In this bulletin:

• Seven die in Afghanistan blast
• Victims of suicide bombing treated at Kandahar base
• US military to investigate claims Koran burnt in Afghanistan
• Militants behead six 'criminals' in Pak tribal region
• Pakistani Taliban free 30 abducted soldiers
• 15 suspects held in Kabul
• The new Taliban
• Role of Pakistan's 'captain' shows enduring Taliban ties
• Taliban use hostage cash to fund UK blitz
• WB grants $50m for education sector in Afghanistan
• Most irresponsible armed groups yet to surrender arms
• Could Afghan Poppies Be Painkillers for the Poor?
• PM's choice of Manley catches Liberals off guard
• The treasures of Turquoise Mountain

Seven die in Afghanistan blast
CanWest News Service , Sunday, October 14, 2007

KANDAHAR AIRFIELD AFGHANISTAN -- A suicide bomber killed seven people and injured another 29 Saturday as Canadians from the 12th armoured regiment organized their largest medical evacuation operation yet in Kandahar province.

The regiment frantically tried to save the lives of 36 Afghan policemen and civilians who were wounded in an attack.

The explosion took place at Spin Boldak, which is within Canada's area of military responsibility in Southern Afghanistan near the Pakistan border. The Canadians, from a Quebec-based reconnaissance unit, sent 25 of the 35 wounded by air and by road from Spin Boldak to the Kandahar airfield for treatment at the Canadian-led NATO multinational hospital there. Nine people were deemed to be in critical condition and in urgent need of sophisticated surgical care.

"Five civilians and two policemen were killed," Kandahar province police chief Sayed Aqa Safed told AFP. Twenty-one policemen and eight civilians were hurt. "The suicide attacker was torn into pieces," he said.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility but the Taliban have stepped up the use of suicide attacks in an insurgency launched since they were driven from government in late 2001.

The troops from the 12th Armoured Regiment arrived at the scene of the attack moments after it occurred. The medical scene was so complicated and catastrophic that they requested that two military doctors be flown immediately there from the Kandahar hospital, 80 kilometres to the west, to provide immediate care at the scene.

Kandahar is the headquarters of Canada's Joint Task Force Afghanistan.

Roads were closed on some parts of the airfield as a fleet of military ambulances, with lights flashing, carried the large number of casualties to hospital. Triage teams at the hospital were waiting at the doors to assess patients as they arrived.

The attack occurred at dusk at the start of the Eid Festival to mark the end of Ramadan. It also happened as President Hamid Karzai made a short visit the provincial capital, less than 100 kilometres (60 miles) away.

Victims of suicide bombing treated at Kandahar base

Associated Press and Canadian Press - October 13, 2007

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — An emergency triage unit was set up Saturday at the military base at Kandahar Airfield to treat more than 30 Afghan civilians injured in a suicide bombing near the Pakistan border.

Officials said seven people were killed and dozens wounded when a suicide bomber on a motorbike detonated his explosives near some policemen in a crowded marketplace in Spin Boldak.

Interior Ministry spokesman Zemeri Bashary said two policemen and five civilians died. Twelve people were said to be in critical condition.

The injured, including eight Afghan police officers and an eight-year-old child, were taken to the Kandahar base by helicopter.

Canadian soldiers in the area of Spin Boldak were sent to help local authorities with the evacuation, as were two doctors from Kandahar Airfield.

"Our reconnaissance squadron is helping Afghan authorities over there to manage the situation," said Captain Josee Bilodeau, a spokeswoman for Canada's Joint Task Force Afghanistan.

Such suicide attacks against Afghan police have become a trademark of Taliban suicide bombers. More than 600 police have been killed in insurgency-related violence this year, the Interior Ministry has said.

US military to investigate claims Koran burnt in Afghanistan

ASADABAD, Afghanistan (AFP) - The US military said it would investigate claims that its soldiers had burnt a copy of the Koran in Afghanistan, as angry locals demanded action and threatened retaliation.

Allegations that troops tore up and burnt the Muslim holy book during a raid in the eastern province of Kunar on Saturday led several hundred villagers to demonstrate the same day, blocking a main road for hours.

Locals repeated the charges at a heated meeting Sunday in the provincial capital Asadabad of representatives of the US military, Afghan officials and more than a dozen men from the area near the raid site in Narang district. "You have desecrated our religion," resident Azim Khan told the US delegation.

"If the perpetrators do not apologise to Afghans and to all the Muslims of the world, and if they are not brought to justice and punished for what they have done, we will stand against you, you will see an uprising," he said.

US Captain Jason Coughenour said the allegations would be treated seriously. "We respect your religion," he said. "We will launch an investigation and find out who has burnt the Koran. If it has been done by an American, we will punish him."

The US-led coalition on Saturday confirmed the raid in which four men were arrested but denied that any religious articles were desecrated.

Afghanistan is a deeply devout country and allegations of abuse of Islam have in the past touched off protests that have turned deadly.

There are about 55,000 foreign soldiers here, about half of them from the United States, helping Afghan security forces fight back an insurgency by the extremist Taliban movement that was in government between 1996 and 2001.

Militants behead six 'criminals' in Pak tribal region

PESHAWAR, Oct 13 (Pajhwok Afghan News): Masked militants beheaded six men, two of them brothers, in the presence of hundreds of tribesmen who had assembled for the funeral of five local Taliban killed during a clash with alleged criminals in in the troubled Pakistani tribal areas on Friday.

Execution of the six alleged criminals was carried out in Pandialai tehsil. Earlier, the militants had announced on loudspeakers in Dwezai area that they would behead the six criminals captured after a clash on Thursday, to avenge the death of their associates.

Witnesses said the six men and two children captured after the clash were brought to the funeral venue. After the funeral, masked militants beheaded the six men, while the children were taken away.

Meanwhile, three men were publicly flogged on Friday after a shura set up by Maulana Fazlullah found them guilty of abetting the abduction of two women.

The sentence awarded by the shura was carried out in Imam Dehri, the native village of the cleric known in Swat as Maulana Radio, after Friday prayers, amid slogans of "Allah-o-Akbar" raised by hundreds of people gathered there.

Maulana Fazlullah said the sentence would be a lesson to all criminals who should now mend their ways. A volunteer force organised by the cleric a few days ago for maintaining law and order in the area, had set up a large stage on which the three alleged criminals were flogged.

Pakistani Taliban free 30 abducted soldiers

MIRANSHAH, Oct 13 (Pajhwok Afghan News): Militants in Pakistan's South Waziristan have freed 30 abducted soldiers of the Pakistani security forces on Saturday, official sources said.

