In this bulletin:

• Afghan suicide blast kills 3 policemen
• NATO allies face new Afghan troop call
• British troops clear Taliban base at major Afghan hydropower dam
• Taliban prepares suicide-bomb campaign
• U.S. forces nab 2 al-Qaeda suspects in Afghan raids
• Afghan tribal elders call for talks with warlords, Taliban leader
• O'Connor dismisses parallels between Afghan abuse, Somalia scandal
• Hillier promises to fix problems
• Afghan Development Assistance
• Official hits U.S. for Afghan missive
• Friends Fall Out in Northern Afghanistan
• Afghans tune in
• Making up for lost time in Afghanistan
• Letter from Afghanistan: Are the Taliban Winning?

Afghan suicide blast kills 3 policemen

suicide attacker blew up a car filled with explosives at a police checkpoint in southern Afghanistan, killing himself and three policemen, the NATO-led force said.

Three other policemen were wounded in the attack in the Zahri district of Kandahar province, International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) spokesman Captain Andre Salloum told AFP on Wednesday.

They were evacuated by helicopter to an ISAF hospital and two were due to be released later Wednesday, Salloum said. Zahri is roughly 50 kilometres (30 miles) west of Kandahar city.

In another attack further west along the same highway Wednesday, a remotely detonated bomb killed two Afghan guards working for the US-based security firm USPI. Six other guards were wounded, three critically.

The Taliban, which rose from Kandahar in the early 1990s, make regular use of suicide attacks in a spiralling insurgency launched after they were driven from power in late 2001. Most of the bombings have been directed at Afghan and foreign forces. There were no ISAF soldiers in the vicinity of Wednesday's blast, Salloum said.

NATO allies face new Afghan troop call
Tue Feb 6, 2007 - By Mark John

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - NATO's top operational commander wants more troops to help crush an expected Taliban offensive in Afghanistan but is facing widespread reluctance among allies to come forward, alliance officials said on Tuesday.

U.S. General Bantz Craddock will present a request for three and a half extra battalions -- the equivalent of over 2,000 troops -- at a meeting of national defense ministers in Seville on Thursday and Friday, they said.

The United States and Britain have in past weeks announced they will send reinforcements of the 34,000-strong NATO force. But Craddock, who took over as NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Europe in December, sees the need for more.

"It is absolutely expected he will make recommendations and that he will buttonhole individual defense ministers," a senior U.S. official said of the talks in the Spanish city.

"It is important that we do our work now with the Afghan army to root out Taliban safe havens and to strengthen the border," said the official, who requested anonymity.

With more than 4,000 people killed in violence, last year was the bloodiest in Afghanistan since U.S.-led forces toppled the Taliban Islamist government in 2001. After a winter lull, NATO expects the fighting to restart in earnest this spring.

The Bush administration, which faces elections in 2008, sees the next 12 months as a crunch year in which it must show voters it is getting the upper hand against insurgencies in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice urged allies at a NATO meeting in January to come forward with troops "ready to fight", but the response so far has been largely limited to a British announcement of an added 800 troops.

Spain, the Netherlands, France and Turkey have ruled out near-term reinforcements. Germany, while looking to send reconnaissance jets to the south, has resisted calls to deploy troops outside its base in the relatively calm north.

"It's one thing to say: 'we have put this on the table -- now match it'," said one alliance source of Rice's call for allies to follow Washington's announcement in January that it was extending the tour duties of some 3,200 troops.

"But it is another to work out who is going to stump anything up. Just as important now is the need for allies to stay the course," added the source, stressing there was unlikely to be a quick fix to Afghanistan's problems.

NATO's four-year presence in Afghanistan has been dogged by U.S. accusations its allies are not shouldering their share of the security burden and European retorts that Washington is underestimating their overall commitment to the country.

The U.S. ambassador to Italy, Ronald Spogli, and five other ambassadors stirred controversy by publishing an editorial in a national newspaper over the weekend calling for an "increase in our contribution for reconstruction and civil development".

The United States' European allies point to the fact that they have made up the majority of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) since NATO took it over in 2003, and have been major donors since the 2001 U.S.-led invasion.

Italy's government, which has suffered infighting over the Afghan mission, criticized the direct appeal to the public, with Defense Minister Arturo Parisi calling it "irregular".

But last year's push by ISAF into the more dangerous south and east came about largely thanks to major reinforcements by the United States and Britain -- which between them now make up a half of the total ISAF force strength.

The Seville trip will be new Pentagon chief Robert Gates's first meeting with his NATO allies. Gates then goes on to a high-profile annual security conference in Munich where U.S. strategy on Iraq is seen dominating the agenda.

British troops clear Taliban base at major Afghan hydropower dam

Tue Feb 6 - KABUL (AFP) - The British military in Afghanistan announced it had cleared a Taliban base consisting of 25 compounds near a major hydro-electric dam project in the volatile south of the country.

The clearance of the area around the Kajaki Hydro-Electric Dam in the southern province of Helmand should pave the way for work to be done to bring it to full power, the Ministry of Defence said in a statement on its website on Monday.

Once fully operational, the dam will bring power to 1.8 million people, it said. Only about 10 percent of Afghans have access to electricity.

The statement did not give details of the clearance operation by British Marines or how many Taliban may have been killed.

It said the area had been "the site of regular insurgent mortar attacks over the past two months and civilians have been forced from their homes leaving the dam largely unserviceable."

Troops who had been in the area for six weeks were regularly fired on from villages around Kajaki and came under attack during the clearance operation, calling in air and other support for help.

There are nearly 6,000 British troops in Afghanistan as the second largest deployment in the 37-nation International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) after the United States.

They cover Helmand province, Afghanistan's premier opium and heroin producer and where a district capital has been in Taliban hands since Friday.

ISAF and the Afghan government say an insurgency launched after the Taliban were driven from power in late 2001 cannot be won through military means alone. It needs ordinary Afghans to see an improvement in their lives, including through the supply of services.

