“There are New Zealand soldiers, so there is no Taliban,” said Ibrahim Chaman, a mobile phone seller whose father was killed by the hardline group over a decade ago. “When they leave, the Taliban for sure will return.”

That affection made it an unusual, perhaps unique outpost in Nato’s web of sprawling camps and fortified outposts across the country, often resented by the people they aimed to protect.

Its closure in April was equally singular, with New Zealand’s head of state and what seemed like half the country’s government flown out on a Hercules military plane from Dubai, to say goodbye to a valley that has firmly etched itself into the consciousness of the distant nation.

Commanders of other bases have kept their demise low-key, with troops slipping away into the night, sometimes leaving piles of debris behind. By contrast, the late afternoon ceremony in Bamiyan was packed with journalists. After solemn tributes to 10 fallen soldiers, the gathering dusk echoed with optimistic speeches from officials highlighting improvements in healthcare, agriculture and education brought by foreign troops and their cash, and the growing strength of local security forces.

But when the New Zealand, Malaysian and US flags were lowered, leaving the Afghan flag fluttering alone as darkness fell, there was a sense that shadows of a more ominous kind were also gathering over the quiet valley.

Bamiyan is a magical place, where the ghosts of long-lost power and opulence haunt a valley of spectacular natural beauty.

Near the university lie the ruins of a citadel untouched since Genghis Khan sacked it in the 13th century, and although the giant Buddhas lie in fragments, frescos painted over a millennium ago still cling to corners of monastic caves that honeycomb the cliff around them.

It is also haunted by more recent spectres, memories of those killed in Taliban massacres barely a decade ago. Home to a heavily persecuted ethnic and religious minority, it has remained one of the safest places in Afghanistan, partly because the memory of that suffering fuels profound hostility towards the insurgency.

Mistrust of Afghans not from the local Hazara ethnic minority runs so deep that when the defence ministry was stationing troops across the country years ago, Bamiyan asked to go without. It is protected only by police, who in Afghanistan are usually recruited locally, and intelligence officers who will take over the New Zealand base.

That was fine when Afghanistan’s insurgency was largely contained, Taliban fighters still focused on areas like Helmand, and Bamiyan was left to its peaceful existence. It was probably the only place in the country where diplomats wandered freely and met Afghans beyond blast walls and security checks that constrict embassy life elsewhere. Even soldiers visited spectacular historical sites in the area, confident they would not be targeted, unthinkable on any other base I have visited in Afghanistan.

So great was the sense of security that Bamiyan was chosen by Nato to be the very first place in the country where Afghan forces officially took over from foreign troops, although the ceremony in 2011 was just a nominal shift to pave the way for real changes this year.

But since then the insurgency has spread and violence lapped steadily closer to this virtual island of calm, isolated by mountain peaks rather than water. First one, then both roads to Kabul became a dangerous lottery. The head of the provincial council, a popular man who had done much to help development in a desperately poor area, was abducted and slaughtered in 2011. A US engineer is among the many others killed on the roads since.

The security of the province itself was next to crumble, with fighters pushing in heavily from the east but also testing boundaries to the west. Half of the New Zealand troops killed in combat during the decade-long mission died last August in the Do Ab area bordering Baghlan province, and their April departure was six months earlier than originally planned.

For those left behind, the threat is tangible. “I don’t see any Taliban in Bamiyan, but when the foreign soldiers leave they will return and be strong,” said Haider Mohammad, a 37-year-old who sold souvenirs to New Zealand troops for six years. Watching as preparations for the farewell ceremony got under way, he added: “When they go, I will leave as well.”

On the base, there was almost an air of celebration after the handover. Soldiers barbecued a whole lamb and visitors clambered up a low blast wall for views to the niches where the Buddhas once stood. Gazing out at the starlit cliff that held the Buddhas, I remembered a man I had met in Bamiyan bazaar years earlier, infamous in the town because he had been forced as a prisoner to spend days stuffing dynamite into the giant statues. Blowing them up took days of hard labour, as other fundamentalists who had tried in vain years earlier found out. The Taliban were more persistent.

By arrangement with the Guardian

The campaign sets the Afghan leader up for another heated showdown with the US government, and will reignite questions about the CIA’s extensive but highly secretive operations in the country.

