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U.S. to elevate Special Operations forces’ role in Afghanistan
By Greg Jaffe, The Washington Post Sun Feb 5, 5:10 pm ET
The U.S. military is planning to elevate the role of Special Operations forces in Afghanistan as it shifts away from a combat focus to a mission that places greater emphasis on advising Afghan forces and raids to kill top insurgent leaders, senior U.S. officials said.
Pakistan vows to help peace efforts in Afghanistan
By Nasir Jaffry AFP via Yahoo! News - Sun Feb 5, 1:12 pm ET
Pakistan will support every effort to promote reconciliation in Afghanistan, a senior government official said ahead of Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani's visit to Qatar Monday to discuss peace efforts.
Pakistan seeks a place at Qatar Taliban talks
Financial Times By Matthew Green, Farhan Bokhari and Michael Peel February 4, 2012
Islamabad, Abu Dhabi - Pakistan’s premier will visit Qatar on Monday for talks about the Gulf State’s push to help the US and Afghan government start peace talks with the Taliban.
Car bomb kills nine in Afghan city Kandahar
KABUL (Reuters) - A car bomb in the south Afghan city of Kandahar killed at least nine people and wounded 19 on Sunday, the presidential palace said in a statement.
Afghan Taliban deny Mullah Omar wrote to White House
Reuters Sat Feb 4, 2012
KABUL - The Afghan Taliban denied on Saturday that the group's leader Mullah Omar wrote to the White House last year.
In Afghan War, Officer Becomes a Whistle-Blower
By SCOTT SHANE February 5, 2012 The New York Times
WASHINGTON — On his second yearlong deployment to Afghanistan, Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis traveled 9,000 miles, patrolled with American troops in eight provinces and returned in October of last year with a fervent conviction that the war was going disastrously and that senior military leaders had not leveled with the American public.
Obama administration’s Afghanistan endgame gets off to bumpy start
By Karen DeYoung, Washington Post - Sun Feb 5, 2:41 pm ET
With war fatigue growing and an election looming, the Obama administration has bumpily embarked on its endgame in Afghanistan.
Panetta Urges International Community to Fund Afghan Forces
TOLOnews.com Sunday, 05 February 2012
The US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta on Saturday urged the international community to help pay for strong Afghan security troops despite worldwide economic pressure.
Military comeback a distant dream for Afghan Taliban
Reuters By Rob Taylor Sun Feb 5, 2012
KABUL - A secret NATO report showing the strength of confidence among the Afghan Taliban is raising concerns from Kabul to Washington that the militant group might overrun the country again when foreign combat forces finally leave.
In Afghanistan, a new approach to teaching history: Leave out the wars
Washington Post By Kevin Sieff Sunday, February 5, 2012
KABUL - In a country where the recent past has unfolded like a war epic, officials think they have found a way to teach Afghan history without widening the fractures between long-quarreling ethnic and political groups: leave out the past four decades.
Avalanche kills 4 Afghans, wounds 6
FAIZABAD, Afghanistan, Feb. 5 (Xinhua) -- Four people lost their lives and six others sustained injuries as an avalanche hit some villages in the mountainous Arghistan district, Badakhshan province, 315 km northeast of Kabul on Saturday, an official said Sunday.
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U.S. to elevate Special Operations forces’ role in Afghanistan
By Greg Jaffe, The Washington Post Sun Feb 5, 5:10 pm ET
The U.S. military is planning to elevate the role of Special Operations forces in Afghanistan as it shifts away from a combat focus to a mission that places greater emphasis on advising Afghan forces and raids to kill top insurgent leaders, senior U.S. officials said.
Initial steps in that direction are likely to take place in the next few months, when the Pentagon is expected to create a new two-star command that would oversee the entire Special Operations effort in Afghanistan. The new command would be led by Maj. Gen. Tony Thomas, the deputy commander of the military’s Joint Special Operations Command, which oversees the military’s elite counterterrorism forces around the world.
The new Special Operations command in Afghanistan could eventually take over responsibility for the day-to-day war effort as U.S. troop levels drop in the country and as the United States moves away from its traditional combat role to an effort focused primarily on training and advising Afghan forces.
The plan, which is still being considered, would mark a major change in the war effort, built around big American conventional units working alongside Afghan army and police forces to clear areas of insurgents and reestablish Afghan governance. In many aspects, it resembles a plan advocated by Vice President Biden in 2009 to focus U.S. efforts on training Afghan forces and killing high-level insurgent leaders.
Biden’s proposal was largely rejected because U.S. military commanders said they needed additional conventional troops to push the Taliban out of major population centers and reverse its momentum.
Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta referred in broad terms to some of the changes last week when he said that the United States hopes to end its combat mission in Afghanistan by the middle of next year, more than a year earlier than scheduled.
Although Thomas is expected to go to Afghanistan as early as this summer to lead the new Special Operations command, senior U.S. officials cautioned that there has not been a final decision to send him.
The next step in the plan, which involves consolidating all NATO military daily operations of the war under a command led by a Special Operations officer, is still the subject of broad debate in the Pentagon and White House, U.S. officials said.
“We are talking about a stair-step approach, and we haven’t even taken the first step in the process,” said a U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the administration’s planning.
The move to shift more of the war effort in Afghanistan to Special Operations units was first reported online Saturday by the New York Times.
There is still broad debate within the military and the White House over how quickly the United States can shift away from its combat mission and turn over primary responsibility for security to Afghan forces that are still weak.
