Ram Bahadur Bomjan told officials that the villagers were smoking cigarettes and disrupting his meditation.

Bara District police superintendent Manoj Neupane said in a phone interview, “Seventeen people have come to us claiming that they were beaten by Bomjan and we are investigating the issue.”

Bomjam, who claims to be in penance (or, meditating), has advocated non-violence and campaigned against the mass sacrifice of animals. Last year, he even addressed the public highlighting non-violence and peace.

Bomjam has claimed that he can mediate for months without eating food. But the 17 villagers, who say they were in the jungle to collect firewood, told police that Bomjam beat them and detained them. Police have sent the injured for medical checks in the nearby Bara Hospital.

The “Buddha Boy” told journalists and police that he slapped the villagers “as a punshiment” for smoking and mimicking him.

–Rajneesh Bhandari

The government—after missing the deadline to write a new constitution—did nothing specific in the past 21 days except wait for a new government to take over. While millions of Nepalis struggled through the workday with only four hours of electric power, the three major political parties–Maoists, Nepali Congress and CPN UML–were claiming political power. But, none of the three prime ministerial candidates managed to score a simple majority.

One of them looked very familiar. Maoist chairman Pushpa Kamal Dahal—“Prachanda”—was back a year after being forced to resign as prime minister after an attempt to sack the army chief was revoked by president Ram Baran Yadav.

A candidate needs to get 300 votes in his favor to win, and as none of the parties have majority, the candidates need to find coalition support. The intrigue began in early morning Wednesday, when Maoists decided to support the CPN UML if they got a two-thirds majority in the election.

By the afternoon, CPN-UML’s Jhalanath Khanal—who had joined the race thinking that Prachanda would withdraw—came close to securing the PM post after Maoists and two other parties expressed their conditional support to him. Khanal himself went to meet members of one group, the Front, asking for support. The Front declined, saying that they “will not vote as none of the candidates agreed to fulfill [our] demands.”

In the two different rounds of election organized in the evening, Prachanda scored 242 votes, Nepali Congress’ candidate Ram Chandra Paudel managed 124 votes. Khanal withdrew from the voting process after being unable to secure two-thirds support.

The next election between Prachanda and Paudel will take place on Friday. “I am confident that I will win the election in the second round,” Paudel said. The lights were still on in Constituent Assembly Hall as he exited, but the rest of Kathmandu flickered and went dark.

–Rajneesh Bhandari

We recently caught up with John Kenneth Press, president of the Brooklyn Tea Party. It was very informative. Everything you want to know about the Tea Party, Press has the goods: Sarah Palin, Arizona’s immigration laws, Obama’s attitudes to Islam, Kurt Cobain… Well, you gotta see it to believe it. For now, check out this teaser. The full interview will appear next week on our series “Open Mic.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I cannot begin to imagine the hell that Bill Shaw has been through. By all accounts he is a manager of impeccable integrity who believed he had paid a legitimate fine to a member of the NDS, Afghanistan’s intelligence agency. In fact, it was his attempt to obtain a receipt for the payment that resulted in his arrest and incarceration. Sadly, Mr. Shaw learned the hard way what happens to honest men in Afghanistan. He spent four months in Kabul’s notorious Pul-i-Charki prison alongside murderers, Taliban and hardcore jihadists who put a $10,000 bounty on his head.

Free thanks to his family.

Bill Shaw is not the first westerner to get caught in a web of Afghan dirty dealing nor will he be the last. Extortion, blackmail and kidnapping are endemic in the country and western security contractors, journalists and aid workers are considered rich targets. And it’s not just shady officials, crooked police officers and hooded kidnapper who pose a threat. Sometimes westerners are scammed by the ‘trusted’ local Afghan employee working alongside them (The same court that acquitted Bill Shaw found his Afghan colleague, Maiwand Limar, guilty of conspiring to defraud him).

I’m not surprised by what the Afghans did to Bill Shaw. I am however deeply, deeply disturbed that his employer and the British government allowed him to endure such a nightmare. ArmorGroup, the G4S subsidiary which employs Bill Shaw has been operating in Afghanistan since 2002. The company provides close protection and site-security for commercial, non-government and government clients including Britain’s FCO. ArmorGroup has hit some serious bumps along the way, including having a British manager shot dead during a cash-in-transit move back in 2007. In short, the firm is intimately familiar with the pitfalls of doing business in the country. The Afghans don’t play by the same rules as the west. The NDS does not have proper accounting systems to track ‘fine’ payments which mysteriously vanish into thin air. The senior managers above Bill Shaw should have understood the Pandora ’s Box he was opening when he went back to the NDS for a receipt. In my view, had they taken over the scenario earlier, events may very well have not spiralled out of control. After what Bill Shaw’s been through, ArmorGroup should make sure he never has to work another day of his life.

