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November 28, 2009 

12 inmates escape prison in western Afghanistan
By Amir Shah, Associated Press Writer – Sat Nov 28, 7:53 am ET
KABUL – A dozen prisoners escaped jail through a tunnel they dug from their cell to the outside in western Afghanistan, police said Saturday.

Newly deployed Marines to target Taliban bastion
Renewed focus on Helmand
Obama expected to give war plan in speech
By Greg Jaffe Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, November 29, 2009
KABUL -- Days after President Obama outlines his new war strategy in a speech Tuesday, as many as 9,000 Marines will begin final preparations to deploy to southern Afghanistan and renew an assault on a Taliban stronghold that slowed

Afghanistan to be given timetable for progress
By Ben Fox, Associated Press Writer – Sat Nov 28, 11:54 am ET
PORT-OF-SPAIN, Trinidad – Countries backing Afghanistan's government are going to demand that it meet specific security benchmarks, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Saturday, outlining a plan to let foreign troops gradually hand control to local forces.

Britain to host Afghanistan conference on Jan 28
Sat Nov 28, 8:32 am ET
PORT OF SPAIN (Reuters) – An international conference on Afghanistan will be held in London on January 28, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said on Saturday.

Europe lacks means, will for Afghan war: experts
by Lorne Cook
BRUSSELS (AFP) – The United States' partners could deploy some 5,000 extra troops under a new strategy to combat the Afghan insurgency but lack the means or the will to do much more, according to analysts.

Senate Report Explores 2001 Escape by bin Laden From Afghan Mountains
By SCOTT SHANE The New York Times November 29, 2009
WASHINGTON — As President Obama vows to “finish the job” in Afghanistan by sending more troops, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has completed a detailed look back at a crucial failure early in the battle against Al Qaeda:

West aims to build Afghan forces with pay hike
Sat Nov 28, 8:25 am ET
KABUL (Reuters) – Afghanistan announced a pay rise of nearly 40 percent for police and military recruits on Saturday, as Western countries aim to increase the size and quality of Afghan security forces so their own troops can go home.

Trainers of Afghan police have work cut out for them
By Jay Price | McClatchy Newspapers
KOLK, Afghanistan — When the improvised bomb exploded in a mud-walled compound about 300 yards from a new traffic checkpoint, the six Afghan police officers at the post just looked at one another.

2 Afghans allege abuse at U.S. site
Teenagers say they were interrogated at secretive Bagram holding center
By Joshua Partlow and Julie Tate Saturday, November 28, 2009 The Washington Post
KABUL -- Two Afghan teenagers held in U.S. detention north of Kabul this year said they were beaten by American guards, photographed naked, deprived of sleep and held in solitary confinement in concrete cells for at least two

Get real on Afghanistan
The Washington Post By Colbert I. King Saturday, November 28, 2009
The selection of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point for President Obama's announcement of his new Afghanistan war strategy is media manipulation worthy of Michael Deaver, the legendary image protector of Ronald Reagan.

Afghan withdrawal would be folly
The Guardian By Robert Fox 11/27/2009
Afghanistan's complex patchwork of success and failure is all a world away from the metropolitan commentators

Afghan Red Crescent official shot dead: police
KABUL, Nov 28, 2009 (AFP) - An official with the Red Crescent humanitarian organisation in Afghanistan has been killed by gunmen in the northern province of Takhar, the provincial police chief said on Saturday.

Afghan, NATO forces detain Taliban militants near Afghan capital
KABUL, Nov. 28 (Xinhua) -- Afghan troops backed by NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) forces detained suspected Taliban militants during an operation in Logar province some 80 km south of capital Kabul on Saturday, said a press release of allies.

US soldiers: Afghanistan war dramatically different, more challenging than Iraq
By Denis D. Gray, The Associated Press Sat Nov 28, 7:30 PM
FORWARD OPERATING BASE SHANK, Afghanistan - Veterans of Iraq recall rolling to war along asphalted highways, sweltering in flat scrublands and chatting with city-wise university graduates connected to the wider world.

Afghan President Karzai to be set international targets
Saturday, 28 November 2009 BBC News
Gordon Brown has said Afghanistan's president will be set targets by the international community for training Afghan forces and tackling corruption.

Taliban amnesty unlikely to work unless NATO gains momentum, ambassador
Canadian Press November 27, 2009
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — Fewer Taliban are joining reconciliation programs in Afghanistan as the insurgency grows in strength.

Explosion heard in Kabul: witnesses
Sat Nov 28, 2:03 am ET
KABUL (AFP) – A huge explosion was heard in Kabul Saturday, according to witnesses, but the immediate cause was not known.
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12 inmates escape prison in western Afghanistan
By Amir Shah, Associated Press Writer – Sat Nov 28, 7:53 am ET
KABUL – A dozen prisoners escaped jail through a tunnel they dug from their cell to the outside in western Afghanistan, police said Saturday.

Afghan police arrested three men for the shooting death of an Afghan Red Crescent official in northern Afghanistan. The shooting Friday was an apparent attempt to settle a long-standing dispute.

In the prison escape, the inmates included low-level Taliban militants, drug-dealers and other minor criminals, said Farah province police chief Gen. Mohammad Faqir Askar.

A 13th prisoner arrested during his attempted escape said the tunnel took 10 days to dig and the plan was to slowly empty the prison overnight, Askar said. More than 300 inmates were held in the prison, which was built to hold about 80, he said.

Afghanistan's overcrowded prisons have been plagued by problems as the country tries to establish a justice system amid ongoing conflict.

In the main prison in Kabul, inmates took control of entire cellblocks last year before being pushed back. Taliban militants launched an assault on a prison in the southern city of Kandahar in June 2008 that freed 900 inmates.

Police detained a father, his son and a nephew in northern Takhar province Friday, provincial police chief Gen. Ziauddin Mohmoodi said.

They attacked the victim — the Afghan Red Crescent 's provincial chief who goes by the single name Abdullah — after he left a mosque where he attended Friday prayers.

Mohmoodi said he did not believe the killing had anything to do with his work with the aid group, but did not provide further details.

Abdul Rahman Kalantari, an official with the Afghan Red Crescent in Kabul, said Abdullah was targeted because of a private feud with his attackers.

President Hamid Karzai condemned the killing in a statement released Saturday.

Also Saturday, a bomb exploded in a large trash container in the center of Afghanistan's capital. Officials say the explosion did not cause any injuries or significant property damage.

Kabul police Chief Abdul Rahman Rahman says the explosion in a neighborhood close to the U.S. Embassy did not appear to be strong.

"It was designed mostly to make a large sound, just to alarm people," Rahman said. An Associated Press reporter at the scene saw a damaged billboard but little other debris.
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Newly deployed Marines to target Taliban bastion
Renewed focus on Helmand
Obama expected to give war plan in speech
By Greg Jaffe Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, November 29, 2009
KABUL -- Days after President Obama outlines his new war strategy in a speech Tuesday, as many as 9,000 Marines will begin final preparations to deploy to southern Afghanistan and renew an assault on a Taliban stronghold that slowed this year amid a troop shortage and political pressure from the Afghan government, senior U.S. officials said.

The extra Marines will be the first to move into the country as part of Obama's escalation of the eight-year-old war. They will double the size of the U.S. force in the southern province of Helmand and will provide a critical test for Afghan President Hamid Karzai's struggling government and Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal's counterinsurgency strategy.

"The first troops out of the door are going to be Marines," Gen. James T. Conway, the Corps' top officer, told fellow Marines in Afghanistan on Saturday. "We've been leaning forward in anticipation of a decision. And we've got some pretty stiff fighting coming."

