins and Thune are also on the Senate armed services committee and Kirk on the House appropriations committee.

7 Afghans Return Home after Imprisonment

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Published: December 16, 2006

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) -- Seven Afghan men on Saturday arrived in their home country -- weary, angry and proclaiming their innocence -- after years of imprisonment in the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

With long, unkempt beards and wearing blue numbered uniforms, the men appeared at a news conference beside Sibghatullah Mujaddedi, head of Afghanistan's reconciliation commission. The commission assists with the release of detainees from Guantanamo and another U.S. prison at the Bagram military base north of Kabul.

All seven men said they were wrongly arrested, but that they were not beaten or mistreated in any way during their imprisonment. In interviews with The Associated Press, one claimed he was forced to join the Taliban, while another said he was arrested merely for being Muslim.

''We had to go with the Taliban. If we didn't go with them, they wanted money from us,'' said Abdul Rahman, 46, from Helmand province. ''I didn't have money to pay the Taliban, so I was forced to join them,'' he said. ''I didn't want to.''

Rahman swore he did not kill anyone or even fire any bullets. The Taliban sent him to northern Kunduz province, where he was arrested and again pressed for money.

He said he was told: ''If you pay us money, we will release you, otherwise, we will sell you to the Americans.'' He claimed that American forces paid $20,000 for him, presumably bounty for his capture.

The men were the eighth group released from Guantanamo and sent back to Afghanistan, said Mohammad Akram, an official with the independent reconciliation commission.

Akram said 47 Afghan prisoners have been released from Guantanamo since the establishment of the commission in 2004. Another 462 prisoners have been released from the U.S. prison in Bagram.

Many Afghans formerly held at Guantanamo claim that they were beaten, kept awake for days and treated like animals. Mujaddedi, the head of the commission, said that 70 Afghans were still being detained in Guantanamo. ''We will try to release them, or bring them here to Afghanistan (for detention),'' Mujaddedi said.

Alef Mohammad, 62, was also held for five years. He, too, denied involvement with the Taliban. ''I was just a simple farmer in Helmand province,'' Mohammad said. He said U.S. troops bombed the area where he lived and that 18 people were killed, including a nephew. Mohammad was arrested.

''I'm innocent, you can ask anyone in my village. They know me,'' he shouted angrily, waving his arms. Reciting excerpts of the Quran, Mohammad claimed his crime was being a Muslim. ''The only fault that I had was that I read the holy word,'' he said.

Afghan president inaugurates new police command control centre

Text of report in English by Afghan independent Pajhwok news agency website

Kabul, 16 December: President Hamed Karzai formally inaugurated the newly-established command control centre at the Interior Ministry on Saturday.

The centre has been constructed at a cost of 3.5m dollars provided by the United States. The centre is equipped with modern facilities and security forces in all the 34 provinces can be contacted from there.

Speaking on the occasion, President Karzai said the previous two decades of war and civil strife had destroyed everything and the ministries of interior and foreign affairs were no exception.

He said reconstruction, especially rebuilding of the centre, was of key importance for establishing links between security forces deployed in the provinces and the centre, Kabul.

The president said loyalty to the land and better training and equipment would ensure the restoration of peace in the country.

The deployment centre of the Ministry of Defence, established with financial assistance from the United States, started functioning some three months back.

Taleban say only two killed in NATO-led operation in southern Afghanistan

Text of report by Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press news agency

Kandahar, 16 December: Reports have been released about the killing of a prominent Taleban commander along with nine other Taleban.

This morning the governor of Kandahar Province, Asadollah Khaled, gave this report to Afghan Islamic Press [AIP]: "Three days ago, NATO and Afghan forces conducted air operations against the Taleban in the Siachoi area of Panjwai District, killing a prominent Taleban commander, Mullah Sher and nine other Taleban."

He added: "Mullah Shirjan was commanding the Taleban in Panjwai and was a security guard and close friend of Mullah Omar."

But a Taleban spokesman, Qari Mohammad Yousuf, speaking to AIP from an undisclosed location, rejected this report and only confirmed the killing of two Taleban in the military operation conducted three days ago in the Siachoi area. "The air strike at a house martyred two Taleban and other local residents," he said.

A NATO commander announced yesterday in Kandahar that a new military operation has been started in Panjwai and Zeri districts in order to start wide-scale reconstruction work in these two districts.

