Why the US is losing in Afghanistan - updates on the Pashtun insurgency

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Taliban hit Afghan police posts; free 23 prisoners

Reuters

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE66H0BQ20100718

July 18, 2010

Taliban guerrillas staged a series of raids in western Afghanistan Sunday, blowing up the gate of a jail and freeing 23 insurgent prisoners, officials said.

Ousted in a U.S.-led invasion in 2001, the Taliban have made a comeback in recent years, dealing heavy losses to Afghan and foreign forces and carrying out brazen attacks on key locations, including in the capital.

Insurgents attacked four police posts leading to the center of Farah town early Sunday, said Mohammad Younus Rasooli, the governor of western Farah province, bordering Iran.

"They kept the police preoccupied and the same time blew up the gate of Farah's jail, which resulted in the escape of 23 prisoners," Rasooli told Reuters by phone.

Four of the inmates were immediately arrested because they had suffered wounds in the escape, he said, adding seven more were captured.

A policeman was killed during the incident, which lasted several hours, he said.

A spokesman for the Taliban, Qari Mohammad Yousuf, confirmed that members of the movement were behind the attacks.

(Reporting by Sharafuddin Sharafyar; writing by Sayed Salahuddin; Editing by David Fox)





 

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Taliban adapt tactics to meet US surge

by Chris Sands

http://uruknet.info/?p=m68051&hd=&size=1&l=e

July 18, 2010

KABUL // In the shadows of the mountains south-west of Kabul, among the apple orchards and cherry trees of the Tangi valley, lies a shrine that has become a site of pilgrimage and part of local legend.

Young and old travel from across the area to offer their respects and pray at the grave of Fazel Rabi, a Taliban commander killed about two years ago.

He spent his last days in Maidan Wardak province on the run, moving from house to house and village to village as foreign troops hunted him down. Then one night they got their man, catching up with him and, the story goes, finishing him off while he slept in a mosque.

The facts surrounding Mr Rabi’s final moments are impossible to verify and could, like a lot of what shapes this conflict, be half-truth, rumour, myth or propaganda. But what seems beyond doubt is that, despite his death, both he and his fellow rebels are still far from defeated.

Indeed, in the Tangi valley and throughout whole swaths of Maidan Wardak, the cult of martyrdom and the urge to fight an enemy regarded as apostate only appears to be on the rise.

"If they have the idea that by killing one mujahid the ranks of the mujahideen will decrease, that’s wrong. I can tell you that when they kill one mujahid, from one drop of his blood Allah will make a thousand other mujahideen," said Omari, 20, a member of the Taliban.

"The mujahideen are all resisting with the help of the people who love Allah and want Allah’s law in the world. The work of jihad will continue until the end of days."

Maidan Wardak is just a 40-minute journey by road to the south-west of Kabul city. In recent years it has become a key battleground in the war because of this very proximity and the fact that one of the country’s main highways runs right through the province.

With military supply convoys routinely attacked there and concern growing about the Taliban’s clear influence in such a strategically important location, hundreds of extra US troops were sent to the area soon after Barack Obama entered the White House.

Security has since improved in the provincial capital, Maidan Shahr, but that has done little to discourage the insurgency.

During a series of interviews conducted there and in Kabul over a two-month period, residents from all sides have claimed that heavy fighting is continuing elsewhere in Maidan Wardak as the rebels adapt their tactics in the face of US reinforcements. The government has denied this.

Omari is from the district of Jaghatu and forms part of a unit of local young Taliban who come from across the province.

Along with his colleagues, he seemed neither remotely tired of the bloodshed nor prepared to accept some kind of peace deal. Indeed, for all of them the only acceptable outcome to the war is an end to the occupation and the creation of a hard-line Islamic state.

Nisar Ahmad Haymat, a fighter from Sayadabad district, also 20, spoke angrily about "Jews and Christians", and accused foreign troops of being in Afghanistan to kill Muslims and steal its natural resources.

"All the people in our area are happy with the mujahideen. You will not find any man in any village who has a problem with them," he said.

Although this statement carries the air of exaggeration, the insurgency does enjoy significant support and momentum in large parts of Afghanistan, including Maidan Wardak.

A report published by the International Council on Security and Development, a European-based think tank, revealed that 74 per cent of those surveyed in Kandahar and Helmand provinces believed working with fore ign forces is wrong and 55 per cent accused the US and its allies of being here for their own benefit, to destroy or occupy the country, or to destroy Islam.

The report added that 65 per cent of respondents want the Taliban’s spiritual leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, to join the government.

One resident of Maidan Wardak who does not back the insurgency is an unemployed engineer who asked to remain anonymous out of fear for his life. He lives in the Tangi Valley, the home of the former rebel commander Fazel Rabi.

"The Taliban are not naturally strong, but they have become stronger because the government has not been able to fulfil its promises," he said.

According to the father of eight, the guerrillas have controlled his area with virtual impunity for the past three years.

"They walk from day to night very freely. The people support them and those that don’t still have to live under their control because they don’t have the power to resist or run away," he said.

The governor of Maidan Wardak, Halim Fidai, however, painted an entirely different picture of the situation in the province.

He insisted that security has drastically improved and claimed that elders and religious scholars have openly turned against the Taliban. He blamed the media for only reporting isolated incidents of bad news.

"The enemy has been pushed towards the very far flank areas, the mountainous areas, and even there they cannot stay in one place," he said.

- csands@thenational.ae

 

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Managed News: Inside The US/NATO Military Industrial Media Empire


by Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff

http://uruknet.info/?p=m68055&hd=&size=1&l=e

t r u t h o u t , July 18, 2010

We face what appears to be a military industrial media empire so powerful and complex that truth is mostly absent or reported in disconnected segments with little historical context. A case in point: The London Times reported on June 5, 2010, that American troops are now operating in 75 countries. Has President Obama secretly sanctioned a huge increase in the number of US Special Forces carrying out search-and-destroy missions against al-Qaeda around the world? If so, this increase is far in excess of special forces operations under the Bush administration, and reflects how aggressively Obama is pursuing al-Qaeda behind his public rhetoric of global engagement and diplomacy. Somehow this information didn't make it into the US media.

"There is nothing so strong or safe in an emergency of life as the simple truth."

- Charles Dickens

The US, in cooperation with NATO, is building global occupation forces for the control of international resources in support of Trilaterialist - US, Europe, Japan - corporate profits. A New York Times report on the availability of a trillion dollars in mineral wealth in Afghanistan, on top of the need for an oil/gas pipeline from the Caspian Sea, suggests other reasons for US objectives in the region.

Jim Lobe of Inter Press Service wrote on June 15, 2010, "The timing of the publication of a major New York Times story on the vast untapped mineral wealth that lies beneath Afghanistan's soil is raising major questions about the intent of the Pentagon. Blake Hounshell, managing editor at Foreign Policy magazine, says that the US Geological Service (USGS) already published a comprehensive inventory of Afghanistan's non-oil mineral resources on the Internet in 2007, as did the British Geological Survey. Much of their work was based on explorations and surveys undertaken by the Soviet Union during its occupation of Afghanistan during the 1980s."

Given the previous reports, there is nothing new about resources in Afghanistan that the Pentagon and US multinational corporations didn't already know. On the contrary, the public should consider whether the surfacing of this resource story is a managed-news press release being done at a time of sensitive concerns regarding NATO's mission in Afghanistan. A deliberate news insertion such as the mineral wealth story is designed to create support for a US/NATO global empire agenda.

Managed news includes both the release of specific stories intended to build public support, as well as the deliberate non-coverage of news stories that may undermine US goals. Have you been told about the continuing privatization of this global war? Independent journalist Jeremy Scahill wrote in The Nation magazine on November 23, 2009 about how Blackwater (Xe) operatives in the Pakistani port city of Karachi are gathering intelligence and helping to direct a secret US military drone bombing campaign in that country.

There was not much coverage of the report in Global Research on May 27, 2010, regarding new US capabilities for cyber warfare, announced recently by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates as the activation of the Pentagon's first computer command and the world's first comprehensive, multi-service military cyber operation. CYBERCOM is based at Fort Meade, Maryland, which also is home to the National Security Agency (NSA).

The US's Israeli partner in the Middle East demonstrated a skilled manipulation of the global media's coverage of the May 31 attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla. Israel controlled the news and images that emerged from the attack on the ships, asserting that the invading Israeli paratroopers were viciously attacked by crewmembers - resulting in the killing of several in "self defense." Israel sought to divert the focus of public discussion away from the illegitimate use of excessive force against a group of humanitarians - of diverse religious and national affiliations - to the blaming of the victims for causing their own deaths.

Managed news creates a Truth Emergency for the public inside the US/NATO Military Industrial Media Empire. Deliberate news management undermines the freedom of information on the doings of the powerful military/corporate entities though overt censorship, mass distractions, and artificial news - including stories timed for release to influence public opinion (i.e., propaganda).

A Truth Emergency is the lack of purity in news brought about by this propaganda and distraction. It is the state in which people, despite potentially being awash in a sea of information, lack the power of discernment resulting in a comprehensive ignorance of what is going on in the world. In short, we are living in a time where people do not know whom to trust for accurate information and yearn for the truth.

One antidote to the ongoing Truth Emergency is the creation of validated independent news by colleges and universities around the globe, where students and professors use research skills and databases to fact check and verify information that is reported to the public. For more about this, and what we can all do to counter managed news, see Project Censored International's new website at mediafreedominternational.org. Together, we can build accountability in our media and breathe life back into our withering republic.



 

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July 19, 2010

Firefight With Taliban   VIDEO

U.S. troops draw fire as they push out of base in Afghanistan


FIREFIGHT: Marines Caught in Vicious Battle With Taliban


AP
VIDEO: Intense gunfire from Taliban militants sends U.S. troops — and a Fox News crew — scrambling for cover as they push out of a base in Afghanistan.
Watch :

http://video.foxnews.com/v/4285489/firefight-with-taliban

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Roadside Bomb Kills at Least 6 Policemen in Southern Afghanistan

Published July 19, 2010
| Associated Press
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2010/07/19/roadside-bomb-kills-policemen-southern-afghanistan/

KABUL, Afghanistan -- A roadside bombing has killed six Afghan policemen in the country's south.

Chief of Khakrez district in Kandahar province Abdul Qayum Khan said four others were injured in Monday's blast.

He said the policemen were on their way to Kandahar city when the bombing occurred.

The Taliban are increasing attacks as Afghan and international forces ramp up security in the insurgents' stronghold.

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Patrick Cockburn: Unlike Iraq, dressing retreat up as success will be difficult


Sunday, 18 July 2010
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/patrick-cockburn-unlike-iraq-dressing-retreat-up-as-success-will-be-difficult-2029420.html



The greatest difficulty facing the US and Britain in Afghanistan is not that the Taliban is very strong, but that the Afghan government is very weak. This does not seem to be changing, and it is this that creates difficulties in making concrete plans and dates for an American and British withdrawal.


The Afghan President, Hamid Karzai, has always had a feeble grip on the country. When he was first mentioned as the future ruler of Afghanistan in 2001, I was talking to a local warlord in a village south of Kabul. He and his men hooted with merriment and kept asking me who he was. Another local leader in the same province raised the UN flag over his village and told me that he was planning to recognise the UN but not the new Afghan government.


Afghans have been listening attentively to the uncertain trumpet call in Washington since President Obama announced last year that he would first increase the number of US troops as part of an "Afghan surge", and then reduce the level of forces in 2011. His idea was to break the momentum of the Taliban's advance, inflict serious damage on them in the areas of their strongest support in Helmand and Kandahar provinces, and then negotiate.

But Afghans are ever eager to emerge on the winning side. The message they received was that the Americans and their allies were not going to stay too long. The Pakistani military and political elite drew similar conclusions and prepared themselves for the day when the American troops depart.

The US leadership is clearly divided on the merits of staying in Afghanistan, but cannot work out how to withdraw without too great a loss of face. It reached the same conclusion over Iraq, but there the situation was easier. The anti-US insurgents came from the Sunni community – which made up only 20 per cent of Iraqis – who were under intense pressure from the Shia government, the armed forces, militias and death squads. The insurgency in Afghanistan is drawn from the Pashtun community, 42 per cent of the population, and so far shows no sign of splitting.

With Iraq, it was enough that US voters got the impression they had won. A retreat could be conducted with no US objectives achieved, but nobody could be accused of cutting and running. This was the achievement of General Petraeus, now the military commander in Afghanistan.

But political and military conditions are wholly different there. Dressing up a withdrawal as some sort of success will be far more difficult in Afghanistan.

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Clinton aims to refine goals of Afghan war

Clinton starts Asia tour aimed at refining goals of prolonged war in Afghanistan

MATTHEW LEE
AP News
http://wire.antiwar.com/2010/07/18/clinton-aims-to-refine-goals-of-afghan-war-5/

Jul 18, 2010 07:19 EDT

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton started a South Asia tour on Sunday aimed at refining the goals of the nearly 9-year-old war in Afghanistan and pushing neighboring nations to work together in the fight against al-Qaida and Taliban extremists.

Clinton landed in Islamabad where she will underscore the need for Afghan-Pakistani cooperation in winning the war but also announce plans to beef up U.S. development assistance to Pakistan, which is rife with anti-American sentiment.

In talks with Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani on Sunday and military and civilian officials on Monday, Clinton is seeking to convince Pakistanis the U.S. is committed to the country's long-term development needs and not just short-term security gains.

This, officials hope, will lead to greater Pakistani cooperation on key U.S. policy goals, particularly combatting Pakistan-based militants accused of conspiring to attack the United States, including the failed Times Square bombing, and stepping up action against extremists along the Afghan border.

"To get there we need to change the core of the relationship with Pakistan," said Richard Holbrooke, the Obama administration's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Clinton plans to announce about $500 million in several new development programs — funded by a bill approved by Congress last year to triple nonmilitary aid to Pakistan with $1.5 billion a year over five years — that will focus on water, energy, agriculture and health.

These initiatives will mark the second phase of projects begun under a new and enhanced "strategic partnership" that began last year.

Holbrooke noted that when Clinton visited Pakistan last October she had "waded into continually hostile and skeptical crowds." But he maintained that the new U.S. focus is "producing a change in Pakistani attitudes, first within the government and gradually, more slowly, within the public."

Still, he and other official concede, mistrust of America runs deep in Pakistan, particularly over unmanned drone strikes which are aimed at militants but kill or maim civilians and to many Pakistanis represent an unacceptable violation of sovereignty.

Vali Nasr, a Holbrooke deputy, said overcoming the suspicion remains a work in progress.

"We're beginning to see movement, but this is not going to happen overnight," he said. "We're not going to be able to get them aligned over a one-year time period on every single issue and change 30 years of foreign policy of Pakistan on a dime."

Equally important, officials say, is getting Pakistan and Afghanistan on the same page.

Holbrooke said last week that "nothing could be more important to the resolution of the war in Afghanistan than a common understanding between Afghanistan and Pakistan on what their strategic purpose is."

After Pakistan, Clinton will attend an international conference on Afghanistan in Kabul on Tuesday.

Security has been tightened across the capital ahead the conference, which will be attended by diplomats from 60 nations as well as the heads of NATO and the United Nations.

Still on Sunday, a suicide bomber in the eastern section of Kabul killed three civilians and injured dozens more.

Clinton's visit to Afghanistan comes as American lawmakers and voters are increasingly questioning the course of the drawn-out war with rising death tolls among U.S. and international troops and growing questions about corruption.

Last month was the deadliest of the war for international forces: 103 coalition troops were killed, despite the infusion of tens of thousands of new U.S. troops. So far in July, 54 international troops have died, 39 of them American. An American service member was killed by a blast in eastern Afghanistan on Saturday, and an American died in a blast in the south on Friday.

Later in the week, Clinton will meet up with Defense Secretary Robert Gates in South Korea, where tensions with the communist North have risen after the sinking of a South Korean warship that was blamed on the North.

She will finish her trip in Vietnam for discussions with regional leaders. Among the topics will be the upcoming elections in Myanmar.

Source: AP News

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'Afghan troops need better vetting and better conditions'

The new commander of British troops in Helmand talks exclusively to Kim Sengupta


Monday, 19 July 2010
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/afghan-troops-need-better-vetting-and-better-conditions-2029772.html?action=Popup&gallery=no

Brigadier Felton visits his troops in Operation Omid Do (Hope 2) on Saturday

Brigadier Richard Felton points to the maps on the wall of his office in Lashkar Gah, dotted with markers for impending military operations over the long, hot, Afghan fighting season. On other walls are the details of the ferocious campaign to date, of ground gained and lives lost – the stark statistics of war.


As the world's top diplomats head to Kabul for tomorrow's conference and the chorus of questions about the Nato mission continues to grow, the commander of the British troops in Helmand is planning the next move in the unrelenting conflict. The stated aim is to wrest territory from the Taliban and extend the shaky reach of the government of Hamid Karzai with the Afghan forces playing an increasing role. It is a tough and bloody process. The British forces have lost eight of their comrades in the space of four days, three of them at the hands of a trusted ally, an Afghan soldier they had lived and fought beside.

In his first interview since assuming command, Brigadier Felton says his most immediate concern is to combat the threat from the enemy within by tightening the vetting procedure for recruits to the Afghan forces. But he is swift to add that another factor is to improve the harsh conditions Afghan soldiers endure while serving on the frontline.


A strengthened co-operation between Nato and Afghan forces is at the heart of the West's exit strategy (last week's Operation Omid Do was the first Afghan-led military operation in the war) and should remain so, despite the shock to the system caused by last week's deaths of three British Gurkhas at PB (Patrol Base) 3 in Nahr-e-Saraj.

"[Partnering] is the tactical centre of my gravity," Brigadier Felton said. "Afghan people want Afghan security, they don't want Isaf (International Security Assistance Force) security. We can't hope to understand all the social dynamics of Afghanistan despite the extensive cultural training we get before deployment. We see things through a Western lens, not an Afghan lens. Once we can hand over security to them we can review the combat role of our troops and the future.

"What happened at PB 3 will make our partnership stronger," he continued. "My commanders have said this will make them pull together more." Many Afghan soldiers, local and national, have come to say sorry. "They are ashamed of what happened."

To make the partnership work better, however, there is a need to reform conditions in the Afghan army where soldiers can get deployed to the frontline for up to four years with hardly a break, "sometimes without pay, often without seeing their families". This has led to problems with desertion and has also bred resentments which have led to outbreaks of violence.

Brigadier Felton is adamant that the PB 3 deaths should not weaken the idea of "courageous restraint" - the doctrine adopted by Nato forces in an effort to eliminate the civilian casualties that had caused widespread anger among the Afghan population and prompted repeated complaints from President Hamid Karzai.

To that end, he is proposing medals for British soldiers who don't take actions that could lead to civilian casualties, as well as those who excel in combat. It is an idea that is bound to lead to criticism in some quarters, but the chief of the Helmand force is holding firm.

