Category Archives: Afghanistan

Karzai aide says Afghan runoff vote is likely

Karzai aide says Afghan runoff vote is likely
By Elisabeth Bumillar and Sabrina Tavernise, New York Times, October 16, 2009

The government of President Hamid Karzai is preparing for the likelihood that he will have to face an election runoff with his main challenger, Afghanistan’s ambassador here said Thursday, acknowledging an outcome that Western diplomats had been pushing for but that could complicate the debate over whether to send more American troops.

The comments by the ambassador in Washington, Said Tayeb Jawad, were the first in which Mr. Karzai’s government conceded that a runoff was likely, after weeks of investigation into stark cases of election fraud.

In an interview on Wednesday and in a follow-up telephone conversation on Thursday, Mr. Jawad said that although he had no direct contact with the commission auditing the vote, the Karzai government was preparing for the commission to announce Saturday that a runoff was necessary. [continued…]

$400 per gallon gas to drive debate over cost of war in Afghanistan
By Roxana Tiron, The Hill, October 15, 2009

The Pentagon pays an average of $400 to put a gallon of fuel into a combat vehicle or aircraft in Afghanistan.

The statistic is likely to play into the escalating debate in Congress over the cost of a war that entered its ninth year last week.

Pentagon officials have told the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee a gallon of fuel costs the military about $400 by the time it arrives in the remote locations in Afghanistan where U.S. troops operate. [continued…]

In Kabul, little hope that a runoff will be fair

In Kabul, little hope that a runoff will be fair
By Sabrina Tavernise, New York Times, October 14, 2009

As experts pore over ballots to determine whether the fraud in this country’s presidential election was so big that a runoff vote was required, many Afghans interviewed here on Tuesday shared the same view: Why bother?

In shops, offices and bakeries around the capital, many Afghans said holding a second round of voting to designate a winner simply did not make sense.

It was not that they did not want a final result. Or that they thought the Aug. 20 election had been fraud-free. But years of disappointment in their government has hardened into cynicism, and many said a second round would only lead to another flawed result.

“It’s a waste of time and money,” said Muhammad Hashem Haideri, a 52-year-old movie theater manager. “It would be useless.” [continued…]

Not good enough
By Tom Friedman, New York Times, October 14, 2009

If President Obama can find a way to balance the precise number of troops that will stabilize Afghanistan and Pakistan, without tipping America into a Vietnam there, then he indeed deserves a Nobel Prize — for physics.

I have no problem with the president taking his time to figure this out. He and we are going to have to live with this decision for a long time. For my money, though, I wish there was less talk today about how many more troops to send and more focus on what kind of Afghan government we have as our partner.

Because when you are mounting a counterinsurgency campaign, the local government is the critical bridge between your troops and your goals. If that government is rotten, your whole enterprise is doomed. [continued…]

Rory Stewart on Obama’s approach to the war in Afghanistan

Rory Stewart interviewed on Bill Moyers Journal
September 24, 2009

LYNN SHERR: You’ve met with Secretary Clinton?

RORY STEWART: Sure.

LYNN SHERR: You’ve met with Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke?

RORY STEWART: Sure.

LYNN SHERR: What do you tell them?

RORY STEWART: Again, my message is: focus on what we can do. We don’t have a moral obligation to do what we can’t. People can get very fixed by saying, “But surely you’re not saying we ought to do nothing? Surely you’re not saying we ought to allow the Taliban to do this or that?” And I just keep saying “ought” implies “can”– you don’t have a moral obligation to do what you can’t do.

LYNN SHERR: How is your advice taken?

RORY STEWART: I think what I see at the moment is that people are polite, because they imagine maybe I have some experience with Afghanistan. But I’m one of a broad community of people — we have nine people working in my center at Harvard who’ve worked there for 20 or 30 years and the problem we all have is that if the Administration has for some reason already decided that they’re going to increase troops, they’re going to do a counterinsurgency campaign, it’s very difficult for them to take on board people coming back and saying, “Look, actually, I don’t think this is going to work. It’s a great idea. I can see why you want to do it. But by trying to do the impossible, you may end up doing nothing. I’d like to present an alternative strategy, which is lighter, more intelligent, and may end up actually achieving something.”

LYNN SHERR: And again, their reaction? They listen politely, you say?

RORY STEWART: They listen politely, but in the end, of course, basically the policy decision is made. What they would like is little advice on some small bit. I mean, the analogy that one of my colleagues used recently is this: it’s as though they come to you and they say, “We’re planning to drive our car off a cliff. Do we wear a seatbelt or not?” And we say, “Don’t drive your car off the cliff.” And they say, “No, no, no. That decision’s already made. The question is should we wear our seatbelts?” And you say, “Why by all means wear a seatbelt.” And they say, “Okay, we consulted with policy expert, Rory Stewart,” et cetera. [continued…]

What I saw at the Afghan election

What I saw at the Afghan election
By Peter W. Galbraith, Washington Post, October 4, 2009

Before firing me last week from my post as his deputy special representative in Afghanistan, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon conveyed one last instruction: Do not talk to the press. In effect, I was being told to remain a team player after being thrown off the team. Nonetheless, I agreed.

As my differences with my boss, Norwegian diplomat Kai Eide, had already been well publicized (through no fault of either of us), I asked only that the statement announcing my dismissal reflect the real reasons. Alain LeRoy, the head of U.N. peacekeeping and my immediate superior in New York, proposed that the United Nations say I was being recalled over a “disagreement as to how the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) would respond to electoral fraud.” Although this was not entirely accurate — the dispute was really about whether the U.N. mission would respond to the massive electoral fraud — I agreed.

Instead, the United Nations announced my recall as occurring “in the best interests of the mission,” and U.N. press officials told reporters on background that my firing was necessitated by a “personality clash” with Eide, a friend of 15 years who had introduced me to my future wife.

I might have tolerated even this last act of dishonesty in a dispute dating back many months if the stakes were not so high. For weeks, Eide had been denying or playing down the fraud in Afghanistan’s recent presidential election, telling me he was concerned that even discussing the fraud might inflame tensions in the country. But in my view, the fraud was a fact that the United Nations had to acknowledge or risk losing its credibility with the many Afghans who did not support President Hamid Karzai. [continued…]

US accepts Hamid Karzai as Afghan leader despite poll fraud claims

US accepts Hamid Karzai as Afghan leader despite poll fraud claims
By Giles Whittell, The Times, September 29, 2009

The White House has ended weeks of hesitation over how to respond to the Afghan election by accepting President Karzai as the winner despite evidence that up to 20 per cent of ballots cast may have been fraudulent.

Abandoning its previous policy of not prejudging investigations of vote rigging, the Obama Administration has conceded that Mr Karzai will be President for another five years on the basis that even if he were forced into a second round of voting he would almost certainly win it.

The decision will increase pressure on President Obama to justify further US troop deployments to Afghanistan to prop up a regime now regarded as systemically corrupt. [continued…]

McChrystal: more forces or ‘mission failure’

McChrystal: more forces or ‘mission failure’
By Bob Woodward, Washington Post, September 21, 2009

The top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan warns in an urgent, confidential assessment of the war that he needs more forces within the next year and bluntly states that without them, the eight-year conflict “will likely result in failure,” according to a copy of the 66-page document obtained by The Washington Post.

