History > 2006 > USA > Wars > Afghanistan (III)

When the Taliban fell,
Lashkar Gah seemed like fertile ground for the United States-led effort to stabilize the country.
Yet today, the city is at the epicenter of a Taliban resurgence and an explosion in drug cultivation.

The New York Times        5.9.2006

Afghan Symbol for Change Becomes a Symbol of Failure        NYT        5.9.2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/05/world/asia/05afghan.html

When Soldiers Go to War,

Flat Daddies Hold Their Place at Home

September 30, 2006
The New York Times
By KATIE ZEZIMA

HERMON, Me. — It was the first day of school, and distance not withstanding, 9-year-old Baylee Smith wanted to take a picture with her father, Mark, who is stationed with a National Guard unit in Afghanistan. Real daddy was not available, but Sergeant Smith’s doppelgänger was.

“Where’s Flat Daddy?” an excited Baylee asked as her stepmother, Jennifer Smith, pulled a large cardboard picture of Sergeant Smith, in his uniform, out of her Chevy Blazer and propped him on the bumper. The two, along with Ms. Smith’s young sons, Alec and Derek, posed for a picture with their Flat Daddy, who promptly fell down.

“Stop it Dad, that’s not funny. It’s not a joke,” Baylee said with a laugh.

The Maine National Guard is giving life-size from-the-waist-up pictures of soldiers to the families of deployed guard members. Guard officials and families say the cutouts, known as Flat Daddies or Flat Soldiers, connect families with a relative who is thousands of miles away. The Flat Daddies are toted everywhere from soccer practice to coffee shops to weddings.

“The response has been unbelievable,” said Sgt. First Class Barbara Claudel, director of the Maine National Guard’s family unit. “The families just miss people so much when they’re gone that they try to bring their soldier everywhere.”

The Maine National Guard has given out more than 200 Flat Soldiers since January. While other guard units are recommending Flat Soldiers, and families around the country are using them, officials here say Maine’s National Guard is the only one giving one to each family that asks.

Flat Daddies have been used by military families since at least 2003, when Cindy Sorenson of Bismarck, N.D., ordered a life-size photo of her former husband, Capt. Dave Bruschwein, on a piece of foam board when he was stationed in Iraq with the North Dakota National Guard.

Ms. Sorenson heard that the children of local guard members made small cutouts of themselves modeled on the children’s book “Flat Stanley,” where the character is flattened and can travel by envelope, and then mailed the images to Iraq.

She wanted to make a similar, life-size version of Captain Bruschwein for their daughter, Sarah, who was 13 months old when her father was deployed. She took a picture of him and his jacket measurements to a local printer, who charged her $75 for Flat Dave, as he was called.

Ms. Sorenson said it helped Sarah, now 4, recognize her father when he came home on leave. “She saw him on the jetway and said, ‘Daddy, Daddy,’ ” Ms. Sorenson said. “There was no anxiety.”

Ms. Sorenson shared the idea with Elaine Dumler, a Colorado motivational speaker, who included it in a book on coping with deployment.

Ms. Dumler said National Guard families were receptive to the idea because many had never dealt with a long overseas deployment.

“It affects these families a little more,” Ms. Dumler said, “because they’re not living on a base or a post, surrounded by families who know what they’re going through. They tend to feel a little more isolated.”

That is especially true here in Maine, whose National Guard members are randomly assigned to bases throughout that large state. The National Guard tries to have parties where Flat Soldiers are invited, and family members sometimes take them to support meetings.

Cristin Gardner of Ellsworth, whose husband, Troy, is stationed in Iraq, said she often caught her 6-year-old son, Ashton, including Flat Daddy when he played with soldiers.

Rachel Austin of Colorado Springs paid $50 for a flat version of her husband, Toby, in February after hearing about them through the Colorado National Guard. Ms. Austin said Toby was at the dinner table every night with their sons, Ayden, 20 months, and Ryan, 5. Flat Toby also has been to pre-kindergarten graduation, an uncle’s 50th birthday party in Cheyenne, Wyo., and a Denver Broncos game, although he sat in the car because it was raining.

Ms. Austin said Ayden, who was 13 months old when she brought Flat Toby home, recognized his father, often taking the image off its usual chair and kissing it. Flat Toby is a real person in their house, she said.

“It’s nice to see him each day, just to remember that he’s still with us,” Ms. Austin said. “It’s one of the best things I’ve done during this deployment. I really think it’s helped us stay connected, to remember that he’s still with us.”

Angela Williams, 27, of Anchorage, got a flat version of her husband, who she married three months before he was deployed to Afghanistan, through the Alaska National Guard.

Her flat husband spends most of his time in their bedroom closet, but she will occasionally take him out to show to friends or to look at herself.

“He went away so recently after we got married that sometimes I look at it and say, ‘Oh, I’m married, and he’s real and he’s gorgeous,”’ Ms. Williams said.

Parents of young deployed soldiers are also using flat soldiers. Carol Campbell of Anson, Me., got a flat version of her 24-year-old daughter, Jessica, who now sits at the family’s kitchen table. Ms. Campbell writes all of the places Jessica has visited on the back of the cutout. In June, Flat Jessica even chaperoned an after-prom party that her younger sister attended.

Ms. Campbell said that her youngest daughter thought the idea was odd at first, and that their dog, Speckles, used to bark at the Flat Soldier, but that both are now used to it.

“At first, it can take you aback, but it never did for me,” Ms. Campbell said. “I just felt like her presence is here. The Flat Soldier does provide comfort, and we’ll take it any way we can.”

    When Soldiers Go to War, Flat Daddies Hold Their Place at Home, NYT, 30.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/30/us/30daddy.html

NATO Adds U.S. Troops for Afghan Mission

September 28, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:51 p.m. ET
The New York Times

PORTOROZ, Slovenia (AP) -- A plan approved Thursday to extend NATO's military control across all of Afghanistan would put as many as 12,000 U.S. troops under foreign battlefield command, a number that U.S. officials said could be the most since World War II.

The move is expected to take place in the next few weeks, NATO spokesman James Appathurai said.

The largest number of U.S. troops ever put under the control of foreign battlefield commanders was about 300,000 during WWI, said military officials traveling with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld for the NATO meeting.

It was not clear how many troops were under foreign command during WWII. A U.S. officer is in charge of the overall NATO force -- Gen. James L. Jones, but Thursday's emerging agreement would put the U.S. troops under foreign commanders on the battlefield.

NATO-led troops took command of the southern portion of Afghanistan just two months ago and have been struggling to stem the escalating violence there. This plan would extend their control to the eastern section -- which U.S. troops now command.

The NATO takeover of the eastern section had been expected later this fall, and it would switch at least 10,000 American troops from U.S. command to NATO control -- specifically British Lt. Gen. David Richards. Currently about 2,000 U.S. troops are serving under NATO commanders in other portions of Afghanistan.

In addition, NATO countries, under pressure from the U.S. and military leaders, may soon come through with additional troops and equipment needed to fight the escalating violence in Afghanistan.

In opening remarks, NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer signaled that commitments for troops and equipment for Afghanistan will be a key goal of the meeting.

The defense ministers will have the ''chance to address the real political issues of resources, of available forces and principally, and I think most importantly, of political will,'' he said.

The 26 NATO defense ministers, gathering for their two-day fall meeting here, are expected to also agree on a plan to donate surplus military equipment to the country, and also are likely to announce new commitments of military resources.

According to a senior U.S. official, Afghanistan has compiled a list of needed equipment, from helicopters and vehicles to armor and guns, and officials will set up a program to coordinate the donations.

The official requested anonymity because the ministers had not met to finalize the agreement, which is similar to one set up previously for Iraq.

Rumsfeld expressed optimism that the NATO countries will find the troops needed to fill gaps in the military operations.