The Marines will be quickly followed by about 1,000 U.S. Army trainers. They will deploy as early as February to speed the growth of the Afghan army and police force, military officials said.

The new forces will not start moving until Obama outlines his new strategy in a speech at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y. The revised plan, which faces a war-weary and increasingly skeptical American public, is expected to call for 30,000 to 35,000 new troops in a phased deployment over the next 12 to 18 months.

The parceling-out of reinforcements is driven in part by Afghanistan's lack of infrastructure, which cannot immediately support a larger U.S. force. The phased approach will also allow the president to cancel some of the additional reinforcements if the counterinsurgency strategy advocated by McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, does not show results or if the Karzai government does not meet goals for stamping out corruption and providing for the Afghan people, White House officials said.

The first place Obama will look for results is Helmand, a Taliban-dominated province that has been McChrystal's primary focus for much of this year and has been the site of some of the bloodiest fighting. Earlier this year, about 10,000 Marines moved into the area and pushed Taliban fighters out of several major cities there. The Marines then began to rebuild the long-absent Afghan government and police forces in the area.

The U.S. offensive, however, did not dislodge the Taliban from such places as Marjeh, a city of about 50,000 people in central Helmand that remains a major center for the opium trade. After several months of fighting, senior Marine officials concluded that they did not have enough troops to expand into Marjeh and a handful of other Taliban havens while holding on to the gains they had made in the province.

"Where we have gone, goodness follows," Conway said. "But the fact is that we are not as expansive as we would like to be, and those probable additional number of Marines are going to help us to get there."

The Marines' inability to push the Taliban out of these key sanctuaries led some Afghans in the area to doubt U.S. resolve. The Taliban has used its haven in Marjeh to produce roadside bombs and plan attacks on areas where Marines were trying to build the local government and police forces. This month, Taliban fighters from Marjeh killed three Afghan city council members in nearby Nawa, which Marines have held up as a major success story in the province.

"The two questions I get from Afghans are 'When are you leaving?' and 'Why aren't you going into Marjeh?' because that is where the real enemy is," said Brig. Gen. Larry Nicholson, senior Marine commander in the province.

Marine commanders have little doubt that the additional 9,000 troops moving into the province will push the Taliban out of its remaining sanctuaries in Helmand. But the gains will be transitory if U.S. forces do not build effective local police forces and foster a government that is relatively free of corruption and can provide for the Afghan people, U.S. officials said. "This will be a credibility test for the [Afghan] government to see if it can deliver," said Rear Adm. Gregory Smith, a spokesman for McChrystal.

Already there is cause for concern. The Afghan government appears likely to commit only 60 percent of the troops that Marine and local Afghan commanders estimate that they need for the assault, a senior Marine official in Helmand said. That means more Marines will probably have to be posted in the city after the initial attack to ensure that the Taliban does not return.

"To have American Marines standing on a corner in a key village isn't nearly as effective as having an Afghan policeman or Afghan soldier," Conway said.

Karzai intervened to halt an attack into Marjeh by U.S. Special Operations forces and Afghan troops this year after residents in the area complained of excessive civilian casualties, senior military officials said. The coming assault on the city will be a measure of Karzai's willingness to buck allies with ties to the opium industry, these officials said.

The other major area of concern is whether the Afghan government and the U.S. military can meet the aggressive new growth targets laid out for the Afghan army and police force in the Obama administration's war strategy. "We have to increase recruiting. We have to increase retention, and we have to decrease attrition this year," said Lt. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, who leads the U.S. training effort in Kabul, Afghanistan's capital.

The administration's new plans for the Afghan army and police, which will probably be a heavy focus of Tuesday's speech, call for increasing the size of the army to about 134,000 troops by October, four years earlier than the initial goal of 2014. To meet that target, the Afghan Defense Ministry must bring in about 5,000 new recruits a month and dramatically cut attrition in battalions.

This month, the ministry missed its monthly recruiting goal by more than 2,000 troops.

Afghan soldiers and police officers were recently given a 40 percent pay increase, but it is too early to tell whether the extra money will fix the recruiting problem, U.S. officials said.

"The extra pay literally brought us to parity with what the Taliban are offering," a senior military official in Kabul said.
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Afghanistan to be given timetable for progress
By Ben Fox, Associated Press Writer – Sat Nov 28, 11:54 am ET
PORT-OF-SPAIN, Trinidad – Countries backing Afghanistan's government are going to demand that it meet specific security benchmarks, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Saturday, outlining a plan to let foreign troops gradually hand control to local forces.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai and foreign ministers from a number of countries are expected to attend a Jan. 28 conference to set a timetable for Afghanistan to train and deploy thousands more soldiers and police, Brown said at a news conference in the Caribbean nation of Trinidad & Tobago, where he is attending the Commonwealth heads of government meeting.

"President Karzai has got to accept that there will be milestones by which he's going to be judged, and he's got to accept that there will be benchmarks which the international community will set," the prime minister said.

The conference also will focus on marshaling resources to help Afghanistan meet those benchmarks, Brown said. The United Nations and other international organizations are expected to attend.

Brown said the first benchmark will come three months after the conference: the Afghan government will be expected to identify additional troops to send to Helmand Province for training.

Within six months, the government should have a clear plan for training more police and reducing corruption among officers, Brown said, and within nine months, Karzai's administration should have appointed nearly 400 provincial and district governors.

By the end of 2010, Brown said, the government should have trained an additional 50,000 troops and must take control of at least five districts to Afghan control from the 43-nation NATO-led force.

The prime minister also said he would announce next week whether conditions have been met to send an additional 500 British troops, bringing the total to 9,500.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon issued a statement Saturday calling the planned conference in London "a very timely initiative."

Together with a later meeting in Afghanistan, it "would outline the framework for an increased lead role for the Afghans in the shaping of their destiny," he said, and called them "defining moments in the reconfiguration of the relationship between Afghanistan and the international community."
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Britain to host Afghanistan conference on Jan 28
Sat Nov 28, 8:32 am ET
PORT OF SPAIN (Reuters) – An international conference on Afghanistan will be held in London on January 28, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said on Saturday.

The conference, announced by Brown on the sidelines of a Commonwealth summit in Trinidad and Tobago, would discuss progressively handing over security in Afghan provinces to Afghan government control so that international forces in the country could be eventually reduced.

Brown made the announcement in Port of Spain with U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who said the London security conference would be followed by another meeting in the Afghan capital Kabul.

Britain has said it will send an extra 500 troops to Afghanistan, taking the British force to 9,500. It has been trying to persuade other countries in the NATO-led coalition to send an extra 5,000 soldiers to help fight the Taliban and train Afghan forces.

A total of 235 British soldiers have died in the Afghan campaign, making the British mission in the landlocked Asian country a sensitive issue for Prime Minister Brown ahead of an election next year.

On Tuesday, U.S. President Barack Obama is expected to announce he is sending about 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan as part of a new counterinsurgency strategy that will place more emphasis on accelerating the training of Afghan security forces so that U.S. soldiers can eventually withdraw.
(Reporting by Adrian Croft, Editing by Stacey Joyce)
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Europe lacks means, will for Afghan war: experts
by Lorne Cook
BRUSSELS (AFP) – The United States' partners could deploy some 5,000 extra troops under a new strategy to combat the Afghan insurgency but lack the means or the will to do much more, according to analysts.

