Afghan-Pakistan Border Tensions Remain as Clashes Continue
Border tensions between Afghanistan and Pakistan showed no sign of easing down on Saturday as troops of the two neighbors continued exchange of fire across the border,a military commander in eastern Afghanistan said.
Border tensions between Afghanistan and Pakistan showed no sign of easing down on Saturday as troops of the two neighbors continued exchange of fire across the border,a military commander in eastern Afghanistan said.
Abdul Zahir, commander of Afghan border troops in the eastern border province of Nangarhar, said that armed clashes between the two sides lasted for about one hour near a border post in Yegobi district of the province, about 150 kilometers from Kabul.
The Afghan border troops in the end warded off the offensives by Pakistan troops, the commander was quoted by state-run Bakhtar Information Agency (BIA) as saying.
Clashes across the Afghan-Pakistan border in recent weeks sent bilateral relations to a multi-year low last week when thousands of Afghans took to the street in Kabul, protesting against the alleged border incursions by Pakistan troops.
Pakistan lodged a formal protest and threatened to close down its embassy in the Afghan capital on Tuesday after some angry students attacked the embassy with stones and stormed into its compound.
After Afghan President Hamid Karzai made a telephone apology tohis Pakistani counterpart Pervez Musharraf for the mob rampage, Pakistan has agreed to reopen the embassy after necessary repairing of its damaged property.
Karzai has also promised to Musharraf that the Afghan government would pay compensation for the physical loss incurred by the embassy and bring those responsible for the attacks to justice.
Three students were arrested for their links with the violence agaisnt the embassy, Afghan authorities said on Saturday.
http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200307/13/eng20030713_120097.shtml
JALALABAD, July 12: Troops of Afghanistan and Pakistan exchanged fire along the border on Saturday. "There was an exchange of heavy fire for 45 minutes, both sides used artillery," said the commander of Afghan border forces, Haji Abdul Zahir Qadir.
He said the clash took place in Yaqoobi Kandaw village of Lalapur district and claimed his men forced Pakistani troops to pull out of an area they seized about three weeks ago.
He said Pakistani forces still occupied some Afghan territory to the east of the city of Jalalabad and his men were ready to recapture the area should President Hamid Karzai give the order.
A Pakistani intelligence official in Peshawar confirmed that there had been an exchange but he said the two sides used AK-47 rifles.-Reuters
http://www.hipakistan.com/en/detail.php?newsId=en32045&F_catID=&f_type=source
Waarom zouden Afghaanse troepen die indirect onder Amerikaanse bevel staan nu Pakistaanse troepen willen aanvallen :confused:
Het is een complex verhaal. Het valt niet zo makkelijk te beoordelen tenzij je iets daarvanaf weet.
Amerika heeft jaren lang Osama ben Laden financieël en militaire gesteund. Juist in dat gebied waren er veel Quran scholen voor arme kinderen die gefinancieerd werden door Osama en Saudie's. Amerika keek toe. Saudi's zijn een bepaald stroming binnen de islam met als naam: Wahabieten. Hun grootste vijanden zijn Sj-ieten ( voornamelijk in Iran en het zuiden van Iraq) en zelfs Soennieten. Zij zijn binnen de islam een beetje te vergelijken zoals Jehova Getuigens. In dat gebied zijn er extreme stromingen ontstaan als antwoord op de bezetting van SovjetUnie in 1978-79. Een van die stroming is SEPAHE SAHABE. Ook een extrimistische groepering die in 1983 zelfs door CIA gesteund werd. Vanwege de aanslag in een Sj-ietische moskee in Pakisttan, 2 weken geleden, en de invoering van Sharia in die provencie probeert Pakistan en Amerika orde op zaken daar stellen. Men gaat er zelfs vanuit dat Osama zich daar bevindt.
Juist toen de Taliban omver is gebracht door gealieerden was Pakistan de enig land dat daar niet blij om was. Iran juichte juist omdat er al jaren lang zijn eigen ambassadeurs en de si-ietische bevolking daar stelsmatig werden afgemaakt.
Ik geef toe dat het ingewikkeld is en ik heb geprobeerd een summier schets te maken van de gang van zaken daar.
Sid
Ja, dit wist ik al.
Maar waarom vallen Afghaanse troepen Pakistaanse troepen aan. In theorie staan ze allebei aan dezelfde kant, namelijk die van 'de goeden' in de strijd tegen het kwaad (terrorisme).
Afghanen haten Pakistaanse soldaten, omdat ze hebben geholpen de Taliban aan de macht te brengen :confused:
Ja dat is inderdaad zo. Jaren lange vernedering van de Noordelijke Alliantie door Taliban, lees Pakistan, heeft geleid tot woede. Maar ik geloof niet dat met zo wijze man als Kharzai dit gaat escaleren.
