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Afghan interior, intel chiefs replaced over attack
By Rohan Sullivan, Associated Press Writer
KABUL, Afghanistan – Afghanistan's intelligence chief and interior minister resigned Sunday to take responsibility for allowing militants to elude a massive security operation and launch an attack on last week's national peace conference.
Karzai orders review of Afghan Taliban detentions
By Rohan Sullivan, Associated Press Writer – Sun Jun 6, 8:41 am ET
KABUL, Afghanistan – President Hamid Karzai ordered a review Sunday of all cases of Taliban suspects being held in Afghan jails and said those being detained on doubtful evidence must be released.
Five NATO soldiers killed in Afghanistan
Sun Jun 6, 12:46 pm ET
KABUL (AFP) – Five NATO soldiers, four of them Americans, were killed Sunday in war-torn Afghanistan, the alliance said in a statement, in a day of violence which left six others dead and 26 wounded.
Afghan jirga's resolutions 'nice on paper'
by Waheedullah Massoud Sun Jun 6, 2:28 am ET
KABUL (AFP) – Decisions made at Afghanistan's landmark peace jirga last week may sound like a good way to put an end to nearly nine years of war with the Taliban, but they are idealistic and impractical, analysts say.
Six dead, 26 wounded in Afghan attacks: officials
Sun Jun 6, 9:27 am ET
KABUL (AFP) – Bomb attacks and insurgent ambushes killed four Afghan police officers and two civilians Sunday, leaving another 26 people wounded in a day of violence across Afghanistan, the government said.
Bombing outside Afghan provincial governor's office kills policeman
By Mirwais Khan Associated Press via The Washington Post Sunday, June 6, 2010; A13
KANDAHAR, AFGHANISTAN -- A bomb exploded Saturday outside the provincial governor's office in the Afghan city of Kandahar, killing one policeman and wounding at least 14 civilians, officials said.
With U.S. Aid, Warlord Builds an Afghan Empire
Rule of the Gun
New York Times By DEXTER FILKINS June 5, 2010
TIRIN KOT, Afghanistan - The most powerful man in this arid stretch of southern Afghanistan is not the provincial governor, nor the police chief, nor even the commander of the Afghan Army.
US Afghan strategy uses economic aid to battle Taliban
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran Washington Post June 6, 2010
NAWA, Afghanistan - In this patch of southern Afghanistan, the US strategy to keep the Taliban at bay involves an economic stimulus.
Russia says world needs to do more for Afghanistan
Sun Jun 6, 1:28 am ET
SINGAPORE (Reuters) – The international community needs to start providing more economic and social assistance to Afghanistan to ensure the nation can function on its own, Russia's Deputy Prime Minister said on Sunday.
Afghan cricket team inspires documentary by Oscar-winner
Press Trust Of India London, June 6, 2010
The rise to prominence of war-ravaged Afghanistan's cricket team has inspired Oscar-winning director Sam Mendes to help produce a documentary -- 'Out of the Ashes' -- charting the side's trials and travails.
In Afghanistan, U.S platoon's tranquil morning shattered by blast
Bombs explode every day in the country, and are preponderant in the Arghandab Valley, where the platoon is based. But for one sergeant, this one was personal and quite memorable.
Los Angeles Times By David Zucchino June 6, 2010
Reporting from Jilga, Afghanistan - Sgt. Tait Terzo was manning the patrol point just after dawn Saturday with his bomb-sniffing dog, Urmel, an eager Belgian Malinois whose job was to warn the U.S. soldiers behind him if he caught a whiff of explosives.
A shared glimpse of CIA officer's secret life
The Associated Press By ADAM GOLDMAN 06/06/2010
WASHINGTON - A last photo shows Darren James LaBonte on an all-terrain vehicle in Khost, Afghanistan, days before his death. He's smiling.
Afghanistan Crime Wave Alarms Balkh Residents
GroundReport By IWPR June 05, 2010
Surge in kidnappings and murder has worried locals in what has been a relatively peaceful province.
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Afghan interior, intel chiefs replaced over attack
By Rohan Sullivan, Associated Press Writer
KABUL, Afghanistan – Afghanistan's intelligence chief and interior minister resigned Sunday to take responsibility for allowing militants to elude a massive security operation and launch an attack on last week's national peace conference.
President Hamid Karzai's office said in a statement he had accepted the resignations of Interior Minister Hanif Atmar and National Directorate of Security chief Amrullah Saleh because they gave unsatisfactory explanations for last Wednesday's attack.
At least two Taliban militants fired rockets at the conference where some 1,500 delegates — including lawmakers, tribal and religious chiefs — discussed how to resolve Afghanistan's nearly 9-year war. The militants then engaged in a gunbattle with security forces near the venue. None of the delegates were hurt. The militants were killed.
Interior Ministry spokesman Zemeri Bashary said earlier Sunday that the two attackers were able to breach security by dressing as a couple — one in a man's street clothes and the other in a woman's burqa, and clutching a Kalashnikov rifle and a grenade launcher wrapped up in cloth like a swaddled baby.
They were able to walk nearly one mile (more than a kilometer) from a house they had rented in the capital to another building near the conference venue where they launched their attack, Bashary said.
"The president of Afghanistan has lost trust in our capability to protect national events," Saleh told reporters in the capital, after what he described as a "tough conversation" with Karzai.
"Our explanations did not convince President Karzai that we were competent," he said.
He said there were "tens of other reasons" that he resigned, but he declined to give any of them, saying that doing so would have repercussions for those still working in the government.
Saleh, an ethnic Tajik who had served as intelligence chief since 2004, said evidence showed that the Haqqani network, a Pakistan-based Afghan Taliban faction with close ties to al-Qaida, was behind the attack on the conference, or jirga.
The statement from Karzai's office said the president had appointed Deputy Interior Minister Munir Mangal as acting interior minister and Engineer Ibrahim Spinzada as acting intelligence chief.
Bashary said two major errors occurred in the security for the jirga: insufficient intelligence reporting about the attackers' militant group and the failure of security forces to stop and search the couple.
"It goes against all customs for a man to search a woman, so the enemy took advantage of this," Bashary said.
Atmar, an ethnic Pashtun and former education minister, had been appointed in a 2008 Cabinet reshuffle that had been aimed at curbing high-level corruption.
In charge of Afghanistan's police force, the British-educated Atmar had a positive reputation among Western officials. He was reappointed to the interior portfolio after Karzai's re-election last year.
Also Sunday, Karzai made his first official response to the jirga by ordering a review of all cases of Taliban suspects in Afghan jails and the release of those detained on doubtful evidence.
The decree did not directly address the issue of the hundreds of Afghans being held in U.S. military custody.
Spokesman Col. Wayne Shanks said the U.S. military was discussing with the government an approach to all the jirga's recommendations. He noted that the American military had already started the process of handing control of the main U.S. prison in Afghanistan, at Bagram Air Base, to the government.
The conference recommended that Taliban prisoners be released if the evidence against them was shaky, as a goodwill gesture to encourage insurgent fighters to lay down their arms and as a precursor to peace talks with Taliban leaders.
Washington supports Karzai's plans to offer incentives to lower-rung militants but remains skeptical about Kabul seeking negotiations with insurgent leaders — although such a strategy could be key to the eventual withdrawal of U.S. forces from the country.
