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Five civilians killed in anti-vehicle mine blast in N. Afghanistan
KABUL, Sept. 5 (Xinhua) -- Five civilians were killed Monday afternoon when their vehicle ran over an anti-vehicle mine in Qaisar district of Faryab province, Interior Ministry said in a statement.
"Today at 12:45 p.m. local time, an anti-vehicle mine which was placed by enemies of peace and stability hit a civilian vehicle in Ghora region, Shakh village, Qaisar district of Faryab province. As a result, five civilians were martyred," said the statement. Faryab province's Maimana is some 425 km northwest of capital city of Kabul.
The brief statement blamed the enemies of peace, a term often used by Afghan officials referring to Taliban insurgents.
However, the militants group has yet to make comments.
Taliban militants have been largely relying on roadside bombing and suicide attacks in fighting Afghan security force and NATO-led troops based in Afghanistan, often causing civilian casualties.
A total of 1,462 Afghan civilians were killed in the first half of 2011, a 15 percent rise over the same period of 2010, according to the UN mid-year report released in Kabul on July 14.
Afghan president to announce second phase of security transition: NATO
KABUL, Sept. 5 (Xinhua) -- Afghan President Hamid Karzai is to announce in coming weeks the second areas where Afghan National Security forces (ANSF) will take over full control from NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), a NATO spokesman said on Monday.
"The NATO Senior Civilian Representative, Simon Gass along with ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) is working in partnership with the Afghan Transition Coordination Commission, under the chairmanship of Dr. Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai, to determine the next areas suitable for transition," Christopher Chambers the NATO's civilian spokesman in Afghanistan told reporters at a joint press conference with ISAF spokesman Brigadier General Carsten Jacobson here.
In about two weeks, the Joint Afghan NATO Transition Board, co- chaired by Dr. Ahmadzai, ambassador Gass and the ISAF commander General John Allen will make their recommendations to President Karzai and the Afghan cabinet of ministers, Chambers added. "An announcement by President Karzai for the second group of areas for transition to Afghan security forces is expected to be made later this month or early in October," he asserted.
Afghan forces have taken the full control of seven areas including three provinces in the first phase of the process late on July.
The transition of security responsibility from over 140,000- strong NATO-led ISAF forces with nearly 100,000 of them Americans begun on July this year and runs to 2014 when Afghanistan is due to take over the full leadership of its own security.
According to President Barack Obama's plan, 10,000 troops will be pulled out from the insurgency-hit Afghanistan by year end, and a total of 33,000 troops will be out by next summer. "With transition, NATO and ISAF's role will change to one of support and training. The mission may change, but the commitment to the peace and security of Afghanistan will remain unwavering," Chambers added. "At the end of August, approximately 170,000 Afghan National Army, 135,000 Afghan National Police and 7,700 Afghan Local Police had completed their training. We are well in plan, actually ahead of plan, to complete the training of 353,000 Afghan National Security Forces personnel by November 2012," said ISAF spokesman Jacobson in the same press conference.
Bodies of missing Germans found in Afghanistan
September 05, 2011 By Matiullah Mati, CNN
The bodies of two Germans who went missing in Afghanistan last month have been found, officials said.
Roshan Khalid, the spokeswoman for the governor of Parwan province, said the bodies were found Monday in the Dasht-e-Khon village in the province.
The pair had been shot and killed, Khalid said blaming the deaths on nomads.
The German foreign ministry would not confirm the deaths, with a spokesman saying his office is "tracking all information."
For its part, the Taliban said it did not know of the abduction or the killing, saying it was not responsible.
The two were reported missing in late August, with the German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle saying at the time it was possible "they have become victims of a kidnapping."
Westerwelle had declined to provide more information on the identities of the two Germans.
Khalid on Monday said the Germans worked for a non-governmental organization and had come to Salang Pass in the province to mountain-climb.
The village where their bodies were found is about three hours from Salang Pass.
A team was headed to the village Monday to retrieve the bodies, Khalid said.
Pakistan Captures Senior al-Qaida Leader
VOA News September 5, 2011
Pakistan's military said it has arrested a senior al-Qaida official and two other members of the terrorist group in an operation assisted by U.S. intelligence agencies.
An army statement identified the senior detainee as Younis al-Mauritani, who it said had been tasked by Osama bin Laden with targeting economic interests in the United States, Europe and Australia. The other two detainees were not identified.
The military said the operation took place in the southern city of Quetta but did not specify when.
Pakistan has been under intense pressure from the United States to crack down harder on al-Qaida since U.S. special forces found bin Laden in a Pakistani town in May and killed him.
The secret operation targeting bin Laden severely strained ties between Pakistan and the United States, raising questions in Washington over whether Pakistan's intelligence agencies knew that the al-Qaida leader was living in the country.
Some information for this report was provided by AP, AFP and Reuters.
Special forces step up secret Afghanistan attacks
The Age By Rafael Epstein September 5, 2011
AUSTRALIAN special forces in southern Afghanistan are stepping up their involvement in controversial secret ground attacks and drone strike missions aimed at killing key Taliban insurgent suspects.
Their commander, Major-General Peter ''Gus'' Gilmore, confirmed his senior officers had used missiles, fired from unmanned US aircraft, and defended his soldiers' ''capture-or-kill'' operations.
''Sometimes it will be an aerial strike, sometimes it will be committing a ground force, sometimes it will be, to be patient and wait,'' he said in an interview with The Age.
The drone strikes are dubbed ''Kill TV'' or ''Taliban TV'' because soldiers watch live video feeds of bombs and missiles detonating, with one source admitting it is uncomfortable viewing. ''You can see everything,'' he said.
General Gilmore commands soldiers from the secretive commando and SAS regiments, who take part in the NATO campaign targeting insurgency leaders.
NATO special forces - including Australians - have tripled their activities, with 1879 missions and 916 ''targets'' killed or captured so far this year. In 2009, there were 675 missions with 306 adversaries killed or captured, according to figures recently released.
In a review of one disputed US drone strike, Kate Clark from the Afghanistan Analysts Network said there were ''systemic concerns'' over the intelligence used, and inquiries into casualties do not give ''due attention to existing alternative accounts'' from locals.
The ABC's Four Corners program tonight says it has documented several incidents in which it claims Australian soldiers targeted the wrong people and civilians were killed.
General Gilmore has not seen the ABC report but has backed his soldiers. "When they are on the ground, by themselves, and they have to make that split-second decision, cascading through their mind is this long line of training," he says.
"I don't worry because I have huge trust in our training and the judgment of the guys."
Critics of the Australian Defence Force and NATO want more details on the soldiers' rules of engagement and intelligence processes.
''If the ADF special forces believe that they are in full compliance with international law, the onus is on them to demonstrate that fact,'' said the former UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Killing, Philip Alston.
''And the risks that follow from such a carte blanche [secrecy] are not hard to see.''
The Age has been told the details of one drone strike, which has not been referenced on the ADF's website.
In 2008, an Australian special forces commanding officer ordered a strike on an insurgent leader and four armed men, seen planting a home-made bomb or IED 20 to 30 kilometres from the Australian base in Oruzgan province.
Final permission from the NATO command in Kandahar was rescinded several times as the insurgents' vehicles passed hamlets and small compounds where the risk to civilians was considered too great.
The strike was finally authorised when the Afghans stopped moving - ''they were having a smoko'', according to one source.
Australian soldiers watched as the first weapon appeared to kill four of the men. The fifth man was killed with a second strike, after he was seen injured by the initial attack.
A warplane from another country was also involved,
but did not fire any weapons.
"The angst we go through with every single activity that may involve targeting or death, it is unprecedented," one soldier said.
The US can have more than 50 such aircraft in the skies above Afghanistan at any one time. The Predator and more advanced Reaper drones can drop as many as two 225 kilogram laser-guided bombs and fire up to four Hellfire missiles from 12 kilometres away.
The $28 million aircraft fly for up to 18 hours without refuelling, controlled by pilots on the US mainland and they are maintained in Afghanistan by private contractors.
Sources say the technology helps the military avoid civilian casualties, with vision from the drones analysed for hours and sometimes days to confirm the target.
