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Karzai adviser says most Afghans want security pact keeping US forces in country indefinitely
By Associated Press, The Washington Post August 31
QUANTICO, Va. — Most Afghans want a binding security pact with the United States that would keep American troops in Afghanistan indefinitely, a senior adviser to Afghan President Hamid Karzai said Wednesday.
Negotiations for such a pact have lagged in part because “some in the Afghan government are trying to sabotage it,” said Taj Ayubi, minister-counselor to Karzai.
Ayubi was not specific, but was apparently referring to factions within the weak central government with ties to Iran, or to a lesser extent, Pakistan or the Taliban insurgency. Iran opposes any U.S. military presence in Afghanistan, and U.S. and other officials say Iran is trying to use its growing influence in neighboring Afghanistan to lobby against a deal that would provide the U.S. a long-term military perch.
The agreement, now in draft form, would give the U.S. use of Afghan-run or jointly-run bases after 2014, when the formal combat role is set to end. Senior U.S. officials have said its central function is to provide assurance to Afghans that the U.S. will not shut the door on Afghanistan in 2014, while establishing terms for continued U.S. counterterrorism, training and counter-narcotics operations.
U.S. officials stress that U.S. military presence will be at Afghanistan’s invitation.
Ayubi said the document would give security assurances “from 2014 until we can stand on our own.”
The agreement is not expected to include firm deadlines for the close of U.S operations.
After nearly 10 years of war, many Afghans are weary of foreign troops and blame the flood of U.S. cash for various security and stability programs for distorting the economy and sucking up a corps of talented Afghans for contract labor. Still, Ayubi predicted broad backing for an agreement once it is in hand.
The U.S. public and Congress are increasingly frustrated by the war, with a majority in public opinion polls now saying it is probably not worth fighting.
“Most people in Afghanistan are strongly in favor of the U.S. presence in Afghanistan,” Ayubi told an audience at Marine Corps University.
“They are in favor of a long-term strategic agreement that includes basic rights for the U.S. military, despite the objections of neighbor states” he said. “Afghanistan is the most logical place for the U.S. to have a base.”
Spelling out that some level of U.S. forces intend to remain would strengthen Karzai’s hand against foreign meddling and in any eventual political negotiation with the Taliban, Ayubi suggested.
“Basing rights would bring a lot of stability and it would also convince the outside actors that the U.S. is there to stay,” he said.
Two U.S. officials said somewhere between 20,000 and 40,000 troops would probably be needed for the smaller role envisioned after 2014, but the security pact is not expected to give exact parameters.
National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said President Barack Obama has not made any decisions about U.S. troops in Afghanistan after 2014.
“Those decisions will be made at the appropriate time, based on our interests and conditions on the ground,” she said.
Karzai sought the agreement more than a year ago amid growing Afghan concern that the U.S. planned a rapid military withdrawal. The U.S. is the biggest international backer of Karzai’s government and its approximately 100,000 troops are a security buffer against the Taliban insurgency that opposes him.
The pact would not have the force of law, although Afghanistan is expected to seek consensus from a panel of elders called a loya jirga. The United States is not expected to submit the document to Congress for approval.
Afghan officials told The Associated Press this week that the document is too vague and does not go far enough to justify the risk they will take in signing it.
A delegation led by Afghanistan’s national security adviser will be in Washington next week for a third round of talks on the agreement. A senior U.S. official and two Afghan officials with knowledge of the talks said the two countries intend to finish an agreement before an international conference on Afghanistan’s future to be held in Bonn, Germany, in early December. The NSC’s Hayden said there is no deadline to complete negotiations.
Among the sticking points being negotiated are which troops will take the lead in conducting nighttime kill-and-capture raids, a flash point for anger over foreign meddling in Afghanistan and whether detention operations will be run by the Afghans or Americans.
August 2011 Deadliest Month for US in Afghanistan
VOA News September 1, 2011
August was the deadliest month for the U.S. military so far in the decade-long war in Afghanistan.
A total of 66 U.S. troops died last month, topping by one the death toll for July 2010, which previously had been the deadliest single month for the United States in Afghanistan since 2001.
August's death toll includes the 30 U.S. troops killed in the downing of a Chinook helicopter by insurgents in eastern Afghanistan. The dead included members of the elite U.S. Navy SEALs. It was the worst loss of life for the United States in a single incident during the Afghan war.
Meanwhile, NATO said one of its service members died Wednesday in a bomb blast in eastern Afghanistan. The coalition did not provide any additional details.
More than 390 international troops have been killed in Afghanistan so far this year.
Taliban insurgents are increasingly using improvised explosive devices to target both security forces and Afghan civilians.
Last month, the United Nations said the number of deaths from roadside bombs increased by 17 percent this year compared to the same period in 2010, making them the single-largest killer of civilians in the first half of this year.
Karzai May Have Met Taliban Envoy During Saudi Visit
TOLOnews.com Wednesday, 31 August 2011
At time Afghan President Hamid Karzai was visiting Saudi Arabia, representatives of the Taliban and party of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar are said to have been in the country too.
Reports suggest that President Hamid Karzai has won Saudi Arabia's support for the peace process with the Taliban.
President Karzai last week flew to Saudi Arabia for Umrah and also to seek help from King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz for peace and stability in Afghanistan.
An Afghan diplomat has told The Express Tribune that Saudi Arabia had invited several Afghan leaders mainly for Umrah, but the visit provided an opportunity to Afghans to share proposals for the reconciliation process.
Head of political affairs for Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Party of Hezb-e-Islami, Dr Ghairat Baheer, is also said to be in Saudi Arabia to discuss the country's support in the reconciliation process.
But Qutbuddin Helal, an aide to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, confirmed the presence of their representative in Saudi Arabia at the time President Karzai was visiting the country, but said this has nothing to do with Karzai's visit and there hasn't been any talks taking place between our representative and Karzai.
There are also reports that some Taliban leaders were invited by the Saudi government during the time President Karzai was visiting the country.
The Afghan Diplomat has told the Pakistani paper on condition of anonymity that the Afghan leader in his meeting with King Abdullah sought Saudi help in the ‘urgently needed' reconciliation efforts to end more bloodshed.
But the Afghan government described the comments as rumours.
Report: Up to $60 Billion Wasted in Iraq, Afghanistan
VOA News August 31, 2011 Michael Bowman
Capitol Hill - The United States' extensive outsourcing of military functions in war zones has been controversial since the beginning of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.
A report by the bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting has heightened concerns with details of allegations of billions of dollars lost due to waste and corruption.
To lessen wartime strains on America’s all-volunteer military force, the Pentagon hires private businesses to provide a vast array of support services.
Reliance on contractors expanded drastically during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, feeding what is now a large for-profit military industry funded by U.S. taxpayers.
The commission's co-chairman, Michael Thibault says not all of the money has been well-spent.
“Total spending on contract and grants in Iraq and Afghanistan amounts to $206 billion. We estimate that $31-$60 billion of that total has been or is being lost to waste and fraud,” said Thibault.
At a news conference Wednesday, Thibault stressed that the commission's aim is not to attack the reputations of individual contractors, but rather to identify problems in the government’s contracting process. He says many problems have been identified.
“The cost of contract support has been unnecessarily high. [The U.S.] government has not effectively managed contracts to promote competition, reward good performance, and impose accountability for poor performance and misconduct by both government and contractor personnel,” Thibault said.
As an example of counter-productive efforts, the commission alleges that some U.S. funds for construction projects in Afghanistan wound up in the hands of insurgents battling American troops.
Contractors do everything from serving meals to troops to building power plants and guarding diplomats.
The commission urges an overhaul of government contracting procedures in war zones, and even phasing out the use of contractors for certain functions.
The other commission co-chairman is former Congressman Christopher Shays.
“The way forward demands reform. With tens of billions of dollars already wasted, with the prospect of more to follow, and with the risk of re-creating these problems the next time America faces a contingency, denial and delay are not good options,” said Shays.
Questions surrounding private military contractors are not new. In 2007, Congress held hearings on allegations that contractors targeted Iraqi civilians with excessive and reckless force. Eric Prince, founder of Blackwater, a well-known military contracting firm, denied any wrongdoing by his employees.
“I disagree with the assertion that they acted like cowboys,” Prince said.
Democratic Senator Jim Webb of Virginia says the commission’s report is a call to action for Congress. “These recommendations will be listened to and, when appropriate, acted on by the United States Congress,” Webb said.
In May, the Congressional Research Service reported that the United States had 155,000 private contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, compared with 145,000 uniformed personnel.
US defence contractors ‘waste’ $12m a day
Financial Times By Anna Fifield August 31, 2011
Washington - Defence contractors have wasted or lost to fraud as much as $60bn over the past 10 years, according to a report by the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The report, released on Wednesday, will exacerbate fears that fiscal discipline at the US Pentagon is lacking at a time when looming budget cuts could lead to greater reliance on outside contractors.
It found that at least $31bn had been wasted through poor planning and management – the equivalent of $12m a day since the invasion of Afghanistan.
“Despite some progress, the government remains unable to provide effective large-scale contract management and oversight,” said Christopher Shays, a former congressman from Connecticut who co-chaired the independent commission. This fact was “troubling”, given that contractors had been considered part of the deployment force for more than 20 years.
“Yet the government was not prepared to go into Afghanistan in 2001, or Iraq in 2003, using large numbers of contractors,” he said. The 240-page report, sent to Congress on Wednesday, found that the US military needed “heavy support” from contractors during military or emergency operations as a result of large-scale reductions in the federal acquisition workforce and in support units within the military during the 1990s. More than 260,000 contractor employees have been used in Iraq and Afghanistan, at times outnumbering the military they support.
The top contractor in Iraq and Afghanistan during the decade surveyed was Kellogg, Brown & Root, an engineering and construction services company.
It earned $40.8bn during the decade, while Agility and DynCorp earned $9bn and $7.4bn, respectively.
As an example of waste, the report cites $38.6bn that Congress allocated between 2006 and 2011 for training the Afghan national security force, saying that such a project was “unsustainable” and far exceed what the Kabul government could absorb.
“We believe as much or more waste may develop as US-funded programmes and projects turn out to be unsustainable by the Iraqi and Afghanistan governments,” said Michael Thibault, former deputy director of the Defence Contract Audit Agency and the other co-chair of the commission. “Both government and contractors have contributed to this waste.”
The commission found inadequate competition for contracts, such as a $36.3bn army logistics contract awarded to KBR in 2001 as the sole provider.
The report also noted that US funds had been diverted to warlords and insurgents in both Iraq and Afghanistan as a cost of doing business in the countries, adding that while there was no official estimate of how much was diverted, it was a “significant percentage” of a project’s cost.
