History > 2011 > USA > War > Afghanistan (I)

An injured woman

is escorted out of “Finest” supermarket in central Kabul

after the suicide attack.

Rahmat Gul/Associated Press

Boston Globe > Big Picture > Afghanistan, January 2011

February 3, 2011

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2011/02/afghanistan_january_2011.html

Suicide bomber kills 20

in Afghanistan's southeast

KHOST, Afghanistan | Mon Mar 28, 2011
2:52am EDT
Reuters

KHOST, Afghanistan (Reuters) - Three suicide bombers killed 20 people in an attack on a construction firm in a restive province in southeastern Afghanistan, government officials said Monday, with the Taliban claiming responsibility for the assault.

Violence across Afghanistan has spiraled in the past year, with Taliban-led militants stepping up their fight against the Afghan government and its Western backers as Kabul prepares to take over responsibility for security gradually from foreign forces.

An Interior Ministry statement said the attackers forced their way into the firm's compound after killing a security guard and then detonated a truck packed with explosives.

"As a result, 20 employees of the construction company were killed and 50 others were injured," the statement said.

Mohebullah Sameem, governor of southeastern Paktika province, earlier put the death toll from the attack in the remote Bermel district at 13.

He said the dead and wounded included employees of the firm and other civilians. Construction crews and others working on infrastructure projects are frequently targeted by insurgents.

Bermel shares a long border with lawless areas of neighboring Pakistan, where insurgents are said to have safe havens from which they launch attacks inside Afghanistan.

In an emailed statement to media, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid claimed the Islamist group had carried out the attack but said it had been on a military base and that 49 foreign and Afghan troops had been killed and wounded.

Taliban insurgents often inflate casualties inflicted on Afghan government forces and foreign troops.

Violence across Afghanistan last year reached its worst levels since the Taliban were ousted by U.S.-backed Afghan forces in 2001, with civilian and military casualties hitting record levels.

The violence underscores the challenges ahead as U.S. and NATO forces begin to hand over security responsibility to Afghan troops, allowing foreign troops to withdraw gradually from an increasingly unpopular war.

The process, announced last week, will begin with the handover of seven areas in July and culminate in the withdrawal of all foreign combat troops by 2014.

(Reporting by Elyas Wahdat; Writing by Hamid Shalizi; Editing by Paul Tait and Alan Raybould)

    Suicide bomber kills 20 in Afghanistan's southeast, R, 28.3.2011, http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/28/us-afghanistan-attack-idUSTRE72R0W420110328

NATO Airstrike in Afghanistan

Claims Civilians

March 26, 2011
The New York Times
By RAY RIVERA

KABUL, Afghanistan — A NATO airstrike targeting Taliban fighters accidentally killed and wounded an unspecified number of civilians Friday in the southern province of Helmand, one of the most insecure regions in the country, NATO officials said on Saturday.

NATO officials are investigating the episode. It occurred when the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force called in an airstrike on two vehicles believed to be carrying a Taliban leader and his associates. A NATO team assessing the damage discovered the civilians following the airstrike. NATO officials have not disclosed how many civilians were killed and wounded, and did not say whether suspected Taliban were among the casualties.

Civilian casualties has been one of the most contentious issues in Afghanistan, exacerbating tensions in the delicate relationship between international forces and President Hamid Karzai. Mr. Karzai raised the issue again in a speech on Tuesday, listing the reduction of civilian deaths as an issue that must be addressed as Afghan forces begin taking over responsibility for security in some areas of the country beginning this summer.

A United Nations report earlier this month said that 2,777 civilians were killed in Afghanistan in 2010, the deadliest toll in more than nine years of war. The Taliban were blamed for 75 percent of the deaths. The number of deaths by NATO forces declined 26 percent. But a number of high-profile episodes have led to continuing strains between NATO and the Afghan government.

Meanwhile, a NATO soldier was killed in an insurgent attack in southern Afghanistan on Saturday. NATO does not release the identity or nationality of casualties until their national authorities are notified.

    NATO Airstrike in Afghanistan Claims Civilians, NYT, 26.3.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/27/world/asia/27afghanistan.html

Soldier Expected to Plead Guilty

to Afghan Murders

March 23, 2011
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

JOINT BASE LEWIS-MCCHORD, Wash. (AP) — A 22-year-old soldier accused of carrying out a brutal plot to murder Afghan civilians faces a court-martial Wednesday in a case that involves some of the most serious criminal allegations to arise from the U.S. war in Afghanistan.

Spc. Jeremy Morlock, of Wasilla, Alaska, has agreed to plead guilty to three counts of murder, one count of conspiracy to commit assault and battery, and one count of illegal drug use in exchange for a maximum sentence of 24 years, said Geoffrey Nathan, one of his lawyers.

His client is one of five soldiers from Joint Base Lewis-McChord's 5th Stryker Brigade charged in the killings of three unarmed Afghan men in Kandahar province in January, February and May 2010. Morlock is the first of the five men to be court-martialed — which Nathan characterized as an advantage.

"The first up gets the best deal," he said by phone Tuesday, noting that even under the maximum sentence, Morlock would serve no more than eight years before becoming eligible for parole.

According to a copy of the plea agreement, which was obtained by The Associated Press, Morlock has agreed to testify against his co-defendants. In his plea deal, Morlock said he and others slaughtered the three civilians knowing that they were unarmed and posed no legitimate threat.

He also described taking a lead role in the January incident — lobbing a grenade at the civilian while another soldier shot at him, and then lying about it to his squad leader.

The court-martial comes days after a German news organization, Der Spiegel, published three graphic photos showing Morlock and other soldiers posing with dead Afghans. One image features Morlock grinning as he lifts the head of a corpse by its hair.

Army officials had sought to strictly limit access to the photographs due to their sensitive nature. A spokesman for the magazine declined to say how it had obtained the pictures, citing the need to protect its sources.

Morlock told investigators the murder plot was led by Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs, of Billings, Mont., who is also charged in the case; Gibbs maintains the reasons behind the killings were legitimate.

Nathan said Morlock's mother, hockey coach and pastor are among the witnesses who might testify on his behalf in court. He indicated the defense would argue that a lack of leadership in the unit contributed to the killings.

"He's really a good kid. This is just a bad war at a bad time in our country's history," Nathan said. "There was a lack of supervision, a lack of command control, the environment was terrible. In his mind, he had no choice."

After the January killing, platoon member Spc. Adam Winfield, of Cape Coral, Fla., sent Facebook messages to his parents saying that his fellow soldiers had murdered a civilian and were planning to kill more. Winfield said his colleagues warned him not to tell anyone.

Winfield's father alerted a staff sergeant at Lewis-McChord, which is south of Seattle, but no action was taken until May, when a witness in a drug investigation in the unit also reported the deaths.

Winfield is accused of participating in the final murder. He admitted in a videotaped interview that he took part and said he feared the others might kill him if he didn't.

Also charged in the murders are Pvt. 1st Class Andrew Holmes of Boise, Idaho, and Spc. Michael Wagnon II of Las Vegas.

Seven other soldiers in the platoon are charged with lesser crimes, including assaulting the witness in the drug investigation, drug use, firing on unarmed farmers and stabbing a corpse.

    Soldier Expected to Plead Guilty to Afghan Murders, NYT, 23.3.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/03/23/us/AP-US-Afghan-Probe.html

Settling the Afghan War

March 22, 2011
The New York Times
By LAKHDAR BRAHIMI
and THOMAS R. PICKERING

DESPITE the American-led counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, the Taliban resistance endures. It is not realistic to think it can be eradicated. Efforts by the Afghan government, the United States and their allies to win over insurgents and co-opt Taliban leaders into joining the Kabul regime are unlikely to end the conflict.

The current strategy of “reintegration” may peel away some fighters and small units, but it does not provide the political resolution that peace will require.

Neither side of the conflict can hope to vanquish the other through force. Meanwhile, public support in Western countries for keeping troops in Afghanistan has fallen. The Afghan people are weary of a long and debilitating war.

For their part, the Taliban have encountered resistance from Afghans who are not part of their dedicated base when they have tried to impose their stern moral code. International aid has improved living standards among Afghans in areas not under Taliban control. That has placed new pressure on the Taliban, as has an increasing ambivalence toward the Taliban in Pakistan.

The stalemate can be resolved only with a negotiated political settlement involving President Hamid Karzai’s government and its allies, the Taliban and its supporters in Pakistan, and other regional and international parties. The United States has been holding back from direct negotiations, hoping the ground war will shift decisively in its favor. But we believe the best moment to start the process toward reconciliation is now, while force levels are near their peak.

For the insurgents, the prospects for negotiating a share of national power are not likely to improve by waiting until the United States withdraws most combat forces by the end of 2014; on the contrary, the possibility that Americans might find a way to maintain an enduring military presence past 2014 suggests that perhaps the only way they can truly get the Americans out is with a negotiated settlement.

A peace settlement would require a domestic element — a political order broadly acceptable to Afghans — and an international element: severing Taliban ties to Al Qaeda and containing rampant drug production and trafficking in Afghanistan. Both elements would need to be negotiated along parallel tracks.

None of it will be easy: Afghans will have to allow for fair representation of the Taliban in central and provincial governments; get the Taliban to abide by election results; determine the proper role of Islamic law in regulating dress, behavior and the administration of justice; protect human rights and women’s rights; decide whether and how to bring perpetrators of war atrocities to justice; and incorporate some Taliban fighters into police and security forces. A guaranteed withdrawal of foreign forces, as the insurgency has demanded, would almost certainly be part of a deal.

As chairmen of an Afghanistan task force with 15 members from nine countries, organized by the Century Foundation, a nonpartisan research institution, we had confidential conversations for nearly a year with dozens of people from almost every side of the conflict.

Attention has rightly focused on the conflicting views about negotiating peace with the Taliban among Mr. Karzai’s supporters, disaffected northerners and other groups in Afghan society, not to mention hesitation in the international community. But there is considerable division within the insurgency too.

The insurgency is not as fragmented as the old anti-Soviet mujahedeen alliance was, but it is hardly monolithic, as we learned from conversations with Taliban field commanders and individuals close to the Quetta Shura, which is made up of Taliban leaders loyal to Mullah Muhammad Omar; the Haqqani network, an insurgent group allied with the Taliban; and the Hezb-i-Islami group, which is led by the longtime mujahedeen warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

Some of the people we interviewed stuck to hard-line positions: “There is nothing to negotiate,” “Foreigners just need to leave Afghanistan,” “This is our country,” and so on. But others engaged in a give-and-take, making clear they wanted to see an end to violence and a start toward serious talks for peace.

For example, an adviser to the Haqqani network told us it was operationally independent but recognized the authority of Mullah Omar — and therefore could not negotiate separately with the Karzai government and the American-led coalition. Yet we were also told that the network was eager to engage in “friendly” dialogue.

Contrary to popular view, Pakistan cannot unilaterally dictate the outcome. Pakistanis told us they were finding it increasingly difficult to prevent the Afghan conflict from fueling extremist violence in their country. Pakistani security officers who have provided long-time support for the Taliban run the risk of events getting beyond their control.

A neutral international facilitator is needed to begin explorations with all potential parties toward negotiation. The United Nations could appoint a facilitator. Or a facilitator could be a group, an international organization, a neutral state or a group of states. A settlement would require international guarantees, aid, peacekeeping and enforcement of the agreement.

The international community has confronted equally intractable conflicts in Cambodia, Bosnia and elsewhere and, with unity of purpose, resolved them. Afghanistan is a particularly challenging case, but it is not hopeless.


Lakhdar Brahimi is a former United Nations special representative for Afghanistan. Thomas R. Pickering is a former ambassador and under secretary of state.

    Settling the Afghan War, NYT, 22.3.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/23/opinion/23brahimi.html

Photos Stoke Tension

Over Afghan Civilian Deaths

March 21, 2011
The New York Times
By ALISSA J. RUBIN

KABUL, Afghanistan — The release of explicit photographs of American soldiers engaged in atrocities against Afghan civilians threatens to ignite tensions between the Afghan and American governments and provide fodder for the Taliban’s efforts to persuade ordinary Afghans that the foreign troops fighting here are a malevolent force.

NATO officials and Western diplomats here have been steeling themselves for the release, worried that it will further undermine relations with President Hamid Karzai at a sensitive moment when there have been several recent episodes of civilian casualties. Despite an overall decline in civilian casualties caused by NATO forces, the incidents have tarnished the coalition campaign and put President Karzai in the awkward position of having to explain why the country’s allies are killing unarmed children and women.

Three photographs, published in the German magazine Der Spiegel, show members of the self-designated “Kill Team” comprised of United States Army soldiers who are accused of making a sport of killing innocent Afghans as they show off one of their victims in a kind of trophy photo; another photograph shows two Afghan civilians who appear to be dead.

Der Spiegel, which published the photographs in its March 20 print edition, but has not yet put the photos online, has blurred the victims’ faces so that their expressions can not be seen. While that makes the photographs somewhat less inflammatory than they would be otherwise, it does not conceal the faces of the soldiers, who look disconcertingly satisfied as they kneel next to an apparently dead Afghan civilian.

Five of the soldiers involved in the killings, who were from the 5th Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, based at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington State, are now facing court martial proceedings for the deaths of three, unarmed Afghan civilians. Seven other members of the unit are accused of lesser crimes. The men are accused of faking combat situations to justify killing randomly chosen Afghans with grenades and guns. The case came to light after one of the soldiers informed military investigators about the killings; he was then beaten so severely by other members of the unit for betraying them that he had to be hospitalized.

The killings occurred in Maiwand district of Kandahar Province, one of the areas that was dominated by the Taliban until major military operations last summer and fall.

The pictures bring to mind those of the torture and humiliation suffered by Iraqis at the hands of American troops in the Abu Ghraib prison, which came to light in the spring of 2004. However, there were dozens of those pictures and they clearly showed the victims’ faces, making their pain all the more apparent. That case reverberated across the Muslim world in ways that this case has yet to do in part because of the absence of photographs. The release of the images threatens to change that.

However there was little reaction on Monday because it was Nowruz, the Persian New Year, which is a national holiday and many families go out for picnics so that even those few with internet access were less likely to see the photos. The Afghan government had no comment on Monday on the release nor did the American Embassy, which referred all questions to the American military.

The military and diplomats are hoping to mute public anger by emphasizing that the soldiers in the Afghan case are being brought to justice. In a statement, the Army described the actions as “repugnant” and underscored that a prosecution was underway.

“The actions portrayed in these photographs remain under investigation and are now the subject of ongoing U.S. court-martial proceedings,” the statement said.

“The United States Army is committed to adherence to the Law of War and the humane and respectful treatment of combatants, noncombatants, and the dead,” the statement added. “When allegations of wrongdoing by Soldiers surface, to include the inappropriate treatment of the dead, they are fully investigated. Soldiers who commit offenses will be held accountable as appropriate.”

One of the pictures published by Der Spiegel shows a soldier, Spc. Jeremy Morlock of Wasilla, Alaska, posing, a grin on his face, next to a dead Afghan who is mostly undressed, his body streaked with blood, as the soldier lifts up the man’s head as if showing him off like a trophy. Specialist Morlock has been charged with murder.

A second, similar photograph shows another soldier, Pfc. Andrew Holmes, who has been charged with murder, kneeling next to the same corpse.

A third photograph shows two Afghan civilians who appear to be dead and whose bodies have been arranged leaning limply against a post.

The photos had been described to reporters by defense lawyers for some of the soldiers, but their release had been prohibited by a military judge. It is not clear how Der Spiegel obtained the images.

    Photos Stoke Tension Over Afghan Civilian Deaths, NYT, 21.3.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/22/world/asia/22afghanistan.html

NATO air strike killed

two Afghan children in east - officials

KABUL | Tue Mar 15, 2011
10:56am GMT
Reuters

KABUL (Reuters) - An air strike by NATO-led forces killed two children as they were watering fields in Afghanistan's eastern Kunar province late on Monday, an Afghan official and lawmaker said.

The deaths occurred weeks after tensions between Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his Western backers were inflamed by the killing of nine children who were collecting firewood in the same province.

Last year was the most lethal for non-combatants since the Taliban were ousted from power in 2001, with a 15 percent rise in civilian casualties to 2,777 according to a report by the United Nations last week. The report said insurgents were responsible for three quarters of the deaths.

Abdul Marjan, district chief of Chawki in Kunar where the two brothers, aged 10 and 15, where killed on Monday, said the boys had been working on irrigation channels before they were hit.

"They might have been mistaken for insurgents as they were carrying spades on their shoulders," Marjan told Reuters.

Shahzada Shahid, a lawmaker from Kunar, said the pair were students who had gone out to help work their father's fields.

Irrigation agreements between villagers in the area mean the family's land gets access to river water only in the evening.

A spokesman for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force,(ISAF) said an air strike in Chawki on Monday evening targeted two suspected insurgents, killing one and wounding another after they were seen planting a roadside bomb.

He added that ISAF were looking into media reports of civilian casualties.

NATO-led forces have significantly tightened rules governing air strikes and night raids in the past two years, leading to a drop in civilian casualties, but deaths are still relatively frequent and highly sensitive.

Karzai this month told General David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, that his apology for the strike that killed nine children was "not enough," and civilian casualties by foreign troops were "no longer acceptable" to the Afghan government or people.

(Reporting by Rohullah Anwari, writing by Hamid Shalizi, editing by Emma Graham-Harrison)

    NATO air strike killed two Afghan children in east - officials, R, 15.3.2011, http://uk.reuters.com/article/2011/03/15/uk-afghanistan-civilians-nato-idUKTRE72E2XS20110315

Targeted civilian killings spiral

in Afghan war: U.N.

KABUL | Wed Mar 9, 2011
1:37am EST
Reuters
By Matt Robinson

KABUL (Reuters) - Targeted killings of civilians in Afghanistan doubled last year, the United Nations said on Wednesday, as an expanding insurgency strikes at Western efforts to build up the Afghan government and security forces.

Of 462 assassinations in 2010, half occurred in Taliban strongholds in the south, where the United States says it has made most gains from a troop surge aimed at turning the tide of the almost decade-old war.

In an annual report on the conflict's civilian toll, the United Nations said there had been a 15 percent rise in the number of civilians killed to 2,777 in 2010, continuing a steady rise over the past four years.

Insurgents were responsible for 75 percent of those deaths.

Abductions rose 83 percent, and violence continued to spread from the south to the north, east and west, the report said. Civilian deaths in the north, in particular, rose 76 percent.

But the most "alarming" trend, it said, was a 105 percent increase in the targeted killing of government officials, aid workers and civilians perceived to be supportive of the Afghan government or NATO-led foreign forces.

The tactic threatens to undermine further the handover of responsibility for security to the Afghan government, police and army starting this year, as Washington and its NATO allies seek to draw down their combined 150,000-strong force.

In many parts of Afghanistan, local governors live behind sandbags on U.S. military outposts and government officials rarely travel to the areas they are supposed to run.

The social and psychological impact of assassinations are "more devastating than a body count would suggest," the U.N. report said.

"An individual deciding to join a district shura (meeting), to campaign for a particular candidate, to take a job with a development organization, or to speak freely about a new Taliban commander in the area, often knows that their decision may have life or death consequences," it said.

"This suppression of individuals' rights also has political, economic and social consequences as it impedes governance and development efforts."

VIOLENCE SPREADING

Civilian assassinations were up 588 percent and 248 percent in Helmand and Kandahar provinces respectively, the main strongholds of the Taliban and the focus of a U.S. troop surge.

The report noted a 26 percent decline in the number of civilian deaths caused by coalition and Afghan forces.

Yet the killing of civilians in NATO operations has re-emerged as a major source of friction between Kabul and its Western backers.

Last week, NATO helicopters gunned down nine Afghan boys collecting firewood, drawing condemnation from Afghan President Hamid Karzai and apologies from President Barack Obama and his top commander in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates repeated the apology on Monday during a visit to assess security progress before Washington starts gradually withdrawing troops in July.

Casualties among women rose 6 percent in 2010, and among children by 21 percent, while "the spread and intensity of the conflict meant that more women and children had even less access to essential services such as healthcare and education."

Suicide attacks and homemade bombs claimed most lives.

Of the 440 deaths attributed to NATO and Afghan forces, 171 were caused by aerial attacks, sharply down on 2009 as a result of tightened rules of engagement.

The report noted a decline in civilian casualties in "night raids" by foreign forces, a tactic ramped up under Petraeus to the anger of Afghans and Karzai's government.

It attributed the drop to stricter regulations, but expressed concern about "consistent implementation" and a "persistent lack of transparency on investigations and accountability."

(Editing by Paul Tait and Daniel Magnowski)

    Targeted civilian killings spiral in Afghan war: U.N., R, 9.3.2011, http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/09/us-afghanistan-civilians-idUSTRE7224WJ20110309

Putting Afghan Plan Into Action

Proves Difficult

March 8, 2011
The New York Times
By C. J. CHIVERS

ALAM KHEL, Afghanistan — If the American-led fight against the Taliban was once a contest for influence in well-known and conventionally defined areas — the capital and large cities, main roads, the border with Pakistan, and a handful of prominent valleys and towns — today it has become something else.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the United States military has settled into a campaign for scattered villages and bits of terrain that few people beyond their immediate environs have heard of.

