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Karzai edges closer to 50 percent in Afghan vote
By Heidi Vogt, Associated Press Writer
KABUL – President Hamid Karzai nudged closer to the 50 percent threshold needed to avoid a runoff in Afghanistan's election, according to the latest results released Sunday.
At some Afghan polling places, Karzai got every vote
By Hal Bernton, Mcclatchy Newspapers – Sat Sep 5, 4:55 pm ET
KABUL, Afghanistan — Detailed polling records released by an Afghanistan election commission reveal numerous polling places in Kandahar Province where all the votes were delivered to a single candidate — incumbent President Hamid Karzai .
Afghanistan election: poll tension rises
Telegraph.co.uk 6 Sept 2009
With allegations of fraud and intimidation growing, the presidential poll results will be a dangerous time for the country's fledging democracy, writes Ben Farmer in Kabul
Six civilians killed in NATO raid: Afghan official
Sun Sep 6, 8:44 am ET
KUNDUZ, Afghanistan (AFP) – Six civilians, including a child, were among 54 people killed in a NATO air strike in Afghanistan that targeted two fuel tankers hijacked by the Taliban, a local official said Sunday.
NATO Begins Investigation of Deadly Airstrike on Fuel Tanks in Afghanistan
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS via The New York Times September 6, 2009
KUNDUZ, Afghanistan (AP) — Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top United States and NATO commander in Afghanistan, visited the site of an airstrike on fuel tankers hijacked by the Taliban, as the alliance began an investigation
Afghan airstrike based on single informant
KABUL, Afghanistan, Sept. 6 (UPI) -- A NATO airstrike that killed 125 people in Afghanistan, many said to be civilians, was guided by a single informant, military officials say.
Deadly air raid in Kunduz to fertilize Taliban propaganda
by Abdul Haleem
KABUL, Sept. 5 (Xinhua) -- NATO's deadly air strike against suspected Taliban insurgents in Kunduz province north of Afghanistan early Friday, which left over 100 people dead and injured, would strengthen Taliban propaganda
Taliban attacks in north Afghanistan spike
Jason Motlagh The Washington Times September 6, 2009
KUNDUZ, Afghanistan | Eight years ago, this northern flood plain was the scene of the Taliban's last stand.
Leaders to call for Afghanistan conference
By Jean Eaglesham in London, Matthew Green in Kabul and Bertrand Benoit in Berlin September 6 2009 17:57 Financial Times
Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, and Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, are expected to call for an international political conference on Afghanistan to co-ordinate support and resources for the US-led mission there.
IEDs wreak havoc among forces in Afghanistan
by Lynne O'donnell – Sun Sep 6, 1:24 am ET
KABUL (AFP) – Cheap home-made bombs are exacting a high price from the world's most sophisticated armies battling Afghanistan's Taliban insurgency and have become the pivot on which the eight-year war is turning.
EU commits troops to Afghanistan, but calls for improvements in Kabul
Deutsche Welle - Sep 06 2:01 AM
The European Union has promised that its troops will stay the course in Afghanistan. However, officials called on Afghan politicians to help bring an end to corruption, human right abuses and the narcotics trade.
Target Germany: A Second Front in Afghanistan?
By Jason Motlagh time.com Saturday, Sep. 05, 2009
The details of a deadly coalition airstrike near the city of Kunduz in northern Afghanistan are yet vague. However, the attack has potentially deep military consequences as well as political ramifications far away
US soldier killed in Afghanistan
Sun Sep 6, 1:15 am ET
KABUL (AFP) – Another US soldier serving in the NATO-led coalition fighting a Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan was killed Sunday in an attack in the east of the country, the military said.
US to send arms to Afghanistan via Russia
Press TV - Sep 06 2:27 AM
Following a deal between Washington and Moscow, the US military will be able to use Russian airspace to send troops and arms to Afghanistan.
Too much has been gained in Afghanistan to exit now
Debra J. Saunders Sunday, September 6, 2009 San Francisco Chronicle
As he campaigned for the presidency, Sen. Barack Obama argued that Afghanistan should become "the central front in the battle against terrorism." Obama has delivered on that issue. U.S. troop levels have more than doubled
The things Mr Brown did not say about Afghanistan
The British army could be broken by another humiliation like the retreat Tony Blair precipitated in Basra
Andrew Rawnsley The Observer, Sunday 6 September 2009
In Eric Joyce's noisy letter of resignation as an aide to the defence secretary, the Labour MP wrote that he had chosen this moment to quit because it "seems to me the least disruptive time to do that".
The Afghanistan Abyss
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF September 6, 2009 The New York Times Op-Ed Columnist
President Obama has already dispatched an additional 21,000 American troops to Afghanistan and soon will decide whether to send thousands more. That would be a fateful decision for his presidency
Troops kill 3 Taliban insurgents in W Afghanistan
KABUL, Sept. 6 (Xinhua) -- Gun battle between Afghan forces and Taliban fighters left three insurgents dead in Farah province west of Afghanistan, an official said Sunday.
CNN heads to Afghanistan for 9/11 anniversary
Baltimore Sun - Sun Sep 6, 3:37 am ET
Of all the cable and network news channel plans to commemorate the attacks of 9/11 this week with special programs, none seems more timely and relevant than that of CNN. The cable news network has sent a team of correspondents
FAQ: Does fighting in Helmand make Britain safer or more dangerous?
Richard Norton-Taylor The Guardian, Saturday 5 September 2009
Is Brown correct in insisting "a safer Afghanistan means a safer Britain"?
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Karzai edges closer to 50 percent in Afghan vote
By Heidi Vogt, Associated Press Writer
KABUL – President Hamid Karzai nudged closer to the 50 percent threshold needed to avoid a runoff in Afghanistan's election, according to the latest results released Sunday.
The Aug. 20 ballot has been marred by accusations of vote-rigging and election officials said they threw out results from 447 out of more than 26,000 polling sites because of fraud allegations. The head of the Independent Election Commission, Daoud Ali Najafi, said it was not yet clear how many votes were affected.
With 74 percent of polling stations counted, Karzai is leading with 48.6 percent. Top challenger Abdullah Abdullah has 30.1 percent. Karzai needs more than 50 percent to avoid a second round against Abdullah.
The country's election commission has slowly been releasing partial results, but says it will complete the count from all polling stations later this week.
Those results won't be finalized until later this month, after a complaints commission investigates more than 650 claims of serious violations on voting day and after. These include charges by Abdullah that Karzai supporters stuffed ballot boxes with tens of thousands of votes.
The commission has the power to nullify the results from districts or provinces, or even call for a new election, if it finds large-scale fraud.
Former Foreign Minister Abdullah on Saturday urged the election commission to stop announcing preliminary results because of "highly suspicious numbers" in tallies released so far.
He said a number of polling stations posted nearly identical numbers for Karzai and none for any other candidate. The challenger alleged electoral officials were beholden to Karzai, who appointed them.
"It is state-engineered fraud. It is not violations here and there," Abdullah said.
Commission chairman Najafi insisted Sunday that the commission was unbiased.
"The Independent Election Commission has been completely impartial in fulfilling its duties throughout the process," he said.
International and Afghan observers have been critical of the vote but have withheld judgment until counting and fraud investigations are complete.
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At some Afghan polling places, Karzai got every vote
By Hal Bernton, Mcclatchy Newspapers – Sat Sep 5, 4:55 pm ET
KABUL, Afghanistan — Detailed polling records released by an Afghanistan election commission reveal numerous polling places in Kandahar Province where all the votes were delivered to a single candidate — incumbent President Hamid Karzai .
The records bolster the case of ballot-box stuffing during the Aug. 20 election to pick a new president to lead Afghanistan , which is now struggling against an increasingly powerful Taliban insurgency.
In Kandahar Province in southern Afghanistan , the results from 66 polling sites have been released. In nine of them, 100 percent of the votes went to Karzai.
Also in Kandahar Province , an area that was a target of insurgent attacks to try to suppress the vote, there were six polling places that had more than 100 percent of the estimated registered voters reportedly turn out. At one location, the turn out was nearly a third high than the number of voters registered.
"It is state organized fraud," said Karzai's main challenger, Abdullah Abdullah , a former minister in Karzai's government, on Saturday.
Since the election, Abdullah has repeatedly called press conferences to allege misconduct in a flawed election. On Saturday, he invited reporters to a courtyard at his Kabul home. There, campaign workers installed a giant computer screen linked to the Internet records of the polling places, and Abdullah spent more than an hour in a public examination of some of the questionable polling results.
At one point, he read the voting tallies at six polling sites where Karzai received almost all the votes and where all the totals were rounded numbers ranging between 250 and 350. "They should have set these aside," Abdullah said.
The fraud allegations have created a tangled aftermath to the August election. The Obama Administration had hoped the election would strengthen the Afghan people's faith in a government set up in the aftermath of the 2001 U.S. invasion that overthrew the Taliban .
But the election process could drag on for many weeks as more than 600 high-priority allegations of ballot-box stuffing, voter intimidation and other misconduct are investigated by the Afghanistan Electoral Complaints Commission .
As of Saturday, the results from about 60 percent of Afghanistan's polling places had been announced. Karzai has more than 47 percent of the vote compared to 33 percent for Abdullah. But as of Saturday, Karzai was still shy of the 50 percent threshold needed to avoid a runoff.
Karzai campaign officials have repeatedly rejected allegations that the president has encouraged any organized effort to tilt the election.
