History > 2007 > USA > War > Afghanistan (V)

Editorial

Plenty of Blame for Afghanistan

December 16, 2007
The New York Times
 

It was not a pretty sight: Defense Secretary Robert Gates, last week, accusing NATO allies of not doing nearly enough in Afghanistan. But beyond the finger-pointing, there is a much more serious issue. Unless the United States and Europe come up with a better strategy — and invest more money, attention and troops — the “good war” will go irretrievably bad.

One year after NATO took over all peacekeeping responsibilities (the United States still has 26,000 troops there), attacks by Taliban and Qaeda forces, including suicide bombings, are on the rise. Afghans are growing increasingly disillusioned both about their country’s government and its Western backers. Poppy production is also soaring as the Kabul government, Washington and Europe squabble over the best approach to eradication.

There is plenty of blame to go around. President Hamid Karzai and his government are weak. Pakistan, with Washington’s acquiescence, has not done enough to root out Al Qaeda along Afghanistan’s border. NATO has 28,000 troops on the ground, but member states seem to be losing their enthusiasm for the effort.

Urgent pleas for 3,500 more military trainers for Afghan security forces, 20 helicopters and 3 infantry battalions have gone unanswered. British, Canadian, Australian and Dutch troops are fighting in southern Afghanistan, where insurgents are most active. But some European countries have placed so many restrictions on where and how their forces will operate — including barring deployments in the south — that they are hobbling the effort. France, Germany, Italy and Spain are among those that could do more.

One of the biggest problems is that when NATO took command in Afghanistan, many members expected that most of the fighting would be over and their troops would focus on development and stabilization. Instead, they are increasingly taking casualties, and European leaders have still failed to tell their citizens why Afghanistan matters — and why a major effort must be made to deny the Taliban and Al Qaeda a safe haven.

We understand Mr. Gates’s frustration. He might do better with the Europeans if he told another truth: Before NATO got involved, Washington never had enough troops in Afghanistan, nor did it have a coherent strategy for stabilizing and developing the country. Its decision to invade Iraq ended up shortchanging the effort even more. Too few ground troops, meanwhile, meant too much reliance on airstrikes, leading to too many civilian casualties, which fanned popular anger and resistance.

By the end of last week, Mr. Gates and European officials agreed that instead of trading blame they would begin a much needed top-to-bottom review of their strategy. Better late than never. The review must look at everything: politics, development, counternarcotics and security. It must find ways to improve coordination between NATO, Washington and Kabul. It must acknowledge that European and American troops will most likely have to remain there for many years. And it must be done quickly, before Afghanistan unravels even more.

Plenty of Blame for Afghanistan, NYT, 16.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/16/opinion/16sun1.html

Afghan Mission Is Reviewed

as Concerns Rise

December 16, 2007
The New York Times
By THOM SHANKER and STEVEN LEE MYERS

WASHINGTON — Deeply concerned about the prospect of failure in Afghanistan, the Bush administration and NATO have begun three top-to-bottom reviews of the entire mission, from security and counterterrorism to political consolidation and economic development, according to American and alliance officials.

The reviews are an acknowledgment of the need for greater coordination in fighting the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, halting the rising opium production and trafficking that finances the insurgency and helping the Kabul government extend its legitimacy and control.

Taken together, these efforts reflect a growing apprehension that one of the administration’s most important legacies — the routing of Taliban and Qaeda forces in Afghanistan after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 — may slip away, according to senior administration officials.

Unlike the administration’s sweeping review of Iraq policy a year ago, which was announced with great fanfare and ultimately resulted in a large increase in troops, the American reviews of the Afghan strategy have not been announced and are not expected to result in a similar infusion of combat forces, mostly because there are no American troops readily available.

The administration is now committed to finding an international coordinator, described as a “super envoy,” to synchronize the full range of efforts in Afghanistan, and to continue pressing for more NATO troops to fight an insurgency that made this the most violent year since the Taliban and Al Qaeda were routed in December 2001.