Government report suggests rebuilding Afghanistan a tough slog

Jeff Esau, Canadian Press - National post 16 Dec 2006

OTTAWA — Afghanistan’s financial infrastructure is “primitive” and its recent economic growth “will be difficult to sustain,” says a blunt assessment of the country’s future by senior Canadian government officials.

Afghanistan is “seriously hampered” by security problems, endemic corruption, skilled labour shortages, limited access to finances, land tenure problems, the strain of returning refugees and “the generally weak rule of law,” says the Sept. 5 analysis prepared by the Privy Council Office.

The office, the co-ordinating body for cabinet and the prime minister’s office, released the seven-page document after a request under the Access to Information Act.

Its bleak forecast, delivered almost two weeks before a visit to Canada by Afghan President Hamid Karzai, appears at odds with recent claims by other Canadian officials that progress has been significant and steady.

The heavily censored report, The Future of Afghanistan: The Next Five Years, was written by PCO’s intelligence assessment co-ordinating committee and widely distributed within government.

Based on “diplomatic and intelligence sources from Canada and allied countries,” the report says some progress has been achieved since the U.S.-led victory over the Taliban in November 2001, particularly in children’s schooling and improved access to basic health care.

But the vast majority of the population still struggles for the “bare essentials of survival,” just as they did in the days of the Taliban.

The economy has benefited from the influx of foreign aid, which is driving a reconstruction boom, but is far from being self-sustaining.

Substantial budget subsidies and continued foreign financing will be required for many more years to help with trade and current account deficits, says the report.

The country’s economy is heavily dependent on the drug trade, and although most poppy production is located in the southern provinces, revenue from drug production and shipment is important outside these Taliban-controlled areas.

The authors praise Afghanistan’s new constitution and the direct election of the president, and say the elected legislature “has been surprisingly active and effective” since it was formed a year ago.

But the committee’s stark economic assessment will likely stir debate, as the Liberals and the Bloc Quebecois question whether the Canadian mission is properly focussed and how much progress has really been made since Canadian troops were deployed to Afghanistan in 2002, and to the volatile Kandahar region last year.

Bob Bergen, of the University of Calgary’s Centre for Military and Strategic Studies, says the committee’s report is a “very good assessment because it lays out in very stark terms the challenges that NATO faces” in both military and economic spheres. The Afghan economy is “a step back to the seventeenth century.”

The Privy Council assessment is more in line with the “very realistic” briefings of joint parliamentary committees than with some of the government’s public statements, Bergen said in an interview.

“The threat posed by the narco-economy to the efforts to rebuild is so overwhelming that without doing something about that economy first, the Afghani government could be completely and utterly overrun by the Taliban.”

The key to preventing that, he says, is NATO adopting a military approach “even more robust” than it has to date.     

Bergen said UN statistics he has analyzed indicate the drug trade represents 52 per cent of the country’s $5.2-billion economy, while the Afghan government’s revenue is only 5.2 per cent.

The Privy Council committee produced at least one earlier report on Afghanistan last December, The Afghan Economy: Is there one?

That study slammed non-governmental agencies for their “squandering of aid money” and said “the rehabilitation efforts of disparate aid groups, agencies and nations often overlap, conflict, or are at worst, fratricidal.”

Bergen said the aid money the Canadian government has earmarked for Afghanistan “is probably not getting through in a way the military commanders on the ground would like to see it.” Aid money should be channeled through coalition military forces, he said.

Changing Afghan mission to reconstruction, not security, would fail: Hillier

Sunday, December 17, 2006 - Canadian Press - OTTAWA (CP) - Changing the focus of Canada's Afghan mission to stress reconstruction over combat, as demanded by Bloc Leader Gilles Duceppe, would be folly, says the country's top soldier.

Gen. Rick Hillier, the chief of defence staff, says the fighting aspects of the mission are vital to the redevelopment of the country.

"We're doing the security operations not because we want to do them, but because they are absolutely essential to do," he said in an interview with The Canadian Press.

Duceppe has said he may try to topple the minority Conservative government with a non-confidence motion unless the Afghan operation is "rapidly and profoundly"' retooled to focus more heavily on reconstruction instead of fighting.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has accused Duceppe of playing politics with soldiers. Jason Kenney, Harper's parliamentary secretary, said Duceppe would abandon Afghans to the "tender mercies" of the Taliban. "It's disgraceful," Kenney said.

Hillier wouldn't address Duceppe's position directly: "That would be a political discussion and I've been accurately described as not being a politician."

