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U.N. Warns of Food and Security Crises in Afghanistan
By NICK CUMMING-BRUCE The New York Times July 2, 2008
GENEVA — The United Nations coordinator of relief efforts called Tuesday for a new international plan for Afghanistan, warning that humanitarian problems there were getting worse as a result of soaring food prices, declining security and increasing civilian deaths.
Coalition chopper downed in Afghanistan
Associated Press
KABUL, Afghanistan - The U.S.-led coalition says one of its helicopter has been shot down south of the Afghan capital but there were no serious injuries.
Italy revises caveats for Afghan troops
Tue Jul 1, 11:32 AM ET Associated Press
ROME - Italy has revised some restrictions on Italian soldiers in Afghanistan, allowing them more easily to be deployed temporarily in volatile areas, defense officials said Tuesday.
NATO, US forces suffer deadliest month in Afghanistan: figures
Tue Jul 1, 9:46 AM ET
KABUL (AFP) - June was the deadliest month for foreign troops in Afghanistan since the 2001 fall of the Taliban and the second in a row in which casualties exceeded those in Iraq, official figures showed Tuesday.
Afghanistan urges Pakistan to extend anti-militant offensive
Wed Jul 2, 2008 1:43am AEST Radio Australia, Australia
Afghanistan is urging Pakistan to expand its hunt against Islamic militants in a tribal district near their shared border.
Afghan ministry summons Pakistani diplomat over beheadings
Daily Times, Pakistan
KABUL: The Afghan government has condemned the last week’s beheading of two Afghans on Pakistani soil.
Soldiers in Afghanistan celebrate Canada Day
Tue, July 1, 2008 By THE CANADIAN PRESS
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan are celebrating Canada Day with cake, concerts and comedians.
Kent files second suit against War
MATT HARTLEY Globe and Mail Update July 1, 2008 at 7:53 PM EDT
It's unlikely there'll be a follow-up to the movie Charlie Wilson's War, but a lawsuit one Canadian journalist has launched against the film's producers has already spawned a sequel.
Inside the Taliban jailbreak
GRAEME SMITH From Wednesday's Globe and Mail July 2, 2008 at 12:54 AM EDT
KANDAHAR, AFGHANISTAN — The prison cells that once held Taliban sit almost empty, with little remaining except rubbish: plates of rice ready for meals never eaten, and sandals discarded by fugitives who ran away in bare feet.
In Afghanistan, Snapshots of Uncertainty
By Tara Bahrampour, a Washington Post staff writer and the author of "To See and See Again: A Life in Iran and America"
Wednesday, July 2, 2008; Page C02
THE END OF MANNERS
By Francesca Marciano
Pantheon. 256 pp. $23.95
On a recent trip to Afghanistan, according to a note from her publisher, Rome-based author Francesca Marciano "felt more vulnerable [than] she's ever felt anywhere else in the world" and, afterward, sought "to capture the feeling of being
Afghanistan: ‘It was a battlefield last time I was here. The progress is remarkable’
On a tour of the Snake’s Head, once a no-go area and Taleban stronghold, with the Chief of the Defence Staff, Sir Jock Stirrup
Magnus Linklater The Times Online, UK July 2, 2008
The Mastiff armoured car lumbered its way down the dusty main street of Garmsir’s newly opened market, past broken, mud-brick shops, and the impassive stare of watching Afghans.
Can Pakistani troops make Peshawar safe?
By Abdul Hai Kakar BBC News, Peshawar Tuesday, 1 July 2008 18:26 UK
The city of Peshawar in north-west Pakistan is gripped by fear, even though the government has launched a security operation to protect it against threats from Islamist militants.
Pakistan: Negligent on Terror?
Monday, Jun. 30, 2008 By ARYN BAKER / ISLAMABAD Time.com
It's almost like a bad joke. A bus driver, a ski lift operator and a gym rat have turned the Islamic world's only nuclear-armed nation upside down. On Saturday Pakistani forces chased militants led by former bus driver Mangal Bagh from the fringes
Is Osama bin Laden Dying ... Again?
Monday, Jun. 30, 2008 By MASSIMO CALABRESI / WASHINGTON time.com
Which is closer to dying: Osama bin Laden or the CIA's effort to catch him? Nothing has characterized the fruitlessness of the hunt for the al-Qaeda leader so much as the recurrent — and mostly inaccurate — reports that he is seriously ailing
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U.N. Warns of Food and Security Crises in Afghanistan
By NICK CUMMING-BRUCE The New York Times July 2, 2008
GENEVA — The United Nations coordinator of relief efforts called Tuesday for a new international plan for Afghanistan, warning that humanitarian problems there were getting worse as a result of soaring food prices, declining security and increasing civilian deaths.
“It’s becoming clearer and clearer that the humanitarian situation is not only serious but deteriorating,” said John Holmes, the United Nations deputy secretary general and relief coordinator. He had just returned from a four-day trip to Afghanistan. “I think we need to put together a new humanitarian action plan there. We need to mobilize more resources.”
Six months ago, the United Nations appealed for $81 million in food aid for Afghanistan, and Mr. Holmes said the organization had been preparing to appeal for $300 million to $400 million more in food aid for about 4.5 million people, about 14 percent of the population, and for seeds and fertilizer to try to increase local food production.
“The needs really are very great,” he said, adding that Afghanistan’s worsening conditions resulted partly from the global surge in food prices and the effects of a drought that has affected major food-producing areas and threatens to cut the wheat harvest by 40 percent.
Against that backdrop, Afghanistan has to cope with refugees returning from neighboring Pakistan and Iran who have needed food and other aid to resettle.
Mr. Holmes also cited declining security as a factor. The number of civilian deaths caused by the fighting rose to 638 in the first five months of the year, 62 percent more than in the same period of last year, although the proportion caused by pro-government forces fell, he said.
The United Nations attributed 422 civilian deaths this year, or two-thirds of the total, to insurgent attacks, a higher proportion than in 2007, when pro-government forces and insurgents caused about the same number of civilian deaths. The number of internally displaced people has risen to an estimated 160,000, Mr. Holmes said.
Moreover, he said, the deterioration in security made it harder to deliver humanitarian aid. “There’s a pretty clear coincidence between the areas where there is a need and areas where access is most difficult,” he said. “It can still be done, but it’s more complicated.”
Mr. Holmes noted that attacks on food convoys had become “distressingly common,” citing an attack on a 47-vehicle food convoy in the southern province of Kandahar last week. Eleven armed attacks since January this year have resulted in the loss of 340 tons of food provided by the World Food Program, he said.
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Coalition chopper downed in Afghanistan
Associated Press
KABUL, Afghanistan - The U.S.-led coalition says one of its helicopter has been shot down south of the Afghan capital but there were no serious injuries.
