In this bulletin:

• British say Taliban used women, children as shields
• A War on Schoolgirls – Newsweek
• UN urges care during new military operation in Afghanistan
• Mega road project for Uruzgan planned
• Afghanistan in a Dangerous Neighborhood
• Good prospects for Sino-Afghan relations
• Heavy fighting in Afghanistan displaces thousands
• Detainees not given access to witnesses, but in one case, 3 quickly found
• Efforts needed to achieve sustainable growth: Paper
• Golf, pedalos and cockfights
• Corruption and coalition failures spur Taliban resurgence in Afghanistan
• Afghan interpreters for Canada pressured
• Thailand may rebuild Bamiyan Buddhas
• The Battle to Restore Kabul’s Dignity and Identity

British say Taliban used women, children as shields - Agence France-Presse;  20 June 2006

In the thick of battle, the Taliban pushed women and children into the
firing line. Soldiers had no choice but to cease fire, a corporal recalled
of British troops' biggest clash in Afghanistan.

The six-hour firefight, in which up to 21 militants were killed, erupted as
the soldiers attempted to search and secure a compound on the outskirts of
Nawzad, a town in the north of Helmand province.

By the end of the June 4 encounter, the 160 British soldiers had fired
about 2,000 rounds of ammunition, soldiers said on Monday, giving the first
detailed account of the operation to the media.

"We had, over a period of six hours, seven individual attacks," said
Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Tootal, commanding officer of the 3 Para Battle
Group.

The action started just before midday when a company of 100 paratroopers,
backed by a 30-strong reconnaissance team and 30 Gurkhas, flew by
helicopter to a walled compound where they planned to search for weapons.

The group first ventured the area in 10 armed Land Rovers and were hit from
all sides by gunfire. They responded, leaving their vehicles to return fire at the militants, some of whom were armed with rocket propelled grenades (RPGs).

Private Bash Ali, 20, had a lucky escape after a bullet slammed through two
ammunition clips strapped around his waist, setting fire to the third but
not reaching his stomach.

"I thought an RPG or something bad had hit me and I lay on the floor
stunned," said Ali, speaking from Camp Bastion, the headquarters of the new
British deployment to the southern province of Helmand where some 3,300
troops are based.

The fire from the third magazine clip ignited his uniform but the young
soldier quickly put it out by rolling in the dirt.

The exchange ended when Apache attack helicopters were called in, used for
the first time in battle, to hit the main building where the rebel fighters
were located.

Soldiers then poured into the compound to search houses, finding a few
"bits and pieces" but nothing significant. A while later, 12 of the militants -- who were believed to number between
50 and 100 in total -- returned.

The fighting started again and the rebels took shelter in the compound. A
while later they pushed out 10 to 15 women and children, some of them as
young as four.

The troops stopped firing straight away, said Corporal Quintin Poll, 29,
who was in charge of the platoon involved in the exchange. "I immediately thought, 'Ceasefire', as I could not get a clear shot at the target. I had to control my troops and pull back slightly," he told AFP..

Then six grenades were thrown out from the compound. "The troops actually made a conscious decision not to throw grenades back because they did not know if there were more women and children inside the compound," Tootal told a briefing of British journalists at Camp Bastion.

The 3 Para Battle Group, which arrived in Helmand two months ago, have been
pushing forward into the hostile north of the province faster and further
than expected over the past two weeks.

In that time they have had three live engagements with rebel fighters, but
the Mutay operation was by far the largest. "As we expand into these areas it is the likelihood that this is going to happen," Tootal said.

Britain has been deploying to Helmand, a stronghold of the hardline-Islamic
Taliban, to take over from the US military there from the end of July under
the umbrella of a NATO-led force.

A War on Schoolgirls - Newsweek

Unable to win on the battlefield, the Taliban are fighting to prevent half the country's children from getting an education.

June 26, 2006 issue - Summer vacation has only begun, but as far as 12-year-old Nooria is concerned, the best thing is knowing she has a school to go back to in the fall. She couldn't be sure the place would stay open four months ago, after the Taliban tried to burn it down. Late one February night, more than a dozen masked gunmen burst into the 10-room girls' school in Nooria's village, Mandrawar, about 100 miles east of Kabul. They tied up and beat the night watchman, soaked the principal's office and the library with gasoline, set it on fire and escaped into the darkness. The townspeople, who doused the blaze before it could spread, later found written messages from the gunmen promising to cut off the nose and ears of any teacher or student who dared to return.

The threats didn't work. Within days, most of the school's 650 pupils were back to their studies. Classes were held under a grove of trees in the courtyard for several weeks, despite the winter chill, until repairs inside the one-story structure were complete. Nearby schools replaced at least some of the library's books. But the hate mail kept coming, with threats to shave the teachers' heads as well as mutilate their faces. Earlier this month, NEWSWEEK visited and talked to students and faculty on the last day of classes. Nooria, who dreams of becoming a teacher herself, expressed her determination to finish school. "I'm not afraid of getting my nose and ears cut off," she said, all dressed up in a long purple dress and headscarf. "I want to keep studying."

Schoolgirls need that kind of courage in Afghanistan. Unable to win on the battlefield, the Taliban are trying to discredit the Kabul government by blocking its efforts to raise Afghanistan out of its long dark age. They particularly want to undo one of the biggest changes of the past four years: the resumption of education for girls, which the Taliban outlawed soon after taking power in 1996. "The extremists want to show the people that the government and the international community cannot keep their promises," says Ahmad Nader Nadery of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC). Today the Ministry of Education says the country has 1,350 girls' schools, along with 2,900 other institutions that hold split sessions, with girls-only classes in the afternoon. (Coeducation is still forbidden.) More than a third of Afghanistan's 5 million schoolchildren are now girls, compared with practically none in early 1992. In the last six months, however, Taliban attacks and threats of attacks have disrupted or shut down more than 300 of those schools.

Most of the closures have been in the far south, where the Taliban are strongest, but schools are also getting hit in areas that used to be relatively safe, like the fertile river valleys of Laghman province. The rock-walled compound where Nooria attends classes is one of six schools for girls in the province that have been torched so far this year. The damage at two of them was so bad that they remain closed. In nearby Logar province, arsonists have struck 10 sister schools—all within 50 miles of Kabul. "People are extremely frightened," says Palwasha Shaheed Kakar, the AIHRC representative in neighboring Nangarhar province, where at least eight other schools have burned. "These extremists need to attack only one or two schools to send a strong message."

