NYT Columnist Roger Cohen: A Once and Future Nation

October 22, 2007

QALAT, Afghanistan

Once upon a time there was a country, more a space than a nation, landlocked, mountainous, impoverished and windblown.

There resided many peoples, including Pashtuns and Tajiks and Uzbeks and Turkmen, and a new tribe called the Americans.

They had come, the Americans, after 30 years of bloodshed, to bring peace to this land called Afghanistan. But what did they know — what could they know — of life behind burkas, or on the other side of mud walls, or inside minds made mad by war?

Past goat herds and yellowing almond trees, the helmeted Americans drove armored Humvees. Beside lurching stacks of battered tires children gathered in villages and, unlike those in another broken land called Iraq, they smiled and waved.

The Americans talked about empowering Afghans. Sometimes they took to Blackhawk choppers and swooped along the dun-colored river beds and sent goats scurrying for cover.

The 26,000 U.S. troops meant well. They wielded billions of dollars. They calculated “metrics” of progress. They had learned, to their cost, how this faraway place — invaded and used and at last abandoned to pile rubble upon rubble — could nurture danger.

Not only was it once home to the American-financed Islamists who humbled the Soviet empire. It also housed their jihadist offspring, who, like sorcerers’ apprentices, turned on a distracted sponsor and brought the dust of two fallen towers to Manhattan.

To help forge a better Afghanistan — or merely an Afghanistan — the Americans involved their NATO friends. An alliance forged to defend the West against the Soviets was transformed into an agent of democratic change in southwest Asia.

How strange! The enemy now was Taliban Islamofascists rather than Kremlin totalitarians. On a hillside in south-eastern Afghanistan rose “Camp Dracula,” a garrison of 700 Romanian soldiers on this NATO mission.

It would take a great fabulist to make up such stories. Yet they wrote themselves after reports that the cold war’s conclusion marked the end of history proved greatly exaggerated.

And so, one recent morning, Lt. Col. James Bramble, a reservist from El Paso, Tex., with a job there as a pharmaceuticals executive, found himself visiting the Romanian forces and then going to the nearby village of Morad Khan Kalay.

Nations are built one village at a time. Or so Colonel Bramble has come to believe. He is a thoughtful man, commanding a NATO provincial reconstruction team, one of 25 across the country, at a base in Qalat, between Kandahar and Kabul. His team is supposed to deliver the development and good governance that will marginalize the Taliban.

That’s the theory. The practice looks like this. Seven armored U.S. Humvees form a “perimeter” on the edge of the village and newly trained members of the Afghan police — the “Afghan face” on this mission — are dispatched to bring out village elders.

Looking apprehensive, the Afghans appear swathed in robes and headgear whose bold colors mock dreary U.S. Army camouflage. Staff Sgt. Marco Villalta, of San Mateo, Calif., steps forward: “We would like to ask you some questions about your village.”

The following is elicited: There are 300 families using 25 wells. Their irrigation ditches get washed away in winter. A small bridge keeps collapsing. They send their children to a school in nearby Shajoy, but it’s often closed because of Taliban threats to teachers.

Sergeant Villalta takes notes. “We’ll share this information with the governor and make sure that something is done.”

“No! No!,” says Sardar Mohammed. “We don’t trust the governor. If he gets food, he gives it to 10 families. He puts money in his pocket. We trust you more than him. Bring aid directly to us.”

Bramble’s view is that the governor is as good as officials get around here. The U.S. officer, like his country and NATO, is caught in the hall of mirrors of contested nation-building. The exchange at the village has traversed cultures, civilizations and centuries. For Western soldiers trained to kill, and now in the business of hoisting an Islamic country from nothing as fighting continues, that’s challenging.

Still, Bramble thinks this first contact will lead to others and perhaps he can arrange for the bridge to be bolstered soon. Another community will be brought around in “the good war” against death-to-the-West Islamists.

This process will be very slow. The West’s stomach for investing blood and treasure here for another decade is unclear. But I see no alternative if Afghanistan is to move from its destructive gyre and the global threat that brings.

The children’s smiles suggest hope still flickers. To lose Afghanistan by way of smile-free Iraq — and do so on the border of a turbulent nuclear-armed Pakistan — would be a terrible betrayal and an unacceptable risk.

That, alas, is no fairy tale.

•

Blog: www.iht.com/passages.

Spiegel Online: THE DISCOUNT WAR–ISAF Is Failing in Effort to Secure Afghanistan on the Cheap

SPIEGEL ONLINE – October 10, 2007, 05:29 PM
URL: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,510674,00.html

By Ralf Beste, Konstantin von Hammerstein and Alexander Szandar

Germany’s parliament votes this Friday on whether to extend Berlin’s participation in the military mission in Afghanistan. The country is on the brink of disaster, but German politicians have chosen to ignore Afghanistan’s real problems.

Italian Brigadier General Fausto Macor is the ideal star witness to make the situation in Afghanistan dramatically clear to German politicians. The wiry general from the northern Italian city of Turin has been in charge of the Regional Command West of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan since July. He and his men are deployed in what is considered the quietest and safest part of the country.

Macor and his men are barricaded into an area near the airport in Herat, an old trading city of 250,000 inhabitants that has long served as a gateway to nearby Iran. Heavily armed Albanian soldiers guard the entrance to the camp, which is protected against enemy fire by a 1-meter-thick wall of boulders.

