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Under Guard, Lawmakers Are Sworn In in Kabul
By RAY RIVERA and ABDUL WAHEED WAFA The New York Times September 3, 2011
KABUL, Afghanistan — The speaker of Parliament on Saturday swore in eight of nine new members reinstated last month by the country’s election commission, as hundreds of police officers armed with riot gear and machine guns blocked the entrance to the building to keep out members who had been replaced by the commission’s ruling.
The sedate swearing-in ceremony was witnessed by only a few dozen Parliament members. Dozens more, however, stood outside in solidarity with the ousted members, in a sign of a widening rift within Parliament, which up to now had appeared mostly unified against President Hamid Karzai’s efforts to reshape the legislature.
A spokesman for the president denied that he had ordered extra police officers to block the ousted members, saying that police officials had decided on their own that the extra force was necessary to prevent irate lawmakers from entering the building with guns. But supporters of the nine disqualified members took it as a signal of the president’s willingness to use force to impose the panel’s decision.
“This is a coup d’état by the president against the Parliament,” said Abdul Jabbar Qahraman, a lower house member from Helmand Province. He is part of a coalition that claims to have about 140 members — more than half the lower house — who oppose the Independent Election Commission’s latest ruling. He spoke after a faceoff between lawmakers and police officers outside the entrance.
“We’re not standing just for the nine people who are to be unseated,” he added. “Our position is in the last 10 years, with the help of all these foreign and Afghan troops, we are trying to build a democracy, and the president is trying to step on that.”
The standoff, which remained peaceful, was the latest in a constitutional crisis that has frozen the legislative process here for much of the past year and shows little sign of easing, even as Mr. Karzai has tried to ease concerns among the international community and appease Parliament members angered over his earlier efforts to overturn election results in a broader way.
According to a former Western diplomat, the political deadlock is being closely watched by American officials as they work out a strategic partnership with the Afghan government that is expected to include an agreement to maintain American military bases in the country and continue American financing of Afghan security forces long after the planned end of the international combat mission in 2014.
Throughout the crisis, Parliament had made repeated shows of unity against the president. But behind the scenes, observers describe an atmosphere of increasing tension and division as many members of Parliament, out of fatigue or self-interest, began signaling they were open to deals in which the nine would go.
The controversy has caused plenty of political theater, including street demonstrations and shaded threats of violence. At one point, a female member who is one of the nine slated to lose her seat threw her veil on a male member who had switched sides, a huge cultural insult tantamount to accusing him of no longer being a man.
On Saturday, police officials denied sending extra officers to the Parliament. But throughout the day, hundreds of police officers, far more than is normally seen here, blocked the main parliamentary compound, and armored Humvees and police trucks with mounted machine guns stood poised along the pathways leading to it.
Dawood Kalakani, a Parliament member from Kabul, defended the show of force, saying it was necessary because of the many opponents who now have their own armed bodyguards. She denied accusations levied by opponents that some members had received favors and monetary compensation in return for supporting the president.
“It is baseless,” she said. “We just supported what the Constitution says, and it says the election commission is the only authority to decide the results of parliamentary elections.”
NATO kills ex-Gitmo detainee in Afghanistan
By RAHIM FAIEZ
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — NATO and Afghan forces killed a former Guantanamo detainee who had become a key al-Qaida affiliate after returning to Afghanistan, officials said Saturday.
Sabar Lal Melma, who was released from Guantanamo in 2007 after five years of detention, had been organizing attacks in eastern Kunar province and funding insurgent operations, NATO spokesman Capt. Justin Brockhoff said.
A NATO statement described Melma as a "key affiliate of the al-Qaida network" who was in contact with senior al-Qaida members in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Troops surrounded Melma's house in Jalalabad city on Friday night and shot him dead when he emerged from the building holding an AK-47 assault rifle. Several other people were detained.
A guard at the house, Mohammad Gul, said a group of American soldiers scaled the walls of the compound around 11 p.m. and stormed the house, shooting Melma in the assault. Three others were detained, Gul said.
Melma had been detained for about five days in August, Gul said.
Melma is not the first former detainee to rejoin the insurgency. In 2009, the Pentagon said 61 detainees, or approximately 11 percent, released from Guantanamo had rejoined the fight. Experts have questioned the validity of that number.
About 520 Guantanamo detainees have been released from custody or transferred to prisons elsewhere in the world.
After the fall of the Taliban, Melma, 49, was given the rank of brigadier general and placed in charge of approximately 600 border security troops in Konar province, according to his military file made public by WikiLeaks.
He was captured in August 2002 while attending a meeting with U.S. military officials in Asadabad and transferred to the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay in October that same year. He was suspected of helping carry out rocket attacks against U.S. troops.
While imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, the U.S. determined he was a "probable facilitator for Al-Qaida members" and was also thought to have links to Pakistan's intelligence service.
He was sent back to Afghanistan in September 2007.
NATO said in a statement that coalition forces have captured or killed more than 40 al-Qaida insurgents in eastern Afghanistan this year.
In June 2010, then CIA Director Leon Panetta said only 50 to 100 al-Qaida operatives continued to operate inside Afghanistan. It's not clear if Panetta was referring to commanders or foot soldiers.
In Kabul, meanwhile, a political standoff over the makeup of the legislature continued as police escorted a handful of new lawmakers into parliament despite protests from sitting parliamentarians that the new group is illegitimate.
Afghan election officials ruled last month that nine sitting parliamentarians should be replaced following a review of vote fraud allegations from last year's election.
More than 1,000 police were stationed around the parliament building Saturday in anticipation of violence, but the new lawmakers took their seats without incident, officials said. Saturday was the first day back at work after the Islamic holiday of Eid al-Fitr and many lawmakers had not yet returned from their home provinces.
The nine ousted parliamentarians were blocked from entering and vowed to continue to fight for their seats.
"This is a coup against the Afghan parliament and against democracy," said Mohammad Rafiq Shaher from Herat province, one of the ousted lawmakers.
And in the southern city of Kandahar, officials said NATO forces killed a child and a shopkeeper who were caught up in a firefight between a military patrol and a gunman. The attacker started shooting at the NATO troops and they returned fire, killing the two, said Sher Shah Yosufzai, the deputy police chief of Kandahar province.
He said he had reports that a NATO service member had also been killed in the fighting.
NATO said in a statement that one of its service members was killed in an insurgent attack on Saturday in southern Afghanistan but did not say if it was the same incident and did not provide any further details.
____
Associated Press writers Heidi Vogt and Adam Goldman contributed to this report from Kabul.
Taliban claims kidnap of 30 Pakistanis
By Nasrullah Khan | AFP News
Pakistani Taliban on Saturday claimed responsibility for the kidnap of more than 30 young people who mistakenly crossed the border from the country's lawless northwest into Afghanistan.
A spokesman for Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan's (TTP) said those kidnapped were not boys as reported by Pakistani officials but aged between 20 and 30, adding their fate would be decided by the central leadership of the organisation.
"We have kidnapped them. These people are with us, they are not kids but young people of ages between 20 to 30," Taliban spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan told AFP by telephone from an undisclosed location.
"These people belong to the areas where tribesmen rose militias against TTP. We will thoroughly investigate about them and then our central leadership will decide their fate," Ehsan said.
Pakistani officials had said the incident took place on Thursday after a group of boys, aged between 12 and 18, left the Ghakhi area of Pakistan's Bajaur tribal region during celebrations marking the Muslim Eid holiday.
Bajaur administration official Islam Zeb said the boys had been abducted by a militant group allied with Taliban commander Maulvi Faqir Muhammad, who led local insurgents but is believed to have fled to Afghanistan in 2010.
Zeb told AFP on Saturday that a delegation of Pakistani tribesmen is negotiating with the tribal elders in Afghanistan "to put pressure on the kidnappers to set them free,".
"We are trying our best to seek their release. A tribal Jirga has been sent to Kunar for negotiations," Zeb said.
Malik Ayaz, a tribal elder involves in negotiations told AFP on Saturday that Pakistani tribesmen are facing difficulties securing the safe release of the abductees as the border area is mostly controlled by Taliban.
"We are in contact with the tribesmen across the border but at the moment we are facing difficulties in negotiations. This border area is largely controlled by Taliban," he said.
Mohammad Akhtar, a witness who managed to fleethe mass kidnap said dozens of young people were in the area.
"We were there to enjoy our Eid vacations and all of a sudden Taliban attacked," he said.
"Some people managed to flee the area because they were a little bit away from the attack site," he said.
"We were their just for fun and to see the mountainous areas and to enjoy," he added.
Afghan border police commander General Aminullah Amarkhel, the governor of Kunar, where the boys vanished, Fazlullah Wahidi, and the local Afghan Taliban commander all told AFP on Friday they were unaware of the incident.
Afghanistan shares a disputed and unmarked 2,400-kilometre (1,500-mile) border with Pakistan, and Taliban and other Al-Qaeda-linked militants have carved out strongholds on either side.
The Pakistani military has repeatedly claimed to have eliminated the militant threat in Bajaur, one of seven districts in the semi-autonomous tribal belt that the United States sees as the global headquarters of Al-Qaeda.
A monster roaming the world
Sydney Morning Herald By Paul McGeough September 3, 2011
The West has spent billions trying to buy Pakistan's friendship but the jihadists are stronger than ever, writes Paul McGeough.
Search for a firm footing in Pakistan and there is none - all is quicksand strategically, politically, morally.
Here in south Asia, strategically sandwiched between failing Afghanistan and the China and India powerhouses, is a country in which journalists are abducted in the night by agents of the state and murdered; in which the only advance after a decade in which Washington has tried to buy friendship with cheques for more than $20 billion, is the expansion of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal - which is on the verge of surpassing Britain's as the fifth biggest in the world.
In Pakistan, a 50-year-old woman is sentenced to death on a dubious blasphemy charge - and politicians who dare to speak in her defence are gunned down; and a woman is gang-raped and paraded naked through her village on the orders of a local council, over bogus claims that her 12-year-old brother has offended a 20-year-old woman from the clan of the men who defiled her.
But that's village life. In the leafy garrison town of Abbottabad, an hour's drive north of Islamabad, Osama bin Laden, mastermind of the attacks of September 11, 2001, was able to hide in plain sight for years. The location of his fortified bunker, a stone's throw from a prestigious military academy, made it harder to give any credence to the generals' repeated denials that significant elements of Pakistan's extensive security apparatus sheltered the al-Qaeda chief and continue to give succour to the Taliban and other insurgency and terrorist movements.
In the south-west, in the wilds of provincial Baluchistan, there have been 150 ''kill and dump'' operations this year. Most of the victims are Baluch nationalist rebels. Their killers are the Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) and other elements of Pakistan's national security forces - driven to brutality by a belief, which could be correct, that Pakistan's arch foe, India, stirs the local nationalist pot. In turn, the Baluch nationalists are accused of running their own death squads - their victims are Punjabi ''settlers'', government workers brought in from other parts of the country.
Baluchistan is half Pashtun, which also makes it a sanctuary for the Taliban from adjoining Afghanistan, where Washington and the world still struggle, with little success, to impose a semblance of democracy on the bones of a fracturing, failing state. Here then is another of the ironies that puts a serious question mark over the bona fides of the Pakistani security forces: the leadership of the Afghanistan Taliban sequesters in Quetta, the provincial capital of Baluchistan, but the various Pakistani security services are so busy putting the Baluch nationalists through the mincer they don't have time to take down the Taliban command-and-control centre. Instead, they reportedly socialise with the Taliban and sit in on their strategy meetings.
