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Polish PM Visits Afghanistan Following Deadly Bomb Attack
VOA News December 22, 2011
Poland's Prime Minister Donald Tusk visited Afghanistan Thursday, one day after Polish troops suffered their single deadliest day since their 2002 deployment to the country.
German Defence Minister on Surprise Visit to Afghanistan
TOLOnews.com Wednesday, 21 December 2011
Germany's Defence Minister Thomas de Maiziere on Wednesday made an unannounced visit to his troops in northern Kunduz province.
McManus: A long goodbye to Afghanistan
Unlike the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, the plan for leaving Afghanistan will keep some American troops in combat against the Taliban long after 2014.
Los Angles Times By Doyle McManus December 22, 2011
This week, the last convoy of U.S. troops in Iraq drove noisily across the border into Kuwait and shut the gate behind them. The next drawdown comes in Afghanistan, where American forces are scheduled to disengage from most combat by the end of 2014.
How quick to the exits in Afghanistan?
Washington Post By David Ignatius Thursday 22 December
KABUL - Gen. John Allen insists there is “no daylight” between him and President Obama about policy for continued troop withdrawals from Afghanistan next year. That may be technically true, but a political battle is brewing over the future pace of the U.S. military drawdown here.
How quick to the exits in Afghanistan?
Washington Post By David Ignatius Thursday 22 December
KABUL - Gen. John Allen insists there is “no daylight” between him and President Obama about policy for continued troop withdrawals from Afghanistan next year. That may be technically true, but a political battle is brewing over the future pace of the U.S. military drawdown here.
New Zealand Troops to Leave Afghanistan Next Year
TOLOnews.com Thursday, 22 December 2011
New Zealand Prime Minister John Key on Thursday said that his country's troops' elite commando will leave Afghanistan in March.
INTERVIEW-Afghan cenbank chief focuses on Kabul Bank fix
Reuters By Emily Flitter Dec 22, 2011
* Delawari says tighter supervision needed for banks
* Country must bring import activity into banking system
* Negotiations with "major company" to create dry port
WASHINGTON - In the late 1980s, an Afghanistan-born banker working in California watched as U.S. regulators struggled to cope with a deepening savings-and-loan banking crisis.
Report Blames Both U.S. and Pakistan for Errant Airstrike That Killed 24
New York Times By MATTHEW ROSENBERG December 22, 2011
KABUL, Afghanistan - Mistakes by both American and Pakistani forces led to airstrikes against Pakistani border posts that killed 24 Pakistani Army soldiers last month, according to the findings of a United States military investigation of the incident. The strikes sent the already fragile relationship between the allies into a tailspin, and the results of the investigation appeared unlikely to assuage Pakistani anger over the raid.
U.S. And Pakistan Relations: From Bad To Worse
NPR By Julie McCarthy December 22, 2011
In Pakistan, transit routes for NATO supply trucks heading to Afghanistan remain shut. The CIA drone missile program has gone quiet in Pakistan's tribal area. Pakistan's government has called for a re-negotiation of its troubled relationship with the U.S.
Afghan Army Increases to 180,000 Troops
TOLOnews.com Wednesday, 21 December 2011
Afghan armed forces now number 180,000 troops, Afghan Defence Ministry said on Wednesday.
As foreign forces are preparing to leave the country by the end of 2014, Afghan government has been trying to make sure it has enough troops to take over all security responsibilities.
Soldiers just back from Iraq get new orders: Afghanistan
CNN By Chelsea J. Carter December 21, 2011
Atlanta - Soldiers who just returned from Iraq are among several thousand being ordered to Afghanistan in six months as part of a mission designed to beef up Afghan forces ahead of a planned 2014 U.S. military withdrawal, officials said.
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Polish PM Visits Afghanistan Following Deadly Bomb Attack
VOA News December 22, 2011
Poland's Prime Minister Donald Tusk visited Afghanistan Thursday, one day after Polish troops suffered their single deadliest day since their 2002 deployment to the country.
Five Polish soldiers were killed Wednesday when their convoy was struck by a roadside bomb in the southeastern province of Ghazni. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack.
At the Polish base in Ghazni Thursday, Prime Minister Tusk expressed condolences to the families of the slain soldiers, and called the incident the “greatest tragedy in the history of Polish missions” abroad.
Poland is one of the largest contributors to the NATO security force contingent with at least 2,500 troops in Afghanistan.
The total number of Polish troops to die in Afghanistan now stands at 36.
