Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: In Afghanistan, Violence Stalls Renewal Effort

 
In Afghanistan, Violence Stalls Renewal Effort
By CARLOTTA GALL
ABUL, Afghanistan, April 25 — In the middle of the main road between
Kabul and Kandahar lie two bombed-out, rusted fuel trucks, destroyed in
American strikes in October 2001. That no one — not the Americans, nor
international aid workers, nor Afghans themselves — has dragged them out
of the way shows how little has been done to mend Afghanistan since the
2001 war, despite promises of copious foreign assistance.
In a very real sense, the war here has not ended — as shown by an attack
today that killed two American soldiers and by a planned visit on Sunday
from Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. Nearly every day, there are
killings, explosions, shootings and targeted attacks on foreign aid
workers, Afghan officials, and American forces, as well as continuing
feuding between warlords in the regions.
No clear picture exists of who will provide the security to stop the
bloodshed: the government of President Hamid Karzai, which still has no
national army or police force; or the international force of 5,000
peacekeepers here in the capital; or the 11,500 Americans, Romanians and
other foreign soldiers still in the provinces hunting for the Taliban
and Al Qaeda.
For months now, the American military here has talked of moving into
"Phase Four," which would mean winding down combat activities and
entering a period of reconstruction. Yet the military is still mounting
large-scale combat operations in the pursuit of armed groups of rebels
in mountain hideouts, and turning villages upside down in a search for
suspects and weapons that is making the foreign presence ever more
unpopular with Afghans.
In southern and eastern Afghanistan, the exiled Taliban movement has
been resurgent since December. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a renegade
mujahedeen commander and former American ally, has called for a holy war
against "occupying forces."
The attack today, which killed an American soldier near a Special Forces
base close to Shkin in eastern Afghanistan, was particularly brazen.
About 20 rebels opened fire on a platoon of American and Afghan soldiers
in broad daylight, wounding at least six other soldiers before
retreating across the border to Pakistan, as many attackers have in
recent weeks. A second American soldier later died of wounds from the
battle, Reuters reported.
Cross-border violence has risen so much that President Karzai,
apparently with the backing of the United States, took the unusual step
this week of naming the fugitive Taliban leaders he wants Pakistan to
hand over to his government in Kabul.
His administration appears equally hamstrung, however, when it comes to
reducing the power of the warlords, who often put personal interest
before national unity, but who have been virtually the only source of
security for ordinary Afghans, who have been looking for safety and some
form of economic subsistence since Afghanistan began to fall into chaos
more than two decades ago, during the Soviet invasion in 1979.
Fixing the Kabul-Kandahar road, one of the main arteries of the country,
has been a priority of the Karzai government. It is part of the
American-led $180 million plan to repair main roads and provide hundreds
of jobs. Yet now, in the second year of reconstruction, there is no sign
of any work being done all along this 300 miles of ruts and holes.
American soldiers at their headquarters at Bagram Air Base, near Kabul,
share many of the apprehensions of the Afghan public — despite their
public, official optimism on their ability to secure both Afghanistan
and Iraq. "I don't feel comfortable watching us start on another war
when this remains unfinished," one soldier at Bagram said recently,
insisting on anonymity. "It would have been better if we could have
moved into Phase Four before they started in Iraq."
After their grueling hikes through the Afghan mountains, American troops
often head back to base with little to show for their effort. The
international coalition here regularly announces that weapons caches
have been seized and destroyed, but there have been few important
arrests made, and no pause in attacks on American bases and Afghan
government posts and personnel
A recent two-week operation with 500 Special Forces and airborne
infantry troops in the Baghran Valley in the southern province of
Helmand failed to net its main prey — Abdul Waheed, the local chief of
Baghran, and another former Taliban commander, Mullah Kabir. Both men
got away, and Mr. Waheed later told friends that he had made it to the
safety of Quetta in Pakistan, an American official said.
The continuing airborne assaults and rough searches are angering Afghan
villagers, especially when fatal errors are made. One of those, an
airstrike that was meant for a group of rebels but that hit a house in
eastern Afghanistan this month, killed 11 members of a family as they
slept. The bombing occurred near Shkin, where today's attack happened
and where the first signs of renewed rebel activity emerged last Dec.
21, when an American soldier on patrol was shot dead.
The recent operation in Helmand left one shepherd dead and five people
injured, three of them children. A trail of houses was trashed and
looted; other families wept to see their male breadwinners detained.
The popularity of the American presence was also not increased by the
deaths of two men among a group of Afghans arrested and held for
interrogation at Bagram Air Base in December.
