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US Military Investigates Leaked Afghan War Documents
July 27, 2010 VOA News Al Pessin | Baghdad
While enroute from Afghanistan to Iraq Tuesday, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen said he is "appalled" about the release of tens of thousands of Afghan war documents that have been posted on the Internet on the Wikileaks website. He also told reporters on his aircraft that he is concerned the public release of raw intelligence could jeopardize troops operating in Afghanistan.
Kabul urges West to review Pakistan policy after leaks
by Sardar Ahmad
KABUL (AFP) – Afghanistan's national security adviser called on the West Tuesday to review policy towards Pakistan after leaked Pentagon documents pointed to Pakistani double-dealing in the Afghan war.
WikiLeaks Organization Sparks Controversy
July 27, 2010 VOA News Jennifer Glasse | London
WikiLeaks is a website that posts formerly secret documents online in what its members say is the pursuit of transparency and accountability. Its release of more than 75,000 U.S. Army and Marine Corps documents chronicling six years of events in Afghanistan has angered officials in Washington, Britain and Pakistan.
Afghans Welcome Wikileaks Revelations, While Pakistan Rejects Them
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty July 26, 2010
The immediate reaction in Kabul to the Wikileaks bombshell was one of vindication, while Islamabad has rejected much of what has emerged.
WikiLeaks' reports about Afghan war enrage Pakistanis
by Jamil Bhatti
ISLAMABAD, July 27 (Xinhua) -- The Afghan war report posted by the WikiLeaks website, alleging that Pakistani intelligence services were backing Afghan militants against U.S. forces, have enraged Pakistanis as they consider it an attempt to pressurize and malign Pakistan in war against terrorism.
Secret documents on Afghan war could threaten links with Pakistan
The New York Times By Eric Schmitt and Helene Cooper Tuesday, July 27, 2010
WASHINGTON - The White House sought to reassert control over the public debate on the Afghanistan war Monday, as political reaction to the disclosure of a six-year archive of classified military documents increased pressure on President Barack Obama to defend his war strategy.
Iran's Ahmadinejad denies helping Taliban in US interview
WASHINGTON (AFP) – Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has denied in an interview with US television charges that his government is providing support to Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan.
Remains of missing US sailor found in Afghanistan
by Lynne O'donnell – Tue Jul 27, 8:27 am ET
KABUL (AFP) – NATO said Tuesday the remains of a US sailor had been recovered in Afghanistan and confirmed that a second was held captive, four days after the pair vanished in an area largely controlled by the Taliban.
Pakistan Aids Insurgency in Afghanistan, Reports Assert
The New York Times By MARK MAZZETTI, JANE PERLEZ, ERIC SCHMITT and ANDREW W. LEHREN July 26, 2010
Americans fighting the war in Afghanistan have long harbored strong suspicions that Pakistan's military spy service has guided the Afghan insurgency with a hidden hand, even as Pakistan receives more than $1 billion a year from Washington for its help combating the militants, according to a trove of secret military field reports made public Sunday.
Pakistan to send all Afghan refugees home by 2012
ISLAMABAD, July 27 (Xinhua) -- The Pakistani Senate was informed on Tuesday that some three million Afghan refuges, still living in the country, will be repatriated by 2012, official sources said.
Strikes in eastern Afghanistan target militant
By the CNN Wire Staff July 27, 2010
Kabul, Afghanistan (CNN) -- Afghan and international forces targeting a militant commander launched several "precision strikes" in eastern Afghanistan, NATO's International Security Assistance Force said.
Rescue operation for missing U.S. soldier leaves 3 insurgents dead in Afghanistan
GHAZNI, Afghanistan, July 27 (Xinhua)-- Rescue operation with the involvement of Afghan and NATO-led troops for the recovery of the missing U.S. soldier has expanded to Ghazni province as three militants have been killed, police said on Tuesday.
Afghan intelligence contracts apply some limits
By Walter Pincus Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, July 27, 2010
After more than eight years of fighting in Afghanistan, the United States and its NATO coalition partners continue to hire private contractors to support their intelligence and counterintelligence analyses and operations in that country.
5 Taliban militants killed, 10 injured in Afghanistan
KABUL, July 27 (Xinhua) -- Afghan security forces backed by NATO-led troops, in efforts to root out militants in the northern Kunduz province, kicked off a three day offensive that concluded on Monday, killing five Taliban militants and injuring 10 others, a statement of Interior Ministry said Tuesday.
Soldiers Charged With Fuel Theft
Wall Street Journal By MARIA ABI-HABIB And ALAN CULLISON JULY 27, 2010
KABUL - U.S. investigators arrested two U.S. soldiers and suspended a pair of Afghan trucking companies on suspicions they helped the soldiers steal $1.6 million in fuel from a military base in eastern Afghanistan.
Taliban Set 150 Houses on Fire in Barg-e-Matal District
July 27, 2010 Tolo News
Afghan and Pakistani Taliban have burnt down 150 houses in Barg-e-Matal district of the eastern Nooristan province, local officials say
Mass grave cover-ups undermine justice
KABUL, 27 July 2010 (IRIN) - Three years after President Hamid Karzai appointed a commission to investigate a mass grave site in the Chimtala plains, north of Kabul city, the site, the commission and the truth are missing.
Tajik National Bank Head: Counterfeit Money Printed In Afghanistan
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty July 27, 2010
DUSHANBE -- The head of the Tajik National Bank has warned people that forged Tajik somonis are circulating in Tajikistan, RFE/RL's Tajik Service reports.
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US Military Investigates Leaked Afghan War Documents
July 27, 2010 VOA News Al Pessin | Baghdad
While enroute from Afghanistan to Iraq Tuesday, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen said he is "appalled" about the release of tens of thousands of Afghan war documents that have been posted on the Internet on the Wikileaks website. He also told reporters on his aircraft that he is concerned the public release of raw intelligence could jeopardize troops operating in Afghanistan.
"I think sometimes people don't appreciate what kind of information could be out there that makes their job a lot more difficult and, in fact, could jeopardize their lives," said Mullen.
He emphasized the U.S. military will do everything possible to ensure there are not leaks like this one in the future.
Even before the documents were published, Mullen had expressed concern about some of what they allege, particularly the alleged support for some insurgent groups, including the Haqqani network, by Pakistan's intelligence service, the ISI.
"We are very focused on that network because it's doing so much damage to our efforts in Afghanistan," Mullen said. "And to the degree that anybody in Pakistan, military or ISI, is connected to that, that's unsatisfactory. That's unacceptable."
One key aspect of the U.S. strategy for Afghanistan is to improve relations with Pakistan so that officials there will crack down on al-Qaida and related groups operating in the western part of the country, and infiltrating into Afghanistan. Admiral Mullen is a key player in that effort, and he visited Pakistan just this past weekend, his 19th visit in the two-and-a-half years he has been in office.
He took an aerial tour and had a long dinner Saturday with Pakistan's powerful military chief, General Ashfaq Kiyani, who was director of the ISI during part of the period depicted in the released documents. Admiral Mullen said the message to Pakistan has been very clear.
"These are concerns that have been raised and discussed extensively over the period of the last several years in my relationship with him," said Mullen. "He fully understands my concerns, the United States government's concerns."
The admiral repeated that the ISI "must strategically change its direction," but he could not say how much that has happened in spite of his efforts and those of other senior U.S. officials.
"I'm not really prepared to tell you that given that information how far we've moved off it, or how far we've moved forward. I certainly know that over the last couple of years we've moved dramatically forward in our relationship with Pakistan," said Mullen.
In spite of the improvements, Mullen described the U.S.-Pakistan relationship "not unchallenging."
At the same time, the admiral says the raw intelligence reports published by the Wikileaks website need to be put in context. He notes they are raw, unconfirmed reports from various sources. He said his staff is working through the more than 90,000 documents to determine whether there is anything new and whether the information gathered between 2003 and 2009 turned out to be valid.
But he said overall, the issues raised in the documents are not new, and were considered by senior U.S. officials when they developed the new strategy for Afghanistan last year.
