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Anand Gopal | Jun 29th, 2010
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On a balmy summer’s day in the village of Hiratian in Afghanistan’s Helmand province, locals found the body of eight-year-old Dilawar hanging from a tree of a small fruit farm. Taliban fighters had accused the boy of spying for the American forces and had kidnapped him, strung him up and left his body to sway in the wind for hours for all to see. The murder was horrifying, yet few villagers would come to the defense of anyone charged with spying for the hated foreign forces. But slowly, the details of the story emerged. The Taliban in the area were involved in a weeks-long campaign to collect donations — money, food or weapons — from the local population. They had demanded either a large sum of money or a weapon from Mullah Qudoos, the ill-fated boy’s father. Qudoos, poor and jobless, had neither. So the insurgents took his son as revenge and killed him as an example. |
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Anand Gopal | Jun 5th, 2010
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Wardak province, a rustic region of verdant dales and twisting streams that borders Kabul, is home to one of the untold stories of the Afghan war: over the last nine months, U.S. forces have quietly decapitated the Taliban’s leadership in the area. Through dozens of nighttime raids, U.S. Special Operations Forces have succeeded in killing or capturing a number of important Taliban commanders. Dozens of notorious insurgent leaders who have ruled Wardak for five or six years unmolested have suddenly been removed from the picture, marking one of the biggest setbacks the Taliban has faced on the ground in recent times. |
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Anand Gopal | Mar 8th, 2010
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It was late November, 2001, and the Taliban were on the run everywhere in Afghanistan. The Northern Alliance had captured Kabul and much of the rest of the country; only parts of the southwest—including the province of Helmand, remained in the Taliban’s hands. In Marjah, a quiet market town near the Helmand desert, the dying Taliban were making a last stand against a local tribal commander named Abdur Rahman Jan. The battle lasted for nearly two days, and many reinforcements came from the surrounding areas. But the Taliban, beleaguered around the country and bereft of public support, soon succumbed; Jan’s force overran Marjah and the Taliban fled in disgrace. Jan went on to become Helmand’s police chief under the new government of Hamid Karzai. His close friend Sher Muhammad Akhundzada, a strongman with deep pockets and roots in the area, became the governor. The two quickly populated the seats of local government with their friends, family members and those from their tribes. The local government revenues became part of their personal piggy bank, locals say, and they became heavily involved in the opium business. They marginalized other tribes, destroyed the poppy fields of rivals, took bribes and kickbacks for government contracts and filled the ranks of the police with hated former mujahedeen commanders. One resident of Marjah told me, “The police were the biggest criminals. We were more afraid of them than of anyone else.” |
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Anand Gopal | Apr 13th, 2009
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Just as the world’s eyes are turning towards Afghanistan once again, a few conservative Afghan lawmakers are trying to pass a law that would, amongst other things, legalize marital rape, prohibit women from leaving the home without permission, deny them the right of inheritance, force a woman to “preen for her husband as and when he desires,” and set the minimum female marital age to sixteen. The draft proposal, which is aimed only at the country’s Shia minority, recalls for many the harsh strictures of the Taliban era and has been roundly condemned in the international community: Hillary Clinton said that she is “deeply concerned” about the law, Obama found it “abhorrent”, and others in the West have asked, “Is this what our soldiers are dying for?” The international condemnation has forced the Karzai administration to shelve the law for the time being, as the Afghan government pledges to look at the details of the bill more closely. While the world buzzes about this latest setback for Afghan women, you might be wondering just what exactly the bill says about women’s rights in Afghanistan. |
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Anand Gopal | Apr 12th, 2009
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Kabul, Afghanistan - Militants attacked a supply depot Sunday in Pakistan that serves Western forces in Afghanistan, increasing the pressure for US and NATO officials to find alternatives to their beleaguered supply lines. In a predawn raid in the northwestern city of Peshawar, scores of Pakistani Taliban guerrillas torched trucks stationed at the supply terminal. The assault is the latest in a series that have targeted the Western supply convoys that run through Pakistan to replenish forces fighting in Afghanistan. Attacks on convoys and depots increased dramatically in 2008 after militants gained a foothold in the Khyber Agency, an area bordering Afghanistan through which supply routes run. The guerrillas have torched more than 500 vehicles in the last year, and a number of times they even succeeded in temporarily halting the supply chain altogether. Some 70 percent of Western supplies come through the militant-infested western Pakistan. To add to US and NATO difficulties, another major supply route via a base in Kyrgyzstan, is slated to close. “This is strategically vital,” says Waliullah Rahmani, policy analyst with the Kabul Center for Strategic Studies. “For the Americans to win this war, it’s important to find another route.” US officials are actively seeking such routes. A series of recently-inked agreements allow the movement of non-lethal materiel through the former Soviet Central Asian States. The Monitor recently reported on US efforts to open a supply route through Uzbekistan. Officials are also considering other, even more complicated routes that pass through the caucuses. But the alternatives come with difficulties of their own. The new “northern route” utilizes a complex rail network through many different countries, taking longer and costing more than the Pakistani route. And American overtures to the former Soviet states, in what is widely considered Russia’s sphere of influence, might spark tensions between Washington and Moscow. Still, Moscow fears the growing strength of Islamic militants on its flank, and may be willing to work with the US and NATO. Click here to read about it. But replacing Pakistan supply routes completely won’t be easy. The American military uses jet fuel of a standard only produced in the Gulf States and Pakistani refineries. “This will make it hard for the US to abandon Pakistan even if the northern routes work out,” says Mr. Rahmani. |