The girls' school in Haider Khani village, just up the main road from Mandrawar, has suffered a sharp drop in attendance since January, when masked gunmen forced their way in and torched the place. Before the attack, up to 80 percent of the families in Haider Khani were sending their daughters to school, according to the principal, Fazal Rabi. An American military Provincial Reconstruction Team quickly repaired the damage and reopened the school. Even so, the principal reckons that only 40 percent of the village's preteen girls came back, and only 10 percent of the teenagers. Parents dread what might happen on the walk to school. Teachers get scared, too. Since the Mandrawar attack, Nooria's teacher, Farida, has traveled to and from school every day wearing a burqa and escorted by a male relative. "Otherwise I fear my nose and hair will be cut off," she told NEWSWEEK.

Even the country's 4,250 boys-only schools are vulnerable to attack. Some enemies of the Kabul government claim that the school system is no more than a plot to impose Western ideas—even Christianity—on the country's Muslim children. Back in February, Taliban fighters threatened to shut down the boys-only school in the town of Ghanzi, an hour's drive north of Kabul, according to Malak Mirza, 55, a local tribal elder. The townspeople sent back a warning that the Taliban would be driven out of the area if the school was attacked. The Taliban relented on one condition: no Christianity (which is very occasionally taught in Afghanistan—surreptitiously—by zealous missionaries). They distrust any education that takes place outside madrassas. "These extremists know that educated children are unlikely to follow religious extremism in the future," says Nadery. "The Taliban want to keep us backward."

UN urges care during new military operation in Afghanistan

KABUL, June 19, 2006 (AFP) - The United Nations on Monday called on Afghan and coalition forces to avoid harm to civilians during a major new operation against Taliban fighters in southern Afghanistan.

Operation Mountain Thrust, the biggest operation since the fall of the Taliban in 2001, kicked off mid-May.

"While these operations are ongoing, it's imperative that the security forces -- both national and international -- exercise extreme caution to prevent any civilian casualties," UN spokesman Aleem Siddique told reporters.

"We call on the security forces to do everything they can to ensure the safety and protection of the local communities in districts where the operations are taking place," he said.

Up to 34 civilians, including women and children, were killed mid-May when US warplanes hunting militants bombed a village outside the southern city of Kandahar, which has been badly hit by Taliban-linked violence in recent months.

Operation Mountain Thrust involves more than 10,000 Afghan and coalition troops who have been setting up in southern Afghanistan over the past few months before the operation was launched.

Mega road project for Uruzgan planned

KABUL, June 19 (Pajhwok Afghan News): As part of the ongoing reconstruction programme in southern Afghanistan, the US-led coalition forces will construct a 91-kilometre road at the cost of $21 million in Uruzgan.

The road will lead from Tirinkot, capital of the province, through Deh Rawod district to reach the Oshay area in the north, says a press release issued here on Monday. The project will be financed by the Commanders Emergency Reconstruction Programme (CERP).

Work on the road construction project, which will be overseeing by Afghan engineers, is scheduled to begin in September this year. Width of the road will be five metres, says the release

.

It added another road project was under construction in the southeastern Paktia province. The 51-kilometre road will connect Argun with Barmal district. Work was started on the road in December 2005 and so far 50 per cent construction has been completed. The remaining work will be completed by August next.

The road would connect a number of villages and improve life standard of people in the southeastern region, said Major General Benjamin C Freakley, commander of Combined Joint Task Force - 76.

The projects would not only improve security by helping Afghan National Army (ANA) to maneuver north to south but also provide easy access to farmers from farms to market and other people to reach cities, said the statement.

Afghanistan in a Dangerous Neighborhood - VOA 06/19/2006 By Gary Thomas

A spate of activity by an apparently revitalized Taliban has led the United States and its coalition allies to launch a new offensive in Afghanistan. The country also faces a threat of interference by neighboring nations.

More than 100 years ago, Britain and Russia engaged in what was called the "Great Game." The phrase was coined by author Rudyard Kipling to describe the geopolitical intrigue of the two nations as they grappled for supremacy in Central Asia, particularly in Afghanistan, which by an accident of geography became the central playing field of the game.

Challenges Facing the Afghan Government - Now a new, scaled-down version of the "Great Game" is looming as Afghanistan's neighbors watch to see if the struggling government of President Hamid Karzai can survive in the face of a renewed insurgency, unmet domestic expectations, and drifting international attention.

In a new paper for the U.S. Institute for Peace, former State Department intelligence analyst Marvin Weinbaum says the Karzai government is losing support because of faltering security.

"I just see this as the kind of paralysis which is then going to, along with everything else, lead people to turn away from the central government. And in this case the Taliban, not because they are a beloved group but by default, are there to pick up the pieces," says Weinbaum.

Landlocked Afghanistan is surrounded by Pakistan, Iran, China, and the three Central Asian nations of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan. Larry Goodson, a professor of Middle East Studies at the U.S. Army War College, says Afghanistan's central location in a strategic but tough neighborhood has had its benefits and drawbacks throughout history.

"You have a country that has overlapping ethnicities and sectarian groups with neighboring countries, extremely porous borders, and it is landlocked but it lies between countries that all wish to trade and interact with each other. So it's both its blessing and its curse that it's the crossroads of Central and South Asia and the Middle East," says Goodson.

Marvin Weinbaum, now with the Middle East Institute, says that for now, Afghanistan's neighbors, especially Pakistan and Iran, have a "hands off" attitude towards Afghanistan so long as U.S. and NATO troops are there, and no other nation tries to gain advantage in Afghanistan.

"This is what has precipitated the competition over Afghanistan. They can live with an Afghanistan which is a neutral state as long as it's very clear that neither party, any party, has been able to manipulate Afghanistan to its own advantage," says Weinbaum.

The Pakistan Factor - Afghanistan's longest border is with Pakistan, a nation with which it has had a tumultuous relationship over the years. Pakistan was a key backer of the Islamic-based resistance to Soviet occupation in the 1980s, partly in the hope it would get a friendly government in Kabul. But the mujahedin resistance fighters quickly descended into fratricidal squabbling after their victory in Kabul in 1992. Pakistan then helped create a new movement in Afghanistan: the Taliban.

Today, Marvin Weinbaum says, the government of Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf is engaged in a two-track, often conflicting Afghan policy. On the one hand it supports the Karzai government and its stabilizing influence. But as a hedge against any collapse in Afghanistan, Musharraf is also keeping ties with its old mujahedin allies, some of whom may be Taliban or even al-Qaida.

"The very patronage of those elements undermines its official policy, which is to see that the Karzai government succeeds. So it wants it to succeed at one level, but it is doing things within Pakistan - - some of which it has no choice because it doesn't control its own borders very well - - which in fact work against the central government and Karzai," says Weinbaum.

The Army War College's Larry Goodson says President Musharraf's efforts to halt the cross-border activities of the Taliban have been half-hearted at best, much to the displeasure of President Karzai.