Election commission officials also have been attacked by Abdullah for tallying - rather than opting to set aside - some of the disputed votes. "They were supposed to announced the clean results. It's not clean at all," Abdullah said.
But commission officials say that they are carefully reviewing the polling results, and have excluded large numbers of votes for possible irregularities.
"The allegations of Abdullah are not true, and we reject them," said Noor Mohammad Noor , a spokesman for Afghanistan's Independent Election Campaign.
Noor said that the commission had carefully considered which results to include the tally, and that a commission team was investigating fraud allegations. An updated tally of votes is scheduled to be released Sunday.
Some polling sites in the north that voted in favor of Abdullah also are coming under scrutiny, and Abdullah has acknowledged that some of his supporters might have been involved in altering vote counts.
Some of the biggest voting controversies have flared in southern Afghanistan , where Karzai has deep roots but where Abdullah enlisted the support of some tribal leaders.
The Kandahar voting records so far released by the commission cover less than 22 percent of the province's polling places.
Nonetheless, Abdullah cited numerous instances of suspicious voting results.
The polling place called Zherai Awal Camp, for example, has an estimated 2,100 voters who were eligible to cast ballots for president. On election day , the polling place reported nearly 2,300 voters showed up, and every one who voted cast ballots for Karzai.
At three polling sites at the Shorabak District of Kandahar , 11,210 votes were tallied, and 99 percent went to Karzai.
Seattle Times Reporter Justin Mayo and McClatchy Special Correspondent Hashim Shukoor contributed to this report. Bernton reports for The Seattle Times .
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Afghanistan election: poll tension rises
Telegraph.co.uk 6 Sept 2009
With allegations of fraud and intimidation growing, the presidential poll results will be a dangerous time for the country's fledging democracy, writes Ben Farmer in Kabul
Sardar Mohammad Khan thought President Hamid Karzai's corrupt regime had taken all the money, power and rights it could. But on election day, he realised he was mistaken - government officials could still rob him of his vote.
That is what he had left his grape vines and almond orchards and travelled to Kabul to say. Jabbing his finger with each accusation, the white-turbaned elder catalogued the blatant vote-rigging which he had travelled hundreds of miles from his village in the south of the country to denounce.
"This hasn't been an election where people voted," he said, his voice rising and his cataract-clouded eyes burning with anger.
"This has just been an election in the town centres. Even just half a mile outside them the election didn't take place, it was fixed." His allegations of intimidation and ballot box stuffing in remote districts of Afghanistan have become commonplace in a presidential election bogged down in accusations of widespread fraud.
Yet this week, election officials will announce the first - provisional - full result of the voting on August 20, and there is every likelihood that Mr Karzai will declare himself the winner, without the need for a second round of voting.
It will be a dangerous moment for Afghanistan and its precarious democracy, as Mr Karzai's rivals must decide how far to push their challenge to the legitimacy of the result - with many Afghans arming themselves against possible bloodshed.
It will also be perilous for British, American and other Nato forces in the country, where anger is still growing over last week's air strike on two hijacked fuel tankers that killed 90 people, with children among the many civilians dead and injured, in the northern Kunduz province.
Mr Karzai denounced that attack and said any civilian casualties are "unacceptable". The White House admitted "great concern" over the killings at a time when the new commander of Nato forces had promised to protect innocent Afghans.
Yesterday there was a highly-charged atmosphere in the dozen villages nearest to the blackened shells of the two vehicles, witnesses said. As memorial prayers were said throughout the region, European ministers joined the outcry.
Bernard Kouchner, French foreign minister, said: "This was a big mistake. We have to enquire and to denounce those responsible."
Jean Asselborn, his counterpart in Luxembourg, said: "I cannot understand that bombs can be dropped so easily and swiftly."
If the West is now also seen by Afghans like Mr Khan as having connived at a fraudulent election, it will further stoke their enmity and drive more recruits into the arms of the Taliban.
Mr Khan's voice rose and he clutched at his prayer beads as he described how he and other Pashtun tribesmen from Uruzgan, Helmand and Kandahar had made the dangerous journey to Kabul, the capital, to press their complaints - both to Abdullah Abdullah, their chosen candidate and Mr Karzai's closest rival, and to the official election watchdog.
After saying goodbye to his family in their rural village he climbed into a minibus and left the southern province of Zabul on roads notorious for homemade bombs and Taliban checkpoints, to make his way to Kandahar airport.
His province is an insurgent stronghold where fighters warned that anyone caught voting would have their fingers cut off. Too dangerous for international observers or those of rival candidates, the polling stations were at the mercy of the Karzai regime's police and officials.
Mr Khan said: "The ballot boxes have been to those districts, but there were no observers. It was just the district governor and his people carrying the boxes, and they filled the boxes themselves." His own son, 36-year-old Daud, tried to vote for Dr Abdullah, and was beaten by the district chief's henchmen, he claimed. "The police chiefs were from them, there was nothing we could do." Mr Khan described how ballot boxes from polling stations in small settlements came back packed with thousands of votes, all for the incumbent. In one polling station, a single man had used the registration cards supposed to have gone to 700 women to cast their votes.
A Karzai supporter was found carrying a potent cleaning fluid, said to be able to remove the indelible ink used to mark voters' fingers.
It is men like Mr Khan who decide how their people vote in the deeply traditional south of Afghanistan. Elders choose which horse to back as they balance previous loyalties with competing offers of jobs, or preferential treatment, from rival candidates.
In a country where the president rules by patronage and has nearly every plum job and contract in his gift, many opt to back the most powerful candidate. But Mr Khan and his fellow elders had decided that lack of progress made by Hamid Karzai's government meant they would vote for his closest rival.
Once a decision is made the villagers and tribesmen beneath the elders are expected to fall into line and vote accordingly. "This isn't the kind of country where mum, dad and their children discuss policies around the kitchen table the night before and then all go out and vote for different people," said one senior United Nations official.
Voting against the president carries risks, with every government official and police chief a Karzai appointee - and so does complaining about fraud. But Mr Khan said he felt he had no choice.
"The only thing we had left was our vote," he said. "We thought people couldn't take our votes, but they did." Now his complaint lies - along with more than 2,100 others - in the hands of the unassuming, white-haired Canadian appointed to run Afghanistan's Electoral Complaints Commission.
An academic specialising in elections and former director of the Afghan office of the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, Grant Kippen knows the fiery pressures of Afghanistan's young democracy.
When he refereed complaints in the country's 2005 parliamentary elections, supporters of a banned candidate protested outside his office shouting "Death to Kippen!"
His team of 200 investigators are now urgently sifting evidence as the political temperature rises, and have identified more than 600 complaints which they deem potentially "material to the outcome". They have not divulged the total number of disputed votes at stake, but will begin ruling on them early this week and have the power to strike out individual suspect votes, ballot boxes or even all the votes from a suspect polling station.
As votes have gradually been counted over the last three weeks, Mr Karzai - who at first appeared only a little ahead of Abdullah - has steadily drawn ahead and is widely expected to win outright, with more than 50 per cent, when they are all tallied. In that case a second round run-off between the two leading candidates would be unnecessary.
Mr Karzai's campaign team has said he could reach 70 per cent. But anything approaching that would contradict opinion polls that put Mr Karzai at around 44 per cent just before the election, sharpening the sense that the election was rigged.
Almost more problematic would be an outright win by a margin narrower than the total number of officially disputed votes.
All eyes would then turn on Mr Kippen and his staff.
"There'll be huge pressure on them," said one analyst. "Everyone will expect them to deal with what everyone knows happened. But just because everyone knows there was massive fraud in an area doesn't mean they will be able to prove it." Mr Kippen chuckled when asked if he was under pressure. His staff had put themselves under pressure to do a good job he said.
He said: "In some ways it's boring. We have got complaints and we have just got to do a job and work through them." A final outcome cannot be officially confirmed until Mr Kippen's team has finished its work - and the deluge of complaints they face risks delaying the result, extending the political limbo already gripping the country.
Officials now admit that the original Sept 17 deadline for confirming the result looks unlikely to be met.
Each further day would delay a second round if one is needed, from the planned date of Oct 1 towards the cusp of the harsh Afghan winter.
"That's a tentative working date," Mr Kippen said. "We are going to do our best to meet that.
"But given the number of complaints we have and we are still early in the investigations, it's going to take some time to see how we are going to get through this." Richard Holbrooke, US super envoy to the region, reportedly provoked an "explosive" reaction from Mr Karzai last month when he suggested a second round could give much needed legitimacy to the result.
Instead, as the counting drags on, Mr Karzai has made overtures to leading rivals, offering "tea and a job" to Dr Abdullah and to Ashraf Ghani, the former finance minister and World Bank executive who is likely to come in third.
Ustad Atta Mohammed Noor, the wealthy governor of Balkh province who bankrolled Dr Abdullah, has been courted by Amrullah Saleh, Mr Karzai's chief of the Afghan intelligence services, according to Afghan newspaper reports.
Dr Abdullah himself has said he will never make a deal and has denied being under international pressure to work with Mr Karzai. He has said he will not accept a Karzai win in a fraudulent election. As tensions rise, he has urged his supporters to remain calm, responsible and patient, while hinting he may not be able to prevent unrest if the election is stolen.
Afghans, who have seen three decades of fighting, are once again buying weapons in the fear protests could erupt.
One gun dealer north of Kabul told The Sunday Telegraph that his sales of Kalashnikovs had risen by a fifth in the past two months.
Prices had risen 40 per cent from 13,000 Afghani (£160) to 18,000 (£220). "People just want them for their homes. It's for the election," he said.
