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Official: Rabbani assassination planned outside Afghanistan
By the CNN Wire Staff September 26, 2011
Kabul, Afghanistan (CNN) -- The assassination of Berhanuddin Rabbani, an Afghan leader spearheading the reconciliation process with the Taliban, was planned outside the country, an Afghan intelligence official said Monday.
Rabbani, a former Afghan president and chairman of the High Peace Council, was killed in an attack at his home on September 20.
"We have arrested one individual who is a citizen of Afghanistan," the official, who declined to be named, told reporters at a news conference. "But who these people are or who the organization involved in the attack is, we will say that in the future."
"We cannot deny the involvement of Quetta Shura," he said. Quetta Shura is a leadership council based in the Pakistani city of Quetta, thought to run much of the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan.
No one in the Afghan government played a role in Rabbani's death, he said. "This was a terrorist act and was planned very carefully outside Afghanistan."
Rabbani's death shocked the war-torn country, undermined the fledgling peace initiative and stoked fears of renewed ethnic conflict between Pashtuns and others, such as Rabbani's ethnic group of Tajiks.
An Afghan intelligence source told CNN last week that the bomber arrived at the house at the same time a meeting was due to take place between Rabbani and a delegation representing the Taliban insurgency.
Police said the bomber claimed to be a Taliban member who had come for the talks about peace and reconciliation and detonated the explosives as he entered the home.
Long an enemy of the Taliban, Rabbani was a controversial choice when appointed by President Hamid Karzai as chairman of the High Peace Council a year ago. He was forced to flee Kabul when the Taliban took over in 1996, but he continued to lead resistance to the regime from his stronghold in Faizabad in northern Afghanistan.
Journalist Ruhullah Khapalwak contributed to this report.
Afghan employed by U.S. kills American inside Kabul CIA station
By Ernesto Londono, The Washington Post Monday, September 26, 1:49 PM
KABUL — An Afghan man employed by the U.S. government opened fire Sunday night inside the CIA station in Kabul, killing one American, a government employee, and wounding a second, officials said Monday.
U.S. Embassy spokesman Gavin A. Sundwall identified the building where the attack took place only as an embassy annex compound, but Afghan officials and Western security officials said it is used by the CIA.
Sundwall said investigators believe the gunman acted alone. They have not yet determined what the motive may have been, he said.
“We mourn the loss of life in the incident as we mourn the loss of all life,” Sundwall said.
The shooting comes two weeks after a 20-hour attack on the U.S. Embassy in Kabul by a team of gunmen who sprayed Kabul’s heavily guarded diplomatic compound with grenades, rockets and small-arms fire. No Americans were killed or wounded in that attack.
That attack, and the recent slaying of a prominent Afghan official tasked with brokering a peace deal with the Taliban, have stoked concerns about the ease with which militants have carried out attacks in the heart of a capital once regarded as relatively secure.
Sundwall said the wounded American was being treated at a military hospital for wounds that are not life-threatening.
The Afghan gunman was killed in the incident, he said, and “the embassy has resumed business operation.”
Afghan officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the shooting occurred at the building that formerly housed the Arianna Hotel. The compound was taken over by the CIA in 2002, according to Afghan officials and Western private security experts.
An official briefed on the investigation said the Americans who were shot appear to have been “at the wrong place at the wrong time,” and not specifically targeted. The official spoke on condition of anonymity given the preliminary nature of the findings.
The official added that the incident was over quickly, but said it took security personnel several hours to clear the rest of the compound to make sure there were no other threats.
U.S. military officials have grown increasingly worried about the threat posed by militants who have infiltrated Afghan security forces to launch attacks on NATO personnel.
Sunday’s shooting appeared to mark the first time an Afghan employed by a civilian entity of the U.S. government in Afghanistan turned on his American colleagues.
In 2009, a suicide bomber posing as an informant penetrated the CIA base near Khost, Afghanistan and detonated his explosives, killing the station chief and six other agency employees. It was the most lethal attack against the agency in decades.
Building used by CIA attacked in Afghan capital
By DEB RIECHMANN - Associated Press
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — A building used by the CIA in Kabul came under attack Sunday, U.S. and Afghan officials said, the latest in a series of attacks in the Afghan capital.
Afghan authorities said gunfire was heard in the evening near the Ariana Hotel, a building that former U.S. intelligence officials said was the CIA station in Kabul. The CIA occupied the heavily secured building just blocks from the Afghan presidential palace in late 2001 after the U.S.-led invasion that toppled the Taliban.
There was no immediate word on casualties.
A U.S. official confirmed there was an attack on a facility used by American officials in Kabul.
"The situation is fluid, and the investigation is ongoing," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation.
Officials at the U.S.-led coalition headquarters nearby said they heard the gunfire, but did not have details about the incident.
All the officials in Afghanistan spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.
The attack came two weeks after militants fired rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles at the U.S. Embassy, NATO headquarters and other buildings, killing seven Afghans. No embassy or NATO staff members were hurt in the 22-hour assault, but accusations over who was responsible have plunged U.S. relations with Pakistan to new lows.
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 the Sept. 13 attack 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.
Pakistan also is receiving criticism from Afghanistan.
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.
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.
Pakistan 'will not launch' Haqqani offensive
By Nasir Jaffry (AFP) – September 26, 2011
ISLAMABAD — Pakistan will not launch an offensive against Haqqani extremists despite Washington ramping up the pressure after a series of attacks on US targets in Afghanistan, an official said Monday.
The alliance between Pakistan and the United States in the 10-year war in Afghanistan and against Al-Qaeda hit rock bottom this year in the wake of the unilateral American raid that killed Osama bin Laden near Islamabad on May 2.
In a series of escalating rows, Washington accused Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency of involvement in the September 13 attack on its embassy in Kabul and a September 11 attack on a NATO base in central Afghanistan.
The White House has since demanded that Pakistan "break any link they have" with the Haqqani network, which was founded by former CIA asset Jalaluddin Haqqani and is today run by his son Sirajuddin -- based in Pakistan's North Waziristan.
Pakistan's army chief of staff called his top generals for an extraordinary meeting at the weekend to discuss the series of stinging American rebukes blaming the Haqqanis and Pakistani intelligence for recent attacks.
Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani is now expected to call a rare cross-party conference, although he has dismissed the American allegations as little more than finding a scapegoat for US "disarray" in the 10-year war in Afghanistan.
"I don't think the indicators are as such," a senior Pakistani security official told AFP when asked if the army was going to launch an operation in North Waziristan, part of the country's semi-autonomous tribal belt.
Instead, he said, the military needs to "consolidate gains" made against local militants who pose a security threat elsewhere in the tribal region that Washington has branded an Al-Qaeda headquarters.
Pakistan has around 140,000 troops based along its northwest that borders Afghanistan and says more than 3,000 soldiers have been killed since 2001 -- more than the 2,735 Western soldiers who have died in Afghanistan.
General James Mattis, commander of the US Central Command which oversees the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, on Sunday became the most senior US commander to hold talks with Pakistani generals in Islamabad since last week's public US accusations of Pakistani involvement with the Haqqanis.
In a curt statement after the talks, the Pakistani military said it was committed to achieving "enduring peace in the region" -- something it said was only possible "through mutual trust and cooperation".
But the Pakistani official told AFP that troops were too busy countering cross-border attacks from Afghanistan and local Pakistani militants in other parts of the tribal belt to take on the Haqqanis.
"These are kind of more pressing issues that we have to tackle. We have to consolidate the gains in Mohmand and in other tribal and northwestern regions after a series of operations in these areas," the security official said.
"As for North Waziristan, the army has at least five brigades there, which is enough to take care of the situation. There is a complete tribal structure in the region to help security forces deal with the militants and outlaws."
Last week, the outgoing top US military officer, Admiral Mike Mullen, bluntly accused Pakistan of "exporting" violent extremism to Afghanistan through proxies and warned of possible action to protect US troops.
Some Pakistanis interpret the accusations as a search for a scapegoat for US failings in Afghanistan, where the Taliban insurgency is deadlier than ever and from where Washington plans to recall all combat troops by 2014.
Analysts believe Pakistan lacks the capacity to take on the Haqqanis and that the American response is limited to an already active drone war against militants in the tribal belt and further economic sanctions.
Washington has already decided to withhold almost a third of its annual $2.7 billion security assistance to Islamabad.
"They can apply economic sanctions and increase drone attacks," political and security analyst Hasan Askari told AFP.
As an ally, Pakistan has repeatedly rejected American ground incursions -- such as the May 2 bin Laden raid -- and any North Waziristan offensive would not only be deadly, but hugely costly for the Americans diplomatically.
