In this bulletin:

• Afghanistan 'holds Pakistani spy'
• Afghan general arrested as spy for Pakistan
• Ten dead in fresh Afghanistan gunbattles
• NATO jets kill several Taliban in Afghanistan
• Taliban set 2010 as Afghanistan takeover deadline
• France Willing To Send Troops To Afghanistan's Front Lines
• Pakistan receives Afghan proposals on jirga
• Afghanistan dismisses 'war criminals' report
• The Regathering Storm
• AFGHANISTAN: Government warns of possible poppy crop spraying
• Twenty-three heroin labs destroyed in east Afghanistan
• Paper says Hungary becoming key transit route for Afghan heroin
• Afghanistan, Not Iraq, Is Where We Should Focus our Efforts
• Senators meet with Canadian troops in Afghanistan
• UK probing Afghanistan shootings
• German Soldiers Face Court-Martial Over Afghan Skull Scandal
• Wafa replaces Daud as Helmand governor
• In Afghanistan, money tips the scales of justice
• Afghan MPs struggle to find voice

Afghanistan 'holds Pakistani spy' – BBC 12.19.06

Afghanistan says it has arrested a Pakistani intelligence agent who acted as a key link with al-Qaeda leaders. Presidential spokesman Karim Rahimi said the agent had been detained in eastern Kunar province carrying documents which proved his guilt.

The announcement came a day after an Afghan army general was arrested on charges of spying for Pakistan. Afghanistan has long blamed Pakistan for cross-border attacks by the Taleban. Islamabad denies the charges.

Mr Karimi named the man arrested as Sayed Akbar, who he said worked for Pakistan's notorious Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency. "Some evidence and documents have been seized with him proving his destructive activities in Afghanistan," Mr Karimi said.

Sayed Akbar comes from the Chitral region of northern Pakistan bordering the Afghan province of Nuristan, the spokesman said. The BBC's Payenda Sargand in Kabul says, according to the Afghan authorities, Mr Akbar was in charge of relations between the ISI and al-Qaeda leaders.

Officials say he has confessed to his "illegal activities" in Afghanistan. These are said to include escorting Osama Bin Laden last year from Nuristan to Chitral. There has so far been no response from Pakistan to the news of the arrest.

Afghan general arrested as spy for Pakistan – Canwest 12.19.06

Afghan intelligence agents have arrested an army general on charges of spying for Pakistan, officials said yesterday, fuelling a dispute over Islamabad's alleged attempts to destabilize its western neighbour. Gen. Khair Mohammad was detained within the past week after he was found to be selling information to Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), the press office of the Afghan national intelligence agency said.

"We've arrested Khair Mohammad over an act of treason against his country and working for Pakistan's ISI," an intelligence agency spokesman said on condition of anonymity. The spokesman said the general, who worked in the Afghan Defence ministry in Kabul, provided Pakistani agents with information about the ministry's formation, a list of high-ranking officials and their contact numbers. Gen. Mohammad was also tasked to give details of western military bases and headquarters in the capital Kabul.

Ten dead in fresh Afghanistan gunbattles

December 18, 2006 - KHOST, Afghanistan (AFP) - Nine Taliban rebels and an Afghan soldier were killed and 14 insurgents were captured in fresh fighting across insurgency-hit Afghanistan.

A major firefight broke out early Monday after nearly 200 militants crossed the border from Pakistan and attacked a border checkpost in the eastern Afghan province of Khost, police said.

Five Taliban fighters and an Afghan militia soldier died in the hour-long exchange of fire, provincial police official Gul Dad said, adding that four Afghan nationals were arrested.

Pakistani militants "were also with them fighting our troops," Dad told AFP, citing documents found on the bodies of the dead rebels. "It was a heavy battle."

Self-confessed Taliban spokesman Mohammad Hanif claimed responsibility for the attack on behalf of the ousted Islamists but said only one rebel was killed.

The fighting took place days after Afghan President Hamid Karzai publicly accused the Pakistani government for the first time of supporting Taliban rebels. Islamabad denies the claims.

Meanwhile, four Taliban insurgents were killed in a separate clash late Sunday in the southern province of Kandahar which also left three US-led coalition soldiers injured, the US military said in a statement.

The raid supported by warplanes "seized an enemy weapons cache containing mines and explosives" near Kandahar city, the birthplace of the Taliban and a continuing focus for the insurgency.

Also on Monday, coalition troops backed by Afghan army soldiers detained 10 "suspected terrorists" including an Al-Qaeda-linked militant in the eastern province of Kunar, another troubled region on the Pakistani border.

"The operation resulted in the capture of a known transporter of weapons and explosives who is linked to foreign fighter movements in the region," the coalition said in a statement.

The man, whose name and nationality were not disclosed, was also responsible for facilitating suicide bombings which have increased in Afghanistan in recent months, the statement said.

"Credible information led the combined force to believe the transporter and his associates were at the compound," which the rebels shared with women and children, it said, adding that there were no civilian casualties in the raid.

Some 4,000 people, many of them militants but also troops and civilians, have died in Taliban-led violence this year alone, making it Afghanistan's bloodiest year since the movement was toppled by US-led forces in 2001.

NATO jets kill several Taliban in Afghanistan

Kandahar (AFP) - NATO-led warplanes dropped guided bombs on a Taliban command post in southern Afghanistan overnight, killing a number of insurgents, the alliance said.

The airstrike by International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) jets on a compound in the Taliban-dominated Panjwayi district of southern Kandahar province was part of a fresh anti-insurgent offensive launched this week.

"Overnight, ISAF forces launched a precision airstrike against a known insurgent command and logistics post in an isolated area of the Panjwayi district," ISAF said in a statement on Tuesday.

It did not give details of casualties, but an ISAF military official speaking on condition of anonymity told AFP that "a number of Taliban were killed in the air raid".

The official could not provide an exact figure, saying the casualties were being assessed. The raid was the second of its kind since hundreds of ISAF troops backed by a similar number of Afghan security forces kicked off "Operation Baaz Tsuka" in and around Panjwayi.

Some 30 Taliban rebels including two commanders were killed on December 13 in a similar airstrike in the same area, a known stronghold of the Taliban, the provincial governor said on Sunday.

In mid-September NATO forces led "Operation Medusa", during which ISAF claimed to have killed more than 1,000 rebels and cleared the orchard-lined valley of Taliban guerrillas.

Ahead of the new offensive, ISAF earlier this week dropped leaflets on insurgent positions warning them to leave the area before troops forced them out.

Despite being toppled in late 2001 by US-led forces and Afghan warlords, remnants of the ultra-Islamic Taliban are still active and have been carrying out fierce attacks.

Some 4,000 people, including 1,000 civilians, have died in Taliban-led violence and suicide bombings this year, the bloodiest since the fall of the Taliban regime.

Taliban set 2010 as Afghanistan takeover deadline

The Nation - Islamabad, Dec 18: The Taliban militia have fixed 2010 as the deadline for the complete takeover of Afghanistan from the Hamid Karzai government. According to officials, the Taliban are making a strong comeback, launching an average of 600 attacks against the US, NATO and Afghan troops every month.

