Published on Apr 9, 2013
Pictures of dead children in Afghanistan, the victims of a U-S-led air strike, have once again raised questions on accountability, the purpose of the foreign troop presence and ways to bring security back to a country that hasn’t seen peace for a long time.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai has ordered all U.S. Special Forces out of two key provinces within two weeks, accusing Afghan units under their jurisdiction of being responsible for the torture, abuse, and disappearance of Afghan civilians.
The deadline was announced today by Karzai spokesman Aimal Faizi at a hastily convened press conference, and later repeated in a statement from the Presidential Palace.
The decision came after Karzai met Sunday with his National Security Council. According to the statement, during the meeting “it became clear that armed individuals belonging to US Special Forces engaged in harassing, annoying, torturing, and even murdering innocent people.”
A NATO spokesperson says they are aware of the allegations, but would not provide further comment.
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President Barack Obama and Afghan President Hamid Karzai. (AP)
(CNSNews.com) – The Taliban, which harbored al Qaeda in Afghanistan in the lead up to the 9/11 attacks on America in 2001, will have an office in Afghanistan and engage in direct talks with the democratic government there, President Barack Obama and Afghan President Hamid Karzai affirmed at a joint White House news conference Friday.
“Ultimately security gains must be matched by political progress, so we’ve recommitted our nations to a reconciliation process between the Afghan government and the Taliban,” Obama said. “President Karzai updated me on the Afghan government’s road map to peace, and today we agreed that this process should be advanced by the opening of a Taliban office to facilitate talks.”
Karzai agreed this would be an important step for the peace process.
“We also agreed on the steps that we should be taking in the peace process, which is of highest priority to Afghanistan,” Karzai said. “We agreed on allowing a Taliban office.”
The killing of four children in a US raid and the disappearance and murder of civilians at the hands of occupation troops have provoked growing anger and protests among the people of Afghanistan.
With the US-led war now in its twelfth year, violence against the country’s population continues to mount. The latest incidents were confirmed by the office of Afghanistan’s puppet president, Hamid Karzai, on Tuesday. The worst of them took place on Sunday in the eastern province of Logar, just south of Kabul.
Citing a report from the provincial governor, Mohammad Iqbal Azizi, a statement from Karzai’s office recounted: “NATO forces carried out an operation on Sunday afternoon to detain two armed militants, but resulted in killing four innocent children who were just grazing animals.”
NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) acknowledged Tuesday that civilians may have been killed in the raid. Gen. John Allen, the top US commander in Afghanistan, offered “condolences to the families” and said officers would be sent out to “offer a condolence payment and express our deep regret.”
The slaughter of the children in Logar comes just one week after ISAF issued a formal apology for the killing of three other children in an air strike conducted in southern Helmand province’s Nawa district. A teenage girl and two young boys were killed in the October 14 strike, which the occupation command claimed had been directed against “insurgents” planting improvised explosive devises (IED). Witnesses, however, said that only the bodies of the children, who had been collecting firewood, were found at the scene.
According to estimates by the United Nations, the war in Afghanistan killed or wounded more than 578 children in the first six months of 2012. A UN report issued in August found that during the first half of this year, two-thirds of the victims of US and NATO air strikes in Afghanistan were women and children.
In his debate with Republican challenger Mitt Romney Monday night, President Barack Obama spoke of the US intervention as a “nation-building experiment.” In fact, the war has left the country devastated, exacting its greatest toll upon Afghanistan’s children.
While Washington has poured hundreds of billions of dollars into the country since the 2001 invasion, Afghanistan still has the world’s highest infant mortality rate, with one out of four children dying before reaching the age of five.
In his statement Tuesday, Karzai declared, “Despite repeated pledges by NATO to avoid civilian casualties, innocent lives, including children, are still being lost.”
The second incident condemned by Karzai was a joint military operation carried out by US troops and Afghan puppet forces in southern Zabul province, near the Pakistan border, on October 13. In the midnight raid, four civilians were taken away, according to the Afghan president’s statement, and three of them have since disappeared.
Nearly 1,000 people demonstrated Monday in Qalat, the capital of Zabul province, blocking the Kandahar-Kabul highway to protest against the operation and continuing US-led night raids. These raids, which, after air strikes, are the leading cause of civilian casualties inflicted by occupation forces, are deeply unpopular in Afghanistan.
According to Pajhwok Afghan News, the demonstration in Qalat was sparked by a more recent raid in which two tailors were arrested. It quoted one of the organizers of the protest, Abdul Qadir Qalatwal, a member of the local parliament, as saying that the “beheaded bodies of the tailors were dumped in a desert before being blown up.”
The news agency reported that the Zabul governor’s office had confirmed the deaths of the two men and “had sought clarity from the NATO-led force.”
