Reuters reports: Four U.S. troops fighting with the NATO-led alliance were killed in another suspected “insider” attack in southern Afghanistan on Sunday, bringing the total number of deaths this weekend caused by Afghans turning on their allies to six.

Four troops were found dead and two wounded when a response team arrived at the scene from a nearby checkpoint, a spokesman for the coalition said. A Pentagon spokesman confirmed that the four dead were Americans.

One of the six members of the Afghan National Police (ANP) operating the observation post with six coalition troops was also found dead, while the other five had disappeared.

“The fighting had stopped by the time the responders arrived,” said Major Adam Wojack, a spokesman for the NATO-led coalition.

Sunday’s shooting took place in Zabol, a province where U.S. forces are based, according to a local official.

The attack came a day after two British soldiers were shot dead by an Afghan policeman while returning from a patrol in the southerly Helmand province, one of the strongholds of the Taliban-led insurgency.

At least 51 foreign military personnel have been killed in “insider” attacks this year, deaths that have badly strained the coalition’s relations with Afghan forces as it moves towards handing security responsibility to them by the end of 2014.

Reuters reports: The United States’ decision to designate the Haqqani network as a terrorist organization shows it is not sincere about peace efforts in Afghanistan, senior commanders of the group said on Friday.

The move will also bring hardship for U.S. Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, who is being held by the militants, the commanders told Reuters by telephone from an undisclosed location.

The United States is designating the Pakistan-based Haqqani network, accused of high-profile attacks in Afghanistan, as a terrorist organization, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Friday, in a move that would trigger sanctions against the group and turn up the heat on Pakistan’s government.

US officials have long accused Pakistan of supporting the network, an allegation Islamabad denies.

The Haqqanis, who are allied with the Afghan Taliban, are some of the most experienced fighters in Afghanistan and have carried out several high-profile attacks on Western targets.

Senior commanders from the network said the decision to designate the group as terrorists could endanger efforts to reach a peaceful settlement to the Afghan conflict before most NATO combat troops withdraw by the end of 2014.

“It means the United States is not sincere in their talks. They are on the one hand claiming to look for a political solution to the Afghan issue while on the other they are declaring us terrorists,” said one of the commanders.

“So how can peace talks succeed in bringing peace to Afghanistan?”

Whether or not to brand the group a terrorist organization has been the subject of intense debate within the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama, with some officials arguing it would have little real impact, but would risk setting back Afghan reconciliation efforts.

Kelley Beaucar Vlahos writes: Lt. Col. John Nagl was at his peak.

It was 2007, the shimmery dawn of the group think experiment we now call the mass COIN (counterinsurgency) delusion. Nagl’s boss, Gen. David Petraeus, Washington’s newest demigod, had convinced everyone that his Surge Strategy could tame the wild disaster that had become the Iraq War. Nagl, who had positioned himself at Petraeus’s elbow to sell that formula, was now sitting in full dress uniform, his hair in regulation “high and tight,” whacking nimbly at the pathetic softballs lobbed by Jon Stewart who was being embarrassingly — and uncharacteristically — deferential to his decorated guest.

“It’s a very difficult kind of war, it’s a thinking person’s war, and it’s a kind of war we’re learning and adapting and getting better at fighting in the course of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Nagl pronounced in response to a question about FM-24, otherwise known as the “Counterinsurgency Manual,” which was written by committee led by Petreaus, “a remarkable man,” according to Nagl. FM-24 became the bible of COIN and the vehicle by which several of its authors, Nagl included, advanced their careers amid some very heady times — from 2007 through 2010 — in the Washington security world (I began sensing the decline as early as January 2010).

Iraq veteran and writer Carl Prine takes credit for calling them the COINdinistas first. They are the post-Bush civilian and military “crusaders” (as pegged by arch-COIN critic and TAC contributor Andrew Bacevich) dominating the Washington security establishment. Having gobbled down the fairy dust about the Iraq Surge signifying a new “graduate level,” “population-centric” counterinsurgency strategy (and ignoring our overwhelming firepower over Baghdad and Sunni strongholds and the complicated ethnic dynamics on the ground), they attempted to apply the same hocus-pocus to our war in Afghanistan under President Obama. FM-24 became more than a bible, but code for who was in and who was clearly out of the loop, infecting not only the think tank and beltway banditry, but the military agenda, too.