West from Baluchistan is the sprawling port city of Karachi, where the spiralling death toll in renewed ethnic turf-wars gives raw meaning to what local novelist Kamila Shamsie broaches obliquely, recounting how the city ''winks'' at her. "Yes, the city said, I am a breeding ground for monsters, " she writes, "but don't think that is the full measure of what I am."
This drab, chaotic home to 18 million people who account for 65 per cent of Pakistan's economy is being carved up by bullets that this year have accounted for as many as 1000 ''wrong place, wrong time'' deaths as gunmen randomly select their targets - sending messages to whole communities, not the individuals with whose blood they paint the rough pavements. As the suburbs seethe, police do little, because they are cowed by the systematic elimination of those in their ranks who intervened in the last iteration of these ethnic wars. Provincial and federal governments and the security forces only wring their hands.
In Karachi everyone lies. No one denies turf wars are being waged. They simply blame everyone else - all the political parties deny any links to the militias that prosecute their bloody agendas and to the crime, drug and land-development mafias that prosper in their wake. And the city's once-dominant Urdu-speaking Mohajirs fight to maintain their control of corrupted city politics, amid an influx of Pashtuns fleeing upheavals along the Afghan border.
"Tension rises, we see killings and then scores must be settled," an adviser to the provincial governor says. "We are at war - the political parties say they are not involved, but the mafias take shelter from the parties as they exploit the situation."
In Islamabad, enter any of the city's newsrooms, and see fear in the eyes of journalists who risk death and torture for going about assignments. Consider the words of their Karachi colleague Madiha Sattar - "a growth of intolerance has forged an extreme, murderous antipathy to freedom of expression."
Most shocking in this campaign of fear and intimidation against one of the pillars of democracy was the disappearance in late May of Syed Saleem Shahzad, an investigative reporter for the respected, Hong Kong-based Asia Times Online. Two days after his abduction, Shahzad's battered body was found at Mandi Bahauddin, 130 kilometres south-east of the capital. The reporter left detailed accounts of the threats he had received from the ISI; in Washington, senior officials unflinchingly confirming that Shahzad's death had been ''sanctioned'' by the Pakistani government.
Umar Cheema might just as easily have been their victim. Behind a door marked ''Investigation Cell'' off a basement corridor in the Islamabad offices of The News, the 34-year-old father of two explains that the shock in his colleague Saleem Shahzad's murder was a realisation it might just as easily have been him.
As Cheema drove home from a party in the early hours during Ramadan last year, 12 men who identified themselves as police commandos abducted him, he says. Informing him first that he was a suspect in a killing, they pulled a bag over his head and hauled him away.
"They took me to a building where the leader stripped off my clothes. Then I was ordered to lie on the floor and they beat me on the back and shoulders for 20 or 25 minutes with leather straps and wooden canes.
"I was writing about corruption in the government and the lack of accountability in the military and intelligence agencies - they said they were beating me because of my reporting. Then they shaved my head and eyebrows - that's what is done to thieves in rural areas to humiliate them.
"Shahzad's death left me speechless," he says. "I was the second last victim before they took him. So I felt very much that this was a message for me - it was very, very personal."
In Islamabad, the government of Prime Minister Yousaf Gillani is as overwhelmed as it is complicit in the nation's failings. The economy is in crisis and the government has ceded control of more than half the country to the military or to extremist militias. "None of the cogs of state mesh to make it do what must be done," Human Rights Commission of Pakistan's Kamran Arif said.
Just south of Islamabad is Rawalpindi, a more typical Asian city than the sanitised and empty boulevards of Islamabad. As home and headquarters to the men and institutions that comprise Pakistan's military and intelligence establishment, this is the centre of absolute power in Pakistan. And it is here that a deep-fried sense of humiliation over the American raid to kill Osama bin Laden, in May this year, is felt most acutely.
"After the bin Laden raid, it's a question of the survival of the state," the defence analyst and director of the South Asian Strategic Stability Institute, Maria Sultan, says. "The problem now is that by this very public humiliation, the US has lost its biggest supporter - it's not the capability of the Pakistani military that is affected, it's its credibility."
A close reading of ''Getting Bin Laden'', The New Yorker's inside account of the May 2 raid, reveals the mission was not just a single US incursion that managed to evade Pakistan's air defences. On the night, there were effectively three separate American missions, none of which was detected by a military-security complex that demands indulgence by the people of Pakistan on the grounds that it is their only protection from the Indian hordes.
Pakistan's generals faced a grim choice - they had to admit to deceiving the world in harbouring bin Laden, or to incompetence by not knowing he was lounging in their backyard. So supine were they in opting to plead incompetence there were fears of a mutiny in the middle ranks of the security services.
The US signal to the world of just how much it could not trust its south Asian ally came hard on the heels of serial embarrassments at the hands of the Taliban and other militant groups in Pakistan.
There have been a series of militant attacks on the most secure and sensitive defence establishments. The latest, which some observers concluded could not have been undertaken without inside help, saw a 10-man assault team storm the Mehran naval aviation base in Karachi. It took hundreds of Pakistani navy commandos, marines and paramilitaries to retake the base, but not before two aircraft were destroyed, hostages taken and the base had been occupied for the best part of a day.
But it takes a discerning Pakistani general to differentiate between militants - some are ''strategic assets'' of the security apparatus and the generals refuse to go after them.
Dr Ayesha Agha, whose military and political commentaries appear in Pakistan's Dawn newspaper, explains: "The military depends on these 'assets' - they are a cost-effective means to fighting wars that the Pakistani military wants to fight in India and Afghanistan." Extrajudicial killings by the military now are counted in the hundreds.
When men in uniform were filmed recently murdering a detainee, the reckoning in human rights circles was that far from being a lapse of judgment, the recording had been allowed in the knowledge that its distribution on the internet would serve as a useful warning to the wider community.
A Karachi taxi driver becomes excited as he ferries us from the airport to a downtown hotel - "Pakistan lovely country," he bellows. "Terrorism? No, no, no."
But a single graphic in a 200-page study of Pakistan, published in May by the Washington-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies, reveals an impossible security challenge. Last year alone, 2113 terrorist attacks, 369 clashes between the security services and militants, 260 operational attacks by the security forces, 135 US drone attacks, 69 border clashes, 233 bouts of ethno-political violence and 214 inter-tribal clashes resulted in more than 10,000 dead and as many injured.
The death of bin Laden and the reported death of al-Qaeda's new No. 2 figure, Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, in an American drone attack last week, are still being factored into a running debate among intelligence specialists on the extent to which al-Qaeda offshoots elsewhere in the world, especially the Yemen-based al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula [AQAP], have taken the baton from the Pakistani organisation.
But a July study by the New America Foundation of 32 ''serious'' jihadist terror plots against the West from 2004 to 2011, finds 53 per cent had operational or training links to jihadist groups in Pakistan - compared to just 6 per cent being linked to Yemen. And the rising tempo of the drone attacks has failed to dent the rising frequency of Pakistan-linked plots against the West, the study finds.
Implicit or explicit in any discussion on Pakistan's volatile mix of militant violence and governmental chaos, is the level of anxiety around the world about the security of its nuclear arsenal. Confronted with claims such as that by bin Laden that acquiring a nuclear weapon was a ''religious duty'' and the hope expressed by one of his lieutenants that such a weapon one day might be seized in Pakistan, officials in Islamabad invariably boast that all is tightly locked down.
But when we ask a Pakistani diplomat how secure were the weapons in the aftermath of the US mission to kill Osama bin Laden, he replies: "Less so, now that the Americans have revealed to the world that it is possible to sneak into Pakistan undetected, to take something that you really want."
President Obama's public appeal that Pakistan not become the world's first ''nuclear-armed militant state'' gives context to disclosures by The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh of the existence of a US Special Operations rapid-response team which would be parachuted into Pakistan in the event of a nuclear crisis.
Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a former director of intelligence and counter intelligence at the US Department of Energy, is boldest in setting out the fears of Washington, London and other capitals - some of which were disclosed without diplomatic varnish by Wikileaks last year.
Writing in Arms Control Today, Mowatt-Larssen, who served 20 years at the CIA, bills Pakistan as the most likely setting for terrorists bent on acquiring a nuclear device to co-opt a nuclear insider - of whom there are estimated to be as many as 70,000 in Pakistan.
"There is a lethal proximity between terrorists, extremists, and nuclear weapons insiders," he writes. "Insiders have facilitated terrorist attacks. Suicide bombings have occurred at air force bases that reportedly serve as nuclear weapons storage sites. It is difficult to ignore such trends.
''Purely in actuarial terms, there is a strong possibility that bad apples in the nuclear establishment are willing to co-operate with outsiders for personal gain or out of sympathy for their cause."
"Not possible," says Maria Sultan. "About eight to 10,000 personnel working at the strategic level on security," she says, ticking off seven or eight interlocking layers of complex security, the first of which she says would trip most intruders before they came within 80 kilometres of a nuclear facility. "The idea that a terrorist can walk in and get hold of a device is just not possible."
Such is the bind in which Pakistanis find themselves. But if it is true feeble and corrupt civilian administrations make circumstances ripe for a military takeover, it is hardly surprising the generals have no respect for democratic fundamentals.
As revealed in one of the Wikileaks cables, Army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani was ready to force President Asif Ali Zardari from office - save for the fact the general thought even less of Zardari's likely civilian replacement. And historically, Washington has opted to connect with Pakistan through the military power of the generals, rather than the people power of the civilian leadership.
Bruce Riedel, a veteran CIA analyst, sets out the connections in Deadly Embrace: Pakistan, America and the Future of the Global Jihad. "Richard Nixon turned a blind eye to the murder of hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshis to keep his friends in Pakistan's army in power, a strategy that ultimately failed," Riedel writes. "Ronald Reagan entertained Zia-ul-Haq even as Zia was giving succour to the Arab jihadists who would become al-Qaeda. George W. Bush allowed Pervez Musharraf to give the Afghan Taliban a sanctuary from which to kill American and NATO soldiers in Afghanistan."
And in the judgment of Bushra Gohar, an elected MP from Pakistan's troubled Swat Valley, Washington still prefers to deal with the military rather than the country's civilian leadership. "That's not a role that the military has under the constitution," she says during a break in the business of the National Assembly in Islamabad. "There has been a democratic transition in this country and we expect the international community to support it."
Power vacuums become ripe for exploitation, as was revealed with frightening clarity earlier this year when two of three elected figures who had dared to speak out against Pakistan's draconian blasphemy laws were assassinated. In January, Punjab provincial governor Salman Taseer was gunned down by one of his state-provided security men; in March, the Minorities Minister and the only Christian in Gillani's cabinet, Shahbaz Bhatti, died in a hail of gunfire as his car left his mother's home in Islamabad.
Taseer's killer confessed and became a national hero. His home is a shrine, he is garlanded with rose petals and, in the oddest twist of all, the young lawyers' movement that effectively bundled Pervez Musharraf, the last dictator, from power in 2008, has taken the side of this cold-blooded murderer - not the principle for which his victim died.
A visitor leaves Pakistan wondering if anyone here speaks the truth. The dictators habitually resort to amping up religious parties - either to drown out secular ones that might be interested in the ideals of selfless democracy, or to further marginalise the country's Shiia Muslim minority.
"And people like Musharraf have two faces," Kamran Arif of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan said. "He would say all the right things for the West and do just what he wanted to do at home."
Some foreign analysts fall back on the seeming failure of Pakistan's religious parties at the ballot box as a hopeful sign. But a sense of rising radicalisation, particularly in the military and the middle classes, suggests an asymmetric contest for control of a highly unstable society - the non-religious parties fight in the parliament, but the religious parties are street brawlers.