"We need to consider what we mean by gallantry. I am not saying that some sorts of the more traditional definitions of gallantry are not valuable, but we need a change of mindset," he says. "In a conventional war, the man going up the hill to plant a flag got a medal. In this case, the person who doesn't fire, ends up getting injured, but doesn't kill civilians or damage property, has to be considered as well.

"Each individual case has to be judged by circumstances, but I would certainly consider recommendations for citations for people who have shown courageous restraint on a case by case basis," he says.

In his view, the most of his troops understand how the war can be lost through the excessive use of force, despite the casualties they are suffering. "I know it is difficult. I don't go on patrol every day, I don't get shot at every day, I don't have to go past somewhere a mate had stood on an IED ( improvised explosive device). I can understand the frustrations they feel, especially when it comes to the IEDs. But I think, despite all that, they understand," he said,

While he acknowledges that losses have mounted, he stresses that some of the important gains have not been recognised in Britain. "Sacrifices have been made. We have taken quite a lot of casualties this tour. I feel for every one of them, I can understand how it affects the Task Force because we are such a close knit team" he said. "But Afghanistan is not just about casualties and body-bags. I don't think people back home fully understand the progress that is being made. We are extending security, building schools, connecting people to governance. If we sat in the bases doing nothing, we wouldn't have had those casualties. But we have to go out to get the success we have achieved. It is frustrating that this is not getting across."

Politicians in the West are clamouring for a deadline for withdrawal. In the UK, David Cameron has said British troops will be back home by 2015; his Foreign Secretary William Hague talks of 2014; Defence Secretary Liam Fox has stated that troops should leave a "broken 13th Century state" as soon as possible, but then subsequently declared they should stay as long as it takes.

Many commanders on the ground are deeply worried that this is sending the wrong signals to both allies and enemies. "We work to a timeline the politicians give. If that doesn't work, it's up to us to make that point" says Brigadier Felton. "I wouldn't say the timeline is unrealistic. If they said we should leave by the end of the year, then I would be worried. I personally wouldn't want to put that kind of timeline on what we are doing in central Helmand because we are making significant progress."

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Afghan, NATO forces ready security for Kabul Conference

By Jonathon Burch Jonathon Burch
Sun Jul 18, 5:26 pm ET
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100718/wl_nm/us_afghanistan_conference_security
 
KABUL (Reuters) – Afghan and foreign forces are stepping up security in the Afghan capital for the biggest international conference in decades this week, where delegates will thrash out plans for handing more responsibility for the country to the government. Over 60 envoys, among them some 40 foreign ministers and including U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, are expected to attend the conference on Tuesday, co-chaired by President Hamid Karzai and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

With violence at its worst levels since the Taliban were overthrown in late 2001, western diplomats are lauding the fact the conference is taking place in Kabul at all and the Afghan government is keen to see it run smoothly.

A major attack could be a disaster for the government and could score a valuable propaganda point for the insurgents.

While they say all necessary steps to thwart an assault on the day have been taken, both Afghan and NATO forces acknowledge they cannot be everywhere at once.

That message hit home on Sunday when in the latest spell of violence a suicide bomber killed two civilians and wounded several more, including a child, in a residential area in the capital, close to the U.S. embassy, the Interior Ministry said.

"We are 100 percent prepared but this doesn't mean everything will go exactly to plan. We will try to do our best and we will also rely on the support of God," said Zemarai Bashary, spokesman for the Interior Ministry which runs the police force.

PREPARE FOR ATTACK

NATO's top civilian representative in Afghanistan said insurgents would try to launch an attack and no amount of security preparations could be infallible.

"We have to prepare ourselves for the fact that the insurgents are going to seek to disrupt this," Mark Sedwill told reporters over the weekend.

"Nobody is going to offer a 100 percent guarantee, but they (security precautions) are very extensive and indeed intensive."

Bashary said all police officers had been placed on "high alert" and had already taken up their positions in a "ring of steel" around the city. Policemen from other units such as the anti-narcotics police, would also be on standby, he said.

While Western forces are keen to point out the conference security plans have been drawn up by the Afghans, NATO said its troops would be out on the streets with their Afghan counterparts and would have a "quick reaction force" on standby.

NATO helicopters will also be circling over the city in a "show of force" to try and deter an attack, said Lieutenant Commander Katie Kendrick, a spokeswoman for NATO-led forces.

"NATO forces are also ready to assist the Afghan government with any other assets," she said. Bashary said the ministry had not received any specific threats against the conference, but NATO forces said they had captured several militants inside the capital over the weekend who were planning to attack the meeting.

While not able to completely disrupt it, insurgents fired rockets and tried to stage a suicide attack on a peace "jirga," or meeting, of tribal elders last month, while Karzai was addressing the gathering.

The attack was quickly suppressed but caused embarrassment for the government and led to the resignations of the interior minister and the head of the country's intelligence service. Karzai will want to avoid a repeat of the incident.

(Writing by Jonathon Burch; Editing by David Fox)

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Convoy attack just another day in rural Afghanistan


By Rob Taylor Rob Taylor
Sun Jul 18, 3:30 am ET
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100718/ts_nm/us_afghanistan_outpost
 
OUTPOST JELAWUR, Afghanistan (Reuters) – Rising smoke and two muted booms bring the first sign of trouble for Lieutenant Laura Jonikaitis's supply convoy, stalled on a narrow main road in volatile Arghandab district.

"They just popped off right now. It's a mortar. Someone's firing a mortar," driver Jorge Martinez yells into his vehicle headphones. The shells, fired from a mud-walled village in the distance, seem to land nowhere.

But moments later, a far louder boom reverberates as an insurgent rocket grenade, or RPG, explodes near a hulking, mine-proofed vehicle up front, while bullets clank beside Jonikaitis, on doors built strong enough to withstand a roadside bomb.

In the back of her MATV a kind of SUV on steroids -- gunner Rodney Reyes swivels a remote-control 50-mm caliber machine gun on the roof and squints at a television screen showing green fields and squat houses in front of him.

"I'm looking. I don't see anything. We need to go now ma'am. It's kinda dumb if we're just sitting here. It's kind of a big target," Reyes says.

Jonikaitis has already given orders to move, but the road is blocked as Afghan civilians abandon their trucks and cars on this artery to the main U.S. command post in the area, nervous of an escalating firefight.

"Be advised: These civilians are jumping out of the trucks like roaches," says Martinez, leaning over to scan up along the road through glass windows several inches thick.

It is another setback for Jonikaitis, 24, whose column of 12 military trucks and three civilian haulers, known as "jingles" to the troops because of the decorative chains that give them their distinctive sound, is already six hours late on its supply run to Combat Outpost Jelawur.

COP Jelawur and several smaller nearby bases are taking the brunt of fighting as 150,000 U.S. and NATO troops prepare for an offensive against Taliban insurgents in their Kandahar province strongholds.

THREATS FROM ALL SIDES

Along the way, delays and threats have come from all sides: an ownerless pushbike with containers on the back holding possible bombs, flocks of sheep and village children giving the finger. A creaking lorry piled high with orange-colored sacks overtakes.

"What's in those sacks?" asks Jonikaitis.

"Should I fire a round into it ma'am?" asks Reyes, 23, only half-joking.

COP Jelawur and several smaller nearby bases are right now taking the brunt of fighting as 150,000 U.S. and NATO troops prepare for an offensive against Taliban insurgents in their Kandahar province strongholds.

This convoy belongs to the 2nd Brigade of the U.S. 101st Airborne Division, which has just arrived in the area as shock troops to choke off two routes used by insurgents to move into Kandahar city from districts to the west.

The brigade is already experiencing heavy fighting against hardcore Taliban fighters that COP Jelawur's battalion commander, Lieutenant-Colonel David Flynn, thinks have such skills that some have come from outside Afghanistan.

A sniper killed one of Flynn's soldiers at a forward post near here with a long-range shot that struck him in the head. Three other soldiers have lost limbs to bombs in recent days, including one who lost both legs.

For Jonikaitis, help arrives in the form of Afghan army troops who flank the road, clear traffic and prepare to hunt the insurgents, one poised behind his own machine gun on an open-back utility wearing a red bandana on his head.

"That guy's a bad ass," says Reyes. "You don't want to get in the way of the Afghan army. They say if those guys start shooting, they just unload everything."

Another boom sounds through the armored doors. Jonikaitis and her trucks are already moving, picking up speed and hoping to arrive before dark, when the Taliban threat really starts.

(Editing by David Fox and Jonathan Thatcher)

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Posted on Sat, Jul. 17, 2010
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/07/17/97715/as-fight-looms-taliban-leader.html

Taliban's Mullah Omar orders attacks on women, U.S. says

Dion Nissenbaum and Saeed Shah | McClatchy Newspapers
last updated: July 17, 2010 06:32:41 PM
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/07/17/97715/as-fight-looms-taliban-leader.html

ARGHANDAB, Afghanistan — U.S. intelligence officials say they have intercepted new orders from the Taliban's spiritual leader that call on insurgents to target women and Afghan civilians helping American-led forces.

One year after issuing a detailed code of conduct that called on Taliban fighters to protect Afghan civilians, NATO officials say, Mullah Omar has issued new directives to his commanders that appear to represent a tougher stance.

Release of the directives comes as Afghan and U.S.-led forces are preparing for a looming new military confrontation with insurgents in the Taliban's spiritual heartland of Kandahar province.

A Taliban spokesman dismissed the report as American propaganda and some Afghan analysts expressed doubts that the Taliban leader would specifically single out Afghan women as targets.

"This sounds weird, but possible," said Sami Kovanen, senior Information Analyst for Indicium Consulting, a Kabul-based research analyst firm. "I have not heard anything like this before and have not seen incidents like this."

Civilian deaths are a potent issue in the Afghan war.

Last year, Mullah Omar released a detailed rulebook that called on Taliban fighters to minimize civilian casualties and choose suicide attacks carefully to avoid needless deaths.

At the time, the code of conduct was seen as an attempt by the Taliban leadership to win over Afghans by actively working to protect civilians.

Over the past year, the U.S.-led military coalition in Afghanistan also has issued new military rules meant to contain civilian deaths.

As the Taliban ramped up its insurgent campaign this spring, U.S. intelligence officials said that Mullah Omar issued his new directives to field commanders.

The orders call on fighters to "capture and kill any Afghan women who are helping or providing information to the coalition forces" and to target Afghans working with the Afghan government and U.S.-led military.

In the first six months of this year, about 1,074 civilians were killed in Afghanistan, according to the Afghan Rights Monitor, an independent research firm.

Taliban fighters and their allies were responsible for 60 percent of the deaths, according to the report. Afghan government forces and members of the international military coalition were responsible for about 30 percent of the civilian deaths.

The single most deadly incident took place last month when a young suicide bomber killed 40 civilians — including young boys — at a wedding party in Arghandab. Some of the victims had been part of an anti-Taliban force operating in the area, which may have made them a particular target of the bombing.

"This sort of outright targeting of innocent Afghan men and women working for the betterment of their country flies in the face of any alleged 'code of conduct'

propaganda that the Taliban may have produced for public consumption," said U.S. Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale, a spokesman for the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan.

One top NATO official in Afghanistan said that the military coalition's focus on protecting major population centers had forced the Taliban to bring the fight into densely populated areas.

"In the past, we were operating in the hinterlands," said the military official, who spoke on condition of anonymity so he could more freely discuss the orders. "Now we're staying inside the population — it's a risk they are taking and they're screwing it up. Their own tactics are working against them."

Meanwhile, Taliban spokesman Qari Yusef rejected the report as American disinformation.

"This kind article has not been issued by the supreme leader of the Taliban to the media yet," he said. "This is something that the infidels are making up."

Reports of the change in Taliban tactics comes as Afghan and American-led soldiers are poised to launch a new offensive against insurgents in Arghandab, the fertile valley on the edge of Kandahar city.

On Saturday, the top military leaders held a two-hour meeting in Arghandab with their Afghan partners to fine-tune plans to target an estimated 150 to 200 hardcore insurgents who have destabilized the river valley.

Military officials and Afghan leaders in Kandahar said they intend to put Taliban fighters on the defensive before the Muslim holy month of Ramadan begins in four weeks.

"Arghandab — right now 50 percent, plus or minus — is under government control," said U.S, Army Brig. Gen. Ben Hodges, the director of coalition operations in southern Afghanistan, before the meeting. "We would really like to — and I think it's feasible — by the time Ramadan comes around, have it at 80-85 percent."

But U.K. Maj. Gen. Nick Carter, the commander of coalition forces in southern Afghanistan, sought to dampen expectations about what might be accomplished by the beginning of Ramadan.

"These things take time and you've got to persuade people," said Carter, who estimated that the Afghan government currently had control over 20-to-40 percent of Arghandab. "I'm not expecting to see anything particularly different by Ramadan."

Dion Nissenbaum reported from Arghandab. McClatchy special correspondent Saeed Shah reported from Islamabad, Pakistan. McClatchy special correspondent Muhib Habibi contributed to this report from Kandahar, Afghanistan.

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Published on Monday, July 19, 2010 by The Guardian/UK

Taliban Talks: The Obstacles to a Peace Deal in Afghanistan

• US withdrawal pledge 'handed propaganda coup'

• Ceding south to insurgents risks civil war


by Jon Boone in Kabul

As the big names of world politics fly into Kabul for a conference on the future of Afghanistan [1], many of the capital's international residents have been fleeing in the opposite direction, keen to escape before the airport is closed down and the city put into "lockdown".
Today cars in the city were stopped at checkpoints every few hundred metres as part of a "ring of steel" operation. Those foreigners who have not escaped have been banned from leaving their guesthouses by their employers.

Organisers have attempted to attach great historic symbolism to the half-day conference. Of the nine international conferences on Afghanistan held in the last nine years, this is the first to actually convene inside Afghanistan.

But even diplomats involved in the five-hour event roll their eyes when asked whether it is going to produce any dramatic changes in policy.

The communique – already leaked in draft form to the media – focuses on efforts to build up the Afghan state by making it more effective, better funded and less corrupt. But on the fringes of the conference the hot topic is a subject that is barely mentioned in the draft and until recently eschewed by the US administration; making peace with the Taliban [2].

That's because despite the fact that the Afghan government is finally strong enough to organise its own conference, the prospect of that government ultimately prevailing over an ever stronger insurgency has never looked more bleak.

At an evening reception a few days before the conference, a senior European diplomat said glumly: "I cannot think of a single reason to die for Afghanistan."

The country, which has suffered almost 30 years of war of one form or the other, is a problem for its neighbours, not for Europe, he said. It was a different a few years ago, when most people still thought victory was possible, he said. But now, pessimism has taken over. "Afghanistan is in a state of freefall and I don't think strategy proposals announced at a one-day conference will solve that," said Candace Rondeaux, a senior analyst from the International Crisis Group. A paper by the Afghanistan NGO Security Office articulated what most people believe: that the counter-insurgency programme cannot win. It sees this summer's surge of US troops in southern Afghanistan as the "grand finale" of a western intervention which is looking to wind itself up.

The biggest problem is that what Nato [3] soldiers are trying to do cannot be achieved on the time frames of the "political clocks" ticking down in Washington and its allied cities. In a recent off-record briefing, one of the most senior US soldiers in Afghanistan pointed out that no counter-insurgency has prevailed against an enemy with sanctuaries of the size the Taliban and other groups enjoy over the border in Pakistan.

 

Negotiated settlement

No wonder then that most people's thoughts, including Barack Obama's administration, are turning to some sort of negotiated settlement with the insurgents. It is now part of the conventional wisdom in Kabul that the west will have to make compromises with insurgents that once would have been unthinkable, including dropping efforts for women to be given a more equal place in Afghan society. Few people put it quite as bluntly as Francesc Vendrell, a retired senior diplomat who served first the UN in Afghanistan before 2001 and then worked as the top representative of the European Union in Kabul. He recently told the Guardian that the current military effort to push the Taliban out of Kandahar and Helmand was particularly foolish because these are precisely the areas that, in his view, will have to be handed over to Taliban control.
Such a handover of the south could be achieved, he argued, through constitutional reform that would decentralise power from Kabul. In a trice, the south would be ceded to Taliban control, under the pretence of local democracy. Meanwhile, the north would similarly be handed back to the old warlords, the former strongmen who rose to prominence during the 1980s resistance to the Soviet occupation and its violent aftermath.

But deal-making with the insurgents is fraught with danger. Hamid Karzai's so far fairly limited appeals to the Taliban, not least during his "peace jirga" in June, have lost the Afghan president the support of some of the few political powerbrokers who backed him that are not from the Pashtun ethnic group, from which the Taliban draws most of its support.

Haroun Mir, a political analyst and parliamentary candidate with close links to the largely non-Pashtun Northern Alliance that fought against the Taliban, predicted civil war as the ultimate consequence of peace deal with the Taliban.

He said: "The moment the south is abandoned to the Taliban, you will see the north rearming. Any change that sees the Taliban entering government and you will create a full ethnic war."

Put most simply, the risk to the Americans is that they may win over the south, but lose the north. And it is not clear how the Americans will talk to the Taliban.

European diplomats say that whatever the latest thinking in the White House might be, David Petraeus, the new US commander of Nato forces in Afghanistan seems interested in making the fight against the Taliban last as long as possible. After years of refusing to contemplate even the most secret of discussions with a movement viewed as partly responsible for the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, the Americans have precious few ways of reaching out to the other side.

A security official who has in the past been involved in efforts to reach out to the Taliban bemoaned the fact that so many years had been wasted, pointing out that in Northern Ireland the British government had contacts "from the beginning".

Instead of a well-organised effort to talk to the Taliban, there is currently an extraordinary free-for-all, with a whole range of people and countries trying to make contacts with the quetta shura, the Taliban's leadership council. They include Karzai's elder brother Qayoum, and even Burhanuddin Rabbani, a northern power broker and former president. Countries interested in getting in on the act are the UK, Germany, Turkey and Indonesia.

While Saudi Arabia is often cited as potential interlocutor because of that country's status as the guardian of the Islam's holiest places, and because of previous involvement in Afghanistan, diplomats say the Saudis are holding back after "getting their fingers burned once before", according to one diplomat.

With everyone keeping their cards close to their chests, it is not clear whether any country or individual has had any success in talking to anyone of consequence. Mark Sedwill, Nato's ambassador in Kabul, said that Karzai has had little success in forging strong channels of communication. "There are channels of communication with various people, but it is very hard for the Afghans to know how close those people are to the inner circle," he said.

Obama's announcement that US troops will start withdrawing next July has been ruthlessly exploited by Taliban propagandists to convey the impression they are on the road to victory. This has helped deter them from negotiating a peace deal now, said Michael Semple, a former deputy of the European Union political mission and regional analyst. "The Taliban's dominant perspective is to ride it out for another year. They think 'one more push and we'll get them out'."

 

Insurgent groups are already positioning themselves for the post-conflict power grab, he said. "Perversely, now that the Americans have signalled they are leaving, there's an incentive for the Taliban to keep fighting so they can show they were the ones who pushed them out," he said.

