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Taliban: Kandahar bombings a 'warning' to NATO
By Noor Khan, Associated Press Writer
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan – Deadly bomb attacks in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar were a warning to NATO's top general that the Taliban are ready for a coming offensive in their heartland, the insurgents said Sunday.
Taliban assault on Afghanistan's Kandahar kills 35
by Nasrat Shoib
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (AFP) – Thirty-five people were killed in a Taliban assault on Kandahar described by rebels as a pre-emptive response to Western plans to eradicate them from the strategic city.
Afghan gov wants more troops after Kandahar attack
By Noor Khan, Associated Press Writer – Sun Mar 14, 7:31 am ET
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan – The governor of Kandahar province demanded more security around Afghanistan's largest southern city Sunday after a series of explosions killed dozens of people in the Taliban heartland — the target of the war's next major offensive by Afghan and international forces.
Blast kills Pakistani national in Afghanistan: police
Sun Mar 14, 5:21 am ET
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (Reuters) – A roadside bomb killed a Pakistani construction worker and wounded six of his compatriots on Sunday in Afghanistan's southern city of Kandahar, police said.
Afghanistan eases ban on news coverage of raids
By Jonathon Burch – Sat Mar 13, 8:48 pm ET
KABUL (Reuters) – Afghanistan rowed back on Saturday from a total ban on media broadcasts of "disturbing" images from insurgent attacks or live pictures of security operations.
Kandahar slides into lawlessness as Taliban attacks force government to retreat
By Keith B. Richburg The Washington Post Sunday, March 14, 2010; A13
KANDAHAR, AFGHANISTAN -- Even in this dusty, dangerous city long accustomed to violence, the killing last month of Abdul Majid Babai managed to shock.
Afghanistan's new great game: The undeclared wars within the war
Deutsche Welle - Mar 14 4:30 AM
Conventional Western public opinion regards the war in Afghanistan as a struggle between NATO and extremist Islamic militants. Since assuming office Barack Obama has redefined the conflict by calling it the Af-Pak war.
At least 18 Afghan suspects arrested in Pakistan
People's Daily - Mar 14 4:08 AM
At least 18 suspected Afghan nationals were arrested Sunday by Pakistani police during a search operation in southern Pakistan, according to local TV reports.
Afghan Prosecutors Key to Beating Taliban
Robert C. O’Brien and Stephen G. Larson: Establishing a Judicial System Afghans Can Trust Must Be Priority
CBS News By Robert C. O’Brien and Stephen G. Larson March 13, 2010
Robert C. O’Brien is the Co-Chair of the U.S. Department of State Public-Private Partnership for Justice Reform in Afghanistan and is the managing partner of Arent Fox LLP’s Los Angeles Office. Stephen G. Larson is a retired federal Judge
We've met the enemy in Afghanistan, and he's changed
By Roy Gutman, McClatchy Newspapers via Stars and Stripes online edition, Sunday, March 14, 2010
KABUL, Afghanistan — A decade ago, when the Taliban controlled the Afghan government, their militiamen — barely motivated, untrained conscripts — tried for five years to seize control of the entire country from more moderate forces but didn't succeed, even with the help of Osama bin Laden's Arab and other foreign volunteers.
Five myths about the war in Afghanistan
The Washington Post By Michael O'Hanlon and Hassina Sherjan Sunday, March 14, 2010
The war in Afghanistan is in its ninth year, and even officials supportive of the U.S. presence there acknowledge the challenges that remain. "People still need to understand there is some very hard fighting and very hard days ahead," Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates
At Afghan outpost, Marines gone rogue or leading the fight against counterinsurgency?
The Washington Post By Rajiv Chandrasekaran 03/14/2010
DELARAM - Home to a dozen truck stops and a few hundred family farms bounded by miles of foreboding desert, this hamlet in southwestern Afghanistan is far from a strategic priority for senior officers at the international military headquarters
Training for the civilian surge in Afghanistan
By Kim Ghattas BBC News, Mascatatuck Urban Training Center, Indiana Saturday, 13 March 2010
The Afghan governor walked down the main market street, chatting with US soldiers and civilians as an armoured personnel carrier stood guard on a corner.
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Taliban: Kandahar bombings a 'warning' to NATO
By Noor Khan, Associated Press Writer
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan – Deadly bomb attacks in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar were a warning to NATO's top general that the Taliban are ready for a coming offensive in their heartland, the insurgents said Sunday.
Taliban spokesman Qari Yousef Ahmadi said the bombings show the insurgents are still able to operate despite the buildup of international troops in the south in preparation for a push into Kandahar province.
"With all the preparations they have taken, still they are not able to stop us," Ahmadi said.
The multiple bomb attacks Saturday night killed 35 people but failed to free insurgents from the city prison, apparently the main target.
A separate, Taliban-linked Web site called the attacks a "warning" to Gen. Stanley McChrystal. The top NATO general has said Kandahar province is the next target for coalition forces who recently drove the insurgents from a town in neighboring Helmand province.
"Gen. McChrystal has said that soon they will start their operations, and now we have already started our operations," Ahmadi said by telephone.
The Kandahar provincial governor demanded more security forces around Kandahar city, the largest in southern Afghanistan, on Sunday. A spokesman for the Ministry of Interior said the government is considering the request.
Gov. Tooryalai Wesa said the blasts included two car bombs, six suicide attackers on motorbikes and bicycles, and homemade bombs. The attackers targeted the city's prison, police headquarters, a wedding hall next door and other areas on roads leading to the prison.
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Taliban assault on Afghanistan's Kandahar kills 35
by Nasrat Shoib
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (AFP) – Thirty-five people were killed in a Taliban assault on Kandahar described by rebels as a pre-emptive response to Western plans to eradicate them from the strategic city.
A series of massive explosions rocked the southern city late Saturday in what appeared one of the biggest coordinated assaults by the militants since their insurgency began more than eight years ago.
The governor of Kandahar province said he had requested more troops to help secure the city from further attacks by the Taliban, who regard it as their spiritual centre.
Interior ministry spokesman Zemarai Bashery said the attackers aimed to blow open Kandahar's prison and free its inmates, including militants.
He said the dead comprised 13 police officers and 22 civilians, and that another 57 people were injured.
The attack came as tens of thousands of extra troops are arriving in Afghanistan as part of a new counter-insurgency strategy aimed at concluding the US-led war on the Taliban.
The injured comprised 40 civilians -- among them six women and three children -- and 17 police officers. Forty-two houses close to the city's prison and its police headquarters were destroyed or badly damaged.
"Initial information shows that after the prison attack the enemy attacked locations and routes that end up at or are en route to the prison in an effort to prevent police from going and securing the prison," Bashery said.
President Hamid Karzai branded the perpetrators "enemies of Islam and Afghanistan".
"Those who do not respect Islamic values and act against them no doubt will be cursed by God and will go to hell," he said in a statement.
The city was hit by five blasts at 8:00 pm (1530 GMT) on Saturday. The first, caused by a huge suicide car bomb, occurred outside the prison and was followed by a similar blast outside provincial police headquarters.
Three other explosions were probably also suicide attacks, Bashery said.
"Most of the police casualties were outside the police headquarters where officers had stopped and surrounded the vehicle laden with explosives as it detonated," he said.
Early Sunday police seized eight explosive-packed suicide vests and three rockets from a house near the prison. The Taliban plan appeared to be to first break into the prison, then use suicide vests and rockets to burst open cells and free prisoners, Bashery said.
A Taliban spokesman, Yousuf Ahmadi, told AFP the attack was a response to comments by the commander of foreign forces in Afghanistan that Kandahar would be targeted in military efforts to eradicate the Taliban.
Kandahar was the Taliban's base during their rule of the country, which ended with the US-led invasion in 2001.
"This was an answer to General (Stanley) McChrystal, who announced Operation Omaid in Kandahar," Ahmadi said, using the name of the battle plan.