Classified software is also used to predict the size and strength of the blast. Personnel on the ground sometimes help aid the drones' accuracy by placing devices in vehicles and on buildings.
Afterwards, video of locals rushing to the blast site is analysed, and mobile phone calls and emails are intercepted, to assess who was killed.
The ADF says it won't release detailed rules of engagement, methods used to compile target lists, or details of drone strikes.
''International laws explicitly and implicitly require a significant degree of transparency,'' said Philip Alston, now a professor at New York University. He said while the military did not need to reveal all details, ''without transparency there can be no accountability''.
What Do Afghans Know About 9/11?
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty September 5, 2011
KABUL -- In America, it's difficult to find anyone who doesn't know precisely where they were on 9/11.
Not so in Afghanistan. There, many people never heard the news of those coordinated attacks a decade ago, or, if they did, had little sense that it would dramatically change their world.
That change came 26 days later, when the U.S. invoked the self-defense clause of NATO's charter and led a military intervention in Afghanistan.
That campaign, starting October 7, 2001, first toppled the hard-line Taliban regime then brought more than 100,000 foreign soldiers to Afghanistan in a continuing effort to stabilize the country.
So perhaps it should be no surprise that Americans and Afghans tend to think of 9/11 differently.
While Americans see 9/11 as the reason U.S. forces deployed to Afghanistan, many Afghans see it as only part of a larger story. And that larger story, as correspondents quickly find out, can take many different and even bizarre forms, depending on who you talk to.
"I was in Peshawar [in neighboring Pakistan] when I heard that in America they had attacked skyscrapers," says one man in Wardak Province, southwest of the Afghan capital, Kabul. "I saw it on television and heard about it on the radio. What can I say? You know what happened next. The world came to Afghanistan because they said the Taliban and the Muslim Brotherhood attacked the buildings. But the Muslims don't accept that and think the Americans did it themselves."
Questions Abound
The man, who does not give his name, is sitting along the main highway that links Wardak Province to Kabul, near a truck stop -- a place where drivers rest, cargo is offloaded for local distribution, and he ekes out a living as a small shopkeeper.
He says he is one of the hundreds of thousands of people who were living as refugees in Pakistan at the time of the attacks and, following the toppling of the Taliban, returned to Afghanistan to build a new life.
But while he welcomes the toppling of the Taliban, which ruled with an extreme interpretation of Islam and an iron fist, he does not see the international presence in Afghanistan as either justified by 9/11 or in the interest of the Afghans themselves.
And he suggests ulterior motives. "It had a negative effect," the man says, "because many kafir [non-Muslim] countries came to Afghanistan and maybe some Muslims, too, because Turkey also came, and now you see the result. There is no work."
He goes on to question the thoroughness of the international forces' commitment to rooting out the Taliban.
"If I say to you that during the Taliban security was OK, you should accept that; but now you see in Kabul there are lots of warlords," he says. "I am not pro-Taliban, but I ask the Americans and others why they left the Taliban in power in some places such as Helmand Province instead of wiping them all out."
In Afghanistan, there is a common conspiracy theory that 9/11 was a pretext for the United States to invade the country and that U.S. forces do not destroy the Taliban because Washington needs an ongoing justification for occupation. This man does not, or cannot, say what the foreigners want in Afghanistan; but any notion they are here to help is outweighed by the continuing insecurity and lack of economic opportunities.
If America really wanted the war to end in Afghanistan, he says, it would give work to the people with big projects like dams and irrigation systems. Then, he says, the Taliban would not be able to make a comeback and people wouldn't go over to their side.
'What's The Sense?'
It would be easier to ignore such a string of complaints and hints of conspiracy theories if they were not so widespread. Stop at virtually any roadside resting place, north, south, or east of Kabul, and there is more of the same.
At a truck stop in Logar Province, directly south of the capital, Jan Mohammed can't remember where he was on 9/11. What he thinks about it is heavily influenced by all that has followed.
"I don't know where I was during this attack because I was working as a laborer in Islamabad [Pakistan], but later I saw it on television," Jan Mohammed says. "It brought us nothing good, everything is against us and we have lost a lot. The American and international forces came and as a result we lost a lot of relatives and friends in the war. Every day tens of our people die, while the international forces have brought nothing good for us, including any work."
For him, the international force's efforts would be justifiable if they brought factories, electricity, water, and security. But without any of those things in sight where he lives, his answer to our question about what he knows about 9/11 and the reasons foreign forces are here is simply to pose a question of his own: "In one direction, there is fighting; in another, martyrs; in another, killing; in another, roadblocks and searches. What's the sense of it?"
Nearby, another man, Nurulla, is waiting along with Jan Mohammed and dozens of others for the chance of an odd job loading or unloading cargo onto the passing trucks. The truck stop is the only economic hub for miles around and looks busy as arriving and departing vehicles kick up huge clouds of dust over the road. But there are more men here than jobs and many will go home empty-handed.
Manipulated Youth
Nurulla says he remembers 9/11 but it seems like a long, long time ago.
"We saw on television they attacked the Twin Towers. I forget where I was at that time," Nurulla says. "Ever since I was old enough to notice I have a right hand and a left hand, we have been fighting. I have adapted to it, but we are tired of this war and even more tired of having no work. These days, when you look for work even as a day laborer you can't find it. So we stand close to the highway and sometimes load the cars."
Does anybody know in detail what happened on 9/11 and feel like the war in Afghanistan is part of a larger global struggle against a common enemy: terrorism?
It takes some looking to find such a person, but finally we do meet him at a roadside market north of Kabul, in Kapisa Province.
"My information about 9/11 is that an airplane controlled by Al-Qaeda hit a building in America and a lot of people were killed," Abdulrahim says. "After that, America and the world felt they should do something to destroy Al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups active in the world. They came to Afghanistan to find the root of the problem and remove it."
Abdulrahim, who is a shopkeeper, is the kind of person the international forces in Afghanistan need to explain their presence if they are to succeed in marginalizing the Taliban and, along with Afghan forces, secure the country. So, we ask what it is that makes him such a supporter of the new order when so many others are filled with doubts.
The reason, he says, is the suicide bombings.
"In Kapisa Province, we have suicide attacks and we have lost several close friends. We condemn suicide attacks. According to Shari'a, too, this is wrong," Abdulrahim says. "Those who organize them are misusing the young generation and misleading them with evil ideas. The suicide attacks kill innocent people and we hear of them almost every day. Our wish is for the American and other international forces to destroy the bases of these groups. We know there is a high cost, but we support that."
For him, the suicide bombings are the daily echoes of 9/11 and the common link between what happened in New York and Washington 10 years ago and what is happening in Afghanistan today.
Not everybody hears the echoes that way. But for those who do, it is a convincing argument for trying to root out terrorism before foreign forces withdraw and Afghanistan is on its own.
That date is now set to come in three more years.
In July, the United States withdrew the first of some 10,000 troops due to leave the country this year, with all combat troops to be out by 2014. Washington's NATO partners are following a similar timetable.
interviews conducted by RFE/RL Radio Free Afghanistan correspondent Sayaed Jan Sabawoon; with additional reporting by Radio Free Afghanistan correspondent Zarif Nazar in Prague; written by RFE/RL correspondent Charles Recknagel in Prague
Another Sept. 11 terrorist attack "no longer possible": EU official
BRUSSELS, Sept. 5 (Xinhua) -- Terrorist attacks similar to those that struck New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001, are "probably no longer possible," European Union (EU) counter-terrorism coordinator Gilles de Kerchove said on Monday.
"I think we can say today that an attack of the scale and the sophistication that we once had on September 11 probably is no longer possible," he told reporters at a news conference for the 10th anniversary of the attacks.
However, he also stressed "That doesn't mean we are completely out of threat."
He said that al-Qaida, the terrorist group that allegedly masterminded the Sept. 11 attacks, had been significantly weakened by the striking campaigns in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which led to the death of its leader Osama bin Laden this year.
Kerchove warned that terrorist threat today is "more complex and diverse", referring to remnants of al-Qaida and terrorist groups in the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa.
In the last decade, international cooperation on fighting against terrorism has been strengthened by sharing data, collaborating in the fields of police and judiciary etc., Kerchove said, adding mechanisms and institutions within EU have been established for counter-terrorism.