"Certainly at my level each area is an area that we considered in developing the new strategy and that we've addressed as we've moved on from that review last year to where we are now," said Mullen.
In spite of the concerns about support for insurgents, the admiral said he does not believe Pakistani leaders have misled the United States. U.S. officials are concerned that without the improved relations, including military sales and $12 billion of aid over the coming five years, Pakistan will not expand its campaign against insurgents to areas where groups that attack U.S. forces in Afghanistan operate.
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Kabul urges West to review Pakistan policy after leaks
by Sardar Ahmad
KABUL (AFP) – Afghanistan's national security adviser called on the West Tuesday to review policy towards Pakistan after leaked Pentagon documents pointed to Pakistani double-dealing in the Afghan war.
Kabul has consistently accused Pakistan's intelligence agency of supporting Taliban insurgents -- including masterminding attacks against Afghan and US-led targets in the country. Islamabad denies the claims.
Kabul said information contained in documents released on whistleblowing website WikiLeaks on Sunday backed its long-held position.
Rangeen Dadfar Spanta, President Hamid Karzai's national security advisor, took issue with US aid to Pakistan, which last year secured a 7.5 billion-dollar non-military package from Congress spread over the next five years.
"It's not justifiable for Afghans to see a country given 11 billion dollars in reconstruction aid and to support its security forces, and then see those same forces training terrorists," said Spanta.
"At least we Afghan politicians are not able to explain this to the Afghan people," he said, calling on US and NATO troops to deal with insurgents before they infiltrated Afghanistan from their sanctuaries in Pakistan.
A secretive US drone war routinely targets Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked groups holed up in Pakistan's lawless border districts with Afghanistan.
Karzai has ordered Spanta and Afghan foreign minister Zalmai Rasoul to "study the leaked US documents," a statement from the president's office said.
Afghanistan's National Security Council (NSC) said the leaked Pentagon documents showed the country's Western allies had an incoherent approach to fighting a Taliban insurgency, now in its ninth year and at its deadliest.
"Having a contradictory and unclear policy towards those forces who have used terrorism as a tool of interference and destruction against others has had disastrous consequences," it said in a statement, referring to Pakistan.
The NSC said thousands of Afghans and citizens of allied countries had been killed in the last nine years and called on its international supporters to formulate a united policy to deal with militancy.
The leaked documents dating from 2004 to 2009 were released to The New York Times, Britain's Guardian newspaper and Germany's Der Spiegel by WikiLeaks.
Admiral Mike Mullen, the US military's top officer, denied that information in the documents questioned US strategy or relations with Pakistan.
Mullen said he was "appalled" at the leak, but that the information had been taken into account during a strategy review last year and that Washington made clear to Islamabad its concerns about possible links to militant groups.
US relations with Pakistan have "dramatically" improved in the past year and Pakistan has launched offensives against Islamist extremists in the northwest, involving tens of thousands of troops, Mullen said.
According to the New York Times, Pakistani agents and Taliban representatives meet regularly in secret "to organise networks of militant groups that fight against American soldiers in Afghanistan, and even hatch plots to assassinate Afghan leaders".
Although relations between Kabul and Islamabad have also improved since a civilian government replaced Pakistan's military ruler General Pervez Musharraf in 2008, Afghan and NATO commanders say Taliban leaders operate from Pakistan.
The leaked files also indicated that civilian deaths have been covered up, and that Iran is funding Taliban militants eight years after the 2001 US-led invasion ousted the radical Islamist regime from power.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad denied those charges in an interview, telling CBS television: "We do not support any group".
Civilian casualties are an extremely sensitive issue in Afghanistan, with leaders fearing that the deaths of ordinary Afghans in military operation encourage people to sympathise with the Taliban.
NATO and Afghan authorities are investigating a rocket strike that Karzai said killed 52 civilians in a southern Taliban stronghold last Friday. NATO has denied involvement.
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WikiLeaks Organization Sparks Controversy
July 27, 2010 VOA News Jennifer Glasse | London
WikiLeaks is a website that posts formerly secret documents online in what its members say is the pursuit of transparency and accountability. Its release of more than 75,000 U.S. Army and Marine Corps documents chronicling six years of events in Afghanistan has angered officials in Washington, Britain and Pakistan.
The WikiLeaks website says the organization began as a dialogue between activists who wanted to alleviate suffering. It says the organization champions "principled leaking."
Since 2007 WikiLeaks has posted thousands of documents on the internet. Founder Julian Assange sees himself as an information activist whose main goal is to get information into the public domain. He says he has a small, overworked staff, about 800 part time workers and thousands of supporters.
"I suppose our greatest fear is we will be too successful too fast, and we will not be able to do justice to the material we are getting in fast enough," said Assange. "That is our greatest problem at the moment."
WikiLeaks is non-profit and Assange says during the past few months there has been tremendous financial support.
"We have raised a million dollars from the general public. As a result we are enabled to have a sort of fierce independence that larger organizations find more difficult. That said, of course, we are also immediately accountable to the public because that is where our money comes from, directly from the public, not from advertisers or foundations," said Assange.
Simon Schneider, who runs a competition to find new internet technology to improve global security, says WikiLeaks main strength is protecting its sources.
"The fact that it is so controversial and the fact that so many people talk about it tells me that WikiLeaks touches on a very, very important point," said Schneider. "And I think that this discussion between what should be private and what should be public touches a lot of peoples nerves, and I think it is important that we talk about it."
But former intelligence analyst Bob Ayers is not convinced WikiLeaks is a force for good.
"The fact that we have a bunch of liberal amateurs trying to do intelligence assessments of material does not give me a strong feeling of confidence," said Ayers.
Ayers cites WikiLeaks most recent revelations, the release of more than 75,000 U.S. military documents relating to Afghanistan.
"The information that was released is not a threat to the United States per se," said Ayers. "It has the potential to be a threat to combatants that are fighting in the area, it has the potential to destabilize the trilateral relationships between Afghanistan, Pakistan and the U.S. And it has the potential to place the intelligence community at some level of risk if their sources are being compromised publicly."
WikiLeaks founder Assange says his organization has a harm-minimization process to identify, redact or withhold anything that might hurt a source or anyone involved in the documents. Assange says for that reason, they did not release more than 15,000 Afghanistan-related documents, and he says because what they did make public was seven months old, he believed it contained no information that could harm NATO troops.
Ayers disagrees. "The fact it is seven months old is immaterial. It is irrelevant. They are not going to change their patrolling patterns in seven months, they are still going to patrol the same way. So now what you have done is you have informed the enemy of information that can assist them in planning how to attack NATO forces in Afghanistan when they are on patrol," said Ayers.
Ayers believes the American government will have to do something about WikiLeaks. Under U.S. law it is illegal to disclose classified information.
"There is a real dilemma here as to how to deal with a site like WikiLeaks," said Ayers. "Are they acting in the public good? Are they acting sensationally? Are they endangering the public good? Are they endangering lives by their actions? And those are things that I think we will still see addressed and sorted out over the next six months or so."
To thwart censorship, WikiLeaks released the leaked documents in three jurisdictions, the United States, Germany and Great Britain.
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Afghans Welcome Wikileaks Revelations, While Pakistan Rejects Them
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty July 26, 2010
The immediate reaction in Kabul to the Wikileaks bombshell was one of vindication, while Islamabad has rejected much of what has emerged.
To many Afghan officials and analysts, the allegations contained in the 92,000 field reports by U.S. and NATO troops across Afghanistan strengthened the claims they have been making for years about the way the war was being conducted.
Speaking to journalists on July 26, Afghan presidential spokesman Wahid Omar said the scale of the leak was shocking, but not its contents.
"So far as we are concerned, two things that are obvious in most of the documents that we have read so far are about civilian-casualties cases and about the role the ISI [Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency] has played in destabilizing activities inside Afghanistan," Omar said.
The leaked military files -- covering the period from January 2004 to December 2009, before the Obama administration embarked on a new war strategy in May of this year, according to a White House statement -- chronicle a worsening war situation.
