French journalists arrive home after 18-month Taliban hostage ordeal | World news | The Guardian

 

 

Two journalists held hostage by the Taliban for 18 months in Afghanistan have arrived home in France to an emotional welcome.

Television reporter Hervé Ghesquierè, 47, with tears in his eyes, described being confined indoors "23 and three-quarters hours a day" and repeatedly having his hopes raised of an imminent release – and then dashed.

Cameraman Stéphane Taponier, 46, said: "We're doing really, really, really well."

Both looked quite pale but otherwise healthy, and were visibly moved by the huge crowd of journalists gathered at a military airbase outside Paris for the long-awaited homecoming.

Their plight was one of France's longest-ever hostage ordeals, and had become a national cause. President Nicolas Sarkozy, first lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy and France's defence and foreign ministers met the two men as they left the plane from Kabul.

The two journalists and three Afghan associates were kidnapped in December 2009 while working for France 3 television on a story about reconstruction on a road east of Kabul. They had been embedded with French troops in Afghanistan, and decided to take off to report on their own but were captured.

They were freed on Wednesday along with their Afghan translator, Reza Din. Two others were freed earlier.

French officials insist no ransom has been paid, though the circumstances of the release remained unclear.

The journalists insisted that they had not been beaten or mistreated by their Taliban captors, just suffered "very very difficult" living conditions. They said they were separated after the first three months and spent the rest of the time isolated and confined.

"We represented something important for the Taliban," Taponier said, which he said gave him hope they would eventually be freed.

In April 2010, after posting a video of the hostages on the web, the Taliban said it had submitted a list of prisoners to French authorities it wanted freed in exchange.

Last week, the French defence minister, Gérard Longuet, said the announcements of staggered French and American troop withdrawals might help the cause of freeing Ghésquierè and Taponier. US president Barack Obama announced the withdrawal of 33,000 troops by September 2012, and France followed suit, announcing it will pull out a quarter of its force of 4,000.

The Taliban gave each journalist a radio at some point, they said. Taponier was able to listen to Radio France International, which was broadcasting regular messages of support to the two men in the hope they were listening.

"That warmed our hearts," Taponier said.

But Ghesquierè was only able to get a BBC signal, and said he was largely unaware of the large support campaign in France.

He described battling boredom and discouragement by exercising in the small room where he was isolated for months, and writing.

And he exclaimed in dismay in recalling that a year-and-a-half of notes he took were taken away before his liberation, because his captors didn't want any document released.

Ghesquierè specialised in war reporting, covering the Balkans conflict and investigative reports around the globe, from Cambodia to the disputed Western Sahara territory. Taponier had filmed in Afghanistan, notably a 2000 report on the northern commander Massoud, who was later killed.

Ghesquierè said he wanted to get back to a "normal life" as soon as possible, and not "play the role of an ex-hostage".

For the past 547 days, banners bearing their photos hung in city halls around France – banners taken down in jubilation after their release.

 

The Kabul hotel attack was destined to happen | Nushin Arbabzadah | Comment is free

 

It was the first group of security guards at the Intercontinental hotel in Kabul who gave us tips about how to sneak in. "Don't tell them that you just want to hang out in the hotel. Tell them you are here for a meeting."

 

My friend and I thanked them happily. We had fond childhood memories of the hotel – the scene of a suicide attack earlier this week – and just wanted to enjoy seeing our old haunts.

 

The little wooden cabin where female visitors underwent body searches was even more relaxed. A TV was running in the corner and the women dressed in traditional clothing took only a cursory look into our bags. There was no proper search.

 

The women who do body searches in "secure" places in Kabul are often too polite or too embarrassed to conduct a proper search. Looking into my bag, one of them said: "Don't worry sister, I know you only have women's stuff in your bag." Frequently, I found myself asking female security staff to search me properly, to look carefully into my bag, but often they refused out of embarrassment.

Whether young or old, male or female, rich or poor, Afghans are exceedingly polite people and it is this culture of politeness that makes conducting a proper search a rather awkward endeavour. A friendly visitor who speaks the language and greets security guards in a friendly and respectful manner unwittingly culturally disarms the guards, rendering them incapable of conducting their search duty vigorously.

