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.
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By Mustafa Andalib
GHAZNI, Afghanistan | Sat Mar 30, 2013 12:07pm EDT
(Reuters)
Last month Afghan President Hamid Karzai forbade Afghan forces from calling for NATO air support and forbade international forces from using air strikes “in Afghan homes or villages” after Afghan forces called in a strike that killed 10 civilians.
NATO initially said that Saturday’s strike was in support of Afghan troops – which would be in contravention of the president’s orders – but later said new information showed the helicopter had struck the insurgents separately.
“This was an independently acquired and engaged target,” said ISAF spokesman Major Adam Wojack.
There were conflicting reports on the death toll from the air strike. A Reuters reporter saw the bodies of two children. One was in school uniform. Local elder Jan Mohammad and other residents said he was killed in the air strike.
The reporter also saw the hand and foot of a toddler at the site of the air strike, but the circumstances of the death were not immediately clear.
Senior police detective Colonel Mohammad Hussain said nine Taliban and one school-age child were killed in the air strike. He also said a woman was killed and eight civilians were wounded in a firefight between Afghan security forces and insurgents.
The deaths, on the outskirts of the capital of Ghazni province,A NATO helicopter killed at least one child and nine suspected Taliban fighters in Afghanistan’s east on Saturday, officials and local residents said. will reopen an often heated debate between those who blame NATO air strikes for civilian deaths and others who argue NATO air support is vital to protect Afghan security forces.
A statement from the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said: “We are aware of reports of civilian casualties resulting from an engagement in Ghazni district, Ghazni province, this morning in which an Afghan security force was attacked by insurgents and returned fire.
“We can also confirm that later in the morning, in the same area, an attack helicopter engaged a group of insurgents with direct fire, killing or wounding several.”
“We take all allegations of civilian casualties seriously. Afghan and ISAF officials are assessing the incident,” the ISAF statement said.
Civilian casualties – particularly those caused by air strikes – are a significant source of friction between Karzai and his international allies as the United States and Afghanistan negotiate over the size of a future American military presence following the departure of most international troops by the end of 2014.
Some Afghan officials say privately that limiting air strikes exposes the 352,000-strong Afghan security forces to greater danger as they take over the responsibilities of international forces.
Foreign air power is especially critical to cover the mountainous regions near the Pakistani border.
(Additional reporting by Mirwais Harooni and Katharine Houreld; Editing by Jeremy Laurence and Stephen Powell)
Published on Feb 4, 2013
Less than four months after being shot by the Taliban because of her quest to be educated, Malala Yousafzai spoke out about her second life.
cnsnews.com
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 incident occurred on Sunday when a bomb planted in a fuel tanker detonated in a terminal near the airport, where NATO oil tankers were parked.
Jalalabad Airport, which is located five kilometers (three miles) southeast of Jalalabad, is currently used only for military purposes and is seen as the second largest US airbase in Afghanistan.
No group has claimed responsibility for the blast, but such attacks are usually blamed on Taliban militants.
Taliban militants frequently attack trucks carrying supplies from Pakistan to the US-led forces deployed in Afghanistan. Pakistan is the cheapest way for the Western military alliance to dispatch supplies to the foreign forces in the landlocked country.
Militants in neighboring Pakistan have also destroyed hundreds of oil tankers and containers carrying fuel and other supplies to foreign forces in Afghanistan.
The United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001 under the pretext of combating terrorism. The offensive removed the Taliban from power, but insecurity continues to rise across the country despite the presence of thousands of US-led soldiers.
The US-led war in Afghanistan, which has caused record-high civilian and military casualties, has become the longest military conflict in the American history.
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A graduation ceremony for Afghan police officers in the eastern city of Jalalabad on Thursday. More Photos »
Early Thursday morning, an Afghan policeman unlocked the door of the check post where he was stationed in Oruzgan Province and let in his friends from the Taliban, who helped him attack his sleeping colleagues with knives and guns, eventually killing four and wounding eight.
On Sunday, a local police commander in a remote northern province, Jawzjan, shot to death, in their beds, five men under his command and fled to join the Taliban.
And on Dec. 18, a teenager, apparently being kept for sexual purposes by an Afghan border police commander in southern Kandahar Province, drugged the commander and the other 10 policemen at the post to put them to sleep, and then shot them all; eight died.
In the crisis that has risen in the past year over insider killings, in which Afghan security forces turn on their allies, the toll has been even heavier for the Afghans themselves — at least 86 in a count by The New York Times this year, and the full toll is likely to be higher — than it has been for American and other NATO forces, which have lost at least 62 so far, the latest in Kabul on Monday.
Unlike most insider attacks against foreign forces, known as “green on blue” killings, most of the attacks between Afghans, “green on green,” have been clear cases of either infiltration by Taliban insurgents or turncoat attacks. As with the three recent attacks, they have fallen most heavily on police units, and they have followed a familiar pattern: the Taliban either infiltrate someone into a unit, or win over someone already in a unit, who then kills his comrades in their sleep. Frequently, the victims are first poisoned or drugged at dinner.
