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

Afghan war amputees and children practice walking

at the International Committee of the Red Cross orthopedic center on Sept. 10 in Kabul.

After more than 30 years of war and a decade

since the 9/11 attacks in the United States,

thousands of Afghans, both military and civilian,

continue to pay a heavy price from the conflicts.

The center makes prosthetics for amputees and helps them,

as well as Afghans with spinal injuries and children

with congenital birth defects, to learn to walk.

Photograph:

John Moore/Getty Images

Boston Globe > Big Picture > Afghanistan, September 2011

September 23, 2011

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2011/09/afghanistan_september_2011.html

Looking After the Soldier,

Back Home and Damaged

September 27, 2011
The New York Times
By CATRIN EINHORN

RAY CITY, Ga.— April and Tom Marcum were high school sweethearts who married after graduation. For years, she recalls, he was a doting husband who would leave love notes for her to discover on the computer or in her purse. Now the closest thing to notes that they exchange are the reminders she set up on his cellphone that direct him to take his medicine four times a day.

He usually ignores them, and she ends up having to make him do it.

Since Mr. Marcum came back in 2008 from two tours in Iraq with a traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder, his wife has quit her job as a teacher to care for him. She has watched their life savings drain away. And she has had to adjust to an entirely new relationship with her husband, who faces a range of debilitating problems including short-term memory loss and difficulties with impulse control and anger.

“The biggest loss is the loss of the man I married,” Ms. Marcum said, describing her husband now as disconnected on the best days, violent on the worst ones. “His body’s here, but his mind is not here anymore. I see glimpses of him, but he’s not who he was.”

Ms. Marcum has joined a growing community of spouses, parents and partners who, confronted with damaged loved ones returning from war who can no longer do for themselves, drop most everything in their own lives to care for them. Jobs, hobbies, friends, even parental obligations to young children fall by the wayside. Families go through savings and older parents dip into retirement funds.

Even as they grieve over a family member’s injuries, they struggle to adjust to new daily routines and reconfigured relationships.

The new lives take a searing toll. Many of the caregivers report feeling anxious, depressed or exhausted. They gain weight and experience health problems. On their now frequent trips to the pharmacy, they increasingly have to pick up prescriptions for themselves as well.

While taking comfort that their loved ones came home at all, they question whether they can endure the potential strain of years, or even decades, of care.

“I’ve packed my bags, I’ve called my parents and said I’m coming home,” said Andrea Sawyer, whose husband has been suicidal since returning from Iraq with post-traumatic stress disorder. “But I don’t. I haven’t ever physically walked out of the house.”

Those attending to the most severely wounded must help their spouses or adult children with the most basic daily functions. Others, like Ms. Marcum, act as safety monitors, keeping loved ones from putting themselves in danger. They drive them to endless medical appointments and administer complicated medication regimens.

One of the most frustrating aspects of life now, they say, is the bureaucracy they face at the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs, from problems with the scheduling of medical appointments to being bounced around among different branches of the system, forcing them to become navigators and advocates for their loved ones.

A variety of care services are offered to the severely injured. But many family members do not want their loved ones in nursing homes and find home health services often unsatisfactory or unavailable.

Despite Ms. Marcum’s cheerful manner and easy laugh, she has started taking antidepressants and an anti-anxiety medication when needed. She has developed hypertension, takes steroids for a bronchial ailment that may be stress related, and wears braces to relieve a jaw problem.

“I just saw all of my dreams kind of vanishing,” she said.

Over the past few years, advocacy organizations like the Wounded Warrior Project lobbied Congress to pass a law providing direct financial compensation and other benefits to family caregivers of service members. In 2010 they succeeded, and by mid-September, the veterans agency had approved 1,222 applications, with average monthly stipends of $1,600 to $1,800. Caregivers can also receive health insurance and counseling.

“We know it doesn’t replace full lost income,” said Deborah Amdur, who oversees caregiver support for the agency. “It’s really a recognition of the kinds of sacrifices that are being made.”

While families express deep gratitude for the help, questions remain about who will qualify and how compensation is determined, advocates for veterans say. Furthermore, the law applies only to caregivers of service members injured in the line of duty on or after Sept. 11, 2001, eliminating help for thousands who served in earlier conflicts.

And the emotional strain is still palpable as families struggle to adjust to what many call their “new normal.”

In a reversal of the classic situation in which adult children help out ailing parents, a substantial number of the caregivers of post- Sept. 11 service members are parents caring for their adult children.

Rosie Babin, 51, was managing an accounting office when a bullet tore through her son Alan’s abdomen in 2003. She and her husband rushed to Walter Reed Army Medical Center and stayed at his side when Alan, then 22, arrived from Iraq. He lost 90 percent of his stomach and part of his pancreas. His kidneys shut down and he had a stroke, leaving him with brain damage. He eventually underwent more than 70 operations and spent two years in hospitals, his mother said.

Ms. Babin fought efforts by the military to put her son in a nursing home, insisting that he go into a rehabilitation facility instead, and then managed to care for him at home.

But since her son’s injuries, her doctor has put her on blood pressure medication and sleeping pills. Now, while deeply grateful for her son’s remarkable recovery — he gets around in a wheelchair and has regained some speech — she sadly remembers the days when she looked forward to travel and dance lessons with her husband. Instead, she helps Alan get in and out of bed, use the bathroom and shower.

“I felt like I went from this high-energy, force-to-be-reckoned-with businesswoman,” she said, “to a casualty of war. And I was working furiously at not feeling like a victim of war.”

Research on the caregivers of service members from the post-Sept. 11 era is just beginning, said Joan M. Griffin, a research investigator with the Minneapolis V.A. Health Care System who is leading one such study. (The V.A. estimates that 3,000 families will benefit from the new caregiver program; 92 percent of the caregivers approved so far are women.)

What makes the population of patients receiving care different, Ms. Griffin said, is their relative youth. “The V.A. has not had a significant influx of patients of this age group since Vietnam,” she said, with a result that caregivers are looking at a “long horizon of providing care.” And one in five returning service members, a previous study found, report symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder or major depression.

Ms. Griffin’s research shows that many family members spend more than 40 hours a week providing care. Half feel that they do not have a choice.

“They feel stuck,” Ms. Griffin said.

Some walk away.

For Ms. Marcum, 37 — who has an 18-year marriage and two sons, ages 14 and 11, with Tom, 36 — there was never a question of leaving. “I’m his wife and it’s my job, whether he’s hurt or not, to make sure he’s O.K.,” she said.

When she first asked for a leave of absence from work to care for him, she expected it would be for just a few weeks, while doctors got to the bottom of the migraines keeping him in bed for days on end. When he was up, he often seemed confused and sometimes slurred his speech. After 12 years in the Air Force, where he worked as a weapons specialist, he was suddenly having trouble taking a phone message or driving home from the base.

Mr. Marcum, who endured several mortar attacks in Iraq, one of which knocked him unconscious, eventually was given diagnoses of traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder.

“My wife, I would imagine, probably felt as if she was a single parent for a while,” said Mr. Marcum, who is now medically retired from the Air Force. “She had to raise two boys. And now at times she probably thinks that she’s raising three boys,” he added with a laugh.

Ms. Marcum has found relief at a weekend retreat for military wives in her situation, and on a private Facebook page where caregivers vent, offer emotional support and swap practical advice. Participants say online communities like these are often more supportive than their extended families, who sometimes retreat in the face of such overwhelming change.

Financially, at least, things are looking up for the Marcum family. Ms. Marcum was awarded the highest tier of coverage through the veterans agency’s new caregiver program, giving her a monthly stipend of $1,837. Physical, occupational and speech therapy have all helped Mr. Marcum improve, but she worries that his progress has plateaued.

“We kind of have been in the same spot for a while,” Ms. Marcum said.

As proud as she is of her husband’s service, Ms. Marcum feels guilty that neither of them now works, and hopes that one day she will again hold down a job, while continuing to care for him. She pictures herself working somewhere relaxed, like a Hallmark store, where she could chat with people and help them with cards and gifts. It would be an escape, she said, from the stress at home.

