 |
||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Serving you since 1998 | ||||||||||||
|
|
Afghans celebrate new year with hopes for peace
by Sardar Ahmad – Sun Mar 21, 4:42 am ET
MAZAR-I-SHARIF, Afghanistan (AFP) – Afghans have travelled from across their war-ravaged country to the northern city of Mazar-I-Sharif united behind one wish: that the advent of a new year will bring them peace.
Afghan VP voices hope for peace as bombs kill 12
By Deb Riechmann, Associated Press Writer
MAZAR-I-SHARIF, Afghanistan – Afghanistan's hard-line vice president expressed hope Sunday that an upcoming national conference will lay the foundation for peace with insurgents as a dozen civilians died in separate bombings in front-line provinces.
Bomb blast kills 10 in southern Afghanistan <br> by Nasrat Shoib
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (AFP) – At least ten people picnicking by a stream in southern Afghanistan to celebrate the Afghan new year were killed in a suicide bomb attack on Sunday, police and officials said.
Taliban behead 3 'US spies' in Pakistan: police
Sun Mar 21, 3:08 am ET
MIRANSHAH, Pakistan (AFP) – Taliban militants in Pakistan's restive tribal area Sunday beheaded three men they accused of spying for US forces stationed across the border in Afghanistan, police said.
Air strikes kill 15 Taliban in Pakistan: officials
PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AFP) – Air strikes killed 15 Taliban in restive Pakistani northwestern tribal areas on Sunday, where militants beheaded three tribesmen accusing them of spying for the United States.
U.S. may expand use of its prison in Afghanistan
The White House is considering housing international terrorism suspects at Bagram air base, as is done at Guantanamo Bay.
By David S. Cloud and Julian E. Barnes March 21, 2010 The Los Angeles Times
Reporting from Washington - The White House is considering whether to detain international terrorism suspects at a U.S. military base in Afghanistan, senior U.S. officials said, an option that would lead to another prison with the same purpose as Guantanamo Bay, which it has promised to close.
We are still in the picture in Afghanistan: India
rediff.com - Mar 21 3:49 AM
Refuting reports that it has been "squeezed out" of Afghanistan, External Affairs Minister S M Krishna has said India was playing a "stellar role" in rebuilding the war-torn country, which was acknowledged by the people and the legitimate government there.
Afghan president to court China
AFP via The Taipei Times Monday, Mar 22, 2010, Page 5
BEIJING - Afghan President Hamid Karzai travels to China this week eyeing investment from his mighty neighbor that has shown more interest in helping to rebuild his war-torn nation than military involvement.
U.S. turns blind eye to opium production in parts of Afghanistan
By ROD NORDLAND The New York Times
KABUL - The effort to win over Afghans on former Taliban turf in Marjah has put U.S. and NATO commanders in the unusual position of arguing against opium eradication, pitting them against some Afghan officials who are pushing to destroy the harvest.
Afghan drug cartels squeeze poppy farmers
by Lynne O'donnell – Sun Mar 21, 2:09 am ET
LASHKAR GAH, Afghanistan (AFP) – Like farmers the world over Haji Afzal has locked in the price for his crop with a forward contract.
Taliban fighters being taught at secret camps in Iran
The Sunday Times Miles Amoore in Kabul March 21, 2010
THE Taliban fighters scurried up the craggy mountainside. As they neared the top, their 30-strong platoon split into three sections and they launched a ferocious assault on an enemy fort, opening fire from numerous positions.
The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight
Six billion dollars later, the Afghan National Police can't begin to do their jobs right—never mind relieve American forces.
By T. Christian Miller, Mark Hosenball, and Ron Moreau | NEWSWEEK Mar 19, 2010 From the magazine issue dated Mar 29, 2010
Mohammad Moqim watches in despair as his men struggle with their AK-47 automatic rifles, doing their best to hit man-size targets 50 meters away. A few of the police trainees lying prone in the mud are decent shots, but the rest shoot clumsily
Inteview: The Life And Times Of An 'Afghan Gandhi'
March 21, 2010
RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan welcomed independent lawmaker Ramazan Bashardost, winner of its "Person of the Year" award, into the studios of its Kabul bureau to learn more about his life and his views of the world.
Iraq and Afghanistan: America's invisible wars
After seven years in Iraq and nine in Afghanistan, residents of York, Pa., talk about how the wars have become like a screen saver: always there but rarely acknowledged.
Christian Science Monitor - USA By Michael Ollove, Correspondent March 20, 2010
York, Pa. - Standing in Continental Square in this southern Pennsylvania town in the early 1940s, it wouldn't have taken long to divine the subject foremost in the minds of the citizenry.
Back to Top
Afghans celebrate new year with hopes for peace
by Sardar Ahmad – Sun Mar 21, 4:42 am ET
MAZAR-I-SHARIF, Afghanistan (AFP) – Afghans have travelled from across their war-ravaged country to the northern city of Mazar-I-Sharif united behind one wish: that the advent of a new year will bring them peace.
Up to half a million people are in the city, police said, to mark the spring equinox and the first day of the traditional Persian new year, called Nowruz and celebrated across Central Asia and Iran.
Mazar is at the heart of one of the most peaceful regions of the country, but security is tight amid an escalation of Taliban activity in the north.
City police chief Abdul Rauf Taj said 4,000 security personnel had been deployed against insurgent attacks and all visitors were being screened at seven check points around the city outskirts.
"Every person and every vehicle entering the city is being searched, we're in full control of security," he said, adding that 10,000 cars, each carrying between five and 10 people, had entered the city in recent days.
Insurgent activity has escalated in northern Afghanistan over the past year as US-led military efforts to eradicate the Taliban from their southern strongholds have intensified, driving the war north.
The Taliban have established shadow administrations across a swathe of northern provinces, including Kunduz, Balkh and Faryab, and military bases run by NATO allies such as Germany and Norway are being reinforced by US troops in an effort to reverse the trend, military and security officials have said.
The US and NATO have more than 120,000 troops in Afghanistan fighting the insurgents, with another 30,000 arriving in coming months, mostly for deployment in southern Helmand and Kandahar provinces, Taliban hotbeds.
After recent deadly and coordinated attacks in Kabul and Kandahar cities, tensions across the country have been running high ahead of Nowruz, amid expectations of Taliban attacks on major population centres.
For many people converging on Mazar-I-Sharif's breathtaking Blue Mosque, believed to contain the grave of Islam's fourth caliph, Hazrat Ali, peace was at the heart of their new year wishes.
The Taliban outlawed this celebration during their brutal rule of Afghanistan -- when Mazar-I-Sharif was never fully under their control -- from 1996 until the US-led invasion in late 2001.
Since the Taliban's downfall, Mazar-I-Sharif has reclaimed its place as the centre of Afghanistan's Nowruz festivities, a blend of ancient Zoroastrian rites and Afghan traditions dating back thousands of years.
Marshal Mohammad Qasim Fahim, Afghanistan's vice-president, echoed the wishes of many at the shrine in calling for peace.
"This year we have extensive plans for peace. I hope we succeed in achieving peace," he said, ahead of a traditional pole-raising ceremony said to bring good luck to those who touch the pole.
"One of my biggest wishes has been to participate in Nowruz celebrations here and I have finally made it," said Murtaza Rezayee, a student from the central province of Daikundi.
Getting here wasn't easy, he said, as the road traverses the often treacherous Salang Pass, scene in February of one of Afghanistan's worst natural disasters when avalanches buried cars and buses, killing 170 people.
He said he had been saving up for five years, and his family sold a goat to help cover his travel expenses so he could bring in the year 1389 at Ali's shrine.
"I will make a wish," he said, adding: "My biggest wish is for peace for Afghanistan. Just peace."
For some Afghans, the shrine brings more than just luck and fortune; some believe it also has the power to cure the ill and infirm.
Shepherd Abdul Saleem said he had brought his "insane" daughter in the hope of a miraculous cure from the spirit of Ali.
"I took her to the clinic in our village but nothing happened, she's as she was before," he said, pointing to his eight-year-old daughter as she sat cross-legged beside him, her wrists bound with a scarf.
"I have heard from lots of people that when doctors can't do any thing, Ali can.
"So I have brought her here to Ali's court -- this is my last hope," he said.
In Kabul, President Hamid Karzai planted a tree to mark the new year, his office said.
Back to Top
Back to Top
Afghan VP voices hope for peace as bombs kill 12
By Deb Riechmann, Associated Press Writer
MAZAR-I-SHARIF, Afghanistan – Afghanistan's hard-line vice president expressed hope Sunday that an upcoming national conference will lay the foundation for peace with insurgents as a dozen civilians died in separate bombings in front-line provinces.
During celebrations in Mazar-i-Sharif marking the Afghan New Year, Vice President Mohammad Qasim Fahim, who fought the Soviets and commanded forces that overthrew the Taliban in 2001, said a "peace jirga" planned for late April or early May would try to chart a way to reconcile with government opponents.
"The government will try to find a peaceful life for those Afghans who are unhappy," Fahim said without mentioning the Taliban by name. "God willing, by the help of the people, we will have a successful, historic jirga. ... My dear countrymen, my hope is that this year will be the year of peaceful stability."
Fahim's support would be crucial to efforts by President Hamid Karzai to reach a political settlement with Taliban leaders to end the war, now in its ninth year.
Fahim, who has been critical in the past of any deals with the Taliban, is an ethnic Tajik and former defense minister, while Karzai and the Taliban leadership are ethnic Pashtuns.
The jirga, an Afghan institution in which community leaders meet to take decisions by consensus, is expected to formulate a national strategy for reconciliation talks with the Taliban and their allies.
Talking with the Taliban is gaining support in Afghanistan as thousands of U.S. and NATO reinforcements are streaming in to reverse the Taliban's momentum. That has prompted Pakistan, Iran and others to stake out positions on possible reconciliation negotiations that could mean an endgame to the war.
A spokesman for a Taliban-allied group led by former Prime Minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar told The Associated Press on Sunday that his party had sent a three-member delegation to Kabul to talk peace with the government. But the spokesman, Wali Ullah, did not say when the delegation from Hizb-i-Islam, or Party of Islam, had arrived in the Afghan capital.
Spokesmen for the government could not be reached due to the New Year holiday.
Last Friday, the U.N.'s former envoy to Afghanistan, Norwegian diplomat Kai Eide, said he and other U.N. officials had been in discussions with senior Taliban officials since last year but the dialogue has stopped since the arrests of top Taliban figures in Pakistan.
