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January 18, 2006
"This is too critical to just say we want victory but we want it on the cheap. We're still in a war, and we need to win."
—U.S. Ambassador Ronald Neumann
"We do not want bombing of our villages. We do not want searches of our homes. We don't want our civilians harassed anymore."
—President Hamid Karzai
"If this report is not sufficient, then the NGOs are ready to answer parliament's questions. We have nothing to hide."
—Anga Debeer, director of the Agency Coordination Body for Afghan Relief, which submitted
an activity report for the past six months to the Economics Ministry.
"We apologize, but I can’t tell you that we wouldn’t do the same thing again …We have to do what we think is necessary to take out al Qaeda, particularly the top operatives. This guy has been more visible than Osama bin Laden lately."
—Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), on "Meet the Press,"
discussing the attack on al-Zawahiri.
Afghanistan By the Numbers
(Source: IRIN Afghanistan Year in Review 2005 unless noted)
- Estimated illicit drug users in Afghanistan, 2005: 920,000
- Percentage of Afghan population using illicit drugs, 2005: 3.8 percent
- Percentage of U.S. population using illicit drugs (2001): 7.1 percent ( ONDCP )
- Former Afghan combatants disarmed and reintegrated, 2003-2005: 60,646
- Estimated “illegal armed groups” active in Afghanistan : ~1,900
- Human rights violations reported to AIHRC, 2005: 4,236
- Afghan women who set themselves on fire to escape forced marriages, 2005: 100
- Fatalities from conflict-related violence, 2005: 1,600
- Aid worker fatalities, 2005: 31
- Aid worker fatalities, 2004: 24
Wave of attacks strikes Afghanistan
This weekend was the bloodiest on recent record. According to Defense Minister Rahim Wardak, the timing is no accident: "It has to do with the London conference. And it has to do with the NATO takeover." Here’s a rundown of the reported attacks:
Jan 16:
Spin Boldak: A man on a motorcycle rides into a crowd of hundreds and detonates a bomb, killing at least 20 and injuring at least 30 more.
Kandahar: Witnesses report that a teenager ran in front of a military convoy and exploded his vest. The attack kills three Afghan soldiers and two civilians and injures four Afghan soldiers and 10 civilians.
Jan 15:
Kandahar: An attack on a Canadian military convey kills two Afghans and a senior Canadian diplomat, Glyn Berry. Thirteen others are wounded, including three Canadian soldiers, two of them critically.
Jan 14:
Kandahar : Gunmen assassinate Mohammed Khaksar, a former Taliban minister who defected several years ago and ran in parliamentary elections this fall.
Khost: Two separate bomb incidents kill one and injure 40. In one incident, a bomber struck in a crowd celebrating Eidul Azha.
Helmand: A suicide bomb targeting a Coalition-Afghan convoy injures one U.S. soldier.
Paktia: Fighting kills one Afghan soldier and two insurgents.
Jan 13:
Uruzgan: A U.S. military patrol kills six insurgents in a firefight.
Pakistan: U.S. military strike kills at least 18; the toll includes both suspected terrorists and civilians.
Helmand: Militants burn down a school.
*RFE/RL has a useful chronology of suicide attacks since 2001
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A Predator unmanned drone, which may have been used in the Pakistan airstrike.
Source: Department of Defense |
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Pakistan: Thousands protest U.S. airstrike; Four foreign terrorists among dead
Reports on the impact of the air strike targeting Ayman al-Zawahri have varied, and it is still not clear what transpired. Early reports suggested only civilian fatalities, but one Pakistani official has claimed that as many as seven foreign jihadists and four local fighters were also killed (which would bring the death toll into the 30s.) Pakistan ’s information minister has said that a strong protest would be made to the U.S. ambassador. With thousands of anti-U.S. protesters on the street, this incident seems poised to have a resounding political impact in the region—whether or not there were jihadists among the dead.
PESHAWAR, January 17 (AP)—At least four foreign terrorists died in the purported U.S. airstrike aimed at Al Qaeda's No. 2 leader in a Pakistani border village, the provincial government said Tuesday. A statement, issued by the administration of Pakistan's semiautonomous tribal regions bordering Afghanistan, also said that between 10 and 12 foreign extremists had been invited to the dinner at the village hit in Friday's attack.
It was the first official confirmation by Pakistani authorities that foreign militants were killed in the attack on the village of Damadola . Women and children also died, triggering outrage in this Islamic nation. . .Damadola residents claim all the victims were locals and they buried them all. One Pakistani official told The Associated Press Saturday that the bodies had been taken away for DNA tests, although it wasn't clear by whom.
The statement, citing the chief official in the Bajur region where the Damadola is located, said its findings were from a report compiled by a "joint investigation team" but gave no specifics on who was included in the team. "Four or five foreign terrorists have been killed in this missile attack whose dead bodies have been taken away by their companions to hide the real reason of the attack," the statement said.
