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Afghanistan warns Pakistan about border fighting
By RAHIM FAIEZ - Associated Press
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Afghan defense officials warned Pakistan on Sunday to stop firing rockets and heavy artillery into the northeast of the country or the military will respond with force. Pakistan denied it was responsible.
In its strongest condemnation to date, the Afghan Defense Ministry accused the Pakistani army of firing more than 300 artillery rounds and rockets into Kunar and Nuristan provinces during the past five days.
The area is a haven for hardcore insurgent groups fighting in both Pakistan and Afghanistan. U.S.-led coalition forces have a light footprint in the area and the cross-border fighting highlights NATO's struggles to pacify the remote region. It also underscores the lack of cooperation between Afghanistan and Pakistan against their common foes.
The ministry said an unknown number of Afghan civilians have been killed by the shelling coming from Pakistani territory. Several houses and mosques have been destroyed and hundreds of people have been displaced from their homes, the ministry said.
"Once again, the Pakistani army started firing heavy artillery and rockets over innocent Afghan people from the other side of the Durand Line," the statement said, referring to the disputed 19th century demarcation between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Pakistan army spokesman Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas said he had asked security officials in the area of the reported shelling about the allegations and was waiting for a reply. He said those officials were surprised by the accusations since no activity had been reported in the area.
"I assume this is not correct news," said Abbas, in reference to the Afghan reports.
Pakistan complained earlier this summer that militants coming from Afghanistan killed at least 55 members of its security forces and tribal police and demanded that U.S. and Afghan forces do more to stem the flow of fighters.
Afghan defense officials said that according to their forces on the ground, more than 100 rockets or mortars rained down on the two provinces Saturday night.
"It's a clear attack on civilian residential areas," the ministry statement said.
"The Afghan Defense Ministry is strongly condemning the attack and is giving strong warnings that such violations (of sovereignty) will have their effect on the brotherly, friendly relations of two neighboring countries," the statement said. "There is no reason for continuing such attacks. The Pakistan government should know that Afghan National Army, with the support of the Afghan people, is ready to respond if such attacks continues."
Pakistan is also under heavy criticism from the United States.
The top U.S. military officer, Adm. Mike Mullen, last week accused Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency of supporting insurgents in planning and executing a 22-hour assault on the U.S. Embassy in Afghanistan on Sept. 13 as well as a truck bomb days earlier that wounded 77 American troops.
The insurgents, from the Haqqani network, are affiliated with the Taliban and al-Qaida. The group primarily operates in eastern Afghanistan and is often blamed for attacks in Kabul.
Senior Pakistani officials have lashed out against the allegations of support for the Haqqani network, accusing the U.S. of trying to make Pakistan a scapegoat for its troubled war in Afghanistan. The public confrontation has plunged the already troubled U.S.-Pakistan alliance to new lows.
Pakistan's leaders have shown no indication that they plan to act on renewed American demands to attack the Haqqani network in its main base in Pakistan, even at the risk of further conflict with Washington. The U.S. has given Pakistan billions of dollars in military and economic aid, but the relationship has been riven by mistrust.
Also in the east of Afghanistan, the U.S.-led coalition said two NATO service members were killed Sunday in separate roadside bombings, and a suicide bomber on a motorbike detonated explosives at a local police headquarters building, killing four people in Paktika province.
In the south, Afghan police shot and killed two men wearing explosives vests, foiling a planned suicide attack on a government building in Zabul province.
The deaths of two NATO service members raised to 442 the number of international troops killed in Afghanistan so far this year. The coalition did not disclose further details about their deaths.
In the capital, Kabul, President Hamid Karzai met with his national security team and appointed a panel of high-ranking officials, led by Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak, to investigate the assassination of former Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani, who headed the nation's peace council.
Karzai said Rabbani's death was a "big loss" and that greater security measures should be taken to protect top Afghan figures, including religious clerics and tribal leaders. Intelligence officials at the meeting said one person had been arrested in connection with the assassination and that authorities were close to ascertaining the details of the killing.
U.S. Should Put Pakistan on Notice After Kabul Embassy Attack, Graham Says
By Jeff Bliss and Heidi Przybyla - Sep 25, 2011
The U.S. may have to consider a military response to the government of Pakistan’s alleged support of a terrorist group that attacked the American embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham said.
“We need to put Pakistan on notice,” Graham, a member of the Senate Armed services Committee, said today on the “Fox News Sunday” program. “If they continue to embrace terrorism as a part of their national strategy, we’re going to have to put all options on the table, including defending our troops.”
Graham, a South Carolina Republican, said lawmakers would muster bipartisan support “to elevate our response” if needed. He didn’t specify what actions he would back.
Pakistan must stop providing safe havens for the Haqqani group, said David Plouffe, a White House senior adviser, on CNN’s “State of the Union.” U.S. and Afghan officials have said the network of militants, supported by Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s main spy agency, is behind a Sept. 13 assault on the U.S. embassy with rocket-propelled grenades.
In a statement, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani yesterday denied his government’s ties to the Haqqani group and said U.S. policy on Afghanistan shows “confusion and disarray.” The U.S., Afghanistan and Pakistan need to better coordinate action to fight terrorism, he said.
Graham said that Congress should reconsider its practice of approving a designated amount of aid for Pakistan. The administration is talking about whether to change its requests for aid to the country, Plouffe said.
‘Important Aim’
“Those discussions are happening between our foreign policy and national security teams,” he said. Severing the alleged connection between the Haqqanis and the Pakistan government is “going to be a very important aim for us in the coming period of time.”
The U.S. said in July it was withholding about $800 million in aid because of steps Pakistan took following the U.S. raid that killed al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden on May 2, creating difficulties between the two countries.
Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the armed services panel on Sept. 22 that the Haqqani network also conducted the June 28 attack at the Inter- Continental Hotel in Kabul.
The Haqqani group, based in eastern Afghanistan and the Pakistani region of Waziristan, has claimed responsibility or been blamed by the Afghan, U.S. and Indian governments for attacks on Kabul in the past three years against the Indian Embassy, government ministries and hotels where foreign diplomats or aid workers were living.
Legal Obstacle
There may be little the U.S. can do to halt Pakistan’s support for militants, according to Tom Lynch, a former special assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs who is now a research fellow for the Near East and South Asia at the National Defense University in Washington.
Given the fragility of Afghanistan, Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal and the dangers of a new confrontation with India, even the leverage the U.S. has is very difficult to use, he has said.
A legal obstacle to a military attack on the Haqqani organization inside Pakistan is the fact that the State Department has never designated it a Foreign Terrorist Organization. Three of its leaders have been identified as terrorists and 49 other groups have been named FTOs.
Pakistan Holds Special Military Meeting Amid US Tensions
VOA News September 25, 2011
Pakistan army chief General Ashfaq Kayani chaired a special meeting with his top commanders Sunday as an escalating war on words with the U.S. drags relations between the two nations to a new low.
Pakistani officials say the corps commanders met at the General Headquarters in Rawalpindi to review the “prevailing security situation” in the country.
The meeting follows scathing U.S. allegations that the Pakistani spy agency, the ISI, is assisting the militant Haqqani network attack U.S.-led international forces in neighboring Afghanistan.
The outgoing chairman of the U.S. Joint Chief of Staffs, Admiral Mike Mullen, told a Senate hearing last week that the Haqqani network acts as a “veritable arm” of the ISI, and its fighters planned and conducted this month's assault on the U.S. embassy in Kabul and on NATO bases in Afghanistan.
Pakistani officials have rejected the allegations as baseless, warning they are detrimental for regional peace efforts.
Speaking Sunday in Islamabad, Interior Minister Rehman Malik said the Haqqani network is not operating from Pakistan. He countered U.S. claims by alleging the network was established and trained by the American CIA with support from Pakistan to fight the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s.
Malik reiterated that Pakistan is cooperating with the U.S. in its fight against terrorism, and that he has ordered authorities to tighten border controls between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The U.S. and Pakistan are allies in the war against militants in Afghanistan. But amid the recent allegations Pakistan has warned the U.S. that it risks losing an ally.
A U.S. embassy statement Sunday says the head of U.S. Central Command, General James Mattis, met with Pakistani leaders and emphasized the need for persistent engagements among militaries of the U.S. Pakistan and other countries in the region.
A Pakistan army statement says a Pakistani representative in the talks, Khalid Shameem Wyne expressed concern about the “negative statements emanating” from Washington and stressed the need to address the irritants in the relationship which are “the result of an extremely complex situation.”
Pakistani PM calls back FM over U.S. charge
ISLAMABAD, Sept. 25 (Xinhua) -- Pakistani Prime Minister Syed Yusuf Raza Gilani on Sunday called back Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar, who is present at the UN General Assembly in New York, after Washington accused Islamabad of supporting Taliban- allied militants, official sources said.
U.S. top defense officials said Thursday the Haqqani network was supported by Pakistan's intelligence agency in carrying out the September 13 attack on the U.S. embassy in Kabul and the truck bomb attack on a military base in Maidan Wardak province in Afghanistan on September 11.
The White House urged Islamabad on Friday to break any link with the militant group and take strong and immediate action against this network on its soil.
Washington has threatened to take unilateral action against the Haqqani network in Pakistan if the authorities there failed to take action against the group.
Pakistan denied the U.S. charges with Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar warning that the U.S. could lose Pakistan as an ally.
The Prime Minister called several top politicians including the opposition leader Nawaz Sharif to ask for their support, a spokesman for the PM office said.
The Prime Minister invited leaders of various political parties to attend a national conference to brief them on security conditions in Pakistan and the situation in the region.
Almost all political leaders said they would back the government to meet every challenge.
US in 'disarray' in Afghanistan: Pakistani PM
AFP
Pakistan's prime minister has turned on the US over its allegations of links to the Haqqani terror network, saying the "blame game is self-defeating" and US policy in Afghanistan is in "disarray".
The two countries are key allies in the war against Islamist militants in Afghanistan, but their relationship is often troubled and plumbed new depths after the killing of Osama bin Laden in a covert US raid in Pakistan in May.
The latest row, with Washington accusing elements of the Pakistani state of supporting the Al-Qaeda-linked Haqqani network it blames for an attack on the US embassy in Kabul, has raised the tensions to an unprecedented level.
Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani said Saturday the US allegations would only benefit the militants, and that they "betray a confusion and policy disarray within the US establishment on the way forward in Afghanistan".
"We strongly reject assertions of complicity with the Haqqanis or of proxy war," he said in a policy statement issued by his office amid a growing rift with the United States.
