Hazara Nation

IOM this week provided shelter materials to 21 vulnerable families displaced by the threat of a rock fall in Bamyan province.

The materials which include iron beams, metal doors and windows, will allow each family to build a new two-room home on land provided by the government several hundred meters above their old houses.

The aid is part of IOM's humanitarian assistance programme, which is currently also active in Kabul, Nangahar, Laghman, Herat, Kandahar, Kunduz, Ghor, Gardez, Badakhshan, Farah and Balkh provinces.

The programme, which provides emergency aid to people displaced by natural disasters or conflict, and vulnerable returnees from neighbouring countries, is implemented in close collaboration with the government, and funded by the UN Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF), Japan and the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

"This is a responsive programme, and we are ready to expand our activities with our partners wherever there is a need to help internally displaced people," says IOM Afghanistan Chief of Mission Robbie Thomson.

IOM works with the Afghanistan National Disaster Management Authority, the Ministry of Refugees and Repatriation, provincial and district government, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) and other UN agencies to identify people most in need, before activating a rapid response mechanism that procures, warehouses and delivers non-food relief items.

Over the past year, which saw one of the harshest winters in decades, IOM humanitarian interventions have been triggered by large-scale deportations of undocumented labour migrants and their families from Iran, and the return of a growing number of refugees to Afghanistan's eastern provinces from Pakistan.

The programme has distributed 7,352 household kits, 5,000 agricultural kits, 3,435 winter kits, 6,678 clothing items and 2,025 shelter kits. It has also provided transportation assistance for 342 families.

As the leading inter-governmental organization in the field of migration, IOM promotes humane and orderly migration for the benefit of all. In Afghanistan, IOM also facilitates long-term return and reintegration to and within Afghanistan, stabilizes migrant communities through sustainable development in the context of long periods of mass population displacement, and works with Afghan government institutions to manage migration and build capacity.

For further information, please contact:

Althea Rivas
IOM Kabul
Tel. + 93 (0) 700 486728
E-mail: arivas@iom.int
or

Katsui Kaya
Tel. +93 (0) 700 18596
E-mail: kkaya@iom.int
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Two French aid workers kidnapped in central Afghanistan last week are being held by a commander of a former armed faction, a Western radio broadcaster said on Tuesday.

The pair were working for the humanitarian agency of Action Against Hunger in the central province of Dai Kundi and were kidnapped while sleeping in their house on Friday, the organization said.

Commander Sedaqat phoned Radio Liberty to claim responsibility for seizing and holding the two, said the U.S.-sponsored station which broadcasts in Afghanistan's main languages, Pashtu and Dari.

Sedaqat said he had kidnapped them due to differences with provincial authorities he said had sidelined him from power, the network said. Sedaqat said he wanted to settle the issue peacefully, but made no demand for freeing the pair.

Sedaqat belonged to an ethnic Hazara armed faction and briefly joined the Taliban when the group was in power from 1996 till 2001, the radio said. He then sided with the Afghan government after U.S.-led and Afghan forces toppled the Taliban following the September 11 attacks in 2001.

As violence rises, kidnapping has become a lucrative business in Afghanistan and scores of Afghans and foreigners have been abducted by criminals or Taliban militants in recent years.

Two Turkish employees of a road project, seized last week in the western town of Islam Qala, bordering Iran, were freed on Sunday. The pair were released following possible ransom, according to the police chief for the western zone.

Ousted from power in 2001, Taliban insurgents have been behind a number of kidnappings in Afghanistan. Some hostages have been killed, but most have been released unharmed.

The insurgents kidnapped 23 South Koreans last year, killing two and releasing the rest more than a month later.

(Reporting by Sayed Salahuddin; Editing by Jerry Norton)
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Thousands of ethnic Hazaras marched Tuesday in the Afghan capital and the central town of Bamiyan in a protest over a land dispute with nomads in which several people are said to have been killed.

In Kabul, hundreds of riot police were out to control an angry and chanting crowd and a Hazara security team also tried to calm the protesters, an AFP reporter said.

The Kabul police official tasked with maintaining public order, Ghulam Rasoul, said 3,000 to 4,000 people took to the streets, but an AFP reporter said the crowd was likely three times larger.

In Afghanistan's main Hazara town of Bamiyan, up to 1,000 people marched on the same issue and handed a written complaint to United Nations representatives, officials said.

The dispute erupted when Kuchi nomads, who are ethnic Pashtuns, moved into Wardak province's Behsud area, about 100 kilometres (60 miles) east of Kabul, in recent months in search of grazing land for their animals.

Hazaras allege that the nomads forced their way in and killed several people, and destroyed houses and crops.

There have been weeks of clashes in the area, with media reports of deaths, but interior ministry spokesman Zemarai Bashary said it was not clear how many people had been killed.

"Our fact-finding team is working and investigating to determine exactly what number of people were killed," Bashary told AFP.

Ethnicity is a flashpoint issue in Afghanistan, which is still scarred by the 1992-1996 civil war in which different groups massacred, raped and tortured each other. The violence left around 80,000 people dead in Kabul alone.

Rural Afghanistan sees regular land disputes often resulting in casualties but most go unreported. Disputes involving ethnicity are however often politicised.

Hazara leader and parliamentarian Haji Mohammad Mohaqiq is reported to be on hunger strike over the dispute which he has warned could re-ignite civil war.

"The demonstration is to protest against the Kuchi invasion," said Akram Gizabi, spokesman for one of the groups involved in the Kabul protest.

"Kuchi people attacked Hazarajat (Hazara land). They killed our people and destroyed our land and the government does not do anything because the government supports such people," said another protester, Massoom Ali, 16.

The demonstrators carried posters of nine people including four children they alleged were killed by Kuchis.

Kuchi nomads, whose numbers are not known, move up from the south and east every summer in search of land for grazing.
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Haji Muhammad Mohaqiq, a Hazara MP, is on hunger strike. By all accounts, eight days into it, he is weakening.
Mohaqiq is protesting the recent violent incursion of Kuchi nomads into Hazara areas in the Behsud district of Wardak province. Reportedly, upwards of four Hazara were killed during the incursion. This is an old conflict—the Economist wrote of it last year, but it has roots going back at least into the Taliban’s rule. Many Hazara claim the Kuchi are “Taliban,” or at least Taliban-loving, because during the 90s they worked with the Taliban, who granted them access to Hazara (and Tajik) land. Naturally the Hazara are angry over this imbalance.

Here’s the rub. As a predominantly Pashtun force, the Taliban were rather notorious for their appalling treatment of all other minorities within Afghanistan, including (or perhaps especially) the Hazara. In fact, the imposed famine on the Hazarajat was particularly brutal and generally unreported in the media in the West.

Wardak is about half Pashtun, with most of the rest (somewhere around 40%, according to unreliable official statistics) Hazara. This is an area where corruption is so bad many Pashtun villagers eagerly open their arms to Taliban entreaties, whose promises to end corruption and establish justice seem to meet eager ears in many areas, and whose courts have willing participants.

This places the Hazara in a bit of a quandry. While the Taliban claim not to recognize ethnicity, they clearly hate the Hazara as Shiite apostates. Meanwhile, the Kuchi, who are Sunni, might be able to get some Taliban support in their quest to find grazing land. But both groups—Hazara and Kuchi—can quite correctly claim to have been marginalized for centuries, and claim to have been ignored in Afghanistan’s post-Taliban politics. This last complaint is a bit of a stretch: the 3 million Kuchi have a guaranteed 10 seats in Parliament, a courtesy not given the Uzbeks or Balochi. The Hazara have one of the country’s two co-vice presidencies in the man of Karim Khalili. (Neither of these facts guarantee any sort of co-equal voice in the government.)

Khalili claimed in a recent press conference that President Karzai ordered an evacuation of the Kuchi from Behsud district. Meanwhile, Hazara representatives claim several thousand have fled the violence.

The danger is that the Kuchi will reach out to the Taliban for support. While there is scant evidence this has actually happened, given the general negligence of Hazara areas—they tend to be quiet, so the troops with all those CERP funds rarely give them focus—the only way for the Hazara to draw attention to their conflict to cry “Taliban,” and maybe let slip the dogs of war. There is the possibility of armed conflict between the two groups beyond the limited skirmishes so far.

But Mohaqiq’s hunger strike is peaceful. And so far the Hazara community seems to be holding its breath to see what kind of reaction they can get from Kabul and NATO (there is a protest scheduled in Kabul for Tuesday, July 22). They shouldn’t hold it too long: the Turks, who run the Wardak PRT, pretty much never leave their compound. Similarly, a 2007 commission Hamid Karzai set up to discover a solution to the Hazara-Kuchi conflict has yet to reveal anything about its proceedings.

The unfortunate angle to this conflict is that not only is it in a generally ignored area just to the west of Kabul, it also has nothing to do with the Coalition/Taliban conflict raging further south and east. It is, in brief, a fairly standard nomad/settler conflict, with the consequent disputes over land used both for agriculture and grazing. These types of conflicts become especially acute during times of drought or shortage, and the current squeeze over food prices, and a looming drought in the south, have probably exacerbated the conflict.

Despite the constant cries of Taliban, however, very few seem to take the Hazara complaint seriously. And here is where it could backfire: just like crying wolf, it might fall on deaf ears next time there is a real, and serious, Taliban incursion in Wardak beyond setting up a few shadow institutions. Similarly, if the Hazara succeed in painting the Kuchi as Taliban sympathizers, this might push them into seeking support from the Taliabn to gain advantage in their struggle.

