From the Armed Forces Journal:

I spent last year in Afghanistan, visiting and talking with U.S. troops and their Afghan partners. My duties with the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force took me into every significant area where our soldiers engage the enemy. Over the course of 12 months, I covered more than 9,000 miles and talked, traveled and patrolled with troops in Kandahar, Kunar, Ghazni, Khost, Paktika, Kunduz, Balkh, Nangarhar and other provinces.

What I saw bore no resemblance to rosy official statements by U.S. military leaders about conditions on the ground.

Entering this deployment, I was sincerely hoping to learn that the claims were true: that conditions in Afghanistan were improving, that the local government and military were progressing toward self-sufficiency. I did not need to witness dramatic improvements to be reassured, but merely hoped to see evidence of positive trends, to see companies or battalions produce even minimal but sustainable progress.

Instead, I witnessed the absence of success on virtually every level.

How can anyone not like this?

This article titled “US bomb warning to Pakistan ignored” was written by Declan Walsh in Islamabad and Jon Boone in Kabul, for The Guardian on Thursday 22nd September 2011 21.32 UTC

The American commander of Nato in Afghanistan personally asked Pakistan’s army chief to halt an insurgent truck bomb that was heading for his troops, during a meeting in Islamabad two days before a huge explosion that wounded 77 US soldiers at a base near Kabul.

In reply General Ashfaq Kayani offered to “make a phone call” to stop the assault on the US base in Wardak province. But his failure to use the American intelligence to prevent the attack has fuelled a blazing row between the US and Pakistan.

Furious American officials blame the Taliban-inspired group the Haqqanis – and, by extension, Pakistani intelligence – for the 10 September bombing and an even more audacious guerrilla assault on the Kabul US embassy three days later that killed 20 people and lasted more than 20 hours.

On Thursday the US military chief, Admiral Mike Mullen, described the Haqqanis as “a veritable arm of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence [spy] agency”. He earlier accused the ISI of fighting a “proxy war” in Afghanistan through the group.

Pakistan’s defence minister, Ahmed Mukhtar, rejected the American accusations of Haqqani patronage as “baseless”. “No one can threaten Pakistan as we are an independent state,” he said.

The angry accusations lift the veil on sensitive conversations that have heretofore largely taken place behind closed doors. On 8 September, General John Allen, the Nato commander in Afghanistan, raised intelligence reports of the impending truck bomb at a meeting with Kayani during a visit to Islamabad.

Kayani promised Allen he would “make a phone call” to try to stop the attack, according to a western official with close knowledge of the meeting. “The offer raised eyebrows,” the official said.

But two days later, just after Allen’s return to Kabul, a truck rigged with explosives ploughed into the gates of the US base in Wardak, 50 miles south-west of Kabul, injuring 77 US soldiers and killing two Afghan civilians.

Afterwards the US ambassador to Kabul, Ryan Crocker, blamed the Haqqanis. “They enjoy safe havens in North Waziristan,” he said, referring to the Haqqani main base in the tribal belt.

Allen’s spokesman said Nato “routinely shares intelligence with the Pakistanis regarding insurgent activities” but he refused to confirm the details of the conversation with Kayani.

The Pakistani military spokesman, General Athar Abbas, said: “Let’s suppose it was the case. The main question is how did this truck travel to Wardak and explode without being checked by Nato? This is just a blame game.”

US allegations of ISI links to Haqqani attacks stretch back to July 2008, when the CIA deputy director, Stephen Kappes, flew to Islamabad with intercept evidence that linked the ISI to an attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul.

But American disquiet has never been so uncompromisingly expressed as in recent days. The issue dominated three hours of talks between the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, and the Pakistani foreign minister, Hina Rabbani Khar.

On Tuesday Mullen said he had asked Kayani to “disconnect” the ISI from the Haqqanis. In Washington the CIA chief, David Petraeus, delivered a similar message in private to the ISI chief, General Shuja Pasha. Even the soft-spoken US ambassador to Islamabad, Cameron Munter, has joined the chorus of condemnation, delivering a hard-hitting message through an interview on Pakistani state radio.

“We’ve changed our message in private too,” one US official said. “Before, we used to make polite demands about the Haqqanis. Now we are saying ‘this has to stop’.”

The new mood is driven by a combination of climbing casualties and brazen attacks. The Haqqanis were also blamed for a recent assault on the InterContinental Hotel, while August was the deadliest month for US forces in Afghanistan, with 71 deaths.