A coalition statement said small-arms fire downed the chopper in Kherwar district of Logar province early Wednesday.
It said the pilots were able to land the aircraft and evacuate everyone on board before it caught fire.
Fighting between insurgents and security forces is intensifying across the southern half of Afghanistan, including in provinces just south of the capital, Kabul.
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Italy revises caveats for Afghan troops
Tue Jul 1, 11:32 AM ET Associated Press
ROME - Italy has revised some restrictions on Italian soldiers in Afghanistan, allowing them more easily to be deployed temporarily in volatile areas, defense officials said Tuesday.
Defense Minister Ignazio La Russa said during a visit to troops in Afghanistan that he had signed off on the revision. Gen. Vincenzo Camporini, the chief of staff, said the changes "are effective."
The Defense Ministry confirmed both comments.
Italy's 2,300 soldiers are based in relatively safe regions such as Kabul and western Afghanistan. Along with other European nations, Italy has been criticized for not sending troops to the front lines.
The government of Premier Silvio Berlusconi had long said that it was willing to ease the restrictions, known as caveats. Berlusconi had discussed the issue in separate meetings in Rome with U.S. President George W. Bush and NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer over the past weeks.
The revision speeds up procedures for the government to respond to NATO requests to move the soldiers to dangerous areas. It must now make a decision within six hours, compared with the previous 72 hours.
However, the government has said it does not plan to reposition its troops permanently.
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NATO, US forces suffer deadliest month in Afghanistan: figures
Tue Jul 1, 9:46 AM ET
KABUL (AFP) - June was the deadliest month for foreign troops in Afghanistan since the 2001 fall of the Taliban and the second in a row in which casualties exceeded those in Iraq, official figures showed Tuesday.
Forty-nine soldiers from the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and the separate US-led coalition died in combat, attacks or accidents in June, according to an AFP tally based on military statements.
June accounted for more than 40 percent of the 122 deaths of foreign soldiers in Afghanistan during 2008, according to the independent website icasualties.org.
Most were killed by roadside bombs hitting their convoys or patrols.
ISAF spokesman General Carlos Branco said the figures should be seen in the context of rising numbers of international forces fighting a resurgent Taliban militia.
"ISAF has many more soldiers now than in the past and is now going to places where it was not going before," Branco told AFP.
By contrast, 31 soldiers including 29 Americans were killed in Iraq in June despite the fact that there are more than twice as many troops there as in Afghanistan, icasualties figures showed.
International casualties in Afghanistan also outstripped those in Iraq in May.
Foreign soldier deaths in Afghanistan hit 23 in May, 19 of them by hostile fire, while in Iraq the number of coalition soldiers killed dropped to 21, of whom 17 where in action.
"If you want to compare the same period last year with the year to date (January 1- June 21) you find 55 in 2007 and 70 in 2008. However, comparisons in this domain can be very misleading if you don't put them into context," Branco said.
He said that in January 2007 ISAF had 37,493 members and as of January 2008 there were nearly 50 000.
"The ratio of killed in action per 1,000 troops in 2007 and 2008 is nearly the same. The ratio of killed in action per military engagements in 2007 and 2008 is again the same," he said.
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Afghanistan urges Pakistan to extend anti-militant offensive
Wed Jul 2, 2008 1:43am AEST Radio Australia, Australia
Afghanistan is urging Pakistan to expand its hunt against Islamic militants in a tribal district near their shared border.
Pakistan, which has been accused by Kabul of failing to tackle insurgents based in the semi-autonomous Pashtun tribal belt along the rugged frontier, launched an offensive in the Khyber region at the weekend.
Welcoming Islamabad's military operations, the spokesman for the Afghan president Homayun Hamidzada says more needs to be done to remove terrorist hideouts within Pakistan.
Last month president Hamid Karzai had threatened to launch military action against insurgents on Pakistani soil provoking an angry protest by Islamabad, which says it is doing its utmost to counter the rebels.
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Afghan ministry summons Pakistani diplomat over beheadings
Daily Times, Pakistan
KABUL: The Afghan government has condemned the last week’s beheading of two Afghans on Pakistani soil.
The Afghanistan Foreign Affairs Ministry has summoned Pakistan’s Deputy Ambassador to Afghanistan Asif Durrani to explain how Taliban militants were allowed to behead the two Afghans. The ministry is expected to demand Pakistani authorities do everything to punish those responsible for the beheading.
The Taliban in Bajaur Agency, thought to be the militant Jaish-e-Muhammad group, publicly executed two Afghans on Saturday for “spying”. The group warned at the time that whoever spied for foreign forces in Afghanistan, or supported the Pakistan Army, would meet the same fate. Wali Muhammad, a spokesman for Jaish-e-Muhammad, said the two beheaded Afghans were residents of Kunar. online
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Soldiers in Afghanistan celebrate Canada Day
Tue, July 1, 2008 By THE CANADIAN PRESS
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan are celebrating Canada Day with cake, concerts and comedians.
A giant Maple Leaf flag has been erected at the front of the Kandahar Airfield where soldiers lined up for cake and posed for pictures with the Grey Cup.
Country singer George Canyon and comedian Mike MacDonald have dropped by to entertain the troops.
In Ottawa, Gen. Rick Hillier, the outgoing chief of Defence staff, says over the past few years, Canadians’ appreciation of the work their men and women in uniform do has grown enormously.
Hillier says he expects this renaissance will continue.
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Kent files second suit against War
MATT HARTLEY Globe and Mail Update July 1, 2008 at 7:53 PM EDT
It's unlikely there'll be a follow-up to the movie Charlie Wilson's War, but a lawsuit one Canadian journalist has launched against the film's producers has already spawned a sequel.
Veteran war correspondent Arthur Kent has launched a second lawsuit, this time in Canada, against the makers of Charlie Wilson's War, stemming from the 2007 Universal Studios film's use of footage Kent produced for a BBC news program about the Soviet Union's conflict in Afghanistan.
Whereas Kent's initial lawsuit targets the film's producers and its U.S. distributors, the new suit is directed at Universal Studios Canada Inc., and claims that the company's distribution of the film in Canada infringes on his copyright.
“A-list stars and studios complain about piracy, but in this case Universal has stolen and mutilated material that belongs to someone else,” Kent said in an interview.
“I have great respect for [the film's star and one of its producers] Tom Hanks and Universal, but Hollywood moguls must respect the copyright laws that we all work by,” he said. “There isn't one set of lenient rules for rich movie-makers and a harsher set for documentarians and for the public.”
Kent – who earned the nickname the Scud Stud while reporting live for NBC during Iraq's Scud missile attacks against Saudi Arabia during the 1991 Persian Gulf war – said his initial lawsuit against Universal in the United States has elicited little response beyond legal manoeuvring from the movie studio and its lawyers, and that he hopes the Canadian legal system will allow the case to be heard more quickly.
