In this bulletin:

• Clashes in Afghanistan kill 40 militants
• Four killed, 25 injured in suicide blast
• School set alight in Maidan Wardak
• Feature: Poor economy, plans reasons for low literacy
• U.S., EU pledges over 3 bln USD to Afghanistan
• Afghanistan wakes to false dawn
• Analysis: NATO`s crisis in Afghanistan
• Canadians find link between Taliban, drug trade during furious firefight
• Canadian Forces airdropping supplies for first time in half-century
• AFGHANISTAN: THE NO FROM PACIFISTS
• U.S. company lays groundwork for Afghan telecommunications
• Taliban gets smart in Afghanistan's propaganda war
• Pakistan's 'jihadi option' threatens regional peace: analysts
• Afghanistan respects cultural pluralism: embassy
• Refuge from the real Afghanistan

Clashes in Afghanistan kill 40 militants - Associated Press By NOOR KHAN 
7/15/06

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan - Coalition and Afghan forces killed more than 40 militants across southern Afghanistan on Saturday, including 10 in a large-scale air assault aimed at wresting a desert town from Taliban control

More than 300 British paratroopers, backed by U.S. and Canadian forces, launched an early morning raid on Helmand province's insurgent stronghold of Sangin, where hundreds of Taliban had massed in preparation for launching attacks, coalition spokesman Maj. Scott Lundy said.

"The coalition conducted a large-scale air assault before dawn with helicopter-borne infantry dropped on several positions," Lundy told The Associated Press. "Coalition forces killed 10 Taliban and drove the others out, but it is difficult to say if the remainder are still nearby."

Coalition troops and Taliban militants also skirmished throughout the southern Uruzgan province Friday into Saturday, with an estimated 31 insurgents killed in and around Chora district, said Lt. Col. Paul Fitzpatrick.

The clashes come amid stepped-up U.S.-led efforts to crush armed extremists, primarily the Taliban, behind a bloody insurgency raging across Afghanistan, particularly in the south.

Separately, the U.S. military said it will cooperate with an Afghan government team probing reports of civilian casualties in a southern air raid Monday in Uruzgan's provincial capital of Tirin Kot.

The military, however, said in a statement that it has no information to support claims that civilians were killed or wounded in the raid, which U.S. forces estimated killed more than 40 Taliban extremists. Residents wounded in the assault have said at least four civilians, including children, were among the injured.

On Thursday, Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who has previously criticized coalition attacks that killed civilians, ordered an inquiry into the latest reports. A five-member team of officials has traveled to the city to interview local authorities and residents.

Lundy said operations will continue in Sangin until the Taliban threat is wiped out and coalition forces win over local support for Afghan reconstruction.

"This operation seeks to remove the Taliban from the security equation in Sangin," said Brig. Gen. David Fraser, commander of coalition forces in southern Afghanistan.

More than 3,000 British forces are deploying in Helmand province, hundreds of them operating in the Sangin area in the northern part of the province bordering Kandahar. The town is in a "natural corridor" for Taliban and criminal movement in southern Afghanistan, Lundy said.

Afghan and coalition soldiers also killed two male "foreigners" wearing burkas — the body-shrouding veil worn by women — and detained five Taliban in Uruzgan's Dihrawud district on Friday, an Afghan Defense Ministry statement said. The men's nationalities were unclear.

Soldiers at the scene later found an explosives-rigged vest, 16 roadside bombs and other explosive material, the statement said.

Elsewhere in Uruzgan, Afghan and coalition soldiers repelled an attack by 20 insurgents, killing one, the U.S. military said.

Militants also attacked an Afghan army convoy in southern Zabul province's Shinkay district Friday, sparking a gunbattle that killed four Taliban, said local army commander Razzaq Khan. Soldiers detained one Taliban.

Outside Zabul's provincial capital early Saturday, a Taliban rocket-propelled grenade attack on a convoy delivering supplies to U.S.-led coalition forces killed one bystander and wounded a truck driver, said police chief Noor Mohammed. Police responding to the attack wounded two militants and captured another.

Afghanistan is gripped by the deadliest spate of violence since the Taliban's late 2001 ouster in a U.S.-led invasion for harboring al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden. More than 700 people, mainly militants, have been killed since mid-May.

Four killed, 25 injured in suicide blast

GARDEZ, July 16 (Pajhwok Afghan News): At least four people were killed and 25 others injured in a suicide blast on Sunday in Gardez city, capital of the southeastern Paktia province.

A doctor at the main civil hospital of the city said they received four bodies of victims and 25 wounded so far. However, provincial police chief Abdul Hanan Raufi said two civilians were killed and an Afghan soldier was wounded in the attack. He said a bomber detonated explosives wrapped around his body as he reached near a convoy of the US-led coalition forces and Afghan National Army (ANA).

Provincial reporter of Pajhwok Afghan News, Elyas Wahdat, who was also wounded in the attack, informed from hospital the bomber detonated himself close to the convoy in the city around 300pm. Governor's office, police headquarters and some other governmental departments are located just hundreds of metres to the scene. This is the 34 th suicide attack during the past four months in Afghanistan.

School set alight in Maidan Wardak - MAIDAN SHAHR ( Pajhwok News Agency 07/16/2006 By Zubair Babakarkhel)

A primary girls' school was torched in Saidabad district of the central Maidan Wardak province last night, teachers and eyewitnesses said on Friday. Half of the school's building was reduced to ashes in the fire that was ignited around midnight and continued till morning in Lwari village.

Ahmad Jan Azimi, a teacher at the school, told Pajhwok Afghan News half of the building was burnt before the villagers tried to control the fire. It was the only school for a village of 500 homes.

A resident of the village Naqibullah Wardak said he also saw a paper attached to the school by the miscreants reading as "We do not want girl schools."