In other words, Wardak right now is a tinderbox… one that is still almost entirely ignored by the West. They would do well to pay attention to the trouble brewing at Kabuls’ gates.
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Tim King Salem-News.com

You have to work hard to name a country more different and removed from the United States than Afghanistan. It is the historic crossroads between the Eastern and Western worlds, a place that has been settled since the earliest days of man.

Even though the U.S. and several other nations are sending military troops there year after year to fight a war against criminal insurgents, few in the west really understand the dynamics of this place.

I am no expert, but I have spent time covering the war in Afghanistan and between that experience and my long list of contacts and Internet sources, it made sense to write this and spread the knowledge about this fascinating and captivating land that is as stark, cold and empty as it is historic, vibrant and mystic/exotic.

Afghanistan is bordered by several countries; Pakistan in the south and east, Iran in the west, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan in the north, and China in the far northeast. The name Afghanistan means the "Land of Afghans" Wikipedia states.

Two Languages, One Primary Religion and Several Cultures

In Afghanistan, there are two official languages: Persian and Pashto. People in the northern areas of the country including the capitol Kabul, usually speak Dari, similar to Persian, while those living in the south and southeast speak Pashto. Several other languages are spoken in their own regions, including Hazaragi, Uzbeki, Turkmen and Balochi.

Most Afghans are Muslims. About 80% of the population is Sunni, while 19% is Shia. Most Islamic people in both Iraq and Iran, are Shia Muslims, approximately 65% in Iraq and 90% in Iran.

A small percentage of the people in Afghanistan are not Muslim. This seems obvious to all who know of the tremendous statues of Buddha that were carved out of a mountainside, only to be destroyed in recent years by teh Taliban.

Among Afghanistan's population today are 15,000 to 30,000 Hindus and Sikhs living in Afghanistan. Most are in the country's larger cities such as Kabul, Kandahar, and Jalalabad.

Afghanistan's population is divided into specific and definable ethnic groups. There is a great amount of cast typing and prejudice and rivalry between the different groups.

These are issues that go far beyond national borders or religions. Bitterness toward the Hazara people is depicted in the recently released movie "The Kite Runner."

An actual census has not been held in Afghanistan for decades, and exact figures about the size and composition of the various ethnic groups are not completely accurate. The CIA World Factbook says it breaks down like this:

* Pashtun: 42%

* Tajik: 27%

* Hazara: 9%

* Uzbek: 9%

* Aimak: 4%

* Turkmen: 3%

* Baloch: 2%

* Other: 4%

The social order in this country seems to correspond with the numbers you see above. Pashtun people are very proud and they can be very kind. But they are not necessarily very tolerant of Hazara people, as depicted in "The Kite Runner."

A gentleman in Afghanistan who I became friends with through MySpace, shows the pride of this ethnic group with this statement:

"Of course we Pashtuns love american people, and we are the greatest hosts towards outsiders. But those who have weapons, and carpet bomb us in our own land. This is something that is intolerable. Today thanks to the American government, there are crooks in the government of Afghanistan."

This individual whose name I will not reveal, told me about the vast numbers of anti-American and anti-Coalition forces that originate from Pakistan, in this statement from March 2007:

"I'm totally against Bush's wars in the middle east and today Afghans remember the Taliban as the most secure government and brought the most stability than any other government did."

But this Pashtun stops short of endorsing the Taliban, in fact very short. Instead he lamented the way Pakistan's Taliban have eradicated the things that meant the most to this historic country. "With the help of their Pakistani friends, they want to eliminate our culture, and our history that we take great pride of."

Most Taliban fighters emerge from the regions of Pakistan that are left alone by the government, as the MySpace friend revealed.

"Taliban fighters are everywhere in Afghanistan and Pakistan-Afghan border Tribal areas. Most of the fighters are coming from the tribal areas, they still have local support in Southern Afghanistan and strong Pashtun regional alliances, and especially more tensions have risen after the Waziri wars, when Pakistan launched a war in Waziristan in 2004."

As we have reported countless times here at Salem-News.com, the problems in Afghanistan for the most part, do not stem from within its borders, but from Pakistan. This is another bizarre example of the alliances that the United States forges. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are dangerous places with almost no equity for the treatment of women. Iran on the other hand is at peace and has a large number of women in professional roles, in college, and holding political office.

The reason Taliban forces hail from Pakistan is simple, and we can thank the bloodthirsty Soviet forces for it. They occupied Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989 and as a matter of policy, the Soviet monsters would routinely intentionally poison Afghan water reserves. As they did that, they managed to murder approximately 1.5 million Afghan citizens in the process.

Millions of Afghans fled their native country and most fled to Pakistan, others to Iran. These are comparatively calm and peaceful countries next to Afghanistan. As the U.S. war in Afghanistan mounted, more and more young men of Afghan descent were moving into their parent's homeland. They were trained for the jihad by the mullahs in Pakistan.

Who the Americans Trust

When the Taliban captured of Kabul in 1996, all the Hazara groups united with the new Northern Alliance against the common new enemy. The Hazara people are proud, but they are the most persecuted people in Afghanistan. Time and time again these people of Mongolian heritage have been enslaven. People of Pashtun descent appear to see themselves much higher on the food chain through direct racism and depending on the time period in history, they have made life very difficult for the Hazaras.

The place they originate from, Hazarajat, fell to the Taliban in 1998 despite what has been called "fierce resistance". The Taliban totally isolated Hazarajat from the rest of the world, going as far as not allowing the United Nations to deliver food to the provinces of Bamiyan, Ghor, Wardak, and Ghazni. These things are not easily forgotten by any group of people. The Taliban are by all measures, one of the cruelest and least-Godlike of all the warring factions in the Mideast. They torture women, murder them in the street, and abuse little boys for sexual practices (not that it is unusual there) as a matter of culture. This has led to some of the most bitter resentments in the world.

An American soldier who I spent time with in Afghanistan, Ryan "Vandy" Vandewalker, explained to me how frequently U.S. forces rely on Hazara information in locating Taliban in the regions around Gardez and Ghazni.

"We were going up a mountain," he said, motioning toward a tall peak near the base at Gardez where we stood on the flightline awaiting a helicopter- my ride to the next base. "These Hazara's saw us and told us that not very far up, there was a camp of Taliban." He said some early warning shots scattered the Taliban and it didn't end in a bloody firefight.

"Their food was still cooking on the fire when we walked into that camp". Vandee told me there were a small number of soldiers in his platoon, compared to the number of enemy fighters who they almost walked up on, "Hazara people have been so screwed over by the Taliban. They hate them and they love us and I have never even heard of one lying to Americans forces."

Perhaps there will never be a way to really move past this type of prejudice in Afghanistan today, but it is important to note that some cultures are distinctly more friendly to a western presence, than others. The Pashtuns are largely from Kandahar where fighting has continued non-stop since the beginning of the war there.

One thing the Afghan National Army has done to fight projudice, is to implement a program in the military that makes all battalions or "kandeks" as the ANA refers to them, multi cultural. Here, Tajik's serve with Uzbek's, Hazara's and Pashtun's. They country did divide between the north and south, as the soldiers from the same country literally can not speak to one another. Dari and Pashtun are similar in some ways, but they are completely different languages.

Tim King is a former U.S. Marine with twenty years of experience on the west coast as a television news producer, photojournalist, reporter and assignment editor. Today, in addition to his role as a war correspondent in Afghanistan where he spent the winter of 2006/07, this Los Angeles native serves as Salem-News.com's Executive News Editor. Salem-News.com is the nation's only truly independent high traffic news Website, affiliated with Google News and several other major search engines and news aggregators. Tim's coverage from Iraq that was set to begin in April has been delayed and may not take place until August, 2008. You can send Tim an email at this address: newsroom@salem-news.com
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By: iStockAnalyst
Text of an un-attributed article entitled: "Will Khalili turn his back on Karzai?" published by Afghan independent secular daily newspaper Hasht-e Sobh on 12 July

A reliable source in Kabul reports that Karim Khalili, the second- vice president, has resigned as chairman of the DIAG [Disbandment of Illegal Armed Groups] programme. This source says that Mr Khalili did not attend a meeting of the vice-presidents either, and that he is now consulting elders of the Hazara tribe and leaders of Shi'i political parties and is exchanging views with them on the continuation of his cooperation as Mr Karzai's vice-president.

Mr Khalili's decision comes as, on the one hand, clashes have restarted between Hazara villagers and nomads in Behsud [District of Maydan Wardag Province], and on the other, rumours are going around that the elections are to be postponed. Many analysts say there are reports that Mohammad Karim Khalili will be one of the possible vice- presidents of Mr Karzai in the second round of elections. It is now seen after four years that Mr Khalili's patience has also worn thin because of Karzai's work methods.

Ahmad Zia Masud [the first vice-president] has also criticized Mr Karzai's method of governance many times in the past, and over the last one year, he has been practically in opposition. Even now, Ahmad Zia Masud acts more as an active spokesman for the National Front than supporting the government's view. Though Karim Khalili is counted as one of the most harmless members of Karzai's team and has never criticized the government over the past four years, he now follows the policy of the first vice-president.

Some believe that the main reason behind the discontent of the second vice-president is apparently the issue of nomads. Speaking at a meeting attended by elders and political parties of the people of the Hazara tribe last winter, Mr Khalili spoke of an honourable solution to the problem, but the tension has again increased in the spring of the current year, and the government has so far failed to put an end to the tension. Some analysts believe that the problem of nomads has now become a political interest-seeking issue for political leaders of both sides, and instead of offering a solution to the problem, both sides are mostly trying to take advantage of the opportunity.