During a trip to Afghanistan in March this year, the commission found that extortion of funds from US construction and transportation projects was the second-biggest funding source for insurgent groups.
The findings will probably alarm members of Congress, as the federal budget comes under intense scrutiny. The Pentagon has the task of finding $400bn in budget cuts over the next 12 years, but could have to save an additional $600bn if lawmakers cannot agree on cuts as part of a budget deal.
The commission recommended that the government should phase out the use of private security contractors for certain functions, improve inter-agency co-ordination and expand the authority of civilian and military officials responsible for contingency contracting.
The Pentagon said it shared the commission’s commitment to improving wartime contracting. “We are supportive of efforts to reduce waste and improve on the value we obtain for the dollars we spend in support of contingency operations,” said Colonel David Lapan, a Pentagon spokesman.
“Monitoring, assessing, and taking corrective action is a continuous process within the department, and we continually improve our planning, oversight, and the management of contractors on the battlefield,” he said.
Some of the steps taken to improve contingency contracting included the investigation and prosecution of individuals engaging in fraud, increased staffing for contract oversight, and better training for deployed military supervising and interacting with contractor personnel, Col Lapan said.
The report comes on the heels of a study by the non-profit Center for Public Integrity that found that the value of Pentagon contracts awarded without competitive bidding almost tripled over the same time period, from $50bn in 2001 to more than $140bn last year.
A report by the Senate’s Democratic-majority foreign relations committee in June concluded that the decade-long US effort to build a new Afghanistan had dramatically distorted the local economy and its few successes were unlikely to survive the military withdrawal, due to begin next month.
Pakistan fuels Afghan bombs
U.S. urges tighter border controls on fertilizer supplies
Associated Press By Chris Brummitt 01/09/2011
Multan, Pakistan - The main ingredient in most of the homemade bombs that have killed hundreds of American troops in Afghanistan is fertilizer produced by a single company in Pakistan, where the U.S. has been pushing unsuccessfully for greater regulation.
Enough calcium ammonium nitrate fertilizer for at least 140,000 bombs was legally produced last year by Pakarab Fertilizers Ltd., then smuggled by militants and their suppliers across the porous border into southern and eastern Afghanistan, according to U.S. officials.
The U.S. military says around 80 percent of Afghan bombs are made with the fertilizer, which becomes a powerful explosive when mixed with fuel oil. The rest are made from military-grade munitions like mines or shells.
The United States began talks a year and a half ago with Pakistani officials and Pakarab, one of the country's largest companies. But there is still no regulation of distribution and sale of calcium ammonium nitrate fertilizer.
"If you have a host country that has a factory making a substance that ultimately becomes the problem, then that country has to contribute at least half the solution," said Democratic Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, who led a congressional delegation to Pakistan last week to press army and civilian leaders for action. Issue strains relations
U.S. officials say Pakistan and Pakarab have expressed willingness to regulate the fertilizer, which is also widely used in the manufacture of bombs used by insurgents to kill thousands of soldiers and civilians inside Pakistan. They acknowledge the difficulties: 15 years after ammonium nitrate was used in the Oklahoma City bombings, the U.S. government presented its proposals to regulate it Aug. 2.
But with the death toll from homemade bombs rising almost daily inside Afghanistan, continuing inaction by Pakistani authorities will add more strain to a U.S.-Pakistani relationship already frayed by allegations that Islamabad is aiding Afghan insurgents on its side of the border.
"This is a test," Casey said. "The key thing now is to see results." All exports are illicit
The only producer of calcium ammonium nitrate fertilizer in Pakistan, Pakarab operates two factories in Punjab province, the country's agricultural heartland.
The largest is on the outskirts of Multan, an ancient city surrounded by thousands of acres of mango orchards and cotton fields.
Pakistani fertilizer producers are not permitted to export to Afghanistan because they are subsidized by the government and their products are meant for domestic use only. But the low price of fertilizer in Pakistan, and a chronic shortage in Afghanistan, has meant that smuggling has long been rife.
Petraeus Bids Farewell to US Military
VOA News August 31, 2011 Luis Ramirez
Pentagon - General David Petraeus bid farewell to the U.S. military where he served for 37 years. He is credited, among other things, with turning around the U.S.-led war in Iraq and working to contain violence in Afghanistan, where he commanded U.S. forces.
In a ceremony with much pomp, the U.S. military said goodbye to one of its generals considered a star by many. In his 37 years in the army, Petraeus had many successes, most recently commanding U.S. forces both in Iraq and Afghanistan.
He is best remembered for changing the way U.S. forces deal with counterinsurgency conflicts in the post-Cold War era. He leaves the military as concerns grow over the Pentagon's plan to slash more than $350 billion from its budget in the next 10 years.
In his parting remarks at Fort Myer outside Washington Wednesday, Petraeus warned against cutting too deeply.
"I do believe that we have re-learned since 9/11 the timeless lesson that we don't always get to fight the wars for which we are most prepared or most inclined," Petraeus said. "Given that reality, we will need to maintain the full-spectrum capability that we have developed over this last decade of conflict in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere."
Petraeus heads to a new job as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) next week, a post previously held by the new Defense Secretary, Leon Panetta.
Nora Bensahel is Deputy Director of Studies and Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security in Washington. She says Petraeus changed the conventional U.S. military strategy of killing or capturing those who attack the United States - a strategy she says had further enflamed violence in Iraq. Petraeus' new approach, she says, brought down the level of violence.
"The counterinsurgency doctrine and strategy that was executed in Iraq starting in late 2006 and through the rest of General Petraeus' tenure there was, instead of staying at a far distance and trying to kill the adversary was a true counterinsurgency strategy of having troops live within the population areas, have a permanent presence there so that they could provide 24-hour protection and getting to know the population to get tips on who was involved in the various activities," Bensahel explained.
The general chose to retire from the military before going to the CIA as some in Washington raised questions of whether he might militarize the intelligence service, which has already come under criticism for its alleged use of unmanned aircraft and direct attacks against specific targets.
Afghanistan's Noor Eye Hospital Draws 400 Patients Each Day
The Huffington Post - Aug 31 06:47am
KABUL, Afghanistan -- Had they treated Nasaratullah sooner, the doctors might have been able to save the Afghan baby's eye, which was riddled with cancer.
Instead, the doctors at Noor Eye Hospital, a rundown facility in the Afghan capital overrun with 400 patients a day, had to remove it.
"Unfortunately, people come to us very late," Dr. Najib Osmani said looking up from the operating table where his tiny six-month-old patient, still anesthetized, rested in purple pajamas. "In early stages, this is curable. You can save the eyes, the sight – everything. Not in Afghanistan."
Eye care is a casualty of Afghanistan's tortured history. Eye clinics exist in only a few major Afghan cities. There are only six ophthalmologists for every 1 million Afghans. The country's lack of roads, mountainous terrain, extreme poverty and three decades of civil unrest are immense roadblocks to getting care – and giving it.
Roughly 1.5 million Afghans are visually impaired, according to the Ministry of Public Health. Every year, around 25,000 Afghans lose vision in one of their eyes.
Nasaratullah, a round-faced boy from eastern Afghanistan, has retinoblastoma, a rare cancerous tumor in his retina. After removing it, Osmani embedded a whitish glass ball, which later can be replaced with an artificial eye.
The infant's other eye appears healthy now, but there is a 40 percent chance that cancer will develop in it as well, the doctor said.
"I pray the other eye is OK," Osmani said. "At least we can refer him to neighboring countries for better treatment, radiation or chemotherapy."
Simpler vision problems can be easily treated in Afghanistan – if patients can get access to care.
Sixty percent of all blindness in Afghanistan is blamed on cataracts, which are removed in simple operations common in the developed world. But in Afghanistan, only 15,000 cataract surgeries are performed each year, not even enough to keep up with new cases and causing the huge backlog of cases – 200,000 by some estimates – to grow even more.
Babi Dukther, a 45-year-old woman from Kabul, is one of the lucky ones. On a hot day in the dusty capital, she walked barefoot into one of the hospital's operating rooms where a man was still swabbing the floor with a dirty mop.
"My eyes have gotten weaker for five or six months, and in the last month, it got worse," the mother of seven said as she lay down on the operating table to have a cataract removed from her left eye. "When I look, it's like something is coming down from the sky – like it's raining or snowing."
Doctors perform 15 to 20 operations at the hospital each day. With more space, beds and equipment, they could do more.
"We have too many patients," Dr. Yosuf Mahboob said. "It's too crowded. We don't have enough rooms for checkups."
Patients start lining up outside the hospital at around 7:30 a.m. There's plenty of pushing and shoving to get to two tiny registration windows – one for men and the other for women.
Patients thrust their fists, clutching the entrance fee of 50 Afghanis, or about $1, inside the windows hoping to be the next person allowed inside.
After registering, the patients sit in stifling waiting areas. Somebody tries to turn on a window fan, but it doesn't work. Patients fan themselves with the green registration cards. There's a 4-year-old girl with infected eyes ringed in red and men with cataracts shuffling with canes. There's a woman who suffered a splinter in her eye while chopping wood.
Those called from the waiting rooms line up for an eye test, with the chart is painted on a glowing light box. Fewer than 30 percent of Afghans are literate, so the chart uses a symbol that resembles an "E." Patients are asked whether the symbol is facing left, right, up or down.
Watching everything was 9-year-old Safauddin, his right eye severely deformed by a type of neurofibromatosis, a genetic disorder that causes the growth of tumors. The boy was silent, but his mother was shouting .
"I don't know how his eye got this way. Something happened during the Taliban time," she said, referring the years from 1996 to 2001 when the hardline Taliban regime ruled Afghanistan.
She barked at a doctor through her blue burqa, saying she could not understand why her son could not be treated at the hospital, which has no facilities or expertise to treat the disease.
In an examination room next door, a toothless woman was nearly hysterical, saying her eyes were getting weaker. She complained that she had no medicine and nobody to help her. Mahboob jotted some notes on her registration card and quickly sent her to the next examining area.
"We have to work like this because of the rush of patients," he said. "If we try to tell the patients to come back tomorrow they'd hold a demonstration."
Upstairs, the baby boy's father, Hafizullah, was fighting back tears. The shopkeeper, who like his son uses only one name, was heartbroken that surgeons couldn't save the diseased eye. His wife sat on the edge of the baby's bed, straightening his pajama top over his belly. Nasaratullah's face was covered by a bandage, and no one had told his mother yet that the eye had been removed.
The surgery was life-changing, yet it gave the parents hope that their son born to war might someday see a more peaceful Afghanistan.
That's a long way off. Noor Eye Hospital is the last stop in Afghanistan for patients with serious eye conditions. If they can't be treated there, they must be referred outside the country.