Afghans: Pakistan's 'Double Game'
The reports document allegations of increasing civilian casualties and mounting Taliban attacks. Insurgents are portrayed as enjoying aid and sanctuary in neighboring Pakistan, whose intelligence officials are accused of providing support.
Kabul-based Afghan analyst Ahmad Sayedi tells RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan that the leaked documents reveal Islamabad's double game in Afghanistan.
He says that the leaks show that Pakistan has been spending U.S. aid intended to combat terrorism to foment insurgency in Afghanistan.
Sayedi hopes that the issue will push Washington to get tough with Pakistan. "I believe that unless America gets serious with Pakistan, it will continue to damage Afghanistan more," he says, "and the Americans will be pushed deeper into a quagmire."
The leaks detail the alleged role of Pakistani agents in organizing attacks against Western troops, Indian diplomats, aid workers, and Afghan officials. It depicts the former head of ISI, Hamid Gul, as having organized attacks on the front lines.
...Is Denied By Pakistan
Meanwhile, the mood in Islamabad was one of denial. General Talat Masood, a former military general-turned-security analyst, says that the leaks amount to a deliberate attempt to malign Pakistan.
"Most of the allegations have no basis. In fact, their own very senior [officials] in the National Security Council and elsewhere [have said] that such leaks take place [and have] no substance," Masood says.
"And they have said that the level of cooperation between Pakistan and the United States has improved."
Pakistani analysts suggest that the information in the documents could be from Afghan informants and intelligence operatives who hold grudges against Pakistan because of its historically acrimonious relationship with Kabul.
Hamid Gul a former head of the ISI, condemned the allegations and denied any links to the Taliban and Al-Qaeda.
"Report of my physical involvement with Al-Qaeda or Taliban in planning attacks on American forces is completely baseless," he told "The Wall Street Journal" today. "I am not against America, but I am opposed to what the American forces are doing in Afghanistan."
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WikiLeaks' reports about Afghan war enrage Pakistanis
by Jamil Bhatti
ISLAMABAD, July 27 (Xinhua) -- The Afghan war report posted by the WikiLeaks website, alleging that Pakistani intelligence services were backing Afghan militants against U.S. forces, have enraged Pakistanis as they consider it an attempt to pressurize and malign Pakistan in war against terrorism.
The report, under the heading "Afghan War Diary" with nearly 90, 000 secret documents published by the online organization WikiLeaks on Monday, said that Pakistan was actively collaborating with the Taliban in Afghanistan while accepting U.S. aid.
General (retired) Hameed Gul, former chief of country's premier intelligence agency Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), rejected all reports and declared them American's intentional attempt to defame Pakistan and to cover their failure and mistakes in Afghanistan.
While talking to local media, Gul warned that any military intervention in Pakistan will trigger a rage among Pakistanis.
"Actually Americans are finding any pretext to intervene Pakistan, but I say if they try to do so, it will inflame every part of the region," Gul said during an interview with TV channel ARY News.
The report also alleged that Gul in mid-December 2006 met with senior members of the Taliban leadership in northwestern region of Pakistan and dispatched three insurgents to Kabul to carry out attacks.
According to another report, in January 2008, Gul also directed the Taliban to kidnap high-level United Nations personnel in Afghanistan to trade for captured Pakistani soldiers.
Gul, with a smile on his face, justified why U.S. is against him, "because I know Americans' wrongdoings in Afghanistan and deficiencies in their leadership, their air-force is involved in the drugs smuggling to the world and their army high-ups are minting money from contracts."
The secret documents were also published by The New York Times, The Guardian newspaper and German weekly Der Spiegel.
The reports also blame U.S. forces for the incidents of Afghan civilian killings and also contained evidence of possible war crimes.
Pakistan's foreign office rejected what it called " unsubstantiated information" posted by WikiLeaks and termed them " baseless".
"The reports were not based on facts and Pakistan's role in the settlement of Afghan issue and its efforts for peace and stability there could not be denied," Pakistan Foreign Office spokesman Abdul Basit said in his official statement.
Hussain Haqqani, Pakistani ambassador in America, said the documents "do not reflect the current on-ground realities."
"The U.S., Afghanistan and Pakistan are jointly endeavoring to defeat Al-Qaeda and its Taliban allies militarily and politically, "he said.
The U.S. has strongly condemned the disclosure of the secret reports and praised the Pakistan's role in war against terrorism over the past years and reaffirmed close strategic partnership with Pakistan.
Reacting to the release, U.S. President Barack Obama's National Security Advisor James Jones called it the "irresponsible" leaks and said, "It could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk, and threaten our national security but these would not impact the ongoing U.S. commitment to deepen partnership with Pakistan to defeat common enemies."
In spite of U.S. attempt to clear its position over the leaks, many Pakistani experts believed that the release of top secret documents in such a big quantity is not so easy game as the U.S. government is pretending to.
"How it is possible, your 90,000 reports were leaked and you don 't know. I believe a big part of high officials are involved in the whole process," Aslam Khan, a keen observer of the Afghan war, told Xinhua.
Khan also thought that this "senseless leaking can deepen the differences among Pakistan's intelligence agencies and Americans working in tough war field of Afghanistan."
The Pakistani and U.S. governments have been trying to minimize the trust gap between the two countries for many years. Recently U. S. Secretary of States Hillary Clinton visited Pakistan and negotiated with all higher authorities of the country over the reasons of mistrust and also announced some financial packages.
Professor Sadaqat Ali, an educationist turned politician, told Xinhua about the reasons of the rising distrust between the two countries. "Both countries were allies in the Afghan war against Russia in 1980s, but America's distances from the area, just after the war, sowed a mistrust crop in the hearts of Pakistanis which is at peak now," Ali said.
But a senior defense analyst Hassan Askari considered these leaks less harmful for Pakistan. "Pakistan is mentioned in only 15 reports and the rest are about the faults of U.S. policy in Afghanistan. I think it is a headache for Americans, not for us," said Askari, while talking to local TV Geo News.
Majority of the people in streets, when asked about these allegations through WikiLeaks, showed their anger over the reports and favored alleged support of Pakistani intelligence agencies for the Afghan Taliban.
"If they are supporting them (Afghan Taliban), they are doing good because in future Americans will leave the area as usual and we shall have to live in the neighborhood of the Taliban," Shabir Abbasi, a grocery shopkeeper told Xinhua.
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Secret documents on Afghan war could threaten links with Pakistan
The New York Times By Eric Schmitt and Helene Cooper Tuesday, July 27, 2010
WASHINGTON - The White House sought to reassert control over the public debate on the Afghanistan war Monday, as political reaction to the disclosure of a six-year archive of classified military documents increased pressure on President Barack Obama to defend his war strategy.
On Capitol Hill, a leading Senate Democrat said the documents -- with their detailed account of a war faring even more poorly than two administrations had portrayed -- would intensify congressional scrutiny of Mr. Obama's policy.
"Those policies are at a critical stage, and these documents may very well underscore the stakes and make the calibrations needed to get the policy right more urgent," said Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry, D-Mass., who has been an influential supporter of the war.
The disclosures landed at a crucial moment. Because of difficulties on the ground and mounting war casualties, the debate over the U.S. presence in Afghanistan has begun earlier than expected. Inside the administration, more officials are privately questioning the policy.
In Congress, the House could vote on a critical war-financing bill as early as today -- the same day a Senate panel is set to hold a hearing on Mr. Obama's choice to head the military's Central Command, Gen. James Mattis, who would oversee military operations in Afghanistan.
Administration officials acknowledged that the documents, released on the Internet by an organization called WikiLeaks, will make it harder for Mr. Obama as he tries to hang on to public and congressional support until the end of the year, when he has scheduled a review of the war effort.
"We don't know how to react," one frustrated administration official said Monday. "This obviously puts Congress and the public in a bad mood."
Mr. Obama is facing a tough choice: He must either figure out a way to convince Congress and the American people that his war strategy remains on track and is bearing fruit -- a harder sell, given that the war is lagging -- or move more quickly to a far more limited U.S. presence.
As the debate over the war begins anew, administration officials have been striking tones similar to the Bush administration's to argue for continuing the current Afghanistan strategy, which calls for a significant troop buildup.