On Tuesday of last week, the general met with Eckart von Klaeden, the foreign policy spokesman of Germany’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Von Klaeden had traveled to the city with the German ambassador to Afghanistan, Hans-Ulrich Seidt.

The general is slightly delayed, having attended a memorial service for two Spanish soldiers who were killed the day before in a bomb attack 80 kilometers (50 miles) to the south. The service was broadcast live on Italian television to a distressed nation. NATO troops have just liberated two kidnapped Italian intelligence officers from Macor’s contingent. One of the Italians suffered serious injuries during the raid.
The commander sits in a chair, his back to the television set, and points to a military map on the wall. “You see,” he says, “I am responsible for an area half the size of Italy.” Then he rattles off the relevant statistics. Of the 1,800 soldiers under his command, only 270 can go on patrol. If he sends two units out on patrol, they can easily find themselves operating 400 kilometers (249 miles) apart. “It’s as if one of them were in Turin and the other in Venice,” says the general.

He can expect little support from the Afghan army, which has only 400 armed troops in the western sector. As a result, the general is left to his own resources as far as entire regions are concerned. He has no illusions. There is no power vacuum in Afghanistan: Taliban fundamentalists, armed tribal warlords or criminal gangs control the areas where there are no international troops.

In fact, the rule of law ends only a few hundred meters from Macor’s headquarters, where the commander of the Herat airport complains about his situation. Outside, the warm late autumn sun shines on the Italians’ gray Hercules transport aircraft. The mustachioed police colonel keeps his office cooled to a chilly 19 degrees Celsius (61 degrees Fahrenheit). The law requires that no armed soldiers be allowed on the airport grounds. The police colonel complains that his men, armed with only 30 old Kalashnikov automatic rifles, are poorly equipped to uphold the law at the airport.

This isn’t nearly enough firepower to deter the city’s powerful men, who often appear on the tarmac with scores of bodyguards armed with pistols, rifles and mobile grenade launchers. In front of the parked aircraft, rival private armies occasionally engage in violent gun battles, while the airport commander’s men are forced to look on helplessly.
Welcome to Afghanistan in the sixth year following the Western intervention. Welcome to a country that ranks, sadly, in eighth place in the 2007 edition of the “Failed States Index” compiled by the US magazine Foreign Policy — just behind Sudan, Iraq, Somalia and Zimbabwe. Welcome to Afghanistan, the country NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer has proclaimed a test case for the future operability of the world’s most powerful military alliance.

A troop withdrawal would be a “serious defeat for international law and the international community,” warns Peter Struck, the floor leader of Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD), while German Chancellor Angela Merkel believes that her country’s commitment to the operation in Afghanistan is “the only way to demonstrate that we fight terrorists, and that we do so with great resolve.” Welcome to one of the most controversial issues in German foreign policy.

This Friday, Germany’s parliament, the Bundestag, will vote on whether to extend two of the three German military mandates in Afghanistan, currently the Bundeswehr’s most dangerous mission. Twenty-one German soldiers have already lost their lives in Afghanistan, and last Friday three Germans were lucky to escape from a suicide attack with only minor injuries. The Bundestag will decide the fate of up to 3,500 soldiers and six Tornado reconnaissance aircraft operating in Afghanistan under the auspices of NATO’s ISAF force.

Parliament’s approval of the mission is considered a done deal, with a broad majority in both the ruling grand coalition and the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP) likely to vote in favor of keeping the troops in Afghanistan. Even a number of Green parliamentarians intend to support the measure, despite the party’s recent decision not to. Only the Left Party is strictly opposed to the Bundeswehr’s Afghanistan mission.

The future of Germany’s more controversial involvement in the US-led antiterrorism Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) will not be decided until November, after the SPD convention in Hamburg.

Relatively few members of parliament have traveled to Afghanistan in recent months to get a first-hand impression of the situation in the war-torn country, despite the fact that members of the German Bundestag are normally known for their love of travel. Apparently only very few of Germany’s elected representatives feel that Afghanistan is worth a visit.

The ones who choose to stay at home are acutely aware of why they do not want to be associated with the country. The mood among the German public has changed dramatically since the grand coalition took office two years ago. Whereas 60 percent of poll respondents approved of the Bundeswehr’s Afghanistan mission in the past, considerably more than half are openly pushing for a withdrawal today.
Although officials at the Chancellery insist that the country is at the top of the chancellor’s agenda, Angela Merkel studiously avoids being tainted by unpopular issues like Afghanistan. She expresses her support for Germany’s commitment to the shattered country from time to time, perhaps out of a sense of duty, but she has already withdrawn to the sidelines of the debate.

Her predecessor, former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, made two trips to the crisis-plagued region. Photo ops from Afghanistan were still considered desirable at the time. Merkel, on the other hand, prefers being portrayed as a climate change crusader, posing for the cameras in front of a glacier in Greenland or visiting a school in Ethiopia. But she has yet to make an appearance in Afghanistan. There have been many excuses for her apparent decision to shun the country, ranging from kidnappings to SPD conventions to a busy schedule.

The news that reaches Berlin from Afghanistan these days is simply too horrific. Members of parliament who have visited the country describe a place on the verge of collapse. Instead of declining, the problems of poverty, corruption, violence and sheer hopelessness are on the rise. Government institutions are virtually nonexistent in many parts of the country, the police are corrupt and overworked and the military isn’t in much better shape. The effects of Western development aid go largely unnoticed by much of the population.

