Afghanistan - News & Discussions

[abhi_the _gr8_maratha]

Asian Defence News: RAAF Heron mission to Afghanistan extended

 

[IBSA]

Indian airline flight escapes Thursday's rocket attack in Kabul
By GHANIZADA - Fri Jul 04 2014, 6:18 pm


An Indian airline flight escaped a rocket attack by militants in Kabul international airport on Thursday.

The Boeing 737 plane belonging to SpiceJet airline was about to leave for India with 100 people on board when the incidnet took place.

Militants fired at least three rockets which landed in the military sie of the airport on Thursday.

According to the SpiceJet airline officials, the flight from Kabul to Delhi was delayed; however, no passengers, crew and the aircraft of the no-frill carrier were not affected by the strike.

The officials further added that the attack has not deterred SpiceJet from stopping its services to Kabul.

Taliban militants group claimed responsibility behind the attack and said several military aircrafts were damaged following the attack.

Officials in the ministry of interior affairs of Afghanistan also confirmed that a warehouse where helicopters were kept caught fire following the incident.

Indian airline flight escapes Thursday’s rocket attack in Kabul - Khaama Press (KP) | Afghan News Agency

 

[abhi_the _gr8_maratha]

Afghanistan will not be the next Iraq - Worldnews.com

 

[nrupatunga]

Afghan elections: Audit of disputed run-off halted

Afghanistan's election commission has suspended an audit of votes from June's hotly-disputed presidential run-off.

The Independent Election Commission (IEC) said this was due to a "misunderstanding",without elaborating.

Both candidates Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah accuse each other of electoral fraud.

The audit process of more than eight million votes - brokered by US Secretary of State John Kerry - has been marred by walkouts by both sides.

Mr Ghani won the 14 June run-off, according to preliminary results. Mr Abdullah came top in the first round in April, but failed to secure 50% of the vote to avoid the run-off.

Analysts warn that any further delays could further destabilise the conflict-torn country.

Unity threat
The IEC announced its decision just four days after the process began. It did not provide further details.
However, the BBC has learnt that party agents from the Ghani camp staged a brief walkout on Saturday after a dispute over how the ballots were being scrutinised, the BBC's Karen Allen in Kabul reports.

The two sides still appear at odds over the ground rules for the audit, and most of the 23,000 ballot boxes are still to be checked, our correspondent says.

US special representative James Dobbins is now back in Afghanistan for talks with both candidates try to "move the process forward" - paving the way for a government of national unity, but only once an audit is complete.

Meanwhile, Nader Nadery, who heads the main Afghan election observer team, warned that the auditing process "could be much slower than anticipated" if disruptions continued.

He added that further stand-offs "would do little for national unity".

Taliban militants have been testing the capacity of the Afghan army in recent weeks, with a major offensive in the southern province of Helmand.

The withdrawal of foreign troops by the end of this year will be the litmus test of whether more than a decade of training and investment in building up Afghanistan's own security forces has paid off, correspondents say.

President Barack Obama has said the US remained committed to Afghanistan provided the incoming president signed a security agreement.

Afghanistan's current President Hamid Karzai, who came to office after the US-led overthrow of the Taliban, is stepping down after more than 10 years.

 

[nrupatunga]

Why Did the U.S. Spend Millions to Make Afghans Eat Soybeans?

Afghanistan has a rich culinary tradition, but soybeans are not part of it. American agricultural experts who consider soybeans a superfood found this dismaying, and so over the past four years, they've invested tens of millions of taxpayer dollars to try to change the way Afghans eat – and failed miserably.

According to interviews and government documents obtained by the Center for Public Integrity, the effort to make Afghans eat soy has been marked by mismanagement, poor government oversight and financial waste. Warnings by agronomists that the $34 million program was unwise were ignored, as was a simple fact: Afghans don't like the taste of soy.

The project's problems model the larger shortcomings of the estimated $120 billion U.S. reconstruction effort in Afghanistan, including what many experts depict as ignorance of Afghan traditions, mismanagement and poor spending controls.

No one has calculated precisely how much the United States wasted or misspent in Afghanistan, but a congressionally-chartered group estimated in 2011 that it could be nearly a third of the total. A special auditor appointed by President Obama the following year said he discovered nearly $7 billion worth of Afghanistan-related waste in just his first year on the job.


"We didn't have a reconstruction effort, we just spent a lot of money," mostly to get the Afghan military working and keep its government afloat, commented Anthony H. Cordesman, a Middle East specialist and former defense intelligence analyst who is now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a nonprofit group in Washington. The funds allocated to rebuild the country, said Cordesman, mostly went to "short-term aid projects, without an assessment of the overall economy, with reliance on contractors.