Provincial officials showed their unawareness about the incident. Arson attacks on school have increased this year in parts of the country. Recently, co-education primary school in Chardara district of the northern Kunduz province was set ablaze.

More than 160 schools have been set alight since about beginning of this year in arson attacks by militants, officials often call them enemies of the country.

Feature: Poor economy, plans reasons for low literacy

HERAT CITY, July 14 (Pajhwok Afghan News): Education officials termed poor economy and limited plans of donors as main reasons for low literacy level in the western Herat province.

Mohammad Din Fahim, director of the Education Department in Herat, said $210 million were spent on education institutions. Some people were of the view that reconstruction plans were not in accordance with the budget and initial changes in education system might yet be seen, he added.

Confirming limited plans by the donors, Fahim said: "If we were not agreed with donors plans, they would have shifted their projects to other countries like Iraq."

Engineer Syed Ali Ahmad Mansuri, head of the Economy Department, said: "The fund allocated for Afghanistan can never be shifted to Iraq or other countries."

He said they were getting share for Herat from fund allocated for education, and then granting permission to the non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

Though the education has brought positive impacts in the province but insecurity has affected the process of learning.

Munira, a student of vocational institute in Herat, earlier she was studying in tented-school when other students were reading in advanced institutions.

It merits a mention that according to director of education 460,000 students including 250,000 girls were busy in studying in 545 schools that are more as compared with other provinces.

Problems may not be seen only in backward institutions but also in advanced schools in the province. One of such considerable schools is Sultan Ghiasudin Ghori High School that was paid great attention by France and Germany. Though the school has thousands of students but its problems are multifarious.

Khwaja Mirwais, a teacher at the school, said instead of focusing on one school money should be spent on the makeshift schools.

He said: "Though our school is a model in the province but still students of fifteen classes are reading in makeshifts and on grounds."

The teachers said the tents were ragged after many years use and would not be further utilized. Long and ugly wars have badly shattered the country and has made a centre of problems, but many people think that best administrative organizations can solve the obstacles.

U.S., EU pledges over 3 bln USD to Afghanistan

The United States and the European Union have pledged more assistance of over 3 billion U.S. dollars to post-war Afghanistan, Afghan Foreign Minister Rangin Dadfar Spanta said Saturday.

"In addition to its previous contributions, the U.S. agreed to provide 2 billion U.S. dollars fresh assistance to Afghanistan in order to support and equip Afghan national army and police," Spanta told newsmen after returning home from a two-week long tour to the United States and Europe.

The European Union would provide 1 billion Euros (about 1.3 billion U.S. dollars) to Afghanistan to rebuild itself, he added.

However, he did not say when the fund will be disbursed to the Afghan government.

Both the United States and the European Union have hugely contributed in the rebuilding of the post-Taliban nation over the past nearly five years. Source: Xinhua

Afghanistan wakes to false dawn - Paul McGeough Sydney Morning Herald Chief Herald Correspondent in Kabul - July 15, 2006

SUDDENLY Afghanistan is a mess. Against the daily grind of bad news from Baghdad, Kabul had been a more optimistic beachhead for Washington. New roads cut through man-eating deserts and leapt treacherous mountains; girls were joyfully back in the classroom.

The luxury $US250-a-night ($330) Serena Hotel opened with fanfare and a Kabul taxi firm imported a stretch limo for wedding parties. Mobile phone sales and new email accounts are surging.

Millions of refugees have come home to a new constitution and there have been heroic election turnouts. And through it all, President Hamid Karzai strutted the globe like an elegant starburst, greeting fellow leaders in an array of tribal hats and colourful coats that earned him a place on magazines' best-dressed lists.

But as Afghan households count their meagre gains in this new dawn, a troubling sentiment is emerging. Afghans now openly criticise their leader and, during riots in May, wild mobs burnt his image in the streets.

The wealthy have become exceptionally so, but the poor languish as their homes are bulldozed to make way for poppy palaces and narco-villas.

There is still the stench of raw sewage in the streets; power is rationed because the Electricity Ministry cannot pay its fuel bill; there is little running water. Teachers and the police complain of insufficient and erratic pay. Kabulis grumble furiously about the aggression and arrogance with which the armoured convoys of US and NATO forces and foreign security contractors have taken over the streets.

Unemployment is chronic and, with average wages just $US60 a month, all struggle against rocketing prices in the bazaars and a wild property market - a house that fetched $US20 rent a month under the Taliban now pulls more than $US3000 from a foreign aid agency.

Despite 14 per cent growth last year, the economy is essentially drugs and donations. Virtually no taxes are collected. Big dollars are doled out for reconstruction. But after crippling security costs and profit-taking, as contracts are sold from one company to the next, there is often little left to build roads or public facilities.

In the shade of a tree near the hut from which he rents out big cooking pots for wedding feasts, 45-year-old Khalilullah ventured that life was better since the fall of the Taliban. But then he reconsidered. "Nothing is really changed. There are no benefits for the people … our expectations have not been fulfilled.

"We can move around more than we did under the Taliban. But with insecurity and higher prices people are losing faith in Karzai and the US."

Estimating that maybe half the people had turned against Karzai, a Kandahar MP, Fariba Ahmadzai, warned: "If we can't make serious decisions and act on them, this country will not be rebuilt. The lawlessness and insecurity is very disappointing."

International support for Karzai's government is also slipping. The European Union's Frances Vendrell told Newsweek: "Karzai has not been able to act firmly - many provincial governors are incompetent and corrupt and many police chiefs are linked to the drug trade and criminal groups."

In the face of a stinging Taliban resurgence in the south this summer, there is a disturbing frequency in villagers expressing the sentiment that allowed the Taliban to snatch Afghanistan from the mujahideen in the 1990s - they don't care which side wins, just as long as the fighting stops.

