In this bulletin:

Two NATO soldiers, 'Arab fighters' killed in Afghanistan

KABUL (AFP) 21 May 2008- Two NATO soldiers were killed in a blast in Afghanistan, the alliance force said Wednesday, as an Afghan official reported that six Arabs were among more than a dozen rebels killed in battle.

The International Security Assistance Force announced late Tuesday that the explosion in the central province of Ghazni had killed one soldier and an interpreter. It said Wednesday a second soldier had died from wounds.

The 40-nation force did not say what had caused the explosion, or give the nationalities of the soldiers involved.

An ambush in the eastern province of Paktika meanwhile wounded two other ISAF soldiers, a spokesman told AFP, without giving details.

Nearly 60 international soldiers have lost their lives in Afghanistan this year, most of them in hostile action.

Scores of extremist insurgents have also been killed but international forces do not issue death tolls from military action.

A deputy provincial governor said about 14 were killed in a new battle overnight in Zabul province, on the southern border of Ghazni.

The militants had left eight bodies on the battlefield and documents and other items indicated that six were Arab nationals, said Zabul deputy governor Gulab Shah Alikhail.

One Afghan soldier had also died, he said, adding international forces had supported Afghan soldiers on the ground in the remote Khak-e-Afghan district.

The US- or the NATO-led forces said however that they had no information about the operation and the Afghan army could not immediately confirm what had happened.

About 70,000 international soldiers are working alongside thousands of Afghan troops to fight Taliban and other extremists including, authorities say, fighters from a range of Central Asian and Middle East nations.

Battles often take usually in remote areas, making it difficult to verify facts independently.

Pakistan, Taliban Deal A "Victory For bin Laden And al Qaeda": US Officials

ABC News reports that some U.S. officials are calling the new peace deal between Pakistan and pro-Taliban militants a "victory for Osama bin Laden and al Qaida":

Pakistan's new government has signed a peace deal with pro-Taliban militants, in what some U.S. officials call a "victory for Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda."

Under the terms of the 15-point plan, signed Wednesday in the city of Peshawar, the Pakistani army will withdraw thousands of troops deployed to the Swat Valley region, an area where officials believe local Taliban militants are hiding. The militants have promised to stop suicide bomb attacks and hand over any foreign militants, according to Bashir Bilour, a senior minister of Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province.

"While the deal sounds good, it's likely to be implemented badly," said Richard Clarke, an ABC News consultant and former White House counterterrorism chief. "What this means is that the United States will continue to be threatened by an al Qaeda that has a safe haven where it can attract people from around the world, be trained and equipped and sent out to the United States and other countries around the world."

A Taliban spokesman, Muslim Khan, told ABCNews.com, "We accept the writ of the state and will no longer challenge it."

This peace agreement comes only three days after a suicide bomber killed at least 13 people in the northwestern Pakistani city of Mardan, an area "which has experienced several attacks blamed on pro-Taliban Islamist militants in recent months."

Miliband warns Pakistan, Afghanistan democracies at risk

Foreign Minister David Miliband warned Pakistan and Afghanistan on Wednesday that their democracies would be at risk if they did not forge a united front against terrorism.

The neighboring nations should stop blaming each other for terrorist attacks along their border and recognize their shared interests and work together, said the top British diplomat on a visit to the US capital.

"If the terrorist threat continues to be shunted back and forth across the Afghan-Pakistan border, democracy will have little chance of success," he warned at a forum of the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.

"There needs to be a common strategy to tackle the insurgency," said Miliband, whose speech was based on building democracy in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf, who grabbed power in a military coup in 1999, gave up his military role and allowed free elections in February while Afghanistan held its first elections in almost 30 years in 2005.

But the two countries have been bickering over counter terrorism efforts, largely over Kabul claims that Islamabad is not forceful enough in containing rising Taliban insurgency from the unpoliced border areas in Pakistan.

Milliband said countries needed "democratic and effective states not just democratic and credible elections."

He also appeared to back moves by the leaders of Afghanistan and Pakistan to reach out to militants or suspected terrorists, saying political reconciliation was critical to strengthening the two nations.

Last month, Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai urged US forces to stop arresting suspected Taliban and their sympathizers, arguing that such arrests and past mistreatment were discouraging Taliban from laying down their arms.

The newly elected government of Pakistan Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani on Wednesday signed a peace deal with pro-Taliban militants in the country's northwestern valley despite fresh calls from the United States to clamp down on Islamist rebels.

"In both Afghanistan and the FATA we need to accept that government reconciliation efforts will reach out to people that we are uncomfortable with," Milliband said.

Washington claims that the Al-Qaeda terror network was rebuilding itself in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and North West Frontier Province, both on the border with Afghanistan.

"We have a right and a duty to say clearly when we think the governments of Afghanistan or Pakistan are putting our forces in the region or our citizens at home at greater risk, making deals which leave extremists free to attack us," Miliband said.

