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  abunoor 4:26 pm on March 19, 2010 | 2 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: afghanistan, ISI (15), Pakistan (570), taliban (261)

  Kai Ede, the former head of UN mission in Afghanistan is speaking out publicly and consistently with the theory Ahmed Rashid floated immediately after some of the arrests of Taliban leaders in Pakistan, that the arrests were of people who were engaging in talks and were actually designed by Pakistan to scuttle the chance of an agreement.

  The recent arrests of senior Taliban leaders in Pakistan may have disrupted secret talks between members of the group and UN representatives, the former head of the UN mission in Afghanistan has said.

  Kai Eide, who stepped down from the post earlier this month, confirmed on Friday in an interview with the BBC World Service that the UN had been holding talks with Taliban leaders since the spring of 2009.

  But he said the face-to-face talks held in Dubai and other locations were halted several weeks ago after more than a dozen Taliban members were captured in Pakistan.

  “The effect of (the arrests), in total, certainly, was negative on our possibilities to continue the political process that we saw as so necessary at that particular juncture,” he said.

   

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  aziz 11:25 am on March 12, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: afghanistan, charity (19), Obama (249), Three Cups of Tea

  Obama announces the list of charities to receive his Nobel Peace Prize money. I’m particularly gratified to see Greg Mortenson’s Central Asia Institute on the list – of Three Cups of Tea fame.

  

   
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  thabet 11:56 pm on March 10, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: afghanistan, christianity (74), Islam (244), religion (365), united states (577), warfare (22)

  How (not) to make sure your war doesn’t look like a religious war.

   
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  thabet 7:57 am on March 8, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: afghanistan, civilians (28), collateral damage (76), hamid karzai (13), human rights (381), justice (15), NATO (40)

  £1,300: the value of an Afghan life:

  President Karzai has paid “blood money” to the families of nine children killed in a brutal night raid after Nato admitted that they were gunned down by mistake.

  US-led forces had originally claimed that the victims were part of a terrorist cell making improvised explosive devices but an investigation by The Times found that Nato now believes the victims, aged 12-18, were killed in an operation based on faulty intelligence.

  The President paid relatives Afs100,000 (£1,300) for each of the victims — eight students from one family, a 12-year-old shepherd boy who was the family’s guest and a farmer from a neighbouring compound.

  Silence from the usual quarters.

   
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  abunoor 3:00 pm on March 6, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Abdul Zahir Aryan, afghanistan, domestic abuse

  The man the U.S. military is installing as governor in Marja is a wife beater who served time in prison in Germany for attempting to murder his stepson who tried to stop the abuse.

  But Zahir, who goes by Haji Zahir, arrived at this position after a tumultuous personal history that American and Afghan officials have not publicly disclosed. During more than a decade living in Germany, Zahir, 60, served four years in prison for attempted murder after stabbing his stepson, according to U.S. officials.

   
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  arif 9:53 pm on March 2, 2010 | 7 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: afghanistan, birth control (3)

  Mullahs in Afghanistan are trying new strategies to prevent an ongoing health and economic crisis caused by high fertility and maternal mortality rates: They’re passing out birth control pills and distributing condoms.

  The tactics might come as a surprise …

  http://www.aolnews.com/health/article/under-who-intiative-afghan-mullahs-promote-birth-control/19380056

  No kidding!

   
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  johnpi 3:35 pm on March 1, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Afghan Taliban (41), afghanistan, censorship (44), free press (13), freedom of press (7), freedom of the press (4), Press Intimidation (2)

  This is dumb: Afghanistan bans coverage of Taliban attacks.

  Afghanistan on Monday announced a ban on news coverage showing Taliban attacks, saying such images embolden the Islamist militants, who have launched strikes around the country as NATO forces seize their southern strongholds.

  The Taliban are making their own videos, they don’t need the media to get video drama when they’re standing right next to it. Here’s a Frontline documentary that aired on Tuesday, “Behind Taliban Lines.” At one point one of the fighters is shown holding up a small device – either a cell phone or a small digital camera – showing off video of one their own attacks.

  This ruling is self-serving on the part of the Afghan government.

   
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  thabet 10:34 am on February 20, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: afghanistan, foreign policy (237), geert wilders (24), geopolitics (119), netherlands (18), politics (765)

  The collapse of the Dutch government over The Netherlands’ role in Afghanistan is being seen by some pundits as a chance for Geert Wilders to enter a future coalition government.

   
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  abunoor 10:32 am on February 18, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Abdul-Ghani Baradar, afghanistan, ahmed rashid (2), ISI (15), Mullah Baradar, Pakistan (570), taliban (261)

  Ahmed Rashid was on Fresh Air discussing recent developments in Afghanistan.