"This was to sabotage the operation and to show we can strike anywhere, any time we want."
Kandahar governor Turyalai Wisa said at least 10 people attending a wedding party were among the dead. Rescue workers were still searching the rubble.
He told reporters he had asked the Kabul government to send more forces to improve security.
"We have asked the central government to send us more security forces, especially intelligence workers, and they have accepted our request in principle," he said.
Up to 1,000 Taliban inmates escaped from Kandahar's Sarpoza prison in June 2008 after a suicide attack blew open the gates and destroyed the walls.
Another explosion took place early Sunday close to the Kandahar office of a Japanese construction company, injuring five employees -- four of them Pakistanis and one an Afghan.
The first major offensive of the current war strategy is taking place in Helmand province, neighbouring Kandahar province.
Visiting Afghanistan last week, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates told troops to brace for a tough fight as generals lay their plans to battle the Taliban in Kandahar.
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Afghan gov wants more troops after Kandahar attack
By Noor Khan, Associated Press Writer – Sun Mar 14, 7:31 am ET
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan – The governor of Kandahar province demanded more security around Afghanistan's largest southern city Sunday after a series of explosions killed dozens of people in the Taliban heartland — the target of the war's next major offensive by Afghan and international forces.
The blasts, which occurred one after another for 25 minutes across Kandahar city Saturday night, indicate that the insurgents remain a potent force in the area where NATO plans an assault later this year, the follow-up to an operation that has driven militants from a key stronghold in neighboring Helmand province.
Residents say Taliban militants can operate in Kandahar with little restraint.
"They can do what they intend and want, and the government can't control the situation," said Javed Ahmad, 40, of Kandahar. "We don't feel secure in the presence of all the forces in Afghanistan, and it's terrible for us to live in this kind of situation. We don't feel safe even at home, and we can't walk around."
At least 35 people were killed in Saturday night's attacks, according to the Ministry of Interior.
Gov. Tooryalai Wesa said the blasts included two car bombs, six suicide attackers on motorbikes and bicycles, and homemade bombs. The attackers targeted the city's prison, police headquarters, a wedding hall next door and other areas on roads leading to the prison.
Wesa told reporters that he had asked the central government in Kabul for more Afghan troops to protect the city in the run-up to the expected offensive in Kandahar province, the spiritual birthplace of the Taliban. He also said he wants to coordinate with NATO forces to improve security.
President Hamid Karzai condemned the attacks, and Ministry of Interior spokesman Zemeri Bashary told reporters Sunday that the government was considering Wesa's request for additional forces.
The main target of the attacks was the prison, where investigators have found eight suicide vests, three rockets and AK-47 ammunition, police said.
Bashary told reporters the attackers were trying to free prisoners and block security forces from responding, "but they failed in their mission."
"They were trying to open the jail, that is why they attacked cleverly in different parts of the city," said Kandahar provincial police chief Gen. Sardar Mohammad Zazi.
The assault mirrored a 2008 suicide bombing at the Kandahar prison gates that freed hundreds of prisoners, many of them suspected insurgents. No inmates escaped this time from the lockup, which Canadian troops reinforced with cement block after the 2008 attack.
Among the dead were 13 policemen and 22 civilians, including six women and three children, the interior ministry said. Most of the casualties occurred at the police headquarters and at the wedding celebration in a hall next door.
Another 57 people were wounded, including 17 policemen, and 42 homes were damaged, the ministry said.
"Last night was like doomsday for all of Kandahar's people," said Mohammad Anwar, a 30-year-old shopkeeper, whose relative lost a son in the attacks. He said residents blamed the United States and international forces for not battling the militants strongly enough.
"It is difficult for us to bear this kind of situation anymore," Anwar said. "We don't know the aim of these people," he said, referring to the insurgents. "Are they trying to kill civilians or eliminate the system? The government is too weak to control these kind of attacks."
Haji-Muhammad Aslam, 46, who also runs a store in the city, said residents of Kandahar feel helpless.
"What we can do?" he asked. "Almost nothing, except accept deaths and injuries. We are created to be killed by anyone, whether by militants, Americans or Afghan forces.
President Karzai's half brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, a member of the Kandahar provincial council, told The Associated Press that two of the explosions occurred near his home. But he said he was not being targeted personally.
The offensive that U.S., NATO and Afghan forces are planning in Kandahar later this year is a follow-up to the ongoing military operation in Helmand province's Marjah district. The operation is the first test of top Afghanistan commander U.S. Gen. Stanley McChrystal's strategy to rout insurgents from areas, set up new governance and rush in development aid in hopes of winning the loyalty of the residents.
Kandahar city, population 800,000, was the seat of government for the Taliban when it ruled Afghanistan, imposing its vision of Islamic theocracy for five years before being toppled by U.S.-backed forces in 2001.
Armed Taliban bands still control villages around the city, and Taliban agents move through the city at night, delivering letters warning people against cooperating with the U.S.-backed government. International forces find homemade bombs almost daily as they patrol the city streets.
Another roadside bomb Sunday morning targeted a car carrying Pakistani construction workers south of the city in the district of Dand, according to the governor. Four of the Pakistani workers and their Afghan driver were wounded.
Training a workable Kandahar police force has become a priority for international forces trying to build trust in the Afghan government, which they hope will eventually be able to take over security. The 2,800 Canadian troops who oversee operations in Kandahar city and the surrounding province are due to leave Afghanistan next year.
The U.S. sent nearly 300 more military police to Kandahar in August to help build up the 2,000-strong local police force — a six-fold increase over the small Canadian and U.S. force that had been there training Afghan police, traditionally one of the country's least-trusted institutions.
Afghan National Police forces were the first to respond to Saturday's explosions and some Canadian troops later deployed to support them, Canadian military spokeswoman Capt. Cynthia LaRue said.
"The most important part here is to remember that ANP did a very good job and responded quickly," LaRue said Sunday.
___
Associated Press writers Kathy Gannon in Islamabad, Rahim Faiez in Kabul and Heidi Vogt in Helmand province contributed to this report.
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Blast kills Pakistani national in Afghanistan: police
Sun Mar 14, 5:21 am ET
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (Reuters) – A roadside bomb killed a Pakistani construction worker and wounded six of his compatriots on Sunday in Afghanistan's southern city of Kandahar, police said.
The device hit the vehicle which was carrying the group on a road close to Pakistan's consulate in the eastern part of the city and came after a series of attacks overnight by Taliban killed 31 people in several parts of Kandahar.
"It was a roadside bomb that hit the vehicle of Pakistani construction workers, killed one of them and wounded six more," police officer Mohammad Asif told Reuters.
Last week, five Pakistani employees of the same Pakistani construction firm, CITA, were gunned down by unknown people in another part of Kandahar.
Kandahar is the next target of an offensive by NATO-led forces after foreign and Afghan troops secured a district regarded as a key Taliban stronghold from the militants in adjacent Helmand in recent weeks.
Before the Taliban's ouster in a U.S.-led invasion in 2001, Kandahar was the traditional and spiritual seat of power of the militants.
No one has claimed responsibility for the deadly attack of last week or Sunday's one on the Pakistani nationals in Kandahar.
The Taliban mostly claim responsibility for attacks on Afghan government, foreign forces and anyone backing them, but the group has rarely targeted Pakistanis. (Reporting by Ismail Sameem; Writing by Sayed Salahuddin; Editing by Jerry Norton)
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Afghanistan eases ban on news coverage of raids
By Jonathon Burch – Sat Mar 13, 8:48 pm ET
KABUL (Reuters) – Afghanistan rowed back on Saturday from a total ban on media broadcasts of "disturbing" images from insurgent attacks or live pictures of security operations.
The new rules for media were agreed over the past week after an outcry over restrictions imposed on March 1 by the National Directorate of Security (NDS) spy agency that threatened to arrest journalists who film attacks.