A bomb attack killed another NATO service member in eastern Afghanistan on Thursday. The coalition did not give the soldier's nationality.
All NATO combat troops are scheduled to withdraw by the end of 2014.
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German Defence Minister on Surprise Visit to Afghanistan
TOLOnews.com Wednesday, 21 December 2011
Germany's Defence Minister Thomas de Maiziere on Wednesday made an unannounced visit to his troops in northern Kunduz province.
The Defence Minister while his meeting with troops said he was "cautiously optimistic" about the security situation and the planned 2014 withdrawal.
Mr de Maiziere said that there is a lot of work to be done before troops could leave, specifically in terms of training of Afghan security forces.
His visit comes days after the German troops handed over their base in Faizabad to Afghan civilian control.
The German troops will leave Afghanistan by the end of 2014 as planned.
Germany has around 5,000 troops in Afghanistan, most of them based in northern Kunduz province and it has so far lost 53 soldiers in the Afghan war.
Germany held Bonn conference on Afghanistan's future on December 5 in which representatives of more than 100 countries and pledged continued support after foreign combat troops leave the country at the end of 2014.
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McManus: A long goodbye to Afghanistan
Unlike the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, the plan for leaving Afghanistan will keep some American troops in combat against the Taliban long after 2014.
Los Angles Times By Doyle McManus December 22, 2011
This week, the last convoy of U.S. troops in Iraq drove noisily across the border into Kuwait and shut the gate behind them. The next drawdown comes in Afghanistan, where American forces are scheduled to disengage from most combat by the end of 2014.
But the Afghanistan withdrawal won't be anywhere near as final as the one we just saw. U.S. military leaders are working on a new slimmed-down strategy that would keep some American troops in combat against the Taliban for years to come, long after 2014.
The heart of the new strategy is a shift in the U.S. mission from fighting the Taliban directly to serving mainly as advisors and support forces for the new Afghan army. But some Americans would still be in the combat business, not only as frontline advisors, but also as special operation units and a quick reaction force to rescue Afghan fighters who got into trouble.
The strategy is still being debated and designed, and officials said they haven't determined how many Americans would stay behind. "I'm not predicting tens of thousands," Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, told me and other reporters who accompanied him on a visit to U.S. bases in Afghanistan last week.
When I asked another senior official whether 15,000 was a plausible figure, he nodded and said: "I like that number."
The force now numbers about 94,000; that hypothetical 15,000 would be a smaller presence than the United States has maintained in Afghanistan since 2005. But it's still likely to come as a surprise to anyone who thought President Obama's promise to draw forces down by 2014 meant a complete end to the U.S. combat role.
"Our troops will continue coming home at a steady pace as Afghan security forces move into the lead," Obama said in June, when he outlined his withdrawal timetable. "Our mission will change from combat to support. By 2014, this process of transition will be complete, and the Afghan people will be responsible for their own security."
U.S. officials in Afghanistan have tried to stress the flip side of the message: One way or another, we're staying for a long time.
"We're not going to be done by the end of '14," the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Marine Gen. John Allen, told us last week. "The message that we will be here in some form is a very important message for the Taliban."
If the two messages sound contradictory, that's because they reflect a continuing ambivalence at the heart of U.S. policy. Obama wants to prevent the Taliban from toppling the government in Kabul, so he ordered a surge in U.S. troops to a peak of more than 100,000 last year. But the president also wants to make sure that the surge is only temporary — and that American voters focus on the fact that the war, or at least our part of it, is winding down.
Those cross-pressures are driving the military's scramble to draw up a new strategy, even though many officers on the ground aren't convinced that the Afghans will be ready to take over on schedule. "The numbers are coming down, and we're reacting to that," an official explained.
Under the timetable Obama imposed on the surge, the U.S. force will decline to about 68,000 by next September and continue shrinking after that at a pace that's still undetermined.
As the numbers come down, it will quickly become impractical to rely on U.S. units as the main combat force in the war. The burden will have to shift to the Afghan armed forces, which already number about 180,000 troops and hope to grow to 240,000 by 2014.
That's how counterinsurgency warfare is supposed to work: a local government's forces take responsibility for security on the ground, even if they need foreign help with training, supplies, transportation and air support.
Some officers, including Allen, have argued for keeping as many U.S. combat troops in the field as long as possible — pointing to their success this year in quelling the Taliban in southern Afghanistan and to continued heavy fighting in the eastern provinces.
