A publication of Afghanistan watch Number 16, July 31, 2010
Sixteenth Note from the UN Blacklist and release of the launching a commission for investigating Taliban‐linked prisoners are considerable the foreign contracts are other Dear readers Salaam, The analysis of this measures by the government of developments on fighting corruption. volume of TRUTH, Haqiqat biweekly Afghanistan to push ahead the peace Election Transparency: Excluding names magazine is an article entitled 'what initiative. These efforts have not been of some candidates from the final list of framework for the Peace talks?' written by preceded by satisfaction of the Taliban, parliamentary election, due to violation of but instead the insurgents have Mr. Ali Amiri. As a political scholar and election regulations or having links with intensified their deadly attacks. Many of university lecturer, Amiri has put under the illegal armed groups is a significant the critics of this policy have severely consideration the availability/absence of a measure by the Independent Election peace framework for talks with the objected the unilateral moves by the government of Afghanistan. Commission (IEC). The IEC says it is well insurgent groups, discussing on how engage prepared for leading the election as the in the talks with an effective peace plan. Corruption: In Kabul Conference, the security agencies are confident of In this issue, there are 66 news articles international community agreed to providing security of the ballot stations. and analysis selected from different print channel 50 of the international aids Removal of names of the candidates by through the government of Afghanistan, media in Afghanistan, of which 32 are the IEC met criticisms from the excluded conditioning that the government should about reconciliation with the armed candidates. Providing security, as the take effective measures on capacity‐ opposition groups, 16 news articles about main challenge to the forthcoming building and fighting corruption. But the the corruption, 15 on elections election, has been attentively debated by critics blame the government of transparency and 3 articles on transitional the print media of Afghanistan. Afghanistan that over its failures towards justice. The recondition program is still at its commitments. They believe that Transitional Justice: As before, the print the top of the news published by the print Afghan government would not be able to media of Afghanistan has paid the least media. effectively fight the widespread attention to the transitional justice. There Reconciliation with the insurgent groups: corruption. Establishing a special court for are only three news articles on Excluding names of some Taliban leaders indicting high‐ranking officials and administering Transitional Justice.
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The Truth is a bi‐weekly publication of the Afghanistan Watch supported by the International Centre for Transitional Justice (ICTJ). It is intended to provide a snapshot of how the Afghan media debate and approach these key issues facing the country: transitional justice, corruption, elections transparency and negotiations with the armed insurgents. PURL: https://www.legal-tools.org/doc/93b581/ If you wish to subscribe please send an email to [email protected] or visit our website: www.watchafghanistan.org Inside This Issue Transitional Justice Elections Transparency Reintegration Program not Feasible 3 Badakhshan Residents Protest on Exclusion of Candidates 11 The Justice should be Thoroughly Administered 3 IEC Announces the Final List of Candidates 11 Kabul Conference and Mistakes of the West in Afghanistan 3 Independent Election Commission: Government Facilities Negotiation with armed opposition Groups used in Election 11 UN Blacklist and the Contradictory Policies of US and Afghanistan 4 10,000 NATO Troops to Contribute in Securing the Election 11 Karzai Demands Removing Names of 50 Top Militants from A Glimpse on Hidden Election Irregularities in Kabul City 11 the UN Blacklist 4 Sar‐e Pul Candidates Concerned on Election 12 Finally Two‐way Road for Terrorism 4 Candidates Violate Election Rules 12 Government, Taliban and the Dangerous Game of Betrayal to ECC Receives Over 260 Complaints in 1 Month of the Pashtoons 4 Campaigns 12 28 Taliban Prisoners Released Ghazni Candidates Worried over Transparency of the Election 12 Kabul Denies Proposing Exclusion of 50 Top Militants from 115,000 Election Personnel Receive Professional Trainings 12 UN Blacklist 5 The Challenges Ahead of the Parliamentary Election 13 List of Taliban Leaders Presented to UNSC 5 The Final List of Election Candidates Announced: 2150 males Women’s Place in Talks with Taliban 5 and 406 females 13 Compiling another Blacklist by Taliban 5 Security for the Candidates, the Main Requisite of a Fair Election 13 UN Blacklist and the Grounds for Peace 5 Qualified Voters: 13 million Issued Voter Cards: 17.6 million 13 The Reconciliation Program Won’t Bring Peace and Security 6 Media Commission of the IEC: The Candidates not Allowed to Afghans themselves should Lead the Peace Talks 6 Run Televised Programs 13 Kabul Conference Supports Democracy, Defies Taliban 6 Corruption Kabul Conference and Shift of Strategy on Fighting Terrorism 6 Afghan Government to Demand Control of $13bn Foreign Aids 14 Afghan Women Rights not to be Victimized in Peace Talks 7 Finance ministry spokesman: Concrete Plans for Fighting Haqqani Network: Deserve Sanctions or Penalty? 7 Corruption 14 BBC Adjusts its Reports with Statements of the Insurgents 7 Special Court Law Approved 14 Reconciliation with Taliban, an Ambitious Goal of the Gov’t 7 All are Involved in the Devil Circle of Corruption 14 Collapse of Barg‐e‐Matal, a Response to the Reconciliation Program 7 Heading to Kabul Conference, the Intl Community Has no A Taliban Commander and His Men Join Peace Process 8 Trust on Afghan Govt 15 Dozens of Prisoners Released due to Insufficient Evidences 8 Another Falsification at the Eve of Kabul Conference 15 The Govt. Obliged to Compensate the Blameless Prisoners 8 The Law for Access to Information should be Enacted Soon 15 Releasing the Prisoners: by Law or Order of the Commission 8 The Ambitious Goals of Afghan Govt. in Kabul Conference 15 Who will be Removed from the Blacklist, the Repentant Abuse of US Aid by Americans 15 Militants or Karzai’s Allies? 8 What were the Expectations from Kabul Conference? 16 Germany: Exclusion of Taliban Names from the UN Blacklist Kabul Conference Proved World Backing Afghanistan 16 helpful 9 A Commission Set up for Monitoring Foreign Aids Getting Out 16 Karzai’s Advisor: Peace Efforts are Ineffectual 9 Washington‐Kabul Relation Still Tense 16 Five Militants Including a Commander Join Peace Program 9 British Ambassador: There are Conditions for Delivering Aids 17 Taliban Killing for More Concessions 9 Helplessness of Int’l Community in Kabul Conference 17 The Questions urrounding Kabul Conference 10 Kabul Conference and Unabated Concerns on Corruption 17 Contradictory Policies of the Coalition towards Peace Talks 10 Articles & Interviews 18 Circumstances of the Peace Talks with Taliban 10 What Framework for the Peace Talks? Peace Supreme Council to be Established 10 New Publications 20
PURL: https://www.legal-tools.org/doc/93b581/
No 16, July 31, 2010
Transitional Justice
Reintegration Program not Feasible community is heading to a wrong direction. The most important mistake of the international community in Afghanistan is their Mandegar Daily, Volume No 376, July 22, 2010, Page 6 negligence towards supporting justice and indicting the war A member of Wolesi Jirga, Lower House of the Parliament, criminals. The foreign countries in Afghanistan cannot turn the Ahamd Behzad said, “As everyone knows the Taliban as a situation until the warlords and the offenders are enjoying terrorist armed group is murdering the people of Afghanistan. impunity, holding positions in the government by their military Therefore, I don’t think it would be logical to give the group the power and social influence. opportunity to join the government.” Today, the top government posts of Afghanistan are distributed
Mr. Behzad called the “Reintegration Program” as contradictory, among the warlords, drug cartels and private firms. As they adding that, “How it is possible to include the militants in the control all the development projects of the country, the fate of government an to make reconciliation with those terrorists who are the reconstruction process of the country is definitely doomed being prosecuted by international organizations, as they are killing to failure. dozens of innocent people in each of their terror acts.” In this circumstance, it is impossible to monitor effectively the “As war crime are is considered as a main issue in the country, projects. As a result of the situation, channeling 50 percent of how it would be possible to reach an agreement with those who the aids through the government of Afghanistan is meant to are involved in killing people.” Behzad said concluding that “the pouring half of the international aids to warlords and the drug whole program has many problems which make it difficult to traffickers. reach peace through negotiations.
ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ The Justice should be
Thoroughly Administered
A fghanistan Daily, Volume No 1157, July 26, 2010, Page 5 By Abdullah Herawi Initially, the Blacklist was architected for the war commanders and the leaders of political factions and Jihadi groups. Their cases were considered as the criminal cases of the warlords or the human rights violators. By the lapse of time and ups and downs of politics in Afghanistan, the war criminals were not indicted by law and as the violators of human rights, they were not sanctioned. Instead, they raised themselves in political arena as the influential leaders, making decisions about the national affairs. At the beginning, the people were very hopeful about bringing the criminals and the human rights violators to justice. In the meantime, the perpetrators, who were accused of violation of human rights, had lost their audacity to challenge the new current, struggling for hearts and minds of the people by changing their policy. As the process of justice was shelved and the perpetrators of war crimes were honored by the government and the international community, the game changed and the war criminals, who were indebted their power and position to grace and munificence of the people, once again took the people hostage. ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Kabul Conference and Mistakes of the West in Afghanistan
Charagh Daily, Volume No 1608, July 26, 2010, Page 2 Regarding the reconstruction of Afghanistan, the international 3 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org
PURL: https://www.legal-tools.org/doc/93b581/
No 16, July 31, 2010 Negotiation with armed Opposition Groups
UN Blacklist and the Contradictory Policies of US and Afghanistan
8 Subh Daily, Volume No 384, July 13, 2010, Page 2 As the Taliban are refusing the repeated calls of Afghan government for peace talks, President Karzai is trying to remove names of 50 high‐profile leaders of the group from the UN blacklist. The 50‐name list include names of some former members of Taliban who are currently serving as MPs in the parliament of Afghanistan or plays the role of mediators between Kabul and the insurgent groups. A political analyst Wahid Mojhda believes that removal of 50 high‐profile leaders of Taliban insurgents from the Blacklist is not possible, adding that the US officials would agree with it. Mr. Mojhda added that if names of the militants who are fighting NATO forces are removed from the Blacklist, it means they are fighting for legitimate cause and cannot be considered has slid to Pakistan to gain supports of Islamabad for peace talks as terrorists. with Taliban. Seemingly President Karzai is prepared to give unilateral concessions to Pakistan even in expense of support ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ and confidence of the people of Afghanistan. Karzai Demands Removing Names of 50 Top Such statements by Pakistani officials would surely challenge Militants from the UN Blacklist the unconditional surrender of Kabul to Islamabad and add to internal oppositions on inclinations of the government towards Rah‐e‐Najat Daily, Volume No 1476, July 13, 2010, Page 1 Richard Holbrook, US Special Envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan. ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Pakistan, met UN officials last week to pressurize the world body to remove names of some Taliban militants from the blacklist. Government, Taliban and the Dangerous The United Nations so far has opposed removing names of Game of Betrayal to Pashtoons some Taliban leaders from the Blacklist, including the group’s 8 Subh Daily, Volume No 384, July 13, 2010, Page 4 leader Mullah Omar. US envoy Richard Holbrook is trying to By Shakir Mehryar reach an agreement with UN officials on removing some names Having the recommendations of Kabul Peace Jirga, President of the Taliban from the list before Kabul Conference, to be held Karzai is intended to set forth the removal of Taliban names on July 20, 2010 in Kabul. from the UN Blacklist as the will and desire of the people of Meanwhile, a report by Washington Post has quoted an Afghan Afghanistan. The fact is that the Taliban have links with Al‐ high‐ranking official, who wanted to remain anonymous, that Qaeda and are operating under the umbrella network of Al‐ the proposal to exclude names of 30‐50 out of the 137 Taliban Qaeda. In terms of identity and practice, the Taliban is a militants from the Blacklist is an effort by President Karzai in terrorist group, following retrogressive and reactionary order to start reconciliation talks with Taliban. ideologies. The government and some political circles are trying to gradually exempt the Taliban as follows: Declaring Taliban disconnected from Al‐Qaeda and making ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Finally Two‐way Road for Terrorism propagandas for this
Charagh Daily, Volume No 126, July 13, 2010, Editorial Dividing Taliban into Afghan Taliban and Pakistani Taliban Pakistan interior minister Rahman Malik called the Afghan Calling the insurgents as ‘disgruntled Afghans’ instead of terrorists Taliban responsible for the latest attack in northwest of the country. Malik rejected that the Taliban militants organized Proposing reconciliation with Taliban with a broad campaign for it attacks against NATO forces in Afghanistan using Pakistani soil. Defending Taliban as an ethnic group These hostile statements come at a time that President Karzai Providing space for Taliban and making tensions with 4 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org
PURL: https://www.legal-tools.org/doc/93b581/
No 16, July 31, 2010 international community and domestic groups government has presented a list of Taliban leaders to be Such a dangerous policy would have the following consequences: removed from the UN Blacklist. Mistura said the list was delivered to United Nations Security Council. Security and political failures of the government against the Taliban According to the reports, names of ten Taliban leaders are to be National disintegration and creating distrusts among the people removed from the list soon. The UN Special Envoy to and the political groups Afghanistan did not give more details on the list, but added that Pakistanization of politics and preparing the ground for a civil war more names might be sent to the UNSC by the end of the month. Using Pashtoons’ ethnic sentiments and betraying them ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Expanding war in all pashtoon areas and creating discords among Pashtoons Women’s Place in Talks with Taliban
Subh Daily, Volume No 385, July 14, 2010, Editorial 8 ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ 28 Taliban Prisoners Released Undoubtedly, the project of reconciliation talks with the insurgent groups and sharing power with the extremists not 8 Subh Daily, Volume No 384, July 13, 2010, Page 2 only threatens the rare‐visible achievements of women gained Twenty eight Taliban‐linked suspects were released as the in past nine years but also vanishes their hopes and ideals on government says they were in custody by insufficient evidences. their contribution in political, social and economic affairs of society, pledged by the constitution. A news statement released by the President’s office said that the special commission, organized by the recommendation of the Peace In fact, the notion that the Taliban would abandon their Jirga, has started considering the cases of the prisoners. ideology is not less than a deceptive imagination, because the nature of Taliban extremists has shaped as a misogynist and In the statement, justice minister Habibullah Ghalib is quoted anti‐democratic group. As the government of Afghanistan is that cases of 45 more prisoners are under consideration and struggling to start peace talks with the insurgents, they has they will soon be released. shown no hint of reconciliation with a government they .consider a puppet of foreigners ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Kabul Denies Proposing Exclusion of 50 Top Militants from UN Blacklist Compiling another Blacklist by Taliban
Rah‐e‐Najat Daily, Volume No 1477, July 14, 2010, Page 1 Sorosh‐e‐Mellat Daily, Volume No 414, July 16, 2010, Page 1 Recently, media reports suggested that President Karzai intends to By Mehrdad Kamran ask the United Nations to exclude names of 50 Taliban militants from Officials from the NATO forces in Afghanistan announced that the UN Blacklist. But president’s spokesman Wahid Omar, speaking Taliban leader Mullah Omar has issued a list of Afghans he at press conference on July 13, called the reports as baseless rumors, wanted to be killed. adding that the previous proposal of the president was still valid. In the meantime, Afghan government and NATO officials have asked removal of names of Taliban leaders from the United In 2005, President Karzai asked 20 names of Taliban members Nations Blacklist. They are prepared to grant huge concessions to be removed from the UN Blacklist, of which 5 names are to the militants in a hope to start peace talks with the removed, 5 of the militants are not alive anymore while only 10 insurgents in order to draw them back to the society. But in others are still in the list. response to the call, the Taliban has mocked the efforts, Wahid Omar said that lately the 10‐name list has been presented to arranging their own Blacklist of Afghan civilians and tribal elders the UN again to consider removing them from the Blacklist. Omar in order kill them. Taliban leader Mullah Omar has sent the list stressed that the government of Afghanistan has not presented any to his fighters. And more people are to be included to the list. new list to the United Nations and the reports are false. ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ He added that Afghan government had agreed with the United Nations Security Council to work jointly on the cases of the UN Blacklist and the Grounds for Peace militants in the Blacklist and to review the cases individually. Mandegar Daily, Volume No 373, July 17, 2010, Page 2 On the other hand, the Peace Jirga held in Kabul asked called on Without intense pressures on the Taliban, the insurgent group would not come to negotiation table. Pakistan, as an important Afghan government and international community to remove 70 mentor to the Taliban, has offered its pre‐conditions to the names of the Taliban members from the UN Blacklist. government of Afghanistan. Recognizing Durand Line, dismissing figures of the (Mujahideen era) resistant front from ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ important government posts, limiting presence of India and List of Taliban Leaders Presented to UNSC sharing power with the insurgents by giving the Taliban,
8 Subh Daily, Volume No 385, July 14, 2010, Page 1 Haqqani and Hezb Islami factions posts in the government, are UN Special Envoy to Afghanistan staffan di Mistura says Afghan the main demands of Islamabad. 5 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org
PURL: https://www.legal-tools.org/doc/93b581/
No 16, July 31, 2010 The Article 111 of the constitution has authorized the Loya Jirga, Regarding to peace talks with the insurgent groups, Pakistan’s or supreme assembly, to decide over issues which are foreign minister said that the country believes the process of considered as a threat to national sovereignty or interests of the reconciliation talks with Taliban should be led by Afghans country. Instead of squandering millions of dollars for the non‐ themselves. obligatory Peace Jirga, the government had to organize the Loya ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Jirga which is legal body for making decisions on national issues with its obligatory mandate to all government institutions. That Kabul Conference Supports Democracy, would surely have had far less spending for the government. But the government of Afghanistan intentionally avoided Defies Taliban organizing the Loya Jirga. 8 Subh Daily, Volume No 390, July 21, 2010, Page 4 By Murtazawi The government of Afghanistan has not only ignored to refer to It was expected that some participants of the international the people’s opinion but it also did not manage to consult with conference in Kabul would voice their supports on talks with the legislators in the parliament as the real representatives of insurgents, but interestingly, none of the representatives from the people. up to 70 world countries and international organizations praised The chairman of the Afghanistan’s Civil Society, a non‐ the terrorist group. They put forward difficult preconditions for governmental organization, says, “Any change to the Blacklist talks with the militant groups. without consent of the people would not be acceptable. It is the Non‐resiliency of US policy on talks with Taliban indicated that people to decide whether to acquit the criminals or not; there still are huge obstacles in the way to raise up the because the men, women and the children of Afghanistan have insurgents to power structure in Afghanistan. US Secretary of suffered under the Taliban harsh treatments, whipping and State Hillary Clinton clearly stated that for any peace talks the torturing. Only the people realize the scale of Taliban’s insurgents must respect the rights of Afghan women, accept the atrocities, not others.” constitution and sever ties with Al‐Qaeda Terrorist Network. Only British foreign minister William Hague utilized a mild tone ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ The Reconciliation Program Won’t Bring on Taliban, calling on political settlement of the conflict in Afghanistan. Peace and Security ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ 8 Subh Daily, Volume No 389, July 18, 2010, Editorial As the talks with the insurgents is probably the key issue in Kabul Conference and Shift of Strategy on Kabul Conference, the Taliban is continuing their deadly Fighting Terrorism terrorist attacks across the country, demonstrating that they are less interested in peace efforts led by the government of 8 Subh Daily, Volume No 391, July 22, 2010, Page 4 Afghanistan. At the eve of Kabul conference, the Taliban are By Shakir Mehryar determined to gain more concessions by waging a new wave of The conception of shift of war strategy is now more seriously war. being considered as the Kabul Peace Jirga legitimized the move in the gathering of about 1600 representatives from across According to the London‐based Oxfam, “The reconciliation Afghanistan. The international Conference on Afghanistan held program is far from a process which Afghans desire. The process in Kabul also tacitly approved talks with Taliban and brought it is said to be led by Afghans but the questions that who really up to the world stage. But the main concern is that in both lead it are remained unanswered.” There are concerns that the Kabul Peace Jirga and Kabul Conference the war on terror and criminals and perpetrators of war crimes would have dominant insurgency was considered as an internal conflict in Afghanistan, role in leading the process. ignoring to point seriously on external motives and sanctuaries outside the country. ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Afghans themselves should Handing the responsibilities to Afghans themselves and the so‐ called Afghanization of peace and development efforts signified Lead the Peace Talks importance of the decision‐makings by the government of
