USA > History > 2010 > War > Afghanistan (III)

Petraeus Finishes

Rules for Afghan Transition

August 30, 2010
The New York Times
By THOM SHANKER

WASHINGTON — Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top commander in Afghanistan, has completed work on new guidelines for turning some security duties over to Afghan forces in the months ahead, calling for American and allied troops to step back gradually from areas as they are pacified rather than handing off the task all at once to local units, according to senior NATO and Pentagon officials.

The guidelines envision that while some troops would leave the country when their current areas were secured, others could be reassigned new missions within Afghanistan, giving General Petraeus flexibility in troop deployments as he confronts pressure from some allies and some Democrats in Washington to begin winding down the war next year.

The emphasis in his plan would be on shifting troops to train Afghan security forces to accelerate the pace at which local police officers and soldiers could successfully take over, allowing even more of the alliance force to depart. But some remaining foreign troops could move into areas near their current operations where militants remain active.

The security transition guidelines acknowledge that progress has been slow, and that Afghan forces are nowhere near ready to take over the mission across the country. One senior NATO military officer in Kabul said there actually were a few areas in which American forces had begun thinning out and moving to neighboring regions, especially in Helmand Province, in southern Afghanistan, the focus of President Obama’s troop surge. But the officer acknowledged that areas showing such progress are few in number so far.

In another illustration of the continued challenges facing the United States and its allies, five American service members were killed in attacks in Afghanistan on Tuesday, according to the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force. Seven American troops were killed by two roadside bombs in southern Afghanistan on Monday.

The two bombings were unrelated, officials said, with one killing five service members and the other killing two. Nineteen American service members have been killed in Afghanistan, mostly in the south, since Saturday.

Pentagon and administration officials acknowledged that the guidelines drawn up by General Petraeus and his staff at their Kabul headquarters — in particular a goal of redeploying troops pulled from contested areas to other tasks — might clash with timetables set by some NATO nations to begin pulling troops from Afghanistan.

But a range of military and administration officials, who discussed the planning on the condition of anonymity, said that the guidelines developed by General Petraeus did not represent a shift in the Obama administration’s strategy for Afghanistan, and that they had the Defense Department’s strong backing.

In particular, these officials said, the guidelines were designed to set the conditions for fulfilling Mr. Obama’s pledge to begin reducing the American military presence by next July.

“It has everything to do with getting the principles and concepts for transition right,” said a senior NATO military officer in Kabul. “The transition pace will, after all, be conditions-based, and this reflects that.”

Even so, the new road map to long-term security transition does represent a substantial reorientation of how the president’s strategy of counterinsurgency would be carried out, and is being viewed as the most significant effort by General Petraeus to put his stamp on the mission since taking over last month.

Other new areas of his emphasis have been rooting out corruption across the government and increasing security operations in additional areas of the country, including Kabul, the capital.

The fear among supporters of the current strategy is that the priority in some NATO capitals — and among some in Washington — is getting out of an unpopular war, instead of committing to a patient, sustainable transition to Afghan government control.

That concern underscores another of the new Petraeus guidelines, which is to ensure that resources are not diverted simply to pursue transition as an end in itself.

In the past, in part driven by a shortage of combat forces, American and allied troops might have cleared an area of insurgents and moved on to other priority combat missions — leaving an ill-trained and insufficient number of Afghan soldiers or police officers unable to effectively hold that area from returning insurgent forces. And there was little government or financial capability to improve life in the area through rebuilding.

With the broad guidelines complete, General Petraeus and his team now are turning to the task of writing specific projections for security transition by time and region in 2011. Those projections will be completed for a NATO meeting in Lisbon in November.

In support of General Petraeus’s new guidelines, the White House, Pentagon and State Department leadership plan to continue lobbying NATO partners to take on more of the politically palatable training mission, even if they are pressured by their populations to end their combat role, officials said.

The administration’s strategy in the coming months will aim to explain to the population in NATO countries that, while the war in Afghanistan has been going on for nearly nine years, the current counterinsurgency strategy began only in the first year of the Obama administration — and that a full complement of forces has only arrived late this summer.

General Petraeus hinted at his effort to develop new plans for security transition during an interview broadcast by NBC on Aug. 15, when he said that he and his team had drawn up “principles and guidelines, which we’ve provided up our operational chain of command.” He provided further details in an interview posted on Wired.com.

A senior military officer at the Pentagon noted that of Afghanistan’s more than 300 districts, divided among 34 provinces, about two-thirds could see control turned over to local security forces without significant risk as there is little fighting now.

Most of the current insurgent effort, this officer said, is focused in about one-third of Afghanistan, mostly in the south and east, although officials acknowledge that militants are showing their numbers in the north and west.


Rod Nordland contributed reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan.

    Petraeus Finishes Rules for Afghan Transition, NYT, 30.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/31/world/asia/31military.html

Graft-Fighting Prosecutor Fired

in Afghanistan

August 28, 2010
The New York Times
By DEXTER FILKINS and ALISSA J. RUBIN

KABUL, Afghanistan — One of the country’s most senior prosecutors said Saturday that President Hamid Karzai fired him last week after he repeatedly refused to block corruption investigations at the highest levels of Mr. Karzai’s government.

Fazel Ahmed Faqiryar, the former deputy attorney general, said investigations of more than two dozen senior Afghan officials — including cabinet ministers, ambassadors and provincial governors — were being held up or blocked outright by Mr. Karzai, Attorney General Mohammed Ishaq Aloko and others.

Mr. Faqiryar’s account of the troubles plaguing the anticorruption investigations, which Mr. Karzai’s office disputed, has been largely corroborated in interviews with five Western officials familiar with the cases. They say Mr. Karzai and others in his government have repeatedly thwarted prosecutions against senior Afghan government figures.

An American official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that Afghan prosecutors had prepared several cases against officials suspected of corruption, but that Mr. Karzai was “stalling and stalling and stalling.”

“We propose investigations, detentions and prosecutions of high government officials, but we cannot resist him,” Mr. Faqiryar said of Mr. Karzai. “He won’t sign anything. We have great, honest and professional prosecutors here, but we need support.”

This month, Mr. Karzai intervened to stop the prosecution of one of his closest aides, Mohammed Zia Salehi, who investigators say had been wiretapped demanding a bribe from another Afghan seeking his help in scuttling a corruption investigation.

Mr. Karzai’s chief of staff disputed Mr. Faqiryar’s characterization of the president’s involvement, saying that the president had instructed the prosecutors to move cases forward “appropriately.”

“I strongly deny that the president has been in any way obstructing the investigations of these cases,” said the chief of staff, Umer Daudzai. “On the contrary, he has done his bit in all these cases, and it is his job to make sure that the justice is not politicized. And, unfortunately we see in some of these cases that it is politicized.”

Mr. Aloko did not respond to requests for comment on Saturday. Mr. Salehi could not be reached for comment.

Mr. Faqiryar made his accusations amid a growing sense of alarm in the Obama administration and in Congress over Mr. Karzai’s failure to take action against officials suspected of corruption, but also as the administration debates whether pushing too hard on corruption will alienate a government whose cooperation it needs to wage war.

Awash in American and NATO money, Mr. Karzai’s government is widely regarded as one of the most corrupt in the world. American officials believe that the corruption drives Afghans into the arms of the Taliban.

In a two hour interview at his home, Mr. Faqiryar said he and the other prosecutors in his office were demoralized by the repeated refusal of Mr. Karzai and Mr. Aloko to allow them to move against corrupt Afghan leaders.

Mr. Faqiryar said his prosecutors had opened cases on at least 25 current or former Afghan officials, including 17 members of Mr. Karzai’s cabinet, 5 provincial governors and at least 3 ambassadors. None of the cases, he said, have gone forward, and some have been blocked on orders from Mr. Karzai. He did not elaborate on each case, and it was not clear whether Mr. Aloko or Mr. Karzai were involved in all of the cases.

