Azaranica is a non-biased news aggregator on Hazaras. The main aim is to promote understanding and respect for cultural identities by highlighting the realities they face on daily basis...Hazaras have been the victim of active persecution and discrimination and one of the reasons among many has been the lack of information, awareness, and disinformation.

Thursday, April 28, 2011

Buddhas of Bamiyan




Ancient archaeological remains have been thrust into the cruel world of today’s seemingly endless conflicts — the ever-changing aims and alliances of international politics, religions dueling on the world stage, and the ironic trade-off of providing aid to conserve the material heritage of the past but not to preserve the lives of modern inheritors of that past. Arrayed against the tolerant and measured messages of Buddhism, the quagmire of the “Bamiyan Massacre” seems perplexing at best.

First, it is important to recognize that the massacre has little to do with religion. The Buddha is not God or even one among many gods. During his lifetime of 80 years, Buddha Sakyamuni only allowed his image to be recorded as a reflection in rippling water. Images of the Buddha himself did not appear for at least 400 years after his death and even then were created only to remind followers of their own innate “Buddha Nature.” This kind of early aversion to “idolatry” is typical of Christianity and other religions — many devotees of Christ railed against material images of Jesus for centuries, especially during two waves of “iconoclasts” (idol smashers) in the Byzantine Empire.

The colossal Buddhas were cut at immeasurable cost (probably in the third and fifth centuries A.D.) into the tall, sandstone cliffs surrounding Bamiyan, an oasis town in the center of a long valley that separates the mountain chains of Hindu Kush and Koh-i-Baba. The taller of the two statues (about 53 meters or 175 feet) is thought to represent Vairocana, the “Light Shining throughout the Universe Buddha” The shorter one (36 meters or 120 feet) probably represents Buddha Sakyamuni, although the local Hazara people believe it depicts a woman.

The two colossi must once have been a truly awesome sight, visible for miles, with copper masks for faces and copper-covered hands. Vairocana’s robes were painted red and Sakyamuni’s blue. These towering, transcendental images were key symbols in the rise of Mahayana Buddhist teachings, which emphasized the ability of everyone, not just monks, to achieve enlightenment.

While the dates of the statues are somewhat equivocal, the Buddhist monk Xuanzang, who traveled to India to bring back to China copies of the original sutras of the Buddha’s teachings, bore witness to the statues in A.D. 630-31.

For centuries, Bamiyan lay at the heart of the fabled Silk Road, offering respite to caravans carrying goods across the vast reaches between China and the Roman Empire. And for 500 years, it was a center of Buddhist cultivation. The myriad caves that pockmark Bamiyan’s cliffs were also home to thousands of Buddhist monks and served as a kind of Holiday Inn for traveling merchants, monks, and pilgrims.

Today those open, cold caves are used primarily by refugees from Afghanistan’s brutal, internal war.

Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Taliban Ghazni road blockade continues

By Farzad Lameh
2011-04-25


GHAZNI – Taliban militants have blockaded a key road connecting Jaghori to Qarabagh in eastern Ghazni Province for two weeks, officials said April 24.

“The blockade has caused many problems ... but we are working to resolve it through the tribal elders as soon as possible,” Marouf Ayoobi, Ghazni provincial spokesman, told Central Asia Online.


The Taliban imposed the blockade soon after it warned travellers to stop using the road April 9.


“We would have reopened the road by now, but we are faced with a reduced number of police in the province,” Zerawar Zahid, provincial police chief, said.


Last June, the Taliban also blocked the road for several days.

Indian Steel Companies May Unite for Bamiyan Iron Ore: Forbes India

Indian Steel Companies May Unite for Cause

Indian steel companies are pondering whether to put aside their rivalry and bid together for one of the world’s most precious iron ore reserves in Afghanistan

by Prince Mathews Thomas, Cuckoo Paul | Apr 26, 2011



For a millennium and a half until 2001, the giant Buddhas of Bamiyan in central Afghanistan were witness to much history. They overlooked the passing of the trade caravans of Europeans, Indians and Chinese along the Silk Route. Over the centuries, the Gandharas, Hunas, Ghengis Khan and even Soviet tanks had left their imprints in the vicinity. Throughout all this turbulence, the statues stood unchangingly as the symbol of Buddha’s greatest teachings — harmony and co-existence. So, when the Taliban dynamited and destroyed the Buddhas a decade ago, it appeared as if these ideals had been lost forever.

Today, the Bamiyan Valley is helping to rediscover a new future for Afghanistan. Not only is there an international effort to rebuild the Buddhas, there is also a plan taking shape to convert the Bamiyan province into a thriving industrial centre. Not far from the ruins lies a hidden treasure: The 1.8 billion tonne Hajigak iron ore mines. With a very high ferrous content of 68 percent, these are among the most coveted reserves in this part of the world and represent the best chance for rebuilding the war-torn nation.

