As a result of staffing constraints, changes in media reporting on Afghanistan and Pakistan, and a shift in our strategic priorities, we have decided to discontinue the Afghanistan and Pakistan Conflict Monitors. As a consequence, we will no longer be producing the Daily Briefing, or updating the websites.
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Nine suicide bombers penetrated several rings of security to lay siege to one of the capital’s premier hotels for six hours overnight Tuesday in a complex attack that jolted Afghans’ sense of security and highlighted the weakness of their police forces. At least 21 people were killed: all the attackers, two policemen, nine Afghan civilians, and one foreigner, a Spaniard. One witness said that the police failed to stop a man who obviously presented a threat: a man carrying weapons, dressed in a police uniform but with a white hat of the kind often favored by religious Afghans and instead urged the witness to move away from the man, calling him a “bomber.” Other witness accounts said that some security officers fled. The siege ended in the morning; at least five of the attackers blew themselves up, and others were shot by Afghan and NATO forces.
Two French journalists abducted in Afghanistan 18 months ago have been released, French President Nicolas Sarkozy has announced.
Herve Ghesquiere and Stephane Taponier were freed along with their interpreter, Reza Din, Mr Sarkozy said in a statement in Paris.
They are reportedly now at a French base in north-eastern Afghanistan.
Expressing delight, Mr Sarkozy thanked Afghan President Hamid Karzai for his handling of the hostage situation.
Prime Minister Francois Fillon told the French parliament the freed Frenchmen were at the Tagab base in Kapisa province.
They were "in good health" and would be back on French soil "in a few hours", he said.
There was no immediate word about two other Afghans who were abducted along with the three men released.
This report draws on an extensive modeling effort by Andrew C. Gagel. It provides a statistical trend of the US count of terrorist actions by terrorist organization in each region and country, along with maps of the number and density of terrorist acts. These trends and developments are summarized in a short overview for each sub region.
Terrorist activity was also high in Central Asia and South Asia. Unsurprisingly, terrorist activity was the highest in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region, with India and Nepal also experiencing high rates of attacks.
The data show that Taliban conducted the majority of known attacks in Afghanistan, killing, wounding, and kidnapping more Afghanis than any other group in the last four years. Attacks were centered in Helmand province in the south and along the border with Pakistan in the east. The number of attacks in attacks in Afghanistan increased during each consecutive fighting season since 2007, spiking in the summer months and receding in the winter.
The Pakistani Taliban (TTP) accounted for the most of known attacks and deaths in Pakistan; however the majority of attacks were perpetrated entities not identified by the NCTC. Other active groups in the country included the Balochistani-based Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) and Balochistan Republican Army (BRA), but their attacks were not on the scale or scope of the Pakistani Taliban. The data warn that instability in Pakistan is far broader than the threats relating to either the conflict in Afghanistan or tensions with India. Much of the threat is caused by internal, rather than external, instability.
The data also show that that India experienced a wide range of attacks from a wide range of both foreign and indigenous groups, mainly at the hands of Islamist extremists and Maoists. The most dangerous pattern of terrorism is clearly caused by terrorist groups with links to Pakistan—terrorism that could trigger a broader confrontation between India and Pakistan.
The insurgency in Afghanistan has expanded far beyond its stronghold in the south east. Transcending its traditional Pashtun base, the Taliban is bolstering its influence in the central-eastern provinces by installing shadow governments and tapping into the vulnerabilities of a central government crippled by corruption and deeply dependent on a corrosive war economy. Collusion between insurgents and corrupt government officials in Kabul and the nearby provinces has increased, leading to a profusion of criminal networks in the Afghan heartland. Despite efforts to combat the insurgency in the south, stability in the centre has steadily eroded. Yet, with nearly one fifth of the population residing in Kabul and its surrounding provinces, the Afghan heartland is pivotal to the planned transition from international troops to Afghan forces at the end of 2014. Given the insurgency’s entrenchment so close to the capital, however, it appears doubtful that President Hamid Karzai’s government will be able to contain the threat and stabilise the country by then. Countering the insurgency in these crucial areas requires the implementation of long-overdue reforms, including more robust anti-corruption efforts, stricter oversight over international aid and greater support for capacity building in the judicial and financial sectors.
A group of former warlords who helped the U.S. topple the Taliban regime in 2001 have launched a political alliance against Afghan President Hamid Karzai's rule, in a re-emergence of old civil-war divisions as the country looks ahead to the departure of U.S. forces.
The leaders, each representing a minority ethnic group, say they are concerned that Mr. Karzai will seek to claim more power following President Barack Obama's announcement last week of plans to begin withdrawing U.S. troops.
The announcement of the renewed alliance last week followed a decision by a special court backed by Mr. Karzai that disqualified a quarter of all parliamentarians elected in September polls. The decision weakened the contingent of lawmakers that is trying to turn the legislature into a check on Mr. Karzai's authority.
Mr. Karzai had argued that the election wasn't representative of the public's wishes because it diluted the power of the Pashtuns, the country's largest ethnic group—to which Mr. Karzai and the Taliban belong.
Afghan civilians are caught in the middle of an intensifying military campaign against a fractured armed insurgency. Despite the U.S. military’s claims of progress, insurgent attacks are up by 50% over last year, and more than 250,000 people have fled their villages in the past two years. U.S. funded and trained militias are only exacerbating this explosive situation. As the U.S. begins to draw down its forces and transition responsibilities to the Afghan government, the Obama administration must mitigate further displacement and ensure that the Afghan government takes greater responsibility for the protection of displaced people. In addition, the UN must strengthen its capacity to respond to the growing humanitarian needs.Since January 1, more than 91,000 Afghans have fled their villages – compared with 42,000 over the same time period last year. This is mostly due to international and Afghan forces’ military operations against the Taliban. The increasing use of airstrikes by the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), as well as night raids by U.S. Special Forces is destroying homes, crops and basic infrastructure, traumatizing civilians and displacing tens of thousands of people.
A senior leader of an al-Qaida-linked terror group has been captured in northern Afghanistan dressed up like a woman — the latest in a recent series of cases involving male militants disguised as females, the U.S.-led military coalition said Tuesday.
A joint Afghan and coalition force apprehended a senior figure from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and two of his associates during a nighttime operation Monday in Kunduz city, NATO said.
It said the militant, who also supported the Taliban network, had planned attacks against the Afghan National Police, as well as various suicide bombings and assaults against other Afghan security forces.
NATO did not release the names of the three suspects caught in Kunduz.
"The leader attempted to disguise himself as a female by wearing a burqa, which is an all-enveloping cloak worn by some Muslim women," the coalition said in a statement. "In the last two months there have been several instances of targeted males wearing burqas in attempts to disguise themselves in order not to be caught by Afghan-led forces."
During his confirmation hearing last week for his new post at the helm of the Central Intelligence Agency, Petraeus said coalition forces had already shifted out of some parts of the country—including the areas in and around Kabul—and handed security responsibility off to the Afghans. He said coalition forces planned to move to parts of the former Taliban stronghold of Helmand province this fall, with further redeployments set for next spring and next fall.
"We're not just going to come out and hand off," he said. "We'll thin out and indeed hand off to Afghan forces." [...] Many of those troops will come from southern Afghanistan, long the focus of the overall war effort. There are currently just over 31,000 troops in eastern Afghanistan, compared with 38,000 in the south. Under some redeployment plans, the officials said, the number of troops in the two regions would gradually equalize. [...]
In a little-noticed briefing last week, the top American commander in Helmand offered a detailed roadmap of what those redeployments would look like.
Maj. Gen. John Toolan, the senior U.S. commander in the province, said he was preparing to take troops out of areas that appear to be firmly under Afghan or coalition control—like the provincial capital of Lashkar Gah—and redeploy them to northern Helmand and other regions that continue to see regular insurgent violence.
Afghan officials have issued an arrest warrant for the former governor of the central bank, Abdul Qadeer Fitrat.
