Latest Stories from Afghanistan

(KABUL ANC) - The news coming our of Afghanistan every day is widespread and varied; from violent bloodshed to unusual, heroic accomplishments. People struggle to survive amid terrorists, corruption, and a NATO force that is increasingly finding itself unwelcome.

The information is presented by the Afghanistan News Center in Kabul, published by a number of groups and agencies that are covering developments.

U.S. Says Qaeda Militants Killed in Afghanistan
By ROD NORDLAND The New York Times May 29, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan — American military officials said on Tuesday that two militants killed in eastern Kunar Province on Sunday were members of Al Qaeda.

Afghan poppy blight may not harm heroin supply
By Rob Taylor | Reuters
KABUL (Reuters) - An Afghan poppy blight helping drive up heroin prices may not dent global opiate supply, the United Nations' anti-drug tsar said on Tuesday, as Afghan President Hamid Karzai lashed out at foreigners for their part in his country's drug trade.

Afghan insurgents target safest province Bamiyan
By Mirwais Harooni | Reuters
KABUL (Reuters) - Insurgents have stepped up attacks in the area thought to be Afghanistan's safest, rugged central Bamiyan province, moving into the region in a bid to undermine security ahead of the end-2014 exit from the country of most foreign combat troops.

Militants kill pro-gov't elder in eastern Afghanistan
GHANZI CITY, Afghanistan, May 29 (Xinhua) -- Suspected Taliban militants shot dead a pro-government tribal elder in eastern Afghan province of Ghazni, an official said on Tuesday.

Official: 160 girls poisoned at Afghan school
From Masoud Popalzai, CNN May 29, 2012
Kabul, Afghanistan (CNN) -- A hospital in northern Afghanistan admitted 160 schoolgirls Tuesday after they were poisoned, a Takhar province police official said.

Some 160 Afghan Schoolgirls Ill After Suspected Gas Attack
May 29, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Some 160 schoolgirls are reported to have fallen ill and lost consciousness in northern Afghanistan after a suspected poisonous gas attack at their school.

16 Taliban insurgents killed, 23 detained in Afghanistan within 24 hours
KABUL, May 29 (Xinhua) -- Afghan army and police, backed by NATO-led coalition troops, have eliminated 16 Taliban insurgents and detained 23 others during military operations within the last 24 hours, the Afghan Interior Ministry said on Tuesday morning.

Afghan Dam Saga Reflects U.S. Travails
Six Decades On, America Is in Race to Wrap Up Troubled Power Project
Wall Street Journal By MICHAEL M. PHILLIPS May 28, 2012
KAJAKI, Afghanistan - The U.S. plans to spend $471 million in the waning years of the Afghan war to conclude work on a dam and electrical-power system that over six decades have come to symbolize America's soaring ambitions and crushing disappointments here.

Afghan road lifelines blocked by graft, kickbacks
By Hamid Shalizi | Reuters – Sun, May 27, 2012
KABUL (Reuters) - When the Afghan government unveiled plans for a road linking his small village to larger centers elsewhere, Rahmanullah was so enthusiastic he offered a section of his farm for the route, thinking it would help move his produce to larger markets.

Afghanistan Urges Pakistan To Release Textbooks
By RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan May 28, 2012
KABUL -- Afghanistan's Education Ministry has urged Pakistan to reopen supply routes to NATO to allow for the delivery to Afghanistan of 4.5 million textbooks intended for Afghan schoolchildren.

Afghan Female Boxers Strike A Blow For Girl Power
NPR By Ahmad Shafi May 28, 2012
When Saber Sharifi goes out recruiting girls and young women for his female boxing team in Afghanistan, he encounters a lot of skeptical parents.

US Came to Lead the Region, Not Beat the Taliban: Hizb-e-Islami
TOLOnews.com Monday, 28 May 2012
The US-led military incursion into Afghanistan was not an attempt to drive out the Taliban or Al-Qaeda, but rather an effort to lead the region, the political head of hard-line Islamists Hizb-e-Islami said Monday at a conference in Pakistan.

One of the militants was Sakhr al-Taifi, according to a statement from the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force that described him as Al Qaeda’s second-ranking leader in Afghanistan.

