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Bin Laden demands Europe withdraw Afghanistan troops
Fri Sep 25, 2:07 pm ET
DUBAI (Reuters) – Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden demanded that European nations withdraw their troops from Afghanistan in a new audio tape aired on Friday, saying they were sacrificing men and money in an unjust U.S.-led war.
McChrystal Fudges Taliban’s Key Pakistan Protectorates
By Arthur Kent, Skyreporter.com
Sept. 25, 2009 - As if the current occupant of the Oval Office needed just one more reminder, General Stanley McChrystal’s much heralded report on Afghanistan makes clear that Barack Obama
Dubious Afghan Vote Drove U.S. to Revisit Strategy
Wall Street Journal By Peter Spiegel 09/24/2009
The public debate in Washington over the White House's unexpected reappraisal of its Afghan strategy has focused on troop numbers and military tactics. But the Obama administration's focus is on another issue
Afghan official gives 2-week window for new vote
The Associated Press 09/24/2009
KABUL - Afghanistan has a two-week window to realistically hold any presidential runoff vote before winter sets in, an election official said Thursday in a stark acknowledgment that a quick decision is needed on whether to hold new balloting.
Officials To Audit Sampling Of Suspect Afghan Ballots
by Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson NPR - National Public Radio September 25, 2009
Five weeks after Afghanistan's presidential elections, it's still unclear who will lead the country.
Zalmay Khalilzad: "There was a mistake in terms of dealing with Karzai"
Foreign Policy magazine By Blake Hounshell 09/24/2009
The former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan speaks about Hamid Karzai, General McChrystal's report, and the Obama administration's mistakes.
Infighting leaves 5 Taliban dead, wounds 7 in W Afghanistan
KABUL, Sept. 25 (Xinhua) -- Infighting between two groups of Taliban outfit in Herat province west of Afghanistan have left five insurgents dead and injured seven other, an official said Friday.
15 Taliban insurgents killed in S Afghanistan
KABUL, Sept. 25 (Xinhua) -- Taliban militants stormed a police checkpoint in Helmand province south of Afghanistan, killing one police constable and wounding seven others while over a dozen militants died in the gun battle, a local official said Friday.
British army commander quits over Afghan policy
LONDON, Sept. 25 (Xinhua) -- A senior British army commander has resigned after bitter clashes with the British government over the war in Afghanistan, local media reported on Friday.
Pakistan reluctant to give route for India-Afghan transit trade
By Hadi Mayar
KABUL, Sept. 25 (Xinhua) -- Despite Afghanistan's insistence to renew and expand transit trade agreement with Pakistan, the latter seems the least interested to allow New Delhi to use its land routes for trade with Kabul.
Matt Frei's diary: World's worst job?
By Matt Frei BBC News, Washington Thursday, 24 September 2009
When President Obama was elected last November, the satirical weekly The Onion quipped in its headline: "Black man gets nation's worst job."
Terror Case Called One of the Most Serious in Years
New York Times By DAVID BROOKS September 24, 2009
Always there is the illusion of the easy path. Always there is the illusion, which gripped Donald Rumsfeld and now grips many Democrats, that you can fight a counterinsurgency war with a light footprint,
US charges man in bomb plot, releases imam
by Sebastian Smith Thu Sep 24, 4:51 pm ET
NEW YORK (AFP) – A Colorado airport bus driver trained to build homemade bombs in Pakistan, then scoured US beauty stores for deadly chemicals in one of the biggest US terror plots since 9/11, officials said Thursday.
Poll: 50% oppose U.S. surge in Afghanistan
USA Today By Ken Dilanian, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON - Half of all Americans, and six in 10 Democrats, oppose sending more troops to Afghanistan, a new USA TODAY/Gallup Poll shows, underscoring the pressures on President Obama as he re-evaluates
Karzai Backers Want Troops
Senior Afghan Officials Argue for an Expanded Military Effort to Defeat Taliban
Wall Street Journal By YAROSLAV TROFIMOV SEPTEMBER 25, 2009
KABUL - Senior Afghan officials, alarmed by the Obama administration's reappraisal of its Afghanistan strategy, said an increased U.S. military commitment is needed to roll back an emboldened insurgency.
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Bin Laden demands Europe withdraw Afghanistan troops
Fri Sep 25, 2:07 pm ET
DUBAI (Reuters) – Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden demanded that European nations withdraw their troops from Afghanistan in a new audio tape aired on Friday, saying they were sacrificing men and money in an unjust U.S.-led war.
"We are not demanding anything unjust. It is just for you to end injustice and withdraw your soldiers (from Afghanistan)," he said in the tape, released on the Internet with a background picture of bin Laden and with German and English subtitles.
"One of the greatest injustices is to kill people unjustly, and this is exactly what your governments and soldiers are committing under the cover of the NATO alliance in Afghanistan," bin Laden said in the recording, entitled "A message to the people of Europe."
"An intelligent person does not waste his children and wealth for the sake of a gang in Washington," he said in the four-minute recording produced by al Qaeda's media arm As-Sahab.
"It is shameful to be part of an alliance whose leader does not care about spilling the blood of human beings by bombing villages intentionally," he said, referring to civilian deaths in missile attacks against Taliban fighters in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
"If you had seen (the mass killings) of your American allies and their helpers in northern Afghanistan...then you would understand the bloody events in Madrid and London," bin Laden said, referring to attacks in the two cities in 2004 and 2005 respectively.
Germany, which holds elections over the weekend, has 4,200 troops serving with NATO-led forces in Afghanistan.
Three videos have been posted on the Internet in the past week in which an al Qaeda messenger, identified by the German Interior Ministry as German-Moroccan Bekkay Harrach, says Germany will pay a price if voters back a government that supports the deployment.
On Friday, Harrach called for Muslims to join a jihad, or Islamic holy war, in a new German-language Internet message. The messages appeared to be part of a focused media campaign by al Qaeda ahead of the German elections.
Bin Laden's last message was addressed to the American people and was posted a few days after the eighth anniversary of the Sept 11, 2001, attacks.
(Reporting by Firouz Sedarat; Editing by Louise Ireland)
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McChrystal Fudges Taliban’s Key Pakistan Protectorates
By Arthur Kent, Skyreporter.com
Sept. 25, 2009 - As if the current occupant of the Oval Office needed just one more reminder, General Stanley McChrystal’s much heralded report on Afghanistan makes clear that Barack Obama has inherited command of a misguided, inadequately resourced war effort, a campaign that has been rooted from the start in profound ignorance of the Afghan people - and the forces, homegrown and foreign, who seek to dominate them.