Simmering uncertainty about the fate of the Afghanistan venture has exploded in rancour and an unseemly blame game. A conspiracy of events began in May - anti-US and anti-Government riots in Kabul resulted in 16 deaths and more than 100 injured after a US military vehicle collided with a civilian vehicle; and there was anger over claims that more than 30 civilians died in a mistaken US air strike in the south.

A crisis of confidence among diplomats and the foreign military brass in Kabul is also fuelled by other developments: expectations of a record opium crop that will confirm five years of Western failure to tackle the Afghan narco-menace; and the Taliban's links with drug smugglers to extract support from the poppy-growing regions across the south.

Running operations from Pakistan, the Taliban now claim to have more than 12,000 men under arms and to be in control of more than 20 districts across their old southern heartland provinces of Kandahar, Zabul, Helmand and Uruzgan. The total poppy crop is worth almost $US3 billion a year.

Local government and police chiefs are rolling over for the Taliban to the extent that a local MP told the Herald: "It's a Taliban government down south now - the Afghan and foreign military can move only by aircraft; Kabul controls only five to 20 per cent of the southern provinces."

The Taliban are taking advantage of the planned handover of security in the south from the US to NATO on August 1. European governments had been confidently planning for development and reconstruction but they have been landing in an all-out war. Already Britain is packing hundreds more reinforcements onto aircraft.

The Taliban have warned villagers that the foreigners have come south to eradicate their only cash crop - the opium poppy - and that the switch of forces really amounts to an American retreat.

Their tactics have changed markedly since they were bundled out of Kabul in 2001. Now Taliban fighters swarm in 100-strong battle groups and make effective use of the same tools used by the Iraqi insurgency: suicide attacks and roadside bombs; intimidation and blood-curdling mutilation for villagers who don't succumb. They use the internet to spread their message just as effectively as their mosque noticeboards, and run their own sharia courts.

Dad Mohammed Khan, a sacked local intelligence chief who was elected to parliament, said: "People listen to the Taliban now because they are afraid, and that keeps them silent about the movement of the Taliban. They believed there would be a lot of help when the Americans came, but they are disappointed at getting nothing and they are turning against the foreigners. "Increasingly, they doubt that the US can defeat the Taliban."

He estimated that as many as 50 Taliban supporters operated from key mosques, taking turns to fight or distribute dreaded "night letters", which carry threats against schools and other symbols of Kabul's or American power.

But Mullah Salam Rocketti, a reformed Taliban MP, cautioned against any expectation that the Taliban might widen their activity beyond the south. "They don't have the power to take territory and hold it for a long time. But they can disturb the peace and, day by day, that causes instability … they can't fight the foreigners for long periods, but they can take on the Afghan military."

Afghanistan is a clash that can still go either way. A beleaguered army of foreign forces, diplomats and aid workers fights for the concepts of democracy to take root. The willingness of millions of Afghans to vote in the face of violent threats revealed hunger for a new life. But they are up against an amoral, self-serving elite that operates with a reckless sense of impunity as it divides the spoils of power in backroom deals that have little to do with democracy.

Kabul's fledgling press is in revolt over attempts to curb reporting. A United Nations report that implicates much of the political elite as brutal war criminals is being suppressed and, at the last minute, Karzai brazenly added 13 warlords with links to drugs and private militias to a list of 100 new police chiefs. One of the worst is Kabul's new top cop.

When Atta Mohammad Noor, a warlord turned governor, addressed police in the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif recently, observers were stunned. He said: "Corruption increases day by day. You are partners with gamblers, bandits, brothels, alcohol dealers and even pickpockets. The criminals who are your partners operate freely. The only ones who get arrested are those who are not your associates - and even they get released after paying bribes."

A Kabul diplomat acknowledged the new uncertainty but said Karzai "is more secure than most credit … The truth is he's the only person who can command legitimacy at this stage of the process". But many are fearful. Ramazan Bachardoust, the Kabul MP, says history could repeat: "Before the mujahideen leaders gave way to the Taliban, there was a lot of corruption as the leaders took the best houses, the best land and the best cars for themselves. We're seeing it all again."

As it prepares to quit the south, the US rejects accusations of policy failure. But the fact that 6000 troops are replacing only 3000 Americans is an implicit acceptance that on the Americans' watch the Taliban regained control of much of the same region from which they snatched Afghanistan in the 1990s. And, that while the Taliban reduced poppy cultivation to virtually zero in 2001, Washington and its allies are watching over the mother of all opium harvests this year.

One of Karzai's old allies, the sacked governor of Helmand, Sher Mohammed, warns: "It would be a dreadful mistake if the international community cannot give our president unified support, because Afghanistan and the world will not find another Hamid Karzai."

Just as the US rejects comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam, it bridles at a growing tendency to compare Afghanistan with Iraq. But a Kabul-based human rights observer just back from Washington said: "They're scratching their heads, asking 'How did it come to this?' and 'What are we going to do now?"'

Analysis: NATO`s crisis in Afghanistan - By Martin Sieff Jul 14, 2006

WASHINGTON, DC, United States (UPI) -- The United States handed over primary responsibility for peacekeeping in Afghanistan to NATO. It seemed like a good idea at the time. However, now the policy has fallen apart and presented the alliance with its greatest crisis in a quarter-century.

For NATO`s forces in Afghanistan are no longer peacekeepers. They are being forced to defend themselves as warriors. And they lack the numbers, the air power and the logistical support to even defend themselves adequately.

NATO`s peacekeeping role in Afghanistan was supposed to mark a proud milestone for the venerable alliance. Instead of defending the democratic nations of Western Europe from communist aggression as it did so successfully for 40 years through the Cold War, the new, broader and grander NATO was supposed to step out on to the world stage and 'export security' to unstable nations that needed it throughout the Middle East and Central Asia.