Then Tom Ricks, Washington Post correspondent-court scribe, conducted a full-blown high school popularity contest, literally ranking the “brains behind counterinsurgency’s rise from forgotten doctrine to the centerpiece of the world’s most powerful military.” In this cringe-worthy “top ten” published in Foreign Policy in December 2009, Ricks places “King David” Petraeus at Number 1, and then Nagl, whose Oxford dissertation-turned-Barnes-and-Noble-bestseller Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife made him a counterinsurgency “scholar,” among other bright lights of the time. Nagl, Ricks predicted, would be “in a top Pentagon slot within a year or two.”

That was just three years ago. Today, there is no better symbol for the dramatic failure of COIN, the fading of the COINdinistas and the loss that is U.S war policy in Afghanistan than this week’s news that Nagl is leaving Washington to be the headmaster of The Haverford School, a rich preparatory school (grades k-12) for boys on Philadelphia’s Main Line.

That’s right — Nagl, once called the Johnny Appleseed of COIN, who reveled in his role as face man, tutoring reporters with practiced bookish charm on the “the new way of war,” and burnishing his personal story to convince everyone that he was a counter-insurgent before his time — a modern T.E. Lawrence — is packing up for good. [Continue reading…]

Malou Innocent reviews, An Enemy We Created: The Myth of the Taliban-Al Qaeda Merger in Afghanistan, by Alex Strick van Linschoten & Felix Kuehn: In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, George Tenet, then head of the CIA, told national security advisers in the White House bunker that the Taliban and Al Qaeda were really the same. In An Enemy We Created, Kandahar-based field researchers Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn turn that story on its head. Drawing on six years of experience living in southern Afghanistan, as well as hundreds of interviews with senior Taliban officials, field commanders, and former militants, they find good reasons to doubt that the Taliban and Al Qaeda were once fused as a single entity. They do find, however, that after years of coalition night raids, aerial bombings, and billions in American aid to a predatory regime in Kabul, Al Qaeda ideology is influencing a new generation of Taliban-affiliated insurgents.

During their jihad against the Soviets, the progenitors of the Afghan Taliban, based in the south around greater Kandahar, were religious nationals fighting to protect their communities and customs against the communist government in Kabul and the external occupiers that backed it. “Afghan Arabs,” on the other hand, were based mainly in the south-east and desperate for martyrdom. Many of them, including elements of Al Qaeda’s predecessor (Maktab al-Khidmaat, or “Services Office”), were emptied from prisons of U.S.-allied Arab tyrannies, as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and others disposed of their jihadists by exporting them to Afghanistan. One group of Arabs marked their tents white so they would stand out. Asked why, they replied, “We want them to bomb us! We want to die!”

When the Soviets withdrew in February 1989, thousands of these stateless jihadists were left behind. Eighteen months later, they found a new rallying cry and turned against their American and Saudi sponsors. The stationing of U.S. troops on Saudi soil was like an “earthquake,” as America’s war against Saddam was perceived as a conspiracy to control Muslim states and the oil under their sands. The authors, corroborating much of the existing literature, brilliantly illustrate how Osama bin Laden and his coterie, who in 1992 moved from Afghanistan to Sudan, would eventually seek to draw America into a prolonged and costly war, striking the “far enemy” to weaken the “near enemy”—apostate Arab regimes.

During this period, the book reveals, the Kandahari Taliban “were not ever listening to the radio in those days, being content simply to continue their studies free from the distractions of the outside world.” They were less interested in global concerns than in the looting, murder, and chaos consuming their country. War-ravaged Afghans, looking for order, turned to the Taliban, which from the south gradually spread and established a legal system, arbitrating local disputes and enforcing their harsh interpretation of Sharia law.

By September 1996, U.S. officials largely welcomed the Taliban’s capture of Kabul, a feat the militants accomplished with Pakistan’s generous assistance. But bin Laden’s relocation to Afghanistan earlier that year would become a source of constant friction, not only between Washington and Kabul but also between the Taliban and Al Qaeda. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: His war was almost over. Or so Marina Buckley thought when her son Lance Cpl. Gregory T. Buckley Jr. told her that he would be returning from southern Afghanistan to his Marine Corps base in Hawaii in late August, three months early.