"Overall, we are much better equipped today that we were 10 years ago," he said.
In addition, Kerchove said it was very important that terrorists should be brought to justice, rather than imprisoned or killed without trail.
Why al Qaeda's still a threat in Afghanistan
CBS.com By Jere Van Dyk September 5, 2011
On Sept. 20, 2001, President George W. Bush told Congress, "Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but... It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated."
On Aug. 19, 2011, Marc Grossman, President Obama's special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, told Radio Free Europe, "The job President Obama has given us is to deter, deny, and defeat al Qaeda in Afghanistan. I think we're well on the way to doing that."
Ten years after the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington, does al Qaeda in Afghanistan or Pakistan still pose a threat to the U.S.?
9/11: Ten years later
In October 1981, I went as a young journalist to Peshawar, Pakistan, to meet the leaders of the Mujahideen - America's allies in the war against the Soviet Union - and to live with their men in Afghanistan.
I met Gulbadeen Hekmatyier, Yunus Khalis, and other leaders. I liked Khalis and went with his men into the tribal areas and hiked up the mountains into Afghanistan to the bombed, baked-mud compound of Jalaluddin Haqqani, a Mujahideen commander.
It was at a place called Shi-e-Khot. Haqqani gave me a plate of honey to go with my tea.
An Egyptian Army major came to stay with us. He hated me because I was American. He was arrogant and the Afghans didn't like him, but he seemed to have power over Haqqani, and they deferred to him. Haqqani allowed him to fire a surface to air missile. He missed his target, a Soviet helicopter, and the Afghans laughed behind his back. I realized years later that the Egyptian major was the beginning of al Qaeda's influence in Afghanistan.
According to the 9/11 Commission, from 1996 until Sept. 11, 2001, between 10,000 and 20,000 foreign fighters came to Afghanistan and trained in camps run by al Qaeda. Al Qaeda's camps were mostly in Haqqani territory.
Today, Haqqani is the patriarch of the Haqqani Network, the most lethal insurgent group in Afghanistan. He was once a lowly mullah who ministered in a small baked-mud mosque outside of Khost. Today, his giant white marble mosque with turquoise minarets looms over Khost like a cathedral over a village in France or Spain.
In 1984, the Mujahideen, under Pakistani tutelage, formed the Afghan Mujahideen government-in-exile in Peshawar. A few months later, Pakistan and the U.S. brought the government to the U.S. to present its credentials to the U.N. and to meet with President Reagan. I sat in a hotel room in New York with Hekmatyier, president of the government.
A call came from the State Department. "Tell Mr. Hekmatyier it's confirmed that he and other members of his government will meet with President Reagan in the Oval Office," said the caller. He gave a date and time. I told Hekmatyier.
"I can't do that," he said softly. I told the State Department official. He screamed at me on the phone. "Who does he think he is?"
He knew who he was, an ambitious, ruthless man whose Mujahideen fired on other Mujahideen as well as the Russians. He was a guest in the U.S. and had the gall, and, I noted, the courage, to say no to the most powerful man in the world, who was providing millions of dollars in arms and ammunition, sent through Pakistan's ISI military intelligence agency, to him.
In 2007, he told Pakistan's Geo television that his men helped bin Laden escape from Tora Bora, but said he had no links to al Qaeda today. He is based in Chitral, Pakistan, and is still fighting the infidel, foreign invaders, 35 years later.
In December 2006, I disguised myself as a Pashtun and went up into the mountains of Khost Province, along the Afghan-Pakistani border. I realized I had been here before, with Haqqani's men. Nothing had changed, except now I was the enemy.
My guide pointed east, toward Pakistan. "Jalaluddin is over there," he said softly. "The Taliban come across through that valley."
I wanted to see Haqqani again, and find out about al Qaeda. I spent months traveling, off and on, along both sides of the border. Tribal leaders blamed bin Laden for "burning their houses" - the destruction of Afghanistan. Others said he was a good Muslim. No one said he could hide him for longer than a day or two. He was too big, too important.
In November 2007, I sat in a mountain village across from a Taliban commander. Why was he fighting?
"We are fighting jihad," he said. Who supported him? "Pakistan," he replied. "We live in the mountains, but for training we go to Pakistan. Sometimes the army comes and trains us."
A few of his men stood in the doorway, among them a thin young man wearing a red and white kefeyyah, like men wore in the Middle East. He was al Qaeda. I asked who was in charge, the Taliban or al Qaeda.
"We are," said the commander. "Al Qaeda is also fighting for Islam, and they are our friends."
U.S. officials say there are no more than 50 al Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan. In February 2008, I was kidnapped in Pakistan by the Taliban.
"Not a shot would be fired in Afghanistan without Pakistan's approval," my jailer told me. He told me there were many al Qaeda fighters there. They married local women.
I believe, based upon my experiences over a period of 30 years in the region, that Hekmatyier and Haqqani are tied to the Pakistani government. Haqqani especially is still tied to al Qaeda.
Ex-Militant: Pakistan supports terror groups U.S. official: Pakistan still tips off militants Why won't Pakistan dump the Islamists?
Al Qaeda is comprised of foreigners living in an alien land, and cannot operate independently. The question is, after the death of bin Laden, will those who know where al-Zawahiri is hiding, allow him to try to attack the U.S.?
The threat is still very much there, but I think an attack, if it comes, will originate in Yemen, or Europe.
Anger After a Raid Kills a Wealthy Afghan With a Murky Past
New York Times By RAY RIVERA September 4, 2011
KABUL, Afghanistan - In life and death, Sabar Lal’s story was riddled with conflicting narratives.
After the fall of the Taliban government in 2001, he claimed to be on the side of the Americans in the hunt for Al Qaeda, but United States troops accused him of helping Osama bin Laden and his allies flee to Pakistan.
After five years in the American detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, he returned to Afghanistan in 2007 and built a new life with his two wives and nine children. They lived comfortably in a wealthy section of Jalalabad, one of the safer big cities in the country.
But suspicions lingered, and on Friday, coalition and Afghan forces killed him in a night raid at his residence, acting on intelligence that he had been using his wealth to help lead and finance insurgent attacks in the Pech Valley in Kunar, the northeastern province where he grew up.
His death has angered members of the Afghanistan High Peace Council, who are responsible for reconciliation efforts with militans. Council members say that just days earlier they had won a promise from coalition forces to stop bothering Mr. Lal after they had detained him last month. NATO officials insist they had not detained him.
These conflicting details, among many others, add to the puzzle of Mr. Lal’s life before and after Guantánamo. His killing comes as the Peace Council, appointed by President Hamid Karzai, is struggling to persuade Taliban fighters to lay down their arms and rejoin society. Some council members worried Sunday that NATO’s raid on Mr. Lal’s compound could further undermine those efforts.
“It really hurts the prestige of the Peace Council among the people of Afghanistan,” said Haji Deen Muhammad, a council member. “More importantly, those Taliban members who were released through our process are going to have big concerns that this will happen to them.”
Council members said NATO and Afghan forces detained Mr. Lal, who was in his late 40s, in an operation early last month, then turned him over to the National Directorate of Security, Afghanistan’s main intelligence agency. But after assurances from Afghan intelligence officials and high-level government officials that he did not pose a threat, the council, working closely with its NATO counterparts, obtained his release, said Farhadullah Farhad, the council’s deputy chief executive officer.
“Everybody was involved,” he said, adding, “They would not have released him unless he was proven innocent.”
Lt. Col. Jimmie E. Cummings Jr., a spokesman for the NATO-led military coalition, said that until the operation that killed Mr. Lal, NATO forces had never “detained him or had him in custody.” Officials with the National Directorate of Security did not respond to questions on Sunday.
White House officials have long worried about Guantánamo detainees reverting to terrorism after their release. More than 600 prisoners have been released or transferred to prisons elsewhere since 2002, a Defense Department spokeswoman said Sunday. Last year, the Obama administration told Congress that 117 former detainees were confirmed or suspected of turning to terrorist activity. The prison still holds 171 detainees.