Ik kan mij goed herinneren wanneer de koningin in het kader van de vijftig jaar herdenking van de tweede wereld oorlog een prachtig, bijna revolutionair, toespraak hield en daar vroeg om niet er steeds vinger te wijzen naar de anderen maar ook bij onze tekortkomingen en fouten still staan dat er heel veel positieve discussie los barste. Men ging anders naar de zaak kijken. Kun je nagaan dat 50 jaar was er voor nodig om de haat tussen twee democratische bijna identieke landen te overbruggen. Laar staan daar met die twee landen. Daarom zijn er mensen zoals Kharzai echt een nobelprijs waard.
Sid
Washington's Afghan plan unravels
By Ramtanu Maitra
In recent weeks, two major incidents along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border have laid bare the new complexities in the area. And a large part of the blame for these two incidents lies with the United States's duplicitous role in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The first of the two incidents occurred on July 4, a Friday afternoon at the Jama Masjid-o-Imambargah Kalaan Isna Ashri, a Shi'ite mosque in Quetta in the western Pakistani province of Balochistan bordering Afghanistan. On that holy Muslim day, while the Shi'ite faithful were offering their prayers, three killers, apparently including a suicide bomber, attacked the mosque: 53 were killed and 57 injured. This is not the first time the Shi'ite community has been at the receiving end of such a vicious attack from presumed Sunni killers in Quetta. Less than a month ago, on June 8, 13 trainee police personnel, all belonging to the Shi'ite community, were slaughtered in the same town, which, incidentally, is a major headquarters of the Pakistan army.
The second incident occurred three days later, on July 7, when about 2,000 Afghan demonstrators, protesting the Pakistan army's alleged occupation of Afghan territory in the Nangarhar and Kunar provinces along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, climbed the Pakistan embassy walls in Kabul and broke windows and furniture. Pakistan promptly closed the embassy. In all likelihood, the embassy will be opened shortly, but the bad blood developed between Islamabad and Kabul, both virtual client states of the United States, will continue to bring death and mayhem for some time to come.
Fiascos waiting to happen
The Quetta killings were orchestrated by either the Sipah-e-Sahaba or the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, both virulent Sunni killer gangs fortified by the Taliban militia, al-Qaeda members and Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agents. It is rather well known that al-Qaeda and Taliban remnants have been avoiding the US dragnet by hiding in Balochistan and in Pakistan's tribal agencies (FATA) bordering Afghanistan. The Balochi Shi'ites, most of whom immigrated ages ago from the Hazara region in central Afghanistan, have been providing the Americans and the Pakistanis intelligence about al-Qaeda and Taliban militia in the province. That led to a number of arrests of al-Qaeda operatives. But while their intelligence was accepted, neither the Americans nor the Pakistanis saw it necessary to provide the Shi'ite sources with adequate security.
It is certain that more killings will ensue, likely precipitating full-fledged sectarian violence between Shi'ites and Sunnis in already-troubled Pakistan that may, sooner or later, embroil the keeper of the Shi'ite faith - Iran. Indeed, some in Washington, particularly the neo-conservatives thumping to "take out" the Iran regime, would like to get Tehran involved in the brawl. This crude layer of the American political mainstream hopes that such action by Tehran would provide the "smoking gun" to justify a regime change in Iran to the hapless American populace.
The stoning of the Pakistan embassy in Kabul was yet another incident waiting to happen. The fact is that under the guidance of its Afghan-born expert, Zalmay Khalilzad, the Bush administration has been pursuing a policy that will not only set Pakistan and Afghanistan on the road to confrontation, but also threaten to tear down the already-stretched fabric of Pakistani society.
The ABCs of the Afghan campaign
To repeat the ABCs of this situation: the key players in Pakistan on whom the US is relying to eradicate Taliban extremists are the very individuals who created the Taliban. By supporting President General Pervez Musharraf in his power grab in 1999 in a coup under the pretext of replacing a "fundamentalist" with a "moderate", Washington did manage to buy off a small section of the Pakistani army personnel. These switched from being pro-Taliban to become pro-American. Needless to say, Musharraf is one of them. Since then, Washington has dumped money on Pakistan, looked away from its enriched uranium-for-missile deal with North Korea, and suppressed information about the on-going support to the Taliban and al-Qaeda militia by a section of the Pakistan army and the ISI.
