Afghanistan Analysts Network – English

Month: January 2012

Afghan President Hamid Karzai ‘plans talks with Taliban’

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BBC, 29 January 2012 The Afghan government is planning to meet Taleban representatives in Saudi Arabia in what appears to be an attempt to jump-start their own channel for peace talks, in possible competition to the US/German Qatar channel. The BBC reports that the meeting ‘will come in the coming weeks, before the establishment of […]

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Talks on Two Channels? The Qatar office and Karzai’s Saudi option

Thomas Ruttig •

The latest reports about developments on reconciliation – or better: talks with insurgent groups, both with the Taleban and Hezb-e Islami* – have been rather contradictory. Or haven’t they? The main insight from these reports, is that President Karzai has only rhetorically bowed to the unilateral US/German thrust to establish a Taleban liaison office in […]

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Emboldened Taliban Try to Sell Softer Image

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Wall Street Journal, 28 January 2012 In the article, Afghan education minister Faruq Wardak is quoted as confirming that the Taleban have become more lenient on education and he attributes this on pressure from the population (only). The report says further that ‘[e]ducation directors in more than a hundred of Afghanistan’s 398 districts have reported […]

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Hekmatyar’s never-ending Afghan war

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al-Jazeera, 28 january 2012 A very enlightening account about the Hezb-e Islami leader, his past and current relations with the US (and former Ambassador Khalilzad in particular who has handled Hekmatyar during his famous US tour when he refused to meet President Reagan), but also with brief comments about other former mujahedin leaders.

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Former Taliban Officials Say U.S. Talks Started

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New York Times, 28 January 2012 According to the Times, former Taleban officials in Kabul have confirmed that ‘four to eight Taliban representatives had traveled to Qatar from Pakistan to set up a political office’ and one of them spoke about ‘fairly advanced discussions’ between US and Taleban representatives ‘about the transfer of prisoners’. According […]

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The Afghan divide

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Los Angeles Times, 26 January 2012 An interesting op-ed by Sarah Chayes about whether the US is succeeding in Afghanistan and the measures used to answer that question. She refers to the latest NIE report and the negative reaction of US generals about critical remarks in it.

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طرح تغییر نظام، عزم واقعی یا جنگ زرگری

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8 Sobh (Kabul), 25 January 2012 An unsigned article in the Kabul-based daily weighing the arguments and reasons of both the government and the opposition in the recent political brawl about decentralisation.

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Afghanistan’s Terrorised Women

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The Straits Times, 25 January 2012 In his op-ed for the Singapore-based newspaper, the AIHRC Executive Secretary Muhammad Musa Mahmoodi summarised why violence against women persists in Afghanistan: the country’s patriarchal tribal tradition that assumes women’s inferiority; the strong political incentive by radical political groups like the Taleban to deprive women of their rights; because […]

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Agenten-Affäre belastet Deutschlands Beziehungen zu Pakistan

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Spiegel online, 23 January 2012 Pakistani authorities have closed what they call a German intelligence office in Peshawar and claim that three persons arrested there (flown out to Germany meanwhile) have used business cards and a car of German governmental development agency GIZ. Spiegel says that a BND office exists in Peshawar since years. GIZ […]

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What Next for the AIHRC (2): Civil Society Responses

Sari Kouvo •

When three of the nine members of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) were removed by President Hamed Karzai in December, it laid bare the fragile position of human rights activism in Afghanistan. In AAN’s second blog* on the removal of the AIHRC Commissioners, Sari Kouvo takes a look at how the President’s move […]

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Afghan asylum bids hit 10-year high

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AP, 21 January 2012 ‘More Afghans fled the country and sought asylum abroad in 2011 than in any other year since the start of the decade-long war, suggesting that many are looking for their own exit strategy as international troops prepare to withdraw. From January to November, more than 30,000 Afghans applied for political asylum […]

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