Mr. Karzai said he had intervened in the case of Mr. Salehi, an official on the National Security Council, because the American-backed anticorruption agencies were violating the civil rights of those they detained. He blamed foreign contractors for the corruption, and threatened to take control of the agencies, summoning the head of the one that arrested Mr. Salehi to the presidential palace for questioning.

Under intense Western pressure, Mr. Karzai appeared to back off, saying he would allow the anticorruption units to do their jobs.

Mr. Faqiryar, a 72-year-old career prosecutor, said he was fired Wednesday by Mr. Karzai after sending a midlevel prosecutor to speak about public corruption on an Afghan television station. After Mr. Karzai watched the broadcast, he called for the papers to authorize the dismissal, Mr. Faqiryar said.

But Mr. Faqiryar said his abrupt departure was the culmination of a long-running tug-of-war between him and his prosecutors on one side, and Mr. Karzai and Mr. Aloko on the other.

The dispute began last year, Mr. Faqiryar said, when he went before the Afghan Parliament and read aloud the names of at least 25 Afghan officials who were under investigation for corruption. The list included some of the most senior officials in Mr. Karzai’s government, including Mohammed Siddiq Chakari, the former minister for hajj and Islamic affairs, and Rangin Spanta, who is now the national security adviser.

When Mr. Faqiryar returned from Parliament, he said he was summoned by Mr. Aloko, who told him that Mr. Karzai was furious.

“He told me the president was not happy about this,” Mr. Faqiryar said. “He said, ‘I told you not to divulge this.’ ”

Mr. Daudzai, the president’s chief of staff, insisted that Mr. Faqiryar was not dismissed. He said Mr. Faqiryar had been due to retire and that his papers “were signed weeks ago but just now came to the surface.”

Some of the corruption cases involved relatively minor transgressions. But Mr. Faqiryar said his prosecutors had unearthed serious allegations of corruption against several senior Afghan officials. In many of those cases, he said, the prosecutors had substantiated the claims with ample evidence.

Just three of the 25 Afghan officials have been charged, he said, and in no case has a verdict been rendered. The cases of the other 22 have either been blocked or are lying dormant for inexplicable reasons, he said.

One of the most serious cases involves Khoja Ghulam Ghaws, the governor of Kapisa Province, who was appointed by Mr. Karzai in 2007. According to Western officials, Afghan prosecutors compiled a dossier against Mr. Ghaws that included telephone intercepts and sworn statements from Americans and Afghans working in the province.

According to these officials, prosecutors have enough evidence to charge Mr. Ghaws with colluding with insurgents and demanding kickbacks from contractors working on American- and Afghan-financed development projects. Mr. Ghaws is also a suspect in the killing of five members of a provincial reconstruction team last year.

Prosecutors turned over the Ghaws case to Mr. Aloko, the attorney general, four months ago, said a Western official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Mr. Aloko has refused to sign either the warrant to arrest Mr. Ghaws or the warrant to search his house, the official said. “He’s the president’s ally,” the official said of Mr. Ghaws. “Obviously, Karzai doesn’t want the case to go forward.”

Mr. Daudzai insisted that Mr. Karzai had made the first move against Mr. Ghaws “weeks ago” by signing a letter suspending him from his job and asking him to appear before the attorney general. He could not explain why Mr. Ghaws was still running the province and residing in the governor’s compound, where he was interviewed last week by The New York Times.

In the interview, Mr. Ghaws said he was innocent of any wrongdoing.

The case against Mr. Ghaws was raised two weeks ago by Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat, who traveled to Kabul in part to urge Mr. Karzai to take action against corrupt officials.

In the interview, Mr. Faqiryar confirmed the Western official’s account, saying that Mr. Ghaws has been allowed to remain free at Mr. Karzai’s insistence.

“Mr. Karzai has not agreed,” Mr. Faqiryar said of the Ghaws case. “Aloko said to me, ‘You have to follow the president.’ ”

Mr. Aloko signed the arrest warrant of Mr. Salehi, the Karzai aide who was later released, but only after Western officials insisted that he do so, Mr. Faqiryar said.

Mr. Salehi was arrested as part of the investigation into New Ansari, a money transfer firm that American investigators say has shipped billions of dollars out of the country for Afghan politicians, insurgents and drug smugglers.

Mr. Aloko is also blocking the arrest of Hajji Rafi Azimi, the vice chairman of the Afghan United Bank and a key figure in the New Ansari case, Mr. Faqiryar said.

According to Western officials, Mr. Azimi is suspected of helping pass tens of thousands of dollars in bribes to Mr. Chakari, the former minister for hajj and Islamic affairs. Prosecutors say Mr. Chakari extorted the bribes from tour operators who arrange travel for Afghan pilgrims to Mecca in Saudi Arabia in exchange for steering business to the tour operators.

Mr. Azimi was out of Afghanistan and could not be reached for comment. Mr. Chakari fled the country last year as prosecutors prepared to arrest him and is believed to be in Britain. Afghan officials have filed an arrest warrant with Interpol.

American officials in Kabul say that Afghan prosecutors have tried to arrest Mr. Azimi but have been prevented from doing so by key figures in the Karzai government. In his interview, Mr. Faqiryar said Mr. Salehi had emerged from his office in the presidential palace and asked Attorney General Aloko to block Mr. Azimi’s arrest.

“The reason Mr. Aloko does not sign the arrest warrant for Mr. Azimi is because Salehi told him not to,” he said.

Mr. Faqiryar listed three cases of corruption among senior Afghan diplomats posted in Canada, Germany and Britain, and said there were other cases as well. In each of the three cases he said, they were suspected of stealing public money. None of them, including two former ambassadors and a consul general, have been prosecuted.

Reached Saturday, an official at the Afghan Foreign Ministry confirmed that the three diplomats had in fact taken public money. But, the official said, at least two of them, the former ambassadors to Britain and Germany had “paid the money back.”

After a career spanning 48 years, Mr. Faqiryar said he was looking forward to retirement.

“It’s good to be away from them and not held accountable for their wrongdoings,” he said.

Afghans Deny C.I.A. Payments

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Afghanistan’s presidential office on Saturday condemned American news media reports that Afghan government officials had received payments from the C.I.A. in return for information.

A statement from the spokesman’s office called the reports part of an attempt to divert attention from the greater priorities of fighting terrorism, preventing civilian casualties, and disbanding private security companies.

“Afghanistan believes that making such allegations will not strengthen the alliance against terrorism and will not strengthen an Afghanistan based on the law and rules, but will have negative effects in those areas,” the statement said.

“We strongly condemn such irresponsible allegations which just create doubt and defame responsible people of this country,” it said.

The New York Times reported that the C.I.A. had been paying Mohammed Zia Salehi, the chief of administration for Afghanistan’s National Security Council, who was arrested last month as part of an investigation into corruption. The Washington Post reported that the C.I.A. was making payments to a large number of officials in President Hamid Karzai’s administration.


Sangar Rahimi contributed reporting.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 29, 2010


A previous version of this article incorrectly referred to the Afghan officials involved in corruption cases in Canada, Germany and Britain. The suspects were two former ambassadors and a consul general, not three ambassadors.

    Graft-Fighting Prosecutor Fired in Afghanistan, NYT, 28.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/world/asia/29afghan.html

CIA Pays Many In Karzai Administration: Report

August 27, 2010
Filed at 2:03 a.m. ET
The New York Times
By REUTERS

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The CIA is making payments to a significant number of officials in Afghan President Hamid Karzai's administration, The Washington Post reported on Friday.

Citing current and former U.S. officials, the paper said the payments were long-standing in many cases and intended to help the agency maintain a source of information within the Afghan government.