But McChrystal doesn’t stop at stating the obvious.
He burdens his commander-in-chief with a proposal for a Soviet-style troop build up, complete with the retrenchment of U.S. and NATO forces in heavily populated areas, allegedly to better protect the Afghan people.
Worst of all, Gen. McChrystal dismisses in a cavalier way the Taliban’s key strategic advantage: the sanctuary and support endowed to its leaders, recruiters and armorers by the Pakistan Army – the same umbrella of support that enabled the Afghan Mujahideen to send the Red Army packing in the 1980’s.
The general’s report lists three militant fronts, Mullah Omar’s rump Taliban leadership (the “Quetta Shura”), and groups led by the CIA’s former client warlords, Haqqani and Hekmatyar.
But too often in his text, McChrystal succumbs to semantics.
“Afghanistan’s insurgency is clearly supported from Pakistan,” his report states. Supported ‘by’ Pakistan would be the wording more befitting the evidence. But here, too, McChrystal fudges, stating that the major Afghan insurgent groups “are reportedly aided by some elements of Pakistan’s ISI.”
Reportedly? Does CIA Director Leon Panetta tell President Obama that the agency’s drones cannot direct Hellfire missiles at Mullah Omar in his Quetta protectorate because he is ‘reportedly’ aided by the ISI? Of course not.
The Taliban leader and his council would be out of business without the institutional and tactical shield provided by Pakistan’s military, as would have been the case for the Mujahideen without President Zia's support.
McChrystal blows still more smoke. His report states: “While the existence of safe havens in Pakistan does not guarantee ISAF’s failure, Afghanistan does require Pakistani cooperation against violent militancy, particularly against groups active in Afghanistan.”
This is more than diplomatic doubletalk. It’s deeply misleading. The Afghan Taliban’s safe havens provide vital command and control elements. Pakistan is crucial to the militant groups’ recruitment and re-armament.
To propose changes in strategy that fail, even by political or diplomatic means, to apply pressure to an enemy’s command and control elements, and to its supply chains, goes beyond incompetence. It is dereliction of duty, a betrayal of U.S. and NATO troops, and of the Afghan people.
Yet rather than stressing the need to deal with Pakistani interference, McChrystal suggests that improving local government in Afghanistan can “strengthen” the country against “foreign insurgent penetration.”
He fails to square this lofty goal with the Afghans’ loss in confidence in the Western-crafted Kabul government. Most Afghans doubt whether the regime will ever deliver water and electricity, much less effective "sub-national" governance.
McChrystal attributes this to “The weakness of state institutions, malign actions of power-brokers, widespread corruption and abuse of power by various officials, and (the International Security Assistance Force's) own errors…”
Perversely, elsewhere in his report, McChrystal disregards his own bleak assessment of the Karzai regime by quoting at length one of its most incompetent officials, Defence Minister Rahim Wardak (whose son, Hamid, has benefited from a raft of contracts from the Pentagon).
Widely known as the hardest-drinking, least capable member of Karzai’s cabinet, the elder Wardak disputes that Afghanistan is a “graveyard of empires” and asserts that Afghans have never seen the U.S. as occupiers.
Gen. McChrystal reports: “Minister Wardak’s assessment was part of my calculus.” As was Wardak’s wildly exaggerated manpower claims for his Afghan National Army: McChrystal perpetuates the myth that the ANA is 92,000 men strong.
The general’s field commanders have experienced the bitter truth: U.S. Marines ran short of combat-ready ANA support personnel within days of launching their Helmand offensive this summer.
As an exit enabler, the ANA remains little more than a pipe dream, one fuelled not so much by the intoxicants found in Afghan bazaars, but by the ambitions of careerist foreign generals and politicians.
From McChrystal's smorgasbord of the obvious and absurd, President Obama must try to salvage something from his predecessor’s most contemptible foreign policy failure.
It won't be easy.
But the first step is self-evident: understanding that any war plan for Afghanistan that does not begin in Pakistan is no plan for war at all, much less for success.
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Dubious Afghan Vote Drove U.S. to Revisit Strategy
Wall Street Journal By Peter Spiegel 09/24/2009
The public debate in Washington over the White House's unexpected reappraisal of its Afghan strategy has focused on troop numbers and military tactics. But the Obama administration's focus is on another issue: Is Afghan President Hamid Karzai a reliable ally?
According to senior administration officials, the Afghan war plan that President Barack Obama announced in March -- which called for a comprehensive and manpower-intensive counterinsurgency strategy -- was built around the assumption that Mr. Karzai would emerge from last month's elections with new legitimacy, a critical factor in fighting a guerrilla enemy.
But allegations of widespread vote fraud in the Afghan balloting have revived long-held skepticism within Mr. Obama's national-security team -- including the increasingly influential Vice President Joe Biden -- about Mr. Karzai's role, convincing the White House that a complete rethink was warranted.
"Forget even the McChrystal report," said a senior administration official, referring to the grim assessment of the war effort submitted three weeks ago by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan. "Every counterinsurgency is built on one credible partner."
Although the election has had a clear impact on Mr. Obama's national-security team, the White House is also facing mounting U.S. casualties, flagging support among Americans and rising criticism of the war effort among fellow Democrats.
The Obama administration was well aware of allegations of corruption in Mr. Karzai's government ahead of the election, having repeatedly pressed him to sideline political allies accused of links to Afghanistan's burgeoning heroin trade.
But Mr. Karzai's behavior during the vote appears to have been a last straw, forcing Mr. Obama and his senior advisers to completely rethink the way forward. "If you decide your troop levels before you decide your strategy, it's a really bad movie," said Rahm Emanuel, Mr. Obama's chief of staff.
Senior administration officials said they had viewed the election as the key first step in rebuilding Afghanistan, but that Mr. Karzai squandered the opportunity.
U.S. officials insist they haven't given up on Mr. Karzai completely.
Among the salvage scenarios that have been discussed in policy circles are a possible runoff between Mr. Karzai and his leading opponent, former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah, or an alliance between the two.
But given the fast-approaching winter, which makes a runoff vote prohibitively difficult, and U.S. reluctance to play broker between the Afghan camps, the administration has been left with the policy it has pushed for weeks: encouraging a thorough investigation of fraud allegations and hoping Mr. Karzai emerges with a semblance of credibility.
In recent days, the Afghan president has for the first time publicly acknowledged the fraud probes are legitimate, a move some in Kabul believe is a sign that Mr. Karzai is starting to realize his standing is at risk of collapsing.
U.S. officials have also tried to support members of the Afghan cabinet they believe are clean and effective, such as Agriculture Minster Mohammad Asif Rahimi.