In and near places like this village in Ghazni Province, American units have pushed their counterinsurgency doctrine and rules for waging war into freshly contested areas of rural Afghanistan — even as their senior officers have decided to back out of other remote areas, like the Pech, Korangal and Nuristan valleys, once deemed priorities. In doing so, American infantry units have expanded a military footprint over lightly populated terrain from the Helmand and Arghandab River basins to the borders of the former Soviet Union, where the Taliban had been weak.

Depending on point of view, this shift — which resulted from both the current military leadership’s reconsideration of past commanders’ decisions and the troop buildup ordered by President Obama — is either an operational achievement or grounds for exasperation, even confusion.

On a morning a few weeks ago, helicopters touched down before dawn on a hard, frozen field beside this village. American and Afghan soldiers ran out and clustered against mud walls, where they shivered until beginning their searches at sunrise.

For hours, the young men entered homes, separating local men from local women, seeking signs of those who plant bombs and ambush government patrols. They found little beyond a staple of Afghan counterguerrilla war: a procession of men who said they knew nothing of the Taliban.

One ritualized exchange summarized the encounters. The soldiers questioned a man who had seemed to signal their movements by repeatedly honking a minivan horn. His right hand bore a tattoo of crossed swords.

Asked by the American platoon commander, First Lt. Philip Divinski, what the tattoo signified, the man said he didn’t know. “My mother put it there,” he said. He added, “When I was 2.”

The lieutenant gave a sigh.

Episodes like this, duplicated countless times on patrols in places where more American forces have fanned out, underscore an institutionalized frustration in a war in its second decade. They capture the latest change in how the Pentagon’s counterinsurgency campaign feels on the ground — in a new list of villages designated “key terrain,” the old search for Afghan needles in Afghan haystacks grinds on.

Officially, Mr. Obama’s Afghan buildup shows signs of success, demonstrating both American military capabilities and the revival of a campaign that had been neglected for years. But in the rank and file, there has been little triumphalism as the administration’s plan has crested.

With the spring thaw approaching, officers and enlisted troops alike say they anticipate another bloody year. And as so-called surge units complete their tours, to be replaced by fresh battalions, many soldiers, now seasoned with Afghan experience, express doubts about the prospects of the larger campaign.

The United States military has the manpower and, thus far, the money to occupy the ground that its commanders order it to hold. But common questions in the field include these: Now what? How does the Pentagon translate presence into lasting success?

The answers reveal uncertainty. “You can keep trying all different kinds of tactics,” said one American colonel outside of this province. “We know how to do that. But if the strategic level isn’t working, you do end up wondering: How much does it matter? And how does this end?”

The strategic vision, roughly, is that American units are trying to diminish the Taliban’s sway over important areas while expanding and coaching Afghan government forces, to which these areas will be turned over in time.

But the colonel, a commander who asked that his name be withheld to protect him from retaliation, referred to “the great disconnect,” the gulf between the intense efforts of American small units at the tactical level and larger strategic trends.

The Taliban and the groups it collaborates with remain deeply rooted; the Afghan military and police remain lackluster and given to widespread drug use; the country’s borders remain porous; Kabul Bank, which processes government salaries, is wormy with fraud, and President Hamid Karzai’s government, by almost all accounts, remains weak, corrupt and erratically led.

And the Pakistani frontier remains a Taliban safe haven.

Even a successful military campaign, soldiers and Marines consistently say, is unlikely to untangle this knot of dysfunction, much less within the deadlines discussed in Washington. The Obama administration hopes to begin withdrawing forces within months and to complete a drawdown by 2014 (a plan reiterated by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in Afghanistan this week).

“This is tough,” one company commander, Capt. Edward T. Peskie, said of the problems. “And it’s more complex than I think most people realize.”

And if the American presence is decreased, the troops often say, to whom is the country’s security to be entrusted?

An awareness of the disconnect should not be confused with pessimism, at least not outwardly expressed. A can-do pragmatism and a quick operational tempo are apparent in many infantry units, even if the work is overlaid with nagging questions.

Another commander, Lt. Col. Alan Streeter, leads a reinforced infantry battalion newly arrived in Ghazni Province for a one-year tour. “I think this place is far from secure,” he said of the Andar and Deh Yak districts, where his unit, Second Battalion, Second Infantry, is assigned. “But I think it is a hell of a lot better than it was.”

With cold weather lingering, he planned to have soldiers meet local Afghans while they can — before temperatures climb and vegetation rises, making conditions better for the Taliban to stage attacks. “I want to take this chance to get out, to talk to the people,” he said. “Because in the spring we may be too busy fighting.”

Such determination is evident in many conversations. But in some ways, the mission of Colonel Streeter’s battalion frames another difficulty with the Pentagon’s puzzle: the math. His reinforced battalion, about 1,000 soldiers, is assigned to secure territory with an estimated 150,000 people. And he was explicit: these districts are far from secure.

Afghanistan has nearly 30 million people. How can an American force of roughly 100,000 secure them all? The question tends to bring perplexed looks, or even grimaces, meaning — politely and carefully — take that question upstairs.

Again, the generals have an answer. The Afghan military and police are growing, and in a few years could be roughly three times the size of the NATO forces, they say.

But the escalating numerical projections, which have grown each year as the United States has deepened its involvement in the war, have yet to undo these forces’ reputation for poor initiative, corruption, marginal skills and an enduring dependency on foreign supervision for everything from resupply and fire support to actions that should be routine, like standing post.

Many American officers, year in and year out, describe a persistent trait visible to anyone who visits almost any line unit for an extended time. Afghan units are supposed to be preparing to take over security. Yet they are often unwilling to set out on independent patrols, beyond trips back and forth between their own positions, or to the bazaar. They remain largely a tag-along force.

And so, firefight by firefight, bomb by bomb, many of the troops whose lives are at risk openly discuss how gains feel tentative, perhaps temporary.

Their generals have designated scores of rural areas “key terrain districts.” The soldiers are creating, at cost of money and blood, pockets of security.

But when Americans arrive in a new area, attacks and improvised bombs typically follow — making roads and trails more dangerous for the civilians whom, under current Pentagon counterinsurgency doctrine, the soldiers have arrived to protect.

And in some cases, the old priorities — like the fight for the Pech Valley — are later deemed unnecessary, even as the latest effort carves out ground.

“We create little security bubbles,” said Sgt. First Class Paul Meacham, a platoon leader in Third Battalion, 187th Infantry, which swept Alam Khel, after one of his last patrols before rotating back to the States last month. “But they are little bubbles that are easy to attack and infiltrate.”

After a moment of reflection, he said: “I think it could work. But it’s going to be a long time.”

Asked how long, his answer was immediate. “These people,” he said, nodding toward the villages nearby, “think in decades.”

    Putting Afghan Plan Into Action Proves Difficult, NYT, 8.3.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/09/world/asia/09ghazni.html

Petraeus Sees Military Progress

in Afghanistan

March 8, 2011
The New York Times
By CARLOTTA GALL

KABUL, Afghanistan — Besides well-reported advances in southern provinces, American and NATO forces have also been able to halt or reverse Taliban gains around the capital, Kabul, and even in the north and west of the country, Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American commander in Afghanistan, said Tuesday.

The general made his case for an improving overall picture in Afghanistan in an interview, offering a preview of what is likely to be his argument next week when he testifies before Congress for the first time since he took over command of coalition forces in Afghanistan eight months ago.

It will also be his first testimony since the influx of additional American and Afghan troops began to change the balance of the fighting in southern Afghanistan in late 2010.

Under General Petraeus, the tempo of operations has been stepped up enormously. American Special Operations forces and coalition commandos have mounted more than 1,600 missions in the 90 days before March 4 — an average of 18 a night — and the troops have captured and killed close to 3,000 insurgents, according to information provided by the general.

“The momentum of the Taliban has been halted in much of the country and reversed in some important areas,” he said.

“The Taliban have never been under the pressure that they were put under over the course of the last 8 to 10 months,” he added.

Other aspects of the war remain difficult, and progress is patchy and slow, General Petraeus conceded. There has been only modest momentum on efforts to persuade Taliban fighters to give up the fight and join a reintegration program, and a plan to train and install thousands of local police officers in rural communities to mobilize resistance to the Taliban has proved to be a painstaking business constrained by concerns that it will create militias loyal to warlords.

But security in and around Kabul has significantly improved, he said, thanks in part to specialized commando units of the Afghan Army, the police and the intelligence service, which operate in the greater Kabul area.

In 2009, Kabul was encircled by Taliban forces and there was talk of the capital’s falling to the insurgents, but now much of the greater Kabul area has been secured, he said.

President Hamid Karzai is to announce on the Afghan New Year, March 21, the beginning of the transition to Afghan control of some districts around the country, part of the plan to pass responsibility for security to the Afghan government by 2014.

The Taliban are expected to try to retake lost territory in coming months, and in particular to single out those districts in transition, the general said. But he said coalition forces would mount their own spring offensive to pre-empt Taliban efforts to retake lost territory.

“You cannot eliminate all the sensationalist attacks,” he said. “That is one of the objectives for our spring offensive — to solidify those gains and push them back further.”

Over the past four months, coalition forces have seen a fourfold increase in the number of weapons and explosives caches found and cleared, in large measure because the Taliban were forced out of territory they had held for up to five years, he said.

“The Taliban had to leave hastily, and the fighters and leaders were killed, captured or run off, and if they were run off they could not cart off all the I.E.D. and weapons and explosives that they had established over five years in some cases,” the general said, referring to improvised explosive devices.

Troops were finding more than 120 explosives and weapons caches a month recently compared with 40 a month a year ago, according to information from the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan provided by the general.

Destroying the infrastructure the Taliban had built up over the years, including field hospitals, weapons stores, bomb-making factories, safe houses and even detention facilities, would make it harder for them to regain the territory, he said. “Not having those will make their job more difficult this spring,” he said.

Many of the Taliban leaders and fighters had escaped to sanctuaries in Pakistan, he said, and coalition forces would focus in coming months on a strategy called “defense and depth,” blocking their return through strategic border regions that the insurgents traditionally used, namely in southern Helmand, eastern Kandahar and eastern Nangarhar Provinces, where Afghanistan borders Pakistan, and preventing them from regaining control of their old havens in Afghanistan.

As Afghanistan braces for an increase in fighting that traditionally occurs in the spring, however, tensions over civilian casualties have flared again, after an episode in eastern Afghanistan last week when American helicopter gunners killed nine boys collecting firewood.

A time lag between the sighting of a group of insurgents by ground forces and the relay of the information to a helicopter attack team led to the deaths, the general said, citing a preliminary inquiry. The attack team believed that the group of boys was the group of insurgents, he said.

“They thought they saw the same group but did not, and there was a gap in time before the final positive identification from the ground force until the handoff to the weapons team,” he said. “Beyond a human tragedy, it was a terrible and tragic mistake.”

That episode on March 1 came soon after a more controversial attack in the same region that the Afghan government said killed 65 civilians on Feb. 17. Mr. Karzai rejected General Petraeus’s earlier explanation that the victims were Taliban fighters, and he refused to accept his apology on Sunday for the deaths of the nine boys.

President Obama and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates have also apologized to Mr. Karzai and the Afghan people for the deaths.

“This kind of event does clearly undermine the trust between the Afghan government and ISAF, and more important, between the Afghan people and ISAF,” General Petraeus conceded. The full investigation was nearly complete, he said, and a review had been ordered of the tactical directive given to troops. He declined comment on the Feb. 17 episode.

Despite the flare-up, relations with President Karzai were good, the general insisted. The two meet several times a week, including for one-on-one meetings. “We have open and forthright conversations with one another,” he said.

Over all, he noted, civilian casualties caused by Afghan and coalition forces had declined in 2010 by about 20 percent from the previous year, which he said was “impressive” given the deployment of 100,000 more Afghan and coalition troops and the increase in operations in 2010.

A United Nations report on civilian casualties in Afghanistan to be released Wednesday would show the majority — 75 percent — of civilian casualties in 2010 were caused by Taliban and insurgent attacks, he said.

    Petraeus Sees Military Progress in Afghanistan, NYT, 8.3.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/09/world/asia/09petraeus.html

Gates Says U.S. Positioned

to Take Some Troops

Out of Afghanistan

March 7, 2011
The New York Times
By ELISABETH BUMILLER

KABUL, Afghanistan — Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said on Monday that the United States is now “well-positioned” to begin withdrawing some American troops from Afghanistan in July, but he said a substantial force would remain and that the United States was starting talks with the Afghans about keeping a security presence in the country beyond 2014.

At a joint news conference in the Afghan capital with President Hamid Karzai, Mr. Gates said that no decisions had been made about the number of troops to go home. His remarks were tempered with enough caveats, however, to suggest that the July drawdown, a promise of President Obama, could be minor. “As I have said time and again, we are not leaving Afghanistan this summer,” Mr. Gates said.

Currently there are some 100,000 American forces in the country.

Mr. Gates also used the news conference to offer an extended apology to Mr. Karzai about the mistaken killings last week of nine Afghan boys, which Mr. Karzai accepted. On Sunday Mr. Karzai had rejected an apology about the killings from Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American commander in Afghanistan.

“This breaks our heart,” Mr. Gates said as he stood beside Mr. Karzai in the Afghan presidential palace. “Not only is their loss a tragedy for their families, it is a setback for our relationship with the Afghan people.”

One boy who was wounded but survived the incident described a helicopter gunship that hunted down the children as they gathered wood on the mountainside outside their village. The gunners apparently mistook the children for insurgents who hours earlier had fired on an American base. The boys were from 9 to 15 years old.

Mr. Karzai, after responding that civilian casualties were at the heart of the tensions between the United States and Afghanistan, said of Mr. Gates that “I trust him fully when he says he’s sorry.”

Mr. Gates, who is on an unannounced two-day trip to Afghanistan, spoke more positively than he has in recent months about what he cited as progress in the nearly decade-old war. “The gains we are seeing across the country are significant,” he said, citing improvements in security in Helmand and Kandahar Provinces in the south as well as some progress on Afghanistan’s eastern border with Pakistan.

Mr. Gates made similar remarks to American troops at Bagram Air Base earlier in the day, when he told them that “you’re having success, there’s just no question about it.” He added, “I know you’ve had a tough winter, it’s going to be a tougher spring and summer, but you’ve made a lot of headway, and I think you’ve proven with your Afghan partners that this thing is going to work.”

Despite the optimism in Mr. Gates’s remarks, American commanders in the east and north have seen continued violence in 2011 and two of the most lethal suicide bomb attacks in nearly two years occurred in the last four weeks. One in the eastern city of Jalalabad killed 40 people and another in Kunduz Province in the north killed 32.

And on Monday a bomb blast in Jalalabad killed another two people and injured 19.

Although fewer American troops are dying this year than last, commanders say it is hard to tell whether that is due to a weakening in the Taliban offensive or the traditional winter hiatus in fighting. But if Afghan troops prove able to keep the violence under control, that could signal a growing ability to protect difficult patches on their own. Training Afghan troops well enough to defend their own country is the long-term goal of the United States and Mr. Obama’s strategy for ending the war.

Maj. Gen. John F. Campbell, the top American commander in eastern Afghanistan, told reporters traveling with Mr. Gates that violence in his region on the border with Pakistan was up from a year ago and that it had also increased in the last 30 days. “I think the enemy is trying to get an early start on what they call their spring campaign,” General Campbell said.

In recent weeks American forces have withdrawn from remote parts of the Pech Valley, which is part of General Campbell’s battle space, in order to concentrate more forces in the border area. General Campbell refused to call the thinning of forces in the valley, once deemed vital to American interests, a retreat, although the fighting there had dragged on for years with no clear result.

“When somebody says you’ve abandoned the Pech, that’s absolutely false,” General Campbell said.

Despite the rise in violence in the east, General Campbell said the attacks by insurgents were less effective than a year ago. His office produced statistics stating that American and coalition forces had killed 2,448 insurgents in his region between June 2010 and February 2011 and had captured 2,870 in the same time period.

As far as an American military presence in Afghanistan beyond 2014, Mr. Gates said that an American team would be in Kabul next week to begin negotiations on what he called a security partnership, which he predicted would be a “small fraction” of the American forces in Afghanistan today. “We have no interest in permanent bases, but if the Afghans want us here, we are certainly prepared to contemplate that,” Mr. Gates said.

From Afghanistan, Mr. Gates is to fly to Stuttgart, Germany, the headquarters of United States Africa Command, where he will preside over a ceremony observing General Carter Ham’s ascension as commander of Africa Command, which has Libya in its area of responsibility.

After that, Mr. Gates will attend a meeting of NATO defense ministers in Brussels, where the civil war in Libya and American troop withdrawals in Afghanistan will be discussed.

Alissa J. Rubin contributed reporting

    Gates Says U.S. Positioned to Take Some Troops Out of Afghanistan, NYT, 7.3.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/08/world/asia/08gates.html

U.S. apology for Afghan deaths

"not enough": Karzai

KABUL | Sun Mar 6, 2011
10:50am EST
Reuters
By Hamid Shalizi and Jonathon Burch

KABUL (Reuters) - Afghan President Hamid Karzai told General David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, on Sunday his apology for a foreign air strike that killed nine children last week was "not enough."

At a meeting with his security advisers at which Petraeus was present, Karzai said civilian casualties by foreign troops were "no longer acceptable" to the Afghan government or to the Afghan people, Karzai's palace said in a statement.

Civilian casualties caused by NATO-led and Afghan forces hunting insurgents have again become a major source of friction between Karzai and his Western backers.

In the meeting, Petraeus apologized for the deaths of the nine children in eastern Kunar province last Tuesday, saying the killings were a "great mistake" and there would be no repeat.

"In return, the president said the apology was not enough and stressed that civilian casualties caused during operations by coalition forces were the main cause of strained relations between the United States and Afghanistan," the palace said.

"The people of Afghanistan are fed up with such horrific incidents and apologies or condemnation is not going to heal their wounds," it quoted Karzai as saying.

Hours before Karzai's statement, hundreds of people chanting "Death to America" protested in the Afghan capital against the recent spate of civilian deaths, in a sign of the simmering anti-Western feeling among many ordinary Afghans.

International concern over civilian casualties has grown, and the fallout from the recent incidents is even threatening to hamper peace and reconciliation efforts, with a gradual drawdown of the 150,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan to begin in July.

"DEEP REGRET"

Last Tuesday, two attack helicopters gunned down nine Afghan boys as they collected firewood in Kunar after a nearby foreign base had come under insurgent attack.

The incident, in a volatile area that has seen a recent spike in foreign military operations, prompted rare public apologies from Petraeus and his deputy.

President Barack Obama also expressed "deep regret" over the killings and the United Nations called for a review of air strikes.

There have been at least four incidents of civilian casualties by foreign troops in the east in the past two weeks in which Afghan officials say more than 80 people died.

Demonstrators marched through the center of Kabul, some carrying banners bearing pictures of blood-covered dead children they said were killed in air strikes by foreign forces.

"We will never forgive the blood shed by our innocent Afghans who were killed by NATO forces," said one protester Ahmad Baseer, a university student.

"The Kunar incident is not the first and it will not be the last time civilian casualties are caused by foreign troops."

Dozens of women were also among the protesters, a rare occurrence in a country where women are largely banned from public life. Using loudspeakers, some of the women chanted: "We don't want Americans, we don't want the Taliban, we want peace."

PROTESTERS BLAME BOTH SIDES

U.S. and NATO commanders have tightened procedures for using air strikes in recent years, but mistaken killings of innocent Afghans still happen, especially with U.S. and NATO forces stepping up operations in the past few months.

Although civilian casualties caused by foreign forces have decreased over the past two years -- mainly due to a fall in air strikes -- aid groups last November warned a recent rise in the use of air power risked reversing those gains.

Civilian casualties in Afghanistan rose 20 percent in the first 10 months of 2010 compared with 2009, according to U.N. figures, with insurgents responsible for more than three-quarters of those killed or wounded.

In the latest attack by insurgents, 12 civilians were killed on Sunday when their vehicle was hit by a roadside bomb in southeastern Paktika province, governor Mohebullah Sameem said.

But while insurgents are responsible for the large majority of civilian deaths, it is those by foreign forces which rile Afghans most. Many Afghans say militant attacks would not happen if international troops were not in Afghanistan.

"Killing civilians, whether it is the Taliban or foreign forces, is a crime," said protester Shahla Noori.

"Both the Taliban and Americans are responsible for the killings of thousands of civilians," she said.

(Additional reporting by Matt Robinson in Kabul and Elyas Wahdat in Khost; Writing by Jonathon Burch; Editing by Elizabeth Fullerton)

    U.S. apology for Afghan deaths "not enough": Karzai, R, 6.3.2011, http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/06/us-afghanistan-civilians-idUSTRE7224WJ20110306

NATO Apologizes

for Killing 9 Afghan Civilians

March 2, 2011
Filed at 8:14 a.m. EST
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — NATO has apologized for killing nine civilians in Kunar province, a hotbed of the insurgency in northeast Afghanistan.

In a statement Wednesday, the coalition said preliminary findings indicate that NATO forces accidentally killed nine civilians in the Pech district of Kunar province on Tuesday. Local officials say nine boys, ages 12 and under, were killed as they were gathering firewood.