"Blame game is self-defeating... It will only benefit the enemies of peace. Only terrorists and militants will gain from any fissures and divisions."
The White House demanded Friday that Pakistan "break any link they have" with the Haqqanis, a Taliban faction founded by a CIA asset turned Al-Qaeda ally.
A day earlier, top US military officer Admiral Mike Mullen directly accused Pakistan's intelligence service of supporting the network's attack on the embassy and a truck bombing on a NATO outpost.
The Haqqani network, which has a fighting force of at least 2,000 men, operates independently of the Taliban leadership but remains politically subservient and would fall behind any peace deal it negotiated.
It was founded by Jalaluddin Haqqani, a disciplined Afghan guerrilla leader bankrolled by the United States to fight Soviet troops in Afghanistan in the 1980s and now based with his family in Pakistan.
Haqqani allied himself to the Taliban after they took power in Kabul in 1996 and when American troops invaded Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks he took refuge in the Pakistani tribal district of North Waziristan.
With training bases in eastern Afghanistan, the network is close to Al-Qaeda, loyal to Mullah Omar, and targets US troops across the Afghan east, the southeast and within the capital Kabul.
Gilani's comments came after Pakistan's foreign minister Hina Rabbani Khar said Washington's humiliating public attack was "not acceptable" and warned the US stood to lose a vital ally.
The Pakistani premier said his country was not responsible for the security of foreign troops inside Afghanistan and it was itself a victim of terrorist attacks launched from Afghan soil.
"While there have been terrorist attacks in Kabul and Wardak, there have also been numerous attacks on Pakistan launched from sanctuaries and safe havens in Nooristan and Kunar in Afghanistan," he said
"It is as much the responsibility of the Afghan National Army, NATO and ISAF not to allow such cross-border militancy."
He said there was concern over the deterioration of the security situation in Afghanistan and called the recent attacks in Kabul "disquieting".
"We condemn these attacks," he said.
Insurgents besieged the US embassy and NATO headquarters in Kabul with rocket and gunfire for 19 hours earlier this month, leaving 15 people dead and turning the most secure district of the Afghan capital into a battle zone.
Gilani said given the sacrifices made by Pakistani security forces and citizens the "propaganda blitz against Pakistan is indeed most unfortunate".
"It vitiates the atmosphere and is counter productive. It tends to ignore the sacrifices by the people of Pakistan and negates all that we have endeavoured to achieve over the last so many years," he said.
More then 35,000 Pakistanis have been killed in the fight against terrorism and many more injured, Gilani said, adding that the US was well aware of the arrests and killings of a large number of Al-Qaeda operatives by Pakistan.
Meanwhile, US Centcom chief General James Mattis Saturday held security talks with Pakistani army chief Ashfaq Kayani, officials said.
"Matters related to security were discussed," a senior military official told AFP on condition of anonymity. No other details were available, but Pakistani officials said the meeting would help defuse the mounting tensions.
Afghanistan to probe Rabbani killing
(AFP)
KABUL — Afghan President Hamid Karzai Sunday appointed a team to investigate the assassination of peace envoy Burhanuddin Rabbani as officials insisted they were getting "closer to the truth" about his death.
Rabbani, chairman of Karzai's High Peace Council, was killed by a turban bomber who had purported to be a peace emissary from the Taliban leadership.
His death threatens fresh turmoil in Afghanistan, with experts saying it could lead his Tajik supporters -- who provided the bulk of resistance to the Taliban when they were in power -- to reject all efforts to talk peace.
Officials also revealed that last week they arrested a man who spoke to the killer on the phone the day before Rabbani's killing.
Police and other senior figures have blamed the Taliban for the attack, but unusually, the leaders of Afghanistan's ten-year insurgency have so far refused to comment on it.
The investigation will be led by Afghan defence minister Abdul Rahim Wardak, seen as close to Karzai, a statement from the presidential palace said.
The statement added: "As a result of actions taken to identify the elements behind Ustad (professor) Rabbani's assassination, an arrest has been made and information obtained from him is bringing us closer to the truth."
A government source speaking on condition of anonymity told AFP that the arrested man had spoken to the bomber the day before the attack.
The bomber, who was believed to be a trusted Taliban emissary, had left the official guesthouse where he was staying to speak to the man, the source said.
"When Esmatullah (the bomber) left the guesthouse he had a white hat but when he returned, he was wearing a turban and had new clothes. He had cleaned himself up," the source said.
"He joked with the workers of the guesthouse about his new clothes and turban, saying: 'I'm going for a very important meeting. I should look good.'"
The statement from the presidential palace also announced beefed-up security for senior figures in Afghanistan in the wake of Rabbani's killing.
Rabbani was buried in Kabul on Friday amid chaotic scenes with angry supporters chanting "Death to America, death to Pakistan, death to Karzai" and vowing to take to the streets to protest his killing.
Assassinations of Afghan Officials Were Plotted in Pakistan, Karzai's Office Says
TOLOnews.com Saturday, 24 September 2011
There is mounting evidence to suggest that the targeted assassinations of prominent Afghans in the past six months were plotted in Pakistan, deputy spokesman for President Karzai, Seyamak Herawi, said on Saturday.
"There is evidence with Afghans and with the United States that shows all attacks on Afghan leaders and elders, who have been martyred over the past six months, have been organised by special circles inside Pakistan," Herawi said. "Special individuals are deployed to Afghanistan and our influential [people] and elders are being killed one after another."
Memorial services for former President Rabbani were held across the country today. A service at the Presidential Palace was attended by high-ranking government officials and international diplomats.
At the service, Sebghatullah Mujadidi, former speaker of the Upper House of Parliament, accused Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency of being behind the death of Burhanuddin Rabbani, Karzai's special envoy who was tasked with brokering peace with the Taliban.
"Only foreigners, Pakistan and ISI are involved in it, nobody else," Mr Mujadidi said.
"For ten to twelve years I have been saying that the ISI is the cause of all miseries and insecurity in Afghanistan. Nobody accepted it. But now the entire world is saying that."
Professor Rabbani was assassinated at his home in Kabul on Tuesday by a suicide bomber pretending to be an important peace emissary from the Taliban leadership.
The Taliban denied responsibility for the attack.
Kabul residents angry, fearful after string of deadly attacks
In the Afghanistan capital, people speak out against insurgents, at Westerners whose presence makes targets of everyone nearby, and the Afghan government.
By Laura King, Los Angeles Times September 25, 2011
Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan - When the shooting started, the lunchtime crowd at Musa Burger scattered. The tea-seller abandoned his burning brazier. The kitchen worker dropped a half-peeled onion. The beggar woman in a faded blue burka scooped up her few tattered bank notes and ran.
Insurgents armed with rockets and heavy machine guns had taken over a half-finished high-rise on Kabul's busy Abdul Haq traffic circle, beginning a siege of the U.S. Embassy that would continue for 20 hours.
Scarcely a week later, this same small slice of urban landscape — which includes a gaudy wedding hall, a dimly lighted snooker parlor and a run-down car wash shadowed by a billboard for an energy drink called Hell — was already caught up in the next convulsion of violence. This time, it was a suicide bombing that killed a former Afghan president at his nearby home.
Kabul once considered itself relatively insulated from the violence that leapfrogs daily from one part of Afghanistan to another. But a series of attacks over the last four months has left many in the capital feeling vulnerable, jittery and angry — at the insurgents who seemingly strike at will, at Westerners whose presence makes targets of all those living here, and at their own government, which few consider capable of keeping them safe.
The growing violence in Kabul, the seat of government and symbolic heart of the country, poses a conundrum for the U.S. and its NATO allies. American officials blame the attacks on the Haqqani network, a Taliban offshoot based across the border in Pakistan. On Thursday they accused Pakistani intelligence agents of collusion in the embassy attack.
Overall, U.S. officials have consistently sought to play down the strategic importance of such attacks, saying they will not affect plans to hand over security responsibilities to Afghan forces in 2014 and wind down the Western combat mission.
But to Afghans who see their lives and livelihoods increasingly at risk, American assertions that such strikes are a sign of desperation on the insurgents' part ring hollow.
"It's like a drum that is beating faster and faster," said Amir Mohammed, who runs a small stand that sells paint sealant, decals and air freshener to car-wash clientele. "First one thing happens, and then another, and another. No one in the city feels safe anymore."
In addition to this month's strike on the U.S. Embassy and the adjacent NATO headquarters, targets since June have included a heavily guarded hilltop hotel, which was stormed by a squad of gunmen and bombers, and a well-fortified British cultural center, where frightened staffers holed up in a "safe room" during an hours-long insurgent assault last month.
Adding to the climate of fear were the brazen in-home assassinations of two senior government officials: Jan Mohammed Khan, a close aide to President Hamid Karzai who died July 17 in a bombing, and Burhanuddin Rabbani, a former Afghan president. Rabbani, Karzai's main negotiator with the Taliban, was killed Tuesday by a suicide bomber who hid explosives in his turban.
On Friday, a police checkpoint slowed passing traffic to a crawl as mourners streamed into the area to pay respects to Rabbani. Once again, the shops and businesses were shuttered, this time for three days of mourning.
U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker, a veteran diplomat who took up his post this summer, infuriated many in the capital when he declared that the Sept. 13 attack on the embassy launched from Abdul Haq circle was "not a very big deal." It was one of several strikes across Kabul that day in which 17 people were killed — all Afghans.
Crocker was speaking in terms of the larger insurgent threat to the U.S. diplomatic and military mission, but his phrasing rankled Afghan families who for hours could hear explosions and gunfire just outside their darkened homes.
"We were awake all night, astounded and frightened," said Ahmad Shoaib, 30, who lives with his extended family in a building within sight of the unfinished multistory structure taken over by the insurgents. "From our windows we could see the two sides exchanging fire, and hear the noise of fighting. The children were terrified."
Still, Shoaib counted himself lucky to be able to comfort his wife and 2-year-old son throughout the ordeal. Some family members were trapped elsewhere in the battle zone, unable to make their way home.
Pakistan has angrily rejected charges by Adm. Michael G. Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, that the Haqqanis are a "veritable arm" of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, or the ISI.
In Kabul, many fear that the rancorous U.S.-Pakistani dispute will result in even more strikes in the capital if Pakistan seeks to drive home the point that it will not be dictated to by Washington.
The gnawing uncertainty disrupts daily life; some people say anxiety is leading them to alter long-cherished routines.
One university professor has reluctantly stopped taking after-dinner strolls. Shoaib, the young father, says he is much more likely now to stay home with his family on days off, rather than considering an outing on a sunny early-autumn day.