He is being investigated in connection with massive fraud at the privately owned Kabul Bank and the printing of unauthorised amounts of currency.
Earlier, it emerged Mr Fitrat had fled Afghanistan for the US - he said his life was in danger for exposing fraud.
He said the Afghan government had hindered his attempts to investigate corruption.
Afghanistan's Deputy Attorney General Rahmatullah Nazari said he would ask the US embassy and Interpol for help in securing Mr Fitrat's arrest.
"He will be brought here to face the judiciary. We will follow him," he told the BBC.
"There are some serious charges against him. He needs to answer all of them.'' Charges made against Mr Fitrat include that he financially mismanaged the bank, sabotaged the country's economy, ignored advice from other government institutions and did not adequately observe private banks.
The US - where Mr Fitrat has residency - does not have an extradition treaty with Afghanistan. He has said he has no plans to return to Afghanistan.
Military intelligence officers were scrambling a year ago to collect and analyze the social, economic and tribal ins and outs of each valley and hamlet in Afghanistan.
This information wasn't the kind of secret or covert material many military intelligence specialists were used to. But it was seen as crucial to helping commanders tell the good guys from the bad, learn what Afghans really needed from their government and undermine the Taliban-led insurgency by winning hearts and minds over time.
Since last fall, top intelligence leaders in Afghanistan shifted their focus back to targeting the enemy in the more traditional way, by mapping their networks and analyzing what made the Taliban tick.
They didn't stop collecting the other information. But their goal now was helping tell commanders what they needed to know to kill insurgents and drive the enemy to the negotiating table. [...] Two senior intelligence officials involved in the reorganization say it was simply a response to Gen. David Petraeus' priorities, when he took over from now-retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal. The top U.S. commander did try to send the message that social intelligence was important in tracking enemy networks, and he asked officers to count things such as the number of cellphone towers in an area, as a measure of success equal to the number of insurgents killed, the official said.
Taliban insurgents used an eight-year-old girl carrying a bag of explosives to attack a police checkpost in central Afghanistan, the Afghan government said on Sunday, making her one of the youngest child bombers of the decade-old conflict.
The incident took place in Char Chino district of central Uruzgan province, the interior ministry said. "The insurgents handed over a bag with a homemade bomb to an eight-year-old girl and asked her to take it to police forces," it added.
"As the girl was getting close to the police, it exploded and killed the girl."
[...] Around the same time in north-western Pakistan, the Pakistani Taliban deployed a married couple who attacked a police station by blowing themselves up. Two burqa-clad figures made their way into a police station in Kolachi, near the Taliban hub of South Waziristan, pretending to want to lodge a complaint, police said.
Afghanistan's political crisis worsened Saturday with lawmakers voting to sack the five most senior judicial officials and international consternation growing after a presidential tribunal threw out a quarter of parliament.
The special court, set up by a decree of Afghan President Hamid Karzai after parliamentary elections last year were marred by fraud, ruled Thursday that 62 lawmakers would have to be replaced because of alleged poll fraud.
[...] With anger growing over the decision, lawmakers voted on Saturday to sack the five most senior members of Afghanistan's Supreme Court, including Chief Justice Abdul Salam Azimi and his deputy Bahahuddin Baha, for failing to stop the special court's decision.
[...] Ahmad Humayoun, a lawmaker from eastern Khost province, said the vote was taken because the five had all advised Karzai to set up the special court to resolve the weeks of protests and infighting that followed the elections.
It was not immediately apparent if the five would indeed be sacked, with no comment from the presidential palace. Karzai is in neighboring Iran attending a security conference.
Funerals of victims of a car bombing at a hospital in Afghanistan's eastern Logar province have been taking place.
Thirty-eight people, including pregnant women, children, doctors and nurses, died in the attack, officials say - the deadliest on a medical facility since the fall of the Taliban in 2001.
The hospital, in Azra district, was destroyed, leaving people buried under rubble.
Officials blamed the attack on the Taliban, but the group denied it.
A Taliban spokesman said the militants did not target civilians and that "someone with an agenda" was behind the blast.
The actual death toll could be higher than the official figure, since relatives of some of those killed took the bodies away, officials said.
Azra's director of health told the BBC the clinic's chief doctor, who was injured in the attack, had resumed work on Sunday morning and was operating from a mobile clinic.
The Taliban has denied carrying out the attack, but Afghan officials in Logar told the BBC the insurgents had warned locals not to house, feed or join the Afghan security forces.
They said they believed the Haqqani group staged the attack to take revenge, when its warnings went unheeded, says the BBC's Bilal Sarwary in Kabul.
A special court set up at the behest of President Hamid Karzai ordered on Thursday the reinstatement of 62 candidates who had lost their seats or had been disqualified from last year's parliamentary elections, reviving the prospect of a constitutional crisis for the nation. The decision was the latest chapter in a heated dispute over allegations of fraud in last September's elections. Coming a day after President Obama's announcement of troop withdrawals from Afghanistan, it provided a stinging reminder of the potential for turbulence in the country's fledgling democracy. Mr. Karzai swore in the current Parliament in January under pressure from his international backers and angry threats from the winning candidates. But he did so only after setting up the special court to review complaints by scores of candidates many of them Pashtuns from his political base in the south who were disqualified by the country's election commissions.
European allies on Thursday applauded President Barack Obama's plan to start withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, with France jumping at the chance to announce its own drawdown in a mission that has drained budgets and strained public opinion across the continent.
After nearly a decade of fighting in Afghanistan, Obama's withdrawal blueprint was welcomed by NATO allies facing dwindling support, if not outright opposition, because of the conflict.
Obama said Wednesday he will bring home 33,000 troops by next summer - nearly as many as the number sent to Afghanistan for the 2009 "surge" aimed at saving a flailing war effort. [...] French Defense Minister Gerard Longuet, doing the math on the U.S. pullout, said on BFM TV that roughly a quarter of American troops would leave Afghanistan by summer 2012 and that France "will do the same." That means about 1,000 French troops will be out by next summer. [...] In Germany, Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said his country aims to begin pulling out troops for the first time by year's end. Germany has some 4,900 troops in a part of northern Afghanistan that was long relatively calm but has seen increasing fighting in recent years.
In Brussels, a member of NATO's governing body, the North Atlantic Council, said a number of smaller member states are now "actively looking" at reducing their Afghanistan contingents over the next 12 months.
The CSIS Program on Crisis, Conflict, and Cooperation (C3), formerly the PCR Project, has studied the link between the rise of nonstate armed groups (or militants, for the sake of simplicity) and the quality of local governance in Afghanistan and Pakistan: whether a link exists and, if so, what the United States can do about it, if anything. This research, based on more than 250 field interviews and an extensive review of published literature, found that most militant groups do not rely on governance and service provision to gain access to areas or populations that are operationally or strategically useful to them; instead, they use intimidation or personal connections such as tribal or kinship networks. Some groups do exploit grievances related to weak or corrupt governance (e.g., recruiting victims of police extortion), and a subset of those groups offer security, justice, education, disaster assistance, or (very rarely) health care in an effort to win the support and protection of a community.
The Afghan government on Friday called for an end to cross-border attacks from Pakistan, warning that such incidents could affect "improving trust and cooperation" between the two wary allies.
The high-level warning comes after days of claim and counter-claim over cross-border attacks by the neighbours, whose relations are strained over the Islamist militancy faced by both which Kabul says is rooted in Pakistan.
Four children were killed late Thursday by Pakistani shelling in the latest attack in the volatile northeastern province of Kunar, Kabul said.
There was no immediate comment from Pakistan, where foreign ministry officials were wrapping up a fresh round of peace talks with India.
"The ministry of foreign affairs of Afghanistan expresses its serious concern about the continuing Pakistani artillery shelling of Afghan villages in Kunar and Nangarhar provinces," it added in a statement.
