Afghanistan in Crisis / Already Shaky India-Pakistan Relations Take a New Hit / Mumbai attacks shock Bollywood
Ic
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20081129_afghanistan_in_crisis/
Nov 29, 2008 By Robert Fisk
Editor’s note: This article was originally printed in The
Independent.
The collapse of Afghanistan is closer than the world believes.
Kandahar is in Taliban hands—all but a square mile at the centre of
the city—and the first Taliban checkpoints are scarcely 15 miles from
Kabul. Hamid Karzai’s deeply corrupted government is almost as
powerless as the Iraqi cabinet in Baghdad’s “Green Zone”; lorry
drivers in the country now carry business permits issued by the
Taliban which operate their own courts in remote areas of the country.
The Red Cross has already warned that humanitarian operations are
being drastically curtailed in ever larger areas of Afghanistan; more
than 4,000 people, at least a third of them civilians, have been
killed in the past 11 months, along with scores of Nato troops and
about 30 aid workers. Both the Taliban and Mr Karzai’s government are
executing their prisoners in ever greater numbers. The Afghan
authorities hanged five men this month for murder, kidnap or rape—one
prisoner, a distant relative of Mr Karzai, predictably had his
sentence commuted—and more than 100 others are now on Kabul’s death
row.
This is not the democratic, peaceful, resurgent, “gender-sensitive”
Afghanistan that the world promised to create after the overthrow of
the Taliban in 2001. Outside the capital and the far north of the
country, almost every woman wears the all-enshrouding burkha, while
fighters are now joining the Taliban’s ranks from Kashmir, Uzbekistan,
Chechnya and even Turkey. More than 300 Turkish fighters are now
believed to be in Afghanistan, many of them holding European
passports.
“Nobody I know wants to see the Taliban back in power,” a Kabul
business executive says—anonymity is now as much demanded as it was
before 2001—“but people hate the government and the parliament which
doesn’t care about their security. The government is useless. With so
many internally displaced refugees pouring into Kabul from the
countryside, there’s mass unemployment—but of course, there are no
statistics.
“The ‘open market’ led many of us into financial disaster. Afghanistan
is just a battlefield of ideology, opium and political corruption. Now
you’ve got all these commercial outfits receiving contracts from
people like USAID. First they skim off 30 to 50 per cent for their own
profits—then they contract out and sub-contract to other companies and
there’s only 10 per cent of the original amount left for the Afghans
themselves.”
Afghans working for charitable organisations and for the UN are
telling their employers that they are coming under increasing pressure
to give information to the Taliban and provide them with safe houses.
In the countryside, farmers live in fear of both sides in the war. A
very senior NGO official in Kabul—again, anonymity was requested—says
both the Taliban and the police regularly threaten villagers. “A
Taliban group will arrive at a village headman’s door at night—maybe
15 or 16 of them—and say they need food and shelter. And the headman
tells the villagers to give them food and let them stay at the mosque.
Then the police or army arrive in the day and accuse the villagers of
colluding with the Taliban, detain innocent men and threaten to
withhold humanitarian aid. Then there’s the danger the village will be
air-raided by the Americans.”
In the city of Ghazni, the Taliban ordered all mobile phones to be
switched off from 5pm until 6am for fear that spies would use them to
give away guerrilla locations. The mobile phone war may be one
conflict the government is winning. With American help the Interior
Ministry police can now track and triangulate calls. Once more, the
Americans are talking about forming “tribal militias” to combat the
Taliban, much as they did in Iraq and as the Pakistani authorities
have tried to do on the North West Frontier. But the tribal lashkars
of the [1980s] were corrupted by the Russians and when the system was
first tried out two years ago—it was called the Auxiliary Police Force—
it was a fiasco. The newly-formed constabulary stopped showing up for
work, stole weapons and turned themselves into private militias.
“Now every time a new Western ambassador arrives in Kabul, they dredge
it all up again,” another NGO official says in near despair. “ ’Oh,’
they proclaim, ‘let’s have local militias—what a bright idea.’ But
that will not solve the problem. The country is subject to brigandage
as well as the cruelty of the Taliban and the air raids which Afghans
find so outrageous. The international community has got to stop
spinning and do some fundamental thinking which should have been done
four or five years ago.”
What this means to those Westerners who have spent years in Kabul is
simple. Is it really the overriding ambition of Afghans to have
“democracy”? Is a strong federal state possible in Afghanistan? Is the
international community ready to take on the warlords and drug barons
who are within Mr Karzai’s own government? And—most important of all—
is development really about “securing the country”? The tired old
American adage that “where the Tarmac ends, the Taliban begins” is
untrue. The Taliban are mounting checkpoints on those very same newly-
built roads.
The Afghan Minister of Defence has 65,000 troops under his dubious
command but says he needs 500,000 to control Afghanistan. The Soviets
failed to contain the country even when they had 100,000 troops here
with 150,000 Afghan soldiers in support. And as Barack Obama prepares
to send another 7,000 US soldiers into the pit of Afghanistan, the
Spanish and Italians are talking of leaving while the Norwegians may
pull their 500 troops out of the area north of Heart. Repeatedly,
Western leaders talk of the “key”—of training more and more Afghans to
fight in the army. But that was the same “key” which the Russians tried
—and it did not fit the lock.
“We” are not winning in Afghanistan. Talk of crushing the Taliban
seems as bleakly unrealistic as it has ever been. Indeed, when the
President of Afghanistan tries to talk to Mullah Omar—one of America’s
principal targets in this wretched war—you know the writing is on the
wall. And even Mullah Omar didn’t want to talk to Mr Karzai.
Partition is the one option that no one will discuss—giving the
southern part of Afghanistan to the Taliban and keeping the rest—but
that will only open another crisis with Pakistan because the Pashtuns,
who form most of the Taliban, would want all of what they regard as
“Pashtunistan”; and that would have to include much of Pakistan’s own
tribal territories. It will also be a return to the “Great Game” and
the redrawing of borders in south-west Asia, something which—history
shows— has always been accompanied by great bloodshed.
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Already Shaky India-Pakistan Relations Take a New Hit
http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/20081129_indian_pakistani_relations_strained_after_attacks/
Nov 29, 2008
The already fraught relationship between neighboring nations India and
Pakistan has been further complicated by the terror siege in Mumbai,
in which as many as 195 people were killed and 295 wounded, according
to the BBC.
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Mumbai attacks shock Bollywood
German producer among dead
Fri., Nov. 28, 2008
The terror attacks in southern Mumbai have caused shock within the
Indian entertainment industry, but given the scale of the attacks, the
disruption has been limited.
Coverage of the tragedies, which left more than 120 people dead and
300 injured, has dominated the airwaves, with other issues like the
upcoming regional elections relegated down the running order.
"Terrible! Terrible situation!," superstar actor Amitabh Bachchan
wrote in his blog.
Among the dead was Ralph Burkei, the co-owner of German television
production company CAMP, who fell from the facade of the Taj Mahal
hotel, trying to escape the terrorists. Burkei managed to call a
friend from his cell phone and told him: “I have broken every bone in
my body. If no one helps me now, I’m finished.” He died on the way to
the hospital.
continue...
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117996564.html?categoryid=13&cs=1&nid=2562
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