Afghanistan and Pakistan

[buglerbilly]

Weakening, possible firing of McChrystal compounds sense of peril in Afghanistan

By Karen DeYoung and Scott Wilson
Washington Post Staff Writer

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

The firestorm sparked by the general responsible for creating and implementing President Obama's Afghanistan strategy has further set back U.S. prospects in a war that was already on shaky ground.

Combat delays, rising casualties and new reports of Afghan corruption have led to growing skepticism in Congress and among the American public. The weakening, and possible firing, of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal over disrespectful comments he made about Obama and his policy team has compounded the sense of peril.

However the McChrystal crisis ends, "much is different going forward," a senior administration official said. "It's hard to brush past it."

McChrystal's apparent disdain for his civilian colleagues, and the facts on the ground in Afghanistan, have exposed the enduring fault lines in the agreement Obama forged last fall among policymakers and military commanders. In exchange for approving McChrystal's request for more troops and treasure, Obama imposed, and the military accepted, two deadlines sought by his political aides. In December, one year after the strategy was announced, the situation would be reviewed and necessary adjustments made. In July 2011, the troops would begin to come home.

Each side thought it had gotten the better part of the deal.

Many senior military officials considered the withdrawal deadline a bad idea and argued among themselves whether counterinsurgency, inherently a time-consuming roller coaster of a process, could be conducted on a clock. Civilian policymakers, including Vice President Biden, thought the scope of the commitment -- 30,000 additional troops and a massive civilian deployment -- was unnecessary to achieve Obama's narrowly focused goal of decimating al-Qaeda.

But the new deployments, Obama concluded, would prove to allies and Afghans the depth of the U.S. commitment; the timetable would compel Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his government to put their own house in order. The president's advisers agreed that significant progress toward the goals they had set -- putting the Taliban on the run, establishing a stable and competent government, and building Afghanistan's own security forces to eventually take over -- could be achieved within a deadline.

"He asked each of them directly if they had any problems with the strategy and if they could implement it," an administration official said Tuesday of Obama. "They all stood up and said, 'Yes, sir.' "

Several administration officials portrayed McChrystal's comments, made this spring in the presence of a reporter from Rolling Stone magazine, as a reflection of "behavior" rather than an unraveling of consensus around the war strategy. Some speculated that what many consider his tactical brilliance did not translate well in Washington's political arena. Others said that after years of 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week warfare, one interlude in which he and his staff unwisely unwound had no bearing on McChrystal's competence and commitment to the strategy.

But as the administration confronts the possibility that success in Afghanistan, if it comes at all, will take far longer than the president and his advisers envisioned when Obama first announced it nearly seven months ago, no one saw McChrystal's remarks as anything but a setback.

"There is no question this is a distraction we could ill afford," a senior defense official said. "It comes at an inopportune time. Although we believe it is fundamentally the right strategy and we are on the right course, we still have a lot of work to do to prove that to the American people, and this doesn't help."

The speed with which support for the strategy has seemed to unravel over the past several weeks has frustrated and concerned many senior officials, none of whom was willing, in an atmosphere of high anxiety within the administration, to speak about it on the record.

Barely a month ago, Karzai and much of his cabinet ended a visit to Washington with hugs, handshakes and assurances that things were moving in the right direction. The administration declared an end to its uneasiness about Karzai's abilities and honesty, endorsed his plans for an eventual political settlement of the war and pledged a long-term relationship with Afghanistan that would outlive the Taliban.

A Marine offensive in Helmand province, in southern Afghanistan, was said to be progressing, the new troop deployments were underway and plans were set to begin operations in the key city of Kandahar this month.

But just as there seemed a small breathing space, reports emerged of problems with a lagging civilian governance program and a resurgent Taliban in Helmand. Two weeks ago, McChrystal expressed public concerns about the rate of civilian progress in Kandahar and announced that military elements of the offensive there would be delayed. Karzai abruptly fired his interior minister and intelligence chief, two officials who had been singled out as star performers by U.S. officials.

Obama went directly to McChrystal for assurance, a senior official said Friday, before the Rolling Stone story broke. "He asked about it, he heard directly from the field. . . . General McChrystal's representation was that we shouldn't think of things in Kandahar as though they were a light switch. It's more of a rheostat, and it doesn't yield a black and white shift overnight."

McChrystal, the official said, "reassured the president that it's moving in the right direction, at a pace he's comfortable with . . . that seems to be in concert with what we laid out months ago."

But Congress was growing uneasy. Last week, Gen. David H. Petraeus, McChrystal's boss as head of the Central Command, and Undersecretary of Defense Michèle Flournoy were called to testify about the war. Both offered encouragement, but when Petraeus told lawmakers that he did not consider the upcoming December review Obama had ordered an important milestone, the president again went to his commanders.

"We have reminded them that there is going to be one," the official said, referring to the military. "And I think they understand."

One year, from strategy announcement to major reassessment, "will have been long enough for us to get a really good sense of how we're doing in Helmand, and to get an initial sense of the trend lines for Kandahar," he said. "It's important for everyone to see," including other nations with troops in Afghanistan, "but also the Afghans themselves, that there is a tide that's moving in a certain direction. A favorable direction, hopefully."

On Tuesday, lawmakers criticized the Pentagon's failure to supervise trucking contracts for contributing to widespread corruption in Afghanistan.

As they awaited Obama's decision on McChrystal, some officials searched for a silver lining in the thunderclouds, or at least a lull in the downpour. "Ideally this will create a moment to clarify what the mission is, what we're doing to try to make it a success, and that we are all on the same page here," one said.

"This is the policy we agreed to -- among the civilian leadership and the military brass," he said.

[Milne Bay]

Everyone knows that the Americans are going to go home.
Two years, five years ten years - it doesn't matter how long it takes, they will get tired of this and go home.
And when they do, everyone else will leave as well, if they haven't gone already.
All that the Taleban have to do is hang around until then.
The Afghanistan government and much of its bureaucracy are either inept, corrupt or both.
Those who have decided to pursue a career with the current Afghanistan administration and really want to make a difference, must be wondering if they have backed the right horse.
From what we read, the bulk of the population just want to get on with their lives and are ambivalent about who it is who is in power.
Does anyone honestly think that in twenty or thirty years time, Afghanistan will be a functioning democracy, or that fundamentalist terrorism will be eliminated?
MB

[Deks]

You know, they haven't had a functioning modern society before.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/05/27/once_upon_a_time_in_afghanistan?page=full

Anything is possible IMHO.

[buglerbilly]

McChrystal Ousted, Petraeus Takes Over

By ANDREW TILGHMAN

Published: 23 Jun 2010 14:06

President Barack Obama relieved of command the four-star general who has led the war in Afghanistan for the past 12 months, ending a rare public schism between military and civilian authorities.


Gen. Stanley McChrystal arrives at the White House in Washington, D.C. on June 23 before his meeing with President Barack Obama. (Nicholas Kamm / AFP via Getty Images)

Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal will leave his post and day-to-day control over the war effort there will be handled by Army Gen. David Petraeus, the chief of U.S. Central Command in the Middle East, Obama said in remarks at the White House on June 23.

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"This is a change in personnel but it is not a change in policy," Obama said.

The White House summoned McChrystal from Afghanistan Tuesday after publication of an article in Rolling Stone magazine that feature him and his staff members disparaging White House officials.

Obama said McChrystal displayed "conduct [that] does not meet the standards that should be set by a commanding general. It undermines the civilian control of the military that is at the core of our democratic system"

It is important to show that the same rules apply to "the newly enlisted private and to the general officer who commands him," Obama said.

Obama said he did not accept McChrystal's resignation based on any disagreement in policy or "out of any sense of personal insult."

"Stan McChrystal has always showed great courtesy and carried out my orders faithfully," Obama said.

Obama made several gracious comments about McChrystal, but also signaled that his career may be over. The president said the nation should be grateful for McChrystal's "remarkable career in uniform."

McChrystal left the White House abruptly Wednesday morning after a half-hour meeting with the president and before a scheduled war strategy session. The general was seen climbing into a van outside the White House shortly after 10 a.m.

Obama reportedly convened a war strategy session in the Situation Room about an hour later, apparently without McChrystal.

McChrystal later issued a statement saying he resigned out of "a desire to see the mission succeed."

"I strongly support the president's strategy in Afghanistan," McChrystal said.

In the magazine article, McChrystal did not criticize Obama himself, but he was quoted mocking Vice President Joe Biden. McChrystal called the period last fall when the president was deciding whether to approve more troops "painful" and said Obama appeared ready to hand him an "unsellable" position.

Sources told the Rolling Stone reporter that McChrystal thought Obama looked "uncomfortable and intimidated" during a meeting with military brass last year.

McChrystal told Rolling Stone that he was "betrayed" by Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, the man the White House chose to be his diplomatic partner in Afghanistan. He accused Eikenberry of raising doubts about Afghan President Hamid Karzai only to give himself cover in case the U.S. effort failed. "Now, if we fail, they can say 'I told you so,'" McChrystal told the magazine.

The political meltdown between the president and his wartime general was the most intense public spat between civilian and military leaders since President Harry Truman stripped Gen. Douglas MacArthur of his command more than a half-century ago after disagreements over Korean War strategy. MacArthur wanted to expand the Korean War into China.

Some military observers wondered whether McChrystal's comments in the magazine amounted to a violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice's Article 88, which forbids "any commissioned officer" from uttering "contemptuous words against the President, the Vice President" and other high-level officials.

For service members, the episode seemed to pit the urgent needs of the Afghanistan mission against the long-term integrity of military discipline and the chain of command.

"Yes, the comments made by his staff were inappropriate and should not be tolerated, but the war in Afghanistan is at a key point right now and the United States cannot afford to lose him. Can anyone think of anyone else more qualified to run the war in Afghanistan?" said Army Spc. Matthew McBride at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., in an e-mail to Military Times.

Marine Sgt. James Day supported Obama's decision.

"Gen. McChrystal … has shown a history of bad decisions as a general including the cover-up of the true cause of death of Pat Tillman. At least he was given another chance after that and he failed to clean up his act," Day wrote in an e-mail to Military Times. "I was punished for writing a letter to the editor and didn't get a second chance. Freedom of speech does not apply to the Army. Should be the same for generals as for other ranks."

Navy Lt. Cmdr. Dan Buckler said McChrystal's mistake was in violating what many people call "the Washington Post rule."

"I'm a Navy officer and we vent to each other all the time about politicians," Buckler said. "But we follow the "don't-end-up-on-the-Washington-Post rule."

[buglerbilly]

White House: Petraeus Will Shed CENTCOM Post

By JOHN T. BENNETT

Published: 23 Jun 2010 16:49

U.S. Army Gen. David Petraeus will give up his post as U.S. Central Command chief to take over for ousted Afghanistan commander Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the White House said June 23. That's essentially a demotion for Petraeus, who as CentCom commander oversaw McChrystal.


During a Rose Garden press briefing, President Barack Obama announced McChrystal's departure and his intention to nominate Petraeus to take over. (Getty Images)

During a Rose Garden press briefing, President Barack Obama announced McChrystal's departure and his intention to nominate Petraeus to take over. Missing was any mention of whether Petraeus would keep his Central Command post.

"He'll give up CENTCOM," White House spokesman Tommy Vietor said.

He referred questions about who might take over the top post at CENTCOM headquarters in Tampa, Fla., to the Pentagon.

McChrystal resigned in a morning White House meeting with Obama after a controversy erupted surrounding a Rolling Stone magazine article in which the general and his staff are highly critical of the president and his top lieutenants.

In the piece, posted June 22 on the magazine's website, McChrystal and his staff are quoted - often by name - criticizing the president, Vice President Joseph Biden, National Security Adviser James Jones, U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry, and Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Earlier on June 23, the Pentagon indicated Petraeus would be "dual-hatted" as both Afghanistan commander and CENTCOM boss. That no longer appears to be the case.

Ray DuBois, once a senior adviser to former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfled and now an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, hailed the president's intention to put Petraeus in charge of the Afghanistan mission.

"He has both the skill set and the temperament to do what needs to be done in Afghanistan," DuBois said. "These kinds of jobs require you are skilled at the politics of the E Ring, the politics of Kabul and the politics of the Afghan warlords. And a lesson here is that [special operations] guys just don't have the skill set for that."

On the matter of whether Petraeus should hold both jobs, DuBois said yes.

"There's no reason to distract him with a confirmation hearing process," DuBois said. "He's already been confirmed by the Senate. So why not keep him as CENTCOM commander and send him to Kabul tonight?"

While dual-hatting him would give Petraeus a portfolio that includes the laundry list of issues over CENTCOM's area of responsibility, which stretches from northeastern Africa to central Asia, DuBois said other senior administration and Pentagon officials could simply step up their involvement on issues like Iran's nuclear weapons and the coming Iraq withdrawal.

Earlier in the day, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell had said defense officials had not identified a nominee to take over as CENTCOM chief.

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., said he expects to hold a confirmation hearing for Petraeus no later than June 29.

[buglerbilly]

Denmark: New MRAPs Must Be Funded With 2010 Budget

By GERARD O'DWYER

Published: 23 Jun 2010 17:19

HELSINKI, Finland - Denmark's military has come under increased pressure from government and opposition parties to acquire new Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) personnel carriers that provide superior armored chassis protection.

The pressure has intensified following the latest fatalities and injuries suffered during IED attacks on Danish ISAF troops in Afghanistan. The Armed Forces Command (AFC) has informed the Ministry of Defense (MoD) that it cannot afford to buy MRAPs under its 2010 defense budget.

The Danish government has signaled its support for the purchase, but remains opposed to providing supplemental funding.

Defense Minister Gitte Lillelund Bech said the government would not block an MRAP purchase to better protect Danish troops in Afghanistan.

"This is for the armed forces to decide, but they must do it within the agreed budget framework," the minister said.

The Danish Armed Forces' (DAF) most recent casualties came on June 13 when four soldiers from an engineering unit were injured when their Piranha APC was hit by a roadside IED while near their patrol base at Budwar. One of the four soldiers later died of his injuries.

On June 2, a female Danish soldier died after an IED-attack while on patrol in a Piranha IIIC PC near the Danish base at Bridzar north of Gereshk in Helmand Province. The soldier was a gunner in the DAF's mechanized infantry C company.

The DAF has suffered 31 troop-combat fatalities in Afghanistan since 2001, the highest number per capita of population than any other ISAF country.

In talks with the MoD on June 20, the AFC underlined that it would need time to evaluate MRAP options, observing that not all MRAP vehicles offered guaranteed protection against IEDs.

"Ultimately, this is an issue for the military. They must decide what to do to provide better protection to Danish troops in Afghanistan. If the armed forces' chiefs believe that they need improved armored vehicles, then they should tell the government just that. Safety, and providing the best equipment for the job, must be the first priority," said John Dyrby Poulsen, the Social Democrat's spokesman on defense.

The DAF began testing newly acquired CV9035 DK IFV armored vehicles in Helmand province last February. Other armored vehicles deployed by the DAF in Afghanistan include the Mowag Eagle IV and Armored Mercedes-Benz Gelaendewagens.

[buglerbilly]

Aussie Afghan Pullout Slated in 2 Years

June 23, 2010

Associated Press

CANBERRA, Australia -- Australia may start withdrawing troops from Afghanistan in two years if its mission to train Afghan soldiers goes as planned, the defense minister said Wednesday.

The timetable, while loose, was the most detailed yet given by Canberra for bringing troops home from an almost nine-year-old war that is increasingly unpopular among Australians. And it added pressure on a U.S. administration struggling to show progress against a stubborn insurgency, while losing key allies along the way.

Most of Australia's 1,550 troops in Afghanistan are in Uruzgan, a southern province with a significant Taliban presence, where they are training an Afghan National Army brigade to take over security and stability.

The mission had been expected to take between three to five years. Defense Minister John Faulkner shortened that Wednesday, saying the latest advice from defense chiefs is it could be completed between two and four years.

"What that means is that at some time in that two-year to four-year timeframe we would see our training mission transition to an over-watch role, and that would obviously mean ... we would start to see a reduction in the number of troops in Afghanistan," Faulkner told reporters.

Faulkner's comments marked the first time an Australian official has offered a possible timetable on plans to begin pulling forces out of the war-torn country.

Neil James, executive director of the independent security think tank Australian Defense Association, described the announcement as significant.

"They're no longer talking about restoring security to the province. They're saying, 'once we've trained up the Afghans, that's it,'" James said.

Polls show public support for Australia's military involvement in Afghanistan is waning, raising pressure on Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to find an exit.

That pressure was underscored by the deaths of five Australian soldiers in the past two weeks in Afghanistan, for a total of 16 since the war began in 2001 -- the country's worst record of military deaths abroad since Vietnam.

Other U.S. allies have even firmer plans to leave Afghanistan -- the Netherlands is pulling out its 1,600 troops in August, and Canada plans to withdraw its 2,800 troops next year. Poland wants to scale back its 2,600 forces starting next year.

Britain's new government is reviewing its Afghanistan strategy, though Washington's staunchest ally says no reduction in troop numbers is being considered anytime soon.

Faulkner also said a U.S.-led multinational force will replace the Dutch troops in Uruzgan, where they have a leadership role.

Observers had said Australia was well placed to increase its own troops and take over from the Dutch, but the Australian government ruled out sending more soldiers.

Faulkner sidestepped questions on the controversy enveloping the Afghanistan war commander, U.S. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, over disparaging comments he made about President Barack Obama and his top aides.

Obama has summoned McChrystal to Washington for a rebuke.

"I do believe that is matter for Gen. McChrystal and the U.S. administration, but ... I note that he acknowledged he shouldn't have said what he did say ... He's apologized for his error of judgment," Faulkner said.

In a similar vein, New Zealand Prime Minister John Key said McCrystal's comments were an issue for Washington and made no difference to his country's commitment to Afghanistan. New Zealand has about 140 troops there.

© Copyright 2010 Associated Press. All rights reserved.

[buglerbilly]

McChrystal Aides Shocked, ‘Heartbroken’ After Mag Profile (Updated)

By Noah Shachtman June 23, 2010 | 10:20 am



I’ve spoken with a number of current and former aides to General Stanley McChrystal today. None of them felt like going on-the-record; no surprise there. But their reactions to his incendiary profile in Rolling Stone mostly ranged from shock to dismay to sadness to think-I’m-gonna-puke.

All of them remain loyal — fiercely loyal — to McChrystal and to his counterinsurgency approach to warfighting. But they feel like McChrystal was done in by his inner circle, by an adversarial reporter, and possibly by the strains of seven years of near-constant war. Few recognized the man portrayed in the Rolling Stone piece. Several expected President Obama to let McChrystal go tomorrow.


“It’s heartbreaking for me,” said one International Security Assistance Force officer who worked in Kabul. “He’s the best officer we have over there. Rolling Stone’s portrayal of COIN [counterinsurgency] and of McChrystal’s strategy as some fringe approach is silly. We’re fighting the best strategy we could possibly fight. It’s still not a great strategy, because the time for a great strategy passed six years ago. We missed whatever golden opportunities we had by taking our eyes off the ball in Afghanistan when the insurgency barely existed. Now we’re doing nation-building under fire. The effort can still be salvaged, but McChrystal was the best man to salvage it.”

Inside the Pentagon, feelings are mixed. The Rolling Stone article was a mistake, sure. But mostly, it was a bunch of macho-talk by anonymous assistants. The expectation is that Obama will simply let McChrystal twist in the wind to satisfy a D.C. media frenzy — and then send the general back to Kabul. The hope is that the White House won’t have fatally undermined McChrystal in the process.

In Kabul and inside the Beltway, there’s a lot of anger being directed at Duncan Boothby, the strategic communications advisor who arranged the Rolling Stone interviews. Boothby, a former producer for Lou Dobbs’ television show, spent years counseling generals on improving their outreach. Those senior officers would sometimes appear on the most unlikely of media outlets. Ft. Leavenworth commander Lieutenant General William Caldwell, for instance, promoted the Army’s new field manual for operations on the Daily Show.

Boothby is one of a handful of former journalists who in recent years became communications aides to top officers and diplomats. USA Today’s Dave Moniz now works as a media advisor to the Chief of Staff of the Air Force and other top officers. Time magazine’s Sally Donnelly is today a special assistant to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen. The Chicago Tribune’s Bay Fang currently works in Afghanistan as a strategic communications advisor to the State Department. Some of these advisors were policy-focused. David S. Cloud briefly assisted U.S. ambassador to Kabul Karl Eikenberry before returning to journalism; he’s now with the Los Angeles Times. Rosa Brooks, a former Times columnist, advises Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy and also serves as a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense.

All of these leading officials have public affairs assistants, as well. But with their journalism backgrounds, these strategic communicators are supposed to be more media-savvy than the civil servants or the servicemembers. They largely operate behind the scenes, connecting the officials to influencers and opinion-makers; meanwhile, the public affairs specialists are supposed to set up the bulk of the press interviews. But the boundaries between the two jobs can get pretty porous. So often, there’s a bit of tension between the “SC” and “PA” types. Rarely does it rise to this level.

Update: McChrystal’s former colleagues are, if anything, even more pissed off than the general’s current coterie. “I never thought I would say this,” one field-grade special forces officer tells Sean Naylor.


“Until this article I was a huge McChrystal fan. I was just floored at how immature he came across.”

“Every son of a b—- near McChrystal should be fired as well,” the field grade SF officer said. “Every one of those guys.”

Already in Afghanistan, there’s a deep divide between the special forces and the regular troops. To oversimplify, the SF guys think they’re carrying most of the load. The standard-issue troops view the SF crowd as a bunch of cowboys who overcomplicate the mission by using force recklessly. Lines like this one from the Rolling Stone piece aren’t going to help bridge that gap:


“You better be out there hitting four or five targets tonight,” McChrystal will tell a Navy Seal he sees in the hallway at headquarters. Then he’ll add, “I’m going to have to scold you in the morning for it, though.”

Photo: White House

Read More http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/06/mcchrystal-aides-shocked-heartbroken-after-mag-profile/#more-26379#ixzz0rkZxwk3s

[buglerbilly]

Ares

A Defense Technology Blog

Wise Words From Gen. Mattis

Posted by Paul McLeary at 6/23/2010 10:33 AM CDT

Given everything that has happened over the past several days with the mess Gen. McChrystal and his staff have created with their immature and ill-considered comments to a Rolling Stone reporter, I thought it would be interesting to rerun this quote from Gen. James Mattis, JFCOM chief (and rumored replacement for McChrystal as he is replaced this morning). Back in May, JFCOM held its annual conference in Norfolk, Va, during which Mattis has this to say about leadership:


“In this age,” he said, “I don’t care how tactically or operationally brilliant you are, if you cannot create harmony—even vicious harmony—on the battlefield based on trust across service lines, across coalition and national lines, and across civilian/military lines, you need to go home, because your leadership is obsolete. We have got to have officers who can create harmony across all those lines.”

[buglerbilly]

Ares

A Defense Technology Blog

Exposing Afghan Cyber-crime to the Light

Posted by David A. Fulghum at 6/23/2010 11:07 AM CDT

The war on corruption in Afghanistan may finally get serious attention, but whether there are results is another matter.

The targets of interest are cyber-crimes including financial scams, organized crime, blackmail, bureaucratic corruption or spying via networked communications.

The weapons of choice include software that tracks social media connections and money transfer processes. Hardware and software options include high-speed, purely optical, photonic switches and fiber optics that allow the fast access and distribution of massive amounts of data for processing and rapid analyses by intelligence agencies.

Afghanistan – notorious for corruption at every level of society, business and government – is to become a test case for redirecting such technology and intelligence techniques toward solving internal abuses. While al Qaeda, the Taliban and temporary residents of the un-policed Pakistani tribal lands have been the primary target for intelligence-gathering, the Afghan bureaucracy may soon have equal status in observation and analyses of its activities.


“The technology to monitor [internally] exists and is being acquired by many governments around the world to suppress criminal activity and corruption,” says a senior Pentagon official with insight into Afghan operations. “The main underlying reason is to track foreign entities and anti-government groups in[side threatened] countries. This specifically can be applied to Afghanistan.”

However, corruption is an ingrained element of a culture that is based on family, tribal and village ties rather than rule of law.


“It’s easy to talk about universal terrorism,” says a veteran, U.S. intelligence specialist. “It’s tougher to talk about what countries are doing internally to police themselves. They face problems from corruption, extortion, kidnapping and international or local Mafia. Commerce is another threatened area. Are there basic core capabilities being stolen?”

“The current direction of technology is to monitor [communications] traffic optically with something that can select a particular optical fiber [selected from among thousands] on demand,” says Robert Lundy, president & CEO of Glimmerglass Networks, a company that builds advanced intelligence optical systems to remotely access, sort and distribute massive amounts of data flowing through fiber optic conduits. “Once you have extracted the wavelengths, you can dynamically select the ones you are interested in and do it all from a remote location. If we were [installed] at an operations center of some country, our systems could be used to look at all the international entry and exit points for fiber optics.”

As the mid-point of an 18-mo. buildup of NATO troops in Afghanistan nears, additional intelligence gathering capabilities, new techniques and tools such as specialized fusion cells as well as an increase in interrogators and analysts are being focused on internal surveillance.

The effort began late last year when the U.S. created an anti-corruption task force led by U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn, the director of military intelligence for operations in Afghanistan. Early targets have been border police, drug traffickers and politicians.


“More than 95% of the world’s transoceanic communication is carried over fiber,” says Keith May, senior director of defense intelligence solutions for Glimmerglass Networks. “That presents a problem to the intelligence communities that since World War II have been learning to intercept radio, microwave and satellite communications.”

“On the intelligence side, the message is that if you are going to protect your citizens by monitoring communications traffic, you need light [and optical tools] because nearly all internet traffic is ultimately on some form of fiber,” Lundy says. “If you are going to monitor it, you need to do much of it optically. You can pick some off cell phones. But clearly, the massive top of the [intelligence gathering] funnel is coming through optically and you need to manage that.”

[buglerbilly]

U.S. troops express mixed views of Gen. McChrystal controversy

By Ernesto Londoño
Washington Post Foreign Service

Thursday, June 24, 2010

KABUL -- Among U.S. troops, opinion was split Wednesday into three camps: those who were rooting for Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, those who were eager to see him ousted, and those who were too deep in the trenches to follow the scandal.


"We have too many things going on here," said 1st. Lt. James Rathmann, a platoon leader deployed in Kandahar. "As a soldier, you just follow orders."

The Internet had been shut down temporarily at Rathmann's base because a soldier had been killed. His men had heard snippets about a magazine story and a brewing scandal. But the frenzy in Washington was an afterthought for many of the troops on the front lines of a worsening conflict.


"I don't really know what's going on," said Rathmann, 31. "I heard he had to go to Washington?"

Those who rallied around the embattled general called his candor refreshing and his acumen indisputable. On Facebook, fans created pages urging McChrystal to run for president in 2012. Users, many of them troops, posted hundreds of comments on pages dedicated to the general.


"Gen. McChrystal has tried to take the tactful, respectful and appropriate response for months now, to no avail," said a 30-year-old sergeant first class who was deployed to Afghanistan in 2004 and is scheduled to return next year. "His hands keep getting tied. . . . He's the one that gets blamed by the families and the troops when we suffer more casualties. But the ones who should bear that burden are the people in D.C. who make the decisions about our actions."

Like other troops, the sergeant, who is on active duty, spoke on the condition of anonymity to remark candidly on a controversy involving senior commanders.

Support for the general was far from universal among service members. The Rolling Stone article that led to McChrystal's dismissal gave voice to frustration among troops who feel the general's directives, which sharply curtailed the use of lethal force, had made them more vulnerable.


"He should be fired," said a 23-year-old specialist who recently completed a deployment in Afghanistan. "Today's rules of engagement in Afghanistan is a Taliban weapon that is commonly used against American forces."

As a 30,000-troop surge recommended by McChrystal gets underway, June is shaping up to be the deadliest month for NATO service members since the nearly nine-year-old war began.

On Wednesday, NATO officials announced the death of eight service members, including two killed Tuesday. The deaths raised this month's death toll for the U.S.-led international force to 75, the same number killed last July, which set a record.

[buglerbilly]

Building Afghan Air Corps Expensive Task

(Source: Voice of America news; issued June 23, 2010)

In Afghanistan, planes and helicopters are essential for moving troops and supplies, providing air support for ground forces and keeping an eye on insurgents.

The war in Afghanistan makes Kandahar air field one of the busiest single runway airports in the world. It is located in the country's south, and jets and helicopters take off and land every few minutes all day and all night long.

In one corner of the vast airfield, Afghan technicians bring in a (Soviet-era) helicopter for repair. The technicians are part of the Afghan Air Corps -- a force NATO hopes someday will take over this airfield and others around the country.

Colonel Abdul Halim heads maintenance here. He says under the Taliban, the Air Corps was essentially held prisoner and forced to fly and to maintain the aircraft. Now he says, the Afghans are basically starting from nothing.

Captain Chris Tooman says these helicopters may be more than 30 years old, but they can take off and land at high altitudes in relatively small spaces, and are mechanically robust. "Extremely reliable, we have very few issues with them. They're perfect for this type of environment," he said.

At this weekly meeting, the Afghan Air Corps officers discuss their concerns with NATO officers. The Afghans say they cannot get the supplies or the support they need from their fellow Afghans and NATO. Colonel Bernard Mater, the chief NATO mentor, understands the problem. "There aren't enough resources to be able to do all of the missions and all of the support that's necessary to help the government of Afghanistan to improve their capacity to support the people of Afghanistan," he stated.

The Air Corps' main task now is moving Afghan troops and officials around the country. In Kandahar, the Corps has only four helicopters and one is out of commission because of a damaged rotor. Overall the force has about 50 helicopters and aircraft. NATO wants to triple that and more than double the number of personnel -- from 3,300 today to 8,000.

Building Afghanistan's Air Corps will take some time. It takes years to train a pilot, and Afghans have to learn not only how to fly the plane, but also how to speak English, the language of international aviation.

The average age of an Afghan pilot is 45, and so far only one new Afghan pilot has completed training. And because of their age, most pilots will need to be replaced in the next decade. During the civil wars and Taliban rule of the 1990s, Afghans did not develop aviation skills. NATO officials say it will be years before Afghans can control their own air space and patrol their own skies. Even so the Afghan president wants the corps to be known as an air force.

There was a recent sign of progress though, when a commercial aircraft crashed in a remote area of Afghanistan in May, the Afghan Air Corps led the search and recovery effort.

-ends-

[buglerbilly]

RAF Helicopter Crews Train for Afghanistan in Jordanian Desert

(Source: U.K Ministry of Defence; issued June 23, 2010)

Royal Air Force helicopter crews have been training in the Jordanian desert for the first time in preparation for operations in Afghanistan and to develop relations with the Royal Jordanian Air Force.

Over 300 personnel from RAF Benson and RAF Odiham, many preparing to go to Afghanistan for the first time, took part in Exercise Desert Vortex in Jordan.

Wing Commander John Watson was the Detachment Commander during the month-long exercise at King Faisal Air Base near Amman. He said:


"This is the first bilateral training exercise between the Royal Jordanian Air Force and elements of our Joint Helicopter Force. We have had six Chinooks from RAF Odiham and three Merlins from RAF Benson, along with aircrew, engineers and support staff from the two stations.

"There were three main reasons to use Jordan; to develop relationships with their Air Force, to carry out pre-deployment training for Afghanistan and to provide environmental training in realistic and similar conditions to those we will face on operations."

For many of the newly-qualified pilots, this was the first time they had experienced flying in desert conditions.

Chinook pilot Flying Officer Tom Knapp has recently joined 18 Squadron at RAF Odiham and is due to deploy in August. He said:


"You can't replicate these conditions in the UK. The thin air means the engines and aircraft have to work much harder, and the dust and humidity out here are very similar to that which we will face in Afghanistan, making this a great training opportunity.

"I am a little bit apprehensive but at the same time I am really looking forward to actually getting out there and doing the job that I have been trained to do.

"I'm keeping an open mind about what I might find out in Afghanistan - from what I have heard it will be challenging and I know I will be faced with things I haven't experienced before. But I love handling the Chinook. In particular I enjoy the dust landings, and working with the crew and engineers."

For pilots to complete a dust landing they rely on the assistance of the rear crew - the loadmasters - such as Sergeant Rebecca Nicholls from 18 Squadron.

Sergeant Nicholls explained:


"Dust landings are when we come into an area where the pilots can lose sight of references on the ground - the dust cloud envelopes the whole of the aircraft, making it difficult for the pilots to see.

"We become the pilot's eyes; we tell them how far off the ground we are, and whether there is any danger to be aware of."

Sergeant Nicholls also explained the role of a loadmaster:


"Basically we are in charge of anything that goes on in the back - troops coming on or off, freight carried inside or beneath the helicopter, and we also assist the pilots in navigating.

"Underslung loads are when we carry a load underneath - the pilots are looking out the front, they can't see what's going on beneath the aircraft, so we are essentially a 'satellite navigation' system for them; we tell them where they need to be above the load, whether they are too high, too low, if they need to come right or left a bit."

In the last three years Sergeant Nicholls has already clocked up three winter tours in Afghanistan, and will be going out this year during the summer:


"Going to Afghanistan has become normal for me now; it's become part of my life. I know that every ten months I'll be going out for two months, but I enjoy my job - it's active and interesting," she said.

Alongside the Chinook crews were 90 instructors, aircrew and engineers from RAF Benson.

Squadron Leader Mark Biggadike from 78 Squadron oversaw the Merlin Force part of the exercise:


"We've been training Merlin pilots and crewmen who have never operated in a desert before," he said.

"It's quite a step up for the new guys, they have come straight out of training onto the Merlin Force, and this is their first time operating the aircraft in these kinds of conditions.

"At a higher altitude the air is thinner, and it's hot, so training to fly in Jordan is invaluable. Learning how to land in dust clouds and fly at night in very low light conditions are areas we have been concentrating on.

"As a result of this exercise in Jordan we now have another team of environmentally-qualified aircrew who will be ready for deployment to Afghanistan. During their time in Jordan, the Merlins have clocked up in excess of 230 flying hours, and carried out more than 900 dust landings - the training has gone very well."

-ends-

[buglerbilly]

Defence Secretary Dr Liam Fox comments on General McChrystal

A Defence Policy and Business news article

24 Jun 10

Defence Secretary Dr Liam Fox has spoken to the media about yesterday's resignation of General Stanley McChrystal from his post as Commander of US and NATO coalition forces in Afghanistan.

In a statement published on NATO's ISAF website General McChrystal said:


"This morning the President accepted my resignation as Commander of US and NATO coalition forces in Afghanistan.

"I strongly support the President's strategy in Afghanistan and am deeply committed to our coalition forces, our partner nations, and the Afghan people. It was out of respect for this commitment and a desire to see the mission succeed that I tendered my resignation.

"It has been my privilege and honour to lead our nation's finest."

Speaking to the British media Dr Liam Fox said:


"I think the first thing is to pay tribute to General McChrystal and his leadership and his total transformation of the strategy in Afghanistan.

"General Petraeus is an outstanding General who will lead ISAF, I think, with distinction. I think the other thing to say is that Britain stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the United States in our determination to see through the mission in Afghanistan."

Asked whether ISAF's strategy in Afghanistan will remain the same, as it was General McChrystal who wrote it, Dr Fox said:


"Well, it's very clear that that is now the coalition strategy; that we have a clear counter-insurgency mission in place; that we intend to be resolute in that mission; and that with General Parker, the British General taking over temporarily, we will get continuity, as we must have in this extremely important struggle against the trans-national terrorists who are making life difficult in that part of the world."

Asked whether the Taliban will be rejoicing at what they might perceive as division at the top of the NATO command, Dr Fox said:


"There can be no celebration amongst our enemies, the Taliban or anybody else, because it's very clear that we're getting a continuity in policy; that General Parker, taking over temporarily will provide that continuity, and General Petraeus will continue the policy of counter-insurgency that General McChrystal started.

"I think General McChrystal contributed a huge amount personally to the strategy being created in the way that it has, in shaping it and taking it forward, and we're enormously grateful to him for that.

"General Petraeus is enormously distinguished, as we know, and will continue that leadership, and the struggle will go on with the strategy that was set out."

[buglerbilly]

Four British soldiers drown in Afghanistan canal

Four British soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan after their vehicle drove off the road into a deep canal at night.

By Thomas Harding, Defence Correspondent

Published: 11:09AM BST 24 Jun 2010


An 18 ton Ridgback armoured vehicle patrols the streets of Lashkar Gah Photo: PA

Rolled when it went into the canal?

It is understood that all four men were drowned when their 18 ton Ridgback armoured vehicle plunged into the Nar-e-Bughra canal while travelling to an incident at a nearby checkpoint.

Colleagues believed to be travelling in a second vehicle were unable to rescue the men from the deep and fast flowing canal that provides irrigation for much of central Helmand.

The accident happened at 11pm on Wednesday night and it is likely that the driver of the Ridgback was travelling using night vision aids rather than headlights in an area that is under threat of IEDs (improvised explosive devices).

The track next to the canal is unmarked and has no crash barriers. It is also the first time soldiers have been killed in the Ridgback which has proven very resilient against IEDs.

Three of the soldiers were from the 1 Bn Mercian Regiment along with a soldier from the 1 Bn the Yorkshire Regiment who was attached to the Mercians.

The soldiers, part of a Police Advisory Team, were killed in what the Ministry of Defence called a “vehicle incident” near the town of Gereshk.

The deaths bring the total British fatalities for this month to 18, the worst since last August. The most killed in a month came last July when 22 died when the Panther’s Claw operation was underway.

The total number of British dead in Afghanistan now stands at 307 since 2001.

Lt Col James Carr-Smith, the British military spokesman in Helmand,: said: “It is with great sadness I must inform you that four soldiers were killed last night in northern Nahr-e Saraj, Helmand Province. They were part of a team that was travelling to assist in an incident at a nearby check point when they were killed in a vehicle incident. They will be sorely missed and their actions will not be forgotten. We will remember them.”

Next of kin have been informed and have asked for a 24 hour period of grace before further details are released.

[buglerbilly]

Afghanistan dismay after Barack Obama fires Gen Stanley McChrystal

The dismissal of Gen Stanley McChrystal, the US commander in Afghanistan, was greeted with dismay in Kabul where Afghans and foreign diplomats praised his bold efforts to reshape the war.

Published: 12:50PM BST 24 Jun 2010


Gen McChrystal's counter-insurgency strategy had been credited with bringing some order to a chaotic and spiralling conflict Photo: AFP/GETTY

The Taliban vowed the change in command would not halt their fight against foreign troops, as Nato marked a grim milestone with June becoming the deadliest month for its soldiers since the war began almost nine years ago.

Gen McChrystal's counter-insurgency strategy, which brought sweeping changes aimed at cutting civilian casualties and winning over the population, had been credited with bringing some order to a chaotic and spiralling conflict.

Hamid Karzai's government had publicly urged the White House not to remove Gen McChrystal over disparaging remarks he made about officials in Barack Obama's administration in a Rolling Stone profile.

A spokesman for Mr Karzai – whose relations with the White House have been troubled – praised Gen McChrystal as a "trusted partner of the Afghan people" and said his removal would "not be helpful" at this critical juncture.

Waheed Omar, Mr Karzai's spokesman, speaking before Gen McChrystal's removal on Wednesday following Gen McChrystal's Rolling Stone profile, said Kabul believed the US general had made a mistake but it should not detract from the urgency of trying to bring peace and stability to Afghanistan.

"For the continuation of the process in Afghanistan and the critical time that we've ahead – his presence is going to be greatly important."

However, the Afghan government later said it respected Mr Obama's decision and welcomed the appointment of David Petraeus, the general credited with changing the direction of the Iraq conflict, to succeed Gen McChrystal.

"His replacement General David Petraeus is someone who knows Afghanistan, who knows the region very well and is an experienced general," Mr Omar said. "We are looking forward to working with him."

Nato's announcement of the deaths of four troops in a vehicle accident in southern Afghanistan made June the deadliest single month for US-led foreign forces in the nearly nine-year conflict.

The incident brought to 79 the number of foreign troops who have died as a result of the conflict in Afghanistan so far this month, eclipsing the previous most deadly month last August, when 77 Nato soldiers were killed.

The US military has warned that casualties will inevitably mount as foreign forces build up their campaign to oust militants from the southern province of Kandahar, the Taliban's spiritual home and a hotbed of violence.

The removal of Gen McChrystal, a brilliant former special operations chief who was appointed commander in June last year of what has become America's longest war, saw the Taliban react with customary defiance.

"We don't care whether it's McChrystal or Petraeus," Taliban spokesman Yousuf Ahmadi said.

"We'll be fighting the invading forces until they leave."

Nato's senior civilian representative in Afghanistan Mark Sedwill called Gen McChrystal "one of the finest men I have ever known" who "was pivotal in creating and driving forward Nato's strategy in Afghanistan".

"This strategy remains the basis of the campaign. The campaign remains on course. The Afghan people should have no doubt of our commitment to building a stable Afghanistan and a safer world," Sedwill said.

Vygaudas Usackas, EU special envoy to Afghanistan, said Gen McChrystal would be remembered for "shaping a new paradigm for the military in defence of civilians and empowering the Afghan nation".

Gen McChrystal's strategy poured tens of thousands of extra troops into Afghanistan to win over civilians and train local forces.

He won early praise for a drop in civilian casualties, for reaching out to Afghans and for working overtime to bring Mr Karzai on board.

The Afghan presidency credited Gen McChrystal with helping to "increase the level of trust" with the Afghan people since he assumed command last year.

Mr Karzai and Mr Obama have endured months of discord and worsening relations, but made an effort to present a united front during the Afghan leader's last visit to Washington on May 12.

[buglerbilly]

Five Americans jailed in Pakistan for plotting terrorist attacks

Five American students have been sentenced to 10 years in Pakistani prisons after being found guilty of plotting terrorist attacks.

Rob Crilly in Islamabad

Published: 12:42PM BST 24 Jun 2010


Aman Hassan Yemer, (L), Ahmed Abdulah Minni, (2nd L), Waqar Hussain Khan, (R), Ramy Zamzam, (L rear) and Umar Farooq (R rear) Photo: REUTERS

The men, all Muslims, were arrested in the eastern city of Sargodha in December.

Their families in Virginia reported them missing a month earlier after finding a farewell video message calling for Muslims to be protected.

The case is particularly sensitive for American officials trying to come to terms with young men apparently being radicalised within the US – such as Faisal Shahzad, who this week pleaded guilty to the botched Times Square plot.

However, Hassan Katchela, their defence lawyer, said the men planned to launch an appeal.

"These boys had watched reports of how the Afghan people were living – especially the orphans – and they came here to help," he told The Daily Telegraph.

Umar Farooq, Waqar Hussain, Rami Zamzam, Ahmad Abdullah Mini and Amman Hassan Yammer had faced a maximum punishment of life in prison if convicted of all charges.

The judge found them guilty of two charges - criminal conspiracy and funding a terrorist group - but acquitted them of three other charges.

Police officers said they had email evidence that they had been in contact with militant groups and were found with maps of Chasma Barrage in Punjab, an area close to a nuclear power facility.

The men said they had come to Pakistan for Farooq's wedding in Sargodha and planned to travel to Afghanistan - but said they wanted to distribute medicine and financial aid.

They also claimed to have been framed.

A note written on toilet paper and hurled from a prison van as they arrived for a court hearing earlier this year, read: "Since our arrest the USA, the FBI and Pakistani police have tortured us. They are trying to set us up. We are innocent."

[buglerbilly]

Obama Faces Calls To Shake Up Afghan Diplomatic Team

AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE

Published: 24 Jun 2010 17:52

U.S. President Obama faced calls June 24 to follow the sacking of his commander in the Afghan war with a shake-up of the diplomatic team, amid strained military-civilian relations.


One day after U.S. Army Gen. David Petraeus was tapped as the new commander of the Afghanistan war, some lawmakers and commentators argued for the replacement of U.S. civilian envoys, saying it would shore up ties with the Afghan government. (NICOLAS KAMM / AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE)

A day after U.S. Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal was forced to step down from the Kabul command, some lawmakers and commentators argued for the replacement of U.S. civilian envoys, saying it would shore up ties with the Afghan government and put an end to damaging in-fighting within the administration.

McChrystal's disdainful remarks to a magazine about the U.S. envoy to the region, Richard Holbrooke, and the U.S. ambassador to Kabul, Karl Eikenberry, led to his abrupt exit, but also underlined signs of a toxic relationship between the military commander and his civilian counterparts.

"The civilian side is, in my view, completely dysfunctional," Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said June 23.

"I would urge the president to look at this as a chance to put new people on the ground without old baggage. And if we don't change quickly, we're going to lose a war we can't afford to lose," he said.

Graham was one of three hawkish senators who quickly demanded a clean sweep, saying too much was at stake to allow turf wars to drag on.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., on June 24 praised the appointment of Army Gen. David Petraeus to take over in Kabul, but told ABC "we also need a new team over there as well - perhaps at the embassy and other areas."

Both Holbrooke and Eikenberry have taken a tough line towards Afghan President Hamid Karzai over allegations of widespread government corruption, and some critics say they have lost influence with Kabul as a result.

"Neither Holbrooke nor Eikenberry has a functional working relationship with President Karzai - Holbrooke because of his early efforts to find a replacement for Karzai during the Afghan election, and Eikenberry because of leaked cables in which he stated that he did not believe Karzai to be an adequate partner," commentator Alexander Benard wrote on the website of National Review magazine.

"So Eikenberry and Holbrooke no longer have any sway over Karzai, and they are not capable of effectively serving as intermediaries between him and President Obama."

There was no immediate sign from the White House that Obama was prepared to relieve top civilians shaping Afghan policy. But the U.S. president did issue a stern warning Wednesday against any more back-biting on his Afghan team.

Skeptics of the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan say the military has been given too prominent a role in diplomacy, and that the top U.S. civilians have pinpointed the weak link in Washington's strategy - the Kabul government.