However, there are no known published references to Mr. Taifi, and nobody by that name (or by two pseudonyms given by the military, Mushtaq and Nasim) appears on the official United Nations blacklist of Qaeda terrorists, which has several hundred names. Most of the group’s significant figures are believed to be based in Pakistan or Yemen.

NATO’s statement said the two were killed in a precision airstrike after they had been identified.

A spokesman for ISAF’s Joint Command, Capt. Justin Brockhoff, said that Mr. Taifi had connections with Taliban leaders “and exercised influence on them,” as well as controlling “multiple Al Qaeda terrorists.” He said the military’s information came from “information gathered through combined intelligence gathering.”

Elsewhere in Afghanistan, a suicide bomber in eastern Nangarhar Province detonated his explosives prematurely while apparently en route to the district governor’s office in Momand District on Tuesday, according to the governor, Shakrullah Durani.

Mr. Durani said two people were killed and three severely wounded, all of them passengers in the bomber’s car. He said the bomber had apparently offered them rides in an effort to disguise his attack.

Karzai, after meeting United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime Executive Director Yury Fedotov in Kabul, said while Afghanistan almost got the blame for supplying most of the world's opiates, it was unnamed others who "get the benefit".

"The president stressed that drug trafficking and international terrorism were inextricably linked, and that most of those involved in the trafficking business are not Afghans," Karzai's office said in a statement.

Afghanistan supplies about 90 percent of the world's opium, from which heroin is made, and its poppy-driven economy helps fuel the decade-long war, lining insurgents' pockets with more than $100 million a year and earning traffickers billions more.

Anti-drug watchdogs say drug-linked corruption is also pervasive within the government, with donors and law enforcement agencies pressing Karzai to do more to prosecute senior officials linked to trafficking syndicates, and confiscate millions of dollars received from their participation or bribes.

Eradication efforts - favored by top opium consumer Russia but condemned by the United States - and a fungus that leaves the poppy bulb without the liquid form of raw opium are now threatening to give insurgents even more cash by cutting output and driving up the price.

But Fedotov said it was still unclear how much impact the poppy blight would have this year and whether it would hit the crop as hard as a 2010 outbreak which slashed the harvest, with assessment still underway.

"Stocks are huge. There is no expiration date almost - it might be 10 years. So if there is a dramatic decrease in the production of opium this year, I'm not sure that it would affect the final product, opium and heroin," he told reporters.

Opium can keep for years which is one of the reasons farmers prefer the crop as, unlike with foodstuffs, there is no danger of it going off on the way to market and once stored, it is rather like having money in the bank.

In southern Helmand province, which is one of the country's six main poppy growing areas in the south, farmer Himat Yar said his two acre poppy crop had been decimated by blight.

"My harvest was more than 100 kg last year, but was less than 10 kg this year," he said, speaking to Reuters in the province's arid Nawzad district.

Jan Agha, 45, from Babaji district, said he had cultivated 33 acres of poppy, but only got only 120 kg of opium, which he said was not enough to even pay for his efforts.

"People here say that foreigners have dropped a kind of powder to destroy our fields. No even our vegetables are full of disease," he said. The price of opium, meanwhile, has doubled to more than $320 a kg.

In 2011, the farm-gate value of opium production more than doubled from the previous year to $1.4 billion and now accounts for 10 percent of the economy, according to Fedotov's UNODC.

Fedotov said his office was prodding Karzai's government to take steps to combat further price hikes, including education, development, jobs, and beefing up anti-narcotic laws.

With foreign combat forces leaving by the end of 2014, and with much of their cash and air power expected to go with them, experts say the Afghan government needs to do much more to fight poppy cultivation.

"President Karzai has assured me that he is committed to taking more active measures with regard to the drugs and organized crime," Fedotov said. (Editing by Jon Hemming)

Around 20 Taliban fighters from neighboring Baghlan province have crossed into Bamiyan and launched attacks in several districts, Bamiyan Police Chief General Juma Guldi Yardem told Reuters on Tuesday, prompting the government to promise extra officers and weapons.

"They usually plant roadside bombs, lead attacks on security checkpoints and some have even launched suicide attacks on some government offices," Yardem said.

