BLOGGED: FIRST BLOGGED SEPT.2/2013
CANADA MILITARY NEWS: 11 September 2014-Tribute n photos of Canadians Sept. 11 2001-World Trade Center-New York USA/Photos and Memorial 2 Canadians sacrificed Afghanistan- We Remember Always/IRAQ-CHRIS MASON- Chris also said: "WE CHOOSE TO BELIEVE That the Patch We Wear On Our Right Shoulder Stands For Something That's Greater Than Ourselves; That's Greater Than Where We Are From... We're The Fabric That Holds the Flag Together"
http://nova0000scotia.blogspot.ca/2013/09/canada-military-news-september-2013.html
-------------------
September 11, 2001- why we were in Afghanistan and Iraq
.jpg)
--------------------------
GIT R DONE..... GREAT THINGS DONE IN AFGHANISTAN- FROM 2002-2003 WE WILL SUCCEED
Current mood:God Bless Nato Troops
Category: News and Politics
THOUSANDS OF GOOD THINGS DONE IN AFGHANISTAN BY CANADIAN AND NATO TROOPS...
These are some of the incredible highlights.... from 2002 and 2003.... The Americans are coming.... and God they are good; the UK Elite (they are so good that the Islamic Terrorists are now going to their homes to destroy them and their families at home); the Gurkhas - OMG; the Aussies; beloved New Zealand, Spain, France, Poland and on and on and on- the world of everyday people is sick and tired of this human waste soulless Islamic terrorism slithering across our world.... and we are going to stop it.... in 2010. And we are going to help Afghanistan create their own democracy, culture and a place where women and men and all Afghan children have a true and free and beautiful Afghanistan. China is investing in Afghanistan.... that is huge. Russia, India and Pakistan are dancing and getting anxious... because Afghanistan is the jem in that part of the world... and they are finally beginning to understand- that WE are going to give Afghanistan a life..... theirs. Canada has been there through it all... each and every damn day..... Canada is the only street cred that NATO and UN mafia thugs have (and nobody trusts them moneychangers in their own pockets). World leaders are learning... the hard way.... you do not mess with our free world's Military, Militia and Reservists.... they are the face of who you are ... and the only face left of global humanity... wearing your flags on their shoulders. They did NOT SIGN ON TO COMMIT SUICIDE!!! They are not babysitters; they are not police of the country they are visiting; they are not the political face nor are they the whiners and criers and moaner (far away in the comforts of their own homes.... of course and weapon of choice... computer... and small type) of Islamic terrorists prisoners might get a scratch from the visiting country's policing methods; they are not the press pass to a story of the moment.... and we have lost a Canadian Angel named Michelle Lang.... and she is one of ours.... so don't u dare besmirch her name and our Military's for your news bite (regardless of fact or fiction).... and on and on and on; they are not there to listen to the Middle East Islamics bemoan and cry over innocents whilst harbouring (and we know u all do) Islamic terrorists.... we are soooo over this. 2010 is the cleanup and move on up year to better things. And we, as Canadains... and Nato will succeed.
Following are some success stories which we will be posting on the years we have been here in Afghanistan. It's time. The Islamic Terrorists have more than enough of their spies and lies and helpers throughout the world... who hide under our free world laws and rights that our forefathers and mothers gave to much to give to us. Betrayal will be called as it is.... and voting in the polls will evidence the real dissatisfaction and anger and anguish of losing 6 Canadians in one month in Afghanistan because the Canadian opposition parties dragged our nation, our flag and our men and women serving RIGHT there on the ground in Afghanistan to a public forum... and subsequently their death. When we leave Afghanistan- this matter will be addressed in more detail.... and assurances are being made throughout Canada's 'silent majority' that the vote in the next Canadian election will be the mark of remembrance of our fallen in December.... and how heartless politicians will even walk on the bloodstains of our Canadian sons and daughters right there in the filth and dirt of Afghansitan at such a crucial time.... just for their own personal agendas..... at Christmas. Parliament is adjourned- it's mourning time, reflecting and celebration of Canada's human spirit and our ability to move forward. The winter olympics will allow our friends globally to come and join us and share some love, fun and the triumph of worldclass atheles at their finest. So some good news for awhile... because I can't even begin to get my arms around all your successes. We love u so much ... first and foremost.
Oh and by the by..... the Islamic Terrorists.... have a lot of HIV AND AIDS..... BIG TIME CARRIERS..... you know they love little boys and girls and teens.... and never bathe, wash or comb their hair..... and love to mix in big 'man' only groups all the time in their dresses whilst beating and murdering girl children, their women and daughters and often bury them alive.... ever. So be careful. I may re copy a couple articles.... but frankly just don't see the point.... so Gurkhas... keep taking the scalps.... but be careful.... and you nastier American and UK coming.... back of of dismemberment..... we don't want YOU getting sick..... just burn the trash as you leave.... that ought to do it.... or does AIDS and HIV spread into the soil????!!! hmmmmmmmm. We are praying the Afghans truly take notice of the open sores and so on and hands etc. of the Islamic terrorist taliban errrr whatever..... and don't touch them or allow them near your children or friends.
December 2002
New Highway Construction Starts in Afghanistan
(VOA) - A long-awaited and much needed project to rebuild a major highway system in Afghanistan is now underway. The highway reconstruction project will restore a key portion of Afghanistan's national highway system, which was destroyed by more than 20 years of war and neglect.
Heavy duty road grading equipment may be an all too common sight in most countries, and a source of inconvenience for drivers, forced to slow down and wait while it passes.
But, in Afghanistan, the sight of a road grader is a cause for celebration. It is a sign the country's roads are being repaired, and that one day, drivers may be able to speed along an asphalt highway to their destination, something that is a distant memory in Afghanistan.
Mohammed Nasir is a former farmer who is now a proud signalman for the road grader, stopping cars along Afghanistan's Highway One, between Kabul and Kandahar. Standing on a freshly graded stretch of road near the village of Durrani, about 40 kilometers south of Kabul, he says Afghanistan's shattered highway's are not only inconvenient, they are deadly. He says many Afghans die in accidents caused by bad roads.
Mohammed Nasir said drivers always stop for his signal, and many jump out of their cars to congratulate him, and tell him how happy they are Highway One is being rebuilt.
The stretch of road Mohammed Nasir works on is the first of 1,200 kilometers of Highway One to be rebuilt over the next three years. The project, linking Kabul, Kandahar and Herat is funded by the United States, Japan and Saudi Arabia and is expected to cost $250 million. Craig Buck, the Director of the U.S. Agency for International Development's Afghanistan program says the road project is critical for rebuilding Afghanistan.
"They (roads) are a unifying factor for this nation," he said. "What is needed to bind the provinces to the center, to promote commerce, to facilitate trade and so, getting the road system back in operation is absolutely critical."
Craig Buck says when Highway One is completed it will be able to handle 60 ton trucks. He says the road will be built to international standards, and will be better than the original road, known as the Eisenhower Highway, which was built by American engineers in the 1950s.
However, so far only about 20 kilometers of the road has been graded, and while construction is expected to pick up after the Afghan winter ends, Craig Buck says the danger of mines along the old highway means progress will be slow for some time.
"It is quite different, because we have to have de-miners go through and look not only on the road itself, but on the margins," he said. "And we have to 100 percent certainty that there are no mines so there will be no problem with our construction crews or with the people who will be transiting this road. Furthermore there is a lot of unexploded ordinance out there. There are a lot of wrecked military vehicles that have to be pulled away and taken off, so there is a lot of prior work that needs to go forward."
Craig Buck of U.S. AID says six bridges will also be rebuilt along the road and when the project is completed, the highway will be maintained by collecting tolls managed by a private company. Once the road is completed he says the 18 hours it now takes to drive between Kabul and Kandahar will be cut to four hours.
Back on Highway One just past Durrani, the villagers of Andar are eagerly awaiting the arrival of the road grader. Akhtar Gul a shopkeeper said the road passing by Andar was destroyed by Soviet invaders nearly 20 years ago, and ever since then he and his neighbors have been wating for it to be fixed.
Akhtar Gul said dust from the road ruins people's vegetable gardens and makes them sick. After 20 years of breathing dust, he and his neigbors are looking forward to the new road.
People along the road say the reconstruction project is long overdue. Even people who make a living from fixing the broken axles and flat tires that cause half the cars and trucks traveling on Highway One to break down say they too welcome the new road. Everyone it seems is tired of breathing dust.
--------------
2002
Rebuilding Akokolacha Why America must get more involved - not less - in Afghanistan
Monday, December 09, 2002 5:05 PM EST By Sarah Chayes
AKOKOLACHA, AFGHANISTAN, Dec 10, 2002 (The Christian Science Monitor via COMTEX) Former National Public Radio correspondent Sarah Chayes went to Afghanistan in October 2001 to report on the war. When the fighting - and the news assignment - was over, she sensed her responsibility was just beginning. Feeling a growing need to stop talking about conflict and start doing something about it, she stayed to serve as field director of Afghans for Civil Society, a non-profit group in Baltimore.
Engineer Abdullah and I clambered about the wreckage of this parched village last June, a knot of elders and a gaggle of children spilling over the uneven ground. It quickly became clear that we would never know what the village had once looked like.
"I had seven rooms here," one turbaned elder with a wolf-like face asserted. "And a bathroom adjoining every room."
Abdullah and I looked at each other, then at the 10 square yards of mounded debris we were standing on. The mansion the man was describing was what he wished he'd owned, and I told him as much. The visit went on like that. No one would tell the truth about a neighbor's house, for fear of scuttling his own chances of getting a castle from the foreigners who had inexplicably arrived to rebuild the village.
The Akokolacha project has proved to be an extraordinary microcosm of the wreckage that is Afghanistan, the obstacles in the way of laying new foundations, and the key role the US has played and still plays - for good or for bad.
The parched village of Akokolacha abuts the Kandahar airport. It was smashed half to rubble a year ago when Al Qaeda forces - holed up in a bloody last stand - were pounded by US bombs. Villagers returned to find 10 of their 30 houses heaps of broken mud bricks, the desert wind softening the edges.
Last spring, the nonprofit development organization I'm helping to run appealed to the people of Concord, Mass. (where I gave a lecture) and others we approached personally for money to reconstruct Akokolacha's ruined houses. The response was breathtaking - $18,000 in private donations to build a symbolic bridge between a small American town and a crippled village in Afghanistan.
By September, we'd held several shuras - or council meetings - with the villagers. Top of the repair list were houses rendered truly uninhabitable by the bombing - we weren't doing cracked ceilings. The villagers wanted to start with the mosque and the house of a crotchety, feisty elder called Hajji Baba. Least popular was our decision to build standard houses for everyone: three rooms, a veranda, a kitchen, and a bathroom. The decision was a result of the impossibility of getting good-faith descriptions of the houses that had been destroyed.
At first, I was hurt and offended by the villagers' attitude. Abdullah has remained so. He's run rebuilding projects for 20 years and has seen boundless permutations of ingratitude, theft, and corruption. He's bitter about those of his people he feels dishonor the rest. Akokolacha's residents disgust him, and he shows it.
I'd been describing Afghanistan to friends as a society suffering from collective posttraumatic shock. Now I was seeing the reality behind the metaphor. For a quarter century, Akokolacha inhabitants have been deprived of a future, of the wherewithal to think ahead, to husband resources for later wise investment. Their destiny - appalling suffering or sudden bounty handed out for no apparent reason - has come down upon them arbitrarily, usually at the hand of outsiders. So what matters is right now. And the villagers were trying to leverage as much as they could get right now.
I learned to deflect their complaints and requests with bluff repartee. And so, despite some nagging internal misgivings, I informed them of the dimensions of their future standard houses at the shura.
Hilarious old Hajji Baba, who is toothless and wears dark glasses with one lens poked out, balked. First he insisted he didn't want a house at all unless the rooms were seven meters long. Then he tried to bargain down to six. We'd agreed on five, and we were sticking to it. We told Hajji Baba we wouldn't force him to have a house and we turned to someone else's. He caved and told us to get cracking - and he was on it like a hawk, complaining and adjusting and pitching in, and cackling and throwing tantrums. Every time I'd show up, his pout would crack into a smile; he'd let me kiss his dirt-caked hand and tease him, and he'd grudgingly agree that the work was OK.
To add irony to this crash course in aid delivery, I was caught in the crossfire of Afghan and American notions of how I should be working. An independent film crew making a documentary on the Akokolacha project began questioning my attitude: Why wasn't I more sympathetic to the villagers' desires? Wasn't I imposing my Western image of an Afghan village on them?
In my other ear, Abdullah was remonstrating in the opposite vein: "Why do you keep listening to these thieving villagers? Will you just let me run this job?"
Through it all, trenches were dug, and wizened stonemasons were deftly choosing pieces of rock to Rubiks-together into solid, mortarless foundations.
Abdullah came to me one September morning: "There's a problem with the stone for Akokolacha. Gul Agha's soldiers stopped our tractor. "
"Zu," I said, "Let's go." And we headed for our battered black Toyota Land Cruiser and the quarry that held stone needed for Akokolacha's new foundations.
The road there cleaves a dun-colored wasteland of rock and clay, hardened by the punishing sun. Only a fleet of nappy-haired camels, some sheep combing a parched field, and the patchwork tents of impoverished nomads break the monotony. Up a sandy track to a hollow in the flank of some rocky hills, we found the quarryman's son.
"Bikhi bad sarai," he said. A "very bad man" had come with a Kalashnikov-toting tough, twisted a fistful of collar under the young man's chin, and warned that no one was to take foundation stone from the quarry. The "bad man" was the nephew of Gul Agha Shirzai, the governor of Kandahar Province. The nephew and the governor's brother, it emerged, are opening a gravel plant next to the old quarryman's operation. The governor's kin had snatched the old quarryowner's contract with the US military base for the large amounts of gravel and stone it requires. And the former quarryoperator was no longer allowed to sell any stone or gravel at all.
At a time when reconstruction is perhaps Afghanistan's highest priority, no one can legally obtain stone for foundations. That's because there is a lucrative market in stone crushed into gravel that Gul Agha is cornering for himself.
"Only with a written order from Gul Agha can I give stone," explained the white-bearded quarryman.
"Zu," I said to Abdullah. "Let's go see the governor."
Gul Agha - literally "Noble Flower" - Shirzai was governor of Kandahar Province in the early 1990s, and so much mayhem and rapine flourished on his watch that much of the population welcomed even the draconian Taliban, which banished him and his ilk. The one fear consistently expressed by Afghan refugees during last year's war was that the end of the Taliban regime would bring back warlord rule.
Gul Agha returned to Afghanistan in November 2001 as part of the US "southern strategy" to compliment its reliance on the Northern Alliance. Military pressure on Kandahar was needed as well as the patient negotiating tactics of Hamid Karzai, now transitional president. So Gul Agha's men, together with several Pakistani Army officers, were inserted just south of Kandahar.
When the Taliban were ready to surrender, Mr. Karzai asked Gul Agha to remain outside the city with his troops - at the very airport that Akokolacha abuts. But Gul Agha, accompanied by his US and Pakistani advisers, advanced on Kandahar militarily to take it from Karzai. He was threatening exactly the kind of civil strife that has brought Afghanistan to its knees over the past decades. Forced to give in to this blackmail, Karzai named Gul Agha governor.
In its hurried effort to support "the government" and consolidate even the most superficial stability, the international community has funneled its aid to the region - overt and covert - almost exclusively through Gul Agha. As a result, a fatalism is growing among Kandaharis and international actors alike who fear that Gul Agha is, in fact, "the" government, that his hold on power is acceptable, and that there will be no recourse against him. He treats the province as his personal property, enforcing his will at gunpoint.
At Gul Agha's compound we drank in the scene: Open-backed trucks sporting bunches of rocket-launchers strapped to the struts like metal bananas. A flock of petitioners never straying far from the gates - only swinging, as if at anchor, to avoid the butts of his soldiers' Kalashnikovs. Those soldiers wear US Army fatigues, and in the eyes of Kandaharis, they - and their rude, often criminal behavior - are part of the US military presence here, as is Gul Agha himself. The abundance of guns and soldiers are a mark of raw power. And the exercise of power remains inexorably personal in Afghanistan. That is the significance of the constant press of petitioners around Gul Agha's gates. To settle the most elementary grievance, or to obtain a routine authorization, citizens must see the governor in person.
Eventually we were let into a low-slung white-washed building where we stopped to see the chief of staff who had his own press of petitioners. One wiry old man was positively begging - kissing his fingertips and touching them to his own eyes in a gesture of submission - saying he'd come three days in a row, please give his opium back. The official insisted without a glance that opium is illegal.
"Why is it illegal for me and not for Hajji Abdullah?" the old man asked. Hajji Abdullah is a wealthy businessman reputed to be the biggest opium dealer in the province. At that very moment he was meeting with Gul Agha.
We were directed to the governor's private quarters across a small park - an oasis of green in parched, dust-swept Kandahar. Rows of eucalyptus trees shade the lawn where, in a touch of medieval pageantry, an antelope ambled.
At length, Gul Agha emerged flanked by Hajji Abdullah. Gul Agha, the "Noble Flower" who is a great, hairy bear of a man with thick black locks of hair sticking from a white bandage wrapped around his head. He'd been grazed in the recent assassination attempt on President Karzai.
After the gush of friendly greeting, I brought up the question of the stone for Akokolacha.
"You can't have any stone. We're building a cement factory," he said, then smiled broadly. "Let me give you some advice: make your foundations from brick, with cement for mortar."
We tangled politely for 10 minutes, and I finally wrested a promise that he'd send a delegation with us to find another source of stone near Akokolacha. But there is none, as the provincial chief of mines and industry discovered when he drove out with us. So the chief ordered the old quarryowner to provide stone to our tractors.
Akokolacha has a new mosque now, and all but two houses are up; some families are moved in - complaining, though, that without glass in the windows it's too cold.
The old quarryoperator did not fare so well.
Two days after he sold us our stone, a dented white station wagon pulled up next to our car, a hand proffering a note out the window. It was the quarryman's writing: He was in jail. Gul Agha himself had gone to the hillside and told his soldiers to take him away.
We were frantic: Descriptions of Gul Agha's jails are chilling. We pulled all the strings we could - from Kandahar elders to Amnesty International. A week later he was released - mercifully, unhurt.
This is warlord government, and it is crippling Afghanistan's hopes for a future. And the international community is honor bound to do something about it.
Afghans look to the international community, and the US in particular, as a force that can push their leaders toward a more democratic and professional governing style.
Odd as it may sound, the US presence enjoys a large measure of popularity here - but it is conditional on Americans getting more involved, not less, using their influence to limit the devastating effects of warlordism.
It's time America shoulder some responsibility for the consequences of its actions and begin actively promoting the values it claims to cherish - even in faraway Afghanistan.
-----------------
2002
Donors pledge 1.7 billion dollars in aid to Afghanistan
by Pia Ohlin
OSLO, Dec 17 (AFP) - More than 20 countries meeting at an international donors conference for Afghanistan in Oslo have pledged at least 1.7 billion dollars (euros) in aid to the war-torn country for 2003, sources close to the talks told AFP on Tuesday.
"Everything indicates that the level of aid pledged in 2002 will be extended for 2003," diplomats from Norway, which chairs the Afghan Support Group, said.
An international donors conference in Tokyo last year saw long-term pledges of around five billion dollars, of which 1.7 billion were earmarked for 2002.
"We think we will reach at least that level for 2003," the sources said.
If the figure is confirmed, it would be more than double the amount the United Nations had appealed for Afghanistan last week. It scaled down its appeal to 815 million dollars for the next 15 months from the 1.6 billion dollars requested for the past 15 months.
