In this bulletin:

• Gunbattles kill 6 in Afghanistan
• Pakistan arrests Taleban suspects
• U.S. Senate majority leader calls for efforts to bring Taliban into Afghan
• Pakistan reaches into Afghanistan
• Takhar residents took to streets against armed men
• US military arrests former Afghan commander
• Women officials face death threats in southern provinces
• Over 300 schools closed in south
• Afghan girls risk their lives to go to secret school
• President Bill Clinton Calls for Investment in Afghan Farmers
• Through Global Partnership for Afghanistan
• Mixed messages - Jean's role in Afghan debate contributes to Harper's problems
• Military worried about Tory failure to defend Afghan mission
• Letter Gives Glimpse of Al-Qaeda's Leadership
• Vulnerable Afghans cast off crutches of dependency
• Salvaging fragments of the giant Buddhas

Gunbattles kill 6 in Afghanistan

Kabul (AP 10.3.06) - Two gunbattles in eastern Afghanistan killed four Afghan and two U.S. troops, officials said Tuesday, and NATO prepared to assume military command of all of the country from the U.S.-led coalition.

A suicide bomber on a motorbike attacked a Canadian military convoy in the city of Kandahar, but no troops were injured, said Maj. Daryl Morrell, a spokesman for the NATO-led force.

Two American and one Afghan soldier died Monday during a gunfight with militants in eastern Kunar province, which borders Pakistan, the U.S. military said. Three U.S. soldiers were wounded in the battle in Pech district, it said.

"The soldiers were operating as part of a combat patrol that made contact with enemy extremists. The unit engaged the insurgents with small arms and artillery fire," the statement said.

About 7,000 Afghan and U.S. troops are operating in eastern Afghanistan as part of Operation Mountain Fury, aimed at wiping out militants and extending the Afghan government's reach.

Separately, three border police were killed and three wounded late Monday after Taliban fighters attacked their outpost near the border in the eastern province of Paktika, said provincial Gov. Mohammad Akram Akhpelwak.

In the Taliban's former southern stronghold of Kandahar, flames engulfed a military vehicle after a suicide bomber rammed into a NATO convoy, witnesses said.

"I was sitting outside my shop. I saw a motorbike come close to the Canadian convoy, and then (the driver) detonated himself," said a witness, Ali Ahmad.

NATO-led troops, meanwhile, will take over the command of military operations for all of Afghanistan from the U.S.-led coalition on Thursday, said Daan Everts, the alliance's senior civilian representative in Afghanistan.

The takeover is seen as a significant step in an already historic expansion of missions for the largely European alliance that was created as a Cold War bulwark against the Soviet Union.

Of the 40,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan, about 8,000 U.S. troops tracking al-Qaida terrorists or involved in air operations will remain outside NATO's control, officials said.

NATO's twin roles of combating the growing violence and trying to extend the reach of the Afghan government are among the most challenging missions the alliance has undertaken in its 57-year history.

Afghanistan in recent months has seen the largest increase in violence since the U.S.-led invasion ousted the Taliban regime in 2001. A suicide bomber in the capital, Kabul, killed 12 people and wounded more than 40 on Saturday.

Pakistan arrests Taleban suspects

BBC News - Monday, 2 October 2006 - Pakistani police say they have arrested nine suspected Taleban militants in the south-western province of Balochistan.

The arrests were made on Sunday during a raid at a hospital where six of the arrested men were receiving treatment for bullet wounds, they said.

At least 42 Afghan nationals have been arrested from private hospitals in the provincial capital, Quetta, in the past two months. Police say they usually deny any links with Taleban during interrogation.

Police said the six men with bullet wounds were admitted to Al Khidmat hospital in Quetta's Saryab Road area for treatment in August, accompanied by the three others.

"They are Taleban, and they have links with those living in Afghanistan. They had no documents so we will hand them over to the Afghan authorities," Balochistan's police chief, Chaudhary Mohammad Yaqub, said.

In July, Pakistani police said they had arrested more than 50 Taleban militants in Balochistan. Afghan authorities have in the past expressed doubt that suspects handed over by Pakistan had done anything wrong.

The Afghan government, the US and Nato all allege that there has been a strong Taleban presence in Quetta since the movement was ejected from Afghanistan in 2001.

Correspondents say while Pakistan has vigorously fought against suspected al-Qaeda remnants in the frontier tribal regions of North and South Waziristan, it has been accused of "going soft" when it comes to dealing with the Taleban.

Gas-rich Balochistan has also seen months of violence this year as tribal groups push for greater political and economic rights.

U.S. Senate majority leader calls for efforts to bring Taliban into Afghan government - The Associated Press - By Jim Krane

QALAT - U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said Monday that the Afghan war against Taliban guerrillas can never be won militarily and urged support for efforts to bring ``people who call themselves Taliban'' and their allies into the government.

The Tennessee Republican said he learned from briefings that Taliban fighters were too numerous and had too much popular support to be defeated on the battlefield.

``You need to bring them into a more transparent type of government,'' Frist said during a brief visit to a U.S. and Romanian military base in the southern Taliban stronghold of Qalat. ``And if that's accomplished, we'll be successful.''

Afghanistan is suffering its heaviest insurgent attacks since a U.S.-led military force toppled the Taliban in late 2001 for harboring al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden.

According to an Associated Press count, based on reports from U.S., NATO and Afghan officials, at least 2,800 people have been killed nationwide so far this year. The count, which includes militants and civilians, is about 1,300 more than the toll for all of 2005.

The top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, told Pentagon reporters last month that while the Taliban enemy in Afghanistan is not extremely strong, their numbers and influence have grown in some southern sections of the country.

President Bush has been criticized for his handling of the war and is trying to contain the damage ahead of midterm elections this fall. On Friday, Bush acknowledged setbacks in the training of Afghan police to fight against the Taliban resurgence but predicted eventual victory.

Frist said asking the Taliban to join the government was a decision to be made by Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Karzai's spokesmen were not immediately able to be reached for comment.

Sen. Mel Martinez, a Republican from Florida accompanying Frist on his trip, said negotiating with the Taliban was not ``out of the question'' but that fighters who refused to join the political process would have to be defeated. ``A political solution is how it's all going to be solved,'' he said.

Frist said he had hoped the U.S. would be able to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan soon. But he said the 20,000 U.S. troops in the country are still needed to support the NATO alliance, which will assume direct control over most military operations here.

``We're going to need to stay here a long time,'' Frist said. The senator said he was warned to expect attacks to increase. There appears to be an ``unlimited flow'' of Afghans and foreigners ``willing to pick up arms and integrate themselves with the Taliban,'' he said.

He said the only way to win in places like the volatile southern part of the country is to ``assimilate people who call themselves Taliban into a larger, more representative government.''

``Approaching counterinsurgency by winning hearts and minds will ultimately be the answer,'' Frist said. ``Military versus insurgency one-to-one doesn't sound like it can be won. It sounds to me ... that the Taliban is everywhere.''

Frist and Martinez flew to this dust-blown mountain city 220 miles south of Kabul during a one-day stop in Afghanistan on a regional tour that includes stops in Pakistan and Iraq.

The pair had intended to visit a new $6.5 million hospital built by the United Arab Emirates, but a group of wounded Taliban fighters were recuperating there, including a midlevel commander, and U.S. commander Lt. Col. Kevin McGlaughlin canceled the visit because of security concerns.

In violence Monday, a suicide bomber blew himself up next to a NATO convoy in the capital Kabul, wounding three foreign soldiers and three civilians, while a roadside bomb in the eastern Paktia province killed three Afghan soldiers and wounded three others, officials said.

Maj. Luke Knittig, a military spokesman, said he could not disclose the nationalities of the NATO soldiers who were wounded. The attack came two days after another suicide bomber killed 12 people and wounded more than 40 outside Afghanistan's Interior Ministry.

In the southern province of Helmand, five civilians were killed when their vehicle hit a mine on a road usually used by NATO and Afghan forces, said Ghulam Muhiddin, the governor's spokesman.