Pakistan intelligence chief leaves for Saudi Arabia
ISLAMABAD, Sept. 26 (Xinhua) -- Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) chief Lt.Gen. Ahmad Shuja Pasha left for Saudi Arabia on Monday after Pakistan-U.S. ties was strained over the U. S. accusation that ISI supported Haqqani network in recent attacks on U.S. targets in Afghanistan, local media reported.
Top military commanders met on Sunday to propose the visit to Saudi Arabia by the ISI chief to brief Saudi leaders on the Pakistan-U.S. tension, reports said..
Pakistan is likely to send envoys to other friendly countries in view of the tension with the U.S., sources said.
Apart from diplomatic efforts, the government has also stepped up consultations with political leaders to seek their support.
The chairman of U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen on Thursday called the Haqqani network a "veritable arm" of ISI, the charge denied by Pakistan.
U.S. Secretary of Defence Leon Panetta threatened to take unilateral action against the Haqqani network inside Pakistan if the authorities there faided to do so.
Mullen's accusations: Has US reached its limit with Pakistan?
Adm. Mullen's public accusation that Pakistani intelligence was involved in militants' attacks on US targets in Afghanistan suggest that the US has reached its limit with its 'strategic partner.'
By Howard LaFranchi, The Christian Science Monitor Staff writer / September 26, 2011
Warnings of new lows in US-Pakistan relations have popped up like mushrooms in past years, but in recent days “even worse” seems accurate to describe the state of play between the two “strategic partners.”
Public accusations of Pakistani involvement in recent attacks on US targets in Afghanistan leveled by Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, before a Senate committee Thursday suggest that the United States has reached a limit.
Admiral Mullen’s dire appraisal of the relations between the two countries leaves the door open to new unilateral US military actions inside Pakistan beyond recent stepped-up drone attacks, and even beyond last May’s surprise special-forces operation to get Osama bin Laden, which so enraged Pakistanis.
A fed-up Mullen may be signaling that US incursions into Pakistan to take out militant groups the Pakistanis refuse to touch could be on the horizon – and that the Pakistanis could only blame themselves for it, some national security analysts say.
US claims of a direct link between Pakistan’s intelligence services and the Haqqani network, one of Pakistan’s most powerful and anti-US militant groups, are nothing new. But the Sept. 13 attack on the US Embassy in Kabul – and reports that cell phones found on the attackers were linked to the ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence agency – offered a new level of proof of Pakistani complicity with Islamist militants.
Moreover, the fact that last week’s accusation was made publicly, and that it came from Mullen, was striking.
Probably no US military official has worked harder to repair relations and met more with his Pakistani military counterparts than Mullen to try to convince them of the need not just to sever ties to the Haqqani group, but to actually take it on, analysts say. Most recently, in mid-September, Mullen spent more than two hours with the Pakistani military chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, on the sidelines of a NATO meeting in Spain, Pentagon officials say.
But Mullen is suggesting that the window for imploring the Pakistanis to act is closing. The US shouldn’t wait long to take action, some regional analysts say – even if it could mean a breakdown in US-Pakistan relations.
“While there are risks inherent to going down a more punitive path with Pakistan, the recent information on ISI links to the attack in the US Embassy leaves the US with no other option,” says Lisa Curtis, a South Asia expert at the Heritage Foundation in Washington.
If the reports of cell phone links between the Embassy attackers and the ISI are accurate, Ms. Curtis says, it would be the first time the US had a “smoking gun” on Pakistani collusion with anti-US militants.
The Pakistani response to the US accusations followed a familiar pattern of denial – and of high-level refusals to take US orders and go after the Haqqanis. The Pakistani argument has long been that Pakistani militant groups operating inside Afghanistan are a hedge against eventual US withdrawal, and that they operate as proxies for advancing Pakistani interests in the arena of a strategic battle with arch-rival India.
Some Pakistani officials also say privately that the ISI wouldn’t be doing its job if it didn’t have contacts with the Haqqani group, but that accusations of support for the group are a completely different matter and are false.
But Curtis says that if the Pakistani denials cannot be backed up within a few days, then the US should proceed with a set of harsh measures, including listing the Haqqani network on the US list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations, and then initiating an aggressive campaign of drone strikes against the group in its home turf of North Waziristan in Pakistan.
The US should also suspend all assistance to Pakistan, including civilian aid, she says. A similar idea is advancing in the US Congress: Last week a Senate committee voted to advance a measure to hold back $1 billion in US aid, conditional on the Pakistanis reversing course and launching an expanded crackdown on militants, including the Haqqani group.
Curtis also calls for reversing US withdrawal plans for Afghanistan. Such a move would be aimed at convincing the region, including Pakistan, that the US is committed to Afghan stability, she says, while signaling to the Taliban and groups like the Haqqani network that the US will not tolerate Afghanistan once again becoming a haven for terrorists.
But with the US and NATO committed to having all of their combat forces out of the country by 2014, that suggestion may be the least likely to occur.
The U.S.-Pakistan Row Reveals Hard Choices in Afghanistan
By ROBERT BAER | Time.com
What does Pakistan really want in Afghanistan? That question has become all the more urgent since Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, accused Pakistan of being indirectly responsible for last week's attack on our embassy in Kabul. Reports of a second possible attack, on Sunday, on the building alleged to house the local CIA station will, no doubt, fuel further speculation. Assessing Pakistan's interests in Afghanistan through the prism of honesty and realpolitik rather than wishful thinking may be the only way we're going to get out of this messy war.
For a start, we need to understand that Pakistan intends to bring down the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, even if that means taking on its sometime U.S. ally. Pakistan hates Karzai out of a conviction that he has made common cause with Pakistan's strategic nemesis, India, and a suspicion that the Afghan leader intends to harm Pakistan's strategic interests in other ways. And, of course, the hatred is mutual. Rightly or wrongly, Karzai believes that Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) assassinated his father, and would do the same to him given half a chance.
A second misunderstanding we need to dispense with is that the ISI is somehow a rogue organization outside of Pakistan's chain of command and is pursuing a pro-Taliban agenda all its own. The Pakistani army can remove the ISI director, General Ahmad Shuja Pasha - or any other officer of the organization - at a moment's notice. So, if the ISI did indeed sponsor an attack on the U.S. embassy in Kabul, such a step should be assumed to have been taken with the consent of the power that be in Pakistan, i.e. the military establishment. The idea that to make our Pakistan problem go away, the ISI needs to be "cleaned up" is naive. The Pakistani actions that make life difficult for the U.S. in Afghanistan are driven by a clear-sighted strategic agenda.
As for the Pakistani proxy accused of carrying out the embassy attack, the Haqqani network, we need to understand why Pakistan won't give it up or act against it as the U.S. demands. With up to 15,000 fighters and effective control of large parts of eastern Afghanistan and Pakistan's North Waziristan, the Haqqanis are an indispensible party to a peace settlement in Afghanistan - and a vehicle for securing Pakistan's interests in that country after the U.S. withdraws. To sever relations with the Haqqanis now would mean Pakistan giving up a large degree of influence in Afghanistan after the war is over.
The U.S. has for years demanded that Pakistan mount a sweeping military offensive in North Waziristan to destroy the Haqqanis, but even if they were so inclined, the fact is that the Pakistani military has only ever been able to control the main roads in North Waziristan. The Pakistani army is incapable of occupying and holding this territory, no matter how much money we offer or how dire the threats we make.
At the core of the problem stands a simple proposition: Pakistan doesn't trust us with Afghanistan - and from Islamabad's perspective, not without cause. We took a strategic decision to invade a country central to their national-security doctrine without seriously consulting them, preferring to think in terms of an Afghanistan of our dreams. Nor did we take into account their strategic interests and the proxies through which they have pursued them. The Soviet Union made the same mistake when it invaded Afghanistan in 1979.
Having failed to prevail a decade later, we now have two choices, neither of them particularly attractive to Washington. We can attempt to destroy the Haqqani base in North Waziristan by invading Pakistan. But to do that effectively would require more troops than we currently have in Afghanistan. Doing so would obviously destroy whatever relations we still have with Pakistan, with profoundly dangerous consequences in Afghanistan and far beyond.
Alternatively, we could hash out a settlement with Pakistan, which would inevitably mean accepting the Haqqanis and easing out Karzai in any political settlement to the conflict. Such a deal would also potentially bring in Afghanistan's other neighbor with real strategic interests in the country - Iran. Iran can be unpredictable, but it's by no means certain it would accept true Pakistani-American collusion in Afghanistan. In the mid-'90s, Iran was all but at war with the Taliban, and if Iran isn't consulted on a settlement, it could play the spoiler.
Accepting Pakistan's postconflict agenda and backing off on the Haqqanis at Karzai's expense is too bitter a pill for Washington to swallow in an election year, so we'll muddle through for another year. But when the U.S. finally leaves, don't be surprised to see the Haqqanis in Kabul.
