Afghan women and their children wait outside the main hospital in the western Afghan city of Farah earlier this year
Due to poor conditions, the children's mother bled to death while giving birth in her home. Sharifa says her pregnant sister was not able to travel over the rough roads to a medical center in the city of Faizabad -- just three kilometers from her village -- in time to give birth.
"My sister died while giving birth," Sharifa told the Reuters news agency. "Her orphaned children do not have anyone to take care of them. I am their aunt, so I have to come to take care of them. Sometimes I can't help them. There is no one to care for them. There is no clinic nearby, no cars, and no proper roads. When my sister was about to deliver a baby, we could not take her to the hospital. She stayed at home for one day and one night. Then she died."
Death during childbirth is a scourge in Afghanistan. On average, a woman dies there every 27 minutes from complications during pregnancy, according to the nongovernmental group Save The Children. It is a chilling statistic that contributes to making Afghanistan one of the most difficult places in the world to be a mother.
In fact, Save The Children's latest index on living conditions for mothers does not include Afghanistan among its ranking of 146 countries. That is because economic data was not available for one key category of the index -- a comparison of the incomes of Afghan men and women.
But the statistics that are available from Afghanistan -- data on women's health, education, nutrition, and personal safety -- confirm that life is very difficult for Afghan mothers. The data shows that one out of every eight women in Afghanistan dies during pregnancy or while giving birth. The only country where that situation is worse is Niger, where one out of every seven women dies during pregnancy or childbirth.
Ministry's Top Priority
Afghan Deputy Health Minister Faizullah Kakar says that is why maternal mortality is now the top priority of his ministry.
"Maternal mortality [in Afghanistan] is the second highest in the world. There is an African country that I think has more [deaths] than us. But our maternal mortality is 1,600 for every 100,000 live births," Kakar says. "So that is a very important area of health that we are paying attention to. That is actually our first priority in health. So we are doing quite a few things to reduce maternal mortality."
A clinic near the border with Tajikistan, in the Ishkashem District of Badakhshan Province, is one example. When Mahenow became pregnant recently, her husband escorted her to the clinic on a donkey for an examination. Mahenow says the clinic has helped her learn more about the health risks she faces.
"In the past there was no hospital, no doctor, and no medicine here," Mahenow told Reuters. "That is why we were doing the deliveries at home. Now we have clinics and good doctors. So I decided to come to the clinic in order to become more aware of health issues."
Education Seen As Key
Dozens of NGOs are also actively helping women who have little access to proper medical care. And it is not only pregnant women who are attending the NGOs' special programs.
Rona Azamyan is the coordinator of a midwife-education program in Faizabad that is offered at a series of schools. Azamyan says the goal is to educate women from isolated areas about how to help other women deliver a baby.
"These schools were established in order to bring down the rate of maternal mortality," Azamyan says. "We train local midwives who will be able to provide health services for mothers within the in communities remote areas where they are living. There are no proper hospitals in those areas. So they can save lives and help to rescue mothers from death during childbirth."
Indeed, Afghan men prefer their women to consult only women health workers. But that is easier said than done in a society where there are few female doctors or nurses and where little emphasis has been placed on educating girls.
The problem was worse during the Taliban regime, when girls were banned from schools and severe restrictions were placed on women leaving their homes. During those years, from 1996 to 2001, there were only about 1,000 female health-care workers in the entire country. They staffed female-only hospitals -- leaving women in remote rural areas without any health services. Still the situation remains far from ideal today.
Training As Midwives
One student in the Faizabad program, Momina Hinafy, says the death of her own mother convinced her that Afghanistan needs more women to be trained as midwives.
"The maternal mortality rate in Badakhshan was too high -- especially in the remote and mountainous districts," Hinafy told Reuters. "My mother died while giving birth. That is why I took the detour to become a midwife and help mothers. I want to help save the lives of other mothers."
Meanwhile, the government's plans call for more midwifery schools to be set up and for more female students to be assigned to medical and nursing schools. Authorities hope that will improve dire statistics like those compiled by Save The Children, which show that only 14 percent of all births in Afghanistan were attended by skilled health personnel during 2006 -- a figure comparable to Chad. In fact, only Ethiopia had a poorer score on that issue -- with trained health personnel attending to just 6 percent of the births there.