"Currently, they are focusing on country's south and once it comes totally under the control, the former ruling militia will turn the guns towards the other parts of country. They now have 2010 in their mind as deadline to reoccupy the Afghan lands that they lost after the United States attacked Afghanistan in pursuit of al-Qaeda," The Nation quoted a source as saying.

According to officials, over 50000 diehard Taliban fighters have now fully regrouped under the leadership of Mulla Mohammad Omar and taking on US, NATO and Afghan forces almost everywhere in the southern provinces.

They had all disappeared from the scene following orders from the top leadership only to strike again at the proper time, said an official.

"The senior Taliban leaders are busy in recruiting more fighters through the training camps hidden in the rugged mountains of Afghanistan," he said, adding that the militia was taking full advantage of anger of ordinary Afghan citizens against the Karzai government, which they see as corrupt and too slow to bring security to the remote areas of country.

Civilian deaths from retaliatory US and NATO air strikes have also generated an ill will towards the coalition forces, which the Taliban have been able to exploit to their advantage.

Officials said the war torn country's southern provinces had returned to the same chaotic situation that spawned the Taliban movement.

"Due to widespread corruption in the government ranks, some people in south have stopped dealing with officials and started turning to Taliban for the resolution of their disputes. The Taliban are strongly active in Kandahar, Uruzgan, Helmand, Paktika, Ghazni and Zabul provinces but very soon they would start moving towards the other areas," the official added. --- ANI

France Willing To Send Troops To Afghanistan's Front Lines

Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty - December 18, 2006 -- France says it is willing to send its troops to Afghanistan's violence-plagued south and east if reinforcements are requested in those regions. NATO allies agreed last month to rush to one another's aid anywhere in Afghanistan in emergencies.

Key alliance nations, including France, Germany, Italy, and Spain, have refused to regularly send troops to fight alongside the British, Canadian, Dutch, and U.S. forces on the front lines of battles with the resurgent Taliban in the restive south and east.

French Defense Minister Michele Alliot-Marie said today that "We have planned that our forces in Kabul could, if needed, go to other regions if our allies ask for it to help in a situation that would require it."

She made her comments a day after announcing that France would withdraw its 200-strong special forces from the eastern city of Jalalabad.

Pakistan receives Afghan proposals on jirga

Pakistan has received proposals from Afghanistan about a tribal jirga or council of elders, the Pakistani foreign office announced Monday.

Pakistani Foreign Office spokesperson Tasnim Aslam told a weekly press briefing that the jirga is basically aimed at bringing peace in the border areas and stopping cross border filtration for military purposes besides ending violence.

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and his Afghan counterpart Hamid Karzai in a meeting hosted by U.S. President George W. Bush in Washington in September had agreed to convene tribal jirgas to end violence in Afghanistan.

Aslam said that Pakistan had already planned to hold jirgas of tribal elders on its side like Waziristan which is part of the country's political strategy.

She said that it is evident from the peace accord in the North Waziristan that violence and cross border infiltration has dropped significantly and the Afghan government also acknowledged this.

To a question regarding criticism on the peace accord in tribal areas, Aslam reminded that there had been also one peace agreement in Afghanistan to normalize the situation in some areas. Source: Xinhua

Afghanistan dismisses 'war criminals' report

December 18, 2006 - (AFP) - Afghan President Hamid Karzai has angrily rejected a Human Rights Watch (HRW) report that says war criminals are holding positions in his administration.

The US-based HRW report released this week named in particular legislators Abdul Rasul Sayyaf and Mohammad Qasim Fahim, former president Burhanuddin Rabbani, Energy Minister Ismail Khan and Vice-President Karim Khalili.

It proposed Afghan and international judges should hear cases against them relating to the 1979-1992 communist regime, the 1992-1996 civil war and the 1996-2001 Taliban regime.

A statement from his office says Mr Karzai considers the report to be incorrect and regrettable. "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," it said.

"The Afghan Government wants Human Rights Watch to prepare its report on Afghanistan based on realities and realistic assessments."

Several leaders who were involved in decades of conflicts and bloodshed in Afghanistan are still holding key government positions, including some working as provincial governors.

Many of these leaders, known as warlords, still maintain their own private armies, making it difficult for the US-backed leader to extend his authority beyond the capital, Kabul.

The Regathering Storm

Along the ungoverned border of Pakistan and Afghanistan, Al Qaeda is training would-be jihadists from the West to attack their home countries.

By Sami Yousafzai, Ron Moreau And Mark Hosenball - Newsweek

Dec. 25, 2006 - Jan. 1, 2007 issue - For the past year, a secret has been slowly spreading among Taliban commanders in Afghanistan: a 12-man team of Westerners was being trained by Al Qaeda in Pakistan for a special mission. Most of the Afghan fighters could rely only on hearsay, but some told of seeing the "English brothers" (as the foreign recruits were nicknamed for their shared language) in person. One eyewitness, a former Guantánamo detainee with close Taliban and Qaeda ties, spoke to NEWSWEEK recently in southern Afghanistan, demanding anonymity because he doesn't want the Americans looking for him. He says he met the 12 recruits in November 2005, at a mud-brick compound near the North Waziristan town of Mir Ali. That was as much as the tight-lipped former detainee would divulge, except to mention that Adam Yahiye Gadahn, the notorious fugitive "American Al Qaeda," was with the brothers, presumably as an interpreter.

Another Afghan had more to say on the subject. Omar Farooqi is the nom de guerre of a former provincial intelligence chief for the Taliban; he now serves as the Taliban's chief Qaeda liaison for Ghazni province, in eastern Afghanistan. He says he spent roughly five weeks this past year helping to indoctrinate and train a class of foreign recruits near the Afghan border in tribal Waziristan, and among his students were the English brothers. The 12 included two Norwegian Muslims and an Australian, along with nine British subjects, says Farooqi. Their mission, Farooqi told NEWSWEEK, will be to act as underground organizers and operatives for Al Qaeda in their home countries—and their yearlong training course is just about finished.

U.S. and British security agencies have known this threat would come sooner or later. While saying he could not confirm the English brothers' case specifically, a spokesman for Britain's Foreign Office (unnamed as a matter of standard policy) calls it "common knowledge" that jihadist recruits have been traveling from Britain to Pakistan for indoctrination and training. The existence of a Qaeda pipeline between those two countries has grown harder to deny with every new terrorism story that has broken since the suicide bombings in London that killed 52 subway and bus passengers on July 7, 2005. Each new case that emerges features at least one or two suspects with ties to Pakistan—such as an alleged plot that began before 9/11 to bomb financial buildings in New York, Newark, N.J., and Washington, and this past summer's alleged plot to blow up airline flights from Britain to the United States.

A few weeks ago Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, director-general of the British security service M.I.5, publicly disclosed that British authorities are monitoring 200 networks and 1,600 individuals "actively engaged in plotting or facilitating terrorist acts here and overseas." A "substantial" fraction of those 1,600 people have connections to Pakistan, says a British official, declining to be named because the subject is sensitive. The M.I.5 chief added that her investigators had identified nearly 30 separate plots "that often have links back to Al Qaeda in Pakistan, and through those links Al Qaeda gives guidance and training to its largely British foot soldiers here."

