Articles found 10 Sept 2006
Extending Canada’s mission in Afghanistan ‘right thing to do’
By PETER MACKAY
http://thechronicleherald.ca/Opinion/527313.html
Alongside our allies from more than 35 other nations, our Canadian Forces members, diplomats and development workers are working to ensure the benefits of peace and prosperity extend to all Afghans.
They are working with the Afghan people and their first-ever elected government to create a better future for the Afghan people.
Development cannot occur in the absence of security.
Because of the work of our CF members, girls are now going to school in Afghanistan. Low-income farmers can get small loans to improve their crops. Families can get credit to open a small bakery, or a shoe repair shop, or a teahouse. Wells are being dug and pipes installed to bring water to villages. Roads are being resurfaced so that farmers can get their vegetables to market.
Unfortunately, these images are not the ones most often seen on television.
I saw first-hand how our presence in Afghanistan is helping improve the daily lives of Afghan citizens.
Our integrated approach of development, diplomacy and defence is helping the Afghan people stabilize their country and ensure that Afghanistan never again becomes a haven for terrorists.
We must never forget that we are there at the invitation of Afghanistan’s democratically elected government. We are guided by core Canadian values: freedom, democracy, respect for human rights and the rule of law.
Much progress has been made; but laying the groundwork for democratic development takes time and requires sustained support.
More on link
Report: Germany to move armoured vehicles to Afghanistan
Sep 8, 2006, 17:50 GMT
http://news.monstersandcritics.com/southasia/article_1199291.php/Report_Germany_to_move_armoured_vehicles_to_Afghanistan
Berlin - The German Army plans to move infantry fighting vehicles (IFVs) to northern Afghanistan in case it is drawn into fighting with the Taliban, a newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, said Friday.
The tracked Marder vehicles are better armed than the lighter armoured personnel carriers on wheels used by the Germans currently.
In the report quoting politicians involved with defence, to appear Saturday, the newspaper said the stock was being sent as a precaution and would merely be parked at a new German base in Mazar-e-Sharif.
The Germans are a key component in the ISAF peace force in the country. ISAF forces have been drawn into fighting with the Taliban in the south and west of the country, but not in the north where the Germans operate.
The newspaper said a Defence Ministry spokesman in Berlin stated that no decision on sending the vehicles had been taken yet. The 33- ton Marder carries a crew of three plus six infantrymen.
End
Distance the Afghan mission from the U.S.
Sep. 10, 2006. 01:00 AM HAROON SIDDIQUI
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1157838637103&call_pageid=968256290204&col=968350116795
Haroon Siddiqui urges NATO to call meeting with tribes and reassess task
T he scum were to be squished. We were in Afghanistan to kill the Taliban. It was a matter of our survival; if we weren't there, they'd be here. (Arguably, they could be here because we are there, no? But such common sense questions are not permitted these days.)
Now Ottawa has a new tune. Both the defence minister and the chief of the defence staff concede that the Taliban cannot be eliminated militarily.
Should we, then, be talking to them, as Jack Layton suggests? No. We don't talk to terrorists.
Afghanistan is unravelling. Canadian soldiers are dying. Half the Canadians want our mission ended, even while NATO wants more reinforcements for its 18,000 troops, who are augmenting the 18,000 American soldiers, who have made a mess, just as they have in Iraq.
The Iraqification of Afghanistan, running parallel to the Americanization of Canada under Stephen Harper, is clear.
More on link
NATO forces kill 94 Taliban in s. Afghanistan
By ASSOCIATED PRESS KANDAHAR, Afghanistan Sep. 10, 2006 12:34
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1154526042123&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
NATO forces kill 94 Taliban in southern Afghanistan
NATO and Afghan forces killed 94 Taliban fighters in airstrikes and ground attacks in southern Afghanistan, the military alliance said Sunday.
The 94 militants were killed in Kandahar province's Panjwayi and neighboring Zhari districts late Saturday and early Sunday and were separate to more than 40 Taliban who died in fighting in the same areas earlier Saturday, NATO spokesman Maj. Scott Lundy said.