Baer, a former Middle East CIA field officer, is TIME.com's intelligence columnist and the author of See No Evil and The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower.
Cost of training Afghan forces can be cut: US general
AFP
The US military hopes to slash the cost of training Afghan forces over the next several years, partly because commanders expect the Taliban insurgency to decline, a top US general said Monday.
The United States has forecast that the annual price tag of training and equipping Afghan security forces in coming years would drop to about $6 billion but the officer overseeing the effort, Lieutenant General William Caldwell, said the cost likely will be much less.
"So what I will tell you is, from the efforts that have been ongoing here, it's going to be significantly lower than that ($6 billion)," Caldwell told reporters by video link from Kabul.
"We do in fact expect the level of insurgency to go down, we do in fact expect to find more efficiencies in how we do things...," he said.
Caldwell did not offer estimates as to how much money could be saved in coming years.
The general's comments come amid growing pressure to scale back US defense spending -- including the cost of the Afghanistan war -- as politicians struggle to tackle the government's budget deficit and debt.
Caldwell's prediction that the Taliban would gradually recede has been echoed by some other senior officers, but violence levels remain high and the insurgency has proved resilient as it exploits safe havens in neighboring Pakistan.
The US military's top officer told lawmakers last week the Pentagon was looking to reduce the cost of building up the Afghan security forces, which are due to take over from NATO-led troops by the end of 2014.
The Pentagon has proposed spending $12.8 billion in 2012 on training and arming the Afghan army and police, with the force due to expand to 352,000 by November 2012.
Caldwell said the NATO-led mission had found ways to save money in the training effort. Fans were being installed at Afghan bases instead of air conditioning units and boots and uniforms were being bought from Afghan firms instead of US companies, he said.
The general said Afghan security forces are improving steadily and that they performed heroically in fending off a September 13 attack on the US embassy and NATO headquarters.
Only two battalions out of about 180 were now able to operate independently, and even then they required some logistical or other support from NATO forces, he said.
Once Afghan troops and police take the lead throughout the country by 2015, the force will still need some support from the NATO-led coalition to help with intelligence and air power, he said.
Ex-Afghan Minister: Pressure On ISI To End Ties With Terror Groups
September 26, 2011 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
KABUL -- A former Afghan official says pressure is mounting on Pakistan to end its support for extremist groups who were reportedly involved in last week's assassination of former Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani, RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan reports.
Ali Ahmad Jalali, an Afghan-American professor at the United States National Defense University in Washington, told RFE/RL on September 23 that recent comments by Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, have added to the pressure on Pakistan's intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), to sever ties with extremist groups such as the Haqqani network.
"The U.S. has issued its strongest statement yet to Pakistan's ISI on its ties with the Taliban and Haqqani groups," said Jalali, who served as Afghan defense and interior minister from 2003-2005. "It is a clear message to Pakistan that it can no longer continue its current strategy in Afghanistan."
Mullen on September 22 accused the ISI of aiding the Haqqani network in planning and executing last week's attacks on the U.S. Embassy in Kabul. He said the Pakistani government had used the Haqqani network and other terrorist groups as its proxies in Afghanistan.
Mullen said Pakistan had chosen to "use violent extremism as an instrument of policy," adding that "by exporting violence, they have eroded their internal security and their position in the region. They have undermined their international credibility and threatened their economic well-being."
Jalali said "Pakistan has to come to terms [with the fact] that it cannot get what it wants in Afghanistan through violence and hard power. It must open up to diplomatic channels and use avenues such as the current peace council to state its concerns and ideas."
Jalali thinks that after the killing of Rabbani, Afghanistan must unite as a nation and learn from the experience.
"Until the people in Afghanistan unite in a common cause, its enemies will use these divisions to their advantage and promote their own agendas," he said. "We [Afghans] must come together."
7 insurgents killed, 32 arrested in E. Afghanistan
KABUL, Sept. 26 (Xinhua) -- Afghan and NATO-led forces during operations have killed seven insurgents and captured 32 in eastern Afghanistan's provinces over the past 24 hours, the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said on Monday.
"Ten Afghan and Coalition force conducted operations in RC-East (Regional Command-East) killing seven enemies, the detaining 32 suspected individuals and a weapon cache turned in over the past 24 hours throughout the region," said a statement issued by ISAF' s RC-East here.
A concerned local Afghan civilian turned over a weapons cache that included 11 mortar rounds, two anti-tank mines, an anti- personnel mine, a jug of homemade explosives, a bag of improvised explosive device (IED) components, 24 rocket primers, two 82mm recoilless rifle rounds, two bolt actions rifles and two shotguns and a heavy machine gun barrel, according to the statement.
It also confirmed that a Coalition drone was crashed in country' s eastern Paktika province in the same period of time.
"An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) crashed in the Sar Rowzah District of Paktika Province. The UAV was recovered and there was no enemy activity in the area prior to the crash," it said.
Afghan and NATO officials often use the word "insurgents" for referring to Taliban militants.
The insurgent group, who stepped up their attacks on Afghan and about 140,000 ISAF troops stationed in the country since a spring rebel offensive was launched in May this year in the country, has yet to make comments.
Afghan police foil suicide attacks in the south
Sun, Sep 25, 2011
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Afghan police say officers have shot dead two men wearing explosives vests, foiling a planned suicide attack on a government building.
The Ministry of Interior says the shooting on Sunday morning in the southern Zabul province detonated the attackers' explosives and both died.
Separately, the ministry says more than 340 rockets have been fired in the past week from Pakistan into two east Afghan provinces.
Shells landing in Dangam district of Nuristan province destroyed six houses, two mosques and displaced at least 50 families.
The ministry says it's unclear who is firing the artillery rounds — including more than 100 that rained down Saturday night in Nuristan and Kunar provinces — but insists they are being fired from Pakistani soil.
Four militants killed in premature explosion in Afghanistan
GHAZNI, Afghanistan, Sept. 26 (Xinhua) -- Four Taliban insurgents died as their explosive device went off accidentally in Ghazni province in southern Afghanistan on Monday, police said.
"Four terrorists were busy in planting a mine on a road in Andar district to target security forces but their explosive device went off prematurely killing all the four on the spot this morning," district governor Shir Khan Yusufzai told Xinhua.
The Rapid Rise Of America's Man In Kandahar
by NPR Staff NPR September 27, 2011
Gen. Abdul Raziq is the acting police chief of Afghanistan's Kandahar province. Just 33 years old, he's a former warlord on whom the United States relied during its 2010 "surge" operation. But Raziq is also accused of brutal abuses of power, even massacring his tribal rivals, according to a new article in The Atlantic.
Matthieu Aikins, the article's author, describes Raziq as a "rags-to-riches character, who started as a small shopkeeper living in exile in Pakistan during the Taliban period, and has ascended to the most dizzying heights of wealth and power."
Aikins tells Morning Edition co-host Steve Inskeep that Raziq began his rise after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001.
"He became the head of this tribal militia that controlled a key border crossing between Kandahar, in southern Afghanistan, and Pakistan," Aikins says.
According to Aikins, anyone who controls that vital military and trade passage is "sitting on a gold mine."
"The other thing is that he oversaw the most dramatic expansion of the opium trade in history," he adds.
In his article, Aikins also links Raziq to several episodes of brutal violence. One instance took place in 2006, when Raziq was a colonel in Afghanistan's Border Police.
According to Aikins, that's when Raziq "basically conspired with another man to abduct 16 people from Kabul, where they'd sort of been on vacation, and then take them out into the desert and murder them there, and leave their corpses there — and claim that they had actually been Taliban infiltrating from across the border [from Pakistan]."
Raziq has not denied being responsible for the deaths, but he has maintained that those killed were Taliban fighters.
"They didn't have connections to the Taliban; they were rivals of Abdul Raziq," Aikins says, citing a thorough police investigation.
The results of that police inquiry were suppressed, Aikins says in The Atlantic. And senior Afghan officials, including President Hamid Karzai, chose not to move against Raziq, he says.
Last autumn, Raziq was named a partner in the U.S. effort to clear Kandahar city of militants, raising his profile in Afghanistan — and leading to a promotion to brigadier general. In May, he was named acting police chief of Kandahar province.
Excerpt: 'Our Man In Kandahar' — Matthieu Aikins describes the final days of Shin Noorzai, "a burly smuggler in his mid-30s" who was killed along with more than a dozen other men he was traveling in March of 2006.
According to an acquaintance of Shin's who was also present at the gathering, he and his friends had arrived at the invitation of another man, Mohammed Naeem Lalai, an old friend of Shin's who was then working as an officer in the Border Police. It was Lalai who had persuaded Shin and his friends to stop in Kabul on their way to Mazar. As the group sat down to dinner, Shin's acquaintance, a fellow tribesman, watched uneasily, nervous about the company Shin was keeping. He offered to make the trip with Shin instead. "Come with me to Mazar," he said to him.