Among capital residents, living close to any foreign installation is cause for extreme nervousness, even though such environs are likely to be heavily guarded. Civilians living nearby in ordinary homes, rather than those inside the fortified Western structures, are the most likely to be hurt or killed in an insurgent attack.
"We draw the fire meant for them," said Jamal Noori, who owns a building that was half-wrecked during an Aug. 19 assault on the British Council, which left nine people dead. "Wherever they are, that is where the danger is."
Back at Abdul Haq circle, the Dunya wedding hall was counting up its financial loss from a lavish wedding party with 1,500 guests that had to be canceled because of the embassy siege. Mirwais Khotak, who runs Musa Burger, gestured around his near-empty establishment. No one, he said, feels like lingering over lunch now.
"It affects us every day, wondering what comes next," said Mohammed Sabar Momand, proprietor of the snooker parlor next door. "Yet it all seems very familiar, as well. And maybe that is the most frightening thing."
A Brutal Afghan Clan Bedevils the U.S.
New York Times By MARK MAZZETTI, SCOTT SHANE and ALISSA J. RUBIN September 24, 2011
WASHINGTON - They are the Sopranos of the Afghanistan war, a ruthless crime family that built an empire out of kidnapping, extortion, smuggling, even trucking. They have trafficked in precious gems, stolen lumber and demanded protection money from businesses building roads and schools with American reconstruction funds.
They safeguard their mountainous turf by planting deadly roadside bombs and shelling remote American military bases. And they are accused by American officials of being guns for hire: a proxy force used by the Pakistani intelligence service to carry out grisly, high-profile attacks in Kabul and throughout the country.
Today, American intelligence and military officials call the crime clan known as the Haqqani network — led by a wizened militant named Jalaluddin Haqqani who has allied himself over the years with the C.I.A., Saudi Arabia’s spy service and Osama bin Laden — the most deadly insurgent group in Afghanistan. In the latest of a series of ever bolder strikes, the group staged a daylong assault on the United States Embassy in Kabul, an attack Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, charged Thursday was aided by Pakistan’s military spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI. According to two American officials, cellphones used by the attackers made calls to suspected ISI operatives before the attack, although top Pakistani officials deny their government played any role.
But even as the Americans pledge revenge against the Haqqanis, and even amid a new debate in the Obama administration about how to blunt the group’s power, there is a growing belief that it could be too late. To many frustrated officials, they represent a missed opportunity with haunting consequences. Responsible for hundreds of American deaths, the Haqqanis probably will outlast the United States troops in Afghanistan and command large swaths of territory there once the shooting stops.
American military officers, who have spent years urging Washington to take action against the Haqqanis, express anger that the Obama administration has still not put the group on the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations out of concern that such a move would scuttle any chances that the group might make peace with Afghanistan’s government.
“Whoever is in power in Kabul will have to make a deal with the Haqqanis,” said Marc Sageman, a former C.I.A. officer who served in Pakistan during the Soviet-Afghan war. “It won’t be us. We’re going to leave, and those guys know it.”
When their threat was less urgent, the Haqqanis — estimated at 5,000 to 15,000 fighters in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan — were not a top priority for the Americans. But even then the United States also had little leverage against them. The Haqqanis have expanded their reach and numbers as top American officials have tried repeatedly over the last decade to berate and cajole officials in Pakistan to cut ties to a group it considers essential for its own security, all with little effect.
“Some have become convinced that after 10 years, it’s a bridge too far to try to change Pakistan’s strategic calculus,” said Col. Bob Cassidy, who recently returned from Kabul after serving as a top aide to Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez, a senior American commander in Afghanistan.
Now largely run by two of Mr. Haqqani’s sons, who experts say are even more committed Islamists than their father, the network is in a position of strength as the United States tries to broker a peace deal in Afghanistan before pulling its troops from the country.
In recent days, top Haqqani network leaders have indicated that they are willing to negotiate, but on their own terms. The group maintains close ties to the Taliban, but often works independently, and some intelligence officials see Haqqani operations like the American Embassy attack this month as a very public message from the group that it will not be cut out of any grand bargain.
One former American intelligence official, who worked with the Haqqani family in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation in the 1980s, said he would not be surprised if the United States again found itself relying on the clan.
“You always said about them, ‘best friend, worst enemy.’ ”
Militia and Ministate
With a combination of guns and muscle, the Haqqani network has built a sprawling enterprise on both sides of a border that barely exists.
The Haqqanis are Afghan members of the Zadran tribe, but it is in the town of Miram Shah in Pakistan’s tribal areas where they have set up a ministate with courts, tax offices and radical madrasa schools producing a ready supply of fighters. They secretly run a network of front companies throughout Pakistan selling cars and real estate, and have been tied to at least two factories churning out the ammonium nitrate used to build roadside bombs in Afghanistan.
American intelligence officials believe that a steady flow of money from wealthy people in the gulf states helps sustain the Haqqanis, and that they further line their pockets with extortion and smuggling operations throughout eastern Afghanistan, focused in the provinces of Khost, Paktia and Paktika. Chromite smuggling has been a particularly lucrative business, as has been hauling lumber from Afghanistan’s eastern forests into Pakistan.
They are also in the kidnapping business, with a mix of pecuniary and ideological motives. In May, the group released the latest of a series of videos showing Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, an American infantryman held by the network since June 2009, with a Haqqani official. David Rohde, then a reporter for The New York Times, was held hostage by Haqqani operatives from November 2008 to June 2009.
Over the past five years, with relatively few American troops operating in eastern Afghanistan, the Haqqanis have run what is in effect a protection racket for construction firms — meaning that American taxpayers are helping to finance the enemy network.
Maulavi Sardar Zadran, a former Haqqani commander, calls this extortion “the most important source of funding for the Haqqanis,” and points out that a multiyear road project linking Khost to Gardez in southeastern Afghanistan was rarely attacked by insurgent forces because a Haqqani commander was its paid protector.
“The Haqqanis know that the contractors make thousands and millions of dollars, so these contractors are very good sources of income for them,” he said in an interview.
Other road projects in the region have been under constant assault. According to an authoritative report written by Jeffrey A. Dressler of the Institute for the Study of War, Haqqani militants “repeatedly targeted road construction projects which, if completed, would provide greater freedom of movement for Afghan and coalition forces.”
But the group is not just a two-bit mafia enriching itself with shakedown schemes. It is an organized militia using high-profile terrorist attacks on hotels, embassies and other targets to advance its agenda to become a power broker in a future political settlement. And, sometimes, the agenda of its patrons from Pakistan’s spy service, the ISI.
Last month, Afghanistan’s National Intelligence Directorate released recordings of phone calls intercepted during the June 28 attack on the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul. In the exchanges, Haqqani network leaders in Pakistan instruct their operatives in the hotel to shoot the locks off rooms, throw in grenades and make sure no one escapes.
Later, as a fire blazes, the recordings capture the voice of Badruddin Haqqani, one of Jalaluddin’s sons, who the State Department says is in charge of kidnappings for the network.
On the tape, Mr. Haqqani asks: “How is the fire?”
A militant named Omar replies: “It’s a big fire, and the smoke is blinding me.” Omar says he will not be able to move away from the fire, and Mr. Haqqani asks if he has bullets.
“Yes, I have a lot of ammunition,” Omar says. “God willing, I’m very relaxed, lying on this mattress, waiting for them.”
Mr. Haqqani laughs and says: “God will give you victory.” More than a dozen people were killed in the attack, which American officials say they think was carried out with some ISI help.
A NATO officer who tracks Haqqani activities in southeastern Afghanistan gave a blunt assessment of the Haqqanis’ brutal ways of intimidation, saying: “They will execute you at a checkpoint, or stop you and go through your phone. And, if they find you’re connected to the government, you’ll turn up in the morgue. And that sends a message.”
According to a senior American military official, cross-border attacks by the Haqqanis into Afghanistan have increased more than fivefold this year over the same period a year ago, and roadside bomb attacks are up 20 percent compared with last year.
For years, American officials have urged Pakistan to move against the Haqqanis’ base of operations in North Waziristan. They typically are rebuffed by military and intelligence officials in Islamabad, who say that Pakistan’s military is overstretched from operations elsewhere in the tribal areas and is not ready for an offensive against the Haqqanis.
As a result, the United States has fallen back on a familiar strategy: missiles fired from armed drones operated by the C.I.A. But because the Haqqani network’s leaders are thought to be hiding in populated towns like Miram Shah, where the C.I.A. is hesitant to carry out drone strikes, American officials said that the campaign has had only limited success against the group’s leadership.
1980s Allies
A quarter-century ago, the Haqqani fighters were not the targets of C.I.A. missiles. They were the ones shooting C.I.A.-supplied missiles, the shoulder-fired Stingers that would devastate Soviet air power over Afghanistan.
Jalaluddin Haqqani was in temporary alliance with the United States against its greater adversary, the Soviet Union, just as his network today is allied with a Pakistan that sees Afghanistan as a critical buffer against its greater adversary, India. His clan’s ruthlessness and fervent Islam were seen then as marks of courage and faith on the part of men Ronald Reagan called freedom fighters.
Representative Charlie Wilson, the late Texas Democrat who made the mujahedeen his cause, called the elder Mr. Haqqani “goodness personified.”
American intelligence officers who worked directly with Mr. Haqqani had a somewhat less starry-eyed view. “He was always a wild-eyed guy,” said the former American intelligence official who worked with the Haqqanis. “But we weren’t talking about getting these guys scholarships to Harvard or M.I.T. He was the scourge of the Soviets.”
The Haqqani fighters would roll boulders down mountains to block passing Soviet convoys, said the official, who requested anonymity because he remains a consultant for the government. “Then they would sit up in the hills and pick the Russians off all afternoon,” he said.
Jalaluddin Haqqani’s fierce temperament was matched by his devotion to the rules of Islam, the official said. Shot in the knee one time during the daytime fast of Ramadan, Mr. Haqqani had medics dig the bullet out without anesthesia rather than violate a religious tenet by swallowing pain medication, the official said. There is little doubt in Afghanistan that if the family were to gain power, it would institute strict Islamic rule.
For Americans who worked with them in the 1980s, the fact that the Haqqanis are now fighting their former American allies is no shock. The Russians were the foreign occupiers before; now the Americans are.
“The Haqqanis have always been the warlords of that part of the country,” said Mr. Sageman, the former C.I.A. officer. “They always will be.”
Limited U.S. Options
On Feb. 19, 2009, the day before Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, Pakistan’s new senior military commander, was due in Washington for his first meetings with the Obama administration, the American Embassy in Islamabad sent a classified cable to the State Department.