But others argue that moving slowly risks not getting there at all. As long as American units are doing the fighting, they argue, the Afghans won't get a chance to take the lead role as soon as they should.
When a U.S. officer leads American and Afghan forces into battle now, "he focuses on the success of his own [American] unit," said one official. "If you're an advisor, you have to focus on the success of the Afghan unit."
Under the new strategy, U.S. advisors would probably be attached to Afghan combat units in teams of 12 to 16, officials said. They would help the Afghans plan operations, provide them with U.S. military intelligence and call on U.S. backup forces when needed.
The new strategy doesn't promise any kind of quick victory. Instead, it promises mostly to give the Afghan army a chance to fight a long, slow war to convince the Taliban that they can't win.
And even if the Afghan military performs well, the country faces problems that aren't being solved: a government riddled with inefficiency and corruption, and the Taliban's use of Pakistan as a shelter from which to fight.
Still, the new strategy makes a virtue of necessity: The numbers are coming down, and this is the best we can do with what we are willing to commit. It recognizes our impatience. Counterinsurgencies can take decades to fight; Americans dislike any costly war that's longer than one presidential term.
Hawks won't like it, because it reduces U.S. firepower in the war. Doves won't like it, because it isn't a definitive end to the U.S. military presence.
But it's a coherent strategy and could even turn out to be a realistic one. Those aren't bad benchmarks in a 10-year-old war that has seen its share of failure.
doyle.mcmanus@latimes.com
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How quick to the exits in Afghanistan?
Washington Post By David Ignatius Thursday 22 December
KABUL - Gen. John Allen insists there is “no daylight” between him and President Obama about policy for continued troop withdrawals from Afghanistan next year. That may be technically true, but a political battle is brewing over the future pace of the U.S. military drawdown here.
Allen, commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, says the White House hasn’t given him any timetable for further cuts after September. That’s when the last of the 30,000 “surge” troops Obama dispatched will be gone, leaving about 68,000 U.S. soldiers.
“No one has conveyed to me that at the end of September I’m going to get a number” for more withdrawals through 2013, Allen said in an interview here Tuesday. He said that the president’s policy, as he understands it, is for a “strategy-based drawdown” that’s driven by the situation on the ground, rather than a preordained timeline.
Yes, but that’s precisely what the debate is about.
According to Pentagon officials, Allen favors keeping most of the 68,000 in place until late 2013, so that the United States has two “fighting seasons” to bolster Afghan troops before giving them full responsibility in 2014. But Vice President Biden and some other administration officials want a commitment to steady, sustained withdrawals through next year’s election campaign. Allen told me that “there could be a quicker drawdown” if military conditions allow, but that there is no “glide path.” Some in the White House would disagree.
Does this sound familiar? It mirrors the wrangle that surrounded Obama’s December 2009 decision to send more troops but start withdrawing them in July 2011 — and the debate this year about how quickly the 30,000 should come home. Obama could make it easy if he just left the decision to his commander. But for Obama on Afghanistan, nothing is easy.
Behind the issue of troop withdrawals are some interesting but little-noticed strategic changes that Allen has made since taking over in Afghanistan from Gen. David Petraeus in July. Basically, Allen wants to accelerate transfer of responsibility to Afghan troops in some key regions — preferring to take these risks sooner, when the United States has more troops available for backup, rather than later.
Allen’s adjustments involve the transition schedule: He shortened this process and front-loaded it. In the latest phase, announced last month, he included the once-shaky capitals of Ghazni and Wardak provinces; the next phase, in the spring, may include volatile Nuristan and Kunar provinces on the Pakistan border as well as Helmand and Kandahar provinces, two key battlegrounds in the south. By mid-2013, responsibility could be transferred for Paktia, Paktika and Khost provinces, three hot spots on the eastern border known as “P2K.”
“Nobody knows how it will go after Afghan troops take the lead,” explains one U.S. commander. “What you want is enough troops to back the Afghans up credibly, so they don’t lose confidence.” One reason this speedup is possible, he says, is that security has improved this year in southern Afghanistan, where another commander says attacks are down about 8 percent compared to a year earlier. This allows more U.S. forces to move east, where the fight is harder.
At a meeting Wednesday in Kandahar, U.S. officers described what they said was improved security in the southern provinces of Oruzgan, Zabul and Kandahar — and better performance by Afghan troops. Such upbeat reports have sometimes proved premature. But Gen. Ray Odierno, the U.S. Army chief of staff, said after the meeting: “My take-away is that the Afghan army and police are making progress and in some parts are beginning to take the lead.”