"But the process of reconciliation will be infinitely more legitimate and effective if it is locally owned," he said.

The governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan however must, with the support from allies, be able to defend their own people, "by force if they have to" against those who resisted democratic principles and the rule of law and remained committed to violence, he said.

Americans and British are among 70,000 international soldiers working alongside Afghan troops to fight Taliban and other extremists in Afghanistan.

Ahmadinejad: Set an Afghanistan deadline

TEHRAN, May 21 (UPI) -- A deadline should be set for the withdrawal of foreign troops from Afghanistan, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says.

The president met Monday with Kai Eide, the United Nations envoy to Afghanistan, the Fars News Agency reported. He promised that Iran would do whatever it can to help Afghanistan become stable.

Ahmadinejad said western countries have "double standards" on Afghanistan.

"Certain foreign states, present in Afghanistan, cooperate both with the government and their enemies," he said, an apparent reference to Pakistan.

One of Afghanistan's most serious problems is its re-emergence as a source of drugs, Ahmandinejad said. He said Iran will do its best to help its neighbor fight drug trafficking.

Taliban claim death of 'female US spy'

Karachi, 21 May (AKI) - (by Syed Saleem Shahzad) - Taliban fighters in Afghanistan claim to have killed a woman by slitting her throat after accusing her of spying for US forces in Afghanistan.

They said they killed the alleged female American informer in the Afghan valley of Kunar on Monday.

"Bachagai, 32, was part of an American proxy network in the Sarkano district's village Barogai," a Taliban spokesperson Zubair Mujahid told Adnkronos International (AKI) from the Kunar valley.

"Her information caused a lot of American attacks on the position of the mujahadeen, their killings and arrests," said Mujahid.

"We throughly investigated the matter and confirmed her links with Afghan intelligence and American troops. She also received cash rewards on the information she provided against the Taliban," he said.

Mujahid told AKI that once all the evidence against the alleged spy was gathered, they slit her throat with a knife and killed her.

The Taliban have killed many suspected informers in past especially in the eastern Afghan province of Kunar but killing a woman is a rare occurence among the former ruling student militia.

NATO Afghan chief wants talks on command in south

WASHINGTON (Reuters)21 May 2008 - The top NATO commander in Afghanistan said on Wednesday he favored talks to end the rotating command among allied forces in the violent south of the country, where the United States has added more troops.

U.S. Army Gen. Dan McNeill also said he still needed more troops and aircraft for his 50,000-strong force, declaring he was a "fairly frugal dude" and only asked for what he needed.

"I am in favor of a dialogue by the policymakers and the politicians about the consideration of one country leading a multinational headquarters in the south," McNeill told reporters in Washington by videolink from Kabul.

Command of Afghanistan's southern sector, scene of the heaviest fighting with Taliban insurgents, currently rotates between Britain, the Netherlands and Canada, which all have substantial contingents of troops there.

But the United States has deployed more than 2,000 Marines to the south this year and some diplomats see the debate about the command as a U.S. effort to take charge of the region.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said earlier this month it was "certainly worth taking a look at" whether the United States should take command of the south but Washington would consult closely with its NATO allies.

McNeill said Afghan security forces had trouble adapting to different commands with different ways of operating.

"It is sometimes a little difficult for them to change from one culture to the next," he said.

Losing a command role would be a blow to the prestige of any nation, but could be particularly hard for nations like Canada and the Netherlands, where the Afghan mission -- and its toll in casualties -- is politically controversial.

McNeill did not say if he had a view on which nation should take command in the south. He indicated he supported an end to rotation but stopped short of saying so explicitly.

"Dialogue typically results in some outcome, and you've just defined what would be a reasonable outcome," he said when asked about the idea of having one country in overall charge.

McNeill said his International Security Assistance Force remained "under-resourced" despite having increased from under 36,000 troops when he took command in February 2007.

"I'm a child of children of the American Great Depression and I'm a fairly frugal dude and I ask usually only for the things that I need," he said.

McNeill did not give figures for the additional resources he wanted, but Pentagon officials have said he has a "wish list" amounting to three extra brigades. That could mean anything between 9,000 to 15,000 extra soldiers.

Pakistan signs peace deal with pro-Taliban militants

PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AFP) — Pakistan's new government signed a peace deal with pro-Taliban militants in a northwestern valley Wednesday, despite fresh calls from the United States to clamp down on Islamist rebels.

The agreement will see the gradual withdrawal of troops from the devastated former tourist region of Swat and the imposition of Islamic Sharia law in line with the rebels' demands, provincial ministers said.

In return the militants will close training camps, hand over foreign fighters and halt suicide attacks on government installations and security forces under the 15-point pact, they said.

The army launched a major offensive in October to clear Swat of militants loyal to Maulana Fazlullah, a radical pro-Taliban cleric who led an uprising to enforce Sharia law in the valley.