Nato is now investigating whether the Haqqanis had a hand in Tuesday’s assassination of Burhanuddin Rabbani, President Hamid Karzai’s peace envoy to the Taliban. Rabbani was killed at his home by a suicide bomber wearing an explosives-packed turban. A bloodstained four-page letter he was carrying at the time of the attack, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, insisted that “Pakistan is not our boss”.

American officials have vowed to act unilaterally if Pakistan fails to comply with their demands over the Haqqanis. But it remains unclear how far they are willing to go against Pakistan, a nuclear-armed country that still provides vital counter-terrorism support.

There was some hope of resuscitating fragile relations between the Pakistani and American intelligence services, which were buffeted by the US raid that killed Osama bin Laden on 2 May. Officials from both countries hailed a joint operation on 28 August to arrest Younis al-Mauritani, a senior al-Qaida operative, in the western city of Quetta. On 5 September the Pakistani military issued a press release that highlighted Pakistani-American co-operation; some viewed the raid as a possible turning point in relations.

But the flurry of Haqqani attacks over the past two weeks seems to have washed away whatever goodwill was generated by the arrest.

US officials say debate is raging inside US policy circles about what to do next. The defence secretary, Leon Panetta, is said to have privately advocated US military incursions into the Haqqani stronghold in Waziristan – a risky gambit other officials reject as dangerous folly, citing the historical record of failure of western armies in the tribal belt.

Other US officials say Washington could slash non-military aid such as the $7.5bn five-year Kerry-Lugar-Berman package, which was approved in 2009.

There is also debate about the exact nature of the ISI’s relationship with the Haqqanis. One western official said it was not a puppetmaster scenario. “It’s not like they have a chain of command, with the Pakistanis handing down XOs [executive orders],” he said. Neither are the Pakistanis necessarily providing logistical support, he added: “It’s murkier than that.”

But, the official added, the US believes Pakistan is “actively tolerating” the Haqqanis. And the ISI could, if it wanted to, seriously disrupt their activities.

He warned that Pakistan was heading towards international isolation. “If it keeps going like this, it could end up like Syria – before the Arab spring.”

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

This article titled “No big deal? US ambassador’s baffling response to Afghan assault” was written by Jeremy Kelly in Kabul, for guardian.co.uk on Wednesday 14th September 2011 17.56 UTC

To Ryan Crocker, the US ambassador to Afghanistan, a 20-hour assault on Kabul from militants firing from a high-rise building on the US embassy and Nato compound while suicide bombers targeted police buildings across the city was “not a very big deal”.

Earlier in the week he had told the Washington Post in an interview that the Afghan capital’s biggest problem was the traffic. The attack that began on Tuesday and concluded Wednesday morning with the killing of the last of seven Taliban fighters armed with rocket-propelled grenades (RPG) and automatic weapons had at least solved that problem.

Streets were relatively scant of vehicles as many Kabulis steered clear out of fear of more attacks, or as Crocker put it, “harassment” in the form of the RPGs.

“That isn’t Tet,” he said, in reference to the offensive in Vietnam. Putting the two wars in the same sentence, even as a contrast, was unlikely to have been approved by his media advisers.

“If that’s the best they can do, you know, I think it’s actually a statement of their weakness and more importantly since Kabul is in the hands of Afghan security it’s a real credit to the Afghan national security forces,” Crocker said.

Later, he released a statement, with a more measured tone, that mourned the civilians, police and foreign forces killed or wounded and praised the security personnel that were “up to the task of thwarting such operations”.

Yet few ordinary Afghans see it that way. They struggle to understand how the attackers could get so close with such an arsenal. They believe the militants have help on the inside of their indigenous security forces. And their trust in their own government is such that many don’t even believe the “official” death tolls following terrorist attacks.

Kabul shopkeeper Mohammad Bashir Suleiman Khil summed up the thoughts of many. “Every 10 days there are attacks in Kabul,” he said. “There is no work, there is no business. People are not coming out of their homes today. We don’t have any hope here.”

The Arabic-speaking Crocker, coaxed out of retirement by President Barack Obama, returned to Afghanistan this year as head of the embassy he reopened in 2002. He has had front-row seats to several attacks on or near US embassies over his long diplomatic career, which might explain his initial take on the 20-hour siege.