Charagh Daily, Volume No 132, July 21, 2010, Page 6 Afghanistan. As an effort to end the nine‐year old war, the Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmoud Qureshi told Kabul peace talks with insurgent groups was considered by Kabul Conference that his country’s interests are in establishing peace Conference which ultimately obtained supports from the in Afghanistan, adding that Pakistan fully supports Afghan international community. This initiative and support of Kabul president Hamid Karzai’s plans in peace talks with the insurgent Conference has its direct affects on political situation and the groups, which was declared at the London Conference. war in Afghanistan and the region. Qureshi reaffirmed Pakistan’s commitment on supporting the There is a serious matter of concern that the responsibility people of Afghanistan. He insisted that the military is not the transition to Afghan government and Afghanization of security only solution to Afghan conflict, adding that the issues need to and development efforts may empower the Taliban; widen be settled through political solutions. ethnic rifts and fuel a civil war. 6 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org
PURL: https://www.legal-tools.org/doc/93b581/
No 16, July 31, 2010
Afghan Women Rights the Britain, Saudi Arabia and the Nawaz Sharif political front in not to be Victimized in Peace Talks Pakistan is advocating on Taliban. They want the extremist Taliban and Al‐Qaeda groups to come to power in Pakistan and Sorosh‐e‐Mellat Daily, Volume No 418, July 22, 2010, Page 8 Afghanistan or at least contribute in power‐sharing in US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, participating in the Afghanistan,” Mubarez added. international conference on Afghanistan in Capital Kabul, expressed her commitment that in any peace negotiations for The Britain‐owned BBC is one of the most influential media in ending the war, Washington would not accept compromising Afghanistan. Supporting peace talks with Taliban and as an the rights of Afghan Women. advocate of sharing power with the militants, the British government has put the BBC under its impression. At the eve Kabul Conference, Hillary Clinton stated that the ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ women of Afghanistan and their rights would never be victimized for peace deal with the insurgent groups. Clinton Reconciliation with Taliban, added that based on her own experiences, the role of women and the civil society would have fundamental impact on an Ambitious Goal of the Gov’t
development of the country. 8 Subh Daily, Volume No 392, July 24, 2010, Page 5 According to media reports, a consultative meeting was ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ organized by President Karzai at the Presidential Palace, the Haqqani Network: Arg, to consider the establishment of the High Peace Council, Deserve Sanctions or Penalty? recommended by the Kabul Peace Jirga.
8 Subh Daily, Volume No 392, July 24, 2010, Page 1 If President Karzai intends to persuade the Taliban to accept the Removing names of top militants from the UN blacklist or constitution and respect the human rights and democratic expanding the list even further has turned to a political dispute values gained during past nine years, it doesn’t need such a between Afghan government and its western allies. As the process as establishing High Peace Council. government in Kabul is struggling to delist names of Taliban As the officials establish High Peace Council, they leaders from the list, the US, in a most recent move, has unintentionally elevate the position of the insurgent groups in included three more names to its sanctions list. Names of the political arena of Afghanistan. Establishing the High Peace militants are reported as Nasiruddin Haqqani, Gul Agha Ishaqzai Council for bringing the insurgents to negotiation table suggests and Amir Abdullah. the conception that the Taliban is not an insurgent and isolated Seemingly, the move by Washington is a sort of reaction group but it is political party, having profound roots in the against President Karzai’s efforts in removing names of the top society. leaders of Taliban from the UN Blacklist. Moreover, such a President Karzai’s administration is trying to introduce a new move by Washington challenges the process of the secret talks image of Taliban as the group has come from the grass‐root and between Karzai and the leaders of Haqqani Network, representing the political aspirations of the people. considered as the most tenacious enemy of the NATO and Undoubtedly, such approach would result to even more growth forces in Afghanistan. of Taliban and expansion of their activities. Undeniably, the move by Washington, at least at present ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ circumstances, would heighten the mistrusts and doubts between the Haqqani Network and the government of Collapse of Barg‐e‐Matal, a Response to the Afghanistan. Reconciliation Program
Subh Daily, Volume No 394, July 26, 2010, Editorial 8 ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ BBC Adjusts its Reports As the local officials confirmed the collapse of Barg‐e Matal by Taliban insurgents, it is appearing that weakness of war motives with Statements of the Insurgents for defending the district is significant factor for seizure of the
8 Subh Daily, Volume No 392, July 24, 2010, Page 3 district by Taliban. The government officials’ rhetoric describe Head of the Media Monitoring Committee Sadiqullah Tawhidi the Taliban as “Mossulman brothers” or “disgruntled brothers” says the attitude of some Western countries, particularly the who are being called on to abandon insurgency and ‘killing their Britain, towards Taliban is being transformed. He stressed that innocent brothers and sisters’ and contributed in reconstruction the Britain is the pioneer of the countries supporting talks with of ‘their own country’. the Taliban. Here, the question raises that by what motives and cause the Abdul Hamid Mubarez, head of the National Association of soldiers can fight against the insurgents who are called by the Journalists said in recent months the BBC Radio is trying to high‐ranking officials as ‘Afghan brothers’. So, it is not possible justify the position of Taliban. Mubarez believes that the change to array against the insurgent groups for defending the country of BBC’s approach towards Taliban is due to British policy and sovereignty of Afghanistan. change on Taliban insurgents. “It is because of the policy that On the other hand, the Taliban call themselves ‘Muslims’ and as 7 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org
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No 16, July 31, 2010 result of this how the people fight them by religious motives as decree, hundreds of prisoners were freed by the designated they fought the Soviet Union’s Red Army. commission from the detention centers in Bagram and Pule Charkhi. In one case on July 27, up to a hundred prisoners were .released from Bagram and Pule Charkhi prisons ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ A Taliban Commander and His Men Officials from Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Join Peace Process Commission (AIHRC) say the government should compensate and rehabilitate the prestige of the prisoners who were Rah‐e‐Najat Daily, Volume No 1486, July 27, 2010, Page 1 detained innocently, after they acquire their freedom. An 11‐member group of Taliban insurgents in Herat province According to the AIHRC officials, the penal law of Afghanistan announced their loyalties to the government. According to an specifies that when a prisoner is proved to be innocent, the official of the Directorate for National Security (DNS) in Herat government is obliged to pay compensation and rehabilitate the province, the armed insurgents under command of Rahimullah, prestige of the prisoner. a Taliban Commander and a resident of Shindand District, ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ abandoned insurgency and joined Peace process as result of efforts by the DNS personnel and cooperation of the local Releasing the Prisoners: residents. Rahimullah, the Taliban commander, said he quitted Taliban ranks and joined peace process to help ending the war by Law or Order of the Commission
and provide security for the forthcoming Parliamentary Sorosh‐e‐Mellat Daily, Volume No 422, July 28, 2010, Page 2 election. The participants of the National Consultative Peace Jirga held in The former Taliban militant added that he is intended to contact Kabul recommended the government to review the cases of the other insurgents in the district and urge them to join peace Taliban‐linked prisoners. The Jirga stressed that the prisoners process. According to Herat DNS officials, in past two months 73 who are detained based on false reports or insufficient insurgents in Shindand District have handed their weapons and evidences should be released. declared their supports from the Government. Since then, the government has released up to 200 prisoners from different prisons in Afghanistan. While the government ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ officials say the measure is aimed to administer justice and law, Dozens of Prisoners Released due to but the analysts and political experts believe that it is a political Insufficient Evidences decision rather than administering justice or implementing the law. Rah‐e‐Najat Daily, Volume No 1486, July 27, 2010, Page 1 Afghanistan’s Justice Ministry announced it has released more On the other hand, some analysts and the people believe that than 90 Taliban‐linked suspect prisoners from Pule Charkhi and the government is trying to appease the warring insurgent Parwan prisons, as there were no convincing evidences to prove groups by releasing the prisoners, some of whom are war the allegations against them. criminals. They argue that the prisoners, who apparently are freed as there were no convincing evidences against them, may According to the statement of the ministry, the prisoners were have been released even in presence of criminal evidences. released by the recommendation of a special commission, Determined to start negotiations with the insurgents, the reviewing the cases of the Taliban‐linked prisoners. government of Afghanistan is prepared to give any concessions The commission, set up by the government to review the cases in a hope to strike peace deal with the insurgents. ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ of the prisoners who are accused of having links with Taliban and Al‐Qaeda insurgents, so far has announced release of several prisoners, saying there were no sufficient evidences to Who will be Removed from the Blacklist, the prove the allegations against them. Repentant Militants or Karzai’s Allies? Considering the cases of the prisoners, who are in custody by Charagh Daily, Volume No 127, July 14, 2010, Editorial insufficient evidences, was recommended by the Consultative According to reports from the President’s office, the National Peace Jirga held in Kabul in order to pave the way for government has recognized that there are names of some talks with the insurgent groups. individuals, who don’t have ties with terrorist organizations, in the UN blacklist. According the report, after the UN Security ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Council approves the demand of Afghan government on The Govt. Obliged to Compensate the excluding names of Taliban militants from the Blacklist, removal Blameless Prisoners of 15 names would be declared to the mass media.