Sherry Rehman, the only elected figure in the country to defend the convicted blasphemer Aasia Bibi, makes the same point in explaining how that debate was lost. "The discourse shifted from the parliament to the street," she says.
"We have to keep the agenda in the parliament, and not with the gun-toting thugs who make inflammatory speeches outside."
Like the financial institutions in the 2008 global financial crisis, Pakistan is deemed by Washington to be ''too big to fail''. Between them, however, Washington and Islamabad have been unable in the past decade to make this relationship work - credibly or creditably.
Predictions of imminent collapse in Islamabad are exaggerated, but perhaps not overly so. "The government does not have the capacity to tackle any of the issues," says the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan's Arif. "Things will just keep getting bad and I don't discount the fact that we can fall into chaos."
Like many other analysts, Bruce Riedel laboriously sets out the policy options by which Washington and Islamabad might work together to defeat the global jihadist movement - before he concludes that none is easy or guaranteed.
An adviser to several US administrations and now with the Brookings Institution, Riedel sees Pakistan under siege from a syndicate of radical terrorist groups unified by the notion that nuclear-armed Pakistan could be the extremist jihadist state they have never had.
"They want to hijack Pakistan and its weapons," he says. Alluding to Islamabad's role in creating a monster, as often as not with Washington's sponsorship, he writes: "An extremely powerful jihadist Frankenstein is now roaming the world, with equally powerful protectors in Pakistani society, right up to the very top.
"Who cannot fear that the 'long beards' will prevail?"
U.S. uses radio DJs to spread the word in Afghanistan
In Afghanistan's Paktika province, where news travels almost exclusively by radio, the man who calls himself DJ Abed Lawang is one of the biggest names on the airwaves. But there's one key fact the disc jockey has never told his listeners: He is broadcasting from a studio on a U.S. Army base, delivering messages written by American military officers.
By Kevin Sieff The Washington Post via The Seattle Times
AT FORWARD OPERATING BASE SHARANA, Afghanistan — In Paktika province where news travels almost exclusively by radio, the man who calls himself DJ Abed Lawang is one of the biggest names on the airwaves, known for playing hit Pashto ballads, telling jokes and hosting a popular call-in show about farming practices.
But there's one key fact the disc jockey has never told his listeners: He is broadcasting from a studio on a U.S. Army base, delivering messages written by American military officers.
He is one of more than 20 radio DJs in Paktika province, and dozens more across the country, who are engaged in what the U.S. military considers a crucial operation: persuading residents in an area dominated by insurgents to embrace Afghan and NATO forces.
In practice, that means he has to pause between Pakistani love songs and passages from the Quran to read about the heroism of Afghan and U.S. armies, and the destruction caused by insurgents. The commentary is not always well-received; he uses the pseudonym to protect himself, but he told a reporter he would not mind if his real name, Noor Jan Mangal, were published.
In recent months, as the war has raged in Paktika, Mangal has been instructed to redouble his efforts, narrating the conflict from the U.S. Army's perspective.
"Afghan and NATO personnel take every step to prevent civilians from being hurt while conducting operations," he said on a recent broadcast, reading a note written by a U.S. officer and translated into Pashto.
"Insurgents have no true cause. They pick and choose to enforce only that which benefits them," he read in another message.
As U.S. forces prepare to leave Afghanistan by the end of 2014, the war against insurgents is as much about information as it is about fighting ability. It's a contest that U.S. and Afghan government forces have often lost, unable to compete with insurgents who live and pray among residents. But U.S. forces have recently discovered a new hope in an old medium.
The medium of radio
In a region with one of the lowest literacy rates in the world, where the vast majority of families are unable to afford a television set, 92 percent of Paktika residents listen to the radio every day, according to a U.S. military survey. Officials have crafted their communications strategy around that statistic, investing heavily in new radio stations, dubbed Radios in a Box. There are about 100 such stations across the country.
The radio campaign has been a boon to the U.S. war effort, enabling the Army to advance its own viewpoint after successful operations or destructive Taliban attacks. In recent weeks, when insurgents in Paktika attempted to attack a convoy of politicians or when Taliban members forced a telecom company to shut down local cellphone towers, Mangal was swiftly handed messages to read on the air.
Before insurgents were able to describe their actions as valiant attempts to vanquish foreign infidels, Mangal put a different spin on the news, explaining — in the words of U.S. officers — the senselessness of the attacks.
When U.S. or Afghan soldiers engage in firefights or air assaults, Mangal is the one responsible for justifying the operations to residents, a particularly important — and delicate — responsibility when civilians are caught in the crossfire.
"Read this three times per day," a young lieutenant usually instructs him after delivering handwritten notes.
The U.S. military has distributed 500,000 hand-crank and solar-powered radios across eastern Afghanistan to better the odds that residents will tune in to Mangal's broadcast and other U.S. stations in the region, even if listeners suspect the program's foreign backer.
Mangal has about 50,000 listeners.
"We hear the station's messages about the Afghan government and ISAF achievements. It is sometimes good information, but many people here assume (Light FM) is run by Americans. It doesn't seem independent," said Ali Mohammad Nazari, 20, a Sharana resident.
Overall, the United States has spent several million dollars on the program, which was launched in 2005 but took hold in many provinces only within the past year. Each station costs about $15,000 to establish and about $12,000 a year in operating expenses.
"This has been by far the most effective way to get our message across," said Capt. Kurt McDowell, who leads the program in Paktika. "For us, the key is getting the truth out, and getting it out quickly."
Insurgents have for years taken their fight to the airwaves, transmitting messages about violent jihad and the evils of foreigners by using portable transmitters on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. The United States has attempted to scramble those signals, temporarily paralyzing the Taliban's communications strategy.
But those efforts did little to dispel rumors propagated by insurgents. Last year, Gen. David Petraeus, then the top NATO commander in Afghanistan, issued guidelines for an aggressive "information war."
"Challenge disinformation," Petraeus instructed. "Turn our enemies' extremist ideologies, oppressive practices, and indiscriminate violence against them. Hang their barbaric actions like millstones around their necks."
A year later, the U.S. radio program has taken root in several of the country's far-flung provinces, with DJs including Mangal recruited from private Afghan stations to lead the new information campaign.
Watchful eyes and ears
U.S. officials monitor Mangal's broadcasts — along with other U.S.-funded stations — to ensure that he doesn't bend to pressure from the Taliban or other critics. In recent weeks, they identified, and dismissed, another DJ on the payroll who officials suspect has ties to the insurgency.
Mangal, 23, a former stage actor, has long, jelled hair and a bushy goatee. His studio is decorated with images of Pakistani pop stars and photos of himself interviewing top provincial politicians. Cassette tapes litter the floor.
For the past three years, he has made about $500 a month at Light FM (106.3), fielding a steady stream of phone calls from listeners in the mud huts and rough-hewn houses that pepper Paktika's mountains and valleys. For the most part, Mangal is comfortable with his fame, basking in the attention of callers and the importance of his mission.
But he is starting to worry. Some residents have argued to Mangal that broadcasting music is un-Islamic. Others have threatened to kill him for taking phone calls from women. And he suspects that a number of his listeners have figured out his connection to the U.S. forces based on the content of the broadcasts.
Given his recognizably pro-American voice, it's only a matter of time before someone hears him talking in a local bazaar or mosque and makes good on a death threat, he says. He rarely leaves the base these days.
"Most people really like the show. They rely on me for information. They trust me. But then there are some who don't like the message," he said.
Amid Triumph in Libya, War Lingers for Britain in Afghanistan
New York Times By ALAN COWELL September 2, 2011
LONDON - Offsetting the euphoria of the victorious rebels in Tripoli and the hoopla among their Western sponsors, another image intruded in the past week, recalling a different war that will most likely outlast the sound bites and headlines of triumphalism in Libya.
In the southwest of England, as a brass band played, Britain’s union flag was furled, blessed and laid on a church altar to mark the end of a remarkable four-year remembrance, during which hearses carrying the bodies of 345 fallen British service personnel have passed through the village of Wootton Bassett on their way to burial from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Those tearful moments started out as impromptu memorials when the airplanes ferrying the coffins began landing at the nearby — and soon-to-be-closed — Royal Air Force base at Lyneham, in Wiltshire. In the future, the airplanes will land at a more distant base in Oxfordshire, and a potent emblem of the cost of Britain’s involvement in Afghanistan will be lost, though other reminders will certainly endure, like the family snapshot published in the past week by the Defense Ministry of Sgt. Barry Weston, 40, with his three daughters, Jasmine, Poppy and Rose — the 380th British soldier to die in Afghanistan since 2001.
And there will be other considerations and comparisons. The war in Afghanistan began almost a decade ago in direct response to the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States. It drove the Taliban from formal power. It lost focus as George W. Bush and Tony Blair shifted their attention to the ouster of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
But, since then, it has drawn in ever more American and allied forces, posing the questions of whether it can be won in any formal sense and, more significantly for politicians, how coalition troops can be extricated with at least an appearance of honor by the deadline they have set for Afghan forces to take over in 2014.
Those doubts have gradually deepened with the awkward interplay of politics and soldiering underpinning the Afghan campaign, particularly since 2006, when a small and poorly equipped British force pushed into the Taliban strongholds of Helmand Province to face increasing casualties before the increase last year in American troop numbers eased some of the pressure.
It “was a triumph of hope over experience,” the Royal United Services Institute, a respected research group, said in a recent analysis. “The U.K. took on a nasty little war for essentially abstract political reasons and then found itself deeply embroiled in a long game of catch-up, for essentially operational reasons.”
Libya reflected a different doctrine. Apart from the reported presence of special forces — never officially acknowledged — no British, French or American military boots stamped their way, in public at least, across the deserts and scrub of Libya.
NATO’s involvement was remote, surgical, airborne — free of the casualties on the ground that haunt politicians’ boasts of missions accomplished. The NATO bombs and missiles that debilitated the forces of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi fell from planes that faced no threat of ground fire once Libyan air defenses had been destroyed.
Unlike the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where hundreds of thousands took to Europe’s streets to demonstrate against them, the conflict in Libya drew no such protests. Libyans themselves chased their dictator from power — albeit with Western air support — inscribing a new chapter in the putative and still unfolding Arab cycle that has ended tyrannies in some places but created enormous bloodshed in others.
On the surface, Libya was about democracy and, only just subliminally, about securing European access to oil supplies, trade and post-conflict reconstruction projects. It somehow seemed appropriate that, in one of the first noncombat missions after the fall of Tripoli, a Royal Air Force transport plane flew in Libyan bank notes worth some $220 million, freshly printed in Britain but previously frozen by international sanctions against Colonel Qaddafi. The delivery, in time for the Muslim feast of Id al-Fitr at the end of Ramadan, set the pecuniary markers for future remittances in the opposite direction.
In Afghanistan, the rationale was to fight militants and terrorists in their havens there and in Pakistan to keep Western streets safe. (Libya, once a sponsor of terrorist acts, including the Lockerbie bombing of 1988, had tried to shed that reputation when Colonel Qaddafi cozied up to the West after the fall of Saddam Hussein, seeking to postpone a similar fate for himself.)
A reader who wished to remind me of the imbalances wrote acerbically to inquire in an e-mail why journalists spend so much time charting the course of events in Libya while, in Afghanistan, 67 American soldiers died in August alone. Those deaths brought the American total for the year to 308 and the tally since 2001 to 1,754, according to the Web site iCasualties.org.
“Libya is barely a footnote to what’s going on in Afghanistan,” this anonymous reader wrote, perhaps overstating the case but underscoring the point that, if the rationale for war in Afghanistan was as portentous and existential as it was initially presented by Western leaders, then events in North Africa are not on the same scale of clear and present danger.