US, NATO and Afghan officials have criticised previous peace deals in Pakistan, saying that they have led to an increase in suicide attacks on international and Afghan forces across the border in Afghanistan.

"The agreement was signed today between the government committee and representatives of local Taliban. We are very positive that this agreement will end violence and ensure lasting peace in the region," committee member and North West Frontier Province minister Wajid Ali Khan told AFP.

Dozens of people have been killed in suicide bombings in Swat, which began in July last year after troops raided the hardline Red Mosque in the capital Islamabad, leaving scores dead.

"We have agreed on a gradual withdrawal of the troops as the situation improves. The Taliban will close down all training centres for suicide bombers and militant activities. They will not attack security forces," Khan said.

The militants had also agreed not to target girls' schools, music shops and barbers, all targets of the hardline militants who follow an interpretation of Islam echoing the 1996-2001 Taliban regime in Afghanistan, he said.

"We have agreed to enforce the Sharia laws in the area," Khan added.

Officials said there was no agreement on the fate of Fazlullah, for whom the militants were demanding a general amnesty. The army has been hunting for him in the region's forests and mountains for months.

Afghanistan foreign ministry spokesman Sultan Ahmad Baheen criticised the the Swat agreement.

"We believe any exclusive deal with the Taliban would result in worsening of the situation," Baheen told AFP. "We believe any sort of agreement with the terrorists would harm both countries."

US Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte urged Pakistan on Tuesday to arrest a leading Taliban commander based in the tribal area of South Waziristan, with whom Islamabad is also negotiating.

South Waziristan is around 350 kilometres (220 miles) south of Swat.

The commander, Baitullah Mehsud, has been accused by the CIA and the previous Pakistani government of masterminding the assassination in December of ex-premier Benazir Bhutto.

The new government, led by Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani, has pledged to completely overhaul Islamabad's counter-terrorism pursuit after defeating US-backed President Pervez Musharraf's political allies in February elections.

Negroponte said he would be encouraged to see Pakistan "operating effectively against some of these militant extremists, like for example bringing Baitullah Mehsud... capturing him and bringing him to justice, which is what should happen to him."

Afghanistan - Appeal verdict in death sentence case adjourned to 25 May

MONTREAL, May 21 /CNW Telbec/ - A court in Kabul today adjourned its

Verdict in the appeal against the death sentence of journalist Sayed Perwiz

Kambakhsh of Jahan-e Naw (The New World).

The 24-year-old was sentenced to death for blasphemy by the first chamber

of the Mazar-i-Sharif court in northern Afghanistan on 22 January 2008.

A lawyer at the appeal hearing even though represented Kambakhsh

the lawyer only received his file during the week, two months after the

Journalist’s transfer to Kabul. His brother, journalist Sayed Yaqub Ibrahimi,

said that the "appeal could lead to his release". "We want this trial to be

fair and hope that the verdict will not be obstructed by pressure from the

Fundamentalists", he added.

Kambakhsh's summary trial in Mazar-i-Sharif was held behind closed doors

and without a defence lawyer. He has been imprisoned since 27 July 2007 and is

Currently being held in the Pul-e-Sharkhi jail in the east of the capital.

British minister says promoting democracy best way to fight terrorism in Pakistan, Afghanistan

The Associated Press

Wednesday, May 21, 2008

WASHINGTON: British Foreign Secretary David Miliband says promoting democracy in Afghanistan and Pakistan is the best way to eliminate terrorist groups there.

Miliband is also expressing support for talks between Pakistan's new government and leaders in the country's tribal areas.

Miliband is in Washington Wednesday meeting with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. In a speech, he said that military operations alone will not eliminate terrorist groups in the two countries.

Miliband says, "security measures can deal with symptoms, but politics is required to address underlying causes."

Miliband will be in California with Rice Thursday and Friday to meet with U.S. business leaders. The trip will include a visit to Internet search giant Google's headquarters.

Who is the Enemy?

By ERIC WALBERG

(Counter Punch) 21 May 2008 - Twenty years ago this week the Soviet Union began its withdrawal from Afghanistan, eight and a half years after it was invited by the desperate People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), which had degenerated into intra-party squabbling and was beset by Islamic rebels massively financed by the United States. The straw that broke the Soviets’ back was when the US began providing Stinger missiles to Osama bin Laden and his friends.

Now, after eight years of US/NATO occupation, the parallels — and differences — between the two occupation are many and stark, as confirmed by the current Russian ambassador to Afghanistan, Zamir Kabulov.

“There is no mistake made by the Soviet Union that was not repeated by the international community here in Afghanistan,” Kabulov said. “Underestimation of the Afghan nation, the belief that we have superiority over Afghans, that they are inferior and cannot be trusted to run affairs in this country. A lack of knowledge of the social and ethnic structure of this country; a lack of sufficient understanding of traditions and religion.”