This January, the Hamid Karzai government put the exploration rights to the mine up for an open bid. It attracted some of the biggest mining and steel firms from around the world, including Vale of Brazil and China Metallurgical Group. But the biggest interest came from Indians. Fifteen of the 22 firms that expressed an interest in tapping the mines are Indian. If all goes well at the final opening of bids in August, India hopes to use the Hajigak mines as a gateway to playing a role in Afghanistan’s transformation.

But the Indians face a dilemma. If each of the 15 firms competes on its own, the flock could be swept aside by the global giants. So, the Indian companies have done something they never did before: They have taken a leaf from Buddha’s teaching of peaceful co-existence and are exploring the possibility of bidding as a single consortium. Now, these are hardwired rivals competing for the $51 billion steel market back home. If they decide to bid together, they would be opening a whole new chapter of co-operation.

Understandably, the Indian government is delighted. It has backed the plan with a promise to fund 15 percent of the acquisition corpus. In early April, the Indian Express reported that at a high level meeting chaired by steel secretary P.K. Misra, senior officials from the ministry of external affairs said the government had the provision to dip into the Rs. 5,850 crore corpus set aside for executing developmental projects in Afghanistan. When asked, Misra downplays the development saying that no final decision has been taken. Given that some of the companies trying to get into the joint bid are state-owned, the final go-ahead will, of course, have to come from the finance ministry.

The joint bid is seen as a stepping stone to a larger objective: The creation of India’s own sovereign fund that will help home-grown companies buy expensive resources abroad and also help meet the country’s energy needs. For it is not only steel companies looking to buy mines abroad, but also power generation players hungry for coal mines. “Various concepts including a sovereign fund are there, but all are in debating stage right now. A sovereign fund will come under the MoF and it has to decide on that,” says Misra.

Bonds of steel


Three men are the centre of this initiative to bring together rivals for a greater common purpose. V. Krishnamurthy, former chairman of Steel Authority of India and now the head of the National Manufacturing Commission, C.S. Verma, the current SAIL chairman and Malay Mukherjee, CEO of Essar Steel who had earlier worked at both SAIL and ArcelorMittal. They think the urgency for the steel industry to collaborate hasn’t come a day sooner.

Indian steel companies are ravenous for iron ore to feed an economy growing at 9 percent. But “the Indian steel industry’s current plans [to secure raw material] are not working,” says Mukherjee. And without the security of getting raw material, the future plans of the Indian steel industry could be in jeopardy.

The industry veterans say that a joint bid in Afghanistan will work like a pilot project for Indian companies to co-operate in matters like global sourcing of raw materials and expanding the market for steel. “If this arrangement for the Afghanistan bid works out, it will help us expand its scope in many more ways,” says Verma.

While NMDC, India’s largest iron ore miner, will lead the Indian consortium, the partners will get the allocation of resources as per the investment they bring. It looks like the NMDC consortium will include SAIL, Tata Steel, JSW and Essar. This is pretty much most of the industry anyway.
There have been both short-term and long-term triggers for Indian steel companies to come together. We are living in an era of rising commodity prices. In just over a month, spot prices of key raw materials like iron ore and coking coal have shot up by 30 percent.

Indian firms have also struggled to buy mines across the globe. Tata Steel and JSW Steel have lost out on iron ore mines in Africa, while SAIL has struggled to match the speed and bidding power of its international peers while evaluating coal mines in Indonesia and Australia.

What’s more, as the price of raw materials has climbed, companies have been forced to move from annual long term contracts to the now quarterly, or in some cases, even monthly contracts where prices are closely linked to the volatile spot rates. This has not only increased the scramble among companies to buy mines but also pushed up the value of these mineral resources.

In India, SAIL and Tata Steel have iron ore mines, unlike others. But when it comes to coking coal, even they are not self-reliant. In the case of Tata Steel, the need is more urgent to feed its plants in Europe that it got through the Corus acquisition in 2007. None of these plants owns mines.

SAIL, despite its iron ore cushion, saw its net profit drop by 34 percent in the third quarter of 2010-11 due to high coking coal prices. “Even our next phase of expansion, which will see SAIL’s annual capacity increasing to 24 million tonnes from the present 14 million tonnes, would be unviable unless we have access to more captive mines,” says Verma.

