Not far away, the sparkling 10-story glass-and brick Jamhuriat Hospital rises in the midst of Afghanistan’s war-torn capital. Beijing gave $25 million and the Chinese workers to build it.

Every day, Afghans wait in long lines at the Chinese Embassy for visas to let them cross the border to trade.

As the U.S. and its NATO allies fight to stabilize Afghanistan, China has expanded its economic footprint with several high-profile investments and reconstruction projects. In 2007 it became the country’s largest foreign investor when it won a $3.5 billion contract to develop copper mines at Aynak, southeast of Kabul.

The U.S. is in favor of the Chinese investment. “It can be a good thing. As a matter of fact, we encourage all of the international community to take an interest in the economic development of Afghanistan,” said U.S. State Department spokesman Gordon Duguid.

“Working with our coalition partners and other interested partners, we are trying to establish a viable market economy in Afghanistan. This is one way to wean people from illicit activities and also to fight the ideology of the terrorists,” he said.

For China, the reward is not only expanded trade and access to natural resources, it’s also security for its western flank, the vast Xinjiang region that is home to a separatist movement of minority Uighurs, said Liu Xuecheng of the China Institute of International Studies, the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s think tank.

“Our interest is clear. We need a peaceful neighbor because we have our own problems in Xinjiang,” Liu said. “If we have a friendly country in Afghanistan, they can help us to manage issues on the separatists, security and territorial integrity. We want Afghanistan to be successful.”

Though the two countries have always been friendly, the relationship has blossomed in recent years. In March, President Hamid Karzai made his fourth trip to Beijing, bringing back agreements on economic cooperation, technical training and lower tariffs for Afghan goods.

The emerging alliance is giving Kabul an alternative to its sometimes strained ties with the West. The two neighbors share a narrow, mountainous border, the Wakhan Corridor, and links that date back centuries to the caravans of tea, spices and other riches that traveled the Silk Road.

Afghanistan is “well aware that the U.S. is likely to only be a temporary ally so it’s looking for a longer-term partner in the region. China would be an obvious choice,” said security analyst Christian Le Miere, editor of Jane’s Intelligence Review.

China drew worldwide attention with the $3.5 billion winning bid by the state-owned China Metallurgical Group Corp. tap one of the world’s largest unexploited copper reserves. That deal — which included commitments to build a power plant, railway, hospital and mosque, and to employ thousands of Afghans as miners — has dwarfed all other countries’ foreign investments, including the U.S.

“China is the biggest buyer of raw materials in the world, whether that’s in Africa, Asia or any other part of the world. So if China wants to come to Afghanistan, why not?” said Ghullam Mohammad Yalaqi, the Afghan commerce and industry minister. “We just like to do the deal.”

The country’s untapped minerals, including gold, iron, copper and cobalt, is valued by a U.S. estimate at nearly $1 trillion. Afghan officials say it’s triple that amount.

For Yalaqi, who led a group of Afghan government and business leaders to China last month, the Chinese contribution is as important as that of Western troops.

“If we can create jobs, then youths wouldn’t turn to the Taliban. A good economy also has the impact of stability,” he said.

Trade between the two neighbors has mushroomed over the past decade from $25 million in 2000 to $215 million in 2009, according to Chinese figures. Yalaqi’s ministry estimates the actual figure, including unofficial border trade, to be closer to double.

On display in the crowded stalls of Kabul’s main electronics market are the fruits of that trade: computers, cell phones, cameras, irons, heaters and washing machines.

Squeezed into a small space is Suliman Electric, the electrical parts business owned by Gul Akbar’s family. Akbar and his brother used to travel to Iran and Pakistan to buy merchandise but switched four years ago.

“We started going to China because a socket made in Germany or Iran or the U.S. is more expensive — 200 Afghanis ($4.40). But sockets from China are only one-fifth the price. The quality of Chinese goods is not the best, but it’s good enough and the price is the lowest,” he said.

“When I started traveling to China, my business increased by 50 percent.”

Every four months, he makes the 4,800-kilometer (3,000-mile) flight to eastern China to fill up two 40-foot containers and ship them to Kabul.