Richard C. Holbrooke, Mr. Obama's special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, said in testimony before the Foreign Relations Committee two weeks ago that the Afghan war effort came down to a matter of U.S. national security.
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs struck a similar note Monday in responding to the documents, which WikiLeaks made accessible to The New York Times, the British newspaper The Guardian and the German magazine Der Spiegel.
"We are in this region of the world because of what happened on 9/11," Mr. Gibbs said. "[We're] ensuring that there is not a safe haven in Afghanistan by which attacks against this country and countries around the world can be planned. That's why we're there, and that's why we're going to continue to make progress on this relationship."
Several administration officials privately suggested that they might be able to use the leaks, and their description of a sometimes-duplicitous Pakistani ally, to pressure the Islamabad government to cooperate more fully with the United States on counterterrorism. The documents seem to lay out rich new details of connections between the Taliban and other militant groups and Pakistan's main spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI.
Three administration officials separately expressed hope that the documents might provide leverage in efforts to get more Pakistani aid against insurgents in the region. Two of them raised the possibility of warning the Pakistanis that congressional anger might threaten U.S. aid to their country.
"This is now out in the open; it's reality now," a senior administration official said. "In some ways, it makes it easier for us to tell the Pakistanis that they have to help us."
But much of the White House pushback over the past two days has been to stress that the connection between the ISI and the Taliban was well-known. "I don't think that what is being reported hasn't in many ways been publicly discussed, either by you all or by representatives of the U.S. government, for quite some time," Mr. Gibbs said during a briefing for reporters Monday.
While agreeing that the disclosures were not altogether new, some leading Democrats said the details underscored deep suspicions they have harbored toward the ISI.
"Some of these documents reinforce a longstanding concern of mine about the supporting role of some Pakistani officials in the Afghan insurgency," said Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich. During a visit to Pakistan this month, Mr. Levin, who has largely supported the war, said he confronted senior Pakistani leaders about the ISI's continuing ties to the militant groups.
The White House appeared to be focusing some of its ire toward Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks.org, the website that provided access to the tens of thousands of secret military reports spanning the period from January 2004 through December 2009.
White House officials e-mailed reporters select transcripts of an interview that Mr. Assange conducted with Der Spiegel, underlining the quotations that the White House apparently found most offensive. Among them was Mr. Assange's assertion, "I enjoy crushing bastards."
At a news conference Monday in London, Mr. Assange defended the release of the documents. "I'd like to see this material taken seriously and investigated, and new policies -- if not prosecutions -- result from it," he said.
The Times and the two other news organizations agreed not to disclose anything likely to put lives at risk or jeopardize military or antiterrorist operations, and redacted the names of Afghan informants and other delicate information from the documents it published. WikiLeaks said it withheld posting about 15,000 documents for the same reason.
Pakistan strongly denied suggestions that its military spy service has guided the Afghan insurgency. A senior ISI official, speaking on condition of anonymity under standard practice, sharply condemned the reports as "part of the malicious campaign to malign the spy organization," and said the ISI would "continue to eradicate the menace of terrorism with or without the help of the West."
Farhatullah Babar, spokesman for Pakistan's President Asif Ali Zardari, dismissed the reports and said Pakistan remained "a part of a strategic alliance of the United States in the fight against terrorism."
While Pakistani officials protested, a spokesman for Afghan President Hamid Karzai said Mr. Karzai was not upset by the documents and did not believe that the picture they painted was unfair.
Speaking after a news conference in Kabul, Karzai spokesman Waheed Omar was asked whether there was anything in the leaked documents that angered the president or that he thought unfair. "No, I don't think so," he said.
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Iran's Ahmadinejad denies helping Taliban in US interview
WASHINGTON (AFP) – Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has denied in an interview with US television charges that his government is providing support to Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan.
"We do not support any group," Ahmadinejad said when asked by CBS television in interview late Monday whether Tehran provided aid to Afghan rebels.
"We just and only support the Afghan people. We support and we want to strengthen security in Afghanistan.
"And we think the Afghan people should run their own country," he added.
"We think the root cause is related to the intervention of the United States and NATO. It's been for about 20 years that the Americans are interfering directly in Afghanistan," the Iranian leader said.
He made his remarks after documents leaked Sunday and posted on the whistleblower website WikiLeaks suggested that Iran had provided support to Afghan insurgents.
Asked during the interview about the effects of sanctions on Iran's people, he suggested that the measures may hurt the countries imposing them more than Iran.
"I think the policies by the Europeans and the Americans are ridiculous. They think they are going to influence the life of the Iranian society. In fact, they're imposing sanctions against themselves," Ahmadinejad said.
"Iran is a great nation with a great population. We have vast and rich resources and it's very much easy for us to overcome old problems."
The Iranian leader also appeared less than sanguine about the prospects for a detente in the chilled relations with Washington after a 31-year break in relations.
"Please pay attention," Ahmadinejad said.
"I sent a letter to Bush, and that letter was a golden opportunity for the US administration in order to change policy, and they should not continue the hostility."
He added that he had also made similar overtures to President Barack Obama.
"During my visit in New York, I said I was ready to talk to President Obama. After the election of Mr Obama, I sent a message and in different occasions and meetings we said we would support changes and we are ready to help," he told CBS.
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Remains of missing US sailor found in Afghanistan
by Lynne O'donnell – Tue Jul 27, 8:27 am ET
KABUL (AFP) – NATO said Tuesday the remains of a US sailor had been recovered in Afghanistan and confirmed that a second was held captive, four days after the pair vanished in an area largely controlled by the Taliban.
The remains of the sailor were recovered on Sunday, NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said in a statement.
The search for the second missing sailor was continuing in Logar province, south of Kabul, it said.
"Afghan and coalition forces recovered the remains of a missing ISAF servicemember Sunday in eastern Afghanistan," it said.
"Afghan and coalition forces launched an extensive search-and-recovery operation when two service members failed to report to their destination Friday.
"ISAF holds the captors accountable for the safety and proper treatment of our missing servicemember," it said.
It marked the first time ISAF conceded the Americans had been held captive.
The two US Navy sailors went missing late Friday after leaving a military compound in Kabul in an armoured but unmarked vehicle, ISAF officials said.
The Taliban, who are active in Logar, said Sunday their fighters had ambushed the pair, killing one and taking the other captive.
ISAF launched a massive ground and air search in the area, checking compounds of what it said were known insurgents.
Kidnappings of foreign soldiers are rare in Afghanistan, where a nine-year insurgency has been escalating in recent months, particularly in the southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar.
The Taliban warned earlier this year they would target foreign military and government installations and staff, as well as Afghans working for them or for the Kabul government.
A 24-year-old US soldier, Bowe Bergdahl, who disappeared on June 30, 2009 is believed to have been the first American snatched by militants in Afghanistan.
Recovery of the sailor's remains came as ISAF reiterated denials that its forces were to blame for a rocket attack in southern Afghanistan on Friday that the president said killed 52 civilians.
Hamid Karzai said on Monday that a rocket attack on a residential compound in southern Helmand province was carried out by ISAF forces.
The attack by a helicopter gunship last Friday killed 52 people in Regey village, in volatile Sangin district, he said. US Marines operate in Sangin.
NATO has consistently denied its forces were responsible for the incident.
"We do not know where the information they say they have is coming from," said ISAF public affairs officer Todd Breasseale.
A joint ISAF-Afghan government investigation had not revealed ISAF involvement in the deaths in Regey, he said.
The conflicting reports coincided with the leak of 92,000 Pentagon documents showing, among other things, under-reporting of civilian casualties.
The issue is sensitive in Afghanistan, where many people blame the presence of foreign forces for the violence of the Taliban-led insurgency.
Close to 150,000 US and NATO troops are deployed in Afghanistan.
Kabul said the leaked documents showed the country's Western allies had an incoherent approach to the insurgency and backed its position that Pakistan provides safe havens for militant groups which attack Afghan targets.
The most controversial allegations centre around claims that Pakistan, a key US ally, allows its spies to meet the Taliban directly.