Taliban prepares suicide-bomb campaign

Source: The Australian - Correspondents in Kabul - 06feb07

THE Taliban threatened a bloody spring offensive involving suicide bombers yesterday as the US, doubling its combat troops in Afghanistan, took over command of the 33,000-strong NATO force.

As US General Dan McNeill assumed control of the International Security Assistance Force, NATO said a local Taliban leader in a southern district was killed in a drive to recapture the key southern town of Musa Qala from the rebels.

Military officials said privately they expected General McNeill to take a harder line with militants than his British predecessor, General David Richards.

General Richards backed a controversial peace deal in Musa Qala, strongly criticised by the US, that crumbled on Thursday when an estimated 200 Taliban fighters overran the town.

The deal between village elders and the Helmand provincial government, struck after fighting caused widespread damage to the town of about 10,000 inhabitants, prevented NATO, Afghan and Taliban fighters from coming within 5km of the town centre.

But Taliban insurgents raided the town late on Thursday, disarming police and capturing the administrative headquarters, forcing NATO to launch an offensive to retake the town and killing the local Taliban chief in an air strike.

Mullah Abdul Ghafour and "some of his aides" were killed in the strike near the town, the Afghan Interior Ministry said in a statement that described the death as a "major achievement".

The Taliban warned yesterday that this would be "the bloodiest year for foreign troops", saying they had 2000 suicide bombers ready to act when winter snows melted in a few months. "We have made 80 per cent preparations to fight American and foreign forces and we are about to start war," Mullah Hayatullah Khan, a guerilla leader, said at a secret base yesterday. He said the 2000 were just 40 per cent of fighters preparing to become suicide bombers, a tactic almost unheard of here until last year.

Hours after the NATO handover, a suicide bomber attacked a NATO convoy in Afghanistan's second city and birthplace of the Taliban, Kandahar, killing himself but no one else, police said.

Analysts believe General McNeill is taking over ISAF at a pivotal time; last year was the bloodiest since US-led forces ousted the Taliban government in 2001. More than 4000 people died, a quarter of them civilians and 170 foreign soldiers.

"The first three to five months of 2007 are absolutely crucial to the entire Afghan effort as the mission has been defined - that is, in bringing security to the southern provinces," said Sean Kay, a security expert and professor of international relations at Ohio Wesleyan University.

General McNeill - a veteran of five foreign conflicts, from Vietnam to Afghanistan - said at a handover ceremony yesterday that the mission of NATO's ISAF was to facilitate reconstruction so Afghans "might enjoy self-determination, education, health and the peaceful realisation of their hopes and dreams".

"We will quit neither post nor mission until the job is done or we are properly relieved," he said.

The US has effectively doubled its combat troops on the ground by extending the tours of duty for some soldiers by four months. This will provide a rapid reaction force General Richards long demanded but was never given.

General Richards, the outgoing NATO commander, who saw his force grow from 9000 as it expanded into the Taliban's southern heartland during his nine-month command, was upbeat about prospects.

"There was last year some scepticism about NATO," he said. "Today that has gone." (Reuters, AP, AFP )

U.S. forces nab 2 al-Qaeda suspects in Afghan raids

Last Updated: Wednesday, February 7, 2007 - The Associated Press

Coalition forces captured two suspected al-Qaeda members during an early morning raid in eastern Afghanistan on Wednesday, officials said.

The raid near the town of Hakimabad in Nangarhar province was conducted based on information provided "about an al-Qaeda member known to pass correspondence for al-Qaeda senior leaders," the military said in a statement.

The two Afghan men were taken into custody to determine their association with al-Qaeda, the statement said.

Several militant groups including al-Qaeda, the Taliban and fighters for warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar operate in eastern Afghanistan. The groups do not always operate together, though they may share the same goals.

U.S. Special Forces soldiers operate under the banner of "coalition forces" in Afghanistan. Coalition forces work under a separate command structure than NATO's International Security Assistance Force.

Afghan tribal elders call for talks with warlords, Taliban leader

The Associated Press - Wednesday, February 7, 2007

KABUL, Afghanistan - Tribal elders from the insurgency-plagued eastern provinces of Afghanistan want to negotiate with the country's key warlords, including Taliban leader Mullah Omar, to push for peace and stability in the region, a tribal leader said Wednesday.

The elders convened in Kabul for a two-day jirga — or tribal meeting — aimed at giving them a larger role in the country's stability, said Arsalh Rahmani, a leader from Paktika province and member of Parliament.

The elders are interested in holding talks with warlords Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Jalaluddin Haqqani and the Taliban's Mullah Omar, Rahmani said at the end of the two-day gathering with 140 tribal elders, religious leaders and government officials from six provinces.

The non-governmental Tribal Liaison Office convened the meeting with leaders from Paktia, Khost, Paktika, Logar, Ghazni and Wardak provinces to address instability and underdevelopment in their region.

Several militant groups including al-Qaida, the Taliban, and fighters for Hekmatyar and Haqqani, are believed to operate in eastern Afghanistan and over the border in Pakistan.

The Afghan government has been trying to convene a joint Pakistan-Afghanistan jirga for tribal leaders to discuss security, but the plans appear to have floundered over disagreements with Pakistan over who should attend.

Paktika Gov. Mohammed Akram Akhpelwak said that Afghanistan is "completely ready" for the jirga but that Pakistan is moving slow and was holding up the meeting.

Pakistani Foreign Ministry officials were not immediately available for comment. Wahidullah Omar, deputy secretariat for the bilateral jirga, said that the date and number of people attending the jirga were not yet clear.

O'Connor dismisses parallels between Afghan abuse, Somalia scandal

OTTAWA (CP) - Defence Minister Gordon O'Connor was quick to reject comparisons between allegations of abuse of Afghan prisoners by Canadian soldiers and the Somalia affair that brought shame and disrepute to the army.

O'Connor said none of the claims have been proven and any attempt to draw parallels to the Somalia scandal is misguided. Soldiers from the Canadian Airborne Regiment tortured and killed a youth in Somalia in 1993. The death was followed by failed attempts to cover-up the death of Shidane Arone.