Indeed, while often thought to have become mostly an inspiration to jihadists around the world, Al Qaeda appears to be gaining strength along the unruly Afghan-Pakistani border. Within the past year, M.I.5 has produced detailed reports about a group of British men, ethnic Pakistanis, who traveled to jihadist training camps in Pakistan by way of Saudi Arabia, Syria and Afghanistan, according to a counterterrorism official in London who requested anonymity because of the sensitive subject. And the scariest part is not what M.I.5 knows but what it doesn't know: there's no way the authorities can watch more than a tiny percentage of the 400,000 British residents who visit Pakistan every year.

U.S. security agencies are no less worried. American intelligence officials tell NEWSWEEK that their people are definitely concerned about terror suspects and operatives shuttling back and forth between Britain and Pakistan. One particular worry is that under current practice, British visitors to the States are not required to apply in advance for temporary visas, which are routinely granted to any British passport holder who is not on a watch list. In other words, the door is wide open for Britain's growing ranks of young jihadists, even those who have attended Qaeda training camps, if they are unknown to intelligence agencies. U.S. officials are discussing how the visa system could be tightened. "For the most effective background checks on passengers, the United States needs information and assistance from the country where the traveler resides," says Homeland Security Department spokesman Russ Knocke, adding that such help should be "routine."

While the Americans talk, Al Qaeda is pressing on with its training plans, Farooqi says. He confidently described those plans to a NEWSWEEK correspondent at a mud-brick house in Paktia province, not far from the Pakistan border, mentioning the English brothers almost in passing as an example of the jihad's recent successes. The specifics of his story could not be independently corroborated. But one gunman among the dozen or so guarding the house, with most of his face hidden by a black-and-white kaffiyeh, appeared to be a European with light-colored eyes; Farooqi later confirmed that the guard was one of the brothers. An open notebook lay on the carpet where Farooqi sat, and the NEWSWEEK correspondent caught a fleeting glimpse of scrawled names and phone numbers, including several that were preceded by the United Kingdom's country code: 44.

Farooqi says he first met the brothers, all of them in their 20s, soon after they reached Waziristan in October 2005. He recalls one of them, known as Musa, telling him that the 7/7 bombings in London "were just a rehearsal of bigger acts to come." A few, he couldn't say how many, had arrived in Pakistan by air, but most had taken a clandestine overland route across Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan, escorted by a network of professional smugglers. As NEWSWEEK has reported previously, Al Qaeda uses the same underground railroad to transport Iraqi bombmakers and insurgent trainers to share their skills with Taliban fighters in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

According to Farooqi, the brothers' travel arrangements were made by Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi, one of Al Qaeda's top operations men and a liaison with insurgents in Iraq. (His name has also cropped up in an ongoing British criminal trial in which seven London-area defendants of Pakistani descent are accused of conspiring to bomb British targets with homemade explosives. Prosecutors have alleged that Abdul Hadi's deputy even visited Britain and prayed at a mosque near London with one of the suspects.) The transcontinental journey took a month to complete, but Farooqi claims the brothers left no official traces of their passage, slipping past every border-control post without showing any travel documents. Once they get home, there may be no record that they ever visited Pakistan.

That's something a British Qaeda operative would certainly want to keep secret. A newly issued International Crisis Group report on the tribal areas says the militants have been able to "establish a virtual mini-Taliban-style state there" where they can "provide safe haven to the Taliban and its foreign allies." In the words of a senior Western diplomat in Islamabad, who asks to remain nameless to avoid offending his hosts: "The Pakistanis simply don't control the territory in any meaningful way, and that means a common enemy has a place [to operate]. You have to assume Al Qaeda will make the most of it." Before September 11, Al Qaeda had no network inside Pakistan and only limited contact with Pakistani militants. Now the group has close support on both sides of the border.

Inside Afghanistan, Taliban field commanders depend on regular visits from their Qaeda paymasters. Guerrillas in eastern Ghazni province say the Arab money teams ride in from the direction of the Pakistan border astride motorcycles driven by Taliban fighters. The Qaeda men ask each local commander what weapons, money and technical assistance he needs—and then deliver the aid that is required. According to Zabibullah, a senior Taliban official who has been a reliable source in the past, Al Qaeda has more than 100 specialists, mostly Arabs, helping support Taliban forces in Afghanistan.

Still, Al Qaeda took no chances with the English brothers' safety. They received much of their training behind mud-brick walls in the sprawling compounds that are typical of Pakistan's tribal areas. The idea was to keep the men hidden from U.S. and Pakistani reconnaissance planes. Farooqi says the recruits were taught a wide variety of subjects, from religious and ideological doctrine to the art of molding, assembling and detonating state-of-the-art Iraqi-style shaped-charge IEDs. They learned how to make and use suicide-bomb vests, how to rig car bombs, how to motivate other men to sacrifice their lives for the jihad and how to maintain communications with Al Qaeda on the Afghan-Pakistani frontier. They're not meant to be suicide bombers themselves, Farooqi says; they are far too valuable to waste. The recruits that M.I.5 was tracking also seemed bound for bigger things than cannon fodder.

Some counterterrorism experts argue that Al Qaeda has become only a figurehead, with no real control over the local terrorist cells it has spawned around the world. The English brothers—and the Pakistan pipeline—are signs that the organization is still in action. Farooqi says he believes, based on overhead conversations, that Al Qaeda is planning for the very long term, a decade into the future. He says the terrorist group is talking about gradually fielding more than 1,000 operatives in Europe over the next 10 years. From what he has heard, only 10 percent of those jihadists are in place so far. Based on information from M.I.5, the British Home secretary, John Reid, recently warned that a terrorist attack in the United Kingdom could be highly likely during the holidays.

The English brothers completed their Waziristan stay in October, Farooqi says, but before going home, they had one final assignment. Their Arab handlers separated them into several smaller groups and sent them into Afghanistan to see the jihad firsthand, embedded with Taliban units in Khowst and Paktia provinces. The unit commanders were warned to avoid putting them in any danger. After that, the brothers were supposed to return to Britain the same way they got to Pakistan. That means most of them could be getting home any day now—if they aren't there already.

With Zahid Hussain in Islamabad and Emily Flynn Vencat in London

AFGHANISTAN: Government warns of possible poppy crop spraying

KABUL, 18 December (IRIN) - In a bid to curb poppy cultivation, the government of Afghanistan has warned farmers that it could spray poppy fields if other ways are not successful.

This year, only 10 percent of the total 165,000 ha under cultivation was eradicated, while the total area planted was up 59 percent compared to 2005. The impoverished Central Asian state produces more than 90 percent of the world opium, according to Afghan Ministry of Counter Narcotics (MCN).

"We could use ground spray when it's needed," said Minister for Counter Narcotics Habibullah Qaderi in the Afghan capital, Kabul, on Sunday.