By comparison, qualified health personnel attended 90 percent or more of the births in countries like Iran, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, China, and Azerbaijan.
At the end of the day, Save The Children stresses that statistics tell only a portion of the story about the harm caused to the well-being of Afghan mothers and their children by years of war, violence, and lawlessness. But it hopes that focusing attention on the problem will mean that more Afghan mothers will be alive to celebrate the next Mothers' Day.
Additional reporting by Ron Synovitz in Prague
Ghulam Dastagir Azad, the governor of Afghanistan's southwestern province of Nimroz, told RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan that one of the detained men was captured with documents and photographs that prove he had links with militants.
Azad said the man was captured trying to enter the city of Zarang, on the border with Iran. "He had a camera that had photographs of weaponry indicating clear ties with [Afghanistan's] enemies," Azad said.
In a second incident, near Afghanistan's southeastern border with Pakistan, authorities say they detained an Iranian man who was preparing information for what they believe was an attack against NATO and Afghan security forces.
No Passport, Documents
Wazir Pacha, the assistant police chief in the southeastern Afghan province of Khost, said the man was not carrying any passport or documents and that he initially had pretended to be mentally ill. But Pacha says the man later confessed that he was on an information-gathering mission.
Police in Khost played an audio recording for journalists in which the man confesses he was preparing maps of NATO and Afghan military installations in Khost, which lies just across the border from Pakistan's volatile tribal region of North Waziristan.
In that recording, the man says he is from the town of Shiraz and entered Afghanistan from the Iranian border city of Mashhad. He says he arrived in Khost after passing through the Afghan cities of Herat and Kabul.
Meanwhile, Afghan security forces say they discovered a large cache of weapons in the western Afghan province of Herat, just 10 kilometers from the Iranian border. Authorities say they suspect the weapons were sent from Iran and were intended for the Taliban.
Ramatullah Safi, chief of border police in western Afghanistan, told Radio Free Afghanistan that some of the weapons contained Iranian markings.
"The cache contained one mortar shell, 785 land mines, and 445 tripod-mounted machine guns," Safi said. "There also was a lot of ammunition -- 2,400 boxes of ammunition for Kalashnikov assault rifles, 85 rocket-propelled grenades, and other ammunition."
'Interfering' In Different Ways
The Afghan government has not commented on the significance of the arrests or the discovery of the weapons cache. But Richard Boucher, the assistant U.S. secretary of state for south and Central Asia, told reporters in Paris on May 6 that Iran is interfering in Afghanistan in "a variety of different ways -- perhaps not as violently as they sometimes do in Iraq."
Boucher concluded that Iran is seeking to keep Afghanistan weak and unstable by delivering weapons to the Taliban while ostensibly supporting the central government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai. He said Washington sees "Iranian interference politically" in terms of money that Tehran channels into Afghanistan's political process, as well as interference aimed at undermining the Afghan state by playing off local Afghan officials against Karzai's government.
Radio Free Afghanistan correspondents Sharafuddin Stanakzai and Reshtin Qadiri in Herat; Amir Bahir in Khost; and Ajmal Seddique in Prague contributed to this report
Afghan Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak announces the arrests
Afghan officials say the government employees who were arrested were low-ranking workers in the Defense and Interior ministries. Karzai escaped unharmed, but three others were killed in the attack.
Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak identified one of the arrested government workers as a man named Jawed from Kapisa Province, north of Kabul. Wardak says Jawed repaired weapons at an Afghan Defense Ministry factory. He alleges Jawed provided two AK-47 assault rifles and a machine gun to three gunmen who attacked Karzai during a Kabul military parade on April 27.
Wardak identified the second suspect as a police nurse named Zalmay from the Jabal Saraj district of Parwan Province, also north of Kabul. Wardak says Zalmay had been in contact with one of the key organizers of the failed assassination plot.
Although authorities in Kabul have not released details about who they think organized the plot, Afghan intelligence chief Amrullah Saleh insists the masterminds behind the attack on Karzai were Al-Qaeda-linked militants based in neighboring Pakistan. Saleh says Kabul has provided information on the militants' whereabouts to "relevant international sources" who have the capacity to "put pressure on those people who are outside our borders."
