QUETTA: The Nato and US troops have started withdrawal of their equipments from Afghanistan after more than ten years of war.

The US and its allies invaded Afghanistan to oust Taliban government in the aftermath of tragic incident of September 11, 2001. They are set to withdraw all their forces by the end of 2014.

Pakistan is a key transit route for the Nato mission in landlocked Afghanistan, from where it is driven to the border from the Arabian Sea port of Karachi.

First convoy carrying weapons, armoured vehicles and trucks reached Quetta, the capital of Balochistan amid tight security on Tuesday evening.

Sources in frontier corps told Dawn.com that 50 trucks and armoured vehicles reached Quetta from Kandahar, the Taliban’s previous spiritual headquarter amid strict security measures.

They said levies and FC personnel guard the Nato convoy from Pak-Afghan border to Quetta. The convoy would leave for Port Qasim Karachi on Wednesday.

“Withdrawal of weapons and other equipments would continue in the coming days,” they said. Sources said security in and around Chaman, Pakistan’s bordering town with Afghanistan, was tightened following shifting of equipments.

Militants have attacked Nato supplies in different parts of Balochistan in the past.http://dawn.com/2013/05/21/nato-troops-start-equipment-withdrawal-from-afghanistan/

Local officials said armed men thrashed health workers at Manikhel village of Darra Adamkhel and warned them against vaccinating children against polio in the area.

They said the incident led to the suspension of the immunisation campaign. Local elders escorted polio team out of the area without administering polio drops to children.

Senior local official Farooq said such incidents had happened in some no-go areas of Darra Adamkhel, including Tor Chapper, Bostikhel, Mazidkhel and adjoining villages.

He said Manikhel was among no-go areas but the administration with the support of local tribal elders ran the immunisation campaign in the area.

The campaign was launched in Darra Adamkhel in Sept 2012 after a gap of four years. It was stopped in the area due to clashes between militants and security forces.

Two polio cases have been reported in these no-go areas during the last three years.

In Bajaur Agency, the anti-polio drive continued for the second day on Tuesday.

The political administration has enhanced security of polio workers after Monday’s attack on a polio team in the border area of Mamond. The attack had left a member of the levies force dead. The decision to increase security of polio workers was made during a meeting in Khar, headquarters of Bajaur Agency.

Political agent Abdul Jabbar Shah, agency surgeon Dr Jehanzeb Dawar, officials of political administration and the donors’ representatives attended the meeting.

Speaking on the occasion, Jabbar Shah said the local administration was committed to eradicating polio from the agency and that terrorist attacks could not weaken their resolve.

“Our efforts to free the agency from polio will continue. We will never succumb to the pressure of anti-social elements, whose agenda has been rejected by tribesmen,” he said.

The participants decided that two members of Bajaur levies force and three members of local peace committees would be deployed with each polio team. http://dawn.com/2013/05/22/militants-thrash-polio-team-in-darra/

According to an official of the political administration, unidentified men bombed the main electricity pylon supplying power to Wana around 11pm on Monday night. On Tuesday morning, Frontier Constabulary personnel reached the site to investigate the incident and repair the damaged pylon when suspected militants remotely detonated a second bomb, killing two and injuring seven others.

The official added the injured were shifted to the military hospital in Wana Scouts Camp. Electricity supply to Wana, which was suspended following the blast, could not be restored till the filing of this report.http://tribune.com.pk/story/552662/double-attack-two-fc-personnel-killed-in-blast/

PTI approached Samiul Haq, nicknamed the “Father of the Taliban”, after emerging from elections as the largest party in the troubled Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Former cricket star Imran has called for an end to military operations and peace talks with the Taliban, making his party’s victory in the northwest a significant development. Imran has vowed to put together a provincial coalition government in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and turn it into a “role model” for the rest of the country.

“We will talk to all stakeholders for establishment of peace in our province, meeting with Maulana Samiul Haq was a part of that,” Shaukat Yousafzai, a party leader who won a seat for the party in the provincial assembly told AFP. Samiul Haq is chief of his own faction of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JUI-S) and runs a madrassa that educated several Taliban leaders. Yousafzai said a PTI delegation led by Pervez Khattak, the incoming provincial chief minister, met Samiul Haq late Monday. Hamidul Haq, the cleric’s son and a former MP, confirmed to AFP that PTI leaders came to seek support.