Sources stressed that the exact calculation of the pledges made at the conference was difficult to determine as a number of countries' fiscal budgets have yet to be approved by their parliaments, and because the countries spread out their pledges over varying periods.
In an address opening the two-day conference earlier Tuesday, Afghan President Hamid Karzai appealed for long-term reconstruction aid to help rebuild the country after 23 years of war, vowing that the money would be used efficiently.
"We would like to ask the members states (of the Afghan Support Group) to continue to assist us with rehabilitation and reconstruction by funding projects aimed at long-term recovery," Karzai said.
He said the money would be used to rebuild roads and infrastructure, restore farming and agriculture, rejuvenate communities and boost government institutions.
"I assure you that we in Afghanistan are extremely careful and dedicated to spending the money that you give us in a correct, transparent and efficient manner," he stressed, urging: "Please help us do that."
Members of the Afghan Support Group include Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Norway and the United States.
Earlier Tuesday, Norway said its pledge for 2003 would amount to 375 million kroner (52 million dollars/euros).
"Long-term commitment from the international society is still required," Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik said.
"More than 20 years of war have had their sad effect on Afghan society and the Afghan economy," he added.
Bondevik urged the Afghan government to focus its efforts on improving the plight of women, who were stripped of most of their rights under the hardline Islamic Taliban regime.
"The situation for women in Afghanistan is improving but there is still a way to go," the Norwegian leader said.
The call came as the New York-based group Human Rights Watch issued a report claiming that women in parts of Afghanistan were still subjected to systematic human rights abuses more than one year after the fall of the Taliban.
Karzai stressed that the issue was a top priority for his government, but rejected the report's claim that women's conditions were deteriorating.
"I don't think it has deteriorated compared to the Taliban time," he said, stressing that women were now able to work in both the public and private sector and that schools and colleges were open to girls.
"Afghanistan is very, very keen to see that the women in Afghanistan get a much better life and that children in Afghanistan get an education and the quality of life that normal children can enjoy in the rest of the world," he said.
Meanwhile, a group of non-governmental organisations said donors must give priority to bolstering the country's institutional structure to end rights abuses and improve security.
-------------
this took over 100 hours collecting this sigh... thx Scots, Germans, Brits, Aussies, Irish, American, Canadian, Europe, Kiwis.... contacts...... imagine ... all the good sheeet .... that never hits the airwaves.... but our troops know... by God... they know
Posted/posted/posted/ posted
2002
Afghanistan Urges Shift in Aid to Rebuilding
Tue Dec 17,11:39 AM ET By Alister Doyle
OSLO (Reuters) - Afghanistan urged the world to shift aid toward long-term reconstruction of the war-shattered nation Tuesday as Kabul came under criticism for human rights abuses since the overthrow of the Taliban last year.
President Hamid Karzai urged officials from 23 donor nations at the start of two-day talks in Oslo to move from short-term aid, like food and medicines, toward long-term projects for building roads and institutions and reforming farming.
"We would like the international community to focus more on reconstruction projects," he said at the opening of the talks at a hotel, guarded by police with sub-machine guns.
Making a plea for continued support, he thanked donors for support in defeating what he called the "reign of terror and tyranny" in Afghanistan, emerging from decades of war.
The United Nations wants $815 million in aid from January 2003 until March 2004 for everything from helping a return of refugees to building roads. About $2.0 billion was pledged for 2002.
Human rights groups faulted Kabul's record and said much still needed to be done to ensure basic freedoms, especially for women, despite the U.S.-led overthrow of the radical Islamic Taliban regime a year ago.
"Major human rights abuses continue to be committed in Afghanistan, and without international pressure and increased advice and support to Afghan institutions, the situation will not change," Amnesty International said in a statement.
And New York-based Human Rights Watch said in a report that women in Afghanistan were still subject to the same abuse, and faced even worse harassment in some regions, as under the Taliban.
Karzai told donors that the government was working to improve the rights of all and that education was his key to end abuse of women.
"I don't think it (the situation of women) has deteriorated in comparison to the Taliban time," Karzai told a joint news conference after earlier talks with Norwegian Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik.
"Schools are open, colleges are open for women to study," Karzai said of western areas of the nation singled out by Human Rights Watch for most criticism. He added he would investigate charges of worsening abuse in the western city of Herat and crack down if needed.
Many Afghan women still wear the all-enveloping burka which was obligatory under the Taliban regime. The Taliban harbored Osama bin Laden (news - web sites), blamed for masterminding the September 11 attacks on the United States last year.
The burka has been viewed in the West as a symbol of oppression under rules forbidding women to work or go to school.
Education for women "is what we are concentrating on very, very strongly," Karzai said.
Karzai won praise from U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who said in a message to the talks that peace in Afghanistan required the international community to grant "increased support" for Afghan-led solutions.
"I urge you all to invest in the recovery and security of Afghanistan, to invest in the will and capacity of Afghans themselves to rebuild their country and to win the struggle for return and survival that so many Afghans still face," he said.
Hungary to send medics to Afghanistan
Tue Dec 17,11:19 AM ET AP
BUDAPEST, Hungary - Parliament decided Tuesday to send army medics to Afghanistan as part of the international peacekeeping force there.
The decision, approved 339-21 with two abstentions, came after opposition parties told the government that they would not support sending combat troops.
"Hungary is not going there to create peace with weapons, but to create peace by humanitarian means," Istvan Simicsko of the opposition Fidesz-Hungarian Civic Party told parliament during the debate.
A smaller opposition party, the Hungarian Democratic Forum, voted against the proposal, saying that the army - including its medics - was not well enough equipped for such dangerous missions.
Foreign Minister Laszlo Kovacs said that Hungary had originally offered a detachment of soldiers for guard duties, but his Socialist Party supported the compromise of sending medics. He said that a detachment of 50 volunteer medics would now leave for Afghanistan on Feb. 15 for a six-month term of service.
-
Norway rolls out red carpet for Afghanistan's president
Aftenposten English Web Desk
Norwegian officials gave a warm welcome to Afghan President Hamid Karzai this week, promising even more aid to rebuild the country next year. Karzai, in turn, vowed to fight corruption in an effort to ensure the aid is used as intended.
Karzai spent most of Monday in meetings with, among others, Norwegian Foreign Minister Jan Petersen and Hilde Frafjord Johnson, the cabinet minister in charge of aid to developing countries.
She told Karzai that Norway would continue to donate aid and expertise to Afghanistan. The international community has promised to pump USD 4.5 billion into Afghanistan during the next five years, and Norway's 4.5 million residents already have contributed about NOK 350 million.
Concern over corruption within Afghanistan, however, has been high, with donor countries worrying that their money will fall into the wrong hands.
Karzai vowed to mount a major fight against corruption. He told Norwegian officials that the international accounting firm KPMG would monitor the use of funds given to the public sector, that new government purchasing rules and bidding procedures were being implemented and that the number of state employees would be cut in half.
He also said new public sector employment rules would be put in place, public sector salaries would be raised in an effort to make bribes less attractive, and that evidence of corruption would result in funds being cut off to the department in question.
Johnsen said she has confidence in Karzai and his government's efforts to keep control of the international aid pouring into the country.
Karzai was meeting Tuesday morning with Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik, who would announce new aid grants totalling NOK 375 million for next year. He also was due to meet the president of Norway's parliament before having lunch at the Royal Palace.
A meeting with the international support group for Afghanistan was to follow at the Holmenkollen Park Hotel, where Karzai is staying during his visit.
---------------
2002
U.N. report: Al-Qaida camps are being reactivated in eastern Afghanistan
Tue Dec 17, 7:40 PM ET By RANJAN ROY, Associated Press Writer
UNITED NATIONS - New foot soldiers for Islam's holy war are streaming into al-Qaida training camps that have been recently reactivated in eastern Afghanistan, a U.N. report on the terror group said Tuesday.
While Osama bin Laden's financial network has been mostly dismantled, his terror network still enjoys significant support and has "access to substantial funding from its previously established investments," said the report by an expert panel.
Michael Chandler of Britain, who led the expert group, told a news conference that al-Qaida operatives might be present in about 40 countries, which he did not identify.
The U.N. experts warned in the report that al-Qaida has the potential to obtain nuclear material and build "some kind of dirty bomb."
More than a year after a U.S.-led coalition ousted Afghanistan's former Taliban rulers, who harbored bin Laden and his followers, the report said "one of the most recent developments to come to light is the apparent activation of new, albeit simple, training camps in eastern Afghanistan" for al-Qaida supporters.
Chandler said the camps may have sprung up near the eastern town of Asadabad, in Kunar province. But he said since U.S.-led coalition forces in Afghanistan were constantly looking for such facilities, these camps were "small, discreet and mobile" and did not stay in one place for too long.
"Particularly disturbing about this trend is the fact that new volunteers are making their way to these camps, swelling the numbers of would-be al-Qaida activists and the longer-term capabilities of the network," the report said.
Reports of training camps have also surfaced from Peshawar, near the porous Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
Last week, some officials in Pakistan's intelligence community and Interior Ministry said suicide squads were being trained in Pakistan by al-Qaida operatives to hit targets in Afghanistan. The Pakistani government denies the presence of such camps.
Many "disillusioned" young men still flock to such camps, either to be trained as "foot soldiers" for al-Qaida or to receive more specialized training, Chandler said. He did not give details.
"There is a tremendous amount of sympathy in some countries for the movement," Chandler said, referring to al-Qaida. He did not name any country.
There are no precise numbers for suspected terrorists, but "the figure of 10,000 is tossed around," he said.
The Oct. 12 bombings in Bali, Indonesia, confirmed the extent of relationships between al-Qaida and the loose coalition of extremist groups in Southeast Asia, while the Nov. 28 attacks in Mombasa, Kenya, demonstrated a shift in tactics by the group to hit soft targets, the U.N. report said.
The blasts in two nightclubs in Bali killed 192 people, mostly foreign tourists. In Mombasa, a vehicle packed with explosives plowed into the Paradise Hotel, about 16 kilometers (10 miles) north of the Indian Ocean port. Ten Kenyans, three Israelis and at least two bombers died. Minutes earlier, unidentified assailants fired two missiles at an Israeli jet taking off from Mombasa airport, narrowly missing the aircraft filled with Israeli tourists returning to Tel Aviv.
"Soft targets, preferably with maximum casualties, would now appear to be the order of the day," the report said.
Chandler said there was no proof that al-Qaida had obtained nuclear material, but there was evidence to show the group had expressed interest in it.
"Our concern is you can actually get the stuff," he said.
The report noted the recent seizure by Tanzanian police of 108 kilograms (240 pounds) of suspected uranium, an element that can be used as fuel in a nuclear bomb. Experts later said they believed the uranium was not weapons-grade.
Chandler said his group had no evidence linking al-Qaida to Iraq's suspected program to build weapons of mass destruction.
Under U.N. sanctions, which the expert group is monitoring, all nations are required to freeze the finances and impose arms embargoes and travel bans on individuals and groups associated with bin Laden, al-Qaida and Afghanistan's former Taliban leaders - wherever they are in the world.
According to the United Nations, the list currently has 324 names, including 232 individuals and 92 groups.
Richard Grenell, the U.S. spokesman at the United Nations, said U.S. President George W. Bush had spoken earlier about a long haul in the fight against al-Qaida.
"Much has been accomplished and there is much more to be done. As the president said in the beginning this war will be a non-traditional war and will take a long time," Grenell said.
In Washington, a counterterrorism official said the Bush administration was aware of al-Qaida activity in Afghanistan, but said no major training activity was going on.
In a report about one year after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the group had warned the United States and other nations involved in the campaign against terror that al-Qaida still had the money and recruits to strike.
It has repeatedly urged countries to abide by U.N. sanctions to freeze funding to suspected terror groups and provide names of terror suspects so that they can be tracked down.
"Many countries have refrained completely from providing names of such persons or entities," the report said.
Most of these nations, which it did not identify, cited legal complications in accusing people or organizations of being linked to terrorism without enough evidence.
------------------
2002
U.S. Troops Hurt in Afghan Grenade Attack
Tue Dec 17, 3:23 PM ET By TODD PITMAN, Associated Press Writer
KABUL, Afghanistan - Attackers ambushed two U.S. soldiers and an Afghan interpreter at a busy corner outside the capital's Blue Mosque on Tuesday, wounding all three with a grenade thrown at their unmarked jeep.
Kabul's police chief said two men were arrested. One said later during questioning witnessed by journalists that he attacked the Americans because "they were laughing at women."
A policeman at the scene, speaking on condition of anonymity, said he saw a boy throw a grenade at the Americans' gray, Russian-made jeep. A second man also tried to throw a grenade but was tackled by a fruit vendor, the officer said.
Afghanistan's interior minister linked the attack in the heart of Kabul to the al-Qaida terrorist network, although he offered no specific evidence. There have been frequent attacks on U.S. bases in eastern Afghanistan, but attacks on American troops in Kabul are rare.
Both Americans were in stable condition, and the interpreter suffered only light wounds, said British Maj. Gordon Mackenzie, a spokesman for the 4,800-soldier international peacekeeping force that patrols Kabul. They were reported at the German hospital, which has the city's best medical facilities.
Lt. Tina Kroske, a U.S. military spokeswoman at Bagram Air Base north of the city, would not identify the soldiers. She said one suffered injuries to the head and "in the lower extremities," while the second had shrapnel wounds in his lower right leg.
Interior Minister Taj Mohammed Wardak said on state TV that authorities were investigating, but he accused the attackers of having ties to al-Qaida.
"Some of the madrassas on the other side of the border, they're training these kids for terrorist actions," Wardak said, referring to Islamic religious schools in Pakistan.
"There's no doubt that these people had links to al-Qaida," he added, although he didn't say what evidence he had.
Kabul Police Chief Basir Salangi identified the two arrested men as Amir Mohammed of Khost in eastern Afghanistan and Ghulam Saki of Jalalabad, the capital of eastern Nangarhar province. Mohammed had at least two grenades in his pocket when he was arrested, Salangi said.
With journalists present during an interrogation at a police station, Wardak asked Mohammed why he attacked the Americans.
"They were laughing at women," Mohammed said, without further explanation.
Saki, the other detainee, said: "I wasn't involved in this. Everyone was running away and I was running, too."
As U.S. soldiers in four Humvees armed with heavy machine-guns guarded the ambush site, six Americans in flak jackets inspected the jeep with flashlights, taking digital pictures.
The only apparent damage to the jeep was a cracked windshield. Blood trickled down the left side and a small pool of blood was on the ground on the other side. The jeep was then towed away by an Afghan truck.
At Bagram, a U.S. military spokesman, Col. Roger King, said there would be no change in the state of alert of American troops in the capital, but soldiers would be on the lookout for any new attacks.
"It does increase the individual alertness of the soldiers because they recognize that this type of action can happen because Afghanistan remains a dangerous place to operate," he said.
U.S. troops frequently drive through Kabul in unmarked vehicles. Their most visible presence is around the heavily guarded U.S. Embassy compound.
Tuesday's attack was the first since a Nov. 28 incident in which a sniper wounded a U.S. Special Forces soldier in the leg in eastern Afghanistan. The shooter escaped.
Fifteen U.S. soldiers have been killed in combat or hostile situations in Afghanistan since the U.S.-led anti-terror campaign began last autumn.
-------------
2002
Bin Laden Said to Have Sought Nuke Help
Sunday, December 29, 2002 8:34 PM EST
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) A leading Pakistani nuclear scientist, barred by his government from talking to reporters, has made it known through his son that Osama bin Laden approached him before the Sept. 11 attacks for help in making nuclear weapons.
The al-Qaida leader was rebuffed, the son, Azim Mahmood, said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.
``Basically Osama asked my father, 'How can a nuclear bomb be made and can you help us make one?''' he said. ``My father said, 'No, and secondly you must understand it is not child's play for you to build a nuclear bomb.'''
The scientist, Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, is under a gag order from Pakistani intelligence officials, but his conversations with bin Laden in meetings in 2000 and as late as July 2001 were reconstructed for the Associated Press by his son.
The conversations as described by Azim Mahmood clearly show bin Laden was interested in developing nuclear weapons. They don't, however, shed any light on whether the terrorist mastermind had taken even the first steps on that complex technological challenge.
The U.S. Embassy declined to discuss Mahmood's story. American officials in Washington also would not comment.
There has been previous evidence of al-Qaida's interest in nuclear weapons.
Computers found by journalists and U.S. troops at a variety of facilities in Afghanistan indicated al-Qaida had sought to obtain and develop nuclear and other potent weapons. An AP reporter saw anthrax and other chemical concoctions at an al-Qaida laboratory outside Kabul.
During a New York trial two years ago stemming from bombings at two U.S. embassies in Africa, a former bin Laden aide testified he was ordered in 1993 to try to buy uranium on the black market for an effort to develop a nuclear weapon. Jamal Ahmed Al-Fadl said al-Qaida was prepared to spend $1.5 million, but he didn't know if a purchase was ever made.
In addition, U.S. officials have said captured al-Qaida lieutenant Abu Zubaydah told American interrogators the terrorist network was working on a ``dirty bomb,'' a conventional bomb that would scatter radioactive material. Such a radiological weapon would be far less deadly and damaging than a nuclear explosion.
Authorities also have said that Jose Padilla, the former Chicago gang member charged with plotting with al-Qaida, attended two meetings in Karachi, Pakistan, at which senior al-Qaida operatives discussed the possible use of a ``dirty bomb.''
A United Nations report issued by experts monitoring al-Qaida movements warned that al-Qaida has the potential to obtain nuclear material and build ``some kind of dirty bomb.''
``Our concern is you can actually get the stuff,'' said Michael Chandler, the British expert who heads the monitoring group.
The conversations related by Azim Mahmood confirm bin Laden's nuclear ambitions. But they also offer a glimpse at the nexus of science and conservative Islam at a high level in Pakistan, one of the world's newest nuclear powers along with neighboring India, whose own leaders follow a Hindu fundamentalist philosophy.
The elder Mahmood, who has been questioned by the FBI and is under close Pakistani surveillance, is a deeply conservative Muslim who espouses the same puritanical brand of Islam as Afghanistan's former Taliban rulers.
Enraged over Pakistan's plans in 1998 to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, he resigned from the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission and devoted his time to his charity, the Holy Quran Research Foundation.
Last December, President Bush labeled the charity a terrorist group and Mahmood a terrorist. His assets and those of his charity were frozen.
``Even my father's pension is blocked. At the moment he has nothing,'' said Azim Mahmood, a physician in his 30s who also adheres to a strict Islam.
For years, Pakistani peace activists and liberal academics have fretted about Islamic hard-liners in Pakistan's nuclear organization.
``We have always expressed our fear that a large number of people in the nuclear establishment would be ideologically motivated to share Pakistan's nuclear weapons technology,'' said Dr. A.H. Nayyar, a nuclear physicist and research fellow at the Sustainable Development Policy Institute, an independent Pakistani group.
Azim Mahmood said his father met with bin Laden in Afghanistan several times, ``and definitely this question of building a nuclear bomb came up.''
The father was detained in November 2001, questioned and freed in February, but has to carry a mobile phone at all times so Pakistani intelligence can track his movements, the son said.
He said his father's American interrogators were particularly intrigued by one of his books, ``Doomsday and Life After Death,'' and wanted to know whether it meant he had some kind of inside knowledge of what al-Qaida was planning.
Mahmood first met bin Laden in 2000 while visiting Afghanistan to build a school, the son said. He wanted to help the Taliban, because he was angry at the international criticism of the regime's brand of Islam, the son recalled.