But he did say that Canadians have to fight the Taliban insurgency to protect the rebuilding that is being done.

"The combat operations . . . are absolutely necessary as long as the Taliban tries to destroy everything that's being built or prevent it from being built to start with.

"To switch 100 per cent into reconstruction and redevelopment from the military side would mean that you would leave the Taliban not being confronted, not being constrained, and therefore the destruction of things would increase."

The NDP has called for withdrawal of Canadian troops from Afghanistan, while the Liberals, who originally dispatched the troops there, have become ambivalent about the operation, especially since casualties began to increase sharply this year.

Canada has had 44 soldiers and one diplomat killed in Afghanistan since the mission began in 2002. The majority of those casualties came this year.

Canadians have been deeply divided on the mission, with roughly a 50-50 split between those who support and oppose the deployment. But those polling numbers have remained relatively stable in the face of the heaviest Canadian casualties since the Korean War.

Quebecers are most opposed to the war, according to polls. Members of the Royal 22nd regiment, based in Val-Cartier, Que., will make up the bulk of the forces in Afghanistan early next year.

Hillier said he believes in the value of the operation. "We have a mission in Afghanistan which essentially comes down to helping the Afghans there reclaim their own country. That's what we're trying to do every hour of every day that we're there."

He said combat has attracted a lot of attention at home, but it's proceeding hand-in-hand with development projects. Those projects, however, have to be protected.

The Canadian combat efforts against the Taliban in the troubled south of the country pay dividends elsewhere, he said. "That's helped keep the Taliban on its back foot in Kandahar province, which is their home province, which is their point of origin somewhat.

"That, in fact, has had an enormous effect around the rest of Afghanistan because as they are on their back foot in Kandahar province, and in region south in general, they are reduced in their ability to affect reconstruction around the rest of the country. "That's obvious to see in almost every place you go in Afghanistan."

Rebuilding Afghanistan, one project at a time

CHRISTIE BLATCHFORD From Saturday's Globe and Mail

The other day, a 34-year-old Canadian reservist named Corporal Shawn Denty got to deliver the medical supplies his friends and colleagues in Oakville, Ont., had collected after reading an e-mail about his distressing visit to Mirwais Hospital, the lone civilian hospital in Kandahar city.

“I was shocked,” Cpl. Denty wrote home. “The dirt, the dust... it was a shambles. There I was, standing in the middle of a Third World country.”

Like many of those who came before him, and surely many of those who will follow, all he wanted was to do something for the poor and suffering of this battle-scarred nation.

Back in Canada, in Manitouwadge, Ont., his fiancée, family and co-workers at Xerox Business Supplies beat the bushes, and came up with about 20 boxes of supplies that are like gold in Kandahar: an EKG heart monitor, green surgical gowns and towels, bed sheets, diapers, syringes, and intravenous cannulas.

Everyone involved, but particularly Cpl. Denty, who had seen the gaping need at the hospital while escorting VIPs on a tour, dreamed of helping Afghans and especially children.Instead, what happened was that his treasure trove was given over to a tiny Afghan National Army medical clinic just outside the giant NATO base at Kandahar Air Field, journalists were invited to bear witness to his soldierly good works, and in the end much of the valuable booty was taken to a warehouse, where despite the locks on the doors it may yet disappear to the black market.

Therein lies the lesson of aid, reconstruction and development in this most battered part of Afghanistan: Good intentions are never enough.

Arguably, nowhere has it been better learned than at the Canadian Provincial Reconstruction Team headquarters on the fringes of Kandahar city, the second-largest in Afghanistan, and birthplace of the Taliban.

By the time the PRT crew from the Royal Canadian Regiment arrived last August, weary Afghans here had been promised the moon by the soldiers, aid agencies and various levels of government that collectively make up what's known as “the international community,” and by their own leaders, and yet had very little to show for it.

And, as in broad strokes the international effort here has been much criticized — most harshly in a recent Senlis Council report which announced that the Taliban was winning the “hearts and minds” campaign because of the world's failure to make the lives of the Afghan people even marginally better — so the Canadian PRT, as it was operated under the auspices of the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, came in for its share.

That in turn prompted concerns on the Canadian home front that the supposedly three-pronged nature of Canada's role here had turned into a purely combat operation.

But the PRT team in place now has quietly managed in little more than three months to get 75 projects under way, most of them small and Afghan-run and some remarkably innovative.

