Afghanistan Analysts Network – English

Sudhansu Verma

27 and 30 June 2012, Berlin: Two Afghanistan podiums with AAN

AAN • admin •

AAN’s Co-Director Thomas Ruttig will participate in two podiums on Afghanistan in Berlin this week, organised by the Berlin he Nahost-Forum and by the Afghanistan Committee for Peace, Reconstruction and Culture. On Wednesday, 27 June 2012, he will talk about ‘Afghanistan: The current situation and prospect for the future’ (in German) at the invitation of […]

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Afghanistan’s Fluctuating Poppy Production: More Than a Poverty Problem

Doris Buddenberg •

Afghanistan’s area of poppy cultivation has increased by 7 per cent compared to the last year and more provinces cultivate poppy than then. This is the gist of annual opium survey for the country for 2012. There are no predictions about how many (thousands of) tons this will be. And the publishers – the UN […]

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Moderate Taliban speaks of divisions

admin •

AP, 14 May 2012 Kathy Gannon speaks to the former head of the Taleban’s political commission, and Quetta shura member Agha Jan Motassem, who is recovering from an assassination bid in Turkey.

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Ghori Cement Plant Faces Bankruptcy

admin •

TOLOnews, 12 May 2012 Afghanistan’s largest cement company based in Pul-e Khumri (Baghlan), that is fully Afghan-owned, is facing bankruptcy at its second cement plant if it cannot secure sufficient bank financing, the company’s officials said Saturday. McClatchy newspapers, in late 2010, that Ghori Cement Factory and Karkar coal mine in Baghlan had ‘become symbols […]

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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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Taliban poetry book denounced by former British commander

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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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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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May 2012: ‘Under the Drones’ – New book with AAN participation

AAN • admin •

Titled ’Under the Drones: Modern Lives in the Afghanistan-Pakistan borderlands’ and edited by Shahzad Bashir and Robert D. Crews, the book contains chapters about a broad spectrum of issues, both political and ethnographic, that go back to a seminar held at Stanford University in late 2009. I asked a mullah, what do you think Paradise is […]

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