The Afghan diet reform effort, formally known as the Soybeans for Agricultural Renewal in Afghanistan Initiative, was a "risky but honorable endeavor," according to one of the project's managers. It was meant to address malnutrition by raising the level of protein in Afghan diets.

But the project, overseen by the Agriculture Department (USDA) and implemented by the main trade association for the industry, the American Soybean Association, encountered problems from the start.

The first crop failed, and subsequent harvests didn't produce enough soybeans to operate a special factory in Mazar-e-Sharif that was constructed and managed at a cost of at least $1.5 million to create a local soybean economy. Afghan farmers participating in the project, discouraged by crop failures, largely abandoned their growing efforts.

As a result, the factory has instead been forced to use at least 4,000 metric tons of soybeans imported from America at a cost of more than $2 million. But its operation has been so hobbled by shortages that those involved in the project worry its equipment could soon be dismantled and sold by its local owner.

In March, Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction John Sopko met with project and government employees in the country who told him there is no "significant demand for soybean products in Afghanistan," as he wrote in a letter the following month to Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack. "This should have been expected, since Afghans apparently have never grown or eaten soybeans before," Sopko wrote.

Moreover, those running the program told him that "Afghans don't like the taste of bread made with soybean flour," Sopko wrote. He requested that the department turn over all of its internal documents on the program.

Then, after reviewing the documents, Sopko wrote Vilsack again in June, expressing alarm that a feasibility study was not performed before the department started spending tens of millions of dollars on the idea, and that it was not halted when problems were flagged in a USDA-financed review this February.

"What is troubling about this particular project is that it appears that many of these problems could have been foreseen and, therefore, possibly avoided," Sopko said.

Asked for comment, the Agriculture Department called Sopko's criticisms "premature." Spokeswoman Gwen Sparks said, "The project has produced positive results in the direct distribution of soybean products, renovation of irrigation systems and rehabilitation of farm-to-market roads." She also said the effort, slated to end in five months, was modified after the special expert review and would be reexamined before it is extended.

Sowing but not reaping

The first planting took place in spring 2011. The program ran into early trouble when its new planting managers, who had prior experience in the northern Afghan province of Takhar, decided to plant a soybean seed variety there that required four months to reach maturity. A major snowfall occurred in late September, before the harvest, and most of the crop was lost.

"The season in Takhar," a February 2014 independent evaluation noted, "is just too short." The evaluation, paid for by USDA, was conducted by EnCompass LLC, based in Rockville, Maryland.

As it turns out, a feasibility study conducted three years earlier by a British group, Joint Development Associates International, for the principal British foreign aid organization highlighted the special challenges posed by Afghanistan's weather patterns. It concluded that "the crop production cycle and available water means that soybeans do not fit profitably into the Afghan farming system."

The group's report, obtained by the Center, said it "strongly advise[d] against any further encouragement of farmers growing soybeans in Afghanistan." It bluntly noted that while many government agencies "have been approached by people wanting to promote soybean production," agreeing to do so would result in "the waste of development funding."

Jim Hershey of the American Soybean Association, the trade group that helped launch the project, said he was unfamiliar with the British report until 2013. "Had we known about the report," he said, "we might have approached things a little bit differently."

According to the Encompass independent evaluation for USDA, the Afghans recruited into the U.S.-led effort were predominantly illiterate, small subsistence farmers, who resisted planting soybean seeds as densely as they should have, sharply reducing crop yields. They also had no crop insurance, so the early crop failure due to weather killed their family income.

It "put the program in total jeopardy because farmers are told this is going to work, we've got your market, and then the crops fail because you don't have the varieties right," said Don Dwyer, a private agricultural consultant who has worked on crop substitution in Afghanistan with the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Department of Defense.

The independent evaluation said that while thousands of farmers received training and planted soybeans in 2011 and 2012, less than 100 of those farmers replanted in 2013.

The project's first country director left in November 2012, and the second left the project on Oct. 15, 2013. The third was the association's former regional office director in Istanbul; he was teamed with an Afghan spokesperson to serve as a liason to the Afghan government, part of what Hershey called the "Afghanization" of the project.

The program also cycled through five chief agronomists over a three-year period, according to the EnCompass report. "It was a revolving door," one of the project's members told EnCompass, which concluded that staffing gaps "seem to have undermined implementation." The report added that those with a stake in the project's success concluded that "leadership in-country did not have the requisite experience in agriculture or rural development to oversee the project."

In 2013, indigenous farmers produced less than 3 percent of the 4,500 metric tons per year needed for the factory to operate at full capacity.

The soybean association responded to the evaluators' blunt critique that success would take more time — at least five to seven years "to introduce a new crop," according to the report.

But the signs are not good. As of this spring, the report said, the program's managers still had not figured out a "mechanical" planting method and the best cultivation techniques to increase yields. And data show that soy is not "more profitable than alternative crops," giving farmers in the program little incentive to keep going.

