History > 2008 > USA > Wars > Afghanistan (II)

Steve Sack

cartoon

Minnesota

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune

Cagle

2.7.2008

FACTBOX:

Military deaths in Afghanistan

Wed Jul 30, 2008
6:59am EDT
Reuters

(Reuters) - A British soldier in Helmand province, southern Afghanistan, was killed in a firefight with Taliban militants on Tuesday, Britain's Ministry of Defense said on Wednesday.

Here are figures for foreign military deaths as a result of violence or accidents in Afghanistan since the Taliban government was toppled in 2001:


NATO/U.S.-LED COALITION FORCES:

United States 561

Britain 114

Canada 88

Germany 26*

Spain 23

Netherlands 16

Other nations 75

TOTAL: 903

* NOTE: Figures supplied by German Ministry of Defense.

Sources: Reuters/icasualties ( www.icasualties.org/oef  ), compiled from official figures.

FACTBOX: Military deaths in Afghanistan, R, 30.7.2008, http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUKL051040220080730

Op-Ed Columnist

Drilling in Afghanistan

July 30, 2008
The New York Times
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Sometimes in politics, particularly in campaigns, parties get wedded to slogans — so wedded that no one stops to think about what they’re saying, whether the reality has changed and what the implications would be if their bumper stickers really guided policy when they took office. Today, we have two examples of that: “Democrats for Afghanistan” and “Republicans for offshore drilling.”

Republicans have become so obsessed with the notion that we can drill our way out of our current energy crisis that re-opening our coastal waters to offshore drilling has become their answer for every energy question.

Anyone who looks at the growth of middle classes around the world and their rising demands for natural resources, plus the dangers of climate change driven by our addiction to fossil fuels, can see that clean renewable energy — wind, solar, nuclear and stuff we haven’t yet invented — is going to be the next great global industry. It has to be if we are going to grow in a stable way.

Therefore, the country that most owns the clean power industry is going to most own the next great technology breakthrough — the E.T. revolution, the energy technology revolution — and create millions of jobs and thousands of new businesses, just like the I.T. revolution did.

Republicans, by mindlessly repeating their offshore-drilling mantra, focusing on a 19th-century fuel, remind me of someone back in 1980 arguing that we should be putting all our money into making more and cheaper IBM Selectric typewriters — and forget about these things called the “PC” and “the Internet.” It is a strategy for making America a second-rate power and economy.

But Democrats have their analog. For many Democrats, Afghanistan was always the “good war,” as opposed to Iraq. I think Barack Obama needs to ask himself honestly: “Am I for sending more troops to Afghanistan because I really think we can win there, because I really think that that will bring an end to terrorism, or am I just doing it because to get elected in America, post-9/11, I have to be for winning some war?”

The truth is that Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Pakistan are just different fronts in the same war. The core problem is that the Arab-Muslim world in too many places has been failing at modernity, and were it not for $120-a-barrel oil, that failure would be even more obvious. For far too long, this region has been dominated by authoritarian politics, massive youth unemployment, outdated education systems, a religious establishment resisting reform and now a death cult that glorifies young people committing suicide, often against other Muslims.

The humiliation this cocktail produces is the real source of terrorism. Saddam exploited it. Al Qaeda exploits it. Pakistan’s intelligence services exploit it. Hezbollah exploits it. The Taliban exploit it.

The only way to address it is by changing the politics. Producing islands of decent and consensual government in Baghdad or Kabul or Islamabad would be a much more meaningful and lasting contribution to the war on terrorism than even killing bin Laden in his cave. But it needs local partners. The reason the surge helped in Iraq is because Iraqis took the lead in confronting their own extremists — the Shiites in their areas, the Sunnis in theirs. That is very good news — although it is still not clear that they can come together in a single functioning government.

The main reason we are losing in Afghanistan is not because there are too few American soldiers, but because there are not enough Afghans ready to fight and die for the kind of government we want.

Take 20 minutes and read the stunning article in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine by Thomas Schweich, a former top Bush counternarcotics official focused on Afghanistan, and dwell on his paragraph on Afghan President Hamid Karzai:

“Karzai was playing us like a fiddle: The U.S. would spend billions of dollars on infrastructure improvement; the U.S. and its allies would fight the Taliban; Karzai’s friends could get rich off the drug trade; he could blame the West for his problems; and in 2009, he would be elected to a new term.”

Then read the Afghan expert Rory Stewart’s July 17 Time magazine cover story from Kabul: “A troop increase is likely to inflame Afghan nationalism because Afghans are more anti-foreign than we acknowledge, and the support for our presence in the insurgency areas is declining ... The more responsibility we take in Afghanistan, the more we undermine the credibility and responsibility of the Afghan government and encourage it to act irresponsibly. Our claims that Afghanistan is the ‘front line in the war on terror’ and that ‘failure is not an option’ have convinced the Afghan government that we need it more than it needs us. The worse things become, the more assistance it seems to receive. This is not an incentive to reform.”

Before Democrats adopt “More Troops to Afghanistan” as their bumper sticker, they need to make sure it’s a strategy for winning a war — not an election.

    Drilling in Afghanistan, NYT, 30.7.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/30/opinion/30friedman.html?ref=opinion

Is Afghanistan a Narco-State?

July 27, 2008
The New York Times
By THOMAS SCHWEICH

On March 1, 2006, I met Hamid Karzai for the first time. It was a clear, crisp day in Kabul. The Afghan president joined President and Mrs. Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Ambassador Ronald Neumann to dedicate the new United States Embassy. He thanked the American people for all they had done for Afghanistan. I was a senior counternarcotics official recently arrived in a country that supplied 90 percent of the world’s heroin. I took to heart Karzai’s strong statements against the Afghan drug trade. That was my first mistake.

Over the next two years I would discover how deeply the Afghan government was involved in protecting the opium trade — by shielding it from American-designed policies. While it is true that Karzai’s Taliban enemies finance themselves from the drug trade, so do many of his supporters. At the same time, some of our NATO allies have resisted the anti-opium offensive, as has our own Defense Department, which tends to see counternarcotics as other people’s business to be settled once the war-fighting is over. The trouble is that the fighting is unlikely to end as long as the Taliban can finance themselves through drugs — and as long as the Kabul government is dependent on opium to sustain its own hold on power.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. When I attended an Afghanistan briefing for Anne Patterson on Dec. 1, 2005, soon after she became assistant secretary of state for international narcotics and law-enforcement affairs, she turned to me with her characteristic smile and said, “What have we gotten ourselves into?” We had just learned that in the two previous months Afghan farmers had planted almost 60 percent more poppy than the year before, for a total of 165,000 hectares (637 square miles). The 2006 harvest would be the biggest narco-crop in history. That was the challenge we faced. Patterson — already a three-time ambassador — made me her deputy at the law-enforcement bureau, which has anti-crime programs in dozens of countries.

At the beginning of 2006, I went to the high-profile London Conference on Afghanistan. It was a grand event mired in deception, at least with respect to the drug situation. Everyone from the Afghan delegation and most in the international community knew that poppy cultivation and heroin production would increase significantly in 2006. But the delegates to the London Conference instead dwelled on the 2005 harvest, which was lower than that of 2004, principally because of poor weather and market manipulation by drug lords like Sher Muhammad Akhundzada, who had been governor of the heroin capital of the world — Helmand Province — and then a member of Afghanistan’s Parliament. So the Afghans congratulated themselves on their tremendous success in fighting drugs even as everyone knew the problem was worse than ever.

About three months later, after meeting with local officials in Helmand — my helicopter touched down in the middle of a poppy field — I went to the White House to brief Vice President Cheney, Secretary Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and others on the expanding opium problem. I advocated a policy replicating what had worked in other countries: public education about the evils of heroin and the illegality of cultivating poppies; alternative crops; eradication of poppy fields; interdiction of drug shipments and arrest of traffickers; and improvements to the judicial system.

I emphasized at this and subsequent meetings that crop eradication, although claiming less than a third of the $500 million budgeted for Afghan counternarcotics, was the most controversial part of the program. But because no other crop came even close to the value of poppies, we needed the threat of eradication to force farmers to accept less-lucrative alternatives. (Eradication was an essential component of successful anti-poppy efforts in Guatemala, Southeast Asia and Pakistan.) The most effective method of eradication was the use of herbicides delivered by crop-dusters. But Karzai had long opposed aerial eradication, saying it would be misunderstood as some sort of poison coming from the sky. He claimed to fear that aerial eradication would result in an uprising that would cause him to lose power. We found this argument perplexing because aerial eradication was used in rural areas of other poor countries without a significant popular backlash. The chemical used, glyphosate, was a weed killer used all over the United States, Europe and even Afghanistan. (Drug lords use it in their gardens in Kabul.) There were volumes of evidence demonstrating that it was harmless to humans and became inert when it hit the ground. My assistant at the time was a Georgia farmer, and he told me that his father mixed glyphosate with his hands before applying it to their orchards.

Nonetheless, Karzai opposed it, and we at the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs went along. We financed ground-based eradication instead: police using tractors and weed-whackers to destroy the fields of farmers who refused to plant alternative crops. Ground-based eradication was inefficient, costly, dangerous and more subject to corrupt dealings among local officials than aerial eradication. But it was our only option.

Yet I continued to press for aerial eradication and a greater commitment to providing security for eradicators. Rumsfeld was already in political trouble, so when he started to resist my points, Rice quickly and easily shut him down. The briefing at the White House was well received by Rice and the others present. White House staff members also made clear to me that Bush continued to be “a big fan of aerial eradication.”

The vice president made only one comment: “You got a tough job.”

Even before she got to the bureau of international narcotics, Anne Patterson knew that the Pentagon was hostile to the antidrug mission. A couple of weeks into the job, she got the story firsthand from Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, who commanded all U.S. forces in Afghanistan. He made it clear: drugs are bad, but his orders were that drugs were not a priority of the U.S. military in Afghanistan. Patterson explained to Eikenberry that, when she was ambassador to Colombia, she saw the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) finance their insurgency with profits from the cocaine trade, and she warned Eikenberry that the risk of a narco-insurgency in Afghanistan was very high. Eikenberry was familiar with the Colombian situation, but the Pentagon strategy was “sequencing” — defeat the Taliban, then have someone else clean up the drug business.

The Drug Enforcement Administration worked the heroin trafficking and interdiction effort with the Afghans. They targeted kingpins and disrupted drug-smuggling networks. The D.E.A. had excellent agents in Afghanistan, but there were not enough of them, and they had seemingly unending difficulties getting Mi-17 helicopters and other equipment that the Pentagon promised for the training of the counternarcotics police of Afghanistan. In addition, the Pentagon had reneged on a deal to allow the D.E.A. the use of precious ramp space at the Kabul airport. Consequently, the effort to interdict drug shipments and arrest traffickers had stalled. Less than 1 percent of the opium produced in Afghanistan was being seized there. The effort became even more complicated later in 2006, when Benjamin Freakley, the two-star U.S. general who ran the eastern front, shut down all operations by the D.E.A. and Afghan counternarcotics police in Nangarhar — a key heroin-trafficking province. The general said that antidrug operations were an unnecessary obstacle to his military operations.

The United States Agency for International Development (USAid) was also under fire — particularly from Congress — for not providing better alternative crops for farmers. USAid had distributed seed and fertilizer to most of Afghanistan, but more comprehensive agricultural programs were slow to start in parts of the country. The USAid officers in Kabul were competent and committed, but they had already lost several workers to insurgent attacks, and were understandably reluctant to go into Taliban territory to implement their programs.

The Department of Justice had just completed an effort to open the Afghan anti-narcotics court, so capacity to prosecute was initially low. Justice in Afghanistan was administered unevenly by tribes, religious leaders and poorly paid, highly corruptible judges. In the rare cases in which drug traffickers were convicted, they often walked in the front door of a prison, paid a bribe and walked out the back door. We received dozens of reports to this effect.

And then there was the problem of the Afghan National Police. The Pentagon frequently proclaimed that the Afghan National Army (which the Pentagon trained) was performing wonderfully, but that the police (trained mainly by the Germans and the State Department) were not. A respected American general in Afghanistan, however, confided to me that the army was not doing well, either; that the original plan for training the army was flimsy and underfinanced; and that, consequently, they were using police to fill holes in the army mission. Thrust into a military role, unprepared police lost their lives trying to hold territory in dangerous areas.

There was no coherent strategy to resolve these issues among the U.S. agencies and the Afghan government. When I asked career officers at the State Department for the interagency strategy for Afghan counternarcotics, they produced the same charts I used to brief the cabinet in Washington months before. “There is no written strategy,” they confessed.

As big as these challenges were, there were even bigger ones. A lot of intelligence — much of it unclassified and possible to discuss here — indicated that senior Afghan officials were deeply involved in the narcotics trade. Narco-traffickers were buying off hundreds of police chiefs, judges and other officials. Narco-corruption went to the top of the Afghan government. The attorney general, Abdul Jabbar Sabit, a fiery Pashtun who had begun a self-described “jihad against corruption,” told me and other American officials that he had a list of more than 20 senior Afghan officials who were deeply corrupt — some tied to the narcotics trade. He added that President Karzai — also a Pashtun — had directed him, for political reasons, not to prosecute any of these people. (On July 16 of this year, Karzai dismissed Sabit after Sabit announced his candidacy for president. Karzai’s office said Sabit’s candidacy violated laws against political activity by officials. Sabit told a press conference that Karzai “has never been able to tolerate rivals.”)

A nearly equal challenge in 2006 was the lack of resolve in the international community. Although Britain’s foreign office strongly backed antinarcotics efforts (with the exception of aerial eradication), the British military were even more hostile to the antidrug mission than the U.S. military. British forces — centered in Helmand — actually issued leaflets and bought radio advertisements telling the local criminals that the British military was not part of the anti-poppy effort. I had to fly to Brussels and show one of these leaflets to the supreme allied commander in Europe, who oversees Afghan operations for NATO, to have this counterproductive information campaign stopped. It was a small victory; the truth was that many of our allies in the International Security Assistance Force were lukewarm on antidrug operations, and most were openly hostile to aerial eradication.