The local Taliban had released 30 abducted security personnel in South Waziristan this morning, reported the official Pakistani media.

According to the sources, the local Taliban had arrested forty days ago more than two hundred security officials while they were en route from Wana to Laddah in South Waziristan.

The Taliban released thirty security personnel. Mehsud tribes and some politicians were involved in negotiations with the Taliban for the safe release of the soldiers. Sources said efforts were underway to secure the release of other security men as well.

15 suspects held in Kabul

KABUL, Oct 13 (Pajhwok Afghan News): Police in this capital city claimed apprehending 15 suspects, including a man accused of murder, officials said on Saturday.

Crime investigations chief Gen. Alishah Paktiawal told Pajhwok Afghan News the detainees belonged to the two groups which clashed in Shah Shaheed area after Eid prayer on Friday.

The two sides used knives and batons and several people were injured in the quarrel. One of the injured later died at a hospital, said the police officer.

He said the 15 people, including the one accused of stabing a man to death, were arrested during an operation launched in the area last evening. He said the detainees were being investigated by the police.

The new Taliban

In a swath of territory across Afghanistan and Pakistan, a wild and lawless new state is being born. As warlords struggle for control and Islamic militants pour in, Jason Burke travels deep into the region to reveal hidden forces fuelling a growing conflict in the front line of the 'War on Terror'

Sunday October 14, 2007 - The Observer (UK) - The bomb was far from the biggest seen on the North-West Frontier but it did its job well. Placed in a water cooler, it ripped through the Nishtar Abad music market, sending shards of glass and splintered CDs in all directions. 'Miraculously, no one was killed,' said Mohammed Azam, who was shopping for presents for the Muslim holiday of Eid this weekend. Twenty people were injured, three seriously, and a dozen shops gutted.

For the police chief of Peshawar, the dusty Pakistan city 40 miles from the Afghan border, it was clear who planted last Tuesday's bomb. 'We suspect the involvement of those people who in recent months had sent letters to the CD and video shops, warning them to shut their businesses, saying it is against Islam,' Abdul Majid Marwat said.

The 'Pakistan Taliban' - or one of the various groups claiming the name - had struck again. Within hours the debris was being cleared away and the blood wiped off the walls. 'This is the life we lead,' said Azam.' We have no choice but to continue.'

The Pakistan Taliban's campaigns go way beyond bombing music shops. Fifty miles south of Peshawar last week, a full-scale pitched battle, complete with air strikes and artillery barrages, raged between the Pakistani army and local and international militants dug into fortified positions in remote tribal villages. By the time a fragile calm had settled on the rocky hills, scattered palm trees and desiccated fields of Mir Ali, 50 soldiers, a 100 or so militants and around 100 civilians had died. Given the inaccessibility of the battlefield and the conflicting claims of the military and their opponents, accurate casualty figures are simply not available.

What is not in doubt is the scale of the fighting. It was a bloody week for everyone as half a dozen ragged conflicts raged across a stretch of land the size of Britain, from the Indus river to the central highlands of Pakistan.

The weekend before had seen an American soldier and a handful of Afghans killed in Kabul; last Monday saw the latest in a spate of suicide bombings attributed to the Taliban in Afghanistan when a bicycle bomber hit a convoy of Nato troops moving through the British-held town of Lashkar Gah, injuring two civilians. Towards the end of the week, around 100 Taliban stormed a remote police post close to Afghanistan's border with Iran, sparking lengthy exchanges that left 10 militants and a police officer dead. An Australian died when his armoured vehicle was hit by a massive remote-detonated mine, the 192nd coalition soldier killed this year in Afghanistan.

The death of David Pearce, 41, made this year the bloodiest for foreign soldiers deployed in Afghanistan since the days of the Soviet occupation. The number of Afghan civilians who have died in the fighting this year is already higher than that for any year since the vicious civil war that tore the country apart in the early Nineties.

In both Afghanistan and Pakistan, analysts talk of an explosion of violence. Tensions were so high last week that when a gas cylinder exploded in an affluent suburb of Islamabad, already hit by a bloody series of suicide bombings, it was initially thought to be yet another terrorist blast.

For some, the ongoing violence in south-west Asia is simple to explain: the Taliban, reconstituted after the defeat of 2001, and with the help of al-Qaeda's Osama bin Laden and his key lieutenants such as Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abu Yahya al-Libi, are battling their way back to power in Afghanistan and, perhaps worse, fast making progress towards seizing power in nuclear-capable Pakistan.

But the reality is far more complicated. It is hard to make sense of one of the most confusing conflicts of modern times, a war with no defined fronts, waged with tactics that range from those of the dynamite-throwing anarchists of the late 19th century to those of the Western Front trench stalemate in 1916, and sometimes to state-of-the-art 'fourth generation' 21st-century warfare.

Across an area that stretches through Pakistani cities such as Peshawar, Islamabad and Karachi, through Kabul and Kandahar, to remote villages and Nato bases in southern Afghanistan, it is possible to unpick the intricate detail of the battle for the strategic centre of the War on Terror. What emerges is a picture not of a single movement or insurgency called 'the Taliban', but of a new state without formal borders or even a name, a state that is currently nothing more than a chaotic confederation of warlords' fiefdoms spanning one of the most critical parts of the world and with the potential to escalate into a very real presence - with devastating consequences for global security.

And this weekend, the 'centre of the centre', as one western official called it, was the small, scruffy town of Mir Ali.

In the lulls between fighting last week, soldiers and militants retrieved their dead. Among the corpses buried within hours according to Islamic custom were a couple of Arabs and several Uzbeks. The find confirmed the worst fears of Western intelligence services. Over recent years it has become increasingly obvious that bin Laden's al-Qaeda group has been able to rebuild a version of the terrorist infrastructure that existed in Afghanistan in the late Nineties.

Volunteers, many of them British, have travelled in a steady stream to training camps. They have included key members of the 7/7 London bombing plot and those convicted in the recent Operation Crevice trial. A new 'high command', including a high proportion of Egyptians and Saudis, has taken on the task of directing strikes around the globe, and into Pakistan (where President Pervez Musharraf remains a key target), and providing technical and financial assistance to chosen allies in Afghanistan.

The training camps are 'rudimentary', according to Pakistani government and Western intelligence sources, but despite steady losses - a missile fired from a Predator drone killed Abu Hamza Rabia, the al-Qaeda number three, in a house in Mir Ali last November - there is no shortage of militants to fill the gaps. 'The number three position in al-Qaeda, "director of external operations", is one of the jobs with the shortest life expectancies in the world,' said a UK-based intelligence source. 'But that does not stop people volunteering for it.'