Eide criticized Pakistan for arresting the Taliban's No. 2 leader and other members of the insurgency, saying the Pakistanis surely knew the roles these figures had in efforts to find a political settlement. Pakistan denies the arrests were linked to reconciliation talks.
Talk of reconciliation, however, has done little to slow the violence, which has escalated dramatically over the past three years.
In Sunday's deadliest attack, a suicide bomber killed 10 civilians and wounded seven others when he detonated his explosives near an Afghan army patrol at a bridge in Gereshk, a town in the southern province of Helmand.
Provincial spokesman Dawood Ahmadi said all the victims were civilians, most of them vendors selling goods along the highway. Helmand is the scene of some of the bloodiest fighting in recent months.
Elsewhere, two other civilians died and four were wounded when a roadside bomb exploded near a crowd of New Year's celebrants in Khost province near the border with Pakistan.
Khost police Chief Yaqoub Khan was about 40 yards (meters) away from the blast but was not injured. He said Afghan and U.S. forces provided enough security to prevent a deadlier attack "but unfortunately the enemy uses every means and planted a bomb just off the road."
Late Saturday, two other explosions shook the city of Jalalabad in Nangarhar province north of Khost, causing no damage or casualties. Nangarhar police spokesman Ghafour Khan said the bombs were designed "to create fear among the people" during New Year's celebrations.
During the New Year's celebrations in Mazar-i-Sharif, 90 miles (150 kilometers) northwest of Kabul, a large crowd cheered as clerics raised a colorful banner at the shrine of Imam Ali, a cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad.
White birds were released into the cloudy sky over the turquoise and light-green shrine as Afghan army helicopters circled overhead, dropping leaflets with New Year's messages from the local governor.
During his speech to the crowd, provincial Gov. Atta Mohammad Noor also expressed support for reconciliation and stressed the need for input from Afghans across all ethnic factions and regions, especially those who have "been damaged by fighting from both sides."
Reconciliation cannot set back democracy or women's rights, he told the crowd.
"If the people participate or share in this process, then there is no doubt the war machine of the Taliban will get weak," he said.
___
Associated Press writers Zarar Khan in Islamabad, Rahim Faiez in Kabul and Amir Shah in Mazar-i-Sharif contributed to this report.
(This version CORRECTS Ali's relationship to Muhammad to cousin and son-in-law in graf 18)
Back to Top
Back to Top
Bomb blast kills 10 in southern Afghanistan
by Nasrat Shoib
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (AFP) – At least ten people picnicking by a stream in southern Afghanistan to celebrate the Afghan new year were killed in a suicide bomb attack on Sunday, police and officials said.
A suicide bomber on a three-wheeled motorcycle had apparently been trying to blow up an Afghan army convoy, but missed his target, a spokesman for the government of Helmand province said.
"It was a suicide bomber who detonated a motorcycle as an Afghan National Army (ANA) vehicle was passing by," Daud Ahmadi told AFP.
"The blast killed ten civilians and injured seven others," he said, adding that it took place around 1.45 pm (0915 GMT) in the Gereshk district of Helmand, a cauldron of Taliban insurgent activity.
The blast struck a bridge on the main highway between the capital Kabul and Herat, Afghanistan's second city, he said.
Beneath the bridge, crowds had gathered on the banks of a stream to mark Nowruz, the Zoroastrian new year which falls on the March 21 equinox.
Helmand's provincial public health director, Anayatullah Ghafari, said two children were among the wounded taken to a local hospital.
President Hamid Karzai condemned the "terrorist" attack, which he said in a statement was "contrary to all human and Islamic principles... made 17 innocent people swim in blood".
Gereshk was the target of a military campaign in mid-2009 that attempted to eliminate Taliban insurgents in control of the area, along with local drugs cartels.
Afghan and NATO military chiefs have recently hailed the district as a model of success in clearing out insurgents and replacing their harsh style of justice with government security and civil services.
A military operation is under way in Marjah, about 70 kilometres (45 miles) south of Gereshk, as part of a counter-insurgency strategy aimed at clearing the Taliban out of Helmand, where they control a massive drugs industry.
Preparatory operations, led by US Marines and involving NATO and Afghan troops, have already begun in neighbouring Kandahar province, also a Taliban hotspot and the birthplace of their extremist movement.
More than 120,000 US and NATO troops are being reinforced for the operations, expected to hit 150,000 within months, in an effort to speed up an end to the war and allow foreign troops to draw down from mid-2011.
Afghanistan is just one of many Central Asian states marking Nowruz, though security is tight across the country amid fears of Taliban strikes which have been increasingly staged on national holidays and religious festivals.
The most recent major attack on Kabul occurred on February 26, the Prophet Mohammed's birthday, when two guesthouses were targeted in a suicide assault that killed 16 people, including Indians, who appeared to be the main target.
In Mazar-I-Sharif, the main city of northern Afghanistan that annually attracts tens of thousands to Nowruz celebrations at the Blue Mosque -- believed to be the grave of the fourth caliph Hazrat Ali -- police set up a series of roadblocks and checkpoints to prevent Taliban infiltration.
In eastern Khost province, which borders Pakistan, a roadside bomb -- a favoured weapon of the Taliban-linked insurgents -- killed two construction company guards when it hit their car on Sunday.
Three other people were injured in the blast, said Amir Badshah Rahmatzai Mangal, head of the provincial public health department.
Taliban attacks are the biggest killers of civilians in the Afghan war, according to the United Nations, with roadside bombs and suicide attacks indiscriminate in their collateral damage.
Back to Top
Back to Top
Taliban behead 3 'US spies' in Pakistan: police
Sun Mar 21, 3:08 am ET
MIRANSHAH, Pakistan (AFP) – Taliban militants in Pakistan's restive tribal area Sunday beheaded three men they accused of spying for US forces stationed across the border in Afghanistan, police said.
The bodies of three men were found near Mir Ali town in the North Waziristan tribal district that borders Afghanistan.
"Notes found with the bodies said the men were killed for spying for the US," tribal police official Nisar Khan told AFP.
Khan said the three dead men had themselves killed "several Taliban and ordinary people".
A local security official confirmed the incident.
Islamist militants frequently kidnap and kill local tribesmen accusing them of spying for the Pakistani government or US forces, who are battling a Taliban-led insurgency in war-torn Afghanistan.
Pakistan's rugged tribal regions have been wracked by violence since becoming a stronghold for hundreds of Taliban and Al-Qaeda rebels who fled across the border to escape the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001.
Back to Top
Back to Top
Air strikes kill 15 Taliban in Pakistan: officials
PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AFP) – Air strikes killed 15 Taliban in restive Pakistani northwestern tribal areas on Sunday, where militants beheaded three tribesmen accusing them of spying for the United States.
Pakistan's rugged tribal regions have been wracked by violence since becoming a stronghold for hundreds of Taliban and Al-Qaeda rebels who fled across the border to escape the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001.
Separately, a bomb targeting a senior police official killed three people in southwestern Baluchistan province and another bomb damaged an oil tanker carrying fuel for NATO forces stationed in neighbouring Afghanistan.
Five of the militants were killed in air strikes on a village in Orakzai tribal district, where militants fleeing a military operation in South Waziristan tribal district have taken refuge.
"Two jet fighters carried out air strikes at a militant hideout at Ghiljo. Five militants were killed," a senior paramilitary official told AFP.
In a second air strike in Kurram, another tribal district, 10 militants were killed, the official and local administration chief Fazal Qadir said.
The death toll could not be verified by independent sources as the area is under military operations.
In North Waziristan, another tribal district and known as a hot bed of Taliban, militants Sunday beheaded three tribesmen they accused of spying for US forces stationed across the border in Afghanistan.
"Notes found with the bodies said the men were killed for spying for the US," tribal police official Nisar Khan told AFP.
Khan said the Taliban accused the three dead men of killing "several Taliban and ordinary people".
A local security official confirmed the incident.
Islamist militants frequently kidnap and kill local tribesmen accusing them of spying for the Pakistani government or US forces, who are battling a Taliban-led insurgency in war-torn neighbouring Afghanistan.
Elsewhere, a remote-controlled bomb attached to a bicycle killed three people and wounded 14 others in Quetta city, capital of the province of Baluchistan.
The blast, which targeted a senior policeman, occurred on a main road in Quetta.
It killed the senior policeman's driver and a security guard as they drove past, but the policeman was not in the car at the time, police official Hamid Shakeel told AFP.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but similar bombings have been blamed on separatist, secular tribal rebels in Baluchistan.
A timed bomb meanwhile planted on an oil tanker carrying fuel for NATO forces in Afghanistan exploded near the southwestern border town of Chaman, leaking fuel but causing no casualties, police said.
Back to Top
Back to Top
U.S. may expand use of its prison in Afghanistan
The White House is considering housing international terrorism suspects at Bagram air base, as is done at Guantanamo Bay.
By David S. Cloud and Julian E. Barnes March 21, 2010 The Los Angeles Times
Reporting from Washington - The White House is considering whether to detain international terrorism suspects at a U.S. military base in Afghanistan, senior U.S. officials said, an option that would lead to another prison with the same purpose as Guantanamo Bay, which it has promised to close.
The idea, which would require approval by President Obama, already has drawn resistance from within the government. Army Gen. Stanley A. McCrystal, the top commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, and other senior officials strongly oppose it, fearing that expansion of the U.S. detention facility at Bagram air base could make the job of stabilizing the country even tougher.
That the option of detaining suspects captured outside Afghanistan at Bagram is being contemplated reflects a recognition by the Obama administration that it has few other places to hold and interrogate foreign prisoners without giving them access to the U.S. court system, the officials said.
Without a location outside the United States for sending prisoners, the administration must resort to turning the suspects over to foreign governments, bringing them to the U.S. or even killing them.
In one case last year, U.S. special operations forces killed an Al Qaeda-linked suspect named Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan in a helicopter attack in southern Somalia rather than trying to capture him, a U.S. official said. Officials had debated trying to take him alive but decided against doing so in part because of uncertainty over where to hold him, the official added.
U.S. officials find such options unappealing for handling suspects they want to question but lack the evidence to prosecute. For such suspects, a facility such as Bagram, north of Kabul, remains necessary, officials said, even as they acknowledged that having it in Afghanistan could complicate McCrystal's mission.
"No one particularly likes any of the choices before us right now, but Bagram may be the least bad among them," a senior Defense official said.