“We are looking for ways to gain greater strategic coherence,” said a senior administration official involved in the review process.

One assessment is being conducted within the United States military. Adm. William J. Fallon, commander of American forces in the Middle East, has ordered a full review of the mission, including the covert hunt for Taliban and Qaeda leaders.

“It’s an assessment of our current strategy and how we are doing,” said a senior military officer. “It’s looking at whether we’ve done enough or need to do more in terms of expanding governance and economic development, as well as wrestling with the difficult security issues that we have been dealing with in Afghanistan.”

Senior State Department officials also said that R. Nicholas Burns, the under secretary of state for political affairs, was coordinating another internal assessment of diplomatic efforts and economic aid — the sorts of “soft power” assistance beyond combat force that officials agree are required for success.

A third review, one that has previously been part of the public discussion, involves the strategy of NATO, which last year assumed control of the security operation in Afghanistan and has since been criticized by American officials and lawmakers for not being aggressive enough.

At an alliance meeting in Scotland on Friday, Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates successfully gained a commitment from NATO to produce what senior Pentagon officials called an “integrated plan” for Afghanistan.

“The intent is to get people to look beyond 2008 and realize this is a longer-term endeavor,” said Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary, who was with Mr. Gates in Scotland. He said the plan would “start off by acknowledging the success we’re having in terms of reconstruction and education and governance and so forth, but it also will state where we want to be in three to five years, and how we get there.”

The NATO assessment is to be completed for a meeting of alliance heads of state in Bucharest, Romania, next spring. The other reviews are due early next year.

Publicly, administration officials have expressed optimism that the war in Afghanistan can be won, but Mr. Gates told Congress this week that his optimism was “tempered by caution.”

In recent months, though, Mr. Bush’s senior advisers have expressed a growing unease.

While there is a sense that this year’s troop buildup in Iraq has turned around a dire situation, the effort in Afghanistan has begun to drift, at best, officials said. That prompted Mr. Bush’s national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, to oversee internal deliberations that resulted in the push for the new reviews.

The NATO-led security assistance mission in Afghanistan has about 40,000 troops; of those, 14,000 are American. Separately, the United States military has 12,000 other troops in Afghanistan conducting specialized counterterrorism missions.

Mr. Gates has declined to name specific allies that have not fulfilled pledges for combat troops, security trainers and helicopters for Afghanistan, or whose governments have placed restrictions on their combat forces. But he has noted that Britain, Canada and Australia had met their commitments and carry their full combat load.

Some members of Congress have not been so diplomatic.

“The Germans, the Spanish, the Italians don’t send any troops to the south except for 250 troops by Germany,” said Representative Joe Sestak, Democrat of Pennsylvania. A retired three-star admiral who worked on the staff of the National Security Council in the 1990s, Mr. Sestak complained that some allies “refuse to do combat ops at night and some don’t fly when the first snowflake falls.”

As part of the NATO review, alliance diplomats and military officers are closely watching the actions of Britain, which may be able to commit additional troops to Afghanistan as it reduces its deployments in Iraq.

To that end, Britain has opened its own “strategic review” of the Afghan mission, especially in the turbulent southern provinces, which will shape the alliance’s assessment, according to a senior diplomat of a NATO nation.

“Essentially what’s driving it is that a year ago, we were regarding Afghanistan as an outstanding success — we established democracy, we were in control of many parts of the country,” the NATO diplomat said. “Now we have significant issues with certain areas producing opium and the Taliban coming back in certain parts of the country, as well.”

The Democratic chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Representative Ike Skelton of Missouri, was more direct in assessing possible failure in Afghanistan.

“I have a real concern that given our preoccupation in Iraq, we’ve not devoted sufficient troops and funding to Afghanistan to ensure success in that mission,” Mr. Skelton said. “Afghanistan has been the forgotten war.”