The killings were part of a NATO-led Operation called Operation Medusa, which began Sept. 2 and has killed at least 420 insurgents, according to the alliance. Purported Taliban spokesmen have disputed the high death counts.
NATO said in a statement that the insurgent casualties were inflicted by warplanes in four separate engagements.
Panjwayi has long been regarded as a haven for the Taliban, which has been fanning Afghanistan's deadliest spate of violence since the U.S.-led invasion that toppled the hard-line regime after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks for harboring al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden.
Separately, Taliban militants killed three Afghan soldiers and wounded eight in an ambush in southern Zabul province's Shahjoy district Saturday, said Defense Ministry spokesman Gen. Zahir Azimi.
Afghan authorities also found the body of a district education chief Saturday who was kidnapped by suspected militants in central Afghanistan's Ghazni province, said Abdul Ali Faquri, a spokesman for the provincial governor.
More on link
The harsh realities of Afghanistan
Renata D'aliesio, The Calgary Herald, with files from The Associated Press Sunday, September 10, 2006
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/story.html?id=fd47e314-4ae3-46bf-80c9-7388ca0dae55
Troops learn quickly of country's dangers, horrors of war
ZHARI DISTRICT, Afghanistan -- By the time a fresh batch of Canadian troops stepped into Afghanistan early last month, illusions of peacekeeping had already dissipated from their minds.
This wasn't the Afghanistan soldiers Morgan Spurrell, Chris Desjardins and Shane Schofield visited in 2002, a few months after the Taliban government was overthrown. Four years into supposed reconstruction and rebuilding, the country was descending deeper into drugs and violence.
This mission, they knew, was not about peacekeeping, at least not yet. This was about war.
"I think older people get it. They've lived through wars," Master-Cpl. Schofield said yesterday. "But young people in Canada, they don't seem to understand why we're here."
Here, for the moment, is a stretch of fertile land near southern Afghanistan's Zhari district. Fields of corn stalks, cucumbers and onions crisscross rows of marijuana plants, some with stems so thick and long they stretch nearly 2.5 metres into the air.
A major offensive to demolish the Taliban's hold over southern Afghanistan has entered its second week. The first few days claimed the lives five Canadian soldiers. Yesterday, Operation Medusa claimed the life of a U.S. soldier.
NATO forces, however, believe the noose around the insurgents is tightening. Troops destroyed three Taliban positions, a bomb-making factory and a weapons cache yesterday, killing more than 40 of the group's fighters, NATO said.
"We're making good progress every day," said Canadian Brig.-Gen. David Fraser, head of NATO's southern Afghanistan operation. "There is severe pressure on the insurgents remaining in the area, which will continue until they are either defeated or choose reconciliation through surrender."
That said, NATO officials -- and Defence Minister Gordon O'Connor -- are calling for more troops and equipment to bolster the forces already in Afghanistan.
Canada is now sending as many as 20 Leopard tanks and 300 additional personnel to Kandahar to provide additional protection for its troops.
The decision to ratchet up Canada's force comes as military officers acknowledge they underestimated the resilience of the Taliban.
More on link
Making every drop count, Coke opens in Afghanistan
Sun Sep 10, 2006 7:11am ET
http://today.reuters.com/news/articleinvesting.aspx?view=CN&storyID=2006-09-10T111057Z_01_SP144391_RTRIDST_0_AFGHAN-COKE-PICTURE.XML&rpc=66&type=qcna
By Terry Friel
KABUL, Sept 10 (Reuters) - The blind cleric's haunting Arabic prayer chant echoed among the sterile plastic rows of Coke and Fanta, seeking Allah's blessing for the only major business to open in Afghanistan in more than a decade.
Coca-Cola, with its distinctive red-and-white logo, has come to Kabul in what is at once a sign of economic progress and a symbol of the failure of major businesses to open up in the five years since the fall of the hardline Islamist Taliban.
President Hamid Karzai opened the $25 million bottling plant in the capital's industrial complex of Bagrami, meaning sweet or fragrant, on Sunday.