Plagued by economic problems, overstretched armies deployed in Iraq or the Balkans and growing military and civilian casualties, European nations are losing appetite for a fight that has dragged on for eight years.

But any tepid response to requests by commanders could hurt US President Barack Obama, who is due to unveil the new strategy on Tuesday, and dispatch more than 30,000 US reinforcements to make it work.

"The Europeans are unable to find sense in this conflict," said Joseph Henrotin, at Belgium's Centre for Analysis and International Risk Prevention.

"Many governments no longer see the goal nor what they stand to win," he said.

The United States is counting on its allies -- more than 40 countries have troops in Afghanistan -- provide up to 10,000 troops for the counter-insurgency plan devised by top commander US General Stanley McChrystal. Related article: 9,000 Marines to Helmand

Obama will insist on finishing a job started after the September 11, 2001 attacks -- when a US-led coalition ousted the Taliban militia for harbouring Osama bin Laden -- to break down Al-Qaeda.

But as casualties rise, the benefits of a protracted operation are harder to sift from the risks, and Henrotin said European good will is drying up.

"The strength of their resolve has evaporated little by little. The only real motive that remains, the most important factor, is transatlantic solidarity," he said.

Main US ally Britain has offered a further 500 troops, on condition that Kabul commits police and soldiers and if other allies boost force levels, as the operations gets smarter by protecting civilians in Afghan towns and cities. Related article: British PM sets Afghan targets

London is likely, along with Germany, Spain and Italy combined, to keep in-country around 1,500 troops who were providing security for the fraud-marred elections in August, a NATO military officer said.

On top of that, Europeans could send some 3,000 extra troops, while partner nation South Korea is due to send another 500.

However Germany will wait until after a new international conference on Afghanistan, set for late January in London, before committing more resources.

"They want to see any further contributions in the context of the overall political environment in which they will be deploying their forces," NATO spokesman James Appathurai said.

France insists it has reached its limit, although Washington is pressuring Paris to come up with at least 1,000 personnel.

"It's quite clear that the Europeans aren't going to do much. Paris doesn't even look like preparing public opinion" for any increase, said Francois Heisbourg, special advisor at the Foundation for Strategic Research in Paris.

The lack of support is leaving NATO's mission, its most challenging ever, increasingly in US hands. Of the roughly 150,000 troops who might be deployed, two thirds would be American.

But just as casualties undermine public backing in Europe, and more crucially among Afghans, US citizens are growing impatient, leaving Obama with a heavy domestic price to pay -- more so if his allies don't dig deeper.

Economic woes, unemployment and health care also weigh on minds, said former US NATO ambassador Kurt Volker, now managing director at the Center for Transatlantic Relations at Johns Hopkins University.

"The US has kind of been immune to some of the difficult domestic politics that some of our European allies have had to deal with. That's no longer the case," said Volker, who supports sending more troops.

NATO's troubled Afghan effort tops the agenda when alliance foreign ministers meet in Brussels on Thursday. Military officers will also meet in Belgium on December 7 to discuss the mission's resources.
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Senate Report Explores 2001 Escape by bin Laden From Afghan Mountains
By SCOTT SHANE The New York Times November 29, 2009
WASHINGTON — As President Obama vows to “finish the job” in Afghanistan by sending more troops, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has completed a detailed look back at a crucial failure early in the battle against Al Qaeda: the escape of Osama bin Laden from American forces in the Afghan mountains of Tora Bora in December 2001.

“Removing the Al Qaeda leader from the battlefield eight years ago would not have eliminated the worldwide extremist threat,” the committee’s report concludes. “But the decisions that opened the door for his escape to Pakistan allowed bin Laden to emerge as a potent symbolic figure who continues to attract a steady flow of money and inspire fanatics worldwide.”

The report, based in part on a little-noticed 2007 history of the Tora Bora episode by the military’s Special Operations Command, asserts that the consequences of not sending American troops in 2001 to block Mr. bin Laden’s escape into Pakistan are still being felt.

The report blames the lapse for “laying the foundation for today’s protracted Afghan insurgency and inflaming the internal strife now endangering Pakistan.”

Its release comes just as the Obama administration is preparing to announce an increase in forces in Afghanistan.

The showdown at Tora Bora, a mountainous area dotted with caves in eastern Afghanistan, pitted a modest force of American Special Operations and C.I.A. officers, along with allied Afghan fighters, against a force of about 1,000 Qaeda fighters led by Mr. bin Laden.

The committee report, prepared at the request of Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, the committee’s Democratic chairman, concludes unequivocally that in mid-December 2001, Mr. bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, were at the cave complex, where Mr. bin Laden had operated previously during the fight against Soviet forces.

The new report suggests that a larger troop commitment to Afghanistan might have resulted in the demise not only of Mr. bin Laden and his deputy but also of Mullah Muhammad Omar, the leader of the Afghan Taliban. Mullah Omar, who also fled to Pakistan in 2001, has overseen the resurgence of the Taliban.

Like several previous accounts, the committee’s report blames Gen. Tommy R. Franks, then the top American commander, and Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, for not putting a large number of American troops there lest they fuel resentment among Afghans. General Franks, who declined to comment for the committee’s report, has at times questioned whether Mr. bin Laden was even at Tora Bora in late 2001.

The report represents unfinished political business on the part of Mr. Kerry. Before and during his unsuccessful 2004 presidential campaign, he hammered on the failure to catch Mr. bin Laden.

The Foreign Relations Committee’s report draws on previous accounts, including books by two C.I.A. officers, Gary Berntsen and Gary Schroen, and by a commander in the Army’s elite Delta Force who goes by the pen name Dalton Fury. The analysis in their books of the flawed tactics at Tora Bora is generally echoed in the official Special Operations Command history.

The 2007 history said that it “has been determined with reasonable certainty” that Mr. bin Laden was at Tora Bora in December 2001, but that the fewer than 100 American troops committed to the area were not enough to block his escape.

The Senate report was prepared by the Foreign Relations Committee’s Democratic staff, whose chief investigator, Douglas Frantz, is a former journalist who has reported extensively on the hunt for Mr. bin Laden.

The report describes how Americans at Tora Bora intercepted Mr. bin Laden’s voice in radio transmissions to his fighters, as well as references to “the sheikh.”

The former Delta Force officer who uses the name Fury told staff members that C.I.A. officers “had a guy with them called Jalal and he was the foremost expert on bin Laden’s voice.”

“He worked on bin Laden’s voice for seven years and he knew him better than anyone else in the West,” the former officer said. “To him, it was very clear that bin Laden was there on the mountain.”

The report says some villagers who were paid to help in the fight were given global positioning system devices and told to push a button wherever they saw fighters or arms caches. The coordinates were then sent to American military spotters to call in airstrikes.
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West aims to build Afghan forces with pay hike
Sat Nov 28, 8:25 am ET
KABUL (Reuters) – Afghanistan announced a pay rise of nearly 40 percent for police and military recruits on Saturday, as Western countries aim to increase the size and quality of Afghan security forces so their own troops can go home.

Interior Minister Hanif Atmar said monthly salaries would increase by $45 to about $165 for a new recruit. At present, there are about 95,000 Afghan soldiers and 93,000 police.

"We have an Afghanistan that will be able to defend itself with its own national security forces," Atmar said in a statement.

Afghanistan depends on funds from the United States and other Western countries for large budgetary expenses such as military and police salaries.

The commander of U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan wants dramatic increases in the size of Afghan security forces, perhaps to as many as 240,000 soldiers and 160,000 police -- goals that would take years to meet.