``My father shared the Taliban thinking. He liked their system of government. He wanted to help them.''
When bin Laden learned a nuclear scientist was in Kabul, he sent an al-Qaida operative, Abu Bilal, to the Pakistani's hotel to arrange a meeting, the son said.
``My father went to meet him and he said, 'Why don't you come and help us build these things?''' Azim Mahmood said, adding that the two men met several times in the Afghan capital and the discussion invariably returned to nuclear weapons.
The al-Qaida leader wanted a nuclear device, Azim Mahmood said. ``Al-Qaida also wanted a person who could train their people, and who could get them enriched material for their weapons.''
Experts say, however, that making a nuclear bomb requires a cadre of highly trained, experienced scientists and technicians.
In a separate interview, a former senior Taliban official said bin Laden was trying to obtain nuclear materials, but he could not say whether the al-Qaida leader succeeded.
Mullah Mohammed Khaksar, who renounced the Taliban last year but had made contact with U.S. officials in 1999, said he knew of several mysterious shipments that entered Afghanistan and were stored at a warehouse in Kandahar, a Taliban stronghold. One was a balloon-like container covered in aluminum and others were capsules the length of a man's hand, he said.
Azim Mahmood said his father was uncertain what nuclear material, if any, al-Qaida possessed.
``At one meeting they brought a box, a thing that someone had sold to them for a huge amount of money, but my father laughed and said it was nothing,'' he said.
----------------
2002
Tribesmen Take Up Arms to Resist Afghan Drug War
Sun Dec 29, 7:22 AM ET
JALALABAD, Afghanistan (Reuters) - Authorities were forced to stop destruction of opium poppy fields in parts of an eastern Afghan province after tribesmen took up arms to resist the move, residents said Sunday.
They said tribesmen in Shinwar, Khogyani and Achin districts of Nangarhar province opened fire when anti-drug enforcers from the provincial government showed up Saturday and an unidentified person was wounded in Achin.
Production of opium, which is used to make heroin exported to Europe and the United States, has soared to near record levels in Afghanistan since the fall of the fundamentalist Taliban regime last year.
Noor Rahman, a native of Khogyani, said tribesmen had vowed to resist future eradication efforts with force.
"The tribesmen used loudspeakers to call on people to come out of their houses to resist the plan," he told Reuters. "Government troops have been forced to leave the area."
Saifour Rahman, from Shinwar, said the tribesmen there had also vowed armed resistance, saying the government had failed to provide alternatives to opium growing.
The Taliban succeeded in implementing a near total ban on production, but this collapsed after its overthrow.
The United Nations has forecast Afghanistan's opium production will reach a near record 3,400 tons this year, making it the world's biggest producer once more.
More than a third of Afghanistan's drugs come from Nangahar, which border's Pakistan's tribal belt.
Authorities in the provincial capital Jalalabad said the tribal resistance was only a temporary problem.
"People can't stop this effort," Jalalabad governor Haji Deen Mohammad said in reaction to the events.
However, it appeared a setback for President Hamid Karzai's government, which is under pressure from its Western backers to halt opium cultivation.
Karzai ordered a ban on drugs production when he came to power and promised farmers $350 for each acre of poppies destroyed. But many farmers complain they have yet to see any compensation and have flouted the ban.
In the spring, several dozen opium farmers were killed in a battle with government forces in the southern province of Helmand.
Diplomats say current erradication efforts may achieve little since poppies plowed up so soon after planting have time to grow again.
They say farmers in debt to moneylenders often find they have no choice but to grow opium, sometimes at the behest of powerful local figures who profit most from the trade.
-----------------
2002
Families and officials bid last respects to seven German soldiers killed in Afghanistan accident
Sun Dec 29, 1:13 PM ET By MARKUS SEMBALE, Associated Press Writer
BONN, Germany - Germany's president joined the families and friends of seven German troops killed in Afghanistan at a memorial service honoring the soldiers who died when their helicopter went down eight days ago.
Thousands of people packed the cathedral in Bonn to mourn the seven peacekeepers who died Dec. 21 when their Sikorsky CH-53 helicopter crashed as it returned from a routine patrol over the Afghan capital, Kabul.
President Johannes Rau read the names of the soldiers, who ranged in age between 24- to 53-years-old, then thanked them for serving their country.
"Seven men gave their lives for something that is important for us," said Rau. "The fatherland says thank you for serving your country."
Besides Rau, Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, Defense Minister Peter Struck and former Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher all attended the ceremony in an expression of support for Germany's continued participation in the Afghan peacekeeping mission.
The accident was the worst for German troops since Berlin began sending its soldiers to participate in international peacekeeping missions.
"We Germans believe it is right for our soldiers to fight international terrorism, for the security of our country and that of our allies," Rau said, adding, "The price of peace and freedom can be painful."
The seven were among the 4,800 peacekeepers who have been in Afghanistan for a year to try to establish security in a country ravaged by 23 years of invasion, civil war and repressive regimes.
Last week, German lawmakers voted to double the number of German peacekeepers in Afghanistan to 2,500 and extend their mandate there for another year. Germany, along with the Netherlands, is to take over command of international force in Kabul in February.
About 10,000 German troops are serving in international peacekeeping missions around the globe, notably in the Balkans and Afghanistan.
-----------------
2002
Convoy of 25 Indian buses arrive in Pakistan for donation to Afghanistan
Sun Dec 29, 1:40 PM ET AP
LAHORE, Pakistan - In a rare move of cooperation between South Asia's nuclear rivals, 25 buses which the Indian government is donating to Afghanistan arrived Sunday in Pakistan, whose territory they must cross to reach their destination.
Pakistan and India have fought for decades over the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir, which both countries claim. Almost all ground and air transport links between the two countries were suspended following a December 2001 attack by Islamic militants against the Indian Parliament in New Delhi that killed 14 people.
"The first consignment of 25 buses out of the 400 to be donated to the Afghan people by India crossed (the Pakistan-India border) at Wagah," said Abid Saeed, a Pakistani government official in Lahore, the capital of Pakistan's Punjab border province. Wagah is located about 35 kilometers (22 miles) east of Lahore.
The Indian buses will be driven across Pakistan and enter Afghanistan at the Torkham border station.
Both India and Pakistan are supporting efforts to rebuild war-torn Afghanistan.
India has pledged US$100 million for Afghanistan's reconstruction, including three commercial aircraft and hundreds of vehicles for the Afghan army. Pakistan has donated aid and materials.
--------------
2002
U.N. Will Help Afghan Government Investigate Reports of Mass Graves
By Chris Kraul Los Angeles Times December 29 2002
KABUL, Afghanistan KABUL, Afghanistan Treading cautiously on the issue of atrocities in a country that has seen many in 23 years of war, the United Nations said Saturday that it will help investigate several mass graves in northern Afghanistan this spring but will leave it up to Afghans whether and how to proceed with any evidence that is uncovered.
Site work for a U.N.-sponsored feasibility study for an investigation has just been completed, and excavations at three or more sites around Sheberghan and Mazar-i-Sharif may begin as early as April, a U.N. source said Saturday on condition of anonymity.
Due to the political climate, the United Nations will not press the Afghan government to launch a truth commission or war crimes tribunal even if a wealth of evidence indicating atrocities is found, sources said. Past U.N.-led investigations of alleged mass slayings in Rwanda, Guatemala and the Balkans have led to such panels.
"In our view, what is to be done with the results of the investigation needs to be decided by the Afghans in a nationwide debate. In a country with transitional justice, one just emerging from a long period of conflict, conditions might not be mature enough to deal with human rights violations of this magnitude," said an international human rights expert working in Afghanistan who asked not to be named.
Further complicating the situation is that allegations of mass graves abound in Afghanistan, a source said. That presents fair-minded officials with the problem of where to start digging.
The investigation in northern Afghanistan began after reports surfaced that hundreds of captured Taliban fighters died last year in metal shipping containers during their transfer to prisons by Northern Alliance militiamen. Taliban prisoners at the Sheberghan prison told a delegation from the U.S.-based Physicians for Human Rights last January that hundreds of their comrades never arrived at the prison after giving themselves up in the city of Kunduz.
In a report in August, Newsweek magazine said as many as 1,000 people may have suffocated in the containers. Spokesmen for Northern Alliance leaders have acknowledged that some captured Taliban fighters died but say that no more than 200 perished. They contend that the deaths were not intentional but were caused by disease and battle injuries.
Among the sites likely to be analyzed is one in Dasht-i-Leili, near Sheberghan, where the principal mass grave of the Taliban prisoners is said to be. But in a bid to assuage Northern Alliance leaders who now control the region and who initially resisted the investigation, international officials have agreed to study two or more sites around Mazar-i-Sharif that allegedly contain victims killed by the Taliban in 1997 and 1998 before the U.S.-led force and the Northern Alliance drove the regime from power last year.
Before the multisite plan was hammered out, Northern Alliance warlords told the United Nations that they could not guarantee the safety of investigators, drawing a rebuke from Lakhdar Brahimi, the U.N. special envoy to Afghanistan.
U.S. human rights groups called for a probe of the shipping container deaths after witnesses said U.S. soldiers may have been present during the transport. U.S. troops were seen accompanying warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum's forces during several stages of the prisoner transfer, according to news reports. But the Pentagon said this summer that an internal inquiry found no U.S. involvement in the deaths.
Site work for the U.N.-sponsored feasibility study for the probe was performed by William Haglund, a noted forensic anthropologist from Seattle who has analyzed mass graves in Rwanda, the Balkans and Sri Lanka and who visited Sheberghan prison with the physicians group.
In an interview after a recent trip to Afghanistan, Haglund described a grave site he visited as "very large" but declined to estimate how many victims could be buried there. Haglund is expected to make recommendations to the U.N. in late January.
----------
2002
Education spells new way of life for Afghan nomads
by Barry Neild
SHERAK, Afghanistan, Dec 29 (AFP) - Three hours' trek up a steep valley cleaved through unforgiving rock, a tribe of Afghan nomads gathers to greet a herd of donkeys that could change their centuries-old way of life forever.
Strapped to these beasts are the chalkboards, books and tools of teaching with which they hope to offer their children an escape from a lifestyle that, largely thanks to years of war in Afghanistan, has trapped them in poverty.
The equipment is a gift from the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), whose representatives have made the two-day journey to this tiny settlement in the Shinwari district of Parwan province, 50 arduous miles (80 kilometres) north of Kabul.
Unusually for Afghanistan, where most of the country's estimated one million Kuchi nomads move south for the winter, these Kuchis have chosen to put down tentative roots in the tiny village of Sherak.
Here, desperation has driven them to build a rudimentary school for their 148 children, which will operate through the freezing months until spring with the bittersweet aim of making this generation of Kuchis one of the last.
"No one likes this way of life, we live like animals," said Malawi Sayed Ahmad, 42, head of the Kuchis at Sherak, who says his tribe have suffered heavily in four years of drought in Afghanistan.
"At the moment there are only four out of 300 of our people who can read and write. Since we are Kuchis we move about a lot. Sometimes we travel into cities, we need to read signposts so we can find clinics or marketplaces," he explained.
"This is one of the reasons we need education, and also to be able to have the opportunity to get jobs in the city. This is why we build our school and why we need things for our teachers and children."
Ahmad, whose people rely on a dwindling collection of livestock for their income, says he would have no regrets if his children abandoned their lifestyle for the city.
"Everyone dreams of having a better job, a better life here. We have asked the government many times to help us, but we are stuck living in very poor conditions."
Inside the school, where students take their lessons on dirt floors as cold air blows in through unglazed windows, many of the youngsters have their sights set high.
"I want to be a doctor and treat patients," says eight-year-old Akhtar Bibi, who declared herself very happy with new books and pens donated by UNICEF.
Niaz Mohammad, one of the school's four teachers, has been struggling to educate using textbooks printed in Dari the wrong Afghan language for the Pashto-speaking tribe.
Nevertheless he perseveres, hoping his pupils can build a better Afghanistan.
"We hope our people will get educated and they can serve their country, their people and their government in the future," he said.
While the roadless Namokab valley in which the mud houses of Sherak are built escaped the worst of the 23 years of conflict which ended with last year's collapse of the Taliban regime, the fighting has long isolated the Kuchis from assistance such as that brought by the UN.
UNICEF communication officer Edward Carwardine, who accompanied the donkeys on their expedition to the village, said the organisation had no qualms about disturbing the Kuchis' unique and isolated way of life.
"Education is the foundation upon which the future of Afghanistan will be built," Carwardine said. "That is why we have to ensure that every child has the chance of schooling, whether they are urban children, rural children or children like these nomadic Kuchis.
"If we have to trek for hours into the mountains to ensure that these children and teachers receive the supplies they require, so that they have at least the basics to start learning, then that is a commitment we are more than happy to make. Afghan children deserve nothing less."
His comments were echoed by Abdul Shakoor Rahimi, education officer for impoverished Shinwari district, who hopes that as many of the area's estimated 6,000 students as possible are able to use their schooling to head for a brighter future.
"I believe that if our children get educated their life will be changed. They may leave the area, but they will find good jobs and life can only be better for that."
-------------
2002
Afghan returnees top two million mark for 2002
KABUL, Dec 29 (AFP) - More than two million Afghans have returned to their homes in the past year, far outstripping early expectations following the fall of the Taliban regime and the end of 23 years of war, the UN said Sunday.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said the number arriving in Afghanistan from abroad passed the 1.8 million mark in December, while a further 250,000 internally displaced people have been resettled.
"We had to re-calculate the return figures in mid-year when the return flow exceeded the initial plan of 1.2 million just 15 weeks into the repatriation operation and adjust our assistance levels to match two million by the year end," said UNHCR spokeswoman Maki Shinohara. "We made it."
Shinohara said the operation, the largest repatriation in UNHCR's recent history, was set to continue into 2003 with a further 1.5 million due to return home.
She said a budget of 195 million dollars had been approved to assist with the returns, mostly from neighbours Pakistan and Iran.
Those returning to date had received transport assistance, a sum of cash between five and 30 dollars, plastic sheeting, hygiene items and flour from the UN's World Food Programme.
Preparations were also ongoing to ensure 550,000 returnees in rural areas were able to weather the hardships of the harsh Afghan winter, an ongoing drought and the effects of two decades of war, Shinohara said.
Contingency measures include the provision of 11,000 tents, 36,000 stoves, 146,000 blankets and nearly 70,000 plastic sheets.
Plummeting temperatures have proved a major problem for returnees, with cold weather reportedly claiming the lives of up to 40 children in refugee camps on either side of the Pakistan border near the southern Afghan town of Spin Boldak.
Shinohara said Afghanistan would remain heavily dependent on the global community to assist those attempting to start a new life in their troubled homeland.
"Afghanistan enjoyed the international support it deserved this year after a decade of being forgotten by the world.
"But the peace process has just begun, much has improved in the course of this year, but security remains a problem in many parts if the country," she said.
----------
Osama, Dead or Alive
By JAMES TRAUB The New York Times December 29, 2002
Osama bin Laden, the founder and leader of Al Qaeda, was dead for about five months this past year. In July, Dale Watson, then the F.B.I.'s head of counterterrorism, said publicly that he thought bin Laden had died, perhaps in the savage battle of Tora Bora in Afghanistan. No, said Pervez Musharraf, the president and generalissimo of Pakistan, bin Laden had died of kidney failure. Or perhaps it was something else. Certainly the nemesis of the Western world had neither been seen nor heard from since the previous December. And then, last month, he popped up again like the inextinguishable Professor Moriarty. In an audiotape that was first broadcast Nov. 12 and that has been declared authentic, bin Laden issued another in his string of apocalyptic threats. ''As you kill,'' he admonished his adversaries in the West, ''you will be killed. As you bomb, you will be bombed.'' It is we, not he, who will be killed.
Osama taunts us, and inspires his followers, with his magic invulnerability. Perhaps who knows? he kept his silence until rumors of his death had taken on the status of received wisdom. And so he retains his tremendous grip on the imagination not only of those who revere him but also of those who fear and despise him. He is not simply the kingpin of Al Qaeda but its incarnation, the visible embodiment of an entity otherwise elusive, secretive and almost incomprehensibly protean. And because he is graspable because he is evil personified he has become our great idee fixe. In the days after 9/11, President Bush said that he wanted Osama ''dead or alive.'' The president intuitively felt that he could neutralize the organization if he could kill or capture its fountainhead. We feel that, too, or at least we wish it to be so.
But is it so? Ari Fleischer, Bush's spokesman, suggested not long ago that a patriotic Iraqi could solve the crisis over Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction with a single bullet. Does the same hold with Al Qaeda? Would Osama's death cripple the organization if not instantly then at least in a year or two? The answer is almost certainly no. As Peter Bergen, a CNN journalist and the author of ''Holy War, Inc.,'' an account of the rise of bin Laden and Al Qaeda, observes: ''We've already run the experiment of what it was like to have Al Qaeda without bin Laden. After 9/11, it wasn't at all obvious to bin Laden's followers that he was alive. But they seemed to carry on and do all these things without him.'' Since 9/11, Al Qaeda appears to have organized several lethal bombings in Pakistan as well as the bombing of a synagogue in Tunisia, of a French oil tanker off Yemen and of a hotel full of Israelis in Mombasa and to have had a role, as yet unclear, in the recent attack on a nightclub in Bali that killed more than 180 people.
Al Qaeda's ability to ''survive'' bin Laden is vivid proof of bin Laden's own gifts. As Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at RAND, puts it, ''The groundwork and the foundations that he's laid were deliberately conceived to ensure that Al Qaeda's mission will outlive even his death.'' It is hard to think of any other leader who combines, as bin Laden does, the charismatic power required to inspire followers to a transcendent, life-and-death commitment with the impersonal management skills needed to create an organization that can dispense with charismatic leadership altogether. In ''Inside Al Qaeda,'' Rohan Gunaratna, a scholar at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, points out the remarkable fact that not one of the 19 men chosen to carry out the attacks of 9/11 showed the slightest sign of a second thought: ''All went willingly to their deaths, even the very young.'' Gunaratna observes that no other Islamic terrorist body has embedded ''the culture of martyrdom'' so deeply into its fabric. He also describes the scene of bin Laden sitting in his office in Khartoum in the early years of Al Qaeda, drawing up detailed files on each mujahed, or fighter. ''Osama studied these files carefully before entrusting a particular task to anyone,'' Gunaratna writes. ''He promoted and appointed people based on merit, ability and performance.''
It is not bin Laden but Al Qaeda that turns out to be unkillable. Before 9/11, Al Qaeda was a hierarchical body with a central command and, in Afghanistan, a country of its very own. Now it has neither country nor command, and a new, diffuse and decentralized organization has taken its place ''Al Qaeda 2.0,'' as Peter Bergen calls it. This new Al Qaeda is, if not ''virtual,'' then at least a-geographic.
Al Qaeda 2.0 doesn't need a leader combing through a database, and it may not need a leader pointing the way to sacred violence, either. ''They've got their videos,'' Martha Crenshaw, a terrorism expert at Wesleyan, says of bin Laden's followers. ''They can worship at his shrine.'' Bin Laden might be every bit as valuable to Al Qaeda in death as he is in life. In a way, he might as well already be dead. His own followers have not seen him in a year; he has been, in effect, reduced to a disembodied voice. And yet he is not reduced at all. Bin Laden constructed his own symbolic identity as methodically as he devised Al Qaeda's bureaucratic structures. Gunaratna notes that when bin Laden was living in a pleasant house in Jalalabad, in pre-9/11 Afghanistan, he would hold interviews with journalists in a cave to promote his air of asceticism and otherworldly commitment. He was often depicted in posters riding a white horse to remind the faithful of the Prophet Muhammad, who went into battle astride a white horse. Now, in effect, bin Laden is fully occupying the iconic identity he so lovingly devised: he has virtualized not only his organization but also himself. Even if that voice is finally blotted out, the imagery will live on. ''There is,'' as Bruce Hoffman says, ''no more recognizable a brand name than bin Laden and Al Qaeda.''