Although Panetta said the United States hopes to end its combat mission in Afghanistan by mid-2013, in some parts of eastern Afghanistan, conventional U.S. units could still be involved in heavy combat through 2014 and even into 2015, according to senior military officials in Washington and Kabul.
In those areas, mountainous terrain and insurgent havens across the border in Pakistan have made it difficult for U.S. and Afghan units to push Taliban fighters out of remote valleys and hold on to gains once the enemy fighters are dislodged.
The Obama administration has said it will bring home about 22,000 troops by September, cutting the overall size of the American force to 68,000. There will be heavy pressure on military commanders to continue the troop reductions into 2013.
Currently, the Afghan forces partner with similarly sized U.S. units in areas where the fighting is heaviest. U.S. forces patrol regularly alongside Afghan units and take a leading role when insurgents launch attacks.
As American troop levels drop, U.S. commanders will by necessity have to rely more heavily on Afghan units to operate with minimal support from big, conventional Army and Marine units.
Senior military officials said they will begin pairing up small, U.S.-led advisory teams with the more capable Afghan forces this spring. The full complement of U.S. advisory teams should be in place by early 2013.
The new focus could rely on American Special Forces soldiers to fill out some of the advisory teams in the most violent areas of Afghanistan. The Special Forces troops would continue to advise and mentor elite Afghan units and the Afghan local police, a program in which villages form units to defend themselves. The primary mission of the Army’s Special Forces, also known as the Green Berets, is to mentor, train and fight alongside indigenous forces. The Special Forces teams also have the ability to marshal firepower from American warplanes for Afghan forces.
Even with a heavy complement of Special Forces troops, the United States also would have to rely on significant numbers of conventional soldiers to fill out the advisory teams.
The new plans being weighed by the Pentagon and the Obama administration would also keep large numbers of elite U.S. counterterrorism troops in Afghanistan to hunt the remaining terrorist threats and keep heavy pressure on insurgent leaders.
Thomas, who is expected to lead the consolidated Special Operations effort in Afghanistan, has extensive experience overseeing counterterrorism operations around the world. He also served in Iraq as an assistant division commander in the Army’s 1st Armored Division and is well known in the regular Army.
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Pakistan vows to help peace efforts in Afghanistan
By Nasir Jaffry AFP via Yahoo! News - Sun Feb 5, 1:12 pm ET
Pakistan will support every effort to promote reconciliation in Afghanistan, a senior government official said ahead of Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani's visit to Qatar Monday to discuss peace efforts.
Gilani's trip comes after the Taliban last month said they planned to set up a political office in Qatar ahead of possible talks with the United States.
"There are certain ideas and suggestions on Afghan reconciliation and when Prime Minister Gilani meets Qatar's leadership, these will certainly come under discussion," the official, privy to developments on the issue, told AFP Sunday.
"Americans have been briefing us on all developments aimed at pushing forward the peace process in Afghanistan and we have clearly told them that Islamabad strictly adheres to a policy of non-interference," the official, who wished to remain anonymous, said.
"We are ready to support every effort and a process that is Afghan-led and involves all factions," he said, adding "it is important to engage all Afghan factions including Taliban in the process to achieve a lasting peace".
"We have no favourites in Afghanistan and strongly believe that all Afghan factions have to be on board and agree on a certain formula", the official stressed.
"The only favourite that we have is peace and stability in Afghanistan."
Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar during a visit to Kabul last week rejected accusations that her country was secretly supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan.
The Taliban have also denied plans for peace talks with the Afghan government in Saudi Arabia.
The statements came as a leaked NATO report charged that Pakistan's security services were backing the Taliban, who consider victory inevitable once Western combat troops leave Afghanistan in 2014.
Asked how Pakistan viewed the Taliban's announcement on setting up an office in Qatar, the official said "now they have an address and all those wanting peace can have a contact."
Afghanistan has given its blessing to the move, but Kabul, wary of being sidelined in talks between the insurgents and Washington, has insisted on a central role in any negotiations.
Relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan are often tense. The Kabul government has accused Islamabad in the past of supporting the Taliban and sabotaging all efforts to launch peace negotiations.
Pakistan's support is therefore seen as key to forging peace in the country.
The official said Pakistan did not think it was being left out of the process.
"There is nothing of the sort and we did not gather such an impression of being left out from anywhere," he said.
Asked how Pakistan viewed the possibility of Saudi Arabia as a possible facilitator in the process, the official said Islamabad was not fixed on a particular country taking the role.
"The end result should be a solution and peace in Afghanistan," he said.
"Pakistan welcomes any effort that is made from anywhere to push forward the peace process."
Meanwhile, Gilani said during a televised media discussion in Islamabad on Sunday that it was in Pakistan's interest to see a stable Afghanistan.
"We are ready to support any reconciliation process that is Afghan-led," he said.
But analysts believe that any role for Pakistan in the process is possible only after it improves ties with the United States.
"Pakistan will have to improve relations with the US. Qatar is a facilitator of the dialogue between the US and the Taliban and it cannot get a seat for Pakistan at the negotiations table," analyst Hasan Askari told AFP.
Pakistan must have the confidence of the US and Afghanistan to become an active player in the dialogue process, he added.
Commenting on Taliban's decision to open a political office in Qatar, he said, "It will be a very useful contact point if it is an extension of Mullah Omar's system".