    Looking After the Soldier, Back Home and Damaged, NYT, 27.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/28/us/looking-after-the-soldier-back-home-and-damaged.html

A Brutal Afghan Clan Bedevils the U.S.

September 24, 2011
The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI, SCOTT SHANE and ALISSA J. RUBIN

This article was written by Mark Mazzetti, Scott Shane and Alissa J. Rubin.

WASHINGTON — They are the Sopranos of the Afghanistan war, a ruthless crime family that built an empire out of kidnapping, extortion, smuggling, even trucking. They have trafficked in precious gems, stolen lumber and demanded protection money from businesses building roads and schools with American reconstruction funds.

They safeguard their mountainous turf by planting deadly roadside bombs and shelling remote American military bases. And they are accused by American officials of being guns for hire: a proxy force used by the Pakistani intelligence service to carry out grisly, high-profile attacks in Kabul and throughout the country.

Today, American intelligence and military officials call the crime clan known as the Haqqani network — led by a wizened militant named Jalaluddin Haqqani who has allied himself over the years with the C.I.A., Saudi Arabia’s spy service and Osama bin Laden — the most deadly insurgent group in Afghanistan. In the latest of a series of ever bolder strikes, the group staged a daylong assault on the United States Embassy in Kabul, an attack Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, charged Thursday was aided by Pakistan’s military spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI. According to two American officials, cellphones used by the attackers made calls to suspected ISI operatives before the attack, although top Pakistani officials deny their government played any role.

But even as the Americans pledge revenge against the Haqqanis, and even amid a new debate in the Obama administration about how to blunt the group’s power, there is a growing belief that it could be too late. To many frustrated officials, they represent a missed opportunity with haunting consequences. Responsible for hundreds of American deaths, the Haqqanis probably will outlast the United States troops in Afghanistan and command large swaths of territory there once the shooting stops.

American military officers, who have spent years urging Washington to take action against the Haqqanis, express anger that the Obama administration has still not put the group on the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations out of concern that such a move would scuttle any chances that the group might make peace with Afghanistan’s government.

“Whoever is in power in Kabul will have to make a deal with the Haqqanis,” said Marc Sageman, a former C.I.A. officer who served in Pakistan during the Soviet-Afghan war. “It won’t be us. We’re going to leave, and those guys know it.”

When their threat was less urgent, the Haqqanis — estimated at 5,000 to 15,000 fighters in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan — were not a top priority for the Americans. But even then the United States also had little leverage against them. The Haqqanis have expanded their reach and numbers as top American officials have tried repeatedly over the last decade to berate and cajole officials in Pakistan to cut ties to a group it considers essential for its own security, all with little effect.

“Some have become convinced that after 10 years, it’s a bridge too far to try to change Pakistan’s strategic calculus,” said Col. Bob Cassidy, who recently returned from Kabul after serving as a top aide to Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez, a senior American commander in Afghanistan.

Now largely run by two of Mr. Haqqani’s sons, who experts say are even more committed Islamists than their father, the network is in a position of strength as the United States tries to broker a peace deal in Afghanistan before pulling its troops from the country.

In recent days, top Haqqani network leaders have indicated that they are willing to negotiate, but on their own terms. The group maintains close ties to the Taliban, but often works independently, and some intelligence officials see Haqqani operations like the American Embassy attack this month as a very public message from the group that it will not be cut out of any grand bargain.

One former American intelligence official, who worked with the Haqqani family in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation in the 1980s, said he would not be surprised if the United States again found itself relying on the clan.

“You always said about them, ‘best friend, worst enemy.’ ”

Militia and Ministate

With a combination of guns and muscle, the Haqqani network has built a sprawling enterprise on both sides of a border that barely exists.

The Haqqanis are Afghan members of the Zadran tribe, but it is in the town of Miram Shah in Pakistan’s tribal areas where they have set up a ministate with courts, tax offices and radical madrasa schools producing a ready supply of fighters. They secretly run a network of front companies throughout Pakistan selling cars and real estate, and have been tied to at least two factories churning out the ammonium nitrate used to build roadside bombs in Afghanistan.

American intelligence officials believe that a steady flow of money from wealthy people in the gulf states helps sustain the Haqqanis, and that they further line their pockets with extortion and smuggling operations throughout eastern Afghanistan, focused in the provinces of Khost, Paktia and Paktika. Chromite smuggling has been a particularly lucrative business, as has been hauling lumber from Afghanistan’s eastern forests into Pakistan.

They are also in the kidnapping business, with a mix of pecuniary and ideological motives. In May, the group released the latest of a series of videos showing Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, an American infantryman held by the network since June 2009, with a Haqqani official. David Rohde, then a reporter for The New York Times, was held hostage by Haqqani operatives from November 2008 to June 2009.

Over the past five years, with relatively few American troops operating in eastern Afghanistan, the Haqqanis have run what is in effect a protection racket for construction firms — meaning that American taxpayers are helping to finance the enemy network.

Maulavi Sardar Zadran, a former Haqqani commander, calls this extortion “the most important source of funding for the Haqqanis,” and points out that a multiyear road project linking Khost to Gardez in southeastern Afghanistan was rarely attacked by insurgent forces because a Haqqani commander was its paid protector.

“The Haqqanis know that the contractors make thousands and millions of dollars, so these contractors are very good sources of income for them,” he said in an interview.

Other road projects in the region have been under constant assault. According to an authoritative report written by Jeffrey A. Dressler of the Institute for the Study of War, Haqqani militants “repeatedly targeted road construction projects which, if completed, would provide greater freedom of movement for Afghan and coalition forces.”

But the group is not just a two-bit mafia enriching itself with shakedown schemes. It is an organized militia using high-profile terrorist attacks on hotels, embassies and other targets to advance its agenda to become a power broker in a future political settlement. And, sometimes, the agenda of its patrons from Pakistan’s spy service, the ISI.

Last month, Afghanistan’s National Intelligence Directorate released recordings of phone calls intercepted during the June 28 attack on the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul. In the exchanges, Haqqani network leaders in Pakistan instruct their operatives in the hotel to shoot the locks off rooms, throw in grenades and make sure no one escapes.

Later, as a fire blazes, the recordings capture the voice of Badruddin Haqqani, one of Jalaluddin’s sons, who the State Department says is in charge of kidnappings for the network.

On the tape, Mr. Haqqani asks: “How is the fire?”

A militant named Omar replies: “It’s a big fire, and the smoke is blinding me.” Omar says he will not be able to move away from the fire, and Mr. Haqqani asks if he has bullets.

“Yes, I have a lot of ammunition,” Omar says. “God willing, I’m very relaxed, lying on this mattress, waiting for them.”

Mr. Haqqani laughs and says: “God will give you victory.” More than a dozen people were killed in the attack, which American officials say they think was carried out with some ISI help.

A NATO officer who tracks Haqqani activities in southeastern Afghanistan gave a blunt assessment of the Haqqanis’ brutal ways of intimidation, saying: “They will execute you at a checkpoint, or stop you and go through your phone. And, if they find you’re connected to the government, you’ll turn up in the morgue. And that sends a message.”

According to a senior American military official, cross-border attacks by the Haqqanis into Afghanistan have increased more than fivefold this year over the same period a year ago, and roadside bomb attacks are up 20 percent compared with last year.

For years, American officials have urged Pakistan to move against the Haqqanis’ base of operations in North Waziristan. They typically are rebuffed by military and intelligence officials in Islamabad, who say that Pakistan’s military is overstretched from operations elsewhere in the tribal areas and is not ready for an offensive against the Haqqanis.

As a result, the United States has fallen back on a familiar strategy: missiles fired from armed drones operated by the C.I.A. But because the Haqqani network’s leaders are thought to be hiding in populated towns like Miram Shah, where the C.I.A. is hesitant to carry out drone strikes, American officials said that the campaign has had only limited success against the group’s leadership.

1980s Allies

A quarter-century ago, the Haqqani fighters were not the targets of C.I.A. missiles. They were the ones shooting C.I.A.-supplied missiles, the shoulder-fired Stingers that would devastate Soviet air power over Afghanistan.