American officials believed that General Kayani, Pakistan’s onetime spymaster, had for years overseen Pakistan’s covert support for militant groups like the Haqqani network, and the cable offered blunt advice about the coming talks.
“The single biggest message Kayani should hear in Washington is that this support must end,” said the cable, written by Ambassador Anne W. Patterson.
In the 30 months since, few in Washington believe that Pakistan’s support of armed militia groups has diminished. American officials who were once optimistic they could change Pakistani behavior through cajoling and large cash payments now accept a sober reality: as long as Pakistan sees its security under threat by India’s far larger army, it will rely on militant groups like the Haqqanis, the Taliban and Lashkar-e-Taiba as occasional proxy forces.
The new urgency for a political settlement in Afghanistan has further limited Washington’s options for fighting the Haqqani network. During high-level discussions last year, Obama administration officials debated listing the group as a “Foreign Terrorist Organization,” which allows for some assets to be frozen and could dissuade donors from supporting the group. While some military commanders pushed for the designation, the administration ultimately decided that such a move might alienate the Haqqanis and drive them away from future negotiations.
Officials chose to take the more incremental step of naming individual Haqqani leaders as terrorists, including Badruddin and Sirajuddin Haqqani. Senior American officials said there was once again a fierce debate inside the Obama administration about whether to put the entire group on the terrorist list.
But as Washington struggles to broker an endgame for the Afghan war, there is widespread doubt about whether the Haqqanis will negotiate, and whether their patrons in Islamabad will even let them. After a decade of war, there is a growing sense among America’s diplomats, soldiers and spies that the United States is getting out of Afghanistan without ever figuring out how a maddeningly complex game is played.
“Is there any formula for Pakistan to agree to stop supporting the insurgency in Afghanistan and instead help broker and be satisfied with a political settlement?” asked Karl W. Eikenberry, who served as both America’s top military commander in Afghanistan and its ambassador to the country.
“We don’t know the answer to that question,” he said.
Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane reported from Washington, and Alissa J. Rubin from Kabul, Afghanistan. Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington.
Suicide Attack Kills 2 in Eastern Afghanistan
VOA News September 25, 2011
Afghan police say a suicide bomber detonated an explosive device outside a local police headquarter in eastern Afghanistan, killing two policemen and wounding two civilians.
The attack happened Sunday in Yahya Khel district in Paktika province near Afghanistan's eastern border with Pakistan.
Also Sunday, two international coalition members died in eastern Afghanistan from separate bomb blasts.
On Saturday in the country's central Ghor province, Afghan officials say a German tourist and his Afghan counterpart were killed when unknown gunmen opened fire on their van. That attack comes weeks after unknown assailants killed two German nationals while hiking in the mountains near the capital Kabul.
In a separate development, Afghan President Hamid Karzai has appointed a team to investigate the assassination of former President Burhanuddin Rabbani, who headed the nation's peace council and was leading efforts to find a political solution to the ten-year war with the Taliban. He was killed last week in a suicide attack at his home in Kabul.
Local police, his son killed in N. Afghan town
KUNDUZ, Afghanistan, Sept. 25 (Xinhua) -- Unknown armed men gunned down a local police commander and his son in Kunduz province, 250 km north of capital city Kabul, Saturday night, police said Sunday.
"Unidentified armed men opened fire on Abdul Khaliq, the commander of local police in Kunduz city, the capital of Kunduz province, last night, killing him along with his son," police spokesman in Kunduz city Sayed Sarwar Hussaini told Xinhua.
The incident took place when Khaliq was going to his home along with his son, he added.
Local police is a community police established by government to defend their villages against possible Taliban attacks.
Meantime, Zabihullah Mujahid, who claims to speak for the Taliban outfit in talks with media via telephone from undisclosed location, claimed responsibility, saying Taliban fighters punished commander Khaliq for his support to government.
Road accident kills 8, wounds 12 in Afghan town
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan, Sept. 25 (Xinhua) -- Eight people were killed and 12 others sustained injuries as a bus and mini-bus collided in Kandahar province, 450 km south of capital city Kabul, on Sunday, police said.
"The tragic incident happened in Daman district at 11 a.m. when a passenger bus collided with a mini-bus, leaving eight commuters dead and 12 others injured," a traffic police officer Mohammad Nabi told Xinhua.
Some of the injured passengers are in critical condition, he said, adding that such tragic incidents are usually caused by reckless driving.
A similar road accident in Kandahar province in August left 35 passengers dead and 24 others injured.
Afghan police say gunmen kill German tourist
Reuters By Sharafuddin Sharafyar 24/09/2011
HERAT, Afghanistan - Unknown gunmen killed a German tourist and his Afghan companion in central Afghanistan on Saturday and wounded two other Afghans when they opened fire on the van the tourist was traveling in, a senior police officer said.
The men were on a road in poor, remote Ghor province, driving toward Bamiyan province which is more often visited, deputy provincial police chief Abdul Rashid Bashir told Reuters.
Bashir said the dead man was a tourist, and documents found in his possession showed that he was German. The German embassy in Kabul could not immediately be reached for comment.
Two German nationals were killed last month while hiking in mountains near the capital Kabul. Their killers have not been found.
Ghor is still relatively peaceful, even though it shares a border with Helmand province, an insurgent stronghold. But it is a risky place for foreigners to visit as tourists.
Abdul Hai Khatibi, a spokesman for the provincial governor, declined direct comment on the killing, but said the Taliban had limited influence in Ghor and appeared to suggest that the shooting was likely to be the work of bandits, not insurgents.
"Rivalry between armed groups has damaged the security situation in Ghor and encourages insurgents to claim credit for any attack," he said.
Violence has risen to its worst levels in Afghanistan since the 2001 overthrow of the Taliban government, with record numbers of civilian deaths.
The insurgency is also spreading fast to once relatively peaceful northern and western parts of the country, in addition to the south and east.
Germany has around 5,200 soldiers deployed as part of NATO's mission in Afghanistan, most of them in the north.
(Reporting by Sharafuddin Sharafyar; Editing by Tim Pearce)
Ghosts of Afghanistan: Hard Truths and Foreign Myths by Jonathan Steele - review
Just as the Soviets ran aground in Afghanistan so America is busy repeating their mistakes, writes former diplomat Rodric Braithwaite
The Observer By Rodric Braithwaite Sunday 25 September 2011
Afghanistan, Jonathan Steele writes in his new book, is full of ghosts. There are the ghosts of Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, and their numerous successors – invaders who were able to conquer the place, but could not hold it. "Ghosts" is the word the Russians used for the mujahideen guerrillas who merged with the peaceful population during the day and struck during the night – who fought the Russians in the 1980s and are fighting us today.
Steele has covered events in Afghanistan for many years, and he skewers with palpable glee the myths and half-truths that are peddled by politicians, generals, official spokesmen, and too many commentators. Perhaps the most damaging in his eyes is the myth that the destruction of the Taliban would eliminate the threat from the Arab terrorists who felled the twin towers in New York. That myth has made it all but impossible for us to construct a sensible strategy for Afghanistan.
And so he now writes with increasing despair about the failing efforts of the United States and its allies to build a viable Afghan state out of the physical, institutional and human rubble left behind by three decades of civil war and foreign intervention. A central theme is "the similarity of the Soviet and US interventions and the lessons that ought to be learned". In spite of failing to defeat the mujahideen, Steele writes, the Soviet leadership "had the sense to change course".
When the Russians invaded, Afghanistan had a fairly coherent state apparatus, built up since the end of the 19th century, and an economy which, though very backward, was beginning to develop thanks to American and above all Soviet aid. Most modern Afghan leaders were reformers, but their attempts to change Afghan society, especially when it came to the treatment of women, often met with bloody resistance.
The Afghan communists were reformers too. But they were a small and murderously fractious clique, and they killed their opponents in very large numbers. They soon faced violent uprisings, especially in the countryside.
The Russians invaded in December 1979 not as part of a plan for the world victory of communism, as our propaganda had it, but to protect the security of their southern frontier against Islamic unrest and American intrigue. Senior Soviet generals and officials had warned against getting mixed up in an Afghan civil war. They pointed to the unhappy precedent of Vietnam. Their leaders went ahead nevertheless, as much as anything because they could not think of a better alternative. Change the Afghan leader, train up his army and his police, and then – they hoped – the Soviet troops would be able to leave in a matter of months. It did not happen. The Russians were soon sucked into just the quagmire that the sceptics had feared. Before long they were looking for a way out.
The man who eventually did it was Mikhail Gorbachev. By the time he came to power in 1985, Gorbachev firmly believed that the issue could not be settled by force. He was determined to cut the Gordian knot through negotiation. He was supported by his political colleagues and by his generals, who did not try to argue that they could achieve "victory" if only they were given more troops and more time. He told the Afghan government that his soldiers would be out within 18 months. It still took three years of difficult negotiation before the Soviet army marched away, undefeated on the battlefield but profoundly demoralised by nine years of useless war. And though the Russians left their man Najibullah behind them, they did not bequeath him a wider settlement that would command the support of his enemies among the mujahideen and in Pakistan. The consequence was a bloody civil war, which ended in the victory of the Taliban.
Steele contrasts this record with that of President Obama who, unlike Gorbachev, came to power believing that his war in Afghanistan was a "necessary" war. He thought – at least at first – that if the Afghans adopted western standards of good governance and financial probity they would, by some alchemy, no longer be willing to give cover to the Taliban. Instead of looking for ways to negotiate with the insurgents, he listened to his generals, who persuaded him that they could beat the Taliban if they were given the tools to finish the job.
That has not happened. Despite tired claims of progress by official spokesmen, the Taliban continue to advance. The Afghan government remains unconvincing, hamstrung by arrogant foreign advice, corrupted by an overdose of foreign money. Steele believes that the only way forward is for the Americans to change course, like the Russians did, to commit themselves wholeheartedly to a far-reaching settlement between Kabul and all its enemies, under which the foreign armies can withdraw in good order. The Afghans, helped by their foreign friends, can then devote themselves to rebuilding their shattered country in peace.
That is an ambitious objective. It seems more likely that the Americans and their allies will eventually leave as the Russians did, without the broad settlement that alone can ensure that the civil war does not resume. As we leave, we will doubtless explain away our failure by blaming the ungrateful Afghans for their unwillingness to adopt our western ways. And meanwhile both Afghans and foreigners will continue to die in another useless war.