His death and the ensuing scandal ended up before the courts and was the subject of a formal public inquiry that led to the disbanding of the regiment.

"This isn't Somalia," O'Connor said. "Let's get the scale properly. "There's an allegation of some potential abuse of a prisoner. There's no proof that this actually happened. That's what these investigations will find out."

The minister confirmed Tuesday that two military investigations are looking into claims that soldiers may have abused three detainees last spring and a civilian watchdog agency is deciding whether it should jump in.

"At the moment, we have an allegation which will be investigated," he told the House of Commons. "If there is truth to it, corrective action will be taken. If there is no truth to it, it will pass away." He added that the results of the investigations will be made public.

"The national investigation service looks to see whether an incident did occur," he said. "The chief of defence staff's board of inquiry will review the processes to see if everybody, everywhere did what they're supposed to do.

The Military Police Complaints Commission, an arm's-length, watchdog agency with the power to conduct its own hearings into allegations against the military police force has been asked to investigate the whole process by Amid Attaran, a University of Ottawa law professor.

Attaran complained to the commission late last month, saying documents he obtained under the Access to Information Act suggest three detainees were injured while in Canadian custody in Afghanistan last April.

He said his "reasoned guesses" drawn from the heavily edited documents are that the men were beaten during interrogation by Canadian military police and that the police then "shortcutted" standard procedures to hand the men over to the Afghan authorities without a proper and documented medical examination.

"These hypotheses may be (and hopefully are) wrong," he said in his letter to commission chairman Peter Tinsley.

The documents say two of the detainees had bruises and abrasions on the upper arms back and chest while the third was bruised and cut around the face and had bruises on his upper arms, back and chest.

"Taken together, this extraordinary assortment of injuries suggests that the men, and particularly man No. 3, were beaten."

Tinsley wrote to Capt. Steve Moore, the Canadian Forces Provost Marshal - basically the military chief of police - and Gen. Rick Hillier, the chief of the defence staff, asking for their comments on Attaran's request for a public hearing.

A spokesman for the commission said Moore and Hillier were expected to reply by Tuesday and that Tinsley would likely decide by the end of the week whether to hold a public hearing.

Tinsley, a retired military lawyer, knows about soldiers' misconduct. He was the prosecutor in Kyle Brown's murder trial in the Somalia affair in the early 1990s.'

Brown was convicted of manslaughter in the death of a Somali youth. The main perpetrator was never tried because he suffered brain damage in a suicide attempt and was found unfit for trial.

Hillier promises to fix problems

Feb 07, 2007 - Bruce Campion-Smith Toronto Star OT tawa Bureau
OTTAWA–Canada's top general has ordered a high-level investigation into a complaint that Canadian soldiers in Kandahar mistreated prisoners and he's vowing to fix any lapses in procedures the probe may uncover.

Gen. Rick Hillier, the chief of defence staff, yesterday announced that a board of inquiry was being convened to probe disturbing reports of injuries – contusions and cuts – suffered by as many as three prisoners while in Canadian custody last April.

"We'll peel back the layers of the onion and we'll determine what if anything occurred, did that meet our policies and processes for handling detainees, do we have to improve anything," Hillier told reporters yesterday.

"We'll make the results of that investigation clearly public," he said as the defence department worked to contain a furor that troops or military police officers may have mistreated Afghan detainees. While declaring that all members of the Canadian Forces have a "hyper-sensitivity" to handling detainees, Hillier as well as Defence Minister Gordon O'Connor, were at a loss to explain why it took the complaints of an Ottawa university professor to get the senior leadership to act – 10 months after the injuries were first reported in military documents.

"There are many, many activities going on inside the defence department and senior management is not aware of every activity going on inside the department," O'Connor told reporters yesterday.

The Toronto Star has learned that senior leaders were tipped off last year about the possible mistreatment of at least one prisoner. Two senior investigators with the National Investigation Service – a military branch that probes serious or sensitive cases – flew to Kandahar to look into the complaints from within the military that soldiers had been too aggressive in handling a prisoner.

However, they cleared Canadian Forces members of any wrongdoing after finding no evidence of injuries and hearing from other witnesses who praised soldiers for their handling of detainees.

Now that case and two others are the subject of the board of inquiry as well as a fresh examination by the National Investigation Service.

The possible mistreatment first came to light in military documents that Amir Attaran, a law professor at the University of Ottawa, says he obtained under access to information legislation.

``It is inexcusable that they have not investigated," Attaran said. "This is not right."

In one document, a soldier describes having to use force to restrain a suspect who would not comply with his requests to get on the ground. "He resisted and became extremely belligerent, to the point that it took four personnel to subdue him," according to the statement.

The reports go on to describe injuries suffered by the prisoners and Attaran says it appears that at least one of them was beaten during an interrogation.

"Lacerations on L&R eye brows; contusions & swelling of both eyes; lacerations on L cheek; lacerations centre of forehead; abrasions on chin; multiple contusions on both upper arms, back & chest," according to Military Police Temporarily Detained Persons Register.

The two other men suffered similar contusions and abrasions, according to other registers obtained by Attaran.

"This extraordinary assortment of injuries suggests that the men ... were beaten," Attaran wrote in his original complaint to Canadian Forces.

He also complains that the military police responsible for overseeing the detainees "failed to exercise due diligence." That includes not ensuring the injured detainees received medical treatment.

But even as the investigation got underway, Hillier expressed confidence in the way detainees are handled.

"We understand how important it is to get this right and we do a lot of training, and we've done a lot of preparation, and we have a chain of command that supervises that to a very good extent," he said.

But at the same time, he cautioned that Kandahar is a rough place where force sometimes has to be applied by troops.

"Bear in mind that we are in an operational theatre where men are trying to and sometimes kill Canadian soldiers. We handle it in the most appropriate and best possible manner we can," he said.

