Afghanistan News and Discussions

[Patriot]

Petraeus tries to reassure US Congress on Afghan war

WASHINGTON: General David Petraeus, named as the new commander in Afghanistan, tried to reassure an anxious US Congress that NATO-led troops are making headway in the country, amid fraying public support for the war.

Petraeus, the United States' most revered military officer, told senators the coalition force "has achieved progress in several locations" this year but warned them to brace for a "tough fight" ahead against Taliban insurgents.

With lawmakers concerned over a rift between military and civilian leaders, Petraeus vowed to work closely with his civilian counterparts and also promised to review disputed rules restricting troops' use of firepower.

President Barack Obama nominated Petraeus to take the helm in Kabul after the dramatic sacking of General Stanley McChrystal as commander last week.

McChrystal was forced to step down over a bombshell magazine article that quoted him and his staff disparaging their civilian counterparts in the administration, including Obama himself, the US envoy to the region and the US ambassador.

Petraeus, speaking at a senate hearing on his nomination, said he would seek "to forge unity of effort" with diplomats and White House officials.

After the hearing, the Senate Armed Services Committee promptly approved Petraeus's nomination, clearing the way for a swift confirmation for a general who enjoys the backing of both parties.

Staffers said the Senate will vote at around noon Wednesday.

He recounted how during his time in Iraq, he worked "very closely" with the US ambassador in Baghdad and that he would do the same with the American ambassador in Kabul, Karl Eikenberry, as well as NATO and UN envoys.

McChrystal and Eikenberry had widely-publicized tense relations, sharply disagreeing last year over plans for a major troop "surge" inAfghanistan.

Despite troubling signs from Afghanistan and growing public doubts about the war, Petraeus insisted there had been "security gains" over the past year in Afghanistan, particularly in southern Helmand province.

But he warned that violence would likely rise as Islamist insurgents seek to test NATO's will, and that it would take "a number of years" before Afghan security forces would be ready to take over.

"My sense is that the tough fighting will continue; indeed, it may get more intense in the next few months," he said.

In written testimony to the panel, he described the security situation as "tenuous, with instability fueled by a resilient and still-confident insurgency."

With members of Congress worried about delays in a pivotal operation around Kandahar city, the Taliban's birthplace, Petraeus said political efforts were underway in the area to secure local support.

He said the military had launched "a high tempo of targeted special forces operations" around Kandahar in recent months, without offering details.

The four-star general, credited with turning around the war in Iraq, pledged to review how new rules for combat are being carried out, saying he was aware of complaints by troops who say their hands are sometimes tied.

"When our troopers and our Afghan partners are in a tough spot, it is a moral imperative that we use everything we have to make sure that they get out of it," thegeneral said.

But he said the rules of engagement -- designed to lower the risk of civilian casualties -- are "fundamentally sound" and that he agreed with the former commander that it was crucial to prevent civilian deaths.

The hearing reflected deep disagreement among lawmakers over war policy, with Republicans renewing their criticism of a July 2011 deadline set by Obama to start a gradual drawdown of US troops.

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham blasted the administration over the mid-2011 target date, saying it sent the wrong message to the enemy and that theWhite House needed to clarify "what the hell we're going to do" in Afghanistan.

Obama's fellow Democrats meanwhile are worried about an open-ended war and are pushing for a strict commitment to the 2011 deadline.





http://www.defencetalk.com/petraeus-tries-to-reassure-us-congress-on-afghan-war-27287/

 

[ajtr]

Afghan Unravelling?​

Jun 29th, 2010 -- Vikram Sood

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After nine years in Afghanistan — its longest war — the United States seems to be caught in a quagmire with the Taliban, backed by US ally Pakistan, on the ascendant. Thousands of Afghans have died along with nearly 2,000 ISAF troops, and $300 billion spent on a war that has chronically been under-resourced and self-delusionary. Today, the campaign looks increasingly an exclusive American enterprise, with Canada and the Netherlands deciding to walk out; the German President had to resign over differences and the French also reluctant to continue with this never-ending war. The US commander had to quit amid stories of dissonance among major US policymakers. The British envoy, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, is on long leave, and Britain's CDS is to demit office prematurely. The Canadians have just revealed they had unearthed a conspiracy to destroy the Canadian Parliament by a group of 18 home-grown Muslim terrorists angry with the country's Afghan war involvement.
Afghanistan remains lawless with several governments acting on their own, an ineffective police force and an inept national army that won't be ready to take on full functions for several years. Many of America's quixotic adventures were on the advice of Pakistan's rulers, who led them to believe they could capitalise on the differences between the "good" and "bad" Taliban. Attempts at regime change, by demonising President Hamid Karzai without taking the elementary precaution of identifying a successor, were an incredibly naïve pursuit that created irreconcilable differences between master and ally. Once intelligence chief Amrullah Saleh, who opposed negotiations with the insurgents, was eased out, Mr Karzai could buy local insurance and pursue the policy of chatting up Siraj Haqqani under close Pakistani supervision.
Late in the day, perhaps, US and other Western think tanks and media have begun to acknowledge the source and gravity of the problem. The latest and most comprehensive was the Rand Corporation paper by Christine Fair and Seth Jones, which highlights the terrorist threat not only to the region and the world but to Pakistan itself. While suggesting that Pakistan abandon its policy of using terror as a foreign policy weapon, the authors also asked the US to revisit its own policy of too many carrots and too few sticks. The LSE report authored by Matt Waldman on the Pakistan government's official policy of supporting, through the ISI, Afghan insurgents (Taliban and the Haqqani network) only embellishes what has been stated here in India for years, known in the West but rarely openly acknowledged. Further, the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba's growing profile in Afghanistan means Pakistan seeks to use this trusted jihadi organisation as insurance in case the Taliban turn rogue. It is an unfortunate measure of Pakistani leaders' all-consuming hostility towards India that they would rather cohabit with a retrograde organisation like the Taliban instead of seeking a compromise with India.
The sudden publication of what is really old news about the trillion-dollar mineral reserves in Afghanistan is a new factor. Will the global war on terror, once described as unwinnable by President Barack Obama, now become a winnable war for resources? These are all heavy-investment and long-gestation projects that only the rich and powerful can manage. But there is no magic wand for instant riches and stability for Afghanistan's poor. The fear is that Afghanistan, as the land bridge between Central Asia and the rest of Asia, will go further downhill amid increased violence among its various ethnic groups. A significant number of these forces would be provided by jihadi foot soldiers from Pakistan.
These reports, about the Pakistan Army's control over the Taliban, the presence of its surrogates in Afghanistan along with reports of exploitable vital minerals in that country and the slowing down of the Kandahar and North Waziristan operations, could suggest there is a deal on the anvil. The West withdraws its fighting forces substantially, outsources security of its projects to private military contractors while exploiting minerals. Pakistan will have attained strategic depth and security through the Taliban and Haqqani networks.
It is sometimes forgotten that in the ultimate analysis, the Taliban are Pashtun who live on both sides of the Durand Line, and there has been an upsurge in anti-Pashtun violence in Balochistan, Karachi and Fata. It might not be long before there is an upsurge of the demand for a Greater Pushtunistan once the foreigner (and common enemy) has departed, and Pashtuns internalise their problems swept under the carpet by successive regimes. Pashtun assertiveness will almost certainly lead to retaliation from Afghanistan's other ethnic groups. Religious obscurantism combined with ultra-nationalism can be a very explosive mix.
The future looks uncertain and violent unless there is an all-nations guarantee for Afghan neutrality and non-interference by other powers. It is a fair assumption that Mr Karzai's Afghanistan is unravelling fast and no one really has any idea how to prevent this. The Saudi-Wahhabi and the Pakistan-military nexus, the latter's nexus with Afghan drug lords, worth billions of dollars, appears to be picking up the pieces in a divided country.
The cure, if any, lies in Pakistan — where all Afghan-specific and India-specific insurgent/terrorist groups take shelter, receive support and now coalesce for Pakistan's foreign policy objectives. So far India been comfortable with its infrastructure assistance to Afghans, while others battled for bigger stakes. This situation will change, with Pakistan remaining hostile despite the recent veneer of bonhomie.
China, with ambitions to reach the Persian Gulf, is the rising power seeking space and resource bases for itself, with Pakistan as its staunch ally. India needs to strengthen its relations with Iran and Russia, who would be similarly affected by the rise of Taliban, for access to Central Asia and West Asia. Despite the odds against us, India's profile in Afghanistan must not be lowered. If Kashmir is an all-time issue for Pakistan, so should Gilgit and Baltistan — a geo-strategic jugular for both Pakistan and China — be for India. It would be sound policy to modernise our defence forces in all aspects, especially maritime. The region will eventually normalise only when the Pakistan Army, whose policies have hurt the Pakistani people immeasurably, normalises like other armies.
Vikram Sood is a former head of the Research and Analysis Wing, India's external intelligence agency

 

[ajtr]

An Afghan trade route: What could possibly go wrong with that?​

Posted By Steve LeVine Tuesday, June 29, 2010 - 12:40 PM Share

The U.S. military is studying a plan to solve Afghanistan's problems by turning it into a superhighway of roads, railroads, electricity lines and energy pipelines connected to the entire Eurasian landmass. According to a piece in the National Journal by Sydney Freedberg, the proposal has the ear of Gen. David Petraeus, whose confirmation hearings to be the new U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan start today in the Senate Armed Services Committee.

The plan is heavy on ringing optimism. I have my doubts. They are rooted in the last time this was tried, in the 1990s, when Unocal -- now part of Chevron -- sought to build an $8 billion oil-and-natural gas pipeline network from Turkmenistan to Pakistan via Afghanistan. The plan -- which Unocal saw as so potentially lucrative that it could catapult the company into the big leagues of the industry -- attracted much attention, hoopla and hopes for peace after years of war and chaos in the country.

Then it fell apart. There were just a few reasons:

1. The country was at war;

2. The Taliban were not the usual pipeline-negotiating types;

3. The Taliban kept beating Afghan women in the streets, which aggravated American human-rights advocates;

4. Osama bin Laden kept attacking U.S. targets like embassies, which aggravated the U.S. military.

So in 1998, three years after first launching the venture, Unocal withdrew. Taking stock of the affair a few years later, Unocal executive Marty Miller told me he felt like "a team sent on a suicide mission. If it worked out, we would be heroes. But there was a good chance we would be slaughtered." What he said at his Austin, TX., golf club reminded me of nighttime talks I had back in 1996 in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif with Charlie Santos, the on-the-ground pipeline representative for Unocal's partner in the deal, a Saudi company called Delta. Santos was a bit secretive, but he'd talk to you if you asked, and were patient. Much maligned by his colleagues, Santos saw what they didn't. "There isn't going to be any pipeline deal with the Taliban, no freaking way," Santos would repeat. It wasn't that the pipeline idea wasn't technically great -- it was. What Santos meant was that the tribal reality wouldn't allow for such an infrastructure to be built. There was also the matter of funding sources: They weren't going to pony up billions of dollars for an energy network with a 30-year life if it was built across a war zone.

The authors of the new report -- S. Frederick Starr over at Johns Hopkins, and Andrew Kuchins at the Center for Strategic and International Studies -- do not suggest that the problems presented by the Taliban in the 1990s are over. Instead, they argue that those focused on security are using "flawed" analysis. David Ignatius wrote about it over at The Washington Post.