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal says emphatically: “Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near-term (next 12 months) — while Afghan security capacity matures — risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible.”

His assessment was sent to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates on Aug. 30 and is now being reviewed by President Obama and his national security team.

McChrystal concludes the document’s five-page Commander’s Summary on a note of muted optimism: “While the situation is serious, success is still achievable.”

But he repeatedly warns that without more forces and the rapid implementation of a genuine counterinsurgency strategy, defeat is likely. McChrystal describes an Afghan government riddled with corruption and an international force undermined by tactics that alienate civilians. [continued…]

Changes have Obama rethinking war strategy
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Karen DeYoung, Washington Post, September 21, 2009

From his headquarters in Kabul, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal sees one clear path to achieve President Obama’s core goal of preventing al-Qaeda from reestablishing havens in Afghanistan: “Success,” he writes in his assessment, “demands a comprehensive counterinsurgency campaign.”

Inside the White House, the way forward in Afghanistan is no longer so clear.

Although Obama endorsed a strategy document in March that called for “executing and resourcing an integrated civilian-military counterinsurgency strategy,” there have been significant changes in Afghanistan and Washington since then. A disputed presidential election, an erosion in support for the war effort among Democrats in Congress and the American public, and a sharp increase in U.S. casualties have prompted the president and his top advisers to reexamine their assumptions about the U.S. role in defeating the Taliban insurgency.

Instead of debating whether to give McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, more troops, the discussion in the White House is now focused on whether, after eight years of war, the United States should vastly expand counterinsurgency efforts along the lines he has proposed — which involve an intensive program to improve security and governance in key population centers — or whether it should begin shifting its approach away from such initiatives and simply target leaders of terrorist groups who try to return to Afghanistan. [continued…]

Meet the Afghan Army
By Ann Jones, TomDispatch, September 20, 2009

The big Afghanistan debate in Washington is not over whether more troops are needed, but just who they should be: Americans or Afghans — Us or Them. Having just spent time in Afghanistan seeing how things stand, I wouldn’t bet on Them.

Frankly, I wouldn’t bet on Us either. In eight years, American troops have worn out their welcome. Their very presence now incites opposition, but that’s another story. It’s Them — the Afghans — I want to talk about.

Afghans are Afghans. They have their own history, their own culture, their own habitual ways of thinking and behaving, all complicated by a modern experience of decades of war, displacement, abject poverty, and incessant meddling by foreign governments near and far — of which the United States has been the most powerful and persistent. Afghans do not think or act like Americans. Yet Americans in power refuse to grasp that inconvenient point. [continued…]

Afghan election woes raise Taliban’s stock
By Craig Whitlock, Washington Post, September 21, 2009

The big winner in the fraud-ridden, never-ending Afghanistan elections is turning out to be a party not even on the ballot: the Taliban.

A stream of revelations about systematic cheating during last month’s vote has given the Taliban fresh ammunition in their propaganda campaign to portray President Hamid Karzai’s administration as hopelessly corrupt. Infighting among U.S., U.N. and European diplomats over whether to accept the results with Karzai the winner or force a new round of voting has also fed the Taliban line that the government in Kabul is merely a puppet of foreign powers.

Mohammad Omar, the Taliban’s reclusive leader, broke his silence Saturday to denounce “the so-called elections which were fraught with fraud and lies and which were categorically rejected by the people.”

In a statement released on the Internet to mark the end of Ramadan, Omar also railed against what he called “the rampant corruption in the surrogate Kabul administration, the embezzlement, drug trafficking, the existence of mafia networks, the tyranny and high-handedness of the warlords,” according to a translation by the NEFA Foundation, a terrorism research group. [continued…]

Obama’s Afghanistan blind spot

Obama’s Afghanistan blind spot
By Kenneth Weisbrode, World Politics Review, September 16, 2009

On the ground, no doubt, U.S. and NATO forces are doing their best to implement a policy of limited liability in Afghanistan — meant to buy enough time for a predictable stalemate to emerge. We already know what that will look like: a non-Taliban-dominated government with friendly relations with its Pakistani neighbor. So long as Pakistan doesn’t collapse and the regime in Kabul is not nominally led by the Taliban or a similar Islamist regime opposed to the West, we can claim success after a decent interval.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this outcome. It approximates the post-Soviet situation in the country until the Taliban took control in the late 1990s. But for nearly all of that post-Soviet period, Afghanistan was embroiled in civil war among various factions, nearly all of them backed by outside powers — not simply Pakistan but also Iran, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Saudi Arabia, and several others.

All of Afghanistan’s neighbors have a history of interfering in Afghanistan because they fear that militants not kept busy there will eventually wreak havoc within their own borders. At the same time, all have been unwilling to tolerate the “victory” of a single Afghan contender because of deep concerns about the aims of rival backers. The fears stem from internal conflicts in all of the neighboring countries, many of which, in turn, are linked to Afghanistan.

The specter of this “international civil war” haunts those dealing with Afghanistan today. There is only one way to prevent it besides an indefinitely long and costly military occupation: an agreement among neighboring powers to respect Afghanistan’s neutrality and to lend greater political assistance to U.S. and NATO efforts on the ground. It may not be sufficient to stabilizing Afghanistan, but it is necessary. [continued…]

Obama says he won’t rush Afghanistan troop decision
By Julian E. Barnes, Los Angeles Times, September 17, 2009

On a day when his administration outlined ambitious goals for Afghanistan and Pakistan, President Obama also moved Wednesday to call a timeout in the escalating national debate over a possible troop increase in Afghanistan.

Obama insisted he would not be rushed in deciding whether to send more troops — an action favored by top military leaders but questioned by a growing number of Democrats — saying that additional time is needed to refine strategy and assess needs.

Yet the lofty goals set by the White House — such as promoting an Afghan government that can combat extremism and corruption while supporting human rights — represent difficult, time-consuming work likely to require additional military and nonmilitary commitments at a time of flagging support from Obama’s wary political base. [continued…]

NATO says U.S. airstrike in Kunduz killed 30 civilians
By Yochi J Dreazen, Wall Street Journal, September 17, 2009

NATO investigators believe that 30 civilians were killed in a controversial U.S. airstrike in Afghanistan’s Kunduz province, a preliminary finding that could spark new pressure for disciplinary actions against the German and American personnel involved in the attack.

A team of military officers led by Canadian Maj. Gen. C.S. Sullivan spent more than a week probing the Sept. 4 bombing, which took place after a German commander in Kunduz ordered an airstrike on two hijacked fuel trucks that he feared would be used in a suicide attack against his troops.