Karzai's Western-backed government is desperate to kickstart an economy independent of the $3 billion-a-year illegal drugs trade, but has been unable to lure investors to one of the world's five poorest countries, where violence has hit a high since the 2001 war.
The plant, which Coca-Cola goes out of its way to emphasise will produce only non-alcoholic beverages, is franchised to one of the country's richest men, Habib Gulzar, and will initially produce Coke, Fanta and Sprite and soon make bottled water, the company said in a statement.
More on link
Long after 9/11, Afghanistan struggles to find way
11 September 2006
http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,3792597a13638,00.html
BAMIYAN: Life is grim when you can't pay the rent on a scorpion-infested cave, there is no job in sight and desperate people are waiting to take your spot.
As Afghanistan struggles to rebuild five years after September 11 and the fall of the Taliban, hundreds of families are trapped in a sprawling web of caves in the lush Bamiyan valley, surrounded by stark, desert mountains and famous for two giant Buddhas blown up in 2001.
"We have no work. Our lives are getting worse. We can't get enough food," says Mahtab, a 35-year-old mother of six perched on a narrow path carved into a cliff, nursing her year-old daughter Fatema, her hair stiff with sand.
Five years on, Bamiyan is at once a symbol of the progress that has been made and of the lack of it in Afghanistan.
Bamiyan has Afghanistan's first and only woman governor and is trying to rebuild its tourist trade. But it remains desperately poor, dragged down by the failure of President Hamid Karzai and his Western backers to kick-start the economy while eliminating opium production.
With the Taliban at its strongest since 2001 and opium production at record levels, violence is blocking efforts at economic development.
The lack of jobs means more people are willing to grow opium poppies, bolsters warlords and forces impoverished villagers into the arms of the Taliban as paid fighters.
"We have the young generation and all of them, they are jobless, the majority of them they are jobless," says Bamiyan's thoughtful, soft-spoken Governor Habiba Sarabi, a doctor.
More on link
Two coalition soldiers killed in Afghanistan
10/09/2006 - 2:35:34 PM
http://www.irishexaminer.com/breaking/story.asp?j=83413004&p=834y33x6&n=83413384&x=
A US-led coalition soldier has been killed in combat in southern Afghanistan, Nato said today.
The soldier was killed late on Saturday in southern Zabul province, where he was embedded as a trainer with the Afghan army, a Nato statement said. It gave no further details.
A second coalition soldier died during the Nato-led Operation Medusa in Kandahar’s southern Panjwayi district, the statement said.
It added that the dead soldier had earlier been mistakenly identified as a Nato soldier – the sixth foreign soldier to die in the anti-Taliban operation that began on September 2.
Nato says more than 420 militants have died in the fighting.
The statement did not give the soldiers’ nationalities. Most of the 20,000 troops in the coalition are American.
More on link
Afghan governor killed by suicide bombing
2006-09-10 18:14:13 by Yu Zhixiao
KABUL, Sept. 10 (Xinhua) -- A suicide bombing killed Hakim Tanewall, governor of the eastern Paktia province of Afghanistan, and his two bodyguards on Sunday, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry told Xinhua.
The spokesman, Yusuf Stanizai, said the incident happened at around 1:00 p.m. (0830 GMT) when an attacker belted with explosives rushed to the car carrying Tanewall.
Three other bodyguards were injured in the attack, which occurred before the governor's office in Gardez city, the capital of Paktia province, he added
More on link
Get out of Afghanistan now: NDP
Sep. 10, 2006. 01:00 AM BRUCE CAMPION-SMITH OTTAWA BUREAU
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1157838637235&call_pageid=968332188774&col=968350116467
QUEBEC—NDP Leader Jack Layton wants Parliament to debate the withdrawal of Canadian soldiers from Afghanistan after party delegates overwhelmingly backed his call to "bring the troops home."
And Layton urged Prime Minister Stephen Harper to distance Canada from America's war on terrorism.