Instead, Lance Corporal Buckley became the 1,990th American service member to die in the war when, on Aug. 10, he and two other Marines were shot inside their base in Helmand Province by a man who appears to have been a member of the Afghan forces they were training.

A week later, with the death of Specialist James A. Justice of the Army at a military hospital in Germany, the United States military reached 2,000 dead in the nearly 11-year-old conflict, based on an analysis by The New York Times of Department of Defense records. The calculation by The Times includes deaths not only in Afghanistan but also in Pakistan and other nations where American forces are directly involved in aiding the war.

Nearly nine years passed before American forces reached their first 1,000 dead in the war. The second 1,000 came just 27 months later, a testament to the intensity of fighting prompted by President Obama’s decision to send 33,000 additional troops to Afghanistan in 2010, a policy known as the surge.

In more ways than his family might have imagined, Lance Corporal Buckley, who had just turned 21 when he died, typified the troops in that second wave of 1,000. According to the Times analysis, three out of four were white, 9 out of 10 were enlisted service members, and one out of two died in either Kandahar Province or Helmand Province in Taliban-dominated southern Afghanistan. Their average age was 26.

The dead were also disproportionately Marines like Lance Corporal Buckley. Though the Army over all has suffered more dead in the war, the Marine Corps, with fewer troops, has had a higher casualty rate: At the height of fighting in late 2010, 2 out of every 1,000 Marines in Afghanistan were dying, twice the rate of the Army. Marine units accounted for three of the five units hardest hit during the surge. [Continue reading…]

Dexter Filkins writes: In the fall of 2009, the Americans stepped up their efforts to reinforce the Afghan government. American commandos swooped into villages almost every night, killing or carrying away insurgents. Local Taliban leaders — “shadow governors” — began disappearing. “Most of the Taliban governors lasted only a few weeks,” a Khanabad resident, Ghulam Siddiq, told me. “We never got to know their names.”

The most effective weapon against the Taliban were people like Mohammad Omar, the commander of a local militia. In late 2008, Omar was asked by agents with the National Directorate of Security (N.D.S.) — the Afghan intelligence agency — if he could raise a militia. It wasn’t hard to do. Omar’s brother Habibullah had been a lieutenant for Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, one of the leading commanders in the war against the Soviets, and a warlord who helped destroy Kabul during the civil war. The Taliban had killed Habibullah in 1999, and Omar jumped at the opportunity to take revenge. Using his brother’s old contacts, he raised an army of volunteers from around Khanabad and began attacking the Taliban. He set up forces in a string of villages on the southern bank of the Khanabad River. “We pushed all the Taliban out,” he told me.

The Taliban are gone from Khanabad now, but Omar and his fighters are not. Indeed, Omar’s militia appears to be the only effective government on the south side of the Khanabad River. “Without Omar, we could never defeat the Taliban,” a local police chief, Mohammad Sharif, said. “I’ve got two hundred men. Omar has four thousand.”

The N.D.S. and American Special Forces have set up armed neighborhood groups like Omar’s across Afghanistan. Some groups, like the Afghanistan Local Police, have official supervision, but others, like Omar’s, are on their own. Omar insists that he and his men are not being paid by either the Americans or the Afghan government, but he appears to enjoy the support of both. His stack of business cards includes that of Brigadier General Edward Reeder, an American in charge of Special Forces in Afghanistan in 2009, when the Americans began counterattacking in Kunduz.

The militias established or tolerated by the Afghan and American governments constitute a reversal of the efforts made in the early years of the war to disarm such groups, which were blamed for destroying the country during the civil war. At the time, American officials wanted to insure that the government in Kabul had a monopoly on the use of force.

Kunduz Province is divided into fiefdoms, each controlled by one of the new militias. In Khanabad district alone, I counted nine armed groups. Omar’s is among the biggest; another is led by a rival, on the northern bank of the Khanabad River, named Mir Alam. Like Omar, Alam was a commander during the civil war. He was a member of Jamiat-e-Islami. Alam and his men, who declined to speak to me, are said to be paid by the Afghan government.