North Atlantic Treaty Organization investigators believe roughly 100 people were killed in the resulting strike, including approximately 70 militants, according to people familiar with the matter. A separate Afghan government probe reached roughly the same conclusions about the militant and civilian death tolls, these people said. [continued…]

Afghanistan’s other front

Afghanistan’s other front
By Joseph Kearns Goodwin, New York Times, September 16, 2009

Allegations of ballot-stuffing in the presidential election in Afghanistan last month are now so widespread that a recount is necessary, and perhaps even a runoff. Yet this electoral chicanery pales in comparison to the systemic, day-to-day corruption within the administration of President Hamid Karzai, who has claimed victory in the election. Without a concerted campaign to fight this pervasive venality, all our efforts there, including the sending of additional troops, will be in vain.

I have just returned from Afghanistan, where I spent seven months as a special adviser to NATO’s director of communications. On listening tours across the country, we left behind the official procession of armored S.U.V.’s, bristling guns and imposing flak jackets that too often encumber coalition forces when they arrive in local villages. Dressed in civilian clothes and driven in ordinary cars, we were able to move around in a manner less likely to intimidate and more likely to elicit candor.

The recurring complaint I heard from Afghans centered on the untenable encroachment of government corruption into their daily lives — the homeowner who has to pay a bribe to get connected to the sewage system, the defendant who tenders payment to a judge for a favorable verdict. People were so incensed with the current government’s misdeeds that I often heard the disturbing refrain: “If Karzai is re-elected, then I am going to join the Taliban.” [continued…]

Can we bribe our way to victory?
By Fred Kaplan, Slate, September 15, 2009

…the unlikely figure of Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., raised the key issue of the day. He began his questioning of Adm. Mullen by asking whether the Taliban had any tanks. No, Mullen replied. Graham then asked how many airplanes they have. None, the admiral answered, perhaps wondering where this line of inquiry was going.

Then Graham zeroed in. If that’s the case, he asked, how is it that the Taliban are gaining ground? The problem isn’t the Taliban, it’s the Afghan government, isn’t that right?

Mullen agreed. The problem, he said, “is clearly the lack of legitimacy of the government.”

Graham pushed the matter. “We could send a million troops, and that wouldn’t restore legitimacy in the government?” he asked.

Mullen replied, “That is correct.”

A few minutes later, under questioning from Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, Mullen elaborated: “The Afghan government needs to have some legitimacy in the eyes of the people. The core issue is the corruption. … It’s been a way of life for some time, and it’s just got to change. That threat is every bit as significant as the Taliban.” [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — Fred Kaplan’s proposal — that the US government can “legitimize” an Afghan government by heavily bribing its officials — is, I imagine he would say, “counter-intuitive”. I’d call it stupid. It presupposes that everyone is bribable — everyone has their price. That certainly applies to those who are already corrupt, but I see no reason to view all Afghans as corruptable. On the contrary, those who have the strongest allegiance to their country or their tribe are least likely to have any interest in doing the bidding of an American paymaster.

Maybe the real solution requires that the Americans have the humility to accept that homegrown solutions are ultimately the only ones that take root.

Call for an Afghan surge
By Yochi J Dreazen, Wall Street Journal, September 16, 2009

America’s top military officer endorsed sending more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, a shift in Pentagon rhetoric that heralds a potential deepening of involvement in the Afghan war despite flagging support from the public and top Democrats in Congress. [continued…]

Afghan recount presents huge task
By Richard A Oppel Jr and Sangar Rahimi, New York Times, September 16, 2009

One out of every seven ballots in last month’s Afghan presidential elections — and possibly many more — will be examined as part of a huge recount and fraud audit that may force the incumbent, Hamid Karzai, into a runoff, Afghan election officials said Tuesday.

A United Nations-backed commission serving as the ultimate arbiter of the election ordered the recount from around 10 percent of the country’s polling stations because of suspected fraud, the head of the panel said Tuesday, though the number of actual votes covered by the order is much higher, numbers from a top Afghan election official showed.

The Aug. 20 ballot was racked by egregious voting fraud and ballot stuffing, international and Afghan election observers have said, throwing Afghanistan into an electoral crisis even as the Taliban gains ground in the rugged countryside. [continued…]

A somber warning on Afghanistan

A somber warning on Afghanistan
By Alison Small, New York Times, September 14, 2009

Western powers now in Afghanistan run the risk of suffering the fate of the Soviet Union there if they cannot halt the growing insurgency and an Afghan perception that they are foreign invaders, according to Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former U.S. national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter.

In a speech opening a weekend gathering of military and foreign policy experts, Mr. Brzezinski, who was national security adviser when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in late 1979, endorsed a British and German call, backed by France, for a new international conference on the country. He also set the tone for a weekend of somber assessments of the situation.

He noted that it took about 300 U.S. Special Forces — fighting with Northern Alliance troops — to overthrow Taliban rule after the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001.

Now, however, with about 100,000 U.S. and allied troops in Afghanistan, those forces are increasingly perceived as foreign invaders, much as the Soviet troops were from the start, Mr. Brzezinski said. [continued…]

In Kandahar, a Taliban on the rise
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Washington Post, September 14, 2009

The slow and quiet fall of Kandahar, the country’s second-largest city, poses a complex new challenge for the NATO effort to stabilize Afghanistan. It is factoring prominently into discussions between Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the overall U.S. and NATO commander, and his advisers about how many more troops to seek from Washington.

“Kandahar is at the top of the list,” one senior U.S. military official in Afghanistan said. “We simply do not have enough resources to address the challenges there.”

Kandahar in many ways is a microcosm of the challenges the United States faces in stabilizing Afghanistan. The city is filled with ineffective government officials and police officers whom the governor calls looters and kidnappers. Unemployment is rampant. Municipal services are nonexistent. Reconstruction projects have not changed many lives. A lack of NATO forces allowed militants free rein. [continued…]

Are US taxpayers funding the Taliban?
By Jean MacKenzie, GlobalPost, September 2, 2009

The United States Agency for International Development has opened an investigation into allegations that its funds for road and bridge construction in Afghanistan are ending up in the hands of the Taliban, through a protection racket for contractors.

And House Foreign Affairs Committee member, Rep. Bill Delahunt (D-Mass.) vowed to hold hearings on the issue in the fall, saying: “The idea that American taxpayer dollars are ending up with the Taliban is a case for grave concern.”

U.S. officials confirmed that the preliminary investigation and the proposed hearings were sparked by a GlobalPost special report on the funding of the Taliban last month that uncovered a process that has been an open secret in Afghanistan for years among those in international aid organizations.

The report exposed that the Taliban takes a percentage of the billions of dollars in aid from U.S. and other international coalition members that goes to large organizations and their subcontractors for development projects, in exchange for protection in remote areas controlled by the insurgency. [continued…]

McChrystal: No major al-Qaida signs in Afghanistan
AP, September 11, 2009

The top commander of U.S. and international forces in Afghanistan said Friday he sees no signs of a major al-Qaida presence in the country, but says the terror group still maintains close links to insurgents. [continued…]

Bin Laden calls Obama ‘powerless’ in Afghan war
AP, September 14, 2009

Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden described President Barack Obama as “powerless” to stop the war in Afghanistan and threatened to step up guerrilla warfare there in a new audiotape released to mark the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States.