"Afghanistan has always emphasised that terrorism should be fought in its place of origin," the National Security Council said.
"Having a contradictory and unclear policy towards those forces who have used terrorism as a tool of interference and destruction against others has had disastrous consequences," it added, referring to Pakistan.
The Australian government ordered an internal defence inquiry into the leaks to see whether they posed a risk to operations.
Britain said that one of its soldiers was killed in Sangin while on patrol searching for roadside bombs, the Taliban's main weapon.
The death brought to 401 the number of foreign soldiers to die in the war so far this year, according to an AFP tally based on figures kept by icasualties.org.
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Pakistan Aids Insurgency in Afghanistan, Reports Assert
The New York Times By MARK MAZZETTI, JANE PERLEZ, ERIC SCHMITT and ANDREW W. LEHREN July 26, 2010
Americans fighting the war in Afghanistan have long harbored strong suspicions that Pakistan's military spy service has guided the Afghan insurgency with a hidden hand, even as Pakistan receives more than $1 billion a year from Washington for its help combating the militants, according to a trove of secret military field reports made public Sunday.
The documents, made available by an organization called WikiLeaks, suggest that Pakistan, an ostensible ally of the United States, allows representatives of its spy service to meet directly with the Taliban in secret strategy sessions to organize networks of militant groups that fight against American soldiers in Afghanistan, and even hatch plots to assassinate Afghan leaders.
Taken together, the reports indicate that American soldiers on the ground are inundated with accounts of a network of Pakistani assets and collaborators that runs from the Pakistani tribal belt along the Afghan border, through southern Afghanistan, and all the way to the capital, Kabul.
Much of the information - raw intelligence and threat assessments gathered from the field in Afghanistan- cannot be verified and likely comes from sources aligned with Afghan intelligence, which considers Pakistan an enemy, and paid informants. Some describe plots for attacks that do not appear to have taken place.
But many of the reports rely on sources that the military rated as reliable.
While current and former American officials interviewed could not corroborate individual reports, they said that the portrait of the spy agency's collaboration with the Afghan insurgency was broadly consistent with other classified intelligence.
Some of the reports describe Pakistani intelligence working alongside Al Qaeda to plan attacks. Experts cautioned that although Pakistan's militant groups and Al Qaeda work together, directly linking the Pakistani spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, with Al Qaeda is difficult.
The records also contain firsthand accounts of American anger at Pakistan's unwillingness to confront insurgents who launched attacks near Pakistani border posts, moved openly by the truckload across the frontier, and retreated to Pakistani territory for safety.
The behind-the-scenes frustrations of soldiers on the ground and glimpses of what appear to be Pakistani skullduggery contrast sharply with the frequently rosy public pronouncements of Pakistan as an ally by American officials, looking to sustain a drone campaign over parts of Pakistani territory to strike at Qaeda havens. Administration officials also want to keep nuclear-armed Pakistan on their side to safeguard NATO supplies flowing on routes that cross Pakistan to Afghanistan.
This month, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, in one of the frequent visits by American officials to Islamabad, announced $500 million in assistance and called the United States and Pakistan "partners joined in common cause."
The reports suggest, however, that the Pakistani military has acted as both ally and enemy, as its spy agency runs what American officials have long suspected is a double game - appeasing certain American demands for cooperation while angling to exert influence in Afghanistan through many of the same insurgent networks that the Americans are fighting to eliminate.
Behind the scenes, both Bush and Obama administration officials as well as top American commanders have confronted top Pakistani military officers with accusations of ISI complicity in attacks in Afghanistan, and even presented top Pakistani officials with lists of ISI and military operatives believed to be working with militants.
Benjamin Rhodes, deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, said that Pakistan had been an important ally in the battle against militant groups, and that Pakistani soldiers and intelligence officials had worked alongside the United States to capture or kill Qaeda and Taliban leaders.
Still, he said that the "status quo is not acceptable," and that the havens for militants in Pakistan "pose an intolerable threat" that Pakistan must do more to address.
"The Pakistani government - and Pakistan's military and intelligence services - must continue their strategic shift against violent extremist groups within their borders," he said. American military support to Pakistan would continue, he said.
Several Congressional officials said that despite repeated requests over the years for information about Pakistani support for militant groups, they usually receive vague and inconclusive briefings from the Pentagon and C.I.A.
Nonetheless, senior lawmakers say they have no doubt that Pakistan is aiding insurgent groups. "The burden of proof is on the government of Pakistan and the ISI to show they don't have ongoing contacts," said Senator Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat on the Armed Services Committee who visited Pakistan this month and said he and Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the committee chairman, confronted Pakistan's prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, yet again over the allegations.
Such accusations are usually met with angry denials, particularly by the Pakistani military, which insists that the ISI severed its remaining ties to the groups years ago. An ISI spokesman in Islamabad said Sunday that the agency would have no comment until it saw the documents. Pakistan's ambassador to the United States, Husain Haqqani, said, "The documents circulated by WikiLeaks do not reflect the current on-ground realities."
The man the United States has depended on for cooperation in fighting the militants and who holds most power in Pakistan, the head of the army, Gen. Parvez Ashfaq Kayani, ran the ISI from 2004 to 2007, a period from which many of the reports are drawn. American officials have frequently praised General Kayani for what they say are his efforts to purge the military of officers with ties to militants.
American officials have described Pakistan's spy service as a rigidly hierarchical organization that has little tolerance for "rogue" activity. But Pakistani military officials give the spy service's "S Wing" - which runs external operations against the Afghan government and India - broad autonomy, a buffer that allows top military officials deniability.
American officials have rarely uncovered definitive evidence of direct ISI involvement in a major attack. But in July 2008, the C.I.A.'s deputy director, Stephen R. Kappes, confronted Pakistani officials with evidence that the ISI helped plan the deadly suicide bombing of India's Embassy in Kabul.
From the current trove, one report shows that Polish intelligence warned of a complex attack against the Indian Embassy a week before that bombing, though the attackers and their methods differed. The ISI was not named in the report warning of the attack.
Another, dated August 2008, identifies a colonel in the ISI plotting with a Taliban official to assassinate President Hamid Karzai. The report says there was no information about how or when this would be carried out. The account could not be verified.
General Linked to Militants
Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul ran the ISI from 1987 to 1989, a time when Pakistani spies and the C.I.A. joined forces to run guns and money to Afghan militias who were battling Soviet troops in Afghanistan. After the fighting stopped, he maintained his contacts with the former mujahedeen, who would eventually transform themselves into the Taliban.
And more than two decades later, it appears that General Gul is still at work. The documents indicate that he has worked tirelessly to reactivate his old networks, employing familiar allies like Jaluluddin Haqqani and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, whose networks of thousands of fighters are responsible for waves of violence in Afghanistan.
General Gul is mentioned so many times in the reports, if they are to be believed, that it seems unlikely that Pakistan's current military and intelligence officials could not know of at least some of his wide-ranging activities.
For example, one intelligence report describes him meeting with a group of militants in Wana, the capital of South Waziristan, in January 2009. There, he met with three senior Afghan insurgent commanders and three "older" Arab men, presumably representatives of Al Qaeda, who the report suggests were important "because they had a large security contingent with them."
The gathering was designed to hatch a plan to avenge the death of "Zamarai," the nom de guerre of Osama al-Kini, who had been killed days earlier by a C.I.A. drone attack. Mr. Kini had directed Qaeda operations in Pakistan and had spearheaded some of the group's most devastating attacks.
The plot hatched in Wana that day, according to the report, involved driving a dark blue Mazda truck rigged with explosives from South Waziristan to Afghanistan's Paktika Province, a route well known to be used by the insurgents to move weapons, suicide bombers and fighters from Pakistan.
In a show of strength, the Taliban leaders approved a plan to send 50 Arab and 50 Waziri fighters to Ghazni Province in Afghanistan, the report said.
General Gul urged the Taliban commanders to focus their operations inside Afghanistan in exchange for Pakistan turning "a blind eye" to their presence in Pakistan's tribal areas. It was unclear whether the attack was ever executed.