U.S. officials contend the Taliban leadership — which is demanding the complete withdrawal of foreign troops from Afghanistan — feels it has little reason to negotiate because it believes it is winning the war.
Five NATO troops — including four Americans — were killed in three separate incidents Sunday, the coalition said.
Three U.S. troops died in a vehicle accident in southern Afghanistan, and a fourth was killed in an insurgent attack in the country's east, said U.S. military spokesman Lt. Col. Joseph T. Breasseale. The fifth NATO service member — who was not immediately identified — was killed when a makeshift bomb exploded in southern Afghanistan.
In other violence, a suicide attacker rammed an explosives-laden motorbike into a NATO convoy on the outskirts of the eastern city of Jalalabad, wounding one police officer and 12 civilians, Afghan officials said. NATO spokesman Sgt. Kevin Bell one service member received minor shrapnel wounds. Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid claimed responsibility for the attack on behalf of the group.
Also Sunday, a roadside bomb attack hit a police truck on a main road in Kandahar province's Panjwai district, killing one police officer and two civilians in a nearby vehicle, said local official Shah Baran Noorzai, the district government chief.
Meanwhile, NATO reported that its forces had killed a Taliban commander it named as Mullah Akhtar in air strikes Saturday in western Farah province. NATO said Akhtar had close ties with Taliban and al-Qaida senior leaders and arranged training for foreign fighters from Iran.
___
Associated Press Writers Rahim Faiez, Heidi Vogt and Matthew Pennington in Kabul and Mirwais Khan in Kandahar contributed to this report.
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Karzai orders review of Afghan Taliban detentions
By Rohan Sullivan, Associated Press Writer – Sun Jun 6, 8:41 am ET
KABUL, Afghanistan – President Hamid Karzai ordered a review Sunday of all cases of Taliban suspects being held in Afghan jails and said those being detained on doubtful evidence must be released.
The step was Karzai's first official response to a national conference last week on ways to end his country's nearly 9-year-old insurgency. The resolution from that meeting included recommendations to move toward negotiations with militant factions.
The conference, called a "jirga" in the local language, also recommended that Taliban prisoners being held in Afghan custody and by the U.S. military should be released if they were being held on "inaccurate statements or unsubstantiated allegations."
Hundreds of Taliban and other militant suspects are being held in Afghan jails across the country. Hundreds more, including al-Qaida operatives, are being held in U.S. military jails in Afghanistan and Cuba.
Karzai's office said in a statement he had ordered the creation of a delegation of officials from the Supreme Court, a government-backed reconciliation commission, Justice Ministry and other judicial officers to "identify those prisoners who are in jails without enough evidence and release them."
Last week's meeting — made up of some 1,500 tribal, religious, provincial and other leaders — said insurgent prisoners should be released as a goodwill gesture that would precede peace talks with the Taliban. But it also stressed that insurgents who want to take part in the peace process must cut their ties with foreign terrorist groups such as al-Qaida.
Washington supports Karzai's plans to offer incentives for rank-and-file militants to lay down arms but remains skeptical about Kabul seeking negotiations with insurgent leaders — although such a strategy could be key to the eventual withdrawal of U.S. forces from the country.
U.S. officials contend the Taliban leadership — which is demanding the complete withdrawal of foreign troops from Afghanistan — feels it has little reason to negotiate because it believes it is winning the war. NATO forces are preparing a major operation in the Taliban heartland of southern Kandahar province which the Obama administration hopes can help turn the war around.
On Sunday, a suicide attacker rammed into a NATO convoy on the outskirts of the eastern city of Jalalabad, Afghan officials said. The assailant hit the convoy with an explosives-laden motorbike, wounding 13 people — 12 civilians and one police officer, the Interior Ministry said in a statement.
NATO spokesman Sgt. Kevin Bell said the blast ripped into a mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicle, or MRAP, but no one inside was seriously injured. One service member was treated for minor shrapnel wounds, he said.
Photos from the scene show the vehicle on fire, flames lapping around the blackened door and front wheel well.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack. The assailant was a man from Jalalabad who attacked the convoy in a Toyota Corolla, Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid said.
Meanwhile, NATO reported that its forces had killed a Taliban commander and several other insurgents in the western province of Farah.
The international alliance launched airstrikes Saturday in Gulistan district after observing "armed individuals moving through a known insurgent safe haven," a statement said. A ground search team later approached the strike area and shot and killed several heavily armed insurgents, it said.
NATO identified the insurgent commander as Mullah Akhtar and said he had close ties with Taliban and al-Qaida senior leaders. It said he was responsible for arranging training for foreign fighters from Iran and helped resolve disputes between militant networks.
Last week, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of NATO and U.S. forces in Afghanistan, said there was "clear evidence" that some Taliban fighters have trained in Iran — although U.S. officials have previously said not in great numbers.
Also Sunday, a roadside bomb attack hit a police truck on a main road in Kandahar province's Panjwai district, killing one police officer and two civilians in a nearby vehicle, said Shah Baran Noorzai, the district government chief.
The Interior Ministry gave a different toll, saying one police officer and one civilian were killed.
Panjwai lies on the edge of Kandahar city. NATO has widely publicized the coming offensive there as a combination of military strikes and government-boosting programs it hopes will win over the population.
The Taliban, meanwhile, have launched a series of high-profile attacks as part of their own summer offensive against the Afghan government and international forces. The area in and around Kandahar city has become particularly violent in recent months, with regular bomb attacks and assassinations of people seen as allied with the government.
No one immediately claimed responsibility for Sunday's attack, which came a day after a bomb exploded outside the provincial governor's office in Kandahar city. That bomb killed one police officer and wounded at least 14 civilians.
In neighboring Uruzgan province, police said they killed more than 20 insurgents in two operations in the past 36 hours. In one of those operations, in Charchino district, 14 militants were killed including an area commander, said Gen. Juma Gul Himmat, the provincial police chief.
As with many reports of violence in far-flung areas of Afghanistan, it was not possible to confirm the casualty toll independently.
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Associated Press writers Rahim Faiez and Matthew Pennington in Kabul and Mirwais Khan in Kandahar contributed to this report.
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Five NATO soldiers killed in Afghanistan
Sun Jun 6, 12:46 pm ET
KABUL (AFP) – Five NATO soldiers, four of them Americans, were killed Sunday in war-torn Afghanistan, the alliance said in a statement, in a day of violence which left six others dead and 26 wounded.
The soldiers, members of NATO's US-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), were killed in two separate attacks and a crash, according to a NATO statement.
"Three ISAF servicemembers died today as a result of a vehicle accident in southern Afghanistan," the statement said.
"In a separate operation, one ISAF servicemember died today following an improvised explosive device attack in southern Afghanistan. Another ISAF servicemember died today as a result of an insurgent attack in eastern Afghanistan."
A NATO spokeswoman told AFP that four of the five dead were US troops. She did not give the nationality of the fifth.
The deaths follow the killings of two ISAF soldiers on Friday by small-arms fire in the militant-infested south, where international forces are fighting an increasingly deadly insurgency led by the Taliban.
Three policemen also died when their car hit a roadside bomb, the weapon of choice of the Taliban, in the northern province of Kunduz, the interior ministry said earlier.
And two civilians and another officer were killed by an improvised explosive device targeting police in the Taliban spiritual homeland of Kandahar, the provincial government said.
The bomb wounded 11 civilians, including six children.