Nonetheless, throughout 2006 and into 2007 there were positive developments (although the Pentagon did not supply the helicopters to the D.E.A. until early 2008). The D.E.A. was training special Afghan narcotics units, while the Pentagon began to train Afghan pilots for drug operations. We put together educational teams that convened effective antidrug meetings in the more stable northern provinces. We used manual eradication to eliminate about 10 percent of the crop. In some provinces with little insurgent activity, the eradication numbers reached the 20 percent threshold — a level that drug experts see as a tipping point in eradication — and poppy cultivation all but disappeared in those areas by 2007. And the Department of Justice got the counternarcotics tribunal to process hundreds of midlevel cases.

By late 2006, however, we had startling new information: despite some successes, poppy cultivation over all would grow by about 17 percent in 2007 and would be increasingly concentrated in the south of the country, where the insurgency was the strongest and the farmers were the wealthiest. The poorest farmers of Afghanistan — those who lived in the north, east and center of the country — were taking advantage of antidrug programs and turning away from poppy cultivation in large numbers. The south was going in the opposite direction, and the Taliban were now financing the insurgency there with drug money — just as Patterson predicted.

In late January 2007, there was an urgent U.S. cabinet meeting to discuss the situation. The attendees agreed that the deputy secretary of state John Negroponte and John Walters, the drug czar, would oversee the development of the first interagency counternarcotics strategy for Afghanistan. They asked me to coordinate the effort, and, after Patterson’s intervention, I was promoted to ambassadorial rank. We began the effort with a briefing for Negroponte, Walters, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and several senior Pentagon officials. We displayed a map showing how poppy cultivation was becoming limited to the south, more associated with the insurgency and disassociated from poverty. The Pentagon chafed at the briefing because it reflected a new reality: narcotics were becoming less a problem of humanitarian assistance and more a problem of insurgency and war.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime was arriving at the same conclusion. Later that year, they issued a report linking the drug trade to the insurgency and made a controversial statement: “Opium cultivation in Afghanistan is no longer associated with poverty — quite the opposite.” The office convincingly demonstrated that poor farmers were abandoning the crop and that poppy growth was largely confined to some of the wealthiest parts of Afghanistan. The report recommended that eradication efforts be pursued “more honestly and more vigorously,” along with stronger anticorruption measures. Earlier this year, the U.N. published an even more detailed paper titled “Is Poverty Driving the Afghan Opium Boom?” It rejected the idea that farmers would starve without the poppy, concluding that “poverty does not appear to have been the main driving factor in the expansion of opium poppy cultivation in recent years.”

The U.N. reports shattered the myth that poppies are grown by destitute farmers who have no other source of income. They demonstrated that approximately 80 percent of the land under poppy cultivation in the south had been planted with it only in the last two years. It was not a matter of “tradition,” and these farmers did not need an alternative livelihood. They had abandoned their previous livelihoods — mainly vegetables, cotton and wheat (which was in severely short supply) — to take advantage of the security vacuum to grow a more profitable crop: opium.

Around the same time, the United States released photos of industrial-size poppy farms — many owned by pro-government opportunists, others owned by Taliban sympathizers. Most of these narco-farms were near major southern cities. Farmers were digging wells, surveying new land for poppy cultivation, diverting U.S.-built irrigation canals to poppy fields and starting expensive reclamation projects.

Yet Afghan officials continued to say that poppy cultivation was the only choice for its poor farmers. My first indication of the insincerity of this position came at a lunch in Brussels in September 2006 attended by Habibullah Qaderi, who was then Afghanistan’s minister for counternarcotics. He gave a speech in which he said that poor Afghan farmers have no choice but to grow poppies, and asked for more money. A top European diplomat challenged him, holding up a U.N. map showing the recent trend: poppy growth decreasing in the poorest areas and growing in the wealthier areas. The minister, taken aback, simply reiterated his earlier point that Afghanistan needed more money for its destitute farmers. After the lunch, however, Qaderi approached me and whispered: “I know what you say is right. Poverty is not the main reason people are growing poppy. But this is what the president of Afghanistan tells me to tell others.”

In July 2007, I briefed President Karzai on the drive for a new strategy. He was interested in the new incentives that we were developing, but became sullen and unresponsive when I discussed the need to balance those incentives with new disincentives — including arrests of high-level traffickers and eradication of poppy fields in the wealthier areas of the Pashtun south, where Karzai had his roots and power base.

We also tried to let the public know about the changing dynamics of the trade. Unfortunately, most media outlets clung to the myth that the problem was out of control all over the country, that only desperate farmers grew poppies and that any serious law-enforcement effort would drive them into the hands of the Taliban. The “starving farmer” was a convenient myth. It allowed some European governments to avoid involvement with the antidrug effort. Many of these countries had only one- or two-year legislative mandates to be in Afghanistan, so they wanted to avoid any uptick in violence that would most likely result from an aggressive strategy, even if the strategy would result in long-term success. The myth gave military officers a reason to stay out of the drug war, while prominent Democrats used the myth to attack Bush administration policies. And the Taliban loved it because their propaganda campaign consisted of trotting out farmers whose fields had been eradicated and having them say that they were going to starve.

An odd cabal of timorous Europeans, myopic media outlets, corrupt Afghans, blinkered Pentagon officers, politically motivated Democrats and the Taliban were preventing the implementation of an effective counterdrug program. And the rest of us could not turn them around.

Nonetheless, we stayed hopeful as we worked on what became the U.S. Counternarcotics Strategy for Afghanistan. The Defense Department was initially cooperative (as I testified to Congress). We agreed to expand the local meetings and education campaign that worked well in the north. Afghan religious leaders would issue anti-poppy statements, focusing on the anti-Islamic nature of drugs and the increasing addiction rate in Afghanistan. In the area of agricultural incentives, since most farmers already had an alternative crop, we agreed to improve access to markets not only in Afghanistan but also in Pakistan and the wider region. USAid would establish more cold-storage facilities, build roads and establish buying cooperatives that could guarantee prices for legal crops. With the British, we developed an initiative to reward provinces that became poppy-free or reduced their poppy crop by a specified amount. Governors who performed well would get development projects: schools, bridges and hospitals.

But there had to be disincentives too. We agreed to provide security for manual poppy eradication, so that we could show the Afghan people that the more-powerful farmers were vulnerable. We focused on achieving better ground-based eradication, but reintroduced the possibility of aerial eradication. We agreed to increase D.E.A. training of counternarcotics police and establish special investigative units to gather physical and documentary evidence against corrupt Afghan officials. And we developed policies that would increase the Afghan capacity to prosecute traffickers.

Adding to the wave of optimism was the arrival of William Wood as the new U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan. He had been ambassador in Colombia, so he understood drugs and insurgency well. His view was that poppy cultivation was illegal in Afghanistan, so he didn’t really care whether the farmers were poor or rich. “We have a lot of poor people in the drug trade in the U.S.A. — people mixing meth in their trailers in rural areas and people selling crack in the inner cities — and we put them in jail,” he said.

At first Wood advocated — in an unclassified e-mail message, surprisingly — a massive aerial-eradication program that would wipe out 80,000 hectares of poppies in Helmand Province, delivering a fatal blow to the root of the narcotics problem. “If there is no poppy, there is nothing to traffic,” Wood said. The plan looked good on paper, but we knew it would be impossible to sell to Karzai and the Pentagon. Wood eventually agreed to language advocating, at a minimum, force-protected ground-based eradication with the possibility of limited aerial eradication.

Another ally for a more aggressive approach to the problem was David Kilcullen, a blunt counterterrorism expert. He became increasingly concerned about the drug money flowing to the Taliban. He noted that, while Afghans often shift alliances, what remains constant is their respect for strength and consistency. He recommended mobile courts that had the authority to execute drug kingpins in their own provinces. (You could have heard a pin drop when he first made that suggestion at a large meeting of diplomats.) In support of aerial eradication, Kilcullen pointed out that, with manual eradication you have to “fight your way in and fight your way out” of the poppy fields, making it deadly, inefficient and subject to corrupt bargaining. Aerial eradication, by contrast, is quick, fair and efficient. “If we are already bombing Taliban positions, why won’t we spray their fields with a harmless herbicide and cut off their money?” Kilcullen asked.

So it appeared that things were moving nicely. We were going to increase incentives to farmers and politicians while also increasing the disincentives with aggressive eradication and arrest of criminal officials and leading traffickers. The Pentagon seemed on board.

Then it all began to unravel.

In May 2007, Anthony Harriman, the senior director for Afghanistan at the National Security Council, in order to ensure the strategy paper would be executed, decided to take it to the Deputies Committee — a group of cabinet deputy secretaries led by Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, whom President Bush had appointed his “war czar” — which had the power to make the document official U.S. policy. Harriman asked me to start developing an unclassified version for public release.

Almost immediately, the Pentagon bureaucracy — particularly the South Asia office — made an about-face. First, they resisted bringing the paper to the deputies. When that effort failed (largely because of unexpected support for the plan from new field commanders like Gen. Dan McNeill, who saw the narcotics-insurgency nexus and were willing to buck their Pentagon minders), the Pentagon bureaucrats tried to prevent the release of an unclassified version to the public. Indeed, two senior Pentagon officials threatened me with professional retaliation if we made the unclassified document public. When we went ahead anyway, the Pentagon leaked the contents of the classified version to Peter Gilchrist, a British general posted in Washington. Defense Department officials were thus enlisting a foreign government to help kill U.S. policy — a policy that implicitly recognized that the Pentagon’s “sequencing” approach had failed and that the Defense Department would have to get more involved in fighting the narcotics trade.

Gilchrist told me that the plan was unacceptable to Britain. Britain, apparently joined by Sweden (which has fewer than 500 troops in a part of the country where there is no poppy cultivation), sent letters to Karzai urging him to reject key elements of the U.S. plan. By the time Wood and Secretary Rice pressed Karzai for more aggressive action, Karzai told Rice that because some people in the U.S. government did not support the plan, and some allies did not support it, he was not going to support it, either. An operations-center assistant, who summarized the call for me over my car phone just after it occurred, made an uncharacteristic editorial comment: “It was not a good call, ambassador.”

Even more startling, it appeared that top Pentagon officials knew nothing about the changing nature of the drug problem or about the new plan. When, through a back channel, I briefed the under secretary of defense for intelligence, James Clapper, on the relationship between drugs and the insurgency, he said he had “never heard any of this.” Worse still, Defense Secretary Robert Gates testified to Congress in December 2007 that we did not have a strategy for fighting drugs in Afghanistan. I received a quick apology from the Pentagon counterdrugs unit, which sent a memo to Gates informing him that we actually did have a strategy.

This dissension was, I believe, music to Karzai’s ears. When he convened all 34 Afghan provincial governors in Kabul in September 2007 (I was a “guest of honor”), he made antidrug statements at the beginning of his speech, but then lashed out at the international community for wanting to spray his people’s crops and giving him conflicting advice. He got a wild ovation. Not surprising — since so many in the room were closely tied to the narcotics trade. Sure, Karzai had Taliban enemies who profited from drugs, but he had even more supporters who did.

Karzai was playing us like a fiddle: the U.S. would spend billions of dollars on infrastructure improvement; the U.S. and its allies would fight the Taliban; Karzai’s friends could get rich off the drug trade; he could blame the West for his problems; and in 2009 he would be elected to a new term.

This is not just speculation, even when you stick with unclassified materials. In September 2007, The Kabul Weekly, an independent newspaper, ran a blunt editorial laying out the issue: “It is obvious that the Afghan government is more than kind to poppy growers. . . . [It] opposes the American proposal for political reasons. The administration believes that it will lose popularity in the southern provinces where the majority of opium is cultivated. They’re afraid of losing votes. More than 95 percent of the residents of . . . the poppy growing provinces — voted for President Karzai.” The editorial recommended aerial eradication. That same week, the first vice president of Afghanistan, Ahmad Zia Massoud, wrote a scathing op-ed article in The Sunday Telegraph in London: “Millions of pounds have been committed in provinces including Helmand Province for irrigation projects and road building to help farmers get their produce to market. But for now this has simply made it easier for them to grow and transport opium. . . . Deep-rooted corruption . . . exists in our state institutions.” The Afghan vice president concluded, “We must switch from ground-based eradication to aerial spraying.”

But Karzai did not care. Back in January 2007, Karzai appointed a convicted heroin dealer, Izzatulla Wasifi, to head his anticorruption commission. Karzai also appointed several corrupt local police chiefs. There were numerous diplomatic reports that his brother Ahmed Wali, who was running half of Kandahar, was involved in the drug trade. (Said T. Jawad, Afghanistan’s ambassador to the United States, said Karzai has “taken the step of issuing a decree asking the government to be vigilant of any business dealing involving his family, and requesting that any suspicions be fully investigated.”) Some governors of Helmand and other provinces — Pashtuns who had advocated aerial eradication — changed their positions after the “palace” spoke to them. Karzai was lining up his Pashtun allies for re-election, and the drug war was going to have to wait. “Maybe we taught him too much about politics,” Rice said to me after I briefed her on these developments.

Karzai then put General Khodaidad (who, like many Afghans, goes by only one name) in charge of the Afghan counternarcotics efforts. Khodaidad — a conscientious man, competent and apparently not corrupt — was a Hazara. The Hazaras had no influence over the southern Pashtuns who were dominating the drug trade. While Khodaidad did well in the north, he got nowhere in Helmand and Kandahar — and told me so. Karzai had to have known this would be the case.

But the real test for the Afghan government and the Pentagon came with the “force protection” issue. At high-level international conferences, the Afghans — finally, under European pressure — agreed to eradicate 50,000 hectares (more than 25 percent of the crop) in the first months of this year; and they agreed that the Afghan National Army would provide force protection.

The plan was simple. The Afghan Poppy Eradication Force would go to Helmand Province with two battalions of the national army and eradicate the fields of the wealthier farmers — including fields owned by local officials. Protecting the eradication force would also enable the arrest of key traffickers. The U.S. military, which trained the Afghan army, would assist in moving the soldiers there and provide outer-perimeter security. The U.S. military would not participate directly in eradication or arrest operations; it would only enable them.