“It takes two months to send it to Kabul and then another two months to sell it all. When we finish, I go back to China to buy more,” he said. “I pay $50,000 for one container’s worth of goods and I sell it for $60,000. I would go more often if I could afford to.”

He is one of an estimated 30,000 Afghan traders shuttling between the two countries, said Sultan Baheen, Afghanistan’s ambassador to China. Most head to the southern manufacturing hub in Guangzhou province, the far west city of Urumqi in Xinjiang, or the eastern city of Yiwu, home to a massive commodities market, he said.

The need to quickly shuttle goods between countries is huge. On the strength of cargo demand alone, privately owned Safi Airlines plans to launch the first-ever direct passenger and cargo flights between Kabul and Beijing this fall. Currently the only flights are between Kabul and Urumqi.

“What we found out is that the amount of visas being issued from Afghanistan to China, and vice versa, has increased dramatically. This is an indication that there’s upcoming traffic, upcoming business,” said Werner Borchert, Safi’s chief operating officer.

China may be the biggest foreign investor, but its $180 million in development aid over the past eight years lags far behind the U.S.’s $12 billion.

Much of China’s aid has gone on projects such as the Parwan irrigation system in the north, a conference hall for Karzai’s presidential palace and the Jamhuriat Hospital in Kabul. It has also helped train some civil servants as well as teaching police and army officers in logistics and mine-clearance, said Baheen, the ambassador.

But by focusing on signature construction projects, often built with its own workers, China has made itself visible in a way that the U.S., has not, he said.

“America spends billions and billions of dollars, but they give out projects to contractors from different countries — China, India, Pakistan, etc. because the labor costs are low,” Baheen said.

So when the average Afghan looks at an American project, “How does he know this is American money?”

The State Department’s Duguid cautioned that while foreign investment is welcome, it should be done “according with Afghan laws and free and fair competition rules that much of the world respects. That would include investment from China.”

The Aynak copper mine deal was shadowed by allegations that the Afghan mines minister, who has since been replaced, had collected huge bribes for steering the bid toward China.

China has also benefited by focusing its investments on Afghanistan’s relatively safer north, while much of the U.S.-funded effort is in the more violent south and east regions. The Taliban is not known to have made threats against Chinese involved in Afghanistan.

Beijing has reaped admiration for projects such as the 350-bed Jamhuriat Hospital. Inaugurated last summer, it was built in three years by 200 Chinese workers who lived on-site in temporary lodgings, said hospital director Ramazan Karimi. The hospital sits empty, though, because the government hasn’t allocated any operating funds, he said.

“The Afghan people prefer this gift from China. The Chinese side has done streets, roads and clinics in Afghanistan,” Karimi said. “They didn’t bring their troops here.”

Liu, the Beijing think tank analyst, said he doubted China would ever send troops. “The war is not China’s war,” he said. “… But economically and socially, we can try to help.”

For Afghans such as Akbar the merchant, China is an example to be emulated.

“When I travel to China, I feel safe. I see good roads and cars,” he said. “I don’t hear the sound of weapons. I don’t worry about someone stealing. I wanted to stay there.” — AP

The attack was launched early Thursday near a construction site in the northern province of Parwan where the South’s provincial reconstruction team is to be based, a spokesman told AFP.

“Four rockets fell in and outside the site but no casualties have been reported,” he said, adding there was no information on who fired the rockets.

The South’s team, which currently numbers 49 civilian workers and eight police officers, plans to officially launch its aid mission Thursday.

It will be progressively expanded this year to about 100 reconstruction workers and 40 police who will train Afghan counterparts, according to Yonhap news agency. The defence ministry declined to give figures.

The Koreans will help strengthen the provincial government’s capabilities and offer medical services as well as vocational and police training.

A South Korean army contingent is to protect them. An advance team of about 90 troops has been stationed in Parwan since mid-June and about 240 more troops are due to join them this month and in late August.

A purported Taliban spokesman last October warned that South Koreans “should be prepared for the consequences” if they dispatch a contingent, accusing Seoul of breaking a promise not to send troops back to Afghanistan.

The South, a close US ally, sent 210 engineering and medical troops to Afghanistan in 2002. It withdrew them in late 2007 after Taliban insurgents took 23 South Korean church volunteers hostage and murdered two of them.