Mr. Lal, who was identified in Guantánamo records as Sabar Lal Melma, was viewed by officials there as someone more committed to self-interest than to any cause. He had come from a wealthy family in Kunar Province and had ties to prominent tribal elders. Through years of fighting against the Soviets in the late 1980s and later against the Taliban, he knew the treacherous mountain terrain along the Pakistan border intimately, information valued by American forces searching for Qaeda crossing routes.
After the Taliban’s fall in late 2001, he was given the rank of brigadier general and put in charge of 600 border security troops in Kunar.
But as Americans searched for Bin Laden in the mountainous Tora Bora region south of Kunar, they suspected Mr. Lal of orchestrating rocket attacks against American forces. They also suspected that he and a prominent tribal elder were helping Arab fighters, perhaps even Bin Laden himself, escape to Pakistan.
In August 2002, American troops arrested Mr. Lal and the elder, Haji Rohullah Wakil, along with 10 other associates after a meeting with United States military officials in Asadabad. They were transferred to Guantánamo Bay later that year. In a 2005 assessment, Guantánamo officials said that Mr. Lal “seems to side with any group or organization that is willing to pay or reward him for his cooperation, from coalition forces to Arabs fleeing Afghanistan.”
At a military tribunal during his detention at Guantánamo, Mr. Lal denied the allegations. When the Americans arrived, he said, according to a transcript, “I joined them, I ate with them, I went places with them. I helped them.”
Guantánamo officials later dropped the allegation that he helped Bin Laden escape, and deemed him a “medium risk.” In September 2007, they transferred him to Afghan custody. The Afghan government released him about 20 days later.
Mr. Wakil, who was released the next year, said in an interview on Sunday that Mr. Lal always felt he had been wrongly imprisoned. “We all think we had been imprisoned unjustly,” Mr. Wakil said.
Mr. Lal moved to Jalalabad with his family shortly after his release, and ran a small but lucrative real estate business.
“He was living there peacefully with no link to anyone,” Mr. Wakil said.
But suspicions continued. NATO officials said in a statement after the raid that Mr. Lal was responsible for attacks in the Pech District and was “a key affiliate of the Al Qaeda network,” tied to senior members of the group throughout Kunar Province and Pakistan.
Mr. Muhammad, the Peace Council member, questioned why a night raid was even necessary when Mr. Lal was living in the middle of a peaceful city where people knew him. “I don’t know what kind of justice it is to kill someone when it would have been very easy to detain him if they had any suspicion that he was linked to insurgents,” he said.
Among the people NATO detained at Mr. Lal’s home that night, Mr. Wakil said, was another former Guantánamo prisoner, Said Amir Jan, also known as Ghorzang.
Mr. Wakil also appears to have remained under suspicion after his release from Guantánamo. In a 2009 Pentagon report, he was listed as one of 47 former detainees suspected of reverting or turning to terrorist activity.
It is unknown if Mr. Lal was on the list because not all the names were published.
Now, like so many aspects of his life, even the details of his death are in dispute. NATO said in a statement that Mr. Lal was killed after he ran out of the home wielding an assault rifle as they tried to arrest him.
But a night watchman named Rahmatullah, who like many Afghans goes by one name, said he was at the residence the night of the raid and gave a different account.
He said coalition forces stormed the compound, handcuffed and blindfolded Mr. Lal and his other guests, then took Mr. Lal out to a veranda. About 20 minutes later, Mr. Rahmatullah said, “we heard gunshots.”
Sangar Rahimi and Abdul Waheed Wafa contributed reporting from Kabul, and an employee of the New York Times from Jalalabad.
9/11: HQ where bin Laden plotted atrocities
CIA could have seized al-Qaeda leader from his Afghanistan farm but chance was spurned and 9/11 plans took shape, writes Ben Farmer in Kandahar
Telegraph.co.uk By Ben Farmer 05 Sep 2011
Kandahar - The walled Tarnak farm, sitting on a stark desert plain on the edge of Kandahar airfield, is all but deserted and the only life is a police guard post in one corner.
Yet a decade ago officials at Washington’s highest levels spent days poring over photographs of these same buildings trying to decipher every move of their main resident — Osama bin Laden.
The farm was watched for four years — scrutinised and mapped in a story of missed chances that ended in tragedy on September 11 2001.
Tarnak now has a new agricultural research station built nearby with millions of dollars of aid money that Western officials declare is a hopeful sign for Afghanistan’s future.
The bombed-out Soviet-era compound where bin Laden lived holds reminders of Afghanistan’s violent past and present, however.
Tarnak farm was Osama bin Laden’s main Afghan residence during much of the late 1990s.
From there he oversaw al-Qaeda’s plot to fly hijacked airliners into the World Trade Centre and Pentagon in an attack that killed more than 2,500 people.
The area is still unsafe. When The Daily Telegraph visited Tarnak in an American military convoy, militants fired a rocket-propelled grenade that glanced off one vehicle’s turret and detonated 40 yards away.
The turret gunner escaped with splinters of glass embedded in his face and concussion.
Visitors to the farm are warned not to try the scaling wall where trainee jihadists once clambered. The previous time American soldiers had visited, it had been booby-trapped with an anti-personnel mine.
Nearby is a barbed wire frame and the cut-off metal stumps of monkey bars where apprentice fighters once crawled and swung for physical training.
Bin Laden was already well known to the CIA when he arrived at Tarnak with a wife and his entourage as a guest of the Taliban.
He had yet to approve the September 11 operation but American intelligence officers had become increasingly concerned over his links to terrorists planning to attack the US.
A bin Laden tracking unit had been set up a year previously and plans to seize him were discussed.
Tarnak’s collection of 80-odd sheds, mud huts and offices provided a perfect base for the Saudi extremist when he arrived in May 1997.
From there he toured his other camps across Afghanistan as he trained thousands of fighters to help his Taliban hosts or wage jihad around the world.
But Tarnak also provided an opportunity for the CIA to spy on him.
Reawakening Afghan contacts from the anti-Soviet resistance, the bin Laden unit meticulously mapped out Tarnak to find where bin Laden slept and it planned a raid to capture him.
The plan was refined and rehearsed from late 1997 to 1998 until it was decided that a raiding party of about 30 armed tribesmen would subdue the guards and seize the al-Qaeda leader as he slept.
They would hand him to another group who would transfer their captive to a desert landing strip where a waiting CIA plane would fly him to the Middle East.
However, after months of debate, senior CIA managers decided not to go ahead because of fears that the tribesmen were not up to the task and innocent civilians would be killed.
Unknown to them they would have no better chance to seize him until more than 10 years later when he was finally cornered at his compound in Pakistan.
The United States government commission into the September 11 attacks later concluded: “No capture plan before 9/11 ever again attained the same level of detail and preparation.
“The tribals’ reported readiness to act diminished. And bin Laden’s security precautions and defences became more elaborate and formidable.”
Al-Qaeda struck in August 1998, killing 12 Americans and 200 others in bombings at two US embassies in East Africa.
The bin Laden unit continued to suggest opportunities to capture or kill their target while growing frustrated at the lack of authorisation from senior ranks worried about civilian deaths.
Michael Scheuer, who led the unit at the time, told The Daily Telegraph earlier this year that it had at least eight further opportunities to kill bin Laden, several around Kandahar, in the following months.
“I’m not saying it would have been simple to take care of the problem, but it got progressively harder when we didn’t take those opportunities. One 50 cent round could have put us all out of our agony,” he said.
Another opportunity presented itself in mid-2000 when the CIA and Pentagon ran a joint mission to fly unmanned Predator drones over bin Laden’s camps looking for him. The first flight over Tarnak saw a tall figure in white robes surrounded by bodyguards who was identified as bin Laden.
Officials again debated a strike. Analysts tried to calculate which buildings would collapse and how many civilians would die in a missile attack.
The plan was shelved again. In the end it was only after September 11 that Tarnak was targeted in the US campaign to drive out the Taliban. By then bin Laden was long gone.
Andrew Haviland, the senior State Department official in southern Afghanistan, said: “Working to bring peace and stability to the part of Afghanistan where the Taliban took root and al-Qaeda hatched plans for 9/11 is a great responsibility that is full of risks and challenges.