Sayed Ishaq Gailani, a member of parliament for the southern province of Paktika, who backed Dr Abdullah, said the election would be stolen.
He said: "They will announce a provisional vote for Mr Karzai of 75 or 80 per cent and then they will send it to the complaints office.
"There, they will subtract 10 or 12 per cent to allow for fraud and then announce Mr Karzai is the winner.
"If so, people will definitely come out on the streets. They will not demonstrate peacefully like they did in Iran." As Mr Khan prepared to make the return journey to Zabul, Dr Abdullah said he was trying to diffuse the tension, but the people of Afghanistan were "boiling".
He said: "Since the fraud is quiet clear and widespread, people are concerned and people are left alone and they are not listened to and they are not given their rights." Asked for assurances there would be no violence, he would only reply darkly: "I am not responsible for everything and anything that is coming."
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Six civilians killed in NATO raid: Afghan official
Sun Sep 6, 8:44 am ET
KUNDUZ, Afghanistan (AFP) – Six civilians, including a child, were among 54 people killed in a NATO air strike in Afghanistan that targeted two fuel tankers hijacked by the Taliban, a local official said Sunday.
The driver of one of the trucks and his son were killed separately by the Taliban, Mohammad Omar, the governor of Kunduz province, told AFP by telephone.
"According to our findings 56 people were killed. Forty-eight men were identified as armed while the rest were civilians. Fifteen were wounded, including two Taliban," said Mohammad Omar, the governor of Kunduz province.
Of the six civilians who perished in the raid, one was a child killed inside one of the tankers, he added.
Afghan officials have given different death tolls related to the Taliban hijacking and NATO air strike, and precise figures are difficult to clarify.
"All I know is that 56 were killed and 15 were wounded. I don't have the report of how many of them were civilians," Kunduz provincial police chief General Abdul Razak Yaqubi told AFP.
The strike destroyed two fuel tankers hijacked by gunmen as villagers were clamouring to collect free fuel at the Taliban's invitation, witnesses said.
While officials insisted most of the dead were militants, President Hamid Karzai, who is leading the count in controversial elections, said any targeting of civilians was unacceptable and sent a delegation to investigate.
On Saturday, the commander of US and NATO troops in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, promised a full investigation into Friday's air strike, in which Karzai's office said 90 people were killed and wounded.
Police and the interior ministry earlier said up to 56 Taliban died and 10 more wounded, including a 12-year-old child, when a NATO air raid targeted the tankers in Kunduz after they were hijacked en route from Tajikistan.
"As commander of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), nothing is more important than the safety and protection of the Afghan people," McChrystal said in the 57-second video shown on private television.
"I take this possible loss of life or injury to innocent Afghans very seriously," he said. The incident renewed an outcry over civilian casualties by Western troops during the eight-year war.
McChrystal said NATO "launched an attack against what we believed to be a Taliban target" early Friday.
"I have ordered a complete investigation into the reasons and results of this attack, which I will share with the Afghan people," he said.
ISAF "has also offered emergency medical help and assistance to those who might have been injured," he said, shying away from confirming casualties.
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NATO Begins Investigation of Deadly Airstrike on Fuel Tanks in Afghanistan
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS via The New York Times September 6, 2009
KUNDUZ, Afghanistan (AP) — Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top United States and NATO commander in Afghanistan, visited the site of an airstrike on fuel tankers hijacked by the Taliban, as the alliance began an investigation on Saturday into how many civilians were among the scores who died.
General McChrystal waded through knee-high water to inspect the blackened tankers, which exploded when an American F-15E Strike Eagle jet, answering a call from German forces, dropped two 500-pound bombs. He also visited a hospital where the wounded were taken, stooping to talk with a severely burned 10-year-old boy.
A 10-member NATO investigative team, led by Rear Adm. Gregory J. Smith of the United States, flew over the strike site, in the north. The tankers were hit after they became stuck trying to cross the Kunduz River before dawn on Friday.
Local officials have said that 70 people or more died, but it was unclear how many were militants and how many villagers who had rushed to siphon fuel from the trucks. Many bodies were burned beyond recognition, and villagers buried some in a mass grave.
General McChrystal recently tightened rules on airstrikes in the face of Afghan outrage over high civilian casualties in NATO military operations. Questions have been raised about whether the call for the strike complied with those rules.
European leaders gathering in Stockholm on the eve of talks on increasing efforts in Afghanistan sharply criticized the strike, with some calling it a “tragedy” and “a big mistake.”
The deputy United Nations representative to Afghanistan, Peter W. Galbraith, said Saturday that he was “very concerned” about the strike. “Steps must also be taken to examine what happened and why an airstrike was employed in circumstances where it was hard to determine with certainty that civilians were not present,” he said.
General McChrystal discussed the strike with President Hamid Karzai and later told senior commanders that “we need to know what we are hitting,” an aide said, speaking on condition of anonymity under command policy.
Meeting with local Afghan leaders here in the capital of Kunduz Province, the general expressed sympathy for any civilian losses and said the fight against the Taliban should not come at the cost of civilian lives. “I am here today to ensure that we are operating in a way that is truly protecting the Afghan people from all threats,” he said.
German officials said the Taliban might have been planning a suicide attack on a nearby military base using the tankers, which were hijacked carrying NATO fuel supplies from neighboring Tajikistan. The German troops in Kunduz have come under increasing attacks in their area of responsibility in the north, which had largely escaped the scale of violence seen in the east and south of the country.
On Friday, Germany’s defense minister, Franz Josef Jung, said the Taliban had threatened attacks on German troops in advance of Germany’s national elections, set for Sept. 27. Polls show that a majority of Germans want their 4,000 troops home.
“It was a very concrete situation of danger for the Taliban to get hold of two tankers, which meant significant danger for our soldiers,” Mr. Jung said.
The strike’s toll remained unclear on Saturday. Germany said that 57 fighters were killed and that no civilians were believed to have been in the area at the time, based on surveillance aircraft. But NATO’s secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, acknowledged that some civilians may have died.
The local governor, Mohammad Omar, said 72 people were killed and 15 wounded. He said about 30 of the dead were insurgents. The rest were probably fighters or relatives, he said.
NATO statements said two American service members died in Afghanistan on Saturday, one in the east and one in the west. Poland’s Defense Ministry reported that a Polish soldier had been killed and five were wounded by a roadside bomb in the east on Friday.
On Sunday, an American service member was killed in an insurgent attack in the east, United States forces said. The military did not provide further details.
Violence has soared across much of Afghanistan since President Obama ordered 21,000 more American troops here this year to curb the Taliban, which has regrouped since American-led forces drove them from power in November 2001.
Meanwhile, there were further delays in the country’s disputed presidential election. Partial results from 60 percent of polling places show Mr. Karzai ahead but still shy of the more than 50 percent needed to avoid a runoff. More results had been scheduled for release on Saturday, but the electoral commission announced a delay.
One of the main challengers, Abdullah Abdullah, said he had appealed directly to the commission to stop announcing preliminary results because of “highly suspicious numbers” in tallies released so far.
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Afghan airstrike based on single informant
KABUL, Afghanistan, Sept. 6 (UPI) -- A NATO airstrike that killed 125 people in Afghanistan, many said to be civilians, was guided by a single informant, military officials say.
An account provided to NATO officials from German forces contends that because an Afghan informant insisted everyone gathered around a pair of hijacked fuel trucks stuck in the mud were Taliban insurgents, a deadly airstrike at Haji Sakhi Dedby was ordered by a German commander, The Washington Post reported Sunday.
The newspaper said a NATO fact-finding team determined Saturday that at least 24, but perhaps more, of the 125 killed in the bombing were civilians. Survivors hospitalized at nearby Kunduz and in Kabul said villagers went to site because they thought they could get free fuel.
The Post said none of the survivors disputed that Taliban fighters were at the scene, but accounts varied about how many civilians were killed along with them.
The newspaper said the revelation that the airstrike was ordered on the basis of a single informant's intelligence seemed to go against a directive issued by the new commander of the NATO mission in Afghanistan, U.S. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, aimed at reducing civilian casualties.
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Deadly air raid in Kunduz to fertilize Taliban propaganda
by Abdul Haleem
KABUL, Sept. 5 (Xinhua) -- NATO's deadly air strike against suspected Taliban insurgents in Kunduz province north of Afghanistan early Friday, which left over 100 people dead and injured, would strengthen Taliban propaganda as the outfit has described all the victims were innocent civilians.
In the incident, according to provincial police chief Abdul Razaq Yaqubi 56 people were killed and 12 others got wounded all of them Taliban insurgents. However, provincial governor Mohammad Omar says more than 90 people including rebels and locals lost their lives in the air raid. A Taliban commander Mullah Abdul Rahman, according to local officials, is among the dead bodies.
Among the injured men hospitalized in Kunduz province, Shafiullah said that Taliban militants asked villagers at mid night to fetch oil and he went to Omarkhil village to take oil suddenly came under bomb attack and wounded.
Meantime, Taliban outfit in a statement released to media in south Afghanistan said that "air strikes of crusaders brutally martyred dozens of innocent civilians in Hajji Abdul Rahman village of Ali Abad district Friday night."
The bloody air raid, according to governor Omar, took place after Taliban hijacked two oil tankers and distributed the fuel to locals at mid night.
In retaliation, NATO-international Security Assistance Force (ISAF) raided the place where the militants distributed oil from the tankers leaving scores dead.