The United States has pushed the United Nations to put General Gul on a list of international terrorists, and top American officials said they believed he was an important link between active-duty Pakistani officers and militant groups.
General Gul, who says he is retired and lives on his pension, dismissed the allegations as "absolute nonsense," speaking by telephone from his home in Rawalpindi, where the Pakistani Army keeps its headquarters. "I have had no hand in it." He added, "American intelligence is pulling cotton wool over your eyes."
Senior Pakistani officials consistently deny that General Gul still works at the ISI's behest, though several years ago, after mounting American complaints, Pakistan's president at the time, Pervez Musharraf, was forced publicly to acknowledge the possibility that former ISI officials were assisting the Afghan insurgency. Despite his denials, General Gul keeps close ties to his former employers. When a reporter visited General Gul this spring for an interview at his home, the former spy master canceled the appointment. According to his son, he had to attend meetings at army headquarters.
Suicide Bomber Network
The reports also chronicle efforts by ISI officers to run the networks of suicide bombers that emerged as a sudden, terrible force in Afghanistan in 2006.
The detailed reports indicate that American officials had a relatively clear understanding of how the suicide networks presumably functioned, even if some of the threats did not materialize. It is impossible to know why the attacks never came off - either they were thwarted, the attackers shifted targets, or the reports were deliberately planted as Taliban disinformation.
One report, from Dec. 18, 2006, describes a cyclical process to develop the suicide bombers. First, the suicide attacker is recruited and trained in Pakistan. Then, reconnaissance and operational planning gets under way, including scouting to find a place for "hosting" the suicide bomber near the target before carrying out the attack. The network, it says, receives help from the Afghan police and the Ministry of Interior.
In many cases, the reports are complete with names and ages of bombers, as well as license plate numbers, but the Americans gathering the intelligence struggle to accurately portray many other details, introducing sometimes comical renderings of places and Taliban commanders.
In one case, a report rated by the American military as credible states that a gray Toyota Corolla had been loaded with explosives between the Afghan border and Landik Hotel, in Pakistan, apparently a mangled reference to Landi Kotal, in Pakistan's tribal areas. The target of the plot, however, is a real hotel in downtown Kabul, the Ariana.
"It is likely that ISI may be involved as supporter of this attack," reads a comment in the report.
Several of the reports describe current and former ISI operatives, including General Gul, visiting madrasas near the city of Peshawar, a gateway to the tribal areas, to recruit new fodder for suicide bombings.
One report, labeled a "real threat warning" because of its detail and the reliability of its source, described how commanders of Mr. Hekmatyar's insurgent group, Hezb-i-Islami, ordered the delivery of a suicide bomber from the Hashimiye madrasa, run by Afghans.
The boy was to be used in an attack on American or NATO vehicles in Kabul during the Muslim Festival of Sacrifices that opened Dec. 31, 2006. According to the report, the boy was taken to the Afghan city of Jalalabad to buy a car for the bombing, and was later brought to Kabul. It was unclear whether the attack took place.
The documents indicate that these types of activities continued throughout last year. From July to October 2009, nine threat reports detailed movements by suicide bombers from Pakistan into populated areas of Afghanistan, including Kandahar, Kunduz and Kabul.
Some of the bombers were sent to disrupt Afghanistan's presidential elections, held last August. In other instances, American intelligence learned that the Haqqani network sent bombers at the ISI's behest to strike Indian officials, development workers and engineers in Afghanistan. Other plots were aimed at the Afghan government.
Sometimes the intelligence documents twin seemingly credible detail with plots that seem fantastical or utterly implausible assertions. For instance, one report describes an ISI plan to use a remote-controlled bomb disguised as a golden Koran to assassinate Afghan government officials. Another report documents an alleged plot by the ISI and Taliban to ship poisoned alcoholic beverages to Afghanistan to kill American troops.
But the reports also charge that the ISI directly helped organize Taliban offensives at key junctures of the war. On June 19, 2006, ISI operatives allegedly met with the Taliban leaders in Quetta, the city in southern Pakistan where American and other Western officials have long believed top Taliban leaders have been given refuge by the Pakistani authorities. At the meeting, according to the report, they pressed the Taliban to mount attacks on Maruf, a district of Kandahar that lies along the Pakistani border.
The planned offensive would be carried out primarily by Arabs and Pakistanis, the report said, and a Taliban commander, "Akhtar Mansoor," warned that the men should be prepared for heavy losses. "The foreigners agreed to this operation and have assembled 20 4x4 trucks to carry the fighters into areas in question," it said.
While the specifics about the foreign fighters and the ISI are difficult to verify, the Taliban did indeed mount an offensive to seize control in Maruf in 2006.
Afghan government officials and Taliban fighters have widely acknowledged that the offensive was led by the Taliban commander Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, who was then the Taliban shadow governor of Kandahar.
Mullah Mansour tried to claw out a base for himself inside Afghanistan, but just as the report quotes him predicting, the Taliban suffered heavy losses and eventually pulled back.
Another report goes on to describe detailed plans for a large-scale assault, timed for September 2007, aimed at the American forward operating base in Managi, in Kunar Province.
"It will be a five-pronged attack consisting of 83-millimeter artillery, rockets, foot soldiers, and multiple suicide bombers," it says.
It is not clear that the attack ever came off, but its planning foreshadowed another, seminal attack that came months later, in July 2008. At that time, about 200 Taliban insurgents nearly overran an American base in Wanat, in Nuristan, killing nine American soldiers. For the Americans, it was one of the highest single-day tolls of the war.
Tensions With Pakistan
The flood of reports of Pakistani complicity in the insurgency has at times led to barely disguised tensions between American and Pakistani officers on the ground.
Meetings at border outposts set up to develop common strategies to seal the frontier and disrupt Taliban movements reveal deep distrust among the Americans of their Pakistani counterparts.
On Feb. 7, 2007, American officers met with Pakistani troops on a dry riverbed to discuss the borderlands surrounding Afghanistan's Khost Province.
According to notes from the meeting, the Pakistanis portrayed their soldiers as conducting around-the-clock patrols. Asked if he expected a violent spring, a man identified in the report as Lt. Col. Bilal, the Pakistani officer in charge, said no. His troops were in firm control.
The Americans were incredulous. Their record noted that there had been a 300 percent increase in militant activity in Khost before the meeting.
"This comment alone shows how disconnected this particular group of leadership is from what is going on in reality," the notes said.
The Pakistanis told the Americans to contact them if they spotted insurgent activity along the border. "I doubt this would do any good," the American author of the report wrote, "because PAKMIL/ISI is likely involved with the border crossings." "PAKMIL" refers to the Pakistani military.
A year earlier, the Americans became so frustrated at the increase in roadside bombs in Afghanistan that they hand-delivered folders with names, locations, aerial photographs and map coordinates to help the Pakistani military hunt down the militants the Americans believed were responsible.
Nothing happened, wrote Col. Barry Shapiro, an American military liaison officer with experience in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, after an Oct. 13, 2006, meeting. "Despite the number of reports and information detailing the concerns," Colonel Shapiro wrote, "we continue to see no change in the cross-border activity and continue to see little to no initiative along the PAK border" by Pakistan troops. The Pakistani Army "will only react when asked to do so by U.S. forces," he concluded.
Carlotta Gall contributed reporting.
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Pakistan to send all Afghan refugees home by 2012
ISLAMABAD, July 27 (Xinhua) -- The Pakistani Senate was informed on Tuesday that some three million Afghan refuges, still living in the country, will be repatriated by 2012, official sources said.
Pakistani Minister for Sates and Frontier Regions Najmuddin Khan told the upper house of the parliament that there are 1.7 million registered and more than one million unregistered Afghan refugees currently residing in Pakistan.
Responding during the question hour session, he said that the Afghan refugees would completely be repatriated with honour to their own country by 2012.
He said that a tripartite commission set up under the Tripartite Agreement between governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is working for return and reintegration of Afghan refugees.
Meanwhile, Pakistani Interior Minister Rehman Malik informed the House that Afghan refugees residing in different parts of the country especially in the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhawa are involved in acts of terrorism and crimes.