With such a move certain to draw furious criticism by allies and human rights groups that the administration was re-creating the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, officials stressed that no final decisions have been made, and a White House spokesman declined to comment.
The idea of using Bagram emerged as the White House National Security Council solicited suggestions on how to handle detainees from the Justice Department, CIA and other government agencies.
The procedures for holding suspected terrorists have been largely in limbo as the White House sought to carry out Obama's pledge last year to close the Guantanamo prison and overhaul the U.S. detention process.
Although it has been known for some time that the administration was seeking options other than Guantanamo for holding existing prisoners, it has not been reported previously that it was considering Bagram for suspected terrorists that might be captured in the future.
Bagram remains controversial in Afghanistan because of documented cases of detainee abuse there, including two deaths, in the early months of the Afghan war. The original prison was recently replaced by a new detention facility on the U.S. base.
McCrystal fears that a decision to expand Bagram could be used by extremists for propaganda purposes, as Guantanamo has been. In addition to the abuse cases, the prison has been criticized for the interrogation techniques used there and the amount of time suspects have been detained without trial.
"Gen. McCrystal's singular focus is on making sure our military campaign is successful," the senior Defense official said. "Anything that potentially complicates that is something they are reluctant to embrace."
There are about 800 prisoners at Bagram, but fewer than 10 are foreign fighters not captured in Afghanistan or in the Afghan-Pakistani border region, according to a Defense official.
No suspect captured elsewhere has been brought to Bagram during the Obama administration. Similarly, no additional prisoners have been sent to Guantanamo.
U.S. officials emphasized that the number of additional prisoners at Bagram would be modest. If Osama bin Laden or other senior Al Qaeda leaders were captured, they probably would be sent to the U.S. for prosecution. Bagram, by contrast, would hold lesser-known suspects, whom the U.S. government may not be able to prosecute but who would be deemed to remain a threat if released, the officials said.
The debate over detainees intensified in recent weeks after the military command in Afghanistan announced plans to turn the Bagram facility over to the Afghan government. That step surprised officials in Washington who want to preserve the option of using the prison to hold terrorism suspects.
McCrystal said last week that the prison would be handed over to the Afghans in January. It is unlikely the U.S. would send terrorism suspects to Bagram once it is under the control of the Afghan government. As a result, some officials in Washington want to slow down the hand-over, at least until other options are examined.
The Obama administration is hoping to buy a state prison in Thomson, Ill., to turn it into a federal facility to house some terrorism suspects. But the administration has indicated that any such suspects held at the prison would be limited to detainees facing prosecution and those currently at Guantanamo.
Thomson is not viewed as an option for suspected terrorists captured outside the U.S. because of near-certain resistance from Congress and the public. "Thomson is there to clean up a mistake, not to serve as a permanent model for future detentions," said Tom Malinowski, the Washington advocacy director of Human Rights Watch.
In addition, any suspected terrorist held inside the U.S. would probably have the right to challenge his detention in federal courts. Bagram, for now, is outside the reach of U.S. courts.
In April 2009, U.S. District Judge John D. Bates ruled that detainees captured outside Afghanistan and shipped to Bagram could seek court review of their detention, like prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. Bates' ruling allowed the detainees to file habeas corpus petitions seeking their freedom.
Bates put his ruling on hold after the administration filed an appeal, to the chagrin of human rights groups who said it conflicted with Obama's pledge to overhaul George W. Bush-era detention policies. If the original ruling is upheld, it would undermine a key legal justification for using Bagram.
Another uncertainty, officials said, is that it's not known whether Afghan President Hamid Karzai would continue to accept having non-Afghan prisoners at Bagram.
The prison that opened this year replaced the Soviet-era hangar that had been used since 2002 to house prisoners, sometimes under harsh conditions.
An official familiar with discussions over Bagram said McCrystal supports using the prison for militants picked up in Pakistan who have a "direct impact on the fight in Afghanistan." That would include Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the Taliban leader captured in Pakistan in February, the official said.
Baradar's capture renewed a debate over where to put high-level detainees. But as an Afghan Taliban leader captured in Pakistan, Baradar does not pose as many legal and political complications for U.S. officials as extremists seized in Yemen, Somalia or elsewhere.
When the issue came up at a Senate hearing last week, officials ducked the question. Navy Adm. Eric T. Olson, head of U.S. Special Operations Command, was asked where the U.S. would send a suspect captured in Yemen.
"That's a question that, on so many levels, we would have to go into closed session" to answer, Olson replied.
david.cloud@latimes.com
julian.barnes@latimes.com
Back to Top
Back to Top
We are still in the picture in Afghanistan: India
rediff.com - Mar 21 3:49 AM
Refuting reports that it has been "squeezed out" of Afghanistan, External Affairs Minister S M Krishna has said India was playing a "stellar role" in rebuilding the war-torn country, which was acknowledged by the people and the legitimate government there.
He also said India has taken note of Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai's statement that it was a friend and Pakistan a conjoined twin.
"I do not think that India has been squeezed out. I think India is playing a stellar role in rebuilding Afghanistan which has been acknowledged by the people of Afghanistan and by the legitimate Government of Afghanistan, and that is what matters," Krishna said in an interview to Karan Thapar for Devil's Advocate.
He was asked about the media reports that whilst Pakistan's influence was growing, India was either left out of the loop or is being squeezed out.
On Karzai's statement, the minister said "In President Karzai's assessment, I think that is the scheme of things."
"We take note of that", was his reply when asked if it worried India.
About attacks on Indians, Krishna noted that those who have gone there on humanitarian purposes are unarmed, which makes them "easy and soft targets" but he said Afghanistan government has assured that they will be able to protect the Indian personnel who have gone there on call of duty.
He said, "Apart from what the Afghanistan government is doing, India will have to take some additional measures ourselves."
The minister also rejected the reports that the US Administration was trying to minimise India's presence in Afghanistan.
"We have in our interactions with the US Administration at various levels not got the impression that the United States is trying to convey directly or indirectly to the Indian Government that our presence in Afghanistan should be minimised. That is not my impression," he said.
Back to Top
Back to Top
Afghan president to court China
AFP via The Taipei Times Monday, Mar 22, 2010, Page 5
BEIJING - Afghan President Hamid Karzai travels to China this week eyeing investment from his mighty neighbor that has shown more interest in helping to rebuild his war-torn nation than military involvement.
More than eight years after the Taliban regime was toppled by US-led forces, Karzai will also seek to strengthen ties with China, increasingly seen as a key player in maintaining stability in Afghanistan after US troops pull out.
During the trip — his first to China since re-election last year — Karzai will hold separate talks with his counterpart President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao.
Karzai will present the Chinese leadership with a plan for reconciliation with the Taliban during his visit from tomorrow to Thursday, but financial issues are likely to dominate talks, his spokesman Waheed Omar said.
“Most of what will be discussed with the Chinese government will be on economic issues and a large number of Afghan businessmen will accompany the president,” Omar told reporters in Kabul last week.
China has a keen interest in Afghanistan’s natural resources. Three years ago, a Chinese group put a record US$3 billion into the Aynak copper mine, one of the biggest in the world.
Whereas Beijing refuses to send troops into the Afghan quagmire, despite the risk of instability in the event of an Islamist regime returning to power in Kabul and the ongoing scourge of drug trafficking, it has provided aid and assistance.
Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi recently pointed out that China had given “unconditional” assistance to Afghanistan in areas such as the construction of schools, hospitals, roads and waterworks.
He also stressed that China, which says it faces a militant Islamist threat in its western regions bordering central Asia, has taken part in a series of international conferences on Afghanistan in Moscow, London and Turkey.
“Representatives of many countries at the conferences were of the view that military means did not offer a fundamental solution to the Afghanistan issue,” Yang said.
Chinese observers say Beijing’s investments in Afghanistan help stability as they create employment and are therefore in step with the Afghan government’s wish to offer a future to Taliban who want to lay down their weapons.
Andrew Small of the German Marshall Fund, a US research center, said China’s “influence is potentially significant both economically ... and politically, where its close ties with Pakistan’s military could be leveraged, but Beijing has been reluctant to use this influence to complement allied efforts — it has largely pursued its bilateral interests without much reference to more broadly shared international goals.”
Experts say stronger relations between Afghanistan and its neighbors are an important factor in the success of US President Barack Obama’s strategy for the troubled country.
Obama aims to start withdrawing US troops next year. In the meantime, he has sent in military reinforcements to step up the fight against the Taliban.
In February, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen stressed how vital it was to reinforce ties with countries such as China, India and Pakistan.
“This is a key lesson we are learning in Afghanistan today ... we need an entirely new compact between all the actors on the security stage,” Rasmussen said. “India has a stake in Afghan stability, China too, and both could help further develop and rebuild Afghanistan. The same goes for Russia. Basically, Russia shares our security concerns.”
Walid Phares, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said he saw growing pressure on Karzai to widen his diplomatic activities outside the traditional realm of consultations with only Washington.
“He understands he needs to bring in other powers because US support — as President Obama stated — won’t be forever. Karzai is trying to bring in a new consensus from Asian powers, starting with China,” Phares said.
Back to Top
Back to Top
U.S. turns blind eye to opium production in parts of Afghanistan
By ROD NORDLAND The New York Times
KABUL - The effort to win over Afghans on former Taliban turf in Marjah has put U.S. and NATO commanders in the unusual position of arguing against opium eradication, pitting them against some Afghan officials who are pushing to destroy the harvest.
From Gen. Stanley McChrystal on down, the military's position is clear: "U.S. forces no longer eradicate," as one NATO official put it.
Opium is the main livelihood of 60 to 70 percent of the farmers in Marjah, which was seized from Taliban rebels in an offensive last month. U.S. Marines occupying the area are under orders to leave the farmers' fields alone.
"Marjah is a special case right now," said Cmdr. Jeffrey Eggers, a member of the general's Strategic Advisory Group, his top advisory body. "We don't trample the livelihood of those we're trying to win over."
U.N. drug officials agree, though they acknowledge the conundrum. Pictures of NATO and other allied soldiers "walking next to the opium fields won't go well with domestic audiences, but the approach of postponing eradicating in this particular case is a sensible one," said Jean-Luc Lemahieu, who is in charge of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime here.
Afghan officials are divided. Though some support the U.S. position, others, citing a constitutional ban on opium cultivation, want to plow the fields under before the harvest, which has begun in parts of Helmand province.