"Pakistan has agreed with them and told them that jihad is fair against the people of Afghanistan," Saleh says. "This should once again make our people united and see how deep the roots of this crisis go."
Escaped To Pakistan
Saleh says a raid on April 30 by Afghan security forces on a Taliban hideout in Kabul killed a militant involved in planning a suicide-bomb attack on Kabul's Serena Hotel in January that killed eight people. Saleh says that militant, known as Humayun, had escaped to Pakistan after the Serena Hotel bombing but returned to support last week's attack on Karzai.
Intelligence officials have said previously that Humayun had links to a network headed by militant leader Siraj Haqqani. That network is associated with the Taliban and also is thought to have links to Al-Qaeda fighters. It is part of a myriad of militant groups that support Afghanistan's former hard-line Islamist regime and that are trying to topple Karzai's Western-backed government.
Saleh charges that the recent violence in Kabul shows that authorities in Pakistan's tribal regions continue to allow Al-Qaeda-linked militants to cross into Afghanistan to commit terrorist attacks.
"In what the Pakistanis are doing, we see two faces," Saleh says. "On one hand, we see a fight against terrorism. But on the other hand, they are agreeing with terrorist groups -- telling them to stay out of Pakistani cities but turning a blind eye if they go to Afghanistan."
Pakistan has repeatedly denied such allegations from Kabul in the past, noting that Pakistani security forces have arrested Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked suspects on its soil. The United States has launched missile strikes on suspected Al-Qaeda hideouts in Pakistan, even though Islamabad condemns those attacks as a breach of its sovereignty.
Domestic Political Rivals
Last week's attack on Karzai led to speculation and allegations in Afghanistan's lower chamber of parliament, the Wolesi Jirga, that Karzai's domestic political rivals may have been involved.
Legislator Shukria Barakzai tells RFE/RL that she does not think the arrests of the two Afghan government workers will be the final result of the investigation by a specially appointed Afghan commission. Barakzai says such an assassination attempt is a "major plot" that could not have been planned by just one or two people.
"I think Afghanistan's current administration has two kinds of enemies," Barakzai says. "One kind goes by the name 'Taliban' and clearly says that it is the enemy. The second is inside the system itself, representing old political parties with old aims. They are destroying the system from the inside. If this appointed commission doesn't find anything else besides these two low-ranking government employees, nobody in Afghanistan will trust such commissions in the future."
Last week, Afghan lawmakers passed a vote of no confidence against Wardak, Saleh, and the interior minister after they revealed they had been aware of a plot against Karzai but failed to stop it. Despite the no-confidence vote, all three security officials retained their jobs.
RFE/RL Radio Free Afghanistan correspondents Zakfar Ahmadi in Kabul and Ibrahim Amiri in Prague contributed to this report
U.S. soldiers are under two different commands in Afghanistan
Gates said the Pentagon would consult closely with NATO allies before making any decision to alter its military role in Afghanistan.
When asked by reporters to comment on discussion at the Pentagon about the possibility of taking over the command in southern Afghanistan, Gates said that this is "a matter that's going to be looked at over probably some period of time, primarily because it requires consultation with our allies."
During a visit on May 2 to the Red River Army Depot in Texarkana, Texas, the defense chief also said the United States needs to look at whether it continues to make sense to have two combatant commands involved in one country.
The United States has 34,000 troops in Afghanistan under two commands.
About 16,000 soldiers under U.S. European Command serve mostly in eastern Afghanistan as part of the 47,000-strong NATO-led International Security Assistance Force.
The other 18,000, which are involved in counterterrorism operations and training of Afghan security forces, are under U.S. Central Command.
Britain, Canada, the Netherlands, and Australia all have forces in southern Afghanistan, which has seen the worst of a rising tide of Taliban violence.
"The New York Times" reported on May 3 that the Pentagon is considering sending up to 7,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan next year to make up for a shortfall in contributions from NATO allies.
Citing unnamed senior administration officials, the newspaper said if the plan was to be approved, the number of U.S. troops in the country would entail at least a modest reduction in troops from Iraq.
It said U.S. forces would then account for two-thirds of foreign troops in Afghanistan.