Jalaluddin Haqqani was in temporary alliance with the United States against its greater adversary, the Soviet Union, just as his network today is allied with a Pakistan that sees Afghanistan as a critical buffer against its greater adversary, India. His clan’s ruthlessness and fervent Islam were seen then as marks of courage and faith on the part of men Ronald Reagan called freedom fighters.

Representative Charlie Wilson, the late Texas Democrat who made the mujahedeen his cause, called the elder Mr. Haqqani “goodness personified.”

American intelligence officers who worked directly with Mr. Haqqani had a somewhat less starry-eyed view. “He was always a wild-eyed guy,” said the former American intelligence official who worked with the Haqqanis. “But we weren’t talking about getting these guys scholarships to Harvard or M.I.T. He was the scourge of the Soviets.”

The Haqqani fighters would roll boulders down mountains to block passing Soviet convoys, said the official, who requested anonymity because he remains a consultant for the government. “Then they would sit up in the hills and pick the Russians off all afternoon,” he said.

Jalaluddin Haqqani’s fierce temperament was matched by his devotion to the rules of Islam, the official said. Shot in the knee one time during the daytime fast of Ramadan, Mr. Haqqani had medics dig the bullet out without anesthesia rather than violate a religious tenet by swallowing pain medication, the official said. There is little doubt in Afghanistan that if the family were to gain power, it would institute strict Islamic rule.

For Americans who worked with them in the 1980s, the fact that the Haqqanis are now fighting their former American allies is no shock. The Russians were the foreign occupiers before; now the Americans are.

“The Haqqanis have always been the warlords of that part of the country,” said Mr. Sageman, the former C.I.A. officer. “They always will be.”

Limited U.S. Options

On Feb. 19, 2009, the day before Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, Pakistan’s new senior military commander, was due in Washington for his first meetings with the Obama administration, the American Embassy in Islamabad sent a classified cable to the State Department.

American officials believed that General Kayani, Pakistan’s onetime spymaster, had for years overseen Pakistan’s covert support for militant groups like the Haqqani network, and the cable offered blunt advice about the coming talks.

“The single biggest message Kayani should hear in Washington is that this support must end,” said the cable, written by Ambassador Anne W. Patterson.

In the 30 months since, few in Washington believe that Pakistan’s support of armed militia groups has diminished. American officials who were once optimistic they could change Pakistani behavior through cajoling and large cash payments now accept a sober reality: as long as Pakistan sees its security under threat by India’s far larger army, it will rely on militant groups like the Haqqanis, the Taliban and Lashkar-e-Taiba as occasional proxy forces.

The new urgency for a political settlement in Afghanistan has further limited Washington’s options for fighting the Haqqani network. During high-level discussions last year, Obama administration officials debated listing the group as a “Foreign Terrorist Organization,” which allows for some assets to be frozen and could dissuade donors from supporting the group. While some military commanders pushed for the designation, the administration ultimately decided that such a move might alienate the Haqqanis and drive them away from future negotiations.

Officials chose to take the more incremental step of naming individual Haqqani leaders as terrorists, including Badruddin and Sirajuddin Haqqani. Senior American officials said there was once again a fierce debate inside the Obama administration about whether to put the entire group on the terrorist list.

But as Washington struggles to broker an endgame for the Afghan war, there is widespread doubt about whether the Haqqanis will negotiate, and whether their patrons in Islamabad will even let them. After a decade of war, there is a growing sense among America’s diplomats, soldiers and spies that the United States is getting out of Afghanistan without ever figuring out how a maddeningly complex game is played.

“Is there any formula for Pakistan to agree to stop supporting the insurgency in Afghanistan and instead help broker and be satisfied with a political settlement?” asked Karl W. Eikenberry, who served as both America’s top military commander in Afghanistan and its ambassador to the country.

“We don’t know the answer to that question,” he said.

 

Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane

reported from Washington,

and Alissa J. Rubin from Kabul, Afghanistan.

Eric Schmitt

contributed reporting from Washington.

    A Brutal Afghan Clan Bedevils the U.S., NYT, 24.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/25/world/asia/brutal-haqqani-clan-bedevils-united-states-in-afghanistan.html

Pakistan’s Spy Agency

Is Tied to Attack on U.S. Embassy

September 22, 2011
The New York Times
By ELISABETH BUMILLER and JANE PERLEZ

WASHINGTON — The nation’s top military official said Thursday that Pakistan’s spy agency played a direct role in supporting the insurgents who carried out the deadly attack on the American Embassy in Kabul last week. It was the most serious charge that the United States has leveled against Pakistan in the decade that America has been at war in Afghanistan.

In comments that were the first to directly link the spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, with an assault on the United States, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, went further than any other American official in blaming the ISI for undermining the American effort in Afghanistan. His remarks were certain to further fray America’s shaky relationship with Pakistan, a nominal ally.

The United States has long said that Pakistan’s intelligence agency supports the Haqqani network, based in Pakistan’s tribal areas, as a way to extend Pakistani influence in Afghanistan. But Admiral Mullen made clear that he believed that the support extended to increasingly high-profile attacks in Afghanistan aimed directly at the United States.

These included a truck bombing at a NATO outpost south of Kabul on Sept. 10, which killed at least five people and wounded 77 coalition soldiers — one of the worst tolls for foreign troops in a single attack in the war — as well as the embassy assault that killed 16 Afghan police officers and civilians.

“With ISI support, Haqqani operatives planned and conducted that truck bomb attack, as well as the assault on our embassy,” Admiral Mullen said in a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee. “We also have credible evidence that they were behind the June 28th attack against the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul and a host of other smaller but effective operations.” In short, he said, “the Haqqani network acts as a veritable arm of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency.” His remarks were part of a deliberate effort by American officials to ratchet up pressure on Pakistan and perhaps pave the way for more American drone strikes or even cross-border raids into Pakistan to root out insurgents from their havens. American military officials refused to discuss what steps they were prepared to take, although Admiral Mullen’s statement made clear that taking on the Haqqanis had become an urgent priority.

On Thursday, Rehman Malik, Pakistan’s interior minister, rejected accusations by the United States of ISI involvement in the attacks in Afghanistan. “If you say that it is ISI involved in that attack, I categorically deny it,” he said in an interview with Reuters. “We have no such policy to attack or aid attack through Pakistani forces or through any Pakistani assistance.” He also said his government would “not allow” an American operation aimed at the Haqqani network in North Waziristan, a remote part of Pakistan’s lawless tribal region.

Mr. Malik seemed to indicate that American officials had threatened on Tuesday in meetings in Washington with the head of the ISI, Maj. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, that American troops were prepared to cross the border from Afghanistan to attack Haqqani militants. An American official would say only that David H. Petraeus, the new director of the Central Intelligence Agency, told General Pasha that the C.I.A. would continue its campaign of drone strikes against the Haqqanis in Pakistan and pursue them in Afghanistan.

“The Pakistan nation will not allow the boots on our ground, never,” Mr. Malik said in an interview with Reuters. “Our government is already cooperating with the U.S. — but they also must respect our sovereignty.”

A senior American official said Thursday that no decisions had been made on actions that the Obama administration might take against the Haqqanis.

American covert raids into Pakistan are rare — only two, including the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in May, have become public — but some American intelligence officials argue that more aggressive ground raids in Pakistan are necessary.

The United States gives Pakistan more than $2 billion in security assistance annually, although this summer the Obama administration decided to suspend or in some cases cancel about a third of that aid this year. Altogether, about $800 million in military aid and equipment could be affected.

The suspension was intended to chasten Pakistan for expelling American military trainers this year and to press its army to fight militants more effectively. The decision was made after the Bin Laden raid in Pakistan, where the leader of Al Qaeda had been living comfortably near a top military academy.

Admiral Mullen is to retire at the end of this month, and coming from him the statements carried exceptional weight. For years he has been the American military official leading the effort to improve cooperation with the Pakistanis. But relations have reached a nadir since the Bin Laden raid. Pakistani officials were angered that they had not been told of the raid in advance, and questions remain about whether Pakistani intelligence was sheltering Bin Laden.