As in the nineties, the militias around Kunduz have begun fighting each other for territory. They also steal, tax, and rape. “I have to give ten per cent of my crops to Mir Alam’s men,” a villager named Mohammad Omar said. (He is unrelated to the militia commander.) “That is the only tax I pay. The government is not strong enough to collect taxes.” When I accompanied the warlord Omar to Jannat Bagh, one of the villages under his control, his fighters told me that Mir Alam’s men were just a few hundred yards away. “We fight them whenever they try to move into our village,” one of Omar’s men said.

None of the militias I encountered appeared to be under any government supervision. In Aliabad, a town in the south of the province, a group of about a hundred men called the Critical Infrastructure Protection force had set up a string of checkpoints. Their commander, Amanullah Terling, another former Jamiat commander, said that his men were protecting roads and development projects. His checkpoints flew the flag of Jamiat-e-Islami. Terling’s group — like dozens of other such units around the country — is an American creation. It appears to receive lots of cash but little direct supervision. “Once a month, an American drives out here in his Humvee with a bag of money,” Terling said.

Together, the militias set up to fight the Taliban in Kunduz are stronger than the government itself. Local officials said that there were about a thousand Afghan Army soldiers in the province — I didn’t see any — and about three thousand police, of whom I saw a handful. Some police officers praised the militias for helping bring order to Kunduz; others worried that the government had been eclipsed. “We created these groups, and now they are out of control,” Nizamuddin Nashir, the governor of Khanabad, said. “The government does not collect taxes, but these groups do, because they are the men with the guns.”

The confrontations between government forces and militias usually end with the government giving way. When riots broke out in February after the burning of Korans by American soldiers, an Afghan Army unit dispatched to the scene was blocked by Mir Alam’s men. “I cannot count on the Army or the police here,” Nashir said. “The police and most of the soldiers are cowards.” He was echoing a refrain I heard often around the country. “They cannot fight.”

Much of the violence and disorder in Kunduz, as elsewhere in Afghanistan, takes place beyond the vision of American soldiers and diplomats. German, Norwegian, and American soldiers are stationed in Kunduz, but, in the three days I spent there, I saw only one American patrol. The American diplomats responsible for Kunduz are stationed seventy-five miles away, in a heavily fortified base in Mazar-e-Sharif. When I met a U.S. official and mentioned the reconstituted militias once commanded by Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, the official did not know the name. “Keep in mind,” he said, “I’m not a Central Asian expert.”

Largely prohibited from venturing outside their compounds, many American officials exhibit little knowledge of events beyond the barricades. They often appear to occupy themselves with irrelevant activities such as filling out paperwork and writing cables to their superiors in the United States. Some of them send tweets — in English, in a largely illiterate country, with limited Internet usage. “Captain America ran the half marathon,” a recent Embassy tweet said, referring to a sporting event that took place within the Embassy’s protected area. In the early years of the war, diplomats were encouraged to leave their compounds and meet ordinary Afghans. In recent years, personal safety has come to overshadow all other concerns. On April 15th, when a group of Taliban guerrillas seized buildings in Kabul and started firing on embassies, the U.S. Embassy sent out an e-mail saying that the compound was “in lockdown.” “The State Department has marginalized itself,” an American civilian working for the military said.

The more knowledgeable American officials say they have a plan to deal with the militias: as the U.S. withdraws, the militias will be folded into the Afghan national-security forces or shut down. But exactly when and how this will happen is unclear, especially since the Afghan security forces are almost certain to shrink. “That is an Afghan government solution that the coming years will have to determine,” Lieutenant General Daniel P. Bolger, the head of the NATO training mission, said.

Many Afghans fear that NATO has lost the will to control the militias, and that the warlords are reëmerging as formidable local forces. Nashir, the Khanabad governor, who is the scion of a prominent family, said that the rise of the warlords was just the latest in a series of ominous developments in a country where government officials exercise virtually no independent authority. “These people do not change, they are the same bandits,” he said. “Everything here, when the Americans leave, will be looted.”