Karzai’s spokesman Aimal Faizi said the CIA controlled large commando-like units, some of whom operated under the nominal stamp of the Afghan government’s intelligence agency, the National Directorate of Security (NDS), but were not actually under its control.

“Some of them are said to be working with the NDS, but they are not armed by the NDS, not paid by the NDS, and not sent to operations by the NDS. Sometimes they only inform the NDS minutes before the operation,” Faizi said. “They are conducting operations without informing local authorities and when something goes wrong it is called a joint operation.”

One of these groups was involved in a battle with insurgents in a remote corner of eastern Kunar province early this month that left several Afghan children dead, Faizi said. Karzai has fired the provincial head of intelligence in connection with the incident.

The US citizen who died during the battle was advising the Afghan intelligence service, and the air strike that killed the children is believed to have been called in after he was fatally injured.

The US embassy declined to comment on CIA issues, but sources with knowledge of the battle said he was an agent, and his name has not been released, usually an indication of intelligence work.

Bob Woodward in his 2010 book, Obama’s Wars, described a 3,000-strong Afghan militia working for the CIA, and Faizi said the Afghan government had little information about the teams. “There is a lack of clarity about their numbers and movement,” he said when asked how many men the CIA had on its payroll, or where these large teams might be based.

Woodward said the unofficial commando units were known as counter-terrorism pursuit teams, and described them as “a paid, trained and functioning tool of the CIA”, authorised by president George Bush.  They were sent on operations to kill or capture insurgent leaders, but also went into lawless areas to try to pacify them and win support for the Afghan government and its foreign backers. Woodward said the units even conducted cross-border raids into Pakistan.

In the wake of the Kunar battle, Karzai has also ordered his security officials to step up implementation of a presidential decree issued in late February abolishing “parallel structures”. Faizi said this order was aimed primarily at dismantling CIA-controlled teams.

“The use of these parallel structures run by the CIA and US special forces is an issue of concern for the Afghan people and the Afghan government,” he said.

 SOVEREIGNTY: For Karzai the move is another step towards reasserting Afghan sovereignty, part of a long campaign waged against US forces and their allies. He has already won control of the main US-run prison in the country, and ended unilateral night raids on insurgent hideouts that Western commanders once described as critical to the war.

But Karzai’s move comes at a critical time for an already volatile relationship, when Washington and Kabul are trying to negotiate what, if any, military presence the US will have in Afghanistan beyond 2014, and curbing the CIA’s reach could strike at the heart of US strategic interests there.

Barack Obama has been clear that the US does not plan to fight the Taliban after next year. Instead some foreign troops will train Afghan soldiers to fight the insurgency while US special forces pursue groups such as Al Qaeda.

While the US is expected to keep a few thousand soldiers in Afghanistan, bolstered by troops from Nato allies, Obama has also made clear there is “zero option” of a complete US withdrawal, as happened in Iraq.

—By arrangement with the Guardian

Roadblocks, roadside bombs, the risk of being caught up in fighting and unprovoked attacks are all stopping civilians from getting to hospitals, and limiting travel of doctors and nurses to remote areas without clinics.

Gherardo Pontrandolfi, head of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Kabul, said: “What we observe in some areas of the country is a proliferation and fragmentation of armed actors that renders the provision of basic services to the population increasingly difficult.

“To have safe access to certain parts of the country we have to multiply contacts at all levels with different armed groups, different command structures. It’s not getting any easier.”

The Red Cross has been in Afghanistan since 1987, outlasting Soviet soldiers, civil war and the Taliban’s austere rule, and has promised to stay beyond the end of the Nato-led mission in 2014. But despite decades of experience operating in violent places, its doctors are increasingly separated from sick Afghans by the intensity of fighting across the country.

“A general lack of security prevents medics and humanitarian aid from reaching the sick and wounded just when they need it most,” Pontrandolfi told a news conference in Kabul, adding that patients were not free to travel either. “Civilians are all too often, unfortunately, caught up in the middle of fighting, they are stopped at roadblocks.”

He was speaking two days after the death of a driver and vaccination worker from the Afghanistan Red Crescent who were gunned down in northern Jowzjan province; a doctor and pharmacist are still recovering from injuries.