The British description of a commitment to leave by 2015 "plays better to the Afghan audience", he added. "That's a more Afghan-style timetable." For Nato to reverse insurgent thinking it needs to "credibly clarify its plans for the period between 2011 and 2015". For the time being the Taliban are sticking to their negotiating position that talks will not begin until foreign forces leave Afghanistan.

Another senior western diplomat said that such talk was surely just the sort of "bluff" that characterises the start of any negotiation. He also hinted that the requirement that insurgents must lay down their weapons as a precursor to "reconciling" with the Afghan government was also not to be taken too seriously.

One possibility that is often suggested as a potential confidence-raising measure is reform of the UN list of terrorists, offering to remove the names of senior Taliban officials that would allow them to travel internationally and have bank accounts.

But what the Taliban appear to be most confident about is their chances of outright victory. Rumours abound that Mullah Omar, the one-eyed leader of the Taliban, has recently responded with a list of his own: a kill list of senior government officials and politicians.

© Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

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Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/07/19-6

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Published on Monday, July 19, 2010 by The Guardian/UK

Kabul Faces Severe Water Crisis

Report says Afghan city and region will need six times more water by 2050, as Oxfam warns of violence over scarce resource


by John Vidal

Kabul and its surrounding region are perilously short of water and may not be able to supply a fast-growing, more affluent population, a joint US and Afghan government scientific report has warned.

A girl at a communal water pump in Kabul, Afghanistan. More than half the shallow wells people use will dry up if temperatures continue to rise as predicted. (Photograph: Rodrigo Abd/AP)

Rapid population growth and expected temperature rises due to climate change mean the area – which just manages to support 6 million people today – will need six times more water by 2050, the US Geological Survey report says.

More than half the shallow wells people now rely on will dry up if temperatures continue to increase as expected, it warns.

Thousands of wells have been sunk in Kabul in the last decade as the city's population has more than doubled. But the water table has dropped several metres, and many settlements already experience water shortages.

In addition, most of the shared water points and wells are contaminated, leading to illness. According to current United Nations estimates, Kabul's population could reach 9 million by 2050.

The two-year Kabul basin water survey warned that barely exploited deep underground water sources may not be sufficient to provide for all human and farming needs.

Mountain snow, which feeds rivers throughout the basin, is melting earlier each year, leaving less water for use later on, particularly during summer, when it is needed most.

Kabul residents use around 40 litres a day each, far less than most other Asian cities, but demand is expected to soar as communities develop and numbers grow.

The study backs up Oxfam research which shows that competition for water in both rural and urban Afghan communities is increasing, leading to heightened tensions and violence. According to the aid agency, 43% of local conflicts are now over water.

The Oxfam policy officer, Ashley Jackson, said: "Thirty years of war has left sources of water co-opted, stolen and contaminated.

"Oxfam research has found that water is now a major cause of local conflicts. Disputes over these scarce resources lead to violence and even, in some instances, fuel the greater conflict."

Last year, two men were killed after being found trying to steal water from the river Paghman in Kabul province. Families took sides, the row escalated and fights broke out between people armed with knives.

The conflict was only resolved when elders found a new way to channel the river, which provides 20 villages with water.

© Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/07/19-0

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South Asia
Jul 21, 2010 
http://atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/LG21Df03.html

 
Kabul tries to grasp aid purse strings


By Zarif Nazar and Charles Recknagel

When the Afghan government and its international partners begin a meeting in Kabul on July 20, there will be a dramatic change in their relationship.

For the first time, the Afghan government will present its more than 70 foreign partners with its own plans for how to spend the bulk of foreign aid the country is receiving. Specifically, Afghan ministers will present 23 programs and ask donors to direct funding that now goes to non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and contractors to these programs instead.

That is in line with the new buzzword in Afghan development: alignment.

Simply put, "alignment" means assuring that international money supports more Afghan national programs and fewer foreign-determined priorities. The adjustment is seen as essential for helping Kabul win greater legitimacy among the Afghan population and for setting back the Taliban.

Kabul hopes to flip the current balance in how foreign aid is spent on its head at the conference.

"What we are asking is that all aid that comes to Afghanistan - whether it is through the government's national budget or outside - that 80% of this over the next two years should be aligned with the priorities of the Afghan government and of the Afghan people," Afghan Finance Minister Omar Zakhilwal told RFE/RL.

According to the Finance Ministry, some 77% of the US$29 billion in international aid spent in Afghanistan since 2001 has been disbursed on projects with little or no input from Afghan government officials.

Whether the international community will agree to so radically change its spending pattern remains to be seen.

Commitment still stands

The Kabul conference follows up on the January 28 London conference, where all sides agreed the Afghan government should directly take control of 50% of spending over the next two years, contingent on Kabul's progress in creating better public financial systems and curbing corruption.

Since then, top international officials have repeatedly said the commitment still stands.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization's senior civilian representative in Afghanistan, ambassador Mark Sedwill, recently told RFE/RL's Radio Mashaal and Radio Free Afghanistan that, "At the moment, only 20% of the aid goes through Afghan government systems."

"We've agreed [at the London conference] to increase that to 50% in the next two years, and what we want to do with the rest of it, as well, is align it with Afghan government priorities," Sedwill said.
Ahead of the conference, United Nations secretary general Ban Ki-moon urged Afghan President Hamid Karzai to unveil "concrete" steps to improve governance and promote national reconciliation. Ban, who will co-chair the high-level meeting in Kabul along with Karzai, said the future of Afghanistan remained "a high-priority agenda" for the international community and the world body.

But the Kabul conference also comes as concerns about the levels of corruption in Afghanistan have reached a high point. That exerts enormous pressure upon the participants at the meeting to proceed cautiously. In recent weeks, both Afghan and foreign officials have traded highly public charges blaming each other for the rampant corruption surrounding aid spending.

'Wipe their dirty hands'

Afghan officials say most of the corruption is due to the fact that foreign contractors and NGOs control the aid. Afghan Justice Minister Habibullah Ghalib recently told reporters in Kabul, "The foreigners come here and wipe their dirty hands on our clean clothes."

But international officials generally defend the foreign NGOs' record and transparency. "International aid is generally well spent," Sedwill said. "There are good audit controls in place to ensure that it meets the needs of the people."

That same level of transparency, many say, is sorely lacking within the Afghan government itself. Ramazan Bashar Dost, who ran as a candidate in last year's presidential campaign, said the Afghan authorities are deeply associated with corruption.

"If the government of Afghanistan and the government offices from the presidential palace to the provinces and districts were not involved in corruption, no NGO, whether local or foreign, and no company and no organization of the United Nations would be able to misuse the assistance for Afghanistan," Dost said.

'Checks and balances'

Both European Union officials and some US lawmakers have increasingly signaled their unhappiness with delivering new aid until better anti-corruption systems are in place. The European Union's envoy to Afghanistan said on July 13 that the bloc would postpone delivery of a $252 million aid package until it sees the results of the July 20 conference.

Vygaudas Usackas said that extending the aid to Afghanistan would be "conditional on a memorandum signed between the parties to ensure there are checks and balances".

Similarly, a key panel in the US House of Representatives blocked $4 billion in aid to Kabul late last month, demanding that Washington investigate charges that huge amounts of foreign aid are being embezzled with the complicity of top Afghan officials.

In a bid to still the mounting criticism, the office of Karzai announced on July 13 that the cabinet had approved a bill that would allow government ministers and senior officials accused of corruption to be put on trial before a special tribunal. Under Afghan law, ministers currently are immune from prosecution in ordinary courts.

How much aid money disappears illegally in Afghanistan is beyond anybody's ability to estimate. Finance Minister Zakhilwal sought to put at least a partial figure to it when he reported recently that some $4.2 billion has been transferred overseas from Afghanistan.

But what is clear is that anger in Afghanistan over such massive corruption has become one of the Taliban's strongest allies in the conflict.

Nathan Hoepner, chief of the Anti-corruption and Stability Directorate of NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), told RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan earlier this month that in surveys his organization does every quarter, "one of the things that comes out very strongly is that corruption is one of the leading reasons that causes people to join the insurgency."

"It is not necessarily because of radicalization; it is because of the frustration they feel," Hoepner said.

No new funds pledged

Hoepner said the international community would be looking for new commitments in Kabul to make the workings of the government and how it spends money more transparent to the public.

"The Afghan government made a commitment back in the London conference and will reaffirm that with a more specific plan here in Kabul regarding how mid- and senior-level civil-service people are, in fact, hired," Hoepner said. "They have said that they also want a transparent hiring process so people can see how it is done and people can see the merit that brings people into position, because how a person takes authority very much determines how they use that authority."

The July 20 conference will not see donor nations and organizations pledging any new funds. Instead, the focus will be on financial aid that has already been committed.

The meeting will be the first time the Afghan government meets with its international partners on Afghan soil. Among the key attendees will be Ban, NATO secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, as well as more than 40 foreign ministers.

The conference is intended to discuss the whole range of issues facing Afghanistan, including peace and reconciliation, aid effectiveness, and regional and global cooperation.

Copyright (c) 2010, RFE/RL Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington DC 20036

(To view the original article, please click here.) 
http://www.rferl.org/content/Kabul_Wants_To_Change_The_Way_Foreign_Aid_Is_Spent_/2103750.html


   

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Expert: Afghanistan policy not working

July 19th, 2010
10:55 AM ET
http://afghanistan.blogs.cnn.com/2010/07/19/expert-afghanistan-policy-not-working/

One of the most respected voices among U.S. foreign policy experts says the Obama Administration’s Afghan policy is not working.

WATCH VIDEO:
http://afghanistan.blogs.cnn.com/2010/07/19/expert-afghanistan-policy-not-working/

Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations and a veteran of several U.S. administrations, writes in the latest edition of Newsweek: “Continued or increased U.S. involvement in Afghanistan isn’t likely to yield lasting improvements that would be commensurate in any way with the investment of American blood and treasure. It is time to scale down our ambitions there and both reduce and redirect what we do.”

Speaking on CNN’s American Morning on Monday, Haass said Afghanistan was now “a sponge for American resources and it is a distraction. We out to be thinking militarily about what we might have to do in North Korea or Iran where we really do have vital national interests.”

He added the scale of the mission in Afghanistan now amounted to nation-building. “The Taliban, maybe 30, 40-thousand of them that they're going after, and this represents to some extent half the population of Afghanistan,” he said.

Haass proposed a much more targeted counter-terrorism approach – of the sort that was attributed to Vice-President Biden in recent internal discussions at the White House on Afghanistan. “We could have done in Afghanistan essentially what we're doing in places like Yemen and Somalia,” Haass said.

“We don't have 100,000 troops in those countries. We've got a few special forces there. We can target those terrorists or people who are supporting terrorists with drones, cruise missiles, special forces.”

“The Taliban share the same [Pashtun] ethnicity of half the population of Afghanistan. So Mr. Obama has essentially made the United States now a central participant in Afghanistan's civil war," Haass said.

A recent study by the respected Afghanistan Analysts Network argued that the Taliban’s influence and appeal extended well beyond Afghanistan’s Pashtun heartland.

Haass suggested a different approach to Afghanistan should include working directly with local leaders – bypassing the government in Kabul – and providing them weapons. President Hamid Karzai has resisted arming local militia, fearing it will revive “warlordism.”

He also suggested essentially a “truce” with the Taliban, allowing them control or influence over certain parts of the country if they renounce al Qaeda.

“We know you're going to come back in parts of the country, you have strong connections. If you don't bring back al Qaeda, if you don't undermine the rest of the country, then we won't attack you.”

But Haass supported the Administration’s focus on Pakistan.

“Pakistan has more than 100 nuclear weapons; it's host to the world's most dangerous terrorist organizations," he said. “The last thing we want is for Pakistan to go from a fragile state – which it is now – to a failed state. The United States is right to make sure Pakistan does not unravel.”

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced in Islamabad Monday a major trade and aid package for Pakistan, which will focus on developing its energy sector. The country is plagued by power shortages.

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White House shifts Afghanistan strategy towards talks with Taliban

Senior Washington officials tell the Guardian of a 'change of mindset' over Obama administration's Afghanistan policy

by Ewen MacAskill in Washington and Simon Tisdall
guardian.co.uk,
Monday 19 July 2010 23.49 BST
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/19/obama-afghanistan-strategy-taliban-negotiate

Any negotiations with the Taliban would be conducted largely in secret, through third parties, Washington sources reported. Illustration: Saeed Achakzai/Reuters


The White House is revising its Afghanistan strategy to embrace the idea of negotiating with senior members of the Taliban through third parties – a policy to which it had previously been lukewarm.

Negotiating with the Taliban has long been advocated by Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, and the British and Pakistani governments, but resisted by Washington.

The Guardian has learned that while the American government is still officially resistant to the idea of talks with Taliban leaders, behind the scenes a shift is under way and Washington is encouraging Karzai to take a lead in such negotiations.

"There is a change of mindset in DC," a senior official in Washington said. "There is no military solution. That means you have to find something else. There was something missing."

That missing element was talks with the Taliban leadership, the official added.

The American rethink comes in the aftermath of the departure last month of General Stanley McChrystal, the top US commander in Afghanistan.

Barack Obama, apparently frustrated at the way the war is going, has reminded his national security advisers that while he was on the election campaign trail in 2008, he had advocated talking to America's enemies.

America is reviewing its Afghanistan policy which is due for completion in December, but officials in Washington, Kabul and Islamabad with knowledge of internal discussions said feelers had been put out to the Taliban. Negotiations would be conducted largely in secret, through a web of contacts, possibly involving Pakistan and Saudi Arabia or organisations with back-channel links to the Taliban.

"It will be messy and could take years," said a diplomatic source.

The change of heart by the US comes as Afghanistan hosts the biggest international gathering in its capital for 40 years, with representatives from 60 countries including Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, and Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general.

The dominant theme of the Kabul conference is "reintegration", which involves reaching out to low-level insurgents to encourage them to lay down their arms.

Earlier this year Richard Holbrooke, Obama's special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, distinguished between "reintegration", which the US supported, and "reconciliation" or negotiating with senior Taliban. Holbrooke said: "Let me be clear. There is no American involvement in any reconciliation process."

There is growing disenchantment in the US with the war in Afghanistan and members of the Senate's foreign relations committee last week questioned Holbrooke over what they described as a lack of clarity on an exit strategy.

The US has no agreed position on who among the leaders of the insurgency should be wooed and who would be beyond the pale. The Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, would be a problem as he provided Osama bin Laden with bases before the 9/11 attacks.

The US would also find it problematic to deal with the Pakistan-based insurgents led by Sirajuddin Haqqani, whose group pioneered suicide attacks in Afghanistan. The third main element in the insurgency is Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who has hinted he is ready to break ranks.

A source with knowledge of the process said: "There is no agreed US position, but there is agreement that Karzai should lead on this. They would expect the Pakistanis to deliver the Haqqani network in any internal settlement."

The US has laid down basic conditions for any group seeking negotiations. They are: end all ties to al-Qaida, end violence, and accept the Afghan constitution.

A senior Pakistani diplomat said: "The US needs to be negotiating with the Taliban; those Taliban with no links to al-Qaida. We need a power-sharing agreement in Afghanistan, and it will have to be negotiated with all the parties.

"The Afghan government is already talking to all the shareholders‚ the Taliban, the Haqqani network, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and Mullah Omar. The Americans have been setting ridiculous preconditions for talks. You can't lay down such preconditions when you are losing."

Some Afghan policy specialists are sceptical about whether negotiations would succeed. Peter Bergen, a specialist on Afghanistan and al-Qaida, told a US Institute of Peace seminar in Washington last week that there were a host of problems with such a strategy, not least why the Taliban should enter negotiations "when they think they are winning".

Audrey Kurth Cronin, a member of the US National War College faculty in Washington, and the author of How Terrorism Ends, said talks with Mullah Omar and the Haqqani network were pointless because there would be no negotiable terms.

She said there could be talks with Hekmatyar, but these would be conducted through back channels, potentially by a third party. Given his support for jihad, she said, "it would be unreasonable to expect the US and the UK to do so".

Asked how Obama's Afghan strategy was progressing, a senior former US government official familiar with the latest Pentagon thinking said: "In a word, poorly. We seriously need to be developing a revised plan of action that will allow us a chance to achieve sufficient security in a more sustainable manner."

Officials have mentioned possible roles in negotiation for the UN and figures such as the veteran UN negotiator, the Algerian Lakhdar Brahimi, who heads, along with the retired US ambassador Thomas Pickering, a New York-based international panel which is looking at such a reconciliation.

Another name mentioned is Michael Semple, an Irishman based in Boston at Harvard's Kennedy School who has extensive contacts with the Taliban.

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Afghan govt ?wants to take full control? by 2014

Published: Tuesday July 20, 2010
http://rawstory.com/news/afp/Afghan_govt_wants_to_take_full_cont_07202010.html



Afghan President Hamid Karzai sought Tuesday to convince an international conference in Kabul that his government could assume security responsibility by 2014 and demanded greater control of aid money.

Karzai is under massive Western pressure to crack down on corruption and take the lead in facing down a nine-year Taliban insurgency now killing record numbers of foreign soldiers and swallowing billion of dollars of money.

The Taliban, ousted from power by the 2001 US-led invasion, control large swathes of the south and have put up stiff resistance to a US-led surge deploying 150,000 troops under a last-ditch counter-insurgency strategy.

UN chief Ban Ki-moon and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton led representatives from 70 organisations and countries who used the conference to urge Kabul to work harder to meet its goals and clean up corruption.

"I remain determined that our Afghan national security forces will be responsible for all military and law enforcement operations throughout our country by 2014," said Karzai in his opening address.

Thousands of Afghan troops, backed by NATO forces, put Kabul under a security lockdown to prevent any possible Taliban attack on the conference at the heavily protected foreign ministry.

Although the meeting began without incident, NATO said several insurgents were killed in a shootout and two others arrested near the capital overnight to thwart the "final stages" of a Taliban attack.

Suspected militants also fired several rockets into Kabul near the airport overnight, but there were no casualties, the interior ministry said.

Karzai said the international community had committed enough money to see Afghanistan through the next three years and called for greater control of the multi-billion-dollar aid budget for his impoverished country.

"We all agree that steady transition to Afghan leadership and ownership is the key to sustainability," he said.

He called on foreign allies to invest in major infrastructure projects that can transform the lives of Afghans instead of isolated projects that have minimal impact, do not win widespread public favour or support good governance.

Since 2001, only 20 percent of the total 40 billion dollars of pledged international aid had been channelled through the Afghan budget, leading to serious corruption among the rest.

The West is under increasing pressure at home to justify their commitments to Afghanistan, where the war has killed 381 foreign soldiers so far this year -- including a NATO soldier who died in a bomb attack in the south on Tuesday.

Ban, who joined Karzai in chairing the conference and has called for concrete steps to improve governance and promote national reconciliation, called on Afghans to take greater responsibility for all their challenges.

"Let us also be clear -- just as Afghans are taking greater responsibility for governance and development, so must they take greater responsibility for security as well," he said.