Both O'Connor and Hillier were quick to dismiss any suggestion this incident has parallels to the torture death of a Somali teen at the hands of Canadian troops in 1993 and an attempted cover-up. "We learnt many lessons from Somalia. One is responsibility of chain of command ... I do not fear another Somalia," Hillier said.

Afghan Development Assistance – VOA 1.6.07

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says security forces can drive out Afghanistan’s Taleban insurgents, but “when you’ve cleared out an area, you have to be able to help the population recover, and that keeps them on your side.”

To help the Afghans recover, President George W. Bush will seek congressional approval for two billion dollars in reconstruction assistance during the next two years. In addition, Mr. Bush will request more than eight and a half billion dollars in security assistance for Afghanistan.

U.S. Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns says American aid is helping the Afghan people build infrastructure:

“We have been involved in trying to construct a ring road, a national ring road. . . .from Kabul to Kandahar around to Herat in the west and back up again. About seventy-five percent of that road is constructed, about one-thousand-four-hundred miles of road, and we intend to finish it by 2010.”

The United States, says Mr. Burns, is working with the Afghan government to help meet other basic needs of the Afghan people:

“We’re involved in power construction. We have several multinational projects underway to build up hydro and electrical power systems. . . .We’re also involved in rural development. In the past five years, about five million girls and boys have been returned to school with the assistance of the Afghan government, but also of the United States and the other donor countries.”

The new aid will also pay for economic development projects, including those to expand irrigation and agriculture, and efforts to combat narcotic trafficking. Under Secretary of State Burns says, as Afghans rebuild, they continue to be threatened by the Taleban:

“They’ve gone into Kandahar and killed elected authorities, they’ve killed schoolteachers, they have tried to intimidate people who educate girls.”

A female teacher who was once beaten by Taleban religious police for teaching girls says she now administers a girls’ school in Kabul. “We have our first class of eleventh-graders,” she says.

Protecting the gains made by Afghan women and men, says U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, means “defeating the Taleban” and winning the trust and support of the Afghan people.

The preceding was an editorial reflecting the views of the United States Government

Official hits U.S. for Afghan missive

By John Phillips THE WASHINGTON TIMES February 7, 2007

ROME -- Foreign Minister Massimo D'Alema yesterday protested an open letter to a Rome newspaper from U.S. Ambassador Ronald P. Spogli and five other envoys urging Italy to maintain its troop deployment in Afghanistan.

    Mr. D'Alema, a former communist who, as prime minister in 1999, won NATO's trust with his support for the bombing of Kosovo, called the letter an "irregular" departure from normal diplomatic procedures. The letter also was signed by the ambassadors of Australia, Britain, Canada, the Netherlands and Romania.

    Prime Minister Romano Prodi's center-left government is struggling to maintain its deployment of 1,938 troops in Afghanistan in the face of opposition from Communists and Greens in the Cabinet, three of whom abstained when the Cabinet voted to refinance the mission last month.

    Mr. Prodi has withdrawn most Italian troops from Iraq, and his government's razor-thin majority in the Senate could collapse if the dissident coaliti

    "There are more appropriate bodies in which to discuss Italy's commitment in Afghanistan rather than through open letters from ambassadors to daily newspapers," Mr. D'Alema snorted during a visit to Seoul.

    In Washington, the State Department said the letter was "a praiseworthy initiative" by the U.S. envoy.

    Mr. D'Alema last night sent his own letter to the six envoys, expressing "surprise and disapproval" at their decision to make their missive public. Gianfranco Fini, a spokesman for the opposition, fired back, telling Mr. D'Alema, "What was irregular was your angry response."

    A Canadian Embassy spokesman rejected speculation in the Italian press that Mr. Spogli had pressured his fellow ambassadors to sign the letter.

    "It is true that the Americans had a guiding role in the affair, but the letter was born out of exchanges of views between the various ambassadors on the spot," the spokesman said. "It was totally shared by all of us."

    Some Italian newspapers speculated that the ambassadors of France, Germany and Spain also had been approached but had declined to sign the letter because their governments were uncomfortable with a NATO appeal for increased troop deployments in Afghanistan.

    Foreign Ministry sources said they were aware that Mr. Spogli and his recently arrived British counterpart, Edward Chaplin, planned to ask Italy to assign its troops in Afghanistan to more front-line duties.

    Sources said Mr. D'Alema heard nothing more until he received a call in Japan informing him that the letter from the six envoys had been published in the left-leaning newspaper La Repubblica.

Friends Fall Out in Northern Afghanistan

A former ally of General Dostum takes him on in a battle for political power in the north. By Sayed Yaqub Ibrahimi in Mazar-e-Sharif (ARR No. 240, 6-Feb-06)

Accusations of brutality are nothing new for General Abdul Rashid Dostum, who commanded an Uzbek militia faction throughout years of civil war in Afghanistan. The international watchdog group Human Rights Watch has repeatedly alleged that he is a war criminal.

Dostum has weathered the storm with relative equanimity. Not only has the burly general escaped prosecution, he enjoys the prestige of a top post in President Hamed Karzai’s administration as the Afghan army’s chief of staff.

But now one of Dostum’s closest political friends has joined the chorus of voices against him, accusing him of responsibility for killings and other atrocities during the civil war of the early Nineties, and even claiming that he plotted an armed insurrection against the present government.

Akbar Bay, a prominent Uzbek community member, broke with Dostum last month during the inauguration of his new party called the Turkic Islamic Council of Afghanistan. The event took place in the northern province of Jowzjan, which is - not coincidentally - the seat of Dostum’s power and prestige.

“I can no longer work with a criminal and killer,” Akbar Bay told IWPR. “During his years of dominance, he murdered everyone who he felt was trying to challenge him.”

During the decades of war, Dostum’s armed militia conducted brutal operations across several Afghan provinces.

Now the former deputy says he intends to mobilise all northern tribes against his former boss.

Akbar Bay himself has a somewhat chequered past. He spent the years of Soviet occupation abroad, and in 1989 he was arrested in the United States and later convicted of drug smuggling and tax evasion. He remained in prison until 2003, when he was released and came back to Afghanistan, where he took a key position in Dostum’s party, Junbesh-e-Islami.