In August of 1986, Kent produced a 10-minute documentary for the BBC program Newsnight, which detailed the time he spent with Afghan mujahedeen in the northeastern mountains of Afghanistan during their conflict with the Soviets. Kent says that segments from the documentary, including images and narration that he produced, appeared in Charlie Wilson's War without his permission.
Kent says the movie, in which Tom Hanks portrays former U.S. senator Charlie Wilson, contains “grossly inaccurate” information and that Universal “perpetuates and deepens the public's misunderstanding of the Afghan conflict …,” according to court filings.
“They're welcome to do a fairy tale about the Afghan war, but not with my voice track,” he said in the interview. “As well as infringing my copyright, [the film] tarnishes my reputation because people who are aware of the facts of Afghan and American history assume when they hear my voice track that I endorsed Charlie Wilson's War's narrative, and I don't.”
None of the allegations have been proved in court.
Calls to both Universal Studios Canada and parent company Universal Studios in the U.S. were not returned.
Prior to the film's Canadian DVD release on April 22, Kent and his lawyer say they approached Universal Studios and its Canadian subsidiary with their concerns but received no response. Kent filed a statement of claim in Federal Court in Toronto on May 12, which was served to Universal Studios the following day.
Despite a two-week extension, Universal Studios Canada has yet to file a statement of defence in the case and instead has indicated to Kent's Toronto lawyer Mark Hayes that it plans to file a motion that would prevent the Canadian case from being heard until after the U.S. suit is resolved.
On Monday, Kent and his attorneys filed a motion for default or summary judgment in Federal Court in Toronto.
Hayes said that because Universal has yet to file a notice of defence, a judge could issue a default judgment in favour of Kent. Barring that, Hayes said the court could issue a summary judgment provided a judge finds that none of the facts in the case require a trial. Hayes said he hopes to have the case in front of a judge within a matter of weeks.
Kent is demanding that Universal stop distributing the movie and eliminate anything associated with him in the film. He is also seeking unspecified damages.
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Inside the Taliban jailbreak
GRAEME SMITH From Wednesday's Globe and Mail July 2, 2008 at 12:54 AM EDT
KANDAHAR, AFGHANISTAN — The prison cells that once held Taliban sit almost empty, with little remaining except rubbish: plates of rice ready for meals never eaten, and sandals discarded by fugitives who ran away in bare feet. Some of the debris inside Sarpoza prison offer hints about what happened amid the chaos last month when the Taliban accomplished one of the largest jailbreaks in modern history, freeing at least 800 prisoners and rampaging into Kandahar without facing any serious resistance from Canadian troops or the other forces assigned to protect the city.
A chunk of metal the size of a picnic table sits 125 metres away from the site where a truck bomb hit the gate, testifying to the force of the explosion. In a room where prison officials believe the inmates planned their escape, bullet casings on the floor suggest the prisoners had smuggled at least one handgun into the cells.
With those scattered bits of evidence, and a dozen interviews with witnesses, a picture emerges of the way security collapsed in the largest city in southern Afghanistan on the evening of Friday, June 13. Details of the attack show not only why the city defences fell apart; they also illustrate how the notorious problems of the Afghan mission – corruption, poor intelligence, a distrustful population, weak Afghan security forces, a lack of foreign troops – made the ingredients of a disaster.
The Canadian military has not escaped blame. In a private session two days after the attack, Kandahar's provincial council strongly criticized the foreign troops for arriving at Sarpoza roughly two hours after the jailbreak started. They demanded to know why Canadian soldiers watched the prisoners run away and failed to chase them. Witnesses say that hundreds of inmates spent their first night of freedom camping in the fields only a few kilometres south of the prison, within easy reach of the Canadian soldiers sent to investigate.
Brigadier-General Denis Thompson, the top Canadian commander in Kandahar, confirmed that NATO surveillance tracked the fugitives as they fled. But he said it's not Canada's job as part of the International Security Assistance Force to hunt down escaped prisoners.
“You can ask yourself the rhetorical question, what if we find 100 fugitives in the fields?” Gen. Thompson said. “What is ISAF's duty in that circumstance? Is it to go arrest people?”
The commander continued: “We're not policing this country, right? It's not our role to police this country. Our role is to stand behind our Afghan partners and assist them.”
But the Afghan forces stationed nearby did not consider themselves capable of standing up to the Taliban that evening, as police in three outposts around the prison hunkered down behind their fortifications and refused to intervene.
Local and foreign intelligence agencies also failed to understand glaring signs of trouble at the jail in the weeks before the attack, including a mass poisoning of prison guards just eight days beforehand. Taliban fighters warned local shopkeepers about an impending battle in the hours before they struck, but nobody passed the warning to the correct authorities.
Corruption likely helped the Taliban that night, too, as some indications have implicated a senior Afghan official in the jailbreak planning.
Sifting through the rubble at Sarpoza prison, it's obvious that the attack was not just a successful Taliban operation. It was a failure of the institutions that protect Kandahar city, despite the Canadian money and lives expended to build a zone of security here in the past two years.
Three of the city's top Afghan security officials have been fired in the aftermath of the jailbreak, and the prison director has been arrested. A review by Afghanistan's intelligence service concluded that the prison needed more guards, better weapons and stronger fortifications. But the lessons of Sarpoza may prove more fundamental, pointing to the fragility of the international efforts in Afghanistan.
The last time residents of Kandahar city heard rumours about a possible jailbreak was two years ago, in the summer of 2006. Insurgents had been digging trenches and establishing bases in the village of Pashmul, 15 kilometres west of the city limits. The whispers among insurgents suggested plans for a Taliban inmate to fake an illness, allowing an ambulance full of gunmen to slip through the heavy black gates of the prison compound. With the insurgents already operating so close to the edge of the city, the threat seemed credible.
But the attack never happened, possibly because Canadian troops and their allies smashed the Taliban's bases in Pashmul with a massive offensive in September of 2006.
Two years later, however, the Taliban had again established a foothold 15 kilometres outside the city, this time directly south of the prison in a cluster of villages known as the Nakhonay triangle. Canadian troops had known for months that insurgents were massing in Nakhonay, with Taliban reportedly enforcing their own laws and using the area as a staging ground for operations. But the Canadians lacked the troops necessary to set up permanent security in those villages. The Taliban would exploit the security vacuum in the Nakhonay area on June 13, entering and leaving through the farmland south of the prison.