Holbrooke has conveyed a "tough love" message to Karzai and Eikenberry has rightfully questioned if the Afghan leader was a reliable partner, Peter Galbraith, the former deputy head of the U.N. mission in Afghanistan, told The Cable blog.

But when the Obama administration chose to take a less confrontational approach to Karzai in recent months, Holbrooke and Eikenberry were sidelined, Galbraith said.

"Unfortunately, as part of his love offensive, Obama made a mistake in letting Karzai choose his interlocutor," said Galbraith, who was fired from his U.N. post after alleging his superiors covered up electoral fraud in the presidential polls last year.

Galbraith echoed comments from some on the left that the U.S. government should rely on its diplomats and not generals to communicate its policies.

"The president needs to make clear that it is the ambassador that speaks for the U.S. and the commanding general is not the one who is making U.S. policy."

[buglerbilly]

We’re Not Bogged Down

By Greg Grant Thursday, June 24th, 2010 4:06 pm



While the generals commanding the U.S. led war in Afghanistan might have changed, the strategy and the campaign plan remain the same, Defense Secretary Robert Gates told reporters today.

Gates said his single biggest concern with President Obama’s abrupt dismissal of Gen. Stanley McChrystal was to not allow it to negatively impact the Afghan war effort. Putting Gen. David Petraeus in charge, who he called “one of the great battle captains in American military history,” was the best possible outcome to an “awful situation.”

Obama first suggested Petraeus as a potential replacement for McChrystal, and Gates said it was obvious he was the officer who could move into that position “with hardly a missed beat and continue this campaign.” He emphasized that Petraeus agrees both with the strategy Obama laid out last year and the planned July 2011 drawdown, “which is conditions based,” he added.

He pushed back against reporter’s suggestions that the war in Afghanistan was bogged down or that McChrystal had ordered a delay in the offensive to eject the Taliban from Kandahar. “The Kandahar campaign has been underway for several weeks,” he said, although he acknowledged that the campaign in southern Afghanistan was unfolding more slowly and was more difficult than he anticipated.

On the issue of negotiating with reconcilable elements of the Taliban, Gates said they must suffer more battlefield reverses “before we can sit down with them.”

“Any commander has the flexibility to make changes as he sees fit,” said Joint Chiefs chair, Adm. Mike Mullen, but he did not expect Petraeus to make any significant changes to the campaign plan. “Our focus must be on succeeding in this mission and continuing our efforts in Kandahar.”

On the much discussed and often contentious rules of engagement McChrystal put in place restricting the use of airpower and artillery, Petraeus had approved McChrystal’s various directives intended to reduce civilian casualties, Mullen said. Most of the last 10,000 U.S. troops to arrive as part of the surge over the next few weeks will go to Kandahar.

Mullen said that when he first read the Rolling Stone article that he was nearly physically sick. It was clear from listening to both Gates and Mullen today that the top uniformed leader was the more upset by the disparaging remarks about the Obama administration’s nationals security team by McChrystal and his entourage.

There must be no question about the neutrality of the military, its apolitical aspect or civilian control of the military, Mullen said. “We are and must remain a neutral instrument of the state.”

[buglerbilly]

US, Afghan Forces Hammer Haqqani Network

June 24, 2010

Long War Journal|by Bill Roggio

US and Afghan forces again battled with the deadly Haqqani Network in eastern Afghanistan, near the border with Pakistan earlier this week.

The joint US and Afghan force killed "a large number of insurgents, including several key leaders for both the Haqqani network and Taliban" during a military operation in the Jani Khel district in Paktia province, according to the International Security Assistance Force. "Arabs, Uzbeks, Turks, and Chechens" were among those killed, according to the ISAF report.

The fighting took place during a two-day offensive in Jani Khel that targeted the "largest insurgent camp in the area." Local villagers in Jani Khel joined the fight in an attempt to block the retreat of Haqqani Network fighters into neighboring Khost province.

"When Haqqani network fighters attempted to retreat from Jani Khel to Musa Khel, a neighboring district in Khost, villagers from Kotkai prevented the foreign fighters from moving through their village," ISAF stated.

Among those reported killed were a Haqqani network commander named Hamiddullah, a Taliban commander named Qari Ismael, and a foreign fighter facilitator named Maulawi Sadiq.

Hamiddullah was a Haqqani Network commander in the Sabari district in Khost "who had direct ties to Haqqani senior leadership based in Pakistan," ISAF stated. Sabari is a major stronghold of the the Haqqani Network; it operates a forward command center in the village of Zambar in Sabari. The death of Hamiddullah, who "was well-known throughout the Haqqani Network, is expected to have significant disruptive effects on the network throughout Khost and Paktia provinces," ISAF stated.

Qari Ismael was the Taliban's commander for Jani Khel, and Maulawi Sadiq helped al Qaeda fighters infiltrate from Afghanistan and conduct attacks in Afghanistan. ISAF often uses the term "foreign fighter" to describe Arab and Central Asian al Qaeda fighters.

The clash in Jani Khel earlier this week was preceded by another major fight across the provincial border in Khost late last week. US and Afghan forces killed 38 Haqqani Network fighters in the Musa Khel district in Khost during a two-day battle on June 19-20. The fighting broke out after more than 200 Haqqani Network fighters attacked the joint force during an operation in the area.

There have been two other major clashes against the Haqqani Network in the Khost-Paktika-Paktia region this month. Afghan and US forces killed 38 Haqqani Network fighters in neighboring Paktika province on June 16, according to an Afghan police official. The operation took place in the Surobi and Komal districts, two known strongholds of the Haqqani Network.

On June 9-10, US and Afghan forces killed Haqqani Network commander Fazil Subhan and an undisclosed number of fighters during a raid in the Shamal district. Subhan and his team were holed up in fortified fighting positions in the district. He was a known facilitator of al Qaeda fighters and aided them in entering the country from Pakistan.

© Copyright 2010 Long War Journal. All rights reserved.

[buglerbilly]

Will the Afghan War Suffer From McChrystal’s Ouster?



What’s lost with Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s ouster? The most innovative battlefield commander the U.S. has ever had, say former colleagues who worked with him there and in the super-secretive Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC).

A commander who truly grasped both the value added of new sensors and information networks and intuitively understood the organizational changes required of a hidebound military to best exploit it.

During his five years at JSOC and his truncated command of ISAF, McChrystal flattened hierarchies, empowered subordinates and everywhere pushed a freer flow of information between operators and analysts, between commanders and their units and even between oftentimes distrustful allies.

“He had better battlefield situational awareness than any other commander out there,” one former operator told me. McChrystal, who spent much of his career in the “black” special operations world, understood that the best weapon to fight terrorist and insurgent networks was another network, and he put those networks in place in Iraq, Afghanistan and other parts of the world.

Those personal networks McChrystal built up during his time in the black SOF world, “special mission unit” commanders that he knew and had worked with for years, he brought with him to Afghanistan; some who still commanded SOF units, others who now commanded units among the general purpose force.

Those crucial human networks were bolstered by a legion of analysts and techno geeks who were given the most advanced IT systems in the inventory by virtue of McChrystal’s control of a near limitless budget and ability to procure outside the military’s traditional acquisition system that operates at a glacial pace.

McChrystal knew the military has plenty of “shooters”; where he really worked to change the organization was not the pointy end of the spear, but rather the “shaft of the spear,” a former colleague of his told me. He sent his liaison officers all over the battlefield, not only to mine information from often widely dispersed units, but also to share information his command received from higher, national level intelligence sources, such as CIA informants and NSA signals intel.

Before McChrystal took over ISAF, there was a huge reluctance among U.S. units to share information with NATO allies. He put an abrupt end to that practice and pushed information out to the point of pissing off a lot of people.

“McChrystal was all about information flow,” the former colleague told me, “he wanted his command to function like a Google or Microsoft, always innovating, always moving information.” And, unlike most commanders in the conventional military, he had the resources to do it.

The huge jump, some described it as “orders of magnitude,” in high-value targeting effectiveness McChrystal achieved in Iraq and then Afghanistan may never be known, it’s all top secret. Those who do talk about it in do so in generalities and hushed tones with awe and a respect for a commander who they say instinctively grasped warfighting in this new world.

Will incoming ISAF commander Gen. David Petraeus be able to maintain those networks McChrystal built? It’s going to be difficult, I’m told, as those networks are human, not technological. He’s likely the only person that stands a chance of building on the work McChrystal has already done, as Petraeus mentored McChrystal and the two had a very close personal and professional relationship.

Some of McChrystal’s closest cadre, seasoned veterans from America’s wars, will leave Afghanistan and will suffer professionally because of a magazine article. Those who remain will respect Petraeus and accept the change, while never forgetting the contributions of Stanley McChrystal.

– Greg Grant

Read more: http://defensetech.org/2010/06/24/will-the-afghan-war-suffer-from-mcchrystal%e2%80%99s-ouster/#more-7893#ixzz0rp957WHY
Defense.org

[buglerbilly]

Gates, Mullen Comment on McChrystal Situation

(Source: U.S Department of Defense; issued June 24, 2010)

WASHINGTON --- Judgment and civilian control of the military were at the heart of President Barack Obama’s decision to accept Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s resignation as the NATO and U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said today.Video

Gates and Navy Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, both said they “fully support” Obama’s decision and his nomination of Army Gen. David H. Petraeus to replace McChrystal.

“Like the president, I deeply regret the circumstances that made this decision necessary,” Gates said during a Pentagon news conference. “General McChrystal is one of the finest officers and warriors of his generation, who has an extraordinary record in leading the fight against some of this country’s most lethal enemies in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Gates and Mullen said McChrystal showed poor judgment with regard to the Rolling Stone profile in which he and members of his staff were critical of administration officials. The situation “has made his continued service in that post and as a member of the national security team untenable,” Gates said. “The statements and attitudes reported in the news media are unacceptable under our form of government, and are inconsistent with the high standards expected of military leaders.”

The chairman said he was stunned when he read the Rolling Stone profile.

“I cannot excuse his lack of judgment with respect to the Rolling Stone article or a command climate he evidently permitted that was at best disrespectful of civilian authority,” Mullen said. “We do not have that luxury, those of us in uniform. We do not have the right, nor should we ever assume the prerogative, to cast doubt upon the ability or mock the motives of our civilian leaders, elected or appointed.”

Military personnel are and must remain a neutral instrument of the government, he said. Servicemembers must be accountable to and respectful of civilian leaders “no matter which party holds sway or which person holds a given office,” Mullen said.

Military leaders must step down when they lose the trust and confidence of civilian leaders, the chairman said.

“The job we are called upon to do for the nation is too important, the lives we are sworn to protect too precious, to permit any doubt or uncertainty in that regard,” he said. “General McChrystal did the right thing by offering to resign.”

Both men stressed that while the leadership is changing, the strategy in Afghanistan is not. “Our troops and coalition partners are making extraordinary sacrifices in the fight against al-Qaida and its extremist allies,” Gates said. “Our singular focus must be on succeeding in this mission without distraction or division.”

Gates said that he was concerned that the effort in Afghanistan would lose time and focus if a new commander came in without knowledge of the situation.

One concern that the secretary had was to minimize any impact a change would have on the conduct of the war in Afghanistan. “I will tell you that … it was the president who first raised Petraeus’ name,” Gates said. “And it immediately, to me, answered a lot of the concerns that I had.”

As the U.S. Central Command chief, Petraeus has been part of the discussions on the Afghan strategy all along. The general was in charge of U.S. military operations in Iraq during the troop surge there, and military and civilian efforts there have paid off.

“The key [in Afghanistan] was that we not lose our focus and be further distracted for a period of months,” Gates said. “And that's why the selection of General Petraeus was so important, in my view. Now the president has established the strategy, but from my perspective, General Petraeus will have the flexibility to look at the campaign plan and the approach and all manner of things when he gets to Afghanistan, assuming Senate confirmation.”

The Senate Armed Services Committee has scheduled Petraeus’ confirmation hearings for June 29, and committee officials promised an early vote on the matter. NATO still must act to appoint the general as the commander of the International Security Assistance Force.

“No one – be they adversaries or friends, or especially our troops – should misinterpret these personnel changes as a slackening of this government’s commitment to the mission in Afghanistan,” Gates said. “We remain committed to that mission and to the comprehensive civil-military strategy ordered by the president to achieve our goals there.”

Both Gates and Mullen praised McChrystal’s service.

“General McChrystal and many of his immediate staff have served and protected this country in combat with great courage, valor, skill and devotion for many years,” Gates said. “Their outstanding record of service remains intact for posterity, and is deserving of our lasting recognition and profound gratitude.”

Mullen said McChrystal is a friend with whom he worked when the general served as the director of the Joint Staff for a year.

“He's a fine soldier and a good man,” Mullen said of McChrystal. “He has served his country nobly and with great distinction for more than three decades, much of that last decade at war. He led men in places the rest of us could not follow, and he fought men in ways the rest of us could not fathom.

“I was proud one year ago to support him for the Afghanistan command,” the admiral continued. “And I think it's worth noting his strong leadership and the foundation he has laid for future success there.” (ends)

Gates, Mullen Cite Progress in Afghanistan

(Source: U.S Department of Defense; issued June 24, 2010)

WASHINGTON --- Although it has come more slowly than expected, progress is, nonetheless, being made in Afghanistan, the top Defense Department civilian and military officials said today.

“I do not believe we are bogged down,” Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said of U.S. operations in Afghanistan. “I believe we are making some progress. It is slower and harder than we anticipated. I think we are moving forward.”

Gates and Navy Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, took questions from reporters in a Pentagon news conference. They expressed support for President Barack Obama’s strategy in Afghanistan and confidence in his decision to nominate Army Gen. David H. Petraeus to command U.S. and international forces there.

Though Petraeus will be given an opportunity to assess the situation in Afghanistan, assuming he’s confirmed by the Senate, Gates said, the strategy there has not changed, and the chairman agreed.

“The strategy hasn’t changed in any way,” Mullen said. “Nor has the policy.”

Mullen explained that the strategy and troop increase Obama announced in December still is in its early stages. About one-third of the 30,000 additional troops the president approved have yet to deploy there, he noted.

Most of the surge troops who have arrived are operating in Marja, a former Taliban stronghold in southern Afghanistan’s Helmand province. Success there is evident, the admiral said, as markets, schools and governance are under way there. Such freedoms had not been available there for more than eight years, he added.

Offensive operations in Kandahar, however, are kicking off slower than predicted, Mullen acknowledged. U.S. forces, he said, are still conducting “shaping” operations in Kandahar ahead of a planned offensive.
“We haven’t put off the operations in Kandahar,” Mullen said. “It’s an enormously complex operation. We need to make sure we get the forces there to execute. A significant part of this last 10,000 [troops] will be included in that.”

Operations in Marja and Kandahar are classic counterinsurgency operations, and they must be developed and executed carefully to sustain gains against the Taliban, Mullen said. Success in Kandahar, particularly, is vital to the overall success of the strategy, he added.

Earlier today, Mullen spoke to a group of political staffers, defense industry officials and reporters at The Hill newspaper’s annual Tribute to the Troops breakfast, where he noted Kandahar’s importance.

“Kandahar is really the center of gravity for how we move forward with this strategy,” he said. “I believe as goes Kandahar, so goes Afghanistan.

“This is a tough, tough time,” he continued. “There’s certainly a desire to get specific timelines, but I think they’re very difficult to pin down. It’s an extraordinary, complex challenge. It’s not just about security; it’s about governance [and] getting at corruption.”

Operations have been hindered by challenges in Kandahar, Mullen acknowledged, but it’s much too soon to determine the level of success there, he said.

“It is exceptionally well planned,” Mullen said. “It is an operation that has been discussed at great length with [Afghan] President [Hamid] Karzai, [and] both the Afghan leadership as well as the [NATO] and coalition leaderships are very much committed.”
-ends-

[buglerbilly]

U.K. Adds 37 Mastiffs To Army

By ANDREW CHUTER

Published: 25 Jun 2010 10:46

LONDON - British force protection capabilities will be boosted by an order for additional Mastiff mine resistant armored vehicles from U.S. builder Force Protection.

The Ministry of Defence has purchased a further 37 Mastiff machines to add to the fleet of 277 vehicles it has ordered from the MRAP builder since 2006. Most of the existing fleet is operational in Afghanistan, where it is protecting troops fighting the Taliban in southern Afghanistan.

The deal has not been officially announced by the Ministry of Defence, but a spokesman confirmed a contract for the vehicle was signed recently.

Mastiff is the British variant of the widely used six-wheel-drive Cougar vehicle. Force Protection produces the basic vehicle, with U.K. company NP Aerospace modifying the machine to local requirements.

The Mastiff deal is the second Force Protection success here in two days. On June 23, British defense procurement and technology minister Peter Luff announced the military was also acquiring a further 28 Wolfhound armored trucks from the firm.

Luff also announced an order for a further 140 Jackal patrol vehicles from Supacat in a deal worth 45 million pounds ($67.3 million). The contract takes Jackal numbers in the British Army beyond the 500 mark. The latest deal is for the 2A version of the off-road vehicle, which has a better protected cab area than earlier Jackals.

Some 97 Wolfhounds, the truck variant of the Mastiff, were originally ordered in April 2009 by the then-Labour administration as part of a 350 million pound tactical support vehicle program involving more than 400 machines of various categories.

Together, the new Wolfhound and Mastiff orders are probably worth about 40 million pounds.

Force Protection also supplies Britain with the four-wheel-drive version of the Cougar, known here as the Ridgback. A total of 154 Ridgbacks were ordered by the MoD and further vehicles are likely to be purchased later this year.

The first of the Wolfhounds are expected in theater this summer.

[buglerbilly]

Top Taliban Cmdr. Killed in Kandahar

June 25, 2010

Long War Journal|by Bill Roggio

Afghan and Coalition forces have killed the top Taliban commander in a vital district in Kandahar province after destroying an IED factory in an airstrike.

The clashes took place after Coalition aircraft bombed the Taliban IED factory in Panjwai Wednesday. A Coalition and Afghan force raided the attack site and battled with a Taliban force in the area. The combined force "quickly overwhelmed insurgent forces defending the area near the destroyed IED factory," the International Security Assistance Force stated in a press release on its website.

Izzatullah, the Taliban's military commander for Panjwai, was among those killed. A police chief put the Taliban casualties at 15, according to Xinhua. Izzatullah "planned and conducted attacks against coalition forces and was involved in the attack on Sarpoza prison outside of Kandahar City in June 2008," ISAF stated. Several top Taliban leaders were killed during the complex suicide and military assault on Sarpoza prison in the heart of Kandahar City.

Panjwai district is numbered among the major Taliban strongholds in Kandahar; other such districts are Arghandab, Zhari, Maywand, Ghorak, Khakrez and Shah Wali Kot.

Last week, Coalition and Afghan forces claimed to have ejected the Taliban from Shah Wali Kot during a five-day-long operation in the northern district which included "heavy fighting." A "significant number of insurgents" were killed, according to an ISAF press release. "Through this operation, the combined force dealt a major blow to more than 100 insurgents and their commanders."

Targeting the Taliban in Kandahar

The Coalition has been targeting top Taliban leaders and facilitators in Kandahar in the run-up to the long awaited operation to dislodge the Taliban from the province. The much-touted Kandahar operation, which was supposed to be launched this month, has been delayed until the fall as local tribal leaders and other influential Kandaharis have expressed reservations about the offensive.

Kandahar is the birthplace of the Taliban and a major power center for the group. Over the past four months, more than 70 midlevel Taliban commanders have been killed during a series of special operations raids in and around Kandahar City, The National Post reported.

Izzatullah is the third top Taliban leader to have been killed in Kandahar since late May. On May 30, Afghan and Coalition special operations forces killed Mullah Zergay, who led the Taliban in Kandahar City and in the vital districts of Zhari and Arghandab. On May 29, Afghan and Coalition forces killed Haji Amir, who was described as one of the top two Taliban leaders in all of Kandahar province.

The Taliban have launched their own offensive in Kandahar province. The Taliban have targeted tribal leaders, politicians, and other elites for assassination. More than 20 people, including the district chief for Arghandab and the deputy mayor of Kandahar City, have been killed over the past several months.

The International Security Assistance Force has placed great emphasis on Kandahar and is deploying the bulk of its forces en route to Afghanistan to the province. President Obama and Defense Secretary Robert Gates have said that progress must be made by December in Kandahar, and in other key areas in the south, east, and north, in order for Western nations to continue their support for the war.

But a Defense Department survey of the situation earlier this year in key districts in Afghanistan paints a grim picture of Afghan public support for the government in the south. In Kandahar and Helmand, the two provinces considered to be the key to the Taliban's power in the south, the majority of the population is considered to be ambivalent toward the Afghan government and the Coalition, or sympathetic to or supportive of the Taliban.

Of the 11 of Kandahar's 13 districts assessed earlier this year, one district (Kandahar City) supported the government, three districts were considered neutral, six were sympathetic to the Taliban, and one supported the Taliban. Of the 11 of Helmand's 13 districts assessed, eight of the districts were considered neutral, one was sympathetic to the Taliban, and two supported the Taliban.

The situation appears equally grim in neighboring Helmand province. Of the 11 of Helmand's 13 districts assessed, eight of the districts were considered neutral, one was sympathetic to the Taliban, and two supported the Taliban.

The U.S. has indicated that it will begin turning over security to the Afghan Army and police by July 2011 and that it will also start to withdraw its forces from the country at that time.

© Copyright 2010 Long War Journal. All rights reserved.

[buglerbilly]

Petraeus to Loosen Controversial Afghan ROE?



Fox News, outgoing Afghan commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s least favorite news channel (he banned it from the televisions in his HQ), reports that one of the first moves of incoming Afghan commander Gen. David Petraeus will be to loosen the controversial rules of engagement in Afghanistan to allow more artillery and air strikes. Troops in Afghanistan complain they’re fighting with one hand tied behind their back because of the various “directives” issued by McChrystal restricting the use of indirect fires in an effort to curtail civilian casualties.

Not so fast, reports Leo Shane with Stars and Stripes, who asked Petraeus’ spokesman, Col. Erik Gunhus, if the Fox report is true. Gunhus said Petraeus has made no such decision. Once he arrives in Kabul (he still has to pass Senate confirmation on Tuesday, which will be a formality), Petraeus will review the ROE and determine whether they should be modified.

At a Pentagon press conference yesterday, Joint Chief’s chair Adm. Mike Mullen said Petraeus is mindful of the sensitivity of Afghans to civilian casualties and that he also signed off on McChrystal’s directives, that have ranged from instructing troops on polite driving techniques on Afghan roads to curtailing raids on Afghan homes in the middle of the night, but that he also has the flexibility to “make changes as he sees appropriate.”

– Greg Grant

Read more: http://defensetech.org/#ixzz0rv5Novwf
Defense.org

[buglerbilly]

British troops prepare for summer battle in Sangin

Royal Marines are being moved to Sangin in Afghanistan amid a battle for the town from Taliban snipers and insurgents trying to shoot down helicopters, the new US commander of British troops has said.

By Duncan Gardham, Security Correspondent, UK Daily Telegraph

Published: 3:25PM BST 25 Jun 2010


Villages around the dam have been deserted since fierce fighting began in 2006 Photo: PA

Major General Richard Mills of the US Marine Corps, said the “significance of this summer is not lost on the insurgents” as he laid out plans to strengthen the town, the scene of some of the heaviest fighting since British troops arrived in Helmand four years ago.

President Obama has promised to start the withdrawal of US troops in July next year and this summer is seen as vital in demonstrating that the war in Afghanistan can be won.

Gen Mills, giving his first interview since taking command of troops in South West Afghanistan, said the Taliban knew there was a “battle for the people.”

Speaking by video link from Camp Bastion in Lashkar Gah, Gen Mills, said Sangin was a vital target for the Taliban.

“Sangin is difficult ground,” he said. “It is key terrain for the insurgents, it is one of the last population centres that they contest. They are giving it up very, very reluctantly but they are giving it up.

“They are consistently pushing back against us but we are consistently pushing out further and further from the district centre.”

Gen Mills said coalition forces were making “slow but steady success” in Sangin but it had come at a “steep price” – 99 of the 307 British deaths in Afghanistan have been in Sangin.

Gen Mills praised the performance of British troops over the last four years saying their performance had been “nothing short of magnificent” and adding that they had “made progress against very significant opposition.”

In Sangin, he said, “gallant brave soldiers have held key ground, defending it at huge cost to themselves.”

Gen Mills added: “Truth be told, there is still much hard fighting left to do, there are still improvements to be made in the Afghan security capacity, but progress is steady.”

Around 150 Royal Marines from 40 Commando Battlegroup have been moved from their position defending the Kajaki Dam to join the main force of around 1,000 troops in Sangin. They have been replaced by US Marines.

Gen Mills said the Taliban had begun to target helicopters with rocket propelled grenades as they come in to land and take off, successfully downing a US Black Hawk helicopter during a medical evacuation of British soldiers in Sangin earlier this month.

“They are looking for the spectacular attack,” he added, “They are looking for those that have an impact on us.”

He said insurgents were also increasing their use of small arms fire, characterised by a British army spokesman as “single shots at range” although he questioned their ability as snipers.

The Royal Marines have abandoned their position on the Kajaki Dam which was taken from the Taliban in 2007 and supplied with a new turbine in one of the biggest logistical operations since the Second World War.

Cpl Mark Wright of the Parachute Regiment was posthumously awarded the George Cross in September 2006 after going into a mine field to rescue another soldier at Kajaki.

Major General Gordon Messenger, spokesman for the British Army, said forces were redeploying “with their heads held high” after helping with the refurbishment of the existing hydroelectric turbines that provide power across the area.

But Tangye, the town at the dam remains little more than a ghost town, with the village’s baker recently returning to serve just two families, and the new turbine is still not working.

Gen Mills has 20,000 US Marines under his command who have joined the 8,000-strong British Taskforce Helmand, and 10,000 Afghan forces protecting a population of 800,000.

In the wake of the dismissal of Stanley McChrystal, the US general in charge of operations in Afghanistan, Gen Mills said: “We must not lose sight of our mission.”

Gen Messenger paid tribute to Gen McChrystal, who was fired by President Obama after making adverse comments about the US administration in an interview with Rolling Stone Magazine.

“Not many people would have wanted that to happen,” Gen Messenger said. “He was a popular general who...provided unity of purpose and must take a degree of credit for that.”

[buglerbilly]

Afghanistan withdrawal before 2015, says David Cameron

Prime minister indicates that he wants all British soldiers to return home before next general election

Patrick Wintour in Toronto The Guardian, Saturday 26 June 2010


David Cameron, centre, with Barack Obama and Canada's prime minister Stephen Harper at the G8 summit in Toronto. Photograph: Chris Wattie/Reuters

David Cameron yesterday gave the first clear indication of the timing for a full withdrawal of British soldiers from Afghanistan, saying that he wanted troops home within five years.

Asked in Canada at the Toronto G8 summit if he wanted UK forces home before the 2015 general election, he said: "I want that to happen, make no mistake about it. We can't be there for another five years, having been there for nine years already."

Cameron said: "I want us to roll up our sleeves and get on with delivering what will bring the success we want, which is not a perfect Afghanistan, but some stability in Afghanistan and the ability for the Afghans themselves to run their country, so they [British troops] can come home."

The prime minister's aides insisted his remarks to Sky News were not designed to signal a change of strategy before his first bilateral meeting with Barack Obama today. Cameron added that he preferred not to "deal in too strict timetables".

During the election campaign, he said he wanted to see UK troops start to come home by 2015. But this was the first time as prime minister that he has indicated a timetable for withdrawal. Obama has committed himself to a review of the US counter-insurgency strategy next year.

Cameron and Obama have already spoken on the phone this week about the implications of the removal of General Stanley McChrystal as Nato commander in Afghanistan, insisting the British did not see his removal as the moment for a further strategic review.

But Cameron and his defence secretary, Liam Fox, have made it clear they are impatient with the slow progress in the counter-insurgency campaign in Afghanistan, notably in recruiting and training local security forces, the key to an exit strategy for Nato forces. Both Cameron and Fox have also made it clear they do not share Tony Blair's enthusiasm for "liberal interventionism" in foreign conflicts.

They are sceptical about the role of "nation building", as Fox demonstrated in an interview in which he compared Afghanistan to a 13-century state. Fox also rejected the idea that UK troops should next year be deployed in Kandahar, the Taliban's heartland, when Canada withdraws its troops.

The coalition government's sceptical attitude about Nato's military operations in Afghanistan, and Britain's role in it, has caused concern in Washington. It is also being observed with apprehension by some British military commanders who fear it might undermine their influence and role in Afghanistan, where the population suspects their troops will pack up and go home as soon as possible.

However, Cameron's impatience is likely to find favour with those – including Sherard Cowper-Coles, who recently resigned as the government's special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan – who want a political settlement, including talks with the Taliban, soon.

The prime minister has already braced the public for further British troop casualties this summer, saying this was inevitable as the counter-insurgency seeks to spread itself across Afghanistan. In a separate interview with ITV News, Cameron acknowledged British troops can expect fierce opposition from the Taliban in the coming months. "It will be a difficult summer, there is no doubt about that," he said. "But [that's] partly because we are doing so much more with the Americans in Helmand province, with hundreds of thousands of troops rather than the few thousand we used to have, and it's making a big difference.

"It will be a difficult summer, but we are getting to a period where parts of Afghanistan can now be run by the Afghans themselves. That is a very exciting prospect for bringing our troops home."

Cameron is due to lead discussions at the G8 today on Afghanistan and Pakistan, including the need for an inclusive political settlement.

He added: "Britain should have a long-term relationship with Afghanistan, including helping to train their troops and their civil society, long after the vast bulk of troops have gone home."

Obama wants a US withdrawal to begin next summer, although General David Petraeus, the US commander in Afghanistan, has insisted that has to be based on conditions on the ground.

Obama and Cameron hold their first meeting as president and prime minister on the fringes of the G8 summit today. Obama will try to reassure Cameron that the war in Afghanistan will not go on indefinitely, in the week that the 300th British soldier died there.

A total of 307 UK service personnel have died there since the start of operations in 2001. In the latest incident on Wednesday, four died in Helmand province when their armoured vehicle rolled off a road and ended up underwater in a canal.

[buglerbilly]

Taliban switch to long-range fire in fight against UK troops

Royal Marines facing growing threat from change of tactics by Taliban in southern Afghanistan

Richard Norton-Taylor guardian.co.uk, Friday 25 June 2010 19.10 BST Article history


Royal Marines engaged in fighting the Taliban in Sangin, Afghanistan. Photograph: Corporal Adrian Harlen/PA

Royal Marines deployed in Sangin in southern Afghanistan, where British troops have suffered a high rate of casualties in recent weeks, are facing a growing threat from long-range rifle fire as Taliban fighters change their tactics, a senior British officer revealed today.

Brigadier George Norton, deputy commander of British and US forces in Helmand province, was speaking by video link from Camp Bastion as it was disclosed that the marines – from 40 Commando – will be reinforced by a contingent guarding the nearby Kajaki dam. The unit will be replaced by US troops.

More than 800 British troops are based in Sangin, a strategic crossroads in central Helmand where four marines have been killed recently. Two were killed by gunfire this week. The number wounded has not been disclosed. Of the 307 British soldiers who have died in Afghanistan since 2001, 98 have been in Sangin.

Asked about the vulnerability of British troops in Sangin, Norton said: "We are all vulnerable to IEDs [improvised explosive devices], but the insurgents are increasingly using long-distance small arms." Major General Gordon Messenger, the Ministry of Defence's chief military spokesman, said Taliban-led insurgents were resorting to what he described as an "increasing use of single shots at range". British officers said it would be misleading to describe the shots as coming from snipers, a word suggesting the use of sophisticated rifles by well-trained fighters.

They said it was more a question of hidden insurgents firing from a distance and then fleeing an area difficult for British troops to attack because of the danger of civilian casualties.

"If the truth be told, there's still much hard fighting left to do," said Major General Richard Mills, the American commander of 20,000 US marines and 8,000 British troops in Helmand. "It is a very difficult situation , a very difficult fight ... There is a lot left to do, but progress is steady."

He acknowledged it had been a difficult week for British forces but said they were holding up "very, very well". "Sangin is difficult ground. It is key terrain for the insurgents, it is one of the last population centres that they contest. They are giving it up very, very reluctantly but they are giving it up. They are consistently pushing back against us, but we are consistently pushing out further and further from the district centre."

He also said insurgents were increasing attacks on helicopters, mainly with rocket-propelled grenades. "They are looking for the spectacular attack. They are looking for those that have psychological impact on us," Mills said.

Norton described the challenge his troops faced as enormous, but said they were determined to achieve the results that were needed. He referred to the debate about what British troops were doing in Afghanistan: whether it was to promote Afghan development and stability or to protect Britain's national security. "It is clear we are here for both purposes," he said. The two issues were connected. "It is a significant challenge but viewed through one lens", he said.

Asked about previous suggestions from Barack Obama that US troops would start coming home in July next year, Mills said he had been given neither a timeline nor a deadline.

There is a view among officials that Obama's decision to replace General Stanley McChrystal as commander of US and Nato forces in Afghanistan by General David Petraeus could lead to US forces staying longer than anticipated.

London has made it clear it wants to speed up the recruitment and training of Afghan forces to enable British troops to start leaving as soon as possible, preferably by the middle of next year. The role of British troops in Afghanistan is likely to feature in events organised tomorrow, Britain's second annual Armed Forces Day.

The four soldiers killed on Wednesday in Afghanistan when their armoured vehicle crashed into a canal were named by the MoD as Private Alex Isaac, Private Douglas Halliday and Colour Sergeant Martyn Horton, of 1st Battalion the Mercian Regiment, and Lance Corporal David Andrew Ramsden, from 1st Battalion the Yorkshire Regiment.

[buglerbilly]

Ares

A Defense Technology Blog

The Other Battle in Afghanistan

Posted by John M. Doyle at 6/25/2010 9:30 AM CDT

Darren Richardson, a U.S. Agriculture employee, points out a nearby canal to Kuchi tribesmen while Marine Corps Major Jeffrey Seavy looks on in the Bawka district in Afghanistan's Farah province. The major is the 1st Marine Expeditionary forward liaison officer to Provincial Reconstruction Team Farah.


(U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Rylan Albright)

Provincial Reconstruction Teams are part of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) mission. There are currently 26 PRTs in Afghanistan, 12 of which are under U.S. command, including Farah. Other countries, ranging from Hungary to New Zealand, oversee 14 other PRTs.

The teams deliver assistance at the provincial and district level for improving security, supporting good governance and enhancing economic development.

In addition to military representatives charged with providing security and logistical support, PRTs include civilians from the State Department, U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and other agencies like the Department of Agriculture.

The teams are seen as a key component in winning the support of the Afghan people and undermining the credibility of the Taliban. Recently the Farah PRT's medical staff assisted the first Afghan Health Ministry village outreach effort, where hundreds of villagers were treated in a remote area.

For more photos on PRT Farah's visit to this district click here............

http://www.defense.gov/PhotoEssays/PhotoEssaySS.aspx?ID=1740

[buglerbilly]

General Petraeus faces battle on many fronts, not all of them in Afghanistan

General David Petraeus, put in charge of Afghanistan by Barack Obama, has a hard job ahead - with battles both on the ground and back in Washington

By Philip Sherwell, US Editor, and Ben Farmer in Zhari

Published: 7:54PM BST 26 Jun 2010


General David Petraeus has a hard job ahead Photo: GETTY

In the baking hot school building, its windows blocked with sandbags and off-duty soldiers dozing on beds where pupils should be studying at desks, the rumours were initially greeted with disbelief by the troops from Hardrock company.

The architect of the Afghan war strategy that meant they were deployed to the frontlines near Kandahar as part of a military surge intended to turn the Taliban tide was supposed to have lost his job - over an article in a pop culture magazine, of all things.

The Pir Mohammad school in Senjaray comes under frequent fire from nearby Taliban forces in the Zhari valley where Mullah Omar once ran a mosque and then founded the fundamentalist movement.

Built and opened by American forces in 2002, the locals loved it and boys and girls studied there. But the Taliban hated the place for the same reasons and they attacked and booby-trapped the building, forcing its closure in 2007.

Despite the attacks, the US troops currently based there intend to re-open it as an emblem of their attempts to win hearts and minds under the counter-insurgency strategy now in vogue with the US high command.

But it was not incoming rockets, but rather incoming reports from Washington that last week shook the new arrivals from the 101st Airborne Division.

General Stanley McChrystal, US commander in Afghanistan, had indeed been sacked by President Barack Obama for disparaging comments quoted in Rolling Stone.

It was an unprecedented second dismissal of a wartime commander in a year as Gen McChrystal had only been appointed by the President last June to replace Gen David McKiernan and beef up the troubled mission.

Twenty-one year old soldiers who are fighting for their lives do not expect to be told that their commanding officer has abruptly departed, just weeks before what is being billed as the decisive battle of a controversial and costly war.

They only learnt the full details from The Sunday Telegraph. "No way! Has McChrystal really been sacked?" said one incredulous young soldier, still wiping the grime from his face after a dangerous patrol.

Sympathy was limited him, however. He may have been a legendary counter-insurgency expert, but he was not universally loved among the troops, partly because of the restrictions on using firepower which he has enforced.

"It's hard to see how those kinds of comments could be made," said another soldier, on learning that loose talk in the company of a Rolling Stone writer was the reason for the general's downfall.

And there was a silver lining when this newspaper informed them of their new commander - Gen David Petraeus. The replacement is their hero, a decorated officer from their own division under whom many served for two tours of duty of Iraq here he is credited by many US soldiers with retrieving some form of victory from what looked like inevitable defeat.

"Everyone wearing this patch loves him because he is one of us," said staff sergeant Brandon Griffis, 26, pointing at the division's screaming eagle badge. "The whole surge thing in Iraq worked and that was his idea."

With a rare display of decisiveness, and to a rare degree of bipartisan approval, Mr Obama had quickly replaced his Afghan military chief with the most venerated American officer in active service.

But what the commander-in-chief's quick action could not cover up were the rifts among his inner circle over how the US - and its Nato allies, most prominently Britain - should be fighting the war in Afghanistan. And it was those feuds that framed the backdrop to the ill-judged Team McChrystal exercise in derision and score-settling.

Those disagreements have only deepened as the counter-insurgency strategy - championed by Gen Petraeus in Iraq and enthusiastically adapted by his protégé Gen McChrystal in Afghanistan - has suffered a series of recent setbacks on the ground. The new man will need all his much-vaunted political and diplomatic skills to steer through this toxic Washington mess.

Some commentators are even raising the grim spectre that the US and its friends are losing in Afghanistan in a quagmire that resonates of Vietnam. And there is increasing speculation that the only long-term solution there will involve a negotiated settlement with some Taliban factions.

Mr Obama insisted that the change in personnel would not mean in a switch in strategy. But Gen Petraeus is expected to make some significant tweaks, most notably with a change to the rules of engagement to make it easier for US soldiers to engage in combat.

That will ease restrictions imposed by his predecessor to minimise civilian casualties but which troops said were costing US lives. Indeed, while it was the drink-fuelled barbs that garnered the dramatic headlines from the Rolling Stone piece, just as powerful were the complaints of soldiers that their comrades had died because of these battlefield restrictions.

Asked about the reports of troop dissatisfaction with the rules of engagement, a US officer in Zhari told The Sunday Telegraph: "When you read the COIN directive, it's open to interpretation. It might be interpreted differently in future."

Under the so-called "courageous restraint" rules troops are not allowed to engage the enemy unless they positively identify someone actually firing at them - problematic given the well-hidden corners and niches used as Taliban firing points. Calling in air strikes is now also a complicated process and much rarer than before.

British troops in Helmand expressed their frustration with the approach to The Sunday Telegraph in the wake of the McChrystal saga. "We aren't going to win this war with hearts and minds with the insurgents," said one. "Courageous restraint is like a health and safety notification. When we are being smashed there is nothing we can do about it so what's the point?'"

Another soldier pointed out that Taliban fighters are well aware of the rules that govern how their enemies must fight. "They know we aren't allowed to fire back when they shoot at us unless we actually see them firing, which is difficult because they shoot from very well hidden 'murder holes'," he said.

"And they know we can't shoot if there are civilians around, so in the middle of a fire fight you suddenly see a civilian or a child out in the open who has been placed there by insurgents."

There is speculation that Gen Petraeus will use his status in Washington to press for extra troops - Gen McChrystal asked for a surge of 40,000 men but Mr Obama eventually decided to send only 30,000 - and effectively to push aside the July 2011 deadline set by the president for a withdrawal to begin.

Meanwhile, critics of the counter-insurgency doctrine, led by Vice President Joe Biden, are gunning up on their arguments that the strategy is based on a hopelessly flawed principle of nation-building in a patchwork of tribal fiefdoms with no sense of national identity. They will also counter Gen Petraeus' attempts to draw comparisons with Iraq by emphasising the contrasts between the two war-zones.

Mr Biden's scepticism about the counter-insurgency strategy is backed on the ground by the American ambassador to Kabul, Karl Eikenberry, another retired general. He strongly opposed the McChrystal "surge", arguing that Hamid Karzai, the capricious Afghan president, was not a partner with whom America could do business.

The general can expect full support from Hillary Clinton, secretary of state, and Pentagon chief Robert Gates, who have established a formidable hawkish axis in the war cabinet. But what he might need most is for Mr Obama to impose the discipline he demanded last week from his querrellous national security team.

These re-awakened disputes are the last thing that the president wants after he oversaw a protracted and painful three-month Afghan strategy review late last year. But they seem certain to re-surface when he holds yet another review, in December, and possibly as early as this week when Gen Petraeus appears before a Senate confirmation session.

Although it is a foregone conclusion that he will receive that thumbs-up, critics of Mr Obama's Afghan approach - from left and right - will highlight their concerns about troop numbers and his desire for a withdrawal to begin next July, especially given the general's oft-stated dislike for timelines and benchmarks.

Indeed, in a statement that further frustrated his former liberal anti-war powerbase, Mr Obama gave himself "wiggle room" on that July date. "We didn't say we'd be switching off the lights and closing the door behind us," he said. "What we said is we'd begin a transition phase in which the Afghan government is taking on more and more responsibility." And what had been widely referred to as a "pullout" is now being described as a "draw down" by Mr Gates.

David Cameron, the prime minister, ventured into the political minefield of timings this weekend when he said he that he wanted the bulk of the 10,000 British troops home before the next general election - scheduled for 2015.

On a visit to Afghanistan, his armed forces minister, Nick Harvey, insisted yesterday that there was no "firm timeline" for withdrawal. The apparent contradiction came just hours before Mr Cameron's first meeting as prime minister with President Obama. Afghanistan was high on the agenda of their one-to-one discussion on the fringes of the G8 summit in Canada.

There was certainly some significant progress during the McChrystal tenure, most notably in the training of Afghan troops. But the unreliability of Mr Karzai, who recently sacked two top security advisers trusted by America, and the absence of local government allies severely undermines a key tenet of the counter-insurgency doctrine.

The Marjah offensive, intended as a dry-run for Kandahar when launched amid much fanfare in February, has been such a major setback that even Gen McChrystal referred to the town as a "bleeding ulcer". American forces are under nightly attack and there is no meaningful civilian Afghan government.

Gen Nick Carter, the British commander of international forces in the south, acknowledged that Marjah operation would be run differently if repeated and that Coalition troops had been slow to persuade local residents they were committed to helping them.

"I think we now realise that in order to show genuine commitment you probably need to deliver more lasting effect more quickly," he told this newspaper.

"I think if you could have delivered some paved roads or some street lights, or those sorts of things which really did show commitment. Those things are now happening but it is now 120 days in."

He also alluded to the pressure from politicians to show Marjah was working. "The trouble is the outside world is looking in and the outside world wants to see utopia as quickly as possible," he said. "The challenge we have got is to try and show that this strategy is an effective strategy and we need to show the people are with us as quickly as we possibly can."

Doug Macgregor, a retired colonel, former West Point room-mate of Gen McChrystal and the leading public critic among former senior military officer of the COIN strategy, was blunt in his condemnations.

"We are pursuing a massive and ill-guided nation-building operation in Afghanistan," he told The Sunday Telegraph. "Buying off some sheikhs in Iraq does not constitute a successful COIN strategy. This is a huge fraud as it is beyond our capability to change, transform or fix Afghanistan."

Meanwhile, calls for talks with "moderate" Taliban - whose ranks include men who have fought and killed Western troops - are growing, not least in Britain.

"McChrystal is a great man but he is a cheerleader for a flawed strategy," said Adam Holloway, a Tory MP and former soldier who served in Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan.The only way out of the mess we find ourselves in is to make political deals - direct negotiations with the Taliban's Quetta Shura."

And David Miliband, foreign secretary until last month and Labour leadership candidate, wrote an open letter to Gen Petraeus proposing a peace deal in Afghanistan that "must include the vanquished as well as the victors" and "include the excluded" in the political process. His comments prompted speculation that mainstream Labour might take on an anti-war stance.

David Kilcullen, a former Australian officer and Petraeus adviser regarded as one of the world's leading authorities on winning guerrilla wars, also predicted talks with the Taliban would be a vital part of the general's policy. "There is nothing wrong with talking to the enemy, that is how you win these things in the end," he told The Sunday Telegraph. "But it's got to be from a position of strength. You fight the enemy to the point where they rejoin negotiations."

Amid the enthusiasm in some quarters for Gen Petraeus' appointment, another former top aide injected a heavy dose of reality that may not be welcome to the political classes in Washington or London.

"I think the biggest issue now is managing expectations," Col Stephen Boylan, who worked the general as he spearheaded the Iraq troop surge, told this newspaper. "Everyone is expecting Gen Petraeus to pull a rabbit out of the hat, and I have heard him say numerous times over the years that things will always get harder before they get easier."