"The Afghan government calls for the immediate cessation of the artillery fire against Afghan villages.
President Barack Obama's decision to withdraw one-third of U.S. forces in Afghanistan over the next 14 months conjured up uneasy memories for Afghans concerned that their American allies could leave the country before the job is done.Across the political spectrum, Afghan leaders expressed reservations about American intentions, saying they don't want to see U.S. policy makers repeat the patterns of the past by cutting off support for Afghanistan without making sure it had a stable government. They recalled the U.S. decision to dramatically scale back support for Afghanistan after Soviet forces were forced to withdraw in 1989. [...] "Twenty years ago, they left Afghanistan after the Russians pulled out of Afghanistan and Afghanistan was controlled by the ISI," said Ghulam Haider Hamidi, mayor of Kandahar city. "We don't want to go back 20 years when they were making the decisions about Afghanistan."
Mr. Obama's support for a quicker-than-expected drawdown is the clearest indication yet that the U.S. is shifting its agenda toward what one U.S. official in Kabul called a "new paradigm."
Afghan intelligence officials in the province of Nuristan have accused the central government and Nato forces in particular of ignoring insurgents there and in other strategically important areas close to the Pakistani border.
They say that increasing violence in Nuristan - and in the provinces of Laghman, Kunar and Nangarhar - poses a significant security threat.
"Nuristan is now al-Qaeda and Taliban central," said one senior police official in the province. "They attack in hundreds, they have blocked key roads. We need to retake these areas from them."
The problem has become so acute that Gen Aminullah Amarkhel of the Afghan border police says the border with Pakistan is like a "house without a door". [...] The government has never been in total control of this region. Nangarhar in particular is notorious for the illegal drug trade. Poppy and hashish are grown here and it is known to have several heroin processing laboratories.
[...] Very little will happen immediately. “What’s going to be different 24 hours after the president’s speech? Nothing,” said a senior American official in Kabul.
Over the next three years, however, as the American military and civilian presence — and spending — decrease, thousands of jobs will end for Afghans who work at or around bases and under grants and contracts financed by the State Department and the United States Agency for International Development.
Afghans and American civilian and military planners fear that the country will fall into an economic abyss, sending some Afghans back into the insurgency and deepening the poverty of people throughout the country. “We’ve had remarkable achievements, but can they make up the gap with the hit from the withdrawal of the war economy? That would be a stretch,” said a senior United States official.
Global opium poppy cultivation reached some 195,700 hectares (ha) in 2010, a small increase over 2009, shows the flagship report launched today at United Nations Headquarters by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon; Yury Fedotov [...]. [...] Opium production declined, however, by 38 per cent to 4,860 tons due to a blight that wiped out much of the opium harvest in Afghanistan in 2010. Nonetheless, the bulk of opium production still took place in Afghanistan (3,600 tons or 74 per cent of the global total). While cultivation in Afghanistan remained stable, the global trend was mainly driven by increases in Myanmar, where cultivation rose by some 20 per cent from 2009. [...] Global opium production declined by 45 per cent between 2007 and 2010, particularly as a result of opium blight in 2010 in Afghanistan, but this trend is unlikely to continue.“Though the area under poppy cultivation may have remained stable this year, our preliminary findings indicate that Afghan opium production will probably rebound to high levels in 2011” warned Mr. Fedotov.
Eight Afghan police were killed Wednesday when Taliban attacked their checkpoint in a brazen assault likely to raise fresh security questions as the United States prepares a troop drawdown.
The attack in Ghazni province's Qarabagh district, about 120 kilometres (75 miles) southwest of Kabul, is thought to have been an inside job in which insurgents worked with a policeman at the checkpoint to strike.
"The attack started at around 7:00 am (2:30 GMT)," Sayed Amir Shah, the head of Afghanistan's intelligence agency in Ghazni province, told AFP, putting the death toll at eight after the fighting had stopped.
Mohammad Ali Ahmadi, the deputy provincial governor of Ghazni, confirmed the number of dead.
"Probably one of the police officers at the checkpoint had a previous deal with the insurgents and cooperated with and facilitated the assault," he said.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack in a text message sent to AFP. Earlier this month, three police were killed in a similar insurgent strike on their checkpoint in the same district.
Afghans across different groups see the United States as a key party to the conflict whose direct participation in a peace process is crucial to its success, and therefore question the effectiveness of U.S. emphasis on an “Afghan-led” reconciliation strategy. The U.S. must engage directly in negotiating a settlement because of its control over the issue of withdrawal of NATO forces. The Taliban demand for full withdrawal prior to talks appears to be an opening position. A challenge will be linking a structure for drawdown to necessary steps by insurgents to allow a cessation of violence and prevent Afghanistan’s use for terrorism. A settlement process will entail discussion of the composition and future of the Afghan National Security Forces, and the current “transition” strategy of a large army and expanding local defence initiatives will almost certainly need re-examining during such a process. The conflict is not only a struggle for power and resources; it is also a legitimacy crisis stemming from a system of power and patronage that feeds conflict. From this perspective, a settlement should address the concentration of powers in the presidency through incremental reform to appointments, elections, or farther-reaching changes to the structure of government over time. There is a tension between reform and using political appointments to accommodate powersharing demands. A durable settlement will need to involve political and social agreements among Afghans taking into account the views of a range of stakeholders. To manage this tension, the intra-Afghan peace process should be oriented toward broad inclusion of noncombatants while balancing the secrecy required to make progress.
Barack Obama is set to reject the advice of the Pentagon by announcing on Wednesday night the withdrawal of up to 30,000 troops from Afghanistan by November next year, in time for the US presidential election.
The move comes despite warnings from his military commanders that recent security gains are fragile. They have been urging him to keep troop numbers high until 2013.
The accelerated drawdown will dismay American and British commanders in Kabul, who have privately expressed concern that the White House is now being driven by political rather than military imperatives.
"This is not something we feel entirely comfortable with," a Whitehall official told the Guardian.
Obama's nationally televised address, the sixth he has given since becoming president, is intended to mark the beginning of the end of American military deployment in Afghanistan, from a present high of almost 100,000 troops.
The White House confirmed that the withdrawal will be "significant".
Far away from the war, in the remote hills of Badakhshan, there is another battle raging. Trundling into the valleys on dusty roads ripped up by large SUVs, an Afghan task force is heading towards their target: an industry so profitable that many fear it's Afghanistan's only viable option once the West pulls its troops and money out.
We've joined up with the Ministry of Counter Narcotics looking for opium. Here in Badakhshan, the Taliban aren't much of a problem. The real issue is the business that has kept Afghans afloat for many years.
For a while, NATO eased off pushing against the opium trade, feeling that the enemies it created made it even harder to fight the insurgency that was its number one priority. But this year things are different for a reason.
The price of the drug has tripled, making it highly possible the harvest will flood record profits into the country, according to the United Nations Office of Drug Control here.
While May concluded with the reporting of
extraordinary levels of
conflict related activity
(surpassing the previous peak
recorded in August 2010),
the opening period for June
indicates a continuation of
this momentum, reporting
similarly high levels of
incidents (see p. 7). This
periods figures also reveal
that despite security force
efforts at interdiction and
disruption of AOG networks
(both manpower and supply
related) through the winter
and into early 2011, armed
opposition elements are far
from being a spent force, and
in fact appear more than
capable of continuing their
efforts unabated. Early June
generally serves as a reliable
indicator for pending levels
of violence and marks a stage
in the steady upwards trend
leading into the later summer
months, though this may be
affected by the early onset of
Ramadan this year (August). component of the
opposition campaign plan
(as indicated by the graphs
on p. 10) and serve as one
of the key tactics driving
present growth. Suicide
attack levels remain
relatively steady, and the
use of indirect fire methods
continue to be a regular
feature of the conflict
landscape.