NATO countries recently have been slow to meet needs for more coalition forces for the alliance in Afghanistan, where violence has surged. Jones, who also heads the U.S. European Command, asked other nations this month for about 2,500 troops and other equipment, and said last week that some had come through.

''I have every confidence that NATO is fully committed in Afghanistan and that the requirements that the military commanders on the ground deem as appropriate and necessary'' will be filled by NATO nations and countries in a program considered a stepping stone toward full membership in the alliance, Rumsfeld said.

The U.S. official also said that while new commitments are expected, the full troop requirements may not be met.

Currently there are about 20,000 NATO troops in Afghanistan and an additional 21,000 from the United States.

Under the expected equipment deal, allies will be able to coordinate and donate supplies to the Afghan National Army. The official could not estimate how much equipment was included on Afghanistan's wish list.

A senior U.S. defense official said NATO defense ministers also are expected to make progress resolving problems with restrictions countries put on their armed forces when they are serving in Afghanistan. Some troops are prohibited from working in specific regions of the country or cannot serve at night.

Associated Press Writer Paul Ames in Portoroz contributed to this report.

On the Net:

NATO: http://www.nato.int/

    NATO Adds U.S. Troops for Afghan Mission, NYT, 28.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Rumsfeld-NATO.html

Attacks in Afghanistan Grow More Frequent and Lethal

September 27, 2006
The New York Times
By CARLOTTA GALL

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan, Sept. 26 — Afghanistan suffered two deadly bombings on Tuesday that killed 20 people, providing another sign of the increasing size and power of suicide attacks and roadside bombs by insurgents.

The more devastating attack occurred when the police stopped a suicide bomber as he approached a security checkpoint near the governor’s office in Lashkar Gah, in southern Helmand Province, and he detonated explosives strapped to his chest.

The bomber killed 18 people, 6 of them policemen and soldiers. The rest of the casualties, including a woman, were civilians who had gathered at a central mosque to sign up for the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, said the police chief of Helmand, Gen. Muhammad Nabi Mullahkhel.

South of Kabul, the capital, a bomb planted under a bridge struck a NATO military vehicle, killing an Italian soldier and an Afghan child nearby.

The suicide attack in Lashkar Gah was the second there in a month, and one of more than 60 in Afghanistan this year, United Nations officials said. The tactic was rarely used by insurgents a year ago.

Civilians increasingly have been paying the price of the more frequent and devastating attacks. More than 150 civilians have been killed by suicide bombings this year, the head of the United Nations mission in Afghanistan, Tom Koenigs, said recently, before the attacks on Tuesday.

The bombings, once relatively ineffective, now increasingly claim casualties in the double digits. On Aug. 3, a suicide bomber struck in the district bazaar of Panjwai, near Kandahar, killing 21. A suicide attack killed another 21 people in Lashkar Gah on Aug. 28.

On Sept. 18, a bomber in Kabul rammed his car into an American military convoy, causing a huge explosion that ripped apart an armored Humvee and killed 16 people, 2 of them American soldiers and the rest passers-by.

The use of roadside bombs has also increased. Two powerful bombs were laid on roads close to Kabul in recent weeks.

The bomb bomb near the capital, positioned under a bridge less than 10 miles south of Kabul, also wounded five soldiers and five civilians, according to officials. The hurt civilians were driving in a car behind the convoy.

Military and intelligence officials in Afghanistan are divided about whether the tactics and technology used in suicide bombings and roadside bombs have been brought from Iraq, where they are so common, or if insurgents here are simply copying those tactics.

Canadian and American soldiers on operations in the southern province of Kandahar last week said they saw a clear connection with tactics in Iraq. One called it the “Iraqization” of the insurgency here, whether through personal contacts or the Internet.

Canadian soldiers, for instance, said they recently found a scarecrow by a roadside rigged with explosives. In Iraq, insurgents have rigged corpses beside roads with explosives.

Suicide bombers are also now using explosive vests, which are far more powerful than before, the soldiers said. In another bombing on Sept. 18, a man on a bicycle who rode up to Canadian soldiers handing out gifts to children in the southern village of Char Kota, in Pashmul, had on a vest rigged with explosives. The detonation killed four soldiers and injured several more who were in full body armor, as well as wounding two dozen children.

There are signs of more careful training as well. The bomber who killed the governor of Paktia Province on Sept. 10 managed to penetrate security by claiming to have a letter of recommendation addressed to the governor.

He then threw himself onto the hood of the governor’s car, detonating his explosive vest up against the windshield and killing everyone inside the car, according to government and military officials.

The high level of civilian casualties has appeared to cause a split in the Taliban, with some apparently opposed to suicide bombing, NATO military officials said.

Taliban fighters who occupied the Panjwai district in July and August tried to distance themselves from the suicide bombing that killed so many civilians and damaged shops in August. They posted leaflets saying that outsiders, or “foreign Taliban,” were responsible for the suicide bombing and that such violators would receive capital punishment.

“They were worried about their image,” said Olli-Pekka Nissinen, a NATO media operations officer.

Villagers and farmers in the Panjwai area, where heavy fighting has taken place over the past three weeks, also blamed foreigners or outsiders for the suicide bombing, and said that ordinary Taliban were just intent on fighting NATO forces.

A witness of the Sept. 18 suicide bombing in nearby Pashmul, Khair Muhammad, whose two daughters were wounded in the blast, said the bomber appeared to be an Arab.

    Attacks in Afghanistan Grow More Frequent and Lethal, NYT, 27.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/27/world/asia/27afghan.html

War price on U.S. lives equal to 9/11

Posted 9/22/2006 9:48 PM ET
AP
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) — Now the death toll is 9/11 times two. U.S. military deaths from Iraq and Afghanistan now match those of the most devastating terrorist attack in America's history, the trigger for what came next. Add casualties from chasing terrorists elsewhere in the world, and the total has passed the Sept. 11 figure.

The latest milestone for a country at war came Friday without commemoration. It came without the precision of knowing who was the 2,973rd man or woman of arms to die in conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan. The terrorist attacks killed 2,973 victims in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

The Pentagon's report Friday night of the latest death from Iraq, an as-yet unidentified soldier killed a day earlier after his vehicle was hit by a roadside bombing in eastern Baghdad, brought the U.S. death toll in Iraq to 2,695. Combined with 278 U.S. deaths in and around Afghanistan, the 9/11 toll was reached.

Not for the first time, war that was started to answer death has resulted in at least as much death for the country that was first attacked, quite apart from the higher numbers of enemy and civilians killed.

Historians note that this grim accounting is not how the success or failure of warfare is measured, and that the reasons for conflict are broader than what served as the spark.

The body count from World War II was far higher for Allied troops than for the crushed Axis. Americans lost more men in each of a succession of Pacific battles than the 2,390 people who died at Pearl Harbor in the attack that made the U.S. declare war on Japan. The U.S. lost 405,399 in the theaters of World War II.

Despite a death toll that pales next to that of the great wars, one casualty milestone after another has been observed and reflected upon this time, especially in Iraq.

There was the benchmark of seeing more U.S. troops die in the occupation than in the swift and successful invasion. And the benchmarks of 1,000 dead, 2,000, 2,500.

Now this.

"There's never a good war but if the war's going well and the overall mission remains powerful, these numbers are not what people are focusing on," said Julian Zelizer, a political historian at Boston University. "If this becomes the subject, then something's gone wrong."

Beyond the tribulations of the moment and the now-rampant doubts about the justification and course of the Iraq war, Zelizer said Americans have lost firsthand knowledge of the costs of war that existed keenly up to the 1960s, when people remembered two world wars and Korea, and faced Vietnam.

"A kind of numbness comes from that," he said. "We're not that country anymore — more bothered, more nervous. This isn't a country that's used to ground wars anymore."