“They asked Samiul Haq to play his role in establishment of peace in the province,” Haq said. “Samiul Haq told the delegation that he will play his role in establishment of peace and initiation of peace talks.” Incoming prime minister Nawaz Sharif on Monday said he was open to talks with the Taliban, saying bringing peace was one of his top priorities. Pakistan’s umbrella Tehreek-e-Taliban (TTP) movement in February signalled its willingness to enter peace talks with the government but also stepped up attacks against Nawaz’s rival Pakistan People’s Party and its main allies, drastically curtailing their ability to campaign during the election.

Previous Pakistani governments, as well as the military, have forged ad hoc peace deals with insurgent factions in various parts of the northwestern tribal belt, which have often broken down quickly. The Taliban, who denounce democracy as un-Islamic, killed more than 150 people during the election campaign, including 24 on polling day itself. Taliban spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan had said the insurgents would “wait until political parties form their government” but told AFP before the polls that anyone who “comes into conflict with Islam” would be targeted.http://dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2013\05\22\story_22-5-2013_pg1_5

Zohra Yusuf, in a statement issued on Monday, expressed her fear over escalating confrontation and violence in Karachi and appealed to all sides to act in a rational manner and focus on resolving the litany of challenges facing the country.

“The HRCP is appalled by the spike in tensions in Karachi and the murder of a senior politician belonging to Pakistan Tehrik-i-Insaf (PTI),” she said.

Vice-President of Pakistan Tehrik-i-Insaaf’s Sindh chapter, Zahra Shahid Hussain, was killed late on Saturday night.

“We reiterate the hope that many matters that emerge out of elections will be resolved rationally and in a non-violent manner and without flaring up emotions,” she added.

Zohra urged all sides to act in a calm and reasonable manner and de-escalate the tensions.

“We also expect that those responsible for ensuring the security of citizens will wake up to their duty without any further delay,” she added. http://dawn.com/2013/05/20/promoters-of-hate-violence-responsible-for-killing-hrcp/

Relative Muntazir told police here that he was walking with Saifur Rehman near Tableeghi mosque when two gunmen riding a motorcycle opened fire on him.

He said Rehman suffered serious bullet injuries and died at a local hospital.

According to him, Mr Rehman was an active member of the peace committee formed by pro-government tribal elder Malik Turkistan Bhittani against militant commander Baitullah Mehsud. Police registered murder case against unidentified gunmen and began investigation.

BOMB DISPOSAL SQUAD MAN INJURED: A member of the bomb disposal squad was injured in a roadside bomb explosion in Manzai area of South Waziristan Agency on Monday.

The explosion took place when a bomb disposal squad team was combing the area ahead of the movement of a military convoy.

MILITANTS TORCH HOUSES: Dozens of Lashkar-i-Islam militants torched houses of several peace activists and pro-government elders in Tirah valley on Saturday and Sunday.

Sources said militants had suspected the owners of the houses of supporting action against them and having close contacts with the local political administration. — http://dawn.com/2013/05/21/peace-worker-gunned-down-in-tank/

According to a local official, the team was administrating anti-polio drops in Kalan village of Mamood area along the border with Afghanistan when militants opened fire on them from a nearby field.

This was the first such attack in the area.

“A Bajaur Levy soldier escorting the polio team was killed on the spot,” the official said, adding that eight suspected tribesmen had been taken into custody. An official at the tribal secretariat in Peshawar said the anti-polio campaign in the region would continue. “We are taking stock of the situation and will take further security measures to protect the polio teams,” he said.

A total of 682 teams – mobile, transit and fixed – were involved in administering anti-polio drops among over 223,500 children in Bajaur, the official said.

No woman is participating in the campaign because of security threats. http://dawn.com/2013/05/21/levies-man-dies-in-attack-on-polio-team/

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — As soon as the Taliban bullet struck 24-year-old Afghan Sgt. Nazir Moradi’s leg, the men in his unit began brainstorming a way to get him off the battlefield.

The roads were too dangerous for an army ambulance. The Afghan soldiers, in several calls to their commanders, repeated one plea: They needed a helicopter.

The Afghan air force didn’t have any working aircraft available. The U.S. military, in the midst of drawing down its air support, denied a request for help. Instead, Moradi was carried for miles and eventually put in an unarmored ambulance impeded by rough terrain and the threat of roadside bombs.

By the time Moradi arrived at the Kandahar Regional Military Hospital, more than three hours away, he had bled to death from a minor wound. Hospital workers carried him to the morgue in a flag-draped coffin, the ritual they perform each time a soldier arrives too late.

“We kept waiting for a helicopter, either American or Afghan. But it never arrived,” said Pvt. Morabuddin, Moradi’s best friend. “He did not have to die.”