Clinton said transition to Afghan leadership could not be put off indefinitely but said much more work faced the Afghan government -- a refrain that was echoed by other foreign ministers in their speeches.

"The Afghan government is stepping forward to deal with a multitude of difficult challenges. We?re encouraged by much of what we see, particularly their work to improve governance," Clinton told the conference.

"These steps are important. But much more work remains," she said.

William Hague, the foreign minister of Britain -- which after the United States is the biggest supplier of foreign troops to Afghanistan -- called for improved financial management to ensure that money was being best spent.

"We will always need to see that the government is making the best possible use of our, and its own money.

"This means continuing on a path of improved financial management and budget execution, as well as tackling corruption at all times," he said.

Karzai last month won endorsement from Afghan leaders to start peace talks with insurgent leaders and called on the international community to back his efforts -- despite at least initial scepticism from the United States.

NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen emphasised that the alliance would remain in Afghanistan even after Afghans take over responsibility for security, when foreign troops would "move into a supporting role".

[bigron]

US military build-up in Kandahar will bolster Taliban, warns security monitor


Nato's counterinsurgency tactic shows no signs of success, says Afghanistan NGO Security Office


by Jon Boone in Kabul
guardian.co.uk,
Sunday 18 July 2010 20.25 BST
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/18/kandahar-us-military-taliban-afghanistan

An Afghan security official inspects the scene of a suicide bomb attack in Kabul. Photograph: S. Sabawoon/EPA


The US military build-up in Kandahar is likely to further strengthen the hold of the Taliban over the vital southern Afghanistan city, a highly respected security organisation said today in a bleak report warning of record Taliban violence and rising civilian deaths across the country.

The report by the Afghanistan NGO Security Office, which monitors trends in violence on behalf of aid organisations, said Nato's counter-insurgency strategy was not showing any signs of succeeding amid rising violence, the unchecked establishment of local militias and a huge increase in attacks on private development workers across the country.

It revealed that June marked a record for Taliban attacks – up 51% on the previous year to 1,319 operations.

At the same time the number of civilians killed by both sides of the conflict rose by 23%, despite the efforts of Nato forces to avoid killing innocent bystanders. The organisation also said attacks on private development organisations working on projects designed to win the support of ordinary Afghans had shot up, with more than 30 workers killed in the first three months of the year.

"We do not support the [counter-insurgency] perspective that this constitutes 'things getting worse before they get better', but rather see it as being consistent with the five-year trend of things just getting worse," the report said.

The report was published days before the world's foreign ministers gather in Kabul to discuss the international community's future role in Afghanistan.

today a suicide bomber managed to evade Kabul's new "ring of steel" – a series of police checkpoints designed to protect the city – and killed three civilians in a busy market. Local police said the bomber was on foot and it was not clear what his intended target was.

Nato said it had intercepted a letter from Taliban leader Mullah Omar which ordered fighters to kill any Afghans working for foreign forces. A huge number of local nationals are employed as interpreters and logistics workers.

In southern Afghanistan, insurgents staged a jailbreak by smuggling a bomb inside a prison, allowing 11 inmates to escape in the province of Farah.

In Kandahar a roadside bomb exploded near the city's hospital, killing two police officers and a civilian. Nato also said that one of its soldiers from an unidentified country was killed by a roadside bomb.

With such bombings a near-daily occurrence in the south, the Anso report also reflected the grave doubts held by most Afghan experts that Nato's concentration of force in southern Afghanistan can possibly work.

It said the effort to dislodge the Taliban from Marjah, a former Taliban stronghold in Helmand, had failed to deliver security to local people, allow refugees to return to their homes or given credibility to the local government.

It was sceptical that the next stage of the operation, in and around Kandahar, would be any better. It said the operation was "very unlikely to be the 'breaking point' of the Taliban".

"It seems more likely to go the way of Operation Moshtarak, in Helmand, with lots of public ballyhoo around the actions of the IMF while the Afghan 'partners' discreetly pursue their own, often countervailing, agendas."

It added that the military buildup in Kandahar, which will see fighting take place in districts surrounding the city in the autumn, "will cause a significant rise in support for the armed opposition in Kandahar and, with that, make eventual Taliban ascendency feasible".

It also raised concerns about the increasing use of local people to defend their own villages – a strategy that David Petraeus, the US commander of Nato forces in the country, is strongly in favour of expanding.

There were already cases of the so-called "militias" causing the same problems as the 1963 South Vietnamese Self Defence Corps, including partnering with insurgents to steal from the local population, the report said.

On Saturday Mark Sedwill, Nato's ambassador in Kabul, said the increase in violence this year had always been expected and it was a sign that the coalition was "taking the fight to the Taliban".

[bigron]

Iran outlines solutions to Afghan crisis

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 09:53:52 GMT
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=135525&sectionid=351020101

 
The photo shows an Afghan child in rubbles in war-torn Afghanistan.

 
At the international conference on Afghanistan, Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki outlines Tehran's solutions to the Afghan crisis.

Speaking at an international conference on Afghanistan on Tuesday, Mottaki called for a regional solution to the Afghanistan crisis and blamed growing insecurity and drug trafficking on foreign military presence in the war-ravaged country.

During his speech, he outlined five Iranian proposals to bring back stability to Afghanistan. He said that any solution to the Afghan crisis needs to take into account the following issues:

1) The Afghan Constitution is the greatest achievement of the country and hence needs to set the criterion for any measures to be taken in the country. Besides that, the process of government formation and the reinforcement of civil institutions should be supported by the international community.

2) The presence and increase of foreign forces will not help the situation in Afghanistan. Afghan people and government need to be trusted and a timetable for the withdrawal of foreign forces should be set as well.

3) A double standard policy on fighting terrorism has to be avoided.

4) Security and development are two inseparable factors; hence the reconstruction of Afghanistan and its infrastructures should become the focus of more attention. In doing so, Iran continues to contribute to the reconstruction of Afghanistan and welcomes other countries' participation as well.

5) Regional cooperation needs to be supported as the proper approach to the issue. Iran for its part continues to hold regional meetings on Afghanistan and expects other non-regional countries to support the move. Iran believes that increased regional cooperation in transportation, energy and other sectors will contribute to development in Afghanistan.

The international conference on Afghanistan opened in Kabul on Tuesday, with Afghan President Hamid Karzai delivering the opening speech.

Delegates from more than 70 countries and several international bodies, including United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki- moon, are attending the one-day conference.

Iran has attended the meeting as an immediate neighbor of Afghanistan.

Increasing the capacity of the Afghan security forces and reconciliation with Taliban militants are the main topics of the Kabul Conference.

AR/MMA

[bigron]

Clinton puts Afghan insecurity on Bush

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 05:18:00 GMT
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=135490

 
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (R) meets with Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
 
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton blames the former Bush administration for the insecurity gripping Afghanistan amid rise in attacks against foreign troops.

Clinton, who arrived in Kabul on Monday ahead of a key international conference on the future of peace and security in Afghanistan, held talks with the country's President Hamid Karzai who will co-chair the summit with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon on Tuesday, AFP reported.

The US Secretary of State defended the Obama administration's strategy in Afghanistan at a time when a recent poll shows more than 50 percent of Americans want US soldiers to pull out of the war-hit country.

In an interview with BBC, she warned against abrupt and permanent withdrawal from Afghanistan, adding the war was "a fight worth waging."

However, Clinton acknowledged that the Obama administration was playing "catch up" and said that George W. Bush's administration should be blamed for the deterioration and difficulties facing the Obama administration.

Defending the strategy in Afghanistan that has so far failed to curb the mounting insurgency, Clinton said she thinks the current plan is the right one.

"I don't see an alternative. I think we are on the right track and I think we have to persevere and I think we can do that," Clinton said.

After landing at the Kabul airport, she was greeted by the US Ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry, and the commander of US and NATO forces, Gen David Petraeus.

The US Secretary of State dined with President Karzai as the two were putting final touches on preparations for the international conference on Afghanistan, which will be attended by 70 international representatives including 40 foreign ministers.

Karzai is expected to negotiate with visiting officials over issues ranging from development priorities and peace talks with the Taliban to setting a timeframe for the Afghan police to take over responsibility for the country's security, allowing foreign combat troops to withdraw by the end of 2014.

Afghan officials are set to unveil a string of proposals covering governance, economic and social development, the rule of law and justice, human rights and aid effectiveness.

HA/JG/MMA

[bigron]

Monday, July 19, 2010
12:02 Mecca time, 09:02 GMT 
http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/2010/07/201071971742284959.html
 
FOCUS  
 
Nine years, nine conferences 
 
 By Gregg Carlstrom

 

Deep mistrust still characterises the relationship between the Afghan government
and its international donors [EPA]

The Afghan government has a long list of demands for the international donors who will gather in Kabul on Tuesday for the ninth such conference since the start of the Afghanistan war in 2001.

Kabul will ask donors to focus 80 per cent of their aid budgets on a list of 23 "national priority programmes," which will be introduced at the conference. Afghan officials will also push for a more transparent, organised aid process; donors often fail to report how they are spending money, leading to redundancies and inefficiencies.

"It's not only about strengthening the legitimacy of the government," said Omar Zahkilwal, the Afghan finance minister, at a press conference last week. "We believe this alignment with the government's priorities, and therefore the people's priorities, leads to sustainable development."

Those goals, laudable as they may be, are hardly new. The London conference in 2006 produced a document - the Afghanistan Compact - which was to guide reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan. It declared that the Afghan government would take the lead on setting priorities, as defined in the Afghanistan National Development Strategy (ANDS), which was also approved at the conference.

A subsequent donors conference - in Paris, in 2008 - concluded with a communique which promised "increased, more predictable, transparent and accountable assistance".

Little coordination

Yet those promises have gone mostly unmet. Seventy-seven per cent of the $29bn pledged by international donors has been spent without any input from the Afghan government, according to a review conducted last year by the finance ministry. That includes much of the money earmarked for the ANDS.

"The government has some valid points: Half of the money pledged for ANDS is out of line with priorities," said Ashley Jackson, the head of Afghanistan policy at Oxfam, in an interview from Kabul. "There are no records of what the [provincial reconstruction teams] are doing ... and many of the donors are bad at reporting, too."


The Afghan government says reconstruction teams often fail to report their work [EPA]

The Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of the US congress, issued a report last week that found many Afghan development programmes do not have proper performance metrics. The US cannot track whether or not they are effective, in other words.

US and Nato officials have also encouraged Kabul to allow local governments more control over aid spending. The first "district community council" was stood up in Logar province earlier this year. The councils are supposed to better link aid distribution with the needs of the people, but their efforts are sometimes marred by corruption and nepotism.

"They've been aggressive in strengthening local governance," said Caroline Wadhams, a South Asia analyst at the US-based Center for American Progress. "But it's not a transparent process. People are being appointed by powerful politicians in Kabul. It's not representative."

Weak institutions

Nine years after the war began, a deep mistrust still characterises the relationship between the Afghan government and its international donors. The latter are often reluctant to funnel aid through the government in Kabul, fearing corruption or mismanagement.

"US agencies are making decisions about how these resources are to be used, and they're trying to go around the government," said John Brummet, the assistant inspector general for audits at the office of the US special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction. "That's largely to avoid corruption ... but also because of the weakness [of state institutions]."


Karzai has taken small steps to end corruption, like creating an office of oversight [AFP]

Corruption is undeniable: Hundreds of millions (if not billions) of dollars have been stolen by government officials, and a recent report by Integrity Watch Afghanistan found that Afghans paid twice as much in bribes in 2009 as they did in 2006.

But a more fundamental problem is the persistent weakness of many ministries in Afghanistan. The Brookings Institution released a report in 2008, the Index of State Weakness, that ranked Afghanistan as having the second-weakest institutions in the world - behind only Somalia.

Little has changed since then. A US defence department report released in April found that the Afghan government has only a minimal presence in many areas of the country.

This creates what several people interviewed for this article called a "chicken and egg" problem. International donors are reluctant to rely on the Afghan government because it is so weak; but Afghan officials complain that efforts to circumvent their ministries further weaken the state.

"It's clear that you undermine the credibility of the institutions by bypassing them," said Martine van Bijlert, a co-director of the Afghanistan Analysts Network in Kabul. "But I'm not sure that the way to strengthen institutions is by spending more money through them."

Intermediate steps

Weak Afghan ministries are routinely unable to meet their development goals. The Afghanistan Compact, for example, called for 65 per cent of Afghanistan's urban households, and 25 per cent of rural households, to have electricity by the end of 2010.

Today, though, just 15 per cent of urban households, and only 6 per cent of rural families, have access to electricity, according to the Afghan Energy Information Center.

The compact also promised that 90 per cent of Afghan villages would have safe drinking water by the end of 2010 - but only 27 per cent do today, according to Oxfam.

"Often, in the provinces, the ministries only have a budget that covers salaries," Jackson said. "People have nothing to do."

Aid groups and analysts have proposed a number of short-term steps that the Afghan government can take to improve accountability.

Jackson said the government should approve a freedom of information law and strike down a constitutional provision that makes it almost impossible to prosecute cabinet ministers. Van Bijlert said Karzai should set up an evaluation system that removes ineffective ministers and provincial officials.

And Wadhams, in a new paper released last week, proposed changes to make the government more representative.

Karzai has made little progress towards implementing those reforms, though, and many analysts say that the government's modest reforms to date will do little to resolve the tension with international donors.

"These conferences are not really changing anything," Wadhams said.

"They create the illusion of momentum, but nothing is really changing."
 
 

[bigron]

Afghan Recruit Reportedly Kills 2 NATO Service Members at Training Facility

Published July 20, 2010
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2010/07/20/afghan-recruit-reportedly-kills-nato-service-members-training-facility/

 
An Afghan recruit killed two NATO service members at a post in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif Tuesday, Reuters reported, citing provincial sources.

A spokesman for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force said the organization was aware of the incident but did not provide additional details.

The incident comes a week after a renegade Afghan soldier killed three British troops on a joint Afghan and British base in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan.

[bigron]

NATO Chief Predicts Heavier Fighting, More Casualties in Afghanistan

West 'Underestimated' Scale of Afghan War


by Jason Ditz, July 19, 2010
http://news.antiwar.com/2010/07/19/nato-chief-predicts-heavier-fighting-more-casualties-in-afghanistan/

In an interview with a German newspaper, NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen predicted that the NATO forces in Afghanistan would soon face even heavier fighting, and more casualties.

Such predictions are becoming all too common from US and NATO officials after June’s record death toll, which saw 103 NATO troops killed. At least 57 NATO troops have been killed so far in the month of July.

Rasmussen added that “it is undeniable that, at the beginning, the international community underestimated the scale” of the Afghan War. NATO invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and has repeatedly escalated the size of their occupation force, though the war has continued to worsen since then.

Yet Rasmussen insisted that he remains “optimistic” about the war in Afghanistan, nearly nine years later, and claimed that the large number of deaths proved that the war was going well and the Taliban were getting desperate. Unfortunately, it seems Rasmussen will continue to have reason for such “optimism” going forward.

[bigron]

Taliban talks: the obstacles to a peace deal in Afghanistan

• US withdrawal pledge 'handed propaganda coup'

• Ceding south to insurgents risks civil war

 
 
 

Jon Boone in Kabul
guardian.co.uk,
Monday 19 July 2010 20.02 BST 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/19/taliban-talks-obstacles-peace-deal-aghanistan/print

A fighter with the Haqqani network, part of the Afghan insurgency, at a camp in Khost, eastern Afghanistan. The network is said to have close links with Pakistan. Photograph: Ghaith Abdul-Ahad for the Guardian


As the big names of world politics fly into Kabul for a conference on the future of Afghanistan, many of the capital's international residents have been fleeing in the opposite direction, keen to escape before the airport is closed down and the city put into "lockdown".

Today cars in the city were stopped at checkpoints every few hundred metres as part of a "ring of steel" operation. Those foreigners who have not escaped have been banned from leaving their guesthouses by their employers.

Organisers have attempted to attach great historic symbolism to the half-day conference. Of the nine international conferences on Afghanistan held in the last nine years, this is the first to actually convene inside Afghanistan.

But even diplomats involved in the five-hour event roll their eyes when asked whether it is going to produce any dramatic changes in policy.

The communique – already leaked in draft form to the media – focuses on efforts to build up the Afghan state by making it more effective, better funded and less corrupt. But on the fringes of the conference the hot topic is a subject that is barely mentioned in the draft and until recently eschewed by the US administration; making peace with the Taliban.

That's because despite the fact that the Afghan government is finally strong enough to organise its own conference, the prospect of that government ultimately prevailing over an ever stronger insurgency has never looked more bleak.

At an evening reception a few days before the conference, a senior European diplomat said glumly: "I cannot think of a single reason to die for Afghanistan."

The country, which has suffered almost 30 years of war of one form or the other, is a problem for its neighbours, not for Europe, he said. It was a different a few years ago, when most people still thought victory was possible, he said. But now, pessimism has taken over. "Afghanistan is in a state of freefall and I don't think strategy proposals announced at a one-day conference will solve that," said Candace Rondeaux, a senior analyst from the International Crisis Group. A paper by the Afghanistan NGO Security Office articulated what most people believe: that the counter-insurgency programme cannot win. It sees this summer's surge of US troops in southern Afghanistan as the "grand finale" of a western intervention which is looking to wind itself up.

The biggest problem is that what Nato soldiers are trying to do cannot be achieved on the time frames of the "political clocks" ticking down in Washington and its allied cities. In a recent off-record briefing, one of the most senior US soldiers in Afghanistan pointed out that no counter-insurgency has prevailed against an enemy with sanctuaries of the size the Taliban and other groups enjoy over the border in Pakistan.

'Unthinkable' compromises
No wonder then that most people's thoughts, including Barack Obama's administration, are turning to some sort of negotiated settlement with the insurgents. It is now part of the conventional wisdom in Kabul that the west will have to make compromises with insurgents that once would have been unthinkable, including dropping efforts for women to be given a more equal place in Afghan society. Few people put it quite as bluntly as Francesc Vendrell, a retired senior diplomat who served first the UN in Afghanistan before 2001 and then worked as the top representative of the European Union in Kabul. He recently told the Guardian that the current military effort to push the Taliban out of Kandahar and Helmand was particularly foolish because these are precisely the areas that, in his view, will have to be handed over to Taliban control.

Such a handover of the south could be achieved, he argued, through constitutional reform that would decentralise power from Kabul. In a trice, the south would be ceded to Taliban control, under the pretence of local democracy. Meanwhile, the north would similarly be handed back to the old warlords, the former strongmen who rose to prominence during the 1980s resistance to the Soviet occupation and its violent aftermath.

But deal-making with the insurgents is fraught with danger. Hamid Karzai's so far fairly limited appeals to the Taliban, not least during his "peace jirga" in June, have lost the Afghan president the support of some of the few political powerbrokers who backed him that are not from the Pashtun ethnic group, from which the Taliban draws most of its support.

Haroun Mir, a political analyst and parliamentary candidate with close links to the largely non-Pashtun Northern Alliance that fought against the Taliban, predicted civil war as the ultimate consequence of peace deal with the Taliban.