What about the Taliban? They appear to have had a tough 2011, but intelligence reports indicate they are making plans to take control of some provinces after 2014, on the expectation that Afghan forces won’t be strong enough to stop them.
One boon for the Taliban is that governance is very poor in most parts of Afghanistan. That’s the weakest link of the U.S. strategy — and a problem even the optimists don’t contest.
“As General Allen moves forward, he needs flexibility to execute his strategy,” argues Odierno. But it will fall to Obama whether to endorse such a flexible, “strategy-based drawdown” or to opt for a faster timetable — with its political appeal for a war-weary America.
My sense is that Obama should listen to his commander in the field — especially when he seems to be speeding up the process that would allow withdrawal of most U.S. troops by 2014.
davidignatius@washpost.com
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US: 'Inadequate Coordination' Led to Pakistan Border Attack
VOA News December 22, 2011
The U.S. Department of Defense says inadequate coordination by both Pakistani and U.S.-led forces led to last month's coalition attack that mistakenly killed 24 Pakistani soldiers along the border with Afghanistan.
A U.S. military investigation released Thursday found that American forces acted "in self-defense and with appropriate force" after being fired upon by Pakistani forces along the poorly demarcated border between the two countries.
The report said incorrect mapping information exchanged between U.S. troops and Pakistan border officials led to a misunderstanding about the location of Pakistani border posts.
The investigation found, however, that there was "no intentional effort" by U.S. forces to mislead or target the Pakistani military.
The Defense Department expressed its "deepest regret" and "sincere condolences" for the incident, but stopped short of meeting the Pakistani demand for a full apology.
The attack on November 26 has inflamed already damaged tensions between the United States and Pakistan. Islamabad has ordered U.S. forces to vacate a Pakistan airbase it uses, and has indefinitely closed the two main overland routes NATO uses to send non-lethal supplies to Afghanistan.
American media reports on Thursday quoted unnamed U.S. officials as saying NATO's failure to inform Islamabad that it was conducting the operation may have led Pakistani soldiers to mistake the coalition forces for Taliban militants.
The reports also said that American forces may have given Pakistani border coordination officials wrong or incomplete coordinates for the locations to be attacked by U.S. helicopters and gunships, though it is not clear if Pakistan cleared the attacks beforehand.
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New Zealand Troops to Leave Afghanistan Next Year
TOLOnews.com Thursday, 22 December 2011
New Zealand Prime Minister John Key on Thursday said that his country's troops' elite commando will leave Afghanistan in March.
Thirty five troops which were involved in air services for New Zealand combat forces in Afghanistan will leave the country, Mr Key added.
New Zealand has around around 188 troops in Afghanistan, most of them based in central Bamyan province.
It has lost 5 soldiers in the Afghan war, according to icasualties.org, a website that keeps a tally of foreign soldiers' deaths.
Foreign combat troops will leave Afghanistan by the end of 2014 when Afghan security forces will take over full security responsibilities.
On December 5 the second Bonn conference was held in Germany in which representatives of more than 100 countries pledged continued support after foreign combat troops leave the country.
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INTERVIEW-Afghan cenbank chief focuses on Kabul Bank fix
Reuters By Emily Flitter Dec 22, 2011
* Delawari says tighter supervision needed for banks
* Country must bring import activity into banking system
* Negotiations with "major company" to create dry port
WASHINGTON - In the late 1980s, an Afghanistan-born banker working in California watched as U.S. regulators struggled to cope with a deepening savings-and-loan banking crisis.
Now he is attempting a similar feat in Kabul with the added challenges of widespread corruption, still rampant violence and a major crisis of confidence in Afghanistan's banking system.
Noorullah Delawari, who was re-appointed last month as head of the country's central bank, has put fixing troubled Kabul Bank, one of the country's largest commercial banks, at the top of his list of priorities.
While U.S. bank regulators in the 1980s struggled to stem a plunge in property values as hundreds of lenders failed, the stakes are even higher for Afghanistan and for Delawari.
"My immediate goal is to reinstate confidence in the banking system of Afghanistan," he told Reuters during an interview.
Without that, the country's economy could continue to function largely outside the formal banking system, hobbling monetary and economic policy makers who are struggling to enact change in the war-torn nation where institutions remain weak.
Delawari's predecessor quit the central bank suddenly this year and fled from Afghanistan, saying he feared for his life after trying to tackle corruption.