  Mr. RASHID: Well, I think the very big question is why now? I mean, why have the Pakistanis now arrested him? Because his whereabouts were certainly known to the Pakistani intelligence services, the ISI, for many, many years. And if it means that the Pakistanis are now serious about reining in the Taliban, well, of course, that’s a very positive step. That’s something that NATO and the Americans have wanted all along.

  However, speculation from Kabul – and I’ve been speaking to officials in Kabul – their speculation is somewhat different. The first is that, you know, the Americans, the CIA could have discovered his whereabouts and then, you know, insisted that the ISI arrest him.

  The second thing is that it was very well-known for several months now, and I knew this personally, that Mullah Baradar was actually in touch with the Kabul authorities, holding talks with them through not directly, but indirectly through his representatives. They were meeting in Saudi Arabia, and he was also meeting with Kabul representatives in Kandahar, the major – the second city in Afghanistan.

  Now, one speculation is that these talks were moving forward, and perhaps the Pakistanis arrested him because he was talking to the Kabul authorities above and beyond the Pakistanis, who are very keen to make sure that any dialogue that happens between the Americans and President Karzai and the Taliban take place with Pakistani mediation, Pakistani brokership, if you like.

  GROSS: So what kind of information do you think that interrogators are trying to get now from Baradar?

  Mr. RASHID: Well, you know, I don’t think that I mean, obviously, there’s going to be a mild sort of interrogation, if he knows where Mullah Omar is or Osama bin Laden or anyone else. But I think he’s going to be treated very well because I think in the long term, what both the Americans and the Pakistanis would want out of him is to use him in negotiations with the Taliban leadership.

  I mean, one speculation is that now that he’s been arrested, he could be used much more effectively to negotiate with Mullah Omar and others because he could be allowed to meet with the other Taliban leaders, he could meet with Kabul authorities, he could meet with the Americans, et cetera. So I don’t think he’s going to be, you know, tortured or anything like that. I think he’s going to be kept in a safe house. He’s probably going to be interrogated about, you know, other leaderships, et cetera, and certainly the Americans will pursue him about the whereabouts of al-Qaida.

  But I think this arrest will mean that we may well see a speeding-up of the negotiations between the Taliban and the Americans and others.

   
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  johnpi 9:46 pm on February 12, 2010 | 4 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: afghanistan, Hazaras, hostages (2), imperialism (12), imran khan (2), Marjah, Pakistan (570), Pakistan Taliban (124), Pakistani Taliban (126), Pashtuns (11), Tajiks, Taliban pagans (29), Terrorism (399), Theocratic Imperialist Watch (15), Uzbeks (2)

  I am so completely unsympathetic to Pakistani criticism of America for its conduct in Afghanistan as represented in this Imran Khan documentary.

  Early in the video a group of “young cosmopolitan” Pakistani women at a pop music concert are portrayed razing America for imperialism and terrorism.

  My response as an American is to just throw it right back in their faces.

  The lack of self-awareness or self-examination is just amazing. America left the region after the Soviets retreated from Afghanistan in 1989. Gone. And in that time until 2001 Pakistan decided to play ‘masters of the universe’ and support the Taliban throughout its campaign to take over Afghanistan. Pakistan provided unlimited military equipment and supplies, it provided military intelligence and advisors that traveled with the Taliban forces, and tens of thousands of Pakistanis volunteered and fought with the Taliban in Afghan campaigns that had the character of ethnic violence in parts of the country largely inhabited by the Hazaras, Tajiks, Uzbeks, etc. And these educated middle-class Pakistanis are sitting around getting all indignant about America’s conduct?

  Please…I wonder if any Pakistani veterans of the Afghan campaigns brought captive Hazara concubines with them back to Pakistan…

  Related: Speaking of foreign fighters marines and Afghan troops have started their attack on the Taliban-held city of Marjah. A tribal elder reports most of the Afghan Taliban have already fled the area, but

  Militant commanders from the Middle East or Pakistan have stayed on “and they want to fight,” he said.

  I guess it will be foreign fighters versus foreign fighters then. Too bad the Pakistani and Middle Eastern fighters in Marjah won’t allow Afghan civilians to flee the city, thereby putting them potentially in the line of fire.

  How nice of the Pakistani volunteers to come to Afghanistan and take the Afghans hostage…

   
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  thabet 12:08 pm on February 8, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: afghanistan, collateral damage (76), counterterrorism (35), foreign policy (237), international law (143), military (58), rule of law (79), united kingdom (732), war on terror (45)

  A killer above the law?