Not all of our efforts are received in the same positive spirit they are given. Nonetheless, the signs of progress we see every day give us hope.”
www.afghanistannewscenter.com
KABUL, Sept. 5 (Xinhua) -- Five civilians were killed Monday afternoon when their vehicle ran over an anti-vehicle mine in Qaisar district of Faryab province, Interior Ministry said in a statement.
"Today at 12:45 p.m. local time, an anti-vehicle mine which was placed by enemies of peace and stability hit a civilian vehicle in Ghora region, Shakh village, Qaisar district of Faryab province. As a result, five civilians were martyred," said the statement. Faryab province's Maimana is some 425 km northwest of capital city of Kabul.
The brief statement blamed the enemies of peace, a term often used by Afghan officials referring to Taliban insurgents.
However, the militants group has yet to make comments.
Taliban militants have been largely relying on roadside bombing and suicide attacks in fighting Afghan security force and NATO-led troops based in Afghanistan, often causing civilian casualties.
A total of 1,462 Afghan civilians were killed in the first half of 2011, a 15 percent rise over the same period of 2010, according to the UN mid-year report released in Kabul on July 14.
Afghan president to announce second phase of security transition: NATO
KABUL, Sept. 5 (Xinhua) -- Afghan President Hamid Karzai is to announce in coming weeks the second areas where Afghan National Security forces (ANSF) will take over full control from NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), a NATO spokesman said on Monday.
"The NATO Senior Civilian Representative, Simon Gass along with ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) is working in partnership with the Afghan Transition Coordination Commission, under the chairmanship of Dr. Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai, to determine the next areas suitable for transition," Christopher Chambers the NATO's civilian spokesman in Afghanistan told reporters at a joint press conference with ISAF spokesman Brigadier General Carsten Jacobson here.
In about two weeks, the Joint Afghan NATO Transition Board, co- chaired by Dr. Ahmadzai, ambassador Gass and the ISAF commander General John Allen will make their recommendations to President Karzai and the Afghan cabinet of ministers, Chambers added. "An announcement by President Karzai for the second group of areas for transition to Afghan security forces is expected to be made later this month or early in October," he asserted.
Afghan forces have taken the full control of seven areas including three provinces in the first phase of the process late on July.
The transition of security responsibility from over 140,000- strong NATO-led ISAF forces with nearly 100,000 of them Americans begun on July this year and runs to 2014 when Afghanistan is due to take over the full leadership of its own security.
According to President Barack Obama's plan, 10,000 troops will be pulled out from the insurgency-hit Afghanistan by year end, and a total of 33,000 troops will be out by next summer. "With transition, NATO and ISAF's role will change to one of support and training. The mission may change, but the commitment to the peace and security of Afghanistan will remain unwavering," Chambers added. "At the end of August, approximately 170,000 Afghan National Army, 135,000 Afghan National Police and 7,700 Afghan Local Police had completed their training. We are well in plan, actually ahead of plan, to complete the training of 353,000 Afghan National Security Forces personnel by November 2012," said ISAF spokesman Jacobson in the same press conference.
Bodies of missing Germans found in Afghanistan
September 05, 2011 By Matiullah Mati, CNN
The bodies of two Germans who went missing in Afghanistan last month have been found, officials said.
Roshan Khalid, the spokeswoman for the governor of Parwan province, said the bodies were found Monday in the Dasht-e-Khon village in the province.
The pair had been shot and killed, Khalid said blaming the deaths on nomads.
The German foreign ministry would not confirm the deaths, with a spokesman saying his office is "tracking all information."
For its part, the Taliban said it did not know of the abduction or the killing, saying it was not responsible.
The two were reported missing in late August, with the German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle saying at the time it was possible "they have become victims of a kidnapping."
Westerwelle had declined to provide more information on the identities of the two Germans.
Khalid on Monday said the Germans worked for a non-governmental organization and had come to Salang Pass in the province to mountain-climb.
The village where their bodies were found is about three hours from Salang Pass.
A team was headed to the village Monday to retrieve the bodies, Khalid said.
Pakistan Captures Senior al-Qaida Leader
VOA News September 5, 2011
Pakistan's military said it has arrested a senior al-Qaida official and two other members of the terrorist group in an operation assisted by U.S. intelligence agencies.
An army statement identified the senior detainee as Younis al-Mauritani, who it said had been tasked by Osama bin Laden with targeting economic interests in the United States, Europe and Australia. The other two detainees were not identified.
The military said the operation took place in the southern city of Quetta but did not specify when.
Pakistan has been under intense pressure from the United States to crack down harder on al-Qaida since U.S. special forces found bin Laden in a Pakistani town in May and killed him.
The secret operation targeting bin Laden severely strained ties between Pakistan and the United States, raising questions in Washington over whether Pakistan's intelligence agencies knew that the al-Qaida leader was living in the country.
Some information for this report was provided by AP, AFP and Reuters.
Special forces step up secret Afghanistan attacks
The Age By Rafael Epstein September 5, 2011
AUSTRALIAN special forces in southern Afghanistan are stepping up their involvement in controversial secret ground attacks and drone strike missions aimed at killing key Taliban insurgent suspects.
Their commander, Major-General Peter ''Gus'' Gilmore, confirmed his senior officers had used missiles, fired from unmanned US aircraft, and defended his soldiers' ''capture-or-kill'' operations.
''Sometimes it will be an aerial strike, sometimes it will be committing a ground force, sometimes it will be, to be patient and wait,'' he said in an interview with The Age.
The drone strikes are dubbed ''Kill TV'' or ''Taliban TV'' because soldiers watch live video feeds of bombs and missiles detonating, with one source admitting it is uncomfortable viewing. ''You can see everything,'' he said.
General Gilmore commands soldiers from the secretive commando and SAS regiments, who take part in the NATO campaign targeting insurgency leaders.
NATO special forces - including Australians - have tripled their activities, with 1879 missions and 916 ''targets'' killed or captured so far this year. In 2009, there were 675 missions with 306 adversaries killed or captured, according to figures recently released.
In a review of one disputed US drone strike, Kate Clark from the Afghanistan Analysts Network said there were ''systemic concerns'' over the intelligence used, and inquiries into casualties do not give ''due attention to existing alternative accounts'' from locals.
The ABC's Four Corners program tonight says it has documented several incidents in which it claims Australian soldiers targeted the wrong people and civilians were killed.
General Gilmore has not seen the ABC report but has backed his soldiers. "When they are on the ground, by themselves, and they have to make that split-second decision, cascading through their mind is this long line of training," he says.
"I don't worry because I have huge trust in our training and the judgment of the guys."
Critics of the Australian Defence Force and NATO want more details on the soldiers' rules of engagement and intelligence processes.
''If the ADF special forces believe that they are in full compliance with international law, the onus is on them to demonstrate that fact,'' said the former UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Killing, Philip Alston.
''And the risks that follow from such a carte blanche [secrecy] are not hard to see.''
The Age has been told the details of one drone strike, which has not been referenced on the ADF's website.
In 2008, an Australian special forces commanding officer ordered a strike on an insurgent leader and four armed men, seen planting a home-made bomb or IED 20 to 30 kilometres from the Australian base in Oruzgan province.
Final permission from the NATO command in Kandahar was rescinded several times as the insurgents' vehicles passed hamlets and small compounds where the risk to civilians was considered too great.
The strike was finally authorised when the Afghans stopped moving - ''they were having a smoko'', according to one source.
Australian soldiers watched as the first weapon appeared to kill four of the men. The fifth man was killed with a second strike, after he was seen injured by the initial attack.
A warplane from another country was also involved,
but did not fire any weapons.
"The angst we go through with every single activity that may involve targeting or death, it is unprecedented," one soldier said.
The US can have more than 50 such aircraft in the skies above Afghanistan at any one time. The Predator and more advanced Reaper drones can drop as many as two 225 kilogram laser-guided bombs and fire up to four Hellfire missiles from 12 kilometres away.
The $28 million aircraft fly for up to 18 hours without refuelling, controlled by pilots on the US mainland and they are maintained in Afghanistan by private contractors.
Sources say the technology helps the military avoid civilian casualties, with vision from the drones analysed for hours and sometimes days to confirm the target.
Classified software is also used to predict the size and strength of the blast. Personnel on the ground sometimes help aid the drones' accuracy by placing devices in vehicles and on buildings.