“But after a while, when I discovered Dostum’s crimes, I realised he had misled people,” said Akbar Bay. “He violates the rights of those under his influence.
“That is why I have chosen a different path.”

Afghanistan's constitution and the law on parties support the creation of new political organisations and obliges the government to provide them with security.

But when Akbar Bay attempted to open up headquarters in Shiberghan, the main town in Jowzjan province, his office was attacked, the windows smashed and the doors blocked up. Akbar Bay insists thugs from the Junbesh party carried out the raid.

“When Dostum realised that I had influence among the Uzbeks, he tried to wipe me out. But I am not afraid of him,” he said.

Dostum is denying any involvement in the attack, but Jowzjan’s chief of police, General Fazeldin Ayar, acknowledged that the damage was done by youths from Junbesh.

“Akbar Bay is right,” he told IWPR. “It was young men from Junbesh who attacked the office, broke windows, and set fire to the guest quarters.”

Dostum allies accuse Akbar Bay of providing false information to the authorities, and staunchly refute any allegations of wrongdoing.

“Nothing he says is true,” insisted Kinja Kargar, a Dostum deputy. “It is all just hostile words. He is being used by enemies who are trying to weaken Dostum and the Junbesh party.”

Kargar was dismissive of Akbar Bay’s attempt to set up a new party. “People here have got Junbesh-e-Islami. They won’t tolerate any other party bearing the name of Turkic or Uzbek people,” he said.

Not content with bringing up Dostum’s war record, Akbar Bay alleges that the general is now intent on destabilising Afghanistan.

“I know that Dostum has hidden thousands of weapons, and is seeking an opportunity to create disturbances again,” claimed Akbar Bay. “I can even tell the government where these weapons are.”

Kargar denied the existence of hidden arms caches. The Junbesh faction went through the United Nations disarmament programmes, he said, and now has no illegal weapons.

Zamaray Bashiri, a spokesman for the Afghan interior ministry, said the police were unaware of any secret arms depots.

“We need the help of the people,” he said. “If anyone knows of the whereabouts of arms, whether held by individuals or groups, they should come to us. Our doors are open.”

Many political analysts have dismissed the dispute as a typical Afghan falling-out. Akbar Bay, they say, is disgruntled by losing the power and rewards he was used to receiving from Dostum.

"People gather around warlords in anticipation of money and rewards,” said Qayum Babak, a political analyst in Mazar-e-Sharif. “But Dostum’s power is waning. He cannot dispense the kind of benefits that he could before.”

Babak said that while Dostum’s deputies were quick to defend him, even they may change their tune if is in their interests.

“In order to curry favour with another powerful man, they will disclose what they were concealing only yesterday,” he said. Ordinary people in Balkh are similarly jaded by the spectacle.

"Akbar Bay is saying these things against Dostum to gain attention,” said Mohammad Qadir, a student at Balkh University. “But if Dostum gives him money or privileges, he will go back to being his friend.”

Many Afghans would like to see former strongmen punished for crimes committed during the savage battles that followed the end of communist rule and the capture of Kabul in 1992.

"We support efforts to unveil human rights violators and put them on trial,” said Qadir. “We do not care what their ethnic group is, or their political affiliation. We just want to see them punished.”

A resident of Sar-e-Pul province, who refused to give his name, agreed with the Akbar Bay’s assessment of Dostum.

"During the civil war, Dostum’s militia took control of our village after a week of fighting,” he said. “Those who stayed behind and survived the battle were all killed by Dostum’s men. We fled, but when we came back we found that all that remained of our home was four walls. They had stolen all the rest.”

Dostum may deserve to be prosecuted, added the man, “but we have given up hope that he and others will be punished”.

Nadir Nadiri, spokesperson for the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, told IWPR, "I can neither confirm nor deny the allegations regarding crimes against humanity, because we do not have any proof of it."

The commission is trying to substantiate the accusations, he said.

“We are initiating a programme to examine all alleged crimes, but we cannot comment until the process is completed,” he said.

If a plan by the lower house of parliament, the Wolesi Jirga, makes its way into law, such moves to investigate alleged war crimes will come to nothing.

In a resolution issued on January 31, legislators said that, in the interests of national reconciliation, those involved in past hostilities - including Communist-era leaders and possibly the Taleban, too - would not face prosecution.

The move has had a negative reaction, in a society where many want to see accountability as well as reconciliation after decades of violence. The Wolesi Jirga resolution faces a number of hurdles - it must be approved by the legislature’s upper chamber and by President Karzai before it becomes law.

Sayed Yaqub Ibrahimi is an IWPR staff reporter in Mazar-e-Sharif.

Afghans tune in

Pam Lloyd – Le Journal Lookout February 5, 2007

A new radio station operated by the Canadian Forces has hit the airwaves in Kandahar, Afghanistan. RANA-FM, 88.5 on the dial, began broadcasts Jan. 6 out of Kingston, ON, and is geared toward a 15- to 25-year-old Afghani audience.

“It’s aimed at 15- to 25-year-olds because they are the people who will rebuild the country,” says station manager David Bailey.

The station plays modern Afghan and Bollywood pop music, plus international sports and news programming, and specials features on prominent Afghanis from around the world.

“We try to find positive stories and profiles of Afghani role models,” says Bailey.

Interviews include the H.E. Omar Samad, Ambassador of Afghanistan to Canada, and Mohammad Ehsan Zia, the Minister for Rural Rehabilitation and Development for the Government of Afghanistan.

RANA means light in Pashtun-Dari, and is the essence of the station’s slogan: Light in your life. The presenters are Canadian-Afghani, and are fluent in Pashto.

The station will also provide information about Canada and the different activities the military is engaged in throughout Afghanistan. The addresses are part of public affairs programming made with the help of a translator.