The Obama administration's relationship with Mr. Karzai has been fraught from the start. Early in Mr. Obama's presidency, White House officials sent clear messages that they believed the Bush administration had been too lenient toward Mr. Karzai, who had been accused of widespread corruption and turning a blind eye to the heroin trade.
Mr. Biden, in particular, has had a rocky rapport with Mr. Karzai. While still a senator, Mr. Biden famously walked out of a dinner meeting with Mr. Karzai in early 2008 after the Afghan president brushed aside criticism of rising corruption.
Longtime Biden associates say his fears about the Kabul government's fragility are now animating much of the administration's reappraisal.
"If you don't have a legitimate government, you don't have a prayer of protecting our troops and our interests," said Democratic Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, who heads the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
The animosity quickly became mutual. According to palace insiders, Mr. Karzai often blamed his own government's inadequacies on the West. "He has repeatedly said that the U.S. hasn't allowed the Afghan government to succeed," said Khalil Roman, his former deputy chief of staff.
In a few cabinet meetings in recent months, Mr. Karzai has opened his remarks by criticizing the U.S. and its allies, according to two witnesses.
But by the time Mr. Karzai met with Mr. Obama in Washington in May, senior U.S. officials had decided they were stuck with Mr. Karzai and threw their weight behind him. "We know what each side thinks about the issues that we have, and we have sorted some of them," Mr. Karzai said upon arriving in Washington. "I'll be sorting the rest of it, I hope, on this trip."
Doubts about Mr. Karzai quickly re-emerged, however. As a way to shore up his re-election chances, Mr. Karzai began cutting deals with former warlords -- including onetime Defense Minister Mohammed Fahim, ousted four years ago amid allegations of human-rights abuses. After Gen. McChrystal's team took over in June, its members were stunned by the extent of corruption they found, according to people familiar with the commander's thinking.
This summer, some advisers went as far as to question whether Mr. Karzai amounted to another Ngo Dinh Diem, the corrupt South Vietnamese leader backed -- and ultimately turned on -- by Washington in the early days of U.S. involvement there.
"I've used that analogy in recent weeks," said a former senior military official who has advised the administration on Afghan policy. "You have an order-of-magnitude change from five years ago."
Since the election, top U.S. officials have repeatedly pressed Mr. Karzai directly to let the fraud investigation run its course, which in some cases has increased tensions between the governments.
In his assessment, Gen. McChrystal characterized the lack of confidence in Mr. Karzai's government as undermining popular confidence in the U.S.-led campaign and helping to generate recruits for the insurgents.
More fundamentally, said a second senior administration official, Mr. Obama's counterinsurgency strategy was predicated, in part, on developing a domestic Afghan security force that could eventually take over from U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops. Without a central government to manage those forces, all the work of U.S. trainers would go for naught.
"We need a government capable enough in Kabul to handle countrywide, federal responsibilities," said the second senior administration official. "I'm not arguing for a new Afghan supreme court or a commission on women's rights or something like that. But we've got to have something the security forces connect to."
—Matthew Rosenberg and Neil King Jr. contributed to this article.
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Afghan official gives 2-week window for new vote
The Associated Press 09/24/2009
KABUL - Afghanistan has a two-week window to realistically hold any presidential runoff vote before winter sets in, an election official said Thursday in a stark acknowledgment that a quick decision is needed on whether to hold new balloting.
Preliminary results from Afghanistan's Aug. 20 vote show President Hamid Karzai winning outright with 54.6 percent of the vote. However, a raft of fraud charges are currently being investigated. If enough votes are thrown out, Karzai could dip below the 50 percent threshold needed to avoid a runoff with leading challenger Abdullah Abdullah.
Delaying a runoff until spring could leave Afghanistan with a power vacuum at a time when Taliban attacks are increasing, and undermine support abroad for a war backing an apparently corrupt administration.
Daoud Ali Najafi, the chief electoral officer of the Afghan election commission, said the window for a runoff has narrowed to the last two weeks in October. Ballot papers and other materials have already been ordered and will be in place by the third week of October, a U.N. group assisting the commission has said.
Najafi said it would be nearly impossible to hold a vote after the end of October because entire provinces get closed down by winter snows.
"The first week of November, it's a very difficult time" because of blocked roads and inaccessible villages in the north, Najafi said.
He cited as an example the last presidential election, held on Oct. 9, 2004. Heavy snow in the Panjshir valley just north of Kabul meant some ballot boxes nearly weren't retrieved, Najafi said.
A runoff has seemed increasingly likely in recent weeks as independent analyses of the preliminary results showed more and more indications of fraud. The European Union monitoring team said about 1.1 million of Karzai's 3.1 million votes were questionable. If even a third of those suspect ballots are thrown out, Karzai will fall below 50 percent.
Certified results from the original vote have been delayed by the reports of ballot stuffing, suspicious tallies and voter coercion. The fraud investigations are not yet complete and recounts of about 10 percent of polling stations ordered by a U.N.-backed fraud panel have yet to begin.
The recounts and audits have been delayed because officials are working out a system to count only a sampling of suspect votes. The idea is to speed a process Afghan officials originally said could last two or three months.
Najafi said he is hopeful that final results will be known with enough time to hold any runoff this fall, but said it is not worth compromising the integrity of the vote to rush the process. The vote needs to meet international standards to confer legitimacy, he said.
Asked what would happen if a runoff was called for but could not be held before November, Najafi said the commission would try to negotiate a solution with all parties.
The Afghan election commission has the power to reschedule polls - it pushed back the Aug. 20 vote from spring because of the need for better security and more time to prepare. However, Najafi said the commission would be unlikely to make such a decision about a second round alone.
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Officials To Audit Sampling Of Suspect Afghan Ballots
by Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson NPR - National Public Radio September 25, 2009
Five weeks after Afghanistan's presidential elections, it's still unclear who will lead the country.
A preliminary tally suggests that incumbent Hamid Karzai is the winner, with 54 percent of the vote. But widespread allegations of fraud and official calls for a recount have stalled the final outcome.
Afghan and international officials are now hoping to break the logjam by agreeing to review ballots at about 10 percent of the nearly 3,100 polling stations flagged as suspicious by a U.N.-backed watchdog.
Election officials will audit 313 polling stations to help determine which votes from the controversial election should be cast out. People who attended a closed-door meeting at the main United Nations compound Thursday say the polling stations where ballots will be reviewed are being kept secret for now to prevent tampering.