The initiative comes after John Walters, Director of the US Office of National Drug Control Policy, warned last week in Kabul that Afghanistan could turn into a narco-state unless dramatic steps were taken toward eliminating poppy cultivation. Walters called for spraying poppy cultivation in the country.

"The government will continually monitor the progress of eradication around the country, through the use of advanced technology, and on the ground verification. We will react to situations as they occur," Qaderi elaborated.

Commenting on this, Adrian Edwards, United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) spokesman remarked: "We have not got a particular view on ground spaying and it has not been our favourite option. We do suggest alternatives to this."

"If there is eradiation than you need to find alternative means so the people can not only make a living, [but] families can have sufficient food and means of making a living," Edwards told IRIN.

Governors from the 12 largest poppy growing provinces in Afghanistan came to the capital on Sunday to finalise eradication plans with the ministries of interior and counter-narcotics. The governors came from Balkh, Nangahar, Kunduz, Farah,Ghor, Uruzgan, Zabul, Badakshan, Baghlan, Samangan, Sar-i-Pal, and Helmand provinces.

Warnings were also given to the governors that if there is evidence that officials have been involved in bribery or corruption related to eradication, they would be dismissed from their jobs and prosecuted, Ministry of Interior officials said.

Twenty-three heroin labs destroyed in east Afghanistan

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

Jalalabad, 16 December: Twenty three heroin-processing laboratories have been destroyed in Nangarhar Province

Giving details, Mawlawi Abdol Aziz Khairkhwa, deputy head of Nangarhar Provincial Council, said to Afghan Islamic Press [AIP]: "We went to Abdol Khel valley in Achin District together with some district chiefs, tribal leaders and police today where we destroyed 22 heroin-processing laboratories."

He added: "We seized 560 kg of opium which were going to be processed into heroin together with some tools and apparatus."

Mawlawi Abdol Aziz Khairkhwa also told AIP that afterwards there was a big gathering in the region where the tribal chiefs and elders agreed that if any body creates a heroin laboratory in the future, his house will be burnt down and he will be fined 2m afghanis [approximately 40,000 dollars] as well as being driven out of that area.

In addition, the police recently destroyed a heroin-processing laboratory in the Nemla area of Khogiani District and seized some opium.

Achin District is located in the Shinwaro area bordering on Pakistan. It has long been famous for drug production and business. Drug-processing laboratories have been destroyed there many times in the past.

Paper says Hungary becoming key transit route for Afghan heroin

The following is the text of an article by Peter Dunai entitled "Is Hungary to become the main route for Afghan heroin?" and published in the Hungarian newspaper Nepszabadsag on 14 December:

Hungary may become one of Europe's primary transit countries for heroin, a phenomenon related to Afghanistan and the changing trends in the international heroin market. With Afghanistan's sharply increasing role in the world's heroin production, the importance of Hungary, and the "heroin routes" passing trough the country, is also on the rise.

Over the past year, Afghanistan's heroin production has grown by almost 50 per cent to account for 90 per cent of the global output. With Afghanistan's rapid advance, traditional growing and producing areas (such as the Golden Triangle: Burma-Myanmar, Laos) tend to lose importance.

The structure of world heroin production has gone through dramatic changes over the past five years. Afghanistan, which produced fewer than 200 tonnes of raw opium in 2001, has produced over 6,000 tonnes this year. This trend has triggered changes in transit routes, too. Since several years may elapse between production and selling the heroin rush from Afghanistan is expected to reach its peak during the next couple of years. It will go through the main trading routes leading to Europe, including Hungary.

According to the UN International Narcotics Control Board, two-thirds of the heroin produced in Afghanistan is supplied to European markets and a significant part of this amount goes through Hungary.

Heroin has gained strategic, even military importance in recent years. The extreme religious and terrorist groups - including Taleban and Al-Qa'idah combatants - fighting allied forces (including Hungarian troops) in Afghanistan use revenues from drug-trade (up to almost 3bn dollars a year, several times more than the yearly budget of the Hungarian Army) to finance arm deals and pay their mercenaries. A drastic cut in Afghanistan's opium, morphine and heroin production would contribute to restoring the country's internal stability. In a document, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime has referred to Afghanistan as an "opium economy" paralysed by immense corruption fuelled by the drug trade.

US General Karl Eikenberry, commander of Combined Forces Command Afghanistan, told Nepszabadsag in Budapest that opium and heroin production is one of the key unresolved issues of the Afghan problem.

According the well-informed Hungarian sources, all the three "heroin routes" leading from Afghanistan to Western Europe cross Hungary. Heroin routes start in southern Afghanistan's Helmand Province, currently the largest heroin producing area of the world. Later the routes split into several sections. The northern route goes through the former Central Asian Soviet republics and Russia, and enters Hungary from Ukraine. The southern route goes from Iran through Turkey to the Balkans where it splits into two sections. The one that goes through the northern Balkans arrives in Hungary through Bulgaria and Romania. The other route passing through the southern Balkans only touches southwest Hungary. It goes to Austria and Italy through Bulgaria, Albania, Montenegro and Croatia.

Drug shipments are organized by Albanian, Turkish, Kurdish, and, to a lesser extent, Hungarian gangs, mostly the same involved in smuggling people to Hungary or to Western Europe via Hungary. Their base is in Germany, where millions of them, mostly Turks, have already acquired citizenship. The Hungarian police, border guard and national security services closely cooperate with the Customs and Finance Guard to crack down on heroin trafficking.

The fight against drug production and drug trafficking is a national security priority, not only because drug traffickers also smuggle illegal immigrants into Europe but also because there are nearly 200 Hungarian troops serving in Afghanistan and helping the country recover and escape from the suffocating grip of a heroin-based economy. The northern province of Baghlan, where the majority of Hungarian troops serve in a provincial reconstruction team (PRT), is not among the major opium growing regions, but apparently opium farmers intend to use large areas from next spring there, too. According to estimates, the Afghan drug industry produces nearly half of the country's 6bn dollar national income. Although last year the size of poppy fields shrank, this was mostly counterbalanced by good harvest.

One hectare of poppy fields yields 10 times more profit to Afghan farmers than cereals. In one of the world's poorest countries (where GDP per capita is 5 per cent of that of Hungary) there is no agricultural product to rival the lucrative poppy growing business. Neither NATO/EU/UN troops and experts nor local leaders have been able to find a solution to this problem yet.

Afghanistan, Not Iraq, Is Where We Should Focus our Efforts

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution - 12/18/2006 By Cynthia Tucker

Not only is there no path to victory in Iraq, as the Iraq Study Group (ISG) has made clear, but there is also very little chance of preventing disaster. As the U.S. military withdraws -- and it must -- the civil war between Sunni and Shiite will become more savage still, neighboring states will find themselves flooded with refugees, and Iraq will probably become the failed state that our policy was intended to prevent.

That's a brutal, ugly truth, but it is a truth widely acknowledged by many experts. No amount of hand-wringing or finger-pointing will change it.