“We want to open a window to the world for the Afghani audience,” Bailey says. For safety reasons, the station is located in Kingston, where the broadcast is sent by satellite to a radio tower with a 300-watt antenna in Kandahar.

The concept is not new, as BBC Pashto broadcasts from London and Voice of America comes from Washington, D.C. RANA-FM is also available worldwide through a live web stream at www.ranafm.org.

Making up for lost time in Afghanistan

The Guardian, UK 02/05/2007 By Jason Burke

You view Kabul differently if you were there before the fall of the Taliban. If it's your first trip to the city, then it looks pretty dismal, despite the pure aesthetics of the hills, the snow and the sky.

Rubbish in the streets, hideous traffic, desperately poor beggars, erratic electricity, meat hanging on hooks outside the butchers' for want of refrigeration, one-legged mine victims hobbling along potholed roads, entire families piled into one- or two-roomed mud-walled homes without proper sanitation and without proper food either.

But if you were in Kabul under the Taliban, you have different eyes. All the above existed then - except the traffic - but much has changed. So I drive past the Olympic stadium and remember the two executions I saw there.

Now the stadium is empty. I walk down Jaid-e-Maiwand, a main thoroughfare, and think of the expanse of rubble that it once was. Now it is a bustling bazaar and main road. The grim misery that was Kabul in the 90s has gone.

The problem is that in the capital - as elsewhere - there are huge disparities in terms of development. There is a brash nouveau-riche middle class, for example. When I ask an Afghan friend where such people go shopping, he answers: "Dubai."

The differences nationwide are vast, too. Towns to the north of Kabul like Pul-e-Khumri are now secure and relatively prosperous. The Shomali plains are transformed, too. Once, six or seven years ago, I sat with fighters of the Northern Alliance watching shelling across mined and devastated villages and orchards. Now the farmers have returned to their homes and the fruitbasket of Afghanistan is coming back to life.

But then, away from the main roads, in the rural areas, there is dire poverty that is a disgrace to the international community. Much of the aid money channelled to Afghanistan has been misspent. Local government is corrupt and often the Taliban are the "least worst" option in terms of providing security. It is not quite fair to call President Hamid Karzai, "the mayor of Kabul", but central government does not have much influence beyond the capital and regional centres of population.

One interesting anecdote may indicate that some things in some areas are going in the right direction - or perhaps are not. On Jaid-e-Maiwand I spoke to a contractor from the eastern Paktia province, usually seen as a hotbed of warlordism. I asked him how security was in his hometown. "Not bad," he answered. Who is the local commander, I asked.

Previously, this was a standard inquiry as it was always the local warlord who was seen as the biggest power in any given location. However, the contractor, a craggy-faced elder with a henna-died beard and a superb turban, looked perplexed.

Then he gave me the name of the local police chief. Did he mean that the police chief was a warlord? Or that the police actually have some degree of authority where he lived? Difficult to say. What is clear however is that things, for good or ill, are changing in Afghanistan.

The real question is whether the coalition and the central government, having in 2002 missed the fantastic opportunity to better the lives of 20 million people and make themselves more secure into the bargain, are going to be able to make up for lost time.

As we wait for the spring offensive - whether that of Nato or of the Taliban - the jury is still out.

Letter from Afghanistan: Are the Taliban Winning?

Ahmed Rashid - Current History –December 2006.

“There is no doubt that Afghanistan has progressed enormously since 9-11, but now even the positive achievements carried out by the international community appear to be unraveling.”

BrrAfghan 5 Feb 07

In Kabul today, most Afghans, from illiterate cooks to well-educated civil servants, take it for granted that the Taliban are coming back to power. Afghans speak of yet another American betrayal, trading theories on why the United States and the international community have not been serious about combating the Taliban insurgency, stemming the flow of jihadists out of Pakistan, or devoting money and resources sufficient to rebuild the country.

Many Afghans see President Hamid Karzai as an increasingly forlorn figure, trapped in the presidential palace as events spin out of his control, grasping for political straws to stem the widespread disillusionment with his government, begging the international community for more support.

Public morale has been most affected by the revived Taliban insurgency in southern and eastern Afghanistan, areas covering one-third of the country, and by the gradual withdrawal of US troops from the insurgency-hit areas and their replacement by less well-equipped or less motivated NATO forces. On average five NATO soldiers have died every week since May, three times the casualties taken by US troops in the same period. More than 4,000 Afghans, including Taliban fighters, have been killed this year. Some 700 have died in more than 80 suicide bombings, which until 12 months ago were almost unknown in the 27 years of conflict since the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan.

The Taliban have been able to launch attacks involving battalion-size units of over 1,000 men, and for the first time in their four-year-old insurgency, they now receive considerable local support. The major Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders are still at large. And the critical Pakistan-Afghanista n border zone, inhabited by the Pashtun tribes, has become the world's “terrorism central,” a base area where once again terrorist attacks worldwide are planned, and training and funding are coordinated.

Afghans, including aides to Karzai, believe that the hard-line neoconservatives within the US administration never had the intention to stabilize or rebuild Afghanistan after 9-11. Iraq was not just a major distraction, sucking in eight times more American troops and seven times more money than Afghanistan ever received. It was <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas- microsoft- com:office: smarttags" />Washington's ideological and foreign policy focus, whereas stabilizing Afghanistan is a sideshow.

While Iraq has bathed in US funding for infrastructure projects (though these projects have rarely been completed), there is less electricity in Kabul now than there was under Soviet occupation in the 1980s. Afghanistan remains one of the poorest countries in the world--even though it provides 92 percent of the world's heroin, which pumps some $3 billion annually into the Afghan economy, or more than 60 percent of gross domestic product. More than five years after 9-11, and after a well-documented explosion in drug production, there is still no international agreement or adequate funding for a major anti-drug campaign that would offer Afghan poppy farmers new jobs or alternative crops to grow.

Most of the depressing developments in Afghanistan are matters of fact. Others may be matters of perception, or even falsehood. But in a largely illiterate society that for three decades has been fed a diet of violence and rumors, as well as real and imagined conspiracies and interference by neighboring countries, perceptions are all-important. For many Afghans, the perception is that the war against the Taliban is already lost.