Suspected Taliban on a motorbike, meanwhile, killed two policemen and wounded two others in Gereshk district, he said. NATO-led troops killed three militants in Nawzad district.

Pakistan reaches into Afghanistan

Asia Times - By Syed Saleem Shahzad 10.2.06

PASHTUN HEARTLAND, Pakistan and Afghanistan - The Taliban-led rebellion in April marking the beginning of the spring offensive against Kabul, oriented with Iraq's skillful urban guerrilla war, has been so strong that there is even talk in Kabul of the Taliban returning "any time soon".

While the Taliban obviously take all the credit for the stiff fight they are giving foreign forces in the country, an underlying feature of the resistance can't be ignored: neighboring countries, especially Pakistan, never have, and never will, sit idly by to allow events to take their natural course.

Asia Times Online investigations on the ground in Afghanistan and Pakistan reveal that much spade work has already been done to help craft an insurgency that best suits Pakistan's national interests.

Talks like the Taliban ... Qari Mohammed Yousuf is a purported spokesman of the Taliban. He roams around the Chaman and Quetta regions in Pakistan's Balochistan province, where he readily meets with the media and hands out views on the Taliban. He has a local mobile-telephone number and is responsive to correspondents' calls to give his version of Taliban events.

Yet prominent Taliban commanders and affiliates who pledge their allegiance to Taliban leader Mullah Omar noticeably keep their distance from Qari Yousuf.

"Why are his [Qari Yousuf's] calls not traced and why is he not arrested? If I tried to cross the border and go to Quetta I would be immediately arrested," Raza Bacha, a newly famed Taliban commander active in Helmand province in Afghanistan, told Asia Times Online.

The story of Mullah Obaidullah, a purported Taliban commander at Spin Boldek in Afghanistan, is as curious as that of Qari Yousuf. Obaidullah appears to have a relatively small command, with most of his forces made up of young men from Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan. They are each paid about Rs10,000 (US$167) to take part in operations running for a maximum of one month. Yet, as with Qari Yousuf, the Taliban openly distance themselves from Mullah Obaidullah.

The Taliban leadership is known to be wary about the mushroom growth of such "independent" commanders all over Afghanistan, and is taking rapid steps to reorganize its cadre. Taliban circles are convinced that the Pakistani establishment is again actively pushing its agenda.

"They never take directives from the Taliban's leadership. Rather, they receive their instructions [and money] from the Pakistani establishment," commented Raza Bacha on the various commanders active in southwestern Afghanistan.

People such as Raza Bacha believe this is a direct bid by Islamabad to establish its influence in the Pashtun heartlands of Afghanistan - but this time not through the Taliban but through a new force that will be 100% under Pakistan's control.

Pakistan supported the Taliban movement that took over Kabul in 1996 as it wanted to see the end of destabilizing warlordism, beside establish a very Pakistan-friendly government.

British intelligence, while agreeing that Pakistan is meddling, sees the country's involvement in Afghanistan somewhat differently. Last week, the day Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf arrived in London for talks, a leaked memo linked to Britain's Security Intelligence Service accused his spies of "supporting terrorism and extremism".

The Defense Ministry document, obtained by the British Broadcasting Corp, said the West had turned a blind eye toward "the indirect protection of al-Qaeda and promotion of terrorism" by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence. The memo called for dismantling the ISI and ending army rule. The army, led by Musharraf, is "indirectly supporting the Taliban through the ISI", it said. Musharraf and his aides rejected that accusation, though it is a fact that the ISI initially helped create the Taliban.

Looks like the Taliban ... The ISI's main concern at the time was to counter the Northern Alliance and India's hand in Afghanistan, rather than any obsession with the Taliban and its hardline interpretation of Islam.

Soon after the Taliban's retreat from Kabul and Kandahar in 2001, ISI officials tracked a few harmless clerics to Peshawar, Pakistan. They were associated with the Taliban regime as minor central or provincial ministers and had never been a part of the Taliban's fighting corps. In Pakistan, they were simply looking for food and shelter.

The ISI gathered them into a group called the Jamiatul Khudamul Koran and they all rejected Mullah Omar's policy of harboring Osama bin Laden and his jihadist training camps. They received training in Parachanar, a town near the Pakistan-Afghanistan border in North-West Frontier Province, from where they launched operations into Afghanistan against foreign forces. They were pure ISI proxies, and never a part of the Taliban. Nevertheless, most of them eventually left the organization and did join the Taliban as true members.

Similarly, Jaishul Muslim was launched by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the ISI to break Mullah Omar's iron grip over the Taliban. Jaishul Muslim established a network in Afghanistan. However, many of those who had been given a lot of money and training then broke ranks and melted into the Taliban.

Similarly, a group of "good" Taliban was pioneered jointly by the ISI and the CIA in Quetta, with members mostly drawn from towns in the Chaman-Spin Boldek area. A team of former Taliban leaders led by one Mullah Abdul Razzaq, for the first time, negotiated with the US on "any terms" that would bring about a truce. Without Mullah Omar, though, the initiative was doomed from the start.

Many independent observers have given their view of the situation in Afghanistan. An international think-tank, the Senlis Council, which has covered Afghanistan extensively, asserted that the Taliban regained control of the southern half of the country largely because of misguided international counter-narcotics and military policies that are losing hearts and minds.

This is true in part. Southwestern Afghanistan is largely beyond the writ of the Kabul administration, there should be no two opinions on that. But not all of the success can be attributed to the Taliban alone.

In visiting kilis (villages) from Chaman to Spin Boldek and from Zhob to Zabul, this correspondent saw night messages posted on walls and in mosques asking people to stand up against foreign forces. The addressees in all the messages were the "mujahideen".

"Yes, all former mujahideen are now active," said Said Rasool, a cleric in the Afghan province of Zabul and a member of Hekmatyar's group. "They command their small groups and their activities are sporadic [and] isolated and do not have any coordination with any bigger command structure, like the Taliban or the Hezb-i-Islami Afghanistan led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. They are stand-alone - they carry out actions and then go back to their places. This is in fact a mass mutiny against foreign forces."

It is worth repeating that developments in Afghanistan are very much in line with the historic traditions of Afghan society (although the order of events changes). This growth of small warlords and commanders, as happened against the Soviets, is an example.

In 1979, when Soviet forces entered Afghanistan, the mujahideen were divided into 28 groups. When Pakistani and Iranian intelligence overtly became involved in Afghan operations, the 28 groups were reduced to 13, of which seven were pro-Iranian and headquartered in Tehran and six were pro-Pakistan and headquartered in Peshawar and Quetta.

Afghanistan is at the point now that, apart from the Taliban, independent commanders have emerged. Nearly two centuries ago, they were sufficiently organized to drive out the Soviets.

Now, in their new struggle against foreign forces, they could evolve into a separate movement fueled by Iran or Pakistan, or both, or turn into an independent movement. Alternatively, as in the recent past, they could melt into the Taliban.

Whichever way it develops, this force will have an important bearing on Afghanistan's future - and, as important, its neighboring countries.

Takhar residents took to streets against armed men

TALOQAN, Oct 2 - (Pajhwok Afghan News) - Thousands of people on Monday staged a protest demonstration against the presence of armed commanders in the northern Takhar province.

The protestors demanded of the government to reign in the commanders, who had recently distributed arms to their supporters in an effort to press the government for conceding them more perks and privileges.

Ainudin Rustaqi, member of the provincial council, told Pajhwok Afghan News about five thousand people took to the streets to register their protest against the re-organisation of private militia's by some former commanders in the province.

Without naming any one, Rustaqi said people would not tolerate those commanders and would extend their full support to the government against them.

Abdulllah, one of the protestors, said: "The commanders want to sabotage peace of the province but we will not allow them to do so."

He said former commanders and strong men, including Piram Qul (member of lower house), Qazi Kabir (member of upper house), Bashir Chah Aabi (a local commander), former provincial police chief Mutallib Baig and former Junbish-i-Milli commander Mamoor Hassan had attended the meeting and distributed arms to their loyalists to destabilise the government.

He urged upon the government to disarm those men to ensure peace in the province.

