Category Archives: Taliban

Pakistan to boycott meeting on Afghanistan after NATO strike kills troops

Bloomberg reports: Pakistan stepped up its protests over a NATO airstrike that killed 24 of its soldiers, deciding to boycott an international conference on Afghanistan to be held in Germany next week.

The decision to pull out from the Dec. 5 summit in Bonn was agreed at a meeting of the federal Cabinet yesterday, according to a government statement. The nuclear-armed nation had already closed border crossings to trucks carrying supplies for U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan and ordered American personnel to vacate the Shamsi airbase in Pakistan’s southwest that has served as a launching point for Predator unmanned aircraft.

Pakistan still supports “stability and peace in Afghanistan and the importance of an Afghan-led, Afghan-owned process of reconciliation,” the government said in the statement. “In view of the developments and prevailing circumstances, the country has decided not to participate in the conference.”

The U.S. wants the Bonn meeting to cement a sustained international commitment to stabilize Afghanistan, and prevent any Taliban takeover, following the planned U.S. pullout of its main combat forces by 2014. The U.S. and Afghan governments have said Pakistan’s role is critical as it wields influence with the Taliban and could press the guerrillas for concessions in a peace process.
‘Beyond Rhetoric’

Following the Nov. 25 airstrike, “there’s a lot of domestic pressure in Pakistan that’s forcing the government to move beyond rhetoric,” Shaheen Akhter, an analyst at the Institute of Regional Studies in Islamabad, said yesterday. Still, Pakistan can’t afford “to remain on the sidelines as the international community decides on the future of Afghanistan. They will be back at the table soon.”

The Economist‘s correspondent in Lahore notes: Pakistan’s leaders know the Americans are still deeply dependant on them. In the past few months NATO—and especially the Americans—have done an impressive job of reducing their reliance on land transport corridors through Pakistan to supply Western soldiers in Afghanistan. Over the past 120 days, for example, of the materiel received by the Americans in Afghanistan, around 30% was flown in and 40% was driven over Afghanistan’s northern borders from Central Asia, leaving just 30% to come via Pakistan’s roads. That is a sharp reduction on previous years. Thus the immediate and predictable closing of the Pakistan route, in response to the deaths on the border, should prove less disruptive than it once would have been.

But America relies on Pakistan in other ways. A military base, Shamsi, used by America inside Pakistan, apparently to launch drones, has been ordered closed within 15 days. That may be smoke and mirrors (it was quite possibly no longer used by the Americans anyway, after a previous clash), but is a sign of the sort of co-operation the Americans have quietly enjoyed on Pakistan’s account as they hunted al-Qaeda and other extremist leaders whom Pakistan does not regard as allies. Intelligence co-operation (however flawed) from Pakistan, against individuals plotting attacks on the West will also continue to be crucial in the coming years. Keeping close tabs on Pakistan’s large (perhaps 100-warhead strong) and fast-growing nuclear arsenal is also a long-term priority for the Americans.

Yet America and Pakistan could decide it is better to wind down their relationship to something minimal. A strong cohort within the Pentagon—especially after attacks on America’s embassy in Kabul, in September, by fighters seen as allied with Pakistan—has been demanding direct American military intervention in North Waziristan, possibly including American soldiers on the ground, even if Pakistan’s government opposes the idea. Pakistan is blamed for NATO and Afghan army forces’ failure to defeat the Taliban and other insurgents in Afghanistan, and for the Taliban’s refusal to consider peace talks. American lawmakers have also grown increasingly hostile over civilian and military aid to Pakistan, especially once it appeared that bin Laden had been harboured in Pakistan.

Within Pakistan, a breaking point could be near. One factor may be the rise of Imran Khan, a populist figure who makes a big deal of his opposition to America’s role in the ongoing fighting. As important may be the rise of younger, more religious army officers who are instinctively more anti-American than previous generals. After a year of crises and confrontations, the relationship, though troubled, survives. But the moment when one side or the other decides it is better to cut aid, reduce military co-operation and weaken diplomatic ties is growing nearer.

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Night raids and death squads in Afghanistan

What’s the difference between the death squads being operated by the Haqqani network and the night raids by US Special Operations forces? Chances are that the Haqqanis know the names of a much higher percentage of their victims. That isn’t the only difference, but it’s significant. As far as the U.S. and its allies are concerned, any adult male who gets shot in the night by their forces gets counted as an insurgent.

The New York Times reports: As targeted killings have risen sharply across Afghanistan, American and Afghan officials believe that many are the work of counterintelligence units of the Haqqani militant network and Al Qaeda, charged with killing suspected informants and terrorizing the populace on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

Military intelligence officials say that the units essentially act as death squads and that one of them, a large group known as the Khurasan that operates primarily in Pakistan’s tribal areas, has been responsible for at least 250 assassinations and public executions.

Another group, whose name is not known, works mainly in Afghanistan and may be responsible for at least 20 killings in Khost Province over the summer alone, including a mass beheading that came to light only after a video was found in the possession of a captured insurgent. The video shows 10 headless bodies evenly spaced along a paved road, while their heads sit nearby in a semicircle, their faces clearly visible.

It is another indication that the Haqqanis, a mostly Pakistan-based faction, remain the most dangerous part of an insurgency that makes full use of a porous and often ill-defined border, as the NATO strike that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers over the weekend showed.

Though the circumstances of that strike remain murky, it has now further upset relations between Pakistan and the United States, even as it once again demonstrated how havens inside Pakistan remained a critical part of the insurgent strategy.

The Americans have geared their offensive around bloodying the insurgents as they enter Afghanistan. But the new wave of assassinations shows that, even as NATO portrays the insurgents as a weakening force, the Haqqanis can still assert their influence, not only with headline-grabbing bombings but also through intimidation and by controlling perceptions.