For the past decade, the Afghan army has relied on hundreds of American helicopters to pluck wounded soldiers from remote battlefields and outposts. Now, the U.S. helicopters are leaving Afghanistan just as the country’s army embarks on its toughest fight, assuming formal responsibility for security this summer. The Afghan air force has 60 helicopters, but many are out of commission at any given time, and none is dedicated solely to casualty evacuation.

The war here is full of asymmetries between one of the world’s strongest militaries and one of the world’s newest forces, dependent entirely on foreign aid. The staggering gap in air evacuation capacity raises questions not only about how Afghan troops will defeat a resilient enemy, but how they will avoid countless unnecessary deaths. About 250 Afghan soldiers and police officers die every month, a toll far higher than that suffered by Western troops in their deadliest period.

The United States has invested millions of dollars in training and supplying the Afghan air force, but American officials acknowledge that Afghan pilots will be able to evacuate only a fraction of wounded soldiers and police officers. Last year, the United States evacuated 4,700 Afghan soldiers by air, compared with the Afghan air force’s 400.

With American air support vanishing, the rest will have to rely on unarmored ambulances, even though soldiers are often wounded hundreds of miles from an adequate hospital, separated by roads peppered with homemade bombs, known as IEDs.

“Your helicopters are our life support, and they’re leaving,” said Ahmad Zia Safai, a surgeon at the Kandahar hospital.

A crisis of confidence

When its troops are wounded, the U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) has long relied on a massive fleet of Black Hawk helicopters operating 24 hours a day. Rapid air evacuation is credited with saving hundreds of lives in the past decade of war. The coalition deems transporting its own casualties from the battlefield in ambulances too dangerous.

The Afghan air force, meanwhile, has about six working helicopters in all of the restive south. Afghan pilots don’t have the resources, such as night-vision goggles, necessary to fly after sunset, and their weakness in ground combat means that they are seldom able to land in hostile territory.

The Afghan fleet is expected to require NATO support until at least 2017, according to U.S. officials, due in large part to concerns about maintenance.

“There’s no way the Afghan air force will be able to cover what we’ve been covering,” said Col. Michael Paston, the U.S. 438th Air Expeditionary Advisory Wing surgeon general. “Are they going to be surprised when they call on ISAF [to evacuate a casualty] and ISAF says no? That’s happening now.”

That new reality has prompted a crisis of confidence in many Afghan units. Some commanders worry that troops might be less willing to put their lives at risk knowing that they lack once-dependable medical support.

“How can we fill the gap as the U.S. withdraws? It’s impossible. We can’t grow fast enough,” said Col. Asrail Wardak, the deputy commander of the Afghan air force’s southern fleet.

As the Taliban’s summer fighting season went into full swing this month, the dead and critically wounded soldiers poured into Kandahar Regional Military Hospital in almost equal number. All the men who arrived with life-threatening injuries had been evacuated by U.S. helicopters.

After performing a double amputation on a soldier who had stepped on a makeshift bomb, Khadir Tajik, a physician, emerged from the operating room with beads of sweat on his forehead.

“Without a helicopter, there’s no question he would have died. An ambulance would have taken way too long,” he said.

The recovery room was full of patients who said they knew that the helicopters that saved their lives were leaving Afghanistan. With the NATO withdrawal accelerating, they could be some of the last Afghan casualties to be evacuated by international forces.

Lt. Tamarac Dyer, an ISAF spokesman, said coalition forces “will provide assistance when needed, but not on a routine basis,” at bases shared with Afghan forces, which are rapidly diminishing in number.

In most cases, like Moradi’s, Afghan soldiers are injured while on missions at which no foreign forces are present.

In the Kandahar recovery room, there was a 25-year-old commando whose unit had unearthed eight makeshift bombs before the ninth exploded beneath his feet. There was a 21-year-old police officer whose vehicle had stepped on a roadside bomb and whose right leg was amputated by doctors; when he couldn’t hear them, they whispered that his left leg would probably have to be removed, too. There was a 22-year-old soldier who was stabbed and beaten after he stepped out of his outpost to investigate suspicious activity.

Top U.S. and Afghan military leaders have met twice in the past year to discuss the future of casualty evacuation after NATO’s pullout. U.S. officials urged Afghan commanders to do ground evacuation, according to U.S. and Afghan officials. Gen. Abdul Basir, the Afghan army’s deputy medical commander, said he stood at the second meeting and spoke angrily.

“If a soldier is in serious condition — if he has lost his limbs — an ambulance will not get him to the hospital in time,” he recalled saying.

