Yesterday, Hashmat Karzai was killed at his home, in Karz.
Hashmat Khalil Karzai, a cousin of President Hamid Karzai and a powerful supporter of the presidential candidate Ashraf Ghani, was killed by a suicide bomber in southern Afghanistan on Tuesday as he greeted well-wishers at his home, government officials and a witness said.
Mr. Karzai was said to have been killed instantly when a young man embraced him and set off a bomb in his turban.
Bomber Kills Karzai Cousin Who Backed Recent Candidate for Afghan President, New York Times
[Kandahar provincial spokesman Dawa Khan] Minapal said a suicide bomber was among a group of people who were visiting Hashmat Karzai at his house for Eid al-Fitr celebrations when he detonated his explosives.
Another relative of Afghan President Karzai killed, CNN
Hashmat was a member of the Kandahar Provincial Council, and ascended in power after the 2011 assassination of Ahmed Wali Karzai.
In 2009, James Risen reported allegations that Hashmat Karzai had killed Waheed Karzai, as one in a series of revenge killings, all going back to an old dispute about an arranged marriage in the family.
The day before the assassination of Hashmat Karzai, gunmen had tried to kill Abdul Raziq, a powerful figure in Kandahar politics.
The six attackers, all of whom were wearing suicide vests, launched Sunday's attack from a school building near General Abdul Razeq's house in the Spin Boldak district of Kandahar province, but were shot before they could enter the residence, Zia Durani, provincial police spokesman, said.
Taliban claims attack on police official, Al-Jazeera
Hashmat Karzai was a campaign manager for Ashraf Ghani. The election has seen some assassinations, and many assassination attempts.
Responsibility for the killing of Hashmat Karzai is not known.
Hashmat was fiercely critical of the president and was known to have many enemies both within and outside the Karzai clan.
Karzai's powerful cousin killed, worsens strains over poll deadlock, Reuters
Earlier this week, gunmen selected and killed Shia passengers traveling on a bus to Ghor from Kabul.
Suspected Taliban fighters have halted two minibuses in the western province of Ghor, identified 14 Shia Hazara passengers, including three women and a child, bound their hands, then shot them dead by the side of the road, an official has said.
The buses were travelling from Kabul, where many of the passengers had gone to the capital to shop ahead of the holiday weekend, said the provincial governor, Sayed Anwar Rahmati.
"The insurgents stopped two vans and after checking peoples' identifications cards, they separated 14 passengers from 32 others and shot them dead," said the governor.
Fourteen civilians shot dead in Afghanistan, Al-Jazeera
The attack is especially troubling, because Afghanistan has not recently seen overtly sectarian violence like this.
The attack shortly after midnight in Ghor province marked one of the relatively few major instances of sectarian killings in Afghanistan’s 13-year war.
Gunmen kill 14 Shiite Muslims in rare sectarian attack in Afghanistan, Los Angeles Times
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism has previously reported on drone strikes in the covert U.S. wars in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. They now have a report on the open and acknowledged U.S. war in Afghanistan.
On the afternoon of September 7 last year, a truck made its way along a remote road in Watapur, a region in Afghanistan’s Kunar province. A local farmer, Miya Jan, heard a buzzing overhead, and looked up to see a drone above him, he told the Los Angeles Times. Minutes later, he heard an explosion.
Reaching the site, he realised the mangled vehicle belonged to his cousin. Among the bodies, he recognised his brother and his brother’s family. “There were pieces of my family all over the road,” he told the newspaper. “I picked up those pieces from the road and from the truck and wrapped them in a sheet to bury them.”
In the attack’s aftermath, claims and counter-claims circled. Afghan officials said the vehicle had contained at least eight civilians – and possibly as many as 11. But the International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) said the strike killed 10 “enemy forces” – although a spokesman told the New York Times Isaf would investigate.
The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (Unama) investigated too. Interviewing more than 50 sources, it concluded that the vehicle was carrying six “insurgents” when it was struck – but also 11 civilians, including four women and four children. A four-year-old girl was seriously wounded.
Faced with this claim, Isaf initially “denied the possibility of civilian casualties”, Unama later reported. Pressed further, Isaf eventually confirmed the deaths of a woman and child, and “would not rule out the possibility of another woman’s death”.
Who is dying in Afghanistan’s 1,000-plus drone strikes?
The Bureau stresses that gathering information about drones strikes in our covert wars is less difficult than gathering information about drone strikes in our open war in Afghanistan.
Afghanistan has been targeted by more drone strikes than any other country in the world, yet almost nothing is known about where those attacks took place, or who they killed.
A new study by the Bureau’s drones team, published today, examines the official opaqueness that surrounds drone operations and explores how outside organisations – such as the Bureau – might be able to lift this veil of secrecy.
Bureau study reveals vacuum of information around Afghanistan drone strikes
In 2012, Andar district in Ghazni saw a local anti-Taliban uprising.
“Now it’s a bit of a mess,” said one Western diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “It started as an anti-Taliban type thing, then Hezb-i-Islami moved in, then the government and the N.D.S. got involved and there are lots of different players, and that makes the people who started the whole thing suspicious.”