United, We Bargain
Verma and Essar Steel’s Mukherjee have been the most vocal backers of the new initiative. Mukherjee is a former SAIL veteran who later became part of the core team of L.N. Mittal. Back in India since 2009, Mukherjee has become some sort of a champion for co-opetition. He points to international examples such as Mexico, where ArcelorMittal shares an iron ore mine with a competitor. “Resources are divided according to investment and production history,” says Mukherjee, who adds that Indian companies have already lost an opportunity in Mongolia. The central Asian country had earlier this year invited companies to develop the world’s largest untapped coking coal deposits. Consortiums from China, Russia and South Korea have made bids. There was none from India.

Verma cites another international example that could help broaden the scope of the Indian initiative. “Japanese steel mills every year jointly bargain with mining companies for annual contracts to procure raw materials. Indian companies should also come together to increase their bargaining power and thus get better rates,” says Verma. His office is now in talks with heads of other steel companies such as JSW Steel and Essar Steel who also import coking coal. Together, steel companies in India import about 40 million tonnes of coking coal a year, enough to give them bargaining power. (SAIL is also in talks with an undisclosed India private company to jointly buy a stake in Indonesian mines.)

The other area where a consortium could work is opening up new market segments within India. Take the household sector or the farming sector, for instance. It may not be viable for one firm to seed these markets as initial volumes will not justify product development and marketing costs.


Interestingly, that was a task that Indian Steel Alliance, or ISA, was supposed to do. Set up in 2001, ISA had five of the biggest Indian steelmakers as members — SAIL, Tata Steel, JSW Steel, Essar Steel and Ispat Industries. “It was set up as an industry representative at government level and also internationally. Unfortunately, differences between its members saw it shutting shop in 2008,” says D.A. Chandekar, editor and CEO of SteelWorld, an industry information and consultancy organisation.

The bone of contention, say industry executives, was setting the monthly prices of steel products. “While in the beginning the system worked, later on government pressure would force either SAIL or Tata Steel to take back the hike. Other companies were forced to follow. Differences cropped up,” says a former executive at one of the private steel companies. From 2004, when the rise of the Chinese steel industry pushed up raw material prices and made mines integral for steel business, the differences widened. “As SAIL and Tata Steel already had their own iron ore mines, other companies wanted preference in allotment of mines,” says the executive. In 2007, Tata Steel withdrew from the Alliance and SAIL followed suit a year later. ISA soon folded up.

It was a sad end to the first of its kind public-private partnership in the steel industry. Verma concedes the Afghanistan initiative to revive that idea is indeed a difficult task.

There are sceptics to the plan too. J.J. Irani, the former managing director of Tata Steel and ex-chairman of ISA told Forbes India in an email that “I do not think there is any potential” in the activity. While he declined to explain, old timers say it will take a “great level of maturity” on the behalf of the players to “leave their egos behind”. Most of these companies have locked horns over Indian mines, especially the Chiria iron ore mines in Jharkhand where SAIL has taken claim. “Also, can the decision-making mechanism of a public sector company like SAIL synchronise itself with that of a private company like Tata Steel?” asks a senior executive at one of the private steel companies. Forbes India sent emails to Tata Steel and JSW Steel asking if they are part of this new initiative. Neither of them responded.

For India, Afghanistan is a strategic priority. It enjoys immense goodwill among Afghans that the US hasn’t been able to garner even after investing $50 billion. The country has been a theater for war for too long and when the tide turns, there will be great business opportunities. For India to maximise its role in rebuilding Afghanistan, the synergy of private and public sector companies is crucial.

Source,
http://business.in.com/article/big-bet/indian-steel-companies-may-unite-for-cause/24362/3

Saturday, April 23, 2011

نمایشگاه کاریکاتورهای بامیان، اعتراض مدنی دیگر

به روز شده: 11:27 گرينويچ - جمعه 08 آوريل 2011 - 19 فروردین 1390

محمد رضایی
بی‌بی‌سی



آقای روحانی می گوید که مشکلات زندگی مردم را در کاریکاتورهای خود بازتاب داده است.
یک نهاد اجتماعی موسوم به "بنیاد اجتماعی توازن" نمایشگاه مجموعه ای از کارتون های انتقادی را برگزار کرده است.
این نمایشگاه از روز هفتم اپریل (آوریل) به مناسب روز جهانی کاریکاتور برای چهار روز برگزار شده است.