"It is regrettable that 18 local people lost their lives in the attack, but this fact also cannot be denied, that 10-12 foreign extremists had been invited on a dinner," it said. . .
The attack has become an embarrassment for Islamabad , a staunch U.S. ally in the war on terrorism. Many in this nation of 150 million people oppose the government's backing of the United States in the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. . .Thousands of Pakistanis took to the streets over the weekend, chanting "Death to America " and calling for the resignation of military leader President Gen. Pervez Musharraf. . .
NATO and the Netherlands
The latest wave of violence is unlikely to embolden the Dutch parliament. A Dutch refusal to send troops would not derail the deployment—NATO has already said it is committed to providing 6,000 additional troops, whether or not the Dutch follow through—but it would call into doubt the credibility of NATO as an institution.
Ahmed Rashid has criticized the “national caveats” that have “paralyzed NATO commanders in Kabul”:
Spanish troops based in the west will rarely leave their compound. German troops in the north will allow no other NATO troops to fly in their helicopters. Every nation has a different concept of running a PRT which makes any kind of unified reconstruction programme in the provinces next to impossible. Moreover NATO troops seem far more concerned about their own security than the security of the Afghans they are supposed to be protecting.
Vance Serchuk of the American Enterprise Institute argues that this issue is symptomatic of the flaws in America’s strategy of “outsourcing” Afghanistan to NATO:
The Netherlands' skittishness makes for an important cautionary tale not only about the near-farcical indecision of a European ally in the war on terror, but more important, the risks inherent in outsourcing ever-greater responsibility for Afghanistan to NATO, as the Bush administration evidently hopes to do. . .
Does it really make sense to hand southern Afghanistan to a coalition of British, Canadian, and Dutch forces under the NATO flag while the counterinsurgency is in full swing? Putting aside why it might not be a mistake, what exactly makes it necessary?
In truth, NATO's expansion into southern Afghanistan isn't being driven by conditions on the ground or by what makes sense for winning the war there. Rather, it is a function of the Pentagon's misplaced desire to reduce its commitments in the Middle East and bludgeon some defense reform out of Brussels in the process. . .
Above all, however, the Bush administration needs to stop thinking about Afghanistan as a burden to be shrugged off. Washington will be on the right track when it starts doing a little more listening to its friends in Kabul—and a little less worrying about whether the Netherlands is coming along for the ride.
Originally Dutch hesitation centered around two issues: the security situation and the Afghan government’s support of the death penalty. The latter was ostensibly resolved earlier this month with an agreement by Afghan authorities that any detainees provided by ISAF would not face the death penalty. The former remains an impediment, in large part because of the 1995 Srebrenica fiasco.
Henk van de Poll, a Dutch journalist, argues below that the rational debate over risks and benefits has been “totally over-shadowed by a political poker game” between Holland’s political parties. America’s ham-handed diplomacy helped stoke the opposition’s dissent. The Administration sent Paul Bremer, a former Ambassador to the Netherlands to threaten economic penalties if Holland didn’t deliver—a move that has clearly backfired. Tuesday, Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende said the United States has shown "too little respect for what the Netherlands has done over the years for the international community."
If the Dutch remain divided about the value of NATO expansion—one poll showed 71 percent opposed it—Afghans do not. The most recent polling research, conducted by the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes, shows that Afghan citizens overwhelmingly support NATO expansion (by a margin of 66 percent to 18 percent)and would like to see NATO expanded even further (58 percent to 5 percent).
A floor debate on the issue is scheduled for next week, though a final decision is unlikely to emerge until February.
How Afghanistan led to war in The Hague
January 12 (ANP) translated from an article by Henk van de Poll—If Dutch troops go to Afghanistan, the junior coalition party (D66) may drag its ministers out of the Dutch government, causing it to collapse. . .The long-running indecision about dispatching 1,200 troops to the south of Afghanistan is turning into a political poker game, with the fate of the Dutch government at stake. All sides seem prepared to let the crisis go down to the wire and no one is about to fold. The troops may bring down the Dutch coalition rather than prop up Kabul's regime.
"It is a travesty for the political system that foreign countries are going to tell the Netherlands what our country should do," said Labour Party (PvdA) deputy Bert Koenders on 11 January. He was voicing the anger felt among many MPs about what they see as undue international pressure being put on the Netherlands to join the US-led effort against the Taliban in Uruzgan Province in the south of Afghanistan. . .
The foot-dragging is being watched with incredulity in the US, with mumbling from the Pentagon that the delay proves yet again NATO is a toothless dinosaur.
Superficially, the doubts in the Netherlands centre on the dangers of the mission and fears that prisoners taken by Dutch troops may be executed by the Afghan authorities. Despite assurances on these issues, the opposition remains firm. This has a lot to do with the trauma of Srebrenica, when a lightly-armed Dutch force—denied air support— surrendered the enclave to Serbian troops in 1995. The Serbs massacred up to 8,000 Muslim men and boys. Recalling how doubts about that mission were ignored in 1993, Boris Dittrich, leader of D66, is determined not to "jump on to a speeding train" this
time. . .
