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I will build more and kill less, says Nato's Afghanistan general
By Michael Evans and Anthony Loyd November 01, 2006
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2431423,00.html
Winter campaign is to improve country rather than kill insurgents
The general says 'armchair critics' in Britain fail to see the progress being made in Afghanistan (Musadeq Sadeq/AP)
THE British general commanding all 31,000 Nato troops in Afghanistan has pledged to focus his winter campaign on development projects rather than killing Taleban fighters.
Lieutenant-General David Richards conceded that significant improvements were needed over the next few months to persuade Afghans to “keep the faith” with the Nato mission.
In an interview with The Times, General Richards said that he aimed to switch all the efforts of his 37-nation force towards protecting and enabling “visible” reconstruction projects. He was ready to “put a security cloak” around rebuilding programmes that would make an immediate difference to the people.
The shift follows months of fighting in which hundreds of Afghans have been killed in some of the toughest fighting experienced by British troops facing a resurgent Taleban. While not playing down the threat still posed by the Taleban, General Richards said he hoped that the “kinetic energy” that marked the first six months of his command would ease through the winter. Forty-six Nato troops have died in Afghanistan this year.
“Something that really hit me in the eye was just how important it was for the Afghan people for us to prove that we could fight and defend their areas. We did prove this but we don’t need to carry on doing this in the long term, and I hope the fighting element throughout the winter will be minimal compared with what our troops have had to face in the summer,” he said.
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Al-Qaeda leaders frequented bombed Pakistan madrassa: official
10-31-2006, 20h08 ISLAMABAD (AFP)
http://www.turkishpress.com/news.asp?id=149204
A religious school destroyed in Pakistani airstrikes was frequented by top Al-Qaeda militants including Ayman Al-Zawahiri and the alleged mastermind of the foiled London airliners attack, a senior security official said.
Neither Zawahiri -- Osama bin Laden's Egyptian-born deputy -- nor Abu Obaida Al-Misri were in the Islamic school, or madrassa, at the time of the raid on Monday, the official said in a briefing to journalists.
Thousands of tribesmen rallied earlier Tuesday saying the seminary in the Bajaur tribal agency near the Afghan border was harmless and that the 80 people who died in the helicopter raid were all civilians, mostly young students.
"The madrassa that was targeted was frequently visited by Al-Qaeda leaders, including Ayman Al-Zawahiri and Abu Obaida Al-Misri," the security official said on condition of anonymity.
He said Al-Misri was Al-Qaeda's operational commander in Afghanistan's eastern Kunar province and was also the mastermind behind August's alleged conspiracy to blow up jets flying from London to the United States.
Al-Misri was responsible for guiding Rashid Rauf, a British national arrested by Pakistan in August in connection with the alleged plot, the official said.
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2 NATO troops killed in eastern Afghan bombing
Updated Tue. Oct. 31 2006 7:23 AM ET CTV.ca News Staff
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20061031/nato_soldiers_061031/20061031?hub=CanadaAM
A roadside bomb killed two NATO soldiers and wounded two others on patrol in Afghanistan's eastern province of Nuristan on Tuesday.
The two wounded soldiers were transported to an American military facility in Asadabad in neighbouring Kunar province.
The roadside bomb struck the soldiers' vehicle in the province of Nuristan, NATO said.
NATO did not release the nationalities of the soldier but American troops are the bulk of the NATO component in eastern Afghanistan.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the blast in the restive region, which is a bastion for militants as well as a stronghold for former prime minister and militant leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.
Taliban's top military commander, Mullah Dadullah, said the attack was triggered by a remote controlled device, according to unconfirmed reports from Reuters.
Meanwhile, NATO reported that its warplanes killed 12 insurgents in Kandahar province as "they tried to occupy firing positions on the roof of a compound."
The troops also reported that suspected militants launched an attack on a convoy of foreign troops in Nuristan.
There are a number of casualties in that attack, a NATO spokesman said, without offering further details.
In Ghazni province, meanwhile, a suicide bomber detonated himself Tuesday in the office of the chief of Andar district.
One police officer was killed and another wounded when they tried to keep the attacker from entering the office of the chief, provincial police chief Gen. Abdul Ghafar told The Associated Press.
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Who pays for Afghanistan's Tim Hortons?
Canadian taxpayer foots nearly $4-million bill
Hannah Boudreau, Brian Liu globalnational.com Tuesday, October 31, 2006
http://www.canada.com/topics/news/story.html?id=925e280d-e9fc-402e-a121-151618ddd9d6&k=17995
OTTAWA -- In late June 2006, a pair of Soviet-era Illyushin-76 transport planes left Canada, carrying inside their cargo bellies tonnes of precisely chilled ingredients for making doughnuts and bagels.
Along with the precious cargo, six Canadian experts made the 10,000-kilometre journey over the North Pole to a region of the world from which Canada's Department of Foreign Affairs advises its citizens to stay away.
That place was Kandahar, Afghanistan, home to roughly 2,300 Canadian soldiers who are there to fight terrorism and rebuild the nation. Their mission was simple: to set up and train a team of Canadians to open the first Tim Hortons franchise outside of North America, at a place where Canadians feel furthest away from home.
Although while the Oakville, Ont.-based company initially balked at opening a franchise nine time zones from their main market (Canada and the U.S.), negotiations between Tim Hortons and the Department of National Defence eventually led to what was initially thought to be a private franchise operation on the Kandahar airfield -- the site of Canada's main base of operations in the region.