Daily Afghanistan, Volume No 1158, July 28, 2010, Page 8 The news come as previously the western papers reported that Based on recommendations of the Kabul Peace Jirga, President President Karzai has offered 50 names to the UN to be removed Hamid Karzai directed the officials to release the prisoners who from the Blacklist, but later the officials denied the news, are detained based on insufficient evidences or false reports on correcting the figures to 15. their links with Taliban and Al‐Qaeda. After the presidential It is said that the list, comprising 20 names, was handed by 8 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org
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No 16, July 31, 2010 Afghan President to the United Nations years ago and last year last month, some Taliban members have shown readiness for the UN officials agreed to exclude names of 5 high‐profile joining peace program, but the process needs to be dealt with Taliban figures form the Blacklist. They were deputy head of the high‐profile leaders of Taliban. This requires helps from frontier ministry of Taliban regime Abdul Hakim, deputy to the Pakistan, he added. Plan minisry Muhammad Musa Hutak, then foreign minister ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Abdul Wakil Motawakkil Mutawakkil, then deputy of finance ministry Faiz Muhammad Faiz and Shamsul Safa a foreign Five Militants Including a Commander ministry official. Join Peace Program From the mentioned ex‐Taliban officials, Mr. Mutawakkil and Hootak are currently in Kabul, as Mr. Hootak serves in the Afghanistan Daily, Volume No 1148, July 17, 2010, Editorial Parliament. By effort of the Peace Consolidation Commission, five Taliban militants including a military commander of the If the 15 Top Taliban officials are the ones fighting NATO group in Khost Province joined the government‐led peace troops in Afghanistan, it is suggesting the idea that the program. At a ceremony on the event, the Khost governor insurgency against the government is legitimate. On the pledged the rejoined Taliban militants to help them other hand, if the five militants, as the five mentioned beginning a new life. Taliban figures, have joined the government, then removal of their names from the Blacklist is not considered as a Once Taliban commander Gul Zaman said he was a member of a concession for the Taliban. In this case, it is something Taliban squad in North Waziristan under command of Gulbahar. which had to be done in this way before now, because it According to Gul Zaman, the Pakistanis trained them on carrying has been as a hindrance to the Taliban members who out attacks and explosions. Gul Zaman said he had for a two‐ wanted to join the peace process. month period received commando trainings. The once Taliban Commander says he commanded 150 fighters ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ in Paktika province being provided weapons and equipments Germany: from Pakistan’s Waziristan. He added that after contacts with Exclusion of Taliban Names from the UN the Peace Consolidation Commission he realized that the Blacklist helpful Islamic Republic is governing Afghanistan, which led him to decide helping the country. Mandegar Daily, Volume No 372, July 14, 2010, Page 1 Hajji Ismael, the chairman of the Peace Consolidation The government of Germany supports Karzai’s demands for Commission in Khost Province said that since 1385 about 460 removing the names of top Taliban officials from the United militants have joined the peace program in Khost province. He Nations Blacklist. complained that some of the rejoined Taliban militants have German foreign minister told the reporters on July 13 that been imprisoned in past years and their homes searched, which “if the initiation of President Karzai is a step towards peace, potentially endangers peace process. it would helpful for the work mission in Afghanistan.” he ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ added that basically it is right to push for efforts to persuade some members of Taliban to accept the Taliban Killing for More Concessions reconciliation program. Afghanistan Daily, Volume No 1148, July 17, 2010, Page 5 But Russia, as another member of the UN Security Council By Rahin Farahmand (UNSC), is still opposing the peace plan with Taliban. As the finance ministry announces that over nine million Moscow’s envoy to the UNSC has said that the government people, or about 36 percent of the population in the country, of Afghanistan has not presented convincing evidences to are suffering poverty, the world donors have allocated $180 mln the world body to remove the names of militants from the for peace talks and financing the insurgents to come back to UN Blacklist. civil life. Obviously, the peace effort should not be stalled, but in the meantime, it should not be underestimated that defeating ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Karzai’s Advisor: the Taliban needs decisive confrontation. But regretfully, this vital issue has been left in margin. Peace Efforts are Ineffectual Along with the peace efforts, the government should be Mandegar Daily, Volume No 373, July 15, 2010, Page 1 negligent of military strikes against the insurgents and as A security advisor to President Karzai Muhammad Maasoum more importantly, the government should give more Stanekzay said that until the leaders of Taliban are alive with concessions to the Taliban insurgents. It is absolutely impunity, it would be a vain effort to convince the Taliban to necessary to halt the process of granting concessions to the abandon violence and join the peace process, because until insurgents, at least for a period of time, to prove the they are inspired by their leaders, they would continue violence strength and capability of the government to the Taliban. and insurgency against the government. This would be more beneficial to the nation and Stanekzai added that since holding the National Peace Jirga in government of Afghanistan. 9 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org
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No 16, July 31, 2010 The Questions some leading Congress lawmakers had asked the US urrounding Kabul Conference government to consider the Haqqani Network as a terrorist group and launch military offensive against the group in Sorosh‐e‐Mellat Daily, Volume No 415, July 17, 2010, Page 1 northwest of Pakistan. US Special Envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrook Another challenge to the peace talks with Taliban is that there is said the international conference in Kabul would focus on not a unified definition of the Taliban as well as to which turning the Taliban militants back to civil life. branches of Taliban the talks should be carried out. Currently, According to Holbrook, the Kabul Conference will mainly focus wide spectrums of insurgents are fighting under umbrella on raising funds for the peace program and considering the network of Taliban. No one knows the definitions of the proposed plan of the Afghan government. According to reports, government from the word ‘Taliban’. It is a puzzle whether the government of Afghanistan intends to call on United there should be Peace talks with the Taliban under Mullah Nations in Kabul Conference to remove names of ten top Omar or other smaller factions of the insurgents groups and the Taliban militants from the UN blacklist. Islamic Party of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. These groups virtually have a lot differences in ideas and ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ practices and the only common goal among them is to fight Contradictory Policies of the Coalition foreign forces. On the other hand, the soldiers‐distributing towards Peace Talks countries in Afghanistan have their own differences of opinions over the circumstances of the peace talks and to which parties Sorosh‐e‐Mellat Daily, Volume No 415, July 17, 2010, Page 1 the negotiations should be carried out. Some countries are As the government of Afghanistan has been struggling in vehemently insisting on necessity of negotiations while some building confidence with the Taliban by policy of flexibility and others are opposing the talks with the insurgents. compromise to open the door for peace talks, the consistent attacks of NATO and Pakistani forces continued to target the As there is no unified stance on fighting Taliban insurgency in Taliban leaders. This led the Taliban not to trust on Peace Afghanistan, similarly, there is no coherent strategy on peace efforts by NATO alliance and Afghan government and as a result talks to put the international front and the government of the insurgents did not make compromises on their stance Afghanistan at a unified and effective position. Lack of specific regarding to the negotiations. strategy on fighting the extremists in Afghanistan has led the Taliban to evolve from a vanquished group into implacable In a latest report, the coalition forces have issued a press enemy of international coalition in Afghanistan. release briefing the military achievements and details of the ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ military operations from 9‐16 July this year, carried out by NATO Afghanistan’s armed forces. The press release said that Peace Supreme Council to be Established during a week of warfare, over 40 military operations have been carried out by against the Taliban leaders in Afghanistan. Rah‐e‐Najat Daily, Volume No 1483, July 24, 2010, Page 2 A consultative meeting headed by President Karzai discussed Release of such statements, is more beneficial for the terrorism the establishment of the Peace Supreme Council, recommended and the process of peace talks rather than interests of Afghanistan by Kabul Peace Jirga. and the war against insurgency, because such statements would stir anger and sensitivity of the Taliban even further. According to the reports, the participants of the meeting, including Jihadi leaders, government officials and national Needless to say, if NATO wants the peace efforts to succeed, it dignitaries, discussed on organizing the High Peace Council. The must try to bring closer the views of the Taliban and the government high‐ranking officials and the high‐profile Jihadi government of Afghanistan and avoid any provocative measures. leaders unanimously stressed that providing peace through negotiations with the insurgent groups in an essential need of ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ the people of Afghanistan. They called on stepping up assiduous Circumstances of the Peace Talks efforts all over the country. with Taliban The participants exchanged views on the composition of the
Afghanistan Daily, Volume No 1154, July 24, 2010, Page 6 Peace Supreme Council, agreeing that the council should be By M. Reza Howaida established as soon as possible and begin its work to start The final declaration of the Peace Jirga, held in Kabul, negotiations with the insurgent groups. recommended the government of Afghanistan to, in cooperation President Karzai told the gathering that the efforts for peace would with the international community, take immediate measures for bear results if the Peace Council posses the following characteristics: removal of names of Taliban leaders from the UN blacklist. It should be a national council; its members should be committed to In a latest move against the insurgents, the Treasury peace and more importantly it should comprise the clerics and Department of United States have added names of three other national personalities. The president specified that the Peace Taliban high‐profile leaders named Nasirudding Haqqani, Gul Supreme Council, enjoying the above‐mentioned characteristics, Agha Ishaqzai and Amir Abdullah to its sanctions list. Earlier, would be soon established to begin its revered duty. 10 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org
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No 16, July 31, 2010 Elections Transparency
Badakhshan Residents Protest on The names of the candidates have not been revealed yet but Exclusion of Candidates the IEC says it sent the list of these violator candidates to the Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC) for more investigations. 8 Subh Daily, Volume No. 384, July 13, 2010, Page 3 Hundreds of residents of Argo district of Badakhshan Province Meanwhile, the IEC announced that it has referred names of 50 protested on exclusion of some candidates from the candidates to the ECC, because they in contrary to the parliamentary election in the country. regulations of the IEC pasted their posters on forbidden locations, At a gathering in front of the local office of Independent ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Election Commission in Faiz Abad, the capital city of Badakhshan, the protestors asked IEC not to bar the candidates 10,000 NATO Troops to Contribute in from standing in parliamentary election. There are four candidates from Argoo district of Badakhshan whose names are Securing the Election
removed from the final list of the candidates running in Rah‐e‐Najat Daily, Volume No 1480, July 18, 2010, Page 2 parliamentary election. Officials from the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) say that they consider reinforcing Afghan security forces for ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ security of the forthcoming parliamentary election by deploying IEC Announces the Final List of Candidates 10,000 troops for the mission.