More on link
The `war on terror' will turn a generation of angry young men against the West, says Linda McQuaig
Sep. 10, 2006. 01:00 AM LINDA MCQUAIG
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1157838637025&call_pageid=968256290204&col=968350116795
In the days after 9/11, Iranian president Mohammad Khatami condemned the terrorist attack and reached out to the West to fight terrorism together.
Too bad we ignored him. We'd be safer today if we hadn't.
Khatami was a moderate reformer, a popular democratically elected president who had been struggling to limit the power of Iran's reactionary religious leaders, and to open up a dialogue between the West and the Muslim world.
You'd think the West would love a guy like that. But the Bush administration was determined to treat 9/11 as a battle in the "clash of civilizations" — a clash that Khatami was trying to steer the world away from.
So, despite an outpouring of sympathy from Iranians over 9/11 — including a moment of silence at an Iranian soccer match — Washington declared Iran part of the "axis of evil" and dragged the West into a "war on terror" that involved invading Muslim countries.
More on link
AFGHANISTAN: BULGARELLI, IT'S WAR, PULL OUT THE TROOPS Italy
(AGI) - Rome, Sep 8 -
"Today's attacks give the grave confirmation of the escalation of the situation in Afghanistan, now effectively a theatre of war, and impose the acceleration of the calendar for the withdrawal of the Italian contingent," said Green senator Mauro Bulgarelli, according to whom: "we must take note again that there are no conditions for our troops to stay in Afghanistan, who will inevitably be involved, day after day, in the escalation of conflict which now concerns the entire region, just like this morning. On the other hand, when the decree on the refinancing of missions was being made, it was decided that the presence of our soldiers be conditioned by the escalation of the situation and that a parliamentary monitoring committee be established for this. Today, the constitution of this organ is more urgent than ever, especially in the light of the new commitments our country has made in Lebanon, which make the withdrawal from Afghanistan all the more urgent. There are currently no conditions for the carrying out of a peace mission in Afghanistan. It is also urgent to concentrate the efforts of the UN mission, which is very arduous and taxing." (AGI) -
081910 SET 06
COPYRIGHTS 2002-2006 AGI S.p.A.
End
More on link
Extending Canada’s mission in Afghanistan ‘right thing to do’
By PETER MACKAY
http://thechronicleherald.ca/Opinion/527313.html
Alongside our allies from more than 35 other nations, our Canadian Forces members, diplomats and development workers are working to ensure the benefits of peace and prosperity extend to all Afghans.
They are working with the Afghan people and their first-ever elected government to create a better future for the Afghan people.
Development cannot occur in the absence of security.
Because of the work of our CF members, girls are now going to school in Afghanistan. Low-income farmers can get small loans to improve their crops. Families can get credit to open a small bakery, or a shoe repair shop, or a teahouse. Wells are being dug and pipes installed to bring water to villages. Roads are being resurfaced so that farmers can get their vegetables to market.
Unfortunately, these images are not the ones most often seen on television.
I saw first-hand how our presence in Afghanistan is helping improve the daily lives of Afghan citizens.
Our integrated approach of development, diplomacy and defence is helping the Afghan people stabilize their country and ensure that Afghanistan never again becomes a haven for terrorists.
We must never forget that we are there at the invitation of Afghanistan’s democratically elected government. We are guided by core Canadian values: freedom, democracy, respect for human rights and the rule of law.
Much progress has been made; but laying the groundwork for democratic development takes time and requires sustained support.
More on link
Report: Germany to move armoured vehicles to Afghanistan
Sep 8, 2006, 17:50 GMT
http://news.monstersandcritics.com/southasia/article_1199291.php/Report_Germany_to_move_armoured_vehicles_to_Afghanistan
Berlin - The German Army plans to move infantry fighting vehicles (IFVs) to northern Afghanistan in case it is drawn into fighting with the Taliban, a newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, said Friday.
The tracked Marder vehicles are better armed than the lighter armoured personnel carriers on wheels used by the Germans currently.
In the report quoting politicians involved with defence, to appear Saturday, the newspaper said the stock was being sent as a precaution and would merely be parked at a new German base in Mazar-e-Sharif.