The villagers, according to Taliban statement, were busy in fetching oil from the two tankers when they came under air raids and suffered huge casualties.
"American aircrafts carried out heavy air raids at maid night and martyred some 150 villagers including children and teenagers," Taliban outfit stressed in the statement.
The deadliest air raid since beginning of this year has taken place in the wake of change in military strategy where the new commander of the NATO-led ISAF forces in Afghanistan General Stanley McChrystal on the assumption of charge in June promised to avoid harming none-combatants.
In a sharp reaction to the bloody incident, the commander of more than 100,000 troops in Afghanistan, besides expressing concern, promised thorough investigation into the case.
United Nations also expressed concern over the killing of civilians in Kunduz, saying the body would send an investigating team there, Deputy to UN special envoy Peter Galbraith said in a statement.
"Steps must also be taken to examine what happened and why an airstrike was employed in circumstances where it was hard to determine with certainty that civilians were not present," the UN diplomat stressed in the statement released here.
"The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan is sending a team to look into the situation," the statement further said.
Inflicting casualties on civilians in the past had triggered protest demonstrations and promoted President Hamid Karzai to ask international troops coordinate operations with Afghan authorities.
Afghan leader has insisted that killing civilians would neither strengthen Afghan government nor serve the war on terror.
Taliban in the statement described the incident as "an intentional massacre" and adding that the "Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (the name of Taliban ousted regime)" besides sharing the grief of its countrymen wants all human right organizations and the UN to condemn it.
Taliban-linked violent incidents and military operations had left over 6,000 people with more than 2,100 civilians dead in 2008 while a UN report release in June spoke of 24 percent increase in civilian casualties this year in battle-plagued Afghanistan.
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Taliban attacks in north Afghanistan spike
Jason Motlagh The Washington Times September 6, 2009
KUNDUZ, Afghanistan | Eight years ago, this northern flood plain was the scene of the Taliban's last stand.
Now, it's the locus of a resurgent militancy in a region that is fast becoming a new front in the Afghan war - with troubling consequences for coalition supply lines and U.S. allies whose will to stay and fight is being tested by rising casualties.
Over the past 18 months, the strength and frequency of Taliban attacks on Afghan and international forces in the north has spiked sharply, to the alarm of those who have long taken security in the northern provinces for granted.
On Saturday, a bomb hit a German military convoy in Kunduz, wounding four troops, the Associated Press reported. On Friday, a coalition air strike targeted a group of militants who had stolen two fuel tankers, killing at least 70 people, including an undetermined number of civilians.
Gen. Stanley McChrystal, head of U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan, inspected the site of the strike on Saturday and also visited a hospital, where he stopped to talk to a severely burned boy.
"From what I have seen today and going to the hospital, it's clear to me that there were some civilians that were harmed at the site," Gen. McChrystal told reporters in Kunduz, according to the AP.
According to local residents, many of those killed and injured were villagers who rushed to siphon fuel from the tankers. A NATO team began an investigation into the incident Saturday.
A senior U.S. military officer, speaking on the condition of anonymity owing to the sensitivity of his post, said the Kunduz region is "cutting edge" and "more of a concern than it has ever been."
The officer, who has served in Afghanistan and now tracks the war from the Pentagon, added: "All options are on the table, and people above me are definitely looking at development resources" as new U.S. personnel come into the country.
U.S. and Afghan officials say that insurgent ranks are being boosted by southern militants responding to increased pressure there, as well as by a limited number of foreigners - Uzbeks, Arabs, Chechens and Pakistanis - who have filtered across borders to widen the conflict.
"We are facing a chain of very serious problems here. The Taliban is challenging us," the governor of Kunduz province, Mohammad Omar, told The Washington Times.
One of the militants' main objectives, he said, is to squeeze the critical highway resupply route from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan that has assumed greater importance as the Pakistani border crossing grows more dangerous.
This past spring, Mullah Mohammed Omar, the elusive one-eyed leader of the Taliban, was reported to have mobilized extra fighters to ramp up disruptions against northern transport convoys.
Analysts say the Taliban strategy may also stir up tensions in the ethnically diverse region between the Tajik majority and the Pashtuns, who account for most of the militants.
The militants' main foothold is the Chahar Dara district, a Pashtun enclave just 18 miles west of Kunduz city. German troops based in the region are increasingly being targeted with roadside ambushes and improvised explosive devices (IEDs). In Friday's incident, German officials called in the air strikes out of concern that the hijacked fuel tankers would be used for a suicide attack on their base. A U.S. F-15E Strike Eagle jet responded by dropping two 500-pound bombs on the tankers.
Seven members of the coalition forces have been killed in the region in the last two months. Improved technologies and coordination among the militants have led officials to think that al Qaeda has had a direct hand in the violence.
"The insurgents appear to be well-resourced - better trained and led than in the past, when efforts appeared ad hoc," said one Western aid official who spoke on the condition that he not be named to avoid jeopardizing his security.
Locals, meanwhile, are forced to provide militants with food, shelter and money that may total as much as a quarter of their farming profits. Rolling checkpoints harass motorists on the outskirts of Kunduz city.
The absence of governance and a dire shortage of police are partly to blame for the violence. The district chief has said that he has fewer than 30 men to safeguard 80,000 residents. As a result, they are under the de facto control of about 3,000 militants who often travel in convoys of pickup trucks.
A 23-year-old district resident who gave his name as Farhad said the militants typically move in groups of 10 to 12 but have been appearing in his village almost daily and in larger numbers.
Because some 15,000 Taliban surrendered when the U.S. and the Northern Alliance, a U.S.-allied Afghan militia, defeated them in 2001, Farhad added, many suspect that the Taliban are now supported by the U.S. and its allies to justify their continued presence - a view not uncommon in the Afghan backcountry.
Attacks surged in the run-up to the Aug. 20 presidential election, according to local police chief Gen. Mohammed Razaq Yaqubi. Supply vehicles were repeatedly hit en route to the headquarters of a German provincial reconstruction team. Incumbent President Hamid Karzai's running mate, warlord Gen. Mohammed Qasim Fahim, narrowly escaped an ambush in the area, and errant rockets were fired into the city on the day of the vote.
In Chahar Dara, people were "so frightened of Taliban threats that almost no one voted," said Abdul Wahed Omar Khil, 25, another district resident. "People did not want to even leave their homes that day." Two other militant-contested districts were similarly affected.
In Baghlan province, a Pashtun stronghold south of Kunduz that is currently the second thrust of the northern insurgency, running gunbattles shut down 14 polling sites and killed a district police chief and at least 21 Taliban fighters, local officials say, in the worst election-day violence nationwide.
Such trends have alarmed Pentagon officials faced with record casualties as fighting grinds on in the southern provinces amid decreasing support for the war in the U.S.
Gen. McChrystal last week presented a strategic review to NATO and U.S. military leaders focusing on increasing protection for civilian populations and partnering with Afghan security forces. No formal request for troop increases was included, but one is expected soon.
While thousands of American reinforcements have poured into the south, other countries with troops serving in Afghanistan have refused to deploy there.
Until recently, Germans were barred from combat operations, to the annoyance of American military planners. But the spike in attacks has precipitated a change in their rules of engagement.
In July, the Germans embarked on their biggest military offensive since World War II to clear Chahar Dara. Residents and local Taliban leaders said the sweep temporarily displaced militants but that they returned as soon as the German troops headed back to their base.
Back in Germany, the war's unpopularity has become a contentious political issue, with opposition leaders calling for a timetable for withdrawal from Afghanistan ahead of German parliamentary elections at the end of this month. Some suspect the Taliban of actively trying to exploit this divide.
Deteriorating security also has halted development work, with many aid workers leaving the region. The need to subcontract work to Afghans - and Taliban extortion - have resulted in a loss of "quality control," according to the Western aid official.
One Western diplomat, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that earlier this year foreign staff would not think twice about traveling around inside Kunduz. That has changed.
During a visit this weekend, city market stalls bustled with activity as the sun dipped and the end of the Ramadan fast approached. Yet nearly all those interviewed would not give their names for fear of reprisal.
"The Taliban come and go from my village as they please and would kill me for talking with a foreigner," said one man fashioning tin pails by hand on a back street. "They are getting stronger here."
And bolder. Later that same day, this reporter passed what appeared to be a group of Taliban militants huddled alongside the main road east out of Kunduz city.
When the reporter arrived at a police outpost a mile farther up, officers were hastily commandeering a pickup truck packed with about a dozen locals. They locked and loaded their machine guns in the flatbed and sped off.
A radio call had been received moments earlier that militants were spotted down the road.
Minutes after they responded, a pair of rocket-propelled grenades were fired at a German patrol convoy in the south of the town, followed by small-arms fire. Across town, an IED was detonated, killing four children and wounding a policeman.
This article was reported with a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
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Leaders to call for Afghanistan conference
By Jean Eaglesham in London, Matthew Green in Kabul and Bertrand Benoit in Berlin September 6 2009 17:57 Financial Times
Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, and Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, are expected to call for an international political conference on Afghanistan to co-ordinate support and resources for the US-led mission there.
The conference will be designed to bring together a newly elected Afghan government with Nato, the United Nations and “other key allies” to agree a detailed strategy for 2010, a UK government insider said last night. “The aim is about ensuring strong international backing [for the war], with a key focus on resources.”
Mr Brown and Ms Merkel are expected to announce the initiative at a joint press conference in Berlin on Sunday night. The two leaders, together with Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, will this week write to Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general, who will organise the event. The conference is expected to be held early next year, after the new Afghan government has been formed, with London and Kabul both touted as possible venues.
