Secretary of State John Kerry has made a surprise visit to Baghdad today. Ariana News says that Kerry will be in Kabul tomorrow.
Afghanistan officials have stated that secretary of state John Kerry to visit Kabul on Saturday and will discuss the ways for implementation of the strategic mutual agreement in between Kabul-Washington.
Mps have urged that secretary of state Kerry should talk over the political disagreements which are tensed in between the two leaders to break the Election deadlock.
Kerry to visit Afghanistan’s Officials on Saturday, Ariana News
The Secretary of State will be trying to impose on Afghanistan a solution to the problems created by the government he imposed on Afghanistan in 2014.
Afghanistan's government is in disarray. Following bitterly fought and inconclusive presidential elections in 2014, Ghani and Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah are sharing power under a deal brokered by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry. But the country's so-called unity government is proving anything but unified.
Afghan insurgency battle marred by political dysfunction, Lynne O’Donnell, Associated Press
Liberal politicians in the United States are unanimous now, that large-scale operations by U.S. ground troops are a mistake.
Can we not learn more lessons from our experience in Afghanistan, than just that one?
The government in Afghanistan is deeply disunified, because the United States imposed something it called a National Unity Government, as a short-term solution to a crisis.
Once you start up something like that, it is very hard to back out of it. John Kerry is flying to Afghanistan, to try.
A U.S. airstrike is reported to have killed 17 civilians, in remote Gomal district of Paktika province, on the border with Pakistan.
American airstrikes in the southeastern Afghan province of Paktika killed at least 17 civilians, local officials and elders said on Thursday, differing from official American and Afghan claims that only militants had been killed.
Hajji Muhammad Hasan, a former senator from the Gomal District, said that three drone strikes hit the area of Nematabad on Wednesday. He said that the first strike hit a pickup truck carrying Hajji Rozuddin, a local elder on his way to mediate a land dispute in the Kakarzai tribe. Also in the truck were four of Mr. Rozuddin’s bodyguards and seven other people.
A second strike soon after killed two people who had come to pick up the bodies, Mr. Hasan said. A third strike killed three others who had climbed a small hill to try to see what had happened and why the previous two men had not returned already.
At Least 17 Civilians Killed in U.S. Airstrikes, Afghan Officials Say, Farooq Jan Mangal and Mujib Mashal
The two strikes in Paktika province were aimed at insurgent targets, U.S. military spokesman Commander Fernando Estrella said on Thursday, but he gave no more details.
Paktika provincial police chief Zorawar Zahid said 14 insurgents were killed. But another local official said those killed were civilians.
"I am from the area where the incident happened and I can say there were all civilians," said Nimatullah Baburi, a deputy provincial council chief.
Afghan casualties disputed after U.S. air strikes, Reuters
Both Foreign Policy and the Wall Street Journal have accounts of the most recent events in the 40-year-long war in Nangarhar province.
The secret police are funding rag-tag village militias, to fight agency tribesmen pushed out by Pakistani military operations against them, who call themselves ISIS.
President Ashraf Ghani is backing the militias, called the People’s Uprising Program, where previously he has been an opponent of similar plans.
The Foreign Policy article, by Franz Marty, is pretty good on both reporting details of the war, and expressing the author’s inability to report on such murky and unverifiable events with any certainty.
The Wall Street Journal article, by Jessica Donati and Habib Khan Totakhil, discusses at length their inability to tell you how much the Central Intelligence Agency is involved.
The two articles together can be considered a publicity announcement of the program. Wall Street Journal considers the disclosure to be new.
The government has closely guarded the program, and news of it hasn’t been reported since its establishment in August 2015. Details of the program came from Afghan government officials, local village leaders and Western officials who have been monitoring its progress.
An upsurge in local militias calling themselves People’s Uprisings has been apparent for some time. Perhaps it is fairest to say, that the increased willingness of Afghan and American officials to semi-officially discuss and have publicized a named program is new, but the news is not at all surprising.
Wall Street Journal names a government position and a director.
The village militias are active in Kot, Achin and Nazian districts in the province of Nangarhar, and are already being considered for 140 districts in 32 provinces, said Abdul Qayum Rahimi, the director of the People’s Uprising Program at the Independent Directorate of Local Governance, a ministerial-level body that oversees provincial governments.
A 2011 Human Rights Watch report on American-backed militia plans in Afghanistan had discussed the wide variety of names the militias were given. When one program would be disbanded, for the abusive practices of the militias, another program of another name would be started.
Since 2010, they have mostly been called Afghan Local Police. The new People’s Uprisings Program would be an attempt to distance the program from the Afghan Local Police record, while doing the very same thing.
Last month, Hillary Clinton gave a speech on counterterrorism, at Stanford University. She spoke of a lesson learned, the need to avoid U.S. involvement in costly ground wars. And she spoke of another lesson learned, from the U.S. experience in Afghanistan, that nations have to secure their own communities, and that the United States must support this.
For example, it would be a serious mistake to stumble into another costly ground war in the Middle East. If we’ve learned anything from Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s that people and nations have to secure their own communities. We can—I argue, must—support them, but we can’t substitute for them.
The U.S. record in Afghanistan, of backing community security programs such as the Afghan Local Police, has been disastrous.
Can we not learn more lessons from our experience in Afghanistan, than just the one about big invasions?
Once these militias get started up, it is very hard to stop them. If their funding is cut off, the armed gangs just turn to robbery entirely.
These People’s Uprisings Programs, run by the Afghan National Directorate of Security, which receives funding from the CIA, are being considered for
being considered for 140 districts in 32 provinces
a whole lot of districts.