Karzai delays hired-guns ban

Dec. 17 deadline still to apply to some; others to get extension

Private security contractors guard a roadway Wednesday as NATO supply trucks roll through the Afghan province of Ghazni southwest of Kabul.
Private security contractors guard a roadway Wednesday as NATO supply trucks roll through the Afghan province of Ghazni southwest of Kabul.

— President Hamid Karzai agreed Wednesday to push back his deadline for kicking private security guards out of Afghanistan, a concession the U.S. and other countries considered essential to prevent billions of dollars’ worth of development and reconstruction projects from shutting down.

The international community supports the idea of getting rid of the estimated 30,000 to 40,000 guns-forhire in the war-torn country, but not by the Dec. 17 deadline Karzai had set.

International officials spent several days in negotiations with the president, and even U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton weighed in with a phone call asking him to reconsider.

Some security contractors still could be barred from working in Afghanistan by Dec. 17 under Karzai’s re-vised plan, but others will get extensions until at least February.

Karzai has complained for years that many private guards commit human-rights abuses, pay protection money to the Taliban and undercut the country’s national security forces by offering higher wages and better living conditions. Nations providing aid to Afghanistan, however, question whether Afghan security forces - poorly trained, rife with corruption and stretched thin fighting insurgents - will be able to take on the work of the private guards.

Interactive

http://www.arkansas…" onclick="window.open(this.href,'popup','height=650,width=750,scrollbars,resizable'); return false;">Afghanistan war

Contractors say they will not be able to find insurers if they are forced to give up private security. Some have already been winding down projects early because they feared they would not be able to protect their workers.

A statement from the government said a committee led by the Interior Ministry will review private-security contractors used at development sites. The panel will include representatives from NATO forces and major donors.

“Recognizing the importance of maintaining the continuous delivery of critical development projects and programs funded by the international community, the committee will prepare a timetable for the disbandment,” the statement from Karzai’s office said.

The panel is to report back to Karzai on Nov. 15, but details are sketchy about what happens after that.

A Western diplomat familiar with the negotiations, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the discussions, said that after receiving the report, Karzai will decide which private-security outfits protecting development projects must be shut down by the original Dec. 17 deadline and which ones will have up to 90 days to disband.Depending on when Karzai makes his decision, the 90-day extension could expire as early as February. Then, the Afghan government will assume responsibility for providing security for the projects.

“We were expecting a compromise,” said Haroun Mir, the director of the Kabul-based Afghan Center for Research and Policy Studies. “This is facesaving for President Karzai because in Afghan eyes he can’t be seen as a weak president.”

He said the president’s decree is tinged with nationalism, allowing Karzai to be seen as fighting for the rights of Afghans against foreigners.

“This is a technical problem but the president made it into a political issue,” Mir said.

Karzai and the international community have had strained relations in recent months over allegations about corruption within his government, as well as the government’s slow progress in expanding its influence beyond Kabul to reclaim areas where the international forces have routed the Taliban.

Security contractors, meanwhile, have been in trouble for everything from paying protection to the Taliban to killing unarmed Afghan civilians. Two former workers for the company formerly known as Blackwater - now Xe - are charged in federal court in Virginia in the killings of two Afghan civilians and the wounding of another unarmed civilian.

The majority of contractors, however, are Afghans, and some have powerful family connections to members of the government or insurgency.

Interior Minister Bismullah Mohammadi said the ministry already had dissolved 26 of 54 private security contractors operating illegally and had seized 26,000 weapons. Diplomatic installations and residences are exempt from the ban, but roads and convoys eventually will be secured by Afghan security forces, Mohammadi said.

U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry said he was happy that the development projects were being given a brief reprieve.

“We have a lot of work ahead of us with this committee,” Eikenberry said. “It’s about coming up with arrangements so that security can be provided.”

65 DIE AT WEDDING FETE

Also Wednesday, a roof collapsed during a wedding in a remote area in northern Afghanistan, killing 65 people, nearly all women and children, said police.

Most of the dead were women celebrating the wedding on the top floor of a mud-brick house packed with guests, said Jawad Bashart, spokesman for the Baghlan provincial police. Only one man was killed.

He added that 12 children were among the dead and 40 more people were injured at the wedding, which took place in the remote Jelga district. Women and men traditionally have separate celebrations at weddings.

“This is a very tragic incident,” said provincial Gov. Abdul Majid. He said an exact death toll was difficult to establish because of conflicting reports and the remoteness of the area.

DRONE STRIKES KILL 14

Meanwhile, suspected U.S. drones fired missiles at a house and a vehicle in a militant-infested area of northwestern Pakistan near the Afghan border Wednesday, killing seven people, intelligence officials said.

Also, American unmanned planes fired two missiles at a house in the tribal region today, killing seven alleged militants, intelligence officials said.

The strike in North Waziristan was the third attack there in 24 hours. They were seen as the latest attacks in an intensifying campaign by the U.S. to use unmanned aircraft in Pakistan to wage war against militants who regularly target foreign troops in Afghanistan.

There have now been at least 19 suspected U.S. missile strikes in Pakistan this month, many of them in North Waziristan. There were 21 such attacks in September, nearly double the previous monthly record.

The first strike Wednesday occurred about 3:30 a.m. when a drone fired a missile at a house in the Spin Wam area, killing three people, said the intelligence officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media.

The second attack took place around 2:45 p.m. when a drone fired a missile at a vehicle in the Datta Khel area, killing four suspected foreign militants, the officials said. Two were Arab and two were Western, they said.

A bomb planted on a motorcycle exploded Wednesday as a member of an anti-Taliban militia drove up to a market in the village of Qamberkhel in the Khyber tribal region, wounding the militiaman and five other people in the vehicle, said local government administrator Riaz Khan.

Malik Amal Gul and the five others were rushed to a hospital in the nearby city of Peshawar, said Khan.

Also Wednesday, a bomb apparently targeting a police patrol in Pakistan’s southwest Baluchistan province killed two civilians and wounded nine other people, including four police officers, said Hamid Shakeel, chief of police in the provincial capital, Quetta.

AID MONEY HARD TO TRACK

In other developments, a U.S. government office reported Wednesday that U.S. agencies spending the most on Afghanistan reconstruction projects can’t easily show where their money goes and aren’t tracking contracts in a shared database.

The special inspector general’s office for Afghanistan reconstruction developed its own list of contractors and found that that nearly 7,000 received almost $18 billion between 2007 and 2009 from the Defense Department, State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Those three agencies are the biggest spenders on Afghanistan projects, yet they don’t separate money for that work from other U.S.-funded projects around the world. That makes it hard to keep watch on spending and identify the contractors receiving the money, according to the report.

The inspector general, Arnold Fields, said it’s the first such accounting of contractors since the U.S. started its rebuilding effort in Afghanistan in 2001. The tab so far is about $55 billion.

Fields said the information is “crucial because if we don’t even know who we’re giving money to, it is nearly impossible to conduct system wide oversight.” Information for this article was contributed from Kabul by Rahim Faiez, from Peshawar, Pakistan,by Rasool Dawar and Riaz Khan, from Quetta, Pakistan, by Abdul Sattar and from Washington by Brett J. Blackledge of The Associated Press.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 10/28/2010

Upcoming Events