Like many of his colleagues, Basir was trained by American doctors and military officers over the past decade. His U.S. advisers taught him the importance of the “golden hour” — the window of opportunity to save a victim of severe trauma.

“Without helicopters, we lose the golden hour,” Basir said in an interview. “We lose an opportunity to save lives.”

Still, late last year, after the meeting with U.S. officials, Gen. Sher Mohammad Karimi, the Afghan army’s chief of staff, issued a memo to his commanders explaining the need to rely on ambulances as U.S. air support dwindles.

“Until now, the evacuation of the war wounded and injured was often carried out by the international coalition through air,” Karimi wrote. “Since this process has been gradually reduced . . . Afghan army units need to arrange their plans for ground evacuation.”

Evacuations and escalations

Recently, two Afghan Mi-17 helicopters flew over the rocky, inhospitable terrain between Kandahar and Zabul provinces. Each casualty evacuation amounts to a small triumph for the nation’s young air force. This one occurred after a hailstorm grounded the entire fleet for four days.

A few hours after a wounded soldier, Pvt. Lal Muhammad, was loaded, grimacing, into the helicopter and transported to the Kandahar military hospital, he spoke coldly from his hospital bed.

“It took four days for them to pick me up,” he said. “How is that possible?”

Muhammad’s injury wasn’t life-threatening — he had accidentally shot himself in the foot in the middle of a firefight. But the closest hospital with experienced medics was nearly 200 miles from his remote outpost. The road to the facility, Muhammad’s unit knew, was lined with bombs. The only solution was to wait for a helicopter, however long it took. If the injury had been more serious, he he assumes he would have died.

“You can’t replace a U.S. helicopter with an Afghan ambulance,” said Soor Gulab Ahmadzia, the flight medic who tended to Muhammad.

U.S. officials haven’t articulated what kind of air support they will provide to Afghans through 2014 — only that it will continue to diminish. That transition has been rocky, and U.S. officials acknowledge that they are letting Afghans down by denying requests for air evacuation.

The U.S.-led coalition made a similar change in 2009, when it largely stopped providing air evacuation assistance to Afghan civilians injured by the Taliban. Some in the U.S. military viewed that as a betrayal.

“Not only did the U.S. choose to escalate the war knowing that civilians would increasingly be killed and wounded — without proper trauma care in place — they also changed the medical rules of engagement, resulting in greater mortality,” said one U.S. official who is not authorized to talk to the media and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

U.S. officials say they are simply trying to find an “Afghan solution” as their resources diminish. But there are many stories, like Moradi’s, of Afghan soldiers and police officers dying of treatable injuries.

‘He died for his country’

In March, Naqibullah, a police officer in Wardak province who had been injured by a Taliban mortar round, waited seven hours to be evacuated by air because his commander worried that an ambulance would be vulnerable to roadside bombs. The helicopter never came, and Naqibullah bled to death.

But the commander’s concern turned out to be justified: Hours later, a vehicle in the convoy transporting Naqibullah’s body from Jaghatu district to the provincial capital hit one such bomb, killing another officer.

“This brought down the morale of our officers one hundred percent,” said Wahid Tanha, the Jaghatu police chief. “It shows the weakness of our government.”

In an interview in Kandahar, Morabuddin said he traveled 500 miles with Moradi’s coffin to Badakhshan province, along the border with Tajikistan.

When he arrived, Moradi’s relatives opened the coffin and saw the minor gunshot wound. Morabuddin said he felt obligated to explain what had happened, how their son and brother had died of a treatable injury.

“After he was wounded, there was no way to evacuate him by ambulance,” Morabuddin recalled telling them. “There was no road. By the time he arrived in the hospital, he was dead.”

Morabuddin waited for more questions, dreading the answers he would have to give. But the family was silent. Finally, Moradi’s brother spoke.

“What we know is that he died for his country. It was his destiny.”http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/without-us-helicopters-afghans-struggle-to-save-wounded/2013/05/19/2856b772-b64e-11e2-b568-6917f6ac6d9d_print.html

Even as this fragile nation of about 30 million holds its breath, fearing catastrophe could follow the presidential election and NATO troop pullout next year, both the Afghan government and its armed opponents seem to think that time is on their side. A once-acute feeling of urgency to end the war seems to have been overtaken by uneasy, tenuous maneuvering in a vast political fog.

“Everything in Afghanistan seems very ambiguous now,” said Abdul Hakim Mujahid, a former Taliban diplomat and a member of the government-appointed peace council. “There are a hundred questions to be answered, but nothing is clear, and we have no magic formula.”