Afterwards, video of locals rushing to the blast site is analysed, and mobile phone calls and emails are intercepted, to assess who was killed.
The ADF says it won't release detailed rules of engagement, methods used to compile target lists, or details of drone strikes.
''International laws explicitly and implicitly require a significant degree of transparency,'' said Philip Alston, now a professor at New York University. He said while the military did not need to reveal all details, ''without transparency there can be no accountability''.
What Do Afghans Know About 9/11?
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty September 5, 2011
KABUL -- In America, it's difficult to find anyone who doesn't know precisely where they were on 9/11.
Not so in Afghanistan. There, many people never heard the news of those coordinated attacks a decade ago, or, if they did, had little sense that it would dramatically change their world.
That change came 26 days later, when the U.S. invoked the self-defense clause of NATO's charter and led a military intervention in Afghanistan.
That campaign, starting October 7, 2001, first toppled the hard-line Taliban regime then brought more than 100,000 foreign soldiers to Afghanistan in a continuing effort to stabilize the country.
So perhaps it should be no surprise that Americans and Afghans tend to think of 9/11 differently.
While Americans see 9/11 as the reason U.S. forces deployed to Afghanistan, many Afghans see it as only part of a larger story. And that larger story, as correspondents quickly find out, can take many different and even bizarre forms, depending on who you talk to.
"I was in Peshawar [in neighboring Pakistan] when I heard that in America they had attacked skyscrapers," says one man in Wardak Province, southwest of the Afghan capital, Kabul. "I saw it on television and heard about it on the radio. What can I say? You know what happened next. The world came to Afghanistan because they said the Taliban and the Muslim Brotherhood attacked the buildings. But the Muslims don't accept that and think the Americans did it themselves."
Questions Abound
The man, who does not give his name, is sitting along the main highway that links Wardak Province to Kabul, near a truck stop -- a place where drivers rest, cargo is offloaded for local distribution, and he ekes out a living as a small shopkeeper.
He says he is one of the hundreds of thousands of people who were living as refugees in Pakistan at the time of the attacks and, following the toppling of the Taliban, returned to Afghanistan to build a new life.
But while he welcomes the toppling of the Taliban, which ruled with an extreme interpretation of Islam and an iron fist, he does not see the international presence in Afghanistan as either justified by 9/11 or in the interest of the Afghans themselves.
And he suggests ulterior motives. "It had a negative effect," the man says, "because many kafir [non-Muslim] countries came to Afghanistan and maybe some Muslims, too, because Turkey also came, and now you see the result. There is no work."
He goes on to question the thoroughness of the international forces' commitment to rooting out the Taliban.
"If I say to you that during the Taliban security was OK, you should accept that; but now you see in Kabul there are lots of warlords," he says. "I am not pro-Taliban, but I ask the Americans and others why they left the Taliban in power in some places such as Helmand Province instead of wiping them all out."
In Afghanistan, there is a common conspiracy theory that 9/11 was a pretext for the United States to invade the country and that U.S. forces do not destroy the Taliban because Washington needs an ongoing justification for occupation. This man does not, or cannot, say what the foreigners want in Afghanistan; but any notion they are here to help is outweighed by the continuing insecurity and lack of economic opportunities.
If America really wanted the war to end in Afghanistan, he says, it would give work to the people with big projects like dams and irrigation systems. Then, he says, the Taliban would not be able to make a comeback and people wouldn't go over to their side.
'What's The Sense?'
It would be easier to ignore such a string of complaints and hints of conspiracy theories if they were not so widespread. Stop at virtually any roadside resting place, north, south, or east of Kabul, and there is more of the same.
At a truck stop in Logar Province, directly south of the capital, Jan Mohammed can't remember where he was on 9/11. What he thinks about it is heavily influenced by all that has followed.
"I don't know where I was during this attack because I was working as a laborer in Islamabad [Pakistan], but later I saw it on television," Jan Mohammed says. "It brought us nothing good, everything is against us and we have lost a lot. The American and international forces came and as a result we lost a lot of relatives and friends in the war. Every day tens of our people die, while the international forces have brought nothing good for us, including any work."
For him, the international force's efforts would be justifiable if they brought factories, electricity, water, and security. But without any of those things in sight where he lives, his answer to our question about what he knows about 9/11 and the reasons foreign forces are here is simply to pose a question of his own: "In one direction, there is fighting; in another, martyrs; in another, killing; in another, roadblocks and searches. What's the sense of it?"
Nearby, another man, Nurulla, is waiting along with Jan Mohammed and dozens of others for the chance of an odd job loading or unloading cargo onto the passing trucks. The truck stop is the only economic hub for miles around and looks busy as arriving and departing vehicles kick up huge clouds of dust over the road. But there are more men here than jobs and many will go home empty-handed.
Manipulated Youth
Nurulla says he remembers 9/11 but it seems like a long, long time ago.
"We saw on television they attacked the Twin Towers. I forget where I was at that time," Nurulla says. "Ever since I was old enough to notice I have a right hand and a left hand, we have been fighting. I have adapted to it, but we are tired of this war and even more tired of having no work. These days, when you look for work even as a day laborer you can't find it. So we stand close to the highway and sometimes load the cars."
Does anybody know in detail what happened on 9/11 and feel like the war in Afghanistan is part of a larger global struggle against a common enemy: terrorism?
It takes some looking to find such a person, but finally we do meet him at a roadside market north of Kabul, in Kapisa Province.
"My information about 9/11 is that an airplane controlled by Al-Qaeda hit a building in America and a lot of people were killed," Abdulrahim says. "After that, America and the world felt they should do something to destroy Al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups active in the world. They came to Afghanistan to find the root of the problem and remove it."
Abdulrahim, who is a shopkeeper, is the kind of person the international forces in Afghanistan need to explain their presence if they are to succeed in marginalizing the Taliban and, along with Afghan forces, secure the country. So, we ask what it is that makes him such a supporter of the new order when so many others are filled with doubts.
The reason, he says, is the suicide bombings.
"In Kapisa Province, we have suicide attacks and we have lost several close friends. We condemn suicide attacks. According to Shari'a, too, this is wrong," Abdulrahim says. "Those who organize them are misusing the young generation and misleading them with evil ideas. The suicide attacks kill innocent people and we hear of them almost every day. Our wish is for the American and other international forces to destroy the bases of these groups. We know there is a high cost, but we support that."
For him, the suicide bombings are the daily echoes of 9/11 and the common link between what happened in New York and Washington 10 years ago and what is happening in Afghanistan today.
Not everybody hears the echoes that way. But for those who do, it is a convincing argument for trying to root out terrorism before foreign forces withdraw and Afghanistan is on its own.
That date is now set to come in three more years.
In July, the United States withdrew the first of some 10,000 troops due to leave the country this year, with all combat troops to be out by 2014. Washington's NATO partners are following a similar timetable.
interviews conducted by RFE/RL Radio Free Afghanistan correspondent Sayaed Jan Sabawoon; with additional reporting by Radio Free Afghanistan correspondent Zarif Nazar in Prague; written by RFE/RL correspondent Charles Recknagel in Prague
Another Sept. 11 terrorist attack "no longer possible": EU official
BRUSSELS, Sept. 5 (Xinhua) -- Terrorist attacks similar to those that struck New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001, are "probably no longer possible," European Union (EU) counter-terrorism coordinator Gilles de Kerchove said on Monday.
"I think we can say today that an attack of the scale and the sophistication that we once had on September 11 probably is no longer possible," he told reporters at a news conference for the 10th anniversary of the attacks.
However, he also stressed "That doesn't mean we are completely out of threat."
He said that al-Qaida, the terrorist group that allegedly masterminded the Sept. 11 attacks, had been significantly weakened by the striking campaigns in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which led to the death of its leader Osama bin Laden this year.
Kerchove warned that terrorist threat today is "more complex and diverse", referring to remnants of al-Qaida and terrorist groups in the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa.
In the last decade, international cooperation on fighting against terrorism has been strengthened by sharing data, collaborating in the fields of police and judiciary etc., Kerchove said, adding mechanisms and institutions within EU have been established for counter-terrorism.