The NDS had imposed the ban on international as well as local media, saying the images emboldened the militants and allowed them to gain tactical information. The move outraged Afghan media and rights groups who said the public would be deprived of vital security information.
The president's chief spokesman, Waheed Omer, said the new guidelines, hammered out over three days of meetings between officials and media representatives, would guarantee freedom from censorship while addressing government concerns about safety.
"There was a resolution ... which guarantees media freedom, with guarantees that nobody is censored, nobody is kept away from obtaining the information," Omer told a news conference.
"In the meantime, some of our concerns have also been addressed."
However, Afghan journalists' groups said they remained suspicious of the motives behind the new guidelines, which they believed could be used to cover up government failings.
"We think by this move the government is trying to hide its inabilities and shortcomings in dealing with Taliban attacks," Rahimullah Samandar, head of the Afghan Independent Journalists' Association, said.
The resolution is based on an existing article of Afghan Media Law which bans broadcasting "disturbing" images of an attack. The law does not define "disturbing."
The resolution says media are not allowed to broadcast images of Afghan security forces while an operation is under way, to avoid disclosing operational tactics. There appears to be no ban on filming the security forces, provided the images are not broadcast while the attack is in progress.
BOLDER ATTACKS
Taliban fighters have staged ever bolder attacks over the past year, including commando raids inside the capital and other cities.
Last month, suicide bombers struck hotels and battled police in downtown Kabul for two hours. Sixteen people were killed, including Indian government officials and an Italian diplomat.
Vivid images were broadcast worldwide as fighting continued.
Days later, NDS officials summoned journalists into the spy agency's headquarters to inform them that filming such incidents would be barred. U.S. officials expressed concern over the ban.
Since the hardline-Islamist Taliban was overthrown by U.S.-backed Afghan forces in late 2001, Afghanistan has seen dozens of newspapers and television channels spring up.
The country has fairly relaxed media freedom laws compared to some of its Central Asian and Middle Eastern neighbors but insecurity has made it more dangerous for journalists to work.
Last year, three journalists -- two Afghans and a Canadian -- were killed in Afghanistan, and a British reporter died in January. Several have been kidnapped and many have reported intimidation by both the Taliban and government forces.
(Additional reporting by Hamid Shalizi; Editing by Michael Roddy)
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Kandahar slides into lawlessness as Taliban attacks force government to retreat
By Keith B. Richburg The Washington Post Sunday, March 14, 2010; A13
KANDAHAR, AFGHANISTAN -- Even in this dusty, dangerous city long accustomed to violence, the killing last month of Abdul Majid Babai managed to shock.
Babai, a well-liked writer and poet, was the provincial government's minister of information and culture and was working to locate and preserve Afghanistan's antiquities. He was fatally shot Feb. 24 by two assailants on a motorcycle as he walked to work, as he always did, alone and without bodyguards.
His death appeared intended as a warning: No one, no matter how respected, is safe.
"Whoever is working for this government, the Taliban will kill him," said Haji Mohammed Qasim, a physician and tribal elder who was close to Babai. Qasim now carries a pistol in his pocket, travels only with two armed bodyguards and rarely leaves his home; for exercise, he jogs on his roof. "I am afraid," he said.
In theory, the Afghan government is in place in Kandahar, but its authority is nominal. Bombings and assassinations have left the government largely isolated behind concrete barricades and blast walls. In the latest burst of violence, a suicide squad struck across the city late Saturday, detonating bombs at a recently fortified prison, the police headquarters and two other sites, the Associated Press reported. At least 30 people were killed.
For the first time in years, however, the U.S. military again has Kandahar in its sights.
American troops are seeking to reclaim the city and surrounding province, where the Taliban has proved resurgent, more than eight years after the U.S.-led invasion forced the group from power. But a visit here last week made clear that American forces will face an insidious enemy that operates mainly in the shadows and exercises indirect control through intimidation and by instilling fear. The provincial governor remains mostly behind barricades. The provincial council has trouble convening because many members have fled to Kabul. The police are viewed as ill-trained, corrupt and possibly in league with criminal gangs.
"I think nobody is in control," said Ahmad Nader Nadery, a member of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, who recently visited Kandahar. "What was worrying to me is how the government is nonfunctional."
In many ways, that makes the environment here more complicated than the one the Marines have encountered in neighboring Helmand province and the town of Marja, where the Afghan government's presence was nonexistent and where Taliban fighters were massed in large numbers. The Marines took Marja with relative ease, installing a governor handpicked by the Kabul government.
In Kandahar city, residents say, real power rests with Ahmed Wali Karzai, head of the council and the younger brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Ahmed Karzai has been accused of vote rigging and involvement in the drug trade, allegations he has consistently denied. The eight judges still working in the city and province live together for security, packed into an impregnable compound, behind gray concrete walls topped with razor wire.
"If we want to walk, we just walk inside our building," said Judge Dilagha Hemat, director of the Kandahar appeals court, who like others hears cases in the fortress, where judges sleep two to a room and a cook prepares the meals.
In the past few weeks, the precarious security situation in Kandahar city has worsened, with several assassinations and car bombings.
Along with the violence go the threats. Bismillah Afghanmal, a member of the provincial council, said that in the weeks since Babai's killing, he has been getting threatening calls and text messages on his cellphone. Afghanmal still has scars on his head from when he survived an attack last year by seven suicide bombers who stormed the council building, killing and wounding scores. With Babai's killing, he said, "the whole system has been intimidated."
The violence has become so widespread in recent weeks, and so seemingly random, that many residents are suggesting that other shadowy forces -- criminals, drug lords, corrupt local officials and police -- may profit from the instability.
"The Taliban are just part of the problem," said Abdul Qader Noorzai, the Kandahar program manager for the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission. "The increase in criminal activity is out of the control of the local authorities."
If Kandahar city is sliding into lawlessness, the surrounding province appears in even worse shape. In the city, the government has retreated behind concrete barricades; in much of the countryside, there is no government presence.
Kandahar province is divided into 17 districts, and the human rights commission said the government is in control of five. As for the other 12 districts, "I cannot say they are under the control of the Taliban," Noorzai said, "but they are out of the control of the government."
Haji Raz Mohammed, president of a district council, said he regularly negotiates with the Taliban to prevent its fighters from destroying development projects. "The Taliban is there, the Americans are there, the government is there," he said, "But nobody is really in control of the district."
To operate so easily, in the city and the province, the Taliban must rely on some level of local support. Khalid Pashtun, a member of parliament from Kandahar, estimates the Taliban's support at about 10 percent or less of the area's population, emerging either from tribal connections or ideological affinity.
Abdul Satar, a former Taliban minister of refugees and returnees who switched sides a year ago, estimates that there are 3,000 to 4,000 active Taliban fighters in Kandahar province, and he said people assist the Taliban not out of loyalty, but out of fear.
"The majority of people say they are afraid of the Taliban," said Satar, who works as a paid adviser to the government's reconciliation commission in Kandahar. "But they are better than the government, because the government is so corrupt."
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Afghanistan's new great game: The undeclared wars within the war
Deutsche Welle - Mar 14 4:30 AM
Conventional Western public opinion regards the war in Afghanistan as a struggle between NATO and extremist Islamic militants. Since assuming office Barack Obama has redefined the conflict by calling it the Af-Pak war.
The US president's redefinition is recognition that the Taliban's nerve center, as well as al Qaeda's safe haven are across Afghanistan's border in neighboring Pakistan. In the forbidding tribal territories, Waziristan especially, another dimension of the same fierce conflict is underway with more Pakistani troops thrown into the fray than the whole of NATO deploys on its side of the Northwest Frontier.