"How can we allow the world to see lawful forces in charge of Marjah next to fields full of opium, which one way or another will be harvested and turned into a poison that kills people all over the world?" said Zulmai Afzali, spokesman for the Afghan Ministry of Counternarcotics.
"The Taliban are the ones who profit from opium, so you are letting your enemy get financed by this so he can turn around and kill you back," he added, referring to how the Taliban squeeze farmers for money to run their operations.
The argument may strike some as a jarring reversal of early tensions with Afghan officials, some of whom vehemently resisted U.S. pressure to stop opium production in the years right after the 2001 invasion.
Though the U.S. government's official position remains to support opium-crop eradication in general, some U.S. civilian officials said the internal debate over Marjah is far from over within parts of the State Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration.
A spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Brendan O'Brien, said officials would decline to comment while the matter was under review.
At the heart of the debate with Afghan officials is an important question of cause-and-effect: Is poor security in Marjah the reason there is so much opium, or is so much opium the reason there has been poor security?
"Every province in Afghanistan where you find opium cultivation, you have insecurity as a result," Afzali said.
U.S. military officials and U.N. drug officials have a different view. Opium cultivation has been largely wiped out in 20 provinces where security has been improved, and in the seven most insecure provinces, poppy is still farmed.
"Nothing can compete with opium in an insecure environment," Lemahieu said. "A secure environment is the precondition for governance and a long-term solution."
Although the International Security Assistance Force, the NATO force that McChrystal commands, no longer carries out eradication programs, its official position is that it supports the Afghan government's efforts to eradicate and lends backup and protection to provincial officials, who are responsible for carrying out eradication.
The ardently anti-opium governor of Helmand province, Gulab Mangal, has a record of success, cutting back cultivation by 33 percent last year. But he, too, is willing to make an exception for the current harvest.
"In general I've been told by my higher-ups that this year you will not eradicate there, because people have suffered a lot of hardships because of the fighting," Mangal said. "We may do it next year."
Afzali, however, said the Counternarcotics Ministry still hoped to prevail in time to eradicate the current crop in Marjah. Mangal said, "If they order me, I will start the destruction of Marjah's opium the same day."
Back to Top
Back to Top
Afghan drug cartels squeeze poppy farmers
by Lynne O'donnell – Sun Mar 21, 2:09 am ET
LASHKAR GAH, Afghanistan (AFP) – Like farmers the world over Haji Afzal has locked in the price for his crop with a forward contract.
Rather than a contract on the Chicago Board of Trade -- like an American wheat farmer or a Thai rice grower -- Afzal was paid 400,000 Pakistani rupees (5,000 dollars) by a middleman for the world's biggest drugs cartels.
Afzal will harvest in a month, when the tall green weeds on his land have burst into scarlet bloom and the poppy bulbs ooze sap that will become opium.
The cash ensured Afzal had all he needed for a good crop -- seed, water, fertiliser, tools -- supplied by the men who will process his opium into heroin and ship it across the world.
But opium prices have fallen over the past year by about 30 percent, to less than 50 dollars a kilogramme, and Afzal worries officials will destroy his plants -- or demand bribes not to.
He also worries his farm will be squeezed between the Afghan government with its Western military backers and Taliban militants who control poppy production in Helmand province, source of most of the world's opium.
Azfal -- not his real name -- lives in Gereshk and is watching closely as US Marines lead efforts to assert government rule in Marjah, a farming district further south down the Helmand River.
The area has for years been controlled by insurgents and drug traffickers who compel farmers to grow poppies, paying for the raw opium they produce or making life difficult if they do not.
"We know the government has started a campaign to eradicate opium," said Azfal, referring to new plans to wipe out poppies.
"Some people are worried, although we know they cannot extend their campaign to our district because there are Taliban who will resist and attack them.
"But we are also worried about the military -- if the Marjah operation goes well, they may plan to extend their operation to other parts of Helmand," he said.
-- Poppy farmers squeezed between drug cartels, corrupt officials --
Marjah is the target of a coordinated campaign to push out militants and drug dealers and establish government control with police and civil services.
Operation Mushtarak ("together" in Dari and Pashto) is the test of a US-led counter-insurgency strategy focused on winning the confidence of local people with a level of security to keep the Taliban and drug lords from returning.
It has not worked in the past because the Afghan government could not ensure a stable and accountable presence with officials immune to the temptations of corruption inherent in the three-billion-dollar-a-year drugs business.
"Drug money is addictive, and is starting to trump ideology," said the head of the UN's Office on Drugs and Crime, Antonio Maria Costa, in a September report.
Cooperation between the Taliban, drug smugglers and corrupt officials has turned areas such as Marjah into mafia fiefdoms.
Militants provide the muscle to coerce farmers to grow poppy and protect the processing labs and smuggling routes through Pakistan to the east, Iran to the west or the former Soviet states to the north.
The Taliban use religion and violence to bolster their power -- telling local people it is un-Islamic, for instance, to send their girls to school, and administering rough justice to ensure compliance.
This "marriage of convenience" has turned Afghanistan into a narco-state comparable to Colombia, Costa said.
Afghan opium funds crime gangs, insurgencies and terrorism in Afghanistan and elsewhere, his report said, adding "collusion with corrupt government officials is undermining public trust, security and the rule of law".
-- Eradication efforts a failure --
In Lashkar Gah, a reconstruction team -- where British bureaucrats lead a multinational team of experts in such areas as governance, justice and counter-narcotics -- has distributed wheat seed to 40,000 Helmand farmers in an effort to provide alternatives to poppy, said deputy head Bridget Brind.
"These sort of counter-narcotics initiatives reduce insurgent influence and increase government authority," she told reporters, adding that the fall in opium prices was matched by a wheat price rise, another reason to switch.
But the figures don't quite match the rhetoric and UNODC has called eradication "a failure."
In 2008-2009, only 10,000 hectares of opium, or less than four percent of land planted, were eradicated.
Norine MacDonald, president of the International Council on Security and Development (ICOS), said: "If these calculations are accurate, it still leaves a staggering 1.4 million people involved in illegal poppy cultivation.
"Despite good intentions and investment in alternative development programmes there is still no structural solution for these millions of Afghans," she told a US Senate hearing in October.
UNODC found opium output down by 10 percent, to 6,900 tonnes in 2009, but said yield rose 15 percent because farmers extracted more opium per bulb.
Production far outstripped annual world demand of 5,000 tonnes, it said.
For farmers the world over the equation of over-supply and falling prices is simple and in Afghanistan cartels are hoarding, with stockpiles of opium estimated at 10,000 tonnes.
That's two years supply of heroin for addicts, or three years of morphine for medical use, according to UNODC.
-- Amid military campaign, smugglers look for other routes --
Nevertheless, the Afghan government this month announced eradication had begun anew in Helmand, Nangahar and Farah provinces, and will soon begin in Kandahar.
Deputy Interior Minister Mohammad Daud Daud said poppy cultivation had stopped in 21 of Afghanistan?s 34 provinces by 2009, but there was "minor" planting in 18 of those provinces this year, suggesting a re-emergence.
He said he hoped the programme would see 25 provinces cleared of poppy by the end of this year.
Interdiction had also failed, with only about two percent of the world's opium seized in Afghanistan, UN figures show.
Sending in the military is having an impact, another expert said on condition of anonymity, comparing it to the short-lived but effective tactics of the Taliban's 1996-2001 regime.
It will only work if the government can provide security along with alternatives, she said, "because there is so much money to be made".
A Helmand smuggler said the Marjah campaign has shaken up kingpins, who are now looking for alternative routes.
"Our main route for transporting drugs to neighbouring districts, provinces and countries was Marjah," he said, giving his name as Haji Abdul Qudos.
As he had already advanced 10 million rupees to farmers, he would be looking for other ways to get the drugs out, not ways to get out of drugs.
"We will find alternative routes or even use Marjah roads, but (the military campaign and presence of police) mean it is more difficult now, with the danger that our opium is sometimes confiscated by international forces," he said.
"At the moment no one's farms have been eradicated but there is the concern that they might be."
Back to Top
Back to Top
Taliban fighters being taught at secret camps in Iran
The Sunday Times Miles Amoore in Kabul March 21, 2010
THE Taliban fighters scurried up the craggy mountainside. As they neared the top, their 30-strong platoon split into three sections and they launched a ferocious assault on an enemy fort, opening fire from numerous positions.
The bullets they sprayed at the fort’s mud-coloured walls were blank, however. They merely pretended to fire their rocket-propelled grenades. When they reached the desert at the foot of the mountain, they did not race away on motorbikes, but filed into sand-coloured tents to refresh themselves with tea and naan.
The attack was a training exercise overseen by Iranian security officials in plain clothes. The Taliban do not know whether they were police officers, soldiers or secret service agents. What they can say is that in camps along the border between Afghanistan and Iran, Taliban recruits are being taught how to ambush British, American and other Nato troops using guns and improvised explosive devices (IEDs).
They are learning to attack checkpoints as well as mountain bases. Iranian instructors are also giving them target practice on desert ranges with Kalashnikov assault rifles.
In the past, Shi’ite Iran has opposed the Sunni Taliban. But western officials say Iran now wants to expand its influence within the Taliban movement.
A Taliban commander who has been trained in Iran said last week: “Our religions and our histories are different, but our target is the same — we both want to kill Americans.”
In recent months, senior American officials have accused Iran of playing “a double game” by training and arming the Taliban while supporting the Afghan government.
Taliban leaders interviewed by The Sunday Times last week provided the first direct evidence of how Iran is training insurgents on its own soil.
According to one Taliban source, emissaries travelled to Iran early last year to discuss a training programme with Iranian officials. The training began during the winter.
Working through local mediators, this newspaper persuaded two Taliban commanders who had attended the programme in Iran to travel to Kabul, the Afghan capital, to tell their stories. The men, interviewed separately in a partially constructed concrete building on the edge of the city, were both extremely nervous. “How do I know you are not spies and that you will not follow me when I leave?” said one before the interview began.
At times, their voices dropped to whispers as they spoke about their role in the insurgency and drank cups of tea on dirty cushions.
One of the commanders, from the central province of Wardak, described how he travelled to Iran with 20 of his men.
His journey took him south into Pakistan, then west to the border with Iran and on to Zahedan, a city of 600,000 people in southeast Iran.