The Afghan government spent $825 million trying to rescue the private lender Kabul Bank after an embezzlement scandal involving its top shareholders, including President Hamid Karzai's brother, broke in September 2010.
With total official economic output in 2010 worth only about $15 billion, Afghanistan's finances couldn't handle the full cost of the bailout and the country turned to the International Monetary Fund for support, securing a $134 million loan.
By restructuring bad loans and selling real estate seized from the embezzlers, Delawari hopes to recover 80 percent of the $825 million within five years.
"Eighty percent recovery of a failed bank is a huge success," he said.
Afghanistan's parliament confirmed Delawari's appointment to head the central bank in late November. The five-year term marks his second spell in the role after he ran the bank from 2004 to 2007 and then founded the Afghan Investment Support Agency (AISA), a business development agency.
"I hope I will be healthy to complete this job," said Delawari, speaking in Washington on Wednesday on his way to visit family members in California. "I've inherited a lot of very difficult things to do."
Delawari, who was born in 1945 and studied in Britain and the United States before working for Lloyds Bank of California and Bank of the West, said he is restructuring the central bank to add more supervisory powers.
The bank will now have a special unit to focus on commercial banks that are identified as troubled in routine examinations.
He is also changing banking laws to tighten regulation.
"I believe that our implementation of changes to the banking law will close loopholes," he said.
Delawari said he hoped to lead by example in the push to reduce corruption in Afghanistan.
"I can say with confidence that AISA is a place where you go. No one is expecting any kind of bribe and they do their job without mischief."
He plans to run the central bank with the same discipline, hoping to serve as a model for other government agencies and officials.
KEEPING THE CURRENCY STABLE
During his first term, Delawari helped re-launch the country's currency, the afghani, after different regimes and leaders issued their own competing versions of coins and banknotes amid the chaos of years war.
Afghanistan faces a new challenge in the coming two years as foreign troops leave, taking with them some of the dollars and euros with which the country is now flush.
Delawari said keeping the currency stable would involve finding new sources of income, most immediately through new mining projects.
He said reducing imports would also help. Afghanistan could start to produce some of the things it buys from other countries, including cement, natural gas and oil, he added.
"I want to see more investment in the country, particularly in the area of agriculture."
DRY PORT
For the imports that will still flow into landlocked Afghanistan, Delawari said the government was negotiating with a major foreign company to establish a dry port at the entry point from Pakistan to the eastern city of Jalalabad that could receive and process goods shipped into the Pakistani port of Karachi.
Having the dry port would help bring more importing activity inside the banking system because the goods in transit could be considered as collateral for loans to purchase them.
Delawari said 90 percent of Afghanistan's imports were now ordered on a cash-in-advance basis.
The dry port could also help bring the foreign exchange market under the central bank's regime, he said.
(Editing by Robert Birsel)
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Report Blames Both U.S. and Pakistan for Errant Airstrike That Killed 24
New York Times By MATTHEW ROSENBERG December 22, 2011
KABUL, Afghanistan - Mistakes by both American and Pakistani forces led to airstrikes against Pakistani border posts that killed 24 Pakistani Army soldiers last month, according to the findings of a United States military investigation of the incident. The strikes sent the already fragile relationship between the allies into a tailspin, and the results of the investigation appeared unlikely to assuage Pakistani anger over the raid.
Even though it spread blame between both countries, the key finding of the investigation is likely to further enrage Pakistan: that the airstrikes were ultimately justified because Pakistani soldiers fired first on a joint team of Afghan and American special operations forces operating along the often poorly demarcated frontier between Afghanistan and Pakistan, said American and Western officials, who asked not to be identified because the report of the investigation had not yet been released.
Since the airstrikes, Pakistan has steadfastly insisted its forces did nothing wrong, and that they certainly did not fire the first shots. Rather, senior Pakistani military and civilian officials have openly accused the United States of knowingly striking the border posts. Officials in Pakistan have said they will accept nothing short of a complete apology from President Obama.
American officials had not planned to release the results of the investigation by the United States Central Command this week and were still redacting parts of it and determining what details could be publicized and what should remain classified, said a Western official in Kabul. But with word spreading in Washington about the report’s main findings, American officials in Islamabad, Washington and Kabul scrambled on Thursday to brief their Pakistani counterparts and try to limit the fallout before news of what it contained became public.
The American and Western officials said the report lays out Washington’s counter-narrative to the Pakistani accusations that their forces were intentionally and repeatedly targeted over the course of two hours after midnight on Nov. 26. Some elements of the report confirm what Pakistani officials have been saying about the airstrikes but others contradict the Pakistani account, the officials said.