Equally troubling is the renewed activity of al-Qaeda-affiliated groups such as the Uzbeks under Tahir Yuldashev, brutal commander of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), and Pakistani militant groups that have moved into the hills after losing Islamabad's backing. According to Brigadier Mehmud Shah, there are several hundred Uzbek fighters in and around Mir Ali, all set on killing as many Pakistani soldiers as possible. 'In 2003, there were around 600 Uzbek fighters, now there are more than three times that figure,' said Shah, a retired Pakistani officer who oversaw security on the frontier until last year. The influx has been fuelled by fierce repression in Uzbekistan itself, ruled by Stalinist dictator Islam Karimov.

Last month, a terrorist plot was uncovered in Germany after American intelligence intercepted emails from a breakaway faction of the IMU to German converts who had travelled to the North-West Frontier to be trained. The increasing internationalisation of the militant presence in the Pakistani tribal areas recalls the worst days of the late Nineties, when scores of different groups were based in Afghanistan, all plotting violence in the Middle East or the West. Already, British intelligence experts are describing the Pakistani tribal areas as 'the Grand Central Station' of modern Islamic militancy.

Again, however, the situation is complex. In many parts of the border country, the Uzbeks are far from welcome and have fought pitched battles with local tribes. An estimated 200 were killed in fighting between Pashtuns and 'foreigners' in the south Waziristan agency earlier this year. But few doubt that the Uzbeks - and al-Qaeda - have enough allies, enough respect and enough money to ensure a welcome in the hills around Miram Shah and Mir Ali for a long time yet.

The Torchi river snakes down from the high mountains along the Afghan-Pakistan frontier to the Indus and eventually into the Arabian Sea. Mir Ali lies where the river hits the flatlands. It is a ragged settlement of half a dozen villages grouped around a scruffy bazaar on a crossroads and a concrete ramp that serves as a bridge over the river.

Last week, Pakistani soldiers took heavy casualties as they tried to battle their way in. Despite air strikes reducing dozens of the mud houses to dust and fierce fighting between the low walls and across the dried-out fields and sparse orchards, they had made little progress by this weekend despite talk of a 'major push' before the Eid festival. Refugees fleeing the area spoke of a 'rain' of missiles and shells.

'We don't have any place to live,' said Mohamed Anwar. 'We have sent our children to other areas because we are scared that the bombing could start again.' With the fragile truce barely holding, renewed fighting is almost certain in the days that come.

Few observers were surprised at the lack of progress. Pakistan now has 101,000 troops deployed in the semi-autonomous badlands along the frontier, but they face daunting obstacles. Mir Ali is in the North Waziristan tribal agency, one of seven agencies stretching along the strategically crucial frontier area where the authority of the Pakistani government is, under an agreement concluded by British imperial administrators anxious to pacify the warlike and truculent Pashtun tribes, constitutionally limited to the roads and a narrow strip either side just 10 yards wide. There is no tax collection, justice system or police force.

A second difficulty is the terrain. On both sides of the highly porous border, there are very few roads, high ridges provide vantage points and frequent gorges are perfect for ambushes. Those forests that have yet to be stripped of their valuable timber give excellent cover. Even the houses are fortified. With its high hills and populated plains, the terrain is similar to that where British troops are deployed in southern Afghanistan.

As in the restive south and east of Afghanistan, the agencies are populated by self-ruling Pashtun tribes for whom war has been a way of life for centuries. 'A Pashtun takes his Kalashnikov out with him like a westerner takes his mobile phone,' said Latif Afridi, a local tribal leader. 'They learn to shoot when they learn to walk.'

Inter-tribal violence is a continual backdrop to life on the frontier. Last week, tribes west of Peshawar battled over rights to grazing, water and other scarce resources with mortars and machine-guns, oblivious to the global conflict unfolding around them. And experience gained in the war against the former Soviet Union in Afghanistan, when many Pashtuns in the region fought against the Red Army and its local auxiliaries, has forged a new style of warfare where combat is no longer seen as an extension of negotiation but as a bid to annihilate the opponent.

Finally, there is Islam. In recent years the radical new ideology of Middle Eastern militants such as bin Laden has spread among the Pashtun tribes in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, providing a new language and justification for age-old resentments against central authority, buttressed by new ideas about 'the global attack on Islam by the West' and a powerful call to 'jihad'.

One powerful factor has been the massive growth in recent decades of the hardline Deobandi traditionalist school of Islam. With tribal leaders losing their authority in the new radicalised environment, the clerics are more influential than ever. 'The traditional structure with tribal chiefs, big landowners or merchants and religious figures sharing power has broken down,' Professor Zia Ullah, of Peshawar University, told The Observer. 'At the moment it is the mullah and the talib [religious student] who are in charge. A system that has lasted centuries has been overturned.'

It is these mullahs, whose religious education is often minimal, who are forming the private militias labelled 'the Pakistan Taliban'. In fact, they are little more than a fractious confederation of mini-states run by warlords. Together they have succeeded in expelling almost all representatives of any government authority from their territory and in doing so, some analysts fear, have laid the foundations for a state without borders or flags, but which has a justice system and a common ethnicity, ideology, culture and religion. And it was this fragmented, chaotic, embryonic state's soldiers that were fighting so hard at Mir Ali last week.

Carry on up the road that slices through Mir Ali bazaar, heading west into the mountains, and you will soon come to Miram Shah. Lying in a hollow below a crucial pass over the mountains, the small town was a crucial support base for the mujahideen who fought the Soviets. One of their leaders, an Afghan tribal chief called Jalaluddin Haqqani, held Miram Shah as a personal fiefdom for decades, building a mosque and a huge religious school on its outskirts. Haqqani, a senior cleric, or maulvi, in the Deobandi school of Islam, is now old and ailing - some intelligence sources believe him to be dead - but his son, Sirajuddin Haqqani, has taken over and is as active as his father ever was. If anyone is going to be president of this new state it is he.

Little is known about Sirajuddin Haqqani. According to Brigadier Shah, the Pakistani army is 'currently fighting blindfold', and western intelligence agencies admit a 'lack of visibility' in the tribal areas. However, all believe that Haqqani is the dominant figure among the warlords hacking out their fiefdoms in the tribal areas.

'[Sirajuddin Haqqani] is at the top of the food chain,' said one western military official in Islamabad. 'He's one of the few people everyone listens to.' Sources told The Observer that it was Haqqani who, four weeks ago, brought three different warlords together to provide a big enough force to take on the Pakistani army around Mir Ali.