"He's been officially trying to maintain good relations with the Karzai government in Kabul, while at the same time allowing - - especially the Taliban forces from the Kandahar region but across the border in Pakistan, in Quetta and Baluchistan - - he's allowed those forces to continue to have some sanctuary and go back and forth across the border. And I think the Kabul government now is beginning to reach a point of disquiet and dissatisfaction with this," says Goodson.

Iran's Interests - As far as Iran goes, analysts say most of its attention has been focused elsewhere, primarily on Iraq. But, says Larry Goodson, Afghanistan has not been forgotten in Tehran, particularly with regard to Afghanistan's western provinces that border Iran and are populated with Shiite Muslims.

"What we have seen in Afghanistan is a careful [Iranian] policy of economic development in the west and very quiet business and intelligence linkages being developed out there with, I think, a long run view to at least protecting Iranian interests and thwarting Pakistani expansionism, as they see it," says Goodson.

Goodson adds that Afghanistan's neighboring states' perspective is that that the United States and its allies will not continue to be engaged at a high enough level to prevent the reassertion of a new, little version of the Great Game.

Good prospects for Sino-Afghan relations

Afghan President Hamid Karzai started his second official visit to China yesterday after attending the summit of the Shanghai Co-operation Organization (SCO) as a guest.

He told Chinese journalists that Afghanistan is willing to develop all-round friendly relations with China, a good neighbour and friend, which has contributed significantly to Afghanistan's reconstruction over the past four years.

His wishes accord with China's diplomatic strategy with regard to relations with neighbouring countries being a good neighbour to surrounding nations and helping make them prosper. Promoting co-operation in various fields with Afghanistan, an important neighbour, facilitates regional stability and security in China's western regions.

Things have changed since Karzai's first China visit four years ago. Reconstruction in Afghanistan, for instance, has been going well. The country's new constitution has been enacted and presidential and parliamentary elections were successfully staged, with the help of the international community.

As a result, Afghanistan has become a normal country with a basically complete political infrastructure. In addition, initial economic recovery has been achieved.

Against this backdrop, Afghanistan is showing an ever-stronger desire for more extensive co-operation with the South Asian and Central Asian nations. The country is expected to soon become a full member of the South Asian Association for Regional Co-operation.

Karzai also expressed his wish to further expand his country's co-operation with the SCO and its individual member states. As a geopolitical hub wedged between the South, Central and West Asia, Afghanistan is bound to play a bigger part in regional co-operation.

As the SCO improves its functions and working mechanisms, it is having a greater influence on Afghanistan. It is quite possible that Afghanistan will ask for co-operation with the SCO in some chosen areas in the near future.

Peace and reconstruction dictate that the neighbouring nations in the region are vitally important to Afghanistan, although the United States remains the most influential player for the country politically and militarily. It is only natural that Afghanistan should not put all its eggs in the US basket. The country's desire to be more independent and self-reliant will get ever stronger with the unfolding of events in the regional political and economic arenas.

SCO member states have carried out effective co-operation in combating terrorism and extremism. Afghanistan, enormously haunted by the same problems, has good reason to work in concert with the SCO members in this regard. This also serves US interests in this region.

China is among those countries that first provided aid to post-Taliban Afghanistan. As early as 2002, for example, China pledged economic aid worth US$150 million to the country. China has also become actively involved in the construction of highways, water conservation projects, hospitals and other public infrastructure. For example, Kandahar Hospital and the Parvan water conservation project have become symbols of Sino-Afghan friendship.

As an increasingly important global economic player, China provides its neighbours with important opportunities and a vast market. Karzai, in an interview with Chinese media, expressed his hope that Afghanistan would benefit from China's economic growth, with more and more Afghan commodities finding their way into the Chinese market.

Taking all this into account, Karzai's current China visit has very special connotations laying foundations for all-round Sino-Afghan co-operation, pinpointing specific fields for collaboration and, in turn, promoting common security and co-prosperity.

China and Afghanistan have never had any disputes with each other, something that helps lay good foundations for co-operation. The two nations have been developing their relations via equal exchanges and mutually beneficial undertakings. Grape and carrot planting techniques in China, for instance, were borrowed from Afghanistan in ancient times. Afghanistan is a staunchly independent nation that does not like being dictated to by major powers.

At the same time, China's good-neighbour policy is in the interest of Afghanistan and the Chinese aid is based on the principles of equality and respecting Afghanistan's sovereignty. This will be the guideline for future Sino-Afghan relations.

The visiting Afghan delegation is the largest since the founding of the new government. Securing specific aid projects and developing trade links constitute important aspects of Karzai's China tour.

China is by far one of Afghanistan's most important trade partners, being the third largest exporter to the latter after Japan and Pakistan. But China imported just US$900,000 worth of goods from Afghanistan last year. The huge potential in this regard needs to be tapped.

It is advisable that China continues its involvement in the infrastructure construction on the condition that the safety of Chinese personnel is guaranteed and that Chinese enterprises are encouraged to seek business opportunities in Afghanistan.

Furthermore, China may have a role to play in training the technicians and managers desperately needed by Afghanistan for its reconstruction and development. Expanding the enrolment of Afghan students studying in Chinese universities is also an imperative task.

At present, terrorism and drugs pose two major obstacles to Afghan reconstruction. These are also destabilizing factors affecting western China.

More opium is planted and more drugs are trafficked than before. This has seriously affected the country's economic reconstruction and the security situation. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime predicts that Afghanistan's opium output in 2006 will hit 4,500 tons and that roughly 87 per cent of the world's heroin will originate from Afghanistan.

Driven by the huge profits brought by drugs, terrorist elements and local armed bands are secretly engaged in opium planting, drug processing and deals, with the money made from drug-related activities used to fund the expansion of their forces. All this makes the bad security situation even worse. At the same time, drug processing and trafficking bring security problems to Afghanistan's neighbours.

In view of all this, it is in the interest of all parties that Afghanistan works in concert with the SCO or its individual member states in combating organized crime, drug trafficking and weapons smuggling. China and Afghanistan are expected to work more closely in this regard, with the signing of a package of agreements during Karzai's current China visit. In addition, the two countries will possibly conduct co-operation in the field of energy resources.

The SCO and the South Asian Association for Regional Co-operation offer China and Afghanistan a platform for co-operation. This all-round bilateral collaboration is not aimed at any third party and there is no intention to rival other big powers.

Source: China Daily; The author is an associate professor with the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations.

Heavy fighting in Afghanistan displaces thousands - CTV.ca News –Canada Sun. Jun. 18 2006

Canadian troops embarking on the largest military operation in Afghanistan in five years hope to convince residents they are fighting for stability. But the Afghan government said skirmishes have already displaced 900,000 people.