Almost 10 times more Americans have died in Iraq than in Afghanistan, where U.S. casualties have been remarkably light by any historical standard, although climbing in recent months in the face of a resurgent Taliban.

The Pentagon reports 56 military deaths and one civilian Defense Department death in other parts of the world from Operation Enduring Freedom, the anti-terrorism war distinct from Iraq.

Altogether, 3,030 have died abroad since Sept. 11, 2001.

The civilian toll in Iraq hit record highs in the summer, with 6,599 violent deaths reported in July and August alone, the United Nations said this week.

Among the latest U.S. deaths identified by the armed forces:

•Army 2nd Lt. Emily J.T. Perez, 23, Fort Washington, Md., who died Sept. 12 in Kifl, Iraq, from an explosive device detonated near her vehicle. A former high school sprinter who sang in her West Point gospel choir, she was assigned to the 204th Support Battalion, 2nd Brigade, 4th Infantry Division, Fort Hood, Texas.

•Marine Sgt. Christopher M. Zimmerman, 28, Stephenville, Texas, killed Wednesday in Anbar province, Iraq. He was assigned to 2nd Reconnaissance Battalion, 2nd Marine Division, II Marine Expeditionary Force, Camp Lejeune, N.C.

A new study on the war dead and where they come from suggests that the notion of "rich man's war, poor man's fight" has become a little truer over time.

Among the Americans killed in the Iraq war, 34% have come from communities reporting the lowest levels of family income. Half come from middle income communities and only 17% from the highest income level.

That's a change from World War II, when all income groups were represented about equally. In Korea, Vietnam and Iraq, the poor have made up a progressively larger share of casualties, by this analysis.

Eye-for-an-eye vengeance was not the sole motivator for what happened after the 2001 attacks any more than Pearl Harbor alone was responsible for all that followed. But Pearl Harbor caught the U.S. in the middle of mobilization, debate, rising tensions with looming enemies and a European war already in progress. Historians doubt anyone paid much attention to sad milestones once America threw itself into the fight.

In contrast, the United States had no imminent war intentions against anyone on Sept. 10, 2001. One bloody day later, it did.

    War price on U.S. lives equal to 9/11, UT, 22.9.2006,http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-09-22-war-toll_x.htm

U.S. to Maintain Afghanistan Force Level

September 21, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:43 p.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan are likely to remain steady, at about 21,000, at least until next February, the top U.S. general there said Thursday, echoing earlier comments about forces in Iraq.

Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry told Pentagon reporters that while the Taliban enemy in Afghanistan is not extremely strong, their numbers and influence have grown in some southern sections of the country.

''Our expectation is that our troop levels in Afghanistan will remain about steady through the point'' that the U.S. takes command of the NATO force next February, he said. At that point, Eikenberry said, there will be a reassessment and commanders may make recommendations to defense officials.

He also expanded on the reasons why U.S. troops did not fire on a group of suspected Taliban leaders gathered for a funeral -- an incident that came to light when a photo of the group was made public. Eikenberry said the military commander believed that innocent citizens, including woman and children from the village there, may have been present.

''So that commander made a decision based upon our values as a people, based upon our values as a nation, that he would not strike,'' said Eikenberry. Earlier military officials had said they considered bombing the group but decided not to after determining it was a funeral.

Gen. John Abizaid, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, said this week that it is not likely that U.S. forces in Iraq will be cut back before next spring.

NATO-led forces took over the southern portion of Afghanistan in July, and later this year they are expected to take over the eastern section -- where U.S. troops are currently in command. U.S. military teams are working to train Afghanistan troops to take over the security of their country.

Currently, there are roughly 145,000 troops in Iraq.

Meanwhile, Gen. James L. Jones Jr., commander of the NATO military alliance, told members of Congress that the border with Pakistan ''should be a lot quieter'' if Taliban-linked militants observe a truce with Pakistan in which they agreed to stop crossing into Afghanistan to launch ambushes.

Jones, testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said ''we should know in a month or so'' how well it is working, and said he will go to Pakistan at that point for talks with senior Pakistani officials.

Eikenberry said the principles of the agreement are good, including plans to relocate some Pakistani military forces to the border.

Both commanders expressed optimism about Afghanistan's future, but stressed that the military is not the main solution.

''The critical task at this stage is strengthening the government of Afghanistan, developing the economy and helping to build Afghan civil society,'' said Eikenberry, who said about 76,000 Afghanistan army and police are trained, equipped and engaged in security operations.

Both also said that success in Afghanistan depends on the country's ability to bring its escalating drug trafficking problems under control. Officials have said opium production there had jumped 59 percent this year, to a record 6,100 tons of opium -- a full 92 percent of the world's supply.

Jones said that as NATO continues its efforts to take over military operations in the south, ''I am optimistic where Afghanistan can be in the next few years.''

Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., criticized the Bush administration as being ''badly distracted'' by Iraq.

''There is very little to show for the billions of dollars that have been pumped into many of Afghanistan's rural provinces,'' he said.

Associated Press Diplomatic Writer Barry Schweid contributed to this report.

    U.S. to Maintain Afghanistan Force Level, NYT, 21.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-US-Afghanistan.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Op-Ed Contributor

Afghanistan’s Drug Habit

September 20, 2006
By JOEL HAFVENSTEIN
The New York Times

London

AS if there hadn’t been enough bad news from Afghanistan of late, now the country’s drug dependency is back in the headlines. On Sept. 2, the head of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime reported that the shattered country is now producing 92 percent of the world’s supply of illegal opium, up from 87 percent in 2004. This deplorable new record will not be reversed by more belligerent counternarcotics measures. Instead, America, NATO and the Afghan government must reform a vital but neglected institution: the local police.

In 2004, for the first time in history, farmers in every province of Afghanistan chose to cultivate opium poppies. The American and Afghan governments promised a major poppy eradication campaign. Aid agencies scrambled to create an economic alternative for the thousands of Afghans who depended on poppy farming to survive.

Thus in November 2004, I traveled to Lashkargah, the capital of Helmand Province, the opium heartland of Afghanistan, as the deputy leader of an “alternative livelihoods” project financed by the United States Agency for International Development. Our core team was made up of six Western aid workers, and we hired some 80 Afghan staff members.

In the long-term plan, alternative livelihoods meant helping Afghan farmers export high-value crops like saffron and cumin. It meant restoring the orchards and vineyards that had once made Afghanistan a power in the raisin and almond markets. It meant providing credit to farmers who had relied on traffickers for affordable loans.

In the short run, however, with the first eradication tractors already plowing up poppy fields, we had no time for those approaches. Instead, we created public-works jobs. Like a New Deal agency, we handed out shovels to thousands of local Afghans and paid them $4 per day to repair canals and roads. We found plenty of work on Helmand’s grand but dilapidated irrigation system, a legacy of early cold-war American aid. By May 2005, we had paid out millions of dollars and had some 14,000 men on the payroll simultaneously. The program buoyed the provincial economy, and would have made a fine launching pad for long-term alternatives to poppy.

Security was our Achilles’ heel. There was a new American military base by the graveyard on the edge of town, but the few score Iowa National Guard members there lacked the manpower and the local knowledge to protect us. We could not afford the professional security companies in Kabul, most run by brash veterans of Western militaries. Then, just before Christmas, some of our engineers were carjacked. We resorted to the only remaining source of protection: the provincial police.

We soon found that at their best, the Helmand police forces were half-organized militias with charismatic leadership and years of combat experience. At their worst, the policemen were bandits, pederasts and hashish addicts. Our local guard captain was one of the better ones, but he was still far from reliable.

Once I asked him what he earned as a district police commander. “The governor paid us no salary,” he curtly replied. “The people gave us money. To thank us for solving their problems.” I was never sure if we were paying him enough to solve our problems.