Strained by commitments in Iraq, the American military has few troops available to expand its forces in Afghanistan. “It is simply a matter of resources, of capacity,” Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress this week. “In Afghanistan, we do what we can. In Iraq, we do what we must.”

Both Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Mr. Gates have urged Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, to consider proposals for eradicating poppy fields by aerial spraying to halt the rapid increase in opium production. But the Afghan president has thus far rejected the idea, and even American officials admit that vastly increased eradication efforts would be counterproductive unless alternative livelihoods were immediately available to the poppy farmers.

The Karzai government also is said to be reluctant to endorse having an international coordinator with expanded powers, fearing its own legitimacy and credibility could be undermined.

Julianne Smith, director of the Europe Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the mission in Afghanistan was at risk of failure, as political support in European capitals strained NATO’s ability to sustain, let alone expand its effort there.

“The mission in Afghanistan has been suffering from neglect on all sides,” she said.

    Afghan Mission Is Reviewed as Concerns Rise, NYT, 16.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/16/washington/16afghan.html?hp

5 Afghans Die in Kabul Explosions

December 15, 2007
Filed at 12:50 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) -- A rocket landed in a crowd of civilians near Kabul's police headquarters Saturday, and a truck full of rockets smuggled into the city under a pile of hay exploded nearby moments later, officials said. At least five people were killed.

The truck contained five 107 mm rockets rigged to explode, said Gen. Mohammad Zahir Azimi, the Defense Ministry spokesman. He said two of the rockets detonated in the explosion but that three did not. The sound of the blast reverberated through Kabul around 8:20 a.m.

Moments earlier, a rocket was fired -- apparently by remote control -- toward the police station, but it instead landed in a crowd of civilians, said Najib Nekzad, a press officer for the Ministry of Interior. Nekzad said five civilians died and five people were wounded, including two police.

The attacker smuggled the rocket launcher and rockets into the city by hiding them under a pile of hay, Nekzad said.

Afghanistan has seen a record level of suicide bombings this year, and rockets are sometimes fired into Kabul at night, though most land harmlessly in a patch of dirt. But Saturday's attack appeared to be the first time insurgents used rockets at such close range in an attack.

Officials said three distinct explosions were heard during the attack.

Nekzad speculated that the first explosion was the rocket that was fired toward the police headquarters. A second explosion appeared to have gone off near the truck, perhaps to lure police officers toward the vehicle. The third explosion -- the largest by far -- was the sound of the vehicle exploding, Nekzad said.

No attacker's body was found, Nekzad said, leading police to believe that the attack was detonated remotely.

A police officer at the scene, Mohammad Amin, said he saw the truck before it exploded, and that it was loaded with bags and a large rocket launcher. He said the attack did not appear to be a suicide bombing.

This year has been the deadliest in Afghanistan since the 2001 U.S.-led invasion. More than 6,300 people have been killed in insurgency-related violence, according to an Associated Press tally of figures from Western and Afghan officials.

    5 Afghans Die in Kabul Explosions, NYT, 15.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Afghan-Violence.html?hp

With Color and Panache, Afghans Fight a Different Kind of War

December 15, 2007
The New York Times
By KIRK SEMPLE

KABUL, Afghanistan — The kites appear suddenly, whimsical flashes of color that kick above the beige landscape here of relentless dust and desperation.

They reveal themselves, like dragonflies, at the most unexpected moments: through the window of a grim government office, beyond the smoke curling from the debris left by a suicide bomber, above the demoralizing gridlock of traffic and poverty. To a new arrival in this chaotic city of three million, they are unexpected and wonderfully incongruous.

Banned during the Taliban’s rule, kite flying is once again the main recreational escape for Afghan boys and some men. (It still remains largely off limits to girls and women.) And with the American release Friday of the film “The Kite Runner,” based on the best-selling novel of the same name, a much wider audience will be introduced to Afghan kite culture.

Follow a kite’s string to its source and you will most likely find an Afghan boy standing on top of his roof or in an empty lot, playing the line in deep concentration.