The second Taliban commander, from Ghazni province in southern Afghanistan, took a group of his men on a five-day drive to Nimroz, in the southwest. From there, he crossed into Iran’s Sistan and Baluchestan province, a hotbed of drug smuggling and tribal rivalry.
The militants paid a $500 fee to Afghan people-smugglers using routes usually taken by refugees looking for work in Iran. They crossed the border at night in cars with the help of Baluch traffickers who guided the groups along dirt tracks to avoid checkpoints. After stopping to rest in the mountains, they headed out again at first light.
Finally, they were met by their Iranian instructors in white Toyota pick-up trucks and were taken to a village on the outskirts of Zahedan, an hour’s drive from the training camps.
There they were placed in basic compounds, each housing up to 30 Taliban fighters, mostly from the south and southeast of Afghanistan where the insurgency against British and American forces is fiercest.
Battered buses and pick-up trucks ferried the militants back and forth between the village and the camps every morning and night.
“Iran paid for the whole trip. We paid the travel fees to begin with and once we got to Iran they refunded us. They paid for our food, our mobile phone cards, any expenses,” said the Ghazni commander.
At one camp, a cluster of low tents erected in the shadow of a mountain, the Taliban fighters conducted live firing exercises, physical training and mountain assaults under the watchful eye of the plain-clothes Iranians, the commander said.
During a course lasting three months, the Iranian instructors worked in groups of two to five men. Their programme was split into three parts, each taking a month to complete.
For the first month, the recruits were taught how to launch complex ambushes on moving convoys. They learnt where to set up firing positions, when to trigger the ambush and how to escape before the enemy had time to respond.
“They were strong on the planning side. We would sit in the tents and they would take us through things like where the best escape routes were, making sure we had good cover and where to place our lookouts,” the commander said.
The second month was spent learning how to plant the roadside bombs that are responsible for most of the deaths of British soldiers in Helmand province. The insurgents were taught to use carefully positioned secondary and tertiary devices to kill or wound rescuers organising medical evacuations.
During the third month, the instructors taught the Taliban how to storm fixed enemy positions, climbing mountains in formation to launch attacks on checkpoints and bases.
“We were told ambushing was a very useful tool compared with a straightforward attack. They taught us how to select a good hiding position and how to limit the enemy’s response to our attacks by laying well- positioned mines,” said the commander. “We can kill a lot of our enemies this way.”
Both commanders said Iran also supplied them with weapons, often paying nomads to smuggle ammunition, mines and guns across the desert and mountain passes between Iran and Afghanistan’s western provinces. The nomads used donkeys, camels and horses to carry the military supplies into provinces such as Ghazni and Wardak, the commanders said.
Although the commanders believed that, after years on the battlefields of Afghanistan, they already possessed some of the skills that were taught in Iran’s camps, they agreed the training had improved their ability to launch more sophisticated attacks.
“I found some elements of the training in Iran very useful, especially the escape and evasion techniques I was taught,” said the commander from Wardak as he showed me video footage of his men patrolling on motorbikes with AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenade launchers slung over their shoulders.
The commanders gave no indication of precisely who was behind the training. Late last year General Stanley McChrystal, the US commander of foreign troops in Afghanistan, accused Iran’s al-Quds force — an elite wing of the Revolutionary Guard — of undermining the efforts of the Afghan government and Nato forces.
“The problem with dealing with the Iranian regime is knowing to what extent these initiatives are conducted by local commanders and to what extent they are backed by the government,” said a western defence source. He added that, although he had seen no direct evidence, the accounts of Taliban training camps in Iran were “credible”.
American officials believe Iran’s support for the Taliban has reached “troubling” proportions, although it is not on the same scale as its backing for Shi’ite insurgents in Iraq. The commanders’ accounts suggest the number of Taliban fighters trained in Iran may already have reached the hundreds.
Taliban militants still receive much of their training in neighbouring Pakistan. Elements of the ISI, Pakistan’s secret service, are known to train, equip and fund the Taliban. But a recent crackdown on Taliban safe havens in Pakistan has forced many insurgents to look to Iran for support.
“The military is pressuring the Taliban in Pakistan. It is certainly harder to reach places that were once easy to get into. I think more of my fighters will travel to Iran for training this year,” said the Ghazni commander.
Two weeks ago Robert Gates, the US defence secretary, said of the Iranians: “They want to maintain a good relationship with the Afghan government. They also want to do everything they possibly can to hurt us, or for us not to be successful.”
Days later, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran insisted he wanted to rebuild Afghanistan and criticised the presence of foreign troops.
The Taliban commander from Ghazni province said he had no doubt Iranian police and intelligence services knew about the training camps, however. “The government is not sleeping,” he said. “You just have to wiggle your ears in Iran and they will know about it.”
Back to Top
Back to Top
The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight
Six billion dollars later, the Afghan National Police can't begin to do their jobs right—never mind relieve American forces.
By T. Christian Miller, Mark Hosenball, and Ron Moreau | NEWSWEEK Mar 19, 2010 From the magazine issue dated Mar 29, 2010
Mohammad Moqim watches in despair as his men struggle with their AK-47 automatic rifles, doing their best to hit man-size targets 50 meters away. A few of the police trainees lying prone in the mud are decent shots, but the rest shoot clumsily, and fumble as they try to reload their weapons. The Afghan National Police (ANP) captain sighs as he dismisses one group of trainees and orders 25 more to take their places on the firing line. "We are still at zero," says Captain Moqim, 35, an eight-year veteran of the force. "They don't listen, are undisciplined, and will never be real policemen."
Poor marksmanship is the least of it. Worse, crooked Afghan cops supply much of the ammunition used by the Taliban, according to Saleh Mohammed, an insurgent commander in Helmand province. The bullets and rocket-propelled grenades sold by the cops are cheaper and of better quality than the ammo at local markets, he says. It's easy for local cops to concoct credible excuses for using so much ammunition, especially because their supervisors try to avoid areas where the Taliban are active. Mohammed says local police sometimes even stage fake firefights so that if higher-ups question their outsize orders for ammo, villagers will say they've heard fighting.
America has spent more than $6 billion since 2002 in an effort to create an effective Afghan police force, buying weapons, building police academies, and hiring defense contractors to train the recruits—but the program has been a disaster. More than $322 million worth of invoices for police training were approved even though the funds were poorly accounted for, according to a government audit, and fewer than 12 percent of the country's police units are capable of operating on their own. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, the State Department's top representative in the region, has publicly called the Afghan police "an inadequate organization, riddled with corruption." During the Obama administration's review of Afghanistan policy last year, "this issue received more attention than any other except for the question of U.S. troop levels," Holbrooke later told NEWSWEEK. "We drilled down deep into this."
The worst of it is that the police are central to Washington's plans for getting out of Afghanistan. The U.S.-backed government in Kabul will never have popular support if it can't keep people safe in their own homes and streets. Yet in a United Nations poll last fall, more than half the Afghan respondents said the police are corrupt. Police commanders have been implicated in drug trafficking, and when U.S. Marines moved into the town of Aynak last summer, villagers accused the local police force of extortion, assault, and rape.
The public's distrust of the cops is palpable in the former insurgent stronghold of Marja. Village elders welcomed the U.S. Marines who recently drove out the Taliban, but told the Americans flatly they don't want the ANP to return. "The people of Marja will tell you that one of their greatest fears was the police coming back," says Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, who took over in November as chief of the U.S. program to expand and improve Afghanistan's security forces. "You constantly hear these stories about who was worse: the Afghan police that were there or the Taliban." The success of America's counterinsurgency strategy depends on the cops, who have greater contact with local communities than the Army does. "This is not about seizing land or holding terrain; it's about the people," says Caldwell. "You have to have a police force that the people accept, believe in, and trust."
More than a year after Barack Obama took office, the president is still discovering how bad things are. At a March 12 briefing on Afghanistan with his senior advisers, he asked whether the police will be ready when America's scheduled drawdown begins in July 2011, according to a senior official who was in the room. "It's inconceivable, but in fact for eight years we weren't training the police," replied Caldwell, taking part in the meeting via video link from Afghanistan. "We just never trained them before. All we did was give them a uniform." The president looked stunned. "Eight years," he said. "And we didn't train police? It's mind-boggling." The room was silent.
Efforts to build a post-Taliban police force have been plagued from the start by unrealistic goals, poor oversight, and slapdash hiring. Patrolmen were recruited locally, issued weapons, and placed on the beat with little or no formal training. Most of their techniques have been picked up on the job—including plenty of ugly habits. Even now, Caldwell says, barely a quarter of the 98,000-member force has received any formal instruction. The people who oversaw much of the training that did take place were contractors—many of them former American cops or sheriffs. They themselves had little proper direction, and the government officials overseeing their activities did not bother to examine most expenses under $3,000, leaving room for abuse. Amazingly, no single agency or individual ever had control of the training program for long, so lines of accountability were blurred.
Coalition efforts to build an Afghan police force were painfully slow at first. By 2003 the U.S. State Department decided to speed things up by deploying the Virginia-based defense contractor DynCorp International, which had held previous contracts to train police officers in Kosovo and Haiti. The company began setting up a string of training centers across the country. After the Defense Department took a role in overseeing that work in 2005, it squabbled constantly with State over whether the training should emphasize police work or counterinsurgency.
Neither the State Department nor DynCorp was prepared for the job they faced. Most of the recruits are rural villagers who have never been inside a classroom. Roughly 15 percent test positive for drugs, primarily hashish. Few know how to use a toothbrush or drive, and nearly 90 percent are illiterate. In 2005 DynCorp opened a new police academy on the outskirts of Jalalabad, and within a few months the academy's drains backed up. Maintenance workers discovered that the septic tanks were full of smooth stones—a toilet-paper substitute used by many rural Afghans. DynCorp had to bring in backhoes to repair the problem, and the company had to add two days of classes in basic hygiene.
The ANP still takes just about anyone who applies. "Our recruits are unemployed youth with no education and no prospects," says Police Col. Mohammad Hashim Babakarkhil, deputy commander of Kabul's central police-training center. Since January 2007, upwards of 2,000 police have been killed in action—more than twice the figure for Afghan Army soldiers. U.S. officers say as many as half the police casualties were a result of firearms accidents and traffic collisions.