But the United States need not leave two failed states. We can still save Afghanistan; that's where we should concentrate our diplomacy and manpower. If we don't, that nation will continue to deteriorate until it is once again a cauldron of violence and corruption, a haven for jihadists and narco-terrorists.

The ISG report made that point explicitly: "The longer that U.S. political and military resources are tied down in Iraq, the more the chances for American failure in Afghanistan increase."

Routing the Taliban was the righteous war that grew out of Sept. 11. The jihadist-warrior cult had offered safe harbor to Osama bin Laden, who planned the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. The Bush administration had no choice but to mount an invasion of Afghanistan.

Unfortunately, neither the neoconservatives nor the traditional conservatives had much real interest in the remote, obscure country. They didn't think the use of U.S. military might on a primitive nation would inspire awe among other Islamists; they had no patience for nation-building; they weren't passionate about planting democracy there.

So before bin Laden was captured, before the Taliban was decimated, before the remote mountainous regions of Afghanistan were secure, civilian leadership at the Pentagon ordered the military to turn its attention and personnel to Iraq. Special forces operatives who might have located bin Laden were pulled out; troops and materiel were redirected. When Afghan President Hamid Karzai was elected, the White House declared victory and pulled back. There are now about 21,000 U.S. troops and nearly as many troops from other NATO countries in Afghanistan.

However, they have met stiff resistance from a resurgent Taliban and al-Qaida, which still have the run of the mountainous border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Though the Bush administration has declared Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf an ally in the war on terror, he has proved unable or unwilling to clamp down on insurgents.

Gen. Michael Hayden, director of the CIA, told the Senate Armed Services Committee last month that the Taliban and al-Qaida were waging a "bloody insurgency" in the east and south of the country. He noted that al-Qaida forces are using techniques in Afghanistan perfected in Iraq, including roadside explosives and suicide bombers. Lt. Gen. Michael Maples, head of the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency, told the committee that violent attacks this year had nearly doubled over 2005.

Indeed, there are places in Afghanistan where Karzai fears to tread, so he usually confines himself to the nation's capital, Kabul. With no real law in effect, Afghanistan farmers reaped a record opium harvest this year, producing about 92 percent of the world's supply. Drug activity feeds not just jihadists movements but also violent narco-traffickers.

Despite its problems, Afghanistan can still benefit from U.S. military and diplomatic might. As the Pentagon pulls troops out of Iraq, it can beef up the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan. (If we contribute more heavily, we might be able to persuade our NATO allies to do the same.) The insurgency can be quelled, if not eradicated.

And as stability takes root, nongovernment aid organizations and charitable institutions will pour in, offering health care and educational and economic assistance. It may take decades to stamp out poppy cultivation, but it's worth a more serious effort than we've given it so far.

President Bush could still see a stable, pro-Western nation rise from the anger and anguish of 9/11. It just won't be Iraq.

Liberals won't topple Tory government over Afghanistan mission: Dion - Tuesday, December 19, 2006

QUEBEC (CP) - The Bloc Quebecois threat to bring down the Tory government over Afghanistan lost its edge Monday when Liberal Leader Stephane Dion said he will not play along.

Dion said he would not back the motion of non-confidence threatened by Bloc Leader Gilles Duceppe, even if Prime Minister Stephen Harper refuses to overhaul the Afghan effort. "I don't understand the Bloc's position, at all," Dion told reporters in Quebec City.

"It doesn't seem very useful to me to want to bring down the government on that in February as (Bloc Leader Gilles) Duceppe is proposing."

Duceppe has said he may try to topple the minority Conservative government as early as February unless the Afghan operation is "rapidly and profoundly" revamped to focus on reconstruction instead of fighting.

Dion has also called for a change of focus to the mission to more reconstruction but he won't topple the government over it. A Bloc motion could not bring down the government without Liberal help.

The Bloc is looking for an excuse to provoke a quick election before Liberals can get organized, Dion said. "We'll prepare for an election, but it doesn't seem to me that Canadians want an election in the middle of winter," Dion said.

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.

Duceppe's threat also drew the scorn of Quebec Premier Jean Charest who is waiting for Ottawa to answer his demand for more money to eliminate the so-called fiscal gap between the federal government and the provinces.

"I find it disgusting that Gilles Duceppe is putting the interests of the Bloc Quebecois ahead of the interests of Quebec," Charest said at an end-of-year news conference.

The Bloc must allow the federal government to state its position on the fiscal imbalance, Charest said. "Gilles Duceppe should be ashamed today, and he should tell the people of Quebec that he will adjust his aim."

Speaking outside a Liberal meeting in Quebec City, Dion named former leadership rival Michael Ignatieff as deputy leader of the Liberal party.

"We will have a dream team to put in front of a Canadians, and it's my dream to have Michael Ignatieff as close as possible to me," Dion said. Dion will hand out other jobs to former leadership contenders on Tuesday.

Senators meet with Canadian troops in Afghanistan
Monday, December 18, 2006 - CanWest News Service

OTTAWA - A group of senators are in Afghanistan this week checking up on Canadian troops and hoping to spread some Christmas cheer.

“Meeting the troops at this time of year is one of the things we wanted to concentrate on and every Canadian should be terribly proud of what they’re doing,” Senator Michael Meighen told CTV’s Canada AM on Monday morning.

The senators arrived on Saturday and have so far spent their time meeting with troops on the base in Kandahar. They have also travelled outside the perimeter of the base to visit soldiers who work on the Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT).

The security situation has prevented them from visiting any of the actual reconstruction projects, the Conservative senator said.

“Without a moment’s hesitation I can tell all Canadians that their morale is absolutely first class, they are doing a superb job by everybody’s account including people we’ve talked to from other nations,” Meighen said. “They’re happy, they’re busy and they are convinced, and I think they have reason to be convinced, that they are making progress in bringing an improved quality of life to this very troubled part of Afghanistan.”

Meighen sits on the Senate committee on national security and defence. In September, he and other members of the committee tried to visit Afghanistan while they were on a trip to England, the Netherlands and Dubai but they ended up stuck in Dubai for six days racking up a $30,000 hotel bill.

That angered Senate Leader Marjory LeBreton, who blasted the senators for not cancelling the trip after being told by defence officials, including Gen. Rick Hillier, chief of the defence staff, that they couldn’t enter Afghanistan because of military operations. The entire trip cost $150,000.

The current visit comes at the start of a major new offensive aimed at defeating the Taliban in the Panjwaii and Zhari district in the south of Afghanistan.

UK probing Afghanistan shootings

Press Association (PA) December 16, 2006 - The military is investigating the shooting of civilians by British troops as they sped away from a suicide bomb attack in southern Afghanistan that injured three soldiers and killed three Afghans.

Witnesses to the December 3 incident in which a suicide bomber in a minibus rammed the military convoy in Kandahar, said residents fled in fear of their lives.

It is one of seven incidents in the last month in which Nato forces shot Afghan citizens. Seven people have been killed and 11 injured, eroding public support for the battle against a resurgent Taliban.

Nato said the soldiers had acted in self-defence in all the shootings. After the Kandahar bombing, Said Ahmed, a 30-year-old bakery worker, said he ran into his shop when he saw British soldiers coming down the street shouting and firing their guns.