But Haqqani, who is believed to be in his forties, has another key role to play. He has inherited the influence his father built over 20 years well beyond the tribal zones of Pakistan. That influence stretches across eastern Afghanistan as far as Ghazni and even into Uruzgan, where the Australian soldier was killed last week.

As in Pakistan, the Afghan Pashtun tribes do not unconditionally obey one commander but Jalaluddin Haqqani and his son have been able to draw together a complex web of links of allegiance, some based on tribal loyalty, others inspired by religious devotion to the senior Deobandi cleric that Haqqani is (or was), still more by a quasi-national response to what is perceived to be a 'foreign' invasion and occupation that threatens to change Afghan society for ever.

'We respect Maulvi Haqqani,' one tribal leader told The Observer by telephone from the Pakistani town of Kohat. 'He has always been a true mujahed [freedom fighter], fighting the Russians and the Americans and the British. And he has built many schools and mosques.'

Another reason the Haqqani dynasty is so powerful is its wealth. This allows them to buy the loyalty that their religious and jihadi credentials do not win them. That money comes from smuggling opium, weapons and timber out of Afghanistan as well as from quasi-legitimate businesses. It also comes in direct donations from backers in Gulf Arab states such as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia - until 2001, Jalaluddin Haqqani was a frequent visitor to the Gulf and one of his wives is from a wealthy family in the United Arab Emirates - and from indirect donations via the scores of Islamic charities which gather the 10 per cent zakat levy that every devout Muslim gives to religious causes.

Cash is a critical commodity throughout the 'south-western Asian theatre'. Though not among the prime motivations for many Afghan fighters, money is necessary for weapons, equipment and for the tribal auxiliaries who will turn out to protect drug shipments and boost numbers for major one-off attacks. To bolster a recent, and rapidly broken, peace agreement in the tribal zones on their side of the frontier, Pakistani army commanders distributed sums ranging from £10,000 to £100,000 to five leaders of militant militias who promised to lay down their arms. The money, the men said, was needed to pay back advances given to them by 'al-Qaeda' to fight the Islamabad government's forces.

But the militias, like the Haqqanis, are not loyal to bin Laden, according to Peshawar-based analyst Ashraf Ali. 'Baitullah Mahsud [one of the key leaders of the militant militias on the Pakistan side of the border] recently said that neither bin Laden nor al-Qaeda was his leader,' Ali said. 'His leader was Mullah Omar [the ousted Afghan leader].'

In the sprawling multinational base in Kandahar there is one hangar riddled with rusty bullet holes and shrapnel marks. It stands in stark contrast to the pristine new constructions - including a Pizza Hut outlet, a Burger King and a full-sized chapel - elsewhere in the vast complex that the headquarters of Nato's Regional Command South in Afghanistan has become over the six years western forces have been fighting in Afghanistan. The hangar is known as the Taliban's Last Stand, and was left as a memento to the defeat of the hardline Islamic militia in 2001. It has since become something of an embarrassment.

The latest contingent of British troops to deploy in Afghanistan, 52 Brigade, arrived last week. Most will be based in Helmand, the province to the west of Kandahar. From their bases in places such as Lashkar Gah and Kajaki, the activities of the Haqqanis and the Pakistan Taliban will seem a long way away.

Analysts are split over the links between the two wings of the Taliban. According to Brigadier Shah, 'the Afghan Taliban have no extraterritorial operations or ambitions'. 'Communications among senior leaders we intercepted showed us that [the Afghan Taliban] considered the Pakistan Taliban as a burden and requested them to fight Pakistan but not come into Afghanistan,' Shah told The Observer.

But others are less convinced. 'The situation is so complex that you cannot draw a line between the Afghan and the Pakistan Taliban,' said Ashraf Ali, the analyst.

Certainly Mullah Omar, the one-eyed cleric who has led the Afghan Taliban since its creation in 1993, is respected by everyone on both sides of the border, including the Haqqanis. 'If there is one chief, it is him,' one official in Islamabad said. 'If Talibanistan suddenly came into being, he would be the president.'

But the links that tie the two halves of the Taliban together go way beyond shared allegiances. A United Nations report into the new phenomenon of suicide bombers in Afghanistan stated that 'much (but not all) of the recruiting and training happens' in Pakistan.

'While suicide attackers elsewhere in the world tend not to be poor and uneducated, Afghanistan's attackers appear to be young, uneducated and often drawn from religious schools in Pakistan,' the report stated. Government and military sources in Kabul told The Observer that many bombers came from the Haqqanis' madrassas [religious schools] around Miram Shah, others from the system of Deobandi madrassas around Quetta.

In Peshawar, The Observer found evidence that one bomber who killed himself in Kandahar last autumn was recruited in the small town of Charsadda north east of the Pakistani frontier city by a Pakistani group. The bomber, who had no previous involvement with radical Islam, had travelled nearly 500 miles, from one side of the border to the other, to attack western troops.

Equally, though substantial funding is generated within Afghanistan from taxes on the sale of opium and contributions from wealthy sympathisers, much of the funding of the Afghan Taliban comes from across the border. Weapons from stores in Pakistan or from gun factories such as that at Darra Adam Khel to the south of Peshawar - temporarily occupied in August by a group of Pakistan Taliban - cross the mountains to be used against Nato forces too.

And though much of the fighting in Helmand or in Kandahar is in part based on tribal rivalries, cross-border personal links, not least through the Deobandi religious network, play a key role. 'At the end of the day, it is all about who knows who,' said one Kabul-based intelligence official. Maulana Rahat Hussain, a senior cleric interviewed by The Observer in Peshawar last week, reeled off a list of his classmates at the massive Binoria madrassa in Karachi, Pakistan's largest city and commercial centre, who had all become senior figures in the Taliban.

'They were and are and will forever be my brothers,' Hussain, the deputy secretary of the Deobandi-linked political party that has run Peshawar for the past five years, said. 'They are fighting an occupying force and inshallah they will be victorious.'

On the ground, differences disappear. Hundreds of thousands of Afghans displaced in the Eighties and early Nineties grew up in refugee camps in Pakistan or studied in religious schools there. 'Telling the two apart is impossible,' one British officer in Helmand told The Observer. 'We have found bodies with pockets full of Pakistani currency. But does that mean it's an Afghan or a Pakistani? Round here the distinction is meaningless. Nation states don't really exist in the way we imagine them to.'

And though British intelligence officers and diplomats who have served on both sides of the frontier stress that there are considerable differences between the Afghan and Pakistan Taliban, cautioning that 'to conflate the two' would be a serious error, they admit that there are many links too. 'The short-term objectives may differ but if you are looking for shared long-term aims or a common world view, culture, language and so on, they are very close indeed,' one official, a veteran observer of the region, said last week.