Mutallib Baig, one of the commanders, rejected the allegations regarding distribution of arms as baseless. At the same time, he said some commanders had distributed arms to their men.

Provincial Security chief General Aqa Noor Kintoz said the protestors, numbering some 2,000, had informed the law-enforcement agencies about the presence of armed men.

Contacted for comments, police chief of the province Brigadier General Mujtaba Patang also admitted that some commanders had distributed newly-imported arms to their men. However, he would not name any one.

US military arrests former Afghan commander

Xinhua - KABUL - The U.S.-led coalition forces in cooperation with Afghan National Army have taken into custody a former Jihadi or resistance commander in the northern Faryab province, a local newspaper reported Sunday.

"Coalition forces in conjunction with Afghan troops detained Qadir Sarhozi from Gurziwan district of Faryab province on unknown reasons," Daily Afghanistan said.

It did not say the exact date of the arrest of the former commander. Sarhozi, who fought against former Soviet Union forces and then against Taliban in the past was a powerful commander in his region.

Neither the coalition sources nor Afghan authorities have made any comment in this regard. An official at Afghanistan Interior Ministry said that he had no report on the subject.

Sarhozi is the third former Jihadi commander has been taken into custody over the past couple of months.

Previously the authorities detained Commander Amir Gul, a loyalist to Hekmatyar-led outlawed Islamic group the Hizb-e-Islamiin Baghlan and the Taliban's former official Gargari of Balkh provinces respectively.

Women officials face death threats in southern provinces

KABUL, Oct 2 - (Pajhwok Afghan News)- Women officials in a number of southern and western provinces are facing death threats from anti-state elements.

Chief of the women affairs department Karima Salik told Pajhwok Afghan News provincial chiefs of the department in Helmand, Nimroz, Farah, Zabul, Khost, Uruzgan, Paktia, Logar and Paktika provinces are facing death threats from unidentified armed men.

She said Safia Ama Jan, who was gunned down in Kandahar province about a fortnight back, had received similar threats. Karima Salik said a woman chief of the department in the southeastern Khost province had received similar threats. She was now going to her office wearing veil (burqa).

She alleged the concerned Ministry of Women Affairs as well as the Interior Ministry was informed about the problems faced by women officials in those provinces; however, nothing had been done so far.

She said women were being threatened by distributing pamphlets and night letters. The miscreants warn them to quit their jobs or face death.

Asked for comments, spokesman for the Interior Ministry Zmary Basharay said the ministry had received no such complaints from women affairs department. He said the ministry would adopt all necessary measures to ensure safety of women.

Over 300 schools closed in south

IRIN - LASHKAR GAH - Schools in southern Afghanistan are closing in large numbers due to pressure and intimidation from the resurgent Taliban movement, leading to an education crisis in the volatile region, officials say.

Almost 150 educational institutes have closed in Kandahar province alone, according to the education ministry. Regionally more than 50 schools have been attacked this year.

"Some 145 schools are currently closed in Kandahar and more than 70,000 students, including boys and girls, are deprived of education," said Mahbobullah Khan, an official from Kandahar's education department.

Marzia, who was studying at the girl's high school in Laskhkar Gah, provincial capital of Helmand province, gave up her studies in mid-September after her father made her leave school due to fear of attack.

"My father told me to stop attending school because he feared that one day our school could be targeted by bombs or even by suicide attackers," the 15-year-old said.

She's one of thousands of students deprived of education due to fear of attacks in the volatile south where insurgents have stepped up attacks on government institutions, aid workers and foreign and local troops.

The threat is real enough as Marzia's teacher explained: "I have received several warnings during the past two months including letters and even phone calls threatening me to stop working in the school, otherwise I will be killed," Jamila Niazi, head of Lashkar Gah girls' high school, told IRIN.

The extremist Taliban movement, which first emerged from southern Afghanistan, banned girls from attending schools and universities and stopped women from working in government institutions during their five-year rule. The fundamentalist organisation was ousted by a US-led coalition in late 2001 but has re-emerged to threaten the government of President Hamid Karzai.

"After the collapse of the Taliban, we started attending schools with a better hope for our future but now after five years, unfortunately it seems that we are again going back to the dark ages," Marzia maintained.

The end of Taliban rule resulted in a concerted national and international campaign to get the nation's education system working again. By December 2005 an additional 5.1 million children were being educated. Most impressively, 1.5 million girls who had been discriminated against under the Taliban returned to formal learning, according to UN figures.

But much of that optimism has now been lost. Currently, due to fear of attacks, the doors of some 330 mixed schools have been closed in Kandahar, Zabul and Helmand provinces alone, according to Saifal Maluk, head of education in Helmand province.

And it's not just the south where primary education is suffering. "More than 200,000 students are shut out of schools across the country because of school closures due to fear of attacks," Deputy Education Minister Mohammad Sadiq Fatman told IRIN from Kabul.

In August, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) warned that attacks on schools in the south and southeastern regions were spreading to other parts of Afghanistan and called for strict measures to ensure the safety of teachers and students.

In the six-month period to July this year, UNICEF had recorded 99 incidents involving schools, staff and pupils. The figure is more than six times the number in the same period in 2005. Six children have died as the result of the violence this year. The assaults include one missile attack, 11 explosions, 50 school burnings and 37 threats against schools and surrounding communities.

"With all that the children of Afghanistan have gone through, to expose them to this kind of terrible violence is appalling," said Bernt Aasen, UNICEF Representative in Afghanistan, last month.

Observers have pointed out that the closure of schools in southern Afghanistan will have consequences beyond the education sector.

"The [education] situation, which is extremely alarming in southern Afghanistan, not only threatens the future of thousands of people but will further fuel poverty, unemployment and the growing insurgency in those areas," Abdul Quadar Noorzai, regional head of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) in Kandahar, told IRIN.

The material contained on www.IRINnews.org comes to you via IRIN, a UN humanitarian news and information service, but may not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations or its agencies.

Afghan girls risk their lives to go to secret school

The Observer, UK - By Pamela Constable in Mollai, Afghanistan

Arson, grenade attacks and Taliban threats have driven 200,000 children out of the classroom

In a small, sunlit room last week, 20 little girls seated on rush mats sketched a flower drawn on the blackboard. In a darker, interior room, 15 older girls recited passages from the Koran. Upstairs was a class of teenage girls, hidden from view. The location of the mud-walled home school is a close secret. The students include five girls who attended another home school that was burnt down three months ago. The very existence of these classes is a challenge to the insurgents who have attacked dozens of schools across Afghanistan in the past year, especially those teaching girls. 'We are scared. All the home schools are scared. If I even hear a dog bark, I don't open the gate. I go up on the roof to see who is there,' said Mohammed Sulieman, 49, who teaches in several villages in the Sheikhabad district of Wardak province.

Children's education was once touted as a success in this new democracy. Within two years of the 2001 overthrow of the Taliban, who banned girls' education, officials boasted that 5.1 million children of both sexes were enrolled in state schools, including hundreds of village tent-schools erected by Unicef.

Now that positive tide has come to a halt in several provinces where Taliban insurgents are battling Nato troops, and has slowed dramatically in many other regions. President Hamid Karzai said last week that some 200,000 Afghan children had been forced out of school this year by threats and violence. According to Unicef, 106 attacks or threats against schools occurred from January to August. They included one missile attack, 11 explosions, 50 arson attacks and 37 threats. In the four southern provinces under serious assault by Taliban forces, nearly half of the 748 schools have closed. Bernt Aasen, of Unicef, has warned that the attacks 'undermine the very fabric of the future of Afghan society'.

In the southern province of Kandahar, all schools are closed in five districts. Attackers have hurled grenades into classrooms and threatened to throw acid on girl pupils. In Helmand province, a headteacher was beheaded, another teacher killed by gunmen on motorbikes, and six schools burnt down. Three districts have closed all schools.