The Germans are a key component in the ISAF peace force in the country. ISAF forces have been drawn into fighting with the Taliban in the south and west of the country, but not in the north where the Germans operate.
The newspaper said a Defence Ministry spokesman in Berlin stated that no decision on sending the vehicles had been taken yet. The 33- ton Marder carries a crew of three plus six infantrymen.
End
Distance the Afghan mission from the U.S.
Sep. 10, 2006. 01:00 AM HAROON SIDDIQUI
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1157838637103&call_pageid=968256290204&col=968350116795
Haroon Siddiqui urges NATO to call meeting with tribes and reassess task
T he scum were to be squished. We were in Afghanistan to kill the Taliban. It was a matter of our survival; if we weren't there, they'd be here. (Arguably, they could be here because we are there, no? But such common sense questions are not permitted these days.)
Now Ottawa has a new tune. Both the defence minister and the chief of the defence staff concede that the Taliban cannot be eliminated militarily.
Should we, then, be talking to them, as Jack Layton suggests? No. We don't talk to terrorists.
Afghanistan is unravelling. Canadian soldiers are dying. Half the Canadians want our mission ended, even while NATO wants more reinforcements for its 18,000 troops, who are augmenting the 18,000 American soldiers, who have made a mess, just as they have in Iraq.
The Iraqification of Afghanistan, running parallel to the Americanization of Canada under Stephen Harper, is clear.
More on link
NATO forces kill 94 Taliban in s. Afghanistan
By ASSOCIATED PRESS KANDAHAR, Afghanistan Sep. 10, 2006 12:34
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1154526042123&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
NATO forces kill 94 Taliban in southern Afghanistan
NATO and Afghan forces killed 94 Taliban fighters in airstrikes and ground attacks in southern Afghanistan, the military alliance said Sunday.
The 94 militants were killed in Kandahar province's Panjwayi and neighboring Zhari districts late Saturday and early Sunday and were separate to more than 40 Taliban who died in fighting in the same areas earlier Saturday, NATO spokesman Maj. Scott Lundy said.
The killings were part of a NATO-led Operation called Operation Medusa, which began Sept. 2 and has killed at least 420 insurgents, according to the alliance. Purported Taliban spokesmen have disputed the high death counts.
NATO said in a statement that the insurgent casualties were inflicted by warplanes in four separate engagements.
Panjwayi has long been regarded as a haven for the Taliban, which has been fanning Afghanistan's deadliest spate of violence since the U.S.-led invasion that toppled the hard-line regime after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks for harboring al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden.
Separately, Taliban militants killed three Afghan soldiers and wounded eight in an ambush in southern Zabul province's Shahjoy district Saturday, said Defense Ministry spokesman Gen. Zahir Azimi.
Afghan authorities also found the body of a district education chief Saturday who was kidnapped by suspected militants in central Afghanistan's Ghazni province, said Abdul Ali Faquri, a spokesman for the provincial governor.
More on link
The harsh realities of Afghanistan
Renata D'aliesio, The Calgary Herald, with files from The Associated Press Sunday, September 10, 2006
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/story.html?id=fd47e314-4ae3-46bf-80c9-7388ca0dae55
Troops learn quickly of country's dangers, horrors of war
ZHARI DISTRICT, Afghanistan -- By the time a fresh batch of Canadian troops stepped into Afghanistan early last month, illusions of peacekeeping had already dissipated from their minds.
This wasn't the Afghanistan soldiers Morgan Spurrell, Chris Desjardins and Shane Schofield visited in 2002, a few months after the Taliban government was overthrown. Four years into supposed reconstruction and rebuilding, the country was descending deeper into drugs and violence.
This mission, they knew, was not about peacekeeping, at least not yet. This was about war.
"I think older people get it. They've lived through wars," Master-Cpl. Schofield said yesterday. "But young people in Canada, they don't seem to understand why we're here."
Here, for the moment, is a stretch of fertile land near southern Afghanistan's Zhari district. Fields of corn stalks, cucumbers and onions crisscross rows of marijuana plants, some with stems so thick and long they stretch nearly 2.5 metres into the air.