Small boys make obscene gestures at American troops as they pass by
villages in Khost Province, and villagers complain that the Americans
are arresting the wrong people, often because they are misled by the
local militias working with them who hunt down personal enemies.
A former mujahedeen commander, Hajji Spin Bacha Zadran, 60, who was held
for a month in the Bagram detention center last fall, said he told his
captors they were encouraging animosity among Afghans.
"I told them they should not arrest innocent people and they should try
to be close to the people and should not make the people angry, because
already now the people do not like them because they are arresting
innocent people," he said in an interview at his home in the eastern
town of Khost.
In a tea house in Khost, where scores of arrests have been made over the
past months, residents listened keenly to a conversation about the
American presence in Afghanistan.
One speaker praised the Americans because, he said, they have prevented
Afghan militias' feuding. But the room fell into an appalled silence
when it was suggested that American forces would stay for as long as a
decade. "Oh my God!" muttered one man, turning his back on the speaker
in disgust.
"There is a widening gap between the Afghan people and the Americans,"
warned a senior government official on his return from the eastern
border regions.
American officials say the military has learned the bitter lessons of
working too closely with any one clan or tribe, often ending up being
used to further local vendettas. But their critics say they are not
moving fast enough to cut ties with troublemakers.
The American commander in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Daniel K. McNeill, has
stressed the importance of treating villagers with respect and of
rebuilding and bringing in aid after combat operations, his top
commander in southern Afghanistan, Lt. Col. John Campbell, said in a
recent interview. But it does not always work.
"We will not be angry if they help us and do not bother us," said Pai
Muhammad, a villager in the Baghran Valley. "Up until now, I have not
become angry, but then they have not killed anyone in my family." But
the villagers of Lejay were so embittered after Special Forces spent 10
days in their village, conducting searches and making arrests, that they
wrote an open letter to the United Nations mission in Afghanistan.
"The Americans searched our province," the letter reads in part. "They
did not find Mullah Omar, they did not find Osama bin Laden, and they
did not find any Taliban. They arrested old men, drivers, and
shopkeepers, and they injured women and children."
These villagers said they did not see any of the aid that United States
forces said they would airlift into the region.
The escalating violence has also slowed reconstruction. A series of
attacks on nongovernmental agencies culminated in the killing of an
expatriate Red Cross worker in Kandahar last month, prompting most
agencies to scale back their work in the most needy south and
southeastern regions.
"Thousands of people are going to suffer from this," said one aid worker
as he prepared to pull his team of four foreign workers out of refugee
camps in the south.
Already frustrated last year by the slowness of reconstruction and the
failure of aid organizations to reach the more remote areas, the
American military decided last fall to use military civil affairs teams
to take reconstruction efforts to the turbulent regions.
The idea is to position civil affairs personnel backed up by Special
Forces for security — groups of up to 60 or even 100 people — in as many
as 10 places around Afghanistan. The teams have a total of $12 million
for projects they oversee, and they hire local contractors to do the
building.
In Kabul, foreign diplomats have welcomed the idea of a larger military
presence in the regions, particularly because no country is prepared to
expand the 5,000-member international peacekeeping force in the capital
out to the border regions.
But the plan was immediately criticized by relief groups. The United
Nations gently pointed out that it was responsible for coordinating aid,
and the nongovernmental aid agencies expressed alarm about becoming
associated with the military, suggesting that the soldiers stick to the
bigger projects — roads, bridges, government buildings — that aid groups
cannot manage.
In the end, some aid officials say, the teams will fail because they are
neither one thing nor another.
"They are undermanned, underresourced and are focusing on the wrong
areas," said Paul O'Brien of CARE International, the American-based aid
group, which has long experience in Afghanistan.
Most aid agencies, and many Afghans around the country, would like
foreign troops to disarm the private militias, reduce continuing robbery
and extortion, and curb the power of the warlords, Mr. O'Brien said.
But the military teams are concentrating on small-scale projects —
building schools, or even just providing desks and latrines for them —
while the larger issues of disarmament and peacekeeping are left
unfinished, he said.
Rafael Robillard, the director of a coordinating body of international
aid agencies in Kabul, summed up the frustration of many aid workers. "I
was talking to one civil affairs guy, and we were looking at a
kindergarten the American military was building, and the soldier turned
to me and said, `Why aren't you guys doing anything about disarmament?'
I could not believe it. The military is building kindergartens, and they
are asking me, a civilian aid worker, to do disarmament! The world is
upside down."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/26/international/worldspecial/26AFGH.html?pagewanted=3
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the regions.
Cioe' criminalita' e faide tra signorotti locali. :)
-Stefano