But unlike Afghanistan where NATO allows journalists free access to combat operations, the Pakistani military remains media-averse and highly secretive of its own internal counter-insurgency efforts. On the surface of things, however Pakistan is NATO's and particularly Washington's staunch ally in the regional and global campaign against terror. It's a role for which Islamabad in dire economic straits is rewarded handsomely with a massive combined US economic and military aid package it could not do without.
But as British author Moni Mohsin, a lifelong student of Pakistan points out "Pakistan is also the only US ally, America frequently bombs with drone missile strikes, which sometimes kill terrorists and just as often kill civilians."
And While Islamabad is at pains to denounce the Predator missile attacks and adamantly insists it does not authorize them, Mohsin told Deutsche Welle that there is tacit Pakistani government approval for the strikes. Yet when the attacks are publicized it only helps to feed the ever present anti-American propaganda in Pakistan's right wing media "which in turn becomes a pro-Talibanization as far as the public is concerned."
Anti-US sentiment
The prevalence of anti-US sentiment in popular culture is something the Pakistani army and the all powerful military intelligence service or ISI, seem to thrive on and encourage although they are ostensible allies of the West, in presumably the same struggle. The underpinning complexity of such duality is at the essence of what routine western analysis of South Asia often fails to pinpoint.
At the core of this double game, is Pakistan's traditional enmity with India, the dominance of the armed forces and its spymasters in Pakistan's national and political life and a long standing rapport with the Taliban and other radical groups which it has not only supported but also created in some cases.
British journalist Rishaad Salamat, a long time Pakistani analyst and a senior economic anchor with Bloomberg Europe, argues that from a national security perspective "there are elements in the ISI who don't want a democratic and stable Afghanistan. A state that they perceive as being in the pocket of India and one which has irredentist claims on Pakistani territory."
Mohsin concurs. "The Pakistani army feels threatened by India on its right flank. And if most countries have armies, Pakistan is an army with a country and to remain in this preeminent position, the generals play up the Indian threat. But then India does have a massive presence and influence in Afghanistan. It has 26 consulates, what does Afghanistan have as one of the poorest nations on earth that India needs so badly?"
Proxy war means more instability
Muddling things further in what seems to be an ongoing proxy war between Delhi and Islamabad, though they are not playing it up, there is widespread suspicion in Western intelligence agencies that the ISI may well have behind the recent suicide attacks and shootings in Kabul aimed at the Indian community there.
Not surprising when the Pakistani Jihadist group Laskhar e Taiba which carried out the bloody raid on Mumbai in 2008 is clearly recognized as an offspring of the ISI, recruited, armed and trained by the intelligence service.
That thus far Islamabad has also refused to extradite or try a single suspect among over 40 militants linked to the slaughter has only exacerbated tensions with its Indian rival. This refusal arguably brought India and Pakistan to the brink of what might have become their fourth modern war since achieving independence from the British Raj in 1947.
It is also undeniable that the ISI has a clear hand in supporting separatist militants in Indian administered Kashmir. Though it isn't all one way mischief, India continues to covertly back Baluchi separatist in Pakistan deeply alienated from central government, in what endures as another, albeit lower level rebellion within Islamabad's borders.
It is also now conveniently overlooked that the Taliban itself, ironically enough, was the very creation with a lot of US funding of both the ISI and the US Central Intelligence Agency as a tool to confront Moscow during the Soviet War in Afghanistan.
What remains more confusing is that while the Pakistani army fights a costly war against the Taliban in its own tribal areas, every once in a while Taliban casualties in Afghanistan are discovered wearing Pakistani army dog tags, most of them officers on seconded, special duty. There have also been repeated instances of Taliban prisoners of war admitting that Pakistani regular army officers run specialized Taliban training camps.
So does it mean civil war has spread to the ranks of the Pakistani military itself? Is it a simple case of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing? Not quite. Mohsin argues that there are elements of the Taliban the Pakistani army and the ISI do not control nor favor.
"The army and ISI say (to Washington) look we will deal with al Qaeda and the Jihadists, but you have made it clear that you will withdraw sooner rather than later and we want an Afghan government in which we have a say, because we live here and we'd prefer a Taliban type of government we can play ball with," Mohsin told Deutsche Welle.
It is a stance that angers Washington but when "NATO is bleeding and Pakistani support is critical there is little that they can do and Pakistan is going to milk it for all its worth and keep collecting the aid looking to Washington to keep defusing tensions with Dehli."
History repeating itself?
Of course there are also other permutations of power geo-politics at play too. China remains a staunch Pakistani ally and military supplier because it suits China to have Pakistan as a thorn in India's side, with whom its also fought a war in the past and seeks to check its power.
Israel increasingly has also emerged as key provider of military technology for India which it sees as a natural ally in the fight against Islamic radicalism. But its hard to escape the perception that the Pakistani military and the ISI are really the key players in the drama of the Hindu Kush and the larger crisis of South Asia.
Within Pakistan itself the military's power far exceeds that of a weak civilian government. A massive portion of the national budget is allocated to the armed forces with no questions asked. There is no public nor international accountability of the nature of conflict in the territories, where there may well be large scale civilian losses and human rights abuses on both sides.
And among those that dissent in Pakistan, but who also oppose radicalization, the military and the ISI are challenging democracy itself, pitting the judiciary against the government and using nationalist sentiment in the conservative elements of the media to keep tensions at a fever pitch. It's a dangerous game and last year casualties from suicide bombings in Pakistan exceeded those in Iraq.
The great game as it was once called pitted the British and Russian empires against one another with Afghanistan as the chosen battleground. During World War II, Nazi Germany even sought Afghanistan as a potential ally in its struggle against Britain, even sending a team of saboteurs to blow up bridges on the Afghan-Indian borders.
Of course the Soviets had their failed era and now it is America and its NATO European allies who are embroiled in the Hindu Kush. But it is much more complex than anyone dare admit and it would seem as ever, if history is anything to go by, it is the locals that will have the final say, not the outsider.
Author: Chris Kline
Editor: Rob Mudge
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At least 18 Afghan suspects arrested in Pakistan
People's Daily - Mar 14 4:08 AM
At least 18 suspected Afghan nationals were arrested Sunday by Pakistani police during a search operation in southern Pakistan, according to local TV reports.
The private ARY TV quoted police sources as saying that all the suspects were arrested from local hotels in Sukkar, a city in the southern Sindh province and have been taken to a unknown place for further interrogation.
Hundreds of suspected people have been arrested during a country-wide search operation started after three suicide attacks in the eastern Pakistan city of Lahore last week, causing over 70 casualties, the TV said.
Source:Xinhua
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Afghan Prosecutors Key to Beating Taliban
Robert C. O’Brien and Stephen G. Larson: Establishing a Judicial System Afghans Can Trust Must Be Priority
CBS News By Robert C. O’Brien and Stephen G. Larson March 13, 2010
Robert C. O’Brien is the Co-Chair of the U.S. Department of State Public-Private Partnership for Justice Reform in Afghanistan and is the managing partner of Arent Fox LLP’s Los Angeles Office. Stephen G. Larson is a retired federal Judge and a member of the Executive Committee of the Partnership. He is partner at Girardi Keese in Los Angeles.
Without well-equipped and honest Afghan prosecutors to bring criminal cases against the country’s drug lords and terrorists, the sacrifices of our front line soldiers could be in vain. Police and counter-insurgency work alone is insufficient to stop the Taliban and narco-terrorists.
As we learned in this country, to combat organized crime, successful prosecutions and convictions of the traffickers and terrorists are required. Only then will Afghanistan’s drug and terror networks be dismantled. Critical to this effort is paying Afghan prosecutors a wage sufficient to sustain their families.
The links between poppy cultivation, narco-trafficking, and the expanded Taliban insurgency could not be stronger. The drugs are funding both the Taliban and Al Qaeda, allowing terrorists to operate in wide swathes of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Dirty money secures influence and power over local populations and officials. The money is also used to bribe Afghan prosecutors, thereby allowing criminals to escape justice and continue to operate against Afghan police and American soldiers and marines.