------------
2002
Afghan woman general jumps into world of men
AFP [ MONDAY, DECEMBER 30, 2002 01:03:45 PM ] via The Times of India
KABUL: That Afghan General Khatool Mohammadzai has a chest full of medals and has completed no less than 600 parachute jumps is impressive. That Mohammadzai is a woman makes it even more so.
Dressed in full military uniform, Mohammadzai is a striking sight in Afghanistan, where many women remain imprisoned under the all-encompassing burqa veils made compulsory by the hardline former Taliban regime.
Despite being a devout Muslim, the 34-year-old mother steadfastly refuses to conform to the norms of what remains a repressive society.
"According to our tradition and culture, women normally do not go out of the house. So once a woman does go out, she should do something extraordinary. She should do something to keep all the men quiet; that's what I'm doing."
Mohammadzai lives up to her claim. At the age of 16 she signed up for the airforce, dreaming of becoming a parachutist during an era of communism in Afghanistan when female equality was promoted.
Then came the dark days of the Taliban, when women were banned from the workplace and most other walks of everyday life in Afghanistan, made prisoners in their own homes.
Mohammadzai, who by this time had already become a popular figure in Afghanistan, was reduced to making embroidered clothes and handicrafts to scrape together a living.
But such was her popularity that, after the fall of the Taliban late last year under a US-led military campaign, the country's new leaders were soon begging her to return to duty. She literally jumped at the chance.
----------
2002
Afghan dairy farmers find market
AFP
SHAH AZIZ - Every day the farmers line up, bottles of milk in hand, taking part in one of Afghanistan's premier, if basic, experiments in market agriculture.
Half a dozen farmers, or sometimes their children, wait in line to hand over their two or four litres of milk at the collection point in the village of Shah Aziz, about 15 kilometres south of Kabul.
Said Imam, 38, measures up each farmer's contribution for the day and carefully puts a bit in a test-tube and mixes it with alcohol and sulfuric acid to determine the fat content.
Once a week the farmer is paid by the quality and quantity of his milk. The average payout is nine afghanis, about 20 US cents.
The milk is taken to Kabul by a collector who charges an afghani a litre. Then it is put in plastic bags, pasteurized and sold at five points in the capital under the brand name Pamir.
"The farmers don't have any market for their products. They often have only one cow for farm work, for milk and for meat," says Mustafa Zafar, Pamir's founder.
"But in the city, there's a demand. The technology is very simple; the whole problem is having an opportunity, and that opens up the peasant's worldview."
A former professor of animal sciences at Kabul University, Zafar launched this strikingly basic formula in 1999 to help the impoverished country's rural base, with the assistance of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
The experiment started in the southern city of Kandahar and now includes about 400 farmers around Kabul. It has also spread to Mazar-i-Sharif and the north and may soon expand to Jalalabad in the east.
The Rome-based FAO helps transport the milk from the collection points and an Afghan non-governmental organisation called PRB takes care of the processing and sales. The pasteurisation system is basic but is overseen by FAO experts.
"The program is simple, but it's efficient and generates revenue. It works so well in Kandahar, for example, that there is competition. A dozen similar systems have been organized," said Olaf Thiene, who is in charge of the project for the FAO.
The program is also cost-effective. The entire operation in Kabul cost less than $60,000.
The principal problem for the budding enterprise, ironically, is international good intentions. Pamir milk is up against humanitarian aid, which supplies "tons of milk that's free, or which is resold at five afghanis a litre," said Mustafa Kabir, the director of the PRB.
The project's founder Zafar, however, is convinced that with enough effort Afghanistan can see a resurgence of livestock raising, which has been devastated by 23 years of war and drought.
Already, farmers engaged in the milk program are taking part in a project to produce fodder. And an artificial insemination project is trying to breed cows that can produce more than the daily five to six litres each one pumps out now.
Back in Shah Aziz, farmer Said Imam is far away from grandiose plans for the future. But he can point to concrete improvements in his daily life since Pamir came to town.
"I already have one cow, but as soon as I can I'll buy a second one," he says.
-----------
2002
US, Canadian Troops Battle al-Qaida
Thu Mar 14, 1:59 PM ET
By PAUL HAVEN, Associated Press Writer
BAGRAM, Afghanistan (AP) - U.S. and Canadian troops battled al-Qaida fighters in the Shah-e-Kot area Thursday, killing three of them in a 90-minute gunbattle,
according to Canadian reporters accompanying the troops.
The Canadian Press news agency quoted U.S. First Lt. Greg Darling of Warren Center, Penn., as saying coalition troops subdued the enemy with anti-tank
weapons, heavy machine guns and small arms fire.
There were no U.S. or Canadian casualties, the agency reported.
The troops were conducting mop-up operations in the Shah-e-Kot area, which was abandoned by al-Qaida forces after heavy U.S. airstrikes. Forensics experts
conducted DNA tests to make certain none of the terrorist organization's senior leaders was among the dead.
Neither Osama bin Laden (news - web sites) nor Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar was believed to be in the Shah-e-Kot valley March 2 when U.S. forces
and their Afghan allies launched the biggest offensive of the 5-month-old war. But some corpses were so badly mangled that Maj. Gen. Frank L. Hagenbeck
ordered the tests - just to be sure.
"Even if it's a long shot that maybe one of these al-Qaida leaders (was there), we want to go through every means we've got available to us to try to positively
identify them," said Hagenbeck, the commander of all coalition troops in Afghanistan (news - web sites).
A U.S. officer estimated as many as 500 al-Qaida fighters were killed in the 12-day offensive in eastern Afghanistan. But Afghan troops said they found only 25
bodies in the initial sweep of the area. Others may be buried in caves that collapsed during the bombing.
Among the dead were "second and third tier" al Qaida leaders, though Hagenbeck did not explain what he meant.
Helicopters patrolled the valley looking for anyone who might have slipped through a coalition dragnet, sneaking out on smuggling routes and into neighboring
Pakistan.
In Washington, Pentagon (news - web sites) spokeswoman Victoria Clarke said Wednesday that fighting had "mostly ended" and that troops were in the
"exploitation phase," going cave to cave in search of bodies, weapons and intelligence information.
"We will have a long way to go in Afghanistan," she said.
Canadian forces took the lead in the mop-up work following the battle, with 500 troops landing high in the snowcapped mountains to search for al-Qaida fugitives,
including Saif Rahman Mansour, the Taliban leader of the Shah-e-Kot fighters.
"We're right on their backs right now," Hagenbeck said of Rahman and his comrades.
A joint Canadian and American team moved systematically through the area, blasting cave entrances with grenade and machine gun fire to make sure no one was
hiding inside.
Canadian officers said they found stacks of rocket-propelled grenades, grenade launchers and stacks of small arms ammunition hidden in the abandoned bunkers.
Most of the dead were non-Afghans, and included Chechens and Uzbeks as well as corpses with Mongol features, Hagenbeck said. U.S. officials said they were
holding about 20 prisoners who were being interrogated.
Pentagon officials had repeatedly said the only choice facing the enemy troops was to "surrender or die," although Afghan commanders had been prepared to allow
them to leave.
Leading the final assault were Afghan commanders Zia Lodin and Gul Haider, who had floated the idea of a negotiated exit.
"There are some fighters who have escaped - we think to Pakistan," said Shurkurullah, an Afghan commander who uses only one name.
"As Anaconda unfolded, we saw that the larger concentrations of Taliban and al-Qaida fighters began to disperse," said Vice Admiral Greg Maddison, a Canadian
military official speaking in Ottawa. "And the area that we are engaged in is one of the areas where some of the fighters went to."
The number of enemy fighters still in the valley had dropped to "double digits," Hagenbeck said.
U.S. officials had hoped to prevent a repeat of the flight from Tora Bora, the cave complex U.S. troops hammered for weeks in December on suspicion that bin
Laden was inside.
Afghan militias from the area conducted most of the ground fighting at Tora Bora, and U.S. authorities said they apparently let many al-Qaida fighters escape to
Pakistan.
When Tora Bora was finally overrun, there was no sign of bin Laden.
Fighting died down during the last five days, enabling the United States to withdraw most of the estimated 1,400 troops from the 101st Airborne Division and the
10th Mountain Division who fought in the battle.
The coalition casualty toll stood at eight U.S. special forces troops and three Afghan allied fighters.
Hagenbeck also acknowledged that some civilians were killed in the fighting, though he did not say how many. He blamed the deaths on the al-Qaida fighters, who
set up mortar positions between the houses in the hamlets of the Shah-e-Kot Valley.
"It's always tragic when noncombatants are killed in something like this," Hagenbeck said.
-----------
Schroeder Limits Afghan Troop Support, Offers Aid
Thu Mar 14,12:08 PM ET
By Philip Blenkinsop
BERLIN (Reuters) - German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder told visiting Afghan leader Hamid Karzai on Thursday Germany did not wish to expand its
peacekeeping role in Kabul but was ready to offer further economic assistance.
"If the United Nations (news - web sites) wishes, we can talk about an extension in time to the mandate...but I have emphasized we are skeptical about any
expansion. We would not consider it possible to moving beyond Kabul, although we are not proposing a reduction of our troop presence," Schroeder told a news
conference.
Karzai, who arrived in Berlin for a 48-hour visit on Wednesday, highlighted a century of strong Afghan-German ties. He has said he would welcome Germany,
which has 850 troops stationed in Kabul, taking over the leadership of the international peacekeeping mission from Britain.
"If Germany takes this step...the whole of the Afghan people will be happy. Germany enjoys much respect and confidence in Afghanistan (news - web sites). There's
no doubt about that," Afghanistan's interim leader said in the interview broadcast on German television late on Wednesday.
The two leaders met as top officials from Britain and the United States arrived in Ankara to encourage Turkey to take over command of the International Security
Assistance Force (ISAF) in Kabul.
"Germany is already playing the leading role in Kabul. If and when Turkey takes over, Germany will be number two," Karzai said on Thursday.
Schroeder said Germany and Afghanistan had signed a memorandum of understanding on Thursday aimed at tightening economic links and providing assistance.
The deal would help improve Afghanistan's infrastructure, especially telecommunications. Germany has also offered to provide economic advisers to Kabul.
Schroeder said Germany would support Afghanistan's schools and hospitals and would help build up a civilian police force.
--------
September 2003
Afghan government welcomes fresh US aid
* Kabul is satisfied with $400m, awaits implementation
KABUL: Afghanistan welcomed Washington's announcement of 800 million dollars in fresh aid, Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah said.
"We are satisfied by this pledge, it's a very good news and that was needed," Abdullah told AFP late Tuesday.
Just 800 million dollars of US President George W Bush's vast 87-billion-dollar request to Congress for post-war Iraq and Afghanistan is earmarked for Afghan reconstruction.
US officials said the administration would also reallocate nearly 400 million dollars from its 2003 existing budget to boost the promised Afghan aid package to 1.2 billion dollars in fiscal year 2004.
One-third of the 1.2 billion dollars will go towards training and support for the new Afghan National Army and police force.
A further 300 million dollars is to be spent on infrastructure, including roads, schools and health clinics.
"We are now waiting for the implementation of this money," Abdullah said.
"What is important is the commitment of the United States, it shows that the international community is still focused on Afghanistan," he said.
Some 11 billion dollars of the Bush budget request announced on Sunday will also go to the US military's hunt for Al Qaeda and Taliban remnants in Afghanistan.
The sum represents the ongoing monthly bill of around 900 million dollars for the 12,500-strong US-led coalition hunting the extremists, who are blamed for a fresh surge in violence in the country's southeast.
While the money represented an increase in US financial commitment, aid agencies said Washington needed to look further ahead than just a one-year package.
"Afghanistan is not a one-year contract, there is a need for multi-year help for Afghanistan, probably of around 20 billion dollars," said Paul Barker, Afghanistan director for the US-based humanitarian organisation CARE International.
With the war-ravaged country struggling to rebuild after 23 years of conflict, the World Bank and United Nations have estimated its reconstruction needs at between 13 billion and 19 billion dollars.
Finance Minister Ashraf Ghani has said Afghanistan needed 30 billion dollars in aid and investment over five years to drag itself out of poverty and violence. -AFP
----------------
2002
U.S. Says Foreigners Among Afghan Rebels Killed
Thu Mar 14,11:56 AM ET
By Mehrdad Balali and Christine Hauser
BAGRAM AIR BASE/SHAHI KOT, Afghanistan (Reuters) - Afghan troops found Egyptians, Sudanese, Indonesians and other foreigners among 20 dead Taliban
or al Qaeda fighters discovered on Thursday in caves after the biggest battle of the Afghan war.
The commander of U.S. forces on the ground, General Frank Hagenbeck, said he believed Chechens, Uzbeks and Chinese were also among hundreds of militants
killed in the 12-day Battle of Shahi Kot in eastern Afghanistan (news - web sites).
He said troops had established that Taliban leader Mullah Omar and al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden (news - web sites) were not in the battle.
The grinding clashes ended on Wednesday when U.S., Canadian and Afghan troops overran rebel caves and trenches near Gardez, capital of Paktia province,
about 95 miles south of Kabul.
"We have killed some second or third al Qaeda leadership. Big names were not in the valley. But we have indications where they are and I can assure you we will
track them down and kill them," Hagenbeck said at Bagram near Kabul, the control point for the operation.
"We are not gonna let loose of these guys. We got good leads on them. We track them 24 hours a day. We have the means and the patience. We do all it takes to
get them."
WEALTH OF INFORMATION
Hagenbeck said troops had found a treasure trove of intelligence information in wary searches carried out so far of mined and booby-trapped caves burrowed into
mountains that soar 12,000 feet high.
"We found bomb-making devices, large caches of weapons, manuals on how to attack individuals and how to blow up a bridge," he said.
At the village of Shahi Kot, now a base for Afghan troops and U.S. special forces, Commander Mohammad Ismail said he saw 20 dead rebels in a trench and cave
network.
"I have seen their bodies and I have got their ID cards," he told Reuters. "The Arabs were from Sudan and Egypt and there was an Indonesian identity card. There
were also Chechens."
"Some were in trenches and some in cave bunkers with lots of domestic possessions, like tea kettles and every kind of equipment for living," he added.
In the distance, there was the sound of an occasional single explosion as troops fired mortar bombs or threw hand grenades into caves before entering them.
Ismail said his troops suspected many Taliban/al Qaeda escaped, possibly to mountains 12 miles away.
The U.S. military says it killed 800 to 1,000 militants during the campaign, although Afghan commanders like Ismail have expressed concerns many slipped across
the rugged mountains toward the nearby Pakistan border.
"We believe we killed hundreds, but not many bodies have been found," Major Bryan Hilferty said.
"I think it is because we dropped very big bombs on them, so it is not like they were in a car crash," he added. "There are many caves we have shut down and they
are in there."
During a fierce air bombardment of the Taliban and al Qaeda positions, U.S. planes used a new "thermobaric" 2,000-pound bomb which creates a blast that drives
air out of a cave to suffocate those inside.
CALLS FOR COFFINS
Hagenbeck said intercepted radio traffic showed the fighters asking local supporters to send coffins.
"On the fourth day, they asked to bring trucks and equipment to extract them," he said. "They never got in. Very few al Qaeda managed to escape."
There was no news on the whereabouts of Saif Rahman Mansour, leader of the roughly 1,000 rebels who held the U.S. and Afghan forces at bay.
"He is either killed or has fled to Pakistan," said Gulbuddin, an aide to Afghan Defense Minister Mohammad Fahim.
Gulbuddin said Mansour, in his 40s, had been a leader of the Taliban in the area. His father was killed in fighting between Afghan warlords before the Taliban ended
the civil war and took power in the capital Kabul in 1996.
Canadian troops played a leading role in the final day of the battle on Wednesday, helping to capture and secure a strategic ridge known as the Whale or
Whaleback, in an operation code-named "Harpoon."
"For the first time since the Korean war, Canadian soldiers were deployed yesterday in a combat operation," said Canadian spokesman Lieutenant Luc Sharron.
"We are going there to destroy and kill remaining pockets of Taliban and al Qaeda in the mountain regions of Paktia," he told reporters at Bagram.
"The Canadian commander has 500 men under his command, including an American rifle company," Sharron said. "We are proud to be here, we are making
history."
Canadians scour Afghan caves
Afghan soldiers are also involved in the new operation
Hundreds of Canadian troops have begun searching caves in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan, where al-Qaeda and Taleban fighters held out against
American-led forces for almost two weeks.
A spokesman said they were looking for information that may have been left by the guerrillas, and for survivors.
Few bodies of enemy fighters have been found, although US officials believe hundreds have been killed.
We are conducting sensitive site exploitation, looking for information, looking in the caves
US military spokesman
It is thought some may have been buried as caves collapsed under heavy aerial bombardment.
The new operation is the first led by the Canadians in the five-month-old Afghan campaign.
US and Afghan troops finally overran the cave and trench complex on Tuesday and Wednesday after fierce resistance.
Fears of booby-traps and land-mines have also delayed searches of the area.
'Operation Harpoon'
About 500 Canadian infantry troops are taking part in the operation "designed to destroy and the remaining pockets of Taleban and al-Qaeda elements" in the Shahi
Kot Valley and the Arma mountains, a Canadian military spokesman said.
US helicopters ferried in the Canadian troops to the Shahi Kot area
US forces spokesman Major Bryan Hilferty said the Canadians had taken over from the Americans on the ground.
A total of about 1,000 troops are now involved - about half Canadians with a US rifle company, the other half allied Afghans.
"We are conducting sensitive site exploitation, looking for information, looking in the caves," Major Hilferty said.
He said the caves were probably booby-trapped.
The new action, called Operation Harpoon, is part of Operation Anaconda - the 13-day US-led offensive against the last known stronghold of Taleban and
al-Qaeda fighters.
Possible escapes
Afghan commanders have expressed concern that many militants may have slipped away across the rugged mountains.
Major Hilferty said he had "no direct intelligence" about possible escapes but "obviously some have probably escaped".
The reason that not many enemy bodies had been found was "probably because we dropped very big bombs on them... also there were many in caves and we
believe that we have shut the caves with them in there", he suggested.
The spokesman added that Afghan forces in the battle area had been "burying all the bodies they found".
Fewer than 20 people have been captured in Operation Anaconda - but none are thought to be senior Taleban or al-Qaeda leaders.
The offensive has seen some of the bloodiest fighting of the US-led anti-terror campaign. Eight US servicemen have died and 49 have been wounded in the action so
far. Several allied Afghans have also been killed.
----------------
2002
Danger and stark beauty View from above: Snowy mountains, fresh graves
By Dave Moniz
USA TODAY
SHAH-E-KOT VALLEY, Afghanistan -- From the pilot's seat of his giant CH-47 Chinook helicopter Wednesday, Chief Warrant Officer-2 Jeffrey Fichter could
see a welcome sight.
America's Afghan allies were occupying the top of a twin-humped mountain ridge that U.S. forces have dubbed ''The Whale.'' The friendly forces, thanks to 12 days
of bombing by U.S. jets, had been able to push an estimated 100 to 200 remaining al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters from the high ground, giving the U.S-led anti-terror
coalition forces control of this battleground.