However, through Access to Information requests, Global National has learned that it took a lot more than thirsty soldiers longing for a "double-double" morale boost to open the Afghan coffee shop -- to the tune of nearly $4 million in Canadian taxpayers' dollars.
Upon the March announcement of the plans to open the Kandahar branch, Tim Hortons announced in a press release that it would convert a trailer normally used for restaurant renovations and deliver it to the Canadian Forces for use in Afghanistan.
Documents obtained now show that in fact, two trailers were purchased and retrofitted at the cost of $378,000. And renting the two Illyushin-76 cargo planes to transport the trailers over? The Canadian government picked up the $425,000 tab for that too.
The costs don't stop there:
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Canadian soldiers are not enough
Unless Hamid Karzai cracks down on his government's corruption, the people will keep making room for Taliban, says author and Kandahar businesswoman SARAH CHAYES
SARAH CHAYES From Tuesday's Globe and Mail
http://www.theglobeandmail.com//servlet/story/RTGAM.20061003.wcoafghan03/BNStory/specialComment/home
'Are you going back to Kandahar?"
On a speaking tour in the United States and Canada, I keep hearing this question. The recent assassination of Safia Ama Jan, the provincial director of women's affairs in Kandahar, not to mention the death of yet another Canadian soldier, has made people wonder whether the violence in Afghanistan has taken a quantum leap that would cause me to reconsider.
I have lived in Kandahar for nearly five years -- arriving originally as a radio reporter, then deciding to stay on to help rebuild. Currently, I run a small co-operative that manufactures fine skin-care products and exports them to Canada and the United States. For residents of Kandahar, like me, who have been watching the apparently inexorable decline, Safia Ama Jan's killing seemed utterly within the realm of normalcy. More than a year ago, in late May of 2005, the head of the provincial council of religious leaders -- a much more important person locally than Safia Ama Jan -- was gunned down outside his office right next to the seat of provincial government. Three days later, my best Afghan friend, the chief of the Kabul police, was blown up along with 21 other people at the oldest mosque in town, at a prayer service in memory of the slain mullah.
At that time, it seemed to me that nothing could ever get worse.
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Drawing battle lines
Sun Media sent undercover employees to the street where they gauged the pulse of the nation
By THANE BURNETT
http://torontosun.com/News/Columnists/Burnett_Thane/2006/10/31/pf-2186194.html
There is a quiet divide in our country.
It is between those who believe we should remain fighting in Afghanistan and those who hope we find a way out now.
But unlike our neighbours to the south, most Canadians don't often take a stand on corners to express and press our world views.
Last weekend's anti-war protests in Canadian cities, as well a few pro-mission gatherings weeks earlier, are rare and include only a small number of our voices.
We're usually so very quiet in our convictions and conversations, as we walk by one another on crowded streets. So I'm looking for signs to break the silence -- and get us talking.
Over the past week, in Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Ottawa and London, Sun Media journalists, including myself, have stood on our busiest boulevards, carrying sandwich boards and waving placards which spelled out battle lines on our home front.
One day, our billboards called for us to hold fast in Afghanistan. In my case, the words were "Support Our Troops" -- the acknowledged slogan to stay the course.
Then the next day, the placards changed to a call of withdrawal -- "Canada Out of Afghanistan."
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US's Afghan policies going up in smoke
By Ann Jones
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/HK01Df01.html
On the fifth anniversary of the start of the Bush administration's war in Afghanistan, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld wrote an upbeat op-ed in the Washington Post on that hapless country's "hopeful and promising" trajectory. He cited only two items as less than "encouraging": "the legitimate worry that increased poppy production could be a destabilizing factor" and the "rising violence in southern Afghanistan".
That rising violence - a full-scale onslaught by the resurgent Taliban - put Afghanistan back in the headlines this summer and
brought consternation to North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) governments (from Canada to Australia) whose soldiers are now dying in a land they had been led to believe was a peaceful "success story".
Lieutenant-General David Richards, the British commander of NATO troops that took over security in embattled southern Afghanistan from the US in July, warned at the time, "We could actually fail here." In October, he argued that if NATO did not bring security and significant reconstruction to the alienated Pashtun south within six months - the mission the US failed to accomplish during the past five years - the majority of the populace might well switch sympathies to the Taliban.
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Taliban handpick their targets
By Jason Motlagh Oct 28, 2006
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/HJ28Df03.html
KABUL - Taliban militants are targeting Afghan government officials in yet another nod to Iraqi insurgents, marked by a spike in assassinations and attempted attacks in recent weeks that coincide with a greater reliance on suicide terrorism and the use of imported bomb technologies.
The killings appear to represent a systematic campaign to undermine the weak government of President Hamid Karzai, both to create fear in urban centers with a heavy security presence and distant provinces that have in past months experienced the
bloodiest fighting since the hardline movement was ousted five years ago for harboring al-Qaeda operatives.
"This really is a deliberate campaign to assassinate Afghan officials," Barnett R Rubin, a leading expert on Afghanistan at the Council on Foreign Relations, told Asia Times Online. "We have seen well-placed suicide bombers operating more effectively than they ever have before."
