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Afghans to hold parliament vote
by late MayEmma Graham-Harrison and Jonathon Burch, Reuters December 26, 2009
KABUL (Reuters) - Afghanistan aims to hold a vote for the lower house of parliament by late May, as laid out in the constitution, a top election official said on Saturday, but admitted it faces major fraud, funding and security concerns.
US soldier killed in Afghanistan bomb attack: NATO
Sat Dec 26, 3:53 am ET
KABUL (AFP) – An American soldier has been killed by a roadside bomb while serving with NATO forces in southern Afghanistan, the alliance said Saturday.
Civilian, military planners have different views on new approach to Afghanistan
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, December 26, 2009; A01
Two days before announcing the deployment of additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan, President Obama informed Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal that he was not granting McChrystal's request to double the size of the Afghan army and police.
President Karzai's Inauspicious Start
New York Times December 25, 2009
President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan has squandered a chance to shake up his government and chart a new course after eight years of mismanagement and corruption.
German DefMin: Afghanistan not suited for democracy
BERLIN (Reuters) - German Defence Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg does not see democracy as a suitable political system for Afghanistan, a newspaper reported on Saturday.
Taliban Commander Killed In Afghanistan Shootout
RAHIM FAIEZ | 12/26/09 05:21 AM The Huffington Post
KABUL — A heavily armed Taliban commander was killed Saturday during an pre-dawn shootout at a mosque in eastern Afghanistan, NATO said as it reported an American service member was killed in a separate attack.
Let India help Afghanistan
India's close ties with Afghanistan mean it is well placed to step in when the west has flown its last soldier out of Kabul
guardian.co.uk Shashank Joshi Friday 25 December 2009
In the 19th century, Indian armies twice crossed the Hindu Kush, hoping to stitch together the patchwork political authority of the territory in the service of their British masters. Over a century later, the sovereign republic of India
No transit route to Afghanistan for Indian trucks: Pak
December 26, 2009 12:53 IST rediff.com
Notwithstanding United States' pressure, Pakistan has denied allowing Indian goods to pass through its territory to Afghanistan.
Defense chief's Afghan plan: Empower local centers
New York Times By MAUREEN DOWD December 26, 2009
It is the greatest example of the Law of Unintended Consequences.
In a bit of unpoetic justice, Robert Gates helped create the mess in Afghanistan decades ago and now has to try to clean it up.
Afghan religious council condemns Pakistani Taliban over sending fighters
Xinhua www.chinaview.cn 2009-12-26
KABUL - Council of religious scholars in Afghanistan has strongly denounced the decision of Pakistani Taliban to send more militants to fight in the war-torn country, a statement of the religious body said on Saturday.
Afghan police work to overcome barriers for women
By Heidi Vogt, Associated Press Writer
KABUL – The young Afghan woman leaves home every morning with her face and figure hidden by a burqa. At her office, she dons a police uniform, grabs a pistol and starts knocking in doors, looking for drug dealers and Taliban sympathizers.
Rocket hits Afghan Defence Ministry, no casualties
KABUL (Reuters) - A rocket landed inside the grounds of the Afghan Defence Ministry in the heart of the capital Kabul on Saturday, but there were no casualties, a ministry official said.
Family plea follows new Taliban video of captured GI
KABUL (AP) — In a Christmas Day move, the Taliban on Friday released a video of an American soldier captured in Afghanistan, showing him apparently healthy but spouting criticism about the U.S. military operation.
Taliban planned to use Americans in Pakistan attacks
ISLAMABAD (Reuters) – Taliban insurgents had planned to use five Americans, now detained in Pakistan, who had contacted the militants via the Internet, to carry out attacks in the U.S.-allied country, a police official said on Saturday.
GI Christmas in Afghanistan: hip-hop, iced tea and an antenna tree
By Thomas L. Day And Nancy A. Youssef, Mcclatchy Newspapers – Fri Dec 25, 4:38 pm ET
KABUL, Afghanistan — Soldiers deployed to Afghanistan , thousands of miles away from their loved ones, did things this Christmas Day that they wouldn't at home. They improvised -- building an ersatz Christmas tree out of stacked communications equipment. And they partied.
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Afghans to hold parliament vote
by late MayEmma Graham-Harrison and Jonathon Burch, Reuters December 26, 2009
KABUL (Reuters) - Afghanistan aims to hold a vote for the lower house of parliament by late May, as laid out in the constitution, a top election official said on Saturday, but admitted it faces major fraud, funding and security concerns.
After corruption, violence and voter intimidation marred last August's presidential poll, there have been worries that holding another election before more safeguards can be put in place will mean a repeat of those problems.
But Zekria Barakzai, deputy head of the government-appointed Independent Election Commission (IEC) of Afghanistan, said the president, chief justice and speakers of both houses of parliament had met and agreed that the elections should go ahead according to the schedule laid out in Afghanistan's constitution. "The only problem we have right now is how it will be funded. We are talking to the finance ministry to see if it can be funded from the Afghan budget," Barakzai told Reuters.
He said the IEC would announce a date for the parliament and district council elections by Jan 3.
A U.N.-backed probe found that a third of President Hamid Karzai's votes in this year's August 20 presidential poll were fake, but there will not be time for a full revamp of voter lists now. "There will be an update. We do know there were flaws in the voter registration process, but time constraints would not allow us to fundamentally resolve this problem," he told Reuters.
Candidates would be key to combating fraud by sending their own observers to all polling stations, Barakzai said.
"Much of the election is in the hands of candidates, who can send their own representatives to election outposts."
Security is another concern, with violence at the worst levels since the ouster of the Taliban by U.S.-backed Afghan forces in late 2001.
But Barakzai said there was no guarantee delaying the election -- as some critics have suggested -- would improve the situation.
"No one can guarantee that if it is postponed security will be any better," he said.
(Editing by Sugita Katyal)
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US soldier killed in Afghanistan bomb attack: NATO
Sat Dec 26, 3:53 am ET
KABUL (AFP) – An American soldier has been killed by a roadside bomb while serving with NATO forces in southern Afghanistan, the alliance said Saturday.
NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said the soldier died on Friday, but gave no details of where the incident took place.
The death of the American, who was not named, was the only known Christmas Day fatality among the 113,000 international troops deployed to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan.
"An ISAF service member from the United States died following an IED strike in southern Afghanistan Friday," the ISAF statement said.
The death takes this year's international military casualties in Afghanistan to 505, according to an AFP tally based on independent website icasualties.org which tracks military deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq.
This year has been the deadliest since the 2001 US-led invasion, backed by most NATO countries, forced the Taliban from government.
The Taliban, who were in power from 1996-2001, are trying to overthrow the Western-backed government of President Hamid Karzai. The Islamist militia have consistently rejected reconciliation calls by Kabul.
The United States and NATO are boosting their military presence by another 40,000 troops in an influx that should be completed by August next year, military officials in Kabul have said.
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Civilian, military planners have different views on new approach to Afghanistan
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, December 26, 2009; A01
Two days before announcing the deployment of additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan, President Obama informed Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal that he was not granting McChrystal's request to double the size of the Afghan army and police.
Cost was a factor, as were questions about whether the capacity exists to train 400,000 personnel. The president told McChrystal, the top commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, to focus for now on fielding a little more than half that number by next October.
Ten days after Obama's speech, the U.S. command responsible for training the Afghans circulated a chart detailing the combined personnel targets for the army and police. McChrystal's goal of 400,000 remained unchanged.
"It's an open issue," a senior Pentagon official said last week.
Nearly a month after Obama unveiled his revised Afghanistan strategy, military and civilian leaders have come away with differing views of several fundamental aspects of the president's new approach, according to more than a dozen senior administration and military officials involved in Afghanistan policy, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
Members of Obama's war cabinet disagree over the meaning of his pledge to begin drawing down forces in July 2011 and whether the mission has been narrowed from a proposal advanced by McChrystal in his August assessment of the war. The disagreements have opened a fault line between a desire for an early exit among several senior officials at the White House and a conviction among military commanders that victory is still achievable on their terms.
The differences are complicating implementation of the new strategy. Some officers have responded to the July 2011 date by seeking to accelerate the pace of operations, instead of narrowing them. At the White House, a senior administration official said, the National Security Council is discussing ways to increase monitoring of military and State Department activities in Afghanistan to prevent "overreaching."
The NSC's strategic guidance, a classified document that outlines the president's new approach, was described by the senior administration official as limiting military operations "in scale and scope to the minimum required to achieve two goals -- to prevent al-Qaeda safe havens and to prevent the Taliban from toppling the government." The use of resource-intensive counterinsurgency tactics -- employing U.S. forces to protect Afghan civilians from the Taliban -- is supposed to be restricted to key cities and towns in southern and eastern parts of the country, the official said.
"The strategy has fundamentally changed. This is not a COIN strategy," Vice President Biden said on MSNBC last week, using the military's shorthand for counterinsurgency. "This is not 'go out and occupy the whole country.' "
Setting limits
During a videoconference two days before the speech, Obama made it clear to McChrystal and U.S. Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry that he did not want the additional troops to fuel a broader mission. Speaking to both men from the White House Situation Room, the president told them not to deploy the forces to areas they would not be able to transfer to Afghan security forces by July 2011, according to two senior officials with knowledge of the conversation.
Obama's essential instruction was, according to one of the officials, "Don't bite off more than you can chew."
White House officials said the president opposes using the forces he has authorized to duplicate an expansive, Iraq-style counterinsurgency operation -- in part because he questions whether it will be possible to achieve a similar outcome in Afghanistan, which is less developed, and because he wants to start reducing troops in 18 months. The White House's desired end state in Afghanistan, officials said, envisions more informal local security arrangements than in Iraq, a less-capable national government and a greater tolerance of insurgent violence.
Senior military officials still think they can achieve a better outcome than envisaged by civilian skeptics in the administration by using the new forces to mount more comprehensive counterinsurgency operations. Although Pentagon strategists and McChrystal's advisers in Kabul are looking at how they can fulfill the White House desire for a less extensive mission, military officials said they are reluctant to strip too much away and weaken an approach that has come to be revered within the ranks as the only way to suppress guerrilla movements.
Military officials contend that McChrystal does not harbor expansionist aims. They note that he has begun removing troops from remote mountain valleys and concentrating resources on a modest number of key population centers. But the approach in those areas will involve counterinsurgency tactics: Troops will focus on restoring normal patterns of life by trying to keep the Taliban at bay, helping the Afghan government provide basic services to the population and training local security forces.
McChrystal's plan, the senior Pentagon official said, "is still counterinsurgency, regardless of the various agendas people are trying to spin."
Dissent over drawdown
During strategy discussions at the White House, differences between the White House and the military came into sharp relief over Obama's decision to announce his intention to begin drawing down troops in July 2011.
McChrystal argued against it, according to three officials familiar with the process. The head of the U.S. Central Command, Gen. David H. Petraeus, also expressed concerns. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates urged Obama to make the drawdown "conditions-based."
"There was a lot of pushback" from the Defense Department, one of the officials said.
The president received cover from one uniformed general at the table, James E. Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Cartwright had adopted a more skeptical view of the mission than many of his military colleagues, one that resonated with Obama and Biden.
Cartwright effectively endorsed the July 2011 date, arguing that increasing forces and engaging in limited counterinsurgency made sense, the senior administration official said, "but given the risk factors -- Pakistan, the Karzai government, the whole notion of sub-national governance and our track record with the [Afghan security forces], which is not prestigious -- that it made sense to demonstrate that we could actually do this."
It also helped Obama that the principal troop-increase proposal being discussed at the time -- a recommendation that McChrystal receive 30,000 forces for 18 to 24 months -- had been developed by Gates. The Defense Department paperwork detailing the proposal identified the increase as starting in the summer of 2009, when the first troops deployed by the president this year began conducting operations in Afghanistan, but it did not specify an end date.
"Rather than leaving this indefinite and hypothetical, the president's intervention was to say, 'Okay, if we're starting in July of '09, then we're really talking about July of '11," said the senior administration official who described the NSC guidance.