From a str a t e g i c
perspective, there is little
significant month to month
change in the geographic
distribution of incidents,
though periodic ‘hills and
valleys’ do occur in various
areas, the result of both
intentional planning and
forced circumstance on
both sides. This period
Logar, Paktya and Herat
marked significant monthly
volume increases for AOG
attributed events, and
f o l l owi n g per i o d i c
fluctuations in an otherwise
meteoric rise, AOG activity
levels in Helmand are once
again on the upswing.
In Afghanistan and Pakistan, the humanitarian
crises are twofold: on the one hand, the
‘Afghan’ crisis affects not only Afghanistan
but also Iran and Pakistan, where almost four
million Afghan refugees are still living; on the
other hand, Pakistan is affected by a twinfaceted
crisis with still more than 1.2 million
people displaced by the conflict and almost
20 million affected by major flooding as from
July 2010.
In Afghanistan the deterioration in security
and the consequences of extensive military
operations, aggravated by years of drought,
increasing flooding and recurrent smallscale
disasters such as earthquakes, caused
a sharp increase in humanitarian needs in
2010 which is likely to continue this year
with more than 335 000 IDPs. In Pakistan,
during the summer of 2010, an area of the
country stretching from the Chinese border
in the north to the Arabian Sea in the south
was hit by the worst floods in living memory,
leaving millions of people in dire need of
humanitarian assistance. Both countries are
very prone to natural disasters. [...] The main groups with substantial
humanitarian needs in 2010 were the over
335 000 internally displaced persons (IDPs)
within Afghanistan affected by the conflict,
as well as refugees returning from Pakistan
and Iran. Host communities receiving
these returnees are also beneficiaries of the
programmes.
The highly food-insecure population affected
by recurrent natural disasters, including
many years of drought and the recent severe
flooding in the north and east, have been
benefiting from assistance too. The needs of
the returnees and IDPs included protection,
transport and resettlement support, plus
food, shelter, and water/sanitation for the
most vulnerable such as female-headed
households. [...] Under its 2010 Global Plan, the EU provided
funding totalling € 36 million, including € 25.4
million in support for refugees and returnees,
covering registration and transportation
of refugees from Pakistan and Iran to
Afghanistan, support for reintegration plus
aid for the most vulnerable of the remaining
refugees in both countries. Protection
assistance was provided, among others
through the UNHCR and the ICRC in line
with their respective protection mandates.
Shelter, together with water/sanitation, was
the other most important area of activity
within Afghanistan.
A Taliban suicide bomber targeted a provincial governor in northern Afghanistan on Tuesday, killing two civilians and wounding another two, the interior ministry said.
The attack struck the usually peaceful province of Parwan, when the bomber tried to enter the compound of governor Basir Salangi.
"At around 10:45am (0615 GMT) Tuesday, a suicide bomber detonated himself in front of the gate of the Parwan governor's compound. As a result, two civilians including a women were martyred and two others injured," the ministry said.
[...] Elsewhere in Afghanistan, three policemen were killed by a landmine blast while out on patrol Monday in the southern province of Uruzgan, said Amanullah Hotaki, the chief of the local provincial council.
Also Monday, two men -- one a shopkeeper and another a foreign forces contractor -- were shot dead in the southern city of Kandahar, police said.
Taliban spokesman Qari Yosuf Ahmadi took responsibility for all the attacks.
A cornerstone US policy to turn Afghan farmers into armed watchmen to keep out the Taliban has hit controversy and been scaled back over allegations of infighting and illegal taxation.
In Marjah, the 1,150 trained local police or "arbaki" patrol an area transformed from insurgent hotbed into a mostly peaceful farming district in southern Afghanistan since a military operation 15 months ago.
[...] But President Hamid Karzai has expressed concern that the new groups could feed a fresh generation of warlords, doubts shared by many Kabul-based policy experts and some US commanders.
And initial plans for a 30,000-strong force nationwide have been scaled back, with the scheme already canned in the dangerous nearby district of Sangin. [...] In the centre of Marjah, the arbaki or ISCI (interim security for critical infrastructure) receive a polite welcome as they conduct searches of rural compounds suspected of hiding bomb-making material.
But residents in outlying areas still troubled by Taliban attacks claim the local police use their official status to solve petty disputes.
"Some of those who joined the arbaki are using it to settle scores with their family members. They tell the US and ANA (Afghan army) that they are Taliban and should be arrested," said Haji Abdul Rasoul, a Shinghazak resident.
Insurgents in Afghanistan's violent east will target courts and judges after the execution of two fighters convicted over a brutal bank raid, one of the leaders of the al Qaeda-linked Haqqani network said on Monday.
At least 40 people were killed when seven gunmen and suicide bombers, dressed in border police uniforms, attacked an office of private lender Kabulbank on February 19, triggering gunbattles that lasted several hours.
Security camera footage showed insurgents shooting those inside the bank, some as they cowered on the floor in fear and others with their hands raised in the air, in one of the most savage attacks in Afghanistan for months.
The National Directorate of Security (NDS), Afghanistan's intelligence agency, said the two men were hanged in Kabul's Pule Charkhi prison on Monday for their part in the attack.
It named the two men only as Zarjam, a Pakistani national, and Matiullah, from eastern Kunar province near the border with Pakistan.
The NDS said Zarjam's body would be handed over to Pakistani embassy officials in Afghanistan and that Matiullah's body would be returned to his family in Kunar. [...]
"If our man in Afghan custody is executed, we will launch a new operation to only target judges and courts," Sirajuddin Haqqani said before the executions were confirmed by the NDS.
Outgoing US Defence Secretary Robert Gates has confirmed that the US is holding "outreach" talks with members of the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Mr Gates said talks were "preliminary" but that a political solution was the way "most of these wars end".
It is the first time the US has acknowledged such contact and comes a day after Afghan President Hamid Karzai said peace talks had started.
The US is due to start withdrawing its 97,000 troops from Afghanistan in July.
It aims to gradually hand over all security operations to Afghan security forces by 2014.
[...] On Friday, the UN split a sanctions blacklist for the Taliban and al-Qaeda, to encourage Taliban members to turn their back on the Islamist organisation and join reconciliation efforts.
Before now, both organisations have been handled by the same UN sanctions committee.
The UN Security Council said it was sending a signal to the Taliban that now is the time to join the political process.
With more than three million refugees
in 75 countries, Afghanistan remained
the leading country of origin of refugees
in 2010. On average, three out of
ten refugees in the world were from
Afghanistan, with 96 per cent of them
located in Pakistan and the Islamic
Republic of Iran. Iraqis were the second
largest group, with an estimated
1.7million having sought refuge mainly
in neighbouring countries. Afghan and
Iraqi refugees accounted for almost half
(45%) of all refugees under UNHCR’s
responsibility worldwide. [...] Afghanistan continued to be the
main country of return, with 118,000
registered returns during the year and
twice as many as last year (57,600). Levels
in 2009 were the lowest since start of
the large-scale refugee return in 2002.
Overall, close to 5.5 million Afghan refugees
– or roughly one-fifth of Afghanistan’s
population – have returned home
since 2002. As part of its monitoring responsibilities,
UNHCR conducts interviews
with returning Afghans to assess
the reasons for return. In 2010, the most
often-cited factors have been economic concerns, difficulties in Pakistan, and
local improvements in security in some
parts of Afghanistan. [...] In UNHCR and state asylum procedures
combined, the highest number of new
asylum claims was filed by individuals
originating from Zimbabwe (149,400),
Somalia (37,500), the Democratic Republic
of the Congo (35,600), Afghanistan
(33,500), Colombia (32,300), Serbia
(and Kosovo: UNSCR 1244) (30,500),
and Myanmar (27,900). [...] Afghan and Iraqi refugees accounted for almost half of
all refugees under UNHCR’s responsibility worldwide;
three out of ten refugees in the world were from
Afghanistan (3 million). Afghans were located in
75 different asylum countries.