Sorosh‐e‐Mellat Daily, Volume No 414, July 16, 2010, Page 1 ISAF commander in the north of the country said that despite Fazal Ahmad Maanawi, the chairman of the Independent the increasing insecurity in the north, foreign forces will be able Election Commission (IEC) said 54 candidates have voluntarily to provide security for the parliamentary election in the North. withdrawn their candidateship, and more than seventy The assurance by ISAF in the North comes at a time that the candidates were excluded from the election by the IEC. candidates from the north are increasingly complaining about According to Maanawi, 36 candidates are excluded form the the security situation in Northern provinces such as Kunduz, race because of having ties with armed illegal groups, 31 Baghlan, Faryab, Sarepul, and some other northern provinces. candidates are excluded based on investigations of the IEC and ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ names of seven other candidates are removed from final list because they failed to resign from their government posts. A Glimpse on Hidden Election Briefing on the final list of candidates of parliamentary election, Mr Maanawi said: “There are overall 2556 names on the ballot Irregularities in Kabul City
papers, including 2150 male candidates and 406 females.” Sorosh‐e‐Mellat Daily, Volume No 416, July 19, 2010, Page 5 According to the IEC the journalists or proprietors who are Reports from different parts of Kabul city is suggesting that some standing in parliamentary election, cannot appear in their own candidates of the parliamentary election are trying to obtain votes media programs but have only chances of media publicities of the people by unrealistic promises and distributing gifts, hoping equal to other candidates. The IEC officials say because there to be elected as a parliamentarian for the next four years. has not been a country‐wide population census in Afghanistan, There are also reports that a number of candidates have the parliament seats would be distributed for the provinces as promised the people to asphalt their streets and help them the previous election of 2005. building their localities if they vote for them. Such promises to the people, as serious electoral irregularities with no legal ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ penalty, are used as a popular method for electoral campaign all Independent Election Commission: over the country particularly in Kabul city. Regretfully, the Government Facilities used in Election Independent Election Commission (IEC) has not taken any measure to prevent these irregularities. Sorosh‐e‐Mellat Daily, Volume No 414, July 16, 2010, Page 1 The Independent Election Commission (IEC) has accused some The IEC had previously accused some candidates of taking candidates of taking advantages of government facilities in their advantage of government facilities in their electoral campaigns, campaigns. According to the IEC, some of the candidates of but the commission has remained negligent towards what in parliamentary election have taken advantage of government fact is buying votes by money and illegal promises. The IEC is facilities which their relatives are enjoying as the local expected to prevent the deceptive and illegal manner of strongmen or government officials. campaign and take accountable the violators. 11 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org
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No 16, July 31, 2010 Sar‐e Pul Candidates Concerned on Election resigned in time from their government jobs. Mr. Rafaat added that the complaints also include the cases of getting advantage 8 Subh Daily, Volume No 390, July 21, 2010, Page 1 of government facilities and threatening the candidates by In a meeting with the local officials and officials of the unspecified people. Independent Election Commission (IEC), Candidates from Sar‐ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Pul province expressed their concerns over the challenges ahead of parliamentary electoral campaign and the voting Ghazni Candidates Worried over processes. Transparency of the Election They mentioned the security challenges and the likely frauds and irregularities during election process as their main 8 Subh Daily, Volume No 396, July 28, 2010, Page 6 concerns, calling on the officials for accountability and The candidates of parliamentary election in Ghazni province implementing effective measures for success of the election. are concerned about lack of transparency in the forthcoming election. While there are only two months Sar‐e Pul Governor Sayed Anwar Rahmati assured the remaining to the day of the election, there has been no participants of the meeting that since the government has taken positive development in Ghazni security situation. The effective measures for success of the election, there will not candidates in Ghazni province say there would be no take place any fraud in the forthcoming election. The chairman transparent election in more than twelve districts of the of the local bureau of the IEC Muhammad Aman Aman also province, while the security situation in other relatively promised the candidates to lead the election fairly. secure provinces are also deteriorating. The chairperson of Independent Election Commission in ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Candidates Violate Election Rules Ghazni province Obaidullah Usmani said those candidates who see it impossible to run their campaigns in some of the Afghanistan Daily, Volume No 1154, July 24, 2010, Page 8 districts, should collectively discuss the issue with the Ezzatullah Arman, the chairman of local bureau of Independent governor of the province, the Police chief and other security Election Commission (IEC) in Balkh province told a press agencies. He added that the candidates should express their conference that a number of candidates do not are not reactions to the security situation and inform to the local obligated to election regulations. Mr. Arman added that some officials the security problems threatening a fair and candidates of the province have threatened the election transparent election. If it appears that a region is not safe workers in Balkh province. and the election would not be held transparently, the IEC According to the chairperson of IEC’s local bureau in Balkh, the would suspend the election in the region, Usmani said. above‐mentioned candidates encouraged less than 18‐year old According to the head of the IEC’s local bureau, the election youths to register for election with fraudulent cards and would not be held at about 107 election centers in Ghazni threatened the election workers as they sought to prevent the province due to serious security threats. irregularities. ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Election Personnel Receive 115,000 ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ECC Receives Over 260 Complaints in 1 Professional Trainings
Month of the Campaigns Afghanistan Daily, Volume No 1158, July 28, 2010, Page 8
Bakhtar Daily, Volume 282, July 25, 2010, Page 3 The Independent Election Commission (IEC) announced a The spokesman of the Independent Election Commission (IEC) training program for the 115,000 personnel of the Noor Muhammad Noor says according to the procedural parliamentary election in the capital and the provinces. regulations of the IEC, the candidates are allowed to past their According to the IEC officials, the program is aimed to ensure all posters only at the specific locations prepared by the technical problems would be prevented during the process of municipalities of the cities. the forthcoming election. According to the IEC officials, most of the irregularities occurred The deputy secretariat of the IEC Zakaria Barekzai told a press during one‐month electoral campaign is related to this issue, as conference that the program is designed to boost the quality many of the candidates have pasted their posters on prohibited and professional standard of the IEC, expressing hope that the places. international and domestic observers and the people would Ahamd Zia Rafaat, the spokesperson of the Electoral Complaints witness a fair and transparent election. Commission (ECC), said since the beginning of the campaigns for According to Mr. Barekzai, the ink to be used on the day of parliamentary election the ECC has recorded over 260 election for identifying the voters is purchased from China and complaints. would soon be delivered to the government of Afghanistan. He According to Rafaat, some of the complaints are about the stressed that samples of the ink had been tested by IEC officials candidates’ posters pasted on unpermitted areas while some in the laboratory of the Kabul University and approved by the others are claims that a number of the candidates have not Independent Election Commission. 12 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org
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No 16, July 31, 2010 The Challenges Ahead of the threatened by the insurgents. ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Parliamentary Election
Afghanistan Daily, Volume No 1158, July 28, 2010, Page 5, By Abdullah Herawi Qualified Voters: 13 million The legal and political analysts believe that despite the changes in Issued Voter Cards: 17.6 million the structure of the Independent Election Commission (IEC), there are still much concerns about the leadership body of the election. 8 Subh Daily, Volume 396, July 28, 2010, Page 5 Since the previous presidential and parliamentary elections, up to The analysts say such concerns would result to raising distrusts now which the second parliamentary election is looming, over towards the transparency of the election. However, one of the seventeen million voter cards have been distributed by the concerns for the people is the policies of the IEC and conduct of the Independent Election Commission (IEC). According to the IEC election process. Another concern, in other word, the challenge officials, estimated figures show about thirteen million people in ahead of the election is the excess of candidates racing for the the country are eligible to participate in the parliamentary election. parliamentary seats, disregarding to the principles and morals of the election. Though, the excess of candidates may be considered As more than four million voter cards are distributed in the as political freedom or observing civil rights for participating in country, the concerns about likely frauds and irregularities are political affairs, but it is of much concern for the people. raising. In the meantime, the IEC officials say that some people may hold more than one card, but they cannot use more than Regarding to their capability and wisdom, many of the candidates one voting card on the day of election. competing for a seat in the parliament aren’t capable of assuming the job as a would‐be lawmaker. But regretfully, some candidates The spokesman of the IEC acknowledged that 17 million voter who are in majority lack the least social morals. cards are distributed in the country, adding that it is not meant that there are 17 million qualified voters. He added that some people may have received vote cards for two times and some ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ The Final List of Election Candidates Announced: others have migrated from one province to another in the 2150 males and 406 females country which, according to regulation of the IEC, creates no problem. Rah‐e‐Najat Daily, Volume No 1476, July 13, 2010, Page 2 ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ After exclusion of dozens of candidates by the Independent Election Commission (IEC) and withdrawal of some others, Media Commission of the IEC: finally the list of candidates racing for the forthcoming election is announced by the IEC officials, comprising 2556 candidates, The Candidates not Allowed to Run including 406 women. Televised Programs
The IEC officials say that the exclusion of a number of Eqtedar‐e‐Melli Weekly, Volume No 371, July 24, 2010, Page 8 candidates has not disrupted the position and numbers of other The chairman of the Media Commission of the Independent candidates. According to the officials, the locations of the final Election Commission (IEC), speaking at a press conference in candidates on the vote papers have not been displaced and the Kabul accused some media of violating the election regulations. names with the specified numbers will appear on the papers. He called on media owners and news presenters who are running for parliamentary seats not to continue their activities .in media programs ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Security for the Candidates, the Main Delawar Nazirzooy stressed that presence of media presenters, Requisite of a Fair Election who are candidates for the election, in news and analytical programs are a kind of campaign for them. He added that the Sorosh‐e‐Mellat Daily, Volume No 421, July 26, 2010, Editorial journalists who present news and analytical programs on Since the beginning of the campaigns for parliamentary televisions and radios as well as the media owners and other election, three of the candidates in different parts of the media influential figures who are running for parliamentary country have been killed by Taliban or kidnapped. Obviously, election cannot anymore present media programs or appear on providing security for the voters and the officials of the Election television screens. Commission across the country is one of main priorities for a fair and transparent election. If the security agencies fail to Meanwhile, the spokesman of the IEC Noor Muhammad Noor develop security in the country, neither the people would be specified that, based on media law, those who violate the able to go to ballot stations nor the vote officials and the election regulations will be fined 500,000 AFs. observers can monitor properly the process of election. According to Mr. Noor, in case of violation of the election In some parts of the country, the Taliban has virtually blocked regulations by the media members, the Media Commission of the process of campaigns for the parliamentary election, leading the IEC have the authority to abolish the license issued for the preparations for the election into a standstill. Apparently, it covering the election events. If the license of a media is would impossible to hold election in the mentioned restive cancelled, it would be deprived of having access to the areas, while in many other places the candidates are being information of the Media Commission of the IEC, Noor said. 13 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org