"Overall, we are much better equipped today that we were 10 years ago," he said.
In addition, Kerchove said it was very important that terrorists should be brought to justice, rather than imprisoned or killed without trail.
Why al Qaeda's still a threat in Afghanistan
CBS.com By Jere Van Dyk September 5, 2011
On Sept. 20, 2001, President George W. Bush told Congress, "Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but... It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated."
On Aug. 19, 2011, Marc Grossman, President Obama's special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, told Radio Free Europe, "The job President Obama has given us is to deter, deny, and defeat al Qaeda in Afghanistan. I think we're well on the way to doing that."
Ten years after the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington, does al Qaeda in Afghanistan or Pakistan still pose a threat to the U.S.?
9/11: Ten years later
In October 1981, I went as a young journalist to Peshawar, Pakistan, to meet the leaders of the Mujahideen - America's allies in the war against the Soviet Union - and to live with their men in Afghanistan.
I met Gulbadeen Hekmatyier, Yunus Khalis, and other leaders. I liked Khalis and went with his men into the tribal areas and hiked up the mountains into Afghanistan to the bombed, baked-mud compound of Jalaluddin Haqqani, a Mujahideen commander.
It was at a place called Shi-e-Khot. Haqqani gave me a plate of honey to go with my tea.
An Egyptian Army major came to stay with us. He hated me because I was American. He was arrogant and the Afghans didn't like him, but he seemed to have power over Haqqani, and they deferred to him. Haqqani allowed him to fire a surface to air missile. He missed his target, a Soviet helicopter, and the Afghans laughed behind his back. I realized years later that the Egyptian major was the beginning of al Qaeda's influence in Afghanistan.
According to the 9/11 Commission, from 1996 until Sept. 11, 2001, between 10,000 and 20,000 foreign fighters came to Afghanistan and trained in camps run by al Qaeda. Al Qaeda's camps were mostly in Haqqani territory.
Today, Haqqani is the patriarch of the Haqqani Network, the most lethal insurgent group in Afghanistan. He was once a lowly mullah who ministered in a small baked-mud mosque outside of Khost. Today, his giant white marble mosque with turquoise minarets looms over Khost like a cathedral over a village in France or Spain.
In 1984, the Mujahideen, under Pakistani tutelage, formed the Afghan Mujahideen government-in-exile in Peshawar. A few months later, Pakistan and the U.S. brought the government to the U.S. to present its credentials to the U.N. and to meet with President Reagan. I sat in a hotel room in New York with Hekmatyier, president of the government.
A call came from the State Department. "Tell Mr. Hekmatyier it's confirmed that he and other members of his government will meet with President Reagan in the Oval Office," said the caller. He gave a date and time. I told Hekmatyier.
"I can't do that," he said softly. I told the State Department official. He screamed at me on the phone. "Who does he think he is?"
He knew who he was, an ambitious, ruthless man whose Mujahideen fired on other Mujahideen as well as the Russians. He was a guest in the U.S. and had the gall, and, I noted, the courage, to say no to the most powerful man in the world, who was providing millions of dollars in arms and ammunition, sent through Pakistan's ISI military intelligence agency, to him.
In 2007, he told Pakistan's Geo television that his men helped bin Laden escape from Tora Bora, but said he had no links to al Qaeda today. He is based in Chitral, Pakistan, and is still fighting the infidel, foreign invaders, 35 years later.
In December 2006, I disguised myself as a Pashtun and went up into the mountains of Khost Province, along the Afghan-Pakistani border. I realized I had been here before, with Haqqani's men. Nothing had changed, except now I was the enemy.
My guide pointed east, toward Pakistan. "Jalaluddin is over there," he said softly. "The Taliban come across through that valley."
I wanted to see Haqqani again, and find out about al Qaeda. I spent months traveling, off and on, along both sides of the border. Tribal leaders blamed bin Laden for "burning their houses" - the destruction of Afghanistan. Others said he was a good Muslim. No one said he could hide him for longer than a day or two. He was too big, too important.
In November 2007, I sat in a mountain village across from a Taliban commander. Why was he fighting?
"We are fighting jihad," he said. Who supported him? "Pakistan," he replied. "We live in the mountains, but for training we go to Pakistan. Sometimes the army comes and trains us."
A few of his men stood in the doorway, among them a thin young man wearing a red and white kefeyyah, like men wore in the Middle East. He was al Qaeda. I asked who was in charge, the Taliban or al Qaeda.
"We are," said the commander. "Al Qaeda is also fighting for Islam, and they are our friends."
U.S. officials say there are no more than 50 al Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan. In February 2008, I was kidnapped in Pakistan by the Taliban.
"Not a shot would be fired in Afghanistan without Pakistan's approval," my jailer told me. He told me there were many al Qaeda fighters there. They married local women.
I believe, based upon my experiences over a period of 30 years in the region, that Hekmatyier and Haqqani are tied to the Pakistani government. Haqqani especially is still tied to al Qaeda.
Ex-Militant: Pakistan supports terror groups U.S. official: Pakistan still tips off militants Why won't Pakistan dump the Islamists?
Al Qaeda is comprised of foreigners living in an alien land, and cannot operate independently. The question is, after the death of bin Laden, will those who know where al-Zawahiri is hiding, allow him to try to attack the U.S.?
The threat is still very much there, but I think an attack, if it comes, will originate in Yemen, or Europe.
Anger After a Raid Kills a Wealthy Afghan With a Murky Past
New York Times By RAY RIVERA September 4, 2011
KABUL, Afghanistan - In life and death, Sabar Lal’s story was riddled with conflicting narratives.
After the fall of the Taliban government in 2001, he claimed to be on the side of the Americans in the hunt for Al Qaeda, but United States troops accused him of helping Osama bin Laden and his allies flee to Pakistan.
After five years in the American detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, he returned to Afghanistan in 2007 and built a new life with his two wives and nine children. They lived comfortably in a wealthy section of Jalalabad, one of the safer big cities in the country.
But suspicions lingered, and on Friday, coalition and Afghan forces killed him in a night raid at his residence, acting on intelligence that he had been using his wealth to help lead and finance insurgent attacks in the Pech Valley in Kunar, the northeastern province where he grew up.
His death has angered members of the Afghanistan High Peace Council, who are responsible for reconciliation efforts with militans. Council members say that just days earlier they had won a promise from coalition forces to stop bothering Mr. Lal after they had detained him last month. NATO officials insist they had not detained him.
These conflicting details, among many others, add to the puzzle of Mr. Lal’s life before and after Guantánamo. His killing comes as the Peace Council, appointed by President Hamid Karzai, is struggling to persuade Taliban fighters to lay down their arms and rejoin society. Some council members worried Sunday that NATO’s raid on Mr. Lal’s compound could further undermine those efforts.
“It really hurts the prestige of the Peace Council among the people of Afghanistan,” said Haji Deen Muhammad, a council member. “More importantly, those Taliban members who were released through our process are going to have big concerns that this will happen to them.”
Council members said NATO and Afghan forces detained Mr. Lal, who was in his late 40s, in an operation early last month, then turned him over to the National Directorate of Security, Afghanistan’s main intelligence agency. But after assurances from Afghan intelligence officials and high-level government officials that he did not pose a threat, the council, working closely with its NATO counterparts, obtained his release, said Farhadullah Farhad, the council’s deputy chief executive officer.
“Everybody was involved,” he said, adding, “They would not have released him unless he was proven innocent.”
Lt. Col. Jimmie E. Cummings Jr., a spokesman for the NATO-led military coalition, said that until the operation that killed Mr. Lal, NATO forces had never “detained him or had him in custody.” Officials with the National Directorate of Security did not respond to questions on Sunday.
White House officials have long worried about Guantánamo detainees reverting to terrorism after their release. More than 600 prisoners have been released or transferred to prisons elsewhere since 2002, a Defense Department spokeswoman said Sunday. Last year, the Obama administration told Congress that 117 former detainees were confirmed or suspected of turning to terrorist activity. The prison still holds 171 detainees.