Now there are specific circles on both sides which are after restoring their lost political and social prestige among the people, using tribal sentiments. Mr Khalili's decision can be part of his new policies to attract the attention of the Hazaras towards a new political leadership for them in a competitive atmosphere. The other reason why the second vice-president took the decision is to allegedly weaken the political position of President Karzai in the eyes of the public and the international community.

Mr Khalili knows better than anyone else that if the elections are not held, there is the possibility of an emergency situation and holding of a loya jerga, in which case the two vice presidents may not keep their current positions. Therefore, he is trying to turn his back on Karzai in an honourable manner, and by making a justifiable pretext before any change takes place, join the other front.

If Mr Khalili really resigns, what will be the position of the president in the absence of coordination and cooperation of the two vice-presidents who represent the Hazara and Tajik tribes?

Anyway, which front will the second vice-president join if he leaves Mr Karzai's working team?

Will the secret good relations between Mr Khalili and the National Front help him join the Front, or will he open a new front? One should wait and see what role he is going to play this time.

Story Source: BBC Monitoring South Asia Read the full story

Afghan Minister for Mines Ibrahim Adil has said that his ministry had discovered varieties of mines worth of 300 billion U.S. dollars in Afghanistan's central high lands, a local newspaper reported Saturday.

Daily Outlook quoted the minister, who had recently visited the above provinces, as saying the coal mine reservoir discovered in Yakawlang district of Bamyan province could be more than 200 million tons.

He said that the iron mine discovered in the same district could have some 1 billion tons of the metal.

The mining of the entire underground treasury would be leased to private sectors in future, according to officials at the ministry.

Afghanistan has already leased its biggest copper mine in Logar province to the China Metallurgical Group Corp. months ago.

Meantime, a press release of the Afghan Foreign Ministry issued here Saturday said that Afghan Minister for Public Work Dr. Sohrab Ali Saffary and Italian ambassador to Afghanistan Ettore Francesco Sequi will sign an agreement for the rehabilitation of the second section of the Maidan Shar-Bamyan Road today.

Work on the 136-km road linking Kabul through Wardak province to the central Bamyan province began in 2006 with 151 million U.S. dollars financial support from Italy and is expected to be completed within the next three years. Read the full story

By M K Bhadrakumar
Asia Times Online

The horrendous terrorist attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul on Monday has no precedents. Never has the mission there been attacked in this fashion - not even during the darkest periods of the civil war in the 1980s and 1990. Nor has any other diplomatic mission in Kabul been so targeted in the current phase of the civil war that began with the United States invasion in 2001.

The suicide attack claimed the lives of 41 people, with more than 140 injured. Among the dead were Indian Defense Attache Brigadier R D Mehta, diplomat Venkateswara Rao and two Indian paramilitary guards.

Unsurprisingly, Indian opinion makers have been swift in depicting the terrorist act as a moral evil, which it probably is. All the same, it is necessary to draw a line while presenting what happened as a kind of morality play of good versus evil. The danger is when the narrative begins depicting a moral universe where we are hated solely on account of our altruistic motives and intrinsic goodness.

Whereas, the reality is that we live in savage times where realpolitik and not morality often enough happens to be the guiding force inciting our monstrous enemies. A need arises, therefore, to take a more honest look at any hidden sewers that may exist. Such an exercise cannot and should not in any way detract from the total condemnation that the terrorists deserve. But it will serve an important purpose in so far as we do not fall into a false sense of innocence.

Even the death of a sparrow is a tragedy. Too many Indian lives are being lost in Afghanistan. The death of a brigadier, certainly, is a huge loss to India's armed forces. It is about time to ask questions why this is happening. First and foremost, do we comprehend the complexities of the Afghan situation?

The primary responsibility for this task lies with the Indian mission in Kabul, which should assess the situation correctly and report to Delhi. The Ministry of External Affairs will be the best judge to decide whether there have been any lacunae in putting in place the underpinnings of India's Afghan policy. After all, a distinct pattern is emerging in the recent past. Is it mere coincidence?

Each time an Indian life was lost, top officials in Delhi reiterated their resolve not to be deterred by terrorists. A high-level meeting of officials ensued to take stock of the security of Indian personnel in Afghanistan. Apart from diplomatic and other staff, several thousand Indians are involved in reconstruction work in the country.

We then moved on. But does that approach suffice? Is anyone listening out there in the Hindu Kush? Isn't a comprehensive re-look of policy warranted? Something has gone very wrong somewhere. The government owes an explanation.

One thing is clear. The Taliban are a highly motivated movement. They are not in the business of exhibitionism. Their actions are invariably pinpointed, conveying some distinguishable political message or the other. This has been so all along during the past decade. Anyone who interacted with the Taliban would agree.

Even on the eve of the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, they were prepared to deal, but by then the Gorge W Bush administration was bent on the military path. In the present case of India's embassy, the terrorist attack was carefully targeted. Equally, its timing must also bear scrutiny. The overall fragility of the security situation or the prevailing climate of violence in Afghanistan alone cannot account for it. India is not part of the tens of thousands of coalition forces stationed in Afghanistan. But why is India being singled out? After all, Iran has been no less an "enemy" for the Taliban or al-Qaeda - or Russia and Uzbekistan for that matter.

The first point is that the Taliban have once again chosen to target Indian interests, which are located on Afghan soil. They haven't stretched their long arm to act on Indian soil. Even though India's army chief recently speculated that Kashmiri militants could have tie-ups with the Taliban or al-Qaeda, such a link seems highly improbable. (Why there should have been such a speculative statement at all on a sensitive issue at such a responsible level, we do not know). The Taliban message is that they have a score to settle with India's Afghan policy; that it is best settled on Afghan soil; and that they do not have any hostility toward India as such.

Two, the Taliban have ratcheted up the level of their attacks on Indian interests. Targeting the Indian chancery makes it a very serious message. It is unclear whether the Indian defense attache was specifically the target. Conceivably, he was. If so, the timing of the attack is relevant. India has sharply stepped up its military-to-military cooperation with Afghanistan. Media reports indicate that India is training Afghan military personnel and possibly supplying military hardware to the Afghan armed forces. The Indian authorities have not cared to deny these reports.

Needless to say, the Taliban would be keeping a close tab. The Taliban have infiltrated Afghan security agencies and would know the nature of the India-Afghanistan military cooperation. In any case, in the Kabul bazaar, nothing remains secret for long. The Taliban seem to have sized up that the Afghan-Indian "mil-to-mil" cooperation is assuming a cutting edge, and the resent it, seeing it as unwarranted Indian interference in their country's internal affairs.

Arguably, India's cooperation is within legitimate parameters. Delhi is dealing with the duly elected Afghan government of President Hamid Karzai, which enjoys international legitimacy. But such things are never quite that simple in war zones. It took all the persuasiveness on the part of India's envoys to get the mujahideen to accept, with the benefit of hindsight, that India's erstwhile ties with president Mohammad Najibullah's regime in the 1980s were history and were not directed against the mujahideen but merely signified government-to-government relations, which were usual.

Again, as India learned at enormous cost, in the ultimate analysis, it became completely irrelevant that the Indian Peace Keeping Force saga in the mid-1980s in Sri Lanka began at the insistence of the established government in Colombo under the leadership at the highest level. The dividing line between the judicious and injudicious becomes thin when an outsider becomes involved in a fratricidal strife.

In this particular case, there is an added factor. The Afghan army has pronounced ethnic fault lines. Ethnic Tajiks account for close to 70% of the officer corps of the army. So, when India trains Afghan army officers in its military academies to fight the Taliban - who are a predominantly Pashtun movement - India is needlessly stepping into a political minefield of explosive sensitivity. Either India does not comprehend these vicious undercurrents in Afghan politics or it chooses to deliberately overlook them. In any case, it demands some serious explanation.

Three, the United Progressive Alliance government in Delhi has incrementally harmonized its Afghan policy with the US's "war on terror". This is most unfortunate. India ought to keep a safe distance from the Bush administration's war against militant Islam. Besides, the US has complicated motives behind its intervention in Afghanistan - its geostrategy toward Russia and Central Asia, its agenda of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's expansion as a global political organization, its crusade against "Islamofascism", etc.

Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh recently revealed in the New Yorker magazine what was an open secret - Washington has been using Afghanistan as a base for training and equipping terrorists and planning and executing subversive activities directed against Iran with a view to speeding up "regime change" in that country.

India does not share these diabolical US policy objectives and hare-brained dogmas. But unfortunately, influential sections within the India security community have labored under the notion that acquiring a sort of frontline status in the US's "war on terror" in Afghanistan would have tangential gains with regard to Pakistan. The temptation to harmonize with the US is all the greater when we see that US-Pakistan security cooperation has come under strain on account of Islamabad's growing resistance to the American attempt to shift the locus of the war into the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and the tribal areas within Pakistan that border Afghanistan.

Again, some others in India's strategic community hold a belief that it is time India began to flex its muscles in its region. Indeed, US think-tankers routinely encourage their counterparts to believe that India is far too shy and reticent for a serious regional power in the exercise of its muscle power.

At any rate, there is a widespread perception in the international community - including former US officials who held responsible positions and even British statesmen - that Afghanistan is the theater of a proxy war between Pakistan and India. But we can certainly do without such a proxy war. There are five good reasons for saying so.