Not only that, but the country’s new patrons are making lots of new mistakes as well.

“NATO soldiers and officers alienate themselves from Afghans — they are not in touch in an everyday manner. They communicate with them from the barrels of guns in their bullet-proof Humvees.” As a career diplomat who was posted to Afghanistan in 1977, he sees some divine justice in the US’s current predicament. “But I am even more satisfied by not having Russian soldiers among ISAF [International Security Assistance Force] because I don’t want them to suffer the same results.”

Kabulov explains that things are even harder now than they were in the 1980s. “The structures of government then were very much there and our task was very much to support and to win loyalty — if you will, hearts and minds — but we had a working administration.” These are long gone, though, ironically, in Helmand province and elsewhere, NATO forces are fighting from military posts originally built by the Soviets.
At least the Soviets were invited in, if only by one faction — Parcham, by far the most benign one — of the ruling PDPA. The US merely issued an ultimatum to the ruling Taliban to hand over their own erstwhile ally, Osama bin Laden, knowing full well no devout Muslim would turn a guest over to the enemy. The offer of the Taliban to send him to a neutral third country until proof of his masterminding of 9/11 was made was dismissed out of hand, and US and eventually NATO forces proceeded to illegally invade and depose the legitimate government, launching a merciless air attack, using depleted uranium “bunker busting” bombs, that makes the horrors of Vietnam and the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan pale in comparison.

Another difference is that the US managed to con the world into supporting its invasion, while when the Soviet troops arrived in 1979, the US was already arming Islamic rebels with the most advanced military hardware, as Under-Secretary of Defense Slocumbe said at the time, “sucking the Soviets into a Vietnamese quagmire.” President Carter’s national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski made a point of maintaining the flow of arms, even after Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev made it clear the troops would be withdrawn, intending to use this golden opportunity to stick the knife as deep as possible into the now unravelling Soviet Union. On this basis alone, the current invasion should be miles ahead of where the Soviets were after eight years. But no.

Yet another contrast is that while the Soviets were providing massive aid, effectively dragging Afghanistan into the 20th century with universal education, equal rights for women, safe drinking water — the standard communist fare — the US/NATO strategy has been mostly to fight the remnants of the Taliban, with aid well down the list. As for the quality of the aid, while Soviet teachers and engineers earned not much more than locals, and were generally selected for their idealism, Western-backed aid is channelled almost exclusively through foreign NGOs, with Western professionals earning the bulk of the money and living in conditions that locals can only dream of, causing well-earned resentment.

It should be noted that from the Soviet withdrawal in 1989 till the US invasion in 2001, Afghanistan was mostly forgotten, with no Western programme of reconstruction. Russia, of course, had been bankrupt by then and there was nothing to be expected from it either. Ahmed Shah Ahmadzai, a mujahideen leader and prime minister in exile during the 1990s, admits the mujahideen failed in the years following the Soviet withdrawal. He is now an opponent of the government who stood against President Hamid Karzai in the last election. “To my opinion the ground situation is no different because the Soviets were imposing their Communist regime on us. The present forces — they are imposing their so-called democracy on us. They were wrong then and the present NATO forces are doing wrong now by killing innocent people — men, women and children.”

Given the huge advantages over the Soviet experience, and given the possibility to learn from Soviet mistakes, there really is no excuse for the current tragedy unfolding with no end in sight. But then, in carrying out their invasion of Iraq, the Americans apparently learned nothing from the British invasion of the 1920s, repeating to the letter all the horrors the Brits inflicted on the Iraqis.

Is it possible the chaos and murder is intentional? While the Taliban were no sweethearts, they did completely disarm the nation and wipe out the production of opium. Similarly, while Saddam Hussein would hardly be one’s favourite uncle, he presided over a stable welfare state where its many ethnic groups were at least not blowing each other up. In contrast, the US has destroyed the state structures in both countries, and made both into arms dumps. It has managed to turn the peoples of both countries against each other, with the likely prospect of civil war and disintegration into various malleable statelets.

All in keeping with Israeli plans first published in 1982 as “A Strategy for Israel”, a plan to ensure its “security” (read: expansion) with the Middle East a patchwork of small ethnically-based states which it could keep in order.

One brilliant innovation by the US, with Israel’s Haganah and Irgun as possible inspirations, is the use of private mercenaries to carry out murder and espionage that the NATO troops can’t do because of their “concern” for international law. This policy is already well known to Iraqis in the guise of Blackwater. Special investigator for the UN Human Rights Council Philip Alston referred to three such recent raids in south and east Afghanistan during a visit last week, clearly alluding to US intelligence agencies, though he didn’t dare state this publicly. Alston said the raids were part of a wider problem of unlawful killings of civilians and lack of accountability in Afghanistan. In one incident, two brothers were killed by troops operating out of an American Special Forces base in Kandahar. Another group, known as Shaheen, operates out of Nangahar, in eastern Afghanistan, where US forces are in charge. “Essentially, they are companies of Afghans but with a handful, at most, of international people directing them. I’m not aware that they fall under any command.”