A new NATO training mission is working to expand the Afghan army to 134,000 soldiers by October 2010.

In addition to increasing the numbers, the quality of the forces need to be improved, especially the police force, which is plagued by corruption, desertion and high turnover.

Under the new pay scale, police officers will be eligible for pay increases throughout their careers, and those serving in dangerous areas will earn a bonus, the statement said.

"This will help improve recruiting, increase retention of those professionals in the force today, and it will also help reduce attrition," U.S. Lieutenant-General William Caldwell, commander of the NATO training mission, said in the statement.

Gross domestic product per person is about $300 per year in Afghanistan, or $25 a month.

U.S. President Barack Obama is expected to announce next week a strategy that involves sending tens of thousands of extra troops to Afghanistan to quell a growing Taliban insurgency.

A top priority for Obama's strategy is to accelerate the training of Afghan security forces to take over responsibility from U.S. and NATO troops.

Newly inaugurated President Hamid Karzai said Afghans would be able to take over security of the country in five years, a goal U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called "ambitious," but one that Washington would work toward.

(Writing by Yara Bayoumy)
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Trainers of Afghan police have work cut out for them
By Jay Price | McClatchy Newspapers
KOLK, Afghanistan — When the improvised bomb exploded in a mud-walled compound about 300 yards from a new traffic checkpoint, the six Afghan police officers at the post just looked at one another.

Another violent day on Afghanistan's Highway 1 had begun.

"Tell them to send three guys and go check it out to make sure no locals were hurt," U.S. Army 2nd Lt. Hans Beutel told a translator. "Tell them not to get too close, but go take a look."

Then Beutel, 23, and the rest of his team from the 4th Brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division drove off to a half-finished nearby base to grab a quick lunch. When they returned to the police checkpoint in the early afternoon, they found it deserted.

It was another lost afternoon in the frustrating effort to train Afghanistan's ill-paid police, who have a well-deserved reputation for stealing and extorting bribes. Staff Sgt. Tony Locklear, a 44-year-old from Robeson County, N.C., who'd spent the morning coaching the officers on running a checkpoint, cursed when he saw they were gone.

Training the Afghan national and local police, who function as a paramilitary force, is essential to the Obama administration's efforts to find an exit from Afghanistan. If the Afghan government is ever to take control of the country, it will need a less corrupt and more professional police force that can stand on its own.

Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. commander, has called for boosting the police force to 160,000 from its strength of 84,000; McChrystal also wants the Afghan army to double in size, to 240,000.

Eight years after the U.S.-led invasion, the police appear to be years away from functioning independently. American trainers say they must tell the Afghans repeatedly to do the simplest things, such as separating passengers they've searched from ones they haven't when they stop a vehicle.

The police suffer from a range of problems besides corruption, their U.S. trainers say. Illiteracy is the norm — Beutel thinks that only about 10 percent of the police officers he works with can read — and drug abuse is common.

Fuel is often in short supply. The central police headquarters in Kandahar, in southern Afghanistan, provides the district police with whom Beutel works one tank of diesel fuel a month per truck. That often means that when Beutel wants to mount a mission, he has to carry American fuel in jerrycans for the Afghan vehicles, a double frustration since the whole idea is to develop a force that can work without U.S. help.

Still, the police, manning vulnerable traffic checkpoints, routinely suffer casualties at a rate two or three times that of any other force on the coalition side, and American trainers say that many are fearless under fire.

This area along Highway 1 about 25 miles west of Kandahar illustrates the challenge the police face. Down a dusty side road about 700 yards from the police checkpoint, two white flags flapped in the breeze one recent morning.

"A few days after we started showing up here, the Taliban put up those flags," said Beutel, of Huntersville, N.C. "Pretty much everything past that is theirs."

That means the Taliban control a series of small grape-farming villages on a strip of land a mile or two wide between the highway — the main east-west artery — and the Arghandab River, a key waterway in Kandahar province.

After nearly two dozen assaults into Taliban turf in the past three months, Beutel and the soldiers he commands describe a nightmarish place in which the Taliban control the villages even in daylight, and the roads and paths are larded with bombs and mines.

Explosive booby traps are set into walls, and the insurgents have dug elaborate fighting positions with "spider holes," bunkers, camouflaged trenches and even tunnels that are reminiscent of the Vietnam War.

Beutel said he'd like to clean it all out and set up checkpoints outside the villages to prevent the Taliban from slipping back. That, however, would take perhaps twice as many police and a savvier police district commander who could persuade the village elders to build a working relationship with the police.

For now, it's all the local police and Afghan National Army units can do to try to keep the highway safe along the 12-mile stretch that Beutel's police are supposed to patrol.

"The ANA should clear (the villages) and the police should hold them, but for now they're both kind of in survival mode," Beutel said. "They have a foothold on Highway 1 and that's about it."

Beutel's soldiers work with the officers on a range of skills, from how to patrol to how to operate a checkpoint and even how to act professionally.

He talks with the police battalion commander, Bismullah Jan, almost daily, the young American officer sitting with the grizzled policeman on a rug in the district police offices on the Canadian military base where Beutel's troops live. They sip tea and discuss what went well that day and what could improve, plan missions and discuss what supplies the police need.

Before the police disappeared from the checkpoint, Beutel had been feeling good about the last 25 days. His soldiers had worked with the police to beef up several permanent checkpoints along the district's stretch of highway. The plan had been to monitor who was entering and leaving villages and to keep the Taliban away from the highway.

The operation had been a success: The number of bombs planted on the road had fallen by 70 to 80 percent, Beutel said. The mission couldn't last indefinitely, however, because it required too many police officers, and its last day would underscore the security challenges.

The explosion at the nearby compound was only the first of a series of incidents. Beutel thought an insurgent might have set off a bomb accidentally or possibly tried to lure his soldiers into an ambush.

Next, a U.S. Army truck filled with soldiers from another unit hit a mine, which blew off one wheel.

Then the attack that many had been expecting came just after Beutel's paratroopers drove off for lunch at the partly constructed U.S. base.

This time, the insurgents struck an Afghan army convoy about 1,000 yards east with rocket-propelled grenades and small arms. Beutel's troops, hearing the attack just as they were beginning to eat, jumped in their armored trucks and raced out through the gate.

They tore past the Afghan convoy and took up a position where they had a good line of sight south. Beutel got on the radio with the pilots of two U.S. helicopters overhead. The pilots fired a couple of rockets at yet another taunting white flag south of the highway, near where Beutel told them the insurgents had been seen last, but they didn't flush any.

That didn't surprise Locklear, whose men have found networks of holes and trenches near the villages.

"We've even seen them shoot at helicopters, slide down awhile when the choppers fire rockets at them, then pop up and shoot again," he said.

Later, Beutel went to find the police battalion commander for their usual evening meeting, but an assistant said Jan was off on business. A police commander named Farouk, who like many Afghans goes by a single name, walked up. U.S. paratroopers had spoken admiringly about him.

Farouk said he'd just chased a dozen Taliban away from a broken-down truck on the highway. He thought he knew where they were hiding. "Let's go kill them!" he said.

"He comes out with ideas. He'll come to us with plans for operations," Beutel said. "He's a real go-getter."

Then Hamayun, the battalion's gaunt, bearded criminal investigations officer, approached. Beutel asked through a translator why the six policemen had abandoned the checkpoint.

"Did the Taliban shoot at them?" he asked.

Hamayun drew himself up.

"We wouldn't put on these uniforms if we were afraid of the Taliban," he said. "They left because the Americans never came back."