The security situation is also becoming more and more precarious. More than 5,000 people were killed in attacks or combat during the first nine months of this year alone. According to a United Nations report, acts of violence have increased by close to 30 percent this year. Three-quarters of the attacks are directed against Afghan soldiers, police officers and foreign troops, “in a deliberate and calculated effort to impede the establishment of legitimate government institutions,” the UN report states.

The situation on the military front is unclear. In a Sep. 18 classified report labeled “Urgent” to the governments of European Union member states, the EU’s special envoy in Kabul, Spain’s Francesc Vendrell, identifies a “paradoxical trend.” “While ISAF is achieving significant military successes against the insurgents, especially as a result of targeted attacks on Taliban commanders,” Vendrell writes, “the unsafe zone in which the insurgents operate is growing.” Even a weak Taliban presence is sufficient, Vendrell continues, to bring “normal government activities to an end” and to bring large segments of the population under the influence of the insurgents.

Vendrell’s conclusions coincide with the results of a study by the Senlis Council, an international think tank, which conducted a survey in March of 12,000 Afghan men in the southern and eastern sections of the country, regions which have seen fierce fighting. The study’s conclusions were devastating. In late 2001, the vast majority of Afghans believed that the Taliban had been defeated once and for all. Today only half of those surveyed are convinced that international forces will win the war against the insurgents in southern Afghanistan. It appears that although the Taliban is unlikely to win the war militarily, it is increasingly emerging victorious in the battle for public opinion.

The loss of confidence in and respect for the international community has political consequences. EU envoy Vendrell reports, with some concern, on a written memo from the Afghan interior minister to all provincial governors and police commanders, in which they were instructed to refrain from visiting international aid organizations and civilian and military reconstruction teams in the future.

Although the consequences of the order would not be significant in practice, writes Vendrell, many of his Afghan contacts are concerned about the impression it conveys, namely that the level of trust between the government and the international community is declining. They also fear that “officials with connections to organized crime could gather incriminating material against non-corrupt officials because of harmless contacts.”

There is an odd disparity between the reality in Afghanistan and the political debate in Germany. Seemingly oblivious to the information coming from the country, both the Bundestag and the political parties become embroiled in heated debates over technical details that are in fact irrelevant in Afghanistan. The Green Party and the SPD, in particular, spent weeks in an enthusiastic debate about OEF, ISAF and the Tornado jets.

For many Greens and Social Democrats, the OEF anti-terrorism operation is the epitome of a merciless US-led bombing war that they claim is practically driving Afghans into the arms of the Taliban. At the Green Party convention in the central German city of Göttingen, the party base decided that it would no longer vote in favor of extending the Bundeswehr’s Afghanistan mission. The SPD’s leadership has scheduled the discussion of Afghanistan at its upcoming convention in Hamburg in late October for Saturday evening, timed to coincide with the popular sports broadcast “Sportschau” — apparently in an attempt to divert delegates’ attention away from the debate over OEF and the ISAF.

The debates being conducted in Berlin are essentially ersatz discussions — a not-uncommon tactic among German politicians. Last year, a swarm of self-proclaimed naval experts spent weeks debating the marginal issue of whether the German navy’s deployment off the Lebanese coast should remain outside a three-mile or a six-mile zone.

The important questions in the Afghanistan debate are also being ignored. For instance, how does one define success for the mission? Can a discount war — one that is being waged with a relatively minimal financial commitment — succeed in the long run? Shouldn’t the West, including Germany, increase its commitment to the mission? Should its goals be redefined? Or is it enough to provide the Afghan people with electricity, running water and a little freedom of opinion?

At least some politicians — those who focus on foreign affairs — are offering clear answers to many of these questions. Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, for example, says that the goal in Afghanistan is, of course, not to establish a “Westminster democracy” with the corresponding benefits of a social welfare state. Christian Democratic parliamentarian Ruprecht Polenz, the chairman of the Bundestag’s Committee on Foreign Affairs, consciously sets the bar low when he says: “The goal is to ensure that no more threats originate from within the Afghan state.”
In truth, this objective would represent a dramatic reversal of German policy. In 2002, then Chancellor Schröder insisted that the Afghans ought to be compensated for their “return to the civilized world” by providing them with an adequate “prosperity dividend.” The goal of the intervention, the Schröder administration explained, was to achieve human rights, democracy and prosperity for Afghanistan.

These noble objectives are rarely mentioned today. But which criteria must be fulfilled before the mission can be considered a success and the German troops and their allies can return home? No one knows. An exit strategy is “currently not in sight,” says one German NATO general.

“We won’t let the foreigners leave until our roads are built, our schools, electricity are built, until our police and army are better,” Afghan President Hamid Karzai said recently. Some at NATO perceive this statement as a threat. “Our assistance ends,” says German Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung, “when Afghanistan can find its way to a positive future on its own two feet.”

“NATO will have successfully completed its mission when the Afghan government and its security forces can take responsibility throughout the entire country,” NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer told SPIEGEL in a recent interview. But Scheffer is unwilling to make any predictions, except to say: “NATO will have to stay for the foreseeable future.”