  The UK use of drones to kill “high-value targets” in Afghanistan should have come as no surprise. British troops are fighting in some of the most dangerous and rugged parts of Afghanistan, and drones have great attractions. They are a relatively cheap way of killing people in areas that are otherwise largely inaccessible. The lives of British troops are not put at risk. Remote pilots carry out an apparently clinical operation, with none of the gore and messiness of military combat.

  Nor is it surprising that the Ministry of Defence responds to the news with bland assurances that every effort is made to ensure that drones are used in compliance with the laws of war. There are “no reports” of civilian casualties, the ministry adds. If taken at face value, these are heartening assurances. But they also illustrate the heart of the problem: the use of killer drones is shrouded in secrecy, and the accountability mechanisms that apply to regular warfare are simply absent.

   
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  johnpi 9:47 pm on January 28, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: afghanistan, US military (60)

  US troops kill Afghan cleric.

  U.S. soldiers shot and killed an Afghan cleric as he drove Thursday with his young son near an American base on the eastern edge of Kabul, underscoring the dangers facing civilians despite NATO efforts to minimize casualties.

   
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  thabet 4:01 pm on January 27, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: afghanistan, bae (3), corruption (32), gordon brown (13), lying liars (57), united kingdom (732)

  Ahead of the London ConferenceAfghan Exit Plan, Gordon Brown told a group of students that he calls up Hamid Karzai and tells him what he thinks of corruption in Afghanistan.

  What a shame Brown didn’t say anything about corruption involving Britain.

   
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  johnpi 7:56 am on January 26, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Afghan surge, afghanistan, eikenberry, hamid karzai (13), McChrystal (2), Pakistan (570), Pakistani government (8)

  The New York Times has “dropped a bombshell” and published Ambassador Eikenberry memos opposing Obama’s Afghan surge.

  The cables — one four pages, the other three — represent a detailed rebuttal to the counterinsurgency strategy offered by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top American and NATO commander in Afghanistan, who had argued that a rapid infusion of fresh troops was essential to avoid failure in the country.

  Eikenberry was deeply concerned about Karzai’s ability to create a viable government that doesn’t require massive foreign support in perpetuity.

  And then there’s Pakistan and the Taliban sanctuaries across the border, about which Eikenberry wrote:

  More troops won’t end the insurgency as long as Pakistan sanctuaries remain. Pakistan will remain the single greatest source of Afghan instability so long as the border sanctuaries remain, and Pakistan views its strategic interests as best served by a weak neighbor. There is reason to be encouraged by Pakistan’s current military offensive in Waziristan, but the lasting result of this effort is still unclear. Nor does the Pakistan military action address the role of the Quetta Shura, which has the most influence over the insurgency in southern Taliban strongholds, or the Haqqani network, the most lethal killer of allied troops and Afghan civilians. Until this sanctuary problem is fully addressed, the gains from sending additional forces may be fleeting.

  (via)

   
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  johnpi 12:55 am on January 26, 2010 | 5 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: afghanistan, ISI (15), Mullah Omar (5), Pakistan (570), peace (5)

  Pakistan’s former spymaster who trained Mullah Omar: ‘US must negotiate directly with Omar to end war.’

  The problem historically with Omar is that he doesn’t negotiate directly. In fact, the last I read, Mullah Omar has never met a non-Muslim.

  During the 1990s when Mullah Omar’s Taliban ruled large parts of Afghanistan, the UN struggled to establish meaningful agreements with the Taliban government but whatever a local cleric agreed to had to be sent back to Kandahar to be approved by Omar who frequently voided or overturned it.

  What Sultan Amir Tarar may mean is that the ISI should play some kind of stepped-up intermediary role between Omar and the US, and that would probably be a bad idea.

   
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  johnpi 12:59 pm on January 24, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: afghanistan, Ahmed Qureshi, conspiracy theories (24), India (174), Pakistan (570)

  A compendium of Pakistani conspiracy theories and their rebuttals.

  For example:

  

  The picture above has been bandied about by Ahmed Qureshi and the rest of the clown posse as proof that the Indian government is secretly supplying weapons to the Pakistani Taliban in order to destabilize the Pakistani government. The conspiracy theorists have misidentified it as a manufactured-only-in-India weapon. It is actually from Russia:

  PK Machine gun is one of the most common weapons in Afghanistan which is not only used by the Afghan Taliban but used also by the Afghan police and their national army. These guns are available in large supply in Afghanistan mainly because the Russian army left behind large caches of Russian made weapons in after the war in 1980s. Another reason is the drug trade between the Russian gangs and Taliban where the gangs buy cheaper drugs from Afghanistan and pay for it with guns instead of money.

