Will Afganistan serve as the 'end state' model for success in Iraq? If
so, Bush's strategy of blasting countries back to the stone age doesn't
stop terrorism, but only serves to increase it.
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(New York, May 24, 2005) — Afghanistan's security situation has
deteriorated significantly in recent weeks, with a spate of political
killings, violent protests, and attacks on humanitarian workers, Human
Rights Watch said today. The instability comes as President Hamid Karzai
visits the United States this week. The recent violence includes the
assassination of a parliamentary candidate in Ghazni two weeks ago, the
murder of three female aid workers, the kidnapping of an aid worker in
Kabul, and clashes between armed factions in the northern province of
Maimana.
"May was a terrible month for Afghanistan," said John Sifton,
Afghanistan researcher for Human Rights Watch. "President Karzai needs
more than a handshake from Washington. He needs concrete assistance from
the United States and its allies to improve security."
Over three years have passed since NATO member states undertook to
provide international security forces in Afghanistan and expand the
International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), yet to date NATO forces
have only deployed to a handful of regional centers outside of Kabul.
Human Rights Watch called on the United States to lead efforts to
accelerate the deployment of additional international security forces to
remote provinces, and increase the number of international human rights
monitors and election monitors for parliamentary elections scheduled to
take place in September.
"Current troop levels are a fraction of what has been deployed in other
post-conflict settings," said Sifton. "And there are simply not enough
human rights monitors and election observers."
Examples of violence in May include:
May 18-19, 2005: Eleven Afghan employees of a Washington-based
agricultural company were shot and killed in Zabul province in two
separate incidents.
May 18, 2005: An Afghan television presenter, Shaima Rezayee, 24, was
shot in the head at her Kabul home. In March, Rezayee was fired from her
position at a Kabul independent television station, Tolo TV, after
several clerics in Kabul said her show was "anti-Islamic," and should be
taken off the air.
May 16, 2005: Armed men kidnapped CARE International worker Clementina
Cantoni, a 32-year-old Italian woman, from a car in Kabul.
May 15-16, 2005: Five people were reported wounded, and one killed, when
violence erupted between supporters of rival warlords in a district in
Faryab province, in the north of Afghanistan.
May 11, 2005: Akhtar Mohammad Tolwak, a parliamentary candidate and
former delegate to Afghanistan's two loya jirgas, was killed while
driving near Diyak District in the east of Ghazni province, along with
his driver.
May 9-13, 2005: Sixteen protesters were killed by police and army troops
during violent demonstrations against a Newsweek report of U.S.
interrogators desecrating a copy of the Koran during interrogations at
Guantanamo Bay. Riots occurred in several Afghan cities, including
Jalalabad, Ghazni, Kabul, and Maimana, during which some protesters set
fire and loot government and U.N. buildings.
May 7, 2005: A suicide bomber set off a bomb in a Kabul internet café,
killing two Afghan civilians and a Burmese engineer working for the
United Nations.
May 5, 2005 – Armed men attempted to kidnap three foreign World Bank
employees in Kabul.
May 2-6, 2005: Fighting between the Taliban and the U.S.-backed Afghan
military killed ten Afghan army troops and scores of militants,
according to the U.S. military.
April 30 – May 1: During a protest in Herat by several hundred
supporters of former Herat governor Ismail Khan, police shoot several
civilians, killing an old man, a 36-year old woman and her 11-year-old
daughter.
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