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Pakistan seeks a place at Qatar Taliban talks
Financial Times By Matthew Green, Farhan Bokhari and Michael Peel February 4, 2012
Islamabad, Abu Dhabi - Pakistan’s premier will visit Qatar on Monday for talks about the Gulf State’s push to help the US and Afghan government start peace talks with the Taliban.
Qatar aims to play host to a planned Taliban office to make it easier for the Afghan government and US officials to make contact with insurgents. Washington wants to negotiate an end the fighting in Afghanistan before the vast majority of foreign troops leave by the end of 2014 and US officials have been urging Pakistan to support its efforts.
Yusuf Raza Gilani, Pakistan’s prime minister, will travel to Doha to discuss talks with the Taliban and other issues, Pakistani officials said on Sunday.
Western officials have been encouraged by the security hierarchy’s decision to allow Taliban representatives based in Pakistan to travel to Qatar. Pakistan’s intelligence agencies, which acknowledge maintaining contacts within the insurgency, have quashed past attempts by Taliban commanders to reach out to the Afghan government without their go-ahead.
“The visit is pretty much about the negotiations. Pakistan wants to make certain, we are not left out of the Afghan process which is due to take place in Qatar,” said an official in Pakistan’s foreign ministry.
Mr Gilani was due to be accompanied by Hina Rabbani Khar, Pakistan’s foreign minister, who visited Kabul on Wednesday to try to repair a sharp deterioration in ties triggered by the murder of Burhanuddin Rabbani, the former Afghan president, in September.
Rabbani had been the head of a High Peace Council mandated by the Afghan government to make contacts with insurgents. Afghan officials blamed the ISI, Pakistan’s main spy agency, for the murder, though the accusations were more a reflection of entrenched suspicions rooted in Pakistan’s history of backing Afghan insurgents than hard evidence.
Mrs Khar said Pakistan was prepared to do whatever Afghanistan asked, to help the government foster dialogue with insurgents, though she warned that the start of negotiations proper was still “miles away.”
Hopes of starting talks have been complicated by the Afghan government’s fears that it might be sidelined in negotiations.
Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan’s president, recalled his ambassador to Qatar in December to register his concern that his government was being left out of US-Taliban talks.
Afghan officials have floated the idea that Saudi Arabia – a rival of Qatar – might serve as a facilitator, raising the prospect of more diplomatic wrangling.
Pakistan’s security forces supported the emergence of the Islamist militia as a proxy force in Afghanistan in the mid-1990s and experts say that they continue to provide a degree of strategic direction and logistical support to the movement. But Pakistan’s relationship with the Taliban has evolved since the 1990s, with ties between Taliban leaders and their handlers in the ISI strained by mutual mistrust.
A US military report based on interrogations of some 4,000 Taliban and al-Qaeda detainees that was leaked last week suggested that the ISI continues to play a significant role in steering Taliban strategy – though the authors did not find significant evidence Pakistan is providing funding or weapons.
Pakistan’s military, which dominates policy-making on Afghanistan, says it wants to see stability in its neighbourhood, though it remains far from certain that the army could usher the Taliban into a deal, even assuming it believes such an outcome suits its interests.
“Among the Taliban, not everyone is on board and there are deep divisions,” said a Pakistani intelligence official. “Many Taliban see the US practically losing the war. Why would they want to negotiate when they also see themselves in a position of increasing strength?”
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Car bomb kills nine in Afghan city Kandahar
KABUL (Reuters) - A car bomb in the south Afghan city of Kandahar killed at least nine people and wounded 19 on Sunday, the presidential palace said in a statement.
The Kandahar province's media office said five police officers and two civilians were among the dead.
"(The) explosion took place near a busy shopping area of (the) city," it said on its official Twitter feed.
Last year, fighting in Afghanistan killed more than 3,000 civilians, the United Nations said on Saturday, the fifth year in a row that the number of civilian deaths has risen.
Suicide attacks carried out by insurgents and roadside mines were the biggest killers of non-combatants, the U.N. report said.
"Once more, enemies of the people of Afghanistan showed, by launching such a terrorist attack in a crowded place in Kandahar city, their enmity toward the innocent people of Afghanistan," President Hamid Karzai said in the palace's statement.
(Reporting by Daniel Magnowski and Mirwais Harooni; Editing by Nick Macfie)
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Afghan Taliban deny Mullah Omar wrote to White House
Reuters Sat Feb 4, 2012
KABUL - The Afghan Taliban denied on Saturday that the group's leader Mullah Omar wrote to the White House last year.
The White House received a letter in 2011 which purported to come directly from Mullah Omar, asking the United States to deliver prisoners whose transfer is now central to American efforts to broker peace in Afghanistan, an Obama administration official said Friday.
"Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan rejects this baseless rumor with the strongest of words," a statement on the Islamist group's website said, using the name by which the Taliban often calls itself.
The letter, intended for President Barack Obama, reportedly expressed impatience that the White House had not transferred five former senior Taliban officials out of Guantanamo Bay military prison.
The White House itself was "skeptical" the letter was actually from Mullah Omar, the official said, though others within the administration believed it was authentic.
"Hoping for surrender from the Afghan people is an unrealistic wish and a goal which could not be achieved by America in the past ten years," said Saturday's statement, attributed to Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid.
The Taliban last month said it would open a political office in Qatar, suggesting the group may be willing to engage in negotiations.
After more than a decade of war, Washington and its allies are announcing plans to steadily withdraw their troops amid doubts about the ability of the Afghan government and its nascent security forces to confront ongoing violence.