Suicide attacks have killed seven government officials so far this year, with many near misses. The upward trend began when Paktia provincial governor Abdul Hakim Taniwal, a Karzai confidant, was killed along with two aides on September 10 outside his office by a suicide bomber, followed by another strike at his funeral service the next day that claimed six lives.
A district police chief, an intelligence officer and an administrator in the eastern province of Nangarhar died on October 9 when a roadside bomb ripped through their vehicle en route to check on a school that had been torched.
Last month, a gunman killed Safia Ama Jan, the director of the Ministry of Women's Affairs in Kandahar province, a Taliban stronghold, after which four other female state employees opted to quit their posts. Two other provincial governors have since escaped assassination attempts, including one last month in which a suicide bomber killed 18 people outside the governor's compound in Helmand province. This week a provincial councilman was slain in Kandahar, prompting the council to double the amount of bodyguards on hand.
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Taliban demand release of hostage
By Danish Karokhel Oct 26, 2006
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/HJ26Df03.html
(A review of Gabriele Torsello's book, The Heart of Kashmir , can be found at A story in black and white, Asia Times Online, Jan 26, 2004)
KABUL - An Italian freelance photojournalist kidnapped in southern Afghanistan by unidentified gunmen should be immediately released, a Taliban spokesman said on Tuesday.
Gabriele Torsello was abducted with his Afghan assistant on October 12 between Lashkargah, the capital of Helmand province, and Kandahar. Five armed men stopped their taxi and took them away, according to Ghulam Mohammad, a fellow-passenger.
The kidnappers had threatened to kill the photojournalist, who is now a practicing Muslim, unless Italy returned Abdul Rahman, an Afghan Christian convert who was given asylum, and also withdrew its soldiers from the country. This deadline has passed.
Qari Yousaf Ahmadi, a so-called Taliban spokesman, told Pajhwok Afghan News by phone from an undisclosed location that the journalist was innocent and must not be made to pay for the actions of the Italian government. "The abductors who claimed they were Taliban did so only to defame us," he said.
"Kidnappers of the Italian journalist are robbers and they have abducted the journalist for money. We will drag them to court if we find them," he declared.
Torsello had visited the Musa Qala and Sangin districts of restive Helmand province. The Taliban, who have appealed for his release, said that they provided the photojournalist with security during his five-day assignment in the two districts.
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Gross stupidity in Afghanistan
By Ajai Sahni Oct 25, 2006
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/HJ25Df01.html
The US-led coalition is unambiguously losing the war in Afghanistan, and it is important, at this stage, to reiterate the obvious, that is, precisely why the war was undertaken in the first instance: because of September 11, 2001, because of the al-Qaeda presence in Afghanistan, and because of the assessment that the Taliban regime there had provided safe haven and operational facilitation to al-Qaeda for its planning and execution of the multiple and catastrophic strikes in the United States. The war was not merely punitive, it was intended to be preventive. It has proved a failure on both counts.
As with all the pertinent leaderships confronted with the possibility, if not imminence, of defeat, saving face has become infinitely more important than the original objectives of this war. It is useful to emphasize here that this was not a war of conquest, or even of "liberation" (despite the rhetoric of "Enduring Freedom"), but of defense. Its principal objective was to deny a base for future September 11s to be strategized, planned and executed.
But the Taliban and al-Qaeda have survived - albeit somewhat damaged - and, if current trends persist, will soon have the freedom, the power and the required setting to plan out their next wave of attacks against the West. And Western - particularly US - leaderships are squarely to blame for this. US diplomat Alberto Fernandez has spoken scathingly of the "stupidity in Iraq", but the stupidity in Afghanistan is far more manifest, and was considerably the more avoidable.
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No 'real change' for Afghan women
By Pam O'Toole BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6100842.stm
Millions of Afghan women still face discrimination, the report says
An international women's rights group says guarantees given to Afghan women after the fall of the Taleban in 2001 have not translated into real change.
Womankind Worldwide says millions of Afghan women and girls continue to face systematic discrimination and violence in their households and communities.
The report admits that there have been some legal, civil and constitutional gains for Afghan women.
But serious challenges remain and need to be addressed urgently, it states.
These include challenges to women's safety, realisation of civil and political rights and status.
Self-harming
Womankind Worldwide sent a film crew to Afghanistan to investigate the situation of women there.
They found a young Afghan woman crying in hospital who said she wanted to die. She was recovering after setting fire to herself.
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Taliban factions map
October 30, 2006
http://www.snappingturtle.net/flit/archives/2006_10_30.html#005976
For those who are having trouble (like me) keeping up with the increasingly complex Taliban dynamics in Afghanistan, here's a heavily oversimplified map, just depicting the three major anti-government factions' geographic centers of gravity
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A Tim Hortons Soldier Fires Back
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/004896.html
From the comments of the CTV Politics blog (responding to a quote from the Senlis Council's Norine MacDonald in this CTV story);
Re: The Afghanistan conundrum
by Trevo on Sun 29 Oct 2006 08:29 AM EST | Profile | Permanent Link
I'm not quite sure where you're going with the "Our military base in Kandahar has a Burger King and a Tim Hortons. And 15 minutes away, there are children dying of starvation," comment.
Is it a time issue that determines who should help these children you mention? Is the Tim Hortons you go to, far enough away that you don't care about starving children? Do you really think that because our coffee is closer to starvation, we should feel guilty? So are you saying the closer I am with my coffee to the problem of starving children, the worse I should feel? Further to that, because you are really, really far away, it’s not your concern?