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Anand Gopal | Mar 3rd, 2009
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If there’s one rule of thumb when reading the Indian press, it is this: never believe a word it says. At least when it comes to Paksitan. The Times of India recently carried a real doozy, titled: Pakistani ISI Top Boss Met Osama Aide, which itself was based on “reporting” from the TV station TimesNow. The report states that ISI officials met with Siraj Haqqani, leader of the Haqqni network, a prominent Afghan insurgent group. “Highly placed intelligence sources”
Let’s give TimesNow the benefit of the doubt and assume that by “highly placed intelligence sources” they mean on the Indian side, not the ISI! The article says that the ISI was trying to get the Haqqanis to shift operations from NWFP to Afghanistan, which is absurd on many levels: 1) The Haqqanis have never operated in NWFP. No one has even accused them of this. The Haqqanis operate out of Waziristan, which is in FATA, not NWFP. 2) They are trying to convince the Haqqanis to focus on Afghanistan–which is the only place they’ve ever directed attacks! There has never been a recorded instance of the Haqqanis attacking inside Pakistan. 3) They want a ceasefire with the Haqqanis–but the Haqqanis are not fighting with Pakistan! There has never been any record of the Haqqinis ever fighting with Pakistan. The author of the article might be confusing Haqqani with Baitullah Mehsud and the Pakistani Taliban. This all is as absurd as saying India had a secret meeting with the Tamil Tigers to convince them to stop fighting in India and direct their fire against the Sri Lankan government. |
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Anand Gopal | Jan 23rd, 2009
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“The Taliban want to expel foreign troops, not win power.” So says Mullah Salaam Zaif, the movement’s former ambassador to Pakistani, who is now on good terms with the Karzai government. The Taliban doesn’t want to win power? Are we expecting the Talibs to just go back to their villages and plant wheat once the foreigners leave? Zaif is either lying to Reuters or he is lying to himself. Even most Taliban would probably laugh at this assessment. |
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Anand Gopal | Jan 22nd, 2009
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Pajhwok reports that the Pak. military has killed Omar Khalid. Khalid, the head of the so-called Shah Khalid group, was in control of Mohmand agency. Khalid, whose group generally acted as the TTP (Pakistani Taliban) representative in Mohmand, was one of the highest-ranking leaders in the Pakistani Taliban movement. He was a close ally to Faqir Muhammad of the Bajaur agency, who in turn has been linked to Zawahiri. He has led fighters into Afghanistan to attack US forces there, according to several reports. The Long War Journal describes Khalid’s career trajectory:
We still don’t have official confirmation of Khalid’s death, however |
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Anand Gopal | Jan 21st, 2009
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Things are devolving by the day. The Pakistani Taliban is now demanding that buses in the northwest cannot carry audio or video players. The Riaz Khan of the AP reports:
Meanwhile, TNSM is strengthening its grasp of Swat. The Daily Times in Pakistan (via the MEMRI blog) reports that women are no longer allowed in the central market. And while we’re at it, we might as well mention that the Pakistani Taliban forced a popular Pashtun comedian to renounce his work, MEMRI tells us. Lovely. |
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Anand Gopal | May 7th, 2008
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It looks like we have some confirmation of last week’s post on Hekmatyar’s letter to Karzai. The Afghan online news site Quqnoos is reporting that the President is indeed close to opening talks. Might we see a return of Hekmatyar to the Afghan government? The last time Hekmatyar held a government post, you might recall, he was much too busy shelling Kabul and murdering Afghans to attend to his government duties. The Quqnoos story in full: PRESIDENT Hamid Karzai’s office says it is “optimistic” about striking a peace-deal with the leader of one of the country’s most hard-line Islamic groups, Hezb-e-Islami Afghanistan (HIA), whose leader is on the US’s most wanted list of “terrorists”. The president’s spokesman, Humayun Hamidzada, said today (Tuesday) that there was fresh optimism about the possibility of holding talks with HIA’s leader, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who is frequently accused of collusion with Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. “We are optimistic to have some developments for you in the near or far future,” Hamidzada said. The spokesman was answering questions about claims that sources close to Hekmatyar said recently that the HIA leader planned to hold talks with Kabul in the near future. Hekmatyar, who founded HIA in the mid-1970s, has reportedly tried to open negotiations with the Karzai government for the past four years. His group was long-considered one of the most radical Islamist groups before the emergence of the Taliban. Hamidzada also said the president welcomed talks between Pakistan’s new coalition government and the Pakistani Taliban, although talks between the two sides recently broke down when the government refused to withdraw troops from the country’s tribal areas. In April 2002, the US Central Intelligence Agency tried and failed to kill Hekmatyar with an unmanned predator drone. Four years later, he was wrongly reported as captured before he allegedly took credit for Al-Qaeda leader Osma bin Laden’s escape from Tora Bora during the US-led invasion of 2001. In 2003, the US government blacklisted HIA a “terrorist” organisation and the UN put its leader’s name on a list of people accused of supporting the Taliban. In related news, CBS has a video a interesting new interview with Hekmatyar, which you can watch it in full here - just after the ad for the new Buick Enclave. |
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