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No 16, July 31, 2010 Corruption
Afghan Government to Demand Control of $13bn Foreign Aids
Sorosh‐e‐Mellat Daily, Volume No 411, July 13, 2010, Page 1 The government of Afghanistan has been under intense criticisms of the international donors on squandering millions of dollars foreign aids. But Afghan president Hamid Karzai says most of the aids are being wasted by the firms and NGOs which are channeling the international assistance to Afghanistan. Western diplomats have said that they expect Afghan government to present its plans on spending about $13 billion committed by international donors. President Karzai has demanded that the $50 billion committed for next five year be channeled through the government of Afghanistan, but the world donors want the government of Afghanistan to effectively fight corruption. Kabul is expecting the international donors to allocate a part of the aids for capacity building of government agencies and better governance in the country. case of urgency, a special court will be established for the ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Finance ministry spokesman: members and chief of the Supreme Court, Omar said, adding Concrete Plans for Fighting Corruption that the law will be effective by presidential decree and will be presented to the parliament after is back from the recess. Rah‐e‐Najat Daily, Volume No 1477, July 14, 2010, Page 2 Omar said that the law was approved in the latest meeting of Finance ministry spokesperson Aziz Shams said in an interview the cabinet members, calling it as efforts of the government for that the country had a lot of successes in financial fighting corruption. managements in past recent years. He added that as a result of ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ this management, Afghanistan could attract aids from the international community. According to Mr. Shams the commitments of the international community in London All are Involved in the Conference was a result of financial management of the Devil Circle of Corruption government of Afghanistan. 8 Subh Daily, Volume No 386, July 15, 2010, Page 1 The government of Afghanistan always has had clear answers The so‐called parallel administrations with the government of on corruption in the government agencies and based on Afghanistan, which are mostly working independently from the documents and certain evidences it proved the sources of central government, is appeared to be another factor for corruption, the spokesman said. spreading corruption in the country. No one in the West He assured that there are concrete plans for fighting corruption questions that what went in Afghanistan that in few time in government institutions by which the government of General Mutiullah in Urozgan, Gul Agha Shirzai in Jalalabad, Afghanistan would hopefully gain support and confidence of the Ahmad Wali Karzai in Kandahar, Abdul Razaq in Spin Buldak and international community. more dozens became millionaires. Regretfully, the million‐dollar contracts with these local strongmen have empowered them, challenging the process of ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Special Court Law Approved state‐building and forming legal institutions in the country particularly in the south. On the other hand, lucrative contracts Sorosh‐e‐Mellat Daily, Volume No 412, July 14, 2010, Page 8 with the foreign firms, was another reason for spreading President Karzai’s spokesman Wahid Omar told a press corruption in the government institutions of Afghanistan. conference that the minister’s council has approved a law by which a special court will be established to consider the cases of After eight years of oversight and errors in spending aids in corruption by the high‐ranking officials of the government. In Afghanistan, the US designated a special inspector for 14 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org
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No 16, July 31, 2010 overseeing the aids donated for Afghanistan’s development. But law has resulted to more corruption in the government it was too late and billions of dollars were squandered by institutions and widened gap between the people and the negligence of the international community on the private firms government. In a statement, the civil organizations declared, working in Afghanistan by pretext of reconstructions. “according to a survey carried out in 2010, bribery has doubled during past three years, increasing to $1bn per year. Lack of access to information on corruption and bribery has developed ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Heading to Kabul Conference, the Intl a helpful space for spreading the phenomenon and deprive the Community Has no Trust on Afghan Govt people from the public services provided by the government and the foreign assistance. 8 Subh Daily, Volume No 386, July 15, 2010, Page 6 The civil organizations say that they have drafted the law of Afghan minister of mines Waheedullah Shahrani told a press access to information and the government should provide conference that there are various sorts of corruption in the access to information for the people by approving it. The country but the widespread one is bribery, not embezzlements organizations urged the government to enact the law in a from the government budget. certain period of time and consult with the civil organizations, Shahrani stressed that being assured of Afghan government NGOs and the donor institutions for enactment of the law of budget, the international community will pledge in Kabul access to information. Conference to channel at least 50 percent of the foreign aids ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ .through the government of Afghanistan The Ambitious Goals of Afghan Govt. in ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Kabul Conference Another Falsification at the Eve of Kabul Conference 8 Subh Daily, Volume No 389, July 18, 2010, Page 4 The government of Afghanistan claims that a large part of Mandegar Daily, Volume No 373, July 17, 2010, Page 6 corruption in government institutions is because of the As Kabul is getting prepared for a milestone international troublesome administrative bureaucracy in the government. conference, Karzai has resorted to another deception by But the fact is that merely focusing on decreasing the approving a law for prosecution of corrupt high‐ranking officials. administrative bureaucracy without applying any mechanisms The law was approved after some world donors reacted to the for oversight, accountability and prosecution of the corrupt widespread corruption, warning that they may halt their government officials would produce no result. On the other assistance to Afghanistan. If the law is not a drama by Karzai’s hand, the deceptive notion that corruption in Afghanistan is administration, the government had to approve it when there only in form of bribery leaves the many complicated and hidden were reports on involvements of high‐ranking officials in aspects of corruption out of spotlight. corruption. The government should draw a mechanism for prosecuting the In case of fighting corruption in Afghanistan, the first official high‐ranking officials who are accused of being irresponsible in who should be brought to justice is Karzai, not anyone else. their duties, getting advantage of their authority and public Before the last year presidential election, Karzai registered his facilities and interfering in affairs of independent institutions. assets, saying proudly that he owns only about ten thousand Meanwhile, such a strategy should be implemented to all dollars in a bank account in Europe. But during the presidential equally. election he spent millions of dollars in frauds by the pretext of Other aspects of corruption also should not be ignored. They his electoral campaigns. must be defined clearly and dealt with decisively. In absence of The government has plans to ask another 12 million dollars applying strict measures for curtailing administrative from international donors in Kabul conference. For this purpose, bureaucracy and corruption, the widespread corruption would the government obviously needs a series of measures to prove grow even more and the corrupt officials would have better its capability to the world donors. Approving the law for chances for embezzlement. indicting the high‐ranking officials of the government is one of ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ .such measures Abuse of US Aid by Americans ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ The Law for Access to Information Rah‐e‐Najat Daily, Volume No 1480, July 18, 2010, Page 2 US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Arnold Fields, who should be Enacted Soon is assigned to oversee the spending of US aid in Afghanistan’s
8 Subh Daily, Volume No 389, July 18, 2010, Page 3 reconstruction, has recently been objected by his US colleagues. At the eve of holding Kabul Conference, more than 200 civil A US inspector agency has accused Mr. Fields that he is not organizations have asked the government of Afghanistan to doing his task in a transparent manner. finalize the law of having access to information. After some probes on US aid for Afghanistan, the US Inspectors Representatives from the civil organizations say that lack of the Council asked the Attorney General Eric Holder to abrogate or 15 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org
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No 16, July 31, 2010 suspend authority of US inspector on the country’s aid for According to the President Karzai, establishing the High Office of Afghanistan. Oversight and Anti‐Corruption and another institution for The Inspector General for Afghanistan told a review committee fighting serious crimes, are the measures done by the in a hearing session that they have measures in hand to bring government of Afghanistan. reforms to the task in Afghanistan. But his statements could not President Karzai also stressed on fighting corruption in foreign convince the chairman of the committee for investigations of US firms and NGOs in Afghanistan saying that these international government contracts. agencies are working as parallel government in Afghanistan. The Associated Press quoted head of the committee saying that the donor countries in Kabul conference expect President Karzai's report suggests that the performance of US inspector General government to effectively fight corruption and embezzlement. office in Afghanistan has been ineffective and meaningless. He US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in her remarks in Kabul stressed that it is the time to purify the General Inspector’s International Conference, stressed on fighting corruption and office in Afghanistan and take accountable its leadership. embezzlement. Hillary Clinton called on Afghan government to pursue and implement effective measures. Clinton added that ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ she would ask President Hamid Karzai, to act for fulfilling his What were the Expectations promises to improve governance and fight corruption. from Kabul Conference? Meanwhile, she stressed that the US and its partners should oversee the performance of Afghan government. Sorosh‐e‐Mellat Daily, Volume No 417, July 21, 2010, Page 2 ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Seventy percent of the US aid goes wasted for buying equipments, transportation and other expenditures in A Commission Set up for development projects of the countries being donated. As a result of such aid policy, 86 cents of each dollar is a visionary Monitoring Foreign Aids Getting Out
assistance which comes only on paper rather than producing Afghanistan Daily, Volume No 1154, July 24, 2010, Page 1 any tangible result. In this way, 47 percent of the technical aids Afghan and US officials will establish a commission to monitor go back to the United States. As 86 cents of each aid dollar are the billions of dollars cash which has been transferred to abroad drained by US firms and only in name they are recorded as in recent years. assistance to Afghan government and the people of country, it The officials believe a major part of the money, got out through is nothing else but corruption. In fact, it is a sort of Corruption Kabul airport, has been earned illegally by corruption and drug or squandering in a way that can not be used appropriately. trafficking. US ambassador to Kabul Karl Eikenberry said the Afghan government has only access to 10 percent of foreign initial phase of the program is completed and the works for the assistance for the country, while the major part of the aids is whole implementation of the program will get underway in next controlled by foreigners themselves. This is the main factor of months. increasing corruption in Afghanistan and the aid being According to the officials, a major part of the cash has been squandered in this country. registered to the declaration forms of the airport customs and has been legally transferred to foreign countries. But the source ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ and the details of these cashes are not clear. Kabul Conference Proved Meanwhile, Afghan finance minister Omar Zakhilwal said the World Backing Afghanistan ministry would investigate the issue to clarify whether the