Nashir grew increasingly vehement. “Mark my words, the moment the Americans leave, the civil war will begin,” he said. “This country will be divided into twenty-five or thirty fiefdoms, each with its own government.” Nashir rattled off the names of some of the country’s best-known leaders — some of them warlords — and the areas they come from: “Mir Alam will take Kunduz. Atta will take Mazar-e-Sharif. Dostum will take Sheberghan. The Karzais will take Kandahar. The Haqqanis will take Paktika. If these things don’t happen, you can burn my bones when I die.” [Continue reading…]

Amy Davidson writes: If we’re talking about a Buffett Rule for taxes, we might also think about a Karzai Rule. This could be formulated as subjecting the the billions of taxpayer dollars we are sending to Afghanistan to the same rate of scrutiny we give to the income of a billionaire, or his secretary. That doesn’t seem to be the case now. The Times, this week, had a report on how the family of President Hamid Karzai is engaged in an end-of-days fight over whatever money and power is left to Kabul. The family has become rich enough on graft and other forms of corruption—funded, in many cases, by American contracts and piles of aid money—for factions to form among his relatives. One brother, Mahmoud Karzai, says another, Shah Wali Karzai, essentially stole fifty-five million dollars from a real-estate development venture called Aino Mena. Shah Wali says that he just moved the money because Mahmoud was going to steal it and move it abroad as he’s done with other funds (which Mahmoud denies). These charges are not mutually exclusive. Figuring out which brother of the President we’re keeping in power is guilty of stealing how much makes legal sense. But this may also be one of those cases where two people each tell you that the other is crazy, or corrupt, and all you can work out is that at least one of them is—and that maybe you shouldn’t be giving money to either of them.

Another question: Does anyone think that that Aino Mena, a big housing development outside of Kandahar, through which tens or hundreds of millions of dollars are apparently flowing, actually makes any economic sense? I could misapprehend the Afghan housing market, but it seems from a distance to be about as sensibly run as the Kabul Bank, where lending resembled looting and which ultimately failed, and involved some of the same characters. (See Dexter Filkins’s story for the details.) Then again, since, according to the Times, it is being built on “land that Afghan military officials have claimed was illegally seized from the Ministry of Defense,” it might make some money.

One odd aspect of the story is that a number of members of the Karzai family are actually American citizens, including Mahmoud. They lived here for many years in exile; they started a chain of Afghan restaurants, which are supposed to have pretty good food. This is also why Mahmoud is under investigation on various tax-evasion charges, and here the Karzai Rule suggests another question: If you can’t even tax the true income of the expatriate multimillionaire American associates of a corrupt foreign regime, should the taxes of a secretary in America be paying for it? [Continue reading…]

Michael Hastings writes: The mother and father sit at the kitchen table in their Idaho farmhouse, watching their son on YouTube plead for his life. The Taliban captured 26-year-old Bowe Bergdahl almost three years ago, on June 30th, 2009, and since that day, his parents, Jani and Bob, have had no contact with him. Like the rest of the world, their lone glimpses of Bowe – the only American prisoner of war left in either Iraq or Afghanistan – have come through a series of propaganda videos, filmed while he’s been in captivity.

In the video they’re watching now, Bowe doesn’t look good. He’s emaciated, maybe 30 pounds underweight, his face sunken, his eye sockets like caves. He’s wearing a scraggly beard and he’s talking funny, with some kind of foreign accent. Jani presses her left hand across her forehead, as if shielding herself from the images onscreen, her eyes filling with tears. Bob, unable to look away, hits play on the MacBook Pro for perhaps the 30th time. Over and over again, he watches as his only son, dressed in a ragged uniform, begs for someone to rescue him.

“Release me, please!” Bowe screams at the camera. “I’m begging you – bring me home!”

Private First Class Bowe Bergdahl arrived in Afghanistan at the worst possible moment, just as President Barack Obama had ordered the first troop surge in the spring of 2009. Rather than withdraw from a disastrous and increasingly deadly war started by his predecessor, the new commander in chief had decided to escalate the conflict, tripling the number of troops to 100,000 and employing a counterinsurgency strategy that had yet to demonstrate any measurable success. To many on Obama’s staff, who had been studying Lessons in Disaster, a book about America’s failure in Vietnam, the catastrophe to come seemed almost preordained. “My God,” his deputy national security adviser Tom Don­ilon said at the time. “What are we getting this guy into?” Over the next three years, 13,000 Americans would be killed or wounded in Afghanistan – more than during the previous eight years of war under George W. Bush.