Obama eventually told his war cabinet that he would announce the July 2011 deadline but that the pace of withdrawals would be determined, as Gates had sought, by conditions on the ground. Obama said he would conduct a thorough review of progress in a year's time. Although he did not endorse McChrystal's request to increase the Afghan security forces to 400,000, he said he would reevaluate the issue once the 2010 goal of training 230,000 forces is achieved.
The president avoided details in his Dec. 1 address, leaving it up to members of his Cabinet and to his advisers to explain the specifics. The result has been a wide divergence of expectations. Gates, appearing on NBC's "Meet the Press" the Sunday after the speech, said that perhaps only "some handful or some small number" would be withdrawn. Biden, during his MSNBC appearance last week, said a chart showing an increase in U.S. deployments this year would be "coming down as rapidly over the next two years."
The ambiguity over the meaning of the July 2011 deadline has generated uncertainty over the president's intent. "Is the surge a way of helping us leave more quickly, or is the timeline a way to help win support for the surge?" asked a senior Democratic staff member in Congress. "Which is the strategy and which is the head-fake? Nobody knows."
One senior military officer in Afghanistan said he and his fellow soldiers "don't know if this is all over in 18 months, or whether this is just a progress report that leads to minor changes."
"Until they tell us otherwise," the officer said, "we're operating as if the latter is the policy."
A 'dramatic change'?
Although senior-level civilians in the administration emerged from the review process thinking the mission had been circumscribed, senior military officials continue to have a different view. The result, as they see it, is that the White House has embraced McChrystal's original plan.
"We had already been pretty focused that we wouldn't try to clear and hold things more than we needed to," said a senior commander involved in the war. "It wasn't a dramatic change by any means."
White House officials have cited a meeting among NSC staff members and McChrystal in which the general displayed a slide stating that his mission was to "Defeat the Taliban," which some civilians deemed overly ambitious because it suggested that every last member of the Taliban would have to be killed or captured. The officials said the mission was redefined to avoid the term.
But to military officers, defeat "doesn't mean wipe everyone out," the commander said. "It means after Waterloo, Napoleon still had an army but he wasn't going to threaten Europe. We used that view when we worked defeat."
Even before the White House review had finished, the commander in charge of day-to-day operations, Lt. Gen. David M. Rodriguez, had developed a plan to concentrate U.S. and NATO efforts in 80 of the country's nearly 400 districts.
"They're taking credit for some of the things that McChrystal was already doing and calling it a narrowed focus," a senior military official said.
White House advisers maintain that the review process did refine the mission beyond what McChrystal had proposed over the summer.
"There was a real narrowing here," the senior administration official said. "Stan has a big leadership task to adapt his original concept to the new strategic guidance."
The official said NSC officials recognize it will take time for the new orders to filter through the ranks. "This doesn't turn around with a speech," the official said. "But I hope we don't see slides a month from now that continue to state that our goal is 400,000" Afghan security forces.
The challenge, said that official and another senior administration official, is to recalibrate military operations over the next 18 months in accordance with the new goal.
"The guidance they have is that we're not doing everything, and we're not doing it forever," the second official said. "The hardest intellectual exercise will be settling on how much is enough."
For now, however, top military officers speak more expansively than White House advisers.
"Winning means we hand off to a security force that can secure the country," the senior Pentagon official said. "We've separated the enemy, we've connected the people to the government, and we're helping them to rebuild their economy. It's at that point that we begin to transition it over to them."
Terms such as "winning" and "victory" have been eschewed by the White House. Obama did not use either in his Dec. 1 address, and he said in an interview earlier this year that he was uncomfortable using the term "victory" when fighting "a non-state actor, a shadowy operation like al-Qaeda."
But when Gates visited Kabul a week after Obama's speech, he made a point of telling military personnel there that "we are in this thing to win."
"From a moral perspective, when you ask soldiers and families to sacrifice, we do that to win," the Pentagon official said. "We need to be able to articulate winning."
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President Karzai's Inauspicious Start
New York Times December 25, 2009
President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan has squandered a chance to shake up his government and chart a new course after eight years of mismanagement and corruption.
In the cabinet he announced last week, Mr. Karzai conceded just enough to minimally satisfy competing constituencies: on the one hand, Washington and its NATO allies, which aim to have 140,000 troops in the country by mid-2010; on the other, the political cronies who made sure he won a fraud-marred election. That is not the standard the times require.
Mr. Karzai still does not seem to understand that substantial and urgent change is needed — in policies and personnel — to fix a government that has lost credibility and is barely hanging on in the face of an increasingly powerful Taliban insurgency.
In announcing earlier this month that he is committing 30,000 more troops to the fight, President Obama made clear that a credible partner is essential to any effort to stabilize Afghanistan to the point where the Americans and their NATO allies can eventually go home.
Of the 24 cabinet nominees, slightly more than half are ministers who would stay in their current positions or who have served previously in Mr. Karzai's government. Ismail Khan, a notorious warlord from Herat who has been accused of human rights abuses, will stay on as water and energy minister. Mr. Karzai has at least two other warlords in his team: Vice Presidents Muhammad Qasim Fahim and Karim Khalili, who are reported to have looted Afghanistan for years. It might make a difference if they showed a conversion to the rule of law and to a government that puts the needs of all citizens ahead of personal interests. There is little sign of that.
We were also disappointed that Mr. Karzai excluded Abdullah Abdullah, his main challenger in the August election, and his supporters. The Afghan people might be more convinced that their government is working on their behalf if Mr. Karzai reached out to his critics as well as his cronies. Mr. Abdullah and his allies can make a real contribution if they take this opportunity to build a responsible opposition party that holds the government to account, including on stamping out corruption.
The United States leaned on Mr. Karzai to reappoint the ministers of defense (Abdul Rahim Wardak) and interior (Hanif Atmar), who administer the army and the police, and he did. Washington has been working with both men to strengthen these forces so they can help fight the Taliban and take over security when American troops leave. The ministers are considered competent, but Mr. Atmar's ministry played an unsavory role in the disputed presidential election and Mr. Wardak's son has secured lucrative defense contracts.