Nato officers in Kabul dismiss the suicide bombings as 'not a strategic threat', but senior officers admit privately that there is a danger that the south and east of Afghanistan, already well beyond the authority of Kabul, will effectively translate 'de facto autonomy' into independence. That raises the spectre of the confederation of warlord states that is in the process of emerging on the Pakistani side of the border effectively trebling in size with the addition of the Taliban-controlled zones in Afghanistan.

'It would be the United Taliban Emirates and it would be a very nasty place indeed,' one said. 'It would be the biggest and most defensible terrorist safe haven the world has ever seen.'

Few are hopeful that a swift solution will be found to the problem posed by the emerging state without a state on the borders of Afghanistan. The Pakistani army, according to western defence officials in Islamabad, lacks the doctrine or the equipment or the will to take on the forces against them. 'They are demoralised. They are taking heavy casualties, having hundreds of guys captured. They are in real trouble up there,' said one.

Nor is the Pakistani army's will to fight unquestionable. 'The men and the officers are sick of fighting America's war,' said one recently retired general in Islamabad. 'Why should we kill other Pakistanis and other Muslims or sacrifice our lives for President Bush? It is not just the tribesmen who are anti-American. The whole country is.'

There are frequent allegations that the Pakistani intelligence services are helping the Taliban on both sides of the border. 'There is no institutional policy to provide support for the militants but it may well be happening at a low level with some individuals pursuing their own agendas,' said one Islamabad-based defence official. 'I have never seen a smoking gun though.'

There is general recognition that the Nato alliance and the Taliban, who are increasingly relying on amateurish suicide bombings, have fought each other to a standstill. Nato partners such as Germany, the Netherlands and France are tiring of a war that British commanders admit may take '30 years to win'. British ministers have suggested talking to the Taliban - something President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan has offered to do. Earlier this month he made a personal plea to Mullah Omar to negotiate and stop 'the destruction of [his] country'.

But the confederation of warlords, Pakistan Taliban, Deobandi religious networks, businessmen and smugglers, the veterans such as Haqqani and the newcomers who have seized power in villages like Mir Ali will not give way easily.

'The loose, chaotic quasi-state which we are seeing emerging has been in the process of being built since the early days of the war against the Soviets 30 years ago,' said one western diplomat in Pakistan. 'It is going to take that long, if not longer, to dismantle.'

Taliban literally means 'students'. Originally mainly ethnic Pashtuns, many footsoldiers came from radical seminaries in Pakistan, where two million Afghans sought refuge from two decades of war.

Soviet troops left Afghanistan in 1989. The pro-Soviet government fell in 1992; rebel factions took power but then began infighting. Thousands died in a vicious civil war. The Taliban emerged as a real force in 1994. In 1996 they captured Kabul. They were forced out in 2001 by a US-led invasion, but staged a comeback last year.

The Taliban believe in a strict interpretation of Islamic law and last month produced a constitution. Executions are carried out in public. Women are fully covered and are not permitted education. Men should wear beards, and light entertainment - music, television and film - is deemed to be anti-Islamic.

Poppy production in Afghanistan rose dramatically after the 2001 invasion destabilised a shaky economy, leading more and more farmers to turn to opium production to survive. The country provides 86 per cent of the world's supply of the drug.

Role of Pakistan's 'captain' shows enduring Taliban ties

Analysts fear intelligence agency figure actually plays double role

via Houston Chronicle, October 14, 2007 By JAMES RUPERT Newsday

SHEKHANANDEH, PAKISTAN — The stocky, bearded man they call the Subidar is an encyclopedia of the jagged mountains and insular tribes here along Pakistan's northwestern border. As a retired career officer now on contract to Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency, he would be just the man to enforce his government's declared policy: to stop Taliban and allied guerrillas from crossing into Afghanistan to attack U.S. troops.

But the Subidar's mission is just the opposite, say U.S., Afghan and Pakistani sources. Working from his home in this village, and reporting to the ISI, he recruits and organizes guerrillas to make those attacks, the sources say. In Afghan districts just over the border, guerrilla attacks have escalated this year, killing at least six U.S. soldiers since June.

President Pervez Musharraf and senior Bush administration officials say Musharraf is America's best friend in the war against al-Qaida and its Islamic extremist allies in this region. But the case of the Subidar (the Urdu-language title means "captain") appears to illustrate assertions by many scholars that Pakistan is deeply divided and playing a double role. Its ruling army denied any knowledge of the Subidar, whose name is being withheld because he could not be reached directly to comment on this story.

While Musharraf is allied with Washington, many in his army and security services are wedded to the Taliban, say independent analysts including Boston University's Husain Haqqani. Parts of the ISI, the army and political and religious elites form a support network to help the Taliban and allied guerrillas recruit and train fighters, raise money and infiltrate Afghanistan, the analysts say.

In this shadowy war, the Taliban's main bases and support networks are hidden in rugged mountains of Pakistan's ethnic Pashtun tribal areas, along the border south of here. A U.S. National Intelligence Estimate report said in July that the same tribal districts are "a safe haven" for al-Qaida. Those districts are closed to foreigners, except army-escorted trips.

Pakistan's support for jihadist guerrillas is an old cornerstone of its national security policy, Haqqani and other scholars say. Working largely through the ISI, Pakistan's army cultivated the Taliban and backed their fight for power in Afghanistan as a way to keep Pakistani influence there. The ISI sponsored groups such as Jaish-e-Muhammad (Army of Muhammad) and Lashkar-e-Toiba (Army of the Pure) to battle India in the disputed territory of Kashmir, scholars say.

The Subidar was one of hundreds of men who served as "handlers" for the ISI's guerrilla clients. In the 1980s, he helped provide U.S.-supplied weapons and logistical support to Afghan, Pakistani, Arab and other mujahedeen fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, according to residents. After the Soviets withdrew in 1989, he oversaw camps over the border in Afghanistan that trained Jaish-e-Muhammad guerrillas, they said.

After Sept. 11, 2001, the United States leaned on Musharraf to shut down the ISI's guerrilla clients, which also were allied with al-Qaida. The ISI retired dozens of its guerrilla handlers, most of them junior officers, said Hassan Abbas, a Harvard analyst of the Pakistani military and a former Pakistani police official. The Subidar was among them.

Musharraf's anti-jihadist purge of the ISI and army hasn't been effective, especially among lower-level officers, Abbas and other analysts say. For example, militants linked to al-Qaida used army connections twice to bomb Musharraf's highly secured motorcades in 2003, coming close to killing him.