Bamiyan was a focus of world attention in March 2001 when Afghanistan's former Taliban government destroyed two colossal sandstone Buddhas carved into cliffs, targeting the 1,700 year-old statues with tank and anti-aircraft guns, as well as dynamite, because they were un-Islamic.

The province, where most people belong to the Hazara ethnic group, opposed to the Pashtun-dominated Taliban, is located in the Hindu Kush mountains around 240 km (150 miles) northwest of Kabul, and had been thought to be one of the country's safest areas.

Though infrequent bombings and sporadic attacks have taken place, the government had been working on making the province a centre for tourism, albeit in limited form, with security provided by Afghan police and a small number of soldiers from New Zealand.

It is home also to the Bande Amir chain of lakes, whose deep blue waters are fenced by sheer limestone cliffs.

Yardem said the insurgents, who he said had been trained in Pakistan, attacked a police checkpoint in Kohmard district in April, and also laid roadside bombs targeting civilians.

Afghan officials often say insurgents receive training and shelter in Pakistan, although Pakistan denies the accusations.

"The insurgents are attempting these attacks in Bamiyan to create fear and panic among people, and make a safe province insecure," he said.

EARLY SECURITY HANDOVER Bamiyan was one of the first provinces to be handed over to Afghan security forces in July 2011, with around 1,000 lightly armed Afghan police and intelligence forces based there, but no Afghan soldiers.

"As soon as they find a security vacuum, they step up attacks," Yardem said. "It's obviously affecting Bamiyan's security."

He said he was asking the Afghan interior ministry and security forces in neighboring Baghlan to step up offensive operations against the insurgents, because police numbers in Bamiyan were insufficient to guard Bamiyan.

Interior Ministry deputy spokesman Najib Nikzad said the insurgents were so far only targeting small pockets in the area, but said "additional police and weapons are being sent to Bamiyan".

Abdul Rahman Ahmadi, a spokesman for the provincial governor, said security in the province was still comparatively good. European skiers even held an international competition in the area in March, taking advantage of heavy winter snows.

New Zealand's government earlier this month said soldiers from that country would leave Afghanistan in 2013, a year earlier than planned, because of security improvements in Bamiyan, with a team ready to assess security in the next few weeks.

Violence has surged across Afghanistan since the Taliban began its yearly summer offensive in April, vowing to target Afghan government and security forces, as well as the 130,000 foreign troops in the country.
(Editing by Rob Taylor and Daniel Magnowski)

"A prominent elder named Hajji Mohammad was killed by armed men when attending prayers in a mosque in Andar district late on Monday night," administrative chief of Andar district, Yousuf Sarhadi, told Xinhua.

The elder was shot several times and died on the spot, Sarhadi said, adding the attackers fled the area shortly after the incident.

He blamed Taliban for the attack. This is second incident of its kind in a single day. Armed men shot and killed Raz Mohammad, a member of community council in Sangin district of southern Helmand province on Monday.

The Taliban insurgents, who have been waging more than a decade- long insurgency, announced that they would launch a spring offensive starting from May 3 to target Afghan forces as well as U. S. and NATO troops across the country.

The insurgent group has warned the civilians to stay away from official gatherings, military convoys and centers regarded as the legitimate targets by militants besides warning people against supporting government and foreign troops.

Despite the presence of more than 130,000 U.S. and NATO, the post Taliban Afghanistan has been seeing Taliban-led violent incidents as seven civilians were injured when a rocket fired by militants hit an area in Ghazni city, earlier Tuesday.

In another development, four Taliban militants were killed when Afghan army and NATO-led coalition forces launched an operation against Taliban hideouts in Zurmat district of neighbouring Paktika province Monday night.

The joint forces also found and sized a handful of weapons, a district official Gulab Shah told Xinhua on Tuesday.

Their classrooms might have been sprayed with a toxic material before the girls entered, police spokesman Khalilullah Aseer said. He blamed the Taliban.

The incident, the second in a week's time, was reported at the Aahan Dara Girls School in Taluqan, the provincial capital.

The girls, ages 10 to 20, complained of headaches, dizziness and vomiting before being taken to the hospital, said Hafizullah Safi, director of the provincial health department.

More than half of them were discharged within a few hours of receiving treatment, Safi said. The health department collected blood samples and sent them to Kabul for testing.

