Another excellent article from Christie Blatchford, this time on the fire fight that
Corporal Anthony Boneca was injured in.
Canadian dies in Afghan battle
Soldiers engaged in lethal two-day game of cat-and-mouse with Taliban fighters
CHRISTIE BLATCHFORD
From Monday 10 July 2006 - Globe and Mail
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20060710.wxafghanblatch10/BNStory/National/?cid=al_gam_nletter_newsUp
PASHMUL, AFGHANISTAN — It was about 6 a.m. local time Sunday when Corporal Tony Boneca and the rest of the 1st Battalion, Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry first filed through the maze of lush grape fields of the Panjwei district west of Kandahar.
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Canadians adapt to war's reality. . .
CHRISTIE BLATCHFORD - POSTED ON 07/07/06 - Globe & Mail
http://www.theglobeandmail.com//servlet/story/LAC.20060707.AFGHAN07/TPStory/Front
KANDAHAR, AFGHANISTAN -- At the Tim Hortons at Kandahar Air Field, the enormous oven that is the main coalition base in southern Afghanistan, a small group of young men were having a morning coffee yesterday.
They looked much like any other group of 20-somethings -- a little leaner perhaps, a little more tanned -- but they are rare birds indeed.
Warriors from the peaceable kingdom of Canada, they are some of the boys of 7 Platoon, Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry.
In recent months, like the rest of the 800-strong Canadian battle group here, they have had in spades what the euphemism-loving military calls TICs, short for Troops in Combat, or "contact."
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U.S.: 40 Taliban killed in south Afghanistan
15 reportedly killed a day earlier, part of Operation Mountain Thrust
10 July 2006 - MSNBC News Services
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/13798276/
KABUL, Afghanistan - U.S. and Afghan government forces attacked an insurgent stronghold in the southern province of Uruzgan on Monday, killing more than 40 of them, the U.S. military said.
One member of the Afghan security forces was killed and three members of the U.S.-led coalition force were wounded in the attack, the U.S. military said in a statement.
Some 10,000 U.S., Canadian, British and Afghan forces have deployed across southern Afghanistan as part of Operation Mountain Thrust in a bid to loosen the Taliban’s hold on the region. At least 20 coalition troops have been killed in combat across Afghanistan since the offensive started in May, according to an Associated Press tally based on coalition figures. Most of the fatalities have been in the south.
Afghanistan reels under bumper harvests
By Jason Motlagh - South Asia - Jul 11, 2006 Asia Times
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/HG11Df01.html
Afghanistan boasts two bumper crops this season, and both could be lethal to the already fledgling authority of its government.
Western officials expect the largest-ever opium crop in the face of a toothless US$1 billion eradication campaign. And contrary to earlier pronouncements by military officials, the Taliban are gaining steam in the volatile southern provinces, where fighting has raged at levels not seen since the US-led invasion that toppled the al-Qaeda-allied Islamic fundamentalist movement five years ago.
Forty thousand tons of narcotics were burned last week at a ceremony in Kabul to show the state's determination to stamp out illegal drugs that now account for nearly half of its gross domestic product. This came just one week after US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made a five-hour pit stop for a meeting with President Hamid Karzai to affirm Washington's full support of his efforts to steer reconstruction and defeat a reconstituted Taliban.
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Pak helps rebuild highway to Afghanistan
Monday, July 10, 2006 - THE TIMES OF INDIA
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1721951.cms
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan has helped neighbour Afghanistan rebuild the 75-km Torkham-Jalalabad highway at a cost of Rs 2 billion ($33 million) and says it has completed 95 percent of the task two months before deadline.
Although there are many entry points, this highway, which was but a rundown road, is the key entry from Afghanistan to Pakistan via the Khyber Pass and witnesses daily movement of goods and travellers
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TV-rapped Pakistan may ease rape laws
Sunday, July 09, 2006 - THE TIMES OF INDIA
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1719361.cms
ISLAMABAD: The young audience fell into confused silence and then buzzed with whispers after Mir Ibrahim Rahman announced that there was no difference between an apple and an orange.