At the Jurydash refugee camp, a cluster of mud-walled shelters in the middle of the desert, the Rahim family waits with 47,000 other people who fled their homes.

"When the fighting started we left everything," Rasak Rahim told CTV News. "Now my children are hungry and we're running out of water." Rahim moved to the camp with his 10 children after Canadian troops arrived at his village last month to flush out insurgents.

More than 2,000 Canadians are now involved in Operation Mountain Thrust, as part of a contingent of more than 10,000 coalition and Afghan troops targeting Taliban fighters.

Coalition soldiers are searching for insurgents in Taliban safe havens and trying to win over the local populations. But their efforts are angering Afghans like Rahim, who argue the increased fighting will only bring more chaos and harm to civilians.

"The Canadians have told us they will help us, but we've seen nothing but bombs," said Rahim. "Now we live as a refugee in our own country." The United Nations refugee program created Jurydash, but the camp has been without food supplies for four months.

UN officials declined to be interviewed, but Afghan officials were more than willing to share their frustration. "We've had several meetings with the UN," said one official. "All they tell us is that earthquakes and other emergencies around the world have cut our assistance and donations."

Another refugee, Dost Mohammad, said Afghans have nowhere to turn. "The Canadian troops, the Afghan government, they are all liars," said Mohammad. "If they can't help us, they have to leave."

However, CTV's Steve Chao, reporting from Afghanistan, said Canadian military officials claim not all Afghans are angry that Canadian troops are flushing out the Taliban.

"We spoke with the Canadian battle group commander earlier this week and he told us they're getting a very good reception, that a lot of intelligence is coming from the local population because they're simply fed up with the Taliban and they want peace," Chao told CTV's Question Period Sunday. With a report from CTV's Steve Chao

Detainees not given access to witnesses , but in one case, 3 quickly found - By Farah Stockman and Declan Walsh - The Boston Globe June 18, 2006

GARDEZ, Afghanistan - The US government routinely failed to give detainees at Guantanamo Bay access to witnesses who might have helped them prove their assertions of innocence, saying it could not locate the vast majority of the witnesses the terror suspects requested at special military hearings.

But within a three-day span, a Globe reporter was able to locate three of those witnesses in the case of one detainee. The Globe found two of them in Afghanistan, and located a third in Washington, D.C., where he is teaching at the National Defense University.

In 2004, after a Supreme Court ruling, the US military was forced to give hearings to more than 500 prisoners being held without charge at the US detention facility in Cuba. At the time, the military pledged to try to locate defense witnesses to give testimony for those hearings, but later routinely reported that they could not be found.

A Globe review of the transcripts of the hearings, which were released to the public in March, identified 34 detainees who convinced tribunal officials that their overseas witnesses would provide relevant testimony.

But in all 34 cases, detainees were told at their hearings that their witnesses could not be found. Nearly all of those 64 approved witnesses were deemed ``unavailable" because the governments of the country where the witnesses lived did not respond to a State Department request for help in locating them.

Military investigators and State Department officials did not even contact witnesses who were well known to US authorities.

In one case, the State Department said that it could not locate Ismail Khan , the well-known minister of energy in Afghan president Hamid Karzai's cabinet, who meets frequently with American diplomats.

In another case, tribunal officials said they could not contact a prisoner in US custody in Bagram, Afghanistan, because the US officials holding him failed to respond to their inquiries. The tribunal records also show that the time period allowed by the tribunals to find the witnesses was often brief. In some cases, tribunal officials declared witnesses unavailable after two weeks.

In the vast majority of cases, detainees had to rely on the jailhouse testimony of fellow prisoners at Guantanamo, whose credibility is deeply in question, or on letters from family members.

Defense lawyers say the absence of witnesses at the hearings made it harder for any innocent detainee to prove that he was the victim of a mistake. Out of nearly 380 detainees who participated in the process, only 38 managed to win their release.

The status of the Guantanamo detainees received new attention following the suicides of three prisoners June 10, after months of hunger strikes by scores of detainees to protest the US military's refusal to grant them hearings under usual criminal procedures. The Pentagon considers the detainees to be terrorists or Taliban fighters captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The military did not initially intend to allow detainees to challenge their status through hearings or to be able to call witnesses. But in June 2004, the Supreme Court ruled that prisoners at Guantanamo had to be given a chance to prove their innocence, either in US federal court or in special military hearings.

To satisfy the court ruling -- and to keep the cases out of federal court -- the military quickly set up ``Combatant Status Review Tribunals" in which detainees could challenge their status as ``enemy combatants" and call witnesses who were ``reasonably available."

The tribunals, which began in the fall of 2004 and concluded in early 2005, represented the only opportunity for the vast majority of detainees to call witnesses to try to prove contentions of mistaken identity or misinformation. (Only 10 detainees have been granted formal trials, which provide a second opportunity for a defense.)

Detainees' lawyers were barred from participating in the hearings. But Gordon England, then the secretary of the Navy, who oversaw the creation of the tribunals, pledged to reporters at the time that the US government would make good-faith efforts to find the witnesses, and that he would ask US embassies to help locate witnesses overseas.

``We will ask them to, and I expect people will do their jobs," England said, explaining that witnesses would either testify in person or be asked to submit written statements.

The State Department's role was merely ``to pass information to host governments," according to department spokesman Tom Casey. ``The US government did not physically go out and try to locate these witnesses," said a State Department official who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak to the press. ``We relied very heavily on the governments to run down these witnesses. Some governments were not as cooperative."

Another State Department official, who also asked not to be identified, said the US government would have paid for some witnesses to be transported to Cuba to testify, but that detainees failed to provide enough details to locate them.

The two State Department officials also said that some witnesses were found but that they opted to provide written statements instead of testifying in person. Yet, thousands of pages of transcript hearings reveal fewer than 10 such witnesses, most of them prisoners in US custody.

Pentagon spokesman Lieutenant Commander Chito Peppler said the Defense Department did not keep track of how many witnesses were located. He acknowledged that no overseas witness had ever been brought to testify on the base.

The detainee whose witnesses the Globe located is Abdullah Mujahid, a former Afghan provincial police commander arrested by US troops in July 2003. The US military maintains that Mujahid ``was fired from his appointed position due to suspicions of collusion with anti-government forces" and that he later attacked US troops in retaliation, according to the transcripts. Mujahid's defense was that he was promoted to a highway security job, not fired, and that he had always been friendly to American forces.

He requested four witnesses in Afghanistan, including the country's Interior Minister at the time, but was told that none could be contacted.

``The Afghan government was contacted on or about 26 November, 2004," the tribunal president told him, according to the transcript. ``As of this date, the Afghanistan government has not responded to our request. . . . Without the cooperation of that government, we are unable to contact those witnesses and to obtain the testimony you requested."