One encouraging move was the replacement of two cabinet members — overseeing mines and the hajj — whose ministries are targets of corruption inquiries.
Mr. Obama has no choice but to work with Mr. Karzai, but that does not absolve his team of the duty to keep pressing for a relatively corruption-free, competent government so the Afghan people are no longer pushed into the hands of the Taliban. For Washington, that means ensuring that its aid flows through ministries — like health and finance — that have proved they can spend the money competently. And it means reminding Mr. Karzai that he will be held accountable for this cabinet's success or failure.
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German DefMin: Afghanistan not suited for democracy
BERLIN (Reuters) - German Defence Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg does not see democracy as a suitable political system for Afghanistan, a newspaper reported on Saturday.
The comments will further fuel scepticism over Germany's military operations in Afghanistan and add to growing political momentum against a troop increase which Berlin is considering.
"I've long come to the belief that Afghanistan, because of its history and background, is not currently suited to be a model democracy by our standards," Guttenberg told the Bild am Sonntag newspaper.
On Thursday the head of Germany's Protestant churches described the Afghanistan war as unjust and called for a pullout of the 4,400 German troops taking part in the NATO-led operation against the Taliban.
Washington wants NATO allies to contribute at least 5,000 more soldiers to the mission. However, polls show the German public oppose the troops' presence and would like to see them withdrawn in the next few years.
(Writing by Brian Rohan; Editing by Angus MacSwan)
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Taliban Commander Killed In Afghanistan Shootout
RAHIM FAIEZ | 12/26/09 05:21 AM The Huffington Post
KABUL — A heavily armed Taliban commander was killed Saturday during an pre-dawn shootout at a mosque in eastern Afghanistan, NATO said as it reported an American service member was killed in a separate attack.
A joint Afghan-international force went to a compound in Wardak province to look for an insurgent believed responsible for planning attacks and buying weapons and parts for making bombs, the international coalition said. When the joint force approached the compound, the Taliban commander, who was armed with grenades and hundreds of rounds of ammunition, ran to a nearby mosque.
Afghan security forces surrounded the mosque outside the town of Pirdad in the Nirkh district and called for him to surrender. When he didn't, they went inside.
"The Taliban commander opened fire with his AK-47 while in the mosque and was killed by the Afghan security force," NATO said in a statement.
NATO said Taliban insurgents frequently seek protection in mosques, but the Afghan-international force says it does everything possible to avoid fighting in or around any known mosque.
Abdul Haq, acting police commander of Nirkh province, said the shooting actually occurred in the mosque compound, not inside the mosque itself. The shootout was at about 3 a.m.
"As the Afghan forces were about to enter the mosque, he escaped through a window," Haq said. "For the second time, the Afghan forces shouted at him to stop. He didn't, and they opened fire on him and he was killed. He was not killed inside the mosque, but in the mosque compound."
Separately, NATO said an American service member died following a roadside bomb attack Friday in southern Afghanistan. No other details were disclosed.
Also in eastern Afghanistan, the military said a joint force Friday night in Khost province captured several militants, including a known operative of the Jalaluddin Haqqani militant network, which is linked to al-Qaida. The joint force retrieved several AK-47 rifles, hand grenades and bomb components from the operative's home in the Sabari district.
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Let India help Afghanistan
India's close ties with Afghanistan mean it is well placed to step in when the west has flown its last soldier out of Kabul
guardian.co.uk Shashank Joshi Friday 25 December 2009
In the 19th century, Indian armies twice crossed the Hindu Kush, hoping to stitch together the patchwork political authority of the territory in the service of their British masters. Over a century later, the sovereign republic of India once more has a renewed presence in what was once its mountainous buffer from the Tsarist, and then Soviet, giant to the north.
A year ago, Indians completed the construction of Afghanistan's new parliament building and, to compound the symbolism, provided training to the legislators who would make the country's laws. Over a billion dollars in aid and investment, multiple consulates, and a little-reported thousand-strong troop presence all testify to the flourishing ties between the two democracies.
India is Afghanistan's fifth-largest donor, pledging $1.2bn since 2001 and providing aid that spans education, health and infrastructure. The most eye-catching project, a 215km road connecting the Iranian border to Afghanistan's arterial highway, will eventually allow India to transport goods by sea to an Iranian port it is developing, and thence to Afghanistan and beyond. This circumvents the overland route, blocked by Pakistan, but also gives a fillip to Indo-Afghan trade ($538m during 2007-8). Hamid Karzai, himself educated in India and the beneficiary of Indian military support during the 1990s, visited India four times in the first five years of his tenure. The Afghan national army, the linchpin of the new American strategy to pacify the country, receives training across India.
Not everyone is happy with the widening Indian footprint. Pakistan, long reliant on Afghanistan as a source of "strategic depth" has invoked fears of encirclement and Indian-sponsored separatism. This is in addition to the panoply of wild "conspiracy theorists who insist that every one of Pakistan's ills are there because of interference by the US, India, Israel and Afghanistan", says Ahmed Rashid, a noted Pakistani journalist.
Among other attacks, a car bomb at the Indian embassy in Kabul killed 41 in July 2008. According to the New York Times, American officials quickly presented "intercepted communications between Pakistani intelligence officers and militants who carried out the attack" to demonstrate Pakistani culpability and "the ISI officers had not been renegades".
Then in September 2009, General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of the International Security Assistance Force, suggested in a leaked assessment of the war that "while Indian activities largely benefit the Afghan people, increasing Indian influence in Afghanistan is likely to exacerbate regional tensions and encourage Pakistani countermeasures in Afghanistan or India". The scarcely veiled threat of further bloodbaths such as Mumbai prompted renewed anger in the Indian media.
India has responded cautiously. Indian defence minister AK Antony insisted "categorically there is no question of Indian military involvement in Afghanistan not now, not in the future". A former head of India's foreign intelligence service has said that "sending troops is not an option".