The interior ministry announced meanwhile that a suicide bomber on a motorcycle had targeted a NATO convoy in Jalalabad, in the war-torn nation's northeast.
Thirteen Afghan civilians, including five children, were wounded, it said.
Elsewhere two Spanish soldiers sustained minor injuries when they were ambushed by insurgents in the northwest, Spain's defence ministry said.
The Taliban are waging an insurgency to overthrow the US-backed government of President Hamid Karzai which is supported by 130,000 international troops.
The insurgency has gained strength in recent years as the rebels have spread their influence beyond their traditional stronghold in the country's south.
Police said Afghan and foreign forces killed 25 Taliban militants in two separate military operations in central Uruzgan province late Saturday.
"Fifteen of them were killed in Charchino and 10 others in Gizab, both Taliban-troubled regions in the province," Juma Gul Hemat, the provincial police chief, told AFP.
"Their bodies were left in the area. We handed them to the elders for burial."
According to an AFP tally, based on one kept by the independent website icasualties.org, 235 foreign troops have been killed in Afghanistan so far this year. Last year was the deadliest yet, with 520 killed.
Around two-thirds of this year's casualties are American. US forces make up the bulk of the 130,000 foreign troops based in Afghanistan.
NATO, US and Afghan troops are preparing their biggest offensive against the rebels in the southern province of Kandahar, with foreign troop numbers set to peak at 150,000 by August.
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Afghan jirga's resolutions 'nice on paper'
by Waheedullah Massoud Sun Jun 6, 2:28 am ET
KABUL (AFP) – Decisions made at Afghanistan's landmark peace jirga last week may sound like a good way to put an end to nearly nine years of war with the Taliban, but they are idealistic and impractical, analysts say.
Some 1,600 delegates from across Afghanistan's political and social spectrum attended the three-day event in a huge tent in a Kabul suburb, interrupted at the start by a suspected Taliban rocket attack.
At its conclusion on Friday the jirga produced a 16-point resolution which included a call for the removal of militant leaders from a UN terrorist blacklist, among them Mullah Mohammad Omar and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.
Political analyst Ahmad Sayeedi is among those sceptical about the exercise.
"The decisions made are very good but are not practical since the government cannot implement any of them," Sayeedi told AFP. "They just look nice on paper and are idealistic."
Some of the other proposals agreed upon at the Consultative Peace Jirga included releasing some Taliban prisoners, developing a comprehensive peace programme, a call on militants to renounce violence and to drop all preconditions for peace talks.
"There is no specific mechanism for peace and talks with Taliban. If the government could implement the jirga's suggestions they would have done so years ago," said Sayeedi.
The jirga advised the government act "immediately" on seeking the removal of the names of militant leaders from a blacklist drawn up by the UN Security Council in response to the September 11 2001 attacks on the US.
The list designated as terrorists Taliban and Al-Qaeda leaders who were then based in Afghanistan, and helped to provide a UN-sanctioned justification for the US-led invasion of the country in November 2001.
"Removing those names from the blacklist would mean the leaders are no longer considered terrorists and that would undermine the military presence of foreign forces here, making it an occupation," Sayeedi said.
"That is why it is not practical at all," he said.
Leaders of the Taliban insurgency have said they will negotiate with the Afghan government only after foreign forces have left the country and the Afghan constitution has been amended.
"I do not think the decisions made at the jirga will convince the opposition to come and join the peace process," said another political analyst and commentator, Waheed Mujda.
"Most of the points in the declaration were a repetition of what has been said over the past years... the decisions made means that the Taliban must come and surrender and I don't think the Taliban will accept this," he said.
Some analysts and diplomats consider the jirga a success for giving Afghan President Hamid Karzai broad-based public support for his peace plan and for applying pressure on the militants.
The jirga also decided that a shura (council) should be established to implement a peace process and co-ordinate the jirga's decisions with the international community's representatives in Afghanistan.
"(This) is a very wise move from Karzai. This way Karzai passes... the responsibility of reconciliation," said a western ambassador who attended the jirga.
"If it is a failure, Karzai cannot be held responsible for that. The jirga was well organised," he said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The challenge now facing the jirga was the implementation of its proposals, said political commentator Janan Mamozai.
"What remains to be seen, though, is whether the Afghan government and the international community -- the Americans in particular -- honestly and sincerely make efforts to implement the recommendations," he said.
The US embassy in Kabul welcomed the jirga's outcome.
"These discussions are the beginning of a process that we believe can help bring stability to Afghanistan and long-desired peace to its people," the embassy said in a statement.
The United States has been cautiously favourable towards reintegrating into civilian life those Taliban fighters who renounce Al-Qaeda, abandon violence and commit to live by the laws of Afghanistan.
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Six dead, 26 wounded in Afghan attacks: officials
Sun Jun 6, 9:27 am ET
KABUL (AFP) – Bomb attacks and insurgent ambushes killed four Afghan police officers and two civilians Sunday, leaving another 26 people wounded in a day of violence across Afghanistan, the government said.
Three policemen died when their car hit a roadside bomb, the weapon of choice of the Taliban, in the northern province of Kunduz, the interior ministry said.
Two civilians and another officer were killed by an improvised explosive device targeting police in the Taliban spiritual homeland of Kandahar, the provincial government said.
The bomb wounded 11 civilians, including six children.
The interior ministry announced meanwhile that a suicide bomber on a motorcycle targeted a NATO convoy in Jalalabad, in the war-torn nation's northeast.
Thirteen Afghan civilians, including five children, were wounded, it said.
Elsewhere two Spanish soldiers sustained minor injuries when they were ambushed by insurgents in the northwest, Spain's defence ministry said.
The Taliban are waging an insurgency to overthrow the US-backed government of President Hamid Karzai which is backed by 130,000 international troops.
The insurgency has gained strength in recent years as the rebels have spread their influence beyond their traditional stronghold in the country's south.
Police said Afghan and foreign forces killed 25 Taliban militants in two separate military operations in central Uruzgan province late Saturday.
"Fifteen of them were killed in Charchino and 10 others in Gizab, both Taliban-troubled regions in the province," Juma Gul Hemat, the provincial police chief, told AFP.
"Their bodies were left in the area. We handed them to the elders for burial."
NATO, US and Afghan troops are preparing their biggest offensive against the rebels in the southern province of Kandahar, with foreign troop numbers set to peak at 150,000 by August.
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Bombing outside Afghan provincial governor's office kills policeman
By Mirwais Khan Associated Press via The Washington Post Sunday, June 6, 2010; A13
KANDAHAR, AFGHANISTAN -- A bomb exploded Saturday outside the provincial governor's office in the Afghan city of Kandahar, killing one policeman and wounding at least 14 civilians, officials said.
The attack reflects deteriorating security in the largest city in the country's volatile south -- also the Taliban's spiritual home -- where NATO is preparing for a major operation seen as key to combating the insurgency. The governor, Tooryalai Wesa, was not in his office at the time.
The bombing also comes a day after a national peace conference in Kabul boosted President Hamid Karzai's plans to seek negotiations with the Taliban in a bid to end the nearly nine-year war.
Kandahar's police chief, Sardar Mohammad Zazai, said the explosives were strapped to a bicycle on the street outside the compound where the governor lives and works.