But Fichter also knew that the U.S. troops he has been ferrying back and forth from Bagram air base still have incredibly dangerous work to do, even though they've
won the campaign known as Operation Anaconda.
Those U.S. forces, together with Canadian troops, have begun searching an undetermined number of caves that snake and twist beneath The Whale and surrounding
mountains. They're looking for al-Qaeda stragglers, at altitudes of 8,000 to 10,000 feet and in terrain littered with land mines and booby traps.
''It's potentially very dangerous, but we hope the payoffs are worth the risks,'' says Maj. Bryan Hilferty, an Army spokesman at Bagram.
American officials say they have already accomplished a lot here. They estimate that more than 500 enemy fighters have been killed. Lt. Col. David Gray, an
operations officer with the Army's 10th Mountain Division, says the dead were primarily non-Afghans -- members of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda terrorist network
who came to Afghanistan to train. ''What we have done,'' Gray says, ''is denied al-Qaeda of its most important, well-trained fighters.''
The view from Fichter's helicopter Wednesday on the one-hour flight from Bagram provided an aerial perspective on the land where eight Americans, at least three
allied Afghans and the enemy fighters died in battle. From a distance, the scenery was beautiful. Snowcapped mountains were set against a clear blue sky. Up close,
the landscape was mostly barren. At lower elevations, the bare ground was a dusty brown.
Villages that Fichter and his crew of four others passed over were small clusters of mud-walled huts. Occasionally, packs of dogs could be seen running. A few
farmers were tilling the ground with hand tools. A couple of shepherds with small flocks were spotted. So were a few children, running in apparent fear of the
helicopters (Fichter's was joined by two other Chinooks) passing 100 feet overhead.
There were some reminders of the fighting. A few burned-out vehicles. A cemetery of fresh graves.
Fichter's crew -- a co-pilot and three gunners -- was not challenged as it flew but remained alert. Two gunners on each side and one at the rear exit ramp were
poised in case of trouble. ''We don't want to get complacent'' just because al-Qaeda and Taliban forces have apparently been routed, Fichter says.
But the only Afghan soldiers they saw were those on The Whale and a convoy of troops commanded by Gen. Zia Lodin, a U.S. ally. Zia's tanks and armored
vehicles were rolling across this valley.
Wednesday's mission for Fichter and his crew from the 101st Airborne Division was to pick up 40 U.S. troops who needed a lift back to Bagram. That job was
accomplished quickly, with no trouble. Fichter landed and in just four minutes was back in the air with his 40 passengers on board.
-----------
2002
Taliban and Qaeda Death Toll in Mountain Battle Is a Mystery
March 14, 2002
BODY COUNT
By ERIC SCHMITT and THOM SHANKER
The Battlefield: Details of Victory Are Unclear but It Is Celebrated Nonetheless (March 14, 2002)
Marooned Taliban Tick Off Grim Hours in an Afghan Jail (March 14, 2002)
ASHINGTON, March 13 - The Pentagon says it is not counting the bodies of opposing fighters in the latest battle in Afghanistan.
But nearly every day since the American-led offensive began, the military has produced a classified estimate for senior officials of Al Qaeda and Taliban dead.
At the start of the week, the Pentagon estimate listed the confirmed number of dead Arab, Chechen and other fighters for Al Qaeda at 517. Another 250 were
believed to have been killed, but the deaths were listed as unconfirmed. By today, the total estimate had risen above 800, according to one official.
"Those numbers are all extremely fuzzy," said one senior military officer.
The body-count estimates are just that. They are based on reports from Apache helicopter pilots who often spot fighters before firing missiles, on gun-camera film
taken by combat aircraft, on video images from unmanned Predator drones and on reports by Special Forces troops on the ground, among others.
Even though helicopters and high- technology surveillance systems can blow away some of the fog of war, military officials acknowledge that these sources have
limitations. Cameras and pilots cannot peer into caves, for instance, or assess the number of dead in the two villages that were laid waste by bombs.
Nor is an American pilot's count of opposing fighters in a mountain redoubt before he fires always completely certain. Even if it is, there may be little in the way of
remains.
To list a Qaeda fighter as "confirmed dead" does not necessarily mean that the military has a body. Journalists who toured the Shah-i- Kot Valley, where the recent
fighting has taken place, saw only three bodies today.
Still, the estimates exist, despite the assertions of Pentagon officials that they are not in the body-count business.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has made it clear to his senior advisers and military commanders that he is against releasing the numbers, fearing any echoes
from Vietnam of "body counts" - often inflated - that haunted his predecessors.
"I don't do body counts," Mr. Rumsfeld said last week in a CBS News interview. "This country tried that in Vietnam, and it didn't work. And you've not heard me
speculate on that at all, and you won't."
The morning briefing given to Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the commander of the war in Afghanistan, does not contain precise enemy casualties, said a spokesman at the
Central Command, Maj. Brad Lowell. "The Cinc" - General Franks - "relies on his commanders on the ground to make those assessments," Major Lowell said.
Some senior Pentagon officials expressed irritation that the commander of operation in Shah-i-Kot, Maj. Gen. Franklin L. Hagenbeck, spoke so explicitly about Al
Qaeda deaths in the campaign's opening days. But other senior officers said his candor shed welcome light on a complicated operation and in no way compromised
the mission.
"Our estimation is that in the last 24-48 hours, the number of enemy that we fought over time is somewhere in the neighborhood of 600 to 700 enemies," General
Hagenbeck, commander of the 10th Mountain Division, said on March 6. "Conservatively speaking right now, I'm convinced from the evidence that I have seen that
we have killed at least half of those enemy forces."
Military commanders say that unlike in Vietnam, they are not using the closely held figures to measure their battlefield achievements. Instead, the estimates of enemy
dead are used to help plan operations.
"This is less about the numbers than about assessing the enemy's strength," said one senior officer.
Barry R. McCaffrey, a retired Army general and highly decorated Vietnam veteran, said gauging enemy deaths is just one component that field commanders
consider when weighing an opponent's effectiveness.
"What you do is estimate enemy casualties," General McCaffrey said. "You also ask: `Did we bust them up? Did they leave the area with or without their weapons?'
"
In the latest campaign, the fierce fighting and rugged terrain have for the most part kept reporters at a distance. But in any case it is impossible to count the dead in a
cave that has been sealed by bombs, or those in two Qaeda-controlled villages, Sirkankel and Marzak, that were leveled by bombs.
In fact, Pentagon officials said, most of deaths of opposing fighters were from high-powered ordnance - satellite-guided 2,000-pound bombs and Hellfire missiles
- as opposed to firefights at close range. In this 12- day operation alone, American warplanes have dropped more than 2,500 bombs.
Such munitions often leave little behind.
In cases where there was a body, a Pentagon official said, Al Qaeda fighters may have placed many of their fallen comrades in makeshift graves, following the
Muslim custom of burying the dead within 24 hours.
Further complicating the count is the confusion over the number of fighters who joined the battle.
The Pentagon now acknowledges that it badly underestimated the size of Al Qaeda forces entering the battle. After initially putting the count at 150 to 200 fighters,
American intelligence officials now believe as many as 1,000 were holed up in the battle zone. Some poured in from nearby redoubts after the operation started,
officials said.
Of the 1,000 or so original fighters, Pentagon officials estimate that about 100 remain in ever smaller pockets of resistance. Another 100 have probably fled over
mountain trails, military officials said.
Brig. Gen. John W. Rosa, deputy director of current operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, acknowledged that small numbers of fighters may have slipped out, but
he said unlike at Tora Bora in December, the American-led coalition had largely sealed off the area.
"We've got troops in position in the high ground guarding the escape routes, and I think we're doing a pretty good job," he said.
----------------
2003
World Bank Announces Loan to Afghanistan
Wed Mar 12,10:54 AM ET AP
KABUL, Afghanistan - The World Bank announced its first loan to Afghanistan in more than 20 years Wednesday, $108 million to help repair the country's ruined bridges and roads.
The 40-year no-interest loan will help rebuild transportation infrastructure ruined by 23 years of warfare that has devastated the country and made it one of the world's poorest nations.
"Solving Afghanistan's transport problems is absolutely essential to both short-term recovery and long-term development," said Terje Wolden, a World Bank transport specialist.
The money will be spent on repairing disintegrating roads, collapsed bridges, damaged tunnels and the runway at Kabul airport in the capital.
The World Bank loan was its first to the war-ravaged country since the former Soviet Union invaded in 1979. The same year, Afghanistan went into arrears to international donors after discontinuing payments on foreign loans.
Also Wednesday, the U.S. Agency for International Development announced a new $60 million program to rehabilitate Afghanistan's school system.
The money will go toward printing 10 million textbooks in the local Dari and Pashtu languages for schools across the country, said Elizabeth Kvitashvili, a USAID official in Afghanistan.
The money will also help the construction or reconstruction of about 1,200 primary schools in every province in Afghanistan, Kvitashvili said.
International donors pledged about $5 billion at a conference in Tokyo in January 2002. So far, about $2 billion has been delivered, most of it in emergency assistance.
---------------
2003
March
USAID to launch US$60 million program to rehabilitate Afghan schools
KABUL, Afghanistan - The United States Agency for International Development is launching a US$60 million program to rehabilitate Afghanistan's school system, which suffered badly during the last two decades of war, U.S. officials said Wednesday. The money will go toward printing 10 million textbooks in the local Dari and Pashtu languages for schools across the country, said Elizabeth Kvitashvili, a USAID official in Afghanistan.
The money will also facilitate the construction or reconstruction of about 1,200 primary schools in every province in Afghanistan, Kvitashvili said.
Last year, about 3 million children attended some 7,000 schools, two-thirds of which had been damaged by war.
-----------
March 2003
Afghanistan calls for more foreign assistance for national reconstruction
Thursday, March 13, 2003 7:12 AM EST
KABUL, Mar 13, 2003 (Xinhua via COMTEX) Afghanistan on Thursday asked the international community to be more "generous" in helping the country to rebuild its economy ravaged by 23 years of war and civil conflicts.
"I hope you will be more generous than last year to contribute to the safety, economic viability and betterment of Afghan people' s life this year," Afghanistan Transitional President Hamid Karzai said while inaugurating a meeting of donors here.
The Afghan government is to present its budget for the 2003 fiscal year to representatives from about 30 donor nations and aid agencies at the two-day meeting, which is the first annual gathering of the Afghan Development Forum.
"While we ask your help to contribute to our ordinary budget and reconstruction budget, we are very strongly aware that Afghanistan has to work hard to generate its own resources and revenues to pay for its expenses," Karzai said.
However, he said Afghanistan will continue to depend on international assistance with its budget although it is trying to raise its revenues for this year, starting from March 21.
According to the Finance Ministry, the government's public budget for the coming fiscal year was estimated at 500 million US dollars, of which about 200 million dollars will come from domestic revenues and the rest needs to be raised through foreign assistance.
Karzai said that the needs of his country would be much greater than what was estimated at the Tokyo conference in January 2002, when donors pledged 4.5 billion dollars in aid for the reconstruction of Afghanistan for five years.
According to him, Afghanistan needs some 15 to 20 billion dollars in rebuilding the country's economy from "ground zero", as well as fighting against terrorism and the widespread narcotics problem over next five years.
"We are somehow in very strong need of your support to make Afghanistan to reach a stage whereby it can begin to stand on its own feet," Karzai said.
He added that Afghanistan first wants to at least reach back to the economic level in 1979 before the former Soviet occupation in the country.
At that time, "Afghanistan was self-sufficient in agriculture, Afghanistan produced its own food, Afghanistan was among the biggest exporters of raisins, Afghanistan had a good foreign exchange reserve," Karzai said.
While addressing the meeting, special envoy of the United Nations to Afghanistan Lakhdar Brahimi urged the Afghan government to improve the security situation in the country to ensure a successful reconstruction process.
"The average Afghan continues to live under the arbitrary and often extortionary rule of armed individuals and undisciplined armed groups or military formations," he said.
He added the country's reconstruction depends on the security sector reform efforts, including the formation of a new national army, and the upcoming disarmament process, which aims to disarm over 300,000 former militia and integrate them into the civil society.
------------
March 2003
Afghan Refugees Return for Home Resumes
By RIAZ KHAN, Associated Press
PESHAWAR, Pakistan - Afghan refugees began returning to their homeland from neighboring Pakistan on Wednesday after waiting more than four months for snow to clear from mountain roads, officials said. The families were the first of about 600,000 refugees expected to return to Afghanistan this year, said the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.
Before the former Taliban regime was overthrown in a U.S.-led war in late 2001, an estimated 4 million Afghans were in exile, mostly in Pakistan and Iran.
More than 1.8 million Afghans had returned, mostly from Pakistan, before the overland repatriations were stopped last November after snow made the roads impassable. A similar number of refugees remains in Pakistan, and last December the Pakistani and Afghan governments agreed on a plan to send the rest home within three years.
On Wednesday, more than 300 families loaded their belongings, including chickens, colorful quilts and window frames, and left the Kacha Garhi camp. "I am happy to be going back with my sons," said Rabia Bibi, 45, whose husband was killed fighting the Russians in Kabul, the Afghan capital.
"We will rehabilitate our farms. Our relatives there will help us," her son, Gulab Khan, 25, said. The two dozen trucks were to enter Afghanistan through Torkham, the main border crossing point, 30 miles west of Peshawar, said Waqar Maroof, a deputy chief of the Pakistani government department on Afghan refugees.
The Kacha Garhi camp was set up in a Peshawar suburb in 1980 following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and is still home to about 80,000 Afghans, Maroof said.
--------
march 2003
U.S., Pakistan Deny bin Laden Captured
Wednesday, March 12, 2003 3:12 PM EST PAUL HAVEN, Associated Press Writer
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) As the search intensifies for Osama bin Laden, debate is building about what to do with the world's most wanted man if he is found: Taking him alive raises the risks of a trial, but his death could make him a martyr.
Meanwhile, Pakistani and U.S. officials Wednesday denied Iran Radio's report that bin Laden had been arrested in Pakistan but that his capture would not be announced until the outbreak of fighting in Iraq.
The Iranian state radio's external service quoted the deputy leader of the Islamic Awami Tahrik party in Pakistan, Murtaza Poya, who also made the same assertion to The Associated Press. Pakistani interior and information ministries denied bin Laden had been captured, as did the CIA and the U.S. military in Afghanistan.
Since the March 1 arrest of key al-Qaida leader Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a manhunt has been under way in a remote 350-mile corridor near where the borders of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran meet, and officials believe they may be closer than ever to capturing bin Laden.
Sweeps are being made through the rugged tribal belt that separates Pakistan and Afghanistan and in the inhospitable peaks of Afghanistan searching for bin Laden and other terrorists who might attack in the event of war in Iraq.
The activity has resulted in reports of operations and even the report of bin Laden's capture.
Western intelligence sources said a raid last week in southwestern Afghanistan's Rabat region targeted one of bin Laden's eldest sons, Saad, a rising star in the al-Qaida network.
The home affairs minister in Pakistan's Baluchistan province, Sanaullah Zehri, announced that Saad bin Laden was wounded and captured at Rabat, but U.S. officials strongly disputed the report. Contacted two days later, Zehri stuck to his story, saying his information came from intelligence sources. However, he said he could not independently confirm it.
As anticipation builds over finding the al-Qaida leader himself, an awkward question is being raised: Would it be better to capture Osama bin Laden alive or ensure that he dies?
Both options pose serious problems for the Bush administration, especially as it tries to rally jittery Middle East allies for a war in Iraq.
``It's a tremendous debate. If you kill him you create a martyr, but if you capture him you have to go through a tribunal or a trial,'' said Michael Swetnam, a counterterrorism specialist at the Washington-based Potomac Institute for Policy Studies.
Many key Middle East allies, particularly bin Laden's native Saudi Arabia, fear bringing bin Laden to trial could prompt more violence from his followers.
The Saudis passed up a chance to put bin Laden on trial in 1996, when he was forced to leave Sudan. The African country was reportedly willing to accede to a U.S. request to turn bin Laden over to the Saudis, but the kingdom declined, afraid a trial would destabilize the country.
This time, many in Saudi Arabia feel the government would like a quick end to the story.
``It's a known fact that he is popular here, and capturing him and putting him on trial would create unwelcome attention and possibly anger that could spill into violence in the streets,'' said an editor at a leading Saudi newspaper who refused to allow his name of newspaper to be identified, citing the extreme sensitivity of the issue in his country.
In the Saudi government's eyes, ``killing him would be better than capturing him, even if that means making him a martyr,'' he said.
But capturing bin Laden and convicting him of his crimes could send a powerful message, others say.
A photograph taken shortly after the arrest of Mohammed showed a dazed and exhausted looking man, a far cry from the confident and well-dressed image seen in pictures on the FBI's Web site. Analysts say the photograph of an overweight, T-shirt clad Mohammed went a long way to shattering his air of invincibility and say similar images of a captured bin Laden would greatly diminish the myths surrounding him.
Bin Laden could also provide valuable information under interrogation about the vast terrorist network he inspired, and he would likely have knowledge of the whereabouts of other top al-Qaida leaders, like his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri. He might also know the hiding place of former Taliban leader Mullah Omar.
In recent days, U.S. intelligence and military personnel have poured into the remote tri-border region. Still, many doubt the United States will ever get a chance to choose bin Laden's fate.
``He is too proud a person to allow himself to be captured alive,'' said Hamid Gul, former chief of Pakistan's intelligence agency. He said bin Laden has likely ordered his bodyguards not to allow him to be captured.
Still, several of bin Laden's top lieutenants have been taken alive in Pakistan. Abu Zubaydah, al-Qaida's former No. 3, was arrested in in March 2002. Ramzi Binalshibh, a suspected Sept. 11 planner, was captured in September. Even Mohammed, believed to have spawned the suicidal plans for Sept. 11, was seized without incident.
In any event, terrorism experts say taking bin Laden out is essential to winning the war on terrorism.
``If you kill him, yes, you will create a martyr,'' said Talat Massood, a security analyst and retired Pakistani general. ``But he will be a martyr no matter what happens, so it would be much better to have him dead than out there on the run.''
-------------
2003
Canada to reopen embassy in Afghanistan
6/10/03
OTTAWA (AFP) - Canada is to reopen its embassy in Kabul in January, Canadian Foreign Minister Bill Graham announced. Talking to reporters after the government's weekly cabinet meeting, Graham said Canada was also ready now "to make substantial investments" in Afganistan, without elaborating.
Graham recalled that, starting in a few weeks time, Canada would be sending some 1,800 troops to head up the international stabilization force in Afghanistan.
Canada's International Development Minister, Susan Whelan, announced she was releasing immediately some 21.2 million dollars (15.6 million US) from a 250 million dollar package announced last March.
The 21.2 million dollars will be used primarily to help the fledgeling Afghan government operate and to help finance a United Nations de-mining programme as well as contributing to what she called "community development" in the country.
-----------
2003
Canada Worries for Troops in Growing Afghan Chaos
By David Ljunggren
OTTAWA (Reuters) - The government of Canada, which will send 1,800 peacekeepers to Kabul in August, expressed serious concern on Tuesday about the growing chaos in Afghanistan and admitted the Canadian troops would face "a huge challenge". Four German peacekeepers were killed by a car bomb last Saturday, opium production is soaring and commentators say there are increasing signs that the ousted Taliban movement is making a comeback.
"The anarchy in Afghanistan clearly is of serious concern for us," said Foreign Minister Bill Graham. "There are two dimensions to it. We want to secure Kabul but clearly having Kabul secure alone is not going to resolve all the problems of Afghanistan," he told reporters.
