Current Projects
Afghans Weigh In On US Presidential Candidates
The outcome of the US presidential election has a far-reaching impact, and in Afghanistan's capital, some have definite ideas about who they would like to see in office: Republican nominee Donald Trump or Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. This is the country where America's longest war has been playing out since 2001. It's where US drones and NATO air strikes kill al-Qaeda targets and civilians alike. It is also where a US troop withdrawal has resulted in increased Taliban attacks and rising civilian casualties. The choice between the candidates has left some puzzled - but then, there's a saying in these parts: When ones lives in the world of the blind, the man with one eye is king. Still, for Afghans, what Americans decide on the other side of the world could have life or death consequences. "Unfortunately, we seem lost in this election. Neither candidate seems to have a plan for Afghanistan," said Bashir Ahmad Qasani, who covers politics for Afghanistan's 1TV. "The American elections are quite important for us - and It's worrying for us. Why is it that for 14 or 15 years, their longest war, has been taking place here but is forgotten?" asked Qasani. He said the hope is that the Democrats stay in power, because at least under President Barack Obama, they have decided to delay total troop withdrawal and are supporting Afghan troops. "Trump, as a candidate, is fascinating for Afghans - he's unreal. I've never covered a candidate like him. And yet, with two or three days left to the elections, it seems that he's getting close to Clinton in polls and could be equal." The closeness of the race is making some nervous here, especially given some of Trump's statements on wanting to prevent Muslims from entering the US, or adding them to a watchlist. "What he's saying will be bad for Muslims in America and bad for Islam," said Dean Mohamad, 20, supervisor of a sporting goods store. Kabul social science major Ahmad Reza, 22, called Trump "hateful" and "dangerous", saying...
Afghanistan In Focus: EASO Publishes A Country of Origin Information Report On Security Situation In Afghanistan
Today, the European Asylum Support Office (EASO) published a Country of Origin Information (COI) Report entitled ‘Afghanistan security situation’. The report is a second update of the version first published in February 2015 and provides a comprehensive overview of the security situation in Afghanistan, information relevant for the protection status determination of Afghan asylum seekers. Until the end of September 2016, Afghanistan ranked 2nd in the top countries of origin in EU+ countries (1 ), with more than 153,000 applicants. In addition, the Afghan applications constitute the largest backlog of all countries of origin. By the end of September 2016, there were more than 230,000 pending asylum applications from Afghan nationals in the EU+. This COI report represents a second update on the security situation in Afghanistan (2). The report was co-drafted by researchers from the national asylum authorities of Austria, Belgium, France, Hungary and Poland in accordance with the EASO COI Report Methodology. Researchers from Greece and Slovakia did supportive research and the report was reviewed and commented upon by COI researchers from Austria, Canada, EASO, Finland, Ireland and UNHCR. The ‘Afghanistan security situation’ report provides a general description of the security situation in Afghanistan, covering the following topics: a brief historic overview; actors in the conflict; security trends and armed confrontations, description of tactics and arms used; state ability to secure law and order; impact of the violence on the civilian population; and the geographical overview of the security situation. The report also provides a description of the security situation for each of the 34 provinces and Kabul City. In these chapters, a general overview of the province is given, followed by a background on the conflict and actors in the province, and recent security trends including data on violent incidents, and qualitative information on the type of violence....