The largest challenge, however, may be the most fundamental one — namely, how to make Afghans appreciate the product's taste and want to buy it.

The soybean association, in its formal response to the Encompass evaluation, said it was "in the process of conducting a baking study to determine the optimum amount of low fat soy flour that can be incorporated into Afghan naan [bread] while maintaining total acceptability to local Afghan people."

In the interview, Hershey said that "most of our acceptability work" suggests that making naan with four to five percent soy flour will extend its shelf life without greatly changing its traditional flavor. But many Afghans, he added, still "aren't ready to pay a little more" for what's being sold under the label "Strong Naan."

 

[amoy]

Why Did the U.S. Spend Millions to Make Afghans Eat Soybeans?

this news indeed amusing why Americans became so altruistic suddenly? good efforts though. soybean one of staple foods of East Asians , soybean milk （i.e. juice）, soy sauce, toufu "¦ also a top commodity imported from US. low fat soy flour is good for a balanced diet if one eats too much meat and too little veget.

Interestingly Naan is also the pronunciation for bread in W. China revealing a long history of interactions. Available at every Xinjiang restaurant all over China.

Sent from my 5910 using Tapatalk 2

 

[cobra commando]

Three Indians abducted by Afghan Taliban rescued: Report

Kabul: Three Indian engineers, abducted by the Taliban, have been rescued in a special military operation in eastern Logar province while they were being taken to Pakistan, Afghanistan's intelligence agency announced on Saturday. The Indian nationals, working for OASIS company, were abducted by Taliban while they were on their way from Logar to capital Kabul, National Directorate of Security (NDS) said in a statement. The Taliban militants were planning to take the three Indians to Quetta city of Pakistan, before they were freed by intelligence operatives, Afghan news agency Khaama Press quoted the domestic intelligence agency as saying. NDS said the hostages were freed during a military operation yesterday from Babos area of Logar province. The statement also added that the three abducted Indians were engineers and the Taliban militants were planning to take them to Quetta city via Maidan Wardak province. A suspect was also arrested in connection with the abduction, the NDS said, adding that the operation was launched after gathering enough intelligence information regarding the incident. The Taliban has not commented on the report so far.
Three Indians abducted by Afghan Taliban rescued: Report

 

[Rushil51]

Source:- https://twitter.com/combatjourno/status/500638359908532225

Afghan intelligence service adds that the Taliban were tending to take these 3 Indian engineers to Quetta city, Baluchistan, Pakistan.

 

[nrupatunga]

Amid Election Impasse, Calls in Afghanistan for an Interim Government

A coterie of powerful Afghan government ministers and officials with strong ties to the security forces are threatening to seize power if an election impasse that has paralyzed the country is not resolved soon.

Though it is unusual to telegraph plans for what could amount to a coup — though no one is calling it that — the officials all stressed that they hoped the mere threat of forming an interim government would persuade the country's rival presidential candidates, Abdullah Abdullah and Ashraf Ghani, to make the compromises needed to end the crisis.

After weeks of quietly discussing the prospect of imposing a temporary government, officials within the Karzai government said the best way out of a crisis that had emboldened the Taliban, weakened an already struggling economy and left many here deeply pessimistic about the country's democratic future, might well be some form of interim government, most likely run by a committee.

"But what will happen if the legal institutions, if they are not working?" asked Rangin Dadfar Spanta, national security adviser to President Hamid Karzai, though he declined to explicitly back any move toward an interim government and insisted a solution to the crisis must be in line with Afghanistan's Constitution.

It often happens that when power is seized during a political crisis, as in Thailand or Egypt, those taking charge argue that the step is essential to restore order and protect democracy in the long run. That is also the case here, where such a move is being advertised as a last resort to save democracy. It could also effectively discard the results of a presidential runoff election that, until it was derailed by allegations of fraud, had been promoted as a historic event in a country that never had a democratic transfer of power.

"I see some people are really serious about it," said a senior Afghan official. He said fears of a repeat of the civil war that engulfed Afghanistan in the years after the withdrawal of Soviet forces in 1989 were driving the discussions.

"It's not only tactical, it's real, and it's because the memory of the crisis years ago in the 1990s is still fresh, and they don't want to go to that," the official said.
That official and others interviewed in recent days spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were discussing plans that could be considered seditious. The fact that they discussed the plans in advance suggests that they are using the threat of a coup to achieve political ends, not simply plotting in secret to execute one.

The officials said they believed they would have the backing of Afghanistan's army, police and intelligence corps. Though no concrete plans are in place, several officials said a committee would most likely be formed to run Afghanistan and that representatives of Mr. Abdullah and Mr. Ghani would be asked to join. Both candidates have dismissed the idea of an interim government.