But the Canadians could not be accused of neglecting the prison itself. One of the key tenets of “clear, hold, and build,” as a method of counterinsurgency is the idea that investing money and improving the lives in a particular spot will make the locals more likely to deliver useful intelligence. By that measure, the guards and prisoners at Sarpoza should have been excellent sources for the Canadians, who had been pouring money into the jail.
In the year before the prison break, the Canadians paid for new septic systems, solar-powered lighting, new doors and windows, an infirmary, landscaping, guard towers and washroom facilities, among other improvements. Painted walls replaced the rough stone surfaces; where chunks of masonry used to fall on prisoners as they slept, the ceilings now arched smoothly.
The current budget for all prison upgrades stands at $4-million, and Canadian officials visited the jail regularly to check on the progress.
Despite the Canadians' focus on the prison, however, they failed to understand the trouble brewing inside.
A report by the U.S. magazine Newsweek claimed that the planning started when a disgruntled prisoner telephoned insurgent leader Mullah Berader and complained about prison conditions, but that story was dismissed by Taliban spokesman Qari Yousef Ahmadi.
“The Taliban in jail were always calling us, asking us to release them,” Mr. Ahmadi said. “Especially our commanders who were sentenced to 20 years or execution.”
Several sources say the planning started in earnest after accused Taliban prisoners launched a hunger strike in May, trying to obtain sentences in cases that remained undecided. Some suspected insurgents had languished in the prison for years without a conviction, and they described themselves as frustrated with a justice process that they claimed was designed to keep them in jail indefinitely.
They struck a committee of seven Taliban prisoners, who gathered every day inside one of the nicest cells of the national-security wing, a sunny room on the north side with a view of a garden.
They posted a sign on their door, saying: “No interruptions from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m.”
Prison officials say a few members of the prisoners' committee also held regular meetings, in private, with prison director Colonel Abdul Qadir. It's not known what they discussed; one of the prison officials who helped arrange the meetings was shot in the head during the jailbreak, and Col. Qadir was arrested soon afterward.
An insurgent who escaped, a 28-year-old father of two children who didn't want his name published, said the Taliban planners were helped by jail officials.
“Important officials from the jail helped us bring in pistols and mobile phones, and we also bought some explosives for the bombing,” the fugitive said.
The same cell where prison officials believe the Taliban held their afternoon planning meetings contained an Arabic phrase recently painted on the wall: “ Jihad is mandatory.” The accused Taliban in that cell sometimes imposed their religious fervour on fellow inmates, giving long speeches about Islam in the evenings, refusing to allow any disrespect toward Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammed Omar and enforcing early wake-up times for morning prayers.
Their room also had a view of the jail's central guard tower, and prison officials say they used at least one smuggled handgun to open fire on the tower during the jailbreak. Brass casings remain on the cell floor. None of the guards in the tower were killed or injured, but the gunfire coming from that corner of the prison may have resulted in the initial false reports that Taliban had breached the prison's north wall.
No matter how suspicious the behaviour of the Taliban inmates at the time, Gen. Thompson said it would have been difficult for the Canadians to notice.
“If there are Taliban holding little meetings and they've struck some kind of agreement with the warden, if that was in fact the case, I don't think we'd be aware of it unless the warden saw fit to share it with us,” he said.
The Canadian commander said he was also unaware, until informed by The Globe and Mail, that most of the prison staff had been poisoned in the week before the attack.
Rahim Bibi, 40, superintendent of the women's section, said one bite of the mutton stew was enough to tell her something was wrong when she sat down with other guards and a few prisoners for an evening meal on June 5. The meat tasted bitter, like tobacco. Soon at least 25 people at the dinner were vomiting. Some bled from the nose and mouth, and fell unconscious. Many were hospitalized and the rest staggered home, leaving only a few guards on duty that evening.
It's unclear why the poisoning happened, and prison officials say it was never properly investigated. Like the other staff, Ms. Bibi recovered from the poisoning and returned to work. She didn't notice anything else unusual, she said, until she had a puzzling conversation with the prison director on the day of the attack. She passed him outside his office, she said, and he smiled at her.
“He told me, ‘Something might happen tonight,' ” Ms. Bibi said. “He said, ‘If any of the prisoners owes you money, collect it. If you owe them money, pay it.' ” In the hours before the bombing, others in the neighbourhood also received warnings. Insurgents visited shops and a gas pump near the prison, telling people to evacuate the area because of an impending attack. The tactic was effective: Only one civilian, who worked at a bakery, was confirmed killed in the subsequent bombing. Apparently nobody passed the warning to police, or the information was never acted on.
“Why didn't the people call the government? Because the people are afraid of the government,” said Haji Ehsan, a provincial council member.
The first explosions and gunfire erupted around 9:10 p.m., witnesses say, as insurgents attacked the Dand Chowk police checkpoint about 600 metres east of the prison and the Gendama police barracks about 2,200 metres to the west, hitting the two nearest positions held by Afghan forces and keeping them away from the prison for the next hour.
Sardar Mohammed, the police captain responsible for the eight officers at Dand Chowk, said his men were pinned down behind their sandbags for half an hour, and even after reinforcements arrived, they only managed to take up positions a dozen metres further toward the prison.
“Mostly we fired our rifles in the dark,” he said.
At the same time as the two checkpoint attacks, a fuel tanker rolled up to Sarpoza's main gate. The driver appeared nervous, and he ran away. Guards fired in the direction of the fleeing insurgent, but he escaped; the Taliban later claimed the suicide bomb had a defective switch.
Moments later, at about 9:18 or 9:19 p.m., two rocket-propelled grenades whistled out of the darkness. The first shot missed the tanker but the second ignited a massive explosion. Witnesses describe a shock wave so powerful that it knocked out windows a kilometre away, and a large ball of white light rose momentarily over the west side of Kandahar city. Four guards in the gate towers were killed instantly.
The remaining guards offered little resistance as the Taliban charged through the haze of dust and falling debris. Gunfire came from only one of five guard towers. A guard was blasted into pieces by a rocket-propelled grenade as he took cover underneath a water tower.
Three more were shot to death along the corridor that leads into the heart of the prison. The Taliban went straight for the national-security wing, shooting the locks off the prison gates with a belt-fed machine gun at close range.
A few insurgents went a short distance along the rows of Taliban cells and distributed weapons to comrades, shouting at them to escape quickly. Cell doors in the wing are required to be locked by nightfall, but the Taliban timed their strike just minutes before the guards made their evening rounds; one escaped insurgent said a group of ringleaders hiding in the bathroom had given precise timing to the jailbreakers using smuggled cellphones.
More contraband cellphones appeared in the hands of inmates after the first moments of the attack, witnesses said, describing a chorus of men shouting into their handsets: “God is great!”
An insurgent who participated in the jailbreak said the Taliban leaders had a short argument after opening the national-security wing, because they disagreed about whether to set free the jail's criminals, but eventually decided to open all the locks.