The stations selected for audit are where a single candidate received 95 percent or more of the votes cast, or where a suspiciously large number of ballots were cast, or both. The idea behind this "sampling" of suspect votes is to allow for a speedier announcement of final results.
The audit might begin as early as next week, although officials say questions of who will be allowed to observe the process and where the reviews will take place are still being worked out.
Canadian Grant Kippen, who heads the U.N.-backed Electoral Complaints Commission, hopes the random audit will resolve the matter.
"So the exact timeline is not known, but I think it's going to be a more efficient way of doing this audit and recount than if we went to look at every single one of the boxes," he says.
Saving time is crucial. Winter in this mountainous country is only a few weeks way, after which many roads will become impassable. That will make it impossible to hold a runoff election should enough votes be invalidated to require one.
The uncertainty is already paralyzing the Afghan government, which is seen by a growing number of people here as ruling without a legal mandate.
Waheed Omar, Karzai's campaign spokesman, says he is cautiously optimistic about the audit. "It has been a long and painful wait for the people of Afghanistan, and it has to be over as soon as possible."
But like most other efforts by Afghan and international election officials here, the upcoming audit is generating nervousness and suspicion.
"What they've announced recently about the sampling, it is extremely unclear what they are talking about," said former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah, Karzai's chief election rival. "We don't know. They say it has to be transparent, it has to be fair, but we don't know the details."
Abdullah says it would have been easier to simply cast out some 1.5 million questionable ballots.
But Omar says his side will object to any effort that significantly changes the already announced outcome.
"If somebody decides at the end of the day that so and so number of votes are cut from President Karzai's votes and he goes below 50 percent, somebody has to explain it," he says.
Many Western and Afghan election observers here say such grousing is understandable. They argue allegations of fraud should have been dealt with more quickly and decisively by Afghan officials and the international community. But they also predict that the audit could restore some credibility to the election.
"Whoever the next president is," says Candace Rondeaux, senior analyst in Afghanistan for the International Crisis Group, "even if they are disappointed in who it is, will determine their ability to go around the corner and buy a carton of milk and to do so without having to pay a bribe to get through the police checkpoint."
Rondeaux adds: "This is what really concerns Afghans today, is their ability to get around securely, to live their lives, to send their children to school without fear of harassment, without fear they'll actually be bombed. And they expect their government to answer for this, and the fact they haven't gotten an answer for the last eight years, it's really what's riveting everyone to the outcome."
The election controversy could have a bright side, adds Nader Nadery, who heads the Free and Fair Election Foundation of Afghanistan, which helped monitor last month's polls.
"If we end up with an acceptable result, I would say Afghanistan has taken a positive step forward, because the debate [has] helped [mature] both the politicians and the public," he said.
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Zalmay Khalilzad: "There was a mistake in terms of dealing with Karzai"
Foreign Policy magazine By Blake Hounshell 09/24/2009
The former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan speaks about Hamid Karzai, General McChrystal's report, and the Obama administration's mistakes.
Zalmay Khalilzad, the former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan who now runs a private consulting business and is affiliated with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said Monday that the Obama administration, and the Bush administration before it, had made "mistakes" in dealing with incumbent Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who is now facing widespread allegations of electoral fraud.
In a talk at the Foreign Policy Initiative's 2009 Forum on democracy, Khalilzad said he supported Gen. Stanley McChrystal's call for more U.S. troops in Afghanistan and said that "leaving and cutting our losses would be a huge victory for al Qaeda and the Taliban." Afghanistan, he said, would go back to the way it was before the September 11 attacks. He called instead for a counterinsurgency approach focused on protecting the Afghan people.
In a follow-up interview, I asked him if he thought, given how Karzai seems to have tilted away from the United States in recent years and allied himself with a number of unsavory characters such as Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, that the U.S. had made mistake in moving away from the Afghan leader, and whether the Obama administration had compounded that mistake.
"Karzai understands, I am sure, that he needs the United States," Khalilzad responded. "Afghanistan cannot succeed without the United States. I think that he would be making a mistake if he believed no matter what, the United States will be there forever."
But "we have made mistakes in dealing with him," he admitted. "So much so that now it looks like we have very limited ability to do even the things we think are right for his own country."
"I don't want to say anything I am saying as a partisan comment," he stressed. "We have one government at one time. But I believe that there was a mistake in terms of dealing with Karzai. Clear indications were given as least as Karzai saw it that the administration, some key members of the administration, did not like him and wanted to get rid of him and was encouraging others to run against him. And the meetings with him were quite contentious."
"At the same time the administration did not have a realistic plan about how to get another leader elected by the Afghan people. And so that in turn has been a factor in getting Karzai to hedge against the U.S. being administratively against him by assuring his prospects by making deals with others."
"I think that at the end of the day if he is reelected as president then the United States has no choice but to work with him as the leader of Afghanistan if we want to help Afghanistan succeed," Khalilzad said, "and I think that Karazi has no choice but to work with the United States because without the United States his country cannot succeed."
Asked about the growing concerns over Karzai's legitimacy, Khalilzad said, "I think that there is no question that the election has done damage." But he emphasized that the best way forward was to address the complaints of fraud, which are quite widespread, within the context of Afghan law and procedures.
"At the end of the day, if that council decides that Karzai has won," he said, referring to the independent Afghan commission that was set up to review election-related grievances, "I think that would bestow legitimacy in a fundamental way. If not, then there would be another round perhaps."
Could Karzai turn his government, which is widely described as corrupt and incapable of providing basic services to the Afghan people, into something more effective?
"I think he has got to do it if the international assistance is to be sustained," Khalilzad said. "This is sort of his last chance if he gets elected to be president."
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Infighting leaves 5 Taliban dead, wounds 7 in W Afghanistan
KABUL, Sept. 25 (Xinhua) -- Infighting between two groups of Taliban outfit in Herat province west of Afghanistan have left five insurgents dead and injured seven other, an official said Friday.
"The clash erupted between supporters of Taliban commander Ghulam Yahya Akbari and Habib Mughal in the districts of Pashtunzarghon and Gazara on Thursday, so far have left five dead," Dilawar Shah Dilawar the deputy to police chief of Herat told Xinhua.
The clash is still going on, he stressed.
Two of those injured in the firefight, the official added, belonged to Taliban commander Habib Mughal.
This is the first time that infighting has been reported in Taliban rank. However, Taliban militants have yet to comment.
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15 Taliban insurgents killed in S Afghanistan
KABUL, Sept. 25 (Xinhua) -- Taliban militants stormed a police checkpoint in Helmand province south of Afghanistan, killing one police constable and wounding seven others while over a dozen militants died in the gun battle, a local official said Friday.