ArmorGroup let Bill Shaw down in my opinion. But their failure is nothing compared to the FCO which never should have allowed him to spend a single night in jail. The FCO is well aware of the flaws in Afghanistan’s judicial system because British tax payers partially fund it. The Afghan legal system does not serve the law imposed on it by the West. Like all institutions in the country, it is a pawn of powerful interests. I firmly believe the Afghan courts convicted Bill Shaw in order to curb western criticism of the country’s endemic corruption.

Why did the FCO stand by and let Bill Shaw get railroaded? I’d very much like an official answer to that question. My gut feeling is that the FCO was so focused on the greater political picture they didn’t think he was worth fighting for—that is until his family launched a high profile petition and social-networking campaign to draw attention to his plight. Shaw’s wife and daughter fought tooth and nail to make the British government stand up and listen. They even marched petitions up to Downing Street.

Bill Shaw’s family deserve every credit for his release. But not every British citizen jailed in Afghanistan has a vocal support network back home. As I write this, Anthony Malone, an ex-British soldier who went to Afghanistan in 2002 to set up a security and logistics business languishes in Pul-i-Chakri prison. Malone has already served more than two years in jail for ‘non-payment of debt’ which is NOT a criminal offence in Afghanistan. Not surprisingly, Malone recently told a reporter from the Daily Mail he’s been ‘abandoned’ by the British Embassy. Why the hell hasn’t the FCO demanded his freedom?

Cowering behind excuses of ‘diplomacy’ just won’t cut it; especially when the British government encourages British businesses to come to Afghanistan. As the experiences of Bill Shaw and Anthony Malone demonstrate, no matter how much blood and treasure Britain squanders, Afghans will never embrace the institutions imposed on them by the West. It’s time for the British government to acknowledge the limitations of what it can achieve in Afghanistan before another innocent Brit like Bill Shaw is thrown to the wolves.

Bob Shepherd is an ex-SAS soldier and bestselling author of The Circuit. His debut novel The Infidel will be published August 5th by Simon & Schuster UK. To read more posts by him, please visit www.bobshepherdauthor.com.

Learn more about what’s happening in Iran and the Green Movement’s ongoing fight for freedom in this episode of The Week in Green.

Click here to view the embedded video.

First, let’s separate the military brass from the brave soldiers doing the hard graft on the ground. The British produce the finest soldiers in the world. I have no doubt our forces could hang on in Sangin indefinitely, as the Paras proved in 2006 during the opening phase of Britain’s woefully undermanned and infamously underequipped deployment to Helmand. Sadly, the number of boots on the ground was never increased sufficiently to allow British forces to dominate their area of operations; hence why they have managed to ‘hang on’ rather than turn the situation around.

They'll Take the Aid...

If anyone has failed in Sangin it is Britain’s military and political leaders. They never should have sent our forces to Helmand in the first place, let alone in such unrealistic numbers. As mentioned in previous posts, NATO troops aren’t fighting an insurgency in Afghanistan; they’ve taken sides in a long term civil war. The Brits never had a hope in hell of ‘winning hearts and minds’ in Sangin because the local Pashtoon population believe NATO forces and the Afghan National Army for that matter, are allied with the former warlords of the Northern Alliance – the historic enemies of the Pashtoon. Furthermore, British troops in Sangin were also unwittingly thrust into the centre of more localized rivalries between tribes and drugs lords; a scenario which has unfortunately played out in many other areas of Afghanistan as well.

In the last few months, the British media has started analyzing the Afghan quagmire with an increasingly wary eye. The late awakening is understandable, given that for years the FCO has been feeding journalists a steady diet of ‘good news’ stories about ‘flourishing markets’, health clinics, and school openings in Sangin. The Pashtoon aren’t going to turn down a health clinic, even one provided by the allies of their mortal enemies. They’ll grab the aid money with one hand…but hold a dagger in the other.

The Americans will deploy to Sangin in greater numbers than the British. They’ll likely be better equipped and supported as well. I doubt however that these advantages will make their mission more successful. I’ve said it before but it bears repeating: more troops equals more causalities in Afghanistan. That’s the tragic reality of entering a conflict on one side of a civil war.

I’m over-the-moon that British forces are withdrawing from Sangin and redeploying to an area more conducive to their current force strength. There is absolutely no shame in that. It’s a sensible move. Of course, it would be an even better move if British forces were withdrawn from Afghanistan all together.

Bob Shepherd is an ex-SAS soldier and bestselling author of The Circuit. His debut novel The Infidel will be published August 5th by Simon & Schuster UK. To read more posts by him, please visit www.bobshepherdauthor.com.