First, it is tragic, immoral and contemptible if India indeed is cynical enough to overlook the suffering that it would be inflicting on the friendly Afghan people - who barely eke out a living as it is - by making them pawns in India's "low intensity" wars with Pakistan. Second, such a proxy war is contrary to India's broader regional policy, which is to make Pakistan a stakeholder in friendly relations with India. Third, India would be annoying or alienating the Pakistani military, which is a crucial segment of the Pakistani establishment. Fourth, it undercuts the climate of trust and confidence, which is gathering slowly but steadily in the overall relationship with Pakistan.

Finally, it is plain unrealistic to overlook Pakistan's legitimate interests in Afghanistan. It would be as unrealistic as to expect that India would sit back and take with equanimity if it perceived creeping Pakistani influence in the Maldives, Sri Lanka, Nepal or Bhutan. (Three top Indian officials recently visited Colombo to make precisely such a point about trends toward Sri Lanka's expansion of ties with China and Pakistan.)

Call it "sphere of influence", call it the "Monroe Doctrine" [1], but there are geopolitical realities that cannot be overlooked. Afghanistan poses fundamental challenges to Pakistan's territorial integrity and sovereignty. Therefore, Pakistan is highly sensitive about Afghanistan's external relations. It is inconceivable that Pakistan would take in its stride any Indian activities in Afghanistan, which it perceives as threatening its security interests. (Sophistries apart, Delhi's calculated political decision to maintain consulates in Jalalabad, Kandahar, Herat and Mazar-i-Sharif is a case in point.) A futile cycle of tit-for-tat will ensue

whereby India and Pakistan would end up bleeding each other.

From the Indian perspective at least, its national priorities at the present crucial juncture of economic growth and development should be very obvious. It can do without mindless distractions and extravaganzas. It needs a peaceful external environment. China's fascinating example of national priorities is in front of India - almost mocking it.

The biggest danger is that in the present climate of euphoria over India's so-called strategic partnership with the US, Washington may egg Delhi on to a "proactive" role in Afghanistan. Indeed, this may be happening already to some extent. India (and China) has been approached by the Bush administration to send troops to Afghanistan. Understandably, with the Afghan war posing such a profound dilemma to the US, Washington would be immensely pleased if India, with its surplus manpower, geared up for a bit of load-sharing in the "war on terror".

Nothing would be more foolhardy on India's part than to be drawn into the US stratagem. There cannot be any two opinions that when the chips are down, the US would know that Pakistan is a fundamentally more valuable ally in Afghanistan than India ever could aspire to be. Simply put, geography favors Pakistan, and geography delimits a direct Indian role in Afghanistan.

India can only end up as a doormat for US regional policy. However, there are disturbing signs that sections of the Indian strategic community, egged on by the armchair cheerleaders in its media, are raring to go for a bit of action in the great game. Indeed, the great game in the Hindu Kush is a heady, exhilarating game. But it is also a high-risk one. It can even end up tragically, which was what happened to imperial Britain and the Soviet Union - and quite probably will happen to the US.

It is understandable if India were to retaliate against the Taliban for its hostile activities towards India. But that is not the case here. The case is more of the powerful pro-American lobby in India's security community hoping against hope that somehow or the other a justification could be found for a raison d'etre for India to get involved in the Afghan war. The easy route is to cast the Taliban as inimical to India's national security.

Part of the problem is also India's lack of understanding about the phenomenon of political Islam and its manifestations in its neighborhood. Carnegie scholar and author of Journey of the Jihadist: Inside Muslim Militancy, Fawaz A Gerges, has tackled the intellectual challenge of disentangling myth from the reality of Islamism. He came up with some facts to consider: a) Islamism is highly complex and diverse; the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliates which form the overwhelming majority (over 90%) of religiously political groups embrace democratic principles and oppose violence; b) Mainstream Islamists have become unwitting harbingers of democratic transformation in Muslim societies, learning to make compromises and even rethink some of their absolute positions; c) Mainstream militants serve as a counterweight to ultra-militants like al-Qaeda; d) Islamists, like their secular counterparts, are deeply divided among themselves and the intensity of the fault lines are very real.

Interestingly, Gerges had this to say about the Taliban: "There is nothing uniquely 'Islamic' about their internal governing style except the rhetoric and the symbolism. They have not offered up an original model of Islamic governance." Thus, once in power in the late 1990s, the Taliban did face a Herculean task of coping with political reality. If not for their cynical manipulation in the 1990s by outsiders - the US, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia - the Taliban would not have been driven into the welcoming arms of al-Qaeda.

Much of the currently perceived threat to regional stability from the Taliban is a dark illusion that has been exaggerated and distorted. But then India became trapped by a fear and adversarial perceptions had crystallized by the late 1990s. India promptly, unconditionally, surrendered the right to question the myth about the Taliban. Indeed, Taliban functionaries kept conveying to India directly and through intermediaries that they didn't harbor ill will toward India to provoke such vehement Indian support for the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance.

Maybe India overreacted; maybe the searing pain of the blood-letting in Jammu and Kashmir in the late 1980s and early 1990s percolated into India's thinking; maybe the specter of Islamic extremism genuinely haunted the country; maybe Pakistan's hostile manner prompted India to retaliate; maybe the hijack of the Indian Airlines aircraft to Kandahar in Afghanistan in 1999 and the humiliation that followed was too much to accept; maybe the destruction of the famed Bamyan statues in Afghanistan in 2001 was already an affront to India's civilization. Certainly, one thing led to another.

But 2001 was a cut-off point. India should have stopped in its tracks and reassessed. The Bonn conference in the winter of 2001 following the invasion of Afghanistan was the occasion for an ancient country like India to have pointed out to the world community that there could be no durable peace unless the vanquished and the defeated party was also brought into the settlement. The Europeans would have understood. But India's political leadership let the country down. Instead, India revived belief in its role to battle evil. On the other hand, if India had plodded through, the myth might have easily fallen away. And that might have offered a permanent solution to India's Taliban problem.

Note
1. The Monroe Doctrine is a US doctrine which, on December 2, 1823, said that European powers were no longer to colonize or interfere with the affairs of the newly independent nations of the Americas. The United States planned to stay neutral in wars between European powers and their colonies. However, if later on, these types of wars were to occur in the Americas, the United States would view such action as hostile. President James Monroe first stated the doctrine during his seventh annual State of the Union Address to Congress, a defining moment in the foreign policy of the United States. Most recently, during the Cold War, the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine (added during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt) was invoked as a reason to intervene militarily in Latin America to stop the spread of communism. - Wikipedia

Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar was a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service. His assignments included the Soviet Union, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Germany, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kuwait and Turkey.

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I am pleased to join Canadian Ismailis, as well as Ismailis around the world, in marking the accession of His Highness Prince Karim Aga Khan as Imam of the Shi'a Ismaili Muslims.

Mowlana Hazar Imam has now led the Ismaili Muslims for more than half a century. During those years he has exerted a profound influence within his community and far beyond. Canada has greatly benefited from members of the Ismaili community who have made this country their home and who contribute to all aspects of Canadian life.

As Prime Minister Stephen Harper has said, "We are proud to live in a country that embraces the many cultures and religions of the world. Our Government considers diversity to be one of this country's greatest assets, and we are committed to strengthening both our pluralism and our national unity."

I am pleased that the Government has a strong, long-standing relationship with Aga Khan Foundation Canada. This year marks the 25th anniversary of our collaboration. In Afghanistan, for example, the Foundation is a trusted partner of Canada in the effort to provide development, reconstruction and humanitarian assistance to ensure a brighter future for that country.

Canada is providing $8 million to the Aga Khan Foundation Canada for its Girls Education Support Program in Afghanistan. The program is helping girls gain access to high-quality learning opportunities in secure and supportive learning environments. It is expected to benefit more than 100,000 girls and 4,600 teachers in close to 350 schools in Bamyan, Baghlan and Badakshan provinces in northern Afghanistan.

Canada is also contributing some $7 million to the Foundation's Afghanistan Community Renewal Program. Our assistance helps to identify, implement and sustain a number of projects that foster rural development and literacy. Together, these initiatives are making a significant difference in the lives of many Afghans.

We are also honoured that His Highness is establishing the Delegation of the Ismaili Imamat in Ottawa and the Aga Khan Museum and the Ismaili Centre in Toronto.

The Government of Canada is pleased to have a valued partner in the Aga Khan Foundation Canada.

As Secretary of State (Multiculturalism and Canadian Identity), I extend sincere congratulations to His Highness Prince Karim Aga Khan on the 51st anniversary of his accession as Imam. I encourage all Canadians to join in the Imamat Day celebrations and to learn more about the remarkable contributions of the Aga Khan and the Canadian Ismaili community.

For more information, please contact
Office of the Honourable Jason Kenney, P.C., M.P.
Secretary of State (Multiculturalism and Canadian Identity)
Alykhan Velshi
Director of Communications
alykhan_velshi@pch.gc.ca

Text of report by state-owned National Afghanistan TV on 8 July

The delegation sent to the Kaj Ab area of Maydan Wardag Province presented a report on the result of their assessments to Hamed Karzai, the president of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, today.

A meeting was held at the presidential palace today. The meeting was attended by the ministers of national defence and interior, and members of the delegation sent to the Kaj Ab area of Maydan Wardag Province.


Shahzada Masud, head of the delegation, briefed the president about his assessment of the dispute between Kochi nomads and local residents, and gave his recommendations to address the dispute.

The delegation proposed that an authorized delegation, composed of representatives from judicial bodies and influential personalities from the two sides, should be established to help find a fundamental and permanent solution to the dispute.