Canada is deploying the 1,800 soldiers to help the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), which is charged with maintaining security in Kabul and surrounding areas. Graham conceded the Canadian contingent would not find life easy.
"The task is big. It's clearly a huge challenge but it's not just us... there are 29 countries involved in Afghanistan," he said, adding that he was particularly worried by signs the drug trade was reviving.
Attacks on peacekeepers, aid agencies and civilians have increased noticeably in the past few months and Afghan President Hamid Karzai said last week the country would descend into hell if ISAF pulled out.
"Our expectations should not be too high. In a year from now Afghanistan will not be a modern democracy," Defense Minister John McCallum told reporters. He said no effort or money would be spared to ensure the security of the Canadian troops, adding that the soldiers would have robust rules of engagement. "The safety of our people is uppermost in our minds. If people didn't understand it was unsafe last seek they certainly understand this week," he said.
The decision to send troops to Afghanistan helped allay U.S. anger over Ottawa's announcement that it would not take part in the war on Iraq.
"There's certainly an appreciation by the American administration that Canada is making a very important contribution," said Graham, who also announced that Canada would be opening an embassy in Kabul next January.
"I believe they understand that the war on terrorism is not going to be won in Iraq alone," he said. Canada -- which has contributed C$120 million ($90 million) in humanitarian aid to Afghanistan since September 2001 -- pledged in March to give C$250 million more over the next two years.
-----
NZ To Give Extra Reconstruction Aid To Iraq, Afghanistan
WELLINGTON (AP)-- New Zealand will provide extra reconstruction aid to Iraq and Afghanistan, Prime Minister Helen Clark said Monday. Clark said a team of 60 defense force engineers and support troops will be posted to U.K.-controlled southern Iraq to work on reconstruction for at least a year after initial visits this month to detail the nature of the work.
New Zealand will also donate NZ$1 million to help rebuild the Iraqi Agriculture Ministry building in Baghdad. Iraqi students will be offered agriculture scholarships and training courses in New Zealand, she said.
"This is 100% about New Zealand being a good international citizen," Clark told reporters after her cabinet approved the troop commitments. New Zealand already has pledged 15 specialists to the U.N. mine clearance operation due to begin shortly in Iraq, and also committed several million dollars in medical and other aid.
Clark said New Zealand also would send a team of military engineers to assist in building infrastructure in Afghanistan that would help the country's transitional government "expand its influence outside Kabul."
A defense force reconnaissance team was already in Afghanistan to report on how best to use a team of up to 100 military personnel, she said.
New Zealand has a small group of peacekeeping troops in Afghanistan, along with an air force transport plane. It also has a warship and aerial reconnaissance plane in the Gulf of Oman as part of the anti-terrorist Operation Enduring Freedom.
--------------
2003
The question in Kabul: to rebuild or start afresh?
The Christian Science Monitor 06/10/2003 By Gretchen Peters
KABUL - Three decades of almost constant war and crushing poverty have left much of the Afghan capital in a pitiable, almost uninhabitable state. Instead of rebuilding it, argue top Afghan leaders, why not start anew?
The plan goes like this: leave some of the most shattered neighborhoods as a silent monument to the horrors of war, and use millions of dollars of pledged foreign aid money to create a new Kabul on largely empty land to the north of the present-day city.
The original Kabul will hardly disappear for good, top officials involved in the planning phase insist. "Since the old Kabul is a souvenir of our forefathers and a symbol of our heritage, we do want to save it and rebuild," says Amin Farhang, the minister of reconstruction.
But with refugees flooding back from neighboring Pakistan and Iran, he adds, "the population of Kabul is increasing day by day, and we need more space and more houses for people to live in." As in other cities around the world that were largely destroyed in wars or by natural disasters, there is controversy over how to shape Kabul's future.
Some European cities - like Warsaw and Frankfurt - meticulously rebuilt entire neighborhoods as they had stood before World War II. Other places, like Hiroshima, Berlin, and London, left bombed-out buildings amid reconstructed neighborhoods so the residents would never forget what happened there.
In Kabul, residents, too, are divided. Some remember the days when its peaceful streets were lined with colorful bazaars, fine old homes, and leafy trees that swayed in the breezes blowing off nearby snow-capped mountains. Called the "Paris of the East," Kabul was a popular stopping-off point with travelers in Asia, who raved about its fine architecture and charming ambience.
"This is our fathers' town, our grandfathers' town and it was their fathers' town before that," says Managarai Fawadi, a policeman patrolling the rubble-lined streets of Darul Aman, the southwestern district of Kabul that was largely reduced to ruins. "It may be a disaster, but it is a reminder of our history. We never want to forget it or leave it."
The hullabaloo is such that city officials refuse to discuss actual plans, saying the idea is still in its formulation phase. "These are still only thoughts and plans," says Mayor Mohammed Anwar Jekdelek. "They may not ever go through."
But urban planners and construction experts argue that something must be done to give residents a livable city. Hospitals and schools function with little or no electricity. Major government offices and housing complexes have gaping holes where rockets crashed through the outer structure.
Plus, with limited aid funds at the Afghan government's disposal, there's growing evidence that rebuilding the worst-hit neighborhoods may cost as much as 50 percent more than simply starting over.
Digging through the rubble to replace damaged sewage and electrical lines isn't cost-effective, especially if there is land available to develop new communities, says Engineer Ahmed Shah, who runs the Freedom Construction Company, a local firm that has already rebuilt roads, bridges, and schools with money from the US government and other sources.
Meanwhile, centuries-old neighborhoods perched on mountains have seen less war damage but are seriously deteriorated and out of date. There's no running water, central sewage, or heating systems and few cables that bring electricity or phone lines.
Another problem in Kabul: none of the city currently has central heating, meaning construction teams would have to submerge gas lines or electrical cables beneath war damaged roadways, which bombs have left structurally insecure.
Many Kabul residents welcome the plan to rebuild, saying gleaming new neighborhoods would help attract much-needed foreign investment for industry and tourism.
"We would benefit from building a whole new city, like they did in Islamabad," Mr. Shah says, referring to the capital of neighboring Pakistan, which was opened in 1963 after the southern city of Karachi became too unwieldy to serve as that nation's federal hub.
"It's a good idea," agrees Jan Mohammed, who repairs metal doors in a building that has half collapsed over his workshop. "The unfortunate days are over, and now it is time to build a new Afghanistan."
----------
2003
'Taliban' message attacks aid workers
By Kathy Gannon AP - 13 August 2003
A message attributed to Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban's reclusive leader, has attacked Western charities as the "greatest enemies of Islam". The two-page message, written in Pashtu, was received by the Associated Press agency yesterday. It said: "Oh Muslims, know the enemies of your religion - the Jews and Christians. America, Britain, the UN and all Western aid groups are the greatest enemies of Islam and humanity."
The authenticity of the message, which carried Mullah Omar's signature, could not be independently verified. But it comes after a series of attacks on Western aid workers. In the southern and eastern parts of Afghanistan, international aid has dwindled because aid organisations have banned travel on most roads, fearing attacks by rebel fighters. In the southern city of Kandahar, a former Taliban stronghold, the presence of international workers was reduced this year after a member of the International Committee of the Red Cross was killed.
UN mine clearers have been attacked on several occasions. Last weekend, the UN suspended road travel for its workers in southern Afghanistan after five policemen were wounded and Afghan aid workers were tied up and beaten. While responsibility is rarely claimed for attacks, the Afghan authorities routinely blame remnants of the deposed Taliban regime.
-----------
2003
Karzai Vows Death for Taliban Who Attacked Clerics
August 12, 2003 By Sayed Salahuddin
KABUL (Reuters) - Afghan President Hamid Karzai vowed on Tuesday to execute Taliban guerrillas involved in the murder of pro-government clerics. "I have no pity...no compassion, nor any feeling for these people," he told a gathering of religious scholars in Kabul. "I will not allow them to escape execution."
Taliban guerrillas have shot dead two pro-government clerics and wounded a third from the Ulema Shura, or clerics' council in the southern province of Kandahar, in recent weeks. The attacks came after the council declared Afghanistan's "jihad," or holy war, over and said Muslims should support the U.S.-backed government that replaced the Taliban in 2001.
Karzai did not make clear if any guerrillas involved in the attacks had been caught, but said he had ordered provincial authorities in southern Afghanistan to send them to Kabul. He said he had information that more attacks on pro-government clerics were being planned, but did not elaborate.
Karzai also said that authorities had recently arrested two young men sent from outside the country to carry out attacks on aid workers rebuilding a vital highway from Kabul to the southern city of Kandahar near the border with Pakistan. "They were told to kill those who build the road as they were enemies of Afghanistan," Karzai said. "They are trying to make sure Afghanistan does not rebuild and stand on its own feet," he said. "We will protect this country and will not allow this to happen."
Officials say the pair were among dozens especially trained by Islamic militant groups in neighboring Pakistan to disrupt rebuilding projects and attack government targets and soldiers from the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan. One local deminer has been killed and five others wounded in several suspected Taliban attacks on workers on the Kabul-Kandahar road in the past few months. The government has recently deployed hundreds of police to protect the project, one of the main reconstruction efforts to be launched following the overthrow of the Taliban.
----------
2003
Pakistan lets Taliban operate unimpeded, critics say- Afghanistan, U.S. demand it end
By Liz Sly, Chicago Tribune 11 August 2003 ISLAMABAD
With attacks against U.S. and Afghan targets on the rise across southern and eastern Afghanistan, suspicions are mounting that Pakistan once again is lending support to the remnants of the Taliban movement it helped to create.
In recent weeks, Kabul and Washington have urged Islamabad to do more To prevent a resurgent Taliban from using Pakistani territory to launch The hit-and-run raids that have turned swaths of southern Afghanistan into areas too dangerous for foreign aid workers and Afghan officials. At the very least, Afghan officials charge, Pakistan is turning a blind Eye to the use of Pakistani territory by Taliban commanders to regroup, Recruit and challenge the administration of President Hamid Karzai. And many suspect that Pakistan's military establishment has resumed Covertly supporting the Taliban, violating the promise President Pervez Musharraf made after the attacks of Sept 11, 2001, to abandon the fundamentalist movement and back America's war against terrorism.
The border towns of Chaman and Quetta, in the Pakistani province of Balochistan, are swarming with former Taliban officials who have access To vehicles with fake plates provided to them by Pakistan's military, According to Feda Mohammed Achakzai, who commands Afghanistan's border forces in the neighboring province of Kandahar. Taliban attackers cross the border in broad daylight and are seen escaping back across the border, he said.
"They have the full support of the ISI," he said, referring to Pakistan's intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence. U.S. officials say they have no evidence that Pakistan is actively supporting the Taliban, and they praise Pakistan's cooperation in the hunt for Al Qaeda fugitives. Last month, however, Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan, said Pakistan also needs to take action against the Taliban members operating from Pakistan.
"We need 100 percent assurances from Pakistan on this, not 50 percent assurances," he said in Kabul. "We know the Taliban are planning in Quetta," he added. Pakistan denies allegations Pakistan strenuously denies it is helping the Taliban.
"Pakistan does not allow anyone, any group, any individual or any organization to operate from its soil," Interior Minister Faisal Saleh Hayat told reporters in Islamabad. "We will come down with a very heavy hand against anyone trying to do so." But that, according to Afghan officials, is what Pakistan has failed to do.
While Pakistan boasts that it is has captured and handed over to U.S. authorities nearly 500 Al Qaeda suspects, no Taliban leaders or officials have been detained in Pakistan, even though most members of the former Taliban government took refuge there, said Omar Samad, spokesman for Afghanistan's Foreign Ministry.
"There is infiltration across the border, of men and of arms, and they have to put a stop to that," Samad said. "We're seeing a sort of double game here. They say one thing and do something else."
Pakistan insists it is doing its best. The 1,500-mile border is Mountainous and cuts through tribal areas that are impossible to control, officials say.
The Afghan allegations may simply reflect the residual suspicions shared by many Afghans who blame Pakistan for sponsoring the rise of the Taliban in the early 1990s and find it hard to believe that the increased frequency of Taliban attacks is not in some way linked to Pakistan.
Underpinning the claims and counterclaims is a disturbing proposition: That Pakistan, fearing the influence of India in Afghanistan, has come to view the Taliban as a means of destabilizing a regime that increasingly is seen as hostile toward Pakistani interests. Weave of politics If Pakistan's government is not now backing the Taliban, it may be tempted to do so in the future if it feels threatened by India's closer ties to the Karzai government, warned Talat Masood, a retired general who remains close to the military establishment.
"What India is trying to do is encircle Pakistan," he said. "And it's possible that Pakistan is saying, `If that's what they're doing to us, let's do this to them, let's make it unsafe for them.' "It is a very dangerous game, but if Pakistan is frustrated with the Indian moves, this is how a pattern will develop," he added. There still is broad sympathy for the Taliban among many Pakistanis, which would make it difficult for Musharraf's government to move aggressively against the Taliban, analysts say. Islamic fundamentalist parties closely allied to the Taliban won control of the local government in the two provinces bordering Afghanistan last year and have emerged as a powerful opposition force in national politics.
Most Pakistani analysts think it unlikely that the government is Reverting to a policy that proved so disastrous for Pakistan in the past. But at the same time, they say, it cannot afford to alienate either the Taliban movement or its Pashtun fundamentalist allies in Pakistan. "One thing is clear: Pakistan is turning a blind eye to the Taliban," said Arif Jamal, an Islamabad-based expert in Islamic militancy.
----------------
2003
Three new projects launched to address immediate needs
Reconstruction and Development in Afghanistan World Bank 08/12/2003
At the request of the Government of Afghanistan, the World Bank, as the administrator of the Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund (ARTF), signed agreements last week for three new projects designed to help improve the country's telecommunications system; repair its roads and drainage systems, and provide financial services to low-income people.
A grant of US$ 3 million will be provided to the Ministry of Telecommunications to establish international connectivity between Afghanistan and the rest of the world, particularly with its neighboring countries. The funds will also begin investment in Afghan Telecom in preparation for its privatization - a key step for future partnerships with the private sector.
"Today Afghanistan has one of the weakest telecommunications systems in the world. Only one out of every 625 Afghan citizens has access to telephone service," said Philippe Dongier, Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund Manager. "The ARTF Management Committee approved Government's proposal for an investment in this project as it will generate funds from telecom services to strengthen Government's revenue base for contribution to the recurrent and development budget of the country."
The Trust Fund also provided for a grant of US$ 3 million to improve transport services on important roads within Kabul city through the rehabilitation of road sections, as well as the repair of drainage systems along these roads. The overall objective is to achieve effective and visible contribution to the economic recovery of Kabul.
"As the capital of Afghanistan, Kabul has a population of about 3 million people including returnees, internally displaced people, female-headed households, disabled people and other vulnerable groups. One of the Government's priorities is to improve the situation here and the ARTF Management Committee felt it was critical to help the government finance activities to enable it to achieve its development goals for the city," said Mohammad Qahir Haidari, World Bank Operations Officer in Kabul.
The third grant which was issued last week, was one for US$ 4 million which will support access to credit and other financial services for poor and low income people. These households can use the micro-finance to invest in business opportunities, meet emergency needs, reduce vulnerability and build assets. This project will specifically focus supporting the entrepreneurial spirit of the Afghan people to help them improve their livelihoods and make the transition from dependence on humanitarian assistance to economic independence. It will help the government establish the foundations of a strong, sustainable micro-finance sector and set up a national Micro-finance Investment and Support Fund for Afghanistan as an autonomous wholesale institution for long term development and the sustainability of the sector.
"War has devastated almost all basic services in the country, and has resulted in a significant increase in the level of poverty," said Mudassir Khan, a World Bank Senior Financial Specialist. "Micro and small business opportunities will generate livelihoods for the people of Afghanistan where lack of capital is the key constraint."
------------
2003
They bend rules sans Beckham
Indian Express 08/12/2003 By Angie Ramos
Kabul - It's the most popular sport in Afghanistan. And these days, football is attracting the most unusual of players: Teenage girls. Once or twice a week, a dozen girls in black school uniform, black shoes, and white headscarves gather in a Kabul school ground surrounded by a high wall for a kick around.
''I like football because it is the best sport,'' puffs Humaira, 17, during a break. She then goes off and does what would have been unthinkable during the Taliban rule: she removes the scarf from her head and wraps it around her waist. Now she moves freely, faster and shouts out to her teammates, who desperately try to kick the ball towards an imaginary goal. When the ball eventually reaches one side of the ground, Humaira's team shout ''goal!'' and it is. But there are no goalposts as the girls don't have a proper pitch. A lack of women coaches compounds the problem. An appeal for help from abroad has yet to yield results. Surprisingly, they get most support from parents thrilled to have their daughters play football.
A few lucky ones have access to overseas games on cable TV network. But none of them has ever watched a live match as it involves risk of being stared at and teased. Maradona from Argentina,'' chimed Humaira. David Beckham, however, clearly needs to work on his Afghan image. ''David who?'' asked Mariam, 15. ''I just like Alvardo...I mean Rivaldo,'' shrieked Salda, 16.
With limited funds, Afghanistan's Football Federation can do little. Said federation member and coach Habib Ullah Niazai: ''But we will continue to make people aware and hopefully we will have enough funds to help these girls fulfil their dreams.''
Despite lingering religious conservatism, some male fans don't mind. ''One day when our women take part in international games,'' said one fan, Sayeed Hussni, ''that would make us proud.'' (Reuters)
---------------
2003
Afghan Officials Visit Grave of Massood
Wed Sep 10,11:28 AM ET By AMIR SHAH, Associated Press Writer
PANJSHIR VALLEY, Afghanistan - Hundreds of Afghan officials made a pilgrimage Wednesday to the tomb of Ahmed Shah Massood, the Northern Alliance leader whose assassination two years ago was seen as a precursor to the Sept. 11 attacks.
Defense Minister Mohammed Fahim told the somber crowd that Afghanistan was slowly realizing a goal of the former Northern Alliance leader - a truly representative government.
After a loya jirga, or grand council, convenes in December to approve a new constitution, elections would put in place a government that "belongs to the people of Afghanistan," he said.
"In this way we will face up to the conspiracy and cheating by enemies of Islam and Afghanistan," Fahim said, apparently referring to the Taliban regime that U.S. forces ousted in late 2001.
Remnants of that regime still are waging a rebellion inside Afghanistan.
Fahim and former President Burhanuddin Rabbani joined more than 1,500 people at the ceremony at Massood's domed, hilltop mausoleum in the Panjshir Valley, about 90 miles north of Kabul. On Tuesday, thousands gathered there and in the capital, Kabula, to remember Massood.
Massood, known as the "Lion of Panjshir," was killed by Middle Eastern assassins posing as journalists who planted a bomb inside a camera that detonated during a Sept. 9, 2001, interview.
The attack, allegedly carried out by al-Qaida, was believed to have been timed to take out the main opposition leader to the then-ruling Taliban just before the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States. The Taliban had offered sanctuary in Afghanistan to Osama bin Laden and his terror network.
Massood fought against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s and then led the northern-based forces that battled the Taliban in the late 1990s. The alliance swept to power after the Taliban fell.
The government of President Hamid Karzai now faces a major challenge in wresting control of much of the country from commanders, such as Fahim, who have their own powerful private militias.
--------------
september 2003
Afghanistan: Aid agency suspends operation after deadly attack
KABUL, 10 September (IRIN) - Following an armed attack on a Danish aid agency in the central province of Ghazni on Monday which killed four aid workers and wounded one, the Danish Committee for Aid to Afghan Refugees (DACAAR) said it had suspended activities pending a security assessment. "It is still being considered how should we react but now we have suspended all our operations until further notice," Gorm Pedersen the director of DACAAR, told IRIN on Wednesday in the capital Kabul.