One chilling case attributed to the second death squad came after American forces captured the senior Afghanistan-based leader for the Haqqanis, Hajji Mali Khan, and killed his top deputy this summer. Just days later, the bodies of two men accused of helping the Americans turned up near the village where Mr. Khan was captured. Scalding iron rods had been shoved through their legs. One victim had been disemboweled, and both had been shot through the head and crushed by boulders. Fear shot through the entire village.

“You could hardly recognize them,” said a witness who viewed the bodies.

Across Afghanistan, assassinations have jumped 61 percent, to 131 reported killings, through the first nine months of this year, compared with the same period in 2010, according to NATO statistics. United Nations officials say they began noticing a sharp increase in 2010, with 462 assassinations according to their records, double the number from the previous year. The figures may not include many killings in remote areas, like the mass beheading, because fearful villagers never reported them.

Early this month, Gareth Porter wrote: U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) killed well over 1,500 civilians in night raids in less than 10 months in 2010 and early 2011, analysis of official statistics on the raids released by the U.S.-NATO command reveals.

That number would make U.S. night raids by far the largest cause of civilian casualties in the war in Afghanistan. The report by the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan on civilian casualties in 2010 had said the use of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) by insurgents was the leading cause of civilian deaths, with 904.

Except for a relatively few women and children killed by accident, the civilians who died in the raids were all adult males who were counted as insurgents in press releases and official data released by the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).

The data on night raids, which were given to selected news media, cover three distinct 90-day night raid campaigns from May through July 2010, early August to early November, and mid-November to mid- February. The combined totals for the three periods indicate that a minimum of 2,599 rank and file insurgents were killed and an additional 723 “leaders” killed or captured in raids.

Assuming conservatively that one-third of the alleged leaders were killed, the total number of alleged insurgents killed in the raids was 2,844.

SOF night raids during the 10-month period totaled 6,282, according to the same ISAF data.

A third crucial statistic, repeated frequently by U.S and NATO officials in 2010 and 2011, is that shots were fired by SOF units in only 20 percent of night raids.

A U.S. military source who has been briefed on SOF operation confirmed to IPS what has been generally known among outside observers – that anytime shots are fired by SOF troops in a night raid, someone is killed.

If shots were fired in 20 percent of the 6,282 raids, it means that 2,844 were killed in 1,256 raids.

With very rare exceptions, night raids target only individuals rather than groups. They are carried out at night because they are aimed at catching the individual at home asleep and therefore taken completely by surprise.

Therefore, a minimum of 1,588 people (2,844 total killed minus the 1,256 targets in the lethal raids) were killed in the raids even though they weren’t targeted.

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Taliban target mobile phone masts to prevent tipoffs from Afghan civilians

The Guardian reports: Afghanistan’s communications infrastructure has become the latest casualty of the intensified war between Nato and the Taliban, with mobile phone companies reporting crippling attacks on their network of transmission masts.

The onslaught came in the wake of a decree by Hamid Karzai ordering phone companies to defy insurgent demands to shut down transmission networks in large parts of the country during the night.

The mobile phone networks are a key battleground in the war on the Taliban as the vast majority of anti-insurgent tipoffs from Afghan civilians are made at night, through phone calls.

The phone industry says the damage has been so great that the numbers of hours of coverage available to all phone users has fallen significantly – the first time there has been such a fall.

After a decade of explosive growth in public access to phones, which are now part of everyday life for millions of Afghans, the falloff is an extraordinary change of fortunes for an industry that is often cited as one of the country’s biggest post-2001 success stories.

The Taliban began attacking transmission masts in 2007, but the damage was limited and the attacks were often aimed only at extorting money from companies.

But since mid-summer attacks have soared, with up to 30 towers being destroyed or damaged in one 20-day period. Previously a loss of five would be considered a bad month.

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U.S. turned a blind eye to torture in Afghan prisons

The Washington Post reports: Across the street from U.S. military headquarters in Kabul, shrouded from view by concrete walls, the Afghan intelligence agency runs a detention facility for up to 40 terrorism suspects that is known as Department 124. So much torture took place inside, one detainee told the United Nations, that it has earned another name: “People call it Hell.”

But long before the world body publicly revealed “systematic torture” in Afghan intelligence agency detention centers, top officials from the State Department, the CIA and the U.S. military received multiple warnings about abuses at Department 124 and other Afghan facilities, according to Afghan and Western officials with knowledge of the situation.

Despite the warnings, the United States continued to transfer detainees to Afghan intelligence service custody, the officials said. Even as other countries stopped handing over detainees to problematic facilities, the U.S. government did not.

U.S. Special Operations troops delivered detainees to Department 124. CIA officials regularly visited the facility, which was rebuilt last year with American money, to interrogate high-level Taliban and al-Qaeda suspects, according to Afghan and Western officials familiar with the site. Afghan intelligence officials said Americans never participated in the torture but should have known about it.

When the United Nations on Aug. 30 brought allegations of widespread detainee abuse to Gen. John Allen, the top U.S. military commander here, he took swift action ahead of the public release of the findings. Coalition troops stopped transferring detainees to Department 124 and 15 other police and intelligence agency prisons. They also hastily began a program to monitor those facilities and conduct human rights classes for interrogators.

But the prospect that U.S. officials failed to act on prior warnings raises questions about their compliance with a law, known as the Leahy Amendment, that prohibits the United States from funding units of foreign security forces when there is credible evidence that they have committed human rights abuses.

The State Department is investigating whether the law applies and what funding might be affected, according to U.S. officials.

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Attacks on Americans in Kabul get Haqqani network’s message across

Rod Nordland reports: Every bomb, they say, has a return address.

When car bombs blew up in West Beirut, or explosions cut down worshipers in Sadr City mosques, survivors generally knew who was to blame, and more or less why — even when no one claimed responsibility.

So, too, with the suicide car bomb that on Saturday delivered the worst blow that NATO forces have suffered yet in Kabul, smashing into an armored bus full of troops and killing 13 foreigners, most of them Americans, and at least 4 Afghans.