The delegation also asked for an immediate end to armed violence in the area, and urged the government to collect illegal weapons from the two sides.

The meeting also discussed other mechanisms that could help ensure peace and brotherhood among Kochi nomads and members of Hazara [ethnic group]. The meeting decided that the final decision of the government would be announced to the two sides next week.

Originally published by National Afghanistan TV, Kabul, in Dari and Pashto 1530 8 Jul 08.

Story Source: BBC Monitoring South Asia Read the full story

A REFUGEE hoping to remain in the UK after fleeing Afghanistan has taken his plight to West Ham MP Lyn Brown.

Brampton Manor pupil Kamal Begi, 16, visited the House of Commons to present her with a petition containing more than 1,000 signatures. He was accompanied by his uncle Aramudin and school representatives.

Kamal, of Stratford, said: "I am touched by the sympathy shown by my MP. She seemed really to care and now I am hopeful that I shall be able to stay here."

Ms Brown said she would make representations on Kamal's behalf. If his application to stay fails she vowed to take his case to Minister for Borders and Immigration, Liam Byrne.

Threat of deportation hangs over Kamal who arrived in the UK as an asylum seeker more than six years ago.

He said his father and one of his two uncles were murdered and he was threatened with a gun.

His family belong to the Hazara tribe who have been subjected to ethnic cleansing, said Kamal.

Leaving family behind, Kamal arrived in the UK with his surviving uncle and was granted exceptional leave to remain for one year.

He applied for extension of his leave to remain but was turned down. He appealed in 2005 and is yet to have a decision.

A UK Border Agency spokesperson has said: "We do not comment on individual cases. We will not remove someone if they have an application outstanding or they are pursuing an avenue of appeal. Read the full story

You can kill them. It is not a sin,” he said over the radio. In another speech, he bragged: “Last year, you people of Mazar I sharif killed 10,000 Taliban. Now we have killed more than that.”A side note: if you want to talk about case studies of scoundrels who should be brought to justice, remember the name: Mullah Niazi. This brings me to the “story” we “missed.” It was at about this time, in August 1998 that bin Laden effectively hijacked the Afghan government. That is, a terrorist took control of a state, or key elements of a state. That would have been quite a headline. The

Full story is here Read the full story

From Registan .net

My involvement with Global Voices is one of those things I am deeply proud of, yet rarely write about. I met some incredible writers and free speech activists from Central Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and South America at the Budapest Summit last week. One guy I didn’t meet, whom I wish had more of a chance to discuss what he does with a Western audience, is Nasim Fekrat. In short, he travels around Afghanistan, arranging his own funding to run blogger workshops (which includes help for blogging anonymously) and advocates free speech and citizen’s media online. He is the exact kind of person Global Voices tries to support and encourage, and I respect him tremendously (and is a regular feature of my roundups at Global Voices).


Now meet Nasim Fekrat’s profile in Slate:

So he’s a primitive-looking mongoloid with buck teeth? How the hell did those sentences get past an editor? The rest of the profile is great, highlighting the ways in which he is exactly the kind of Public Intellectual 2.0 Daniel Drezner has gone on about before. And incredibly courageous, too—Fekrat works against a deeply engrained tradition against free speech, and challenges a lot of conservative mindsets in the process. But geez, easy on the 19th century racial psysiognomy next time, okay?

Fekrat’s photos, which are at times haunting and at times really funny, are here.

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The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) today announced plans to open a new office in Tirin Kot, the provincial capital of Uruzgan in southern Afghanistan.

The new UNAMA office will play a key role in helping local communities, coordinating development and humanitarian efforts, supporting local Government institutions to strengthen good governance and the rule of law, monitor human rights issues and to ensure more development assistance reaches the people of Uruzgan.


The Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Afghanistan, Kai Eide, said: ‘We are coming to Uruzgan to listen closely to the needs of the local community. The opening of our new office will be in direct support of the people of Uruzgan, aid agencies and other civil society organizations that want to deliver more development assistance in this vital province of southern Afghanistan’

‘The challenges of bringing development assistance to this province are vast but not insurmountable. Making progress will require the concerted and sustained effort of the central and provincial government as well as the donor community.’

Welcoming the opening of the new UN office, the Netherlands Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen said: ‘The Netherlands favours a strong UN presence in the South of Afghanistan. Today’s announcement signals further progress and increased stability in the province. The new UNAMA office will strengthen the civilian face of the international reconstruction efforts in Uruzgan and will have a positive impact on the lives of its citizens.’

Netherlands Minister for Development Co-operation Bert Koenders emphasized that: ‘The opening of the UNAMA office is crucial for the coordination of the reconstruction in Uruzgan. The UN plays an important pioneering role.’

Notes to editors:

- UNAMA has 17 other offices located in Mazar-e-Sharif; Kunduz; Herat; Kandahar; Nangarhar; Bamyan; Kabul; Gardez; Ghor; Kunar; Khost; Nimroz; Badghis; Maimana; Faizabad, Daikundi and Zabul provinces.

For more information on the work of UNAMA please visit: www.unama-afg.org

United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan
Spokesperson’s Office, Kabul, Afghanistan
Tel: 00 39 0831 24 6121 – 00 93 (0) 20 297 6121
Email: spokesperson-unama@un.org Website:
www.unama-afg.org
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With The Northern Alliance On The Move And A U.S. Assault Still Possible, Refugee Afghanis Say The Taliban Regime Is Vulnerable

Perched high in the arid mountains of central Afghanistan, the village of Kargamtu is one of the most isolated and destitute corners of the planet. Its 500 inhabitants dwell in mud huts without electricity; nobody owns a radio and few have ever heard of America.

But two weeks ago, frightening rumors began sweeping through Kargamtu about an imminent attack from a powerful, unnamed enemy. "People said, 'it isn't safe here, we must leave,'" says Roza Ma, 40, sitting on the roof of a half-finished mosque in a squalid neighborhood of Quetta, Pakistan. After village elders convened a meeting and urged Kargamtu's inhabitants to flee, Ma and her children stuffed their bags with clothing and bread and joined 40 other families on an eight-day journey by truck, bus and on foot to Pakistan. Along the way, she says, Taliban fighters frisked them at checkpoints, demanding bribes to allow them through. Ma, whose husband was killed by the Taliban in a massacre of Hazara tribespeople two years ago, feared meeting a similar fate. But, she says, "the Taliban didn't bother us."

The isolated regime may have more important matters to worry about. With a United States assault on Afghanistan still a possibility and the opposition Northern Alliance advancing toward Kabul from sanctuaries inside the Panjshir Valley, the Taliban government suddenly looks vulnerable. Refugees arriving in Pakistan describe forced conscriptions and the abandonment of hundreds of military checkpoints in western Afghanistan as Taliban fighters secure the country's borders or head toward the front line, north of Kabul. "Order appears to be breaking down," says one Western analyst in Pakistan.

Meanwhile, a refugee crisis is looming. By late last week, 1 million people were on the move inside Afghanistan, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Many were fleeing the cities for rural areas; thousands were making for the frontier with Pakistan and Iran. Both those countries have closed their borders, though border guards often look the other way in exchange for a small bribe, and Pakistan has promised to allow refugees in if Afghanistan disintegrates.

By some accounts, that disintegration is already underway. Word of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon spread within hours to many Afghanis over the Farsi- and Pashto-language services of the BBC and Voice of America. In the Taliban's strongholds, Kandahar and Kabul, "there was a big panic and a big exodus," says a Western relief worker in Quetta. By the end of the week, rumors of the crisis had filtered to even the most remote regions of the country. In the Tajik village of Mehmaniya in northern Afghanistan, Mohammed Abdullah, 58, heard neighbors murmuring about airplane attacks on tall buildings, thousands of deaths, suicide bombers killing opposition leader Ahmed Shah Massoud and probable war between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance. Abdullah sold his carpets, wood-timbered roof, two cows and four sheep, gathered his wife and five children and hopped trucks all the way to the border with Quetta, where he paid a Pakistani guard 100 rupees to let the family through. "Everyone believes that a big war is coming," says the bearded farmer, squatting in a mud-hut refugee camp in Quetta known as Jungle Bagh.

The Taliban is preparing, as well. Many young men have reportedly been press-ganged; most come from the Pashtun tribe, which dominates Afghanistan's south and west and fills the Taliban's ranks. But refugees fleeing from Kabul toward Northern Alliance territory say that Taliban militiamen are "rounding up young men from all ethnic groups and forcing them to fight," says one Western relief worker in Quetta. In one incident, Taliban militiamen stopped 40 Tajik families who tried to cross into Iran and ordered the men in the convoy to report for military duty. Taliban checkpoints along the 450-kilometer stretch of road between Kandahar and Herat were deserted last week, evidence, according to Western aid workers, that the government is dispatching all available troops to the front lines.
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By Scott Taylor

His name is Mullah Abdul Salam Rocketi, which loosely translates to "Reverend Bazooka" and is a moniker he proudly earned for his battlefield proficiency with rocket-propelled grenades.

Although he originally fought against the Soviets, Rocketi still wears the black turban of the Taliban with whom he served as a commander until the U.S. intervention toppled the regime in 2001.

Rocketi is back in Kabul these days serving in the Afghan parliament as a democratically elected opposition member for the volatile southern province of Zabul. The former top-level Talib commander now finds himself in the difficult position of participating in a government that many of his former followers continue to violently resist.

The short, stocky, heavily bearded Rocketi still looks every inch the defiant fighter, but in a private interview he expressed sincere respect for the ongoing insurgency in Afghanistan.