"The rebels raided police checkpoint in Shakariz village of Musa Qala district on Thursday, during which one police lost his life and seven others sustained injuries," district chief of Musa Qala Mullah Abdul Salam told Xinhua.
He added that so far neither Afghan reinforcement nor international troops have extended cooperation to dislodge the advancing militants.
Fifteen insurgents have also been killed so far, the police official further said.
Taliban militants fighting Afghan and the NATO-led forces in Afghanistan have intensified their activities since early this year.
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British army commander quits over Afghan policy
LONDON, Sept. 25 (Xinhua) -- A senior British army commander has resigned after bitter clashes with the British government over the war in Afghanistan, local media reported on Friday.
The Ministry of Defense said Major-General Mackay resigned for "personal" reasons.
"We can confirm that Major General Andrew Mackay has decided to leave the army. This is a personal matter for him," a ministry spokesperson said.
However, the leading British newspaper Independent reported Friday that Mackay, recently appointed general officer commanding Scotland, Northern Ireland and Northern England, resigned due to the "inadequate support" given troops and a "lack of clear policy" in the conflict in Afghanistan.
Mackay said that tanks which were supposed to be operational could not get into reverse gear without the engine being restarted. A quarter of the Mastiff armored vehicles were out of action for weeks and the new Vector vehicles were not being used because "the wheels kept falling off."
The House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee also quoted the major general's views in its report on the Afghan conflict as noting that "we conclude that the British deployment to Helmand was undermined by unrealistic planning at senior levels, poor coordination between Whitehall departments, and crucially, a failure to provide the military with clear direction."
Mackay is the fifth senior officer to leave the forces prematurely in two years amid criticism of Britain's strategy in Afghanistan.
Major Nick Haston, who was Mackay's deputy chief of staff, resigned earlier this year in protest of unclear policy and equipment shortages. Lieutenant-Colonel Stuart Tootal and Major Sebastian Morley also left, citing equipment shortages. Brigadier Ed Butler also quit, voicing similar concerns.
General Richard Dannatt stepped down as head of the army in late August after repeatedly speaking out against what he saw as equipment shortages and poor pay and conditions.
The death toll of British troops in Afghanistan since the start of the war in 2001 is 217, with more people in Britain calling for an immediate withdrawal.
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Pakistan reluctant to give route for India-Afghan transit trade
By Hadi Mayar
KABUL, Sept. 25 (Xinhua) -- Despite Afghanistan's insistence to renew and expand transit trade agreement with Pakistan, the latter seems the least interested to allow New Delhi to use its land routes for trade with Kabul.
During the trilateral meeting between Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the United States in Washington on May 6, 2009, Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his Pakistani counterpart, Asif Ali Zardari signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to begin talks for renewing their transit trade agreement.
While addressing a joint press conference with Karzai and Zardari, Hilary Clinton, the U.S. secretary of state, said: "the memorandum of understanding commits the two countries to achieving a trade transit agreement by the end of the year, which we believe will have great economic benefits for both peoples."
She said both sides would strive to sign an agreement that would ultimately allow India to use Wagah-Khyber route for trade with Afghanistan.
"This is an historic event. This agreement has been under discussion for 43 years without resolution. Afghanistan and Pakistan have reached an important milestone in their efforts to generate foreign investment and stronger economic growth and trade opportunities," Hilary Clinton observed.
Within a week, the Pak-Afghan Joint Working Group held its meeting in Islamabad on May 11, discussing pros and cons of the issue and expressing the resolve to sign the deal by the end of the current year, as announced by the U.S. secretary of state.
Later, the working group held its second meeting in Islamabad on August 5-6 renewing the commitment to achieve the objective within the stipulated time period. It agreed to hold its next meeting in Kabul on October 15.
However, soon after the meeting, Pakistani officials said Islamabad would not allow Afghanistan transit facility to import oil from India.
They said Pakistan could not grant the transit facility, because Pak-India trade was suspended ever since the November 26, 2008 attacks on the Indian city of Mumbai.
Islamabad cited the rampant smuggling along its border with Afghanistan as another reason for not favouring the deal.
Pakistan also insisted to allow it transit facility to promote trade with Tajikistan via Afghanistan.
Earlier, a mini storm had surged up in the Pakistani media, which lamented that signing of the MoU to allow for India-Afghanistan transit route was not on Pakistan's agenda for the trilateral talks with Afghanistan and the United States.
Media reports and analysis observed that the MoU had been signed under the US pressure and the Pakistani cabinet and parliament had not been taken on board.
There was also a rumpus that the proposed agreement would only benefit India. These reports forced the Pakistani Foreign Minister, Shah Mahmood Qureshi, to issue a statement that India had nothing to do with the Pak-Afghan transit trade agreement.
Islamabad and Kabul had singed the Afghan Trade and Transit Agreement (ATTA) in 1965, under which Afghanistan, a landlocked South Asian country, was allowed to use the Pakistani routes for trade with the outside world.
Under terms of the agreement, Afghan imports were also exempted from custom duty and other levies.
While Afghanistan was allowed to use Karachi Port and Port Qasim for its imports, two border points i.e. Torkham and Chaman, were spared for shifting the goods to Afghanistan.
It was on this ground that Islamabad unilaterally reviewed the transit trade agreement in 1996, putting 17 items on the negative list, prohibiting their import via the Pakistani routes. Pakistan insisted that these items, mostly electronic goods, were not needed in Afghanistan and were being smuggled back into Pakistan.
According to International Monetary Fund (IMF), Pakistan is the largest trade partner of Afghanistan, followed by the European Union and the United States.
While Pakistan occupies 37 percent of the Afghan trade, the EU shares 15.9 percent and the United States 12.5 percent.
The total volume of trade between Pakistan and Afghanistan was 169.93 million U.S. dollars in 2000-2001, which jumped to 1235.01 million U.S. dollars in 2007-2008.
The balance of this trade tilted in favour of Pakistan as Pakistan's exports soared, during this period, from 140.4 million dollars to 1143.66 million dollars.
Pakistan might have little reservation about signing a bilateral trade deals with Afghanistan.
However, it seems reluctant to include India in this bilateral mechanism.
"The MoU is only the reaffirmation of the desire of Afghanistan and Pakistan to expedite the finalization of the revised [transit trade] agreement," Pakistan Foreign Office spokesman, Abdul Basit, said in a recent press briefing.
He added that the Afghan government had asserted last year, and Pakistan agreed in principle, to initiate negotiations for a new transit trade agreement.