 

This is one reason why security is lax in Kabul and why attacks such as the one in the Intercontinental can easily take place despite security guards and barricades. Hence, this week's attack did not come as a surprise to many of the hotel's visitors.

 

A friend told me about her recent experience of visiting the Intercontinental. "My driver told me that the security guard had simply asked him whether he had weapons on him and he told the guard that he had none. He was then allowed to drive up and park the car in the upper section of the parking lot."

 

From the upper parking lot, the driver had an excellent view of the pool area and the ground level. Had he been a terrorist, he would have had a field day.

 

Afghans are perhaps just too polite to be good security guards. Social interaction is informal and people can be easily persuaded to compromise and not fulfil their security duty vigorously.

 

Taxi drivers in Kabul are fully aware of the lax security because it makes their job dangerous. According to Mohammad, a driver, "When police stop your taxi, they only look into the glove compartment. They don't look anywhere else and they only look in the glove compartment because they hope to find and confiscate dope there."

 

Mohammad calls Kabul "Shahr-e Kharbouza" (melon market), a derogatory phrase that sums up not only the security chaos but also the city's nerve-racking traffic.

 

Kabul's drivers often have little idea of the name or meaning of the city's historical landmarks. The map of the city stored in their brains is full of terrorist attack locations. "This is where the co-ordinated attacks against Serena and Golbahar Centre took place. Here is where I had to turn back because there was a suicide attack. This place is when I called my company to tell them not to send anyone to this address because there was an attack."

 

The drivers tell their tales of terror in a low and monotonous voice, which powerfully conveys they have resigned themselves to living in a city that can turn dangerous at any time.

 

The continuation of security threats has two more equally significant sources. First, there's the widespread belief that terrorism has nothing to do with Afghans but is something that outsiders do to Afghans.

 

Regarding a recent attack on a hospital that resulted in the killing of numerous patients, a young, trendy Afghan told me: "There's no way the Taliban carried out the attack. Our Taliban would never do such a thing. It was al-Qaida with the help of the US."

 

The denial that terrorism in Afghanistan is also a local problem that needs a local solution is widespread among all classes of people and might be a reflection of a desperate psychological need to believe in Afghanistan as a good and safe homeland which owes all its problems to foreign interference.

 

Certainly, to accept that one's compatriots can be a people of such brutal cruelty as to not even spare hospitals is tough and this, in turn, makes denial as a psychological coping mechanism understandable. But the downside of denial is that attacks keep happening again and again.

 

The third factor that allows terrorism to go on is fatalism. When discussing ways to reduce the threat of terrorism, one often encounters a shrug followed by: "Well, if it's your destiny to die, you end up dying. It's not up to you."

 

To people who are not culturally part of Afghanistan, this fatalistic mindset is seriously disconcerting. But Afghans believe in destiny and that's why they interpret death in suicide attacks as something that is predetermined for the victims rather than a political act of intimidation.

 

Such belief means that guesthouse and hotel managers neglect to double-check escape routes or make adequate security preparations. "We have an escape door," a guesthouse manager told me, but when I tried to open the door, it was impossible to unlock it, let alone open it. In a less fatalistic society, the door would have been checked every day but not so in Afghanistan.

 

When I tried to explain to a friend that believing in fate was not a solution to security threats because those who planned attacks were not God but human beings, who plotted them carefully and deliberately, he laughed, and said: "You know what's the only solution for this place? We should all be put into a spaceship and sent into space so that the international community can finally sort this place out in our absence."

 

This jokingly delivered "solution" was a rare example of Afghan self-criticism. But even though it was delivered laughingly, the bitterness lurking behind the hilarity was hard to miss.

 

Kabul hotel attack leader killed by Nato aircraft | World news | The Guardian

Nato aircraft killed an insurgent leader linked to a deadly hotel attack in the Afghan capital this week, the coalition has said, a raid that raised questions about whether Afghan forces are ready for the looming security transition.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack on the Intercontinental, one of two major hotels used by foreigners and Afghan government officials, a rare night-time raid that began on Tuesday and ended five hours later with 12 killed.

However, the Nato-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said the al-Qaida-linked Haqqani network had also been involved in the assault by nine suicide bombers and gunmen.

ISAF identified the Haqqani network leader killed in an air strike as Ismail Jan, whom it described as a deputy to the senior Haqqani commander in Afghanistan, Haji Mali Khan.