He said: "The moment the south is abandoned to the Taliban, you will see the north rearming. Any change that sees the Taliban entering government and you will create a full ethnic war."

Put most simply, the risk to the Americans is that they may win over the south, but lose the north. And it is not clear how the Americans will talk to the Taliban.

European diplomats say that whatever the latest thinking in the White House might be, David Petraeus, the new US commander of Nato forces in Afghanistan seems interested in making the fight against the Taliban last as long as possible. After years of refusing to contemplate even the most secret of discussions with a movement viewed as partly responsible for the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, the Americans have precious few ways of reaching out to the other side.

A security official who has in the past been involved in efforts to reach out to the Taliban bemoaned the fact that so many years had been wasted, pointing out that in Northern Ireland the British government had contacts "from the beginning".

Instead of a well-organised effort to talk to the Taliban, there is currently an extraordinary free-for-all, with a whole range of people and countries trying to make contacts with the quetta shura, the Taliban's leadership council. They include Karzai's elder brother Qayoum, and even Burhanuddin Rabbani, a northern power broker and former president. Countries interested in getting in on the act are the UK, Germany, Turkey and Indonesia.

While Saudi Arabia is often cited as potential interlocutor because of that country's status as the guardian of the Islam's holiest places, and because of previous involvement in Afghanistan, diplomats say the Saudis are holding back after "getting their fingers burned once before", according to one diplomat.

With everyone keeping their cards close to their chests, it is not clear whether any country or individual has had any success in talking to anyone of consequence. Mark Sedwill, Nato's ambassador in Kabul, said that Karzai has had little success in forging strong channels of communication. "There are channels of communication with various people, but it is very hard for the Afghans to know how close those people are to the inner circle," he said.

Obama's announcement that US troops will start withdrawing next July has been ruthlessly exploited by Taliban propagandists to convey the impression they are on the road to victory. This has helped deter them from negotiating a peace deal now, said Michael Semple, a former deputy of the European Union political mission and regional analyst. "The Taliban's dominant perspective is to ride it out for another year. They think 'one more push and we'll get them out'."

Post-conflict power grab
Insurgent groups are already positioning themselves for the post-conflict power grab, he said. "Perversely, now that the Americans have signalled they are leaving, there's an incentive for the Taliban to keep fighting so they can show they were the ones who pushed them out," he said.

The British description of a commitment to leave by 2015 "plays better to the Afghan audience", he added. "That's a more Afghan-style timetable." For Nato to reverse insurgent thinking it needs to "credibly clarify its plans for the period between 2011 and 2015". For the time being the Taliban are sticking to their negotiating position that talks will not begin until foreign forces leave Afghanistan.

Another senior western diplomat said that such talk was surely just the sort of "bluff" that characterises the start of any negotiation. He also hinted that the requirement that insurgents must lay down their weapons as a precursor to "reconciling" with the Afghan government was also not to be taken too seriously.

One possibility that is often suggested as a potential confidence-raising measure is reform of the UN list of terrorists, offering to remove the names of senior Taliban officials that would allow them to travel internationally and have bank accounts.

But what the Taliban appear to be most confident about is their chances of outright victory. Rumours abound that Mullah Omar, the one-eyed leader of the Taliban, has recently responded with a list of his own: a kill list of senior government officials and politicians.

[bigron]

July 19, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/07/19/world/asia/AP-AS-Afghanistan.html?_r=2&partner=TOPIXNEWS&ei=5099

Road Bombs Kill Six Afghan Police and Two U.S. Troops

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 8:11 p.m. ET

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) -- The strategy sits for now on a table in a locked-down Afghan capital: Hand over security in all 34 provinces to the government by the end of 2014 -- more than three years after President Barack Obama's date for the start of an American troop drawdown.

By Tuesday, it will be adopted at a one-day international conference, giving war-weary Americans and Europeans a date for when their involvement in Afghanistan may begin to come to an end. It will also give President Hamid Karzai a chance to show whether his struggling government is making progress toward running the country.

The conference comes at a time of growing anxiety in the U.S. and Europe about the course of the war -- concerns underscored by Taliban attacks on Monday that killed six Afghan police and two American soldiers. A major security operation virtually shut down Kabul for the conference in which some 60 nations will focus on the postwar transition.

Afghan officials want the U.S. and other international donors to give them a greater say in spending the billions of dollars in aid and reconstruction funds that have flowed into the country since the war began in 2001 -- often with only limited results and amid allegations of corruption and mismanagement that have bolstered the Taliban in the eyes of many ordinary Afghans.

Talk of lofty development goals will take place against the backdrop of rising casualties, especially in the Taliban strongholds of the south and east.

Mindful that public patience is running out, the delegates will endorse the goal of gradually turning over security to Afghan forces by the time Karzai leaves office at the end of 2014, according to a draft communique obtained by The Associated Press.

The Afghan government and the international community are expected to agree on a plan to decide which of the 34 provinces would be ready for Afghan control and when. The communique however makes no mention of international troop levels during the transition period.

If NATO follows the model used in Iraq, the coalition will likely keep substantial numbers of troops in Afghanistan through much of the transition to help train Afghan forces and to intervene if the Afghans cannot control security and prevent the Taliban from mounting a comeback in provinces cleared of major insurgent forces.

Although Obama said in December that U.S. troops would begin coming home in July 2011, he did not say how many troops would leave then. Critics complained that the date signaled to the Taliban that all they had to do was hold out until the Americans and their allies were gone.

Vice President Joe Biden told ABC's ''This Week'' on Sunday that the number of U.S. troops leaving Afghanistan ''could be as few as a couple of thousand,'' but was once quoted as saying next July's drawdown would mean ''a lot of people moving out.''

In London, a senior British diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity because final details of the communique have not yet been finalized, said the conference would likely agree that the process of handing over control to Afghan forces would begin early next year.

The diplomat said a NATO conference in Lisbon in October would decide which areas would be handed over immediately. A conference working paper on security says that during the transition, NATO troops may ''remain in the lead in specific districts'' of provinces nominally under Afghan control.

Ahead of the conference, representatives of Britain and Afghanistan's neighbor, Pakistan, said some troops may have to remain past 2014 to help train Afghan forces.

''We recognize that there'll be further work to do in terms of training and improving the quality of those forces beyond that, which is why we've said that training forces may be available after that date but we have made it very clear that that will not be combat forces,'' British Defense Secretary Liam Fox told the British Broadcasting Corp., on Sunday.

Speaking to reporters, Pakistan's foreign minister, Shah Mahmood Quereshi, expressed skepticism that the Afghans will be ready to take over security by 2014, saying ''in my personal assessment, it might take longer.''

''But again it depends on how quickly they are able to train their armed forces, their civilian law enforcement agencies, to take on the responsibility of security and protection of the ordinary Afghan citizen,'' said Quereshi, whose government has longtime ties to insurgents. He said Pakistan was ready to help the Afghans achieve stability ''because we feel that a stable, peaceful, prosperous Afghanistan is in Pakistan's interest.''

Underscoring the security challenge, bombs killed six Afghan policemen in the biggest southern city of Kandahar and two American troops in the south, Afghan and U.S. officials said. The American deaths brought to 42 the number of U.S. troops killed in Afghanistan this month.

To demonstrate their commitment to good governance, Afghan officials have been working feverishly in recent weeks to prepare action plans with benchmarks for agriculture, reintegrating insurgents back into society and economic and social development.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is leading the U.S. delegation, told reporters the Kabul conference ''is going to show more Afghan ownership and leadership, which is something we've been pushing.'' She said the U.S. is ''pressing the Afghan government at all levels to be more accountable, to go after corruption,'' but that the U.S. also had a responsibility to improve management of its programs.

The Afghans have long complained that the U.S. and other donors have squandered aid money through hiring overpriced international contractors and pursuing development projects that the country does not need or cannot afford to maintain.

Since the 2001 U.S.-led invasion that toppled the Taliban, 77 percent of the $29 billion in international aid spent in Afghanistan has been disbursed on projects with little or no input from Afghan government officials, according to the Afghan Ministry of Finance's 2009 donor financial review.

At a January meeting in London, donor nations agreed to have half of development aid delivered through the Afghan government to 50 percent in two years.

On Tuesday, Karzai will ask the international community to restate this commitment and to align at least 80 percent of development and governance assistance over the next two years to a list of more than 20 national priority programs being introduced at the conference. In return, Karzai's government will promise to improve its financial management system, improve collection of taxes and customs revenues and fight corruption.

----

Associated Press writers Deb Riechmann and Matthew Lee in Kabul and Mirwais Khan in Kandahar contributed to this report.

[bigron]

Afghanistan: Send less money for drug war, give us more control

On the eve of the Kabul Conference – the ninth major international Afghan donor conference – Afghanistan's Finance Minister Omar Zakhilwal offers suggestions for how to cut down on the waste and fraud that is limiting the impact of billions in aid.

Afghanistan's Finance Minister Omar Zakhilwal speaks during a news conference after a meeting of special envoys to Afghanistan and Pakistan, in Madrid, Spain, June 7. On the eve of the Kabul Conference, Zakhilwal says he’s hoping that international donors will agree to better enable the country to be self-reliant.(Victor R. Caivano/AP)



By Dan Murphy, Staff writer
posted July 19, 2010 at 4:15 pm EDT
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-South-Central/2010/0719/Afghanistan-Send-less-money-for-drug-war-give-us-more-control


Kabul, Afghanistan — Afghanistan's Finance Minister Omar Zakhilwal says he’s hoping that international donors convening Tuesday in Kabul will agree to better enable the country to be self-reliant. To do so, he says, the donors must cut down on the waste and fraud that has hampered development programs, and entrust the government with greater control of aid money.

“Our expectation from the international community … is to respect Afghan leadership and to be serious about building Afghan institutions – not undermine them,’’ said Mr. Zakhilwal in a briefing with a small group of reporters ahead of the Kabul Conference.

Senior officials from about 40 countries – including US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton – are expected to attend the event, the ninth major donor conference since the country was invaded in 2001.

Taking place against a backdrop of unprecedented civilian and military casualties, both Afghan and international, governments and aid groups alike are under pressure to demonstrate that the billions they have poured into projects here have been well spent.

In the world of Afghan aid spending – where a government with $1.5 billion in domestic revenue is running an $11 billion budget and the US has committed more than $50 billion to infrastructure and creating a national army and police force from scratch – there is plenty of criticism about where that money is going, and why.

Zakhilwal: Only 5 percent of US aid channeled through government

Afghans say they’ll be pressing for more government control over international spending. Foreign donors such as the US will be seeking guarantees that the money they provide won’t be diverted or wasted. They also may give their agreement to the government’s effort to “reintegrate” Taliban fighters into society.

US officials say they expect no new aid to be announced at the conference, though Zakhilwal says he’s hoping that $1 billion to $2 billion for infrastructure will be announced.

The meeting itself will effectively be a ratification of already agreed upon measures to improve aid spending here by better aligning international aid programs with priorities identified by the Afghan government.

Zakhilwal said he hoped the donors in attendance would agree to “waste” no more money on counternarcotics programs, channel more of their aid through the government, and place better controls on their spending to prevent the fraud that has hampered development programs here.

The US has channeled only about 5 percent of its spending here through the government, he says, compared to about 50 percent by Britain and “well over” 50 percent by Scandinavian countries.

“I say: ‘Give me more control.' They say: ‘You don’t have the capacity, so we’re going outside [the government],' " he says, describing the dynamic. "I say: ‘How do you have the capacity?’ They buy it at a very steep price,” he answers, pointing to the international consultants who work on aid projects here. For a “fraction” of the money spent, he said, the US could help build capacity within the Afghan government.

In a written response to questions, the US Embassy in Kabul said that 13.5 percent of US aid is being channeled through the government in the current fiscal year. Next year, the embassy says it will be 25 percent, assuming “the Afghan government establishes the necessary accountability and administrative procedures.”

Zakhilwal’s tone of independence was echoed by Afghan National Security Advisor Rangin Dadfar Spanta, who says that “Afghanistan is beyond the point where the international community can tell us what to do.”

'The impact could have been greater'

Contractors for USAID and other agencies, which have channeled some of the billions of US dollars spent here, privately say that hundreds of millions of dollars have been wasted, from petty instances of buying extra laptops for personal use to large-scale problems such as programs meant to attract foreign investment here yielding meager results.

A survey released by Integrity Watch Afghanistan earlier this month found that 1 in 7 Afghans have to pay bribes to receive government services, that many government employees must pay kickbacks to their bosses to receive their salaries, and that the country’s judiciary and security agencies are considered the most corrupt branches of government.

Mr. Zakhilwal accepts that his own government has been part of the problem but bristles at suggestions that corruption and inefficiency on the Afghan side is largely responsible for the $4 billion that he says flows out of the country each year. Last month, Congress withheld $4 billion in Afghanistan spending due to such concerns.

He says that money has often been spent recklessly to create an “illusion of development.” The international approach “leads to quick spending because they have to show” they’re doing something and the “money spent is used as a success indicator” rather than effectiveness. “I don’t want to sound ungrateful… but the impact could have been greater.”

He says that he welcomes US criticism in turn and that the government recognizes it needs to do more to control corruption on its end. “If [the Afghan government] is trusted by the international community but not by our own people, then we are in trouble.”

Is US aid responsible for drop in opium production?

In Zakhilwal’s estimation, “not a single penny” spent on counternarcotics has been effective or to the nation’s benefit. “What was the aim of this spending? Find a single farmer, find a village” and they’ll tell you that poppy cultivation remains a mainstay for tens of thousands of Afghans, he said. The US is spending about $700 million on counternarcotics in Afghanistan this year.

The US Embassy in Kabul disagreed and said that opium production has fallen by about a third since 2008, that Helmand province received a $10 million grant as a reward for reducing land under poppy cultivation by 33 percent, and that 373 “high value narcotics” cases have ended in convictions in the past yar.

Like any other commodity, heroin is subject to market cycles. Two years ago the poppy crop hit a record high, and many middlemen stockpiled supplies. The UN estimated 2009 production at 6,900 tons of opium (the raw material for heroin), against global demand of about 5,000 tons.

That mismatch between supply and demand has pushed down prices. This year’s crop was also hit by poppy plight, according to farmers, whose yields have also become dramatically more efficient in recent years. For instance, 2009 production fell 10 percent over the previous year with a 30 percent fall in land under cultivation.

$100 million to clean ditches; Afghans used to do it for free

Mr. Zakhilwal says US money channeled to emergency employment programs has been actively harmful because he said it has paid money to Afghans to maintain irrigation canals that they previously looked after on their own, and for no pay.

“When it gets to the project level, $100 million is spent on cleaning ditches ... that takes away self-help,” he says.

The US embassy wrote that “ 'cash-for-work' projects offer short-term solutions for Afghanistan, which suffers from massive unemployment both on a rural and urban scale. USAID direct implementation or cash-for-work projects seek to avoid rehabilitating canals and roads where the Afghan government or local authorities can provide their own means of repair or construction of these projects.”

[bigron]

July 19, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/20/world/20mattis.html?ref=middleeast

Petraeus’s Successor Is Known for Impolitic Words

By THOM SHANKER

"General Mattis is a warrior's warrior. That's a virtue not always appreciated," said Nathaniel C. Fick, a former Marine who served under Gen. James N. Mattis.


WASHINGTON — To those who have served under him, Gen. James N. Mattis is the consummate Marine commander, a warrior who chooses to lead from the front lines and speaks bluntly rather than concerning himself with political correctness.

But General Mattis, President Obama’s choice to command American forces across the strategic crescent that encompasses Iraq and Afghanistan, has also been occasionally seen by his civilian superiors as too rough-edged at a time when military strategy is as much about winning the allegiance of local populations as it is about firepower.

If his predecessor as the commander of Central Command, Gen. David H. Petraeus, is known for his skill at winning over constituencies outside the military, General Mattis has a reputation for candid, Patton-esque statements that are not always appreciated inside or outside the Pentagon.

“You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap around women for five years because they didn’t wear a veil,” General Mattis said during a forum in San Diego in 2005. “You know guys like that ain’t got no manhood left anyway, so it’s a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them.”

For those comments, he received an official rebuke. His career path, however, was not seriously altered, and he now finds himself awaiting Senate confirmation to take over one of the most important jobs in the military. His new assignment would nominally put him atop General Petraeus — now the commander in Afghanistan — in the chain of command and leave him overseeing the reduction of American troops in Iraq, the escalation in Afghanistan and an array of potential threats from across the Middle East and South Asia, including Iran.

Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, described General Mattis’s significant professional growth as he rose through the senior ranks, in particular at his current post atop the military’s Joint Forces Command. “I watched him interact in NATO at the highest levels, diplomatically, politically, and on very sensitive subjects,” Admiral Mullen said.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates described General Mattis as “one of our military’s outstanding combat leaders and strategic thinkers.”

But the general angered one of Mr. Gates’s predecessors, Donald H. Rumsfeld, in 2001 with another remark that played well with his Marines, but not with civilian leaders in Washington. After Marines under his command seized an airstrip outside Kandahar, establishing the first forward operating base for conventional forces in the country, General Mattis declared, “The Marines have landed, and we now own a piece of Afghanistan.”

Mr. Rumsfeld and other senior officials believed that these words violated the official message of the invasion, that the United States had no desire to occupy a Muslim nation, but was fighting to free Afghanistan from the Taliban tyranny.

General Mattis is viewed differently by those who have been with him on the front lines.

It was the first winter of the war in Afghanistan, when the wind stabbed like an ice pick and fingertips froze to triggers, but a young lieutenant’s blood simmered as he approached a Marine fighting hole and spotted three heads silhouetted in the moonlight. He had ordered only two Marines to stand watch while the rest of the platoon was ordered to rest before an expected Taliban attack at first light.

“I dropped down into the hole, and there were two junior Marines,” the lieutenant, Nathaniel C. Fick, recalled of that overnight operation outside Kandahar. “But the third was General Mattis. He has a star on his collar and could have been sleeping on a cot with a major waiting to make him coffee. But he’s out there in the cold in the middle of the night, doing the same thing I’m doing as a first lieutenant — checking on his men.”

The military career of the previous top commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, ended over comments he made to Rolling Stone magazine that were read as disparagements of civilian leadership. Yet even in that context, General Mattis’s past provocative comments do not appear to have caused any serious second thoughts about him at the Pentagon or the White House.

“General Mattis is a warrior’s warrior,” said Mr. Fick, who served twice under his command —in Afghanistan in 2001 and 2002, and in Iraq in 2003 — and is now chief executive of the Center for a New American Security, a nonpartisan policy institute. “That’s a virtue not always appreciated in American society.”

Associates of General Mattis offer an explanation for the contradiction of a general who uses “ain’t” in public but devotes his government moving allowance to hauling a library of 6,000 books from station to station, forgoing most personal effects.

He is a reader of philosophy who has patterned his speeches and writings on Aristotle’s famous dictum on effective communications: Know your audience. When he is speaking to Marines, he speaks like a Marine. When he is speaking to defense chiefs or senior government leaders, he uses their language.