“The message we’re trying to convey tonight is that were some pretty serious breakdowns all around,” said an American official in the region. “How does Pakistan react? We hope we can start moving forward.”
The report says that the joint Afghan-American patrol, which was operating in a remote and mountainous area between the Afghan province of Kunar and the Pakistani tribal area of Mohmand, came under machine gun and mortar fire from at least one of the Pakistani border posts sometime around midnight on Nov. 26, American and Western officials said. The American official said the Afghan and American special operations forces believed they were being attacked by militants, at least initially, and called for air support.
Why the Pakistanis were firing remains unclear, the American official said. But in the days after the airstrikes, another American official in Washington provided part of an explanation: the Pakistanis apparently had intelligence that the Taliban was planning to attack the border posts and the Pakistani soldiers may have mistaken the Afghan and American troopers for militants.
The United States military report lends credence to that theory: the officials said it finds that NATO did not inform Pakistan that the operation on the border was taking place, and thus the Pakistani soldiers would not have known to expect allied forces near their posts. NATO and Pakistani forces are supposed to inform each other when launching operations on the border precisely to avoid the kind of mistake that took place on Nov. 26.
The second American mistake came when the airstrikes were called in. The Americans apparently gave the Pakistani Army the wrong coordinates that were to be struck by Apache attack helicopters and an AC-130 gunship, the officials said.
It wasn’t immediately clear whether the Pakistanis cleared the strikes after getting the wrong coordinates. They have said they did not; regardless, the strikes began before their officers based at NATO coordination posts in Afghanistan had a chance to check with superiors in Pakistan, according to the Pakistani account of what took place.
But, as the report shows, even if Pakistan did clear the strikes, the posts still probably would have been hit because the Pakistanis had been given the wrong coordinates.
Another safeguard also failed, according to the report: Pakistan never told NATO it had established the border posts, which had been up for about three months, said a Western official in Kabul. Both sides are supposed to inform each other when setting up new positions along the border, another measure intended to avoid strikes against each other.
Whether any American service members will be disciplined in connection with the incident has not been decided, the American and Western officials said.
NATO’s Afghanistan headquarters and the United States Embassy in Kabul declined to comment on the investigation, referring queries to the Defense Department and State Department in Washington. Pakistani officials did not offer any immediate reaction.
But given the indignant Pakistani response to the raid — “They killed our sons and we can never forgive this,” said one senior Pakistani defense official in a recent interview, speaking anonymously because he still works with Americans — Washington was bracing for another round of recrimination, said the American and Western officials.
A ban on the shipment of NATO supplies through Pakistan, which was put in place after the strike, is expected to remain for some time, the officials said. NATO officials have said the blockade is not affecting operations because less than 30 percent of supplies for coalition forces in Afghanistan are currently shipped through Pakistan.
More damaging is the faltering military and counter-terror cooperation between Washington and Islamabad after a year of crises that began with the shooting of two Pakistanis by a CIA contractor in the city of Lahore. The two sides no longer conduct joint operations along the border, which they had started doing a few years ago, and intelligence-sharing on a range of threats from al Qaeda to lesser known Islamist militant groups has also fallen off, the American and Western officials said.
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U.S. And Pakistan Relations: From Bad To Worse
NPR By Julie McCarthy December 22, 2011
In Pakistan, transit routes for NATO supply trucks heading to Afghanistan remain shut. The CIA drone missile program has gone quiet in Pakistan's tribal area. Pakistan's government has called for a re-negotiation of its troubled relationship with the U.S.
All of this is fallout from an attack on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border last month in which NATO fire from helicopter gunships killed 24 Pakistani soldiers.
President Obama expressed condolences to the families of the Pakistani troops who died when NATO forces crossed into Pakistani territory and obliterated two border posts on Nov. 26. But the U.S. has not yet issued a formal apology, pending the outcome of an investigation.
Meanwhile, U.S. Ambassador Cameron Munter has been engaged in diplomatic damage control in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital.
"It was not intentional that this tragic accident took place," Munter said recently. "We'll make sure that we do everything we can on both sides of the border — Pakistanis, Americans and Afghans — to make sure something like that will never happen again."
But Pakistan's military brass says the attack was no accident. The generals say that Pakistani officers had established communications with NATO during the attack, and that the continuation of it was "blatant aggression."