They call their much-expanded version of the Unocal line the "Modern Silk Road Strategy." You know you are in trouble when someone trots out the Silk Road and the late 19th-early 20th Century English geographer Sir Halford Mackinder in the middle of a war strategy. The Great Game is not far behind (in fact two sentences after Mackinder's stage entrance), and with it much romance.

Starr has been advocating variations of this plan for at least four years. The idea is "a major effort to link India's booming economy through Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia to Caspian, European, Russian and Chinese markets," according to a 48-page booklet describing the idea.

The plan provides no details on the extent of the construction envisioned, nor the price. But Afghanistan, which currently contains a whopping 15 miles of railroad track, would have a full-blown rail network following most of the country's perimeter before trailing off to Pakistan's port of Gwadar on the Arabian Sea, and connecting to existing railroads in Pakistan, in Iran and north into the former Soviet Union. Afghanistan's road network would be completed and built up to modern standards. Electric lines would be extended throughout the country.

As for energy pipelines, the new plan calls for the construction of the 1,000-mile-long Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline, known as TAPI, which the Asian Development Bank is studying. It and the Unocal proposal are generally identical routes through the Taliban heartland in western and southern Afghanistan.

The authors say those concerned about security for the tens of billions of dollars in modern construction described here aren't focusing on the main issue. As evidence, they point to an Asian Development Bank survey of almost 1,000 truck drivers whose job it was to haul goods across Eurasia including through Afghanistan; 90% of the respondents cited bureaucracy at borders (delays for customs and so forth), rather than security, as the chief impediment to their work.

Corruption on the borders across the region is rife, and the military's one stab at the type of network that Starr and Kuchins are proposing -- the so-called Northern Distribution Network -- has not gotten off to a stunning beginning, according to a piece by Dierdre Tynan at Eurasianet.org. In addition to border difficulties, the infrastructure across the former Soviet Union simply isn't very good. So in order to achieve what the Starr-Kuchins report envisions, we are talking reconstruction all the way from Afghanistan to the Baltics.

I tried to find this ADB report. While I did not succeed -- the study is not footnoted; Starr is in Kazakhstan and said he would locate it on his return -- I did find a previous citation for it in 2006 (also in a document produced by Starr). Meaning that the survey was conducted before much of the Taliban's revival into a highly problematic force.

The question isn't whether it is a great idea for Afghanistan to be tied in with the rest of the world with a modern infrastructure. It is whether this is the stuff of dreamers.

For an agnostic expert view, I contacted a longtime friend - an expert on Afghanistan - who is currently serving in the country. He emailed me back, but asked that he not be identified. Here is his response.

First, it's going to be a long, long time before the infrastructure is in place in Afghanistan for it to be competitive with the far more developed infrastructure in Iran. Secondly, the security problems and unhealthy climate in Afghanistan for either business, regulation, or any form of legitimate activity isn't something that's going to go away soon. We continue to see Afghans playing the same games that they have for decades: they hold up shipments for bribes, they loot shipments and they trump up reasons to impede transportation in order to control and compete unfairly because it's far more lucrative than legitimate commerce.

Moreover, the massively attractive destination for everything isn't Pakistan, it's India. And India has profound concerns that any transportation or resource routes that transit Pakistan are unreliable

and put them at the mercy of the shabby, inept, unstable government and politics of Pakistan.

In addition, the Pakistani infrastructure is generally in bad shape, except for the expanding highway system. The Pakistani rail system is in terrible shape and it's built on a British gauge. It has suffered from lack of investment and modernization. Gwadar port has potential but it's in the middle of nowhere with no modern connections to the rest of Pakistan. And there's the simmering insurgency in Baluchistan which illustrates the inability of Pakistan throughout its history to deal fairly with the minority provinces. Why should we expect the shabby infrastructure and the instability in Baluchistan to disappear when all of the trend in Pakistan point to a continuation of the type of conditions that have characterized the place since its founding?

The rail system in the Stans is built to Soviet standards. There's a modern rail system in Iran which may be a different gauge, but it's been built up and extends throughout the country. Already there is some interconnectedness between the Stans and the Iranian rail system. Moreover there's Charbahar port which the Indians built in Iran.

One of the few positive developments that I've noted recently was that the field survey of Turkmenistan gas fields suggest that there is a significant amount of gas there. But will Gazprom allow Turkmenistan to develop another market, or will it try to control the gas in order to send it to markets in Europe? Whatever the case, I'd not want to build a pipeline across Afghanistan in such an insecure environment. Even with superb engineering, it will be susceptible to interference and sabotage.

As with the stories a few weeks ago about Afghanistan have abundant mineral wealth, it seems at this time there's an interest in building up the case for why we're in Afghanistan. Everything that can suggest benefits will accrue from this adventure is being presented. I suspect that this is one reason that Starr's proposal is receiving more widespread attention than it has earlier.

I also emailed John Imle, who was president of Unocal and oversaw the company's 1990s pipeline plans. He personally thinks that if the plan involves Afghan President Hamid Karzai "brokering discussions of business with all of the then political factions on Afghanistan, ... I think he's on the right track." Imle said, "I feel I've awakened after a long sleep to another Groundhog Day! I hope someone gets it right this time!"

 

[ajtr]

The Haqqanis and al-Qaeda​

BY ANAND GOPAL, MANSUR KHAN MAHSUD, AND BRIAN FISHMAN, JUNE 30, 2010 Wednesday, June 30, 2010 - 10:17 AM Share

The LA Times reported this morning that Pakistan has been "trying to seed a rapprochement" between Afghan President Hamid Karzai and the Haqqani insurgent network -- obstructed by the Haqqanis' ties to al-Qaeda. Anand Gopal, Mansur Khan Mahsud, and Brian Fishman describe what connections, both historical and current, the Haqqani network has with Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.

Jalaluddin Haqqani, the founder of the Haqqani group, established contact with Arab fighters very early in the anti-Soviet war. In 1981, American journalist Jere Van Dyk traveled with Haqqani in Afghanistan and was confronted by a fundamentalist Egyptian named Rashid Rochman. Although Rochman was generally disliked by Jalaluddin's men, who were turned off by his extremism, the mujahideen leader favored the man. Rochman gleefully questioned Van Dyk about the recent assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, an attack that landed future al-Qaeda second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri in an Egyptian prison. It seems likely that Jalaluddin understood that relationships with Arabs such as Rochman could be a fundraising boon for his movement. Jalaluddin still maintains ties through marriage to the Persian Gulf, and much of the Haqqani Network's funding comes through such relationships.[ii] In addition, the movement maintains ties to al-Qaeda and the Uzbek Islamic Jihad Union, and has used its leverage with other militants to protect foreign fighters.[iii]

Osama bin Laden built a relationship with the Haqqanis in the mid-1980s when he spent months along the front lines with Jalaluddin.[iv] The relationship has paid dividends for both parties. In the 1980s, bin Laden's wealthy family and royal connections in Saudi Arabia would have been indispensable for a mujahideen leader like Jalaluddin, and the elder Haqqani's military success offered bin Laden the opportunity to exaggerate his own role in those operations. Indeed, bin Laden's ties to Haqqani were much deeper than those he had with Mullah Omar's Taliban government, which ultimately operated from Kandahar and Kabul. Jalaluddin and bin Laden had much more in common than bin Laden and the illiterate leader of the Taliban. They had shared history from the anti-Soviet jihad. Jalaluddin spoke Arabic and had an Arab wife. Bin Laden may even emulate some of Jalaluddin's leadership affectations. The Afghan commander toted a relatively rare AK-74 assault rifle in the early 1980s as a symbol of his leadership; bin Laden was given the same model by a top lieutenant, Abu Ubaidah al-Banshiri, after the Lion's Den battle in 1987 and subsequently carried it everywhere, including in Sudan.[v]

Al-Qaeda and aligned groups have two main roles in the Haqqani Network: facilitating attacks and providing suicide bombers. Attack facilitation includes providing training, weapons expertise, and arms and funding procurement. Haqqani compounds in and around Miram Shah have housed a number of al-Qaeda weapons stashes.[vi]

In recent years, however, as the Haqqani Network has developed and al-Qaeda's operational reach has declined, this facilitation role has diminished.[vii] Al-Qaeda, the Islamic Jihad Union, and other groups still provide suicide attackers, however. A number of high-profile assaults in Kabul have used al-Qaeda-trained attackers for commando-style suicide missions. For instance, the attack on the U.N. guesthouse in October 2009 used a number of non-Afghans thought to have been trained by al-Qaeda.[viii]

The Haqqani leadership's direct contact with al-Qaeda figures is minimal today, however, partly because drone attacks make communications difficult and risky.[ix] Moreover, the relationship is reportedly strained because of the Haqqanis' ties to the Pakistani state -- an enemy of al-Qaeda. Pakistani authorities have conducted a number of raids on Haqqani compounds that house al-Qaeda men and supplies, but Haqqani fighters are often left untouched. This prompted al-Qaeda to grow gradually closer to militants in South Waziristan, such as those led by Baitullah and later Hakimullah Mehsud, who are also at war with the Pakistani government.[x]

It is hard to determine exactly how the Haqqani Network fits ideologically with the al-Qaeda organization. Former and current Haqqani Network commanders say that their movement is closer to the Quetta Shura's nationalist rhetoric than al-Qaeda's vision of global jihad, but some members of the group espouse al-Qaeda-like language. The Haqqanis have avoided the anti-Pakistan rhetoric common to al-Qaeda and the TTP. In June 2006, Jalaluddin Haqqani's office released a letter arguing that attacking Pakistan "is not our policy. Those who agree with us are our friends and those who do not agree and [continue to wage] an undeclared war against Pakistan are neither our friends nor shall we allow them in our ranks."[xi] Sirajuddin Haqqani has gone further, explaining in an interview that he opposed "any attempt by Muslims to launch attacks in non-Muslim countries."[xii] In May 2009, he argued to two French journalists: "It is a mistake to think that al-Qaeda and the Taliban are pursuing the same aim. Al-Qaeda is trying to spread its influence throughout the world. This does not interest us. The Taliban's aim is to liberate Afghanistan from foreign troops."[xiii]

However, former Haqqani Network commanders say the movement is unlikely to break ties with al-Qaeda unless it is forced to do so by military or diplomatic pressure.[xiv] It is unclear whether all Haqqani Network commanders agree with Sirajuddin's efforts to separate the group from al-Qaeda. Mullah Sangin, an important field commander, said in an interview with as-Sahab, al-Qaeda's media arm: "We do not see any difference between Taliban and al-Qaeda, for we all belong to the religion of Islam. Sheikh Usama has pledged allegiance to Amir Al-Mumineen [Mullah Muhammad Omar] and has reassured his leadership again and again. There is no difference between us."[xv] New York Times journalist David Rohde, who was kidnapped by Haqqani supporters and held captive in North Waziristan for seven months before his escape, argued that he

did not fully understand how extreme many of the Taliban had become. Before the kidnapping, I viewed the organization as a form of "al-Qaeda lite," a religiously motivated movement primarily focused on controlling Afghanistan.