There were other factors and coincidences in play. On Thursday, the same day as Britain and France — the twin European motors of the anti-Qaddafi campaign in Europe — hosted a conference in Paris to fete the Libyan rebels, Britain itself announced 1,850 layoffs among its already stretched armed forces as part of measures to reduce its huge public debt.
The notion of shrinking the military at a time of crisis from the Maghreb to the Hindu Kush might appear ill-timed. But, as the mourners fell silent in Wootton Bassett, the spending cuts might well have shown that the bigger challenge for post-imperial Britain lay not so much in the projection of power to distant killing fields as in the struggle with economic hard times back home.
One in seven Afghan soldiers deserted during first half of year
At least one in seven Afghan soldiers walked off the job during the first six months of 2011, a worsening trend at a time Afghan and U.S. officials are trying to shift the burden of fighting the Taliban to Afghan security forces.
The Washington Post By Joshua Partlow Friday, September 2, 2011
KABUL, Afghanistan - At least one in seven Afghan soldiers walked off the job during the first six months of 2011, a worsening trend at a time Afghan and U.S. officials are trying to shift the burden of fighting the Taliban to Afghan security forces.
Between January and June, 24,590 soldiers walked off the job, compared with 11,423 who left in the same period last year, according to NATO statistics. In June, more than 5,000 soldiers deserted, nearly 3 percent of the force, which has about 170,000 soldiers, significantly more than a year ago.
At the height of harvest time in Afghanistan this summer, the desertion rate climbed to an annualized rate of nearly 35 percent.
The rate of desertion has attracted increasing criticism of a long-standing decree by President Hamid Karzai that protects Afghan army deserters from being punished.
Afghan and coalition officials said the soldiers who leave often complain about poor living conditions or commanders who do not allow a regular vacation schedule. But Afghan and U.S. military officials also say poor leadership is a main reason soldiers desert the ranks.
Despite the recent resurgence, the level of dropouts remains significantly lower than earlier in the war. As recently as September 2009, more soldiers were quitting than joining the army.
At Afghan Military Hospital, Graft and Deadly Neglect
By MARIA ABI-HABIB The Wall Street Journal SEPTEMBER 3, 2011
KABUL—American officers deployed as mentors in Afghanistan's main military hospital discovered a shocking secret last year: Injured soldiers were routinely dying of simple infections and even starving to death as some corrupt doctors and nurses demanded bribes for food and the most basic of care.
The discovery, which hasn't previously been reported, added new details to longstanding evidence of gross mismanagement at Dawood National Military Hospital, where most salaries and supplies are paid for by American taxpayers.
Yet the patient neglect continued for months after U.S. officials discovered it, as Afghan officials rebuffed American pressure to take action, multiple documents and testimonies viewed by The Wall Street Journal show.
The way senior Afghan officials tolerated such deadly graft shows just how deeply rooted corruption has become in President Hamid Karzai's administration, as well as the limits of Washington's ability to rein it in. American advisers have since forced an improvement in conditions at the hospital.
Afghan policeman Ali Noor Hazrat had been admitted to Dawood hospital after being injured in a Taliban rocket attack on a police convoy last fall. Initially patched up by American doctors, he spent his last days starving there while his brother Sher sold off what little land the poor farming family had in order to bribe nurses and doctors for care and food, the brother said in an interview. In photos, Ali's flesh hangs off his frail, boney frame, his eyes heavy with pain. He died on Dec. 27, Afghan government documents show.
"Malnourished/starvation," said an internal coalition slide showing Mr. Hazrat, dated Nov. 5, prepared by American mentors at the hospital to document abuse cases. "Willful neglect," another bullet point said.
Sher Hazrat is determined that none of his relatives in the eastern Nangarhar province will consider joining Afghan security forces after what happened at Dawood. "If there's no service for us," he says, "why should we serve our country?"
Such sentiments have raised questions about how the fledgling Afghan military would fare against Taliban insurgents once most U.S. troops depart in 2014.
Dawood is the premier hospital of the Afghan security forces, akin to the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in the U.S.
As early as 2006, American officers noted evidence of severe dysfunction at the hospital, including patients who appeared to be malnourished, a U.S. military mentor who served there at the time says. He adds that the findings were reported to the Afghan Ministry of Defense, but no action was taken to improve conditions.
In 2008, doctors complained to hospital administrators that patients were being given defective morphine, according to internal documents produced by the NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan, or NTM-A. Later testing revealed the presence of counterfeit morphine, suggesting that U.S.-procured medicine had been diverted.
The NTM-A command, headed since November 2009 by U.S. Army Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, is spending $11.6 billion this year alone, more than 90% of it funded by U.S. taxpayers, on building up the Afghan army and police.
The biggest problem, American officials dealing with the hospital concluded by the middle of last year, was the Afghan army's politically connected surgeon general, Gen. Ahmed Zia Yaftali. As early as May 2010, U.S. officials say they confronted Gen. Yaftali about missing pharmaceuticals at the hospital and asked him to investigate. They ultimately came to suspect that he himself was profiting from graft, according to mentors and senior NTM-A commanders. The alleged theft of pharmaceuticals in the hospital has previously been reported by the Associated Press.
In an email to Gen. Caldwell dated August 25, 2010, U.S. Army Col. Gerald Carozza, a senior legal mentor at the Afghan defense ministry, complained that corruption was "deep and wide" within the senior leadership of the Afghan defense ministry and army and urged him to pressure the defense minister to allow various internal investigations to proceed. He said in the email that the Afghan army chief of staff's legal team was developing a case against Gen. Yaftali involving "a $20 million (US) theft from [the defense ministry] and pilfering $153 million (US) worth of medical supplies."
Gen. Yaftali denied all allegations of impropriety in a phone interview and declined to discuss them further, saying he would "only answer" to the Afghan defense ministry.
In his reply to Col. Carozza, Gen. Caldwell argued that the Afghan government needed to take responsibility for combatting corruption in the military. "We're not going to be able to solve this for them. Keep encouraging them to do the right thing," he wrote.
The U.S. government in general has been trying to build Afghan institutions that can solve their own problems, in preparation for an eventual U.S. withdrawal.
"We can build the greatest army, we can build the greatest police force," Gen. Caldwell said in an interview. "But if we don't have the rule of law being implemented...then we were not going to have legitimacy in this government."
In a Sept. 14 visit to the hospital to show America's appreciation to wounded Afghan soldiers, Gen. Caldwell was accompanied by the Afghan army chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Sher Mohammed Karimi. There, the two stopped by the bed of an emaciated Afghan soldier. Gen. Caldwell thanked him for his service and let Gen. Karimi pin a U.S. Army achievement medal to the Afghan soldier's bedsheets.
Gen. Caldwell said he was emotionally moved when he saw the patient's condition, but wasn't yet aware that neglect at the hospital was systemic.
Minutes after the American general left, the Afghan soldier—who hadn't been fed by the hospital in weeks—threw out his medal, people present in the hospital say.
A beefed-up group of at least two dozen U.S. military mentors had arrived at the hospital in August 2010 as part of the "surge" of American forces in Afghanistan. They began to deploy throughout the wards, replacing an earlier group that had less direct contact with patients.
By the following month, the new mentors began to document what they describe as horrific conditions. Maggots fed off patients' open wounds. Nurses and doctors refused to help amputees to the bathroom, and they soiled their beds for days.
Several patients died of simple infections because their bandages would go unchanged for weeks, while at least four died of complications related to malnourishment, according to mentors and internal documents.
In late September, Gen. Karimi was invited to attend an Afghan shura, a traditional meeting, at the hospital with Canadian Brigadier Gen. David Neasmith, the assistant commander for army development at the NTM-A. NATO officials pressed Gen. Karimi to address the problem of staff absenteeism and missing medicine, a U.S. mentor who was present says. But Afghan hospital and army officials who attended the meeting steered the conversation away from such issues and asked for raises and promotions, the mentor says.
As weeks passed without progress, the mentors say they assembled more evidence of neglect, including detailed medical charts and photos showing emaciated patients and bedsores a foot long and so deep that bones protruded from them.
In an Oct. 4 document emailed by the mentors to Gen. Neasmith, they complained about the hospital's intensive-care unit, among other issues: "The most dynamic and ill affected is the ICU, whereby favoritism, ambivalence, incompetence coupled with understaffing lead to the untimely deaths of patients daily, occasionally several times per day."
That month, Gen. Caldwell visited the Afghan defense minister, Gen. Abdulrahim Wardak, and persuaded him to launch a new investigation into Gen. Yaftali, according to two U.S. officers. Gen. Wardak and the Afghan defense ministry spokesman didn't reply to repeated requests for comment for this article except to say that Gen. Yaftali is still under investigation.
Gen. Wardak warned that prosecuting Gen. Yaftali would be difficult, saying the surgeon general was too politically connected, according to U.S. officials involved in the issue. Gen. Yaftali fought against the Taliban in the 1990s alongside other ethnic Tajiks who have since became prominent government figures.
In late October, with the Afghan investigation going nowhere and Gen. Yaftali keeping his job, Col. Carozza, NTM-A Inspector General Army Col. Mark Fassl and U.S. Air Force Col. Schuyler Geller, the chief mentor to the hospital, filed a request that the U.S. Defense Department inspector general assist in investigating the hospital.
The coalition declined to make Col. Geller available for an in-person interview. The Canadian military declined to make available Gen. Neasmith, who has since returned to Canada.
According to a November 2010 NTM-A memo titled "Leadership Failure," prepared to assist with the Defense Department investigation, soldiers were going to the operating table without morphine or even sedatives. When one patient demanded medicine, an orderly punched him in the face.
"In addition," the memo went on, "there have been incidents of nurses and orderlies demanding payment for patient treatment and care," including one in which "a patient was left unattended after soiling his bed because the patient or his family could not pay to have the bed cleaned."
A separate presentation, prepared the same month, documented a "loss of 50 pounds" for a policeman named Tajudin after 40 days in the hospital, accompanied by photos showing the patient's wasted frame.
That month, the mentors prepared a patient bill of rights to enforce medical standards at the hospital, informing patients that all medical care should be free and ordering the staff to perform routine checkups. Within days of the bill's being printed and pasted on hospital walls in December, the Afghan staff tore the posters down, according to U.S. officials.
Gen. Caldwell visited the hospital again in December. When he inquired about the soldier to whom he'd awarded a medal, he was shown a healthier-looking patient, according to a person present. On his way out, a tearful American captain told the general that this was an impostor. The real Afghan war hero had died.
By mid-December, Gen. Yaftali, the Afghan army's surgeon-general, was moved out of his job without explanation—after the coalition's commander at the time, Gen. David Petraeus, personally raised the problems at the hospital during a meeting with President Karzai, people familiar with the matter said.
The hospital has seen major improvements since then. A surge of coalition military mentors is helping ensure that Afghan nurses and doctors conduct regular checkups of patients and provide routine feedings and dressing changes. There haven't been any documented cases of starvation since February, American mentors say. In March, Gen. Petraeus brought up the Dawood hospital in a conversation with reporters, citing it as a success story of American efforts against Afghan corruption.
There is no public word about where the investigation into Gen. Yaftali stands, and one U.S. official said record-keeping at the hospital was so poor it may be difficult to sort out how much was actually stolen. Gen. Yaftali, who still receives a monthly army salary heavily subsidized by U.S. taxpayers, said in an interview he expects to be promoted to three-star general.