In the 11-minute tape, addressed to the American people, bin Laden said Obama is only following the warlike policies of his predecessor George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney and he urged Americans to “liberate” themselves from the influence of “neo-conservatives and the Israeli lobby.”

The tape was posted on Islamic militant Web sites two days after the eighth anniversary of the 2001 suicide plane hijackings. The terror leader usually addresses Americans in a message timed around the date of the attacks, which sparked the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan the same year, and then in Iraq two years later.

Bin Laden said Americans had failed to understand that al-Qaida carried out the attacks in retaliation for U.S. support for Israel. If America reconsiders its alliance with the Jewish state, al-Qaida will respond on “sound and just bases.” [continued…]

To save Afghanistan, look to its past

To save Afghanistan, look to its past
By Ansar Rahel and Jon Krakauer, New York Times, September 11, 2009

No matter who is ultimately certified as the winner of Afghanistan’s presidential election, the vote was plagued by so much fraud and violence, and had such low turnout, that it is inconceivable the Afghan people will regard the victor as a legitimate leader. And if a majority of Afghans do not consider the president and his government to be legitimate, the military campaign now being waged by the United States and its allies is doomed to fail, regardless of the number of troops deployed.

Current discussions about cobbling together mistrustful factions into a new power-sharing government will produce neither enduring democracy nor short-term peace. The slate must be wiped clean. Afghans need to start again from scratch and choose their leader by a fresh process that restores legitimacy to the national government.

Fortunately, such a process already exists — one that is both highly respected by the Afghan people and recognized in the Afghan Constitution: the convening of an emergency loya jirga, or grand assembly. The loya jirga has been called in times of national crisis in Afghanistan for centuries. In 1747, such an assembly in Kandahar selected Ahmad Shah Durrani as the first king of Afghanistan, uniting a patchwork of contentious tribal entities into the modern Afghan state. The loya jirga, moreover, is not only deeply rooted in Pashtun tradition, but is also consistent with notions of Western representative democracy. [continued…]

Obama faces doubts from Democrats on Afghanistan
By Eric Schmitt and David E Sanger, New York Times, September 11, 2009

The leading Senate Democrat on military matters said Thursday that he was against sending more American combat troops to Afghanistan until the United States speeded up the training and equipping of more Afghan security forces.

The comments by the senator, Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat who is the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, illustrate the growing skepticism President Obama is facing in his own party as the White House decides whether to commit more deeply to a war that has begun losing public support, even as American commanders acknowledge that the situation on the ground has deteriorated.

Senator Levin’s comments, made in an interview and in the draft of a speech he will deliver Friday, are significant because his stature on military matters gives him the ability to sway fellow lawmakers, and his pivotal committee position provides a platform for vetting Mr. Obama’s major decisions on troops. [continued…]

Pelosi sees support ebbing for Afghan war
By Yochi J Dreazen and Naftali Bendavid, Wall Street Journal, September 11, 2009

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she sees little congressional support for boosting troop levels in Afghanistan, putting the Democratic majority in Congress on a possible collision course with the Obama administration over the future conduct of the war there.

The remarks Thursday by Ms. Pelosi (D., Calif.) make her the highest-ranking Democrat to signal opposition to the administration’s handling of the Afghan war, a top national-security priority.

The remarks also underscored the increasingly complex political dynamics confronting President Barack Obama as he considers whether to send additional U.S. forces to Afghanistan. [continued…]

Afghan warlord General Atta Mohammad Nur warning raises fear of election violence
By Jerome Starkey and James Hider, The Times, September 11, 2009

One of Afghanistan’s most powerful warlords has defended the popular right to protest against the presidential election results, raising fears that the country could be engulfed by violence if supporters of the losing candidates reject the poll as being rigged.

General Atta Mohammad Nur, who broke ranks with the Government to support President Karzai’s main election rival, insisted: “It is the right of our people to defend their votes. Demonstrations, gatherings, strikes and protests against fraud being carried out by the current system are the absolute right of the people.”

Speaking on national television, he accused the country’s Interior Minister, Hanif Atmar, of “forcing people to keep silent”. [continued…]

NATO nations ask U.N. for new Afghan ‘timelines’

NATO nations ask U.N. for new Afghan ‘timelines’
By Andres Cala, New York Times, September 10, 2009

The Spanish defense minister, Carme Chacón, said Wednesday that five years would be a “reasonable” timeframe for NATO forces to withdraw from Afghanistan, just as major European powers officially called on the United Nations to convene an international conference before the end of the year to set new “benchmarks and timelines.”

Mrs. Chacón also said she would request 220 more troops for Spain’s Afghanistan contingent, bringing the permanent deployment there to about 1,000. With the additional troops, Spain’s contribution would still fall behind those of 10 other NATO members, led by the United States, Britain, France and Germany. Spain’s government is expected to approve the request Friday at a cabinet meeting.

Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero had already said in July that troop levels would probably increase. [continued…]

Afghan election watchdog discards tainted votes
By Anand Gopal, Wall Street Journal, September 10, 2009

The U.N.-funded elections watchdog in Afghanistan has begun to throw out fraudulent ballots from the country’s presidential balloting, a day after a tally including contested votes put President Hamid Karzai over the 50% he needs to avoid a second round.

The Electoral Complaints Commission, a United Nations-sponsored body responsible for investigating allegations of fraud and misconduct, has been looking into more than 600 serious accusations, Commissioner Grant Kippen said. The accusations include instances of ballot stuffing and voter intimidation. In some cases, the commission has disqualified results from entire polling stations. [continued…]

September 9: The shot that was not heard round the world

September 9: The shot that was not heard round the world
By Paul Woodward, War in Context, September 9, 2009

As the war in Afghanistan enters its ninth year, in the minds of most Americans the attacks of September 11, 2001 remain the signal event that shaped everything that has followed. Yet had we been paying more attention, we would have known that September 9, 2001, the day that Ahmed Shah Massoud was assassinated, was no less significant.

On that day, Afghanistan lost a leader of global stature — a man who truly was irreplaceable. Now, as much as ever, as the Taliban is resurgent and American and its allies attempt to prop up a deeply corrupt government in Kabul, the memory of Massoud is a symbol of the Afghan people’s so many shattered hopes.

A year after Massoud’s death, John Burns wrote in the New York Times:

As Americans prepare to mark the Sept. 11 anniversary, with many still struggling to come to terms with the cataclysm of that day, Afghans are passing through their own harrowing remembrance, of an attack that was overshadowed for the rest of the world by what happened two days later in the United States. Only four men died on Sept. 9 — the 49-year-old Mr. Massoud, an aide and the assassins — but there has been little healing of the wounds the killers inflicted on the hearts and the hopes of millions of his countrymen.

Ask Afghans who knew Mr. Massoud what it was about him that inspires such grief, and they struggle. Like [Fahim] Dashti [who was with Massoud at the time of his assassination], they talk of his skills as the guerrilla commander who astonished Soviet generals he outfought during the occupation of the 1980’s, or of his years holding out against the Taliban, when almost all other guerrilla leaders had joined the Taliban or fled abroad.