Living side by side with the Haqqanis' followers, I learned that the goal of the hard-line Taliban was far more ambitious. Contact with foreign militants in the tribal areas appeared to have deeply affected many young Taliban fighters. They wanted to create a fundamentalist Islamic emirate with al-Qaeda that spanned the Muslim world.[xvi]

Anand Gopal is a Kabul-based journalist who has reported for the Wall Street Journal, the Christian Science Monitor, and other outlets on Afghanistan and the insurgency. He is writing a history of Afghanistan after September 11, 2001 (Henry Holt). Mansur Khan Mahsud is the research coordinator for the FATA Research Center, an Islamabad-based think tank. He is from the Mahsud tribe of South Waziristan and has worked with several NGOs and news outlets as a researcher. He holds a masters degree in Pakistan studies from the University of Peshawar. Brian Fishman is a counterterrorism research fellow at the New America Foundation. This is excerpted from a longer Counterterrorism Strategy Initiative research paper on militancy in North Waziristan, part of the New America Foundation's "Battle for Pakistan" series.

 

[ajtr]

Taliban threaten to attack NGOs​

Thursday, July 01, 2010
By Mazhar Tufail

ISLAMABAD: Ruling out possibility of talks with the Karzai regime or the occupation forces, the Taliban movement of Afghanistan has said that it would now also target the NGOs and other organisations that are spreading alien culture in the war-ravaged country and advancing their hidden agenda under the garb of development work.

"The operation commanders of the Islamic Emirate (as Taliban movement calls itself) are going to meet shortly to finalise a new war strategy under which the foreigners working on their national agendas, particularly Indians, will be targeted," said Qari Ziaur Rehman, a Taliban commander, while talking to The News via telephone from an undisclosed location in Afghanistan.

The Taliban commander said another meeting of the operation commanders would be convened before the holy month of Ramazan to devise a new strategy. He said that they would never hold talks with any representative of the puppet Karzai regime or any Nato commander come what may "because we have already won the war".

"All the non-Muslims busy in promoting alien culture and agendas of their respective countries and trying to alienate Afghan people from the Islamic Emirate will be driven out from the country," Qari Zia said."Indians are on top among the foreigners who are working on hidden agenda on the pretext of carrying out development activities," he added.

The Taliban commander said when the erstwhile Soviet Union, which too claimed to be a superpower of its time, even vanished from the map of the world after invading Afghanistan despite sharing border with the country, how could the Americans and their allies return from Afghanistan as victors? He said that neither any new strategy nor new commander of the occupation forces succeed in Afghanistan. He said the only option left with the US and Nato is that they quit Afghanistan.

"Until now, the Taliban groups have been devising their own strategy in different areas of the country but now onwards a joint war strategy will be adopted across the country," Qari Zia said.

 

[ajtr]

Taliban rule out negotiations with Nato​

The Taliban in Afghanistan have told the BBC that there is no question of their entering into any kind of negotiations with Nato forces.

It comes after US commanders and the British army chief of staff, Gen David Richards, suggested that it might be useful to talk to the Taliban.

The Taliban statement is uncompromising, almost contemptuous.

They believe they are winning the war, and cannot see why they should help Nato by talking to them.

They assume, perhaps wrongly, that the Americans are in disarray after the sacking of the Nato commander Gen Stanley McChrystal last week, and regard any suggestion that they should enter negotiations with them as a sign of Nato's own weakness.

June, they point out, has seen the highest number of Nato deaths in Afghanistan: 102, an average of more than three a day.

'Differences'
Nowadays it is extremely hard for Westerners to meet Taliban leaders face to face, either in Afghanistan or in Pakistan.But a trusted intermediary conveyed a series of questions to Zabiullah Mujahedd, the acknowledged spokesman for the Afghan Taliban leadership, and gave us his answers.

The text runs as follows:

"We do not want to talk to anyone - not to [President Hamid] Karzai, nor to any foreigners - till the foreign forces withdraw from Afghanistan.

"We are certain that we are winning. Why should we talk if we have the upper hand, and the foreign troops are considering withdrawal, and there are differences in the ranks of our enemies?"

This is propaganda, of course - yet many Afghans, even those who hate and fear the Taliban, are coming round to exactly the same view.

The Taliban are still deeply unpopular in many parts of the country.

Memories are still vivid of the brutal and extreme way they governed from 1996 to 2001.

They, together with their supporters, certainly do not represent anything near a majority of the Afghan people.

'Instinctive dislike'
They are still predominantly a Pashtun faction, and when they were in power they caused much anger by imposing Pashtun cultural norms on the complex and varied peoples of Afghanistan.

Nevertheless, there is an instinctive and widespread dislike of having foreign troops, and especially non-Muslim ones, based in Afghanistan.People who do not support the Taliban know that the Nato-led force is preventing the Taliban from returning to power.

But the dislike of occupying forces goes very deep.

The key to the Taliban's remarkable success in capturing Kabul from the more moderate mujahideen leadership in 1996 was their ability to convince dozens of uncommitted warlords that they were bound to win.

Many of these warlords were not themselves Pashtun, and often were not extreme Muslims.

They joined the Taliban simply to be on the winning side.

The Taliban have not forgotten this. If they can convince people that they are beating the British and Americans, more and more local warlords will join their cause.

Petraeus' challenge
The difficult job facing Gen Petraeus, who takes over control of the Nato forces in Afghanistan, will be to change this perception.

When he was in charge of coalition forces in Iraq he managed to change the widespread perception that the war there was unwinnable.

He presented the draw-down of US forces as a victory: they had, he said, done the job they had come to do, and succeeded. Therefore they could leave Iraq as victors.Cynics may point out that the number of deaths from terrorism in Iraq is still appallingly high, and that the fragile Iraqi government is struggling to do anything about it.

But since most American news organisations have pulled out of Baghdad, little news of what is happening in Iraq seeps through to the United States.

Gen Petraeus will no doubt try to replicate his remarkable Iraqi success in Afghanistan.

Yet it will be harder, and doubts about the value of the operation are already growing in every Nato country.

His main aim will be to reverse the growing belief in Afghanistan that the Americans, the British and the others will pull out soon, and leave the country to fight out its own war - with the Taliban the likely winners.

It is likely to be the hardest fight of his career.

 

[ajtr]

US to cut $4bn in Afghan aid over corruption fears​

US lawmakers have voted to cut almost $4bn (£2.7bn) in aid to the government of Afghanistan, after allegations of corruption.

It comes after the Wall Street Journal reported that huge sums of cash had allegedly been flown out of Kabul international airport in recent years.

Military operations and humanitarian aid will not be affected by the cuts.

But critics fear the move could threaten crucial infrastructure projects in Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, Gen David Petraeus, who has replaced Gen Stanley McChrystal as the commander of US forces in Afghanistan, is on his way to brief US allies at Nato headquarters in Brussels.

He will then travel to Afghanistan to take up his new post, after he was confirmed by the US Senate on Wednesday.US Congresswoman Nita Lowey, chair of the subcommittee responsible for aid appropriations, has demanded that an audit is carried out of billions of dollars of past funds.

She said that alleged corruption in the Afghan government made taxpayer money hard to justify.

"I do not intend to appropriate one more dime for assistance to Afghanistan until I have confidence that US taxpayer money is not being abused to line the pockets of corrupt Afghan government officials, drug lords and terrorists," Ms Lowey said.

The money could be reinstated in a few months after a review of Kabul's efforts to tackle the issue.

Republican lawmaker Mark Kirk, however, expressed concern that the slashing of funds could put important projects at risk and would not help the war effort.

He cited the example of Kandahar's electrical system, which he said was an important step to winning over the residents of the area to the US mission.

President Hamid Karzai has denied allegations of corruption by government officials, and has pledged to take a firm stance on the issue.

On Monday, the Wall Street Journal claimed that US investigators believed that "Afghan officials and their associates were sending billions of diverted US aid and logistics dollars and drug money to financial safe havens abroad".

The BBC's Jane O'Brien in Washington says that the aid cuts will send a very strong message to the Karzai government that they need to do more about corruption.

Our correspondent says that the issue is yet another blow to diplomatic relations.

Kabul has meanwhile said that international partners should shoulder some of the blame for failing to provide oversight for contracts, our correspondent adds.

The subcommittee has not cut military funds, which are to be debated in a separate bill.

Lawmakers are due to vote as early as Thursday on President Barack Obama's request for $33bn in military aid to support a surge of 30,000 troops.

Are you an aid worker affected by this decision? Are you in Afghanistan, what impact will the suspension of aid have? Send us your comments using the form below.

 

[Neil]

US chief Petraeus vows to protect Afghan civilians

Petraeus: "You must do everything possible to protect the population"

he new chief of US and Nato forces in Afghanistan has vowed to protect Afghan civilians when he takes up his post.

Gen David Petraeus has been briefing allies and partners at Nato HQ in Brussels before heading to Kabul.

The general said he had no plans to change current rules of engagement, which limit some uses of force to prevent civilian casualties.

However, he said he would look into the application of the rules, which critics say put US troops in danger
Gen Petraeus said there there were concerns among commanders on the ground that some of the processes were "too bureaucratic".

The general was unanimously confirmed in the post by the US Senate on Wednesday.

He replaces Gen Stanley McChrystal, who was removed after he and his aides mocked and criticised senior US officials in a magazine article.

Gen Petraeus paid tribute to his predecessor after the briefing, saying Gen McChrystal had made an "enormous contribution".
Allies 'not consulted'

Gen Petraeus met Nato's Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen and addressed the alliance's top decision-making body, the North Atlantic Council.

Mr Rasmussen said the general, the mission and the current strategy had Nato's "full support".

He said plan remained the same - to take the fight to the Taliban, and allow the Afghan security forces to take responsibility in their own country.

Gen Petraeus addressed the key question of rules of engagement. He had said at his Senate hearings that he would reassess them.

Some US troops believe the rules, aimed at cutting civilian casualties, put them at too great a risk.

But Gen Petraeus insisted the rules would not be changed, only that he would look at their application because he had "a moral imperative to bring all force to bear when our troops are in a tough position".

Civilian deaths have been one of the major difficulties in the relationship between Nato forces and the Afghan government.

At the briefing, Gen Petraeus also called for Nato unity - "linking arms and making our way together", as he put it.

He said he was a "Nato guy through and through".
Taliban claim upper hand

Shortly before the briefing, Gen Petraeus's new challenge was brought into focus when a key spokesman for the Afghan Taliban leadership said there was no question of entering into any kind of negotiations with Nato forces.

"We are certain that we are winning," Zabiullah Mujahedd said in a statement to the BBC's John Simpson through an intermediary.

"Why should we talk if we have the upper hand, and the foreign troops are considering withdrawal, and there are differences in the ranks of our enemies?"

BBC defence correspondent Nick Childs says the allies have largely been spectators in the drama of Gen McChrystal's sudden departure and his replacement by Gen Petraeus.

Some alliance diplomats have said their nations were not consulted over the change and Gen Petraeus needed to address strains with some allies who were questioning their deployment of troops.

The Dutch will withdraw troops from August and Canada's force is set to return home next year.

Speaking on Thursday, UK Foreign Secretary William Hague said he would be "very surprised" if Afghan forces had not taken control of their own security from international forces by 2014.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/10472555.stm

 

[ajtr]

US chief Petraeus vows to protect Afghan civilians


http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/10472555.stm

Petraeus must protect his troops first.June was the bloodiest month for the occupying coalition forces.