Shin replied that he was going to travel up to Mazar with Lalai. But first, he said, Lalai was taking him to another house where music and entertainment were promised. That night, as darkness fell over Kabul, Shin and his 15 companions left the house with Lalai. Their friends and families would never see them alive again.
At the second house, Shin and his friends were apparently drugged. Unconscious, they were bound and gagged, then loaded into vehicles with official plates, one of them a green Ford Ranger with the seal of the Border Police on its doors.
Driving along back roads, the cars made their way 500 kilometers south to Kandahar province, and by the next morning arrived at Spin Boldak, where Abdul Raziq, then a Border Police colonel in his mid-20s, was waiting for them.
Raziq and Lalai had together lured Shin and his associates to Kabul. The tribes to which Raziq and Shin belonged had been feuding over smuggling routes, and Raziq held Shin responsible for the 2004 killing of his brother. Shin had been a marked man ever since. His 15 companions were just going to be collateral damage.
Raziq and his men loaded their captives into a convoy of Land Cruisers and headed out to a parched, desolate stretch of the Afghan-Pakistani border. About 10 kilometers outside of town, they came to a halt. Shin and the others were hauled out of the trucks and into a dry river gully. There, at close range, Raziq's forces let loose with automatic weapons, their bullets tearing through the helpless men, smashing their faces apart and soaking their robes with blood. After finishing the job, they unbound the corpses and left them there.
Arriving back in Spin Boldak, Raziq reported to his superiors and to the press that he had intercepted "at least 15" Taliban fighters infiltrating from Pakistan, led by the "midlevel Taliban commander Mullah Shin," and had killed them in a gun battle. "We got a tip-off about them coming across the border. We went down there and fought them," Raziq told the Associated Press the next day. It was the beginning of a cover-up that would go all the way up to President Karzai in Kabul.
"Our Man in Kandahar" by Mattieu Aikens will be featured in the November issue of The Atlantic and is currently available online at TheAtlantic.com.
War-weary Afghans plead for peace amid series of deadly attacks
by Farid Behbud, Zhang Jianhua
KABUL, Sept. 26 (Xinhua) -- Series of deadly attacks, particularly a brutal suicide offensive on former Afghan president and peace body chief Burhanudin Rabbani, rocked parts of the country including the capital city of Kabul over the past couple of months and prompted the war-weary Afghans to pray for durable peace in their country.
"Yet again there was an attack in Kabul just last night, and this time also in the fortified location, we are tired of witnessing such incidents that always cause horror and dread among Kabulis," a Kabul resident Liyakat Khan told Xinhua on Monday, referring a gun battle Sunday night in Ariana Hotel near the Afghan presidential palace, NATO's headquarters and U.S. embassy in Kabul that left a U.S. citizen dead.
A security source who declined to be identified said that a U.S. -run intelligence agency located in Ariana Hotel opposite to the U. S. embassy building was the scene of gun shots Sunday night which left one person dead and injured two others.
Several Afghan cities including the capital city Kabul have experienced a string of deadly suicide attacks and gun battles since the beginning of this year, fading common citizens' hope for having viable peace.
The latest violent attack was a suicide attack against former Afghan President Burhanudin Rabbani, who also served as the Chairman of Afghan High Peace Council, a 70-member government- backed peace body which was set up by President Hamid Karzai on October 2010 to broker peace with the Taliban and other armed opposition groups.
The attack which occurred on Tuesday Sept. 20 inside Rabbani's Kabul residence also injured four people including the head of joint secretariat of the Peace Council Mohammad Masoom Stanekzai.
However, Khan, in his 50s, said that he was hopeful for the government-initiated peace process, saying "if both sides accept to end the war in a peaceful way and they had to act sincerely, of course the war will end here one day."
The Taliban insurgents, who often claim responsibility for suicide attacks and roadside bombings, for the first time rejected their involvement in killing Rabbani, although the outfit had accepted responsibility hours after Rabbani's murder.
"In fact the situation in Afghanistan is uncertain. It is critical and out of the control of the Afghan and foreign forces. They are losing the momentum despite of their claim of success," Khan went on to say.
Escalation of deadly attacks, especially the murdering of influential figures and high ranking officials, have brought Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his government under enormous pressure from the public and political opponents to capture those responsible for Rabbani's killing, which has been regarded a big blow to the peace process.
"I have no empathy for Mullah Omar and his Taliban fighters or to the NATO and Americans whosoever, I just want to see peace in my land," a female resident of Kabul namely Ryhana said.
"Calling for peace in Afghanistan by the government and rejected by the Taliban, in fact resembles to a one-way road which deemed to defeat," she said.
"If they (the NATO and U.S. forces) really want to stabilize Afghanistan and the region, they have to go after Mullah Omar," Ryhana said.
Taliban always put preconditions for making peace, but if the government and the world accept their conditions, the Afghans will lose all the achievements which have gained over the past decade including human rights and women rights, she said.
The Taliban also claimed responsibility for a multiple suicide and gun attacks against the U.S. embassy in Kabul and other government institutions on Sept. 13 that left 16 people including nine attackers dead.
"Our demand for the government is to arrest and award capital punishment in public to those who organize and support suicide attacks and terrorist activities in the country," said another lady Mrs. Salima in Kabul.
Hurtling down Afghanistan’s road to perdition
Financial Times By Matthew Green September 25, 2011
I was taking tea with a former Mujahideen fighter pilot in the Safi Landmark hotel in Kabul when a suicide bomber blew himself up in the lobby. My companion remained unperturbed as guests rushed for cover. When a guard said three more bombers were loose in the building, he barely blinked.
Such sangfroid is a feature of a city that has endured years of violence. But behind the brave face put on by Kabulis there is fear: fear for what the withdrawal of foreign troops might mean; fear for what the Taliban will do next; and fear that the country is headed inexorably for a new round of civil war.
The killing of Burhanuddin Rabbani, the former president, last week brought that prospect a step closer. In the best traditions of Afghan hierarchs, he was both elder statesman and warlord, a vainglorious politician and Islamic scholar. His hilltop grave now stands as a milestone on Afghanistan’s march towards the next instalment in 30 years of fratricidal bloodshed.
To understand what is happening, it is important to tune out what Nato politicians and generals are saying. Yes, US special forces are netting Taliban commanders by bursting into Afghan homes. It is true that the army and police are expanding in numbers and scope, quickly, if unevenly. Also, the US will not abandon Afghanistan again, at least not in the way it did after the departure of the Red Army – the Pentagon will have bases long beyond the withdrawal date of 2014.
None of this will stop the coming showdown. With the Obama administration’s successive troop surges already starting to recede, it is Afghan and Pakistani players who are increasingly making the key decisions. And, to be clear, there is no chance at all of a peace deal between the government of Hamid Karzai, the president, and the Taliban in the near future. The killing of Rabbani, who was in charge of putting out feelers to insurgents, destroyed once and for all the idea that reconciliation was feasible in the coming months.
The ease with which suicide bombers can infiltrate the Kabul police’s so-called ring of steel to attack hotels, lob rocket-propelled grenades at the US embassy or kill prominent Afghans intensifies the increasing impression that this is a city up for grabs. The situation is far worse in provincial towns where senior officials keep being assassinated.
Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president’s brother, who once improbably described himself to me as the “Nancy Pelosi” of Kandahar, was shot dead in July. Daoud Daoud, a wily police general who with a conspiratorial grin would share his suspicions that Ahmed Wali was involved in drug trafficking, was blown up in May. Ghulam Haider Hamidi, the mayor of Kandahar, who always cheerfully assured me that security was improving, was also killed in July.
This slow-motion implosion of administration has made the situation even more febrile. Many in Kabul will say that the Taliban is containable and that it is their own government that is out of control. Mr Karzai has presided over a system of crony capitalism symbolised by the scandal at Kabul Bank: a $1bn Ponzi scheme implicating a roster of the city’s elite.
Oligarchs who have flourished on Nato contracts careen around the city in convoys of pick-up trucks with masked gunmen clinging to the back. Even these entrepreneurs of the war economy are afraid: one told me his five-year-old son had advised him to stop working with Americans and join the Taliban.
In the vacuum, old loyalties have become primary. Rabbani was a titan of the Northern Alliance of warlords from the ethnic Tajik community. Its leaders have prospered since the ousting of the Taliban, which hails from the Pashtun south. His killing has deepened civil war fault-lines – accelerating a growing polarisation between northerners and Pashtuns.
The trend suits Pakistan’s generals, who are stoking the fire by backing the Taliban. A weak Afghanistan is more appealing to them than a pro-Indian Afghanistan. Unbowed by US pressure, Pakistan’s spies will continue to back Afghan proxies such as the Haqqani network to protect their interests.