"It sounds like they just took off because they were lazy," Beutel said, walking back to the concrete bunker where he sleeps. "If we're not around, they think it's not really like an operation."

Beutel remained philosophical, however. Most of the police are brave, and some are, if anything, too eager, he said. Others aren't much good. Regardless, making the police into a force that can counter the Taliban is going to be a long haul, and a single afternoon doesn't mean much.

"Somehow we've got to empower the locals to trust" the police, Beutel said. "Right now, though, the guys with legitimacy in those villages are the ones who can bust through your door with an AK-47."

(Price reports for The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C.)
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2 Afghans allege abuse at U.S. site
Teenagers say they were interrogated at secretive Bagram holding center
By Joshua Partlow and Julie Tate Saturday, November 28, 2009 The Washington Post
KABUL -- Two Afghan teenagers held in U.S. detention north of Kabul this year said they were beaten by American guards, photographed naked, deprived of sleep and held in solitary confinement in concrete cells for at least two weeks while undergoing daily interrogation about their alleged links to the Taliban.

The accounts could not be independently substantiated. But in successive, on-the-record interviews, the teenagers presented a detailed, consistent portrait suggesting that the abusive treatment of suspected insurgents has in some cases continued under the Obama administration, despite steps that President Obama has said would put an end to the harsh interrogation practices authorized by the Bush administration after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The two teenagers -- Issa Mohammad, 17, and Abdul Rashid, who said he is younger than 16 -- said in interviews this week that they were punched and slapped in the face by their captors during their time at Bagram air base, where they were held in individual cells. Rashid said his interrogator forced him to look at pornography alongside a photograph of his mother.

The holding center described by the teenagers appeared to have been a facility run by U.S. Special Operations forces that is separate from the Bagram Theater Internment Facility, the main American-run prison, which holds about 700 detainees. The teenagers' descriptions of a holding area on a different part of the Bagram base are consistent with the accounts of two other former detainees, who say they endured similar mistreatment, but not beatings, while being held last year at what Afghans call Bagram's "black" prison.

A Defense Department spokesman, Lt. Col. Mark Wright, said that the military does not respond to each allegation of detainee abuse, but that all prisoners are treated humanely and in accordance with the Geneva Conventions and U.S. law.

"Department of Defense policy is and always has been to treat detainees humanely. There have been well-documented instances where that policy was not followed, and service members have been held accountable for their actions in those cases," he said.

Jonathan Horowitz, who works on detention issues in Afghanistan for the Open Society Institute, said: "These allegations of physical and mental abuse at a secretive facility are, if true, patently unacceptable and must be investigated."

There have been reports about the existence of an interrogation facility at Bagram that is run by Special Operations forces, but little has been disclosed about living conditions or interrogation methods there. Representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross have not been permitted access to the detainees at this facility. The site has continued to operate under the terms of an executive order that Obama signed soon after taking office, which forced the closure of secret prisons run by the CIA but not those run by Special Operations forces.

Mistreatment such as beating, lengthy sleep deprivation and sexual humiliation is prohibited during interrogations under the Army Field Manual, and it is illegal under the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005.

'The hardest time'

The two teenagers were interviewed Wednesday at the Afghan-run Juvenile Rehabilitation Center in Kabul, where they were transferred after their detention at Bagram and a brief stay in an Afghan adult prison known as Pul-i-Charkhi. They sat together on a bench outside the building and told their stories in succession, as did a third teenager, Sayid Sardar Ahmad, 17, who also spent time at Bagram.

"That was the hardest time I have ever had in my life," Rashid said of his interrogation. "It was better to just kill me. But they would not kill me."

Rashid, a woodcutter from the Sabari district of Khost province, said he was arrested in the spring with his cousin and father during a U.S. military raid. After being kept at a base in Khost, he said, he was flown to Bagram.

At the beginning of his detention, he was forced to strip naked and undergo a medical checkup in front of about a half-dozen American soldiers. He said that his Muslim upbringing made such a display humiliating and that the soldiers made it worse.

"They touched me all over my body. They took pictures, and they were laughing and laughing," he said. "They were doing everything."

He said he lived in a small concrete cell that was slightly longer than the length of his body. Food was tossed in a plastic bag through a slot in the metal door. Both teenagers said that when they tried to sleep, on the floor, their captors shouted at them and hammered on their cells.

When summoned for daily interrogations, Rashid said, he was made to wear a hood, handcuffs and ear coverings and was marched into the meeting room. He said he was punched by his interrogators while being prodded to admit ties to the Taliban; he denied such ties. During some sessions, he said, his interrogator forced him to look at pornographic movies and magazines while also showing him a photograph of his mother.

"I was just crying and crying. I was too young," Rashid said. "I didn't know what a prison looks like or what a prison is."

Lengthy interrogations

Mohammad, a vegetable farmer from the Arghandab district of Kandahar province, said he was arrested around March, also during an American military raid. He said he spent 14 days in a solitary cell before being moved to group quarters at the main Bagram prison, which he described as a separate area. During those initial two weeks, he recalled, interrogation sessions lasted hours, with one man "yelling at me and also punching and slapping my face."

"He kept asking me, 'Tell us the truth.' I told them the truth more than 10 times. That I'm a farmer, my father was a farmer, my brother was a farmer," Mohammad said. "But they said, 'No, help us with this case. Tell us the truth.' That's why he was slapping me."

Similar living conditions, particularly the lengthy sleep deprivation and intense cold, were also described by two other former detainees, Malik Mohammad Hassan, a tribal elder from the Jalalabad area, and Mohammad Mukhtar, a former teacher. They said they were arrested last year and held for some time in the "black" prison. They said they were not beaten but still described their treatment as "torture."

"This is something nobody can bear. It's extraordinary," Hassan said. "They treated us like wild animals."

Conditions inside the main Bagram prison have been kept hidden from the American public for most of the eight-year-old war in Afghanistan. Detainees are held there without charge, sometimes for several years, and are denied access to lawyers. In the early years, the prison was notorious as a place where aggressive interrogations and severe sleep deprivation were regularly used. Two detainees died there in 2002 after being beaten by U.S. soldiers.

The Special Operations facility at the Bagram base has been even more carefully shielded, with the identities of detainees kept secret even from the International Committee of the Red Cross. But in the summer, the military agreed to notify the Red Cross within 14 days of the identities of detainees brought there.

The U.S. military is now reforming detainee policies at Bagram, and the captives are expected to be transferred to a new $60 million detention center by year's end. The facility is intended to provide better living conditions and prepare detainees to re-enter society. On a tour of the unoccupied prison this month, U.S. military officials touted the changes: rooms for family visits, vocational classes, recreational areas and medical checkups. The detainees will live under natural light, have access to regular hearings with an appointed U.S. military representative, and get a mattress, two blankets, a prayer rug, a prayer cap and a Koran.

"I want to be clear that there is no harsh treatment at all," Col. John Garrity, a commander at Bagram, said at the time.

Tate reported from Washington. Special correspondent Javed Hamdard contributed to this report.
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Get real on Afghanistan
The Washington Post By Colbert I. King Saturday, November 28, 2009
The selection of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point for President Obama's announcement of his new Afghanistan war strategy is media manipulation worthy of Michael Deaver, the legendary image protector of Ronald Reagan. What better setting than an audience of military cadets to project Obama as the reluctant warrior and commander in chief who, because of circumstances not of his making, is forced to commit the nation's finest to a war not of his choosing?

Makes for a great visual, too.