“I tell my cook not to allow any police officer in the kitchen,” said Taaj Mohammad, a commander of a border police check post near the one in Kandahar that was attacked on Dec. 18. “This kind of incident really creates mistrust among comrades, which is not good. Now we don’t trust anyone, even those who spent years in the post.”
The most recent of the green-on-green betrayals took place on Thursday about 3 a.m., in the town of Tirin Kot, the capital of Oruzgan Province in southern Afghanistan. According to Fareed Ayal, a spokesman for the provincial police chief, a police officer named Hayat Khan, who had been in regular touch with the Taliban for religious guidance, waited until the other officers at his check post fell asleep and then called Taliban fighters by cellphone and let them in. First the attackers stabbed the one officer who was on watch, but he raised the alarm in time to awaken some of the police officers.
KABUL, Afghanistan A vehicle driven by a suicide bomber exploded at the gate of a major U.S. military base in eastern Afghanistan on Wednesday, killing the attacker and three Afghans, Afghan police said. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack.
Police Gen. Abdul Qayum Baqizai said a local guard who questioned the vehicle driver at the gate of Camp Chapman was killed along with two civilians and the assailant. The camp is located adjacent to the airport of the capital of Khost province, which borders Pakistan. Chapman and nearby Camp Salerno had been frequently targeted by militants in the past, but violent incidents have decreased considerably in recent months.
Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said in an email that the bomber targeted Afghan police manning the gate and Afghans working for the Americans entering the base. He claimed high casualties were inflicted.
NATO operates with more than 100,000 troops in the country, including some 66,000 American forces. It is handing most combat operations over to the Afghans in preparation for a pullout from Afghanistan in 2014. Militant groups, including the Taliban, rarely face NATO troops head-on and rely mainly on roadside bombs and suicide attacks.
NATO forces and foreign civilians have also been increasingly attacked by rogue Afghan military and police, eroding trust between the allies.
On Tuesday, the Interior Ministry said a policewoman who killed an American contractor in Kabul a day earlier was a native Iranian who came to Afghanistan and displayed “unstable behavior” but had no known links to militants.
A Pakistani mother mourned her daughter, who was killed on Tuesday in an attack on health workers participating in a drive to eradicate polio from Pakistan.
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Gunmen shot dead five female health workers who were immunizing children against polio on Tuesday, causing the Pakistani government to suspend vaccinations in two cities and dealing a fresh setback to an eradication campaign dogged by Taliban resistance in a country that is one of the disease’s last global strongholds.
The bodies of two female workers with an anti-polio drive lay in the morgue at Jinnah Hospital in Karachi on Tuesday.
“It is a blow, no doubt,” said Shahnaz Wazir Ali, an adviser on polio to Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf. “Never before have female health workers been targeted like this in Pakistan. Clearly there will have to be more and better arrangements for security.”
No group claimed responsibility for the attacks, but most suspicion focused on the Pakistani Taliban, which has previously blocked polio vaccinators and complained that the United States is using the program as a cover for espionage.
The killings were a serious reversal for the multibillion-dollar global polio immunization effort, which over the past quarter century has reduced the number of endemic countries from 120 to just three: Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria.
Nonetheless, United Nations officials insisted that the drive would be revived after a period for investigation and regrouping, as it had been after previous attacks on vaccinators here, in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
Pakistan has made solid gains against polio, with 56 new recorded cases of the diseases in 2012, compared with 192 at the same point last year, according to the government. Worldwide, cases of death and paralysis from polio have been reduced to less than 1,000 last year, from 350,000 worldwide in 1988.
But the campaign here has been deeply shaken by Taliban threats and intimidation, though several officials said Tuesday that they had never seen such a focused and deadly attack before.
Insurgents have long been suspicious of polio vaccinators, seeing them as potential spies. But that greatly intensified after the C.I.A. used a vaccination team headed by a local doctor, Shakil Afridi, to visit Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, reportedly in an attempt to obtain DNA proof that the Bin Laden family was there before an American commando raid attacked it in May 2011.
In North Waziristan, one prominent warlord has banned polio vaccinations until the United States ceases drone strikes in the area.
Posted: Tuesday, December 11, 2012, 3:01 AM
A Defense Department statement says Checque, 28, died of combat-related injuries but gave no further details of the mission.
He was among members of SEAL Team Six, which freed an American doctor, Dilip Joseph, who was abducted by the Taliban.
It is the same team that killed Osama bin Laden last year, but it’s unclear whether Checque was on the bin Laden mission.
An unidentified man who answered a relative’s phone in Washington County, where Checque’s father lives, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette the family “has asked that everybody respect their privacy at this time of grief and they do not wish to be contacted.” The man would not identify himself.
Dr. Dilip Joseph was captured by Taliban insurgents Wednesday outside the Afghan capital, in the Sarobi district of Kabul province, a statement by the coalition said.
He was rescued in an early morning operation ordered after intelligence showed that the doctor was in imminent danger of injury or possible death, according to a statement.
A non-profit organization called Morning Star Development said in a statement that Joseph worked as its medical adviser and is from Colorado Springs.
Morning Star said Joseph and two other staff members had been returning from a visit to one of its rural medical clinics when the kidnappers stopped their vehicle. The three were then taken to a mountainous area about 50 miles from the Pakistan border, Morning Star said.
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