The coalition says there apparently was miscommunication in passing information about the location of militants firing on a coalition base.

Top NATO commander Gen. David Petraeus said the coalition was "deeply sorry" for the tragedy and said the deaths should never have occurred. Petraeus says he will personally apologize to President Hamid Karzai when he returns from London.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Several hundred villagers protested Wednesday against coalition strikes that they claim killed scores of civilians, including nine boys, in a hotbed of the insurgency in the northeast. NATO has contested the claims, saying armed insurgents, not civilians, were killed.

Civilian casualties have long been a source of friction between Afghan President Hamid Karzai and the U.S.-led international force fighting in Afghanistan.

Karzai's office issued a statement condemning the NATO strike.

"Innocent children who were collecting fire wood for their families during this cold winter were killed. Is this the way to fight terrorism and maintain stability in Afghanistan?" Karzai asked in the statement. He said NATO should focus more on "terrorist sanctuaries" — a phrase he typically uses when referring to Taliban refuges in neighboring Pakistan.

Noorullah Noori, a member of the local development council in Manogai district, said four of the nine boys killed were age 7, three were age 8, one was nine years old and one was 12. Also, one child was wounded, he said.

He said the children were gathering wood under a tree in the mountains on Tuesday about a half kilometer from a village in Manogai district.

"I myself was involved in the burial," he said. "Yesterday we buried them at 5 p.m."

He said that during the four-hour demonstration, protesters chanted "Death to America" and "Death to the spies," a reference to what they said was bad intelligence given to helicopter weapons teams.

The coalition said it was investigating the villagers' allegations. NATO said coalition forces returned fire after two rockets were fired at a coalition base, slightly wounding a local contractor.

Late last month, tribal elders in Kunar claimed that NATO forces killed more than 50 civilians in air and ground strikes. The international coalition denied that claim, saying video showed troops targeting and killing dozens of insurgents and a subsequent investigation yielded no evidence that civilians had been killed. An Afghan government investigation has said that 65 civilians were killed.

In Logar province on Tuesday, four Afghan soldiers and their interpreter were killed by a roadside bomb, according to Din Mohammad Darwesh, a spokesman for the province. He said Wednesday that the soldiers were on a joint patrol with U.S. forces when their vehicle hit the bomb planted in Charkh district.

    NATO Apologizes for Killing 9 Afghan Civilians, NYT, 2.3.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/03/02/world/asia/AP-AS-Afghanistan.html

Taliban Bet on Fear

Over Brawn as Tactic

February 26, 2011
The New York Times
By ALISSA J. RUBIN

KABUL, Afghanistan — This year the spring offensive by the Taliban and other insurgent groups has a new and terrifying face: the insurgents are using suicide bombers who create high casualties to sow terror and are planning an assassination campaign as well, Afghan and American military analysts say.

The insurgents’ deadly bet is that fear will trump anger and that Afghans will lose any faith they had in their government’s security forces and eventually turn to the Taliban.

“You have to ask yourself, ‘If you were the Taliban now, what would you do?’ ” said Gen. Jack Keane, who retired from the Army in 2003 and is now a consultant to Gen. David H. Petraeus, the NATO commander for Afghanistan.

Given the massing of NATO forces in the south, the answer appears to be attack the urban, civilian population, creating widespread insecurity in an effort to reinforce the existing resentment of foreign troops and doubts about President Hamid Karzai’s government.

In less than four weeks, 116 Afghans have died in seven suicide attacks, most recently in Faryab Province on Saturday. Two of the attacks, one in Jalalabad on Feb. 19 and another in Kandahar on Feb. 12, involved multiple assailants and were carefully choreographed and skillfully timed to obtain a high death toll and maximum media coverage. In at least one case, the mission was carefully rehearsed.

This is a striking change from Afghan suicide bombings of just six months ago, in which the bombers exacted few casualties.

These new tactics highlight the challenge of an adaptive insurgency with a reservoir of potential fighters, many of them madrasa students in Pakistan’s tribal areas. They show too the increasingly integrated network of insurgent groups that lend their expertise to one another as well as the difficulties the Afghan government has had in rallying its own people to fight them.

President Karzai has compounded the problem, some Afghan analysts say, by insisting that the Taliban are not to blame for the violence and that they are “upset brothers” rather than mortal enemies.

Underlying the latest attacks are the region’s geopolitics. Both Pakistan and Iran are known to be supporting the Taliban and play out their antagonism to the United States on Afghan soil. “You have to see these attacks in the broader strategic context,” said Haseeb Humayoon, the director of a risk consulting firm here.

A period of relative calm last year in Afghan cities coincided with an easing of tensions between the Afghans and Pakistan over negotiations with the Taliban. Now the Afghans appear to be trying to negotiate with the Taliban on their own, and there is talk of permanent American bases here, which Pakistan and Iran see as a potential loss of their influence.

“Our neighbors interpret that as Afghans’ seeking guarantors of security other than them,” Mr. Humayoon said.

“Both the international military and our own government are distracted,” he added. “Our government is not focusing enough on rallying people against these forces, and the international military coalition has not focused enough on Pakistan.”

American commanders play down the significance of the attacks in terms of the overall fight in Afghanistan, but Afghan security officials say they see a troubling and potentially crippling development. “It’s not that the American surge operations will be affected by this directly,” said a former Afghan security official. Rather, he predicted that the suicide attacks could preoccupy Afghan security leaders, diminishing their ability to contribute to the fight in the south.

The Americans had not expected the suicide bombings on this scale but were bracing for assassination attempts this spring against officials, said Rear Adm. Gregory J. Smith, NATO’s chief of strategic communications.

The Taliban in the past have been careful not to single out civilians, although civilians are often killed in attacks. At least some Taliban factions seem worried about the latest tactics. Zabiullah Mujahid, the Taliban spokesman for the north and east of the country, said an investigation was under way into the Jalalabad attack, which killed 40 people, nearly half of them civilians.

“We are taking this issue seriously as we have appointed a delegate to assess the civilians casualties,” he said. “We are not happy when there is even one civilian lost.”

Despite such statements, attacks on civilians are clearly on the rise and the sophistication of the suicide bombings has been striking, Admiral Smith said. American and Afghan officials now believe that Lashkar-e-Taiba, the group that planned the attacks in Mumbai, India, in 2008, has been working with the Haqqani network, which is based in North Waziristan. Lashkar-e-Taiba specializes in planning complex suicide attacks.

“The suicide bombings are, we believe, predominantly requested and funded by Haqqani but facilitated by LET and AQ,” said a senior American military official, referring to Lashkar-e-Taiba and Al Qaeda. “The latter groups provide bombers and material in exchange for money. Haqqani chooses targets.”

The bombing of the Kabul Bank branch in Jalalabad used a formula Lashkar-e-Taiba has used elsewhere: multiple attackers, a first bomber to clear the way for the others and the holding of one bomber in reserve to attack the police and medical workers who arrive to help. Other signatures included having a suicide bomber on a cellphone with a handler, as was the case in the Mumbai attacks.

What cannot be ignored, however, is the situation across the border in Pakistan. While American troops have made clear gains in uprooting the Taliban from Kandahar and large areas of Helmand Province, Pakistan has not made similar strides in ousting the Taliban from the tribal areas, according to analysts here. The Haqqani network, among the most brutal, remains anchored in North Waziristan despite a stream of drone strikes by the Central Intelligence Agency.

And in bad news for Afghanistan, a little-noticed peace deal took place late last year between the Haqqani network and Shiite tribes in the Kurram Agency in Pakistan, which opened up a new route for Haqqani agents to enter Afghanistan, American and Afghan intelligence officials said. A number of fighters have been observed crossing the border over the past several weeks, American intelligence officials said.

No one yet seems to have figured out how to deal with the two largest underlying problems: the poor performance of the Afghan government, which makes many of the country’s citizens reluctant to fight for it, and the millions of Pashtuns in the tribal areas who feel they are unrepresented and even discriminated against and are willing to cross the border to fight in Afghanistan.

“You still have two major factors,” General Keane said, “the ineffectiveness of the central government and the Pakistani sanctuaries.”

The situation is strikingly reminiscent of Iraq in 2005, when that country’s cities were gripped by violence, the government was unable to keep the people safe and fighters flowed in from other countries. It took four years to stem that violence, and an influx of troops like the one that Americans have now carried out in Afghanistan. The rash of recent bombings risks undermining the psychological advantage that had come with increased American troop strength in southern Afghanistan.

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington.

    Taliban Bet on Fear Over Brawn as Tactic, NYT, 26.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/27/world/asia/27afghanistan.html

Warning Against Wars

Like Iraq and Afghanistan

February 25, 2011
The New York Times
By THOM SHANKER

WEST POINT, N.Y. — Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates bluntly told an audience of West Point cadets on Friday that it would be unwise for the United States to ever fight another war like Iraq or Afghanistan, and that the chances of carrying out a change of government in that fashion again were slim.

“In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as General MacArthur so delicately put it,” Mr. Gates told an assembly of Army cadets here.

That reality, he said, meant that the Army would have to reshape its budget, since potential conflicts in places like Asia or the Persian Gulf were more likely to be fought with air and sea power, rather than with conventional ground forces.

“As the prospects for another head-on clash of large mechanized land armies seem less likely, the Army will be increasingly challenged to justify the number, size, and cost of its heavy formations,” Mr. Gates warned.

“The odds of repeating another Afghanistan or Iraq — invading, pacifying, and administering a large third-world country — may be low,” Mr. Gates said, but the Army and the rest of the government must focus on capabilities that can “prevent festering problems from growing into full-blown crises which require costly — and controversial — large-scale American military intervention.”

Mr. Gates was brought into the Bush cabinet in late 2006 to repair the war effort in Iraq that was begun under his predecessor, Donald H. Rumsfeld, and then was kept in office by President Obama. He did not directly criticize the Bush administration’s decisions to go to war. Even so, his never-again formulation was unusually pointed, especially at a time of upheaval across the Arab world and beyond. Mr. Gates has said that he would leave office this year, and the speech at West Point could be heard as his farewell to the Army.

A decade of constant conflict has trained a junior officer corps with exceptional leadership skills, he told the cadets, but the Army may find it difficult in the future to find inspiring work to retain its rising commanders as it fights for the money to keep large, heavy combat units in the field.

“Men and women in the prime of their professional lives, who may have been responsible for the lives of scores or hundreds of troops, or millions of dollars in assistance, or engaging or reconciling warring tribes, may find themselves in a cube all day re-formatting PowerPoint slides, preparing quarterly training briefs, or assigned an ever-expanding array of clerical duties,” Mr. Gates said. “The consequences of this terrify me.”

He said Iraq and Afghanistan had become known as “the captains’ wars” because “officers of lower and lower rank were put in the position of making decisions of higher and higher degrees of consequence and complexity.”

To find inspiring work for its young officers after combat deployments, the Army must encourage unusual career detours, Mr. Gates said, endorsing graduate study, teaching, or duty in a policy research institute or Congressional office.

Mr. Gates said his main worry was that the Army might not overcome the institutional bias that favored traditional career paths. He urged the service to “break up the institutional concrete, its bureaucratic rigidity in its assignments and promotion processes, in order to retain, challenge, and inspire its best, brightest, and most battle-tested young officers to lead the service in the future.”

There will be one specific benefit to the fighting force as the pressures of deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan decrease, Mr. Gates said: “The opportunity to conduct the kind of full-spectrum training — including mechanized combined arms exercises — that was neglected to meet the demands of the current wars.”

    Warning Against Wars Like Iraq and Afghanistan, NYT, 25.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/26/world/26gates.html

The Next Impasse

February 24, 2011
The New York Times
By DEXTER FILKINS

THE WRONG WAR
Grit, Strategy, and the Way Out of Afghanistan
By Bing West
Illustrated. 307 pp. Random House. $28.

In the nine years since the first American troops landed in Afghanistan, a new kind of religion has sprung up, one that promises success for the Americans even as the war they have been fighting has veered dangerously close to defeat. Follow the religion’s tenets, give yourself over to it and the new faith will reward you with riches and fruits.

The new religion, of course, is counterinsurgency, or in the military’s jargon, COIN. The doctrine of counterinsurgency upends the military’s most basic notion of itself, as a group of warriors whose main task is to destroy its enemies. Under COIN, victory will be achieved first and foremost by protecting the local population and thereby rendering the insurgents irrelevant. Killing is a secondary pursuit. The main business of American soldiers is now building economies and political systems. Kill if you must, but only if you must.

The showcase for COIN came in Iraq, where after years of trying to kill and capture their way to victory, the Americans finally turned the tide by befriending the locals and striking peace deals with a vast array of insurgents. In 2007 and 2008, violence dropped dramatically. The relative stability in Iraq has allowed Americans to come home. As a result, counterinsurgency has become the American military’s new creed, the antidote not just in Iraq but Afghanistan too. At the military’s urging, President Obama has become a convert, ordering thousands of extra young men and women to that country, in the hopes of saving an endeavor that was beginning to look doomed. No one in the Obama administration uses the phrase “nation-building,” but that is, of course, precisely what they are trying to do — or some lesser version of it. Protect the Afghan people, build schools and hold elections. And the insurgents will wither away.

So what’s wrong? Why hasn’t the new faith in Afghanistan delivered the success it promises? In his remarkable book, “The Wrong War,” Bing West goes a long way to answering that question. “The Wrong War” amounts to a crushing and seemingly irrefutable critique of the American plan in Afghanistan. It should be read by anyone who wants to understand why the war there is so hard.

The strength of West’s book is the legwork he’s done. Most accounts of America’s wars, particularly those by former military officers, are written in the comfort of an office in the United States. Not so here. At age 70, West, the author of several books on America’s wars, went to Afghanistan and into the bases and out on patrols with the grunts, waded through the canals, ran through firefights and humped up the mountains. (At one point he contracted cholera and was evacuated by helicopter.) Embedding with American troops in God-forsaken places like Kunar and Helmand Provinces is hard business. What drives this man? West is worth a book in himself.

But the legwork pays off. West shows in the most granular, detailed way how and why America’s counterinsurgency in Afghanistan is failing. And, in the places where the effort is showing promise, he demonstrates why we don’t have the resources to duplicate that success on a wider scale. Mind you, West is no antiwar lefty: he’s a former infantry officer who fought in Vietnam. An assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration, he admires — nay, adores — America’s fighting men and women, and he wants the United States to succeed. But the facts on the ground, it appears, lead him to darker truths.

West joined American troops in Garmsir, Marja and Nawa in Helmand Province; Barge Matal in Nuristan; and the Korengal Valley in Kunar — all in the heart of the fight. His basic argument can be summed up like this: American soldiers and Marines are very good at counterinsurgency, and they are breaking their hearts, and losing their lives, doing it so hard. But the central premise of counterinsurgency doctrine holds that if the Americans sacrifice on behalf of the Afghan government, then the Afghan people will risk their lives for that same government in return. They will fight the Taliban, finger the informants hiding among them and transform themselves into authentic leaders who spurn death and temptation.

This isn’t happening. What we have created instead, West shows, is a vast culture of dependency: Americans are fighting and dying, while the Afghans by and large stand by and do nothing to help them. Afghanistan’s leaders, from the presidential palace in Kabul to the river valleys in the Pashtun heartland, are enriching themselves, often criminally, on America’s largesse. The Taliban, whatever else they do, fight hard and for very little reward. American soldiers, handcuffed by strict rules of engagement, have surrendered the initiative to their enemies. Most important, the Afghan people, though almost certainly opposed to a Taliban redux, are equally wary of both the Americans and their Afghan “leaders.” They will happily take the riches lavished on them by the Americans, but they will not risk their lives for either the Americans or their own government. The Afghans are waiting to see who prevails, but prevailing is impossible without their help.

Time after time, West shows the theory of counterinsurgency scraping up against the hard and jagged ground of the real Afghanistan. In one instance, he examines the work of a group of American soldiers and civilians, known as a provincial reconstruction team, whose job was to provide development assistance to Afghan locals in Asadabad (A-Bad to the Americans) in eastern Afghanistan. It was overseen by a battalion known as the 1-32 and commanded by a lieutenant colonel named Mark O’Donnell. In June 2009, after the reconstruction team had been working there for three years, an American supply truck blew a tire on the main road. A crowd of Afghans gathered, and then suddenly a grenade exploded, killing and maiming several Afghans. A riot ensued. “Kill the Americans!” the Afghans shouted. “Protect Islam!” Only later did a videotape of the incident show clearly that an Afghan had tossed the grenade.

About this, West writes:

“For three years, the provincial reconstruction team had lived in a compound a few blocks from the scene of the tragedy. The P.R.T. had paid over $10 million to hire locals, who smiled in appreciation. Every time a platoon from 1-32 patrolled through town, they stopped to chat with storekeepers and to buy trinkets and candy to give to the street urchins. Yet the locals had turned on the soldiers in an instant. That the townspeople in A-Bad who profited from American protection and projects would believe the worst of O’Donnell’s soldiers — whom they knew personally — suggested that the Americans were tolerated but not supported, regardless of their good works and money.”

West’s book is coming out just as the American military, fortified by the extra troops, is claiming to be making significant progress in routing the Taliban from their strongholds in the south. This may be true, but remember who is doing most of the hard work: the Americans, not the Afghans themselves. It’s still an American war.

The subtitle of West’s book promises a “way out,” but it’s a little thin on exit strategies. His solution, tacked on to the final pages of the book, is to transform the American mission to one almost entirely dedicated to training and advising the Afghan security forces. Let the Afghans fight. “Our mistake in Afghanistan was to do the work of others for 10 years, expecting reciprocity across a cultural and religious divide.”

West is not the first to advocate such a course. But it’s not that simple, as he well knows. Nothing in Afghanistan is. Nine years of training and investment have created an Afghan Army fraught with the same corruption and lack of cohesion as the rest of the country. As it is, the Americans are now pouring more resources into the Afghan security forces than ever before. At best, the Afghans are years away from taking over the bulk of the fighting. And even that is a very fragile hope.

Until then, what? As “The Wrong War” shows so well, the Americans will spend more money and more lives trying to transform Afghanistan, and their soldiers will sacrifice themselves trying to succeed. But nothing short of a miracle will give them much in return.


Dexter Filkins is a staff writer for The New Yorker.

    The Next Impasse, NYT, 24.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/27/books/review/Filkins-t.html

U.S. Pulling Back in Afghan Valley

It Called Vital to War

February 24, 2011
The New York Times
By C. J. CHIVERS,
ALISSA J. RUBIN and WESLEY MORGAN

This article is by C. J. Chivers, Alissa J. Rubin and Wesley Morgan.

KABUL, Afghanistan — After years of fighting for control of a prominent valley in the rugged mountains of eastern Afghanistan, the United States military has begun to pull back most of its forces from ground it once insisted was central to the campaign against the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

The withdrawal from the Pech Valley, a remote region in Kunar Province, formally began on Feb. 15. The military projects that it will last about two months, part of a shift of Western forces to the province’s more populated areas. Afghan units will remain in the valley, a test of their military readiness.

While American officials say the withdrawal matches the latest counterinsurgency doctrine’s emphasis on protecting Afghan civilians, Afghan officials worry that the shift of troops amounts to an abandonment of territory where multiple insurgent groups are well established, an area that Afghans fear they may not be ready to defend on their own.

And it is an emotional issue for American troops, who fear that their service and sacrifices could be squandered. At least 103 American soldiers have died in or near the valley’s maze of steep gullies and soaring peaks, according to a count by The New York Times, and many times more have been wounded, often severely.

Military officials say they are sensitive to those perceptions. “People say, ‘You are coming out of the Pech’; I prefer to look at it as realigning to provide better security for the Afghan people,” said Maj. Gen. John F. Campbell, the commander for eastern Afghanistan. “I don’t want the impression we’re abandoning the Pech.”

The reorganization, which follows the complete Afghan and American withdrawals from isolated outposts in nearby Nuristan Province and the Korangal Valley, runs the risk of providing the Taliban with an opportunity to claim success and raises questions about the latest strategy guiding the war.

American officials say their logic is simple and compelling: the valley consumed resources disproportionate with its importance; those forces could be deployed in other areas; and there are not enough troops to win decisively in the Pech Valley in any case.

“If you continue to stay with the status quo, where will you be a year from now?” General Campbell said. “I would tell you that there are places where we’ll continue to build up security and it leads to development and better governance, but there are some areas that are not ready for that, and I’ve got to use the forces where they can do the most good.”

President Obama’s Afghan troop buildup is now fully in place, and the United States military has its largest-ever contingent in Afghanistan. Mr. Obama’s reinforced campaign has switched focus to operations in Afghanistan’s south, and to building up Afghan security forces.

The previous strategy emphasized denying sanctuaries to insurgents, blocking infiltration routes from Pakistan and trying to fight away from populated areas, where NATO’s superior firepower could be massed, in theory, with less risk to civilians. The Pech Valley effort was once a cornerstone of this thinking.

The new plan stands as a clear, if unstated, repudiation of earlier decisions. When Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the former NATO commander, overhauled the Afghan strategy two years ago, his staff designated 80 “key terrain districts” to concentrate on. The Pech Valley was not one of them.

Ultimately, the decision to withdraw reflected a stark — and controversial — internal assessment by the military that it would have been better served by not having entered the high valley in the first place.

