Afghan Civilian Casualties Rise

The Washington Post reports:

The number of civilians killed or wounded in the Afghan war increased by 20 percent during the first 10 months of this year, compared with the same period last year, according to a U.N. report issued this week.

The top U.N. envoy to Afghanistan, Staffan de Mistura, said as the world body released its latest quarterly report that insurgents are likely to stage high-profile attacks in the months ahead.

“Before it gets better, it may get worse,” he said.

The report concluded that the number of civilian casualties attributable to insurgents increased by 25 percent during the 10-month period. It said insurgent groups were responsible for killing or injuring 4,738 civilians during that period, while 742 were killed or wounded by Afghan and international troops – a drop of 18 percent.

In a statement Thursday on its Web site, the Taliban called the civilian casualty figures in the report “a propaganda stint aimed at concealing American brutalities.”

U.S. airstrikes, long controversial in Afghanistan because of the high incidence of civilian casualties associated with them, were the leading cause of civilian deaths by NATO forces, the report said. At least 162 civilians were killed in airstrikes and 120 were wounded during the 10-month period.

On Thursday, NATO said it was investigating reports that one of its units had mistakenly killed two Afghans in northwestern Faryab province.

The grim statistics come as U.S. military officials are claiming some success in their effort to halt the Taliban’s momentum as the war enters its 10th year.

De Mistura said insurgent groups are likely to try to undermine NATO’s sense of traction by staging spectacular attacks in the near future.

Click here to read more.

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php
Five Filters featured site: So, Why is Wikileaks a Good Thing Again?.

View the original article here

Cables Reveal Extent of Afghan Corruption

WASHINGTON — From hundreds of diplomatic cables, Afghanistan emerges as a looking-glass land where bribery, extortion and embezzlement are the norm and the honest man is a distinct outlier.

Describing the likely lineup of Afghanistan’s new cabinet last January, the American Embassy noted that the agriculture minister, Asif Rahimi, “appears to be the only minister that was confirmed about whom no allegations of bribery exist.”

One Afghan official helpfully explained to diplomats the “four stages” at which his colleagues skimmed money from American development projects: “When contractors bid on a project, at application for building permits, during construction, and at the ribbon-cutting ceremony.” In a seeming victory against corruption, Abdul Ahad Sahibi, the mayor of Kabul, received a four-year prison sentence last year for “massive embezzlement.” But a cable from the embassy told a very different story: Mr. Sahibi was a victim of “kangaroo court justice,” it said, in what appeared to be retribution for his attempt to halt a corrupt land-distribution scheme.

It is hardly news that predatory corruption, fueled by a booming illicit narcotics industry, is rampant at every level of Afghan society. Transparency International, an advocacy organization that tracks government corruption around the globe, ranks Afghanistan as the world’s third most corrupt country, behind Somalia and Myanmar.

But the collection of confidential diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks and made available to a number of publications, offers a fresh sense of its pervasive nature, its overwhelming scale, and the dispiriting challenge it poses to American officials who have made shoring up support for the Afghan government a cornerstone of America’s counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan.

The cables make it clear that American officials see the problem as beginning at the top. An August 2009 report from Kabul complains that President Hamid Karzai and his attorney general “allowed dangerous individuals to go free or re-enter the battlefield without ever facing an Afghan court.” The embassy was particularly concerned that Mr. Karzai pardoned five border police officers caught with 124 kilograms (about 273 pounds) of heroin and intervened in a drug case involving the son of a wealthy supporter.

The American dilemma is perhaps best summed up in an October 2009 cable sent by Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry, written after he met with Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president’s half brother, the most powerful man in Kandahar and someone many American officials believe prospers from the drug trade.

“The meeting with AWK highlights one of our major challenges in Afghanistan: how to fight corruption and connect the people to their government, when the key government officials are themselves corrupt,” Ambassador Eikenberry wrote.

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php
Five Filters featured article: Beyond Hiroshima - The Non-Reporting of Falluja's Cancer Catastrophe.

View the original article here

Cables Show Iran Funds Afghan Leaders

Iran is financing a range of Afghan religious and political leaders, grooming Afghan religious scholars, training Taliban militants and even seeking to influence MPs, according to cables from the US embassy in Kabul.

The dispatches, relating conversations between American and Afghan officials, build up a picture of mounting Iranian involvement in its eastern neighbours.

In perhaps the most revealing, a top Hamid Karzai aide recently revealed to have received sacks of cash from the Iranian government told a senior US diplomat that all sorts of Afghan officials were on Tehran’s payroll, including some people nominated for cabinet positions.

Omar Daudzai “also asserted that in addition to financing Afghan religious leaders, Iran had provided salary support for some [Afghan government] deputy ministers and other officials, including ‘one or two even in the [presidential] palace’,” he told the then deputy US ambassador, Francis Ricciardone, in February.

“Daudzai claimed that some of these officials had been relieved of their duties because ‘you can’t be an honest Afghan if you receive a package [from Iran].’” The incident is striking because Daudzai attracted headlines in October when Karzai admitted his chief of staff had received “bags of cash”, containing hundreds of thousands of euros, from an Iranian official during an official trip with the president to Tehran. The money was to support Karzai’s office, something the diplomatic cables reveal the Americans were told about in 2009.

Daudzai told Ricciardone his government preferred the US’s sustained cash support to the occasional and unpredictable payments from Iran. He said Afghans were trained to fight with the Taliban inside Iran and thousands of Afghan religious scholars were on the Iranian payroll, with the entire project co-ordinated by an official in Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s office.

His discussion with US diplomats, and many other cables concerning Iran, illustrate Kabul’s awkward relationship with a neighbouring country that provides financial aid but also bribes Afghan MPs and supplies weapons to insurgents.

In late 2007 the US under-secretary of defence for policy, Eric Edelman, told Karzai that “Iranian meddling is getting increasingly lethal“. The warning came amid reports of the Taliban being provided with training camps inside Iran, explosively formed projectile weapons, and shoulder-held surface-to-air missiles capable of shooting down Nato planes.

The cable said Karzai believed Iran was trying to sabotage Afghanistan’s development to prevent it from becoming an important regional transit hub, and to protect its natural gas exports to India and Pakistan from central Asian competition.

Another 2009 report warned of Iranian officials in the Afghan parliament who “routinely encourage parliament to support anti-coalition policies and to raise anti-American talking points during debates”.

Mirwais Yasini, the deputy speaker of the lower house, is reported to have told a US official that an Iranian intelligence officer put pressure on him to change parliament’s agenda to allow for a debate about civilian casualties caused by Nato operations, and offered him “support” if he agreed. When Yasini refused, two MPs raised the subject in a different debate, using identical talking points to the ones the Iranian spy had tried to push on him earlier.

Despite such provocation, the Afghan government has been reluctant to publicly criticise Iran’s behaviour, despite regular US pressure for them to speak out.

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php
Five Filters featured article: Beyond Hiroshima - The Non-Reporting of Falluja's Cancer Catastrophe.

View the original article here