AfghanWire Podcast #1
Newscast
March 5th-March 18th 2007
Newscast
Welcome to the AfghanWire Podcast, a new feature to complement our existing services. Every fortnight we will be discussing the major news from Afghanistan, bringing together two weeks of reporting from around the world into a single digestible package. With exclusive interviews and in depth analysis, we are sure the AfghanWire Podcast will become essential listening for those with an interest in Afghanistan.
In this edition Vanni Cappelli discusses the Taliban’s targeted killings of medium to low-level civil servants, tribal leaders, and members of the religious clergy and we hear from Tom Coghlan, of the Daily Telegraph newspaper, who discusses the importance of Mullah Naqib, the most recently targeted such figure. But first, a round up of the main news from Afghanistan over the last two weeks.
• Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a leader of the insurgency against NATO, Hezb-i Islami founder and former Prime Minister has announced he is seeking talks with the Afghan government.
• NATO has announced a major new offensive in southern Afghanistan.
• An American airstrike killed 9 civilians, including 4 children, just 12 hours after US troops were accused of opening fire on members of the public following a suicide bombing.
• The UN warn that opium production is set to increase for the forthcoming year.
• Prominent tribal elder Mullah Naqib is severely injured in a blast many believe was carried out by the Taliban.
Asia Today has reported that Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a key commander in the Taliban led insurgency has announced he will seek talks with the central government. Hekmatyar, who founded the Hizb-i Islami movement, and is a former prime minister of Afghanistan, has said he will lay down his arms and negotiate with the Karzai administration.
But the paper reported that: “His move is not expected to make any significant difference to the Taliban's planned offensive, as they had all its elements in place before the decision.”
Hekmatyar’s announcement comes just days after the lower house of the Afghan parliament passed a bill guaranteeing immunity to prosecution for suspected war criminals. It is believed that this, as well as pressure from Pakistan, encouraged him to give up the fight against NATO.
The US regards Hekmatyar as a terrorist, and would strongly discourage Karzai from allowing him any role in the administration. This is not to mention the destruction that he wreaked on Kabul during the mid-1990s, and the hatred that this continues to inspire among the people of Kabul. This would seem to preclude the opening of any negotiations.
Meanwhile, NATO announced a major new offensive in the south of Afghanistan last week, in an attempt to bring the lawless province of Helmand under control. The operation, codenamed Achilles, will involve 4500 troops from NATO’s ISAF force and 1000 Afghan soldiers. Its main aim is to pacify the difficult Sangin district that the Guardian described as “the most serious obstacle to NATO strategy” in the region.
The operation is to be a two-pronged initiative aimed at the Taliban led insurgency and the opium producers which fund them.
Speaking from a British outpost at Lashkar Gah, the British Foreign secretary said: "The message it gives is an important one. It will give our military some more flexibility and send an important political signal to the government of Afghanistan."
The British have suffered a difficult fortnight in Afghanistan, losing 2 men to insurgent operations.
Anthony Loyd, a reporter from the Times of London who spent ten days on patrol with British troops in Helmand spoke of the difficulty of identifying insurgents in the region. He reported that they “Sometimes sat down with local Pashtuns. Then they fought them in pitched battle.”
“The villagers appear wary but not hostile,” the report went on. “Their message is always the same: they have not seen the Taliban, they do not know any Taliban, their Government has done nothing for them, they want nothing from the British but to be left alone.”
The rationale behind the war against the Taliban was questioned in the International Herald Tribune. The article pointed out that “The Al Qaeda leadership are still alive and free – while the defeat of the Taliban has become not just a principal goal of US strategy, but a key issue for NATO’s “relevance”. The war against the Taliban, the article argued, was a “classic mistake in military strategy” in which a secondary objective had come to dominate the whole campaign.
Pakistani newspapers reported that US were planning cross-border raids into Pakistan in pursuit of suspected militants. A senior Pakistani security source, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the press the US had pressured Musharraf on a recent visit to the region: “There was only one demand: that Pakistan allow NATO troops the right of hot pursuit of al-Qaeda in Pakistani territory, or NATO would force its own way in,” he said.
A Swiss newspaper claimed that the Taliban's former defense minister was freed two days after his reported capture by Pakistani security forces.
The Swiss weekly SonntagsBlick said one of its reporters spoke to Mullah Ubaidullah Akhund on Feb. 28 unhindered in an Islamic school in the southwestern city of Quetta.
Akhund, considered a key ally of fugitive Taliban leader Mullah Omar, was the most senior leader from the hard-line militia to be reported arrested since U.S.-led troops ousted it from power in 2001.