 

[ajtr]

The 30-Year War in Afghanistan​

By George Friedman

The Afghan War is the longest war in U.S. history. It began in 1980 and continues to rage. It began under Democrats but has been fought under both Republican and Democratic administrations, making it truly a bipartisan war. The conflict is an odd obsession of U.S. foreign policy, one that never goes away and never seems to end. As the resignation of Gen. Stanley McChrystal reminds us, the Afghan War is now in its fourth phase.

The Afghan War's First Three Phases

The first phase of the Afghan War began with the Soviet invasion in December 1979, when the United States, along with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, organized and sustained Afghan resistance to the Soviets. This resistance was built around mujahideen, fighters motivated by Islam. Washington's purpose had little to do with Afghanistan and everything to do with U.S.-Soviet competition. The United States wanted to block the Soviets from using Afghanistan as a base for further expansion and wanted to bog the Soviets down in a debilitating guerrilla war. The United States did not so much fight the war as facilitate it. The strategy worked. The Soviets were blocked and bogged down. This phase lasted until 1989, when Soviet troops were withdrawn.

The second phase lasted from 1989 until 2001. The forces the United States and its allies had trained and armed now fought each other in complex coalitions for control of Afghanistan. Though the United States did not take part in this war directly, it did not lose all interest in Afghanistan. Rather, it was prepared to exert its influence through allies, particularly Pakistan. Most important, it was prepared to accept that the Islamic fighters it had organized against the Soviets would govern Afghanistan. There were many factions, but with Pakistani support, a coalition called the Taliban took power in 1996. The Taliban in turn provided sanctuary for a group of international jihadists called al Qaeda, and this led to increased tensions with the Taliban following jihadist attacks on U.S. facilities abroad by al Qaeda.

The third phase began on Sept. 11, 2001, when al Qaeda launched attacks on the mainland United States. Given al Qaeda's presence in Afghanistan, the United States launched operations designed to destroy or disrupt al Qaeda and dislodge the Taliban. The United States commenced operations barely 30 days after Sept. 11, which was not enough time to mount an invasion using U.S. troops as the primary instrument. Rather, the United States made arrangements with factions that were opposed to the Taliban (and defeated in the Afghan civil war). This included organizations such as the Northern Alliance, which had remained close to the Russians; Shiite groups in the west that were close to the Iranians and India; and other groups or subgroups in other regions. These groups supported the United States out of hostility to the Taliban and/or due to substantial bribes paid by the United States.

The overwhelming majority of ground forces opposing the Taliban in 2001 were Afghan. The United States did, however, insert special operations forces teams to work with these groups and to identify targets for U.S. airpower, the primary American contribution to the war. The use of U.S. B-52s against Taliban forces massed around cities in the north caused the Taliban to abandon any thought of resisting the Northern Alliance and others, even though the Taliban had defeated them in the civil war.

Unable to hold fixed positions against airstrikes, the Taliban withdrew from the cities and dispersed. The Taliban were not defeated, however; they merely declined to fight on U.S. terms. Instead, they redefined the war, preserving their forces and regrouping. The Taliban understood that the cities were not the key to Afghanistan. Instead, the countryside would ultimately provide control of the cities. From the Taliban point of view, the battle would be waged in the countryside, while the cities increasingly would be isolated.

The United States simply did not have sufficient force to identify, engage and destroy the Taliban as a whole. The United States did succeed in damaging and dislodging al Qaeda, with the jihadist group's command cell becoming isolated in northwestern Pakistan. But as with the Taliban, the United States did not defeat al Qaeda because the United States lacked significant forces on the ground. Even so, al Qaeda prime, the original command cell, was no longer in a position to mount 9/11-style attacks.

During the Bush administration, U.S. goals for Afghanistan were modest. First, the Americans intended to keep al Qaeda bottled up and to impose as much damage as possible on the group. Second, they intended to establish an Afghan government, regardless of how ineffective it might be, to serve as a symbolic core. Third, they planned very limited operations against the Taliban, which had regrouped and increasingly controlled the countryside. The Bush administration was basically in a holding operation in Afghanistan. It accepted that U.S. forces were neither going to be able to impose a political solution on Afghanistan nor create a coalition large enough control the country. U.S. strategy was extremely modest under Bush: to harass al Qaeda from bases in Afghanistan, maintain control of cities and logistics routes, and accept the limits of U.S. interests and power.

The three phases of American involvement in Afghanistan had a common point: All three were heavily dependent on non-U.S. forces to do the heavy lifting. In the first phase, the mujahideen performed this task. In the second phase, the United States relied on Pakistan to manage Afghanistan's civil war. In the third phase, especially in the beginning, the United States depended on Afghan forces to fight the Taliban. Later, when greater numbers of American and allied forces arrived, the United States had limited objectives beyond preserving the Afghan government and engaging al Qaeda wherever it might be found (and in any event, by 2003, Iraq had taken priority over Afghanistan). In no case did the Americans use their main force to achieve their goals.

The Fourth Phase of the Afghan War

The fourth phase of the war began in 2009, when U.S. President Barack Obama decided to pursue a more aggressive strategy in Afghanistan. Though the Bush administration had toyed with this idea, it was Obama who implemented it fully. During the 2008 election campaign, Obama asserted that he would pay greater attention to Afghanistan. The Obama administration began with the premise that while the Iraq War was a mistake, the Afghan War had to be prosecuted. It reasoned that unlike Iraq, which had a tenuous connection to al Qaeda at best, Afghanistan was the group's original base. He argued that Afghanistan therefore should be the focus of U.S. military operations. In doing so, he shifted a strategy that had been in place for 30 years by making U.S. forces the main combatants in the war.

Though Obama's goals were not altogether clear, they might be stated as follows:

Deny al Qaeda a base in Afghanistan.
Create an exit strategy from Afghanistan similar to the one in Iraq by creating the conditions for negotiating with the Taliban; make denying al Qaeda a base a condition for the resulting ruling coalition.
Begin withdrawal by 2011.
To do this, there would be three steps:

Increase the number and aggressiveness of U.S. forces in Afghanistan.
Create Afghan security forces under the current government to take over from the Americans.
Increase pressure on the Taliban by driving a wedge between them and the population and creating intra-insurgent rifts via effective counterinsurgency tactics.
In analyzing this strategy, there is an obvious issue: While al Qaeda was based in Afghanistan in 2001, Afghanistan is no longer its primary base of operations. The group has shifted to Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and other countries. As al Qaeda is thus not dependent on any one country for its operational base, denying it bases in Afghanistan does not address the reality of its dispersion. Securing Afghanistan, in other words, is no longer the solution to al Qaeda.

Obviously, Obama's planners fully understood this. Therefore, sanctuary denial for al Qaeda had to be, at best, a secondary strategic goal. The primary strategic goal was to create an exit strategy for the United States based on a negotiated settlement with the Taliban and a resulting coalition government. The al Qaeda issue depended on this settlement, but could never be guaranteed. In fact, neither the long-term survival of a coalition government nor the Taliban policing al Qaeda could be guaranteed.

The exit of U.S. forces represents a bid to reinstate the American strategy of the past 30 years, namely, having Afghan forces reassume the primary burden of fighting. The creation of an Afghan military is not the key to this strategy. Afghans fight for their clans and ethnic groups. The United States is trying to invent a national army where no nation exists, a task that assumes the primary loyalty of Afghans will shift from their clans to a national government, an unlikely proposition.

The Real U.S. Strategy

Rather than trying to strengthen the Karzai government, the real strategy is to return to the historical principles of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan: alliance with indigenous forces. These indigenous forces would pursue strategies in the American interest for their own reasons, or because they are paid, and would be strong enough to stand up to the Taliban in a coalition. As CIA Director Leon Panetta put it this weekend, however, this is proving harder to do than expected.

The American strategy is, therefore, to maintain a sufficient force to shape the political evolution on the ground, and to use that force to motivate and intimidate while also using economic incentives to draw together a coalition in the countryside. Operations like those in Helmand province — where even Washington acknowledges that progress has been elusive and slower than anticipated — clearly are designed to try to draw regional forces into regional coalitions that eventually can enter a coalition with the Taliban without immediately being overwhelmed. If this strategy proceeds, the Taliban in theory will be spurred to negotiate out of concern that this process eventually could leave it marginalized.

There is an anomaly in this strategy, however. Where the United States previously had devolved operational responsibility to allied groups, or simply hunkered down, this strategy tries to return to devolved responsibilities by first surging U.S. operations. The fourth phase actually increases U.S. operational responsibility in order to reduce it.

From the grand strategic point of view, the United States needs to withdraw from Afghanistan, a landlocked country where U.S. forces are dependent on tortuous supply lines. Whatever Afghanistan's vast mineral riches, mining them in the midst of war is not going to happen. More important, the United States is overcommitted in the region and lacks a strategic reserve of ground forces. Afghanistan ultimately is not strategically essential, and this is why the United States has not historically used its own forces there.

Obama's attempt to return to that track after first increasing U.S. forces to set the stage for the political settlement that will allow a U.S. withdrawal is hampered by the need to begin terminating the operation by 2011 (although there is no fixed termination date). It will be difficult to draw coalition partners into local structures when the foundation — U.S. protection — is withdrawing. Strengthening local forces by 2011 will be difficult. Moreover, the Taliban's motivation to enter into talks is limited by the early withdrawal. At the same time, with no ground combat strategic reserve, the United States is vulnerable elsewhere in the world, and the longer the Afghan drawdown takes, the more vulnerable it becomes (hence the 2011 deadline in Obama's war plan).

In sum, this is the quandary inherent in the strategy: It is necessary to withdraw as early as possible, but early withdrawal undermines both coalition building and negotiations. The recruitment and use of indigenous Afghan forces must move extremely rapidly to hit the deadline (though officially on track quantitatively, there are serious questions about qualitative measures) — hence, the aggressive operations that have been mounted over recent months. But the correlation of forces is such that the United States probably will not be able to impose an acceptable political reality in the time frame available. Thus, Afghan President Hamid Karzai is said to be opening channels directly to the Taliban, while the Pakistanis are increasing their presence. Where a vacuum is created, regardless of how much activity there is, someone will fill it.

Therefore, the problem is to define how important Afghanistan is to American global strategy, bearing in mind that the forces absorbed in Iraq and Afghanistan have left the United States vulnerable elsewhere in the world. The current strategy defines the Islamic world as the focus of all U.S. military attention. But the world has rarely been so considerate as to wait until the United States is finished with one war before starting another. Though unknowns remain unknowable, a principle of warfare is to never commit all of your reserves in a battle — one should always maintain a reserve for the unexpected. Strategically, it is imperative that the United States begin to free up forces and re-establish its ground reserves.

Given the time frame the Obama administration's grand strategy imposes, and given the capabilities of the Taliban, it is difficult to see how it will all work out. But the ultimate question is about the American obsession with Afghanistan. For 30 years, the United States has been involved in a country that is virtually inaccessible for the United States. Washington has allied itself with radical Islamists, fought against radical Islamists or tried to negotiate with radical Islamists. What the United States has never tried to do is impose a political solution through the direct application of American force. This is a new and radically different phase of America's Afghan obsession. The questions are whether it will work and whether it is even worth it.