—Ziaulhaq Sultani and Habib Khan Totakhil contributed to this article.
www.afghanistannewscenter.com
By RAY RIVERA and ABDUL WAHEED WAFA The New York Times September 3, 2011
KABUL, Afghanistan — The speaker of Parliament on Saturday swore in eight of nine new members reinstated last month by the country’s election commission, as hundreds of police officers armed with riot gear and machine guns blocked the entrance to the building to keep out members who had been replaced by the commission’s ruling.
The sedate swearing-in ceremony was witnessed by only a few dozen Parliament members. Dozens more, however, stood outside in solidarity with the ousted members, in a sign of a widening rift within Parliament, which up to now had appeared mostly unified against President Hamid Karzai’s efforts to reshape the legislature.
A spokesman for the president denied that he had ordered extra police officers to block the ousted members, saying that police officials had decided on their own that the extra force was necessary to prevent irate lawmakers from entering the building with guns. But supporters of the nine disqualified members took it as a signal of the president’s willingness to use force to impose the panel’s decision.
“This is a coup d’état by the president against the Parliament,” said Abdul Jabbar Qahraman, a lower house member from Helmand Province. He is part of a coalition that claims to have about 140 members — more than half the lower house — who oppose the Independent Election Commission’s latest ruling. He spoke after a faceoff between lawmakers and police officers outside the entrance.
“We’re not standing just for the nine people who are to be unseated,” he added. “Our position is in the last 10 years, with the help of all these foreign and Afghan troops, we are trying to build a democracy, and the president is trying to step on that.”
The standoff, which remained peaceful, was the latest in a constitutional crisis that has frozen the legislative process here for much of the past year and shows little sign of easing, even as Mr. Karzai has tried to ease concerns among the international community and appease Parliament members angered over his earlier efforts to overturn election results in a broader way.
According to a former Western diplomat, the political deadlock is being closely watched by American officials as they work out a strategic partnership with the Afghan government that is expected to include an agreement to maintain American military bases in the country and continue American financing of Afghan security forces long after the planned end of the international combat mission in 2014.
Throughout the crisis, Parliament had made repeated shows of unity against the president. But behind the scenes, observers describe an atmosphere of increasing tension and division as many members of Parliament, out of fatigue or self-interest, began signaling they were open to deals in which the nine would go.
The controversy has caused plenty of political theater, including street demonstrations and shaded threats of violence. At one point, a female member who is one of the nine slated to lose her seat threw her veil on a male member who had switched sides, a huge cultural insult tantamount to accusing him of no longer being a man.
On Saturday, police officials denied sending extra officers to the Parliament. But throughout the day, hundreds of police officers, far more than is normally seen here, blocked the main parliamentary compound, and armored Humvees and police trucks with mounted machine guns stood poised along the pathways leading to it.
Dawood Kalakani, a Parliament member from Kabul, defended the show of force, saying it was necessary because of the many opponents who now have their own armed bodyguards. She denied accusations levied by opponents that some members had received favors and monetary compensation in return for supporting the president.
“It is baseless,” she said. “We just supported what the Constitution says, and it says the election commission is the only authority to decide the results of parliamentary elections.”
NATO kills ex-Gitmo detainee in Afghanistan
By RAHIM FAIEZ
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — NATO and Afghan forces killed a former Guantanamo detainee who had become a key al-Qaida affiliate after returning to Afghanistan, officials said Saturday.
Sabar Lal Melma, who was released from Guantanamo in 2007 after five years of detention, had been organizing attacks in eastern Kunar province and funding insurgent operations, NATO spokesman Capt. Justin Brockhoff said.
A NATO statement described Melma as a "key affiliate of the al-Qaida network" who was in contact with senior al-Qaida members in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Troops surrounded Melma's house in Jalalabad city on Friday night and shot him dead when he emerged from the building holding an AK-47 assault rifle. Several other people were detained.
A guard at the house, Mohammad Gul, said a group of American soldiers scaled the walls of the compound around 11 p.m. and stormed the house, shooting Melma in the assault. Three others were detained, Gul said.
Melma had been detained for about five days in August, Gul said.
Melma is not the first former detainee to rejoin the insurgency. In 2009, the Pentagon said 61 detainees, or approximately 11 percent, released from Guantanamo had rejoined the fight. Experts have questioned the validity of that number.
About 520 Guantanamo detainees have been released from custody or transferred to prisons elsewhere in the world.
After the fall of the Taliban, Melma, 49, was given the rank of brigadier general and placed in charge of approximately 600 border security troops in Konar province, according to his military file made public by WikiLeaks.
He was captured in August 2002 while attending a meeting with U.S. military officials in Asadabad and transferred to the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay in October that same year. He was suspected of helping carry out rocket attacks against U.S. troops.
While imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, the U.S. determined he was a "probable facilitator for Al-Qaida members" and was also thought to have links to Pakistan's intelligence service.
He was sent back to Afghanistan in September 2007.
NATO said in a statement that coalition forces have captured or killed more than 40 al-Qaida insurgents in eastern Afghanistan this year.
In June 2010, then CIA Director Leon Panetta said only 50 to 100 al-Qaida operatives continued to operate inside Afghanistan. It's not clear if Panetta was referring to commanders or foot soldiers.
In Kabul, meanwhile, a political standoff over the makeup of the legislature continued as police escorted a handful of new lawmakers into parliament despite protests from sitting parliamentarians that the new group is illegitimate.
Afghan election officials ruled last month that nine sitting parliamentarians should be replaced following a review of vote fraud allegations from last year's election.
More than 1,000 police were stationed around the parliament building Saturday in anticipation of violence, but the new lawmakers took their seats without incident, officials said. Saturday was the first day back at work after the Islamic holiday of Eid al-Fitr and many lawmakers had not yet returned from their home provinces.
The nine ousted parliamentarians were blocked from entering and vowed to continue to fight for their seats.
"This is a coup against the Afghan parliament and against democracy," said Mohammad Rafiq Shaher from Herat province, one of the ousted lawmakers.
And in the southern city of Kandahar, officials said NATO forces killed a child and a shopkeeper who were caught up in a firefight between a military patrol and a gunman. The attacker started shooting at the NATO troops and they returned fire, killing the two, said Sher Shah Yosufzai, the deputy police chief of Kandahar province.
He said he had reports that a NATO service member had also been killed in the fighting.
NATO said in a statement that one of its service members was killed in an insurgent attack on Saturday in southern Afghanistan but did not say if it was the same incident and did not provide any further details.
____
Associated Press writers Heidi Vogt and Adam Goldman contributed to this report from Kabul.
Taliban claims kidnap of 30 Pakistanis
By Nasrullah Khan | AFP News
Pakistani Taliban on Saturday claimed responsibility for the kidnap of more than 30 young people who mistakenly crossed the border from the country's lawless northwest into Afghanistan.
A spokesman for Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan's (TTP) said those kidnapped were not boys as reported by Pakistani officials but aged between 20 and 30, adding their fate would be decided by the central leadership of the organisation.
"We have kidnapped them. These people are with us, they are not kids but young people of ages between 20 to 30," Taliban spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan told AFP by telephone from an undisclosed location.
"These people belong to the areas where tribesmen rose militias against TTP. We will thoroughly investigate about them and then our central leadership will decide their fate," Ehsan said.
Pakistani officials had said the incident took place on Thursday after a group of boys, aged between 12 and 18, left the Ghakhi area of Pakistan's Bajaur tribal region during celebrations marking the Muslim Eid holiday.
Bajaur administration official Islam Zeb said the boys had been abducted by a militant group allied with Taliban commander Maulvi Faqir Muhammad, who led local insurgents but is believed to have fled to Afghanistan in 2010.
Zeb told AFP on Saturday that a delegation of Pakistani tribesmen is negotiating with the tribal elders in Afghanistan "to put pressure on the kidnappers to set them free,".
"We are trying our best to seek their release. A tribal Jirga has been sent to Kunar for negotiations," Zeb said.
Malik Ayaz, a tribal elder involves in negotiations told AFP on Saturday that Pakistani tribesmen are facing difficulties securing the safe release of the abductees as the border area is mostly controlled by Taliban.
"We are in contact with the tribesmen across the border but at the moment we are facing difficulties in negotiations. This border area is largely controlled by Taliban," he said.
Mohammad Akhtar, a witness who managed to fleethe mass kidnap said dozens of young people were in the area.
"We were there to enjoy our Eid vacations and all of a sudden Taliban attacked," he said.
"Some people managed to flee the area because they were a little bit away from the attack site," he said.
"We were their just for fun and to see the mountainous areas and to enjoy," he added.
Afghan border police commander General Aminullah Amarkhel, the governor of Kunar, where the boys vanished, Fazlullah Wahidi, and the local Afghan Taliban commander all told AFP on Friday they were unaware of the incident.
Afghanistan shares a disputed and unmarked 2,400-kilometre (1,500-mile) border with Pakistan, and Taliban and other Al-Qaeda-linked militants have carved out strongholds on either side.
The Pakistani military has repeatedly claimed to have eliminated the militant threat in Bajaur, one of seven districts in the semi-autonomous tribal belt that the United States sees as the global headquarters of Al-Qaeda.
A monster roaming the world
Sydney Morning Herald By Paul McGeough September 3, 2011
The West has spent billions trying to buy Pakistan's friendship but the jihadists are stronger than ever, writes Paul McGeough.
Search for a firm footing in Pakistan and there is none - all is quicksand strategically, politically, morally.
Here in south Asia, strategically sandwiched between failing Afghanistan and the China and India powerhouses, is a country in which journalists are abducted in the night by agents of the state and murdered; in which the only advance after a decade in which Washington has tried to buy friendship with cheques for more than $20 billion, is the expansion of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal - which is on the verge of surpassing Britain's as the fifth biggest in the world.
In Pakistan, a 50-year-old woman is sentenced to death on a dubious blasphemy charge - and politicians who dare to speak in her defence are gunned down; and a woman is gang-raped and paraded naked through her village on the orders of a local council, over bogus claims that her 12-year-old brother has offended a 20-year-old woman from the clan of the men who defiled her.
But that's village life. In the leafy garrison town of Abbottabad, an hour's drive north of Islamabad, Osama bin Laden, mastermind of the attacks of September 11, 2001, was able to hide in plain sight for years. The location of his fortified bunker, a stone's throw from a prestigious military academy, made it harder to give any credence to the generals' repeated denials that significant elements of Pakistan's extensive security apparatus sheltered the al-Qaeda chief and continue to give succour to the Taliban and other insurgency and terrorist movements.
In the south-west, in the wilds of provincial Baluchistan, there have been 150 ''kill and dump'' operations this year. Most of the victims are Baluch nationalist rebels. Their killers are the Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) and other elements of Pakistan's national security forces - driven to brutality by a belief, which could be correct, that Pakistan's arch foe, India, stirs the local nationalist pot. In turn, the Baluch nationalists are accused of running their own death squads - their victims are Punjabi ''settlers'', government workers brought in from other parts of the country.
Baluchistan is half Pashtun, which also makes it a sanctuary for the Taliban from adjoining Afghanistan, where Washington and the world still struggle, with little success, to impose a semblance of democracy on the bones of a fracturing, failing state. Here then is another of the ironies that puts a serious question mark over the bona fides of the Pakistani security forces: the leadership of the Afghanistan Taliban sequesters in Quetta, the provincial capital of Baluchistan, but the various Pakistani security services are so busy putting the Baluch nationalists through the mincer they don't have time to take down the Taliban command-and-control centre. Instead, they reportedly socialise with the Taliban and sit in on their strategy meetings.