Sir Rodric Braithwaite is the author of Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan, 1979-89 (Profile).
www.afghanistannewscenter.com
By RAHIM FAIEZ - Associated Press
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Afghan defense officials warned Pakistan on Sunday to stop firing rockets and heavy artillery into the northeast of the country or the military will respond with force. Pakistan denied it was responsible.
In its strongest condemnation to date, the Afghan Defense Ministry accused the Pakistani army of firing more than 300 artillery rounds and rockets into Kunar and Nuristan provinces during the past five days.
The area is a haven for hardcore insurgent groups fighting in both Pakistan and Afghanistan. U.S.-led coalition forces have a light footprint in the area and the cross-border fighting highlights NATO's struggles to pacify the remote region. It also underscores the lack of cooperation between Afghanistan and Pakistan against their common foes.
The ministry said an unknown number of Afghan civilians have been killed by the shelling coming from Pakistani territory. Several houses and mosques have been destroyed and hundreds of people have been displaced from their homes, the ministry said.
"Once again, the Pakistani army started firing heavy artillery and rockets over innocent Afghan people from the other side of the Durand Line," the statement said, referring to the disputed 19th century demarcation between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Pakistan army spokesman Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas said he had asked security officials in the area of the reported shelling about the allegations and was waiting for a reply. He said those officials were surprised by the accusations since no activity had been reported in the area.
"I assume this is not correct news," said Abbas, in reference to the Afghan reports.
Pakistan complained earlier this summer that militants coming from Afghanistan killed at least 55 members of its security forces and tribal police and demanded that U.S. and Afghan forces do more to stem the flow of fighters.
Afghan defense officials said that according to their forces on the ground, more than 100 rockets or mortars rained down on the two provinces Saturday night.
"It's a clear attack on civilian residential areas," the ministry statement said.
"The Afghan Defense Ministry is strongly condemning the attack and is giving strong warnings that such violations (of sovereignty) will have their effect on the brotherly, friendly relations of two neighboring countries," the statement said. "There is no reason for continuing such attacks. The Pakistan government should know that Afghan National Army, with the support of the Afghan people, is ready to respond if such attacks continues."
Pakistan is also under heavy criticism from the United States.
The top U.S. military officer, Adm. Mike Mullen, last week accused Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency of supporting insurgents in planning and executing a 22-hour assault on the U.S. Embassy in Afghanistan on Sept. 13 as well as a truck bomb days earlier that wounded 77 American troops.
The insurgents, from the Haqqani network, are affiliated with the Taliban and al-Qaida. The group primarily operates in eastern Afghanistan and is often blamed for attacks in Kabul.
Senior Pakistani officials have lashed out against the allegations of support for the Haqqani network, accusing the U.S. of trying to make Pakistan a scapegoat for its troubled war in Afghanistan. The public confrontation has plunged the already troubled U.S.-Pakistan alliance to new lows.
Pakistan's leaders have shown no indication that they plan to act on renewed American demands to attack the Haqqani network in its main base in Pakistan, even at the risk of further conflict with Washington. The U.S. has given Pakistan billions of dollars in military and economic aid, but the relationship has been riven by mistrust.
Also in the east of Afghanistan, the U.S.-led coalition said two NATO service members were killed Sunday in separate roadside bombings, and a suicide bomber on a motorbike detonated explosives at a local police headquarters building, killing four people in Paktika province.
In the south, Afghan police shot and killed two men wearing explosives vests, foiling a planned suicide attack on a government building in Zabul province.
The deaths of two NATO service members raised to 442 the number of international troops killed in Afghanistan so far this year. The coalition did not disclose further details about their deaths.
In the capital, Kabul, President Hamid Karzai met with his national security team and appointed a panel of high-ranking officials, led by Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak, to investigate the assassination of former Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani, who headed the nation's peace council.
Karzai said Rabbani's death was a "big loss" and that greater security measures should be taken to protect top Afghan figures, including religious clerics and tribal leaders. Intelligence officials at the meeting said one person had been arrested in connection with the assassination and that authorities were close to ascertaining the details of the killing.
U.S. Should Put Pakistan on Notice After Kabul Embassy Attack, Graham Says
By Jeff Bliss and Heidi Przybyla - Sep 25, 2011
The U.S. may have to consider a military response to the government of Pakistan’s alleged support of a terrorist group that attacked the American embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham said.
“We need to put Pakistan on notice,” Graham, a member of the Senate Armed services Committee, said today on the “Fox News Sunday” program. “If they continue to embrace terrorism as a part of their national strategy, we’re going to have to put all options on the table, including defending our troops.”
Graham, a South Carolina Republican, said lawmakers would muster bipartisan support “to elevate our response” if needed. He didn’t specify what actions he would back.
Pakistan must stop providing safe havens for the Haqqani group, said David Plouffe, a White House senior adviser, on CNN’s “State of the Union.” U.S. and Afghan officials have said the network of militants, supported by Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s main spy agency, is behind a Sept. 13 assault on the U.S. embassy with rocket-propelled grenades.
In a statement, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani yesterday denied his government’s ties to the Haqqani group and said U.S. policy on Afghanistan shows “confusion and disarray.” The U.S., Afghanistan and Pakistan need to better coordinate action to fight terrorism, he said.
Graham said that Congress should reconsider its practice of approving a designated amount of aid for Pakistan. The administration is talking about whether to change its requests for aid to the country, Plouffe said.
‘Important Aim’
“Those discussions are happening between our foreign policy and national security teams,” he said. Severing the alleged connection between the Haqqanis and the Pakistan government is “going to be a very important aim for us in the coming period of time.”
The U.S. said in July it was withholding about $800 million in aid because of steps Pakistan took following the U.S. raid that killed al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden on May 2, creating difficulties between the two countries.
Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the armed services panel on Sept. 22 that the Haqqani network also conducted the June 28 attack at the Inter- Continental Hotel in Kabul.
The Haqqani group, based in eastern Afghanistan and the Pakistani region of Waziristan, has claimed responsibility or been blamed by the Afghan, U.S. and Indian governments for attacks on Kabul in the past three years against the Indian Embassy, government ministries and hotels where foreign diplomats or aid workers were living.
Legal Obstacle
There may be little the U.S. can do to halt Pakistan’s support for militants, according to Tom Lynch, a former special assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs who is now a research fellow for the Near East and South Asia at the National Defense University in Washington.
Given the fragility of Afghanistan, Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal and the dangers of a new confrontation with India, even the leverage the U.S. has is very difficult to use, he has said.
A legal obstacle to a military attack on the Haqqani organization inside Pakistan is the fact that the State Department has never designated it a Foreign Terrorist Organization. Three of its leaders have been identified as terrorists and 49 other groups have been named FTOs.
Pakistan Holds Special Military Meeting Amid US Tensions
VOA News September 25, 2011
Pakistan army chief General Ashfaq Kayani chaired a special meeting with his top commanders Sunday as an escalating war on words with the U.S. drags relations between the two nations to a new low.
Pakistani officials say the corps commanders met at the General Headquarters in Rawalpindi to review the “prevailing security situation” in the country.
The meeting follows scathing U.S. allegations that the Pakistani spy agency, the ISI, is assisting the militant Haqqani network attack U.S.-led international forces in neighboring Afghanistan.
The outgoing chairman of the U.S. Joint Chief of Staffs, Admiral Mike Mullen, told a Senate hearing last week that the Haqqani network acts as a “veritable arm” of the ISI, and its fighters planned and conducted this month's assault on the U.S. embassy in Kabul and on NATO bases in Afghanistan.
Pakistani officials have rejected the allegations as baseless, warning they are detrimental for regional peace efforts.
Speaking Sunday in Islamabad, Interior Minister Rehman Malik said the Haqqani network is not operating from Pakistan. He countered U.S. claims by alleging the network was established and trained by the American CIA with support from Pakistan to fight the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s.
Malik reiterated that Pakistan is cooperating with the U.S. in its fight against terrorism, and that he has ordered authorities to tighten border controls between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The U.S. and Pakistan are allies in the war against militants in Afghanistan. But amid the recent allegations Pakistan has warned the U.S. that it risks losing an ally.
A U.S. embassy statement Sunday says the head of U.S. Central Command, General James Mattis, met with Pakistani leaders and emphasized the need for persistent engagements among militaries of the U.S. Pakistan and other countries in the region.
A Pakistan army statement says a Pakistani representative in the talks, Khalid Shameem Wyne expressed concern about the “negative statements emanating” from Washington and stressed the need to address the irritants in the relationship which are “the result of an extremely complex situation.”
Pakistani PM calls back FM over U.S. charge
ISLAMABAD, Sept. 25 (Xinhua) -- Pakistani Prime Minister Syed Yusuf Raza Gilani on Sunday called back Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar, who is present at the UN General Assembly in New York, after Washington accused Islamabad of supporting Taliban- allied militants, official sources said.
U.S. top defense officials said Thursday the Haqqani network was supported by Pakistan's intelligence agency in carrying out the September 13 attack on the U.S. embassy in Kabul and the truck bomb attack on a military base in Maidan Wardak province in Afghanistan on September 11.
The White House urged Islamabad on Friday to break any link with the militant group and take strong and immediate action against this network on its soil.
Washington has threatened to take unilateral action against the Haqqani network in Pakistan if the authorities there failed to take action against the group.
Pakistan denied the U.S. charges with Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar warning that the U.S. could lose Pakistan as an ally.
The Prime Minister called several top politicians including the opposition leader Nawaz Sharif to ask for their support, a spokesman for the PM office said.
The Prime Minister invited leaders of various political parties to attend a national conference to brief them on security conditions in Pakistan and the situation in the region.
Almost all political leaders said they would back the government to meet every challenge.
US in 'disarray' in Afghanistan: Pakistani PM
AFP
Pakistan's prime minister has turned on the US over its allegations of links to the Haqqani terror network, saying the "blame game is self-defeating" and US policy in Afghanistan is in "disarray".
The two countries are key allies in the war against Islamist militants in Afghanistan, but their relationship is often troubled and plumbed new depths after the killing of Osama bin Laden in a covert US raid in Pakistan in May.
The latest row, with Washington accusing elements of the Pakistani state of supporting the Al-Qaeda-linked Haqqani network it blames for an attack on the US embassy in Kabul, has raised the tensions to an unprecedented level.
Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani said Saturday the US allegations would only benefit the militants, and that they "betray a confusion and policy disarray within the US establishment on the way forward in Afghanistan".
"We strongly reject assertions of complicity with the Haqqanis or of proxy war," he said in a policy statement issued by his office amid a growing rift with the United States.