It said on Thursday he and "several Haqqani fighters" were killed in the air strike in the Gardez district of Paktia province south of Kabul on Wednesday.

"The Haqqani network, in conjunction with Taliban operatives, was responsible for the Tuesday-night attack on the Kabul Intercontinental hotel which killed 12 people, including a provincial judge," ISAF said in a statement.

The raid came only a week after the US president, Barack Obama, announced a phased withdrawal of combat troops, with 10,000 to leave by the end of this year and 23,000 more by the end of September 2012.

Obama's announcement preceded the start of a gradual transition of responsibility to Afghan forces from next month that will end with all foreign combat troops leaving Afghanistan by the end of 2014.

With that process to begin in seven areas next month, the hotel raid raised serious questions about whether Afghan forces, particularly the police, were ready to take over.

"It shows one of the concerns is that the Afghan security forces are growing in quantity, not in quality," said Thomas Ruttig, co-director of the Kabul-based Afghanistan Analysts Network.

The attack ended when snipers on board a Nato helicopter killed the last three attackers fighting from the roof of the hotel. Earlier television footage showed Afghan forces firing wildly into the air.

ISAF has been training members of the 126,000-strong Afghan national police since 2009.

Afghan police, who will be at the frontline of the security transition in villages and towns across Afghanistan, have long been viewed as inept and lagging behind the training of the better-equipped army, which had been the focus of training efforts since the Taliban were toppled in late 2001.

Violence has risen to record levels across Afghanistan over the past 18 months as Nato troops, especially US forces, hit back against a growing insurgency, especially in the Taliban heartland in the south.

A quarterly report by the UN secretary-general to the security council about Afghanistan found that the number of security incidents since March had risen 51% on the same period in 2010, with suicide attacks rising sharply.

Attacks in the Taliban heartland of Kandahar were especially worrying. "The city of Kandahar and its surroundings registered the majority of the incidents during the reporting period, with a quarter of the overall attacks and more than half of all assassinations recorded countrywide," the report said.

But Ruttig said the attack also highlighted other problems confronting Afghanistan before the start of the transition process, which also includes handing the running of civil institutions and projects over to Afghans.

Not least is the political paralysis that has gripped the country for months.

"The fact that neither Nato nor the Afghans were able to prevent it says something – that transition needs to be something more than just security," Ruttig said of the hotel attack.

"Security forces are only part of transition. There also needs to be a strengthening of political institutions and, at the moment, the parliamentary crisis has brought politics to a standstill," he told Reuters.

Last week a special poll court set up by a decree by the president, Hamid Karzai, overturned the results for a quarter of parliamentary seats from last year's elections, effectively throwing out 62 MPs who had been declared winners.

The move, and the court itself, have been branded unconstitutional and illegal by Afghan and western officials and observers. Critics have said the court was set up by Karzai to further his own political agenda and silence opposition.

 

Stéphane Taponier and Hervé Ghesquière tell of Afghan ordeal | World news |

 

Two French journalists held hostage in Afghanistan for 18 months have spoken of the boredom and claustrophobia of their confinement, as the Taliban said they had been freed in exchange for imprisoned militant leaders.

Hervé Ghesquière and Stéphane Taponier landed at an airbase near Paris on Thursday after one of France's longest hostage ordeals. Ghesquière, a seasoned war reporter, and Taponier, a cameraman, told how they had been kept in the mountainous province of Kapisa after being seized at a roadblock 40 miles east of Kabul while filming in December 2009.

The journalists said they had been locked up for "23 hours and 45 minutes a day" with just two short toilet breaks morning and evening, because of the paranoia of the Taliban, who did not want locals to see them. Barred or covered windows meant they saw little sunlight.

The men, who looked pale and thin, said they were well treated and never beaten or tied up, but they described living conditions as "very, very difficult". Le Parisien reported that they did not have a proper shower for a year and a half.

Ghesquière described how they were initially held together in a small room with their interpreter, but then separated for eight months.

Taponier added: "The worst thing is saying to yourself: what am I going to do with the day? It's 8am, we're going to have to live without doing anything until 10pm. Nothing to read."

He did three hours' exercise a day, while Ghesquière did 45 minutes, in order to deal with stress.