He escaped a Beirut truck bomb that killed 60 at the US embassy in 1983, was airlifted from the same location eight years later because of terrorist fears and was bunkered down when protesters attacked the US embassy in Damascus in 1998. On the day he was sworn in as the US’s top man in Iraq in 2007, suicide bombers struck, killing 104 people in the city.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Source: Reuters
U.S. Admiral Mike Mullen tells members of the U.S. Congress that although he supports Obama’s plan to reduce troops in Afghanistan, the drawdown is more “aggressive” than he anticipated and will incur risks. Deborah Gembara reports.

Here’s President Obama’s speech announcing troop reductions in Afghanistan.

This article titled “Afghanistan worst place in the world for women, but India in top five” was written by Owen Bowcott, for The Guardian on Wednesday 15th June 2011 01.12 UTC

Targeted violence against female public officials, dismal healthcare and desperate poverty make Afghanistan the world’s most dangerous country in which to be born a woman, according to a global survey released on Wednesday.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Pakistan, India and Somalia feature in descending order after Afghanistan in the list of the five worst states, the poll among gender experts shows.

The appearance of India, a country rapidly developing into an economic super-power, was unexpected. It is ranked as extremely hazardous because of the subcontinent’s high level of female infanticide and sex trafficking.

Others were less surprised to be on the list. Informed about her country’s inclusion, Somalia’s women’s minister, Maryan Qasim, responded: “I thought Somalia would be first on the list, not fifth.”

The survey has been compiled by the Thomson Reuters Foundation to mark the launch of a website, TrustLaw Woman, aimed at providing free legal advice for women’s groups around the world.

High maternal mortality rates, limited access to doctors and a “near total lack of economic rights” render Afghanistan such a threat to its female inhabitants. “Continuing conflict, Nato airstrikes and cultural practices combine to make Afghanistan a very dangerous place for women,” said Antonella Notari, head of Women Change Makers, a group that supports women social entrepreneurs around the world.

“Women who do attempt to speak out or take on public roles that challenge ingrained gender stereotypes of what is acceptable for women to do or not, such as working as policewomen or news broadcasters, are often intimidated or killed.”

The “staggering levels of sexual violence” in the lawless east of the DRC account for its second place in the list. One recent US study claimed that more than 400,000 women are raped there each year. The UN has called Congo the rape capital of the world.

“Rights activists say militia groups and soldiers target all ages, including girls as young as three and elderly women,” the survey reports, “They are gang raped, raped with bayonets and some have guns shot into their vaginas.”

Pakistan is ranked third on the basis of cultural, tribal and religious practices harmful to women. “These include acid attacks, child and forced marriage and punishment or retribution by stoning or other physical abuse,” the poll finds.

Divya Bajpai, reproductive health adviser at the International HIV/Aids Alliance, added: “Pakistan has some of the highest rates of dowry murder, so-called honour killings and early marriage.” According to Pakistan’s human rights commission, as many as 1,000 women and girls die in honour killings annually.

India is the fourth most dangerous country. “India’s central bureau of investigation estimated that in 2009 about 90% of trafficking took place within the country and that there were some 3 million prostitutes, of which about 40% were children,” the survey found.

Forced marriage and forced labour trafficking add to the dangers for women. “Up to 50 million girls are thought to be ‘missing’ over the past century due to female infanticide and foeticide,”, the UN population fund says, because parents prefer to have young boys rather than girls.

Somalia, a state in political disintegration, suffers high levels of maternal mortality, rape, female genital mutilation and limited access to education and healthcare.

Qasim added: “The most dangerous thing a woman in Somalia can do is to become pregnant. When a woman becomes pregnant her life is 50-50 because there is no antenatal care at all. There are no hospitals, no healthcare, no nothing.

“Add to that the rape cases that happen on a daily basis, and female genital mutilation being done to every single girl in Somalia. Add to that famine and drought. Add to that the fighting [which means] you can die any minute, any day.”

Monique Villa, the chief executive of the Thomson Reuters Foundation, said: “Hidden dangers – like a lack of education or terrible access to healthcare – are as deadly, if not more so, than physical dangers like rape and murder which usually grab the headlines.

“In Afghanistan, for instance, women have a one in 11 chance of dying in childbirth. In the top five countries, basic human rights are systematically denied to women.

“Empowering women tackles the very roots of poverty. In the developing world when a woman works, her children are better fed and better educated because they spend their money for their family.”