The group had been taking a mobile clinic to rural areas, but the drive home was considered safe for health workers, and the group has not suffered an attack like this in Jowzjan before, Walid Akbar, a Red Crescent spokesman, said.

The Red Crescent has halted work in the area as they try to find out who the gunmen were, and understand their motives, in order to avoid future attacks. But until then, the people they had been helping will have to risk dangerous roads themselves to seek help when they fall ill.

“This is not only a particularly shocking event for the people involved and their families,” Pontrandolfi said. “Something not always very visible is the side-effect of those attacks. Entire sections of the country are cut off from medical services and supply as a consequence; these are the hidden victims of such attacks.”

The Red Cross head also warned that Afghans struggles’ to get healthcare would probably increase as western troops begin to head home, taking with them the funding and attention that have contributed to improvements in everything from vaccination rates to the number of mothers surviving childbirth.

Jobs will also go as Nato and US contracts dry up, and some families may struggle to pay doctors’ fees and medical bills just as aid spending falls.

“The decline of the war economy brings also difficulties for ordinary Afghans, those who have been relying in international assistance, job opportunities that were provided by this war economy,” he said.

“The risk and concern is that despite dwindling international attention, the needs of Afghan people will not disappear.”

By arrangement with the Guardian

The rapid growth of poppy farming as western troops head home reflects particularly badly on Britain, which was designated “lead nation” for counter-narcotics work over a decade ago.

“Poppy cultivation is not only expected to expand in areas where it already existed in 2012 . . . but also in new areas or areas where poppy cultivation was stopped,” the Afghanistan Opium Winter Risk Assessment found.

The growth in opium cultivation reflects both spreading instability and concerns about the future. Farmers are more likely to plant the deadly crop in areas of high violence or where they have not received any agricultural aid, the report said.

Opium traders are often happy to provide seeds, fertilisers and even advance payments to encourage crops, leaving farmers who do not have western or government agricultural help very vulnerable to their inducements.

At the same time the more powerful figures in the drugs trade, from traffickers to corrupt government officials, who take over half the profit from each kilo of opium, have shrinking opportunities to earn money from Nato or international aid contracts—and may be preparing a war chest for upcoming presidential and parliamentary elections.“Opium cultivation is up for the third successive year, and production is heading towards record levels,” said Jean-Luc Lemahieu, Afghanistan head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime.

“People are hedging against an insecure future both politically and economically.”

Just 14 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces are now “poppy free”, down from 20 in 2010. In three provinces, the spring sowing was the first time this decade that farmers had risked an attempt at growing opium.

The only figures showing a fall in cultivation, for western Herat province, may actually be due to a statistics blip. The UN was forced to use external data last year instead of the satellite images that are usually the basis of poppy growing calculations, and local officials protested heavily that the opium crop there had been overestimated.

If this year’s poppy fields are harvested without disruption, the country would likely regain its status as producer of 90 per cent of the world’s opium. Afghanistan’s share of the deadly market slipped to around 75pc after bad weather and a blight slashed production over the past two years.

But the decline in opium production also drove up prices, to a record $300 a kilogramme. Prices have now slipped by over $100 but are still far above historic levels, helping tempt more farmers to turn land over to poppy. It seems unlikely that the poor harvests of the last year will be repeated; there have been no reports of blight and the exceptionally bitter winter of 2011-12 was followed this year by a milder one, creating expectations of a large crop.

The increase has come despite a marked improvement in Afghanistan’s specialised counter-narcotics units, Lemahieu said. Fear of eradication has become a far more significant reason for farmers to stick to legal crops than in the past, the report found.

But overall the government and aid community has not prioritised efforts to cut back a crop and trade that feeds global markets for heroin, Lemahieu said, despite its corrosive effect on security, corruption and trust in Kabul.

Typical of the official neglect are the 22 “national priority programmes” drawn up by Kabul to focus aid money and diplomatic efforts on its key development concerns including justice and education. Counter-narcotics was not one of them, nor has it been put at the heart of the other programmes.

By arrangement with the Guardian

The US army has decided to cut back on catering, morale, welfare and recreation (MWR) services as it starts the $6bn relocation of a nearly 70,000-strong force, who must all leave by the end of 2014.