Afghanistan, unlike Iraq, was supposed to be an ideal pioneering showcase for this new role. There was not supposed to be a war to fight as the United States and its Afghan allies had already topped the Taliban in the winter of 2001-2002. And Afghanistan was not a controversial war among America`s European NATO allies the way Iraq became from the very beginning.

The need to topple the Taliban who had protected Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida while they plotted the Sept. 11, 2001, atrocities was obvious to all. German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who later suffered President George W. Bush`s enmity for opposing the war in Iraq, took huge political risks earlier when he took the unprecedented decision to deploy thousands of German soldiers in Afghanistan outside the territory of NATO`s member states for the very first time in the history of Germany`s participation in the alliance.

President Bush and U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld welcomed the idea of handing over security responsibilities in Afghanistan to their NATO allies and to Australian forces because it could obscure from the American public the embarrassing fact that the United States was becoming totally isolated in Iraq in real terms.

Even Britain, the one effective U.S. military ally in Iraq, is preparing to pull its ground forces out of that country. Also, precisely because Bush and Rumsfeld thought the Afghan war was already won, they did not mind handing over peacekeeping in Afghanistan to a NATO alliance and to European allies that they have consistently treated with contempt over the past six years.

But the whole U.S. and NATO strategy in Afghanistan rested on two false assumptions: The first was that the war was over and that the Taliban and their allies could never seriously revive there. However, they have indeed done so. And now they have already Afghan President Hamid Karzai of effective power anywhere where U.S., NATO and Australian soldiers do not patrol outside his capital Kabul.

The second false assumption of U.S. policymakers was even more serious. It was that NATO -- which has been steadily expanding in member states and total population since the collapse of communism, could project any real military power outside the borders of its constituent nations.

Instead, NATO`s fate since the collapse of communism has been that of a rapidly expanding ink blot: The further it grows, the feebler it becomes.

Far from growing in military power, NATO has been steadily losing it, precisely because none of its new members is capable of exporting military and security beyond their own borders. Germany and France have only feeble independent airlift capabilities beyond NATO`s European heartland. Britain, supposedly the most impressive European NATO member in terms of such capabilities, is down to only five aging Lockheed Martin Tristars, that can carry a total of 1,330 troops and their automatic rifles and personal gear at any one time.

So feeble is Britain`s independent airlift capacity that, as recent articles in the British press have documented, the 8,000 exhausted and overstretched British troops still serving across southern Iraq have had to endure vastly extended tours of duty there because Royal Air Force lacks the airlift capacity to rotate them out and replace them.

And in Afghanistan, British units under attack from Taliban and other rebel guerrilla forces have had to wait for up to four hours for that support to come because the available air support capability is so limited.

The U.S. Air Force alone of the major NATO allies retains a truly formidable tactical ground support force. A single supersonic B-1 bomber can now deliver a rain of devastating ordinance with unerring accuracy on to any pinpointed target anywhere in Afghanistan -- or anywhere else, for that matter.

But the U.S. Air Force, like the other U.S. armed forces, already has its hands full in Iraq. Therefore any additional military conflict, or the immediate threat of one, with either North Korea or Iran -- let alone countries at the same time -- would stretch its operational capabilities to the limit.

NATO was not supposed to need to rely on U.S. air power in Afghanistan. The conflict there was supposed to be over, not escalating, and the Atlantic Alliance was supposed to be getting stronger, not weaker.

Instead, the ever expanding balloon full of hot air that NATO has become is being humiliated by the same relative handful of Afghan tribal warriors who were supposed to have been lastingly routed four and a half years ago.

As Stanley Kober of the Cato Institute in Washington told UPI, 'The fate of NATO is being decided on the hills of Waziristan.' It is not a reassuring prospect.

Canadians find link between Taliban, drug trade during furious firefight - Saturday, July 15, 2006 - CanWest News Service

HELMAND PROVINCE, Afghanistan -- Canadian soldiers have seized an estimated $3 million in opium from a mud-walled Taliban compound after an outnumbered Canadian reconnaissance patrol held off more than two dozen fighters until additional firepower arrived.

"It confirms what we knew but hadn't seen -- Ethe physical evidence that there is a direct connection between Taliban activities and the drug trade here," said Lt.-Col. Ian Hope, commander of the Canadian battlegroup in southern Afghanistan. "The Taliban is funded in large part by the opium trade."

Afghanistan is the world's largest producer of opium, which is refined into heroin. In the 30-minute firefight Thursday, one Canadian soldier survived a bullet to the back when the slug hit the armour plate in his flak vest.

Thursday's engagement was followed on Friday by more fighting for Canadian troops, who engaged twice twice with the Taliban in Helmand province but suffered no casualties.

After Thursday's battle, troops found five dead Taliban but believe many more were killed. "The enemy is very good at policing up their own battlefield," said Capt. Jon Hamilton, who led the reconnaissance mission. "They'll pick up their own dead."

The 12 soldiers set out early Thursday morning to probe a suspected cell of Taliban making improvised explosive devices (IEDs), which are often homemade bombs concealed on the sides of roads.

The patrol crossed a small footbridge in a lush area of orchards, fields and trees in the Helmand River valley and spotted the Taliban less than 50 metres away, hurrying into one of two mud-walled compounds.

Once the fighters were inside, they opened fire through windows and holes punched through walls. "They began to launch RPGrockets, lots of small-arms fire," Hamilton said.

A group of Taliban began shooting from trees to the soldiers left. "We got a good volume of fire down. We were beating them back, and then they decided to try to flank us on our right," he said.