Additional reporting by Nick Meo, Lalage Snow and Colin Freeman

[buglerbilly]

U.S. embassy launches campaign to correct errors in Pakistani media

By Karin Brulliard
Washington Post Foreign Service

Sunday, June 27, 2010

ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN -- Some reports are deemed "a paranoid fabrication," such as the claim that all Pakistanis are stripped naked in U.S. airports.

Others are "false and malicious," such as the one about the Americans moving Pakistani Taliban leaders to Afghanistan to prepare them for a battle against Pakistan's army.

So says the U.S. Embassy here, which for nearly eight months has issued statements countering every major error about American foreign policy that it finds in Pakistan's boisterous media.

It's a herculean task that embassy officials say has been undertaken by no other U.S. mission in the world -- because nowhere else, those officials say, does U.S. policy face such disdain and misrepresentation.

The statements -- called "Corrections for the Record" -- are issued a handful of times a month. Whether they are effective is hard to measure, though embassy officials express confidence. Taken together, the missives serve as a chronicle of the uphill battle the U.S. government faces in Pakistan in its sometimes clumsy efforts to influence opinion.

Much is at stake. The Obama administration views Pakistan as a crucial partner in its fight against Islamist terrorism, and it has spent the past year trying to convince Pakistanis that the United States is a steadfast, well-intentioned ally. So far the public has not been swayed: A recent Pew Research Center survey found that 17 percent of Pakistanis view the United States favorably, and only 8 percent expressed faith in President Obama -- his lowest rating in 22 countries surveyed.

The corrections have challenged widely believed theories in a nation with a penchant for conspiracies: that Americans were behind deadly bombings ("absurd, baseless") or plotting a "massive infiltration" by U.S. Marines of Pakistan's militant-riddled tribal areas ("entirely false").

The correction campaign comes as the media in Pakistan grow in size and influence. As of 2002, there was one state-owned television station in Pakistan. Now there are more than 90 private channels, many of which feature roundtable-style political debate, plus countless newspapers, magazines and journals.

The content is raucous and the journalists are free, within certain nebulous limits; many avoid criticism of the powerful security establishment, though they savage the civilian government. The United States, which is expanding its footprint here, often features as an all-powerful schemer, a depiction embassy officials complain is exacerbated when Pakistani journalists do not seek the American side of the story.

Some observers, though, say the real problem is the two nations' spy novel-like relations. Secrets surround so many aspects of the relationship that the resulting vacuum is easily filled by rumors.

Against that backdrop, some Pakistani journalists say, official embassy denials carry little weight. "Our government does not have a history of giving out information. If the U.S. pulls another Pakistan on the Pakistani media . . . it's only natural they would be hostile," media analyst Adnan Rehmat said. "The hostility stems from this space where secrecy is the norm."

That attitude has been compounded by confirmations -- in the American press -- of reports that initially seemed to be wacky conspiracy theories, said Huma Yusuf, a columnist for Dawn newspaper. Those CIA drones that strike militant mountain hideouts? Turned out they are indeed allowed by Pakistan, despite the government's public denials. The rumors about U.S. troops on Pakistani soil? American officials confirmed in 2008 that U.S. commandos had conducted a ground raid and more recently that about 200 Special Forces are training elements of Pakistan's military.

Still, Yusuf said, many of Pakistan's newly minted journalists are learning as they go, and "making stuff up" is a common way to generate news.

"If you can take even the slightest thing and turn it into a story that proves the U.S. is the evil demon . . . it's going to sell papers," Yusuf said.

Embassy officials say that they have stepped up interaction with Pakistani media but that the embassy's press shop -- set to grow to five people by next year -- is small for the job.

The U.S. special envoy for the region, Richard Holbrooke, has met with Pakistani journalists on many of his visits, as have many U.S. lawmakers while passing through, said Larry Schwartz, the embassy's senior spokesman. They often focus on the less-clandestine aspects of the U.S.-Pakistan relationship, such as aid for power plants and schools, even if the news media do not.

"We really are trying to develop a meaningful and supportive relationship with this country," Schwartz said. "The distortions that we see in the media do need to be countered."

In this duel, the embassy says its biggest foe is the Nation, an English-language newspaper. It has published photos of houses it says were rented by menacing American operatives employed by the security company Blackwater; in one case, according to a U.S. Embassy correction, the resident was a U.S. aid worker.

More recently, the newspaper reported what it called "stark confirmation of the vicious U.S. agenda": Police had detained a U.S. military official driving an "ammunition-laden vehicle" and "trading heavy weaponry." The embassy retorted that the truck carried "equipment" used in Special Forces training, with the consent of authorities.

Shireen Mizari, the editor of the Nation, responded to questions about its coverage and the embassy corrections in her column.

"If the police confirm a piece of information, we have no reason to doubt it," she wrote of the article about the truck. Regarding the house photos, she wrote that "if we see anyone doing something suspicious, it is our job to report it."

But the market for English-language newspapers is small. Television, where 70 percent of Pakistanis get their news and anti-Western venom flows, may be the biggest arbiter of public opinion. The embassy rarely issues corrections about television reports, which are too numerous to monitor.

Even so, the Americans might want to lighten up, Rehmat said. Given the surge in programming, most has nothing to do with the United States, and some is even positive, he said. Instead of corrections, the embassy should focus on getting more American scholars, scientists, artists and athletes -- not just Washington officials -- into Pakistan to mingle with journalists.

"For us, America is either Obama or Bush, or it's 50 Cent and Michael Jackson," he said. "We're missing all the other amazing spectrum."

[buglerbilly]

In Kandahar, many wounds of war treated at Mirwais hospital


Kandahar's Mirwais hospital treats many of the war wounded
The city's main medical facility tends to a regular stream of injuries, and doctors don't ask whether patients are Taliban or civilians.

By Joshua Partlow
Washington Post Foreign Service

Sunday, June 27, 2010

KANDAHAR, AFGHANISTAN --

No one here is surprised by any of it anymore.

This Story
Where horrific is a way of life
Kandahar's Mirwais hospital treats many of the war wounded
Even on the quietest days, you can watch bodies riddled with bullets and shrapnel being delivered or see people with burned faces and broken bones arriving in police pickups and taxicabs -- as they have for weeks and months and years.

The new patients are greeted without fanfare at the door of the lime-green Mirwais hospital, Kandahar city's main medical facility and the collection point for war wounded from across southern Afghanistan. They are ferried through the chipped-paint door and the "no weapons" sign, past orderlies pushing mango carts and relatives smoking cigarettes, into surgery with doctors who might be pulling a 24-hour shift. The patients recover under polka-dot sheets in dingy wards next to catatonic roommates wearing oxygen masks who do not have the wherewithal to brush away flies.

"You can adapt to anything," said Mohammad Daoud, the director of surgery.

And that might be what's most remarkable about the Mirwais hospital: It's a place where tragedy has become ordinary and exhaustion feels like calm.

"Sometimes I'm so tired, I can't walk," said Mujibur Rahman, 23, a nurse.

As the U.S. military swings its spotlight to Kandahar this summer, many of the war's stories will play out here. Of the 8,000 surgical patients the hospital treated last year, about half suffered wounds from war -- many of them civilians caught in the crossfire of insurgent roadside bombs, NATO airstrikes, Afghan army raids, gunfire on all sides. The hospital is beleaguered but not overwhelmed. Daoud said that it has about half the number of doctors it needs but that it has learned to make do.

There are beds for more than 400 patients and four tan tents outside to handle overflow. In the children's ward, patients sleep two to a bed. The tents were donated by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which funds the hospital and provides expatriate doctors to work alongside and train the Afghan staff members. They come from Ethiopia, Germany, Britain and elsewhere.

"I've never seen an American doctor here," said Ali Ahmad Qani, 39, a surgeon who has worked at the hospital for more than a decade.

"I don't want to get myself involved in politics," Qani clarified. Nor do the other doctors. When the wounded arrive, no one asks them whether they are Taliban or civilians. Hospital staff members said they are allowed to go about their business unhindered, unlike other professionals or government officials in Kandahar, whom insurgents regularly threaten and kill.

"A doctor is a person who should help everyone. He should be a balm for all wounds," Qani said.

Fazil Mohammad, 18, was wounded while co-piloting a supply convoy transporting bottled water through the Zhari district of Kandahar province. A bullet pierced the truck's passenger-side door and lodged in his right flank. The driver, Noor Ghani, a friend, laid Mohammad next to the highway as blood leaked from his side. Ghani wasn't familiar with Kandahar city, so he found a taxi to take them to the hospital.

In the second-floor ward the next day, Ghani held up an X-ray to the light coming through the window. The outline of the bullet suspended below Mohammad's ribs was clearly visible. "The doctors decided they're going to leave the bullet inside me," Mohammad said.

"It's too dangerous now to do supply runs. A lot of people are being killed, cars set on fire," Ghani said. "It's really hard for us to judge: Is the problem the Taliban or the other side? Everything is mixed up."

Down the hall, Noor Ali, an elderly man from the Garmsir district of Helmand province, recovered from an operation on his intestine. He was shot while protesting an alleged desecration of a Koran by NATO troops in January. A hospital in Helmand could not handle his injury, and the ICRC transported him to Kandahar.

"The doctors here are trying their best," he said.

His son, Mohammad Anwar, said foreign troops shot his father.

"We don't want them to be in this country," Anwar said. "If they were here to help us and bring security and development, that's okay. If they're just here to give us problems and kill us, to search our houses at night, that's not."

The summer is fighting season in Afghanistan and the busiest time of year for the Mirwais hospital. The doctors there did not offer any opinions about whether the arrival of 10,000 additional U.S. troops in Kandahar was good for the city. Daoud said only, "We expect more patients."

"This is war," Qani said. "And this war is growing."

[buglerbilly]

CIA director: US has not had good intelligence on Osama bin Laden in years

The United States has not had good intelligence on the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader, in years, Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, admitted on Sunday.

Published: 8:42PM BST 27 Jun 2010


Leon Panetta, the CIA director Photo: GETTY

He also gave a sobering account of the war in Afghanistan, saying the Taliban seemed to be strengthening with a stepped-up campaign of violence, even as US-led forces undermine the Islamist movement with attacks on its leadership.

Of greatest concern, he said, was al-Qaeda's reliance on operatives without previous records or those living in the US.

We are engaged in the most aggressive operations in the history of the CIA in that part of the world, and the result is that we are disrupting their leadership," Mr Panetta told ABC television's "This Week".

The rare assessment from the US spy chief comes as President Barack Obama builds up US forces in Afghanistan to prop up the government and prevent al-Qaeda from returning. Mr Panetta said only 50 to 100 militants were believed to be operating inside Afghanistan.

Mr Panetta said the al-Qaeda leadership was at its weakest point since the Sept 11, 2001 attacks, but admitted that he had not had reliable intelligence on the location of the group's leader since "the early 2000s".

"Since then, it's been very difficult to get any intelligence on his exact location," he said. "He is, as is obvious, in very deep hiding ... He's in an area of the tribal areas of Pakistan."

Denying the world's most wanted man safe haven on the lawless Afghanistan-Pakistan border has been an aim of Western policy since the Sept 11 attacks, when the Taliban in effect spurned a US demand to hand over the al-Qaeda chief.

Taliban militants, Mr Panetta said, "with regards to some of the directed violence, they seem to be stronger. But the fact is, we are undermining their leadership and that I think is moving in the right direction."

Violence in Afghanistan is at its worst in the nine-year war, with the Taliban stepping up their campaign of suicide bombings and assassinations, particularly in their Kandahar heartland.

Some 80 foreign troops have been killed so far in June, making it the deadliest month for international forces since the war began in late 2001. More than 300 troops have been killed this year compared with about 520 for all of 2009.

[buglerbilly]

Taliban talks in Afghanistan should start soon, says head of army

General gives his 'private view' in interview on Radio 4, and warns he is not certain of military victory

Andrew Sparrow guardian.co.uk, Sunday 27 June 2010 20.30 BST


British troops returning to camp in the Nad-e Ali district of Helmand province, Afghanistan. Photograph: Sean Smith for the Guardian

Coalition forces in Afghanistan should open talks with the Taliban "pretty soon" as part of a future exit strategy, the head of the army said today.

Insisting that talking to the enemy was eventually inevitable in a conflict of this kind, General Sir David Richards also seemed to cast doubt on whether the coalition would be able to inflict "strategic defeat" on the Taliban.

"If you look at any counter-insurgency campaign throughout history there's always been a point at which you start to negotiate, probably through proxies in the first instance," he said in an interview on Radio 4's the World this Weekend.

Claiming that he was merely expressing "a private view", he went on: "I think there's no reason why we shouldn't be looking at that sort of thing pretty soon."

Ministers have been cautious about talking up the prospects of holding peace talks for fear that it might be seen as an admission of defeat. But Richards said he did not think negotiations and outright war were "mutually contradictory".


"At the same time [as talking to the enemy] you have got to continue the work we are doing on the military, governance and development perspectives to make sure they don't think that we are giving up. It's a concurrent process," he said.

"We need to continue to make the Taliban feel they are being punished in a military sense.

"So that needs to continue, but whether we can turn that into some sense of strategic defeat I'm less certain."

Richards insisted that the people of Afghanistan did not want the Taliban to return and was confident the coalition was making progress in training Afghan forces. Creating a "stabilised Afghanistan under a competent government" would allow British troops to come home with a feeling of a "job well done", he said.

A Ministry of Defence source said although the government has not called for talks to start quite as directly as Richards did when expressing his "private view" on Radio 4, the general's comments were in line with ministerial thinking. "We can't win a purely military victory in Afghanistan," said the source. "It's going to have to go hand in hand with a political settlement."

Last week David Cameron said he wanted British troops home by 2015, but in a separate interview today Sir Richard Dannatt, Richards's predecessor, said:


"There's a notion: strategic patience. Just think back. Northern Ireland, maybe very different circumstances, but we were there for 38 years. Bosnia, we were there for 14, 15. Kosovo, we were there for 10. These things take time. And although people quite rightly say 'well, we've been in Afghanistan now since 2001', actually this major operation that we're involved in began in 2006."

[buglerbilly]

More on Panetta's interview...........

CIA Chief: Two Years ‘Til Iran’s Bomb, Sanctions Won’t Work

By Noah Shachtman June 27, 2010 | 10:48 am

CIA Director Leon Panetta just gave a remarkably candid interview on ABC’s This Week. Some of the highlights:

* Do you think the latest sanctions will dissuade the Iranians from trying to enrich uranium? “I think the sanctions will have some impact… Will it deter them from their ambitions with regards to nuclear capability? Probably not.”

* “We think [the Iranians] have enough low-enriched uranium right now for two weapons. They do have to enrich it, fully, in order to get there. And we would estimate that if they made that decision, it would probably take a year to get there, probably another year to develop the kind of weapon delivery system in order to make that viable.”

* A peace deal in Afghanistan? “The bottom line is that we really have not seen any firm intelligence that there’s a real interest among the Taliban, the militant allies of Al Qaeda, Al Qaeda itself, the Haqqanis, TTP, other militant groups. We have seen no evidence that they are truly interested in reconciliation.”

* “I think the estimate on the number of Al Qaeda [in Afghanistan] is actually relatively small. I think at most, we’re looking at maybe 60 to 100, maybe less.”


* When was the last time we had good intelligence on bin Laden’s location? “It’s been a while. I think it almost goes back, you know, to the early 2000s.”

* The drone attacks in Pakistan? “There is no question that we are abiding by international law and the law of war.”

* What about this new $100 million contract with Blackwater? “They provided a bid that was underbid everyone else by about $26 million. And a panel that we had said that they can do the job, that they have shaped up their act. So their really was not much choice but to accept that contract… n the war zone, we continue to have needs for security. You’ve got a lot of forward bases. We’ve got a lot of attacks on some of these bases. We’ve got to have security. Unfortunately, there are a few companies that provide that kind of security.”

* What threat are we not paying enough attention to? “The whole area of cyber security. We are now in a world in which cyber warfare is very real. [Ugh -- ed.] It could threaten our grid system. It could threaten our financial system. It could paralyze this country, and I think that’s an area we have to pay a lot more attention to.”

Read More http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/06/cia-chief-irans-bomb-two-years-away-sanctions-wont-work/#more-26509#ixzz0s6nzx0Bf

[buglerbilly]

The full interview.........from ABC News...........

http://abcnews.go.com/ThisWeek/video/interview-leon-panetta-11026048&tab=9482931&section=4765066&playlist=&page=1

[buglerbilly]

Petraeus Won't Alter Afghan Plan

June 27, 2010

Associated Press

KABUL, Afghanistan - America's top military officer assured President Hamid Karzai on Saturday that newly chosen NATO commander Gen. David Petraeus would pursue the policies of his ousted predecessor, whom the Afghan leader warmly praised for reducing civilian casualties.

Karzai's emphasis on preventing civilian deaths and injuries could make it difficult for NATO to relax rules of fighting that some U.S. troops say give the battlefield advantage to the Taliban. For now, however, no changes have been proposed, said a spokesman for visiting Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

During a 45-minute meeting with the Afghan leader, Mullen explained the events that surrounded President Barack Obama's decision to dismiss Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of both U.S. and NATO forces. McChrystal resigned after he and his aides were quoted in Rolling Stone magazine making disparaging remarks about top Obama administration officials guiding the civilian mission in the war.

Mullen, who spent just a half-day in Kabul, also met with U.S. Embassy officials and had a video teleconference with regional commanders in the field. To both sides, Mullen stressed the importance of a good "lash up" between often strained civilian and military efforts to beat back a resurgent Taliban and extend the Karzai government's control beyond Kabul.

"He stressed to President Karzai that absolutely nothing will change about our commitment to the struggle there, to the strategy," said Capt. John Kirby, a spokesman for Mullen.

Mullen then flew to neighboring Pakistan, where he repeated the message to President Asif Ali Zardari and Chief of Army Staff Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani.

Mullen's trip, which was scheduled before McChrystal's dismissal, took on a different tone after the change. Afghan leaders and some U.S. allies in the war worried that McChrystal's firing could disrupt the counterinsurgency strategy at a critical juncture in the war. But they were relieved when Obama chose Petraeus, McChrystal's boss who helped author the plan, to replace him.

Mullen stressed at the meeting that Petraeus had been involved in developing the strategy from the beginning and was attuned to the challenges in Afghanistan. The two talked briefly about the ongoing security operation in Kandahar, a hotbed of insurgent activity, Kirby said. Karzai lauded McChrystal, saying he was able to "reduce civilian casualties, create good cooperation between the Afghan and international forces and strengthen and develop the Afghan forces," according to a statement from the Afghan presidential palace.

A year ago, McChrystal imposed new restrictions on how NATO troops fight the enemy. The rules, credited for reducing the number of civilians killed and wounded by international troops, helped win McChrystal the trust of many Afghans.

Down in the ranks, however, the rules are widely perceived as too restrictive. Some troops believe the rules cost American lives and force them to give up the advantage of overwhelming firepower to a foe who shoots and melts back into the civilian population.

Kirby said that for now, all the rules of engagement that were in place under McChrystal will remain in effect.

"Gen. Petraeus, as any new commander, has the right when he comes in to review those rules of engagement and may recommend changes to them as he sees fit," Kirby said. "But we have no indication right now that he has any intention of changing anything."

Mark Moyar, a counterinsurgency expert, said he expected that Petraeus would reassess the rules and how they were being applied.

"I think morale would not be an issue if the rules permitted success, but in many cases they have made it impossible to defeat the insurgents and to convince the population that we are strong enough to protect them," he said.

The rules don't prevent U.S. troops from calling in air support, especially in the rugged east of the country where Taliban fighters are active but the population is smaller than in the agricultural areas of the ethnic Pashtun south - the main focus of the war. But the emphasis is on caution, and officers fear career damage if they mistakenly call for air or heavy weapons support and kill civilians in the process.

Details of the rules are classified, but troops say they cannot fire on a suspected militant unless he is presenting a clear threat. Troops say, for example, if a fighting-age man emerges from a building from which they are taking fire, the soldiers cannot fire at him unless he is armed or they personally saw him drop a weapon.

On the battlefield, five international service members died on Saturday, NATO said. Two, including at least one American, were killed in two separate roadside bombings in southern Afghanistan. Two others, including one American, were killed in roadside bomb attacks in the east. That brought to 89 the number of international troops killed so far in June - already the deadliest month of the nearly 9-year-old war. The figure includes at least 52 Americans.

Separately, Karzai nominated seven new members of his uncompleted Cabinet to replace ones rejected by lawmakers. So far, lawmakers have approved only 15 members of Karzai's 25-member Cabinet. Among the nominations Saturday was Bismullah Mohammadi, a senior commander in the civil war against the Taliban, to replace Hanif Atmar as interior minister.

Atmar, who was in charge of police, and Amrullah Saleh, the former head of Afghan intelligence, resigned earlier this month after Karzai held them responsible for failing to prevent a militant attack on a national conference, or jirga, on how to reach peace with insurgents. Both men were highly regarded by Western officials.

© Copyright 2010 Associated Press. All rights reserved.

[buglerbilly]

U.S. officials say Karzai aides are derailing corruption cases involving elite


Afghan President Hamid Karzai pledged in November to focus on fighting government corruption. (Kimimasa Mayama/bloomberg News)

By Greg Miller and Ernesto Londoño

Monday, June 28, 2010

I have viewed Karzai as a singularly incompetent and corrupt little shit for at least the last 2-3 years..........there is a lot more than this to come out yet including the machinations of members of his Family............

Top officials in President Hamid Karzai's government have repeatedly derailed corruption investigations of politically connected Afghans, according to U.S. officials who have provided Afghanistan's authorities with wiretapping technology and other assistance in efforts to crack down on endemic graft.

In recent months, the U.S. officials said, Afghan prosecutors and investigators have been ordered to cross names off case files, prevent senior officials from being placed under arrest and disregard evidence against executives of a major financial firm suspected of helping the nation's elite move millions of dollars overseas.

As a result, U.S. advisers sent to Kabul by the Justice Department, the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration have come to see Afghanistan's corruption problem in increasingly stark terms.

"Above a certain level, people are being very well protected," said a senior U.S. official involved in the investigations.

Karzai spokesman Waheed Omar denied investigations had been derailed. "There is no case, no instance, in which the palace or anyone from the palace has interfered with a case," he said.

Afghanistan is awash in international aid and regarded as one of the most corrupt countries in the world. Indeed, even as the United States and its allies pour money in, U.S. officials estimate that as much as $1 billion a year is flowing out as part of a massive cash exodus. The money, as first reported in The Washington Post in February, is often carried out in full view of customs officials at Kabul's airport, where such transfers are legal as long as they are declared. Officials suspect much of the cash is going to the Persian Gulf emirate of Dubai, where elite Afghans, including Karzai's older brother, have villas.

For the Obama administration, the ability of Afghan investigators to crack down on corruption is crucial. If American voters see Karzai's government as hopelessly corrupt, public support for the war could plunge. Corruption also fuels the Taliban insurgency and complicates efforts to persuade ordinary Afghans to side with leaders in Kabul.

Afghanistan's attorney general, Mohammed Ishaq Aloko, was seen as a potential ally against corruption when he took the job two years ago. Some investigations have ended in convictions. But U.S. officials said that Aloko, a native of Kandahar province who studied law in Germany, has repeatedly impeded prosecutions of suspects with political ties.

In meetings with U.S. Justice Department officials, Aloko has seemed almost apologetic and acknowledged coming under pressure from Karzai as well as members of parliament, officials said. On one occasion, according to a U.S. official, Aloko told his American counterparts, "I'm doing this because that is what the president tells me I have to do."

The official, like others quoted in this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive investigations.

Aloko referred questions to his deputy, Rahmatullah Nazari, who blamed resource constraints for his office's failure to win more corruption convictions. "There isn't any kind of pressure on the attorney general's office," Nazari said. "If anyone caves to pressure, they should go to prison."

But U.S. officials point to multiple instances of interference. The most prominent example to surface publicly involves Afghanistan's former minister of Islamic affairs, who fled the country this year as prosecutors were preparing to charge him with extorting millions of dollars from companies seeking contracts to take pilgrims to the Muslim holy land, a trip known as the hajj.

A travel ban was issued to block the former minister, Mohammad Siddiq Chakari, from leaving. But U.S. officials said Chakari escaped after showing airport security officials a letter he obtained from Aloko's office saying he had cooperated in the case and was not to be detained. Nazari said Chakari had not been convicted of a crime and, therefore, could not be prevented from leaving.

Chakari, who is now in London, has repeatedly maintained his innocence. Because there is no extradition treaty between Afghanistan and Britain, U.S. officials said it is unlikely that he will ever stand trial. Even so, some regard his departure as a moral victory.

"The very fact that the former minister of the hajj had to leave the country is in a way a remarkable achievement," said Steve Kraft, director of Afghanistan and Pakistan programs for the State Department's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement. "We would rather see him in jail here. But in the old days, they would have scoffed" at the idea of pursuing such a probe, he added.

Combined efforts

Critics say Karzai's initiatives are meant to appease the international community. "It's all a show," lawmaker Sayed Rahman said, noting that no senior government official has been imprisoned on corruption charges.

Over the past year, U.S. officials said, Afghan investigators have assembled evidence against three Karzai-appointed provincial governors accused of embezzlement or bribery. All three cases have been blocked. The interference has persisted, officials said, despite Karzai's pledge in November during his second inaugural address to make fighting corruption a focus of his new term.

The extent of the interference has become evident, officials said, in large part because of improvements in Afghan authorities' ability to pursue corruption cases.

Over the past two years, U.S. agencies have allied with their Afghan counterparts to create elite investigative and prosecutorial teams. Afghan applicants undergo polygraph tests in which they are asked whether they have taken bribes. Some have been sent to U.S. facilities, including the DEA academy in Quantico, to be trained.

Still, Karzai's administration has reportedly taken steps to limit the independence of these units. The U.S. official said that Aloko recently created a three-member commission to "review" the units' cases and that it has removed names of politically connected Afghans from prosecutors' files.

Nazari, Aloko's deputy, said that if others know of a list of names that have been removed, "they should bring it to us."

The long-term aim of the anti-corruption units, Kraft said, is to assemble cases in which the evidence is "so profound and well-known that the ability to get people off the hook will no longer be there."

Evidence from wiretaps

A key capability is a U.S.-provided eavesdropping system that allows Afghan investigators to intercept cellphone calls in the most populous parts of the country.

The wiretaps, approved by Afghan judges, have yielded key evidence in a growing list of embezzlement and bribery cases. U.S. officials said the wiretaps have also caught senior officials and members of parliament discussing efforts to derail certain cases.

In January, Afghan authorities raided the offices of New Ansari, a firm that has served as Afghanistan's primary link to the "hawala" money exchange system. This informal system for transferring cash overseas makes electronic tracking difficult. A second U.S. official familiar with the investigation said the firm is suspected of laundering drug money, delivering funds to insurgents and helping Afghan officials transfer tens of millions of dollars to accounts abroad.

After the raid, wiretaps picked up conversations indicating that there had been a frantic meeting involving Karzai aides at the presidential palace. U.S. officials said members of Karzai's administration as well as members of parliament held subsequent meetings with Aloko, pressuring him to ensure that certain New Ansari executives not be charged.

Among those protected was Haji Muhammad Rafi Azimi, deputy chairman of Afghan United Bank, a subsidiary of New Ansari, U.S. officials said. On a wiretap recording, Azimi is heard discussing bribes paid to Chakari. The recorded conversations were played in open court in the trial of a lower-ranking official in the Religious Affairs Ministry, Mohammed Noor.

"It's clear to everyone involved he should be indicted and charged," a U.S. official said of Azimi. But, the official said, Azimi is "a businessman who knows a great deal about the finances of government officials."

A second U.S. official familiar with the case concurred. "What happened is a large group of very powerful people . . . went to the attorney general and told him to stand down," the official said.

Phone calls and e-mails to Azimi did not elicit any responses. Guards outside New Ansari's office in Kabul told a reporter that the site had been closed for months. They said they did not know why they were still getting paid to guard it.

Noor, a civil servant, was sentenced to 15 years in prison after being convicted in May of collecting bribe money for Chakari in Saudi Arabia and bringing it to Afghanistan. Two others in the case are awaiting trial. Azimi remains in his position at Afghan United Bank.

Aloko has announced that his office is investigating five current and former ministers, reportedly including Mohammad Ibrahim Adel, the mines minister, accused by U.S. officials of taking a $30 million bribe from a Chinese firm. Adel stepped down, but neither he nor any other minister -- besides Chakari -- has been charged.

Londoño reported from Kabul.

[buglerbilly]

Panetta says Afghan insurgents show no real interest in reconciliation talks

By Peter Finn and Karen DeYoung

Monday, June 28, 2010

CIA Director Leon Panetta said Sunday that U.S. officials have not seen "any firm intelligence" that insurgent groups in Afghanistan are interested in reconciliation, and he dismissed reports that a top militant leader is open to a Pakistan-brokered agreement.

"We have seen no evidence that they are truly interested in reconciliation where they would surrender their arms, where they would denounce al-Qaeda, where they would really try to become part of that society," Panetta said on ABC's "This Week." "My view is that . . . unless they're convinced the United States is going to win and that they are going to be defeated, I think it is very difficult to proceed with a reconciliation that is going to be meaningful."

Panetta was responding to reports that senior Pakistani military and intelligence officials are seeking to broker a deal that would usher the network led by Sirajuddin Haqqani, a major element in the insurgency in Afghanistan and an ally of al-Qaeda, into a power-sharing arrangement in Kabul. More broadly, Panetta said none of the insurgent groups in Afghanistan has shown a real interest in talks.

The Obama administration has always maintained that the war will end with a political settlement rather than a military one. It has gradually warmed to the idea of negotiations with insurgent groups, but senior administration officials have warned Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistan that Washington considers Haqqani's network off-limits. Any deal between the sides would drive a wedge between Karzai and the United States and would rehabilitate the Haqqani network, a longtime Pakistani asset.

Karzai has said that he will talk with any insurgent group about its grievances, but that any deal must include a commitment by fighters to give up arms, sever ties with al-Qaeda and respect the Afghan constitution. His aides have held inconclusive meetings, within and outside Afghanistan, with representatives of two groups loosely linked under the banner of the Afghan Taliban: the Quetta shura led by Mohammad Omar and the Hezb-i-Islami.

On Sunday, television network al-Jazeera, citing unnamed sources, reported that Karzai recently held face-to-face talks with Haqqani, in the presence of Pakistan's army and intelligence chiefs. Karzai's office denied that, as did a Pakistani military spokesman, Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, who called the report "baseless and concocted with malicious intent."

Haqqani fighters, based in Pakistan's North Waziristan tribal area, operate primarily in eastern Afghanistan, where their attacks against coalition forces and Afghan civilians have grown more ruthless. Haqqani's father, the founder of the network, is a former Afghan warlord who fought occupying Soviet forces with U.S. and Pakistani help in the 1980s, battled the Taliban after the Soviet departure, then joined the Taliban when it took over the country in the mid-1990s.

President Obama said Sunday it is "too early to tell" whether reintegration and reconciliation efforts will succeed. "I think that we have to view these efforts with skepticism, but also openness," he said at a news conference at the close of the Group of 20 conference in Canada.

"The Taliban is a blend of hard-core ideologues, tribal leaders, kids that basically sign up because it's the best job available to them. Not all of them are going to be thinking the same way about the Afghan government, about the future of Afghanistan," Obama said in his most extensive remarks to date about the reconciliation process. "And so we're going to have to sort through how these talks take place."

He said conversations between the Afghan and Pakistani governments were a "useful step."

The remarks by Obama and Panetta came as a suspected CIA missile strike killed three militants in North Waziristan, thought to be the location of al-Qaeda's Pakistan headquarters. Panetta said that only 50 to 100 al-Qaeda operatives remain inside Afghanistan. Without explicitly acknowledging the CIA's drone campaign, he said U.S. actions were in compliance with domestic and international law.

He acknowledged that the fight in Afghanistan has proved "harder" and "slower than I think anyone anticipated."

Panetta also warned that being a U.S. citizen was no protection for those who conspire against the United States. He had been asked about Anwar al-Aulaqi, an American-born cleric, now in Yemen, who has been linked to terrorist attacks, including the Fort Hood shootings and the bombing attempt on a Detroit-bound plane last Christmas.

"Aulaqi is a terrorist and, yes, he is a U.S. citizen, but he is first and foremost a terrorist, and we are going to treat him like a terrorist," Panetta said when asked whether Aulaqi was on an assassination list. "We don't have an assassination list, but I can tell you this: We have a terrorist list, and he's on it." Intelligence and counterterrorism officials have said Aulaqi is on a target list of terrorists who can be killed.

Staff writer Karin Brulliard in Islamabad contributed to this report.

[buglerbilly]

Preliminary Observations on DOD's Progress and Challenges in Distributing Supplies and Equipment to Afghanistan

(Source: Government Accountability Office; issued June 25, 2010)

In fiscal year 2009, the Department of Defense (DOD) reported that it spent $4 billion to move troops and materiel into Afghanistan, a mountainous, arid, land-locked country with few roads, no railway, and only four airports with paved runways over 3,000 meters. The terrain and weather in Afghanistan and surrounding countries pose further challenges to transporting supplies and equipment. In December 2009, the President announced that an additional 30,000 U.S. troops will be sent to Afghanistan by August 2010.

Today’s testimony discusses GAO’s preliminary observations drawn from ongoing work reviewing DOD’s logistics efforts supporting operations in Afghanistan, including (1) the organizations involved and routes and methods used to transport supplies and equipment into and around Afghanistan; (2) steps DOD has taken to improve its distribution process, based on lessons learned from prior operations; and (3) challenges affecting DOD’s ability to distribute supplies and equipment within Afghanistan, and its efforts to mitigate them.

Movement of supplies and equipment into and around Afghanistan is a complex process involving many DOD organizations and using air, sea, and ground modes of transportation. DOD’s ability to provide timely logistics support to units deploying to Afghanistan or already in theater depends on its ability to synchronize all of these activities into one seamless process. For example, U.S. Transportation Command manages air and surface transportation from the United States to and around the U.S. Central Command area of operations; U.S. Central Command’s Deployment and Distribution Operations Center validates and directs air movements and monitors and directs surface movements within theater; the Air Force’s Air Mobility Division assigns and directs aircraft to carry materiel within the theater; and the Army’s 1st Theater Sustainment Command monitors strategic movements of materiel and directly influences movements into theater.

Most cargo in theater is transported commercially by ship to Pakistan and then by contractor-operated trucks to Afghanistan, but high-priority and sensitive items are transported by U.S. military and commercial aircraft directly from the United States and other countries to logistics hubs in Afghanistan.

DOD has taken some steps to improve its processes for distributing materiel to deployed forces based on lessons learned from prior operations. For example, in response to lessons learned from problems with keeping commanders informed about incoming materiel in Operation Iraqi Freedom, U.S. Transportation Command established the Central Command Deployment and Distribution Operations Center, which now helps coordinate the movement of materiel and forces into the theater of operations. Also, since GAO reported in 2003 that radio frequency identification tags were not being effectively used to track materiel in transit to, within, and from Iraq, DOD developed policies and procedures to increase tag use on cargo traveling through the U.S. Central Command theater of operations, including Afghanistan.

Challenges hindering DOD’s ability to distribute needed supplies and equipment to U.S. forces operating in Afghanistan include difficulties with transporting cargo through neighboring countries and around Afghanistan, limited airfield infrastructure, lack of full visibility over cargo movements, limited storage capacity at logistics hubs, difficulties in synchronizing the arrival of units and equipment, lack of coordination between U.S. and other coalition forces for delivery of supplies and equipment, and uncertain requirements and low transportation priority for contractors.

DOD recognizes these challenges and has ongoing or planned efforts to mitigate some of them; however, some efforts involve long-term plans that will not be complete in time to support the ongoing troop increase. DOD is also working to address these challenges through planning conferences to synchronize the flow of forces into Afghanistan. At these conferences, DOD officials stressed the need to balance and coordinate multiple requirements in order to sustain current operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, draw down forces and equipment in Iraq, and increase forces and equipment in Afghanistan.

Click here for the full report (30 pages in PDF format) on the GAO website.

http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d10842t.pdf

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[buglerbilly]

Aid cash feared lost as £2bn is flown out of Afghanistan

More than £2bn of cash has been openly flown out of Kabul airport since 2007, raising fears huge sums of British and American aid are being creamed off by corrupt officials.

Ben Farmer in Kabul

Published: 5:27PM BST 28 Jun 2010


Afghanistan's endemic corruption and Hamid Karzai's failure to tackle the problem have angered his western backers Photo: EPA

The sum haemorrhaging from one of the poorest countries in the world has led officials to believe the money is from plundered Western aid projects and security or reconstruction contracts, it has been reported.

Proceeds from the country's rampant opium and heroin businesses also account for part of the sum, which is more than the Afghan government's entire tax revenue.

The money is packed in suitcases or even stacked on pallets and flown mainly to Dubai.

Customs records for legally declared money leaving the airport showed £2.1 billion left between since the start of 2007 and the end of February 2010.

The declared cash is likely to be a fraction of what actually leaves the country. Customs records are incomplete and money is also smuggled out unregistered.

In December The Daily Telegraph reported that the Afghan ministry of finance estimated £6m a day was being smuggled out.

Afghanistan's endemic corruption and Hamid Karzai's failure to tackle the problem have angered his western backers who are pouring in money to defeat the Taliban insurgency.

Nato spent more than £10bn in Afghanistan alone last year.

Afghanistan's gross domestic product was only £8bn in 2008.

Earlier this month, the then US commander in Afghanistan, Gen Stanley McChrystal, told Nato defence ministers that corruption was a "critical risk" to their counter insurgency campaign's success.

Mr Karzai's inner circle of warlord supporters and his own brothers, Mahmood and Ahmad Wali, have been accused of leading the plunder, but have totally denied wrongdoing.

One US official investigating corruption told the Wall Street Journal: "It's not like they grow money on trees here."

"A lot of this looks like our tax dollars being stolen. And opium, of course."

General Mohammad Asif Jabarkhail, the airport's chief customs officer, said his men faced pressure to let money through when they did find it being smuggled.

When his men found a "pile of millions of dollars," all undeclared, en route to Dubai last year, "there was lots of pressure from my higher ups," he said.

"It came from very, very senior people. They told me there was an arrangement with the central bank and told me to let it go," he said.

The declared money leaves largely through couriers who are part of the Hawala money transfer network which is widespread in the Middle East and Asia. The name of the owner of the money is rarely registered at customs.

It was also reported that the Pakistan government was attempting to broker a power-sharing peace deal between Kabul and the Haqqani network, one of the insurgency's largest factions.

Mr Karzai was reported to have personally met with Sirajuddin Haqqani, leader of the network, with help from Pakistan's ISI military intelligence service.

Mr Karzai's office and the Pakistan government have denied the allegations.

[buglerbilly]

Report faults U.S. for being too optimistic about Afghan security capabilities


U.S. troops help wounded soldiers to a helicopter in Kandahar province, where a major push is planned. (Justin Sullivan/getty Images)

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 29, 2010

The U.S. military has systematically overstated or failed to adequately measure the capabilities of Afghan security forces, whose performance is key to the Obama administration's exit strategy for the war, according to a new government audit.

Efforts to prepare and equip Afghan forces are also plagued by a shortage of U.S.-led coalition trainers and mentors and a corrupt and inadequate Afghan logistics system, the report by the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction said.

The coalition did not challenge the findings and acknowledged significant ongoing problems. But it said the report, released Monday, was outdated and failed to take sufficient account of recent improvements in the training program.

Gen. David H. Petraeus, whom President Obama nominated last week to head U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, is likely to face questions about the effort to train Afghan security forces at a confirmation hearing Tuesday. Under the administration's plan, the U.S.-led coalition will begin transferring control of some areas to Afghan security forces beginning in July 2011.

Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told reporters Monday that plans for coalition forces to outnumber their Afghan counterparts in an upcoming offensive in Kandahar were "totally unacceptable."

"It runs exactly contrary to what needs to be done in terms of the success of this mission, to put Afghans more in front," Levin said. "What's going on? Why is that true? Why is that still the case?"

According to the Kandahar plan presented to NATO leaders in Brussels this month by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who was ousted as coalition commander by Obama last week, the operation will include 11,850 mostly American foreign troops and 8,500 Afghan military and police personnel.

Levin said he would also press Petraeus on his support for the July 2011 U.S. withdrawals. At a recent hearing, Petraeus hesitated when asked to voice his support for the deadline, which many in the military oppose, then emphasized that it would mark the beginning of a transition to Afghan control that would have a pace and scope that would depend on "conditions on the ground."

Levin and other Democrats have pressed the administration for a commitment to speed up the turnover of control to Afghan forces. But senior Republicans have charged that the deadline, set by Obama when he announced a new strategy and a surge in U.S. forces to Afghanistan last December, only encouraged Taliban insurgents to wait for a U.S. departure.

Lawmakers are also expected to ask Petraeus whether he plans to alter McChrystal's rules of engagement, including restrictions on coalition air attacks and ground operations, which some troops have said endanger them and put them at a disadvantage in fighting the Taliban. But the rules, designed to avoid civilian casualties, are drawn directly from the U.S. Army's counterinsurgency manual, which Petraeus authored.

Levin said that most Democrats still support the war strategy but warned of "the beginnings of a fraying of that support."

Obama's strategy called for a surge in U.S. forces to take momentum from the Taliban and a doubling of the size of trained Afghan army and police forces that would eventually take over. The forces, though, remain in poor shape, with high rates of desertion, illiteracy and drug abuse.

The overall coalition plan calls for 2,325 trainers, of which only 846 are on the ground, with 660 additional pledged. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has diverted about 800 U.S. troops to temporarily bridge the gap.

The report's principal focus is the rating system used since 2005 to measure the extent to which individual Afghan security units are capable of fighting on their own. According to U.S. figures at the end of March, only 23 percent of the Afghan army and 12 percent of the police drew top ratings.

The system, which counted the quantity of troops and equipment rather than quality of effort, was deeply flawed, the report said, and the number of capable units was probably lower. In one top-rated police district, it noted, 53 officers had been authorized and 23 had been trained, but only six officers were found to be present. Another district had 10 vehicles provided by the U.S. government, but only three drivers.

In a written response to the report, Lt. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, the training commander, said the findings were "not only inaccurate" because they relied on outdated data but "potentially damaging." The United States has spent $27 billion, more than half of all reconstruction dollars, on training and equipping Afghan forces.

U.S. Army Col. John Ferrari, under Caldwell's command, agreed that the rating system was not "optimal" and said that it had been replaced this spring with a more subjective, qualitative assessment program, along with vastly expanded training and mentoring. The military has not yet provided assessments under the new system.

Rather than sending Afghan troops directly into combat -- many of them for the first time -- all soldiers and police are trained before being sent to the battlefield with coalition forces at their sides, Ferrari said in a telephone interview.

"What you want to do over a period of time is to stay with that unit," Ferrari said. "And then maybe you take the training wheels off . . . and back off a bit and see how it does. Some are going to backslide, and then you grab it back again for a couple of times until the unit can hold that readiness level."

Staff writer Craig Whitlock contributed to this report.

[buglerbilly]

Heavy-lift Helos Haul Big Missions in Afghanistan

(Source: US Marine Corps; issued June 26, 2010)


The disabled British Merlin Mk3 on the cargo hook of a Marine Corps CH-53E Super Stallion that transported it to Camp Bastion. (USMC photo)

CAMP BASTION, Afghanistan --- A CH-53E Super Stallion flew across the dawning sun here June 26 as it returned with an 18,000-pound piece of vital cargo slung beneath its belly. The sight of the aircraft against the painted morning sky was impressive on two accounts – the vision of the silhouetted helicopter floating in Afghanistan’s vibrant dawn, and the fact that the cargo toted below was a United Kingdom Mk3 Merlin (EH-101) helicopter.

The Super Stallion, deployed here with Marine Heavy Helicopter Squadron 466, was recovering the aircraft from a forward operating base after the Merlin went down in a non-hostile event. Perhaps the most impressive part of the recovery mission – HMH-466 pulled it off with less than 18 hours notice.

“In order for it to go down,” Lt. Col. Mitch Cassell, the HMH-466 Commanding Officer, explained, “it required the entire squadron to throw themselves behind the lift.”

The planning and preparation involved in outfitting a CH-53E to carry tens of thousands of pounds is extensive and requires meticulous attention to detail. Pilots and crew in the ready room who weren’t even flying the mission planned it. An entire maintenance department jumped into action pulling off 2,000 pounds worth of gear, including the auxiliary fuel tanks, fuel probe, troop seats, ramp, cargo wench and utility hoist. “We had to remove all that equipment from our aircraft to make it light enough to lift the stricken Mk3 Merlin,” said Cassell.

The mission is called TRAP – Tactical Recovery of Aircraft or Personnel – a mission Marines actively train for all the time. However, very few real world TRAP missions have ever been conducted. Conducting one TRAP during a deployment is rare. Twice is practically unheard of… until now. In addition to the Mk3 Merlin mission, HMH-466 conducted an earlier TRAP mission to recover a U.S. Army MH-47G Chinook helicopter May 15 that made a hard landing near Kandahar.

This mission was also conducted with less than 24 hours notice and followed many of the same planning and execution processes, “but more weight had to be removed from our aircraft because the Chinook was much heavier than the Merlin” said Cassell. To successfully lift the Chinook, over 5,600 pounds of equipment had to be removed from the CH-53E helicopter.

“The fact that an Army unit was able to call across the boundaries to ask the Marine Corps to support a mission is pretty remarkable," said Lt. Col. Timothy Sheyda, HMH-466’s executive officer. “We were able to smoothly interact with their airborne assets on station, as well as their ground team which was at the site, and their command and control system that was in place.”

The CH-53E squadron is getting the call on these big missions because, according to Sheyda “there are only three aircraft in the world that could possibly do that lift.” The other two besides the CH-53 are the Russian-made MI-26 Halo and the CH-47 Chinook. Although those aircraft are available in the area, “the Marine Corps is the only service capable of reconfiguring its aircraft and performing the mission on such short notice.”