Mr. Lal, who was identified in Guantánamo records as Sabar Lal Melma, was viewed by officials there as someone more committed to self-interest than to any cause. He had come from a wealthy family in Kunar Province and had ties to prominent tribal elders. Through years of fighting against the Soviets in the late 1980s and later against the Taliban, he knew the treacherous mountain terrain along the Pakistan border intimately, information valued by American forces searching for Qaeda crossing routes.
After the Taliban’s fall in late 2001, he was given the rank of brigadier general and put in charge of 600 border security troops in Kunar.
But as Americans searched for Bin Laden in the mountainous Tora Bora region south of Kunar, they suspected Mr. Lal of orchestrating rocket attacks against American forces. They also suspected that he and a prominent tribal elder were helping Arab fighters, perhaps even Bin Laden himself, escape to Pakistan.
In August 2002, American troops arrested Mr. Lal and the elder, Haji Rohullah Wakil, along with 10 other associates after a meeting with United States military officials in Asadabad. They were transferred to Guantánamo Bay later that year. In a 2005 assessment, Guantánamo officials said that Mr. Lal “seems to side with any group or organization that is willing to pay or reward him for his cooperation, from coalition forces to Arabs fleeing Afghanistan.”
At a military tribunal during his detention at Guantánamo, Mr. Lal denied the allegations. When the Americans arrived, he said, according to a transcript, “I joined them, I ate with them, I went places with them. I helped them.”
Guantánamo officials later dropped the allegation that he helped Bin Laden escape, and deemed him a “medium risk.” In September 2007, they transferred him to Afghan custody. The Afghan government released him about 20 days later.
Mr. Wakil, who was released the next year, said in an interview on Sunday that Mr. Lal always felt he had been wrongly imprisoned. “We all think we had been imprisoned unjustly,” Mr. Wakil said.
Mr. Lal moved to Jalalabad with his family shortly after his release, and ran a small but lucrative real estate business.
“He was living there peacefully with no link to anyone,” Mr. Wakil said.
But suspicions continued. NATO officials said in a statement after the raid that Mr. Lal was responsible for attacks in the Pech District and was “a key affiliate of the Al Qaeda network,” tied to senior members of the group throughout Kunar Province and Pakistan.
Mr. Muhammad, the Peace Council member, questioned why a night raid was even necessary when Mr. Lal was living in the middle of a peaceful city where people knew him. “I don’t know what kind of justice it is to kill someone when it would have been very easy to detain him if they had any suspicion that he was linked to insurgents,” he said.
Among the people NATO detained at Mr. Lal’s home that night, Mr. Wakil said, was another former Guantánamo prisoner, Said Amir Jan, also known as Ghorzang.
Mr. Wakil also appears to have remained under suspicion after his release from Guantánamo. In a 2009 Pentagon report, he was listed as one of 47 former detainees suspected of reverting or turning to terrorist activity.
It is unknown if Mr. Lal was on the list because not all the names were published.
Now, like so many aspects of his life, even the details of his death are in dispute. NATO said in a statement that Mr. Lal was killed after he ran out of the home wielding an assault rifle as they tried to arrest him.
But a night watchman named Rahmatullah, who like many Afghans goes by one name, said he was at the residence the night of the raid and gave a different account.
He said coalition forces stormed the compound, handcuffed and blindfolded Mr. Lal and his other guests, then took Mr. Lal out to a veranda. About 20 minutes later, Mr. Rahmatullah said, “we heard gunshots.”
Sangar Rahimi and Abdul Waheed Wafa contributed reporting from Kabul, and an employee of the New York Times from Jalalabad.
9/11: HQ where bin Laden plotted atrocities
CIA could have seized al-Qaeda leader from his Afghanistan farm but chance was spurned and 9/11 plans took shape, writes Ben Farmer in Kandahar
Telegraph.co.uk By Ben Farmer 05 Sep 2011
Kandahar - The walled Tarnak farm, sitting on a stark desert plain on the edge of Kandahar airfield, is all but deserted and the only life is a police guard post in one corner.
Yet a decade ago officials at Washington’s highest levels spent days poring over photographs of these same buildings trying to decipher every move of their main resident — Osama bin Laden.
The farm was watched for four years — scrutinised and mapped in a story of missed chances that ended in tragedy on September 11 2001.
Tarnak now has a new agricultural research station built nearby with millions of dollars of aid money that Western officials declare is a hopeful sign for Afghanistan’s future.
The bombed-out Soviet-era compound where bin Laden lived holds reminders of Afghanistan’s violent past and present, however.
Tarnak farm was Osama bin Laden’s main Afghan residence during much of the late 1990s.
From there he oversaw al-Qaeda’s plot to fly hijacked airliners into the World Trade Centre and Pentagon in an attack that killed more than 2,500 people.
The area is still unsafe. When The Daily Telegraph visited Tarnak in an American military convoy, militants fired a rocket-propelled grenade that glanced off one vehicle’s turret and detonated 40 yards away.
The turret gunner escaped with splinters of glass embedded in his face and concussion.
Visitors to the farm are warned not to try the scaling wall where trainee jihadists once clambered. The previous time American soldiers had visited, it had been booby-trapped with an anti-personnel mine.
Nearby is a barbed wire frame and the cut-off metal stumps of monkey bars where apprentice fighters once crawled and swung for physical training.
Bin Laden was already well known to the CIA when he arrived at Tarnak with a wife and his entourage as a guest of the Taliban.
He had yet to approve the September 11 operation but American intelligence officers had become increasingly concerned over his links to terrorists planning to attack the US.
A bin Laden tracking unit had been set up a year previously and plans to seize him were discussed.
Tarnak’s collection of 80-odd sheds, mud huts and offices provided a perfect base for the Saudi extremist when he arrived in May 1997.
From there he toured his other camps across Afghanistan as he trained thousands of fighters to help his Taliban hosts or wage jihad around the world.
But Tarnak also provided an opportunity for the CIA to spy on him.
Reawakening Afghan contacts from the anti-Soviet resistance, the bin Laden unit meticulously mapped out Tarnak to find where bin Laden slept and it planned a raid to capture him.
The plan was refined and rehearsed from late 1997 to 1998 until it was decided that a raiding party of about 30 armed tribesmen would subdue the guards and seize the al-Qaeda leader as he slept.
They would hand him to another group who would transfer their captive to a desert landing strip where a waiting CIA plane would fly him to the Middle East.
However, after months of debate, senior CIA managers decided not to go ahead because of fears that the tribesmen were not up to the task and innocent civilians would be killed.
Unknown to them they would have no better chance to seize him until more than 10 years later when he was finally cornered at his compound in Pakistan.
The United States government commission into the September 11 attacks later concluded: “No capture plan before 9/11 ever again attained the same level of detail and preparation.
“The tribals’ reported readiness to act diminished. And bin Laden’s security precautions and defences became more elaborate and formidable.”
Al-Qaeda struck in August 1998, killing 12 Americans and 200 others in bombings at two US embassies in East Africa.
The bin Laden unit continued to suggest opportunities to capture or kill their target while growing frustrated at the lack of authorisation from senior ranks worried about civilian deaths.
Michael Scheuer, who led the unit at the time, told The Daily Telegraph earlier this year that it had at least eight further opportunities to kill bin Laden, several around Kandahar, in the following months.
“I’m not saying it would have been simple to take care of the problem, but it got progressively harder when we didn’t take those opportunities. One 50 cent round could have put us all out of our agony,” he said.
Another opportunity presented itself in mid-2000 when the CIA and Pentagon ran a joint mission to fly unmanned Predator drones over bin Laden’s camps looking for him. The first flight over Tarnak saw a tall figure in white robes surrounded by bodyguards who was identified as bin Laden.
Officials again debated a strike. Analysts tried to calculate which buildings would collapse and how many civilians would die in a missile attack.
The plan was shelved again. In the end it was only after September 11 that Tarnak was targeted in the US campaign to drive out the Taliban. By then bin Laden was long gone.
Andrew Haviland, the senior State Department official in southern Afghanistan, said: “Working to bring peace and stability to the part of Afghanistan where the Taliban took root and al-Qaeda hatched plans for 9/11 is a great responsibility that is full of risks and challenges.
Not all of our efforts are received in the same positive spirit they are given. Nonetheless, the signs of progress we see every day give us hope.”
www.afghanistannewscenter.com