When the attacks came, our security was useless. On May 18, five of our Afghan staff members were murdered in the field. The next morning, one of the funeral convoys was ambushed, leaving six more of our workers and their relatives dead. The police responded with indiscriminate arrests and bluster, but they lacked the investigative skills to catch the killers.

We heard rumors that the attackers were Taliban troops — and indeed, the attacks were harbingers of the Taliban resurgence that Helmand has seen in the last year. We also heard that the Taliban had been paid by local drug barons to attack our project. All we knew was that we were targets, and that we could not protect ourselves. Within days, we had stopped all our projects and most of the staff went home.

To reduce Afghanistan’s poppy cultivation, Western governments must keep their focus on improving security. Aid agencies and the Afghan government cannot foster alternatives to opium while under fire. In chaotic times, Afghan farmers are more likely to plant poppy, which offers the surest and highest returns on investment. Some remote areas of Afghanistan have grown poppy since the time of Alexander the Great, but in the irrigated plains of Helmand it caught on only during the breakdown of order in the 1980’s. With security restored, the farmers of Helmand could rebuild their province and return to licit crops.

Local police forces are the weakest link in Afghanistan’s security net. After the fall of the Taliban, the United States and NATO put most of their energy into building a professional Afghan Army. The police forces were essentially surrendered to local warlords — not through any malign plan, but by lack of money and attention.

Most Afghan policemen have now gone through a basic training course run by American and German police officers, but they return to units that are ill equipped, badly organized, founded on personal loyalty to a commander and accountable to no one.

The 4,500 British troops now fighting alongside Afghan soldiers in Helmand can defeat insurgents who muster in large numbers, but they cannot counter the Taliban’s shrewder tactics — urban ambushes, suicide bombings and strikes on “soft” civilian targets like our project. For that, the police are necessary.

The Afghan Army and foreign powers must create space in which a professional, accountable police force can take root. This means continued military action against large Taliban incursions, diplomatic pressure on Pakistan to stop providing a haven for insurgents, and a focus on shielding the large cities of southern Afghanistan — Lashkargah, Kandahar and Ghazni — long enough for the Afghan government to establish the kernels of an improved police force there. It will also require an end to the impunity enjoyed by warlords and major traffickers, who can order an attack safe in the knowledge that the Taliban will be blamed.

The new Afghan police force needs clear lines of authority, formal disciplinary procedures and methods for internal oversight and public complaint. The officers need adequate pay and equipment, which can come only from Western sources, and better training in investigation and civilian protection. To ensure that all this makes a difference, the United States and its allies must commit experienced Western police officers to field-based mentoring programs with provincial police forces.

The poppy boom won’t be solved by police reform alone, of course. The Afghan government must purge drug kingpins from the federal and provincial governments, and continue disarming militias (friendly as well as hostile).

Nothing has cost President Hamid Karzai more popularity in the south than the sense that unscrupulous gunmen are back in control. Security was the Taliban’s main selling point when it took control of the country in the 1990’s; it could be again.

Joel Hafvenstein, an international development consultant, is the author of the forthcoming book “The Opium Season.”

    Afghanistan’s Drug Habit, NYT, 20.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/20/opinion/20hafvenstein.html

U.S. Military Says Suicide Cell Is in Kabul

September 10, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 7:52 a.m. ET
The New York Times

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) -- A suicide bombing cell is operating in the Afghan capital with the aim of targeting foreign troops, the U.S. military said Sunday.

The statement came two days after a suicide car bomber rammed into a U.S. military convoy near the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, killing 16 people, including two American soldiers. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the bombing, which was the deadliest suicide attack in the capital since the fall of the hard-line Taliban in late 2001.

Col. Tom Collins, the chief U.S. spokesman, said the coalition was aware that a bomber was in the city before the bombing, but lacked a description of the attacker or the vehicle he was using.

''The coalition had intelligence that a suicide bomber was lurking in Kabul. What we didn't have was a description of the attacker or license plate for his vehicle, but somehow I believe somewhere out there someone knew this guy and had information that could have saved a lot of lives that day had they reported it,'' he said.

Collins said he couldn't give further details about the suicide bombing cell, but said it was still working and ''remains very much a threat.''

''Through our intelligence sources we know there's a cell here in Kabul, at least one, whose primary mission is to seek coalition or international troops and hit them with suicide bombs,'' he said at a news conference.

Taliban-led militants have stepped up attacks in Afghanistan this year, including suicide bombings. More than 100 Taliban fighters raided a government compound in western Afghanistan early Sunday, while NATO and Afghan forces killed 94 Taliban fighters in airstrikes and ground attacks in southern Afghanistan, police and military alliance sources said.

Taliban fighters riding in pickup trucks and firing rocket-propelled grenades and AK-47 assault rifles attacked the compound in the Farah provincial town of Kalaigar at about 1 a.m., said provincial police chief Sayed Agha. Two police were killed by the Taliban, who also burned two rooms of the compound and a health clinic in the town, said Agha.

Resurgent Taliban fighters have been most active in southern provinces. But attacks have started occurring in the west amid intense NATO military operations targeting Taliban in southern provinces like Kandahar and Helmand.

94 militants were killed in Kandahar province's Panjwayi and neighboring Zhari districts late Saturday and early Sunday and were separate to more than 40 Taliban who died in fighting in the same areas earlier Saturday, NATO spokesman Maj. Scott Lundy said.

The killings were part of a NATO-led Operation called Operation Medusa, which began Sept. 2 and has killed at least 420 insurgents, according to the alliance. Purported Taliban spokesmen have disputed the high death counts.

On Friday, a bomber in a car rammed into a U.S. military convoy near the U.S. Embassy, killing 16 people in the deadliest suicide attack since the fall of the hardline Islamic regime in late 2001.

A purported Taliban spokesman claimed responsibility for Friday's attack. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the assassination of the Paktika governor.

The attacker, with explosives attached to his body, ran towards the governor's car and detonated the bomb as he was leaving the house, Raufi said.

Also killed were a bodyguard and Taniwal's secretary, who were riding in the car, said Interior Ministry spokesman Yousef Stanezai.

Three police on duty at the house were wounded, he said.

    U.S. Military Says Suicide Cell Is in Kabul, NYT, 10.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Afghan-Violence.html?hp&ex=1157947200&en=7ed6152d8e502d83&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Afghan Symbol for Change Becomes a Symbol of Failure

September 5, 2006
The New York Times
By DAVID ROHDE

LASHKAR GAH, Afghanistan — It began last summer.

On a July morning, Taliban gunmen shot dead the province’s most powerful cleric as he walked to the main city mosque to lead morning prayers. Five months later, they executed a teacher at a nearby village school as students watched. The following month, they walked into another mosque and gunned down an Afghan engineer working for a foreign aid group, shooting him in the back as he pressed his forehead to the ground and supplicated to God.

This spring and summer, the slow and methodical siege of this southern provincial capital intensified. The Taliban and their allies set up road checkpoints, burned 20 trucks and slowed the flow of supplies to reconstruction projects. All told, in surrounding Helmand Province, five teachers, one judge and scores of police officers have been killed. Dozens of schools and courts have been shuttered, according to Afghan officials.

“Our government is weak,” said Fowzea Olomi, a local women’s rights advocate whose driver was shot dead in May and who fears she is next. “Anarchy has come.”

When the Taliban fell nearly five years ago, Lashkar Gah seemed like fertile ground for the United States-led effort to stabilize the country. For 30 years during the cold war, Americans carried out the largest development project in Afghanistan’s history here, building a modern capital with suburban-style tract homes, a giant hydroelectric dam and 300 miles of canals that made 250,000 acres of desert bloom. Afghans called this city “Little America.”