But once again, Karzai and his Pentagon friends thwarted the plan. First, Anthony Harriman was replaced at the National Security Council by a colonel who held the old-school Pentagon view that “we don’t do the drug thing.” He would not let me see General Lute or Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, when the force-protection plans failed to materialize. We asked numerous Pentagon officials to lobby the defense minister, Abdul Rahim Wardak, for immediate force protection, but they did little.

Consequently, in late March, the central eradication force set out for Helmand without the promised Afghan National Army. Almost immediately, they came under withering attack for several days — 107-millimeter rockets, rocket-propelled grenades, machine-gun fire and mortars. Three members of the Afghan force were killed and several were seriously wounded. They eradicated just over 1,000 hectares, about 1 percent of the Helmand crop, before withdrawing to Kabul.

This spring, more U.S. troops arrived in Afghanistan. They were effective, experienced warriors — many coming from Iraq — but they knew little about drugs. When they arrived in southern Afghanistan, they announced that they would not interfere with poppy harvesting in the area. “Not our job,” they said. Despite the wheat shortage and the threat of starvation, they gave interviews saying that the farmers had no choice but to grow poppies.

At the same time, the 101st Airborne arrived in eastern Afghanistan. Its commanders promptly informed Ambassador Wood that they would only permit crop eradication if the State Department paid large cash stipends to the farmers for the value of their opium crop. Payment for eradication, however, is disastrous counternarcotics policy: If you pay cash for poppies, farmers keep the cash and grow poppies again next year for more cash. And farmers who grow less-lucrative crops start growing poppies so that they can get the money, too. Drug experts call this type of offer a “perverse incentive,” and it has never worked anywhere in the world. It was not going to work in eastern Afghanistan, either. Farmers were lining up to have their crops eradicated and get the money.

On May 12, at a press conference in Kabul, General Khodaidad declared the 2008 anti-poppy effort in southern Afghanistan to be a failure. Eradication this year would total less than a third of the 20,000 hectares that Afghanistan eradicated in 2007. The north and east — particularly Balkh, Badakhshan and Nangarhar provinces — continued to improve because of strong political will and better civilian-military cooperation. But the base of the Karzai government — Kandahar and Helmand — would have record crops, less eradication and fewer arrests than in years past. And the Taliban would get stronger.

Despite this development, the Afghans were busily putting together an optimistic assessment of their progress for the Paris Conference on Afghanistan — where, on June 12, world leaders, including Karzai, met in an event reminiscent of the London Conference of 2006. In Paris, the Afghan government raised more than $20 billion in additional development assistance. But the drug problem was a nuisance that could jeopardize the financing effort. So drugs were eliminated from the formal agenda and relegated to a 50-minute closed discussion at a lower-level meeting the week before the conference.

That is where we are today. The solution remains a simple one: execute the policy developed in 2007. It requires the following steps:

1. Inform President Karzai that he must stop protecting drug lords and narco-farmers or he will lose U.S. support. Karzai should issue a new decree of zero tolerance for poppy cultivation during the coming growing season. He should order farmers to plant wheat, and guarantee today’s high wheat prices. Karzai must simultaneously authorize aggressive force-protected manual and aerial eradication of poppies in Helmand and Kandahar Provinces for those farmers who do not plant legal crops.

2. Order the Pentagon to support this strategy. Position allied and Afghan troops in places that create security pockets so that Afghan counternarcotics police can arrest powerful drug lords. Enable force-protected eradication with the Afghan-set goal of eradicating 50,000 hectares as the benchmark.

3. Increase the number of D.E.A. agents in Kabul and assist the Afghan attorney general in prosecuting key traffickers and corrupt government officials from all ethnic groups, including southern Pashtuns.

4. Get new development projects quickly to the provinces that become poppy-free or stay poppy free. The north should see significant rewards for its successful anticultivation efforts. Do not, however, provide cash to farmers for eradication.

5. Ask the allies either to help in this effort or stand down and let us do the job.

There are other initiatives that could help as well: better engagement of Afghanistan’s neighbors, more drug-treatment centers in Afghanistan, stopping the flow into Afghanistan of precursor chemicals needed to make heroin and increased demand-reduction programs. But if we — the Afghans and the U.S. — do just the five items listed above, we will bring the rule of law to a lawless country; and we will cut off a key source of financing to the Taliban.

    Is Afghanistan a Narco-State?, NYT, 27.7.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/magazine/27AFGHAN-t.html?hp

Obama’s Visit Renews Focus on Afghanistan

July 20, 2008
The New York Times
By CARLOTTA GALL and JEFF ZELENY

KABUL, Afghanistan — Senator Barack Obama arrived in Afghanistan on Saturday, on a high-profile foreign trip in a country that is increasingly the focus of his clash with Senator John McCain over whether the war in Iraq has been a distraction in hunting down terrorists.

Even as Mr. Obama met privately with American troops, military leaders and Afghan officials in the eastern part of the country, Mr. McCain was questioning his judgment on foreign policy. In a radio address on Saturday, he said Mr. Obama had been wrong about the increase in troops in Iraq, a strategy Mr. McCain said should be the basis for addressing deteriorating conditions in Afghanistan as well.

As the American presidential campaign unfolded across borders and time zones, Mr. Obama received support from an unexpected corner: Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, told a German magazine that he endorsed the Obama plan to withdraw most American troops in a gradual timeline of 16 months.

Mr. Obama flew to eastern Afghanistan, near Pakistan, to get a firsthand look at the region where American troops are feeling the brunt of increased attacks from militants infiltrating the border. In selecting Afghanistan as an early stop in his first overseas trip as the presumptive Democratic nominee, he was seeking to highlight what he says is the central front in the fight against terrorism. He made no public statements on his first day here.

The visit was part of a weeklong tour that will take him to Iraq, Israel and Western Europe on a trip intended to build impressions, and counter criticism, about his ability to serve on the world stage in a time of war. It carries political risk, particularly if Mr. Obama makes a mistake — the three broadcast network news anchors will be along for the latter parts of the trip — or is seen as the preferred candidate of Europe and other parts of the world. But his advisers believe it offers an opportunity for him to be seen as a leader who can improve America’s image.

“I’m more interested in listening than doing a lot of talking,” Mr. Obama told reporters before leaving Washington for a trip cloaked in secrecy because of security concerns. “And I think it is very important to recognize that I’m going over there as a U.S. senator. We have one president at a time.”

Even as the fragile economy has emerged as the chief issue on American voters’ minds, the arguments that reverberated from the United States to Afghanistan served as a reminder that the nation is at war and that the candidates offer very different backgrounds and approaches when it comes to national security.

Mr. Obama touched down here just before noon on Saturday, his aides said, after stopping to visit, and play basketball with, American troops in Kuwait. In Afghanistan, he received a briefing from military commanders at Bagram Air Base and Afghan officials at an American base in Jalalabad. He was scheduled to meet on Sunday with President Hamid Karzai before heading to Iraq.

While the Iraq war has been one of the dominant issues in the presidential campaign, Afghanistan has moved to the forefront of the foreign policy plans of both candidates. President Bush’s agreement to a “general time horizon” for withdrawing American troops in Iraq has opened the door to new consideration of strengthening the American and NATO presence in Afghanistan, which Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain agree on in principle.

For months, Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, has criticized his rival for failing to visit Afghanistan and taking only one trip to Iraq. Even on Saturday, in a radio address, Mr. McCain renewed his criticism and sought to minimize Mr. Obama’s trip. “In a time of war,” Mr. McCain said, “the commander in chief’s job doesn’t get a learning curve.”

Mr. McCain, whose campaign spokeswoman suggested that Mr. Obama was embarking on a “campaign rally overseas,” said his rival was not going to Afghanistan and Iraq with an open mind. “Apparently,” Mr. McCain said in his radio address, “he’s confident enough that he won’t find any facts that might change his opinion or alter his strategy. Remarkable.”

But Republicans were carefully watching Mr. Obama’s trip, which is rare in its profile and scope for a presidential candidate. The White House also made clear Saturday that it was monitoring Mr. Obama’s travels; it accidentally sent e-mail to a broad list of reporters with the news report that the Iraqi prime minister supported Mr. Obama’s proposed 16-month timeline for withdrawing combat troops from Iraq.

In an interview with Der Spiegel magazine in Germany that was released on Saturday, Mr. Maliki said he was not endorsing Mr. Obama’s candidacy, but called his proposal “the right timeframe for a withdrawal.”

The magazine interview was far from helpful to the McCain campaign, and aides to Mr. McCain sought to clarify Mr. Maliki’s remarks.

“John McCain believes withdrawal must be based on conditions on the ground,” Mr. McCain’s senior foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann, said in a statement. “Prime Minister Maliki has repeatedly affirmed the same view, and did so again today. Timing is not as important as whether we leave with victory and honor.”

Besides visiting Iraq, Mr. Obama is also set to meet with presidents, prime ministers and opposition leaders as he travels to Jordan, Israel and three European capitals, including Berlin, where he is to give a major speech on Thursday. On the Afghanistan and Iraq leg of the trip, he is being joined by Senators Chuck Hagel, Republican of Nebraska, and Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island; the two men have been mentioned as possible running mates for Mr. Obama.

The three senators, all of whom have been critical of the administration’s policy in Iraq and Afghanistan, were casually dressed as they flew on Saturday to Jalalabad, one of 13 provincial bases that are commanded by American forces in the Regional Command East of the NATO force in Afghanistan. Many of those provinces, including Kunar, Nuristan, Nangarhar, Khost and Paktika, line the border with Pakistan’s turbulent tribal areas, where militant groups allied with the Taliban and Al Qaeda have gained in strength and have increased attacks by some 40 percent in recent months.

The governor of Nangarhar Province, Gul Agha Shirzai, was the only Afghan official to meet the senators, along with the United States ambassador and generals. A former mujahedeen commander with a brutal past, Mr. Shirzai is nevertheless favored by the United States as someone who can get things done, and has been praised for his tough action against poppy cultivation and official corruption in his province. He is thought to have his own aspirations in Afghan presidential elections next year.

“Barack Obama thanked the officials of Nangarhar and the people of Nangarhar for eliminating poppy cultivation, fighting corruption,” Mr. Shirzai said by telephone after the one-hour meeting, “and he promised that the United States would give more help to Afghanistan and especially to Nangarhar.”

The senators flew back to Bagram Air Base, north of Kabul, at 5 p.m., the governor said. At 6 p.m. two Chinook military helicopters landed at the United States Embassy, as two more attack helicopters circled above.

Afghans in Kabul said they knew nothing of Mr. Obama’s visit; some interviewed on the streets near the embassy did not even know who he was. But some who had heard of him said they liked his message, in particular that he would pursue Al Qaeda in Pakistan.

“So far what he is talking about is what Afghans want to hear: reduce troops in Iraq, focus on Afghanistan and focus on Pakistan,” said Ashmat Ghani, an influential tribal leader whose home province of Logar, just south of the capital, is suffering from growing instability by insurgent groups.

Mr. Ghani, a critic of Mr. Karzai’s leadership who opposes his running for another presidential term next year, also welcomed Mr. Obama’s recent criticism that the Afghan president had not come out of his bunker to lead efforts in reconstruction and building security institutions.

“We would welcome such a direct voice that would close up this problem,” Mr. Ghani said.

Yet other Afghans interviewed were skeptical that a new American president would make much difference for them.

“What have we seen from the current president that we should expect anything from a future president?” said Abdul Wakil, 28, who runs a juice stall in the street near the heavily guarded embassy in central Kabul.
 

Carlotta Gall reported from Afghanistan, and Jeff Zeleny from Washington. Larry Rohter contributed reporting.

    Obama’s Visit Renews Focus on Afghanistan, NYT, 20.7.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/20/us/politics/20obama.html?hp

Obama Lands in Afghanistan

July 20, 2008
The New YorkTimes
By JEFF ZELENY

WASHINGTON – Senator Barack Obama arrived in Afghanistan early Saturday morning, opening his first overseas trip as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, to meet with American commanders there and later in Iraq to receive an on-the-ground assessment of military operations in the two major U.S. war zones.

Mr. Obama touched down in Kabul about noon, according to a pool report released by his aides. In addition to attending briefings with military leaders, he hoped to meet with President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan before flying to Iraq later in the weekend.

His trip was cloaked in secrecy, which advisers said was due to security concerns set forth by the Secret Service. His whereabouts have been unknown since he departed Chicago. He left Andrews Air Force Base near Washington on Thursday afternoon, according to a pool report, and turned up in Afghanistan on Saturday.

Before he left the United States, he gave a brief outline of his trip to two pool reporters traveling with him from Chicago to Washington. No reporters accompanied him to Afghanistan.

“Well, you know, I’m more interested in listening than doing a lot of talking,” Mr. Obama said. “And I think it is very important to recognize that I’m going over there as a U.S. senator. We have one president at a time, so it’s the president’s job to deliver those messages.”

Mr. Obama’s arrival opened a weeklong foreign trip that includes visits to Iraq and two other stops in the Middle East as well as appearances in three European capitals. His tour of Afghanistan and Iraq are part of a Congressional delegation — similar to trips that Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, made in the spring — in which he is joined by Senators Chuck Hagel, Republican of Nebraska, and Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island, both of whom have been mentioned as possible vice presidential running mates.

The international trip by Mr. Obama is intended to counter Republican criticism — and one advanced by Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton during the Democratic primary campaign — that he has too little experience in foreign affairs to serve as a world leader.

His advisers said Mr. Obama chose to begin his trip in Afghanistan because he believes that the region is among the most important foreign policy challenges facing the United States.

“Well, I’m looking forward to seeing what the situation on the ground is,” Mr. Obama told reporters on Thursday before he left Washington. “I want to, obviously, talk to the commanders and get a sense, both in Afghanistan and in Baghdad of, you know, what the most, ah, their biggest concerns are. And I want to thank our troops for the heroic work that they’ve been doing.”

It is the first trip to Afghanistan for Mr. Obama, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee. This week, he proposed deploying about 10,000 more troops to battle resurgent forces in Afghanistan, a plan intended to shift the American military focus from the Iraq war to what he calls the central fight against terrorism.