But this is not the stuff of idle afternoons or, as in American culture, carefree picnics in the park. This is war. The sole reason for kites, Afghans will tell you, is to fight them, and a single kite aloft is nothing but an unspoken challenge to a neighbor.

The objective of the kite fight is to slice the other flier’s string with your own, sending the vanquished aircraft to the ground. Kite-fighting string is coated with a resin made of glue and finely crushed glass, which turns it into a blade.

The big kite-fighting day is Friday, the Muslim day of prayer, when thousands of boys and men flock to their rooftops and to the summits of the craggy hills that ring the city, carrying stacks of kites fashioned from bamboo and brightly colored tissue paper, and miles of sharp string on wooden spools.

On a recent Friday afternoon, there were scores of kites locked in duels above Tapeii-i-Maranjan, a high bluff in a southeastern neighborhood of the capital and the city’s most popular kite-flying venue. All strata of Kabuli life — male Kabuli life, that is — were well represented: schoolchildren were fighting ministerial officials, doctors were battling day laborers. They fought in teams of two, with one person tweaking the string and the other handling the spool.

Packs of boys too poor to buy their own equipment were sprinting after defeated kites as they fell to earth. They were the kite runners.

“We don’t have, like, soccer, baseball or basketball,” said Ahmad Roshazai, a translator at a medical clinic near Bagram who was flying kites on the hill with two of his brothers. He had cuts on his fingers from handling the bladelike fighting string. “We don’t have any good places for that,” he said. “No green places.”

He added: “This is the only game we have every Friday. That’s it.”

The inveterate kite fighters speak of their craft as part science and part art. The key to excellence depends on a combination of factors, both empirical and ineffable: the flexibility and balance of the kites’ bamboo frames, the strength of the glue binding the tissue paper skin, the quality of the string, the evenness of the spool and, of course, the skill of the fliers and their ability to adjust to the vicissitudes of the wind.

Rashid Abedi, 25, a business administration student, described the satisfaction of killing another kite. “It has a taste,” he said, and he likened it to the thrill of horse riding or driving a car. “These things all the time have a special taste.”

Kite-fighting string in Afghanistan was traditionally homemade by a laborious process that involved coating cotton string with a concoction of crushed glass and glue. But factories in other more-developed kite-flying nations like Pakistan, India, Thailand, Malaysia and China now churn out tens of thousands of spools of machine-made nylon fighting string that swamp the Afghan market.

Unlike in other Asian countries, like Pakistan and India, where kite flying is wildly popular, Afghanistan’s kite industry is still homespun and humble. There is still no Afghan kite federation, no national competitions, no marketing. While nearly all the string sold in Afghanistan is now factory-made and imported from other countries, most of the kites are still made by local artisans.

By consensus in Shor Bazaar, a blocklong market of tiny kite shops in Kabul, the best kite maker in the capital is Noor Agha, a slender and vain 53-year-old man who lives in a squalid mud-and-stone hovel in a cemetery and is missing most of his teeth.

“Nobody can beat me, nobody can do what I’m doing,” he said one recent afternoon as he sat barefooted on the carpeted floor of his workshop making a kite. “Even computers can’t beat me.”

His tools were arrayed before him: long stalks of bamboo and sheets of tissue paper; pliers and blades to cut and whittle the bamboo into long, flexible dowels for the frames; scissors to shape the tissue paper; and a bowl of glue.

“My prestige is higher than the interior minister,” he said.

Noor Agha, like most Afghan kite makers, inherited the craft from his father, who made kites until he was too old to grip the tools.

Alone, he can make about 40 kites a day, he said. But his business has become so large that he has enlisted the help of his two wives and several of his 11 children.

While most kites in Shor Bazaar sell for less than 30 cents, Noor Agha’s kites can fetch upward of $1. He sells custom-ordered kites to Afghan and foreign corporations and clients for much more, he said.