Sorosh‐e‐Mellat Daily, Volume No 417, July 21, 2010, Page 3 money transferred to abroad are earned legally or not, and also By Bismillah Naderi to whom they are belonging. Afghan President Hamid Karzai in his speech at Kabul ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ conference called on the world donors to hand more control of the aids to Afghan government. Karzai also called for more Washington‐Kabul Relation Still Tense transparency and coordination of development programs in the Mandegar Daily, Volume No 378, July 26, 2010, Editorial provinces implemented through the Provincial Reconstruction Suspension of billions of dollars aid for Afghanistan by the US Teams (PRT). Congress proved that neither President Karzai’s visit from The President reaffirmed his commitment on administrative Washington nor the two milestone gatherings in Kabul –Peace reform in his administration, saying that a special financial Jirga and the Kabul Conference– could help in normalization of program will be carried out for more transparency in the the tense relation of Kabul and Washington. government institutions. Earlier, the chairperson of US Congress warned that the As the international community has long been pressurizing congress cannot approve the money of American taxpayers for Afghan government to combat corruption, Karzai told the a corrupt government. After the warning, Karzai’s Minister’s conference that his government has taken a step forward in Council immediately and in a symbolic move approved a law by fighting corruption. which the high‐ranking officials who are accused of corruption 16 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org
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No 16, July 31, 2010 and embezzlement would be indicted at a special court. Kabul Conference and Unabated Concerns Seemingly, the US officials know well about their Afghan on Corruption partners and are well aware that Karzai’s government is not committed to fighting corruption and indicting the corrupt Bakhtar Daily, Volume No 278, July 17, 2010, Page 1 officials. The analysts believe that a factor of the growing insurgency in the country is the widespread corruption in Afghanistan. The people witness over $30 Billion have been donated the ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ British Ambassador: development of the country, while the international donations There are Conditions for Delivering Aids have changed nothing in their lives and there is no development in delivering public services to the people. Mandegar Daily, Volume No 380, July 28, 2010, Page 1 On the other hand, the people see obviously the luxury lives of British Ambassador to Kabul William Patty said his country’s the people who hold government positions and have shares aids for Afghanistan will continue as before. Speaking to the from power. As a result of such injustice, the motives of reporters on July 27, the British Envoy said, “The supporting the government and opposing the insurgents among commitments will be fulfilled. But there are conditions for the people are dwindling. that, because we have obligations to the taxpayers of our country.” At the eve of the Kabul Conference, a very significant question for the people is that would the international Referring to the agreement in Kabul Conference to channel community and the government of Afghanistan begin a joint at least 50 percent of the world aids through Afghan effort for eliminating corruption or they only end the government, Patty added, “We need to be assured of gathering by criticizing the widespread corruption in transparency of the process. It does not mean we don’t Afghanistan. assist Afghanistan. In case of lack of transparency in the process, we will continue our donations to Afghanistan The international community expects to see a clear and through other projects.” convincing mechanism for fighting corruption by the government of Afghanistan, in order to support the strategy drawn by Kabul. The confidence‐building with the world donors ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Helplessness of Int’l Community would only be successful if the government of Afghanistan presents the required guarantees on fighting corruption to the in Kabul Conference international community.
Mandegar Daily, Volume No 375, July 22, 2010, Editorial The international community believes that the government of Afghanistan has been unable of effectively spending the 20 percent of international aids as the major portion of the aids has been squandered by the predominant mafia. In the International Kabul Conference the world donors conditionally agreed to channel at least 50 percent of the donations through the government of Afghanistan. According to the agreement, during one next year, the international community would closely oversee the reforms in Afghanistan to be assured that the Afghan government has succeeded to fulfilling its commitment on fighting corruption and developing good governance. If the world donors witness positive developments, they would channel 50 percent of the aids through the government budget, but otherwise they would maintain the system of delivering aids through their own projects. The analysts believe that the government of Afghanistan is not prepared for reforms, because reforms need political will and serious consideration, while the government in Kabul lacks both. Due to many reasons, the international community didn’t want to immediately signal positive response to the call of Afghan government for channeling more aids through the government budget. But the preconditions the have set for Kabul, is well indicating their cautious and skeptical approach towards the world aids. 17 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org
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No 16, JulyJuly 31, 2010 Articles & Interviews
What Framework for the Peace Talks?
Ali Amiri, University Lecturer and researcher in political science
Today, there are repeated talks on peace deal with the armed Though it is said that a peace plan of 30‐pages or more is opposition groups. In the meantime, President Karzai is being designed by help of the Britain, but virtually it is obvious that severely criticized over his leniency towards the insurgents. But the ongoing peace efforts have no defined plan. Any likely no one questions that how and in what framework the talks or peace initiative may be comprised of the following factors: opposing the talks would be carried out. Let’s ask it clearly, The background of the conflict: If what are the logics of those who are opposing talk? Do they the government is intended to support war and eliminating Taliban through military means? decisively follow the peace efforts, Since the peace efforts What is the president seeking through peace talks with the it should transparently analyze the implemented so far, such Taliban? In case, the Taliban is not prepared for peace accord, background of the conflict, does the President still seek peace in this way? The fact is that as activities of the Peace considering the relevant factors by in present situation, while some support peace and some others Commission, has not been a realistic approach to the issue. oppose, these questions don’t find their answers. There is no Such approach in itself does not pursued through a peace defined framework for peace or opposing the peace help solving the conflict, but it framework, it has not negotiations. Due to absence of a defined framework, the logics attracts attention of the people of oppositions to the peace negotiations are justifiable. produced any results. So towards sincere policy of the Meanwhile, the proponents of the negotiations with Taliban far, the efforts for peace government and offers its cannot engage in peace talks with a terrorist armed group, narrations to the judgment of the have been carried out which still is waging deadly attacks, without having announced a public. through traditional thoroughly specified framework. Thus, this concise article is raising the question of “what framework for peace?” Internal Factors: The government frameworks such as should mobilize all national Initially, the international community suggested the nationalism, patriotism capabilities for providing peace constitution of Afghanistan, human rights and civil freedoms as and ethnic honor. and security. In the meantime, it the red lines in reconciliation talks with the with the insurgent must consider all internal groups, and later on President Karzai repeated the pre‐ conditions in his speeches. As the President has stressed on sensitivities and national achievements such as human rights disconnection of the Taliban with Al‐Qaeda and other terrorist and the much‐revered constitution of the country. Dealing with groups, his aides have hinted likely compromises on the the war crimes, administering transitional justice and redressing constitution. This has raised fears that the President’s belief is the sufferings of the victims are also ingredients of this factor. not what he himself is saying, but it is what his aides say. In such The internal factors have its own technical complexities, which circumstance, that different voices are heard from the political cannot be discussed in this note. But there is the important establishment, President Karzai’s assurance on protecting the issue of balance. The balance among different factors constitution and conditioning severance of Taliban linkage with particularly between peace and justice should be assiduously Al‐Qaeda also cannot be considered a reliable framework for considered, to ensure that none of them is victimized for reconciliation with Taliban. Therefore, the talks on peace others. negotiation with insurgent groups would be as a suspending or Regional Factor: Undoubtedly, peace efforts are involved with bewildered idea, as far as the government has not declared a various regional factors. No peace initiative would go successful framework for the reconciliation. Lack of a clear strategy on without consideration of the factors. The regional and neighbor peace talks brings the intentions of the government into serious countries are closely tracking the peace efforts, some of which questions and reflects the peace efforts of the government as may consider the peace talks as a change of regional array and ineffectual and a play. Here, first of all it is necessary to consider try to sabotage it. For instance, India never accepts a what frameworks can be considered for peace talks with the government in Kabul as a puppet for Pakistan. The Central Asian insurgents. Republics and Iran also have their own narratives of peace and Concisely, the concept of a framework for peace is drawing a security in Afghanistan. The regional factors should be defined peace plan. There would be no peace without a peace plan. in accordance with the arrays of regional political powers, in a 18 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.orghttp://www.watchafghanistan.org
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No 16, JulyJuly 31, 2010 way that attains more regional supports for the peace efforts. In this regard, it may be necessary to have negotiations with the certain regional players to consider their concerns in the process of peace negotiations with the insurgent groups. International factors: In this part, issues such as global security and human values are very significant. The international community is seeking specific goals as they are battling against Taliban and Al‐Qaeda extremists in Afghanistan and the region. The top goal of this international mission is eliminating threats of terrorism and their sanctuaries in the region. Other than security, the values such as democracy and human rights are very important issues. Along with the global security, the international community has focused on state‐building and democracy. Considering these issues, any peace initiative should guarantee the relations with the free world based on the shared human values. These are elements of a general peace plan. Coordination among all of the elements is not a simple task, but an efficient and active policy with the support and goodwill of the people would somewhat ease the hardships of the peace process. Even if the peace efforts do not bear the expected results, they would expose the iceberg of challenges, which currently only the tip is visible. Since the peace efforts implemented so far, such as activities of the Peace Commission, has not been pursued through a peace framework, it has not produced any results. So far, the efforts for peace have been carried out through traditional frameworks such as nationalism, patriotism and ethnic honor. As the conflict in Afghanistan has turned to a strategic conflict, it needs to be settled through consideration of strategic aspects of the conflict and array of the regional, international and the domestic players. Peace is the top necessity in Afghanistan. Beside that, building a democratic and progressive government, a pluralist political system and observing civil freedoms and global shared values are other urgent necessities of the nation. Opposing peace is stupidity, but similarly speaking about peace without a clear framework is stupidity as well as treason. The opposition groups and civil organizations should not blindly blame the government for peace negotiations with the insurgent groups. But instead, they should pressurize the government to present a transparent and clearly‐defined peace plan. Only in this case, the civil organizations would be able to evaluate the peace program with consideration of the mentioned factors. As there is no logic and specific ground for the reasoning of the proponents and oppositions to the negotiations, the government and civil organizations have nothing to say except ineffectual and damaging expressions. The argument that the constitution is the framework for peace talks with the insurgents is so much indefinite notion which cannot be considered significant. If the peace process is to be pursued persistently there should be developed a framework for the peace. Because, at present the talks with the insurgent groups are facing the question: 'peace in what framework?'