“What we figured out is that people in the Pech really aren’t anti-U.S. or anti-anything; they just want to be left alone,” said one American military official familiar with the decision. “Our presence is what’s destabilizing this area.”

Gen. Mohammed Zaman Mamozai, a former commander of the region’s Afghan Border Police, agreed with some of this assessment. He said that residents of the Pech Valley bristled at the American presence but might tolerate Afghan units. “Many times they promised us that if we could tell the Americans to pull out of the area, they wouldn’t fight the Afghan forces,” he said.

It is impossible to know whether such pledges will hold. Some veterans worry that the withdrawal will create an ideal sanctuary for insurgent activity — an area under titular government influence where fighters or terrorists will shelter or prepare attacks elsewhere.

While it is possible that the insurgents will concentrate in the mountain valleys, General Campbell said his goal was to arrange forces to keep insurgents from Kabul, the country’s capital.

“There are thousands of isolated mountainous valleys throughout Afghanistan, and we cannot be in all of them,” he said.

The American military plans to withdraw from most of the four principal American positions in the valley. For security reasons, General Campbell declined to discuss which might retain an American presence, and exactly how the Americans would operate with Afghans in the area in the future.

As the pullback begins, the switch in thinking has fueled worries among those who say the United States is ceding some of Afghanistan’s most difficult terrain to the insurgency and putting residents who have supported the government at risk of retaliation.

“There is no house in the area that does not have a government employee in it,” said Col. Gul Rahman, the Afghan police chief in the Manogai District, where the Americans’ largest base in the valley, Forward Operating Base Blessing, is located. “Some work with the Afghan National Army, some work with the Afghan National Police, or they are a teacher or governmental employee. I think it is not wise to ignore and leave behind all these people, with the danger posed to their lives.”

Some Afghan military officials have also expressed pointed misgivings about the prospects for Afghan units left behind.

“According to my experience in the military and knowledge of the area, it’s absolutely impractical for the Afghan National Army to protect the area without the Americans,” said Major Turab, the former second-in-command of an Afghan battalion in the valley, who like many Afghans uses only one name. “It will be a suicidal mission.”

The pullback has international implications as well. Senior Pakistani commanders have complained since last summer that as American troops withdraw from Kunar Province, fighters and some commanders from the Haqqani network and other militant groups have crossed into Afghanistan from Pakistan to create a “reverse safe haven” from which to carry out attacks against Pakistani troops in the tribal areas.

The Taliban and other Afghan insurgent groups are all but certain to label the withdrawal a victory in the Pech Valley, where they could point to the Soviet Army’s withdrawal from the same area in 1988. Many Afghans remember that withdrawal as a symbolic moment when the Kremlin’s military campaign began to visibly fall apart.

Within six months, the Soviet-backed Afghan Army of the time ceded the territory to mujahedeen groups, according to Afghan military officials.

The unease, both with the historical precedent and with the price paid in American blood in the valley, has ignited a sometimes painful debate among Americans veterans and active-duty troops. The Pech Valley had long been a hub of American military operations in Kunar and Nuristan Provinces.

American forces first came to the valley in force in 2003, following the trail of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the leader of the Hezb-i-Islami group, who, like other prominent insurgent leaders, has been said at different times to hide in Kunar. They did not find him, though Hezb-i-Islami is active in the valley.

Since then, one American infantry battalion after another has fought there, trying to establish security in villages while weathering roadside bombs and often vicious fights.

Along with other slotlike canyons that the United States has already largely abandoned — including the Korangal Valley, the Waygal Valley (where the battle of Wanat was fought in 2008), the Shuryak Valley and the Nuristan River corridor (where Combat Outpost Keating was nearly overrun in 2009) — the Pech Valley was a region rivaled only by Helmand Province as the deadliest Afghan acreage for American troops.

On one operation alone in 2005, 19 service members, including 11 members of the Navy Seals, died.

As the years passed and the toll rose, the area assumed for many soldiers a status as hallowed ground. “I can think of very few places over the past 10 years with as high and as sustained a level of violence,” said Col. James W. Bierman, who commanded a Marine battalion in the area in 2006 and helped establish the American presence in the Korangal Valley.

In the months after American units left the Korangal last year, insurgent attacks from that valley into the Pech Valley increased sharply, prompting the current American battalion in the area, First Battalion, 327th Infantry, and Special Operations units to carry out raids into places that American troops once patrolled regularly.

Last August, an infantry company raided the village of Omar, which the American military said had become a base for attacks into the Pech Valley, but which earlier units had viewed as mostly calm. Another American operation last November, in the nearby Watapor Valley, led to fighting that left seven American soldiers dead.


Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington, and Sangar Rahimi from Kabul.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 24, 2011


An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to a pullback of American forces in eastern Afghanistan. It is a pullback from remote territory within Kunar Province, not from the province as a whole.

    U.S. Pulling Back in Afghan Valley It Called Vital to War, NYT, 24.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/25/world/asia/25afghanistan.html

Exclusive:

U.S. soldier faces trial

for Afghan civilian murder

METHERLAM, Afghanistan | Wed Feb 23, 2011
2:54am EST
Reuters
By Emma Graham-Harrison

METHERLAM, Afghanistan (Reuters) - Yar Mohammad was in Iran one afternoon last September when his electrician father was taken from his home in an Afghan village by U.S. and Afghan soldiers, beaten in a school bathroom and then shot in the head.

By the time he returned the funeral was over, but neighbors had saved cellphone pictures of the bloodied concrete where they said Atta Mohammad spent his last minutes, and of the battered body being carried to his grave.

They told Yar Mohammad, who worked as a laborer in Iran, about the sound of a single deadly shot ringing out through the village.

A U.S. soldier now faces trial for pulling the trigger, but Atta's family, part of the vast rural Afghan population whose support is vital to turning the tide in a decade-long war against Islamist insurgents, say they have been given no compensation and little sense of justice.

"If I had power I would take revenge, but I have no power," said Yar Mohammad, sadly unwrapping one of his few mementos of his father, a picture of a proud older man in a smart turban, superimposed on an ocean sunset.

It is hard to reconcile with the visibly bruised face, surrounded by flowers and tinsel, on videos of the burial.

Sergeant Derrick A. Miller from the Connecticut National Guard is charged with murder, and will appear before a court martial at Fort Campbell in Kentucky on June 6, 2011, an army spokeswoman said in a statement.

The prosecution charges that Miller "at or near Masamute Bala, Afghanistan, on or about September 26, 2010, (did) with premeditation murder Atta Mohammed, son of Mohammed Akbar, by means of shooting him in the head with an M9 9mm Beretta pistol."

The army declined any further comment about the case. And this sparse information is as much as Atta Mohammad's family say they have been given about the loss of a loved one and breadwinner.

The U.S. and other foreign forces fighting in Afghanistan have tightened regulations in recent years to try and prevent civilian casualties, recognizing them as a strategic problem.

But they have done little to tighten up a chaotic system of justice and support for the families of victims.

The lack of support is systemic, long-standing and undermines the impact of billions of dollars spent on aid and years of military rules aimed at reducing civilian deaths, experts say.

"It is important that the U.S. is holding their soldiers accountable for wrongdoing," said Sarah Holewinski, executive director of advocacy organization Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict.

"They must also be accountable, however, to the victims' families and ensure they are doing everything they can to dignify their tragic losses -- communicate, investigate, make amends."

"THEIR ENEMIES WILL INCREASE"

No one from Yar Mohammad's village understands why 60-year-old Atta Mohammad, who worked on a small hydropower project nearby, was taken away and killed. His only apparent offence was failing to hear an order to get out of a patrol's way.

"My father was a little bit deaf. He was passing American soldiers who were patrolling in the area. The Americans shouted to him to stop and he did not pay attention, so when he came home the Americans directly came after him," Yar Mohammad said.

After the killing, the body was passed around between local officials, foreign troops, Afghan police and a hospital before his family was finally summoned to collect it, in what the family saw as a macabre effort to avoid blame for a suspect shooting.

Accidental civilian deaths in firefights, or during raids targeting insurgents, are a regular occurrence, but daylight killings, apparently in cold blood, are rare.

Miller's trial appears to be the first such case since a group of soldiers were accused of forming a "kill team" in southern Afghanistan that murdered civilians for fun last year, although military opacity means there could potentially be similar, unreported prosecutions.

Such egregious killings, however, are seen by many Afghans as the thin end of a wedge of unjustified civilian deaths, which fuels anger at foreign forces and helps insurgents. The NATO-led force in Afghanistan says last year 472 non-combatants were killed or injured by coalition forces last year.

"I suggest American forces don't perform these activities in the future or the number of their enemies will increase," Yar Mohammad told Reuters in government offices in the capital of Laghman province.

Across Afghanistan as a whole, the Taliban are responsible for far more deaths than foreign forces, in suicide attacks, from bombs planted for military or government vehicles, or through the execution of perceived spies or collaborators.

But in Laghman, as in many areas where control is ebbing from the government, the Taliban are not seen as the main threat.

"The Taliban does not have proper weapons and tools so most of the casualties are from American bombardments," Yar Mohammad said. As grim proof, a night-time bombing raid on the village killed his uncle less than six months after his father's death.

POWER OF JUSTICE

A sense that justice is being done can go a long way toward easing anger over civilian deaths.

"At first we were saying all Americans are our enemies, but we identified the person responsible and now only appeal for him to go to trial," Yar Mohammad said.

Yet there seems little attempt to communicate the military's efforts to hold Sergeant Miller to account to those with most at stake, or help the family deal with their economic problems.

The pattern is repeated across Afghanistan.

"In the last year, troops have gotten better at apologizing and compensating, but a majority of civilians still fall through the cracks for a variety of reasons," said Erica Gaston, a human rights lawyer and Afghanistan expert at Open Society Foundations.

It took days of emails and phone calls by Reuters to get confirmation of the charges against Miller, even though the military were given the basic details, including date and location of the shooting and his unit.

The U.S. army said it does not keep a database of ongoing trials of soldiers because it would be too expensive, and does not have a centralized record of convictions. The Department of Defense did not respond to questions about similar cases in other branches of the military.

There appears to have been almost no change or improvement in a weak, haphazard system since Professor Philip Alston, the U.N. special rapporteur on extra-judicial killings, visited Afghanistan in 2008.

"Seeking clarification from international forces is like entering a maze, one that I also experienced myself," wrote professor Alston, whose status, education and contacts left him little better informed than an illiterate Afghan farmer.

"The international forces in Afghanistan should take seriously the principles of accountability and transparency, the importance of which they so frequently proclaim in other contexts," he added, in a report on the visit.

After months of silence and petitioning officials, Yar Mohammad was invited in January to meet a small group from the U.S. military -- he does not know their name or rank -- in nearby Jalalabad city, where they told him about the trial date.

Five witnesses to his father's abduction accompanied him and gave testimony, but the Afghans left without contacts for a military liaison or even a promise they would be kept updated.

Yar Mohammad simply shrugs when asked about compensation, although he has had to give up hope of returning to Iran and now works as a day laborer in the fields of other villagers.

"I didn't ask about compensation, it is not right for me to focus on money after they killed my father," he said.

(Additional reporting by Rafiq Sherzad;

Editing by Paul Tait, Sanjeev Miglani and Miral Fahmy)

    Exclusive: U.S. soldier faces trial for Afghan civilian murder, NYT, 23.2.2011, http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/23/us-afghanistan-civilian-idUSTRE71M1C420110223

The ‘Long War’

May Be Getting Shorter

February 20, 2011
The New York Times
By NATHANIEL FICK
and JOHN NAGL

Washington

IT is hard to tell when momentum shifts in a counterinsurgency campaign, but there is increasing evidence that Afghanistan is moving in a more positive direction than many analysts think. It now seems more likely than not that the country can achieve the modest level of stability and self-reliance necessary to allow the United States to responsibly draw down its forces from 100,000 to 25,000 troops over the next four years.

The shift is most obvious on the ground. The additional 30,000 troops promised by President Obama in his speech at West Point 14 months ago are finally in place and changing the trajectory of the fight.

One of us, Nathaniel, recently flew into Camp Leatherneck in a C-130 transport plane, which had to steer clear of fighter bombers stacked for tens of thousands of feet above the Sangin District of Helmand Province, in southwestern Afghanistan. Singly and in pairs, the jets swooped low to drop their bombs in support of Marine units advancing north through the Helmand River Valley.

Half of the violence in Afghanistan takes place in only 9 of its nearly 400 districts, with Sangin ranking among the very worst. Slowly but surely, even in Sangin, the Taliban are being driven from their sanctuaries as the coalition focuses on protecting the Afghan people in key population centers and hubs of economic activity, and along the roads that connect them. Once these areas are cleared, it will be possible to hold them with Afghan troops and a few American advisers — allowing the United States to thin its deployments over time.

A significant shift of high-tech intelligence resources from Iraq to Afghanistan, initiated by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the former top commander, is also having benefits. The coalition led by the United States and NATO has been able to capture or kill far more Taliban leaders in nighttime raids than was possible in the past.

The United States certainly can’t kill its way to victory, as it learned in Vietnam and Iraq, but it can put enough pressure on many Taliban fighters to encourage them to switch their allegiance, depriving the enemy of support and giving the coalition more sources of useful intelligence.

Afghan Army troop strength has increased remarkably. The sheer scale of the effort at the Kabul Military Training Center has to be seen to be appreciated. Rows of new barracks surround a blue-domed mosque, and live-fire training ranges stretched to the mountains on the horizon.

It was a revelation to watch an Afghan squad, only days from deployment to Paktika Province on the Pakistani border, demonstrate a fire-and-maneuver exercise before jogging over to chat with American visitors. When asked, each soldier said that he had joined the Army to serve Afghanistan. Most encouraging of all was the response to a question that resonates with 18- and 19-year-old soldiers everywhere: how does your mother feel? “Proud.”

These changes on the ground have been reinforced by progress on three strategic and political problems that have long stymied our plans.

The first is uncertainty about how long America and its allies will remain committed to the fight. The question is still open, but President Obama and the NATO secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, have effectively moved the planned troop withdrawal date from July 2011 to at least 2014, with surprisingly little objection. Congress and the American public seem to have digested without a murmur the news that far fewer troops will be withdrawn in 2011 than will remain. NATO is not collapsing because of Afghanistan. In fact, the International Security Assistance Force continues to grow, with one-quarter of the world’s countries on the ground in Afghanistan with the United States.

Two more vexing problems are the corruption of the Afghan government and the complicity of some Pakistanis with the insurgency. While it is safe to assume that neither the Afghan nor Pakistani leaders will fundamentally alter their policies any time soon, we are changing ours. Previously, our policy options with Presidents Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan and Asif Ali Zardari were limited to public hectoring and private pleading, usually to little effect.

Now, however, the coalition’s military and civilian leaders are taking a new approach to the Afghan and Pakistani governments. We are establishing a task force to investigate and expose corruption in the Afghan government, under the leadership of Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster. We are also shoring up the parts of the border that the Taliban uses by thickening the line with Afghan forces, putting up more drones and coordinating more closely with Pakistani border guards.

Not since the deterioration in conditions in Iraq that drew our attention away from Afghanistan have coalition forces been in such a strong position to force the enemy to the negotiating table. We should hold fast and work for the day when Afghanistan, and our vital interests there, can be safeguarded primarily by Afghans.

That day is coming, faster than many Americans think.


Nathaniel Fick, a former Marine captain, is the chief executive of the Center for a New American Security. John Nagl, a former Army lieutenant colonel, is the president of the center.

    The ‘Long War’ May Be Getting Shorter, NYT, 20.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/opinion/21nagl.html

Staying in Touch With Home,

for Better or Worse

February 16, 2011
The New York Times
By JAMES DAO

KUNDUZ, Afghanistan — Forget the drones, laser-guided bombs and eye-popping satellite imagery. For the average soldier, the most significant change to modern warfare might just boil down to instant chatting.

Consider these scenes from northern Afghanistan:

A gunner inside an armored vehicle types furiously on a BlackBerry, so engrossed in text-messaging his girlfriend in the United States that he has forgotten to watch for enemy movement.

A medic watches her computer screen with something approaching rapture as her 2-year-old son in Florida scrambles in and out of view before planting wet kisses on the camera lens, 7,500 miles away.

A squad leader who has just finished directing gunfire against insurgents finds a quiet place inside his combat outpost, whips out his iPhone and dashes off an instant message to his wife back home. “All is well,” he tells her, adding, “It’s been busy.”

The communication gap that once kept troops from staying looped into the joyful, depressing, prosaic or sordid details of home life has all but disappeared. With advances in cellular technology, wider Internet access and the infectious use of social networking sites like Facebook, troops in combat zones can now communicate with home nearly around the clock.

They can partake in births and birthdays in real time. They can check sports scores, take online college courses and even manage businesses and stock portfolios.

But there is a drawback: they can no longer tune out problems like faulty dishwashers and unpaid electric bills, wayward children and failing relationships, as they once could.

The Pentagon, which for years resisted allowing unfettered Internet access on military computers because of cyber-security concerns, has now embraced the revolution, saying instant communication is a huge morale boost for troops and their families. But military officials quietly acknowledge a downside to the connectivity.

Some commanders worry that troops are playing with iPhones and BlackBerrys (as well as Game Boys and MP3 players) when they should be working, though such devices are strictly forbidden on foot patrols.

More common are concerns that the problems of home are seeping inexorably into frontline life, creating distractions for people who should be focusing on staying safe.

“It’s powerful for good, but it can also be powerful for bad when you’re hearing near real time about problems at home,” said Col. Chris Philbrick, director of the Army’s suicide prevention task force. “It forces you to literally keep your head in two games at one time when your head should be in just one game, in Iraq or Afghanistan.”

It took the military several years to come to terms with both the cyber-security and safety issues. Initially, the Pentagon banned access to social networking sites. But when officials realized that they were falling behind the times and angering young Web-savvy troops, they conducted a study and determined there was more to be gained by allowing access. Classified-network computers still have no access to social networking sites.

To see the upside of a well-connected force, one need look no further than the Morale, Welfare and Recreation building, fondly known as the M.W.R., at Forward Operating Base Kunduz, home to the First Battalion, 87th Infantry for the past year.

In more than 40 plywood cubicles that are available all day, soldiers sit in front of computer terminals or talk on telephones, all of them connected to home. There is virtually no privacy, so the arguments over money and children, the love talk and baby talk, are clearly audible in one cacophonous symphony of chat.

Pfc. Briana Smith, 23, medic and bubbly single mother, is regularly in the M.W.R. checking up on her 2-year-old son, Daniel, who is living with her parents in Tampa. She tries to call home daily and routinely logs onto Facebook to check in with family and friends. And at least once a week, she uses video conferencing on Skype to visit with Daniel.

The close communication thrills her, but can leave a pang, too. “I can’t be involved in the everyday things,” she said. “I only get to see the little tidbits of his life. It’s good to see, but it’s a little heartbreaking at times.”

The Internet connections and phones are not all free. Though troops do not pay to use computers in the M.W.R., they do pay for the phone calls. And those soldiers who bring their own cellphones pay fees that typically start at $70 and frequently run as high as $300 a month. A few chatty soldiers have received bills for more than $10,000 when their texting spun out of control.

To veterans from previous generations, it all seems like something out of science fiction.

George Moody, whose son, Billy, is a gunner with the battalion in Kunduz, spent 25 years in the Navy, deploying on ships that were at sea for months at a time. Letters home to his girlfriend and now wife, Mary Jo, sometimes took six weeks to arrive.

Now Mr. Moody, 49, has the family computer programmed to play reveille as loudly as possible whenever Billy logs onto Skype in Kunduz. With an eight-and-a-half-hour difference between Afghanistan and their home in Ashville, N.C., he and his wife are waking after midnight almost every day.

“It’s like having a baby again, because we’re back to getting up at 1:30, 2 in the morning to talk to him,” Mr. Moody said. “But we could not live with ourselves if we could not talk to him when he wanted to talk.”

The easy communication can relieve fears — but also stoke them. Once families become used to hearing from troops daily, lapses in communication can send imaginations racing.

Christina Narewski communicates daily with her husband, Staff Sgt. Francisco Narewski, by Skype or instant messaging on their BlackBerrys. But when he does not call back quickly, she frets. “It’s an anxiety just waiting to hear from him again, just waiting to hear when he gets back,” she said.

Barbara Van Dahlen Romberg, a psychologist and founder of a group, Give an Hour, that provides counseling to troops and their families, called the connectivity “a mixed blessing” when couples spend too much time waiting for calls or excessively discussing problems that cannot be repaired long distance.

“It’s just stress, stress, stress,” she said. “I talked to a mom who was counting the minutes between calls from her son. I gently told her that may not be good for either one of them. It is a burden.”

The ability to keep tabs on people at almost any hour can also be dangerous for soldiers suspicious of their lovers or spouses. “It’s nothing to go ask your friend: ‘What was she doing last night?’ ” Pfc. Billy Moody said. “They might tell you one thing, she tells you another, and the next thing you know, there’s drama.”

Specialist Kyle Schulz, for instance, learned via cellphone that his girlfriend was taking up with another man. The news sent him into an emotional tailspin — until he rekindled his relationship with an old girlfriend, by cellphone and Facebook. They later discussed marriage, also on Facebook, until that relationship, too, flickered out.