"We were receiving fire from three different sides. We were quite outnumbered and did our best to hold them and fight back." Four Canadian light armoured vehicles (LAVs) armed with machine-guns and rapid fire cannons, arrived.

"They started to get the 25-millimetre cannons down on the enemy, and began to push them back," Hamilton said. The fighters retreated about 250 metres before fleeing.

A search of the compound turned up sacks of opium paste, totalling more than 70 kilograms, an RPG (rocket-propelled grenade)launcher, four rockets, an AK-47 and ammunition, a passport and documents.

"We did achieve some element of surprise," Hamilton said. "If they knew we were coming, they probably wouldn't have left that stuff out."

On Friday, Canadian troops engaged twice with the Taliban in Helmand province. A reconnaissance platoon inspecting bridges came under attack by RPG rockets and small arms.

Reinforcements arrived within 10 minutes, and a Canadian artillery group seven kilometres away fired one of Canada's four new 155-millimetre Howitzer guns in support. The Canadians suffered no casualties, but believe the enemy did, Hope said.

Close to the same time, and 11 kilometres to the south, American soldiers also doing bridge reconnaissance were fired upon. Four Canadian LAVs joined the U.S. soldiers in a 40-minute battle. No Taliban dead were found, but there was evidence of casualties, Hope said. "There's body parts and blood trails," he said.

Canadian Forces airdropping supplies for first time in half-century - Friday, July 14, 2006 - CanWest News Service

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — For the first time since the Korean War, Canadian Forces are parachuting supplies to support combat troops.

The same type of airplane that on Monday carried the body of fallen Canadian soldier Cpl. Anthony Boneca home has been put into service dropping ammunition, food, water, razor wire and sandbags to coalition soldiers on combat missions.

Each flight of the Hercules CC-130 airplane dedicated to the supply missions can deploy up to 14,500 kilograms of material, which is dropped from the plane and floats by parachute to the ground.

The Hercules will fly from the Kandahar Airfield coalition base in southern Afghanistan. A detachment of 13 people is required to operate the air-drop missions.

Although Canada hasn't used such drops to supply combat troops since the 1950-53 Korean War, the Canadian Forces in 1991 conducted humanitarian-assistance air-drops to Kurds in northern Iraq at the end of the first Gulf War.

AFGHANISTAN: THE NO FROM PACIFISTS - Saturday July 15, 2006

(AGI) - Rome, 15 Jul - "Against war, with no ifs or buts. Out of Iraq, out of Afghanistan". This was the theme of the meeting held by leading figures in the pacifist movement - associations, politicians, leading figures in the cultural world - that took place this morning in Rome. 'Dissident' senators from the Refoundation, the Verdi and the Italian Communists were also present, against the refinancing of the mission in Afghanistan.

A 'round up' of personalities who concluded the four hour meeting in Rome at the Frentani congress centre with a motion which repeats, once more, the no to war. "Our cry - the final motion reads - is heard while in the Middle East a new, old, war is violently re-emerges with the indiscriminate use of bombings. A war that, increasingly, seems like a privileged tool of the stronger and more powerful states in the world. It is against this war - it reads - that we intend to fight, without mediation, because where war is concerned, there can be no mediation".

Included in the matters mentioned by the motion, that was greeted with long and enthusiastic applause, was 'solidarity with the Palestinian people the constitution of a lay and democratic state in the territories occupied since '67 and with Jerusalem". But also "out of Iraq and out of Afghanistan. The military occupation of these countries, does not represent a solution to a problem, but is the problem itself" the organisers write. Included amongst the other points was that of a "reduction in military expenditure" and abandoning "the military and nuclear bases on Italian soil".

But this morning's meeting also allowed the voice of the 'pacifist' wing of the majority to be heard. "D'Alema doesn't frighten me when he says that he could cease being Foreign Minister, just as the bombs in Kosovo didn't frighten me" claimed Ferdinando Rossi, PDCI senator and a member of the group of eight 'dissidents'. "They tell us - Rossi added - that we're an arrogant minority when they are a 'common law couple': DS and DL, associated with The Italy of Values and the Radicals, put together to make a programme".

Cesare Salvi, president of the Senate Justice Commission, said: "I don't know how I'll vote in Parliament; I'll decide together with other left wing MPs when the text of the measure is available. The fundamental point - Salvi added - is that there are issues to be discussed regarding these themes: I'm against this war but certainly it won't be my vote that brings down the government. For sure, however, we'll have to face those who are against these wars. I said so eight times in the previous legislature". For Marco Ferrando, who recently set up the Workers Communist Party (PCL) "our aim is that of a parliamentary group that is different regarding Afghanistan, keeps going and does not stop half way".

For Ferrando this means "voting no, not only against the decree but also against the parliamentary motion that accompanies it, because certain aspects of the text of the motion are worse the decree". Ferrando issued a warning: "If you vote no, the conclusion must be drawn that, in the sense that you vote no to a war you break with the party that votes for it and you take on the responsibility of political independence.

We - he concluded - like the PCL, are open to all forces that want to build, with us, a left wing opposition in Italy"- For Franca Rame, Italy of Values leading figure, "Italy is a country that is getting progressively poorer. First it was in the big cities, now it's in the small towns. Once, she said, the public canteens were full of the homeless. Now entire families eat there, so we need to think about the fact that many, not all, of our boys sent to countries at war, go there because otherwise they would be unemployed. I hope - she concluded - that there will be a good debate in the Senate and in Parliament". (AGI) -

U.S. company lays groundwork for Afghan telecommunications

WASHINGTON: Afghanistan’s fledgling Ministry of Communications now is "connected," thanks to a U.S. telecommunications firm that has set up a satellite network in the country.

Globecomm Systems Inc. (GSI), headquartered in Hauppauge, New York, has completed a government communications network that connects the 38 ministries in the Afghan capital Kabul to the 34 provincial capitals.