This week, U.S. Defense Secretary surprised Kabul by suggesting the American combat mission could end in 2013, well ahead of the end-2014 deadline agree with Afghan President Hamid Karzai for the exit of foreign combat troops.
"The U.S. is committed to the Lisbon timetable, which means that combat operations by international and Afghan forces are fully resourced and capable as necessary until the end of 2014 and beyond," U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan Ryan Crocker said in a statement Saturday.
"This is not a change in policy or strategy but recognition of the progress we all agreed to achieve in Lisbon."
(Reporting by Daniel Magnowski; Editing by Jonathan Thatcher)
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In Afghan War, Officer Becomes a Whistle-Blower
By SCOTT SHANE February 5, 2012 The New York Times
WASHINGTON — On his second yearlong deployment to Afghanistan, Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis traveled 9,000 miles, patrolled with American troops in eight provinces and returned in October of last year with a fervent conviction that the war was going disastrously and that senior military leaders had not leveled with the American public.
Since enlisting in the Army in 1985, he said, he had repeatedly seen top commanders falsely dress up a dismal situation. But this time, he would not let it rest. So he consulted with his pastor at McLean Bible Church in Virginia, where he sings in the choir. He watched his favorite movie, “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” one more time, drawing inspiration from Jimmy Stewart’s role as the extraordinary ordinary man who takes on a corrupt establishment.
And then, late last month, Colonel Davis, 48, began an unusual one-man campaign of military truth-telling. He wrote two reports, one unclassified and the other classified, summarizing his observations on the candor gap with respect to Afghanistan. He briefed four members of Congress and a dozen staff members, spoke with a reporter for The New York Times, sent his reports to the Defense Department’s inspector general — and only then informed his chain of command that he had done so.
“How many more men must die in support of a mission that is not succeeding?“ Colonel Davis asks in an article summarizing his views titled “Truth, Lies and Afghanistan: How Military Leaders Have Let Us Down.” It was published online Sunday in The Armed Forces Journal, the nation’s oldest independent periodical on military affairs. “No one expects our leaders to always have a successful plan,” he says in the article. “But we do expect — and the men who do the living, fighting and dying deserve — to have our leaders tell us the truth about what’s going on.”
Colonel Davis says his experience has caused him to doubt reports of progress in the war from numerous military leaders, including David H. Petraeus, who commanded the troops in Afghanistan before becoming the director of the Central Intelligence Agency in June.
Last March, for example, Mr. Petraeus, then an Army general, testified before the Senate that the Taliban’s momentum had been “arrested in much of the country” and that progress was “significant,” though fragile, and “on the right azimuth” to allow Afghan forces to take the lead in combat by the end of 2014.
Colonel Davis fiercely disputes such assertions and says few of the troops believe them. At the same time, he is acutely aware of the chasm in stature that separates him from those he is criticizing, and he has no illusions about the impact his public stance may have on his career.
“I’m going to get nuked,” he said in an interview last month.
But his bosses’ initial response has been restrained. They told him that while they disagreed with him, he would not face “adverse action,” he said.
Col. James E. Hutton, chief of media relations for the Army, declined to comment specifically about Colonel Davis, but he rejected the idea that military leaders had been anything but truthful about Afghanistan.
“We are a values-based organization, and the integrity of what we publish and what we say is something we take very seriously,” he said.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Petraeus, Jennifer Youngblood of the C.I.A., said he “has demonstrated that he speaks truth to power in each of his leadership positions over the past several years. His record should stand on its own, as should LTC Davis’ analysis.”
If the official reaction to Colonel Davis’s campaign has been subdued, it may be partly because he has recruited a few supporters among the war skeptics on Capitol Hill.
“For Colonel Davis to go out on a limb and help us to understand what’s happening on the ground, I have the greatest admiration for him,” said Representative Walter B. Jones, Republican of North Carolina, who has met with Colonel Davis twice and read his reports.
Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, one of four senators who met with Colonel Davis despite what he called “a lot of resistance from the Pentagon,” said the colonel was a valuable witness because his extensive travels and midlevel rank gave him access to a wide range of soldiers.
Moreover, Colonel Davis’s doubts about reports of progress in the war are widely shared, if not usually voiced in public by officers on duty. Just last week, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California and chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said at a hearing that she was “concerned by what appears to be a disparity” between public testimony about progress in Afghanistan and “the bleaker description” in a classified National Intelligence Estimate produced in December, which was described in news reports as “sobering” and “dire.”
Those words would also describe Colonel Davis’s account of what he saw in Afghanistan, the latest assignment in a military career that has included clashes with some commanders, but glowing evaluations from others. (“His maturity, tenacity and judgment can be counted on in even the hardest of situations, and his devotion to mission accomplishment is unmatched by his peers,” says an evaluation from May that concludes that he has “unlimited potential.”)
Colonel Davis, a son of a high school football coach in Dallas and who is known as Danny, served two years as an Army private before returning to Texas Tech and completing the Reserve Officer Training Corps program. He served in Germany and fought in the first Iraq war before joining the Reserve and working civilian jobs, including a year as a member of the Senate staff.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, he returned to active duty, serving a tour in Iraq as well as the two in Afghanistan and spending 15 months working on Future Combat Systems, an ambitious Army program to produce high-tech vehicles linked to drones and sensors. On that program, too, he said, commanders kept promising success despite ample evidence of trouble. The program was shut down in 2009 after an investment of billions of dollars.
In his recent tour in Afghanistan, Colonel Davis represented the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force, created to bypass a cumbersome bureaucracy to make sure the troops quickly get the gear they need.