A suicide attacker blew up his explosives-laden car next to a German military convoy in northern Afghanistan on Sunday, killing three Afghan civilians, officials and witnesses said.
Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid claimed responsibility for the attack.
The bomber detonated his vehicle on a busy road on the edge of Kunduz city, near the airport, the Afghan Interior Ministry said. [...]
Three civilians were killed and 11 were wounded in the attack, the ministry said.
Germany's military said two German soldiers were lightly wounded and treated at a nearby base. Two vehicles were damaged, according to a German military spokesman, who declined to be named in line with department policy.
The commander of a German base outside Kunduz, Col. Norbert Sabrautzki, was traveling in the convoy to a security meeting with the provincial governor and other Afghan officials in Kunduz when the bomber struck, the spokesman said.
The blast comes about three weeks after an attack inside the compound of the governor of nearby Takhar province at a similar security meeting. That attack killed several people and injured the NATO force's commander for northern Afghanistan, Germany's Gen. Markus Kneip.
Suicide bombers in army uniform attacked a Kabul police compound on Saturday, killing nine people in the second major assault inside the Afghan capital in less than a month, the Interior Ministry said.
The Taliban, which claimed responsibility for the assault, vowed last month to carry out attacks on foreign and Afghan troops and government officials, and have assassinated several senior police commanders since the start of the year.
Three policemen, an intelligence agent, and five civilians -- including two finance ministry employees who worked in an office beside the police station -- were killed in the attack, said officials. Two other policemen and 10 civilians were wounded.
Despite the presence of up to 150,000 foreign troops, violence across Afghanistan is at its worst since the 2001 overthrow of the Taliban government. May was the deadliest month on record for Afghan civilians, the United Nations said.
Pakistan's Taliban movement, regarded as one of the world's most dangerous militant groups, said on Thursday it backed Ayman al-Zawahri as al Qaeda's new leader and vowed to carry out attacks against Western targets.Pakistani Taliban spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan described Zawahri as an "capable person" and said the former Egyptian doctor would inspire the group to take on the West. [...] Omar Khalid Khorasani, a senior Pakistani Taliban commander, recently said in response to questions posed by Reuters that Zawahri was the group's "chief and supreme leader". [...] Zawahri has expressed contempt for the U.S.-backed Pakistani government. In recordings posted on the Internet he has urged Pakistanis to revolt against their government and army. Like other militants, he sees Pakistan as a U.S. puppet.
In an audio recording, released in September last year, he accused the Pakistani government of responding too slowly to floods that devastated the country. [...]
Zawahri met bin Laden in the mid 1980s when both were in Pakistan to support guerrillas fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan.
This document has been produced by the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) for the Afghan Independent Journalists’ Association and other partners and affiliates in Afghanistan.
Journalism in Afghanistan continues to be scarred by seemingly endless conflict but is able, when occasion arises, to celebrate significant achievements At the official commemoration of World Press Freedom Day in 2011, the country’s Minister for Information, Sayed Makhdoon Raheen, remarked upon the growth of Afghanistan’s media as one of the signal achievement of the years since the dismantling of the Taliban regime in November 2001. Within a month of the Taliban collapse, according to Raheen, Afghanistan had sprouted no less than 200 independent media outlets. Ten years later, the figure, as quoted by the Minister in his public address on 3 May 2011, stood at 1000. This is not to discount the difficulties that journalism in Afghanistan faces almost on a continuous basis. It should be counted among the most significant achievements of journalists in Afghanistan that they have put in place a nascent media rights monitoring network, with the most serious instances of media rights violations reported to a world audience. With support from the Commission for the European Union (EU), the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has assisted the Afghan Independent Journalists’ Association (AIJA) and other local organisations to develop this network, with particular reference to promoting free and safe reporting in the context of Afghanistan’s elections in recent years.
If World Press Freedom Day were to be used as reference point, the years since 2008 would seem to suggest a decline in the hazards that journalists face. But the decline in physical hazards, though of some consequence, does not yet mean that journalism is able to function in a congenial environment. [...] If World Press Freedom Day were to be used as reference point, the years since 2008 would seem to suggest a decline in the hazards that journalists face. But the decline in physical hazards, though of some consequence, does not yet mean that journalism is able to function in a congenial environment.
The Afghan government will struggle to pay its bills "within a month" after the International Monetary Fund rejected proposals for resolving the Kabul Bank scandal, western officials have warned.
Although the war-torn country's biggest bank nearly collapsed last September, the government of Hamid Karzai and the international community are still at loggerheads over plans to fund an 0m (£507m) bailout as well as how the disgraced former managers and shareholders who helped themselves to hundreds of millions of dollars should be prosecuted.
As long as the IMF declares the plans to be inadequate, many countries, including Britain, are legally barred from pumping money into a government that is almost completely reliant on foreign cash to pay civil servants' salaries.
It was reported by Reuters that the IMF has now formally rejected the Afghan government's proposals, meaning aid disbursements will remain on hold.
A rocket fired during fighting Friday in Pakistan's tribal region landed in eastern Afghanistan, killing four children in an area where militants launch attacks on U.S.-led forces, officials said.
The rocket landed in Sirkanay district of Kunar province, an area where more than 100 rockets have landed in the last few days from across the border, provincial police chief Gen. Ewaz Mohammad said.
It was unclear who fired the rocket, though Mohammad said there had been Pakistani military airstrikes in the region.
An Afghan border police official, Gen. Aminullah Amarkhil, said a neighboring region of Pakistan had seen the military fighting there.
Afganistan Conflict
Please be advised that our offices will be closed on Friday, July 1st, 2011 in observance of Canada Day.
Nine suicide bombers penetrated several rings of security to lay siege to one of the capital’s premier hotels for six hours overnight Tuesday in a complex attack that jolted Afghans’ sense of security and highlighted the weakness of their police forces. At least 21 people were killed: all the attackers, two policemen, nine Afghan civilians, and one foreigner, a Spaniard. One witness said that the police failed to stop a man who obviously presented a threat: a man carrying weapons, dressed in a police uniform but with a white hat of the kind often favored by religious Afghans and instead urged the witness to move away from the man, calling him a “bomber.” Other witness accounts said that some security officers fled. The siege ended in the morning; at least five of the attackers blew themselves up, and others were shot by Afghan and NATO forces.
Two French journalists abducted in Afghanistan 18 months ago have been released, French President Nicolas Sarkozy has announced.
Herve Ghesquiere and Stephane Taponier were freed along with their interpreter, Reza Din, Mr Sarkozy said in a statement in Paris.
They are reportedly now at a French base in north-eastern Afghanistan.
Expressing delight, Mr Sarkozy thanked Afghan President Hamid Karzai for his handling of the hostage situation.
Prime Minister Francois Fillon told the French parliament the freed Frenchmen were at the Tagab base in Kapisa province.
They were "in good health" and would be back on French soil "in a few hours", he said.
There was no immediate word about two other Afghans who were abducted along with the three men released.
This report draws on an extensive modeling effort by Andrew C. Gagel. It provides a statistical trend of the US count of terrorist actions by terrorist organization in each region and country, along with maps of the number and density of terrorist acts. These trends and developments are summarized in a short overview for each sub region.
Terrorist activity was also high in Central Asia and South Asia. Unsurprisingly, terrorist activity was the highest in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region, with India and Nepal also experiencing high rates of attacks.
The data show that Taliban conducted the majority of known attacks in Afghanistan, killing, wounding, and kidnapping more Afghanis than any other group in the last four years. Attacks were centered in Helmand province in the south and along the border with Pakistan in the east. The number of attacks in attacks in Afghanistan increased during each consecutive fighting season since 2007, spiking in the summer months and receding in the winter.