His local fame attracted the attention of the producers of “The Kite Runner,” who hired him to train the film’s child stars in the art of kite fighting and to make hundreds of kites used in the film.

For the kite fliers of Kabul, the release of “The Kite Runner” will help to draw the culture of Afghan kite flying out of the shadows of the much larger and more prosperous kite-flying nations in Asia.

It might also go some way toward explaining a particular Afghan kite ambush of an unsuspecting American kite flier in Maryland in 2004.

That spring, Shoab Sharifi, a Columbia University student recently arrived from Kabul, was visiting Ocean City when he spotted several people flying kites on the beach. He bought a kite from a vendor and did what for him was the natural thing: He started to kite fight. “I thought people were doing it here, too,” he said in a telephone interview from New York.

Mr. Sharifi went on: “There was a little girl and I did the maneuvers and cut her string from below.” As the wind carried the girl’s kite into the ocean, and Shoab celebrated his first kite-fighting victory on American soil, the little girl broke down in tears. When the lifeguards descended on him and accused him of “disturbing the peace,” it dawned on Mr. Sharifi that he had stepped into a cultural rut between Afghanistan and the United States.

“In the United States, I think people try to avoid conflict,” he concluded. “In Afghan culture, everything is about fighting.” He added: “It was a very educational experience.”

    With Color and Panache, Afghans Fight a Different Kind of War, NYT, 15.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/15/world/asia/15kites.html?hp

On Taliban Turf, Long Lines of Ailing Children

December 12, 2007
The New York Times
By C. J. CHIVERS

KARAWADDIN, Afghanistan — The Afghan boy crouched near a wall in this remote village, where the Taliban’s strength has prevented the government from providing services. His eyes were coated by an opaque yellow sheath.

Sgt. Nick Graham, an American Army medic, approached. The villagers crowded around. They said the boy’s name was Hayatullah. He was 10 years old and developed the eye disease six years ago. “Can you help him?” a man asked.

Sergeant Graham examined the boy. He was blind. There was nothing the medic could do.

A second man appeared, pushing a wheelbarrow that held a hunched child with purplish lips and twisted feet, problems associated with severe congenital heart disease. Sergeant Graham listened to his heart. Without surgery, he said, this stunted boy would probably die.

A third man turned the corner from an alley, leading a girl, Baratbibi, by the arm. She was 7 years old. She turned her ruined eyes toward the afternoon sun without blinking. They were more heavily coated than Hayatullah’s. Sergeant Graham sighed.

“We could use an entire hospital here,” he said.

Throughout early December a company of paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division patrolled the Nawa District of Ghazni Province, an isolated region near Pakistan where the Taliban operate with confidence and the Afghan government’s presence is almost nonexistent.

Each patrol was a foray into villages regarded as Taliban sanctuaries. Each began with tension and the possibility of violence. But the Taliban did not confront the heavily armed paratroopers, and within minutes the mood of the patrols shifted.

Once the villagers realized that the platoons were accompanied by medics, they pushed forward sick children and pleaded for help.

A catalog of pediatric suffering quickly formed into queues: children with grotesque burns and skin infections, distended scrapes and scorpion and spider bites, bleeding ears, dimmed eyes or heavy, rolling coughs. Some were bandaged in dirty rags. Others were in wheelbarrows because they lacked the strength to walk.

In one village, Zarinkhel, the villagers begged Capt. Christopher J. DeMure, the commander of B Company, Second Battalion, 508th Parachute Infantry, for vaccines. Seven children had died of measles in the last three days, they said, including two the morning the patrol arrived.

Afghanistan remains hobbled by underdevelopment, poverty and illiteracy, a legacy of decades of war. The population’s health problems are acute. But the problems in areas like these villages, the residents said, have been aggravated by the continuing insurgency and the harsh edicts of the Taliban, whose rule survived in such remote places even after it lost control of Kabul, the Afghan capital, late in 2001.