Can the slide to civil war be stopped? Nato has failed. There was nothing more striking about a three-week stint I spent embedded with US “surge” forces last summer than watching three men with spades, AK-47s and fertiliser calmly plant a roadside bomb while an F-18 Hornet circled overhead. Armoured vehicles were scrambled, but to no avail – the men vanished.
The insurgency cannot be beaten on the battlefield. Nor can the Taliban be forced into a deal. The only hope is that the changes in Afghan society in the past decade can provide an incentive for moderation ultimately to prevail. In Kabul at least a younger generation is long since disillusioned with the politics of the gun. But as the calls for revenge at Rabbani’s funeral showed, Afghan politics are now ruled by fear.
The writer is the FT’s Afghanistan and Pakistan correspondent
Bulgaria plans phased troops withdrawal from Afghanistan: DM
SOFIA, Sept. 26 (Xinhua) -- Bulgaria has developed a draft strategy for phased withdrawal from the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan, Defense Minister Anyu Angelov said here on Monday.
According to the strategy that would be adopted by the Bulgarian government by the end of this year, the 610-member Bulgarian contingent based in Kabul and Kandahar would be gradually pulled out in 2012, 2013 and 2014, Angelov told a press conference.
However, "probably" Bulgarian military instructors would remain in Afghanistan after 2014 because there was an agreement between NATO and Afghanistan to continue assisting the Afghan security forces in their preparation and training, Angelov said.
Angelov added that he has met with his Belgian counterpart because Belgium already declared to withdraw its contingent from Kabul in 2012.
Angelov also said he would meet informally with NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Europe Admiral James Stavridis, and with defense ministers of countries such as Afghanistan and Portugal that could potentially take on certain functions performed by the Bulgarian contingent.
US Marines find rewards in Afghanistan
By CHRISTOPHER TORCHIA - Associated Press
FORWARD OPERATING BASE JACKSON, Afghanistan (AP) — An American in uniform stands near a landing zone at about 2 a.m., moonlight framing his features, and talks about dead and maimed men he knows. His flight out isn't until next month, and he is counting the days.
Then he says he will miss Afghanistan.
"It's just life or death: the simplicity of it," said Cpl. Robert Cole of the 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, which ends a seven-month deployment in the southern region of Sangin in October. "It's also kind of nice in some ways because you don't have to worry about anything else in the world."
The dominant narrative about war in a foreign land says its practitioners yearn for home, for the families, the comforts, and the luxury of no longer worrying about imminent death or injury. It applies to young American troops in Afghan combat zones, but it's not the whole truth.
Combat can deliver a sense of urgency, meaning, order and belonging. There is the adrenaline-fueled elation of a firefight, and the horror of rescuing a comrade wounded by a bomb on patrol. It is magnified, instantaneous experience. An existence boiled down to the essentials mocks the mundane detritus, the quibbles and bill-paying and anonymity, of life back home.
Building on the costly inroads of a previous unit, the Marine battalion has seen a decline in Taliban attacks in Sangin, a southern Afghan area where the insurgency battled British forces to a stalemate for years. Now the troops have more time to build bridges and sluice gates, and sit cross-legged at meetings with Afghan elders in hopes of stripping the insurgency of popular support.
Early on, the going was hard. Cole said his platoon suffered close to 30 percent casualties, mostly from bombs hidden around its patrol base.
He described how one Marine on patrol triggered a bomb that severed his legs. Another Marine rushed forward to apply tourniquets, knowing his friend would bleed to death if he methodically checked, as training dictated, for more boobytraps in his path. The second Marine started dragging the first toward safety when he set off another bomb, severing his own legs, according to Cole. But he saved his comrade in the process.
"He didn't lose his legs for his country, he lost his legs for his brother," Cole, of Klamath Falls, Oregon, said bluntly. He gestured to another Marine in the dark at the landing zone at Forward Operating Base Jackson, the battalion's headquarters.
"The only shred of sanity that keeps us going out here is that I have to protect his ass and he has to protect my ass," said Cole, who is confined to the base after suffering concussions in two explosions.
Cole, 22, is not bitter. He treasures the fierce loyalty, born of bloodshed. Politics, the debate about the wisdom of the decade-long U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, the plan to withdraw international combat forces by the end of 2014, seem irrelevant to young Marines.
When they talk about friends with amputated limbs under treatment in the United States, they often stick to the line, "he's doing really good right now," even if they know that isn't true.
"Get some!" is a Marine slogan, reflecting the U.S. military branch's traditional taste for expeditionary action. On the night of Sept. 11, possibly to mark the 10th anniversary of the terror attacks in the United States, insurgents fired on guard posts at the Jackson camp. It was harassment, not a major attack. Marines returned fire in great volume, red tracer rounds plunging into the darkness.
"Watch your sectors!" warned a company captain as some Marines, adrenaline unleashed, broadened their sweep of fire from defensive berms. After a while, the shooting subsided. One Marine was asked: Is it over?
"I have no clue," he laughed. "They can fire at us all night if they want, as long as nobody gets hurt."
At Patrol Base Fulod, about a 15-minute ride in an armored vehicle from the Jackson camp, Cpl. Ernest Tubbs is something special among his peers. He has discovered three-dozen hidden bombs on this deployment. A smooth talker who radiates confidence, he remembered the first time he uncovered an IED, or improvised explosive device, "heart racing, so many emotions at one time."
Tubbs, 22, of Parsonsburg, Maryland, leads patrols with a metal detector, potentially the most dangerous job in the lineup. In a small victory celebration, he smokes a cigarette whenever he finds an IED; he smoked two in a row after one very hazardous experience.
He is desperate to return to his wife and newborn son, and become a civilian, but he won't forget what it is like to be a kind of savior, to know men depend on him for their lives.
"The feeling of when things happen out here, it's a feeling that you'll never get rid of. But it's a feeling that will always belong to you," he said. "There's no more adrenaline rush in the world than finding an IED. I'm going to miss that a bunch."
For families in the United States, there are no such thrills, only the grind of not knowing. Tubbs' wife, Hannah, gave birth to a boy, Gabe, last month. Her husband's oldest brother cut the umbilical cord. In an e-mail to The Associated Press, she wrote:
"Even when I was still pregnant with him I would tell him that his daddy loves him and can't wait to meet him. I tell him who his daddy is and all about him. Being pregnant for most of the deployment didn't help the emotional part of it all. It was hard getting ready for the baby without him. It was even harder to hear about guys who had been hurt or even killed knowing they did the same job as my son's father."
She continued: "His best friend is a triple amp (amputee) and another lost his life, he had not even been married a year. We kept in touch with his wife and she plans on being at the homecoming. There are no words that describe what families go through during a deployment. The days drag on when there is no phone call and your heart drops when there is an unexpected knock on the door."
Various books, films and television series address the theme of troops liking aspects of war, or missing it when they get home. Many focus on the sacrifice, the brotherhood, or the bloodshed, or some combination. Norman Mailer's novel, "The Naked and the Dead," and the 1998 movie "Saving Private Ryan" are among works that explore the psychological impact of intense combat on its protagonists.
"It is well that war is so terrible — otherwise we would grow too fond of it," U.S. Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee reportedly said at the Battle of Fredericksburg on Dec. 13, 1862.
Some transitions to home are the hardest of all.
Walking past cornfields on a patrol, 1st Lt. Richard Marcantonio of Corpus Christi, Texas, talked about a Marine who lost three limbs in a bombing and was transferred to a military hospital in the United States. One day, his father walked in and handed his son's baby to him as he lay in bed.
According to Marcantonio, the father said something like: "Here's your child. I'm not going to bring her up, so you better do it."
And, this story of tough love goes, the Marine is doing just that.
Some who come from rural areas in the United States feel a curious affinity with Afghanistan and its web of sparsely populated villages and farmland. Capt. Brian Huysman of Delphos, Ohio — "Good luck finding Delphos on the map," he said — sees parallels between the "small town mentality" and rivalries back home and the jostling for advantage among local leaders in southern Afghan settlements.
"It's very eerie," said Huysman, Weapons Company commander for the battalion.
When these men are retired veterans, many will look back on Afghanistan as a place of loss, but also a place that made them better than they were, whether the U.S. military succeeds in its long-term goals or not. The cult of sacrifice finds expression in a shrine to the missing in action of past wars in the dining hall at Camp Leatherneck, the main Marine base in southern Afghanistan.
There, an empty chair sits in front of a table laid with white cloth and a place setting for one. On the bread plate, a notice says, a slice of lemon symbolizes their "bitter fate," and salt stands for families' tears. There are dog tags and an inverted drinking glass.
Cole, the corporal at the landing zone, said that in his time in Sangin, he had seen Taliban fighters only once, in a treeline hundreds of yards (meters) away, too far to fire on them accurately. Marines called for an air strike, but it was denied because there were children in the area. International forces have "rules of engagement" designed to avoid civilian casualties.