The Pakistani Taliban (TTP) accounted for the most of known attacks and deaths in Pakistan; however the majority of attacks were perpetrated entities not identified by the NCTC. Other active groups in the country included the Balochistani-based Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) and Balochistan Republican Army (BRA), but their attacks were not on the scale or scope of the Pakistani Taliban. The data warn that instability in Pakistan is far broader than the threats relating to either the conflict in Afghanistan or tensions with India. Much of the threat is caused by internal, rather than external, instability.
The data also show that that India experienced a wide range of attacks from a wide range of both foreign and indigenous groups, mainly at the hands of Islamist extremists and Maoists. The most dangerous pattern of terrorism is clearly caused by terrorist groups with links to Pakistan—terrorism that could trigger a broader confrontation between India and Pakistan.
The insurgency in Afghanistan has expanded far beyond its stronghold in the south east. Transcending its traditional Pashtun base, the Taliban is bolstering its influence in the central-eastern provinces by installing shadow governments and tapping into the vulnerabilities of a central government crippled by corruption and deeply dependent on a corrosive war economy. Collusion between insurgents and corrupt government officials in Kabul and the nearby provinces has increased, leading to a profusion of criminal networks in the Afghan heartland. Despite efforts to combat the insurgency in the south, stability in the centre has steadily eroded. Yet, with nearly one fifth of the population residing in Kabul and its surrounding provinces, the Afghan heartland is pivotal to the planned transition from international troops to Afghan forces at the end of 2014. Given the insurgency’s entrenchment so close to the capital, however, it appears doubtful that President Hamid Karzai’s government will be able to contain the threat and stabilise the country by then. Countering the insurgency in these crucial areas requires the implementation of long-overdue reforms, including more robust anti-corruption efforts, stricter oversight over international aid and greater support for capacity building in the judicial and financial sectors.
A group of former warlords who helped the U.S. topple the Taliban regime in 2001 have launched a political alliance against Afghan President Hamid Karzai's rule, in a re-emergence of old civil-war divisions as the country looks ahead to the departure of U.S. forces.
The leaders, each representing a minority ethnic group, say they are concerned that Mr. Karzai will seek to claim more power following President Barack Obama's announcement last week of plans to begin withdrawing U.S. troops.
The announcement of the renewed alliance last week followed a decision by a special court backed by Mr. Karzai that disqualified a quarter of all parliamentarians elected in September polls. The decision weakened the contingent of lawmakers that is trying to turn the legislature into a check on Mr. Karzai's authority.
Mr. Karzai had argued that the election wasn't representative of the public's wishes because it diluted the power of the Pashtuns, the country's largest ethnic group—to which Mr. Karzai and the Taliban belong.
Afghan civilians are caught in the middle of an intensifying military campaign against a fractured armed insurgency. Despite the U.S. military’s claims of progress, insurgent attacks are up by 50% over last year, and more than 250,000 people have fled their villages in the past two years. U.S. funded and trained militias are only exacerbating this explosive situation. As the U.S. begins to draw down its forces and transition responsibilities to the Afghan government, the Obama administration must mitigate further displacement and ensure that the Afghan government takes greater responsibility for the protection of displaced people. In addition, the UN must strengthen its capacity to respond to the growing humanitarian needs.Since January 1, more than 91,000 Afghans have fled their villages – compared with 42,000 over the same time period last year. This is mostly due to international and Afghan forces’ military operations against the Taliban. The increasing use of airstrikes by the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), as well as night raids by U.S. Special Forces is destroying homes, crops and basic infrastructure, traumatizing civilians and displacing tens of thousands of people.
A senior leader of an al-Qaida-linked terror group has been captured in northern Afghanistan dressed up like a woman — the latest in a recent series of cases involving male militants disguised as females, the U.S.-led military coalition said Tuesday.
A joint Afghan and coalition force apprehended a senior figure from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and two of his associates during a nighttime operation Monday in Kunduz city, NATO said.
It said the militant, who also supported the Taliban network, had planned attacks against the Afghan National Police, as well as various suicide bombings and assaults against other Afghan security forces.
NATO did not release the names of the three suspects caught in Kunduz.
"The leader attempted to disguise himself as a female by wearing a burqa, which is an all-enveloping cloak worn by some Muslim women," the coalition said in a statement. "In the last two months there have been several instances of targeted males wearing burqas in attempts to disguise themselves in order not to be caught by Afghan-led forces."
During his confirmation hearing last week for his new post at the helm of the Central Intelligence Agency, Petraeus said coalition forces had already shifted out of some parts of the country—including the areas in and around Kabul—and handed security responsibility off to the Afghans. He said coalition forces planned to move to parts of the former Taliban stronghold of Helmand province this fall, with further redeployments set for next spring and next fall.
"We're not just going to come out and hand off," he said. "We'll thin out and indeed hand off to Afghan forces." [...] Many of those troops will come from southern Afghanistan, long the focus of the overall war effort. There are currently just over 31,000 troops in eastern Afghanistan, compared with 38,000 in the south. Under some redeployment plans, the officials said, the number of troops in the two regions would gradually equalize. [...]
In a little-noticed briefing last week, the top American commander in Helmand offered a detailed roadmap of what those redeployments would look like.
Maj. Gen. John Toolan, the senior U.S. commander in the province, said he was preparing to take troops out of areas that appear to be firmly under Afghan or coalition control—like the provincial capital of Lashkar Gah—and redeploy them to northern Helmand and other regions that continue to see regular insurgent violence.
Military intelligence officers were scrambling a year ago to collect and analyze the social, economic and tribal ins and outs of each valley and hamlet in Afghanistan.
This information wasn't the kind of secret or covert material many military intelligence specialists were used to. But it was seen as crucial to helping commanders tell the good guys from the bad, learn what Afghans really needed from their government and undermine the Taliban-led insurgency by winning hearts and minds over time.
Since last fall, top intelligence leaders in Afghanistan shifted their focus back to targeting the enemy in the more traditional way, by mapping their networks and analyzing what made the Taliban tick.
They didn't stop collecting the other information. But their goal now was helping tell commanders what they needed to know to kill insurgents and drive the enemy to the negotiating table. [...] Two senior intelligence officials involved in the reorganization say it was simply a response to Gen. David Petraeus' priorities, when he took over from now-retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal. The top U.S. commander did try to send the message that social intelligence was important in tracking enemy networks, and he asked officers to count things such as the number of cellphone towers in an area, as a measure of success equal to the number of insurgents killed, the official said.
Taliban insurgents used an eight-year-old girl carrying a bag of explosives to attack a police checkpost in central Afghanistan, the Afghan government said on Sunday, making her one of the youngest child bombers of the decade-old conflict.
The incident took place in Char Chino district of central Uruzgan province, the interior ministry said. "The insurgents handed over a bag with a homemade bomb to an eight-year-old girl and asked her to take it to police forces," it added.
"As the girl was getting close to the police, it exploded and killed the girl."
[...] Around the same time in north-western Pakistan, the Pakistani Taliban deployed a married couple who attacked a police station by blowing themselves up. Two burqa-clad figures made their way into a police station in Kolachi, near the Taliban hub of South Waziristan, pretending to want to lodge a complaint, police said.
Funerals of victims of a car bombing at a hospital in Afghanistan's eastern Logar province have been taking place.
Thirty-eight people, including pregnant women, children, doctors and nurses, died in the attack, officials say - the deadliest on a medical facility since the fall of the Taliban in 2001.
The hospital, in Azra district, was destroyed, leaving people buried under rubble.
Officials blamed the attack on the Taliban, but the group denied it.
A Taliban spokesman said the militants did not target civilians and that "someone with an agenda" was behind the blast.
The actual death toll could be higher than the official figure, since relatives of some of those killed took the bodies away, officials said.
Azra's director of health told the BBC the clinic's chief doctor, who was injured in the attack, had resumed work on Sunday morning and was operating from a mobile clinic.
The Taliban has denied carrying out the attack, but Afghan officials in Logar told the BBC the insurgents had warned locals not to house, feed or join the Afghan security forces.