Bowe’s own tour of duty in Afghanistan mirrored the larger American experience in the war – marked by tragedy, confusion, misplaced idealism, deluded thinking and, perhaps, a moment of insanity. And it is with Bowe that the war will likely come to an end. On May 1st, in a surprise visit to Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, President Obama announced that the United States will now pursue “a negotiated peace” with the Taliban. That peace is likely to include a prisoner swap – or a “confidence-building measure,” as U.S. officials working on the negotiations call it – that could finally end the longest war in America’s history. Bowe is the one prisoner the Taliban have to trade. “It could be a huge win if Obama could bring him home,” says a senior administration official familiar with the negotiations. “Especially in an election year, if it’s handled properly.” [Continue reading…]

Meredith Tax writes: Why is it so hard for people in the anti-war movement to hold two ideas in their heads at the same time? Can’t we want to end the war in Afghanistan and at the same time practice solidarity with its victims?

As the Taliban, prompted by Pakistan’s ISI, becomes ever more aggressive, Afghan women and civil society campaigners are asking for support to protect the gains they’ve made, but nobody in the US government – or the left – seems to be listening.

Obama’s realpolitik has replaced the Bush administration’s rhetoric about bringing democracy to the region. “Afghan good enough” is the magic phrase in Washington. If this entails throwing women overboard, hey, that’s realpolitik. In March, 2011, Rajiv Chandrasekaran of the Washington Post asked a senior State Department officer what the policy would be towards women as the US withdrew. The answer:

“Gender issues are going to have to take a back seat to other priorities … There’s no way we can be successful if we maintain every special interest and pet project. All those pet rocks in our rucksack were taking us down.”

The war has cost too much in lives and money to be sustainable, and no one questions that it has been badly managed. The latest US blunder, according to Human Rights Watch, has been to make a huge strategic investment in the Afghan Local Police force; unfortunately, the ALP is full of rapists and thugs who are not held accountable for their crimes. The latest horror story concerns Lal Bibi, an 18-year-old girl abducted by an ALP leader in Kunduz province, chained to a wall, and raped, beaten and tortured for five days in revenge for an offense by a distant cousin. Normally, Lal Bibi’s family would have killed her – they may yet do so – but they have gone public and are trying to get justice. Meanwhile, the US military continues to express confidence in the Afghan Local Police.

And if its misjudgment is behind the ALP, the US is equally to blame for the rise of the Taliban; together with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, the US funded them and gave them weapons in the late 1970s, when they wanted a proxy to fight the Soviets. Thus the US people have some responsibility to make sure that the result of all this intervention is not the Talibanization of the Karzai government.

Further, Obama has committed us to financial aid to Afghanistan for the forseeable future. What kind of financial aid should the US be giving, and what conditions should it place on such aid?

The anti-war movement isn’t discussing these issues. It simply echoes the position of the Obama administration – out as soon as possible and no questions asked. The movement’s entire attention seems to be focused on drones, as if wanting to end the war precludes thinking constructively about peace. [Continue reading…]

The Associated Press reports: NATO has concluded agreements with Central Asian nations allowing it to evacuate vehicles and other military equipment from Afghanistan and completely bypass Pakistan, which once provided the main supply route for coalition forces.

Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said Monday that Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan had agreed to allow the reverse transport of alliance equipment. Since NATO already has an agreement with Russia, the deal will allow it to ship back to Europe tens of thousands of vehicles, containers and other items through the overland route when the evacuation picks up pace later this year.

Pakistan shut down the southern supply routes six months ago after U.S. airstrikes accidentally killed 24 Pakistani soldiers at two border posts, forcing NATO to switch almost completely to the so-called Northern Distribution Network.

After months of stalemate, Pakistani leaders last month signaled that negotiations on the supply routes were progressing, just in time to secure an invitation to the weekend NATO summit in Chicago. But since then the two sides have made little progress in the talks, officials said.

The announcement on Monday appears to indicate that Washington and the allies are now preparing for the possibility that the supply link through Pakistan, said to be about six times cheaper than its northern alternative, may not be reopened at all.

The New York Times reports: The Army has amended its charges against Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, the soldier accused of murdering civilians in southern Afghanistan in March, reducing the murder count by one, to 16, and adding charges of illegal steroid use and alcohol consumption.

In its statement accompanying the amended charges, the Army did not explain why it had eliminated one of the murder counts, though it initially reported 16 dead shortly after the killings.