Although American military officials believe that the ISI is in many cases directing the Haqqani network to attack United States forces in Afghanistan, they did not go so far as to say on Thursday that the ISI specifically directed the assault on the American Embassy. American military officials did not describe the kind of support they believe the ISI gave the Haqqani network for the embassy attack, and also offered no evidence for their claim. In July 2008, the United States was able to determine that the ISI was behind the bombing of the Indian Embassy in Kabul based on intercepted communications of ISI officers.

Admiral Mullen testified alongside Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, who told the committee that the attack on the embassy and the assassination this week of Burhanuddin Rabbani, the leader of Afghanistan’s High Peace Council and a former Afghan president, were “a sign of weakness in the insurgency.” He cast the attacks as signs that the Taliban had shifted to high-profile targets in an effort to disrupt the progress that the American military had made.

No one has claimed responsibility for the attack on Mr. Rabbani, which has dealt a potentially devastating blow to efforts to negotiate a peace with the Taliban.

In his remarks to the committee, Admiral Mullen voiced a stern warning to Pakistani officials, who he said were undermining their own interests as well as American interests in the region.

“They may believe that by using these proxies, they are hedging their bets or redressing what they feel is an imbalance in regional power,” he said. “But in reality, they have already lost that bet. By exporting violence, they’ve eroded their internal security and their position in the region. They have undermined their international credibility and threatened their economic well-being.”

He also said he did not think he had wasted his time by putting so much effort into improving ties with Pakistan’s government.

“I’ve done this because I believe that a flawed and difficult relationship is better than no relationship at all,” he said. “Some may argue I’ve wasted my time, that Pakistan is no closer to us than before, and may now have drifted even further away. I disagree. Military cooperation again is warming.”

Elisabeth Bumiller reported from Washington, and Jane Perlez from Islamabad, Pakistan. Mark Mazzetti contributed reporting from Washington.

This article has been revised

to reflect the following correction:

Correction: September 22, 2011

An earlier version of this article included a photo caption that mistakenly referred to Leon E. Panetta as the C.I.A. director. He is the secretary of defense.

    Pakistan’s Spy Agency Is Tied to Attack on U.S. Embassy, NYT, 22.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/23/world/asia/mullen-asserts-pakistani-role-in-attack-on-us-embassy.html

Pessimism Fills Kabul

During Mourning

for Slain Peace Council Chief

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

KABUL, Afghanistan — President Hamid Karzai landed at Kabul International Airport as dusk fell here Wednesday and faced a country even more fearful and divided than the one he had left just three days ago.

The assassination of Burhanuddin Rabbani, the head of the country’s High Peace Council, on Tuesday by a supposed emissary from the Taliban was still reverberating through the country. His death raised disturbing questions about who was responsible and, if it was the Taliban, whether the insurgents had any interest in pursuing peace with an American-backed government.

By Wednesday it was apparent that the killing threatened to splinter the already fragile alliances between Afghanistan’s ethnic groups, leaving a sense of desolation about the country’s future.

No one lost more politically when Mr. Rabbani died than Mr. Karzai, several analysts said. Mr. Karzai is a Pashtun from Kandahar, in the south, while Mr. Rabbani was a former president and onetime leader of the Northern Alliance, the anti-Taliban force made up mostly of ethnic Tajiks.

While Mr. Rabbani’s efforts at peace had shown only limited promise, his backing of Mr. Karzai had shored up the president, who was under constant pressure from former members of the Northern Alliance not to sell out to the Taliban, who are also mostly southern Pashtuns like the president.

In standing shoulder to shoulder with Mr. Karzai, Mr. Rabbani blunted the sharpest criticism from the northerners and lent a patina of credibility to Mr. Karzai’s often naïve sounding efforts to reach out to the Taliban. Mr. Karzai has often spoken of the Taliban as alienated “brothers,” glossing over their killing of civilians and the string of assassinations that have killed even close allies of the president.

“President Rabbani brought a notable dimension of stability and so that’s why he was very important and his assassination left a vacuum in the north,” said Haroun Mir, a political analyst in Kabul.

The northern powerbrokers are both inside and outside the government and include the governor of Balkh Province, Atta Mohammed Noor; the minister of interior, Bismullah Khan; as well as former presidential candidate Abdullah Abdullah. Some have delivered barely veiled broadsides against Mr. Karzai. However in Mr. Rabbani’s presence they deferred.

“Now who represents the north? Now that President Rabbani is not here, the critics of President Karzai will gain prominence in the North,” Mr. Mir said.

The other casualty is the peace process itself. While no one is declaring it dead, with Mr. Rabbani’s it cannot go forward in anything like the form it was in. First off a new chairman must be found for the peace council, and finding someone who holds the same national stature as Mr. Rabbani and can command the same respect from an array of groups will not be easy.

Trickier is to set up new rules that will at once safeguard council members from being killed and ensure that they are not duped by imposters, but still leave them accessible to insurgents who are thinking of changing sides.

Security for the peace process has been troubled from the start, and there have been repeated efforts to derail it. In the summer of 2010 when the Consultative Jirga was held in Kabul, which resulted in the formation of the council, insurgents attacked the event, shooting multiple rockets at it. Mr. Karzai, infuriated at the breach in security, fired his minister of interior and his head of national intelligence. Subsequently it emerged that Pakistani authorities had pressed for their removal.

A few months later, a man posing as a senior Taliban leader engaged in talks with NATO officials and even went to the presidential palace, getting gifts of money along the way, only to turn out to be an imposter — a shopkeeper in Quetta, Pakistan. This time, the emissary from the enemy turned out to be a saboteur.

The Northern Alliance is unequivocal that the approach has to change. Although what that means is open to interpretation, there was not a good word from the north for Mr. Karzai. Some said overtures to the Taliban needed to end altogether. Others said many more safeguards needed to be put in place.

“We can’t make peace with Taliban from a position of weakness,” said Ahmad Wali Massoud, the brother of Ahmad Shah Massoud, the jihadi leader killed on the eve of the attack on the World Trade Center. He spoke just outside the mourning tent hastily set up on Wednesday to accommodate the crowds of supporters of Mr. Rabbani who gathered at his house to offer condolences.

“The responsibility for this attack goes to this government. Because if they cannot differentiate between two people — which one is Taliban and which one is not — how can they negotiate with a big movement like the Taliban.”

Others were angrier and suggested giving up on achieving any rapprochement with any Taliban.

“We have reached the conclusion that Taliban can’t be one side of a dialogue and peace deal,” said Sultan Mohammad Awrang, a former member of Parliament and a member of Jamiat, the party started by Mr. Rabbani. “They don’t have that independence; they are just tools and outsiders who control them. So we can not get anywhere in this process.” The term outsiders generally refers to the Pakistanis.

More moderate voices were still to be found, but they seemed faint, not least because of the unanswered questions that loomed. A day later much about the assassination remained mysterious. No one seemed to know anything about the man who killed Mr. Rabbani, beyond his name, which by the end of the day everyone agreed was Esmatullah Kandahari.

Questions abounded about how a man carrying a bomb could have entered the home of a high-ranking figure like Mr. Rabbani without apparently either a background check or a thorough search.

“How can it be that they would let someone in to see the man in charge of bringing peace to Afghanistan without knowing who he is?” said an Afghan consultant, who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak about the issue.

Mr. Karzai also seemed at a loss for words. As soon as he arrived, he went straight to the military hospital where Mr. Rabbani’s body was being kept until his burial on Friday and made no public statement.

 

Reporting was contributed by Jack Healy, Abdul Waheed Wafa
and Sangar Rahimi from Kabul, and Taimoor Shah from Kandahar, Afghanistan.

    Pessimism Fills Kabul During Mourning for Slain Peace Council Chief, 21.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/22/world/asia/pessimism-fills-kabul-during-mourning-for-slain-peace-council-chief.html

Assassination Deals Blow

to Peace Process in Afghanistan

September 20, 2011
The New York Times
By ALISSA J. RUBIN

KABUL, Afghanistan — An assassin with explosives hidden in his turban was ushered into the home of the head of Afghanistan’s peace process on Tuesday, embraced him and then exploded the bomb, killing him and dealing a potentially devastating blow to the effort to reconcile with the Taliban and end 10 years of war.