Basit said "we have also engaged bilaterally to chart out a vision of common prosperity, including joint projects in the field of energy, minerals, and infrastructure."
The spokesman, rather, emphasized "trans-regional cooperation within the Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO) framework."
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Matt Frei's diary: World's worst job?
By Matt Frei BBC News, Washington Thursday, 24 September 2009
When President Obama was elected last November, the satirical weekly The Onion quipped in its headline: "Black man gets nation's worst job."
I was reminded of the headline this week as I watched Mr Obama at the UN.
Between the beaming moments and the winning smiles, his face was etched with anxiety and fatigue. I wondered how much he is actually enjoying running America. But this is of course a purely superficial impression based on nothing other than observation.
There is little doubt the policy headaches have been mounting. The one that is really beginning to weigh on Mr Obama and his team is an issue that they must have hoped would be on the back boiler by now.
Unfortunately its priority is now scorching, and it could really burn this presidency. I am talking about Afghanistan.
A familiar dilemma is occurring. As the rock band The Clash put it: Should I stay or should I go?
President Obama had thought that he could scale down Iraq and beef up Afghanistan. It would allow him to prove that he was tough about defending America, pursuing al-Qaeda to the gates of hell and preventing Afghanistan from turning into another incubation chamber for Islamic extremism.
But the mission has changed dramatically and the change has been forced on this administration by the Taliban.
As the New York Times columnist Tom Friedman told me the other day: "We have gone from baby-sitting to adoption without really noticing and really wanting to."
Hurried adoption
After the 2001 invasion and removal of the Taliban, the occupation of Afghanistan turned into essentially a policing operation. That was the baby-sitting part - with a very distracted baby sitter. Afghanistan became the "second war" while the US and the world focused on Iraq.
How things have changed. We are now in the middle of a hurried adoption; reluctant and half-hearted nation-building amid an increasingly vicious military conflict.
On top of that Nato troops are seen to be propping up a regime that has just been caught fiddling an election and stuffing ballot boxes with the brazenness of a taxidermist.
Mr Obama himself is said by some to be cautiously in favour of a greater commitment. He does not want America to be accused of abandoning Afghanistan to its own meagre resources as it had done after the collapse of the Soviet occupation.
If Mr Obama is pondering full-scale adoption, Vice President Joe Biden is said to be arguing voraciously, as is his style, for handing Afghanistan to foster parents, otherwise known as the United Nations. He wants out.
The public debate over this war had been largely smothered by all the sound and fury over race, liars and the decline of civility.
But the issue demanded the limelight this week when the Washington Post published the details of a damning 66-page report in which America's top general in Afghanistan dished out some sobering stuff: the war had been grossly under-resourced for most of its eight years.
If America does not up its game, the outcome could well be failure. The leaked report could be the Pentagon's way of pressuring the White House to hand over thousands more troops. It is an old trick.
The top brass did exactly the same in the UK earlier in the summer. At the very least they put down a public "we told you so" should things get worse.
Messy recount
Opinion polls indicate that a conflict once seen as a worthy cause - and a sideshow to Iraq - has become increasingly unpopular and decreasingly relevant to the war on "terror".
Americans are quietly beginning to ask uncomfortable questions about "a pile of rocks called Afghanistan", as Representative Charlie Wilson once called it.
What are we doing there? Is it nation-building? Are we still hunting al-Qaeda? Haven't they migrated across the border to Pakistan? And where are our foreign friends?
As Mr Obama said bluntly at the UN on Wednesday, the same countries that accused America for going it alone under George W Bush cannot now leave it alone to fix the world.
But when it comes to Afghanistan, the likes of Germany, Italy or Canada are heading for the door.
At home, Americans have lost their appetite for foreign adventure, however noble and worthy. It is the war against poverty at home that is now concentrating minds.
Nation-building in the tribal valleys of Helmand is considered too costly and quixotic. The Uruzgan recount is going to be even messier than the Florida recount - with undoubtedly bloodier consequences for American and British lives.
And the president is no doubt losing sleep and hair over this latest dilemma to land on his desk.
The only good news comes in the form of winter: when the snow falls, as it will do by the end of next month, the fighting dies down and the conflict goes into partial hibernation. Winter will buy him time but not an answer.
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Terror Case Called One of the Most Serious in Years
New York Times By DAVID BROOKS September 24, 2009
Always there is the illusion of the easy path. Always there is the illusion, which gripped Donald Rumsfeld and now grips many Democrats, that you can fight a counterinsurgency war with a light footprint, with cruise missiles, with special forces operations and unmanned drones. Always there is the illusion, deep in the bones of the Pentagon's Old Guard, that you can fight a force like the Taliban by keeping your troops mostly in bases, and then sending them out in well-armored convoys to kill bad guys.
Documents filed in Brooklyn against the driver, Najibullah Zazi, contend he bought chemicals needed to build a bomb — hydrogen peroxide, acetone and hydrochloric acid — and in doing so, Mr. Zazi took a critical step made by few other terrorism suspects.
If government allegations are to be believed, Mr. Zazi, a legal immigrant from Afghanistan, had carefully prepared for a terrorist attack. He attended a Qaeda training camp in Pakistan, received training in explosives and stored in his laptop computer nine pages of instructions for making bombs from the same kind of chemicals he had bought.
While many important facts remain unknown, those allegations alone would distinguish Mr. Zazi from nearly all the other defendants in United States terrorism cases in recent years. More often than not the earlier suspects emerged as angry young men, inflamed by the rhetoric of Osama bin Laden or his associates. Some were serious in intent. More than a few seemed to be malcontents without the organization, technical skills and financing to be much of a threat. In some cases, the subjects appeared to be influenced by informants or undercover agents who pledged to provide the weapons or even do some of the planning.
In two cases unrelated to Mr. Zazi in which charges were announced on Thursday, in fact, the subjects dealt extensively with undercover agents.
The Zazi case “actually looks like the case the government kept claiming it had but never did,” said Karen J. Greenberg, executive director of the Center on Law and Security at New York University law school.
Her center has studied all the prosecutions of terrorism-related crimes since 2001, and she said many had turned out to be “fantasy terrorism cases” where the threat seemed modest or even nonexistent.
This time, she said, “the ingredients here are quite scary,” and the government's statements have had none of the bombast and exaggeration that accompanied some previous arrest announcements.
Jarret Brachman, author of “Global Jihadism” and a consultant to the government about terrorism, said some details — like what individuals trained Mr. Zazi in Pakistan — remained to be learned. But he said the case was “shaping up to be one of the most serious terrorist bomb plots developed in the United States,” one resembling the London public transit attacks of July 2005.