  (via)

   
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  johnpi 10:37 pm on January 20, 2010 | 4 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: afghanistan, coin (3), tribal customs (3), tribalism (2), US military (60)

  Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’, Kubrick’s ‘Apocalypse Now’ exemplars of the new American war policy in Afghanistan.

  A US special forces major who published a paper last fall advocating that US Special Forces “go native” has been hired to implement the idea. Major Jim Gant’s experience with “going native” was described recently in the WaPo:

  In an unusual and unauthorized pact, Gant and his men were soon fighting alongside tribesmen in local disputes and against insurgents, at the same time learning ancient tribal codes of honor, loyalty and revenge — codes that often conflicted with the sharia law that the insurgents sought to impose. But the U.S. military had no plans to leverage the Pashtun tribal networks against the insurgents, so Gant kept his alliances quiet.

  No longer. In recent months, Gant, now a major, has won praise at the highest levels for his effort to radically deepen the U.S. military’s involvement with Afghan tribes — and is being sent back to Afghanistan to do just that.

  A writer at the Small Wars Journal lit into Gant’s paper back in November:

  Where to begin? The paper is a collection of nativist mythologies that have run as a theme throughout the West’s imperial age. Last of the Mohicans? Lawrence of Arabia? Dances with Wolves? They’re in there. So is an element of Stockholm Syndrome, for that matter. The problem arises not with Lawrence, of course, but with his evil twin, Kurtz, who has already served as a symbol of colonial-era (Heart of Darkness) and modern American (Apocalypse Now) hubris.

  And if that seems like hyperbole, consider that Gant’s narrative begins with his apparently arbitrary and unilateral decision to take the side of one tribal chieftain over a rival group from within the same tribe, based solely on his gut feeling.

  Or as this blogger points out, “…going in blind and picking winners and losers actually creates insurgency, not the opposite.”

   
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  johnpi 7:38 pm on January 20, 2010 | 2 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Afghan Taliban (41), afghanistan, Brave Warriors Of Afghanistan (10), Pakistan (570), taliban (261), Taliban pagans (29)

  Taliban overhaul their image in bid to win allies.

  …as the Taliban deepen their presence in more of Afghanistan, they are in greater need of popular support and are recasting themselves increasingly as a local liberation movement, independent of Al Qaeda, capitalizing on the mounting frustration of Afghans with their own government and the presence of foreign troops. The effect has been to make them a more potent insurgency, some NATO officials said.

  Afghan villagers and some NATO officials added that the code had begun to change the way some midlevel Taliban commanders and their followers behaved on the ground. A couple of the most brutal commanders have even been removed by Mullah Omar.

  I don’t know how significant a development this is in relation to the entire Afghan nation, since the Taliban aren’t going to be growing their presence outside of Pashtun areas any time soon, what with all the hurt feelings about scorched earth property destruction, massacres, taking the local women for concubines, etc. leftover from the 1990s civil war that was really a Pakistan-aided war of aggression against other ethnic and Muslim groups in the country…

   
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  johnpi 6:58 pm on January 20, 2010 | 1 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: afghanistan, aid (8), electricity, US policy (3), usaid (3)

  Forehead-slapping idiocy: Report slams U.S. for building power plant Afghans can’t run.

  A $300 million power plant in Afghanistan paid for with U.S. tax dollars was an ill-conceived and mismanaged project that the Afghan government can’t afford to switch on now that it’s almost finished, a watchdog agency has found.
  ….

  Even when the plant is completed in March, however, the Afghan government is unlikely to be able to pay the millions of dollars for diesel fuel that’s needed to power the plant and maintain it, the auditors concluded. The U.S. Agency for International Development has agreed to pay for the fuel temporarily.

  “USAID may face the difficult decision of whether to continue funding the plant’s operations or terminating U.S. involvement with the project and placing the plant’s future operation at risk,” the report says.

  The special inspector general’s office questioned the wisdom of building a diesel and heavy fuel plant that has a “technically sophisticated fueling operation that they (the Afghans) may not have the capacity to sustain.”

   
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  johnpi 9:47 am on January 14, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Afghan Taliban (41), afghanistan, hirabah (17), Hirabah watch (13), Muslim-on-Muslim violence (76), taliban (261), Taliban pagans (29)

  Afghan market suicide bombing ‘kills 20.’

   
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  johnpi 8:27 am on January 13, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: afghanistan, corruption (32)

  Three-quarters of Afghan corruption cases involve Westerners.