Meanwhile, outside the jail, other insurgents were distracting the security forces with several small gun battles inside the city. At one point, a Western observer counted six simultaneous gun battles in the downtown.
“They kept us busy,” said Dost Mohammed, 23, a policeman. “We could hear shooting in many places in town, and we were afraid.”
The confusion was equally frightening for most of the prisoners. Bashir Ahmad, 19, said he followed the Taliban's orders to get out of the prison, and was confronted by an insurgent commander near the gate who wore a pakool hat and spoke with an accent that suggested he was not native to Kandahar. The commander had a scarf wrapped around his entire head, he said, with only his left eye showing.
“He gave us a choice: Fight along with the Taliban, or go home,” Mr. Ahmad said. “Many of us wanted to go home, so they divided us into groups of 100 or 200. They appointed a Taliban commander for each group, and each group had a few Taliban guards.”
The insurgents shepherded the groups of escapees down narrow alleyways, through vineyards, and across streams. When they heard aircraft, they took cover under trees or lay down in fields of wheat.
Mr. Ahmad's group spent the night camped in a village about 12 kilometres south of the prison, but others didn't go as far, flopping down to sleep one or two kilometres away from the scene of the jailbreak.
Many of them expected the government or foreign troops to chase them, and expressed amazement at the lack of pursuers. Canada's Quick Reaction Force, deployed from Camp Nathan Smith about six kilometres away, was seen by one Western observer arriving at Sarpoza around 11 p.m., after the shooting had stopped.
Roughly 400 Taliban escaped the national-security wing, and only three were recaptured.
“I thought that there would be big fighting, aerial bombardments, and many Taliban would be killed some arrested,” said a Taliban fighter, now enjoying freedom with his family in Kandahar city. “But when we reached our safe houses we were surprised, because there was no fighting, nothing.”
He added: “I didn't think we would succeed like we did.”
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In Afghanistan, Snapshots of Uncertainty
By Tara Bahrampour, a Washington Post staff writer and the author of "To See and See Again: A Life in Iran and America"
Wednesday, July 2, 2008; Page C02
THE END OF MANNERS
By Francesca Marciano
Pantheon. 256 pp. $23.95
On a recent trip to Afghanistan, according to a note from her publisher, Rome-based author Francesca Marciano "felt more vulnerable [than] she's ever felt anywhere else in the world" and, afterward, sought "to capture the feeling of being weak in a place of danger and tension." The result is "The End of Manners," a novel about a nervous Italian photojournalist named Maria Galante who reluctantly goes on assignment to Afghanistan. She teams up with a writer who swears the story she is working on transcends cliches; in fact, however, her topic about suicides by young women forced into marriage turns out to be hackneyed. When the two journalists swoop into a village, they are ineffectual, especially Maria, who is so ambivalent about the assignment -- and about photojournalism itself-- that she becomes paralyzed each time she lines up a shot.
Mishaps ensue. Some are unarguably terrifying, as when the women's car is stopped on a desolate road by hostile gunmen, during which Maria remains strangely calm. At other times her panicked reactions to small setbacks seem overblown, considering she is in a place where terrorist bombs regularly kill people. The theme, however, is consistent: Again and again Maria finds herself entirely in the hands of men, who can decide whether to save her or destroy her. It is a familiar dynamic for women in patriarchal societies such as Afghanistan, and it clearly affected the author during her travels there.
Marciano captures the odd social brews that bubble when expats are thrown together, especially in a place seething with danger: the reliance on others for information and succor, the boastful tales of adventure, the clueless lurching around in unfamiliar places and the sudden bizarre incident. In Maria's hotel, for example, a blond man stalks the darkened corridor at night naked. This doesn't advance the plot, but seems designed to add menace and weirdness, and perhaps to say that foreign men can be just as frightening and incomprehensible as Afghan ones.
The author has an ear for the connections forged between human beings in dire situations. For all the men who threaten Maria, there are also those who rescue her (sometimes the same man ends up doing both). Some of the best scenes are quiet moments in which she bonds with a stranger -- she asks her Afghan fixer to tell her how he chose his wife, she naps beside a gay expat -- and the ache of loneliness is dulled.
Despite her initial fearfulness, Maria ends her journey in a state of serenity, and by her last morning in Kabul, she declares herself to be in love with the place and mysteriously connected with the people she has met there. But her transformation feels flat. This may be because the book seems heavily based on the author's travels, and it is hard not to feel one is reading notes on Marciano's experiences, encased in a plot about an Italian photojournalist. As a result, Maria's character feels underdeveloped. The main tension driving her personal journey is that, over and over, at the moment of consummation -- snapping the shutter -- she freezes, gripped by "shame and rage for what I was about to do." This may be a comment on the preemptive guilt and overthinking of Westerners, as contrasted with the instinctive acts of people living more primitive lives, but Maria's motivations are not clear enough to explain why this sought-after photographer doesn't quietly press the button and agonize later about whether to publish.
Although she and her colleague fail to get their story, Maria gets a better one unexpectedly when a woman who has been ill throughout the novel worsens. Until then she has been invisible, merely the idea of a woman. When Maria finally notices her, the weird and scary events drop away; she puts aside her own problems, and she reaches for her camera, realizing later that "what pushed me to capture her image was probably my sense that she was slipping away. I wanted to retrieve her somehow." It is a moment of grace, but it is marred somewhat by the author's decision to have Maria remark afterward to a fellow expat: "What kills me is that we were too busy doing a story on violence against women to pay attention to the fact that one of them was dying of childbirth. If that wasn't shameful I'd say it's ironic." It would have been more subtle and satisfying to let the reader draw that conclusion unaided and not force it through the protagonist's mouth. Instead, Maria feels a little pushed around -- not only by the men surrounding her but also by the author who created her.
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Afghanistan: ‘It was a battlefield last time I was here. The progress is remarkable’
On a tour of the Snake’s Head, once a no-go area and Taleban stronghold, with the Chief of the Defence Staff, Sir Jock Stirrup
Magnus Linklater The Times Online, UK July 2, 2008
The Mastiff armoured car lumbered its way down the dusty main street of Garmsir’s newly opened market, past broken, mud-brick shops, and the impassive stare of watching Afghans.
With the rear door manned by a soldier of 5 Scots battalion armed with an SA80 rifle, and “top cover” provided by a wary machine-gunner, we were well-protected. But the Chief of the Defence Staff wanted a closer look at his newly secured territory. Standing up, he poked his head through the manhole on the roof of the vehicle and surveyed the passing scene.
“Want to have a look?” asked Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup. I stood up gingerly, my blue helmet a worryingly obvious target, I thought, for any passing Taleban. The roof of the Mastiff was too hot to touch, in the 50C (122F) temperature, but the experience was exhilarating.