They speak of Mr. Massoud’s directness, his lack of pretense or false piety, his modesty, the look of somber intensity that rarely left his face. But usually, they give up, as people do when they try to define charisma. Mr. Dashti, the editor, resorted, in the end, to the simplest words. “We loved him,” he said. “We loved him more than we loved our own mothers and fathers. He embodied everything we loved about Afghanistan.”

In 1998, in a letter to the American people, Massoud wrote:

Let me correct a few fallacies that are propagated by Taliban backers and their lobbies around the world. This situation over the short and long-run, even in case of total control by the Taliban, will not be to anyone’s interest. It will not result in stability, peace and prosperity in the region. The people of Afghanistan will not accept such a repressive regime. Regional countries will never feel secure and safe. Resistance will not end in Afghanistan, but will take on a new national dimension, encompassing all Afghan ethnic and social strata.

The goal is clear. Afghans want to regain their right to self-determination through a democratic or traditional mechanism acceptable to our people. No one group, faction or individual has the right to dictate or impose its will by force or proxy on others. But first, the obstacles have to be overcome, the war has to end, just peace established and a transitional administration set up to move us toward a representative government.

We are willing to move toward this noble goal. We consider this as part of our duty to defend humanity against the scourge of intolerance, violence and fanaticism. But the international community and the democracies of the world should not waste any valuable time, and instead play their critical role to assist in any way possible the valiant people of Afghanistan overcome the obstacles that exist on the path to freedom, peace, stability and prosperity.

Pepe Escobar recounts:

During the 1990s, and especially during the time of the Taliban rule, which began in 1996, Washington never knew exactly how to deal with Massoud. But after the attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agents sought a meeting with Massoud in Dushanbe. The CIA wanted information on how to get to bin Laden. Massoud carefully considered all the angles, but ultimately he could not but criticize American shortsightedness. For the Bill Clinton administration, the ultimate aim was to get bin Laden and destroy al-Qaeda. For Massoud, the main point was to destroy the Taliban. He repeatedly stressed at the time that “without the Taliban, Osama can’t do anything”.

Massoud, indeed, had agents and intelligence in the heart of Taliban country. The best example is how his Panjshiris planted a powerful truck bomb just outside Mullah Omar’s compound in central Kandahar, in 1999. The explosion left a huge crater and killed 10 people, including three of Mullah Omar’s bodyguards. Omar escaped, almost by a miracle, but if the Northern Alliance could get close to the Taliban, they could not penetrate al-Qaeda’s ultra-hardcore security to try to find and menace bin Laden. And as much as the Northern Alliance could penetrate the Taliban, security chief Arif – now head of intelligence of Hamid Karzai’s government – says that “Osama was actively trying to recruit spies inside the Panjshir Valley”. But once again, no one investigated the “Moroccans”.

In his interview with Asia Times Online, the second-to-last in his lifetime, Massoud repeatedly portrayed al-Qaeda, the Taliban and Pakistan as a sort of “triangle of evil”. He criticized the US for basically following a Pakistani plan: try to “reform” the Taliban and concentrate on seducing Taliban “moderates” (a contradiction in terms). There were never any moderates within the Taliban. Mullah Omar was totally under the spell of bin Laden. American diplomats with knowledge of Central Asia were warning about the “Arabization” of Afghanistan. But no one in Washington was listening. The US only got the message after September 11 – and after Massoud’s death.

In the first months of 2001, Massoud calculated that he had to involve himself in a complex gamble: change his image from warrior to statesman. He addressed the European parliament in Strasbourg, France, in April 2001. This was his first official trip to the West. He tried hard to attract Western support for the resistance against the Taliban. But still no one was listening. In Strasbourg, Massoud delivered a stunning message that nobody took seriously at the time: “If President Bush doesn’t help us, then these terrorists will damage the United States and Europe very soon – and it will be too late.”

Afghanistan Revealed a documentary broadcast by National Geographic in October 2001, presents a portrait of Massoud and his struggle to save Afghanistan.

Measuring success in Afghanistan

Measuring success in Afghanistan
By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch, September 8, 2009

Here may be the single strangest fact of our American world: that at least three administrations — Ronald Reagan’s, George W. Bush’s, and now Barack Obama’s — drew the U.S. “defense” perimeter at the Hindu Kush; that is, in the rugged, mountainous lands of Afghanistan. Put another way, while Americans argue feverishly and angrily over what kind of money, if any, to put into health care, or decaying infrastructure, or other key places of need, until recently just about no one in the mainstream raised a peep about the fact that, for nearly eight years (not to say much of the last three decades), we’ve been pouring billions of dollars, American military know-how, and American lives into a black hole in Afghanistan that is, at least in significant part, of our own creation.

Imagine for a moment, as you read this post, what might have happened if Americans had decided to sink the same sort of money — $228 billion and rising fast — the same “civilian surges,” the same planning, thought, and effort (but not the same staggering ineffectiveness) into reclaiming New Orleans or Detroit, or into planning an American future here at home. Imagine, for a moment, when you read about the multi-millions going into further construction at Bagram Air Base, or to the mercenary company that provides “Lord of the Flies” hire-a-gun guards for American diplomats in massive super-embassies, or about the half-a-billion dollars sunk into a corrupt and fraudulent Afghan election, what a similar investment in our own country might have meant.

Ask yourself: Wouldn’t the U.S. have been safer and more secure if all the money, effort, and planning had gone towards “nation-building” in America? Or do you really think we’re safer now, with an official unemployment rate of 9.7%, an underemployment rate of 16.8%, and a record 25.5% teen unemployment rate, with soaring health-care costs, with vast infrastructural weaknesses and failures, and in debt up to our eyeballs, while tens of thousands of troops and massive infusions of cash are mustered ostensibly to fight a terrorist outfit that may number in the low hundreds or at most thousands, that, by all accounts, isn’t now even based in Afghanistan, and that has shown itself perfectly capable of settling into broken states like Somalia or well functioning cities like Hamburg. [continued…]

Evidence of ballot fraud for Karzai forces U.S. into action
By Matthew Rosenberg and Anand Gopal, Wall Street Journal, September 8, 2009

Evidence of electoral fraud on behalf of incumbent Afghan President Hamid Karzai has become so overwhelming, some U.S. and Western officials say, that they are scrambling to avoid a potential political crisis if he claims victory.

Afghanistan’s election commission decided Monday that it will release a complete preliminary tally from the Aug. 20 presidential election, including votes tainted by fraud charges but not disqualified, a commission official said. Western officials now say they believe almost one of every six of Afghanistan’s more than 25,000 polling stations is tainted by fraud, most of it on behalf of Mr. Karzai.

Including those votes, the preliminary tally is expected to show Mr. Karzai with more than 50% of the vote — enough to avoid a runoff election, Afghan and Western officials say. [continued…]

The Afghanistan abyss

The Afghanistan abyss
By Nicholas D Kristoff, New York Times, September 6, 2009

President Obama has already dispatched an additional 21,000 American troops to Afghanistan and soon will decide whether to send thousands more. That would be a fateful decision for his presidency, and a group of former intelligence officials and other experts is now reluctantly going public to warn that more troops would be a historic mistake.