500,000 People Displaced Due To Recent Violence: UN
A new UN report indicates that nearly half a million Afghans have been displaced in the past ten months due to the recent surge in violence. The report illustrates that the majority of those displaced are from war-hit regions such as Kunduz, Uruzgan and Helmand provinces. In addition many are dealing with food shortages. The United Nations Assistance Mission (UNAMA) has said that 56 percent of those displaced are children and teenagers, 23 percent are men and 22 percent women. The majority of those displaced belong to Kunduz, Uruzgan, Helmand and Faryab provinces, the report stated. The conflict in Kunduz province has also largely contributed to this problem and many displaced residents from this northern province have sought refuge in Kabul city. Concerns have also been raised as winter fast approaches. "I don't have a husband and sought refuge in Kabul with my five children. (We been here) for forty days. We do not have food to eat or a house to live in; we are looking for a place to live. Everyday life becomes harder for us. I have come to the department of refugees for twenty days to ask for some help, but I get nothing," said one Kunduz resident, Benazir. "I was in class 9 in Kunduz before the war, but I was deprived of an education after coming to Kabul. We have no food to eat or place to live," said another displaced person from Kunduz, Baz Mohammad. "We have lived in a rented house for forty days and life is quite hard for us," another displaced resident, Kamila, said. "We accompanied three families from Kunduz and came here to Kabul," said another resident, Abdul Hai. In the meantime, government has been criticized over its inability to address the problems of these refugees "Internally displaced families do not have good living conditions; half of them have not been given aid; government's financial resources are also not enough to address the problems of the displaced families, (especially) before winter," sociologist Hadi Meeran said. The...
India’s Crackdown in Kashmir: Is This The World’s First Mass Blinding?
For the past month, while the attention of the world has been fixed on every dramatic twist in the US presidential election, the renewal of armed conflict between India and Pakistan has barely touched the headlines. In the past few weeks, the two nuclear states have, between them, killed two dozen civilians and injured scores of others in exchanges of artillery fire across the disputed border – known as the “line of control” – that divides Kashmir into parts controlled by India and Pakistan. The latest flare-up in the long-running war of attrition between the two countries comes on the heels of a bloody summer of protest and repression in Kashmir that has now been erased from memory by the banging of war drums in Delhi and Islamabad. Since July, when the killing of a young militant leader sparked a furious civilian uprising across the Kashmir valley, the Indian state has responded with singular ruthlessness, killing more than 90 people. Most shocking of all has been the breaking up of demonstrations with “non-lethal” pellet ammunition, which has blinded hundreds of Kashmiri civilians. In four months, 17,000 adults and children have been injured, nearly five thousand have been arrested, and an entire population spent the summer under the longest curfew in the history of curfews in Kashmir. All this has been quickly forgotten in the past two months. On 18 September, a small group of jihadi fighters, widely believed to have come from Pakistan, staged a commando raid on an Indian army camp near the northern Kashmir town of Uri, killing 19 Indian soldiers – the deadliest attack on Indian security forces in Kashmir in two decades. Indian politicians quickly blamed Pakistan, which the country’s home minister described as a “terrorist state”, while Pakistani leaders made the implausible claim that India had staged the attack itself to distract from the protests in Kashmir. The Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, who came into office promising to take a harder...
Afghanistan Can’t Win — Until Pakistan Falls in Line
The end of the Soviet war in Afghanistan began one improbably sunny November day, when many in Moscow had spilled out on to the city’s parks and embankments to enjoy the freakish 13ºC warmth. Inside the Kremlin, Sergei Akhromeyev, chief of the general staff of the Soviet armed forces, was speaking. “There is no single piece of land in this country which has not been occupied by the Soviet soldier,” the minutes of the November 13, 1986, meeting record him telling the Politburo. “And yet, the majority of the territory remains in the hands of rebels. There is no single military problem that has arisen that has not been solved, and yet there is no result.” Every problem, Akhromeyev went on, except one: “Fifty thousand Soviet soldiers are stationed to close off the border (with Pakistan), but they are not in a position to close off all passages.” His leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, had long seen the war in Afghanistan as a distraction from the big prize — a nuclear arms-reduction deal with the United States. He had no interest in cracking Akhromeyev’s Pakistan problem: “In the course of two years, effect the withdrawal of our troops from Afghanistan.” No one voted against. Thirty years on, the world is learning this grim lesson: the war in Afghanistan will not, and cannot, be won until the “problem” is solved. The United States military estimates insurgents control or influence 33 of the country’s 407 districts, to the government’s 208, the rest being contested. Independent estimates by The Long War Journal’s Bill Roggio are bleaker, giving the Taliban 97 districts, up from 70 a year ago. Fatalities are reported to have crossed over 1,700 in the first six months of this year, an uptick of 15% from 2015 — levels no military can endlessly sustain. Last week, after Taliban assaults that almost claimed the town of Lashkar Gah and succeeded in briefly taking Kunduz, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani lashed out at his own commanders for failures in delivering...