Last week, more than 120 girls and three teachers were admitted to a hospital after a similar suspected poisoning.

"The Afghan people know that the terrorists and the Taliban are doing these things to threaten girls and stop them going to school," Aseer said last week. "That's something we and the people believe. Now we are implementing democracy in Afghanistan and we want girls to be educated, but the government's enemies don't want this."

But earlier this week, the Taliban denied responsibility, instead blaming U.S. and NATO forces for the poisonings in an attempt to "defame" the insurgent group.

There have been several instances of girls being poisoned in schools in recent years.

In April, also in Takhar province, more than 170 women and girls were hospitalized after drinking apparently poisoned well water at a school. Local health officials blamed the acts on extremists opposed to women's education.

While nearly all the incidents involve girls, earlier this month, nearly 400 boys at a school in Khost province fell ill after drinking water from a well that a health official said may have been poisoned.

The Taliban recently demanded the closure of schools in two eastern provinces. In Ghazni, the school closure was in retaliation for the government's ban on motorbikes often used by insurgents. People in Wardak said the Taliban has been a little more lenient and has allowed schools to open late after making changes to the curriculum.

The battle indicates broader fears about Afghanistan's future amid the drawdown of U.S. troops in the country.

NATO leaders last week signed off on U.S. President Barack Obama's exit strategy from Afghanistan, which calls for an end to combat operations next year and the withdrawal of the U.S.-led international military force by the end of 2014.

During the Taliban's rule from 1996 to 2001, many Afghan girls were not allowed to attend school. The schools began reopening after the regime was toppled by the U.S.-led invasion in 2001. However, observers say abuse of women remains common in the post-Taliban era and is often accepted in conservative and traditional families, where women are barred from school and sometimes subjected to domestic violence.

Afghan Education Minister Dr. Farooq Wardak told the Education World Forum in London in January 2011 that the Taliban had abandoned its opposition to education for girls, but the group has never confirmed that.

The May 29 incident at the Ahan Dara Girls' High School in Toloqan, the capital of Takhar Province, was the fourth alleged attack on a school in the area since last month.

Some of the Takhar schoolgirls told RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan that they smelled a foul odor before losing consciousness.

"When I entered the class I smelled something and then I started to vomit and fell unconscious; I don't remember what happened after that," Amena Jan, one of the girls who was poisoned, was quoted as saying by Reuters.

Afghan intelligence officials say the Taliban has been increasing attacks on schools and students in an attempt to intimidate families to stop sending their children to school.

"An investigation into this incident is under way," Habibiullah Rustaqi, head of Takhar regional hospital, told the same agency from Toloqan, capital of Takhar Province. "We have already sent the blood samples of poisoned students to laboratory in Kabul to carry out tests, in order to get a clear result of what has happened. All of these incidents are similar. It has created a panic for students, and in my opinion, I suggested to officials to lock down the school at least for a week."

Local health official Hafizullah Safi has sought to downplay the incidents, claiming that even if some students inhaled poisonous gas, others "may have lost consciousness due to fear and hysteria."

Several other major poisonings have been reported in recent months, including one affecting more than 120 schoolgirls in the same province on May 23.

Another attack targeted a boys' school in Khost in April, leaving more than 200 students ill.

The Education Ministry reported this month that 550 Afghan schools have been closed down because of security concerns, affecting 300,000 students in 11 provinces.

President Hamid Karzai has called on tribal and religious leaders to encourage the education of girls.

"The joint forces launched 10 cleanup operations in Kabul, Helmand, Kandahar, Sari Pul, Baghlan, Logar, Wardak, Paktia and Farah provinces, killing 16 armed Taliban insurgents and detaining 23 others," the ministry said in a statement providing daily operational updates to media.

They also found and seized weapons besides defusing 16 rounds of different mines, the statement said, without saying if there were any casualties on the side of security forces.

However, the Taliban insurgent group, which announced the launching of a spring offensive from May 3 against Afghan and NATO forces, has not to make comments yet.

Afghan forces and some 130,000 NATO-led coalition troops have intensified cleanup operations against Taliban and other militants throughout the country since the beginning of the spring but the insurgents in retaliation responded by carrying out suicide attacks and roadside bombings.

Four policemen were killed and another was injured when their patrolling van hit a roadside bomb in northern Baghlan province on Monday evening.