Days later, Hafizullah and his wife bundled up Nasaratullah and drove for 16 hours, hoping of seeing an eye specialist in Lahore, Pakistan.
Senator Scott Brown returns from military training in Afghanistan
By Martin Finucane, Globe Staff The Boston Globe
US Senator Scott Brown is on his way home from a week of training in Afghanistan, his office says.
Brown, a National Guardsman for more than 31 years, spent most of his time in Kabul, his office says.
“Sen. Brown came away with a heightened appreciation for the service and sacrifice demonstrated by all those who are fighting overseas to keep America safe,” spokeswoman Marcie Kinzel said in a statement.
Brown is expected to return Thursday, said Kinzel.
Brown is a lieutenant colonel in the Judge Advocate General Corps. He asked to fulfill his annual training obligations in Afghanistan, and “lived, ate and trained with the troops,” Kinzel said.
Brown said in May that he hoped the experience would offer him a fuller understanding of what American troops are facing.
It’s the first time he has trained in a war zone in his National Guard career.
Brown, 51, is facing reelection in 2012. He already faces several Democratic challengers, but the spotlight recently has been on Harvard Law School Professor Elizabeth Warren, who is considering a challenge.
Brown scored a surprise victory over Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley in a 2010 special election to fill the seat left vacant by the death of long-time liberal Democratic US Senator Edward M. Kennedy.
Afghan police casualties soar
Washington Post By Joshua Partlow August 31, 2011
CHARIKAR, Afghanistan - They die in assaults on lonely mountain checkpoints and in group beheadings captured on hand-held video cameras. They are engulfed by flaming car bombs and are shot at point-blank range by men who often dress up in the same plain gray uniform as theirs.
Forever maligned as corrupt, incompetent and drug-addled, Afghan National Police officers have sacrificed unlike any force in the country, foreign or domestic, taking casualties at a rate far higher than Afghan soldiers or their partners in the U.S.-led coalition.
Over the past year, 1,555 Afghan police officers have been killed. That’s more than twice the number of Afghan soldiers who died in the same period, although there are 35,000 fewer officers than soldiers in the country, according to the U.S.-led coalition. In the same period, 474 U.S. soldiers died in Afghanistan. The police death toll in June, 246 officers — a rate of eight a day — was 50 percent higher than in any other month in the past year.
The 135,000 Afghan police officers generally receive less training, more-rudimentary equipment and lower pay than their army colleagues. Although soldiers drive around in armored Humvees, most police officers travel in pickup trucks, even though they are often called upon to operate in areas rife with insurgents. But U.S. military officials are hoping the police can become the primary long-term solution to Afghanistan’s woes, a force they envision as growing even as the more expensive army shrinks in the future.
For now, they remain the weakest, and most regularly hammered, link in the war against the Taliban.
“The army is looked after very well — they get good food and Pepsi,” said Lt. Mohammad Qahir, 41, a police officer based at the governor’s compound in Parwan province, north of Kabul. “The police stand in the sun all day and don’t get anything.”
Qahir was away from his post on a day last month that has come to typify the grim existence of Afghanistan’s police. When he heard a commotion begin on the morning of Sunday, Aug. 14, he was unarmed, he said, because there were not enough guns to go around for the small team guarding the governor’s gate.
His colleague, Rahimullah, said that he was stationed at the door when a black Toyota Corolla pulled up and men in police uniforms demanded entry. Rahimullah said he soon recognized that the men were suicide bombers.
As the Taliban insurgents stormed the compound, Rahimullah was shot in the left leg, took grenade shrapnel in his back and broke his ankle, he said later from his hospital bed.
Another police officer, Aynuddin, woke from his nap, rolled off his cot and rushed to the doorway of the police shack. As he stepped outside, a bullet pierced his left thigh, he recalled. He fell down and passed out.
Seeing this unfold, Mohammad Azim, a 31-year-old officer who had been lounging in the shade in a blue plastic chair when the Taliban attack began, said he fired some shots from his Kalashnikov, then ran to hide in an empty kitchen as the suicide bombers stalked the grounds. He was alone. The room was dark. He had three bullets left.
“I believed they would come and kill me at any second,” Azim recalled. “At that moment, you forget about everything. You only think about yourself.”
He was not thinking about the fact that of the 15 police positions allotted for the governor’s office, only four have been filled, not including the governor’s personal bodyguards. Or that the surveillance camera affixed to the building closest to the gate was broken and hadn’t been repaired. Or that the officers don’t have body armor or helmets. Or that he makes $150 a month and supports a family of 12.
“We have three Kalashnikovs for four people. How can we defend the compound?” Qahir said. “If we were fully equipped, I swear no suicide bomber would enter the compound.”
Efforts at improvement
To address the high rate of police casualties, the NATO training command in Afghanistan is giving the force 3,400 new armored Humvees over the next eight months — the police now have 1,000, and last year they had none. The training curriculum, expanded from six to eight weeks, has been revised to include more survival and first-aid training, as well as driving instruction, because some casualties stem from traffic accidents, U.S. military officials said.
The force is largely illiterate, so each student takes reading and writing classes intended to get them to at least a first-grade level.
The role of Afghan police as the first line of defense often puts them in vulnerable spots. They guard government officials who are frequent targets of assassination. They man poorly fortified checkpoints along dangerous roads, presenting a wealth of soft targets for the Taliban to choose from. With a thriving insurgency, they are often thrust into a demanding paramilitary role.
“Our job is to enforce law and order, but sometimes we’re sent to the front lines to fight, and that’s not the duty of the police,” Qahir said.
Despite these vulnerabilities, fewer police officers walk off their jobs than soldiers. In 17 of the 18 months between January 2010 and June, the rate of “attrition,” or dropouts, among police was lower than that of the army. In June, 5,027 soldiers left the Afghan army; 2,043 officers left the police force.
Police officers still have a bad reputation in many parts of the country. They’re often accused of extorting money and abusing power or operating at the whim of a local power broker or tribal leader. Their behavior in some areas has driven residents to turn to the Taliban for help.
The beleaguered officers at the Parwan governor’s office say they are committed to their jobs and country, come what may. The insurgents who attacked the compound killed at least 20 people, blew up offices, torched cars and sprayed a torrent of bullets — but the police officers were back at their jobs the next day.
“In a certain macabre way, the police did their job,” Lt. Col. Jeremy T. Siegrist, the U.S. Army battalion commander responsible for Parwan province, said as he visited the remains of the governor’s office last week. “They didn’t save the compound, but it’s still usable, and the governor’s still alive. It’s not a victory by any means, but certainly it shows the police are perhaps improving.”
Special correspondent Sayed Salahuddin contributed to this report.
Will US exit strategy work in Afghanistan? Brutal valley emerges as test
US forces have had to return to a key outpost they left to Afghan forces in March. Now, the US commander there is trying to forge a new partnership to bring the Afghans up to speed.
Christian Science Monitor By Anna Mulrine, Staff writer August 31, 2011
Kunar, Afghanistan - Nestled in a lush but mean valley on the banks of the Pech River, Camp Blessing was no longer the sort of place, US commanders decided in February, that warranted the bloodshed of American soldiers.
Instead, the US war effort would benefit from focusing its limited resources on population centers, they concluded, and away from the Pech’s brutal terrain and rather xenophobic citizenry, ready and more than willing to skillfully take up arms against outsiders.
Better, they concluded, to leave this sparsely settled region – where Afghan fighters mustered to make the first successful stand against Soviet occupation – to the Afghan Army.
So soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division towed away the modern toilet trailers and stripped Camp Blessing of its amenities – air-conditioning units, flat-screen monitors, and the covered plywood porch where senior US troops convened to smoke cigars and discuss the news of the day.
In March, they rechristened the base “Nangalam” and turned it over to Afghan forces.
Today, however, US soldiers are back. The conditions at the once built-up outpost are now spartan. Troops bathe with baby wipes and bottled water and sleep on the floors of buildings that, they discovered upon their return in late July, were littered with human feces.
Insurgents had advanced so steadily since March that the Afghan Army could lose the base itself, say a new crop of US commanders.
They see the return as an opportunity to forge a new model for cooperation and mentoring with the Afghan security forces. But while the Pech is admittedly one of Afghanistan’s toughest assignments, the Afghan Army’s failed four-month attempt take the reins of security illustrates its shortfalls – and how far there is to go, US officers say, if NATO is to turn all security responsibilities over to Afghan forces by 2014.
The troops who have come back to this jagged spine of mountain peaks are under no illusions about the difficulty of the task that awaits them. Their code name for this operation: “Hotel California.”
“It’s like the lyrics,” says 2nd battalion intelligence officer Maj. Marcus Wright of the Eagles song: “ ‘You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.’ ” Welcome back
When US forces moved back into Camp Blessing in late July, they were greeted with mortars and rocket-propelled grenades, one of which hit the underbelly of a US Chinook carrying supplies for the base. That marked the first shoot-down of a Chinook this year. The pilot was able to land relatively gently without any serious injuries, though passengers were forced to sprint when thousands of rounds of ammunition caught fire and ignited, causing shrapnel injuries and destroying the helicopter.
It was a pattern of hostility repeatedly encountered by US forces. “We really had to reoccupy the base,” says Maj. Glenn Kozelka, executive officer for the 2nd battalion, 3rd brigade combat team of the 25th Infantry Division.
Security had deteriorated rapidly after US forces departed. Within weeks, the Afghan battalion commander at Nangalam could not safely get to meetings in a Asadabad, Kunar’s bustling capital 25 miles east. The Taliban overran and occupied the capital of a nearby district center.
At the same time, insurgents routinely attacked Afghan National Army (ANA) patrol routes. By May, the Afghan commander stationed at Nangalam had abandoned the outpost, along with his top staff.
“It was better before” the US left, says Afghan commander Col. Adam Khan Matin. “When the coalition forces left, the [insurgent] training camps came back.”
Lt. Col. Colin Tuley, the top US commander at Nangalam, grappled with how to address the regression. His battalion now had responsibility for an area that had previously needed two. His 800-plus soldiers were spread out across multiple forward operating bases and command posts.
Simply holding that ground would be challenge enough. After evaluating the capabilities of the ANA at Nangalam, Col. Tuley came to a conclusion. “We needed to do something else.”
In his idea is a hope central to the American exit strategy: If US troops focused more intently on creating a workable partnership with the Afghans, perhaps the mentoring could make up for the diminished number of US troops and ensure that a decade's worth of US battles are for not for naught.
So began what Tuley calls a “permanent embedded partnership” – or PEP – an experiment that could hold lessons for the American war effort in Afghanistan.
The PEP will revolve around 40 US troops at Nangalam working with multiple companies of the Afghan Army. Most immediately, with a stronger base here, Tuley hopes US forces “can come in and do operations as necessary,” allowing NATO to extend its reach farther into the valley. Perhaps more long-term, he adds, the PEP “is a great kind of interim phase to get the ANA to where [the transition is] not as abrupt.”