In the 1990s, civil conflict and religious repression hampered education. Many teachers fled the country. Families who could afford to do so educated their children abroad. In rural areas education became virtually inaccessible, especially for girls, and in some places female literacy fell to less than 1 per cent. State education remains controversial for girls, especially once they reach puberty and custom forbids them to mix with boys. In northern provinces, where the Taliban threat is minimal and customs more moderate, many communities have welcomed foreign offers to build schools for girls. One such community is in Parwan, a lush but impoverished province of rushing streams and terraced fields. This summer the US Army built an eight-room school for 300 girls in Mollai village, the first in the area. In one class every child is the first girl in her family to attend school.

'There are still a few parents who don't want their daughters to come, but we keep talking to them,' said the teacher, Mahmad Agul, 25. 'We lack everything here - paved roads, electrical power, deep wells, clinics. But this school was our highest priority.'

Gul Khanum, 11, said that her parents were illiterate farmers, but she hoped to become a doctor. Nazia, 10, stood to recite a poem, speaking nervously but without a hitch. Afterwards, she said she had learnt to read at home but had not attended school before: 'Before, we were just sitting in the dust. Now we have desks and chairs and a roof.'

In the remote northwest provinces, Save the Children has been working with officials to promote schooling for girls. 'Every kid in Afghanistan has been affected by conflict, but you still have to try and educate them. It can't just stop,' said Leslie Wilson of Save the Children. In Sar-e Pol province, she said, there are three times more girls in school than three years ago: 'It's a drop in the bucket, but it's progress.'

Where schools are too distant or too dangerous to attend, hundreds of communities set up home schools. With the revival of the Taliban threat, they are becoming an important alternative. In the central province of Wardak, the main road was crowded last week with boys on bicycles travelling to high school. But not even they are safe from attack. In one village, the only boys' school was bombed six months ago and some students have stopped attending.

'It happened at three in the morning,' said Syed Hassan, 46, a maths teacher. 'The windows were all shattered and the pages of books scattered on the ground, even our Korans. If our people do not get educated, it will be a disaster for our country.'

Sulieman, headmaster of a boys' high school, showed off several home schools where girls were studying art and maths. In one village, a three-room home school was crammed with students, but another had just closed after an arson attack. Sulieman said the arson was not necessarily by rebels - there are rivalries for contracts to run home schools and 'personal enmities' lead to violence.

'Once I was walking late in my village when three Taliban warned me to stop educating girls,' he said. 'I told them the Koran says girls should be educated as well as boys, and that my school was teaching young girls to memorise the Koran and pray five times a day.'

MIGA Guarantees Support Economic Development and Reconstruction in Afghanistan

WASHINGTON, DC - October 2, 2006

The Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA), a member of the World Bank Group, said today it is support-ing two new investments in Afghanistan to address the lack of financing avail-able to micro and small businesses, as well as the need for low-cost generic medicine.

The projects were underwritten through the Afghanistan Investment Guaran-tee Facility (AIGF), a special fund designed to encourage foreign direct invest-ment into the country. The facility, administered by MIGA, is jointly funded by the World Bank’s International Development Association, government of Af-ghanistan, United Kingdom, and Asian Development Bank. Germany is cover-ing implementation costs.

“Attracting foreign direct investment is critical to the reconstruction efforts and sustainable long-term economic growth of Afghanistan,” says MIGA’s Execu-tive Vice President, Yukiko Omura. “Perceptions of risk by investors and bankers can be a major obstacle to investment. MIGA’s risk mitigation tools can play an important role in securing investment, which is especially impor-tant given the country’s challenging post-conflict environment.”

After more than two decades of conflict, Afghanistan has begun a political, economic, and social transformation. Despite some early gains, tremendous challenges remain. Capacity remains uneven and weak overall, systems and procedures rudimentary, and many areas of the country are seriously affected by conflict. Today, the majority of Afghans still live in dire poverty without access to safe drinking water or electricity—or opportunities to improve their lives. Reconstruction needs are enormous and underscore the need for private sector help in meeting the challenge.

MIGA’s support comes in the form of two investment guarantees (insurance), totaling $2.43 million. The first guarantee covers a $2 million equity investment and retained earnings in BRAC Afghanistan Bank by ShoreCap International Ltd., of the Cayman Islands. The guarantee, for up to seven years, will protect the investment against the risks of transfer restriction, expropriation, and war and civil disturbance (including terrorism).

The project involves the creation of a newly licensed commercial bank, BRAC Afghanistan Bank, to provide credit and other financial services to the coun-try’s small and medium-size enterprises. BRAC NGO—the bank’s sponsor and Afghanistan’s primary microfinance provider, with 70 percent market share in terms of lenders—is one of the largest microfinance operators in the world.

BRAC Afghanistan Bank will provide loans and savings products to micro en-trepreneurs and small businesses across Afghanistan. The lack of employment opportunities in war-ravaged rural areas and the disappearance of jobs and low pay in the public sector in urban areas have resulted in the growth of a large number of small, privately owned enterprises, representing a sizeable demand for credit.

“This new bank is going to focus on providing access to capital for the ‘missing middle’—small enterprises that are too large for conventional microfinance programs but not big enough to be served by existing commercial banks in Af-ghanistan,” says Paul Christensen, President of ShoreCap International Ltd. “We expect BRAC Afghanistan Bank to replicate the success of BRAC Bank in Bangladesh, another ShoreCap portfolio company, where outreach has grown to nearly 50,000 borrowers. But we would not have gone forward without mitigating the risks beyond our control with MIGA’s instruments.”

The second guarantee involves the establishment of a local pharmaceutical company, Baz International Pharmaceutical Company Limited. The company will produce essential generic medicine locally, which will help improve the availability, quality, and access to essential medicines in Afghanistan.

The health sector in Afghanistan remains underdeveloped. Due to the shortage of essential medicines, diseases such as acute respiratory illnesses, diarrhea, pneumonia and typhoid continue to spread through the Afghan population.

“This project really takes aim at improving the Afghan people’s quality of life,“ says MIGA’s Omura. “The plant is the first initiative to restart the production of local basic medicines since the end of the Afghan wars. It will be one of the first concrete reconstruction projects led by the international community in partnership with local entrepreneurs to rehabilitate Afghanistan’s manufactur-ing infrastructure.”

The MIGA guarantee is covering a $0.48 million equity stake in the pharma-ceutical company by the Geneva-based non-profit, Business Humanitarian Fo-rum Association, for a period of up to three years. Private Afghan investor, Dr. Karim Baz, the United Nations Development Program in Kabul, the European Generic Medicines Association, and the Development Finance Institution of Germany are contributing to the project.

The investments represent the second and third transactions supported by the Afghanistan Investment Guarantee Facility to date. The first deal covered by the fund was a $1.07 million investment in the agricultural sector by French in-vestor Dagris in February 2006. “Afghanistan is a challenging environment, but MIGA is pleased to have been able to support three investments through the facility this year,” says Orjan Helland, AIGF Investment Officer.

-- MIGA was created in 1988 as a member of the World Bank Group to promote foreign direct investment into emerging economies to support economic growth, reduce pov-erty, and improve people’s lives. In addition to providing technical assistance to in-vestment promotion agencies, MIGA fulfills this mandate by offering political risk in-surance (guarantees) to investors and lenders (covering expropriation, breach of con-tract, currency transfer restriction, and war and civil disturbance), and by mediating investment disputes. Since its inception, MIGA has issued close to 850 guarantees for projects in 92 developing countries, totaling more than $16 billion in coverage. MIGA’s gross exposure stands at $5.3 billion.

President Bill Clinton Calls for Investment in Afghan Farmers Through Global Partnership for Afghanistan

PR NEWSWIRE - NEW YORK, Sept. 22 - In his closing address at the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) conference today, President Bill Clinton today called upon participants to support Afghan farmers as they rebuild their livelihoods with the help of the Global Partnership for Afghanistan (GPFA).

"The Global Partnership for Afghanistan is the essence of what [the Clinton Global Initiative is] all about," said President Clinton, "They propose to partner with local farmers to launch 100 commercially viable orchard and woodlot businesses. Each [is] projected to generate an income sufficient to support a family of eight, eight now living in poverty -- with a rate of return on the endeavor higher than the same people could earn by cultivating poppies."

