Tagged: Afghanistan

This week, NATO Cabinet ministers, including U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, will try to tackle the problem of Afghan security. The basic plan for bringing American troops home from Afghanistan is to let Afghan security forces fight for their own country. But there's a hitch — finding a way to pay for the Afghan army.

Right now, the Afghan national security forces are growing, and will surpass 350,000 troops and police later this year. For the West, that's the idea — once those troops are well trained, Western forces can leave. But someone will have to pay the multibillion-dollar cost of keeping those Afghan forces in arms.

Noted Granite State attorney and advisor to the Afghan Ministry of Finance explores the economic and political future of Afghanistan.

Afghans say they're so inured to civilians killed in wars that they bury their dead and move on. That's not so easy for Muhammad Wazir. He lost his mother, his wife, a sister-in-law, a brother, a nephew, his four daughters and two of his sons in last week's mass shooting in two villages.

"My little boy, Habib Shah, is the only one left alive, and I love him very much," says Wazir.

The boy cried next to his father as Wazir spoke by cellphone. The 4-year-old is his favorite, Wazir says, and that's why he took the boy as he traveled to the eastern side of Kandahar province last week. While they were away, tragedy struck their tiny mud brick village in Panjwai district, southwest of Kandahar City.

The killings of some 16 civilians in Afghanistan on Sunday allegedly by a U.S. soldier are raising new questions about U.S. military strategy: whether the surge of American troops worked, and whether the U.S. troops have won over the Afghan people or alienated them.

The place where the killings happened was a "no-go zone" for American and even Afghan troops as recently as two years ago — it was Taliban country.

That changed when soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division swept into the rural district in the dead of night in November 2010. Back then, Capt. Davitt Broderick stood in his command post, a two-story adobe house in Panjwai, near Kandahar. He said that better security would lead to schools, clinics and fewer young men joining the Taliban.

President Obama apologized in a letter and Afghan President Hamid Karzai appealed for calm.

But that was not enough to keep Afghans from protesting violently for a third day following word that several copies of the Muslim holy book, the Quran, were burned at a large NATO base outside Kabul.

The latest incident resembled other cases in recent years, where rumors that a Quran was desecrated — even thousands of miles away in Florida or Guantanamo Bay — ignited deadly riots in Afghanistan.

This time American officials acknowledged the desecrations took place. They say U.S. soldiers accidentally burned several Qurans along with what was considered radical religious materials.

Two Americans Killed

After a long hiatus, the Afghan and U.S. governments this week reopened talks on a strategic partnership that will determine how many American troops stay in Afghanistan past the end of the NATO mission in 2014.

The resumption of talks comes amid a flurry of contradictory statements from U.S. officials and NATO members about the shape of the foreign mission in Afghanistan. When President Obama first arrived at the White House, he said troops would begin pulling out in the summer of 2011. Then a NATO meeting pushed the end of the mission to 2014. Last week, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta muddied the waters further, suggesting that the U.S. combat mission might end by 2013.

Uncertainties surrounding the future of the NATO mission in Afghanistan are of particular concern for an area near Kabul that French troops have controlled for the past decade. France now plans to withdraw its army a year ahead of schedule, sparking fears of a potential crisis in Kapisa province.

On a plateau amid the towering Hindu Kush mountains, Hukum Khan, a 31-year-old Afghan farmer, says the presence of French troops hasn't made much difference in his life in the past 10 years.

A new documentary follows the poignant journey of a group of three small town friends to Afghanistan and back again.