The survey was based on responses from more than 200 aid professionals, academics, health workers, policymakers, journalists and development specialists chosen for their expertise in gender issues.

Each country was also ranked in terms of six risk factors including: health, discrimination and lack of access to resources, cultural and religious practices, sexual violence, human trafficking and conflict-related violence.

In terms of individual risk categories, Afghanistan was deemed to be the most dangerous for health, economic/discrimination and non-sexual violence; the Congo is most plagued by rape and sexual violence; and India has most problems with trafficking.

“You have to look at all the dangers to women, all the risks women and girls face,” said Elisabeth Roesch, who works on gender-based violence for the International Rescue Committee in Washington.

“If a woman can’t access healthcare because her healthcare isn’t prioritised, that can be a very dangerous situation as well.”

The TrustLaw website has been in existence for some time, linking up local NGOs and social entrepreneurs with established law firms who are prepared to offer legal advice on a pro-bono basis. The groups are vetted by Transparency International.

More than 450 law firms are already involved including some from China. Among those that have recently benefited have been the charity Riders for Health, which delivers medicine to remote villages, and reviewed its contracts in Nigeria.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

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This article titled “Taliban behind surge in attacks on western troops and advisers” was written by Jason Burke in Kabul, for The Guardian on Tuesday 31st May 2011 19.35 UTC

Commanders of international troops in Afghanistan are becoming increasingly concerned at the growing number of attacks by members of local security forces on western forces or advisers.

The Taliban ordered insurgents to step up infiltration of the Afghan national army and police earlier this year, Nato officials believe, leading to an alarming rise in the number of “blue on green” attacks.

Increasing the numbers of local security forces is a key part of the coalition strategy to allow international combat troops to leave the country before the 2014 deadline set at the Lisbon conference last year.

Recent months have seen dozens of incidents – many unreported – of Afghan soldiers or policemen turning their weapons on western troops or facilitating attacks by insurgents.

The latest saw an Australian mentor killed by an Afghan soldier in Oruzgan province on Monday. Lance Corporal Andrew Gordon Jones, 25, was shot three times by a soldier, who then fled. A Taliban spokesman said the killer was a hero. “Every soldier who joins us is rewarded with medals and great honour,” he said.

The Taliban regularly claim responsibility for attacks in which they had no immediate role. Intelligence officers said most are by “disgruntled guys”.

One spark for violence may be widespread anger in Afghanistan at continuing civilian casualties caused by international troops. The most recent incident saw 14 civilians killed by an airstrike in the southern province of Helmand at the weekend. Reports suggest insurgents fled into a home after attacking US troops.

President Hamid Karzai said he would take “unilateral action” if the airstrikes did not stop, adding that Afghans would react as they have to previous occupying forces if attacks continued. Afghans are proud of their history of repelling invaders, including the Soviet Union in the 1980s and the British in the 19th century. Karzai has repeatedly made similar threats.

Data collected by the UN shows most civilian casualties in Afghanistan are from Taliban attacks, particularly suicide bombs and remote-controlled blasts.

Western officials fear a “rising trend” of attacks by Afghan soldiers and police on western forces, though they stress that the numbers involved are a small minority of Afghan security forces.

In the past 18 months Nato has recorded around 20 incidents in which Afghan soldiers or policemen have attacked international forces, killing more than 50.

Two Nato trainers were killed by a police officer in Helmand earlier this month. In April, a veteran Afghan air force major shot and killed eight US troops and an American contractor in Kabul. Other recent incidents include the shooting of two Americans during police training in the northern Faryab province and the killing of three Germans in the north of the country by an Afghan soldier.

In November last year six US troops were killed when an Afghan border police officer shot them. Three British soldiers were killed by a soldier last July. In November 2009 five British soldiers were shot dead by a “rogue” Afghan policeman in an attack at a police checkpoint.

Hanif Atmar, the former interior minister, said most incidents were the result of “cultural misunderstandings” between foreigners and the police or troops they were trying to train. “There is an Afghan way of doing things that sometimes they don’t respect and that leads to angry outbursts and then shootings,” he said.

In addition, there are frequent but much less often reported incidents of members of the Afghan security forces involved in attacks on fellow Afghans.

Two recent incidents – the killings of the police chief of Kandahar province on 15 April and of the police chief of northern Afghanistan last weekend – involved individuals wearing police uniforms. It is unclear whether they were serving officers or imposters, although Afghan officials said a senior police bodyguard was involved in the attack in Kandahar.