There are sound and perhaps compelling reasons for this reticence. There remain bitter memories of the 1,200 deaths suffered by an Indian peacekeeping force in Sri Lanka, and although Indian security forces have six decades of counterinsurgency experience, they face multiple intensifying guerilla wars at home from Maoists and separatists. Moreover, India's coalition politics, featuring local parties with parochial interests, is hardly suited to sustaining ambitious foreign policies.
Yet more than 1,000 members of the paramilitary Indo-Tibetan Border Police are deployed in Afghanistan. President Obama's affirmation to withdraw US forces by 2011 has generated a prospective vacuum, inducing Pakistan to renew its support for the Taliban. This has produced loudening, though still marginal, Indian voices in favour of more boots on the ground.
Amir Taheri, writing in The Times, suggests that a military commitment is "surprisingly popular in India". One former diplomat argues that "influential sections of Indian opinion are stridently calling for an outright Indian intervention in Afghanistan without awaiting the niceties of an American invitation letter".
The editor of the "realist" journal Pragati writes that "military involvement will shift the battleground away from Kashmir and the Indian mainland". An affiliated blog draws on the idea of "force fungibility" to argue that "since it is not feasible for Indian troops to directly attack Pakistan's military-jihadi complex, India should ensure that US troops do so" by "reliev[ing them] of duties in areas where they are not actually fighting the Taliban – especially in western and northern Afghanistan".
Others have suggested that "the best contribution might be in the areas of combat training and creating capacities in logistics and communications", still sorely lacking in the embryonic Afghan national army.
Support for the war is faltering in western capitals, partly because citizens cannot see how it furthers homeland security. The frequency and scale of attacks on India mean that Indians have no such trouble. National caveats on force employment – particularly from France, Italy, and Germany – hinder the efficacy of Nato troops, but Indian casualty sensitivity is almost certainly less than that in, say, Britain.
India's longstanding cultural ties to Afghanistan – Bollywood movies are wildly popular there, for instance – mean that Indian soldiers would be less likely to be stigmatised as occupiers, with 73% of Afghans professing a favourable view of India (and 91% holding the opposite view of Pakistan).
India is also experienced at counterinsurgency, enjoys good relations with regional powers such as Iran and Russia (including bases in Tajikistan), and the large reserves of available forces. India has nearly 9,000 troops with the UN, and just withdrew 30,000 from Jammu and Kashmir.
The obstacle to India's involvement is Pakistan. Yet few stop to evaluate the absurdity of having "today's most active sponsor of terrorism" as a frontline ally against terrorists. In December 2009, the New York Times reported Pakistan's refusal to crack down on Siraj Haqqani, the strongest Taliban commander in Afghanistan, on the basis that he was a "longtime asset of Pakistan's spy agency".
The truth downplayed in western capitals is that India is one of the only interested parties, the US included, that has an interest in both state-building and counterterrorism on the Afghan side of the Durand line. Creating incentives for it to expand its provision of security could lay the groundwork for a commitment that will last long after the last western soldier is flown – or desperately airlifted – out of Kabul.
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No transit route to Afghanistan for Indian trucks: Pak
December 26, 2009 12:53 IST rediff.com
Notwithstanding United States' pressure, Pakistan has denied allowing Indian goods to pass through its territory to Afghanistan.
According to The Nation, Pakistan has strongly opposed the US proposal of granting transit facility to Indian trucks to Afghanistan through its soil.
"Washington has swallowed the bitter pill and given up its moves to get land route transit facility for India [ Images ] through Pakistan," a senior government official, who is privy to the issue, said.
Insiders said Pakistani authorities rebuffed the demands by pointing out towards India's alleged involvement in terror activities in Balochistan and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas through Afghanistan.
However, Pakistan has agreed to allow Afghanistan more than 60 trucks a month for transporting of its goods up to the Wagah border.
Sources said both Pakistan and Afghanistan have also agreed to maintain a track of the supply trucks through an electronic tracking system.
The drivers of these vehicles would be responsible for the ultimate delivery of the goods in transit while Afghan goods arriving at Pakistani seaports will have to reach Afghanistan within 30 days after their clearance.
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Defense chief's Afghan plan: Empower local centers
New York Times By MAUREEN DOWD December 26, 2009
It is the greatest example of the Law of Unintended Consequences.
In a bit of unpoetic justice, Robert Gates helped create the mess in Afghanistan decades ago and now has to try to clean it up.
At the CIA in the '80s, Gates conspired with Charlie Wilson and the Saudis to help the insurgents in Afghanistan turn back the occupation of a superpower. Now he's guiding the attempt of the occupying superpower to turn back the insurgents, some of whom are the same ones he armed to defeat the Soviet Union.
Trying to do a good thing that also seemed like a strategically brilliant thing -- help the Afghan Davids repel the raw aggression of the Soviet Goliaths -- we created the monsters that have come back to haunt us, and we learned how little control we have over history.
We trained a whole generation of jihadists and armed them. We paved the way for the Taliban takeover and the rise of Osama bin Laden. We created the Islamist power in the northwest frontier of Pakistan, swelled by millions of Afghan refugees. We enabled the conditions for bin Laden's safe haven. We contributed to the instability of Pakistan.
On a rainy day in Kabul last week, I watched Gates climb into the cockpit of a Soviet-era helicopter that Americans use to teach Afghans how to fly. The defense secretary was in one of the same style Mi-17s that he once provided Stinger missiles to shoot down. The absurdity was not lost on Gates, an avid history reader who feels our foreign policy has too often been "an exercise in misread history."
Gates promised that America would not repeat its disappearing act of 1989. Flying from Kabul to Iraq, I asked him whether, like Paul Wolfowitz with the Iraqi Shiites, he was driven to war because of guilt at abandoning people we had promised to stand by.
"I don't feel guilt about it, but we made a strategic mistake," he said. "And it wasn't just the Afghans. At almost the same time, we basically cut off our relationship with the Pakistanis. And the mistrust that exists today is a reflection of that action on our part."
I asked what he learned in the exhaustive White House review. He said Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top American commander in Afghanistan, convinced him that "it was less the size of the force footprint than what the forces did on the ground." The Soviets, he added, "invaded a country." Well, so did we. But the Soviets, he said, killed a million Afghans and tried to impose "an alien culture."
