Washington Post | The human toll of suicide bombings in Afghanistan Washington Post The Trump administration has not laid out its policy for Afghanistan, but senior U.S. military officials have urged increasing the current level of 8,400 advisory troops to prevent the insurgents from consolidating their territorial gains and to keep ... |
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The human toll of suicide bombings in Afghanistan - Washington Post
Gunmen wearing white lab coats stormed a military hospital in Afghanistan's capital on Wednesday, killing at least 30 people and wounding dozens in an attack claimed by the Islamic State group.
The attack on the 400-bed military facility, located near two civilian hospitals in Kabul's heavily-guarded diplomatic quarter, set off clashes with security forces that lasted several hours.
The brazen assault reflected the capability of militant groups in Afghanistan to stage large-scale and complex attacks in the heart of Kabul, underscoring the challenges the government continues to face to improve security for ordinary Afghans.
Gen. Dawlat Waziri, a Defense Ministry spokesman, said there were "more than 30 killed and more than 50 wounded" in the attack. Afghan forces battled the attackers floor by floor, he added. The ministry said the attackers were dressed like health workers.
According to Waziri, four gunmen were involved, including two suicide bombers who detonated their explosives vests once the group was inside the hospital.
The two other attackers were shot dead by security forces, the spokesman said. A member of the security forces was killed in the shootout and three other security officers were wounded. Along with the suicide vests, the attackers also had AK-47 rifles and hand grenades, Waziri said.
Obaidullah Barekzai, a lawmaker from southern Uruzgan province, said Wednesday's attack by the Islamic State group and other similar assaults, especially in the capital, are very concerning.
"This is not the first attack by the Islamic States group, they have carried out several bloody attacks in Kabul," he said.
The U.N. Security Council condemned "the heinous and cowardly terrorist attack" in the strongest terms and underlined the need to bring perpetrators, organizers, financiers and sponsors to justice.
Council members reiterated that "any acts of terrorism are criminal and unjustifiable, regardless of their motivation, wherever, whenever and by whomsoever committed." They urged all countries "to combat by all means ... threats to international peace and security caused by terrorist acts."
The assault lasted for several hours, with Afghan helicopters circling over the hospital building, troops rappelling onto rooftops and security forces going floor-by-floor in a gunbattle with the attackers. By mid-afternoon, the attack was over and a clean-up operation was underway.
Abdul Qadir, a hospital worker who witnessed the attack, said an attacker in a white coat shot at him and his colleagues. Ghulam Azrat, another survivor, said he escaped through a fourth floor window after attackers killed two of his friends.
IS claimed the attack in a statement carried by its Aamaq news agency.
An affiliate of the extremist group has carried out a number of attacks in Afghanistan in the last two years, and has clashed with the more powerful and well-established Taliban, who carried out another complex attack in Kabul last week.
Mohammad Nahim, a restaurant worker in Kabul, said he worries that IS militants are getting stronger. "Daesh has no mercy on the humanity," he added, using an Arabic name for the group.
Afghan security forces have struggled to combat both groups since the U.S. and NATO formally concluded their combat mission at the end of 2014, switching to an advisory and counterterrorism role.
Afghan President Ashraf Ghani condemned Wednesday's attack during an address in honor of International Women's Day, calling it "an attack on all Afghan people and all Afghan women."
The foreign ministry in neighboring Pakistan condemned the Kabul attack, describing it as a "heinous terrorist attack" and expressing Islamabad's condolences to the victims.
The acting U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Afghanistan, Adele Khodr, warned in a statement that hospitals, medical staff and patients "must never be placed at risk, and under no circumstances be subject to attack" and urged all parties in the conflict to abide by and "respect all medical workers, clinics and hospitals in compliance with international law."
She said that in 2016, at least 41 attacks on health care facilities and workers were recorded across Afghanistan "an appalling catalogue of attacks that ultimately further hinders delivery of essential and life-saving health care to all Afghans across the country."
Associated Press writers Munir Ahmed in Islamabad and Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations contributed to this report.
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Islamic State gunmen in white lab coats kill 30 in Afghanistan hospital - Chicago Tribune
An Afghan refugee in a makeshift tent on the outskirts of Jalalabad, a city in eastern Afghanistan. Photograph: Ivan Flores
Afghanistan is starkly different from what Masooma had imagined. She was just a little girl when her family fled the Afghan war against the Soviets in the 1980s. They left everything they owned behind to look for sanctuary in Pakistan and she has few memories of the place.
But when she found out six months ago that her family were going to be forcibly repatriated to a war-torn country her seven children had never set foot in and she had last seen 30 years ago, she tried to stay positive.