Failure of initiatives

Just a few months ago, momentum seemed to be building for rapprochement. In December, Afghan officials, political opposition figures and Taliban leaders held private discussions in Paris. Several participants described the meetings as a breakthrough, yet no concrete actions or agreements emerged from them.

A planned Taliban office in Qatar, where the insurgents could meet with Afghan and foreign officials to talk about peace negotiations, did not get off the ground before the summer fighting season began this year. Although President Hamid Karzai, who had balked at the idea, finally reached agreement with Qatar in April, the Taliban — which has insisted that it will talk only with the Americans and not with Karzai — has expressed little recent interest in moving forward.

Talks between the Americans and the Taliban in Doha, Qatar, ended early last year, and a tentative deal to exchange prisoners and implement other confidence-building measures fell apart. Those discussions have not resumed, according to Obama administration officials.

The common denominator that played a part in undoing both initiatives, observers said, was the deep hostility and mistrust between Taliban leaders and Karzai. The Taliban does not recognize the Kabul government as legitimate, calling it a Western-installed puppet. The group has demanded a new constitution and says it prefers to negotiate with a wide range of Afghans and foreign interlocutors.

“The Taliban say Karzai is the biggest obstacle to peace,” said Waheed Mojda, a political analyst and former Taliban ministry employee. “They discovered in Paris that they have a lot in common with some of his opponents, and they have the same questions everyone else does about 2014. Once Karzai is gone from power, they want to be in communication with other parties and movements.”

Aides to Karzai, however, said they are convinced that despite the more-moderate tone being adopted by Taliban leaders today, they remain ruthless extremists who want to forcibly turn Afghanistan into a pure Islamic state. Karzai, who shares ethnic and tribal roots with the Taliban, was once fond of calling the group’s members “brothers,” but his comments have taken a harsher, more exasperated tone of late.

“We need a just and enduring peace, not a quick deal with the Taliban,” said Ismael Qasimyar, a longtime Karzai aide and peace council member. “The Taliban talk about girls’ education and political pluralism now, but they think that after the NATO troops withdraw, they can conquer and rule us again. . . . We will never sacrifice a single Afghan’s rights just to get a settlement with the Taliban.”

Mounting concerns

Several other factors have contributed to deepening pessimism about prospects for peace. Most dramatic is a renewed surge in Taliban violence this spring, which has left hundreds of Afghan police officers, soldiers and civilians dead, along with 57 coalition troops, from March to May. The southern-based insurgents have staged small attacks and bombings across hundreds of miles and more than a dozen provinces.

In the latest attack, a suicide bombing killed 14 people Monday, including the provincial council head of Baghlan, a relatively peaceful and secure province in the northeast. The attacker approached the official, a known anti-Taliban figure, as he talked with a group outside his office in the city of Pul-i-Khumri. The Taliban swiftly asserted responsibility for the bombing.

NATO and Afghan officials point out that most attacks are still confined to a few small areas of the country and that the insurgents lack the capacity to confront Afghan and coalition troops, who far outnumber them. But the growing number of attacks on civilians this year has alarmed Afghans and international observers, and many express concern that Afghan troops will not be able to provide security in many regions during the election next year.

Another widely shared concern here is whether Pakistan, a powerful neighbor that many Afghans mistrust, will hinder the peace process and take advantage of a tumultuous transitional year to weaken the Kabul government. Afghan officials say Pakistan wields strong influence over the Taliban and is in no hurry to bring the group to the negotiating table.

Pakistan “does not want a strong Afghan government; it wants a slice of the cake of Afghan power,” Qasimyar said. “Pakistani officials repeatedly say they want peace and stability for Afghanistan, but Pakistan is a nursery and exporter for extremism. Taliban leaders living in Pakistan need to get out of there, so they will be free to think and be independent and engage in peace.”

Beyond any single source of worry, though, analysts and officials here said the broad questions associated with the upcoming transition seem to have overwhelmed the narrower demands and conditions for peace. Who will govern the country? Will the defense forces hold together or disintegrate into ethnic factions? Will the war economy collapse? Will the neighbors interfere? Will any Americans stay beyond 2014, and what will be the function of those troops?

“For everyone, 2014 is the big nightmare,” Mujahid said. “There is a great gap between the people and the government, but I see little chance for a legitimate election that will bring stability. As long as the future is not clear, I think there is nothing we can do for peace.”http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/afghan-peace-lost-in-transition-worries/2013/05/20/8af1780c-c09b-11e2-9aa6-fc21ae807a8a_print.html