"I have taken up the issue with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and asked him to take measures for the return and reintegration of Afghan refugees and strengthen your vote bank but he didn't reply positively," the minister added.
Millions of Afghan refugees had arrived in Pakistan after the former Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. They had been living in camps and cities in rented houses and many of them have returned after the collapse of Taliban regime in 2001.
Pakistan has issued a special card known as Proof of Registration Card which allow them to stay in Pakistan.
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Strikes in eastern Afghanistan target militant
By the CNN Wire Staff July 27, 2010
Kabul, Afghanistan (CNN) -- Afghan and international forces targeting a militant commander launched several "precision strikes" in eastern Afghanistan, NATO's International Security Assistance Force said.
The Monday strikes targeted a bunker complex in a remote area of Paktiya province, where intelligence sources believed the commander was hiding. It is not yet known whether the commander died.
The militant, who was not identified, was part of the Haqqani network, a group with links to the Taliban, and was responsible for the Khost-Gardez pass region, officials said. ISAF said the commander "regularly directs and conducts attacks against Afghan and coalition forces and is in regular contact with top Haqqani leadership across the border in Pakistan."
"These strikes were meticulously conducted against a known and extremely dangerous senior leader within the Haqqani network," said Col. Rafael Torres, an ISAF spokesman. "The insurgents are regularly smuggling foreign fighters across the borders of Afghanistan to bring violence and instability to the Afghan people."
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Rescue operation for missing U.S. soldier leaves 3 insurgents dead in Afghanistan
GHAZNI, Afghanistan, July 27 (Xinhua)-- Rescue operation with the involvement of Afghan and NATO-led troops for the recovery of the missing U.S. soldier has expanded to Ghazni province as three militants have been killed, police said on Tuesday.
"The rescue operation launched Monday in Andar district and so far three Taliban militants have been killed and two others sustained injuries,"deputy to provincial police chief Nawroz Ali Mahmoudzada told Xinhua.
He also said that intelligence reports indicate that the insurgents had taken the U.S. soldier to Andar district.
Two U.S. soldiers went missing in Charkh district of Logar province 60 km south of capital Kabul on Friday.
A Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid later on claimed abducting the two soldiers and in talks with media via telephone from undisclosed location said one of the kidnapped soldiers was killed and the other has been kept in secret place.
Mahmoudzada, meantime said that the rescue operation is still continuing in Charkh district and surrounding areas.
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Afghan intelligence contracts apply some limits
By Walter Pincus Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, July 27, 2010
After more than eight years of fighting in Afghanistan, the United States and its NATO coalition partners continue to hire private contractors to support their intelligence and counterintelligence analyses and operations in that country.
Earlier this month, NATO's International Security Assistance Force issued two solicitations for intelligence help, one to supply individuals with 14 specialties as part of a "multi-faceted intelligence operations support program" and the other to supply a 28-person team to work in Kabul inside the intelligence and operations division of the Afghan combined forces command.
The Washington Post series Top Secret America highlighted the enormous increase in contracting for intelligence assistance since Sept. 11, 2001. Last week, James Clapper, President Obama's nominee to be director of national intelligence, told senators during his confirmation hearing, "Intelligence . . . now drives everything, so it's not surprising in my view that we have so many contractors."
Clapper, however, said that standards are lacking and raised the question: "Should there be limits on the number of full-time-equivalent contractors who are embedded in the intelligence community?"
The Afghan intelligence contracts come as Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates is seeking to cut Pentagon spending and reduce contracting by 13 percent, according to the Post series. In addition, Gates has investigations underway into past intelligence contracting.
Reflecting congressional concerns that contractors are taking over inherently governmental functions, both of the solicitations issued last week say the contracted employees cannot be used "in direct support of combat operations [or] used to conduct source operations." In addition, contractors will "not direct or supervise government personnel . . . [or] conduct or directly participate in interrogations under any circumstances." These limitations reflect language attached recently to defense authorization legislation by Congress. ad_icon
A senior officer at Central Command said he could not comment on specific contracts but emphasized the importance of having contractors when "we need a certain high level of knowledge and familiarity with a culture in which most service intel types don't have a strong enough background."
Anthony H. Cordesman, an intelligence and national security expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the need for contractors arises because retention of military and civilians employed within the intelligence community is bad, in part because government pay runs "60 percent to 100 percent lower than the contract base." He said coupling that with normal turbulence caused by military reassignments leaves the Pentagon "heavily dependent on contractors, particularly for specialized skills."
What types of work will contractors do under the newly issued solicitations?
Employees working under the broader contract -- to support Afghan intelligence -- will "support and augment, not replace government military and civilian personnel." Its counterintelligence support specialists will "interview walk-in sources, conduct screenings" and assist force protection programs, working out of secure bases and installations. Senior counterintelligence support specialists will ensure flow of information between brigades and higher echelons, as the solicitation notes.
A "screener project lead" will assist in the screening of Afghan and third-country nationals for access to coalition military bases and recommend "access or denial of access." A "reachback intelligence analyst" is to support analysis and dissemination "of Afghanistan measures of stability" and will work at Central Command headquarters. Staying in touch with analytic teams in Afghanistan, this person is to meld assessments done in provinces and districts using daily human intelligence, signals and other forms of intelligence, including products from "high value individual targeting."
Others working under this contract will handle strategic debriefing of senior officials and design and develop multimedia exploitation of intelligence imagery and electronic intercepts at operational and strategic levels for senior officials. In addition, there are to be signal intelligence ground and aerial specialists, as well as managers to support collection by human spies as well as satellites and manned and unmanned aircraft.
The solicitation for the 28-person team specifies that 15 individuals are to work in human intelligence, helping prepare packages to support spy operations and review plans for recruitment of new agents.
Ten of the group will be counterintelligence support specialists, including a senior person who will brief senior government officials. Together they will work on "areas critical to detecting, deterring, neutralizing and exploiting" intelligence and insurgent activities against coalition forces. Rounding out the group are counterintelligence/human intelligence special advisers who serve as program managers.
"We never built up the structure we needed in intel and really did not start creating an effective structure until the summer of 2009," Cordesman says, adding, "We now have a far more sophisticated effort looking at the civil side of Afghanistan, threat networks, interface with Pakistan and only now are creating the capabilities for a population-centric fight."
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5 Taliban militants killed, 10 injured in Afghanistan
KABUL, July 27 (Xinhua) -- Afghan security forces backed by NATO-led troops, in efforts to root out militants in the northern Kunduz province, kicked off a three day offensive that concluded on Monday, killing five Taliban militants and injuring 10 others, a statement of Interior Ministry said Tuesday.
"A joint cleanup operation launched by Afghan National Police, Army and Coalition troops was launched on Saturday and ended on Monday in Nahri Sufi area of Chardara district. As a result five enemies of peace and stability were killed and 10 other enemies were injured,"the statement said.
It said that no casualties were inflicted to combined forces.
Kunduz and neighboring Baghlan province in north Afghanistan have been the scene of increasing militancy over the past several months.
Earlier this month, three foreigners and two Afghan police were killed while Taliban militants attacked a guest house run by a U.S. organization in the Kunduz city, the capital of the same name province. Six suicide bombers were also killed in the blasts.
However, the Taliban outfits who largely have been relying in suicide and roadside bombings have yet to make comments.
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Soldiers Charged With Fuel Theft
Wall Street Journal By MARIA ABI-HABIB And ALAN CULLISON JULY 27, 2010
KABUL - U.S. investigators arrested two U.S. soldiers and suspended a pair of Afghan trucking companies on suspicions they helped the soldiers steal $1.6 million in fuel from a military base in eastern Afghanistan.
The arrests and suspensions come amid rising scrutiny of the $2.16 billion trucking contract system that has successfully supplied coalition troops but, critics say, also fueled corruption and anticoalition violence during the nine-year-old war.
Suspicions about the soldiers were raised after colleagues, while going through files in their offices, discovered more than $160,000 in cash stuffed into pasteboard boxes at the outpost in Logar province, south of Kabul.