Seoul said the withdrawal was already planned and not part of any deal with the kidnappers.

South Korea also sent non-combat troops to Iraq but withdrew them in December 2008 after four years. — AFP

Japan was expected to stress that it wants to see better governance and less graft in the bitterly poor central Asian nation as it disburses aid from a massive pledge of five billion dollars until 2013.

New Prime Minister Naoto Kan, who took office last week, was to discuss with Karzai the security situation in his country, where US-led forces have battled Taliban insurgents since late 2001.

In Washington on Wednesday, US President Barack Obama’s top military planners defended their exit strategy for Afghanistan, saying despite setbacks US troops could still begin withdrawing a little over a year from now.

General David Petraeus, commander of US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, repeated to senators his support for Obama’s goal of transferring security duties to Afghan forces starting in July 2011.

US Defence Secretary Robert Gates expressed confidence in Karzai and rejected reports an offensive was not going well in the south, after a week in which 28 NATO troops were killed in Taliban attacks.

The leaders of Japan and Afghanistan were also expected to discuss the fate of a Japanese journalist, Kosuke Tsuneoka, 40, who has been held captive by Taliban insurgents in northern Afghanistan since late March.

Karzai had an audience with Emperor Akihito in the morning and was later due to meet Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada and then Kan, with whom he was due to give a brief joint press conference.

The Afghan leader’s trip, his fourth to Japan, is his first since he won his second presidential term last November in a vote that was widely criticised as marred by electoral irregularities.

Japanese foreign ministry press secretary Kazuo Kodama told AFP that while Tokyo had sympathy for the challenges facing Karzai, the quality of governance in Afghanistan had to be improved.

Watchdog Transparency International says Afghanistan has the worst corruption of any country except Somalia, which has no functional government.

Japan last year pledged up to five billion dollars in aid over five years, of which 980 million dollars have been paid out, including more than 300 million dollars to cover the wages of Afghanistan’s 80,000 police officers.

Japanese aid has built 650 kilometres (400 miles) of highway and a new Kabul airport terminal, and its city planners are working to redevelop the capital, where more than 100 Japanese buses are now providing public transport.

Other Japanese aid projects in the works are vocational training and small-scale rural aid projects that would help former Taliban foot-soldiers give up their arms and earn a living in civil society.

Karzai was travelling with his foreign and finance ministers, as well as national security adviser Rangeen Dadfar Spanta.

He planned to deliver a policy address on Friday before visiting the Hiroshima Peace Memorial on Saturday commemorating the victims of the US atomic bombing of the city at the end of World War II.

On Sunday he will visit the nearby world heritage site of Nara — another former capital that once marked the end of the Silk Road trade route which also ran through Afghanistan — before leaving Japan. — AFP

“I am in good health. I don’t have any injuries,” Kosuke Tsuneoka, 40, was quoted as telling the Mainichi Shimbun, which said it interviewed him and his captors in a 30-minute telephone conversation.

To his parents in Japan, the freelance journalist said: “I want them not to worry and to wait for me.”

Members of the group holding Tsuneoka told the Mainichi that they had asked the Japanese embassy to negotiate the release of their imprisoned comrades, but were told that Japan had no jurisdiction over them.

Criminal groups and Taliban insurgents have kidnapped several dozen foreigners, many of them journalists, since the 2001 US-led invasion that ousted the Taliban regime in Kabul and sparked the current insurgency.

In his last Twitter posting on March 31, Tsuneoka said he had gone into a Taliban-controlled area in the country’s north.

He had previously also covered conflicts in Chechnya and Iraq. — AFP

Karzai will be the first foreign leader to meet with Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan since he took office earlier this month. The Afghan leader will be discussing his government’s efforts to strengthen governance and improve security, according to Japanese Foreign Ministry spokesman Kazuo Kodama.

The two leaders are also expected to tackle Thursday the implementation of aid measures that Tokyo announced last year, including a five-year pledge of $5 billion in fresh aid in November to help the war-torn nation strengthen its police force as well as support agriculture and infrastructure projects.

Under former Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, Japan ended a naval refueling mission in the Indian Ocean in support of the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, saying it should focus on humanitarian rather than military support.