The added charge of alcohol consumption was expected, as military officials had previously said that soldiers on Sergeant Bales’s combat outpost in Kandahar Province reported seeing him drinking the night of the killings.

But the report of steroid use is new. The Army’s new charging sheet said that Sergeant Bales had illegally possessed and used stanozolol, an anabolic steroid commonly used by athletes to build muscle mass.

While anabolic steroids can promote rapid muscle growth, they carry an array of risks, including for higher blood pressure and cancer, and have been linked to psychological changes.

Tony Karon writes: President Barack Obama huddled with President Hamid Karzai in Chicago on Sunday, urging Afghanistan’s leader to accelerate negotiations with the Taliban over a political solution to the longest war in America’s history. But the prospect for Karzai negotiating successfully with the insurgents is clouded by a question raised by Josef Stalin, on the eve of World War II, in response to the suggestion that he offer concessions to the Pope: “How many divisions does he have?” The Taliban now ask the same question about Karzai. And should the Afghan leader also ask himself the question, he might reach a similarly dispiriting conclusion. Karzai’s independent power base is minimal, as is his ability to influence the outcome of his country’s civil war absent direct U.S. involvement. And that gives neither Karzai nor the Taliban much incentive to cut a deal with the other.

While acknowledging “hard days ahead,” Obama was painting a picture of the “Afghan war as we understand it (being) over” after the U.S. combat role ends in 2014 and Afghanistan entering a “transformational decade of peace and stability and development.” But his commander on the ground offered a more chilling assessment on Sunday. ”I don’t want to, again, understate the challenge that we have ahead of us,” Gen. John Allen, commander of NATO’s ISAF mission in Afghanistan, told a media briefing on the sidelines of the NATO summit in Chicago on Sunday. “The Taliban is still a resilient and capable opponent in the battle space. There’s no end of combat before the end of 2014. And, in fact, the Taliban will oppose the ANSF (Afghan National Security Forces) after 2014.”

In other words, the war won’t end with NATO withdrawal.

It’s the realization that the Taliban will remain very much alive and kicking after NATO leaves that has prompted Obama to press upon Karzai the need to engage with greater urgency in reconciliation talks with the Taliban — and also to implement electoral reforms to diminish corruption and make elections more transparent. But Karzai is a survivor by instinct, and neither electoral reform nor serious talks with the Taliban do much to enhance his prospects of political survival. [Continue reading…]

Michael Hastings writes: President Obama will arrive in Chicago this weekend to participate in a charade that has one not-so-hidden goal: Get the hell out of Afghanistan.

After Obama made what many around him now privately acknowledge was a mistake to escalate the conflict three years ago — essentially creating a new war of his own, tripling the size of U.S. forces after he caved under intense pressure from the Pentagon — the White House has been desperately searching for a way out. Ideally, one that couldn’t be spun as a full on retreat.

The administration didn’t find it at the last NATO Summit in Lisbon, Portugal, two years ago. The U.S. still had to pretend they were in it for the next decade. There, NATO Secretary General Anders Foghs Rasmussen boldly committed the U.S. and Europe beyond 2014. “One thing must be very clear: NATO is in this for the long term,” he told reporters at the time.

Today, the calculus has changed completely, while the strategy’s failure is nearly impossible to deny. Bin Laden’s killing — which, for what it’s worth, had zero relationship to the counterinsurgency plan we adopted — gave Obama the political cover to pull it off. Finally, Obama could overrule his generals (which he did a month after the Osama raid) whose plan called for 130,000 troops to stay for years more to come.

“People are ready to see the war be wound down,” says Heather Hurlburt, executive director of the National Security Network. “They don’t really understand. It’s been ten years, Bin Laden is gone, what exactly are we there for again?”