The governor's spokesman, Zelmai Ayubi, said the 14 wounded included five children. Four of the wounded were in critical condition, he said.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the bombing, but Taliban militants are the most likely suspects.
The hard-line Islamist movement, ousted from power in 2001 but now a formidable militant force, says it will keep fighting. Its leaders say no talks are possible until foreign troops withdraw from the country -- a step Karzai cannot afford with the insurgency raging. U.S. officials contend that the Taliban leadership feels it has little reason to negotiate because it believes it is winning the war.
Karzai, who organized the conference -- known as a "peace jirga" -- that ended Friday, clearly got what he wanted from it: a mandate for his peace efforts and his government months after winning an election tainted by fraud. It also represented the first major public debate in Afghanistan on how to end the war amid widespread belief here that the insurgency cannot be defeated militarily.
"The one significance of the jirga is that for the first time, a collective and structured voice of Afghans for peace has been presented to the government and to the international community," said Ahmad Nader Nadery, a commissioner with Afghanistan's Independent Human Rights Commission.
U.S. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley praised the jirga as providing "a national consensus to pursue a political strategy to reduce the danger posed by the insurgency." While active militant leaders were not invited to the jirga in Kabul, some former Taliban and their sympathizers came. Many stay in contact with Taliban foot soldiers, who till their farms by day and lay roadside bombs by night.
Nadery said it's these rank-and-file Taliban who could be pressed by their communities to embrace the peace process, particularly if backed by government incentives.
The jirga's resolution calls for militants who join the peace process to be removed from a U.N. blacklist. The blacklist imposes travel and financial restrictions on about 137 people associated with the Taliban.
The resolution also supports the release of Taliban prisoners in U.S. and Afghan custody -- and Karzai promised to make that a priority as a goodwill gesture to the militants.
But it says insurgents who want to take part must cut their ties with foreign terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda.
In other violence, two British soldiers were killed in a gun battle with insurgents Friday in southern Helmand province, Britain's Ministry of Defense said Saturday.
Also Saturday, dozens of angry residents blocked a highway from western Herat city to the Iran border after a shooting involving NATO forces in which an Afghan civilian died and several others were arrested, police said.
Associated Press writers Kathy Gannon, Rohan Sullivan and Rahim Faiez in Kabul and Matthew Lee in Washington contributed to this report.
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With U.S. Aid, Warlord Builds an Afghan Empire
Rule of the Gun
New York Times By DEXTER FILKINS June 5, 2010
TIRIN KOT, Afghanistan - The most powerful man in this arid stretch of southern Afghanistan is not the provincial governor, nor the police chief, nor even the commander of the Afghan Army.
It is Matiullah Khan, the head of a private army that earns millions of dollars guarding NATO supply convoys and fights Taliban insurgents alongside American Special Forces.
In little more than two years, Mr. Matiullah, an illiterate former highway patrol commander, has grown stronger than the government of Oruzgan Province, not only supplanting its role in providing security but usurping its other functions, his rivals say, like appointing public employees and doling out government largess. His fighters run missions with American Special Forces officers, and when Afghan officials have confronted him, he has either rebuffed them or had them removed.
“Oruzgan used to be the worst place in Afghanistan, and now it’s the safest,” Mr. Matiullah said in an interview in his compound here, where supplicants gather each day to pay homage and seek money and help. “What should we do? The officials are cowards and thieves.”
Mr. Matiullah is one of several semiofficial warlords who have emerged across Afghanistan in recent months, as American and NATO officers try to bolster — and sometimes even supplant — ineffective regular Afghan forces in their battle against the Taliban insurgency.
In some cases, these strongmen have restored order, though at the price of undermining the very institutions Americans are seeking to build: government structures like police forces and provincial administrations that one day are supposed to be strong enough to allow the Americans and other troops to leave.
In other places around the country, Afghan gunmen have come to the fore as the heads of private security companies or as militia commanders, independent of any government control. In these cases, the warlords not only have risen from anarchy but have helped to spread it.
For the Americans, who are racing to secure the country against a deadline set by President Obama, the emergence of such strongmen is seen as a lesser evil, despite how compromised many of them are. In Mr. Matiullah’s case, American commanders appear to have set aside reports that he connives with both drug smugglers and Taliban insurgents.
“The institutions of the government, in security and military terms, are not yet strong enough to be able to provide security,” said Maj. Gen. Nick Carter, commander of NATO forces in southern Afghanistan. “But the situation is unsustainable and clearly needs to be resolved.”
Many Afghans say the Americans and their NATO partners are making a grave mistake by tolerating or encouraging warlords like Mr. Matiullah. These Afghans fear the Americans will leave behind an Afghan government too weak to do its work, and strongmen without any popular support.
“Matiullah is an illiterate guy using the government for his own interest,” said Mohammed Essa, a tribal leader in Tirin Kot, the Oruzgan provincial capital. “Once the Americans leave, he won’t last. And then what will we have?”
Building a Fortune
Mr. Matiullah does not look like one of the aging, pot-bellied warlords from Afghanistan’s bygone wars. Long and thin, he wears black silk turbans and extends a pinky when he gestures to make a point. Mr. Matiullah’s army is an unusual hybrid, too: a booming private business and a government-subsidized militia.
His main effort — and his biggest money maker — is securing the chaotic highway linking Kandahar to Tirin Kot for NATO convoys. One day each week, Mr. Matiullah declares the 100-mile highway open and deploys his gunmen up and down it. The highway cuts through an area thick with Taliban insurgents.
Mr. Matiullah keeps the highway safe, and he is paid well to do it. His company charges each NATO cargo truck $1,200 for safe passage, or $800 for smaller ones, his aides say. His income, according to one of his aides, is $2.5 million a month, an astronomical sum in a country as impoverished as this one.
“It’s suicide to come up this road without Matiullah’s men,” said Mohammed, a driver hauling stacks of sandbags and light fixtures to the Dutch base in Tirin Kot. The Afghan government even picks up a good chunk of Mr. Matiullah’s expenses. Under an arrangement with the Ministry of the Interior, the government pays for roughly 600 of Mr. Matiullah’s 1,500 fighters, including Mr. Matiullah himself, despite the fact that the force is not under the government’s control.
“The government tried to shut him down, and when they couldn’t, they agreed to pay for his men,” said Martine van Bijlert, a co-director of the Afghanistan Analysts Network, an independent organization here. NATO commanders say they reluctantly pay Mr. Matiullah (and others like him) for his services because they have no other way of moving their convoys across dangerous territory. Having their own men do it, they say, would take them away from other tasks.
American Support
But Mr. Matiullah’s role has grown beyond just business. His militia has been adopted by American Special Forces officers to gather intelligence and fight insurgents. Mr. Matiullah’s compound sits about 100 yards from the American Special Forces compound in Tirin Kot. A Special Forces officer, willing to speak about Mr. Matiullah only on the condition of anonymity, said his unit had an extensive relationship with Mr. Matiullah. “Matiullah is the best there is here,” the officer said.
With his NATO millions, and the American backing, Mr. Matiullah has grown into the strongest political and economic force in the region. He estimates that his salaries support 15,000 people in this impoverished province. He has built 70 mosques with his own money, endowed scholarships in Kabul and begun holding weekly meetings with area tribal leaders. His latest venture is a rock-crushing company that sells gravel to NATO bases.
This has irritated some local leaders, who say that the line between Mr. Matiullah’s business interest and the government has disappeared.