Two steps back - There is no doubt that Afghanistan has progressed enormously since 9-11, but now even the positive achievements carried out by the international community appear to be unraveling. It took at least $300 million for the United Nations to hold presidential and then legislative elections in 2004 and 2005, inaugurate the parliament, and pass a new constitution. Since then parliamentarians have been killed by the Taliban and abused by warlords, and many from the south cannot go home because of the insurgency. The new constitution is in virtual abeyance across the country because implementing it is impossible.

Japan contributed $100 million to a highly successful UN-led program that collected heavy weapons from warlords and disarmed some 62,000 Afghan militiamen. But now a follow-up UN program to disarm more than 1,000 smaller illegal gangs and armed groups is at a standstill. In northern and western Afghanistan the price of weapons has doubled, as warlords and ordinary Afghans rearm to protect themselves against Taliban fighters arriving in their areas.

The rebuilding of a 70,000-man Afghan National Army by the Americans and the training of a 60,000-man police force by the Germans are going far too slowly. The army numbers just 34,000 men and is poorly equipped, lacking armor and helicopters. Now, in order to protect towns and villages in the south, the government has asked tribal chiefs to provide local guards--a return to the kind of local warlordism that the new political order was supposed to replace.
 
The beacon of the international aid effort in Afghanistan- -restoring education and placing 5.1 million children in school--has been badly affected as the Taliban have killed teachers and students and burned down school buildings, causing 300 schools to shut down. Afghans are passionate about education. It has become the most important indicator of progress and change, and it highlights the differences between conditions today and those under the former Taliban regime--which is precisely why the Taliban are targeting schools and in particular girls’ schools.

For many Afghans, Taliban bases and sanctuaries in Pakistan are at the heart of the problem. The Bush administration knows that these bases and sanctuaries exist but refuses to acknowledge them. Karzai and US and NATO military commanders believe that the Taliban leadership is based in Quetta, the capital of Balochistan province, just 80 miles from the Afghan border. From this safe haven they are able to recruit, organize logistics, import arms and ammunition, and carry out fund-raising.

Since 9-11 the Pakistani military and the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) have deliberately allowed “Talibanization” to take place along both sides of the 1,600-mile-long Pakistan-Afghanista n border, which is populated by Pashtun tribes. Tens of thousands of Afghan Taliban retreated into Pakistan after their defeat in 2001. The radical Islamic schools and parties in Pakistan, which had supported their cause since 1994, gave them shelter. And they were joined by Pakistani Taliban, young Pashtun men who had been indoctrinated by the same madrassas. Today, hundreds of Pakistani Taliban join in attacks inside Afghanistan.

Pakistan sees the Taliban as a proxy card to be kept in reserve and used to mount pressure on Karzai, so that Pakistan can regain its dominant position among the Afghan Pashtuns in the south. Islamabad also believes that Talibanization or the Islamization of Pashtun culture and politics will serve as a bulwark against secular and democratic-minded Pashtun nationalism, which is reemerging in Kabul, Peshawar, and Quetta.

A Talibanized Pashtun belt will owe first loyalty to Islamabad rather than Kabul, and will counter growing Indian influence in Afghanistan, which Pakistan sees as a threat to its security. Finally, the Pakistan military believes that the threats posed by Al Qaeda and the Taliban encourage continued international support for General Pervez Musharraf’s regime and for military rule, since only the army can combat Islamic fundamentalism.

Angry and bewildered - Afghans are disillusioned with the United States and the international community because they see them as providing cover for Pakistan's actions. Anti-Pakistan feeling is running at an all-time high among Afghans across the political and ethnic spectrum.

In a US Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on September 21, 2006, General James Jones, NATO's supreme commander, testified that the Taliban’s headquarters is based in Quetta. Yet President George W. Bush did not even bring up Quetta when he hosted a dinner for Musharraf and Karzai in Washington on September 27. Jones's comments were largely ignored by the US media--infuriating many Afghans.

Tom Koenigs, the UN secretary general's special representative for Afghanistan, reported to the UN Security Council in September that ''five distinct leadership centers of the insurgency can be identified.' ' They include a Taliban northern command active in Afghanistan' s northeastern provinces, a Taliban eastern command, and a Taliban southern command, as well as separate fronts established by two Taliban allies, the Islamist warlords Gulbuddin Hekmetyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani.

Although Koenigs did not openly allege that all these fronts are based in Pakistan, NATO and US intelligence place all the top leaders of these fronts--Haqqani, Hekmetyar, Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, and Mullah Dadullah, the chief commander in the south--in Pakistan. ''The leadership relies heavily on cross-border fighters, many of whom are Afghans drawn from nearby refugee camps and radical seminaries in Pakistan,'' says the report to the UN Security Council. ''They are trained and paid to serve as medium-level commanders, leading operations inside Afghanistan and are able to retreat back to safe havens outside the country,'' the report adds.

The UN Security Council declined to debate Koenigs’s findings, which again left Afghans angry and bewildered. Afghans were even more infuriated when Musharraf, during his September visit to Washington, waved the UN report at journalists at the White House, saying that it vindicated Pakistan's denials about providing sanctuary to the Taliban. The State Department declined to correct Musharraf's misreading of the report.

However, the ISI is cooperating fully with the United States and Britain in dealing with their domestic terrorism threat, which in Britain largely emanates from young men born in Pakistan or of Pakistani descent who now hold British citizenship. Access to information from Pakistani intelligence about potential terrorist threats has trumped concerns about Afghanistan.

Meanwhile the Pakistan military's controversial September 5 deal with Afghan and Pakistani Taliban in the North Waziristan tribal region has allowed Pakistani Taliban to set up a virtual Islamist state. Although Islamabad insisted the deal would prevent attacks against both Pakistani troops in Pakistan and US forces in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, the commander of US forces, told me that attacks out of North Waziristan have gone up 300 percent since the deal was signed.