Merely increasing the size of coalition forces in the country will not defeat the insurgency if not coupled with robust law enforcement in Afghanistan. The DOD has told Congress that “to end the illegal narcotics trade it is necessary to dismantle the networks that enable it. U.S. Government efforts [must] focus on developing Afghan capability to identify and arrest drug traffickers and interdict shipments of drugs and money.”
To increase the effectiveness of a criminal justice system that is permeated with corruption, the DOD recommended higher pay for Afghan National Police, judges, and soldiers. This step, which is being implanted, however, solves only part of the problem. Afghan criminal prosecutors must also be paid a salary that allows them to meet their expenses if corruption is to be rooted out of the justice system.
Prosecutors play a key role in the Afghan justice system. They are responsible for investigating all crimes following the arrest of suspects and presenting those cases in court. Thus, they handle much of the detective work that the police usually undertake in the United States. Where they receive proper support, such as in the Counter Narcotics Tribunal, which is supported by the DEA and DOJ, the results are impressive. The CNT is increasingly targeting and convicting higher-level dealers. Such work lead to the assassination of the CNT’s chief judge, Alim Hanif, last year by suspected drug traffickers.
On recent trips to Afghanistan, we asked groups of senior prosecutors to raise their hands if they accepted bribes. None did. We then asked them to raise hands if they knew of other prosecutors who took bribes. All did. Their explanation for such corruption was simple: In Kabul, the average prosecutor is paid approximately $100 per month, while the basic cost of living is about $500 per month. While they acknowledged that some prosecutors took bribes out of greed, they claimed that most did so merely to support their families.
Compounding the problem of low salaries is the prosecutors’ lack of equipment to conduct their investigations. They do not have vehicles to visit crime scenes and interview witnesses, they require cell phones and they need generators to power their equipment. It goes without saying that they do not have basic CSI tools to lift finger prints or take impressions of foot prints or tire marks much less deal with DNA evidence.
U.N. sources state that the five-year cost of increasing salaries of prosecutors and properly equipping them could reach over $100 million. Given the lack of resources of the Afghan government, it is unlikely that prosecutors’ salaries will be increased without foreign assistance. Although the cost of paying Afghan prosecutors a reasonable wage and giving them to tools to successfully prosecute criminals is not insignificant, it is a price worth paying given the war effort in Afghanistan. An honest and effective Afghan criminal justice system will not be cheap, but without it, a just and stable Afghanistan will remain elusive.
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We've met the enemy in Afghanistan, and he's changed
By Roy Gutman, McClatchy Newspapers via Stars and Stripes online edition, Sunday, March 14, 2010
KABUL, Afghanistan — A decade ago, when the Taliban controlled the Afghan government, their militiamen — barely motivated, untrained conscripts — tried for five years to seize control of the entire country from more moderate forces but didn't succeed, even with the help of Osama bin Laden's Arab and other foreign volunteers.
Today, although the United States and more than three dozen NATO allies and other countries are supporting Afghan President Hamid Karzai, the Taliban dominate a growing swath of territory, and their power trumps the government's in three-quarters of the country.
Although they're often portrayed as mindless fanatics, the militant Islamists' "life experience" from their years in the wilderness, their study of American military tactics and their analysis of the Karzai government's shortcomings have helped reverse their fortunes, U.S. intelligence experts say.
With President Barack Obama sending at least 30,000 additional American troops to knock the Taliban off-balance and a U.S.-led offensive in Helmand province, a better understanding of today's Taliban is central to the effort to defeat them and to begin withdrawing some American troops from Afghanistan in summer 2011.
While much is made of the recent arrests of Taliban leaders in Pakistan and the deaths of others in U.S. unmanned drone attacks, the group appears to be a movement in transition, with greater sophistication along with limited central control and considerable autonomy for its local commanders in Afghanistan.
Western intelligence officials cite varied signs of the "new" Taliban:
During and after every military operation, top Taliban leaders — who intelligence officials think move along the Afghan-Pakistani border but sometimes retreat to Karachi and other Pakistani cities — routinely run circles around the Karzai government with rapid-response public relations.
Some Taliban still fight as they did a decade ago, in flip-flops and traditional baggy pants, but the hard-core "Taliban cavalry" is equipped with North Face jackets, good boots, warm clothing and swift motorbikes purchased in Pakistan.
The Taliban made some 8,000 improvised explosive devices last year, an astonishing rate of almost 22 a day. "An enemy that can generate 8,000 IEDS and bring 8,000 IEDS to bear and have a major effect, we ought to hire the J-4, the logistician," said a top general with the U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force.
Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar issued a 67-article code of conduct for his fighters last summer, ordering them to protect the civilian population.
Based on debriefings of some 4,000 Taliban detainees captured over the past four to five years, the ISAF general concludes the insurgents are motivated to seize power either by conquest or by negotiation and to establish the rule of law in the areas they control. Taliban fighters say they want to bring Shariah, Islamic law, to rural areas where government officials are known to be corrupt.
The Taliban "have totally changed," said Vahid Mojdeh, a former Taliban foreign ministry official who monitors the movement. "They've totally put behind them their international agenda" of spreading Islamist revolution "and now are just focused on Afghanistan."
Although Western and Afghan experts acknowledge Omar, the one-eyed cleric, is the group's supreme leader, many Taliban innovations for controlling territory are probably of local origin.
Take, for example, an order to shut down cell phone communications after about 4 p.m. every day in four southern Afghan provinces. Taliban commanders approached the four commercial cell-phone companies in the area and told them to halt service or their towers would be blown up.
According to Mojdeh, the move is part of a Taliban effort to prevent spies from communicating Taliban positions to Afghan government officials.
However, it's also "to make sure they can get a good night's rest," the senior ISAF general said.
The Taliban also must communicate with one another, however, and their devices — VHF radio-relay networks that use hundreds of small antennas linked to big solar panels — have impressed Western militaries. The basic equipment is bought off the shelf in Pakistan or stolen from NATO trucks and assembled in the field.
"It's extremely sophisticated," the general, who couldn't be identified under the terms of the briefing, told McClatchy. On the other hand, he said, Taliban codes are "pretty easy to break."
Taliban policies also have become somewhat more sophisticated. Mojdeh said in the past year, the insurgents had stopped burning down schools, and they no longer oppose vaccination campaigns for children or health clinics.
"There's a new generation. They are familiar with computers. They communicate with text messages. They're in favor of education," he told McClatchy. Unlike the Taliban of the 1990s, he said, "They are no longer all illiterates."
Drawing on insurgent tactics from the war in Iraq, the Afghan civil war in the 1990s, Pakistani trainers and al-Qaida operatives, the Taliban have developed a plan for civilian governance of regions they control, appointing a governor — usually from another region, to avoid local tribal rivalries — a military commander, a financial official in charge and a judge.
Haroun Mir, the director of Afghanistan's Center for Research and Policy Studies, who fought against the Taliban in the 1990s, said the insurgents had taken a leaf from their former archenemy, the late Afghan guerrilla leader Ahmed Shah Massoud, who was an ethnic Tajik, unlike the mostly Pashtun Taliban.
The Taliban "previously never let anyone in (Massoud's) movement have influence," but now they're accepting ideas from below, Mir said. "I wonder if the traditional Taliban are still in control?" he asked.
He said the Taliban's new emphasis on justice paralleled Massoud's concern people behind the front lines "should feel secure," he said. Mir also said the principal slogan Omar used today "is to expel the infidels, the same slogan we used against the Russians," but now meaning U.S. and European forces.
However, the Taliban also have adopted new and deadly tactics such as recruiting pupils from madrassas — Islamic schools — for suicide bombings.