But the greatest accomplishment extends beyond the rescued aircraft being delivered to their respective owners. The capability the HMH-466 Marines have to plan, organize and execute these operations with very limited advance notice speaks to their teamwork and dedication.

“The fact that a team can throw a plan together in less than 24 hours to do a mission really validates the Marine Corps planning process,” Sheyda exclaimed. “This process will have to be passed on to future generations.”

He went on to say, “Marines are trained to be light, agile, quick and lethal. In this case, we were able to do all of those things and effectively accomplish our mission in a short timeline. That’s how we operate.”

At the end of the summer, HMH-466 will return to Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, Calif., and pass off their responsibilities to Marine Heavy Helicopter Squadron 361. As HMH-466 flies off into the sunset, HMH-361 picks up a “heavy” mission supporting the Afghan National Security and NATO Forces as the “heavy haulers” of southern Afghanistan.

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[buglerbilly]

Petraeus: I’ll Change Afghanistan’s Rules of War

By Spencer Ackerman June 29, 2010 | 10:20 am



Who called it? Noah mused last week that Gen. David Petraeus might relax the strict rules on U.S. troops in Afghanistan once he takes over command of the war there. Looks like Petraeus is proving Noah right.

In his opening statement, Petraeus vowed to “look very hard” at the directives Gen. Stanley McChrystal put in place to cut down on civilian casualties. McChrystal was following counterinsurgency principles that Petraeus, in large part, pioneered and championed within the U.S. military, principles that led McChrystal to say that the attitudes of the Afghan people will be “strategically decisive” in the war.

And Petraeus, as you’d expect, publicly supports that mission to the hilt. “In counterinsurgency operations, the human terrain is the decisive terrain,” he said, using a jargony term to mean the Afghan people. “I will continue the emphasis on reducing the loss of innocent civilian life to an absolute minimum in the course of military operations.” But that doesn’t mean he’ll continue McChrystal’s rules as written.

In Afghanistan, McChrystal went further in restricting troops’ ability to use force than Petraeus did in Iraq. McChrystal cut way back on the use of air cover for U.S. troops in firefights, instructed them to give Afghans the right of way on highways, and urged them to cut off battles when insurgents retreat to populated areas. The biggest overlooked aspect of Michael Hastings’ Rolling Stone piece that ended McChrystal’s career was the frustration troops in Afghanistan felt under the rules of engagement — fairly or unfairly.

So, to send a new signal to those troops, Petraeus called it a “moral imperative” to allow troops “all the support they need when they are in a tough situation.” He said discussed it with the Afghan leadership over the last few days and indicated that he secured their “full agreement” for that principle. While Petraeus didn’t specifically promise a change in the rules or their application, that’s a pretty strong indication that a change is in the works when Petraeus gets to Kabul — something Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the chairman of the committee, indicated he wanted to see the Senate ensure happens before the July 4 holiday.

So while no one should expect Petraeus to abandon population-centric counterinsurgency — “we cannot kill or capture our way out of an industrial-strength insurgency,” he said, so you don’t get it twisted — “we will continue to pursue relentlessly the enemies of the new Afghanistan in the months and years ahead.”

Photo: U.S. Army

Read More http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/06/petraeus-ill-change-the-rules-of-war-in-afghanistan/#more-26658#ixzz0sFjw0800

[buglerbilly]

Is Obama’s 2011 Afghanistan Deadline a Mistake?

By Spencer Ackerman June 29, 2010 | 5:14 pm



General Petraeus and everyone else in the Obama chain of command swears up and down that they’re committed to the July 2011 deadline for beginning to bring troops home. But the question remains: is setting a transition date actually a mistake?

The Obama administration argues that the date sends “a message of urgency” to the Afghan government to get its act together and start governing. Less clearly stated but still salient is that the war has stretched out for over nine years with minimal progress and the public is tired of waging it. Advocates for the Obama administration’s strategy don’t say that they think their approach to the war will work. They say that it’s the least-worst strategy to secure U.S. interests against al-Qaeda and its affiliates in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Whatever that says about the administration’s intellectual honesty, it’s not a rallying cry to fight.

Meanwhile, the administration’s opponents in the Senate today said any deadline heralding any transition to Afghan responsibility is a bad idea. Their refrain is that you don’t announce the date a war will end before you win it. And in a conventional conflict, that’s true. In a conflict that depends on the popular legitimacy of a foreign military coalition waging a really long war, and on the ability of the Afghan government to deliver prosperity and justice and essential services, it’s more complicated.

But Sen. John McCain and company are right that the July 2011 date is problematic. Even the most stalwart defender of the administration’s decision to set the date has to concede that it hasn’t been quite the “forcing mechanism” for the Afghan government that Obama intended. Since the date was unveiled, Hamid Karzai has shown himself to be far more inclined to cut a deal with the Taliban than he has to govern. His “peace jirga” started to build a consensus for offering the Taliban peace terms. Reportedly, he and the Pakistanis are working on the contours of what the New York Times reported could amount to a “separate peace” on terms that may or may not support U.S. interests against al-Qaeda, with the Pakistanis offering to bring its quasi-proxies in the Haqqani extremist network and the Taliban in from the cold if Karzai agrees to share power.

There’s only so far you can go with this assessment, in fairness. Karzai has pledged support for NATO-Afghan security operations in the southern city of Kandahar. And everyone pretty much acknowledges that the Afghan war is going to end with some kind of negotiated power-sharing arrangement with unsavory characters.

But contrast it with what the Afghan government is doing on, well, governance. The famous “government in a box” that Gen. Stanley McChrystal forecast would be airlifted into Majra in February turned out to be empty. And a recent United Nations report found that while there are some positive signs that the Afghan government is starting to prioritize economic development, it’s not really gotten into gear out past Kabul, where it matters. (Or, as the report put it, “the capacity of subnational government to coordinate through the sector working groups is limited in many locations where mechanisms are operating below expectations.“) To top it all off, Karzai is backsliding on pledges to hold government officials accountable for the country’s endemic corruption. Does this sound like Karzai’s hearing that “message of urgency” on governing?

None of this is to say that Karzai would act with greater haste to govern if Obama didn’t say that U.S. troops are going to start to very slowly come home in July 2011. The U.S. has eight years’ worth of evidence that an unpressured Karzai is pretty disinclined to reform. And no critic of the Obama administration’s July 2011 transition date has offered any alternative proposal for how to compel Karzai to sack up and start governing. What’s more, Petraeus made it clear that if the Taliban have taken any encouragement from the date, he intends to beat it out of them.

But it is to say that if we’re to take Obama and Petraeus seriously that capable governance is the key to Afghanistan’s long-term stability, it’s worth acknowledging that the mechanism that Obama chose to compel Karzai to govern looks more like it’s compelled him to move in a different direction — one that has a far less clear benefit to U.S. interests. And that might strengthen the hand of aides in December’s upcoming administration-wide strategy review who argue that only a more-rapid withdrawal of U.S. troops than Obama and Petraeus currently envision will have the desired result.

Credit: Department of State / Flickr

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[buglerbilly]

Petraeus Pal McMaster Headed to Afghanistan

By Spencer Ackerman June 29, 2010 | 4:04 pm



It’ll be another few days before the Senate formally votes to confirm General David Petraeus as the new top commander of the Afghanistan war. But it looks like he’s sparing no time assembling his posse. Danger Room has learned that Brigadier General H.R. McMaster is headed to Afghanistan to become Petraeus’ new “Deputy J5,” a top officer in charge of plans.

McMaster is considered one of the brightest and most successful general officers in the U.S. Army. As a colonel commanding the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment in Tal Afar in Iraq in 2005 and 2006, McMaster basically improvised his own counterinsurgency strategy before it was popular or had the support of higher headquarters. Working with the town’s mayor, Najim al-Jubouri, to provide security for the local population, McMaster calmed the volatile Ninewa Province town at a time when the rest of Iraq was on fire. His example helped convince the Bush administration — and Petraeus — that a shift to a counterinsurgency strategy was still possible late in the game.

But he didn’t easily convince the Army, with its then-institutional wariness of counterinsurgency, that he ought to advance as an officer. It took the unusual involvement of Petraeus in 2008 to make sure that the Army’s promotions board gave McMaster his first star. More recently, he’s been at the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command, where he’s pursued such unconventional ideas as crowdsourcing the service’s Capstone Concept planning document.

This looks like Petraeus is Assembling his old crew of Avengers. Hey, Pete Mansoor, Dave Kilcullen: you guys like Afghan food?

Source: DoD

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[buglerbilly]

Shorter Petraeus: Seriously, Guys, I Support The July 2011 Afghanistan ‘Deadline’

By Spencer Ackerman June 29, 2010 | 1:54 pm



Remember the scene in Goodfellas when a prison-confined Paulie chopped garlic with a razor blade to make a marinara? That was what it was like today at the Senate Armed Services Committee when legislators tried to get Gen. David Petraeus to break with President Obama over the July 2011 date to being transitioning security responsibilities to Afghan soldiers and police.

Petraeus actually went through the same thing, from the same senators, two weeks ago. But that was before Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s command imploded and Petraeus received Obama’s nod to take charge in Afghanistan. So maybe it was inevitable that certain senators — not just Republicans, but Democrats too — wanted to see if Petraeus’s views shifted at all now that he’s faced with the responsibilities of command.

Short answer: they haven’t. Again and again and again, Petraeus reiterated the same line: he backs the July 2011 date as “the beginning of a process” of placing Afghan troops in the lead and beginning a “conditions-based” withdrawal, and “not the date when the US heads for the exits and turns out the lights.” Only this time he larded his testimony with repeated references to times Obama has said the same thing, going back to the December 1 presidential speech at West Point unveiling the Afghanistan surge. Petraeus said he backed placing the date in the president’s strategy in order to send “a message of urgency,” particularly to the Afghan government, so it steps its game up.

For the better part of four hours, senators parsed and parsed some more, trying to find daylight between Obama and Petraeus, and not really succeeding. The closest they came was when Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the ranking Republican on the committee, got Petraeus to concede that neither he nor any other military officer he knew came up with the July 2011 date. But, Petraeus said, while he might not have proposed it, “there was no question but that in the final session” of internal administration debate, “that this was discussed and I supported it.” After all, he continued, “a whole of of things appropriately intrude” on strategy-making other “than just strictly military advice.”

At the same time, Democratic senators spent so much time at the hearing spinning Petraeus’s support of the transition date that they neglected their own problems on the left. Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the speaker of the House, told the Huffington Post’s Sam Stein yesterday that she expects a “serious drawdown” of U.S. troops in July 2011. Pelosi herself added that she didn’t expect — per Obama, and per Petraeus — that “turning out the lights” is in the cards in Afghanistan by then. But the White House hasn’t exactly bent over backwards to send the message to its progressive base that it expects much more war to unfold in Afghanistan even after July 2011 comes and goes.

Accordingly, none of what Petraeus said particularly sat well with senators, mostly on the right, who think that setting any date to mark a transition in strategy is a dangerous concession to the insurgency and an uncertain signal to the Afghan and Pakistani governments. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), one of McCain’s closest political allies and usually a big Petraeus fan, raised his voice at one point when he lambasted comments attributed to Vice President Joe Biden indicating a more rapid withdrawal than Petraeus anticipated. But Petraeus said that he personally talked with Biden and secured Biden’s support for the strategy as he understands it. For an administration so recently rocked by internal acrimony between McChrystal and some senior diplomats, it was quite the message of unity.

Still, it didn’t overcome any GOP senators’ perception that Obama picked the date simply for domestic political reason. And with Hamid Karzai’s government backsliding on key issues like curbing corruption, quite possibly because of a perception that the U.S. commitment to Afghanistan is less enduring than Obama has pledged, it’s not likely to stop the debate. But Petraeus repeatedly declined hours’ worth of opportunities to signal disagreement with the Afghanistan strategy, for better or for worse, so if the Obama administration is making a mistake, they’re all going down in the same ship.

Photo: DoD

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[buglerbilly]

NATO retools in a key mission: Building an Afghan police force

By Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writer

Wednesday, June 30, 2010

When Gen. David H. Petraeus begins his new job as top military commander in Afghanistan, his success will hinge in part on a group of green-uniformed Afghan recruits who recently practiced a mock ambush at the country's main police academy in Kabul.

As the men battled wooden props with fake weapons, an Italian instructor called out: "Remember, police are always the victims of the ambush, so they have to react to them." A few yards away, other trainees were searching a truck for a hidden bomb, the cause of many of the nearly 1,600 fatalities among Afghan police officers in the past two years.

The practice sessions were deemed successful, but the crucial test comes weeks from now when the training academy's June graduates take their positions in districts around the country. Based on past performance, at least a quarter will quit or die in the first 12 months.

Plugging the gaps with competently trained police officers -- and persuading them to stay -- is a challenge that has frustrated each of Petraeus's predecessors. But the task has taken on renewed urgency in recent months as NATO prepares to begin drawing down its forces next year.

The alliance is shaking up existing training programs and adding new incentives in an attempt to turn around what has been one of the biggest, most enduring disappointments of the nearly nine-year-old war: the inability to transform the country's 90,000 police officers into a professional force capable of assuming control of local security.

NATO officials touted the changes in advance of the release of an audit by the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction. The report, released Monday, criticized NATO for overstating the percentage of Afghan security forces -- including police and army -- that are fully capable of performing their missions. The report also said training efforts suffer from a shortage of trainers and mentors.

"The old system was broken. It just didn't work," said Marine Col. Gregory T. Breazile, spokesman for NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan, which oversees police and army training. While better instruction is yielding a stronger Afghan army, he said, the police units responsible for local security have been until now "just a mess."

"Police couldn't shoot, or if they shoot, they can't hit," he said. "Half the police force is still untrained and on the streets. And then there are the reports of corruption."

New inducements

The makeover, which began late last year, is largely aimed at attracting a higher-caliber recruit and offering incentives to keep him in uniform longer. The inducements include signing bonuses and -- a first -- literacy classes, a powerful draw in a country where only 20 percent of the adult population can read and write.

A revamped, eight-week training program supervised by foreign paramilitary officers is improving marksmanship and basic military and survival skills. Soon it will be expanded to include veteran officers, NATO officials say.

A crucial improvement is helping ensure that police officers actually get the money that is owed them. Instead of being paid by their commanders -- who often pocket some of the cash -- officers receive their paychecks directly through ATM cards or bank credits sent to their cellphones. Because many officers are illiterate, "some of these guys never even realized how much they were supposed to be paid," Breazile said.

Such changes have only recently taken effect, and Defense Department officials acknowledge that they do not yet have the data to fully measure the impact.

Nationally, the attrition rate for police continues to hover around 20 percent -- and upwards of 70 percent for the country's elite paramilitary police force, the Afghanistan National Civil Order Police, or ANCOP, the Defense inspector general said. Many police officers quit because of fear, Taliban intimidation or because they could make more money elsewhere, said a Defense official who studied the attrition trends.

Eliminating corruption

NATO and Afghan officials acknowledge that fixing the country's policing problems could take years, partly because police units by nature are decentralized. The officials also acknowledge the difficulty of rooting out corruption, a time-honored tradition in many districts where officers feel compelled to find ways to supplement wages that average $200 a month.

The widespread practice of extracting fees and bribes has so undermined support for police that some districts seem to prefer having no police at all. After U.S. Marines booted the Taliban out of the southern city of Marja in February, town elders petitioned the U.S. commander not to allow local police to reclaim their old jobs, complaining that they were little better than thieves in uniforms.

"The army is becoming a more professional force. The police, frankly, are not," said a member of the Afghan parliament who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "The officers can't read, so when they ask for your papers, they can't read them. If you can't read an ID card, how are you capable of taking on a drug lord?"

Afghan officials see a glimmer of hope in the improved training programs and emphasis on literacy. Still, they note that the country's main police academy can handle fewer than 600 recruits at a time, or roughly 3,600 a year. NATO and Afghan officials project that the country will need 134,000 trained police officers on patrol by next summer, when foreign troops are expected to begin leaving the country.

"We want to train the new forces, and we know we need to retrain the existing ones," said Mohammad Munir Mangal, a top Interior Ministry official. "We just don't have the facilities."

[buglerbilly]

Military restricts use of Humvees


The Humvee's fatal flaw, a 2008 Pentagon inspector general's report found, is that its "flat bottom, low weight, low ground clearance and aluminum body" leave it vulnerable to IEDs buried in roads. Military officials had known of that weakness since 1994, according to the report.

By Tom Vanden Brook - USA Today

Posted : Wednesday Jun 30, 2010 8:10:53 EDT

WASHINGTON — Top commanders in Afghanistan have further tightened restrictions on the use of vulnerable vehicles after roadside bomb attacks that have killed eight U.S. soldiers since late May.

The new rules come as attacks from improvised explosive devices (IEDs) have spiked to record levels and insurgents create ever more lethal bombs.

One of those bombs killed five soldiers June 7 when it destroyed their Humvee in eastern Afghanistan.

At the time of the attack in June, troops needed at least a lieutenant colonel to approve leaving a protected base in a Humvee, according to Maj. Patrick Seiber, an Army spokesman for forces in eastern Afghanistan.

This month, the commander of coalition forces in the region raised the authorization for Humvee use to the level of colonel, Seiber said in an e-mail.

The change by Maj. Gen. John Campbell, commander of Combined Joint Task Force-101, had been discussed for some time, Seiber said, and was not simply a reaction to the attack.

The bombing, like all attacks that result in troop deaths, is under investigation by the military, Seiber said.

The new requirement for a colonel's authorization is an overreaction to tragic events, said Dakota Wood, a military analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. He noted that a lieutenant colonel has about 20 years of experience.

Sergeants and junior officers often have the most relevant experience in combat, Wood said. Top officers should rely on their subordinates' judgment about the danger on roads and the vehicles required for Afghanistan's rugged terrain, he said.

"Out of concern for high casualty levels because of roadside bombs, senior leaders appear to be taking decisions out of the hands of subordinates," Wood said.

Roadside bomb attacks have soared in Afghanistan.

The 1,128 IED attacks in May were more than double the same month in 2009, according to the Pentagon's Joint IED Defeat Organization. Attacks that wounded or killed coalition troops increased by 205 percent.

Those bombs killed 134 servicemembers from January through May and wounded 1,052, records show.

A suicide car-bomb attack on an armored sport-utility vehicle in Kabul on May 18 killed a U.S. colonel, a Canadian colonel and two U.S. lieutenant colonels. The attack killed the most high-ranking U.S. officers since the war began in 2001.

Col. Wayne Shanks, a spokesman for the military leadership in Kabul, said commanders continually assess insurgent threats and take measures to protect troops.

Commanders have to balance protection with conducting the counterinsurgency campaign, he said.

"We have to convince the Afghan people we are here to help their government and them," Shanks said in an e-mail. "You can't do that from inside an armored vehicle. No amount of armor protection will protect troops from some of the IEDs we've seen in the recent months."

The military's newest defense against IEDs — an all-terrain armored truck — has helped troops survive dozens of attacks in Afghanistan and could help defuse the insurgents' most effective weapon against coalition troops, according to military officials and analysts.

The all-terrain version of the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicle was designed specifically for Afghanistan's poor roads and rugged terrain.

The MRAPs produced for Iraq aren't nimble enough for much of Afghanistan, and their ride was bone-jarring for troops in the back, said Marine Brig. Gen. Michael Brogan, who leads the Pentagon effort to field the trucks for Afghanistan.

The first all-terrain MRAPs arrived in Afghanistan late last year.

A Marine battalion commander in restive Helmand province reported that insurgents had destroyed 50 of the all-terrain vehicles with improvised explosive devices (IEDs), Brogan said. The most serious wound suffered in the attacks was a bad concussion. Nobody died, the commander told Brogan in an e-mail. The trucks have seats for four troops and a turret for a gunner.

"The troops really love these vehicles," Brogan said.

Navy Capt. Jack Hanzlik, a Central Command spokesman, said there have been about 200 IED attacks against the all-terrain MRAPs between January and June. The attacks resulted in several deaths and a number of injuries, but the death and injury rates would have been much more significant had troops not been in those vehicles, Hanzlik said.

Commanders have issued urgent requests for more than 8,000 of the trucks to protect troops from roadside bombs. About 3,000 of the vehicles are in Afghanistan, and the remainder will arrive in November.

Their raised chassis and V-shaped bottoms can protect troops by putting them farther from the blast and deflecting its force.

The vehicles' off-road ability makes U.S. forces less predictable, Brogan said.

"We can make the targeting challenge more difficult for the enemy," he said. "If we can go where they're not expecting us, you might not run into a bomb."

The trucks have the potential to be "hugely important" in defeating the insurgency, said Michael O'Hanlon, a military analyst at the Brookings Institution, a think tank.

[buglerbilly]

Petraeus Calls Afghanistan a Test of Wills

(Source: U.S Department of Defense; issued June 29, 2010)

WASHINGTON --- Afghanistan is a test of wills, and the enemy has to know the United States and its allies have the will to prevail, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus said before the Senate Armed Services Committee today.

The testimony was part of the confirmation process for Petraeus, President Barack Obama’s nominee to replace Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal as commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

The general also has been nominated to succeed McChrystal as commander of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force, a position that requires a separate confirmation process through NATO channels. Petraeus currently is commander of U.S. Central Command.

The United States has vital national interests in Afghanistan, Petraeus told the panel, noting that Obama has said the United States will not tolerate a safe haven for terrorists who want to destroy Afghan security from within and launch attacks against innocent men, women and children around the world.

“In short, we cannot allow al-Qaida or other transnational extremist elements to once again establish sanctuaries from which they can launch attacks on our homeland or on our allies,” the general said. “Achieving that objective, however, requires that we not only counter the resurgent Taliban elements who allowed such sanctuaries in the past. We must also help our Afghan partners develop their security forces and governance capacity so that they can, over time, take on the tasks of securing their country and seeing to the needs of their people.”

If confirmed, Petraeus will command almost 100,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan and more than 50,000 servicemembers from 45 other nations.

The general said he will work closely with civilian agencies to implement a whole-of-government approach to the situation on the ground, as the campaign strategy in Afghanistan calls for a fully integrated civil-military effort. Further, he added, the plan calls for international cooperation and crucial contributions from the Afghan government and Afghan national security forces.

As Centcom commander, Petraeus participated in forming the president’s strategy in Afghanistan.

“I support and agree with his new policy,” the general said. “During its development, I offered my forthright military advice, and I have assured the president that I will do the same as we conduct assessments over the course of the months ahead. He, in turn, assured me that he expects and wants me to provide that character of advice.”

The general said he supports the need to inspire greater urgency on the Afghan government’s part, noting the policy’s intent to begin transitioning security responsibilities to Afghan national security forces in July 2011.

“It is important to note the president's reminder in recent days that July 2011 will mark the beginning of a process, not the date when the U.S. heads for the exits and turns out the lights,” Petraeus said. “As he explained this past Sunday in fact, we’ll need to provide assistance to Afghanistan for a long time to come.”

The general said notable progress has taken place in Afghanistan already. The number of civilian deaths due to coalition military operations has dropped, and areas in Helmand province have been freed from the Taliban. He acknowledged that more remains to be done to secure the progress.

A basic tenet of the counterinsurgency strategy is to secure the population. “Focusing on securing the people does not, however, mean that we don’t go after the enemy,” Petraeus said. “In fact, protecting the population inevitably requires killing, capturing or turning the insurgents. Our forces have been doing that, and we will continue to do that. In fact, our troopers and our Afghan partners have been very much taking the fight to the enemy in recent months.”

The Taliban and their terrorist allies have paid a grave price since April, with more than 130 middle- and senior-level operatives being captured or killed, and thousands of rank-and-file members taken off the battlefield.

The general noted that those gains have come at a cost for U.S. and allied forces. “I want to assure the mothers and fathers of those fighting in Afghanistan that I see it as a moral imperative to bring all assets to bear to protect our men and women in uniform and the Afghan security forces with whom ISAF troopers are fighting shoulder to shoulder,” he said. “Those on the ground must have all the support they need when they are in a tough situation.”

This is so important, he added, that he has discussed it with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, Afghan Defense Minister Abdul Wardak, and Afghan Interior Minister Bismullah Khan. “And they are in full agreement with me on this,” Petraeus told the senators.

The general said he is “keenly aware of concerns” servicemembers have raised about the application of rules of engagement and a tactical directive designed to minimize the possibility of inflicting civilian casualties. “They should know that I will look very hard at this issue,” he said.

Developing the Afghan security forces so they can take responsibility for their country and produce sustained success is “hugely important and hugely challenging,” Petraeus said.

“Indeed, helping to train and equip host-nation forces in the midst of an insurgency is akin to building an advanced aircraft while it is in flight, while it is being designed, and while it is being shot at,” he said. “There is nothing easy about it.” Progress in that regard has picked up since the training effort in the country has been overhauled, he added, but more must be done for the trend to continue.

“Further progress will take even greater partnering, additional training improvements, fuller manning of the training and mentoring missions, and expanded professional education opportunities,” he said, “and initiatives are being pursued in each of these areas.”

Petraeus said tough fighting will continue in Afghanistan, noting that June has seen many NATO casualties.

“Indeed, it may get more intense in the next few months,” he said. “As we take away the enemy’s safe havens and reduce the enemy’s freedom of action, the insurgents will fight back.”

The general praised the commitment of American troops in the country.

“I’d like to once again note the extraordinary work being done by our troopers on the ground in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere around the world,” he said. “Our young men and women truly deserve the recognition they have earned as America’s new greatest generation. There is no question that they comprise the finest, most combat-hardened military in our nation’s history.

-ends-

[buglerbilly]

Petraeus Leaves Room for Pullout Changes

June 30, 2010

Associated Press

WASHINGTON -- Gen. David Petraeus left open the possibility of recommending that President Obama delay his plans to start withdrawing troops from Afghanistan next summer if the new commander can't turn around the stalemated war.

"There will be an assessment at the end of this year after which undoubtedly we'll make certain tweaks, refinements, perhaps some significant changes," Petraeus told a Senate panel Tuesday of the battle plan and the timeline Obama has laid out.

The Senate Armed Services Committee quickly approved Petraeus for the job of running the Afghan war, and the full Senate was expected to confirm him Wednesday. Obama nominated Petraeus to take over from the disgraced Gen. Stanley McChrystal, fired last week for disparaging remarks about his civilian bosses.

Petraeus also told senators that he may change the war's battlefield rules, designed to limit civilian casualties and improve support for the foreign forces fighting the Taliban-led insurgency. Some troops and congressional Republicans complain they handicap U.S. forces.

Obama has said troops will begin to leave in July 2011, but that the pace and size of the withdrawal will depend upon conditions.

Petraeus did not rule out a significant exodus then, as Vice President Joe Biden favors, but he would not promise one either. Petraeus has previously said that he would recommend putting off any large-scale withdrawal if security conditions in Afghanistan can't sustain it.

The general, credited with turning around the Iraq war after the height of sectarian violence there in 2006, told the Senate panel that Obama wants him to provide unvarnished military advice.

He did not paint a rosy picture on Tuesday.

"My sense is that the tough fighting will continue; indeed, it may get more intense in the next few months," Petraeus said. "As we take away the enemy's safe havens and reduce the enemy's freedom of action, the insurgents will fight back."

Beneath bipartisan rounds of praise for Petraeus lay fault lines over the nearly nine-year war. A make-or-break military push across southern Afghanistan is stuck in neutral, though U.S. officials insist there are signs of progress and reason for hope.

"On the Democratic side, there is solid support. But there's also the beginnings of fraying of that support" for the war, committee Chairman Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., said ahead of Tuesday's session.

As the number of troop deaths rise, support for the war is dropping in the United States and Europe. June is the deadliest month of the war so far, with the total U.S. deaths above 1,000, and the new British government says it wants its troops out in five years.

A careful student of politics, Petraeus gave something to everyone while leaving himself room to maneuver.

For Democrats and his White House masters, Petraeus endorsed Obama's revamped war strategy and the plan to begin withdrawing U.S. forces from the unpopular fight next July.

The exit plan isn't just a sop to American liberals opposed to the conflict, Petraeus said under questioning from skeptical Republicans.

He made clear he is wary of deadlines, but said he values the sense of urgency Obama's timeline conveys.

"I'm convinced it was not just for domestic political purposes," he said. "It was for audiences in Kabul, who, again, needed to be reminded that we won't be there forever."

For Republicans uneasy about the strict rules of engagement, Petraeus promised a hard examination. In particular, he will look at the way the "tactical directive" is applied.

The directive is the guidance given to commanders on when they can rely on heavy firepower such as attack helicopters to protect troops under attack. McChrystal had limited the circumstances under which such bombing could be used.

Petraeus said he believes the rules and the reasoning behind them are basically sound.

"That's an area we have to look very closely at because, of course, if you drop a bomb on a house, if you're not sure who's in it, you can kill a lot of innocent civilians in a hurry," he told the Senate panel.

At the same time, Petraeus said he is concerned that some commanders were "making this more bureaucratic or more restrictive than necessary when our troops and our Afghan partners are in a tough spot.

"And when they are in a tough spot, it's a moral imperative that we use everything we have to ensure that they get out of it," he said.

The only fireworks came when Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, sharply questioned Petraeus about whether he agreed with White House suggestions that the pullout will occur on schedule, no matter what Afghanistan looks like in a year's time.

"Somebody needs to get it straight without doubt what the hell we're going to do in Afghanistan," Graham said.

Petraeus suggested that the infighting between U.S. military and civilian officials responsible for Afghanistan policy would end. Several times throughout the hearing, Petraeus said he already had been in close contact with Karl Eikenberry, the top diplomat in Afghanistan who sparred with McChrystal.

Petraeus said the two planned to meet in Brussels this week to confer with NATO officials before flying together to Kabul.

Petraeus became chief of U.S. Central Command following his time in Iraq. In that job, he oversaw both wars but had no direct battlefield responsibility. The Afghanistan job is technically a step down, albeit one that came at the direct request of the commander in chief.

© Copyright 2010 Associated Press. All rights reserved.

[buglerbilly]

8 Militants Killed in Air Field Battle

June 30, 2010

Associated Press



KABUL, Afghanistan -- Militants set off a car bomb and stormed the entrance to an airport in eastern Afghanistan on Wednesday in a failed attempt to enter the air field used by Afghan and international forces, authorities said. Eight insurgents died in the ensuing gunbattle.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the assault, part of an upswing in violence in the nearly 9-year-old war.

Using light weapons and rocket-propelled grenades, the militants battled international forces, reportedly mostly U.S. Soldiers, for 30 minutes on the outskirts of Jalalabad city, according to information provided by the media office at the airport.

An Afghan soldier and one international servicemember were wounded in the fighting, NATO said.

"They were not able to breach the perimeter. They were fought off by a combination of Afghan and coalition security forces," German Army Brig. Gen. Josef Blotz, a spokesman for NATO, told reporters at a briefing on Wednesday.

The air field, shared by Afghans and the international force, is situated on a main road that leads to the Pakistani border

In a text message to The Associated Press in Kabul, Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid said six suicide attackers killed 32 foreign and Afghan security forces at the airport, about 125 kilometers (78 miles) east of the Afghan capital. The insurgents often claim higher numbers of deaths in their attacks than the official toll.

Elsewhere in the east, U.S. and Afghan forces battled hundreds of militants from an al-Qaida-linked group for a third day Tuesday in Kunar province, the U.S. military said. Two American Soldiers were killed Sunday in the first day of the operation.

The attack in Kunar was directed against insurgents believed responsible for the roadside bombing that killed five American servicemembers in the area on June 7, a U.S. statement said.

The militants were believed to be members of the Haqqani group, a faction of the Taliban based in Pakistan that has close ties to al-Qaida. About 600 U.S. and Afghan troops are taking part in the operation, the U.S. statement said.

On Tuesday in Kabul, an Afghan man working for the United Nations was shot and killed in his vehicle near a busy traffic circle.

The Afghan U.N. employee who died was driving a white pickup truck with the blue U.N. logo painted on the side. Another Afghan member of the U.N. staff, who was in the vehicle, was not wounded, the U.N. said.

The morning shooting occurred amid heavy traffic near Massoud circle, an intersection near the U.S. Embassy and an American military base.

"The circumstances of the shooting are not yet clear," a statement released by the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan said. "United Nations security teams are working with Afghan security institutions to assist investigations."

Blotz said Wednesday that it remains unclear whether the U.N. vehicle was the intended target of the shooting.

U.N. officials extended condolences to the victim, who has not been identified.

"The United Nations condemns violence against any of its personnel under any circumstances," the U.N. statement said. "Those responsible for this killing should be brought to justice without delay."

Also on Tuesday, a roadside bomb wounded seven civilians in Arghistan district of Kandahar and another bomb killed two civilians and wounded two others in Khakrez district, the Afghan Ministry of Interior said.

Afghan and international forces are ramping up security in and around Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban.

Blotz said 43 insurgents had been killed or captured in a three-day operation aimed at disrupting insurgents in Panjwai district of Kandahar province, where they have plotted attacks on Kandahar city. In the past two months, joint forces have captured more than 115 suspected insurgents, including more than 15 mid- and senior-level militant leaders, and destroyed four roadside mine factories.

© Copyright 2010 Associated Press. All rights reserved.

[buglerbilly]

Karzai Denies Meeting With Haqqanis



At his senate confirmation hearing yesterday, new Afghan commander Gen. David Petraeus said Afghan president Hamid Karzai denies ever meeting with a leader of the Haqqani network, the most dangerous of the numerous insurgent groups operating in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

An Al Jazeera press report over the weekend said that Karzai had met with Sirajuddin Haqqani, who has largely taken over day-to-day operations of the insurgent network from his father and famed mujaheddin commander Jalaluddin Haqqani, and members of Pakistan’s powerful intelligence directorate, the ISI. Karzai’s office issued an official denial of the report.

Petraeus told senators that he had spoken with Karzai multiple times by phone and had received his personal guarantee that press claims of a meeting with Haqqani were false.

U.S. intelligence officials now tell Bill Roggio that a face-to-face meeting between Karzai and Sirajuddin was impossible if for no other reason than Karzai is always accompanied by a heavy American security detail. The same officials do not dispute that backchannel talks to broker some sort of reconciliation and power sharing deal are underway between Pakistani intelligence, the Haqqanis and Karzai.

The Afghan insurgency is made up of three main groups: the Quetta Shura Taliban, Hezb-e Islami Gulbuddin (HIG), and the Haqqani Network (HQN). The Haqqani network is based in eastern Afghanistan and the Taliban controlled area of North Waziristan in Pakistan and is noted for its expertise in IED and complex attacks.

– Greg Grant

Read more: http://defensetech.org/#ixzz0sLcHI14S
Defense.org

[Gubler, A.]

The US DoD has revealed the identity of the fourth soldier to die in the Black Hawk crash along with the Australian commandos. He was:

Staff Sgt. Brandon M. Silk, 25, of Orono, Maine, died June 21 of injuries sustained when the helicopter in which he was travelling made a hard landing. He was assigned to the 5th Battalion, 101st Aviation Regiment, 101st Combat Aviation Brigade, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), Fort Campbell, Ky.

L-W-F

[buglerbilly]

British troops 'will be last ones home' warns Defence Secretary

By Tim Shipman

Last updated at 10:38 PM on 30th June 2010

British troops will be among the last to leave Afghanistan, Defence Secretary Liam Fox announced yesterday.

In a major speech in Washington, Dr Fox said the Prime Minister and U.S. President Barack Obama must 'see the job through' and resist succumbing to a 'natural impatience' to get the troops home.

In an interview he then conceded that the British armed forces would be among the last home, because they are stationed in a 'difficult' area that is likely to be 'one of the last parts to transition to Afghan security'.


Stay the course: Defence Secretary Liam Fox meets his American counterpart Robert Gates at the Pentagon yesterday. Today he warned Britain must hold its nerve in Afghanistan

Dr Fox's admission put him dramatically at odds with David Cameron's promise at the weekend to bring troops home in time for the next election.

Addressing the conservative Heritage Foundation thinktank, Dr Fox admitted that progress in Afghanistan is 'not always obvious to the eye' but stressed that 'the first rule of armed conflict is to win it'.

In a shot across the bows of Downing Street and the White House, where pressure is growing to devise an exit strategy, the Defence Secretary said: 'We must hold our nerve, maintain our resolve and have the resilience to see the job through.

'Our natural impatience to see our troops come home should be seen in the context of the needs of national security.'

Dr Fox warned that premature withdrawal of Nato forces would be a 'shot in the arm' to violent Islamic extremists around the world and a 'betrayal' of the sacrifices made by British forces.

He also claimed that Afghanistan could be plunged into civil war and terrorists could even gain control of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal.

But Downing Street was swift to deny any split between the Defence Secretary and Mr Cameron.

A spokesman said: 'I don't think there is any difference. The Prime Minister has been very clear about this. There is an agreed strategy.'


Soldiers of A Company of the1st Battalion Royal Gurkha Rifles preparing for a patrol at their patrol base in a Nahr e Saraj village, in Helmand, last week. There is a 'natural impatience' to bring the soldiers home, Dr Fox said

Claims of divisions between Dr Fox and the Prime Minister also created a flurry at the Ministry of Defence, and officials issued a quote from the Defence Secretary in which he echoed Mr Cameron.

In it, Dr Fox said: 'As David Cameron made clear to the British Parliament on Monday, the presence of large-scale ISAF forces cannot be indefinite.'

Those words had not been present in the printed copy of his speech.

It is not the first time that differences of emphasis have caused friction between Dr Fox and Downing Street.

The Defence Secretary angered Mr Cameron and his senior aides by revealing in a newspaper interview earlier this month that the Chief of the Defence Staff Sir Jock Stirrup and the senior MoD mandarin Sir Bill Jeffrey were both being removed.

Tensions between the two men, who ran against each other for the Tory leadership, are heightened by suspicion that Dr Fox will one day assert himself as leader of the Tory right in opposition to the coalition.

Dr Fox's comments echoed those of the new top soldier in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus.

At a Congressional hearing this week he left open the possibility of recommending that President Barack Obama delay his plans to start withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan next summer if he cannot turn around the stalemated war.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1290914/Afghanistan-Liam-Fox-warns-Britain-hold-nerve-troops-war.html#ixzz0sPLJXFUf

[buglerbilly]

Some Afghan military officers to get training in Pakistan


American and Afghan troops carry a wounded comrade to a medevac helicopter near Kandahar on Tuesday. (Justin Sullivan/getty Images)

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.

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."

The United States has spent $27 billion to train and equip Afghan security forces since 2002, and President Obama's war strategy calls for doubling the strength of both the army and police force there by October 2011 to facilitate the gradual departure of U.S. troops.

Gen. David H. Petraeus, confirmed Wednesday as the new U.S. and NATO war commander, said this week that the United States wants to "forge a partnership or further the partnership that has been developing between Afghanistan and Pakistan." In addition to taking military action against Taliban sanctuaries inside its borders, Petraeus said, it is "essential" that Pakistan be involved "in some sort of reconciliation agreement" with the insurgents.

U.S. officials are generally pleased with the rapprochement between Afghanistan and Pakistan, but the rapid progress of the talks has given some an uneasy feeling that events are moving outside U.S. control. Karzai told the Obama administration about his first meeting with Pakistani intelligence chief Ahmed Shuja Pasha when he visited Washington in May, but "he didn't say what they talked about, what the Pakistanis offered. He just dangled" the information, one U.S. official said.

That session, and at least one follow-up meeting among Karzai, Pasha and the Pakistani army chief of staff, Gen. Ashfaq Kiyani, included discussion of Pakistan-facilitated talks with Taliban leaders, although the two governments differed on whether the subject was raised with a Pakistan offer or an Afghan request. Both governments denied subsequent reports that Karzai had met face to face with Pakistan-based insurgent leader Sirajuddin Haqqani.

Hedging their bets

Pakistan and Afghanistan have long held each other at arm's length. The border between them is disputed, and Afghans resent Pakistan's support for the Taliban government during the 1990s and its tolerance of insurgent sanctuaries. But as they have assessed coalition prospects in the war, both governments appear to have turned to each other as a way of hedging their bets against a possible U.S. withdrawal.

While building Afghanistan's weak army is a key component of U.S. strategy, more than 300 Afghan soldiers are currently being trained under bilateral agreements in other countries, including Turkey and India, Pakistan's traditional adversary. Pakistan has been pushing for months for a training deal, and Spanta said that a "limited" number of officers would be part of the new agreement. Details were still under discussion, but a senior Pakistani government official said the program was expected to begin "soon."

Shuja Nawaz, director of the South Asia Center at the Atlantic Council in Washington and an advocate of a Pakistani training program, said the plan could expedite joint operations between the two militaries and reduce suspicions about Pakistan within the Afghan army.

"This is a major move," Nawaz said. "It will have a powerful signaling effect in both countries."

Fears of Pakistani military influence persist among Afghan ethnic minorities and some in Karzai's government, including one official who compared the training initiative to the Soviet education of Afghan officers in the 1960s and 1970s that he said was "the start of all evil in Afghanistan."

"Pakistanis never trust Afghans. And Afghans never trust Pakistanis," according to a senior Afghan official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect his job. "But because the current situation is getting worse and worse, Karzai has to say okay to the Pakistanis and shake hands."

'We have doubts'

Another Afghan official, citing Karzai's recent firing of two top security officials who were highly critical of Pakistan, said the Afghan leader may be moving too far, too fast. The firings, the official said, were a "triumph for the ISI," Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, which has had a history of backing the Taliban and other militant groups in Afghanistan.

Afghan skeptics noted that Pakistan still refuses Afghanistan's demand to extradite Taliban commander Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, who was captured in Karachi in a joint Pakistani-U.S. raid early this year, or to arrest other senior leaders with whom they believe Pakistan retains ties. "If they were able to arrest Mullah Baradar . . . why haven't they arrested [Afghan Taliban leader] Mullah Omar? Or . . . Haqqani? This is something we have doubts about," one senior Afghan official said.

Baradar, who reportedly had engaged in talks with the Karzai government, "was interested and more willing to negotiate," the official said. "He was tired of fighting. Pakistan wants to use the Taliban as a pressure element. They don't want the Taliban to be in direct contact with the Afghan government."

Some U.S. officials expressed similar wariness about Pakistan's intentions. "What the Pakistanis and the Taliban want," one said, "is a cleaning of the house," including replacement of the Afghan officer corps, currently dominated by ethnic Tajiks whom Pakistan sees as hostile to its interests.

But other officials in all three countries rejected that analysis and pointed to a broader thaw in Afghanistan-Pakistan relations over the past year. Pakistani scholarships have been accepted by a number of Afghan university students, and Pakistan is training Afghan civilian officials, Spanta said.

"We have seen a paradigm shift in the relationship," said Mohammad Sadiq, Pakistan's ambassador to Afghanistan. "And of course, both sides are benefiting from it."

DeYoung reported from Washington.

[buglerbilly]

Pentagon recommends Medal of Honor for a living soldier

By Greg Jaffe and Craig Whitlock
Washington Post Staff Writer

Thursday, July 1, 2010



The Pentagon has recommended that the White House consider awarding the Medal of Honor to a living soldier for the first time since the Vietnam War, according to U.S. officials.

The soldier, whose nomination must be reviewed by the White House, ran through a wall of enemy fire in Afghanistan's Korengal Valley in fall 2007 in an attempt to push back Taliban fighters who were close to overrunning his squad. U.S. military officials said his actions saved the lives of about half a dozen men.

It is possible that the White House could honor the soldier's heroism with a decoration other than the Medal of Honor, the nation's highest award for valor. Nominations for the Medal of Honor typically include detailed accounts from witnesses and can run hundreds, if not thousands, of pages. The review has been conducted so discreetly that the soldier's family does not know that it has reached the White House, according to U.S. officials who discussed the nomination on the condition of anonymity because a final decision is pending.

Pentagon officials requested that The Washington Post not name the soldier to avoid influencing the White House review. Administration officials declined to comment on the nomination.

The nomination comes after several years of complaints from lawmakers, military officers and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates that the Pentagon had become so cautious that only troops whose bravery resulted in death were being considered for the Medal of Honor. Gates "finds it impossible to believe that there is no one who has performed a valorous act deserving of the Medal of Honor who has lived to tell about it," said Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell, who declined to comment on specific nominations.

George W. Bush similarly lamented during the latter days of his second term as president that he had never had an opportunity to present the award to a living recipient.

The presentation of a Medal of Honor to a living soldier would be an important moment for President Obama, whose relationship with the military has been complicated in recent months by controversy over the administration's Afghan war deliberations in the fall and the recent firing of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal for remarks that belittled senior Obama administration officials.

The honor would also mark an important moment for a military that is exhausted after nine years of repeated deployments and increasingly worried that the rest of the country has tuned out the wars and their service. "There has been a certain emotion that is almost like martyrdom within the military," said Richard Kohn, a military historian at the University of North Carolina. "It's a feeling that they are sacrificing a great deal while the rest of the country is going about its business."

Obama presented a posthumous Medal of Honor in September to the family of Sgt. 1st Class Jared Monti for his heroism in exposing himself to enemy fire to retrieve a wounded comrade. But honoring a living soldier with the nation's highest award for valor would give the president an opportunity to ease some of the military's feelings of estrangement from the rest of U.S. society.

Such a ceremony also would allow the president to honor military heroism and virtue, sentiments that Republicans say Obama does not celebrate frequently enough.

The award has the potential to produce something increasingly rare in today's wars: a recognizable hero in uniform. "The Afghan and Iraq wars really haven't produced heroes with a face," said Peter Feaver, a professor at Duke University who served in the Bush White House. In World War II, Medal of Honor winners such as Audie Murphy and John Basilone came to represent the ideals of the U.S. fighting force.

Some senior Bush administration officials worried that the lack of visible heroes made it tougher to convey the importance of the Iraq and Afghan wars to the American people, Feaver said. Early efforts by the Pentagon to weave heroic narratives out of the lives of soldiers such as former NFL football player and Army Ranger Pat Tillman collapsed when early military accounts of battlefield valor proved to be untrue. He was posthumously awarded the Silver Star.