"I saw one motorbike driver get shot, and he fell down on to the ground," Ahmed said. "It was a very scary moment."

Foreign troop convoys are coming under increasing attack. Taliban militants exploded more than 100 suicide bombs in the country this year, a more than fivefold increase from 2005, often targeting Nato forces in armoured personnel carriers and Jeeps.

Most victims of Nato shootings are Afghan civilians -- motorists who have failed to stop when ordered to do so, or people caught in the chaotic aftermath of bombings.

The shootings have deepened resentment among Afghans as Nato struggles to contain an uprising that has found new strength five years after the ousting of the Taliban regime.

Nato has issued radio and newspaper advertisements warning Afghans to stay away from troop convoys. Last month, the alliance announced that more warning signs would be put on military vehicles, but far less than half the military vehicles seen on the street by AP reporters in Kabul and Kandahar carry any type of warning.

German Soldiers Face Court-Martial Over Afghan Skull Scandal

Deutsche Welle December 16, 2006 - Seven German soldiers are facing courts-martial over photographs that show troops posing and playing with human skulls while stationed in Afghanistan, according to the Defense Ministry.

The soldiers, five of whom are still among active troops while two are in the reserves, will be charged with bringing the Bundeswehr into disrepute and risking the lives of their fellow soldiers serving with the NATO-led force in Afghanistan.

The ministry said Friday that 5,500 soldiers had been questioned in an internal inquiry into the scandal that broke in October when German media splashed photographs of soldiers on duty in Afghanistan striking sometimes obscene poses with human skulls and bones.

The soldiers could face demotion and pay cuts if found guilty. Four other lower-ranking soldiers avoided courts-martial when it became clear that superiors did not hinder them from posing with the human remains.

State prosecutors opened criminal investigations against 23 soldiers but have decided not to charge any of them. Six soldiers have been suspended from the military over the pictures.

The prosecutor's office in Munich last week said two of the main culprits in the affair had taken human remains from a lime field outside Kabul, rather than from a cemetery, and could therefore not be charged with desecrating graves.

It said the area near the Afghan capital was strewn with skeletons, presumably those of Russian soldiers who died during the Soviet occupation of the central Asian country in the 1980s.

Bundeswehr General Inspector Wolfgang Schneiderhan said he intended to make changes in ethical and moral training given to middle and high-ranking officers as a consequence of the so-called skull scandal.

"Overall, our training is good and appropriate," he said Friday in an interview with the online version of Die Welt newspaper. "The young superiors have to have the courage to intervene when mistakes are made, even when it is not easy."

Schneiderhan also submitted a three-page report to German Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung, outlining how he intended to prevent similar occurrences in the future. Schneiderhan, however, also said that the Bundeswehr should not be considered a "school for the country."

"Obviously the internalization of morals laid out in the constitution are no longer an obvious result of parental and school education," he said. "We in the Bundeswehr are not a school for the nation. We cannot correct the mistakes that have probably been made over many years."

Germany has 2,750 peacekeepers serving with the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan and commands the section of the force operating in the north of the country.

Wafa replaces Daud as Helmand governor

Hamim Jalalzai  - KABUL, Dec 16 (Pajhwok Afghan News): After the approval of the President Hamid Karzai, the Ministry of Interior Saturday appointed, Asadullah Wafa as a new governor of the southern Helmand province.

Press office of the ministry told Pajhwok Afghan News the appointment was made after President Karzai approved recommendations by the Interior Ministry in this regard. The appointment was aimed to help in enhancing security and implementing reforms, the office added.

Asadullah Wafa has replaced the former governor of Helmand Engineer Mohammad Daud. According to the press office, Wafa has also worked as a governor of Paktia and Kunar. Wafa has also remained as deputy minister for Tribal Affairs in the past. However, Sayed Mohammad Daud was appointed as deputy governor of Kapisa and Hamidullah Danishi as deputy governor of Kunduz provinces. The office would not give details about other new officials. It merits a mention that few days back Engineer Daud in a press conference rejected the report of Sunday Times, published on the governor sacking from his position.

In Afghanistan, money tips the scales of justice

The nation's legal system is driven by bribes, and the public's disgust is stoking nostalgia for the Taliban. By Paul Watson The Los Angeles Times December 18, 2006

Kabul, Afghanistan — IN the halls of justice here, almost everything is for sale. It can take one bribe to obtain a blank legal form and another to have a clerk stamp it.

Lawyers openly haggle in corridors and parking lots over the size of payoffs. A new refrigerator delivered to the right official might help solve a long-running property dispute.

Court dockets don't exist. The Koran, the basis of Islamic law and also the Afghan legal code, is often the only book on the shelves of poorly trained judges. Even a 93-year-old man depending on the courts to save his family home can be threatened with jail.

As Afghans try to piece their legal system back together after decades of war, many spend long months shopping for justice in the gloomy corridors of Kabul's central courts complex. More than 90% of lower-court cases end up in the capital's appeals court, landing on the glass top of Judge Muzafarddin Tajali's large wooden desk.

A former Supreme Court justice, Tajali fled to Pakistan when the Taliban seized most of the country. Now he's back, sitting in a high-back swivel chair with the Chinese price tag still dangling from the black upholstery, amid a dangerous mess created by incompetence and corruption.

"In the whole country, we may not have even two qualified defense lawyers," Tajali said. "Everybody has expectations, and of course they get upset," he added. "They don't threaten me inside the courtroom. But when their hopes are broken, they get mad and go and scream outside.

"This kind of justice system, which is not clean and transparent, threatens the government and democracy."

Systematic injustice stokes searing humiliation and resentment, turning many Afghans against President Hamid Karzai's government and his foreign backers. Nostalgia for the ruthless rule of the Taliban is growing as the line between judges and criminals blurs. When they can't find justice in the courts, Afghans are tempted to turn back to what they've trusted most for a generation: their weapons.

Sometimes prisoners in white pinstripes hobble into the carpeted office that serves as Tajali's courtroom. Their wrists shackled to heavy bars, linked by jangling chains to irons padlocked around their ankles, they stand accused of murder, kidnapping, rape and other crimes.

But Tajali spends most of his time trying to settle arguments over land, the legacy of almost constant war that drove millions of Afghans into exile and made squatters out of many of those who stayed. Most government records survive, but forgers have tampered with many of them, Tajali said.

"Houses have been sold to three or four different people while the owners were totally unaware of what was happening," the judge said.

One laborer, Abdul Jamil, spends most of his time in a nasty legal fight with a neighbor who claimed a piece of his family's land and persuaded a lower-court judge to ignore Jamil's deed.

"If I had a gun, I would take it and fire 30 bullets into the judge's head," Jamil said, touching a leathery finger to the center of his forehead. "But I worry about my children because they would suffer. No justice exists in this country. Justice is only for those who have money to buy it."

AMONG the disputes that have landed in Tajali's court is the case of Khaliq Dad, the 93-year-old patriarch of an extended family of 30 who all live in a single-story, dun-colored house that Dad says he bought 16 years ago.

