• Listen to this segment

• Listen to the entire program

Afghan President Hamid Karzai is calling on U.S. forces to cease their controversial and increasingly frequent night raids. The two countries have been in talks about the future of their collaborative military efforts since March. However, the Afghan government has made firm demands that if the tactics used by the U.S. military of conducting night raids into the private homes of its citizens are not changed immediately, the U.S. presence in Afghanistan could end. These demands were made on the eve of the Second Bonn Conference on Afghanistan in Germany on Monday. That conference, exactly ten years after a similar conference in Bonn where Karzai was first named interim Afghan President, brought together representatives from about a hundred countries and organizations to discuss Afghanistan’s future. During the one-day conference President Karzai reached out to the global community for its “continued solidarity.. commitment and support” well after the withdrawal of foreign forces in 2014. The delegates pledged their support declaring “[w]e reiterate our common determination to never allow Afghanistan to once again become a haven for international terrorism.” However, notably absent from the proceedings were delegates from Pakistan, and representatives of the Taliban. Pakistan recently announced it would boycott the conference after US strikes killed over two dozen Pakistani troops. Before heading to the conference in Bonn, Karzai – in response to pressure from both international and local communities – pardoned a young Afghan woman named Gulnaz, a rape victim who was jailed for two years until recently released under the condition she marry her rapist and the subsequent father of her child. The controversy around Gulnaz comes even as concerns have been voiced about the role of Afghan women at the Bonn Conference.

GUESTS: Gareth Porter, investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy and the Afghanistan war. He writes for Interpress Service; Yifat Susskind, Executive Director of MADRE, an international women’s human rights organization – she has also written extensively on US foreign policy and women’s rights and her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy in Focus, and more.

Read Gareth Porter’s latest article here: http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=106087

Read Yifat Susskind’s article about Gulnaz here: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/12/05-4