The Taliban immediately claimed responsibility, but Afghan and American officials suspect that, more specifically, it was the fearsome Haqqani faction, whose fighters have proved better trained and organized than many Taliban, and which in recent months especially has focused its attacks on military targets rather than civilian ones.

The message the Haqqanis are sending — to the world and, especially, to the Afghan public — is that they are willing and able to kill foreign troops. And with the Haqqani bombs comes a particularly troublesome return address: Pakistan, where the group is based.

One Western diplomat, speaking on the condition of anonymity under diplomatic ground rules, said it was clear that if the Haqqanis were behind the attack, the militants were reacting to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s recent trip to Pakistan. During the visit, she again demanded that the government do something about the Haqqanis, whose bases are in the Pakistani territory of North Waziristan.

“No one goes to this much trouble if they don’t think you’ll get the message,” the diplomat said.

An Afghan political analyst, Haroun Mir, agreed. “These are planned attacks in response to the pressure from the United States on Pakistan against the Haqqani network,” Mr. Mir said. Beyond that, he added, “the Pakistanis are sending another message, too: They are not willing to abandon their support of the Taliban.”

The New York Times also reports: Just a month after accusing Pakistan’s spy agency of secretly supporting the Haqqani terrorist network, which has mounted attacks on Americans, the Obama administration is now relying on the same intelligence service to help organize and kick-start reconciliation talks aimed at ending the war in Afghanistan.

The revamped approach, which Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called “Fight, Talk, Build” during a high-level United States delegation’s visit to Kabul and Islamabad this month, combines continued American air and ground strikes against the Haqqani network and the Taliban with an insistence that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency get them to the negotiating table.

But some elements of the ISI see little advantage in forcing those negotiations, because they see the insurgents as perhaps their best bet for maintaining influence in Afghanistan as the United States reduces its presence there.

The strategy is emerging amid an increase in the pace of attacks against Americans in Kabul, including a suicide attack on Saturday that killed as many as 10 Americans and in which the Haqqanis are suspected . It is the latest effort at brokering a deal with militants before the last of 33,000 American “surge” troops prepare to pull out of Afghanistan by September, and comes as early hopes in the White House about having the outlines of a deal in time for a multinational conference Dec. 5 in Bonn, Germany, have been all but abandoned.

But even inside the Obama administration, the new initiative has been met with deep skepticism, in part because the Pakistani government has developed its own strategy, one at odds with Mrs. Clinton’s on several key points. One senior American official summarized the Pakistani position as “Cease-fire, Talk, Wait for the Americans to Leave.”

In short, the United States is in the position of having to rely heavily on the ISI to help broker a deal with the same group of militants that leaders in Washington say the spy agency is financing and supporting.

“The Pakistanis see the contradictions in the American approach,” said Shamila N. Chaudhary, a former top Obama White House aide on Pakistan and Afghanistan. “The big question for the administration is, What can the Pakistanis actually deliver? Pakistan is holding its cards very closely.”

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German general says NATO Afghan mission has ‘failed’

Der Spiegel reports: It was 10 years ago that the United States, together with its NATO allies, marched into Afghanistan to put an end to Taliban rule and begin the hunt for al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden. A decade later, the terrorist leader is dead. But, says Harald Kujat, former general inspector of the German military, the mission has been a failure.

“The mission fulfilled the political aim of showing solidarity with the United States,” Kujat told the German daily Mitteldeutsche Zeitung. “But if you measure progress against the goal of stabilizing a country and a region, then the mission has failed.”

Kujat said that it was ignored for too long that “the opponent was fighting a military battle and we needed to do the same.” In reference to claims from German political leaders, among others, he said “the argument that it was a stabilization mission was maintained for too long.” The result, he said, is that soldiers were not given what they needed in order to effectively fight the enemy.

Kujat is hardly the first to criticize the Afghanistan war. But his words carry weight in Germany. He was a leading planner of the German mission to Afghanistan and served as general inspector of the German military — the Bundeswehr’s [German armed forces] highest-ranking soldier — from 2000 to 2002. Part of his job included advising both the German government and the Defense Ministry on military matters.

The former Bundeswehr leader also took aim at Germany’s plan to complete withdrawal of all of its 5,000 combat troops from Afghanistan by 2014, a timeline that was reiterated on Friday by Germany’s special representative for Afghanistan, Michael Steiner.

“If we withdraw from Afghanistan in 2014,” said Kujat, “then the Taliban will take over power again within just a few months.”

The Associated Press reports: They were the first Americans into Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 attacks and will probably be the last U.S. forces to leave.

As most American troops prepare to withdraw in 2014, the CIA and military special operations forces to be left behind are girding for the next great pivot of the campaign, one that could stretch their war up to another decade.

The war’s 10th anniversary Friday recalled the beginnings of a conflict that drove the Taliban from power and lasted far longer than was imagined.

“We put the CIA guys in first,” scant weeks after the towers in New York fell, said Lt. Gen. John Mulholland, then a colonel with U.S. special operations forces, in charge of the military side of the operation. U.S. Special Forces Green Berets, together with CIA officers, helped coordinate anti-Taliban forces on the ground with U.S. firepower from the air, to topple the Taliban and close in on al-Qaida.

Recent remarks from the White House suggest the CIA and special operations forces will be hunting al-Qaida and working with local forces long after most U.S. troops have left.

When Afghan troops take the lead in 2014, “the U.S. remaining force will be basically an enduring presence force focused on counterterrorism,” said National Security Advisor Tom Donilon, in remarks in Washington in mid-September. That will be augmented by teams that will continue to train Afghan forces, added White House spokesman Tommy Vietor.