The results are plainly visible. First, two Pakistani provinces - Balochistan and the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) - are now under fundamentalist control and Islamic laws, reminiscent of the Taliban-imposed so-called Dark Age laws, are being put in place in the NWFP. Second, the bordering tribal agencies, where Islamabad's writ never ever reached, have become the hideouts of the al-Qaeda and the Taliban. These areas border eastern and southeastern Afghanistan, where most of Afghanistan's major cities are located. The fabled Kabul-Kandahar road runs parallel and close to the borders.
From these hideouts, and with the help of the intelligence provided by the Pakistan army and the ISI, the anti-American and anti-Kabul elements carry out sorties and ambushes. When Americans used their muscle to force the Pakistan army to comb that area jointly, the chiefs of at least one tribal agency, the Mohmand agency, announced their opposition to the joint combing. Promptly, the NWFP provincial assembly, now under the control of the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) - also known as Musharraf Mullahs and Army - endorsed the Mohmand tribal chiefs.
More recently, when Musharraf was touring abroad for 18 days in late June appeasing Western leaders, Pakistan's chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee, General Mohammad Aziz Khan, identified America as Pakistan's number one enemy. In a public speech in Rawalkot in the Pakistan-held part of Kashmir Khan declared, "All the defeats and setbacks that the Islamic world has suffered have been due to disunity and splits in Muslim ranks, because of the presence of and tolerance of these elements that most of our [jihadi] movements came to nought." Khan, once the most powerful commander in the Pakistan army, is close to the mullahs, and it is likely that he will be fired. But that may not be the end of the story, for such a move could spell doom for Musharraf himself and the rest of the pro-American Pakistani "moderates" in the army.
The problems of puppetry
If Musharraf has turned out to be an American puppet, it was not, perhaps, intended. His switch from being a pro-Taliban to pro-American and anti-Taliban - a move made to receive protection from Washington - made him a puppet. By contrast, Hamid Karzai, the interim leader of Afghanistan, was always an American puppet. He knows better than most that he had virtually no credentials to take up the job that was handed to him by a group of bullying Americans at the UN-organized international conference in Bonn at the close of 2001.
Nobody knows better than Karzai the problem of being a puppet of Washington. Karzai, who is referred to as the "mayor of Kabul" by cynical Kabul residents, was wholly at the mercy of the Americans from the time he was made leader. The US provides him an inner core of bodyguards, and he remains as distant from the Afghans as he was the day he was sworn in. Meanwhile, Americans are out there "fixing" things.
One of the things that the Americans "fixed" is drug production. During the Taliban days, opium production had reached a peak of 5,000-plus tons. In 2001, with the warehouses filled to the ceiling with raw opium, the Taliban wanted to show how "good" they were, and stopped poppy cultivation in the territories they controlled - about 95 percent of the country. The opium price soared, and the Taliban regime and its Pakistani benefactors made huge profits. At the same time, the Taliban, citing their efforts to end the venal drug trade, sought recognition as the legitimate Afghan government.
Following the American invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001 and subsequent removal of the Taliban from power, competing agencies within the US government set about to prove their worth (with some individuals intensely involved in lining their pockets with the drug money) by adopting policies to "short-cut" the process of Afghan reconstruction. One of these short-cuts involved a deal with the warlords. The deal was to allow the warlords to grow poppy, so that these warlords could buy arms and recruit militia to strengthen their ranks. In return, they would not only provide the Americans with the intelligence on where the al-Qaeda and the Taliban are hiding, but would also provide the Americans with fighters.
What came of this approach? The first thing that happened is that poppy fields and the poppy growers took over Afghanistan. In the year 2002, about 3,750 tons of opium was harvested. In cold cash, this translates conservatively into anything between US$5-6 billion for the warlords.
The second thing that the policy did was further weaken Karzai, who was running from pillar to post to get some cash to show some "improvement" in living conditions in Kabul to justify his and the Americans' presence, and he was deprived of revenue. The warlords claimed - and the American operatives endorsed their claims - that they needed the money to bolster their anti-Taliban militia and help the Americans find al-Qaeda members. As a result, the Afghan warlords, who were virtually eliminated by the Taliban, are now stronger than ever. In a few more years, these warlords will be strong enough to kick out their American benefactors and American puppets.
As if these developments do not portend a bad enough future for the immediate region, Washington felt compelled to introduce another. By pressurizing the Pakistan army to comb the border areas to ferret out the al-Qaeda and the Taliban, the Americans have given Pakistani troops a free hand to occupy Afghan territory and maintain control of the Taliban and al-Qaeda operations. According to area expert Ahmed Rashid, the Afghan government and the US have been frustrated by Pakistan's reluctance to reign in elements of the Taliban and al-Qaeda Islamic militant units. These militants use Pakistan as a safe haven from which to launch raids against US and Afghan troops. United Nations officials and heads of aid agencies say that the security situation has worsened and that aid and reconstruction is blocked in southern Afghanistan, or one third of the country, because of increasing Taliban activity.