They said they believed the Haqqani group staged the attack to take revenge, when its warnings went unheeded, says the BBC's Bilal Sarwary in Kabul.
The CSIS Program on Crisis, Conflict, and Cooperation (C3), formerly the PCR Project, has studied the link between the rise of nonstate armed groups (or militants, for the sake of simplicity) and the quality of local governance in Afghanistan and Pakistan: whether a link exists and, if so, what the United States can do about it, if anything. This research, based on more than 250 field interviews and an extensive review of published literature, found that most militant groups do not rely on governance and service provision to gain access to areas or populations that are operationally or strategically useful to them; instead, they use intimidation or personal connections such as tribal or kinship networks. Some groups do exploit grievances related to weak or corrupt governance (e.g., recruiting victims of police extortion), and a subset of those groups offer security, justice, education, disaster assistance, or (very rarely) health care in an effort to win the support and protection of a community.
The Afghan government on Friday called for an end to cross-border attacks from Pakistan, warning that such incidents could affect "improving trust and cooperation" between the two wary allies.
The high-level warning comes after days of claim and counter-claim over cross-border attacks by the neighbours, whose relations are strained over the Islamist militancy faced by both which Kabul says is rooted in Pakistan.
Four children were killed late Thursday by Pakistani shelling in the latest attack in the volatile northeastern province of Kunar, Kabul said.
There was no immediate comment from Pakistan, where foreign ministry officials were wrapping up a fresh round of peace talks with India.
"The ministry of foreign affairs of Afghanistan expresses its serious concern about the continuing Pakistani artillery shelling of Afghan villages in Kunar and Nangarhar provinces," it added in a statement.
"The Afghan government calls for the immediate cessation of the artillery fire against Afghan villages.
President Barack Obama's decision to withdraw one-third of U.S. forces in Afghanistan over the next 14 months conjured up uneasy memories for Afghans concerned that their American allies could leave the country before the job is done.Across the political spectrum, Afghan leaders expressed reservations about American intentions, saying they don't want to see U.S. policy makers repeat the patterns of the past by cutting off support for Afghanistan without making sure it had a stable government. They recalled the U.S. decision to dramatically scale back support for Afghanistan after Soviet forces were forced to withdraw in 1989. [...] "Twenty years ago, they left Afghanistan after the Russians pulled out of Afghanistan and Afghanistan was controlled by the ISI," said Ghulam Haider Hamidi, mayor of Kandahar city. "We don't want to go back 20 years when they were making the decisions about Afghanistan."
Mr. Obama's support for a quicker-than-expected drawdown is the clearest indication yet that the U.S. is shifting its agenda toward what one U.S. official in Kabul called a "new paradigm."
Afghan intelligence officials in the province of Nuristan have accused the central government and Nato forces in particular of ignoring insurgents there and in other strategically important areas close to the Pakistani border.
They say that increasing violence in Nuristan - and in the provinces of Laghman, Kunar and Nangarhar - poses a significant security threat.
"Nuristan is now al-Qaeda and Taliban central," said one senior police official in the province. "They attack in hundreds, they have blocked key roads. We need to retake these areas from them."
The problem has become so acute that Gen Aminullah Amarkhel of the Afghan border police says the border with Pakistan is like a "house without a door". [...] The government has never been in total control of this region. Nangarhar in particular is notorious for the illegal drug trade. Poppy and hashish are grown here and it is known to have several heroin processing laboratories.
Eight Afghan police were killed Wednesday when Taliban attacked their checkpoint in a brazen assault likely to raise fresh security questions as the United States prepares a troop drawdown.
The attack in Ghazni province's Qarabagh district, about 120 kilometres (75 miles) southwest of Kabul, is thought to have been an inside job in which insurgents worked with a policeman at the checkpoint to strike.
"The attack started at around 7:00 am (2:30 GMT)," Sayed Amir Shah, the head of Afghanistan's intelligence agency in Ghazni province, told AFP, putting the death toll at eight after the fighting had stopped.
Mohammad Ali Ahmadi, the deputy provincial governor of Ghazni, confirmed the number of dead.
"Probably one of the police officers at the checkpoint had a previous deal with the insurgents and cooperated with and facilitated the assault," he said.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack in a text message sent to AFP. Earlier this month, three police were killed in a similar insurgent strike on their checkpoint in the same district.
Afghans across different groups see the United States as a key party to the conflict whose direct participation in a peace process is crucial to its success, and therefore question the effectiveness of U.S. emphasis on an “Afghan-led” reconciliation strategy. The U.S. must engage directly in negotiating a settlement because of its control over the issue of withdrawal of NATO forces. The Taliban demand for full withdrawal prior to talks appears to be an opening position. A challenge will be linking a structure for drawdown to necessary steps by insurgents to allow a cessation of violence and prevent Afghanistan’s use for terrorism. A settlement process will entail discussion of the composition and future of the Afghan National Security Forces, and the current “transition” strategy of a large army and expanding local defence initiatives will almost certainly need re-examining during such a process. The conflict is not only a struggle for power and resources; it is also a legitimacy crisis stemming from a system of power and patronage that feeds conflict. From this perspective, a settlement should address the concentration of powers in the presidency through incremental reform to appointments, elections, or farther-reaching changes to the structure of government over time. There is a tension between reform and using political appointments to accommodate powersharing demands. A durable settlement will need to involve political and social agreements among Afghans taking into account the views of a range of stakeholders. To manage this tension, the intra-Afghan peace process should be oriented toward broad inclusion of noncombatants while balancing the secrecy required to make progress.
Far away from the war, in the remote hills of Badakhshan, there is another battle raging. Trundling into the valleys on dusty roads ripped up by large SUVs, an Afghan task force is heading towards their target: an industry so profitable that many fear it's Afghanistan's only viable option once the West pulls its troops and money out.
We've joined up with the Ministry of Counter Narcotics looking for opium. Here in Badakhshan, the Taliban aren't much of a problem. The real issue is the business that has kept Afghans afloat for many years.
For a while, NATO eased off pushing against the opium trade, feeling that the enemies it created made it even harder to fight the insurgency that was its number one priority. But this year things are different for a reason.
The price of the drug has tripled, making it highly possible the harvest will flood record profits into the country, according to the United Nations Office of Drug Control here.
While May concluded with the reporting of
extraordinary levels of
conflict related activity
(surpassing the previous peak
recorded in August 2010),
the opening period for June
indicates a continuation of
this momentum, reporting
similarly high levels of
incidents (see p. 7). This
periods figures also reveal
that despite security force
efforts at interdiction and
disruption of AOG networks
(both manpower and supply
related) through the winter
and into early 2011, armed
opposition elements are far
from being a spent force, and
in fact appear more than
capable of continuing their
efforts unabated. Early June
generally serves as a reliable
indicator for pending levels
of violence and marks a stage
in the steady upwards trend
leading into the later summer
months, though this may be
affected by the early onset of
Ramadan this year (August). component of the
opposition campaign plan
(as indicated by the graphs
on p. 10) and serve as one
of the key tactics driving
present growth. Suicide
attack levels remain
relatively steady, and the
use of indirect fire methods
continue to be a regular
feature of the conflict
landscape.
From a str a t e g i c
perspective, there is little
significant month to month
change in the geographic
distribution of incidents,
though periodic ‘hills and
valleys’ do occur in various
areas, the result of both
intentional planning and
forced circumstance on
both sides. This period
Logar, Paktya and Herat
marked significant monthly
volume increases for AOG
attributed events, and
f o l l owi n g per i o d i c
fluctuations in an otherwise
meteoric rise, AOG activity
levels in Helmand are once
again on the upswing.
In Afghanistan and Pakistan, the humanitarian
crises are twofold: on the one hand, the
‘Afghan’ crisis affects not only Afghanistan
but also Iran and Pakistan, where almost four
million Afghan refugees are still living; on the
other hand, Pakistan is affected by a twinfaceted
crisis with still more than 1.2 million
people displaced by the conflict and almost
20 million affected by major flooding as from
July 2010.