The officials said the decision for more troops could be left to the next U.S. president, who will take office in January, and that few additional troops were expected in Afghanistan anytime soon.
The United States has recently increased its troop presence in Afghanistan. Some 3,500 Marines have been deployed to reinforce NATO forces in the south for seven months.
The United Sates and other NATO members have pushed their allies to provide combat troops and equipment to fill shortfalls in the south, but the response so far has been tepid.
According to "The New York Times" a dozen NATO countries, including France, have so far pledged a total of about 2,000 additional troops for Afghanistan, while alliance commanders have asked for 10,000.
An Afghan police officer stands outside the house in Kabul where security forces clashed with suspected Taliban militants
Afghanistan's national intelligence chief, Amrullah Saleh, said the operation at a house in the west of the capital targeted what he described as a "terrorist cell." Saleh said the dead included two "terrorists," one woman, whom he said had come "to carry out a suicide attack," one child, and three Afghan intelligence agents.
Saleh said soldiers surrounded the house but that those inside refused to surrender. In the end, Saleh said, Afghan security forces blew up the house. He said the woman, who was not Afghan, had planned to carry out a suicide attack, adding that security forces suspect the militants had "intended to use the child as a suicide bomber."
A Taliban spokesman confirmed two militants were killed in the fighting, along with the wife and daughter of one of the militants. The Taliban said the dead fighters had planned and helped to carry out the April 27 attack against a military parade in Kabul. Afghan President Hamid Karzai, foreign dignitaries, and other Afghan officials were in attendance at the parade, which was marking the victory of Afghan mujahedin fighters against the Afghan communist government 16 years ago.
Karzai was unharmed, but three other people watching the parade -- including an Afghan lawmaker, a 10-year-old boy, and a tribal leader -- were killed, along with three militants.
Saleh said the plan to attack the parade had been hatched in Pakistan's volatile tribal regions, but said there is no evidence that Pakistan's government or intelligence services were involved.
He added that Afghan security forces also have arrested eight other militants allegedly involved in providing logistics and weapons to the parade attackers, while a third raid against suspects is continuing in southeastern Kabul.
Ordinary Afghans say the incidents in Kabul this week have raised concerns about the ability of Afghan security forces to protect them.
"We are afraid of this situation because of all these threats against the president, cabinet members, and our nation," says Kabul resident Khan Wali.
"What has happened in front of this huge security force -- rockets being fired or other things -- in fact, this worries all Kabul residents," says Iqbal Shah, another resident of the capital.
Opposition lawmakers like Ramazan Bashardost have been complaining in parliament about the performance of the interior and defense ministries.
"There is no security force in Afghanistan that people trust," Bashardost says. "If you pay attention to [the April 27] attack, the security forces fled from the site before ordinary people did. This shows that our security force doesn't have the talent to ensure the safety of the people."
The Taliban appears to have become increasingly successful at recruiting new, young fighters in southern and southeastern Afghanistan during the last two years. But the violence this week in the heart of Kabul marks the most brazen attempts by Taliban fighters to assert their presence in the Afghan capital since the collapse of the Taliban regime in late 2001.
A section of the Gardez-Khost road before reconstruction
The 100-kilometer stretch of road will link the provinces of Khost and Paktia to Afghanistan's "ring road," which will circle the country. The contract was signed on April 26 by the Afghan and U.S. governments. The project is being funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and is scheduled to be completed in 2009.
The new asphalt road is seen by Kabul as one of the most important reconstruction projects in southeastern Afghanistan. One reason is its economic impact. The road is intended to reduce travel time between Kabul and the Khost by four hours, making it much easier for agricultural produce from the border areas to be transported elsewhere in the country.
Loren Stoddard, the director of USAID's Agriculture and Alternative Development program in Afghanistan, explains that the primitive condition of roads on the Afghan side of the border has kept economic activity in Khost tied more to Pakistan's tribal regions than Kabul.
"The Khost area has long been isolated from the rest of Afghanistan," Stoddard says. "Khost has a fairly vibrant economy because of its closeness and interaction with the Pakistan economy, but it has always been somewhat of a regional economy that has been tied more to Pakistan than to the rest of Afghanistan. What we expect with this road is that Khost's economy will then begin to be somewhat more oriented toward the rest of Afghanistan, which is new."
