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Afghan president Ashraf Ghani, centre, at Kabul peace conference on Tuesday. The attack last week was one of the deadliest since 2001. Photograph: Shah Marai/AFP/Getty Images

The death toll from the bombing outside Kabuls diplomatic quarter last week has climbed to 150 with more than 300 wounded, the Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani, has said at a peace conference in the city.

The revised number makes the attack one of the deadliest in Afghanistan since 2001. A week of violence and protests cast a shadow over Tuesdays long-planned meeting, named the Kabul Process. More than 20 countries took part, including some rivalling for covert influence in Afghanistan.

After the bombing on 31 May, hundreds of protesters demanded the resignation of government officials. The government helped fuel public anger when police fired into the crowds, killing nine.

On Saturday, three suicide bombers attacked the funeral of a senate deputy speaker who was killed at the protest. Nearly 20 people died, according to local media and people who attended the ceremony.

The one-day conference aimed to reboot peace talks and enlist neighbours in a regional fight against terrorism. Were fighting 20 transnational terrorist groups on your behalf, Ghani said. What we need is an agreement on regional security.

In front of an almost exclusively male gathering including representatives of Pakistan, India, Iran, Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, the US and various European countries, Ghani accused Pakistan of waging an undeclared war.

He scolded western countries for attempting to negotiate with the Taliban on their own. There are too many players running too many parallel tracks with too little clarity on who they are and what they represent, Ghani said. We also ask that you respect the integrity of an Afghan-owned and led consolidated process and not set up separate tracks of your own.

Ghani spoke in the midst of regional diplomatic upheaval. Tensions between arch-rivals India and Pakistan have run high since Pakistan sentenced an alleged Indian spy to death in April. In May, more than a dozen Pakistanis and Afghans were killed in clashes on the two countries border.

This week, five Gulf states severed ties with Qatar over accusations of supporting Islamist terrorists.

The last direct talks with the Taliban, Afghanistans main armed opposition group, broke down in 2015 after Taliban founder Mullah Omar was declared dead two years earlier.

The Taliban called the Kabul Process futile. Talks about peace during the presence of foreign invaders will not yield results and are meaningless, the group said in a statement.

The withdrawal of western troops from Afghanistan is a demand shared by Russia and several regional powers, which further complicates a political settlement.

The representatives of the countries who attended the conference have many differences. They dont see eye to eye on the regional security problems, the Taliban and Isis, said Javed Kohistani, a military analyst in Kabul. We have had several such conferences of peace in the past. The result has been a piece of paper, which has quickly been forgotten, he said.

Tuesdays conference did not include representatives of the Taliban.

Also absent, in a sign of growing rifts within the government, was Ghanis foreign minister, Salahuddin Rabbani, who last week demanded the resignation of the national security adviser Hanif Atmar.

For security purposes, the government called a national holiday to clear the streets. Jets and fighter helicopters crisscrossed the sky. As the conference was getting under way, rockets landed on the tennis court of the Indian ambassadors house.

Last weeks police killings of protesters have prompted new rallies, with activists camping out in three different locations in Kabul. They were shielded from the view of delegates driving to the conference by shipping containers planted to block main thoroughfares.

The government is stopping young people, stopping democracy, said Sharif Beena, a protester.

Nazanin Atashi, 23, a political science student who spoke at a rally a hundred metres from the truck bomb site, said: I came to raise my voice and tell the government and the people that I cant bear it any more. Atashi was the only woman in sight among about 100 protesters. Because of the violence on Friday, most women are afraid, she said.

Atashi was travelling from Bamiyan to Kabul on Friday during the protests. When we arrived, there was a war going on between the government and the people, she said.

While demonstrators encouraged the government to meet with regional powers, they said peace was unattainable as long as Afghanistan did not solve its internal problems.

The way to peace, said a protester, Ahmad Fahim Yousefi, was for the government to reconcile with the opposition and civil society.

The western city of Herat suffered a deadly bombing outside the citys great mosque on Tuesday. After 3pm prayers, a remote-controlled bomb in a motorcycle detonated, killing eight and injuring more than a dozen, said the governors spokesman, Jalani Farhad.

The rest is here:
Afghanistan holds peace conference amid violence and protests - The Guardian

Foreign Policy (blog)

Should this have been the American strategy in Afghanistan? Yes, I think so Foreign Policy (blog) I am not quite sure of what MacLean, a journalist who was an Marine infantry platoon leader in the Afghan war, means by recognition of Pakistan's lack of interest in a stable Afghanistan. I'll try to ask him. Photo credit: SGT. MATTHEW FREIRE/U.S. ...