He spoke with about 250 soldiers, from 19-year-old privates to division commanders, as well as Afghan security officials and civilians, he said. From the Americans, he heard contempt for the perceived cowardice and double-dealing of their Afghan counterparts. From Afghans, he learned of unofficial nonaggression pacts between Afghanistan’s security forces and Taliban fighters.
When he was in rugged Kunar Province, an Afghan police officer visiting his parents was kidnapped by the Taliban and killed. “That was in visual range of an American base,” he said. “Their influence didn’t even reach as far as they could see.”
Some of the soldiers he interviewed were later killed, a fact that shook him and that he mentions in videos he shot in Afghanistan and later posted on YouTube. At home, he pored over the statements of military leaders, including General Petraeus. He found them at odds with what he had seen, with classified intelligence reports and with casualty statistics.
“You can spin all kinds of stuff,” Colonel Davis said. “But you can’t spin the fact that more men are getting blown up every year.”
Colonel Davis can come across as strident, labeling as lies what others might call wishful thinking. Matthew M. Aid, a historian who examines Afghanistan in his new book “Intel Wars,” says that while there is a “yawning gap” between Pentagon statements and intelligence assessments, “it’s oversimplified to say the top brass are out-and-out lying. They are just too close to the subject.”
But Martin L. Cook, who teaches military ethics at the Naval War College, says Colonel Davis has identified a hazard that is intrinsic to military culture, in which a can-do optimism can be at odds with the strictest candor when a mission is failing.
“You’ve trained people to try to be successful even when half their buddies are dead and they’re almost out of ammo,” he said. “It’s very hard for them to say, ‘can’t do.’ ”
Mr. Cook said it was rare for an officer of Colonel Davis’s modest rank to “decide that he knows better” and to go to Congress and the news media.
“It may be an act of moral courage,” he said. “But he’s gone outside channels, and he’s taking his chances on what happens to him.”
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Obama administration’s Afghanistan endgame gets off to bumpy start
By Karen DeYoung, Washington Post - Sun Feb 5, 2:41 pm ET
With war fatigue growing and an election looming, the Obama administration has bumpily embarked on its endgame in Afghanistan.
In recent weeks, closed-door strategizing over Taliban peace talks, the pace of NATO’s combat handover and withdrawal, and the future of U.S. relations with Afghanistan and Pakistan have suddenly become part of the public and political debate.
But revelations about plans already in motion have emerged sooner than the administration has been prepared to explain them, complicating efforts to turn them into a coherent whole and build support.
“There are people at every piece of this — the Taliban, Islamabad, Kabul and Washington” — who object to or are trying to influence elements of the emerging strategy, a senior administration official said, speaking on condition of anonymity to talk more candidly. “They use leaking as a tool.”
Last week, days after French President Nicolas Sarkozy proposed transitioning combat responsibilities to Afghan forces a full year ahead of NATO’s schedule, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta told reporters that the administration anticipated doing just that.
U.S. and Afghan military forces on the battlefield responded with open concern that they weren’t ready for an early turnover. At the White House, aides grumbled that only President Obama could announce a new timetable and that he wouldn’t be addressing the issue until a NATO summit in May.
Panetta’s comments also poured fuel on an ongoing debate within the administration’s national security team over the right balance between talking to the Taliban and fighting them, even as the troop-heavy counterinsurgency argument that won Obama’s approval two years ago has shifted in favor of those who advocated a sleeker counterterrorism force.
Some senior officials privately echoed Republican critics, who argue that an earlier end to the combat mission — or even public discussion of one — would weaken the administration’s hand as State Department and National Security Council officials prepare for another meeting with Taliban representatives this month in Qatar, and as the military girds for this summer’s fighting season.
With the election less than a year away, the administration has denied any domestic political calculus. Officials have said, however, that they think Americans are tired of the financial and human cost of the war and would welcome an exit strategy so long as they believed it ensured U.S. national security.
Opinion surveys show strong support for an early end to the Afghan war, and the GOP presidential field has failed to find a coherent message in opposition.
Nonetheless, the welter of revelations over talks with the Taliban has angered lawmakers on Capitol Hill. In appearances before Congress last week, Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. and CIA Director David H. Petraeus were pressed on the divergence between administration public claims of major battlefield progress, and classified intelligence assessments describing a stronger and more confident Taliban fighting force.
Senators from both parties expressed concern during a classified White House briefing Tuesday on the proposed transfer of five Taliban leaders detained at Guantanamo as part of a peace deal. The administration, which is required to give Congress 30 days’ notice before moving a prisoner, had previously classified all five as too dangerous to leave the U.S. military prison in Cuba.
“Given the fact that after the negotiations started, [the Taliban] were committing acts of political assassination to undermine all of the work, all of the sacrifice of the United States military and intelligence forces on the ground . . . some of us might get a little cranky about what we’re doing when we talk about reconciliation” with the insurgents, Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told Petraeus at a Thursday hearing.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton made clear Saturday she did not intend to clear up the confusion. “I am not going to go into any details about what we are or are not prepared to do, because we are just at the beginning of this process of exploration whether or not there is an opportunity to bring about an end to the conflict through a political solution,” Clinton told reporters in Munich, where she and Panetta were attending an international security conference.
“There will continue to be all kinds of speculation about what is or is not happening,” Clinton said.
Clinton, considered a relative hard-liner on the military side of the Afghan equation, has also been at the forefront in pushing for Taliban talks as part of a strategy she has called “fight, talk, build.” The White House plans to seek NATO agreement on a comprehensive way forward in May.