The White House insists this does not mean abandoning the strategy of counterinsurgency, in which large numbers of troops are needed to keep the population safe. It simply means replacing the surge of 33,000 U.S. troops, as it withdraws over the next year, with newly trained Afghan ones, according to senior White House Afghan war adviser Doug Lute

It also means U.S. special operators and CIA officers will be there for the next turn in the campaign. That’s the moment when Afghans will either prove themselves able to withstand a promised Taliban resurgence, or find themselves overwhelmed by seasoned Taliban fighters.

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9/11: the tapping point

David Rose writes: One morning in June 2001, three months before the 9/11 attacks on the United States, I happened to be interviewing a senior official from the British Secret Intelligence Service, M.I.6. His current focus was the war on drugs, not international terrorism, but he shared a piece of information that united the two subjects.

A short time earlier, the official told me, the U.S. National Security Agency had intercepted a call between two satellite-telephone users in Afghanistan—the al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and the Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar. They had been discussing the Taliban’s ban on growing opium poppies, imposed the previous summer—a remarkably effective edict that had shrunk production in areas they controlled almost to zero.

According to the M.I.6 official, bin Laden sounded unhappy. “Why stop growing opium?” he asked. “Heroin only weakens our enemies.” There was no need to worry, Mullah Omar replied. The ban was merely a tactic. “There has been a glut, and the price is too low. Once the world price has risen, the farmers can start growing it again.”

The real lesson of this overheard conversation was not its specific content but the fact that it could be heard at all. Electronic eavesdropping clearly had potential in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. But in the years before 9/11, when bin Laden’s terror plot was first being discussed, that potential remained limited. The reason was simple: Afghanistan had no cell phones, no Internet, and only a rudimentary landline network, which did not work at all outside the country’s largest cities. This could be remedied, however. Indeed, by the end of 1999, the Taliban government had embraced a full-fledged American scheme to install a modern cell-phone-and-Internet system in Afghanistan. It could have been up and running within months. The Taliban had already granted an exclusive license to a U.S.-owned firm, the Afghan Wireless Communications Company.

More to the point, electronic modifications concealed within the circuitry would have allowed every call and every e-mail emanating from Afghanistan to be relayed without interference to N.S.A. headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. “This project was a dream,” says one former senior F.B.I. counterterrorism specialist who knew about the scheme at the time. “To be able to wire up a country from ground level up—you don’t get too many opportunities like that.” No, you don’t. But at the critical moment, the Clinton administration put the project on hold, while rival U.S. agencies—the F.B.I., the N.S.A., and the C.I.A.—bickered over who should control it.

In the decade since 9/11, investigations by journalists and government commissions have explored the many missed opportunities to prevent bin Laden’s attacks. Overall, it is the story of a catastrophic failure to connect the dots. One can argue—and many have—that the connections emerge more visibly in retrospect than they ever did as events themselves unfolded. But the affair of the Afghan cell-phone network—put on hold until time ran out—falls into a category by itself. It was a course of action whose value and urgency were acknowledged by everyone, but it was impeded nonetheless. The cell-phone plan “was one tool we could have put in Afghanistan that could have made a difference,” a former C.I.A. official says. “Why didn’t we put it in? Because we couldn’t fucking agree.”

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US-Taliban talks were making headway

The Associated Press reports:

Direct U.S. talks with the Taliban had evolved to a substantive negotiation before Afghan officials, nervous that the secret and independent talks would undercut President Hamid Karzai, scuttled them, Afghan and U.S. officials told The Associated Press.

Featured prominently in the talks was the whereabouts and eventual release of U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl of Hailey, Idaho, who was captured more than two years ago in eastern Afghanistan, according to a senior Western diplomat in the region and a childhood friend of the Taliban negotiator, Tayyab Aga.

The U.S. negotiators asked Aga what could be done to gain Bergdahl’s release. The discussion did not get into specifics but Aga discussed the release of Afghan prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and in Afghanistan at Bagram Air Field.

Published reports about the clandestine meetings ended the talks abruptly, and sent Aga into hiding.

Collapse of the direct talks between Aga and U.S. officials probably spoiled the best chance yet at reaching Mullah Mohammed Omar, considered the linchpin to ending the Taliban fight against the U.S.-backed government in Afghanistan. The contacts were preliminary but had begun to bear fruit, Afghan and U.S. officials said.

Perhaps most importantly they offered the tantalizing prospect of a brokered agreement between the U.S. and the Taliban — one that would allow the larger reconciliation of the Taliban into Afghanistan political life to move forward. The United States has not committed to any such deal, but the Taliban wants security assurances from Washington.

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In valley where SEALs died, U.S. raids boost Taliban support

McClatchy reports:

The 30 U.S. soldiers, many of them Navy SEALs, who died Saturday in the U.S. military’s single biggest loss of the Afghan war, were operating in a Taliban-controlled valley where frequent U.S.-led night raids have won the insurgents popular support, area residents said Sunday.

The raids occur “every night. We are very much miserable,” said Roshanak Wardak, a doctor and a former member of the national Parliament. “They are coming to our houses at night.”

Wardak runs a clinic about 3 miles from the rugged Tangi Valley where insurgents early Saturday shot down a helicopter carrying the U.S. troops, an Afghan translator and seven Afghan commandoes.

Night raids have become a significant part of the U.S. strategy aimed at weakening the insurgents and compelling their leaders to accept U.S. and Afghan government offers to hold talks on a political settlement of the decade-old war.

The Taliban have suffered heavy losses in the operations, which have soared since last year to an average of 340 per month, according to a Western intelligence official, who requested anonymity in order to discuss the issue.

There has been no apparent progress toward convening peace talks, but U.S. commanders defend the raids as effective in eliminating and capturing insurgents, and gaining intelligence that leads to other militants and arms caches.

“Eight-five percent are shots not fired, when you’re talking about night raids and disruption,” said the Western intelligence official. “Over 50 percent of the time they hit the target that they’re after, which shows the intelligence has been accurate.”

Afghan commandoes participate in all such operations, he added.