They have two assets their predecessors didn't: a dedicated “force protection” team which allows them to move about the sprawling city safely and easily, and a squad of 12 combat engineers who act as managers on larger projects and who can, as deputy PRT commander Major Steve Murray says, “write up a contract on a field message pad and do it so it's enforceable.”

With the engineers at the helm, the team found an Afghan contractor who has been able to repair three of four neglected Afghan National Police substations, start building some of five planned new ones and get to work on improving 14 ANP checkpoints, all aimed at improving security in the city, of course, but also at professionalizing a police force that is widely considered inept at best and corrupt at worst.

A platoon of military police and civilian Canadian police, most from the RCMP, meanwhile, continues to train ANP officers.

But it is from the contingent of 14 CIMIC soldiers — the acronym stands for Civilian-Military Co-operation — that some of the most ingenious small projects, most costing under $5,000 (Canadian) each, have come.

Sergeant Ted Howard burbles with enthusiasm about them, particularly the two being run under the auspices of the Afghan Women's Council.

One of them has war widows sewing custom-made winter jackets for the 400 children who live at the frigid, unheated Abdul Ahad Karzai Orphanage that sits off the much-bombed Highway 4 (the building's windows were shattered by the Nov. 27 suicide bombing which killed Regimental Sergeant-Major Bobby Girouard and Corporal Albert Storm). The PRT, with money from the Department of National Defence-Commander's Contingency Fund, will buy the jackets from the widows.

The other project has imprisoned Afghan women, who in many cases are jailed — with their children — for offences under Islamic laws that would not be crimes in the West, busily making blankets for Afghan security forces; again, the PRT will buy the blankets. In both instances, penniless women and youngsters benefit.

Similarly, inspired by Mohammed Niaz, a PRT interpreter who lost both legs in a May 24 battle and who is back at work at the compound, the “cobbler program” is about to get started.

A cobbler paid by the PRT will come to Kandahar from Kabul, teach amputees how to make custom dress shoes on equipment bought by the PRT, and the amputees will set up shop at markets at the PRT and perhaps later at the much-bigger air field at Kandahar, with their captive audiences of foreigners looking for bargains. Well under way, too, is the “canal and culvert cleaning” cash-for-work project.

At the behest of the Kandahar mayor, desperate to get his city moving again and to offer his business taxpayers a functional city service, the PRT hired a local contractor, who in turn is hiring as many as 200 local fighting-age men a day, to clear out six years of garbage. In October, the PRT paid for 1,800 “man days,” last month 2,250 — meaning several thousand unemployed, illiterate men, who “sign” for their wages with a fingerprint, had a little cash in hand and were at least in theory less vulnerable to Taliban recruiters.

“What we're doing,” Major Murray says, “is buying time” for the big aid players, such as the Canadian International Development Agency, which has major dam, bridge and irrigation projects in the offing, but still can't get them going until the security situation in the region improves.

As for Cpl. Denty, he's not giving up. There's a girls' school he wants to help, and even as he heads home this weekend, he'd like to come back to Afghanistan one day.

And Sgt. Howard has a little of the dreamer in him, too. By next spring, he says, he hopes to put flowers along volatile Highway 1, improve the park by the soccer stadium, and plant a few trees. “Trees in downtown Kandahar,” he says with a smile. “Can you imagine?”

Afghan gov't to construct 1,000 schools

Xinhua 12/16/2006 - The Afghan Education Ministry plans to construct 1,000 schools, mostly primary, in the war-ravaged country by the end of Afghan year that ends on March 21, 2007, a local newspaper reported Saturday.

"The Education Ministry with the support of World Bank would construct about 1,000 schools across the country and the project would be completed within the next four months," the daily Cheragh quoted Deputy Education Ministry Sidiq Patman as saying.

However, Patman did not say the amount required for the project, or how much the World Bank would contribute to it.

Though the Afghan government has constructed or rebuilt thousands of schools since the collapse of Taliban regime over the past five years, still the shortage of educational centers is felt as more than 4,000 primary and secondary schools are under tents or open air.

More than 5.5 million Afghan boys and girls are going to schools today in the post-Taliban nation where it was a dream during the Taliban's fundamentalist regime toppled in late 2001.