After promising a strategy of peace with the seven tribal agencies that border Afghanistan, the Pakistani military, under US pressure, bombed a religious school in the Bajaur tribal agency on November 1, killing 80 people believed to be extremists. The action inflamed emotions and left Pakistanis baffled by the military’s vacillating tactics and apparent lack of strategy.

Pakistan’s military has carried out few of the reforms promised by Musharraf after 9-11. There has been no reform of the madrassas, where radicals and militants are trained, and no serious attempt to deal with extremists. In fact, the military remains in alliance with the largest Islamic fundamentalist party that aids the Taliban--the Jamiat-e-Ullema Islam. Next year Musharraf plans to continue his alliance with these radicals when he runs for another five-year term as president.

Meanwhile, India, Iran, the Central Asian states, Russia, and even Pakistan's longstanding ally China are looking warily at Pakistan's support of the Taliban. Most of these states have zero tolerance for Sunni Islamic radicalism of the Taliban variety and they expect the United States to contain Pakistan. If America proves unable or unwilling to do so, Washington's clout in the region will diminish substantially. Weaker countries such as those in Central Asia will move closer to China and Russia to protect themselves, instead of relying on the United States.

Failed commitments - For many Afghans the other part of the crisis is the incompetence and corruption of the regime. President Karzai has failed to carry out tough measures against well-known drug traffickers, including several in his cabinet and parliament. Western nongovernmental organizations say corruption is epidemic, with aid money and profits from reconstruction contracts being siphoned off to senior officials. Key parts of the reform agenda that Karzai promised he would carry out after being elected president in 2004 remain to be implemented. The lack of developmental activities in the south has resulted in part from Karzai’s failure to purge corrupt or drug-trafficking officials from powerful positions. This has fuelled disillusionment among Pashtuns, the dominant ethnic group in southern and eastern Afghanistan, many of whom are now offering to fight for or at least offer sanctuary to the Taliban.

The other part of the blame rests with the international community's failure to rebuild the shattered infrastructure in the south, including roads, electricity, and water supply, and to invest in agriculture to wean farmers from growing poppies. NATO cannot combat the growing insurgency in Afghanistan unless it shows the flexibility and determination to effectively address major problems stemming from the legacy of the American failure in Afghanistan over the past five years. Turning the tide will mean that NATO has to act not just as a military alliance, but also as an economic, political, and diplomatic alliance--something it has never done before.

NATO now commands some 30,000 troops in Afghanistan drawn from 37 countries, including 8,000 American troops, while another 10,000 US troops remain under separate US command. NATO will need to use military victories as a lever to pry more money out of the European Union, the United States, and the Muslim world--money that, along with funds from Western development agencies, could be devoted to expensive infrastructure projects.

NATO also has to play a critical political role in resuscitating the Afghan government and giving it the confidence to perform better and to eliminate public corruption. At the same time, NATO needs to play a more aggressive diplomatic role in convincing Pakistan to stop supporting the Taliban.

However, as a result of the intense fighting in the south, European countries are balking at providing more troops to the NATO forces in Afghanistan. Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and others have refused to send more soldiers. France, Germany, Spain, Turkey, and Italy, which have troops stationed in the more peaceful regions of Afghanistan, are refusing to send them to the south, where British, Canadian, and Dutch forces are facing the bulk of the fighting. NATO members have also been extremely slow to come up with a reserve brigade and the necessary military equipment for their troops, especially much-needed helicopters.

Lieutenant General David Richards, the NATO commander in Afghanistan, says he is trying to persuade all NATO countries to lift the caveats that governments have imposed on their contingents, caveats that prevent them from taking part in combat or being deployed where commanders want them. Not surprisingly, the publics, parliaments, and media in many NATO countries whose soldiers are dying in Afghanistan are up in arms--demanding that their governments recall their troops. In many European countries, public opinion equates Afghanistan with Bush’s misjudged occupation of Iraq, and the dislike for Bush’s policies means Afghanistan suffers as a result.

Stiff resistance

NATO was ill prepared for the Taliban offensive in the south this past summer. When the NATO forces deployed there in the spring, they found themselves under heavy attack by the Taliban, who aimed to inflict such heavy casualties that Western publics would demand a recall of their troops. In “Operation Medusa,” from September 4 to September 17, 2006, NATO forces in Kandahar's Panjwai district defeated a well-entrenched force of 1,500 Taliban who had planned to attack Kandahar city. NATO commanders say they killed a staggering 1,100 Taliban fighters, including hundreds of Taliban reinforcements who arrived from Quetta in pickup trucks.

A post-battle report compiled by NATO and Afghan intelligence showed that during the battle the Taliban had fired an estimated 400,000 rounds of ammunition, 2,000 rocket-propelled grenades, and 1,000 mortar shells. The Taliban had stocked over 1 million rounds of ammunition, estimated to have cost around $5 million. ''Taliban decision-making and its logistics are all inside Pakistan. There are several Taliban shuras [councils] in Quetta, each with a Pakistani ISI officer coordinating it,'' said Afghan Defense Minister and army chief General Rahim Wardak.

As in their comments about the war in Iraq, senior US officials have downplayed the threat of any imminent collapse of the Afghan government or defeat for NATO forces.They have insisted that all is well and the Taliban violence is only a sporadic response to NATO's wider deployment. But to many Afghans, it seems the Americans are talking about some other country, not Afghanistan.

NATO and US commanders now believe that there will be no winter lull in Taliban attacks as has happened in the past, and that suicide bombings in the cities against soft Afghan targets and concerted Taliban strikes against NATO forces will continue. Since the Panjwai battle there have been major Taliban attacks in the southern provinces of Helmand, Uruzgan, and Zabul, demonstrating that the huge losses they suffered have not demoralized the fighters.

A major problem for the West is its inability or refusal to acknowledge past failures in Afghanistan, or the country’s present predicament, and to offer serious future commitments of both money and troops. Until that happens, Afghans will continue to believe that they are losing the war against the Taliban.

[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.]