What are you doing about the children of Afghanistan? You're sitting back in your recliner, after turning up the thermosat and having a warm shower, and deciding we (Canadian soldiers)should feel bad for having a coffee becuase we're closer than you to starving children. So you put down the newspaper, tell the kids to go outside and play, and head over to your computer to “throw” your opinion out there. We're trying to help these kids. We're giving girls the chance to go to school and we are doing our best to make this a safer place for everyone. Some of the greatest people i have ever met in my life have died trying to help these people. We leave our families, missing birthdays, funerals, new births, hockey games, and every comfort we as Canadians can enjoy. Now, we have a Tim Hortons to microscopically ease the burden of putting our lives on hold for 6 months, and bring our morale up for the 7 minutes it takes to drink a double-double.
For me personally, the hardest part of my job was not going to Afghanistan, Bosnia, or Kosovo, but it was the fact that I put my life on the line so that people like you can have these opinions.
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International Security Assistance Force Map
http://www.jfcbs.nato.int/ISAF/media/pdf/placemat_isaf.pdf
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Majority backs Afghan troop deployment: survey
Updated Mon. Oct. 30 2006 2:16 PM ET CTV.ca News Staff
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20061030/tory_reportcard_061030/20061030?hub=Politics
A new survey finds a majority of Canadians support sending troops to Afghanistan, believing they provide "critical assistance" to the local population.
But at the same time, support for Canada's current mission and confidence that it's making a difference seem to have eroded since the summer.
The Innovative Research Group Inc. survey of almost 2,500 Canadians was conducted for the Canadian Defence & Foreign Affairs Institute -- a Calgary-based lobby group.
The survey found that 54 per cent of Canadians are willing to put troops in harms way in Afghanistan.
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Tribal fury at air strike in Pakistan
POSTED: 1134 GMT (1934 HKT), October 31, 2006
http://edition.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/asiapcf/10/31/pakistan.attack.reut/index.html
KHAR, Pakistan (Reuters) -- More than 15,000 armed Pakistani tribesmen protested on Tuesday over a Pakistan Army helicopter attack on an al-Qaeda-linked religious school that killed around 80 suspected militants.
Chants of "Down with America" and "Down with Musharraf" rang out as the tribesmen gathered in Khar, main town in the Bajaur tribal region close to the Afghan border, in anger at the air strike.
"Our jihad (holy war) will continue and Inshallah (God willing), people will go to Afghanistan to oust American and British forces," Maulana Faqir Mohammad, a pro-Taliban cleric, told the crowd of turbaned tribals, many carrying Kalashnikovs and wearing bandoliers, and a few shouldering rocket launchers.
While the government claimed the madrasa school at Chenagai was being used to train militants, protesters said the dead, mostly young men aged between 15 and 25, were merely students.
President Pervez Musharraf, speaking at a seminar in Islamabad, said the army had killed militants.
"We were working on them for six or seven days, we know who they were. They were doing military training," Musharraf said.
Nowhere is Musharraf's alliance with the United States in a war on terrorism more unpopular than in the Pashtun tribal belt straddling the Pakistan-Afghan border.
A mountainous region that is difficult to access, Bajaur lies across from the eastern Afghan province of Kunar, where U.S. troops are hunting al Qaeda and Taliban militants.
Along with North and South Waziristan, Bajaur is regarded as a hotbed of support for Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar and al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden.
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Canada's David Fraser wraps up deadly mission in southern Afghanistan
Published: Wednesday, November 01, 2006
http://www.canada.com/topics/news/world/story.html?id=411f3403-aaae-4237-bd01-6856a8dc1979&k=2867
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (CP) - Canada's Brigadier-General David Fraser has handed NATO control of southern Afghanistan to the Dutch.
It's a rotational change of command that wraps up a deadly eight months for Fraser in one of the world's most dangerous zones. Fraser says much has been accomplished: new roads, canals and schools. But he concedes that many Afghans are still waiting for help, and that NATO needs more troops to fight back insurgents and finish the job.
Maj.-Gen.Ton Van Loon of the Netherlands takes over for Fraser in southern Afghanistan.
Forty-two Canadians and one diplomat have died in the country since 2002
End
Afghanistan to prove to be 3rd Vietnam for U.S.: dissident
November 01, 2006
http://english.people.com.cn/200611/01/eng20061101_317263.html
As leader of the radical Hizb-e- Islami and a former Afghan premier, Gulbudin Hekmatyar warned that this post-Taliban central Asian state would become the third Vietnam for the United States, a Kabul-based newspaper reported Wednesday.
"Afghanistan will prove to be a third Vietnam for the United States," daily Outlook quoted a statement of the dissident Afghan warlord as saying.
Terming Iraq as the second Vietnam, Hekmatyar maintained that wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would break the U.S. economic backbone and that its fate would be similar to the former Soviet Union, a reference to the USSR's dismemberment.
Hekmatyar, a wanted man by the U.S. government, in his statement also called on Afghans to continue Jihad or holy war till the withdrawal of U.S.-dominated foreign forces from Afghanistan.
It is the second statement issued by Hekmatayr over the past 10 days. In his previous statement released on the eve of Eidul Fitr to mark the end of Muslims fasting month of Ramadan, he called on Afghans to back him in fighting the foreign forces in Afghanistan.
Source: Xinhua
End
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this "news only" thread system work!