Some Karzai aides were CIA informants and others received payments to ensure their accessibility, the Post said, citing a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The CIA payments have continued despite concerns that the agency is backing corrupt officials, the report said.

The Post said CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano disputed the official's characterization, saying, "This anonymous source appears driven by ignorance, malice or both."

Corruption and governance in Afghanistan are being scrutinized in Washington as U.S. President Barack Obama plans a strategy review in December, a month after mid-term Congressional elections will be held and amid sagging support for the war.

The Washington Post also cited a former CIA official as saying that the CIA payments to Afghan officials were necessary because "the head of state is not going to tell you everything" and because Karzai often seems unaware of moves that members of his own government make.

Obama pressured Karzai earlier this year to do more to root out corruption, which Washington says complicates efforts to win over the population to the effort by foreign and Afghan forces to fight a widening insurgency.

In addition to cleaning up Afghan governance, Obama's war strategy hinges on building up the country's army and police forces to take over security responsibility.

The New York Times reported on Thursday that one of Karzai's key national security advisors who is under investigation for allegedly soliciting bribes was on the CIA payroll.

Karzai's half-brother, Ahmad Wali Karzai, a businessman and political power broker in Kandahar has been widely accused of amassing a vast fortune from the drug trade, intimidating rivals and having links to the CIA, charges he strongly denies.

(Reporting by JoAnne Allen; Editing by Sandra Maler)

    CIA Pays Many In Karzai Administration: Report, NYT, 27.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2010/08/27/world/international-us-afghanistan-usa-cia.html

Mr. Karzai’s Promises

August 25, 2010
The New York Times

It did not take long for President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan to forget his latest anticorruption promise. In June, he vowed that “all obstacles” to prosecuting offenders “will be removed.” Then two anticorruption agencies in Kabul arrested dozens of suspects, including a member of Mr. Karzai’s inner circle, on graft charges. Now Mr. Karzai has become one of the main obstacles.

Last month, he overruled the agencies — and Afghanistan’s attorney general, who signed the arrest warrant — and ordered the top aide’s release. On Sunday, Mr. Karzai charged that the agencies had violated human rights and Afghan law and were foreign controlled. A spokesman announced that the president would soon issue new rules to limit the agencies’ powers.

That would be a huge setback for Mr. Karzai’s shredded domestic credibility and for the American strategy in Afghanistan, which needs a minimally credible partner. A report in Thursday’s Times that the aide, Mohammed Zia Salehi, is a paid agent of the C.I.A. shows, once again, the seamy complications of this war.

In late July, Mr. Salehi, a top national security adviser to Mr. Karzai, was arrested after being accused of soliciting bribes to help block an investigation of the New Ansari Exchange. New Ansari, a financial firm based in Kabul, is suspected of helping move billions of dollars out of Afghanistan.

The two anticorruption agencies, the Major Crimes Task Force and the Sensitive Investigations Unit, were established by the Afghan government last year with encouragement from the United States. They are independent, with broad powers to arrest, detain and try suspects, and they receive technical and other help from the F.B.I. and the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Eventually, Afghans must run things on their own, but right now American support offers the best chance for reining in endemic corruption. So far no one has offered proof of any abuse in the Salehi arrest. Mr. Karzai has said the prosecution will be allowed to proceed, but his intervention casts a shadow. We are dismayed by reports that Mr. Salehi is back working at the palace.

Mr. Karzai’s spokesman has also tried to shift blame onto the Americans, saying that foreign aid has created “an economic mafia” in Afghanistan. There are too few controls on all of the money sloshing around Afghanistan, including on the American end. But Mr. Karzai’s actions suggest that he has no desire to clean things up.

Afghan and American government contracting procedures must be streamlined and made more transparent. Afghan institutions must be strengthened. Programs must be audited. And leaders more interested in good governance than self-enrichment must have a place at every level of Afghanistan’s government.

That will take time. It cannot happen if Mr. Karzai insists on denying or covering up the predatory ways of some his closest political allies and family members.

The Afghan president needs to tread very carefully here. Americans are fast losing patience with the Afghan war and have all but written him off as a partner. Congress is threatening to withhold aid. Even more important, Afghans see their own government as corrupt and unreliable. Unless that changes, there is almost no hope of driving back the Taliban.

    Mr. Karzai’s Promises, NYT, 25.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/26/opinion/26thu1.html

Key Karzai Aide in Corruption Inquiry Is Linked to C.I.A.

August 25, 2010
The New York Times
By DEXTER FILKINS and MARK MAZZETTI

KABUL, Afghanistan — The aide to President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan at the center of a politically sensitive corruption investigation is being paid by the Central Intelligence Agency, according to Afghan and American officials.

Mohammed Zia Salehi, the chief of administration for the National Security Council, appears to have been on the payroll for many years, according to officials in Kabul and Washington. It is unclear exactly what Mr. Salehi does in exchange for his money, whether providing information to the spy agency, advancing American views inside the presidential palace, or both.

Mr. Salehi’s relationship with the C.I.A. underscores deep contradictions at the heart of the Obama administration’s policy in Afghanistan, with American officials simultaneously demanding that Mr. Karzai root out the corruption that pervades his government while sometimes subsidizing the very people suspected of perpetrating it.

Mr. Salehi was arrested in July and released after Mr. Karzai intervened. There has been no suggestion that Mr. Salehi’s ties to the C.I.A. played a role in his release; rather, officials say, it is the fear that Mr. Salehi knows about corrupt dealings inside the Karzai administration.

The ties underscore doubts about how seriously the Obama administration intends to fight corruption here. The anticorruption drive, though strongly backed by the United States, is still vigorously debated inside the administration. Some argue it should be a centerpiece of American strategy, and others say that attacking corrupt officials who are crucial to the war effort could destabilize the Karzai government.

The Obama administration is also racing to show progress in Afghanistan by December, when the White House will evaluate its mission there. Some administration officials argue that any comprehensive campaign to fight corruption inside Afghanistan is overly ambitious, with less than a year to go before the American military is set to begin withdrawing troops.

“Fighting corruption is the very definition of mission creep,” one Obama administration official said.

Others in the administration view public corruption as the single greatest threat to the Afghan government and the American mission; it is the corrupt nature of the Karzai government, these officials say, that drives ordinary Afghans into the arms of the Taliban. Other prominent Afghans who American officials have said were on the C.I.A.’s payroll include the president’s half brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, suspected by investigators of playing a role in Afghanistan’s booming opium trade. Earlier this year, American officials did not press Mr. Karzai to remove his brother from his post as the chairman of the Kandahar provincial council. Mr. Karzai denies any monetary relationship with the C.I.A. and any links to the drug trade.

Mr. Salehi was arrested by the Afghan police after, investigators say, they wiretapped him soliciting a bribe — in the form of a car for his son — in exchange for impeding an American-backed investigation into a company suspected of shipping billions of dollars out of the country for Afghan officials, drug smugglers and insurgents.

Mr. Salehi was released seven hours later, after telephoning Mr. Karzai from his jail cell to demand help, officials said, and after Mr. Karzai forcefully intervened on his behalf.

The president sent aides to get him and has since threatened to limit the power of the anticorruption unit that carried out the arrest. Mr. Salehi could not be reached for comment on Wednesday. A spokesman for President Karzai did not respond to a list of questions sent to his office, including whether Mr. Karzai knew that Mr. Salehi was a C.I.A. informant.

A spokesman for the C.I.A. declined to comment on any relationship with Mr. Salehi.

“The C.I.A. works hard to advance the full range of U.S. policy objectives in Afghanistan,” said Paul Gimigliano, a spokesman for the agency. “Reckless allegations from anonymous sources don’t change that reality in the slightest.”

An American official said the practice of paying government officials was sensible, even if they turn out to be corrupt or unsavory.