"It was a slaughter. They continued doing it for more than an hour. So if someone says it was by mistake — we're not buying that," says Javed Ashraf Qazi, the former head of Pakistan's intelligence agency, ISI.
Army Chief Gen. Ashfaq Kayani has issued an order allowing troops to retaliate in the event of any future attack.
Qazi says the high command had no choice. "If troops perceive that we are sitting ducks and the Americans can come at will and hit us and go back, and our high command will not allow us to fire back, then that high command will lose all respect."
Anti-American Atmosphere
Pakistani militants and some clerics have banded together vowing to defend Pakistan from "outside aggression." Social commentator Pervez Hoodbhoy says that in such a hot anti-American climate, the army and military intelligence chiefs can no longer be seen as even remotely aligned with the U.S.
"They are afraid of being called American sympathizers, allies, agents or whatever," he says. "Particularly after the Osama bin Laden killing, they have now sought to distance themselves from the Americans by as big an amount as possible."
Gen. Kayani and spy director Shuja Pasha are deeply suspicious of American unilateralism of the sort exercised in bin Laden's killing. Both were humiliated by the secret U.S. raid.
But Mohammad Malick, Islamabad editor of the national daily The News, says a tough stance now over the NATO attack on the border posts at Salalah is restoring their tarnished image as guardians of the nation.
"The public sentiment, the killings, they have really caused a furor in the country," he says. "It should not be underestimated by any account. And Salalah in one way — ironically in one level — it was best thing that could have happened to the military."
Pakistan Cuts Cooperation
Pakistan's blockade of NATO trucks into Afghanistan has shut down half of all NATO supplies. And Pakistan continues to refuse to oblige the Americans in their Afghan strategy by pointedly not pursuing the Haqqani militant network that picks off NATO troops before retreating to bases inside Pakistan.
That has provoked accusations of Pakistani complicity. Analyst and newspaper editor Rashed Rahman says the central problem in the relationship is what he calls the "proxy war that the Pakistan military is waging through the Taliban in Afghanistan."
"That is the core issue. It's the unstated elephant in the room," he says. "So unless you get to grips with that, everything is fraught and liable to go through ups and downs."
Malick maintains that the army is not anti-American. But he says the cost of being an American ally has become too great.
"They realize that if they do what the Americans want them to do in the manner they want it done, in the long term, the consequences would be too great for us," he says. "We want the same things, but we know what can be and what can't be done."
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Afghan Army Increases to 180,000 Troops
TOLOnews.com Wednesday, 21 December 2011
Afghan armed forces now number 180,000 troops, Afghan Defence Ministry said on Wednesday.
As foreign forces are preparing to leave the country by the end of 2014, Afghan government has been trying to make sure it has enough troops to take over all security responsibilities.
A spokesman for the Afghan Defence Ministry, Gen. Zahir Azimi on Wednesday announced that the number of Afghan army forces has reached 180,000.
Mr Azimi added that the number is expected to increase to 195,000 by October next year.
He said Afghan army has had significant achievements and has been able to conduct 27 operations in different parts of the country. At least 50 insurgents have been killed and 360 others captured during the past one month.
The Afghan Ministry of Defence is optimistic that security will improve in the country with the increase in the number of Afghan army troops.
Mr Azimi says that insurgents have presently centred their activities in the eastern parts of the country.
"The enemy is concentrating more on the eastern parts at the moment. The situation has improved in some parts and we hope security will improve as we conduct more operations against insurgents," Gen. Azimi said.
The Ministry says that Afghan army is now 95% equipped and that it is able to take over security responsibilities inside the country. But Mr Azimi said in order to make Afghan army capable of defending the country internally and externally, the number of armed forces should be increased to 240,000.
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Soldiers just back from Iraq get new orders: Afghanistan
CNN By Chelsea J. Carter December 21, 2011
Atlanta - Soldiers who just returned from Iraq are among several thousand being ordered to Afghanistan in six months as part of a mission designed to beef up Afghan forces ahead of a planned 2014 U.S. military withdrawal, officials said.
News of the pending Afghanistan deployments came as families at bases across the country were celebrating the return in recent days of troops who turned off the lights at a number of U.S. bases ahead of an end-of-the-year deadline to leave Iraq.
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"We are glad that we have brought all soldiers back home in time for Christmas to spend with loved ones. We do have to put information out about an upcoming mission, though," the 4th Brigade Combat Team, 1st Armored Division, said Tuesday on its Facebook Page.