I will build more and kill less, says Nato's Afghanistan general
By Michael Evans and Anthony Loyd November 01, 2006
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2431423,00.html
Winter campaign is to improve country rather than kill insurgents
The general says 'armchair critics' in Britain fail to see the progress being made in Afghanistan (Musadeq Sadeq/AP)
THE British general commanding all 31,000 Nato troops in Afghanistan has pledged to focus his winter campaign on development projects rather than killing Taleban fighters.
Lieutenant-General David Richards conceded that significant improvements were needed over the next few months to persuade Afghans to “keep the faith” with the Nato mission.
In an interview with The Times, General Richards said that he aimed to switch all the efforts of his 37-nation force towards protecting and enabling “visible” reconstruction projects. He was ready to “put a security cloak” around rebuilding programmes that would make an immediate difference to the people.
The shift follows months of fighting in which hundreds of Afghans have been killed in some of the toughest fighting experienced by British troops facing a resurgent Taleban. While not playing down the threat still posed by the Taleban, General Richards said he hoped that the “kinetic energy” that marked the first six months of his command would ease through the winter. Forty-six Nato troops have died in Afghanistan this year.
“Something that really hit me in the eye was just how important it was for the Afghan people for us to prove that we could fight and defend their areas. We did prove this but we don’t need to carry on doing this in the long term, and I hope the fighting element throughout the winter will be minimal compared with what our troops have had to face in the summer,” he said.
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Al-Qaeda leaders frequented bombed Pakistan madrassa: official
10-31-2006, 20h08 ISLAMABAD (AFP)
http://www.turkishpress.com/news.asp?id=149204
A religious school destroyed in Pakistani airstrikes was frequented by top Al-Qaeda militants including Ayman Al-Zawahiri and the alleged mastermind of the foiled London airliners attack, a senior security official said.
Neither Zawahiri -- Osama bin Laden's Egyptian-born deputy -- nor Abu Obaida Al-Misri were in the Islamic school, or madrassa, at the time of the raid on Monday, the official said in a briefing to journalists.
Thousands of tribesmen rallied earlier Tuesday saying the seminary in the Bajaur tribal agency near the Afghan border was harmless and that the 80 people who died in the helicopter raid were all civilians, mostly young students.
"The madrassa that was targeted was frequently visited by Al-Qaeda leaders, including Ayman Al-Zawahiri and Abu Obaida Al-Misri," the security official said on condition of anonymity.
He said Al-Misri was Al-Qaeda's operational commander in Afghanistan's eastern Kunar province and was also the mastermind behind August's alleged conspiracy to blow up jets flying from London to the United States.
Al-Misri was responsible for guiding Rashid Rauf, a British national arrested by Pakistan in August in connection with the alleged plot, the official said.
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2 NATO troops killed in eastern Afghan bombing
Updated Tue. Oct. 31 2006 7:23 AM ET CTV.ca News Staff
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20061031/nato_soldiers_061031/20061031?hub=CanadaAM
A roadside bomb killed two NATO soldiers and wounded two others on patrol in Afghanistan's eastern province of Nuristan on Tuesday.
The two wounded soldiers were transported to an American military facility in Asadabad in neighbouring Kunar province.
The roadside bomb struck the soldiers' vehicle in the province of Nuristan, NATO said.
NATO did not release the nationalities of the soldier but American troops are the bulk of the NATO component in eastern Afghanistan.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the blast in the restive region, which is a bastion for militants as well as a stronghold for former prime minister and militant leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.
Taliban's top military commander, Mullah Dadullah, said the attack was triggered by a remote controlled device, according to unconfirmed reports from Reuters.
Meanwhile, NATO reported that its warplanes killed 12 insurgents in Kandahar province as "they tried to occupy firing positions on the roof of a compound."
The troops also reported that suspected militants launched an attack on a convoy of foreign troops in Nuristan.
There are a number of casualties in that attack, a NATO spokesman said, without offering further details.
In Ghazni province, meanwhile, a suicide bomber detonated himself Tuesday in the office of the chief of Andar district.
One police officer was killed and another wounded when they tried to keep the attacker from entering the office of the chief, provincial police chief Gen. Abdul Ghafar told The Associated Press.
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Who pays for Afghanistan's Tim Hortons?
Canadian taxpayer foots nearly $4-million bill
Hannah Boudreau, Brian Liu globalnational.com Tuesday, October 31, 2006
http://www.canada.com/topics/news/story.html?id=925e280d-e9fc-402e-a121-151618ddd9d6&k=17995
OTTAWA -- In late June 2006, a pair of Soviet-era Illyushin-76 transport planes left Canada, carrying inside their cargo bellies tonnes of precisely chilled ingredients for making doughnuts and bagels.
Along with the precious cargo, six Canadian experts made the 10,000-kilometre journey over the North Pole to a region of the world from which Canada's Department of Foreign Affairs advises its citizens to stay away.
That place was Kandahar, Afghanistan, home to roughly 2,300 Canadian soldiers who are there to fight terrorism and rebuild the nation. Their mission was simple: to set up and train a team of Canadians to open the first Tim Hortons franchise outside of North America, at a place where Canadians feel furthest away from home.
Although while the Oakville, Ont.-based company initially balked at opening a franchise nine time zones from their main market (Canada and the U.S.), negotiations between Tim Hortons and the Department of National Defence eventually led to what was initially thought to be a private franchise operation on the Kandahar airfield -- the site of Canada's main base of operations in the region.