It's practically impossible to produce competent police officers in a program of only eight weeks, says a former senior DynCorp executive, requesting anonymity because he continues to work in the industry. But that was the time frame State and Defense set for the course. "They were not going to be trained police officers. We knew that. They knew that," the former executive says. "It was a numbers game." In fact, the course has now been cut from eight weeks to six in order to squeeze in more trainees. ("We believe the training is appropriate under the circumstances," says Assistant Secretary of State David Johnson. DynCorp spokesman Douglas Ebner says the basic-training course is part of a more extensive 40-week program, and is supported by further "field monitoring, mentoring, and advising." Training hours have been extended to make up for the lost weeks, he says. DynCorp does "not make the policies, recruit the police candidates, or design the program," he adds, saying the company has "fully met" its objective of providing highly qualified police trainers.)
Whether or not recruits have mastered their subjects, almost everyone graduates. Even if they fail the firearms test, they're issued a weapon and put on the street. Only the Interior Ministry can flunk a candidate, and that rarely happens. "There were a lot of Afghans who seemed to have some patriotism and wanted to make their country better," recalls Tracy Jeansonne, a former deputy sheriff from Louisiana who worked for DynCorp from May 2006 to June 2008. "But a lot of the police officers wanted to be able to extort money from locals. If we caught them, we'd suggest they be removed. But we couldn't fire anybody. We could only make suggestions."
A former midlevel DynCorp official calls the program "dysfunctional." Requesting anonymity because he doesn't want problems with his former employer, he displays dozens of weekly reports sent to State and military officials; almost all include some mention of an Afghan police officer or commander as "corrupt." Yet of the 170,000 or so Afghans trained under the program since its inception, only about 30,000 remain on the force, according to State and Defense officials. "In terms of retention and attrition, we can say there's a problem," says Steve Kraft, who oversees the program for the State Department. The cops' base salary and hazardous-duty pay were recently raised to match Afghan Army levels, but no one knows if those changes are really helping. "Once they leave the training center, we currently don't know whether they stay with the force or quit," Kraft says. "The bottom line is, we just don't know."
And what has become of all the billions of dollars this program has cost America? Government investigators aren't entirely sure. Fundamental questions are raised in an audit of the Afghan police-training program released in February by the State and Defense departments' inspectors general. When State finally sent an "invoice-reconciliation team" to review expense receipts submitted under one particular contract, it discovered that $322 million in invoices had been "approved even though they were not allowable, allocable, or reasonable." What's more, the auditors said, half those invoices included errors.
The lapses don't stop there. The audit says State Department officials "did not conduct adequate surveillance for two task orders in excess of $1 billion." According to the auditors, State's contract supervisors didn't adequately oversee the use of government-owned property, failed to maintain contract files properly, and sometimes neglected to "match goods to receiving reports"—meaning, evidently, that they didn't verify that the U.S. government had actually received the goods it had paid for. (DynCorp's Ebner responds: "We are fully engaged with the Department of State to ensure complete and thorough reconciliation of all invoices, and recognize and welcome the emphasis on sufficient oversight personnel to complete this process.")
Those failures should have been no surprise. The audit also found that State routinely short-staffed its contract-monitoring office in Afghanistan. At one point, only three contract officers were on the ground overseeing DynCorp's $1.7 billion training contract. A former DynCorp official who worked in Afghanistan, asking not to be named because he remains in the government contracting business, says he asked the State Department repeatedly for concrete goals for the police contract but never got firm answers. "I'd ask them: 'Please explain to me what a successful training program was. What are the standards you want us to apply?' There was no vision for the future." (Assistant Secretary Johnson says, "From the start, our training program was based on a clear, professionally developed curriculum ... A simple head count of the number of individuals on the ground ignores the substantial back-office support our contract oversight personnel had from Washington.")
A new set of difficulties arose last summer. Caldwell's predecessor, Gen. Richard Formica, decided that Defense should take direct control of the training contract. To avoid a lengthy bidding competition, he suggested folding the police-training mission into an existing anti-drug and counterterrorism program overseen by the U.S. Army's Space and Missile Defense Command. Bids were limited to companies already under contract to the missile command, effectively shutting out DynCorp. In the end, only two firms wound up bidding: Northrop Grumman and Xe Services, formerly known as Blackwater.
DynCorp fought back. In December the company filed a formal protest to block the Defense Department from seizing control of the contract. Last week the Government Accountability Office upheld DynCorp's complaint and suggested that the competition be open to all comers, including DynCorp as well as Xe and Northrop. DynCorp's CEO, William Ballhaus, recently told investors that the company's contract had been extended until July in any case; now it seems the new bidding process will take much longer.
At Kabul's police training center, a team of 35 Italian carabinieri recently arrived to supplement DynCorp's efforts. Before the Italians showed up at the end of January for a one-year tour, the recruits were posting miserable scores on the firing range. But the Italians soon discovered that poor marksmanship wasn't the only reason: the sights of the AK-47 and M-16 rifles the recruits were using were badly out of line. "We zeroed all their weapons," says Lt. Rolando Tommasini. "It's a very important thing, but no one had done this in the past. I don't know why."
The Italians also had a different way of teaching the recruits to shoot. DynCorp's instructors started their firearms training with 20-round clips at 50 meters; the recruits couldn't be sure at first if they were even hitting the target. Instead the carabinieri started them off with just three bullets each and a target only seven meters away. The recruits would shoot, check the target, and be issued three more rounds. When they began gaining confidence, the distance was gradually increased to 15, then 30, and then 50 meters. On a recent day on the firing range only one of 73 recruits failed the shooting test. The Italians say that's a huge improvement. (DynCorp says its civilian police advisers are "highly qualified"; the average trainer has more than a decade of law-enforcement experience.)
Caldwell also says it's just easier to work with paramilitary police units, such as the Italians and the French gendarmerie, than with contractors. Active-duty police units have a coherent and disciplined chain of command, Caldwell says. "When I bring in a contractor unit I'm getting a different group of folks," he says. "It may be someone who was a state patrolman, a local sheriff, or a policeman from New York City, each operating under different standards and with different backgrounds." Everything has to be negotiated. "If I say to my contractor that I want to make a change, he may say, 'Well, I'm not sure if that's really the best way,' " says Caldwell. "But if I can bring in a gendarmerie force, they're ready to go ... and take instructions well."
By the end of October, Caldwell hopes to build the force to 109,000 members, including an "elite unit" that so far has roughly 4,900 members. That outfit is called the Afghan National Civil Order Police (ANCOP). It'll be used for particularly sensitive assignments like Marja. ANCOP members get 16 weeks of training, and they're required to have at least a third-grade proficiency in reading and writing. So far, reviews from Marja are mixed. "The new police are more organized, committed, responsible, and helpful than the previous police, who were more like a criminal gang," Assadullah, a school principal, tells newsweek. (Like many Afghans, he uses only one name.) Local shopkeeper Hajji Noruddin Khan disagrees. "We are as disappointed with the new police as we were with the old police," he complains.
Quality matters. "In the rush to increase the number of trained police officers, we must remember that the end goal is a civilian police force capable of promoting good government, not a paramilitary adjunct for the counterinsurgency fight," warns Sen. John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Brig. Gen. Larry Nicholson, the top U.S. Marine commander in southern Afghanistan, puts it more succinctly: "I'd rather have one well-trained cop than 10 untrained." Besides, the fact is that no one is quite sure how many Afghan police there really are. The Americans are only now in the process of trying to create a database that will positively identify and track recruits. Without such data, it's more than difficult to catch "ghost" troops who exist only as names on the payroll, not to mention possible Taliban infiltrators.
But the buildup continues, and so does the training. On the firing range just outside Kabul, one of the few decent marksmen is Khair Mohammad, an illiterate 24-year-old from northern Afghanistan. "I've already had a lot of practice shooting at the Taliban," he says. He's been a cop for two years, serving one year in Kandahar and another on checkpoints just outside Marja. "I lost a lot of friends in the fighting," he says. Now he's getting his first taste of formal training, and hoping to join ANCOP. He figures he'd earn about double the $180 a month (including combat pay) he's been getting. His trainers are doing their best to make him worth the extra salary. "One thing the police don't know is good relations with the people," says Carabinieri Lt. Col. Massimo Deiana. "We're trying to train them to respect and relate to people." If such a skill is teachable at all, it could be far more important in the long run than knowing how to shoot straight.
With Sami Yousafzai in Kabul
T. Christian Miller is a senior reporter with ProPublica, an independent, nonprofit news organization that produces investigative journalism in the public interest. For more of Miller's previous reporting on defense contractors, go to www.propublica.org/contractors
Back to Top
Back to Top
Inteview: The Life And Times Of An 'Afghan Gandhi'
March 21, 2010
RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan welcomed independent lawmaker Ramazan Bashardost, winner of its "Person of the Year" award, into the studios of its Kabul bureau to learn more about his life and his views of the world.
RFE/RL: Greetings, Mr. Bashardost. Would you please tell us about yourself?
Bashardost: In the name of God and salute to the martyrs. I congratulate the Afghan people, because this selection reflects their wishes, will, and thoughts toward me. They have recognized that I am not in favor of any specific ethnic group, particular language speakers or specific region of Afghanistan. Every single Afghan, even those who cannot serve but have the intention to serve the nation, can differentiate between who is traitorous and who is a servant [of Afghanistan].
With reference to your question 'Who is Bashardost?" He is a Muslim, a human being, an Afghan, and a servant. His wishes and dreams are that not only Afghans, but all humanity across the world, should not suffer from poverty and hunger. People should not be deprived, tortured, invaded, killed or insulted. Thus, based on their human desires and beliefs, every person no matter where they live should have a car and a home, a mosque or a church. The mullahs of the mosques should have good meals. Employees should have good clothes and a salary, students should have good laboratories, schools, desks, and chairs.
RFE/RL: You have many friends, but at the same time, you have lots of enemies. Who do you consider your enemies to be?
Bashardost:My enemies are those people who think that if Bashardost comes to power, he will hang them, put them in jail, execute them, or confiscate their properties. That is to say, [those who say] he will act like a despotic dictator and issue decrees and do whatever he wishes. Others who are my enemies include those who have always victimized [Afghanistan's] national interests for their own personal gain.
RFE/RL: If you were to become the leader of Afghanistan, would you execute your enemies or put them on trail?
Bashardost: If Bashardost comes to power, he will not do anything against the law -- even if it is 100 percent for the benefit of the nation. What is obvious, if Bashardost comes to power, even one cruel person who has grabbed people's land by force -- attacked the honor of the people and seized people's property -- cannot work even as a gate man or clerk in my administration. Needless to say, they can never be a minister, a [provincial] governor, or a [military] commander. A new and honest generation -- a generation that believes 100 percent in Islamic values and human rights -- will work responsibly within my government.