A cold, damp draft blows through gaps in the windows. The walls are cracked and the paint is chipped. Dad lives in a front room, his aluminum cane standing in a corner by the door. He keeps a 1990 deed to the property tucked under the corner of his mattress.

But Maliha Ali, a refugee returned from Canada, says the house belongs to her and has gone to court to get it back. Her photograph and thumbprint, along with those of Dad and two witnesses, are on Dad's copy of the deed, but she insists she only leased the property to him.

The witnesses can't be found, nor can a copy of the deed filed with the Treasury Department. Ali doesn't have documents to prove her side of the story. But she says that Dad's copy is a forgery.

"He is a gangster," sneered Ali, who brought a relative named Wahidullah, a tall, thick-necked man with a booming voice, to court as her bodyguard. "I have not given them any documents, so it is all made up."

A senior Supreme Court official who reviewed the deed at The Times' request said he was confident the document was authentic. The official spoke on the condition he not be identified because the court had not ruled on Dad's appeal.

But in separate trials, three lower-court judges declared Dad's copy a forgery. Dad said they also rejected a letter from Karzai's palace asking for a Supreme Court review of the case.

One judge sentenced the old man to a year in prison, which will stretch to three years if he doesn't give up his court battle.

Dad, wearing lenses as thick as magnifying glasses, says he can see just one logical reason justice would turn against him. "I think the woman has paid all of the judges who worked on this case," he said. "She has also paid the police."

Dad says he refuses to bribe anyone because it would dishonor him before God. He doesn't have much money anyway. One of his sons is a driver for the government. The other, a guard at a children's hospital, lost a leg in a land mine blast.

He doesn't have a lawyer, but his opponent does: She hired Ahmad Shah, an edgy young man in a black leather cap and matching jacket. Shah said he didn't want to talk about the case.

"Don't drag me into these problems," he said with a sheepish grin. "I am a poor guy working to earn some money for my children."

WHEN Kabul pharmacist Nader Naderi fled Afghanistan's civil war in 1992, a warlord named Gulabuddin Shirzai took over the family home. Naderi returned briefly to find a tank parked outside, and recalls that Shirzai told him, "If you like your life, leave and don't come back."

The arrival of foreign troops five years ago made it safe for Naderi to return more permanently. By that time, Shirzai was renting out the three-room house for $10,000 a year. Naderi spent the next several years trying to persuade numerous judges to return his property, but they kept telling him his file was lost.

Naderi started treating them to lunch. Suddenly his documents surfaced. "One day when I was sitting with the judges and some other people, one of them was complaining that his washing machine wasn't working," he said. "Then another guy sitting there told me, 'He is talking to you.' "

The next day, Naderi said, he delivered a new washing machine to Abdul Wakil Amini, a prosecutor involved in his case. "Later, when some monitors came from the court, the police station and other departments to see my house and to gather all my documents, the same guy asked for a refrigerator," Naderi said. "So I bought a fridge for him."

But after paying off every clerk, prosecutor and judge who held out a hand, Naderi said, he still didn't have his house. So this year he went to the justice minister's office and stood his ground.

"Every morning when he was coming in, I said, 'Good morning, minister,' and every afternoon when he was leaving I said, 'Good afternoon, minister.' Then finally, after 10 days, he said, 'Do you work here?' "

Naderi explained his predicament. The justice minister listened and wrote an order to the court to give him his house back. "The next day, when I went to the court with his letter, the guy there told me: 'Give me $4,000, because you have direct orders. For others, it costs a lot more,' " Naderi said.

He estimates it cost $11,000 to reclaim what was his in the first place. Amini, the prosecutor, was fired this fall, but he still lives in a luxurious villa. He denies taking bribes.

Like many Afghans, Naderi feels betrayed by the promise of freedom and wants to leave his homeland again. "You can never have democracy if you can buy justice," he said.

KABUL'S central courts are housed in a complex of dilapidated buildings called the Wulayat, where hundreds of people squat in the dirt parking lot or sit on broken chairs in dingy hallways, waiting to see a judge. Many have spent several years trapped in this legal labyrinth.

Most of the courtrooms are small offices, where judges preside at rickety desks decorated with fake potted plants. Among those seeking justice recently were half a dozen women covered in full-length burkas who sat on the floor, waiting in the shadows for resolution of marital disputes. Children nestled quietly beside them, looking worried but unable to make eye contact with their mothers through the heavy mesh that covered their faces. An argument erupted when a family court judge's tea bearer offered to sell them quicker access to the court.

"Shame on you, you old man!" one woman shouted as the angry servant retreated into the court. "You're demanding a bribe. I'll go tell the judge."

Nearby, another lower-court judge, a soft-spoken Muslim cleric in a dark, tent-shaped hat, sat at a splintering desk in an office with no heat or power. He admitted taking at least $100 a month in bribes. But the judge, who spoke on condition he not be named, insisted that he had no choice because after working 30 years in the justice system, his monthly salary was only $140.

The real crooks are in the higher courts and the department that assigns cases to each court, where the big money changes hands, he said. "There is no justice for judges themselves," he griped.

Karzai promised foreign donors in January that he would fix the justice system by 2010, part of a package of reforms demanded in exchange for billions of dollars more in aid.

Tajali was appointed head of the appellate court this fall. Several people who brought appeals to Tajali said he was a big improvement over his predecessor, who was removed after complaints that he was taking bribes.

The Supreme Court also has removed about 80 lower-court judges. But most will be shifted to new courtrooms after they take retraining seminars, officials said. An international effort to clean up Afghanistan's courts, led by Italy, has sputtered from the start.

"Most of the training courses that we've had from the government of Italy lasted 10 to 15 days, and that isn't enough time to train a judge or a lawyer," Tajali said. Before Afghanistan collapsed into a generation of war, university graduates received oral and practical training in the courts for a year, he said.

Six weeks after Tajali was appointed, a man in a shabby gray suit accompanied by a man in traditional Afghan clothing entered his chambers with a bulging shopping bag. They left empty-handed but happy. The men became nervous when a reporter asked what was in the bag. They said they had given the judge a gift but wouldn't say what it was.

"We only wanted to congratulate the judge for getting his new position," one said as the pair rushed off.

Tajali confirmed that he had received several gifts, including cloth for a new suit and a tall artificial plant with white flowers from the provincial governor. The judge said he hadn't broken any rules because they came from friends and relatives who didn't have cases in his court.

MANY Afghans lay the blame for widespread injustice on the president. Karzai backed an elderly, hard-line cleric who had been appointed chief justice by the transitional government that followed the Taliban.

When the new parliament refused to confirm the judge's reappointment, Karzai chose a U.S.-educated moderate. But by that time, Chief Justice Fazl Hadi Shinwari had stacked the courts. Appointees such as Abdul Rahman, a gruff, long-bearded man, praise harsh Taliban rule for eliminating theft and corruption.

"Now," Rahman said, "you see thieves stealing whole banks in the cities." But in the view of one impoverished man, a ruling by Rahman sanctioned just such a theft by a man of power and prestige.