   
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  johnpi 10:13 pm on January 7, 2010 | 10 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: afghanistan, bloggers (59), cia (30), internet radicals (5), jordan (13), suicide attacks (15), suicide bombers (14), suicide bombings (17)

  ‘My words will die if I do not save them with my blood.’

  Excerpt from the alleged final posthumous Internet post from the Jordanian doctor who killed seven CIA operations in a suicide bombing in Afghanistan.

   
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  johnpi 9:39 pm on January 7, 2010 | 1 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: afghanistan, blackwater (24), mercenaries (8), murder (28)

  Two ex-Blackwater staff charged with Afghan murders.

  Justin Cannon, 27, of Corpus Christi, Texas, and Christopher Drotleff, 29, of Virginia Beach, Virginia, have been charged with second-degree murder following the shooting deaths of the two Afghan men.

   
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  johnpi 9:34 pm on January 7, 2010 | 1 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: afghanistan, hypocrisy (6), Pakistan (570), pax pakistania (3)

  Ha Ha Ha.

  Ahsan has truly found the headline of the day.

  Pak warns against foreign meddling in Afghan affairs.

   
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  thabet 10:40 am on January 6, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: afghanistan, geopolitics (119), intelligence (2), liberal interventionism (49), occupation (49), politics (765), security (8), united states (577)

  I could have told you this 12 months ago for no cost (and I am not even an ‘expert’):

  The U.S. military’s intelligence chief in Afghanistan sharply criticized the work of U.S. spy agencies there on Monday, calling them ignorant and out of touch with the Afghan people.

  In a report issued by the Center for New American Security think tank, Major General Michael Flynn, deputy chief of staff for intelligence in Afghanistan for the U.S. military and its NATO allies, offered a bleak assessment of the intelligence community’s role in the 8-year-old war.

  He described U.S. intelligence officials there as “ignorant of local economics and landowners, hazy about who the powerbrokers are and how they might be influenced … and disengaged from people in the best position to find answers.”

  An operations officer was quoted in the report as calling the United States “clueless” because of a lack of needed intelligence about the country.

   
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  johnpi 9:57 pm on January 4, 2010 | 3 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: afghanistan, internet (46), Internet effect on the Ummah (5), internet radicals (5), suicide attacks (15)

  The suicide bomber who killed seven CIA agents may have been a prominent Jihadi blogger.

  First reported by al-Jazeera yesterday, and picked up in the Wall Street Journal today, it appears that a spokesperson of the Pakistani Taliban has claimed that the suicide bomber at Forward Operating Base Chapman was Jordanian national Hammam Khalil Abu Milal, famous in the jihadi blogosphere as Abu Dujana al-Khurasani. If true, this news is sure to galvanize the online jihadi community, and would represent the most dramatic case to date of the potential for virtual-to-actual jihadi activism.
  ….

  He quickly rose to prominence – and eventually an adminstrator position – on the elite al-Hisba forum in 2007, and has long been widely regarded for a series of popular essays he wrote on the forums, especially on the course of the jihad in Iraq and in praise of al-Qa’ida in Iraq.

  Via Thabet tweets.

   
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  abunoor 3:32 pm on January 4, 2010 | 1 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: afghanistan, al-qaida (29), cia (30)

  It seems that with every day there are new reports about the suicide bomber who killed the CIA agents in Afghanistan.

  WASHINGTON – A former senior intelligence official is confirming that the suicide bomber who killed eight people inside a CIA base in Afghanistan was a Jordanian doctor recruited by Jordanian intelligence to support U.S. efforts against al-Qaida.
  The bombing killed seven CIA employees — four officers and three contracted security guards — and a Jordanian intelligence officer, Ali bin Zaid, according to a second former U.S. intelligence official. Both spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the press.
  The former senior intelligence official confirmed an NBC News report Monday that the bomber was Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, a 36-year old doctor from Zarqa, Jordan. He was arrested over a year ago by Jordanian intelligence, and was thought to have been flipped to support U.S. and Jordanian efforts against al-Qaida.

   
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  aziz 11:48 am on January 4, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: afghanistan, nation-building (3), PLI (4)

  Rory Stewart offers cautious optimism for Obama’s Afghanistan policy. Recall that he was quite critical earlier.

  The issue of the phantom Afghani Army is a big problem though.

   
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  plimfix 2:36 pm on January 3, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: afghanistan, anjem choudray, UK (121)

  A post at A History of the Universe (my renamed blog): Anjem Choudary: Idiot!

   
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  johnpi 10:14 am on January 2, 2010 | 1 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: afghanistan, US military (60)

  2009 was deadliest year for U.S. troops in Afghanistan.