The Nawa District, largely out of the Afghan government’s or the American military’s reach, lies on a transit route for insurgents who travel between Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan. The Taliban exist openly here. To limit the influence of the government and prevent it from achieving even its modest development goals, the villagers and the Afghan and American authorities said, the insurgents have sacked schools, threatened teachers and students, scared off private contractors and sharply restricted medical care.

“The Taliban has made it abundantly clear that no outside doctors, no outside medical help, can work in this district,” Captain DeMure said.

Before late 2001, a few international aid organizations worked in the area with the Taliban’s consent. They dug wells, built clinics, distributed small amounts of aid and administered vaccines. Now few outsiders venture here; the area is considered too dangerous.

Its degree of poverty is complete. The villages have no electricity. Many people use the same irrigation ditches to wash, clean their plates, butcher meat, brush their teeth and drink. The canals are lined with animal waste. Few children are seen wearing winter clothes.

The only known doctor in the district, the American officers said, is a man named Dr. Nasibullah, who, according to several intelligence reports, almost exclusively treats the Taliban’s fighters.

One patrol entered Petaw, the village where Dr. Nasibullah lives. The doctor greeted the officers, served tea and denied assisting the Taliban. Captain DeMure told the doctor and a gathering of elders that the Afghan government had a plan to provide services to Nawa, but would need the villagers’ help.

“We have a long-term vision to make this a better place,” he said; a vision that included opening a school near the American firebase in Nawa, where the teachers could be protected. “We see a very, very bright future for this area of Ghazni.”

But the captain added that security had to improve before many other forms of help could arrive. Until the villages help stand against the Taliban, he said, it would be hard to build roads or clinics, or to provide electricity.

On each patrol, the officers made similar presentations. Almost invariably, a similar scene unfolded.

Once the meetings ended, the people brought forward sick children. The American medics, who conducted examinations in front of mosques, were the only modern health care many of the villagers had seen in years.

Sometimes the medics were able to help, quickly cleaning wounds and dispensing simple medicines. Much of what they saw was beyond their reach.

During his recent patrols, the medic for Second Platoon, B Company, Pfc. Corey R. Ball, was asked to treat not only infected cuts and persistent colds, but also retardation, blindness, autism, deafness and epilepsy. “We are medics,” he said. “They want us to be miracle workers.”

Captain DeMure said the health-care situation in the district allowed the government to try to draw a contrast between its actions and those of the Taliban. The government is trying to provide services, the message goes, while the Taliban try to take services away.

The government and the military plan to travel in the region soon with doctors and assess the problems and try to distribute aid and administer vaccinations, the captain said. After leaving Zarinkhel, he sent requests to the battalion headquarters for vaccines.

He had arranged for several recent patrols, including the patrol to Karawaddin, to distribute winter coats and gloves to the children. In many villages, some children were barefoot and wearing a single layer of clothes. The temperature dips well below freezing each night.

But the officers said the Taliban’s strength in the district had made greater long-term health care impossible for now.

On one patrol, in Salamkhel, First Lt. Brian M. Kitching, who leads the Second Platoon, asked the villagers to meet at a mosque and discuss their problems. He suspected that many villagers supported the Taliban, and wanted to tell them that their choices were counterproductive.

One villager, Rahmatullah, 35, said that the Taliban were here because the Afghan government was weak, and that the villagers were afraid. Whenever the military or the government distributed aid, he said, including blankets, children’s notebooks or winter clothes, the Taliban entered the village, collected the aid and set it on fire.

“We would like to support the coalition forces, but if we do that the Taliban will come at night and cut off our heads,” Rahmatullah said.

Another man, Ghulam Wali, 71, expressed dismay. “I know we are supposed to stand up against the Taliban, but we are poor people,” he said. “We do not have the ability to do that.”

Lieutenant Kitching urged the village to resist. “The truth is that you have the ability to make a change,” he said. “You are just not willing to do it.”

After he spoke, the people asked to see the platoon’s medic, and a man led over a boy who was about 6 years old. The child’s hair was wrapped in a patterned green scarf.