The group’s concern — dead right, in my view — is that sending more American troops into ethnic Pashtun areas in the Afghan south may only galvanize local people to back the Taliban in repelling the infidels.

“Our policy makers do not understand that the very presence of our forces in the Pashtun areas is the problem,” the group said in a statement to me. “The more troops we put in, the greater the opposition. We do not mitigate the opposition by increasing troop levels, but rather we increase the opposition and prove to the Pashtuns that the Taliban are correct.

“The basic ignorance by our leadership is going to cause the deaths of many fine American troops with no positive outcome,” the statement said. [continued…]

Can victory for President Karzai be taken as legitimate?
By Bronwen Maddox, The Times, September 6, 2009

Western diplomats have been afraid of this predicament ever since the poll results began to come in, with an apparent lead for President Karzai accompanied by a torrent of allegations of fraud. Mr Karzai is now within a whisker of the 50 per cent that would allow him to him claim victory and prevent a run-off vote. But the huge number of serious allegations of fraud — in the thousands, but with at least 600 material to the outcome of the election — mean that it is hard to take his victory as legitimate.

That, certainly, is the view of Abdullah Abdullah, his main rival, and Abdullah supporters. They are threatening to challenge the result through legal appeals and through violence if necessary. The studied position of British and US officials for the past week — that it is for Afghans to decide whether or not the polls produce a credible and legitimate result — is about to shatter. If substantial numbers of Afghans decide that the vote was rigged, what do other governments do then? They have had no answer, hoping not to be in that position. They had better find one now. [continued…]

Fake Afghan poll sites favored Karzai, officials assert
By Dexter Filkins and Carlotta Gall, New York Times, September 7, 2009

Afghans loyal to President Hamid Karzai set up hundreds of fictitious polling sites where no one voted but where hundreds of thousands of ballots were still recorded toward the president’s re-election, according to senior Western and Afghan officials here.

The fake sites, as many as 800, existed only on paper, said a senior Western diplomat in Afghanistan, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the political delicacy of the vote. Local workers reported that hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of votes for Mr. Karzai in the election last month came from each of those places. That pattern was confirmed by another Western official based in Afghanistan.

“We think that about 15 percent of the polling sites never opened on Election Day,” the senior Western diplomat said. “But they still managed to report thousands of ballots for Karzai.”

Besides creating the fake sites, Mr. Karzai’s supporters also took over approximately 800 legitimate polling centers and used them to fraudulently report tens of thousands of additional ballots for Mr. Karzai, the officials said. [continued…]

Sole informant guided decision on Afghan strike
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Washington Post, September 6, 2009

To the German commander, it seemed to be a fortuitous target: More than 100 Taliban insurgents were gathering around two hijacked fuel tankers that had become stuck in the mud near this small farming village.

The grainy live video transmitted from an American F-15E fighter jet circling overhead, which was projected on a screen in a German tactical operations center four miles north of here, showed numerous black dots around the trucks — each of them a thermal image of a human but without enough detail to confirm whether they were carrying weapons. An Afghan informant was on the phone with an intelligence officer at the center, however, insisting that everybody at the site was an insurgent, according to an account that German officers here provided to NATO officials.

Based largely on that informant’s assessment, the commander ordered a 500-pound, satellite-guided bomb to be dropped on each truck early Friday. The vehicles exploded in a fireball that lit up the night sky for miles, incinerating many of those standing nearby.

A NATO fact-finding team estimated Saturday that about 125 people were killed in the bombing, at least two dozen of whom — but perhaps many more — were not insurgents. To the team, which is trying to sort out this complicated incident, mindful that the fallout could further sap public support in Afghanistan for NATO’s security mission here, the target appeared to be far less clear-cut than it had to the Germans.

One survivor, convalescing from abdominal wounds at a hospital in the nearby city of Kunduz, said he went to the site because he thought he could get free fuel. Another patient, a 10-year-old boy with shrapnel in his left leg, said he went to gawk, against his father’s advice. In Kabul, the Afghan capital, relatives of two severely burned survivors being treated at an intensive-care unit said Taliban fighters forced dozens of villagers to assist in moving the bogged-down tankers.

“They came to everyone’s house asking for help,” said Mirajuddin, a shopkeeper who lost six of his cousins in the bombing — none of whom, he said, was an insurgent. “They started beating people and pointing guns. They said, ‘Bring your tractors and help us.’ What could we do?” [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — The striking gap in this account is the absence of testimony from the pilots who released the 500-pound bombs. It’s as though they were merely small cogs in a military machine within which they had little control. Yet we do learn one thing: one of the F-15 pilots recommended dropping 2000-pound bombs. Based on the thermal images he could see, there was little he could discern about the individuals gathered around the fuel trucks yet in his mind the best thing to do would be to kill the maximum number of people in the area.

As the story has been told, the fuel was being dispersed because the trucks couldn’t reach their intended destination. What seems more likely? That the insurgents hoped to later re-collect hundreds of gallons of kerosene stowed away in kitchen jugs, or that the stolen fuel was destined to be used cooking beans over hand-pumped kerosene burners?

“Who goes out at 2 in the morning for fuel? These were bad people, and this was a good operation,” a key local official told the Post.

In the clear mountain air of Afghanistan, the full-moon late last week would have provided surprisingly good light – certainly good enough to make the prospect of some free fuel appealing to more than just the bad people.

Europeans seek to shift security role to Afghan government
By Judy Dempsey, New York Times, September 7, 2009

The leaders of France, Germany and Britain called Sunday night for an international conference to work out a plan to shift responsibility for security in Afghanistan to the Afghan government.

The call by the three governments, the largest contributors of troops to the war in Afghanistan after the United States, came as mounting military casualties and doubts about the mission there have fueled growing public opposition to the war in Europe.

In Washington, a State Department spokeswoman, Megan Mattson, said the department had no immediate comment on the proposed conference. [continued…]

Advisers to Obama divided on size of Afghan force

Advisers to Obama divided on size of Afghan force
By Peter Baker and Elisabeth Bumiller, New York Times, September 4, 2009

The military’s anticipated request for more troops to combat the insurgency in Afghanistan has divided senior advisers to President Obama as they try to determine the proper size and mission of the American effort there, officials said Thursday.

Even before the top commander in Afghanistan submits his proposal for additional forces, administration officials have begun what one called a “healthy debate” about what the priorities should be and whether more American soldiers and Marines would help achieve them.

Leading those with doubts is Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who has expressed deep reservations about an expanded presence in Afghanistan on the grounds that it may distract from what he considers the more urgent goal of stabilizing Pakistan, officials said. Among those on the other side are Richard C. Holbrooke, the special representative to the region, who shares the concern about Pakistan but sees more troops as vital to protecting Afghan civilians and undermining the Taliban and Al Qaeda. [continued…]

Nato air strike in Afghanistan kills scores
By James Sturcke, David Batty, The Guardian, September 4, 2009

At least 90 people including 40 civilians have been killed in northern Afghanistan after Nato launched an air strike on two fuel tankers hijacked by the Taliban, Afghan officials said.