"Blame game is self-defeating... It will only benefit the enemies of peace. Only terrorists and militants will gain from any fissures and divisions."
The White House demanded Friday that Pakistan "break any link they have" with the Haqqanis, a Taliban faction founded by a CIA asset turned Al-Qaeda ally.
A day earlier, top US military officer Admiral Mike Mullen directly accused Pakistan's intelligence service of supporting the network's attack on the embassy and a truck bombing on a NATO outpost.
The Haqqani network, which has a fighting force of at least 2,000 men, operates independently of the Taliban leadership but remains politically subservient and would fall behind any peace deal it negotiated.
It was founded by Jalaluddin Haqqani, a disciplined Afghan guerrilla leader bankrolled by the United States to fight Soviet troops in Afghanistan in the 1980s and now based with his family in Pakistan.
Haqqani allied himself to the Taliban after they took power in Kabul in 1996 and when American troops invaded Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks he took refuge in the Pakistani tribal district of North Waziristan.
With training bases in eastern Afghanistan, the network is close to Al-Qaeda, loyal to Mullah Omar, and targets US troops across the Afghan east, the southeast and within the capital Kabul.
Gilani's comments came after Pakistan's foreign minister Hina Rabbani Khar said Washington's humiliating public attack was "not acceptable" and warned the US stood to lose a vital ally.
The Pakistani premier said his country was not responsible for the security of foreign troops inside Afghanistan and it was itself a victim of terrorist attacks launched from Afghan soil.
"While there have been terrorist attacks in Kabul and Wardak, there have also been numerous attacks on Pakistan launched from sanctuaries and safe havens in Nooristan and Kunar in Afghanistan," he said
"It is as much the responsibility of the Afghan National Army, NATO and ISAF not to allow such cross-border militancy."
He said there was concern over the deterioration of the security situation in Afghanistan and called the recent attacks in Kabul "disquieting".
"We condemn these attacks," he said.
Insurgents besieged the US embassy and NATO headquarters in Kabul with rocket and gunfire for 19 hours earlier this month, leaving 15 people dead and turning the most secure district of the Afghan capital into a battle zone.
Gilani said given the sacrifices made by Pakistani security forces and citizens the "propaganda blitz against Pakistan is indeed most unfortunate".
"It vitiates the atmosphere and is counter productive. It tends to ignore the sacrifices by the people of Pakistan and negates all that we have endeavoured to achieve over the last so many years," he said.
More then 35,000 Pakistanis have been killed in the fight against terrorism and many more injured, Gilani said, adding that the US was well aware of the arrests and killings of a large number of Al-Qaeda operatives by Pakistan.
Meanwhile, US Centcom chief General James Mattis Saturday held security talks with Pakistani army chief Ashfaq Kayani, officials said.
"Matters related to security were discussed," a senior military official told AFP on condition of anonymity. No other details were available, but Pakistani officials said the meeting would help defuse the mounting tensions.
Afghanistan to probe Rabbani killing
(AFP)
KABUL — Afghan President Hamid Karzai Sunday appointed a team to investigate the assassination of peace envoy Burhanuddin Rabbani as officials insisted they were getting "closer to the truth" about his death.
Rabbani, chairman of Karzai's High Peace Council, was killed by a turban bomber who had purported to be a peace emissary from the Taliban leadership.
His death threatens fresh turmoil in Afghanistan, with experts saying it could lead his Tajik supporters -- who provided the bulk of resistance to the Taliban when they were in power -- to reject all efforts to talk peace.
Officials also revealed that last week they arrested a man who spoke to the killer on the phone the day before Rabbani's killing.
Police and other senior figures have blamed the Taliban for the attack, but unusually, the leaders of Afghanistan's ten-year insurgency have so far refused to comment on it.
The investigation will be led by Afghan defence minister Abdul Rahim Wardak, seen as close to Karzai, a statement from the presidential palace said.
The statement added: "As a result of actions taken to identify the elements behind Ustad (professor) Rabbani's assassination, an arrest has been made and information obtained from him is bringing us closer to the truth."
A government source speaking on condition of anonymity told AFP that the arrested man had spoken to the bomber the day before the attack.
The bomber, who was believed to be a trusted Taliban emissary, had left the official guesthouse where he was staying to speak to the man, the source said.
"When Esmatullah (the bomber) left the guesthouse he had a white hat but when he returned, he was wearing a turban and had new clothes. He had cleaned himself up," the source said.
"He joked with the workers of the guesthouse about his new clothes and turban, saying: 'I'm going for a very important meeting. I should look good.'"
The statement from the presidential palace also announced beefed-up security for senior figures in Afghanistan in the wake of Rabbani's killing.
Rabbani was buried in Kabul on Friday amid chaotic scenes with angry supporters chanting "Death to America, death to Pakistan, death to Karzai" and vowing to take to the streets to protest his killing.
Assassinations of Afghan Officials Were Plotted in Pakistan, Karzai's Office Says
TOLOnews.com Saturday, 24 September 2011
There is mounting evidence to suggest that the targeted assassinations of prominent Afghans in the past six months were plotted in Pakistan, deputy spokesman for President Karzai, Seyamak Herawi, said on Saturday.
"There is evidence with Afghans and with the United States that shows all attacks on Afghan leaders and elders, who have been martyred over the past six months, have been organised by special circles inside Pakistan," Herawi said. "Special individuals are deployed to Afghanistan and our influential [people] and elders are being killed one after another."
Memorial services for former President Rabbani were held across the country today. A service at the Presidential Palace was attended by high-ranking government officials and international diplomats.
At the service, Sebghatullah Mujadidi, former speaker of the Upper House of Parliament, accused Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency of being behind the death of Burhanuddin Rabbani, Karzai's special envoy who was tasked with brokering peace with the Taliban.
"Only foreigners, Pakistan and ISI are involved in it, nobody else," Mr Mujadidi said.
"For ten to twelve years I have been saying that the ISI is the cause of all miseries and insecurity in Afghanistan. Nobody accepted it. But now the entire world is saying that."
Professor Rabbani was assassinated at his home in Kabul on Tuesday by a suicide bomber pretending to be an important peace emissary from the Taliban leadership.
The Taliban denied responsibility for the attack.
Kabul residents angry, fearful after string of deadly attacks
In the Afghanistan capital, people speak out against insurgents, at Westerners whose presence makes targets of everyone nearby, and the Afghan government.
By Laura King, Los Angeles Times September 25, 2011
Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan - When the shooting started, the lunchtime crowd at Musa Burger scattered. The tea-seller abandoned his burning brazier. The kitchen worker dropped a half-peeled onion. The beggar woman in a faded blue burka scooped up her few tattered bank notes and ran.
Insurgents armed with rockets and heavy machine guns had taken over a half-finished high-rise on Kabul's busy Abdul Haq traffic circle, beginning a siege of the U.S. Embassy that would continue for 20 hours.
Scarcely a week later, this same small slice of urban landscape — which includes a gaudy wedding hall, a dimly lighted snooker parlor and a run-down car wash shadowed by a billboard for an energy drink called Hell — was already caught up in the next convulsion of violence. This time, it was a suicide bombing that killed a former Afghan president at his nearby home.
Kabul once considered itself relatively insulated from the violence that leapfrogs daily from one part of Afghanistan to another. But a series of attacks over the last four months has left many in the capital feeling vulnerable, jittery and angry — at the insurgents who seemingly strike at will, at Westerners whose presence makes targets of all those living here, and at their own government, which few consider capable of keeping them safe.
The growing violence in Kabul, the seat of government and symbolic heart of the country, poses a conundrum for the U.S. and its NATO allies. American officials blame the attacks on the Haqqani network, a Taliban offshoot based across the border in Pakistan. On Thursday they accused Pakistani intelligence agents of collusion in the embassy attack.
Overall, U.S. officials have consistently sought to play down the strategic importance of such attacks, saying they will not affect plans to hand over security responsibilities to Afghan forces in 2014 and wind down the Western combat mission.
But to Afghans who see their lives and livelihoods increasingly at risk, American assertions that such strikes are a sign of desperation on the insurgents' part ring hollow.
"It's like a drum that is beating faster and faster," said Amir Mohammed, who runs a small stand that sells paint sealant, decals and air freshener to car-wash clientele. "First one thing happens, and then another, and another. No one in the city feels safe anymore."
In addition to this month's strike on the U.S. Embassy and the adjacent NATO headquarters, targets since June have included a heavily guarded hilltop hotel, which was stormed by a squad of gunmen and bombers, and a well-fortified British cultural center, where frightened staffers holed up in a "safe room" during an hours-long insurgent assault last month.
Adding to the climate of fear were the brazen in-home assassinations of two senior government officials: Jan Mohammed Khan, a close aide to President Hamid Karzai who died July 17 in a bombing, and Burhanuddin Rabbani, a former Afghan president. Rabbani, Karzai's main negotiator with the Taliban, was killed Tuesday by a suicide bomber who hid explosives in his turban.
On Friday, a police checkpoint slowed passing traffic to a crawl as mourners streamed into the area to pay respects to Rabbani. Once again, the shops and businesses were shuttered, this time for three days of mourning.
U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker, a veteran diplomat who took up his post this summer, infuriated many in the capital when he declared that the Sept. 13 attack on the embassy launched from Abdul Haq circle was "not a very big deal." It was one of several strikes across Kabul that day in which 17 people were killed — all Afghans.
Crocker was speaking in terms of the larger insurgent threat to the U.S. diplomatic and military mission, but his phrasing rankled Afghan families who for hours could hear explosions and gunfire just outside their darkened homes.
"We were awake all night, astounded and frightened," said Ahmad Shoaib, 30, who lives with his extended family in a building within sight of the unfinished multistory structure taken over by the insurgents. "From our windows we could see the two sides exchanging fire, and hear the noise of fighting. The children were terrified."
Still, Shoaib counted himself lucky to be able to comfort his wife and 2-year-old son throughout the ordeal. Some family members were trapped elsewhere in the battle zone, unable to make their way home.
Pakistan has angrily rejected charges by Adm. Michael G. Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, that the Haqqanis are a "veritable arm" of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, or the ISI.
In Kabul, many fear that the rancorous U.S.-Pakistani dispute will result in even more strikes in the capital if Pakistan seeks to drive home the point that it will not be dictated to by Washington.
The gnawing uncertainty disrupts daily life; some people say anxiety is leading them to alter long-cherished routines.
One university professor has reluctantly stopped taking after-dinner strolls. Shoaib, the young father, says he is much more likely now to stay home with his family on days off, rather than considering an outing on a sunny early-autumn day.