The proposal has become a centerpiece of Mr. Obama’s foreign policy and a major point of disagreement with Mr. McCain, who maintains that both places are major battlegrounds and disputes Mr. Obama’s suggestion that the war in Iraq has distracted the United States from its efforts in Afghanistan.

Mr. McCain has suggested to voters that Mr. Obama lacks the experience to serve as commander in chief. He particularly criticized the Illinois Democrat for not having held a single hearing in his capacity as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee’s subcommittee on European affairs.

“He’s going to go to the American people and say, ‘I want to be commander in chief,’ ” Mr. McCain told reporters on Thursday, “and yet he has been the chairman of the subcommittee that oversights NATO and he has never had a hearing, nor has he ever visited Afghanistan.’ ”

But that criticism was dismissed this week by Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, who said issues related to Afghanistan were intentionally being addressed “at the full committee level.”

Mr. Obama’s trip is drawing considerable attention in the United States and abroad. It is being carefully choreographed by his campaign strategists to coincide with a new television advertisement in 18 states intended to highlight his ideas on foreign policy and portray him as ready to serve as commander in chief, which is one area where polls show that voters give an edge to Mr. McCain.

In addition to visiting Iraq and Afghanistan, Mr. Obama is extending his overseas tour, his first as a presidential candidate, to include a visit to Amman, Jordan, on Monday, followed by stops in Jerusalem, the Palestinian territories, Berlin, France and London.

Now that Mr. Obama has decided to take the trip, the McCain campaign is not sure what to make of it. Jill Hazelbaker, the communications director for Mr. McCain, offered a hint of the Republican criticism of the trip on Thursday by dismissing it as “the first-of-its-kind campaign rally overseas.” But Mr. McCain sought to temper the message, saying: “I’m glad he is going to Iraq. I am glad he is going to Afghanistan. It’s long, long overdue if you want to lead this nation.”

Robert Gibbs, a senior campaign strategist for Mr. Obama, dismissed that suggestion. He said the trip was rooted in substance, rather than politics.

“The trip is not at all a campaign trip, a rally of any sort,” Mr. Gibbs told reporters on Friday. He said Mr. Obama would hold “a series of substantive meetings with our friends and our allies to talk about the common challenges that we face and the national security dangers for the 21st century.”

In the next week, Mr. Obama is scheduled to meet several foreign leaders, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Jordan’s King Abdullah, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and President Shimon Peres and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

    Obama Lands in Afghanistan, NYT, 20.7.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/20/us/politics/20OBAMA.html?hp

U.S. Abandons Site of Afghan Attack

July 17, 2008
The New York Times
By CARLOTTA GALL

KABUL, Afghanistan — American forces have abandoned the outpost in northeastern Afghanistan where nine American soldiers were killed Sunday in a heavy attack by insurgents, NATO officials said Wednesday.

The withdrawal handed a propaganda victory to the Taliban, and insurgents were quick to move into the village of Wanat beside the abandoned outpost, Afghan officials said. Insurgents nearly overran the barely built outpost in a dawn raid on Sunday, the most deadly assault for United States forces in Afghanistan since 2005.

Those forces have fought some of their most difficult battles in Kunar and Nuristan Provinces, with their thickly forested mountainsides and steep ravines. Guerrillas mount ambushes and rocket attacks from the mountains and then easily escape.

Local people have been angered by civilian casualties caused by American airstrikes aimed at militants, and some now may be cooperating with the militants, Afghan officials said.

Rahmatullah Rashidi, the leader of the provincial council of Nuristan, said some insurgents occupied Wanat on Tuesday immediately after American and Afghan troops had withdrawn. “They were up in the forest not far away,” he said. But on Wednesday, he added, a council of village elders persuaded the Taliban to leave, saying they feared that the Taliban’s presence would draw more fighting.

The local police, who pulled out Tuesday with the American force, returned to Wanat on Wednesday with the support of the tribal elders, Mr. Rashidi said. News agencies quoted Omar Sami Taza, an official in the provincial governor’s office, confirming that the area had fallen to the Taliban.

NATO officials described the area as part of Kunar, but in the Afghan government the district falls under the jurisdiction of neighboring Nuristan. They played down the pullout and did not confirm that Taliban forces had moved into Wanat.

In Kabul, Capt. Mike Finney, a spokesman for the NATO force, said that “the citizens in Wanat and northern Kunar Province can be assured” that NATO and Afghan troops would continue to patrol the district and maintain “a strong presence in the area.”

“We are committed, now more than ever, to establishing a secure environment that will allow even greater opportunities for development and a stronger Afghan governmental influence,” he added.

Only 45 American soldiers and 25 Afghans had occupied the Wanat outpost for a few days before the attack. Far outnumbered by militants, the force was nearly overrun and fought a four-hour battle before the Taliban were repelled. In addition to the nine American deaths, 15 American soldiers were wounded. Four Afghan soldiers were wounded.

At the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Wednesday that the attack, and other recent cross-border strikes, underscored the need for more allied troops in Afghanistan and more aggressive action by Pakistani security forces on the other side of the border.

“There is no question that the absence of pressure on the Pakistani side of the border is creating an opportunity for more people to cross the border and to launch attacks,” Mr. Gates told reporters. “There is a real need to do something on the Pakistani side of the border to bring pressure to bear on the Taliban and some of these other violent groups.”

Admiral Mullen said the attacks probably foreshadowed even greater cross-border violence. “We see this threat accelerating,” said Admiral Mullen, who met with senior Pakistani officials in Islamabad on Saturday. “We see it almost becoming a syndicate of different groups who heretofore had not worked closely together.”

The Bush administration is considering the withdrawal of more combat forces from Iraq beginning in September, in part because of the need for more forces in Afghanistan. Admiral Mullen offered no new timetable, but said, “We are clearly working very hard to see if there are opportunities to send additional forces sooner rather than later.”

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington.

    U.S. Abandons Site of Afghan Attack, NYT, 17.7.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/17/world/asia/17afghan.html

9 Americans Die in Afghan Attack

July 14, 2008
The New York Times
By CARLOTTA GALL

KABUL, Afghanistan — Taliban insurgents carried out a bold assault on a remote base near the border with Pakistan on Sunday, NATO reported, and a senior American military official said nine American soldiers were killed.

The attack, the worst against Americans in Afghanistan in three years, illustrated the growing threat of Taliban militants and their associates, who in recent months have made Afghanistan a far deadlier war zone for American-led forces than Iraq.

The assault on the American base in Kunar Province was one of the fiercest by insurgents since the American-led invasion of Afghanistan routed the Taliban and Al Qaeda militants in late 2001.

The militants have since regained strength in the tribal areas of Pakistan, which they have often used as a base for raids into Afghanistan, an increasingly sore point for the American and Afghan governments.

The new American commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan emphasized that issue on Sunday in an interview that took place before details of the Kunar attack were disclosed, asserting that the militants were not only entering Afghan territory but also firing at targets from the Pakistan side.

“It all goes back to the problem set that there are sanctuaries in the tribal areas that militant insurgent groups are able to operate from with impunity,” said the commander, Gen. David D. McKiernan, who took over the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force in June.

General McKiernan said insurgents based in Pakistan had carried out some kind of attack on Afghanistan “almost every day I have been here.”

It was the first time a senior commander had stated so clearly that militant groups were not only infiltrating from across the border to attack but were also firing from positions inside Pakistan.

NATO officials reported that nine soldiers were killed in the Kunar attack but did not specify the nationalities, in accordance with the policy of letting member countries report them first. A senior military official in Washington said that all nine were American.

The Kunar attack also left at least 15 other NATO soldiers — almost certainly Americans — and 4 Afghan soldiers wounded, and it was one of at least three significant attacks on Sunday, including a devastating suicide bombing in a southern city’s bazaar that killed at least 25 people, 20 of them civilians.

This year of the Afghanistan war is already proving to be the deadliest since the American-led invasion. Bush administration officials are now considering a redeployment of troops to Afghanistan from Iraq to help deal with the rising threat.

Deaths of American troops and their allies for the last two months have been higher than those inflicted in Iraq. In addition, nearly 700 Afghan civilians were killed in the first five months of the year, a marked increase over previous years, United Nations officials have said.

General McKiernan, a four-star general who commanded allied land forces during the invasion of Iraq in 2003, said there were three main reasons for the increase in violence: a change in tactics by the insurgents to small attacks on more vulnerable targets, such as the civilian population, district centers and convoys; the increasing progress of Afghan and NATO forces in pushing into regions previously controlled by the Taliban, which has led to more fighting; and the “deteriorating situation with tribal sanctuaries across the border” in Pakistan.

General McKiernan’s comments followed a weeklong visit to the region by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, who discussed a wide array of security issues with Pakistan’s leaders on Saturday in a surprise visit to Pakistan.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, after conferring with President Bush and Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, directed Admiral Mullen to add the stop in Pakistan. Given that this was Admiral Mullen’s fourth trip to Pakistan this year and his second in two months, the admiral’s talks with Pakistani officials underscored the Bush administration’s increasing concern over the rising violence in Afghanistan and its links with the Pakistan tribal areas.

“The secretary wanted to take advantage of the fact that Admiral Mullen would be in the region to reinforce our concern with the Pakistanis about the spike in violence in Afghanistan and to keep the pressure on in the tribal areas,” Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary, said in a telephone interview about Admiral Mullen’s Pakistan stopover.

Capt. John Kirby, a spokesman for Admiral Mullen, said it was apparent to the admiral that “the Pakistani leadership is aware of their challenges in the border region, as well as of U.S. military concerns there, and are working to address those challenges.”

Pakistan, for its part, has complained that American forces have repeatedly hit Pakistani territory, in particular on June 10, when United States air and artillery strikes killed 11 members of the Pakistani paramilitary force, the Frontier Corps, manning a border post.

General McKiernan did not comment on the June 10 attack since a three-party investigation into the border clash had not yet been concluded, but he was very clear that militants were using their sanctuary in Pakistan to fire across the border and that the NATO and American forces had the right to fire back. “We have the ability to protect ourselves,” he said.

“The point that I am trying to make is that the border security situation is not good, and that border runs for 2,500 kilometers,” or about 1,500 miles, he said.

While he expressed optimism that the American-led forces here would prevail and the insurgency would be defeated, “I look at this problem regionally, the viable outcome in Afghanistan to a large degree is dependent on some outcome in Pakistan with these tribal areas. That is a problem that is not getting better with time.”

The base that came under attack in Kunar Province on Sunday lies in one of the most inhospitable mountainous regions where American forces have frequently faced fierce battles with insurgents.

A NATO news release issued in Kabul said the insurgents attacked the Kunar base with rocket-propelled grenades and mortars, using houses, shops and a mosque in the nearby village of Wanat for cover. Both sides suffered casualties as the insurgents were repulsed, it said.

The only bigger single death toll for the Americans in the Afghanistan war came in June 2005 — also near Kunar — when an American Chinook helicopter was shot down by Taliban gunners in heavy combat. All 16 aboard and three others on the ground were killed.

The American command also reported a heavy clash on Sunday between Taliban insurgents and Afghan and American forces patrolling in the southern province of Helmand in which it estimated that 40 militants were killed by airstrikes as boats and bridges across the Helmand River were destroyed.

A suicide bomber on a motorbike blew himself up in a busy bazaar in the town of Deh Rawood in the southern province of Oruzgan, killing the local police chief and four subordinates. Twenty civilians were also killed and 30 more were wounded, the provincial police chief, Juma Gul Himat, said by telephone. Bodies and wounded people were strewn across the street as the police rushed to help.
 

Taimoor Shah contributed reporting from Kandahar, Afghanistan, Jane Perlez from Islamabad, Pakistan, and Eric Schmitt from Washington.

    9 Americans Die in Afghan Attack, NYT, 14.7.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/14/world/asia/14afghan.html?ref=asia

Taliban attacks spur calls for troops

14 July 2008
USA TODAY
By Tom Vanden Brook

WASHINGTON — A shortage of ground troops in Afghanistan has led the Pentagon to significantly intensify its air campaign in the first half of the year to the highest levels since 2003 to fight the resurgence of the Taliban.
However, the increased bombing has not slowed the Taliban, the fundamentalist Islamic group that ran Afghanistan until its ouster by U.S. forces in late 2001. On Sunday, Taliban fighters attacked a base near the Pakistan border, killing nine U.S. soldiers and wounding 15.

Such Taliban strength, military officials and analysts say, shows the airstrikes alone cannot stop attacks and that more ground troops are needed.

Three U.S. brigades of about 3,500 troops each are needed to bolster the 32,000 U.S. forces already in Afghanistan, said Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. U.S. troops make up about half of the allied forces there. "The Taliban is clearly resurgent," Mullen said in a recent interview. "We don't have enough troops there, and we need to get troops in there to really meet the combat needs."

U.S.-led coalition warplanes dropped 1,853 bombs and missiles in Afghanistan through June in 2008, according to data compiled by the Air Forces Central Combined Air and Space Operations Center. That's a 40% increase from the same period in 2007. The 646 weapons used in June was the second-highest monthly total on record. The highest occurred in August 2007.

In eastern Afghanistan near the border with Pakistan, where many recent airstrikes have occurred, attacks from insurgents have risen 40% this year. The deaths of 28 U.S. troops in June, made it the deadliest month for U.S. troops in Afghanistan since the war began in 2001.

Taliban fighters and al-Qaeda militants are hiding in neighboring Pakistan and crossing into Afghanistan to launch many of their attacks. In a Saturday meeting in Pakistan with President Pervez Musharraf, Mullen expressed his "growing concern over the flow of insurgents across the border," according to his spokesman, Navy Capt. John Kirby.

The Pentagon is sending more air power to the battle. Last week, the aircraft carrier USS Lincoln was repositioned to the area to supply more attack planes, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said.

Airstrikes can kill enemy fighters, but "you're not owning the terrain," said Dakota Wood, a military analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

Civilian casualties have caused tensions between the military and the Afghan government. Last week, an Afghan government probe found that a July 6 airstrike killed 47 civilians. Coalition forces are investigating, Army Capt. Christian Patterson said. "Civilians are never targeted," he said.