"Most of the problem comes from our neighbours: Pakistan, Iran and Russia," he said. "They are interfering with our internal affairs at all levels of government and fuelling the insurgents through the provision of weapons and other war material."

In order to counter this threat, Rocketi believes that the Afghan administration must undergo a thorough housecleaning to remove incompetent, corrupt officials.

"All discrimination within the government needs to be removed and replaced with people who can create an effective administration," said Rocketi.

Surprisingly, he has not only called for a continued presence of international troops, he has also recommended that the U.S.-led coalition and NATO forces work more closely with the Afghan National Army to help reduce the number of unnecessary civilian deaths.

"As soon as the international forces leave Afghanistan, civil war will erupt throughout the entire country between our narrow ethnicities and tribes," said Rocketi. "In that situation there will be insecurity in 80 per cent of the provinces as opposed to the current 20 per cent."

As for the timetable for such a scenario, Rocketi predicted the presidency of Hamid Karzai "would not last more than a few hours without foreign troops."

To stave off a widening of the current crisis, he recommends that an immediate dialogue be opened with Taliban moderates such as himself in order to reduce the influence of the militant insurgents.


'They Refuse to Listen to My Warnings'

While sharing the same strategic assessment as to the disruptive influence of neighbouring states, former warlord Pocha Khan Zadran believes that closing the border with Pakistan is the key to defeating the insurgency. More importantly, Pocha Khan claims that his followers are willing and able to accomplish the task.

As a Pashtun tribal leader, he controlled four provinces in eastern Afghanistan following the Soviet occupation. When the Taliban movement came to power in 1994, Pocha Khan's troops formed a loose alliance with the Talib leaders, rather than resisting them.

"I handed over my weapons to them believing at first they were religious students," explained Pocha Khan in an interview at his Kabul residence. "After six months, I realized they weren't what they said they were...and then I began to oppose them."

When President Karzai came to power in 2002, Pocha Khan was appointed governor of the province of Paktia. However, when allegations surfaced that the former warlord was trying to undermine Karzai's administration, he was stripped of his official title and, in fact, was briefly forced into hiding after a $1-million bounty was placed on his head.

Nevertheless, in the rugged tribal regions of eastern Afghanistan, Pocha Khan remains an unchallenged leader who insists that he can help defeat the insurgency.

"The problem is the foreigners. [The U.S. and NATO] are doing the wrong things based on the wrong information," he explained. "If they gave me control of the border provinces, within two months you will not find a single Talib in the region."

The Pashtuns along the Pakistan border are traditionally known to be a fiercely independent and isolated people.

"The solution to closing the border is to use my tribal military [forces] instead of the Afghan National Army or the foreigners to fight the Taliban," said Pocha Khan. "But the Americans remain opposed to this idea."

A senior official within the Afghan intelligence service confirmed that Pocha Khan's followers have the military means to eliminate the Taliban in their region.

"These people listen to and obey their tribal leaders, and in turn those leaders listen to and obey Pocha Khan," said the intelligence officer. "When the U.S. and Afghan army go into those villages and innocent people get killed, it only makes things worse."

Until the U.S. adopts a different strategy, Pocha Khan believes, the insurgency cannot be defeated.

"The Americans are like a blind man walking on a roof," said the ex-warlord. "I can see clearly that they are about to fall off, but they refuse to listen to my warnings."


'It Will Be the People's Will'

His office is a small tent erected on the shoulder of the highway that runs in front of the Afghan parliament building. Inside, a tattered flag of Afghanistan hangs behind a small desk that is surrounded by a half- dozen plastic chairs. Seated behind the desk is the slightly built Dr. Ramazan Bashardost, a former cabinet minister in the Karzai government turned anti-corruption crusader, and if he has his way, the future president of Afghanistan.

He rises, acknowledges Canada's commitment to Afghanistan's security, and then immediately delivers his message: "Your young Canadian soldiers give their blood for Afghanistan...but there is no reconstruction, only corruption. Canadian development money should be used for big projects, not for buying private luxury houses for government officials and luxury cars with television sets in them."

Bashardost certainly understands the extent of corruption in Afghanistan better than most and speaks out against it publicly more than anyone. After studying in France and obtaining a PhD in international affairs, Bashardost returned to his native Afghanistan following the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001.

As a strong proponent for human rights for all Afghans, President Hamid Karzai appointed Bashardost as his minister of planning in 2004. In this capacity, he undertook a study of the effectiveness of the foreign and Afghan NGOs operating in the country. At that time there were approximately 2,300 agencies registered, employing nearly 52,000 people throughout Afghanistan.

"I recommended to close down over 1,900 of those NGOs that were in operation because they were not actually providing aid to the people," he says. "People were spending $10,000 a month to rent themselves a massive house and hiring their families at exorbitant salaries—and no one was benefiting from their work."

When President Karzai refused to act upon Bashardost's recommendation to shut down the ineffective NGOs, he quit the cabinet and was eventually elected as an independent member of parliament.

Although he would have been guaranteed a seat if he chose to run in his home province of Ghazni, as an ethnic Hazara, Bashardost wanted to secure a national mandate of anti-corruption by running in the capital of Kabul. Buoyed by his success, he now believes that the people of Afghanistan are prepared to set aside their past differences and unite behind him to eliminate corruption. He is registered as a presidential candidate to run against Karzai and he vows that, if elected, he will end the war between the government forces and the insurgents.

"The Taliban are not the problem. It is the corrupt mujahedeen warlords who have been returned to power in the form of the Karzai administration," says Bashardost. "My first priority after I'm elected will be to put the war criminals on trial and to replace all the corrupt governors with responsible, capable people."

One of the key messages that Bashardost keeps repeating is that the foreign aid being pumped into Afghanistan is more than sufficient to rebuild the country.

"To date, more than $60 billion U.S. has been provided in aid to this country, which is more than 10 times the pre-2001 annual GDP," he says. "But most of that money has ended up heading back out of Afghanistan rather than into the hands of Afghans."

One of the reasons for this is that most of the foreign aid-funded reconstruction projects are contracted out to foreign companies. Afghan construction firms end up providing labourers as sub-contractors, but the majority of the highly paid specialists and material are imported and therefore the money does not remain in Afghanistan. By eliminating the government corruption and maximizing the aid money already allocated to Afghanistan, Bashardost intends to then eliminate the rampant illegal drug trade.

When asked just how exactly he intends to eradicate Afghanistan of its warlords, corrupt politicians and druglords when he possesses no private army of his own, Bashardost simply shrugs his shoulders and says, "It will be the people's will."

After excusing himself from the interview, he steps through the tent flap and drives off in a battered little old car. It is hard not to admire the fact that this solitary man with virtually no means actually believes he can achieve his goal.

Scott Taylor is the publisher of Esprit de Corps military magazine and author of several books. Since the 1990s, he has covered conflicts in Iraq and the Balkans. This was his third unembedded trip into Afghanistan.

editor@embassymag.ca Read the full story

The Taliban's bloodthirsty top commander in southern Afghanistan scares almost everyone--even his allies and underlings. A profile in brutality.

If you hoped his June 7 death might be the end of the line for Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, you really don't want to see the newest recruitment videos for the Taliban. Although they never mention the Jordanian-born terrorist by name, the echoes of his Internet videos--and his sheer viciousness--are unmistakable and chilling. The star is Mullah Dadullah Akhund, a one-legged guerrilla commander in southern Afghanistan who now seems bent on matching or exceeding Zarqawi's ugly reputation.

In one scene, the black-turbaned Taliban commander, posing for the camera in a southern Afghan moonscape, blasts away at an unseen target with a heavy machine gun. Another sequence has him doling out his blessings to a succession of young men being sent to carry out suicide bombings in Afghan cities and near military bases. The most revolting footage shows a gang of Dadullah's thugs slitting the throats, one by one, of six Afghans they accuse of spying for the Americans. As each head is severed, it is grabbed and placed facing the camera, atop the torso of the victim's sprawled corpse.

This year's armed push by the Taliban has been the biggest and bloodiest since they lost Kabul in 2001, and Dadullah is believed to be spearheading it. The surge of suicide bombings, school burnings and guerrilla ambushes has killed more than 100 Afghan civilians and at least 40 Coalition soldiers, including 24 U.S. troops. For the first time in memory, Taliban guerrillas under Dadullah have succeeded in capturing government installations in the remote south, if only for brief periods. (Some of those raids are documented in the new recruitment videos, obtained by NEWSWEEK from an Afghan involved in making copies for distribution.) Villagers say that ever-increasing numbers of Taliban fighters are roaming the countryside, entering villages at night--sometimes even in broad daylight--and warning the inhabitants not to cooperate with the Americans or their allies, on pain of death.

Dadullah's own men don't want to risk his anger. Mullah Ghul Agha, who identifies himself as Dadullah's third in command, spoke to NEWSWEEK recently in an apple orchard on a small farm in Helmand province's Barakzai district. He says his boss's disposition swings abruptly from cheerfulness to rage: "For two hours he can be in a good humor, then suddenly he changes into a dark mood that can last for hours," Agha says. No one dares to cross or contradict Dadullah. "He would kill anyone for not obeying orders," says Agha. "I certainly would not want to face Dadullah on the battlefield."

Dadullah built a reputation for cruelty as a Taliban field commander in the 1990s. He lost his leg to a land mine in 1995, the year before the Taliban took Kabul, but he returned from the hospital in Karachi with a prosthetic limb and meaner than ever, fighting his way to become one of the Taliban's three deputy defense ministers. His name became so identified with atrocities that Taliban radio would report he was engaged in battles even when he was not, as a ploy to unnerve opposing forces.