As Cole talked, the dark mass of an Osprey aircraft rumbled inward, its lights off to make it less of a target for insurgents. The back ramp was open, a tethered gunner at the edge with a mounted machine gun.
Dust and wind swirled, tossed up by churning rotors. The courteous corporal pulled a departing passenger into a half-embrace.
"Thank you for listening," he said.
www.afghanistannewscenter.com
By the CNN Wire Staff September 26, 2011
Kabul, Afghanistan (CNN) -- The assassination of Berhanuddin Rabbani, an Afghan leader spearheading the reconciliation process with the Taliban, was planned outside the country, an Afghan intelligence official said Monday.
Rabbani, a former Afghan president and chairman of the High Peace Council, was killed in an attack at his home on September 20.
"We have arrested one individual who is a citizen of Afghanistan," the official, who declined to be named, told reporters at a news conference. "But who these people are or who the organization involved in the attack is, we will say that in the future."
"We cannot deny the involvement of Quetta Shura," he said. Quetta Shura is a leadership council based in the Pakistani city of Quetta, thought to run much of the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan.
No one in the Afghan government played a role in Rabbani's death, he said. "This was a terrorist act and was planned very carefully outside Afghanistan."
Rabbani's death shocked the war-torn country, undermined the fledgling peace initiative and stoked fears of renewed ethnic conflict between Pashtuns and others, such as Rabbani's ethnic group of Tajiks.
An Afghan intelligence source told CNN last week that the bomber arrived at the house at the same time a meeting was due to take place between Rabbani and a delegation representing the Taliban insurgency.
Police said the bomber claimed to be a Taliban member who had come for the talks about peace and reconciliation and detonated the explosives as he entered the home.
Long an enemy of the Taliban, Rabbani was a controversial choice when appointed by President Hamid Karzai as chairman of the High Peace Council a year ago. He was forced to flee Kabul when the Taliban took over in 1996, but he continued to lead resistance to the regime from his stronghold in Faizabad in northern Afghanistan.
Journalist Ruhullah Khapalwak contributed to this report.
Afghan employed by U.S. kills American inside Kabul CIA station
By Ernesto Londono, The Washington Post Monday, September 26, 1:49 PM
KABUL — An Afghan man employed by the U.S. government opened fire Sunday night inside the CIA station in Kabul, killing one American, a government employee, and wounding a second, officials said Monday.
U.S. Embassy spokesman Gavin A. Sundwall identified the building where the attack took place only as an embassy annex compound, but Afghan officials and Western security officials said it is used by the CIA.
Sundwall said investigators believe the gunman acted alone. They have not yet determined what the motive may have been, he said.
“We mourn the loss of life in the incident as we mourn the loss of all life,” Sundwall said.
The shooting comes two weeks after a 20-hour attack on the U.S. Embassy in Kabul by a team of gunmen who sprayed Kabul’s heavily guarded diplomatic compound with grenades, rockets and small-arms fire. No Americans were killed or wounded in that attack.
That attack, and the recent slaying of a prominent Afghan official tasked with brokering a peace deal with the Taliban, have stoked concerns about the ease with which militants have carried out attacks in the heart of a capital once regarded as relatively secure.
Sundwall said the wounded American was being treated at a military hospital for wounds that are not life-threatening.
The Afghan gunman was killed in the incident, he said, and “the embassy has resumed business operation.”
Afghan officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the shooting occurred at the building that formerly housed the Arianna Hotel. The compound was taken over by the CIA in 2002, according to Afghan officials and Western private security experts.
An official briefed on the investigation said the Americans who were shot appear to have been “at the wrong place at the wrong time,” and not specifically targeted. The official spoke on condition of anonymity given the preliminary nature of the findings.
The official added that the incident was over quickly, but said it took security personnel several hours to clear the rest of the compound to make sure there were no other threats.
U.S. military officials have grown increasingly worried about the threat posed by militants who have infiltrated Afghan security forces to launch attacks on NATO personnel.
Sunday’s shooting appeared to mark the first time an Afghan employed by a civilian entity of the U.S. government in Afghanistan turned on his American colleagues.
In 2009, a suicide bomber posing as an informant penetrated the CIA base near Khost, Afghanistan and detonated his explosives, killing the station chief and six other agency employees. It was the most lethal attack against the agency in decades.
Building used by CIA attacked in Afghan capital
By DEB RIECHMANN - Associated Press
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — A building used by the CIA in Kabul came under attack Sunday, U.S. and Afghan officials said, the latest in a series of attacks in the Afghan capital.
Afghan authorities said gunfire was heard in the evening near the Ariana Hotel, a building that former U.S. intelligence officials said was the CIA station in Kabul. The CIA occupied the heavily secured building just blocks from the Afghan presidential palace in late 2001 after the U.S.-led invasion that toppled the Taliban.
There was no immediate word on casualties.
A U.S. official confirmed there was an attack on a facility used by American officials in Kabul.
"The situation is fluid, and the investigation is ongoing," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation.
Officials at the U.S.-led coalition headquarters nearby said they heard the gunfire, but did not have details about the incident.
All the officials in Afghanistan spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.
The attack came two weeks after militants fired rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles at the U.S. Embassy, NATO headquarters and other buildings, killing seven Afghans. No embassy or NATO staff members were hurt in the 22-hour assault, but accusations over who was responsible have plunged U.S. relations with Pakistan to new lows.
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 the Sept. 13 attack 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.
Pakistan also is receiving criticism from Afghanistan.
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.
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.
Pakistan 'will not launch' Haqqani offensive
By Nasir Jaffry (AFP) – September 26, 2011
ISLAMABAD — Pakistan will not launch an offensive against Haqqani extremists despite Washington ramping up the pressure after a series of attacks on US targets in Afghanistan, an official said Monday.
The alliance between Pakistan and the United States in the 10-year war in Afghanistan and against Al-Qaeda hit rock bottom this year in the wake of the unilateral American raid that killed Osama bin Laden near Islamabad on May 2.
In a series of escalating rows, Washington accused Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency of involvement in the September 13 attack on its embassy in Kabul and a September 11 attack on a NATO base in central Afghanistan.
The White House has since demanded that Pakistan "break any link they have" with the Haqqani network, which was founded by former CIA asset Jalaluddin Haqqani and is today run by his son Sirajuddin -- based in Pakistan's North Waziristan.
Pakistan's army chief of staff called his top generals for an extraordinary meeting at the weekend to discuss the series of stinging American rebukes blaming the Haqqanis and Pakistani intelligence for recent attacks.
Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani is now expected to call a rare cross-party conference, although he has dismissed the American allegations as little more than finding a scapegoat for US "disarray" in the 10-year war in Afghanistan.
"I don't think the indicators are as such," a senior Pakistani security official told AFP when asked if the army was going to launch an operation in North Waziristan, part of the country's semi-autonomous tribal belt.
Instead, he said, the military needs to "consolidate gains" made against local militants who pose a security threat elsewhere in the tribal region that Washington has branded an Al-Qaeda headquarters.
Pakistan has around 140,000 troops based along its northwest that borders Afghanistan and says more than 3,000 soldiers have been killed since 2001 -- more than the 2,735 Western soldiers who have died in Afghanistan.
General James Mattis, commander of the US Central Command which oversees the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, on Sunday became the most senior US commander to hold talks with Pakistani generals in Islamabad since last week's public US accusations of Pakistani involvement with the Haqqanis.
In a curt statement after the talks, the Pakistani military said it was committed to achieving "enduring peace in the region" -- something it said was only possible "through mutual trust and cooperation".
But the Pakistani official told AFP that troops were too busy countering cross-border attacks from Afghanistan and local Pakistani militants in other parts of the tribal belt to take on the Haqqanis.
"These are kind of more pressing issues that we have to tackle. We have to consolidate the gains in Mohmand and in other tribal and northwestern regions after a series of operations in these areas," the security official said.
"As for North Waziristan, the army has at least five brigades there, which is enough to take care of the situation. There is a complete tribal structure in the region to help security forces deal with the militants and outlaws."
Last week, the outgoing top US military officer, Admiral Mike Mullen, bluntly accused Pakistan of "exporting" violent extremism to Afghanistan through proxies and warned of possible action to protect US troops.
Some Pakistanis interpret the accusations as a search for a scapegoat for US failings in Afghanistan, where the Taliban insurgency is deadlier than ever and from where Washington plans to recall all combat troops by 2014.
Analysts believe Pakistan lacks the capacity to take on the Haqqanis and that the American response is limited to an already active drone war against militants in the tribal belt and further economic sanctions.
Washington has already decided to withhold almost a third of its annual $2.7 billion security assistance to Islamabad.