Interviews with dozens of former and current army and intelligence officials make clear that many officers of Pakistan's covert security agencies remain emotionally committed to jihad and hostile to the U.S. role in the region.

This is especially true of officers such as the Subidar who worked clandestinely to arm and train Taliban and other jihadist guerrillas, said a Pakistani military analyst who asked not to be named.

Even if such officers were not religious militants at the outset, "they have been working for years with young men who go and die in Kashmir or Afghanistan, and they often come to believe in the cause," he said.

Taliban use hostage cash to fund UK blitz

By Massoud Ansari in Kila Abdullah, Pakistan - The Telegraph, October 14, 2007

Millions of dollars handed over to secure the release of South Korean hostages in Afghanistan have been used to buy weapons deployed against British and American forces in the country, the Taliban claims.

Major Alexis Roberts, 32, Prince William's former platoon commander at Sandhurst, was one of the victims of the Taliban offensive funded by the hostage money.

According to Taliban fighters interviewed by The Sunday Telegraph, the money has also been used to train recruits to carry out terrorist attacks in Britain and America.

South Korea has repeatedly denied claims by Afghan officials that it paid cash to secure the release in August of 21 Christian volunteers who were held for nearly six weeks. But in a recent meeting, three Taliban fighters involved in the conflict with the British in Helmand province said that $10 million cash handed over in two instalments had been used to boost operations in Afghanistan and abroad.

"It was a God-sent opportunity," said Mullah Hezbollah, 30. "It has helped us to multiply our stockpile of weapons and explosives to wage battle for at least a year or so."

He said the money had been paid in August, shortly before the Taliban's fugitive spiritual leader, Mullah Omar, ordered Operation Nusrat (victory), an offensive against coalition troops which ran throughout the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which finished last week. During the operation, four British soldiers were killed in southern Afghanistan, including Major Roberts.

"We were really concerned when we received orders to launch Operation Nusrat, because we had hardly any funds to buy weapons to carry out such a major offence," said Mullah Hezbollah. Thanks to the ransom payments, however, the operation proceeded with "full vigour".

Hezbollah and his two companions said they were emissaries of Mullah Mansoor, who took over as the Taliban military commander in southern Afghanistan after his one-legged brother, Mullah Dadullah Akhund, was killed by Special Boat Service troops in May.

Their decision to grant a rare interview came after several weeks of negotiations with Taliban intermediaries. The meeting took place in a mud-built Taliban safe house in the town of Kila Abdullah, near the border with Afghanistan in Pakistan's lawless tribal belt. After a 15-hour delay, the three bearded insurgents – all sporting pistols under their robes – arrived and talked about their movement over cups of green tea.

Their claims will fuel the controversy about the 23 South Koreans, who were seized as they travelled by bus from Kabul to Kandahar on July 19. Two of the male hostages were executed, but the rest were released after direct negotiations between the South Korean government and the Taliban. Seoul subsequently agreed to withdraw its small contingent of troops from Afghanistan and bar any more missionaries from working there, although it has denied widespread reports that a ransom was also paid.

Hezbollah, however, gave what appeared to be precise details of the transactions. "They gave us $7 million as a first instalment the day we released 12 hostages, and the remaining money was paid soon after we released the remaining hostages on August 31," he said.

He added that another main source of income was opium produced by poppy farmers in Helmand, thanks to a Taliban fatwa, or holy order. "Our scholars have given a religious decree saying that things which are usually abominable in Islam are permitted to wage jihad against the enemies of Islam," he said.

His comrade, Mullah Mohibullah, 32, disclosed that some of the ransom funds were being used to train volunteers from Britain and America to carry out attacks in their homelands. "We want to destroy them, the way they have destroyed our country," he said. "Most of these youths are suicide bombers."

The group said that suicide bombers, either in vehicles or wearing explosive-laden vests, were also becoming the Taliban's main weapon against occupying forces in Afghanistan. Up to 3,000 volunteers, they claimed, had signed up for the religious training necessary for martyrdom operations.

"We do not have gunship helicopters, nor do we have B-52s," said Mullah Hameedullah, 48. "We will carry out suicide attacks everywhere in the country, be it by waistcoats, cars or other ways."

The men said they had been engaged in operations against the British in Helmand province, but were presently on a mandatory break after four months of living mainly on bread and water. They claimed to have been involved in scores of operations in which British and other Nato troops had been killed.

Ruling out any negotiation with coalition forces, Hameedullah said: "We are ready to fight for a hundred years."

Asked to comment on the Taliban claims, the South Korean embassy in London described them as "lies" put out by the movement's propaganda wing.

WB grants $50m for education sector in Afghanistan

PNA - 10/12/2007 By Lalit K. Jha - NEW YORK - The World Bank has agreed to provide $50 million grant for the development of the education sector in Afghaistan.

This comes within a week of the whooping $60 million grant from Canada for developing the education sector in the country.

"This is really good news for the country. For the better future of our country, we need to give top priority to build and strengthen the education sector," Education Minister Muhammad Haneef Atmar told Pajhwok Afghan News.

Atmar recently met the World Bank officials at Washington with a detailed proposal in this regard. The minister said a formal approval of the grant would be announced soon by the World Bank.

Giving details about the grant, Atmar said: "Of the $50 million, $30 million is primarily to construct schools and for teacher education, while $20 million would be used for developing technical education in Afghanistan."

Atmar, whose successful trip to North America, fetched $110 million for the development of the Afghanistans education sector, said the two grants once again reiterated the international community's commitment to his country and the recognition on their part of the role education in bring peace and prosperity in Afghanistan.

Most irresponsible armed groups yet to surrender arms

Ahmad Khalid Mowahid  - KABUL, Oct 11 (Pajhwok Afghan News): It has been two years since the Disarmament of Irresponsible Armed Group (DIAG) programme was launched, but only 124 of 1818 such outfits have surrendered weapons so far.

Senior official of Counter-Terrorism Department at Interior Ministry Saeed Anwar Majmar Ahmadi Thursday said this on Thursday on the occasion of delivering 25 Klashnikov assault rifles collected from various parts of Kabul to DIAG officials.

Over the last two years, 34,655 arms including 4,154 heavy weapons have been received as part of the DIAG programme that began in October 2005 under the chairmanship of Vice-President Karim Khalili.

An official of the Afghanistan New Beginning Programme (ANBP), who wished to remain anonymous, told Pajhwok Afghan News DIAG progress was largely stymied by insecurity and non-cooperation from provincial governors.

According to the Afghanistan Compact, all irresponsible armed groups should be disarmed by 2008, but the target appears pretty difficult to attain.