And he is a reader of history. He was once asked which American Indian warrior he most respected. His answer was a tribe-by-tribe, chief-by-chief exposition spanning the first Seminole war to the surrender of the Lakota.

Just hours before the invasion of Iraq in 2003, in which General Mattis ordered his force on a race from Kuwait to Baghdad, sowing chaos among Iraqi units along the way, he wrote a message to Marines under his command that encapsulates the general’s thinking.

“While we will move swiftly and aggressively against those who resist, we will treat all others with decency, demonstrating chivalry and soldierly compassion for people who have endured a lifetime under Saddam’s oppression,” he wrote.

“Engage your brain before you engage your weapon,” the general added.

He is sure to be tested at Central Command, where his tasks include maintaining relations with allies, some dear and some difficult; building the capabilities of unstable nations to defend themselves against terrorists or other threats; and always, always, keeping an eye on Iran.

The Central Command post in some ways is diminished, since there is an officer of equal rank in charge of the war in Iraq and another for Afghanistan, both falling within the Central Command’s area of responsibility.

Senior officers predict there will be little friction as General Mattis moves into command over General Petraeus, who now has been cast, for a second time, in the role of savior for a faltering war effort. In fact, some officers suggested that General Mattis should have been considered for the Afghan command, but senior officials wanted the more polished Petraeus, given the circumstances of General McChrystal’s removal, and the fact that General Petraeus already was involved in developing the Afghan strategy.

Generals Mattis and Petraeus have worked together before, in writing the military’s manual on counterinsurgency, which has become the guiding concept for both wars — and for which General Mattis rarely gets credit.

[bigron]

Death Comes From Far Away in Afghan Valley


By Rob Taylor
Reuters
http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=11201938


OUTPOST TERRANOVA, Afghanistan - Private Brandon King was standing regular guard duty in a watch tower near Charqulba village in southern Afghanistan when he was killed by a single shot that was anything but normal.

King was hit in the head from long range, raising fears that foreign fighters with exceptional skills may have reinforced local Taliban as U.S. troops prepare an assault on insurgent strongholds, the area's U.S. battalion commander said."I would characterize them right now as out of the area," Lieutenant-Colonel David Flynn told Reuters. "What country they are from I couldn't necessarily tell you. But the skill of the enemy fighter that took down my soldier the other day is not something that was trained here," Flynn said.
King's unit was based just outside Charqulba at Combat Outpost Nolen, now experiencing daily attacks from insurgents operating out of the deserted village below. Local people have long since fled the fighting.

The Arghandab river valley is critical to the upcoming NATO and U.S. battle in Kandahar city to the southeast, as insurgents there have been able to slip into the city using its fertile grape and pomegranate fields for cover.

Southern Arghandab's farmlands are the district's last cover and concealment zone, in a maze of mud-walled villages known to U.S. commanders as "the triangle".

The governor here was recently assassinated and his replacement is now on what troops call the "rock star" tour, trying to win over local tribal elders in a series of high -- security village visits.

Flynn, who commands an artillery battalion recast as infantry and belonging to the U.S. 101st Airborne Division's 2nd "Strike" Brigade -- newly arrived in Kandahar -- said foreign fighters were coming from Pakistan and traveling west.

With local insurgents, they are also seeding the area with roadside bombs. Three soldiers lost limbs over the past week, while two soldiers were injured on Monday and airlifted out by helicopter for treatment.

A forensic investigation is underway into King's death, Flynn said, to determine whether the bullet was from a specialized sniper rifle or just a freak AK-47 shot.

But King's fellow soldiers, who will have a memorial service on Tuesday, have few doubts.

His base, COP Nolen, is now notorious across the battalion and troops believe the bullet was fired from more than 400 meters (yards), sapping morale at all combat posts in the area.

Most insurgents in the valley are generally unskilled and when in contact with U.S. troops, fire wildly with AK-47s or rocket propelled grenades (RPGs), Flynn said. Most RPGs fired were causing only concussion injuries.

"We have fortunately not yet until now seen in this area very skilled markmen," he said. "I don't think the Taliban has a marksmanship program."

While the pool of potential fighters was virtually without limit, Flynn said there were probably only 40-50 hardcore insurgents in his eight kilometer (five mile) section of the valley, home to 57,000 people.

Over coming weeks, U.S. and Afghan army troops will launch a joint offensive to choke out the insurgents and eventually re-forge government ties in the area.

Afghan troops began patrolling with U.S. soldiers this week and are learning advanced battle skills while living side-by-side with American troops on scorching tented bases.

U.S. soldiers believe they will be most vulnerable in the first nine days of operations, and in that time Afghan soldiers will be crucial to keeping them alive, using their local understanding of culture and possible threats.

"It's a field-to-field fight, so unless I put a combat outpost in every field, it's an endless game," says Flynn. "The answer has got to come from the people."

(Editing by David Fox and Sanjeev Miglani)

[bigron]

After years of rebuilding, most Afghans lack power

Failure to deliver electricity highlights setbacks in effort to repair war-ravaged Afghanistan

BRETT J. BLACKLEDGE, RICHARD LARDNER AND DEB RIECHMANN
AP News
http://wire.antiwar.com/2010/07/18/after-years-of-rebuilding-most-afghans-lack-power-4/
Jul 19, 2010 01:20 EDT

The goal is to transform Afghanistan into a modern nation, fueled by a U.S.-led effort pouring $60 billion into bringing electricity, clean water, jobs, roads and education to this crippled country. But the results so far — or lack of them — threaten to do more harm than good.

The reconstruction efforts have stalled and stumbled at many turns since the U.S. military arrived in 2001, undermining President Barack Obama's vow to deliver a safer, stable Afghanistan capable of stamping out the insurgency and keeping al-Qaida from re-establishing its bases here.

Poppy fields thrive, with each harvest of illegal opium fattening the bankrolls of terrorists and drug barons. Passable roads remain scarce and unprotected, isolating millions of Afghans who remain cut off from jobs and education. Electricity flows to only a fraction of the country's 29 million people.

___

EDITOR'S NOTE — The United States has made an enormous and costly commitment to building a new Afghanistan, but an Associated Press investigation finds that the results have been paltry. First in an occasional series, "Fixing Afghanistan."

___

Case in point: a $100 million diesel-fueled power plant that was supposed to be built swiftly to deliver electricity to more than 500,000 residents of Kabul, the country's largest city. The plant's costs tripled to $305 million as construction lagged a year behind schedule, and now it often sits idle because the Afghans were able to import cheaper power from a neighboring country before the plant came online.

What went wrong?

The failures of the power plant project are, in many ways, the failures of often ill-conceived efforts to modernize Afghanistan:

The Afghans fell back into bad habits that favored short-term, political decisions over wiser, long-term solutions. The U.S. wasted money and might by deferring to the looming deadline and seeming desirability of Afghan President Hamid Karzai's 2009 re-election efforts. And a U.S. contractor benefited from a development program that essentially gives vendors a blank check, allowing them to reap millions of dollars in additional profits with no consequences for mistakes.

Rebuilding Afghanistan is an international effort, but the U.S. alone has committed $51 billion to the project since 2001, and plans to raise the stakes to $71 billion over the next year — more than it has spent on reconstruction in Iraq since 2003.

Roughly half the money is going to bolster the Afghan army and police, with the rest earmarked for shoring up the country's crumbling infrastructure and inadequate social services.

There have been reconstruction successes, such as rebuilding a national highway loop left crumbling after decades of war, constructing or improving thousands of schools, and creating a network of health clinics.

But the number of Afghans with access to electricity has only inched up from 6 percent in 2001 to an estimated 10 percent now, well short of the development goal to provide power to 65 percent of urban and 25 percent of rural households by the end of this year.

Too many major projects are not delivering what was promised to the people, and rapidly dumping billions of reconstruction dollars into such an impoverished country is in some ways making matters worse, not better, Afghan Finance Minister Omar Zakhilwal says.

The U.S and its partners have wasted billions of dollars and spent billions more without consulting Afghan officials, Zakhilwal says.

All of that has ramped up corruption, undermined efforts to build a viable Afghan government, stripped communities of self-reliance by handing out cash instead of real jobs, and delivered projects like the diesel plant that the country can't afford, he says.

"The indicator of success in Afghanistan has been the wrong indicator ... it has been spending," Zakhilwal says. "It has not been output. It has not been the impact."

That's certainly true when it comes to electricity. Afghanistan consumes less energy per person than any other country in the world, even after years of reconstruction efforts, according to data compiled by the U.S. government.

The $305 million diesel power plant, which has dubbed the most expensive plant of its type in the world, represents the biggest single investment the U.S. has made thus far to light up the country.

In 2007, the U.S. had rushed to build the plant in time to help Karzai win re-election, a hectic and unrealistic timetable embraced by the Afghan president that led to the jarring cost increases.

Complaints had piled up about Karzai's inability to deliver reliable power to Kabul, let alone the rest of the country.

"That question became very loud in many people's mind, and the media and the press, 'They haven't been able to bring power to Kabul,'" says Ahmad Wali Shairzay, Afghanistan's former deputy minister of water and energy.

The U.S. and other international donors had spent years helping Afghanistan develop an energy strategy, one focused on reducing the country's reliance on diesel as a primary power source, since it was too costly and too hard to acquire.

The goal was to buy cheaper electricity from neighboring countries and develop Afghanistan's own natural resources, such as water, natural gas and coal.

All of that was abandoned with the decision by U.S. and Afghan officials to build the diesel plant on the outskirts of Kabul.

Never mind that the plant would make the country more, not less, reliant on its fickle neighbors for power. Never mind that Karzai's former finance minister pleaded with U.S. officials to drop the idea.

The U.S. plowed ahead, turning the project over to a pair of American contractors, including one already scolded for wasting millions in taxpayer dollars on shoddy reconstruction projects. The U.S. team paid $109 million for 18 new diesel engines to be built — more than the original cost of the plant — only to discover rust and corrosion in several of them.

"The Kabul diesel project was sinful," says Mary Louise Vitelli, a U.S. energy consultant who focused on power development in Afghanistan for six years, working with the U.S., the World Bank and as a special adviser to Karzai's government.

James Bever, the U.S. Agency for International Development's director of the Afghanistan-Pakistan task force, says it's unfair to label the project a failure. Even with the problems, he notes, the plant provides Afghanistan with an additional power source.

"You know, there's a formula in this business. You can have it fast, you can have it high quality, and you can have it low cost. But you cannot have all three at the same time," Bever says.

For Afghans, each nightfall is a reminder of promises not kept.

When darkness comes, there is not much Abdul Rahim and others living in southwest Kabul can do. Without lights, they cannot work, and their children cannot play. Rahim's children sometimes sit around a kerosene lamp to do their homework, their books laid flat in a circle around the flame's flickering light.

"The people who are living in this area, they don't have electricity and it is dark everywhere," Rahim says. "Day and night, we are counting the minutes to when we will finally get electricity."

The setbacks stretch far beyond Kabul.

Despite spending millions of dollars over more than six years studying the nation's natural gas fields in the north, no plan is in place to tap that substantial resource for power. And a huge project to expand hydropower in the south that already has cost about $90 million is delayed by continued fighting in the region, which has long been a Taliban stronghold.

Only 497,000 of the country's 4.8 million households are connected to what passes for a national power grid, despite more than $1.6 billion already spent on energy projects, according to data from the country's utility corporation.

The system is more like a disconnected patchwork of pockets of available electricity, serving different regions of the country, some with hydropower, some with power imported from nearby countries and some with diesel-generated power.

So Afghans improvise at home, and many hotels and businesses — even embassies and international agencies — rely on their own generators for power. And some sell electricity to their neighbors.

Take Qurban Ali's old, crank-operated diesel generator, which coughs and belches black smoke before the engine starts running. His generator provides electricity to more than 100 houses in the Dasht-i-barchi neighborhood in Kabul, where Rahim lives.

"Right now, we are hopeless to have electricity," Ali says.

Afghans who can afford it pay private generator owners by the light bulb, about $2.60 a month for each bulb hanging from the ceiling. It costs nearly $11 a month to power a television. The average income in Afghanistan is a little more than a dollar a day.

The diesel plant that was supposed to serve Kabul was not ready to be turned over to the Afghan government until May 2010. Today, it runs mostly only for short periods, producing only a fraction of its promised 100 million watts of power.

"This power plant is too expensive for us to use," says Shojauddin Ziaie, Afghanistan's current deputy minister of water and energy.

U.S. contractor Black & Veatch oversaw the project for USAID as part of a joint $1.4 billion contract with The Louis Berger Group, another American contractor.

As the plant's costs and schedule veered wildly off course, the payouts to Black & Veatch also ballooned.

USAID refused to disclose the amounts paid as costs increased, but contract records obtained by The Associated Press show expenses and fees paid to the company tripled from $15.3 million in July 2007, when the project was estimated at $125.8 million overall, to $46.2 million in October 2009, when the price tag reached $301 million.

Greg Clum, a Black & Veatch vice president, defended the project, calling the plant a "critical piece in our ability to help Afghanistan get its legs under itself and to be able to become a sustainable, growing economic player in the region."

Black & Veatch and The Louis Berger group landed the contract in 2006.

The next year, congressional investigators chastised Berger's work on an earlier contract to build schools and health clinics, accusing the company of poor performance and misrepresenting work.

USAID also found problems with the two companies under their current contract, which an internal assessment found put too much risk on the agency and too little on the contractors, who had no incentive to control spending.

In March 2009, with more than half of the $1.4 billion already committed, the agency said it had "lost confidence" in the companies' abilities to do reconstruction work in Afghanistan. Yet the contract continues, with both the agency and the contractors saying management has improved.

"We had a rough patch," says Larry Walker, president of Louis Berger.

Shairzay, the former deputy energy minister, says Afghans view the diesel plant as a nice, expensive gift.

"Instead of giving me a small car, you give me really a Jaguar," he says. "And it will be up to me whether I use it, or just park it and look at it."

___

Associated Press investigative researcher Randy Herschaft in New York contributed to this report.

___

The reporters on this project can be reached at fixingafghanistan(at)ap.org

Source: AP News

[bigron]

Tuesday, July 20, 2010
14:52 Mecca time, 11:52 GMT 
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2010/07/201072075811120324.html
 
News CENTRAL/S. ASIA 
 
Kabul conference cheat sheet 

 
Clinton praised Karzai for his efforts to improve governance and reach out to insurgents [EPA]

There were many broad promises at Tuesday's nearly six-hour Afghanistan conference, but few concrete announcements.

The conference was attended by delegates from roughly 65 countries. It was the ninth international conference on Afghanistan, but the first to actually be held in the country.

Much of central Kabul was closed for the day to provide security for the conference. There were no major incidents, though a number of rockets were fired in Kabul overnight.

Several of them prevented Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary-general, and Carl Bildt, the Swedish foreign minister, from landing at Kabul airport. They diverted to Bagram air base instead. The Nato-led International Security Assistance Force also reported arresting two people who were allegedly plotting an attack against the conference.

Discussion at the forum focused on three main areas: security, development and reconciliation talks with fighters opposed to the government. Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, received promises of sustained support on all three.

Security: A 2014 handover

Karzai told delegates that he hoped Afghan forces would take full responsibility for their country's security by 2014.

"I remain determined that our Afghan national security forces will be responsible for all military and law enforcement operations throughout our country by 2014," Karzai said.

"Our goal is to transform the organs of our national security forces into trusted institutions."


Nato secretary-general Anders Fogh Rasmussen talks to Al Jazeera's James Bays
WATCH
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yP_dxB3mFpQ&feature=player_embedded

By most accounts, though, Afghan security forces are far from prepared to secure the country.

A recent report concluded that the US military routinely overstated the competency and preparedness of the Afghan army.

Other recent studies have found rampant corruption in the security services, and declared their growth unsustainable.

So US, Nato and European officials added a number of caveats to Karzai's timeline. Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Nato secretary-general, said any Nato withdrawal would be based on "conditions, not calendars".

"Our mission will end when, only when, the Afghans are able to maintain security on their own," Rasmussen said.

Catherine Ashton, the European Union foreign policy chief, made a similar point: She said withdrawals "should not be driven by a prescribed calendar, but by the reality on the ground."

Shah Mehmood Qureshi, the Pakistani foreign minister, offered to provide training for the Afghan security forces.

"The framework for transition of security responsibilities... requires the capacity-building of the ANA and the ANP," Qureshi said. "Pakistan is willing to assist Afghanistan in this effort."

That offer is likely to be controversial in Afghanistan, where many have long viewed Pakistan's motives with suspicion. It was announced earlier this month, though, that Karzai agreed for the first time to send a group of army officers to Pakistan for training.

Development: Better co-ordination

Omar Zakhilwal, the Afghan finance minister, asked donors to channel 50 per cent of their aid through Afghan ministries within two years.

Only about 20 per cent of the aid sent to Afghanistan is currently funnelled through ministries; the rest is spent by NGOs and other organisations, many of which fail to tell the Afghan government how they are spending it.

Zakhilwal also laid out a long list of priorities for how that money will be spent.


Donors have contributed billions for agriculture, schools, and other programs [AFP]

He pledged to create 300,000 new jobs over the next three years through agricultural development programmes; to expand women's access to education; to improve Afghanistan's infrastructure, particularly its meagre railroad networks; and to expand foreign investment.

Zakhilwal offered few details on how the government would meet those goals.

He also acknowledged that the Afghan government struggles to raise its own funds, and to spend the money it receives.

"In the near term, our capacity to absorb money through the budget is limited, and we recognise that money provided by donors will be important," he said.

Karzai encouraged NGOs to adopt a "common framework" for reporting their budgets to Kabul.

"Civil society organisations have played an important role in the provision of social services," he said. "I call on NGOs to adopt a common framework on budgeting and reporting, and to disclose that information to the public."

Reconciliation: Praise for Karzai's plan

Attendees spoke comparatively little about Karzai's plan for reconciliation talks with the insurgency, which calls for jobs and economic incentives for "foot soldiers" and a political settlement with the leadership.

Karzai said his government has the "political will" to push forward with the plan, which was approved by a "peace jirga" in Kabul last month. Clinton said she was cautiously optimistic about the plan.

"There have been positive steps since last month’s consultative peace jirga," Clinton said. "But progress will depend on whether insurgents agree to be reconciled by renouncing Al-Qaeda and agreeing to abide by the laws and constitution of Afghanistan."

Clinton also said that the rights of women and ethnic minorities "will not be sacrified" in a reconciliation deal.


Habiba Sorabi, the governor of Bamiyan, worries about talks with the Taliban
WATCH
http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid69900095001?bctid=155392177001

The governor of Bamiyan province, the only female governor in Afghanistan, said in an interview on Monday with Britain's Channel 4 News that she worried women would be asked to "make sacrifices" in any deal with the insurgency.

And minority groups, too, worry that a reconciliation deal will trample on their rights.

Several countries renewed their financial commitments to the $750 million fund that the Afghan government will use to implement its reconciliation program.