The move follows growing public disquiet in a number of Nato countries about the cost and effectiveness of the eight-year long fight against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. Concerns about the levels of casualties suffered by troops have been exacerbated by claims of fraud and ballot-rigging in the election.
The Afghan election authorities on Sunday annulled some suspicious election results, under pressure from Western powers scrambling to salvage the credibility of a process marred by allegations of massive rigging.
The Independent Election Commission announced its decision as it issued fresh preliminary results that showed President Hamid Karzai remains just shy of the 50 per cent of the vote he needs to avoid a run-off with Abdullah Abdullah, the former foreign minister who is now running second in the results.
Western diplomats have been lobbying the commission not to include suspect votes that could inflame opposition unrest by swinging the first-round contest in favour of Mr Karzai before complaints of serious fraud have been resolved.
A source in the Commission, whose chairman was appointed by Mr Karzai, said it had on Sunday planned to issue enough results to put the president beyond the 50 per cent mark.
But it backed down under pressure from international officials. The prospect of an election dispute that leads to unrest or produces an administration with no genuine popular mandate would hinder a new US strategy aimed at convincing the population to side with the government against the Taliban.
Ms Merkel on Sunday came under fire from opposition parties over her government’s military deployment in Afghanistan, which is opposed by most Germans. Gregor Gysi, parliamentary head of the radical Left party, criticised the air strike against hijacked tankers ordered by German troops in Kunduz province on Friday. Mr Gysi called the resulting deaths of civilians “unjustified and inexcusable.”
The British prime minister was on Friday forced onto the defensive, after Eric Joyce, a junior minister, resigned in protest at the government’s handling of the conflict and its treatment of troops.
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IEDs wreak havoc among forces in Afghanistan
by Lynne O'donnell – Sun Sep 6, 1:24 am ET
KABUL (AFP) – Cheap home-made bombs are exacting a high price from the world's most sophisticated armies battling Afghanistan's Taliban insurgency and have become the pivot on which the eight-year war is turning.
The weapon of choice is killing foreign troops in record numbers and pushing Western public support for the war in Afghanistan into reverse.
As Taliban tactics sow terror, the 100,000 international troops operating under US and NATO command and with Afghan forces, are struggling to adjust their strategy to take on the insurgents as their reach expands.
"The insurgents have moved to terrorist-style tactics because they realise the high pay-off of IEDs (improvised explosive devices) and suicide bombings," said General Jim Dutton, deputy chief of NATO forces in Afghanistan.
"This is a quick win for them and we are putting a lot of work into dealing with it," he said in a recent interview with AFP.
Experts say the bombs are cheap and easy to make, are rigged to timers or remote controls, can be detonated when vehicles drive over pressure plates and are increasingly linked into a chain of bombs to cause maximum damage.
Bomb-makers cannibalise mortar shells and old mines, which are easy to find in the war-ravaged countryside, or jerry-rig mobile phones to crude explosives such as fertiliser and diesel fuel, or batteries.
Roadside bombs were used to great effect by insurgents in Iraq, where the impact on morale was as devastating as the death toll.
As in Iraq, Taliban insurgents are constantly modifying their designs to stay one step ahead of detection including disrupting radio signals that can detonate IEDs by remote control.
"You can't buy an IED," said a security company executive in Kabul. "The Taliban will use whatever they can to make a bang and cause problems."
NATO issues almost daily reports on IED deaths, principally in southern Taliban strongholds but increasingly in previously peaceful provinces.
The bombs cause horrific injuries to survivors -- blowing off limbs, shredding torsos after cutting through military vehicles and body armour worn by soldiers and journalists who travel with them.
Western governments spending billions to support the Afghan government have highlighted IEDs as the biggest challenge facing troops deployed to Taliban hotspots, especially in southern Helmand and Kandahar.
So far this year, more than 300 foreign troops have died in Afghanistan, according to the independent icasualties.org website, making 2009 the deadliest year of the eight-year war.
By August last year, IEDs accounted for 75 percent of all "enemy initiated action" in Afghanistan, according to the Pentagon's Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization (JIEDDO) set up to tackle the scourge.
The high casualty figures have seen US and British public approval for the war plunge as politicians and military leaders scramble for new ideas to combat the resurgent militants.
The expert deployment by the Taliban of unconventional weapons has stymied international forces, still waging conventional warfare, said a former US army officer who spoke on condition of anonymity.
"The enemy is adapting and evolving faster than (Western forces) can keep up and so the Americans and Brits are forced to literally inch forward in their operations to take territory from the bad guys because those roadside bombs could be buried anywhere," he said.
Countering IEDs is part of the new strategy put forward by the commander of US and NATO troops in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, in a review of the Afghan war handed to his superiors last week.
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown on Friday said "offensive operations are focusing more on countering the IED threat".
In a speech in London, Brown said foreign troop deaths "are almost twice as high as this time last year, and three quarters of these are now due to IEDs".
"Having failed in 2006 and 2007 to defeat international forces by conventional means, the Taliban have more than doubled their IED attacks over the past year," he said
"Already this year we have deployed 200 specialist counter-IED troops" to Afghanistan, he said.
"We are sending another 200 specialist forces and new equipment to find and defuse the IEDs and identify and target the networks who lay them."
McChrystal is expected to request more US troops for deployment to Afghanistan by the end of the year, to accelerate training of Afghan forces as well as specialists in IEDs, which include vehicle bombs and suicide car bombs.
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EU commits troops to Afghanistan, but calls for improvements in Kabul
Deutsche Welle - Sep 06 2:01 AM
The European Union has promised that its troops will stay the course in Afghanistan. However, officials called on Afghan politicians to help bring an end to corruption, human right abuses and the narcotics trade.
European Union officials meeting in Stockholm called for greater engagement on all sides to bring greater stability to Afghanistan. While acknowledging its own shortcomings, the Swedish EU presidency also called on the Afghan administration to up its game.
"We are determined to increase pressure on ourselves, as well as on the Afghan government," Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt said.
Sweden wants the international community and the government in Kabul to "prioritze objectives, especially in those areas which have seen limited progress, such as governance, corruption and human rights". The text published by the Swedish government also stressed that preserving women's rights in Afghanistan should be an important goal to pursue.
Bildt's most immediate call to the government in Kabul however, was to "cleanse" the results of August's presidential election of any serious fraud allegations, as questions over the vote's validity continue to marr the poll.
Both incumbent Hamid Karzai and his main rival Abdullah Abdullah have claimed outright victory in the ballot - though a run-off vote between the pair appears the most likely scenario - and Abdullah has repeatedly accused the Karzai camp of vote-rigging.
EU admits shortcomings
The EU lawmakers also criticized its own failures in Afghanistan, especially its attempts to train the Aghan police forces. Currently, only 265 of the planned 400 trainers have been stationed in the country, a shortfall that Danish foreign minister Per Stig Moller described as "unacceptable".
The meeting was also overshadowed by a NATO attack, authorized by German commanders, near the Afghan city of Kunduz, which Afghan officials now claim killed at least 150 people - both militants and civilians.
"This was a tragedy," Bildt said. "I do not think we will win this war by killing. It might be necessary to kill opponents at times, but I think we will win this war by protecting the population." Bildt also said that peace and state-building, not military means, were the path to victory in Afghanistan.
Afghan authorities must improve
Despite admitting to failings of their own, the EU nations also made it clear that they expected more from the government in Kabul. The Swedish statement made it clear that the international community felt that not enough internal progress had been made considering the years of financial and military support from the West.
Acknowledging progress - like the marked reduction in poppy planting and opium production - the ministers called on Afghan politicians to stamp out corruption, step up the fight against the drug trade, and do more to protect human rights, especially those of women.
"If you have an administration that is corrupt then it is very difficult to go on," said EU External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero Waldner. She hinted that European money should not disappear into a black hole, whilst the bloc's chief diplomat Javier Solana called for stricter rules on sending financial aid to the government in Kabul.
Italy's Foreign Minister Franco Frattini suggested a conference with the next Afghan government with a view to signing a "new contract" between the national administration and the international community.
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Target Germany: A Second Front in Afghanistan?
By Jason Motlagh time.com Saturday, Sep. 05, 2009
The details of a deadly coalition airstrike near the city of Kunduz in northern Afghanistan are yet vague. However, the attack has potentially deep military consequences as well as political ramifications far away — in Germany. NATO said in a statement that Friday's airstrike targeted militants who had stolen two fuel tankers the day before. It said that most of those killed were Taliban. But Afghan authorities are saying that civilians who had flocked to collect free fuel at the behest of insurgents died among them — with an overall death toll estimated as high as 70. If true, it would be one of the deadliest attacks on civilians since Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan, issued strict new counterinsurgency rules to minimize civilian deaths.
Civilian losses had fueled anti-American sentiment in many parts of the country. The question of whether or not the attack contradicted McChrystal's guidelines is paramount. But this time, the airstrike attack was called not by U.S. forces but by the Germans overseeing a coalition supply line from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan that has grown more vital in light of threats to the normal route from Pakistan. Indeed, given that the tankers were just three miles from the German heaquarters when attacked, officials believe militants might have been readying to bomb the base. The circumstances of the attack thus highlight a Taliban offensive in the region that is brazenly challenging the resolve of German forces in charge of security — and a debate about the lack of consistency among the multinational coalition forces.
Since the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001, Kunduz province and the region around it had stayed relatively quiet. A German Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) based just outside the eponymous provincial capital coordinated development efforts, building roads and bridges to upgrade infrastructure shattered by the war. The nature of their mission was reflected in rules of engagement: German troops were prohibited from shooting first.