But Gates knows messy conflicts get messier. There is a brief window of opportunity when a benign occupying power can accomplish some good before it is regarded with resentment and resistance.
I showed Gates an article in the newspaper Stars and Stripes reporting that U.S. trainers considered Afghan soldiers and police a long way from ready, and that some Afghans in a new unit in Baghlan province cower in ditches, steal U.S. fuel and weapons and are suspected of collaborating with the Taliban.
Capt. Jason Douthwaite, a logistics officer in Baghlan, told the military paper that he felt more like an investigating officer than a mentor: "It's not, 'Let me teach you your job.' It's more like, 'How much did you steal from the American government today?' "
W. said invading Iraq could help break the cycle of supporting corrupt dictators. But watching the Karzais acting like a mob family going to the mattresses, how do we know we're not simply creating and propping up another corrupt dictator?
"You have to be realistic about the fact that developments of the kind we want to see take time," Gates replied. "If we can re-empower the traditional local centers of authority, the tribal shuras and elders and things like that and put an overlay of human rights on that, isn't that a step in the right direction?"
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Afghan religious council condemns Pakistani Taliban over sending fighters
Xinhua www.chinaview.cn 2009-12-26
KABUL - Council of religious scholars in Afghanistan has strongly denounced the decision of Pakistani Taliban to send more militants to fight in the war-torn country, a statement of the religious body said on Saturday.
"The Afghanistan National Council of Ulemma (Religious Scholars)strongly condemns the recent announcement made by the Pakistani Taliban on sending militants to fight in Afghanistan," the statement said.
"Continuation of fighting is not in the interest of Islam and would rather harm the region," the statement further said.
A Pakistani Taliban commander Waliur Rahman said recently that the outfit had sent thousands of fighters to fight against NATO-led troops stationed in Afghanistan, according to media reports.
Rahman made the announcement in the wake of the surge of U.S. and NATO-led forces in Afghanistan and mounting pressure by Pakistani troops against the militants in tribal areas along the Afghan border.
In the statement, the religious body stressed that more fighting would "spread evil and fuel violence" and called on militants to renounce violence and instead resume normal life.
Both the neighboring Asian states of Afghanistan and Pakistan have been facing a surging militancy which has claimed thousands of lives over the past couple of years.
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Afghan police work to overcome barriers for women
By Heidi Vogt, Associated Press Writer
KABUL – The young Afghan woman leaves home every morning with her face and figure hidden by a burqa. At her office, she dons a police uniform, grabs a pistol and starts knocking in doors, looking for drug dealers and Taliban sympathizers.
Gulbesha, 22, is one of about 500 active duty policewomen in Afghanistan, compared with about 92,500 policemen. She is also one of just a few dozen who serve in the volatile south, where Taliban influence is strongest.
At a time when the U.S. is sending an additional 30,000 forces into Afghanistan, U.S. and Afghan officials say policewomen play an essential role in winning the war against insurgents. In a culture that strictly separates the sexes, security forces need more women to perform tasks men cannot do, including searching women and homes. Plans call for adding thousands more women in the next five years — a formidable goal in a society where a woman is expected to focus her life on home and family.
Even with a recruitment drive, however, the force has yet to fill the 650 slots already reserved for policewomen. And most of the officers are in relatively safe areas like Kabul and northern Herat province, according to U.S. and Interior Ministry figures. Families discourage their wives and daughters from dangerous jobs often considered corrupt.
Of the 15 female police officers in the southern province of Helmand, only Gulbesha and three others got permission from their families to travel to the capital for an eight-week training course that ended Thursday, said Robert Collett, a spokesman for NATO's provincial reconstruction team in Lashkar Gah.
Of those, only two felt safe enough to be interviewed. They would only give their first names to protect their families from Taliban reprisals.
Gulbesha's colleague, 36-year-old Islambibi, joined the force because she needed money. She walked into the police headquarters in the provincial capital of Lashkar Gah three years ago looking for work as a cleaner.
"But when they told me how much they paid cleaners, I said it wasn't enough," Islambibi said. "I asked if they had any better paying jobs and they told me I should become an officer."
She became the first female police officer in Helmand, earning $250 a month in one of the most dangerous provinces in the country.
Policewomen are "an integral part of being able to conduct door-to-door searches," said U.S. Brig. Gen. Anne Macdonald, who helps oversee the training programs.
Afghans are deeply offended when male soldiers or police search homes where women are present. At border crossings and other sensitive areas, men cannot search women for concealed weapons and other contraband, Macdonald said.
The U.S. is spending the bulk of the money to retrain Afghan police — $397 million in fiscal 2009 alone. Officials say they do not break out how much is spent specifically on female training.
Col. Shafiqa Quraisha, the head of the gender issues unit of the Afghan police, described a raid near Kabul in which insurgents had collected women into a room filled with piles of hay. Because Quraisha was there, she was able to search both the women and the room — finding weapons hidden beneath the hay.
When Gulbesha raids a house, she is the first one through the door so that male residents cannot complain that police have violated decorum by entering a residence with women inside. She wears a uniform of pants covered by a skirt to match the conservative dress expected of women in Helmand. Just before jumping out of the car for a raid, she rips off the skirt so it won't get in the way if she needs to run.
Policewomen must also deal with harassment and threats.
Quraisha said women regularly complain that male administrators won't accept applications for promotion until they agree to have tea or lunch with them. And Islambibi tells of being attacked by women in the villages during operations.
"The men tell their wives to attack me. So they come up and try to tear my headscarf off," she said.
Still, she refuses to quit because she needs the money and is proud of her work.
"I am like a man. I am not afraid," she said.
The risks can be even greater.
In September 2008, two Taliban assassins on a motorbike shot and killed a senior policewoman in Kandahar province. The victim, Malalai Kakar, was head of the department investigating crimes against women in Kandahar and was known for her tough stand against drug traffickers.
"She was always armed. She even slept with her weapon," said her father, Lt. Col. Gul Mohammad Kakar, who encouraged his daughter to join the force. He complained that his daughter's killers remain at large.