“You don't manufacture homemade TATP explosives unless you want to kill people and destroy infrastructure,” Dr. Brachman said, using the abbreviation for the combination of chemicals said to be involved in the Zazi plot.
In some earlier investigations, federal officials seized on what were widely viewed as marginal cases in an apparent effort to show results and justify aggressive steps being taken in the campaign against terrorism. As a result, people in and out of government have become dubious about assertions of the grave danger posed by any particular group of defendants.
In August, for example, William Webb, a federal magistrate in North Carolina, ordered Daniel P. Boyd, an antigovernment militant, and several other men detained on terrorism charges. But the judge expressed skepticism in court when prosecutors asserted that by talking about “going to the beach,” a defendant meant he intended to engage in violent acts overseas.
But even cases that appear insubstantial can be more complex. For example, on Thursday, Mr. Boyd and two other defendants were charged with additional crimes: conducting reconnaissance of the Marine Corps base at Quantico, Va., and obtaining armor-piercing ammunition with the intent to attack Americans, court documents say.
Even in Mr. Zazi's case, veteran counterterrorism investigators who regard it as significant acknowledge that important facts remain unknown. Unclear are whether Mr. Zazi had selected a target or a date for a bombing or had recruited others to help.
Moreover, it is not understood fully whether he had built an operational bomb, officials briefed on the case said. Nor is it known why, after practicing with explosive recipes in Colorado, Mr. Zazi drove to New York without chemicals or equipment, the officials said.
Some of the earliest terrorist operatives arrested after the 2001 attacks had direct ties not just to Al Qaeda, but to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the chief organizer of Sept. 11.
But in recent years, foiled plots announced with fanfare in Washington have sometimes involved unsophisticated people who seemed hardly capable of organizing a major attack.
In some cases, the role of Al Qaeda has been played by an F.B.I. informant or undercover agent who seemed to provide much of the energy for the plotting.
For example, on Thursday prosecutors in Illinois charged a 29-year-old man with trying to kill federal employees by detonating a car bomb at the federal building in Springfield. He tried to carry out the attack while accompanied by an undercover officer of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, according to government legal papers. The vehicle was supplied by the F.B.I., which had placed a dummy device inside.
In yet another case disclosed on Thursday, F.B.I. agents in Texas arrested a 19-year-old illegal immigrant from Jordan and charged him with trying to bomb a 60-story office tower in Dallas. Again, F.B.I. undercover agents posing as members of a Qaeda sleeper cell met with the man for months and supplied a Ford Explorer containing inert material resembling a bomb.
In a 2006 case, a group of Haitian-born men in Miami who had spoken of trying to take down the Sears Tower in Chicago were supplied by an informant with cash, video cameras and boots. The first two attempts to try the men ended in mistrials, but five men were convicted in May in that case after a third trial.
F.B.I. officials have admitted that such cases are “aspirational” rather than operational. But they note that if the Sept. 11 hijackers — some of whom were unsophisticated recent arrivals to the United States — had been interrupted early on, they might have looked amateurish and the notion that they could turn jetliners into missiles far-fetched.
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US charges man in bomb plot, releases imam
by Sebastian Smith Thu Sep 24, 4:51 pm ET
NEW YORK (AFP) – A Colorado airport bus driver trained to build homemade bombs in Pakistan, then scoured US beauty stores for deadly chemicals in one of the biggest US terror plots since 9/11, officials said Thursday.
The indictment of Najibullah Zazi, 24, on charges of conspiracy to unleash a huge bombing campaign dramatically upped the ante in a probe stretching from an Al Qaeda-infiltrated region of Pakistan to Denver and New York.
Zazi "knowingly and intentionally conspired with others to use one or more weapons of mass destruction, specifically explosive bombs and other similar explosive devices," the Justice Department said after the grand jury indictment was unsealed.
A Denver airport shuttle bus driver, Zazi is accused of receiving bomb-making instruction in Peshawar, Pakistan, researching homemade explosives in Colorado, and driving to New York with intent to carry out the plot.
One of the explosives he had been studying, according to the authorities, was triacetone triperoxide, the same chemical used in the 2005 bombings of London's transport system and a failed attack on an airliner by "shoe bomber" Richard Reid in 2001.
Just this month, Zazi allegedly rented a hotel room with a kitchen where he experimented in bomb making after he and unidentified co-conspirators had bought large quantities of hydrogen peroxide and acetone from Denver beauty supply stores.
They also allegedly searched the Internet for availability of muriatic acid, another potential bomb-making ingredient, in New York hardware stores.
Zazi, who is to be transferred from Denver to New York, remains in detention and faces life in prison if convicted.
Meanwhile, New York imam Ahmad Wais Afzali, who is charged with lying to investigators on the case, was ordered released by a Brooklyn federal judge on 1.5 million dollars bail.
Zazi's father in Colorado, also charged with lying, has likewise been ordered free on bail.
Attorney General Eric Holder said the case was far from closed.
"We are investigating a wide range of leads related to this alleged conspiracy, and we will continue to work around the clock to ensure that anyone involved is brought to justice," Holder said.
"We believe any imminent threat arising from this case has been disrupted, but as always, we remind the American public to be vigilant."
Holder's comments coincided with news of two new, unrelated cases.
In New York, a US citizen was charged with conspiracy to join an Al-Qaeda-linked militant group and intending to fight US forces in Afghanistan, Iraq or the Balkans.
And in Illinois, authorities said they had detained a man in connection with a plot to bomb a federal courthouse in Springfield.
Thursday's developments show how seriously US authorities are taking Zazi's alleged bomb plot, but in the case of Afzali how complicated -- some media reports say confused -- the enquiry has become.
Afzali, 37, is alleged to have lied to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) about a conversation he had with Zazi in which he said that their line was tapped.
The lying charge carries a maximum penalty of eight years in prison.
In essence, Afzali is accused of having tipped-off Zazi, thereby blowing the FBI's months-long investigation.
Unnamed police sources have been quoted by US media saying that Afzali's conversation made Zazi suspicious, thus forcing the FBI to make arrests before they had gathered the evidence needed to unmask the broader plot.
But defense attorney Ronald Kuby paints a starkly different picture -- and argues prosecutors' decision Thursday not to oppose Afzali's release on bail supports his argument.
According to Kuby, Afzali had regularly helped anti-terrorism enquiries over a two-year period and only phoned Zazi -- whom he knew slightly from past visits by Zazi to his Queens mosque -- at the request of the police.
Officers came to Afzali asking him to identify pictures of four men and one of them was Zazi, Kuby said.