Six posthumous Medals of Honor have been awarded for heroism in the Iraq and Afghan wars. The honorees exposed themselves to enemy fire to call for reinforcements or pull wounded colleagues to safety. Three of the six jumped on grenades, sacrificing their lives to save their fellow troops.

In response to the paucity of Medals of Honor awarded since 2001, the House Armed Services Committee directed the Defense Department to conduct a formal review of its award policy. Pentagon officials insist that the criteria for awarding the Medal of Honor hasn't changed since Vietnam.

But the nature of battle has changed, said Eileen M. Lainez, a Pentagon spokeswoman. Precision bombs and lethal attack helicopters typically give U.S. troops a huge firepower advantage over lightly armed insurgents on the battlefield. To compensate, fighters in Afghanistan and Iraq have relied heavily on roadside bomb attacks and ambushes that lasted for only a few minutes. Previous Medal of Honor recipients have typically displayed extreme bravery in battles that last for hours.

There are at least three Medal of Honor nominations, including the one at the White House, working through the system. The three nominees served in sparsely populated valleys in eastern Afghanistan that U.S. troops have abandoned in recent years.

The valleys, which are within 30 miles of each other, are dominated by treacherous, mountainous terrain that frequently allowed enemy fighters to move within close range of U.S. forces before launching their attack. The remote nature of the valleys meant that troops often had to fight for an hour before attack helicopters arrived on the scene to drive back the enemy.

Senior military officials described the fighting in those valleys as some of the toughest since the Korean and Vietnam wars. "It is a very, very challenging fight," said one military official. "It is sustained lengthy ground combat."

The relatively large number of potential Medal of Honor nominations emerging from this remote area of Afghanistan also reflected a war strategy that asked U.S. commanders to do too much with too few resources, military analysts said. Frequently troops were overextended in hostile terrain.

"We should be stationing our troops in places where they won't be earning the Medal of Honor because the population and terrain favor us and we have quick access to air support," said John Nagl, one of the authors of the Army's counterinsurgency doctrine and president of the Center for a New American Security, a defense think tank.

Staff writer Anne E. Kornblut and staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

[buglerbilly]

Taliban rule out talks with Nato: 'Why should we when we're winning and foreign troops are withdrawing?'

By Mail Foreign Service

Last updated at 10:24 AM on 1st July 2010

The Taliban in Afghanistan have declared there is no question of them entering into negotiations with Nato forces.

The news came in a defiant statement, which added that they believe they are winning the war.

The statement, released to the BBC’s John Simpson, said: ‘We do not want to talk to anyone - not to [President Hamid] Karzai, nor to any foreigners - till the foreign forces withdraw from Afghanistan.

The defiant message from the Taliban comes as Nato forces suffered their deadliest month yet in Afghanistan, with 102 deaths. Pictured are soldiers from 1st Battalion the Royal Gurkha Rifles during a patrol in Nahr e Saraj, Helmand

‘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?’

It comes as Nato forces suffered their biggest loss in the country so far, with 102 deaths in the month of June.

Withdrawal strategies have been announced with British troops to be among the last to leave Afghanistan, Defence Secretary Liam Fox announced this week.

In a major speech in Washington, Dr Fox said Prime Minister David Cameron and U.S. President Barack Obama must 'see the job through' and resist succumbing to a 'natural impatience' to get the troops home.

In an interview he then conceded that the British armed forces would be among the last home, because they are stationed in a 'difficult' area that is likely to be 'one of the last parts to transition to Afghan security'.

American’s new commander for Afghanistan has warned that the fighting will continue and even escalate as it prepares its own withdrawal plans.

General David Petraeus said the 'industrial strength insurgency' would intensify in the coming months and admitted a previously agreed date to get out by July 2011 represented only the 'beginning of the process'.

His comments to a Senate committee in Washington came days after he replaced General Stanley McChrystal, who was fired last week over disparaging remarks he made about President Barack Obama and his advisers in the magazine Rolling Stone.

Gen Petraeus said he backed Mr Obama's policy to put 30,000 more US troops into Afghanistan and begin a withdrawal next summer, but any pull-outs would be based on how the war was going.

'It's not a date when the U.S. heads to the exits,' he told the Senate Armed Services Committee, which must confirm his appointment.

'We'll need to provide assistance to Afghanistan for a long time to come,' he said.

The President expressed frustration recently with the ‘obsession’ with the withdrawal date for US troops.

He said: ‘I don’t have a crystal ball.

'I think that right now the debate surrounding Afghanistan is presented as either we get up and leave immediately because there's no chance at a positive outcome, or we stay basically indefinitely and do quote unquote whatever it takes for as long as it takes.'

He reiterated that a July 2011 date to begin withdrawing troops does not mean the U.S. will 'suddenly turn off the lights and let the door close behind us.'

The Taliban’s refusal to entertain any dialogue with Nato will come as a blow to Britain after the head of the Army expressed hopes of negotiating with them just days ago.

General Sir David Richards said that despite the enemy's deadly attacks on his own troops he could see 'no reason' why negotiations should not be opened.

And he suggested that talks with Taliban leaders could begin 'pretty soon'.

His comments put him at odds with the Defence Secretary, who has previously ruled out negotiations until Taliban fighters lay down their weapons.

U.S. General McChrystal had called for negotiations with elements of the Taliban who are fighting for money rather than ideology.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1291080/Taliban-rule-talks-Nato-Why-winning.html#ixzz0sQlOmrhs

[buglerbilly]

NATO Captures Taliban District Chief

July 01, 2010

Associated Press

KABUL, Afghanistan -- Afghan and international troops captured a Taliban district chief in a four-hour gunbattle in the southern province of Helmand, NATO said Thursday.

In northern Afghanistan, four rockets slammed into a base housing about 120 South Korean construction and security personnel in Parwan province, the South Korean Foreign Ministry said Thursday. No casualties were reported in the Wednesday attack.

NATO said the Taliban leader was captured after a joint Afghan-international force surrounded a compound Wednesday night in the remote Baghran district in the northern part of Helmand province.

Taliban fighters inside the compound fired rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns before troops called in a precision airstrike, the NATO statement said.

There were no casualties among civilians, Afghan troops or international service members, the alliance said, but an undisclosed number of Taliban were killed or wounded. The wounded included the Taliban district chief for Now Zad, a former insurgent stronghold to the south where U.S. Marines have reported progress in winning over the population after a major offensive last summer.

The joint force seized dozens of automatic weapons, grenade launchers and 20 pounds of opium, the NATO statement said.

Elsewhere, three Afghans were killed and another wounded by a roadside bomb Thursday near a U.S. outpost in Kunar province of eastern Afghanistan, a U.S. statement said. No further details were released.

In Seoul, Foreign Ministry spokesman Kim Young-sun said no group claimed responsibility for the rocket attack on the South Korean base in the north of Afghanistan, which occurred a day before the reconstruction team planned to officially launch its mission.

In 2007, South Korea withdrew troops from Afghanistan following a hostage standoff in which the Taliban killed two South Koreans after demanding that Seoul immediately withdraw its forces.

The attacks occurred as Gen. David Petraeus, widely credited with turning around the war in Iraq, prepared to assume command of the troubled U.S. and NATO force in Afghanistan. His predecessor Gen. Stanley McChrystal was fired last week over critical remarks made by him and his staff about Obama administration officials in Rolling Stone magazine.

Petraeus was unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate on Wednesday and flew immediately to Brussels, Belgium where he briefed NATO officials Thursday.

Violence is on the rise in Afghanistan, where June was the deadliest month of the war for the NATO-led force with at least 102 deaths among international servicemembers.

© Copyright 2010 Associated Press. All rights reserved.

[buglerbilly]

Vengeful Pakistan Militant Group Emerges

July 01, 2010

Associated Press

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- Pakistani authorities now believe a dangerous new militant group, out to avenge a deadly army assault on a mosque in Islamabad three years ago, has carried out several major bombings in the capital previously blamed on the Taliban.

The emergence of the Ghazi Force was part of the outrage among many deeply religious Pakistani Muslims over the July 2007 attack by security forces against the Lal Masjid, or Red Mosque, a stronghold of Islamic militants.

The fierce attack, in which scores of young, heavily armed religious students died, inspired a new generation of militants. These Pakistanis have turned against a government they feel has betrayed them and, to their dismay, backed the U.S. role in neighboring Afghanistan.

The brief but bloody history of the Ghazi Force illustrates the unintended results of Pakistan's policy of promoting Islamic extremists to fight India in the disputed area of Kashmir. That policy -- which Pakistan denies it pursues -- now threatens regional stability as the U.S. and Pakistan's other Western partners pour billions of dollars into the country to stop the rise of Islamic militancy.

The new group is made up of relatives of students who died in the Red Mosque assault. It is named after the students' leader, Maulana Abdul Rashid Ghazi, who was also killed. The mosque's adjacent religious school, or madrassa, had been a sanctuary for militants opposed to Pakistan's support of the U.S.-run war in Afghanistan.

Private television stations broadcast vivid scenes of the assault -- commandos in black fatigues rapelling down ropes, the crackle of gunfire, bodies of black-shrouded girls carried out through the smoldering gates. Those images stunned the nation, especially families of the students and Pakistanis with deep religious feelings.

Islamabad's inspector general of police, Kalim Imam, told The Associated Press that the Ghazi Force was behind most of the deadliest attacks in the capital during the last three years. The attacks targeted the military, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency or ISI -- which had ties to a number of militants -- and a five-star hotel frequented by foreigners and the Pakistani elite.

The Ghazi Force helped recruit a security official who blew himself up inside the office of the World Food Program last October, killing five people, according to Imam. The force also sent a suicide bomber in September 2007 into the mess hall of the commando unit that attacked the Red Mosque, killing 22 people, he said.

Ghazi Force members may also have been involved in the audacious June 9 attack north of the capital that killed seven people and destroyed 60 vehicles ferrying supplies to NATO and U.S. Soldiers next door in Afghanistan, Imam said.

Many of those attacks had been attributed to the Pakistani Taliban, which operates in the remote tribal areas of the northwest along the border with Afghanistan. There is evidence of close ties between the Ghazi Force and the Pakistani Taliban, which the government has vowed to crush.

The Ghazi Force is believed to be headquartered in the Orakzai region of the border area, where the leader of the Pakistan Taliban, Hakimullah Mehsud, held sway for years. The leader of the Ghazi Force is believed to be Maulana Niaz Raheem, a former student at the Red Mosque.

Anger over the bloodshed at the mosque was all the greater because many of the militants and their supporters felt betrayed by a government that had once supported them. Both Ghazi and his brother Maulana Abdul Aziz Ghazi, who was freed on bail this year after two years in jail, were widely believed to have been on the payrolls of both the government and the ISI intelligence service.

Their father, Maulana Mohammed Abdullah, enjoyed a close relationship with the late President Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, and the mosque was a center for recruiting volunteers to fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

As opposition grew to Pakistan's support of the U.S. role in Afghanistan, the mosque became a center of religious agitation against the government, with armed students taking over the complex and police laying siege.

A former senior official in the Interior Ministry told The Associated Press that the police wanted to storm the mosque and end the siege at its outset, send the students home and shut down the religious school and a neighboring library until tempers cooled.

President Gen. Pervez Musharraf refused, the official said, even though police knew that members of al-Qaida's affiliate organization Jaish-e-Mohammed, which is banned in Pakistan, were bringing in weapons for the students.

Musharraf relented and ordered the assault after militants kidnapped several Chinese nationals running a massage parlor in Islamabad, accusing them of prostitution. The death toll remains in dispute. Red Mosque officials say hundreds died. The government says fewer than 100 were killed.

Although the assault turned many Islamic hard-liners against the government, Pakistan remains unwilling to break all ties to the militants, instead following a high-risk strategy of coddling "good militants" while fighting those deemed "bad militants," analysts say.

"The military and the ISI have given importance to these militants as assets. But those who have openly declared war, and there is no chance of them returning back to the state, the army is going after them," said Manzar Jameel, a terrorism expert and researcher on the growth of extremism in Pakistan. "Yet they still believe that some are still assets and that they can keep control of the assets. It's a failure of strategy."

Army spokesman Gen. Athar Abbas denies any assistance to militant groups, saying past ties have long since been severed. He says the Ghazi Force is among the groups the 120,000 Pakistani soldiers waging war in the tribal regions are fighting.

Yet Anatol Lieven, a terrorism expert with the Department of War Studies at London's King College, said it's clear that the ISI continues to protect some militant groups, even if it has broken with others.

In a June report, the Rand Corporation think tank also alleged that Pakistan's military and intelligence still support some militant groups "as a tool of its foreign and domestic policy."

"A key objective of U.S. policy must be to alter Pakistan's strategic calculus and end its support to militant groups," the report said.

Christine Fair, a co-author of that report and an assistant professor at Georgetown University's Center for Peace and Security Studies, said the battle against extremists in Pakistan is mired in layers of subterfuge by Pakistani intelligence and a "mystifying" acceptance by the CIA of Pakistan's "good-militant, bad-militant" policy.

She said U.S. intelligence knows Pakistan protects one group -- Lashkar-e-Taiba, which India blames for the 2008 Mumbai assault and Afghanistan accuses of masterminding deadly attacks against the Indian Embassy in Kabul.

"Lashar-e-Taiba remains intact. I have had conversations with ... officials in Washington. It is not their priority. Lashkar-e-Taiba is not an issue," she said in an interview. "Yet Lashkar-e-Taiba has been attacking us in Afghanistan since 2004."

© Copyright 2010 Associated Press. All rights reserved.

[buglerbilly]

New Estimate of Strength of Al Qaeda Is Offered

By DAVID E. SANGER and MARK MAZZETTI

Published: June 30, 2010

ASPEN, Colo. — Michael E. Leiter, one of the country’s top counterterrorism officials, said Wednesday that American intelligence officials now estimated that there were somewhat “more than 300” Qaeda leaders and fighters hiding in Pakistan’s tribal areas, a rare public assessment of the strength of the terrorist group that is the central target of President Obama’s war strategy.

Taken together with the recent estimate by the C.I.A. director, Leon E. Panetta, that there are about 50 to 100 Qaeda operatives now in Afghanistan, American intelligence agencies believe that there are most likely fewer than 500 members of the group in a region where the United States has poured nearly 100,000 troops.

Many American officials warn about such comparisons, saying that Al Qaeda has forged close ties with a number of affiliated militant groups and that a large American troop presence is necessary to helping the Afghan government prevent Al Qaeda from gaining a safe haven in Afghanistan similar to what it had before the Sept. 11 attacks.

On Monday, Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that on a recent trip to the region he was struck by the “depth of synergies” between Al Qaeda and a number of other insurgent groups, including the Pakistani and the Afghan Taliban.

Mr. Leiter, who is the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, concurred with Admiral Mullen’s judgment.

But with the fighting in Afghanistan intensifying and few indications that the Taliban are weakening, the recent estimates of Al Qaeda’s strength could give ammunition to critics of President Obama’s strategy who think the United States should pull most of its troops from the country and instead rely on small teams of Special Operations forces and missile strikes from C.I.A. drones.

Both Mr. Leiter and Admiral Mullen were speaking at the same homeland security conference at the Aspen Institute, sponsored in part by The New York Times. Mr. Panetta’s public remarks came last Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.”

Mr. Leiter told the audience on Wednesday that “we’ve had some incredible successes” against Al Qaeda’s leadership. Echoing Mr. Panetta’s assessment, he said the group “is weaker today than it has been at any time since 2001.”

But he quickly added, “Weaker does not mean harmless.”

Administration officials talk increasingly about the dangers posed by militant groups affiliated with Al Qaeda, saying they have both the intent and the capabilities to attack the United States. The man accused of trying to detonate a vehicle in Times Square in May received training from the Pakistani Taliban, a group once thought to be interested only in attacking inside Pakistan. On Dec. 25, a young Nigerian man tried to blow up a transatlantic jetliner on its way to Detroit after being trained by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, a Yemen-based terror group, officials say.

Mr. Leiter’s organization was one of those criticized for failing to thwart the Dec. 25 attack by placing the man, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, on a no-fly list.

Mr. Leiter said that “the threshold has been lowered” for placing individuals with suspected links to terror groups on that list, though he would not describe the new criteria. He said that Mr. Abdulmutallab was on a list of suspects “available to 10,000 people” inside the United States government, including the Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department and others.

David E. Sanger reported from Aspen, Colo., and Mark Mazzetti from Washington.

[buglerbilly]

'Pakistan and Iran backing Afghan attacks on British troops'

Bomb attacks that are killing British troops in Afghanistan are being funded and supplied from Iran and Pakistan, a senior officer has said.

By James Kirkup, Political Correspondent

Published: 2:49PM BST 01 Jul 2010

Major General Gordon Messenger also revealed that Taliban insurgents are also altering their tactics to launch more long-range sniper attacks on Nato forces.

A total of 309 British personnel have died in Afghanistan sine 2001. Many have been killed by improvised explosive devices, bombs planted along roads and pathways

The general, the spokesman for Britain’s mission in Afghanistan, said that UK forces and Afghan civilians now face an “unprecedented threat” from such devices.

Maj Gen Messenger told reporters in London that British military intelligence has found “evidence” that some of the IED attacks are being supported from outside Afghanistan.

“We are looking beyond Afghanistan in terms of the provision of some of the more sophisticated components and the provision of finance,” he said. “There is evidence that something is coming in from Iran, something is coming in from Pakistan.”

Some reports have suggested that military chiefs and intelligence agencies in both Pakistan and Iran are supporting the Taliban.

Last month, a London School of Economics report said that Pakistan’s ISI intelligence service gives extensive backing to the Afghan insurgency.

However, Maj Gen Messenger said there was no evidence of foreign “institutional” support for IED attacks in Afghanistan in the same way that parts of the Iranian regime backed bomb attacks on international forces in Iraq.

Britain is increasing the resources and personnel devoted to countering the IED threat. More armoured vehicles are being deployed and David Cameron has promised to double the number of bomb-disposal teams in the country.

Maj Gen Messenger said the growing effort is starting to show results, with more devices being detected and defused without detonating.

And Afghan civilians, “terrified” by the bomb threat, are increasingly reporting the suspected location of devices, and sometimes even handing in IEDs, he said.

But he conceded that there is a constant “arms race of tactics and technology” between Nato forces and their opponents.

Recent weeks have seen an increase in the number of British troops killed by gunshots.

Some military analysts have speculated that shows the Taliban are adapting to the increased British success in thwarting IED attacks.

Maj Gen Messenger said: “There has been an increase in a tactic which is more accurate single-shot fire rather than loosing off a magazine in our direction. Our tactics are evolving to counter it.”

However, he insisted that the increase in casualties from gunfire was “not statistically significant” and said: “We are not drawing too many conclusions from it.”

[buglerbilly]

Children, aged 5, used to plant Taliban bombs in Afghanistan

Children as young as five are being used by the Taliban to lay bombs and carry weapons in a deadly new tactic in Afghanistan, it can be disclosed.

Thomas Harding in Sangin

Published: 10:00PM BST 30 Jun 2010


Innocent children as young as five are being used by the Taliban to plant bombs Photo: JANE MINGAY

In the past five months the number child insurgents has increased almost fivefold in the town of Sangin, to a band of 40, who are used to run weapons, plant bombs and carry out tasks for the Taliban, The Daily Telegraph has learnt.

According to military intelligence sources there are about 12 children being routinely used in the Sangin area just to plant bombs.

The Taliban have resorted to the tactic because they know that British troops are unlikely to fire on children planting IEDs (improvised explosive devices). They have also been forced into the change because sophisticated surveillance technology is able to pick up Taliban IED planting teams and take action against them.

On one occasion surveillance cameras picked up two children under 10 walking along the main road with one placing an IED in a hole followed by another covering it up with a bag of stone and earth.

"They know that we won't engage the kids," said an intelligence source with 40 Commando, Royal Marines, based in Sangin. "The kids are less aware of the risks and will to do anything for a quick buck.

"But it's really exploiting children. The parents are upset they do this but they are very, very intimidated by the Taliban."

There have been 44 roadside bombs in Sangin in the past months, a fifth were carried out by children.

At least one child has been killed in the last month laying an IED. Two other youngsters from his team turned up at the Marines' base one missing a hand and the other was later found with batteries, tape and wire on him.

"We have child accessories not child soldiers," said Major Ed Moorhouse, commander of Charlie Company, 40 Cdo. "They are entirely indoctrinated from an early age, very battle hardened and the Taliban know that our Western values inhibit us from firing on children."

In another incident that left the Marines deeply shocked a teenage boy, believed to be 14, arrived at a compound where he started chatting to one of commandos.

"We were having a joke, he wrote his name on my hand and then asked me if I was an officer," said Marine Tim Jones, 26, a Pashtun speaker. "He just seemed like a normal teenager but he had come in with an agenda."

Twenty minutes later the boy returned and went up to the corporal in charge of the patrol who was carrying a radio and detonated a suicide vest. But it is believed the boy put the vest on the wrong way round and caused only minor injuries to the corporal while killing himself.

"It's still difficult to take in that they are using kids to fight against us," said MnE Jones. "You feel sorry for them really because they are taken away at such a young age that they don't get a chance to choose."

Children are also used to approach Royal Marine patrols to identify commanders or officers who are then targeted by bombers or gunmen.

They will also carry guns or rocket-propelled grenades for the Taliban to be used in ambushes or are asked to connect IEDs to batteries.

Taliban commanders are also thought to develop a "cult of hero worship" around children.

"They are fully aware that we will not engage children except in extreme circumstances," said Company Sergeant Major Buck Ryan.

"I feel for the children. I have a 14-year-old son and to think of him doing something like that, to kill people, is horrific.

"Life is cheap out here, there's no question of that."

During one gunfight on a police check point yesterday, witnessed at a distance by The Daily Telegraph, an eight-year-old girl was struck in the back of the head by a bullet believed to have been fired by insurgents. She was in a stable condition after the bullet skimmed the top of her head causing a deep gauge.

[buglerbilly]

US to cut $4bn in Afghan aid after corruption allegations

Claims that large amounts of money have been flown out of war-torn country but government has blocked investigations

Adam Gabbatt and agencies guardian.co.uk, Thursday 1 July 2010 10.05 BST


Afghan president Hamid Karzai's government has blocked investigations into corruption allegations against political allies. Photograph: Majid Saeedi/Getty Images

A US House of Representatives panel has voted to cut almost $4bn (£2.68bn) in aid to the Afghanistan government after allegations of corruption.

News reports have alleged that large amounts of cash have been flown out of the country, while President Hamid Karzai's government has blocked corruption investigations of political allies.

The move to withdraw aid came as the US senate voted unanimously to confirm General David Petraeus as commander of the Afghan war, and the UK defence secretary Liam Fox insisted the British army must not leave Afghanistan "before the job is finished".

A subcommittee of the House of Representatives voted yesterday to block $3.9bn (£2.6bn) in aid that the Obama administration sought for Kabul, although the panel's chair, Nita Lowey, said the aid could be reconsidered once the Afghanistan government's efforts to fight corruption have been reconsidered.

Last week the Wall Street Journal reported that more than $3bn in cash has been flown out of Kabul International airport in the past three years, while The Washington Post alleged that officials in Karzai's government have been blocking corruption investigations of political allies.

"The cash – packed into suitcases, piled onto pallets and loaded into aeroplanes – is declared and legal to move," the Wall Street Journal said.

"But US and Afghan officials say they are targeting the flows in major anti-corruption and drug trafficking investigations because of their size relative to Afghanistan's small economy and the murkiness of their origins."

Last year the gross domestic product of Afghanistan was $13.5bn, according to the CIA world factbook.

Lowey said she has written to US government auditors asking them to audit all US aid to Afghanistan from the last three years.

The aid withdrawal came as the US senate voted 99-0 in favour of appointing Petraeus to command the Afghan war, after the dramatic sacking of the previous commander Stanley McChrystal last week.

However the unanimous support for Petraeus, seen by some as Obama's last hope in Afghanistan, came amid growing anxiety in among both Democrats and Republicans about an unpopular war, in which casualties are rising, ahead of the November US congressional elections.

"Regardless of who is in command, the president's current strategy in Afghanistan is counterproductive," said Democrat Senator Russ Feingold after voting for Petraeus – whom he stressed was "clearly qualified" for the job.

In the UK, Liam Fox appeared to defy David Cameron's weekend pledge to withdraw all British troops from Afghanistan by 2015, saying an early withdrawal of coalition troops from Afghanistan would risk a return of civil war and act as a "shot in the arm to jihadists".

"Were we to leave prematurely, without degrading the insurgency and increasing the capability of the Afghan national security forces, we could see the return of the destructive forces of transnational terror," he said.

"Not only would we risk the return of civil war in Afghanistan, creating a security vacuum, but we would also risk the destabilisation of Pakistan with potentially unthinkable regional, and possibly nuclear, consequences."

Fox said Britain would be betraying the sacrifices of its fallen soldiers if it left "before the job is finished", adding that British forces would be among the last to leave Afghanistan, as they are stationed in Helmand, one the most dangerous provinces in the country.

[buglerbilly]

173rd Airborne soldier recommended for MoH

By Michelle Tan - Staff writer

Posted : Friday Jul 2, 2010 8:01:28 EDT

A soldier who served in Afghanistan could be the first living recipient of the Medal of Honor since the Vietnam War.

News outlets in and around Cedar Rapids, Iowa, have reported that Staff Sgt. Sal Giunta, who is from that area, is believed to be the soldier being considered for the nation’s highest valor award. Giunta is currently stationed in Vicenza, Italy.

The recommendation has been sent from the Defense Department the White House, according to an Army source, who confirmed that Giunta is likely the nominee.

The Washington Post was the first to report the nomination, but did not reveal the soldier’s name.

A source close to the nomination said the soldier fought through a barrage of fire to repel enemy fighters in a fierce battle in late 2007 in Afghanistan’s treacherous Korengal Valley. His actions saved the lives of several other soldiers.

The White House and the Army refused to comment on the nomination. Efforts to reach Giunta and his family were unsuccessful.

The AP reported officials are concerned that early disclosure could be seen as pressuring President Barack Obama to approve the medal, creating a potentially embarrassing situation if the award is not approved.

If approved, the award would be just the seventh Medal of Honor since the beginning of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. All six prior awards were posthumous, including four for acts of heroism in Iraq and two in Afghanistan.

The small number awarded and the fact that all were awarded posthumously has raised questions among members of Congress and senior military leaders.

When asked by reporters, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said in September the issue has been “a source of real concern to me.” He added: The Medal of Honor nomination process is “a very time-intensive, thorough process. But I would say that I’ve been told there are some living potential recipients that have been put forward,” he said during a Sept. 17 news conference.

Military officials have said it’s difficult to compare the number of awards from previous conflicts to those for Iraq and Afghanistan because warfare has evolved so much.

“The types of actions that we have in Iraq and Afghanistan, although they can be brutally violent for short periods of time, they are not the long duration, force-on-force type of battles that we fought in the past,” Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey said June 7 during a meeting with Army Times editors and reporters. “That said, I think … you’re going to continue to see awards for Medals of Honor and Distinguished Service Crosses continue to process through, and I would expect that some of those, especially for a living soldier, would be favorably approved.”

Giunta’s heroic actions are chronicled in a new book titled “War,” by Sebastian Junger.

A specialist at the time, Giunta deployed with the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team for its June 2007 to August 2008 tour in Afghanistan.

According to Junger’s book, late on Oct. 25, 2007, Giunta and his fellow soldiers from B Company, 2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regiment, were on their way back from a major operation when they are ambushed by the enemy.

Giunta was the fourth soldier from the front; Sgt. Josh Brennan was walking point, according to “War.”

The enemy fired machine-gun and small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades from such close range that the Apache attack helicopters overhead were unable to help the soldiers on the ground.

“First Platoon is essentially inside a shooting gallery,” Junger wrote. “Within seconds, every man in the lead squad takes a bullet. Brennan goes down immediately, wounded in eight places.”

As the battle progressed, Giunta “sees two enemy fighters dragging Josh Brennan down the hillside. He empties his M4 magazine at them and starts running toward his friend,” according to the book.

“Giunta jams a new magazine into his gun and yells for a medic. Brennan is lying badly wounded in the open and Giunta grabs him by the vest and drags him behind a little bit of cover.”

Brennan doesn’t survive surgery, Junger wrote.

Giunta later talks to Junger about his actions. “I did what I did because that’s what I was trained to do,” he told Junger. “I didn’t run through fire to save a buddy – I ran through fire to see what was going on with him and maybe we could hide behind the same rock and shoot together. I didn’t run through fire to do anything heroic or brave. I did what I believe anyone would have done.”

[buglerbilly]

Job One: Petraeus Squashes Beef Over Kandahar’s Grid

By Spencer Ackerman July 2, 2010 | 8:39 am



The top job for General David Petraeus, now the new commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, before the Senate on Tuesday was to show unity within the Obama administration on the war. After the self-immolation of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who exhibited disrespect for his civilian counterparts in the State Department — and their superiors — Petraeus can’t allow any daylight to shine between himself and Ambassador Karl Eikenberry or special representative Richard Holbrooke. With Petraeus arriving in Kabul today, there’s already an early opportunity to unite: a controversial plan for delivering more kilowatt hours to the electricity-starved city of Kandahar.

The approximately 850,000 Afghans who live in the country’s major southern city receive something like six hours of electricity a day. There’s a major series of military and (allegedly) governance operations scheduled all through the baking-hot summer. In order to demonstrate that the NATO coalition and the Karzai government it supports better care for Kandaharis than their insurgent adversaries, some military officers argued that it was worth spending a massive $200 million to buy tons more generators and diesel fuel to power them. The U.S. Embassy in Kabul fretted that such a stopgap measure would encourage increased consumption, quickly overloading the generators. Accordingly, Holbrooke, Eikenberry and embassy officials wanted the Kajaki Dam upgraded, a more sustainable way to keep the juice flowing.

According to the Washington Post in April, Petraeus, as commander of U.S. Central Command, backed Eikenberry and Holbrooke. But now that he’s commander of the war, the bottom paragraphs of a New York Times piece yesterday slipped in a reference to Petraeus siding with the generator surge. What’s up with that?

According to a source close to Petraeus who asked for anonymity, the bureaucratic baby got split. Or, rather, everyone’s getting the solution they favor, and no longer do the State Department and the military view their favored solutions as mutually exclusive. Generators first, but Dam refurbishment to follow.

“The generators are a bridge to the ultimate increase of power generation by the Kajaki Dam generating station,” the source says, as “the infrastructure built and refurbished to support the generators also enables eventual transmission of power produced at the dam.” Accordingly, State, USAID and the military are all on board, “so there is true civilian-military unity of effort on this project.”

That sounds auspicious. But unity of effort is one thing. Results for the Afghan people are another. And this is an engineering and economic problem. Either the extra generators will pump enough electricity to meet demand or they’ll encourage more demand than the new generators can handle. “Electricity is something the Taliban can’t provide,” the source notes, “only the Afghan government can.” Unless the government can’t.

Credit: DoD

Read More http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/07/job-one-petraeus-squashes-beef-over-kandahars-electric-grid/#more-26909#ixzz0sWwn2AOA

[buglerbilly]

War Commanders Need Better Logistics Picture, General Says

(Source: U.S Department of Defense; issued July 1, 2010)

GARMISCH-PARTENKIRCHEN, Germany --- Commanders fighting the battles in Afghanistan and Iraq need a better “common operating picture” for their supplies, contracts and other logistical requirements, the Joint Staff’s logistics director said here this week.

During a June 28-29 visit to the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies, Army Lt. Gen. Kathleen M. Gainey toured the facility and provided the keynote speech for one of the Marshall Center’s graduating classes.

Gainey said she possesses “no budget or authority,” but instead serves as a combatant commander’s strongest advocate in the Pentagon for logistical efforts. She added that despite progress in meshing military supply and distribution chains, work remains to be done breaking down military cultural barriers, integrating data systems and fixing old rules.

“Some of the policies were not conducive to getting supplies in quickly,” she said. “So, we had to work through policy and regulatory changes. Many of our regulations and much of our guidance was in the Cold War era. We had to work those decisions and put changes in process.”

In her two years at the Joint Staff, Gainey said, progress has been made in Afghanistan. Instead of one supply route, there are two: via Pakistan and through the north. Multinational partnerships have been vital to keeping troops fed and watered, as well as allowing combatant commanders flexibility to do their jobs.

“At the start of the war, we had just one route,” Gainey said. “That creates a single point of failure. That's not a good position to be in. As you are trying to bring all this in, everyone is depending on this one route. We need more than one way to bring in cargo so we can bring it in fast and allow ourselves options due to volume or weather or other issues.”

Gainey also talked about issues with contracts.

“We found out we were creating bidding wars between our nation and other nations that were there trying to give support,” she said. “So we started working with those various countries to identify what contracts are already in place. What is the going price for gravel or water? We don’t create those bidding wars, and where possible, we want to leverage other nations’ existing contracts.”

She said some of those problems have been solved by having the International Security Assistance Force create one center for these needs. Creation of the center, she said, goes toward the idea of the one common operating picture that commanders need. Still, Gainey said, a long road remains to be traveled.

“If the ISAF or [the commander of U.S. Central Command] asked for the logistical posture for … his ability to fight something in depth as well as his backup plan, he would have to go to each of the services and each of the nations involved separately and drill all the way down,” Gainey said.

The general also addressed challenges with information technology. “Many of our IT systems are ‘siloed.’ They do not talk well with one another,” she said. “Further, our systems aren’t as flexible and agile as they need to be to give that picture to commanders. We’re working hard to start creating that. It won’t happen today or tomorrow, but we can set the parameters and then find the interim solution.”

One of those solutions is the Global Combat Support System Joint, a system of computers trying to tie together supply and distribution chains of the military services. She added the U.S. Transportation Command and the Defense Logistics Agency continue to look for other solutions.

Industry, Gainey said, has also played an integral role in the war effort. She summed up civilian industrial partners’ effect on the war with one word.

“Huge,” she said. “We have a lot of capability within our commercial industry. If you have a shortfall of military manpower -- where maybe we don’t have enough because of the volume of rotations and wanting to give soldiers that one year of downtime -- you may be able to leverage industry to provide that capability.”

Gainey said the key to commanders achieving a common operating picture as well as gains in both Iraq and Afghanistan depends upon interagency and multinational cooperation. She said both government and nongovernment agencies, as well as industry, have made a difference in the combat theater and elsewhere.

“If everyone knows the shortfalls, they can then provide ideas and options for solutions that we hadn’t even thought about,” the general said. “Collectively, [working] those issues means you end up with a much better solution.”

-ends-

[buglerbilly]

Suicide Bombers Attack USAID Compound

July 02, 2010

Associated Press

KABUL, Afghanistan -– Six suicide bombers stormed a USAID compound in northern Afghanistan before dawn Friday, killing at least four people and wounding several others, officials said. At least two of the dead were foreigners.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, which began about 3:30 a.m. in Kunduz when a suicide car bomber blew a hole in the wall around a building used by Development Alternatives Inc., a Washington, D.C.-based global consulting company on contract with the United States Agency for International Aid, or USAID. The company is working on governance and community development in the area.

At least five other attackers then ran inside the building, killing or wounding security guards and others inside before dying in a gunbattle with Afghan security forces who raced to the scene. Afghan authorities said the five were all wearing explosive vests.

Black smoke poured from the windows of the four-story building. The bodies of the victims were found inside amid rubble, pools of blood and broken glass. Stunned aid workers were led from the scene as NATO troops carried bodies wrapped in black plastic out on stretchers.

Gen. Abdul Razaq Yaqoubi, police chief in Kunduz province, said those killed included an Afghan policeman, an Afghan man who worked as a security guard at the house and two foreigners. The German Foreign Ministry told The Associated Press in Berlin that a German citizen was killed in the attack.

"It was 3 o'clock in the morning, close to the morning prayer time, when a suicide bomber in a 4x4 vehicle exploded his vehicle," Yaqoubi said as Afghan national security forces were battling to kill the last surviving attacker. "There is no way for him to escape."

Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid told The Associated Press in Kabul that six suicide bombers attacked a "training center" for Afghan security forces in Kunduz and killed 55 foreigners. The Taliban often exaggerate their claims.

The attack appeared part of a Taliban campaign against development projects at a time when the U.S. and its allies are trying to bolster civilian programs to shore up the Afghan government. On Wednesday, militants rocketed a base for South Korean construction workers in Parwan province but caused no casualties.

In April, a gunman killed an 18-year-old woman working for Development Alternatives as she left her job in the southern city of Kandahar. Police believed the killing was part of a Taliban campaign against Afghans working for foreign development organizations.

This attack shows the insurgents' desire to prevent progress, and draws attention to their true goal of serving themselves rather than the people of Afghanistan," said Navy Capt. Jane Campbell, a spokesman for NATO, referring to the Kunduz attack.

Coalition troops provided assistance to Afghan security forces and helped wounded civilians at a nearby NATO base, she said.

Violence is rising in Afghanistan, and concern is growing in Washington and other allied capitals over the direction of the war. The 120,000-member NATO-led force is awaiting the arrival of a new commander, Gen. David Petraeus, who has warned of hard fighting this summer.

The United Nations is relocating a few dozen of its 300 foreign-hired staff because of fears about rising violence.

Last October, three gunmen with automatic weapons and suicide vests stormed a guest house used by U.N. staff in Kabul, killing at least 11 people, including five U.N. workers.

© Copyright 2010 Associated Press. All rights reserved.

[buglerbilly]

Troops call it the Heart of Darkness, the spiritual home of the Taliban

US forces are taking on the insurgents in their own back yard in Zhari district, reports Ben Farmer with the 101st Airborne Division.

By Ben Farmer with 101st Airborne Division in Zhari district

Published: 10:00PM BST 02 Jul 2010


American soldiers 101st Airborne Division rest during a dawn patrol into mountains overlooking Zhari district of Kandahar Photo: BEN FARMER

Relief swept the young private's face as the armoured convoy pulled off the road and moved behind the outpost's sandbags.

"Welcome what we call to the Heart of Darkness, or the Alamo," he said and spat as he made safe the turret-mounted machine gun at the end of a tense five-minute drive.

Two convoys travelling to the combat outpost in the Pashmul area of Zhari district had been attacked the previous day. The craters left in the giant sandbagged perimeter by rocket propelled grenades were clearly visibly.

American soldiers arriving in Kandahar for this summer's long-awaited operation to secure Afghanistan's second city have found a well-prepared enemy.

The Daily Telegraph was the first newspaper to accompany the influx of troops from the 101st Airborne Division into Zhari district, the home of the Taliban movement.

Coalition commanders insist the push, named Operation Hamkari or 'cooperation', is a new kind of military offensive. Its objective is governance and jobs rather than gun battles.

But it is already clear, a month after the reinforcements arrived, they will need to fight for Zhari first.

The area forms a funnel of arms, fighters and supplies from rural Kandahar and Helmand to the provincial capital.

Whoever controls Zhari, which sits astride the Highway One nationwide ring road, has a critical hold on the western approach to Kandahar city.

The district is also of historic importance to the Taliban movement, which grew up in Zhari's orchards and vineyards.

Mullah Mohammad Omar, founder of the movement, taught at a small mosque in the village of Singesar after he and other leaders fought the Soviet army in the 1980s.

His militia of religious students, or Taliban, were formed to fight the power of local warlords in 1994.

Their brand of strict Islamic law became the antidote to abusive local commanders.

Mullah Omar and 30 men were said to have hung a warlord who abducted and raped two teenage girls from the gun barrel of a tank.

The 101st Airborne Division and hundreds of Afghan soldiers arrived in May to wrest the Taliban's birthplace from the insurgency's grip.

"This is their area we are operating in," explained Lt Col Johnny Davis, commander of the division's first battalion, 502nd infantry regiment.

"It's their back yard, this is where their movement began and I am sure they have been told not to lose it."

Zhari is a focal point of President Barack Obama's surge. Several thousand American and Afghan troops have replaced a company of little more than 120 Canadians.

Their terrain is a wedge around 15 miles long and four miles wide at its thickest.

Zhari's population is hemmed in by mountains and deserts around a dense strip of irrigated vineyards and orchards which the locals call the gardens.

The Americans instead call it the 'green monster'.

Soldiers patrolling this farmland must scrabble over mud walls in 120F heat to avoid the paths seeded with homemade bombs. Visibility among the pomegranate trees is cut to a few yards.

The gardens are a patchwork of safe areas and battlegrounds, demarcated by streams, tracks and trees. Platoons can count attacks from almost any group of trees.

In the labyrinth of alleys and sun-baked mud houses in Senjaray town, foot patrols have come under grenade attack from fighters no older than boys.

Patrols have found bunkers, fighting positions and "bed down positions" where fighters can rest unobserved.

"There's no doubt that in large tracts of Zhari, you have got clear evidence that the insurgency is alive and well and has significant freedom of action," said Gen Nick Carter the British officer commanding international troops in southern Afghanistan.

"That means the population is oppressed and is not connected to the government."

The intelligence reports that the insurgents are now as corrupt and mercenary as the hated warlords, suggests an opportunity exists to import Afghan civil servants to set-up schools and clinics across the rural district.

The operation - which must also take harvest time demands into account - is set to stretch far into the autumn.

But American commanders are confident that weight of numbers not time will tilt the battle. "We have heard all the names, the Heart of Darkness and so on," said Major Matt Neumeyer "But just by sheer numbers we are going to gain more space and take it from the enemy."

[buglerbilly]

British special forces member killed in Afghanistan

Special forces have been targeting Taliban leaders and drug barons in their biggest operation since second world war

Richard Norton-Taylor guardian.co.uk, Friday 2 July 2010 16.24 BST


British soliders in the Upper Sangin Valley, Helmand province, Afghanistan. Photograph: Cpl Rupert Frere/MoD/PA

A member of British special forces, which have been targeting Taliban leaders and drug barons in their biggest operation since the second world war, has been killed in southern Afghanistan, defence sources said today.

The Ministry of Defence announced only that a Royal Marine had died there yesterday but the Guardian can reveal that he was a member of the Special Boat Service (SBS), the naval equivalent of the SAS.

Though Gordon Brown, the former prime minister, revealed earlier this year that 500 members of Britain's special forces were deployed in southern Afghanistan, their activities are still meant to be an official secret. About 70 are understood to have been wounded there, and at least 13 killed.

They have conducted hundreds of operations against Taliban commanders over the past three years, killing some and capturing other, less prominent, Taliban fighters in joint operations with Afghan special forces. They are engaged in operations in Kandahar, where they are based, as well as Helmand province, where most of the 9,500 regular British troops are deployed.

In "carrot and stick" tactics, the SBS and SAS are mounting attacks directed at Taliban commanders on the ground while in parallel covert operations, intelligence officers are trying to persuade more influential Taliban leaders to negotiate an end to the conflict.

While the SAS led British special operations in Iraq – where seven were killed and 30 seriously wounded – the SBS have taken the lead in Afghanistan ever since their first troops were flown to bases near Kabul soon after the start of the war in November 2001. SBS members were recently reported to have used skis to track down Taliban commanders last winter in the mountains of the Hindu Kush.

In an operation described as "striking a critical blow to the insurgency's command and control capabilities," a Taliban leader known as Bishmullah was killed two years ago in Now Zad in Helmand by British special forces.

In an address to a Royal United Services Institute conference in London, General David Petraeus, who today took command of all US and Nato troops in Afghanistan, praised what he called the "world-class counter-terrorism expertise" of British special forces.

He singled out Lieutenant General Sir Graeme Lamb, a former head of Britain's special forces, a confirmed adherent of hitting the Taliban hard – "till their eyeballs bleed", as he once put it – but also of encouraging "reconcilable" Taliban to lay down their arms.

[buglerbilly]

A badge and a burqa


Sadiqa, 29, an officer in Kandahar, has survived a bombing and has had to move three times because of threats. (Ernesto Londono/the Washington Post)

By Ernesto Londoño
Washington Post Foreign Service

Saturday, July 3, 2010

KANDAHAR, AFGHANISTAN -- Each morning, the 23 female police officers in Kandahar walk into the city's bunkered police headquarters wearing burqas, the enveloping garments that shroud women from head to toe.

The outfit is not a choice; rather, it is their most valuable protection, a cloak of anonymity in a city where insurgents routinely kill police officers and where many residents hold a dogmatic view of the role of women.

"We face threats every day," said 3rd Lt. Fatima Esaqzai, 32, the highest-ranking woman on the force. "In this society, people don't see us with good eyes."

Afghan women in law enforcement make up a small but growing and critical segment of the country's fledgling security forces, Afghan and NATO officials say. But the female officers say they have felt increasingly vulnerable amid a spike in violence and an effort by the Afghan government to reach a negotiated truce with the Taliban.

"If the Taliban comes back, they will kill us all," said Sadiqa, 29, an officer who survived a bombing at police headquarters and has had to move three times because of threats from the Taliban. "If a negotiation takes place, we would have to leave the country."

Female officers are valuable to the government's security efforts because they are able to pat down women at checkpoints and during raids -- acts that would be culturally impermissible for men. They also are better suited than male officers to interrogate women who have information about terrorism and criminal activity.

NATO officials say the predominantly male Afghan security forces have a very difficult time reaching out to women who might become informants on insurgent activity or those who have been victims of crime. In an effort to fill that void temporarily, the U.S. Marines recently trained and deployed two units of female Marines tasked with assessing the needs of Afghan women.

There are roughly 700 female police officers in Afghanistan, which has approximately 100,000 officers overall, Interior Ministry spokesman Zamarai Bashari said. NATO officials say cultural and educational barriers have hindered their goal of hiring 5,000 female officers, but Afghan officials say they are continuing to work on the issue.