"They escaped. We're still looking for them and when I find them, I will take revenge," he said. "Either the government will put them behind bars, or I will kill them."
Six months ago, Gulbesha was attacked as she left her office. She saw a suspicious-looking car near the door as she walked out — the men inside had scarves covering their faces.
"I jumped back, scared," she said. "I know these kind of people are dangerous."
A man in the back seat pulled out a Kalashnikov rifle and started shooting at her. He hit a passer-by in the leg but missed Gulbesha.
She grabbed the pistol from her hip and fired back, wounding the driver in the arm and grazing the shooter in the head.
"Before that I was afraid," Gulbesha said. "But after that I was even more resolved."
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Rocket hits Afghan Defence Ministry, no casualties
KABUL (Reuters) - A rocket landed inside the grounds of the Afghan Defence Ministry in the heart of the capital Kabul on Saturday, but there were no casualties, a ministry official said.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack. Taliban guerrillas have in the past occasionally hit the capital with rockets but they rarely cause casualties.
The defence ministry is located in the centre of Kabul near the presidential palace."One rocket struck inside the courtyard of the defence ministry this evening. There were no casualties and there was no damage to any of the buildings," defence ministry spokesman General Zaher Azimy said, without giving any more details.
Violence in Afghanistan has reached its highest levels in the eight-year war with Taliban insurgents spreading their insurgency from the south and east of the country to the capital and previously peaceful areas.Washington is sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan to try and quell the mounting violence. Other NATO countries are sending around 7,000 more. There are some 110,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan, including 68,000 Americans.
(Reporting by Yousuf Azimy, Writing by Jonathon Burch)
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Family plea follows new Taliban video of captured GI
KABUL (AP) — In a Christmas Day move, the Taliban on Friday released a video of an American soldier captured in Afghanistan, showing him apparently healthy but spouting criticism about the U.S. military operation. In Idaho, Pfc. Bowe Bergdahl's family pleaded for his release and urged him to "stay strong."
Bergdahl disappeared June 30 while based in eastern Afghanistan and is the only known American serviceman in captivity. The Taliban claimed his capture in a video released in mid-July that showed the young Idaho soldier appearing downcast and frightened. He hadn't been heard from until Friday's video, in which he looks well and speaks clearly.
The NATO-led International Security Assistance Force confirmed hours later that the man in the video was Bergdahl, but denounced both its timing and content.
"This is a horrible act which exploits a young soldier, who was clearly compelled to read a prepared statement," said a statement from U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Gregory Smith, ISAF's spokesman. "To release this video on Christmas Day is an affront to the deeply concerned family and friends of Bowe Bergdahl, demonstrating contempt for religious traditions and the teachings of Islam."
Lt. Col. Tim Marsano of the Idaho National Guard issued a statement Friday from the family of Bergdahl, who live outside Hailey, Idaho. In their statement, the family urged the captors "to let our only son come home."
And to their son, the family said, "We love you and we believe in you. Stay strong."
Marsano met with the family Friday morning at their home. He told the AP that the family had not seen the video but had talked to other relatives who had seen it.
In the video, Bergdahl is shown seated, facing the camera, wearing sunglasses and what appears to be a U.S. military helmet and uniform. On one side of the image, it says: "An American soldier imprisoned by the Mujahideen of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan." It also shows him eating while wearing garb characteristic of Afghanistan's Kandahar province, an area where the Taliban emerged in the 1990s.
He identifies himself as Bergdahl, born in Sun Valley, Idaho, and gives his rank, birth date, blood type, his unit and mother's maiden name before beginning a lengthy verbal attack on the U.S. conduct of the war in Afghanistan and its relations with Muslims.
In the video, Bergdahl says "It's our arrogance and, and our stupidity that has made us so blind that we simply refuse to see the blunders and mistakes that we continue to make over and over again. "
"This is just going to be the next Vietnam unless the American people stand up and stop all this nonsense," he said.
Although it is unclear where Bergdahl was being held when the video was recorded, he said he had not been abused by his captors and drew a sharp contrast with his own country's treatment of war prisoners.
In light of "the brutality and inhumane way my country has ravaged the lands and the people of my captures (sic), the Taliban, one would expect that they would justly treat me as my country's Army has treated their Muslim prisoners in Bagram, in Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and many other secret prisons hidden around the world," he said.
"But I bear witness. I was continuously treated as a human being with dignity," he said.
The video, which has an English-language narration in parts, also shows images of prisoners in U.S. custody being abused. The speaker says he did not suffer such ill treatment.
A statement read by a Taliban spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, appears at the end of the video and renews demands for a "limited number of prisoners" to be exchanged for Bergdahl. The statement says that more American troops could be captured.
The Geneva Conventions, which regulate the conduct of war between regular armies, bar the use of detainees for propaganda purposes and prohibit signatories from putting captured military personnel on display. As an insurgent organization, the Taliban are not party to the treaty.
Statements from captives are typically viewed as being made under duress.
Bergdahl, who was serving with a unit based in Fort Richardson, Alaska, was 23 when he vanished just five months after arriving in Afghanistan. He was serving at a base in Paktika province near the border with Pakistan in an area known to be a Taliban stronghold. On Friday, NATO said a joint Afghan-international force killed several militants in Paktika while searching for a commander of the Jalaluddin Haqqani militant network that is linked to al-Qaeda.
U.S. military officials have searched for Bergdahl, but it is not publicly known whether he is even being held in Afghanistan or neighboring Pakistan.
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Taliban planned to use Americans in Pakistan attacks
ISLAMABAD (Reuters) – Taliban insurgents had planned to use five Americans, now detained in Pakistan, who had contacted the militants via the Internet, to carry out attacks in the U.S.-allied country, a police official said on Saturday.
Usman Anwar, police chief in Sargodha, where the men were arrested this month, said emails had revealed plans for the young men from Virginia to travel to a Pakistani nuclear power plant.
"We believe that they were supposed to be used inside Pakistan," Anwar told Reuters by telephone.