مسئولان بنیاد اجتماعی توازن گفته اند که هدف از برگزاری این نمایشگاه ضمن قدردانی از کاریکاتوریست ها و تاکید بر اهمیت جهانی کاریکاتور، انتقاد از کارکردهای مقامهای دولتی است.
در این نمایشگاه ۱۳ اثر محمد روحانی کاریکاتوریست بامیانی را به نمایش گذاشته شده است.
انتقاد از حکومت
عمدتا موضوعات کاریکاتورهایی که در این نمایشگاه به نمایش گذاشته شده است، انتقاد از حکومت و مقام دولتی است.
موسی شفق، استاد دانشگاه بامیان و از برگزارکنندگان این نمایشگاه گفت: "یکی از اهداف این برنامه ترویج فرهنگ نقد از حکومت با روش مدنی است."
نارضایی مردم از عدم توجه مقامات دولتی به امور بازسازی، مشکلات نظام آموزش و پرورش، نقض حقوق بشر، قانون‌گریزی و عدم توازن در برنامه های عمرانی حکومت، از موضوعات بازتاب یافته در این کاریکاتورها است.
بازتاب نارسایی ها




آقای روحانی گفته که با این کاریکاتورها احساسات خود را بیان کرده است.
محمد روحانی، صاحب این کاریکاتورها گفته است: "من با این کاریکاتورها احساسات و چشم دیدهای خود را از مشکلات و نارسایی های موجود در بخش های مختلف زندگی مردم بازتاب داده ام."
او افزود: "من احساسی را که داشتم نمی توانستم در جای دیگری بیان کنم و جای دیگری برای بیان حرفهای خود پیدا نمی توانیستم، بنابر این، خواستم که این حرفهایم را در نمایشگاه کاریکاتورها برای مسئولان و مردم بیان کنم."
همچنین آقای شفق گفت که فقر و کمبود امکانات زندگی در بامیان دلیلی شده است برای برگزاری این نمایشگاه تا توجه مقامهای ارشد دولتی به مشکلات زندگی مردم این ولایت جلب شود.
او افزود: "به صورت مشخص، فقر شدید در میان مردم بامیان، کند بودن روند باسازی در این ولایت، نارضایتی شهروندان بامیانی از عدم توازن در برنامه های عمرانی حکومت و تقاضای مردم از مقامات دولتی در راستایی رسیدگی به این نارسایی‌ها، در این کاریکاتورها بازتاب یافته است."
او همچنین گفت که در کاریکاتورهای به نمایش گذاشته نقاط ضعف حکومت و نارساییهای موجود در بامیان به شیوه مدنی به نقد و برسی گرفته شده است.

او افزود: "موضوعات باتاب یافته در این کاریکاتورها، بیشتر واقعیت‌های سیاسی و اجتماعی جامعه افغانستان است. به باور ما واقعیت های عینی جامعه افغانستان بنا بر مصلحت‌های سیاسی نادیده گرفته می شود وکتمان این واقعیت‌ها برمی‌گردد به نظام سیاسی افغانستان. از این جهت محور موضوع های مطرح شده در این کاریکاتورها، انتقاد از حکومت و چهره های حکومتی است".
پیش از این نیز مردم در بامیان با روشهای طنزآمیز مقامات دولت افغانستان را به دلیل آنچه که عدم توجه به بازسازی و توسعه اقتصادی این ولایت خوانده می شود، مورد انتقاد قرارداده اند.
در یکی از موارد، شماری از شهروندان این ولایت جاده ای خاکی داخل شهر بامیان را به رسم اعتراض از حکومت کاهگل کردند.



در یک مورد دیگر شماری از مردم این ولایت در اعتراض به عدم توجه مقامهای دولت در زمینه تهیه آب آشامدنی و برق، " الاغ هایی" را که در انتقال آب آشامدنی از رودخانه به خانه ها از آنها استفاده می کردند، "تقدیرنامه" دادند.

Friday, April 22, 2011

Anatomy of a tragic error

How a cascade of false assumptions led to a fatal U.S. military strike on a group of Afghan civilians
POSTED ON APRIL 22, 2011, AT 10:03 AM



Children play outside their homes in central Afghanistan: In February 2010, the U.S. military accidentally killed more than a dozen civilians, including two children. Photo: Corbis SEE ALL 42 PHOTOS
NEARLY THREE MILES above the rugged hills of central Afghanistan, American eyes silently tracked two SUVs and a pickup truck as they snaked down a dirt road in the predawn darkness. The vehicles, packed with people, were three and a half miles from a dozen U.S. special operations soldiers, who had been dropped into the area hours earlier to root out insurgents. The convoy was closing in on them.

At 6:15 a.m., just before the sun crested the mountains, the convoy halted. “We have 18 pax [passengers] dismounted and spreading out at this time,” an Air Force pilot said from a cramped control room at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada. Sitting 7,000 miles away from Afghanistan, the pilot was flying the Predator drone whose cameras had picked up the vehicles’ movement more than an hour earlier. He was using a joystick to operate the craft while watching its live video transmissions and radioing information to the unit on the ground.