Humpty Dumpty had a fall
According to reports, the mob that attacked the Pakistan embassy in Kabul was well organized. They were carrying sledge hammers, sticks and stones - an indication that there was a plan to attack the embassy and it was not a decision made on the spur of the moment. Pakistan's ambassador to Kabul, Rustam Shah Mohmand, even accused the Karzai government of inciting the mob. He said, "We hold the Afghan government squarely responsible, not only for negligence, but for stage-managing the show, for creating the environment in which such an attack could take place."
Prior to this, Musharraf, while in the US, criticized the Afghan leader for his limited control over Afghanistan and for having a government which was not fully representative of the ethnic mosaic that represents Afghanistan. The Karzai cabinet has a large number of Panjshiri Tajik and Uzbek representatives, but only a handful of the Pashtun community - the largest community in Afghanistan. It is also well known that Pakistan, being close to the Pashtun-dominated Taliban militia, would like to interact with the Pashtuns, and not with the Tajiks or Uzbeks.
Musharraf's statement in the US did not go well with Karzai. The American puppet in Kabul said that he was seeking clarification from the virtual American puppet in Islamabad concerning his statements that Karzai's government was unable to extend its authority into Afghanistan's provinces. On the same day, Karzai issued a tough statement accusing Musharraf of interfering in Afghanistan's internal affairs.
The Humpty Dumpty of the US war on terrorism has taken another fall, and it is not at all clear that the divisive forces in Washington will be able to put it together again.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/EG15Ag01.html
Kijk dit maakt alles weer wat duidelijker.
KABUL: Afghanistan on Monday rejected allegations by Pakistani authorities that terrorists with links in Afghanistan were behind a recent attack on a mosque in Quetta that left 50 people dead, a foreign news agency reported.
The Afghan Foreign Ministry describing the allegations unwarranted said in a statement that any act of terrorism or sectarian violence in Pakistan has always been condemned by Afghanistan as it negatively impacts the common goal of fighting terrorism. The allegations that this act of violence with visible internal sectarian links has Afghan connections is unjustified, the statement said.
Pakistan's Interior Minister Faisal Saleh Hayyat blamed terrorists with roots in Afghanistan responsible for the incident.
http://www.hipakistan.com/en/detail.php?newsId=en32286&F_catID=&f_type=source
Problemen, problemen en dat in een land met nukes.
de situatie is nog meer complexer eigenlijk , de overgebleven taliban leden plegen laatste tijd aanslagen op pakistaanse troepen waarna ze vluchten naar de tribal arias/ afghanistan border heen en weer. toen de pakistaanse leger daarop een actie begon in afghanistan (volgens de afghanen) werden ze nog bozer terwijl de northern alliance al niet zo'n goeie band had met pakistan.
Geplaatst door Shaheen
de situatie is nog meer complexer eigenlijk , de overgebleven taliban leden plegen laatste tijd aanslagen op pakistaanse troepen waarna ze vluchten naar de tribal arias/ afghanistan border heen en weer. toen de pakistaanse leger daarop een actie begon in afghanistan (volgens de afghanen) werden ze nog bozer terwijl de northern alliance al niet zo'n goeie band had met pakistan.
een maand geleden was er ook een incident terwijl pakistaanse en amerikaanse troepen gezamelijk in afghanistan zaten te jagen op paar gevluchte militanten. Door dit soort acties zijn die troepen natuurlijk niet erg gewild in het gebied met sterke onafhankelijkheidsgevoel. Deze mensen zijn ook vel tegen de nieuwe checkpoints die de leger maakt op de grens omdat ze tot nu toe die gebieden zelf konden beheeren en gewoon vrij heen en weer konden gaan.
Former Taliban Commander Gunned Down
Jul 18, 2003
Zainuddin Achakzai, a former Taliban commander was gunned down in cold blood by unknown individuals in the Pashtoonabad area on the outskirts of Quetta on Thursday.
According to police sources, he was on his way to a mosque for morning prayers when two men opened fire on him. He died instantly from the eight bullet wounds he received while the gunmen fled from the scene.
Police said they suspect that the murder was the result of an old enemy but his younger brother, Murtaza Achakzai, said this was highly unlikely and that his brother had no ruled out the possibility,saying his brother had no hatred with anyone.
Described as an important commander under the former Taliban regime, Haji Zainuddin had been living with his family in the area for the past twelve years. Police are treating the case as a homicide and no arrests have yet been made.