Karzai, taking along his foreign and economics ministers, is hoping for Japanese funding to help support a plan to lure insurgents from the battlefield with jobs and economic opportunities.

Karzai’s government remains unpopular in Afghanistan, where many citizens complain they have benefited little from the billions of international aid distributed since the 2001 ouster of the former Taliban regime. Karzai’s administration is also perceived as corrupt — a factor believed to have attracted Afghans into the insurgency.

Kodama noted that Karzai won backing from a national peace conference earlier this month to pursue his plans to offer incentives to rank-and-file insurgents to stop fighting, and to come up with plans for negotiating with Taliban leaders.

He said the two leaders are expected to touch on the outcome of the conference, adding that Japan welcomes Karzai’s initiative.

Karzai is also scheduled to meet with Emperor Akihito, speak at a seminar, pray at Hiroshima’s peace park for the U.S. atomic bombing victims and visit Japan’s ancient capital of Nara before leaving Sunday. — AP

The move came after President Hamid Karzai hinted that the officials — IEC chairman Azizullah Ludin and chief electoral officer Daoud Ali Najafi — could be removed because of concerns from his Western backers.

Both men belonged to an institution accused of being stacked with Karzai cronies and which oversaw the August 20 presidential vote and its chaotic aftermath, which revealed widespread ballot-stuffing by Karzai supporters.

Karzai’s spokesman Waheed Omer told a news conference in Kabul: “The tenure of the president of the election commission, Dr Azizullah Ludin, has come to an end.

“Yesterday (Tuesday) he told the president that he did not want to continue in the position any more. It was accepted by the president.

“Daoud Ali Najafi also resigned. His resignation was accepted and a new figure will be appointed.”

Ludin and Najafi had previously tendered their resignations although they had not been accepted, Omer added.

Karzai’s main challenger in last year’s presidential election, former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah, fiercely criticised the government-appointed IEC, which he deemed to favour his rival.

A quarter of all votes cast in the election were declared invalid following a probe by a UN-backed watchdog, the Election Complaints Commission (ECC).

Karzai eventually accepted irregularities under extensive diplomatic pressure and Abdullah withdrew from a second-round run-off, fearing a repeat of ballot-stuffing that discredited the first round.

Omer said Karzai appreciated the “hard work” of Ludin and Najafi and said they would be found “suitable positions” in the future.

Karzai has angered the international community, which has 126,000 troops stationed in Afghanistan to fight a growing Taliban insurgency, for claiming that foreign governments were behind the massive electoral fraud.

The White House, notably, called the comments “troubling” and has hinted that Karzai’s invitation to visit Washington for talks with President Barack Obama could be withdrawn.

Karzai said this week he stood by his comments and said they would not affect diplomatic relations, which were already strained over concerns about the speedy implementation of anti-corruption and good governance measures.

Last week, Afghan lawmakers voted down the president’s changes to the country’s parliamentary electoral laws, including a proposal to strip the UN’s authority to appoint at least two non-Afghans to the ECC.

The upper house of parliament, though, refused to debate the issue, leaving the status of the legislative amendments uncertain, as parliamentary elections approach later this year. — AFP

Galbraith’s comments Tuesday came amid heightened tensions between Kabul and Washington after the Afghan leader suggested that foreign powers were behind the fraud in last year’s presidential election that returned him to power.

“He’s prone to tirades, he can be very emotional, act impulsively. In fact, some of the palace insiders say that he has a certain fondness for some of Afghanistan’s most profitable exports,” Galbraith told MSNBC television.

“This continued tirade raises questions about his mental stability and frankly this has been something that has been of concern to diplomats in Kabul,” he added.

But Karzai’s deputy spokesman Siamak Hirawi lashed out at Galbraith’s remarks.

“Since he is a fraudster and a liar, so are his recent comments,” he told AFP. “One could take his recent comments as an example that everything he has said so far about Afghanistan and the Afghan election has been a pure lie.”

Galbraith was sacked as the UN’s deputy head of mission to Afghanistan last year in a dispute over how far to push the Afghan authorities on electoral fraud allegations in the August vote.

EU observers reached similar conclusions that ballots were stuffed on a massive scale in favour of Karzai.