The assassination of Burhanuddin Rabbani, the leader of Afghanistan’s High Peace Council and a former president, on the heels of a carefully planned attack on the American Embassy a week ago, underscored the fierce opposition of those who want to shatter the country’s tenuous stability and thwart its tentative steps toward peace.

It also demonstrated once again the ability of the government’s enemies to reach into even the most secure bastions of the capital, whether through treachery or frontal assaults, and to carry out a rising number of carefully selected assassinations. This one, however, may be the most significant of the war.

Without the 71-year-old Mr. Rabbani, it will be exceedingly difficult to move the peace process forward. A complex figure, he was nonetheless one of the few with the stature to persuade the Taliban’s enemies, the former Northern Alliance, to embark on reconciliation discussions.

Western diplomats said that recently Mr. Rabbani had begun discussions with some Taliban members who might have the power to engage in real negotiations. A number of previous contacts had proved to be with impostors or figures who had little authority.

The attack wounded four others, including Masoom Stanekzai, the head of the peace council’s secretariat, who has also been vital to advancing the talks, according to Afghan security officials. “Whoever did this decided they wanted to disrupt those talks,” a Western diplomat said.

Within hours of the killing, Northern Alliance leaders, most of whom are ethnic Tajiks and Hazaras, as well as some prominent Pashtun figures, were on television, denouncing the peace process and saying that the Taliban could not be trusted. The Taliban are predominantly ethnic Pashtuns.

Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, a former presidential candidate and Northern Alliance leader, summed up the sentiments heard from many Northern Alliance figures in the wake of the assassination: “This is a lesson for all of us that we shouldn’t fool ourselves that this group, who has carried out so many crimes against the people of Afghanistan, are willing to make peace.”

Dr. Abdullah added: “We have to be realistic about what we are up against. We are up against people who don’t believe in any humanity. They assassinate people on the streets of Kabul, they assassinate those trying to achieve peace.” Last spring the Taliban had proclaimed that they would kill members of the High Peace Council.

“No one took it seriously and they should have and it is also time for President Karzai to wake up,” he said. “These are the people who he calls his ‘dear brothers,’ they are behind what happened.” He referred to President Hamid Karzai’s predilection for calling the insurgents “dear brothers” or “upset brothers.”

Mr. Karzai, who had planned a week of meetings in the United States and was at the United Nations when the attack occurred, cut short his trip and was on his way back to Afghanistan by Tuesday evening, after discussions with President Obama.

Calling Mr. Rabbani “an Afghan patriot who sacrificed his life,” Mr. Karzai pledged to continue to seek a peaceful way to end the fighting. “This will not deter us from continuing down the path we have started,” he said.

Mr. Obama called the assassination “a tragic loss.”

Western countries, including the United States, have made contacts with Taliban and former Taliban, hoping to jump-start the process. However, Western officials have emphasized that without strong Afghan involvement it will not be meaningful, because it is the Afghans who will have to trust each other enough to decide how to share power over the long term. That possibility seemed increasingly remote late Tuesday.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attacks, but several groups could have been involved, including the Taliban; the Haqqani Network, a terrorist organization based in Pakistan’s tribal areas and with affiliations to the country’s intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence; and even elements of Al Qaeda, given the method and precise and long-term planning involved in the assassination.

The attack, less than half a mile from the American Embassy, occurred in Mr. Rabbani’s home, indicating that he felt confident the meeting would be safe. Dr. Abdullah and other members of the High Peace Council said the bomber, whose name was Esmatullah, had been staying at a guest house in Kabul and had been in contact with the council over the past five months.

He had been in contact with the council through Rahmatullah Wahidyar, a peace council member who was a Taliban deputy minister for refugees and martyrs when the group ruled the country. Mr. Wahidyar, who has been living in Kabul for several years, was removed during the summer from the list of people facing United Nations sanctions. He served as a chairman of the High Peace Council’s detainee release committee, which worked to get people freed from prison, according to diplomats.

On Tuesday, Esmatullah called Mr. Wahidyar and said that he “he had a very serious message and a very important and positive message from the Quetta Shura” to give Mr. Rabbani, Dr. Abdullah said. The Quetta Shura is the Taliban leadership group.

Mr. Rabbani had just returned from a trip to Iran at around 4:30 p.m. and as soon as he was briefed by Mr. Stanekzai, the peace council official, with whom he worked closely, and by Mr. Wahidyar, the man named Esmatullah arrived.

Moments later, Mr. Rabbani was dead. Mr. Stanekzai was seriously wounded and Mr. Wahidyar was also wounded. Early Wednesday he was being questioned by Afghanistan’s intelligence agency, but several people said it was unlikely that he had prior knowledge of the attack.

With a political career that spanned more than 40 years Mr. Rabbani, a native of the northern province of Badakhshan, came to symbolize the country with its strengths and weaknesses. He fought the Soviets in the 1980s and was a founder of Jamiat-e-Islami, a political party initially composed mainly of Tajiks.

Later, he served as a rather weak president from 1992 to 1996, when he was unable to abate the wrenching civil war that tore the country apart and paved the way for the Taliban takeover. When the Taliban were pushed out in 2001, he again moved into the political spotlight.

His death generated a sense of profound loss, not only among the northerners who knew him and fought the Russians with him, but also in the Pashtun south. For despite Pashtun doubts about whether Mr. Rabbani could be trusted, and suspicions that he was merely looking to burnish his legacy, his sincerity in his work over the past year had impressed people.

The 70-member High Peace Council, which had representatives of every stripe, had a nucleus of people who were working hard to reach out to senior Taliban commanders in Pakistan and also to persuade low-level Taliban fighters to join the government. Mr. Rabbani had traveled all over the country, setting up reconciliation councils in every province, and had gone to neighboring countries to push the project forward, impressing people with his dedication.

In Kandahar, people were aghast when the news broke of his death. A shopkeeper, Mohammed Raza, was glued to his radio, shaking his head in resignation and sadness.

“Afghanistan won’t be rebuilt,” he said. “Some elements don’t let people work in Afghanistan for peace. I am very sad. He was an elderly white-bearded man, respected by all Afghans, and he was working for peace. He paid attention to the south and was trying to end this ongoing riddle in Afghanistan, but the enemy of peace and of Afghanistan has killed him.”

 

Reporting was contributed by Sangar Rahimi, Sharifullah Sahak, Abdul Waheed Wafa and Jack Healy from Kabul, and Taimoor Shah from Kandahar, Afghanistan.

    Assassination Deals Blow to Peace Process in Afghanistan, NYT, 20.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/21/world/asia/Burhanuddin-Rabbani-afghan-peace-council-leader-assassinated.html

U.S. Blames Pakistan-Based Group

for Attack on Embassy in Kabul

September 14, 2011
The New York Times
By JACK HEALY and ALISSA J. RUBIN

KABUL, Afghanistan — Raising the death toll sharply, American and Afghan officials said Wednesday that the complexity and execution of the siege of the American Embassy and NATO’s headquarters in Kabul bore the hallmarks of a militant group based in Pakistan that has become one of the American military’s most implacable foes.

Gen. John R. Allen, the NATO commander here, said 16 people had been killed in the attack — 5 Afghan police officers and 11 civilians, including at least 6 children — double the number reported on Tuesday.

The militant group that he and other officials blamed for the attack, the Haqqani network, is a crucial ally of Al Qaeda in the Pakistani border region and has been a longtime asset of Pakistan’s military and intelligence services in Afghanistan. Pakistan’s military chiefs have resisted American pressure to go after the Haqqanis, whose primary base is in North Waziristan, part of Pakistan’s tribal areas.

Instead, North Waziristan has become a main target of American drone strikes conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency. Some military officials say the Haqqanis have not been hit as hard as they might have been for fear of worsening relations with Pakistan’s intelligence agency, so close are its ties to the network. The Pakistan military has done its best to shut down the drone campaign as relations with the United States have soured after the killing of Osama bin Laden by American commandos operating deep inside Pakistan.