"It's a huge deal. It gives Afghanistan a better chance. It means less opium and less heroin on the streets and in cities all over the world. This is also a model which is infinitely expandable. Here's something you can invest in that you know is going to work."

Selected to be part of the CGI "Poverty Alleviation" initiatives, the Global Partnership for Afghanistan's project will provide sustainable livelihoods and enable the planting of one million fruit and poplar trees.

"GPFA's commitment targets Afghanistan's most critical needs -- reducing poverty, rebuilding high-value agricultural, establishing alternative livelihoods to poppy production, and ultimately, improving security," said Dana Freyer, GPFA's Co-Chair who attended the conference.

"President Clinton's moving call to action today spotlighted the plight of Afghan farmers who represent 80% of the workforce, and once provided 50% of GDP. We hope his leadership will inspire individuals, corporations and other donors to join us in scaling our program. Delivering a package of trees, fertilizers and technical support to help a farm family is a small price to pay for helping to restore economic and political security for Afghanistan."

M. Ishaq Nadiri, GPFA Co-Founder and currently Senior Economic Advisor to Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai, said, "I have visited with farmers and witnessed first-hand the orchards and nurseries that GPFA's efforts have made possible. The trees and vines planted are bearing not only fruit, but hope as well. This assistance means living wages for families, marketable crops, and support to Afghanistan's urgent efforts to combat the illegal cultivation of poppies, all of which combine to strengthen this fledgling democracy.

"I know that President Karzai extends his support for this initiative as well. Agriculture, along with security and infrastructure, ranks as one of the President's top priorities."

The Global Partnership for Afghanistan ( www.gpfa.org ) partners with farm families to restore their orchard, woodlot and nursery businesses. These initiatives address Afghanistan's most critical needs -- reducing poverty, rebuilding high-value agricultural, establishing alternative livelihoods to poppy production, and ultimately, improving security. GPFA is a 501(c) (3) non-profit and is formally registered as a local non-governmental organization with the government of Afghanistan.

The Clinton Global Initiative ( www.clintonglobalinitiative.org ) is a non-partisan catalyst for action, bringing together a community of global leaders to devise and implement innovative solutions to some of the world's most pressing challenges.

Mixed messages - Jean's role in Afghan debate contributes to Harper's problems - Sep. 30, 2006. JAMES TRAVERS The Toronto Star

Ottawa—It's just emerging now that the most revealing moments of Hamid Karzai's three-day visit didn't unfold on the floor of a House of Commons packed with politicians and below its galleries glittering with military brass. They came, instead, at a provocatively stage-managed dinner for 20 hosted by Canada's Governor General and Commander-in-Chief Michaëlle Jean.

Along with lamb and sensitively without wine, Canada's official hostess served a heaping plate of straight talk to President Karzai and his cabinet entourage. In response, the carefully selected and eclectic group of hands-on development workers, diplomats and officials got more of the same — and more than they expected.

On the table for nearly three hours last Friday night was exactly what the Governor General wanted: a full and frank discussion of the pros and cons of a worrying, complex campaign. What she delivered to her guests was significantly different from what Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Karzai spent the day selling to an increasingly skeptical nation.

Instead of bromides about a winning international effort wrestling terrorism to the ground, she artfully and apparently intentionally created the preconditions for a fundamentally disturbing conversation about the obstacles blocking the road between war and peace, destruction and reconstruction.

Fascinating enough on its own, the table talk was nicely spiced by suspicions the dinner was just slightly rogue. Why? Well, that warrants a short detour away from Afghanistan and up and down the capital's pecking order. Remarkable as it seems for a country at war, politics, prestige and protocol weren't far in the background last week.

In a move widely seen as hogging the spotlight by letting the two leaders wave the flag by inspecting the troops, Harper effectively nudged the Governor General aside in declaring the visit "working" rather than "official." Whether it was pay-back or serendipitous happenstance, an administration with only a "correct" and unusually distant relationship with the Governor General then found itself so far out of her loop that the senior official, foreign affairs department deputy minister Peter Harder, was added to the guest list at government insistence as a last-minute substitute for his minister, Peter MacKay.

It was a catalytic addition. Urged with other guests to speak unvarnished truth to foreign power, Harder signalled government satisfaction with Karzai's visit but made clear Canada needs Afghanistan to get tougher on corruption and drug lords while treading more lightly on human rights.

Fired back at Harper's government was the equally direct message that Afghanistan now has a serious Kandahar security problem — one Karzai blamed on the U.S. failure to secure the wild south — and isn't happy with either Western reconstruction profiteering or help Kabul is getting fighting the booming opium trade.

Edgy, yes, but no more pointed than what Care Canada's John Watson said. Accusing the federal government of getting lost in its own guns-and-butter spin, Watson built on the themes of recent speeches to argue that the military mission isn't achieving either of its primary objectives: stabilization and reconstruction.

Watson's Afghanistan analysis caught the Governor General's attention weeks ago and his dark assessment Friday proved unsettlingly close to Karzai's conclusions. Successful development in Kabul and the north can't hide that chronic Kandahar instability is making nonsense of the military — and public relations — strategy of helping the people while killing the enemy.

That's not what a beleaguered minority government wants to hear from development experts who have seen the military results on the ground. And it particularly doesn't want to hear it when Canada, like the U.S., is committed to what's known as a three-block war, a suspect theory that loads on soldiers the crushing weight of delivering humanitarian assistance while repairing a broken country and fighting a war.

A loose Canadian translation of the three-block is the 3-D tactical combination of defence, diplomacy and development. An objective look at Afghanistan strongly suggests none of the three-Ds are succeeding as anticipated and some not at all.

This month's decision to dispatch Cold War-era Leopard tanks is the clearest indication yet that troops dispatched to move fast and mingle with the locals are becoming increasingly defensive and isolated from the people they are there to help.

As was painfully obvious in Washington this week, tension between Afghanistan and Pakistan is rising, lowering hopes that diplomacy will bring a shared border under enough control to protect Canadian troops from free-roaming insurgents.

Almost as obvious is that development, already the three-Ds weak sister, is impossible to deliver in Afghanistan's combat zones and will remain that way until the unlikely moment when foreign forces gain control.

Those realities are now poking holes in the slogans politicians use to hold support for a hard-to-explain war. Along with the obvious risks for the government, changing public opinion is rife with dangers for the peacemaking and state-building exercises that are replacing peacekeeping as Canada's international signature.

As Watson argued to the Governor General's guests, the military's problem in countering insurgents runs roughly parallel to its inability to be a credible vector for long-term development assistance. Without two of its supporting legs, the three-block strategy crashes to the ground and public support crumbles.

What's even more worrying is that success in rebuilding failed states and the dangerously smug export of Canadian values is now clearly dependent on larger and longer military campaigns as well as more expensive national reconstruction.

In that context, Canada's already controversial 2009 Afghanistan commitment begins to look like no more than a start. In putting those issues prominently on the table, the Governor General, either wittingly or more simply out of concern for the safety of her troops, contributes to two Harper problems.

She fans smouldering dissent about a war that can't be won under existing conditions with current tactics. More subtly, it reminds the Prime Minister that a Governor General he hasn't sat down with privately since March is also a commander-in-chief with an intensely personal interest in a politically sensitive conflict.

Part of her duty is to comfort the families of casualties while her now obvious inclination is to ensure thoughtful voices are heard in the national war debate. The first is sure to please Harper more than the second.

Neither was on the dinner menu, but the Governor General is now squarely on the Prime Minister's plate.

Military worried about Tory failure to defend Afghan mission

By MURRAY BREWSTER

OTTAWA (CP) - The Conservative government's inability last summer to clearly articulate and defend Canada's mission in Afghanistan was a source of great frustration among the country's top military commanders, Defence Department sources say.

The vexation was vented at a Sept. 6 meeting involving senior federal officials and Chief of Defence Staff Gen. Rick Hillier.

At the meeting, called to discuss the dispatch of reinforcements including tanks to help in the battle for Panjwai, Hillier reportedly said that critics of the war had enjoyed an "open field" to "degrade public support for the mission," said a source who asked not to be named.