“What law says that a police officer can have a private security company?” said Juma Gul Hemat, the Oruzgan police chief, whose office is a few hundred yards from Mr. Matiullah’s.
“Many times I have confronted Matiullah over his illegal business,” Chief Hemat said. “But as long as the Americans are behind him, there is nothing I can do. They are the ones with the money.”
Both General Carter and Hanif Atmar, the Afghan interior minister, said they hoped to disband Mr. Matiullah’s militia soon — or at least to bring it under formal government control. Mr. Matiullah’s operation, the officials said, is one of at least 23 private security companies working in the area without any government license or oversight.
General Carter said that while he had no direct proof in Mr. Matiullah’s case, he harbored more general worries that the legions of unregulated Afghan security companies had a financial interest in prolonging chaos. In Mr. Matiullah’s case, he said, that would mean attacking people who refused to use his security service or enlisting the Taliban to do it. Local Afghans said that Mr. Matiullah had done both of those things, although they would not speak publicly for fear of retribution.
“Does he make deals and pay people to attack?” General Carter said. “I’m not aware of that.”
Last fall, Mr. Atmar summoned Mr. Matiullah to his office and told him he wanted to give Mr. Matiullah’s army a license and a government contract. The warlord walked out.
“I told him that it’s my men who are doing the fighting and dying,” Mr. Matiullah said. “The guys in Kabul want to steal the money.”
Mr. Matiullah is causing other problems, Mr. Atmar said, alienating members of Afghan tribes not his own. He has also begun charging Afghans to ride on the highway.
“Parallel structures of government create problems for the rule of law,” Mr. Atmar said. Along the highway linking Kandahar and Tirin Kot, many of Mr. Matiullah’s soldiers drive Afghan police trucks and wear Afghan police uniforms. Posters of Mr. Matiullah are plastered to their windshields.
“There is no doubt about it — the people of Oruzgan love Matiullah!” said Fareed Ayel, one of Mr. Matiullah’s officers on the route. “The government people are not honest.”
Like many of Mr. Matiullah’s men, Mr. Ayel quit the police to join his militia, which paid him a better salary.
Indeed, many people in Tirin Kot praise Mr. Matiullah for the toughness of his fighters and for keeping the road open. Mr. Matiullah claims to have lost more than 100 men fighting the Taliban. Recently, he and several of his fighters followed an American Special Forces unit to Geezab, where the Taliban had been expelled after six years.
Persistent Suspicions
But doubts persist about Mr. Matiullah, especially about what he does when Afghan and American officials are somewhere else. An American intelligence report prepared for senior American commanders last spring listed a number of associates of Ahmed Wali Karzai, President Hamid Karzai’s brother and the chairman of the provincial council of Kandahar Province, who were suspected of involvement in the country’s opium trade. The report listed Mr. Matiullah as one of the suspects, but provided few details.
A former senior official in the Kandahar government, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution by Mr. Matiullah and the Karzais, said he believed that Mr. Matiullah was facilitating the movement of drugs along the highway to Kandahar.
“I was never able to look inside those trucks, but if I had, I am fairly certain what I would have found,” he said.
Despite his relationship to the Special Forces, Mr. Matiullah has been suspected of playing a double game with the Taliban. Asked about Mr. Matiullah earlier this year, an American military officer in Kabul admitted that Mr. Matiullah was believed to have a relationship with insurgents. He spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was discussing intelligence matters.
Asked again recently, the same officer said that Mr. Matiullah was suspected of drug smuggling. He provided no details. The next day, after consulting intelligence officers, the officer said Mr. Matiullah was a trusted ally. “Their assessment about him has changed,” he said.
Mr. Matiullah denied any contact with either insurgents or drug smugglers. “Never,” he said.
Like many Afghan leaders close to the Americans, Mr. Matiullah got his start after the fall of the Taliban in 2001, when the Americans were in desperate need of allies. Within a few years, Mr. Matiullah was the head of the Highway Police in Oruzgan Province.
In 2006, out of concern that legions of officers were working with drug traffickers, the entire agency was abolished.
“The highway police was one huge drug smuggling operation,” said a former Western diplomat, who was based here at the time of President Karzai’s order.
Mr. Matiullah’s army is part of a constellation of militias and security companies, many of them unregistered and unregulated, that claim at least some loyalty to Ahmed Wali Karzai, who is widely acknowledged to be the most powerful man in southern Afghanistan. “Ahmed Wali is my friend, my close friend!” Mr. Matiullah said earlier this year, offering to put him on the telephone for this reporter.
In a second, more recent, interview, Mr. Matiullah said he and Mr. Karzai had no relationship at all.
Both Ahmed Wali Karzai and Mr. Matiullah are associates of Jan Mohammed Khan, a former governor of Oruzgan Province and Mr. Matiullah’s father-in-law. Mr. Khan was removed from Oruzgan Province at the insistence of the Dutch in 2006 because of concerns that he was close to the drug trade. He is now an adviser to President Karzai.
Those relationships, Mr. Matiullah’s detractors say, allow him to flourish.
“Matiullah is not part of the government, he is stronger than the government, and he can do anything he wants,” said Mr. Essa, the tribal elder in Tirin Kot. “He is like the younger brother of Ahmed Wali. He is protected in Kabul.”
At a recent meeting inside the American Special Forces compound here, Mr. Matiullah was approached by an elderly Afghan beggar who hobbled up and then stood at attention and saluted in military fashion. Without hesitating — indeed, without even looking — Mr. Matiullah pulled a wad of money out of his pocket and pressed it into the man’s withered hands.
“Long live Matiullah, you are the best,” the old man said.
“O.K., O.K.,” Mr. Matiullah said. “Now I am busy.”
Sangar Rahimi contributed reporting.
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US Afghan strategy uses economic aid to battle Taliban
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran Washington Post June 6, 2010
NAWA, Afghanistan - In this patch of southern Afghanistan, the US strategy to keep the Taliban at bay involves an economic stimulus.
Thousands of men, wielding hoes and standing in knee-deep muck, are getting paid to clean reed-infested irrigation canals. Farmers are receiving seeds and fertilizer for a fraction of their retail cost, and many are riding around on shiny new tractors. Over the summer, dozens of gravel roads and grain-storage facilities will be constructed — all of it funded by the US government.
Pumping reconstruction dollars into war zones has long been part of the US counterinsurgency playbook, but the blanketing of Nawa with cash has resulted in far more money getting into local hands, far more quickly, than in any other part of Afghanistan.
The US Agency for International Development’s agriculture program aims to spend upwards of $30 million within nine months in this rural district of mud-walled homes and small farms. Other US initiatives aim to bring millions more dollars to the area over the next year.
Because aid is so plentiful in Nawa, many young men have opted to stop serving as the Taliban’s guns for hire. Unlike neighboring Marja, where insurgent attacks remain a daily occurrence, the central parts of Nawa have been largely violence-free the past six months.
But the cash surge has also unleashed unintended and potentially troubling consequences. It is sparking new tension and rivalries within the community, and it is prompting concern that the nearly free seeds and gushing canals will result in more crops than farmers will be able to sell. It is also raising public expectations for handouts that the Afghan government will not be able to sustain once US funds ebb.