Majmar Ahmadi said the weapons recovered included ammunition and landmines. He added more than 1700 ammunition depots had been found and about 30 tonnes of arms and ammunition destroyed.

Could Afghan Poppies Be Painkillers for the Poor?

By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr. The New York Times / October 14, 2007

AS opium harvests in Afghanistan have steadily increased, some think tanks and politicians — mostly in Britain — have raised a trenchant question: rather than trying to eradicate Afghanistan’s poppies, why not instead buy them and make morphine?

Given that the World Health Organization estimates that over 6.2 million of the world’s poor are dying of cancer, AIDS, burns and wounds without adequate pain relief, the argument goes, wouldn’t it make sense?

Most prominent among these proposals is an analysis by the Senlis Council, a drug-policy research group with offices in London, Brussels and Kabul. The council argues that the United States and Britain waste more than $800 million a year, as well as soldiers’ lives, trying futilely to eradicate poppies.

Instead, it calculated two years ago, Afghanistan’s whole crop could be purchased for about $600 million — the “farm gate” price, not the street value of the heroin into which it is refined, which is over $50 billion. (The “farm gate” estimate has gone up as the crop has increased, and may be $1 billion now.)

Whatever the price, “enforcement will not work,” said Romesh Bhattacharji, a former narcotics commissioner of India who has investigated the Afghan situation for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. “The Afghan farmer will not switch to alternative crops as long as there is a market for his opium.”

Mr. Bhattacharji says he now endorses the idea of buying the crop. The United States and British governments are vigorously opposed; instead they favor tough eradication tactics and more encouragement to farmers to grow wheat, cotton or fruit.

“They’re growing a poison, sir — one that kills Afghanistan’s neighbors and corrupts officials,” Thomas A. Schweich, chief of the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement, said in a telephone interview. “There needs to be better and more forceful eradication.”

There is an American precedent for buying. In the late 1960’s, the Nixon administration, fighting a heroin epidemic, pressured Turkey, then the world’s chief grower, to eradicate its poppy crops.

Unable to do that (both because of corruption and because peasant farmers vote) Turkey in 1974 started licensing farmers to grow for the morphine trade, and the United States in 1981 gave protected-market status to Turkey and India, obligating itself to buy 80 percent of the raw material for American painkillers from them. Why not, the Senlis Council and others argue, let Afghanistan join the legitimate supply chain? Mr. Schweich and others reply that it is simply impractical — Afghanistan grows 93 percent of the world’s poppies; its crop is 15 times the size of India’s.

Also, heroin smugglers pay better. For example, India officially paid its legal farmers only $20 to $50 per kilogram last year, while farmers interviewed in central India in May said illegal buyers were offering $100 to $190. Prices in Afghanistan, at roughly the same time, were about $125.

“Why would anybody switch to legal opium when they can get those prices?” Mr. Schweich asked. Making up the difference with price supports — another idea with American precedents — would cost as much as an extra $800 million.

“You can do the math,” he said. “If we did it, no one in Afghanistan would grow any other crop, we’d be paying billions for it, and it would become a narco-welfare state.”

The idea meets opposition from other quarters, too. Jagjit Pavadia, the current narcotics commissioner of India, said in an interview that if the world becomes ready to buy more morphine for the dying poor she would like Indian farmers to benefit first. Because of falling demand, India has slowly cut its licensed farmers from 150,000 to 62,000.

A third-generation opium farmer in Neemuch, India, was even more adamant. “We have 150 years’ experience in selling to government,” said Ramchandra Nagda, who also grows wheat, garlic and spices. “There is better control here than there ever will be in Afghanistan.”

The United Nations drugs office estimates that heroin rings buy about 30 percent of India’s crop, despite the efforts of 1,200 narcotics control bureau officers. Diversion in Afghanistan, a lawless warlord state, would presumably be far harder to control.

In the British press, there is some serious discussion of the Senlis proposal. But in the United States, the idea has attracted little attention. The council attributes this partially to the lobbying power of the religious right and law enforcement groups, both of which react with horror to any talk of legalization.

“It’s almost theological, their opposition to our idea,” said Norine MacDonald, the council’s founder.

Also, both she and Mr. Bhattacharji said, with a $600 million annual budget for eradication, the field attracts paramilitary contractors with deep connections to the Bush administration, including Blackwater USA and DynCorp International, both of whom train Afghan anti-narcotics police.

Mr. Schweich called such a view “cynical and inaccurate” and maintained that local Afghan governors were the leading force in eradication, though he agreed that their efforts were plagued with nepotism and corruption.

In any case, many experts — even those favoring the use of Afghanistan’s crop for morphine — say it does not change one looming reality: the heroin trade is so large and so lucrative that someone, somewhere, is going to grow the poppies for it.

PM's choice of Manley catches Liberals off guard

BRIAN LAGHI AND ALAN FREEMAN - From Saturday's Globe and Mail October 12, 2007

OTTAWA — Stephen Harper moved Friday to defuse the issue of Afghanistan before a potential fall election and drove a wedge into the Liberal Party by appointing former deputy prime minister John Manley to lead a blue-ribbon study group.

The Prime Minister's appointment of Mr. Manley as head of a five-member group on Canada's future role in the war-torn country beyond February of 2009 prompted deep anger among Mr. Manley's fellow Liberals.

"What gives, John?" one of his former advisers asked. "This was one area of weakness of the Conservatives. And he's just thrown Stephen Harper a lifeline in the form of himself."

One e-mail circulating among the party said simply, "Et tu Manley?"

The panel is to report to Parliament by the end of January. So if there were a fall election, the Prime Minister could sidestep questions on the government's position on the Afghan mission by saying he would wait for the panel's recommendations.

"One has to wonder what criticism the Liberal Party can levy against the government on Afghanistan now," said a senior Tory who asked not be identified.

Asked directly whether it was his intent to take the issue off the table, Mr. Harper told reporters it would be impossible to clear it from the public consciousness, but that he does want a "rational and considered debate about all of the facts and all of the implications.''

Rudyard Griffiths, co-founder of the Dominion Institute, which has been pressing for Ottawa to appoint such a panel, said the process buys time not only for the Tories, but also for the Liberals.

He called the move by Mr. Harper "a brilliant piece of politics and brilliant piece of public policy."

The panel has been asked to examine four options including the status quo; complete withdrawal from Afghanistan; a transfer to another region of the country; or refocusing efforts on reconstruction that would allow for a new military contingent from another country to take the Canadian combat role.

"Whatever future path we choose in Afghanistan, it must respect the sacrifices Canadians have made there," Mr. Harper said.