Karzai eventually acknowledged irregularities and was returned to power after his main challenger, former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah, withdrew from a second-round contest. — AFP

SAR HAWZA, Afghanistan (AFP) – Every Afghan in Sar Hawza district in dusty eastern Afghanistan wants the medical clinic rebuilt — even the Taliban, who used to send their wounded fighters there for treatment.

But talks to renovate the NATO-funded facility have been deadlocked since militants took refuge there last August and it was partially destroyed in a coalition air strike.

As in many areas, local people are caught in a dilemma.

Do they give in to Taliban threats or trust the Afghan government and foreign forces, even though they have gained a reputation for not fulfilling their promises?

NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) is responsible for security in Sar Hawza and commanders have said reconstruction should be a focus of a new push to reverse a nearly nine-year Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan.

Yet officials from the development arm of ISAF refuse to venture into Sar Hawza town until security improves, and accuse the locals of giving the Taliban food and shelter.

Local leaders say they have to placate the Islamist militia otherwise their family members will be kidnapped or killed and they have to defer to Taliban commanders before any project is built in the area.

“It’s too hard for us to fight the Taliban,” Mowlawy Muhammad, the district elder for Sar Hawza, told AFP. “If they don’t give us permission we are going to get in trouble and our lives will be at risk.

“These people are under pressure from the Taliban and the Afghan government…. It’s too hard for the government to protect us. We are under pressure from both sides.

“The coalition forces and some other governors have made promises, but we have never seen anything from their side.”

The new US-NATO strategy in Afghanistan hinges on bringing security to areas riven by the insurgency, following up with stable government and provision of basic services.

About 50,000 more troops, most from the United States, will swell the foreign force in Afghanistan to 150,000 this year in a push to end a war at its worst since a US-led invasion ousted the Taliban from government in late 2001.

Separating militants from the general population is a mantra in the counter-insurgency strategy, but it is easier said than done because the Taliban often have family ties in the community.

At a meeting the governor of Paktika province, Abdul Qayum Katawazay, addressed grizzled and wary Sar Hawza elders, most of them veterans who fought the Soviets in the 1980s, to try and win them over.

“The Taliban in Sar Hawza may be your brother, your family, but you can convince him,” he told the sceptical-looking elders.

His police chief Dawlat Khan was more direct.

“You are not innocent because you let them use your homes,” he said.

For their part, the elders say the Taliban have granted permission to renovate the clinic and a school but have threatened to kill anyone who works on a proposal to pave the dirt track from the main road to Sar Hawza town.

Lieutenant Scott Blue, at ISAF’s local Provincial Reconstruction Team, said the Taliban can hide bombs easily in the gravel road. Paving it is essential to improve the security needed to fix the clinic.

“We’ve had a convoy hit, so we’re like, ‘We’re not going to go up there and work unless the villagers start helping us out with security’. When the Taliban are active we need to know,” he said.

Blue conceded that Taliban fighters are also keen to get the clinic up and running so they can use it.

“We don’t have a lot of control over that. That’s up to the local villagers,” he added.

But the battle that destroyed the administration section of the Sar Hawza clinic was “a consequence of harbouring the Taliban,” he said.

Although publicly the Afghans say they only give support to the Taliban out of fear, US officials recognise that the militia can still offer some services the government cannot, such as resolving conflicts and land disputes.

Then there are local customs to deal with — the tribal Pashtun honour code of never refusing a guest who comes to your home.

“Aliens could come down and they’d give them food, water and shelter. That’s just part of the culture,” said US Army Lieutenant Marcus Smith, who commands an ISAF outpost just south of Sar Hawza. — AFP

The Afghan Ministry of Interior says the explosion early Wednesday appeared to have targeted a NATO convoy passing through the city’s main intersection.

It says the attack was carried out by a suicide bomber and damaged one of the military vehicles and several nearby shops. — AP

KABUL – Afghanistan’s military said 27 insurgents were been killed in ground fighting and airstrikes in a western province on Tuesday, in what appeared to be a major blow to Taliban influence in the region, while four civilians died in a NATO airstrike in the south.

NATO and Afghan forces launched an operation in Badghis province before dawn, with troops inserted behind Taliban lines to trap the militants, the regional Afghan corps commander Gen. Jalandar Shah Behnam said. Fighting continued well into Tuesday afternoon, he said.