Among capital residents, living close to any foreign installation is cause for extreme nervousness, even though such environs are likely to be heavily guarded. Civilians living nearby in ordinary homes, rather than those inside the fortified Western structures, are the most likely to be hurt or killed in an insurgent attack.
"We draw the fire meant for them," said Jamal Noori, who owns a building that was half-wrecked during an Aug. 19 assault on the British Council, which left nine people dead. "Wherever they are, that is where the danger is."
Back at Abdul Haq circle, the Dunya wedding hall was counting up its financial loss from a lavish wedding party with 1,500 guests that had to be canceled because of the embassy siege. Mirwais Khotak, who runs Musa Burger, gestured around his near-empty establishment. No one, he said, feels like lingering over lunch now.
"It affects us every day, wondering what comes next," said Mohammed Sabar Momand, proprietor of the snooker parlor next door. "Yet it all seems very familiar, as well. And maybe that is the most frightening thing."
A Brutal Afghan Clan Bedevils the U.S.
New York Times By MARK MAZZETTI, SCOTT SHANE and ALISSA J. RUBIN September 24, 2011
WASHINGTON - They are the Sopranos of the Afghanistan war, a ruthless crime family that built an empire out of kidnapping, extortion, smuggling, even trucking. They have trafficked in precious gems, stolen lumber and demanded protection money from businesses building roads and schools with American reconstruction funds.
They safeguard their mountainous turf by planting deadly roadside bombs and shelling remote American military bases. And they are accused by American officials of being guns for hire: a proxy force used by the Pakistani intelligence service to carry out grisly, high-profile attacks in Kabul and throughout the country.
Today, American intelligence and military officials call the crime clan known as the Haqqani network — led by a wizened militant named Jalaluddin Haqqani who has allied himself over the years with the C.I.A., Saudi Arabia’s spy service and Osama bin Laden — the most deadly insurgent group in Afghanistan. In the latest of a series of ever bolder strikes, the group staged a daylong assault on the United States Embassy in Kabul, an attack Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, charged Thursday was aided by Pakistan’s military spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI. According to two American officials, cellphones used by the attackers made calls to suspected ISI operatives before the attack, although top Pakistani officials deny their government played any role.
But even as the Americans pledge revenge against the Haqqanis, and even amid a new debate in the Obama administration about how to blunt the group’s power, there is a growing belief that it could be too late. To many frustrated officials, they represent a missed opportunity with haunting consequences. Responsible for hundreds of American deaths, the Haqqanis probably will outlast the United States troops in Afghanistan and command large swaths of territory there once the shooting stops.
American military officers, who have spent years urging Washington to take action against the Haqqanis, express anger that the Obama administration has still not put the group on the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations out of concern that such a move would scuttle any chances that the group might make peace with Afghanistan’s government.
“Whoever is in power in Kabul will have to make a deal with the Haqqanis,” said Marc Sageman, a former C.I.A. officer who served in Pakistan during the Soviet-Afghan war. “It won’t be us. We’re going to leave, and those guys know it.”
When their threat was less urgent, the Haqqanis — estimated at 5,000 to 15,000 fighters in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan — were not a top priority for the Americans. But even then the United States also had little leverage against them. The Haqqanis have expanded their reach and numbers as top American officials have tried repeatedly over the last decade to berate and cajole officials in Pakistan to cut ties to a group it considers essential for its own security, all with little effect.
“Some have become convinced that after 10 years, it’s a bridge too far to try to change Pakistan’s strategic calculus,” said Col. Bob Cassidy, who recently returned from Kabul after serving as a top aide to Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez, a senior American commander in Afghanistan.
Now largely run by two of Mr. Haqqani’s sons, who experts say are even more committed Islamists than their father, the network is in a position of strength as the United States tries to broker a peace deal in Afghanistan before pulling its troops from the country.
In recent days, top Haqqani network leaders have indicated that they are willing to negotiate, but on their own terms. The group maintains close ties to the Taliban, but often works independently, and some intelligence officials see Haqqani operations like the American Embassy attack this month as a very public message from the group that it will not be cut out of any grand bargain.
One former American intelligence official, who worked with the Haqqani family in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation in the 1980s, said he would not be surprised if the United States again found itself relying on the clan.
“You always said about them, ‘best friend, worst enemy.’ ”
Militia and Ministate
With a combination of guns and muscle, the Haqqani network has built a sprawling enterprise on both sides of a border that barely exists.
The Haqqanis are Afghan members of the Zadran tribe, but it is in the town of Miram Shah in Pakistan’s tribal areas where they have set up a ministate with courts, tax offices and radical madrasa schools producing a ready supply of fighters. They secretly run a network of front companies throughout Pakistan selling cars and real estate, and have been tied to at least two factories churning out the ammonium nitrate used to build roadside bombs in Afghanistan.
American intelligence officials believe that a steady flow of money from wealthy people in the gulf states helps sustain the Haqqanis, and that they further line their pockets with extortion and smuggling operations throughout eastern Afghanistan, focused in the provinces of Khost, Paktia and Paktika. Chromite smuggling has been a particularly lucrative business, as has been hauling lumber from Afghanistan’s eastern forests into Pakistan.
They are also in the kidnapping business, with a mix of pecuniary and ideological motives. In May, the group released the latest of a series of videos showing Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, an American infantryman held by the network since June 2009, with a Haqqani official. David Rohde, then a reporter for The New York Times, was held hostage by Haqqani operatives from November 2008 to June 2009.
Over the past five years, with relatively few American troops operating in eastern Afghanistan, the Haqqanis have run what is in effect a protection racket for construction firms — meaning that American taxpayers are helping to finance the enemy network.
Maulavi Sardar Zadran, a former Haqqani commander, calls this extortion “the most important source of funding for the Haqqanis,” and points out that a multiyear road project linking Khost to Gardez in southeastern Afghanistan was rarely attacked by insurgent forces because a Haqqani commander was its paid protector.
“The Haqqanis know that the contractors make thousands and millions of dollars, so these contractors are very good sources of income for them,” he said in an interview.
Other road projects in the region have been under constant assault. According to an authoritative report written by Jeffrey A. Dressler of the Institute for the Study of War, Haqqani militants “repeatedly targeted road construction projects which, if completed, would provide greater freedom of movement for Afghan and coalition forces.”
But the group is not just a two-bit mafia enriching itself with shakedown schemes. It is an organized militia using high-profile terrorist attacks on hotels, embassies and other targets to advance its agenda to become a power broker in a future political settlement. And, sometimes, the agenda of its patrons from Pakistan’s spy service, the ISI.
Last month, Afghanistan’s National Intelligence Directorate released recordings of phone calls intercepted during the June 28 attack on the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul. In the exchanges, Haqqani network leaders in Pakistan instruct their operatives in the hotel to shoot the locks off rooms, throw in grenades and make sure no one escapes.
Later, as a fire blazes, the recordings capture the voice of Badruddin Haqqani, one of Jalaluddin’s sons, who the State Department says is in charge of kidnappings for the network.
On the tape, Mr. Haqqani asks: “How is the fire?”
A militant named Omar replies: “It’s a big fire, and the smoke is blinding me.” Omar says he will not be able to move away from the fire, and Mr. Haqqani asks if he has bullets.
“Yes, I have a lot of ammunition,” Omar says. “God willing, I’m very relaxed, lying on this mattress, waiting for them.”
Mr. Haqqani laughs and says: “God will give you victory.” More than a dozen people were killed in the attack, which American officials say they think was carried out with some ISI help.
A NATO officer who tracks Haqqani activities in southeastern Afghanistan gave a blunt assessment of the Haqqanis’ brutal ways of intimidation, saying: “They will execute you at a checkpoint, or stop you and go through your phone. And, if they find you’re connected to the government, you’ll turn up in the morgue. And that sends a message.”
According to a senior American military official, cross-border attacks by the Haqqanis into Afghanistan have increased more than fivefold this year over the same period a year ago, and roadside bomb attacks are up 20 percent compared with last year.
For years, American officials have urged Pakistan to move against the Haqqanis’ base of operations in North Waziristan. They typically are rebuffed by military and intelligence officials in Islamabad, who say that Pakistan’s military is overstretched from operations elsewhere in the tribal areas and is not ready for an offensive against the Haqqanis.
As a result, the United States has fallen back on a familiar strategy: missiles fired from armed drones operated by the C.I.A. But because the Haqqani network’s leaders are thought to be hiding in populated towns like Miram Shah, where the C.I.A. is hesitant to carry out drone strikes, American officials said that the campaign has had only limited success against the group’s leadership.
1980s Allies
A quarter-century ago, the Haqqani fighters were not the targets of C.I.A. missiles. They were the ones shooting C.I.A.-supplied missiles, the shoulder-fired Stingers that would devastate Soviet air power over Afghanistan.
Jalaluddin Haqqani was in temporary alliance with the United States against its greater adversary, the Soviet Union, just as his network today is allied with a Pakistan that sees Afghanistan as a critical buffer against its greater adversary, India. His clan’s ruthlessness and fervent Islam were seen then as marks of courage and faith on the part of men Ronald Reagan called freedom fighters.
Representative Charlie Wilson, the late Texas Democrat who made the mujahedeen his cause, called the elder Mr. Haqqani “goodness personified.”
American intelligence officers who worked directly with Mr. Haqqani had a somewhat less starry-eyed view. “He was always a wild-eyed guy,” said the former American intelligence official who worked with the Haqqanis. “But we weren’t talking about getting these guys scholarships to Harvard or M.I.T. He was the scourge of the Soviets.”
The Haqqani fighters would roll boulders down mountains to block passing Soviet convoys, said the official, who requested anonymity because he remains a consultant for the government. “Then they would sit up in the hills and pick the Russians off all afternoon,” he said.
Jalaluddin Haqqani’s fierce temperament was matched by his devotion to the rules of Islam, the official said. Shot in the knee one time during the daytime fast of Ramadan, Mr. Haqqani had medics dig the bullet out without anesthesia rather than violate a religious tenet by swallowing pain medication, the official said. There is little doubt in Afghanistan that if the family were to gain power, it would institute strict Islamic rule.
For Americans who worked with them in the 1980s, the fact that the Haqqanis are now fighting their former American allies is no shock. The Russians were the foreign occupiers before; now the Americans are.
“The Haqqanis have always been the warlords of that part of the country,” said Mr. Sageman, the former C.I.A. officer. “They always will be.”
Limited U.S. Options
On Feb. 19, 2009, the day before Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, Pakistan’s new senior military commander, was due in Washington for his first meetings with the Obama administration, the American Embassy in Islamabad sent a classified cable to the State Department.