Recruiters observe the students and "see who's the more emotional," Mojdeh said. They also seek volunteers from among those who have lost family members to U.S. or Afghan government attacks.
They "work on them and train them and give them a suicide belt — a fake one. If they don't show fear, they give them a real one," Mojdeh said. The suicide attackers say goodbye to their families, "and then they disappear."
The Afghan National Directorate for Security estimates there are at least 1,000 mobile insurgent training centers in Pakistan's seven tribal agencies — lawless zones beyond the writ of the central government — most in the guise of religious education centers.
To a great extent, though, the Taliban remain motivated by revenge. The massacre in 2001 of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Taliban detainees at the hands of an Uzbek warlord in northern Afghanistan still motivates Taliban to fight.
"That massacre was the base or foundation for all the fighting that is now going on," Mojdeh said.
The senior ISAF general agreed the massacre was "absolutely" a recruiting tool for the Taliban. "Those kinds of things thicken the hatred and cause more people to join."
Last July, the U.S. military obtained a copy of the new code of conduct issued by Omar, with instructions to protect civilians and spare the lives of prisoners. It came on the heels of a tactical directive by Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, which said the aim of American troops was to protect the Afghan population, not to kill Taliban.
Unlike the U.S. directive, however, which reduced the number of civilian deaths last year by 28 percent from 2008, there's little sign the Taliban are implementing Omar's code, which says Taliban suicide attacks should be carried out against "major" targets and "utmost steps" taken to avoid civilian casualties.
A U.N. report in January said the Taliban were responsible for 70 percent of the 2,142 civilian killings in 2009, up some 50 percent from the previous year. That included 1,054 victims of suicide bombings and IEDs and 225 victims of targeted assassinations and executions.
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Five myths about the war in Afghanistan
The Washington Post By Michael O'Hanlon and Hassina Sherjan Sunday, March 14, 2010
The war in Afghanistan is in its ninth year, and even officials supportive of the U.S. presence there acknowledge the challenges that remain. "People still need to understand there is some very hard fighting and very hard days ahead," Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said during his trip to Afghanistan last week. But the conflict is not hopeless, nor it is eternal. If we want to develop realistic expectations about the war -- how it might unfold from here and when it could begin to wind down -- it would help to dispel some of the popular mythologies that have emerged about the Afghans, the enemy we're fighting and the U.S. commitment.
1. Afghans always hate and defeat their invaders.
The Afghans drove the British Empire out of their country in the 19th century and did the same to the Soviet Union in the 20th century. They do fight fiercely; many American troops who have been deployed both in Iraq and Afghanistan in recent years have asserted that the Afghans are stronger natural fighters.
Yet, the people of Afghanistan do not despise foreigners. Despite downward trends in recent years, Afghans are far more accepting of an international presence in their country than are Iraqis, for example, who typically gave the U.S. presence approval ratings of 15 to 30 percent in the early years of the war in that country. Average U.S. favorability ratings in recent surveys in Afghanistan are around 50 percent, and according to polls from ABC, the BBC and the International Republican Institute, about two-thirds of Afghans recognize that they still need foreign help.
And before we mythologize the Afghan insurgency, it is worth remembering some history. In the 1980s, the United States, Saudi Arabia and others gave enormous financial and military assistance to the Afghan resistance movement that eventually forced the Soviets out. That group grew to about 250,000 in strength in the mid-1980s. But today, the Taliban and other resistance groups receive substantial help only from some elements in Pakistan -- and diminishing help at that -- and collectively, they number about 25,000 fighters.
Finally, though U.S.-backed Afghan forces overthrew the Taliban after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, today's international presence there does not amount to an invasion. Foreign forces are present at the invitation of the host government, which two-thirds of Afghans consider legitimate, if somewhat corrupt.
2. The situation in Afghanistan is much more difficult than the one in Iraq.
The U.S. goals in both countries are similar -- establishing better security and governance and eventually passing total control to domestic authorities -- and there are certainly ways in which Afghanistan poses a tougher challenge than Iraq. There are more tribes to contend with, the drug problem is worse, literacy rates are lower, national institutions such as the security forces and the judiciary are weaker, and the economy is less advanced.
But Afghanistan's history of violence and its relative underdevelopment also make its people realistic about the future; they are grateful for even incremental progress, as polls show. And consider the following signs of improvement: Seven million children are now in school (compared with fewer than 1 million under the Taliban), and some 8 million cellphones are in use among a population of about 30 million -- compared with virtually zero before 2001. Health care is also getting better.
Also, the violence in Afghanistan today is far less severe than it was in Iraq. Before the troop surge in 2007, more Iraqi civilians were killed every month than have been killed from war-related violence in Afghanistan each year. In other words, Afghanistan is less than a tenth as violent as the Iraq of 2004-07. Communities were displaced and sectarian tensions were inflamed far more in Iraq than they have been in Afghanistan.
3. The U.S. military is for war-fighting, not nation-building.
This was a core philosophy for the incoming Bush administration in 2001 -- until the tide of history made George W. Bush the president most preoccupied with nation-building since Harry Truman.
The debate about whether the U.S. armed forces should be involved in nation-building was big in the 1990s, but the nation-builders have won the argument hands down. The terminology has shifted, to be sure, from "nation-building" to "stabilization and reconstruction" missions, but these include efforts to improve governance and the economy as well as security and stability.
Among top civilian and military leaders, there is no real disagreement about whether the armed forces should engage in these types of activities -- at least not in situations such as Afghanistan, where the weakness of a state threatens American security. While Gen. David Petraeus led the writing of the new counterinsurgency field manual, with its emphasis on protecting local populations and helping build up indigenous institutions, it was then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld who, in a November 2005 directive, wrote that "stability operations are a core U.S. military mission that the Department of Defense shall be prepared to conduct and support." He added that such operations will receive a "priority comparable to combat operations." That remains U.S. policy.
4. We should negotiate with the Taliban.
There is nothing wrong with negotiating with elements of the Afghan resistance, especially at the local level. If they are willing to renounce violence and accept the authority of the central government as well as the temporary presence of international forces, we can allow them to rejoin society, obtain jobs and perhaps, in some cases, hold government positions. Many insurgents who are motivated less by ideology than by money, opposition to the government or tribal rivalries may fit this bill.
But a major compromise with the central Taliban leadership is not only unlikely -- it's a bad idea. The Taliban is not interested in negotiation and is not the sort of organization with which the Afghan government or the United Sates should ever compromise. Its extremist ideology is misogynous and intolerant, and its history in Afghanistan is barbaric. Most important, the Taliban is extremely unpopular among Afghans.
President Hamid Karzai has repeatedly stated his willingness to negotiate with Taliban leaders willing to renounce insurgency, while British Foreign Secretary David Miliband has called for some form of political settlement with the Taliban and other insurgent groups, provided that our core interests are protected. But in general, NATO and Afghan forces will have to establish more battlefield momentum before widespread negotiations become plausible. Any talks must be pursued from a position of strength, so that deals will involve convincing the Taliban to lay down arms rather than pretending that it could share power while clinging to its current ideology.
5. There is no exit strategy or exit schedule.
Some Afghans (and Pakistanis) listened to President Obama's Dec. 1 West Point speech, in which he promised that U.S. forces in Afghanistan would start to withdraw by July 2011, and worried that America's commitment is weak. Many Americans, though, have the opposite concern -- that this war is open-ended.
But if the new strategy being implemented by Gen. Stanley McChrystal is successful, we will see clear evidence of that by late 2010 or 2011. We should then be able to contemplate major reductions in the U.S. military presence starting in 2012.
There are two main reasons for large NATO and U.S. troop deployments in Afghanistan today. The first is to clear and hold key strategic areas, as with the current operation in Marja. This effort will largely culminate in 2010 and 2011. The second is to train Afghan forces. Given schedules for recruiting, training and forming Afghan units, this process will be most demanding through 2012 or so.