We lurched over potholes. The dust swirled. And, through it, we studied the passing scene, attempting to gauge the mood of a liberated people. Some of the shops, battered by the armaments of past battles, stood open to the sky, others were boarded up. But there was a scattering of local traders who watched impassively as we passed. Two men, stripped to the waist, washed themselves in a cattle trough. A turbaned draper set out his goods. Then a little boy waved at us. Just one – but it delighted Sir Jock. “Oh yes, he definitely waved,” he said. On such uncertain straws of evidence are the achievements of the Helmand task force judged in these testing days of the West’s Afghan venture. They are, however, straws worth studying.
A few weeks ago, Garmsir was a no-go area for all but the hunkered down British troops in their heavily guarded forward operating bases, and for the US Marines, beginning to arrive in force. Known as the “snake’s head” because of the distinctive shape of the area – a broad expanse of fertile country in the north, tapering to a long tail of farmland, supporting a rural population, mostly cultivating opium poppies – Garmsir was, until recently, held by the Taleban.
“The last time I was here, I wasn’t able to come into the town at all. It was a full-scale battlefield,” Sir Jock said. “Now we’ve just come twice through the main street. I wouldn’t say for one moment that we’ve restored Garmsir to total peace and security, but the progress we’ve made over the last few months is remarkable.”
Seizing it back was due in part to the surge of the US Marines, with their massively resourced Marine Expeditionary Unit. But it was also achieved through a classic piece of soldiering by A Company of the Argyll and Suther-land Highlanders – the kind of infantry operation that hasn’t changed much in character since the Second World War. In the cramped forward operating base of Delhi (these FOBs, a key part of the Helmand strategy, mostly bear classic names from Britain’s military past, like Inkerman, Balaklava and Nijmegen) Major Neil Den-McKay took me up to his tiny observation post, protected by sand-bags, with a thin slit looking out over a 120-degree arc of the countryside. He pointed to an open field, falling away to a ditch, barely 300 yards away.
“The Taleban were there,” he said.
“We knew they were there because they kept attacking us. So we had to clear it.” He did so by taking a company of jocks in point formation, with bayonets fixed, straight down the ditch until they encountered the Taleban head on. “I don’t think they were expecting us,” said Major Den-McKay drily. “They certainly seemed surprised.” The Argylls drove the Taleban out, inflicting heavy casualties, and without losing a man. It may not have been more than a skirmish, but it sent out a powerful message about the determination of the British forces to make the territory their own.
Earlier, I had sat with Sir Jock and the commanding officer of the Helmand task force, Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith, listening to the commander of the US Marine Expeditionary Unit, Colonel Lewis Henderson, who spoke of how a combination of military might and civil resources had taken and held the snake’s head itself. He talked of the use of powerful armoury to defeat the Taleban, including blowing up more than 200 bunkers, seizing caches of weaponry and destroying the infrastructure, together with tactics designed to win over the local population once victory had been achieved.
“To sustain and secure,” was the way he described it. It was the sustaining part that provided a fascinating insight into how far American counter-insurgency tactics have developed since the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Aware of the danger of suicide bombers, one of the first things they did was to carry out random finger-printing of suspicious-looking civilians in the outlying areas of the snake’s head. It suggested that the Marines had good local knowledge, whereas in fact they had encountered what Colonel Henderson described as “black holes of intelligence”.
He admitted that they knew very little about local power bases and the complexities of tribal allegiances. So instead the marines went out into the villages with grapes. Why grapes? “They give off a nice smell, and they’re not threatening,” he said. They also sent out leaflets – not warning the local people about the Taleban, but explaining what the Americans were trying to do. Reckoning that many residents of Garmsir were underinformed about the war, they distributed 400 clock radios. And they began compiling data – about the number of shops, the distribution of farms, the availability of schools. They discovered things they didn’t know before, like the fact that although this was a very poor rural population, it was surprisingly well-educated, with some of the villagers speaking two or more languages.
The British listeners were clearly impressed by Colonel Henderson’s presentation, but some of the flies in the Garmsir ointment emerged almost immediately. In the first place, the US Marines are due to pull out of the area in September, leaving this experiment in winning the peace open-ended. Could the British maintain the momentum without the kind of resources that the Americans had deployed? “The commander of the Helmand task force will deploy his units as he sees fit to ensure that we can hold on to and sustain the progress that’s been made here and bring it forward,” said Sir Jock, in the clipped manner of one who is not certain of the answer.
Next door, the man with part of the task of sustaining that progress, Doug-las Alexander, Secretary of State for Overseas Development, on a flying visit to Helmand, listened to the other side of the equation: the Afghans themselves. Seated in front of a semicircle of British and American top brass – including the minister, the British Ambassador to Afghanistan, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles and representatives of US and British aid agencies – were three local leaders, whose powers may not have begun to match those of their audience, but whose words were listened to as eagerly as if they had been those of Metternich himself. They were the local governor, his deputy and the chief of police. On them depends the outcome of the experiment in Garmsir. Their expressions were inscrutable.
“What,” asked Mr Alexander, “do you and your families most need from us?” The interpreter leant forward, the Afghans’ eyes were blank. They answered with disappointing briefness. To say that their words were opaque, would be to overstate the case. They were unwilling to be precise, but there was some mention of the need for security; unless they were protected from the Taleban, all would be at naught. Whether they were secret supporters of the Taleban or not was, of course, far from clear.
“Can you persuade the farmers to abandon the opium crop?” asked an official. The eyes narrowed slightly. That depended on the security of the borders, was all they would say – an almost impossible condition to deliver. It was the ambassador who asked the boldest question. “How many of your men take opium?” he asked the chief of police. His eyes bulged momentarily; the Afghan National Police are a byword for corruption in Helmand. “Maybe one or two,” was all he would say. Afterwards, the ambassador told me that their estimate was that 60 per cent of the force took opium.
“Do you need roads?” asked an American official. “We can build you a road from here to Lashkar Gah as good as anything in America.” The governor looked straight ahead of him. His expression said nothing. He agreed that roads were a good thing.
Afterwards I asked Louise Perrotta, the local head of the British stabilisation unit, whose aim it is to win the trust of the people of Garmsir, whether the American approach – big projects, swiftly delivered, and backed by huge resources was the answer to gaining the support of the Afghans. “I think there is a little more to it than that,” she said carefully. Her approach is to find out more about the society in which all this is happening, to understand the mentality of the local people, to win their trust by delivering what they really need, rather than giving them what others think they should have. It is a long-term approach, and it needs a long-term commitment, which Britain will have to ful-fil if it is serious about its plan for Helmand and the future of Afghanistan. But it did strike me that a combination of American might and British diplomacy was not a bad one. Whichever approach is right, Garmsir is going to be on our international agenda for many years to come.