“We’ve blasted Nawa with a phenomenal amount of money in the name of counterinsurgency without fully thinking through the second- and third-order effects,’’ said Ian Purves, a British development expert who recently completed a year-long assignment as the NATO stabilization adviser in Nawa.
US officials responsible for Afghan policy contend that the initiative in Nawa, which is part of a $250 million effort to increase agricultural production across southern Afghanistan, was designed as a short-term jolt to resuscitate the economy and generate lasting employment. They say concerns about overspending are misplaced: After years of shortchanging Afghans on development aid, the officials maintain that they would rather do too much than too little.
“Our goal is to return Nawa to normalcy, to get folks back to their daily lives of farming, and that requires a large effort,’’ said Rory Donohoe, USAID’s agriculture program manager in Helmand province.
Of particular concern to some development specialists is USAID’s decision to spend the entire $250 million over one year in parts of just two provinces, Helmand and Kandahar. In Nawa, which has a population of about 75,000, that works out to about $400 for every man, woman and child. The country’s per-capita income, by comparison, is about $300 a year.
The White House recently asked Congress for an additional $4.4 billion for reconstruction and development programs in Afghanistan, with the aim of increasing employment and promoting economic growth in areas wracked by the insurgency.
Most of it will go to US-based development firms with the ability to hire lots of people and spend lots of money quickly. Among the programs in the pipeline is a $600 million effort to improve municipal governments across the country and to increase the provision of basic services to urban dwellers.
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Russia says world needs to do more for Afghanistan
Sun Jun 6, 1:28 am ET
SINGAPORE (Reuters) – The international community needs to start providing more economic and social assistance to Afghanistan to ensure the nation can function on its own, Russia's Deputy Prime Minister said on Sunday.
Sergei Ivanov told a regional security conference in Singapore that foreign donors should help Afghanistan get back on its feet in addition to sending troops to keep the peace against a threat from the Islamist Taliban.
"One thing is clear, a lot should be done in just starting very primitive social economic life in Afghanistan. If we don't do that, any military presence will be in vain," Ivanov told the Shangri-La Dialogue.
Devastated by 30 years of conflict, Afghanistan's economy, ranked 181st of 182 by United Nations, is dependent on foreign aid, which accounts for 70 percent of the government's budget.
On Saturday, British Defense Secretary Liam Fox told Reuters more trainers were needed for Afghanistan's security forces and British troops would pull out only once they had achieved their mission.
There are nearly 140,000 foreign troops from 42 countries working under the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). The United States has by far the most, with about 80,000, rising to 100,000 by the end of this year.
"Next year I think the ISAF will break the Soviet record in the duration of the stay in Afghanistan," Ivanov said.
He reiterated that Russia would never again send troops to Afghanistan. Moscow has painful memories of the losses suffered during two decades of Soviet involvement, starting from 1979.
"We are already helping a lot in ISAF operations in Afghanistan providing logistic support, transport support, intelligence support. Except for one thing -- never again will a Russian soldier enter Afghanistan," he said.
"I think you understand why. It is just like asking the U.S. whether they will send troops to Vietnam, something like that is totally impossible."
(Reporting by Harry Suhartono and Nopporn Wong-Anan, editing by Ron Popeski)
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Afghan cricket team inspires documentary by Oscar-winner
Press Trust Of India London, June 6, 2010
The rise to prominence of war-ravaged Afghanistan's cricket team has inspired Oscar-winning director Sam Mendes to help produce a documentary -- 'Out of the Ashes' -- charting the side's trials and travails.
"I was moved by the story and very taken by the vivid characters," the director of Oscar-winning film 'American Beauty' said.
Afghanistan's cricket team defied all odds to qualify for last month's Twenty20 World Cup in the West Indies where it crashed out in the preliminary stage.
The country still doesn't have a decent cricket pitch on which the players can practice after the 2001 American invasion.
Mendes said the team's story is so heartwarming that he was instantly touched when another director Timothy Albone sent him the original documentary that charted its success.
"I loved it, but it struck me that a film about the Afghanistan cricket team qualifying for the World Cup was incomplete without seeing the completion of their dream," Mendes was quoted as saying by 'The Times'.
"So I persuaded Tim and his co-directors to continue filming, and helped persuade the International Cricket Council to grant them full access to the tournament," he said.
The documentary, which will be premiered at the Edinburgh International Film Festival on June 17, tracks former Afghanistan coach Taj Malik, who was at the helm when the team was playing qualifiers for the World Cup in Dubai.
The film shows the players having their moments of nervousness on landing in Dubai.
"God spare us from eating that pig meat," one player is shown as saying.
"We'll eat vegetables," suggest others.
"What do you think the girls will be like?" they say.
"I'm sure they will be pretty. In those foreign countries the weather is so nice everyone is fresh with brighter skin."
Taj was replaced by Pakistani Kabir Khan during the course of the qualifying. Under Khan, Afghanistan went on to win divisional tournaments in Tanzania, Buenos Aires and South Africa to make the main event against top teams like India.
"Sport and art bring countries together, when everything else seems to be pushing them apart. Out of the Ashes puts a human face to a nation that many have turned their back on," Mendes said.
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In Afghanistan, U.S platoon's tranquil morning shattered by blast
Bombs explode every day in the country, and are preponderant in the Arghandab Valley, where the platoon is based. But for one sergeant, this one was personal and quite memorable.
Los Angeles Times By David Zucchino June 6, 2010
Reporting from Jilga, Afghanistan - Sgt. Tait Terzo was manning the patrol point just after dawn Saturday with his bomb-sniffing dog, Urmel, an eager Belgian Malinois whose job was to warn the U.S. soldiers behind him if he caught a whiff of explosives.
Sgt. Steve Peterson, a few paces behind, decided to inspect a pile of cow manure beside a dirt wall. Insurgents have hidden bombs in stranger places.
And then Peterson, 23, was knocked on his belly in the dirt, his arms curled around his M-4 carbine, his mouth full of grit, his ears ringing. Dirt and manure and chunks of wall rained down on him.
He no longer knew where he was or what he was doing. It seemed to him that something terrible was happening to someone else.
"IED!" a soldier screamed. An improvised explosive device. A bomb had exploded.
A bomb goes off somewhere in Afghanistan every day — several times a day, in fact. But this bomb, on a tranquil Saturday morning, amid golden fields of wheat and flowering pomegranate groves, was personal and quite memorable, at least to Peterson, his buddies in 2nd Platoon and the journalists accompanying them.
It was the 46th roadside bomb, give or take, since the Army platoon took up residence in this Arghandab Valley village west of Kandahar six months ago. And it was the first of four bombs to hit the platoon's battalion before lunch Saturday. Two more were pointed out by a villager and detonated by a U.S. explosives team in the afternoon.
When the day's first bomb exploded, Peterson was blinded by black smoke. By instinct, he tried to listen to the radio receiver at his left ear, but his ears wouldn't work. He was momentarily deaf.
Spc. Phillip Singleton, a high school track star known as "Doc," the platoon medic, bolted from the rear of the patrol. He was at the blast crater in seconds, trying to find Peterson through the smoke. He had already unfurled two tourniquets.
"Where are you?" Singleton hollered.
"Right in front of you!"
Singleton tried to get a look at Peterson's legs. He was afraid they had been blown off. He groped for the fallen man's feet.
"OK, good," Singleton thought. "He's still got two feet."
Now Peterson was cursing and shouting out orders. He still hadn't realized he'd been hit by a bomb blast.