“We’re trying to meld the military and political sides into one policy,” said a second senior administration official. “There’s not less fighting; they’re fighting as much as possible. But the talking is happening at the same time.”
“On the political track, there’s a hugely realistic view that this thing has a 7 or 8 percent chance of succeeding. There’s no sense that we’re going to put all our eggs in this basket,” this official said of negotiations.
Since details of the talks emerged in December, critics and complications have far outnumbered supporters. A tentative deal to allow the so-called Quetta Shura, the Taliban umbrella organization headed by Mohammad Omar, to open a negotiating office in Qatar was set aside when President Hamid Karzai refused to endorse it.
Other elements of the agreement included the transfer of the five Guantanamo Bay prisoners to house arrest in Qatar. For their part, U.S. officials insisted the Taliban issue a statement renouncing international terrorism and endorsing the legitimacy of the Afghan government.
Karzai has since given his blessing to U.S. talks and the Taliban’s Qatar office. But presidential aides have continued to denounce the U.S.-Taliban meetings and said the administration was working behind Kabul’s back. U.S. officials said they were engaged only in developing “confidence-building measures” to prepare the ground for direct negotiations between Karzai's government and the Taliban.
U.S. and Afghan officials separately held meetings with Hezb-e-Islami, a separate Afghan insurgent group. The group’s leader, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, told the BBC last week that talks with the Taliban outside the country would fail unless all factions were included.
Karzai aides have said he was thinking of starting his own negotiations with the Taliban in Saudi Arabia. Despite their own strained bilateral relations, the Afghan and Pakistani governments found common cause in feeling cut out of the U.S. talks, and Islamabad announced high-level visits to both Kabul and Qatar.
Pakistani officials have said negotiations will fail unless “all groups” are included, referring to the Haqqani network of militants that is Islamabad’s favored faction.
The Taliban, which has surprised administration officials by publicly acknowledging the talks, angrily denied a report Friday that Omar wrote to President Obama last summer to complain about their slow pace. U.S. officials said the unsigned missive was handed to administration negotiators by Mohammed Tayeb al-Agha, Omar’s representative in the talks.
Last month, Marc Grossman, the administration’s diplomatic point man for Afghanistan and Pakistan, traveled to Kabul to ensure Karzai’s support and to issue public statements reiterating the terrorism denunciation that is the Taliban’s part of any initial bargain.
Karzai then embarked on a tour of European governments, while Grossman traveled to Qatar, where he met with Taliban representatives who have already set up residence there in anticipation of the office they hope to open. After the meeting, Grossman stopped in Rome to brief Karzai on the talks. Karzai flew to Paris and endorsed Sarkozy’s call for an early end to NATO combat operations.
The administration says no military decisions will be made before the NATO summit. On the negotiating front, it interprets the myriad moving parts as progress. “A year ago,” the first senior official said, “nobody was talking about a peace process. You have to say that today, lots of people are talking about an Afghan peace process. No one knows how all this will turn out.”
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Panetta Urges International Community to Fund Afghan Forces
TOLOnews.com Sunday, 05 February 2012
The US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta on Saturday urged the international community to help pay for strong Afghan security troops despite worldwide economic pressure.
US is spending around $12 billion a year to train the Afghan security troops, which is expected to rise to 352,000 men to take over security when Nato combat forces withdraw by the end of 2014.
"To sustain sufficient security, the Afghan security forces require adequate financial support," Mr Panetta said.
The United States has predicted that the annual price tag of training and equipping Afghan security forces in coming years will be around $6 billion.
The US wants the international community to contribute $1 billion per year after 2014 in addition to the United States' assistance.
Meanwhile, the British Defence Secretary Philip Hammond has said that Nato ministers would consider two critical questions: "What should be the long term size of the Afghan security forces and how are we going to share the cost of supporting that between different members of the international community. Those are discussions we have started here and we will continue at Chicago."
The two-day meeting in Brussels of ministers from Nato's 28 nations and 22 other countries taking part in the war in Afghanistan is meant to pave the way for a Nato summit in May in Chicago.
The Afghan army and police are scheduled to grow to more than 350,000 members by 2014. But some have proposed that the force can be safely cut in order to reduce its cost.
The long-term size of the Afghan force and cost of maintaining it will be a key topic at a Nato summit in Chicago in May.
Five days ago the US Defence Minister had said that the United States hoped to end its combat mission in Afghanistan by the middle of next year.
The timetable described by US Defence Minister appeared to be the first time the United States has said it would shift into a supporting role, training and advising Afghan troops, by next year.
His remarks came as France also said that it will end combat mission in Afghanistan by the end of 2013.
But Nato chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen on Thursday said that Nato will stand by its previously agreed plan to wind down operation in Afghanistan by the end of 2014 with any changes to the schedule coordinated with allies.
The US has around 90,000 troops in Afghanistan, fighting insurgents. It has lost 1,890 soldiers in the Afghan war since 2001.
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Military comeback a distant dream for Afghan Taliban
Reuters By Rob Taylor Sun Feb 5, 2012
KABUL - A secret NATO report showing the strength of confidence among the Afghan Taliban is raising concerns from Kabul to Washington that the militant group might overrun the country again when foreign combat forces finally leave.
But analysts doubt the militants, who rose from the ashes of Afghanistan's civil war, will be able to again race into the capital in pick-up trucks, hang their opponents in public and once more impose their austere brand of Islam on the country.