Afghan daily says reopening door to Taleban is "to invite disaster"

Text of article in English by Afghan state-run newspaper The Kabul Times on 16 December entitled "Reopening the door to the Taleban is to invite disaster"

As security worsens in Afghanistan, especially in the south and southeast on the border with Pakistan, there is a growing view in NATO circles and the government of Hamed Karzai that the time has come for some power-sharing with the main Taleban figures. This view has also been proposed by the majority leader in the US Senate, Bill Frist and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. However, while superficially appealing, such a move could plunge Afghanistan into a wider conflict; it would prompt anti-Taleban forces to rearm and fight their extremist foe and its supporters.

The idea of reconciliation with the Taleban is not new. Karzai and the former US presidential envoy and ambassador to Afghanistan, the Afghan-born Zalmay Khalilzad, who share the Taleban's ethnic Pashtun background, floated it as early as 2003. The following year, they offered an amnesty to what they called "moderate Taleban" and invited them to join the political process. Although only a few Taleban took up the offer, it alarmed most non-Pashtun Afghans, who had suffered extensively under the Taleban's discriminatory, medieval rule between 1996 and 2001. This obliged Karzai and many of his Pashtun advisers to go slow on the idea.

However, as the Taleban have fought back, largely because they were left to regroup and rearm as US forces focused on hunting Usamah Bin-Ladin as well as on fighting in Iraq, the picture has changed. The Karzai leadership and many of its international backers, especially the USA and Britain, which have the largest troop deployment in Afghanistan, and have sustained heavy casualties over the past six months, want to take the sting out of the Taleban's fighting capacity.

They have begun obliquely to promote the idea of bringing even core Taleban figures on board. As a first step, Karzai has appointed a number of supporters of the former Islamic resistance leader and now ally of the Taleban and Al-Qa'idah Golboddin Hekmatyar, to important positions in the presidential palace. In the past week he has also held a joint jerga (traditional assembly) of Afghan and Pakistani Pashtun tribes, which remain supportive of the Taleban along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

The idea is to appease core Taleban leaders. This is similar to what the USA and Britain have done in Iraq in returning to government some of Saddam Husayn's supporters.

If the Karzai government enters a coalition with the Taleban, it will not only threaten the secure, stable and democratic Afghanistan promised by the USA and its Afghan and non-Afghan allies, it also runs the risk of igniting a savage ethnic conflict. Afghanistan is a heterogeneous state, truly a nation of minorities. While the Pashtun form the largest ethnic group, with extensive cross-border ties with Pakistan, the majority of the Afghan population is made up of non-Pashtun ethnic groups, which have cross-border ties with other neighbours of Afghanistan - Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.

Historically, the Pashtuns, who are themselves divided into two main rival tribal confederations and many tribes and sub-tribes, imposed their political supremacy over other groups. The Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s and the US-backed Afghanistan Islamic resistance to it helped break this historical pattern. When Pashtun chauvinism, combined with extreme Sunni Islamism, peaked again under the Pakistan-backed Taleban, subjecting not only women but also most non-Pashtun Afghans to repressive policies, it was the latter who formed the United Front (the Northern Alliance) and fought the Taleban and their Al-Qa'idah and Pakistani allies.

The United Front was led by Ahmad Shah Masud, a leading resistance fighter during the Soviet occupation who was assassinated by Al-Qa'idah agents two days before the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the USA.

After toppling the Taleban, the United Front was dissolved and many of its followers agreed to disarm. A Taleban return to government would give non-Pashtun groups every reason to rearm. They would receive help from Afghanistan's northern and western neighbours, as well as Russia and India, which would view a Pashtun-led government that included core Taleban figures as detrimental to their interests. The outcome could be more bloody ethnic conflict, with forces of the USA and their allies caught between various warring factions. No-one should underestimate the wider regional implications of such a scenario.

Amin Saikal is a professor of political science and director of the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies at the Australian National University (Sydney Morning Herald)

Waltzing With Warlords

Afghanistan 2006, a book review in the The Nation by PETER BERGEN - [from the January 1, 2007 issue]

On a dimly lit road in Wazir Akbar Khan, the Upper East Side of Kabul, a couple of street kids gesture toward an unmarked iron gate behind which they assure us we can find what we are looking for. An Afghan guard gives us a wary once-over and opens the gate onto a dark garden at the end of which a door is slightly ajar. I open it and step into a world far removed from the dust-blown avenues of Kabul, where most women wear burqas and the vast majority of the population live in grinding poverty.