The tactic, however, has proven highly controversial with ordinary Afghans amid charges that they claim civilian lives. President Hamid Karzai has demanded that they stop.

Residents of the Tangi Valley area, in eastern Wardak Province, about 60 miles southwest of Kabul, issued similar complaints about the night raids in their vicinity, charging that they have killed civilians, disrupted their lives and fueled popular support for the Taliban.

“There are night raids every day or every other day,” said a second doctor who asked not to be identified because he feared for his safety. He said he lives about 100 yards from the parched riverbed where the U.S. Chinook helicopter crashed.

“The Americans are committing barbaric acts in the area and this is the reason that the Taliban have influence,” he said.

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Suicide bomber kills Kandahar mayor

The New York Times reports:

In a further strike against the authorities in war-torn southern Afghanistan, the mayor of Kandahar was killed in his office on Wednesday when a suicide bomber detonated explosives hidden in his turban, officials said.

The killing heightened concerns that the tenuous security gains in the violent south are unraveling despite months of intensified fighting by NATO and Afghan forces.

The mayor, Ghulam Haider Hamidi, was killed in his office in central Kandahar, and one other person was injured, according to Zalmay Ayoubi, an official spokesman. The Taliban took responsibility for the attack, news agencies reported.

He was the second senior official killed this month after the leader of the Kandahar provincial council, Ahmed Wali Karzai, a half brother of President Hamid Karzai, was assassinated in his compound by a close associate on July 12. Mr. Hamidi, the mayor, had been mentioned as a possible successor to Mr. Karzai as factions jostle to replace him, news reports said.

Mr. Hamidi was close to Ahmed Wali, but many Kandahar residents described him as distant because he had spent many years in the United States.

Mr. Hamidi had launched a contentious campaign to destroy illegal homes in northern Kandahar city. The campaign was strongly resisted by the people who lived there, many of whom had been there for years. A day earlier, there had been a protest and the mayor agreed to meet with the protesters on Wednesday.

The bomber entered the mayor’ s compound with the protesters’ delegation, said Mr. Ayoubi, a spokesman for the Kandahar provincial governor, Toorylai Wesa.

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Taliban: A law unto themselves

Patrick Cockburn writes:

It was one of history’s greatest prison escapes in terms of the ingenuity and perseverance of those involved. It happened at 10pm on 25 April this year in southern Afghanistan. After five months of tunnelling, Taliban diggers finally broke through the concrete floor of a cell in the centre of Sarposa prison on the outskirts of the city of Kandahar. Behind them snaked a tunnel 3ft high and almost 1,200ft long, which led under the prison walls to a house on the far side of a main road. During the next five hours, 541 prisoners, one of them with a broken leg, crawled to freedom. Only when the guards tried to hold their regular roll call in the prison yard later in the morning did they discover the empty cells from which had vanished some of the most dangerous prisoners in the world.

The story of the escape is not only exciting in itself; it shows Taliban members – usually portrayed as brainwashed fanatics – as imaginative, disciplined and resourceful. This is what makes them such formidable adversaries of the American, British and Afghan armies, despite their inferiority in numbers, training and weapons. The Kandahar prison break illustrates an ability to foresee difficulties and find intelligent ways of overcoming them.

The escape is also one of the few complicated operations carried out by the Taliban where a full account is available from their side and can be largely confirmed by American and Afghan government sources. Some of these details emerged immediately after the escape, as Taliban spokesmen crowed about their success and Afghan government and American officials produced their own embarrassed explanations about what had gone wrong. But the whole story of the escape from the Kandahar prison only emerged several months later when the Taliban allowed the details of the escape to be published in its Arabic-language magazine Al-Somood. Two articles were printed, one of which appears to be the Taliban’s lengthy official account of the escape, supplemented by a second shorter piece, published under the name of “Muhammad Idris”, a young Taliban fighter who was in Sarposa prison awaiting trial and was one of the first people into the tunnel. The two articles were translated and put online by the prestigious Afghanistan Analysts website. They are circumspect about a few episodes, such as the possible complicity of the prison guards. But their account is otherwise convincing.

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US talking to the Taliban

Philip Weiss writes:

One of the highlights of the Netroots convention that ended yesterday was a panel on getting out of Afghanistan that included the threat by two House Democrats to work with antiwar Republicans to undermine the Obama war program in coming weeks.

Below I’m going to provide some of the back-and-forth from that panel to convey the intensity and eloquence of that leftwing criticism, at a time when the Congressmen said that the White House is reexamining its Afghan commitment. And if you don’t read everything in this dialogue– well, be sure to read General Paul Eaton’s Arlington Cemetery story 1/2 way down.

REP. JIM McGOVERN of Massachusetts: “We’re being called by the administration and being told about all these successes in Afghanistan. ‘We secured this village, this [other] one’… The question is, is any of this sustainable without a prolonged military presence? Everything we do requires us to be there forever… And I wouldn’t trust the government of Afghanistan to tell me the correct time, based on their record of corruption.”

STEVE CLEMONS of the New America Foundation, and leader of an Afghan Study Group, pointed out that we are spending nearly $120 billion a year in a country that has a GDP of $14 billion. Couldn’t that money be better spent than on military actions? Clemons named Republicans who are making hay by questioning Afghanistan, including Michelle Bachmann, Michael Steele, Ann Coulter, Bing West (a former Reagan Defense official), Grover Norquist, and likely presidential candidate John Huntsman Jr.

The White House figured that when leftwingers abandoned them on Afghanistan, they still had the right wing. But Clemons arranged for a poll of conservatives. “Once they knew of the costs, support collapsed.”

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Karzai says US in talks with Taliban

Al Jazeera reports:

The president of Afghanistan has said his government and the US are negotiating with Taliban fighters to bring peace to the country.

While officials at the US embassy in Kabul could not be immediately reached for comment, Hamid Karzai’s remarks were the first official confirmation of US involvement in the negotiations.