But in Afghanistan earlier this month, a reporter for the Globe located three of the four witnesses in a matter of days. The fourth witness is dead.

A phone call to President Karzai's office quickly led to Shahzada Masoud , an adviser to Karzai on tribal affairs. Masoud led an official delegation in May 2003 to Gardez, Mujahid's hometown about two hours south of Kabul, the capital, to persuade him to step down as police chief, a post in which he had served at the request of local elders since the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001.

Masoud said in an interview in Kabul that the move was part of a larger effort by the central government in Kabul to assert control across the country. Although Mujahid did not want to leave his post, and initially prevented his successor from entering the city, he eventually accepted and was given a lavish transfer-of-power ceremony attended by government dignitaries, Masoud said. American troops arrested Mujahid weeks later at his home.

A second witness, Gul Haider, the defense ministry representative who took part in Masoud's delegation, was found after the Globe obtained his phone number from a government official in Gardez. In an interview, Haider confirmed Masoud's account. He said that Mujahid had been promised a job protecting the highways in Kabul as a reward for leaving his post.

Haider, a former commander in the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, described Mujahid as an ally of US troops, not a Taliban sympathizer. He recalled that Mujahid gave 30 of his own men to assist an American-led operation to clear Taliban members from a mountain cave in an area known as Shahikot in March 2002.

Haider said he had never heard any information that would lead him to believe that Mujahid turned on his former American allies, as was alleged at the hearings. Instead, he said, tribal and political rivalries probably landed Mujahid in Guantanamo -- with someone making false accusations. ``Afghanistan has many problems -- between tribes, communists, the Taliban," he said. ``That's why people like Abdullah [Mujahid], who are completely innocent, end up in jail."

The e-mail address for the third witness, former Afghan Interior Minister Ahmed Ali Jalali, was found with one call to the Interior Ministry. A quick Google search would have also located him: He is in Washington, D.C., teaching at the National Defense University.

Jalali, the man who made the decision to remove Mujahid from his post, said he wanted him ousted because of corruption and ``bullying," not sympathies with the Taliban or Al Qaeda. He said he had been on the verge of appointing Mujahid chief of a regiment of highway police, but that he changed his mind after he learned that Mujahid had stolen some police equipment.

Jalali said he learned months later that Mujahid had been taken to Guantanamo Bay because he was suspected of an attack on a provincial reconstruction team. ``I heard this, but I do not know the details," he said. ``I cannot pass judgment on this."

Mujahid's home in Gardez, a single-story building inside a high wall compound beside a field of swaying wheat, is well-known and easy to find. His relatives there are eager to show visitors a videotape of the ceremony during which he handed over power shortly before his capture.

The videotape, viewed by the Globe, shows the governor of Paktiya province at the time, Raz Muhammad Dalili, praising Mujahid in front of uniformed police officers and dignitaries, including Haider and Masoud.

``We have respect for Abdullah Mujahid, who brought peace and security to our province," the governor tells the audience. ``We are very grateful to him." Other senior officials in Afghanistan's government support Mujahid's account.

The director of the Interpol Section of the Afghan National Police, General Ali Shah Paktiawal, said: ``He is innocent . . . Some people have given false information about him and that's why this problem has come up."

Taj Muhammad Wardak , who served as governor of Paktiya in 2002, said Mujahid ``had no contact with any terrorists or insurgents." Wardak, who also served as interior minister, said that lies and rivalries had sent many innocent Afghans to Guantanamo Bay.

``I can tell you that most of the Afghans there are innocent," he said. ``You can investigate these people here. There is no need to send them to Guantanamo. It is a great sadness between our countries that will last for many years."

Walsh reported from Afghanistan and Stockman from Washington. Charlie Savage of the Globe staff also contributed from Washington.

Efforts needed to achieve sustainable growth: Paper - Pajhwok 06/19/2006

A lot of work is yet to be needed for Afghanistan to meet its aim of sustainable, private sector-driven growth at high levels, notes a paper by the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit.

"It is a misconception that the conflict years left the Afghan economy as a blank slate" says author Anna Paterson. "While conflict closed some opportunities and trading routes, it opened profitable opportunities for production and trade in other commodities," said the research paper.

A study of six different commodity chains reveals that while the number of people involved in businesses is large, many of these are small players with equally small returns.

New investors face many obstacles in setting up businesses, including gaining access to secure land and minimal access to formal banking systems. Anti-competitive practices can also hinder the entry of new players into the markets.

"Afghanistan itself has a liberal trade regime, but trade is far from free in the wider Central Asian region. Delays and heavy bureaucracy at border ports are common," observes Paterson.

Government regulation of markets is often bureaucratic and confused, containing many inappropriate and overlapping functions, creating opportunities for rent-seeking by officials. Where regulation is really needed, such as in the sphere of basic standards and gathering public revenue, there is no capacity to enforce rules and regulations even when they exist, says the paper.

The paper notes that private sector was expected to deliver sustained high levels of growth in an extremely difficult investment environment. Moreover, the Afghan government and its development partners emphasises the need for economic growth to be pro-poor, but it is not clear what they mean by this term. "It is not the inherent purpose of markets to be pro-poor, since they are really about making a profit," Paterson points out.

Golf, pedalos and cockfights - The Observer 06/18/2006 By Jason Burke

The people of Kabul are a fun-loving crowd. Most of their leisure activities, dog and cockfighting aside, may seem tame by Western standards but they give the million or so citizens of the Afghan capital as much pleasure as any more risque activities.

The dogfights take place around 7am - mainly to avoid harassment from animal rights activists - and so by mid-morning it is partisans of a more pastoral pursuit who throng the road west out of the city. It is Friday, the single weekly day off, and the road is thick with traffic, yellow and white taxis, battered minibuses and 100cc motorbikes with five passengers. They're all heading to an artificial lake in the dry hills above Kabul - the favourite picnic spot.

The lake is ringed by rubble-strewn beaches. One corner is sectioned off for use by pedalos and six or so yellow and red craft circle aimlessly in the water. The man with the whistle, who shouts 'come in number x, your time is up' in the Persian-derived dialect of Dari, is Nur Ala, 22, who used to be a ship mechanic in Iran. Business is OK, he says. At a dollar an hour for a pedalo, he is making money but not much. 'There is famine in the city, people are hungry, they don't waste money on this sort of thing. It was better a year ago.'

But there is not much sign of hunger among the crowds along the lakeside with its kebab stands and watermelon stalls. Cooking smells waft from the 'family enclosure' - to which I am denied access because there are women there 'having fun with their families' and thus unveiled.