But a surge of roadside bombings and rocket attacks over the past year have taken the lives of several soldiers and shut down projects. Many aid workers have fled. According to one Western diplomat, construction is increasingly going to unsupervised Afghan contractors who are often forced to pay-off militants not to attack them in the districts they now control or contest. More ominously, police in the area say that among the militant ranks are groups of foreign fighters — mostly from Uzbekistan — seeking to open another front against the coalition and the Kabul government, drawing forces away from fighting the Taliban in southern Afghanistan.
Now permitted to initiate the fight, German forces in July launched their biggest operation since World War II to clear Chahar Dara district, a Pashtun insurgent stronghold west of Kunduz city where hundreds of fighters travel openly in pickup trucks and demand money and food villagers. But, says local resident Abdul Matin, 28, the militants simply filtered back into the area when the Germans returned to base and police are nowhere in sight. The insurgent efforts accelerated ahead of the Aug. 20 presidential elections, which the Taliban had vowed to disrupt. President Hamid Karzai's running mate, Mohammad Qasim Fahim, was nearly assassinated in late July while traveling through Kunduz province. Rockets were fired into the city of Kunduz on the day of the vote, though no one was killed. Less than a week later, the head of the provincial justice department died in a bomb attack.
U.S. officials have grumbled about the restrictions observed by Germany and other nations who have contributed troops to the Afghan operation, saying they have not done enough of the fighting. One senior U.S. military officer who has commanded forces in Afghanistan notes the Germans "have not had to fight insurgency or even study it, so [I'm] not sure how culturally ingrained the concept of protecting civilians is to them." With thousands more American troops expected to be deployed once McChrysal makes a formal request to President Obama, the officer indicated that military planners at the Pentagon are "definitely" looking to send reinforcements to help shore up the north.
Lieut. Col. Carsten Spiering, spokesman for Germany's Kunduz PRT, counters that avoiding harm to civilians is a mission priority, even if it means letting the Taliban slip away from time to time. "We take extra care and would rather save the fight for another day than risk killing one innocent person," he says. "That's not how we operate here." (Another German officer, who asked not to be named, insisted the damage done by past U.S. airstrikes has made "everyone's job more difficult").
More and more, however, the fight is coming to the Germans. Some analysts even speculate the Taliban is deliberately ramping up hostilities ahead of the Sept. 27 German election, much as they intimidated Afghan voters last month. On Saturday, a day after the airstrike, three German soldiers were injured when a car packed with explosives exploded next to a passing convoy three miles outside of Kunduz. Indeed, Berlin's continued role in Afghanistan has become the crux of a heated public debate back in Germany. Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the foreign minister bidding to oust chancellor Angela Merkel, has openly called for a timetable for German withdrawal. The chancellor says it's too soon, and she is backed by a defense minister and party ally who expects troops to remain for another five to 10 years. But polls show two-thirds of Germans want them to come home now, a sentiment that is poised to intensify in the wake of the latest airstrike. Taliban losses on the battlefield may yet amount to long-term gain from the war zones of Afghanistan.
This story was reported with a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
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US soldier killed in Afghanistan
Sun Sep 6, 1:15 am ET
KABUL (AFP) – Another US soldier serving in the NATO-led coalition fighting a Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan was killed Sunday in an attack in the east of the country, the military said.
The soldier died following an insurgent attack, said a statement, which gave no further details.
In the past two days, at least three other NATO soldiers have died in the east, where the Taliban and other militants have strongholds, and parts of which share a border with Pakistan.
The year 2009 has already been a record-breaking year for the number of foreign soldiers killed in Afghanistan since the US-led invasion ousted the Taliban following the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.
The independent icasualties website, which tracks military deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq, says more than 300 foreign troops have died here so far this year, compared with a death toll of 294 in all of 2008.
There are more than 100,000 soldiers from NATO and a separate US-led coalition in Afghanistan.
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US to send arms to Afghanistan via Russia
Press TV - Sep 06 2:27 AM
Following a deal between Washington and Moscow, the US military will be able to use Russian airspace to send troops and arms to Afghanistan.
An unnamed US defense official told AFP on Sunday that the flights are legal as of September 6.
"This agreement gives us another option to choose from in our flight planning process," the official said, giving no further details.
US President Barack Obama finalized an agreement in early July with Russian leader Dmitry Medvedev, allowing the US to supply Western forces in Afghanistan via Russia.
The accord permits up to 4,500 military flights per year.
Russia previously had only allowed Washington to ship non-lethal military supplies across its territory by train.
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Too much has been gained in Afghanistan to exit now
Debra J. Saunders Sunday, September 6, 2009 San Francisco Chronicle
As he campaigned for the presidency, Sen. Barack Obama argued that Afghanistan should become "the central front in the battle against terrorism." Obama has delivered on that issue. U.S. troop levels have more than doubled since the beginning of a troop buildup first begun under President George W. Bush.
The price for that promise is not low.
For the moment, more troops mean more combat. As Kimberly Kagan, president of the Institute for the Study of War, noted at a Brookings Institute event last month, "As those new troops come in, as we have seen, violence will go up. They did so in Iraq. They will do so in Afghanistan because we are going into areas that the enemy effectively has controlled. So we mustn't conflate or confuse a rise in violence with success or failure."
But others see the rise in casualties - 51 U.S. troops were killed in combat in August, the deadliest month since the beginning of the war eight years ago - and charges of ballot fraud during the August presidential and provincial council elections as signs of failure.
At a White House news conference Monday, CBS News' Chip Reid asked White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, "Is it possible that you're simply losing control in Afghanistan and it's going to continue to spiral out of control?"
Also last week, conservative Washington Post columnist George F. Will cited the rise in U.S. troop casualties and unquestioned corruption in President Hamid Karzai's government, then called for Obama to reverse course in Afghanistan. Will wrote, U.S. "forces should be substantially reduced to serve a comprehensive revised policy: America should do only what can be done from offshore, using intelligence, drones, cruise missiles, air strikes, and small, potent special forces units, concentrating on the porous 1,500-mile border with Pakistan, a nation that actually matters."
The very notion of recommitting the NATO strategy in Afghanistan to unmanned drones goes against the philosophy of the top NATO commander, U.S. Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, whose strategy calls for winning Afghan hearts and minds, in part by reducing collateral deaths from air strikes. As the Washington Post's David Ignatius reported, McChrystal's classified report to the president on Afghanistan includes the headline: "Protecting the people is the mission. The conflict will be won by persuading the population, not by destroying the enemy."
McChrystal also is working to professionalize Afghanistan's inadequate military and police forces - much as Gen. David Petraeus worked to beef up Iraq's national security forces.
On the left, the pressure to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan is even greater. At a Chronicle editorial board meeting Wednesday, Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Hillsborough, complained about the cost of the war and the lack of an exit strategy. "To me," Speier added, "Pakistan is almost a greater threat."
Fariba Nawa, a freelance journalist based in the Bay Area and dual citizen of Afghanistan and the United States, said the Will/Speier emphasis on Pakistan is "offensive to me - let's go to Pakistan, a country that really matters." They don't get it, she added, "Pakistan and Afghanistan are connected."
"My gut feeling as an Afghan is that if the U.S. troops leave again," Nawa told me, then civil war will return, women will lose precious freedoms, aid workers will be killed, and Afghanistan will return to its pre-9/11 state.
Or as Brookings Institute senior fellow Bruce Riedel argued, "We abandoned Afghanistan twice before. We know what happens. The first time we got Sept. 11 and the al Qaeda base in Afghanistan. The second time, we got the mess we're in here."
If U.S. troops leave, Riedel opined, "The triumph of jihadism or the jihadism of al Qaeda and the Taliban in driving NATO out of Afghanistan would resonate through the Islamic world."
Nawa cites Afghan support for the NATO mission. She sees more people in school, relatives working at good jobs and women making advances in cities. "If we leave," she cautioned, then you're going to have all that progress gone to waste."
Nawa has worked in Iraq and Afghanistan. At a Commonwealth Club event in March, Nawa noted that unlike in Iraq, most Afghans supported U.S. intervention from day one. "They don't consider the U.S. being there an occupation," she said.
And: "They want the U.S. to stay and to help them build their country."
Think of the damage to America's reputation were the Will view to prevail. A precipitous pullout would cement this country's reputation as an unreliable ally that helicopters into countries with money and promises, then rotates out when the body count rises, leaving behind those who have risked their families by helping our mission.
If Washington were to bolt now, then what country in the world would have reason to trust us?
As unpleasant as the situation in Afghanistan is, this is no time to go squishy.
You can e-mail Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@sfchronicle.com.
This article appeared on page F - 6 of the San Francisco Chronicle
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The things Mr Brown did not say about Afghanistan
The British army could be broken by another humiliation like the retreat Tony Blair precipitated in Basra
Andrew Rawnsley The Observer, Sunday 6 September 2009
In Eric Joyce's noisy letter of resignation as an aide to the defence secretary, the Labour MP wrote that he had chosen this moment to quit because it "seems to me the least disruptive time to do that". This is not at all how it seemed to Gordon Brown who felt very disrupted indeed. The prime minister stomped around Number 10 angrily demanding: "Why wasn't I told? Why wasn't he stopped?" Major Joyce held the insignificant political rank of PPS, but his decision to tear off his stripes resonated because he was previously characterised by his über-loyalty and is unique among Labour MPs in having any recent experience of serving as an army officer. The galloping major's resignation was not the prelude that the prime minister wanted for his supposedly definitive speech on Afghanistan.