A Western official close to the investigation said the secret units are known as Campaign Forces, from the time when American Special Forces and CIA spies recruited Afghan troops to help overthrow the Taliban during the US-led invasion in 2001. “The brightest, smartest guys in these militias were kept on,” the official said. “They were trained and rearmed and they are still being used. The level of complacency in response to these killings is staggeringly high,” he said.

Yet another innovation — the most frightening of all — is the role of the US in allowing, perhaps even facilitating, the huge increase in opium production, which, as already mentioned, was wiped out by the Taliban, which will be discussed in Part II.

It is very hard to exaggerate the extent of the abyss that is Afghanistan under US/NATO occupation or to conceive of an honourable exit for the occupiers. Mercenaries, opium and who-knows-what, in a script written in Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Afghanistan a land of disabled and discarded

Country's 'most vulnerable' need help

The Toronto Star / May 21, 2008 Rosie DiManno COLUMNIST

KABUL–Their broken bodies break the heart.

A legless man trundled down the middle of the street in a wheelbarrow. A little boy with deformed and useless limbs scuttling across a bridge like a crab, wrapping his thin arms around a passerby's ankle, unwilling to let go, begging for change. A keening woman with empty eye sockets, her palms upturned, squatting at the edge of traffic.

Afghanistan is a country of the lame and the maimed.

It is doubtful whether any place on Earth has a larger proportion of disabled and often discarded citizens, eking out an existence on the margins of charity.

Three decades of war, millions of mines and unexploded ordinance (UXO) for children to trip over, suicide bombers, birth defects due to clannish intermarriage, congenital disabilities never corrected for lack of health care, ordinary ailments left untreated and the vast afflicted detritus accrued from preventable diseases such as polio, to say nothing of inestimable psychological trauma: Afghanistan is a wasteland of the mutilated and crippled.

"Yes, go ahead and take my picture," agrees Ahmad Hamid, one-legged and blind, pleading for alms on a blanket spread near the bazaar, surrounded by several of his young children. "Show them to the president. Show him how his people, his brave mujahideen, have to beg in the streets for food."

Nearly all amputees – arm missing here, leg missing there – claim to have been mujahideen, Afghanistan's patriots, although often their age belies this. Doesn't mean, though, that they aren't victims of war and its radiating miseries, or even a current insurgency that claims more victims among the citizenry than those in uniform.

"It was a fragment of a bomb," explains Zalmai, 23, lifting the stump of an arm. "It happened near Bagram five years ago, a Taliban explosion. Doctors could do nothing but cut off what was left.''

Hayatolla, 30, says he was a teenage labourer in the north when he stepped on a land mine and lost his leg. "It totally changed my life. I can't work any more. I came to Kabul because I didn't want to be a burden on my family. But 15 years I've been begging on these streets. I live by the kindness of people who feel sorry for me.''

Disabled Afghans receive 400 Afghanis a month in benefits from the government – about $8 Canadian. But they have to go to an office to get the money and a great many are totally immobile, isolated.

A 2005 disability survey conducted by Handicap International found that upwards of 2.7 per cent of the population – or one out of every five households – suffers from a "severe'' disability and a further 4.8 per cent from a "minor" disability. The survey put the tally of severely disabled Afghans at up to 867,000.

War-related disabilities, primarily loss of limbs, account for an overwhelming proportion of non-birth-defect cases. Land mines, bullets, grenades and booby traps are among the causes. Out of a population of 25 million, 123,000 Afghans have been directly incapacitated by war and its consequences.

Many can't dress themselves, can't wash themselves, can't go to the toilet unaided, can't do simple household chores, can't work and can't budge without assistance.

There are so many urgent problems facing Afghanistan. Addressing the needs of the disabled has not been a priority for the government.

The Swedish Committee for Afghanistan now has responsibility for a joint UN-NGO project started in 1995 to help integrated the handicapped into the community. Rehabilitation of Afghans with Disabilities functions in 13 provinces with 500 staff and 600 volunteers.

"We go where nobody else will go," RAD program co-ordinator Zemarai Saqeb told the Star.

"In Afghanistan, all people have economic problems compared to five years ago. But for the most vulnerable people, it has been getting worse. There are simply insufficient services and funds for people with disabilities."

The RAD program has five components: community mobilization, awareness and advocacy; employment support; special/inclusive education; physiotherapy; and orthopedic workshops.

It's tough to identify the needs of a non-visible disabled community, especially in rural areas, Saqeb said.

Disabled people have received training in such trades as carpentry, tailoring and computer technology; many become breadwinners for themselves and their families.

RAD has directly helped 170,000 Afghans, including diagnosis of physical problems, getting medical help and ensuring rehabilitation and physiotherapy.