American officials believed that General Kayani, Pakistan’s onetime spymaster, had for years overseen Pakistan’s covert support for militant groups like the Haqqani network, and the cable offered blunt advice about the coming talks.
“The single biggest message Kayani should hear in Washington is that this support must end,” said the cable, written by Ambassador Anne W. Patterson.
In the 30 months since, few in Washington believe that Pakistan’s support of armed militia groups has diminished. American officials who were once optimistic they could change Pakistani behavior through cajoling and large cash payments now accept a sober reality: as long as Pakistan sees its security under threat by India’s far larger army, it will rely on militant groups like the Haqqanis, the Taliban and Lashkar-e-Taiba as occasional proxy forces.
The new urgency for a political settlement in Afghanistan has further limited Washington’s options for fighting the Haqqani network. During high-level discussions last year, Obama administration officials debated listing the group as a “Foreign Terrorist Organization,” which allows for some assets to be frozen and could dissuade donors from supporting the group. While some military commanders pushed for the designation, the administration ultimately decided that such a move might alienate the Haqqanis and drive them away from future negotiations.
Officials chose to take the more incremental step of naming individual Haqqani leaders as terrorists, including Badruddin and Sirajuddin Haqqani. Senior American officials said there was once again a fierce debate inside the Obama administration about whether to put the entire group on the terrorist list.
But as Washington struggles to broker an endgame for the Afghan war, there is widespread doubt about whether the Haqqanis will negotiate, and whether their patrons in Islamabad will even let them. After a decade of war, there is a growing sense among America’s diplomats, soldiers and spies that the United States is getting out of Afghanistan without ever figuring out how a maddeningly complex game is played.
“Is there any formula for Pakistan to agree to stop supporting the insurgency in Afghanistan and instead help broker and be satisfied with a political settlement?” asked Karl W. Eikenberry, who served as both America’s top military commander in Afghanistan and its ambassador to the country.
“We don’t know the answer to that question,” he said.
Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane reported from Washington, and Alissa J. Rubin from Kabul, Afghanistan. Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington.
Suicide Attack Kills 2 in Eastern Afghanistan
VOA News September 25, 2011
Afghan police say a suicide bomber detonated an explosive device outside a local police headquarter in eastern Afghanistan, killing two policemen and wounding two civilians.
The attack happened Sunday in Yahya Khel district in Paktika province near Afghanistan's eastern border with Pakistan.
Also Sunday, two international coalition members died in eastern Afghanistan from separate bomb blasts.
On Saturday in the country's central Ghor province, Afghan officials say a German tourist and his Afghan counterpart were killed when unknown gunmen opened fire on their van. That attack comes weeks after unknown assailants killed two German nationals while hiking in the mountains near the capital Kabul.
In a separate development, Afghan President Hamid Karzai has appointed a team to investigate the assassination of former President Burhanuddin Rabbani, who headed the nation's peace council and was leading efforts to find a political solution to the ten-year war with the Taliban. He was killed last week in a suicide attack at his home in Kabul.
Local police, his son killed in N. Afghan town
KUNDUZ, Afghanistan, Sept. 25 (Xinhua) -- Unknown armed men gunned down a local police commander and his son in Kunduz province, 250 km north of capital city Kabul, Saturday night, police said Sunday.
"Unidentified armed men opened fire on Abdul Khaliq, the commander of local police in Kunduz city, the capital of Kunduz province, last night, killing him along with his son," police spokesman in Kunduz city Sayed Sarwar Hussaini told Xinhua.
The incident took place when Khaliq was going to his home along with his son, he added.
Local police is a community police established by government to defend their villages against possible Taliban attacks.
Meantime, Zabihullah Mujahid, who claims to speak for the Taliban outfit in talks with media via telephone from undisclosed location, claimed responsibility, saying Taliban fighters punished commander Khaliq for his support to government.
Road accident kills 8, wounds 12 in Afghan town
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan, Sept. 25 (Xinhua) -- Eight people were killed and 12 others sustained injuries as a bus and mini-bus collided in Kandahar province, 450 km south of capital city Kabul, on Sunday, police said.
"The tragic incident happened in Daman district at 11 a.m. when a passenger bus collided with a mini-bus, leaving eight commuters dead and 12 others injured," a traffic police officer Mohammad Nabi told Xinhua.
Some of the injured passengers are in critical condition, he said, adding that such tragic incidents are usually caused by reckless driving.
A similar road accident in Kandahar province in August left 35 passengers dead and 24 others injured.
Afghan police say gunmen kill German tourist
Reuters By Sharafuddin Sharafyar 24/09/2011
HERAT, Afghanistan - Unknown gunmen killed a German tourist and his Afghan companion in central Afghanistan on Saturday and wounded two other Afghans when they opened fire on the van the tourist was traveling in, a senior police officer said.
The men were on a road in poor, remote Ghor province, driving toward Bamiyan province which is more often visited, deputy provincial police chief Abdul Rashid Bashir told Reuters.
Bashir said the dead man was a tourist, and documents found in his possession showed that he was German. The German embassy in Kabul could not immediately be reached for comment.
Two German nationals were killed last month while hiking in mountains near the capital Kabul. Their killers have not been found.
Ghor is still relatively peaceful, even though it shares a border with Helmand province, an insurgent stronghold. But it is a risky place for foreigners to visit as tourists.
Abdul Hai Khatibi, a spokesman for the provincial governor, declined direct comment on the killing, but said the Taliban had limited influence in Ghor and appeared to suggest that the shooting was likely to be the work of bandits, not insurgents.
"Rivalry between armed groups has damaged the security situation in Ghor and encourages insurgents to claim credit for any attack," he said.
Violence has risen to its worst levels in Afghanistan since the 2001 overthrow of the Taliban government, with record numbers of civilian deaths.
The insurgency is also spreading fast to once relatively peaceful northern and western parts of the country, in addition to the south and east.
Germany has around 5,200 soldiers deployed as part of NATO's mission in Afghanistan, most of them in the north.
(Reporting by Sharafuddin Sharafyar; Editing by Tim Pearce)
Ghosts of Afghanistan: Hard Truths and Foreign Myths by Jonathan Steele - review
Just as the Soviets ran aground in Afghanistan so America is busy repeating their mistakes, writes former diplomat Rodric Braithwaite
The Observer By Rodric Braithwaite Sunday 25 September 2011
Afghanistan, Jonathan Steele writes in his new book, is full of ghosts. There are the ghosts of Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, and their numerous successors – invaders who were able to conquer the place, but could not hold it. "Ghosts" is the word the Russians used for the mujahideen guerrillas who merged with the peaceful population during the day and struck during the night – who fought the Russians in the 1980s and are fighting us today.
Steele has covered events in Afghanistan for many years, and he skewers with palpable glee the myths and half-truths that are peddled by politicians, generals, official spokesmen, and too many commentators. Perhaps the most damaging in his eyes is the myth that the destruction of the Taliban would eliminate the threat from the Arab terrorists who felled the twin towers in New York. That myth has made it all but impossible for us to construct a sensible strategy for Afghanistan.
And so he now writes with increasing despair about the failing efforts of the United States and its allies to build a viable Afghan state out of the physical, institutional and human rubble left behind by three decades of civil war and foreign intervention. A central theme is "the similarity of the Soviet and US interventions and the lessons that ought to be learned". In spite of failing to defeat the mujahideen, Steele writes, the Soviet leadership "had the sense to change course".
When the Russians invaded, Afghanistan had a fairly coherent state apparatus, built up since the end of the 19th century, and an economy which, though very backward, was beginning to develop thanks to American and above all Soviet aid. Most modern Afghan leaders were reformers, but their attempts to change Afghan society, especially when it came to the treatment of women, often met with bloody resistance.
The Afghan communists were reformers too. But they were a small and murderously fractious clique, and they killed their opponents in very large numbers. They soon faced violent uprisings, especially in the countryside.
The Russians invaded in December 1979 not as part of a plan for the world victory of communism, as our propaganda had it, but to protect the security of their southern frontier against Islamic unrest and American intrigue. Senior Soviet generals and officials had warned against getting mixed up in an Afghan civil war. They pointed to the unhappy precedent of Vietnam. Their leaders went ahead nevertheless, as much as anything because they could not think of a better alternative. Change the Afghan leader, train up his army and his police, and then – they hoped – the Soviet troops would be able to leave in a matter of months. It did not happen. The Russians were soon sucked into just the quagmire that the sceptics had feared. Before long they were looking for a way out.
The man who eventually did it was Mikhail Gorbachev. By the time he came to power in 1985, Gorbachev firmly believed that the issue could not be settled by force. He was determined to cut the Gordian knot through negotiation. He was supported by his political colleagues and by his generals, who did not try to argue that they could achieve "victory" if only they were given more troops and more time. He told the Afghan government that his soldiers would be out within 18 months. It still took three years of difficult negotiation before the Soviet army marched away, undefeated on the battlefield but profoundly demoralised by nine years of useless war. And though the Russians left their man Najibullah behind them, they did not bequeath him a wider settlement that would command the support of his enemies among the mujahideen and in Pakistan. The consequence was a bloody civil war, which ended in the victory of the Taliban.
Steele contrasts this record with that of President Obama who, unlike Gorbachev, came to power believing that his war in Afghanistan was a "necessary" war. He thought – at least at first – that if the Afghans adopted western standards of good governance and financial probity they would, by some alchemy, no longer be willing to give cover to the Taliban. Instead of looking for ways to negotiate with the insurgents, he listened to his generals, who persuaded him that they could beat the Taliban if they were given the tools to finish the job.
That has not happened. Despite tired claims of progress by official spokesmen, the Taliban continue to advance. The Afghan government remains unconvincing, hamstrung by arrogant foreign advice, corrupted by an overdose of foreign money. Steele believes that the only way forward is for the Americans to change course, like the Russians did, to commit themselves wholeheartedly to a far-reaching settlement between Kabul and all its enemies, under which the foreign armies can withdraw in good order. The Afghans, helped by their foreign friends, can then devote themselves to rebuilding their shattered country in peace.
That is an ambitious objective. It seems more likely that the Americans and their allies will eventually leave as the Russians did, without the broad settlement that alone can ensure that the civil war does not resume. As we leave, we will doubtless explain away our failure by blaming the ungrateful Afghans for their unwillingness to adopt our western ways. And meanwhile both Afghans and foreigners will continue to die in another useless war.
Sir Rodric Braithwaite is the author of Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan, 1979-89 (Profile).
www.afghanistannewscenter.com