It's also a good way for Obama to get his war message across to national security think-tankers who have been banging their spoons for escalation, to Republicans who demand that he give the generals what they want, and to conservatives who say he is a ditherer, not a doer.

Tuesday night's event should go down well with the cadets. But what about the millions of Americans across the country who will be tuned in?

Many will be older and grayer than the cadets, and they are past the point of being impressed by dramatic photo ops and symbolic poses. They don't want orchestration; they want answers.

That's certain to be true of jobless viewers. The nation's unemployment rate is at 10.2 percent, a 26-year high. These people will be waiting to hear Obama explain how adding to the $10 billion monthly price tag for Iraq and Afghanistan will help them find work. African American men, 17.1 percent of whom are unemployed, want a word from Obama on this.

The White House has said that every increase of 1,000 troops will cost $1 billion. So if the administration sends 34,000 more troops to Afghanistan, as rumored, that's an additional $34 billion.

"Where's it going to come from, Mr. President?" the unemployed and their families will want to know. Obama needs to address that question. This country has an accumulated debt of $12 trillion that is forecast to rise to $21 trillion in 10 years.

Picturesque events that help shape Obama's image as commander in chief can take him only so far. He needs to come down to eye level and explain his Afghanistan strategy to the people who must pay for this war: the salary and wage earners who struggle to buy food and pay their bills.

Yes, the administration will float bonds to bring in the cash to buy munitions, but that debt belongs to the American people, not to the White House.

The people all across our country -- not just Washington's political, military and media intelligentsia -- deserve a plausible explanation.

True, most of the folks who will watch on Tuesday are not schooled in military strategy and tactics. They aren't likely to have the erudition of civilian and military experts who toss around such terms as "asymmetric warfare" and "conventional force strategy."

But they heard the president tell Chinese students in Shanghai last week that "the greatest threat to the United States' security are the terrorist networks like al-Qaeda." And they are asking, "If that's so, why is Obama choosing Afghanistan as the place to declare America all-in?" Or to, as the president put it, "finish the job"?

They know that al-Qaeda is an international terrorist organization out to destroy the United States. The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the bombing of the World Trade Center, and the bombings of American embassies and the USS Cole all speak to that. They also know that al-Qaeda is waging global jihad, launching plots in Europe.

They want to know whether denying al-Qaeda a base in Afghanistan will secure America against attacks. That is what Obama, after weeks of study, seems to think. But what happens if, in the face of an U.S. escalation in Afghanistan, al-Qaeda moves its terrorist network to Pakistan or beyond? Will U.S. forces follow?

Washington's intelligentsia may know the answer. The rest of the country should know, too. Obama is accountable to the men and women who hired him, not to his war council, Washington think tanks or editorial pages.

And that gets us to a fear that is growing among some of the president's most ardent supporters: that Barack Obama, the fresh, think-outside-the-box leader brimming with energy and new ideas, has entered the White House and gone native.

Suspicion is spreading that Obama has lost some of the character that made him special; that he has taken on the ways of this town, thinking in conventional terms dictated by a brain trust and self-serving, entrenched Washington interests that make this city go 'round.

That development, if true, would be as disastrous to the Obama presidency as a military miscalculation.
kingc@washpost.com
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Afghan withdrawal would be folly
The Guardian By Robert Fox 11/27/2009
Afghanistan's complex patchwork of success and failure is all a world away from the metropolitan commentators

At the base of the 1st Battalion 5th US Marine Expeditionary Brigade at Garamsir in south Helmand they have a slogan on their T-shirts guaranteed to enrage Caroline Lucas and Simon Jenkins, two of Cif's most recent commentators on Afghanistan.

"Just do Marja" it reads. Marja is a quilt of small fertile plots just south and west of Lashkar Gah, the current provincial capital of Helmand. Like the irrigation channels that feed the fields of Marja, Lashkar Gah is largely the creation of a huge project by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) that made Helmand the bread basket of Afghanistan, and a magnet for tourism even.

Marja has become one of the big poppy growing plots of the world. Today it is largely under Taliban control, who run their "parallel government" there by night – which means robbing the farmers in the name of Islamic taxation, closing schools and demanding tribute in food, warm clothing, and young recruits for their jihad. It is also a centre for assembling IED roadside bombs, which they lay with astonishing deftness and speed.

Marja will be the first target of the Marine Expeditionary Unit now expected here before Christmas as a result of President Obama's anticipated announcement that he will send an extra 30,000 US military personnel to Afghanistan for the next two years. Squeezing Taliban out of Marja, and then Nad-e-Ali to the north, will remove the threat to commerce and farming along the west bank of the Helmand river.

Lashkar Gah is thriving and buzzing, compared with two years ago, when I was last here. The bazaars are booming full of all kinds of produce, a new line in iron bedsteads, small wheat-milling machines, and hundreds of motorbikes – most made in kits in China and assembled in Iran. Farmers and merchants now travel to Gereshk to the north and to Kandahar, less than three hours away. They say the roads are pretty safe, bar the risk of the odd rogue roadblock manned by Taliban or renegade Afghan police.

Lashkar Gah is at the centre of a security bubble or "protected development area" – a key concept of the "ink spot" approach of counter-insurgency theory and practice, recently retooled by General Stanley McChrystal. You take the main centres, such as Lashkar Gah, Garmsir, Gereshk and Musa Qala in Helmand, and protect them with international and then local forces. Confidence and commerce grow, and in time the different areas link together.

The problem, however, is that Afghanistan today defies all such generalities: the whole story is a patchwork quilt, a mosaic, of quirky and contradictory detail. Security and commerce, and even schooling and health, are visibly improving in many parts of Helmand, till now dubbed Afghanistan's most violent province. The Americans and the British are not being "defeated", though they are facing casualties. But to declare any kind of victory would be daft and dangerous. While there are signs of improvement in Helmand, elsewhere there is more than enough evidence that things are getting worse – as Carlotta Gall's report from Kunduz in today's New York Times highlights.

The McChrystal counter-insurgency is already being implemented, and showing signs of working particularly here in central Helmand. Roads are being secured, clinics and schools opened, courts and local councils set up. Communities are swinging from Taliban loyalty to supporting the government, but after nearly 50 years of war and violence they're hedging their bets. Almost all generalisations from the pundits and panjandrums in London, Washington an all points north seem vapid before the complexity of the facts here on the ground.

This struck most forcibly when yesterday I visited Nawa, between Lashkar Gah and Garmsir. It's not so much a one-horse town as a one-ditch town, with its bazaar strung out on a dirt and tarmac track alongside a slow-running, but remarkably clear irrigation ditch.

Until June the place was home to 60 British soldiers training a company of Afghan army troops. They were holed up in the barracks where they exchanged fire with Taliban in the surrounding orchards and bazaar on a daily basis. Last July the US marines arrived, staked out the place with a company of 300 troops, and a fortnight later drove the Taliban off with a full battalion attack of more than 1,000 ground forces with air and helicopter support.

Today the bazaar is booming. On the eve of Eid, the festival of joy and celebration at the end of the hajj, more than 80 shops were open – the Taliban had closed all but about six – selling fresh fruit, sweets, mobile phones, and the electricity from a sun panel to power them. The township has its own community council. But seven weeks ago the Taliban kidnapped its head, then executed him out in the desert, and shot two other councillors in their office. At first the rest of the council stayed away, but lately most meetings get a quorum of 25 out of the remaining 42.

"Every day of peace is like Eid," Haj Mohammed Khan, the clerk to the council told me. He continued:

The marines brought peace because the British didn't have the numbers. If you go away again, the violence will be much worse. There will be a disaster, the world will come here again to fight in a really big war.