DACAAR said five Afghans including three non-DACAAR national contractors were travelling in a locally-hired vehicle towards a DACAAR field office in Makur village in the Ab Band District of the central Ghazni province when their vehicle was stopped by a group of about 10 gunmen. "The victims were taken from the vehicle. Each victim had his hands tied behind before the group was further tied together in one line," Pedersen explained, noting that the survivor reported the assailants as saying, "You were warned about working for NGOs".
According to DACAAR, the victims were then fired upon killing four, the fifth pretended to be dead and survived. "The assailants then made off from the scene with the vehicle that had been used by the victims and the incident duration was approximately 15 minutes," the country director added. The survivor suffered four gun shot wounds.
"I think the general anti-international activity has increased in the last six months and absolutely I have noticed increased incidents," Nick Downie a security coordinator for ANSO, a new organisation acting as a security focal point for NGOs, told IRIN in Kabul on Wednesday. ANSO - a sign of the times - is based in Kabul with regional offices. It's job is to provide security advice and regular information to the aid community in Afghanistan.
"The NGOs have been and are being targeted as we have seen with the DACAAR incident as the most recent," the security coordinator underlined.
DACAAR is one of the largest international agencies in Afghanistan with 1,100 local and 13 international staff at work in more than 20 provinces of the country providing water supply and rural development services. The Danish NGO said although Monday's attack was first incident which involved loss of life, it had received many threats in the past few months.
"It was the first incident in which our staff was killed, however prior to this, we had had cars burned and on one occasion our team was stopped by people threatening to stop our work in Paktya," the agency director ascertained, adding that these threats had caused the organisation to pull out from certain areas as a result of security threats.
In recent months there have been increased attacks throughout Afghanistan but mainly in the south, targeting government troops, officials and aid workers. Last month, two Afghans working for the Afghan Red Crescent were killed and three wounded when gunmen attacked their convoy in Ghazni on the Kabul to Kandahar road.
"There has been a failure by the international community and a failure which has caused the [Afghan] government not to be capable of providing that security," Downie stressed.
---------
september 2003
Pakistan Wants US to do More to Bring Security to Afghanistan
(VOA) - Pakistan wants the United States to do more to bring security and stability to Afghanistan, and has asked for an end to accusations that members of the ousted Taleban are regrouping and organizing attacks from Pakistani territory.
Afghan and U.S. officials have persistently accused Pakistan of not doing enough to block the movement of Taleban guerrillas on its volatile border with Afghanistan.
But Pakistan Foreign Minister Khurshid Kasuri said such allegations will not help resolve the security problems in Afghanistan. "There are problems and sometimes we are told to do more. Of course, all of us can do more. We can do more, the Afghans can do more, and the Americans can also do more because their focus had been shifted to Iraq," he said.
Mr. Kasuri said the intelligence agencies of both Afghanistan and Pakistan need to exchange more information to enhance the fight against terrorism. "Any insecurity in Afghanistan has a direct impact on Pakistan. So we are prepared to do more and it is in our collective interest that things are improved. But no purpose will be served by simply asking Pakistan to do more," he said.
Mr. Kasuri was speaking at a ceremony in the Pakistani capital to hand over the first consignment of five million textbooks in the Dari and Pashto languages that Pakistan is donating to Afghanistan. The commitment to supply the textbooks to the war-ravaged country has reportedly interfered with the printing of books for Pakistan's own school children, drawing some public criticism.
Members of the former Taleban government, have stepped up attacks against Afghan and U.S.-led foreign troops in southern and eastern Afghanistan. They apparently are an effort to destabilize the internationally backed government of President Hamid Karzai.
Two-years ago the U.S.-led anti-terrorism coalition removed the Taleban Islamic militia from power for harboring Osama bin Laden, the alleged leader of the September 2001 attacks in the United States.
--------
september 2003
Special Rapporteur on adequate housing expresses concern over forced evictions in Kabul
Source: UN Commission on Human Rights 10 Sept 2003
The following statement was issued on 6 September in Kabul, Afghanistan, by Miloon Kothari, the Special Rapporteur on adequate housing of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights:
"As the Special Rapporteur on adequate housing appointed by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, currently on mission in Afghanistan at the invitation of the Government, I am deeply concerned about forced evictions taking place in Shirpur village, near Wazir Akbar Khan, Kabul.
According to the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission and the Monitoring and Investigative Unit of UNAMA, in the morning of 3 September 2003 a hundred armed police officers, allegedly led by the Kabul Chief of Police, accompanied by bulldozers and trucks, destroyed the homes of 30 families, amounting to 250 people, including women and children. The destruction of the houses was made without immediate warning and without enabling the residents to rescue their belongings. A number of residents, primarily women and children, were inside their houses when the destruction started, resulting in injuries. When people attempted to halt the evictions the police used excessive force, resulting in more injuries. I myself visited the area, spoke to the residents and witnessed the destruction and injuries inflicted. I have also been informed that 260 additional families in the area are at risk of being evicted in the near future.
According to information received, the land concerned is the property of the Ministry of the Defense, and is foreseen for houses for high-ranking dignitaries within the Government. However, the poor residents of Shirpur village have lived in their houses for many years, some families for 25-30 years, most of them being employees or former employees of the Ministry of Defense. My understanding from meeting with various ministers during my visit is that the transitional Government of Afghanistan has prioritized realizing the rights of the vulnerable sections of the Afghan population. This is incongruent with the case of Shirpur village and elsewhere in Kabul where it appears that the priority for allocating houses and lands is for the rich and well-connected, in particular the officials of the security establishment.
During my visit in Afghanistan, one of my preliminary findings is the lack of clarity of the legal system and the incapacity of the judiciary to effectively deal with housing rights, including land and property disputes. The Shirpur-case and other similar cases confirm these findings. It is my firm recommendation that until such time the Government has adopted a clear all comprehensive National Housing and Land Policy and established an effective judicial system to address disputes in this regard, a moratorium on all evictions should be made. Such a National Housing and Land Policy should take into particular consideration the needs and rights of women and vulnerable groups, including returnees, internally displaced persons, the poor, persons with disabilities and minorities.
Furthermore, notwithstanding the legal considerations as to property rights or notice to vacate that may have been given in this case, the way in which the forced eviction of the 30 families in Shirpur village took place, including excessive use of force, amounts to serious human rights violations of the international human rights instruments that Afghanistan has ratified. If evictions are to take place, they should be in full conformity with the law, including with human rights law. The residents should be fully consulted, granted full compensation and be provided their right to adequate housing in an alternative place, including ensuring that their livelihood will not be threatened.
It is my firm belief that at a time when Afghanistan is in the process of rebuilding after decades of conflict, the governmental authorities should not be involved in any processes that lead to further dispossession of the vast majority of the people of Afghanistan who are already in vulnerable situations."
---------
september 2003
Two years on, Afghanistan still shaky on its feet
By Simon Denyer Wednesday September 10, 5:07 PM
MOGHUL KHAEL, Afghanistan (Reuters) - On a patch of land next to the bare poles and scorched canvas that was once their classroom tent, dozens of young Afghan girls take a lesson in subtraction.
Their school was torched seven nights ago -- apparently by militants opposed to female education -- but they show no sign of giving up their chance to learn.
"I like coming here because I like to study and learn," said shy eight-year-old Fahima. "I'd like to be a doctor when I grow up, so I can serve people by giving them medicine."
The scene shows both how far Afghanistan has come since it shot to world attention after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, and how far it still has to go.
The shackles of fundamentalist Taliban rule have been cast off and the capital Kabul buzzes with a freedom and exuberance hard to imagine two years ago.
Step outside the capital, though, and you enter a realm where warlords still hold sway, where opium production is booming, where a U.S.-led war is still being waged and where the Taliban are carrying out hit-and-run attacks.
Part of the blame falls on the West. Foreign aid has been slow to arrive, and appeals by the Afghan government, the United Nations and aid agencies to deploy peacekeeping troops outside Kabul have so far fallen on deaf ears.
The U.S. army paid warlords large sums of money to buy their support in the battle against the Taliban and the subsequent hunt for remnants of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network. Two years on, those same warlords are a big part of the problem.
So has the international community broken its promise to build a new, safer and more inclusive Afghanistan?
"In the emotional aftermath of September 11, all kinds of promises were made," said one Western diplomat in Kabul.
"But governments are liable to be as short-term and emotional as people. When people say 'I love you forever' just after meeting you, you should not believe this love will last forever."
As Iraq replaces Afghanistan in the eyes of the world's media and governments, some worry that the window of opportunity to build a new Afghanistan has narrowed, if not yet closed.
REASONS FOR HOPE
President Hamid Karzai prefers to stress the achievements of the last two years, and holds up Moghul Khael as a potent symbol of "the desire of the Afghan people to make their life good".
There are other reasons for hope too, not least in the way Afghan women in many major cities are reclaiming their role in society -- even if most still wear the all-enveloping burqa which became such a potent symbol of Taliban misrule.
Reconstruction of the nation's highways has finally begun this year, a subject of "extreme importance", Karzai told a news conference on Sunday.
But the reconstruction effort has a vulnerable spot, and one the Taliban may have found. The murder of a Salvadorean working for the International Committee of the Red Cross in southern Afghanistan in March sent shockwaves through the aid community.
Since then, attacks on aid workers and deminers have intensified, and whole provinces of southern and eastern Afghanistan are effectively off limits for foreigners.
It is a simple but frighteningly effective tactic. If aid does not arrive in Afghanistan's Pashtun heartlands, people may lose confidence in the West, and turn once again to the Taliban.
"It is very important for the government to demonstrate equal commitment to providing reconstruction to all parts of the country," said Paul O'Brien of relief agency CARE. "As long as this level of insecurity prevails they are not able to do that.
"The depth and quality of reconstruction support is affected, and that just breeds further resentment, especially among rural Pashtuns."
U.S. President George W. Bush is expected to announce a big increase in aid to Afghanistan in the next few weeks, and there are even discussions about whether peacekeeping troops could somehow extend their mandate outside the capital.
For many Afghans and foreign aid workers, those gestures seem too little, too late.
In Moghul Khael, 40 km south of Kabul, few people openly support the Taliban, but their patience with Karzai and the West is being stretched.
Hafizullah, a 25-year-old carpenter, complained of U.S. soldiers pulling people from their cars two weeks ago and searching them "like criminals".
Many others say they feel less safe now than in the old days.
"Every government has its faults," said Hafizullah. "During the Taliban time security was much better, but we did not have freedom. Now we have freedom and no security."
-----------
september 2003
In Afghanistan, the war on terror is anything but over
The Independent, UK 09/11/2003 By Phil Reeves in Afghanistan
Afghans are not easily shocked. Repeated invasion, decades of civil war and centuries of poverty harden a place. Yet the latest atrocity to hit this nation was stunningly brutal, even by their dismal standards.
It happened early on Monday afternoon, a multiple execution by men determined to render it impossible for the international community to reconstruct or stabilise the country under the control of a US- supported government.
Five local workers from the Danish Committee for Aid to Afghanistan (Dacaar) were bumping along a dirt road in an unmarked pick-up truck, just as they had many times before.
They were returning from a mission to supply water to one of the country's thousands of miserably poor villages - a task to which Afghan employees were assigned as the area is deemed too dangerous for international staff. Their executioners were waiting. They held up the truck and ordered the men to line up by the road.
They tied their hands. They lectured them on the evils of local Afghans collaborating with international organisations and accused them of ignoring a previous fatwa banning them from doing so. Then they opened fire, spraying them from close range.
By the time the echoes of the Kalashnikovs had stopped bouncing around the stark landscape, four of the Afghans - an engineer, a driver, a mechanic and a drilling contractor - lay dead. The fifth man, badly injured in the legs, feigned death and was later rescued by villagers and taken to hospital.
Yesterday the news of the killings, in the south-eastern province of Ghazni, was made public in the capital, Kabul. Several aid agencies had warned that the security situation in Afghanistan was deteriorating, citing a sharp rise in attacks on workers from non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and United Nations staff - 16 last month - and the steadily rising death toll among soldiers in the fledgling Afghan army. The latest horrors seemed to confirm their case.
After learning of the killings, the charity Care International said it was considering suspending its operations in Afghanistan for the first time since the fall of the Taliban.
Dacaar, one of the biggest NGOs operating in Afghanistan, was expected to cease working in areas of Taliban activity. Gorm Pedersen, director of Dacaar, said that matters were "certainly getting worse".
The terms al-Qa'ida and Taliban are catch-alls that fail to reflect the assortment of anti-government militia in operation in Afghanistan. But in this case, the killers were explicit.
They told their victims that they were Taliban, supporters of the Islamist regime that the Americans sought to destroy after the twin towers of New York's World Trade Centre were brought crashing down two years ago.
Though ousted from power, the Taliban are not destroyed. Far from it. While their forces typically comprise groups of several hundred men, the Talbian have become more active and - in large parts of south and south-east Afghanistan - more popular.
This month, the US military launched one of the biggest of many anti-insurgency missions by its 9,000-strong forces. They claim to have killed more than 100 fighters in Zabul province over nine days. This will not be the last battle. The Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, remains as elusive as Osama bin Laden. It seems the Americans no sooner arrest or kill one batch of guerrillas than another appears on the horizon. A US general said last week that the Taliban were "pouring in" from Pakistan, though he said they were not a serious threat. Reports abound of new Taliban training camps in border areas. His comments came as world attention was focusing again on Afghanistan two years after the terrorist attacks in America. The picture is far from rosy. True, there has been substantial rebuilding and economic growth in Kabul, where there is a large international presence and 5,000 Nato-led peace-keeping troops.
Residents interviewed yesterday expressed relief that the repressive Taliban government was gone, and genuine appreciation at the presence of the peace-keepers and the US troops. But that is the capital, an island of prosperity when compared with the rest of the country.
Take Surkhab, a village 35 miles south of Kabul. Yesterday the whiff of hashish hung thick in the air among the mud homes, having wafted up from a sweep of verdant-looking crops in the valley below the village. The 500 residents are hoping for a bumper harvest.
Mohammed Nabi, 40, said: "In a few months' time the smugglers will come and buy the hashish to sell to you in the West." A good crop should fetch $40 (£25) a kilogram, he said. Then the village will plant their rotation crop - opium poppies.
The village does not appear to oppose Afghanistan's transitional government, but they do find it remote and powerless. "The government never comes here," said Wali Jan, 44 , "They can't do anything about what we are growing. We need to eat, so we will go on growing this stuff until someone provides us with an alternative source of money."
Such places have helped to restore post-Taliban Afghan-istan to its position as the world's number one producer of opium, providing 90 per cent of the heroin in London.
Criticism abounds among aid agency officials in Kabul of the part played by the Americans in this process. The US military is widely accused of supporting warlords who are profiting from the booming narcotics trade, some of whom are within the interim government of Hamid Karzai.
To this should be added a deeper concern. Faced with a disaster in Iraq, the Americans are pressing hard for Afghanistan to stick to its agreed timetable of holding elections next June. Their critics say that a fair poll is impossible until the country's security situation is improved - a move that many believe would only be possible if the peace-keepers' mandate is expanded beyond Kabul, a move being contemplated by Nato.
They fear that the US will force elections through to claim a success, and lay the ground for pulling out before the job of reconstruction is close to completion. Paul O'Brien, from Care International, said: "This is not being driven by a realisation of the long-term needs of Afghanistan, but by short-term political considerations in the West."
-----------------
Under nose of Pak cops, funds raised for jehad
David Rohde Indian Express
Islamabad, September 10: Two years after the 9/11 attacks, questions are growing about whether Pakistan, a crucial US ally in the campaign against terrorism, is mounting a sincere effort to crack down on a resurgent Taliban and other Islamic militants.
The Pakistani military is credited by American officials with excellent cooperation in hunting down members of Al Qaeda. But members of the Afghan government and some Pakistani political and intelligence officials suggest that Pakistan is not doing all it could to stop Taliban forces from using its territory to attack Afghan territory, and that some elements of Pakistan's army are harbouring Taliban and Qaeda members.
At least three low-level Pakistani army officers have been arrested on charges that they helped Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Al Qaeda's chief of operations, hide in the country before his arrest in March, Pakistani intelligence officials said. These officials believe that the most likely hiding place of Osama bin Laden is in the tribal areas along the Pakistani-Afghan border. Overwhelming public support for bin Laden among the area's religiously conservative Pashtun tribes continues to thwart efforts to arrest him, they said.
Such support is also evident elsewhere. Islamic militants are again operating openly in Pakistan. Last Friday afternoon at the Red Mosque in the centre of Islamabad, Fazlur Rehman Khalil, the former head of Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, delivered a sermon to hundreds of worshippers as police officers lounged outside.
''Our salvation lies in obeying the orders of Allah, not America,'' Khalil said. ''If we don't do jehad, our prayers and fasting will not be accepted. This is a sacred duty.'' After he spoke, members of a new group collected money from worshippers.
Asked what the money was for, two members of the group said jehad in Kashmir. Asked if it was also for jehad in Afghanistan, one answered ''Praise be to God.'' The other quickly cut him off and said ''no.'' Western diplomats say the Taliban is building up its forces along the border and running a recruiting network inside Pakistan. But they see the problem as one of Pakistani capacity and politics, not will, and say they have seen no evidence of direct aid from Pakistan's government to the Taliban.
They said the problem was that Pakistan's government was struggling to counter a culture of Islamic militancy that dates back to the anti-Soviet struggle in Afghanistan in the 1980's, a movement the US helped to create. But Afghan and Indian officials, as well as some Pakistanis, contend that the Pakistani military is playing a double game with the US. Pakistan serves up the occasional Qaeda fugitive to appease American officials, they say. At the same time, it makes little effort to eradicate the Taliban and other militant groups that serve its foreign policy goals by fighting against India. -NYT
-------------
september 2003
Multi-million dollar programme to address Afghan youth
Source: UN OCHA Integrated Regional Information Network
KABUL, 9 September (IRIN) - The Afghan government have unveiled a multi-million dollar project designed to address some of the needs of Afghan youth, IRIN learnt on Monday. "Seventy percent of two million unemployed Afghans are the youth who have been deprived of education during the years of war, mainly during the Taliban time," Mohammad Ghuas Bashiri, a deputy minister in the ministry of Labour and Social Affairs, told IRIN in Kabul.
According to the World Bank, which administers the US $2.98 million Japanese-funded youth project, recent studies indicate that there are over five million young people in Afghanistan, many of whom are severely disadvantaged. Despite the influx of developmet aid in the post-Taliban era, there are currently very few programmes aimed specifically at the development of the country's youth.
The Japan Social Development Fund (JSCF) is the lead donor for the project. "We hope this grant will make a difference for young Afghans' social life," said Kinichi Komano, Japanese Ambassador to Afghanistan at the launching ceremony in Kabul.
Under the project, entitled 'Creating Future Potential Micro-Entrepreneurs' youngsters would be targetted with a focus on their developmental needs, helping them to establish youth development centers for orientation, guidance, information exchange, and skills training in the country.
"During more than two decades of war and destruction, many young Afghans lost their livelihoods and missed the chance to be active members of their society," Shideh Hadian, World Bank project team leader, noted.
According to the Labour and Social Affairs ministry, the four-year project is a pilot programme which will offer literacy, micro finance and vocational training in order to build social capacity and create employment opportunities. "We will give top priority for girls as they sustained more deprivation than men," Bashiri maintained. "In fact employment guarantees security and it will stop youth from joining in or undertaking destructive activities," the deputy minister added.