Inside The Tent
RFE/RL: If you come to power, will you continue living in your tent like Libya's leader Muammar Qaddafi?
Bashardost: There is a difference between my tent and Qaddafi's. He has made his tent like a palace. It is a luxurious tent which has female bodyguards aged 18 to 20. But my tent is the tent of [the Propher] Mohammad and leaders of that time. I would not leave my tent. If I left my tent, be sure that I would isolate myself from the pains of [ordinary] Afghan people and events in Afghanistan.
RFE/RL: Please tell us more about your tent -- a description of your tent for those who have not seen it themselves.
Bashardost: My tent is a small and ordinary tent. I set it up for the first time in 2004 after I resigned as the planning minister. When I resigned from Ministry of Planning, a number of people wanted to see me. I had neither a house nor office nor a room. I would spend a night with one friend and the next night with another friend. I would promise some people to meet in restaurants. But our people, especially our elderly people and women, did not want to go to restaurants.
One day, I was walking in park of Shar-e Naw. It was there when Hyde Park of London came to my mind. I thought why can't we build a small Hyde Park in Shar-e Naw Park? I asked Noorzai, the former Kabul mayor, if he would let me set up my tent there. He said it was not a problem because I didn't have money to rent a luxurious house or office. One of our countrymen said he has a tent in his home. He brought that tent -- a very small tent. For four years it was with us. After Shar-e Naw, I became a representative of the people in the parliament. I set up the tent near the parliament. There, the tent got shredded a bit. Then, an Afghan who was donating tents for students gave me a tent [that I have now] -- an ordinary tent.
Private Life
RFE/RL: What place do you call home in Afghanistan or abroad? Where does your family live?
Bashardost: I have no piece of land -- not even a centimeter -- in Afghanistan or abroad, fortunately. My parents live in Dasht-e Barchi, a neighborhood on the west side of Kabul. My father has an auto-parts shop. In the past 30 years, he has owned a mud hut in Dasht-e Barchi. One of my brothers lives in Kabul and another lives in Qara-Bagh, a district in Ghazni Province. The later, has a piece of land that he uses to feed and support his family. During summer, I usually live in the tent. But during winter I cannot live there because it is expensive to and inefficient to warm it up. I have a room in my father's house where I usually live alone. I mostly cook myself, clean my room, wish my dishes, and clothes. But I do not iron my cloths because I do not have patience for ironing. I simply wash my clothes and wear them when they are dry.
RFE/RL: Are you married? Do you have any children?
Bashardost: I am not married yet. I was thinking that when, with the support of the Afghan people, I become the president and then I ask any Afghan family to give me the hand of their daughter in marriage, they might not reject my proposal. But now, I think with my small car that does not even have enough space for one person, the father of a girl will say the car is not enough even for myself. [They will say] "How will you find place for my daughter in your car and where under that tent should she live?" But, if God is willing, I will get married. It is the tradition of Mohammad [the Prophet]. My marriage will be based on Islamic criteria. That is to say, I am seeking a partner for life like Khadija, [the wife of Mohammad, the Prophet] who will support me throughout my campaign and Jihad.
Comparisons To Gandhi
RFE/RL: Some Afghans have referred to you as Afghanistan's [Mahatma] Gandhi. To what extent is this important to you?
Bashardost: Gandhi was a great person. He sacrificed his youth and life for the national interests of his country. This is the positive aspect. It makes me proud for me and for the Afghan people to have a Gandhi figure because there are some people who project the idea in world public opinion that Afghans are only slaves of money and terrorists -- that killing and violence is in their nature.
The negative part is that if they call me Gandhi, and if I wear clothes like Gandhi, I will not survive for even an hour in the cold weather of Kabul.
RFE/RL: Considering the ethnic structure of Afghanistan, have you ever had the feeling that you belong to the Hazara ethnic group?
Bashardost: By no means, I have never had the feeling that I belong to an ethnic group. It is too restrictive for me to think that I belong to an ethnic group. It is even too restrictive for me to think that I belong to one nation or am limited to one geographic location. I mostly consider myself as a human being. Humanity and all my wishes and goals circulate around those criteria. All Afghan tribes are the same to me. Fortunately, most Afghans see me as someone who defies such barriers. They do not see me as an individual, belonging to one ethnic group. If that was not the case, I could not take even one political step in Afghanistan.
Growing Up
RFE/RL: Tell us about your childhood.
Bashardost: I was born in an Afghan village and completed my secondary school there. Fortunately, my father worked for a sugar company. At that time, the rules of the company required employees not to work in any one province for more than two years. Employees had to travel to other provinces. One summer, for instance, I studied in Abubaid Jawazjaji high school in Jawazjan, [a province in northern Afghanistan], and spent the following winter in Uruzgan province [in the south]. I have spent time in Muqur and Helmand [both in southern Afghanistan]. These travels during my childhood encouraged me to move beyond tribal borders.
I have lots unforgettable memories. For example, during a winter season, we were living in Oruzgan Province. Our home was close to a gas station, where the nomad people had set up their tents. From early in the morning, when the light emerged, I would go and play with young nomadic boys and girls until the evening. Sometimes I would not even eat lunch with my father, which usually was soup. Instead, I would eat my lunch, cooked by those nomad people. The nomad mother would cook for kids and other family members. The mother would seat all her sons and daughters in a circle. Like one of her sons, she would also seat me among them. She would give me the same amount of food as she gave to her own sons and daughters.
When I went to Oruzgan during [last year's] presidential campaign, the governor of the province, while on the roof of the governor office, told me that the lights you see around are the tents of nomads. There I had this feeling that my other mother might be in one of those tents, I longed to have time to find her. Whenever I have a discriminative feeling, I close my eyes and remember the face of that mother. Fortunately, I do not differentiate -- not even a tiny bit.
RFE/RL: Would you please describe your interests in culture, literature, and music?
Bashardost: I am mainly interested in reading books. Especially books about historic personalities -- both good and bad -- which led me to change the destiny of the country. In addition, I am interested in films that reflect the pains of people. For example, films being made about Gandhi or films made about the U.S. Civil War during the time of [U.S. President] Abraham Lincoln.
I like to listen to music -- especially the meaningful song of [the late Afghan singer] Ahmad Zahir, Hajab Sabri Khuda Darad, ["What Patience God Has!"]. I also like some songs of Naghma, a female Afghan singer. If I have spare time, I read newspapers that are sent to my tent.
But unfortunately, I do not have time for cultural issues. However, sometimes when I am invited to cinema or theater, I do try to go. In the world literature, I like to read books by writers such as Plato, Aristotle, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Baron de Montesquieu, and so on.
RFE/RL: How did you feel when you first learned that you have been named as RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan "Person of the Year"?
Bashardost: When I first heard that the people of Afghanistan selected me as the person of the year, my belief in the maturity and political wisdom of the people grew. They trust me based on their fundamental Islamic, human and national values. The other feeling that touched me was that the trust of the people has increased my responsibility a million times. I thought that I should not do anything or say anything that will possibly trigger those Afghans in provinces like Khost, Jawazajan, Badakhshan, Dai Kundi, Bamiyan, Kandahar and Nangarhar to regret trusting [me]. I never want to be ashamed in front of those people. I would like to remain committed -- 100 percent -- to my principles and beliefs until the last drop of my blood.
Back to Top
Back to Top
Iraq and Afghanistan: America's invisible wars
After seven years in Iraq and nine in Afghanistan, residents of York, Pa., talk about how the wars have become like a screen saver: always there but rarely acknowledged.
Christian Science Monitor - USA By Michael Ollove, Correspondent March 20, 2010
York, Pa. - Standing in Continental Square in this southern Pennsylvania town in the early 1940s, it wouldn't have taken long to divine the subject foremost in the minds of the citizenry.
You would have seen young men in olive-drab uniforms trudging up from the train station, looking for something to do to kill the few hours of their layover. Many of them would have dropped by the USO post in the square, where they would have been directed to an old schoolhouse over on Beaver Street to grab a bite to eat, play board games, and, if they stayed long enough, enjoy a dance with a pretty local girl.
Elsewhere in the square, you would have spied residents standing in line at a small booth to buy US war bonds. In the windows of all the shops and the big department stores – Bear's, Wiest's, and Bon-Ton – you would have seen large posters drumming up support for the war effort or darkly warning about staying on the lookout for Nazi spies.
IN PICTURES: York, Pa., reflects on the wars
If you had hung around long enough, no doubt you would have been swept up by community campaigns to collect scrap metal or tires for the defense industry. You would have heard boastful references to "the York Plan," a civic initiative that brought local manufacturers together to win huge armament contracts. And certainly there would have been some grumbling as well – about gas rationing and the dearth of ladies' stockings, a consequence of silk being siphoned off to make parachutes.
World War II, in other words, was inescapably Topic A – and probably every other letter of the alphabet as well – in York as it was in every other small town or big city in America in those days.
Today, nearly seven years since the invasion of Iraq and nine years into "the war on terror" – one of the longest conflicts in US history – York's Continental Square tells a different story. Or rather it tells no story at all in terms of the present military entanglements. There isn't a single visible clue that the country is at war. No posters. No banners. No ribbons. Nothing. Even the peace vigils that were held in the square every Friday afternoon starting in 2002 were discontinued in 2008.
"It's almost a forgotten war," says Leada Dietz, a coordinator of People for Peace and Justice, the York group that organized those demonstrations. "It's almost as though there is no war."
York, a manufacturing town of about 40,000 (in a county of 425,000) known for making barbells and Harley-Davidsons, is hardly alone in its aloofness from the war. Other than places where military bases are located and among military families, the two wars seem far from the emotional heart of Americans these days. Iraq and Afghanistan have become America's screen savers – always present but rarely focused on – something that opponents and supporters alike agree, though for different reasons, isn't good for the men and women fighting there nor for any clear sense of national purpose.
Polls bear out the wars' invisibility. A CBS News/New York Times survey conducted in early February found 52 percent of respondents identified the economy as America's most pressing problem. A mere 3 percent named the Iraq and Afghan wars as the nation's biggest worry.
It may be that a lengthy US conflict has never registered so faintly in the American psyche.
"I would say that of our wars that have involved 100,000 servicemen or more, this has had the least engagement from the point of view of the public and society of any major conflict in our history," says Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington and coauthor of the book "Toughing It Out in Afghanistan."