Many Afghans are liable to view any step to an interim government as a power grab by the men who surrounded Mr. Karzai for the last 12 years who may be seeking an excuse to preserve their power.

The United States and European countries are loath to see Afghan officials make an end-run around Afghanistan's Constitution, which would call into question the lives lost and billions spent by the West in Afghanistan. Yet, in the two months since the runoff, the Abdullah and Ghani campaigns have proved unable or unwilling to compromise.

At the same time, talks on creating a national unity government, which the candidates agreed to as part of an American-brokered deal to end the crisis, have made limited progress. A special audit of all 8.1 million votes under the supervision of the United Nations agreed to as part of the same deal has been mired by arguments over what constitutes a fraudulent vote.

Along with the threat of violence, the political fight has brought Afghanistan's ethnic divides back to the surface, pitting the smaller Tajik and Hazara communities against the dominant Pashtuns. The economy is suffering as well. Two Afghan officials warned that the government would soon be unable to pay its civil servants because revenue from taxes and customs were down by nearly a third this year.

Signs of fraying within the Karzai government have already begun to emerge. With Taliban military advances threatening entire districts, for instance, some Afghan officials are now deploying army and police units and seeking help from the American-led military coalition in defiance of Mr. Karzai, who has tried to limit when and where foreign and Afghan forces can operate.
A new government is needed soon if there is to be any chance of securing deals to keep American and European troops here after the end of the year, some Afghan officials said. They said it would be better to start laying the groundwork to justify an interim government now in case Mr. Abdullah and Mr. Ghani cannot not find a solution.

Talk about plans for an interim government intensified after some of Mr. Abdullah's most powerful backers — men who command well-armed militias — came within days of trying to seize power and declare their candidate the president after the release of preliminary results that gave Mr. Ghani a wide lead.

Three senior Afghan officials said they needed a government in place by mid-September to ensure security agreements needed to keep some United States and NATO forces in Afghanistan beyond the end of the year. They said a new presidential election could most likely be held next year, probably at the same time Afghanistan will elect a new parliament, which would help keep costs under control.

"The debate is there and people have the right to debate, of course, particularly when they are faced with such an important national crisis," said Umar Daudzai, the Interior minister. "But personally I prefer, and I see it in our national interest, that something come out of this election, whatever way it is, whether it is a national unity government, or power sharing, because this is the only constitutional way we have."

The potential putsch by Mr. Abdullah's supporters was averted only after President Obama called both candidates, and dispatched Secretary of State John Kerry to broker a deal between them, an effort that has been undercut by continued disagreements and intransigence of hard-liners.

Ultimately, though, it may all come back to Mr. Karzai, as so much has in post-Taliban Afghanistan. Officials with knowledge of the inner workings of the presidential palace said many of Mr. Karzai's confidants were frustrated with what they described as the president's support for Mr. Ghani and fearful that his dark view of the West would eventually leave them at the mercy of the Taliban.

Some of those officials and advisers are now involved in the discussions about the interim government, they said.
Ideally, the officials said, Mr. Karzai would go along with the interim government, and he has in recent days insisted he would step down this month no matter what happened with the election.
Aimal Faizi, a spokesman for the president, said that Mr. Karzai had provided no support to any candidate, dismissing talk of the interim government as "rumors."

It seems the NYT reporter - Mattew Rosenberg - was asked to leave a'stan within 24 hours once this report came.

 

[nrupatunga]

Afghanistan presidential election in crisis after candidate pulls out of audit

One of two men vying to become the president of Afghanistan, Abdullah Abdullah, pulled his observers Wednesday from an audit of the country's disputed election over concerns of widespread fraud in a move that throws the already contentious election into further crisis.

The U.S. brokered the audit of the eight million ballots from the country's June presidential runoff as a way to end what had been a debilitating impasse over who would take over from outgoing President Hamid Karzai. But the audit, which was announced in July, has proceeded in fits and starts as both sides have argued strenuously over every ballot.

Former Foreign Minister Abdullah is facing former Finance Minister Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai in the election. Abdullah came in first during the first round of voting on April 5 but preliminary results from the June runoff showed Ahmadzai in the lead. That sparked accusations of rampant fraud from the Abdullah camp.

On Tuesday, Abdullah's camp threatened to boycott the audit if their concerns over fraud were not addressed. Then on Wednesday, the campaign followed through on its threat and pulled observers from the recount, which is being carried out in warehouses on the edge of the capital.

"It is full of fraud," said a spokesman for Abdullah, Fazel Sancharaki, who confirmed the decision to withdraw from the audit. "Nobody is paying attention to our demands."