In addition to the 27 Taliban bodies collected, one Afghan soldier was killed and five wounded, he said. One U.S. soldier was reported wounded.

There was no immediate comment on the fighting from NATO command in Kabul, but Behnam described the targeted area as one that had emerged as a Taliban stronghold in the past three years, from where the militants fired at supply aircraft and kidnapped members of Afghan and foreign engineering teams. It lies on a key highway connecting several provinces in the country’s west and northwest.

“This had been a serious threat against our forces,” Behnam said, vowing that operations would continue to clear the area of Taliban. “The removal of the opposition from this area is very important to us.”

The general said no civilians had been killed or injured in the offensive, which focused on a sparsely populated area about 185 miles (300 kilometers) from the capital Kabul.

In recent years, the insurgents have expanded their reach beyond their strongholds in the east and south of the country — although those regions remain the focus of much of the fighting in the country.

A NATO airstrike on a residence in the southern province of Helmand killed four insurgents and four civilians — two women, an elderly man and a child, an Afghan official and the military alliance said Tuesday.

Afghan authorities and NATO said they had launched a joint investigation into the deaths, which could further strain relations between President Hamid Karzai and his international allies. Washington on Monday voiced new concerns over recent statements Karzai questioning the nature of their alliance.

According to NATO and provincial government spokesman Dawood Ahmadi, insurgents had fired at NATO troops and Afghan army and police from inside the compound in Helmand’s Nahri Sarraj district on Monday, prompting the airstrike.

The presence of the civilians was discovered only after the troops entered the compound, NATO said.

Afghan and international forces have launched a joint investigation “to review the factors leading up to this unfortunate loss of civilian life,” NATO said in its statement e-mailed to journalists.

Ahmadi confirmed the report and said it was possible that the casualty count could increase.

“We have already sent a delegation to investigate this incident and bring the (Helmand) governor a complete report with the exact information and figures as to how it happened, how they died, and by whom they were killed,” Ahmadi said.

While a large majority of civilian deaths are attributed to the insurgents, civilian deaths at the hands of foreign forces are highly sensitive because they stir resentment against the 120,000 foreign troops in the country and could drive more Afghans into the arms of the Taliban. U.S. commanders have ordered troops not to use heavy firepower when civilians are present and avoid nighttime house searches. The commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, imposed strict limits last year on the use of airstrikes.

Earlier this week, NATO confirmed that international troops were responsible for the deaths of five civilians, including three women, on Feb. 12 in Gardez, south of Kabul.

Rising political tensions between Karzai and Washington in recent days have begun to overshadow efforts to push back against the Taliban ahead of the expected drive into the insurgency’s southern heartland of Kandahar.

In a speech to Afghan lawmakers over the weekend, Karzai made the extraordinary threat to join the Taliban if foreigners don’t stop meddling in Afghanistan.

While that’s considered mere bluster, Karzai has been fuming for months about what he considers Washington’s heavy hand. He seems to be gambling that blaming outsiders for the troubles in a society with a long tradition of resisting occupation will bolster his stature at home — while carrying little risk because the U.S. has no choice but to deal with him.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs described Karzai’s comments on Monday as “troubling.”

“On behalf of the American people, we’re frustrated with the remarks,” Gibbs told reporters.

State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley warned such comments could undercut U.S. support for the Afghan mission.

“Clearly, you know, what he says does have an impact back here in the United States and he should choose his words carefully,” Crowley told reporters on Monday.

Karzai has long chafed under what he considers excessive international pressure. Those complaints escalated last Thursday when he lashed out against the U.N. and the international community, accusing them of perpetrating a “vast fraud” in last year’s presidential polls as part of a conspiracy to deny him re-election or tarnish his victory — accusations the U.S. and the United Nations have denied.

Karzai told CNN on Monday that he has no intention of breaking with Washington, which is pouring 30,000 more troops into the fight against the Taliban.

“It’s just to make sure that we all understand as to where each one of us stands,” Karzai said. “Afghanistan is the home of Afghans and we own this place. And our partners are here to help in a cause that’s all of us. We run this country, the Afghans.” — AP