Rahman, 28, chief executive of the immensely popular Geo TV network, was speaking last Sunday at a youth conference in Rawalpindi.
His absurd statement, he immediately made clear, was meant to illustrate the failings of a set of Islamic decrees known collectively as the Hudood Ordinance.
The laws, introduced in 1979 and criticized internationally since, include a clause stating that to prove rape, a woman must have at least four male witnesses. If the woman fails to provide proof, she herself faces the charge of adultery.
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Pak troops kill 21 rebels in Baluchistan
Sunday, July 09, 2006 - THE TIMES OF INDIA
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1719100.cms
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan security forces on Sunday killed 21 tribal rebels and wounded 15 others while targeting their hideouts in the south-west province of Baluchistan, a government spokesman said here.
Those killed were said to be supporters of Baloch tribal leader Nawab Akbar Bugti, who is leading a revolt from his hideout in the province.
"Several tribesmen have surrendered and more have contacted the government and offered cooperation," spokesman Raziq Bugti said claiming that seven camps of anti-government tribesmen had been eliminated.
He said that security forces are continuing search operations in Sangseela area of Dera Bugti district against the camps of anti-government tribesmen.
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Backing away from Afghanistan no option: UNBy Robert Birsel - Reuters
Monday, July 10, 2006; 7:02 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/10/AR2006071000232.html
KABUL (Reuters) - The international community underestimated the ability of the Taliban to recover from their 2001 defeat and the world should now respond by stepping up support for Afghanistan, the United Nations said on Monday.
An announcement by Britain expected on Monday that it will send more troops was "excellent news" and other countries should increase help, whether military, political or financial, the U.N. secretary-general's special representative said. "These are difficult times for Afghanistan. These are difficult times for the south, but backing away is not an option," the special representative for Afghanistan, Tom Koenigs, told a news conference
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Pak lost 2,700 men in Kargil war: Sharif
Thursday, July 06, 2006 - THE TIMES OF INDIA
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1711896.cms
ISLAMABAD: The Pakistan Army lost 2,700 military personnel in the Kargil conflict, far higher than its casualties during the 1965 and 1971 wars with India, former Pakistan prime minister Nawaz Sharif has said in his memoirs.
Giving his account of the 1999 conflict in the book "Ghadaar Kaun? Nawaz Sharif Ki Kahani, Unki Zubani", Sharif said the casualties suffered by the Army were so extensive that an entire brigade of the Northern Light Infantry based in the Pakistan-controlled Northern Areas was wiped out. Sharif reiterated his contention that Gen Pervez Musharraf, the then Army chief, had not taken him into confidence on the situation in Kargil and that he learnt the details from his Indian counterpart, Atal Bihari Vajpayee.
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U.S. assures full support to Afghanistan: Afghan FM
July 10, 2006 Peoples Daily Online
http://english.people.com.cn/200607/10/eng20060710_281444.html
The United States of America has repeated its firm commitment to continue support the post-war Afghanistan on a long-term basis, a statement of Afghanistan's foreign ministry issued at the conclusion of Afghan foreign minister's tour to Washington said Sunday.
"During his talks with the U.S. officials the Afghan foreign minister Dr. Rangin Dadfar Spanta was assured of Washington's firm support to Afghanistan," the press release noted.
2 militants killed, 9 wounded in Afghanistan
July 10, 2006 - Source: Xinhua ( Peoples Daily Online)
http://english.people.com.cn/200607/10/eng20060710_281721.html
Firefights between anti-government militants and law enforcing agencies left two militants dead and 11 others, including two police, injured in the south and southeast Afghanistan on Sunday night, said authorities on Monday.
"Nine enemies fighters and two police were injured in a clash erupted in Wardak province last night," Yusuf Stanikzai, spokesman of Interior ministry, told Xinhua.
All the nine injured militants had been arrested and taken to hospital, where five of them are in critical condition, he said.
Another two militants have been killed in Andar district of southern Ghazni province on Sunday, a military commander in the province Abdul Wadoud confirmed to Xinhua.