By rarely speaking about the war publicly — Obama has given only four major addresses on Afghanistan, or, about one speech for every 484 soldiers killed — the president allowed the horrible news to fill the void. The public was treated to one fiasco, embarrassment, or atrocity after the other, culminating with a crescendo of upsetting events this year that seemed to solidify public opinion against the fight. (The Koran burning, urinating on the Taliban, the massacre of 17 civilians, posing with dead body photos…)

With almost 70 percent of the public now against it, the war became politically safe enough to quit. “Since [the majority of] Americans neither care nor understand what the hell we’ve done there or in Iraq, he can do as he likes,” says Colonel Douglas MacGregror, a retired officer and influential military analyst. “We are at the beginning of turning inward for ten years.” [Continue reading…]

The Wall Street Journal reports: Taliban attacks are jumping in the southern Afghan areas that were the focus of the 2010 U.S. troop surge, posing a renewed challenge to the American-led coalition that hoped to pacify the crucial region before withdrawing from the country.

Making sure the fledgling Afghan security forces will be able to hold the Taliban at bay here in Kandahar and elsewhere after most American forces pull out over the next two years is the focus of a North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit that begins in Chicago on Sunday.

The summit unfolds as the coalition, after saying it has reversed the Taliban’s momentum, is gradually transferring security responsibilities across the country to the Afghan troops.

Over the past two years, the farming districts of Zhari, Panjway and Maiwand northwest of Kandahar city—the cradle of the Taliban movement—were the key battlefield of the U.S.-led military campaign in southern Afghanistan. The U.S. has held up its successes in routing the Taliban there as proof that it is winning the war.

Pushed out of these rural districts by the surge, the Taliban last year concentrated on Kandahar city, ramping up their campaign of assassinating government officials. This fighting season, however, they appear to have trickled back to their old home turf.

The Washington Post reports: A former Taliban leader-turned peace negotiator was assassinated by an unidentified gunmen in a brazen attack in the Afghan capital on Sunday.

Arsala Rahmani was gunned down by three armed men traveling in a car near a downtown part of the city as Rahmani headed to his office from his home, officials said.

“He died from bullet wound on the way to the hospital,” General Mohammad Zaher, chief for the criminal branch of Kabul police said by phone.

“It is a big loss for Afghanistan. He was thinking about peace and about key national issues,” said Nisar Hares, a lawmaker and close colleague of Rahmani who was also serving as senator apart from running a commission in the government-appointed High Peace Council (HPC).

The embassy of the United States, which is the main donor for the HPC, described the assassination as a tragedy.

No group has claimed responsibility for the killing. Taliban insurgents said they were not behind it, although the guerrillas, while announcing the launch of their annual spring offensive early this month, said the militants would target members of the HPC among others.

Last year, a suicide bomber, posing as an emissary for the Taliban insurgents, killed HPC head Burhanuddin Rabbani in his Kabul home. Rabbani’s killing led to the collapse of HPC’s unsuccessful efforts for reaching out to the insurgents.

Afghan government officials at the time accused neighboring Pakistan in the killing, with suspicion falling largely on the Taliban, which still has neither taken nor denied responsibility for the assassination.

Yahoo News reports: When President Barack Obama welcomes NATO leaders to Chicago in ten days for a high-stakes summit on the war in Afghanistan, there could be a big gap in the alliance’s talks on strategy — a hole the size and shape of Pakistan.

NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen strongly suggested at his monthly press conference on Friday that Pakistan would not be welcome at the May 20-21 gathering unless it reopens key supply routes into Afghanistan.

“We have actually invited a number of countries from the region — neighbors of Afghanistan, Central Asian countries, Russia — because they provide important transit arrangements to the benefit of our operation,” he said.

“But, as you also know, our transit routes through Pakistan are currently blocked so we have to continue our dialogue with Pakistan with a view to finding a solution to that because that’s really a matter of concern,” Rasmussen said.

The secretary general also echoed past statements from leaders like President Barack Obama that no Afghanistan war strategy can ultimately be successful without Pakistan’s help.

“If we are to ensure long-term peace and stability in Afghanistan, we also need a positive engagement of Pakistan,” he said.

White House officials declined to comment on the record about Rasmussen’s comments. But an administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Yahoo News that “The U.S. and NATO want to see these lines opened up, and it would be preferable to have Pakistan participating in Chicago.”

“But we’ll have to see what progress Pakistan can make in the coming days to determine whether they might ultimately be issued an invitation,” the official said. Rasmussen’s comments came two weeks after the Pentagon released an Afghanistan war progress report that highlighted “both long-term and acute challenges” of the conflict, and warned that the Taliban and their al-Qaida allies “still operate with impunity from sanctuaries in Pakistan.”