It was a speech which tried to explain what success might look like, but was inevitably haunted by the failures that forced him to address the subject. The history of this conflict has been told in terms of triumph and disaster, those twin impostors of Kipling's poetry. Many of the current difficulties flow from the deluded triumphalism of eight years ago when, in the wake of 9/11, the Americans with British help toppled Mohammed Omar's diabolical Taliban regime. The rapidity of that victory appeared to confound all the dire warnings about Afghanistan being a graveyard for foreign armies. One delirious American neocon wrote: "With less than a month to prepare, American troops and aircraft had charged into this country, overthrown its government, destroyed its terrorist bases and hunted down their enemies, while losing only 15 of their own to enemy action." Never had regime change seemed such a piece of cake.
Just as in Iraq, there was scant attention paid to the sequel: the tough, expensive and long-term challenge of conflict resolution and nation building. "We will not walk away," promised Tony Blair before the west did just that. The Germans, having promised to take responsibility for training the Afghan police, sent a grand total of 17 officers to do the job. "US forces will not stay," George Bush declared to a meeting of his National Security Council on the very day that the Taliban fled Kabul. Michael Boyce, the then chief of the British armed forces, did his best to scratch together a Nato peace-keeping force, but it was never adequate for the task and lingered there without clear military or political objectives.
The drug traffickers continued to ply their trade. Large swaths of Afghanistan were left under the control of war lords. Ordinary Afghans, fearful that international forces were going to leave them to the mercy of the Taliban as it became resurgent, were given no incentive to commit to the building of a stable Afghan state. The Karzai regime became increasingly corrupt and dedicated to little more than its own survival.
When Britain deployed to Helmand in the first half of 2006, John Reid made a contribution to the compendium entitled Things Politicians Wish They'd Never Said when he voiced the hope that British troops might return "without firing a shot". Three years and more than 200 casualties later, they are still engaged with the Taliban. The publicly stated objectives of the mission have repeatedly shifted and constant talk of decisive moments has raised public expectations of a successful exit, expectations which have been repeatedly dashed. It was not just the politicians who misunderstood the nature of the task. The top brass of the military lobbied intensively for the deployment to Helmand. Despairing of Iraq, the army thought, as one involved in that decision says, that: "It would be a nice, winnable war."
The hubris of those phrases has now flipped into an equally treacherous despair. I keep reading that Afghanistan is turning into a British "Vietnam". It is also routinely said that Nato must cut its losses and run if it is not to suffer the same fate as the Red Army during the Soviet Union's catastrophic attempt to impose a Marxist dictatorship from Kabul. That defeatism is as glib and dangerous as the earlier delusional triumphalism of the neocons. During the eight-and-a-half years of the Soviet occupation, Russia lost hundreds of aircraft and tanks, in excess of 14,000 troops and more than 50,000 of its forces were wounded. In Vietnam, the Americans suffered more than 50,000 casualties. As I write, the number of American troops killed in Afghanistan is 742 and the number of British is 212. Any loss of life is terrible, but 954 is a long way from 50,000.
It is worth remembering that when the Taliban controlled Afghanistan, only a million children were getting an education, none of them girls. Today, there are more than six million in school, more than two million of them girls. It is an achievement that, thanks to international aid, many more Afghans have access to basic health care. The Taliban have been roundly defeated whenever they have been drawn on to the battlefield which is why they switched to terror tactics. The summer offensive in Helmand, which has won ground but at the cost of a big spike in British casualties, will be a success only if the troops stay to hold and build something for the people. The shortage of soldiers has cramped the ability to secure territory and left their commanders over-reliant on airpower. Misdirected American air strikes have caused mass civilian casualties, like the large numbers killed on the very day Mr Brown made his speech. That is one of the biggest sources of Afghan alienation from the allies.
With a mounting body count, open dissent from some army commanders and no end in sight, it is scarcely surprising that there has been a severe erosion in support for the commitment. It is more remarkable, given the growing unpopularity of the war, that none of the main opposition parties is yet advocating withdrawal. The Conservatives opportunistically seize on every setback, but they are not crying "troops out". In so much as the Tories have a policy, it is to advocate sending more troops in, though they are stumped when asked where they would come from.
The Lib Dems are flirting with a withdrawalist position without actually advocating it. Nick Clegg tells us: "There's a tipping point where we have to ask ourselves whether we can do this job properly, and if we can't do it properly, we shouldn't do it at all." And what is this geostrategist's answer to his own important question? "I don't think we are there yet." That's jolly enlightening from Captain Clegg.
The contribution from Angus Robertson, the leader of the Scottish Nationalists at Westminster, is to call for "a major rethink that looks at all the options". While Major Rethink is doing his pondering, real soldiers are fighting and dying. Eric Joyce argues that "leaving the field to the United States would mean the end of Nato as a meaningful proposition" and he is surely right about that. Yet in his rather confused resignation letter, he urges the prime minister to declare that we are getting out of there pdq.
Britain is fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan for a mixture of reasons: the good, the bad, and the unspoken. An unspoken one is British military pride. Britain's involvement in Iraq had an awful denouement when Tony Blair left such a denuded force of troops in the south that they were forced to retreat to their military base at the airport to leave Basra to the mercy of Iranian-supplied militias and criminal gangs. Authority and order were restored later in Operation Charge of the Knights when the Iraqi army, with the support of the Americans, reclaimed the city. The British army could be broken by another humiliation like that which would make all the previous sacrifice seem in vain.
Another unspoken reason – unspoken, anyway, by Mr Brown – is that a precipitate withdrawal will almost certainly turn an awful situation into a catastrophic one. The Karzai regime is corrupt and compromised. This summer's presidential elections have been flawed and tainted by allegations of fraud. That is bad, but still infinitely preferable to a return to Taliban dictatorship or a civil war. Leaving Afghanistan to descend into absolute chaos would destabilise its nuclear-tipped neighbour, Pakistan, and draw in Iran, India and Russia.
This Mr Brown did not say. What he did say was: "The fundamental reason is to ensure al-Qaida cannot again use this region as a base to plan terrorist attacks across the world." A large proportion of terror plots have originated in the badlands that straddle Afghanistan's southern border with Pakistan. Pakistan is at last making an effort to expel the Taliban from the Swat valley. That will be rendered futile if they and al-Qaida find a safe haven back on the Afghan side of the border. As for an exit strategy, its components ought to include pressure to clean up the government, reaching out to the elements of the insurgency with whom accommodations can sensibly be made and the building up of the Afghan national army, currently less than 100,000 strong. That is a task to which serious attention should have been paid eight years ago. The least convincing suggestion from the prime minister was that this can all be made to happen quite rapidly.
There are still compelling arguments for not abandoning Afghanistan yet again and even Mr Brown managed to muster some of them. But it is going to be protracted, difficult and even a good outcome won't be a perfect one. It is idle to pretend otherwise. The delusion that there are quick fixes and easy exits was what got us into this bloody mess in the first place.
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The Afghanistan Abyss
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF September 6, 2009 The New York Times Op-Ed Columnist
President Obama has already dispatched an additional 21,000 American troops to Afghanistan and soon will decide whether to send thousands more. That would be a fateful decision for his presidency, and a group of former intelligence officials and other experts is now reluctantly going public to warn that more troops would be a historic mistake.
The group’s concern — dead right, in my view — is that sending more American troops into ethnic Pashtun areas in the Afghan south may only galvanize local people to back the Taliban in repelling the infidels.
“Our policy makers do not understand that the very presence of our forces in the Pashtun areas is the problem,” the group said in a statement to me. “The more troops we put in, the greater the opposition. We do not mitigate the opposition by increasing troop levels, but rather we increase the opposition and prove to the Pashtuns that the Taliban are correct.
“The basic ignorance by our leadership is going to cause the deaths of many fine American troops with no positive outcome,” the statement said.
The group includes Howard Hart, a former Central Intelligence Agency station chief in Pakistan; David Miller, a former ambassador and National Security Council official; William J. Olson, a counterinsurgency scholar at the National Defense University; and another C.I.A. veteran who does not want his name published but who spent 12 years in the region, was station chief in Kabul at the time the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, and later headed the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center.
“We share a concern that the country is driving over a cliff,” Mr. Miller said.
Mr. Hart, who helped organize the anti-Soviet insurgency in the 1980s, cautions that Americans just don’t understand the toughness, determination and fighting skills of the Pashtun tribes. He adds that if the U.S. escalates the war, the result will be radicalization of Pashtuns in Pakistan and further instability there — possibly even the collapse of Pakistan.
These experts are not people who crave publicity; I had to persuade them to go public with their concerns. And their views are widely shared among others who also know Afghanistan well.
“We’ve bitten off more than we can chew; we’re setting ourselves up for failure,” said Rory Stewart, a former British diplomat who teaches at Harvard when he is not running a large aid program in Afghanistan. Mr. Stewart describes the American military strategy in Afghanistan as “nonsense.”
I’m writing about these concerns because I share them. I’m also troubled because officials in Washington seem to make decisions based on a simplistic caricature of the Taliban that doesn’t match what I’ve found in my reporting trips to Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Among the Pashtuns, the population is not neatly divisible into “Taliban” or “non-Taliban.” Rather, the Pashtuns are torn by complex aspirations and fears.