At one end of a long room is a well-stocked bar tended by a Chinese madam who assesses us with a practiced calculus. In front of her are more than a dozen scantily clad smiling young Chinese women sprawled over a series of bar stools and couches. Adorning the walls are red lanterns and large posters of Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan. Nestling next to the prostitutes are several mustached, glaze-eyed Afghan men who occasionally take unsteady steps onto a makeshift dance floor to bust some surprisingly graceful traditional moves. A couple of the women titter as they gamely join in. Welcome to Kabul, as David Lynch might imagine it.

Our party of four is soon joined by several of the women, who try to make conversation, most of which consists of "Me no speak English." Conversation is not really the point here when $60 will buy you more stimulating forms of intercourse. One of the prostitutes whispers in my ear, "You guys worry about the attacks?" She's referring to a massive car bomb that had blown up a day earlier a couple of hundred yards from the US Embassy, killing two American soldiers, one of them a 52-year-old female reservist, and more than a dozen Afghan bystanders. I arrived at the scene shortly after the attack and found body parts that looked like fried pieces of meat and bone scattered a couple of blocks away from where the bomb had exploded.

Kabul 2006 has a distinctly fin de siècle air. The hotel I stay at plays loungey house music at night and serves beer discreetly. It also has a makeshift bunker surrounded by sandbags in the event the hotel is attacked, a reasonable precaution given that in May an angry anti-American mob shot out the ground floor windows of another Kabul hotel. Suicide attacks are now weekly events in the capital, while an economy steeped in corruption and driven by the heroin/opium trade and foreign aid enriches an elite who party into the night, taking advantage of new freedoms that under the Taliban might have earned them a reprimand from the religious police (listening to music); landed them in prison (drinking alcohol); or had them stoned to death (sex outside marriage).

The Taliban owe some of their renewed strength to the fact that they can play on the fears of a generally conservative population who worry about corrupting foreign influences exemplified by the new brothels in Kabul. A hundred miles to the south of the capital, for instance, the Taliban have recently appeared in force in nearly half the districts of Ghazni province, which sits astride the key road between Kabul and the southern city of Kandahar. Around Kandahar this past summer fierce battles raged between the Taliban and NATO forces, who encountered much stiffer resistance than they anticipated. In September I embedded with soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division at a fire base on Afghanistan's eastern border with Pakistan. The Taliban launched rockets at the base on an almost daily basis, and foot patrols were regularly encountering Taliban forces. Three years earlier, when I was embedded in the same region with soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division, their main complaint was how little action they were seeing.

Between the rising Taliban insurgency, the epidemic of attacks by suicide bombers and improvised explosive devices (IEDs), and spiraling criminal activity fueled by the drug trade, Afghanistan today looks something like Iraq in the summer of 2003, when the descent into violent conflict began. As a former senior Afghan Cabinet member told me in September, "If international forces leave, the Taliban will take over in one hour."

A year ago there was still some real optimism about Afghanistan's future based on President Hamid Karzai's popularity both at home and abroad, the flood of returning refugees and the millions of girls and boys starting school for the first time. That optimism is evaporating. In December 2005, 77 percent of Afghans polled by ABC News said their country was going in the right direction. When asked again one year later, only 55 percent felt the same way.

What went wrong? The books under review supply pieces of that puzzle. Former British diplomat Rory Stewart describes his epic walk across Afghanistan in the winter of 2001, American author Ann Jones recounts the time she spent living in Kabul as an aid worker following the overthrow of the Taliban and American journalist turned aid worker Sarah Chayes writes of the years she lived in Kandahar following the American invasion.

Chayes arrived in Afghanistan as an NPR reporter covering the war against the Taliban. She became disillusioned with the timidity of her editors and decided to embark on a new career as field director of an aid organization, Afghans for Civil Society. It was an often frustrating job: "The whole of Afghan society was suffering from collective PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder)." The result, she says, was "an inability to plan for the future. Inability to think beyond one's own needs, excessive guile."

Settling in Kandahar, Chayes lived a critical part of the Afghan story often overlooked by international journalists and aid workers, who tend to have an insular, Kabul-centric view of the country. As Chayes explains, foreigners generally settle in the capital and "live apart from Afghans in guarded compounds. They do not walk about, but are driven by chauffeurs." Chayes, by contrast, lived with a local family, learned Pashto, kept a Kalashnikov by her bed and "loved the place." If this is cause for a smidgen of self-congratulation, Chayes is entitled to it. Kandahar, located in the middle of a desert that broils in summer and freezes in winter, is a deeply boring, ultraconservative Afghan city that is now quite dangerous for foreigners. For most of us a week's visit would suffice. Chayes lived there for four years.