More orthopedic technicians are being trained. The disabled themselves staff four workshops that manufacture prosthetic devices – 7,000 a year distributed at no cost – and crutches.

"A lot of those beggars on the street have artificial limbs," Saqeb points out, "but they don't use them when they're asking for money."

It's not a con. It's just that standing on your own two feet in Afghanistan is sometimes better done by teetering on one.

Call to reinstate Afghan woman MP

By Martin Patience
BBC News, Kabul
Wednesday, 21 May 2008

The US-based group Human Rights Watch has called for a female Afghan MP to be reinstated a year after she was suspended from the parliament.

Malalai Joya was accused of insulting the house and was suspended until the end of its parliamentary term in 2009.

The MP, who has a reputation for being fiery and outspoken, had compared the parliament to an animal stable.

But Ms Joya says that the remarks, made during a television interview, were taken out of context.

Safe house

The female MP is a fierce critic of former Afghan warlords, many of whom are now in parliament and many of whom have been accused of war crimes.

On one occasion, she was physically attacked during a session in the lower house.

She says she fears for her life, moving from location to location every day and living at secret addresses.

Ms Joya also says that the Afghan government is refusing to allow her to travel.

Human Rights Watch said that her case presented a real test for Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

They said that Ms Joya should be reinstated, adding that even outspoken women should have a role in re-building Afghanistan.

Attacks on Khyber trucking threaten US supply line

KHYBER AGENCY, Pakistan (AP) 20 May 2008 — Thieves, feuding tribesmen and Taliban militants are creating chaos along the main Pakistan-Afghanistan highway, threatening a vital supply line for U.S. and NATO forces.

Abductions and arson attacks on the hundreds of cargo trucks plying the switchback road through the Khyber Pass have become commonplace this year. Many of the trucks carry fuel and other material for foreign troops based in Afghanistan.

U.S. and NATO officials play down their losses in these arid mountains of northwestern Pakistan — even though the local arms bazaar offers U.S.-made assault rifles and Beretta pistols, and the alliance is negotiating to open routes through other countries.

The most high-profile victim of the lawlessness has been Tariq Azizuddin, Pakistan's ambassador to Afghanistan. The 56-year-old was snatched from his Mercedes limousine three months ago while driving toward the border. He wasn't freed until Saturday. Pakistan's government denied it was part of a prisoner swap last week with militants.

A senior government official said Azizuddin's kidnapping was carried out by one of dozens of criminal gangs operating in the region, who then sold the ambassador to the Taliban. The official agreed to discuss the case only if not identified, citing the sensitivity of the efforts that led to the envoy's release.

"The security is absolutely becoming precarious and this poses a threat for U.S. and NATO supplies, but it is also a source of concern for Pakistan," said Mehmood Shah, former security chief for the region. "It's a complex mix (of factors), but it is getting more dangerous."

The raids on trucks traveling what is a vital lifeline for impoverished Afghanistan are also disrupting regular trade, but there is disagreement about how serious the problem is.

Ziaul Haq Sarhadi, who heads an association of Pakistani customs agents helping traders move goods through the customs post at Torkham, claimed the average number of trucks has dropped to 250 a day from 500 early this year, before violence escalated.

However, Abdul Ghani, a commander of Afghan border guards, said there had been only a "small drop" in the number of trucks crossing. He had no numbers.

Fuel tankers, in particular, have become a target for militants seeking to disrupt supplies to NATO and the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan.

In April, a bomb strapped to a truck carrying 11,440 gallons of fuel exploded as the vehicle sat near the Torkham customs post waiting to cross from Khyber. In March, a bomb attack destroyed some 40 tankers in a parking lot. Dozens of people were injured by the raging fires.

Most material for foreign troops in Afghanistan arrives by ship at the Pakistani port of Karachi in unmarked shipping containers and is loaded on South Asia's colorfully decorated "jingle" trucks to be driven to destinations like Bagram Air Base, north of the Afghan capital, Kabul.

NATO and U.S. officials won't say whether the trucks carry weapons and ammunition in addition to food, fuel and other supplies. They suggest that theft — not a disruption campaign by militant groups — is the main problem behind the raids on trucking.

The coalition has "no indication of a pattern by the enemy to attack our supplies," said a coalition spokeswoman, Lt. Col. Rumi Nielson-Green.

Yet NATO is seeking to reduce its dependence on the Khyber route by negotiating with Russia and other nations to allow it to truck in "non-lethal" supplies to Afghanistan through Central Asia.

"It's always good to have alternatives," spokesman James Appathurai said at NATO headquarters in Brussels. "One route for supplies is not necessarily the best way forward."

In Khyber, a mountainous enclave that abuts the main northwestern Pakistan city of Peshawar, U.S. weapons and other supplies — boots, camouflage uniforms and rucksacks — are offered openly for sale.