 

[ajtr]

Afghan Hindus And Sikhs Grapple With Uncertain Future​

KABUL (Reuters) - They thrived long before the arrival of Islam in the seventh century and for a long time dominated the country's economy, but Sikh and Hindu Afghans now find themselves struggling for survival.

"We have no shelter, no land and no authority," says Awtar Singh, a senator and the only non-Muslim voice in Afghanistan's parliament.

"No one in the government listens to us, but we have to be patient, because we have no other options," says Singh, 47.

In a brief idyll in 1992, after the fall of the Moscow backed-government but before civil war erupted, there were around 200,000 Hindus and Sikhs in Afghanistan compared with around just a few thousand today.

When warring factions fought over Kabul, razing entire neighbourhoods in deadly rocket barrages, the two communities became targets partly because of their religion, but also because they didn't have a militia of their own for protection.

Armed men stormed a temple in Kabul and tore a religious book to avenge the destruction of a mosque by fanatic Hindus in India. After complaining of extortion, intimidation, kidnappings, theft and even rape, those with the means fled to India where they live as aliens and require visas, like other foreigners.

Ironically the rise to power of the hard-line Islamist Taliban marked an improvement in the lives of those who remained -- and some emigres even started to return.

"The Taliban did not suppress us -- they respected our religion and if we had any problem they would resolve it immediately, let alone delay it until the next day," says Singh.

Some Afghan Hindus were baffled by Western outrage at one Taliban decree -- ordering them to wear a yellow tag to identify their religion -- saying in practical terms it spared their clean-shaven faces from the wrath of the Taliban religious police, who insisted Muslim Afghan men must grow beards.

The Sikhs escaped scrutiny because they also grow their beards long.

Since the Taliban's fall, Afghanistan's new constitution promises religious minorities greater freedoms than before, but it is harder to ensure in practical terms.

Hindus and Sikhs had scores of properties stolen during the civil war and its aftermath and thousands of claims lie gathering dust in the arcane bureaucracy that makes up the government.

"I have my family still in India because I have lost my house and other properties," says Awtam Singh, who was an important trader in the old days but is now reduced to selling herbal medicines in a tiny Kabul shop.

"We feel ignored by this government," he laments.

While tens of thousands of Muslim Afghans have the same problems, they at least have politicians or leaders fighting their corner.

Some of the returning Hindus and Sikhs have brought their families and live mostly in secure areas such as Kabul and eastern city of Jalalabad, where they have temples and segregated schools.

Even after death, problems continue. Part of the land that Sikhs and Hindus use for the funeral pyres for their dead has been taken over by urban sprawl in Kabul.

"I can not see things getting better for us," said Awtam.

"The Indians say you belong to Afghanistan, and here we are seen as Indians. No government cares for us, he said.

 

[ajtr]

War by other means, part 3: guardians of Wardak​

Special report: By paying local police, the US may be funding the Taliban by another name.

MAIDAN SHAHR, Afghanistan — With his grey silk turban and bushy black beard, Ghulam Mohammad looks just like the Taliban commander that he was for many years.

To many critics what is less convincing is his current title: head of the Afghan Public Protection Program, known as "AP3," a joint Afghan-American effort to bring security to his home province of Wardak.

Ghulam Mohammad himself seems a bit conflicted about his new role. When questioned about his former allegiance to the Taliban and how that squares with his work on behalf of an American-backed program, Ghulam Mohammad just smiled and shrugged.

"That's my business," he said.

With his Taliban past and his U.S.-affiliated present, Ghulam Mohammad seems to embody classically Afghan shades of gray — a mixture of both hope and peril — that make up a controversial component of the U.S. counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan.

It is a policy that seeks to bring former Taliban leaders into the fold by funding forces under their control, but the policy also raises the specter that the U.S. may in fact simply be funding, training and arming the very insurgency that it seeks to defeat.

Such initiatives, said Nic Lee, director of the Afghanistan NGO Safety Office should come with some major caveats. Rather than "peel off," as he put it, the Taliban from the main fighting force, he believes the organization risks bringing the Taliban into the mainstream, and eventually into the government."It would seem to present a convenient mechanism for discretely turning the opposition into the Government," he writes in the first safety office quarterly report for 2010. "This may indeed create local stability in the short term but may seed geographically based factionalism in the long term."

During an interview in his bare-bones office in Maidan Shahr, the capital of Wardak, Ghulam Mohammad explained how he reluctantly came to be involved with the public protection program.

"I had no interest in AP3. The governor and the head of security begged me to cooperate. So I came. It is my obligation to make Wardak secure," he said.

He denied that he or his men harbored any covert affiliation with the active Taliban insurgency, but he did not reject his past allegiance to the movement.

One of the reasons the government may have been so eager to secure Ghulam Mohammad's goodwill was the distinct lack of recruits from his home district, Jalrez.

In fact, before Ghulam Mohammad joined AP3, the majority ethnic group in Wardak, the Pashtuns, were sadly under-represented. But the commander and tribal elder brought his men with him: out of about 1,200 current AP3 "guardians" close to half — 560 — are from Jalrez.

Hundreds of armed men loyal to one commander suggests an old-style militia, a label Ghulam Mohammad strenuously resists.

"They just want to blacken our name, and the name of all Pashtuns, by calling us a militia," he said. "That is not true."

What is undeniable, however, is that by most accounts the situation has improved in Wardak since Ghulam and his AP3 became active just under 18 months ago.

The drive from Kabul to Wardak was not safe even a year ago; and government officials could not visit the outlying districts at all.

For now that has changed. Ghulam Mohammad is not shy about taking credit, either for his AP3 men or for himself.

"I have negotiated with tribal elders and I have brought a balance," he said. "There used to be whole communities with the Taliban. Now there will be one house with the Taliban, but the neighboring house is with AP3."

This would suggest that many of those who have joined the AP3 were formerly with the Taliban, and perhaps followed their leader in switching sides.

But his former Taliban ties landed Ghulam Mohammad in the American-run prison at the Bagram Airbase in 2004. He spent two years incarcerated, the result, he insists, of a plot by political rivals to get him out of the way."They told the Americans I was with the Taliban," he said. "It was not true. I supported the government after 2001."

Ghulam Mohammad maintains that he feels no bitterness toward his U.S. colleagues as a result of his prison years, but friends who know him well say that he claims he was mistreated at Bagram, and has very sour memories of his time there.

The burly commander has a unique approach to stabilizing the situation: he draws on his old contacts in the Taliban and threatens them."I tell them, I know who you are and where you live," he said. "I say, if you touch my men I will kill your father, your mother, your sister. They do not have the courage to face us."

But behind Ghulam Mohammad's bluster lies a deep unease. In his opinion, AP3 is on the verge of collapse.

Under-resourced and under-funded, the program is starting to show signs of strain. The men are unhappy, the population is skeptical, and, worst of all, AP3 may have sown the seeds of instability in the very areas it was meant to secure.

"I keep telling the government and the Americans, 'help us or let us go,' he sighed. "I don't think they really want security."

It is a sad comment on a program that began with such promise just 18 months ago.

Wardak, which adjoins the capital, is known as "the gateway to Kabul." A lush green province of hills, streams and valleys, it was also a popular picnic and vacation spot for those seeking to escape the heat and dust of the city.

But about three years ago the situation began to deteriorate. Armed groups set up checkpoints on the roads, robbing and sometimes kidnapping travelers. The Taliban started distributing night letters, warning residents of Wardak not to cooperate with the government or the international community. Schools were burned, a campaign of assassinations was carried out, and many Wardakis working in Kabul stopped visiting their families on weekends.

"I haven't been home in over a year," said Bashir, a journalist from Chak district, speaking last summer. "It is too dangerous for me."

There were frequent armed attacks even on the road linking Kabul with Wardak's provincial capital, Maidan Shahr.

"Before I became governor, the situation in Wardak was fragile, deteriorating day by day," said Halim Fidai, who took over the reins of the Wardak administration in July 2008. "Officials were restricted in their movements, development stopped. Anyone who came to the governor's office would cover his face, so he would not be killed when he went back to his village. But this year on Prophet's Day we had 5,000 elders, all openly supporting the government."

Fidai divides his time between Maidan Shahr, the capital of Wardak, and his family's home Kabul. But he insists that he is now able to travel freely between the two, something that would have been unthinkable when he first became governor.

"It is safe now," he said. "There is no problem."

The difference, he said, was the AP3.

The AP3 has its fans — the 1,200 young men who are now employed in the program are happy to have work; their families are also better off, and those who work in development are grateful that they can now implement their projects.

But there are many who argue that AP3 is at best ineffective, and at worst destructive. It can divide communities, contribute to instability and give rise to armed groups that could turn into militias, loyal only to their commanders and preying on the local population.

Nonsense, said the governor, Fidai.

"This public protection force is not a militia. It is entirely different," he insists. "It is a responsible, accountable, uniformed, trained force within the framework of the Afghan government."

The AP3 is an initiative of the Ministry of the Interior and the U.S. Special Forces.

But critics ask why, when more than $6 billion has been poured into police training over the past eight years, are the United States and the Afghan government so intent on creating an additional structure?

Simple, Fidai said.

"You can't produce police in 21 days," he said. "We need an immediate remedy "¦ I only have 500 trained police for Wardak. That is not enough."

But stop-gap measures like the AP3 are not the way to bring stability, argues retired Gen. Amanullah (he uses only one name), who was a high-ranking officer in the Defense Ministry during the Communist-backed government of Dr. Najibullah.

"The Ministry of the Interior is now producing plastic police" he said. "They give them a few weeks' training and then they arm them, give them a uniform and send them out. If the Interior Ministry would support the police there would be no need for these kinds of groups."

Even that is now under threat. According to a uniformed officer on Ghulam Mohammad's team, who did not want to give his name, the new recruits receive no training whatsoever. Not that it is much of a loss, he added.

"The Americans do not understand this war," he said. "The training they give is useless. They want us to carry big backpacks — in these hills! It is guerrilla war. They just don't get it."

Another problem with AP3, said Amanullah, are the close ties between the Taliban and the rest of the community. Arming one part of a village against another could be a recipe for disaster."These (AP3) will cause enmity between families, between houses," he said. "Groups like these were the main cause of the civil war."

Rather than heap the credit for the improvement in Wardak on the AP3, he said, better to recognize the contribution of the 1,500 American troops who arrived in the province a little over a year ago.

Fidai concedes that it is possible that the U.S. soldiers have made the difference.

"The Americans have helped a lot," he said. "They have responded in time of need."

Gen. Sayed Kamal Sadat, director general of Public Protection, who oversees the program, acknowledges that the AP3 have had limited fighting experience. In fact, he said, they have never come face to face with "the enemy." There have been some AP3 casualties — 15 as of early April, but these were due to accidents, mines, and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) rather than to actual combat.

According to Rahimullah, a resident of Nerkh district in Wardak who claims to have witnessed clashes between the AP3 and the Taliban, the lack of direct contact is due to the fact that the AP3 simply run away when they come across the better-equipped and more battle-hardened Taliban.

"I do not think that these boys can bring security," he said. "The Taliban control the night in our area. These boys just escape when they see the Taliban. They sit in their checkpoints and smoke hashish. When I pass by, I see blue smoke coming out."

But Ghulam Mohammad denies that any of his men are involved in questionable activities.