Although still much feared, experts say they don't have the military capability to seize control of the whole country when NATO combat troops withdraw in 2014.
Despite the bold predictions of Taliban detainees whose opinions formed the basis of the NATO report, which was leaked last week, circumstances have changed substantially. A partial comeback appears to be the best the Taliban can hope for.
"When they ruled before, many people had fled Afghanistan. There was no young generation. Without much fighting, they captured 90 percent of Afghanistan. But now the situation has completely changed," said Waheed Mujhda, Kabul-based expert on the Taliban.
"They accept that the time has changed. They accept that it's impossible for one party to capture all Afghanistan and rule all over Afghanistan."
The Taliban, ousted after a U.S. invasion in 2001, was able to sweep to power in 1995 partly because it was able to exploit the chaos gripping Afghanistan in the years following the end of the failed Soviet occupation.
DIFFICULT TO TOPPLE GOVERNMENT
The Afghan army and security forces may still be deeply flawed, but their mere size would make it difficult for the Taliban to simply topple the government when NATO troops go.
With an estimated 25,000 fighters at the most, the Taliban is hugely outnumbered by NATO and Afghan forces.
Its budget too is miniscule, put at just $150 million a year. By contrast, the United States has spent some $500 billion on its 10-year war there.
"The government is very fragile but we have to keep in mind it is supported by a 250,000 strong security apparatus ... which is also supported by the international community and these two big elements were missing when the Taliban seized the country in the mid-90s," said Pakistani security analyst Imtiaz Gul.
Without tanks and fighter planes, the Taliban could find itself battling government forces -- and remaining Western special forces - for years.
And a survey by The Asia Foundation showed that the proportion of respondents who say they had some level of sympathy with the motives of armed opposition groups reached its lowest level last year.
Also standing in the way would be the threat of a renewed civil war from the Taliban's old ethnic foes, a small army of Western advisors likely to remain after 2014, and the opposition of many ordinary Afghans.
A surge in U.S. and NATO troop numbers that began in 2010 has suppressed the Taliban on the open battlefield, forcing the insurgency last year to turn to assassinations and high-profile attacks in Kabul to regain a psychological advantage.
Taliban commanders still speak of waging jihad until Islamic rule is restored. But some militants are starting to long for a peaceful end to Afghanistan's years of conflict.
"There are fighters who had suffered losses, lost their family members in fighting and became homeless who want a peaceful solution to the long war," said a Taliban commander who identified himself by his codename Qari Baryal.
In a surprise announcement last month, the Afghan Taliban announced it would open a political office in Qatar, suggesting the group may be willing to negotiate -- for government positions or official control over much of its historical southern heartland.
That also suggests it thinks the odds of a complete takeover are slim and is instead looking for major gains in the political arena.
Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said it was too soon to say how political maneuvers towards peace negotiations could unfold, although the Taliban was open to conciliation.
But there are questions over how cohesive the Taliban can remain.
Ghulam Jelani Zwak, director of Afghan Analytical and Advisory Centre, said he believes peace talks and the NATO withdrawal will lead to the break up of the Taliban between more extreme insurgents and those willing to accept a peace deal.
"But there is no open sign of disaffection in the Taliban, and so we can only guess at that," he said.
MEDIEVAL JUSTICE
The Taliban's medieval justice and punishment system -- including hangings, oppression of women and amputating the limbs of thieves -- was initially accepted by Afghans because it brought security and an end to a period of chaotic warlord rule.
Today, many Afghans have grown accustomed to improved access for women to education and work, and an economy in which growth has averaged 9.1 percent. Foreign investment has climbed sharply from zero in Taliban days to a peak of $300 million in 2008.
Social networks like Facebook and Twitter are catching on among young Afghans, providing a forum for users to criticize the government and the Taliban.
Kamran Bokhari, a South Asia expert at global intelligence firm STRATFOR, said the Taliban had become interested in a political solution over fighting because it needed both a withdrawal of foreign troops and international acceptance of a more moderate face to take part in eventual power sharing.
For those still fighting against Taliban militants, they remain a formidable foe. They have proven resilient in the face of American-led NATO firepower during the war, outsmarting the best U.S. military minds through the use of homemade bombs, sophisticated high-profile attacks and political savvy.
At remote Afghan army posts, soldiers like Nassem Gul doubt their own ability to repel the Taliban that has kept NATO at bay for over a decade.
"When the Taliban try to overrun our post, we think first to call NATO air support. If there is no air support it is very difficult to fight and even hold this post," said Gul, complaining he needs heavier weapons than his AK-47 rifle.
(Additional reporting by Serena Chaudhry in ISLAMABAD and Hamid Shalizi in KABUL, Editing by Michael Georgy and Jonathan Thatcher)
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In Afghanistan, a new approach to teaching history: Leave out the wars
Washington Post By Kevin Sieff Sunday, February 5, 2012
KABUL - In a country where the recent past has unfolded like a war epic, officials think they have found a way to teach Afghan history without widening the fractures between long-quarreling ethnic and political groups: leave out the past four decades.
A series of government-issued textbooks funded by the United States and several foreign aid organizations do just that, pausing history in 1973. There is no mention of the Soviet war, the mujaheddin, the Taliban or the U.S. military presence. In their efforts to promote a single national identity, Afghan leaders have deemed their own history too controversial.
“Our recent history tears us apart. We’ve created a curriculum based on the older history that brings us together, with figures universally recognized as being great,” said Farooq Wardak, Afghanistan’s education minister. “These are the first books in decades that are depoliticized and de-ethnicized.”