In the non-family sections, Kabul's young blades swagger. The sweet smell of hashish hangs in the air. Up a nearby lane there is a makeshift casino, a series of dice games set up in the dust. The stakes are considerable. One man has just lost 700 afghanis - £10 - about half the monthly salary for a teacher.

Below the dammed lake is the Kabul Golf Course. Three Korean engineers are plodding around the desiccated holes, each a circle of levelled dust surrounded by less level dust. The caddy ports both the bags and a disc of Astroturf he places on the dirt for tee off. Mohammed Ashraf started at the golf course when the King was still in power in the early 1970s. The Russians played badly, he says.

Back in Kabul, a few hundred yards from the sports stadium where the Taliban used to hold public executions, is a patch of wasteland where half a dozen teams play, pausing when a particularly virulent dust-storm blows up. In one corner there are six long narrow 22-yard strips of concrete a few yards apart. On each a game of cricket is under way. Every other Friday a team of Afghans plays a team of Pakistanis, a sporting version of a deeper regional rivalry. The Friday cricketers don't know it, but the wasteland where they play saw cricket matches before: between 1839-1842 when British troops invaded Afghanistan and camped on this plain. But the delights of the game the British brought was not enough to convince Afghans their presence was good. The army was massacred.

The 'sound of freedom' is the Titanic theme on your mobile

Under the Taliban, the only planes at Kabul airport were occasional Red Cross or UN aid flights. Customs was a couple of bored young fighters who would rifle baggage in a desultory fashion, so unworldly they thought a satellite phone was a counting machine. There was no lighting and no air-traffic control. The opposition forces lobbed the occasional rocket aimlessly over the nearby hills.

Now there are no rockets, lots of planes from all over the world, a computerised passport system and lots of people. But the biggest change, and something that has arrived in the last year or so, is that, when you get off the plane and turn on your mobile roaming phone, it goes to the local network and there you are, in contact with office, grandma, partner, whoever.

This may not seem like much, but for those who knew Kabul under the Taliban - when there were no newspapers, no television, almost no radios, and half a dozen crackly telephone lines that allowed you to phone only Pakistan - the change is astonishing. Kabul was an information black hole where you learnt about something that had happened a mile away days later on the BBC World Service. Now it is squarely aboard an information superhighway. Hundreds of thousands of mobiles have been sold (half a penny a minute for a local call), there are scores of radio stations, dozens of newspapers and internet cafes. Some hotels even have broadband. There are phones of the fixed (large metal device with yellow hood on pavement) and ambulant (boy with fistful of cards and a mobile) varieties. Down in the main bazaar the air is thick with hawkers' calls, beggars' wails and a cacophony of ringtones. If, as an American diplomat tells me, this is 'the sound of freedom', then freedom sounds mostly like the theme from Titanic.

Corruption and coalition failures spur Taliban resurgence in Afghanistan - Newsday 06/18/2006 By James Rupert

The Taliban have been able simply to fill a political vacuum because the United States and its allies failed to do it instead

KABUL - The United States and its allies have been forced to launch their biggest military operation of the war here because in the 55 months since ousting the Taliban movement from power, they neglected to establish minimal security or governance in the country's south, analysts say.

That failure has let the Taliban walk back in through an open door, say Afghan and foreign officials in Kabul and the southern city of Kandahar. Afghan officials estimate thousands of Taliban guerrillas, many recently infiltrated from Pakistan, are in the five southernmost provinces, where their attacks culminated this spring in a spasm of bombings, ambushes and assassinations against scattered government targets.

U.S.-led coalition forces launched a counteroffensive Wednesday that they said will involve 11,000 Afghan and Western troops, in an effort to stabilize the south this summer before U.S. commanders hand that region over to an arriving NATO force. "If we had made efforts on this scale five years ago, we would be in a much stronger position than we are now," said James Dobbins, a former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan who studies post-war rebuilding operations for the RAND Corp. think tank.

The Taliban have won much of their support by intimidating villagers or buying them off with money gained through the opium trade, said officials and residents interviewed in Kandahar, Afghanistan's second-largest city. But critically, the Taliban have been able simply to fill a political vacuum because the United States and its allies failed to do it instead, they said.

Under coalition supervision since 2001, what has passed for "government" in the south amounts mostly to "corrupt, local warlords who allied themselves with U.S. forces," said Abdul Qadar Noorzai, the director in Kandahar of Afghanistan's government human rights commission. These local strongmen have taken control over the weak state bureaucracies and police forces, and much of the opium trade, Noorzai said.

As the corruption has spread, local officials "push the people for bribes, and so the people are turning to the Taliban" for protection from the government, said Abdul Ahmed Muhammadyar, publisher of a Pashtu-language cultural magazine in Kandahar.

The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, conceded last month that "the very weak institutions of the state" have permitted what he painted as a small Taliban revival. In "several districts" of the south, "it's fair to say the Taliban influence in certain areas is stronger than it was last year," Eikenberry told reporters at the Pentagon. But "I am confident ... the situation will improve by the end of this year," he said.

The reality in the south looks far nastier. Because of the Taliban's spread, UN agencies, which a few years ago operated freely over 60 percent to 70 percent of southernmost Afghanistan, now can work readily in only six of the region's 50 districts, or counties, said UN regional director Talatbek Masadykov. The Taliban have established parallel authorities, including courts, in wide areas of the south -- and people are turning to them to solve conflicts, say Afghan press reports and UN officials.

Relatively few in the revived Taliban movement are "true believers, or real jihadists," Masadykov said. Larger numbers "are fighting for pay" or "have joined the Taliban because of intimidation or disaffection with the government," he said.

In late May, Afghan and U.S. forces battled hundreds of Taliban in villages barely 10 miles west of Kandahar. City residents say armed Taliban patrol their outer neighborhoods, warning people not to send their children to government schools. Last year, guerrillas burned or shut down more than 100 schools in Kandahar province.

Rangina Hamidi, an Afghan-American, runs a project that helps about 520 Kandahar women earn money through traditional embroidery. In the past three years, her group, Afghans for Civil Society, has steadily lost direct access to about two-thirds of those women as Taliban guerrillas infiltrated the city's edges, preventing staff members from visiting.

Hamidi agreed with others who said official accounts of life in Kandahar gloss over the city's creeping re-Talibanization. The Afghan education department has said 70 percent of Kandahar city's girls are in school. But of Hamidi's 520 female clients, "only about 5 percent of the families' girls attend school," she said, a rate she thinks represents Kandahar province overall.

One place Hamidi no longer can visit is Malajat, a sprawling neighborhood at Kandahar's southern edge and a reminder that this isn't really a city in any cosmopolitan sense, but more an oversized Pashtun farming and trading town. Mud-brick family compounds, vineyards and pomegranate orchards line dusty lanes. These days, the cloth, thread and needles for Hamidi's embroidery project are distributed in secret by neighborhood women. "The women become fearful to be seen with outsiders [the aid workers]," she said.