Many Pashtuns I’ve interviewed are appalled by the Taliban’s periodic brutality and think they are too extreme; they think they’re a little nuts. But these Pashtuns also admire the Taliban’s personal honesty and religious piety, a contrast to the corruption of so many officials around President Hamid Karzai.
Some Taliban are hard-core ideologues, but many join the fight because friends or elders suggest it, because they are avenging the deaths of relatives in previous fighting, because it’s a way to earn money, or because they want to expel the infidels from their land — particularly because the foreigners haven’t brought the roads, bridges and irrigation projects that had been anticipated.
Frankly, if a bunch of foreign Muslim troops in turbans showed up in my hometown in rural Oregon, searching our homes without bringing any obvious benefit, then we might all take to the hills with our deer rifles as well.
In fairness, the American military has hugely improved its sensitivity, and some commanders in the field have been superb in building trust with Afghans. That works. But all commanders can’t be superb, and over all, our increased presence makes Pashtuns more likely to see us as alien occupiers.
That may be why the troop increase this year hasn’t calmed things. Instead, 2009 is already the bloodiest year for American troops in Afghanistan — with four months left to go.
The solution is neither to pull out of Afghanistan nor to double down. Rather, we need to continue our presence with a lighter military footprint, limited to training the Afghan forces and helping them hold major cities, and ensuring that Al Qaeda does not regroup. We must also invest more in education and agriculture development, for that is a way over time to peel Pashtuns away from the Taliban.
This would be a muddled, imperfect strategy with frustratingly modest goals, but it would be sustainable politically and militarily. And it does not require heavy investments of American and Afghan blood.
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Troops kill 3 Taliban insurgents in W Afghanistan
KABUL, Sept. 6 (Xinhua) -- Gun battle between Afghan forces and Taliban fighters left three insurgents dead in Farah province west of Afghanistan, an official said Sunday.
"Taliban attacked a patrol team of Afghan soldiers in Pushrod district Saturday night and troops returned fire, killing three rebels on spot," Abdul Basir Ghori, the spokesman of Afghan National Army (ANA) in the region, told Xinhua.
One Afghan soldier sustained injuries in the firefight, he added.
Taliban fighters have intensified attacks against government interests as they carried out series of offensive over the past couple of weeks.
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CNN heads to Afghanistan for 9/11 anniversary
Baltimore Sun - Sun Sep 6, 3:37 am ET
Of all the cable and network news channel plans to commemorate the attacks of 9/11 this week with special programs, none seems more timely and relevant than that of CNN. The cable news network has sent a team of correspondents led by anchorman Anderson Cooper into Afghanistan to do a week's worth of nightly broadcasts on the status of the fight against the Taliban. The series starts Monday night and culminates in an hourlong wrap-up at 8 p.m. Saturday.
"Anderson Cooper 360" will broadcast live from Afghanistan, with the help of international correspondent Michael Ware, medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta and CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen.
And lest anyone think this is simply a case of hot spot-hopping anchorman coverage intended to paper over a lack of sustained reporting, CNN is one of the only U.S. news organizations, print or broadcast, with a full-time bureau in Afghanistan, and Cooper himself has been there several times before.
One of the most intriguing aspects of this week's coverage is the multiple lenses through which Cooper's team examines America's war effort. While Cooper and Gupta will be embedded with the U.S. forces, Ware will be on his own in the country, trying to see back "through the fence" at the U.S. military effort, to use the veteran reporter's terminology. Ware, a native Australian, spent more than a decade in the cable channel's Baghdad bureau covering the Iraq conflict.
Pointing to an "evolution in tactics by the Taliban," Cooper described his goals for the week in Afghanistan as "trying to get a status report on the war" and to "get as close to the front as possible, to go out on as many patrols as possible - and really get a sense of how the war's going," the 42-year-old Yale graduate said in a telephone interview last week. "What are the challenges? ... And what should we expect in terms of what's coming down the road? ... We believe very strongly in going to the front lines of any story and seeing for ourselves what's going on."
As for making the trip during the week of 9/11: "The way the United States originally got involved in Afghanistan is because of 9/11, and the same players are still a factor in the region," Cooper said.
"We have been planning this trip for quite a while, and it just happened to be the week of 9/11. And it seemed appropriate. ... And certainly the Obama administration makes a linkage in saying the reason we are there now is to stop al-Qaida and to protect the United States from any further attacks."
Cooper knows there are limits to what U.S. reporters are allowed to "see" while embedded, which is why Ware's contribution is so important.
"As much as we can, we're attempting to see through the fence to the other side - what the American war effort looks like from the Afghan perspective," Ware said last week via telephone from the war-torn country. "To do that, part of what we've done is to share the difficulties of life that the Afghans experience as a result of the insurgency, to get a real taste of what it's like living under the shadow of the Taliban far beyond the hollow rhetoric that you hear coming from the White House."
Ware described what it takes to get that perspective and bring it to American viewers.
"For me, what I find works best in Afghanistan is to operate independent of the U.S. military," Ware said. "You need to attempt to assimilate as much as is conceivably possible. That can be as simple as wearing Afghan dress or growing your beard to a reasonable Afghan length."
Contrasting his method of "surviving" and reporting free of the military in Afghanistan with the way he operated in Iraq, Ware said, "I go and I seek the favor and protection of the local powers that be. In this particular case, it might be the head of the most powerful tribe in the region that happens to support the Taliban. It might also mean seeking the protection of a tribe that's deeply invested in the Karzai government."
Ware, 40, said his contacts built up over the years also play a role in getting an independent view of the war effort.
"Operating independent of the military also means meeting with a senior police commander who's been my friend for seven years. [He] has outlived numerous police chiefs and governors, and he still somehow survives in the turmoil in Kandahar," the former Time magazine Baghdad correspondent says.
"You need to be able to turn to people ... with the power to offer you some modicum of protection. To rely on the tribal system itself that the Obama war mission has neglected is the way that we survive here."
If some of what Ware says echoes Vietnam, with the American military not fully understanding Afghan culture, the CNN correspondent says so be it.
"The facts on the ground rather frighteningly speak for themselves," he says after laying out a nuanced and extensive explanation of what the military appears to appreciate and not appreciate about Afghanistan as "barely more than a feudal society" built on tribes.
CNN is obviously trying to take advantage of its edge in international coverage with the week of reports billed as "Inside the Battle Zone." But why not? It is an edge the channel pays for by committing resources to bureaus in places like Afghanistan.
Furthermore, when many national TV operations offer little or none of their own international coverage, it is all the more impressive to hear the likes of Cooper and Ware dissecting and explaining the need for multiple points of view and methods of reporting so that American viewers can have trustworthy information about the conflict.
"It's unfortunate we have seen networks cutting back on international coverage. And what that means is stories don't get told about what's happening in Afghanistan, what's happening in Iraq, or what our troops are going through," Cooper said.
"Increasingly, those stories fade from the headlines and from the evening newscasts. CNN is in the enviable position of actually increasing our foreign coverage. We have a full-time correspondent in Afghanistan. We have a bureau there. We're able to be there on a daily basis. ... And then, we're able to go in with coverage like this during the week of 9/11. This is what we do."
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FAQ: Does fighting in Helmand make Britain safer or more dangerous?
Richard Norton-Taylor The Guardian, Saturday 5 September 2009
Is Brown correct in insisting "a safer Afghanistan means a safer Britain"?
Ministers believe this is their trump card – that British troops are fighting the Taliban to protect the UK from a resurgent al-Qaida. It is true, primarily as a result of US firepower, that insurgent leaders have retreated across the border to Pakistan, where both American and Pakistani forces are now attacking their bases and those of their Pakistani supporters.
However, this is simplistic. The insurgency is also fuelled by Pashtun nationalism. There is an argument that the continuing presence of foreign troops in Afghanistan is a spur to continuing Muslim radicalisation, including in Britain. Brown's claims about a potential al-Qaida resurgence also should be seen against the refusal to help provide proper security for Afghanistan in the years after the post-9/11 bombing of the country.
Why did Brown stress Afghan involvement in resolving the conflict?
London and Washington have belatedly recognised that more should be done to involve Afghans in the security and civil development of the country. What the prime minister called a decisive issue is the training, mentoring and "partnering" of the Afghan national army. However, the figures he mentioned are far lower than the 300,000-400,000 which the US administration is talking about. Training the notoriously undisciplined Afghan army and notoriously corrupt Afghan police force will take a very long time and cost a lot of money.
"Our troops will have succeeded when Afghans can look after themselves," Brown said. A hostage to fortune, perhaps, yet this is the key to Brown's exit strategy. He will need to give a more convincing account on this question before the general election.
Was Brown convincing in his references to his commitment to UK military operations in Afghanistan?
Brown and his advisers are well aware of growing criticism – reflected in opinion polls and in the resignation of Eric Joyce, Bob Ainsworth's parliamentary aide – that Downing Street is not engaged wholeheartedly in the difficulties facing the armed forces.
The prime minister repeatedly referred to his visits to meet troops in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan. At one point he referred to "all my friends in the British army". He repeated government plans to increase the number of helicopters to be sent to Helmand, but promised nothing new.
What happens next?
In response to concern about what Lord Hurd, the former Tory foreign secretary, called a "haze of anxiety", Brown fell back on the need to develop Afghan security forces and the country's economic and civil infrastructure. However, these are long-term objectives.
More immediately, Brown said ministers and defence chiefs will have to decide over the next few weeks, with the US and other Nato allies, whether to increase the number of British troops deployed in Afghanistan. The Netherlands plans to withdraw its troops next year, and the Canadians in 2011.
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