Militants seized the two trucks, which were delivering jet fuel to Nato forces, around midnight Afghan time. Nato launched the strike in Kunduz province as the Taliban fighters tried to drive the vehicles across a river, according to the local police chief, Gulam Mohyuddin.

The Nato secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, announced an investigation, saying: “A number of Taliban were killed and there is also a possibility of civilian casualties.” [continued…]

Afghanistan isn’t worth one more American life
By Joseph L. Galloway | McClatchy, September 3, 2009

The debate over our creeping military mission in distant Afghanistan grows ever hotter, and before we march even deeper into trouble, perhaps it’s time to dig out the old Powell Doctrine and answer the eight questions it poses.

Gen. Colin Powell, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said these questions all must be answered with a loud YES before the United States takes military action. He listed his questions in the 1990 run-up to the Persian Gulf War, drawing heavily on the Weinberger Doctrine that was laid down by former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger during the debate over America’s ends and means in Lebanon. [continued…]

Britain’s defense minister aide quits over Afghan strategy
BBC News, September 3, 2009

A former army major has resigned as a parliamentary aide to Defence Secretary Bob Ainsworth, criticising the government’s strategy in Afghanistan.

Falkirk MP Eric Joyce said the UK could no longer justify the growing casualties in Afghanistan by saying the war would prevent terrorism back home.

The government should set a time limit on the deployment of troops, he added. [continued…]

GOP support may be vital to Obama on Afghan war

GOP support may be vital to Obama on Afghan war
By Helene Cooper, New York Times, September 3, 2009

Marines, Golestan, Farah Province, Afghanistan

As President Obama prepares to decide whether to send additional troops to Afghanistan, the political climate appears increasingly challenging for him, leaving him in the awkward position of relying on the Republican Party, and not his own, for support.

The simple political narrative of the Afghanistan war — that this was the good war, in which the United States would hunt down the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks — has faded over time, with popular support ebbing, American casualties rising and confidence in the Afghan government declining. In addition, Afghanistan’s disputed election, and the attendant fraud charges that have been lodged against President Hamid Karzai, are contributing further to the erosion of public support.

A CBS News poll released on Tuesday reports that 41 percent of those polled wanted troop levels in Afghanistan decreased, compared with 33 percent in April. Far fewer people — 25 percent — wanted troop levels increased, compared with 39 percent in April. And Mr. Obama’s approval rating for his handling of Afghanistan has dropped eight points since April, to 48 percent. [continued…]

Afghan vote results likely to be delayed
By Pamela Constable and Joshua Partlow, Washington Post, September 3, 2009

Afghanistan’s volatile presidential election process moved closer to violent confrontation Wednesday, even as officials said releasing the final results from the Aug. 20 polls would be further delayed because of slow vote counting and an even slower effort to investigate hundreds of fraud complaints.

The tension was exacerbated by a suicide bombing outside a mosque in the capital of northeastern Laghman province Wednesday morning. A senior official of the national intelligence service and 23 others were killed; scores were wounded.

Election officials announced Wednesday that President Hamid Karzai, who is seeking reelection, had widened his lead over the main challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, an ophthalmologist and former foreign minister. With about 3.7 million valid votes from 60 percent of polling stations tallied, they said, Karzai leads Abdullah 47.2 to 32.5 percent. [continued…]

Karzai’s election victory seen as inevitable, despite claims of fraud
By Charles Bremner and James Hider, The Times, September 3, 2009

Richard Holbrooke, the US special envoy to the Afghanistan-Pakistan region, dismissed as fantasy the reports that Washington was seeking a run-off against Dr Abdullah. “We have no candidates and no preference as to a first-round victory or a run-off,” Mr Holbrooke said. It was up to the Electoral Complaints Commission to rule on the fraud claims before the final result was proclaimed this month. “The post-election phase, the phase of determining who won, is going to be critical in determining the future of Afghanistan,” he said.

Mr Holbrooke and others among the 27 international envoys played down the likely scope of the irregularities. Many of the 2,500 complaints referred to the same incidents, they said.

“During the process, there will be many claims of irregularities,” Mr Holbrooke said. “That happens in democracies, even when they are not in the middle of a war.”

Bernard Kouchner, the French Foreign Minister, acknowledged concern but said that the election had been a triumph “at a time of serious danger for each of the men and women who dipped their fingers in ink to vote”. [continued…]

How the Taliban are winning the war

Warlord’s defection shows Afghan risk
By Yaroslav Trofimov, Wall Street Journal, September 2, 2009

G Ghulam Yahya Akbari hulam Yahya, a former mayor of this ancient city along the Silk Road, battled the Taliban for years and worked hand in hand with Western officials to rebuild the country’s industrial hub.

Now, Mr. Yahya is firing rockets at the Herat airport and nearby coalition military headquarters. He has kidnapped soldiers and foreign contractors, claimed the downing of an Afghan army helicopter and planted bombs in central Herat — including one that killed a district police chief and more than a dozen bystanders last month.

Mr. Yahya’s stranglehold over the outskirts of Herat has destabilized a former oasis of calm and relative prosperity. “The security situation here is critical,” said Herat’s current mayor, Mohammed Salim Taraki.

The warlord’s odyssey from friend to foe shows how disillusionment with the Western-backed administration of President Hamid Karzai has pushed even some former enemies of the Taliban into the insurgency. Violence is rapidly spreading beyond the ethnic Pashtun heartland of southern and eastern Afghanistan, where much of the countryside already is in rebel hands, into parts of the country that were considered safe just a few months ago. [continued…]

U.S. to boost combat force in Afghanistan
By Julian E. Barnes, Los Angeles Times, September 2, 2009

U.S. officials are planning to add as many as 14,000 combat troops to the American force in Afghanistan by sending home support units and replacing them with “trigger-pullers,” Defense officials say.

The move would beef up the combat force in the country without increasing the overall number of U.S. troops, a contentious issue as public support for the war slips. But many of the noncombat jobs are likely be filled by private contractors, who have proved to be a source of controversy in Iraq and a growing issue in Afghanistan.

The plan represents a key step in the Obama administration’s drive to counter Taliban gains and demonstrate progress in the war nearly eight years after it began. [continued…]

Taliban surprising U.S. forces with improved tactics
By Karen DeYoung, Washington Post, September 2, 2009

The Taliban has become a much more potent adversary in Afghanistan by improving its own tactics and finding gaps in the U.S. military playbook, according to senior American military officials who acknowledged that the enemy’s resurgence this year has taken them by surprise.

U.S. rules of engagement restricting the use of air power and aggressive action against civilians have also opened new space for the insurgents, officials said. Western development projects, such as new roads, schools and police stations, have provided fresh targets for Taliban roadside bombs and suicide attacks. The inability of rising numbers of American troops to protect Afghan citizens has increased resentment of the Western presence and the corrupt Afghan government that cooperates with it, the officials said.