Saifur Rahman Zalmay, a weapons dealer of 30 years, hawks U.S.-made assault rifles and pistols. For a new Beretta, he demands $10,000. New and used M-16s rifles are a few thousand dollars less — far more than Western armies pay.

Zalmay claimed some of the second-hand rifles were sold to arms dealers by Mullah Ismail, a Taliban commander killed in April in Pakistan. Ismail led a June 2005 ambush of U.S. commandos in eastern Afghanistan and shot down a Chinook helicopter sent to rescue them. Sixteen American special forces soldiers died on the chopper.

Shah, the former regional security chief, said local tribes are paid a government stipend to secure the route for regular trade as well as military supplies. But the authority of tribal elders in Khyber has been weakening, as it is all along the frontier.

Ikramullah Khan Afridi, a tribal leader, blamed that trend on the proliferation of radical clerics who are sympathetic to the Taliban and have established parallel administrations and their own militias.

"The traditional mechanism of controlling the area through the jirga (council of elders) of the tribal area has been weakened while the mullahs are taking the law into their own hands," Afridi said. "Now they are out of control."

Rivalry between extremists has also spawned violence, such as a May 1 suicide bombing that wounded dozens of people near Bara, one of Khyber's main towns. It targeted the headquarters of an Islamic fundamentalist group calling itself Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. The group accused Taliban militants from nearby Waziristan of sending the bomber.

Khyber was once regarded as one of the safest of Pakistan's seven semiautonomous tribal regions on the rugged frontier. It was one of the few that foreigners, including diplomats and aid workers, were allowed to venture into, although only to travel to Afghanistan.

The deteriorating security comes despite a relative lull in violence in other parts of Pakistan's frontier regions in recent months. The Pakistani government that came to power in February elections is using tribal intermediaries to try to forge peace with militants, most notably in South and North Waziristan, where the Taliban and al-Qaida are strongest.

Maulvi Abdul Rahman, a Taliban leader, claimed the militants have strong enough ties with influential clerics in Khyber to scuttle any peace talks.

Washington is skeptical that the government's strategy will work anyway. Taking a longer view, it is planning to spend millions of dollars upgrading Pakistan's Frontier Corps, a paramilitary force of tribesmen that is struggling to provide security in the region, including along the crossborder highway.

"They would be the force that should protect U.S. and NATO supplies to Afghanistan," said Pakistan's military spokesman, Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas. The U.S. training program will start in the last half of this year, he said.

But Zalmay, the gun dealer, is skeptical the Frontier Corps can stop either thieves or the Taliban.

"The Frontier Corps does zero," he said.

Associated Press writers Riaz Khan in Peshawar, Fisnik Abrashi in Kabul and Paul Ames in Brussels contributed to this report.

Helmand Farmers Fight to Defend Opium Crop

Rather than watch their poppy fields being destroyed, growers take up arms alongside the Taleban.

Institute for War & Peace Reporting
By Mohammad Ilyas Dayee in Helmand (ARR No. 290, 19-May-08)

Until recently, the Marja area of Helmand province, close to the provincial capital Lashkar Gah, enjoyed relative peace. The main occupation here is farming, albeit with a specific twist – opium poppies take up almost all the arable land.

The calm ended last month when the Afghan government decided to send “eradication teams” into Marja to destroy the crop.

Local residents say the tougher new line yielded little other than angering and radicalising the farmers.

“Marja used to be a very calm district, but when the [eradication] campaign personnel came here, it turned all the farmers into Taleban fighters,” said Janan, who lives in the Wansi Block area of Marja.

“They all got guns and now they’re fighting alongside the Taleban.”

According to Janan, the fighters successfully held off the eradication teams, sent in by the interior ministry in Kabul and consisting mostly of Afghan National Police officers. The result was that almost none of the crop was destroyed.

"To be honest, I am very happy that the campaign has failed in the Marja district,” said Janan. “We’d lose everything if the Taleban didnt help us. We wouldn’t have anything to eat if our poppy fields were destroyed. I thank God for the Taleban.”

Helmand is the undisputed poppy centre of the world, supplying almost half the raw material for heroin sold on international markets.

In previous years, efforts to eradicate the crop have faltered, largely due to corruption. This year, the government announced a major counter-narcotics initiative, and farmers complained that police were no longer as susceptible to bribery as they used to be.

The Taleban have mounted their own campaign to capitalise on the anger and desperation of Helmand’s farmers. According to local residents, the insurgents have been distributing guns and turning farmers into fighters.

“Residents and farmers were very concerned when the [anti-poppy] campaign people arrived in the Sistani area of Marja,” said Rahimullah Sistani, who lives there.

“The farmers thought they were going to lose their crops, but the Taleban promised them protection. Almost all of the farmers in the Sistani area took guns and stood alongside the Taleban. They started attacking the campaign personnel every night. In five days they were able to defeat this huge campaign, something that we’d thought was out of the question. On the sixth day, the campaign people left Marja.”