Today, Little America is the epicenter of a Taliban resurgence and an explosion in drug cultivation that has claimed the lives of 106 American and NATO soldiers this year and doubled American casualty rates countrywide. Across Afghanistan, roadside bomb attacks are up by 30 percent; suicide bombings have doubled. Statistically it is now nearly as dangerous to serve as an American soldier in Afghanistan as it is in Iraq.

Helmand’s descent symbolizes how Afghanistan has evolved since the initial victory over the Taliban into one of the most troubled fronts in the fight against terrorism.

The problems began in early 2002, former Bush administration, United Nations and Afghan officials said, when the United States and its allies failed to take advantage of a sweeping desire among Afghans for help from foreign countries.

The Defense Department initially opposed a request by Colin L. Powell, then secretary of state, and Afghanistan’s new leaders for a sizable peacekeeping force and deployed only 8,000 American troops, but purely in a combat role, officials said.

During the first 18 months after the invasion, the United States-led coalition deployed no peacekeepers outside Kabul, leaving the security of provinces like Helmand to local Afghans.

“Where the world, including the United States, came up short was on the security side,” said Richard Haass, the former director of policy planning at the State Department. “That was the mistake which I believe is coming back to haunt the United States now.”

The lack of security was just one element of a volatile mix. Twenty years of conflict had shattered government and social structures in Afghanistan, the world’s fifth poorest country, where the average life expectancy is 43.

American officials said the country was more destitute than they had envisioned, yet the $909 million they provided in assistance in 2002 amounted to one-twentieth of the $20 billion allocated for postwar Iraq. Officials quintupled assistance to $4.8 billion by 2005, but then reduced it by 30 percent this year.

The Taliban leadership, meanwhile, found safe haven in neighboring Pakistan. And Robert Grenier, the C.I.A.’s former top counterterrorism official and Islamabad station chief, said Pakistani officials largely turned a blind eye to Taliban commanders, who later seeped back across the border.

The government of President Hamid Karzai, hailed as Afghanistan’s eloquent new leader in 2001, has increasingly been criticized for indecisiveness, corruption and inaction.

In Helmand, the absence of security and government control enabled the province to become the largest heroin-producing area in Afghanistan.

By 2005, local Taliban fighters and drug traffickers had formed an alliance against the government. Today, the province’s educated elite accuses local officials of engaging in drug trafficking, and impoverished farmers say they grow poppy to survive.

[Led by a 160 percent increase in Helmand’s opium crop this year, Afghanistan’s overall production grew by 50 percent to a record 6,100 metric tons, United Nations officials said Saturday. Afghanistan now produces 92 percent of the world’s supply of opium poppy, the basis for heroin.]

Richard A. Boucher, the assistant secretary of state for South Asia, defended the pace of progress, saying expectations among Afghans and others that the war-ravaged country could be quickly rebuilt were unrealistic.

“Afghan development is a long-term project, even without the security problem,” said Mr. Boucher. “Over all, I think it’s pretty incredible what we’ve accomplished.”

Despite an active insurgency, he said, 1.6 million Afghan girls are attending school, 730 miles of roads and 1,000 schools, clinics and government buildings have been reconstructed, and the country has its first democratically elected president and Parliament.

Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said that the recent surge in violence was the result of the Afghan central government and NATO exerting their authority in remote areas, prompting retaliatory attacks from the Taliban, drug traffickers and warlords.

The return of more than three million Afghan refugees and the arrival of some foreign aid turned the country’s main cities into boom towns. But over time, the lack of construction in rural provinces fueled Taliban propaganda claims that Americans were enriching themselves and bringing only corruption to Afghanistan.

In impoverished southern rural areas, small numbers of Afghans are openly collaborating with the Taliban. Other Afghans, who say they are unsure of the American commitment and disillusioned with Mr. Karzai, sit by and dare not resist them.

Rauzia Baloch, a 33-year-old teacher, was one of a half dozen women elected to Helmand’s provincial council last year. In December, the American government sent her on a study tour of the United States that included visits to Congress and a domestic violence shelter in Phoenix, and Thanksgiving dinner with a family in Indiana.

When Ms. Baloch returned to Helmand, she found the Taliban assassinating government officials.

“I learned a lot, but unfortunately the situation is not the same as in America,” she said. “We cannot do anything.”

Countering the Soviets

During the cold war years in the Helmand Valley, amid a flat, barren landscape of reddish soil and black boulders, dozens of American engineers and their families carried out a sweeping project designed to develop impoverished southern Afghanistan and wean locals from Soviet influence.

For more than three decades, the American government and Morrison-Knudsen, the firm that built the Hoover Dam, restored and expanded an ancient irrigation system. Its source of life, then and now, was the surging Helmand River, a finger of green that emerges from the mountains of central Afghanistan and snakes for hundreds of miles through the country’s vast southern desert.

The project never irrigated as many acres as was hoped, but its training programs produced hundreds of American-minded Afghan engineers and technicians.

“Most of them have lived and worked and studied in the United States; some have married American wives,” the British historian Arnold J. Toynbee wrote after visiting the area in 1960. “The new world that they are conjuring up out of the desert at the Helmand River’s expense is to be an America-in-Asia.”

Among the young Afghans who were transformed in the process was Ms. Olomi, the women’s rights advocate. One of the first girls to attend the city’s new co-educational school, she also went on to become one of Helmand’s first woman to graduate from college.

In a recent interview, Ms. Olomi, now 49, remembered only a handful of words in English. But she could still tick off the names of her American teachers and recite verses of “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” and “Puff the Magic Dragon.” After school, she recalled, she played a game called basketball with American children.

“It was a very good time,” she said, eulogizing the functioning schools, clean streets and tranquillity of Lashkar Gah in the 1960’s and 1970’s. “I was very happy.”

But her good fortune, like that of Lashkar Gah’s, would be short-lived. Americans abandoned the city just before the 1979 Soviet invasion. Twenty years of guerrilla and civil war ensued.

By the early 1990’s, soldiers-turned-thieves roamed Lashkar Gah’s streets and warlords encouraged local farmers to grow opium poppies, the raw form of heroin.

In 1994, residents welcomed the rise of the Taliban in Helmand’s remote villages and applauded when thieves had their hands chopped off on a local soccer field. Crime plummeted.

For Ms. Olomi and other women, life fell apart. Her husband, who had gone to Russia to study medicine, never returned. Taliban religious police closed a girls’ school she had opened to support herself. Ms. Olomi, who had chosen her husband at the age of 25, watched helplessly as her daughter was forced by her husband’s brothers to marry a cousin at 13.

Hopes rose again in 2001, when American bombs drove the Taliban from power in Afghanistan. Residents like Ms. Olomi said they dreamed of another American-backed renaissance.

“At that time, we really felt so happy,” she said. “We felt that we were free now.”

Roads and Roadblocks

As expectations soared in Lashkar Gah and across Afghanistan, division emerged in Washington over what role the United States should play in rebuilding and securing the country.

During meetings in January and February 2002, Robert Finn, the first American ambassador to post-Taliban Afghanistan, proposed that the United States undertake ambitious construction projects as a way to cement the loyalty of Afghans. Top among them was rebuilding a pulverized ring road linking Afghanistan’s major cities — a road Americans helped build during the cold war.

“I argued for them to build the road and all I got was ‘no,’ ” Mr. Finn recalled. “It was just across the board in Washington: ‘We don’t do those kinds of projects anymore.’ ”

Andrew Natsios, then the administrator of the United States Agency for International Development, the government’s main foreign development arm that had spearheaded the Lashkar Gah project years back, confirmed in an interview that he had opposed road building and other large construction projects.

He said he feared they would consume too much of his agency’s limited budget and staff. Criticism of failed foreign projects and a drive to privatize aid work had shrunk the agency from 3,000 Americans posted abroad in the 1980’s to 1,000 today.