“In a way I kind of think I had too much communication,” Specialist Schulz, 22, said, “because the more I know back home about what’s going on, the less that I am concentrating out here. And it could potentially hurt me or other people.”

In extreme cases, breakups over cellphones or Facebook have sent soldiers to suicide counseling, or worse. In one case involving a different battalion, a soldier in Iraq killed himself in 2009 after spending hours tracking his girlfriend’s movements and then arguing with her and her sister via cellphone and MySpace.

Half an hour after the soldier, Chancellor Keesling, shot himself, his girlfriend sent him an e-mail asking to make up.

“Chance knew exactly who his girlfriend had gone out with and where she was,” said his father, Gregg Keesling. “She stopped taking his calls, and that is what really sent him into the spiral.”

In Kunduz, the battalion chaplain, Capt. Tony Hampton, said he often advises soldiers to shut off the phone and stay away from the computers when tensions are brewing with loved ones back home. Take some time to think, he counsels. Write a letter.

He doubts anyone listens.

“The access is too easy for them and they just can’t rest,” he said. “This is the microwave generation. They need it, and they need it fast.”

    Staying in Touch With Home, for Better or Worse, NYT, 16.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/17/us/17soldiers.html

Afghan Official Says

Women’s Shelters Are Corrupt

February 15, 2011
The New York Times
By ROD NORDLAND

KABUL, Afghanistan — Afghanistan’s top female official launched a sustained verbal assault on women’s shelters on Tuesday, accusing them of corruption and mismanagement, and insisting that the government was determined to take control of them, whether or not donors continue to give financial support.

The shelters, nearly all of them supported by Western charities and governments, provide safe havens for women and girls fleeing sexual and physical abuse, and give the runaways an alternative to seeking help from authorities, who often forcibly return them to their families — and sometimes subject them to further abuse. The new rules would put government officials in charge of the shelters, provide close monitoring of their activities, and could even subject unmarried girls in them to virginity tests, critics complain.

“These shelters do not care about the women in them,” said Hussan Ghazanfar, the acting minister of women’s affairs, at a news conference she called to explain the government’s proposed new rules. “There are thousands of women living around them and they are not concerned about those women,” she said, adding “They are only concerned about their budgets.”

Asserting that the country’s 11 registered shelters spent $11 million last year taking care of 210 women, she said that was far more than needed. “This is corruption, you can just count. The shelters do not need this much money,” Ms. Ghazanfar said.

However, 210 is the number of women in those shelters when officials checked on Monday, she conceded. Many of the women stay briefly until they can reconcile with their families or find an alternative living arrangement. They range from girls forced into child marriage to rape victims fleeing relatives who would kill them to assuage family honor.

Referring to Ms. Ghazanfar’s statistics, Manizha Naderi, who runs the Women for Afghan Women shelter in Kabul, said, “That’s just false information.” Her own shelter with a population of 40 on a given day takes care of 350 women in a year, at a total cost of $100,000, she said.

Many women’s rights advocates have been alarmed by the government’s proposals. “What we’ve heard from our donors is they will not fund the government to run shelters,” Ms. Naderi said. Her non-governmental organization is supported by donations and by foreign aid grants.

Ms. Ghazanfar suggested she was unconcerned about the possibility that international funding for the shelters would end. “The international community gives $11 million and we can work with much less of a budget,” she said. “If they are not ready to give us this money, only one million will take care of this. This budget we can find from anywhere.”

A statement issued by the United Nations recommended that the government consider revisions to the new regulations, as proposed by a legal review commission including human rights advocates as well as government officials.

“The U.N. recognizes that government monitoring and oversight of these centers is needed,” the statement said. “At the same time, civil society organizations should continue to operate women protection centers/shelters independently.”

Ms. Ghazanfar said government control of the shelters reflected the growing maturity of the Afghan government and the increased professionalism of its police, and was part of the broader transition process from dependency on foreign agencies.

Many women’s advocates, however, complain that shelters are needed because women cannot trust police to act on their behalf. Many women, even very prominent ones, say no woman in Afghanistan would go into a police station without a man — even in Kabul and other major cities — for fear of being abused by the police.

Critics of the shelters have accused them, without offering any evidence, of serving as fronts for prostitution, and of undermining the importance of the family in Afghan life.

Others were critical of the embarrassment caused Afghanistan when 18-year-old Bibi Aisha, who had been rescued by a shelter after her Taliban husband cut her nose off, was pictured on Time magazine’s cover last year. The photograph recently won the World Press Photo of the Year award.

“Taking the responsibility of the shelters will reduce rumors about them,” Ms. Ghazanfar said. “This is not a threat to women’s freedom, it is more support for women.”

She said the new regulations came about as the result of a presidential commission which spent a year studying the shelters, but has not yet published its findings. “There are a series of violations we can see and we have told them many times,” she said. Asked for details, she said, “it would take up a lot of time to read all of them.”

She listed some. “Lack of order and discipline, and chaos in some of them. Lack of activities. Shifting women from one province to another. Not following their court cases responsibly. Lack of health facilities. Women kept two weeks when one week was enough. Failure to report problems. Lack of proper reports. Corruption in spending their budgets.”

She also said that many of the women in shelters were “deceived women who don’t have the necessary information about Islam,” and that shelter managers needed to remember that “the family is a sacred place.”

Echoing a favorite refrain of President Hamid Karzai, Ms. Ghazanfar said the international community was often more corrupt than Afghan institutions. “There was $10 million in U.N.D.P. funds for women, how was it spent? No one knows,” she said, referring to the United Nations Development Program, which funds some gender equality programs in Afghanistan, including one inside the Ministry of Women’s Affairs.

United Nations officials did not have an immediate comment on the charge.


Alissa J. Rubin contributed reporting from Kabul.

    Afghan Official Says Women’s Shelters Are Corrupt, NYT, 15.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/16/world/asia/16afghanistan.html

For Some Troops,

Powerful Drug Cocktails

Have Deadly Results

February 12, 2011
The New York Times
By JAMES DAO,
BENEDICT CAREY and DAN FROSCH

This article was reported by James Dao, Benedict Carey and Dan Frosch and written by Mr. Dao.

In his last months alive, Senior Airman Anthony Mena rarely left home without a backpack filled with medications.

He returned from his second deployment to Iraq complaining of back pain, insomnia, anxiety and nightmares. Doctors diagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder and prescribed powerful cocktails of psychiatric drugs and narcotics.

Yet his pain only deepened, as did his depression. “I have almost given up hope,” he told a doctor in 2008, medical records show. “I should have died in Iraq.”

Airman Mena died instead in his Albuquerque apartment, on July 21, 2009, five months after leaving the Air Force on a medical discharge. A toxicologist found eight prescription medications in his blood, including three antidepressants, a sedative, a sleeping pill and two potent painkillers.

Yet his death was no suicide, the medical examiner concluded. What killed Airman Mena was not an overdose of any one drug, but the interaction of many. He was 23.

After a decade of treating thousands of wounded troops, the military’s medical system is awash in prescription drugs — and the results have sometimes been deadly.

By some estimates, well over 300,000 troops have returned from Iraq or Afghanistan with P.T.S.D., depression, traumatic brain injury or some combination of those. The Pentagon has looked to pharmacology to treat those complex problems, following the lead of civilian medicine. As a result, psychiatric drugs have been used more widely across the military than in any previous war.

But those medications, along with narcotic painkillers, are being increasingly linked to a rising tide of other problems, among them drug dependency, suicide and fatal accidents — sometimes from the interaction of the drugs themselves. An Army report on suicide released last year documented the problem, saying one-third of the force was on at least one prescription medication.

“Prescription drug use is on the rise,” the report said, noting that medications were involved in one-third of the record 162 suicides by active-duty soldiers in 2009. An additional 101 soldiers died accidentally from the toxic mixing of prescription drugs from 2006 to 2009.

“I’m not a doctor, but there is something inside that tells me the fewer of these things we prescribe, the better off we’ll be,” Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, the vice chief of staff of the Army who has led efforts on suicide, said in an interview.

Growing awareness of the dangers of overmedicated troops has prompted the Defense Department to improve the monitoring of prescription medications and restrict their use.

In November, the Army issued a new policy on the use of multiple medications that calls for increased training for clinicians, 30-day limits on new prescriptions and comprehensive reviews of cases where patients are receiving four or more drugs.

The Pentagon is also promoting measures to prevent troops from stockpiling medications, a common source of overdoses. For instance, the Navy, which provides medical care for Marines, has begun pill “give back” days on certain bases. At Camp Lejeune, N.C., 22,000 expired pills were returned in December.

The Army and the Navy are also offering more treatments without drugs, including acupuncture and yoga. And they have tried to expand talk therapy programs — one of which, exposure therapy, is considered by some experts to be the only proven treatment for P.T.S.D. But shortages of mental health professionals have hampered those efforts.

Still, given the depth of the medical problems facing combat veterans, as well as the medical system’s heavy reliance on drugs, few experts expect the widespread use of multiple medications to decline significantly anytime soon.

The New York Times reviewed in detail the cases of three service members who died from what coroners said were toxic interactions of prescription drugs. All were classified accidents, not suicides.

Airman Mena was part of a military police unit that conducted combat patrols alongside Army units in downtown Baghdad. He cleaned up the remains of suicide bombing victims and was nearly killed by a bomb himself, his records show.

Gunnery Sgt. Christopher Bachus had spent virtually his entire adult life in the Marine Corps, deploying to the Middle East in 1991, Iraq during the invasion of 2003 and, for a short tour, Afghanistan in 2005. He suffered from what doctors called survivor’s guilt and came back “like a ghost,” said his brother, Jerry, of Westerville, Ohio.

Cpl. Nicholas Endicott joined the Marines in 2003 after working as a coal miner in West Virginia. He deployed twice to Iraq and once to Afghanistan, where he saw heavy combat. On one mission, Corporal Endicott was blown more than eight feet in the air by a roadside bomb, medical records show. He came home plagued by nightmares and flashbacks and rarely left the house.

Given the complexity of drug interactions, it is difficult to know precisely what killed the three men, and the Pentagon declined to discuss their cases, citing confidentiality. But there were important similarities to their stories.

All the men had been deployed multiple times and eventually received diagnoses of P.T.S.D. All had five or more medications in their systems when they died, including opiate painkillers and mood-altering psychiatric drugs, but not alcohol. All had switched drugs repeatedly, hoping for better results that never arrived.

All died in their sleep.

Psychiatry and Warfare

The military medical system has struggled to meet the demand caused by two wars, and to this day it still reports shortages of therapists, psychologists and psychiatrists. But medications have always been readily available.

Across all branches, spending on psychiatric drugs has more than doubled since 2001, to $280 million in 2010, according to numbers obtained from the Defense Logistics Agency by a Cornell University psychiatrist, Dr. Richard A. Friedman.

Clinicians in the health systems of the Defense and Veterans Affairs Departments say that for most patients, those medications have proved safe. “It is important not to understate the benefit of these medications,” said Dr. Robert Kerns, the national director of pain management for the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Paradoxically, the military came under criticism a decade ago for not prescribing enough medications, particularly for pain. In its willingness to prescribe more readily, the Pentagon was trying to meet standards similar to civilian medicine, General Chiarelli said.

But the response of modern psychiatry to modern warfare has not always been perfect. Psychiatrists still do not have good medications for the social withdrawal, nightmares and irritability that often accompany post-traumatic stress, so they mix and match drugs, trying to relieve symptoms.

“These decisions about medication are difficult enough in civilian psychiatry, but unfortunately in this very-high-stress population, there is almost no data to guide you,” said Dr. Ranga R. Krishnan, a psychiatrist at Duke University. “The psychiatrist is trying everything and to some extent is flying blind.”

Thousands of troops struggle with insomnia, anxiety and chronic pain — a combination that is particularly treacherous to treat with medications. Pairing a pain medication like oxycodone, a narcotic, with an anti-anxiety drug like Xanax, a so-called benzodiazepine, amplifies the tranquilizing effects of both, doctors say.

Similarly, antidepressants like Prozac or Celexa block liver enzymes that help break down narcotics and anxiety drugs, extending their effects.

“The sedation is not necessarily two plus two is four,” said Cmdr. Rosemary Malone, a Navy forensic psychiatrist. “It could be synergistic. So two plus two could be five.”

Commander Malone and other military doctors said the key to the safe use of multiple prescriptions was careful monitoring: each time clinicians prescribe drugs, they must review a patient’s records and adjust dosages to reduce the risk of harmful interactions. “The goal is to use the least amount of medication at the lowest doses possible to help that patient,” she said.

But there are limits to the monitoring. Troops who see private clinicians — commonly done to avoid the stigma of seeking mental health care on a base — may receive medications that are not recorded in their official military health records.

In the case of Sergeant Bachus of the Marines, it is far from clear that he received the least amount of medication possible.

He saw combat in Iraq, his brother said, and struggled with alcoholism, anxiety, flashbacks, irritability and what doctors called survivor’s guilt after returning home.

“He could make himself the life of the party,” Jerry Bachus recalled. “But he came back a shell, like a ghost.”

Sergeant Bachus received a diagnosis of P.T.S.D., and starting in 2005, doctors put him on a regimen that included Celexa for depression, Klonopin for anxiety and Risperdal, an antipsychotic. In 2006, after a period of stability, a military doctor discontinued his medications. But six months later, Sergeant Bachus asked to be put on them again.

According to a detailed autopsy report, his depression and anxiety worsened in late 2006. Yet for unexplained reasons, he was allowed to deploy to Iraq for a second time in early 2007. But when his commanders discovered that he was on psychiatric medications, he was sent home after just a few months, records show.

Frustrated and ashamed that he could not be in a front-line unit and unwilling to work behind a desk, he applied in late 2007 for a medical retirement, a lengthy and often stressful process that seemed to darken his mood.

In early March 2008, a military doctor began giving him an opiate painkiller for his back. A few days later, Sergeant Bachus, 38, called his wife, who was living in Ohio. He sounded delusional, she told investigators later, but not suicidal.

“You know, babe, I am really tired, and I don’t think I’ll have any problems falling asleep tonight,” he told her. He was found dead in his on-base quarters in North Carolina nearly three days later.

According to the autopsy report, Sergeant Bachus had in his system two antidepressants, the opiates oxymorphone and oxycodone, and Ativan for anxiety. The delirium he experienced in his final days was “most likely due to the interaction of his medications,” the report said.

Nearly 30 prescription pill bottles were found at the scene, most of them recently prescribed, according to the report.

Jerry Bachus pressed the Marine Corps and the Navy for more information about his brother’s death, but received no further explanations. “There was nothing accidental about it,” he said. “It was inevitable.”

Self-Medicating

The widespread availability of prescription medications is increasingly being linked by military officials to growing substance abuse, particularly with opiates. A Defense Department survey last year found that the illegal use of prescription drugs in the military had tripled from 2005 to 2008, with five times as many troops claiming to abuse prescription drugs than illegal ones like cocaine or marijuana.

The problem has become particularly acute in specialized units for wounded troops, where commanders say the trading of prescription medications is rampant. A report released last month by the Army inspector general estimated that up to a third of all soldiers in these Warrior Transition Units are overmedicated, dependent on medications or have easy access to illegal drugs.

Some of that abuse is for recreational purposes, military officials say. In response, the Army has taken several steps to tighten the monitoring of troops on multiple prescriptions in the transition units.

But in many cases, wounded troops are acquiring drugs improperly because their own prescriptions seem ineffective, experts say. They are self-medicating, sometimes to death.

“This is a huge issue, and partly it’s due to the availability of prescription drugs among returning troops,” said Dr. Martin P. Paulus, a psychiatrist at the University of California, San Diego, and the V.A. San Diego Medical Center. “Everyone knows someone who’ll say, ‘Hey, this worked for me, give it a try.’ ”

Corporal Endicott, for instance, died after adding the opiate painkiller methadone to his already long list of prescribed medications. His doctors said that they did not know where he got the narcotic and that they had not authorized it.

Corporal Endicott, who survived a roadside bomb explosion, was in heavy fighting in Afghanistan, where he saw other Marines killed. After returning from his third deployment, in 2007, Corporal Endicott told doctors that he was having nightmares and flashbacks and rarely left his house. After a car accident, he assaulted the other driver, according to medical records. Doctors diagnosed P.T.S.D. and came to suspect that Corporal Endicott had a traumatic brain injury.

Over the coming year, he was prescribed at least five medications, including the antidepressants Prozac and Trazodone, and an anti-anxiety medication. Yet he continued to have headaches, anxiety and vivid nightmares.

“He would be hitting the headboard,” said his father, Charles. “He would be saying: ‘Get down! Here they come!’ ”

On Jan. 29, 2008, Corporal Endicott was found dead in his room at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., where he had checked himself in for anger management after another car accident. He was 26.

A toxicologist detected at least nine prescription drugs in his system, including five different benzodiazepines, drugs used to reduce anxiety or improve sleep. Small amounts of marijuana and methadone — a narcotic that is particularly dangerous when mixed with benzodiazepines — were also found in his body.

His death prompted Marine Corps officials at Bethesda and Walter Reed Army Medical Center to initiate new procedures to keep Marines from inappropriately mixing medications, including assigning case managers to oversee patients, records show.

Whether Corporal Endicott used methadone to get high or to relieve pain remains unclear. The Marine Corps concluded that his death was not due to misconduct.

“He survived over there,” his father said. “Coming home and dying in a hospital? It’s a disgrace.”

Trying to Numb the Pain

Airman Mena also returned from war a drastically changed man.

He had deployed to Iraq in 2005 but saw little action and wanted to go back. He got the chance in late 2006, when sectarian violence was hitting a peak.

After coming home, he spoke repeatedly of feeling guilty about missing patrols where a sergeant was killed and where several platoon mates were seriously wounded. Had he been driving on those missions, he told therapists, he would have avoided the attacks.

“On my first day, I saw a total of 12 bodies,” he said in one psychological assessment. “Over there, I lost faith in God, because how can God allow all these dead bodies?”

By the summer of 2008, he was on half a dozen medications for depression, anxiety, insomnia and pain. His back and neck pain worsened, but Air Force doctors could not pinpoint a cause. Once gregarious and carefree, Airman Mena had become perpetually irritable. At times he seemed to have hallucinations, his mother and friends said, and was often full of rage while driving.

In February 2009, he received an honorable discharge and was given a 100 percent disability rating by the Department of Veterans Affairs, meaning he was considered unable to work. He abandoned plans to become a police officer.

Now a veteran, his steady medication regimen continued — but did not seem to make him better. His mother, Pat Mena, recalls him being unable to sleep yet also listless, his face a constant shade of pale. Shocked by the piles of pills in his Albuquerque apartment, she once flushed dozens of old prescriptions down the toilet.

Yet for all his troubles, he seemed hopeful when she visited him in early July 2009. He was making plans to open a cigar store, which he planned to call Fumar. His mother would be in charge of decorating it.

The night after his mother left, he put on a new Fentanyl patch, a powerful narcotic often used by cancer patients that he had started using just five weeks before. The Food and Drug Administration issued warnings about the patches in 2007 after deaths were linked to it, but a private clinic in Albuquerque prescribed the medication because his other painkillers had failed, records show.

With his increasingly bad memory, he often forgot what pills he was taking, his mother said. That night when he put on his new patch, he forgot to remove the old one. He died early the next day.

Was the Fentanyl the cause? Or was it the hydromorphone, another narcotic found in his system? Or the antidepressants? Or the sedative Xanax? Or all of the above?

The medical examiner could not say for sure, noting simply that the drugs together had caused “respiratory depression.”

“The manner of death,” the autopsy concluded, “is accident.”


Toby Lyles contributed research.

    For Some Troops, Powerful Drug Cocktails Have Deadly Results, NYT, 12.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/us/13drugs.html

Afghan Rights Groups

Shift Focus to Taliban

February 9, 2011
The New York Times
By ROD NORDLAND

KABUL, Afghanistan — International and local human rights groups working in Afghanistan have shifted their focus toward condemning abuses committed by the Taliban insurgents, rather than those attributed to the American military and its allies.

Outraged by growing civilian casualties, many activists are now calling for the insurgents to be investigated for war crimes and viewed as war criminals. The insurgents are now blamed for more than three-fourths of all civilian casualties, according to United Nations statistics, and those casualties increased by 20 percent last year.

Several groups have approached the International Criminal Court in The Hague, which has been conducting a preliminary inquiry into war crimes charges in Afghanistan.

The activists’ concern would have been unheard-of a year ago, when a series of large-scale civilian casualty episodes caused by NATO forces outraged Afghans and prompted President Hamid Karzai to repeatedly condemn his own allies. Human rights groups joined the chorus of blame.

Now, the episodes that activists say they worry most about no longer stem from NATO aerial bombardments or special forces night raids but from the insurgents’ indiscriminate use of suicide bombers, assassinations and improvised explosive devices. According to United Nations figures, those attacks caused more than 1,800 civilian deaths from January to October 2010. By comparison, NATO forces are blamed for up to 508 civilian deaths last year, according to the Afghanistan Rights Monitor, an independent Afghan group, or even fewer, according to United Nations or NATO figures.