"What the just happened?" he asked.
He didn't understand why his buddy, Spc. Justin Orrick, was patting him down. Orrick had been knocked off his feet by the explosion, then scrambled up to help the medic check Peterson for wounds.
"You just got hit by an IED, dude," said Sgt. David Lee, who had stumbled through the smoke to help.
And now came Urmel the dog, panting, pacing. He is trained to sit when he sniffs explosives. He sat next to the smoking crater. Then he trotted over to the ruined wall where the bomb had been hidden. He sat again.
"Urmel confirmed it: Yep, an IED just went off here," his handler, Terzo, joked later.
In fact, the whole platoon laughed about it afterward, reenacting every moment over eggs, sausage and grits at their fortified combat outpost a couple of miles away.
But when the bomb went off, they were a dozen deadly serious young men. They were certain that two of their buddies had just been killed or maimed. Several screamed out curses at unseen insurgents.
Then their training kicked in. They set up a perimeter, pulled rear security and searched a wheat field for a bomb wire and whoever triggered the device. They found nothing.
Someone radioed a preliminary "nine-line," a call for a medical evacuation helicopter. But when Doc Singleton quickly pronounced Peterson and Orrick whole, they called it off.
Instead, two Kiowa helicopters soared overhead to escort the patrol back to base.
Peterson squatted next to a mud wall and tried to clear his head. He announced to the medic that he was "disorientated."
Singleton checked Peterson's pupils and ears. A trickle of blood dotted one ear canal, but both ear drums were intact.
Peterson gulped a Gatorade. He tried to focus.
"Dude, just goes to show you we're the best at what we do — finding bombs," he told the medic.
The bomb was at least a 100-pounder, by the estimation of the platoon sergeant, Sgt. 1st Class Jeremiah Mason. It was packed with homemade explosives and at least one rocket.
The platoon leader, 1st Lt. Jordan Ritenour, who replaced a lieutenant whose leg was blown off by a roadside bomb in January, tucked a jagged piece of rocket into his pocket for later analysis.
Ritenour had spent the morning patrol talking to villagers, probing for information on insurgents. A farmer had given him a promising lead on a possible Taliban hide-out nearby.
The lieutenant asked the man for his cellphone, then punched in his own cell number. He wrote down the farmer's number and slipped him a few Afghanis, the local currency.
The man said he might phone in more information as long as no one found out. Ritenour promised that no one else would know.
"I know it's dangerous" to talk to Americans, the lieutenant told him. "That's why we pay good money for good information."
A half an hour later, as the patrol prepared to leave the dangerous dirt paths and stomp through wheat fields less likely to contain homemade bombs, the bomb exploded.
Urmel had already passed the site. The bomb was too far off the path for the dog to detect, his handler said. And the adjacent manure pile would have masked the scent.
On the hike back to the platoon's outpost, another roadside bomb exploded in the distance. The Kiowas banked and dipped to investigate. The bomb was intended for another infantry platoon of the 2nd Brigade, 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment, but no one was hurt.
Safely back at base, Mason grabbed Peterson by his shoulders and told him he was a lucky man. The lieutenant attributed his good fortune to proper spacing; the soldiers had followed orders not to walk too closely together.
Peterson went into the living compound and collapsed against a bunkered wall, soaked with sweat. He stared at the ground, chain-smoking.
Before its tour ends in August, the platoon will have mounted a few hundred patrols in a valley that commanders here say has the highest incidence of roadside bombs in Afghanistan. Yet the men go back out almost daily, hauling 80 pounds of gear and weapons in punishing heat
"If you haven't experienced a day like this in Arghandab, then you haven't experienced Arghandab," Mason said.
At breakfast, Peterson wolfed down his eggs. His ears were still ringing, but he felt better. The medic looked him over again, just in case. There wasn't a mark on him.
"My closest call yet, definitely," Peterson said. Even so, he volunteered for another patrol, to escort an explosives team to detonate the two bombs that had been pointed out.
Mason ordered him to rest. Peterson repaired to his tent, where he popped in his ear buds and listened to music, quietly and alone.
Someday, he said, he would tell his parents about the time he was nearly killed by a roadside bomb. But not now, he said. Not yet.
david.zucchino@latimes.com
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A shared glimpse of CIA officer's secret life
The Associated Press By ADAM GOLDMAN 06/06/2010
WASHINGTON - A last photo shows Darren James LaBonte on an all-terrain vehicle in Khost, Afghanistan, days before his death. He's smiling.
Athlete, soldier, husband, father — and determined CIA officer.
LaBonte's family had promised him they wouldn't talk about his work. They kept that pledge as they mourned in private after he died along with six other CIA employees and a Jordanian intelligence officer in the suicide bombing at a U.S. base in Afghanistan in late December.
Even now, months after his burial, they won't detail the dangerous work he did for the agency. "We made that promise to him," said LaBonte's parents, David and Camille.
But his family did decide over Memorial Day to acknowledge that he was among the bombing victims — and they decided to tell the world a bit about the man behind the name.
All but two of the CIA employees killed in the blast had previously been identified publicly. The seventh victim, the agency's chief of base, a 45-year-old mother of three and an al-Qaida expert, remains anonymous.
Indeed, anonymity is part of the trade-off for a career in intelligence. CIA families have grieved in silence for decades.
"It's hard to understand," said Ted Gup, author of "The Book of Honor: The Secret Lives and Deaths of CIA Operatives." "It's hard for our entire culture to grasp the nature of this sacrifice. We live in a culture of celebrity where what is not recognized doesn't exist."
Spies, he added, "come out of a culture where what is recognized ceases to exist. The light is lethal."
The CIA won't discuss LaBonte, but his parents and wife agreed to shed some light about his death. And over this past Memorial Day weekend, a historic B-17 plane dropped flowers over the Statue of Liberty in a tribute to the seven slain Americans.
LaBonte was 35 years old when he died, ending a career that included service in the military and a series of law enforcement jobs.
"He was a pretty talented guy," said his father, who described the son as "intelligent, complex and an incredible athlete."
LaBonte grew up in Connecticut. He played baseball and football at Brookfield High School. He turned down a shot at professional baseball with the Cleveland Indians when he graduated from high school in 1992 and opted for the Army, said his father, a former Navy SEAL.
LaBonte earned the celebrated black and yellow Ranger patch and was assigned to First Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, one of the toughest units.
In 1999, LaBonte met his wife — Racheal — on a blind date to a Ranger ball in Savannah, Ga., where he was stationed. The following year, they married and he left the Army. But after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, LaBonte wanted to get back into the fight.
"He was hellbent on making this 9/11 thing right," his father said. "That really affected him badly."
LaBonte decided not to re-enlist in the Army, choosing to pursue an education and a career in law enforcement. He graduated from Columbia College of Missouri and received a master's degree in May 2006 from Boston University, where he studied criminal justice.
Along the way, he had worked as a police officer in Libertyville, Ill., and as a U.S. marshal before joining the FBI. The family said LaBonte won a leadership and shooting award at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Va., then landed in the FBI's New York field office.
The CIA recruited him, and he resigned from the FBI in late 2006, moving with his wife to the Washington, D.C., area. His father had reservations about the CIA, but his son had always steered his own course.
He was a "man determined to be a part of the solution to the unrest in our world," his mother said.