Details of the case are sketchy and authorities don't know what was done with the stolen fuel. It may have been sold on the black market or been used by the companies, U.S. officials said. But one of the soldiers, a logistics expert, is helping authorities in the probe, leading them to more stolen cash, a U.S. official said.
"These two companies—administrative action is being taken against them and they won't get business with us at this time," said Brig. Gen. Camille Nichols, the commanding general of Centcom Contracting Command.
With supply lines stretched thin in Afghanistan, the coalition has relied on private truckers instead of military convoys to funnel fuel and supplies to its troops at remote outposts. Lately, the coalition has stepped up scrutiny of the suppliers amid growing concerns that the large amounts of cash being distributed have been stolen and possibly used to stoke the anticoalition insurgency.
U.S. officials said they have suspended both of the companies involved from any government contracting for 18 months. They could be barred for longer after an investigation is complete, Brig. Gen. Nichols said.
The companies under investigation are Afghan-owned Guzar Mir Bacha Kot Transportation, known as GMT by U.S officials, and one of its subcontractors, Suleiman & Sons. Neither company has publicly listed contact information or could be reached to comment.
The bigger of the companies, GMT, is one of the eight primary contractors that the Department of Defense relies on to deliver about 70% of the food, water, ammunition, weapons and fuel used by American troops in Afghanistan under what is known as Afghan Host Nation Trucking contract, valued at $2.16 billion.
Suleiman & Sons, a much smaller company, worked as a subcontractor to GMT, and has already been tried and found guilty in Afghan courts, Brig. Gen Nichols said.
GMT has also been barred for now for working as a subcontractor, which it has done extensively for other chief suppliers to the Pentagon, officials said. It will be given 30 days to prove its innocence and if it cannot, it could be disqualified from future U.S. contracts once tried, Brig. Gen Nichols said.
Congressional investigators, who compiled a scathing report on the trucking system this year, say it is hard to say whether barring any of the companies has much effect, as management and ownership of companies are easily changed or intertwined.
U.S. logistics officials in Afghanistan say they often know little about subcontractors, where they believe the bulk of the corruption in the contracting process is rooted.
Officials say U.S. contracting laws don't give U.S. authorities much oversight beyond the primary contractors that sign deals with the Pentagon. But that could change, they say, with an amendment to standing legislation that would force primary contractors to disclose the contact details, ownership structure and even bank-account details of subcontractors when submitting a bid. —Habib Zahori contributed to this article
Write to Alan Cullison at alan.cullison@wsj.com
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Taliban Set 150 Houses on Fire in Barg-e-Matal District
July 27, 2010 Tolo News
Afghan and Pakistani Taliban have burnt down 150 houses in Barg-e-Matal district of the eastern Nooristan province, local officials say
These houses were put on fire during the 24 hours of Taliban control over the district, the governor of Nooristan told Tolo news.
Around 4000 families have been displaced in the province due to clashes between the Taliban and Afghan forces in the past one month, he added.
Barg-e-Matal district has daily been attacked by the Taliban in the past week.
Provincial officials have reported no casualties resulting from the clashes.
Barg-e-Matal district came under Taliban control for 24 hours when a group of 700 Afghan and Pakistani Taliban captured the district after fierce clashes on Saturday night.
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Mass grave cover-ups undermine justice
KABUL, 27 July 2010 (IRIN) - Three years after President Hamid Karzai appointed a commission to investigate a mass grave site in the Chimtala plains, north of Kabul city, the site, the commission and the truth are missing.
Commission chairman Mawlawi Fazel Hadi Shinwari has been in a coma in hospital in India for over eight months, according to government officials.
“I have no knowledge about the commission and its work,” said Mawlawi Qiamuddin Kashaf, acting chairman of the Ulema Council which was also headed by Shinwari. Officials in the President’s Office were also unable to shed any light on the commission’s findings.
Dozens of mass graves have been disturbed or destroyed over the past eight years, and with them crucial evidence about atrocities committed and their perpetrators, human rights groups say.
“In some cases, people have deliberately tampered with or destroyed a mass grave in order to hide criminal evidence,” Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) official Ahmad Nader Nadery told IRIN.
Numerous human rights violations, including mass killings, have been committed by various warring factions since 1979, but no proper investigations of the graves have been carried out.
Officials estimate some graves contain hundreds of bodies, and one in the eastern province of Kunar has over 1,100 bodies, according to the AIHRC, which said it had registered at least 118 mass grave sites.
Accused
A mass grave in the Dasht-e-Lailee desert in Jowzjan Province, where the bodies of thousands of Taliban prisoners were reportedly dumped in 2001-2002, was allegedly tampered with by Uzbek warlord Gen Abdul Rashid Dostum in 2008.
Despite denials, Dostum has been accused of killing thousands of Taliban prisoners when he helped the US-led coalition overcome the Taliban in northern Afghanistan in 2001-2002.
Dostum is a close ally and senior military adviser to President Karzai.
The disturbance of the burial site in Dasht-e-Lailee was widely condemned by human rights groups. Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), a US-based organization, called on the Afghan government and its foreign supporters to preserve the sites.
“Our calls were never heeded and it led to the destruction of an area where we suspect there are mass graves… and even that has not been investigated,” Stefan Schmitt, a PHR forensic expert, told IRIN.
He said a lot of powerful people, some of them in high government posts, were involved in past crimes in Afghanistan and they do not want the truth to come out. “One can attempt to destroy evidence but cannot wash away a crime forever,” he said.
A senior UN official said in December 2008 that the UN was committed to helping the Afghan authorities preserve such sites in order to protect evidence of crimes.
Justice denied
Mass graves were considered key elements in the implementation of a transitional justice action plan which, according to AIHRC officials, failed to achieve even 10 percent of its targeted benchmarks
The official deadline for the implementation of the action plan expired over two years ago and Karzai has refused calls to renew it.
An overwhelming majority of the over 4,000 people interviewed by the AIHRC in 2005 said human rights violators and criminals must be brought to justice. However, there is a lack of political commitment to conduct the necessary investigations, experts say.
“Individually people want to find out about their victims and seek justice but officially this has not been possible so far,” said PHR’s Schmitt.
“Regardless of their importance for the transitional justice process - which is very important - mass graves are an inextricable part of our brutal history and must be protected out of respect for the victims,” said AIHRC’s Nadery.
No peace is viable without justice, and over 76 percent of those interviewed by the AIHRC in 2005 said justice would bring stability and security, which has deteriorated since the fall of the Taliban. Many powerful criminals have not been brought to book, undermining peace efforts, experts say.
Complicating any future investigations is the fact that while the motives for tampering with the dead may be criminal, they are not necessarily so: In some instances, local people, searching for lost family members, have taken bones from mass graves and buried them elsewhere. Collective reburials of human remains have also been reported in some areas at the behest of local Islamic leaders.
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Tajik National Bank Head: Counterfeit Money Printed In Afghanistan
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty July 27, 2010
DUSHANBE -- The head of the Tajik National Bank has warned people that forged Tajik somonis are circulating in Tajikistan, RFE/RL's Tajik Service reports.
Sharif Rahimzoda said on July 26 in Dushanbe that "recently we received information that there was a secret printing house in Afghanistan that was printing counterfeit somonis. We informed our Afghan allies and the printing house was destroyed."
Rahimzoda did not say where the printing presses were or who was running them. He said there is no reliable estimate of the amount of counterfeit currency already printed and brought into Tajikistan.
Rahimzoda noted that people do not care whether the money they receive is forged and admitted that he had used forged banknotes in a Dushanbe market and the vendor accepted them.
He added that many large stores or supermarkets in the Tajik capital have been accepting forged currency because they cannot distinguish the counterfeit banknotes from real ones.
Rahimzoda said the planned increase in the use of bank debit cards is the most effective way of reducing the use of forged currency. He said the number of debit-card users in Tajikistan will increase by 25 percent this year.
Despite that, Rahimzoda said more than 90 percent of all financial transactions in Tajikistan are carried out in cash.
Many Tajiks use U.S. dollars for large transactions. Rahimzoda also said that 2.9 billion somonis ($661.8 million) and around S400 million in cash are currently in circulation in Tajikistan.
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