The Haqqanis have been blamed for high-profile attacks in Kabul and elsewhere in Afghanistan, including the bombing of the Indian Embassy in 2008, which killed 54 people. Afterward, American intelligence officials confronted their Pakistani counterparts with evidence that Haqqani fighters had received support and direction from Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, or ISI.

Hallmarks of attacks linked to the Haqqani network include multiple fighters, targets that are often symbols of the Afghan government and their Western backers, careful planning, and, often, instructions delivered by telephone as the attackers carry out their mission.

“The Haqqanis have been attacking Kabul for a long time because Kabul for so much of this country represents not just the spiritual heartland of this country, it represents the future,” General Allen said at a briefing.

He acknowledged that the insurgents had scored a propaganda victory with the attack, which paralyzed central Kabul, bogged down security forces for hours, and illustrated how the militants still have the ability and the will to attack some of the capital’s most heavily guarded areas.

With the United States and other NATO members preparing to withdraw most of their troops by the end of 2014, the attack also underlined fears that the Afghan security forces would not be able to prevent high-profile violence and secure the country.

An uneasy veneer of calm settled on Kabul on Wednesday as security forces finished clearing the unfinished concrete high-rise from which at least six militants shot rocket-propelled grenades and sprayed bullets into one of the capital’s most heavily secured districts. The government declared the assault to be over at 8:30 a.m. Wednesday, about 19 hours after the first explosions.

All of the attackers inside the building were killed, as were at least three suicide bombers who hit targets elsewhere in the city.

Six coalition soldiers were also wounded, three by rocket-propelled grenades that landed in a military installation near NATO headquarters and another three who were injured during the overnight operation to clear the building, said a NATO spokesman, Lt. Col. Jimmie E. Cummings Jr.

Still, General Allen and other American military and diplomatic officials said that the attack had no military significance, and that no Western soldiers or civilians had been killed.

“Afghanistan is a little like a boxer,” said Simon Gass, the senior civilian NATO representative in Afghanistan. “It is going to take some blows along the way, but it will keep coming forward, and it will prevail over its enemy.”

Officials said the attack had actually demonstrated the growing capability of Afghan security forces. They said Afghan Army and police units responded quickly and ably and worked methodically to clear the high-rise, each floor a treacherous warren of small rooms and potential hiding places for attackers.

The American ambassador, Ryan C. Crocker, played down the attack as “harassment” that had made for a hard day at the embassy but was not a game-changer.

“This really is not a very big deal,” Mr. Crocker said. “If that’s the best they can do, you know, I think it’s actually a statement of their weakness.”

Mr. Crocker indicated that such attacks were likely to continue because the insurgency had strong support in Pakistan.

“You can’t keep every evildoer out of the city,” Mr. Crocker said. “You do have an insurgency that’s going on in the country. It’s particularly hard to do when you have safe havens. And the information available to us is that these attackers, like those who carried out the bombing in Wardak are part of the Haqqani network,” he added, referring to a truck bombing on Sunday.

A senior military official in Washington agreed with that assessment. “Yes, we think HQN led,” he said, using the shorthand for the Haqqani network, “but also probably included other groups.”

Dozens of Afghans gathered outside the scene of the siege on Wednesday morning to watch the police remove the attackers’ bodies. Though the streets were once again open and vendors were grilling meat and corn in the shadow of the building, there remained a sense of insecurity among men who said they neither supported the insurgents’ attacks nor trusted the police to keep them safe.

“We are mad at both,” said Farid Hotak. “At the Taliban for doing these types of attacks, and at the government for failing to prevent them.” Mr. Hotak, who lives in an apartment across the street, seethed at the memory of girls crying and running for cover. “Fear and panic rules,” he said.

None of the attackers appeared to be older than 25, and one looked even younger. The fighters had enough ammunition to keep shooting until the final attacker was killed on Wednesday and appeared to have bottled water and fruit juice, police officers said.

The attackers wore sandals and the traditional Afghan trousers and shirts known as shalwar kameez. The Interior Ministry suggested that they might have tried to conceal themselves by dressing as women, saying they had found burqas, the face-covering robes worn by many Afghan women.

The youngest fighter had tried to surrender, but the others would not let him, said Sediq Sediqi, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry.

An Afghan Army sergeant, Mohammed Daoud, who had spent the previous afternoon shooting at the attackers from a copse of trees across the road, returned on Wednesday with dozens of other security officers to inspect the bloody remnants of the attack and look at the bodies. He blamed the presence of Western forces for the assault but said he had no idea about how the police and soldiers could prevent the next one.

“It’s so difficult to stop these suicide bombers,” Sergeant Daoud said. “Ordinary people have a better chance of stopping them than Afghan security forces.”

 

Reporting was contributed by Ray Rivera, Sangar Rahimi and Abdul Waheed Wafa from Kabul,
and Eric Schmitt from Washington.

    U.S. Blames Pakistan-Based Group for Attack on Embassy in Kabul, NYT, 14.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/15/world/asia/us-blames-kabul-assault-on-pakistan-based-group.html

Militants Launch Attack

on U.S. Embassy in Kabul

September 13, 2011
The New York Times
By ALISSA J. RUBIN,
RAY RIVERA and JACK HEALY

KABUL, Afghanistan — In the most direct assault since the American embassy opened here nine years ago, heavily armed insurgents wearing suicide vests put the embassy and the nearby NATO headquarters in their crosshairs, showing the Taliban’s ability to enter even the most heavily fortified districts in the country.

The nearly five hour siege was one of several attacks that hit the capital on Tuesday afternoon. American civilians fled to their bunkers — a rocket penetrated the embassy compound — as Afghan government offices and the capital’s center emptied as the insurgents fired rocket-propelled grenades and NATO and Afghan troops responded with barrages of return fire.

The attacks asserted the ability of the Taliban with a small number of men to use guerrilla tactics to terrify the population, dominate the media, and overshadow the West’s assertions that the Afghan government and security forces will soon be able to handle the insurgency on their own.

As the gunfire pounded, loudspeakers at nearby embassies kept repeating: “This is not a drill, this is not a drill. If you are in a secure location, do not move.”

While the numbers killed were low— as has been the case in similar complex attacks staged by the Taliban in Kandahar and Kabul — its purpose appeared to be to cast doubt about the government’s ability to protect its people.

At least six people were killed including four policemen, according to the Kabul Provincial Police and the Ministry of the Interior. There were also 19 people wounded including four Afghans who were struck at the American Embassy. Late in the evening the Interior ministry was still counting the number of dead insurgents, but it appeared that at least seven had entered the city and five had taken positions in a 14-story building that was under construction and had clear sight lines to its targets.

The assault from the building was all the more dismaying because it suggested the involvement of many people who would have allowed heavily armed men to enter the city and get through the cordon that surrounds the capital’s center.

Although large areas of rural Afghanistan have long been thought to be heavily infiltrated by the Taliban, the nation’s capital, Kabul, is widely viewed as relatively safe because of the international presence and the large numbers of Afghan security and intelligence forces based there. Tuesday’s attack, which began around 1:15 p.m., was the latest in a string of attacks that have chipped away at a tenuous sense of security in the capital. In August, militants killed eight people in an attack on a British cultural center, and in June, nine suicide bombers breached layers of security to attack the hillside Intercontinental Hotel.

“The nature and scale of today’s attack clearly proves that the terrorists received assistance and guidance from some security officials within the government who are their sympathizers,” said Mr. Mohammed Naim Hamidzai Lalai, chairman of the Parliament’s Internal Security Committee.

“Otherwise it would be impossible for the planners and masterminds of the attack to stage such a sophisticated and complex attack, in this extremely well guarded location without the complicity from insiders.”

A Western official said the attack made the talk of a peace deal with Taliban seem “absurd.”

“This doesn’t show reconciliation, it does show determination,” the official said. “If the Taliban can do this with five guys perched in a building and they can alternate it with these vehicle borne IEDs” — car bombs — “which they have been doing more of, well then this won’t be the last time.”

However, President Hamid Karzai vowed that the attack would not deter his government from taking control of security from western forces on the current schedule which envisions full Afghan control by the end of 2014.