He even signed up for the construction gang, earning $6 a day to help build the 28 km-long route from Gardez, the capital of east Paktia province, and Rahmanullah's home in the mountainous Mirzaki district.

But two years on and Rahmanullah's farming land has gone and the road has largely disintegrated, along with the hopes of local people for a less hardscrabble life in a province where the insurgency offers much-needed money for fighters.

"I gave my farming field for free to the builders to give us a road and this is the result," Rahmanullah said, glumly pointing to a cratered and crumbling surface snaking from his village.

Like other similar projects meant to build prosperity under the counter-insurgent orthodoxy that people with jobs won't fight, the Mirzaki road fell victim to shoddy construction and kickbacks in the award of lucrative building contracts.

More than $57 billion has been spent on Afghanistan's reconstruction since the toppling of the former Taliban government in 2001, but critics says millions of dollars have been misspent as donor aid is parachuted on to an opaque maze of local and international contractors.

Afghanistan is regularly ranked close to the bottom of countries most affected by corruption, according to the Berlin-based graft watchdog Transparency International, with donors linking ongoing aid as the war winds down to improvement in its record.

"The village people hoped the new road would help them find good markets for their vegetables and fruit, getting them there on time before they spoiled," said Rahmanullah, who like many Afghans has one name.

According to a Paktia provincial official, the $7 million contract for construction of the Mirzaki road was given to an Afghan company named Seven Star, but was then sold on to another local contractor for less than $6 million.

Qari Fahim, Seven Star's owner, blamed the convoluted contracting process for failing to release the money on time.

"I got only 25 percent of the contract upfront. Other instalments for the rest were delayed for months. Finally I had to hand over the project to another company for less money," Fahim told Reuters.

Another 105-km road joining Paktia to neighboring Khost province, to the northeast, has also been crippled by graft and kickbacks, some Afghan officials concerned about the problem say on condition of anonymity, fearing repercussions.

That contract, worth $126 million, was awarded to an Indian-based company three years ago, but it was then onsold to an Afghan contractor for $84 million. The road is still incomplete.

Visiting a half-finished part of the route, Paktia governor Juma Khan Humdard fumed at the contract skimming, which forces contractors lower on the chain to skimp on costs and build less-durable roads guaranteed to deteriorate.

"There has been corruption, kickbacks. That's why this road can't be built," Humdard said.

Road-building has been a major priority for President Hamid Karzai and Western backers as his government's popularity fades over its inability to deliver the progress sought by voters in a country where a third of the 30 million population live beneath the poverty line.

The U.S. Agency for International Development promised to build as much as 1,900 km of roads under one program but delivered less than a tenth of that when the program was cut last year, after U.S. taxpayers had spent almost $270 million.

USAid did not address specific accusations about the program, but a spokesman told Reuters it had invested $2 billion in total to build and rehabilitate 1,800 km of roads.

Afghan officials said while 6,700 km of road had been asphalted across Afghanistan, around 4,000 km were quickly deteriorating due to shoddy construction and graft.

The problem even extends to the capital, where poor drainage and heavy winter rains and snow left many major roads choked with traffic jams and impassable.

"We need around $70 million for maintenance of poorly constructed roads built with inadequate materials," Ahmad Shah, the deputy minister of public works, told Reuters.

Azizullah Ludin, the head of the government's anti-graft unit in Kabul, criticized civilian/military Provincial Reconstruction Teams, or PRTs, for their method of awarding contracts, which sees kickbacks go to contracting companies.

"There is no transparency in contract letting by PRTs or other foreign military units. The contracting companies take a share for themselves and then pass contracts over to others desperate to break into potentially lucrative aid contracts.

"We have a case of a $50 million contract awarded to a foreign company with no equipment or machinery, who then passed it to an Afghan company for $30 million," Ludin said.

"It's not only Afghan companies, but foreigners. There are many such cases, not only in roads, but in almost every part of construction."

Ludin said construction of many buildings had also been suspended due to poor quality of materials used, from schools to hospitals and government buildings.

"A $9 million health clinic was built in Bamiyan province. When we inspected it, it was found to be vulnerable to collapse because of winter snow and even small earthquakes," he said.