"It's just propaganda against the AP3 that there are hash smugglers or arms dealers among them," he insisted. "We know these people well, they have been guaranteed by the elders in their village."

Perhaps the best gauge of the success or failure of the AP3 is the fact that it has so far been limited to Wardak. The original idea was to expand the program to other provinces, but there are no immediate plans to introduce AP3 anywhere else.

"The Ministry of the Interior is not happy with this program," said an inside source in the ministry, speaking on condition of anonymity. "It has not been a success."

The governor acknowledges that AP3 is stalled, but insists that this is not due to any deficiency in the Wardak experiment, but to the fact that Americans have been distracted by another "promising idea" — the Local Defense Initiative, which seeks to train and equip tribal militias to fight the Taliban.

"The international community should finish what it starts," Fidai said. "Afghanistan should not become a laboratory."

Fidai staunchly defends the program, which has brought so many benefits to Wardak.

"First, it creates jobs for young people who would otherwise join the Taliban," he said.

It certainly worked for Spin Gul, a young man who returned to Wardak after two years spent working in Iran. He was having no luck finding a job. The economy in his native province was at a standstill, and security had deteriorated sharply, with the Taliban and other armed groups patrolling the highways and attacking the population.

What is a young man to do? The Taliban were one option — several of his friends and neighbors were with them. But he was not eager to participate in the raids, kidnappings and other insurgent activities that were making Wardak a dangerous place to visit.

Then someone told him the AP3, which that would pay him a whopping 8,000 afghani (about $160) per month.

So Spin Gul signed up, was vetted by the local department of the intelligence services and his village local council, went off to a nearby province for three weeks of training, then was issued a uniform and an AK-47.

Now he helps guard the highway leading from Wardak to Kandahar. In general, he is happy with his lot.

"It's better than working in Iran," he laughed. "Now that we have installed a checkpoint on the highway, the Taliban cannot take people off buses. There is no fighting along the road."

Spin Gul rejects the complaints of those who say that the AP3, with a mere 21 days of training under their newly issued belts, cannot fight the Taliban.

"I know the people in my area," he said. "I know who is Taliban and who is not. We are much more effective than the national police and army."

But critics of AP3 say that this intimate local knowledge is also a major weakness of the program: if Spin Gul knows the Taliban in his area, then they also know him. This could keep the young man from taking action against the insurgents, for fear of reprisals against himself or his family. Just as likely, according to some research, Spin Gul and his Taliban pals will team up, split the money and weapons and conduct business as usual.

Still, Fidai is convinced that this is the way to go.

"This could be a reintegration model for the whole country," he insisted.

"Reintegration" is now a catchword for a new, generously funded program to provide jobs and other benefits to those Taliban who want to lay down their arms and rejoin the government. It is called by the American military "the golden surrender."

AP3 provides an alternative — the would-be fighters get a salary and do not even have to give up their guns.

According to Mathieu Lefevre, who researched AP3 for the Afghanistan Analysts' Network, a non-profit, independent policy research organization, the program is generating a lot of anger among the local population.

"I spoke to several Wardakis who found it hard to understand how Ghulam Mohammad, a former Taliban commander, is now the head of a 1,200-man AP3 force to 'protect' them," he said in a recent interview with GlobalPost.

In a blog post on the analysts' network website, Lefevre added that he himself had been suspicious of possible Taliban infiltration of the AP3.

"When I asked local officials about the possibility that elements of the Taliban could infiltrate AP3, I got more than a few big grins as my only answer," he wrote.

A resident of Alesang village, in Chak district, who did not want to give his name for fear of retribution, said that the situation in Chak had worsened since the AP3 began its deployment.

"They have established a checkpoint, but it has not helped," he said. "Three weeks ago armed men assassinated 75-year-old Haji Zahir, the head of Chak's district council. They killed him in broad daylight."

Rafiullah, a resident of Sayedabad district, is worried that the AP3 will degenerate into the lawless militias that so plagued the country during the civil war.

"These militias might be good for the government for the time being," he said. "But they result in instability in the long run. They sow enmity between villages and between families. In past years when different groups set up checkpoints, people got killed over it."

This, curiously enough, is a point that Ghulam Mohammad does not dispute.

"The AP3 will cause enmity house by house," he said. "With one house Taliban, and one house AP3, they will fight, eventually."

Habiburrahman Ibrahimi, a journalist in Kabul, contributed to this report.

 

[anoop_mig25]

Afghan military officials could be trained by Pakistan army

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/30/AR2010063005193.html

By Karin Brulliard and Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 1, 2010
KABUL -- Afghan President Hamid Karzai has agreed to send a group of military officers to Pakistan for training, a significant policy shift that Afghan and Pakistani officials said signals deepening relations between the long-wary neighbors.

THIS STORY
Some Afghan military officers to receive training in Pakistan
Holder, in Kabul, meets with Karzai
Faces of the Fallen: U.S. Fatalities in Iraq and Afghanistan
The move is a victory for Pakistan, which seeks a major role in Afghanistan as officials in both countries become increasingly convinced that the U.S. war effort there is faltering. Afghan officials said Karzai has begun to see Pakistan as a necessary ally in ending the war through negotiation with the Taliban or on the battlefield.

"This is meant to demonstrate confidence to Pakistan, in the hope of encouraging them to begin a serious consultation and conversation with us on the issue of [the] Taliban," Rangin Dadfar Spanta, Karzai's national security adviser, said of the training agreement.

The previously unpublicized training would involve only a small group of officers, variously described as between a handful and a few dozen, but it has enormous symbolic importance as the first tangible outcome of talks between Karzai and Pakistan's military and intelligence chiefs that began in May. It is likely to be controversial among some Afghans who see Pakistan as a Taliban puppet-master rather than as a cooperative neighbor, and in India, which is wary of Pakistan's intentions in Afghanistan.

Some key U.S. officials involved in Afghanistan said they knew nothing of the arrangement. "We are neither aware of nor have we been asked to facilitate training of the Afghan officer corps with the Pakistani military," Lt. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, head of the NATO training command in Afghanistan, said in an e-mail. But Afghanistan, he said, "is a sovereign nation and can make bilateral agreements with other nations to provide training."

 

[ajtr]

'Surge'' smoke follows Petraeus to Afpak​

By Pepe Escobar

Confirmed and reconfirmed by United States President Barack Obama, the US Senate and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and duly hailed as the new armored Messiah by US mainstream media, "tightly disciplined" political fox and former US Central Command chief General David Petraeus is about to land in Kabul. He will either hit the road to his 2012 Republican presidential nomination, or witness another disaster in a US$7 billion a month (and counting) quagmire.

The myth of Petraeus' "successful surge" in Iraq could not but linger on. The Pentagon never managed not to profit by selling a public relations operation to a gullible American public. Petraeus actually "won" the war in Iraq by disgorging Samsonites full of cash to selected strands of the Sunni resistance who were



fiercely fighting the US occupation, while at the same time shielding the American military inside remote bases.

Let's assume that what in effect are mostly Afghan Pashtuns will now also take Petraeus' bundle of cash (after all Afghanistan is the second most corrupt country in the world, only behind Somalia). In this case will he have enough time to buy the whole Afghan resistance before the 2012 US presidential election? It depends on how much cash will flow.

What's certain is that the Pashtuns will be more than happy to take the money and not run, but wait - exactly as the Sunni Iraqis are doing (newsflash: the Sunni-Shi'ite civil war is still on, killing at least 300 civilians every month).

Naturally the infinite war lobby - from the Pentagon's "full-spectrum dominance" crowd to hawkish Zio-cons and assorted Republicans - wants "cold-eyed realist" Petraeus to engage in, what else, infinite war, with its attendant surge(s). We're already on our way; the general already said this is an "enduring" commitment. Maybe not exactly the White House sort of commitment, which until now was demoted General Stanley McChrystal's hardcore, "take, clear and hold" counter-insurgency (COIN) plus building up local "governance".

What US public opinion was sold on was McChrystal performing surge part two in Afghanistan. But from running Pentagon death squads in Iraq to performing COIN designed by Petraeus himself, McChrystal fell way out of his league; not to mention that you don't captivate Pashtun civilians' hearts and minds by bombing their villages to rubble and incinerating their sons, daughters and wedding parties.

Follow the money
Every shard of lapis lazuli and lithium in the Hindu Kush knows al-Qaeda abandoned Afghanistan ages ago. The Taliban remain. For Washington, the Taliban is the same as al-Qaeda. Thus Washington also remains.

Petraeus never ended the Sunni-Shi'ite civil war raging in Iraq between 2006 and 2007. He tried to marginalize the Sadrists; he failed miserably. What he did, apart from showering US dollars, was to kill - via McChrystal's death squads - the leaders of many a Sunni resistance cell, while building a million checkpoints and installing a horrendous cement apartheid in Baghdad (a key factor into driving citywide unemployment to 80%).

Yet the civil war only diminished because the Shi'ites achieved a brutal, large-scale ethnic cleansing of Baghdad (and that showed to the Sunnis that the next best option was to cash in). Petraeus was peripheral at best during this whole (bloody) process. But he was stellar in selling to the US the notion of "victory".

Anyone who buys Pentagon spin believing the same successful "surge" will happen in the Pashtun south and southeast of Afghanistan must have smoked Hindu Kush's finest.

For starters, it's not only the "Taliban" - this James Joyce-style portmanteau word - who are fighting the US and NATO "invaders" as well as the Hamid Karzai "puppet" government in Kabul (the terminology is resistance-based). In crucial Kunar province the key resistance actor is notorious Ronald Reagan-friendly mujahid Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and his Hizb-e-Islami. Karzai, crucially, has been talking to Hekmatyar. And Hekmatyar, apart from fighting some Taliban strands, has also been positioning himself as mediator - as long as the "invaders" leave.

Karzai is also talking to another key mujahid who is based in Pakistan's North Waziristan, Sirajuddin Haqqani, son of the legendary Jalaluddin, another Reagan "freedom fighter". And not leaving anything to chance, Karzai is also negotiating with the number two of the Mullah Omar-led historic Taliban - Mullah Baradar. Mullah Omar himself wants no tea with Petraeus: he firmly believes the infidels will eventually leave.

What this all means is that wily Karzai, seeing which way the wind blows, is essentially leaning towards Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence - and there's nothing Petraeus can do about it. The Central Intelligence Agency - always faithful to divide and rule tactics - predictably abominates the idea of Afghans talking among themselves to sort out their common future. In an aside with truly Dadaist overtones, the head of the Taliban in Kunar, Obaid al-Rahman, offered Petraeus a praetorian "Guard of Death".
The heart of the matter is that the overwhelming majority of Pashtuns in the south and southeast don't want Karzai, don't want Petraeus, don't want surge, don't want US and don't want NATO. They want to be left alone to rule their local tribal land as they see fit. And to top it off, all those strands lumped as "Taliban" believe in their heart of hearts that their own brand of counter-surge is the real deal - that is, taking over Kabul by the end of 2012.

Petraeus' cash diplomacy is doomed. The Taliban in all their strands, compared with Sunni Iraqis, are infinitely stronger, as much as Karzai is much weaker than Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. And even if only 30% of tribal Afghan Pashtuns actively support the Taliban, the majority totally supports their fierce anti-occupation struggle. The Washington notion that Petraeus can influence complex tribal Pashtun politics is risible.