High school students across the country are expected to receive the textbooks in time for the school year this spring. The books are the only ones approved for use in public classrooms as part of the new “depoliticized curriculum.” Elementary and middle school textbooks, which also conclude history lessons in the early 1970s, have been distributed over the past several years.
As Western leaders look to wind down their part in the war, the inability of Afghans to agree on a basic historical record casts doubt on a much more complex exercise that is critical to the country’s future: the creation of a government that would unite Afghanistan’s disparate groups.
But Afghan officials insist that the new textbooks will be one of the government’s best state-building tools, offering a fresh perspective to a generation raised in the middle of a war but unencumbered by the biases of the past four decades. During much of that time, warring political and ethnic groups used their own course materials, imbued with their own ideologies and peppered with their own heroes and villains.
“That’s how we got our extremist ideas,” said Attaullah Wahidyar, director of publication and information for the Education Ministry. “Now, we’ve learned our lesson.”
Foreign powers only deepened divisions, distributing books to further their own political agendas and bringing the “New Great Game” in Central Asia into Afghan classrooms.
In the 1970s, the Soviet Union printed books that stressed communism’s virtues and the importance of Marxist theory. During the last years of the Cold War, the United States spent millions on Afghan textbooks filled with violent images and talk of jihad, part of a covert effort to incite resistance to the Soviet occupation. During the Taliban’s reign in the 1990s, conservative Islamic texts were imported from Pakistan. In western Afghanistan, Iranian textbooks that openly praised Tehran-backed militant groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas were for years distributed in public schools.
‘A sensitive history’
When educators, scholars and politicians gathered to overhaul the curriculum, beginning in 2002, they were intent on undoing the politics of Afghan historiography. But they could not agree on how to address the country’s descent into civil war or its various insurgent groups. Even the mention of key figures — the Northern Alliance commander Ahmad Shah Massoud or the Taliban’s Mohammad Omar — would spark fierce loyalty or hostility, officials said, paralyzing any history lesson.
Educators suggested that the only solution would be to omit the period after King Mohammed Zahir Shah, whose ouster in 1973 ushered in an era of chronic political instability. Among those charged with crafting the new curriculum, there was near-universal agreement.
“We aren’t mature enough to come up with a way to teach such a sensitive history,” Wahidyar said.
Foreign donors reviewed the books to ensure there was no religious content and that materials were well designed, but they made no suggestions related to the omission of recent history, Afghan officials said.
The high school textbooks were funded by the U.S. military’s foreign aid arm, the Commander’s Emergency Response Program.
U.S. military cultural advisers “reviewed the social studies textbooks, grades 10-12, for ‘inappropriate’ material, such as inciting violence or religious discrimination. Content of these textbooks, such as events or dates, are the responsibility of the Ministry of Education,” said David Lakin, a spokesman for the U.S. military in Afghanistan. “There were no discussions between [U.S. military] officials and the Ministry of Education on the teaching of Afghan history.”
Despite the broad consensus, some Afghan scholars and educators have pushed back, claiming the new textbooks mark an abdication of the ministry’s academic responsibility.
“This will be the biggest treason against the people of Afghanistan. . . . It will be a hindrance to all of our spiritual and material gains over the last four decades,” said Mir Ahmad Kamawal, a history professor at Kabul University. “All these young people will be deprived of knowing what happened during this period.”
‘Community-building’
Afghan education officials have begun crisscrossing the country, trying to persuade 8.2 million students and their families that a fair curriculum will emanate from Kabul.
The new history lessons will be taught even in villages still controlled by insurgents. Officials say that if they detailed the atrocities committed during five years of Taliban rule, the textbooks would almost certainly be disputed and discarded.
“We’re talking about community-building through education, and that includes the insurgency,” said Wardak, the education minister. “This curriculum needs to appeal to all Afghans.”
Wardak recently spoke to groups of teachers and students in eastern Afghanistan, explaining that they should come to expect uniformity and accuracy in new public school lessons. If sources of tension can be avoided, he said, the Education Ministry might stand a better chance of recruiting the more than 4 million children currently out of school.
“The curriculum is a national one, based on Islamic principles. It’s not just for Pashtuns or Tajiks or Hazaras,” he said in front of a packed meeting hall in Nangahar province. “The curriculum will bring us all under one roof. It will encourage brotherhood and unity.”
Then he toured schools, hospitals and mosques. In one public building, portraits of Afghan leaders over the past 200 years lined the wall. Wardak pointed to a photo of Mohammed Daoud Khan, who assumed power in 1973.“That’s where the division started,” he said, “and that’s where our history books end.”
Special correspondent Sayed Salahuddin contributed to this report.
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Avalanche kills 4 Afghans, wounds 6
FAIZABAD, Afghanistan, Feb. 5 (Xinhua) -- Four people lost their lives and six others sustained injuries as an avalanche hit some villages in the mountainous Arghistan district, Badakhshan province, 315 km northeast of Kabul on Saturday, an official said Sunday.
"Four people lost their lives and six others were injured as an avalanche hit some villages in Arghistan district yesterday," Sanaullah Amiri, director of the Counter-Natural Disaster Department in Badakhshan province told Xinhua.
He also added that the height of snowfall in Arghistan and adjoining areas is more than one meter.
Due to heavy snowfall and cold weather more than 40 people had already lost their lives in Badakhshan province mostly in Arghistan district over the past several weeks.
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