A spokesman for the United Nations in Kabul, Liam McDowall, confirmed that there had been a "temporary pause" in the audit process but said monitors did not anticipate it would be a significant disruption. The U.N. has been helping supervise the audit along with Afghanistan's Independent Election Commission.

Abdullah's team, concerned that not enough ballots have been invalidated to correspond to the level of fraud they believe happened, would like the criteria for invalidation expanded.

The campaign's decision to drop its support for the ballot raises concerns about whether Abdullah's team and those who voted for him would consider any resulting government to be valid. That could have dangerous repercussions in a country still struggling to overcome ethnic and religious divides and battling a resurgent Taliban insurgency.

The election impasse has also hurt the country's economy, as customers worrying about the outbreak of civil war hold onto their money and investors put the brakes on new projects as they wait to see how the crisis unfolds. It has also delayed the signing of a new security pact with the United States that would allow a small number of troops to stay in Afghanistan past December.

Karzai, who has been trying to bring both sides together to overcome the impasse, met with the two candidates Sunday and again Tuesday after Abdullah's boycott threat. Karzai has said that the inauguration of the new president must happen by Sept. 2. That is just two days before NATO members are expected to meet in Wales.

Without a new president, it's unclear who would represent Afghanistan at a meeting that will discuss the military coalition's support for Afghan forces. A spokesman for Karzai, Aimal Faizi, said the president was not willing to go himself and that it was better to send the new president. Karzai has clashed with NATO over such issues as night raids and civilian casualties in airstrikes. The president has refused to sign an agreement allowing international forces to stay in Afghanistan past December.

 

[nrupatunga]

The Warlord Who Defines Afghanistan: An Excerpt From Bruce Riedel's 'What We Won'

Shibirghan, the capital of Jowzjan province, is a remote and barren place, even by Afghan standards. To the north, Jowzjan borders on the Amu Darya River and Turkmenistan, a former part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Shibirghan is a city of about 150,000 on a flat, dry plain that extends past the river into Central Asia. Most of the city's population is made up of ethnic Uzbeks, with a minority of Turkmen; the province as a whole is 40 percent Uzbek and 30 percent Turkmen. Natural gas has been exploited in the province since the 1970s, initially by a Soviet energy project. Shibirghan is on the Afghan ring road, the country's main highway, which connects the country's main cities. Shibirghan lies between the largest city in the north, Mazar-e Sharif, to the east and the largest city in the west, Herat.

Since the 1980s, Shibirghan has been the stronghold of Abdul Rashid Dostum, an Uzbek Afghan warlord who has played a complex role in the wars that have wracked Afghanistan since 1978. In 1998, Dostum was my host during a visit to Shibirghan. I had met him before, in my Pentagon office, where he had related his life's journey to me. A physically strong and imposing man, he has an Asian appearance, a hint of his Mongol roots. That day he was dressed to look like a modern political leader, in a suit and tie. The notorious warlord was hosting a meeting of the Northern Alliance, the coalition of Afghan parties that opposed the Taliban, in his hometown. In addition to Dostum, Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani, Hazara Shia leader Karim Khalili, and Mohammad Abdullah, a deputy of the legendary Ahmad Shah Massoud, were in attendance. The U.S. party was led by Bill Richardson, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and Karl "Rick" Inderfurth, assistant secretary of State. At the start of the meeting, all the Afghans and Americans held each other's hands in a symbol of unity for the cameras.

In the photo my face is grim. I was bleeding slowly from a bad leg wound that I'd received just an hour earlier, when we got off the small plane that the UN had provided to fly us from Kabul to Shibirghan. Dostum had arranged an elaborate welcome for us. At the airport an honor guard greeted us, and we boarded a convoy of vehicles to drive into the city. Hundreds of children and adults lined the road to welcome the U.S. delegation to Jowzjan, waving flags and banners in English that proudly carried the names of their schools, businesses, and trade unions. Many of the children were in their school uniforms. Most striking was that almost half were girls without head scarves, a rare sight in 1998 in Afghanistan, where very few girls went to school. The event had the look of a communist state celebration of May Day or the Russian Revolution—and it looked that way because Dostum was once a prize pupil of the Soviet Union's intelligence service, the KGB.

Once we arrived in the city center, we moved rapidly into the main stadium. There we were to watch a game of buzkashi, a much more violent variant of polo played by Uzbeks and other Afghans. As we entered the stadium, I slipped and cut my leg badly. Watching the game, I realized that I was in distress and asked for help. Dostum himself summoned a doctor, who arrived carrying a satchel with a large saw on top that was used for amputating limbs. I demurred. Fortunately, NBC News anchor Andrea Mitchell had come along to do a story on the talks, and her camera team included a former British Royal Marine commando who had been trained as a medic. He stitched me up quickly, using a can of 7UP as disinfectant. Ten hours later, doctors at the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, gave me more thorough medical treatment. Andrea described the whole scene very well in her autobiography, Talking Back to Presidents, Dictators, and Assorted Scoundrels.