Mullah Mohammad Qasem, a local Taleban commander, confirmed that his men were working with the local farmers. He was also quite open about the Taleban using drug money to fund their operations.

“We prevent the destruction of poppy fields because we have bought [weapons] on the black market out of the heroin money,” he told IWPR. “We do whatever will weaken the Afghan and International forces."

The fight has left Marja residents relieved that their crop was saved, but concerned for the future.

“The situation in Marja is very bad,” said Abdul Haq, a man from the Sipan area. “We cannot take our sick to get treatment, for fear of the Taleban fighters and the government.”

Abdul Haq poured scorn on the eradication team, and expressed pride in the resilience of local people.

“The police in the poppy eradication campaign are really incompetent. I never thought they would leave the district this way,” he said. “It is true that the ordinary people are also very powerful. All of Marja’s residents stood up against the poppy eradication campaign. Thank God they [police] left the district, otherwise there would have been a serious battle here.”

A policeman in the Sipan area, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed that the eradication efforts had failed.

“A huge campaign involving many people came to Marja, but it was unable to confront the Taleban,” he said. “The Taleban in Marja are very strong. They attack us every night. That is the only reason why the campaign failed.”

Mohammad Gul, one of the officers with the poppy eradication force, disagreed.

“It is not true that the Taleban in Marja are strong. The reason we did not eradicate any poppy fields is because we did not receive orders from the interior ministry to launch the campaign. Anywhere we go, we launch our campaign [only] after receiving an order from the centre.”

He admitted that some fighting had taken place, "It is true that we came under attack from Taleban at some points, but that doesn’t mean they were strong enough to confront the campaign forces. I have no idea why we didn’t launch the poppy eradication campaign in Marja district."

Ali Mohammad, who lives in Marja, said the police were lucky to get away with their lives.

“The police had a lot of personnel and many vehicles. I cannot understand why they did not destroy any poppy fields,” he told IWPR. “But the farmers were all saying that they would resist until they were caught or killed. The interior ministry team was lucky to leave quickly.”

The final results of this season’s poppy eradication campaign have yet to be tabulated, but preliminary figures reported by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime suggest that several thousand hectares of land have been destroyed in Helmand, out of at least 100,000 hectares cultivated with the crop. That is at least an improvement on last year, when an area less than 1,000 hectares is believed to have undergone eradication.

The area under cultivation is believed to have remained more or less stable, because there is little more arable land available to grow poppy.

Counter-narcotics officials with Helmand’s provincial government have been conducting their own campaign, and they are proud of the results. They complain, however, that the Afghan interior ministry and the police units it deployed failed to coordinate with them.

“We have destroyed 7,500 hectares of poppy,” said Fazel Ahmad Shirzad, a senior official with the Helmand counter-narcotics department. “I have no idea what the interior ministry’s team has done. They have not been in touch with us.”

Shirzad insisted that his teams were not intimidated by local resistance.

“We don’t care how the farmers react,” he said. “We destroy the poppy at any cost.”

The official expressed some frustration with the extent of the interior ministry’s operation in Marja. They “should not have left. They did not stay in Marja long enough”, he said.

Few topics are as likely to produce such anger as poppy – on either side of the divide. In Helmand’s monoculture economy, almost everyone is involved in some way with the poppy industry, either fostering it or trying to stamp it out.

Mohammad Hussein Andiwal, Helmand’s chief of police, gave a rousing speech when the season’s eradication campaign kicked off, saying, “This time we will use all of our resources and destroy all of the poppy.”

His police then launched a campaign, which, according to farmers, was fierce and efficient.

Mohammad Ismail, a resident of Babaji village, lost his fields to Andiwal’s men.

“The municipal team is very cruel,” he said bitterly. “They destroyed my lands. We were able to give them money last year, but this year they didn’t take bribes.”

The resolute campaign pursued by the provincial administration may have set the scene for the Taleban’s success in Marja. The uncompromising nature of the eradication effort, contrasting with the more malleable approach seen in past years, clearly angered the farmers and spurred them to take up arms – and find allies where they could.

“The campaign destroyed lands belonging to pro-government farmers,” said Ali Shah Mazlumyar, a tribal elder from the area. “Then the Taleban showed those farmers that they could protect them. So even the pro-government farmers took up arms and stood with the Taleban when the interior ministry came.”

Many growers are grateful for the respite brought by the withdrawal of the government team.

“Thank God the campaign in Marja did not destroy any fields,” said Mohammad Ibrahim, a shopkeeper in Marja, who said he has ten jeribs of land under poppy, equivalent to 20,000 square metres.

“I have heard that the campaign in Nad Ali was conducted by a local police team who destroyed the poppy completely. Thank God there’s been no such campaign in Marja.”

Mohammad Ilyas Dayee is an IWPR-trained journalist in Helmand.

[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.]