ISAF confirmed that civilians had been detained in both raids, but claimed that in the October 13 incident they had been released, while in the October 20 operation, they had been “turned over to Afghan police.”
The obvious question raised by the two incidents is whether US forces are detaining individuals suspected of supporting the resistance to foreign occupation and then turning them over to an Afghan death squad for elimination.
In their debate Monday night, both Obama and Romney insisted that the “surge” that tripled the number of US troops deployed in Afghanistan under Obama was a success, and that a “transition” to Afghan responsibility for security in the country would be completed in December 2014, with US troops coming home.
Both men know that this is a lie. Obama administration officials are currently negotiating the terms of a Strategic Partnership Agreement with the Karzai regime that would see an estimated 25,000 US troops, largely Green Berets and other Special Operations units, stay behind for another decade or more.
Both parties are committed to pursing the aims that drove the invasion to begin with, along with the subsequent war in Iraq: the use of military force to assert US hegemony over the strategic energy reserves of the Caspian Basin and the Persian Gulf.
Meanwhile, the rosy projections about the readiness of the Afghan troops and police to assume responsibility for security continue to be denied by those most involved in training them.
Quoting US military officers and officials, the Washington Post reported Saturday that claims Afghanistan’s 352,000-strong security forces are prepared to take over from the US-led occupation are patently false. According to the Post: “No Afghan army battalion is capable of operating without US advisers. Many policemen spend more time shaking down people for bribes than patrolling. Front-line units often do not receive the fuel, food and spare parts they need to function. Intelligence, aviation and medical services remain embryonic. And perhaps most alarming, an increasing number of Afghan soldiers and policemen are turning their weapons on their US and NATO partners.”
The article, based on interviews with a dozen active-duty officers involved in the training of Afghan forces, makes it clear that in the rush to build the number of Afghan troops and police up to 352,000, Washington has failed to provide adequate training or sufficiently vet the security forces for sympathizers of the Taliban and other armed opposition groups.
“The army is so hollow that some of those units are just going to collapse,” a Special Forces major involved in the training program told the Post.
Charikar
Pressing her cheek against the fresh grave of her newly married teenage daughter, Sabera yowls as she gently smears clumps of dirt over her tear-stained face.
“My daughter! Why did they kill you so brutally?” the mother screams in the sparsely filled cemetery in Parwan province, 65 km (40 miles) north of the Afghan capital, Kabul.
Sabera says her daughter Tamana was killed by a relative in a so-called “honor killing”, in what officials link to a wider trend of rapidly growing violence against women in Afghanistan.
Afghanistan’s independent human rights commission has recorded 52 murders of girls and women in the last four months, 42 of which were honor killings, compared to 20 murders for all of last year.
Activists and some lawmakers accuse President Hamid Karzai’s government of selling out to the ultra-conservative Taliban, with whom it seeks peace talks, as most foreign troops prepare to leave the country by the end of 2014.
During their 1996-2001 reign, the Taliban banned women from education, voting and most work, and they were not allowed to leave their homes without permission and a male escort, rights which have been painstakingly won back.
But there are signs the government is backsliding on women’s rights. Earlier this year, Karzai appeared to back recommendations from powerful clerics that stated women are worth less than men and can be beaten.
“Karzai has certainly changed, and women’s issues are no longer a priority for him,” said outspoken female lawmaker Fawzia Koofi.
Last week, Hanifa Safi, head of women’s affairs in eastern Laghman province, became the first female official to be killed this year when a bomb planted on her car exploded.
A spokesman for Karzai said the government is committed to women’s rights. “Unfortunate incidents against women do occur. The government is doing what it can,” said Siamak Herawi.
Fifteen-year-old Tamana died not far from where a young woman was publicly executed for alleged adultery last month, touching off an international outcry.
Tamana’s parents say she never returned from a trip to the local bakery in March, located near their home in Parwan’s capital Charikar.
The next time they saw her was one week ago, lying dead on a hospital bed. A video filmed on their mobile phone last Monday at her funeral shows the teenager’s bruised face swathed in white sheets.
“My daughter always said she wouldn’t stop studying, and would one day become important, having to travel to work in a convoy of cars,” Sabera told Reuters in her spartan living room, where flies buzzed over ruby red carpets.
“But now she is under a tone of clay,” she said, prompting her husband, retired intelligence official Abdul Fatah, to wipe a tear from his wrinkled eyes.
Tamana was forcibly married to her cousin after refusing his advances for months, they say, adding she was beaten and killed for being a “disobedient” wife, unable to hide unhappiness at her plight.
Reuters could not independently verify the family’s claims, but police in Charikar said they believe Tamana was intentionally poisoned, although cannot say with certainty until the results of the autopsy come later this month.