Taliban reject Karzai talks offer
January 9 (BBC)—Spokesmen for the Taleban have rejected an offer of talks from Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Mr. Karzai had said he would be happy for Taleban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar to "get in touch" if he wanted peace. But Mohammed Hanif, who claims to speak for the Taleban, said Mr. Karzai was a "mouthpiece of Americans". . .
Last May, the head of Afghanistan's independent peace and reconciliation commission, Sibghatullah Mojaddedi, said Mullah Omar should be accepted back by the government if he renounced arms. It was not known at the time if the president backed the call but the US made it clear Mullah Omar would have to answer for his actions.
Karzai’s invitation is less a departure as a continuation of an amnesty strategy that has had mixed success. The government has succeeded in getting about 300 rank-and-file members and 50 senior Taliban officials to complete a reconciliation program, and several prominent Taliban leaders like Mulla Rocketi, Wakil Ahmad Mutawakil and Maulvi Islamudding have disassociated themselves with hardliners and sought parliamentary office.
But amnesty is undermined by concerns over the government’s Islamic legitimacy and by the Taliban’s success in targeting pro-government clerics and officials. On Sunday, January 14, two Taliban gunmen assassinated Mohammed Khaksar, one of the highest ranking former Taliban officials (deputy interior minister) to run for the new parliament. The attack occurred in Kandahar as Khaksar walked in broad daylight with his wife and children.
Afghanistan needs more U.S. help, U.S. Sen. Jack Reed says
January 9 (AP)—Afghanistan suffers from a "lack of robust resources" for reconstruction, U.S. Sen. Jack Reed said Sunday after his three-day trip to the central Asian nation. The Rhode Island Democrat said the U.S. government must do a better job helping its ally build water and power plants, roads and other infrastructure.
"Here, as in Iraq, there seem to be critical shortages in personnel, and civilian advisers especially, that will provide the assistance in this reconstruction," Reed said in a conference call with reporters. "The critical tasks right now are economic and political rather than simply military."
Reed, a member of the Armed Services Committee and a former Army Ranger who graduated from the U.S. Military Academy, has emerged as a leading Senate critic of President Bush's handling of the war in Iraq. . .
Ex-CIA confirms that military leaders knew of bin Laden’s presence in Tora Bora
January 3 (Financial Times) by Peter Spiegel—US military commanders were told that Osama bin Laden was hiding in the mountainous Tora Bora region of Afghanistan in early December 2001 but failed to send troops to block his escape, according to a new account by the CIA officer who ran the agency’s operations in the country.
Gary Berntsen, a CIA veteran who headed a paramilitary team called “Jawbreaker” during the Afghan war, said in a book published last week that one of his Arabic-speaking operatives found a radio on a dead al-Qaeda fighter during the Tora Bora battle and heard the terrorist leader repeatedly try to rally his troops. . .
The issue of whether senior US commanders failed to capture Mr bin Laden at Tora Bora because of an over-reliance on unreliable Afghan warlords became an issue in the 2004 presidential campaign when Democratic challenger John Kerry accused the Bush administration of allowing the al-Qaeda leader to escape by not sending American troops to the battlefield. At the time, retired general Tommy Franks, the former head of US Central Command who ran the Afghan campaign, denied that the military knew of Mr bin Laden’s presence and accused Mr Kerry of relying on “distortions of history”.
“We do not know to this day whether Mr bin Laden was at Tora Bora in December 2001,” Gen Franks wrote in the New York Times during the presidential race. “Tora Bora was teeming with Taliban and Qaeda operatives, many of whom were killed or captured, but Mr bin Laden was never within our grasp.”
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The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)
is providing 7,000 metric tons of wheat seed and technical assistance to farmers in Afghanistan.
Source: USAID |
Mr Berntsen disputes this account, saying he told senior commanders of Mr bin Laden’s presence and arguing that Afghan allies who had militia fighters in the region allowed Mr bin Laden to escape with about 200 Saudi and Yemeni fighters into Pakistan . “He was either badly misinformed by his own people or blinded by the fog of war,” Mr Berntsen wrote of Gen Franks’s claims and his insistence that Afghan militia were up to the task. “I’d made it clear in my reports that our Afghan allies were hardly anxious to get at al-Qaeda in Tora Bora.”
Sowing Afghan Security
January 10 (The Boston Globe) by Robert I. Rotberg—There is a striking antidote to worsening security in Afghanistan, where suicide bombing and convoy ambushes now occur every day. Increasingly, these Taliban- and Al Qaeda-sponsored attacks are linked to opium and heroin trafficking. Afghanistan supplies 80 percent of Europe's heroin and is the largest grower of poppies in the world. Instead of legalizing poppy growing or attempting to eradicate the stubborn plants and destroy the livelihoods of impoverished farmers, why not pay the farmers to grow something else?
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Afghanistan Watch is prepared by Carl
Robichaud, a program officer at The Century Foundation.
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