The change in attitude is prompted by more than just raw statistics. NATO and American military leaders have made reducing civilian casualties a cornerstone of their policy and have moved quickly to investigate claims of abuses and often issued apologies.

“NATO, in some cases they acknowledge their mistakes; to some extent they have taken positive steps in terms of reducing their impact,” said Ajmal Samadi, director of Afghanistan Rights Monitor. “On the insurgent side we don’t have any acknowledgment of the problem and instead we see a brazen continuation of their crimes.”

Afghanistan Rights Monitor is no stalking horse for the government. Last year, Mr. Karzai’s spokesman Waheed Omer attacked the group as supporting the enemy. “We said it will take a miracle to win this war under Hamid Karzai’s leadership, and he didn’t like that,” Mr. Samadi said.

While a code of conduct put out by the Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, in 2009 and updated last June called for avoiding civilian casualties, the Taliban have since claimed responsibility for many attacks where civilians were, if not necessarily the targets, the main victims.

“We haven’t seen any change in the conduct of the Taliban since their code of conduct,” said Ahmad Nader Nadery, a commissioner of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission. “To the contrary, we’ve seen an increase in roadside bombs and suicide attacks in places where there are civilian populations.”

A Jan. 29 attack on the Finest Supermarket in Kabul by a Taliban member, using both firearms and a suicide bomb vest, was both a recent example of the insurgents’ disregard for civilians and something of a watershed event for the human rights community.

Among the 14 civilian victims was a prominent human rights activist, Hamida Barmaki, her husband and their four young children; the youngest victim, her 2-year-old son, had a bullet wound in the head as well as blast wounds. When his body was found, clutched in his hand was the scorched remains of a plastic shopping bag handle.

That galvanized many in the rights community, and a memorial service held in Ms. Barmaki’s honor on Feb. 1 at the Human Rights Commission turned into a series of impassioned eulogies, mostly denouncing the insurgents for singling out civilians.

“Killing innocent people is a mortal sin, and under the holy religion of Islam, those who did this are condemned to hell,” said Sima Samar, the head of the rights commission.

Rights groups have not stopped criticizing international forces, particularly over the issue of night raids, which often result in civilian casualties. Many say, as well, that the increased tempo of NATO operations is to blame for the greater frequency of all attacks, including those that end in civilian casualties.

But human rights advocates’ main emphasis has shifted to what amounts to an insurgent killing rampage among softer, civilian targets — whom insurgents kill more than twice as often as they kill government or coalition forces.

For the first time last summer, the United Nations’ twice-yearly report on the protection of civilians in Afghanistan, which previously focused on NATO and Afghan government violations, blamed the insurgents for engaging in “unlawful means of warfare through increased use of I.E.D.’s, suicide attacks and assassinations that violate Afghans’ basic right to life and the international humanitarian law principles.”

Taliban officials reacted furiously to the report, denying its conclusion that insurgents caused most civilian deaths and proposing a “joint commission” between the United Nations and insurgents to study the problem.

“NATO, with the tactical directives, they’ve moved a long way,” said Rachel Reid, Human Rights Watch’s Afghanistan analyst. “It’s very possible to engage with them, even organizations like mine, they’ll meet with us and listen to our concerns.”

“There is a real need for more pressure and open dialogue with insurgent forces for their violations of the laws of war,” she said.

She was among human rights activists who have met with the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, encouraging at least a preliminary investigation of human rights abuses on all sides. “He’s interested, and his ears are open,” she said.

The prosecutor’s office “is examining alleged crimes within the jurisdiction of the court by all actors involved,” said Florence Olara, a spokeswoman for the prosecutor. “A preliminary examination however does not necessarily mean the prosecutor will open an investigation.”

Last August, Amnesty International called on the court to step in. “The Taliban and other insurgent groups should be investigated and prosecuted for war crimes,” the group declared.

The Human Rights Commission had a meeting on Saturday at which it discussed formally calling on the court to investigate Taliban war crimes, but it has made no decision, Mr. Nadery said.

That initiative is complicated by efforts to start reconciliation talks between the government and the Taliban. As part of that, the Karzai government pushed through an amnesty law that specifically absolves any insurgent who stops fighting and accepts the government of all past war crimes and crimes against humanity — an amnesty so broad that it runs contrary to international law.

On top of that, American officials have shown little enthusiasm for the involvement of the International Criminal Court. Fearing prosecution of its own soldiers, the United States has never signed the treaty that established the court, although Afghanistan has.

    Afghan Rights Groups Shift Focus to Taliban, NYT, 9.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/10/world/asia/10afghanistan.html

Afghan War Killed 2 Children Daily In 2010: Report

February 9, 2011
Filed at 3:16 a.m. ET
The New York Times
By REUTERS

KABUL (Reuters) - An average of two children per day were killed in Afghanistan last year, with areas of the once peaceful north now among the most dangerous, an independent Afghan rights watchdog said on Wednesday.

The Afghanistan Rights Monitor (ARM) said in a report that, of the 2,421 civilians the group registered as killed in conflict-related security incidents in 2010, some 739 were under the age of 18.

It attributed almost two thirds of the child deaths to "armed opposition groups" (AOGs), or insurgents, and blamed U.S. and NATO-led forces for 17 percent.

The ARM report said many of the reported child casualties occurred in the violent southern provinces of Kandahar and Helmand, the traditional strongholds of the Taliban insurgency.

But Kunar in the east and Kunduz in the north were also among the most dangerous provinces for children, it said, underlining how violence has spread from insurgent strongholds in the south and east to previously peaceful areas of the country.

Civilian and military casualties hit record levels in 2010, with violence at its worst since the Taliban were overthrown by U.S.-led Afghan forces in late 2001.

War-related child deaths in 2010 were down on 2009, when ARM said 1,050 were killed. However the watchdog warned: "Children were highly vulnerable to the harms of war but little was done by the combatant sides, particularly by the AOGs, to ensure child safety and security during military and security incidents."

A United Nations report late last year found that civilian casualties in Afghanistan rose 20 percent in the first 10 months of 2010 compared with 2009, with more than three-quarters killed or wounded by insurgents.

The report found that there were 6,215 civilian casualties, including 2,412 deaths, in that period. Those caused by Afghan and foreign "pro-government" forces accounting for 12 percent of the total, an 18 percent drop on the same period in 2009.

Civilian casualties in NATO-led military operations, often caused by air strikes and night raids, have long been a source of friction between the Afghan government and its Western partners.

Rules governing air strikes and night raids have been tightened significantly by NATO-led forces in the past two years.

On Monday, the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said a child had been killed inadvertently in an air strike during coalition operations in Helmand. The child was found dead in a compound near the target of the strike, it said.

The ARM report said most of the child deaths were caused by homemade bombs, followed by suicide attacks, air strikes and mortars.

(Editing by Paul Tait and Sanjeev Miglani)

    Afghan War Killed 2 Children Daily In 2010: Report, R, 9.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2011/02/09/world/international-us-afghanistan-casualties-children.html

In Eastern Afghanistan,

at War With the Taliban’s

Shadowy Rule

February 6, 2011
The New York Times
By C. J. CHIVERS

FORWARD OPERATING BASE ANDAR, Afghanistan — Midway through December, Afghan police officers arrested a man who had hidden a fake bomb near a government office in Miri, a village in eastern Afghanistan. The man, who gave the name Muhammad Mir, confessed, saying he wanted to gauge the security force’s reactions to a Taliban attack, according to American intelligence officials.

A paper found in his pocket, though, proved more significant than evidence of the Taliban’s reconnaissance. It was handwritten in Pashto, and when translated here, it revealed a tax-collection ledger of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan — the resurgent Taliban.

Muhammad Alnabi, it showed, had paid the Taliban 1,600 afghanis, or about $37. Sergeant Akbar had paid 700 afghanis, and Abdulla Kaka had remitted 6,500, funds for a so-called shadow government to carry on its fight.

The scrap in Mr. Mir’s pocket, hinting at both boldness and organization, became one part of a gradually expanding portrait of how the Taliban has organized and fought its guerrilla war in a corner of rural Afghanistan.

The picture is of an underground government by local fighters, organized under the Taliban’s banner, who have established the rudiments of a civilian administration to complement their shadowy combat force. They run schools, collect taxes and adjudicate civil disputes in Islamic courts. And when they fight, their gunmen and bomb makers are aided by an intelligence and support network that includes villagers, who signal for them and provide them shelter, and tunnels in which to elude capture or find medical care.

As part of the Obama administration’s campaign to subdue a sprawling insurgency and create a durable Afghan government, the military sent thousands of soldiers last year into rural areas under the influence, if not outright control, of the Taliban. One of those task forces, the Third Battalion of the 187th Infantry Regiment, arrived in Miri in September to help establish a government presence in a place — though it is the official seat of the Ghazni Province’s Andar District — where government had been sporadic for a decade.

Almost five months later — through prisoner interrogations, informants’ reports, intercepted radio chatter, surveillance of fighters’ funerals, Taliban documents, nearly 200 gunfights, and captured photographs, equipment and bombs — the Americans have assembled an expanding portrait of how the latter-day Taliban functions here.

The battalion’s sense of its enemies is far from complete. Officers say they do not have detailed profiles of most fighting cells. Important questions, including whether outside financing flows to the insurgents in this area, remain unanswered.

But its analysis, built nearly from scratch and revealed through interviews with commanders, soldiers and analysts, nonetheless sketches a tactical, social and visual map of an organization that is at once widespread but rarely seen by outsiders. And it presents an implicit reminder of the difficulties facing the Pentagon’s plan to turn over areas like this one, with its determined and deep-rooted insurgency, to Afghan security forces by 2014.

Hidden Power

The analysis outlines two distinct elements of Taliban structure: — a quasi government and the military arm that empowers it.

On one level, the Taliban has firmly re-established its hold over civilian life in rural Ghazni. Even with an American battalion patrolling Andar and the neighboring Deh Yak District each day, the Taliban runs 28 known schools; circulates public statements by leaflets at night; adjudicates land, water-rights and property disputes through religious courts; levies taxes on residents; and punishes Afghans labeled as collaborators.

“There are tangible indicators that a shadow government does exist and has been strong for the past two or three years,” said First Lt. Michael D. Marietta, the task force’s assistant intelligence officer.

American officers said the Taliban’s influence grew in a vacuum: there had been an almost complete absence of government-provided services here since the Taliban were unseated in the American-led invasion of 2001.

“The most common complaint we hear from Afghans,” said Lt. Col. David G. Fivecoat, the battalion’s commander, “is that we haven’t seen the government in ‘X’ number of years.”

On another level, the Taliban fights. Task force analysts estimate that the Taliban can field roughly 400 fighters in Andar and Deh Yak, which have a combined population of perhaps 150,000 people.

The fighters harass Afghan and American forces and pursue a campaign of intimidation against residents who cooperate with, or even acknowledge, the central government. Dressing as civilians, they battle Western forces with a familiar script: using small ambushes and makeshift bombs with minimal risk and conducting the occasional rocket or mortar attack.

They also have a support network, the officers said, of at least 4,000 civilians. The supporters provide food, shelter and part-time help, like passing false information to the Americans and signaling the movements of the battalion’s patrols with mirrors or thick plumes of smoke.

Local knowledge has often given the fighters the ability to seemingly disappear, slipping away in canals or village alleys.

On Jan. 20, a squad from C Company was watching escape routes from the village of Maumud, where other soldiers and police officers were searching for weapons.

A check of the entrance to a karez, the traditional underground aqueduct system of the high Afghan steppe, led to the discovery of a Taliban battlefield-aid station deep underground.

Inside the aqueduct’s main tunnel, which continued for several hundred yards, the soldiers found soiled sheets, bloodied bandages and intravenous lines, syringes and penicillin — signs that wounded fighters had recently been treated there.

‘Spies Everywhere’

Unlike in some areas of Afghanistan, the task force officers said, the Taliban fighters of eastern Ghazni appear to be entirely local men.

The battalion has not heard languages typical of foreign fighters in Afghanistan — Arabic, Uzbek and Urdu, for example — on intercepted radio messages. Surveillance of how the dead Taliban fighters are treated has consistently pointed to local roots.

“We haven’t seen foreign fighters,” Colonel Fivecoat said. “We know that because we’ve killed fighters and followed it through to the funerals. They are all being buried in local villages by their elders.”

But external influences are evident in the fighters’ command and control. The vast majority of insurgents in Andar and Deh Yak, the officers said, answer to the Quetta Shura — the organization, led by Mullah Muhammad Omar, that formerly governed Afghanistan.

The intelligence officials also said that there was a small presence in easternmost Ghazni Province of fighters loyal to the Haqqani network, the internationally designated terrorist organization, based in Miramshah, Pakistan, that is aligned with the Taliban.

Some improvised bombs bear signs of being assembled by Haqqanis, or by people who have been trained or supplied by them, Lieutenant Marietta said.

With its local origins and connections, the Ghazni Taliban have been able to intimidate the government and exert influence over the population.

Several American officers said Taliban fighters were largely untroubled by the two districts’ small contingent of Afghan police officers, with whom, in some cases, they have brokered under-the-table arrangements.

When the battalion arrived in Deh Yak, it discovered that a police post overlooking the village of Salamanzi had been sold in July by its commander to the Taliban, which had looted it of ammunition, including rocket-propelled grenades.

The outpost has since been re-established as a government position. But suspicions linger. “We have six-man police posts out there in bad areas that never get attacked, and almost every time we go there we get attacked,” Colonel Fivecoat said. “So something is going on.”

Similarly, last fall, when the Taliban ordered residents not to vote in the parliamentary elections, the officers said, the order had its intended effect. “There are 110,000 people in Andar,” said Sgt. First Class Jason S. Werts, the battalion’s senior intelligence sergeant. “Three people voted.”

The organization’s intelligence network has also been effective.

An American sweep of the village of Bashi turned up a detailed terrain model of Forward Operating Base Andar, where the American battalion’s headquarters are located. The model, officers said, was accurate — indicating that the Taliban had informants on the base.

Another sign of the intelligence network’s effects emerged in remarks of Afghan police officers working at the re-established outpost in Salamanzi. In interviews, three police officers said that though they lived near the post, they were afraid to go home.

‘The Taliban have spies everywhere,” said one of the officers, Abdul Wasay.

The same spy network has identified local civilians who have helped American and Afghan troops.

“The guy we had who was willing to give us information about the Taliban is the guy we found dead last week,” said Capt. Edward T. Peskie, who commands one of the battalion’s companies.

That informant, Abdul Hamid, had been stopped on a dirt road, taken from his vehicle, and shot. An American patrol to the nearby village of Janabad produced no information. Several villagers acted as if they had not heard of the man.

Hit-and-Run Attacks

The Taliban’s use of hit-and-run tactics has often made it difficult for soldiers to see their foes clearly. But late in December, in the village of Alu Khel, a platoon found dozens of Taliban photographs while searching a compound.

The photos revealed the faces of the fighters, most of them young men. They also included images of small boys, some of whom appeared to be 5 or younger, brandishing assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenade launchers or tactical radios.

These photos included signs of the Taliban’s logistical sources. Several images, for example, showed fighters with the distinctive rifle of the Afghan police — the AMD-65.

NATO began issuing AMD-65s to Afghan police officers in 2006. Their presence in Taliban hands suggests that weapons purchased by the United States had escaped government custody.

Similarly, an examination by The New York Times of 15 captured Taliban rifle magazines found they contained ammunition identical to that purchased by the Pentagon for issue to the Afghan police — another sign of leakage.

The Taliban’s success at obtaining ammunition and weapons has not always been matched with an ability to use them well. At times, the vaunted movement has appeared to be bungling. “They sometimes are not good at the basics,” Sergeant Werts said.

In nearly 200 small-arms attacks against the Americans in recent months, the insurgents’ bullets have struck only six American soldiers, one fatally, according to the battalion’s medical data.

Early last fall, to cite another example, the Taliban fired four 82-millimeter mortar rounds at Forward Operating Base Andar. All four landed within the perimeter walls, including one that crashed through the roof of a tent crowded with American soldiers. But none exploded. Whoever fired them, the soldiers said, forgot to insert their fuses.

The Taliban’s hidden bombs have also included several duds.

The officers said they took small comfort in signs of the Taliban’s marginal weapons skills. Both sides have spent months assessing each other.

When spring arrives, the officers said, the Taliban in Ghazni will continue the work of their shadow government, including collecting taxes. But the fighters, they said, could follow patterns seen elsewhere when American forces have settled in, and shift toward more improvised bombs.

    In Eastern Afghanistan, at War With the Taliban’s Shadowy Rule, NYT, 6.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/07/world/asia/07taliban.html

A Year in Iraq and Afghanistan

January 29, 2011
The New York Times
By IAN LIVINGSTON,
ALICIA CHENG and SARAH GEPHART

IN 2010, the United States and its allies continued to shift the military focus from Iraq and to Afghanistan. American troop levels in Iraq fell by half, from more than 100,000 troops in January to under 50,000. In Afghanistan, a surge of mainly United States troops brought numbers to roughly 140,000, from near 100,000 at the beginning of the year. As shown in the chart (based on data from the Pentagon, icasualties.org and American allies), in 2010 there were 696 fatalities in Afghanistan and 56 in Iraq.

The death total in Iraq was the lowest of any year in the war by a significant margin, down by 85 from 2009. Nearly two-thirds of the deaths there were not related to combat, and most of the hostile deaths occurred in isolated incidents. Though overall violence levels in Iraq have not improved markedly over the last year, they at least seem fairly stable as Iraqi security forces take on more of the burden.

The fighting in parts of Afghanistan was intense, and 198 more allied troops died there than in 2009. Many of the fatalities occurred in Helmand Province, where some 15,000 American and NATO troops began a major offensive in February; homemade bombs and small-arms fire caused the vast majority of the casualties. While 2010 finished as the deadliest year of the war effort thus far, there is no question that Afghan and Western troops have made great strides in stabilizing the insecure provinces in the south and east of the country.


Ian Livingston is a senior research assistant at the Brookings Institution in Washington. Alicia Cheng and Sarah Gephart are partners at mgmt. design in Brooklyn.

    A Year in Iraq and Afghanistan, NYT, 29.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/30/opinion/30casualty-chart.html

Ex-Pakistani Spy Dies in Captivity

January 24, 2011
Filed at 9:57 a.m. EST
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

ISLAMABAD (AP) — A former Pakistani spy who helped the Taliban rise to power in Afghanistan has died in militant captivity 10 months after he was seized in northwest Pakistan, a top official said Monday.

Sultan Amir Tarar, who as an American ally against Soviet rule in Afghanistan in the 1980s trained at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, died of a heart attack, said Tariq Hayat, the most senior government representative in the tribal regions.

Tarar was kidnapped along with a British TV journalist who was released in September and another former spy, Khalid Khawaja, who was executed by his captors in April. It is unclear why the two men traveled to the northwest, but they may have been acting as guides to the reporter.

Tarar's life personified some of the deep complexities of U.S. and Pakistani policies toward insurgents in the region.

His death in militant captivity was also shrouded in uncertainty, but appeared to indicate the extent to which some insurgents in the northwest had abandoned any loyalties to Pakistani intelligence agencies that nurtured an earlier generation of fighters.

Tarar, who was better known as Col. Imam and usually seen wearing a white turban and army camouflage jacket, played a major role in funneling Pakistani support and training to Afghans fighting Soviet rule in the 1980s, a push in large part financed by the CIA.

After the Soviets withdrew, he continued to be Pakistan's point man with the Taliban, which were seen by Islamabad as allies. He provided the movement with arms, funding and training and was known to be close to Mullah Omar. He and Khawaja remained publicly sympathetic to the Afghan Taliban and Omar since the movement's downfall in 2001 in the U.S.-led invasion.

Some media reports have said Tarar maintained operational ties with the Afghan insurgents in recent years, which he denied. In interviews before his kidnapping, he had spoken of the need to negotiate with the Afghan Taliban to end the almost 10-year war.

The two presumably felt their background and Islamist views offered some protection while traveling in northwest Pakistan. The region is now home to militants battling the Pakistani state, including its intelligence agencies and al-Qaida leaders also hostile to the pro-U.S. regime in Pakistan. Afghan Taliban factions fighting in Afghanistan that do not directly target the Pakistani state are also based there.

A previously unknown militant group calling itself the Asian Tigers initially said it had seized the men. Analysts speculated the captors were a new breed of militants who had turned against their former protectors.

In July, Tarar appeared in a video saying he was being held by another group and that it was demanding the release of prisoners held by the government in exchange for his release.

Tarar's death was first reported Sunday, but officials could not confirm it. He was believed held in North Waziristan, a region bordering Afghanistan that is under effective militant control.

Hayat, the government official, said authorities were "sure that he is dead" but that militants still had Tarar's body. He said the captors, whom he did not identify, were demanding more than $200,000 for its return.

Tarar had very close ties with the U.S. during the Soviet occupation. He trained at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and gave personal tours of the border region to several Congressmen, including Charlie Wilson, who drove American financial support to Afghan militiamen then regarded by Washington as freedom fighters, said Roy Gutman in his book "How We Missed the Story: Osama bin Laden, the Taliban and the Hijacking of Afghanistan."

According to Gutman, the Reagan administration presented Imam with a plaque mounted with a piece of the Berlin Wall that read: "Dedicated to Colonel Imam. With deepest respect to one who helped deliver the first blow."

