"Shoot First” Tactics, Female Officers Contribute to Reduced Crime Rates: Afghan Police
15 March 2011
Colonel Mohammad Zaher, head of criminal investigations for Kabul province, said the number of recorded serious crimes fell by 17 per cent to 546 in the last quarter of 2010 compared with the previous three months. “Six months ago, there were two kidnappings in Kabul every day, but only four cases have occurred in the last four months, and the perpetrators have been arrested,” Mohammad Zaher said. He attributed the improvement to a combination...
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Petraeus Says Afghan War Progress Is "Fragile"
15 March 2011
The commander of American and allied forces in Afghanistan told Congress on Tuesday that the military had had significant battlefield successes but that progress remained tenuous. The commander, Gen. David H. Petraeus, offered an “assessment that the momentum achieved by the Taliban in Afghanistan since 2005 has been arrested in much of the country and reversed in a number of important areas.” But in opening two days of much-anticipated...
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Bombs Kill Provincial Council Member, School Principal in NE
15 March 2011
Two bombings Tuesday killed a local legislator and a school principal, the latest of a series of attacks as the top U.S. commander was trying to persuade Congress that NATO is making progress against insurgents. [...]In another move that could hamper the funding of U.S. and international development efforts, the Afghan government ordered all private security companies to disband by March 21 next year. Although expected, Tuesday's announcement was...
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Exchanges of Fire between Afghanistan-Pakistan Militaries Accelerating: Analysis
15 March 2011
An Afghan civilian was killed over the weekend by the military shooting into a residential area in Goshta, in the eastern part of Nangarhar province on the Pakistani border. Despite the current furor over civilian casualties, neither the Afghan government, nor Afghan president Hamid Karzai -- who is quite vocal in criticizing civilian casualties caused by NATO -- nor the international media are drawing much attention to this incident. Afghan officials...
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EU Ready to Offer Support to Tajikistan in Securing Afghan Border
15 March 2011
Tajikistan asked the European Union on Tuesday to help in protecting its porous border with Afghanistan, saying that its outdated Soviet-era defences were insufficient to contain a spreading Islamist insurgency. Sharaf Faizulloyev, deputy commander of Tajikistan's border guards, said his country was in urgent need of a "European model" to contain the threat of violence spilling over from the NATO-led war in Afghanistan. "The coalition forces are...
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Security Deteriorating in Afghanistan, Life "Untenable": ICRC
15 March 2011
Life for ordinary Afghans has become untenable, the Red Cross said on Tuesday, with security seriously deteriorating in the first two months of the year due to a surge in Taliban attacks and accidental NATO strikes on civilians. Violence in Afghanistan is at its worst since the Taliban were overthrown nearly a decade ago, despite the presence of around 150,000 foreign troops, and with Afghan forces to start taking over securing parts of the country...
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