A key theme of Chayes's angry, very well-written book is her gradual disillusionment with President Karzai, who early in the narrative is portrayed as a possible savior of Afghanistan, "remarkably cultivated" and "uniquely devoid of brutality and arrogance." The villain of Chayes's story is the uncouth Gul Agha Shirzai, who became governor of Kandahar with US support in December 2001. Once in office Shirzai built his "personal power base" with no regard for anyone other than his own tribe, which received the choicest American contracts, and he would allegedly bump off perceived rivals on occasion. Yet much to Chayes's frustration, Karzai seemed unable or unwilling to rein in warlords like Shirzai. "Instead of protecting the people from the warlords, curbing them, or removing them from office, Karzai seemed to be waltzing with them." In January 2003 Chayes, who was close to the president's brother Qayum Karzai, hammered out a plan of action about how to rid Afghanistan of the warlords. Item one of Chayes's plan, which she submitted to President Karzai, was: "Begin with Gul Agha Shirzai." Nothing happened.

The Punishment of Virtue is bookended by the murder of Chayes's friend Muhammad Akrem Khakrezwal, a police official who was killed in Kandahar by a supposedly random suicide bombing in June 2005. For Chayes, Akrem's murder crystallized all that is wrong with the country. He was the polar opposite of the warlords, a police chief who had served in a number of major cities around Afghanistan, who tried to work for the common good and was "the most able public official I encountered." After conducting her own investigation of Akrem's murder, Chayes concludes that it was not a random suicide attack but a targeted assassination. The murder remains unsolved, and we have to take Chayes's word for it that Akrem was the selfless patriot she paints him to be. It is a bleak ending to a bleak story.

Ann Jones, an American author who has written a number of books about women and violence, arrived in Kabul in the winter of 2002: "Kabul in winter is the color of dust...dust fills the lungs, tightens the chest. Lies in the eyes like gravel, so that you look out on this obscure drab landscape always with something like tears." Like Chayes, Jones has written an angry book about Afghanistan and, also like Chayes, she writes evocatively to illuminate another little-known world, that of poor, marginalized women in Kabul.

Unfortunately, Jones's reading of recent Afghan history is sometimes marred by a tendency to see sinister conspiracies where they don't exist. She writes, for instance, that the United States was initially willing to play ball with the Taliban in the mid-1990s because of energy interests eager to build a pipeline across the country from the gas fields of Central Asia and withdrew its support only because the Taliban could not provide "security" for such a project, rather than acknowledging the real reasons the United States turned against the Taliban, which were their antediluvian treatment of women and harboring of Al Qaeda. The one thing the Taliban did provide was security, which is why they had legitimacy and popularity when they came to power. And today, five years after the occupation of the country by the United States, there is still no pipeline across Afghanistan because it just doesn't make any economic sense to build it.

Jones also recycles the trope that the CIA trained and funded the "Arab Afghans" to the tune of $800 million during the 1980s war against the Soviet Union, when, in fact, as journalist Steve Coll has shown in Ghost Wars, his Pulitzer Prize-winning account of American involvement in Afghanistan, there is no evidence that the agency had any direct dealings with Osama bin Laden and his crew of foreign fighters.

Where Kabul in Winter begins to take off is in Jones's devastating critique of American aid to Afghanistan, which is consumed all too often by foreigners, evident in the fleets of Land Rovers and Toyota Land Cruisers that choke Kabul's smog-filled streets. Jones wryly observes: "Afghanistan, we learned from TV, had been 'rebuilt' thanks to millions of dollars of international aid pouring into the country. Where was it?" In a conversation with an American education expert Jones receives a depressing answer to that question. The expert explains that 80 to 90 percent of American aid goes to US contractors to cover overhead for back offices in the States as well as housing and office space in Kabul, and perks such as drivers, R and R, imported food, furniture and alcohol.

Jones points out that in contrast to countries like Sweden, which allocates only 4 percent of its aid costs to "technical assistance" that goes back home to pay Swedes, "eighty-six cents of every dollar of American aid is phantom aid" that will line American pockets rather than go directly to Afghans. According to Jones, only France has a worse record in this area.