To Helmand and back
— A total of 44 British and other Western troops were killed in Afghanistan in June, compared with 31 in Iraq. It was the second consecutive month that more Western troops have died in Afghanistan than Iraq. There are nearly three times as many Western troops deployed in Iraq
— Located in southwest Afghanistan, Helmand’s capital is Lashkar Gah. Helmand’s desert terrain is divided into 13 districts and more than a thousand villages. It has a largely Pashtun population of just over a million
— In the 1950s, Helmand was known as ‘little America’ because it was the centre of a US development programme building irrigation channels and a hydroelectric dam
— Helmand’s economy was badly damaged during the long wars of past decades. Unemployment is high. The economy is largely based around farming and the main crops are wheat, corn and opium poppy
— If Helmand were a country, it would be the second largest producer of opium in the world, after Afghanistan as a whole
— 8,500 British troops are currently stationed in Helmand
Sources: www.culturalprofiles.org.uk; www.icasualties.org ; www.senliscouncil.net
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Can Pakistani troops make Peshawar safe?
By Abdul Hai Kakar BBC News, Peshawar Tuesday, 1 July 2008 18:26 UK
The city of Peshawar in north-west Pakistan is gripped by fear, even though the government has launched a security operation to protect it against threats from Islamist militants.
The reason is obvious.
The government took a very long time responding, and the security operation has yet to liquidate the militant threat.
On Saturday, the government mobilised 5,000 paramilitary troops, equipped with tanks, armoured personnel carriers and artillery pieces, to crush the Islamist groups in neighbouring Khyber tribal district.
The troops have swept through eastern parts of the region. But there have been no significant arrests. Nor has a single militant leader or activist been killed so far.
The militants have simply melted away, offering no resistance to the troops.
What next?
"How long can the troops stay on the city's borders to fight an enemy that is not there?" asks Aijaz Khan, a Peshawar resident.
"And what happens after the troops pull back?"
The action by security forces has apparently come following a growing Taleban presence in Peshawar, the capital of Pakistan's North West Frontier Province (NWFP).
The government is trying to deal a final blow to a menace that has taken a quarter of a century to build up to its present proportions.
Peshawar served as the centre of Afghan resistance in 1980s, when the mujahideen groups fighting a guerrilla war against Soviet troops in Afghanistan were based here.
During the 1990s, it continued to serve as the rear base for Afghan warring factions.
Since 2001, the sprawling Afghan refugee camps in and around the city have served as extended sanctuaries for Taleban militants fighting foreign troops and the government of President Karzai in Afghanistan.
In addition, local Taleban groups have sprouted all around this city of three million people, with strong family and ethnic links within the city and in the surrounding towns and villages.
Their bases are not very far from the city.
In the west, less than 10km (six miles) from the city's outskirts, an Islamist group, Lashkar-e-Islam, established its fiefdom in the Bara region of Khyber agency where it has enforced its own version of the Islamic justice system.
This system was disrupted on Saturday when paramilitary troops raided the area and demolished the group's offices and installations.
Some 25km from Peshawar's southern outskirts, another semi-autonomous tribal region, Darra Adamkhel, is being controlled by another set of militant groups that have recently fought pitched battles with the security troops.
In the north, militant groups control the Mohmand tribal territory which stretches to within 20km of the city limits.
Masked gunmen
As one of the four provincial capitals of the country and also home to a provincial garrison, Peshawar has often been the target of these groups who have taken on the Pakistan government which has sided with Washington during the US-led "war on terror" in the region.
Suspected militants have fired rockets at the army headquarters in the city on a number of occasions during the past six years.
There are also instances where these militants have engaged the Peshawar police in gun battles, sometimes for hours.
In recent months, masked gunmen riding in pick-up trucks have been seen patrolling streets in some city outskirts.
These sightings have coincided with bomb attacks that destroyed various music and video stores in and around the city centre.
'Scary'
But nothing moved the government until at least six suspected prostitutes were abducted by the militants from Peshawar's prosperous neighbourhood of Hayatabad.
Two weeks ago, militants briefly kidnapped 16 local Christians from the centre of the city too.
"It was scary. We felt the Taleban were finally upon us," says Nasir Khan, who lives close to the hospital.
On top of all this, the mood in Peshawar worsened in the face of a number of gloomy predictions about the future of the city by politicians, officials and journalists, with some predicting it could even fall to the militants.
Talking to journalists in Peshawar two weeks ago, the NWFP police chief, Malik Naveed, said the city had been surrounded by militants on all four sides.
He now says there is no way the militants can capture Peshawar.
"The militants cannot take over Peshawar, but they can endanger the lives of the residents," he told the BBC.
"We have 7,000 additional police in the city, and 700 personnel of the Frontier Corps at our disposal. We have also put in place a quick response force of the police to respond to militants' movement at short notice."
The heavily barricaded check posts that have been erected at the city's main entry points may prevent the militants from conducting forays into the city.
But they also serve as a reminder to the citizens that the militants are still out there, unharmed and undefeated, and biding their time.
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Pakistan: Negligent on Terror?
Monday, Jun. 30, 2008 By ARYN BAKER / ISLAMABAD Time.com
It's almost like a bad joke. A bus driver, a ski lift operator and a gym rat have turned the Islamic world's only nuclear-armed nation upside down. On Saturday Pakistani forces chased militants led by former bus driver Mangal Bagh from the fringes of Peshawar, a provincial capital 30 miles from the border with Afghanistan and a key transit point for vital supplies destined for U.S. and NATO forces fighting the Afghan insurgency. In Swat, a onetime tourist haven 100 miles from the capital, Islamabad, militants set five schoolgirls on fire, torched a primary school and burned down the country's only ski resort. Mullah Fazlullah, leader of the local Taliban chapter, used to work the chairlift. Last year he nearly brought the Pakistani military to its knees in brutal fighting that turned "little Switzerland" into something resembling Afghanistan before the fall of the Taliban in 2001. The government sued for peace. Fazlullah agreed, on the condition that he be able to implement Islamic law in the area. Meanwhile, in Waziristan, followers of Baitullah Mehsud, the physical trainer turned assassin, have slaughtered at least 22 peace negotiators who arrived on behalf of the government seeking to cement a cease-fire accord. Both the CIA and Pakistan's intelligence agencies say he is behind the attack that killed former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in December. Three years ago no one had even heard of these men. What happened?