"They can apply economic sanctions and increase drone attacks," political and security analyst Hasan Askari told AFP.
As an ally, Pakistan has repeatedly rejected American ground incursions -- such as the May 2 bin Laden raid -- and any North Waziristan offensive would not only be deadly, but hugely costly for the Americans diplomatically.
Pakistan intelligence chief leaves for Saudi Arabia
ISLAMABAD, Sept. 26 (Xinhua) -- Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) chief Lt.Gen. Ahmad Shuja Pasha left for Saudi Arabia on Monday after Pakistan-U.S. ties was strained over the U. S. accusation that ISI supported Haqqani network in recent attacks on U.S. targets in Afghanistan, local media reported.
Top military commanders met on Sunday to propose the visit to Saudi Arabia by the ISI chief to brief Saudi leaders on the Pakistan-U.S. tension, reports said..
Pakistan is likely to send envoys to other friendly countries in view of the tension with the U.S., sources said.
Apart from diplomatic efforts, the government has also stepped up consultations with political leaders to seek their support.
The chairman of U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen on Thursday called the Haqqani network a "veritable arm" of ISI, the charge denied by Pakistan.
U.S. Secretary of Defence Leon Panetta threatened to take unilateral action against the Haqqani network inside Pakistan if the authorities there faided to do so.
Mullen's accusations: Has US reached its limit with Pakistan?
Adm. Mullen's public accusation that Pakistani intelligence was involved in militants' attacks on US targets in Afghanistan suggest that the US has reached its limit with its 'strategic partner.'
By Howard LaFranchi, The Christian Science Monitor Staff writer / September 26, 2011
Warnings of new lows in US-Pakistan relations have popped up like mushrooms in past years, but in recent days “even worse” seems accurate to describe the state of play between the two “strategic partners.”
Public accusations of Pakistani involvement in recent attacks on US targets in Afghanistan leveled by Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, before a Senate committee Thursday suggest that the United States has reached a limit.
Admiral Mullen’s dire appraisal of the relations between the two countries leaves the door open to new unilateral US military actions inside Pakistan beyond recent stepped-up drone attacks, and even beyond last May’s surprise special-forces operation to get Osama bin Laden, which so enraged Pakistanis.
A fed-up Mullen may be signaling that US incursions into Pakistan to take out militant groups the Pakistanis refuse to touch could be on the horizon – and that the Pakistanis could only blame themselves for it, some national security analysts say.
US claims of a direct link between Pakistan’s intelligence services and the Haqqani network, one of Pakistan’s most powerful and anti-US militant groups, are nothing new. But the Sept. 13 attack on the US Embassy in Kabul – and reports that cell phones found on the attackers were linked to the ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence agency – offered a new level of proof of Pakistani complicity with Islamist militants.
Moreover, the fact that last week’s accusation was made publicly, and that it came from Mullen, was striking.
Probably no US military official has worked harder to repair relations and met more with his Pakistani military counterparts than Mullen to try to convince them of the need not just to sever ties to the Haqqani group, but to actually take it on, analysts say. Most recently, in mid-September, Mullen spent more than two hours with the Pakistani military chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, on the sidelines of a NATO meeting in Spain, Pentagon officials say.
But Mullen is suggesting that the window for imploring the Pakistanis to act is closing. The US shouldn’t wait long to take action, some regional analysts say – even if it could mean a breakdown in US-Pakistan relations.
“While there are risks inherent to going down a more punitive path with Pakistan, the recent information on ISI links to the attack in the US Embassy leaves the US with no other option,” says Lisa Curtis, a South Asia expert at the Heritage Foundation in Washington.
If the reports of cell phone links between the Embassy attackers and the ISI are accurate, Ms. Curtis says, it would be the first time the US had a “smoking gun” on Pakistani collusion with anti-US militants.
The Pakistani response to the US accusations followed a familiar pattern of denial – and of high-level refusals to take US orders and go after the Haqqanis. The Pakistani argument has long been that Pakistani militant groups operating inside Afghanistan are a hedge against eventual US withdrawal, and that they operate as proxies for advancing Pakistani interests in the arena of a strategic battle with arch-rival India.
Some Pakistani officials also say privately that the ISI wouldn’t be doing its job if it didn’t have contacts with the Haqqani group, but that accusations of support for the group are a completely different matter and are false.
But Curtis says that if the Pakistani denials cannot be backed up within a few days, then the US should proceed with a set of harsh measures, including listing the Haqqani network on the US list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations, and then initiating an aggressive campaign of drone strikes against the group in its home turf of North Waziristan in Pakistan.
The US should also suspend all assistance to Pakistan, including civilian aid, she says. A similar idea is advancing in the US Congress: Last week a Senate committee voted to advance a measure to hold back $1 billion in US aid, conditional on the Pakistanis reversing course and launching an expanded crackdown on militants, including the Haqqani group.
Curtis also calls for reversing US withdrawal plans for Afghanistan. Such a move would be aimed at convincing the region, including Pakistan, that the US is committed to Afghan stability, she says, while signaling to the Taliban and groups like the Haqqani network that the US will not tolerate Afghanistan once again becoming a haven for terrorists.
But with the US and NATO committed to having all of their combat forces out of the country by 2014, that suggestion may be the least likely to occur.
The U.S.-Pakistan Row Reveals Hard Choices in Afghanistan
By ROBERT BAER | Time.com
What does Pakistan really want in Afghanistan? That question has become all the more urgent since Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, accused Pakistan of being indirectly responsible for last week's attack on our embassy in Kabul. Reports of a second possible attack, on Sunday, on the building alleged to house the local CIA station will, no doubt, fuel further speculation. Assessing Pakistan's interests in Afghanistan through the prism of honesty and realpolitik rather than wishful thinking may be the only way we're going to get out of this messy war.
For a start, we need to understand that Pakistan intends to bring down the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, even if that means taking on its sometime U.S. ally. Pakistan hates Karzai out of a conviction that he has made common cause with Pakistan's strategic nemesis, India, and a suspicion that the Afghan leader intends to harm Pakistan's strategic interests in other ways. And, of course, the hatred is mutual. Rightly or wrongly, Karzai believes that Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) assassinated his father, and would do the same to him given half a chance.
A second misunderstanding we need to dispense with is that the ISI is somehow a rogue organization outside of Pakistan's chain of command and is pursuing a pro-Taliban agenda all its own. The Pakistani army can remove the ISI director, General Ahmad Shuja Pasha - or any other officer of the organization - at a moment's notice. So, if the ISI did indeed sponsor an attack on the U.S. embassy in Kabul, such a step should be assumed to have been taken with the consent of the power that be in Pakistan, i.e. the military establishment. The idea that to make our Pakistan problem go away, the ISI needs to be "cleaned up" is naive. The Pakistani actions that make life difficult for the U.S. in Afghanistan are driven by a clear-sighted strategic agenda.
As for the Pakistani proxy accused of carrying out the embassy attack, the Haqqani network, we need to understand why Pakistan won't give it up or act against it as the U.S. demands. With up to 15,000 fighters and effective control of large parts of eastern Afghanistan and Pakistan's North Waziristan, the Haqqanis are an indispensible party to a peace settlement in Afghanistan - and a vehicle for securing Pakistan's interests in that country after the U.S. withdraws. To sever relations with the Haqqanis now would mean Pakistan giving up a large degree of influence in Afghanistan after the war is over.
The U.S. has for years demanded that Pakistan mount a sweeping military offensive in North Waziristan to destroy the Haqqanis, but even if they were so inclined, the fact is that the Pakistani military has only ever been able to control the main roads in North Waziristan. The Pakistani army is incapable of occupying and holding this territory, no matter how much money we offer or how dire the threats we make.
At the core of the problem stands a simple proposition: Pakistan doesn't trust us with Afghanistan - and from Islamabad's perspective, not without cause. We took a strategic decision to invade a country central to their national-security doctrine without seriously consulting them, preferring to think in terms of an Afghanistan of our dreams. Nor did we take into account their strategic interests and the proxies through which they have pursued them. The Soviet Union made the same mistake when it invaded Afghanistan in 1979.
Having failed to prevail a decade later, we now have two choices, neither of them particularly attractive to Washington. We can attempt to destroy the Haqqani base in North Waziristan by invading Pakistan. But to do that effectively would require more troops than we currently have in Afghanistan. Doing so would obviously destroy whatever relations we still have with Pakistan, with profoundly dangerous consequences in Afghanistan and far beyond.
Alternatively, we could hash out a settlement with Pakistan, which would inevitably mean accepting the Haqqanis and easing out Karzai in any political settlement to the conflict. Such a deal would also potentially bring in Afghanistan's other neighbor with real strategic interests in the country - Iran. Iran can be unpredictable, but it's by no means certain it would accept true Pakistani-American collusion in Afghanistan. In the mid-'90s, Iran was all but at war with the Taliban, and if Iran isn't consulted on a settlement, it could play the spoiler.