West from Baluchistan is the sprawling port city of Karachi, where the spiralling death toll in renewed ethnic turf-wars gives raw meaning to what local novelist Kamila Shamsie broaches obliquely, recounting how the city ''winks'' at her. "Yes, the city said, I am a breeding ground for monsters, " she writes, "but don't think that is the full measure of what I am."
This drab, chaotic home to 18 million people who account for 65 per cent of Pakistan's economy is being carved up by bullets that this year have accounted for as many as 1000 ''wrong place, wrong time'' deaths as gunmen randomly select their targets - sending messages to whole communities, not the individuals with whose blood they paint the rough pavements. As the suburbs seethe, police do little, because they are cowed by the systematic elimination of those in their ranks who intervened in the last iteration of these ethnic wars. Provincial and federal governments and the security forces only wring their hands.
In Karachi everyone lies. No one denies turf wars are being waged. They simply blame everyone else - all the political parties deny any links to the militias that prosecute their bloody agendas and to the crime, drug and land-development mafias that prosper in their wake. And the city's once-dominant Urdu-speaking Mohajirs fight to maintain their control of corrupted city politics, amid an influx of Pashtuns fleeing upheavals along the Afghan border.
"Tension rises, we see killings and then scores must be settled," an adviser to the provincial governor says. "We are at war - the political parties say they are not involved, but the mafias take shelter from the parties as they exploit the situation."
In Islamabad, enter any of the city's newsrooms, and see fear in the eyes of journalists who risk death and torture for going about assignments. Consider the words of their Karachi colleague Madiha Sattar - "a growth of intolerance has forged an extreme, murderous antipathy to freedom of expression."
Most shocking in this campaign of fear and intimidation against one of the pillars of democracy was the disappearance in late May of Syed Saleem Shahzad, an investigative reporter for the respected, Hong Kong-based Asia Times Online. Two days after his abduction, Shahzad's battered body was found at Mandi Bahauddin, 130 kilometres south-east of the capital. The reporter left detailed accounts of the threats he had received from the ISI; in Washington, senior officials unflinchingly confirming that Shahzad's death had been ''sanctioned'' by the Pakistani government.
Umar Cheema might just as easily have been their victim. Behind a door marked ''Investigation Cell'' off a basement corridor in the Islamabad offices of The News, the 34-year-old father of two explains that the shock in his colleague Saleem Shahzad's murder was a realisation it might just as easily have been him.
As Cheema drove home from a party in the early hours during Ramadan last year, 12 men who identified themselves as police commandos abducted him, he says. Informing him first that he was a suspect in a killing, they pulled a bag over his head and hauled him away.
"They took me to a building where the leader stripped off my clothes. Then I was ordered to lie on the floor and they beat me on the back and shoulders for 20 or 25 minutes with leather straps and wooden canes.
"I was writing about corruption in the government and the lack of accountability in the military and intelligence agencies - they said they were beating me because of my reporting. Then they shaved my head and eyebrows - that's what is done to thieves in rural areas to humiliate them.
"Shahzad's death left me speechless," he says. "I was the second last victim before they took him. So I felt very much that this was a message for me - it was very, very personal."
In Islamabad, the government of Prime Minister Yousaf Gillani is as overwhelmed as it is complicit in the nation's failings. The economy is in crisis and the government has ceded control of more than half the country to the military or to extremist militias. "None of the cogs of state mesh to make it do what must be done," Human Rights Commission of Pakistan's Kamran Arif said.
Just south of Islamabad is Rawalpindi, a more typical Asian city than the sanitised and empty boulevards of Islamabad. As home and headquarters to the men and institutions that comprise Pakistan's military and intelligence establishment, this is the centre of absolute power in Pakistan. And it is here that a deep-fried sense of humiliation over the American raid to kill Osama bin Laden, in May this year, is felt most acutely.
"After the bin Laden raid, it's a question of the survival of the state," the defence analyst and director of the South Asian Strategic Stability Institute, Maria Sultan, says. "The problem now is that by this very public humiliation, the US has lost its biggest supporter - it's not the capability of the Pakistani military that is affected, it's its credibility."
A close reading of ''Getting Bin Laden'', The New Yorker's inside account of the May 2 raid, reveals the mission was not just a single US incursion that managed to evade Pakistan's air defences. On the night, there were effectively three separate American missions, none of which was detected by a military-security complex that demands indulgence by the people of Pakistan on the grounds that it is their only protection from the Indian hordes.
Pakistan's generals faced a grim choice - they had to admit to deceiving the world in harbouring bin Laden, or to incompetence by not knowing he was lounging in their backyard. So supine were they in opting to plead incompetence there were fears of a mutiny in the middle ranks of the security services.
The US signal to the world of just how much it could not trust its south Asian ally came hard on the heels of serial embarrassments at the hands of the Taliban and other militant groups in Pakistan.
There have been a series of militant attacks on the most secure and sensitive defence establishments. The latest, which some observers concluded could not have been undertaken without inside help, saw a 10-man assault team storm the Mehran naval aviation base in Karachi. It took hundreds of Pakistani navy commandos, marines and paramilitaries to retake the base, but not before two aircraft were destroyed, hostages taken and the base had been occupied for the best part of a day.
But it takes a discerning Pakistani general to differentiate between militants - some are ''strategic assets'' of the security apparatus and the generals refuse to go after them.
Dr Ayesha Agha, whose military and political commentaries appear in Pakistan's Dawn newspaper, explains: "The military depends on these 'assets' - they are a cost-effective means to fighting wars that the Pakistani military wants to fight in India and Afghanistan." Extrajudicial killings by the military now are counted in the hundreds.
When men in uniform were filmed recently murdering a detainee, the reckoning in human rights circles was that far from being a lapse of judgment, the recording had been allowed in the knowledge that its distribution on the internet would serve as a useful warning to the wider community.
A Karachi taxi driver becomes excited as he ferries us from the airport to a downtown hotel - "Pakistan lovely country," he bellows. "Terrorism? No, no, no."
But a single graphic in a 200-page study of Pakistan, published in May by the Washington-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies, reveals an impossible security challenge. Last year alone, 2113 terrorist attacks, 369 clashes between the security services and militants, 260 operational attacks by the security forces, 135 US drone attacks, 69 border clashes, 233 bouts of ethno-political violence and 214 inter-tribal clashes resulted in more than 10,000 dead and as many injured.
The death of bin Laden and the reported death of al-Qaeda's new No. 2 figure, Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, in an American drone attack last week, are still being factored into a running debate among intelligence specialists on the extent to which al-Qaeda offshoots elsewhere in the world, especially the Yemen-based al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula [AQAP], have taken the baton from the Pakistani organisation.
But a July study by the New America Foundation of 32 ''serious'' jihadist terror plots against the West from 2004 to 2011, finds 53 per cent had operational or training links to jihadist groups in Pakistan - compared to just 6 per cent being linked to Yemen. And the rising tempo of the drone attacks has failed to dent the rising frequency of Pakistan-linked plots against the West, the study finds.
Implicit or explicit in any discussion on Pakistan's volatile mix of militant violence and governmental chaos, is the level of anxiety around the world about the security of its nuclear arsenal. Confronted with claims such as that by bin Laden that acquiring a nuclear weapon was a ''religious duty'' and the hope expressed by one of his lieutenants that such a weapon one day might be seized in Pakistan, officials in Islamabad invariably boast that all is tightly locked down.
But when we ask a Pakistani diplomat how secure were the weapons in the aftermath of the US mission to kill Osama bin Laden, he replies: "Less so, now that the Americans have revealed to the world that it is possible to sneak into Pakistan undetected, to take something that you really want."
President Obama's public appeal that Pakistan not become the world's first ''nuclear-armed militant state'' gives context to disclosures by The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh of the existence of a US Special Operations rapid-response team which would be parachuted into Pakistan in the event of a nuclear crisis.
Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a former director of intelligence and counter intelligence at the US Department of Energy, is boldest in setting out the fears of Washington, London and other capitals - some of which were disclosed without diplomatic varnish by Wikileaks last year.
Writing in Arms Control Today, Mowatt-Larssen, who served 20 years at the CIA, bills Pakistan as the most likely setting for terrorists bent on acquiring a nuclear device to co-opt a nuclear insider - of whom there are estimated to be as many as 70,000 in Pakistan.
"There is a lethal proximity between terrorists, extremists, and nuclear weapons insiders," he writes. "Insiders have facilitated terrorist attacks. Suicide bombings have occurred at air force bases that reportedly serve as nuclear weapons storage sites. It is difficult to ignore such trends.
''Purely in actuarial terms, there is a strong possibility that bad apples in the nuclear establishment are willing to co-operate with outsiders for personal gain or out of sympathy for their cause."
"Not possible," says Maria Sultan. "About eight to 10,000 personnel working at the strategic level on security," she says, ticking off seven or eight interlocking layers of complex security, the first of which she says would trip most intruders before they came within 80 kilometres of a nuclear facility. "The idea that a terrorist can walk in and get hold of a device is just not possible."
Such is the bind in which Pakistanis find themselves. But if it is true feeble and corrupt civilian administrations make circumstances ripe for a military takeover, it is hardly surprising the generals have no respect for democratic fundamentals.
As revealed in one of the Wikileaks cables, Army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani was ready to force President Asif Ali Zardari from office - save for the fact the general thought even less of Zardari's likely civilian replacement. And historically, Washington has opted to connect with Pakistan through the military power of the generals, rather than the people power of the civilian leadership.
Bruce Riedel, a veteran CIA analyst, sets out the connections in Deadly Embrace: Pakistan, America and the Future of the Global Jihad. "Richard Nixon turned a blind eye to the murder of hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshis to keep his friends in Pakistan's army in power, a strategy that ultimately failed," Riedel writes. "Ronald Reagan entertained Zia-ul-Haq even as Zia was giving succour to the Arab jihadists who would become al-Qaeda. George W. Bush allowed Pervez Musharraf to give the Afghan Taliban a sanctuary from which to kill American and NATO soldiers in Afghanistan."
And in the judgment of Bushra Gohar, an elected MP from Pakistan's troubled Swat Valley, Washington still prefers to deal with the military rather than the country's civilian leadership. "That's not a role that the military has under the constitution," she says during a break in the business of the National Assembly in Islamabad. "There has been a democratic transition in this country and we expect the international community to support it."
Power vacuums become ripe for exploitation, as was revealed with frightening clarity earlier this year when two of three elected figures who had dared to speak out against Pakistan's draconian blasphemy laws were assassinated. In January, Punjab provincial governor Salman Taseer was gunned down by one of his state-provided security men; in March, the Minorities Minister and the only Christian in Gillani's cabinet, Shahbaz Bhatti, died in a hail of gunfire as his car left his mother's home in Islamabad.
Taseer's killer confessed and became a national hero. His home is a shrine, he is garlanded with rose petals and, in the oddest twist of all, the young lawyers' movement that effectively bundled Pervez Musharraf, the last dictator, from power in 2008, has taken the side of this cold-blooded murderer - not the principle for which his victim died.
A visitor leaves Pakistan wondering if anyone here speaks the truth. The dictators habitually resort to amping up religious parties - either to drown out secular ones that might be interested in the ideals of selfless democracy, or to further marginalise the country's Shiia Muslim minority.
"And people like Musharraf have two faces," Kamran Arif of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan said. "He would say all the right things for the West and do just what he wanted to do at home."
Some foreign analysts fall back on the seeming failure of Pakistan's religious parties at the ballot box as a hopeful sign. But a sense of rising radicalisation, particularly in the military and the middle classes, suggests an asymmetric contest for control of a highly unstable society - the non-religious parties fight in the parliament, but the religious parties are street brawlers.