In the posting, the brigade said it was one of four selected to "support a Security Force Assistance Mission to Afghanistan in early summer."
"We just received initial planning orders so lots of details are unknown," it said. "...The mission is part of the transition from combat operations to advisory mission as we did in Iraq and is a sign of progress."
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Maj. Carla Thomas, a brigade spokeswoman, confirmed the validity of the Facebook announcement.
The new mission is part of an overall U.S. military exit strategy from Afghanistan that moves troops from a combat role to advise-and-assist positions that commanders and analysts say will significantly scale back operations ahead of President Barack Obama's self-imposed deadline to leave the country.
Earlier this year, the United States outlined its plan to withdraw its troops, beginning by pulling 33,000 "surge" troops deployed to help quell the violence by the end of 2012. The remaining 68,000 troops would be withdrawn by the end of 2014.
News of the deployments comes as the Obama administration pushes to accelerate the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, a plan that many military commanders have said is unreasonable in a country still trying to gain its security footing.
"I don't think we are going to turn around guys who spent time in Iraq and put them on planes to Afghanistan ... without there being a clear indication that the Obama administration wants to continue the acceleration of the withdrawal," said Bill Roggio, Editor of The Long War Journal & Senior Fellow at The Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
"U.S. commanders want to stop with the withdrawal of the 33,000 (surge troops.) They want to halt it."
Marine Corps Gen. John Allen, commander of the International Security Assistance Force, has said he would like to keep a U.S. "military presence" in Afghanistan beyond 2014 when NATO is scheduled to withdraw its forces. Allen suggested the presence could last as long as 2016 when the Afghan Air Force is completed.
Allen told reporters last week there is "no daylight" between him and the White House on this idea. Allen said he wants to shift the U.S. presence to an advisory capacity in the coming months and then continue to do that mission after 2014.
Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has asked Allen to review the counterinsurgency strategy and determine what changes are needed. Allen said he has to complete the review before he can decide on the rate of drawdown of current U.S. force levels.
The new mission in Afghanistan somewhat mirrors the U.S. exit strategy in Iraq, which used advise and assist teams to improve counterterrorism operations and train security forces.
Just like in Iraq, small teams of American troops will work and live among security forces, and will help coordinate military operations, according to comments Allen made to reporters last week.
In its Facebook posting, the 4th Brigade Combat Team said those who would be deployed in advise-and-assist roles would be senior enlisted personnel, ranging from master sergeants to colonels.
The deployment was expected to last nine months, though it was unclear how many members of the brigade will deploy.
Also being deployed are troops from the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division from Fort Stewart, Georgia; the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division from Fort Carson, Colorado; and the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Kentucky.
The brigade deployments were first reported this week by Stars and Stripes, a newspaper that caters to military personnel.
Under an Army policy, troops are given one month of dwell time for every month they are deployed. In the case of 1st Armored Division's brigade, which returned in December after less than six months in Iraq, its soldiers could be sent to Afghanistan as early as May.
The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a CNN request for comment. Messages left early Wednesday by CNN at public affairs offices at the 3rd Infantry Division, the 4th Infantry Division and the 101st Airborne Division were not immediately returned.
Reactions at Fort Bliss were mixed with some soldiers and families telling CNN by telephone that they were resigned to the specter of an Afghanistan deployment, while others said they were surprised elements of the brigade would be deployed so soon after returning from Iraq.
None of the soldiers or their family members were willing to be quoted, citing possible repercussions over speaking to the media without prior approval.
Responses to the brigade's Facebook post, though, revealed the feelings of spouses and family members.
"All we can do is enjoy the time we have with them," one person wrote.
Another wrote: "Not even home a week. How sad."
Questions remain about the stability of Afghan forces, with some questioning whether an Iraq-style exit strategy can work in Afghanistan.
"Given that we are 10 years into this, my confidence level is pretty low that we can turn the Afghan forces around," Roggio said.
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The U.S.-led war in Afghanistan began October 7, 2001, with an air campaign that was followed within weeks by a ground invasion. President Barack Obama has called it "the longest-running war in the nation's history".
As the United States turned its attention toward Iraq, insurgent violence in Afghanistan flared against Afghan civilians and security forces as well as the U.S. and its coalition partners.
In 2009, President Obama authorized a surge of 33,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan to combat the violence.
Earlier this year, the president announced a plan to withdraw its troops. The move was followed by withdrawal announcements by most of the NATO nations. CNN's Barbara Starr contributed to this report.
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