"One of the main priorities of the Afghan Interior Ministry is to strengthen the number of female police officers," Bashari said. "We need their presence." But he said the ministry will not put female officers in units that specialize in dangerous missions, such as raids. "We use them in jobs that will not contradict tradition and religious values," Bashari said.

Female officers in Kandahar, the country's second-largest city and the birthplace of the Taliban, scoff at that notion, pointing to the risky nature of the missions they are tasked with and the dangers they face when off duty.

Some have come under fire during raids on Taliban safe houses. And in a few instances they have discovered men armed to the teeth, draped in burqas.

"The government has given us nothing," said Sadiqa, who like many Afghans uses only one name. "I don't even have a knife at home. I feel so scared all the time."

Police supervisors have issued handguns to only five of the female officers in Kandahar and have at times resisted efforts by NATO officials to enroll female officers in specialized training.

"They're very brave," said Annie Lacroix, a Canadian police officer who trains the female officers in Kandahar. "You're doing this job without equipment, no weapon, and you still want to be a police officer. That really struck me."

Esaqzai said she frequently receives threatening calls from Taliban members vowing to shoot female officers or douse them with gasoline and set them on fire. "They say, 'You shouldn't work with the government anymore. Otherwise, we will assassinate you,' " Esaqzai said.

One of her colleagues was assassinated in the fall of 2008, and most of the female officers have had to move from their neighborhoods once their jobs became publicly known.

All but five on the Kandahar force are widows, the sole breadwinners in their families. Husbands are generally reluctant to allow their wives to work in law enforcement.

The female officers in Kandahar are not eligible for detective jobs. Although they are often tasked with taking down reports of domestic abuse, all they can do is forward the reports to male colleagues. In the majority of cases, male investigators imprison runaway women until marital disputes are resolved.

Female officers deal with "abuse against women and violence against children, but they can't investigate," Lacroix said. "That's something we're trying to change."

[buglerbilly]

Six Aussie soldiers wounded

July 4, 2010 - 8:01PM

Six Australian soldiers have been wounded in Afghanistan in two days, with both incidents involving roadside bombs, known as improvised explosive devices.

In the latest incident, four soldiers from the 1st Mentoring Task Force were travelling in an Afghan National Army patrol vehicle in Oruzgan province’s Chora Valley when a device exploded.

Two soldiers suffered minor wounds and two others received superficial wounds, a Department of Defence statement said.

The soldiers were treated at the scene and taken by helicopter to an International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) hospital at Tarin Kowt.

The two soldiers with superficial wounds were treated and released from hospital for a few days of rest.

One of the soldiers with minor wounds remains under observation and the other has been moved to an ISAF medical centre at Kandahar for further assessment.

Commodore Roger Boyce said."The soldiers are in good spirits and want to get back out with their mates, but we’ll monitor them closely over the next few days before letting them get back on with the job," he said.

The wounded soldiers have contacted their families.

Saturday’s blast came after two soldiers patrolling the Mirabad Valley on foot on Friday had to deal with both roadside bombs and insurgent fire.

The pair were said to be in "fair condition", with minor wounds.

Meanwhile, a soldier killed in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan is to be farewelled at a funeral in Brisbane on Monday.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Opposition Leader Tony Abbott are expected to attend the service for Private Tim Aplin.

Three soldiers died in the crash on June 21.

The funeral for Private Ben Chuck was held last week and Private Scott Palmer is expected to be farewelled later this week.

The latest casualties bring the number of Australians wounded this year to 42, while 16 Australian soldiers have died since operations in Afghanistan began in 2001.

AAP

[SteveJH]

Geez, not having much luck recently.

[buglerbilly]

Petraeus takes command in Afghanistan, pledging victory

By Joshua Partlow
Washington Post Foreign Service

Monday, July 5, 2010

KABUL -- Seizing the flags of U.S. and NATO forces Sunday morning, Gen. David H. Petraeus formally took hold of the war in Afghanistan and began the daunting task of turning around an ever more deadly and unpopular conflict.

In a ceremony on the tree-shaded lawn in front of NATO headquarters in Kabul, Petraeus assumed command from Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who was fired last month after a magazine quoted him and his staff making critical remarks about Obama administration officials.

A general with a sterling reputation for military creativity and political acumen, Petraeus, 57, struck a determined tone in his remarks to fellow officers, foreign diplomats and Afghan officials, insisting "we are in this to win."

"We're engaged in a contest of wills. Our enemies are doing all that they can to undermine the confidence of the Afghan people," he said.

Before he mentioned the Taliban, Petraeus described those enemies as "al-Qaeda and its network of extremist allies," harking back to the justification for invasion nine years ago. He said his mission is to demonstrate to Afghanistan and the world that the extremists "will not be allowed to once again establish sanctuaries in Afghanistan from which they can launch attacks on the Afghan people and on freedom-loving nations around the world."

"We must demonstrate to the people and to the Taliban that Afghan and [U.S. and coalition] forces are here to safeguard the Afghan people, and that we are in this to win," he said. "That is our clear objective."

Rather than promising sweeping changes, Petraeus praised the work of McChrystal and said he would look, as any new commander should, for places "where refinements might be needed." The military strategy for Afghanistan, which Petraeus helped formulate in his previous position as head of the U.S. Central Command, will remain focused on protecting Afghanistan's people and shoring up its troubled government.

One of the growing problems McChrystal faced was reducing civilian casualties while not leaving his troops hamstrung by restrictive rules of engagement. In his speech, Petraeus affirmed the goal of reducing "the loss of innocent civilians to an absolute minimum," while not hesitating "to bring all assets to bear to protect you and the Afghan forces with which you are fighting shoulder to shoulder."

In a letter to NATO soldiers and civilians in Afghanistan, a gesture he also made when he took over command of U.S. troops in Iraq in 2007, Petraeus wrote, "We must never forget that the decisive terrain in Afghanistan is the human terrain."

"Protecting those we are here to help nonetheless does require killing, capturing, or turning the insurgents. We will not shrink from that; indeed, you have been taking the fight to the enemy and we will continue to do so," he added.

Petraeus ended by saying, "I pledge my total commitment to our mission as we work together to help achieve a brighter future for a new country in an ancient land."

[buglerbilly]

Petraeus Tells Troops: We’ll Kill Insurgents and Protect Afghans, Too

By Spencer Ackerman July 4, 2010 | 10:57 am



In a new letter to the troops and civilians of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, their new commander, General David Petraeus, underlined a point he made in his confirmation hearings last week: the overall task is to secure the Afghan people from harm, but the rules of engagement won’t stop you from finishing fights with insurgents.

“We must also continue our emphasis on reducing the loss of innocent civilian life to an absolute minimum. We must never forget that the decisive terrain in Afghanistan is the human terrain,” Petraeus writes today in the letter. “Protecting those we are here to help nonetheless does require killing, capturing, or turning the insurgents. …[A]s you and our Afghan partners on the ground get into tough situations, we must employ all assets to ensure your safety, keeping in mind, again, the importance of avoiding civilian casualties.”

(Note the addition of “turning the insurgents,” a tweak of the typical kill/capture formulation, indicative of the Karzai government’s desire to “reintegrate” or “reconcile” with Taliban and other insurgent forces.)

The letter is reminiscent of Petraeus’s famous anti-torture “commander’s intent” shortly after taking command in Iraq in 2007. And it follows on the general’s confirmation-hearing signal that he’ll find a subtle way to make ISAF troops less encumbered by the rules of engagement — a sore spot for some under Petraeus’ predecessor, Gen. Stanley McChrystal — while still keeping those rules in place.

Petraeus issued the letter shortly after taking command in Kabul (on July 4, natch). Its other key message: civilian-military teamwork — something else that eluded McChrystal during his tenure — is an absolute must.

Photo: DoD

Read More http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/07/petraeus-to-troops-well-kill-insurgents-and-protect-afghans-too/#more-26952#ixzz0srSvDgMR

[buglerbilly]

France: More military trainers to Afghanistan

Associated Press

2010-07-04 11:37 PM Fonts Size:

France's military will soon send 250 more trainers to Afghanistan, bringing the overall French force to 4,000 people.
The chief of the French defense staff, Edouard Guillaud, said in French Senate hearings that the French troops in Afghanistan "are 3,750 men and women who are engaged in a difficult operation."

He adds that "they will soon be 4,000, with the deployment" of new police and military trainers.

He says the war Afghanistan is "a war for the long term."

The text of his comments Friday was published on chief of staff website.

France has promised to send more trainers to the U.S.-led force in the Afghan theater, but not more combat troops. The trainers work at military schools and assist Afghan troops in the hunt for insurgents.

[buglerbilly]

McCain: Kandahar Key to Victory in Afghan War

July 06, 2010

Associated Press



KABUL, Afghanistan -- The ranking Republican on the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee said NATO and Afghan troops will prevail in the war if they can succeed in securing and bolstering governance in the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar.

Sen. John McCain, who visited Afghanistan's largest city in the south on Monday with two other U.S. lawmakers, warned of tough fighting ahead and predicted that casualties would rise in the short-term.

"The Taliban know that Kandahar is the key to success or failure," McCain told a news conference at the airport in Kabul. "So what happens in this operation will have a great effect on the outcome of this conflict. But I am convinced we can succeed and will succeed, and Kandahar is obviously the key area. And if succeed there, we will succeed in the rest of this struggle."

McCain, a Republican from Arizona, also reiterated his opposition to President Obama's plan to begin withdrawing troops from Afghanistan beginning in July 2011. Obama has said that large numbers of troops would not be pulled out if conditions did not allow, but that caveat has often gotten lost in the discussion over the length of U.S. commitment to the war.

McCain said he expected progress to be made in Afghanistan between now and July 2011. "But we must not tell the enemy that we will begin leaving when we have not finished the job," he said.

During a two-day visit, McCain and Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina who is on the Armed Services Committee, and Sen. Joseph Lieberman, an Independent from Connecticut who is chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, met with Gen. David Petraeus, the newly installed NATO commander, Afghan President Hamid Karzai and U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry.

Lieberman said he understood that Obama wanted to use the July 2011 timetable to send the message that the U.S. would not be in Afghanistan forever. Still, he said he thought the president was wrong to set it. "We hear it everywhere we go here. They say they think we're leaving. We're not going to leave until we win."

McCain also said he expected Petraeus to refine the rules of engagement on the battlefield.

"Probably there will be some tweaking," McCain said. "We get that impression from him."

The rules were designed to limit civilian casualties and improve Afghan public support for coalition forces. The rules don't prevent U.S. troops from calling in air support, but the emphasis is on caution, and some officers fear career damage if they mistakenly call for air or heavy weapons support and kill civilians in the process. Analysts say the rules have been interpreted and implemented unevenly across the country.

All three criticized New York Democratic Representative Nita Lowey, chairwoman of a key House panel that voted to defer consideration of nearly $4 billion in civilian aid -- for reconstruction, redevelopment, health, education and counter-narcotics assistance -- to Afghanistan pending investigations into allegations that Afghan officials are blocking corruption probes and foreign aid was being pocketed.

Putting nearly $4 billion in civilian aid in doubt is self-defeating because it's impossible to defeat the Taliban until Afghanistan has more effective civilian institutions, Graham said.

"Congress needs to understand that statements like this at this point in time are ill-advised," Graham said. "People are making a decision who to side with. ... The money in question is just as important to the war effort in my view as additional troops."

Lowey said the committee's action had spurred increased scrutiny of funding by U.S. government officials and the Afghan government, including an investigation by an Afghan anti-corruption unit over billions of dollars of cash that has left the country. She said U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder's recent trip to Afghanistan sent a strong message that rooting out corruption was critical.

"Given our serious responsibility to ensure that they [U.S. aid dollars] are spent properly and aimed at fostering a stable, secure society, the subcommittee will continue to investigate allegations of corruption involving our foreign assistance, determine what additional safeguards are needed ... and press the Afghan government to aggressively investigate and prosecute corruption," she said in a statement released earlier this week.

Afghan officials had pushed back against the subcommittee and Lowey, saying she was wrong to suggest that government officials in Kabul had misused or pocketed donor funds, accurately noting that contractors and foreign capitals hold the pursestrings for the vast majority of international aid in the country.

Meanwhile, NATO said five U.S. service members were killed Monday by roadside bombs -- two in the west, two in the south and one in the east. No other details were immediately disclosed. Also Monday, a British soldier was killed in a blast during a vehicle patrol in southern Helmand province, the British Defense Ministry said. Their deaths brought to 14 the number of U.S. and other international troops killed so far this month.

June was the deadliest month of the war for U.S. and international forces, according to a tally by The Associated Press.

The AP count, based on announcements by the alliance and national commands, indicates that 103 international service members, including 60 Americans, died in June. The previous deadliest month for the multinational force was July 2009, when 75 troops were killed. For the U.S. contingent, the deadliest month was October 2009, when 59 service members were killed.

Roadside mines also are killing civilians. The Afghan Ministry of Interior reported Monday that six Afghan civilians, including a woman, died after their vehicle hit a roadside bomb Sunday in New Bahar district of Zabul province. Another civilian was killed and four others were wounded in a roadside bomb blast Sunday in Shinkay district of Zabul province, the ministry reported.

© Copyright 2010 Associated Press. All rights reserved.

[buglerbilly]

No. 9 on Most-Wanted Taliban List Killed

July 06, 2010

Long War Journal|by Bill Roggio

The Pakistani military claimed Monday that it has killed one of the top 20 most-wanted Taliban commanders from South Waziristan during a clash in North Waziristan.

Ameerullah Mehsud was reported to have been killed during a shootout with the military at a checkpoint in Miramshah, the main town in North Waziristan. Two soldiers were wounded during the clash.

Ameerullah's name appeared ninth on a list of most-wanted Taliban commanders from South Waziristan that was published by the Pakistani government during the summer of 2009. Twenty Taliban commanders from the Movement of the Taliban in Pakistan were listed as wanted "dead or alive." Ameerulllah had an estimated $300,000 bounty out for his death or capture.

Ameerullah served as a military commander in South Waziristan and is believed to have aided in many of the terror attacks in Pakistan's tribal areas and in the heart of the country. He also went by the names Qari Gud ("the man who limps") and Mazloomyar ("friend of the oppressed"), AFP reported.

So far, only two commanders on the wanted list have been killed or captured. On Nov. 27, Pakistani forces detained Abdullah Shah Mehsud, another military commander, during a raid in Tank, a district that borders South Waziristan.

The killing of Ameerullah in Miramshah serves to highlight the continued presence of al-Qaida and Taliban leaders in areas where "peace agreements" have been struck with Taliban leaders in North and South Waziristan who are not formally allied with the Movement of the Taliban in Pakistan, led by Hakeemullah Mehsud.

During the summer of 2009, just before launching an operation against Hakeemullah's forces in the Mehsud tribal areas in South Waziristan, the Pakistani military signed peace agreements with Hafiz Gul Bahadar, the most powerful Taliban leader in North Waziristan, and Mullah Nazir, the leader of the Wazir Taliban in South Waziristan. The agreements called for the Taliban in those areas to allow the military safe passage and to stop sheltering the Mehsuds or "foreign fighters" -- al-Qaida and other allied outside terror groups.

But Bahadar and Nazir have failed to abide by the peace agreements. Their forces have sporadically clashed with the Pakistani military, and they have continued to shelter the Mehsuds and al-Qaida.

The fact that al-Qaida still shelters in North and South Waziristan can be easily seen by the identities of those killed in the U.S. Predator airstrikes in these tribal areas. Over the past month, the U.S. has killed three al-Qaida military commanders in strikes in North Waziristan, and an al-Qaida commander in the Wazir tribal areas in South Waziristan. Also, a Taliban commander named Hamza Mehsud was killed in a U.S. strike in Miramshah in June.

The Pakistani government and the military have rebuffed U.S. pleas to take action against the terror groups in North Waziristan, including the powerful Haqqani Network, which is closely allied with al-Qaida and routinely carries out deadly attacks in Afghanistan.

Pakistan's military and intelligence services consider Bahadar, Nazir, and the Haqqanis to be "good Taliban" as they do not openly seek the overthrow of the Pakistani state. But Nazir and Bahadar, like the Haqqanis, are anything but benign. Nazir openly supports Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden, and wages jihad in Afghanistan; more senior al-Qaida leaders have been killed in Nazir's tribal areas during the U.S. air campaign than in those of any other Taliban leader in Pakistan. And Bahadar gives cover to the Haqqanis, al-Qaida, and other Central and South Asian terror groups.

At the end of May, Bahadar claimed to have expelled Hakeemullah Mehsud's followers as well as the so-called Punjabi Taliban, a mix of jihadist groups such as Jaish-e-Mohammed, Harkat ul-Jihad-i-Islami, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, and Lashkar-e-Taiba. “Almost 98 percent of the Mehsud militants along with some Punjabi Taliban have left North Waziristan," a Taliabn leader close to Bahadar told The News. Bahadar reportedly issued the expulsion order after being threatened by the military that an operation would take place.

© Copyright 2010 Long War Journal. All rights reserved.

[buglerbilly]

CIA, Pakistan Locked in Battle of Spies

July 06, 2010

Associated Press

WASHINGTON -- A Pakistani man approached CIA officers in Islamabad last year, offering to give up secrets of his country's closely guarded nuclear program. To prove he was a trustworthy source, he claimed to possess spent nuclear fuel rods.

But the CIA had its doubts. Before long, the suspicious officers had concluded that Pakistan's spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence, was trying to run a double agent against them.

CIA officers alerted their Pakistani counterparts. Pakistan promised to look into the matter and, with neither side acknowledging the man was a double agent, the affair came to a polite, quiet end.

The incident, recounted by former U.S. officials, underscores the schizophrenic relationship with one of America's most crucial counterterrorism allies. Publicly, officials credit Pakistani collaboration with helping kill and capture numerous al-Qaida and Taliban leaders. Privately, that relationship is often marked by mistrust as the two countries wage an aggressive spy battle against each other.

The CIA has repeatedly tried to penetrate the ISI and learn more about Pakistan's nuclear program. The ISI has mounted its own operations to gather intelligence on the CIA's counterterrorism activities in the tribal lands and figure out what the CIA knows about the nuclear program.

Bumping up against the ISI is a way of life for the CIA in Pakistan, the agency's command center for recruiting spies in the country's lawless tribal regions. Officers there also coordinate Predator drone airstrikes, the CIA's most successful and lethal counterterrorism program. The armed, unmanned planes take off from a base inside Pakistani Baluchistan known as "Rhine."

"Pakistan would be exceptionally uncomfortable and even hostile to American efforts to muck about in their home turf," said Graham Fuller, an expert on Islamic fundamentalism who spent 25 years with the CIA, including a stint as Kabul station chief.

That means incidents such as the one involving nuclear fuel rods must be resolved delicately and privately.

"It's a crucial relationship," CIA spokesman George Little said. "We work closely with our Pakistani partners in fighting the common threat of terrorism. They've been vital to the victories achieved against al-Qaida and its violent allies. And they've lost many people in the battle against extremism. No one should forget that."

Details about the CIA's relationship with Pakistan were recounted by nearly a dozen former and current U.S. and Pakistani intelligence officials, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter.

An ISI official denied that the agency runs double agents to collect information about the CIA's activities. He said the two agencies have a good working relationship and such allegations were meant to create friction between them.

But the CIA became so concerned by a rash of cases involving suspected double agents in 2009, it re-examined the spies it had on the payroll in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region. The internal investigation revealed about a dozen double agents, stretching back several years. Most of them were being run by Pakistan. Other cases were deemed suspicious. The CIA determined the efforts were part of an official offensive counterintelligence program being run by Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, the ISI's spy chief.

Pakistan's willingness to run double agents against the U.S. is particularly troubling to some in the CIA because of the country's ties to longtime Osama bin Laden ally Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and to the Haqqani network, a Pakistan-based Taliban faction also linked to al-Qaida.

In addition to its concerns about Pakistan's nuclear program, the CIA continues to press the Pakistanis to step up their military efforts in North Waziristan, the tribal region where Hekmatyar and Haqqani are based.

CIA Director Leon Panetta talked with Pasha about ISI's relationship with militants last year, reiterating the same talking points his predecessor, Gen. Michael Hayden, had delivered. Panetta told Pasha he had needed to take on militant groups, including those such as Hekmatyar and Haqqani, a former U.S. intelligence official said.

But the U.S. can only demand so much from an intelligence service it can't live without.

Recruiting agents to track down and kill terrorists and militants is a top priority for the CIA, and one of the clandestine service's greatest challenges. The drones can't hit their targets without help finding them. Such efforts would be impossible without Pakistan's blessing, and the U.S. pays about $3 billion a year in military and economic aid to keep the country stable and cooperative.

"We need the ISI and they definitely know it," said C. Christine Fair, an assistant professor at Georgetown University's Center for Peace and Security Studies. "They are really helping us in several critical areas and directly undermining us in others."

Pakistan has its own worries about the Americans. During the first term of the Bush administration, Pakistan became enraged after it shared intelligence with the U.S., only to learn the CIA station chief passed that information to the British.

The incident caused a serious row, one that threatened the CIA's relationship with the ISI and deepened the levels of distrust between the two sides. Pakistan almost threw the CIA station chief out of the country.

A British security official said the incident was "a matter between Pakistan and America."

The spate of Pakistani double agents has raised alarm bells in some corners of the agency, while others merely say it's the cost of doing business in Pakistan. They say double agents are as old as humanity and point to the old spy adage: "There are friendly nations but no friendly intelligence services."

"The use of double agents is something skilled intelligence services and the better terrorist groups like al-Qaida, Hezbollah, provisional Irish Republican Army and the Tamil Tigers have regularly done. It's not something that should be a surprise," said Daniel Byman, a foreign policy expert at the Saban Center at Brookings Institution.

Nowhere is the tension greater than in the tribal areas, the lawless regions that have become the front line in what Panetta described Sunday as "the most aggressive operations in the history of the CIA."

The area has become what's known in spy parlance as a wilderness of mirrors, where nothing is what it appears. The CIA recruits people to spy on al-Qaida and militant groups. So does the ISI. Often, they recruit the same people. That means the CIA must constantly consider where a spy's allegiance lies: With the U.S.? With Pakistan? With the enemy?

Pakistan rarely -- if at all -- has used its double agents to feed the CIA bad information, the former U.S. officials said. Rather, the agents were just gathering intelligence on American operations, seeing how the CIA responded and how information flowed.

Former CIA officials say youth and inexperience among a new generation of American officers may have contributed to the difficulties of operating in the tribal regions, where the U.S. is spending a massive amount of money to cultivate sources.

After the 2001 terrorist attacks, the CIA dispatched many young officers to Pakistan and Afghanistan to recruit al-Qaida spies. Young officers sometimes unwittingly recruited people who had been on Pakistan's payroll for years, all but inviting Pakistan to use their longtime spies as double agents, former CIA officials said.

The Pakistanis "are steeped in that area," Fuller said "They would be tripping over a lot of the same people."

Many former CIA officials believe a lack of experience among agency officers led to the bombing in Khost, Afghanistan, last year that killed seven CIA employees. The CIA thought it had a source who could provide information about al-Qaida's No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, who was believed to be hiding in the tribal lands. But the person turned out to be a double agent wired with explosives.

Ironically, the CIA steered the source to Khost because officers were concerned ISI would spot him if they brought him to Islamabad for questioning or possibly even arrest him because he was an undocumented Arab.

But inexperience isn't always the problem.

One example of how the suspicious relationship constrains operations was the CIA's base in the remote town of Miram Shah in North Waziristan. U.S. military and CIA officers worked with the ISI together there, under the protection of the Pakistani army, which kept the base locked down.

The two intelligence agencies sometimes conducted joint operations against al-Qaida but rarely shared information, a former CIA officer said. Haqqani spies were well aware the CIA was working there, and the base frequently took mortar and rocket fire.

Two former CIA officers familiar with the base said the Americans there mainly exercised and "twiddled their thumbs." Just getting out of the base was so difficult, U.S. personnel gave it the nickname "Shawshank" after the prison in the movie "The Shawshank Redemption."

The CIA closed the base last year for safety reasons. None of that tension ever spilled into the public eye. It's the nature of intelligence-gathering.

© Copyright 2010 Associated Press. All rights reserved.

[buglerbilly]

Copy of the Petraeus letter...........courtesy of Michael Yon's blog............

[buglerbilly]

General Discusses Afghan Army’s Development



07:09 GMT, July 6, 2010 WASHINGTON | Afghanistan’s army, with help from the NATO training mission there, is working to increase its growth, develop leaders and increase retention to make a stronger force.

“What we do is generate and sustain and develop leaders for the Afghan National Army,” said Army Brig. Gen. Gary S. Patton, deputy commander for army training for NATO Training Mission Afghanistan and Combined Security Transition Command Afghanistan, during a "DoD Live" bloggers roundtable July 2.

The Afghan army has grown in quality and quantity, with significant progress in the past few months, Patton said. From May to June, the Afghan army grew by more than 4,000 soldiers to a current total force of 129,885 soldiers. These numbers put the effort at 6,000 soldiers above the goal for that time frame and ahead of schedule for growing the Afghan army, the general said.

Patton said the Afghan army’s deficit of 12,000 noncommissioned officers stems from the fact that infantry numbers can be increased faster than it takes to make new leaders.

“Leaders take time and take experience,” he said.

To solve this problem, the Afghan army sends 150 of the best soldiers from each infantry class to a four-week course after basic training. A progressive, 12-week direct-entry E-6 course assists with narrowing NCO gaps as well, Patton said.

Some 3,300 Afghan soldiers are enrolled in both courses and will become NCOs after graduation, the general explained, and the cycle of soldiers going to training will repeat as each group graduates.

With the combination of the training and battlefield promotion, he estimated that by the fall of 2011 the army will be on task with the number of NCOs.

The Afghan army also is working to develop and create more leaders who can go out and teach within the forces. The NATO training mission’s “train the trainer” program recently turned out 113 graduates who can go out into the Afghan army and train other soldiers how to drive army vehicles.

Attrition and retention have been issues for the Afghan army. Recruiting goes down and the attrition rises in the summer, he explained, because Afghanistan is an agricultural society. But because the attrition level has been near the goals of 1.3 percent, Patton said, this summer should be fine.

“We have been banking extra recruits over some very successful months,” he said. “As long as we keep the training seats filled, we we'll be OK."

Patton also stressed that the army is making significant headway with increasing the literacy rate of Afghan soldiers. “It’s paramount that we have literacy in the training,” he said.

Only 14 percent of Afghan recruits are literate, and Patton said he has received commitments from his Afghan counterparts to add literacy to army training.

“Having a literacy program embedded within our basic training and NCO training is really critical in developing soldiers and leaders that can advance in their specialty,” he said.

Patton said his overall focus is on leader development and creating a great momentum in the growth of an army that continues to grow in capability.

“If we stay on target,” he said, “we feel all of our objectives are achievable."

----
Christen N. McCluney
Emerging Media, Defense Media Activity

[buglerbilly]

Elite Afghan Police Set Up in Kandahar

July 06, 2010

Associated Press



KANDAHAR, Afghanistan - There's a new cop in this Taliban stronghold where criminals, insurgents and powerbrokers wield more influence than the Afghan government.

Nearly 600 members of Afghanistan's most elite police unit have arrived in Kandahar to help staff new checkpoints - one of the first visible signs of NATO's slow-moving campaign with Afghan forces to ramp up security in the nation's largest city in the south.

The Afghan National Civil Order Police, partnered with international forces, are manning 11 new checkpoints around the clock. By August, their numbers will more than double as the so-called ANCOPs form a security perimeter around the city.

At the same time, thousands of NATO and Afghan troops are streaming into Kandahar province to pressure insurgents operating in more rural areas. The strategy is to secure the population with the additional trained police and troops so that capable governance and development projects designed to build capacity can win the loyalty of the city's half-million residents.

With the temporary, well-trained ANCOP in place, 500 members of Kandahar's current police force are being deployed for six weeks of training designed to create a more professional, less corrupt police force.

"If we train the police on how they should behave and communicate with the local people, they can help them rather then make problems for them. I hope this training will solve the problem we have with the local people," said Kandahar provincial police chief Sardar Mohammad Zazai.

Nationwide, complaints against the police include shaking down travelers for money at checkpoints, skimming fuel, pilfering supplies and demanding bribes, according to a report released last month by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.

Kandahar resident Imran Khan, who works for the local finance department, said the police are overworked because of ongoing violence.

"Hopefully, they are going to come back better after their training - that the corruption can be controlled," he said.

Nisar Khan, a college student in the city, said the public believes the local police force is rife with corruption.

"The people of Kandahar are hopeful that after they get the training, they will know how to treat the people, how to search and it will reduce the amount of corruption," he said.

The security campaign has been moving slower than expected because of the Taliban's deep roots in the area, rising crime, corruption and a public that doubts the Afghan government officials can provide needed services or protect them if they turn against the insurgents.

The Taliban have shown they won't be easily routed from their spiritual birthplace. Proving their resilience, the insurgents have been carrying out attacks on people allied with the government and coalition forces.

Gunmen assassinated the deputy mayor of Kandahar in April as he knelt for evening prayers in a mosque. In June, a car bomb killed the chief of Arghandab district of Kandahar province. Days before, a suicide bomber killed more than 50 people at a wedding party in the same district. In April, three bombings - one targeting a local police official - shook the city.

While such attacks prove the resilience of the Taliban, the poor-performing police force is an equally entrenched problem.

"There are two enemies we're fighting in Kandahar - the Taliban and corruption and poor governance," U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham said Monday in Kabul after visiting Kandahar earlier in the day. "As we neutralize the Taliban, we have to replace their control with good governance, honest government, police that are not corrupt, a legal system that works. The people in Kandahar that we met said the Taliban are 30 percent of the problem and poor governance is 70 percent of the problem."

On a visit to the sprawling city a few weeks ago, Afghan President Hamid Karzai acknowledged corruption as spoke to several hundred leaders from the province in a steamy hall. He recounted a story of an Afghan National Police officer in Kandahar who used profanity and insulted a local religious cleric.

"If we have such people in the police ranks we will not be able to bring security," Karzai said. "If a police officer does not respect a cleric in his house, how will it be possible for the police to respect people in the society? We don't need such police."

The newly trained ANCOP is not only tasked with providing better security in the city, but it's hoped that their professionalism will help change the perception of the Afghan National Police in the eyes of a skeptical public.

"We want the population to see their ANCOP out serving them, providing stability so that people can go out to the bazaar, to school and Kandahar can have a bustling economy that it should have," said Brig. Gen. Anne Macdonald, assistant to NATO's commanding general for police development in Afghanistan. "Right now, the police in Kandahar, unfortunately, have a reputation of being corrupt - certainly not all, but some. I expect to see this reversed as training takes effect and more police deploy over the summer."

As police enter training, biometrics information is obtained and they are drug-tested, Macdonald said. During one training program intake late last month, 60 policemen who had been working in Kandahar tested positive for hashish and nine tested positive for harder drugs, she said.

"If they test positive for opiates, methphetamines or other hard drugs, they will be immediately let go," she said. Evidence of marijuana use will be recorded, but offenders will be retested later to make sure they are not still using the drug, she said.

Residents this week got their first look at the newly trained ANCOP like Mohammad Toryalai, who was patting down the driver of a car and inspecting what turned out to be empty plastic jugs in the trunk.

"We are having our guards search every vehicle," Toryalai said at the checkpoint he was working on the northwest side of the city.

At a different checkpoint, another ANCOP, Mohammad Jawaid, patted down a man still astride his motorbike and inspected a three-wheeled rickshaw, decorated with colorful Pakistani artwork.

"We are trying to do our part," Jawaid said. "And I hope more policemen like us come out to help us bring peace in our country."

© Copyright 2010 Associated Press. All rights reserved.

[buglerbilly]

Ares

A Defense Technology Blog

Restrepo: A Look at the War in Afghanistan

Posted by Paul McLeary at 7/6/2010 1:00 PM CDT



During the 90 minutes it took for an invited audience to sit though a screening of Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington’s new documentary about the war in Afghanistan last Monday night, the Department of Defense announced the deaths of six more American Soldiers and Marines. But just as the vast majority of Americans will never see the names of the six service members killed, nor will they ever likely see or even hear of this arresting film that chronicles the sometimes desperate combat experiences of a small group of young Americans.

Restrepo, the much-lauded documentary that chronicles the 12 months that Battle Company of the U.S. Army’s 173rd Airborne Brigade spent in Afghanistan’s remote Korengal Valley is in all respects a jarring movie, and to their credit the filmmakers avoid the temptation to rely on easy sensationalism or jingoism to try and sell it. But for all of the great press that the movie has been receiving, some claims about its singularity might be a little overstated. The excellent 2006 documentary, The War Tapes, which used footage shot by National Guard soldiers in Iraq covers much the same ground--albeit in a much different war, under much different circumstances. (The two films actually serve as pretty good markers for their respective conflicts -- Restrepo is a fight based around a fixed mountaintop fortification that sees almost daily violence, while the War Tapes follows a unit that provides convoy support across the flat expanse of IED-leaden desert roads.)

Not surprisingly, most reviews of Restrepo have focused on the movie’s steady stream of violence, since in the end that is what puts butts in the seats--but some of the most cringe-inducing scenes have nothing to do with combat. Instead, the film shows the difficulties inherent in asking Army officers and enlisted men to do two jobs at once: fight a war against an elusive and dedicated enemy, while at the same time acting as community outreach coordinators and economic advisors to groups of skeptical, impoverished Korengali villagers. In one scene, an American Sergeant excitedly tells the camera that a small group of Afghan elders has come to the embattled mountaintop combat outpost to talk, something that hasn’t happened before. It turns out that the elders have come to complain that the Americans have killed one of their cows, and they want compensation. The Sgt. radios his commander, who says he won’t pay, but will give the men sacks of rice and beans that equal the weight of their cow. The villagers don’t seem to be happy with this arrangement, but neither does the Sgt., who knows that he has just insulted men who he is trying to make his allies.

Other telling moments come when U.S. Army Captain Dan Kearney tries to win over skeptical locals by telling them that a road being built through the valley (which is the reason the Americans are there in the first place) will make them rich. It is obvious that they neither believe him nor are much interested in the road project. What they want to talk about are not promises from a foreigner who will be gone in a few months, but why some of their neighbors have been arrested. Kearney tells them that he has good intelligence linking the men to crimes, but the villagers remain unconvinced. In the end, neither side is willing to fully trust the other, and given the constant attacks on the American outpost, the refusal of the locals to provide intel on who is doing the shooting, and the complete absence of any representative of the Afghan government, little progress is ever made in the relationship.

Restrepo is what population-centric counterinsurgency looks like once it leaves the world of Powerpoint and the think tank seminar and enters the world of combat. It’s ambiguous, it’s unfair, it’s confusing, and people still end up dead. It’s the modern American way of war.

[buglerbilly]

Civilian Casualties Create New Enemies, Study Confirms

By Spencer Ackerman July 6, 2010 | 3:37 pm



Yes, we needed economists to tell us this. A new working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research finds “strong evidence for a revenge effect” when examining the relationship between civilian casualties caused by the U.S.-led military coalition in Afghanistan and radicalization after such incidents occur. The paper even estimates of how many insurgent attacks to expect after each civilian death. Those findings, however intuitive, might resolve an internal military debate about the counter-productivity of civilian casualties — and possibly fuel calls for withdrawal.

“When ISAF units kill civilians,” the research team finds, referring to the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan, “this increases the number of willing combatants, leading to an increase in insurgent attacks.” According to their model, every innocent civilian killed by ISAF predicts an “additional 0.03 attacks per 1,000 population in the next 6-week period.” In a district of 83,000 people, then, the average of two civilian casualties killed in ISAF-initiated military action leads to six additional insurgent attacks in the following six weeks.

The team doesn’t examine the effect of CIA drone strikes in neighboring Pakistan, the subject of fierce debate concerning both the level of civilian deaths the strikes generate and their radicalizing effect.

A team of four economists — Stanford’s Luke N. Condra and Joseph H. Felter, the London School of Economics’ Radha K. Iyengar, and Princeton’s Jacob N. Shapiro — used the International Security Assistance Force’s own civilian-casualty data to reach their conclusions, breaking it down by district to examine further violence in the area in which civilians died. They examined the effect of over 4000 civilian deaths from January 2009 to March 2010 by looking at the sometimes-lagging indications of reprisal attacks in the same areas. To be clear, the team’s research is inferential, creating a statistical model to examine spikes in violence following civilian-casualty incidents, rather than interviewing insurgents as to their specific motivations.

But in their study, the researchers found that there’s a greater spike in violence after ISAF-caused civilian deaths than after insurgent-caused ones. “An incident which results in 10 civilian casualties will generate about 1 additional IED attack in the following 2 months,” the researchers write. “The effect for insurgents is much weaker and not jointly significant.”

In other words, even if the insurgents possess a “total disregard for human life and the Afghan people,” as an ISAF press release reacting to this weekend’s insurgent bombings in Herat put it, Afghans effectively would rather be killed by other Afghans than foreigners.

That’s not all. The researchers found that ISAF-caused civilian casualties corollate with long-term radicalization in Afghanistan. Plotting reprisal incidents of violence in areas where civilians died at coalition hands, the data showed that “that the Coalition effect is enduring, peaking 16 weeks after the event. This confirms the intuition that civilian casualties by ISAF forces predict greater violence through a long-run effect.” That’s consistent with intuitions that civilian casualties “are affecting future violence through increased recruitment into insurgent groups,” although they find no direct evidence for such a thing. Interestingly, the researchers found the opposite to be the case in Iraq: U.S.-caused civilian casualties are more likely to cause short-term retaliatory spikes than they are violence over the long term. (Yet.)

Repeated efforts to get in touch with the four researchers by email and phone were unsuccessful by publication time.

The relationship between civilian casualties and the creation of new enemies is no mere academic debate. As the paper notes, there can be “strategic military returns” for U.S. troops who incur greater risk to themselves in order to prevent civilian casualties if that stops Afghans from taking up arms against the U.S. in revenge. Some troops in Afghanistan bridled against General Stanley McChrystal’s rules of engagement, considering them too restrictive against a violent insurgency. General David Petraeus’ letter to his troops on Sunday indicates that he’s trying to strike a balance between protecting the Afghan people and allowing troops to finish the battles they fight.

Additionally, some in the military consider a preoccupation with civilian casualties to be a media-driven phenomenon. Last December, the Air Force’s intel chief, Lieutenant General David Deptula, told Danger Room’s Noah Shachtman that “there appears to be an almost complete lack of indication to support the conventional wisdom, popularized in the media, that air attacks have been provoking deep hostility toward the U.S. and the Kabul government.” Deptula was talking specifically about the air war, and the researchers found that only about six percent of civilian casualties caused by ISAF come through air strikes. (Of course, that’s after McChrystal and his predecessor, General David McKiernan, scaled back ISAF’s use of air strikes.) But after the study, Deptula might want to reconsider his contention that “there is little reason based on the admittedly limited data available in open source to expect that drastically reducing the civilian casualty issue would produce game changing results on the political battlefield.”

The most recent United Nations quarterly study of political and security affairs in Afghanistan found that civilian casualties caused by the U.S. and its allies dropped from 33 percent to 30 percent of total civilian casualties, a dip the U.N. attributed to measures resulting from “a reiteration of the July 2009 tactical directive by the Commander of the International Security Assistance Force limiting the use of force.” But the researchers suggest that Afghans aren’t going say, “Those Americans are OK! They only cause one out of three dead innocent Afghans!” — especially if, as the U.N. also found, civilian casualties in the escalated war are on the rise overall.

After all, if the goal is just to stop U.S.-caused civilian casualties, then the policy implications are clear: stop the war. If it’s to erode the influence of al-Qaeda’s allies in Afghanistan while reducing civilian casualties to the “absolute minimum” Petraeus describes in his letter, then getting the balance between fighting insurgents and protecting civilians wrong risks making the Afghanistan war counterproductive for its stated purpose.

And while some recent academic research suggests that across the border in Pakistan, the CIA’s drone strikes may not kill as many civilians as commonly believed — a very difficult thing to verify in any case — it’s not as if the U.S. has much margin for error. At his sentencing last month, Faisal Shahzad testified that his failed attempt to detonate an SUV filled with explosives came as revenge for what he considered an avaricious U.S. foreign policy. “I am part of the answer to the U.S. terrorizing the Muslim nations and the Muslim people, and on behalf of that, I’m avenging the attacks,” said Shahzad, a Pakistani-born U.S. citizen, “because only — like living in U.S., the Americans only care about their people, but they don’t care about the people elsewhere in the world when they die.”

Michael Leiter, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, conceded the point made by the four researchers this weekend. He wouldn’t argue, he said, “that some of our actions have not led to some people being radicalized,” Leiter told an Aspen Institute security forum. “It doesn’t mean you don’t do it. It means you craft a fuller strategy to explain why you’re doing it.” Good luck with that. If the U.S. is killing innocent civilians — however accidentally, and however in pursuit of dangerous fanatics — what story can Washington tell to reassure the relatives of the innocent dead?

Credit: ISAF

Read More http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/07/civilian-casualties-create-new-enemies-study-confirms/#more-27008#ixzz0sxZPh317

[buglerbilly]

East Afghanistan Sees Taliban as ‘Morally Superior’ to Karzai

By Spencer Ackerman July 6, 2010 | 9:43 am



The looming security operations — er, “rising tide” — in southern Afghanistan are getting all the attention. But the American-led coalition may be in serious trouble in eastern Afghanistan as well. According to a just-departed U.S. commander in charge of a big chunk of the area, locals in four critical provinces believe that the Taliban have greater religious legitimacy and a stronger commitment to justice than Hamid Karzai’s government. Coalition forces who aid that government are seen as “naive at best,” and “‘co-conspirators’ at worst.”

Last month, Army Colonel Randy George completed a year-long tour leading the nearly 5800 soldiers of Task Force Mountain Warrior in some of Afghanistan’s most violent and vexing areas: Nangarhar, Nuristan, Kunar, and Laghman provinces, a mountainous part of the country home to about 3.7 million people, 33 tribes and sub-tribes, and over 300 kilometers’ worth of porous border with tribal Pakistan. After a yearlong effort to learn how the locals perceived the obstacles to their future, George prepared some briefing slides attempting to distill popular local sentiments. (He did not make any broader judgment about any other areas of Afghanistan.) Danger Room was recently able to review some of those slides and take notes on their contents, although we weren’t permitted to take them or reproduce them.

George titled of those slides “How Locals Ranked The Enemies To Progress.” Through the locals’ eyes, the slide reported four big challenges. Al-Qaeda and the Taliban rank dead last. A “Corrupt and Ineffective Government” is number one.

Now recall that it’s General David Petraeus’ first week of work in command of the Afghanistan war. He’s got no shortage of challenges: convincing the Afghan people that the NATO coalition acts in its best interest; rolling back insurgent gains; working with an Afghan government of dubious competence and integrity; and doing it all before 30,000 surge troops (allegedly) start coming home in July 2011. Perhaps nowhere in Afghanistan do all these challenges combine and metastasize as ominously as in the area George recently departed.

There’s disaffection for the central government in the area known as “N2KL” (for Nangarhar, Nuristan, Kunar, and Laghman provinces). There’s outrage over government officials who charge bribes for the provision of government services. And there’s resentment over “illegitimate” or “non-existent” rule of law. The government is seen as “Un-Islamic and People Don’t Want to Connect,” George’s slide notes.

The second and third problems roiling are the dual challenges of “Criminal Networks and Graft” and the government’s “Lack of Inclusion of Respected Leaders at the Local Level.” The area has natural resources — like timber with high-grade cedar — that could serve as economic drivers. But as the Wall Street Journal has documented, in 2006 the Karzai government instituted a ban on logging as a questionable save-the-forests maneuver. Unsurprisingly, logging didn’t stop. It just went underground and became illicit, benefiting the insurgency and reinforcing what George’s slide called a “take what you can get when you can get it” mentality that the locals resent. (Petraeus alluded to the problematic nature of the government’s attitude to logging in a congressional hearing in mid-June, before President Obama tapped him to run the Afghanistan war.)

If the government included or listened to local potentates respected by the community, maybe it wouldn’t press forward with alienating measures like the logging ban. But instead, the slide reads, it “injects unfair and unacceptable personalities into local politics,” and its district sub-governors and the central government “do not reach out to connect” to the population.

As a result, those big mistakes by the Afghan government lead the locals of N2KL to rank the “Taliban/al-Qaeda/Militant-Insurgent ‘Syndicate’” fourth out of four on George’s list of how they perceive their problems. Locals consider the insurgents “morally superior” to the Karzai government. The insurgents provide the population something the government doesn’t, or at least doesn’t provide sufficiently: “culturally appropriate access to justice, resources and Islamic identity,” in George’s assessment.

Nor is the U.S. or its allies off the hook for the government’s errors. As befitting allies of a resented and aloof government, another slide of George’s reports that “Coalition Forces Seen As Naive at Best and ‘Co-Conspirators’ At Worst.”

None of that led George to throw up his hands and consider his mission hopeless. It led him to do what he could to get Afghan government officials to the area and address the locals’ legitimate grievances. He responded to the powerful Shinwari tribe’s offer of an alliance of convenience against the Taliban — until the governor of Nangarhar province, Gul Agha Shirzai, nixed the experiment and the U.S. embassy in Kabul balked at the military playing tribal politics. He expanded radio broadcasting in the area to get the coalition’s message out. He used cash at his disposal to help local government officials execute their budgets in an attempt at economic stimulus. And he got local officials to hold public trials for official corruption and violent crimes.

Members of George’s Task Force said George would tell the locals, “I know there are officials are corrupt and predatory officials, and we need your help to fix the problem.”

Whether the problem gets fixed, though, remains to be seen. Since General Stanley McChrystal arrived in Afghanistan in June 2009, U.S. military efforts have shifted toward the Taliban’s southern heartland and away from the eastern border areas. George was tasked with closing bases in remote and hard-to-defend locations away from populous parts of his battlespace, including, in April, withdrawing from the violent Korengal Valley in Kunar.