Taliban-linked insurgency has claimed the lives of more than 1, 000 people including more than 50 foreign soldiers since beginning of this year.
Afghan family awaits payout
Monday July 10, 2006 - The Chronicle Herald
By JOHN COTTER The Canadian Press
http://thechronicleherald.ca/World/515313.html
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — The family of an Afghan civilian fatally shot by a Canadian soldier at a vehicle checkpoint has heard nothing about a federal report that cleared the soldier of any wrongdoing and says it still has not received any compensation.
"No one told us, we are not aware of that," said Farid Ahmed, 23, Hassan’s eldest son, through an interpreter.
"Our father was innocent and he was killed. He left a wife and children behind and a lot of memories. It is my request for Canadians to please do something for us. We can’t survive easily."
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Top UN envoy in Afghanistan asks for more anti-terrorism support
Jul 10, 2006, 12:23 GMT South Asia News
http://news.monstersandcritics.com/southasia/article_1179496.php/Top_UN_envoy_in_Afghanistan_asks_for_more_anti-terrorism_support
Kabul - The top UN envoy in Afghanistan Monday called on international community to provide more financial, military, and political support to fight the stubborn insurgency inside the country and to eliminate safe havens for terrorists outside.
'Since we have logistical bases of the insurgency outside of the country, it is certainly necessary to (address the issue diplomatically),' Tom Koenigs, special representative of the Secretary General in the Afghanistan, told reporters in a press conference. 'The havens of the terrorists and insurgents outside of the country have to be equally addressed as they have to be addressed inside of the country.'
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UK to send more troops to Afghanistan Update
Matthew Tempest, political correspondent
Monday July 10, 2006 - Guardian Unlimited
http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,,1817126,00.html?gusrc=rss
Nearly 900 extra military personnel will be deployed to Afghanistan in the wake of the deaths of six British soldiers in the past month, the government announced today.
It will increase the size of the UK taskforce in the southern Helmand province to around 4,500 by October, from the current level of 3,600.
Additional support helicopters - probably Chinooks and Lynxs - will also be made available, the defence secretary, Des Browne, told MPs in an emergency statement on the state of Afghanistan.
Rumsfeld:
Afghanistan Drug Trade May Help Fuel Taliban Resurgence
Monday, July 10, 2006 - Fox News
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,202787,00.html
DUSHANBE, Tajikistan — Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Monday a flourishing drug trade in Afghanistan may be helping fuel a Taliban resurgence, potentially undermining the young Afghan democracy.
"I do worry that the funds that come from the sale of those products could conceivably end up adversely affecting the democratic process in the country," he told reporters accompanying him on an overnight flight from Washington.
"I also think anytime there is that much money floating around and you have people like the Taliban that it gives them an opportunity to fund their efforts in various ways," he added in the interview.
U.S. forces invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 to oust the radical Taliban regime, and although the country now has a democratically elected government the Taliban have made been making a comeback.
Rumsfeld said there is U.S. intelligence information indicating that the Taliban have taken a share of drug profits in exchange for providing protection. He did not offer specifics or elaborate
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Coalition Forces Kill 40 Taliban in Afghan Raid
Monday, July 10, 2006 - FOXNEWS.COM HOME
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,202744,00.html
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — Afghan and U.S.-led coalition forces killed more than 40 suspected Taliban militants in raid on a compound in southern Afghanistan on Monday, a coalition spokesman said.
One Afghan army soldier was killed and three coalition troops wounded in the fighting near Tarin Kot, the capital of Uruzgan province, 110 miles north of Kandahar, said Sgt. Chris Miller.
The coalition soldiers were in stable condition, he said, declining to give their identities or nationalities. It wasn't immediately clear if there had been airstrikes and if the coalition had recovered the bodies of the dead militants.
The fighting follows heavy clashes in neighboring Kandahar province over the weekend that killed at least 19 militants and a Canadian coalition soldier
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Afghans barred from seeking compensation from Canada
Canadian Press - Globe & Mail - 4:36 PM EDT ON 10/07/06
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20060710.wafghanliable0710/BNStory/Front
Afghan civilians who are accidentally injured or killed, or whose property is damaged by Canadian soldiers have no legal right to compensation under an undisclosed arrangement signed by the two countries last year.