Faced with a difficult situation, the allies are now placing their hopes on the plan to train 70,000 soldiers and 82,000 police officers by the next parliamentary election, in three years. The new mantra of the NATO member states, says Scheffer, is “training, training, training.” “Those who do not invest in training now,” says German General Egon Ramms, who runs the ISAF mission from the NATO command center in the Dutch town of Brunssum, “will have to stay that much longer.”

The Germans are eager to distance themselves from the United States in public debates, insisting that, unlike the Americans, the Germans are mainly involved in civilian reconstruction assistance. But this is precisely where Germany has failed miserably — in developing the Afghan police force, for example, for which Berlin has assumed primary responsibility. After visiting Afghanistan in the summer, a delegation of members of the Bundestag concluded that the work of the German contingent has been disastrous.

Germany, supposedly a “lead nation” in ISAF, has taken a leisurely approach to the Afghanistan effort. In January 2002, a team of high-ranking experts traveled to Afghanistan and recommended sending three German officials to Kabul to serve as advisors to the Afghan interior ministry. The German team, apparently convinced that this would be sufficient, envisioned the trio developing courses for senior bureaucrats and helping the Afghans improve their police academy. It recommended a one-year stint for the three officials. Aside from that, the experts concluded, the Afghans lacked equipment, cars and, most of all, weapons.

But weapons were precisely what the Afghans eventually acquired in abundance. It was an “absurdity,” said FDP parliamentarian Elke Hoff, that Berlin planned to supply Afghanistan with up to 100,000 firearms while denying the Afghan police simple equipment like handcuffs. Germany’s interior and foreign ministries refused to provide countries that fail to fully satisfy German constitutional standards with equipment designed to “exercise direct coercion.”

This defect is only being remedied now — a full five years after Germany launched its Afghan police training program. According to an internal report by the German foreign ministry, “500 officers of the Kabul riot police will soon be equipped with body armor, helmets, shields, gloves, batons and pepper spray.”

Even when the German team of advisors was later expanded to include 60 officials, generally only 40 of them were actually at work at any one time. In the wake of this embarrassing staffing debacle, officials at the interior ministry and chancellery are now quietly examining the possibility of developing a permanent team of specially trained police officers, federal prosecutors and administrative experts that could quickly be deployed to failed states to deal with similar crises. But this is little more than a pipe dream at this point.

Besides, the Americans aren’t interested in waiting for Germany to get its act together and have already taken over from the Germans in many respects. While Berlin agonized over the “further training of mid-level and senior officials” and “salary and rank reforms,” Washington deployed 2,500 troops as police trainers, backed up with hundreds of contractors working for DynCorp, a private security firm.

Managed by retired US generals, the DynCorp employees are training illiterate Afghans to work as police deputies in paramilitary crash courses. Their goal is to ensure that the men will be passable marksmen by the end of the training. The fact that many desert as soon as they complete the courses is seen as an unpleasant fact of life — but not as a blemish on DynCorp’s training statistics.

In the wake of their failures, the Germans are now trying to shift the responsibility for police training to the EU and distribute it among more countries. In May the EU formed its own police training mission, dubbed EUPOL, which has been managed so far by Friedrich Eichele, a German police general. Eichele, the former head of GSG 9, the counterterrorism unit of the German federal police, is a man of few words. His command of the English language is rudimentary and his diplomatic skills are considered limited.

Given such leadership, within only a few months EUPOL has already deteriorated into a directionless tangle of bureaucracy and financial weakness. EUPOL’s 195 EU police officers from 17 countries are not even scheduled to assume their new posts until next March. According to officials, this is the earliest possible date, since the group must first build new, and appropriately comfortable, lodgings for its officers.
All of two German police officers are currently assigned to assist the German reconstruction team in the provincial city of Kunduz, which includes more than 400 soldiers. EUPOL plans to replace the pair with five of its team members soon. The new team will be responsible for the training of 7,500 Afghan police officers in two provinces. In the face of such realities, Guido Westerwelle, the head of the FDP, couldn’t help but comment sarcastically on the program while visiting Afghanistan two weeks ago: “Well, that certainly takes care of police development.”

Despite the efforts of German and British advisors, the interior ministry in Kabul is considered a hotbed of corruption. It costs up to $150,000 in bribes to secure a position as a district police chief. But the investment is worthwhile. Once on the job, a police chief can easily recoup the money from his subordinates.

General Dan McNeill, the American commander of ISAF, likes to entertain visitors to his headquarters in Kabul with small anecdotes from the everyday lives of the Afghan police. He recently instructed his Afghan underlings to set up 20 checkpoints along the road between Kabul and Kandahar. “Which police checkpoints?” a wide-eyed Afghan asked McNeill a few weeks after the initial order. “Oh,” the Afghan quickly realized, “you mean the new tollbooths.”

Wherever one looks in Afghanistan, officials are busy skimming off their cuts. In fact, police officers often exist only on paper. Local police chiefs line their pockets by collecting funds from the international community’s coffers to pay the salaries of nonexistent officers. To add insult to injury, the officers that do exist are paid miserably to perform their life-threatening jobs. At the paltry salary of $70 a month, many police officers complete basic training and then promptly desert to join the private militias of wealthy warlords and drug barons, or even the Taliban. At $400 to $600 a month, the competition pays a lot more than the police.