The US platoon will run workshops on basics from marksmanship to first aid – lessons that have been taught before, Tuley acknowledges, but bear repeating.
“If you think about it, this [Afghan commander at Nangalam] never had a partnership, Tuley adds. “It was. ‘Here’s your battlespace.’ ”
The first order of business – and lesson for Afghan commanders – is to bolster base defenses. When the US was here, Nangalam had early-attack warning systems, including towers with cameras that sent images to screens in a base defense center, which allowed troops to monitor the perimeter.
When Tuley returned, no vestige of those defenses remained. “The security definitely wasn’t at the level that I would ever feel too comfortable having my soldiers out there,” he says.
In response, he has assigned a US platoon of about 30 soldiers to patrol the surrounding area, and he stationed a single US soldier with night-vision goggles at each Afghan guard post along the perimeter of the base.
Beyond base defenses, Tuley must help the Afghans carry out their own missions more effectively.
The PEP's first big test: A humanitarian mission into one of the more isolated and government-averse areas of the country. Testing a new partnership
The mission was an Afghan command idea, and US officials are pleased to see Afghan soldiers taking a page from the US playbook: following violent operations with aid for villages, in the hopes of mitigating hard feelings and demonstrating the reach of the Afghan government.
The plan is to convoy from Kunar up north into the neighboring province of Nuristan, an area where US troops have not been since 2009.
“We’re doing this really to show that the government and the military and the civil authorities can provide for the people, even in the most separated and disparate areas, areas,” says Lt. Col. Pat Stich, the brigade operations officer.
A few hours into the mission, as Afghan and US commanders touch base during a battlefield update, Afghan mission leaders want help in the form of close air support (CAS).
“We definitely need more CAS, because they are trying to shoot our convoys,” one Afghan commander points out.
Then, as nightfall comes, the convoy troops have decided to stop. “It’s dark, so we’ll stay here,” the Afghan commander explains.
By the basic rulebook of modern warfare this is a bad idea, leaving the convoy vulnerable to attack. US officers gently press them to continue in spite of the dark.
“It would be good if you could make it up to Chapadara” – a district center in northern Kunar.
“We’ll keep trying,” comes the reply. “But if there are some obstacles, or IEDs, we’ll stop.”
Without question, Afghan security forces face a tough fight. In addition to improvised explosive devices (IEDs), insurgents have shaved down dirt on the side of the roads, for example, to make them too narrow for US armored vehicles to traverse.
Afghans also lack equipment, including night-vision goggles. “That’s a pretty critical piece of equipment to provide security,” says Tuley. US officials worry, however, that if they give night-vision goggles to the Afghans, particularly with ANA attrition rates remaining high, they could fall into insurgents’ hands.
At the same time, US commanders are trying to ease the Afghans' reliance on American assets, from close-air support to medical evacuations – to help them become self-sufficient. “A lot of these things it makes them hard to wean them off of, because then they don’t want to do the missions without them,” says Lt. Col. Mark Simpson, 3rd brigade, 25th Infantry Division officer in charge of mentoring Afghan forces. “We don’t want to do the missions without them.”
Deciding precisely when to cut off the Afghans from the US equipment and supply chains will require some “very, very hard decisions, in my opinion, from the top,” says Simpson.
“In the next couple of months, we’re supposed to figure out a plan to get them to the next level – and then, what does it take to get them to the ultimate level” where Afghan troops can operate independently, he asks.
While the Afghan forces can “step out smartly” and execute most operations that US troops plan with them, commander agree that there are often problems with the vital details along the way.
“You ask, ‘OK, what’s your transportation plan? Who’s the convoy commander? Do you have three days supply of food and water? What if a vehicle breaks – are you going to tow it or leave it?’ " Simpson says. "Those kinds of things bog them down big time.”
As the 2014 deadline approaches, “without anyone having to say it, I feel a massive sense of urgency,” Simpson says.
But while the pressure to increase the self-sufficiency of the Afghan security forces is immense, “Nobody wants to be that guy that completely cuts the cord on their watch, because, No. 1, they’ve become so dependent on us.”
“And No. 2, I think we’re kind of leery to see that if we cut the cord on them what’s really going to happen is that they fall on their face.” Only the beginning
As the humanitarian mission progresses, Afghan officials decide that they would like their forces to make a second run into Nuristan, to demonstrate the reach of the government. No one is looking forward to breaking this news to the Afghan soldiers, who they fear will be reluctant to go into dangerous territory during the fasting month of Ramadan, when they can’t drink water or eat during daylight hours.
Says one officer: “They don’t have the capacity to deal with the request.”
They will need US assets, including air support and roadside bomb detection trucks, for this mission as well. US officers worry, however, in some cases US troops could be provoking rather than suppressing violence. Many residents here are simply opposed to any outside presence.
“A lot of people in the valley, they see governance, they see development, they just don’t want it. They want to be left alone,” says Tuley. “You come in there and there’s going to be a fight. Now a fight’s good if you’re really making progress. But in some of these areas, you’re probably just exacerbating things.”
For now, however, the US troop presence at Nangalam is likely only to increase.
As the first week of partnership at Nangalam winds to a close, Tuley is increasingly convinced that rather than the 40-plus soldiers currently taking part in the PEP, he will need closer to 200.
He knows, too, that this plan comes with opportunity costs. With US forces set to draw down across Afghanistan, he can only bolster the American presence at Nangalam by closing a combat outpost or a forward operating base.
After the PEP’s first big mission, though, he believes that expanding US forces here is key to US troops being able to one day go home for good. Looking around at the growing stacks of boxes filled with food for the soldiers, he says, “It will grow.”
Afghan Local Police Defect Over Pay
Paramilitaries in Kapisa region complain Afghan authorities ignore their role in fending off Taleban attacks.
IWPR By Maiwand Safi 31 Aug 11
Afghanistan - A local policing venture in Afghanistan’s northeastern Kapisa province is faltering as men leave the force because their wages have been cut.
The men are part of the Afghan Local Police, originally village militias that have been brought under a centralised command structure since last year. They remain distinct from the regular Afghan National Police, ANP.
In Kapisa’s Tagab and Alasai districts, around 40 men are said to have left the force after effective command shifted six months ago from France’s NATO contingent stationed in the area to the Afghan interior ministry.
Until the changeover, they say, they were paid good wages by the French army, which also supplied weapons and conducted joint operations with them.
“The French troops stationed in Kapisa used to provide us with all kinds of assistance. They paid our salaries and gave us arms and ammunition. But once we were transferred to the interior ministry, everything became disorganised,” Nazir Ahmad, who has resigned from the local police in Tagab, said.
He added that although the local police created security over large swathes of territory, they were more or less ignored by the Afghan authorities.
“The government pays wages of 150 dollars [a month], but the payments have been held up for several months. And it’s a low wage,” Nazir Ahmad said. “The [ANP] police headquarters doesn’t care about us. Even if the Taleban kill us all, police headquarters isn’t going to help us.”
His concerns were echoed by Mazar, deputy commander of Afghan Local Police unit in Tagab’s Landakhel area, who said the French had paid wages of 500 dollars a month, not the 150 the government was offering.
“We’re unhappy about this process. Ever since we were incorporated into the interior ministry, we’ve had no supplies and our wages have been delayed for months,” he said.
He said lack of resources meant his police were unable to perform as effectively as they used to. In one recent clash with the Taleban, their Kalashnikov rifles proved no match for the heavier weapons deployed by the insurgents.
Under French control, Mazar said, “We had trained up some people behind the Taleban lines to inform us about their movements, in return for payment. We provided good security in the region, but now we can’t do anything. Our militia members are having to leave their jobs and go into some other business.”
In Kapisa, the Taleban have singled out the Afghan Local Police, accusing them of being worse than the ANP and Afghan National Army and of working as spies for the foreign troops, perhaps because their knowledge of the terrain and community makes them more of a threat than forces drafted in from outside the area. Earlier this year, an IWPR report Taleban Vent Ire on Afghan Local Police described how the insurgents had ordered civilians in Tagab not to have any dealings with the paramilitary police – they were not to allow relatives to marry them or attend their weddings or funerals, on pain of death.
Afghan Local Police members who leave the force say this vendetta means they are also having to move out of their home areas for fear of reprisals.
Zaman, an ex-member in Tagab, is planning to go off to Iran to find work as it is unsafe for him to remain in his own village. Accusing both the Afghan government and the foreign troops for abandoning people like him, he said he would only return if the situation improved.
The ANP commander in Tagab district, Pacha Gol Bakhtiar, denied accusations that the local police were left on their own.
“They use our vehicles in combat and receive training from our commanders. They are also supplied with ammunition, but some of them sell it,” he said.
Bakhtiar said the government could not afford the same high wage levels as the French military, but servicemen should be motivated by patriotism.
General Alishah Ahmadzai is in charge of Afghan Local Police units within the interior ministry. He said there had been teething problems with bringing these irregular forces into the ministry’s structure, but issues like wage delays and supplies were being addressed.
Ahmadzai said the current monthly wage of 150 dollars was the same as regular ANP officers in Tagab received, and this was to be raised to 210 dollars a month . “That’s an adequate wage for someone living there,” he added.
The general appeared unconcerned at the defections, saying, “If people leave, others will be recruited. I don’t think security will deteriorate in Tagab due to their absence.”
Tagab’s district government chief Abdul Hakim Akhondzadah takes a different view, saying the Afghan Local Police presence had allowed officials to move around the area without fear of attack, but this level of security was likely to deteriorate if the force was depleted.
Experiments with raising militias have been controversial from the start. As a diversity of local defence forces began springing up around Afghanistan over the last year or so, in some cases sponsored by NATO troops based in the area, the Afghan government appeared to grow concerned at the lack of structure and control. (See Afghan Village Militias Accused of Abuses for examples from the west of the country.)
The solution the authorities found was the Afghan Local Police initiative, approved in summer 2010 to formalise the status and structure of all these units under interior ministry command.
Many Afghans have bad memories of the armed factions whose members engaged in widespread violence and looting in the civil war of the early 1990s. There were also concerns that the new forces were recruiting ex-members of the old groups.
In Tagab, not everyone would be sad if the paramilitary police disappeared.
“There are no good men in these tribal militias. There are thieves, gamblers, drug addicts and other criminals in their ranks,” a shopkeeper who declined to give his name said. “They robbed my shop three months ago and took everything away with them. I even know who the perpetrators are, but what can I do about it? Nothing.
“I say these militias should not only be disbanded but also prosecuted.”