How to Rig an Election
It’s almost over. Will we heave a sigh of relief, or shriek in horror? Nobody knows for sure, although early indications clearly lean Clinton. Whatever happens, however, let’s be clear: this was, in fact, a rigged election. The election was rigged by state governments that did all they could to prevent nonwhite Americans from voting: The spirit of Jim Crow is very much alive — or maybe translate that to Diego Cuervo, now that Latinos have joined African-Americans as targets. Voter ID laws, rationalized by demonstrably fake concerns about election fraud, were used to disenfranchise thousands; others were discouraged by a systematic effort to make voting hard, by closing polling places in areas with large minority populations. The election was rigged by Russian intelligence, which was almost surely behind the hacking of Democratic emails, which WikiLeaks then released with great fanfare. Nothing truly scandalous emerged, but the Russians judged, correctly, that the news media would hype the revelation that major party figures are human beings, and that politicians engage in politics, as somehow damning. The election was rigged by James Comey, the director of the F.B.I. His job is to police crime — but instead he used his position to spread innuendo and influence the election. Was he deliberately putting a thumb on the electoral scales, or was he simply bullied by Republican operatives? It doesn’t matter: He abused his office, shamefully. The election was also rigged by people within the F.B.I. — people who clearly felt that under Mr. Comey they had a free hand to indulge their political preferences. In the final days of the campaign, pro-Trump agents have clearly been talking nonstop to Republicans like Rudy Giuliani and right-wing media, putting claims and allegations that may or may not have anything to do with reality into the air. The agency clearly needs a major housecleaning: Having an important part of our national security apparatus trying to subvert...
Sharbat Gula: Lessons for Pakistan
For nearly 15 days, the world media rang with the ‘injustice’ that Pakistan was meting out to the National Geographic famed ‘Afghan Girl’ Sharbat Gula. Most of media pounced upon the news of her arrest, the subsequent imprisonment for 15 days and the imminent deportation. Once again, they had found a reason to run down Pakistan’s image. The entire reporting was premised on emotions — not on the rule of law — and the fame that the ‘green-eyed Afghan Girl’ had won when she made it to the title of National Geographic in 1985. Nobody was interested in the ‘illegality’ involved in her registration documents. Neither did most of the foreign media mention that relatives present at the given address had refused to recognise two persons listed as her sons in the form. Nor did she avail the first 2006 census of the Afghan refugees that culminated in the issuance of a Proof of Registration (PoR) cards to all Afghans, enabling them to stay in Pakistan legitimately. Even the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) official refused to help Ms Gula, saying they could have helped had she been arrested under the Foreign Act and if she was a registered refugee. But digging into the truth did not make a good story. True, with so many years spent in Pakistan and with at least one kid, she deserved compassion and consideration, and the permission to stay on in Pakistan. That is why we — as members of the civil society — lobbied against her deportation. We requested Imran Khan for intervention. He instantly responded and requested the K-P government via twitter and then in personal meetings to request the federal government to deal with Sharbat Gula’s — a patient of hepatitis C — case on humanitarian and medical grounds. The advocate general, too, approached the federal government with suggestions on how to prevent Gula’s deportation. But, on November 7, in an application to the K-P government, Sharbat Gula pleaded she would like to return to Afghanistan, turning down K-P...
Pakistan, China Ink MoU to Eradicate Corruption
National Accountability Bureau (NAB) Chairman Qamar Zaman Chaudhry and Chinese Minister of Supervision and Inspection Huang Shuxian Tuesday signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) for cooperation on matters carried with efforts to weed out corruption. Qamar Zaman Chaudhry, who is on an official visit to China, said signing of the MoU between Pakistan and China was specially significant in backdrop of increasing bilateral economic and trade cooperation with resolve by both the governments to work in a fair, impartial and corruption free environment and share their experiences to eradicate corruption. He said China was Pakistan’s true friend and long-standing ties between the two countries had mutually supportive. The cooperation between the two friendly countries in anti-corruption work would be further enhanced, he added. This article originally appeared on www.app.com.pk , 08 November, 2016. Original link. Disclaimer: Views expressed in the article are not necessarily supported by CRSS.