No one has been arrested over Tamana’s killing, but the alleged killer’s sister was given as a bride to Tamana’s brother as compensation, abiding by the brutal Afghan practice ‘baad’, which is widespread despite Karzai criminalizing it in 2009.
She is one of eight women killed in Parwan since March including two in Bagram, home to a major U.S. base, who were shot to death.
WARNING: Viewers may find this video disturbing. A crowd is seen cheering after watching the public execution of a woman accused of adultery.
Outrage in Afghanistan and around the world grew on Monday after video emerged showing what officials said was a member of the Taliban shooting dead a woman accused of adultery in front of a crowd near Kabul, a sign that the austere Islamist group dictates law close to the Afghan capital.
“After 10 years (of foreign intervention), and only a few kilometres from Kabul… how could this happen in front of all these people?” female lawmaker Fawzia Koofi told Reuters after watching a video of the public execution.
“It is really very much a sharp turn, and a huge backward (step),” said the campaigner for girls’ education, wiping away tears as she spoke.
Authorities in Kabul directly blamed the Islamist group. Meanwhile, the Taliban denied involvement in the killing in Parwan province, in which an unnamed woman’s head and body were riddled with bullets at close range in punishment for alleged adultery.
In Charikar, the provincial capital of Parwan about 15 miles south of Shinwari, where the killing took place, Sayed Jalal furrowed his eyebrows in anger as he vowed to avenge the execution.
“We will take revenge for this. Their brutality and such inhumane acts are why we hate the Taliban,” the 42-year-old shopkeeper said.
6 US soldiers killed in roadside bomb attack in eastern Afghanistan
The execution was recorded in a three-minute video, obtained by Reuters, which shows a woman in a shawl being repeatedly shot in front of around 150 men perched on a hill, who cheer and praise the attackers, calling them “mujahideen”, a term the Taliban call themselves.
NATO’s top commander in Afghanistan, U.S. General John Allen, called the killing “an atrocity of unspeakable cruelty.”
Others in Charikar, from where a dirt road leads to Shinwari through rough terrain, lamented what they described as the Taliban’s increasing sway over their once relatively peaceful area, about an hour’s drive west from Kabul.
“The Taliban are creating fear and trying to rule us through terrorism but they will never succeed,” said Charikar resident Najibullah, 30, prompting approving nods from a crowd of men who had formed around him in a busy outdoor market.
Photos – Afghanistan: Nation at a crossroads
The Taliban dismissed the claims: “We have no operational update about this,” spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said. Parwan’s governor Basir Salangi said the Taliban carried out the killing in his province eight days ago.
Resurgent Taliban
Despite the presence of over 130,000 foreign troops and 300,000 Afghan soldiers and police, the Taliban have managed to resurge beyond their traditional bastions of the south and east, extending their reach into once more peaceful areas like Parwan.
“This was a brutal act against the Afghan people by the Taliban,” Interior Ministry spokesman Sediq Seddiqi said.
“They will be punished as they were punished 10 years ago and we will continue our struggle to eliminate them,” he told Reuters, referring to their ousting from power in late 2001 by U.S.-backed Afghan forces after an austere five-year rule.
The condemnation came on the day of a major donors’ summit in Tokyo, where $16 billion in development aid was pledged for Afghanistan over the next four years as they try to prevent it from sliding back into chaos once most foreign troops have left by the end of 2014.
US, Afghan officials condemn public execution of Afghan woman
In a declaration by summit participants, the importance of promoting women’s rights was stressed repeatedly.
The U.S. embassy in Kabul, condemning the public execution in the “strongest possible terms”, said the hard-won gains of Afghan women made in the last 10 years must be protected.
But Shah Jahan Yazdanparast, head of women’s affairs in Parwan, which is connected to the Kabul ministry, said such naked violence as the woman’s execution “will only increase our fear and concern as women in Afghanistan.”
Afghan women have won back basic rights in education, voting and work since the Taliban were ousted from power but fears are mounting both at home and abroad that such freedoms could be traded away as Kabul seeks peace talks with the group.
US delivers ‘powerful commitment’ to Afghanistan
“Afghan women and girls were looking to the international community to protect the progress they have made in the last decade and they have been let down,” Oxfam Afghanistan’s head of policy and advocacy, Louise Hancock, said on Sunday after the close of the Tokyo summit.
Violence against women has increased sharply in the past year, according to Afghanistan’s independent human rights commission. Activists say there is waning interest in women’s rights on the part of President Hamid Karzai’s government.
Authorities blamed the Taliban for the stoning to death of a young couple in northern Kunduz province two years ago in a crowded bazaar, days after a pregnant widow was flogged and killed in western Baghdis province. The Taliban denied involvement.
Reuters contributed to this report.
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