Commanders should coordinate airstrikes with local officials, said Michael O'Hanlon, a military analyst at the Brookings Institution.

    Taliban attacks spur calls for troops, UT, 14.7.2008, http://www.usatoday.com/news/military/2008-07-14-afghanistan_N.htm

2.45pm BST

US air strike wiped out Afghan wedding party, inquiry finds

Friday July 11, 2008
Guardian.co.uk
James Sturcke and agencies
This article was first published on guardian.co.uk on Friday July 11 2008.
It was last updated at 23:44 on July 11 2008.

A US air strike killed 47 civilians, including 39 women and children, as they were travelling to a wedding in Afghanistan, an official inquiry found today. The bride was among the dead.

Another nine people were wounded in Sunday's attack, the head of the Afghan government investigation, Burhanullah Shinwari, said.

Fighter aircraft attacked a group of militants near the village of Kacu in the eastern Nuristan province, but one missile went off course and hit the wedding party, said the provincial police chief spokesman, Ghafor Khan.

The US military initially denied any civilians had been killed.

Lieutenant Rumi Nielson-Green, a spokeswoman for the US-led coalition, told AFP today the military regretted the loss of any civilian life and was investigating the incident.

The US is facing similar charges over strikes two days earlier in another border area of Afghanistan.

The nine-member inquiry team appointed by the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, to look into the wedding party incident found only civilians had been killed in the attack.

"We found that 47 civilians, mostly women and children, were killed in the air strikes and another nine were wounded," said Shinwari, who is also the deputy speaker of Afghanistan's senate.

"They were all civilians and had no links with the Taliban or al-Qaida."

Around 10 people were missing and believed to be still under rubble, he said. The inquiry team were shown the bloodied clothes of women and children in a visit to the scene.

The Red Cross said 250 people had been killed or wounded in five days of military action and militant attacks in the past week.

The toll included the US-led air strikes and a suicide blast outside the Indian embassy in Kabul on Monday that killed more than 40 people, including two Indian envoys.

The UN said last month that nearly 700 Afghan civilians had lost their lives this year - about two-thirds in militant attacks and about 255 in military operations.

Karzai has pleaded repeatedly for western troops to take care not to harm civilians, and in December wept during a speech lamenting civilian deaths at the hands of foreign forces.

    US air strike wiped out Afghan wedding party, inquiry finds, G, 11.7.2008, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jul/11/afghanistan.usa

Suicide Car Blast Kills 41 in Afghan Capital

July 8, 2008
The New York Times
By ABDUL WAHEED WAFA and ALAN COWELL

KABUL, Afghanistan — A huge blast from a suicide car bomb at the gates of the Indian Embassy on Monday killed 41 people in the deadliest suicide car bombing since the American-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 ousted the Taliban.

Among the victims of the attack, the first in seven years on a regional diplomatic mission in Afghanistan, were at least four Indian citizens: the Indian defense attaché, a political counselor and two other Indian officials. Six Afghan police officers were also killed. Many of the rest appeared to be civilians.

The fact that the Indian Embassy was attacked raised suspicions among Afghan officials that Pakistani operatives allied with the Taliban had used the bombing to pursue Pakistan’s decades-long power struggle with India.

India said it would send a delegation to Pakistan to investigate what the Indian Foreign Ministry called “this cowardly terrorist attack.”

There have been a number of attacks in Afghanistan in recent months notable for their increased sophistication and deadliness. Afghan and Western officials have said such attacks are signs of the growing strength of militants in the Pakistani tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, and the influence of Al Qaeda and other foreign terrorists and even elements of Pakistan’s premier intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence.

Suicide bombers attacked the five-star Serena Hotel in January and mounted a sophisticated assassination attempt on President Hamid Karzai during a military parade in April, an attack that Afghan intelligence directly linked to the Inter-Services Intelligence.

Pakistani intelligence has had a long involvement in supporting militant groups fighting in Kashmir and Afghanistan as a means to influence regions on its borders, and according to some Western diplomats and military officials, they maintain those links today, including with some elements of the Taliban.

In a statement Monday, Mr. Karzai said the “enemies of peace in Afghanistan” wanted to hurt Kabul’s international relationships, “particularly with India.”

“Such attacks will not hamper Afghanistan’s relations with other nations,” Mr. Karzai said.

The attack comes amid the worst summer fighting Afghanistan has seen since the fall of the Taliban in 2001, and as concerns mount about the weakness of the Karzai government. Taliban insurgents have proved resilient, NATO and military officials said, and killed 46 members of the international force serving here in June. That was the highest toll since the invasion in 2001.

The Indian Embassy is located on a leafy thoroughfare close to the Afghan Interior Ministry, in what is supposed to be one of the best-guarded neighborhoods of the city, protected by police roadblocks. But the bomber managed to get through, and rammed a car laden with explosives into the embassy gates.

Witnesses said the bomber struck as two diplomatic vehicles were approaching the gates. Nearby, people were standing in line for visas and shopping in a market. The explosion left body parts and bloodstained clothing strewn in the wreckage. Ambulance sirens wailed as residents peered at the wreckage of a dozen vehicles.

Haji Khial Mohammad, 45, one of those in line for an Indian visa, said he saw more than a dozen who appeared to be dead. “I was shocked and could not hear anything after the attack,” he said. “But I saw at least 10 men and three women in the queue who were probably killed.”

Mohammad Ajmal, 26 a shopkeeper in the market, said the explosion sent goods from his shelves spilling out. “I could barely could stand up,” he said.

A spokesman for the Taliban, Zabiullah Mujahed, denied responsibility. “The suicide bomb attack was not carried out by Taliban, we strongly reject that accusation,” he said by telephone. “We don’t know who carried it out.”

The Taliban frequently disavows knowledge of attacks that cause heavy civilian casualties.

Pakistani intelligence has had a long history of supporting militant groups fighting in Afghanistan and Kashmir, officials here said, and has regarded Afghanistan as its backyard. It fiercely resents the growing influence there of regional rival India. The Afghan Interior Ministry said it believed the attack was carried out in collaboration with “an active intelligence service in the region.”

The ministry did not elaborate on the identity of that service. But relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan have become so strained after a series of attacks that Mr. Karzai has threatened to send troops across the border to attack militants operating from bases in Pakistan.

India, meanwhile, is a close ally of Afghanistan. It is spending $750 million on building roads and power lines here in what has become India’s biggest bilateral aid program ever.

It has opened consulates in several parts of the country, and promoted initiatives to offer scholarships for Afghan students.

But there have been some challenges to its influence. Several Indian workers have been killed in recent months, and Indian television shows have been restricted because of objections on religious grounds. Senior Indian Foreign Ministry officials have said for months that they were worried about the safety of Indian personnel in Afghanistan.

Abdul Waheed Wafa reported from Kabul, Afghanistan, and Alan Cowell from Paris. Sangar Rahimi contributed reporting from Kabul, Somini Sengupta from New Delhi and Carlotta Gall from Islamabad, Pakistan.

    Suicide Car Blast Kills 41 in Afghan Capital, NYT, 8.7.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/08/world/asia/08afghanistan.html?hp

Bush signs $162 billion war spending bill

30 June 2008
USA Today
From staff and wire reports

WASHINGTON — President Bush on Monday signed a $162 billion war funding bill that includes doubling college benefits for troops and veterans and provides a 13-week extension of unemployment benefits.

The spending plan also provides $2.7 billion "to help ensure that any state facing a disaster like the recent flooding and tornadoes in the Midwest has access to needed resources."

"With this legislation we send a clear message to all who are serving on the front lines that the nation continues its support," Bush said of troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The legislation allocates money for the wars until mid-2009, when the next president will be in office. It also ends a battle with Bush and Democrats who wanted to delay war funding with demands for a timetable for troop withdrawals.

Bush, who ended up getting the money he wanted, praised Republicans and Democrats for coming together on the bill and "providing these vital funds."

"This bill shows the American people that even in an election year, Republicans and Democrats can come together to support our troops and their families," Bush said in an Oval Office ceremony.

The spending bill will bring to more than $650 billion the amount Congress has provided for the Iraq war since it started more than five years ago.

For operations in Afghanistan, the total is nearly $200 billion, according to congressional officials.

The legislation which is an expansion of the GI bill "will make it easier for our troops to transfer unused education benefits to their spouses and children," Bush said. "It will help us to recruit and reward the best military on the face of the Earth."

The bill also includes $465 million for the Merida Initiative — a partnership with Mexico and nations in Central America to crack down on violent drug trafficking gangs.

Contributing: Associated Press

    Bush signs $162 billion war spending bill, UT, 30.6.2008, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2008-06-30-bush-war_N.htm

Taliban Fighters Infiltrate Area Near Afghan City

June 18, 2008
The New York Times
By CARLOTTA GALL and ABDUL WAHEED WAFA

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Afghan families continued to flee the district of Argandab in southern Afghanistan as Taliban fighters and NATO and Afghan forces prepared to battle over the strategic region Tuesday.

The Taliban have taken control of 18 villages west of the Argandab River and started digging trenches and mines, a tribal elder from the region said. NATO and Afghan forces moved troops in to the region and dropped leaflets from the air warning civilians to stay inside their homes if fighting erupted in their area.

The sudden flurry of activity from all sides, coming days after some 400 Taliban prisoners escaped Friday during a jailbreak in Kandahar, indicates the seriousness of the threat.

Yet Afghan government officials and the United States military played down suggestions that the Taliban was poised to mount an attack on the district center or even on the city of Kandahar, the capital of the south which is situated just a few miles from Argandab.

“Still the Taliban are not in Argandab,” said the provincial governor, Asadullah Khaled. “They are in some places. It does not mean they took it all,” he said in English in telephone call from Kandahar.

“They will have some fighting, but they are not that strong,” he said of the Taliban. Although the governor has in the past raised the alarm when Taliban forces have appeared close to the city, and though he has often called for tougher action from NATO forces in his region, this time he said the threat was not great. “I am not worried.”

The United States military said a patrol of Afghan police and American and allied forces conducted a five-hour patrol from daybreak on the west side of the Argandab River valley, where there have been reports of Taliban fighters. The patrol encountered no resistance, said Lt. Col. Rumi Nielson-Green, a United States military spokeswoman at Bagram air base north of Kabul.

“Nothing but normal patterns of life were observed,” Colonel Rumi said. She could not confirm reports that the Taliban was destroying bridges.

NATO forces dropped leaflets from the air urging villagers to stay indoors when fighting occurred near their homes, said Mark Laity, the civilian spokesperson for NATO forces in Afghanistan.

The leaflets were double-sided and explained that Afghan national security forces, supported by NATO, were coming to the region, he said. On the other side they warned, “Keep your family safe when there is fighting near your home, stay inside, and the Afghan security forces will defeat the enemies of Afghanistan.”

NATO forces have been deployed in the areas where there is a threat, he added.

Still, local farmers and villagers have been concerned enough to evacuate their families from a group of villages in the northwest part of the district.

A tribal elder, who did not wish to be identified by name for fear of jeopardizing the safety of family members still in the Argandab area, said he had left his village a week ago, before the prison break, because he sensed the Taliban was preparing something.

On Monday 40 to 50 Taliban fighters surrounded the village and seized control of it and ordered no one to leave, he said. The elder had managed to get his family out early, but two members of the family had stayed back, were on their way out but still had not arrived, he said.

He said the Taliban came from Khakrez, a neighboring mountainous district that they have used as a base for a long time. There were Pakistani fighters among the Taliban, he said.

The elder said he felt that the surge of Taliban into the area was almost certainly connected to the prison break and that some of the escapees had probably taken refuge in Argandab.
 

Carlotta Gall reported from Islamabad, and Abdul Waheed Wafa reported from Kabul, Afghanistan. Sanghar Rahimi contributed reporting from Kabul.

    Taliban Fighters Infiltrate Area Near Afghan City, NYT, 18.6.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/18/world/asia/18afghan.html?hp

Old-Line Taliban Commander Is Face of Rising Afghan Threat

June 17, 2008
The New York Times
By CARLOTTA GALL

KABUL, Afghanistan — The attack was little reported at the time. A suicide bombing on March 3 killed two NATO soldiers and two Afghan civilians and wounded 19 others in an American military base.

It was only weeks later, when Taliban militants put out a propaganda DVD, that the implications of the attack became clear. The DVD shows an enormous explosion, with shock waves rippling out far beyond the base. As a thick cloud of dust rises, the face of Maulavi Jalaluddin Haqqani, a Taliban commander who presents one of the biggest threats to NATO and United States forces, appears. He taunts his opponents and derides rumors of his demise.

“Now as you see I am still alive,” he says.

The deadly attack demonstrates the persistence of the Afghan insurgency and the way former mujahedeen leaders, like Maulavi Haqqani, combine tactics and forces with Al Qaeda and other foreign terrorist groups.

As a renewed sense of crisis grips the war here, fueled by reports on Monday that Taliban had overrun districts in southern Afghanistan after a huge jailbreak last week, these new networks have given the insurgents a broader pool of recruits and added power and sophistication to their attacks, American military officials say.

The bomber in the March attack, for instance, turned out to be a German citizen of Turkish origin who was trained in Pakistan, according to European officials in Kabul.

The combined terrorist-insurgent networks have flourished from sanctuaries in Pakistan. In a sign of the increasing frustration of the president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, with the challenges to his government, he threatened on Sunday to send Afghan troops into Pakistan to hit militant leaders who have vowed to continue a jihad in Afghanistan.

The combination of sanctuary in Pakistan, deep links on both sides of the border and steady support from Arab and other jihadist networks has made Maulavi Haqqani a formidable threat to the stability of Afghanistan.

The Haqqani network is suspected of being behind three large vehicle suicide bombings in eastern Afghanistan this year, the latest on June 4.

In addition, Afghan security officials say one of his senior lieutenants masterminded a multipronged attack on the Serena Hotel in Kabul that killed seven people in January, as well as the assassination attempt on Mr. Karzai in April.