Malajat's men, too, must now keep secrets. "Our mosque has a notice on the wall signed by the Taliban, warning people not to cooperate with the government" or with foreign aid agencies, said Ahmed, a young resident who said he might face reprisal from the Taliban if his full name were published. "Anyone who can get work with the government or the foreigners will take it, because otherwise it is impossible to live. There are no jobs. But now, we are risking our lives to do it."

The Taliban "patrol the streets at night, and they tell us we must obey their rules because... their government is coming back," he said. "A year or two ago, these things were not happening in Malajat."

In the 1990s, Kandahar was the Taliban's stronghold. After Sept. 11, 2001, when the United States recruited anti-Taliban warlords to overthrow the regime, its ally in Kandahar was Gul Agha Sherzai, a strongman seen here as corrupt and brutal.

Beginning in 2002, U.S.-backed President Hamid Karzai pleaded for a broad, international peacekeeping force to replace and disarm the provincial warlords and speed the training of Afghan army and police forces. But Washington resisted and it took Karzai until last summer to ease first Sherzai and then his protege out of the governor's office here.

Under Karzai and the Americans, Kandahar has had a limited economic revival. Some roads are paved, several glittery office buildings house new shops -- and an energetic Afghan-American businessman has even opened a Starbucks-style coffee shop. But official bribery and extortion, plus the violence of the Taliban's resurgence, have helped choke off any economic boom.

As in much of Afghanistan, perhaps the most glaring failure of rebuilding is the police. In rural districts (counties) across the south, there are 20 to 50 officers, and in some districts they may be facing hundreds of Taliban, said government officials here and in Kabul who asked not to be identified. Most police, recruited locally and untrained, are not paid regularly, and significant numbers are deserting, officials and Kandahar residents said.

"Most police have no uniforms, they act like thugs, demand bribes," said Iqbal Shah Durrani, a Kandahar businessman. "If they don't like where you parked your car, they will just kick out your taillights or shoot out your tires. People see them as just licensed gangsters."

Lt. Gen. Eikenberry's optimism in Washington last month included this issue. "Importantly, the police reform continues to move forward ... As it starts to take hold, there'll be improvements in the quality of the police," he said.

But even in districts where policemen face strong Taliban forces, the policemen don't have a second clip of ammunition for their rifles, said an Afghan security official in Kabul. "The coalition is ramping up now to build up the police force. But that's four years too late."

Afghan interpreters for Canada pressured - By JOHN COTTER

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (CP) - The shock of a recent Taliban bomb blast that killed five Afghan interpreters has shaken the faith of families so much they are putting pressure on remaining "Terps" to stop working for the Canadians.

Haji Fareed, a veteran interpreter with Canada's Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) in Kandahar City, has spent the past few days attending the victims' funerals. Two of the dead interpreters were relatives. The other three were his best friends.

"The families are not doing very well. People don't know what to do. Everyone is just crazy (with grief)," said Fareed, who added the bomb has sent a chill through the whole city.

A minivan carrying the interpreters exploded Thursday as the men were travelling to the nearby international coalition base. In all, 10 people died and 17 were wounded, including bystanders.

The Taliban assumed responsibility, an act military officials say is part of a strategy by the insurgents to focus on "soft targets" to undermine support for the coalition.

In many cases, the interpreters are the sole breadwinners for large extended families. It is a very lucrative job by Afghan standards. Some senior "Terps" can earn up to $1,800 US per month. Teachers and soldiers make less than $100.

But mothers and fathers are making it clear to the young men that the high salaries are not worth the risk.

"Most of the people are now afraid," Fareed said, adding the men themselves want to continue their work. "They say their families will not allow them to continue the job."

There is no official word on whether any have quit or given notice because of the bomb. Interpreters are a key cog in the international coalition's efforts in southern Afghanistan.

They question Taliban suspects in the field for military forces and translate for Canadians working with Afghan civic officials and the public.

Maj. Eric Liebert, deputy commander of the provincial reconstruction team at Camp Nathan Smith, said Canadians who work at the base are also mourning the loss of their colleagues.

Meetings have been set up with some of the remaining interpreters to offer support, including counselling and the services of a Canadian Forces Imam.

It's not clear if their families will receive any financial compensation from Canada or the international coalition. "The bombing has had a significant impact on the people," Liebert said. "We are very dependent on our Afghan friends to support our operations."

This isn't the first time that interpreters have been killed or injured in the line of duty. On May 25, Mohammed Niaz Husseini, 20, lost both his legs when the Canadian Forces vehicle he was riding in was hit by a rocket propelled grenade near Panjwai.

Since then he has been recovering slowly in hospital at the coalition base outside Kandahar. Canadian Forces officials will not allow journalists to visit Niaz.

The man's father, Col. Husseini of the Afghan police, said his son is receiving excellent care but hopes to move to Canada. "Niaz feels better, but he wants to migrate to Canada for the best treatment and higher education," Husseini said.

"The important point is this. Niaz can't stay safe any more in Afghanistan because he is well recognized by Taliban." The Canadian military is reluctant to speak about Niaz's situation other than to say he remains in care and on the payroll.

Camp Nathan Smith is in the process of paving sidewalks and building ramps to make the PRT wheelchair accessible to the popular young man, who has been visited in hospital by everyone from top generals to the ordinary soldiers he worked with in the field.

"He is our employee and we will take care of him," said Maj. Quentin Innis, a coalition spokesman. "As long as he can translate and interpret, we can employ him."

Fareed said the interpreters are heartened by this, but they also worry about the future. Canada's formal commitment to Afghanistan runs until 2009, although it could be extended.

With thousands of foreign troops in their country trying to help, the interpreters don't understand why the security situation appears to be getting worse.

"More than 20 countries' soldiers are in Afghanistan," Fareed said. "Why is the security getting bad, day by day? Why every day are mothers crying for their children?"

Thailand may rebuild Bamiyan Buddhas - Bangkok Post June 18, 2006

Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra said he has proposed to Afghanistan President Hamid Karzsai that Thailand reconstruct the famed Bamiyan Buddha images blown up by the Taliban in 2001.

The former Afghan Islamic fundamentalist regime dynamited and used artillery to deface and destroy the priceless twin Buddha statues, carved into the heart of the Hindu Kush mountains in Bamiyan, claiming that all statues are idols and therefore their existence was contrary to Islamic belief.

The Taliban action against one of Asia's great historical treasures caused international outrage and widespread condemnation.

Speaking to media in Bangkok after returning from a two-day regional conference in Kazakhstan, Mr Thaksin said he had discussed the issue with Mr Karzai on the sideline of the conference.