However, through Access to Information requests, Global National has learned that it took a lot more than thirsty soldiers longing for a "double-double" morale boost to open the Afghan coffee shop -- to the tune of nearly $4 million in Canadian taxpayers' dollars.
Upon the March announcement of the plans to open the Kandahar branch, Tim Hortons announced in a press release that it would convert a trailer normally used for restaurant renovations and deliver it to the Canadian Forces for use in Afghanistan.
Documents obtained now show that in fact, two trailers were purchased and retrofitted at the cost of $378,000. And renting the two Illyushin-76 cargo planes to transport the trailers over? The Canadian government picked up the $425,000 tab for that too.
The costs don't stop there:
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Canadian soldiers are not enough
Unless Hamid Karzai cracks down on his government's corruption, the people will keep making room for Taliban, says author and Kandahar businesswoman SARAH CHAYES
SARAH CHAYES From Tuesday's Globe and Mail
http://www.theglobeandmail.com//servlet/story/RTGAM.20061003.wcoafghan03/BNStory/specialComment/home
'Are you going back to Kandahar?"
On a speaking tour in the United States and Canada, I keep hearing this question. The recent assassination of Safia Ama Jan, the provincial director of women's affairs in Kandahar, not to mention the death of yet another Canadian soldier, has made people wonder whether the violence in Afghanistan has taken a quantum leap that would cause me to reconsider.
I have lived in Kandahar for nearly five years -- arriving originally as a radio reporter, then deciding to stay on to help rebuild. Currently, I run a small co-operative that manufactures fine skin-care products and exports them to Canada and the United States. For residents of Kandahar, like me, who have been watching the apparently inexorable decline, Safia Ama Jan's killing seemed utterly within the realm of normalcy. More than a year ago, in late May of 2005, the head of the provincial council of religious leaders -- a much more important person locally than Safia Ama Jan -- was gunned down outside his office right next to the seat of provincial government. Three days later, my best Afghan friend, the chief of the Kabul police, was blown up along with 21 other people at the oldest mosque in town, at a prayer service in memory of the slain mullah.
At that time, it seemed to me that nothing could ever get worse.
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Drawing battle lines
Sun Media sent undercover employees to the street where they gauged the pulse of the nation
By THANE BURNETT
http://torontosun.com/News/Columnists/Burnett_Thane/2006/10/31/pf-2186194.html
There is a quiet divide in our country.
It is between those who believe we should remain fighting in Afghanistan and those who hope we find a way out now.
But unlike our neighbours to the south, most Canadians don't often take a stand on corners to express and press our world views.
Last weekend's anti-war protests in Canadian cities, as well a few pro-mission gatherings weeks earlier, are rare and include only a small number of our voices.
We're usually so very quiet in our convictions and conversations, as we walk by one another on crowded streets. So I'm looking for signs to break the silence -- and get us talking.
Over the past week, in Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Ottawa and London, Sun Media journalists, including myself, have stood on our busiest boulevards, carrying sandwich boards and waving placards which spelled out battle lines on our home front.
One day, our billboards called for us to hold fast in Afghanistan. In my case, the words were "Support Our Troops" -- the acknowledged slogan to stay the course.
Then the next day, the placards changed to a call of withdrawal -- "Canada Out of Afghanistan."
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US's Afghan policies going up in smoke
By Ann Jones
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/HK01Df01.html
On the fifth anniversary of the start of the Bush administration's war in Afghanistan, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld wrote an upbeat op-ed in the Washington Post on that hapless country's "hopeful and promising" trajectory. He cited only two items as less than "encouraging": "the legitimate worry that increased poppy production could be a destabilizing factor" and the "rising violence in southern Afghanistan".
That rising violence - a full-scale onslaught by the resurgent Taliban - put Afghanistan back in the headlines this summer and
brought consternation to North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) governments (from Canada to Australia) whose soldiers are now dying in a land they had been led to believe was a peaceful "success story".
Lieutenant-General David Richards, the British commander of NATO troops that took over security in embattled southern Afghanistan from the US in July, warned at the time, "We could actually fail here." In October, he argued that if NATO did not bring security and significant reconstruction to the alienated Pashtun south within six months - the mission the US failed to accomplish during the past five years - the majority of the populace might well switch sympathies to the Taliban.
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Taliban handpick their targets
By Jason Motlagh Oct 28, 2006
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/HJ28Df03.html
KABUL - Taliban militants are targeting Afghan government officials in yet another nod to Iraqi insurgents, marked by a spike in assassinations and attempted attacks in recent weeks that coincide with a greater reliance on suicide terrorism and the use of imported bomb technologies.
The killings appear to represent a systematic campaign to undermine the weak government of President Hamid Karzai, both to create fear in urban centers with a heavy security presence and distant provinces that have in past months experienced the
bloodiest fighting since the hardline movement was ousted five years ago for harboring al-Qaeda operatives.
"This really is a deliberate campaign to assassinate Afghan officials," Barnett R Rubin, a leading expert on Afghanistan at the Council on Foreign Relations, told Asia Times Online. "We have seen well-placed suicide bombers operating more effectively than they ever have before."