Instead, restitution to mostly dirt-poor villagers depends upon an obscure claims process that would provide payments under “moral considerations,” say heavily censored documents obtained by The Canadian Press under access to information laws.
In the course of combat operations, “Canadian personnel will not be liable for any damages to private or government property,” said a briefing note prepared for Defence Minister Gordon O'Connor on the accidental shooting of a civilian last March in Kandahar
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Taliban use beheadings and beatings to keep Afghanistan's schools closed
By Tom Coghlan in Kabul - Published: 11 July 2006
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article1171369.ece
The letter pinned overnight to the wall of the mosque in Kandahar was succinct. "Girls going to school need to be careful for their safety. If we put acid on their faces or they are murdered then the blame will be on their parents."
Today the local school stands empty, victim of what amounts to a Taliban war on knowledge. The liberal wind of change that swept the country in 2001 is being reversed. By the conservative estimate of the Afghan President Hamid Karzai, 100,000 students have been terrorised out of schools in the past year. The number is certainly far higher and many teachers have been murdered, some beheaded.
In the province of Zabul a teacher and female MP, Toor Peikai, said yesterday: "There are 47 schools in my province but only three are open." Only one teaches girls. It is 200 metres from a large US military base in the provincial capital.
Across the south, schools burn during the night. According to a bleak report released by Human Rights Watch today at least 200 have been destroyed in the past year and half. Their blackened shells, many of them new buildings constructed with foreign aid money, are visible from the ever more dangerous road south to Kandahar.
The fate of the mixed-sex Sheikh Zai Middle School, on the outskirts of a community in the mountains of Maruf district is sadly not atypical. A local witness told Human Rights Watch what happened when the Taliban came: "They went to each class, took out their long knives .... locked the children in two rooms, where the children were severely beaten with sticks and asked, 'will you come to school now?'"
The six teachers later told residents what happened to them. They were taken out of school and blindfolded, then they were continually hit and were taken to nearby mountains on foot.
All six were separated and nobody knew where the other was. The Taliban asked them individually, "Why are you working for Mr Bush and Karzai?" They said, "We are educating our children with books -we know nothing about Bush or Karzai, we are just educating our children." After that they were beaten and let go.
The beatings were sufficiently serious that they remain handicapped. One of them had his leg broken and he cannot walk or work. One of the others still has problems with his hand and cannot use it.
The headmaster was later targeted. He was beaten with a gun butt and later shot in the thigh.
This summer, across the south of Afghanistan, the Taliban have returned. They boast the same medieval world vision but their numbers are unprecedented, their weapons abundant, and their coffers full of money from wealthy Pakistani and Gulf State patrons and from the proceeds of drug trafficking.
And what was, until this year, characterised as an increasingly vicious "low-level insurgency" has become a war. A palpable terror grips the south of the country, where overstretched Western forces battle an enemy that melts in and out of the local populace at will, and anyone associated with the foreigners or the central government is a target for violent reprisals.
Faced with collapsing security and insurgents who are flowing back and forth from safe havens in the tribal areas of Pakistan, the Western forces in the south are resorting to more extreme measures.
Yesterday, Operation Mountain Thrust, the 11,000-strong coalition offensive in the south, claimed to have killed another 40 insurgents in a strike on a house in Uruzgan. The two months since the start of Mountain Thrust have seen more than 600 killed in the south, the vast majority of them Taliban fighters.
But increasingly figures within both the Afghan government and international community are questioning whether killing such huge numbers of people is quelling the insurgency or simply fuelling popular resentment.
"It is not acceptable that in all this fighting, Afghans are dying," an exasperated and increasingly unpopular Hamid Karzai said in June. "In the past three to four weeks, 500 to 600 Afghans were killed. Even if they are Taliban, they are sons of this land."
