Afghanistan Analysts Network – English

Month: May 2012

The Abbottabad Files: ‘Guests’ and ‘brothers’ at the AfPak border

Thomas Ruttig •

Just around the first anniversary of Osama Bin Laden’s killing by US Special Operations Forces, the US government decided to release 17 al-Qaeda documents(1) that were found in his last refuge in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad. 17 out of 6,000 seized documents is not much, and it is open how representative this selection is […]

Regional Relations Read more

Meet Afghanistan’s Greatest Hope: ‘The Re-Integree’


admin •

The National Interest, 8 May 2012 The number of 4,200 to 4,300 reintegrated insurgents since the first one signed to the APRP in October 2010 is not statistically significant yet, according to a senior US adviser to Massum Stanekzai, head of the Afghanistan Peace and Reconciliation Program (APRP). (Another 600 are now being ‘vetted,’ the […]

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Secret U.S. program releases high-level insurgents in exchange for pledges of peace

admin •

Washington Post, 7 May 2012 The US have ‘for several years been secretly releasing high-level detainees’ from Bagram military prison ‘as part of negotiations with insurgent groups. This so-called ‘strategic release’ program ‘has quietly served as a live diplomatic channel, allowing American officials to use prisoners as bargaining chips in restive provinces’. ‘Unlike at Guantanamo’, […]

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A young leader lost: Sebghatullah Sanjar

Thomas Ruttig •

Sebghatullah Sanjar, leader of Afghanistan’s Republican Party, an advisor to President Karzai, an ambitious politician of a younger, democratically leaning generation and a good friend, lost his life in a traffic accident in Kabul on Saturday. Thomas Ruttig, a Senior Analyst and Co-Director at AAN, first met Sanjar in 2000 when he was working with […]

Political Landscape Read more

Taliban poetry book denounced by former British commander

admin •

Guardian, 4 May 2012 Richard Kemp, a former commander of British troops in Afghanistan, doesn’t like Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn’s anthology of Taleban poetry just to be published. He cautioned against ‘being taken in by a lot of self-justifying propaganda […]. What we need to remember is that these are fascist, murdering […]

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Obama’s visit in ‘pre-dawn darkness’

Kate Clark •

President Obama has visited Afghanistan under cover of darkness, signed a ten year strategic partnership agreement, spoken to the American – although not the Afghan – people from Bagram, claimed near victory over al-Qaida and the Taleban, said a new day was dawning for Afghanistan and left. The Taleban, meanwhile, tried to pretend the visit […]

International Engagement Read more

Osama Bin Laden: The night he came for dinner

admin •

BBC, 2 May 2012 ‘Following Bin Laden’s death a year later, both Pakistani and American officials had insisted that the al-Qaeda chief had lived in total seclusion for nearly five years, without once leaving his Abbottabad compound’, writes Pakistani journalist Muhammad Inyas Khan. He has found evidence to the contrary: OBL has visited local elders […]

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What if Romney is elected president?

admin •

Gulf News, 1 May 2012 The Financial Times’ Edward Luce takes a look at Mitt Romney’s stand on foreign policy and on some of his advisors who will also be responsible for policy on Afghanistan, in case… Some interesting names are found here: the former CIA’s chief of counter-terrorism and Blackwater executive Cofer Black and […]

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Finances a Mystery at Kabul Conference

admin •

IWPR, 1 May 2012 The search began with a missing generator. The machine, worth as much as 20,000 US dollars in Kabul, is said to have been bought with money donated by USAID for the Kabul International Conference in July 2010 that was attended by delegates from more than 70 countries. Spending on the conference […]

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AAN In The Media – May 2012

AAN Team •

The Afghan conflict’s ‘terrible mistakes’  New Straits Times, 30 May 2012 The intervention veered from ‘too little too late’ in its crucial early years, to one of ‘too much too late’,” according to Barbara Stapleton of the Afghanistan Analysts Network. In a May 16 report, the former senior political adviser to the special representative of […]

AAN in the Media Read more

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