The Afghan army has almost doubled in size in three years to more than 164,000. The Afghan national police has grown from fewer than 95,000 in late 2009 to 126,000 today.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

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Back in January I said this man should be the next president of Afghanistan. Karzai is a joke. He’s two-faced and corrupt. This man is not. His name is Amrullah Saleh and he was the head of Afghanistan’s intelligence service until he quit in disgust over Karzai’s corruption. He was considered by the US to be among the most effective members of the Karzai government and remains one of our closest allies. Saleh is not a person who would ever play footsie with the Taliban or harbor Al Qaeda. He’s been fighting them all his life. This is the guy we need.

Frontline has been advertising their new documentary, “Kill/Capture” for the last week. The program finally aired tonight. You can watch it in full below. It tells a side of the war in Afghanistan that until the raid on Osama bin Laden has largely been shrouded in secrecy. The type of raid that was launched on Bin Laden’s compound isn’t rare by any means. Dozens of similar raids happen every week throughout Afghanistan. Not typically using SEAL Team 6 or “DevGru,” but Special Operations “Kill/Capture” missions. Gen. Petraeus has increased the number of K/C missions four fold since assuming command from Gen. McChrystal.

The Counter-Insurgency strategy (COIN) the US is pursuing in Afghanistan is usually discussed in terms of “hearts and minds.” Soldiers and Marines take over an area, secure it from Taliban attacks, and then stay to rebuild. This in theory will engender good will with the population and make them turn away from militancy.

However, the other side of COIN is “Kill/Capture.” Petraeus says the hearts and minds part won’t work unless the enemy is kept on the run. Meaning we aggressively hunt down the enemy and kill him. I’ve listened to an awful lot of bloviating about Counter Insurgency over the last 10 years and never before have I heard such emphasis put on “Kill/Capture.” It makes perfect sense, but I don’t recall hearing the same kind of rhetoric.

What is really going on here is something quite different. What we did in Iraq was the classic COIN strategy. That same strategy is allegedly what Obama agreed to a year or so ago in Afghanistan. But something has clearly changed during that time. It seems the administration and the Pentagon correctly realized that we simply do not have the force size, the time, or the treasure to “clear, hold, and build.” It ain’t gonna happen. Afghanistan is still living in biblical times. We are trying to create a civil society from scratch. Iraq already had a civil society for us to build on.

The emphasis has clearly changed to one of hunting and killing the enemy until we break their will. We don’t just use JSOC (the guys who killed Bin Laden) for hunting down high value targets anymore. We hunt down mid-level Taliban, money and logistics personnel, spiritual leaders, etc. If you have clout in the Taliban at any level, one night very soon your number will be up. A bomb will drop on you or a team of commandos will drop out of the sky and shoot you in the face.

Based on this Frontline documentary it seems to be having the intended effect. We’ve thinned the ranks of the Taliban in some areas of Afghanistan to the point where men barely out of their teens are becoming Taliban “commanders.” Not because they’re awesome fighters, but because we’ve killed everyone else.

As one official points out, the younger ones are more radical but they’re also sloppy. They have no battlefield experience and are therefore easier to kill.

At some point the hope is that this relentless campaign will bring the Taliban to the negotiating table. I’m not convinced this will happen, but it’s worth a shot. What we were doing before wasn’t working so we might as well kick some ass while we’re there.

My reason for skepticism is a simple one. Religion. We Americans still don’t understand that these people believe they’re on a mission from God. We’re killing people who want to die. I’m not sure you can defeat an enemy who isn’t afraid to die. Our enemy welcomes death. It’s difficult for US policy makers to grasp the idea that a group of people would not have some kind of underlying political or financial grievance that can eventually be met. We’ve never faced an enemy like that before. They’re not joking about this Jihad crap. They really do believe they’re going to heaven for killing us.

Radical Islam is their motivation. We are the infidel enemy. Nothing will ever change that.

That is why no amount of negotiation will ever cause Iran to give up its nuke program. They are on a mission from “Allah.”

Watch the full episode. See more FRONTLINE.

Watch the full episode. See more FRONTLINE.

Watch the full episode. See more FRONTLINE.

Watch the full episode. See more FRONTLINE.

Watch the full episode. See more FRONTLINE.