His parents declined to discuss what he did for the agency. But the elder LaBonte said his son had served in Iraq, Afghanistan and Amman, Jordan, his last posting before he died in Afghanistan. Father and son talked about the perils of his job.
"I don't think he feared death," David LaBonte said. "He faced it."
"He was a Spartan," his wife said. "He had to do these things. I respected him and honored him."
Darren LaBonte's parents, who live Arnold, Md., said they had planned a Christmas trip to Italy about the time of the Khost bombing. Their son planned to meet them, along with his wife and daughter Raina, who turns 3 in November. LaBonte's younger brother also was coming.
On Dec. 17, LaBonte left for Afghanistan, leaving his wife and daughter in Amman.
"He was anxious but excited about the mission," Racheal LaBonte said.
His trip to Italy was suddenly delayed. The CIA believed it was on the verge of a major breakthrough in the hunt to kill Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaida's No. 2. The Jordanians had a man on the inside who said he had information about the terrorist.
On the night of Dec. 30, while staying in a villa in Tuscany — the day before LaBonte was supposed to arrive in Italy — his wife took a phone call: Her husband was dead.
"You hear it, but you don't comprehend it," she said. "They are words you never want to hear in your entire life."
In a deadly double-cross, five CIA officers, two security contractors and a Jordanian intelligence officer were killed at the remote base in Khost. Six other CIA officers were wounded.
David LaBonte said the U.S. government "took us by the hand" and helped the grieving family make its way back to the U.S. He praised CIA Director Leon Panetta, who made sure his son was buried in Arlington National Cemetery. The funeral was Feb. 1. The chief of base was also laid to rest at Arlington.
"There was some question about Darren being buried in Arlington," the father said. "Within days, Panetta took care of this, which was a big thing for us. I thought he would be standoffish. He has been magnificent with our family. He has been caring and sincere, not an aloof politician."
Camille LaBonte said the CIA has not forgotten her son or what he did for the country.
"They have not left us," she said. "They can't bring our people back, but they do try to honor them in many different ways."
In March, the family attended a memorial service in Amman, where Robert Beecroft, the U.S. ambassador, praised the fallen CIA officer.
"Most of the people in the CIA are just like the rest of us but they have dangerous jobs," said Racheal LaBonte. "He loved his family. He loved his job. It's not about killing people. It's about saving people."
___
Online:
CIA statement on the bombing: http://tinyurl.com/y8tfnmo
President Barack Obama's remarks at CIA service: http://tinyurl.com/37s5o7e
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Afghanistan Crime Wave Alarms Balkh Residents
GroundReport By IWPR June 05, 2010
Surge in kidnappings and murder has worried locals in what has been a relatively peaceful province.
The recent killing of a local security officer’s young son is the most gruesome of a spate of violent crimes that has unsettled residents of this usually calm region.
The shocking death of 10-year-old Nasir Ahmad, the son of a Mazar-e-Sharif traffic police official, is one of 20 cases of murder and kidnapping reported in April and May, part of a huge increase in levels of crime.
Nasir was seized on his way home from school on April 7, and a 100,000 US dollar ransom demanded for his release. Although his father, Mohammad Kazem, sold whatever he owned to raise 80,000 dollars, the kidnappers suspected he had also tipped off police and so went on to kill the child.
A family member, who did not want to be identified, said, “The kidnappers cut Nasir Ahmad’s body into pieces and put them in a sack behind Kazem’s house. They also sent a message to the kid’s family, telling them it was Mohammad Kazem’s mistake to contact the police.”
He added that the father had now left Balkh after further threats from the kidnappers.
The brutal killing has alarmed people in the province, which has largely escaped the violence that has plagued other areas of Afghanistan in the nine years since the overthrow of the Taleban.
Ahmad Fawad, an 18-year-old student, said that he has had nightmares ever since he heard the story of Nasir’s dismemberment. Although his father, who sells car parts, is not wealthy, he said he still feared the kidnappers.
“When I hear the news of someone’s murder or kidnapping in the city, I cannot go to school calmly,” he said. “My whole family waits, looking at the door from the time I go to school until the time I return.”
In another case, a Belgian citizen was seized while touring Balkh province and held hostage in Sholgara district for a week. The man was released as a result of police efforts, although security officials declined to give further details about the incident.
Further cases include that of a taxi driver, Azizollah, who was killed by robbers who stole his car on April 20. And unidentified armed men shot dead Mohammad Nasim, a teacher at the police training centre in Balkh, on April 24.
Eleven other Balkh citizens were killed between April 25 and May 10 – some of the victims found at the roadside or among rubbish bins.
Security officials say that the level of serious crime has shot up to 115 incidents in April and May, compared with 70 in the same period last year.
General Esmatollah Alizai, the new commander of police in Balkh province, said that poverty, unemployment and upcoming parliamentary elections may have affected the crime rate. The number of kidnappings increased during last summer’s presidential ballot too.
He added that local criminals may have exploited the transitional period around his appointment as chief of police on April 27.
“I admit that when I started working as chief of security in Balkh the level of murder, robbery, kidnapping and so on increased so much that it was very surprising and worrying for me,” he said.
Alizai said that he had gathered together local security officials to warn them that he would dismiss them if they engaged in corruption or neglected their work.
“I have also warned the criminals that I will punish them severely,” he said.
Although no arrests have been made in connection with the recent crime wave, Alizai said, “The work is in process, but the cases are very complicated and have roots outside Balkh province as well.”
He declined to give further details, only saying, “The offenders’ faces will soon be exposed to the media.”
Pointing to his prior experience in Herat province, he said he had drastically reduced the level of crime there over a period of three months by stamping down on police corruption.
But businessmen in Balkh say that they will be unable to continue working in the province if the crime surge continues.
Abdol Sabur Nadem, who imports industrial lubricants from China and Central Asian countries, said that many traders are now thinking about removing both their families and investments from Balkh.
“There is no point working if we and our families do not feel secure,” he said. “I am sitting in my shop, but I feel unsafe, as if the kidnappers could come at any minute and kidnap me.”
He has started paying someone to escort two of his children to school, even though they study near his shop, because of the fear of kidnapping, “The kidnappers are powerful groups and have many opportunities.”
Nurollah Mohseni, a law and political science lecturer at Balkh University, said the apathy of the local police force had allowed crime to escalate.
The majority of Balkh officials, he said, had supported presidential candidate Abdullah Abdullah in last year’s election. When incumbent Hamed Karzai won, most doubted they would keep their posts for very long and so neglected their duties.
“The central government removed the former security chief and sent a new one. Now, most senior officials and even lower level officials think the same destiny awaits them too, so they are not completely interested in their work as they were in the past,” Mohseni said.
Also, he said, the prolonged absence of the rule of law in Afghanistan has created a situation when criminals believe they can commit offences with impunity.
“During the past 30 years of war, no criminal was punished properly and others were released on various pretexts. The law has lost its meaning,” he said.
Residents also believe that the local judiciary has been too lenient with criminals.
Abdol Baset, 25, a student of Islamic law at Balkh University said, “If punishment was in accordance with the penal code of Afghanistan, which is based on Islamic shariah law, and it was implemented, particularly on those who kill a Muslim for their personal benefit, the level of violence and crime will definitely decline, and even be eliminated.”
Ahmad Kawosh is an IWPR trainee reporter in Balkh.
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