Put the pieces together and, while a rapid reduction in U.S. forces starting next summer is unlikely, the United States should be able to cut its presence by perhaps 20,000 troops per year thereafter. This is hardly a quick exit -- at least not as fast as Congress or Obama might want -- and such a time table implies that the United States will still have 60,000 or more troops in Afghanistan when Obama faces voters in 2012. But it is not unending, nor is it unrealistic.
Michael O'Hanlon is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Hassina Sherjan is the president of Aid Afghanistan for Education, a nonprofit group in Kabul. They are the co-authors of "Toughing It Out in Afghanistan."
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At Afghan outpost, Marines gone rogue or leading the fight against counterinsurgency?
The Washington Post By Rajiv Chandrasekaran 03/14/2010
DELARAM - Home to a dozen truck stops and a few hundred family farms bounded by miles of foreboding desert, this hamlet in southwestern Afghanistan is far from a strategic priority for senior officers at the international military headquarters in Kabul. One calls Delaram, a day's drive from the nearest city, "the end of the Earth." Another deems the area "unrelated to our core mission" of defeating the Taliban by protecting Afghans in their cities and towns.
U.S. Marine commanders have a different view of the dusty, desolate landscape that surrounds Delaram. They see controlling this corner of remote Nimruz province as essential to promoting economic development and defending the more populated parts of southern Afghanistan.
The Marines are constructing a vast base on the outskirts of town that will have two airstrips, an advanced combat hospital, a post office, a large convenience store and rows of housing trailers stretching as far as the eye can see. By this summer, more than 3,000 Marines -- one-tenth of the additional troops authorized by President Obama in December -- will be based here.
With Obama's July 2011 deadline to begin reducing U.S. forces looming over the horizon, the Marines have opted to wage the war in their own way.
"If we're going to succeed here, we have to experiment and take risks," said Brig. Gen. Lawrence D. Nicholson, the top Marine commander in Afghanistan. "Just doing what everyone else is doing isn't going to cut it."
The Marines are pushing into previously ignored Taliban enclaves. They have set up a first-of-its-kind school to train police officers. They have brought in a Muslim chaplain to pray with local mullahs and deployed teams of female Marines to reach out to Afghan women.
The Marine approach -- creative, aggressive and, at times, unorthodox -- has won many admirers within the military. The Marine emphasis on patrolling by foot and interacting with the population, which has helped to turn former insurgent strongholds along the Helmand River valley into reasonably stable communities with thriving bazaars and functioning schools, is hailed as a model of how U.S. forces should implement counterinsurgency strategy.
But the Marines' methods, and their insistence that they be given a degree of autonomy not afforded to U.S. Army units, also have riled many up the chain of command in Kabul and Washington, prompting some to refer to their area of operations in the south as "Marineistan." They regard the expansion in Delaram and beyond as contrary to the population-centric approach embraced by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, and they are seeking to impose more control over the Marines.
The U.S. ambassador in Kabul, Karl W. Eikenberry, recently noted that the international security force in Afghanistan feels as if it comprises 42 nations instead of 41 because the Marines act so independently from other U.S. forces.
"We have better operational coherence with virtually all of our NATO allies than we have with the U.S. Marine Corps," said a senior Obama administration official involved in Afghanistan policy.
Some senior officials at the White House, at the Pentagon and in McChrystal's headquarters would rather have many of the 20,000 Marines who will be in Afghanistan by summer deploy around Kandahar, the country's second-largest city, to assist in a U.S. campaign to wrest the area from Taliban control instead of concentrating in neighboring Helmand province and points west. According to an analysis conducted by the National Security Council, fewer than 1 percent of the country's population lives in the Marine area of operations.
They question whether a large operation that began last month to flush the Taliban out of Marja, a poor farming community in central Helmand, is the best use of Marine resources. Although it has unfolded with fewer than expected casualties and helped to generate a perception of momentum in the U.S.-led military campaign, the mission probably will tie up two Marine battalions and hundreds of Afghan security forces until the summer.
"What the hell are we doing?" the senior official said. "Why aren't all 20,000 Marines in the population belts around Kandahar city right now? It's [Taliban leader] Mullah Omar's capital. If you want to stuff it to Mullah Omar, you make progress in Kandahar. If you want to communicate to the Taliban that there's no way they're returning, you show progress in Kandahar."
Marines support Marines
Until earlier this month, McChrystal lacked operational control over the Marines, which would have allowed him to move them to other parts of the country. That power rested with a three-star Marine general at the U.S. Central Command. He and other senior Marine commanders insisted that Marines in Afghanistan have a contiguous area of operations -- effectively precluding them from being split up and sent to Kandahar -- because they think it is essential the Marines are supported by Marine helicopters and logistics units, which are based in Helmand, instead of relying on the Army.
After concern about the arrangement reached the White House, Gen. David H. Petraeus, who heads the Central Command, issued an order in early March giving McChrystal operational control of Marine forces in Afghanistan, according to senior defense officials. But the new authority vested in McChrystal -- the product of extensive negotiations among military lawyers -- still requires Marine approval for any plan to disaggregate infantry units from air and logistics support, which will limit his ability to move them, the defense officials said.
"At the end of the day, not a lot has changed," said a Marine general, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, as did several other senior officers and officials, to address sensitive command issues. "There's still a caveat that prevents us from being cherry-picked."
The Marine demand to be supported by their own aviators and logisticians has roots in the World War II battles for Guadalcanal and Tarawa. Marines landing on the Pacific islands did not receive the support they had expected from Navy ships and aircraft. Since then, Marine commanders have insisted on deploying with their own aviation and supply units. They did so in Vietnam, and in Iraq.
Despite the need to travel with an entourage, the Marines are willing to move fast. The commandant of the Corps, Gen. James T. Conway, offered to provide one-third of the forces Obama authorized in December, and to get them there quickly. Some arrived within weeks. By contrast, many of the Army units that comprise the new troop surge have yet to leave the United States.
"The Marines are a double-edged sword for McChrystal," one senior defense official said. "He got them fast, but he only gets to use them in one place."
Marine commanders note that they did not choose to go to Helmand -- they were asked to go there by McChrystal's predecessor, Gen. David D. McKiernan, because British forces in the area were unable to contain the intensifying insurgency. But once they arrived, they became determined to show they could rescue the place, in much the same way they helped to turn around Anbar province in Iraq.
They also became believers in Helmand's strategic importance. "You cannot fix Kandahar without fixing Helmand," Nicholson said. "The insurgency there draws support from the insurgency here."
'Mullahpalooza tour'
The Marine concentration in one part of the country -- as opposed to Army units, which are spread across Afghanistan -- has yielded a pride of place. As it did in Anbar, the Corps is sending some of its most talented young officers to Helmand.
The result has been a degree of experimentation and innovation unseen in most other parts of the country. Although they account for half of the Afghan population, women had been avoided by military forces, particularly in the conservative south, because it is regarded as taboo for women to interact with males with whom they are not related. In an effort to reach out to them, the Marines have established "female engagement teams."
Made up principally of female Marines who came to Afghanistan to work in support jobs, the teams accompany combat patrols and seek to sit down with women in villages. Working with female translators, team members answer questions, dispense medical assistance and identify reconstruction needs.
Master Sgt. Julia Watson said the effort has had one major unexpected consequence. "Men have really opened up after they see us helping their wives and sisters," she said.
The Marines have sought to jump into another void by establishing their own police academy at Camp Leatherneck in Helmand instead of waiting for the U.S. military's national training program to provide recruits. The Marines also are seeking to do something that the military has not been able to do on a national scale: reduce police corruption by accepting only recruits vouched for by tribal elders.
"This is a shame culture," said Terry Walker, a retired Marine drill instructor who helps run the academy. "If they know they are accountable to their elders, they will be less likely to misbehave."