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New publications
Afghanistan Pushes at UN to Encourage Taliban Reconciliation Bloomberg Business Week / July 15, 2010 Afghanistan’s government, encouraging reconciliation with the Taliban, is seeking the removal of 10 militants from a United Nations blacklist and welcoming the naming of a Canadian judge to review cases. Zahir Tanin, Afghanistan’s ambassador to the UN, said the 10 names were given last week to the Security Council committee that implements sanctions imposed in 1999 on the Taliban and al‐ Qaeda. He said Judge Kimberly Prost’s appointment to the new position of committee “ombudsperson” should facilitate the unanimity needed to remove names. Link: http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010‐07‐15/afghanistan‐pushes‐at‐un‐to‐encourage‐taliban‐reconciliation.html ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ US Push To Blacklist Taliban Networks Could Reap Little Reward EurasiaNet / By Abubakar Siddique / July 18, 2010 The administration of US President Barack Obama is reportedly considering blacklisting major Taliban factions, a move aimed at undermining groups linked closely to Al‐Qaeda, but which could also jeopardize Afghan President Hamid Karzai's efforts to reconcile with Afghan insurgent leaders based in neighboring Pakistan. General David Petraeus, commander of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, discussed the idea of blacklisting the Haqqani network with senior administration officials last week, according to "The New York Times." Senator Carl Levin (Democrat, Michigan), meanwhile, called on the State Department on July 13 to also place the Quetta Shura, the Taliban's leadership council, led by Mullah Mohammad Omar, on its list of terrorist organizations. Link: http://www.eurasianet.org/node/61548 ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Afghan Voters Angry at “Warlord” Candidates Turkish Weekly / July 19, 2010 Residents of the northern Afghan province of Sar‐e Pol are campaigning against the nomination of men they accuse of being former warlords as parliamentary candidates. They have called on Afghanistan’s election body to exclude Haji Mohammad Rahim and Gul Mohammad Pahlavan, both former militia commanders, from the list of candidates for the September ballot. Link: http://www.turkishweekly.net/news/104796/afghan‐voters‐angry‐at‐warlord‐candidates.html ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Factbox: Some facts about Afghanistan's reintegration plan Reuters / By Sayed Salahuddin / July 19, 2010 Afghanistan will ask for more control of billions of dollars pledged to reconstruct the war‐torn country at a major international conference on Tuesday. Critics accuse the government of squandering millions in foreign aid, but President Hamid Karzai says most waste occurs on development projects outside official control, and he wants direct access to more of the $13 billion pot. Link: http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE66I2G920100719 ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Afghan Voters Angry at “Warlord” Candidates Institute for War & Peace Reporting / July 19, 2010 Residents of the northern Afghan province of Sar‐e Pol are campaigning against the nomination of men they accuse of being former warlords as parliamentary candidates. They have called on Afghanistan’s election body to exclude Haji Mohammad Rahim and Gul Mohammad Pahlavan, both former militia commanders, from the list of candidates for the September ballot. Link: http://www.iwpr.net/report‐news/afghan‐voters‐angry‐%E2%80%9Cwarlord%E2%80%9D‐candidates
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No 16, July 31, 2010 ANALYSIS ‐ Pakistan to play key role in talks with Taliban Reuters / By Jonathan Burch / July 20, 2010 Afghan President Hamid Karzai needs Pakistan's help to convince some Taliban factions to end their insurgency, a central plank of his peace strategy, but doubts remain about Islamabad's motives and ability to deliver. Pakistan and Afghanistan are both seeking to encourage some elements of the Taliban to reconcile with the Afghan government by renouncing al Qaeda, laying down their arms and taking part in the Afghan political process. Link: http://in.reuters.com/article/idINIndia‐50266020100720 ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ General comment on the right to the truth working group on enforced or invulontary disappearances Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) / July 22, 2010 The United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances has adopted a general comment on the right to the truth in relation to enforced disappearances, to focus attention of States more effectively on the relevant obligations deriving from the Declaration on the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance that flow from the right to the truth. According to the general comment, the right to the truth in relation to human rights violations, acknowledged by the Working Group in its very first report in 1981, is now widely recognized in international law. Link: http://www2.ohchr.org/english/issues/disappear/docs/GC‐right_to_the_truth.pdf ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ US adds Haqqani Network, Taliban leaders to list of designated terrorists The Long War Journal / By Bill Roggio / July 22, 2010 The US Treasury Department has added three top Haqqani Network and Taliban leaders to the list of designated terrorists for their support of terror groups in Afghanistan. Nasiruddin Haqqani, Gul Agha Ishakzai, and Amir Abdullah were designated today as terrorists under Executive Order 13224 for "supporting acts of terrorism and for acting for or on behalf of the Taliban or the Haqqani Network." The designation allows the US to freeze their assets, prevent them from using financial institutions, and prosecute them for terrorist activities. Link: http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2010/07/us_adds_haqqani_netw.php ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Taliban Violence Creating Social Revolution Among Pashtuns Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) / By Abubakar Siddique / July 23, 2010 Fifty‐three‐year‐old Abdul Ahad Helmandwal is accustomed to being the go‐to guy in one of southern Afghanistan's most violent areas. From his mud compound in Helmand Province's Nad‐e Ali district, the turbaned ethnic Pashtun has for years looked after an extended family whose 110 members ‐‐ particularly the young ‐‐ were expected to obey him without question. Link: http://www.rferl.org/content/Taliban_Violence_Creating_Social_Revolution_Among_Afghanistans_Pashtuns/2108012.html ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Reconciliation plan unlikely to bring peace The Australian / By Frud Bezhan / July 23, 2010 THE landmark international conference in Kabul, attended by 40 foreign ministers and international delegates from more than 70 countries, ended on Tuesday with the official endorsement of Afghan President Hamid Karzai's reconciliation program with armed insurgent groups, including the Taliban. Karzai presented the Afghan Peace and Reintegration Program, an ambitious effort that aims to reintegrate up to 36,000 former Taliban fighters into mainstream Afghan society. In it, low‐level Taliban fighters are to be offered jobs, land and protection in a bid to persuade them to change sides. Link: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/reconciliation‐plan‐unlikely‐to‐bring‐peace/story‐e6frg6ux‐1225895825085 ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Experts: Cost To Afghan Women's Rights Depends On Community’s Unity With Taliban In Negotiations Turkish Weekly / July 26, 2010 Only participation of the Afghan community's all groups, and their unanimous support for democratic reforms will help to avoid speculation on women's rights in negotiations with the Taliban, experts believe. "The only way to safeguard women's rights in a negotiation is to have an open Afghan debate that brings in people from all walks of 21 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org
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life, well beyond the civil society of Kabul," Kristian Berg Harpviken, Norway's expert on Afghanistan told Trend. "This is particularly challenging, as the sensitivity of talks may mean require secrecy," he said. Link: http://www.turkishweekly.net/news/105116/experts‐cost‐to‐afghan‐women‐39‐s‐rights‐depends‐on‐community%E2%80%99s‐unity‐with‐ taliban‐in‐negotiations‐.html ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ AFGHANISTAN: Mass grave cover‐ups undermine justice IRIN NEWS / July 27, 2010 Three years after President Hamid Karzai appointed a commission to investigate a mass grave site in the Chimtala plains, north of Kabul city, the site, the commission and the truth are missing. Commission chairman Mawlawi Fazel Hadi Shinwari has been in a coma in hospital in India for over eight months, according to government officials. Link: http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=89975
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Media Analyst: Ahmad Zia Mohammadi is only responsible for what it writes Translated by: Abdul Ahad Bahrami like notes, analysis and comments. Haqiqat is English Editedor: Mechthild Exo not responsible for news, reports and articles Designed by: Ahmad Zia Mohammadi selected from media sources, the responsibility is returned to the publisher. Reporter: Razia Azimi
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