Maiwand Safi is an IWPR-trained reporter in Kapisa province, Afghanistan.
www.afghanistannewscenter.com
By Associated Press, The Washington Post August 31
QUANTICO, Va. — Most Afghans want a binding security pact with the United States that would keep American troops in Afghanistan indefinitely, a senior adviser to Afghan President Hamid Karzai said Wednesday.
Negotiations for such a pact have lagged in part because “some in the Afghan government are trying to sabotage it,” said Taj Ayubi, minister-counselor to Karzai.
Ayubi was not specific, but was apparently referring to factions within the weak central government with ties to Iran, or to a lesser extent, Pakistan or the Taliban insurgency. Iran opposes any U.S. military presence in Afghanistan, and U.S. and other officials say Iran is trying to use its growing influence in neighboring Afghanistan to lobby against a deal that would provide the U.S. a long-term military perch.
The agreement, now in draft form, would give the U.S. use of Afghan-run or jointly-run bases after 2014, when the formal combat role is set to end. Senior U.S. officials have said its central function is to provide assurance to Afghans that the U.S. will not shut the door on Afghanistan in 2014, while establishing terms for continued U.S. counterterrorism, training and counter-narcotics operations.
U.S. officials stress that U.S. military presence will be at Afghanistan’s invitation.
Ayubi said the document would give security assurances “from 2014 until we can stand on our own.”
The agreement is not expected to include firm deadlines for the close of U.S operations.
After nearly 10 years of war, many Afghans are weary of foreign troops and blame the flood of U.S. cash for various security and stability programs for distorting the economy and sucking up a corps of talented Afghans for contract labor. Still, Ayubi predicted broad backing for an agreement once it is in hand.
The U.S. public and Congress are increasingly frustrated by the war, with a majority in public opinion polls now saying it is probably not worth fighting.
“Most people in Afghanistan are strongly in favor of the U.S. presence in Afghanistan,” Ayubi told an audience at Marine Corps University.
“They are in favor of a long-term strategic agreement that includes basic rights for the U.S. military, despite the objections of neighbor states” he said. “Afghanistan is the most logical place for the U.S. to have a base.”
Spelling out that some level of U.S. forces intend to remain would strengthen Karzai’s hand against foreign meddling and in any eventual political negotiation with the Taliban, Ayubi suggested.
“Basing rights would bring a lot of stability and it would also convince the outside actors that the U.S. is there to stay,” he said.
Two U.S. officials said somewhere between 20,000 and 40,000 troops would probably be needed for the smaller role envisioned after 2014, but the security pact is not expected to give exact parameters.
National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said President Barack Obama has not made any decisions about U.S. troops in Afghanistan after 2014.
“Those decisions will be made at the appropriate time, based on our interests and conditions on the ground,” she said.
Karzai sought the agreement more than a year ago amid growing Afghan concern that the U.S. planned a rapid military withdrawal. The U.S. is the biggest international backer of Karzai’s government and its approximately 100,000 troops are a security buffer against the Taliban insurgency that opposes him.
The pact would not have the force of law, although Afghanistan is expected to seek consensus from a panel of elders called a loya jirga. The United States is not expected to submit the document to Congress for approval.
Afghan officials told The Associated Press this week that the document is too vague and does not go far enough to justify the risk they will take in signing it.
A delegation led by Afghanistan’s national security adviser will be in Washington next week for a third round of talks on the agreement. A senior U.S. official and two Afghan officials with knowledge of the talks said the two countries intend to finish an agreement before an international conference on Afghanistan’s future to be held in Bonn, Germany, in early December. The NSC’s Hayden said there is no deadline to complete negotiations.
Among the sticking points being negotiated are which troops will take the lead in conducting nighttime kill-and-capture raids, a flash point for anger over foreign meddling in Afghanistan and whether detention operations will be run by the Afghans or Americans.
August 2011 Deadliest Month for US in Afghanistan
VOA News September 1, 2011
August was the deadliest month for the U.S. military so far in the decade-long war in Afghanistan.
A total of 66 U.S. troops died last month, topping by one the death toll for July 2010, which previously had been the deadliest single month for the United States in Afghanistan since 2001.
August's death toll includes the 30 U.S. troops killed in the downing of a Chinook helicopter by insurgents in eastern Afghanistan. The dead included members of the elite U.S. Navy SEALs. It was the worst loss of life for the United States in a single incident during the Afghan war.
Meanwhile, NATO said one of its service members died Wednesday in a bomb blast in eastern Afghanistan. The coalition did not provide any additional details.
More than 390 international troops have been killed in Afghanistan so far this year.
Taliban insurgents are increasingly using improvised explosive devices to target both security forces and Afghan civilians.
Last month, the United Nations said the number of deaths from roadside bombs increased by 17 percent this year compared to the same period in 2010, making them the single-largest killer of civilians in the first half of this year.
Karzai May Have Met Taliban Envoy During Saudi Visit
TOLOnews.com Wednesday, 31 August 2011
At time Afghan President Hamid Karzai was visiting Saudi Arabia, representatives of the Taliban and party of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar are said to have been in the country too.
Reports suggest that President Hamid Karzai has won Saudi Arabia's support for the peace process with the Taliban.
President Karzai last week flew to Saudi Arabia for Umrah and also to seek help from King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz for peace and stability in Afghanistan.
An Afghan diplomat has told The Express Tribune that Saudi Arabia had invited several Afghan leaders mainly for Umrah, but the visit provided an opportunity to Afghans to share proposals for the reconciliation process.
Head of political affairs for Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Party of Hezb-e-Islami, Dr Ghairat Baheer, is also said to be in Saudi Arabia to discuss the country's support in the reconciliation process.
But Qutbuddin Helal, an aide to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, confirmed the presence of their representative in Saudi Arabia at the time President Karzai was visiting the country, but said this has nothing to do with Karzai's visit and there hasn't been any talks taking place between our representative and Karzai.
There are also reports that some Taliban leaders were invited by the Saudi government during the time President Karzai was visiting the country.
The Afghan Diplomat has told the Pakistani paper on condition of anonymity that the Afghan leader in his meeting with King Abdullah sought Saudi help in the ‘urgently needed' reconciliation efforts to end more bloodshed.
But the Afghan government described the comments as rumours.
Report: Up to $60 Billion Wasted in Iraq, Afghanistan
VOA News August 31, 2011 Michael Bowman
Capitol Hill - The United States' extensive outsourcing of military functions in war zones has been controversial since the beginning of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.
A report by the bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting has heightened concerns with details of allegations of billions of dollars lost due to waste and corruption.
To lessen wartime strains on America’s all-volunteer military force, the Pentagon hires private businesses to provide a vast array of support services.
Reliance on contractors expanded drastically during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, feeding what is now a large for-profit military industry funded by U.S. taxpayers.
The commission's co-chairman, Michael Thibault says not all of the money has been well-spent.
“Total spending on contract and grants in Iraq and Afghanistan amounts to $206 billion. We estimate that $31-$60 billion of that total has been or is being lost to waste and fraud,” said Thibault.
At a news conference Wednesday, Thibault stressed that the commission's aim is not to attack the reputations of individual contractors, but rather to identify problems in the government’s contracting process. He says many problems have been identified.
“The cost of contract support has been unnecessarily high. [The U.S.] government has not effectively managed contracts to promote competition, reward good performance, and impose accountability for poor performance and misconduct by both government and contractor personnel,” Thibault said.
As an example of counter-productive efforts, the commission alleges that some U.S. funds for construction projects in Afghanistan wound up in the hands of insurgents battling American troops.
Contractors do everything from serving meals to troops to building power plants and guarding diplomats.
The commission urges an overhaul of government contracting procedures in war zones, and even phasing out the use of contractors for certain functions.
The other commission co-chairman is former Congressman Christopher Shays.
“The way forward demands reform. With tens of billions of dollars already wasted, with the prospect of more to follow, and with the risk of re-creating these problems the next time America faces a contingency, denial and delay are not good options,” said Shays.
Questions surrounding private military contractors are not new. In 2007, Congress held hearings on allegations that contractors targeted Iraqi civilians with excessive and reckless force. Eric Prince, founder of Blackwater, a well-known military contracting firm, denied any wrongdoing by his employees.
“I disagree with the assertion that they acted like cowboys,” Prince said.
Democratic Senator Jim Webb of Virginia says the commission’s report is a call to action for Congress. “These recommendations will be listened to and, when appropriate, acted on by the United States Congress,” Webb said.
In May, the Congressional Research Service reported that the United States had 155,000 private contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, compared with 145,000 uniformed personnel.
US defence contractors ‘waste’ $12m a day
Financial Times By Anna Fifield August 31, 2011
Washington - Defence contractors have wasted or lost to fraud as much as $60bn over the past 10 years, according to a report by the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The report, released on Wednesday, will exacerbate fears that fiscal discipline at the US Pentagon is lacking at a time when looming budget cuts could lead to greater reliance on outside contractors.
It found that at least $31bn had been wasted through poor planning and management – the equivalent of $12m a day since the invasion of Afghanistan.
“Despite some progress, the government remains unable to provide effective large-scale contract management and oversight,” said Christopher Shays, a former congressman from Connecticut who co-chaired the independent commission. This fact was “troubling”, given that contractors had been considered part of the deployment force for more than 20 years.
“Yet the government was not prepared to go into Afghanistan in 2001, or Iraq in 2003, using large numbers of contractors,” he said. The 240-page report, sent to Congress on Wednesday, found that the US military needed “heavy support” from contractors during military or emergency operations as a result of large-scale reductions in the federal acquisition workforce and in support units within the military during the 1990s. More than 260,000 contractor employees have been used in Iraq and Afghanistan, at times outnumbering the military they support.
The top contractor in Iraq and Afghanistan during the decade surveyed was Kellogg, Brown & Root, an engineering and construction services company.
It earned $40.8bn during the decade, while Agility and DynCorp earned $9bn and $7.4bn, respectively.
As an example of waste, the report cites $38.6bn that Congress allocated between 2006 and 2011 for training the Afghan national security force, saying that such a project was “unsustainable” and far exceed what the Kabul government could absorb.
“We believe as much or more waste may develop as US-funded programmes and projects turn out to be unsustainable by the Iraqi and Afghanistan governments,” said Michael Thibault, former deputy director of the Defence Contract Audit Agency and the other co-chair of the commission. “Both government and contractors have contributed to this waste.”
The commission found inadequate competition for contracts, such as a $36.3bn army logistics contract awarded to KBR in 2001 as the sole provider.
The report also noted that US funds had been diverted to warlords and insurgents in both Iraq and Afghanistan as a cost of doing business in the countries, adding that while there was no official estimate of how much was diverted, it was a “significant percentage” of a project’s cost.
During a trip to Afghanistan in March this year, the commission found that extortion of funds from US construction and transportation projects was the second-biggest funding source for insurgent groups.