“The attacks can not stop the process of transition from taking place and can not affect it, but rather will embolden our people’s determination in taking the responsibility for their country’s own affairs,” Mr. Karzai said.

The Afghan security forces handled the response to the attack with little visible support from NATO troops, other than some surveillance about two hours into the attack when Blackhawk helicopters circled the building where the assailants were holed up, but they did not fire.

Soon after Afghan forces flew their own attack helicopters to the building, strafing it and appearing to hit their target consistently. Late into the night, Afghan forces were still clearing it, floor by floor, concerned that a bomber or two might still be hiding there, said General Mohammed Ayoub Salangi, police chief of Kabul Province. However, police on the ground, while trying to control the chaos, also added to the whirlwind of gunfire filling the air, at times hoisting their rifles over walls and hedge banks and firing toward the building from blocks away without aiming.

The attack came less than two months after Afghan forces assumed formal responsibility for security in the capital, one of several corners of the country where security was officially handed over in July.

Kerri Hannan, a spokeswoman for the American embassy, said that no embassy personnel had been hurt.

Zabiullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesman, claimed responsibility for the attacks, saying the Taliban had sent an unspecified number of assailants to attack two of the most prominent symbols of the American military and diplomatic presence here. He said the assailants were also firing at Afghan government targets.

At least one explosive projectile landed at the offices of the Afghan TOLO television channel, and another exploded near a minibus, though no injuries were reported. The Iranian English-language television channel PressTV also reported its Kabul office was under attack and that several people were hurt, but offered no other details.

In the west of the city, a suicide bomber set off an explosive vest in an attack that wounded one civilian and killed a policeman. Afghan officials said they thwarted at least two other attempted suicide bombers, shooting and killing both.

The streets surrounding the site of the attack, normally choked with the traffic of minibuses, bicycles and Toyotas, were deserted on Monday afternoon of all but security forces and people racing for cover.

“We don’t know what is their enmity or who is their enemy,” said Fatima, 25, a doctor who was running away from the Ministry of Public Health at the height of the assault. “We don’t know who they are trying to kill.”

 

Sangar Rahimi, Wahid Abdul Wafa and Sharifullah Sahak contributed reporting.

    Militants Launch Attack on U.S. Embassy in Kabul, NYT, 13.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/14/world/asia/14afghanistan.html

At Arlington,

Obama Pays Tribute to US War Dead

September 10, 2011
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

ARLINGTON, Va. (AP) — President Barack Obama and first lady Michele Obama have visited Arlington National Cemetery where they paid tribute to members of the military killed in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

One day before the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, the Obamas made a pilgrimage to Section 60 of the cemetery. The White House says that's the burial ground for military personnel killed in those two wars. Those conflicts have claimed 6,213 military personnel.

At one gravesite, the Obamas stopped to talk with members of a family who appeared to be visiting a grave. The Obamas chatted a few minutes, posed for pictures and gave out handshakes and hugs.

Then the Obamas, hand in hand, strolled along one of the rows between identical white tombstones, pausing at some markers.

    At Arlington, Obama Pays Tribute to US War Dead, NYT, 10.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/09/10/us/AP-US-Sept-11-Obama-Arlington.html

The Clock Is Ticking

September 5, 2011
The New York Times


A minimally successful end to the Afghan war depends on weakening the Taliban militarily and helping Afghanistan build up a government that won’t implode as soon as American troops are gone.

President George W. Bush gave the war — and the rebuilding — shockingly short shrift. President Obama has devoted far more troops and resources, and the United States and NATO have made progress in clearing militants from southern strongholds and building up Afghan security forces. Afghanistan is still a very dangerous place. While overall violence is down, August was the deadliest month of the war for American troops, including several Navy Seal commandos who were killed when their helicopter was shot down.

At this point, we are skeptical that the administration has a comprehensive strategy to help build up a government that Afghans would be willing to fight for.

Mr. Obama has ordered home 33,000 of 100,000 troops by the end of next summer, with Afghans to take full responsibility for their security in 2014. We support that decision. After a decade of fighting, 1,700 American lives lost and $450 billion spent, it is time for the troops to start coming home. But no one should minimize the risks.

Afghans have no love for the Taliban’s brutality. They show extraordinary courage every day when they send 2.5 million of their daughters to school. Still, if the president’s withdrawal timetable has any chance at all, Washington will have to do a lot more to try to build up a government that can deliver basic services and minimal security; one that doesn’t steal its people blind and offers all Afghans — including women — a real opportunity to participate in the country’s political life.

And while the State Department this year finally tripled the number of civilians in the field — there are now more than 1,100 — to oversee aid and development, there is already talk of bringing some of them home.

There isn’t a lot of time left. Here are some of the major issues that must be addressed:

 

GOVERNANCE President Hamid Karzai is more difficult to work with than ever. The government was paralyzed for months after he named a special court to review last year’s fraud-tainted parliamentary election, which gave his Pashtun clan far fewer seats than expected. Under Western pressure, Mr. Karzai recently agreed to a compromise. But his unchecked power and frictions with Washington are serious problems.

Some ministries, like health, perform reasonably well because competent people were found to run them and the Americans provided technical advice. But that is the exception. The truth is that Afghanistan still lacks a functioning government, Parliament or banking system.

Washington has a chance to set a fresh tone with the new American team in Kabul — Ambassador Ryan Crocker; Gen. John Allen, the commander for the war; and Marc Grossman, the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan — respected veterans who don’t have the same history of tensions with Mr. Karzai as their predecessors.

To clear the way for a new generation of politicians, and break the lock of cronyism, Mr. Karzai has to step down in 2014, as the Afghan Constitution demands. He says he will. The Americans should use all of the levers they have to make sure that he keeps his word. The Americans must also press him to make political reforms that will help develop credible candidates and make it harder to tamper with the 2014 vote.

There are some competent officials at the local and provincial levels, many encouraged by the Americans and assisted by military and technical advisers. But many have been targets of Taliban violence. There must be more effort on building this level of governance, including providing more security for officials.

 

RECONCILIATION In February, after much resistance, American officials publicly endorsed the idea of negotiations with the Taliban on a political settlement. Washington held several preliminary meetings with a representative of Mullah Muhammad Omar. While there was little apparent progress, in a statement issued Tuesday, the Taliban leader acknowledged the contacts and left open the door for more.

We are skeptical that there is a deal to be had, but the Americans should keep looking for openings. At a minimum, talks with Taliban leaders may make it easier for lower-level fighters to decide to come in from the cold, especially if NATO continues to pound away at them. Washington should consider supporting the appointment of an international mediator who might be better able to bring more insurgent groups to the table.

 

ECONOMIC SUPPORT According to the World Bank, an estimated 97 percent of Afghanistan’s roughly $28 billion gross domestic product comes from military and development aid and the in-country spending of foreign troops.

An awful lot of that money has been stolen or wasted, but not all of it. Sixty-four percent or more of Afghans now have some access to health care, up from 9 percent under the last year of Taliban rule; eight million children are in school, up from one million in 2001; infant mortality is down; adult longevity is up; half of all Afghan families have cellphones.

What the aid has not built is a stable and viable country. The Afghan government is still struggling to develop the capacity to run — and finance — programs on its own. Revenues cover only one-third of the government’s $4.5 billion budget. Officials fear the economy could contract by 40 percent as the troops leave.

International donors will need to keep underwriting Afghanistan for years to come. But self-sufficiency has to be the goal.

The most immediate question is where will Afghanistan get the $6 billion to $8 billion per year that it needs to maintain a planned 379,000-man security force that is now paid for by foreign donors? Or keep countless other projects and jobs afloat? What will happen if thousands of armed young men are unemployed?

Washington needs a plan to address these challenges. It also needs to spend smarter by investing in projects that are achievable and sustainable but will still strengthen governance and services. One success story: the National Solidarity Program that pays for local projects developed and managed by Afghans themselves.

Over the long term, the country’s huge mineral resources, if developed right, could produce significant jobs and revenue. One short-term idea worth considering: channeling billions of dollars in remittances — sent home by Afghans working in the gulf and in Iran — into Afghan banks to underwrite loans. Afghanistan will first need to build a functioning banking system; the corruption and near-collapse of the Kabul Bank is a reminder of how much effort that will take.