The governor in volatile southern Helmand province, Gulab Mangal, said he had suspended construction of three major roads through the province last month after complaints from local villagers that they had been poorly built.

The roads were meant to connect the provincial capital Lashkar Gah to Giresk and Nawa districts, as well as the town of Marjah, where U.S. surge troops fought one of the fiercest battles of the Afghan war in 2010.

Mangal also blamed the bidding process and said construction companies had been awarded contracts based on their family or business connections with deciding officials in Kabul, rather than their ability to deliver or any knowledge of Helmand.

"Government officials, lawmakers and even the Taliban received a share of money from those contracts," an official told Reuters in Kabul. "There have been amounts of money involved."

"I reassure them that their daughters will not have broken noses on their wedding day," he says with a smile.

Sharifi launched his recruiting campaign in girls' high schools back in 2007. After three months of relentless speeches and presentations, he could only get two girls to sign up.

But he didn't give up. After two more years, he had eight more members on the team.

Today, he has 30 female boxers, and one them, Sadaf Rahimi, will be going to the Summer Olympics in London.

Sharifi still needs to get the approval of the skeptical parents. He promises them he will personally take the girls in his own car to the gym, at Kabul's Ghazi stadium, and bring them back home safely three times a week.

It's still not an easy decision for the parents. It was very difficult, says 19-year-old Shabnam Rahimi, the first Afghan female boxer to bring back a gold medal from a regional championship.

"My dad received death threats because of me two years ago," she says. "The threat was serious, and I had to stop training for a whole month. But our coach came to my father and promised he would personally protect me. My father agreed, and I started training again."

Despite all the risks, Afghanistan's female boxers say they are determined to fight for their rights inside and outside the ring. They say the sport has given them hope to pursue their dreams.

Halima Sadat, 16, says she sees boxing as helping prepare her for a career as a lawyer.

"I want to fight corruption and go after people who take bribes and who violate our rights," she says. "I want to make sure that powerful men don't get away with committing crimes."

The female fighters have few resources and limited space. But they are spirited and determined as they throw punches during this training session.

The only member of the team who has been selected to participate in the Olympics — Sadaf Rahimi — is currently training in China.

For the other young women training in this dimly lit gym in Kabul, Sadaf's participation in London is not just about a quest for Olympic glory. For them, she represents rising female power in Afghanistan.

Afghan King Mohammed Zahir Shah conceived the dam project in the mid-1940s to irrigate a breadbasket in the desert. President Harry Truman embraced the project as part of the struggle for global dominance with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.

The dam was first completed in 1953 and the power station in 1975. The current aid package is intended to refurbish and wrap up the project. It was made possible late last year, a full decade into the U.S. war, when Marines secured the road leading to the hydroelectric site.

Despite its 60-year incubation, the dam project is in a race against time. The Marines are now beginning to withdraw from Afghanistan, which will leave it largely up to barely tested Afghan troops to keep the road safe for workers and supplies.

The existing turbines, though unreliable, provide about half of the electricity going to Helmand and Kandahar provinces, areas the U.S. and its Afghan allies are trying to pry away from the Taliban. Yet the project's irrigation canals also water fields of opium poppies, helping to make Helmand the source of about 45% of the world's heroin.

Richard Olson, who heads the development office at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, says the Kajaki project will "continue to affirm our commitment to a stable, sustainable Afghanistan" and make the Helmand Valley "fully viable" by providing water for irrigation and electrical generation.

Filled by melting winter snows, the Helmand River tumbles out of the Hindu Kush range, joins with the Arghandab River near Kandahar, then pivots west into arid Helmand province and Iran.

To build the original 320-foot-high earthen dam, Afghanistan in the 1940s hired a Boise, Idaho, engineering firm, Morrison Knudsen, which had helped build the Hoover Dam and the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. The Afghan king's aspirations meshed with U.S. Cold War strategy. In his 1949 inaugural address, Mr. Truman linked the success of rich countries to economic growth in poor ones.

By the early 1950s, the U.S. Agency for International Development was a major funder of Kajaki. American workers and their families lived on a bluff near the dam; the king had his own house on site with a view of Helmand River sunsets.

From the start, though, the project was plagued by problems, including waterlogging and salination of farmland, according to a 2002 paper by Indiana University historian Nick Cullather.