Dostum certainly falls into the scoundrel department. He is a useful subject to study for those seeking to understand the violent politics of Afghanistan over the last half-century—especially the intrigues of Afghanistan's communists, who seized power in 1978 and invited the Soviet Union to send an army into their country, setting the stage for the covert involvement of the United States. Participants on both sides in the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s claimed to be more than warlords and militias. The Afghan communist government claimed to represent a new modern socialist world order. The Afghan resistance, the mujahedin, claimed to be holy warriors—jihadists—and freedom fighters defending their country from foreign invasion. The mujahedin narrative was much more honest than that of the communists.

At the commander level, however, there was not much difference between the two sides. Most commanders were warlords and behaved like warlords. The best of them, like Ahmad Shah Massoud, the commander of mujahedin forces in the Panjsher Valley, rose above the others in caring for the welfare of his supporters and the people of his fighting zone. The worst—like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the strongest mujahedin leader in the Pashtun community, and Dostum himself—exemplified the more typical commander on both sides: ruthless, corrupt, volatile, and violent. Dostum switched sides many times during his blood-soaked career. He has been backed over the years by the Soviet Union, Iran, Turkey, Uzbekistan, Russia, and the United States. He even temporarily aligned himself with the Taliban and Pakistan. After 35 years, Dostum is still a major player, so taking a more in-depth look at my host in Shibirghan is a good introduction to the Afghan war.

Dostum began his political life as a communist. Born in 1955 into a peasant family in a village near Shibirghan, he joined the communist party, the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), as a teenager, and in 1973 he became a paratrooper in the Afghan army. The Afghan communist party was badly divided from its birth in 1965. The two factions of the party, the Parcham (the Banner) and the Khalq (the People), were literally at each other's throats throughout the party's history. The Parcham drew its support from urban Afghans and from the country's diverse ethnic groups. The Khalq was more oriented toward rural areas and drew its support almost exclusively from the Pashtuns, Afghanistan's largest ethnic group. The Soviets tried endlessly to convince the two to work together, with only the most limited success. The PDPA's deep factional conflict would bedevil it and the Soviets until the collapse of the communist state in 1992, a collapse in which Dostum was a central player.

On April 27, 1978, the PDPA's supporters in the Afghan army staged a coup d'état in Kabul and overthrew the government of President Mohammad Daoud Khan, who had staged his own coup five years earlier, ousting King Zahir and creating the first Afghan republic. The Saur (April) Revolution would precipitate an Afghan conflict that continues to this day. Dostum was then commander of an armored unit in the army and a member of the Parcham faction. The April coup was led by the Khalq faction and its leader, Nur Muhammad Taraki, who became president of the new People's Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. The Khalq quickly purged many Parchamists from the party and the country, ignoring advice from Moscow to try to build a broad-based government, including noncommunists. The Khalqis were violent ideologues who saw enemies on every side, and they quickly acquired them.

Dostum fled the country to Pakistan, where he lived in exile in Peshawar. As a communist, Dostum did not fit in well in Pakistan, which was rapidly emerging as the main patron of the resistance to the communist takeover and the principal sponsor of the mujahedin. Dostum stayed in exile until December 1979, when the Soviet 40th Red Army invaded Afghanistan and killed Taraki's successor, Hafizullah Amin, and installed Babrak Karmal in his place. Dostum then returned to Afghanistan to become a local militia commander defending the natural-gas fields, the only domestic source of energy in the country, in his home province of Jowzjan. Dostum was a natural soldier and a good leader whose troops admired his charisma and tough military approach. He specialized in frontal assaults on the enemy, and he quickly acquired a reputation for brutal and extreme violence. In 1982 Dostum was promoted to command a battalion of the militia run by the communist government's secret police, the State Information Service, known as the KHAD (Khedamati Ittlaati-e Dawlat). The KHAD was the KGB's Afghan protégé; it also got some assistance from the East German intelligence service. At its height it had about 30,000 employees and an additional 100,000 informants. Its founder was Mohammad Najibullah Ahmadzai, a Pahstun known for his ruthlessness in a regime that extolled extremism. In 1986 Najibullah would become Afghanistan's fourth and last communist dictator. He was nicknamed Najib (the bull) for his cruelty.