As President Obama faces crucial decisions on his war strategy and declining public support at home, administration and defense officials are studying the reasons why the Taliban appears, for the moment at least, to be winning. [continued…]

Deputy intelligence chief is slain in Afghanistan
By Stephen Farrell and Abdul Waheed Wafa, New York Times, September 2, 2009

The second-ranking intelligence official in Afghanistan and a prominent ally of President Hamid Karzai was assassinated by a suicide bomber on Wednesday morning in a blast that also killed 15 others outside the main mosque in the official’s hometown, near Kabul, officials and witnesses said.

The official, Dr. Abdullah Laghmani, was the deputy director of the National Directorate for Security.

“As an intelligence expert, he knew a lot about Al Qaeda, and he was a person who was very actively fighting against the Taliban and against Al Qaeda in the 34 provinces of Afghanistan,” said the provincial governor, Mutfullah Mashal, in an interview at the scene of the attack here in the capital of the eastern province of Laghman. “His loss is really a major loss.” [continued…]

$600 for a Kalashnikov – a sign of bloodshed to come in Afghanistan
By Kim Sengupta, The Independent, September 2, 2009

The price of Kalashnikovs has doubled in Afghanistan. For a country awash with arms, the fact that the weapons are now fetching $600 apiece is a cause of some surprise, but a surge of demand is to blame for the increase, with a steady stream of weapons said to be heading for the north.

This is the Tajik constituency of Abdullah Abdullah, the presidential candidate who claims the election is being stolen by the incumbent Western-backed President, Hamid Karzai. [continued…]

U.N. sees Afghan drug cartels emerging
By Richard A Oppel Jr, New York Times, September 2, 2009

Afghanistan’s production of opium, the raw material for heroin, declined by 10 percent this year, and the amount of land used to cultivate opium fell by 22 percent, according to a report from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime that is to be formally released Wednesday.

The smaller harvest, largely attributed to market forces and heightened interdiction efforts, is a rare bit of good news for the United States and the coalition of Western governments whose troops and taxpayers are supporting what even American commanders describe as a deteriorating situation as the war approaches its ninth year.

But while United Nations officials suggested that some opium-trafficking guerrillas were now less focused on Taliban ideology, they also reported that perhaps more than 10,000 tons of illegal opium — worth billions of dollars and enough to satisfy at least two years of world demand — is now secretly stockpiled. They said they were concerned that part of this stockpile could be a “ticking bomb” in the hands of people who could use it to pay for “sinister scenarios.”

Opium is easily smuggled and stored and “is an ideal form of terrorist financing,” Antonio Maria Costa, the executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, said in an interview. “It’s a huge amount of money to have in the wrong hands.” He called on intelligence agencies to investigate the stockpiles. [continued…]

Contractors outnumber U.S. troops in Afghanistan
By James Glanz, New York Times, September 2, 2009

Civilian contractors working for the Pentagon in Afghanistan not only outnumber the uniformed troops, according to a report by a Congressional research group, but also form the highest ratio of contractors to military personnel recorded in any war in the history of the United States.

On a superficial level, the shift means that most of those representing the United States in the war will be wearing the scruffy cargo pants, polo shirts, baseball caps and other casual accouterments favored by overseas contractors rather than the fatigues and flight suits of the military.

More fundamentally, the contractors who are a majority of the force in what has become the most important American enterprise abroad are subject to lines of authority that are less clear-cut than they are for their military colleagues. [continued…]

Report details misbehavior by Kabul embassy guards
By Ann Scott Tyson, Washington Post, September 2, 2009

Private security contractors who guard the U.S. Embassy in Kabul have engaged in lewd behavior and hazed subordinates, demoralizing the undermanned force and posing a “significant threat” to security at a time when the Taliban is intensifying attacks in the Afghan capital, according to an investigation released Tuesday by an independent watchdog group.

The Project on Government Oversight (POGO) launched the probe after more than a dozen security guards contacted the group to report misconduct and morale problems within the force of 450 guards who live at Camp Sullivan, a few miles from the embassy compound.

The report highlighted occasions when guards brought women believed to be prostitutes into Camp Sullivan and videotaped themselves drinking and partially undressed. It also outlined communications problems among the guards, many of whom don’t speak English and have trouble understanding orders from their U.S. supervisors. [continued…]

Afghan tribal leaders call for Karzai to quit after detailing election fraud

Afghan tribal leaders call for Karzai to quit after detailing election fraud
By James Hider, The Times, September 2, 2009

Hundreds of tribal elders and officials from southern Afghanistan gathered in Kabul yesterday to protest against alleged electoral fraud that robbed entire districts of their votes and allocated them to President Karzai.

In a string of searing testimonies, community leaders told of villages that had been too terrified to vote because of Taleban threats — yet had mysteriously produced full ballot boxes. They said that most of the phantom votes had been cast for Mr Karzai, often by his own men or tribal leaders loyal to him.

“How is it that in a district which a governor can only visit once every two years, where it’s too dangerous for the police to go, where even Nato can’t fly — how come there were 20,000 votes collected?” asked Hamidullah Tokhy, a tribal elder from Kandahar province. [continued…]

Tribal leaders say Karzai’s team forged 23,900 votes
By Dexter Filkins, New York Times, September 2, 2009

Just a week before this country’s presidential election, the leaders of a southern Afghan tribe called Bariz gathered to make a bold decision: they would abandon the incumbent and local favorite, Hamid Karzai, and endorse his challenger, Abdullah Abdullah.

Mr. Abdullah flew to the southern city of Kandahar to receive the tribe’s endorsement. The leaders of the tribe, who live in a district called Shorabak, prepared to deliver a local landslide.

But it never happened, the tribal leaders said.

Instead, aides to Mr. Karzai’s brother Ahmed Wali — the leader of the Kandahar provincial council and the most powerful man in southern Afghanistan — detained the governor of Shorabak, Delaga Bariz, and shut down all of the district’s 45 polling sites on election day. The ballot boxes were taken to Shorabak’s district headquarters, where, Mr. Bariz and other tribal leaders said, local police officers stuffed them with thousands of ballots.

At the end of the day, 23,900 ballots were shipped to Kabul, Mr. Bariz said, with every one marked for President Karzai. [continued…]

First the votes, now the complaints pile up in Afghanistan
By Laura King, Los Angeles Times, September 2, 2009

In a low-slung building tucked behind concrete blast barriers on the edge of the Afghan capital, the plain brown envelopes are opened one by one, and the complaint forms inside smoothed out and scrutinized by weary-eyed workers.

One handwritten account tells of a gunman turning up at a polling place. Another describes a candidate brazenly handing out cash bribes. Yet another reports a ballot box filled with votes only moments after the start of polling.

Nearly two weeks after Afghanistan’s troubled presidential election, the task of sorting out allegations of fraud and intimidation has swelled. More than 2,000 complaints have poured into the Electoral Complaints Commission, a U.N.-backed body given the responsibility of determining the validity of claims of election misconduct. As the vote tally slowly advances, that task becomes more and more crucial. [continued…]