The Afghans unfolded what looked like blankets and kneeled. “They’re praying,” said the Predator’s camera operator, seated in Nevada near the pilot. By now, the Predator crew was sure that the men were Taliban. “This is definitely it, this is their force,” the cameraman said. “They’re gonna do something nefarious,” chimed in a third man in Nevada—the mission’s intelligence coordinator.
At 6:22 a.m., the drone pilot radioed an update: “All…are rallying up near all three vehicles.” The camera operator watched the men climb back into the vehicles. “Oh, sweet target,” he said.

NONE OF THOSE Afghans was, in fact, an insurgent. They were men, women, and children going about their business, unaware that a unit of U.S. soldiers was just a few miles away, and that teams of U.S. military pilots and video analysts had taken them for a group of Taliban fighters. Though the Americans were using some of the most sophisticated tools in the history of war, the high-tech wizardry would fail in its most elemental purpose: to tell the difference between friend and foe.

The Afghan travelers had set out early on the cold morning of Feb. 21, 2010, from three mountain villages in southern Daikundi province, a remote region 200 miles southwest of Kabul. More than two dozen people were wedged into the three vehicles. They included shopkeepers going to Kabul for supplies, students returning to school, people seeking medical treatment, and families off to visit relatives. There were several women and as many as four children younger than 6. They had agreed to meet before dawn for the long drive to Highway 1, the country’s main paved road. To reach it, they had to drive through Oruzgan province, an insurgent stronghold.

“We weren’t worried when we set out,” said Nasim, an auto mechanic who says he was traveling to buy tools and parts. “We were a little scared of the Taliban, but not of government forces,” he said referring to the Afghan national army and its U.S. allies. “Why would they attack us?”

AMERICAN AIRCRAFT BEGAN tracking the vehicles at 5 a.m. The crew of an AC-130, a U.S. ground attack plane, spotted a pickup and an SUV converge from different directions. At 5:08 a.m., they saw two of the drivers flash their headlights in the darkness. With that, the travelers became targets of suspicion.

A few hours earlier, a dozen U.S. special operations soldiers, known as an A-Team, had been dropped off by helicopter near Khod, five miles south of the convoy. The elite unit was moving on foot toward the village to search for insurgents.

Another U.S. special operations unit had been attacked in the district a year earlier, and a soldier had been killed. This time the AC-130, the Predator drone, and two Kiowa attack helicopters were in the area to protect the A-Team.

Under U.S. military rules, the Army captain leading the A-Team, as the operation’s ground force commander, was responsible for deciding whether to order an airstrike. At 5:14 a.m., six minutes after the two Afghan vehicles flashed their lights, the AC-130 crew asked the A-Team what it wanted to do about the suspicious vehicles. “Roger, ground force commander’s intent is to destroy the vehicles and the personnel,” came the unit’s reply.

To actually employ deadly force, the commander would also have to make a “positive identification” that the adversary was carrying weapons and posed an “imminent threat.” The evidence to support such a decision would come from two distant sources: In addition to the Predator crew in Nevada, a team of “screeners”—enlisted personnel trained in video analysis—was on duty at Air Force special operations headquarters in Okaloosa, Fla. They sat in a large room with high-definition televisions showing live feeds from the drone.

“We all had it in our head, ‘Hey, why do you have 20 military-age males at 5 a.m. collecting each other?’” an Army officer involved in the incident said later. “There can be only one reason, and that’s because we’ve put [U.S. troops] in the area.”

AT 5:15 A.M., the Predator pilot thought he saw a rifle inside one of the two vehicles he’d first spotted. “See if you can zoom in on that guy,” he told the camera operator. “Maybe just a warm spot,” the operator replied, referring to an image picked up by the infrared camera. “Can’t really tell right now.”

At 5:30 a.m., not long after the first two vehicles were joined by another SUV, the convoy halted briefly, and the drone’s camera focused on a man emerging from one of the vehicles. He appeared to be carrying something. “I think that dude had a rifle,” the camera operator said. “I do, too,” the pilot replied. But the ground forces unit said the commander needed more information from the drone crew and screeners to establish a “positive identification.” The small convoy continued south, in the general direction of Khod.

At 5:37 a.m., the pilot reported that one of the screeners in Florida had spotted one or more children in the group. “Bull----. Where!?” the camera operator said. “I don’t think they have kids out at this hour.” He demanded that the screeners freeze a video image of the purported child and e-mail it to him. “Why didn’t he say ‘possible’ child?” the pilot said. “Why are they so quick to call kids but not to call a rifle?” The cameraman was dubious too. “I really doubt that children call,” he said.

A few minutes later, the pilot, who was tasked with radioing the screeners’ observations to the ground unit, appeared to downplay the screeners’ report, alerting the A-Team to “a possible rifle and two possible children near the SUV.”