Under Najibullah's leadership, Dostum thrived as a commander of the KHAD militia in Jowzjan, and soon his Jowzjani militia was the most successful communist fighting force in the country. Dostum's Jowzjanis formed a disciplined force that often defeated mujahedin commanders in the northern part of the country and even persuaded some to defect to the communist cause. Within a year Dostum's force was upgraded to a division of 10,000 men, called the 53rd Division or the Jowzjani Division. The Jowzjani Division became one of only a few Afghan communist units that the 40th Red Army felt that it could rely on to fight well. For his performance, Dostum was given the Hero of Afghanistan award, the highest honor bestowed by the People's Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. In 1988, with the 40th Red Army withdrawing from Afghanistan, the Jowzjani militia was given responsibility for leading the communist military campaign in north-central Afghanistan along the southern border of the Soviet Union. After its defeat in Afghanistan, Moscow wanted Dostum controlling the Amu Darya. By then his control of his home province and the surrounding area was complete.

In 1989 Dostum was promoted again, becoming commander of the 7th Afghan Army Corps, with even more responsibility for the north. Najibullah was by now president of Afghanistan, and the KHAD effectively ran the communist state, which was under siege by the mujahedin. Estimates of the size of Dostum's command in the north range from around 20,000 to 45,000. His forces included three infantry divisions, an armored brigade, 60 MiG aircraft, 60 helicopters, and 200 Soviet-made tanks. He ruled a state within a state. He sent elite units of his force to buttress Najibullah's garrisons in other parts of the country, including at the key battle of Jalalabad in 1989, which halted the mujahedin advance on Kabul.

Early in 1992, Dostum read the handwriting on the wall. The USSR had ceased to exist, and its aid to Najibullah was coming to an end. In December 1991, Dostum turned to the newly independent country of Uzbekistan and its dictator, President Islam Karimov, for aid. In 1992 Dostum "defected" to the side of the mujahedin and joined in the battle to take Kabul and oust Najibullah. Afghanistan's civil war entered a new phase: the communists were finished, and a new power struggle arose, between the warlords. Dostum would be a central player, shifting alliances constantly from his power base in Jowzjan. He solicited aid from many regional players, including Iran and Uzbekistan in particular but also Russia and Turkey. In 1998 it was Iran that backed him most actively. A senior delegation from the Iranian intelligence service, MOIS, arrived right after my delegation left to check on what Dostum had been up to with the Americans. He went into exile twice in the late 1990s, on both occasions spending much of his time in Turkey. In 2001 he again became an Iranian protégé, fighting the Taliban from exile. The United States became his new patron when he joined the CIA campaign to oust the Taliban in the last months of 2001, after the 9/11 attacks. Dostum famously led Uzbek cavalry charges supported by U.S. B-52 bombers to defeat the Taliban.

Dostum remains a power broker today, although his health has deteriorated from the effects of a hard life and heavy drinking. He still commands Jowzjan and can deliver one million votes, mostly Uzbeks, in a national election. He was a key supporter of President Hamid Karzai's reelection in 2009. Dostum is a warlord par excellence and a classic product of Afghan politics, which is both local and volatile. He has been accused of numerous war crimes against prisoners and sadistic treatment of his own supporters when they crossed him. In a country with many brutal warlords, his brutality is legendary. Yet in his state-within-a-state in the 1980s and 1990s, Dostum ensured more gender equality than almost any other Afghan leader. In the second decade of the 21st century, he is one of the few prominent communists from the 1980s to still play a role on the Afghan stage. In the deadly politics of Afghanistan, Dostum is a proven survivor.

 

[amoy]

SCO is the next big thing for Afghanistan peace-keeping (or more precisely fire fighting to avoid its spill-over effects)


Are u ready, SCO? 'Peace Mission' involves war games[1]- Chinadaily.com.cn

Mil Mi-8 helicopters were among aircraft taking part in an exercise staged since Sunday at the Zhurihe training base in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. The exercise involved Shanghai Cooperation Organization members China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and spokesperson Yang Yujun said the drill progressed smoothly, with troop exercises beginning on Friday. [Photo/Xinhua]

 

[nrupatunga]

https://twitter.com/TOLOnews/status/507899449939488768
[tweet]507899449939488768[/tweet]

=======

Afghanistan completes election audit

A U.N.-supervised audit of votes in Afghanistan's disputed presidential election has finished, an Afghan electoral official said on Friday.

The audit of the June 14 run-off election was part of a U.S.-brokered deal to defuse escalating tension in a ballot intended to mark the country's first democratic transfer of power.

Chaos in Afghanistan as Western forces pull out most of their troops would be a political blow for those countries which have spent billions of dollars and lost about 3,500 soldiers in a bid to bring peace and stability since the Taliban were ousted in 2001.

"The auditing and recount process of all votes were concluded late on Thursday," Independent Election Commission (IEC) spokesman Noor Mohammad Noor told reporters in Kabul.

"It was a very important mission by the IEC and other major institutions which is finished now," Noor said.

The IEC has already begun invalidating votes deemed fraudulent, but it was unclear when the final results of the audit - and the next president of Afghanistan - would be announced.