Ragtag Revolts in Parts of Afghanistan Repel Taliban, New York Times
Matt Aikins reports on recent events in Andar.
Before dawn on June 1, a group of U.S. special forces and Afghan army commandos arrived by helicopter to the east of Alizai, a farming hamlet in Andar district in Taliban-controlled territory in central Afghanistan. They moved from house to house, arresting any fighting-age men they found, while the local Taliban fighters, who had been sleeping in a mosque at the other end of the village, fled without a fight.
By sunrise, the soldiers had gathered more than 100 men in the yard of a house belonging to a local man named Hajji Badruddin. As is typical in rural Afghanistan, the house had two large adjoining courtyards fenced in by high mud walls. The villagers were kept in one yard, while in the next yard the Americans and Afghan commandos had set up their four-wheeled ATVs, other vehicles and equipment.
“This operation was Afghan planned and led,” Lt. Col. Christopher Belcher, a spokesperson for the U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force, explained in a written statement. “ISAF was there in an advisory role, advising the Afghan security forces conducting the operation.”
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All but one of them, the boy, were bound and blindfolded. According to eyewitnesses, Abdullah and his men put the three captives — Mohammad Gul, Nasrullah and Fazaldin — on the back of motorcycles and drove away as U.S. and Afghan soldiers looked on from rooftop positions. Soon afterward, the villagers said, they heard gunfire.
Exclusive: A US-backed militia runs amok in Afghanistan, Al Jazeera
Aikin's story is about a mix of Afghan Local Police, informal militias, and U.S. Special Forces. Two weeks ago, Khaama had a rundown of recent accounts of abuse by Afghan Local Police and informal militias.
Recent violence allegedly sparked by the behavior of Arbaki forces (pro government militants) and local warlords in north, central and southwestern provinces of Afghanistan has raised fears that the planned withdrawal of international forces by 2014 could lead to renewed violence even in the generally more peaceful central Kabul province the capital of the country.
Fears of civil war in Afghanistan, Khaama
Quickly ramping up a wide variety of militias, formal and informal, has been the U.S. plan for exit from Afghanistan.
In 2009, the General Accounting Office reported that the Department of Defense could not track and account for guns given to Afghan security forces. So Congress passed a law that the Department of Defense should track and account for guns given to Afghan security forces. The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction now reports that the Department of Defense can not track and account for guns given to Afghan security forces.
Lawrence Lewis diaries that.
The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction also reports that an American Soybean Association plan to reconstruct Afghanistan, by having Afghanistan grow soybeans, has failed.
Unreconstructed Afghan farmers ate the soybean seed they were given, put the fertilizer on other crops, and used the money they were loaned to buy sheep.
The Special Inspector General also reports that the money spent on the reconstruction of Afghanistan is larger, in adjusted dollars, than the Marshall Plan.
By the time its combat troops depart at the end of 2014, the United States will have appropriated more money trying to fix Afghanistan than it did on the Marshall Plan that helped Europe recover economically after World War II, according to an analysis by a government watchdog.
The comparison in the latest quarterly report of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction draws attention to the mixed results of U.S. investments in Afghanistan — $104 billion appropriated since 2002 — versus the success of the Marshall Plan, which is credited with helping to spur the economic revival of Western Europe.
Afghanistan to cost more than Marshall Plan, watchdog says, Stars and Stripes
Yet, as the Soybeans for Agricultural Renewal in Afghanistan Initiative points out, little has been achieved.
Afghanistan is a country with grim development indicators. The under-five mortality rate is the second worst in the world, only behind Sierra Leone. Maternal mortality is also among the worst in the world.
Afghanistan is highly factionalized, which prevents progress and development. Julius Cavendish reports on how feuding within the ISAF tribe contributes to problems in Helmand, the location of heavy recent fighting.
He reveals how ISAF repeatedly squandered the chance to build a durable political settlement in the district, including bombing a meeting of Taleban while they were discussing going over to the government. He argues that institutional dysfunction and competing agendas within the coalition helped ensure that the generals and bureaucrats overseeing the campaign in Helmand repeatedly undermined efforts to build a lasting peace.
Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory: How ISAF infighting helped doom Sangin to its ongoing violence, Afghanistan Analysts Network
Afghanistan has a reputation of being fiercely resistant to outside interference, and that it has been this way since the time of Alexander the Great. Actually, Afghanistan is very highly dependent on foreign aid, and is like, say, Gaza, in this.
Also, in other news, Afghanistan has sent $500,000 in aid to Gaza.
When the Afghan government announced last week that it was sending $500,000 “in a show of sympathy to the people of Gaza,” many here and abroad wondered if a nation still reliant on aid — and suffering rising civilian casualty rates — should be providing financial assistance to others.
For some, the announcement was a positive step, showing that Kabul was ready to do its part to help others in need. Hasan, a middle-aged Kabul resident, was supportive of the decision taken by a senior committee headed by President Hamid Karzai.
“They need the help. They are suffering,” Hasan said of the hundreds of Palestinians killed since Israel began its latest air and ground assault earlier this month.
Why Is Afghanistan Sending Aid to Gaza?, VICE News