Mr. Manley made it clear he wouldn't be restricted to the four broad policy options enumerated by the Prime Minister. "Everything is on the table," Mr. Manley said.

Mr. Manley said the panel would canvass a cross-section of specialists on foreign relations, defence and foreign aid. He said the panel would visit Afghanistan and meet with Canada's partners in the Afghan mission.

Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion said in Toronto he welcomes the striking of the panel, providing it has not been set up to allow the government to sidestep a decision.

He added that he hopes Mr. Manley "will have a positive influence to moderate the views in this panel." Mr. Manley said he remains a strong Liberal.

"I'm a supporter of the Liberal Party, but I have some history in Afghanistan in my two visits that have touched me very deeply," he said. Mr. Manley did not seek Mr. Dion's permission to sit on the panel. He said he informed the Liberal Leader of his decision on Thursday, the day before the announcement was made.

Mr. Harper said that continuation of the current mission was still a possibility.

NDP Leader Jack Layton called the panel "highly partisan," noting that there were no New Democrats on the group. "It's contemptuous of Parliament. … Parliament is the place to have this discussion."

In addition to Mr. Manley, the panel's members include former clerk of the Privy Council Paul Tellier, former Tory cabinet minister Jake Epp, former Canadian consul-general in New York Pamela Wallin and Derek Burney, a long-time adviser to previous prime ministers and a former ambassador to the United States.

Meanwhile, the German parliament Friday approved a one-year extension for the country's 3,000-strong force in Afghanistan despite public opinion which is strongly opposed to continuing participation in the NATO-led mission.

With a report from Campbell Clark in Ottawa and Caroline Alphonso in Toronto

The treasures of Turquoise Mountain

Canadian-funded plan aims at breathing new life into ancient culture

The Toronto Star - October 14, 2007 Olivia Ward FOREIGN AFFAIRS REPORTER

In Afghanistan, ragged gashes cut through the cliffs of Bamiyan, where giant Buddha statues that symbolized an age of culture and tolerance once towered.

The Taliban's bombing of the 5th-century Buddhas outraged the world and became an image of the annihilation of Afghanistan's past, as though the claws of war had reached back in time to shred the very identity of its people.

But deliberate destruction accounts for only a fraction of the losses of Afghanistan's cultural treasures. Greed, opportunism and dire poverty have propelled armies of looters through the country's museums and archaeological sites, stripping away thousands of years of cultural history.

Meanwhile, Afghanistan's artists and artisans fled decades of warfare and repression, and most of those who remained were forced to abandon their work for the art of day-to-day survival.

Former British diplomat Rory Stewart saw the sacking of Afghanistan's culture first-hand, walking through the country shortly after the 2001 rout of the Taliban. Two years ago, he returned to set up a project aimed at replacing some of the losses and rebuilding a centuries-old culture.

Last week, Stewart's Turquoise Mountain Foundation was awarded a $3 million grant from the Canadian government to train new artists and restore Kabul's crumbling old market district of Murad Khane.

For Oxford-educated Stewart, a long love affair with Afghanistan's rich history culminated in a near-fatal odyssey through mountains and plains in the dead of winter, following a trail of destruction and dilapidation.

In west central Afghanistan, Stewart made one of his saddest discoveries: a site that may be that of the legendary Turquoise Mountain, a city built in the 12th century by the Persian-linked Ghorids, who presided over a Silk Road trading empire boasting exquisite Asian art and crafts.

In his book The Places in Between, Stewart lamented that it was too late to save the remains of the site, burned out by the Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan and plundered by modern villagers who sold its unique artifacts to antiquities dealers for a few dollars.

But on returning to Afghanistan in 2005, he says, "I realized that the skills so triumphantly displayed at Turquoise Mountain were not entirely lost."

The Aga Khan Trust for Culture was helping to restore historic neighbourhoods of Kabul, where Stewart witnessed an Afghan craftsman, 73-year-old Ustad Abdul Hadi, carving a "crisp Islamic screen" and viewed the painstaking work of traditional calligraphers and potters.

But other areas of Kabul were in danger, including Murad Khane, which flourished in the 18th century but now is without paved roads, water or sewers, its buildings slumping precariously.

Stewart was determined to save it from total ruin. It helped that Britain's Prince Charles was an old acquaintance who once hired him to tutor sons William and Harry.

An architecture enthusiast who shared Stewart's passion for preserving traditional Afghan arts and architecture, Charles met with President Hamid Karzai to discuss the possibilities. For expertise he turned to Stewart, who had a plan and the background to carry it out.

Already experienced in restoration projects as a coalition deputy governor in southern Iraq, he saw the restoration of the old marketplace in the town of Amara win applause from local merchants and a carpentry school in Nasiriyah take "200 unemployed and often radical men from the streets and trained them in basic joinery.

"Almost all of them subsequently found work." It was a blueprint for Afghanistan – and the Turquoise Mountain Foundation.

"This means that this city will be ready to welcome the citizens and artists of Afghanistan with restored buildings, improved infrastructure and a refurbished cultural centre," said International Co-operation Minister Bev Oda, as the grant was announced last week in Kabul.

The Murad Khane restoration is "a project that would honour local culture rather than attacking it," Stewart says, adding that it would be "quick, flexible and visible and would generate as much employment as possible."

When Afghans see no progress, he points out, they quickly place the blame on Western countries that present themselves as rescuers. But Stewart's plan was also risky.

It could be dismissed as fanciful by embittered Afghans who've suffered years of trauma and destitution. And the owners of the crumbling edifices could see more profit in "McBuildings" than in carefully restored heritage sites.

With Afghans' general loss of skills – not to mention basic literacy – rebuilding also means a large-scale crash re-education program. The project has passed its first tests.

It is regenerating the old town, saving historical buildings and setting up galleries for traditional craft businesses that could be Kabul's future Yorkville.

For now, a school and a health clinic have opened, new sewage drains have been laid and local men can find construction and garbage-clearing jobs that need no training.

Meanwhile, the foundation has attracted some of Afghanistan's greatest craft masters to teach new students almost-lost arts of woodcarving, calligraphy and ceramics at a Centre for Traditional Afghan Arts and Architecture. And it is reviving the trade in high-end Afghan products to compete on the world design market.

For Canada, which is struggling to chart a course in Afghanistan through a thorny path of bad news, Turquoise Mountain may be a peak experience.

"This is a project which can have real symbolic and political significance for the international community," Stewart says.

"It is a project that will bring a better life to poor men and women. It is also a chance for Canada to demonstrate its respect for Afghan culture and leave something that hopefully Afghans and Canadians will be able to point to with pride in 50 years' time."

[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.]