Jamil, the poor laborer, is trying to protect his land from a retired army officer who lives next door. He said Rahman ruled against him even though he provided the judge with a decades-old deed, tax receipts and supporting letters from local elders and a mullah.

The Supreme Court finally reassigned the case, but only after Jamil went to court every day for 2 1/2 months, losing the little money he could have earned doing odd jobs.

In this conservative Muslim country, many also regard Karzai's refusal to put murderers, rapists, adulterers and others to death as a grave insult to God. When the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, executions were a public spectacle for cheering crowds in Kabul's Olympic Stadium.

Since the mullahs were ousted, the only Afghan put to death has been Abdullah Shah, a member of a militia loyal to warlord Faryadi Sarwar Zardad that manned a notorious checkpoint on the road from Jalalabad to Kabul during the 1990s civil war. Known to most Afghans as "Zardad's dog," he was found guilty of killing 20 people, including his wife, and executed with a bullet to the back of the head in 2004.

Zardad escaped Afghan justice. He was convicted of kidnapping and torture in Britain, where he is a refugee. Britain has banned the death penalty.

About 500 people sentenced to die have not been executed because Karzai hasn't signed the orders, said Rasheed Reshaad, a Supreme Court justice. European governments that are major aid donors to Afghanistan strongly oppose the death penalty.

But Karzai also has the authority to seek alternatives to executions, such as asking a murder victim's family to pardon the killer in return for compensation, said Reshaad, a former California resident. Karzai has upheld at least a dozen death sentences in the last few months.

Reshaad was among the thousands of educated Afghans who fled after the 1979 Soviet invasion. He lived for more than 20 years in San Francisco, where he worked as a paralegal, then returned to Kabul after U.S. and Afghan forces overthrew the Taliban five years ago.

This year, parliament appointed him to the Supreme Court, where he is in charge of some of the most dangerous public security cases, including those involving narcotics and terrorism.

Karzai's defenders maintain that some of the president's worst mistakes in rebuilding the justice system, such as making former warlords police chiefs and putting them in other powerful positions, were forced on him by foreign backers, led by the United States.

"He was put in this unfortunate position that even his mistakes were made for him," said Jawed Ludin, Karzai's chief of staff.

"There were different ways of doing things, and he would have chosen the way that the Afghan people wanted. There would have been a clean slate. He would have acted decisively, gotten rid of troublemakers and had a fresh start.

"But then he had to draw up another strategy, a strategy of inclusion giving everyone a right — criminals, gangsters, the Taliban," Ludin said. "Everyone had a right to be part of this process."

TAJALI passed the case of Dad, the patriarch, back down to officials for another review on Nov. 12. But the same day, police took Dad from his home to an interrogation room at the courts complex, where he was grilled by prosecutors and his opponent's lawyer.

He emerged trembling with rage, on the verge of tears. He walked slowly to the street, through mud and cold winter rain, trying to steady himself with his cane.

"It is brutal, it is really brutal. There is no justice. Now I will have to kill them," he said, glancing over his shoulder at the glaring prosecutor and police.

But the next day he was back in the fight, appealing to the Supreme Court. During an argument in a hallway, the lawyer beat Dad, bruising the elderly man's forehead and hands.

The next day, several police officers with assault rifles were at Dad's gate. The prosecutor, who refused to identify himself, shouted death threats.

They finally backed off after senior officers intervened. The Supreme Court sent the case back to Tajali, leaving 30 people wondering whether the police would come again to kick them out in the middle of winter.

Dad, a proud, battered man shamed in front of his family, doesn't blame his government, the foreign advisors who are trying to help it rebuild the country or the thousands of foreign troops who are fighting the resurgent Taliban. While the corrupt and powerful tilt the scales of justice in their favor, he said, ordinary Afghans also have been poisoned by greed.

Taliban-led insurgents exploit the disenchantment to recruit new fighters, and a fragile democracy hangs in the balance.

"The government has tried everything. Why should other countries lose their sons fighting here?" Dad asked. "There is no justice. We just chase after the money."

Afghan MPs struggle to find voice By Mark Dummett - BBC News, Kabul

In Afghanistan's parliament, former enemies politely wait their turn to speak, and women debate with warlords.

The country's first parliament in more than 30 years is regularly cited, by the Kabul government and its foreign backers, as one of the great achievements of the post-Taleban era.

"This gathering shows that all of the people of Afghanistan are unified," President Hamid Karzai said at the swearing-in ceremony on 19 December last year.

The 91-year-old former king Zahir Shah felt it was "a step towards rebuilding Afghanistan after decades of fighting". "The people of Afghanistan will succeed!" he exclaimed to applause from the new members of parliament, and guests who included US Vice-President Dick Cheney.

In a recent debate in the Wolesi Jirga, or lower house, the VIPs were absent, but the slogans were similar. "In our 5,000-year history, Afghans have defeated every country that has invaded us," one MP said.

"All of us here in the parliament should stand together, for the sake of the unity of our country." That day the MPs were discussing one of the key challenges facing Afghanistan - how to stop the insurgents crossing the border with Pakistan.

But for all the fighting talk, at the end of the debate, they could only agree on one course of action - to issue a press release condemning a statement allegedly made by Pakistan's foreign minister.

This seems illustrative of the fact that beyond its symbolic importance, Afghanistan's parliament has little to show for its first year - a period which has coincided with the escalation of conflict in the south and east of the country.

Malalai Shinwari, one of the 68 women, admits the MPS are still learning their jobs. "As the representatives of the people, we should advise the government make good policy," she said. "We do have power in our hands. But it is now up to us to decide how to use that power."

In May MPs flexed their muscles for the first time, and used their powers to veto President Karzai's nominee for chief justice of the Supreme Court, and five of his ministers.

But according to Nasima Niazi, who represents Helmand province, where British troops have been battling the Taleban, at other times they are simply ignored.

She says that neither Nato nor the Afghan army have involved them in their struggle to defeat the insurgents by "winning hearts and minds" in Helmand.

"We are not happy because the government does not consult us about the problems in Helmand, and neither do the international forces.

"Even when we asked for a meeting with the authorities there, they said they didn't care who we were," she said. Within the assembly, too, she says she sometimes finds it hard to make herself heard by religious conservatives.

"Most of them don't want to hear women's voices, and turn off our microphones, but we will continue with our struggle. "We want to be listened to, like women in other countries' parliaments," she said.

In the eyes of some Afghans, the MPs' authority is weak because many have links to militia groups.

Instead of being investigated for war crimes, it is alleged many have been able to buy, or cajole themselves into parliament. But it seems there is little that can be done for now.

"There has been a lot of injustice and cruelty, but we don't have a government which can bring people to justice," admits Maulvi Abdelaziz, an MP from north-eastern Badakhshan province.

It has clearly been a slow start for the parliament. But according to a recent report by a think-tank, the International Crisis Group, if the government wants to defeat the insurgency, it needs to involve MPs much more.

"The national assembly as the voice of the people needs to be listened to," the report says. "Afghanistan needs more democracy, not less."

[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.]