As casualties mounted through the summer, opposition to the war galvanized and found a rallying point in NDP Leader Jack Layton's call for a withdrawal of Canadians from combat operations.

Layton has called for Canadian troops in the south to take up a peacekeeping function similar to the role being played by some European NATO members in northern Afghanistan.

Defence Minister Gordon O'Connor's public efforts over the summer were largely limited to a series of photo-ops and written statements honouring casualties. His most substantive comments about the conflict in months were made outside Canada, to a foreign news agency, while touring Australia and New Zealand.

In those remarks he suggested military victory wasn't achievable in Afghanistan - something he quickly clarified in hastily arranged telephone interviews with Canadian media.

In the absence of political leadership, some commentators came to term the bloody struggle to wrest control of southern Afghanistan from the Taliban as "Hillier's War" - a galling description for officers who say the quotable and accessible general is just doing his job.

"He has no problem defending the mission or speaking on behalf of the men and women in uniform, but until recently the government had not stepped up to the plate," said one Defence Department official who spoke on condition of anonymity. "Now that Parliament is back they're being forced to defend the deployment."

A spokesman for O'Connor didn't deny the military's criticism, but rejected the notion that the Conservatives failed to defend the mission at a crucial time. "Canada's new government remains one hundred per cent behind our troops in Afghanistan," said Etienne Allard.

"Our record is one of providing extra resources for the military and promoting the mission on the international stage." The Conservatives have visibly defended the war over the last month, an effort largely led by Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Before leaving for a trip to Afghanistan, Hillier was asked if the government had been slow in defending the mission, and if it had done enough to explain the importance of the military effort to an increasingly skeptical public.

His answer was deftly political. He didn't deny the frustration of fellow officers, but focused on the positive. "Clearly the prime minister has been very articulate, particularly in recent days in the speeches that he's made," Hillier said following a support-the-troops rally on Parliament Hill.

"He's laid out why we're in Afghanistan and why we're committed to that mission in a way that we as soldiers accept that we have a noble cause. You're clearly going to have to do work constantly to keep Canadians satisfied so that they know and understand what we're doing and support it."

It's not that Canadians "don't get, or fail to comprehend why we're in Afghanistan," Hillier said. "They just need to be walked through why our soldiers are in Afghanistan and what we're trying to achieve there."

Allard denied that public support for the mission has softened since the summer spike in violence.

"Canadians are very supportive of our military, the mission, and the extra resources that Canada's new government is providing to end a decade of military neglect under the previous government," he said in an e-mail reopens to questions.

But a defence analyst said the government was absent during the debate over the summer.

"The government is now learning that it's not enough to have one speech or one media article every month or so on what's happening in Afghanistan,' said Alec Morrison, executive director of the Canadian Institute for Strategic Studies.

"The government has to keep up a constant stream of contact with Canadians because the public is seized with this issue." The military's private frustration was on public display recently among many who attended the rally to support Canadian troops held Sept. 22.

One of the military wives who organized the mass show of support said Canadians who believe in the soldiers and their mission have not had a way -nor been encouraged - to publicly display those sentiments until it was suggested they wear red on Fridays.

Letter Gives Glimpse of Al-Qaeda's Leadership

By Karen DeYoung - Washington Post Staff Writer 10.3.06

Six months before the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in June, a senior al-Qaeda figure warned him in a letter that he risked removal as al-Qaeda's leader in Iraq if he continued to alienate Sunni tribal and religious leaders and rival insurgent groups.

The author of the Dec. 11 letter, who said he was writing from al-Qaeda headquarters in the Waziristan region of Pakistan, was a member of Osama bin Laden's high command who signed himself "Atiyah." The military's Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, which last week released a 15-page English translation of the Arabic document made public in Iraq, said his real identity was "unknown."

But counterterrorism officials said they believe he is Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, a 37-year-old Libyan who joined bin Laden in Afghanistan as a teenager during the 1980s. He has since gained considerable stature in al-Qaeda as an explosives expert and Islamic scholar. After becoming acquainted with Zarqawi in the western Afghan city of Herat in the late 1990s, he became al-Qaeda's main interlocutor with the fiery Jordanian.

Atiyah's name does not appear on any published U.S. government list of known or suspected terrorists. But his biography, as described by counterterrorism officials who agreed to discuss him on the condition that they not be named, offers a rare glimpse into the cadre of loyal senior aides who escaped with bin Laden into the mountainous Afghan-Pakistani border region in the fall of 2001.

The letter, the first document to emerge from what the military described as a "treasure trove" of information uncovered from Iraqi safe houses at the time of Zarqawi's death, provides new details of a debilitated al-Qaeda leadership-in-hiding, locating it in Waziristan.

"I am with them," Atiyah writes Zarqawi of the high command, "and they have some comments about some of your circumstances."

Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, said on a visit to the United States last week that he believes bin Laden and his top lieutenants are on the Afghan side of the border. U.S. military and intelligence officials have long believed that the al-Qaeda leadership is hiding in one of the tribal provinces on the Pakistani side of the border, and Atiyah's letter, if accurate, would confirm their location at the time it was written.

Atiyah bemoans the difficulty of direct communications between Waziristan and Iraq and suggests that it is easier for Zarqawi to send a trusted representative to Pakistan than the other way around. The "brothers," he writes, "wish that they had a way to talk to you and advise you, and to guide and instruct you; however, they too are occupied with vicious enemies here. "They are also weak," he continued, "and we ask God that He strengthen them and mend their fractures. They have many of their own problems, but they are people of reason, experience and sound, beneficial knowledge. . . . This letter represents the majority of, and a synopsis of, what the brothers want to say to you."

Deemed authentic by military and counterterrorism officials, Atiyah's letter adds context to events in al-Qaeda's often rocky relationship with its Iraqi subsidiary, shedding new light on the depth of the organization's concern over Zarqawi and the limits of its control over him.

An earlier letter to Zarqawi, written in July 2005 by bin Laden deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri, made some of the same points in more formal and less pointed words. But it appeared to have little effect. In September 2005, Zarqawi released an audiotape accusing Sunni leaders and Shiites of cooperating with U.S. forces and promising their certain death.

Atiyah's letter begins with warm personal words for Zarqawi. "I am setting this out as an introduction," he says, because the rest of his letter "will be primarily about the negatives and cautioning against things that are perilous and ruinous."

Zarqawi had been placed in a position of high responsibility, Atiyah continues, but needed to expand his circle of advisers in Iraq and listen more to those with a better sense of al-Qaeda's wider political objectives. If his words led Zarqawi to wonder if he were being asked to step down, Atiyah writes, the response would be "not necessarily." But, he continues, "it is a possibility if you find at some point someone who is better and more suitable than you." Sharia law, he reminds, requires that "proper fitness be ordained."

Atiyah orders him not to make "any decision on a comprehensive issue" without consulting bin Laden, Zawahiri and the other "brothers." He said Zarqawi should improve his relationship with other Sunni insurgent groups in Iraq and be more judicious in using the al-Qaeda name in his operations. Atiyah refers to a bombing in Jordan ordered by Zarqawi as the kind of operation that requires consultation. He urges the utmost caution "against attempting to kill any religious scholar or tribal leader who is obeyed, and of good repute in Iraq from among the Sunnis, no matter what." After they have succeeded in driving out U.S. forces and dismantling the Iraqi government, he writes, "then we can behave differently."

"Know that we, like all mujahiddin, are still weak. . . . We have not yet reached a level of stability. We have no alternative but to not squander any element of the foundations of strength or any helper or supporter." Atiyah's December missive seemed to produce at least temporary results. In January, Zarqawi's organization, al-Qaeda in Iraq, announced it was melding operations with other Sunni insurgent groups under a new umbrella organization called the Mujaheddin Shura Council. But any hopes of appealing to Shiites -- seen by al-Qaeda as an interim necessity that would be abandoned once U.S. forces were ejected -- was eliminated when Zarqawi-affiliated forces blew up an important Shiite shrine, the golden-domed al-Askari mosque in Samarra, in February. A number of Sunni tribal leaders in Iraq's Anbar province have also been killed this year under the Shura Council banner.