You left twice before – and let in the mujahideen and what came after. This time it will be far worse.

His words had a strange echo from Captain Brian Huysman of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion 5th Marines, whose 70 men are helping the rebuilding and renovation of the council offices and barracks at Nawa. He was asked by a colleague to compare his experience of Helmand with two tours in Iraq at Fallujah and then running a community centre for five months of 2005 in Ramadi ("a complete failure" in his words). He said:

At least I get the feeling we're winning, which I didn't there. The answer is in the approach to the people, getting in among the people, and here we eat in the bazaar every day. Get the approach right and then the force numbers right, that's the key.

"Yes, and that's the way we will be doing things for the next 15 or 20 years, and it's what every grunt and general needs to learn now," added his colleague Major Val Jackson, a US marines civil affairs officer.

Nawa, last year the heart of Helmand darkness, now seems to point the way to the future for the Afghans here, and to how the international support agencies, not just the military, can help and then get out.

The problems are still complex and enormous, not least the issues raised by the complexion of the Karzai administration, its legitimacy and the corrosive nature of the drugs trade. But there are signs of forward momentum, and this should be helped by the modest reinforcements of troops and aid due to be announced next week. The task has been likened to by an NGO colleague to her experiences in working in Cambodia after the psychopathic rule of the Khmer Rouge. "So much was completely broken here by the mujahideen civil war and then the Taliban."

To quit now, as Jenkins and Lucas recommend, would be sheer folly – and a folly which would have direct impact on homeland Europe, UK and America even. I agree with Jenkins on one thing: Whitehall, Westminster and large parts of Washington are blanketed in a cloud of passivity and pessimism about Afghanistan. The complexities of the picture on the ground elude commentators who come her in flying visits with high powered delegations of high powered ambassadors and generals, whose helicopter wheels let alone feet barely touch the ground.

Afghanistan could still go either way, but the indicators from my snapshot visits round Helmand this past week are not all negative. The problem is that the argument is likely to be won and lost in the dining rooms of London and Washington and not in the fields and bazaars of Afghanistan. This is being conditioned by the enormous gap of perception between the metropolitan commentators at home and the reporters and workers out on the ground here. We are not so much worlds apart, but operating on different planets.
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Afghan Red Crescent official shot dead: police
KABUL, Nov 28, 2009 (AFP) - An official with the Red Crescent humanitarian organisation in Afghanistan has been killed by gunmen in the northern province of Takhar, the provincial police chief said on Saturday.

Gunmen attacked Makhdoum Abdullah on Friday, said police chief Zia-u-din Mehmud.

"Yesterday morning, after Eid prayer, the provincial head of the Red Crescent was walking home when he was attacked by gunmen," Mehmud said.

"The victim, Makhdoum Abdullah, was a former jihadi commander. Personal enmity could be the cause of the killing but it is too early to say."

While the gunmen fled the scene of the attack, provincial attorney Mohammad Wazir Jalali said four suspects had been arrested.

President Hamid Karzai intervened to order a thorough investigation.

"Karzai ordered on Saturday, to the officials in charge, a thorough investigation leading to the arrest and the trial of the murderers of Makhdoum Abdullah," the president's office said in a statement.

Afghanistan is battling a deadly Taliban-linked insurgency with the help of more than 100,000 foreign troops. Violence has increased in recent months in the west and north of the country, which have not previously been considered key Taliban battle grounds.
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Afghan, NATO forces detain Taliban militants near Afghan capital
KABUL, Nov. 28 (Xinhua) -- Afghan troops backed by NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) forces detained suspected Taliban militants during an operation in Logar province some 80 km south of capital Kabul on Saturday, said a press release of allies.

"The joint security forces targeted compounds near the village of Alozi in the Pul-e-Alam district where intelligence sources reported militant activity and detained the suspected militants," the statement said.

In a separate incident, two more militants were detained in eastern Khost province on the same day, it added.

"Today an Afghan-international security force detained a couple of suspected militants in Sabari district of Khost province while pursuing a Haqqani facilitator allegedly involved with planning of attacks and the transport of fighters into the area," the statement said.

The Haqqani group is reportedly linked to Al-Qaeda and known for its ruthless attacks in Afghanistan.

The forces also recovered a number of AK-47 rifles and military-grade batteries while no shots were fired and no one was injured in either of the operations, it said, adding "ISAF suffered no fatalities in the last 24 hours."

NATO's Afghan mission currently involves 68,000 U.S. troops and42,000 from other allied.
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US soldiers: Afghanistan war dramatically different, more challenging than Iraq
By Denis D. Gray, The Associated Press Sat Nov 28, 7:30 PM
FORWARD OPERATING BASE SHANK, Afghanistan - Veterans of Iraq recall rolling to war along asphalted highways, sweltering in flat scrublands and chatting with city-wise university graduates connected to the wider world.

Now fighting in Afghanistan, U.S. soldiers invariably encounter illiterate farmers who may never have talked to an American as they slog into remote villages on dirt tracks through bitterly cold, snow-streaked mountains.

"Before deploying here we were given training on language, culture, everything. I thought that since I was an Iraq combat veteran, I didn't need any of that stuff. I was wrong. Both countries may be Muslim but this is a totally different place," says Sgt. Michael McCann, returning from a patrol in the east-central province of Logar.

While their experiences in the two war zones vary, for many soldiers in the field - if not policy makers - the conflict in Afghanistan is one they think may prove harder and longer to win.

Soldiers and officers involved in combat operations all cite the more punishing geography and climate, those focused on development the bare-bones infrastructure, and intelligence specialists the even greater difficulties in identifying the insurgents as among the many sharp contrasts between Afghanistan and Iraq.

"The sheer terrain of Afghanistan is much more challenging: the mountains, the altitudes, severity of weather, the distances. That wears on an army," says Maj. Joseph Matthews, a battalion operations officer in the 10th Mountain Division. "You can flood Baghdad with soldiers but if you want to flood the mountains you are going to need huge numbers and logistics."

McCann, a military policeman from Enterprise, Ala., says that the highest he ever got during his Iraq tour was a five-story building. In Afghanistan, troops routinely cross passes 10,000 feet (3,000 metres) and higher, descending into valleys where they say villagers "hibernate like bears" for up to five winter months, cut off from the outside world by the snows.

This almost medieval isolation makes it far more difficult for the Afghan government and coalition forces to spread the aid and information needed to counter the Taliban push while the villagers - mostly illiterate and with little access to radios, never mind television - rely on religious leaders at Friday mosque prayers, or the insurgents, to shape their world view.

"When you have a society that can't read for itself and religious leaders are trusted, they can say whatever they like and people will believe them. It's hard for the U.S. to penetrate and influence this. In Iraq there are other ways to get the message across," says Chief Warrant Officer Daniel Weiermann, Jr., an intelligence specialist.

The U.S. effort in Logar has stressed bridging the chasms between villages, districts, the provincial capital and a central government in Kabul which has had little control over the country for the past 30 years of warfare. It hasn't been easy.

"This is not an interconnected society. There is a complete separation of ideas from Pul-i-Alam and Kharwar," notes Matthews, of Vero Beach, Fla., of the provincial capital and a district just 23 miles (37 kilometres) away. "The difference between a village and a city in this country is about 200 years," says the officer, who served for more than three years in Iraq and is on his second Afghanistan tour.