“Peace talks have started with [the Taliban] already and it is going well,” Karzai said on Saturday in Kabul.

“Foreign militaries, especially the United States of America, are going ahead with these negotiations.”

Diplomats have already said there have been months of preliminary talks between the two sides, and Karzai, who is a strong advocate of peace talks, has long said Afghans are in contact with anti-government groups.

Karzai’s disclosure came a day after the UN Security Council split the UN sanctions list for Taliban and al-Qaeda figures into two, which envoys said could help induce the Taliban into talks on a peace deal in Afghanistan.

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War fatigue in America

Paul Pillar writes:

Signs are increasing that the American people are growing tired enough over fighting two and a half (or whatever the right number is, depending on how you count what’s going on in Libya) wars for their fatigue to affect policy, especially through the actions of their elected representatives in Congress. The war in Afghanistan, now the largest and most expensive in terms of ongoing operations, and now in its tenth year of U.S. involvement, has been the subject of several expressions of impatience. Less than two weeks ago a resolution in the House of Representatives calling on the administration to accelerate a withdrawal from Afghanistan came very close to passing (the vote was 204 to 215). Now Norm Dicks (D-WA), an influential Democrat on national security matters who is the ranking member of the Appropriations Committee and its subcommittee on defense, has become an outspoken critic of the war. “I just think that there’s a war fatigue setting in up here,” says Dicks, “and I think the president is going to have to take that into account.” Skepticism about the war is increasingly being voiced by Republicans as well. Even Sarah Palin is expressing unease.

On Libya—on which Congressional dissent is fueled in part by the administration’s blatant violation of the War Powers Resolution—two resolutions of protest were put to a vote in the House of Representatives on Friday. One that was introduced by Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) and called directly for a withdrawal of U.S. forces from the Libyan conflict was defeated but attracted 148 votes, including 87 Republicans. The other, which was proposed by Speaker John Boehner as an alternative to the Kucinich resolution and passed, called on the administration to provide a more detailed explanation of the costs and objectives of the U.S. involvement in the war.

Then, of course, there is the Iraq War. It is still by far the most expensive of the expeditions in terms of cumulative costs, with the bill now exceeding $800 billion in direct costs and with all the eventual indirect costs making it more like a three trillion dollar war. But simply adhering to existing policy and agreements will mean that an end to this nightmare is just seven months away. There is no need for new action by Congress.

In general, bowing to popular fatigue is not necessarily a very careful and effective way of formulating national security policy. And throwing into the same hopper three wars that have been fought for different reasons (whether looking at the original rationales or at objectives that later emerged, which in each case were different from the original rationales) doesn’t necessarily represent careful policy-making either. But when drawing down or terminating each of these expeditions is in the national interest—which it is—then the national war fatigue is a force for good. It can and should be harnessed to effect a change of course in Afghanistan and Libya and to resist any diversion from the course toward the exit in Iraq.

The New York Times reports:

President Obama’s national security team is contemplating troop reductions in Afghanistan that would be steeper than those discussed even a few weeks ago, with some officials arguing that such a change is justified by the rising cost of the war and the death of Osama bin Laden, which they called new “strategic considerations.”

These new considerations, along with a desire to find new ways to press the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, to get more of his forces to take the lead, are combining to create a counterweight to an approach favored by the departing secretary of defense, Robert M. Gates, and top military commanders in the field. They want gradual cuts that would keep American forces at a much higher combat strength well into next year, senior administration officials said.

The cost of the war and Mr. Karzai’s uneven progress in getting his forces prepared have been latent issues since Mr. Obama took office. But in recent weeks they have gained greater political potency as Mr. Obama’s newly refashioned national security team takes up the crucial decision of the size and the pace of American troop cuts, administration and military officials said. Mr. Obama is expected to address these decisions in a speech to the nation this month, they said.

Abdul Salam Zaeef, a former ambassador of the Taliban to Pakistan, and Hekmat Karzai, the Director of the Centre for Conflict and Peace Studies (CAPS) in Kabul, write:

In December 2009, President Obama sent an additional 30,000 troops to confront growing violence in Afghanistan. Though the impact of the US military and diplomatic surge remains uncertain, we can nevertheless conclude that 2010 was easily the most violent year in the decade-old conflict.

The Taliban’s response, however, to this renewed attention by the international community was a surge of their own, which they launched through bold attacks and targeted assassinations of senior Afghan government officials. Their efforts have clearly made an impact on the ground.

The past three decades in Afghan history are filled with nothing but violence: cities turned into rubble; atrocities committed by countless different factions and – most importantly – generations lost to the violence.

Indeed, Afghans are now tired and just want to live in peace in a country where their children can go to school and live a normal life.

The process of reconciliation has become an important demand of Afghans and most are convinced, and will tell you, that the only way to end this bloody conflict is through a political settlement with the Taliban. Of course, there are a few voices that claim this blood bath should continue until the Taliban is “defeated”, but their arguments are divorced from the reality on the ground.

Glenn Greenwald writes:

When Dennis Kucinich earlier this month introduced a bill to compel the withdrawal of all American troops from Libya within 15 days, the leadership of both parties and the political class treated it the way they do most of Kucinich’s challenges to establishment political orthodoxy:  they ignored it except to mock its unSeriousness.  But a funny thing happened: numerous liberal House Democrats were joined by dozens of conservative GOP members to express support for his bill, and the White House and GOP House leadership became jointly alarmed that the bill could actually pass; that’s why GOP House Speaker John Boehner introduced a Resolution purporting to rebuke Obama for failing to comply with the War Powers Resolution, but which, in fact, was designed to be an utterly inconsequential act.  Its purpose was to protect Obama’s war by ensuring that Kucinich’s bill failed; the point of Boehner’s alternative was to provide a symbolic though meaningless outlet for those House members angry over Obama’s failure to get Congressional support.