Since Zarqawi's death in a U.S. air raid near the Iraqi city of Baqouba in June, the new leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Hamza al-Muhajer, has appeared more in tune with al-Qaeda's wishes and has reached out to Sunni tribal and religious leaders. Competing for their support with the U.S.-backed Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, al-Muhajer on Thursday issued a public appeal for their forgiveness and pledged to respect their scholarship and status.

Atiyah is no longer in Waziristan, according to U.S. officials who declined to speculate on his current whereabouts. But they said he was not in U.S. custody and expressed certainty that he is still alive. Asked what priority they attach to his capture, one official said: "He is an important figure. . . . The world would be a much safer place with him off the streets." The official said that Atiyah is one of a number of senior al-Qaeda figures whose names have not been made public. "We knew about him," he said. "There are a lot of key al-Qaeda people that might not be on lists for the general public or the press." Rita Katz, whose Washington-based SITE Institute monitors extremist Web sites, said she believes that Atiyah is a "top al-Qaeda strategist" who frequently appears on a password-protected site under the name of Louis Atiyah Allah. "He's the one the jihadists go to when they have a question. He tells them what to do, what fatwahs to provide. He communicates with the jihadi online community."

The counterterrorism official declined to say whether the government believes Louis Atiyah and Atiyah Abd al-Rahman are the same person. Atiyah's journey from Libya to a prominent position in the al-Qaeda hierarchy began like that of many young Muslims who traveled to Afghanistan to join the Afghan mujaheddin fighting a Soviet military occupation in the 1980s. Many were recruited and organized there by bin Laden, a charismatic Saudi who had joined the mujaheddin cause. U.S. officials said Atiyah was principally based around the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad.

In the early 1990s, after a brief return to Saudi Arabia, bin Laden transferred his operations to Sudan. The 1991 U.S. action against Iraq had given him a new cause, and his al-Qaeda organization, formed of the foreign recruits he had organized in Afghanistan, declared war against the U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf.

As bin Laden organized in Sudan, Atiyah went to Algeria, where he is believed to have fought with the Armed Islamic Group (known as GIA, its French initials).

When the Taliban took power in Kabul in 1996, bin Laden returned to Afghanistan, where Atiyah joined him in establishing terrorist training camps. After his release from a Jordanian prison, Zarqawi arrived in Afghanistan in 1999. Although he had only a tenuous relationship with al-Qaeda, Zarqawi took bin Laden's money to set up his own training camp near Herat to prepare to overthrow the Jordanian government in Amman. It was in Herat, U.S. officials believe, that a relationship was established between Zarqawi and Atiyah.

After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Zarqawi traveled to Iran and then to northern Iraq. After U.S. forces invaded Iraq in March 2003, he leveraged his al-Qaeda connections to gain legitimacy and adherents to an anti-U.S. insurgency. In October 2004, he changed the name of his burgeoning organization to al-Qaeda in Iraq.

Atiyah's liaison role was "more a function of his long-term ties to al-Qaeda and his relationship with the al-Qaeda central leadership and their interest in seeing him assume this role as opposed to a close relationship with Zarqawi," a counterterrorism official said.

Vulnerable Afghans cast off crutches of dependency

ISLAMABAD, Oct 2 - (Pajhwok Afghan News) - There are times when life pulls the rug from under your feet.

Waris was only a boy when an accident left him crippled in eastern Afghanistan. "I lost my leg to a landmine in Jalalabad. I was very much disappointed and I thought that I would always be financially dependant on others," he said.

Today, thanks to the Syed Jamaluddin Afghani Welfare Organisation (SJAWO) in Peshawar, northwestern Pakistan, the 25-year-old Afghan has found hope. "The situation has changed. I'm enrolled in a tailoring course and sure that once I complete it, I will be able to support not only myself but also my siblings and mother."

The UN refugee agency has been funding SJAWO since 1991 to provide vocational training and basic education to people with disabilities and vulnerable Afghan refugees in Pakistan.

"Vocational training is useful for refugees during their period of asylum," said Mata-ul-Hussain Changaiz, UNHCR's community services assistant in Peshawar.

"It can also play an important role in the rehabilitation of their country and help prepare some of the young people for a productive life once they return home. This training is part of the ladder of opportunity for some refugees, especially if they come from the most vulnerable strata of the society."

Haji Ghulam Dastagir, director of SJAWO, established the organisation because "persons with disabilities can't do jobs which require a lot of mobility, therefore we train them in fields which prove very beneficial to them. We take account of the current circumstances, market demand, capacity, opportunities and design our training accordingly."

Since the establishment of SJAWO, a total of 7,799 men and 3,355 women have been trained under its programmes. One hundred Afghan men and women are learning different skills in the current session, which runs from July to December.

Training ranges from embroidery, carpentry, plumbing, tailoring, masonry and welding to painting, bar bending, carpet weaving, gabion weaving, blacksmithing, tinsmithing, leatherwork and secretarial work. The sessions also include basic education.

Women, especially, have shown great interest. "The Afghan women are very enthusiastic to learn new skills," said Dastagir. "These skills enable them to earn a decent livelihood without leaving the house." Male trainees are provided with hostel facilities. Sheikhba, a 25-year-old Afghan woman, said: "We have been deprived of everything, but I'm learning to weave carpets. I have heard that it is a well-paid job. Once I learn it, I will teach it to my sisters. I want to go back to Afghanistan but I can't we don't have a house or any source of income."

The UN refugee agency provides the trainees with complete tool kits upon the completion of their course. "We keep a track of the trainees and, according to a survey, more than 90 per cent of them are earning a decent livelihood by practising the skills they have learned," said Dastagir.

More than 130,000 Afghans have repatriated from Pakistan with the assistance of UNHCR so far this year, bringing to 2.87 million the total number who have returned to Afghanistan from Pakistan since 2002. An estimated 2.4 million Afghans are still living in Pakistan.

Salvaging fragments of the giant Buddhas

The Taliban shelling left the statues in bits. Should they be restored? By Andrew Maykuth - The Philadelphia Inquirer (USA) October 2, 2006

BAMIYAN, Afghanistan - The supervisor halted work. Another suspicious piece of metal had been uncovered.

As 50 workers stood amid the remains of two giant Buddhas carved into the cliffs of this serene valley, a munitions expert examined the rubble for unexploded bombs.

This time they were safe. This mess is what the Taliban left behind when they blew up the monuments in March 2001.

From the volume of twisted shrapnel mixed with the dust and rocks, it's clear the Taliban expended an arsenal to bring down the statues - one was 174 feet tall and the other was 115 feet.

It took Buddhist monks several decades to build the monuments 1,500 years ago. The Taliban, who declared the statues idolatrous and un-Islamic, required only a few weeks to blow them up. Five years later, experts are still making an inventory of the fragments, slowed by stoppages every half hour or so to look for buried bombs, grenades and mines.

"We're concentrating now on preservation of what is left, collecting the physical remains," said Georgios Toubekis, a German architect from Aachen University who is supervising the work for the International Council on Monuments and Sites.

Toubekis hopes the recovery is not an empty exercise. "It makes no sense to just collect the pieces and not do anything afterwards with them," he said. "You have to think about what to do with them."

That big question remains unresolved: What to do with thousands of tons of Buddha bits, some the size of small automobiles, but most of it dust. Some people want to reassemble the fragments, rebuilding the Buddhas entirely or in part. Others suggest the Buddhas could be reconstructed in new material - concrete, bricks, plastic or even symbolically, with laser light.

Still others argue that the Taliban's iconoclastic act is now part of Bamiyan's history and must be acknowledged.

"The destruction of the Buddhas by the Taliban in the 21st century, it is history also," said Nasir Mudabir, the site director for the Afghan Ministry of Information, Culture and Youth. "If you reconstruct them, you destroy the history."

Bamiyan's political leaders, as well as Japanese archaeologists who share an affinity with Buddhism, want to rebuild the monuments as the centerpiece of the Bamiyan Valley, here in the Hindu Kush mountains. Here Buddhist culture reached its peak in the sixth century when a royal metropolis developed along the Silk Road, the route linking Asia, the Middle East and Europe. UNESCO declared Bamiyan a World Heritage Site in 2003.