The findings will probably alarm members of Congress, as the federal budget comes under intense scrutiny. The Pentagon has the task of finding $400bn in budget cuts over the next 12 years, but could have to save an additional $600bn if lawmakers cannot agree on cuts as part of a budget deal.
The commission recommended that the government should phase out the use of private security contractors for certain functions, improve inter-agency co-ordination and expand the authority of civilian and military officials responsible for contingency contracting.
The Pentagon said it shared the commission’s commitment to improving wartime contracting. “We are supportive of efforts to reduce waste and improve on the value we obtain for the dollars we spend in support of contingency operations,” said Colonel David Lapan, a Pentagon spokesman.
“Monitoring, assessing, and taking corrective action is a continuous process within the department, and we continually improve our planning, oversight, and the management of contractors on the battlefield,” he said.
Some of the steps taken to improve contingency contracting included the investigation and prosecution of individuals engaging in fraud, increased staffing for contract oversight, and better training for deployed military supervising and interacting with contractor personnel, Col Lapan said.
The report comes on the heels of a study by the non-profit Center for Public Integrity that found that the value of Pentagon contracts awarded without competitive bidding almost tripled over the same time period, from $50bn in 2001 to more than $140bn last year.
A report by the Senate’s Democratic-majority foreign relations committee in June concluded that the decade-long US effort to build a new Afghanistan had dramatically distorted the local economy and its few successes were unlikely to survive the military withdrawal, due to begin next month.
Pakistan fuels Afghan bombs
U.S. urges tighter border controls on fertilizer supplies
Associated Press By Chris Brummitt 01/09/2011
Multan, Pakistan - The main ingredient in most of the homemade bombs that have killed hundreds of American troops in Afghanistan is fertilizer produced by a single company in Pakistan, where the U.S. has been pushing unsuccessfully for greater regulation.
Enough calcium ammonium nitrate fertilizer for at least 140,000 bombs was legally produced last year by Pakarab Fertilizers Ltd., then smuggled by militants and their suppliers across the porous border into southern and eastern Afghanistan, according to U.S. officials.
The U.S. military says around 80 percent of Afghan bombs are made with the fertilizer, which becomes a powerful explosive when mixed with fuel oil. The rest are made from military-grade munitions like mines or shells.
The United States began talks a year and a half ago with Pakistani officials and Pakarab, one of the country's largest companies. But there is still no regulation of distribution and sale of calcium ammonium nitrate fertilizer.
"If you have a host country that has a factory making a substance that ultimately becomes the problem, then that country has to contribute at least half the solution," said Democratic Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, who led a congressional delegation to Pakistan last week to press army and civilian leaders for action. Issue strains relations
U.S. officials say Pakistan and Pakarab have expressed willingness to regulate the fertilizer, which is also widely used in the manufacture of bombs used by insurgents to kill thousands of soldiers and civilians inside Pakistan. They acknowledge the difficulties: 15 years after ammonium nitrate was used in the Oklahoma City bombings, the U.S. government presented its proposals to regulate it Aug. 2.
But with the death toll from homemade bombs rising almost daily inside Afghanistan, continuing inaction by Pakistani authorities will add more strain to a U.S.-Pakistani relationship already frayed by allegations that Islamabad is aiding Afghan insurgents on its side of the border.
"This is a test," Casey said. "The key thing now is to see results." All exports are illicit
The only producer of calcium ammonium nitrate fertilizer in Pakistan, Pakarab operates two factories in Punjab province, the country's agricultural heartland.
The largest is on the outskirts of Multan, an ancient city surrounded by thousands of acres of mango orchards and cotton fields.
Pakistani fertilizer producers are not permitted to export to Afghanistan because they are subsidized by the government and their products are meant for domestic use only. But the low price of fertilizer in Pakistan, and a chronic shortage in Afghanistan, has meant that smuggling has long been rife.
Petraeus Bids Farewell to US Military
VOA News August 31, 2011 Luis Ramirez
Pentagon - General David Petraeus bid farewell to the U.S. military where he served for 37 years. He is credited, among other things, with turning around the U.S.-led war in Iraq and working to contain violence in Afghanistan, where he commanded U.S. forces.
In a ceremony with much pomp, the U.S. military said goodbye to one of its generals considered a star by many. In his 37 years in the army, Petraeus had many successes, most recently commanding U.S. forces both in Iraq and Afghanistan.
He is best remembered for changing the way U.S. forces deal with counterinsurgency conflicts in the post-Cold War era. He leaves the military as concerns grow over the Pentagon's plan to slash more than $350 billion from its budget in the next 10 years.
In his parting remarks at Fort Myer outside Washington Wednesday, Petraeus warned against cutting too deeply.
"I do believe that we have re-learned since 9/11 the timeless lesson that we don't always get to fight the wars for which we are most prepared or most inclined," Petraeus said. "Given that reality, we will need to maintain the full-spectrum capability that we have developed over this last decade of conflict in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere."
Petraeus heads to a new job as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) next week, a post previously held by the new Defense Secretary, Leon Panetta.
Nora Bensahel is Deputy Director of Studies and Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security in Washington. She says Petraeus changed the conventional U.S. military strategy of killing or capturing those who attack the United States - a strategy she says had further enflamed violence in Iraq. Petraeus' new approach, she says, brought down the level of violence.
"The counterinsurgency doctrine and strategy that was executed in Iraq starting in late 2006 and through the rest of General Petraeus' tenure there was, instead of staying at a far distance and trying to kill the adversary was a true counterinsurgency strategy of having troops live within the population areas, have a permanent presence there so that they could provide 24-hour protection and getting to know the population to get tips on who was involved in the various activities," Bensahel explained.
The general chose to retire from the military before going to the CIA as some in Washington raised questions of whether he might militarize the intelligence service, which has already come under criticism for its alleged use of unmanned aircraft and direct attacks against specific targets.
Afghanistan's Noor Eye Hospital Draws 400 Patients Each Day
The Huffington Post - Aug 31 06:47am
KABUL, Afghanistan -- Had they treated Nasaratullah sooner, the doctors might have been able to save the Afghan baby's eye, which was riddled with cancer.
Instead, the doctors at Noor Eye Hospital, a rundown facility in the Afghan capital overrun with 400 patients a day, had to remove it.
"Unfortunately, people come to us very late," Dr. Najib Osmani said looking up from the operating table where his tiny six-month-old patient, still anesthetized, rested in purple pajamas. "In early stages, this is curable. You can save the eyes, the sight – everything. Not in Afghanistan."
Eye care is a casualty of Afghanistan's tortured history. Eye clinics exist in only a few major Afghan cities. There are only six ophthalmologists for every 1 million Afghans. The country's lack of roads, mountainous terrain, extreme poverty and three decades of civil unrest are immense roadblocks to getting care – and giving it.
Roughly 1.5 million Afghans are visually impaired, according to the Ministry of Public Health. Every year, around 25,000 Afghans lose vision in one of their eyes.
Nasaratullah, a round-faced boy from eastern Afghanistan, has retinoblastoma, a rare cancerous tumor in his retina. After removing it, Osmani embedded a whitish glass ball, which later can be replaced with an artificial eye.
The infant's other eye appears healthy now, but there is a 40 percent chance that cancer will develop in it as well, the doctor said.
"I pray the other eye is OK," Osmani said. "At least we can refer him to neighboring countries for better treatment, radiation or chemotherapy."
Simpler vision problems can be easily treated in Afghanistan – if patients can get access to care.
Sixty percent of all blindness in Afghanistan is blamed on cataracts, which are removed in simple operations common in the developed world. But in Afghanistan, only 15,000 cataract surgeries are performed each year, not even enough to keep up with new cases and causing the huge backlog of cases – 200,000 by some estimates – to grow even more.
Babi Dukther, a 45-year-old woman from Kabul, is one of the lucky ones. On a hot day in the dusty capital, she walked barefoot into one of the hospital's operating rooms where a man was still swabbing the floor with a dirty mop.
"My eyes have gotten weaker for five or six months, and in the last month, it got worse," the mother of seven said as she lay down on the operating table to have a cataract removed from her left eye. "When I look, it's like something is coming down from the sky – like it's raining or snowing."
Doctors perform 15 to 20 operations at the hospital each day. With more space, beds and equipment, they could do more.
"We have too many patients," Dr. Yosuf Mahboob said. "It's too crowded. We don't have enough rooms for checkups."
Patients start lining up outside the hospital at around 7:30 a.m. There's plenty of pushing and shoving to get to two tiny registration windows – one for men and the other for women.
Patients thrust their fists, clutching the entrance fee of 50 Afghanis, or about $1, inside the windows hoping to be the next person allowed inside.
After registering, the patients sit in stifling waiting areas. Somebody tries to turn on a window fan, but it doesn't work. Patients fan themselves with the green registration cards. There's a 4-year-old girl with infected eyes ringed in red and men with cataracts shuffling with canes. There's a woman who suffered a splinter in her eye while chopping wood.
Those called from the waiting rooms line up for an eye test, with the chart is painted on a glowing light box. Fewer than 30 percent of Afghans are literate, so the chart uses a symbol that resembles an "E." Patients are asked whether the symbol is facing left, right, up or down.
Watching everything was 9-year-old Safauddin, his right eye severely deformed by a type of neurofibromatosis, a genetic disorder that causes the growth of tumors. The boy was silent, but his mother was shouting .
"I don't know how his eye got this way. Something happened during the Taliban time," she said, referring the years from 1996 to 2001 when the hardline Taliban regime ruled Afghanistan.
She barked at a doctor through her blue burqa, saying she could not understand why her son could not be treated at the hospital, which has no facilities or expertise to treat the disease.
In an examination room next door, a toothless woman was nearly hysterical, saying her eyes were getting weaker. She complained that she had no medicine and nobody to help her. Mahboob jotted some notes on her registration card and quickly sent her to the next examining area.
"We have to work like this because of the rush of patients," he said. "If we try to tell the patients to come back tomorrow they'd hold a demonstration."
Upstairs, the baby boy's father, Hafizullah, was fighting back tears. The shopkeeper, who like his son uses only one name, was heartbroken that surgeons couldn't save the diseased eye. His wife sat on the edge of the baby's bed, straightening his pajama top over his belly. Nasaratullah's face was covered by a bandage, and no one had told his mother yet that the eye had been removed.
The surgery was life-changing, yet it gave the parents hope that their son born to war might someday see a more peaceful Afghanistan.
That's a long way off. Noor Eye Hospital is the last stop in Afghanistan for patients with serious eye conditions. If they can't be treated there, they must be referred outside the country.
Days later, Hafizullah and his wife bundled up Nasaratullah and drove for 16 hours, hoping of seeing an eye specialist in Lahore, Pakistan.