Mr Thaksin said he told the Afghanistan leader that Thailand, as a Buddhist country, would like to collect the remains of the Bamiyan Buddha statues to rebuild the new ones.

President Karzai welcomed the idea but said he would bring up the issue for discussion with his government, according to the Thai premier.

Besides the reconstruction of the famed Buddha statues, the two leaders also discussed plans for a crop substitution project. Thailand has expressed willingness to help to replace opium plantations in Afghanistan, using the model initiated in Thailand by His Majesty the King.

The Battle to Restore Kabul’s Dignity and Identity - The Guardian 06/17/2006 By Simon Jenkins

KABUL — We declare war. We bomb. We conquer. We then pretend to rebuild. But there is no rebuilding, just collateral damage. In Belgrade, Baghdad and Kabul, the last three cities assaulted by Britain in war, millions may be spent on aid, but buildings are left as piles of rubble.

Central Kabul was, until the 1970s, an ethereal place of baked mud houses and gardens nestling among the foothills of the Hindu Kush, "The Light Garden of the Angel King." It then spent a quarter century being bombed and shelled by, successively, Russians, the Taleban, Afghan tribes and western jets.

Eventually the old place sighed and sank to its knees in despair, its heart reduced to acres of dust-blown filth, like Rome's Forum in the Middle Ages. Fragments of crumbling walls still loom from the ruins, like pictures of Dresden after the war. Inhabitants crawl into basement hovels or squat on the bed of the once-blue Kabul River, now little more than a trickle of sewage.

My guidebook remarks that the best advice for a visitor to Afghanistan is "to get out of the capital as soon as you can." Any appealing charms are on the outskirts: the restored burial garden of Babur, the first Mogul emperor; the royal mausoleum; the ruins of the great fortress of Bala Hissar; and the old Timurid pottery village of Istalif, now reviving after being flattened by Taleban shells. Nobody mentions the old city in central Kabul.

Historic quarters form the emotional focus of all great cities. That is why they are treasured, in places as diverse as Warsaw, Barcelona, Cairo and Delhi. It is in such quarters that citizens find their identity and visitors glimpse the uniqueness of a country and its culture. Enough remains of old Kabul to be worth repairing or reconstructing. It requires only an effort of will and persuasion.

A myth of modern Afghanistan is that the Russian occupation ended in 1988 and that, after 13 years of civil war and Taleban rule, a Western democracy was installed. The truth is that communist authoritarianism survived. On the wall of the Kabul mayor's office hangs the still-existing Russian plan for a new city, modeled on the Soviet satellite states to the north. The old city is scheduled to be flattened and replaced by the blocks familiar from Minsk to Tashkent, albeit with concrete replaced by glass.

Kabul city center is already dotted with pastiche Western office blocks, like things from outer space, many built speculatively to launder opium money and covered in sheet glass, fiercely expensive to air condition. Beyond lies the suburb of Microrayon, where acres of rectangular workers' housing ignore the climatic virtues of mud walls and inner courtyards. Traditional building is not taught in the architecture department of Kabul university.

Two efforts are now being made to rescue the old city from the planners' final solution (both supported by President Hamid Karzai). One, financed by the Aga Khan Foundation, is restoring lanes, houses and shops in the old town south of the river. In the alleys beyond the bird market of Ka Farushi (where you buy fighting quails), mud buildings have been restored with jutting upper stories and intricate wooden screens. Dirt streets have been paved. Courtyards, shrines and playgrounds grace what is still a poor district. Here it is possible to feel Afghanistan.

More challenging is the neighborhood on the opposite bank of the river, Murad Khane. Behind a quarter crammed with metal and craft workshops, the land is two-thirds flattened and supposedly expropriated by the city for clearance. Aerial photographs of Murad Khane in 1980 and 2004 are like those of the English city of Coventry before and after the World war II bombing. Remaining houses and mosques are like temples on the moon, with exotic names such as the Great Serai, the House of Columns, the House of Peacocks and the Blue House. Faces peer from the depths, as if wondering whether a visitor presages a gun or a bulldozer.

A British charity run by an energetic former diplomat, Rory Stewart, is struggling to help Kabul avoid Coventry's mistake in destroying whatever the bombs left standing. Under the patronage of the Prince of Wales, Stewart's Turquoise Mountain Foundation is trying to persuade the owners of some 30 surviving buildings to accept free restoration.

The remaining sites would then be rebuilt in traditional style. Such conservation would not be ersatz antiquarianism but merely use appropriate materials to rescue a neighborhood whose character should be as critical to old Kabul as saving Covent Garden was to London's West End. Murad Khane is on the brink of total disaster or exhilarating renewal. Stewart's project hopes to make use of a school he has set up in an old fort, already employing retired Afghan craftsmen to teach apprentices traditional building, wood carving and decorative calligraphy. In the face of some of the world's most unscrupulous property sharks, he is trying to show Afghans that there is a soul to their capital of which they should be proud and which is worth rebuilding for the world to see.

The Aga Khan and Turquoise Mountain are the best things that could happen to Kabul. The occupying powers should be down on their knees pleading with them to join hands over the Kabul River, to embrace what used to be one of the great bazaars of central Asia. Towering behind them runs the ancient city wall along a mountain ridge. At its foot stands the fortress of Bala Hissar, as dramatic as Syria's Crac des Chevaliers. Both await restoration. This could yet be a thrilling place.

Does anyone care? Modern Kabul is in thrall to tens of thousands of frightened UN officials, NGO expatriates and foreign soldiers, few of whom stray from their compounds, either into the old city or out into the wild surrounding country. Some do good work in medicine and education, but most commune with each other in heavily guarded villas and armored Land Cruisers. The NGO "swarm" is now the cultural aftershock of modern war.

The West is spending obscene amounts of money on the ineffective military occupation of Afghanistan, including Britain's £1 billion on a base in Helmand province. Spending is no less obscene on trying (and failing) to suppress the country's one valuable crop, opium, which Britain consumes in vast quantities. For a fraction of this money, Kabul could have restored to it some of the dignity it has lost over the past quarter-century. For a smaller fraction London could at least restore the magnificent old British legation, rotting and derelict in its park while diplomats cower in buildings rented from Bulgarians.

The British statesman George Curzon's greatest legacy to India was not pomp or civil service. It was saving the Taj Mahal, Fatehpur Sikri and a hundred palaces, castles and temples that are today India's glory and its most precious tourist asset. Even Nehru later said of Curzon that he would be remembered most among British viceroys of India because he saved "all that is beautiful in India." It was Curzon's proudest boast. Will the same ever be said of his successors across the Northwest Frontier?

[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.]