I had always wondered what life in our own country would be like - I looked forward to my homecoming.
When her family of 10 finally arrived in Afghanistan, any hope they had died. They were unable to return to the province where Masooma was born due to sustained conflict across the country. With no immediate family in Afghanistan to look out for them and little savings, they ended up in a tented settlement for displaced people. Her children have been out of school for six months as there are no schools near the settlement. Even if there was a school close by, they couldnt afford the fees, Masooma says, describing how even half a year after returning to Afghanistan her husband has been unable to find work.
The harsh reality is that so many other Afghan refugees are returning from Pakistan the labour market is simply flooded with more people than there are jobs. 250,000 have returned to Afghanistan in the last 10 months.
Her family and other returnees are not the only ones struggling. 600,000 Afghans were internally displaced due to conflict in 2016.
For Matthew Graydon, public information officer at International Organization for Migration (IOM), this should be a clear sign to the Pakistan government that Afghanistan is not safe enough for refugees to be returning. There are returnees who belong to districts they cant go back to due to fighting between the Taliban, Daesh and national forces. We are experiencing secondary displacement, or even a third level of displacement, he explains, adding that fresh conflict is forcing returnee families in some parts of the province to flee the IDP settlements where they previously found sanctuary.
Little thought has also been put into how the returnees - many who have either spent decades in Pakistan building a life or who were born there and thus feel little connection to Afghanistan - will integrate back into Afghan society.
We were poor but with the support of the community, we lived a happy life. And then, the police showed up at the mosque
37-year-old Abdul Qadir will not admit it, but his wife Hasiba says that he hasnt slept in a week. He spends a lot of time worrying about our future, and how we will afford the next months rent, she says. Qadir returned from Pakistan five months ago with his wife and eight children, most under the age of five. With the little savings they had, they rented a small one room space in Nangarhar, but five months after returning to Afghanistan, Nadir is still struggling to find a job.
Like many Afghan returnees from Pakistan, their lives were uprooted suddenly. In Pakistan, where he spent the last 25 years of his life, Qadir was an imam at a local mosque. We were poor but with the support of the community, we lived a happy life, Qadir recalls. And then five months ago, the police showed up at the mosque and took me with them. I was kept in detention for four nights and asked to leave immediately after they let me go, he says. They fled Pakistan the very next day.
If it were up to Hasiba, she wouldnt have left at all. Our neighbours in Pakistan were very kind and helpful. They were my friends and were like family to us.
But being an undocumented family meant there was little that anyone could do to protect them from the police who threatened to detain Qadir again if they didnt go. They helped us pack, that was all they could do. We left more than our homes behind; it feels as though we left part of our family behind, says Hasiba.
Qadirs family is not the only one to be pressured into fleeing the country by the police. In the last few months arrests and other forms of police harassment have been a common pressure tactic to get Afghans to leave.
Nearly all of them have been forced to leave against their will, says Graydon describing how 70,000 refugees returned to Afghanistan in just one month last year.
There are about 1.5 million documented and over a million undocumented Afghan refugees (pdf) in Pakistan, and for many years they have assimilated fairly easy into Pakistani community. But anti-refugee rhetoric has grown in the last year following a number of terrorist attacks in Pakistan, blamed on Afghans. Politicians started issuing threats last May, when Balochistans provincial home minister, Sarfaraz Khan Bugti, declared: Either the Afghan refugees can return voluntarily, with respect and dignity, or the people of Balochistan can humiliate them and throw them out of the country.
Relations between a war-torn Afghanistan and Pakistan, which hosts the largest Afghan refugee population, have always been strained. Differences over how to tackle regional insurgency came to a head last summer with several days of deadly clashes at the Torkham border crossing, part of a long and porous border that has been a source of tension between the two countries for many years. In February, the Pakistani government closed it indefinitely.
It was when tension between the two nations was at a peak in September 2016 that Masoomas husband was arrested for not being able produce government-issued refugee documents. We had heard it happen to other people, but I didnt think it would happen to us, she says. As soon as my husband was detained, I knew we would be asked to leave the country. We had watched other Afghan families leave before us. A month later when her husband was released, the family were given less than two days to return to Afghanistan, leaving behind everything they had built over the last three decades.
We didnt have much; we are poor and lived in a rented house. But it was everything that we had made in all our lives. Our friends, our community we had to leave behind, she says.
I was raised with their people, their culture and traditions. I was extremely hurt when we were asked to leave, she added.