"It is the desire of the people, and my wish also, to have at least one of them rebuilt," said Habiba Sarabi, Bamiyan's governor, who hopes the site will draw tourists.

But attempts to replicate the statues make purists queasy. "Basically we're getting pressure from everywhere that we have to rebuild them," said Omar Sultan, deputy culture minister. "But as an archaeologist, I can't imagine we could go reconstruct a Buddha from concrete or something. Those artists who did it 1,500 years ago had another feeling for it."

Sultan, however, does not object to some type of anastylosis, a reconstruction technique in which original fragments are pieced together in new material in such a way that the missing parts are obvious.

The challenge for anyone repairing the Buddhas is that not much of the debris can be easily identified. The statues were carved from a cliff of conglomerate - an amalgamation of rounded rocks and sand. When the soft rock fell, much of it was pulverized.

Because conglomerate would not hold small details, the original artists covered it with a thick layer of plaster, which allowed them to add the fine shapes and paint the surface. The plaster was attached to a matrix of hemp rope and wooden pegs hammered into the rock. The plaster was bonded together with ox hair.

Much of the plaster surface had already eroded long before the Taliban trained its guns at the Buddhas. What's left did not withstand the bombardment well. Most of the surviving pieces of painted plaster are the size of matchbooks.

"You have to find the location of the fragments, and there aren't so many pictures of the Buddhas that give you the precise location of pieces," Toubekis said.

He said comparing the fragments with the surrounding strata in the cliff may provide geologists with clues about the rocks' location. "They can even scan the material and sort out different patterns, to get something like a fingerprint," Toubekis said.

For now, the larger pieces are numbered and stored in barns built of rough lumber and sheet-metal. The smaller plaster bits from the Buddhas' surface are stored in an office. Most of the grit is heaped in piles outdoors.

Reconstruction of a single Buddha could cost $30 million or more, but no one is estimating the amount of time.

The Buddhas are only part of a larger collection of ruins recalling a pre-Islamic civilization that thrived in this valley 8,000 feet above sea level.

Japanese archaeologists have sealed off some grottos carved into the Bamiyan cliff face that contain some of the few frescoes undamaged by the Taliban (the Islamic puritans scratched out the faces on many cave paintings because they thought depicting the human form was blasphemous).

By some estimates, 80 percent of the cave paintings that existed in 1970 have been destroyed or stolen.

Italian engineers also shored up the precarious cliff face, which was in danger of collapse after the Taliban bombardment.

Several archaeological teams are searching for Buddhist monasteries that thrived in the fourth through seventh centuries, when Bamiyan was the region's commercial and religious capital.

"The beauty of this area is one of the reasons why people came here to meditate," said Zemaryalai Tarzi, an Afghan archaeologist who teaches at the Marc Bloch University in Strasbourg, France, and whose work is supported by the National Geographic Society. "The cliff of Bamiyan was really a big screen for the artists to show their work."

Tarzi, 67, believes another giant Buddha may be buried in Bamiyan. A Chinese visitor in 632 described a reclining figure 300 yards long. While most archaeologists believe the clay reclining Buddha was probably destroyed long ago, Tarzi holds out hope that he will find it.

Meanwhile, Tarzi's recent excavations have uncovered one of the 10 monasteries that he says existed in Bamiyan during its heyday. The monastery did not yield clues about the reclining Buddha, but he said it did offer some modern parallels.

Long before Genghis Khan wiped out Bamiyan's population in 1222 - Afghanistan's political center arose instead in Kabul - Buddhists and Muslims coexisted until the Buddhists vanished around the year 1000.

In the excavated monastery, Tarzi pointed out dark traces where he said the structure had been burned and filled in. The Buddhist icons were destroyed, and gold and jewel adornments were looted.

Such destruction is not unusual in history, where new civilizations often wipe out traces of their predecessors.

In that sense, what the Taliban tried to accomplish here five years ago was a continuation of a mission that conquerors began a thousand years ago.

Musharraf nuclear claims attacked

By Gordon Corera Security correspondent - BBC News October 2, 2006

The daughter of disgraced Pakistani nuclear scientist AQ Khan has criticised claims made by President Pervez Musharraf in his autobiography. In her first statement since her father's arrest in 2004, Dina Khan said she wanted to set the record straight.

She said suggestions that her father asked her to go public on Pakistan's nuclear secrets were "ludicrous". Dr Khan was put under house arrest after admitting passing nuclear secrets to Iran, North Korea and Libya.

His arrest followed a tense period in which US pressure on Pakistan to act against Dr Khan was building. But moving against Dr Khan was tricky, not least because he remained intensely popular in parts of Pakistan thanks to his role in building Pakistan's own nuclear bomb.

He also knew a lot of secrets about the country, including who at the top might have known about his illicit activities passing on technology.

It has long been assumed that one of the reasons he has never been put on trial - or interrogated by the CIA - was because of who he might be able to implicate.

In his book, President Musharraf said that Dr Khan sent a letter to his daughter, Dina, asking her to "go public on Pakistan's nuclear secrets" through British journalists.

Now, Dina Khan has hit back. In a statement provided to the BBC, she says that Gen Musharraf's claims are "ludicrous".

Instead, she claims that the letter was for her mother, Dr Khan's wife, and gave details of what had really happened. These details were intended to be released in the event of something happening to Dr Khan.

"The letter gave his version of what actually transpired and requested my mother release those details in the event of my father being killed or made to disappear."

She says the letter mentioned "people and places" but contained no nuclear blueprints or information.

Dina Khan also says she was questioned by the British security service MI5 about the document but they were satisfied she had not committed any crimes and was not in possession of any important information.

"The mistake my father made was in being far too vocal in his opinion about those in power, and as a result he is now paying the price," she writes. She says that her sister was forbidden from seeing her parents for a period of months, and that she was not allowed to travel to Pakistan for a year. "Our mail is opened, our mobiles are tapped and the house is bugged."

When he was placed under house arrest, pressure had been building on Dr Khan for a number of months. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors who visited the Iranian enrichment plant of Natanz in February 2003 had realised that the machines used by Iran were of the same design that Dr Khan had worked on when he was a young scientist in Europe and which he had used to build Pakistan's own programme.

At the same time, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in Libya had opened up a secret channel with MI6 to give up his nuclear programme which had been almost entirely provided by Dr Khan and his network.

The US tried to put pressure on President Musharraf to put Dr Khan out of business in September 2003, when CIA director George Tenet confronted him in a New York hotel room with evidence of Dr Khan's activities, but Gen Musharraf still did not act and frustrations grew in Washington.

In the end it took a phone call from then US Secretary of State Colin Powell in late January to seal Dr Khan's fate. Mr Powell warned Gen Musharraf that President Bush was about to give a speech and publicly name and shame Dr Khan. As a result, the scientist was brought before President Musharraf and forced to publicly confess.

The CIA have never been allowed to interrogate Dr Khan directly, something they would very much like to do since it is still unclear how much nuclear technology he actually passed on to Iran.

In the case of Libya, Dr Khan provided an actual nuclear weapons design. Some in Washington believe similar information may have been provided to Iran, proving Iran was after the bomb and not just peaceful nuclear power as Tehran claims, but they have never been able to prove it.

However, all questions for Dr Khan have to be filtered through Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, and no-one is sure they are getting the real truth.

Allowing the US access to Dr Khan would be very sensitive within Pakistan, where he still has many supporters, as well as potentially embarrassing for Gen Musharraf, who simply wants to move on from the issue.

US officials say, though, that one of the reasons Pakistan will not be offered a civilian nuclear co-operation deal of the type negotiated with India is precisely because of Dr Khan.

The scientist remains under house arrest in Islamabad. He was recently allowed out briefly for surgery for prostate cancer.

Dina Khan ends her statement with a warning. "The investigation into the nuclear scandal was officially closed months ago, yet my father's situation remains unchanged. Perhaps the hope is to have him rot quietly at home, forgotten by all. "That will never happen. The truth will come out eventually, it always does."

[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.]