The men said they obsessed about food. "We didn't have much to eat and it was always the same thing," Ghesquière said. "When you have nothing to do, you really live for eating."

Ghesquière wrote a diary but the Taliban took his 18 months' worth of notebooks before he was freed.

A spokesman for the Afghan Taliban said that Paris failed to free the journalists "by force and power" and that the men were finally traded for insurgent fighters. The Taliban did not say who released the fighters or where they were held.

 

In praise of ... provincial councils | Editorial | Comment is free | The Guardian

 

Step inside the office of a provincial council in Afghanistan and you'll find a handful of councillors listening to the travails of their constituents. A school needs a roof, a village dispute needs to be settled, the head of a family has become too ill to work. Provincial councillors have little to work with beyond glasses of tea and their own wits. But they represent a rare seed of democracy in a barren state. They are hardly immune from corruption: Kandahar provincial council is not exactly a beacon of integrity. But they are often as close to the people as the state gets, for it has been Afghanistan's misfortune that rulers since the Iron Emir, Abdur Rahman, have tried to impose a highly centralised government, sharply against the grain of society. If we were good at state-building, we would champion provincial councils, not ignore them. The kiss of death would be for more donors to rush in, to teach them how to apply for their own funds. Provincial councils need the means to do their job: transport to get around the province and access to a little expertise, and the right to hold regular public hearings with the provincial governor. The intervention in Afghanistan unleashed a torrent of rhetoric about spreading democracy. The military surge, which Barack Obama announced last week he would wind down, was supposed to be accompanied by a civilian one. If British and American governments took their own words more sincerely, we would have more to show for 10 years of state-building.

British soldier missing in Afghanistan confirmed dead | UK news

 

 

A British soldier from who went missing in southern Afghanistan has been found dead, the Ministry of Defence has confirmed.

 

The soldier left his base in central Helmand in the early hours of Monday morning and failed to return

 

It is believed the soldier was finishing sentry duty at a vehicle checkpoint Salaang and rather than join his colleagues appears to have left the small base and disappeared.

 

 

Military sources in the UK dismissed reports from Afghanistan that the soldier had been taken in an ambush, or that there had been a fire fight between insurgents and British forces.

 

A source in Whitehall said: "He had been on 'STAG' (sentry duty) at a small vehicle checkpoint and had just finished his shift. And then, for whatever reason, he walked off. Instead of going back into the base where the other soldiers were, he headed out of the base - and that was the last that was seen of him.

 

"We are still trying to work out exactly what has happened. There are always claims of responsibility for incidents, but we can only work with what we know. And all we know is that he has gone. At the moment, we cannot even be absolutely sure he is in the hands of the Taliban. There are criminal gangs operating in this area too.

 

 

The defence secretary, Liam Fox, told the Commons the man's next of kin have been contacted and will be kept informed.

 

The Taliban have made a number of claims related to the man's disappearance.

 

A Taliban spokesman told Reuters it had captured and killed a foreign soldier on Sunday after a firefight in the Babaji area of southern Helmand. In a separate claim to the Guardian, a Taliban spokesman said its fighters had killed the soldier in an ambush on Sunday afternoon, along with four to six other international troops.

 

Neither claim could be verified and the Taliban often make exaggerated claims for propaganda purposes.

 

The prime minister's spokesman said David Cameron was aware of the incident, but it would have no effect on a statement he intends to make to the Commons on Wednesday announcing that 500 to 800 extra British troops are to withdraw from Afghanistan.

 

Three members of Nato forces are known to have been previously captured in Afghanistan.

 

Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, 25, from Hailey, Idaho, was taken prisoner in June 2009 in Paktika province in eastern Afghanistan and is thought to be in Pakistan.

 

In July 2010, two sailors from the US Navy went missing in Logar province, south of Kabul, prompting an extensive manhunt. The dead bodies of both sailors were found days later in Logar.

 

The Nato command in Afghanistan said the soldier had been listed as "duty status whereabouts unknown" and a search was under way.

 

Can Afghan women count on Hillary Clinton? | Meredith Tax | Comment is free

The US is negotiating with the Taliban! What will happen to Afghan women? They have enough problems already, since the Karzai government is easily as misogynist as the Taliban.