Tarar developed a close rapport with Taliban leader Mullah Omar in the mid-1990s as he rose to power in Afghanistan, said Zahid Hussain in his book "Frontline Pakistan: The Struggle With Militant Islam." He was posted as Pakistan's consul general in several Afghan cities, including Kandahar, and helped funnel arms and money to the Taliban, said Hussain.

    Ex-Pakistani Spy Dies in Captivity, NYT, 24.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/01/24/world/asia/AP-AS-Pakistan.html

President Karzai’s Latest

January 20, 2011
The New York Times

It took particular audacity for President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan to order Parliament to delay this weekend’s opening session while an unconstitutional court he appointed re-investigates charges of fraud in last fall’s parliamentary vote.

Mr. Karzai’s own re-election two years ago was marred by blatant ballot tampering, and his legitimacy — in the eyes of his own people and the world — hasn’t recovered. Beyond that hypocrisy, this sort of cynical meddling is exactly what Afghanistan doesn’t need at this critical moment in the NATO-backed struggle to win hearts, minds and territory from the Taliban.

American-led military forces have reportedly made progress loosening the Taliban’s grip on the southern province of Kandahar. But those hard-won gains could quickly unravel unless Afghans start seeing their government as legitimate and competent.

Mr. Karzai’s seemingly unlimited tolerance for corrupt relatives and cronies and his inability to deliver basic services are already two of the insurgents’ biggest recruiting points. Another blatant power grab will make things even worse.

Kandahar is the heartland of Mr. Karzai’s Pashtun ethnic group, which ended up with far fewer seats in the new Parliament than it held in the last one. The threat of violence, but also discontent with Mr. Karzai, led to a low turnout, and disqualifications for fraud further reduced the number of Pashtun seats.

Mr. Karzai’s delay of Parliament seems intended, at a minimum, to tamp down Pashtun discontent during the Kandahar offensive. What it surely will do is exacerbate tensions across Afghanistan, especially in the non-Pashtun areas where Taliban activity is rising.

Afghanistan needs an accountable government, and one in which all groups and regions are fairly represented. The longer Parliament is kept from convening (it is already five months since the election) the longer Mr. Karzai gets to rule by decree.

This Parliament should be seated without further delay so that it can get to work on serious problems like national reconciliation, pressing for more effective governance and reining in Mr. Karzai’s increasingly arbitrary and capricious actions.

September’s vote was indeed tainted by wholesale irregularities. No one disputes that, or argues that voter fraud should simply be overlooked, as it was in Mr. Karzai’s own re-election race. These returns have already been investigated and adjudicated by the only legal body constitutionally empowered to do so — Afghanistan’s Independent Election Commission — and those findings have been fully backed by the international community. Mr. Karzai’s court has no legal standing and should not be allowed to have the last word.

Members of the new Parliament are saying they will meet on Sunday in another location if Mr. Karzai tries to prevent them from using the Parliament building. We hope their determination, coupled with strong pressure from the United Nations, NATO and Washington, can persuade Mr. Karzai to back off.

Defeating the Taliban requires an effective Afghan partner, and, for better or for worse (and too often it is the latter), Mr. Karzai is the president of Afghanistan. Washington has to work with him. Sometimes, as now, that requires standing up to him in order to extricate him, and Afghanistan, from the consequences of his anti-democratic impulses.

President Obama must make it clear to Mr. Karzai, publicly and privately, that he is not an uncrowned king, but a president accountable to his people and his country’s Constitution.

    President Karzai’s Latest, NYT, 20.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/21/opinion/21fri1.html

Pakistan’s Failure

to Hit Militant Sanctuary

Has Positive Side for U.S.

January 17, 2011
The New York Times
By ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON — Pakistan’s refusal to attack militants in a notorious sanctuary on its northwest border may have created a magnet there for hundreds of Islamic fighters seeking a safe haven where they can train and organize attacks against NATO forces in Afghanistan. But theirs is a congregation in the cross hairs.

A growing number of senior United States intelligence and counterinsurgency officials say that by bunching up there, insurgents are ultimately making it easier for American drone strikes to hit them from afar.

American officials are loath to talk about this silver lining to the storm cloud that they have long described building up in the tribal area of North Waziristan, where the insurgents run a virtual mini-state the size of Rhode Island. This is because they do not want to undermine the Obama administration’s urgent public pleas for Pakistan to order troops into the area, or to give Pakistan an excuse for inaction.

“We cannot succeed in Afghanistan without shutting down those safe havens,” Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last week, underscoring a major conclusion of the White House’s strategic review of Afghanistan policy last month.

But as long as the safe havens exist, they provide a rich hunting ground, however inadvertent it may be.

Pakistani Army operations in the other six of seven tribal areas near the border with Afghanistan have helped drive fighters from Al Qaeda, the Pakistani Taliban, the Haqqani network and other militant groups into North Waziristan, the one tribal area that Pakistan has not yet assaulted.

With several hundred insurgents largely bottled up there, and with few worries about accidentally hitting Pakistani soldiers battling militants or civilians fleeing a combat zone, the Central Intelligence Agency’s drones have attacked targets in North Waziristan with increasing effectiveness and have degraded Al Qaeda’s ability to carry out a major attack against the United States, the senior officials said.

The number of strikes in North Waziristan grew to 104 in 2010 from 22 in 2009, according to the Long War Journal, a Web site that tracks the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan. There have been five strikes in North Waziristan so far this year.

While the overall effectiveness of the strikes is impossible to ascertain, there are many accounts to confirm that insurgent fighters and leaders have indeed been killed.

To be sure, a wide array of administration officials have acknowledged the limitations of drone strikes and emphasized the need for Pakistan to use ground troops to clear out militants who have used the refuge in North Waziristan to rest and rearm, a point Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. made to Pakistani civilian leaders and ranking generals on a visit to Pakistan last week.

A senior counterterrorism official concurred, saying: “We’ve seen in the past what happens when terrorists are given a de facto safe haven. It tends to turn out ugly for both Pakistan and the United States. It’s absolutely critical that Pakistan stay focused on rooting out militants in North Waziristan.”

The C.I.A. director, Leon E. Panetta, discussed counterterrorism issues with the president of Pakistan, Asif Ali Zardari, and the head of Pakistan’s main spy agency, Lt. Gen. Ahmad Shuja Pasha, in a meeting in Washington on Friday, a C.I.A. spokesman said.

But half a dozen senior intelligence, counterterrorism and military officials interviewed in the past several days said a bright side had unexpectedly emerged from Pakistan’s delay. Pounding the militants consolidated in the North Waziristan enclave with airstrikes will leave the insurgents in a weakened state if the Pakistani offensive comes later this year, the officials said.

“In some ways, it’s to our benefit to keep them bottled up, mostly in North Waziristan,” said a senior intelligence official, who like others interviewed agreed to speak candidly about the Pakistan strategy if he was not identified. “This is not intentional. That wasn’t the design to bottle them up. That’s just where they are, and they’re there for a reason. They don’t have a lot of options.”

Another senior administration official added, “We’d still prefer the Pakistani Army to operate in North Waziristan, but consolidating the insurgents in one place is not such a bad thing.”

Senior Pakistani politicians and commanders, including Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the army chief of staff, say their troops are already stretched thin and will carry out an offensive in North Waziristan on their timetable, not Washington’s. Lt. Gen. Asif Yasin Malik, the main Pakistan commander in the northwest, said in October that it would take at least six months to clear militants from two other restive tribal areas, called agencies, before considering an offensive in North Waziristan.

“It’s only a matter of how, when and in what manner do we conduct operations there,” Husain Haqqani, Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States, said in a statement. He said Pakistan had 38,000 military and paramilitary troops in North Waziristan.

Senior United States officials praise Pakistan for carrying out operations in the rugged tribal areas, but many of these officials say they are not convinced that the Pakistani Army is willing or able to clear North Waziristan.

Counterterrorism specialists say that attacking militants in North Waziristan would be a much more difficult campaign than previous operations in Swat, Bajaur and South Waziristan. The region has mountainous terrain as well as urban centers, like Miram Shah, that if attacked could result in many civilian casualties or produce hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing the fighting, as happened in previous clearing operations.

Moreover, no effective civilian police force exists to take over security duties after military operations. The Pakistani Army still remains in Swat, Bajaur and South Waziristan, months after major campaigns.

And to be truly effective, American officials say, a North Waziristan offensive would have to single out not just Qaeda and Taliban fighters, but also militants in the Haqqani network. That group has long enjoyed support from Pakistan’s military and intelligence services because it represents a strategic hedge against what Pakistan views as encroachment by its archrival, India, in Afghanistan.

“There may be an offensive in North Waziristan, but I think it’ll be very carefully orchestrated to preserve Pakistan’s assets in the region,” said Bruce O. Riedel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, who led President Obama’s first Afghanistan policy review.

American intelligence officials say that pressure from the airstrikes has forced small numbers of Haqqani fighters and other militants to slip into other tribal areas, including Kurram and South Waziristan. “The Haqqanis aren’t stupid,” one counterterrorism official said. “They’re feeling some serious pressure in North Waziristan, so it should come as no surprise that they’re looking for places they might think are safer.”

All the more reason proponents of Pakistani action say time is of the essence. “I’ve been very clear in my conversations with General Kayani over the last year or so that there needs to be a focus, from my perspective, on North Waziristan,” Admiral Mullen told reporters in Islamabad last month. “That’s where Al Qaeda leadership resides, that’s where the Haqqani network, in particular, is headquartered, and the Haqqanis are leading the way and coming across the border and killing American and allied forces. And that has got to cease.”

Ismail Khan contributed reporting from Peshawar, Pakistan.

    Pakistan’s Failure to Hit Militant Sanctuary Has Positive Side for U.S., NYT, 17.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/18/world/asia/18terror.html

In New Military,

Data Overload Can Be Deadly

January 16, 2011
The New York Times
By THOM SHANKER and MATT RICHTEL

When military investigators looked into an attack by American helicopters last February that left 23 Afghan civilians dead, they found that the operator of a Predator drone had failed to pass along crucial information about the makeup of a gathering crowd of villagers.

But Air Force and Army officials now say there was also an underlying cause for that mistake: information overload.

At an Air Force base in Nevada, the drone operator and his team struggled to work out what was happening in the village, where a convoy was forming. They had to monitor the drone’s video feeds while participating in dozens of instant-message and radio exchanges with intelligence analysts and troops on the ground.

There were solid reports that the group included children, but the team did not adequately focus on them amid the swirl of data — much like a cubicle worker who loses track of an important e-mail under the mounting pile. The team was under intense pressure to protect American forces nearby, and in the end it determined, incorrectly, that the villagers’ convoy posed an imminent threat, resulting in one of the worst losses of civilian lives in the war in Afghanistan.

“Information overload — an accurate description,” said one senior military officer, who was briefed on the inquiry and spoke on the condition of anonymity because the case might yet result in a court martial. The deaths would have been prevented, he said, “if we had just slowed things down and thought deliberately.”

Data is among the most potent weapons of the 21st century. Unprecedented amounts of raw information help the military determine what targets to hit and what to avoid. And drone-based sensors have given rise to a new class of wired warriors who must filter the information sea. But sometimes they are drowning.

Research shows that the kind of intense multitasking required in such situations can make it hard to tell good information from bad. The military faces a balancing act: how to help soldiers exploit masses of data without succumbing to overload.

Across the military, the data flow has surged; since the attacks of 9/11, the amount of intelligence gathered by remotely piloted drones and other surveillance technologies has risen 1,600 percent. On the ground, troops increasingly use hand-held devices to communicate, get directions and set bombing coordinates. And the screens in jets can be so packed with data that some pilots call them “drool buckets” because, they say, they can get lost staring into them.

“There is information overload at every level of the military — from the general to the soldier on the ground,” said Art Kramer, a neuroscientist and director of the Beckman Institute, a research lab at the University of Illinois.

The military has engaged researchers like Mr. Kramer to help it understand the brain’s limits and potential. Just as the military has long pushed technology forward, it is now at the forefront in figuring out how humans can cope with technology without being overwhelmed by it.

At George Mason University in Virginia, researchers measure the brain waves of study subjects as they use a simulation of the work done at the Nevada Air Force base.

On a computer screen, the subjects see a video feed from one drone and the locations of others, along with instructions on where to direct them. The subjects wear a cap with electrodes attached, measuring brain waves. As the number of drones and the pace of instructions increases, the brain shows sharp spikes in a kind of electrical activity called theta — cause for concern among the researchers.

“It’s usually an index of extreme overload,” said Raja Parasuraman, a director of the university’s human factors and applied cognition program.

As the technology allows soldiers to pull in more information, it strains their brains. And military researchers say the stress of combat makes matters worse. Some research even suggests that younger people wind up having more trouble focusing because they have grown up constantly switching their attention.

For the soldier who has been using computers and phones all his life, “multitasking might actually have negative effects,” said Michael Barnes, research psychologist at the Army Research Lab at Aberdeen, Md., citing several university studies on the subject.

In tests at a base in Orlando, Mr. Barnes’s group has found that when soldiers operate a tank while monitoring remote video feeds, they often fail to see targets right around them.

Mr. Barnes said soldiers could be trained to use new technology, “but we’re not going to improve the neurological capability.”

On the other hand, he said, the military should not shy away from improving the flow of data in combat. “It would be like saying we shouldn’t have automobiles because we have 40,000 people die on the roads each year,” he said. “The pluses of technology are too great.”

The military is trying novel approaches to helping soldiers focus. At an Army base on Oahu, Hawaii, researchers are training soldiers’ brains with a program called “mindfulness-based mind fitness training.” It asks soldiers to concentrate on a part of their body, the feeling of a foot on the floor or of sitting on a chair, and then move to another focus, like listening to the hum of the air-conditioner or passing cars.

“The whole question we’re asking is whether we can rewire the functioning of the attention system through mindfulness,” said one of the researchers, Elizabeth A. Stanley, an assistant professor of security studies at Georgetown University. Recently she received financing to bring the training to a Marine base, and preliminary results from a related pilot study she did with Amishi Jha, a neuroscientist at the University of Miami, found that it helped Marines to focus.

Even as it worries about digital overload, the Army is acknowledging that technology may be the best way to teach this new generation of soldiers — in particular, a technology that is already in their pockets. In Army basic training, new recruits can get instruction from iPhone apps on subjects as varied as first aid and military values.

As part of the updated basic training regimen, recruits are actually forced into information overload — for example, testing first aid skills while running an obstacle course.

“It’s the way this generation learns,” said Lt. Gen. Mark P. Hertling, who oversees initial training for every soldier. “It’s a multitasking generation. So if they’re multitasking and combining things, that’s the way we should be training.”

The intensity of warfare in the computer age is on display at a secret intelligence and surveillance installation at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, a massive, heavily air-conditioned warehouse where hundreds of TVs hang from black rafters. Every day across the Air Force’s $5 billion global surveillance network, cubicle warriors review 1,000 hours of video, 1,000 high-altitude spy photos and hundreds of hours of “signals intelligence” — usually cellphone calls.

At the Langley center, officially called Distributed Common Ground System-1, heavy multitasking is a daily routine for people like Josh, a 25-year-old first lieutenant (for security reasons, the Air Force would not release his full name). For 12 hours a day, he monitors an avalanche of images on 10 overhead television screens. They deliver what Josh and his colleagues have nicknamed “Death TV” — live video streams from drones above Afghanistan showing Taliban movements, suspected insurgent safehouses and American combat units headed into battle.

As he watches, Josh uses a classified instant-messaging system showing as many as 30 different chats with commanders at the front, troops in combat and headquarters at the rear. And he is hearing the voice of a pilot at the controls of a U-2 spy plane high in the stratosphere.

“I’ll have a phone in one ear, talking to a pilot on the headset in the other ear, typing in chat at the same time and watching screens,” Josh says. “It’s intense.”

The stress lingers when the shift is over. Josh works alongside Anthony, 23, an airman first class who says his brain hurts each night, the way feet ache after a long march.

“You have so much information coming in that when you go home — how do you take that away? Sometimes I work out,” Anthony said. “Actually, one of my things is just being able to enjoy a nice bowl of cereal with almond milk. I feel the tension is just gone and I can go back again.”

Video games don’t do the trick. “I need something real,” he said.

    In New Military, Data Overload Can Be Deadly, NYT, 16.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/17/technology/17brain.html

Support Expected for Plan

to Beef Up Afghan Forces

January 16, 2011
The New York Times
By RAY RIVERA

KABUL, Afghanistan — The Afghan government and its international partners are set to approve a plan that would expand the nation’s army and police forces to up to 378,000 personnel by October 2012, a 42 percent increase over the current level, Western and Afghan officials say.

The plan, which is pending, reflects growing confidence in a training mission that for years has been hobbled by illiteracy, drug use, corruption and high desertion and resignation rates among the Afghan security forces. At one point in 2009, more Afghan soldiers were abandoning the army than joining it.

Many of those problems remain, and the effort has been slowed by the inability — or unwillingness — of the NATO allies to fulfill their commitments to provide trainers. The mission responsible for fielding army and police units remains about 700 trainers short.

But success in meeting recruiting benchmarks in the last year has led to optimism among NATO officials that the ambitious goal can be met.

According to a Western official and an Afghan official familiar with the plan, the request is expected to be approved on Tuesday at a meeting of the standing security committee of the Joint Coordination and Monitoring Board, a high-level governing body made up of officials from Afghanistan, the United Nations and allied nations that is charged with the oversight of the nation’s development strategy. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to speak publicly ahead of the formal action.

The official targets for the ultimate size of the Afghan National Army and the Afghan police have steadily increased as the country’s security needs have evolved against a stubbornly resilient enemy. NATO officials hope the latest increase will help secure what they call an “irreversible transition” in 2014, when coalition forces are scheduled to turn over security responsibilities to the Afghan government.

Increasing the size and professionalism of the Afghan security forces is a pillar of the Obama administration’s plans to scale down the United States’ combat operations here over the next four years. The administration cited the growth and improved training and effectiveness of the security forces in its December strategy review, which reported that the United States was on target to begin reducing its military presence in July.

But the planned increase will mean billions more in spending to train and maintain the security forces, and 95 percent of that cost is borne by the United States. Between 2003 and 2009, the United States spent $20 billion to finance the Afghan Army and police. A growing force, pay increases that were intended to retain soldiers and police officers, and the costs of improved training and equipment drove the total to $9 billion in 2010, and $11.6 billion is budgeted for this year.

In January 2010, the security panel approved a plan to increase the army to 171,000 soldiers and the police to 134,000 officers by October 2011. A year later, the army has 149,500 soldiers and the police 117,000 officers; both are ahead of the pace needed to reach the October targets, said Col. John Ferrari of the United States Army, who is deputy commander for programs of the NATO training mission.

“That’s important, because last January when these numbers were approved, there were very few people who thought that could be achieved,” Colonel Ferrari said. He declined to speculate about whether the new goals would be approved on Tuesday.

Thomas Vietor, a White House spokesman, said the Afghan security force “will continue to grow in 2011,” but, he added, “there have been no decisions on growth beyond 2011.”

The formal requests for more troops will be made by the Afghan Defense Ministry, which oversees the army, and the Interior Ministry, which oversees the police.

At a minimum, the plan calls for 23,000 new forces each for the army and the police by October 2012. They can expand by up to an additional 13,000 forces each if they meet certain recruitment and retention goals, Colonel Ferrari said.

In the army, the newcomers would be used to expand the support staff, including engineering and signals units, and combat units to “thicken the force,” Colonel Ferrari said. The increase in the police forces would add 5,000 members to the Afghan National Civil Order Police, which is designed to deal with civil disorder, hostage situations and riots. The additions would increase that force to 23,000 members by the end of 2012.

The need for additional security forces has raised concerns among some Afghans that the government will conscript solders. Gen. Zahir Azimi, a Defense Ministry spokesman, said rumors of such a move were not true. “We are ahead of our goals,” he said. “There is no discussion of conscription.”

One factor that has helped recruiting, Colonel Ferrari said, has been a 50 percent increase in pay. Police officers and soldiers now make, on average, $165 a month; forces serving in Helmand Province and other dangerous places get an additional $75 in hostile environment pay. “What we were paying was well below a living wage,” he said.

Improved training, including classes to help security forces read and write at a first-grade level, has also spurred recruitment, the colonel said. Many of the recruits are “very smart,” he said, but are not able to count or write their name.

“Not only does it get people to come in,” he said, “but by making them literate you get a better, higher quality soldier and policeman.”

The classes, he added, give many of them a “better vision of the future for themselves, their villages and for their children.”

The requests for new forces are being made during what is shaping up to be a violent winter, a time when fighting typically slows.

On Sunday, nine civilians were killed when their taxi struck a roadside bomb in the Pul-e Khumi district of Baghlan Province. Six civilians, all members of one family, died the day before when their vehicle hit a bomb in the Sangin district of Helmand Province.

On Thursday, seven drivers carrying passengers on a shopping trip to Qalat, the capital of Zabul Province, were apprehended by insurgents and interrogated, local authorities said. They were released a short time later, but on the way the back, all seven were killed by a remote-controlled bomb, the authorities said.

Sharifullah Sahak contributed reporting from Kabul, and Thom Shanker and Helene Copper from Washington.