The Ultimate AfPak Reading List
Afghanistan: The Soviet Invasion, 1979-1989 & the Rise of the Taliban, 1994-2001 Barfield, Thomas. Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). AfPak Channel review by Gerard Russell: “a comprehensive but readable short history of Afghanistan, with a heavy focus on the last nine years.” Bradsher, Henry. Afghan Communism and Soviet Intervention. (London: Oxford University Press, 1999). Braithwaite, Rodric. Afghantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan, 1979-1989 (New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 2011) Crile, George. Charlie Wilson’s War, The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History. (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003). Feifer, Gregory. The Great Gamble: the Soviet War in Afghanistan (New York: Harper Collins, 2009). Kalinovsky, Artemy. A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011) Urban, Mark. War in Afghanistan. (London: Macmillan Press, 1988). Yousaf, Mohammad and Mark Adkin. Afghanistan — The Bear: The Defeat of a Superpower. (London: Leo Cooper, 1992). Afghanistan: Under the Taliban 1994-2001 & the Rise of the Religious Warriors and Their Al Qaeda Allies Books Dorronsoro, Gilles. Revolution Unending: Afghanistan, 1979 to Present. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). Dense, authoritative study. Gutman, Roy. How We Missed the Story: Osama bin Laden, the Taliban, and the Hijacking of Afghanistan (Washington, DC: USIP Press, 2008). Maley, William, ed. Fundamentalism Reborn? Afghanistan and the Taliban. (New York: New York University Press, 1998). Rashid, Ahmed. Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. (Paperback Edition) Zaeef, Abdul Salam. My Life with the Taliban. Edited by Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn. (NewYork: Hurst/Columbia University Press, 2010) Articles Cullison, Alan and Andrew Higgins. “Inside al Qaeda’s Afghan Turmoil.” Wall...
Pakistan Warns India Against Breach of Water Treaty
Islamabad has warned New Delhi that Pakistan will respond with full force if India shows open aggression by breaching the World Bank-sponsored Indus Waters Treaty (IWT). “India will be responded [to] if it shows aggression by unilaterally breaking the treaty,” Water and Power Secretary Younis Dagha told the Senate Standing Committee on Water and Power on Monday. The committee had met to reconsider the report regarding an adjournment motion moved in the upper house of parliament by Senator Sherry Rehman on September 27. Rehman had moved the motion in the backdrop of Indian threats to unilaterally revoke the IWT. The PPP senator had sought details about the possible repercussions of the move and Pakistan’s stance and preparedness to combat such a warlike situation. Talking with reference to the Indian threats, Dagha told the panel that there are some more conventions in place in addition to the IWT to safeguard Pakistan’s water rights. “If India shows aggression then there are some other options,” he added. “India cannot stop more water from Neelum River. It can stop water only temporarily for using it.” Dagha said the government had started work on the National Water Policy 2016 and consultations would be completed in the next one to two months. Later, the parliamentary panel formed a subcommittee, comprising members National Assembly, Water and Power Ministry officials and experts on water to review the IWT. Rehman expressed concerns over violation of the IWT and said Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi had threatened to end the treaty unilaterally. “According to a report of the Water and Power Development Authority (Wapda), India has no authority to break the IWT unilaterally,” she said, adding that India has taken advantage due to past mistakes of different governments in Pakistan. Rehman lamented that India built several dams on various rivers but Pakistan could do nothing to stop it. “India has built Kishanganga dam and Baglihar dam. Our Mangla dam will be...
TOP STORIES
TESTIMONIALS
“
I am also a member of National Assembly’s Standing Committee on Information and Broadcasting. Recently, we held a meeting with the Director General of Radio Pakistan and we told them to initiate such local programs (like Constituency Hour) in regional languages to educate and inform people. Even Indian Radio can be heard in FATA which is being used for propaganda purposes and must be closed. Therefore, we should launch some standard and quality programs like CRSS that will change the taste of the listeners.