The reasons for the country's disengagement are familiar. Unlike major conflicts of the past, the present ones have not involved a draft, sparing the vast majority of young men and their families of the worry or reality of being directly affected by the wars. The dangers and casualties of these wars have been borne only by volunteer soldiers.
During the Bush administration, Americans were even prevented from seeing the most emblematic evidence of that danger: the sight of coffins bearing the bodies of American soldiers returning to this country. (President Obama overturned that policy early in his term.) The number of American soldiers killed in Iraq or Afghanistan now stands at 5,401. More than 58,000 died in Vietnam and 405,000 in World War II.
President George W. Bush bucked historic precedent in another way. Not only did he not raise taxes, as occurred in almost every past major war, he actually passed a tax cut. There would be no shared sacrifice even on financial grounds.
The policies of holding Americans harmless renders the war remote and unreal for most, says Andrew Bacevich, a professor of international relations at Boston University, a Vietnam veteran, and the father of a soldier killed in Iraq in 2007.
"Americans are not asked to participate, and only minimally experience the various effects of one of the longest wars in our history," says Mr. Bacevich.
Although the impact of the present conflicts may be limited, that doesn't mean that the experience hasn't altered the views of Americans. A recent poll by the Pew Research Center found that 49 percent of Americans – an all-time high in 40 years of polling – believe the United States should "mind its own business" internationally.
As Luther Sower, a World War II vet and retired York County school administrator says, "I don't believe we should be putting our noses in everyone else's affairs. I don't do that in my private life, and I don't think we should do that in the world."
Carroll Doherty, an associate director at Pew, attributes that finding to the severe economic downturn but also to war fatigue.
Bacevich points to another likely change in outlook as a result of what has happened in Iraq and Afghanistan. For many, the idea of quick, decisive military victories as a result of superior technology, he says, "has pretty much been demolished."
* * *
It may not be fair to say anyplace in America is typical, but like many other cities and towns in the US, York finds itself remote from the present wars but hardly immune. At least three residents of York County have died in Iraq, although the York Daily Dispatch, the local newspaper, has identified as many as 17 fallen servicemen with local connections.
It is a town of little ostentation with modest brick and frame homes in tidy neighborhoods, an old fashioned farmers' market (with a heavy Amish flavor), and major roads lined with all the familiar chain stores and restaurants. The city, once a stage for ugly race relations, recently elected its first African-American mayor. The city leans Democratic in a county that tends to go Republican.
Like many towns in America, York was a manufacturing city, but it had a knack for building big, heavy things. Safes were made there. And farming equipment. Tanks and ordnance as well. Perhaps the most iconic sight in York is the statue along Interstate 83 of a man holding a barbell above his head at York Barbell. Caterpillar closed up shop a decade ago, and Harley-Davidson is shutting its plant there, too.
The town honors its military past with markers or monuments commemorating wars all the way back to the Revolution. In Continental Square, it even acknowledges the city's dubious distinction of being the largest Northern city to surrender to the Confederacy during the Civil War.
Craig Trebilcock is a York lawyer in the Army Reserve who was in Iraq in 2003 and 2004, during the invasion and early reconstruction. To his delight, upon his return home, he found an "incredible" amount of goodwill directed toward his generation of soldiers.
"There is none of this Vietnam War reception when you come home," he says. "When you come home, you are treated like a hero, and your family's sacrifice is definitely recognized."
But over time, after his return, he came to realize that the goodwill did not necessarily mean that the wars those soldiers were fighting figured prominently in the psyche of the people of York.
"The war doesn't affect anyone," he says, referring to the two wars, as many do, as though they are one. "The town really prides itself on the York Plan from World War II, and every family was involved in Victory gardens and bond drives and collections for the defense industries."
But that is far removed from what he sees around York today. "It's a consequence of the way we go to war these days. It doesn't affect the general community, whether it's York or Des Moines or anywhere else," he says. "It's a volunteer Army, so there isn't a general sacrifice at a personal or economic level. There's no rationing. We're an affluent country. We can go fight two wars at the same time, and most people don't even feel a pinprick."
"Frankly," he adds, "I don't think the average person thinks about these wars at all. They're more concerned about what's going on in 'Lost' or who's winning 'American Idol' than what the country is doing overseas."
His wife, Terrie, a high school history teacher, feels the same way. Although she says she received support from family and close friends when Craig was in Iraq, she was surprised how others reacted upon learning she was the spouse of a deployed soldier. "The reaction you get from people you don't know very well – it's almost as though you have a disease, as though they were worried that I'm going to ask something of them," she says.
At her children's school, she was disappointed to find officials flummoxed by her desire that her kids be excused when the school broadcast television news about the war.
To her surprise, she finds the most consistent engagement in the wars among the students at Hereford High School, across the border in Maryland, where she teaches.One group, "For Our Troops," sends care packages to troops, organizes ongoing memorials to two of its alumni killed in Iraq, and even drafted model legislation limiting protests near soldiers' funerals. (Members of an antigay Kansas church had infamously demonstrated at the funeral of a Maryland soldier.)
Some of the students from her school have also chosen to enlist, knowing the near certainty of being deployed to a combat zone. "To those kids, the war is immediate and tangible," Mrs. Trebilcock says, "but I don't think most people get it."
To her, America's detachment from its wars demonstrates what she feels is a lack of backbone in the country, an unwillingness to make sacrifices for a greater good, either at home or abroad. "We are," she says, "spineless creatures."
Daniel Meckley III, a retired corporate executive, still remembers the fervor that enveloped his hometown after Pearl Harbor. "You could barely get into the recruiting offices," he says. "Everyone wanted to get into the services. It was a war everyone believed in."
Every other house, it seemed, displayed a flag with a blue star in its window, indicating a son in the service. As the war persisted, many of those blue stars were changed to yellow, indicating a son killed in combat.
Mr. Meckley recalls his father becoming an air raid warden and his future wife a candy striper in the hospital. Everyone, it seemed, was buying war bonds and hauling their scrap metal, iron, and aluminum foil to collection sites. While men joined the service in prodigious numbers, women flocked to factories to help meet defense production needs.
"There was an indomitable spirit then," says Meckley, who became a Navy officer during the war. It is a communal spirit he sees as absent now. "I don't think [the war] even registers with a lot of people. I'm not sure people even connect it with 9/11 anymore."
Phil Avillo, another wartime veteran – he lost a leg as a marine in Vietnam – agrees that the war is far from people's minds because it is far from their daily existence. "We no longer see the connection between terrorism and the way we live our lives," he says. "9/11 did that but only for a month or so, until George Bush said, 'Let's go shopping.' "
Instead, Mr. Avillo, a retired York College history professor and twice an unsuccessful Democratic candidate for Congress, says when the US first attacked Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, Americans should have been forced to reduce oil consumption as well. "The president should have made the case that reducing our consumption of foreign oil was one more piece of the war on terror."
Instead, he says, the war goes on, "but for most people, life hasn't changed at all. Most communities are unaffected."
The war, compounded by politics back home, has made him question the ability of any leader to rally the country to unite behind a cause.
Dana Shearon, an instructional aide whose brother, Philadelphia policeman Gennaro Pelligini, was killed in Iraq in 2005, tries to keep the war vivid by speaking about Gennaro to her students at York Middle School whenever she can. "I talk to them about the Pledge of Allegiance," she says. "I tell them I always thought it was important, but it took the death of my brother for it to really sink in."
The war, she admits, has left her with views she prefers not to harbor. "When my brother was killed, I was working for a contractor who fingerprinted immigrants. I remember fingerprinting an 86-year- old woman from the Middle East and thinking, Was it your kids who did that to my brother? Was it your grandkids?" It is a prejudice, she says, she tries to choke down.
To say there is no visible sign of the present conflicts in York is not true, and that is thanks in particular to Jack Sommer, a Pittsburgh transplant who owns the Prospect Hill Cemetery, eight blocks north of Continental Square.
In early August 2005, some disturbing news caught Mr. Sommer's attention: Eight soldiers from Pennsylvania had been killed in Iraq in the span of five days.
"It got me thinking," Sommer says, "we should do something about this."
Sommer's older brother had fought in Vietnam, and Sommer never forgot the poor treatment accorded returning soldiers as a result of an unpopular war. No matter how people stood on the intervention in Iraq or Afghanistan, he didn't want American forces disgraced or ignored. But what could he do?
The answer surrounded him there at Prospect Hill. Soldiers from every American war since the Revolution are buried on the grounds of his cemetery. He decided that Prospect Hill was a fitting place to honor all American soldiers who had given their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Beginning in 2005, Sommer arranged to plant an American flag on Prospect Hill for each soldier killed. Eventually, he created three sections, one for all Americans killed in Iraq, another for all Americans killed in Afghanistan, and a third for Pennsylvanians who died in the two conflicts, with a state flag for each.
From April to December, when the display is taken down for the winter, the hillside quivers with more than 5,000 flags. Huge banners for the dead soldiers with York ties fly along George Street by the cemetery. Local businesses sponsor the banners, which bear the photographs of soldiers.
Whenever there are an additional 100 to 150 new deaths, Sommer schedules a memorial ceremony during which all the new names are read aloud. It's been a tangible gauge of the intensity of the two wars, as combat deaths in Afghanistan now vastly outpace those in Iraq. In the spring, he replants all the flags. It used to be that just his laborers did the work, and it would take them half a day to complete the job. Now, the flag plantings attract 30 or 40 volunteers each spring. They finish the work in under an hour.
"I think this is our responsibility as a democracy, to be aware of the price that we are paying," Sommer says. "What shouldn't happen is that it goes unrecognized."
The display resonates with many people, and not only military families. Callers check in after severe weather to make sure the flags remained standing and to volunteer to restore them if they didn't. Sommer's assistant, Steliana Vassileva, whose younger brother served in Iraq, says that one woman stops whenever she passes by to say a prayer. "And she has no one in the military," Ms. Vassileva says. "She just feels a sense of ownership."
No one sees the young woman unless, perhaps, the occasional cemetery worker. It is a quiet, solitary reflection that the US is, in fact, a country at war – even if many Americans have to remind themselves.
Back to Top
Disclaimer:
This news site is mostly a compilation of publicly accessible articles
on the Web in the form of a link or saved news item. The news articles
and commentaries/editorials are protected under international copyright
laws. All credit goes to the original respective source(s).