The labour minstry said the project would cover only four provinces and it would expand once more money was forthcoming from donors. "We also have pledges from donors mainly Iran, to launch similar types of projects throughout the country," Bashir said.
---------------
september 2003
AFGHANISTAN: Interview with UNODC head on opium production
Antonio Maria Costa, Director-General/Executive Director of United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime
KABUL, 4 Sep 2003 (IRIN) - Afghanistan has been regaining notoriety as the world's leading poppy producer, now accounting for about three quarters of global opium production following the collapse of the hardline Taliban regime who had virtually eradicated production in 2001. The director of the United Nations Office for Drugs and Crime (UNODC) Antonio Maria Costa was in Afghanistan last week, to see for himself the extent of the opium industry and help develop strategies to reduce production.
QUESTION: What changes in poppy output have you witnessed this year compared to 2002?
ANSWER: In 2002 we estimated the cultivation at around 74,000 hectares producing 3,400 mt with an income generated of around one billion dollars. Unfortunately, as yet there is no data available for 2003, but possibly very soon UNODC will issue figures on this year. A few things have changed, some of them for the better some of them not.
From the worst side or negative side is the fact that cultivation is spreading beyond the traditional five main provinces that opium has been historically cultivated in Afghanistan like Nangarhar, Kandahar, Badakhshan etc.
But in these five provinces which amounts to about 98 per cent of the whole output, the problem is just as severe as it was last year. But it is good news that the price of opium has declined by about 50 percent in 12 months. So from US $700 per kilo of dry opium bazaar prices are now about $300 per kilo. This means there is a very major cut in the revenues of the traffickers, the revenues of warlords, the revenues of all those who are involved in the opium trade.
Q: Who are the traffickers and growers?
A: Obviously the farmers are involved cultivating their own, somebody else's land or absentee land. And regarding the traffickers, everybody can be. All the ethnic groups are
involved. Are they commanders, warlords or local administrators? Yes and no. I believe most of the commanders are using the revenue from narco-trafficking to feed and arm their armies.
Q: What are the challenges in terms of the eradication of poppy cultivation in Afghanistan?
A: Everything is a challenge. The Counter Narcotics Directorate (CND) [the Afghan government leading authority for drug and crime] is very weak and needs to be strengthened, the counter narcotics police are very weak and without resources so they need to be strengthened. Law enforcement is at its infancy and needs to be strengthened, farmers keep pleading for money for alternative livelihoods because of poverty, administrators keep claiming that they need additional infrastructure, roads electricity, schools and hospitals, so everything is a challenge.
Q: Taking the current challenges into account when do you think Afghanistan will be a poppy free land?
A: I don't have a crystal ball and I cannot predict the future. In other countries with a similar problem for example Thailand, Turkey, Pakistan it took a generation or more, that's 15 to 20 years. The government has approved a 10-year strategy. But that doesn't mean we have to wait nine years to do something. That means that we all have to be engaged right now. In fact everybody has to be committed including the Afghan society at large. The future of Afghanistan is in the hands of Afghans. But it will take some time before the country gets through the problem.
Q: Do you think drug abuse is also a serious problem in Afghanistan?
A: Certainly, our experience is that drug addiction is growing throughout the region. In Afghanistan and in neighboring countries, Central Asia and so forth, I believe that cultivation brings along abuse and abuse brings along death and the need for treatment.
Q: One solution is to pay poppy growers to produce something else, is this feasible?
A: I don't believe we should compensate farmers for not producing opium. However, we need an Afghan government, which should have the ability to enforce the law. And under the law anyone who breaks the law should accept the consequences, so we need to strengthen the ability of the Afghan government to enforce the law.
I have learned that the budget of the CND, which is so important, is just three million dollars and the money was never disbursed and they [CND] are supposed to fight against a drug economy of 1.2 billion dollars. Now it makes no sense. The opium economy last year generated one billion dollars. How many paramilitaries and how many traffickers can be fed for that amount?
Q: Have you appealed for more resources and funding to fight poppy in Afghanistan?
A: Definitely, if we want to be serious about counter trafficking in Afghanistan the authorities need to have a much greater volume of resources. We are in the hands of the international community to provide resources. Resources have not been as generous as I would have liked and the country needs. We are working very hard at that. We are asking for a greater amount of resources towards Afghanistan.
I believe the law enforcement is not taken seriously even by foreign countries, I believe that there are too many narcotics going through because of corrupted officials, corrupted airport and port personnel. We need to be much more committed to fight this problem than we are at the moment. I hear lots of words but very little action.
Q: How commited is Kabul to eradicating opium production?
A: The Afghan government is very committed. This is not the problem, the problem is resources and the rest of society needs to be committed. We are talking about an Afghan problem concerning opium, which involves less than five percent of the population. I would like the 95 per cent of the population, which is not involved in drug activity to be equally committed as president Karzai. If that will be the case we can make it
-----------
2003
New radio station to tackle women's problems
HERAT, 10 November (IRIN) - Sitting behind a microphone, Nurbegum Sa'idi speaks to her female audience on a wide range of women-related topics, thereby rendering Radio Sahar [Dawn], a newly established independent women's community radio station in the western city of Herat, an invaluable mouthpiece for thousands of Afghan women.
"It's great when you feel you can bring about change. The feedback we have been getting from listeners tells us that Sahar is providing new hope for the women in Herat," the radio presenter and former school teacher told IRIN. She is one of four women to be chosen out of over 100 candidates to speak on the two-hour-daily, first-ever, women's radio programme in the province.
Radio Sahar is the latest in a network of independent women's community radio stations to spring up in the country, following Rabia Balkhi in the northern city of Mazar-e Sharif, which began broadcasting in March, along with the Kabul-based Voice of Afghan Women.
Such initiatives are vital. Given the high percentage of illiterate women in Afghanistan with little or no access to education, radio provides one of the most powerful ways to reach and educate women, allowing them to connect in this conservative male-dominated society.
"For many Afghan women who still live very isolated lives, radio can serve as a bridge to the outside world. It can help them develop skills to survive in their daily lives. It can help them feel less alone," Jane McElhone, the project director for the Institute for Media, Policy and Civil Society (IMPACS), a Canadian charitable organisation committed to the protection and expansion of democracy and to strengthening civil society, told IRIN in Kabul.
Working alongside Internews, an international nonprofit organisation supporting open media worldwide, the group has received funding from the Canadian International Development Agency and USAID. "We also provide start-up funding for a six-month period and long-term training and mentoring in radio, journalism, management and fund-raising skills," the IMPACS project director explained.
Looking at the larger picture, IMPACS believes that establishing women's community radio stations provides more women the opportunity to be journalists, producers, technicians, fund-raisers and decision-makers. In assuming these roles, they learn new skills, develop greater self-confidence and awareness, and become active participants in their own communities. McElhone added IMPACS hoped to establish additional stations in the provinces of Konduz and Badakhshan, providing a network capable of linking women up country-wide.
Sahar has an outreach of about 50 to 70 km, with two hours daily programming comprising educational items and around 20 per cent music as entertainment. "We don't have professional women. We may extend the outreach and the time of the programmes once we ourselves learn more about this new experience," Hulan Khatibi, the editor of Sahar and director of the Women's Activities and Social Services Association [a Herat-based agency], told IRIN in Herat.
Radio programming at the station addresses primarily cultural, social and humanitarian matters, but stays clear of political issues, she said, adding that she and the other women had to perform all the jobs including technicians, presenters, reporters and all other relevant works. "We coordinate and work jointly. All we have to do is become self-sufficient for the longer term," Khatibi noted.
Sahar is supported by a community radio advisory board, composed of a variety of people from the local community. "This board is also mandated to assist the station, to offer advice, and to ensure the station reflects the needs of the community and, in particular, the needs of women," she underlined.
According to Khatibi, lack of awareness and ignorance remained endemic among the women of Herat, often leading to depression and other psychological ailments - and sometimes suicide. "Our top priority is to raise the awareness and education of women. We unfortunately witness women burning themselves or attempting other types of suicide. It all originates from their lack of awareness of basic rights and their capabilities," she explained
----------------
2003 Canada
november 11
Troops in Afghanistan refuse bribe demands
Source: The Globe and Mail (Canada) Monday, Nov. 10, 2003 Canadian Press
Paghman, Afghanistan - There's a new twist to the way money problems plaguing Afghanistan's national government are reflecting on peace-support efforts in the war-torn country.
Already known for graft and other corruption, Afghan police and military, some of whom haven't been paid in months, have begun asking for reward money for turning in illicit weapons and ammunition to Canadian soldiers, serving as part of the International Security Assistance Force.
It happened Monday in the mountainous region northwest of the capital, where Sergeant Peter Albert took a section of armoured troops to collect some rockets, anti-tank rounds and mortars from the local Afghan secret police headquarters.
"It's been a political nightmare trying to get this stuff out of here," said Sgt. Albert, a native of Georgetown, Ont. "We were told in September this stuff had been taken in a raid two weeks earlier."
"It has taken us to November to get the job done. They said they wanted it for 'evidence.' What they really wanted was to sell it to us."
Sgt. Albert didn't pay, and ended up taking away 13 mortar bombs, 11 recoilless rifle rounds and 10 rockets anyway.
Most of the ammunition was Soviet-made, according to a weapons manual that Sergeant Michael Thompson has dubbed Little Mikey's Book of Bombs. Sgt. Thompson is one of two engineer detachment commanders who, between them, have destroyed 1,400 rounds since August.
Sgt. Albert's section waited patiently for the area governor to arrive, feted him with photographs and then carted the 34 pieces of munitions away to a sandbagged truck for transport, storage and ultimate destruction.
Soldiers like Corporal Bryan Toope of Ottawa cradled the 122-mm rockets the way they were taught - just like a baby. It made for a stark comparison with a burka-clad woman passerby who was carrying her baby in much the same way.
Some of the rounds were rusting, and one was leaking so badly it was considered too volatile to transport any further than an Afghan army outpost a few kilometres away. Sgt. Thompson, an Alberta native, and Master-Corporal Sean Benedict of Windsor, Ont., wired it and blew it up.
Sgt. Albert took the opportunity to lecture the two Afghan soldiers manning the outpost on the evils of extortion. He had no proof, but he suspected the pair were extorting cash after they stopped a truck and appeared to take money. One of the Afghans said he hadn't been paid in eight months and claimed the money was a Ramadan gift. The Canadian sergeant wasn't buying his story.
"People who do this are just creating a lot of resentment and bad feeling among (ordinary) Afghans," Albert told them through an interpreter.
Soldiers and police are known for setting up illegal checkpoints at key entry points to the capital, some even issue receipts, but Sgt. Albert said he had few illusions about the effect of his lecture.
"Every little bit counts for something," he said. "I know we can't fix the world but whatever little effort we can make to patch it, it's a start."
------------
november 2003
Taliban, not women, wooed
Albany Times 11/10/2003 By Masuda Sultan
President Bush proclaimed in his 2002 State of the Union address that with the Taliban removed from power, Afghan "women are free."But Afghan women have yet to taste real freedom since the Taliban fled Kabul on Nov. 13, 2001.
When I visited Kabul and Kandahar this September, women asked me why my government was so quick to send bombs to liberate them but so tardy in sending them the aid they were promised.
Bush went on the air saying Afghanistan would get a Marshall Plan, but he forgot to include any money for Afghanistan in his administration's budget proposal for 2003. In the administration's latest $87 billion request, Afghanistan was slated to get less than 1 percent of that money, or $800 million, for reconstruction. Not one dollar was earmarked for Afghan women, however.
Rep. Carolyn Maloney, a Long Island Democrat, and others are pushing to earmark $60 million for Afghan women's and girls' programs. This money would help the courageous women in their fight against oppression and poverty.
In Kandahar, my birthplace and the second-largest city in Afghanistan, women told me that the Taliban and warlords still threaten their lives. The Taliban and local warlords continue to rape, kill and intimidate women and girls to prevent women's rights from becoming a reality.
In an initiative where women planned to get signatures for a petition for disarmament, I saw some of the organizers refuse to give their own names, fearing that they would be shot -- or worse.
These women spoke out against the Taliban and told the world how horrible it was to them. But just last month, on Oct. 6, the highest ranking Taliban official in U.S. custody, Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil, was set free. On top of this, the worst violence since the war began continues to spread throughout the south. Attacks by the Taliban and remnants of al-Qaida threaten aid workers and the Afghans who work with them to rebuild their country.
The Afghan government, backed by Washington, is wooing other members of the Taliban. The Afghan government and the Taliban should "come together and join hands, and participate in the reconstruction and rehabilitation of the country," says Khalid Pashtun, a spokesman for the governor of Kandahar province.
Something is going terribly wrong in Afghanistan when the Taliban is being encouraged to vote and join in reconstruction while women are being intimidated into silence.
Masuda Sultan is the program director of Women for Afghan Women. She can be reached by e-mail at the Progressive Media Project, pmproj@progressive.org
------------
2003 December
UN envoy warns on Afghan election date
Financial Times Victoria Burnett - 12/16/03
Afghanistan will not be stable enough to stage elections as scheduled in June next year, the United Nations' top envoy to the country said on Tuesday. "June is already out of the question. We are already looking at August (or) September," Lakhdar Brahimi, UN special envoy to Afghanistan, said in an interview.
The Afghan government and the US are keen to stick to the timetable agreed at peace talks in Bonn two years ago, which stipulate "free and fair" elections by June 2004. But a violent insurgency in the south and continued abuses by provincial warlords has prompted Afghan and international officials to question whether it is safe enough to register voters or carry out a poll.
"If you know an election is going to blow the whole place up, you don't do it just for the sake of respecting the deadline," Mr Brahimi said. Missing the June date would "not be the end of the world", he said, though it was important to maintain pressure so that elections happened as soon as possible.
Amid persistent violence, some Afghan and international officials in Kabul questioned the wisdom of pushing ahead with a loya jirga, or grand council, to debate on the constitution. The jirga, which began on Saturday, had yet to begin debating the document on Tuesday afternoon, as delegates were caught up in administrative questions. A series of rockets fired at a residential area of north-western Kabul on Monday night caused no casualties and did not disrupt proceedings.
Mr Brahimi said there was "no question" of the UN leaving Afghanistan "immediately in the present circumstances", despite deteriorating security conditions that prompted the organisation to evacuate some staff from the south last month. but he said he was frustrated by the international community's reluctance to commit troops to a dangerous country like Afghanistan, despite being prepared to send civilian missions.
"I told the Security Council several times: 'What the hell? You told me to go to Afghanistan. Now when I tell you I have some security concerns you tell me: 'You stay there, but it's too dangerous for our soldiers,'" he said. "What kind of lousy logic is that?"
UN member states must face up to their responsibility to provide troops, if needed, when charting reconstruction plans for countries such as Afghanistan, he said. The UN in October expanded the mandate of the Nato-led Isaf peacekeeping force beyond Kabul, the capital, but Nato has had trouble drumming up additional troops.
"When you go somewhere you have to have all the tools to the do the job you say you are going to do," Mr Brahimi said. "The Secretary General must tell the council what they need to know, not what they would like to hear."
----------
december 2003
Osama fled to Peshawar after Tora Bora bombing:
WT Daily Times - Pakistan
Washington: Osama Bin Laden fled to Peshawar in December 2001 after surviving a massive US military assault on his Tora Bora base in Afghanistan, according to US intelligence and law-enforcement sources.
A report in the Washington Times on Tuesday said Bin Laden reportedly left to meet Mulla Omar near Kandahar, Afghanistan, and later was believed to have moved into Balochistan, which borders Afghanistan and Iran. "Bin Laden is a hero to many of the autonomous tribes that live along the Pakistan-Afghan border and who support the hard-line vision of Islam promoted by the Al Qaeda founder, US intelligence officials say. By contrast, they say, Saddam Hussein was a dictator whom many Iraqis were willing to turn in," the report adds.
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Al Qaeda's operations chief, who was arrested on March 1 this year in Rawalpindi, reportedly gave conflicting information to Pakistan's ISI, the CIA and the FBI as to whether Bin Laden was alive, and whether he had met him after the September 11 attacks.
The report recalled, "Pakistani intelligence officials, in an unusual briefing for foreign journalists at the time, said Shaikh Mohammed acknowledged during three days of interrogation at a safe-house after his arrest that he met Bin Laden in December 2002, though he did not say where. US and Pakistani officials retrieved numerous secret Al Qaeda documents and other information during Shaikh Mohammed's interrogation. Included was a laptop computer used by Shaikh Mohammed that contained the names of at least a dozen safe houses located along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border used by Bin Laden and his supporters, authorities said." -Khalid Hasan
--------
december 2003
Meeting on New Constitution, Afghan Women Find Old Attitudes
AMY WALDMAN NYT - KABUL, Afghanistan, Dec. 15 - After hours of tedium on Monday in the selection of deputy chairmen for Afghanistan's constitutional convention, or loya jirga, there came a moment of illusion-shattering truth.
The chairman, Sebaghatullah Mojadeddi, had announced that there would be three deputies, not two, as planned, and, based on the votes, all of them would be men. Thirteen men and three women had run for the posts.
From the front rows of this assembly, meant to give Afghanistan a constitution that would move it further away from war, a chorus of protest rose. The 100 or so female delegates, of a total of 502, wanted one of their rank as a deputy. They may have been only one-fifth of the delegates, they had argued earlier in the day, but they represented 50 percent of the population.
Mr. Mojadeddi, a former president and religious scholar routinely depicted as a moderate, was having none of it. "We all have to respect the vote," he said. "Women are free to vote for men. Men are free to vote for women. We cannot make this separation." Then he spoke words that still stung hours later. Don't try to put yourself on a level with men, he told the women. Even God has not given you equal rights, he added, because under his decision two women are counted as equal to one man. He was referring to a provision of Islamic law, itself displeasing to many women, that says that the testimony of two women is equivalent to that of one man in some cases. He did not bother to couch the sentiment in a legal context, presenting it instead as a general principle.
In a moment, Mr. Mojadeddi managed to expose the tensions that underlay not just this assembly but also this nation, over the role of women and the role of Islam, the fealty to tradition and the push for modernity.
The women had come "with such hope and inspiration, even leaving our small children behind," said Saira Sarif, a delegate from Khost. "Hearing this comment on the first day, we lost all hope for women."
Some women urged a walkout. An older Pashtun woman, Alima Khazan, approached Mr. Mojadeddi, also a Pashtun, and quietly spoke to him about the Pashtun custom that calls for respecting a woman's request in a council, according to other delegates. The foreign minister, Abdullah, whispered something in his ear.
Mr. Mojadeddi then changed his mind, saying that a fourth deputy would be added, and that it would be a woman. Safiqa Sadiqi of Jalalabad was selected. But there were no victory celebrations. Four hours later at Kabul University, where the assembly is being held, the women were still talking about Mr. Mojadeddi's words, which had led some into a four-hour discussion about the plight of women in Afghanistan.
"We all are kind of not only in shock, but also surprised that he said it," said Rangina Hamidi, 26, who works for Afghans for Civil Society in Kandahar. She spoke by cellphone, and the women in the background still sounded agitated.
"For him to sit in a gathering of this importance, knowing the past history of women, the suffering," she said. "It was uncalled for." Ms. Hamidi did say the women should have united and put forth only one candidate.But that did not erase the words, or the battle lines that had been drawn for the days of debate ahead. "How can we freely express ourselves," asked Khobra Aman, a school principal from Jalalabad, "knowing our leaders think we are only half of men?"
--------------
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.