Soldiers used to enjoying four hot meals a day, including a midnight snack, will have to replace two of them with ration packs by the autumn, the US military has said.
Commanders can choose which meals to cut, but breakfast and late-night servings are the most likely to go as that would remove a whole catering shift.

The change is billed as essential to slimming down a huge military operation supported by thousands of contract chefs and cleaners, going back to the “expeditionary footing” that the first troops to arrive, in 2001, had to endure.

Jeffrey Hawk, spokesman for US forces in Afghanistan, said: “When we arrived in Afghanistan over 11 years ago we were lean and expeditionary. We need to leave the way we came in, lean and expeditionary.”

But commanders are also keen to eat into huge stockpiles of rations built up while there were more than 100,000 US troops fighting in tiny outposts around the country, which would otherwise be abandoned or shipped home at great expense.

The change will begin on May 1 and be rolled out across Afghanistan by October 1, although soldiers living in cramped conditions and working round the clock warned that the change, which could spell the end for treats including regular steak and lobster feasts at some bases, will dent morale.

“It’s great for, I guess, saving money and cutting back on contractors… but there’s a lot more things you can cut back,” Sergeant Michael Day, a combat engineer at Qandahar airfield, told the Stars and Stripes newspaper. “It’s not fair to the soldiers doing the daily grind.”

Among other things to go will be franchises such as Popeye’s at Bagram airbase and TGIF at Qandahar. The PX shops for soldiers will also shrink, cutting back on stocks of goods including computers and high-end sunglasses to concentrate on toiletries and necessities.

“Franchise food, coffee and merchandise vendors will also close when expeditionary standards are implemented,” Hawk said. “There will be less MWR-led events.”

Medical services will not be affected, so anyone injured in combat can be taken to top-level hospitals within the “golden hour” vital for saving lives. And wireless internet will remain switched on until bases close, allowing soldiers to stay in touch with friends and families back home. The only other thing that will still be on tap, for an army notoriously strict about appearances, is barber services. “Bases will see a reduction in MWR and personal care services, except haircuts,” Hawk said.

By arrangement with the Guardian

Half a century later she is opening Afghanistan’s first centre dedicated to the study of its own history and society, picked over for decades by foreign academics but often hard for Afghan scholars to explore in their country.

The Afghanistan Centre at Kabul University is inspired by the work and vision of Louis Dupree, the ethnographer and archaeologist, for whom Nancy left her husband, freeing her from endless embassy coffee mornings, and binding her forever to her adopted home.

“He always felt the people of Afghanistan were being short-changed, and all these people who were ruling from the centre looked upon the rural areas, the rural people, as being superstitious, unteachable, they couldn’t learn anything,” Dupree said.
“Louis felt that was the wrong thing.”

Their great romance nearly didn’t happen. Nancy met Louis after she dropped off her draft manuscript for the first guidebook to Afghanistan, asking for his help filling two gaps. When she went to pick it up from him, there was a terse note saying “adequate but nothing original”.

“I spun on my heel and started to leave, when I heard this voice saying ‘come back here’, so I went back and never left,” she admitted with a grin at her spartan office just a few kilometres from the site of that meeting. “I was a scandal in Kabul, the two of us were.” Their former spouses fuelled even more expat gossip in the then-sleepy capital when they went on to remarry each other.

The couple stayed in the Afghan capital for over a decade, Nancy writing guidebooks while Louis uncovered evidence of prehistoric settlements with stone tools so sophisticated other scholars dubbed their makers the “Michelangelos of the paleolithic era”.

In the late 1970s they were pushed out by the Soviet-backed government, which also briefly imprisoned Louis and grilled him about the couple’s famous afternoon cocktail parties, the “five o’clock follies”.

They were not the only ones forced to flee a brutal regime and soon began working with Afghan refugees who gathered in Peshawar. Along with the humanitarian work, they also started building up the collection now at the heart of the new centre, storing documents that most people saw as rubbish or fire-starters rather than historical records.

The only surviving copies of surveys and reports by aid groups, the newspapers of warring mujahideen factions and the Taliban government, and other records of Afghanistan’s decades of chaos and muddled western efforts to help are now safely stored in underground stacks, along with similar records from the last decade of US and Nato intervention.

Louis died in 1989, but Nancy continued to add to their cache of information in Peshawar for years, only deeming it safe to return to Afghanistan in 2005 and even then made painstaking plans to bring back the documents safely. “I was very vulnerable, everything I had was paper, there were no backups,” she said.