A major offensive to demolish the Taliban's hold over southern Afghanistan has entered its second week. The first few days claimed the lives five Canadian soldiers. Yesterday, Operation Medusa claimed the life of a U.S. soldier.
NATO forces, however, believe the noose around the insurgents is tightening. Troops destroyed three Taliban positions, a bomb-making factory and a weapons cache yesterday, killing more than 40 of the group's fighters, NATO said.
"We're making good progress every day," said Canadian Brig.-Gen. David Fraser, head of NATO's southern Afghanistan operation. "There is severe pressure on the insurgents remaining in the area, which will continue until they are either defeated or choose reconciliation through surrender."
That said, NATO officials -- and Defence Minister Gordon O'Connor -- are calling for more troops and equipment to bolster the forces already in Afghanistan.
Canada is now sending as many as 20 Leopard tanks and 300 additional personnel to Kandahar to provide additional protection for its troops.
The decision to ratchet up Canada's force comes as military officers acknowledge they underestimated the resilience of the Taliban.
More on link
Making every drop count, Coke opens in Afghanistan
Sun Sep 10, 2006 7:11am ET
http://today.reuters.com/news/articleinvesting.aspx?view=CN&storyID=2006-09-10T111057Z_01_SP144391_RTRIDST_0_AFGHAN-COKE-PICTURE.XML&rpc=66&type=qcna
By Terry Friel
KABUL, Sept 10 (Reuters) - The blind cleric's haunting Arabic prayer chant echoed among the sterile plastic rows of Coke and Fanta, seeking Allah's blessing for the only major business to open in Afghanistan in more than a decade.
Coca-Cola, with its distinctive red-and-white logo, has come to Kabul in what is at once a sign of economic progress and a symbol of the failure of major businesses to open up in the five years since the fall of the hardline Islamist Taliban.
President Hamid Karzai opened the $25 million bottling plant in the capital's industrial complex of Bagrami, meaning sweet or fragrant, on Sunday.
Karzai's Western-backed government is desperate to kickstart an economy independent of the $3 billion-a-year illegal drugs trade, but has been unable to lure investors to one of the world's five poorest countries, where violence has hit a high since the 2001 war.
The plant, which Coca-Cola goes out of its way to emphasise will produce only non-alcoholic beverages, is franchised to one of the country's richest men, Habib Gulzar, and will initially produce Coke, Fanta and Sprite and soon make bottled water, the company said in a statement.
More on link
Long after 9/11, Afghanistan struggles to find way
11 September 2006
http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,3792597a13638,00.html
BAMIYAN: Life is grim when you can't pay the rent on a scorpion-infested cave, there is no job in sight and desperate people are waiting to take your spot.
As Afghanistan struggles to rebuild five years after September 11 and the fall of the Taliban, hundreds of families are trapped in a sprawling web of caves in the lush Bamiyan valley, surrounded by stark, desert mountains and famous for two giant Buddhas blown up in 2001.
"We have no work. Our lives are getting worse. We can't get enough food," says Mahtab, a 35-year-old mother of six perched on a narrow path carved into a cliff, nursing her year-old daughter Fatema, her hair stiff with sand.
Five years on, Bamiyan is at once a symbol of the progress that has been made and of the lack of it in Afghanistan.
Bamiyan has Afghanistan's first and only woman governor and is trying to rebuild its tourist trade. But it remains desperately poor, dragged down by the failure of President Hamid Karzai and his Western backers to kick-start the economy while eliminating opium production.
With the Taliban at its strongest since 2001 and opium production at record levels, violence is blocking efforts at economic development.
The lack of jobs means more people are willing to grow opium poppies, bolsters warlords and forces impoverished villagers into the arms of the Taliban as paid fighters.
"We have the young generation and all of them, they are jobless, the majority of them they are jobless," says Bamiyan's thoughtful, soft-spoken Governor Habiba Sarabi, a doctor.