In 1975, the U.S. and Afghanistan added a power station at the dam, with two 16.5-megawatt generators. Between them was left a cavernous hole for a third turbine.

The 1979 Soviet invasion derailed U.S. participation in the project. Within a few years, the dam was producing only enough power to light its own offices. The Soviets fled in 1989, paving the way for the rise of the Taliban. The Islamist government rebuilt electrical lines, but used low-grade wiring that burned out frequently. The two turbines decayed, halving the power they produced. The third turbine didn't materialize.

A few years after the 2001 U.S.-led invasion ousted the Taliban regime, British troops moved into the former workers camp at Kajaki and renamed it Forward Operating Base Zeebrugge. It was an isolated position; the road to Kajaki was made almost impassable by insurgents' booby traps.

In 2008, some 5,000 allied troops, most of them British, fought their way to FOB Zeebrugge with pieces of the long-awaited third turbine and an 18.5-megawatt generator. Then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown called it "yet another example of the skill and courage of our forces."

But a Chinese contractor hired to install the turbine quit after waiting months for supplies, according to Sayed Rasoul, the power station's chief engineer. The parts now sit rusting on a dirt lot near the dam. "In the past four years nobody has gotten anything done," says Sharafuddin, Kajaki District governor, who uses only one name.

Seven months ago, U.S. Marines secured the last stretch of road connecting Kajaki to major southern cities. Two crosses at FOB Zeebrugge bear the names of a score of British and American troops lost defending the dam.

In recent decades, Mr. Rasoul has had to jury-rig equipment to keep electricity flowing under Communists, mujahedeen, Islamists, Britons and now Americans and their Afghan allies. "With each regime change, our salaries went up a little," he said.

With the U.S. combat role due to finish by the end of 2014, American officials are pushing ahead to refurbish the dam and the electricity grid all the way to Kandahar, the major southern city. USAID is paying Black & Veatch Corp., of Overland Park, Kan., $266 million to install the third turbine, upgrade substations and do other work. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will spend $205 million to rehabilitate the dam and improve power lines and substations.

Roseann Casey, a USAID division chief, says the agency is counting on U.S. and Afghan forces, and private security firms, to protect workers. "Having said that, security is and will always be a concern and could threaten progress on the project," she said.

Work was supposed to start last month, but didn't, partly because Pakistan has closed supply routes out of anger over U.S. airstrikes on its territory. Construction seems more likely to begin in September or October.

Still, U.S. officials promise the project will be done by the end of 2014. "They weren't going to give up on it during the Cold War because it would have been a blow to the prestige of the United States government, and they're not going to give up on it now for the same reason," said Prof. Cullather.

The US-led military incursion into Afghanistan was not an attempt to drive out the Taliban or Al-Qaeda, but rather an effort to lead the region, the political head of hard-line Islamists Hizb-e-Islami said Monday at a conference in Pakistan.

Ghairat Baheer, son-in-law of the group's founder Gulbudin Hekmatyar, spoke to religious leaders from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran who met to condemn the presence of Nato forces in Afghanistan.

The group agreed that there will be no peace in Afghanistan if the Nato forces stay.

"US attack on Afghanistan was not to beat Taliban or Al-Qaeda, but you should know that they were looking for a golden chance to lead the region from Afghanistan," Baheer told the attendees of the conference in Peshawar.

Meanwhile, Leader of Jamiat-e Islami in Pakistan Qazi Hussain Ahmad said that the solidarity of Afghans is impossible if Nato troops remain.

"Solidarity of Afghan people is impossible with presence of Nato forces," Ahmad said.

Iranian representative in Peshawar also called for the foreign forces to withdraw from Afghanistan immediately, and the religious leaders voiced their opposition towards the signing and recent approval of the Afghanistan-US strategic agreement.

Afghan university professor Abdul Majid Naseri said in an interview with TOLOnews that their comments amounted to interference in Afghanistan, the same as if they were political leaders saying how the country should be run.

"Afghanistan is an independent country, we will not allow anyone to interfere in our internal affairs," Naseri said.

The Afghan-US long-term pact was approved by Afghanistan's parliament last week after facing some pressure from political elements in Iran and Pakistan to not approve it.