Nearly 300 plastic sacks, originally used for wheat or fertiliser, were filled with paper and then virtually smuggled back to Kabul, nestled among commercial shipments. Not a single sheet was lost or damaged, she says proudly.

But the successful return raised a whole new challenge for Dupree, who was already in her late 70s at the time – where to store them. She set her sights on a new intellectual centre, built for Afghan students rather than as an empty showpiece.

“There were a lot of people who were building clinics and schools, but there was no sense of ownership built in and nobody was using them very well,” Dupree said to explain why she sought the help of a government known for corruption and actively avoided by most foreigners.

She got the finance ministry to provide funds and the university to provide land. Testament to her charm and prodigious work ethic are other contributions, including a top-end IT network provided at the personal order of the Estonian president.

“I feel really guilty just sitting around,” she says, but is quick to credit others for the centre’s success. “It’s not the result of one individual’s effort. It was a total manifestation of those buzzwords the United Nations uses, so dear to their reports and rhetoric, cooperation and coordination.”

Dupree, who is now in her eighties but coy about her exact age, misses the peaceful city she knew as a younger woman. “Kabul is grim now. All of these concrete walls and these barriers and the razor wire. It is not my Kabul.”

Even so, she has no plans to leave. “I’m trying to finish what Louis was trying to do, and his shoes are too big.”

 By arrangement with the Guardian

But in Afghanistan’s highest reaches of government he has found at least one ally. President Hamid Karzai, usually quick to condemn western mis-steps in his country, told the Guardian that the young royal’s comments may have been a mistake, but he should be let off the hook because of his age. “Prince Harry is a young man, we do give exits to young men when they make mistakes,” said Karzai, who is visiting the UK for a high-level conference, and also expects to meet Prince Charles before flying home.

A long-standing friendship with Charles, whom he described as a “great representative of Britain”, may have contributed to Karzai’s uncharacteristic reticence.

“Prince Charles, the father of Prince Harry, is a very fine gentleman, a man for whom I have tremendous respect,” Karzai told the Guardian and ITV News in an exclusive interview, when asked whether he thought Harry had spoken unwisely.

But he also drew a telling contrast with Prince Charles’s more peaceful reputation, as he reminisced about years of admiration for his friend’s vocal advocacy of traditional building styles.

“For years, even when I was a student in Shimla, I used to read about his dislike of modern architecture and the cement buildings and I entirely agreed with him. Prince Charles is a great representative of Britain and the British ways of life,” he said.

Initially, much of the coverage of Harry, which included shots of him ripping out an earpiece as his aircraft was scrambled for an engagement, was greeted largely with admiration. But the description of his job as a “joy” sat uneasily with admissions that he had probably killed Taliban fighters from the helicopter.

“Take a life to save a life, that’s what we revolve around. If there’s people trying to do bad stuff to our guys, then we’ll take them out of the game,” he said.

“I’m not here on a free pass ? Our job out here is to make sure the guys are safe on the ground and if that means shooting someone who is shooting them, then we will do it.”

The prince, who was in charge of firing the Apache’s Hellfire air-to-surface missiles, rockets and 30mm gun, also said his taste for video games helped him in battle. “It’s a joy for me because I’m one of those people who loves playing PlayStation and Xbox, so with my thumbs I like to think I’m probably quite useful,” he said.

Pushed again about the remarks, Karzai said most people had made mistakes in their youth and shouldn’t be hounded for that. “As I said, he’s a young man, and young men do make mistakes talking, while behaving, all of us have gone through that period, so let’s drop it there.”

Harry’s enemies on the battlefield, who have also said they are targeting Karzai even as his government tries to reach out to them, were not so reticent, describing the young prince as a coward who ran away from fighting the mujahideen, or “holy warriors”, as the militants like to call themselves.

“I don’t believe that he participated in the fighting,” said Zabiullah Mujahid, a spokesman for the Taliban. “Maybe he has seen the mujahideen in a movie, but that’s it.”

He accused Harry, who has now completed two tours in one of Afghanistan’s roughest provinces, of staying away from the fight. “I think he has a mental problem, that’s why he is saying it is a game,” he said.