The situation is hardly any better in the military. According to NATO statistics, 38,000 soldiers have already been trained with Western assistance, a process that will take years and is expected to eventually produce 70,000 soldiers. But these figures do not reflect the real situation.

Last Wednesday, for example, the US commander in charge of training gave a memorable performance at the NATO Council in Brussels. The NATO ambassadors attending the meeting asked Major General Robert Cone, who was in Kabul but was taking part in the session via videoconference, how many men in the Afghan army are now ready for combat.

The general responded that while the goal was to train 70,000 men, 50,000 are already being paid. But, he added, many of these men are simply AWOL (“absent without leave”). In other words, they are either deserters or men who occasionally choose to stay at home instead of appearing for duty. Besides, Cone added, he is having trouble retaining the men who have been trained. The actual force, he told the NATO officials, presumably consists of about 30,000 men, but he was unable to provide them with a more precise figure.

But the ambassadors were insistent. How many of those men are ready for combat? “I really can’t say,” the general said. Finally he admitted the truth: “To be perfectly honest — zero.”

In fact, Cone continued, not a single Afghan unit is capable of independently running an operation. According to Cone, the Afghan military lacks everything from artillery to helicopters, military hospitals, reconnaissance equipment and support personnel.

This explains why Afghan Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak tells every Western visitor that what he needs most are weapons. A few Leopard 1 tanks would be nice, the portly general told CDU parliamentarian von Klaeden two weeks ago in an effort to solicit more German support, but the modern Leopard 2 wouldn’t be so bad, either.

For NATO officers, Wardak’s tank fantasies are nothing short of ridiculous. The general, they complain, only wants the expensive combat machinery so that he can stage an impressive military parade. Besides, they add, experience has shown that most Western weapons deliveries to the Afghan army quickly end up on the black market.

The results of the international community’s reconstruction efforts have been so sobering that many, including Foreign Minister Steinmeier, are calling for a rethink of Germany’s commitment in Afghanistan. Berlin cannot afford to continue its current policy, he explained in the summer. He called for a stronger German commitment, saying that more troops, more police officers and more development aid are necessary.

But such calls for action have done nothing to change the situation. The state of the police training effort remains miserable, while Defense Minister Jung is obstructing efforts to increase the Bundeswehr contingent from 4,000 to 5,000 men — a move both the Foreign Ministry and the Chancellery have endorsed. The team of 400 military trainers Steinmeier wants to see sent to Afghanistan will likely be reduced to no more than 180. But he does see progress in reconstruction aid: The German government has increased its annual funding of the program from €80 million to €125 million.

For Bruce Riedel, a member of the National Security Council at the White House until 2002, all of these efforts, including those of other Western nations, are a disgrace. “We have tried to rebuild a country devastated by a quarter century of wars, invasion and terror on the cheap,” he said in a recent interview. “Instead of a massive economic reconstruction effort akin to the Marshall Plan of the 1940s, Afghans have gotten less economic aid on a per capita basis than Haitians or Bosnians.”

His verdict on the Bush administration’s approach? “Like trying to put a Band-Aid on a chest wound.”

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

Radio Sahar: First modern burn unit opens in Herat

Excerpt from report by Afghan female-orientated community Radio Sahar on 7 October

[Presenter] Afghan health minister took part in the inaugural ceremony of a burn centre in Herat Province today. The burn centre has been built thanks to the financial support of the US and French governments. Here is a report on this:

[Correspondent] The hospital has been built amid mounting concern over the increasing instances injuries involving burns. The officials are now trying to prevent casualties caused by immolation instances at this hospital.

In the meantime, Afghan Health Minister Sayed Mohammad Amin Fatemi says this is the only modern burn centre in the country, adding that the US government has spent 700,000 dollars for construction of the hospital. In addition, the French government provided 400,000 euros as aid for equipping it, the minister states. [Passage omitted: minister's comments, repetition]

The hospital has 36 beds and has been built in three floors, with different wards of physiotherapy, treatment of burn injuries and psychosocial services. It is said that the cases of immolation have exceeded 270 in the current year, 246 cases among women and children and 47 cases of self-immolation. It is reported that most of the people setting fire to themselves succumbed to their injuries.

Self-immolation mainly takes place among women, which has caused deep concern [in the Afghan society]. The observers blame patriarchy and traditionalism as the underlying factors of these instances in Herat Province.

Source: Radio Sahar, Herat, in Dari 1230 gmt 7 Oct 07 via OSC EUP20071008950050 Caversham BBC Monitoring

Pajhwok: Dozens killed in attack on US security firm in Afghan west

Excerpt from report in English by Afghan independent Pajhwok news agency website, Sept. 24, 2007.

Kabul, 24 September: [Passage omitted] In the western Farah Province, dozens were killed and wounded in a fierce clash between Taleban and Afghan guards of the US Protection and Investigation (USPI) company.

Farah police head Abdol Rahman Sarjang said the clash took place in Delaram District on the Herat- Kandahar Highway Sunday night. He added the insurgents attacked a USPI convoy. In the ensuing gunbattle, he said, 21 assailants were killed and 10 others wounded.

At least three Afghan guards with the USPI were also killed, several wounded and 10 disappeared in the wake of the fierce clash that lasted more than three hours. But a police official, who did not want to be named, told Pajhwok 15 USPI guards perished in the gunbattle.