“If we decide as a country that we’ll never deal with anyone in Afghanistan who might down the road — and certainly not at our behest — put his hand in the till, we can all come home right now,” the American official said. “If you want intelligence in a war zone, you’re not going to get it from Mother Teresa or Mary Poppins.”

Last week, Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat, flew to Kabul in part to discuss the Salehi case with Mr. Karzai. In an interview afterward, Mr. Kerry expressed concern about Mr. Salehi’s ties to the American government. Mr. Kerry appeared to allude to the C.I.A., though he did not mention it.

“We are going to have to examine that relationship,” Mr. Kerry said. “We are going to have to look at that very carefully.”

Mr. Kerry said he pressed Mr. Karzai to allow the anticorruption unit pursuing Mr. Salehi and others to move forward unhindered, and said he believed he had secured a commitment from him to do so.

“Corruption matters to us,” a senior Obama administration official said. “The fact that Salehi may have been on our payroll does not necessarily change any of the basic issues here.”

Mr. Salehi is a political survivor, who, like many Afghans, navigated shifting alliances through 31 years of war. He is a former interpreter for Abdul Rashid Dostum, the ethnic Uzbek with perhaps the most ruthless reputation among all Afghan warlords.

Mr. Dostum, a Karzai ally, was one of the C.I.A.’s leading allies on the ground in Afghanistan in the weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The agency employed his militia to help rout the Taliban from northern Afghanistan.

Over the course of the nine-year-old war, the C.I.A. has enmeshed itself in the inner workings of Afghanistan’s national security establishment. From 2002 until just last year, the C.I.A. paid the entire budget of Afghanistan’s spy service, the National Directorate of Security.

Mr. Salehi often acts as a courier of money to other Afghans, according to an Afghan politician who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he feared retaliation.

Among the targets of the continuing Afghan anticorruption investigation is a secret fund of cash from which payments were made to various individuals, officials here said.

Despite Mr. Salehi’s status as a low-level functionary, the Afghan politician predicted that Mr. Karzai would never allow his prosecution to go forward, whatever the pressure from the United States. Mr. Salehi knows too much about the inner workings of the palace, he said.

“Karzai will protect him,” the politician said, “because by going after him, you are opening the gates.”

Mr. Salehi is a confidant of some of the most powerful people in the Afghan government, including Engineer Ibrahim, who until recently was the deputy chief of the Afghan intelligence service. Earlier this year, Mr. Salehi accompanied Mr. Ibrahim to Dubai to meet leaders of the Taliban to explore prospects for peace, according to a prominent Afghan with knowledge of the meeting.

Mr. Salehi was arrested last month in the course of a sprawling investigation into New Ansari, a money transfer firm that relies on couriers and other rudimentary means to move cash in and out of Afghanistan.

New Ansari was founded in the 1990s when the Taliban ruled most of Afghanistan. In the years since 2001, New Ansari grew into one of the most important financial hubs in Afghanistan, transferring billions of dollars in cash for prominent Afghans out of the country, most of it to Dubai.

New Ansari’s offices were raided by Afghan agents, with American backing, in January. An American official familiar with the investigation said New Ansari appeared to have been transferring money for wealthy Afghans of every sort, including politicians, insurgents and drug traffickers.

“They were moving money for everybody,” the American official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The flow of capital out of Afghanistan is so large that it makes up a substantial portion of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product. In an interview, a United Arab Emirates customs official said it received about $1 billion from Afghanistan in 2009. But the American official said the amount might be closer to $2.5 billion — about a quarter of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product.

Much of the New Ansari cash was carried by couriers flying from Kabul and Kandahar, usually to Dubai, where many Afghan officials maintain second homes and live in splendorous wealth.

An American official familiar with the investigation said the examination of New Ansari’s books was providing rich insights into the culture of Afghan corruption.

“It’s a gold mine,” the official said.

Following the arrest, Mr. Salehi called Mr. Karzai directly from his cell to demand that he be freed. Mr. Karzai twice sent delegations to the detention center where Mr. Salehi was held. After seven hours, Mr. Salehi was let go.

Afterward, Gen. Nazar Mohammed Nikzad, the head of the Afghan unit investigating Mr. Salehi, was summoned to the Presidential Palace and asked by Mr. Karzai to explain his actions.

“Everything is lawful and by the book,” a Western official said of the Afghan anticorruption investigators. “They gather the evidence, they get the warrant signed off — and then the plug gets pulled every time.”

This is not the first time that Afghan prosecutors have run into resistance when they have tried to pursue an Afghan official on corruption charges related to New Ansari.

Sediq Chekari, the minister for Hajj and Religious Affairs, was allowed to flee the country as investigators prepared to charge him with accepting bribes in exchange for steering business to tour operators who ferry people to Saudi Arabia each year. Mr. Chekari fled to Britain, officials said. Afghanistan’s attorney general issued an arrest warrant through Interpol.

American officials say a key player in the scandal is Hajji Rafi Azimi, the vice chairman of Afghan United Bank. The bank’s chairman, Hajji Mohammed Jan, is a founder of New Ansari. According to American officials, Afghan prosecutors would like to arrest Mr. Azimi but so far have run into political interference they did not specify. He has not been formally charged.

In the past, some Western officials have expressed frustration at the political resistance that Afghan prosecutors have encountered when they have tried to investigate Afghan officials. Earlier this year, the American official said that the Obama administration was considering extraordinary measures to bring corrupt Afghan officials to justice, including extradition.

“We are pushing some high-level public corruption cases right now, and they are just constantly stalling and stalling and stalling,” the American official said of the Karzai administration.

Another Western official said he was growing increasingly concerned about the morale — and safety — of the Afghan anticorruption prosecutors.

So far, the Afghan prosecutors have not folded. The Salehi case is likely to resurface — and very soon. Under Afghan law, prosecutors have a maximum of 33 days to indict a person after his arrest. Mr. Salehi was arrested in late July.

That means Afghan prosecutors may soon come before the Afghan attorney general, Mohammed Ishaq Aloko, to seek an indictment. It will be up to Mr. Aloko, who owes his job to Mr. Karzai, to sign it.

“They are all just doing their jobs,” the Western official said. “They are scared for their lives. They are scared for their families. If it continues, they will eventually give up the fight.”


Dexter Filkins reported from Kabul, and Mark Mazzetti from Washington. Helene Cooper contributed reporting from Washington.

    Key Karzai Aide in Corruption Inquiry Is Linked to C.I.A., NYT, 25.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/26/world/asia/26kabul.html

10 Killed on Medical Aid Trip in Afghanistan

August 7, 2010
The New York Times
By ROD NORDLAND and SHARIFULLAH SAHAK

KABUL, Afghanistan — At least 10 medical personnel, including six Americans, were murdered in northern Afghanistan on Thursday, officials confirmed Saturday. A Taliban spokesman, reached by cellphone, claimed responsibility for the killings.

The bodies from the group, which had been on an expedition to bring eye care and other medical services to remote areas, were found shot to death in a mountainous area of Badakhshan Province, according to the provincial police chief, Aka Noor Kentoz.

The International Assistance Mission, a group that last month had a fund-raiser in Kabul for a medical expedition to Nuristan Province, said six of the dead were Americans, one was German and one was British. Dirk Frans, the executive director of the I.A.M., said the team was headed by Tom Little, an American opthamologist with four decades experience in Afghanistan and a fluent Dari speaker. Mr. Frans said the team numbered 12, including four Afghans, two of whom were killed.

The victims’ bodies were stripped of all belongings, making identification difficult and suggesting robbery as a motive. However, Taliban insurgents are known to be active in the area, and the attackers allowed at least one Afghan to leave the scene unharmed. The survivor, an Afghan driver named Saifullah, told police he was let go because he recited verses from the Koran.

Mr. Kentoz said the group was associated with Noor Eye Hospital in Kabul. A spokesman at the hospital identified them as members of the I.A.M.