THE PREDATOR VIDEO was not the only intelligence that morning suggesting that U.S. forces were in danger: Teams of U.S. intelligence personnel with sophisticated eavesdropping equipment were vacuuming up cell phone calls in the area. For several hours, they had been listening to chatter in the area that suggested a Taliban unit was assembling for an attack. The drone crew took the intercepted conversations as confirmation that there were insurgents in the convoy.

The screeners continued to look for evidence that the convoy was a hostile force. Even with the advanced cameras on the Predator, the images were fuzzy. The Predator crew and video analysts remained uncertain how many children were in the group and how old they were. “Our screeners are currently calling 21 MAMs [military age males], no females, and two possible children. How copy?” the Predator pilot radioed the A-Team at 7:38 a.m. “Roger,” replied the A-team, which was unable to see the convoy. “And when we say children, are we talking teenagers or toddlers?” The camera operator responded: “Not toddlers. Something more toward adolescents or teens.”

At 7:40 a.m., the A-Team radioed that its captain had concluded that he had established “positive identification” based on “the weapons we’ve identified and the demographics of the individuals,” plus the intercepted communications. Although no weapons had been clearly identified, the pilot replied: “We are with you.” The pilot added that one screener had amended his report and was now saying he’d seen only one teenager. “We’ll pass that along to the ground force commander,” the A-Team radio operator said. “Twelve or 13 years old with a weapon is just as dangerous.”

AT 8:43 A.M., Army commanders ordered two Kiowa helicopters to get into position to attack. By then, though, the convoy was no longer heading toward Khod. The three vehicles had changed direction and were now 12 miles from the special operations soldiers. The drone crew didn’t dwell on that news, thinking the convoy probably was trying to flank the A-Team’s position.

The Predator crew began discussing the coming attack. The drone’s one missile was not enough to take out a three-vehicle convoy. The more heavily armed Kiowa helicopters would fire on the vehicles; the Predator would target any survivors who tried to flee.

A little before 9 a.m., the vehicles reached an open, treeless stretch of road. The A-Team commander called in the airstrike.

“Understand we are clear to engage,” one of the helicopter pilots radioed. Hellfire missiles struck the first and third vehicles. They burst into flames.

ON THE GROUND, the damage was horrific. Nasim, the 23-year-old mechanic, was fortunate that he was merely knocked unconscious. Many fellow travelers were dead. “When I came to, I could see that our vehicles were wrecked and the injured were everywhere,” he said. “I saw someone who was headless and someone else cut in half.”

The Predator crew in Nevada was exultant, watching men they assumed were enemy fighters trying to help the injured. “‘Self-Aid Buddy Care’ to the rescue,” one crew member said. “I forget, how do you treat a sucking chest wound?” said another.

Soon, however, the crew in Nevada and the screeners in Florida realized something was wrong. At 9:15 a.m., the Predator crew noticed three survivors in brightly colored clothing waving at the helicopters. They were trying to surrender. “What are those?” asked the camera operator. “Women and children,” the Predator’s mission intelligence coordinator answered. “Younger than an adolescent to me,” the camera operator said.

U.S. and Afghan forces reached the scene two and a half hours after the attack to provide medical assistance. Medevac helicopters began taking the wounded to a hospital in Tarin Kowt, in Oruzgan. By the U.S. count, 15 or 16 men were killed and 12 people were wounded, including a woman and three children. Elders from the Afghans’ home villages said in interviews that 23 had been killed, including two boys, Daoud, 3, and Murtaza, 4.

That evening, Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, then the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, went to the presidential palace in Kabul to apologize to President Hamid Karzai. Two days later, he went on Afghan television and promised “a thorough investigation to prevent this from happening again.”

In separate investigations, the Army and the Air Force reached similar conclusions. The military has taken steps to address the problems it identified, but no member of the operation faced court-martial.

Several weeks after the attack, American officers traveled to the villages to apologize to survivors and the victims’ families. They gave each survivor 140,000 Afghanis, or about $2,900. Families of the dead received $4,800.

By David S. Cloud. ©2011 by the Los Angeles Times

Don't Negotiate Over The Heads Of The Afghan People




Many Afghans are loath to see the return of the Taliban, especially women. Life has never been easy for Afghan women, but it has never been worse for them than it was under the Taliban.
April 22, 2011
By Muhammad Tahir
Everywhere you turn, it seems, someone is talking about talking with the Taliban.

The Europeans have been in favor of the negotiating with the Taliban for years. Now Washington has jumped on the bandwagon.

And it's not just U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who recently gave a much-noted speech about the impossibility of winning the war in Afghanistan by military means alone. She's supported in that by David Petraeus, who commands U.S. and international forces in the country, and other U.S. generals. The Obama administration recently approved $50 million in support of Afghan government efforts to "reintegrate" the Taliban into society.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who has long pushed the cause of "reconciliation" with the insurgents, must be pleased. But what about other Afghans?