Improving Security
Kabul also considers the road development as vital to the goal of improving security along Afghanistan's southeastern border with Pakistan. Khost lies at a strategic position across from Pakistan's tribal region of North Waziristan, an area that serves as a base for Al-Qaeda-linked militants as well as pro-Taliban fighters, who are negotiating a draft peace deal with Pakistan's new government. Despite the peace talks, militants continue to use Pakistan's tribal regions as a staging area for crossborder attacks.
Security officials say road improvements to Khost would make it easier for Afghan and international security forces to rapidly send ground troops and equipment into blocking positions along the border just a few kilometers from the Pakistani tribal town of Miram Shah.
Indeed, U.S. military officials in Afghanistan have told RFE/RL that completion of Afghanistan's ring road -- as well as secondary roads to connect that main highway to Afghanistan's provincial administrative centers -- is central to their strategy of deploying "rapid-reaction forces" overland for counterinsurgency operations.
That is why the regional and national highway system meant to link Afghanistan's major cities and economic centers has been a focus of the U.S. military and reconstruction aid groups since the collapse of the Taliban regime in late 2001. Work began in 2002 to rebuild and improve the ring road's southernmost section, much of which had been destroyed by the Taliban in late 2001 as the regime fled Kabul.
Reconnecting Kabul with the western Afghan city of Herat required some 700 kilometers of USAID-funded construction work through the cities of Ghazni and Kandahar, and through volatile provinces like Helmand and Zabul where the Taliban remains active.
Complete 'Ring'
In October 2007, the Asia Development Bank approved a loan of more than $170 million to make the ring road a complete circle within the country by building a northwestern spur between Herat and the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e Sharif. Work on that final segment of the ring road continues and is expected to be completed by December 2009.
USAID says the latest road improvements certainly will make it easier for surplus food production to be sent from Khost to parts of Afghanistan where there are food shortages. It also is expected to increase international trade through access to Pakistan's nearby rail head, providing a shorter, alternative route for freight to Kabul and relieving the heavily congested freight-traffic route from Jalalabad through the Khyber Pass and on to the Pakistani city of Peshawar.
Stoddard agrees that the new road will help Afghanistan benefit from legitimate trade by increasing its exports to international agriculture markets.
"Afghanistan is famous for some big export products like pomegranates," Stoddard says. "Some of the best pomegranates in the world actually come from Afghanistan. And even in this area, in the area of Paktika, Paktia, and the Khost area, we see a solid [base of] pomegranate [production]. Also dried apricots, almonds, and walnuts. So there [are] a number of tree fruits -- that's probably the way you would identify them -- that come out of these three provinces. And by having this piece of road between Khost and Gardez and being able to get into the ring road, we expect that those products would be able to be consolidated with other similar products from around the country so we could get higher volume exports."
But as with any development project in Afghanistan's isolated provincial regions, meeting the time schedule for the Paktia-Khost road also depends upon maintained security along the proposed route. Work on the ring road's southern segments often was delayed by kidnappings and killings of foreign engineers in provinces like Zabul and Ghazni.
Taliban spokesmen speaking to the media
Taliban militants in Pakistan's border region in March 2008
Britain has expressed reservations about the strategy, and Washington has said it wants Pakistani forces to continue fighting insurgents in the tribal regions near the border with Afghanistan.
Reports from Pakistan said a top leader of pro-Taliban militants has directed his fighters to "immediately cease their activities" in connection with the deal.
The reports come as the new Pakistani government of Prime Minister Yusaf Raza Gilani moves toward signing the peace accord, with militants in the volatile tribal regions near the Afghan border where some believe that Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden is hiding.
Under the proposed deal, pro-Taliban militants would order their fighters to stop using violence and stop sheltering or giving support to foreign Al-Qaeda fighters. In return, Pakistani government troops would be gradually withdrawn from the region.
The orders to the militants were reportedly issued in pamphlets on April 23 by Baitullah Mehsud, the head of the country's umbrella militant group Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP). The pamphlets say militants who violate Mehsud's directives "will be publicly punished."
"If [Mehsud] has said it, we welcome it," Rehman Malik, a senior Pakistani Interior Ministry official, said of Mehsud's reported call for a cease-fire. "We should welcome any good step."