Qari Yusof Ahmadi, who spurned the claim that Taleban suffered heavy casualties, said the movement’s fighters had shot dead 20 employees of the private security firm. Ahmadi claimed Taleban destroyed four vehicles of the company and snatched arms from its workers.

The US security company is engaged in logistic supplies to foreign forces in Afghanistan, but its guards are mostly Afghans. It was the sixth Taleban attack on USPI in Farah.

Elsewhere a police commander for the northeastern zone escaped unhurt in a blast in Taloqan, capital of the Takhar Province. Hezbollah planted the remote-controlled landmine near Maj-Gen Sayed Habib. But the mine exploded before time and wounded the miscreant.

Brig-Gen Ziauddin Mahmudi, police chief of Takhar, said the blast took place in the fourth district of the city. He added police arrested the suspect and recovered 10 remote-controlled bombs, a rocket launcher and a Kalashnikov assault rifle from his house.

He claimed the detainee confessed to having links with Taleban and Al-Qa’idah besides involvement in a recent rocket attack on the police headquarters, killing one and wounding seven others.

The governor’s house in the central Kapisa Province and Zankhan District headquarters in Ghazni were attacked with artillery and rocket-fire Sunday night. Col Mohammad Zaman, Ghazni police chief, said the district headquarters was shelled but there were no casualties.

Mahmud-e Raqi [capital of Kapisa Province] also came under heavy arms attack Sunday night.

Col Sakhi Dad Matin, provincial crimes branch head, said rockets landed near women affairs department and in nearby fields. He admitted windowpanes of the office were smashed.

[Description of Source: Kabul Pajhwok Afghan News (Internet Version-WWW) in English -- Pajhwok Afghan News, established in April 2004, provides daily news and features in Pashto, Dari, English and Urdu. Self-described as "independent," it often reports on security matters and the Taliban activities. It claims to be staffed, managed, and led entirely by Afghans. According to the site, it receives financial support from USAID's Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM). OSC IAP20070924950037 Kabul Pajhwok Afghan News (Internet Version-WWW) in English 1045 GMT 24 Sep 07]

AFP: Iranian, Chinese weapons seized in Herat Province

September 22, 2007

HERAT, Afghanistan (AFP) — Afghan authorities said they had seized dozens of Iranian and Chinese-made weapons after a brief battle Saturday with Taliban fighters near the border with Iran.

The weapons found in the western province of Herat included about 40 mines and rocket-propelled grenades, the government’s intelligence agency said in a statement.

They were found in a vehicle that Taliban fighters abandoned following an exchange of fire in the province’s Ghoryan district on the Iranian border, it said.

“The weapons were seized after Taliban escaped and left one of their vehicles behind with the weapons,” it said.

An intelligence official told AFP separately and on condition of anonymity that the arms appeared to have been manufactured in Iran and China.

Some of the rockets showed to reporters carried Persian writing and the coat of arms of Iran, which reads “Allah.”

US and British officials have alleged that the Taliban are being supplied by weapons that arrive from Iran, although not necessarily from Tehran, which denies involvement.

A sizeable convoy carrying explosives was seized early this month by NATO troops in the western province of Farah, which also borders Iran, the top NATO general here, General Dan McNeill, said last week.

“The geographic origin of that convoy was clearly Iran but take note that I did not say it’s the Iranian government,” the US general told AFP.

Officials with NATO’s International Security Assistance Force told the Washington Post the weapons stash included armour-piercing bombs, which have been especially deadly when used against foreign troops in Iraq.

The NATO-led force interdicted two smaller shipments of similar weapons from Iran into southern Helmand province on April 11 and May 3, the Post said.

US Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte reiterated last week concern about weapons from Iran supplying the Taliban and said Washington was also discouraging China from selling arms to that country.

Toronto Globe and Mail: ISAF coalition wavering

THE AFGHAN MISSION: A SHAKY COALITION

Opening the floodgates to an exodus?
Countries whose troops are battling and dying in the war-ravaged south are feeling pressure to withdraw, threatening NATO’s mission

PAUL KORING
September 20, 2007
It’s not just Canadians scanning the exits looking for an out from Afghanistan.

In other countries where troops are fighting and dying – notably the Netherlands – the public is embroiled in divisive national debate that echoes Canada’s over whether to withdraw from the bloody counterinsurgency against a resurgent Taliban.

Getting out or perhaps even better – swapping the bloody killing fields of southern Afghanistan for a quieter patch in the north where a nation can still proudly claim it is standing shoulder to shoulder with its allies – is fast becoming a recurring theme.

If the Dutch, whose soldiers are battling to hold Uruzgan province, adjacent to Kandahar where Canada’s battle group is deployed, leave when their current commitment ends next August, they could open the floodgates to a bigger exodus.

Australia, whose troops are deployed alongside the Dutch, has warned it will pull out if the Dutch go. The Harper government says it won’t extend Canada’s commitment without the consensus of all political parties.

The entire NATO effort in Afghanistan – once billed as proof that the Atlantic Alliance is relevant in the 21st century and not just a Cold War relic – will seem a chimera if both Canada and the Netherlands bail out at the end of their current commitments.

“It will be a mark of shame on all of us if an alliance built on the foundation of democratic values were to falter at the very moment that it tries to lay that foundation for democracy elsewhere – especially in a mission that is crucial to our own security,” U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates said this week.