He specialized in brutal assignments. One, in 1998, was to pacify the ethnic minority Hazaras, a Shiite group in Bamian province. Dadullah's tactics were so ruthless--he massacred hundreds of Hazara civilians--that Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar relieved him of his command. Even so, a year later Dadullah was back in the field, leading a major drive against the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance in far-north Kunduz province and reportedly slaughtering Tajik and Uzbek noncombatants by the hundreds. Read the full story

When has a state ever been able to curb an insurgency without firm control over its borders? Under the guidance of the Pentagon's planners, Pakistan and Afghanistan are in the process of making history. Each seeks to curb the insurgency within its territory while keeping open its border with the other, ostensibly the very source of insurgency.

The current insurgency notwithstanding, the Pakistani-Afghan border, the Durand Line, is contested since 1947. Pakistan upholds the 1893 demarcation while Afghanistan claims more territory. The UN uses the Afghan maps. The US and NATO use the Pakistani map but mouth the Afghan view.

Pakistan had an opportunity to secure Kabul's endorsement of the Durand Line when the Taliban ruled Afghanistan from 1996-2001. Because all three of the current incumbents, the PPP, the PML-N and Musharref held office during this period, each is to blame for missing the most expedient geopolitical moment to secure bilateral settlement of the Durand Line. In 1998 Jalaluddin Haqqani's appointment as minister for border affairs in the Taliban government meant that the key portfolio in the matter was held by the ISI's protégé. During the time in question, a nuclear-capable Pakistan, oblivious to the geostrategic implications of the 1991 invasion of Iraq, remained preoccupied with conventional strategic depth, vis-à-vis India, through Afghanistan, and failed to secure its immediate border interest.

The United States' invasion of Afghanistan turned Pakistan's "strategic depth" into a strategic nightmare. Pakistan faces a myriad of geostrategic hazards which include the cross-border infiltration of insurgents who are frequently bombed by the US in Pakistan's "lawless" areas. The locals feel terrorised and unprotected as their civilian casualties mount. Musharref's combat with the insurgents as U.S proxy provoked their incitement of the Pakhtuns against the "foreign yoke." The emotive cry of Pakhtun dignity under attack is echoed within the NWFP by groups such as the Pakistani Taliban and the Pakhtun Democratic Council. This has given rise to a Pakistani insurgency akin to the Afghan one.

India's influence in Afghanistan's Pakhtun region is enormous. Pakistan's policy has alienated everyone in Afghanistan, including Tajiks, Hazaras and Uzbeks, as well as the Pakhtuns. Pakistan-Afghanistan relations are at their worst, which makes the Durand Line a possible flashpoint of the future. Washington's declaration that FATA is a threat to US security magnifies the danger.

The current environment renders even positive developments vulnerable to manipulation by Islamabad's detractors. The ANP's victory exposes the marginality of extremism, legitimising Islamabad's fight against it. Paradoxically, while extremism serves the Taliban's purpose, the ANP gives the Karzai government an opportunity to woo Pakhtun nationalism. Both the Afghan contestants now have other avenues in the NWFP to exploit.

The Pentagon labels the Afghan insurgency "Taliban resurgence." US civil society follows suit. During a briefing in Washington's Woodrow Wilson Centre on April 18, a Rand Corporation associate and a Georgetown University professor lamented that NATO's goal in Afghanistan is complicated by a highly decentralised enemy. They called the enemy "multiple Taliban, with varying loyalties, depending on their geographic locations." The academicians failed to explain the logic through which a variety of insurgent groups are given a title that until 2001 identified a distinct Afghan faction.

Because the Afghan insurgents wear baggy clothes and do not shave regularly does not hoodwink the US commanders into believing all are Taliban. There are reasons why the insurgents are labelled so. The US intelligence seeks to shape political realities through political articulation. It seeks to isolate the population from the insurgents by identifying them as a discredited group. It also seeks the international community's acquiescence in the insurgents' massacre. Further, it triggers the resurgence of the Northern Alliance, which crystallised in 2006 as the "United Afghan National Front Opposition Group." The northern warlords' partnership with Karzai is insincere. He is considered a US puppet, just as the Taliban were considered Pakistani puppets. Karzai's appeasement of the moderate Taliban makes the northerners dread a government dominated by undesirable Pakhtun elements, motivating the northerners' reorganisation. Karzai's presence and the hoax of Taliban resurgence create fissiparous fissures in Afghanistan, straining its nationalism. If Iraq is any example to go by, this tendency will intensify under US occupation.

The Pakistani Pakhtuns left to the political and economic periphery hitherto defined themselves as peripheral. The war on terror is pressuring them into separatism. It is a maxim that in common catastrophe men move into unison. The brutality of the Afghan war is a common catastrophe for the Pakhtuns. Unless Islamabad bifurcates its Pakhtuns from the Afghan ones, their struggle to protect themselves and their interests may lead them to seek strength in cross-border territorial unison. Kabul has every incentive to fan separatism in the NWFP.

There are no economic and political boundaries in FATA. Once such boundaries are established, ethnic identities will cease to exist as "autonomous" and will become "relational" instead. The politico-economic boundaries will define the Afghan and Pakistani Pakhtuns vis-à-vis each other. With the advent of rapid development through mining, the border citizens of Arizona began to identify themselves as Mexican Indians and American Indians vis-à-vis each other, whereas in the pre-development stage they looked upon each other as one. There is a consensus among anthropologists and sociologists that ethnic identities are not static but dynamic and are socially constructed and politically contingent.

Whereas the Afghan insurgency goes beyond the Taliban, the Pakistani insurgency does not. It is peripheral and can be controlled. The first step towards the goal is to impede the Taliban mobility to and from Afghanistan. Since late August 2006, Pakistan has conducted patrol of its border jointly with the Afghan military and NATO under a tripartite agreement. This would have sufficed, but for latent interests that have pushed Pakistan in the line of fire.

The way out of this peril is the sealing of the Durand Line and its high-tech monitoring, the integration of FATA into NWFP and its rapid rural development under a robust security network. The United States' hunt for Osama bin Laden through aerial bombardment is a gimmick. Dangerous individuals are apprehended covertly, not through bombardment. Actionable intelligence on Al Qaeda should be responded to by Pakistani covert forces in the field. Withdrawing forces from FATA is a blunder equivalent to fighting the insurgency on the neocons' terms. The mess they have made on foreign lands is unacceptable even to Americans. Pakistan's leadership needs to act like Russia's Putin to prevent its fissiparous fissures from deepening.



The writer, based in Washington, is an energy consultant and analyst of energy geopolitics. Email: zeenia.satti@ yahoo.com Read the full story

Unknown gunmen kidnapped a Chinese road engineer in southern Afghanistan, an official said Tuesday.

The Chinese national and his Afghan driver, were kidnapped Monday in Wardak province, just south of Kabul, acting provincial governor Ali Ahmad Khashi told AFP.

"His Afghan driver was freed by our security forces and efforts to free the Chinese national continue. He'll be freed very soon," the governor said but refused to give details for security reasons.

The men were working for a construction company building a road between Wardak and the central province of Bamyan, the governor added.

Taliban spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahed, whose militant group has been responsible for several such kidnappings denied involvement.

Taliban militants kidnapped two German nationals in July last year. The rebels killed one before releasing the other under a deal.

Around the same time the rebels abducted 23 South Korean nationals and killed two of them before freeing the others.

Criminal gangs have also been involved in kidnapping Afghan and foreign nationals for ransom. Read the full story

By William Pfaff

The Bush government was elected in 2000 on a platform including vigorous opposition to the United States Army’s doing “nation-building.” Swedes, Danes, the European Union, and NGOs did nation-building. The U.S. Army was a fighting army.

This was the principle on which the new U.S. volunteer Army was formed after Vietnam. It is the explanation why, after the fall of Baghdad in 2003, the Army looked on, bemused, while the people of Baghdad hesitantly, and then enthusiastically, tore down the phone and power wires, dug up the copper pipes, and destroyed the power generators of the city infrastructure, looting their own capital city of everything that had value and could be sold.

U.S. commanders, asked to protect at least the National Archaeological Museum, and the arts museums and universities, politely replied to curators, professors and concerned citizens, “Sorry, Sir (or Ma’am), we don’t do that sort of thing.” We only protect ourselves and the Oil Ministry.

What a difference a five-year-long military disaster can make! It now has cleared the way for another and opposite disaster. In the latest issue of the journal Foreign Affairs, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says that “it is absolutely clear that [the United States] will be involved in nation-building for years to come. Democratic state-building is now an urgent component of our national interest.”

In the U.S. Army, “a new generation of military leaders [is being trained] for stabilization and counterinsurgency missions” for decades to come, part of “our long-term partnerships with Afghanistan and Iraq, our new relationships in Central Asia, and our long-standing partnerships in the Persian Gulf, providing a solid geostrategic foundation for the generational work ahead.”

This means American efforts to place and/or maintain in power, by military means when necessary, pro-American governments that will cooperate in an area-wide American policy of suppressing fundamentalist Islamic movements, and combating Palestine liberation groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah, hostile to the United States as well as Israel, or committed to the idea of anti-Western jihad. That’s not the way the secretary of state phrased it; she talks about nation-building and creating democracy. But that is what she was saying.

One might have thought that a decade of laying waste to Vietnam and Cambodia in order to accomplish “democratic state-building” would have taught the eminently practical lesson that the United States cannot democratic-state-build for anyone else. It is not even a total success in doing it at home.