It may have been the right move: senior officers assessed that the U.S. presence did more to inflame the locals than contribute to the fight against the insurgency. And George does not dispute the wisdom of the redeployment. But with Petraeus having about a year to reverse the Taliban’s momentum before broader withdrawals begin, it’s an open question whether the remaining U.S. forces in eastern Afghanistan will be able to compel a distrusted national government to meaningfully connect with a deeply distrustful population in the area George labored to secure.

Credit: U.S. Army

Read More http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/07/in-afghanistans-east-taliban-seen-as-morally-superior-to-karzai/#more-26967#ixzz0sxZydRP1

[buglerbilly]

'Get in The Game,' Biden Tells Afghan Leaders

By ANDREW GULLY, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE

Published: 6 Jul 2010 14:47

WASHINGTON - U.S. Vice President Joe Biden urged Afghan leaders to "get in the game" on July 5 as he issued a robust defense of America's under-fire war strategy.

Almost nine years after the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan, the conflict is at a critical juncture as President Barack Obama pours in tens of thousands more troops to try to break the back of a fierce Taliban insurgency.

Obama's decision to accompany the military surge with a July 2011 target date for beginning a U.S. withdrawal has been criticized as a wrong-headed invitation to the Taliban to stick it out and wait for them to leave.

But Biden suggested the president had chosen the correct strategy which rightly puts the onus on Afghan President Hamid Karzai to step up to the plate, root out corruption and train up his own national police and army.

"You have got to get in the game. We're not here forever. We cannot want the security of your country more than you want it," Biden urged Afghan leaders during a trip to Iraq timed to coincide with the Independence Day holiday.

His comments to MSNBC came the day after Gen. David Petraeus formally took over command of the Afghan war. His predecessor was sacked by Obama for a scathing interview in which Biden was mocked and referred to as "Bite Me!" Gen. Stanley McChrystal's remarks about the vice president and other senior members of Obama's administration were seen as sowing division between the war's civilian and military leadership.

But Biden insisted on July 6 that Obama and his generals were united, saying: "The president's strategy is General Petraeus's strategy, the defense department's strategy, and a unified strategy."

Perhaps seeking to underline the unity between the war's civilian and military leadership, Obama held a conference call on July 6 with Petraeus and the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry, who originally opposed the surge strategy according to leaked cables earlier this year.

Obama "congratulated General Petraeus on the change in command, underscored that his thoughts are with them and their teams on this holiday weekend, expressed his appreciation for their sacrifice, and reiterated the importance of our vital mission in Afghanistan," a White House statement said.

Last December, Obama announced he was sending an extra 30,000 soldiers to Afghanistan in an effort to regain the upper hand against a resurgent Taliban, and said he would begin withdrawing from the country in mid-2011.

Despite assurances from Obama - reiterated July 4 by Petraeus - that the change of command does not mean a change in strategy, the general has already hinted some tweaks could be in the air.

Troops have complained that McChrystal's "courageous restraint" rule, aimed at minimizing civilian casualties, prevents them from properly defending themselves - thus contributing to the spike in casualties.

A total of 102 foreign soldiers died in June, almost triple the May toll and far outstripping the previous highest monthly figure of 77 in August.

As casualties mount, opinion polls show the war is becoming more unpopular at home and criticism from Obama's political opponents is intensifying.

Leading Republican senator and Vietnam War hero John McCain slammed the July 2011 target for beginning to pull US troops out of Afghanistan in an interview from Kabul on July 4 with ABC News.

"I know enough about warfare," said McCain, who was a prisoner-of-war for five-and-a-half years. "If you tell the enemy that you're leaving on a date certain, unequivocally, then that enemy will wait until you leave."

[buglerbilly]

DATE:06/07/10

SOURCE:Flight International

Dutch Afghan withdrawal marks end of contracted surveillance operation

By Craig Hoyle

The Netherlands' military withdrawal from Afghanistan later this month will bring to an end an innovative service provision where the nation has obtained surveillance data from a contractor-operated fleet of tactical unmanned air vehicles.

Dubbed Project "Lintel", the managed service has been provided from Tarin Kowt since June 2009 by Qinetiq and Aeronautics Defense Systems, which provides Aerostar UAVs. Around 10 industry personnel are deployed at the forward operating base, working alongside the Dutch military.

"We can do two sets of targets with two air vehicles within 24h," says David Tilly, Qinetiq's business group manager for unmanned systems managed services.

Flights in support of the Dutch armed forces have so far totalled almost 2,000h, he adds, with typical mission endurance being around 6-8h.

Industry personnel receive a mission tasking 24h in advance of a sortie, but Tilly notes: "We'll launch whenever we're needed to look at troops in contact." Four Aerostar vehicles are available across variants: baseline and extended endurance for use in hot and high environmental conditions, both carrying a Controp electro-optical/infrared camera; and equipped with an array of communications intelligence equipment.

"We get the aircraft and the sensor in the position that the Dutch intelligence centre wants," says. "They are buying data - we're buying everything else." The service will come to an end on 31 July, and the Aeronautics/Qinetiq team is seeking another operator in Afghanistan to use the Project Lintel equipment, either as a capability enhancement or gap-filling service.

"We are seeing a change in attitude towards a contractor service," Tilly says.

The companies are also eyeing a potential border surveillance requirement from within the UN.

[buglerbilly]

Afghanistan: British troops to hand over northern Helmand to US Marines

British troops will hand over some of the most dangerous and heavily contested parts of Afghanistan to US forces, ministers will announce on Wednesday.

By James Kirkup, Political Correspondent, UK Daily Telegraph

Published: 7:50PM BST 06 Jul 2010


Britain has around 8,000 troops in Helmand Photo: AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Liam Fox, the Defence Secretary, will tell MPs that British troops in Helmand province will hand over districts including Sangin, where scores of British troops have been killed.

The change will see British troops withdrawing from large parts of northern Helmand and concentrate on the central area of the province.

By some estimates, around a third of the British fatalities in Helmand have come in Sangin, described by some soldiers as the most dangerous place in Afghanistan.

The Ministry of Defence on Tuesday announced that a soldier from 1st Battalion, The Mercian Regiment, died in hospital after being caught in a bomb explosion on Sunday. A total of 312 British personnel have died in Afghanistan since 2001.

Any suggestion that Britain is giving up areas where so many British lives have been lost driving out the Taliban will prove controversial.

But with the US Marines now outnumbering British forces so heavily, military analysts said it was inevitable that the Americans would take more responsibility in Helmand.

Ministers and commanders are worried that the changes will be seen as a retreat or a humiliation for British forces.

Dr Fox will insist that the changes are simply a sensible redistribution of manpower to reflect the differing sizes of the British and American contingents.

Plans for US Marines to replace British personnel have been under discussion since the start of the year when an American “surge” began, sharply increasing US numbers in Helmand.

Britain has around 8,000 troops in Helmand, while the US Marine Corps now has nearly 20,000

Nato commanders have been reviewing their counter-insurgency mission in recent months. On a visit to London last month, Robert Gates, the US Defence Secretary, said: “The view of the British military is they probably don't have enough manpower to do that their areas of Helmand.”

Today’s announcement follows a change in the Afghan command structure that puts all troops in Helmand under the command of a US Marine Corps general.

A Ministry of Defence spokesman said: “UK Forces continue to make real progress across Helmand including in Sangin, one of the most contested and challenging areas in southern Afghanistan.

“ISAF is responsible for ensuring the most effective allocation of international forces to deliver the campaign strategy in Afghanistan and the UK fully supports ISAF commanders in this aim.”

[buglerbilly]

'Courageous restraint' putting troops lives at risk

Restrictive rules on firing upon the Taliban are putting soldiers' lives in danger, troops serving on the front line in Afghanistan have said.

Thomas Harding, Defence Correspondent, in Sangin, UK Daily Telegraph

Published: 10:00PM BST 06 Jul 2010


A British Royal Engineers Officer waits during the Operation to secure the village of Musakala in Helmand Province, Afghanistan Photo: MOD

Soldiers in Helmand claim that the policy of "courageous restraint" is forcing them to fight with "one hand tied behind our backs".

The doctrine was introduced by Gen Stanley McChrystal, the former American commander, to reduce the number of civilian casualties, which are mainly caused by aircraft bombs or artillery missiles.

However, with their own casualties mounting, troops say there is an urgent need for a change and for more flexibility in using lethal force to defend themselves.

Gen David Petraeus, who has taken over from Mr McChrystal after he was sacked last month by Barack Obama for insubordination, is said to be reviewing the policy as a result of the increase in casualties. June was the bloodiest month since fighting began in 2001.

A senior Non-Commissioned Officer, on his third tour of Afghanistan, said the rules of engagement had "gone too far one way" in favour of the insurgents.

"Our hands are tied the way we are asked to do courageous restraint. I agree with it to the extent that previously too many civilians were killed but we have got people shooting us and we are not allowed to shoot back.

outrageous restraint is a lot easier to say than to implement."

In guidance issued last August Mr McChrystal stated that "destroying a home or property jeopardises the livelihood of an entire family – and creates more insurgents" and that "large scale operations to kill or capture militants carry a significant risk of causing civilian casualties and collateral damage".

A 21-year-old Royal Marine said the policy was making troops "think twice before pulling the trigger" which "endangers them." "A couple of times I've hesitated in shooting someone when I should have done. Some lads have put themselves in danger by allowing a possible suicide bomber too close."

In one incident an insurgent fired single shots at a base for 15 minutes but was not taken out by a missile as after every shot he put down his rifle knowing he could not be hit if he was unarmed.

A junior officer commanding a small fort in Sangin said: "It's a major bugbear for the British Army, it affects us massively. Thank God we have the ANA (Afghan National Army) here because they have different rules of engagement to us and can smash the enemy." The policy has eroded confidence in opening fire to the point that officers have to remind the men that they are entitled to shoot.

"If you can PID (positively identify) an insurgent acting with hostile intent then you are cleared to engage, there's no grey area here," a troop commander told his men before they started a patrol.

Some locals in Sangin have criticised the troops for "not taking out" the Taliban who intimidate and harm them.

"We have our hands tied behind our backs when we want to take the enemy out of the equation," said a Royal Marine corporal. "This was (Gen Stanley) McChrystal's idea but he's been sacked hasn't he."

However, there have been many occasions when exercising courageous restraint has saved civilian lives.

Lt Col Paul James, commanding officer of 40 Commando, Royal Marines, last month ruled out launching an air strike on 15 locals digging in an IED (improvised explosive device).

"I chose not to strike them because that would have been 15 fathers of 15 sons who would almost certainly have been driven into the insurgents' arms.

You could also not rule out who was foe or who was curious onlooker."

Major Ed Moorhouse, a Royal Marine company commander, said: "The men will question courageous restraint but it doesn't mean you don't shoot. If you see a terrorist you ruthlessly prosecute the opportunity to shoot him and I remind them of that daily."

[buglerbilly]

Al-Qaida Appoints New Afghan Commander

July 07, 2010

Long War Journal|by Bill Roggio

Al Qaeda has named an Egyptian as its new commander for operations in Afghanistan and in neighboring Pakistan after its former leader was killed in a US Predator strike in North Waziristan in May 2010.

The terror group has appointed Sheikh Fateh al Masri as its emir, or leader, for Qaidat al-Jihad fi Khorasan, or the base of the jihad in the Khorasan, according to a report in the Asia Times. Several US military and intelligence officials said the report of al Masri's ascension to lead al Qaeda in Afghanistan is accurate.

The Khorasan is a region that encompasses large areas of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Iran. The Khorasan is considered by jihadis to be the place where they will inflict the first defeat against their enemies in the Muslim version of Armageddon. The final battle is to take place in the Levant - Israel, Syria, and Lebanon.

Mentions of the Khorasan have begun to increase in al Qaeda's propaganda since 2007. After al Qaeda's defeat in Iraq, the group began shifting its rhetoric from promoting Iraq as the central front in their jihad and have placed the focus on the Khorasan.

Al Masri has replaced Mustafa Abu Yazid, al Qaeda's former leader in Afghanistan, who was killed in the May 21 Predator airstrike in Datta Khel in North Waziristan. Yazid, who, like al Masri, is an Egyptian, also served as al Qaeda's chief financier and paymaster. Al Qaeda has not named Yazid's replacement for its top financial official, nor is it likely to do so given the job's importance, intelligence officials said.

Yazid was considered an effective commander in Afghanistan as he was close to many Pakistani Taliban leaders. Yazid championed al Qaeda's program of embedding its fighters with Taliban units to serve as force multipliers. Al Qaeda fighters have imparted military tactics as well as expertise in building roadside bombs, the top killer of NATO troops in Afghanistan. Al Masri, having served with Taliban forces, is likely to continue this program as well as maintain good relations with the Taliban.

Little is publicly known of al Masri. According to the Asia Times, he was not a formal member of al Qaeda. Al Masri may have been a member of Al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya, or the Egyptian Islamic Group, an intelligence official told The Long War Journal. Egyptian Islamic Group is a rival to Ayman al Zawahiri's Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which merged with al Qaeda in June 2001. Egyptians hold or have held some of al Qaeda's top positions.

Al Masri has led military operations in Afghanistan as well as carried out attacks in Pakistan, which he still views as a vital theater in the war. "Militants believe that while Masri will focus on tweaking Afghan strategy, he realizes that the war there cannot be separated from Pakistan," the Asia Times reported.

Al Masri is said to have directed several terror attacks in Pakistan, including the May 28, 2010, terror assaults against two Ahmadi mosques in Lahore. More than 90 people were killed in the attacks against the religious sect of Islam that is despised by many Pakistanis and whose adherents are banned from calling themselves Muslims by the government.

Another attack that has been linked to al Masri is the June 9 assault on a NATO supply convoy destined for Afghanistan that was parked just outside of Islamabad, a senior US official told The Long War Journal. Scores of NATO supply trucks and armored vehicles were torched in the assault. While the attack was blamed on the so-called Punjabi Taliban, a group called al Qaeda in Punjab actually claimed the assault.

© Copyright 2010 Long War Journal. All rights reserved.

[buglerbilly]

NATO Airstrike Kills 5 Afghan Troops

July 07, 2010

Associated Press



KABUL, Afghanistan -- NATO mistakenly killed five of its Afghan army allies in an airstrike Wednesday while the Afghans were attacking insurgents in the country's east, officials said.

An Afghan defense official condemned the latest "friendly fire" deaths, which came at a time when international troops are trying to improve coordination with Afghan security forces in hopes of handing over more security to them nearly nine years into the war. Three American Soldiers were also reported killed Wednesday in a roadside bomb in the south.

The Afghan soldiers were launching an ambush before dawn against insurgents reportedly on the move in Ghazni province when NATO aircraft began firing on them without warning, Afghan Defense Ministry spokesman Gen. Mohammad Zahir Azimi said.

Five Afghan soldiers died and two more were wounded in the airstrike in Ghazni's Andar district, he said.

"This is not the first time such an incident has happened, but we wish that at least this would be the last one," Azimi said.

NATO spokesman Josef Blotz confirmed the botched airstrike. He said he regretted the Afghan National Army deaths, telling a news briefing that a joint investigation has been launched.

"The reason for this is perhaps a coordination issue," Blotz said. "We were obviously not absolutely clear whether there were Afghan national security forces in the area."

He extended the personal condolences of U.S. Gen. David Petraeus, the newly arrived commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, to the families of the victims.

The Afghan soldiers' deaths at the hands of their allies was another setback in the U.S.-led force's goal of training and coordinating with the Afghans, one of the cornerstones of its counterinsurgency strategy.

NATO is counting on the strategy to beat back the insurgents' recent gains, nearly nine years after U.S.-backed forces toppled the Taliban's hard-line Islamist regime. The aim is to win over the population by limiting Afghan casualties while securing new areas, eventually turning control over to local army and police and allowing foreign troops to withdraw.

Violence has been increasing across Afghanistan, coinciding with the arrival of thousands of American Soldiers for a new push to try to establish Afghan government control in the south, one of the Taliban's strongest areas of influence.

On Wednesday, NATO said three American troops were killed by a roadside bomb in the south Tuesday. It did not identify them or give any other details.

Last month was the deadliest for international forces since the war began, with 103 killed, including 60 Americans.

© Copyright 2010 Associated Press. All rights reserved.

[buglerbilly]

Afghan Deaths Highlight Lack of Tracking Tech

By Spencer Ackerman and Noah Shachtman July 7, 2010 | 11:39 am



Interesting when viewed against the AP news report above................

At about 4 a.m. Wednesday, NATO warplanes dropped precision-guided munitions on a band of Afghans who seemed like militants in the provincial district of Andor. Instead, the bombs hit a unit of Afghan soldiers. Now, at least five of the soldiers are dead. And if early indications are right, the tragedy was utterly preventable; all NATO had to do was give their Afghan allies a few pieces of simple gear.

An incident team is on the ground as of this writing to assess what actually happened. But a NATO spokesman, Josef Blotz, offered this preliminary explanation: “The reason for this is perhaps a coordination issue…. We were obviously not absolutely clear whether there were Afghan national security forces in the area.”

Technology has largely resolved these miscommunications among the United States and its NATO allies. All kinds of tools are now used to prevent so-called “friendly fire” incidents — from simple reflective tags to GPS beacons and digital maps. But NATO apparently doesn’t trust its Afghan allies with the tech. There’s “a very real issue with illiteracy” among Afghan soldiers, a NATO officer tells Danger Room, making it doubtful that they’d be able to manage or maintain “sensitive technical equipment.”

Of course, anyone with a cellphone these days has gear this complicated. (That’s how Google Maps knows where to steer you.) The idea is the same in the military: Give your unit a GPS device, and the Eyes in the Sky that talk to air support will know that the mysterious band of guys with guns beneath them creeping in formation toward a target is actually a friendly unit.

It’s called Blue Force Tracking (because blue forces = the good guys in military lingo), and it’s simple, straightforward, real-time geolocation. (Well, provided your network data speed is decent.) General David Petraeus praised it to the heavens to Danger Room’s Noah Shachtman a few years ago.

But the Afghan friendlies don’t currently show up on the grid. According to Lt. Col. Joseph T. Breasseale, another spokesman for NATO troops, that Afghan soldiers and police “are not issued ‘blue-force trackers’ or equipment of that nature, typically.” Despite this “terribly regrettable” incident, Breasseale continued, “we work tirelessly to coordinate and synchronize our operations.”

Maybe it’s time. Blue Force Trackers have been amped up recently as the Army has cottoned to their utility. Last month, Satellite Today reports, the service’s Communications Electronics Command released $6.1 million to the Maryland company Comtech Mobile Datacom in order to get Blue Force Tracker production and the satellite bandwidth to support it out to tactical units. That’s part of a $384 million contract for getting the next-gen Blue Force Tracker into the field, something company materials on its website pegged would happen by this spring.

Blue Force Tracker isn’t the only geolocation tool at the military’s disposal. A post-Desert Storm push to make sure aviators stop accidentally blowing up their soldier comrades below has resulted in all kinds of gear. LEDs powered by the 9-volt batteries anyone can buy off the shelf can power up an infrared beacon visible to pilots’ night vision. Indeed, al-Qaeda suspects that’s how CIA drones are tracking them. Don’t like that? Carry around a transponder the size of a bar of soap that acts as a digital dog tag when talking a plane’s radio system.

Sure, there are issues with giving Afghans access to geolocation tech. On top of the literacy issue, it could get expensive. But there are cheap, simple methods to prevent friendly fire. U.S. troops wear infrared-reflective patches on their uniforms as a quick way to identify themselves as “blue.” The Afghan National Army may not have the those patches. (And a single insignia may not have prevented Wednesday’s tragedy.) But, as the Washington Times‘ Eli Lake reported last year, some of them have ended up on the backs of Taliban fighters.

All of which is fair enough. But Comtech’s description of how Blue Force Tracker works makes it look like all you need to do is put a transponder in your truck and tune in the right signal, to say nothing of the lower-tech options for geolocation.

An Army Reserve captain just back from Afghanistan recently told NPR that the most important thing he did during the war was to abandon the condescending belief that his Afghan soldier counterparts couldn’t handle basic computers. Anyone who’s hung around an Afghan National Army unit has been interrupted by the trill of the multiple cellphones in troops’ pouches.

Blue Force Tracker booster Petraeus is now in command in Afghanistan, of course. A big part of his command mantra so far has been to pledge “unity of effort” — not just across the U.S. government and the NATO coalition, but with the Afghans, as well. “This is not the first time this has happened, but we hope this would be the last one,” a spokesman for the Afghan Ministry of Defense told the New York Times. Getting Afghan soldiers on the same grid that U.S. troops use might be an early test of Petraeus’ desired unity.

Photo: USAF

Read More http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/07/afghan-troop-deaths-highlight-lack-of-tracking-tech/#more-27129#ixzz0t4o2ZUFt

[buglerbilly]

U.K.: More Urgent Buys for Afghan Campaign

By ANDREW CHUTER

Published: 7 Jul 2010 14:12

LONDON - Britain is spending a further 189 million pounds ($286.8 million) on purchasing equipment for troops fighting in Afghanistan, the defense secretary, Liam Fox, announced July 7.

Included in the list of items being procured under the Treasury-funded urgent operational requirements scheme are improvements to base security, personal equipment and vehicles.

The bulk of the spending is going toward improving base security. The MoD said 158 million pounds was earmarked for ground-based surveillance systems and secure communications.

A further 19 million pounds is being spent on more body armor, helmets, light and heavy machine guns, combat shotguns and night-vision equipment, and 12 million pounds will go toward better protected logistics vehicles.

The additional equipment orders bring total government spending on urgent operational requirements to 256 million pounds since June. Last month, the government committed to spending 67 million pounds on measures to counter improvised explosive devices.

The announcement about the new equipment orders came in a statement from Fox to Parliament about the situation in Afghanistan. The defense secretary said 300 additional U.K. troops were temporarily being deployed to add to the 9,500 military personnel already in theater.

[buglerbilly]

More info on the UOR buy from the formal MoD article............

Article - £189m for new equipment in Afghanistan announced

An Equipment and Logistics news article

7 Jul 10

The Government is providing £189m from the Treasury Reserve for new equipment for UK troops in support of operations in Afghanistan, Defence Secretary Dr Liam Fox has announced today.


A soldier displays the new combat shotgun which was brought into service for use in close quarters battle in southern Afghanistan
[Picture: Corporal Russ Nolan RLC, Crown Copyright/MOD 2009]

This additional funding will be used to buy a range of base protection equipment, including surveillance equipment, communications equipment and logistics equipment.

It will enable UK forces to continue to increase the number of bases in theatre as the force thickens in central Helmand, and to partner the Afghan security forces more effectively.

Together with the £67m for the counter-improvised explosive device (C-IED) campaign announced by the Prime Minister on 10 June 2010, this totals £256m (£189m and £67m) of Reserve funding allocated to equipment since the beginning of June 2010.

This extra funding will allow the Ministry of Defence to equip an increase in the number of specialist C-IED teams and reflects the continuing move towards partnering the Afghan National Army and Police and the thickening of our force across the area of operations.

As the Secretary of State for Defence has made clear, countering the IED threat faced by our forces in Afghanistan is a top priority for the new Government. He said:


The grenade machine gun has proven to be effective in extreme conditions, perfoming well across the range of operational environments
[Picture: Crown Copyright/MOD 2008]

"There are real challenges; the threat does not stand still and nor does our response.

"I will make sure that everything possible is done to ensure that our forces have what they need to deal with this indiscriminate threat.

"They deserve nothing less. As I have seen during my visits they are doing fantastic work in Afghanistan in support of the UK's national security."

The Secretary of State has also made it clear when looking to the future that when the Afghan security forces have been sufficiently trained to take control, our troops can withdraw:

"...our forces are making progress. In Helmand, the heartland of the insurgency, six districts were under government control in 2008 - now 11 out of 14 are.

"We are also ahead of target in training the Afghan National Security Forces. As soon as they are able to keep their country secure our forces can come home."


The Ridgback armoured personnel carrier
[Picture: Corporal Ian Forsyth RLC, Crown Copyright/MOD 2009]

The equipment package for operations and pre-deployment training includes the following:

• Base equipment (£158m) including:

- secure communications systems;
- ground-based ISTAR (Intelligence, Surveillance, Target Acquisition and Reconnaissance) systems to protect bases.

• Dismounted Close Combat equipment (£19m) including:

- Osprey body armour and helmets;
- weapons systems including light and heavy machine guns and combat shotguns;
- weapon sights and night vision equipment.

• Other (£12m) including:

- additional MAN logistics support vehicles modified for use in Afghanistan (equipping existing vehicles to Theatre Entry Standard to allow them to deploy).

The C-IED equipment package announced by the Prime Minister on 10 June 2010 (£67m) includes:

Mastiff protected mobility vehicles;
remote-controlled vehicles;
specialist IED disruptive and exploitation equipment;
highly trained military working dogs.

These additional resources are aimed at dealing both with the IED threat of today whilst looking to the future by partnering with the Afghans, to whom responsibility for security will be transferred.

[buglerbilly]

Survey of Afghans points to rampant corruption in government

By Ernesto Londoño
Washington Post Foreign Service

Thursday, July 8, 2010

KABUL -- Corruption has soared in recent years as the United States and other international donors have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Afghanistan, giving the Taliban a powerful tool to delegitimize the Afghan government, according to a new national survey.

The survey, which was scheduled to be released Thursday by the Kabul-based anti-corruption group Integrity Watch Afghanistan, suggests that Afghans see their country's police and judicial officials as the most corrupt in the government -- a troubling finding at a time when the U.S. mission here relies heavily on bolstering the credibility and professionalism of Afghan security forces.

It also shows that corruption disproportionately affects poor Afghans and that it is more entrenched in rural areas, where NATO forces are trying to weaken the Taliban and institute government control.

The authors say the survey provides the most comprehensive look to date at the scope and dynamics of petty corruption in Afghanistan, drawing from interviews with about 6,500 people conducted late last year in all but two of Afghanistan's 34 provinces.

American lawmakers and U.S. commanders have grown increasingly concerned about Afghanistan's endemic corruption, which they see as a growing threat to international military and aid efforts at a time when support for the war is waning in the United States and NATO capitals.

"It has become a phenomenon that is more widespread and really institutionalized," said Lorenzo Delesgues, co-director of Integrity Watch Afghanistan. "It has become easier for people to get away with corruption, and you have more money flowing in."

The Interior Ministry, which oversees the police forces; the Justice Ministry; and the National Directorate of Security, Afghanistan's main intelligence agency, are seen as the most corrupt government departments, according to the survey.

Roughly 28 percent of households surveyed reported having paid a bribe last year. Of those, about 78 percent are in rural areas.

Last year, Afghans paid roughly $1 billion in bribes, nearly twice the amount paid in 2007, according to estimates based on the survey. The sum is equal to nearly a third of the country's annual budget.

The most common types of bribes were paid for favorable disposition of court cases and for police protection, the study said. The average bribe paid to influence a judicial official was $135, while the average bribe paid to a police officer was $123.

Bribes were also commonly paid for routine government services, such as electricity, the issuance of passports and national identification forms, and access to education.

"Just to get a signature from a low-ranking official in this country you need to pay a bribe," said Afghan lawmaker Sayed Rahman, who is critical of the government's efforts to fight corruption.

Recent military offensives in Taliban strongholds in southern Afghanistan have been hindered by lukewarm public support for corrupt local officials.

On a recent patrol in Kandahar city, where NATO officials are attempting to boost the government as part of a military campaign, a village elder told a Canadian soldier that he was happy to work with coalition troops but that he had no faith in his government.

"When we have them bring an electrician from the municipal government, we have to pay him" a bribe, Karim Mohammed said. "The people who have power and authority, they can do everything. For us poor people, there's nothing."

The Taliban has seized on that frustration, highlighting in its propaganda the prevalence of corruption. About 50 percent of respondents in the survey said corruption was helping the Taliban expand its influence.

"The Taliban [has] been able to gain some credibility," Delesgues said. During its years in power in the 1990s, the Taliban provided few basic services but discouraged dishonesty with a swift and often-brutal justice system. "There was more accountability," he said. "They were ruling by fear."

U.S. lawmakers have become increasingly concerned about corruption in Afghanistan.

Last month, congressional investigators issued a report suggesting that a U.S. military convoy protection contract was enriching corrupt officials and insurgents.

Days later, Rep. Nita M. Lowey (D-N.Y.), announced that she would block funding for nonessential projects until the government demonstrates that taxpayer money won't be siphoned.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai created an office to coordinate anti-corruption efforts last year. Critics say the initiative has had little impact because it has a small budget and very little reach outside Kabul.

[buglerbilly]

Rodriguez Describes Changes to Operations in Afghanistan

(Source: US Department of Defense; issued July 7, 2010)

WASHINGTON --- The commander of the International Security Assistance Force Joint Command in Afghanistan has made changes to improve command and control in the key province of Helmand.

Army Lt. Gen. David M. Rodriguez also spoke about the civil-military cooperation and lessons learned from the Marja campaign in Helmand.

A Marine battalion will replace British forces in the strategic town of Sangin along the Helmand River, Rodriguez said during a teleconference with Pentagon reporters today.

“The British are committing their theater reserve for the next several months into the central Helmand River valley to increase the security zones in the central Helmand River valley,” he said. A Georgian battalion -- a new addition to the ISAF coalition -- also is moving into the area, the general added.

“This is done to clean up the command and control [situation],” the general said. When all is done, U.S. Marines will be in the northern and southern parts of the province, the British will be concentrated in central Helmand, and the Georgian battalion will be in the west.

Rodriguez told reporters that there has been progress in and around Marja – an agricultural city that had been occupied by the Taliban for three years. “The critical things down in the districts are the delivery of services from the government and the security provided by the police, supported by the army,” he said.

The population is becoming more involved with their local governments and representative councils, Rodriguez said.

“As security grows and as the confidence of the people grows, it will become more representative of the whole district of Marja,” he said. “They are on an upward trajectory to move to that now, but they do not have a fully representative council yet. But they are participating in the council meetings and the shura meetings. … And we look forward to that continual growing confidence as they improve the security.”

It is a hard fight in the region. The Taliban have launched a murder and intimidation campaign to kill the community leaders. Patience is needed to effect change in the region, Rodriguez said, adding that the command and the Afghan government learned lessons from the fight in Marja that can be applied to the larger campaign in and around Kandahar – Afghanistan’s second-largest city and the spiritual home of the Taliban.

The Afghan government also learned many lessons from the experience, he added.

“Most of them had to do with prior planning, preparation, setting the political context and communicating early with the people,” Rodriguez said. “When we went into Marja, … we had not planned long enough in advance. We had done it kind of in a sequence, versus a parallel effort, so it was a little bit slower to get the government services and the development in there that we wanted.”

He said the experience caused the government to begin the political engagement and the consultations with the people much earlier in Kandahar province.

“The president of Afghanistan has already been down there twice, and is going there again shortly,” he said. “And the involvement of the people and the preparations of the Afghan government to best support the people of Kandahar are way ahead of what they were in central Helmand River valley, because of the lessons learned from all during those operations.”

It remains a hard fight in Afghanistan, the general acknowledged, and allied casualties have risen. June was the deadliest month for coalition troops since the war began.

“The soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines … are incredibly committed to what they’re doing,” Rodriguez said. “They’re incredibly committed to each other, to take care of each other and take care of the mission. And their morale remains high as they go into some of the toughest places and the toughest fights that we’ve been in because of going right at the Taliban support bases. So their morale continues to be high.”

-ends-

This is a sequence map issued by the UK MoD late yesterday................

[buglerbilly]

British forces bridge language divide in Afghanistan

A People In Defence news article

8 Jul 10

His name is "Duffus".......!!! I'd love to see the face of any Yank he meets and gets intro'd to.............:rofl

Dozens of British Service personnel trained to speak Dari or Pashtu in the run up to their Afghanistan deployment have been using their language skills to better communicate with the local Afghan population.


Lieutenant David Duffus puts his Dari language skills to good use as an adviser to the Afghan National Army
[Picture: Crown Copyright/MOD 2010]

Some of them have now also decided to write bilingual blogs on the British Army and Royal Navy blog sites to reach out to the wider Afghan community as well as people back home.

Lieutenant David Duffus, of The Royal Scots Borderers, 1st Battalion The Royal Regiment of Scotland, who spent nine months learning Dari before arriving in Afghanistan, said:

"It just shows a bit of respect, that British soldiers are putting the effort in to try to learn one, the local culture, and two, the language."

Dari is spoken mainly in the north of the country rather than in Helmand province.

But nine out of ten soldiers in the Afghan National Army (ANA) speak Dari rather than Pashtu, and as an adviser to the ANA, based in Sangin, Lieutenant Duffus, from Edinburgh, has found his language skills invaluable:

"It just helps you break the ice with the locals and with the ANA," he said. "I can talk directly to the soldiers without needing an interpreter and when we are under fire that can save lives, ours and theirs.

"You can get a lot more information as well out of the local nationals. They feel a bit easier if they speak to you in Pashtu or Dari directly."


Lieutenant David Duffus out on patrol
[Picture: Crown Copyright/MOD 2010]

Royal Marine Rob Milner, of 40 Commando, is also based in Sangin and he speaks fluent Pashtu.

His unit sent him on a year-long course so he would be able to talk to local people and Afghan civilians working directly for the International Security Assistance Force.

While the Royal Marines run Forward Operating Base Jackson in the heart of Sangin, ANA 'Warriors' and the Afghan National Police share it.

This gives Marine Milner plenty of opportunity to practice his Pashtu, although he says it was a little difficult to understand everybody at first.

His Commanding Officer, Lieutenant Colonel Paul James of the 40 Commando Group, stresses the importance of being able to speak the local language:

"We work amongst Afghans who are an incredibly proud people. Everyone in the battle group has had to learn a little bit of Pashtu, including myself.

"We have ten stock phrases, and when we come out with them the Afghans are delighted. They really appreciate it.

"Then while we are wowing them with our limited knowledge we can move the interpreter into place to help us get down to business."


Lieutenant David Duffus at work in Sangin
[Picture: Crown Copyright/MOD 2010]

Lieutenant Duffus said his attempts to chat with the locals have sometimes been met with astonishment:

"There is one local who lives in the Green Zone who we know quite well, who speaks quite a bit of Dari.

"The first time I met him he wouldn't believe it at first. He thought they had dressed me up in British combats and I was really an Afghan soldier."

He says he is certainly picking up lots of military words, both in Dari and Pashtu:

"They use some Pashtu military words even though they speak Dari and I am learning them too.

"Hopefully I will have quite an extensive grasp of both languages by the time I go home in the autumn."

Lieutenant Duffus is blogging in Dari and English on the British Army's brand new blogging site, which is part of the official British Army website, whilst Marine Milner's blog is on the Royal Navy's blogging site, Jack Speak

[buglerbilly]

U.S. Throws $3 Billion At Afghan Bombs

By LYNNE O'DONNELL, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE

Published: 8 Jul 2010 10:04

KABUL, Afghanistan - The U.S. is set to deliver $3 billion worth of equipment aimed at countering Taliban-made crude bombs used in the Afghan war, a U.S. official said July 8.

Improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, have become the main weapon used against international and Afghan forces fighting to end an insurgency increasingly seen as bogged down in favor of the Taliban.

The equipment was "at least doubling" current counter-IED capacity as forces did not have all they needed to take on an escalating threat, said Ashton Carter, U.S. undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics.

The new equipment, including tethered surveillance blimps, heavily armored vehicles and detection machinery such as robots and mine detectors, would arrive in Afghanistan in the coming months, he told reporters.

Carter said the equipment would be accompanied by about 1,000 counter-IED experts, including laboratory technicians, intelligence analysts and law enforcement officials.

"This is an enormous plug of extra effort," he said, adding that the equipment would be shared with coalition and Afghan forces.

IEDs are the biggest threat facing troops engaged in the war in Afghanistan, now well into its ninth year.

They are easy and cheap to produce, often using ammonium nitrate fertilizer that is produced in Pakistan and trucked across the border into Afghanistan, Carter said.

The bombs are difficult to detect, often buried by roadsides and remotely detonated to devastating effect.

Many of the 341 foreign soldiers killed so far this year have died as a result of IED attacks. Others often suffer life-changing injuries.

NATO reported two more deaths of foreign soldiers July 8, one of them in an IED attack in southern Afghanistan.

A June U.N. report marked an "alarming" 94 percent increase in IED incidents in the first four months of this year compared with 2009, as the military says intensifying efforts against the Taliban are being matched by more attacks.

Afghan authorities had banned the use of ammonium nitrate fertilizer and were tightening the border to restrict its flow into Afghanistan, Carter said.

"As Pakistan itself begins to suffer from the same homemade IEDs... their willingness to act is growing. This is a very, very welcome sign given how much of this stuff comes over the border from Pakistan," he said.

Pakistan has long been implicated in the violence in Afghanistan, with the government's intelligence arm and its military blamed for supporting and collaborating with militant groups based on its side of the border.

Afghanistan's national security adviser Rangin Dadfar Spanta this week called on Pakistani authorities to take action against the groups, which he said included al-Qaida, the Taliban and the Haqqani network.

Afghan officials have blamed a number of major attacks on militant groups that have carved out havens in Pakistan's northwestern tribal belt.

Carter attributed a recent spike in casualties among international troops to greater efforts against the insurgents.

"It is fair to say we have been intensifying our operations so much in the last few months, this is the cause of the lion's share of increased IED activity," Carter said.

June saw more than 102 foreign troops deaths, a monthly record since the war began with the 2001 U.S.-led invasion to overthrow the Taliban regime.

Detection and controlled detonation of IEDs had risen considerably, he said, though he conceded that the size of the bombs and the magnitude of the damage caused by them was increasing.

The U.S. and NATO have more than 140,000 troops in Afghanistan.

Another 10,000 are to deploy in coming weeks in an effort to drive the Taliban from their strongholds, mainly in southern provinces Helmand and Kandahar.

[buglerbilly]

British troops could end Afghan combat in 'less than three years'

British troops could start to withdraw from combat operations in Afghanistan in less than three years, the new British ambassador to Kabul has said.

By James Kirkup, Political Correspondent

Published: 10:00PM BST 08 Jul 2010

Link to this video Sir William Patey said that Nato’s combat mission against the Taliban is already on course to wind down in three to five years.

That timescale could be even shorter if Taliban elements are brought into peace talks, he said, adding that those negotiations should begin “sooner rather than later”.

Sir William is the latest senior figure to urge early peace talks with the Taliban. General Sir David Richards, the head of the British Army, last month said negotiations should come “pretty soon.”

David Cameron has told MPs that most of Britain’s 10,000 troops will be withdrawn from Afghanistan by 2015 and officials say the Coalition is looking for an early departure from the country.

It was announced this week that British forces will this week leave Sangin in northern Helmand, the most heavily contested district in the country. A soldier from the Royal Artillery was killed there on Thursday, the 313th British fatality in Afghanistan and the 100th in Sangin.

Sir William, appointed to Kabul in May, told a think-tank in London that the Nato military presence is now “buying time” for the Afghan government to build up its capacity to provide security.

“We are on a three to five year timescale -- the combat role of Nato troops diminishing over three to five years,” he said, adding: “The political process can accelerate that.”

If parts of the Taliban can be brought into the political process more quickly, fewer Afghan security forces will be required, meaning Britain and other Nato members can hasten their departure from the country.

Those negotiations should start soon, he said: “If your message is ‘you need to start talking about a political settlement sooner rather than later’, I absolutely agree.”

Nato can talk to elements of the Taliban even while insurgents are fighting and killing Nato troops, the ambassador suggested.

“The history of conflict tells you it possible to fight and talk at the same time. All conflicts end in negotiation,” he told the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS).

Sir William said that the talks should include even those hardline Taliban figures who are unlikely ever to renounce violence and back the Kabul government.

“There will always be some irreconcilables,” he said, likening the situation to Britain’s talks with the IRA in the 1990s.

“If we hadn’t spoken to the IRA because of a few irreconcilables who wouldn’t negotiate until the six counties [of Ulster] were returned, we’d never have got anywhere.”

Nato forces have been in Afghanistan since 2001, but Sir William said that the West “neglected” Afghanistan for years because of the war in Iraq.

Sir William said: “We went in 2001, knocked over the Taliban then pushed off to deal with that other bloke [Saddam Hussein]. We neglected Afghanistan for a while. It was only in the last year that we have been putting in the resources required.”

Alistair Burt, a Foreign Office minister, told the IISS that even after combat operations end in Afghanistan, Britain will remain heavily committed to the country through economic and development assistance.

“The withdrawal of the combat troops is not the withdrawal of the UK from Afghanistan,” he said.

[buglerbilly]

Afghan Air Force Mi-17 Fleet Grows

Thursday, 08 July 2010 16:58 1061

by MC1 (AW) Elizabeth Burke



The Afghan Air Force received two new Mi-17 helicopters on July 8, 2010. These two aircraft are part of a purchase of ten new helicopters to be fulfilled by November 2010.

The contract to purchase these ten aircraft is worth $155 million. The current AAF fleet includes 25 Mi-17 helicopters. This is the continuation of a buildup of the fleet to 56 helicopters by 2012.

The Mi-17 is perfectly suited to the needs of Afghanistan. Its original design was one optimized for Afghanistan's high, rugged terrain and blistering summer temperatures. Second, Afghans have been flying and training in these aircraft for the last 30 years. They are already familiar with maintenance requirements of the aircraft, and using them allowed an air force with considerable battlefield mobility to rise from the ashes of Afghanistan's war-torn past with almost immediate impact. Finally, the price is very reasonable when compared against Western aircraft of similar high-altitude lifting and payload capability.

"The Mi-17 is vitally important to Afghanistan today to support the counter-insurgency effort, and will continue to be important for the future of Afghanistan," said Brig. Gen. Michael R. Boera, the Commanding General, Combined Air Power Transition Force, NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan/Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan, and Commander, 438th Air Expeditionary Wing. “The Mi-17s have been used to rescue flood victims down to the south and out to the west. It's been used to rescue Afghan citizens off of the mountain peaks--trapped by an avalanche in the Salang pass--and helped recover remains from the Pamir Airways airliner crash in landing zones up at 13,000 feet. And it’s been used to support past national elections getting the ballots to some locations unreachable by other means, except maybe by donkey. The AAF is planning now to do the same for the September elections.”

The service ceiling of the Mi-17 is over 16,000 feet and can transport 24 passengers or 8,800 lbs. of cargo. The Mi-17 comes with a price tag of approximately $15 million, which is one-half to one-third as expensive as Western aircraft with similar capabilities.

“In time, a transition to a Western medium-lift helicopter may be the right thing to do. But for now, the growth and development of the Afghan Air Force, as well as its ability to support today’s fight depends on us staying the course with the Mi-17,” said General Boera. “I would not want to have to send more Afghans outside of the country, and keep more U.S. forces in Afghanistan longer to effect a challenging transition to a medium-lift Western helicopter prematurely,” he added.

The Mi-17 fleet provides the AAF with a wide variety of mission capabilities to include Presidential/distinguished visitor transportation, medical and casualty evacuation (MEDEVAC/CASEVAC), battlefield mobility, basic cargo airlift, reconnaissance, rotary-wing training, and close air support (CAS). Most recently, after completing critical training for its aircrew, the Afghans have added an air assault and sling load capability.

Afghanistan’s Mi-17s will be interoperable with allied and current coalition service systems. There are 77 other nations world-wide that currently employ the Mi-17, including coalition partners Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland.

KABUL, Afghanistan -- The Afghan Air Force with help from the Combined Air Power Transition Force, receive two new Mi-17 helicopters on July 8, 2010. The helicopters were delivered by an An-124 strategic airlift jet airplane named by NATO as a "Condor".(US Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class David Quillen/ RELEASED).

[buglerbilly]

WSJ Blogs

Aug. 14July 8, 2010, 12:36 PM .

U.S. Seeks an Albatross — or 3 — for Afghanistan

By Nathan Hodge

One of the more unusual stories about the war in Afghanistan is the creation of the Afghan air force. In hopes of building a more self-sufficient Afghan military, the U.S. government has been buying up aircraft from its former Cold War rivals.


L-39C Albatros jets. (U.S. DOD photo)

Rugged Russian Mi-17 helicopters are at the top of the Pentagon’s wish list, but the interest in ex-Warsaw Pact aircraft is not just limited to choppers. The Navy is currently in the market to buy three L-39C Albatros planes for the Afghan military.

The Albatros – that’s the correct Czech spelling – is a subsonic jet that can be used as trainer aircraft or a light bomber. The Afghan air force currently has three L-39s, but they aren’t flying missions: They are on the ground awaiting overhaul, and haven’t been flown since last August.
Air Force Capt. Robert Leese, spokesman for the Air Force’s 438th Air Expeditionary Wing in Afghanistan, said the new Czech aircraft are supposed to supplement the L-39s sitting on the tarmac.

Afghanistan’s L-39s are supposed to be back in service next year. The idea, Leese said, was to have the aircraft ready for new pilots when they return from training abroad. The Afghans are also awaiting completion of a new training base in Shindand, western Afghanistan.

“Although Afghan pilots have in the past flown the L-39, the current AAF leadership would like to see younger pilots who are trained in Western-style pilot-training programs become the operators of these platforms,” Leese said in an email. “To bring back older pilots, whose average age is now in their mid-40’s, would set Afghanistan’s air training back a few decades, as the force would revert to ineffective, overly-centralized Soviet-style tactics.”

[buglerbilly]

Hornet Pilots Get “arrested” in Afghanistan

CAMP DWYER, Afghanistan – (07.06.2010)

Story by Cpl. Ryan Rholes, 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing (Fwd) Public Affairs


Maj. Michael Nesbitt, a pilot with Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 232, lands and engages the newly-installed arresting gear here, June 30, during a test landing to ensure the arresting gear functioned properly. A second F/A-18 Hornet landed using the arresting gear about three minutes after Nesbitt.