In a fund-raising blog post about the expedition, Dr. Karen Woo, a British-trained surgeon, said the expedition, which included an eye doctor and a dental surgeon, would be hiking with packhorses for three weeks along a 120-mile route in northeastern Nuristan Province to bring medical services to remote areas. The area is close to the Badakhshan provincial border.

“The expedition will require a lot of physical and mental resolve and will not be without risk but ultimately, I believe that the provision of medical treatment is of fundamental importance and that the effort is worth it in order to assist those that need it most,” Dr. Woo wrote on the blog.

A statement on I.A.M.’s Web site put the death toll at 10. “It is likely that they are members of the International Assistance Mission eye camp team,” the statement said. “If these reports are confirmed we object to this senseless killing of people who have done nothing but serve the poor.”

The governor of Nuristan Province, Jamaluddin Badar, said the expedition had just crossed the border to Badakhshan Province on Friday. They stopped at a local restaurant for lunch in the rugged Sharron Valley of the Hindu Kush mountain range in Badakhshan.

Afterwards, Mr. Kentoz said local residents told police, a group of red-bearded gunmen took the group prisoner and marched them on foot to a remote area where they shot them to death. It is common in Afghanistan for older men to dye their beards with henna.

A spokeswoman for the American embassy, Caitlin Hayden, said officials were aware of the incident. “We have reason to believe that several American citizens are among the deceased,” she said. “We cannot confirm any details at this point, but are actively working with local authorities to learn more about the identities and nationalities of these individuals.”

Mr. Frans said the incident would not deter the Christian-supported group from their work. “We have worked here under the king, under the Russians, under the Communists, under the warlords and the Taliban. Is it time to quit now?”


Richard A. Oppel Jr. contributed reporting from Kabul.

    10 Killed on Medical Aid Trip in Afghanistan NYT, 7.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/08/world/asia/08afghan.html

Insurgents Attack Afghan Police Post in Kandahar

July 14, 2010
The New York Times
By ALISSA J. RUBIN

KABUL — Insurgents killed three American troops, an Afghan police officer and five civilians in a nighttime attack against the Afghan Civil Order Police headquarters in the southern city of Kandahar, Afghan and NATO officials said Wednesday.

The nationality of the dead civilians was not immediately known.

The assault on Tuesday night, which involved a suicide car bomber who drove into the outer perimeter of the headquarters and was followed by attackers armed with rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns, went on for about 20 minutes before the Afghan police and NATO troops repelled the insurgents, according to statements from NATO and from the Kandahar governor’s office.

It was not clear whether any of the attackers were killed.

“Afghan forces are gaining ground,” said Navy Capt. Jane Campbell, a NATO spokesperson. “We commend the actions of those courageous service members who stood their ground and helped repel the insurgent attacks,” she said.

The assault resembled two recent attacks on American bases at Bagram and Jalalabad in which suicide car bombers detonated their explosives, allowing small groups of insurgents to launch follow-up attacks using grenades and other weapons.

In a separate attack in the Marja district of Helmand Province, a roadside bomb exploded Tuesday afternoon as a minivan was passing, killing nine civilians, including three children, said the Helmand governor’s spokesman, Dawood Ahmadi.

“We strongly condemn this wild and cruel action of the enemies of Afghanistan,” he said.

    Insurgents Attack Afghan Police Post in Kandahar, NYT, 14.7.2010, ,http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/15/world/asia/15afghan.html

Death Toll From Pakistan Bomb Attack Reaches 102

July 10, 2010
Filed at 6:34 a.m. ET
The New York Times
By REUTERS

PESHAWAR, Pakistan (Reuters) - The death toll from a suicide attack in a volatile border region of Pakistan climbed to 102 on Saturday, showing the militants' continued ability to stage deadly strikes despite losing ground in army offensives.

The Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), or Taliban Movement of Pakistan, claimed responsibility for Friday's attack in Mohmand, a Pashtun region on the northwestern border with Afghanistan, where security forces have stepped up operations against militants in recent months.

Friday's attack is the deadliest Pakistan has suffered since an attack on a market in Peshawar in October last year that killed 105.

Five children, aged 5 to 10, and several women were among the dead, and the toll rose on Saturday as rescuers working throughout the night found more bodies in the rubble.

"We have recovered more bodies from the debris of dozens of shops that were razed to the ground by the blast and the number of dead has increased" to 102, said Rasool Khan, assistant political agent of Mohmand.

The bomber blew himself up outside Khan's office. There were mixed reports that a car bomb was the source of a possible second blast.

Late on Friday, a TTP spokesman in Mohmand who identified himself as Ikramullah Mohmand, said anti-Taliban tribal elders from various peace committees who had come to Khan's office were the target.

A senior elder and two others were killed in the attack.

Among nearly 80 wounded were several people displaced by fighting between security forces and militants, who were collecting relief goods near the blast side.

The latest militant attack underscored multiple security challenges facing nuclear-armed U.S. ally Pakistan, whose support is vital in attempts to stabilize neighboring Afghanistan, where U.S.-led NATO troops are fighting a raging Taliban insurgency.

The military has made progress over the past year when they pushed militants out of the Swat valley, northwest of Islamabad. In October the army began an offensive in the militants' South Waziristan bastion on the Afghan border.

The offensive was extended to Orakzai in March as many of the militants who fled the South Waziristan operation took refuge there and in Mohmand. Hundreds of militants have since been killed in air strikes in the two regions.

Troops killed 20 militants in an overnight clash in South Waziristan after insurgents attacked a military checkpost in their previous stronghold of Makeen, intelligence officials said. There was no independent confirmation of the casualties.

Despite losing ground in military offensives, militants have proven their ability to bounce back, responding with a barrage of bomb attacks in towns and cities, killing hundreds of people.

Two suicide bombers killed at least 42 people in an attack on Pakistan's most important Sufi shrine in the eastern city of Lahore last week.

While praising Pakistan's efforts to fight homegrown militants, the unabated violence is a source of worry for the United States, which also wants Islamabad to go after Afghan militants who cross the border to attack U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

In a separate incident in Afghanistan, suspected Taliban militants attacked a bus carrying Pakistani Shi'a tribesmen traveling from the Kurram tribal region and heading to Peshawar via Afghanistan, killing 11 and wounding one, residents and government officials said.

Pakistani tribesmen take a circuitous route through Afghanistan to travel between Kurram and Peshawar as the road linking the two regions is often closed because of militants and Pakistani Army operations.

(Writing by Augustine Anthony; Editing by Chris Allbritton and Jeremy Laurence)

    Death Toll From Pakistan Bomb Attack Reaches 102, NYT, 10.7.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2010/07/10/news/news-us-pakistan-violence.html

Bomber Kills at Least 40 in Pakistan

July 9, 2010
Filed at 4:00 a.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

KHAR, Pakistan (AP) -- A suicide bomber on a motorcycle struck outside a government office Friday in a tribal region where Pakistan's army has fought the Taliban, killing at least 48 people and wounding around 80, officials said.

The attack indicated that militants remain a potent force in Pakistan's tribal belt, which borders Afghanistan, despite army offensives. The U.S. has praised Pakistan for taking on Islamist extremists that use the tribal region to plan attacks on Western troops across the border, but the militants have often retaliated on Pakistani soil.

The bomber detonated his explosives near the Yakaghund village office of a top administrator of the Mohmand tribal region, Rasool Khan.

Khan, who was in his office at the time, escaped unharmed. He said some 70 to 80 shops in the area were damaged or destroyed by the powerful blast. A prison building also was damaged, and some 28 prisoners -- ordinary criminals, not militants -- had apparently escaped, the administrator said.

The attacker was on a motorcycle and trying to gain entry to the office when he was stopped and detonated the bomb, government official Meraj Din said. He put the death toll at 48, and other officials said at least 80 people were wounded.