Preliminary results from the run-off put candidate Ashraf Ghani, a former finance minister and World Bank official, well ahead of his rival Abdullah Abdullah, a former foreign minister.

But Abdullah rejected the result, claiming widespread fraud and calling the outcome a "coup" against the Afghan people.

Since then, U.S. State Secretary John Kerry has flown to Afghanistan twice to mediate a deal in which both candidates agreed to a full audit of the vote, and, based on the result, to form a national unity government, a pledge the contenders reiterated in a joint statement on Thursday to a NATO summit.

The crisis over the outcome of the vote has raised the specter of instability, turmoil and potential conflict in a country already battling a potent Taliban insurgency.

The seven-week audit, a painstaking exercise involving more than 8 million votes, was slow-going at times, punctuated by heated arguments between the two candidates' observers present during the process.

In late August, Abdullah's team boycotted the audit, calling it "worthless" in the face of what they have alleged to be widespread fraud in the June vote.

The United Nations subsequently asked Ghani's team to withdraw its observers too, in the interest of fairness. The audit proceeded in its final week with Afghan and international observers present.

Both candidates' camps said talks on the national unity government were going on, though details of what that government might look like remained murky.

President Hamid Karzai urged the candidates to reach a final agreement at the soonest so "the Afghan nation would wait no longer in uncertainty for the new president," Karzai's office quoted him as saying in a September 3 statement.

"I will endorse any final agreement reached in this regard between the two sides," he said.

 

[nrupatunga]

$1 Trillion Trove of Rare Minerals Revealed Under Afghanistan

Afghanistan may hold 60 million tons of copper, 2.2 billion tons of iron ore, 1.4 million tons of rare earth elements such as lanthanum, cerium and neodymium, and lodes of aluminum, gold, silver, zinc, mercury and lithium. For instance, the Khanneshin carbonatite deposit in Afghanistan's Helmand province is valued at $89 billion, full as it is with rare earth elements.

 

[nrupatunga]

Political Process Has Entered Deadlock: Abdullah

Presidential candidate Abdullah Abdullah announced that the political process has entered a deadlock, during a press conference in Kabul on Monday .

Throughout the conference Abdullah explained detail by detail that there was no legitimacy in the entirety of the election process.

"The audit process has completed and the invalidation process is underway, but we still don't have information on the extra one million votes," Abdullah asserted. "We will not accept the results that are on the basis of fraud."

He said that the election commissions—Independent Election Commission (IEC) and Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC)—did not address his camps' concerns and was not "willing to disclose the frauds."

Abdullah criticized, what he calls, the haste commencement of the audit process that added to the reasons for him and his team to announce they would not accept the outcome.

"The audit was aimed to assist in bringing about a political agreement. But there were issues over the audit and invalidation criteria from the very beginning."

Further into the press conference, Abdullah said that talks with rival Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai on the formation of the National Unity Government has failed, adding that from today onwards the process is at a standstill.

Abdullah did not state what his next move is,but joyfully said that he had "won both rounds" and that the "people will decide what is next."

"I will not accept a fraudulent government; not even for a single day," he said with pride. "When we entered the political process our, rival team thought we will be defeated. But our political engagement does not mean we are in second. We are the winner(s) on the basis of the peoples' votes."

In his closing statements, Abdullah stressed to the public that they should not connect the political events of today with Tuesday's commemoration of the martyrs.

"We do not condone violence. Everything that is being done is within the legal framework."

Monday's announcement has led the nation into a much longer anticipated presidential election, which has been felt by the people of Afghanistan economically and security wise for more than five months. The nation can only watch to see what Abdullah and his team have outlined in their next moves.

"We value the national interest."

Tomorrow(tuesday) is the martyrs day i.e. massoud death anniversary a public holiday. There are rumours that there maybe riots/clashes by abdullah supporters.

 

[datguy79]

Indian FM on a visit has dedicated a big-ass 30x68m flag.

 

[ladder]

External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj inaugurates new Indian Embassy building in Kabul

Read more at:
External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj inaugurates new Indian Embassy building in Kabul - The Economic Times

 

[nrupatunga]

Indian FM on a visit has dedicated a big-ass 30x68m flag.

So whats the latest on elections?? Is ghani being declared the president just a formality now??

 

[datguy79]

So whats the latest on elections?? Is ghani being declared the president just a formality now??

Pretty much. Whatever happens next depends on Abdullah. Anything from him joining the government to him declaring a parallel government and even breaking away the north is possible.

 

[nrupatunga]

Pretty much. Whatever happens next depends on Abdullah. Anything from him joining the government to him declaring a parallel government and even breaking away the north is possible.

Can this even happen, who would support him?? Not the west, not the pakis, am not sure even china/russia/iran would support him.