“These kind of people live like diplomats in Afghanistan, they can’t risk themselves by standing against the mujahideen.”

By arrangement with the Guardian

James Cunningham, the US ambassador in Kabul, described reconciliation as “a process that hasn’t even really begun”, although he added that one of Washington’s goals was ensuring “at least the beginning of a serious process”.

He also hinted at concerns over the unconditional release of some Taliban prisoners held in Pakistan, which was done at the request of Kabul, and was seen as a goodwill gesture intended to help ease the way for negotiations.

“To this point they’ve had a pretty hands-off kind of approach to the people that they have released,” Cunningham said when asked if he was working with Islamabad to ensure the released men did not rejoin the insurgency. “We would have preferred to have greater visibility into that. Still, it’s positive that they were released, I think, from the Afghan point of view.”

Secret discussions involving US, Afghan, Pakistan and Taliban officials have been under way for months, focused around confidence-building measures, including the establishment of a political office for the Taliban outside the immediate region and the release of Taliban prisoners.

Earlier this month the insurgent group said they were prepared to open a political office in Qatar for the purpose of negotiations “with the international community”, and since last November Pakistan has also released three batches of Taliban prisoners. The moves were taken as signs of real progress towards getting peace talks under way after years of false starts, missteps and outright disasters.

Among the most serious pitfalls were Nato’s 2010 discussions with a grocer from Quetta, who posed as a senior Taliban official ready to broker talks. He was flown to Kabul for meetings and pocketed thousands of dollars in cash incentives.

In 2011, a suicide bomber posing as a Taliban peace envoy killed the Afghan government’s top peace negotiator, the former president Burhanuddin Rabbani, by hiding explosives in his turban, and then last December an attacker with a bomb concealed in his underwear, also posing as a potential broker for peace talks, nearly killed the country’s spy chief.

One advantage of having a Taliban office is that it should reduce the risk of impostors presenting themselves as Taliban negotiators. But there are question marks over what real incentives the insurgent group has to talk, as the western troops are already heading home, and the Afghan security forces are short on key capacities, from bomb disposal to intelligence and air power.Afghanistan’s political landscape may also be dramatically different in two years’ time, with a new Afghan president set to be elected next year — the incumbent Hamid Karzai cannot stand for re-election — and most western troops gone by the start of 2015.

Cunningham, speaking at a news conference to discuss Karzai’s recent visit to Washington to meet his US counterpart, Barack Obama, said the US hoped to start substantial talks soon, but did not give any further details.

“What we would like to see, and what I think the Afghans would like to see, is… if not the conclusion of a negotiation, at least the beginning of a serious process on peace and reconciliation as soon as possible,” Cunningham said.

“But so far it hasn’t proven possible to bring those pieces together to get that going… We think it’s important if we can help get the Afghans get this process under way, and then try to help them steer it to the best result possible.”

Cunningham also rejected a claim by Karzai that the US had promised Afghanistan drones, saying pilotless surveillance aircraft came up in discussions about equipping Afghan forces during the trip to Washington, but no decision had been made. If drones were provided, they would be unarmed, he added.

By arrangement with the Guardian

With these taboo topics set aside, she quizzes families about everything else: their income and how many wives each man has, whether they can read and if their sons and daughters are in school, domestic details such as how they heat their homes, whether they have a toilet and if they keep chickens.

The shy 18-year-old is part of a critical but controversial effort to count the Afghan population for the first time since 1979.

Expected to take at least six years on a slow, province-by-province basis, it is possible only because it sidesteps tangled questions about the country’s ethnic balance. Asking about language is avoided because it can be used as a proxy marker for ethnicity.

Still, the complexity of Afghanistan’s ethnic politics means any kind of counting is controversial. The first results, from normally calm central Bamiyan province, showed an actual population barely half official estimates. The area is mostly home to Hazaras, a Shia minority who have often been persecuted in Sunni-dominated Afghanistan, and many took the findings as another form of attack.

“Death to the enemies of Bamiyan! The statistics are wrong!” shouted more than 1,000 demonstrators as they marched on UN offices in the small town this summer.

A previous attempt to end the decades-long wait for a count of the Afghan people, in 2008, was scrapped, with the government citing security problems. In December officials even dropped plans to unveil a new estimate of the population.