In the end, the United States pledged $297 million in reconstruction money to Afghanistan in 2002. The European Union pledged $495 million. Japan gave $200 million and Saudi Arabia $73 million, but both were slow to deliver.

When aid officials arrived in Kabul in late 2001, they were shocked by the country’s decrepit state. They had to build headquarters from scratch, they said, and contend with the lack of skilled Afghan workers. For remote areas like Helmand, it meant what assistance was available flowed in slowly.

At the same time, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and Secretary Powell clashed over security issues, according to their aides.

In a response to written questions, Mr. Powell said that in early 2002 he called for American troops to participate in the expansion of a 4,000-soldier international peacekeeping force designed to bolster Mr. Karzai’s fledgling government. Mr. Haass, the former State Department official, said informal conversations with European officials led him to believe the United States could recruit a force of 30,000 peacekeepers, half European, half American.

Mr. Rumsfeld and his aides were skeptical. They feared European countries would not provide enough troops, according to Mr. Whitman, the Pentagon spokesman. Defense Department officials believed it was better to train local security forces.

Over all, Pentagon officials hoped to minimize the number of American troops in the country to avoid stoking Afghans’ historic resistance to foreign occupation, said Douglas J. Feith, the former under secretary for policy.

Ali Ahmed Jalali, the country’s interior minister from 2002 to 2005, said Afghan resentment of foreign peacekeepers was “a myth.” After 10 years of internecine civil war, he said, Afghans yearned for someone to step in.

“They could not help themselves,” he said, referring to Afghans. “They were at war with themselves.”

James Dobbins, then the administration’s special envoy to Afghanistan, said Mr. Powell was ultimately unable to win support from Mr. Rumsfeld and other senior administration officials.

The 4,000-soldier international peacekeeping force would not venture outside Kabul. The United States deployed its 8,000 soldiers separately, but they focused on capturing or killing Taliban and Qaeda members, not on peacekeeping or reconstruction.

As an alternative, officials came up with a loosely organized system designed to empower Afghans to secure the country. The United States would train a 70,000-soldier army. Japan would demobilize some 100,000 militia fighters. Britain would mount an antinarcotics program. Italy would carry out judicial reform. And Germany would train a 62,000-member police force.

In April 2002, President Bush outlined his vision for rebuilding Afghanistan in a speech honoring George C. Marshall, the American general who led the rebuilding of postwar Europe.

Mr. Bush said the history of military conflict in Afghanistan had been marked by “initial success, followed by long years of floundering and ultimate failure.” He vowed: “We’re not going to repeat that mistake.”

On the ground in Afghanistan, problems arose immediately.

When Mr. Finn, the ambassador, reviewed the first Afghan National Army troops trained by the Americans in the summer of 2002, he was dismayed.

“They were illiterate,” he said. “They didn’t know how to keep themselves clean. They were at a much lower level than people expected.”

American military officials told him that local Afghan commanders sent them their worst conscripts.

Mr. Dobbins, the former special envoy to Afghanistan, said Defense Department hopes that Afghans could quickly take responsibility for their own security proved unrealistic.

“The reason we are there is that these are failed states,” said Mr. Dobbins, who has also served as special envoy to Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo. “The thought that this can be quickly remedied has proved unjustified in most cases.”

The police were even more challenging. Seventy percent of the existing 80,000 officers were illiterate. Eighty percent lacked proper equipment and corruption was endemic. Afghan police did not patrol; they set up checkpoints and waited for residents to report crimes, with bribes often needed to do so.

Yet in 2002 and 2003, Germany, the country responsible for police training, dispatched only 40 advisers. They reopened the Kabul police academy and began a program designed to graduate 3,500 senior officers in three years. German officials said developing a core of skilled commanders was the key to reform, frustrating American officials who backed a large, countrywide training effort. Some American and European military units conducted ad hoc training around the country, but no comprehensive instruction occurred outside Kabul.

Shattered Judicial System

In Lashkar Gah, veteran policemen and judges who returned from living in exile during the reign of the Taliban were aghast at what they found. Only one-third of the province’s 3,000 policemen were, in fact, trained. The rest, including the provincial police chief, were former guerrilla fighters who punished members of other tribes and turned a blind eye toward rogues from their own.

“They did not know about the law,” said Abdul Shakoor, a veteran police lieutenant. “They had their tribal ideas.”

Abdul Waheed Afghani, then a 67-year-old retired judge who had been in exile in Saudi Arabia, said the judicial system was no better. When he looked for judges to send to each of the province’s 13 districts, he found only three people with judicial training. He asked for help from Kabul, but received no response.

“I have given reports to many branches of the government,” he said. “But no one has helped me.”

The only foreign troops to deploy in Helmand, a province twice the size of Maryland with a population of one million, were several dozen American Special Forces soldiers. They built a base in the center of the province in 2002, hired several hundred Afghan gunmen to protect them, and focused solely on hunting Taliban and Qaeda remnants, according to Afghan officials.

Helmand Province’s voluble young governor, Sher Muhammad Akhund, was largely left to do as he pleased. The son of a famed local commander who fought the Soviets, Mr. Akhund entered Taliban-controlled Afghanistan in 2001 at Mr. Karzai’s request and won control of Helmand with the help of the Special Forces. Rumors abounded about the governor. In interviews with journalists, Mr. Akhund said he was in his early 30’s and a high school graduate. Afghan aid workers said he was in his late 20’s and illiterate.

Whatever he may have lacked in administrative skills, he made up for in muscle. As the head of Helmand’s largest and most influential tribe, the Alizai, he commanded several hundred gunmen.

As time passed, community leaders grew frustrated with Mr. Akhund. Haji Ahmad Shah, a wealthy local farmer, said Mr. Akhund initially refused to meet with him to discuss farmers’ problems. When he finally did, he ignored the complaints.

“When I was sharing these problems with the governor, he didn’t do anything,” said Mr. Shah. “He was just working for his own benefit.”

In 2003, Mr. Akhund confiscated 200 shops owned by a local minority group, according to a State Department report. Outside the city, the governor doled out parcels of land to his relatives and tribe, according to residents. Mr. Akhund denied the accusations.

At the same time, reports began to reach Kabul that Mr. Akhund was promoting the growth of poppy, according to an American official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the drug issue.

After the fall of the Taliban, poppy growth had exploded in eastern and southern Afghanistan, fed by poverty, weak law enforcement and an epic, five-year drought.

Mr. Akhund vehemently denied rumors that he took a cut of the poppy trade, but foreign officials remained skeptical. [On Saturday, Antonio Maria Costa, the executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, blamed Mr. Akhund specifically for Helmand’s soaring poppy crop, saying there was evidence he encouraged farmers to grow opium poppies.]

While corruption grew in Afghanistan, the Taliban regrouped in Pakistan and changed tactics, according to American officials. After being decimated in open battles with American troops through 2002, the Taliban began ambushing small groups of American soldiers and unarmed aid workers in 2003. Over time, aid groups scaled back or suspended reconstruction projects in the rural south and east.

In March, a group of gunmen in Oruzgan Province pulled a foreign engineer out of a vehicle belonging to the International Red Cross, shot him in the head and back, and left his body in the dirt.

Two days later, in a remote riverbed in northern Helmand, gunmen ambushed American Special Forces as they drove past in a small convoy, killing two soldiers. When their comrades stopped to return fire, the gunmen vanished down a maze of gullies.

U.S. Shifts Course

In the summer of 2003, officials in Washington unveiled an overhaul of American policy in Afghanistan.

Until then, Americans had rebuilt the main highway linking Kabul and Kandahar, after initially rejecting the road proposal by Mr. Finn, the ambassador. Otherwise, Washington had shied away from large-scale projects like power plants.

Between 2003 and 2004, American assistance to Afghanistan increased from $962 million to $2.4 billion; the Afghanistan staff of the United States aid agency doubled; and Washington dispatched an aggressive new ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad.