Still, Kucinich’s bill attracted an extraordinary amount of support given that it would have forced the President to withdraw all troops from an ongoing war in a little over 2 weeks.  A total of 148 House members voted for it; even more notable was how bipartisan the support was:  61 Democrats and 87 Republicans.  Included among those voting for mandatory withdrawal from Libya were some of the House’s most liberal members (Grijalva, Holt, Woolsey, Barney Frank) and its most conservative members identified with the Tea Party (McClintock, Chaffetz, Bachmann).  Boehner’s amendment — demanding that Obama more fully brief Congress — ultimately passed, also with substantial bipartisan support, but most media reports ultimately recognized it for what it was:  a joint effort by the leadership of both parties and the White House to sabotage the anti-war efforts of its most liberal and most conservative members.

Senator Richard Lugar writes:

The president promised that he would act consistent with the War Powers Resolution, which requires congressional approval to continue military action beyond 60 days after it commences, and to consult closely with Congress. These commitments have gone unfulfilled. The administration even barred Defense Department officials from testifying at a public hearing and canceled a private briefing for senators by a Marine general. This disdain for Congress and constitutional principles led to Friday’s nonbinding House resolution.

Belatedly, the president and his allies are trying to establish congressional endorsement for the war through a nonbinding Senate resolution approving “the limited use of military force by the United States in Libya.” But this illustration of the president’s go-it-alone attitude would set a dangerous precedent.

These “sense of the Senate” resolutions are most often used to commemorate non-controversial events such as last month’s resolution celebrating National Train Day — not to authorize a war. The resolution would have no force of law and would not have to be passed by the House. Nonetheless, it would be touted by the administration as evidence of congressional approval for the war.

Passing this resolution would be a profound mistake that would lower the standard for congressional authorization for the use of military force and would forfeit the Senate’s own constitutional role. By setting this precedent in the interests of expediency, Congress would make it far more likely that future presidents will deem a nonbinding vote in one house as sufficient to initiate or continue a war, or marginalize Congress’s involvement in far more consequential war-making decisions than we face now in Libya.

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Prominent journalist Saleem Shahzad murdered after exposing ties between Pakistan’s navy and al Qaeda

Declan Walsh reports:

A prominent Pakistani journalist who investigated links between the military and al-Qaida has been found dead, triggering angry accusations against the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence spy agency.

Saleem Shahzad, Pakistan correspondent for a news service based in Hong Kong, disappeared on his way to a television interview in Islamabad on Sunday evening. On Tuesday, police said they found his body on a canal bank in Mandi Bahauddin, 80 miles south-east of the capital.

Shahzad’s abandoned car was found 25 miles away. Television images of his body showed heavy bruising to his face. Media reports said he had a serious trauma wound to the stomach.

Human Rights Watch had already raised the alarm over the disappearance of the 40-year-old father of three, citing a “reliable interlocutor” who said he had been abducted by ISI.

“This killing bears all the hallmarks of previous killings perpetrated by Pakistani intelligence agencies,” said a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch in south Asia, Ali Dayan Hasan. He called for a “transparent investigation and court proceedings”.

Other journalists reacted angrily, directly accusing ISI of responsibility on television and social media. “Any journalist here who doesn’t believe that it’s our intelligence agencies?” tweeted Mohammed Hanif, a bestselling author.

In his last published report, Shahzad wrote:

Al-Qaeda carried out the brazen attack on PNS Mehran naval air station in Karachi on May 22 after talks failed between the navy and al-Qaeda over the release of naval officials arrested on suspicion of al-Qaeda links, an Asia Times Online investigation reveals.

Pakistani security forces battled for 15 hours to clear the naval base after it had been stormed by a handful of well-armed militants.

At least 10 people were killed and two United States-made P3-C Orion surveillance and anti-submarine aircraft worth US$36 million each were destroyed before some of the attackers escaped through a cordon of thousands of armed forces.

An official statement placed the number of militants at six, with four killed and two escaping. Unofficial sources, though, claim there were 10 militants with six getting free. Asia Times Online contacts confirm that the attackers were from Ilyas Kashmiri’s 313 Brigade, the operational arm of al-Qaeda.

Three attacks on navy buses in which at least nine people were killed last month were warning shots for navy officials to accept al-Qaeda’s demands over the detained suspects.

The May 2 killing in Pakistan of Osama bin Laden spurred al-Qaeda groups into developing a consensus for the attack in Karachi, in part as revenge for the death of their leader and also to deal a blow to Pakistan’s surveillance capacity against the Indian navy.

The deeper underlying motive, though, was a reaction to massive internal crackdowns on al-Qaeda affiliates within the navy.

Several weeks ago, naval intelligence traced an al-Qaeda cell operating inside several navy bases in Karachi, the country’s largest city and key port.

“Islamic sentiments are common in the armed forces,” a senior navy official told Asia Times Online on the condition of anonymity as he is not authorized to speak to the media.

“We never felt threatened by that. All armed forces around the world, whether American, British or Indian, take some inspiration from religion to motivate their cadre against the enemy. Pakistan came into existence on the two-nation theory that Hindus and Muslims are two separate nations and therefore no one can separate Islam and Islamic sentiment from the armed forces of Pakistan,” the official said.

“Nonetheless, we observed an uneasy grouping on different naval bases in Karachi. While nobody can obstruct armed forces personnel for rendering religious rituals or studying Islam, the grouping [we observed] was against the discipline of the armed forces. That was the beginning of an intelligence operation in the navy to check for unscrupulous activities.”

The official explained the grouping was against the leadership of the armed forces and opposed to its nexus with the United States against Islamic militancy. When some messages were intercepted hinting at attacks on visiting American officials, intelligence had good reason to take action and after careful evaluation at least 10 people – mostly from the lower cadre – were arrested in a series of operations.

“That was the beginning of huge trouble,” the official said. [Continue reading…]

Pepe Escobar, a fellow correspondent for Asia Times, describes Shahzad as “a brother.”