According to a new Pentagon report released on Friday, Taliban militants in Afghanistan have regrouped after their fall from power and "coalesced into a resilient insurgency." That resilience, according to military officials in Afghanistan, has a lot to do with their ability to find sanctuary in Pakistan's lawless tribal areas along the border. The day before the report's release, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said in a press briefing that he had "real concern" that Pakistan was contributing to Afghanistan's instability by failing to prevent militants from crossing into Afghanistan to carry out attacks on coalition forces. Cross-border attacks on U.S. troops in eastern Afghanistan have gone up 40% over the past several months. Gates attributes the increase to Pakistani cease-fire accords with Islamist militants in which the country's coalition government agreed to pull the military out of the militants' areas in exchange for a promise not to attack government institutions. The deals meant that "the pressure was taken off" the militants, who are now "free to be able to cross the border and create problems for us," Gates said.
According to U.S. terrorism experts, the threat to the U.S. emanating from Pakistan's ungoverned tribal areas is comparable to the one it faced from Afghanistan on Sept. 11, 2001. Al-Qaeda "has hundreds of training camps" scattered throughout the region, says a Western official in Pakistan with access to some intelligence reports. "Most are less than an acre in size, so they are difficult to detect." But at the moment, Pakistan has little to no ability to tackle the problem. What it does have is a weak, fractured government whose sole focus is figuring out who is running the country. The parliamentary coalition that eclipsed the former military leader, Pervez Musharraf, spends most of its time in office wrangling over positions of power, neglecting the country's most pressing problems. Any long-term strategy on dealing with militants is being pushed aside. "It's like nobody is minding the store," fumes Shaukat Qadir, a retired brigadier. "If they don't start paying attention, we will be in trouble."
At this point, the Pakistani government's lack of attention borders on negligence. For months militants have taken advantage of the Administration's distraction of consolidating forces around the strategic provincial capital of Peshawar. They have attacked freight trucks ferrying fuel, supplies and even helicopter parts from the southern seaport of Karachi to Afghanistan. The notorious Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar has seized on this weakness, exhorting militants in Pakistan to attack American interests there rather than fight across the border. "These days, the Afghan mujahedin have no need for you to come and fight in Afghanistan," he said in a statement obtained by the Afghan news agency Pajhwok. "But we do want you to fight Americans inside Pakistan." The supply convoys, he said, were being used to kill "innocent Afghans and civilians." In Karachi, long-distance truckers have been warned by a Taliban leaflet campaign threatening that "any trawler caught supplying diesel, petrol or goods" destined for foreign forces in Afghanistan "will not only be set on fire, but the driver will also be slaughtered."
The offensive against Mangal Bagh marked the first major military response from the new Pakistani government against militants in the country. While the operation was nominally successful — Bagh and his men were driven from the area and his compound was blown up — it does not bode well for future anti-insurgent activities. Only one militant was killed, and within a few hours of the attack, Bagh was back on his pirate radio station vowing to continue his campaign for the imposition of Shari'a — that is, Islamic law.
The lackluster performance of Pakistani security forces has raised eyebrows elsewhere in the region. Coalition-force officials in Afghanistan have noticed a distinct pattern with some of the more recent cross-border strikes. "The point of origin of the attacks [from Pakistan into Afghanistan] is routinely next to border posts of the Pakistani Frontier Corps," says an official with Western coalition forces in Afghanistan. "Either they are ignoring the fact that Taliban are fighting within their areas or they are complicit." Furthermore, details have emerged of deals involving Pakistani officials that specifically allow cross-border attacks in Afghanistan on the condition that those militants do not conduct any attacks in Pakistan. "People are kidding themselves in Pakistan if they think they can solve their insurgency problem by sending it across the border," says the military coalition official. "Any short-term gain has to be offset by the longer-term fact that anyone pursuing the fight across the border is not someone you want in your country."
The U.S. is in a difficult position, says Seth Jones, a terrorism expert at the Rand Corp. No one knows who is in power in Pakistan, so the Americans are dealing with everybody, which essentially means no one. Pakistan has become the neglected stepchild, only third or fourth in a list of U.S. strategic interests that start with Iraq and Afghanistan. "Pakistan should be No. 1," says Jones. "The most serious homeland threat to the United States from abroad comes from militant groups operating in Pakistan. That in itself means that Pakistan should be at the top of U.S. interests for all." — With reporting by Massimo Calabresi/Washington, Shaheen Buneri/Peshawar and Ershad Mahmud/Rawalpindi
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Is Osama bin Laden Dying ... Again?
Monday, Jun. 30, 2008 By MASSIMO CALABRESI / WASHINGTON time.com
Which is closer to dying: Osama bin Laden or the CIA's effort to catch him? Nothing has characterized the fruitlessness of the hunt for the al-Qaeda leader so much as the recurrent — and mostly inaccurate — reports that he is seriously ailing, or even at death's door. In 2002, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf said bin Laden had kidney disease, and that he had required a dialysis machine when he lived in Afghanistan. That same year, the FBI's top counterterrorism official, Dale Watson, said, "I personally think he is probably not with us anymore." Since then, of course, bin Laden has appeared on multiple videos looking healthier than ever.
Now the CIA has produced a report saying that bin Laden has long-term kidney disease and may have only months to live, two U.S. officials familiar with the report told TIME. The agency ostensibly managed to get the names of some of the medications bin Laden is taking. One U.S. official familiar with the report, which came out between six and nine months ago, says it concluded, "Based on his current pharmaceutical intake, [we] would expect that he has no more than six to 18 months to live and impending kidney failure."
That prognosis, along with some on-the-ground intelligence and a well-aimed Hellfire missile, will get you a dead terrorist leader. Close watchers of the al-Qaeda terror network find such reports inherently unreliable. "It's trying to make a diagnosis from thousands of miles away with only fragments of the medical chart," says Paul Pillar, former top analyst and deputy director of the CIA's counterterrorism center, who now teaches at Georgetown University. Says Frances Fragos Townsend, who stepped down last November as chief of President George W. Bush's Homeland Security Council, "I've read all the same conflicting reports [on bin Laden's health] that people have talked to you about. I never found one set of reporting more persuasive than another."
The CIA, for its part, is disavowing the claims attributed to the report. "I have found no one here familiar with this alleged report or the analytic line it supposedly conveys," says Paul Gimigliano, a CIA spokesman. "The fact that anonymous sources attribute views to the CIA is not, by itself, reason to believe the agency actually holds those views," he says.
If bin Laden really is dying, the news would doubtless be greeted with some ambivalence. On the one hand, his demise is what the U.S. government has been fervently trying to hasten — since before 9/11. But death by kidney disease is not exactly what it had in mind. "Wouldn't that be a tragic situation if, with all this effort, bin Laden died without it happening at the hands of coalition forces?" says one current senior counterterrorism official. Given the reliability of past long-distance diagnoses, however, and the continuing threat al-Qaeda poses around the world, that may be the least of America's worries.
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