Footage from the area showed dozens of men searching through piles of yellow brick and mud rubble in search of survivors.

''After the blast, I saw destruction. I saw bodies everywhere. I saw the injured crying for help,'' security official Esa Khan told The Associated Press in the main northwest city of Peshawar, where he helped escort some of the wounded to a hospital.

Abdul Wadood, 19, was sitting in a vehicle nearby when the attack happened.

''I only heard the deafening blast and lost consciousness,'' he said, while being treated for head and arm wounds in Peshawar. ''I found myself on a hospital bed after opening my eyes.

''I think those who planned or carried out this attack are not humans.''

Mohmand is one of several areas in Pakistan's lawless tribal belt where Taliban and al-Qaida are believed to be hiding. The Pakistani army has carried out operations in Mohmand, but it has been unable to extirpate the militants.

Information from Mohmand is difficult to verify independently because access to the area is heavily restricted.

------

Khan reported from Peshawar. Associated Press Writer Munir Ahmed contributed to this report from Islamabad.

    Bomber Kills at Least 40 in Pakistan, NYT, 9.7.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/07/09/world/asia/AP-AS-Pakistan.html

V.A. Is Easing Rules to Cover Stress Disorder

July 7, 2010
The New York Times
By JAMES DAO

The government is preparing to issue new rules that will make it substantially easier for veterans who have been found to have post-traumatic stress disorder to receive disability benefits, a change that could affect hundreds of thousands of veterans from the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam.

The regulations from the Department of Veterans Affairs, which will take effect as early as Monday and cost as much as $5 billion over several years according to Congressional analysts, will essentially eliminate a requirement that veterans document specific events like bomb blasts, firefights or mortar attacks that might have caused P.T.S.D., an illness characterized by emotional numbness, irritability and flashbacks.

For decades, veterans have complained that finding such records was extremely time consuming and sometimes impossible. And in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, veterans groups assert that the current rules discriminate against tens of thousands of service members — many of them women — who did not serve in combat roles but nevertheless suffered traumatic experiences.

Under the new rule, which applies to veterans of all wars, the department will grant compensation to those with P.T.S.D. if they can simply show that they served in a war zone and in a job consistent with the events that they say caused their conditions. They would not have to prove, for instance, that they came under fire, served in a front-line unit or saw a friend killed.

The new rule would also allow compensation for service members who had good reason to fear traumatic events, known as stressors, even if they did not actually experience them.

There are concerns that the change will open the door to a flood of fraudulent claims. But supporters of the rule say the veterans department will still review all claims and thus be able to weed out the baseless ones.

“This nation has a solemn obligation to the men and women who have honorably served this country and suffer from the emotional and often devastating hidden wounds of war,” the secretary of veterans affairs, Eric K. Shinseki, said in a statement to The New York Times. “This final regulation goes a long way to ensure that veterans receive the benefits and services they need.”

Though widely applauded by veterans’ groups, the new rule is generating criticism from some quarters because of its cost. Some mental health experts also believe it will lead to economic dependency among younger veterans whose conditions might be treatable.

Disability benefits include free physical and mental health care and monthly checks ranging from a few hundred dollars to more than $2,000, depending on the severity of the condition.

“I can’t imagine anyone more worthy of public largess than a veteran,” said Dr. Sally Satel, a psychiatrist and fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative policy group, who has written on P.T.S.D. “But as a clinician, it is destructive to give someone total and permanent disability when they are in fact capable of working, even if it is not at full capacity. A job is the most therapeutic thing there is.”

But Rick Weidman, executive director for policy and government affairs at Vietnam Veterans of America, said most veterans applied for disability not for the monthly checks but because they wanted access to free health care.

“I know guys who are rated 100 percent disabled who keep coming back for treatment not because they are worried about losing their compensation, but because they want their life back,” Mr. Weidman said.

Mr. Weidman and other veterans’ advocates said they were disappointed by one provision of the new rule: It will require a final determination on a veteran’s case to be made by a psychiatrist or psychologist who works for the veterans department.

The advocates assert that the rule will allow the department to sharply limit approvals. They argue that private physicians should be allowed to make those determinations as well.

But Tom Pamperin, associate deputy under secretary for policy and programs at the veterans department, said the agency wanted to ensure that standards were consistent for the assessments.

“V.A. and V.A.-contract clinicians go through a certification process,” Mr. Pamperin said. “They are well familiar with military life and can make an assessment of whether the stressor is consistent with the veterans’ duties and place of service.”

The new rule comes at a time when members of Congress and the veterans department itself are moving to expand health benefits and disability compensation for a variety of disorders linked to deployment. The projected costs of those actions are generating some opposition, though probably not enough to block any of the proposals.

The largest proposal would make it easier for Vietnam veterans with ischemic heart disease, Parkinson’s disease and hairy-cell leukemia to receive benefits.

The rule, proposed last fall by the veterans department, would presume those diseases were caused by exposure to Agent Orange, the chemical defoliant, if a veteran could simply demonstrate that he had set foot in Vietnam during the war.

The rule, still under review, is projected to cost more than $42 billion over a decade.

Senator Jim Webb, Democrat of Virginia and a Vietnam veteran, has asked that Congress review the proposal before it takes effect. “I take a back seat to no one in my concern for our veterans,” Mr. Webb said in a floor statement in May. “But I do think we need to have practical, proper procedures.”

More than two million service members have deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan since 2001, and by some estimates 20 percent or more of them will develop P.T.S.D.

More than 150,000 cases of P.T.S.D. have been diagnosed by the veterans health system among veterans of the two wars, while thousands more have received diagnoses from private doctors, said Paul Sullivan, executive director of Veterans for Common Sense, an advocacy group.

But Mr. Sullivan said records showed that the veterans department had approved P.T.S.D. disability claims for only 78,000 veterans. That suggests, he said, that many veterans with the disorder are having their compensation claims rejected by claims processors. “Those statistics show a very serious problem in how V.A. handles P.T.S.D. claims,” Mr. Sullivan said.

Representative John Hall, Democrat of New York and sponsor of legislation similar to the new rule, said his office had handled dozens of cases involving veterans who had trouble receiving disability compensation for P.T.S.D., including a Navy veteran from World War II who twice served on ships that sank in the Pacific.

“It doesn’t matter whether you are an infantryman or a cook or a truck driver,” Mr. Hall said. “Anyone is potentially at risk for post-traumatic stress.”

    V.A. Is Easing Rules to Cover Stress Disorder, NYT, 7.7.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/08/us/08vets.html

New Bombings Strike Shiites in Iraq

July 8, 2010
The New York Times
By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS and OMAR AL-JAWOSHY

BAGHDAD — Less than a day after a suicide bomber killed more than 50 people in a crowd of Shiite pilgrims at a police checkpoint in Baghdad, more explosions struck worshipers on Thursday, killing 7 and wounding about 60 despite intensive efforts by Iraqi security forces to foil such attacks.

At least five other Shiites were killed and dozens of others wounded in and around Baghdad on Wednesday, as hundreds of thousands of people took part in the annual procession to Kadhimiya’s gold-domed shrine to honor the eighth-century Imam Musa al-Kadhim.

Shiite pilgrims are frequent targets of Sunni insurgent groups, and this year Iraqi security forces ordered several major roads and bridges closed and banned bicycles and motorcycles in the capital to try to safeguard the marchers.

Some 200,000 security force members had been assigned to patrol streets, check cars and search pilgrims as they walked along streets to the shrine.

The suicide explosion on Wednesday occurred about 7:30 p.m. in Adhamiya, a predominantly Sunni neighborhood across the Tigris River from Kadhimiya, which is almost entirely Shiite. On Thursday a government official said that 51 people were killed, and 318 wounded in the attack.

Before striking, the bomber had stopped at the end of a line of people waiting to be searched by the police in order to be allowed onto a bridge leading to Kadhimiya, witnesses said.