David Hershberg, GSI’s chief executive officer, said that within the last two years his company won contracts from the Afghan Ministry of Communications (MOC) to set up two telecommunications networks in Afghanistan. The new government communications network, funded by a $15.4 million World Bank grant, was the first of these contracts.

The second, funded by a $14.2 million grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), is to set up a district communications network. So far, 110 districts have been connected by phone, fax and Internet, according to a July 3 posting on the MOC Web site. The remaining 255 districts are expected to be in the system by mid-2007.

Hershberg said GSI staff in Afghanistan comprises eight foreign nationals of American, Canadian, Turkish and Filipino origin, and 15 Afghan nationals. GSI also works with around 100 Afghans of different ethnic groups through a local partner called Watan (Country).

Tom O’ Neil, GSI’s country manager, said the work has been "very difficult but rewarding," adding that no other American telecommunications company has been so heavily involved in the field in Afghanistan. He emphasized the active "mentorship" program provided by GSI to train Afghan workers.

GSI’s other projects include a $7.4 million U.S. Department of Defense subcontract from DasNet Corporation, a network systems integration firm located in Bohemia, New York. The project will provide equipment and personnel to support a communications network for the Afghan national army. The project is due for completion in September.

Amirzai Sangin, a telecommunications engineer, heads Afghanistan’s Ministry of Communication. He fled Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion in 1980 and pursued a telecommunications career in Sweden for 20 years before returning to Afghanistan soon after September 11. In 2004, Sangin was appointed the chief executive officer of Afghan Telecom, which oversees telecommunications services throughout Afghanistan on behalf of the ministry.

Progress in the telecommunications sector has bolstered Afghanistan’s overall development efforts. Jim Craft, senior telecommunications adviser with the State Department’s Afghanistan Reconstruction Group in Kabul, said the information communications technology (ICT) sector so far "has generated more foreign investment, high-quality jobs, and new tax revenue than any other sector." He said the number of mobile phone subscribers in the country has grown from nearly zero in 2001 to 1 million today. An Afghan-run private-sector company, Roshan (Light), has about 600,000 subscribers, yielding more than 4 percent of the total tax revenue of the Afghan government.

Afghanistan’s telecom success was singled out by the Intelligent Community Forum, which gave the Communications Ministry of Afghanistan its "Visionary of the Year" award at a June 9 ceremony in New York. The forum praised the ministry and Sangin for successfully overseeing the implementation of a "turnkey" multitechnology voice and data infrastructure at an "impressive rate."

Afghanistan’s consul general in New York, Mohammad Sadiq Daudzai, accepting the award on behalf of the ministry, said it "validates the progress we have made in Afghanistan" because telecommunications is central to the country’s overall reconstruction efforts.

The Intelligent Community Forum is a nonprofit entity that focuses on the uses of broadband and information technology for economic development. According to Jim Craft, a delegation of Afghan ICT leaders, including Sangin, will visit the United States in mid-August.

Taliban gets smart in Afghanistan's propaganda war

KABUL (AFP 07/16/2006) - The calls come through nearly every two hours, always from a satellite phone and usually with some new claim of an attack that the reporter must check with the US-led coalition force in Afghanistan.

Sometimes they turn out to be false. Many times, they are true but exaggerated. "I get between six to 10 calls a day from one or the other of the two Taliban spokesmen," said one journalist based in the southern city of Kandahar, a focus of the movement's insurgency launched after it was ousted in 2001. "It is mainly them who tell us first of incidents," he adds.

This increasingly sophisticated propaganda strategy used by the Taliban marks a remarkable departure from one of the pillars of the movement when it ruled most of Afghanistan from 1996 until 2001.

Under the Pakistan-backed regime, movies, videos, television or photographs of any living creature, even animals, were taboo, as they were seen as idolatrous.

But today the religious students not only watch such material, they produce and distribute it for free - usually high-quality video CDs of rousing speeches and Taliban attacks and what they call sacrifice for a "holy cause."

More than a dozen VCDs obtained by AFP in the past 10 months all carry the logos of one of three studios - Omat (Nation) productions, Manbaul-Jihad (Source of Jihad) or Abdullah videos.

These shadowy outfits produce videos for the Taliban - and probably also for Al Qaeda - in the Arabic, Urdu and Pashto languages that are aimed at potential sympathizers in southern Afghanistan and the adjoining Pakistan tribal belt, and Arab extremists.

The emotionally charged videos play on deep ethnic and religious pride to win recruits, showing horrific images of Muslims killed in war or of alleged spies "confessing" before their throats are slit.

One kind preaches the religious rhetoric of the anti-foreigner jihad (holy war) that brought the Soviet army to its knees in Afghanistan in the 1980s and is now being used against the US-led coalition and NATO-led forces.

Another plays to Arab extremists who despise the United States and the West for their attitude towards the Islamic world, including Afghanistan, the Palestinian territories, Iran and Iraq.

The videos, secretly handed out person to person, often start with religious a cappella and verses from the Koran, the Muslim holy book.

There are images of sophisticated US military planes and armored vehicles juxtaposed with others of the Taliban's low-tech small arms and homemade bombs stuffed with nails, nuts and bolts.

New Taliban recruits are shown training in difficult terrain and under harsh conditions, while messages from Al Qaeda leaders Osama Bin Laden and Ayman Al Zawahiri boom out promising success and, for "martyrs," paradise.

Every film includes interviews with purported Taliban commanders who claim to have shot down US helicopters or to have killed US or Afghan soldiers.

Some show gruesome documentary footage of what are called civilian casualties of US bombings in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, or of Christians chopping off the heads and arms of Muslims in Indonesia's religiously tense Poso district.