"In their last email to the Taliban, we found they mentioned the Chashma Nuclear Plant and that's why they were going to Mianwali (district)."
Anwar declined to give details because police were still interrogating the suspects.
The case has illustrated how easy it is for anyone to pursue dreams of joining militant jihad through cyber channels, a worrying reality for Pakistan, already struggling on the ground to contain a Taliban insurgency.
Washington is pressuring Pakistan to root out militants in lawless tribal areas who cross the border to attack Western forces in Afghanistan. But it is a sensitive issue.
Pilotless U.S. drone aircraft attacks on suspected militants on Pakistani soil have already infuriated many Pakistanis.
A drone aircraft attacked a suspected militant target in northwest Pakistan on Saturday, killing five people, intelligence officials said.
Two missiles hit a house in North Waziristan in the attack. Two people other people were wounded, the officials said.
The possibility of militants attempting to attack Pakistan's nuclear weapons alarms Western powers, although analysts say it is highly unlikely.
Militants have struck back with bombings that have killed hundreds of people in response to a major security offensive in one of their strongholds in October.
The Taliban want to impose their harsh version of Islamic rule in Pakistan and have made clear how they would do it -- public whippings and hangings of those deemed immoral.
Local officials said on Saturday militants killed Gul Mohammad, a commander of an anti-Taliban militia, and dumped his beheaded body on a roadside in the Bajaur tribal district on the border with Afghanistan. A note was left warning that others could suffer the same fate, the officials said.
The five Americans were arrested in Sargodha, home to one of Pakistan's biggest airbases, 190 km (120 miles) southeast of Pakistani capital Islamabad.
Some analysts say the case of the Americans reflects a new strategy by militants to try to avoid tighter security measures by forming networks on the Internet.
The men -- two are of Pakistani ancestry, one of Egyptian, one of Yemeni and one of Eritrean -- may face terrorism charges.
They were found with maps and had intended to travel through northwest Pakistan to an al Qaeda and Taliban militant stronghold, officials said.
The suspects were being investigated for links with the banned Jaish-e-Mohammad group, which has carried out high-profile attacks, officials have said. The Pakistan-based group has links with al Qaeda and the Taliban.
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GI Christmas in Afghanistan: hip-hop, iced tea and an antenna tree
By Thomas L. Day And Nancy A. Youssef, Mcclatchy Newspapers – Fri Dec 25, 4:38 pm ET
KABUL, Afghanistan — Soldiers deployed to Afghanistan , thousands of miles away from their loved ones, did things this Christmas Day that they wouldn't at home. They improvised -- building an ersatz Christmas tree out of stacked communications equipment. And they partied.
At Camp Phoenix , outside Kabul , dinner included prime rib, shrimp cocktail, and a Christmas cake in the shape of a tree that was about the size of a tree.
After the sun went down, and the mammoth spread of food was removed, the Morale, Welfare, and Recreation club at Camp Phoenix cleared the dance floor and blasted hip-hop music until midnight.
NATO units from Romania , who maintain a detachment at Phoenix , invited Georgia National Guardsmen to an evening outdoor barbecue, but only a few were up to the challenge of yet another meal.
"You've got to do something to break up the monotony," said Capt. Delando Langley of Woodbridge, Va. "If you get one down day, it's Christmas."
With the American military's "General Order No. 1" still in effect, all celebrants were teetotalers. U.S. troops deployed to Afghanistan are prohibited from consuming alcohol.
Langley spent Christmas evening sipping on an iced tea - regular, not Long Island - with friends.
"Sometimes you're only limited by your own creativity," said Capt. Chuck Newton of Lithonia, Ga.
A group calling itself "Operation Christmas" delivered more than 2,800 bags of gifts to the camp.
The holidays test troop morale for the unit, which is already in the ninth month of this deployment. Many of the Guardsmen at Phoenix also served a one-year tour in Iraq from Spring 2005 to 2006.
"You just try to keep them active and let them know they're cared about," said Sgt. 1st Class Mark Southerland of Sharpsburg, Ga. "Next season you'll be with your families."
Throughout Nangahar province, Georgia Guard members, also from the 48th Brigade , peppered their barren bases and heavily armored MRAPs (Mine Resistant Ambush-Protected vehicles) with creative signs of Christmas.
SPC David Brunson, 21, of Rome, Ga. , donned reindeer ears instead of a helmet, which popped out of the turret of his MRAP as he visited a base near Torkum Gate, an entry route from Pakistan .
Nearby, Staff Sgt. Michael Gloyd , 32, of Marietta, Ga. , and his comrades turned extra communications antennas on their side and stacked them on top of one another to create a makeshift Christmas tree. He estimated the tree was worth $10,000 of antennas; the miniature ornaments another five dollars .
One decoration was particularly special, an ornament from the Marietta police department, where he works as an officer when he is not deployed.
"I looked at my guys one day and said 'we need a tree,' and this was the best we could find around here," Gloyd said. "We like it."
Underneath the tree, someone had placed gifts but no one could figure out who wrapped them or what was inside. "Maybe their orders," a soldier quipped. "Or another manual for us to read," chimed in another.
In Jalalabad, the Guard's Charlie troop took the day off from patrols. Instead, soldiers in motorized carts went around the base delivering care packages.
In the computer room, soldiers hooked up their web cams and talked to families that showed them what they got for Christmas. On some screens, families positioned their cameras so their solider could see the tree. And the line for the phones lasted all day.
By nightfall, the troops gathered around a fire pit. Nearby someone set up a table stacked with cigars and cans of eggnog and a small-lit Christmas tree. A radio blared Christmas classics, all sang with a southern twang. At times, the voice over the radio was joined by a chorus of twangs, those all dressed in uniform.
But even in Jalalabad, where violence is relatively low, soldiers could not escape the risks of war. A mortar landed in a nearby base, which arrived with a muddled thump as the group of soldiers sang carols together over the fire. By evening, commanders began planning for the next day's patrols.
(Day, with the Macon, Ga. , Telegraph, reported from Kabul and Youssef, with the McClatchy Washington bureau, reported from Jalalabad)
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