Suicide attacks have killed seven government officials so far this year, with many near misses. The upward trend began when Paktia provincial governor Abdul Hakim Taniwal, a Karzai confidant, was killed along with two aides on September 10 outside his office by a suicide bomber, followed by another strike at his funeral service the next day that claimed six lives.
A district police chief, an intelligence officer and an administrator in the eastern province of Nangarhar died on October 9 when a roadside bomb ripped through their vehicle en route to check on a school that had been torched.
Last month, a gunman killed Safia Ama Jan, the director of the Ministry of Women's Affairs in Kandahar province, a Taliban stronghold, after which four other female state employees opted to quit their posts. Two other provincial governors have since escaped assassination attempts, including one last month in which a suicide bomber killed 18 people outside the governor's compound in Helmand province. This week a provincial councilman was slain in Kandahar, prompting the council to double the amount of bodyguards on hand.
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Taliban demand release of hostage
By Danish Karokhel Oct 26, 2006
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/HJ26Df03.html
(A review of Gabriele Torsello's book, The Heart of Kashmir , can be found at A story in black and white, Asia Times Online, Jan 26, 2004)
KABUL - An Italian freelance photojournalist kidnapped in southern Afghanistan by unidentified gunmen should be immediately released, a Taliban spokesman said on Tuesday.
Gabriele Torsello was abducted with his Afghan assistant on October 12 between Lashkargah, the capital of Helmand province, and Kandahar. Five armed men stopped their taxi and took them away, according to Ghulam Mohammad, a fellow-passenger.
The kidnappers had threatened to kill the photojournalist, who is now a practicing Muslim, unless Italy returned Abdul Rahman, an Afghan Christian convert who was given asylum, and also withdrew its soldiers from the country. This deadline has passed.
Qari Yousaf Ahmadi, a so-called Taliban spokesman, told Pajhwok Afghan News by phone from an undisclosed location that the journalist was innocent and must not be made to pay for the actions of the Italian government. "The abductors who claimed they were Taliban did so only to defame us," he said.
"Kidnappers of the Italian journalist are robbers and they have abducted the journalist for money. We will drag them to court if we find them," he declared.
Torsello had visited the Musa Qala and Sangin districts of restive Helmand province. The Taliban, who have appealed for his release, said that they provided the photojournalist with security during his five-day assignment in the two districts.
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Gross stupidity in Afghanistan
By Ajai Sahni Oct 25, 2006
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/HJ25Df01.html
The US-led coalition is unambiguously losing the war in Afghanistan, and it is important, at this stage, to reiterate the obvious, that is, precisely why the war was undertaken in the first instance: because of September 11, 2001, because of the al-Qaeda presence in Afghanistan, and because of the assessment that the Taliban regime there had provided safe haven and operational facilitation to al-Qaeda for its planning and execution of the multiple and catastrophic strikes in the United States. The war was not merely punitive, it was intended to be preventive. It has proved a failure on both counts.
As with all the pertinent leaderships confronted with the possibility, if not imminence, of defeat, saving face has become infinitely more important than the original objectives of this war. It is useful to emphasize here that this was not a war of conquest, or even of "liberation" (despite the rhetoric of "Enduring Freedom"), but of defense. Its principal objective was to deny a base for future September 11s to be strategized, planned and executed.
But the Taliban and al-Qaeda have survived - albeit somewhat damaged - and, if current trends persist, will soon have the freedom, the power and the required setting to plan out their next wave of attacks against the West. And Western - particularly US - leaderships are squarely to blame for this. US diplomat Alberto Fernandez has spoken scathingly of the "stupidity in Iraq", but the stupidity in Afghanistan is far more manifest, and was considerably the more avoidable.
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No 'real change' for Afghan women
By Pam O'Toole BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6100842.stm
Millions of Afghan women still face discrimination, the report says
An international women's rights group says guarantees given to Afghan women after the fall of the Taleban in 2001 have not translated into real change.
Womankind Worldwide says millions of Afghan women and girls continue to face systematic discrimination and violence in their households and communities.
The report admits that there have been some legal, civil and constitutional gains for Afghan women.
But serious challenges remain and need to be addressed urgently, it states.
These include challenges to women's safety, realisation of civil and political rights and status.
Self-harming
Womankind Worldwide sent a film crew to Afghanistan to investigate the situation of women there.
They found a young Afghan woman crying in hospital who said she wanted to die. She was recovering after setting fire to herself.
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Taliban factions map
October 30, 2006
http://www.snappingturtle.net/flit/archives/2006_10_30.html#005976
For those who are having trouble (like me) keeping up with the increasingly complex Taliban dynamics in Afghanistan, here's a heavily oversimplified map, just depicting the three major anti-government factions' geographic centers of gravity
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A Tim Hortons Soldier Fires Back
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/004896.html
From the comments of the CTV Politics blog (responding to a quote from the Senlis Council's Norine MacDonald in this CTV story);
Re: The Afghanistan conundrum
by Trevo on Sun 29 Oct 2006 08:29 AM EST | Profile | Permanent Link
I'm not quite sure where you're going with the "Our military base in Kandahar has a Burger King and a Tim Hortons. And 15 minutes away, there are children dying of starvation," comment.
Is it a time issue that determines who should help these children you mention? Is the Tim Hortons you go to, far enough away that you don't care about starving children? Do you really think that because our coffee is closer to starvation, we should feel guilty? So are you saying the closer I am with my coffee to the problem of starving children, the worse I should feel? Further to that, because you are really, really far away, it’s not your concern?