The clips focus on children, women and the elderly. "Their targeted audience is a less-educated section of people with little power of political analysis who react religiously and emotionally," MP and journalist Shukria Barikzai said.

The images often work well to arouse passions, firing up feeling for the militants' cause, she said, noting the Afghan government itself should be making better use of such an obvious strategy.

"It would help to balance things out and help people understand the Taliban if the government showed what Taliban do - the schools and clinics burned, people slaughtered, scholars, teachers and civilians killed," Barikzai said.

The government lacks an effective strategy "not to censor but to guide the news to the truth," admitted defense ministry spokesman General Mohammad Zahir Azimi. "The psychological battle to win minds is very important - sometimes it can even change the outcome of a war."

The insurgents have seized the news agenda, analyst Joanna Nathan said. "There is an information vacuum which the insurgents are only too happy to fill," she said.

The Taliban even fill that void by claiming responsibility for attacks that they may have had no part in, with many analysts saying it is not certain the movement was behind a recent series of minor bombings in the capital Kabul. "The Taliban are often too happy to claim credit for anything," she said.

Taliban videos, magazines and website (www.alemarah.org) aside, the movement's spokesmen are happy to answer telephone queries 24 hours a day while their counterparts in the government can be less accessible. The interior ministry has meanwhile banned provincial authorities from talking to the media.

And, with Taliban statements sometimes grabbing headlines, the government last month issued "guidelines" to local news outlets that barred interviews with Taliban leaders and criticism of foreign troops - a move that attracted wide condemnation and backfired.

By the time the ruthless Taliban were booted out of power, they were hated by the people they had ruled so brutally. But the goodwill that met the new internationally backed government of President Hamid Karzai is ebbing away as security deteriorates and corruption persists.

All the while the Taliban's propaganda planners - finely tuned to the complicated social, ethnic and religions sensitivities of this country - are capitalizing on every weakness, playing on Afghans' cherished notions of religion and liberty from foreign occupation.

Their sophisticated campaign is beyond the capacity of the average illiterate Taliban fighter, said a high-ranking government official who refused to be identified. "There are big hands and organizations behind them," he said. "To gather data, footage and intelligence and reproduce them for Taliban interests is not what the barefoot illiterate Taliban can do in caves and mountains. It is done in cities where they have backers."

Pakistan's 'jihadi option' threatens regional peace: analysts

Islamabad (AFP) - Pakistan could jeopardise peace in South Asia by clinging to a "jihadi option" despite a high-profile crackdown on Islamic militants by President Pervez Musharraf, analysts say.

Military ruler Musharraf, a major US ally in the "war on terror", has also failed to tackle the so-called holy warriors because he needs Pakistan's hardline Muslim parties on-side, they say.

The result is worsening ties with India -- which says Tuesday's Mumbai bombings were carried out with "cross-border" help -- while Afghanistan is urging him to purge Taliban rebels allegedly based on Pakistani soil.

"Musharraf and his government have not totally abandoned the jihadi option," Samina Ahmed, South Asia project director for the International Crisis Group, told AFP.

Pakistan's plethora of extremist outfits were once a principal foreign policy tool, being used to fight the 1979-1989 US-backed war against the Soviets in Afghanistan and later in the divided state of Kashmir.

When Musharraf sided with Washington after the September 11, 2001 attacks, however, he began a widespread campaign against militancy in his own country.

He banned Lashkar-e-Taiba, one of the names in the frame for the Mumbai attacks, and another top jihadi outfit after militants attacked the Indian parliament in December 2001, nearly plunging the nuclear-armed rivals into war.

Pakistan has since caught or killed dozens of Al-Qaeda and Taliban members, many of them along its northwestern border with Afghanistan, while three attempts on Musharraf's life highlighted the risk he was taking.

Even India admitted after launching peace talks with Pakistan in early 2004 that extremist infiltration into Indian-held Kashmir had tailed off.

Yet analysts say his focus has slipped. Prominent Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, author of the book "Taliban", said Musharraf was distracted by troubles at home.

"Pakistan is entering a very tense domestic political crisis, almost, with the military regime wanting to continue and hold elections again next year, which many people fear could be rigged again by the military," he told the BBC this week. "Musharraf does not want to create more domestic enemies."

Foremost among those enemies would be the Islamic parties, whose influence Musharraf artificially boosted after he seized power in 1999 to counter mainstream political parties such as former prime minister Benazir Bhutto's.

The "mullahs" showed their teeth this year by turning mass protests over Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed into anti-Musharraf rallies.

Their power is also likely behind Pakistan's failure to curb extremism in its controversial religious schools, or madrassas, or at least to shut down the 10-15 percent of the seminaries that have links to jihadi groups, analysts say.

Musharraf pledged to crack down on madrassas and expel foreign students after claims that some the July 7, 2005 London bombers studied in them. But most of the foreigners remain and almost no madrassas have been closed.

Others are more sceptical about whether Pakistan really wants to lose its influence on the jihadi groups, seeing the ongoing insurgency in Kashmir as a means of keeping pressure on New Delhi to pursue the peace process.

Pakistan's enemies -- and also its friends -- have long been suspicious about whether its powerful spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), has dropped its backing for several of the militant organisations.

The foreign office this week dismissed speculation that ISI had a hand in the Mumbai attacks as "frivolous" and experts say it is not as strong as in its heyday.

Analysts say Musharraf sent out a dangerous message earlier this year when he refused to follow Washington's lead in banning Jamaat-ud-Dawa, an Islamic charity group founded by the former head of Lashkar-e-Taiba, Hafez Saeed.

"Allowing Lashkar-e-Taiba to operate under a changed name in AJK (Azad Jammu and Kashmir, the Pakistani name for the part of Kashmir it controls) is a provocation for the Indians," the International Crisis Group's Ahmed said.