More on link
Two coalition soldiers killed in Afghanistan
10/09/2006 - 2:35:34 PM
http://www.irishexaminer.com/breaking/story.asp?j=83413004&p=834y33x6&n=83413384&x=
A US-led coalition soldier has been killed in combat in southern Afghanistan, Nato said today.
The soldier was killed late on Saturday in southern Zabul province, where he was embedded as a trainer with the Afghan army, a Nato statement said. It gave no further details.
A second coalition soldier died during the Nato-led Operation Medusa in Kandahar’s southern Panjwayi district, the statement said.
It added that the dead soldier had earlier been mistakenly identified as a Nato soldier – the sixth foreign soldier to die in the anti-Taliban operation that began on September 2.
Nato says more than 420 militants have died in the fighting.
The statement did not give the soldiers’ nationalities. Most of the 20,000 troops in the coalition are American.
More on link
Afghan governor killed by suicide bombing
2006-09-10 18:14:13 by Yu Zhixiao
KABUL, Sept. 10 (Xinhua) -- A suicide bombing killed Hakim Tanewall, governor of the eastern Paktia province of Afghanistan, and his two bodyguards on Sunday, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry told Xinhua.
The spokesman, Yusuf Stanizai, said the incident happened at around 1:00 p.m. (0830 GMT) when an attacker belted with explosives rushed to the car carrying Tanewall.
Three other bodyguards were injured in the attack, which occurred before the governor's office in Gardez city, the capital of Paktia province, he added
More on link
Get out of Afghanistan now: NDP
Sep. 10, 2006. 01:00 AM BRUCE CAMPION-SMITH OTTAWA BUREAU
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1157838637235&call_pageid=968332188774&col=968350116467
QUEBEC—NDP Leader Jack Layton wants Parliament to debate the withdrawal of Canadian soldiers from Afghanistan after party delegates overwhelmingly backed his call to "bring the troops home."
And Layton urged Prime Minister Stephen Harper to distance Canada from America's war on terrorism.
More on link
The `war on terror' will turn a generation of angry young men against the West, says Linda McQuaig
Sep. 10, 2006. 01:00 AM LINDA MCQUAIG
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1157838637025&call_pageid=968256290204&col=968350116795
In the days after 9/11, Iranian president Mohammad Khatami condemned the terrorist attack and reached out to the West to fight terrorism together.
Too bad we ignored him. We'd be safer today if we hadn't.
Khatami was a moderate reformer, a popular democratically elected president who had been struggling to limit the power of Iran's reactionary religious leaders, and to open up a dialogue between the West and the Muslim world.
You'd think the West would love a guy like that. But the Bush administration was determined to treat 9/11 as a battle in the "clash of civilizations" — a clash that Khatami was trying to steer the world away from.
So, despite an outpouring of sympathy from Iranians over 9/11 — including a moment of silence at an Iranian soccer match — Washington declared Iran part of the "axis of evil" and dragged the West into a "war on terror" that involved invading Muslim countries.
More on link
AFGHANISTAN: BULGARELLI, IT'S WAR, PULL OUT THE TROOPS Italy
(AGI) - Rome, Sep 8 -
"Today's attacks give the grave confirmation of the escalation of the situation in Afghanistan, now effectively a theatre of war, and impose the acceleration of the calendar for the withdrawal of the Italian contingent," said Green senator Mauro Bulgarelli, according to whom: "we must take note again that there are no conditions for our troops to stay in Afghanistan, who will inevitably be involved, day after day, in the escalation of conflict which now concerns the entire region, just like this morning. On the other hand, when the decree on the refinancing of missions was being made, it was decided that the presence of our soldiers be conditioned by the escalation of the situation and that a parliamentary monitoring committee be established for this. Today, the constitution of this organ is more urgent than ever, especially in the light of the new commitments our country has made in Lebanon, which make the withdrawal from Afghanistan all the more urgent. There are currently no conditions for the carrying out of a peace mission in Afghanistan. It is also urgent to concentrate the efforts of the UN mission, which is very arduous and taxing." (AGI) -
081910 SET 06
COPYRIGHTS 2002-2006 AGI S.p.A.
End
More on link