Sherry Rehman, the only elected figure in the country to defend the convicted blasphemer Aasia Bibi, makes the same point in explaining how that debate was lost. "The discourse shifted from the parliament to the street," she says.
"We have to keep the agenda in the parliament, and not with the gun-toting thugs who make inflammatory speeches outside."
Like the financial institutions in the 2008 global financial crisis, Pakistan is deemed by Washington to be ''too big to fail''. Between them, however, Washington and Islamabad have been unable in the past decade to make this relationship work - credibly or creditably.
Predictions of imminent collapse in Islamabad are exaggerated, but perhaps not overly so. "The government does not have the capacity to tackle any of the issues," says the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan's Arif. "Things will just keep getting bad and I don't discount the fact that we can fall into chaos."
Like many other analysts, Bruce Riedel laboriously sets out the policy options by which Washington and Islamabad might work together to defeat the global jihadist movement - before he concludes that none is easy or guaranteed.
An adviser to several US administrations and now with the Brookings Institution, Riedel sees Pakistan under siege from a syndicate of radical terrorist groups unified by the notion that nuclear-armed Pakistan could be the extremist jihadist state they have never had.
"They want to hijack Pakistan and its weapons," he says. Alluding to Islamabad's role in creating a monster, as often as not with Washington's sponsorship, he writes: "An extremely powerful jihadist Frankenstein is now roaming the world, with equally powerful protectors in Pakistani society, right up to the very top.
"Who cannot fear that the 'long beards' will prevail?"
U.S. uses radio DJs to spread the word in Afghanistan
In Afghanistan's Paktika province, where news travels almost exclusively by radio, the man who calls himself DJ Abed Lawang is one of the biggest names on the airwaves. But there's one key fact the disc jockey has never told his listeners: He is broadcasting from a studio on a U.S. Army base, delivering messages written by American military officers.
By Kevin Sieff The Washington Post via The Seattle Times
AT FORWARD OPERATING BASE SHARANA, Afghanistan — In Paktika province where news travels almost exclusively by radio, the man who calls himself DJ Abed Lawang is one of the biggest names on the airwaves, known for playing hit Pashto ballads, telling jokes and hosting a popular call-in show about farming practices.
But there's one key fact the disc jockey has never told his listeners: He is broadcasting from a studio on a U.S. Army base, delivering messages written by American military officers.
He is one of more than 20 radio DJs in Paktika province, and dozens more across the country, who are engaged in what the U.S. military considers a crucial operation: persuading residents in an area dominated by insurgents to embrace Afghan and NATO forces.
In practice, that means he has to pause between Pakistani love songs and passages from the Quran to read about the heroism of Afghan and U.S. armies, and the destruction caused by insurgents. The commentary is not always well-received; he uses the pseudonym to protect himself, but he told a reporter he would not mind if his real name, Noor Jan Mangal, were published.
In recent months, as the war has raged in Paktika, Mangal has been instructed to redouble his efforts, narrating the conflict from the U.S. Army's perspective.
"Afghan and NATO personnel take every step to prevent civilians from being hurt while conducting operations," he said on a recent broadcast, reading a note written by a U.S. officer and translated into Pashto.
"Insurgents have no true cause. They pick and choose to enforce only that which benefits them," he read in another message.
As U.S. forces prepare to leave Afghanistan by the end of 2014, the war against insurgents is as much about information as it is about fighting ability. It's a contest that U.S. and Afghan government forces have often lost, unable to compete with insurgents who live and pray among residents. But U.S. forces have recently discovered a new hope in an old medium.
The medium of radio
In a region with one of the lowest literacy rates in the world, where the vast majority of families are unable to afford a television set, 92 percent of Paktika residents listen to the radio every day, according to a U.S. military survey. Officials have crafted their communications strategy around that statistic, investing heavily in new radio stations, dubbed Radios in a Box. There are about 100 such stations across the country.
The radio campaign has been a boon to the U.S. war effort, enabling the Army to advance its own viewpoint after successful operations or destructive Taliban attacks. In recent weeks, when insurgents in Paktika attempted to attack a convoy of politicians or when Taliban members forced a telecom company to shut down local cellphone towers, Mangal was swiftly handed messages to read on the air.
Before insurgents were able to describe their actions as valiant attempts to vanquish foreign infidels, Mangal put a different spin on the news, explaining — in the words of U.S. officers — the senselessness of the attacks.
When U.S. or Afghan soldiers engage in firefights or air assaults, Mangal is the one responsible for justifying the operations to residents, a particularly important — and delicate — responsibility when civilians are caught in the crossfire.
"Read this three times per day," a young lieutenant usually instructs him after delivering handwritten notes.
The U.S. military has distributed 500,000 hand-crank and solar-powered radios across eastern Afghanistan to better the odds that residents will tune in to Mangal's broadcast and other U.S. stations in the region, even if listeners suspect the program's foreign backer.
Mangal has about 50,000 listeners.
"We hear the station's messages about the Afghan government and ISAF achievements. It is sometimes good information, but many people here assume (Light FM) is run by Americans. It doesn't seem independent," said Ali Mohammad Nazari, 20, a Sharana resident.
Overall, the United States has spent several million dollars on the program, which was launched in 2005 but took hold in many provinces only within the past year. Each station costs about $15,000 to establish and about $12,000 a year in operating expenses.
"This has been by far the most effective way to get our message across," said Capt. Kurt McDowell, who leads the program in Paktika. "For us, the key is getting the truth out, and getting it out quickly."
Insurgents have for years taken their fight to the airwaves, transmitting messages about violent jihad and the evils of foreigners by using portable transmitters on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. The United States has attempted to scramble those signals, temporarily paralyzing the Taliban's communications strategy.
But those efforts did little to dispel rumors propagated by insurgents. Last year, Gen. David Petraeus, then the top NATO commander in Afghanistan, issued guidelines for an aggressive "information war."
"Challenge disinformation," Petraeus instructed. "Turn our enemies' extremist ideologies, oppressive practices, and indiscriminate violence against them. Hang their barbaric actions like millstones around their necks."
A year later, the U.S. radio program has taken root in several of the country's far-flung provinces, with DJs including Mangal recruited from private Afghan stations to lead the new information campaign.
Watchful eyes and ears
U.S. officials monitor Mangal's broadcasts — along with other U.S.-funded stations — to ensure that he doesn't bend to pressure from the Taliban or other critics. In recent weeks, they identified, and dismissed, another DJ on the payroll who officials suspect has ties to the insurgency.
Mangal, 23, a former stage actor, has long, jelled hair and a bushy goatee. His studio is decorated with images of Pakistani pop stars and photos of himself interviewing top provincial politicians. Cassette tapes litter the floor.
For the past three years, he has made about $500 a month at Light FM (106.3), fielding a steady stream of phone calls from listeners in the mud huts and rough-hewn houses that pepper Paktika's mountains and valleys. For the most part, Mangal is comfortable with his fame, basking in the attention of callers and the importance of his mission.
But he is starting to worry. Some residents have argued to Mangal that broadcasting music is un-Islamic. Others have threatened to kill him for taking phone calls from women. And he suspects that a number of his listeners have figured out his connection to the U.S. forces based on the content of the broadcasts.
Given his recognizably pro-American voice, it's only a matter of time before someone hears him talking in a local bazaar or mosque and makes good on a death threat, he says. He rarely leaves the base these days.
"Most people really like the show. They rely on me for information. They trust me. But then there are some who don't like the message," he said.
Amid Triumph in Libya, War Lingers for Britain in Afghanistan
New York Times By ALAN COWELL September 2, 2011
LONDON - Offsetting the euphoria of the victorious rebels in Tripoli and the hoopla among their Western sponsors, another image intruded in the past week, recalling a different war that will most likely outlast the sound bites and headlines of triumphalism in Libya.
In the southwest of England, as a brass band played, Britain’s union flag was furled, blessed and laid on a church altar to mark the end of a remarkable four-year remembrance, during which hearses carrying the bodies of 345 fallen British service personnel have passed through the village of Wootton Bassett on their way to burial from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Those tearful moments started out as impromptu memorials when the airplanes ferrying the coffins began landing at the nearby — and soon-to-be-closed — Royal Air Force base at Lyneham, in Wiltshire. In the future, the airplanes will land at a more distant base in Oxfordshire, and a potent emblem of the cost of Britain’s involvement in Afghanistan will be lost, though other reminders will certainly endure, like the family snapshot published in the past week by the Defense Ministry of Sgt. Barry Weston, 40, with his three daughters, Jasmine, Poppy and Rose — the 380th British soldier to die in Afghanistan since 2001.
And there will be other considerations and comparisons. The war in Afghanistan began almost a decade ago in direct response to the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States. It drove the Taliban from formal power. It lost focus as George W. Bush and Tony Blair shifted their attention to the ouster of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
But, since then, it has drawn in ever more American and allied forces, posing the questions of whether it can be won in any formal sense and, more significantly for politicians, how coalition troops can be extricated with at least an appearance of honor by the deadline they have set for Afghan forces to take over in 2014.
Those doubts have gradually deepened with the awkward interplay of politics and soldiering underpinning the Afghan campaign, particularly since 2006, when a small and poorly equipped British force pushed into the Taliban strongholds of Helmand Province to face increasing casualties before the increase last year in American troop numbers eased some of the pressure.
It “was a triumph of hope over experience,” the Royal United Services Institute, a respected research group, said in a recent analysis. “The U.K. took on a nasty little war for essentially abstract political reasons and then found itself deeply embroiled in a long game of catch-up, for essentially operational reasons.”
Libya reflected a different doctrine. Apart from the reported presence of special forces — never officially acknowledged — no British, French or American military boots stamped their way, in public at least, across the deserts and scrub of Libya.
NATO’s involvement was remote, surgical, airborne — free of the casualties on the ground that haunt politicians’ boasts of missions accomplished. The NATO bombs and missiles that debilitated the forces of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi fell from planes that faced no threat of ground fire once Libyan air defenses had been destroyed.
Unlike the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where hundreds of thousands took to Europe’s streets to demonstrate against them, the conflict in Libya drew no such protests. Libyans themselves chased their dictator from power — albeit with Western air support — inscribing a new chapter in the putative and still unfolding Arab cycle that has ended tyrannies in some places but created enormous bloodshed in others.
On the surface, Libya was about democracy and, only just subliminally, about securing European access to oil supplies, trade and post-conflict reconstruction projects. It somehow seemed appropriate that, in one of the first noncombat missions after the fall of Tripoli, a Royal Air Force transport plane flew in Libyan bank notes worth some $220 million, freshly printed in Britain but previously frozen by international sanctions against Colonel Qaddafi. The delivery, in time for the Muslim feast of Id al-Fitr at the end of Ramadan, set the pecuniary markers for future remittances in the opposite direction.
In Afghanistan, the rationale was to fight militants and terrorists in their havens there and in Pakistan to keep Western streets safe. (Libya, once a sponsor of terrorist acts, including the Lockerbie bombing of 1988, had tried to shed that reputation when Colonel Qaddafi cozied up to the West after the fall of Saddam Hussein, seeking to postpone a similar fate for himself.)
A reader who wished to remind me of the imbalances wrote acerbically to inquire in an e-mail why journalists spend so much time charting the course of events in Libya while, in Afghanistan, 67 American soldiers died in August alone. Those deaths brought the American total for the year to 308 and the tally since 2001 to 1,754, according to the Web site iCasualties.org.
“Libya is barely a footnote to what’s going on in Afghanistan,” this anonymous reader wrote, perhaps overstating the case but underscoring the point that, if the rationale for war in Afghanistan was as portentous and existential as it was initially presented by Western leaders, then events in North Africa are not on the same scale of clear and present danger.