Under the scarf, an advanced infection covered the entire top of his head. The wound was coated with what appeared to be a powdered herb mixed with dirt; the boy’s father said it was a traditional medicine he had bought in a bazaar.

Private Ball tried to drain part of the infection, but the child howled. The medic said the wound needed to be excavated and scrubbed, a process that would probably involve cutting away most of the boy’s scalp, cleaning the area and then administering a long course of powerful antibiotics.

The boy’s father said he did not have the money to travel to the nearest clinic, in Gelan, which was more than 40 miles away on a road where the insurgents sometimes buried mines.

The medic dressed the wound and gave the father a course of antibiotics for the boy, with instructions on how to administer them.

Later, back at one of B Company’s firebases, in Nawa, Sergeant Graham said the boy could be saved if he was hospitalized. But if he remained in Salamkhel, he might die.

At night, as Captain DeMure briefed his officers and senior noncommissioned officers for the next day’s missions, he discussed the intelligence that had been collected during the day.

Among the items was a report that the Taliban had moved into Karawaddin after aid had been handed out, and taken the children’s gloves and winter jackets and made a bonfire. In the game of move and countermove for popular influence in the villages of Nawa, the aid had vanished again.

“I am confident we can make a difference down here,” Captain DeMure said. “But it is going to take time.”

    On Taliban Turf, Long Lines of Ailing Children, NYT, 12.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/12/world/asia/12afghan.html?hp

U.S. Deaths in Afghanistan, Region

December 11, 2007
Filed at 11:08 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

As of Tuesday, Dec. 11, 2007, at least 401 members of the U.S. military had died in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Uzbekistan as a result of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001, according to the Defense Department. The department last updated its figures Dec. 8, 2007, at 10 a.m. EST.

Of those, the military reports 271 were killed by hostile action.

Outside the Afghan region, the Defense Department reports 63 more members of the U.S. military died in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. Of those, two were the result of hostile action. The military lists these other locations as Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba; Djibouti; Eritrea; Ethiopia; Jordan; Kenya; Kyrgyzstan; Philippines; Seychelles; Sudan; Tajikistan; Turkey; and Yemen.

There were also four CIA officer deaths and one military civilian death.

------

The latest deaths reported by the military:

-- A soldier died Tuesday in a non-combat incident in Kandahar province, Afghanistan.

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The latest identifications reported by the military:

-- No identifications reported.

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On the Net:

http://www.defenselink.mil/news/ 

    U.S. Deaths in Afghanistan, Region, NYT, 11.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Afghan-US-Deaths.html

Gates Said to Oppose Force Shift

to Afghanistan

December 6, 2007
The New York Times
By THOM SHANKER

BAGHDAD, Dec. 5 — Senior Pentagon and military officials said Wednesday that Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates had decided against a proposal to shift Marine Corps forces from Iraq to take the lead in American operations in Afghanistan.

Mr. Gates told top Marine Corps officials and his senior aides that the situation in western Iraq, where the Marines now operate in Anbar Province, remained too volatile to contemplate such a significant change in how the ground combat mission in Iraq is shared by the Army and the Marine Corps.

That broad message was underscored by Mr. Gates on Wednesday as he made his sixth visit to Iraq as defense secretary.

During an evening news conference, Mr. Gates said the mission facing American, Iraqi and allied forces was to “work together not only to sustain the momentum of recent months, but to build on it.”

Senior Defense Department officials said Mr. Gates met at the Pentagon on Friday with Gen. James T. Conway, the Marine Corps commandant, and received a formal proposal that would shift Marine forces from Anbar Province and deploy them in Afghanistan.

The proposal was based on Marine Corps concepts in which an integrated “air-ground task force” of Marine infantry, attack aircraft and logistics could carry out the Afghanistan mission, and build on counterinsurgency lessons learned by marines in Anbar.