Although war has often put swaths of the country off-limits to statisticians, bitter ethnic politics have also played a role in slow progress, because of the risks that a population count might reduce the official size of some constituencies or expand those of rivals.

“If a politician sees that the ethnic group to which he or she belongs is less than expected, they will sometimes reject the data,” said Abdul Rahman Ghafoori, head of the Central Statistics Office, who has the delicate job of balancing his country’s need for decent data against the influence of groups who would rather details remain opaque or unchanged.

He is trying to capture his country in numbers with a staff of just 800, and an ambivalent population. “Statistics is a new thing for most people in Afghanistan,” he said, “they don’t feel it’s a need, a necessity.”

It is hard to overstate how few reliable numbers there are about population or anything else in Afghanistan, or what a problem this is for those trying to bolster the economy, distribute aid, decide where clinics should be built or how many teachers recruited, or do any other kind of long-term planning.

The estimates are muddied by years of violence, death and exodus, to Pakistan, Iran or further afield; there are only educated guesses about how many people survived, how many returned and how many have since been born.

So far only three provinces have been counted, and they are among the most secure in the country. Security problems are likely to be added to political tensions as teams spread out in more restive areas. But the slow timetable, with the final provinces not due to be surveyed until 2016, may help limit political opposition to the project. — The Guardian, London

The prime minister landed in Camp Bastion in southern Helmand province amid tight security and then headed north to visit soldiers at a base 40 miles away in the troubled Gereshk valley.

At a yard where troops were packing up military equipment to send home, he described the decision to bring nearly 4,000 British men and women home last year as a sign of success.

“We have a staged plan for drawing down our troops which is based on the staged plan for building up the Afghan army and the Afghan police force,” he said. “Frankly the Afghan army is doing better than we expected, there’s more of them than we expected and that’s why we are able to bring home so many troops.”

Cameron said this week that senior officers were impressed with the capabilities of Afghan forces, despite the setbacks of “green on blue” attacks this year in which 12 British troops have been killed by their Afghan colleagues.

Already 500 soldiers have departed in the first stage of a withdrawal that will leave just over 5,000 troops in the country in 2014, and no combat forces after that. Most UK bases and checkpoints in Helmand have already closed, although there is still fierce fighting in some parts of the province.

Philip Hammond, the defence secretary, conceded this week that the withdrawal of Nato forces would lead to “messy compromises”, and that it is likely “some parts of Afghanistan will not be under central government control”. He added, “It is not a perfect democracy and it never will be.”

But the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, welcomed Cameron’s announcement as a “timely decision” by the UK government.

“Afghan security forces are prepared to ensure security and protect their country,” the presidential palace said.

Cameron said the handover was in line with Afghan aspirations to secure their own country, while ensuring the UK had met its main security objective — preventing the country from becoming a base for al-Qaida or similar groups as it had been under Taliban rule over a decade ago.

“When I sit in No. 10 Downing Street and look at where the plots that we face in terms of terror, where they come from, far fewer come from this part of the world than used to be the case when we first came to Afghanistan, so we have made real progress,” he said.

British leaders have in the past spent tens of millions of pounds of aid on building up the Afghan government and state. Cameron said they would leave behind a struggling but improved place.

“Well of course this is a deeply challenged country, it has huge levels of poverty and instability and problems,” he said.

“But it’s a far better place than it was here when we came in 2001 — the economy has grown, there are more children in school, there are more health services available.
And there is, crucially — because this is our main national interest — there’s an Afghan army and an Afghan police force.”

Heavy fog delayed the landing of Cameron’s plane in Camp Bastion.

After an overnight flight, he was diverted to nearby Kandahar airfield for refuelling. The unexpected stop meant Cameron had to cancel some plans, including a trip to the post office to see Christmas post arriving. In the afternoon he headed to a small base on the Helmand River where he dined with troops.

He also remembered the 433 British troops who have died in Afghanistan. “It is tough, it is difficult, we paid a high price and I once again pay tribute to all those who have fallen and their families and their loved ones who miss them so much.”A news blackout on the visit, enforced for security reasons, was lifted late on Thursday.

Cameron’s trip came just a few months after a Taliban suicide squad burst into the base, killing two US marines and torching Harrier jets worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

By arrangement with the Guardian