A quarter-century ago, Maulavi Haqqani was a favorite of American and Pakistani intelligence agencies and of wealthy Arab benefactors because of his effectiveness in organizing mujahedeen fighters from Afghanistan, Arab nations and other Muslim regions to attack the Soviet forces that had occupied Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Today he has turned his expertise against American and NATO forces. From his base in northwestern Pakistan, the aging Maulavi Haqqani has maintained a decades-old association with Osama bin Laden and other Arabs. Together with his son, Sirajuddin Haqqani, 34, he and these allies now share a common mission to again drive foreign forces from Afghanistan.

In Pakistan’s tribal areas of North and South Waziristan, Maulavi Haqqani and his son run a network of madrasas and training bases and provide protection for foreign fighters and terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda.

They also provide logistics and intelligence for attacks in Afghanistan, according to a United States military public affairs officer, Sgt. Timothy Dinneen, who is based at Bagram air base in Afghanistan and wrote a paper on the Haqqanis last year.

Another United States military spokesman, Maj. Chris Belcher, accused the Haqqanis of bringing foreign fighters from Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Chechnya, Turkey and Middle Eastern countries into Afghanistan.

Maulavi Haqqani’s old ties keep his insurgent ranks flush with men and money, the American officials said, as do arms and smuggling rackets they control within their fief.

Meanwhile, Pakistani forces have been reluctant to move against the Haqqanis. According to European officials and one senior Pakistani official, Maulavi Haqqani has maintained his old links with Pakistani intelligence and still enjoys their protection.

Asked in 2006 why the Pakistani military did not move against Maulavi Haqqani, a senior Pakistani intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity, acknowledged that it was because he was a Pakistani asset.

Maulavi Haqqani has by now become so powerful in his redoubt that a Western military official who has worked in both Pakistan and Afghanistan said the problem of going after him was that the Pakistani military was not capable of taking him on and feared failure if it tried.

Pakistani forces accompanied by Americans raided a mosque owned by Maulavi Haqqani while searching for him in North Waziristan in 2002, but since then he has been largely left alone.

One Western military official said there was an unspoken agreement between Pakistani and American officials that United States Predator drones would generally be used in the tribal areas against foreign Qaeda members, rather than Pakistani or Afghan targets, like the Haqqanis.

As Maulavi Haqqani has aged, his son has increasingly taken over military operations from his father and, according to the United States military, has expanded his father’s connections with foreign financing and fighters.

One example may be the bomber in the March 3 attack. The spokesman for the Taliban, Zabiullah Mujahed, in a telephone interview, identified the bomber as Muhammad Beg and said he had volunteered, traveling from Turkey to join Maulavi Haqqani.

“As men from Muslim countries usually do, he came willingly to join Afghan Muslims and carry out attacks against the non-Muslim invaders,” Mr. Mujahed said.

German investigators have taken the German-Turkish link seriously, according to the German news media. Suicide bombings have been widely used in the conflicts in Pakistan and Afghanistan in recent years, but Mr. Beg is the first known German suicide bomber.

The group claiming responsibility for his attack, the Islamic Jihad Union, which is affiliated with Al Qaeda, seems to have acquired some Turkish German recruits whom they trained in Waziristan for terrorist attacks, according to Guido Steinberg, an expert in Islamic studies at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.

The Haqqanis have given shelter to such groups. Last October, Sergeant Dinneen, the public affairs officer, warned in a lengthy press release that the younger Haqqani had expanded his father’s original operating areas from the border provinces to other areas in northern, central and southern Afghanistan, including Kandahar.

“His close connections with Al Qaeda have enabled him to accumulate more financial support from Middle Eastern countries and have created a larger recruiting pool of fighters from other countries,” the sergeant wrote.

Queried in May, a United States military spokeswoman said the Haqqani network had formed a syndicate with other, unspecified groups. Their goal was to “destabilize Afghanistan,” the spokeswoman, Lt. Col. Rumi Nielson-Green, public affairs officer for American forces in Afghanistan, wrote in an e-mail statement from Bagram air base.

The DVD on the March attack appears to be a rare attempt by Maulavi Haqqani, who looks to be well into his 60s, to answer his opponents and dispel months of reports that he was dead or sick and that he had ceded control of his network to his son. He pointedly rebuts those rumors and claims to have been at the scene of the March 3 suicide attack, which was at the site of the government’s office in the Sabari district of the eastern Afghan province of Khost.

“I was present two or three days ago when we started operations on Sabari district,” he says. “And now I am present by the grace of God.”

His voice quavers, and at one point his arm shakes as if from Parkinson’s disease. But he places blame for rumors of his death on propaganda put out by the United States military and its NATO allies.

He specifically mentions attacks on a hotel — possibly the January attack on the Serena in Kabul — and on the Sabari district base, making it clear that he has espoused Al Qaeda’s most ruthless of tactics, suicide bombing.

Suicide bombing was unheard of in Afghanistan before 2001 and remains controversial, even among Taliban commanders. Many Afghans consider it to be contrary to Islam and to the tribal Pashtuns’ code of honor. Maulavi Haqqani’s embrace of it demonstrates the increasingly powerful sway Al Qaeda holds over him and other Taliban.

“We will fight them with patience,” Maulavi Haqqani says on the DVD. “This is not a battle of haste; this is a battle of patience. If a strong animal fights with a small and weak animal, the big animal uses all its power, not against the enemy, but against itself.”

    Old-Line Taliban Commander Is Face of Rising Afghan Threat, NYT, 17.6.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/17/world/asia/17warlord.html?hp

NATO to Counter Taliban Push

June 16, 2008
Filed at 10:41 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (AP) -- Hundreds of Taliban fighters took over several villages in southern Afghanistan on Monday just outside the region's largest city, and NATO and Afghan forces were redeploying to meet the threat, officials said.

Mohammad Farooq, the government leader in the Arghandab district of Kandahar province, said around 500 Taliban fighters moved into his district and took over several villages.

Arghandab lies just north of Kandahar city -- the Taliban's former stronghold -- and a tribal leader from the region warned that the militants could use the cover from Arghandab's grape and pomegranate orchards to mount an attack on Kandahar itself.

''All of Arghandab is made of orchards. The militants can easily hide and easily fight,'' said Haji Ikramullah Khan. ''It's quite close to Kandahar. During the Russian war, the Russians didn't even occupy Arghandab, because when they fought here they suffered big casualties.''

The push into Arghandab comes three days after a sophisticated Taliban attack on Kandahar's prison that freed hundreds of insurgent fighters being held there.

NATO spokesman Mark Laity said NATO and Afghan military officials were redeploying troops to the region to ''meet any potential threats.''

''It's fair to say that the jailbreak has put a lot of people (militants) into circulation who weren't there before, and so obviously you're going to respond to that potential threat,'' he said.

Two powerful anti-Taliban leaders from Arghandab have died in the last year, weakening the region's defenses. Mullah Naqib, the district's former leader, died of a heart attack last year. Taliban fighters moved into Arghandab en masse last October, two weeks after his death, but left within days after hundreds of security forces were deployed there.

A second leader, police commander Abdul Hakim Jan, died in a massive suicide bombing in Kandahar in February that killed more than 100 people.

Elsewhere in Afghanistan, Afghan and U.S.-led coalition forces killed 35 militants in two skirmishes in the south, the coalition said Monday.

Twenty militants were killed in Zabul province after they attacked a combined patrol with rockets, mortars and gunfire. The combined forces returned fire and called in airstrikes against the insurgents in the Sunday battle.

Fifteen militants were killed in the Sangin area of Helmand province Saturday after a group of men in a treeline fired on Afghan and coalition troops. Two hours of fighting ensued, and military aircraft were again called in.

More than 1,900 people have been killed in insurgent violence in Afghanistan this year, according to Afghan and Western officials.

------

Associated Press Writer Rahim Faiez contributed to this report.

    NATO to Counter Taliban Push, NYT, 16.6.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Afghanistan.html?hp

As Ills Persist, Afghan Leader Is Losing Luster

June 7, 2008
The New York Times
By HELENE COOPER

WASHINGTON — After six years in which Hamid Karzai has been the darling of the United States and its allies, his luster may be fading.

Next week, Mr. Karzai, the Afghan president, is to arrive in Paris for a donors conference with attendees from 80 countries and organizations. He will ask for $50 billion to finance a five-year development plan intended to revive Afghanistan’s decrepit farming sector, promote economic development and diversify the economy away from its heavy reliance on opium.

But there is a growing concern in Europe, the United Nations and even the Bush administration that Mr. Karzai, while well-spoken, colorful and often larger than life, is not up to addressing Afghanistan’s many troubles.

A senior State Department official questioned whether Mr. Karzai had the “trust and the backbone” for the job.

“Of course he’s a good guy, and therefore as long as he’s president we’ll support him,” said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the issue. “But there’s a lot of talk inside the administration saying maybe there’s a need for some tough love to push him to do the right thing.”

One European diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity under normal diplomatic rules, said, “We’ve got the standard administration problem of fascination with a flawed figure.” The diplomat likined the support for Mr. Karzai to American backing for President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan.

American officials expressed particular frustration over the Afghan president’s refusal to arrest drug lords who are running the country’s opium trade, which many international observers believe the Taliban have used to fuel their comeback. At both the State Department and the Pentagon, some officials are saying that President Bush should use the financial leverage of American aid to Afghanistan to demand that Mr. Karzai do more to crack down on corruption.

One senior Bush administration official said that Mr. Bush remained enamored of Mr. Karzai. Others questioned whether the White House would endorse a tougher line against him at a time when international forces in Afghanistan are continuing to face a resurgent Taliban, and when there are no obvious pro-American alternatives to Mr. Karzai among Afghan leaders.

Still, Mr. Bush has sought to address some of the complaints. Two months ago he began holding twice-monthly video conference calls with his Afghan counterpart that are similar to his regular sessions with Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister.

Asked to comment about Mr. Karzai, a White House spokesman, Gordon D. Johndroe, said, “President Bush appreciates the work that he’s doing in Afghanistan, but we all know that there is more to be done.”

Afghanistan’s ambassador to the United States, Said T. Jawad, defended Mr. Karzai’s leadership and warned against pointing fingers at a fledgling government. “It’s totally unnecessary to start a blame game,” Mr. Jawad said.

According to American and European diplomats, recent tension has flared around an episode that received little attention outside Afghanistan and that involved Mr. Karzai’s refusal to arrest a notorious Uzbek warlord, Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum.

General Dostum is said to have attacked a rival warlord with a beer bottle this year, almost killing him, and Afghan law enforcement officials sought to arrest him. But Mr. Karzai’s government balked, according to Western diplomats and Afghan officials.

The diplomats — American and European, who spoke on condition of anonymity — said that they urged Mr. Karzai to have General Dostum arrested but that he told them he did not want to pick a fight with General Dostum for fear of alienating his backers.

Richard C. Holbrooke, a former United States ambassador to the United Nations, said he confronted Mr. Karzai shortly after the Dostum dustup while on a trip to Afghanistan. Mr. Holbrooke said he had asked Mr. Karzai how he could “let the thugs back you down over a murderous warlord” Mr. Karzai, he said, responded with a shrug.

A senior Afghan official said that Mr. Karzai wanted to arrest General Dostum but decided not to do so because of the strength of forces loyal to General Dostum in northern Afghanistan and because of uneasiness among NATO officials in Afghanistan.

In an interview, Mr. Holbrooke said he saw the episode as “a metaphor for a government that’s perceived as increasingly weak, but whose effectiveness is key to success in Afghanistan.” He added, “I don’t believe the Taliban can win in Afghanistan, because people remember what they really stand for, but the government as it currently functions can’t win, either.”

Administration officials said the recent sessions between Mr. Bush and Mr. Karzai had been constructive but had yet to produce any tangible steps against corruption.

The Afghan president operates from a heavily fortified presidential palace, and has not arrested any drug lords or warlords, while resisting international pressure for a strong coordinator to monitor the political, economic and military effort in Afghanistan. Mr. Karzai has insisted that Afghanistan’s fledgling government should handle the bulk of the job of deciding how to spend international aid.

Bush administration officials and their British counterparts are still fuming over Mr. Karzai’s rejection this year of the British diplomat Paddy Ashdown as a special envoy. The West had pushed him as it searched for a strong international figure, à la George C. Marshall, to help coordinate the reconstruction of Afghanistan.

Afghan officials said Mr. Ashdown had been rejected because of negative press and public reaction to his appointment, which touched on Afghan sensitivities about foreign interference and fears of colonial intentions by Britain and others.

But European and American diplomats said it had more to do with Mr. Karzai’s desire, one year before Afghan elections, to improve his image by standing up to Western powers. The diplomats complained that the international community, with more than 62,000 troops in Afghanistan, had a right to demand a strong coordinator representing its interest in the country.

A senior United States military officer in Afghanistan said that the disillusionment with Mr. Karzai was palpable among the wide swath of people he dealt with, including allied military and civilian officials. “Their message is consistent,” the officer said in an e-mail message, speaking on condition of anonymity because of diplomatic sensitivity. “He’s a weak leader.”

Frustration over corruption and ineffectiveness in Mr. Karzai’s government has grown within Afghanistan as well in recent years. In 2006, for instance, members of the Afghan Parliament signed a measure of protest over the government’s poor performance and the low quality of some of Mr. Karzai’s appointments.

Western diplomats said that Afghan drug lords and warlords had bought the freedom they exercise throughout the country by bribing members of Mr. Karzai’s government.

Gen. James L. Jones, a former NATO commander in Afghanistan who now works as one of Mr. Bush’s Middle East envoys, said that while the NATO forces military had been making some strides against insurgents, no amount of additional troops would counter the Afghan government’s inability to rein in corruption and the country’s exploding opium cultivation.

“The Karzai government, which is benefiting so much from the sacrifice, in both treasure and lives, by so many countries, needs to show more willingness to meet the expectations of the international community,” General Jones said in an interview. “This is particularly true with regard to reversing the nation’s economic dependency on narcotics, battling corruption within the government and championing judicial reform as a matter of national security.”