Senator Scott Brown returns from military training in Afghanistan
By Martin Finucane, Globe Staff The Boston Globe
US Senator Scott Brown is on his way home from a week of training in Afghanistan, his office says.
Brown, a National Guardsman for more than 31 years, spent most of his time in Kabul, his office says.
“Sen. Brown came away with a heightened appreciation for the service and sacrifice demonstrated by all those who are fighting overseas to keep America safe,” spokeswoman Marcie Kinzel said in a statement.
Brown is expected to return Thursday, said Kinzel.
Brown is a lieutenant colonel in the Judge Advocate General Corps. He asked to fulfill his annual training obligations in Afghanistan, and “lived, ate and trained with the troops,” Kinzel said.
Brown said in May that he hoped the experience would offer him a fuller understanding of what American troops are facing.
It’s the first time he has trained in a war zone in his National Guard career.
Brown, 51, is facing reelection in 2012. He already faces several Democratic challengers, but the spotlight recently has been on Harvard Law School Professor Elizabeth Warren, who is considering a challenge.
Brown scored a surprise victory over Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley in a 2010 special election to fill the seat left vacant by the death of long-time liberal Democratic US Senator Edward M. Kennedy.
Afghan police casualties soar
Washington Post By Joshua Partlow August 31, 2011
CHARIKAR, Afghanistan - They die in assaults on lonely mountain checkpoints and in group beheadings captured on hand-held video cameras. They are engulfed by flaming car bombs and are shot at point-blank range by men who often dress up in the same plain gray uniform as theirs.
Forever maligned as corrupt, incompetent and drug-addled, Afghan National Police officers have sacrificed unlike any force in the country, foreign or domestic, taking casualties at a rate far higher than Afghan soldiers or their partners in the U.S.-led coalition.
Over the past year, 1,555 Afghan police officers have been killed. That’s more than twice the number of Afghan soldiers who died in the same period, although there are 35,000 fewer officers than soldiers in the country, according to the U.S.-led coalition. In the same period, 474 U.S. soldiers died in Afghanistan. The police death toll in June, 246 officers — a rate of eight a day — was 50 percent higher than in any other month in the past year.
The 135,000 Afghan police officers generally receive less training, more-rudimentary equipment and lower pay than their army colleagues. Although soldiers drive around in armored Humvees, most police officers travel in pickup trucks, even though they are often called upon to operate in areas rife with insurgents. But U.S. military officials are hoping the police can become the primary long-term solution to Afghanistan’s woes, a force they envision as growing even as the more expensive army shrinks in the future.
For now, they remain the weakest, and most regularly hammered, link in the war against the Taliban.
“The army is looked after very well — they get good food and Pepsi,” said Lt. Mohammad Qahir, 41, a police officer based at the governor’s compound in Parwan province, north of Kabul. “The police stand in the sun all day and don’t get anything.”
Qahir was away from his post on a day last month that has come to typify the grim existence of Afghanistan’s police. When he heard a commotion begin on the morning of Sunday, Aug. 14, he was unarmed, he said, because there were not enough guns to go around for the small team guarding the governor’s gate.
His colleague, Rahimullah, said that he was stationed at the door when a black Toyota Corolla pulled up and men in police uniforms demanded entry. Rahimullah said he soon recognized that the men were suicide bombers.
As the Taliban insurgents stormed the compound, Rahimullah was shot in the left leg, took grenade shrapnel in his back and broke his ankle, he said later from his hospital bed.
Another police officer, Aynuddin, woke from his nap, rolled off his cot and rushed to the doorway of the police shack. As he stepped outside, a bullet pierced his left thigh, he recalled. He fell down and passed out.
Seeing this unfold, Mohammad Azim, a 31-year-old officer who had been lounging in the shade in a blue plastic chair when the Taliban attack began, said he fired some shots from his Kalashnikov, then ran to hide in an empty kitchen as the suicide bombers stalked the grounds. He was alone. The room was dark. He had three bullets left.
“I believed they would come and kill me at any second,” Azim recalled. “At that moment, you forget about everything. You only think about yourself.”
He was not thinking about the fact that of the 15 police positions allotted for the governor’s office, only four have been filled, not including the governor’s personal bodyguards. Or that the surveillance camera affixed to the building closest to the gate was broken and hadn’t been repaired. Or that the officers don’t have body armor or helmets. Or that he makes $150 a month and supports a family of 12.
“We have three Kalashnikovs for four people. How can we defend the compound?” Qahir said. “If we were fully equipped, I swear no suicide bomber would enter the compound.”
Efforts at improvement
To address the high rate of police casualties, the NATO training command in Afghanistan is giving the force 3,400 new armored Humvees over the next eight months — the police now have 1,000, and last year they had none. The training curriculum, expanded from six to eight weeks, has been revised to include more survival and first-aid training, as well as driving instruction, because some casualties stem from traffic accidents, U.S. military officials said.
The force is largely illiterate, so each student takes reading and writing classes intended to get them to at least a first-grade level.
The role of Afghan police as the first line of defense often puts them in vulnerable spots. They guard government officials who are frequent targets of assassination. They man poorly fortified checkpoints along dangerous roads, presenting a wealth of soft targets for the Taliban to choose from. With a thriving insurgency, they are often thrust into a demanding paramilitary role.
“Our job is to enforce law and order, but sometimes we’re sent to the front lines to fight, and that’s not the duty of the police,” Qahir said.
Despite these vulnerabilities, fewer police officers walk off their jobs than soldiers. In 17 of the 18 months between January 2010 and June, the rate of “attrition,” or dropouts, among police was lower than that of the army. In June, 5,027 soldiers left the Afghan army; 2,043 officers left the police force.
Police officers still have a bad reputation in many parts of the country. They’re often accused of extorting money and abusing power or operating at the whim of a local power broker or tribal leader. Their behavior in some areas has driven residents to turn to the Taliban for help.
The beleaguered officers at the Parwan governor’s office say they are committed to their jobs and country, come what may. The insurgents who attacked the compound killed at least 20 people, blew up offices, torched cars and sprayed a torrent of bullets — but the police officers were back at their jobs the next day.
“In a certain macabre way, the police did their job,” Lt. Col. Jeremy T. Siegrist, the U.S. Army battalion commander responsible for Parwan province, said as he visited the remains of the governor’s office last week. “They didn’t save the compound, but it’s still usable, and the governor’s still alive. It’s not a victory by any means, but certainly it shows the police are perhaps improving.”
Special correspondent Sayed Salahuddin contributed to this report.
Will US exit strategy work in Afghanistan? Brutal valley emerges as test
US forces have had to return to a key outpost they left to Afghan forces in March. Now, the US commander there is trying to forge a new partnership to bring the Afghans up to speed.
Christian Science Monitor By Anna Mulrine, Staff writer August 31, 2011
Kunar, Afghanistan - Nestled in a lush but mean valley on the banks of the Pech River, Camp Blessing was no longer the sort of place, US commanders decided in February, that warranted the bloodshed of American soldiers.
Instead, the US war effort would benefit from focusing its limited resources on population centers, they concluded, and away from the Pech’s brutal terrain and rather xenophobic citizenry, ready and more than willing to skillfully take up arms against outsiders.
Better, they concluded, to leave this sparsely settled region – where Afghan fighters mustered to make the first successful stand against Soviet occupation – to the Afghan Army.
So soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division towed away the modern toilet trailers and stripped Camp Blessing of its amenities – air-conditioning units, flat-screen monitors, and the covered plywood porch where senior US troops convened to smoke cigars and discuss the news of the day.
In March, they rechristened the base “Nangalam” and turned it over to Afghan forces.
Today, however, US soldiers are back. The conditions at the once built-up outpost are now spartan. Troops bathe with baby wipes and bottled water and sleep on the floors of buildings that, they discovered upon their return in late July, were littered with human feces.
Insurgents had advanced so steadily since March that the Afghan Army could lose the base itself, say a new crop of US commanders.
They see the return as an opportunity to forge a new model for cooperation and mentoring with the Afghan security forces. But while the Pech is admittedly one of Afghanistan’s toughest assignments, the Afghan Army’s failed four-month attempt take the reins of security illustrates its shortfalls – and how far there is to go, US officers say, if NATO is to turn all security responsibilities over to Afghan forces by 2014.
The troops who have come back to this jagged spine of mountain peaks are under no illusions about the difficulty of the task that awaits them. Their code name for this operation: “Hotel California.”
“It’s like the lyrics,” says 2nd battalion intelligence officer Maj. Marcus Wright of the Eagles song: “ ‘You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.’ ” Welcome back
When US forces moved back into Camp Blessing in late July, they were greeted with mortars and rocket-propelled grenades, one of which hit the underbelly of a US Chinook carrying supplies for the base. That marked the first shoot-down of a Chinook this year. The pilot was able to land relatively gently without any serious injuries, though passengers were forced to sprint when thousands of rounds of ammunition caught fire and ignited, causing shrapnel injuries and destroying the helicopter.
It was a pattern of hostility repeatedly encountered by US forces. “We really had to reoccupy the base,” says Maj. Glenn Kozelka, executive officer for the 2nd battalion, 3rd brigade combat team of the 25th Infantry Division.
Security had deteriorated rapidly after US forces departed. Within weeks, the Afghan battalion commander at Nangalam could not safely get to meetings in a Asadabad, Kunar’s bustling capital 25 miles east. The Taliban overran and occupied the capital of a nearby district center.
At the same time, insurgents routinely attacked Afghan National Army (ANA) patrol routes. By May, the Afghan commander stationed at Nangalam had abandoned the outpost, along with his top staff.
“It was better before” the US left, says Afghan commander Col. Adam Khan Matin. “When the coalition forces left, the [insurgent] training camps came back.”
Lt. Col. Colin Tuley, the top US commander at Nangalam, grappled with how to address the regression. His battalion now had responsibility for an area that had previously needed two. His 800-plus soldiers were spread out across multiple forward operating bases and command posts.
Simply holding that ground would be challenge enough. After evaluating the capabilities of the ANA at Nangalam, Col. Tuley came to a conclusion. “We needed to do something else.”
In his idea is a hope central to the American exit strategy: If US troops focused more intently on creating a workable partnership with the Afghans, perhaps the mentoring could make up for the diminished number of US troops and ensure that a decade's worth of US battles are for not for naught.
So began what Tuley calls a “permanent embedded partnership” – or PEP – an experiment that could hold lessons for the American war effort in Afghanistan.
The PEP will revolve around 40 US troops at Nangalam working with multiple companies of the Afghan Army. Most immediately, with a stronger base here, Tuley hopes US forces “can come in and do operations as necessary,” allowing NATO to extend its reach farther into the valley. Perhaps more long-term, he adds, the PEP “is a great kind of interim phase to get the ANA to where [the transition is] not as abrupt.”