German foreign minister Guido Westerwelle, for example, said that his country is committed to delivering 50m euros ($65m) over the next five years.
 
 

[bigron]

Tuesday, July 20, 2010
18:51 Mecca time, 15:51 GMT 
 http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2010/07/201072052634402987.html
 
News CENTRAL/S. ASIA 
 
Afghan handover plan endorsed  

 
Karzai and Clinton toured a market in Kabul after delivering their opening speeches [AFP]
 
Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, has received international backing for plans that would see Afghan forces to take over security across the country in four years.

Karzai outlined the plans at an international conference in Kabul attended by ministers and diplomats from around the world.

"I remain determined that our Afghan national security forces will be responsible for all military and law enforcement operations throughout our country by 2014," Karzai told delegates at the meeting in the Afghan capital.

It was the ninth conference on Afghanistan since the US-led war began there in 2001.

After hearing Karzai's speak, international leaders offered support for the plans he had outlined.

Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, described the plan as "comprehensive" and said the conference marked a "turning point," while David Cameron, the British prime minister, said plans for a transition in four years were "realistic".

Ban Ki-Moon, the UN secretary-general who chaired the conference with Karzai, said the final communique reflected the determination of the international community. "Now we must focus all our energies on making this vision a reality," he said.

Meanwhile, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Nato secretary-general, said Nato would not withdraw from Afghanistan until Afghan security forces were able to provide their own security.

"Our mission will end when, only when, the Afghans are able to maintain security on their own," he said. "Our transition will be based on conditions, not calendars."

In an interview with Al Jazeera, Rasmussen said he would not outline a timeline for when Nato forces might start to withdraw, or which provinces they would exit first.

Delegates had been expected to press Karzai to accelerate and improve the training of the Afghan army and police, to facilitate the withdrawal of thousands of Nato troops serving in the country.

Projects and programmes

Karzai also asked international donors to give his government more control over billions of dollars in aid. More than three-quarters of Afghan aid money is spent by NGOs and other organisations, not by the Afghan government.

The Afghan government wants 50 per cent of aid to be channeled through ministries in the next two years.

Delivering our resources through hundreds of isolated projects will not achieve the desired results," Karzai said. "It is time to concentrate our efforts on a limited number of projects and programmes."

Also high on the agenda at the conference was Karzai's plan to offer jobs and cash to Taliban members in exchange for them laying down their weapons.

That plan was endorsed at the last major conference on Afghanistan, held in London in January.

Clinton said the United States has seen "positive steps" from Karzai's outreach to insurgents.

Omar Zakhilwal, the Afghan finance minister, presented a list of "national priority programmes," which will be the focus for international aid efforts. He pledged to create 300,000 new jobs over three years through agricultural programmes; to expand women's access to education; and to create infrastructure to tap into Afghanistan's billions of dollars in mineral wealth.

"We are expecting your full support and alignment," Zakhilwal said.

Concrete Steps

Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary-general, has called for the Afghan president to unveil "concrete" steps to improve governance and promote national reconciliation.
 
"We expect President Karzai and his government would come up with a concrete action plan... about the way to enhance good governance, promote further reconciliation and also how he can improve the security situation in his country," Ban told the AFP news agency.

Karzai said the Afghan government currently has enough aid funding for the next three years. And Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, promised a lengthy international commitment to rebuilding Afghanistan.

"We have no intention of abandoning our long-term vision," Clinton said. "Too many nations... have suffered too many losses to let this country slide backwards."

Clinton arrived in the Afghan capital late on Monday, following a visit to neighbouring Pakistan. On that leg of the trip, Clinton announced the first part of a $7.5bn aid package for the country, including funds for energy and water projects.
 
 

[bigron]

UN chief urges Iran help on Afghanistan

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 18:01:15 GMT
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=135599&sectionid=351020101

   
Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki attends the international conference on Afghanistan in Kabul, July 20, 2010.

On the sidelines of a major security conference, the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon says Iran could play a central part in establishing peace in Afghanistan.

"We believe in Iran's key role in assisting efforts for peace and stability in Afghanistan based on its proximity and vast borders," ISNA's Kabul reporter quoted UN chief as saying.

The remarks were made during a meeting with Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki on Tuesday.

Iran's top diplomat told the UN chief that in the nine years since the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, the US has been following the wrong policies with regards to regional assistance in stabilizing the war-torn country.

On the hostile standoff over Iran's nuclear program, Mottaki stressed that "as a member of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the Iranian nation will not forgo its legitimate rights."

He went on the blast the Vienna group for wasting the opportunity for engagement and dialogue provided by the May 17 nuclear fuel swap declaration issued jointly with Turkey and Brazil.

Earlier on Tuesday, Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast said Western countries attending the conference were seeking to prolong and boost their presence in the region rather than addressing pressing Afghan issues.

ZHD/HGH

[bigron]

Published on Tuesday, July 20, 2010 by Informed Comment

Advice for General Petraeus on the Rules of Engagement:

It’s Neither/Nor, Not Either/Or


by Tom Engelhardt

Recently, we've been flooded with news stories and debate about the "rules of engagement" for U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Now-discredited war commander General Stanley McChrystal, we've been told, instituted fiercely restrictive rules of engagement to lessen the number of Afghan civilians who died or were wounded at the hands of American forces, and to "protect the people," just as the "hearts and minds" part of counterinsurgency doctrine tells us should be done. Specifically, he made it far harder for U.S. troops under fire to call in air strikes or artillery support if civilians might possibly be in the vicinity of any firefight. Grumbling about this among those troops, according to Michael Hastings, the Rolling Stone reporter whose piece took McChrystal down, had already reached something close to fever pitch by the time the general and his special ops cronies began mouthing off in frustration in Paris.

Articles in which troops or mid-level officers claim to be "handcuffed by our chain of command" are now almost as common as implicitly critical stories about the dismal failure of McChrystal's counterinsurgency effort in Afghanistan. General David Petraeus, on being given command of the war effort, turned immediately to those rules of engagement, promising not to change them, but to thoroughly review and "clarify" their "implementation and interpretation."

What this means, we don't yet know, but we should know one thing: the present discussion of counterinsurgency and of those rules of engagement makes little sense. They are being presented as a kind of either/or option - kill us or kill them - when it would be more accurate to say that it's a neither/nor situation.

After all, in another, less protective part of McChrystal's counterinsurgency war, he was bulking up special operations forces in the country and sending them out on night raids searching for Taliban mid-level leaders. These raids continue to cause a cascade of civilian casualties, as well as an increasing uproar of protest among outraged Afghans. In addition, even with McChrystal's tight rules for normal grunts, stories about the deaths of civilians, private security guards, and Afghan soldiers from air strikes, misplaced artillery fire, checkpoint shootings, and those night raids continue to pour out, followed by the usual American initial denials and then formulaic apologies for loss of life.

Whatever the rules, civilians continue to die in striking numbers at the hands of guerrillas and of American forces, and here's the thing: tighten those rules, loosen them, fiddle with them, bend them, evade them, cancel them - at some level it's all still neither/nor, not either/or. In any counterinsurgency war where guerrillas, faced with vastly superior fire power, fight from cover and work hard to blend in with the populace, where the counterinsurgents are foreigners about as alien from the land they are to "protect" as humanly possible, and fight, in part, from on high or based on "intelligence" from others about a world they can't fathom, civilians will die. Lots of civilians. Continually. Whatever rules you make up. The issue isn't the "rules of engagement." No rules of engagement will alter the fact that civilian death is the central fact of such wars.

It's time to stop talking about those rules and start talking about the madness of making counterinsurgency the American way of war. It wasn't always so. Not so long ago, after all, it was considered a scandal that, post-Vietnam, the U.S. military rebuilt its all-volunteer force without rewriting or reconsidering its counterinsurgency manual. The high command, in fact, let counterinsurgency go to hell, exactly where they thought it deserved to rest in peace, and were focused instead on preventing Soviet armies from pouring through Germany's Fulda Gap (something they were conveniently never likely to do). After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the U.S. military would continue to focus for some years on Colin Powell's doctrine of overwhelming force, decisive victory, and quick exit.

Then, of course, Iraq happened and decisive victory ("mission accomplished") soured into decisive disaster. It was at this moment, in 2006, that Generals Petraeus and James "Mad Dog" Mattis (now respectively Afghan war commander and head of Centcom) dusted off the old, failed Vietnam-era counterinsurgency doctrine and made it sexy again. They oversaw the writing of a whole new guidebook for the Army and Marines, 472 pages of advice that even got its own (university press) trade edition, and became the toast of Washington and the Pentagon.

So, after being buried and disinterred, COIN, as its known, is once again the reigning monarch of American war-fighting doctrines as the Pentagon prepares for one, two, three Iraqs or Afghanistans - and the scandal is that (surprise, surprise!) it's not working. This should, of course, hardly have been news. The history of counterinsurgency warfare isn't exactly a success story, or our present COINistas wouldn't have taken their doctrine largely from failed counterinsurgency wars in Vietnam and Algeria, among other places. It's not so encouraging, after all, when the main examples you have before you are defeats.

Our generals might have better spent their time studying the first modern war of this sort. It took place in early nineteenth century Spain when the Islamic fundamentalists of that moment - Catholic peasants and their priests - managed to stop Napoleon's army (the high-tech force of the moment) in its tracks. Just check out Goya's "Disasters of War" series, if you want to see how grim it was. And it's never gotten much better.

Looked at historically, counterinsurgency was largely the war-fighting option of empires, of powers that wanted to keep occupying their restive colonies forever and a day. Of course, past empires didn't spend much time worrying about "protecting the people." They knew such wars were brutal. That was their point. As George Orwell summed such campaigns up in 1946 in his essay "Politics and the English Language": "Defenseless villagers are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set afire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification." The rise of anti-colonialism and nationalism after World War II should have made counterinsurgency history. Certainly, there is no place for occupations and the wars that go with them in the twenty-first century.

Unfortunately, none of this has been obvious to Washington or our leading generals. Of course, if they can rewrite the Army's counterinsurgency manual for a new century, any of us can, so let me offer my one-line rewrite of their 472 pages. It's simple and guaranteed to save trees as well as lives: "When it comes to counterinsurgency, don't do it."

© 2010 Tom Engelhardt
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project [1], runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com [2]. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture [3], a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing [4]. His latest book, The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's [5] (Haymarket Books), will be published in June.

 


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/07/20

[bigron]

Afghan withdrawal may start 2011: UK

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 07:47:58 GMT
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=135662&sectionid=351020403


British Prime Minister David Cameron says his country could begin withdrawing troops from Afghanistan as early as next year.
 
British Prime Minister David Cameron has expressed hope that some British forces could start pulling out of Afghanistan as early as next year.

In an interview with BBC Radio after talks on Tuesday with US president Barack Obama, Cameron raised the prospect of a limited withdrawal of British troops in 2011, Reuters reported.

Obama has said he plans to start bringing US soldiers home in July 2011.

Asked if the UK could do the same, Cameron said, "Yes, we can but it should be based on the conditions on the ground."

"I hope that with the strategy we have, the build-up of the Afghan army, the transitioning of districts of provinces, as the president said, it will be possible to bring some troops home," he said.

The new British premier said the British public should be clear that, by 2015, the UK would not have "combat troops or large numbers" in Afghanistan.

A major conference in Kabul on Tuesday supported a plan that would see responsibility for security in some areas start to be handed over to Afghan forces later in 2010 with an aim of full handover by 2014.

David Cameron had made it clear on the sidelines of the G8 summit earlier in July that he wanted a full withdrawal of British troops from Afghanistan by 2015.

When asked by Sky News whether the 10,000 British troops in Afghanistan would be brought back home by Britain's next general election, Cameron 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."

MVZ/MVZ

[bigron]

Wednesday, July 21, 2010
15:04 Mecca time, 12:04 GMT
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2010/07/2010721111316255611.html
   
News CENTRAL/S. ASIA 
 
Taliban 'beheads' Afghan police 


The attack came as Afghanistan said its forces should be leading security operations by 2014 [File: AFP]
 
Six Afghan police officers have been beheaded by Taliban  fighters in northern Baghlan province, the Nato-led international security
assistance force (Isaf) has said.

The officers were killed after Taliban fighters attacked a number of government buildings, including a police checkpoint.

A spokesman for the Taliban confirmed the attack on Wednesday, but denied the Isaf claims about the decapitations.

Abdul Majid, the governor of Baghlan, also he was unaware of reports that the victims had been beheaded.

The military alliance said police "successfully repelled" an attack on a school, clinic and the district governor's building in Dahanah-ye Ghori on Tuesday, killing several fighters, but that the police checkpoint had been overrun.

"During the attack, insurgents overran a police checkpoint and killed the police officers by cutting off their heads," it said.

The attack took place as Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, hosted an international conference during which he said he hoped that the country's forces would be able to take over responsibility for security by 2014.

He suggested that foreign troops would be able to leave some areas by as soon as the end of the year.

Despite the number of foreign troops in Afghanistan rising to about 150,000, the Taliban continue to stage deadly attacks against government, military and civilian targets.
 
 

[bigron]

Taliban Behead Six Police Officers in Afghanistan Attack

Published July 21, 2010
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2010/07/21/taliban-behead-police-officers-afghanistan-attack/

Taliban-linked rebels beheaded six Afghan policemen after overrunning their checkpoint during clashes in northern Afghanistan, NATO said Wednesday.

The incident took place Tuesday in the province of Baghlan, a region where insurgents have gained strong footholds in recent years, NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said.

The military said police "successfully repelled" an insurgent attack on a school, clinic and the district governor's building in Dahanah-ye Ghori, killing several insurgents.

But added, "During the attack, insurgents overran a police checkpoint and killed the police officers by cutting off their heads."

ISAF condemned the "brutal" killings.

Abdul Majeed, provincial governor confirmed that six Afghan policemen were killed in their post but refused to give details.

Deaths among Afghan and foreign security forces have surged in recent months as NATO, U.S. and Afghan troops roll out a counter-insurgency strategy designed to reverse the Taliban momentum and speed an end to a nearly nine-year war.

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We Are Not Special, and There Is No Happy Ending:

The Blood-Drenched Darkness of American Exceptionalism


by Arthur Silber

http://uruknet.info/?p=m68120&hd=&size=1&l=e

July 20, 2010

You may not regard the two propositions in my title as deserving of any special attention. You may think, entirely correctly, that if we as Americans are special, it is only in the way that any human being is special: that each of us is unique and irreplaceable, that each of our lives, and the lives of all of us, demand reverence for the unrepeatable value of a person's brief passage in this world. And you may recognize, also correctly, that certain actions lead to destruction and loss in a manner and on a scale that forbid correction and amends, that on some occasions we can only accept the certainty of negative consequences that cannot be avoided. Human beings may be capable of remarkable, even wondrous achievement, but limits are inherent in existence itself. Sometimes those limits mean that wounds will never heal, that the pain will never end.

If you view these observations as unremarkable, even mundane, that is because in certain crucial respects, you are an adult. Such a healthy perspective -- "healthy" designating that which proceeds from demonstrable facts -- enables us to see the extreme nature of the delusions necessitated by an unquestioned belief in the myth of American exceptionalism. Despite the events of the last decade, the myth remains the heart of American culture, of American politics, and of the American State. Our politicians still regularly assure us that "America is the last, best hope of Earth," and that "the American moment" will extend for the entirety of "this new century." Americans remain "the Good Guys: "The emphasis is not only on 'Good,' but on 'the': we are the Good Guys in a way that no one else is, or can ever be."

When we believe that America and Americans are unique and uniquely good in all of history, we will also believe that there is no problem we cannot overcome. Our political leaders tell us this fable time and again; many Americans are eager to believe it, in the manner of a damaged child who appeals to mysterious powers to vanquish the dangers lurking in the shadows of his room. We witness this mechanism in connection with a wide range of problems, even when those problems reach the catastrophic level. Here is Obama on the continuing catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico:

President Barack Obama struck an optimistic tone over the ongoing oil disaster Monday afternoon, saying that "things are going to return to normal" on the stricken Gulf Coast after much pain and frustration, and that the polluted waters will eventually be in better shape than before the leak began.

These are reassurances offered by parents to children whom they treat as doltish objects fit only to be manipulated. The parent or other authority figure -- here, Obama -- does not expect his words to be credited after a process of independent evaluation. He expects, in fact he demands, that you take his word for it, that you believe him without question or challenge. He demands that you obey. This is the way our political leaders treat their subjects both abroad and at home. (In addition to rejecting this method of forcible "persuasion," I also reject such reassurances for further, more specific and compelling reasons, as do many others. I recognize that we are provided only such information about the Gulf catastrophe as the government and BP, which are one and the same in this context, wish us to have. We have close to no idea what is actually going on, or the damage that has already been inflicted and that may manifest itself in the future. Moreover, I recognize the dangerous folly of entrusting any kind of solution to a crisis of this kind, or to the crisis of climate change however one may conceive it, to an inherently, fatally corrupted corporatist State.)

The pace of destruction on the domestic front is rapidly increasing at present. But the greatest destruction wrought by the exceptionalist American State will still be found in the realm of foreign affairs. The foundation of America's murderous prescription for large parts of the rest of the world remains as I have identified it:

In the most extreme (and, one could argue, most consistent) version of this [exceptionalist] tale, non-Western parts of the world are less than human -- and they are subhuman by choice. They are immoral, and sometimes even evil. Since we represent the good and they represent the evil, we are surely entitled to improve them, by invasion and bombing if necessary. If they do not threaten us today, they might at some indeterminate time in the future. And while we might kill many innocent civilians in our campaign of civilization, those who survive will be infinitely better off than they would have been otherwise. Besides, how "innocent" can any of them be -- since they are members of inferior, less than fully human civilizations, and since they are so by choice?

With this belief system as the unchallengeable foundation, a vast number of Americans render themselves completely unable to recognize the devastating consequences of the American State's actions abroad. Whenever those consequences threaten to announce themselves in an unavoidable manner, most Americans will explicitly deny or avoid them through an endless variety of stratagems. When all else fails, their ultimate defense will be the cloaked restatement of the myth's message: the lives of those other people are simply not of the same value as our own. Such recognition must be disguised to a degree, for an explicit statement to that effect would shock certain sensibilities (or certain people would at least pretend to be shocked). But -- and this is the critical point -- when we consider the relevant facts, the continuing refusal to acknowledge what the American State has done and still does today can have no other meaning.

A terrifyingly awful example of this phenomenon is the disappearance of the nightmarish tragedy of Iraq from our national conversation. Remember that Iraq never posed a serious threat to the United States, and that our leaders knew that it posed no such threat. Therefore, the U.S. invasion and occupation represent an ongoing series of war crimes. This is not an arguable point in any respect. Since it cannot be argued, it is ignored altogether.

And it is not just ignored, as malignantly evil as that would be by itself. The American exceptionalist myth tells us that the United States is unique and uniquely good. It is not sufficient to ignore negative consequences of our actions: we must transform any and all negative consequences into a positive good. This process has been rigorously followed for every American intervention ever undertaken (going back to the Philippines, then with the American entrance into World War I, on into many interventions after World War II, on into Iraq and Afghanistan today), and the identical process has been underway for several years in connection with Iraq.