    As Ills Persist, Afghan Leader Is Losing Luster, NYT, 7.6.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/07/world/asia/07karzai.html?hp

No charges for Marines in Afghan civilian deaths

Fri May 23, 2008
3:49pm EDT
Reuters
By Kristin Roberts

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Marines who killed Afghan civilians while responding to an ambush in March 2007 acted appropriately and in accordance with military rules, a senior Marine Corps commander said on Friday.

Lt. Gen. Samuel Helland, commander of Marine Corps forces in the Middle East, decided not to bring criminal charges against officers who led the special operations unit involved in the incident.

"The ... commander determined that their reaction to the ambush, to the vehicle-borne improvised explosive device attack, was within the current rules of engagement and in accordance with the laws of armed conflict and was proportionate and appropriate at the time," said Maj. Cliff Gilmore, spokesman for Marine Corps special operations.

On March 4, 2007, Taliban fighters ambushed a Marine convoy in eastern Afghanistan's Nangahar province. The Marines returned fire, killing as many as 19 civilians and wounding at least 24, the military has said.

Scores of civilians have been killed in raids by U.S.-led troops, according to Afghan officials. The deaths in 2007 sparked days of protests against the United States and Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

Even before the Marine Corps opened its investigation into the March incident, an Army colonel commanding forces in the area acknowledged the civilian killings and apologized for the "terrible mistake."

Marine spokesmen on Friday would not comment on the question of Marines' responsibility for the civilian deaths. They also would not say whether Helland made a determination on the issue.

Three officers will face administrative action. If some misconduct is determined in those proceedings, the officers face punishments ranging from a fine to removal from the military.

(Reporting by Kristin Roberts, Editing by Bill Trott)

    No charges for Marines in Afghan civilian deaths, R, 23.5.2008, http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSN2328037120080523

U.S. Planning Big New Prison in Afghanistan

May 17, 2008
The New York Times
By ERIC SCHMITT and TIM GOLDEN

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon is moving forward with plans to build a new, 40-acre detention complex on the main American military base in Afghanistan, officials said, in a stark acknowledgment that the United States is likely to continue to hold prisoners overseas for years to come.

The proposed detention center would replace the cavernous, makeshift American prison on the Bagram military base north of Kabul, which is now typically packed with about 630 prisoners, compared with the 270 held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Until now, the Bush administration had signaled that it intended to scale back American involvement in detention operations in Afghanistan. It had planned to transfer a large majority of the prisoners to Afghan custody, in an American-financed, high-security prison outside Kabul to be guarded by Afghan soldiers.

But American officials now concede that the new Afghan-run prison cannot absorb all the Afghans now detained by the United States, much less the waves of new prisoners from the escalating fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

The proposal for a new American prison at Bagram underscores the daunting scope and persistence of the United States military’s detention problem, at a time when Bush administration officials continue to say they want to close down the facility at Guantánamo Bay.

Military officials have long been aware of serious problems with the existing detention center in Afghanistan, the Bagram Theater Internment Facility. After the prison was set up in early 2002, it became a primary site for screening prisoners captured in the fighting. Harsh interrogation methods and sleep deprivation were used widely, and two Afghan detainees died there in December 2002, after being repeatedly struck by American soldiers.

Conditions and treatment have improved markedly since then, but hundreds of Afghans and other men are still held in wire-mesh pens surrounded by coils of razor wire. There are only minimal areas for the prisoners to exercise, and kitchen, shower and bathroom space is also inadequate.

Faced with that, American officials said they wanted to replace the Bagram prison, a converted aircraft hangar that still holds some of the decrepit aircraft-repair machinery left by the Soviet troops who occupied the country in the 1980s. In its place the United States will build what officials described as a more modern and humane detention center that would usually accommodate about 600 detainees — or as many as 1,100 in a surge — and cost more than $60 million.

“Our existing theater internment facility is deteriorating,” said Sandra L. Hodgkinson, the senior Pentagon official for detention policy, in a telephone interview. “It was renovated to do a temporary mission. There is a sense that this is the right time to build a new facility.”

American officials also acknowledged that there are serious health risks to detainees and American military personnel who work at the Bagram prison, because of their exposure to heavy metals from the aircraft-repair machinery and asbestos.

“It’s just not suitable,” another Pentagon official said. “At some point, you have to say, ‘That’s it. This place was not made to keep people there indefinitely.’ ”

That point came about six months ago. It became clear to Pentagon officials that the original plan of releasing some Afghan prisoners outright and transferring other detainees to Afghan custody would not come close to emptying the existing detention center.

Although a special Afghan court has been established to prosecute detainees formerly held at Bagram and Guantánamo, American officials have been hesitant to turn over those prisoners they consider most dangerous. In late February the head of detainee operations in Iraq, Maj. Gen. Douglas M. Stone, traveled to Bagram to assess conditions there.

In Iraq, General Stone has encouraged prison officials to build ties to tribal leaders, families and communities, said a Congressional official who has been briefed on the general’s work. As a result, American officials are giving Iraqi detainees job training and engaging them in religious discussions to help prepare them to re-enter Iraqi society.

About 8,000 detainees have been released in Iraq since last September. Fewer than 1 percent of them have been returned to the prison, said Lt. Cmdr. K. C. Marshall, General Stone’s spokesman.

The new detention center at Bagram will incorporate some of the lessons learned by the United States in Iraq. Classrooms will be built for vocational training and religious discussion, and there will be more space for recreation and family visits, officials said. After years of entreaties by the International Committee of the Red Cross, the United States recently began to allow relatives to speak with prisoners at Bagram through video hookups.

“The driving factor behind this is to ensure that in all instances we are giving the highest standards of treatment and care,” said Ms. Hodgkinson, who has briefed Senate and House officials on the construction plans.

The Pentagon is planning to use $60 million in emergency construction funds this fiscal year to build a complex of 6 to 10 semi-permanent structures resembling Quonset huts, each the size of a football field, a Defense Department official said. The structures will have more natural light, and each will have its own recreation area. There will be a half-dozen other buildings for administration, medical care and other purposes, the official said.

The new Bagram compound is expected to be built away from the existing center of operations on the base, on the other side of a long airfield from the headquarters building that now sits almost directly adjacent to the detention center, one military official said.

It will have its own perimeter security wall, and its own perimeter security guards, a change that will increase the number of soldiers required to operate the detention center.

The military plans to request $24 million in fiscal year 2009 and $7.4 million in fiscal year 2010 to pay for educational programs, job training and other parts of what American officials call a reintegration plan. After that, the Pentagon plans to pay about $7 million a year in training and operational costs.

There has been mixed support for the project on Capitol Hill. Two prominent Senate Democrats, Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia and Tim Johnson of South Dakota, have been briefed on the new American-run prison, and have praised the decision to make conditions there more humane.

But the senators, in a May 15 letter to the deputy defense secretary, Gordon England, demanded that the Pentagon explain its long-term plans for detention in Afghanistan and consult the Afghan government on the project.

The population at Bagram began to swell after administration officials halted the flow of prisoners to Guantánamo in September 2004, a cutoff that largely remains in effect. At the same time, the population of detainees at Bagram also began to rise with the resurgence of the Taliban.

Military personnel who know both Bagram and Guantánamo describe the Afghan site, 40 miles north of Kabul, as far more spartan. Bagram prisoners have fewer privileges, less ability to contest their detention and no access to lawyers.

Some detainees have been held without charge for more than five years, officials said. As of April, about 10 juveniles were being held at Bagram, according to a recent American report to a United Nations committee.

    U.S. Planning Big New Prison in Afghanistan, NYT, 17.5.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/17/world/asia/17detain.html?hp

Afghan President Was Warned of Attack

April 30, 2008
The New York Times
By ABDUL WAHEED WAFA and CARLOTTA GALL

KABUL, Afghanistan — President Hamid Karzai was warned that an attack was being planned on a military parade on Sunday, when he escaped an assassination attempt, Afghanistan’s intelligence chief told Parliament on Tuesday. He said two groups of attackers were thwarted the same day, though a third succeeded in opening fire on the ceremony.

The intelligence chief, Amrullah Saleh, director of the National Security Directorate, bowed his head before Parliament and said there had been negligence by some in the presidential guard, his own intelligence service and possible complicity by some police officers, making it possible for the gunmen to fire from a hotel room, killing three people and wounding 11.

The attack sent government officials, diplomats and legislators scrambling for cover and caused a stampede of soldiers from the parade ground, embarrassing the government just as it was seeking to take over security of the capital from international forces.

During the session, reports came in of another coordinated suicide bomb and gun attack in eastern Afghanistan on Tuesday morning, in which 19 people were killed and 41 wounded. Among the dead were 12 police officers and 7 civilians, including the district administrator and police chief of Khogiani District in Nangarhar Province, officials said.

Mr. Saleh was called before Parliament, along with the defense and interior ministers, to explain the security failings. They hung onto their jobs when Parliament moved a no-confidence vote on each of them in a daylong session in which lawmakers criticized their performance, that of the government and even the president.

The men blamed differences among the various security forces and gaps in communication for the failures. Mr. Saleh and some lawmakers complained that reforms of the army, the police, intelligence services and the presidential guard left the forces uncoordinated.

Mr. Saleh gave the most detailed account of the events and appeared to lay the blame with the American-trained presidential guard. The force, which is independent of the three security ministries and answers directly to the president, was responsible for the security of one square kilometer, or less than half a square mile, around the parade ground, assisted by the intelligence service, he said.

One of his intelligence officers warned the presidential guard that three men were acting suspiciously in the hotel room that was ultimately used in the attack, Mr. Saleh said. The president’s men kept a close guard on the room while Mr. Karzai was inspecting the troops on the parade ground in an open-topped vehicle, but when he drove off to the spectator stands, they dropped their guard. It was then, as the artillery fired a salute, that the attackers opened fire, he said.

The three attackers, who were all killed, have been identified, he said. He said that the plot was hatched on March 10 and that the attackers had rented the room overlooking the parade ground 45 days before the event. The room was searched two days before the parade, and nothing suspicious was found, police and intelligence officials have confirmed.

There may have been a fourth plotter, who locked them into their room from the outside for the last 36 hours before the attack. The three did not leave the room after that.

Text messages on their cellphones, in the Pashtu language, suggested they were preparing to die, Mr. Saleh said. “They asked for prayers and forgiveness, and from the other side they were messaged: ‘You are close to God. Don’t speak a lot, and endure the hunger,’ ” he said.

Two of the gunmen may have killed themselves before security forces reached them. The third was shot dead, Mr. Saleh said. In the room were found assault rifles capable of launching grenades and a heavy machine gun, the defense minister, Rahim Wardak, said. It is not clear how they brought the weapons into the room, but he said officials had also found a rope in the room.

Intelligence officials had learned that a three-pronged attack was being planned, with a mortar team, a suicide bomber and a third team, Mr. Saleh said. Security forces arrested men with mortars on one of Kabul’s mountainsides, and also caught a suicide bombing group, he said.

Lawmakers were scathing in their criticism of the lapses. “The heart is weak in this country, the heart is sick, and unless we treat the heart I don’t think we can have the other organs with a sick heart,” said one lawmaker, Maulavi Sheikh Ahmad. “This weakness and failure and insecurity all over the country is due to the president we have,” he said.

Mr. Saleh said that Afghanistan had suffered over 4,000 attacks last year and that with the current security system he could not guarantee there would not be 8,000 this year. “If there is not a change in plans, methods and way of working, for all this questioning the issue will not be solved,” he said.

Mr. Wardak, who had overall responsibility for the parade and whose troops provided a ring of security around the capital, also admitted that the security forces had failed. “What happened was really shameful,” he said. “Clearly it was a blow to our national and international prestige.”

The interior minister, Zarar Ahmad Muqbil, whose police officers are generally seen as the weakest of the law enforcement forces, said little, but admitted to gaps in security.

The United States ambassador in Kabul, William B. Wood, issued a statement of condolence, and support and appreciation for the security forces.

“Tragically, the attackers succeeded in getting close enough to fire some shots,” the statement said. “The security institutions of Afghanistan defeated the attack within 120 seconds of the first shot and performed in a skilled, professional, and disciplined way during the attack.”

Abdul Waheed Wafa reported from Kabul, and Carlotta Gall from Kandahar, Afghanistan. Sangar Rahimi contributed reporting from Kabul.

    Afghan President Was Warned of Attack, NYT, 30.4.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/30/world/asia/30afghan.html

U.S. General Sees Afghans Gains in 3 Years

April 21, 2008
The New York Times
By CARLOTTA GALL

KABUL, Afghanistan — The Afghan Army and police forces should be able to secure most of Afghanistan by 2011, allowing international forces to start withdrawing, the American commander of the NATO-led force in Afghanistan, Gen. Dan K. McNeill, said Sunday.

“By about 2011 there is going to be some pretty good capacity in the Afghan National Army,” he said in an interview in the Kabul headquarters of the International Security Assistance Force.

“It will take them a few more years to get their air transport and air support platforms online, but they should be covering a lot of battle space by some time in 2011, in my view,” he said.

By then, barring any cataclysm, the countries contributing troops to the international force could look at whether such a large international force was still desirable, General McNeill said. “I think you begin to get to a juncture and say, ‘Probably not, maybe we should be starting to change the way this force works,’ ” he said.

The issue has been important to the discussion within NATO about its mission in Afghanistan. Some members of NATO, which has taken over much of the security for the country, have been reluctant to send troops, or to allow their troops to operate in areas where the insurgency is active.

General McNeill said that the United Nations-mandated force, which includes 47,000 troops from 40 countries, would be better named the Interim Security Assistance Force, in recognition of its temporary role until Afghan forces can take over.

The general, who will complete his second tour in Afghanistan this summer — he commanded American forces from 2002 to 2003 — said that Afghan forces had already effectively been managing the security for Kabul, the capital, for the last year, albeit with NATO support. He also expressed confidence that the Afghans would be able to secure the country well enough for the country to hold presidential elections in September 2009.

“Tactically, on the battlefield, the insurgents did not have a very good year last year,” he said. “The so-called toe-to-toe fights will probably be less common — smaller skirmishes — but the technique of choice for the insurgent will be the improvised explosive device and the suicide bomber.”