If Petraeus goes "clear, hold and build" COIN in Pashtun lands he is doomed. If Petraeus gets restless and produces a Fallujah in Pashtun lands, he is also doomed (that may be in effect right away, as one of his minions told Fox News that rules of engagement will be more "kinetic" - code for more US firepower and more civilian casualties.)

So what's the point of all this upcoming carnage? Well, there are so many - the poppy trade, the "Saudi Arabia of lithium", the ultimate pipe dream known as Trans-Afghan Pipeline, those military bases spying both Russia and China ... So many rats scurrying around the sinking US flotilla in the sand, but what the hell, there's another successful "surge" to sell and the (war) show must go on.

 

[ajtr]

Counter-insurgency down for the count ​

By Ann Jones

United States President Barack Obama's Afghanistan strategy isn't working. So said a parade of Afghanistan watchers during the flap over war commander General Stanley McChrystal's firing. But what does that phrase, so often in the media these days, really mean? And if the strategy really isn't working, just how can you tell?

The answers to these questions raise even more important ones, including: Why, when Obama fires an insubordinate and failing general, does he cling to his failing war policy? And if our strategy isn't working, what about the enemy's? And if nothing much is



working, why does it still go on non-stop this way? Let's take these one at a time.

1. What do you mean by "it's not working"?
"It" is counter-insurgency or COIN, which, in fact, is really less of a strategy than a set of tactics in pursuit of a strategy. Counter-insurgency doctrine, originally designed by empires intending to squat on their colonies forever, calls for elevating the principle of "protecting the population" above pursuing the bad guys at all cost. Implementing such a strategy quickly becomes a tricky, even schizophrenic, balancing act, as I recently was reminded.

I just spent some time embedded with the US Army at a forward operating base near the Pakistan border where, despite daily "sig acts" - significant activity of a hostile nature - virtually every "lethal" American soldier is matched by a "non-lethal" counterpart whose job it is, in one way or another, to soften up those civilians for "protection".

McChrystal himself played both roles. As the US commander, he was responsible for killing what he termed, at one point, "an amazing number of people" who were not threats, but he also regularly showed up at Afghan President Hamid Karzai's palace to say "sorry". Karzai praised him publicly for his frequent apologies (each reflecting an American act or acts that killed civilians), though angry Afghans were less impressed.

The part of the lethal activity that often goes awry is supposed to be counter-balanced by the "sorry" part, which may be as simple as dispatching US officers to drink humble tea with local "key leaders". Often enough, though, it comes in the form of large, unsustainable gifts. The formula, which is basic COIN, goes something like this: kill some civilians in the hunt for the bad guys and you have to make up for it by building a road. This trade-off explains why, as you travel parts of the country, interminable (and often empty) strips of black asphalt now traverse Afghanistan's vast expanses of sand and rock, but it doesn't explain why Afghans, thus compensated, are angrier than ever.

Many Afghans are angry because they haven't been compensated at all, not even with a road to nowhere. Worse yet, more often than not, they've been promised things that never materialize. (If you were to summarize the history of the country as a whole in these past years, it might go like this: big men - both Afghan and American - make out like the Beltway Bandits many of them are, while ordinary Afghans in the countryside still wish their kids had shoes.)

And don't forget the majority of Afghans in the countryside who have scarcely been consulted at all: women. To protect Afghan women from foreign fighters, Afghan men lock them up - the women, that is. American military leaders slip easily into the all-male comfort zone, probably relieved perhaps to try to win the "hearts and minds" of something less than half "the population".

It's only in the past year or two that the US Marines Corps and the army started pulling a few American women off their full-time non-combat jobs and sending them out as Female Engagement Teams (FETs) to meet and greet village women. As with so many innovative new plans in our counter-insurgency war, this one was cobbled together in a thoughtless way that risked lives and almost guaranteed failure.

Commanders have casually sent non-combatant American women soldiers - supply clerks and radio operators - outside the wire, usually with little training, no clear mission and no follow up. Predictably, like their male counterparts, they have left a trail of good intentions and broken promises behind. So when I went out to meet village women near the Pakistan border last week with a brand-new army FET-in-training, we faced the fury of Pashto women still waiting for a promised delivery of vegetable seeds.

Imagine. This is hardly a big item like the "government in a box" that McChrystal promised and failed to deliver in Marjah. They're just seeds. How hard could that be?

Our visit did, however, open a window into a world military and political policymakers have ignored for all too long. It turns out that the women of Afghanistan, whom former president George W Bush claimed to have liberated so many years ago, are still mostly oppressed, impoverished, malnourished, uneducated, short of seeds and mad as hell.

Count them among a plentiful crew of angry Afghans who are living proof that "it's not working" at all. Afghans, it seems, know the difference between genuine apologies and bribes, true commitment and false promises, generosity and self-interest. And since the whole point of COIN is to gain the hearts and minds of "the population", those angry Afghans are a bad omen for the US military and Obama.

Moreover, it's not working for a significant sub-group of Americans in Afghanistan either: combat soldiers. I've heard infantrymen place the blame for a buddy's combat injury or death on the strict rules of engagement ("courageous restraint", as it's called) imposed by McChrystal's version of COIN strategy. Taking a page from Vietnam, they claim their hands are tied, while the enemy plays by its own rules. Rightly or wrongly, this opinion is spreading fast among grieving soldiers as casualties mount.

It's also clear that even the lethal part of counter-insurgency isn't working. Consider all those civilian deaths and injuries, so often the result of false information fed to Americans to entice them to settle local scores.

To give just one example: American troops recently pitched hand grenades into a house in Logar province that they'd been told was used by terrorists. Another case of false information. It held a young Afghan, a relative of an Afghan agricultural expert who happens to be an acquaintance of mine. The young man had just completed his religious education and returned to the village to become its sole maulawi, or religious teacher. The villagers, very upset, turned out to vouch for him and the army hospitalized him with profuse apologies. Luckily, he survived, but such routine mistakes regularly leave dead or wounded civilians and a thickening residue of rage behind.

Reports coming in from observers and colleagues in areas of the Pashtun south, once scheduled to be demonstration sites for McChrystal's cleared, held, built and better-governed Afghanistan, are generally grim. Before his resignation, the general himself was already referring to Marjah - the farming area (initially trumpeted as a "city of 80,000 people") where he launched his first offensive - as "a bleeding ulcer".

He also delayed the highly publicized advance into Kandahar, the country's second-largest city, supposedly to gain more time to bring around the opposing populace, which includes Karzai. Meanwhile, humanitarian non-governmental organizations (NGOs) based in Kandahar complain that they can't do their routine work assisting the city's inhabitants while the area lies under threat of combat. Without assistance, Kandaharis grow - you guessed it - angrier.

From Kandahar province, where American soldiers mass for the well-advertised securing of Kandahar, come reports that the Afghan National Army (ANA) is stealing equipment - right down to bottled drinking water - from the US military and selling it to the Taliban. US commanders can't do much about it because the official American script calls for the ANA to take over responsibility for national defense.

North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) soldiers have complained all along about the ill-trained, uninterested troops of the ANA, but the animosity between them seems to have grown deadly in some quarters. American soldiers in Kandahar report that, for their own security, they don't tell their ANA colleagues when and where they're going on patrol. In the 1980s, in the anti-Soviet jihad the US supported, the US trained Afghan jihadis who have today become the US's worst enemies and now it is happening again.

Factor in accounts of what McChrystal did best: taking out bad guys. Reportedly, he was vigorously directing special forces' assassinations of high- and mid-level Taliban leaders in preparation for "peeling off" the "good" Taliban - that is, those impoverished fighters only in it for the money. According to his thinking, they would later be won over to the government through internationally subsidized jobs.

But assassinating the ideological leaders, the true believers and organizers - or those we call the bad Taliban - actually leaves behind leaderless, undisciplined gangs of armed rent-a-guns more interested in living off the population we're supposed to protect than being peeled off into abject Afghan poverty. From the point of view of ordinary Afghans in the countryside, our "good Taliban" are the worst of all.

I could go on. If you spend time in Afghanistan, evidence of failure is all around you, including those millions of American taxpayer dollars that are paid to Afghan security contractors (and Karzai relatives) and then handed over to insurgents to buy protection for US supply convoys traveling on US built, but Taliban-controlled, roads. Strategy doesn't get much worse than that: financing both sides and every brigand in between, in hopes of a happier ending someday.

2. So why does Obama stick to this failed policy?
Go figure. Maybe he's been persuaded by Pentagon hype. Replacing McChrystal with Central command chief General David Petraeus brought a media golden-oldies replay of Petraeus' greatest hits: his authorship of the army's counter-insurgency manual, updated (some say plagiarized) from a Vietnam-era edition and of Bush's 2007 "surge" in Iraq, an exercise in sectarian cleansing now routinely called a "success". If you can apply the word "success" to any operation in Iraq, you're surely capable of clinging to the hope that Petraeus can find it again in Afghanistan. But like David McKiernan, the general he ousted, McChrystal has already misapplied the "lessons" of Iraq to the decidedly different circumstances of Afghanistan and so produced a striking set of failures. A deal to buy off the Shinwari Pashtuns, for instance, a tribe mistakenly thought to be the equivalent of the Anbar Sunnis in Iraq, ended in an uproar when they pocketed the money without firing a shot at a single Talib. Not so surprising, considering that the people they were paid to fight are not foreign invaders - that would be us - but their Pashtun cousins.

Moreover, the surge into the Afghan south seems only to have further alienated the folks who live there, while increasing violence against local residents. It has also come at the expense of American troops in the east, the ones I was recently embedded



with, who face an onslaught of hostile fighters moving across the border from Pakistan.

3. What about the enemy strategy? How's that working?
It seems the Taliban, al-Qaeda and various hostile fighters in Afghanistan drew their own lessons from Petraeus' surge in Iraq: they learned to deal with a surge not by fading away before it, but by meeting it with a surge of their own.

An American commander defending the eastern front told me that hostile forces recently wiped out five border posts. "They opened the gate," he said, but with the American high command focused on a future surge into Kandahar, who's paying attention? In fact, as the battle heats up in the east, another official told me, they are running short of helicopters to medevac out American casualties. In this way, so-called strategy easily morphs into a shell game played largely for an American audience at the expense of American soldiers.

And all the while America's "partner" in this strategy, the dubious Karzai, consolidates his power, which is thoroughly grounded in the Pashtun south, the domain of his even more suspect half-brother, Ahmed Wali.

In the process, he studiously ignores parliament, which lately has been staging a silent stop-work protest, occasionally banging on the desks for emphasis. He now evidently bets his money (which used to be ours) on the failure of American forces and extends feelers of reconciliation to Pakistan and the Taliban, the folks he now fondly calls his "angry brothers".

As for the Afghan people, even the most resilient citizens of Kabul who, like Obama, remain hopeful, say: "This is our big problem." They're talking, of course, about Karzai and his government that the Americans put in place, pay for, prop up and pretend to be "partners" with.

In fact, America's silent acceptance of Karzai's flagrantly fraudulent election last summer - all those stuffed ballot boxes - seems to have exploded whatever illusions many Afghans still had about an American commitment to democracy.