The heart of Jones's book is her deeply reported description of her work trying to improve conditions for women prisoners and female hospital patients in Kabul. Dickensian is far too mild an adjective to describe the conditions that she encounters:

In the dirty emergency room...lies a young girl. Perhaps sixteen.... The head nurse stands at the foot of the bed and outlines the case dispassionately, as if the patient were not there. This girl was made to marry an old man, she says. Then he accused her of adultery because a friend of his saw her talking to a boy in the street; he told her to return to her father's house. She hadn't wanted to marry this husband, but to go back was to spread shame on her family, like a stain. She was afraid her father would kill her to wash it away. In this crisis, she went for advice to her neighbor, who said: Why don't you burn yourself? So she did. She drenched her body in diesel fuel and set herself alight. The flames burned 90 percent of her skin and spared only her head, which lies now on a tear-drenched pillow in a kind of separate agony of consciousness and pain.

Jones explains that Afghan customary law, which treats women as property, underlies the self-immolations and honor killings: "Afghans themselves have a saying that names the three sources of social discord as 'zan, zar, zamin'--women, gold and land. When Afghans name threats to social order, they name women first." Afghan customary law is not about justice as it is understood in the West but about the restoration of social order, an order that is entirely dominated by men. And so, in disputes about family honor involving women, it is invariably a woman who ends up paying the price of restoring the social order either by being killed or committing suicide. In the western city of Herat, for instance, there were an estimated 190 self-immolations in 2003.

Herat is where Rory Stewart began his walk across Afghanistan, a country that is "an unpredictable composite of etiquette, humor, and extreme brutality." Any British writer who writes about walking in Afghanistan does so in the shadow of the great British travel writer Eric Newby, who died in October and whose 1958 book A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush is a minor comic masterpiece, the foreword of which was written by Evelyn Waugh. A Short Walk describes how Newby, who toiled unhappily at a fashion house in London, left for Afghanistan to climb a 20,000-foot mountain in Nuristan after training for only four days by climbing rocks in Wales. Suffice to say that many things went wrong during his expedition.

Five decades later Stewart, a worthy successor to Newby, decided to walk across Afghanistan as the Taliban were falling during the winter of 2001. He chose to take a route across central Afghanistan, a region so inhospitable to outsiders, isolated and impassable that only one imperial power in history, the Ghorids in the twelfth century, seems to have bothered to secure the region. (At one point on his trip Stewart even stumbles across the remains of the lost Ghorid highland capital, the Turquoise Mountain, which was being systematically looted by locals.) Stewart takes a "long walk" in the Hindu Kush so fraught with danger that at one point he bumps into a contingent of British Special Forces who call him a "fucking nutter." Stewart, correctly, understands this to be their highest form of praise.

Although Stewart's beautifully written book is in a lighter vein than those of Chayes and Jones, underlying his picaresque stories of adventure on the road is a critical point that is often overlooked by Westerners with dreams of transforming Afghanistan into a place where women enjoy equal rights, "capacity building" creates viable stable government institutions and the power of warlords crumbles with the spread of "civil society." Such dreams rarely survive contact with the religiously conservative, tribal, rural, not infrequently xenophobic societies where most Afghans live.

Stewart, a former British diplomat who served as deputy governor of a southern province of Iraq following the US-led invasion of the country, is skeptical of Western efforts to transform countries like Afghanistan into societies in our own image, a principle espoused by neoconservatives and liberal internationalists alike:

Most of the policy makers knew next to nothing about the villages where 90 per cent of the Afghan population lived. They came from postmodern, secular, globalized states with liberal traditions in law and government. It was natural for them to initiate projects on urban design, women's rights...and to speak of a people "who desire peace at any cost and understand the need for a centralized multi-ethnic government." But what did they understand of the thought processes of Seyyed Kerbalahi's wife, who had not moved five kilometers from her home in forty years. Or Dr. Habibullah, the vet, who carried an automatic weapon in the way they carried briefcases?

This is a pessimistic view of what the West can achieve in Afghanistan (not to mention Iraq), but it's a view that is informed by Stewart's erudite knowledge of Afghan history and his extensive travels in the country, and by what has actually taken place in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban. Afghanistan remains one of the poorest countries in the world; the government barely functions, local warlords have the run of the place and much of the country is racked by violence. The best that can be said of Afghanistan is: At least it's not as bad as Iraq. And even that could change.

The United States' experience in both countries calls to mind Kant's observation: "Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made." Perhaps in coming years we will learn a little humility and patience about the efficacy of the wholesale export of Western democratic values and institutions into countries with very different social mores and political structures. Those Western exports have now beached on the shoals of reality from the Tigris to the Kabul River.

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