Then there's what Marines call the "mullahpalooza tour." Although most U.S. military units have avoided direct engagement with religious leaders in Afghanistan, Nicholson has brought over Lt. Cmdr. Abuhena Saifulislam, one of only two imams in the U.S. Navy, to spend a month meeting -- and praying with -- local mullahs, reasoning that the failure to interact with them made it easier for them to be swayed by the Taliban.
At his first session with religious leaders in Helmand, the participants initially thought the clean-shaven Saifulislam was an impostor. Then he led the group in noontime prayers. By the end, everyone wanted to take a picture with him.
"The mullahs of Afghanistan are the core of society," he said. "Bypassing them is counterproductive."
Reviving a ghost town
In December, columns of Marine armored vehicles punched into the city of Now Zad in northern Helmand. Once the second-largest town in the province, it had been almost completely emptied of its residents over the past four years as insurgents mined the roads and buildings with hundreds of homemade bombs. Successive units of British and U.S. troops had been largely confined to a Fort Apache-like base in the town. Every time they ventured out, they'd be shot at or bombed.
To Nicholson and his commanders, reclaiming the town, which the Marines accomplished within a few weeks, has been a crucial step in demonstrating to Helmand residents that U.S. forces are committed to getting rid of the Taliban. To other military officials in Afghanistan, however, the mission seemed contrary to McChrystal's counterinsurgency strategy.
"If our focus is supposed to be protecting the population, why are we focusing on a ghost town?" said a senior officer at the NATO regional headquarters in Kandahar.
Nicholson notes that Helmand's governor supported the operation, as did many local tribal leaders. Hundreds of residents have returned in recent weeks, and at least 65 shops have reopened, according to Marine officers stationed in Now Zad.
"Protecting the population means allowing people to return to their homes," he said. "We've taken a grim, tough place, a place where there was no hope, and we've given it a future."
Nicholson now wants Marine units to push through miles of uninhabited desert to establish control of a crossing point for insurgents, drugs and weapons on the border with Pakistan. And he wants to use the new base in Delaram to mount more operations in Nimruz, a part of far southwestern Afghanistan deemed so unimportant that it is one of the only provinces where there is no U.S. or NATO reconstruction team.
"This is a place where the enemy are moving in numbers," he said, referring to increased Taliban activity along a newly built highway that bisects the province. "We need to clean it up."
Nicholson contends that if his forces were kept only in key population centers in Helmand, insurgents would come right up to the gates of towns.
Other U.S. and NATO military officials say that what the Marines want to do makes sense only if there were not a greater demand for troops elsewhere. Because the Marines cannot easily be moved to Kandahar, U.S. and British military and diplomatic officials have begun discussions to expand the Marine footprint into more populous parts of Helmand with greater insurgent activity where British forces have been outmatched. That shift could occur as soon as this summer, when a Marine-run NATO regional headquarters is established in Helmand.
Until then, however, Marine commanders want to keep moving.
"The clock is ticking," Nicholson told members of an intelligence battalion that recently arrived in Afghanistan. "The drawdown will begin next year. We still have a lot to do -- and we don't have a lot of time to do it."
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Training for the civilian surge in Afghanistan
By Kim Ghattas BBC News, Mascatatuck Urban Training Center, Indiana Saturday, 13 March 2010
The Afghan governor walked down the main market street, chatting with US soldiers and civilians as an armoured personnel carrier stood guard on a corner.
An explosion sent everybody ducking for cover before they calmly regrouped a bit further away to discuss what they had done right and what had gone wrong.
The village and the explosion were mock, the Afghans were role playing. But the exercise was a very real preparation for the harsh reality of the jobs the civilians have signed up for on the front line of President Barack Obama's war in Afghanistan.
More than 900 state department officials, former NGO and UN workers, ex-Marines, agricultural experts and Treasury Department employees have been training at military facilities in Indiana before shipping out to the conflict zone.
They are part of the civilian surge, a key component of the administration's strategy in Afghanistan.
"I hope to make a difference one Afghan man, child, woman at a time," said Jerry Calhoun.
Experimental strategy
Mr Calhoun has worked on reconstruction efforts in Iraq over the last few years. He has a wife and three grown children. When asked if it was worth risking his life, he answered calmly "Yes, I do, I think the consequences of me not going would be worse."
The focus may be mostly on the thousands of troops in Afghanistan, but Washington is counting on the civilians to help stabilise the country.
They will be working with the Afghans on building governance, fighting corruption and generally establishing a government presence well outside the capital.
To function in such an insecure environment, they will have to work closely with the military.
But there are fears such close co-operation will turn the civilians into legitimate targets and taint all future aid efforts.
State Department official Dereck Hogan admitted that the civilians could be seen as targets.
But, he said, working alongside the military also helped protect them in difficult circumstances.
Jason Cha, who used to do development work for an NGO in Africa, said he had some misgivings about working alongside soldiers when he first joined the surge.
"But given the security situation over there, I think we definitely need to be working with the military, and it's sort of a symbiotic relationship, the only way we can be successful is with them alongside us," he said.
Dubbed "civ-mil cooperation", the surge is an experiment for an administration seeking a way out of Afghanistan by building up the capacity of the Afghan government.
Criticism from within
A report by the Office of the Inspector General of the State Department has already warned that the civilian surge is facing difficulties. The pace and scope of the build-up has made it difficult for the logistics to be in place in time.
The list of problems is long. The role of the civilians is not always clear, co-ordination is lacking and security concerns hinder contact with the Afghans. Some of the training is inadequate and tours of duty are limited to one year, including a total of two months on rest and recuperation, limiting the build-up of knowledge and know-how.
"Even with the able leadership of senior officers, the best of intentions and the most dedicated efforts, Embassy Kabul faces serious challenges in meeting the administration's deadline for 'success' in Afghanistan" the report said.
Local customs
For the civilians heading out to Afghanistan, the training takes a total of four weeks, including five days of at the Muscatatuck Urban Training Center in Indiana.
There, the civilians go through various exercises that will teach them how to interact with Afghans and understand some of the local customs.
They learn how to react to dangerous situations and adapt to working with soldiers. The military, for its part, learns how to deal with civilians in its midst.
Soldiers have mostly welcomed this new way of fighting the war. Sgt Nick Seyes from the Indiana National Guard was at Mascatatuck learning to provide civilian recruits with the protection needed to operate in Afghanistan.
"Us running down the bad guys and shooting at them isn't completing the job as we thought it was going to," he said.
"I think in this way we're making friends with the population again and we are in essence winning the hearts and minds of people. If this is the best way to go after bad guys, if this is the way to do it, we win, right?"
In Washington, there's been very little outright criticism of the civilian surge. One of the few dissenters is Matthew Hoh. A former Marine, he worked for the US State Department in Afghanistan for a year until resigning in November to protest against President Obama's strategy.
"I think in Afghanistan the civilian surge is a waste of time, effort and resources at this point," he said.
High aims
"In Iraq there was an actual government that used to deliver services, in Afghanistan you don't have that, so you're building everything from scratch," he added.
"You're going to have no political stability, which won't give you security, which won't give you development, so the civilian surge is going to be a continuous effort to build a government among people who don't want a government."
The all-out effort in Afghanistan is an ambitious campaign, more ambitious than anything seen since the Vietnam war, according to US special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke.
No-one is calling it nation building, even if it looks like it. But America's changing role and the promise of years of civilian involvement raises a wider question about how America views its role in the world
Charles Kupchan from the Council on Foreign Relations says it would be a mistake for the US to read too much into the success of counter insurgency tactics in Iraq or that of civilian reconstruction in Afghanistan. Mr Kupchan says it cannot become "the imperial fixer of last resort".
"I think the American public is tiring of wars in the Middle East, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and it would certainly be a bridge too far to believe that the United States can now move on and fix Yemen, or fix Sudan, or fix Somalia," he said.
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