The deaths of six Afghan border guards has become the latest indicator of worsening security in the northern Afghan provinces abutting Tajikistan, AP reports.
Police official Abdul Rahman Aqtash said Sunday that militants attacked a checkpoint overnight in Kunduz province near Tajikistan, killing six border police. He said the death toll could rise.
The Ministry of Interior says militants also killed a district chief in Kunduz by remotely detonating a roadside bomb as his car passed.
The ministry says five more police were killed by a roadside bomb in northeastern Badakshan province.
Over the past two years, Taliban-linked rebels have engaged in increasingly brazen attacks in northern Afghanistan, on the northbound drug route via Central Asia to Russia.
The notion that the Northern Distribution Network will turn in to a "modern Silk Road" appears to be gaining momentum among U.S. policymakers. First General Petraeus is behind it, now top State Department officials, like Robert Blake, the assistant secretary for South and Central Asian affairs, are talking it up:
Uzbekistan is already playing a vital role in international efforts to confront violent extremists in Afghanistan. It has provided much-needed electricity to Afghanistan, undertaken infrastructure projects in Afghanistan such as the rail line to Mazar-e-Sharif, and facilitated the transport of non-lethal supplies into Afghanistan via the Northern Distribution Network.
Indeed the Northern Distribution Network has the potential to improve transportation infrastructure and stimulate trade routes connecting Central Asia to the growing markets of South Asia, which would have a lasting economic benefit.
Uzbekistan weathered the global economic downturn well and continues to have solid economic growth. Uzbekistan grew by 9% in 2008 and 8.1% in 2009. Since Uzbekistan's independence, U.S. firms have invested roughly 500 million U.S. dollars in Uzbekistan. And I believe there is room for much more.
Might the Northern Distribution Network -- the transport of U.S. and NATO military goods through Central Asia en route to Afghanistan -- blossom into a "modern Silk Road" that brings prosperity and stability to Central Asia? It's a theory that is either far-reaching and visionary, or completely unrealistic and possibly dangerous, depending on your point of view. But according to the National Journal (via Steve LeVine) the idea has gone, in a few short months, from think tank project to apparent approval by the new commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus:
CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus wants to explore an ambitious regional development strategy aiming to turn Afghanistan from an economic backwater into a hub for trans-Eurasian trade, according to three of his civilian advisers....
"There's a tremendous amount of synergy here," said Petraeus' deputy political adviser, Lewis Elbinger, a State Department foreign service officer on loan to Central Command. "We should get the whole of [the] U.S. government to align behind this project, [and] we're working with our friends on the Afghan side." Elbinger added that he hoped the two governments would announce the plan as official policy at a Kabul conference on July 20.
Hairaton, Afghanistan government officials and commercial transportation representatives meet with U.S. military leadership in Marchto discuss current and future logistics processes.
The railway connecting the Afghanistan-Uzbekistan border with Mazar-e-Sharif has been launched, according to an ISAF press release:
KABUL, Afghanistan – Construction of the railway line between Mazar-e Sharif, Afghanistan, and Termez, Uzbekistan, was officially launched in the Afghan border town of Hairatan, Tuesday....
The 75-kilometer line will run mainly through uninhabited areas, with three railway stations and several other stops along the way. Millions of tons of goods are expected to be transported benefiting up to five million people.
The $165 million project is being constructed by Uzbekistan's state rail company and is funded by the Asian Development Bank.
This area, recall, is where Pentagon officials say the largest bottleneck on the U.S. military's Northern Distribution Network is located. The ISAF press release doesn't give any projected date of completion of the railroad, but at the end of 2009, Pentagon officials said the railroad would take "12 to 18 months."
That would put the completion of the railroad some time in the first six months of 2011 -- just in time, it would seem, for it to start shipping U.S. equipment out of Afghanistan.
Russia has recently been complaining about the U.S. and NATO's failure to stem poppy farming in Afghanistan, which fuels a growing heroin problem in Russia. The Christian Science Monitor looks at the issue, and suggests that the problem, if unchecked, may prompt future Russian intervention into the Central Asian republics:
In recent years, Russia and NATO have run a school for Afghan antidrug police in the Moscow-region town of Domodedovo, turning out hundreds of graduates. But despite that cooperation, experts say Moscow is increasingly dubious about NATO's ability to impose order in Afghanistan, and may be seeking ways to expand its influence in Central Asia against the day the United States decides to leave. Some analysts suggest that the Kremlin's recent backing of a coup in Kyrgyzstan could be a sign of more assertive behavior to come.
"The former Soviet states of central Asia are our own backyard," says Tatiana Parkhalina, director of the independent Center for European Security in Moscow. "Moscow doesn't want to stand by while the Taliban and terrorist networks convert the financial resources from drug trafficking into arms and political influence... There is a practical alliance taking shape between drug traffickers and terrorists, and it is a very big threat...."
But a few Russian experts say the Kremlin is hyping the drug issue as a pretext for becoming more assertive in Central Asia.
Could the fastest way to Washington's heart lead through its stomach? After a recent cool-down in US-Azerbaijani ties, US Chargé d’Affaires in Azerbaijan Donald Lu announced on May 14 that the US plans to buy food supplies -- along with building materials and other non-military equipment -- for its Afghanistan campaign from Azerbaijan, Azerbaijani news services reported.