Certainly not Malalai Joya. She is a former member of the Afghan parliament whose membership was suspended in 2007 for criticizing the presence of warlords, warlord-supported politicians, and the Taliban in parliament. She accused them all of past human rights abuses.

This is what she had to say about possible negotiations with the Taliban

"What kind of negotiations they are talking about?" she asked during a recent appearance on the U.S. radio and TV news program "Democracy Now." "The people want all those killers to be brought to criminal courts for the war crimes they have committed."

She also took issue with Washington's conciliatory stance towards the Taliban. "The U.S. government tells its own justice-loving people and the rest of the world [that] we are negotiating with a moderate Talib," Joya said. "We have no moderate Talib. How can they recognize whether one terrorist is moderate and another isn't moderate?"

Not Speaking For All Pashtuns

Joya's opinion is significant not only because she represents the younger generation (she was born in Farah Province in 1978). It is also worth listening to because she is a Pashtun.


Malalai Joya would like to see the militants prosecuted for human rights abuses.
Public opinion in the West tends to think of the Taliban as a group that represents the majority views of Afghanistan's ethnic Pashtuns. And the fact that the majority of the Pashtuns in parliament supports negotiations with the militants would seem to support this. But Joya's position shows that it's not that simple.

All figures on the ethnic makeup of Afghans have to be taken with a grain of salt. Most counts agree that the Pashtun, who probably account for a bit less than half of the population, represent a plurality of Afghans. Still, it is extremely hard to tell how many of them support reconciliation with the Taliban and how many think like Joya.

And even if the majority of the country's Pashtuns support the idea of talking with the insurgents, that still leaves many questions unanswered. The reason is that many other ethnic groups have bad memories of Taliban rule.

Tajik Resistance...

The country's second-largest ethnic group is the Tajiks, who make up somewhere from 25 percent to 40 percent of the population. It was the Tajiks who formed the core of the group that resisted the Taliban regime right up until its end in 2001. The Panjshir Valley, a Tajik heartland that was surrounded by the Taliban for years, never gave up.

The Tajiks are highly unlikely to forget the killing of their legendary leader, Ahmad Shah Masud, at the hands of Al-Qaeda terrorists allied with the Taliban in 2001. Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri targeted Masud precisely to make life easier for their Taliban allies, who have never expressed a word of regret for the assassination.

"There is no way the Tajiks would sit down with the Taliban," says Ahmad Zia Masud, the brother of the slain Tajik guerilla leader. "It's a grave mistake that the West is supporting these so-called negotiations."

In one of his recent speeches Masud assailed "international efforts" to bring the "weak and corrupt government" of President Karzai "together with a fundamentalist group."

Nor is Masud speaking from the perspective of a resentful outsider. That he served for years as a vice president of Afghanistan in Karzai's own administration gives his views additional weight.

...And Hazara, Uzbek Fears

The Hazaras, Afghanistan's third-largest group, are extremely frightened by the idea of the Taliban returning to the government. This should come as little surprise considering the extent to which they suffered under Taliban rule.


Afghanistan's Tajiks have not fogotten the assassination of Ahmad Shah Masud.
Hazara leaders say some 15,000 of their people were killed by forces loyal to the Taliban regime. On April 7, 2002, UN investigators reported finding evidence of three mass graves near the central Afghan city of Bamiyan. The remains are believed to belong to ethnic Hazaras killed by the Taliban during their last month in power.

The Taliban targeted them out of a combination of traditional disdain for the group, who are regarded by many Afghans as inferior, and contempt for the Shi'ite beliefs held by many Hazaras.

Even now Hazaras recall those events as if they had happened yesterday.

Speaking to Agence France Presse on March 20, Ibrahim, a villager in Bamiyan Province, described one of these events. "The Taliban lined us up in two rows and started shooting us one by one," he said. In another AFP report, Hazara villager Syed Zia described the Taliban organization as "the worst creature on earth."

The Uzbeks, Afghanistan's fourth-largest group, have similar tales to tell. They have fought several brutal wars with Taliban militants, and in 1998 the Taliban killed thousands of them during an advance on the Uzbek-dominated city of Mazar-e Sharif.

To be sure, the Uzbeks responded with comparable brutality once their forces regained the upper hand. In 2001 there were stories of Taliban prisoners massacred by Uzbek commander General Rashid Dostum's men. The prisoners were locked in shipping containers and left to die in the hot desert sun. Controversy over the incident still rages.

More Than Reconciliation Needed

But it is precisely the complexity of this bloody history that makes it unlikely that genuine peace can be achieved without genuine reconciliation. And genuine reconciliation cannot be achieved by fiat. Nor can it be achieved by pretending that all is well, or that everything will be great if everyone simply agrees to move ahead and forget about the past. You can only avoid mistakes in the future by honestly confronting what has happened.