The future for all Afghan refugees is now uncertain, and aid agencies are not optimistic that the situation will improve. Even as trilateral talks between the two countries and the UN are scheduled to take place, organisations such as the IOM and the Norwegian Refugee Council are ramping up their capacities to assist the returnees. It is estimated that there will be over a million expected returnees from Pakistan as well as Iran, along with 450,000 IDPs for this year.
We are expecting a spike in the returnees once UNHCR resumes its allowance for the documented refugees, says Graydon referring to the cash scheme that the UN body offered returning Afghans, an allowance of $400 (326) per person, till they ran out of funding at the beginning of winter.
While it might seem strange that Afghans who have lived as refugees for decades would choose to return to a war-torn country for just $400, in Afghanistan that money could provide a decent financial cushion, and that it is enough of an incentive for some Afghans is also an indicator of the level of police and government harassment in Pakistan.
Meanwhile, the families who have already returned continue to try and find their place in the conflict-ridden society they thought they had escaped for good decades earlier.
I miss my friends in Pakistan, says Masoomas 13-year-old daughter Basmina who was born in Pakistan and had never been to Afghanistan before. She understands a little about her status as an undocumented refugee. I dont belong to any country, she adds with sorrow. And so I dont think I will be able to see them again.
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Forced repatriation to Afghanistan: 'We didn't think it would happen to us' - The Guardian
Forbes | Pakistan's Economic Pressure Against NATO And Afghanistan Must Stop Forbes Pakistan is opening its border with Afghanistan for just 48 hours starting today, and only for people. This is too little too late for those who lost over two weeks of their lives stranded at the border, or who depend on regular and legal cross-border ... Pakistan temporarily reopens border with Afghanistan Pakistan temporarily reopens its border with Afghanistan Pakistan Reopens Border With Afghanistan for 2 Days |
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Pakistan's Economic Pressure Against NATO And Afghanistan Must Stop - Forbes
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Some 16 years in, the war in Afghanistan is the longest in the history of The United States. It is also our most disproportionately ignored, and with a new president in office after an election in which Afghanistan was barely mentioned perhaps our most uncertain major intervention going forward.
Defense Secretary James Mattis will soon present President Trump with a recommendation for the future of U.S.-Afghan engagement. The nature of his proposal is difficult to predict, pressured as it is by a Pentagon eager for fresh escalation and a president whose decrial of nation-building and labeling of the war "a total and complete disaster" has never been accompanied by a concrete exit plan. Of course, whatever policy Trump selects will have its greatest impact outside of Washington on American soldiers tasked with what has devolved into a self-perpetuating nation-building endeavor, and on the American people, who have long since soured on a conflict most no longer believe was worth its costs.
For insight into the shape of the war so far and its prospects under the Trump administration, I spoke with Douglas Wissing, an award-winning journalist who is most recently the author of Hopeless but Optimistic: Journeying through America's Endless War in Afghanistan. Here's a lightly edited, partial transcript.
Hopeless but Optimistic is the result of three stints embedded with U.S. troops in Afghanistan. The portrait you paint is significantly one of waste, corruption, and frustration, so for readers who may not be familiar with your book, will you share the source of the title and especially the source of your optimism despite that grim assessment?
[Let's] work our way through the hopeless part and then get to the optimistic part.
Hopeless but Optimistic is my second book on the war in Afghanistan. My first one was Funding the Enemy: How U.S. Taxpayers Bankroll the Taliban. I was embedded with U.S. soldiers, and they began telling me that we were essentially funding both sides of the war, that the counterinsurgency was so messed up and so dysfunctional that essentially everybody was running their wars on our money. We'd be riding around out in Taliban country in these armored vehicles with machine gunners on top and the soldiers would be saying, "We're funding both sides here."
One really smart intelligence officer one day in Laghman Province, he was on an embattled forward operating base and he clearly had been up all night. We were standing outside and he started telling me that he had been a narcotics detective in Las Vegas. "You know, this war is just like the Mafia. It's just like Las Vegas, you know. Everybody gets their cut," he said. "It's the perfect war. Everybody makes money."
I took that and started talking to more officers and began to learn about things like how our money helps finance the Taliban. I started doing hundreds of interviews with everybody from security soldiers who had been on the ground to generals and ambassadors and congresspeople, and I began to understand that there was this toxic network that connected ambitious American careerists who profit on military development and industrial development corporations, corrupt Afghan insiders, and the Taliban. It was as the soldier said: It was the perfect war. Everybody was making money. Everybody was benefiting everyone, of course, but the American taxpayers and the Afghan people.
I confess at this point I'm struggling more than ever to see where the optimism comes in.