Although tribalism plays a major role in Iraq, U.S. troops find it even stronger in the predominantly rural Afghan society, making the forging of vital bonds between people and government harder. Loyalty is given first and foremost to the tribe, the government coming at best a distant second.

While counterinsurgency in Iraq had its unique complexities, Weiermann said that in Iraq - about 70 per cent urbanized as opposed to 25 per cent in Afghanistan - "you can meet and hopefully influence a lot of people in one day. In Afghanistan with its great distances, sparsely populated areas and rugged terrain you can do far less in the same amount of time." Hence, one reason for the prognosis that Afghanistan will be a longer haul.

Development - which absorbs the U.S. military more than combat and is regarded as key to victory - is also far tougher than in Iraq, which already possessed a solid infrastructure and once almost produced the atomic bomb. In Afghanistan at best a quarter of the population can read, compared to more than 75 per cent in Iraq, which had functioning banking, medical and other systems, however imperfect, through which aid could be channeled.

"Iraq already had the foundation. They just needed the governance piece that would support not just the elite few. In Afghanistan, you are starting at the very beginning. It's like trying to take the American Indians in their purest form and put them into today's New York City. It's not going to happen," says Weiermann, of Ft. Hood, Texas.
"I worked with folks who had been to Oxford and been on projects in multiple other countries. There were homegrown NGOs and highly qualified women - all lacking in Afghanistan," says Les Garrison, a retired U.S. Marine officer from Arlington, Va., who serves as Logar's U.S. State Department adviser.

Col. David B. Haight, commander of U.S. forces in Logar and neighbouring Wardak province, half jokes that some frustrated Afghans come to him and say: "'You can put a man on the moon so can't we get a road here?' and I have to tell them, 'You know, it's a lot harder to build a road in Afghanistan than put a man on the moon. That skill is not in abundance here."'

Pinpointing the insurgents has been devilishly difficult in both countries, the U.S. military says.

"Osama bin Laden could walk right up to me and I wouldn't have a clue to who he was. The enemy cannot be identified at first sight. The enemy blends in easily with the population. That is the same for both places but drastically harder in Afghanistan," Weiermann says.

The Baghdad government has managed polls and censuses, compiling a data base on the populace which includes fingerprints and domiciles down to apartment numbers. In Afghanistan, such information often exists only at the tribal level, tracking the movement of individuals and entire communities like the migratory Kuchi next to impossible, Weiermann says.

Militarily, veterans of both conflicts see both disparities and a mirroring.

Thus far, the level of intense combat and violence has proved lower in Afghanistan. In Iraq, soldiers say it was a 24/7, 365-day war while most insurgents in Afghanistan take a break during the winters and are so far less skilled in mounting complex operations against U.S. and coalition troops.

Roadside bombs are the insurgents' weapons of choice in both countries, and ominously are proving more sophisticated and deadlier in Afghanistan as they did over time in Iraq. U.S. forces in Iraq largely pursued a war of mechanized movement. Afghanistan is a foot soldier's war.

Haight, who served three Iraq tours in Special Forces-type operations, says the core counterinsurgency creed - boiled down to "Going into a village and making friends" - applies squarely to both countries. The devil is in the details.

"We as leaders here have to realize that we cannot simply superimpose some of the things that may have worked in Iraq on Afghanistan," Matthews cautions.

Associated Press correspondent Denis Gray has reported on both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
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Afghan President Karzai to be set international targets
Saturday, 28 November 2009 BBC News
Gordon Brown has said Afghanistan's president will be set targets by the international community for training Afghan forces and tackling corruption.

Mr Brown said Hamid Karzai would be expected to give commitments at a conference in London on 28 January.

The prime minister confirmed the international conference plans at the Commonwealth summit in Trinidad.

Mr Karzai will face targets of ensuring 50,000 troops for training and barring corrupt provincial governors, he said.

Mr Brown made the announcement alongside United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who will be at the conference.

The pair have been discussing strategy for Afghanistan at the summit.

'Political push'

They will be joined in London by Mr Karzai, who was recently installed for a second term as president, and representatives of the 43 nations making up Nato's International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan.

Mr Brown also made it clear that international troop levels would rise in the short term.

US President Barack Obama is expected to announce a decision on reinforcements for Afghanistan on Tuesday.

The prime minister said: "What we need is a political push to match the military push we're now agreeing to.

"And that means that President Karzai has got to accept that there will be milestones by which he's going to be judged and he's got to accept that there will be benchmarks which the international community will set."

He aid the targets would enable control to be handed over to Afghan authorities and pave the way for British troops to return home.

BBC diplomatic correspondent James Robbins says Mr Brown has never been blunter in dictating terms to Mr Karzai.

'Shaping destiny'

Mr Brown said he would announce next week whether an extra 500 UK troops would be sent to Afghanistan, a move which would take the British total to 9,500.

The prime minister will open the London conference which will be chaired by the British Foreign Secretary David Miliband.

A conference at a later date in the Afghan capital Kabul will monitor how much progress has been made.

Mr Brown outlined a timescale of targets for Afghanistan in 2010:

-Three months: Additional troops identified by Afghan government to send to Helmand province for training

-Six months: Clear plan for police training that includes dealing with corruption and working with local communities

-Nine months: 400 provincial and district governors appointed

Mr Brown said: "We see the London conference as setting a path for Afghan and international efforts for the future, one that will bring together military and political strategies in a co-ordinated way.

"One which is based on the proposition of why we are in Afghanistan in the first place, that Britain and the world needs protection from the terrorism that starts in the Afghan/Pakistan area, which is the epicentre of modern global terrorism and has got to be dealt with."

Mr Ban said the conferences in London and Kabul would "outline the framework for an increased lead role for the Afghans in the shaping of their destiny".

Mr Brown made it clear the Taliban would not be involved in the London meeting.
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Taliban amnesty unlikely to work unless NATO gains momentum, ambassador
Canadian Press November 27, 2009
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — Fewer Taliban are joining reconciliation programs in Afghanistan as the insurgency grows in strength.

Figures show that in Kandahar the appeal of amnesty in exchange for quitting the Taliban has dropped dramatically. Local leaders claim amnesty programs have suffered from neglect by both Kabul and the international community. Canada's ambassador to Afghanistan says such programs are unlikely to work so long as the insurgents feel they have the upper hand.

Bill Crosbie says Canada is working with the Afghan government to help revamp its approach to reconciliation with insurgents.

President Hamid Karzai promised to reach out to insurgents during his inauguration speech last week.
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Explosion heard in Kabul: witnesses
Sat Nov 28, 2:03 am ET
KABUL (AFP) – A huge explosion was heard in Kabul Saturday, according to witnesses, but the immediate cause was not known.

The explosion happened around 10:20 am (0550 GMT) and was immediately followed by the sound of sirens as security forces rushed to the scene, apparently in central Kabul.

Afghanistan is marking the Eid-al-Adha Muslim festival of sacrifice with a four-day holiday.

No government or security officials could be immediately contacted for comment.

An international security company, Hart, sent a circular to clients to say the explosion had happened in the wealthy Wazir Akbar Khan neighbourhood of the city.

An AFP employee on the site said an explosive device appeared to have been placed in a rubbish bin but that there did not seem to be any casualties.

Kabul, the most heavily-fortified part of war-torn Afghanistan, has been attacked by Taliban-linked insurgents at least five times in recent months with at least 100 people dead and 300 injured.

Most have been suicide car bomb attacks that the Taliban have claimed responsibility for.

On November 13, a suicide blast struck near a US military base, Camp Phoenix, though there were no deaths.
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