They know now that matters will not be resolved at polling places or in jirga council tents. They probably won't be resolved in Afghanistan at all, but in secret locations in Washington, Riyadh, Islamabad and elsewhere. The American people, by the way, will have little more to say about the resolution of the war - though it consumes our wealth and our soldiers, too - than the Afghans.

Think of what's happening in Afghanistan more generally as a creeping Talibanization, which Afghans say is working all too well. In Marjah, in Kandahar, in the east, everywhere, the Taliban do what we can't and roll out their own (shadow) governments-in-a-box, ready to solve disputes, administer rough justice, collect taxes and enforce "virtue". In Herat, the ulema issue a fatwa restricting the freedom of women to work and move about without a mahram, or male relative as escort.

In Kabul, the police raid restaurants that serve alcohol and the government shuts down reputable, secular international NGOs, charging them with proselytizing. Taliban influence creeps into parliament, into legislation restricting constitutional freedoms, into ministries and governmental contracts where corruption flourishes and into the provisional peace jirga tent where delegates called for freedom for all imprisoned Taliban. Out of the jails, into the government, to sit side-by-side with warlords and war criminals, mujahideen brothers under the skin. Embraced by Karzai. Perhaps even welcomed one day by American strategists and Obama as a way out.

4. If it's so bad, why can't it be stopped?
The threatening gloom of American policy is never the whole story. There are young progressive men and women running for parliament in the coming September elections. There are women organizing to keep hold of the modest gains they've made, though how they will do that when the men seem so intent on negotiating them away remains a mystery.

There are the valiant efforts of thoroughly devout Muslims who wish to live in the 21st century. When they look outward to more developed Islamic countries, however, they see that their homeland is a Muslim country like no other - and if the Taliban return, it will only be worse.

American development was supposed to have made it all so much better. But tales abound of small, successful projects in education or health care, funded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and then dropped without a single visit from USAID monitors afraid to leave their embassy fortress in Kabul. Regularly, USAID now hands over huge hunks of "aid" money to big, impossibly ambitious, quick-fix projects run by the usual no-bid Beltway Bandit contractors whose incompetence, wastefulness, unconscionable profits and outright fraud should be a national scandal.

This, too, is a process everyone knows but can't speak about because it's not part of the official script in which the US must be seen as developing backward Afghanistan, instead of sending it reeling into the darkest of ages. Despairing humanitarians recall that Hillary Clinton promised as secretary of state to clean house at USAID, which, she said, had become nothing but "a contracting shop". Well, here's a flash from Afghanistan: it's still a contracting shop and the contracts are going to the same set of contractors who have been exposed again and again as venal, fraudulent and criminal.

Just as Obama sends more troops and a new commander to fight a fraudulent war for a purpose that makes no sense to anyone - except perhaps the so-called defense intellectuals who live in an alternative Washington-based Afghanaland of their own creation - Clinton presides over an aid program that functions chiefly to transfer American tax dollars from the national treasury to the pockets of already rich contractors and their congressional cronies.

If you still believe, as I would like to, that Obama and Clinton actually meant to make change, then you have to ask: How does this state of affairs continue and why do the members of the international community - the United Nations, all those international NGOs and our fast-fading coalition allies - sign off on it?

You have only to look around in Kabul and elsewhere, as I did this month, to see that the more American military there is, the more insurgents there are; the more insurgent attacks, the more private security contractors; the more barriers and razor wire, the more restrictions on freedom of movement in the capital for Afghans and internationals alike; and the more security, the higher the danger pay for members of the international community who choose to stay and spend their time complaining about the way security prevents them from doing their useful work.

And so it goes round and round, this ill-oiled war machine, generating ever-more incentives for almost everyone involved - except ordinary Afghans - to keep on keeping on. There's a little something for quite a few: government officials in the US, Afghanistan and Pakistan, for-profit contractors, defense intellectuals, generals, spies, soldiers behind the lines, international aid workers and their Afghan employees, diplomats, members of the Afghan National Army and the police and the Taliban and their various pals and the whole array of camp followers that service warfare everywhere.

It goes round and round, this inexorable machine, this elaborate construction of corporate capitalism at war, generating immense sums of money for relatively small numbers of people, immense debt for our nation, immense sacrifice from our combat soldiers and for ordinary Afghans and those who have befriended them or been befriended by them, moments of promise and hope, moments of clarity and rage and moments of dark laughter that sometimes cannot forestall the onset of despair.

 

[ajtr]

The stage is now open for a deal whereby India could agree to minimise its presence in Afghanistan – which it could accept as Pakistan's sphere of influence – in return for Pakistan withdrawing its longstanding sponsorship of the Kashmir jihad, which it could accept as India's domain. To satisfy Nato, an undertaking by Pakistan to drive al-Qaida from the region would also need to be included

William Dalrymple in the Guardian...

 

[ajtr]

New Afghan war commander facing uphill battle

KABUL: US General David Petraeus made his public debut on Saturday as commander of the Afghan war, celebrating US Independence Day in one of the most heavily guarded places in the country.
The four-star general, who arrived in the Afghan capital on Friday, faces a tough task to bring peace and secure a face-saving exit for allied troops fighting the Taliban, observers say.

Replacing the sacked US General Stanley McChrystal, Petraeus has said the war in Afghanistan --now well into its ninth year - is likely to get tougher before significant improvements are seen.

 

[ajtr]

Pakistan asks the world community not to interfere in Afghanistan's internal affairs

While reaffirming its commitment to strengthening its friendly ties with Afghanistan, Pakistan on Friday urged the international community to stay engaged in the war-torn country without interfering in the country's internal affairs.

 

[samarsingh]

William Dalrymple in the Guardian...

The stage is now open for a deal whereby India could agree to minimise its presence in Afghanistan – which it could accept as Pakistan's sphere of influence – in return for Pakistan withdrawing its longstanding sponsorship of the Kashmir jihad, which it could accept as India's domain. To satisfy Nato, an undertaking by Pakistan to drive al-Qaida from the region would also need to be included

how about a little change in this observation Mr Dalrymple, I wish we are able to say say something like this in the near future, anyway here goes
The stage is now open for a deal where UK could agree to minimise its presence in Afghanistan - which it could accept as US/Indian sphere of influence - in return for US promising not fuelling any nationalistic sentiments in Scotland, which it would accept as UK's domain. To satisfy all parties, an undertaking by Pakistan to drive al-Qaida from the region would need to be included.

cant believe these guys still think they have an "empire" and "God Given" right to create problems in other parts of the world and then offer solutions.

btw the author is a respected historian and has been living in Delhi for quite a while. We would appreciate if he sticks to his core competence and not venture into the subfield of geostrategy

 

[ajtr]

Daily brief: Taliban district commander captured​

BY KATHERINE TIEDEMANN, JULY 1, 2010 Thursday, July 1, 2010 - 8:40 AM Share

Offensive moves

Afghan and international forces reportedly captured the Taliban district commander for Naw Zad in Afghanistan's southern Helmand province last night, after a four hour gunfight in the northern part of the province (AP, ISAF). Some 30 Taliban fighters were also reportedly killed (AFP).

U.S. Marines have reportedly launched Operation Cobra in Helmand's Marjah, site of a coalition offensive earlier this year whose slow progress has worried many observers, to "drive insurgents sheltering in rural areas to the east and west of Marjah into even more sparsely inhabited areas" (FT). In Sangin, another area of Helmand, the Taliban are reportedly using children as young as five to plant roadside bombs; of the 44 IEDs in Sangin in the last few months, a fifth were carried out by kids, according to the Telegraph (Tel).

The Journal has today's must-read describing how new legislation in Afghanistan would put local village defense forces, which initially caused concern that the anti-Taliban militias could spin out of control, under the supervision of local police chiefs and ultimately, the Ministry of Interior in Kabul, which would issue weapons and wages (WSJ). Afghan President Hamid Karzai is expected to enact the legislation in the next few weeks.

Officially yours

Britain's defense secretary, Liam Fox, warned yesterday against a "premature" British withdrawal from Afghanistan, a few days after prime minister David Cameron said he wanted to bring British forces home by 2015 (Times, Guardian, McClatchy). Speaking at a conservative think tank in Washington, Fox said an early withdrawal would be "a shot in the arm to jihadists everywhere;" Downing Street insisted it had approved his speech beforehand and denied any policy disagreements between the defense secretary and the prime minister.

The NYT considers the futures of the top U.S. civilian officials in Afghanistan, Amb. Richard Holbrooke and Amb. Karl Eikenberry, and their relationships with incoming Afghanistan commander Gen. David Petraeus, who was confirmed 99-0 yesterday by the Senate and is en route to Kabul now (NYT, AJE, AFP, Reuters, Pajhwok). At a stop at NATO headquarters in Brussels earlier today, Gen. Petraeus said that while he has no plans to changes current rules of engagement in Afghanistan, which limit the use of force to prevent civilian casualties, he would look into the application of the rules and protect the Afghan population (BBC).

As U.S. attorney general Eric Holder met yesterday with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and other top Afghan officials to discuss anti-corruption and narcotics investigations, Karzai and his finance minister Omar Zakhilwal pushed back against allegations of government corruption, saying the international community is responsible for some of the pervasive graft in the country (Wash Post, AP).

Measuring up

Michael Leiter, the head of the National Counterterrorism Center, estimated yesterday that there are "more than 300" al-Qaeda leaders and fighters in Pakistan, a rare public assessment that, when taken with last week's assertion by CIA director Leon Panetta that there are "50 to 100" al-Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan, suggests fewer than 500 total in the border region (NYT). Leiter told an audience in Colorado that while al-Qaeda is "weaker today than it has been at any time since 2001...weaker does not mean harmless."

The Post's big story today is that Afghanistan has agreed to send between "a handful and a few dozen" military officers to Pakistan to receive training, a move which has "enormous symbolic importance" as the first visible result of talks between the Afghan government and the Pakistani military and intelligence (Wash Post). More than 300 Afghan soldiers are currently already being trained in other countries, including Turkey and India.

A Taliban spokesman has reiterated the movement's unwillingness to enter into talks with "anyone -- not to Karzai, nor to any foreigners" unless international forces withdraw from Afghanistan (BBC).

Checkmate?

Pakistan's military has declared the northwestern tribal agency of South Waziristan, site of a major anti-Taliban offensive last fall, cleared of militant hideouts, and stated that infrastructure development and refugee resettlement is underway (ET, Dawn). Pakistan has proposed a law that, if approved by the National Assembly, would ban live media coverage of militant attacks as well as "anything defamatory against the organs of the state" (Reuters). Offenders could be fined up to 10 million rupees or sentenced to three years in jail.

The AP profiles the emergence of a new militant group in Pakistan called the Ghazi Force, made up of relatives of those killed in 2007's Red Mosque incident and reportedly responsible for several attacks previously attributed to the Taliban (AP). The leader of the group, which is reportedly headquartered in Orakzai agency, is believed to be Maulana Niaz Raheem, and there are close ties between the Ghazi Force and the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan.

Journalism job opportunity

Al-Qaeda has launched its first online English-language magazine this week, called "Inspire," run by the group's Yemen affiliate (AP, CNN, Fox, Atlantic). Yesterday's debut did not go smoothly, however; only the first three of the publication's 67 pages were viewable, while the rest appeared as computer gibberish, according to SITE Intelligence Group, a jihadist website monitoring service.

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