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Should this have been the American strategy in Afghanistan? Yes, I think so - Foreign Policy (blog)

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Chances are, you heard plenty about the latest terrorist attacks in Britain. But the chances that you heard about the most recent attack in Afghanistan in which a suicide truck bomber set off his deadly payload in rush-hour traffic near the German embassy in Kabul are much lower. Why?

Perhaps its a natural consequence of news overload when it comes to terrorism. When such attacks become common, it takes a lot to cut through the headline clutter and make an impression. Or it could be because the war in Afghanistan has gone on for so long that were experiencing simple news fatigue about it.

Such fatigue can lead people to lose sight of why the United States is in that country in the first place, let alone why we should remain. Why Are We Still in Afghanistan? reads the headline of a June 5 CBS News commentary, while the one on a June 3 Washington Examiner flatly states: The U.S. Cant Fix Afghanistan, and It Should Stop Trying.

Part of the problem can surely be traced to shifting war aims, as defense expert Luke Coffey ably demonstrates in a June 1 article for The National Interest.

In the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, our aim was pretty straightforward: to deny al Qaeda a safe haven from which to launch terrorist attacks, and to remove the terrorist-harboring Taliban from power. Once that was accomplished, the focus morphed into nation-building and bringing democracy.

However laudable this may sound, though, a fundamental problem lurks: How do you measure success? And so, 16 years later, the question of why were there inevitably arises. Thousands of troops have been killed, Mr. Coffey notes, and nearly $1 trillion spent. Should we still be in Afghanistan?

In a word, yes. Although we can point to some concrete success the violence in Afghanistan is way down, and al Qaeda was indeed denied its safe haven we need to consider what author and military expert James Carafano calls the strategic consequence of failure. He points to three reasons the U.S. needs to be there.

One is that were currently waging a crucial fight to crush ISIS in the Middle East, a fight that is succeeding. The last thing we need at this juncture is to pull back from Afghanistan and yield new hunting grounds to embattled terrorist groups. We cant allow Afghanistan to revert to its pre-September 11 environment once again.

Second, we dont want to contribute to regional instability in Asia. Pulling back when things are particularly bad in two other critical hot spots, the Middle East and Western Europe, would be a serious mistake.

Third, a bigger terrorist presence in Afghanistan would ratchet up tensions between Pakistan and India, both of which possess nuclear weapons. Thats hardly a wise idea.

That doesnt mean were there to nation build.

According to Mr. Coffey: The goal in Afghanistan is to get the forces to a level where they can handle the insurgency themselves, without tens of thousands of Western troops on the ground. If the West continues to mentor, train, and fund the Afghan military, the Afghans will eventually be able to take on the insurgency themselves.

There are numerous smart and specific ways we can show our commitment to Afghanistan. One is to state very clearly that our goal is to keep America and our allies safe. This means a stable enough Afghanistan that can manage its own internal and external security.

Further, we need to keep NATO committed to Afghanistan, and press international partners to provide their fair share of funding for Afghan security forces. And if President Trump is going to increase the U.S. troop presence, we should encourage NATO countries to step up their troop contributions as well.

Weve worked hard in Afghanistan to make the world safer. Its time to build on our successes there and give the terrorists no quarter.

Ed Feulner is president of the Heritage Foundation (heritage.org).

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Giving terrorists no quarter - Washington Times

NEW YORK With the Syria crisis dominating headlines, few are paying attention to Americas longest war. In fact, the war in Afghanistan has hardly been mentioned in the early months of U.S. President Donald Trumps administration, despite the presence of two experienced military officers Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster in key positions. This must change.

After 15 years of failed intervention, the situation in Afghanistan is out of control. The unity government that emerged after the contested presidential election of 2014 is dysfunctional, and security conditions are rapidly deteriorating. Meanwhile, opium production is surging and Afghanistan now ranks second in the world in money laundering (after Iran). In Europe and elsewhere, inflows of Afghan refugees continue unabated.

The war in Afghanistan has exacted enormous costs. So far, fatalities include roughly 3,500 coalition soldiers (some 70 percent of which were U.S. troops), about the same number of contractors, and some 100,000 Afghans (including security forces, opposition fighters and civilians). Since 2002, the U.S. has spent over $780 billion on the war roughly equivalent to the entire U.S. foreign-affairs budget for more than two decades. Additional non-budgetary expenditure, including disability payments and compensation to the families of fallen soldiers, will add hundreds of billions more to the wars total cost.