What are you doing about the children of Afghanistan? You're sitting back in your recliner, after turning up the thermosat and having a warm shower, and deciding we (Canadian soldiers)should feel bad for having a coffee becuase we're closer than you to starving children. So you put down the newspaper, tell the kids to go outside and play, and head over to your computer to “throw” your opinion out there. We're trying to help these kids. We're giving girls the chance to go to school and we are doing our best to make this a safer place for everyone. Some of the greatest people i have ever met in my life have died trying to help these people. We leave our families, missing birthdays, funerals, new births, hockey games, and every comfort we as Canadians can enjoy. Now, we have a Tim Hortons to microscopically ease the burden of putting our lives on hold for 6 months, and bring our morale up for the 7 minutes it takes to drink a double-double.
For me personally, the hardest part of my job was not going to Afghanistan, Bosnia, or Kosovo, but it was the fact that I put my life on the line so that people like you can have these opinions.
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International Security Assistance Force Map
http://www.jfcbs.nato.int/ISAF/media/pdf/placemat_isaf.pdf
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Majority backs Afghan troop deployment: survey
Updated Mon. Oct. 30 2006 2:16 PM ET CTV.ca News Staff
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20061030/tory_reportcard_061030/20061030?hub=Politics
A new survey finds a majority of Canadians support sending troops to Afghanistan, believing they provide "critical assistance" to the local population.
But at the same time, support for Canada's current mission and confidence that it's making a difference seem to have eroded since the summer.
The Innovative Research Group Inc. survey of almost 2,500 Canadians was conducted for the Canadian Defence & Foreign Affairs Institute -- a Calgary-based lobby group.
The survey found that 54 per cent of Canadians are willing to put troops in harms way in Afghanistan.
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Tribal fury at air strike in Pakistan
POSTED: 1134 GMT (1934 HKT), October 31, 2006
http://edition.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/asiapcf/10/31/pakistan.attack.reut/index.html
KHAR, Pakistan (Reuters) -- More than 15,000 armed Pakistani tribesmen protested on Tuesday over a Pakistan Army helicopter attack on an al-Qaeda-linked religious school that killed around 80 suspected militants.
Chants of "Down with America" and "Down with Musharraf" rang out as the tribesmen gathered in Khar, main town in the Bajaur tribal region close to the Afghan border, in anger at the air strike.
"Our jihad (holy war) will continue and Inshallah (God willing), people will go to Afghanistan to oust American and British forces," Maulana Faqir Mohammad, a pro-Taliban cleric, told the crowd of turbaned tribals, many carrying Kalashnikovs and wearing bandoliers, and a few shouldering rocket launchers.
While the government claimed the madrasa school at Chenagai was being used to train militants, protesters said the dead, mostly young men aged between 15 and 25, were merely students.
President Pervez Musharraf, speaking at a seminar in Islamabad, said the army had killed militants.
"We were working on them for six or seven days, we know who they were. They were doing military training," Musharraf said.
Nowhere is Musharraf's alliance with the United States in a war on terrorism more unpopular than in the Pashtun tribal belt straddling the Pakistan-Afghan border.
A mountainous region that is difficult to access, Bajaur lies across from the eastern Afghan province of Kunar, where U.S. troops are hunting al Qaeda and Taliban militants.
Along with North and South Waziristan, Bajaur is regarded as a hotbed of support for Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar and al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden.
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Canada's David Fraser wraps up deadly mission in southern Afghanistan
Published: Wednesday, November 01, 2006
http://www.canada.com/topics/news/world/story.html?id=411f3403-aaae-4237-bd01-6856a8dc1979&k=2867
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (CP) - Canada's Brigadier-General David Fraser has handed NATO control of southern Afghanistan to the Dutch.
It's a rotational change of command that wraps up a deadly eight months for Fraser in one of the world's most dangerous zones. Fraser says much has been accomplished: new roads, canals and schools. But he concedes that many Afghans are still waiting for help, and that NATO needs more troops to fight back insurgents and finish the job.
Maj.-Gen.Ton Van Loon of the Netherlands takes over for Fraser in southern Afghanistan.
Forty-two Canadians and one diplomat have died in the country since 2002
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Afghanistan to prove to be 3rd Vietnam for U.S.: dissident
November 01, 2006
http://english.people.com.cn/200611/01/eng20061101_317263.html
As leader of the radical Hizb-e- Islami and a former Afghan premier, Gulbudin Hekmatyar warned that this post-Taliban central Asian state would become the third Vietnam for the United States, a Kabul-based newspaper reported Wednesday.
"Afghanistan will prove to be a third Vietnam for the United States," daily Outlook quoted a statement of the dissident Afghan warlord as saying.
Terming Iraq as the second Vietnam, Hekmatyar maintained that wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would break the U.S. economic backbone and that its fate would be similar to the former Soviet Union, a reference to the USSR's dismemberment.
Hekmatyar, a wanted man by the U.S. government, in his statement also called on Afghans to continue Jihad or holy war till the withdrawal of U.S.-dominated foreign forces from Afghanistan.
It is the second statement issued by Hekmatayr over the past 10 days. In his previous statement released on the eve of Eidul Fitr to mark the end of Muslims fasting month of Ramadan, he called on Afghans to back him in fighting the foreign forces in Afghanistan.
Source: Xinhua
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