At the same time, the American military, expanding its role beyond combat, deployed eight new Provincial Reconstruction Teams, mostly to volatile southern and eastern Afghanistan. The units tried to win the loyalty of Afghans by equipping local government offices and mounting small reconstruction projects.

Mr. Feith, the former Defense Department official, said progress was made in Afghanistan in 2002 and 2003, but that the disappointing results of the allies’ plan for training the police required an increased American effort.

Former United Nations and State Department officials said the weakness in the Afghanistan policy should have been apparent to the administration much earlier. “It was possible in early 2002 and late 2001 to have calculated more accurately the manpower and money needs,” said Mr. Dobbins.

In Helmand, a field commander in the new development effort was Charles Grader. The 72-year-old Massachusetts native was the last American to head the Afghanistan program before the 1979 Soviet invasion. Twenty-five years later, he was back, managing a $130 million United States government contract to revitalize agriculture and slow the growth of poppy.

Mr. Grader was a marker of how the American approach to development had changed since the 1970’s. No longer a government worker, he was now a private contractor paid $130,000 a year by Chemonics International, a for-profit consulting firm based in Washington. Instead of directing projects, the United States aid agency hired companies like Chemonics, which farmed out work to subcontractors.

In June 2004, Mr. Grader drove into Lashkar Gah with eight security guards and found a burgeoning city of 100,000 people that was a maze of new construction, shops and bustling open-air markets. But the prosperity was illusory. The boom was largely fueled by Helmand’s opium trade, which by then had been spreading across the province for two and a half years since the Taliban was defeated.

On his first stop, Mr. Grader toured a demonstration farm bursting with cotton, pomegranates and other crops designed to show farmers they could make a legal living. Mr. Grader asked the Afghans who ran the farm what would persuade others to stop growing poppy.

Their responses had little to do with agriculture. They said the biggest problem was poverty and corruption. Farmers, they said, no longer believed the government would punish them for growing poppy.

“There is an inverse relationship between security and poppy growing,” said Abdul Ghani Ayubi, an engineer trained by the Americans in the 1970’s.

A local farmer was more blunt. “We don’t have law. This is a warlord kingdom.”

Mr. Grader promised to create public works projects that would repair the province’s irrigation system and employ large numbers of farmers. Four months later he resigned after clashing with aid agency officials over the direction of the program. High turnover rates among both aid agency officials and contractors slowed the American effort, according to Afghan and American officials.

Some work did get under way, including repairs to the hydroelectric dam built by Americans during the cold war and an alternative-livelihoods program that put 37,000 Afghans to work cleaning hundreds of irrigation canals.

A dozen new or refurbished health clinics were opened and over 100 wells were dug or deepened. The aid agency reported spending about $180 million in Helmand since 2001. In addition, the reconstruction of Afghanistan’s major highway included 90 miles in the province.

But local officials said these projects did not provide enough jobs to counter the lure of growing opium poppies for Helmand’s 100,000 farmers.

In addition, a popular perception took hold that after foreign contractors and subcontractors took their cut of aid money, little cash was left for average Afghans. And local residents grew suspicious of the foreigners who lived in heavily guarded compounds with electric generators and satellite televisions while they lacked regular running water and electricity.

Aid agency officials defended their spending in Helmand, saying that foreign workers were needed to properly carry out the projects, train Afghans and prevent corruption.

In October 2004, one of the eight new American military Provincial Reconstruction Teams arrived in Helmand. Over the next two years, the team spent $9.5 million to build, refurbish or equip 28 schools, two police stations, two orphanages, a prison, a hospital ward and 20 miles of roads.

Just outside the American base, the United States built a women’s job-training center for Ms. Olomi to run. The Americans provided dozens of computers and sewing machines and even set up a mock beauty salon so women could learn marketable skills. On one wall are pictures of Laura Bush visiting Afghanistan and meeting with the country’s newly liberated women.

Brazen Attacks Increase

By the spring of 2005, the stepped-up American effort in Helmand was showing signs of being overmatched by the rising violence. On a May morning, gunmen stopped a vehicle carrying five Afghans working on the program to clean irrigation canals. In broad daylight a few miles outside Lashkar Gah, they shot the workers dead.

The following day, gunmen followed six relatives of one of the victims as they drove his body back to Kabul. Just off the main highway, they executed all six.

Days later, the canal cleaning project — perhaps the Americans’ most successful undertaking in Helmand — was shut down over lack of security. Thousands of farmers were immediately out of work. Attacks also slowed repairs to the Kajaki dam.

Security had emerged as the largest single impediment to developing Helmand, but the country’s nascent army and police force were unable to deliver it. The first units from the new, American-trained Afghan National Army arrived in Helmand in 2005, but they comprised only several hundred soldiers and carried out few operations, according to local Afghan officials. A new provincial antinarcotics force was created that year, but it consisted of just 30 officers.

The long-delayed Japanese-led program to disarm militia fighters began in Helmand in 2005, but only several hundred assault rifles and machine guns were collected, according to the local police. Officials said vast numbers of weapons remain in Helmand and are being used by the Taliban and drug traffickers.

Police training also continued to lag behind. After Germany failed to mount any training outside Kabul, the State Department hired DynCorp International, an Irving, Tex., firm, to recruit, train and deploy dozens of American police advisers in Afghanistan and build seven regional training centers.

By mid-2004, the centers were operating two- to four-week training classes across Afghanistan. European officials said the training should be at least three months long, and one derided the classes as “conveyor-belt courses.”

“I had 15 days’ training in Kandahar,” said Mr. Shakoor, the police lieutenant. “The things that they were teaching me I already knew.”

Corruption was also undermining progress. A 28-year-old police recruit who asked not to be identified because he feared retaliation said he was disappointed when he returned from training to his district in Helmand. His commander continued to take 50 percent of his salary, he said, and work with drug traffickers.

The United States, meanwhile, expanded DynCorp’s police training contract, increasing basic courses from two to eight weeks, and sent two DynCorp contractors to important provinces to serve as advisers. Two retired American sheriff’s deputies were sent to Lashkar Gah, to cover all of Helmand.

Jesse Valdez, 55, from Santa Cruz, Calif., had trained police officers in Bosnia, Indonesia and the Philippines. Steve Rubcic, 58, from Wyoming, had never been east of Wisconsin.

When they arrived in October, security was so bad they could not visit any of the province’s 13 districts. In interviews, both said the Afghan police were eager for help and that they were making progress removing corrupt officials. Six weeks after they arrived, a small car bomb detonated outside the governor’s office several minutes before they arrived for a meeting.

In March, two more DynCorp advisers joined them in Lashkar Gah. A month later, a suicide car bomb attack flipped their armored vehicle, but they survived. Both refused to leave.

In June, American officials dispatched an eight-man DynCorp “saturation” training team to Lashkar Gah. Brent Thompson, a 33-year-old former police officer from Dallas who heads the team, said American officials calculated that six Afghan policemen were dying for every soldier in the National Army who was killed.

Half of the saturation team’s two-week training course is devoted to teaching Afghan police military skills, like how to launch or survive an ambush. Mr. Thompson, who trained the police in Iraq for DynCorp, said the Afghan police were more poorly equipped than their Iraqi counterparts. In one recent Afghan class, he said, 40 police officers shared 15 rifles.

As of early July, the training segment that involved police firing their rifles was on hold. Security problems had delayed the delivery of ammunition to Lashkar Gah, according to Mr. Thompson.

During the training, Afghan officers pull the triggers on their rifles and pretend to fire.

Scorn From Locals

On July 10, Helmand’s senior government officials, tribal elders and community leaders gathered for a public forum in Lashkar Gah entitled “Security, Reconstruction and Official Corruption.” For the next hour, the locals heaped scorn on the Afghan government. Speaker after speaker talked of dashed hopes.