In May, the coalition dropped bombs in Afghanistan on no fewer than 750 occasions, more than the ordnance dropped in Iraq. On Sunday night, bombs were again lighting up the sky, amid a dull rumble in Ghazni province.
The letter pinned overnight to the wall of the mosque in Kandahar was succinct. "Girls going to school need to be careful for their safety. If we put acid on their faces or they are murdered then the blame will be on their parents."
Today the local school stands empty, victim of what amounts to a Taliban war on knowledge. The liberal wind of change that swept the country in 2001 is being reversed. By the conservative estimate of the Afghan President Hamid Karzai, 100,000 students have been terrorised out of schools in the past year. The number is certainly far higher and many teachers have been murdered, some beheaded.
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A ruthless enemy, a hostile population and 50C heat
By Thomas Coghlan in Musa Qala, Helmand and Justin Huggler
10 July 2006 The Independent
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article1168220.ece
In Musa Qala, on the front line of the Taliban insurgency against British troops in southern Afghanistan, a pick-up truck packed with heavily armed men roared up the main street. They were just 50 yards from the local district governor's house, a building pitted by bullet and rocket-propelled-grenade strikes, where British commanders were meeting tribal elders.
The gunmen in the pick-up were wearing black robes and large black or white turbans, common tribal dress in Helmand - but also the uniform of the Taliban. Who were they? A terrified local shopkeeper replied: "They could be the governor's militia, or they could be Taliban. We can't tell the difference. But you should leave right now."
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Our duty to Afghanistan
10 July 2006 19:21 - The Independent
http://comment.independent.co.uk/leading_articles/article1168165.ece
Afghanistan is not Iraq. The military intervention to overthrow the Taliban was sanctioned by the United Nations and supported by almost all the nations of the world, including Muslim ones. There were concerns about the means, which relied heavily on bombing from the air and on Northern Alliance warlords on the ground, but the ends were just. This newspaper does not share, therefore, the common conflation of the situation in Afghanistan with that in Iraq. Even in Iraq, where outside intervention was unjustified, we hold to the "china shop" principle set out by Colin Powell, the former US Secretary of State: "You break it, you own it." Even in Iraq, we accept that Britain and the US have an obligation to keep their troops there for as long as the democratic Iraqi government wants them there.
If that is so in Iraq, how much stronger the obligation is in Afghanistan, where the democratic government is so much more soundly based. In that deployment, Tony Blair has been criticised on two diametrically opposed grounds. One, that British forces have no right to be there at all. The other, that he has betrayed his promise to the Afghan people to stand by them because he and the Americans were distracted by the needless war in Iraq. We stand firmly in the second camp. Our criticism of the Nato deployment in Afghanistan is that, as it has not been consistent enough, the Taliban were allowed to regroup. More troops and more engineers should have been deployed five years ago. Instead, US and British attention, troops and resources were drained from Afghanistan by the invasion of Iraq. The fact that, as we report today, Mr Blair has now agreed to reinforce the Helmand deployment is an inevitable consequence of that earlier failure.
Commentary
James Fergusson:
Of course they hate us in Helmand. They are fighting a war we started 157 years ago
The British are simply outriders of the Great Satan
Published: 09 July 2006
http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/article1168160.ece
There are many unanswered questions surrounding Britain's increasingly fraught deployment to southern Afghanistan, though none as urgent as this one: why us? The fierce opposition to our military presence in the region - six British soldiers dead in three weeks - was initially described by a Ministry of Defence spokesman as "unexpected". Des Browne, the Secretary of State for Defence, has since admitted that Britain's military presence has "energised the Taliban".
Yet this response was entirely predictable. The British are not perceived as a "neutral" force in Afghanistan, and nor have they been since before the days of the Raj. Afghans call the Brits "feringhee" - a derogatory term imported from India, where it is applied to Europeans in general. In Afghanistan, it is reserved exclusively for the British. That is the measure of the singular relationship between our nations. The decision to invite Britain to inaugurate Nato's hearts-and-minds mission to Helmand province - and Britain's decision to accept - was madness. Almost any other of Nato's 26 member nations would have been a better choice