 

PAKISTAN Afghanistan will never have a chance at lasting stability if Pakistan continues to harbor and support the Taliban and other extremist groups. If negotiations with the Taliban ever get real traction, Pakistan will have leverage — for good or ill.

The biggest problem, for both Afghanistan and Pakistan, is that Pakistan’s military leadership still sees the Taliban as a proxy for ensuring its influence in Afghanistan, and any move it makes against the extremists as a favor to Washington — rather than also a fight for its own survival.

Relations between Washington and Islamabad have not recovered since the American raid that killed Osama bin Laden. The administration needs to keep searching for ways to revive a working relationship and change the self-destructive mind-set of Pakistan’s leaders. Ending all aid would be a serious mistake, but withholding certain military aid, as the administration has done, could help.

 

INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY The withdrawal of American troops must not be an invitation for a revival of the 19th century’s “Great Game.” For the sake of their own stability, Pakistan, India, Iran and others need to agree to respect Afghanistan’s (and each other’s) sovereignty and forswear interference and conflict.

Turkey will test its leadership skills when it holds a regional conference in November aimed at producing some agreement along those lines. In December, a bigger international meeting in Bonn is supposed to lay out economic initiatives that could help stabilize Afghanistan. Ideas include new investments as well as a broad vision for a “new silk road” that would create jobs and foster economic integration through trade and energy projects.

The United States and its allies have to marshal their best arguments and diplomatic skills to ensure that those meetings produce real results and a persuasive message that is heard by all people in Afghanistan and Pakistan. As we said, there is not a lot of time.

    The Clock Is Ticking, NYT, 5.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/06/opinion/the-clock-is-ticking-on-afghanistan.html

Anger After a Raid Kills

a Wealthy Afghan With a Murky Past

September 4, 2011
The New York Times
By RAY RIVERA

KABUL, Afghanistan — In life and death, Sabar Lal’s story was riddled with conflicting narratives.

After the fall of the Taliban government in 2001, he claimed to be on the side of the Americans in the hunt for Al Qaeda, but United States troops accused him of helping Osama bin Laden and his allies flee to Pakistan.

After five years in the American detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, he returned to Afghanistan in 2007 and built a new life with his two wives and nine children. They lived comfortably in a wealthy section of Jalalabad, one of the safer big cities in the country.

But suspicions lingered, and on Friday, coalition and Afghan forces killed him in a night raid at his residence, acting on intelligence that he had been using his wealth to help lead and finance insurgent attacks in the Pech Valley in Kunar, the northeastern province where he grew up.

His death has angered members of the Afghanistan High Peace Council, who are responsible for reconciliation efforts with militants. Council members say that just days earlier they had won a promise from coalition forces to stop bothering Mr. Lal after they had detained him last month. NATO officials insist they had not detained him.

These conflicting details, among many others, add to the puzzle of Mr. Lal’s life before and after Guantánamo. His killing comes as the Peace Council, appointed by President Hamid Karzai, is struggling to persuade Taliban fighters to lay down their arms and rejoin society. Some council members worried Sunday that NATO’s raid on Mr. Lal’s compound could further undermine those efforts.

“It really hurts the prestige of the Peace Council among the people of Afghanistan,” said Haji Deen Muhammad, a council member. “More importantly, those Taliban members who were released through our process are going to have big concerns that this will happen to them.”

Council members said NATO and Afghan forces detained Mr. Lal, who was in his late 40s, in an operation early last month, then turned him over to the National Directorate of Security, Afghanistan’s main intelligence agency. But after assurances from Afghan intelligence officials and high-level government officials that he did not pose a threat, the council, working closely with its NATO counterparts, obtained his release, said Farhadullah Farhad, the council’s deputy chief executive officer.

“Everybody was involved,” he said, adding, “They would not have released him unless he was proven innocent.”

Lt. Col. Jimmie E. Cummings Jr., a spokesman for the NATO-led military coalition, said that until the operation that killed Mr. Lal, NATO forces had never “detained him or had him in custody.” Officials with the National Directorate of Security did not respond to questions on Sunday.

White House officials have long worried about Guantánamo detainees reverting to terrorism after their release. More than 600 prisoners have been released or transferred to prisons elsewhere since 2002, a Defense Department spokeswoman said Sunday. Last year, the Obama administration told Congress that 117 former detainees were confirmed or suspected of turning to terrorist activity. The prison still holds 171 detainees.

Mr. Lal, who was identified in Guantánamo records as Sabar Lal Melma, was viewed by officials there as someone more committed to self-interest than to any cause. He had come from a wealthy family in Kunar Province and had ties to prominent tribal elders. Through years of fighting against the Soviets in the late 1980s and later against the Taliban, he knew the treacherous mountain terrain along the Pakistan border intimately, information valued by American forces searching for Qaeda crossing routes.

After the Taliban’s fall in late 2001, he was given the rank of brigadier general and put in charge of 600 border security troops in Kunar.

But as Americans searched for Bin Laden in the mountainous Tora Bora region south of Kunar, they suspected Mr. Lal of orchestrating rocket attacks against American forces. They also suspected that he and a prominent tribal elder were helping Arab fighters, perhaps even Bin Laden himself, escape to Pakistan.

In August 2002, American troops arrested Mr. Lal and the elder, Haji Rohullah Wakil, along with 10 other associates after a meeting with United States military officials in Asadabad. They were transferred to Guantánamo Bay later that year. In a 2005 assessment, Guantánamo officials said that Mr. Lal “seems to side with any group or organization that is willing to pay or reward him for his cooperation, from coalition forces to Arabs fleeing Afghanistan.”

At a military tribunal during his detention at Guantánamo, Mr. Lal denied the allegations. When the Americans arrived, he said, according to a transcript, “I joined them, I ate with them, I went places with them. I helped them.”

Guantánamo officials later dropped the allegation that he helped Bin Laden escape, and deemed him a “medium risk.” In September 2007, they transferred him to Afghan custody. The Afghan government released him about 20 days later.

Mr. Wakil, who was released the next year, said in an interview on Sunday that Mr. Lal always felt he had been wrongly imprisoned. “We all think we had been imprisoned unjustly,” Mr. Wakil said.

Mr. Lal moved to Jalalabad with his family shortly after his release, and ran a small but lucrative real estate business.

“He was living there peacefully with no link to anyone,” Mr. Wakil said.

But suspicions continued. NATO officials said in a statement after the raid that Mr. Lal was responsible for attacks in the Pech District and was “a key affiliate of the Al Qaeda network,” tied to senior members of the group throughout Kunar Province and Pakistan.

Mr. Muhammad, the Peace Council member, questioned why a night raid was even necessary when Mr. Lal was living in the middle of a peaceful city where people knew him. “I don’t know what kind of justice it is to kill someone when it would have been very easy to detain him if they had any suspicion that he was linked to insurgents,” he said.

Among the people NATO detained at Mr. Lal’s home that night, Mr. Wakil said, was another former Guantánamo prisoner, Said Amir Jan, also known as Ghorzang.

Mr. Wakil also appears to have remained under suspicion after his release from Guantánamo. In a 2009 Pentagon report, he was listed as one of 47 former detainees suspected of reverting or turning to terrorist activity.

It is unknown if Mr. Lal was on the list because not all the names were published.

Now, like so many aspects of his life, even the details of his death are in dispute. NATO said in a statement that Mr. Lal was killed after he ran out of the home wielding an assault rifle as they tried to arrest him.

But a night watchman named Rahmatullah, who like many Afghans goes by one name, said he was at the residence the night of the raid and gave a different account.

He said coalition forces stormed the compound, handcuffed and blindfolded Mr. Lal and his other guests, then took Mr. Lal out to a veranda. About 20 minutes later, Mr. Rahmatullah said, “we heard gunshots.”

Sangar Rahimi and Abdul Waheed Wafa

contributed reporting from Kabul,

and an employee of the New York Times

from Jalalabad.

    Anger After a Raid Kills a Wealthy Afghan With a Murky Past, NYT, 4.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/05/world/asia/05insurgent.html