There were other factors and coincidences in play. On Thursday, the same day as Britain and France — the twin European motors of the anti-Qaddafi campaign in Europe — hosted a conference in Paris to fete the Libyan rebels, Britain itself announced 1,850 layoffs among its already stretched armed forces as part of measures to reduce its huge public debt.
The notion of shrinking the military at a time of crisis from the Maghreb to the Hindu Kush might appear ill-timed. But, as the mourners fell silent in Wootton Bassett, the spending cuts might well have shown that the bigger challenge for post-imperial Britain lay not so much in the projection of power to distant killing fields as in the struggle with economic hard times back home.
One in seven Afghan soldiers deserted during first half of year
At least one in seven Afghan soldiers walked off the job during the first six months of 2011, a worsening trend at a time Afghan and U.S. officials are trying to shift the burden of fighting the Taliban to Afghan security forces.
The Washington Post By Joshua Partlow Friday, September 2, 2011
KABUL, Afghanistan - At least one in seven Afghan soldiers walked off the job during the first six months of 2011, a worsening trend at a time Afghan and U.S. officials are trying to shift the burden of fighting the Taliban to Afghan security forces.
Between January and June, 24,590 soldiers walked off the job, compared with 11,423 who left in the same period last year, according to NATO statistics. In June, more than 5,000 soldiers deserted, nearly 3 percent of the force, which has about 170,000 soldiers, significantly more than a year ago.
At the height of harvest time in Afghanistan this summer, the desertion rate climbed to an annualized rate of nearly 35 percent.
The rate of desertion has attracted increasing criticism of a long-standing decree by President Hamid Karzai that protects Afghan army deserters from being punished.
Afghan and coalition officials said the soldiers who leave often complain about poor living conditions or commanders who do not allow a regular vacation schedule. But Afghan and U.S. military officials also say poor leadership is a main reason soldiers desert the ranks.
Despite the recent resurgence, the level of dropouts remains significantly lower than earlier in the war. As recently as September 2009, more soldiers were quitting than joining the army.
At Afghan Military Hospital, Graft and Deadly Neglect
By MARIA ABI-HABIB The Wall Street Journal SEPTEMBER 3, 2011
KABUL—American officers deployed as mentors in Afghanistan's main military hospital discovered a shocking secret last year: Injured soldiers were routinely dying of simple infections and even starving to death as some corrupt doctors and nurses demanded bribes for food and the most basic of care.
The discovery, which hasn't previously been reported, added new details to longstanding evidence of gross mismanagement at Dawood National Military Hospital, where most salaries and supplies are paid for by American taxpayers.
Yet the patient neglect continued for months after U.S. officials discovered it, as Afghan officials rebuffed American pressure to take action, multiple documents and testimonies viewed by The Wall Street Journal show.
The way senior Afghan officials tolerated such deadly graft shows just how deeply rooted corruption has become in President Hamid Karzai's administration, as well as the limits of Washington's ability to rein it in. American advisers have since forced an improvement in conditions at the hospital.
Afghan policeman Ali Noor Hazrat had been admitted to Dawood hospital after being injured in a Taliban rocket attack on a police convoy last fall. Initially patched up by American doctors, he spent his last days starving there while his brother Sher sold off what little land the poor farming family had in order to bribe nurses and doctors for care and food, the brother said in an interview. In photos, Ali's flesh hangs off his frail, boney frame, his eyes heavy with pain. He died on Dec. 27, Afghan government documents show.
"Malnourished/starvation," said an internal coalition slide showing Mr. Hazrat, dated Nov. 5, prepared by American mentors at the hospital to document abuse cases. "Willful neglect," another bullet point said.
Sher Hazrat is determined that none of his relatives in the eastern Nangarhar province will consider joining Afghan security forces after what happened at Dawood. "If there's no service for us," he says, "why should we serve our country?"
Such sentiments have raised questions about how the fledgling Afghan military would fare against Taliban insurgents once most U.S. troops depart in 2014.
Dawood is the premier hospital of the Afghan security forces, akin to the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in the U.S.
As early as 2006, American officers noted evidence of severe dysfunction at the hospital, including patients who appeared to be malnourished, a U.S. military mentor who served there at the time says. He adds that the findings were reported to the Afghan Ministry of Defense, but no action was taken to improve conditions.
In 2008, doctors complained to hospital administrators that patients were being given defective morphine, according to internal documents produced by the NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan, or NTM-A. Later testing revealed the presence of counterfeit morphine, suggesting that U.S.-procured medicine had been diverted.
The NTM-A command, headed since November 2009 by U.S. Army Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, is spending $11.6 billion this year alone, more than 90% of it funded by U.S. taxpayers, on building up the Afghan army and police.
The biggest problem, American officials dealing with the hospital concluded by the middle of last year, was the Afghan army's politically connected surgeon general, Gen. Ahmed Zia Yaftali. As early as May 2010, U.S. officials say they confronted Gen. Yaftali about missing pharmaceuticals at the hospital and asked him to investigate. They ultimately came to suspect that he himself was profiting from graft, according to mentors and senior NTM-A commanders. The alleged theft of pharmaceuticals in the hospital has previously been reported by the Associated Press.
In an email to Gen. Caldwell dated August 25, 2010, U.S. Army Col. Gerald Carozza, a senior legal mentor at the Afghan defense ministry, complained that corruption was "deep and wide" within the senior leadership of the Afghan defense ministry and army and urged him to pressure the defense minister to allow various internal investigations to proceed. He said in the email that the Afghan army chief of staff's legal team was developing a case against Gen. Yaftali involving "a $20 million (US) theft from [the defense ministry] and pilfering $153 million (US) worth of medical supplies."
Gen. Yaftali denied all allegations of impropriety in a phone interview and declined to discuss them further, saying he would "only answer" to the Afghan defense ministry.
In his reply to Col. Carozza, Gen. Caldwell argued that the Afghan government needed to take responsibility for combatting corruption in the military. "We're not going to be able to solve this for them. Keep encouraging them to do the right thing," he wrote.
The U.S. government in general has been trying to build Afghan institutions that can solve their own problems, in preparation for an eventual U.S. withdrawal.
"We can build the greatest army, we can build the greatest police force," Gen. Caldwell said in an interview. "But if we don't have the rule of law being implemented...then we were not going to have legitimacy in this government."
In a Sept. 14 visit to the hospital to show America's appreciation to wounded Afghan soldiers, Gen. Caldwell was accompanied by the Afghan army chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Sher Mohammed Karimi. There, the two stopped by the bed of an emaciated Afghan soldier. Gen. Caldwell thanked him for his service and let Gen. Karimi pin a U.S. Army achievement medal to the Afghan soldier's bedsheets.
Gen. Caldwell said he was emotionally moved when he saw the patient's condition, but wasn't yet aware that neglect at the hospital was systemic.
Minutes after the American general left, the Afghan soldier—who hadn't been fed by the hospital in weeks—threw out his medal, people present in the hospital say.
A beefed-up group of at least two dozen U.S. military mentors had arrived at the hospital in August 2010 as part of the "surge" of American forces in Afghanistan. They began to deploy throughout the wards, replacing an earlier group that had less direct contact with patients.
By the following month, the new mentors began to document what they describe as horrific conditions. Maggots fed off patients' open wounds. Nurses and doctors refused to help amputees to the bathroom, and they soiled their beds for days.
Several patients died of simple infections because their bandages would go unchanged for weeks, while at least four died of complications related to malnourishment, according to mentors and internal documents.
In late September, Gen. Karimi was invited to attend an Afghan shura, a traditional meeting, at the hospital with Canadian Brigadier Gen. David Neasmith, the assistant commander for army development at the NTM-A. NATO officials pressed Gen. Karimi to address the problem of staff absenteeism and missing medicine, a U.S. mentor who was present says. But Afghan hospital and army officials who attended the meeting steered the conversation away from such issues and asked for raises and promotions, the mentor says.
As weeks passed without progress, the mentors say they assembled more evidence of neglect, including detailed medical charts and photos showing emaciated patients and bedsores a foot long and so deep that bones protruded from them.
In an Oct. 4 document emailed by the mentors to Gen. Neasmith, they complained about the hospital's intensive-care unit, among other issues: "The most dynamic and ill affected is the ICU, whereby favoritism, ambivalence, incompetence coupled with understaffing lead to the untimely deaths of patients daily, occasionally several times per day."
That month, Gen. Caldwell visited the Afghan defense minister, Gen. Abdulrahim Wardak, and persuaded him to launch a new investigation into Gen. Yaftali, according to two U.S. officers. Gen. Wardak and the Afghan defense ministry spokesman didn't reply to repeated requests for comment for this article except to say that Gen. Yaftali is still under investigation.
Gen. Wardak warned that prosecuting Gen. Yaftali would be difficult, saying the surgeon general was too politically connected, according to U.S. officials involved in the issue. Gen. Yaftali fought against the Taliban in the 1990s alongside other ethnic Tajiks who have since became prominent government figures.
In late October, with the Afghan investigation going nowhere and Gen. Yaftali keeping his job, Col. Carozza, NTM-A Inspector General Army Col. Mark Fassl and U.S. Air Force Col. Schuyler Geller, the chief mentor to the hospital, filed a request that the U.S. Defense Department inspector general assist in investigating the hospital.
The coalition declined to make Col. Geller available for an in-person interview. The Canadian military declined to make available Gen. Neasmith, who has since returned to Canada.
According to a November 2010 NTM-A memo titled "Leadership Failure," prepared to assist with the Defense Department investigation, soldiers were going to the operating table without morphine or even sedatives. When one patient demanded medicine, an orderly punched him in the face.
"In addition," the memo went on, "there have been incidents of nurses and orderlies demanding payment for patient treatment and care," including one in which "a patient was left unattended after soiling his bed because the patient or his family could not pay to have the bed cleaned."
A separate presentation, prepared the same month, documented a "loss of 50 pounds" for a policeman named Tajudin after 40 days in the hospital, accompanied by photos showing the patient's wasted frame.
That month, the mentors prepared a patient bill of rights to enforce medical standards at the hospital, informing patients that all medical care should be free and ordering the staff to perform routine checkups. Within days of the bill's being printed and pasted on hospital walls in December, the Afghan staff tore the posters down, according to U.S. officials.
Gen. Caldwell visited the hospital again in December. When he inquired about the soldier to whom he'd awarded a medal, he was shown a healthier-looking patient, according to a person present. On his way out, a tearful American captain told the general that this was an impostor. The real Afghan war hero had died.
By mid-December, Gen. Yaftali, the Afghan army's surgeon-general, was moved out of his job without explanation—after the coalition's commander at the time, Gen. David Petraeus, personally raised the problems at the hospital during a meeting with President Karzai, people familiar with the matter said.
The hospital has seen major improvements since then. A surge of coalition military mentors is helping ensure that Afghan nurses and doctors conduct regular checkups of patients and provide routine feedings and dressing changes. There haven't been any documented cases of starvation since February, American mentors say. In March, Gen. Petraeus brought up the Dawood hospital in a conversation with reporters, citing it as a success story of American efforts against Afghan corruption.
There is no public word about where the investigation into Gen. Yaftali stands, and one U.S. official said record-keeping at the hospital was so poor it may be difficult to sort out how much was actually stolen. Gen. Yaftali, who still receives a monthly army salary heavily subsidized by U.S. taxpayers, said in an interview he expects to be promoted to three-star general.
—Ziaulhaq Sultani and Habib Khan Totakhil contributed to this article.
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