Omar Habib, 30, the owner of a nearby shop, said the blast was powerful enough to lift people into the air and raise a huge cloud of smoke.

“Things flew everywhere, people started running,” he said. “Old people fell and got trampled. Soldiers were shooting into the air. It was like a horror movie.”

Another shop owner, Bakir Ali, was bleeding from shrapnel wounds to his leg. He described it as “a very big explosion.”

He added, “If there hadn’t been so many people gathered around the bomber, I would have died.”

Afterward, the ground was covered with lost shoes and pilgrims’ brightly colored bags, some still full of food and water.

For years, many Shiite pilgrims walking to the Kadhimiya shrine avoided Adhamiya, which had been a center for Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and other Sunni insurgent groups.

But last year, Iraqi security officials closed a major street through Adhamiya during the religious festival to allow Shiite pilgrims to walk through the neighborhood without having to fear car bombs.

Elsewhere in Baghdad, a roadside bomb in the central part of the city killed six people and wounded 30 others Wednesday night, the Iraqi police said. Police officials said they believed pilgrims were the intended target.

A police officer died in the Dora neighborhood of Baghdad when a bomb that had been attached to his car exploded, local officials said.

Also, the houses of several security officers in the Abu Ghraib area west of Baghdad were bombed an three people were killed, including an 8-year-old, the Iraqi police said. No officers were harmed during the attacks, which wounded six other people, the police said.


An Iraqi employee of The New York Times contributed reporting.

    New Bombings Strike Shiites in Iraq, NYT, 8.7.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/09/world/middleeast/09iraq.html

3 US Troops Killed by Roadside Bomb in Afghanistan

July 7, 2010
Filed at 1:36 a.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) -- The international force in Afghanistan says three American troops have been killed by a roadside bomb in the violence-wracked south.

A NATO statement says two troops died immediately after the blast Tuesday. A third died later that day. NATO said all three were Americans but gave no other details.

Southern Afghanistan is one of the Taliban's strongest areas of influence. Violence there is increasing as thousands of American soldiers arrive to try to establish Afghan government control.

Roadside bombs are a leading cause of casualties in Afghanistan. Last month was the deadliest for international forces in the nearly nine-year-old war, with 103 killed, including 60 Americans.

    US Troops Killed by Roadside Bomb in Afghanistan, NYT, 7.7.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/07/07/world/AP-AS-Afghanistan.html

Petraeus Seeks Unity in Afghan Effort

July 3, 2010
Filed at 8:21 a.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) -- Gen. David Petraeus, the new commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, called Saturday for unity in the civilian and military effort to turn back the Taliban, saying, ''In this important endeavor, cooperation is not optional.''

In his first public comments since he arrived Friday night to assume command of the international military mission in Afghanistan, Petraeus said he would work to improve coordination between troops on the battlefield and civilians trying to bolster the Afghan government and improve the lives of the people.

His predecessor, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, was fired last month for intemperate remarks that he and his aides made to Rolling Stone magazine about Obama administration officials, mostly on the civilian side.

''Civilian and military, Afghanistan and international, we are part of one team with one mission,'' Petraeus told about 1,700 invited guests, including Afghan government and military and police officials gathered at the U.S. Embassy for a pre-Fourth of July celebration marking American independence. His message to the Afghans in the audience: ''Your success is our success.''

Petraeus, widely credited with turning around the U.S. war effort in Iraq, is taking over the 130,000-member NATO-led international force at a time of rising violence and growing doubts in Washington and other allied capitals about the effectiveness of the counterinsurgency strategy, which Petraeus pioneered. June was the deadliest month for the allied force since the war began in October 2001 with 102 deaths, more than half of them Americans.

The general, who formally assumes the command at a ceremony Sunday, was spending time on Saturday receiving his first operational update from the NATO staff and in meetings with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, ground commander Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez and the chief of the NATO training command, Lt. Gen. William Caldwell.

Underscoring the message of unity, U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry called Petraeus a ''great friend.'' Eikenberry handed the general an access pass to the heavily guarded embassy across the street from NATO headquarters in Kabul.

''Welcome aboard. You are welcome at this embassy 24-7,'' said Eikenberry, whose relationship with McChrystal was frosty.

In return, Petraeus said: ''I feel like one of the team now. It's a pleasure to be your Ranger buddy at this critical time.''

Eikenberry told the crowd that the U.S. commitment to Afghanistan would not wane.

''We'll keep at it. We'll persevere,'' Eikenberry said. ''We're committed for the long term.''

McChrystal was fired after telling Rolling Stone, among other things, that he felt ''betrayed'' by Eikenberry's opposition last year to the general's request for a substantial increase in U.S. troops in Afghanistan because the ambassador had doubts about the reliability of Karzai. Eikenberry's opposition to the troop increase, which Obama approved, was contained in diplomatic cables leaked in Washington, a move McChrystal suspected was aimed at protecting the ambassador if the war effort failed.

But Saturday's messages of unity sought to turn the page on past tensions. The gathering was upbeat. A rock band played. Dignitaries sat in tents eating popcorn, hamburgers, fried chicken, cupcakes and ice cream. Tiny American flags lined the sidewalks of the U.S. Embassy compound, which was adorned in red-white-and-blue bunting.

The positive tone, however, was dampened by talk of Friday's attack on a four-story house used by an American aid organization in the northern city of Kunduz and the accidental killing of civilians during a raid.

Taliban suicide attackers stormed the house, killing four people before dying in a five-hour gunbattle with Afghan security forces. The pre-dawn attack appeared part of a militant campaign against international development organizations at a time when the U.S. and its allies are trying to accelerate civilian aid efforts to turn back the Taliban.

And during the picnic, NATO issued a statement acknowledging the deaths on Friday of two Afghan civilians, including a woman, during a joint raid with Afghan troops to arrest a Taliban deputy commander in the Kandahar area.

During the raid, an Afghan man left a compound and ''demonstrated hostile intent,'' NATO said. Troops opened fire, wounding the man. When troops entered the compound, they found an Afghan woman dead from stray rounds and another man wounded, the alliance said. One of the two wounded men later died.

''The joint security force, along with local elders and government officials, are working together to review this unfortunate incident,'' NATO said.

Separately, NATO said an international service member was killed Friday in southern Afghanistan. Also in the south, two Afghan civilians were killed, one child was missing and three women were wounded after their car hit a roadside bomb near Qalat city in Zabul province, provincial spokesman Mohammad Jan Rasoolyar said.

In eastern Afghanistan, a joint force captured a Taliban commander and three other insurgents late Friday in Nangarhar province, NATO said. It said the commander helped members of the Pakistan-based militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba infiltrate into Afghanistan. India has blamed Lashkar-e-Taiba for the November 2008 attacks in Mumbai that killed 166 people.

In the southeastern province of Khost, police said militants from the feared Haqqani group, a Taliban faction, abducted 10 local elders and killed at least five of them.

The Haqqani militants showed up Friday night in Spera district disguised as Afghan soldiers and asked local elders to attend a meeting, provincial police chief Abdul-Hakim Ishaqzai said. There, they selected 10 men, telling them they were invited to another meeting.

Five of the elders were slain and their bodies sent to their villages Saturday, the police chief said. The others remain missing. The leader of the Haqqani gunmen was Nasrat Jamal, a well-known insurgent in the area, the police chief said.

    Petraeus Seeks Unity in Afghan Effort, NYT, 3.7.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/07/03/world/asia/AP-AS-Afghanistan.html

Beyond McChrystal Lies a Bigger Tug-of-War

July 2, 2010
The New York Times
By MARK LANDLER

WASHINGTON

WHILE the uproar set off by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s imprudent comments in Rolling Stone magazine has focused on the larger-than-life personalities involved, there is an important subtext: What does all this drama suggest about how the Pentagon and the State Department are sharing responsibility for the war in Afghanistan?