He said he had seen intelligence reports that more foreign fighters had been arriving recently in the tribal areas of Pakistan that border Afghanistan, where Pakistani and Afghan members of the Taliban and Al Qaeda continue to find sanctuary. “The reports are they are increasing,” he said.

“It quite possibly could mean, in the areas that are adjacent to the border, a more active spring or summer than we should have had,” he said.

“If there are sanctuaries for the extremists, for the miscreants, for the insurgents, that remain just out of reach of security forces, then it becomes a difficult problem and it makes achieving long-term security and stability within Afghanistan awfully hard to reach,” he said.

The long-term stability of Afghanistan also depends on the good will and help of all its neighbors, not just Pakistan, he said. “All neighbors have to be helpful, and there are quite a few neighbors around here,” he said.

NATO forces must improve their training to avoid roadside bombs, which have increased significantly in recent months, he said. But he said that the Afghan forces were the best protection against suicide bombers, since the bombers were usually strangers, and Afghans were likely to spot strangers much more quickly than foreign soldiers could.

Development of a national police force is critical to success in countering the insurgency, he said, adding that despite generous support from the United States Congress for police training, “The rate of progress is not fast enough for any of us.”

    U.S. General Sees Afghans Gains in 3 Years, NYT, 21.3.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/21/world/asia/21afghan.html?hp

Two Marines Killed in Afghanistan

April 18, 2008
The New York Times
By CARLOTTA GALL

KABUL, Afghanistan — Two United States marines were killed and two wounded when an explosion hit their convoy in the southern province of Kandahar, the American military said Thursday.

The men were killed early Wednesday morning but under NATO rules their nationality was not released immediately, Captain Kelly Frushour, the unit’s public affairs’ officer said. She gave little details of the incident except to say that it was a hostile attack, and that the wounded were being sent to the American military base at Landstuhl, Germany.

The soldiers came from the 3,200-strong 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, which was sent to Afghanistan recently to help NATO forces faced with a continued insurgency in southern and eastern Afghanistan. NATO commanders in Afghanistan have called repeatedly called over the last two years but were rebuffed until last month, when the marine unit arrived.

The Marines arrived with own artillery, helicopters and Harrier fighter planes and were expected to provide considerable additional combat capability to the NATO forces, which have struggled to contain the Taliban insurgency since deploying in 2006.

Some 2,200 of the Marines will work with NATO forces and serve as a task force capable of deploying across the country as needed. The remaining 1,000 will provide training and support for the Afghan army and police forces under United States command.

The Marine unit has been stationed at an air base just outside the city of Kandahar, and has yet to see combat. In comments reported in the Baltimore Sun, members of the unit complained recently that the slow and cumbersome NATO command structure has delayed their operational deployment and kept them wasting time on the base rather than out in the country fighting insurgents.

    Two Marines Killed in Afghanistan, NYT, 18.4.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/18/world/asia/18afghan.html?hp

17 Dead in Taliban Ambush of Afghan Road Crew

April 9, 2008
The New York Times
By ABDUL WAHEED WAFA and CARLOTTA GALL

KABUL, Afghanistan — Taliban insurgents ambushed a group of road construction workers and their guards early Tuesday, killing 18 of the guards and wounding seven, Afghanistan officials said. It was one of the worst attacks here in months.

The ambush happened in the southern province of Zabul, about 30 miles from the provincial capital in a remote mountainous area near the Pakistani border, according to the deputy governor of the province, Gulab Shah Ali Kheil.The construction company was surveying a new road linking the provincial capital to the district of Shinkay. The area that has always been considered dangerous since it is an infiltration route for Taliban fighters entering from Pakistan and moving into the mountainous areas of southern Afghanistan.

The group of surveyors and laborers were well guarded and moving in a convoy through a valley to start work on the new road when insurgents opened fire on their guards, said Muhammad Younus, the project manager of the construction company, FCEC.

None of the construction crew members were hurt as the guards took the brunt of the attack and battled with the Taliban for several hours before an Afghan army unit arrived. “The victims who were killed and injured are all our security guards, and all of our technical team survived,” Mr. Younus said in a telephone interview.

“It was a real tragedy today that killed the innocent boys who were working just for $150 a month,” he said. The guards were all young employees of the company, he said. The Afghan army unit fought off the Taliban and killed and wounded several of the attackers, the deputy governor said.

The attack was the latest in a number of clashes around the country in recent days and may signal an increase in violence with the arrival of warmer spring weather, when the insurgents tend to increase their activity. Both the Taliban and the Afghan Defense Ministry have warned that 2008 would be another bloody year. Jakob Kellenberger, the president of the International Committee for the Red Cross, also expressed his concern of the increase in violence and the suffering the fighting is causing during a visit to Afghanistan Tuesday.

“We are extremely concerned about the worsening humanitarian situation in Afghanistan. There is growing insecurity and a clear intensification of the armed conflict, which is no longer limited to the south but has spread to the east and west,” he said.

“The harsh reality is that in large parts of Afghanistan, little development is taking place. Instead, the conflict is forcing more and more people to flee their homes. Their growing humanitarian needs and those of other vulnerable people must be met as a matter of urgency,” he said in a statement to the press on his arrival.

    17 Dead in Taliban Ambush of Afghan Road Crew, NYT, 9.4.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/09/world/asia/09afghan.html?hp

Bush Urges Patience in Afghanistan

April 3, 2008
The New York Times
By STEVEN LEE MYERS

BUCHAREST, Romania — President Bush opened a meeting of NATO leaders here on Wednesday by urging the alliance to “maintain its resolve and finish the fight” in Afghanistan and to strengthen its military forces to combat Al Qaeda and other threats around the world.

With the war in Afghanistan in its seventh year, Mr. Bush used a speech and a news conference to urge NATO nations to deploy still more troops than the 47,000 there now, even as he acknowledged it was politically and militarily difficult for some of the alliance’s 26 nations to do so.

“We expect our NATO allies to shoulder the burden necessary to succeed,” he said, appearing with Romania’s president, Traian Basescu, at a retreat beside the Black Sea.

With officials and commanders warning that NATO risked failure in Afghanistan, Mr. Bush sought to reinvigorate the alliance’s commitment to what earlier in the day he called the “most daring and ambitious” mission in its history. Some nations, including France, have publicly indicated they intend to send more troops, but a full accounting of any additional forces will not be clear until Thursday, when the summit officially convenes.

Mr. Bush, noting that this NATO summit would be the last he attends, effectively called on the alliance to embrace the ambitious and aggressive policies of his presidency on every front, including Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and elsewhere, notably Iraq and Iran.

He warned that Iran had declared its intention to build a ballistic missile with a range of 1,200 miles — enough “to reach us right here in Romania.” And he reminded the European allies that Osama bin Laden’s latest statement, a recording released two weeks ago, included a threat to attack Europe.

“We need to take the words of the enemy seriously,” Mr. Bush said. “The terrorist threat is real, it is deadly, and defeating this enemy must be the top priority of the NATO alliance.”

Mr. Bush’s positions, and his insistence on repeating them even as leaders were gathering, have highlighted internal divisions within the alliance that have rarely spilled so starkly into public.

As he did in Ukraine the day before, Mr. Bush called on the alliance to add three new nations — Albania, Croatia and Macedonia — and to begin a process toward membership for two others, Ukraine and Georgia.

In doing so, he again brushed aside concerns among some of the United States’ closest NATO allies that rapid expansion deeper into what was once the Soviet Union risked weakening the alliance and angering Russia.

Mr. Bush also defended his administration’s plans to install parts of a missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic, another contentious issue for Russia, but added that he hoped to persuade the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, to cooperate with NATO, not oppose it, when the two leaders meet this week.

“I will reiterate that the missile defense capabilities we are developing are not designed to defend against Russia, just as the new NATO we are building is not designed to defend against Russia,” Mr. Bush said during a morning speech at the Palace of the Deposit and Savings Bank, a Beaux-Arts building in Bucharest’s center. “The cold war is over. Russia is not our enemy.”

As dozens of NATO leaders and others gathered here for the first of three days of meetings and social gatherings, Mr. Bush and his aides worked behind the scenes to avoid any public rifts, officials said, though the question of new members continued to divide the allies.

France and Germany have said they will oppose offering a “membership action plan” that could pave the way for Ukraine and Georgia, both former Soviet republics, to join NATO. Greece has also objected to inviting Macedonia to join because of a dispute over that country’s use of the name Macedonia.

NATO has already incorporated seven new nations during Mr. Bush’s presidency. Russia has long been wary of NATO’s expansion, but the consideration of potential membership for Ukraine and Georgia, countries with deep historical ties to the Soviet Union and the Russian Empire before it, has been met with hostility and threats.

Flying to Bucharest on Tuesday night, the White House press secretary, Dana M. Perino, said that Russia should not influence NATO’s decisions on membership. “The last time we checked, Russia didn’t get a vote,” she said. “And this is a NATO discussion, a NATO exercise, and it will be a NATO decision.”

In addition, the alliance will consider whether to begin negotiations with two more countries, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro.

Mr. Bush suggested there should be few restraints on NATO’s growth as a political and military alliance. “NATO membership must remain open to all of Europe’s democracies that seek it,” he declared. His unambiguous position could end up at odds with NATO’s final decision. Since the alliance works by consensus, France and Germany can easily block a decision on extending preliminary invitations to Ukraine and Georgia.

The NATO leaders are to meet on Wednesday evening over dinner. The formal meeting on Thursday, where most decisions will be made, takes place at the Palace of the Parliament, a colossal structure built by Romania’s Communist leader, Nicolae Ceausescu, who was overthrown and executed in 1989.

In Moscow, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, renewed his country’s pointed criticism of NATO and indirectly challenged Mr. Bush’s assertion that the cold war had ended. He said the alliance was mired in the “bloc logic” of another era.

“Attempts to artificially and needlessly expand NATO’s borders an expansion that will in no way boost the effectiveness of the fight against modern and mutual threats will not remain unanswered, believe me,” Mr. Lavrov said in televised remarks in Russia’s Parliament. “But we will respond pragmatically, not like little boys in school, who take offense, slam the door and run out of class to cry in a corner.”
 

Michael Schwirtz contributed reporting from Moscow.

    Bush Urges Patience in Afghanistan, NYT, 3.4.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/03/world/europe/03prexy.html?hp

Cheney: Afghanistan Needs NATO Help

March 20, 2008
Filed at 6:40 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) -- Vice President Dick Cheney said Thursday the United States will ask NATO countries to step up their commitment to help Afghanistan recover from years of tyranny and war.

''We believe the commitment needs to continue and perhaps needs to be reinforced,'' Cheney said.

Standing beside Afghan President Hamid Karzai at a news conference, the vice president also said neighboring Pakistan has an obligation to battle insurgent activity along the border between the two countries.

He said the Pakistani government, like that of Karzai, is a target for al-Qaida and other extremists. ''They have as big a stake as anyone else,'' he said.

Cheney's remarks came after a meeting with Karzai at the Afghan leader's palace to discuss ways the country's fragile government can counter rising threats from al-Qaida and Taliban militants.

''During the last six years, the people of Afghanistan have made a bold, confident journey throwing off the burden of tyranny and winning your freedom,'' he said with a nod to Karzai. ''The process has been difficult, but the courage of the nation has been unwavering.''

He said there has been remarkable progress in improving security forces and rebuilding in the country even as it struggles in a continuing war with insurgents. ''We walk with you still,'' said Cheney.

Karzai also hailed progress, saying the Afghan army was getting stronger ''day by day,'' but adding that international support will be needed for years to come.

As to his own political future, Karzai declined to say whether he will seek another term as president in elections scheduled next year. He said he wants to leave a legacy of strong political leaders in Afghanistan's future and that perhaps he could best achieve that by not running for re-election.

Cheney flew to the Afghan capital from Oman and took a helicopter straight to the presidential palace where he greeted Karzai with a hearty handshake. The two strolled down a red carpet together, reviewing troops before heading inside the palace for their talks.

Reporters were not allowed to disclose Cheney's visit until he had arrived safely. It is Cheney's fourth vice presidential trip to Afghanistan. Cheney, who is on a 10-day trip to the Middle East, visited Iraq earlier this week.

After the news conference with Karzai, the vice president took a 20-minute helicopter ride to Bagram Air Base to get a classified briefing and spend some time with troops there.

More than 8,000 people died in Afghanistan last year, making it the most violent year since 2001 when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan to oust the hardline Taliban regime after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Osama bin Laden is believed to be hiding in rugged, mountainous areas along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

''The president asked the vice president to meet with President Karzai in advance of the NATO summit to discuss progress in a democratic Afghanistan as well as the work that lies ahead, especially in the south,'' Cheney spokeswoman Lea Ann McBride said in advance of the meeting with the Afghan leader.

Problems in Afghanistan will be a key topic at the NATO summit early next month in Romania. NATO's force is about 43,000-strong, but commanders have asked for more combat troops for areas in southern Afghanistan where the insurgency is the most active.

Troops from Canada, Britain, the Netherlands and the United States have done the majority of the fighting against Taliban militants. France, Spain, Germany and Italy are stationed in more peaceful parts of the country.

Canada, which has 2,500 troops in Kandahar province, recently threatened to end its combat role unless other NATO countries provide an additional 1,000 troops to help the anti-Taliban effort there. Canadian Defense Minister Peter MacKay said he expected a pledge for troops before or during the summit April 2-4 in Bucharest, Romania.

The U.S. contributes one-third of the NATO force, and also has about 12,000 other U.S. troops operating independently from NATO. The Pentagon says that by late summer, there will be about 32,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan -- up from about 28,000 now.

The bulk of the increase is the 3,200 Marines President Bush has agreed to send. About 2,300 troops of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit from Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, have begun arriving at their new base in Kandahar, the Taliban's former power base.

An official who briefed reporters during the trip from Oman to Afghanistan said Cheney wanted to compare notes with Karzai to make the upcoming NATO summit a success.

Cheney: Afghanistan Needs NATO Help, NYT, 20.3.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Cheney.html