Unlike in previous discussions, which were routine in nature, "there was a sense of urgency," Kuby said. The officers "were desperate to find out anything they could."
When Afzali called Zazi, tracking down his number in Denver through a number of third persons, "he was just trying to help the police," Kuby said.
Afzali will wear an electronic monitoring ankle bracelet and be restricted to his home, mosque and the funeral parlor where he works. Zazi's father, Mohammed Zazi, 53, was also ordered to wear a monitor.
US media have quoted unnamed sources saying Zazi possessed a video of New York's Grand Central Station and that agents found 14 new black backpacks that may have been meant to carry bombs.
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Poll: 50% oppose U.S. surge in Afghanistan
USA Today By Ken Dilanian, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON - Half of all Americans, and six in 10 Democrats, oppose sending more troops to Afghanistan, a new USA TODAY/Gallup Poll shows, underscoring the pressures on President Obama as he re-evaluates his approach to what he calls "a war of necessity."
That's a stark turnaround from February, when 65% of Americans supported Obama's decision to send 17,000 additional servicemembers, according to Gallup. In March, Obama announced what he called "a comprehensive new strategy" for Afghanistan premised on more troops, training the Afghan army and boosting reconstruction efforts.
The public's doubts about the war, shared by some senior congressional Democrats, come as Obama says he is reconsidering that strategy in light of concerns about fraud in last month's Afghan election. Success in counterinsurgency can depend on a government being viewed by the people as legitimate.
"The first question is: Are we pursuing the right strategy?" Obama said last week on CNN.
Officials are "evaluating what's been achieved, evaluating the situation on the ground, assessing the elections," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Wednesday.
Without more troops, there is a risk of "mission failure," the commanding general Obama installed in May, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, wrote in a confidential assessment made public this week. McChrystal wrote the report before the Afghan election. He has not recommended a number, but his strategy calls for a troop-intensive effort to protect the population in the Texas-size nation.
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said that his party has confidence in McChrystal's leadership and that Obama should follow his recommendations about sending more troops.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in a PBS interview this week that Obama is considering McChrystal's report as part of a broad review.
The poll of 1,053 adults, conducted Tuesday and Wednesday, has a margin of error of +/–4 percentage points.
Obama's March strategy, which also called for a large, new civilian aid effort, is not fully underway. Sweeps of insurgent-infested areas made July and August the deadliest months on record for U.S. troops, and August's presidential election remains unresolved.
"Our plan, our path, our progress seem to be growing less and less clear," Sen. John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat and chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, said at a hearing last week.
The Obama administration and Congress have "to be a lot clearer about the mission, the goals, the objective," said Sen. Robert Casey, D-Pa., who chairs the Foreign Relations subcommittee that oversees Central Asia.
Yet after a briefing last month from McChrystal in Kabul, Casey says he supports giving the general's strategy a chance to work.
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Karzai Backers Want Troops
Senior Afghan Officials Argue for an Expanded Military Effort to Defeat Taliban
Wall Street Journal By YAROSLAV TROFIMOV SEPTEMBER 25, 2009
KABUL - Senior Afghan officials, alarmed by the Obama administration's reappraisal of its Afghanistan strategy, said an increased U.S. military commitment is needed to roll back an emboldened insurgency.
They also cautioned about what they said would be dire consequences of any U.S. attempts to edge out President Hamid Karzai. Results from a presidential election last month gave Mr. Karzai a majority, but allegations of widespread ballot-stuffing have stalled the confirmation of his victory and undermined his credibility in the eyes of many Afghans.
These admonishments come after the top U.S. and allied commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, warned that the war here may become unwinnable unless troop levels are raised and the momentum of insurgents is reversed in the next 12 months.
The Obama administration has yet to endorse these findings, and has called for a review of the U.S.-led war effort before making a decision on troop levels. Vice President Joe Biden in particular has expressed skepticism about the proposed troop increase. Senior administration officials said the review was necessary because the war plan that President Barack Obama announced in March was based on the assumption that the election would give Mr. Karzai new legitimacy.
As the war in Afghanistan becomes increasingly unpopular in the U.S. and Europe, one policy option under review in Washington advocates reducing ground forces and relying instead on surgical airstrikes against Taliban and al Qaeda targets on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
This would be a recipe for failure, warned one of Mr. Karzai's senior associates, Education Minister Farooq Wardak. "Airstrikes alone cannot be a strategy to defeat the insurgency and the Taliban. If the air attacks are not followed up by ground operations, they do not yield the results one expects," he said. "We need additional troops -- but not forever." According to Mr. Wardak, it will take five years before the Afghan army and police can fight mostly on their own.
Parliament member Mohammed Mohaqeq, a powerful former warlord representing the Hazara ethnic minority who backed Mr. Karzai's re-election bid, offered a similar assessment.
"The current number of soldiers is not enough to defeat the Taliban," Mr. Mohaqeq said. Should the U.S. start reducing its forces in Afghanistan -- currently over 60,000 -- "the country will go back to civil war," he added. "The Taliban are capable of recapturing the capital and the government."
Mr. Karzai's spokesman welcomed Gen. McChrystal's report and said he had no comment on the Obama administration's review of policy options.
The Taliban's recent advances to previously secure areas of northern and western Afghanistan were made possible, in part, by growing public anger over the incompetence and graft in Mr. Karzai's administration, many analysts say.
This anger was reinforced by reports of large-scale fraud in favor of Mr. Karzai in the election on Aug. 20. According to a preliminary count, he won with 54.6% of the vote. That tally can change depending on a review of results from 12% of Afghanistan's polling stations that was ordered by the Electoral Complaints Commission, a United Nations-sponsored watchdog.
On Thursday, representatives from the ECC, the Afghan government's electoral commission, and the presidential candidates met in Kabul to choose a random 10% sample from the disputed polling stations. Recounting this sample is expected to take a couple of weeks, compared with months needed for a full recount.
If Mr. Karzai's final vote tally falls below 50% he will face a runoff against the leading challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, a former foreign minister.
Time is of the essence: Such a runoff election will be virtually impossible after snowfall makes many rural roads impassable in early November.
Some Western officials called for flanking Mr. Karzai with a powerful chief executive who will run the government, while others have pushed for a unity government that would include Dr. Abdullah.
But the president's allies cautioned that any foreign effort to disempower Mr. Karzai could plunge the country into more bloodshed. "Let's be practical -- what is the alternative to Karzai?" said Mr. Wardak. Any U.S. move against Mr. Karzai, he said, "will be seen by the Afghan population as no different from the U.S.S.R. occupation" -- and trigger a similar response.
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