The US said Jamaat-ud-Dawa was just a new front for Lashkar-e-Taiba, but Pakistan was reluctant to act because of Dawa's aid work in Pakistani Kashmir after the October 8 South Asian earthquake.

However political analyst Mohammad Afzal Niazi said that banning organisations was "never useful" as they simply emerge under a new name. "It is individuals not the organisations that matter. Those who are involved in acts of terror and hate should be arrested and prosecuted," he told AFP.

He added that there was "no need for the government to keep the jihadi option open". "If a government wants -- 10 or 20 years down the line -- it can motivate and organise people for any jihad, even after Hafez Saeed or Mr Musharraf are in their graves," Niazi said.

Afghanistan respects cultural pluralism: embassy

TEHRAN, July 15 (MNA) – The Afghan Embassy spokesman here on Saturday said cultural pluralism is respected in his country.

“Although just two languages of Dari and Pashto have been officially accepted in Afghanistan’s Constitution, any dialect is also recognized officially in its region and allowed to be taught in schools,” Faramarz Tamanna, who talked to the MNA, added.

“As a citizen and a cultural official, I don’t believe that an equivalent should found for every word. For example, computer should be called by its own technical name since it has been produced by the others,” he opined.

“We don’t like either that other nations rename what we have made.” He mentioned that there are 13 higher education institutes in Afghanistan that have dedicated departments to Farsi literature. “We don’t differentiate between Dari and Pashto since both of them are branches of Farsi.”

Refuge from the real Afghanistan - BBC 07/16/2006 By Paul Vickers

Some 10,000 US-led coalition forces have been engaged in a large-scale offensive against Taleban fighters in southern Afghanistan, where around 700 people have been killed in the last few weeks.

But in the capital, Kabul, the upper echelons of society appear to have forgotten the horrors on their doorstep.

Just a few days ago now, a grand party was held at the US Embassy in Kabul, a redoubt as impregnable as any crusader castle reinforced deep in the heart of a city still described by hardy optimists as the capital of Afghanistan.

The US Ambassador, Ronald Neumann, made an upbeat speech reminding the guests (dress code: lounge suits or national dress) of the thousands of Afghan students educated thanks to the generosity of the American people; of the schools and courthouses built, and of the roads rolled out by provincial reconstruction teams stretching far into the deserts and mountains.

There was some polite applause and then the guests made a bee line for the dance floor, the band of the 10th Mountain Division, still wearing their desert camouflage, struck up and churned out a few more Gershwin classics.

This was a typical social event, tailor-made for the elite in Kabul; aid workers, journalists, diplomats, military top brass and the odd rough diamond - the Northwest Frontier's new Raj - all eagerly swapping business cards and networking with the same people they had met before at the last, equally lavish cocktail and canape melee.

In fact, the same faces and the same frocks turn up over and over again at this embassy or that - at the British Council perhaps. There is even a magazine here called Kabul Scene Magazine that carries a people section with Tatler-style photos.

If you fancy a change there is l'Atmosphere, Kabul's premier French restaurant, where by day you can lounge by the pool, or play petanque and by night you can dine under the stars, eating steak frites, ending the evening with a brandy, or one of the best mojitos in town.

Gary, an American military contractor, told me over a cold beer that the street outside l'Atmosphere is known as "Abduction Alley".

It is especially busy at night, when well-oiled partygoers who have forgotten that they are in a war zone set off into the darkness hoping to find their Landcruisers.

And it is easy to forget that you are in a war zone when you graduate to this exclusive social set. It is easy to forget the poverty too.

A very glamorous French woman with ruby-painted toenails bent my ear about her shopping trip to Chicken Street. "I have bought everything I need for my apartment," she said. "All I want now is to find somewhere in Kabul that sells enough bubble wrap so I can fly it home."

She had spent more than most Afghans earn in a year on carpets and traditional furniture. And she complained: "I hate the military here. All they do is follow orders.

"Most of the private contractors are nothing more than murderers," she said. I thought of my friend Gary, the contractor. Had this murderous band of soldier contractors not been here, I suggested, the shopping trip might well have ended with a bag over her head ... or much worse. She silenced the discussion with a brisk flick of her hand.

But the last time I was here, a local man strolled up to a Western shopper - just as though he was greeting an old friend, his beard dyed scarlet with henna, his eyes ecstatic. He embraced the shopper and then detonated the five grenades tied around his belt. That was Chicken Street not so long ago.

The only Afghans that many of these people meet are the ones circulating with the trays of Chardonnay or Merlot at parties. But once they have collected the empty glasses, they go home to a rather different Afghanistan - the Afghanistan that their guests are supposed to be reconstructing.

A quarter of the children born in this country still die before reaching the age of five. If they live longer than that, they can expect, on the whole, to find little healthcare, no safe water, no sewage system, no jobs, no security and no future.

The roads that the American ambassador boasts about all too soon enter Taleban strongholds. In provinces like Helmand and Zabul, those fabled schools have been taken over by mullahs who have learned to hate the West and its values and who firmly believe that their classrooms are no place for girls.

Outside l'Atmosphere, I chatted to one of the guards, a friendly old chap whose name I will withhold. He was cradling his AK-47 and smiled at me, with his set of yellow and broken teeth. I had got to know him a little, stopping at the guard hut for a chat when I had time.

"I earn $47 a month," he said, "and I work every hour I can for my three sons and my wife." He gestured towards the entrance to l'Atmosphere: "Do you really think that if the Taleban came, I would stay and fight?" Not for $47, I said. "No," he said, "I would take off my uniform and join them."

From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Saturday, 15 July, 2006 at 1130 BST on BBC Radio 4. Please check the programme schedules for World Service transmission times.

[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.]