In Afghanistan the deterioration in security
and the consequences of extensive military
operations, aggravated by years of drought,
increasing flooding and recurrent smallscale
disasters such as earthquakes, caused
a sharp increase in humanitarian needs in
2010 which is likely to continue this year
with more than 335 000 IDPs. In Pakistan,
during the summer of 2010, an area of the
country stretching from the Chinese border
in the north to the Arabian Sea in the south
was hit by the worst floods in living memory,
leaving millions of people in dire need of
humanitarian assistance. Both countries are
very prone to natural disasters. [...] The main groups with substantial
humanitarian needs in 2010 were the over
335 000 internally displaced persons (IDPs)
within Afghanistan affected by the conflict,
as well as refugees returning from Pakistan
and Iran. Host communities receiving
these returnees are also beneficiaries of the
programmes.
The highly food-insecure population affected
by recurrent natural disasters, including
many years of drought and the recent severe
flooding in the north and east, have been
benefiting from assistance too. The needs of
the returnees and IDPs included protection,
transport and resettlement support, plus
food, shelter, and water/sanitation for the
most vulnerable such as female-headed
households. [...] Under its 2010 Global Plan, the EU provided
funding totalling € 36 million, including € 25.4
million in support for refugees and returnees,
covering registration and transportation
of refugees from Pakistan and Iran to
Afghanistan, support for reintegration plus
aid for the most vulnerable of the remaining
refugees in both countries. Protection
assistance was provided, among others
through the UNHCR and the ICRC in line
with their respective protection mandates.
Shelter, together with water/sanitation, was
the other most important area of activity
within Afghanistan.
A Taliban suicide bomber targeted a provincial governor in northern Afghanistan on Tuesday, killing two civilians and wounding another two, the interior ministry said.
The attack struck the usually peaceful province of Parwan, when the bomber tried to enter the compound of governor Basir Salangi.
"At around 10:45am (0615 GMT) Tuesday, a suicide bomber detonated himself in front of the gate of the Parwan governor's compound. As a result, two civilians including a women were martyred and two others injured," the ministry said.
[...] Elsewhere in Afghanistan, three policemen were killed by a landmine blast while out on patrol Monday in the southern province of Uruzgan, said Amanullah Hotaki, the chief of the local provincial council.
Also Monday, two men -- one a shopkeeper and another a foreign forces contractor -- were shot dead in the southern city of Kandahar, police said.
Taliban spokesman Qari Yosuf Ahmadi took responsibility for all the attacks.
A cornerstone US policy to turn Afghan farmers into armed watchmen to keep out the Taliban has hit controversy and been scaled back over allegations of infighting and illegal taxation.
In Marjah, the 1,150 trained local police or "arbaki" patrol an area transformed from insurgent hotbed into a mostly peaceful farming district in southern Afghanistan since a military operation 15 months ago.
[...] But President Hamid Karzai has expressed concern that the new groups could feed a fresh generation of warlords, doubts shared by many Kabul-based policy experts and some US commanders.
And initial plans for a 30,000-strong force nationwide have been scaled back, with the scheme already canned in the dangerous nearby district of Sangin. [...] In the centre of Marjah, the arbaki or ISCI (interim security for critical infrastructure) receive a polite welcome as they conduct searches of rural compounds suspected of hiding bomb-making material.
But residents in outlying areas still troubled by Taliban attacks claim the local police use their official status to solve petty disputes.
"Some of those who joined the arbaki are using it to settle scores with their family members. They tell the US and ANA (Afghan army) that they are Taliban and should be arrested," said Haji Abdul Rasoul, a Shinghazak resident.
With more than three million refugees
in 75 countries, Afghanistan remained
the leading country of origin of refugees
in 2010. On average, three out of
ten refugees in the world were from
Afghanistan, with 96 per cent of them
located in Pakistan and the Islamic
Republic of Iran. Iraqis were the second
largest group, with an estimated
1.7million having sought refuge mainly
in neighbouring countries. Afghan and
Iraqi refugees accounted for almost half
(45%) of all refugees under UNHCR’s
responsibility worldwide. [...] Afghanistan continued to be the
main country of return, with 118,000
registered returns during the year and
twice as many as last year (57,600). Levels
in 2009 were the lowest since start of
the large-scale refugee return in 2002.
Overall, close to 5.5 million Afghan refugees
– or roughly one-fifth of Afghanistan’s
population – have returned home
since 2002. As part of its monitoring responsibilities,
UNHCR conducts interviews
with returning Afghans to assess
the reasons for return. In 2010, the most
often-cited factors have been economic concerns, difficulties in Pakistan, and
local improvements in security in some
parts of Afghanistan. [...] In UNHCR and state asylum procedures
combined, the highest number of new
asylum claims was filed by individuals
originating from Zimbabwe (149,400),
Somalia (37,500), the Democratic Republic
of the Congo (35,600), Afghanistan
(33,500), Colombia (32,300), Serbia
(and Kosovo: UNSCR 1244) (30,500),
and Myanmar (27,900). [...] Afghan and Iraqi refugees accounted for almost half of
all refugees under UNHCR’s responsibility worldwide;
three out of ten refugees in the world were from
Afghanistan (3 million). Afghans were located in
75 different asylum countries.
A suicide attacker blew up his explosives-laden car next to a German military convoy in northern Afghanistan on Sunday, killing three Afghan civilians, officials and witnesses said.
Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid claimed responsibility for the attack.
The bomber detonated his vehicle on a busy road on the edge of Kunduz city, near the airport, the Afghan Interior Ministry said. [...]
Three civilians were killed and 11 were wounded in the attack, the ministry said.
Germany's military said two German soldiers were lightly wounded and treated at a nearby base. Two vehicles were damaged, according to a German military spokesman, who declined to be named in line with department policy.
The commander of a German base outside Kunduz, Col. Norbert Sabrautzki, was traveling in the convoy to a security meeting with the provincial governor and other Afghan officials in Kunduz when the bomber struck, the spokesman said.
The blast comes about three weeks after an attack inside the compound of the governor of nearby Takhar province at a similar security meeting. That attack killed several people and injured the NATO force's commander for northern Afghanistan, Germany's Gen. Markus Kneip.
This document has been produced by the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) for the Afghan Independent Journalists’ Association and other partners and affiliates in Afghanistan.
Journalism in Afghanistan continues to be scarred by seemingly endless conflict but is able, when occasion arises, to celebrate significant achievements At the official commemoration of World Press Freedom Day in 2011, the country’s Minister for Information, Sayed Makhdoon Raheen, remarked upon the growth of Afghanistan’s media as one of the signal achievement of the years since the dismantling of the Taliban regime in November 2001. Within a month of the Taliban collapse, according to Raheen, Afghanistan had sprouted no less than 200 independent media outlets. Ten years later, the figure, as quoted by the Minister in his public address on 3 May 2011, stood at 1000. This is not to discount the difficulties that journalism in Afghanistan faces almost on a continuous basis. It should be counted among the most significant achievements of journalists in Afghanistan that they have put in place a nascent media rights monitoring network, with the most serious instances of media rights violations reported to a world audience. With support from the Commission for the European Union (EU), the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has assisted the Afghan Independent Journalists’ Association (AIJA) and other local organisations to develop this network, with particular reference to promoting free and safe reporting in the context of Afghanistan’s elections in recent years.
If World Press Freedom Day were to be used as reference point, the years since 2008 would seem to suggest a decline in the hazards that journalists face. But the decline in physical hazards, though of some consequence, does not yet mean that journalism is able to function in a congenial environment. [...] If World Press Freedom Day were to be used as reference point, the years since 2008 would seem to suggest a decline in the hazards that journalists face. But the decline in physical hazards, though of some consequence, does not yet mean that journalism is able to function in a congenial environment.