Perhaps a clue came during a secure video conference call between Washington and Kabul last Saturday. General McChrystal’s replacement, Gen. David H. Petraeus, called up the two top American civilian officials in the war — Richard C. Holbrooke, the special envoy; and Karl W. Eikenberry, the ambassador in Kabul.

The general raised a touchy issue: whether to buy generators to supply electricity to Kandahar. For months, the ambassador and many civilian development experts had opposed doing so now, because it didn’t fit long-term national plans for power generation. But Kandahar is the Taliban stronghold that is the American military’s next target. And General Petraeus, according to an official familiar with the conference call, said the basic services were so badly needed there that it justified going ahead.

The ambassador fell into line, the official said. In the perennial tug-of-war between civilian aspirations and military imperatives, score one for the Pentagon.

That, at least, is one way to read the conversation, especially in light of the harsh comments about civilian officials that General McChrystal had allowed members of his staff to make in front of a reporter. But another is that the McChrystal episode — and rumors that Ambassador Eikenberry might be replaced — have chastened officials on both sides, and that both now want to avoid a zero-sum game between State and Defense in Afghanistan. There, more even than in Iraq, the military and civilian sides need each other.

The State Department grew used to a bitter separation in the early years of the Iraq war. Back then, civilian-military collaboration meant sidelining the diplomats, starving the State Department of funds, and marginalizing the secretary of state, Colin Powell, in White House debates.

But by 2007, when the American troop surge was in full swing, the State Department — then under Condoleezza Rice — had managed to achieve a respectable supporting role on the ground, deploying some 700 civilians in provincial reconstruction teams that helped fix sewage systems and train Iraqi judges.

No one was more responsible for that change than General Petraeus. As overseer of the team that wrote the Army’s field manual on counterinsurgency strategy, he stressed the necessity of civilian participation. And as the commander in Iraq, he made the American ambassador, Ryan C. Crocker, his Sancho Panza, bringing him along on tours of Iraq and testifying with him on Capitol Hill.

With the change in administrations in 2009, the State Department’s role seemed destined to expand further. President Obama chose a political star, Hillary Rodham Clinton, as secretary of state, and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates called on Congress to increase her department’s funding, so it could do more to help the Pentagon. During the White House policy debate on Afghanistan, Mrs. Clinton went toe-to-toe with the Defense Department, producing color-coded maps that showed how a “civilian surge” would unfurl across Afghanistan.

Mr. Holbrooke built a high-powered shop inside the State Department, drawing experts from nine other agencies, from the Agriculture Department to the Central Intelligence Agency. As a young diplomat, Mr. Holbrooke had seen firsthand a failed strategy, dominated by the military, in Vietnam. Still, the interwoven nature of military and civilian goals in Afghanistan was plain. Ambassador Eikenberry was given oversight of more than 1,000 civilians on the ground, triple the number in January 2009. But he came to the job as a retired lieutenant general, who himself was once the commander in Afghanistan.

Yet critical problems remained: Military officials expressed frustration at how long it was taking civilians to move aid into the field, and some critics blamed the civilian leadership for mishandling Afghanistan’s elections last year, which President Hamid Karzai is widely believed to have rigged.

“It’s very ironic that two military commanders have already been fired when the military has performed relatively well, while no one has been fired on the civilian side, when its major achievement so far has been the fiasco of the Afghan election,” said Bruce Riedel, a former intelligence official who is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and who helped the administration devise its initial war strategy.

It is tempting to conclude that the arrival of General Petraeus will consolidate the supremacy of the Pentagon in the war effort. He certainly starts out with great prestige in Washington, drawn from his performance in Iraq, and his status as the intellectual father of the strategy.

But there are reasons to believe that the State Department will continue to play a substantial role, if only because that is what General Petraeus wants. He has pledged a “unity of effort” between the civilian and military operations, and he met with Ambassador Eikenberry at a NATO meeting in Brussels so the two of them could fly into Kabul together on Friday.

For all the parallels between Afghanistan and Iraq, there are key differences that will require robust diplomacy. In Iraq, General Petraeus was able to turn the tide by peeling away Sunni leaders who were willing to work with American forces against jihadi extremists. But in Afghanistan, any similar process requires Pakistan’s cooperation. Afghanistan’s neighbor has influence over powerful players like the Haqqani network, which is closely allied with the Taliban, and it is a sanctuary for leaders of the Afghan Taliban.

Officials say that General Petraeus plans to shuttle between Kabul and Islamabad, conferring on issues like reintegrating Taliban fighters into Afghan society. But it easy to imagine that in the negotiations for a broader political settlement between Mr. Karzai and the Taliban, the general could turn to Mr. Holbrooke, whom he described last week as his “wingman.” Mr. Holbrooke, after all, played a central role in the Dayton peace accords, which ended the war in Bosnia.

“One of the reasons the selection of General Petraeus was such a masterstroke was that he understands the importance of a civilian-military effort,” said John A. Nagl, a retired Army officer who is now president of the Center for a New American Security, a Washington research group, and who helped write the counterinsurgency handbook under General Petraeus. “He’ll bend over backwards to make it work.”

    Beyond McChrystal Lies a Bigger Tug-of-War, NYT, 2.7.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/weekinreview/04landler.html

Bombers Storm U.S. Aid Compound in Afghanistan

July 2, 2010
The New York Times
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. and SHARIFULLAH SAHAK

KABUL, Afghanistan — A half-dozen suicide bombers stormed the compound of a American contractor working for the United States Agency for International Development in the northern city of Kunduz on Friday, killing at least four people before the militants were themselves killed during a six-hour-long firefight, according to Afghan officials. No Americans were said to have died, according to initial reports.

But as many as three of the dead were foreigners, including a German and a Filipino, according to accounts from the local authorities. British officials were also investigating reports that one of its citizens was killed. One Afghan police officer died, and 23 other people were wounded, including police, security guards, and civilians, said the governor of Kunduz Province, Mohammed Omar.

The Taliban took credit for the attack on the compound of DAI, which is also known as Development Alternatives Inc., a United States-based global consultant which contracts with Usaid to help bolster governance, development and economic growth in other countries.

The attack began around 3 a.m. when the first bomber exploded his car at the gate of the compound. Five other suicide bombers raced inside the building, where they began firing rifles, Mr. Omar said.

The five other attackers all eventually died inside the building, according to the governor, but he did not make it clear whether they had been shot by Afghan forces or had blown themselves up.

“The building has been destroyed,” Mr. Omar said. He also said six American employees trapped inside along with four security guards had been rescued by Afghan forces. There were unconfirmed reports that some employees fled to the roof of the building during the battle.

The assault was the latest in a string of Taliban attacks on foreign workers and compounds, especially those doing development work, in what has seemed to be a response to American and NATO forces increasing the pace of their military operations throughout the country.

Many of these attacks have come in Kandahar, the hub of southern Afghanistan, were militants have been killing political leaders, foreign workers and their Afghan colleagues, including a young Afghan woman who worked for DAI who was gunned down in April as she drive home in a motorized rickshaw just a few hundred yards from her office.

Kunduz, one the country’s major northern cities, is less volatile than Kandahar. But the province has become increasingly contested over the past year as Taliban leaders have tried to consolidate their control of areas that until recently has been considered relatively safe. German troops have been the major western military force in the region, but new American troops have been arriving in northern Afghanistan to bolster the NATO presence in Kunduz and other northern provinces.

A NATO statement said the Kunduz attack “was an attempt to intimidate Afghans and members of the international community trying to improve the lives of all Afghans.” It said NATO troops were helping Afghan forces at the site and treating injured civilians at a nearby military base.

    Bombers Storm U.S. Aid Compound in Afghanistan, NYT, 2.7.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/03/world/asia/03afghan.html