In other news, an American airstrike on a house near Kabul killed nine people spanning four generations of the same family.
The New York Times reported that the US military had seen two armed men seen entering the compound where the bombing took place:
“Coalition forces observed two men with AK-47s leaving the scene of the rocket attack and entering the compound,” the paper reported a military spokesman as saying. “These men knowingly endangered civilians by retreating into a populated area while conducting attacks against coalition forces.”
But a local representative of the provincial council, Suraya Bahadur, was unhappy with the incident. “I condemn both the suicide attacks and the rocket attacks by the enemy of Afghanistan, and also I condemn these type of mistakes,” by American and NATO forces, she said. “We never want our civilian people to be killed.”
The strike occurred 12 hours after American forces in eastern Afghanistan fired on civilians following a suicide car bombing next to an American convoy. The American fire killed at least 10 people and wounded 25, Afghan officials said.
The incident prompted rumours of a cover-up after it emerged that US soldiers had censored video footage of the violence.
The BBC reported that “two freelance journalists from the Associated Press news agency were on the scene within half an hour and they filmed and photographed a civilian car, 100m from the bomb attack, where three Afghans were killed.
They were ordered by an American soldier to delete the footage from their cameras, which they did. “The US military told the organization that the act was justified because the images were taken by untrained people and might capture visual details that are not as they originally were".
In disputing this, AP Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll in New York said: "That is not a reasonable justification for erasing images from our cameras,” pointing out that "in democratic societies, legitimate journalists are allowed to work without having their equipment seized and their images deleted."
The news has prompted fears that the freedom of the press in Afghanistan may be under threat. The BBC reported that a local journalist from Tolo TV was arrested and held by Afghan authorities for about 36 hours without charge for talking to a Taleban spokesman. The insurgent would ring in every day with his version of events. The corporation says this is “something which happens in most organizations, including the BBC.”
Saad Mohseni from the Afghan Moby Media Group said: "One of the greatest achievements of this post-Taleban era has been a free press and I fear that is now in danger."
Meanwhile, Reuters reported last Saturday that: “The lower house of the Afghan Parliament passed a revised bill that called for amnesty for groups involved in war crimes.” The bill has proven highly controversial in Kabul.
The agency reported that President Karzai praised Parliament’s “important initiative” to promote national reconciliation and stability, but he proposed adding the article that also “safeguards the victim’s rights and punishment of an individual who committed crimes against an individual.”
In other news, an Afghan man was arrested last Sunday at the central post office in Kabul. He had tried to mail a coat fitted with eight pounds of heroin to London, Agence France Presse reported. The man has been detained by police in the capital.
Opium production continues to dominate many of the headlines from Afghanistan. The UN announced that they expected opium production increase over the next year. Afghanistan already produces 92% of the world’s opium.
"It is clear that the insurgents are deriving an income, which they use to pay salaries for their foot soldiers (and) to buy weapons," said Antonio Maria Costa, the UN department's executive director.
"All of this has created quite a cancer of insurgency and illicit drug cultivation that has to be cut through in the years to come."
The UN report also cites a dramatic increase in cannabis growing, which it describes as a “new and disturbing trend.”
A former senior CIA operative who tracked Osama bin Laden for 10 long years warned the Washington Times that the US was facing "an apparent American defeat in Afghanistan".
In an exclusive interview Michael Scheuer said the way ahead in Afghanistan and along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border "ultimately would lead to the defeat of US and NATO forces and the demise of the Karzai government".
An important pro-government tribal leader in Afghanistan was injured in a roadside explosion in Kandahar, prompting fears of reprisal attacks by members of his tribe.
Mullah Naqib, the leader of the Alikozai tribe, was travelling with his two sons when he was targeted by a remotely detonated roadside bomb in the Arghandab valley just outside Kandahar.
Mr Naqib was severely wounded in the attack on Friday 9th March and was flown to India to undergo emergency treatment. One of his sons died that morning, while the other, believed to have lost a leg in the attack, was being treated by Coalition forces in a NATO military base.
The Taliban are thought to be responsible for the blast. Mullah Naqib has recently been involved in drives to curb the Taliban led insurgency in Southern Afghanistan. In January, he urged young men in the volatile Panjwayi and Zheray districts not to become involved in fighting with the Taliban. He also linked the Taliban commander Mullah Dadullah to the death of another tribal leader.
AFGHANWIRE MEDIA BLOG
Sunday, 18 March 2007