The idea also was based on an assessment that a realignment could allow the Army and the Marines each to operate more efficiently in sustaining troop levels for two wars that have put a strain on their forces.

“The secretary understands what the commandant is trying to do, and why the commandant wishes to transition the Marine Corps mission to Afghanistan,” Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary, said Wednesday during Mr. Gates’s visit to Baghdad. “But he doesn’t believe the time is now to do that. Anbar is still a volatile place.”

Senior military and Pentagon officials familiar with the discussion acknowledged that the Marine Corps proposal might eventually be adopted, although such a decision would be left up to the next defense secretary and military commanders.

At present, there are no major Marine units among the 26,000 or so American forces in Afghanistan. In Iraq, there are about 25,000 marines among the approximately 160,000 American troops.

In Washington on Wednesday, General Conway said that he felt the Afghan mission “is one that matches our strength and capabilities.” But he acknowledged that “it doesn’t appear that additional Marine units will be needed in Afghanistan in the near future.”

He added that “that’s not to say that in the future, were there additional U.S. troops needed, that we would or would not be called — that would be a determination made on what the nature of the request was at the time and what the availability of forces were between, probably, Army and Marines.”

When word first surfaced of the Marine Corps proposal in October, some officials in the Air Force expressed private fears that its mission in Afghanistan could be ended if the mission went to the Marines, who deploy with their own tactical fighter and attack combat aircraft.

Army officials acknowledged that the idea could streamline their force planning, by giving them only one mission to fulfill — although some Army officers also expressed wariness that the Marines were trying to move from an unpopular war, Iraq, to Afghanistan, which has more popular support.

Thus the idea was viewed by many military analysts as part of the maneuvering among the four armed services for priority combat missions, and the requisite share of the budget. There is widespread concern among Pentagon and military officials that the high level of military spending approved by Congress since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, may not be sustained by a nation that may move toward isolationism after Iraq.

Marine Corps officials said, however, that their proposal was based solely on military logic and efficiency.

Marine units train to fight in an air-ground task force. The term refers to a Marine deployment that arrives in a combat zone complete with its own headquarters, infantry combat troops, armored and transport vehicles, attack and transport helicopters, and attack jets for close-air support, as well as logistics and support personnel.

    Gates Said to Oppose Force Shift to Afghanistan, NYT, 6.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/06/world/middleeast/06gates.html

Suicide Bomber Kills 13 in Afghanistan

December 6, 2007
The New York Times
By SANGAR RAHIMI

KABUL, Afghanistan, Dec. 5 — A suicide bomber smashed his car into a bus carrying Afghan army personnel in the capital early this morning, killing 13 people. The chief military spokesman Gen. Zaher Azimi, who visited the scene, said the dead included seven army officers in the bus, and six civilians on the street. Among the civilians killed were four children, according to a spokesman for the Ministry of Public Health.

Another 17 people were wounded, eight soldiers and nine civilians, hospital officials said.

The car bombing was the second in two days, and occurred while Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates was visiting Kabul. The Taliban has claimed responsibility for the first bombing on Tuesday morning, in which a suicide car bomber crashed into a two-car NATO convoy on the Kabul airport road, wounding 22 Afghan civilians in a nearby bus and on the street.

It was not clear if the bombings were timed with Mr. Gates’s visit, since there have been several hundred suicide bombings in Afghanistan over the last two years. There have been signs, however, that insurgents, and their Al Qaeda allies, have timed bombings with official visits. A suicide bomber blew himself up at the entrance to Bagram Air Base when Vice President Dick Cheney stayed there in February.

The attack today occurred just before 7 a.m. here in Chilsitoon, a shopping street in the southern district of the capital. A Toyota car hit the bus, which was picking up personnel to take them to work. Most of the civilians who were wounded were shopkeepers and bystanders.

Carlotta Gall contributed reporting from Islamabad, Pakistan.

Suicide Bomber Kills 13 in Afghanistan, NYT, 5.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/06/world/asia/06afghan.html