Well, in the first book, Funding the Enemy, I told that story and at the time I was writing that book it was a pretty controversial thing to say that we were losing the war and we were losing the war because the enemy was us. The reality was, the cost of these two post-9/11 wars is probably about $5 trillion, and we had failed to accomplish our strategic, diplomatic, and military goals.
After the first book created a stir, I decided I wanted to embed for the third time in Afghanistan, to go through the war zones again and find out if there were any lessons learned. People understood that things were not going correctly. So I went back to find out, "Had things changed?"
The answer was no, it hadn't. By the time I got back to Kabul after going through the war zones, I saw how badly counterinsurgency was continuing to go. So I decided that I needed to find something that had worked in Afghanistan.
A lot of our development programs make no sense in Afghanistan. It's just a way to have phantom aid push enormous amounts of tax money to corporations that do very little. There's very little positive outcome. I went around Kabul and I interviewed these people that had longstanding organizations doing work that was very sustainable and appropriate to Afghanistan.
I found these groups and I began to understand the strength of Afghan culture, the resilience of that society, and the poetry of their society. I began to be optimistic about the Afghans as a people. They have done these extraordinary things. They will continue to do extraordinary things. I have faith in certain kinds of sustainable aid. I have faith in Afghans' capacity to run their society in a way that makes sense for them.
I think the other reason for optimism is that I can see the American public is clearly tired of this endless war, and Congress understands that mood. A congressman told me, "Well, sometimes Congress has to be shamed into doing the right thing." I can see that emerging consensus against the war. I can also see the emergence of pragmatic foreign policy strategy that is beginning to counter some of our very over-militarized post-Cold War international strategy. While I am somewhat hopeless about the outcome of a continuation of the way we have waged war in Afghanistan, I am cautiously optimistic that a change is on the way.
We recently learned President Trump is seriously considering some sort of re-escalation of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, and that comes after an election in which Afghanistan was almost never addressed. I was reviewing the three general election debates today, and Afghanistan was mentioned literally once. It was not a substantive discussion; it was merely a passing mention of this 16-year-old war. Given what we know of the Trump administration so far, do you think this potential new surge is likely and do you think it's wise or avoidable?
In the election, Afghanistan was the forgotten war, and this isn't actually the first election where that happened. In 2012, it was the forgotten war even then. It doesn't poll well. Nobody's going to bring it up if they don't have to.
At the Pentagon, Gen. Nicholson made that pitch for "a few thousand more" troops. That's clearly the opening gambit of Pentagon efforts to engage President Trump in a re-escalation. Some people laugh and say, "We haven't had a 16-year war in Afghanistan, we've had 16 one-year wars." Thats because with each new rotation you get the new "good idea" which sometimes is nothing more than the failed "good idea" four rotations prior.
Still, I think we're putting off the inevitable. We're really propping up a very dysfunctional proxy government, trying to define victory by saying, "Kabul hasn't fallen." That only lasts for so long.
We all have the images of the helicopters plucking people off the roof from the Saigon embassy. There have been questions about, "Do we have appropriate landing pads in the embassy in Kabul?" Because Kabul's besieged. The way insurgencies work is they go through the countryside. They're centrifugal. They move towards the capital and you've got capitals that are in a pretty precarious state. In the east and in the south and in the west now. Things blow up with great regularity in Kabul.
The question is: Are our efforts relevant? Are they consequential? If the Pentagon says they want to have "a few thousand more" troops and somehow that's going to turn the tide why would 2,000 more soldiers turn the tide when 100,000 couldn't?
I think it's important to remember that the Taliban-led insurgency has grown in double digits every year since at least 2005. They control growing amounts of territory. I think the conservative estimates say they control around half of the country. I've had some intelligence analysts tell me they're controlling 90 percent of the countryside. The long-time special forces saying is that if an insurgency isn't shrinking, it's winning. U.S. government officials are trying to say this is a "stalemate." It's not a stalemate. It's a lost war.
We have spent more money on Afghanistan than we spent on the Marshall Plan, adjusted for inflation. Afghanistan has a population of about 30 million people that make on average $400 a year. When we invaded it was a basket case of a country. It was at the bottom of every human development industry. Sixteen years later, with more than the Marshall Plan invested there, they're still at the bottom of virtually every human development category. Most of that money was wasted.
I think we are stumbling toward that great economic term, "sunk costs bias," which warns that the costs that have been invested should not be part of the discussion for future action. President Trump is a business man. He's declared bankruptcy four times. He knows how to cut his losses. Perhaps that's our best argument. Why throw good money after bad?
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How America lost Afghanistan - The Week - The Week Magazine