But not to worry. Hillary Clinton is US secretary of state. A feminist will determine US policy in the "reconciliation, reintegration and transition process". Surely the women of Afghanistan can rely on Hillary?

She told them so in London in February 2010, when Hamid Karzai and Afghan ministers met with western and regional diplomats, who agreed to set up a fund to reintegrate "disaffected Taliban back into society", as long as they swore to uphold the constitution. The London conference was planned by the British government and the UN, which seemed to have no problem overlooking its own security council resolution (SCR)1325, mandating that all peace and post-conflict negotiations include a gender perspective. Only one Afghan woman was even invited – not their minister of women's affairs – and she was there to represent civil society in general, not voice the demands of women.

But the Afghan Women's Network, a 15-year-old coalition with 84 member groups and 5,000 individual members, could teach the rest of us a thing or two about organising. Despite the fact that they were not invited to London, four of them showed up, demanding "that the proposed reintegration process is not undertaken at the expense of women's hard-won human rights." They did intensive lobbying, worked with the press, and did their best to convince those present that "women are central to bringing peace and stability." In recognition of their work, Clinton invited them to her press conference and made a commitment to involve women in every stage of the peace process.

But that was last year. Now, Osama bin Laden is dead and the American people are sick of the war. They want out and so does the Obama administration. Last year, Clinton made protection of Afghan women's rights a principle; today, the principle appears to be negotiable.

In March, the Washington Post revealed that USAID was backtracking on a $140m project to help Afghan women own land. Though most Afghans live by farming, only men are landowners. The original USAID request for bids called for specific measures to increase women's access to land ownership, including legal aid, public education on women's rights and incentives to register land in the name of both spouses. But after intervention by the state department, USAID put out new guidelines with no teeth, requiring merely that the project study inheritance laws to see if they could be amended to include women, and then only if the Afghan government supported the initiative.

When questioned, a "senior official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity" said, "gender issues are going to have to take a back seat to other priorities … There's no way we can be successful if we maintain every special interest and pet project. All those pet rocks in our rucksack were taking us down."

Of course, USAID contradicted the story, saying how much money it was spending on Afghan women and, when put on the spot in Congress by Nita Lowey, Clinton told the House that US commitment to Afghan women was undiminished. But she didn't say the old USAID regulations would be restored. That's a pretty clear indication of which way the wind blows.

Women in the Afghan Women's Network made a lobbying trip to Washington this June to try to convince officials that the only way to get stability in Afghanistan is support women's human rights. They brought specific recommendations on how to reintegrate the Taliban fighters, while at the same time protecting women and civil society. (Their programme can be downloaded here.)

The AWN recommendations are brilliant. According to Gita Saghal, former head of Amnesty International's gender unit, they "are an example for all UN agencies dealing with post-conflict situations because they are family-oriented rather than fighter-oriented" and "deal with inclusion of women in monitoring and many different processes rather than just in peace negotiations".

Ann Jones, an American writer who has spent years working in Afghanistan, says the US calls the shots there and could put such measures in place to protect women's rights if it insisted, but people in Washington don't get it. "They regard women's rights as an add-on that's unimportant, and won't face the implications of backing the same old warlords they have been backing since 1979. These guys are a disaster for both Afghanistan and us, because you can't establish a stable country with leaders who have no regard for the welfare of their own people."

The choice is clear: the US can either keep on with the same old policy of making deals with warlords, or try something new – empowering women and civil society. Official Washington apparently thinks the only realistic thing to do is what we have done before, even if it doesn't work. This is not really a choice between pragmatism and idealism. We have tried the warlords option for many years, and it has not brought stability or prosperity or peace.

Half the population of Afghanistan is female, with many households headed by women. These women are capable of farming, doing business, promoting education, safeguarding local people, stabilising their communities. They have lived with war, and they know what works and what doesn't. The AWL programme proposes concrete measures to strengthen the position of women; such measures, embedded into local and national political processes, are a better foundation for security and peace than anything the US has tried so far. Why not support them?

Is Clinton willing to fight for the principle of including women? She understands that it is a principle; as secretary of state, she is in a strong position. And she has enough political skills and support to do so effectively – if she is willing to stand up to the guys and take the risk of being branded a feminist rather than a "realist".