The war in Afghanistan was supposed to be over a long time ago. After all, U.S. troops did not enter the country to reconstruct it or create a democracy. But a series of missteps misguided civilian policies and misplaced priorities on the part of the government and its donors have boosted recruitment for the very groups the U.S. is supposed to be quelling, including al-Qaida, the Afghan Taliban and, more recently, the Islamic State.

The nation-building and counterinsurgency strategy that accompanied U.S. President Barack Obamas troop surge in 2010 was meant to turn the war around. Instead, as U.S. and allied troops left areas that had supposedly been cleared, the Taliban and other extremist groups soon returned.

The 43 percent increase in opium production in just the last year both reflects and reinforces the growing strength of these groups, which use drug-trafficking revenues to finance their operations.

Of global annual flows of 430-450 tons of heroin and morphine, about 380 tons are produced with Afghan opium.

Meanwhile, Afghanistan has been allowed to fall into an aid trap. The U.S. has disbursed about $110 billion for Afghan reconstruction. (Adjusted for inflation, that is equivalent to the $12.5 billion cost of the Marshall Plan for reconstruction in Europe after World War II.) Roughly $70 billion of those funds went to creating and financing Afghan security forces, and $40 billion went to non-military expenditure.

Yet, despite all that spending, Afghanistan will be unable to stand on its own feet for decades to come. The countrys cumulative GDP from 2002 to 2015 was only $170 billion; GDP in 2016 totaled just $17 billion, or $525 per capita. Non-military aid from the U.S. and others has amounted to 50 percent of GDP, on average, every year since 2002. And that aid has consistently been delivered in the same inefficient ways, even as the U.S Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) and others have repeatedly highlighted enormous amounts of waste, fraud and abuse.

As the Trump administration alters U.S. foreign policy priorities, devising a more effective strategy for Americas Afghan operations must be a priority. Only after such a strategy is in place should the administration meet the militarys requests to send more troops.

Fortunately, both Mattis and McMaster know that simply throwing more troops and more money at Afghanistan wont do the job. Indeed, both have emphasized the need to support counterinsurgency operations with effective policies that do not create new enemies and fuel the need for more ammunition. Retired high-level officers from all branches of the U.S. Armed Forces have taken this logic a step further, telling congressional leaders that combating terrorism requires addressing its causes, such as lack of opportunity, insecurity, injustice and hopelessness.

To create more cost-effective, integrated and inclusive policies that benefit most Afghans, not just the privileged few, U.S. leaders will need to engage in some radical rethinking. Various proposals are on the table, including one of my own: to create synergistic reconstruction zones (RZs) one aimed at local production and another aimed at exports that support economic recovery.

Such RZs can help the resource-rich Afghanistan to replace aid with foreign direct investment and export revenues. Foreign investors would work in support of local communities, enabling them to produce food and services for local consumption, rather than displacing them, as is so often the case. In exchange, the communities would protect the RZs, so that investors can produce for export at a lower security risk.

After 15 years of conflict, ending the war in Afghanistan may seem to have lost some of its urgency. But the truth is that it is more urgent than ever, not just to check the flows of refugees to Europe and elsewhere, but also to undermine terrorist recruitment efforts. By promoting impact investment by those seeking both economic gain and social progress, and by advancing projects that benefit foreign investors and local communities alike, the Trump administration may be able to do just that.

Graciana del Castillo, author of Guilty Party: The International Community in Afghanistan is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Project Syndicate, 2017

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A fresh look at the long war in Afghanistan - The Japan Times

Jens Stoltenberg said the alliance is committed to helping Afghanistan in order to help Afghan forces.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has said that recent attacks in Afghanistan have claimed the lives of many people which indicates the situation in the country is extremely complicated.

He said that the NATO alliance is committed to continuing its partnership with Afghanistan in order to help the Afghan security forces.

We should not step back, because the situation in Afghanistan is difficult, we have seen horrendous attacks and many civilians killed, he said.

Meanwhile, President Ashraf Ghani has said the key to peace in Afghanistan is to undertake systematic reforms in the security institutions particularly reforms in the Ministry of Interior (MoI).

The important issue for security strategy is whether we are successful in bringing reforms in the ministry of interior; the ministry of defense has already started its work on reforms. Over the past six months, we took serious decisions to improve the leadership and decrease corruption, said Ghani.

It is believed that weakness among the leaders of security institutions and the lack of equipment were still among the key challenges facing the Afghan security forces.

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Recent Attacks in Afghanistan Show Complex Situation: NATO Chief - TOLOnews