Chris Floyd identified the operation of this mechanism in December of last year:
[T]he situation in Iraq is now being held up as a model, a goal, for Barack Obama's massive expansion of the war and occupation in Afghanistan. Obama himself has called the "surge" in Iraq "an extraordinary achievement," and has at every turn promoted and propagated the myth that George W. Bush's escalation of a hideous war of aggression was a resounding success. This myth is based on one thing only: the fact that the peak of the ghastly death rate produced by the American occupation dropped to a somewhat less horrific level. But as countless experts and analysts have pointed out, this drop had very little to do with the addition of some 28,000 American troops.

In that article, Floyd excerpted Patrick Cockburn, who identified this terrible truth:
The guerrilla war against the US in Iraq ceased because the Sunni community was being slaughtered by Shia death squads. "Judging by the body counts at the time in the Baghdad morgues, three Sunnis died for every Shia," Dr Michael Izady, who conducted a survey of the sectarian make-up of Baghdad for Columbia University's School of International Affairs, is quoted as saying. "Baghdad, basically a Sunni city into the 1940s, by the end of 2008 had only a few hundred thousand Sunni residents left in a population of over five million." Defeated in this devastating sectarian civil war, the Sunni ended their attacks on US troops and instead sought their protection. The "surge" of 28,000 extra US troops who arrived in the summer of 2007 had a marginal impact on the outcome of the fighting.

We must always remember the scope of the horrifying effects of the U.S. invasion and occupation, including the murder of over a million innocent people, together with the all-encompassing devastation of an entire country as set forth in that same article.

Such is the limitless power of delusion on this scale: a blood-drenched tragedy of world-historical proportion becomes "an extraordinary achievement," and a criminal war of aggression is transmuted by the alchemy of cultural myth-making into a "success." This is the evil to be found at the rotted heart of the myth: whatever the United States does, it will lead to good and only to good.

And all of it -- all of it -- is a damnable, unforgivable lie. Patrick Cockburn has written a new article about Iraq: "The Ruin They'll Leave Behind." Let us leave aside the fact that the U.S. isn't leaving, an issue I just recently discussed. In light of the great value of Cockburn's reporting, this is a comparatively minor point. I urge you to read all of Cockburn's piece.

Here are several key passages:
On June 14, this year, an interpreter for the US army called Hameed al-Daraji was shot dead as he was sleeping in his house in Samarra, a city 60 miles north of Baghdad.

In some respects there was nothing strange about the killing, since 26 Iraqi civilians were murdered in different parts of the country on the same day. As well as working periodically for the Americans since 2003, Mr Daraji may have recently converted to Christianity and unwisely taken to wearing a crucifix around his neck – a gesture quite enough to make him a target in the Sunni Arab heartlands.

What made Iraqis, inured to violence though they are, pay particular attention to the murder of Mr Daraji was the identity of his killer. Arrested soon after the body was discovered, his son is reported to have confessed to his father's murder, explaining that his father's job and change of religion brought such shame on the family that there was no alternative to shooting him. A second son and Mr Daraji's nephew are also wanted for the killing and all three of the young men are alleged to have links to al-Qa'ida.

The story illustrates the degree to which Iraq remains an extraordinarily violent place. Without the rest of the world paying much attention, some 160 Iraqis have been killed, and hundreds wounded, over the past two weeks. Civilian casualties in Iraq are still higher than in Afghanistan, though these days the latter has a near-monopoly of media attention. But the killing of Mr Daraji should give pause to those who imagine that the US occupation of Iraq somehow came right in its final years...

...

American troops leave behind a country that is a barely floating wreck. Baghdad feels like a city under military occupation, with horrendous traffic jams caused by the 1,500 checkpoints and streets blocked off by miles of concrete blast walls that strangle communications within the city. The situation in Iraq is in many ways "better" than it was, but it could hardly be anything else, given that killings at their peak in 2006-2007 were running at about 3,000 a month. That said, Baghdad remains one of the most dangerous cities in the world, riskier to walk around than Kabul or Kandahar.

...

Corruption explains much in Iraq – but it is not the only reason why it has been so difficult to create a functioning government. Saddam Hussein should not be such a hard act to follow. Part of the problem here is that the US invasion and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein had revolutionary consequences because it shifted power from the Sunni Arab Baathists to the 60 per cent of Iraqis who are Shia and in alliance with the Kurds. Iraq had a new ruling class rooted in the rural Shia population and headed by former exiles with no experience of running anything. In many ways, their model of government is to recreate Saddam's system, only this time with the Shia in charge. It used to be said that Iraq was under the thumb of Sunni Arabs from Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's home city north of Baghdad, while these days people in Baghdad complain that a similar tight-knit gang from the Shia city of Nasiriyah surrounds the Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

In many ways, Iraq is becoming like Lebanon, its politics and society irredeemably divided by sect and communal loyalties. The outcome of the parliamentary election on March 7 could easily be forecast by assuming that most Iraqis would vote as Sunni, Shia or Kurds. Jobs at the top of government and throughout the bureaucracy are filled unofficially according to sectarian affiliation. In a crude way, this does give everybody a share of the cake, but the cake is too small to satisfy more than a minority of Iraqis. Government is also weakened because ministers are representatives of some party, faction or community and cannot be dismissed because they are crooked or incompetent.

Going back to Baghdad last month, after being away for some time, I was struck by how little had changed. The airport was still among the worst in the world. When I wanted to fly to Basra, Iraq's second biggest city and the centre of the oil industry, Iraqi Airways said they had only one flight during the week and they were none too certain when that would leave.

Violence may be down, but few of the 2 million Iraqi refugees in Jordan and Syria think it safe enough to go home. A further 1.5 million people are Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), forced out of their homes by sectarian pogroms in 2006 and 2007 and too frightened to return. Of these, some half a million people try to survive in squatter camps which Refugees International describes as lacking "basic services, including water, sanitation and electricity, and built on precarious places – under bridges, alongside railroad tracks and amongst garbage dumps". A worrying fact about these camps is that the number of people in them should be shrinking as sectarian warfare ebbs, but in fact the IDP population is growing. These days refugees come to the camps not because of fear of the death squads but because of poverty, joblessness or because the prolonged drought is driving farmers off their land.
Cockburn has much, much more.

As deeply horrifying as these details are, perhaps it is that these facts are not hidden or completely inaccessible that is most unsettling. What the U.S. has done -- death and ongoing suffering on a monumental scale, that "Iraq remains an extraordinarily violent place" and "is a barely floating wreck" -- can easily be known, if we seek to know the truth. Yet almost none of our leaders will acknowledge the smallest part of this truth, and most Americans are unaware of almost all of it. This reveals a notable danger in what is often held up as yet another singular virtue of the United States: that we have a "free" press, and that there is no official censorship. As a result, people believe that they do know the truth. After all, no one is being actively prevented from telling even unpleasant truths.

Such simplistic appeals to what is supposedly another aspect of American virtue disregard the complex operations of cultural "truths" that are widely accepted. It is almost impossible to imagine how official censorship could more successfully and comprehensively obliterate the actual truth. And I repeat: since people delude themselves that their leaders and media are telling them the truth, they feel no need to seek further for it. Moreover, facts such as those set forth by Cockburn, facts that are accessible to anyone if he wants to find them, have no reality for those whose identity and self-worth are critically tied to the myth of American exceptionalism. It is the myth that is real; facts that conflict with and undermine the myth rarely penetrate the consciousness of most Americans. Such facts are never admitted by those who would lead the American State.

Even after the criminal catastrophe of Iraq, the myth prevails. Death and devastation become "success" -- and that "success" then becomes another justification for yet another campaign of death and devastation in Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and then perhaps in Iran...

Some critics of American interventionism abroad point to signs that the same critics think indicate a willingness to more seriously question American foreign policy: the overextension of the American military, the serious, possibly irreversible weakening of the American economy generally, and the like. Again, however, such facts, indisputable though they may be, fall into the category of facts that become non-facts when set against the power of the myth. I have sometimes remarked that myths which assume importance in the manner of the exceptionalist myth constitute life itself. It is crucial to appreciate that this is how it operates in psychological terms. In a contest between a belief system which provides identity and self-worth and facts which threaten that identity and self-worth, it is frequently the facts which many people choose to discard.

Occasionally, when the destructive (and self-destructive) effects of a belief system become sufficiently overwhelming, a person will decide to question and eventually dispense with the belief system. The process can be agonizingly difficult. Many people prefer to avoid it. Most of us are familiar with the tragic story of the individual who refuses to give up the myth that he still believes provides him consolation and meaning -- even when clinging to the myth leads to his own death. Countries can behave in the identical manner; history provides numerous examples of the same tragedy on a national scale.

For the present, and for the United States, the myth commands the controlling position. What will dislodge it? I'm convinced that only widespread devastation visited on the U.S. itself, through economic collapse, natural (or unnatural) catastrophe, or a final war of unspeakably awful consequence, will finally force our leaders and many Americans to surrender the myth that has sustained them for so long. And in such a case, it won't be a choice to acknowledge the truth at long last. The devastation will be so immense that the myth will be rendered entirely irrelevant, a kind of unutterably grisly, sick, pointless joke. I would be profoundly grateful to be in error on this point; I do not think I am.

Even now, we could choose differently, but there are almost no signs that most Americans are willing to consider the possibility. Certainly, our leaders are not. And even if we do not make a different choice, we may have years and even decades before the worst consequences are felt. It is impossible to know the details in advance given the huge number of variables involved.

For the moment, we are left with a nation and a government that is as I described it close to four years ago:
If you have ever wondered how a serial murderer -- a murderer who is sane and fully aware of the acts he has committed -- can remain steadfastly convinced of his own moral superiority and show not even the slightest glimmer of remorse, you should not wonder any longer.

The United States government is such a murderer. It conducts its murders in full view of the entire world. It even boasts of them. Our government, and all our leading commentators, still maintain that the end justifies the means -- and that even the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocents is of no moral consequence, provided a sufficient number of people can delude themselves into believing the final result is a "success."

...

We can appeal all we want to "American exceptionalism," but any "exceptionalism" that remains ours is that of a mass murderer without a soul, and without a conscience. ... It is useless to appeal to any "American" sense of morality: we have none. It does not matter how immense the pile of corpses grows: we will not surrender or even question our delusion that we are right, and that nothing we do can be profoundly, unforgivably wrong.


 

[bigron]

Plan to begin Afghan security handover this year dropped

Exclusive: Change at Kabul conference reflects US commander's belief Afghanistan is too weak to take control

 
 
 
by Jon Boone in Kabul
guardian.co.uk,
Tuesday 20 July 2010 18.48 BST   
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/20/plans-afghan-security-handover-dropped

General David Petraeus formally assumed command of Nato forces in Afghanistan earlier this month. Photograph: Dusan Vranic/AP


Plans to begin handing control of provinces in Afghanistan to Afghan security forces by the end of this year have been quietly dropped amid fears among European countries that General David Petraeus, the new US commander in the country, is less committed to a speedy transfer of power.

The change of tack, revealed in the final communique from today's historic international conference in Kabul, reflects Petraeus's concerns that security conditions in Afghanistan are too weak for a transition of power to begin as quickly as originally planned, a Nato official told the Guardian.

Although the conference agreed that the security needs of the entire country will have to be met by the Afghan army and police by 2014, major European troop contributors were looking forward to more rapid progress in the relatively stable north and west of the country, where Germany, Italy, Norway, Spain and others have personnel.

The difficulties involved in any transition were highlighted today when an Afghan soldier killed two US civilians and one of his own comrades in Mazar-e-Sharif, one of the most stable cities of northern Afghanistan.

The incident marred the otherwise successful conclusion of an international conference on Afghanistan led by Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general, and the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton.

Beneath the diplomatic niceties, it became clear that plans first agreed by Nato ministers at a meeting in Estonia in April had been quietly dropped.

Nato had hoped that by the end of this year a cluster of neighbouring provinces in the north-west of the country would have begun the handover to the Afghan army and police force.

But in the final agreement of the conference, a reference to transition taking place on a "province-by-province" basis, which appeared in an earlier draft, had been removed.

A Nato official said the change reflected Petraeus's wish to slow the pace of the transfer of power.

European powers had wanted to announce which provinces would be handed over at a summit of foreign ministers in Lisbon in November.

The official said: "For Petraeus, Lisbon is not a problem. His main concern is the US political timetable, and being able by next summer to show progress that won't unravel."

According to the official, the slowing of the timetable sparked a heated exchange between Petraeus and Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Nato's secretary general, during a video conference last week.

Speaking before this week's conference, a senior European diplomat said Petraeus's approach was far less welcome than that of his predecessor, Stanley McChrystal.

"Petraeus is trying to slow everything down, pushing back any announcement of transition until 2011," he said.

Although the speed with which foreign forces move from frontline combat to a purely supportive role may slow down under Petraeus, there was full agreement on the ambitious target that the entire country should be under Afghan control by 2014.

Despite the continued weakness of, and corruption within, the Afghan security forces, Karzai said he remained "determined" that they should be in full charge of Afghanistan's security by then.

World leaders are conscious that international public support for the nine-year long intervention in Afghanistan is rapidly waning.

Clinton acknowledged that doubts about the mission have never been higher. "Citizens of many nations represented here, including my own, wonder whether success is even possible – and if so, whether we all have the commitment to achieve it."

The meeting in Kabul was the first time such a conference had been held in Afghanistan. It was supposed to symbolise the growing ability of the Afghan government to manage more of its own affairs.

Ban said the conference marked the "beginning of a very fundamental transition" to Afghan control.

Karzai gave an optimistic speech arguing that the country had a viable future, in part because of its vast untapped mineral wealth.

Although he said the international community had pledged adequate funds for the next three years, he conceded resources should be focused on a limited number of national programmes.

Afghanistan has called for far more international aid to be given directly to the Afghan government, a proposal that has sparked fears that the money will be siphoned off by corrupt ministers. Karzai promised new measures on corruption that will see "the speedy prosecution of offenders".

Security around the conference has been extremely tight, with the capital coming under attack from at least five rockets on Monday night.

A police official said the country's intelligence service had arrested a number of insurgents who were hiding in a house in the city.

[bigron]

Top Officials Reiterate Pledges to Continue Afghan War


New 2014 Drawdown Date Is 'Non-Binding'


by Jason Ditz, July 20, 2010
http://news.antiwar.com/2010/07/20/top-officials-reiterate-pledges-to-continue-afghan-war/



On the eve of the latest policy conference, top US and NATO officials have arrived in Kabul to pledge their support to the continuation of the Afghan War, with promises of an unending commitment to propping up the Karzai government going forward.

At the center of this new pledges, which look remarkably the same as the old pledges, is a new drawdown date in 2014. The date, which had actually been bandied about for over a year, was ostenisbly “leaked” in recent days to a number of key media outlets.

The date, which is “conditions-based” and “non-binding,” appears to be designed to accomplish little but replacing the July 2011 drawdown date, which has now been entirely abandoned by administration officials. The only apparent advantage to the 2014 date is that it is some four years hence and therefore far enough way as to not need to be immediately disavowed by any but the most hawkish officials.

So officials are now expressing their confidence in the 2014 victory, and the eventual security handover that will come at some point after it. In the meantime, the death toll in war continues to rise, and the promises of progress continue to seem more distant and more detached from reality.

[bigron]

Western forces agree on potential timeline for Afghanistan exit

In a landmark conference in Kabul, nations with troops in Afghanistan endorse Hamid Karzai's plan for Afghan military and police forces to take over responsibility for safeguarding the nation by 2014.

By Laura King, Los Angeles Times

1:35 PM PDT, July 20, 2010
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-0721-afghan-conference-20100721,0,5959046.story


Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan

Watch Video :

http://www.latimes.com/videobeta/8707b487-1433-443a-a324-2a1f23786b6f/News/Afghans-want-control-by-2014

 
A landmark international conference on Tuesday endorsed President Hamid Karzai's plan for Afghanistan's security forces to take over responsibility for safeguarding the country within four years, setting a potential timeline for foreign troops' departure.

The Afghan capital was under virtual lockdown for the high-level gathering, which passed without any major attack. However, insurgents fired rockets at Kabul's international airport overnight, forcing the diversion of a plane carrying U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to Bagram air base, north of the capital.

Helicopters thundered overhead as the delegations arrived and departed. Below, the streets were nearly deserted except for patrolling police.

"I remain determined that our Afghan national security forces will be responsible for all military and law enforcement operations throughout our country by 2014," Karzai told the delegates, including Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and dozens of foreign ministers and other dignitaries.

Conference participants also endorsed plans to channel at least half of the $13 billion in annual international aid through Afghan government channels. Currently, only one-fifth of such assistance is funneled through Afghan ministries.

In return, Karzai promised to fight corruption through such means as requiring government officials to declare their assets, and the strengthening of a task force meant to crack down on graft.

Events elsewhere in Afghanistan on Tuesday brought a troubling reminder of the profound obstacles to turning the Afghan military into a professional, dependable fighting force. An Afghan military trainer at a firing range in northern Afghanistan turned his weapon on two U.S. civilian counterparts, killing both before being fatally shot himself, Western military officials said.

A second Afghan soldier was also killed in the exchange of fire and a Western service member wounded, the NATO force said, adding that the incident was under investigation.

The endorsement of Karzai's security timeline by the Kabul conference was not binding, but it addressed a growing desire on the part of North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies to have some kind of pullback plan in place. All the major troop-contributing nations in the Afghan conflict were represented at the meeting.

Karzai had put forth the goal of a security handoff by 2014 last November, as he was inaugurated for a second presidential term. Since then, though, the sense of urgency surrounding an exit strategy for the West has increased dramatically.

The Obama administration has set a target of July 2011 for the start of a drawdown of nearly 100,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan. However, officials have stressed that will depend on conditions there.

Already, doubts have been raised as to whether the tide can be turned against the Taliban by then. A major military operation to secure the southern city of Kandahar, which was described by U.S. commanders as a linchpin of the war, has moved ahead much more slowly than planned.

Domestic political support for the Afghan war has eroded sharply in countries that are the main American partners in the NATO force, including Britain, Canada and Germany. Those qualms have been heightened by the rising Western troop casualty rate, which now stands at its highest level since the Taliban movement was toppled in 2001.

While the five-hour conference proceeded, the Western military announced another troop fatality, in Afghanistan's south. A second Western military death, also in the south, was announced later. The nationalities of the slain service members were not immediately disclosed.

Leaders addressing the conference stressed that the 2014 target would be dependent on the Afghan police and army demonstrating their ability to take the lead on security, on a province-by-province basis. Despite intensive training by Western mentors, the army and, even more so, the police are considered far from ready to step into that role.

"I welcome the road map agreed on today on transition to an Afghan lead in security," NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen told the gathering. "But transition will be based on conditions, not calendars."

He added, "We will never allow the Taliban to overthrow the elected government by force."

laura.king@latimes.com