    Support Expected for Plan to Beef Up Afghan Forces, NYT, 16.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/17/world/asia/17afghanistan.html

Illustration: Matt Rota

January 8, 2011

Beyond the Battlefield, More Suffering

NYT

7 January 2011

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/08/opinion/l08deploy.html

Beyond the Battlefield,

More Suffering

January 7, 2011
The New York Times

To the Editor:

Re “Families Bear Brunt of Deployment Strains” (“A Year at War” series, front page, Dec. 31):

The pattern of multiple deployments imposed on a small segment of enlistment-age individuals in the United States is inequitable and discriminatory. The effect on spouses, partners and especially children is heartbreaking.

If our politicians need something to cry about, this should be at the top of the list.

Sheila Shulman
Grantham, N.H., Jan. 1, 2011

•

To the Editor:

As his dad returns to Afghanistan, 12-year-old Isaac Eisch asks, “Why can’t we just, like, end the war?”

We are in the 10th year of the war in Afghanistan. Almost 1,500 American servicemen and women have been killed, and many more wounded. We have spent more than $350 billion in that desperately poor country. Countless families have been disrupted and dismantled.

Do President Obama and Gen. David H. Petraeus, or we the people, have the ability to imagine what would be gained by ending the war, now? Sometimes it takes a child to ask the right question.

Mary Beth Moore
Wantagh, N.Y., Dec. 31, 2010

•

To the Editor:

Re “Several Warnings, Then a Soldier’s Lonely Death” (front page, Jan. 2): This country reserves its greatest admiration for those in its military who serve despite the wounds they receive in the course of their service. We appropriately stand in awe of those soldiers who fight on, who re-enlist, who redeploy and who want to serve, despite pain and suffering that we know as civilians would knock us out of the ballgame.

Soldiers who struggle with depression are, and deserve to be, counted among those in this group. Like others, they fight wars on two fronts — against the enemy without and the enemy within.

That they serve despite their pain and suffering is deserving of our highest regard and gratitude.

Jeffrey S. Lustman
Westport, Conn., Jan. 2, 2011

The writer is a psychiatrist.

•

To the Editor:

Suicides among veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are preventable. But it will take an all-out effort by military, civilian and spiritual institutions to address the growing crisis.

The Army and Marine Corps suicide rates have never been higher. And Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently suggested that as more soldiers return home, suicides could increase.

The military is working to alleviate the problem. It has increased by two-thirds the number of mental health professionals on duty, expanded a suicide prevention program, and, at Fort Hood, developed a holistic approach to help returning soldiers.

The military is also reaching out for spiritual solutions. (Our group just published “The Military Bible With the Spiritual Fitness Manual,” which is being used in the armed forces on a voluntary basis.)

More is needed.

Our budgets are tight, but these are our boys and girls who took up arms when we asked them to. We cheered them as they left our shores. We tied yellow ribbons around our trees. But they are returning broken now, and we have to fix them. No matter what. They made their sacrifice; it’s time we made ours.

Richard Glickstein
President, National Bible Association
New York, Jan. 5, 2011

    Beyond the Battlefield, More Suffering, NYT, 7.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/08/opinion/l08deploy.html

In Wider War in Afghanistan, Survival Rate of Wounded Rises

January 7, 2011
The New York Times
By C. J. CHIVERS

KHAKREZ DISTRICT, Afghanistan — Intensified fighting and a larger troop presence in Afghanistan in 2010 led to the highest American combat casualties yet in the war, as the number of troops wounded by bullets, shrapnel and bombs approached that of the bloodiest periods of the war in Iraq.

But the available data points to advances in the treatment of the fallen, as the rate at which wounded soldiers who died reached a wartime low.

More than 430 American service members died from hostile action in Afghanistan last year through Dec. 21, according to official data released by the Pentagon last week at the request of The New York Times.

This was a small fraction of those struck. Nearly 5,500 American troops were wounded in action — more than double the total of 2,415 in 2009, and almost six times the number wounded in 2008.

In all, fewer than 7.9 percent of the Americans wounded in 2010 died, down from more than 11 percent the previous year and 14.3 percent in 2008.

The fatality rate declined even though many more troops patrolled on foot, exposing the force to greater dangers than in years past. Several doctors said the improvements came not from a single breakthrough but through a series of lessons learned over nearly a decade of fighting two wars, such as placing medevac helicopters closer to the fighting and the more extensive use of tourniquets.

Although fatality rates for wounded Afghan troops are not similarly available, doctors involved in their care said hospital records showed that they trail those of Western troops by a few percentage points, but have also fallen.

Several soldiers and those who care for them framed the improved survival rates as the grimmest sort of success. Many more troops — some missing multiple limbs or their genitals, or suffering brain damage — are being rescued from near death. But their wounds will be exceptionally difficult to overcome later as they try to resume work, and social and family lives.

Along with interviews with medics and military doctors, and a month spent by two journalists from The Times observing the collection and immediate treatment of troops suffering from a wide range of trauma, the data shows the results, in broad terms, of an evolving contest for wounded soldiers’ fates.

The contest pits a multilayered and expensive effort to keep troops alive against the sharply increased rate at which they suffer grievous injuries, some beyond what any medical system can heal.

A clear decline was evident: In 2005, 19.8 percent of wounded American soldiers died from their injuries. For the past five years in Afghanistan and Iraq, the fatality rates for wounded Americans have otherwise fluctuated between 9.4 and 14.3 percent.

(The data draws from a sample running into the tens of thousands; in 2006 in Iraq, for example, nearly 7,200 American troops were wounded by hostile action, more than 700 of them fatally.)

The statistics further served to reinforce consistent trends in the battlefield’s array of lethal hazards, and offered glimpses of wars within the war.

More soldiers in Afghanistan in 2010 were wounded by explosive devices (at least 3,615, compared to 828 troops reported to suffer gunshot wounds). But the higher fatality rates from gunshot wounds (12.9 percent versus 7.3 percent for wounds caused by bombs) made rifles and machine guns the most statistically deadly weapons.

Rocket-propelled grenades, for all their ferocious reputation, proved less of a threat. They wounded 373 American soldiers, of whom 13 — 3.5 percent — died.

No matter the improved odds, the data, like the field observations, illuminated that even the most determined efforts to cheat death could still be desperate — like the case of an Afghan soldier wounded on Dec. 9.

He was a disoriented young man on a stretcher with his uniform cut away, revealing wounds caused by a makeshift bomb.

His face was mashed. A tourniquet was cinched to his left leg, high by the hip. His abdomen swelled slightly from the bleeding within. From his torso rose the odor of burned flesh and hair.

The man worked with an American Special Forces team. Medics labored over him as the helicopter lifted from the dust, counting minutes in a race against time.

Medical workers attributed his improved chances to several factors, among them changes in training for soldiers who administer first aid, swifter movement of victims to hospitals made possible by more helicopters in the war, and shifts in procedures in operating rooms.

Equipment has also been a factor, including heavier armored vehicles more resistant to explosives and fire-retardant uniforms and gloves — two factors doctors and soldiers say seem to have led to a decline in the frequency and severity of burns.

“We have seen fewer burn injuries over all,” said Col. Evan M. Renz, director of the Army Burn Center in Texas, “even as the number of troops in Afghanistan has climbed sharply.”

Doctors said a change in attitude about tourniquets also prevented many deaths. Until a few years ago, they said, tourniquets were often regarded as a measure of last resort, not always applied swiftly to those with severe extremity wounds.

Every soldier now carries at least one tourniquet — some carry several — in their first-aid kits or visibly on their flak jackets. Fellow soldiers apply them immediately. “The liberal use of tourniquets has clearly been a lifesaver,” said Dr. Eric Elster, a Navy commander and director of surgical services at the NATO hospital at Kandahar Air Field.

One doctor, deployed in an area of fighting along the Arghandab River, said medics on patrols had become more proficient at other lifesaving techniques, too.

These include opening airways via tracheotomies, using needles to decompress swollen chest cavities that can collapse a wounded soldiers’ lungs and applying pressure dressing and bandages with clotting agents to areas — the groin, neck or armpits — where tourniquets have little effect

“This is just basic techniques, trained well,” said Lt. Col. Michael Wirt, brigade surgeon for Task Force Strike, a unit of the 101st Airborne Division.

Confidence in the ability to mitigate trauma — including legs shattered or amputated by bombs — has led to a sometimes visible practice that most units discourage: troops who pre-emptively apply tourniquets loosely to their thighs or upper arms before patrols.

“I think potentially that’s a negative,” Dr. Wirt said, adding that it could be read to suggest nervousness, or that such soldiers are too focused on being wounded. “Our command has not endorsed that.”

Part of the willingness to use tourniquets, doctors and medics said, has been related to the speed with which wounded soldiers reach hospitals.

Afghanistan’s harsh climate, combined with a relative dearth of helicopters in years past, often restricted the reach of medevac crews.

With the increased troop presence in 2010, there are now three Army combat aviation brigades in the country, and detachments of medevac helicopters have been moved to small outposts near the fighting — minutes away from many firefights or bomb blasts.

Within a half-hour of being wounded, a large fraction of troops now are en route to hospitals and being tended by flight medics. On repeated flights flown by the two journalists in May, June and December, some wounded soldiers were retrieved within 20 minutes of their injuries. None waited an hour.

The case of the wounded Afghan soldier showed the risks from wounds that battlefield first aid can barely help, and for whom speed might not be enough.

The man lifted his head and gazed down at his ruined body. Blood ran from his rectum. He had little time.

He frantically waved his burned arms, which were so damaged and sensitive that the medics hesitated to start an IV.

Instead, Sgt. Patrick Shultz lifted a small electric drill and cut through the bone below the man’s right knee, creating access into the marrow to administer drugs.

The hospital was not much farther ahead. But it was too late — 30 minutes after arriving, this man was dead.

For patients who reach NATO-run trauma centers, the overall survival rates have approached levels unseen in past wars. The staff said this was in part a result of the accumulated experience of surgical teams in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as shifts in how patients were treated.

For one example, Dr. Elster and Dr. Wirt said the military had dropped administering saline solutions to patients in favor of what they called “massive transfusion protocols” — giving enormous quantities of blood.

High-volume transfusions aid in clotting and carrying oxygen, and have prevented more patients from dying in the hours after suffering severe wounds, they said.

“It is not unusual for us to give a patient 50 or 100 units of blood in the first 24 to 48 hours,” Dr. Elster said.

At the military hospital in Kandahar, 98 percent of Western troops that arrived alive last year did not die, the staff said.

For Afghans the survival rate was several percentage points lower.

Doctors said there were many reasons, including that most Afghans had not been issued fire-retardant clothing and often traveled in pickup trucks. Unlike vehicles used by American forces, pickup trucks stop neither bullets nor most shrapnel, and are easily blown apart by roadside bombs.

Moreover, Afghan soldiers are often loath to wear protective equipment, including helmets and bulletproof vests.

    In Wider War in Afghanistan, Survival Rate of Wounded Rises, NYT, 7.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/08/world/asia/08wounded.html

Several Warnings,

Then a Soldier’s Lonely Death

January 1, 2011
The New York Times
By JAMES RISEN

WASHINGTON — A gentle snow fell on the funeral of Staff Sgt. David Senft at Arlington National Cemetery on Dec. 16, when his bitterly divided California family came together to say goodbye. His 5-year-old son received a flag from a grateful nation.

But that brief moment of peace could not hide the fact that for his family and friends and the soldiers who had served with him in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, too many unanswered questions remained about Sergeant Senft’s lonely death in a parked sport utility vehicle on an American air base in Afghanistan, and about whether the Army could have done more to prevent it.

Officially, the Army says only that Sergeant Senft, 27, a crew chief on a Black Hawk helicopter in the 101st Airborne Division’s aviation brigade, was killed as a result of “injuries sustained in a noncombat related incident” at Kandahar Air Base on Nov. 15. No specific cause of death has been announced. Army officials say three separate inquiries into the death are under way.

But his father, also named David Senft, an electrician from Grass Valley, Calif., who had worked in Afghanistan for a military contractor, is convinced that his son committed suicide, as are many of his friends and family members and the soldiers who served with him.

The evidence appears overwhelming. An investigator for the Army’s Criminal Investigative Division, which has been looking into the death, has told Sergeant Senft’s father by e-mail that his son was found dead with a single bullet hole in his head, a stolen M-4 automatic weapon in his hands and his body slumped over in the S.U.V., which was parked outside the air base’s ammunition supply point. By his side was his cellphone, displaying a text message with no time or date stamp, saying only, “I don’t know what to say, I’m sorry.” (Mr. Senft shared the e-mails from the C.I.D. investigator with The New York Times.)

With Sergeant Senft, the warning signs were blaring.

The Army declared him fit for duty and ordered him to Afghanistan after he had twice attempted suicide at Fort Campbell, Ky., and after he had been sent to a mental institution near the base, the home of the 101st. After his arrival at Kandahar early in 2010 he was so troubled that the Army took away his weapon and forced him into counseling on the air base, according to the e-mails from the Army investigator. But he was assigned a roommate who was fully armed. C.I.D. investigators have identified the M-4 with which Sergeant Senft was killed as belonging to his roommate.

“I question why, if he was suicidal and they had to take away his gun, why was he allowed to stay in Afghanistan?” asked Sergeant Senft’s father. “Why did they allow him to deploy in the first place, and why did they leave him there?”

Defense Department officials have frequently spoken about how suicide prevention has become a top priority, and in interviews, officials noted that the National Institute of Mental Health was now leading a major study of Army suicides.

Ever since the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq began, suicides among American troops have been soaring, as military personnel become mentally exhausted and traumatized from repeated deployments to combat zones. In 2004, the Army reported that 67 soldiers on active duty committed suicide; by 2009 that number had jumped to 162. The Army has reported 144 suicides in 2010 through November, and officials say it is now beginning to see a sharp rise in suicides among nonactive duty National Guard and Reserve personnel who are not currently deployed.

It is unclear how much the Army knew of Sergeant Senft’s deterioration. But Col. Chris Philbrick, deputy director of the Army’s health promotion and risk reduction task force, which handles suicide prevention programs, said that a medical determination of cause of death, a law enforcement review of the matter by Army investigators, and an internal review of both Sergeant Senft’s personnel history and the handling of his case by his chain of command were all continuing.

“We are trying to get answers to these questions, answers to many of the same questions that the family is raising,” said Colonel Philbrick, who has personally reviewed Sergeant Senft’s case.

Interviews with friends and family members suggest that for Sergeant Senft, prolonged exposure to two wars may have been too much to bear for a friendly and sweet, but emotionally fragile young man filled with insecurities resulting from a badly splintered family life.

His parents divorced when he was about 3 years old, and the rift between his father and mother never healed. Home life for David and his brother and sister became intertwined with a series of stepparents and divided families around Northern California. David’s younger brother, Andrew, is now in prison in California for armed robbery.

The first signs of trouble for David Senft came when he was 18 or 19 and living with a stepmother who had divorced his father and remarried. He ran away and threatened to kill himself, recalled his stepmother, Tina Norvell. Her husband, Steve Norvell, found him and took him home.

David Senft joined the Army in early 2002, just months after the Sept. 11 attacks.

After basic training, he was assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division based at Fort Bragg, N.C., and in 2003 he was sent to Iraq as a member of a helicopter crew.

His experiences during that first combat deployment had a major impact on him, according to close friends. In one episode that he often recounted to both his family and friends, he told of witnessing the crash of an evacuation helicopter filled with medical personnel and wounded soldiers that had been shot down by insurgents. He and his Black Hawk crew were ordered to the crash site, and the gruesome scene haunted him.

“He changed after he went to Iraq the first time,” recalled Ana Ochoa, one of his closest friends.

After returning to Fort Bragg in 2004, David Senft confided in another soldier, Lynette Hager, that he wanted to kill himself.

“I reported it to the chain of command,” recalled Ms. Hager, who has since left the Army. “When you come back from a deployment, they have briefings and make you watch PowerPoints, but if you need help, you have to go get it yourself.”

Ms. Hager and David Senft later began dating, and in 2005 she gave birth to their son, Landon. She said that during a fight over child support payments, he threatened to kill himself rather than make further payments and that because of the suicide threat, the court ordered that he be allowed only supervised visitation rights with their son. “He was a really good guy, fun, nice, and he loved being in the military,” Ms. Hager said. “But he didn’t have the coping skills to get out of his depressive states.”

In 2007, he was deployed again with the 82nd Airborne Division, this time to Afghanistan. After his return, he transferred to the 101st Airborne Division and re-enlisted in the Army.

“I told him not to re-enlist; I told him to get out, his personality was changing. I told him, ‘You are making me uncomfortable,’ ” Ms. Ochoa said. “After each deployment he seemed to get needier, sadder, and he would be talking deeper.”

While at Fort Campbell in 2008, he attempted suicide by swallowing a bottle of sleeping pills. The pills only knocked him out for two or three days, and when he awoke in his apartment, he called friends, who urged him to get help. He agreed to be admitted to a mental hospital in Hopkinsville, Ky. He told Ms. Ochoa that he had tried to kill himself twice while at Fort Campbell. “He was depressed,” she said. “He said he had seen a lot of crazy stuff and seen a lot of friends die, and he was unhappy; he had a lot of failed relationships.”

His suicide attempts and hospitalization finally got the attention of the Army, which kept him back from a scheduled deployment to Iraq. Instead, he was given a desk job at Fort Campbell. “I remember he told me he had tried to kill himself and had been taken off the deployment roster for Iraq,” recalled Matt Davis, who served with Sergeant Senft in the 82nd Airborne Division.

But he could not get out of his unit’s next scheduled deployment, to Afghanistan in early 2010. Colonel Philbrick said that he could not answer why Sergeant Senft was allowed to deploy to Afghanistan after he had been held back from Iraq after his suicide attempt.

He apparently did well for the first few months of the Afghan deployment, because he went home on leave in July and, without telling many friends and relatives, quietly married another soldier he had recently met.

But his mental state seemed to worsen again after his return to Afghanistan, and his commanders took action. He was placed in regular counseling in Kandahar, apparently for the first time in his military career, and met regularly with an Army chaplain on the base. His weapon was taken from him several months before his death, according to the e-mails from the Army investigator.

On the morning of Nov. 15, Sergeant Senft’s roommate woke to find his weapon missing. After Sergeant Senft failed to show up for duty that morning, another member of his unit discovered his body.

Ms. Ochoa said: “As soon as I heard he was dead, I just said to myself, he did it. He did it.”

    Several Warnings, Then a Soldier’s Lonely Death NYT, 1.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/02/world/asia/02suicide.html

U.S. to Send Agents

to Fight Afghan Smuggling

January 1, 2011
The New York Times
By MICHAEL KAMBER

KABUL, Afghanistan — Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said on Saturday that her department planned to triple the number of its agents in Afghanistan, in part to curb the smuggling of cash out of the country.

The number of agents will increase to 77 by April, from the current 25, said Ms. Napolitano, who is in Afghanistan for a two-day visit to inspect border crossings and meet with President Hamid Karzai and the country’s commerce and interior ministers.

Ms. Napolitano said that bulk cash smuggling, in which billions of dollars have been taken out of Afghanistan in recent years, was one focus of her trip. The United States Embassy estimates that $10 million a day leaves Afghanistan bound for Dubai, much of it the proceeds from illicit activities and corruption. Millions more are believed to be smuggled through Pakistan and other border crossings.

According to a secret cable released by WikiLeaks, Ahmed Zia Massoud, a former Afghan vice president, visited the United Arab Emirates in 2009 carrying $52 million in cash. Mr. Massoud has denied the report.

The additional agents are to help with the transition from military to civilian control of border crossings and the training of Afghanistan’s fledgling customs service, which is charged with stopping the flow of illicit funds out of the country.

“Border protection will lead to customs revenues and legitimate trade,” she said. “Then Afghanistan will have money for social services and education.”

“In the drug trade in general, worldwide, the relationship between cash and drug sales is a real opportunity for law enforcement to intervene and disrupt,” she said, adding that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement were investigating how smuggling was financing crime.

Ms. Napolitano and other Homeland Security officials flew over the Torkham Gate border crossing with Pakistan because a ground visit was deemed too dangerous. Torkham, a chaotic border station near the Khyber Pass on Afghanistan’s eastern border, is believed to be major route for smugglers.

Travelers report routinely passing through Torkham without being asked for identification or having their goods inspected. On the rare occasions travelers are confronted by border police, a small bribe gets them through the crossing, many say.

Mohammad Asif, who has a business in Kabul selling laptop computers, crosses into Pakistan twice a month to buy parts and computers.

“Crossing the border is very easy for us without having a passport or any other kind of identification cards,” he said.

“The Pakistani and Afghan border forces ask you only to pay them money — it doesn’t matter what you have and what are you bringing into to the country.”

Also on Saturday, an unidentified coalition service member died following an improvised explosive device attack in southern Afghanistan. The International Security Assistance Force does not release the country of origin of service members killed in action. In 2010, a total of 711 soldiers were killed, an 36 percent increase over the 521 killed in 2009, according to icasualties.org, an Web site that tallies coalition casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Sharifullah Sahak contributed reporting.

    U.S. to Send Agents to Fight Afghan Smuggling, NYT, 1.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/02/world/asia/02afghanistan.html