The urgency of begging those bearing the burden to stay and warning of even greater bloodshed if they leave – as Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai did this week – is matched by increasingly shrill and mostly ignored pleas from top alliance generals for member governments to match their rhetoric with boots on the ground.

A senior officer at NATO headquarters, closely familiar with the failed efforts to get major alliance nations – notably Germany, Spain, Italy and France – to contribute more, voiced what is now a widespread frustration. “The political declarations are robust. But when you count up the number of boots and helicopters, there’s a glaring absence,” he said, speaking on condition that he not be identified by name or nationality.

Getting the Germans, Spanish, Italians and French to lift the caveats that preclude their troops being usefully deployed to where the fighting is remains the most vexing of NATO’s problems.

“Many allies are reluctant to provide the necessary resources and put their men and women in the line of fire,” Mr. Gates said.

Britain and the United States have significantly increased the number of soldiers they have sent to the war-torn south as it became evident that a raging insurgency was under way. Washington has also increased the duration of its combat tours to 15 months, compared with deployments of six months for Canadian soldiers. Britain has sent an extra 2,000 troops to Helmand province, adjacent to Kandahar. Yesterday, Poland extended its commitment for a year to the fall of 2008.

Meanwhile, public support for waging war in Afghanistan is weakening across much of Western Europe and in Canada.

Solid majorities in other major European countries believe the war in Afghanistan has been “a failure,” making it all but impossible for their governments to shift troops into combat zones to relieve the Canadians or the Dutch. More than 60 per cent of German, Italian, British and French respondents – as well as about half of Canadians polled by Angus Reid last month – believe the military effort in Afghanistan has been a failure so far.

“We are going to lose some” European contingents, the senior NATO officer predicted glumly.

Italy, with 2,500 soldiers in the northwestern corner of Afghanistan, far from the fighting but in a critical zone adjacent to Iran and headquartered in the city of Herat, is also wavering.

If the Dutch quit, it will leave an even bigger hole than if the Canadians pull out. Like Canada, the Netherlands has deployed a combat-capable battle group but it has also sent warplanes and helicopters to southern Afghanistan.

Replacing ground troops would be difficult if the Canadians and the Dutch pull out; replacing the Dutch Chinook helicopters and F-16 fighter-bombers would be even harder, the senior NATO officer said.

In Holland, as in Canada, major political parties are positioning themselves as mainstream public opinion shifts on the Afghanistan mission.

“People are feeling deceived by the government,” said Marico Peters, defence spokesman for the opposition GreenLeft party in Holland.

“What they initially thought of as a reconstruction mission is in fact a fighting mission,” he told Dutch radio.

NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, who is Dutch, doubts his countrymen will pull out. “I honestly cannot imagine that the Netherlands would pull out single-handedly,” he said yesterday.

But a frantic effort is under way to persuade other medium-sized NATO nations – perhaps Norway – to either take the lead in Uruzgan or send sufficient troops to relieve the pressure on the Dutch.

What seems far less likely is convincing Germany, Italy or Spain that it’s their turn to have their soldiers in the front lines in the south. For instance, while top German officials have been urging Canada to remain in Afghanistan, Chancellor Angela Merkel has ruled out any fighting role for German soldiers.

Even German Tornado aircraft are limited solely to reconnaissance and are not allowed to drop bombs.

“Not all the allies, and some major allies included, want to go to the places where the fighting is – although they also suffer from improvised explosive devices and suicide attacks,” Mr. de Hoop Scheffer said.

International effort

The coalition of nations supporting the war in Afghanistan is broad, with 48,000 troops from 37 countries taking part. But it’s not deep, because only the United States, Britain, Canada, the Netherlands and Australia are engaged in heavy fighting.

Country Troops
U.S. 23,000
Britain 7,500
Germany 3,000
Canada 2,500
Italy 2,500
Netherlands 1,300
Turkey 1,200
Poland 1,050
France 800
Australia 700
Spain 650
Norway 500
Romania 500
Bulgaria 400
Denmark 400
Belgium 295
Sweden 260
Czech Republic 220
Hungary 180
Croatia 175
New Zealand 150
Portugal 150
Greece 145
Lithuania 130
Macedonia 120
Estonia 110
Finland 70
Slovakia 60
Slovenia 50
Latvia 35
Albania 30
Azerbaijan 20
Luxembourg 10
Iceland 9
Ireland 5
Switzerland 2
Austria 2
SOURCE: ISAF

RFE/RL: U.S. Worried Iran Sending Chinese Weapons To Taliban

(reported Friday, September 14, 2007)

Afghanistan: U.S. Worried Iran Sending Chinese Weapons To Taliban

By Ron Synovitz

September 14, 2007 (RFE/RL) — U.S. Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte says Washington has complained to Beijing about Chinese weapons shipments to Iran that appear to be turning up in the hands of Taliban fighters in Afghanistan.

Negroponte confirmed the U.S. concerns over China’s weapons deals with Tehran after a 10-ton weapons cache was discovered in the western Afghan province of Herat.

The cache found in Ghurian district, near the border with Iran, included artillery shells, land mines, and rocket-propelled grenade launchers with Chinese, Russian, and Persian markings on them.