Two F/A-18 Hornets screamed onto the runway here, June 30, marking yet another “first,” in this historic deployment for the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing (Forward): a safe landing thanks to newly-installed arresting gear to catch the fast-movers.

The Hornets, flown by Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 232 based at Kandahar Air Field, face a rigorous and unforgiving environment, making the arresting gear a possible ‘saving grace’ should pilots need it.



Afghanistan’s dynamic, rapid weather patterns and rough environment can cause increased wear on jets. Brakes failures, hydraulic system issues or even bad weather may cause aircraft to divert and take arrested landings. Arresting gear can provide a safe way for pilots to land without relying on potential faulty brakes, or when critical components of an aircraft have failed.

"Arrested landings are the norm on aircraft carriers, here at the field I have taken an arrested landing on occasion due to hydraulic and braking issues; it's vital to stopping the aircraft safely in the event of an emergency or short runway," said Maj. Michael Nesbitt, one of the pilots with VMFA-232 who performed the arrested landings.

Pilots use “traps” aboard aircraft carriers because of the shorter runways. The system works by transferring the energy of the plane to the arresting engines, which slows the aircraft in a fluid, controlled manner. Arresting gear can halt jets on runways fewer than 1,000 feet in length – a significant reduction in “roll out,” or the distance needed for the fast-movers to stop. It can also be used for emergency landing situations.

The arresting gear here took weeks to install. Then, the night before the test, 13 maintenance Marines from VMFA-232, flew to Dwyer Air Field to help operate the equipment, facilitate the landings, inspect the planes after they touched down and re-launch them.

Dozens of VMFA-232 Marines woke early and began scouring the flight line and taxi ways for foreign object debris; then they cleaned, prepared and assisted in starting the arresting gear.



The Marines pulled the deck pendant - the wire stretching between the arresting engines - taunt across the runway. They used tires to prop the wire several inches off the ground so it would easily feed into a catch hook on the back of the jet. Once done, the Marines established a safety perimeter, pushing spectators away from the expeditionary flight line in case the cable snapped. After a short delay, the two jets roared in overhead, banked hard left to downwind and set up for their landings. The first Hornet touched down and grabbed the cable without problem, and in less than three minutes the crew reset the catch cable and guided in the second jet.

"With a good crew, it should take a little more than two minutes to unhook a jet and have the gear reset and ready for the next landing," said Sgt. Chance Chambers, the runway crew leader for Marine Wing Support Squadron 274. "Today went really well, actually. It took just over two minutes between each jet. My Marines surprised me today."

Chance and his Marines spent more than 1,100 hours in the searing heat installing the arresting gear.

The pilots took a short break on the ground, leaving their cockpits and thanking the Marines for their handwork. Less than half an hour later, both jets streaked off the runway for home, feeling safer knowing they have a safe place to land should the ruthless environment create the need.

[buglerbilly]

Petraeus reviews directive meant to limit Afghan civilian deaths


Afghan children watch as a U.S. soldier patrols the village of Pir-e-Paymal in the Arghandab River valley, outside Kandahar. (Kevin Frayer/associated Press)

By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Staff Writer

Friday, July 9, 2010

To the U.S. soldiers getting pounded with thunderous mortar rounds in their combat outpost near Kandahar, it seemed like a legitimate request: allow them to launch retaliatory mortar shells or summon an airstrike against their attackers. The incoming fire was landing perilously close to a guard station, and the soldiers, using a high-powered camera, could clearly see the insurgents shooting.

The response from headquarters -- more than 20 miles away -- was terse. Permission denied. Battalion-level officers deemed the insurgents too close to a cluster of mud-brick houses, perhaps with civilians inside.

Although the insurgents stopped firing before anybody was wounded, the troops were left seething.

"This is not how you fight a war, at least not in Kandahar," said a soldier at the outpost who described the incident, which occurred last month, on the condition of anonymity. "We've been handcuffed by our chain of command."

With insurgent attacks increasing across Afghanistan, frustration about rules of engagement is growing among troops, and among some members of Congress. Addressing those concerns will be one of the most complicated initial tasks facing Gen. David H. Petraeus, the new commander of U.S. and NATO forces in the country.

The controversy pits the desire of top military officers to limit civilian casualties, something they regard as an essential part of the overall counterinsurgency campaign, against a widespread feeling among rank-and-file troops that restrictions on air and mortar strikes are placing them at unnecessary risk and allowing Taliban fighters to operate with impunity.

During his confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Petraeus promised to "look very hard" at the rules of engagement. He has since asked Lt. Gen. David M. Rodriguez, the top operational commander in Afghanistan, to review the rules. The examination will include discussions with troops around the country, military officials said.

At issue is a tactical directive issued last July by Petraeus's predecessor, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, that limits the use of air and mortar strikes against houses unless personnel are in imminent danger. The directive requires troops to take extensive measures, including a 48-hour "pattern of life" analysis with on-the-ground or aerial surveillance, to ensure that civilians are not in a housing compound before ordering an airstrike.

Senior U.S. military officials in Afghanistan and Washington said Petraeus almost certainly will not rescind the directive but instead will issue revised guidance in the coming days in an attempt to streamline procedures and ensure uniformity in how the rules are implemented.

Despite claims from some relatives of military personnel killed in Afghanistan that the directive has limited the ability of troops to defend themselves, the officials said a review by the U.S. military of every combat fatality over the past year has found no evidence that the rules restricted the use of lifesaving firepower.

"We have not found a single situation where a soldier has lost his life because he was not allowed to protect himself," one of the officials said.

If troops are in imminent danger, there is no restriction on the use of airstrikes or mortars. "The rules of engagement provide an absolute right of self-defense," the official said.

The official, like others quoted for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity because military regulations limit discussion of rules of engagement.

Differing interpretations

Part of the controversy is rooted in divergent interpretations of the directive. To those atop the chain of command, the restriction has helped reduce civilian casualties, which have been a politically charged issue in Afghanistan and have helped sap popular support for the international military presence. There have been 197 civilian fatalities caused by NATO forces, including U.S. troops, in the 12 months since the directive was issued, compared with 332 in the previous year, according to figures compiled by the NATO command in Kabul.

Although the directive has markedly reduced the bombing of housing compounds, dozens of Afghans continue to die each year in airstrikes on other types of targets, including vehicles.

For troops on the ground, however, the directive has lowered their morale and limited their ability to pursue insurgents. They note that Taliban fighters seem to understand the new rules and have taken to sniping at troops from inside homes or retreating inside houses after staging attacks.

"Minimizing civilian casualties is a fine goal, but should it be the be-all and end-all of the policy?" said a junior Army officer in southern Afghanistan. "If we allow soldiers to die in Afghanistan at the hands of a leader who says, 'We're going to protect civilians rather than soldiers,' what's going to happen on the ground? The soldiers are not going to execute the mission to the best of their ability. They won't put their hearts into the mission. That's the kind of atmosphere we're building."

The principal problem, senior officials say, is that U.S. and allied units across Afghanistan have carried out the directive in ways that are more restrictive than McChrystal intended. Fearful of career-ending sanctions if they violate the order, commanders at every subordinate level down the chain have tightened the rules themselves, often adding their own stipulations to the use of air and mortar strikes.

This spring, the Army brigade to which the soldiers at the outpost near Kandahar belong rescinded authority from on-the-scene commanders to fire mortars or call for air support, except in the most urgent cases of self-defense. Permission now has to be granted by a battalion headquarters -- a requirement not enumerated in the tactical directive that could delay any strike on an enemy.

"Now you have to think like a lawyer when you're getting shot at," the soldier at the outpost said. "It's a case of hesitancy and oversimplification. When you're getting shot at, you don't have a lot of time to build a picture for the guys back at headquarters. Your head is in the ground."

Less than six hours before Marines commenced a major helicopter-borne assault in the town of Marja in February, Rodriguez's headquarters issued an order requiring that his operations center clear any airstrike that was on a housing compound in the area but not sought in self-defense. But before the order was given to the Marines, the British-run regional headquarters in southern Afghanistan amended the language to include any strikes "near" houses, according to two U.S. sources familiar with the incident.

The angst over the directive on airstrikes has been compounded by additional orders on driving -- be polite and don't hog the road -- and escalation-of-force situations, such as when suspicious vehicles approach convoys or entrances to bases. The rules, titled Standard Operating Procedures 373, call for military personnel to "use force for the duration and to the extent required to meet the threat and defeat or neutralize it, but no more." Some soldiers say those orders have also been used in a more draconian and patchwork way than senior commanders intended.

"We have to be absolutely certain that the implementation of the tactical directive and the rules of engagement is even throughout the force, that there are not leaders at certain levels that are perhaps making this more bureaucratic or more restrictive than necessary," Petraeus said at his confirmation hearing.

Permission denied

The tightened rules on airstrikes during the initial days of the Marja operation prompted intense frustration not just among Marines on the ground but for mid-level officers in the combat operations center at their headquarters at Camp Leatherneck.

Within an hour after the first Marines landed in Marja, officers in the command center were watching a live black-and-white video feed from an aerial drone that showed suspicious activity around a cluster of 50-gallon fuel drums within the open courtyard of a house. Marines on the ground also had intelligence that insurgents intended to target approaching U.S. forces with 50-gallon drums filled with homemade explosives and metal fragments.

But when officers at the command asked for permission to strike from the regional command in Kandahar, they were rejected. Too close to the house, they were told.

The Marines proposed targeting the drums at an angle to avoid damaging the house in case, as one officer noted, "they contained baby milk." Again they were denied.

Finally, as the sun rose, a Marine unit began approaching the compound. The frustrated officer, fearful that a detonation would kill the troops, declared the target a case of self-defense. No longer was he required to seek permission.

Three Hellfire missiles were launched at the drums, igniting them into a huge fireball, indicating that they were filled with explosives.

"You can't fight a war like this," the officer growled.

[buglerbilly]

Suicide attack kills 56 in Pakistan tribal belt

LEHAZ ALI

July 9, 2010 - 10:04PM

A suicide attacker and suspected car bomb caused carnage in a busy Pakistani market outside a government office on Friday, killing 56 people and burying victims under pulverised shops.

The devastation struck Yakaghund town in the district of Mohmand, one of seven that make up Pakistan's northwest tribal belt which Washington has branded a global headquarters of Al-Qaeda and the most dangerous place on Earth.

It was the deadliest attack in nuclear-armed Pakistan since gunmen wearing suicide vests stormed prayer halls belonging to the minority Ahmadi community in the city of Lahore in May, killing at least 82 people.

A Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked bombing spree across Pakistan has killed around 3,500 people in three years since government troops besieged a radical mosque in the capital Islamabad in July 2007.

Witnesses said a huge explosion damaged an administration office, shops, a jail and other buildings in the small town not far from the border with Afghanistan, where 140,000 US-led foreign troops are fighting the Taliban.

Wounded Raj Wali, 23, a labourer who was working on a nearby road at the time of the blast, said he suddenly felt a massive blow to his back.

"I turned round and saw the area engulfed in smoke. People were crying. I also saw body parts scattered near the blast site," he said.

Bodies were laid out on rope-slung cots, covered in white sheets as relatives arrived to identify the dead. A mother, two sisters and son were seen crying wretchedly over the body of one man who was killed.

Rescue workers were sifting through the debris of partially collapsed buildings and officials feared the death toll could rise further.

"The death toll is 56 now. There are still 89 injured people in different hospitals," local administration official Rasool Khan told AFP.

"Rescue work is also going on to recover people trapped in the debris."

Khan said women and tribal police were among the dead, adding that dozens of shops had been flattened and more than 100 people were treated for injuries.

Buildings in the downtrodden market were made mostly of mud and clay. The force of the explosives collapsed flimsy wooden roofs on more than two dozen shops, twisted shutters and snapped off doors, said an AFP reporter.

Slippers and empty bottles of soft drinks littered the market along with bloodied chunks of flesh.

"We suspect that there were two blasts. One was a suicide attack on a motorbike. We have also found the wreckage of a car. It indicates that a car bomb was detonated with a remote control," Khan told AFP.

"The target is not clear but it could have been the local administration and members of a peace committee who come to my office for routine weekly meetings on Fridays."

At least 28 prisoners held for petty crime escaped after the attack collapsed an outer wall of a local jail, he said.

Although there was no immediate claim of responsibility, immediate suspicion fell on Islamist militant groups which have carved out havens in the remote and craggy mountains of Pakistan's tribal belt outside direct government control.

The Islamic republic is on the frontline of the US war against Al-Qaeda and the Pakistani military are bogged down fighting homegrown Taliban in the northwestern border areas.

Hugging the border with Afghanistan, where US and NATO allies are trying to end a nearly nine-year war, northwest Pakistan has suffered a wave of bombings causing mass casualties and insurgency, fanning fears about regional stability.

Pakistani leaders this week called for a landmark national conference to develop a strategy to counter the Islamist militant threat after a twin suicide attack killed 43 people at a shrine in Lahore on July 2.

Pakistani security forces have fought in the tribal belt and parts of the northwest for years, but deadly clashes are still largely a daily occurrence.

© 2010 AFP

[buglerbilly]

Ares

A Defense Technology Blog

ANCOP and Afghanistan's Police Problem

Posted by Paul McLeary at 7/9/2010 10:36 AM CDT


(Afghan soldier. Pic: Paul McLeary)

While the Afghan army has, in fits and starts, started to show the effects of several years of concentrated effort on the part of NATO trainers to whip it into fighting shape, by all accounts the police are years behind the army in any readiness category one can think of. New York Times journalist C.J. Chivers recently pointed this out when reporting on the ineffectiveness of Afghan National Civil Order Police (ANCOP) units serving in the town of Marja in Helmand province, where the performance of the ANCOP unit assigned to partner with the Marines is raising some serious issues about their readiness. (ANCOP are specialized police units that can be moved around the country to assist NATO forces in areas where there is no police presence.)

I asked Colonel John Ferrari, the deputy of programs for NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan what the institutional view of the ANCOP program and police training was, and he admitted that while the police had been ignored for much of the past decade, the NTM-A is trying to put training programs in place. Amazingly, the Afghan police have only just recently been able to stand up their own recruiting command, and Ferrari says, “we’re also in the middle of standing up a training command -- and it’s that training command, once its stood up that will help get at the development of the leadership of the police.”

When asked what was being done to put an “Afghan face” on the training of local police to ensure that they’re being trained to be Afghan cops, and not an Americanized version of an Afghan cop, Ferrari said that “we’re probably not as far as we want to be as far as having experienced Afghan instructors teaching the Afghans ... ideally what you’d like is that ANCOP policeman who’s done two rotations in Marja to be the guy teaching the next generation of ANCOP coming in,” but due to current force needs, that just isn’t possible.

I asked that same question of Major General Mike Ward, deputy commander-police, NTM-A, in late June, and he said that while “we're very careful to try and make sure that the training is ‘Afghanized,’ if you will, or that it's the right training for local circumstances. And there is -- there is some disagreement about [what kind of] police training should be being delivered.”

He added that “the cultural issue that is causing the most challenge, I think, is for the police to understand their responsibility to get out with, mix with, know the public and be able to both generate confidence that they're there to do a job but equally to get feedback from the public where and when they're not doing a good job.” There is currently a program at work in Kandahar that uses a mix of Canadian civilian police and the U.S. Army’s 97th MP Battalion that is training and partnering with the city’s beat cops, Ward said. “And generally speaking,” he added, “when they're partnered, we see the right kinds of behavior.” But the question is: what happens when they’re not partnered?

[buglerbilly]

NATO Ramps Up Pursuit of Taliban Leaders

July 09, 2010

Associated Press

KABUL, Afghanistan - International and Afghan troops captured a Taliban commander responsible for bringing Pakistani militants across the border to launch attacks, the alliance said Friday as U.S.-led forces ratchet up their pursuit of insurgent leaders.

The coalition is touting a string of successes in capturing or killing dozens of key militant leaders since April, but so far it has not managed to reduce violent insurgent attacks across the country.

On Friday, an explosion ripped into a convoy of NATO and Afghan forces in an eastern province, killing one civilian and wounding nine others. Last month was also the most deadly of the nearly 9-year-old war for international troops, with 103 foreign forces killed.

President Barack Obama has sent 30,000 more American troops to Afghanistan to carry out the war's counterinsurgency strategy, which focuses on securing the Afghan population and reversing Taliban gains.

While international forces patrol new areas to try to protect the population, their comrades in special forces, working with elite Afghan commandos, have been staging raids almost every night trying to weaken the insurgents' operational capacity.

On Tuesday, coalition and Afghan special forces arrested a Taliban commander in the eastern province of Nangarhar, NATO said Friday.

The alliance said the man - whom it would not identify for security reasons - facilitated a recent influx of operatives for Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistani militia accused in the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks and suspected in a string of more recent attacks in Afghanistan.

"Capturing this commander degrades the Taliban's operational and facilitation capabilities," said Col. William Maxwell, the director of the NATO-led international forces' Combined Joint Operations.

Joint Afghan-international raids have led to the arrest of more than 100 Taliban figures since April, NATO says. In the past two weeks alone, at least 23 mid- and senior-level insurgent leaders and 217 lower-level fighters have been captured or killed, it says.

"We've stepped up operations over the last six months," said NATO spokesman Col. Wayne Shanks. "What this is, is directly targeting the insurgent network, their leadership, their facilitators who bring in either weapons, supplies, money, resources."

The campaign against the Taliban leadership echoes a strategy used successfully against both Sunni and Shiite insurgents in Iraq.

One senior Taliban commander recently killed was Ghulam Sakhi, who NATO said was a bomb-making specialist in Logar province who was also behind kidnapping plots, including the abduction and killing of the provincial security chief.

Afghan and coalition forces surrounded a compound he was sleeping in on June 25 and used a bullhorn to urge him to surrender. According to NATO, Sakhi emerged dressed as a woman and fired a pistol at the forces. He was shot and killed.

In the northern province of Kunduz, combined forces killed a Taliban weapons expert called Usman on June 27. NATO said he was a senior insurgent figure who also helped bring in fighters from Pakistan.

However, capturing and killing large numbers of militants has yet to translate into reducing the violence that has been spiraling in Afghanistan, with suicide attacks and roadside bombs exploding across the country.

A suicide car bomb hit a NATO convoy Friday in the eastern province of Nangarhar, provincial spokesman Ahmad Zaiya Abdulzai said. One civilian died and nine were wounded in the attack near a bridge outside Jalalabad, the provincial capital.

Photos from the scene show a coalition armored vehicle in flames, but NATO said no casualties among its troops were reported. A NATO spokeswoman said she had been told the convoy hit a homemade bomb.

The Afghan Taliban has taunted the U.S. for its failure to stop attacks, saying in a message posted Thursday on its website that the U.S. faces "the most catastrophic military setback in its history" in Afghanistan and comparing the fight to the Vietnam War.

Shanks said the effect of the capture operations may take time to show up, and stressed that capturing insurgents must be combined with the foreign and Afghan forces increasing security to win over the support of residents.

"It's a double-pronged approach," Shanks said. "When you combine them into a comprehensive approach, you will start to see a shifting of the momentum and following that there will be a reduction in the violence."

© Copyright 2010 Associated Press. All rights reserved.

[Raven22]

Australian soldier killed in Afghanistan

From: AAP July 10, 2010 9:03AM

CHIEF of the Defence Force air chief marshal Angus Houston has confirmed a member of the 1st Mentoring Task Force has been killed.

Mr Houston said the soldier was killed by an improvised explosives device in Afghanistan just before midnight (AEST) last night.

Authorities are not releasing his name yet but his family has been informed.

A second man was wounded and he remains in a stable condition.

The man killed was a 23-year-old from NSW who was based in Brisbane.

The soldiers were part of an Australian patrol conducting operations in the Chora Valley in the Uruzgan province. The incident occurred in an area known as the green zone.

First aid was provided to both men immediately.

The 23-year-old was rapidly evacuated to Tarin Kowt for further medical treatment. He arrived there within 41 minutes but was declared deceased on arrival.

The man who was wounded was also taken to Tarin Kowt where he remains in a satisfactory condition.

The scene was secured in order to conduct a post-blast investigation.

[buglerbilly]

Gen. Petraeus runs into resistance from Karzai over village defense forces

By Joshua Partlow and Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Foreign Service

Saturday, July 10, 2010

KABUL -- As he takes charge of the war effort in Afghanistan, Gen. David H. Petraeus has met sharp resistance from President Hamid Karzai to an American plan to assist Afghan villagers in fighting the Taliban on their own.

A first meeting last week between the new commander and the Afghan president turned tense after Karzai renewed his objections to the plan, according to U.S. officials. The idea of recruiting villagers into local defense programs is a key part of the U.S. military strategy in Afghanistan, and Karzai's stance poses an early challenge to Petraeus as he tries to fashion a collaborative relationship with the Afghan leader.

Senior U.S. officials say that the United States would like to expand the program to about two dozen sites across Afghanistan, double the current number, and are hoping to overcome Karzai's concerns. But the issue is delicate to many who fear that such experiments could lead Afghanistan further into warlordism and out-of-control militias.

The U.S. initiative was developed under Petraeus's predecessor, ousted Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, although Petraeus has been a strong supporter of such programs. When Petraeus commanded the Iraq war, U.S. forces partnered with tens of thousands of civilian guards, including former insurgents, who fought against the group al-Qaeda in Iraq.

Despite his tensions with other U.S. officials, McChrystal formed a close working relationship with Karzai. The question of whether Petraeus can replicate that bond remains a significant uncertainty hanging over the war effort.

"We always have long meetings and many arguments," said a senior Afghan official who was present at Karzai's meeting with Petraeus. "We always try to teach our foreign partners how to deal with a situation like this. We Afghans know better than you."

In his first week on the job, Petraeus has met with Karzai three times and discussed many topics. But on at least one issue, the village defense forces, the general has run into resistance from Karzai. The policy would give the United States and the Interior Ministry authority to pursue a variety of programs, including expanding the pilot projects that give uniforms and salaries to villagers trained by U.S. Special Operations forces.

The Afghan official said Karzai is wary of creating "a force that will be viewed as a private militia."

"We should be empowering the community in a way that doesn't risk future stability," the official said. "We are not looking for a solution only for our sake. We try to find solutions for the sake of the U.S. and Afghanistan."

A senior U.S. military official described the initial Petraeus-Karzai meeting on July 3 as a "forthright" discussion of "concerns and needs" on both sides and said Petraeus and his staff came out of it feeling that it was valuable for getting a clear firsthand sense of Karzai's views.

At a subsequent dinner in Kabul attended by Petraeus, Karzai, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and others, Karzai asked Petraeus to revisit the idea of the village defense, which Petraeus and Karzai plan to discuss at a meeting Tuesday. Petraeus is attempting to quickly respond to Karzai's concerns point by point, U.S. military officials said.

Some of Karzai's concerns are "understandable," a senior military official said. "There are potential downsides with these, and safeguards are needed," the official said. "That's what we're working with our Afghan partners to ensure."

When Karzai initially objected to the initiative, his skepticism was shared by his then-interior minister, Hanif Atmar, and by U.S. Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry. But Atmar has since been fired, and U.S. officials said that Petraeus's arrival has changed the dynamic between the civilian and military sides of the U.S. effort. While it was not made explicit in President Obama's offer or Petraeus's acceptance of the command, officials said that the general's stature, and the perilous state of the war, have clearly positioned him as the senior member of the U.S. team.

Attempts to recruit villagers to fight the Taliban have emerged in many forms in Afghanistan. One effort called the Village Stability Program (formerly Local Defense Initiatives), run by U.S. Special Operations forces, has been tested in places such as the volatile Argandab Valley of Kandahar. But without Karzai's approval of the policy, the spread of the program would be limited.

Another iteration, the Afghan Public Protection Police, is intended to provide an Afghan government structure over the armed villagers and salaries paid by the Interior Ministry. This program is intended to eventually envelop programs run by the U.S. Special Forces, as Afghans take more control of security in the country.

A plan for local defense forces was expected to be endorsed Thursday at a large coordinating meeting in Kabul of Afghan officials and military and civilian representatives from donor countries, to pave the way for formal introduction at an international conference in Kabul in 10 days. But while the concept was supported, it was not officially endorsed as some at the meeting wanted clarification on how it would work, according to three participants.

"It's a very well-thought-out concept, which is aimed at protecting civilians and enabling and empowering the local people to gather behind the law," said Vygaudas Usackas, the European Union special representative in Afghanistan. "The concern which we had as the European Union is to see a clear chain of command [within the Interior Ministry] so it doesn't become a separate militia."

DeYoung reported from Washington. Staff writer Rajiv Chandrasekaran, also in Washington, contributed to this report.

[buglerbilly]

Update on the Pakistan blast..............

Dozens die in blast targeting government offices, prison in northwest Pakistan


Suicide bombers kill more than 50 in Pakistan
Two suicide bombers struck outside a government office Friday in a tribal region where Pakistan's army has fought the Taliban, killing more than 50 people and wounding more than 100.


By Haq Nawaz Khan and Joshua Partlow
Saturday, July 10, 2010

PESHAWAR, PAKISTAN -- A massive suicide bombing targeting government offices and a prison in Pakistan's volatile tribal borderlands killed about 50 people and wounded more than 70 others Friday, according to local officials.

The blast, one of the deadliest in Pakistan this year, tore through a large crowd, including disabled people who were at the government center in the Mohmand Agency to collect wheelchairs, Pakistani officials said. The agency is part of the northwestern Federally Administered Tribal Areas.

Other reports say 20-25 of the people killed were invalids in or collecting wheelchairs............:cuckoo

Dozens of shops and buildings buckled, and a barrier wall at the prison collapsed, freeing several insurgents, a Pakistani intelligence official said. The Associated Press put the death toll at 62, with at least 111 people injured.

The attack showed the resilience of insurgents along Pakistan's border with Afghanistan, a rugged region that is the main refuge for Taliban and al-Qaeda militants still willing to strike at government installations despite a stepped-up military campaign by the Pakistani army.

A suicide bomber on a motorbike doesn't show "resilience" its shows dispassion, debauchery and a complete disregard for what are supposed to be their own people............

The army has failed to defeat insurgents in Mohmand after years of fighting.

Ghulam Rasool, the deputy political administrator of Mohmand, told local reporters that the blast had targeted his office but that he was not there at the time and was unharmed. Other officials said four policemen were among the dead.

One bomb was transported on a motorcycle, officials said, and the AP reported that a second bomb exploded nearly simultaneously.

Some officials described the prison as the primary target. A political officer in the region told local reporters that about 25 prisoners, including four insurgents, fled the prison when its main gate and a portion of the boundary wall caved in.

"The target was mainly the prison in Yaka Ghund, to release some of the arrested militants," the intelligence official said.

Partlow reported from Kabul. Khan is a special correspondent.

[buglerbilly]

The Fallen Soldier has been named..............RIP

Army was soldier's lifelong passion

July 10, 2010 - 6:20PM

The army was Private Nathan Bewes' lifelong passion.

Even on holidays in Australia last month all he could talk about was getting back to his mates in Afghanistan.

On Friday, Pte Bewes became Australia's 17th soldier to die in Afghanistan.

The 23-year-old's family and partner have paid tribute to him as a dedicated soldier, loving son, brother and partner.

His father Gary, mother Kaye and sister Stephanie said Nathan was inspired by his family's history of military and community service.

"The army was his lifelong passion. It was all he wanted," the Bewes family said in a statement released by Defence on Saturday.

"When he was on leave from Afghanistan in June all he could talk about was getting back to the deployment and his mates."

Born in Kogarah in NSW, Nathan joined the Army Cadets as a 13-year-old and by 15 was a Cadet Under Officer.

He joined the army in 2005 and was on his second deployment in Afghanistan, serving with the First Mentoring Task Force. He had also been deployed to East Timor in 2006.

Pte Bewes, from the Brisbane-based 6th Battalion, The Royal Australian Regiment (6RAR), was killed by an improvised explosive device while on patrol in the Chora Valley region of Oruzgan Province just before midnight (AEST) on Friday.

Gary, Kaye and Stephanie Bewes said their son and brother was a loyal friend who always cared for his mates.

"At his 21st birthday party we could not get over such camaraderie between young men," they said.

"We could not believe that such mateship could exist between young men in this day and age.

"We are missing him dearly."

His partner Alice Walsh said "Bewesy" was "an amazing mate to our many friends and was loved by everyone".

"Nate was my best friend, my soul mate, the one I knew I'd be with for the rest of my life," Ms Walsh said in a statement.

"He always made me laugh and I have never loved anyone so much.

"He was an excellent soldier who was willing to put his life in danger, along with his mates from Team 3, for the people of Australia."

The 23-year-old is the sixth Australian soldier to die in Afghanistan in a little over a month.

Giving an insight into the anguish faced by soldiers' loved ones while they are on deployment, Ms Walsh said their families should be proud.

"While your loved one comes home to you every day there are others who are worrying if there will be another day," she said.

"Soldiers' families be proud, as they are out changing the world, making history and putting their lives on the line for Australia.

"Take one minute out of your day to pray or wish upon a star for a soldier so that they may all come back home safely one day to his/her family."

© 2010 AAP

[buglerbilly]

Six U.S. troops killed in blasts, under gunfire in Afghanistan


In this photo taken Thursday, July 8, 2010, Afghan soldiers pause during a patrol with United States Army soldiers from Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion of the 508 Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 82nd Airborne, in the volatile Arghandab Valley, outside Kandahar City. (AP Photo/Kevin Frayer) (Kevin Frayer - AP)


In this photo taken Thursday, July 8, 2010, A United States soldier from Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion of the 508 Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 82nd Airborne, takes cover in the high grass in an orchard during a patrol in the volatile Arghandab Valley, outside Kandahar City. (AP Photo/Kevin Frayer) (Kevin Frayer - AP)


An Afghan National Army soldier wears an ammunition belt around his neck during a joint patrol with United States Army soldiers from Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion of the 508 Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 82nd Airborne, in the volatile Arghandab Valley, outside Kandahar City, Friday, July 9, 2010. (AP Photo/Kevin Frayer) (Kevin Frayer - AP)


Smoke comes out from the scene of an explosion in Kandahar south of Kabul, Afghanistan on Saturday, July 10, 2010. One bystander was killed when the bomb, concealed in a parked motorcycle, exploded in the middle of the afternoon, said the city's security chief. (AP Photo/Allauddin Khan) (Allauddin Khan - AP)


An Afghan policeman inspects a damaged vehicle at the scene of an explosion in Kandahar south of Kabul, Afghanistan on Saturday, July 10, 2010. One bystander was killed when the bomb, concealed in a parked motorcycle, exploded in the middle of the afternoon, said the city's security chief. (AP Photo/Allauddin Khan) (Allauddin Khan - AP)


Afghans march with a banner which reads" We want to form our Islamic government to stop the wilful operations of the foreign forces in Afghanistan" during a demonstration in Mazar-i- Sharif, Balkh province north of Kabul, Afghanistan on Saturday, July 10, 2010. Dozens of demonstrators blamed a NATO-led operation in the city on Wednesday, in which two people were killed and three were arrested. (AP Photo/Mustafa Najafizada) (Mustafa Najafizada - AP)

By Joshua Partlow
Sunday, July 11, 2010

KABUL -- Six U.S. service members died in separate attacks in Afghanistan on Saturday, another round of killings in what is shaping up to be the most violent summer of the nearly nine-year war.

The troops died from diverse causes, including homemade bombs, gunfire and an accidental explosion. Four were killed in eastern Afghanistan and the others in southern Afghanistan, the two regions of the country where the Taliban insurgency is strongest.

Both deaths in the south were caused by roadside bombs; those in the east involved bombings, small-arms fire, an unspecified insurgent attack and the accidental blast, according to NATO statements. On the day deaths occur, few details are released about the incidents until families are notified.

NATO convoys in the north and east were also the targets of bombings Saturday, but there were no reported deaths.

This month, 23 U.S. soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan. Last month was the deadliest of the war, with 102 NATO soldiers dying, including 60 Americans, according to the Web site http://icasualties.org, which tracks fatalities in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Summer is the season when insurgent aggression intensifies, as the thawing snow allows greater freedom of movement in the mountains. Military officials also attribute the rising violence of recent weeks to the 30,000 new U.S. troops who have arrived or are on their way to Afghanistan, pushing into insurgent havens where the coalition has had little or no presence before.

Afghan civilians have also been among the victims of the violence. On Saturday, 11 Pakistanis were gunned down in the Paktia province, on the Afghan-Pakistani border, after they crossed into Afghanistan to shop, the Associated Press reported. The slain civilians were Shiite Muslims.

[buglerbilly]

Britain's top general in Afghanistan admits 'courageous restraint' must change

Britain's most senior general in Afghanistan has admitted that rules for opening fire on Taliban insurgents must be "re-examined" following complaints from soldiers that they were too restrictive.

By Thomas Harding, Kabul

Published: 10:00PM BST 11 Jul 2010



Royal Marines during a patrol in Afghanistan Photo: JANE MINGAY Soldiers and Royal Marines told The Daily Telegraph last week that their lives were being endangered by the policy of "courageous restraint" introduced by Gen Stanley McChrystal to cut down the number of civilian casualties.

In an interview with the Telegraph, Lt Gen Sir Nick Parker said troops in more dangerous areas should be able to use "all the tools at their disposal".

Last month was the bloodiest since Nato troops entered Afghanistan in 2001, and it is understood that soldiers will be given more flexibility in using lethal force to defend themselves after some complained they were fighting with "one hand tied behind our backs".

"In some areas we have over-corrected and we have to absolutely make sure we bring that gently back into line," said the Deputy Commander ISAF (International Security Assistance Force).

"Our soldiers have to be committed to the very challenging fight that they are in, they have to have all the tools at their disposal and they have got to feel free to use them in the right way, but what we must do is not alienate the population.

"So we need to re-examine this and make sure that there has been no risk of overcorrecting. We have to ensure that we are allowing our people to have the right degree of manouevre on operations to deal with the circumstances they face."

But the general added that recent special forces operations that had been "extremely effective" in capturing or killing high-level Taliban and could force senior commanders to defect.

"What you have to have is effective operations that target the bad people.

"The effect, hopefully, is that they want to be reintegrated.

The operations, which have intensified over the last six months, are designed to "remove important people from the battlefield, to make conditions better for those living there and to make our troops' job easier, but also to undermine the coherency of the insurgency at higher levels."

Lt Gen Parker, speaking at his headquarters in Kabul, said it was a "hugely emotional" decision to remove British troops from Sangin, where his own son, an officer in The Rifles, suffered a double amputation, but it made military sense to concentrate troops in the more densely populated areas of central Helmand.

The general had to run Afghanistan for almost a month after Gen Stanley McChrystal was sacked by President Barack Obama for insubordination, a decision that came as a "deep shock".

"We were very sad that it happened but the extraordinary thing is that his plan was so effective that the platform was easily taken over by (Gen David) Petraeus."

The general, who has been in post for almost a year, said that while the campaign was "bloody hard work" it was his "professional belief" that progress was being made.

[buglerbilly]

Karzai to push for removing up to 50 ex-Taliban officials from U.N. blacklist


Afghan President Hamid Karzai's diplomatic outreach at the United Nations has taken on renewed urgency in recent weeks as he has begun to press for a political settlement to the conflict in his country. (Kimimasa Mayama/bloomberg News)

By Colum Lynch and Joshua Partlow
Washington Post Staff Writers

Monday, July 12, 2010

UNITED NATIONS -- Afghan President Hamid Karzai plans to seek the removal of up to 50 former Taliban officials from a U.N. terrorism blacklist -- more than a quarter of those on the list -- in a gesture intended to advance political reconciliation talks with insurgents, according to a senior Afghan official.

The Afghan government has sought for years to delist former Taliban figures who it says have cut ties with the Islamist movement. But the campaign to cull names from the list, which imposes a travel ban and other restrictions on 137 individuals tied to the Taliban, has taken on renewed urgency in recent weeks as Karzai has begun to press for a political settlement to Afghanistan's nearly nine-year-old conflict.

The diplomatic outreach at the United Nations has been met with resistance from U.N. officials, who are demanding more evidence that the individuals in question have renounced violence, embraced the new Afghan constitution and severed any links with the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

On Tuesday, Richard C. Holbrooke, President Obama's special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, traveled to New York to meet with U.N. officials to press them to move forward on the delisting process, according to sources familiar with the talks.

The United States opposes the delisting of some of the most violent Taliban fighters, including leader Mohammad Omar. But Holbrooke is eager to reach agreement on removing a slate of purportedly reformed Taliban members ahead of a major international conference in Kabul this month that is aimed at bolstering stability in Afghanistan.

Thomas Mayr-Harting, an Austrian diplomat responsible for overseeing the terrorism list, has made it clear that a specially charged U.N. committee he leads will not approve the delisting solely to boost the peace process. He has also voiced frustration that Afghanistan has not made a detailed case for delisting.

"Let me make this absolutely clear: If this information is to be taken into consideration in the course of the ongoing review, receiving it must be a matter not of weeks but of days," he told the U.N. Security Council on June 30.

In October 1999, the Security Council imposed sanctions on members of the Taliban, which ruled Afghanistan at the time, for refusing to surrender Osama bin Laden to U.S. authorities in connection with al-Qaeda's role in the August 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa. In January 2001, more than 100 Taliban leaders were added to the list.

After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the United States ushered through resolutions that added al-Qaeda members and their supporters to the blacklist. The measures include a travel ban, an arms embargo and a prohibition on the direct or indirect provision of funds or economic resources.

The stringent requirements of the U.N. review process have undercut Karzai's efforts. The Afghan president is now planning to make a more modest request that 30 to 50 names be delisted to "remove all those Taliban who are not part of al-Qaeda and are not terrorists," according to a senior Afghan official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, as did others quoted for this article.

Russia has repeatedly rebuffed requests for removing former Taliban officials from the list, arguing that it has seen insufficient evidence that they have broken links with the armed insurgency and its al-Qaeda allies. Moscow has long had antipathy for the Islamist Taliban movement, which shares some roots in the mujaheddin resistance that drove Soviet forces out of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Russia also sees the Taliban and al-Qaeda as maintaining ties to Islamist militant groups in Central Asia and the Caucasus. When the Taliban was in power, Russia provided military backing to the Northern Alliance, which resisted Taliban rule.

"The Russian position is perfectly reasonable," said Richard Barrett, who heads an expert panel established by the Security Council to monitor enforcement of the sanctions against the Taliban and al-Qaeda. "People should not come off the list just because there is a political process. Mullah Omar and others aren't prevented from participating in the political process even though they are on the list."

As it awaits Afghanistan's request to delist more former Taliban officials, the Security Council has proceeded with its review of about a dozen individuals whose names were submitted for removal several years ago.

Among them is a former Taliban education minister, Mullah Arsala Rahmani, who is a member of the Afghan senate.

Rahmani said in an interview that after he spoke with a U.N. delegation in Kabul last month, he was led to believe that he "was going to be removed from the blacklist," although he said he was not told that explicitly.

"I'm very happy I'm going to be removed," Rahmani said. Under the terms of the sanctions, his bank account has been frozen. Once his name is cut from the blacklist, he said, "I'll be able to open an account and . . . get some money."

Despite being blacklisted, though, Rahmani said his travel has not been restricted. He said he has traveled to Britain, France and Kenya since his name was put on the list.

"Karzai wants the U.N. to remove all the people's names from the blacklist," Rahmani said. "And that's something that all Afghans want, because it will help in the process of peace negotiations."

Partlow reported from Kabul.

[buglerbilly]

VBCIs Arrive in Afghanistan

(Source: French Ministry of Defence; issued July 11, 2010)

(Issued in French only; unofficial translation by defense-aerospace.com)


The first French Army VBCI combat vehicles arrive at Camp Warehouse, the main French base in Afghanistan. (French MoD photo)

The first VBCI infantry combat vehicles arrived in Afghanistan on June 27, 2010. The Direction Générale de l’Armement was instrumental in preparing this first foreign deployment.

On May 12 the SS Eider, a roll-on, roll-off ship chartered by the French Ministry of Defence sailed from Toulon naval base with a load of VBCIs belonging to the 35th Infantry Regiment, stationed in Belfort, that it was ferrying to Afghanistan for the vehicle’s first operational mission.

“The entire Program Team was impatient to receive the first combat reports,” said Philippe Memasçon, VBCI program director at UM TER. The 35th Infantry Regiment was the first French Army unit to trial the VBCI, and the reports we received were uniformly very positive. Today, it’s the operator to try to keep up with the vehicle’s capabilities, notably in terms of firepower and digitalization. The VBCI is an exceptionally capable vehicle,” he added.

Crewed by a pilot and a gunner to operate its 25mm automatic cannon and capable of carrying fully-equipped infantrymen, 7.86 meters long and weighing 28 metric tonnes, the VBCI will provide transport, protection and support to infantry combat groups and to their command echelons.

“In December 2009, the Army staff requested a number of specific improvements to prepare for the first operational deployment,” continued Philippe Lemasçon. “Thanks to the work of DGA, the Section Technique de l’Armée de Terre and the manufacturer, we managed to upgrade the vehicles to adapt them to the requirements of the Afghan theatre: additional protection against IEDs, an RPG protection kit, and some minor modifications to the turret.”

The respect of the schedule was an essential element in the VBCI’s success, and its delivery rate of 10 vehicles per month was scrupulously adhered to since July 2008. In May, the VBCI programme management team was awarded the “DGA Quality Trophy 2010,” for the best management of an armaments program, in recognition of its efforts.

A true synergy also developed around the VBCI in the fields of training and support, with for example in November 2009 the opening of “crew” and “troop” firing simulators and of driving simulators. The award of a logistical support contract for production vehicles will inaugurate a new support structure for the French army. “The VBCI is a coherent fighting system in terms of function and operation, while its information system is perfectly suited to the needs of the digital battlefield,” concludes Philippe Lemasçon.

-ends-

[buglerbilly]

LA Police Train Marines in Techniques

July 12, 2010

Associated Press



LOS ANGELES -- A tough-talking, muscular Los Angeles police sergeant steadily rattled off tips to a young Marine riding shotgun as they raced in a patrol car to a drug bust: Be aware of your surroundings. Watch people's body language. Build rapport.

Marine Lt. Andrew Abbott, 23, took it all in as he peered out at the graffiti-covered buildings, knowing that the lessons he learned recently in one of the city's toughest neighborhoods could help him soon in the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan.

"People are the center of gravity and if you do everything you can to protect them, then they'll protect you," he said. "That's something true here and pretty much everywhere."

Abbott was among 70 Marines from Camp Pendleton in a training exercise that aims to adapt the investigative techniques the LAPD has used for decades against violent street gangs to take on the Taliban more as a powerful drug-trafficking mob than an insurgency.

The Marines hope that learning to work like a cop on a beat will help them better track the Taliban, build relationships with Afghans leery of foreign troops and make them better teachers as they try to professionalize an Afghan police force beset by corruption.

The troops believe they can learn valuable lessons from the LAPD, which has made inroads into communities after highly publicized abuses, from the videotaped beating of black motorist Rodney King to corruption in an anti-gang unit.

"Their role is to win the hearts and minds of the community and that's what they did," said Marine Staff Sgt. Brendan Flynn, who also works as a Los Angeles police officer and will be deployed to help train Afghan police.

The weeklong exercise -- unbeknownst to the public -- involved Marines dressed in jeans and T-shirts observing drug busts, witnessing prostitution arrests and even following a murder case. It was the largest group of Marines to embed with the city's officers.

Abbott rode with Sgt. Arno Clair, a 16-year veteran with salt-and-pepper hair who swims up to a mile (1.6 kilometers) a day.

During their afternoon together, police handcuffed a bus driver -- moments after he was caught by an undercover officer with $25,000 worth of crack cocaine outside an apartment complex in a south-central Los Angeles neighborhood long plagued by violent gangs.

The tattooed suspect wearing an earring and baggy shorts seemed a world away from the Kalashnikov-toting Taliban fighters, just as the streets of south-central Los Angeles are from the dusty villages of mud-brick houses in Afghanistan.

But in many ways, police in Los Angeles' crime-ridden neighborhoods use the same skills that Marines say could help them.

Marines are in charge of training Afghanistan's army and police but often have no police experience themselves. Their success in building effective police forces is considered key to stabilizing the country and allowing foreign troops to withdraw.

Marines also are changing their approach, realizing that marching into towns to show force alienates communities. Instead, they are being taught to fan out with interpreters to strike up conversations with truck drivers, money exchangers, cell phone sellers and others.

The rapport building can net valuable information that could even alert troops about potential attacks.

Marines can gather intelligence by picking up the notebooks, receipts and other papers left behind in raids that could provide insight into the opium business the Taliban uses to buy their weapons, Afghan expert Gretchen Peters said.

She told Marines before the Los Angeles patrols that they should follow the lead of some Afghans who have gone from using the term "mujahadeen" or "holy warrior" to identify the Taliban to calling them gangsters.

That, she said, shows how fed up the villagers are with being extorted by them and calling them gangsters will win them over.

"Think of the Taliban as the Sopranos in turbans," she said, referring to the TV crime family. "I think essentially they're criminals."

Peters, who has written extensively about the Taliban being a criminal network, has been talking to troops across the country before they deploy to Helmand Province, a top opium-producing region.

Afghanistan supplies 90 percent of the world's opium, the main ingredient of heroin, and is also the leading global supplier of hashish. Last year, opium seizures soared 924 percent because of better cooperation between Afghan and international forces.

In the end, the police training mission is what will win the war, said Marine 2nd Lt. Jared Siebenaler, 24, who spent the past six months training police in Afghanistan. But he acknowledged their police mission faces enormous challenges.

Siebenaler said many recruits tested positive for drugs, arriving to work high on hashish if they came at all. Supervisors were believed to be skimming money off their officers' measly salaries. One force had men from two tribes who could barely stand each other.

And then there's the language barrier between Marines and the Afghan police.

But like most police work, getting past issues of trust and cultural difference begins with a brief encounter on a street.

As Clair and Abbott cruised past a row of dilapidated homes, the police sergeant told him to notice how a person's walk and dress chang