That applies in particular to the women of Afghanistan. It's no secret that, under the Taliban government, women were completely isolated from public life and deprived of basic rights, such as access to education. Contrary to widespread popular belief in the West, this was not the traditional way of doing things in Afghanistan.

Life has never been easy for Afghan women, but it has never been worse for them than it was under the Taliban. The Taliban regime transformed the parts of the country under its control into an open jail for women, a place where female Afghans were periodically brutalized in the name of justice.

So when President Karzai says that his nation supports negotiations with the Taliban, one is entitled to ask: Which nation does he have in mind?

Even if one can claims that the president received a clear mandate from the public during the last election -- a claim undermined by the number of independent assessments that disputed its fairness -- that is still no excuse for depriving the country's ethnic groups of a direct voice in the peace process. The question of power-sharing with the Taliban is far too important to be left to Karzai alone.

A genuine and sustainable peace process must include a formal mechanism to ensure that everyone's concerns are properly addressed. The best forum would be a conference sponsored by the international community -- perhaps one reminiscent of the Bonn Conference in 2001 that brought the interim government to power after the fall of the Taliban.

At the same time, it should be clearly stated that no real reconciliation can take place without a truth-finding process to clarify the nature of crimes against humanity committed both by the Taliban and its opponents during the long years of internal Afghan conflict.

This does not necessarily have to lead to criminal prosecutions. That would undoubtedly complicate the efforts to find a lasting peace in Afghanistan. The experience of post-apartheid South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission offers a fitting example of the sort of process Afghanistan needs. The Karzai government is fond of referring to "reconciliation" but less eager to talk about the "truth" component of the equation. But lasting peace cannot happen without both.

It is understandable that Karzai wants to prove his leadership. It is equally understandable that the international community wants to leave Afghanistan in secure hands when foreign troops are withdrawn.

But the risks are great. By leaving the process up to the Karzai government at the exclusion of the broader concerns of the Afghan people, leaders in the West run the peril of squandering everything that has been achieved at the cost of vast amounts of blood and treasure. Comparable mistakes have been made in Afghanistan in the past, to the detriment of both Afghans and the world. Let's not make them again.

Muhammad Tahir is a Washington correspondent for RFE/RL and former correspondent of the IHA Turkish News Agency in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of RFE/RL

Source,

http://www.rferl.org/content/commentary_dont_negotiate_over_heads_of_afghan_people/9502595.html

Thursday, April 21, 2011

Rioters Set Fire to Australian Detention Center

By AP / KRISTEN GELINEAU Thursday, Apr. 21, 2011

(SYDNEY, Australia) — Rioters at an Australian immigration detention center set fire to several buildings, climbed onto rooftops and hurled tiles at officials who were scrambling on Thursday to bring the chaotic protest to an end.
Up to 100 people being held at Sydney's Villawood Detention Center were involved in the riots, which began Wednesday night when two detainees climbed onto a roof, immigration officials said.

Protesters set an oxygen cylinder alight, which led to an explosion, and nine buildings — including a medical center and dining hall — were gutted by fire. Firefighters brought the blaze under control early Thursday and no one was injured.
Around 400 people are held at Villawood. Many of them are asylum seekers, but the facility also houses people who have overstayed their visas.
On Thursday, seven detainees remained on the roof of one of the complex's buildings, next to a large sign that read: "We need help."
Immigration department spokesman Sandi Logan said he could not confirm reports the men were protesting because their visa applications had been rejected.
"But any suggestion that they're not being informed of the progress of their claim is nonsense. ... I don't know the motivation," Logan said. "But it's clearly not going to help, in terms of endearing their settlement in Australia."
Logan said officials would not negotiate with the protesters until they came down off the roof. Criminal charges could be filed against the rioters, some of whom threw roof tiles and pieces of furniture at officials trying to get the blaze under control, Logan said.

"This is obviously unacceptable behavior that will have to be investigated," Acting Prime Minister Wayne Swan said.
Mohamed Alameddine, who lives across the street from the facility, said he heard a massive bang as the oxygen cylinder exploded, and the screaming and shouting of protesters and the riot squad.
"It was just like black fumes going up the sky. Buildings — one after one — they just went down," Alameddine, 17, told The Associated Press. "You could see the riot squad in there — everyone was just going crazy."
Australia has seen a surge of asylum seekers fleeing Sri Lanka, Iraq and Afghanistan, and protests at detention centers have become relatively common. The influx has led to a heated political debate as opposition politicians blame the flow on a relaxation of immigration policies by the ruling Labor Party.


Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2066629,00.html#ixzz1KAMT8Woe