The leader of the newly elected provincial assembly said that “in a country where there is no security, there is nothing.” A teacher who had received death threats from the Taliban warned that Mr. Karzai’s government could collapse. An enraged tribal leader in a white turban said the police released the murderers of his sons and brothers after receiving bribes.

“Is this a government?” he thundered. “Anyone other than me would join the Taliban.”

This spring, American forces handed over responsibility for Helmand to the British military. More than 3,600 British troops, 10 times the troops the United States deployed in Helmand, now patrol the increasingly violent province. This year, 15 British and 4 American soldiers have been killed there.

The violence has continued to hamper reconstruction. The canal cleaning project has resumed, but on a much smaller scale — and with many fewer local workers — than originally planned. Some road work is proceeding. But all repairs on the hydroelectric dam were suspended in July amid rising attacks. Nationwide, 90 percent of Afghans still lack regular electricity.

Since early 2005, both Afghan and foreign officials had urged Mr. Karzai to remove Mr. Akhund as Helmand’s governor. Last December, Mr. Karzai finally did. The Afghan leader’s supporters argue that he was never provided with the resources needed to take on warlords.

The new governor, an engineer and former United Nations employee, accepted the assignment on condition he have his own 150-man security force. This spring, Mr. Karzai fired the province’s police chief, but his replacement said he will make little headway stabilizing the province as long as the Taliban continues to have bases in neighboring Pakistan.

Mr. Afghani, the province’s chief judge, said Taliban attacks this spring have shut down courts in 11 of the province’s 13 districts. In June, he found an unexploded bomb in his car. In July, a suicide bomber killed four people in a Lashkar Gah court office.

“Nowadays, no one is taking care of judges in our government,” he said. “We are helpless people. We don’t have any power. We don’t have any police.”

Mr. Shah, the farmer, said he has given up on Mr. Karzai’s government. After growing little opium since 2001, he grew large amounts this spring after his workers demanded higher pay. He and other farmers simply pooled their money and bribed a local official so that eradication teams drove past their village.

On a recent afternoon, Ms. Olomi gave a reporter a tour of her women’s center, which was closed for security reasons after the killing of her driver in May. False rumors had been spread that the center’s female students were being taken to the local American military base and forced to have sex with soldiers.

After the tour of the center, which had the feel of a museum, Ms. Olomi announced she was heading home and pulled out a burqa, the head-to-toe veil that became a symbol of Taliban oppression. Ms. Olomi shed her burqa after the group’s fall in 2001, but began wearing it again after her driver’s death to hide her identity from potential assassins.

As her car rolled out the center’s front gate, Ms. Olomi pulled the burqa over her head and her face disappeared. In Little America in 2006, the former instrument of her oppression was her means of survival.

Carlotta Gall contributed reporting from Kabul for this article.

    Afghan Symbol for Change Becomes a Symbol of Failure, NYT, 5.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/05/world/asia/05afghan.html?hp&ex=1157515200&en=1e70e663189b6fb9&ei=5094&partner=homepage

US Troops Seek 'Revenge' in Afghanistan

September 4, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:58 p.m. ET
The New York Times

NARAY, Afghanistan (AP) -- Hundreds of American soldiers at this remote outpost are keeping up the hunt for Osama bin Laden even though the trail's gone cold, still motivated by memories of the hijacked and crashed airliners of five years ago on Sept. 11.

''Revenge was a big part of it,'' said 24-year-old Lt. Mike Vieira of the U.S. Army's 10th Mountain Division. The unit's 600 soldiers arrived here in February at what was then the army's northernmost outpost along Afghanistan's border with Pakistan.

From the base, called Forward Operating Base Naray, soldiers can spy ethnic Pashtun tribesmen and militants walking on a nearby ridge that marks the border with Pakistan. It's a known passage for surreptitious crossings.

At least seven soldiers, including the battalion's first commander, Lt. Col. Joseph J. Fenty of Florida, have been killed in ambushes and helicopter crashes during the mission. The troops are pushing into areas of eastern Afghanistan where anti-U.S. insurgents have long operated unchallenged.

The steep, wooded valleys offer countless hideouts and natural vantage points for militants to stage ambushes.

''These mountains are very, very ruthless,'' said Sgt. Ross Gilbert, a 24-year-old Californian. On his third tour to Afghanistan since the U.S.-led invasion in late 2001 toppled the Taliban regime, Gilbert said the failure to capturing bin Laden is a major frustration for him and fellow infantrymen.

''But I know he is hiding somewhere and he is not able to get out and around,'' Gilbert said. ''He is hiding like a little mouse in a cave from a snake. Right now he is on the run. He ain't got nowhere to go and one of these days we'll get him.''

The terrain is an enemy too. Sprained ankles, twisted knees and bones broken on the rocks have sidelined a third of soldiers from some units. Many spend weeks-on-end patrolling along goat tracks and foot paths -- while lugging 120 pounds of gear.

Other troops are responsible for keeping this bustling base running. Tasks range from serving food to refueling the helicopters that ferry soldiers, mail and ammunition in and out of this remote valley.

From the main U.S. base in Afghanistan, north of the capital Kabul, getting to Naray requires a hair-raising, two-hour Chinook helicopter trip over jagged mountain tops, desert plains and lush river deltas.

The distance and time spent away from loved ones back home can eat away at morale.

''It is hard, but I have things to look forward to when I get out of here. To go home and drink and party and see my kids,'' said Spc. Matthew Afuola, 24, from New Jersey.

U.S. Army Special Forces first established a small, heavily fortified compound in Naray -- a village of a few mud-brick homes -- following the Sept. 11 attacks. It was only in February that the military started expanding the base, to accommodate hundreds of soldiers and major local reconstruction projects.

Four months ago, the base was ''desolate,'' says Staff Sgt. Jennifer Williams, a Virginian who runs the chow line.

''We had nothing to cook with, so we couldn't even feed people,'' Williams said. ''All we were eating was MREs (pre-packed and precooked Meals Ready to Eat). It has become a lot better.''

But now, depending on the day, the base's menu ranges from pork chops and pot roast to lobster tails, crab legs and pepper steak.

Hot showers, 24-hour Internet access and telephones are also provided, a major feat in such a remote location.

The commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, recently visited Naray to review training of local Afghan troops, development programs and the hunt for insurgents.

''Look around where we are standing right now, sitting in this valley and stretch your head up. I am looking at peaks up there of about 9,000 feet of altitude, not a very good infrastructure through these valleys,'' Eikenberry told The Associated Press.

''There are no roads, communication is hard, these are areas where these people have not probably never seen the central government of Afghanistan.''

Relations between the U.S. soldiers and locals in Naray seem friendly, except for the occasional rocket strike aimed at the base. The troops respond with intense retaliatory fire in often fruitless attempts to kill the hidden attackers.

In recent weeks, more than 100 troops have established a new base farther north at Kamdesh village in neighboring Nuristan province, now the northernmost U.S. outpost along the border. Conditions are more Spartan there. Troops jumping into a river -- sometimes fully clothed -- to wash themselves and their uniforms.

This is a region bin Laden knows well from his days with the U.S.-backed mujahedeen who fought against the Soviet forces that occupied Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989.

The fugitive al-Qaida leader still has dangerous friends in the area, including Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, whose Heb-e-Islami militant group terrorized Soviet forces before turning their rockets at the Americans.

''Unless you are here and see the terrain, you wonder how is it possible the man (bin Laden) has been able to avoid capture for over five years,'' said the battalion's intelligence officer, Lt. Clay Huffman, 24, from New York state. Targeting low-level militants is difficult ''and the higher ones are very careful,'' he said.

    US Troops Seek 'Revenge' in Afghanistan, NYT, 4.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Sept-11-View-from-Afghanistan.html?_r=1&oref=slogin