The new government in Islamabad, which came to power as a result of elections in February, has drafted a six-point peace plan that is expected to be signed soon with the pro-Taliban militants in the restive tribal region of South Waziristan.
In Good Faith?
Mehsud -- who has been linked to Al-Qaeda and is accused of organizing the assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in December -- is entrenched in South Waziristan near the border with Afghanistan along with thousands of his loyal fighters.
Malik said the peace deal would not bring an end to an investigation into allegations that Mehsud was involved in Bhutto's assassination.
"According to the newspaper reports I have seen, [Mehsud] has categorically denied it. But an investigation will take its own course," Malik said. "I assure the nation that whoever has [killed Bhutto] is not going to escape the clutches of the law."
In what was seen by security analysts as a good-faith gesture by the government, authorities in the Northwest Frontier Province on April 21 released a high-ranking pro-Taliban mullah, Sufi Mohammad.
A draft of the six-point peace agreement makes no mention of cross-border attacks into Afghanistan by militants.
But Latiff Afridi, an influential Pashtun political leader in Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province, told RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan that he is confident the militants would also stop incursions into Afghanistan under the accord.
"The group of Sufi Mohammad has gone through different experiences in recent years," Afridi said. "This group sent thousands of fighters into Afghanistan in 2002, but these circumstances have now changed fully. [Sufi Mohammad's people] have assured that those who choose ways other than peaceful ones for their movement -- those who commit violence -- will be violating Shari'a law. And this is wrong."
Western Reaction
On a trip to Pakistan this week to meet the new government, British Foreign Secretary David Milliband gave Islamabad's new policy a cautious welcome.
But Milliband suggested deals that create safe havens for terrorists -- like a failed accord made last year in Waziristan by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf -- will not work. Milliband said reconciliation deals require a "far greater degree" of precision and detail.
"We should negotiate with those who are willing to negotiate, and we should reconcile with those who are willing to reconcile," Milliband said. "Even in the Irish situation, large numbers of people did reconcile. But some refused to reconcile. And we did not negotiate with those who refused to reconcile. Those who are willing to renounce violence, I think it's important to reconcile with them."
Meanwhile, Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi has suggested that Islamabad is leaving the option open for military force if militants fail to comply with their obligations under the proposed deal. "The government would want to give dialogue and reconciliation its utmost full chance," Qureshi said. "But, on the other hand, if we feel that the spirit behind this initiative is not being met, well, other options are there."
In Washington, there were concerns that an accord between Islamabad and pro-Taliban or Al-Qaeda linked militants would merely allow terrorists to regroup and bolster their strength.
Officials at the Pentagon said there is a growing threat of attacks against the United States and Western Europe from Al-Qaeda militants who are thought to be sheltering in Pakistan's tribal regions -- a threat so serious that it requires the use of military force.
White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said Washington was encouraging Pakistani government forces "to continue to fight against the terrorists and to not disrupt any security or military operations" aimed at denying militants a safe haven in the tribal regions.
But Rahul Bedi, a New Delhi-based correspondent for "Jane's Defence Weekly," tells RFE/RL that U.S. military activity in the tribal regions has become more politically complicated in recent months because Washington's key ally in Pakistan -- President Musharraf -- has been politically sidelined.
Bedi said continued military operations in the tribal regions that "divide Pakistan and Afghanistan" -- especially those involving support from U.S. forces -- could undermine the new government in Islamabad.
"The writ of the Pakistan government doesn't run there. And a lot of the militants have bases in these tribal areas -- particularly in places like South Waziristan and North Waziristan. That is what is causing the problems for the NATO forces as well as the American forces in Afghanistan, because the militants retreat to these bases in this no-man's land, regroup, and rearm themselves, and come in [to Afghanistan again]," Bedi says.
"This technically is Pakistani territory; with the American forces reportedly planning cross-border attacks with unmanned [aircraft] or artillery or even special forces, infringements into this area are going to cause a lot of problems -- not only for the Pakistani government but also for the tribals," he adds. "The tribals are very opposed to the Americans and any form of incursion is going to be met with a lot of resistance."
RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan contributed to this report
A former government minister accused by some of war crimes, Abdul Rashid Dostum remains a leading power broker