In the aftermath of 9/11 we worked in tandem; he was in Karachi, I was in Islamabad/Peshawar. After the US ”victory” in Afghanistan I went to visit him at home. He plunged me into Karachi’s wild side – in this and other visits. During a night walk on the beach he confessed his dream; he wanted to be Pakistan bureau chief for Asia Times, which he regarded as the K2 of journalism. He got it.

And then, years before ”AfPak” was invented, he found his perfect beat – the intersection between the ISI, the myriad Taliban factions on both sides of AfPak, and all sorts of jihadi eruptions. That was his sterling beat; and no one could bring more hardcore news from the heart of hardcore than Saleem.

I had met some of his sources in Islamabad and Karachi – but over the years he kept excavating deeper and deeper into the shadows. Sometimes we seriously debated over e-mails – I feared some dodgy/devious ISI strands were playing him while he always vouched for his sources.

Cornered by the law of the jungle, no wonder most of my Pakistani friends, during the 2000s, became exiles in the United States or Canada. Saleem stayed – threats and all, the only concession relocating from Karachi to Islamabad.

Now they finally got him. Not an al-Qaeda or jihadi connection. Not a tribal or Taliban connection, be it Mullah Omar or Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan. It had to be the ISI – as he knew, and told us, all along.

Shahzad had just published a book, Inside Al-Qaeda and the Taliban: Beyond Bin Laden and 9/11.

In an interview on the Real News Network recorded a few days before his murder, Shahzad described the transformation of al Qaeda over the last decade and that while the group itself has shrunk, its ideology has spread horizontally by incorporation inside and beyond the new Taliban.

First you have to understand this fact, that there are 17 Arab-Afghan groups which are operating inside Pakistani tribal areas and in Afghanistan, and most of these groups and most of the groups are aligned with al Qaeda but they are not part of al Qaeda — number one. And the strength of those 17 Arab-Afghan groups is over 1,000 approximately.

Second, those who are the members of al Qaeda are hardly 100, not more than 100.

The third thing is — and this is the most important thing — and that is the phenomenon of new Taliban — the new generation of those Afghan fighters, of the Pakistani fighters, or the fighters coming from the Pakistani tribal areas who previously pledged their allegiance to Mullah Omar and the Taliban, but now they — in the last ten years — they completely absorbed al Qaeda’s ideology inside-out, and they are more loyal to al Qaeda than to Mullah Omar or to the al Qaeda leaders, or to their jihadi commanders.

So this is the new group, this is al Qaeda horizontally, not only in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the tribal areas, but all across the globe, like in Yemen, in Somalia and other parts, even in Europe, even in America. So this is the new generation on which al Qaeda is heavily banking on. And not only those, but it also includes the new converts, white Caucasians which are living in North Waziristan and in South Waziristan. And many of them were sent back to their countries of origin in Europe, Canada and America, and different countries. So, this was a completely new phenomenon. Al Qaeda grew horizontally in different directions.

Watch Shahzad’s last interview (in two parts) with the Real News Network:

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NATO concern over Pakistan nuclear arsenal

Al Jazeera reports:

The head of NATO has admitted that the security of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons is a matter of concern, the day after the worst assault on a Pakistani military base in two years.

Anders Fogh Rasmussen was speaking in Afghanistan on Tuesday, where he met Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, to discuss the transition of security from NATO-led troops to Afghan security forces, which is due to begin in July.

“Based on the information and intelligence we have, I feel confident that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is safe and well protected,” Rasmussen said. “But of course, it is a matter of concern and we follow the situation closely.”

Pakistani forces battled Taliban fighters for 17 hours before reclaiming control of a naval base in Karachi on Monday.

The attack, the worst on a base since the army headquarters was besieged in October 2009, piled further embarrassment on Pakistan three weeks after al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was found living in the city of Abbottabad, close to the country’s military academy.

The Los Angeles Times reports:

The team of Islamist militants knew exactly where the naval base’s weak spot was.

Dressed in black and armed with AK-47 rifles, grenades and rocket launchers, they crept up to the back wall of Mehran Naval Station in Karachi, keeping clear of security cameras. Then, with just a pair of ladders, they clambered over the wall, cutting through barbed wire at the top, to launch a 17-hour siege that would renew disturbing questions about the Pakistani military’s ability to defend sensitive installations, including its nuclear arsenal.

The team, believed to consist of four to six militants, destroyed two U.S.-supplied maritime surveillance aircraft and engaged security forces in hours of pitched firefights. It was not until late Monday afternoon that Pakistani forces regained full control of the facility.

Interior Minister Rehman Malik said 10 Pakistani security personnel were killed and 15 were injured. Four militants died and two were believed to have escaped, he said.

The Pakistani Taliban, the country’s homegrown insurgency with ties to Al Qaeda, claimed responsibility for the attack, which it said was meant to avenge the May 2 killing of Osama bin Laden in the military city of Abbottabad.

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U.S. speeds up direct talks with Taliban

The Washington Post reports:

The administration has accelerated direct talks with the Taliban, initiated several months ago, that U.S. officials say they hope will enable President Obama to report progress toward a settlement of the Afghanistan war when he announces troop withdrawals in July.

A senior Afghan official said a U.S. representative attended at least three meetings in Qatar and Germany, one as recently as “eight or nine days ago,” with a Taliban official considered close to Mohammad Omar, the group’s leader.

State Department spokesman Michael A. Hammer on Monday declined to comment on the Afghan official’s assertion, saying the United States had a “broad range of contacts across Afghanistan and the region, at many levels. . . . We’re not going to get into the details of those contacts.”

The talks have proceeded on several tracks, including through nongovernmental intermediaries and Arab and European governments. The Taliban has made clear its preference for direct negotiations with the Americans and has proposed establishing a formal political office, with Qatar under consideration as a venue, according to U.S. officials.

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