The US platoon will run workshops on basics from marksmanship to first aid – lessons that have been taught before, Tuley acknowledges, but bear repeating.
“If you think about it, this [Afghan commander at Nangalam] never had a partnership, Tuley adds. “It was. ‘Here’s your battlespace.’ ”
The first order of business – and lesson for Afghan commanders – is to bolster base defenses. When the US was here, Nangalam had early-attack warning systems, including towers with cameras that sent images to screens in a base defense center, which allowed troops to monitor the perimeter.
When Tuley returned, no vestige of those defenses remained. “The security definitely wasn’t at the level that I would ever feel too comfortable having my soldiers out there,” he says.
In response, he has assigned a US platoon of about 30 soldiers to patrol the surrounding area, and he stationed a single US soldier with night-vision goggles at each Afghan guard post along the perimeter of the base.
Beyond base defenses, Tuley must help the Afghans carry out their own missions more effectively.
The PEP's first big test: A humanitarian mission into one of the more isolated and government-averse areas of the country. Testing a new partnership
The mission was an Afghan command idea, and US officials are pleased to see Afghan soldiers taking a page from the US playbook: following violent operations with aid for villages, in the hopes of mitigating hard feelings and demonstrating the reach of the Afghan government.
The plan is to convoy from Kunar up north into the neighboring province of Nuristan, an area where US troops have not been since 2009.
“We’re doing this really to show that the government and the military and the civil authorities can provide for the people, even in the most separated and disparate areas, areas,” says Lt. Col. Pat Stich, the brigade operations officer.
A few hours into the mission, as Afghan and US commanders touch base during a battlefield update, Afghan mission leaders want help in the form of close air support (CAS).
“We definitely need more CAS, because they are trying to shoot our convoys,” one Afghan commander points out.
Then, as nightfall comes, the convoy troops have decided to stop. “It’s dark, so we’ll stay here,” the Afghan commander explains.
By the basic rulebook of modern warfare this is a bad idea, leaving the convoy vulnerable to attack. US officers gently press them to continue in spite of the dark.
“It would be good if you could make it up to Chapadara” – a district center in northern Kunar.
“We’ll keep trying,” comes the reply. “But if there are some obstacles, or IEDs, we’ll stop.”
Without question, Afghan security forces face a tough fight. In addition to improvised explosive devices (IEDs), insurgents have shaved down dirt on the side of the roads, for example, to make them too narrow for US armored vehicles to traverse.
Afghans also lack equipment, including night-vision goggles. “That’s a pretty critical piece of equipment to provide security,” says Tuley. US officials worry, however, that if they give night-vision goggles to the Afghans, particularly with ANA attrition rates remaining high, they could fall into insurgents’ hands.
At the same time, US commanders are trying to ease the Afghans' reliance on American assets, from close-air support to medical evacuations – to help them become self-sufficient. “A lot of these things it makes them hard to wean them off of, because then they don’t want to do the missions without them,” says Lt. Col. Mark Simpson, 3rd brigade, 25th Infantry Division officer in charge of mentoring Afghan forces. “We don’t want to do the missions without them.”
Deciding precisely when to cut off the Afghans from the US equipment and supply chains will require some “very, very hard decisions, in my opinion, from the top,” says Simpson.
“In the next couple of months, we’re supposed to figure out a plan to get them to the next level – and then, what does it take to get them to the ultimate level” where Afghan troops can operate independently, he asks.
While the Afghan forces can “step out smartly” and execute most operations that US troops plan with them, commander agree that there are often problems with the vital details along the way.
“You ask, ‘OK, what’s your transportation plan? Who’s the convoy commander? Do you have three days supply of food and water? What if a vehicle breaks – are you going to tow it or leave it?’ " Simpson says. "Those kinds of things bog them down big time.”
As the 2014 deadline approaches, “without anyone having to say it, I feel a massive sense of urgency,” Simpson says.
But while the pressure to increase the self-sufficiency of the Afghan security forces is immense, “Nobody wants to be that guy that completely cuts the cord on their watch, because, No. 1, they’ve become so dependent on us.”
“And No. 2, I think we’re kind of leery to see that if we cut the cord on them what’s really going to happen is that they fall on their face.” Only the beginning
As the humanitarian mission progresses, Afghan officials decide that they would like their forces to make a second run into Nuristan, to demonstrate the reach of the government. No one is looking forward to breaking this news to the Afghan soldiers, who they fear will be reluctant to go into dangerous territory during the fasting month of Ramadan, when they can’t drink water or eat during daylight hours.
Says one officer: “They don’t have the capacity to deal with the request.”
They will need US assets, including air support and roadside bomb detection trucks, for this mission as well. US officers worry, however, in some cases US troops could be provoking rather than suppressing violence. Many residents here are simply opposed to any outside presence.
“A lot of people in the valley, they see governance, they see development, they just don’t want it. They want to be left alone,” says Tuley. “You come in there and there’s going to be a fight. Now a fight’s good if you’re really making progress. But in some of these areas, you’re probably just exacerbating things.”
For now, however, the US troop presence at Nangalam is likely only to increase.
As the first week of partnership at Nangalam winds to a close, Tuley is increasingly convinced that rather than the 40-plus soldiers currently taking part in the PEP, he will need closer to 200.
He knows, too, that this plan comes with opportunity costs. With US forces set to draw down across Afghanistan, he can only bolster the American presence at Nangalam by closing a combat outpost or a forward operating base.
After the PEP’s first big mission, though, he believes that expanding US forces here is key to US troops being able to one day go home for good. Looking around at the growing stacks of boxes filled with food for the soldiers, he says, “It will grow.”
Afghan Local Police Defect Over Pay
Paramilitaries in Kapisa region complain Afghan authorities ignore their role in fending off Taleban attacks.
IWPR By Maiwand Safi 31 Aug 11
Afghanistan - A local policing venture in Afghanistan’s northeastern Kapisa province is faltering as men leave the force because their wages have been cut.
The men are part of the Afghan Local Police, originally village militias that have been brought under a centralised command structure since last year. They remain distinct from the regular Afghan National Police, ANP.
In Kapisa’s Tagab and Alasai districts, around 40 men are said to have left the force after effective command shifted six months ago from France’s NATO contingent stationed in the area to the Afghan interior ministry.
Until the changeover, they say, they were paid good wages by the French army, which also supplied weapons and conducted joint operations with them.
“The French troops stationed in Kapisa used to provide us with all kinds of assistance. They paid our salaries and gave us arms and ammunition. But once we were transferred to the interior ministry, everything became disorganised,” Nazir Ahmad, who has resigned from the local police in Tagab, said.
He added that although the local police created security over large swathes of territory, they were more or less ignored by the Afghan authorities.
“The government pays wages of 150 dollars [a month], but the payments have been held up for several months. And it’s a low wage,” Nazir Ahmad said. “The [ANP] police headquarters doesn’t care about us. Even if the Taleban kill us all, police headquarters isn’t going to help us.”
His concerns were echoed by Mazar, deputy commander of Afghan Local Police unit in Tagab’s Landakhel area, who said the French had paid wages of 500 dollars a month, not the 150 the government was offering.
“We’re unhappy about this process. Ever since we were incorporated into the interior ministry, we’ve had no supplies and our wages have been delayed for months,” he said.
He said lack of resources meant his police were unable to perform as effectively as they used to. In one recent clash with the Taleban, their Kalashnikov rifles proved no match for the heavier weapons deployed by the insurgents.
Under French control, Mazar said, “We had trained up some people behind the Taleban lines to inform us about their movements, in return for payment. We provided good security in the region, but now we can’t do anything. Our militia members are having to leave their jobs and go into some other business.”
In Kapisa, the Taleban have singled out the Afghan Local Police, accusing them of being worse than the ANP and Afghan National Army and of working as spies for the foreign troops, perhaps because their knowledge of the terrain and community makes them more of a threat than forces drafted in from outside the area. Earlier this year, an IWPR report Taleban Vent Ire on Afghan Local Police described how the insurgents had ordered civilians in Tagab not to have any dealings with the paramilitary police – they were not to allow relatives to marry them or attend their weddings or funerals, on pain of death.
Afghan Local Police members who leave the force say this vendetta means they are also having to move out of their home areas for fear of reprisals.
Zaman, an ex-member in Tagab, is planning to go off to Iran to find work as it is unsafe for him to remain in his own village. Accusing both the Afghan government and the foreign troops for abandoning people like him, he said he would only return if the situation improved.
The ANP commander in Tagab district, Pacha Gol Bakhtiar, denied accusations that the local police were left on their own.
“They use our vehicles in combat and receive training from our commanders. They are also supplied with ammunition, but some of them sell it,” he said.
Bakhtiar said the government could not afford the same high wage levels as the French military, but servicemen should be motivated by patriotism.
General Alishah Ahmadzai is in charge of Afghan Local Police units within the interior ministry. He said there had been teething problems with bringing these irregular forces into the ministry’s structure, but issues like wage delays and supplies were being addressed.
Ahmadzai said the current monthly wage of 150 dollars was the same as regular ANP officers in Tagab received, and this was to be raised to 210 dollars a month . “That’s an adequate wage for someone living there,” he added.
The general appeared unconcerned at the defections, saying, “If people leave, others will be recruited. I don’t think security will deteriorate in Tagab due to their absence.”
Tagab’s district government chief Abdul Hakim Akhondzadah takes a different view, saying the Afghan Local Police presence had allowed officials to move around the area without fear of attack, but this level of security was likely to deteriorate if the force was depleted.
Experiments with raising militias have been controversial from the start. As a diversity of local defence forces began springing up around Afghanistan over the last year or so, in some cases sponsored by NATO troops based in the area, the Afghan government appeared to grow concerned at the lack of structure and control. (See Afghan Village Militias Accused of Abuses for examples from the west of the country.)
The solution the authorities found was the Afghan Local Police initiative, approved in summer 2010 to formalise the status and structure of all these units under interior ministry command.
Many Afghans have bad memories of the armed factions whose members engaged in widespread violence and looting in the civil war of the early 1990s. There were also concerns that the new forces were recruiting ex-members of the old groups.
In Tagab, not everyone would be sad if the paramilitary police disappeared.
“There are no good men in these tribal militias. There are thieves, gamblers, drug addicts and other criminals in their ranks,” a shopkeeper who declined to give his name said. “They robbed my shop three months ago and took everything away with them. I even know who the perpetrators are, but what can I do about it? Nothing.
“I say these militias should not only be disbanded but also prosecuted.”
Maiwand Safi is an IWPR-trained reporter in Kapisa province, Afghanistan.
www.afghanistannewscenter.com