Britain’s Foreign Office has also confirmed that it has complained to Beijing about Chinese-made HN-5 antiaircraft missiles confiscated from Taliban fighters who were captured or killed by British Royal Marines in Helmand Province. Beijing has said that it would investigate allegations that the weapons were forwarded to the Taliban through Iran.

When asked in Kabul on September 11 about the Taliban’s use of sophisticated new Chinese weapons, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte also suggested that Iran has been a transit point for Chinese arms deliveries to the Taliban.

“A subject that I have discussed with the Chinese in the past is the fact of their weapons sales to the country of Iran and our concern,” Negroponte said. “We have tried to discourage the Chinese from signing any new weapons contracts with Iran. We are concerned by reports — which we consider to be reliable — of explosively formed projectiles and other kinds of military equipment coming from Iran across the border and coming into the hands of the Taliban.”

In June, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said Washington had no evidence proving a direct role by the Iranian government in smuggling weapons to the Taliban. But Gates said Washington suspects Tehran is involved.

“I haven’t seen any intelligence specifically to this effect, but I would say, given the quantities we are seeing, it is difficult to believe that it is associated with smuggling or the drug business or that it is taking place without the knowledge of the Iranian government,” Gates said.

Not Without Tehran’s Knowledge?

Alex Vatanka is the Washington-based Iran analyst for Jane’s Information Group, which publishes “Jane’s Defence Weekly” and other journals about the weapons industry and global security issues. Vatanka says it will remain unclear whether the Ghurian weapons cache is linked to the Taliban until Afghan or U.S. authorities announce details of their joint investigation.

But the presence of Chinese weapons so close to the Iranian border is the strongest evidence to date suggesting Tehran has had at least an indirect role in arms shipments to Afghanistan.

“Whether the government or somebody in Iran could be buying arms from China and, without Tehran’s knowledge, ship it over to Afghanistan — on that volume of weapons — I find that extremely unlikely,” Vatanka says.

“I can only see that happening if somebody pretty senior and in an influential political position in Iran decided to facilitate that without letting everybody in the system know about it,” he continues. “But they still had to be involved somewhere in the state machinery. We’re not talking about rogue elements [in Iran]. Baluchi drug traffickers can’t pull that kind of thing off.”

Many analysts have noted that Shi’ite Iran and the Sunni Taliban had been firm enemies since 1998, when the Taliban regime controlled most of Afghanistan and executed nine Iranian diplomats in Mazar-e Sharif.

But Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, an expert on Islamic militancy in the region and author of the book “Taliban,” says that times appear to have changed. Now, with U.S. forces deployed some 60 kilometers from the Iranian border at Shindad Airfield in Herat Province, Rashid says Tehran and the Taliban have a common enemy.

“I have no doubt that Iran has been involved in channeling money and arms to various elements in Afghanistan, including the Taliban, for the last few years. They have long-running relations with many of the commanders and small-time warlords in western Afghanistan,” Rashid says. “I think Iran is playing all sides in the Afghan conflict. And there are Pashtuns and non-Pashtuns who are being funded by Iran who are active in western Afghanistan. If the Iranians are convinced that the Americans are undermining them through western Afghanistan, then it is very likely that these agents of theirs have been activated.”

Political Backlash

Still, Vatanka says it would be “almost irrational behavior” for Tehran to supply the Taliban with weapons. He says such a move would almost certainly lead to a negative domestic political backlash for Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad’s government.

For that reason, Vatanka says he is eagerly awaiting the assessment of Afghan and U.S. investigators about whether the arms in the Ghurian cache were stashed away by the Taliban or by one of several rival militia factions in Herat Province.

“The question is, what would get even a faction within Iran to make that type of a decision? Maybe you have excellent business ties between the Iranians and the Afghans on the other side — not necesarily the central government in Kabul — but local leaders in Herat who turn around saying, ‘You Iranians are building roads and infrastructure here. You are setting up shops and factories. But for us to be able to guarantee that we can protect your business interests, we’ll need to receive some arms.’ That’s an argument that one could put out: that the Iranians are essentially supplying not the Taliban, but Afghan partners to secure Iranian businesses and interests in western Afghanistan,” Vatanka says.

To date, Afghan President Hamid Karzai has refused to publicly support allegations of a direct link between Tehran and weapons shipments to the Taliban. “We don’t have any such evidence so far of the involvement of the Iranian government in supplying the Taliban. We have a very good relationship with the Iranian government. Iran and Afghanistan have never been as friendly as they are today,” Karzai has said.

Vatanka says that as long as Karzai maintains that position, skeptics around the world will dismiss suggestions from Washington that Tehran is supplying Taliban fighters in Afghanistan.

“From a U.S. point of view, if the insurgency in Afghanistan is essentially escalating based on Iranian assistance, then what Washington really needs to do is to provide far more evidence that points to that — and get Mr. Hamid Karzai in Kabul and the regional governments in Afghanistan to back the U.S. up when it makes these claims against Iran,” Vatanka says.

After the U.S. military failed to find the weapons of mass destruction allegedly being stockpiled in Iraq, Vatanka says, “the skeptics out there are saying, ‘These [new allegations] are being made up by the U.S. to justify another war with Iran’ — which might not actually be the case. Iran might be involved. But because of the lack of evidence, the Iranians are saying, ‘Who else is backing up the U.S. allegations?’”

http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2007/09/817530bc-0297-4034-8826-ac7fff6331bf.html