It is a rule in the life of modern nations that nationalism trumps all else. If the government in Saigon, or a government in Baghdad or Kabul, cannot, even with appropriate foreign material assistance, establish and maintain order within its own frontiers and by its own means, armed legions of foreign democracy-teachers, state-builders and winners of hearts and mind cannot do it for them.

As the British soldier—and state-builder in Bosnia—Paddy Ashdown said recently, the time it takes for a liberation army to turn into an occupation army is very short. The transformation is already well-advanced, if not complete, in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

In denial of that fact, the Bush administration has ordered reorganization and retraining of American military and political expeditionary forces so as to continue to build nations and democracy, by means of armed intervention and military occupation, for many more years in unlucky Middle Eastern and Central Asian countries (and who knows wherever else).

It is an axiom of history that no government put in place by foreign troops, or needing to be maintained in place by them against internal opposition, can be considered a legitimate government.

The Taliban in Afghanistan are not the Russian army, overrunning Afghanistan with tanks and helicopters, or an invading British colonial army. If they were, the problem would be simple. They are Afghans, members of the 40-million-strong Pathan (or Pushtoon) people, who make up the largest part of the Afghan population. If other Pathans, inside Afghanistan, who are not religious fundamentalists, and the Tajiks, Hazaras and Uzbeks who make up the rest of the country’s population, do not wish to be ruled by Pathan religious reactionaries, they should not need 60,000 NATO and U.S. troops to defend them. If they will not defend themselves, there is nothing the foreigners can do to save them from their countrymen.

The same is true of the Iraqis. The only foreign army that has invaded Iraq is the American Army. The Iraq government is resisting long-term American extraterritorial presence in the country, and Iraqis increasingly are pressing the United States to get out. They are finding that the Pentagon and the White House have actually been planning to stay indefinitely (for 100 years?). This automatically will sooner or later produce popular uprising against military occupation.

Then what will an Obama or McCain administration do? It might order the troops to pull out. It will be accused of surrendering America to forces of evil.

Or it might order the Army and Marines to do again what was done to Falluja. They could forget about democracy and nation-building.

In the present (post-political-campaign) stage of American foreign policy thinking, and under mounting pressure from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee for military solutions in the region, all of this deserves more reflection than it is receiving. Read the full story

Mirza Hussain, and other prisoners like him, had labored for hours to stack mines, bombs and dynamite beneath the feet of Afghanistan s most iconic public artwork — a 175-foot standing statue of the Buddha carved from the sandstone cliffs of the Bamiyan Valley sometime in the 7th century.

Bamyan, 29 June: Mirza Hussain, and other prisoners like him, had labored for hours to stack mines, bombs and dynamite beneath the feet of Afghanistan s most iconic public artwork — a 175-foot standing statue of the Buddha carved from the sandstone cliffs of the Bamiyan Valley sometime in the 7th century. Finally, the local Taliban commander blew his whistle, and hundreds of observers plugged their ears, held their breath and waited for the Buddha to fall. It didn t. The first load of explosives only destroyed the statue s feet. "They were disappointed," says Hussain, of the Taliban leaders who had decreed in March of 2001 that the famous Buddhist monument was idolatrous, and would be demolished. Initially, Taliban fighters had fired at the Buddha with assault rifles, stinger missiles and RPGs, to little effect. When the stacked explosives at the statue s base failed, Hussain and other prisoners were dangled over the edge of the cliffs to stuff dynamite into holes in the soft stone. "Our soldiers are working hard to demolish the remaining parts," announced Mawlawi Qudratullah Jamal, the Taliban s minister of information and culture, at a press conference in Kabul a day later. "It is easier to destroy than to build."

He was right. Within days the Taliban had all but decimated the remains of a magnificent Buddhist civilization that had for six centuries ruled this strategic valley at the crossroads of Central Asian trade. They rampaged through the caves that honeycomb Bamiyan s cliffs, smashing thousands of smaller Buddha sculptures. They chiseled intricate frescoes from the walls, and where they weren t able to tear off the plaster, they gouged out the eyes and hands of those depicted. Locals say the figures in the images bore facial features typical of the Hazara, the persecuted Shi ite minority group that populates the province. The Taliban massacred hundreds of Hazaras when they took control of Afghanistan; many in the valley believe that the destruction of the Buddhas was an extension of their genocidal campaign. "The Buddhas had eyes like ours, and the Taliban destroyed them like they tried to destroy us," says Marzia Mohammadi, a midwife. "They wanted to kill our culture, erase us from this valley."

Seven years on, archaeologists and volunteers from around the world are doing what they can to put the symbols of Bamiyan s Buddhist legacy back together again. Piles of shattered rock lie stacked under shelters of corrugated iron and plastic sheeting where the Buddhas once stood. Under debate, right now, is the question of how and whether the statues should be rebuilt. Little remains of the stucco coat and sculpted stone that gave the Buddhas of Bamiyan their definition. Putting them back together again would be akin to piecing together a puzzle of a million pieces — but without the benefit of an image printed on the box top. Nevertheless, Habiba Sarabi, Bamiyan s governor, believes rebuilding the Buddhas is important for the psychic well-being of her province. "The Buddhas were a part of the life of people in Bamiyan," she says. "Now the empty niches of the Buddhas affect the landscape, so the people share the sorrow."

In a process called anastylosis, original fragments of damaged statuary can be pieced together with cement or other materials — as has been done at Cambodia s ancient Angkor Wat temple complex. But if less than half of the original material remains, says restoration experts, the new structure loses its historical value, and should be considered a replica. And being rebuilt as a replica could put the World Heritage Site status of the Bamiyan Buddhas at risk. Archaeologists have estimated that about 50% of the original stone remains, but a full study has yet to be completed.

Abdul Ahad Abassy, head of Afghanistan s Preservation and Restoration of Historical Monuments department, sees a pattern in the Taliban s efforts to take down the Buddhas. One of Afghanistan s early Islamic kings tore through the caves in the 11th century, smashing idols as he went. And at the end of the 19th century the mother of then King Abdul Rahman had cannons fired at the standing Buddhas. Afghan history, he says, is filled with characters who attempt to erase the past. They, too, are part of Afghanistan s heritage — a heritage that it is his job to preserve. So, Bamiyan s Buddhas present a conundrum. Brutal though it may have been, the Taliban legacy is an important part of Afghanistan s recent past. The empty niches of Bamiyan are testament to a ruthlessness that should not be forgotten — rebuilding the Buddhas would be a kind of erasure. "The present condition of the buddhas is in itself an expression of our history," says Abassy. "No matter how good or bad the Taliban were, we cannot tear that page from the book."

Governor Sorabi sees a Solomonic compromise that both respects Afghanistan s recent history while celebrating its ancient culture. "We have many empty niches to be reminders of the dark parts of our history," she says. "If we rebuild one Buddha, we can leave the other as it is." Read the full story

By Betsy Hiel

The "land of the Afghans" has long bedeviled invaders and would-be conquerors.

As a local proverb holds: "It is easy to enter ... but very hard to leave."

Slightly smaller than Texas, it is a landlocked country of jagged, snowcapped peaks, dusty, open plains and deserts. North of the capital, Kabul, the Hindu Kush mountains divide Central Asia and South Asia.

The influence of its neighbors -- Pakistan, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and China -- is seen in the ethnically mixed faces of its national army.

The nearly 33 million Afghans include 20 ethnic groups speaking more than 30 languages. The Pashto-speaking Pashtun tribe is the largest, at 42 percent. They live by an ancient code, Pashtunwali, of hospitality and revenge.

The Dari or Persian-speaking Tajiks are the second largest, followed by Hazara, Uzbek, Aimak, Turkmen, Baloch and others.

As an East-West crossroads, Afghanistan became a buffer in the "Great Game" between the Russian and British-Indian empires in the late 19th century.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the British fought and lost three wars against the Afghans. Seeking to divide the Pashtuns, who spread out into present-day Pakistan, the British drew the Durand Line, still a point of contention between Afghans and Pakistanis.

The Soviets invaded in 1979, but withdrew in 1988 after failing to defeat U.S.- and Saudi-backed Afghan mujahideen.

Following seven years of civil war, the Pashtun-dominated Taliban seized control in 1996, imposed an austere, brutal interpretation of Islam, and harbored Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida terrorists. The Sept. 11 attacks sparked a U.S. invasion and the overthrow of the Taliban.

Today, President Hamid Karzai's weak central government is trying to broaden its influence to tribal-ruled regions.

Presidential elections are scheduled for 2009, parliamentary elections in 2010.

Afghanistan remains one of the poorest nations, with a per-capita annual income of $1,000 and literacy rate of 43.1 percent among men, 12.6 percent among women.

Due to extreme poverty, government corruption and the relative ease of growing poppies, Afghanistan has become the world's opium capital. It cultivates 93 percent of the globe's opium, and its poppy crop represents more than half of the country's GDP, according to the United Nations.

The Taliban has tapped into the narcotics trade to finance its insurgency.

Around 70,000 foreign troops are in Afghanistan -- some 53,000 under NATO command (including 23,550 Americans) and 16,000 under U.S. command. The United States, Britain, Canada and the Netherlands have led the fighting in volatile southern provinces.

Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has called for higher troop levels, citing a 40 percent surge in violence in recent months.

"We are short of forces there," he said at a recent Pentagon briefing. "I need at least an additional three brigades, one of them a training brigade."

Betsy Hiel can be reached at hielb@yahoo.com. Read the full story