"We believe that Azerbaijan has quality products for sale . . . " an upbeat Lu told participants at a US-Azerbaijan security seminar in Baku. "Quality" searches for other products are apparently planned for Georgia and Armenia as well.
The scale of the American purchases in Azerbaijan will depend on the quality of the products, commented one US foreign policy advisor.
RFE/RL held a small press conference in Washington yesterday with Waheed Omer, Hamid Karzai's spokesman, and a representative from Freedom House. The official theme of the event was press freedom, and a discussion of Freedom House's new report that called Afghanistan's press "not free." But of course -- as anyone could have predicted -- the journalists who showed up were more interested in the visit of Karzai to Washington this week than (with all due respect to the fine people at Freedom House) a report on the Afghan media environment.
But when Omer had finished his defense of the state of press freedom in Afghanistan -- he argued that the country should not be judged by global standards, but in terms of how much progress it has made in the last ten years -- and it was the journalists' turn to ask questions, Omer clearly got flustered by the reporters' insistence on asking about Karzai's visit, such as what the Afghans hopes to bring up with the Americans. He protested (pdf):
"[T}hat is when you use freedom of expression in the wrong way because I was not prepared for this question."
The irony was not lost on the assembled reporters, several of whom responded "Freedom of the press! Free speech!" One suspects most reporters left with a distinct impression of the Afghan government's attitude to the press, and it wasn't the one Omer wanted.
Permanent Mission of Russia to NATO official photo
Dmitry Rogozin
In December, NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen asked Russia to provide helicopters for the anti-Taliban effort in Afghanistan. This week, Russia's NATO ambassador Dmitry Rogozin said they would do so -- but with a catch: NATO countries would have to "allow" Russia to sell weapons to them:
“We are seeking an opportunity for the Russian defense industry to trade its products within the alliance's member states. We will earn money and they will acquire reliable quality weapons....
Today we are considering a possible Mistral deal with France and saying how wonderful all this is. My question is the following: Why can we buy helicopter carriers from France, but we are not allowed to sell helicopters to countries like France?"
There is nothing legal preventing Russia from selling weapons to NATO countries. I asked Paul Holtom,
director of the Arms Transfers Programme at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), about this and he sent me a list of several Russian sales over the last decade to NATO members, mainly former Warsaw Pact countries like the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland, but also Greece, Turkey and even the UK.
So what is preventing Russia from selling to NATO members? There are obviously political reasons, as well as interoperability issues. But another cause might be that even Russian officials criticize the offerings of the Russian defense industry. This is apparently what happened in the case of Greece, according to the Russia Defense Policy blog:
Plenty of food for thought here, from the Washington Post's Spy Talk blog, via Intelligence Online:
[A] top Chinese general recently made an offer to Afghan President Hamid [Karzai] to train his army and security services “after NATO’s withdrawal.”
General Ma Xiaotian, deputy head of the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army, “recently met Karzai to convince him that China would help him to form his new army and security services after NATO’s withdrawal...”
The obvious conclusion to draw -- if the report is true -- is that China is thinking longer-term than the U.S., and is circling, like a vulture, waiting for the western effort in Afghanistan to die so that it can swoop in. Usually this is thought to be an economic strategy, as in the huge deal the Chinese signed for the copper mine in Afghanistan. That China might be trying to expand its military influence, as well, will set off all sorts of alarm bells. But one analyst thinks that China may actually be trying to learn as much as teach:
John Lee, author of Will China Fail?, told me he's spoken to senior officers of the People's Liberation Army and People's Armed Police about the effort.
"Behind closed doors, both the PLA and PAP are worried about what they perceive to be their lack of ‘field experience’ in combating serious, coordinated insurgencies – they feel that their procedures, operational effectiveness, logistical capacity, etc., are ‘untested’," said Lee, foreign-policy fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney.
Jan Agha, a baker in Taloqan, Takhar, Northern Afghanistan
This wonderful image of a young Afghan baker was a recent winner in an ongoing photo contest that being run by Istanbul Eats (you can find a larger version of the photo here).
The photographer, Chris Strickland, is currently working in Afghanistan with The HALO Trust, which is removing mines and unexploded ordinances in the north of the country.
I wrote Chris asking him to provide more details about the baker and the photo. This is what he said:
The Photograph was taken in Taloqan, Takhar, Northern Afghanistan. The baker is called Jan Agha and is a 22 year old Tajik from Taloqan.
In a country where many still rely on subsistence farming to survive, bread is the main part of the Afghan staple diet and is a part of every meal. Afghanistan's agriculture is predominantly rain-fed 'lalmi' land and the main crop is wheat. A good winter and spring rainfall is essential for a good harvest which in turn keeps food prices for essentials such as bread at an affordable level.
I was drawn to the bakery because it was actually a dark uninviting room, but I could smell the bread and hear the activity, and as a curious photographer, I naturally popped my head in. I was then of course presented with an inviting bakers oven and there was a lovely shaft of light coming through from a vent in the roof.
Afghans being Afghans bought me some tea and a chair, and I hung around for half an hour or so, and just before I left I took this image.
The patterns on the bread, the cloak about to be placed to protect the bread, and of course the light bringing it all to life.