Accepting Pakistan's postconflict agenda and backing off on the Haqqanis at Karzai's expense is too bitter a pill for Washington to swallow in an election year, so we'll muddle through for another year. But when the U.S. finally leaves, don't be surprised to see the Haqqanis in Kabul.
Baer, a former Middle East CIA field officer, is TIME.com's intelligence columnist and the author of See No Evil and The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower.
Cost of training Afghan forces can be cut: US general
AFP
The US military hopes to slash the cost of training Afghan forces over the next several years, partly because commanders expect the Taliban insurgency to decline, a top US general said Monday.
The United States has forecast that the annual price tag of training and equipping Afghan security forces in coming years would drop to about $6 billion but the officer overseeing the effort, Lieutenant General William Caldwell, said the cost likely will be much less.
"So what I will tell you is, from the efforts that have been ongoing here, it's going to be significantly lower than that ($6 billion)," Caldwell told reporters by video link from Kabul.
"We do in fact expect the level of insurgency to go down, we do in fact expect to find more efficiencies in how we do things...," he said.
Caldwell did not offer estimates as to how much money could be saved in coming years.
The general's comments come amid growing pressure to scale back US defense spending -- including the cost of the Afghanistan war -- as politicians struggle to tackle the government's budget deficit and debt.
Caldwell's prediction that the Taliban would gradually recede has been echoed by some other senior officers, but violence levels remain high and the insurgency has proved resilient as it exploits safe havens in neighboring Pakistan.
The US military's top officer told lawmakers last week the Pentagon was looking to reduce the cost of building up the Afghan security forces, which are due to take over from NATO-led troops by the end of 2014.
The Pentagon has proposed spending $12.8 billion in 2012 on training and arming the Afghan army and police, with the force due to expand to 352,000 by November 2012.
Caldwell said the NATO-led mission had found ways to save money in the training effort. Fans were being installed at Afghan bases instead of air conditioning units and boots and uniforms were being bought from Afghan firms instead of US companies, he said.
The general said Afghan security forces are improving steadily and that they performed heroically in fending off a September 13 attack on the US embassy and NATO headquarters.
Only two battalions out of about 180 were now able to operate independently, and even then they required some logistical or other support from NATO forces, he said.
Once Afghan troops and police take the lead throughout the country by 2015, the force will still need some support from the NATO-led coalition to help with intelligence and air power, he said.
Ex-Afghan Minister: Pressure On ISI To End Ties With Terror Groups
September 26, 2011 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
KABUL -- A former Afghan official says pressure is mounting on Pakistan to end its support for extremist groups who were reportedly involved in last week's assassination of former Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani, RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan reports.
Ali Ahmad Jalali, an Afghan-American professor at the United States National Defense University in Washington, told RFE/RL on September 23 that recent comments by Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, have added to the pressure on Pakistan's intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), to sever ties with extremist groups such as the Haqqani network.
"The U.S. has issued its strongest statement yet to Pakistan's ISI on its ties with the Taliban and Haqqani groups," said Jalali, who served as Afghan defense and interior minister from 2003-2005. "It is a clear message to Pakistan that it can no longer continue its current strategy in Afghanistan."
Mullen on September 22 accused the ISI of aiding the Haqqani network in planning and executing last week's attacks on the U.S. Embassy in Kabul. He said the Pakistani government had used the Haqqani network and other terrorist groups as its proxies in Afghanistan.
Mullen said Pakistan had chosen to "use violent extremism as an instrument of policy," adding that "by exporting violence, they have eroded their internal security and their position in the region. They have undermined their international credibility and threatened their economic well-being."
Jalali said "Pakistan has to come to terms [with the fact] that it cannot get what it wants in Afghanistan through violence and hard power. It must open up to diplomatic channels and use avenues such as the current peace council to state its concerns and ideas."
Jalali thinks that after the killing of Rabbani, Afghanistan must unite as a nation and learn from the experience.
"Until the people in Afghanistan unite in a common cause, its enemies will use these divisions to their advantage and promote their own agendas," he said. "We [Afghans] must come together."
7 insurgents killed, 32 arrested in E. Afghanistan
KABUL, Sept. 26 (Xinhua) -- Afghan and NATO-led forces during operations have killed seven insurgents and captured 32 in eastern Afghanistan's provinces over the past 24 hours, the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said on Monday.
"Ten Afghan and Coalition force conducted operations in RC-East (Regional Command-East) killing seven enemies, the detaining 32 suspected individuals and a weapon cache turned in over the past 24 hours throughout the region," said a statement issued by ISAF' s RC-East here.
A concerned local Afghan civilian turned over a weapons cache that included 11 mortar rounds, two anti-tank mines, an anti- personnel mine, a jug of homemade explosives, a bag of improvised explosive device (IED) components, 24 rocket primers, two 82mm recoilless rifle rounds, two bolt actions rifles and two shotguns and a heavy machine gun barrel, according to the statement.
It also confirmed that a Coalition drone was crashed in country' s eastern Paktika province in the same period of time.
"An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) crashed in the Sar Rowzah District of Paktika Province. The UAV was recovered and there was no enemy activity in the area prior to the crash," it said.
Afghan and NATO officials often use the word "insurgents" for referring to Taliban militants.
The insurgent group, who stepped up their attacks on Afghan and about 140,000 ISAF troops stationed in the country since a spring rebel offensive was launched in May this year in the country, has yet to make comments.
Afghan police foil suicide attacks in the south
Sun, Sep 25, 2011
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Afghan police say officers have shot dead two men wearing explosives vests, foiling a planned suicide attack on a government building.
The Ministry of Interior says the shooting on Sunday morning in the southern Zabul province detonated the attackers' explosives and both died.
Separately, the ministry says more than 340 rockets have been fired in the past week from Pakistan into two east Afghan provinces.
Shells landing in Dangam district of Nuristan province destroyed six houses, two mosques and displaced at least 50 families.
The ministry says it's unclear who is firing the artillery rounds — including more than 100 that rained down Saturday night in Nuristan and Kunar provinces — but insists they are being fired from Pakistani soil.
Four militants killed in premature explosion in Afghanistan
GHAZNI, Afghanistan, Sept. 26 (Xinhua) -- Four Taliban insurgents died as their explosive device went off accidentally in Ghazni province in southern Afghanistan on Monday, police said.
"Four terrorists were busy in planting a mine on a road in Andar district to target security forces but their explosive device went off prematurely killing all the four on the spot this morning," district governor Shir Khan Yusufzai told Xinhua.
The Rapid Rise Of America's Man In Kandahar
by NPR Staff NPR September 27, 2011
Gen. Abdul Raziq is the acting police chief of Afghanistan's Kandahar province. Just 33 years old, he's a former warlord on whom the United States relied during its 2010 "surge" operation. But Raziq is also accused of brutal abuses of power, even massacring his tribal rivals, according to a new article in The Atlantic.
Matthieu Aikins, the article's author, describes Raziq as a "rags-to-riches character, who started as a small shopkeeper living in exile in Pakistan during the Taliban period, and has ascended to the most dizzying heights of wealth and power."
Aikins tells Morning Edition co-host Steve Inskeep that Raziq began his rise after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001.
"He became the head of this tribal militia that controlled a key border crossing between Kandahar, in southern Afghanistan, and Pakistan," Aikins says.
According to Aikins, anyone who controls that vital military and trade passage is "sitting on a gold mine."
"The other thing is that he oversaw the most dramatic expansion of the opium trade in history," he adds.
In his article, Aikins also links Raziq to several episodes of brutal violence. One instance took place in 2006, when Raziq was a colonel in Afghanistan's Border Police.
According to Aikins, that's when Raziq "basically conspired with another man to abduct 16 people from Kabul, where they'd sort of been on vacation, and then take them out into the desert and murder them there, and leave their corpses there — and claim that they had actually been Taliban infiltrating from across the border [from Pakistan]."
Raziq has not denied being responsible for the deaths, but he has maintained that those killed were Taliban fighters.
"They didn't have connections to the Taliban; they were rivals of Abdul Raziq," Aikins says, citing a thorough police investigation.
The results of that police inquiry were suppressed, Aikins says in The Atlantic. And senior Afghan officials, including President Hamid Karzai, chose not to move against Raziq, he says.
Last autumn, Raziq was named a partner in the U.S. effort to clear Kandahar city of militants, raising his profile in Afghanistan — and leading to a promotion to brigadier general. In May, he was named acting police chief of Kandahar province.
Excerpt: 'Our Man In Kandahar' — Matthieu Aikins describes the final days of Shin Noorzai, "a burly smuggler in his mid-30s" who was killed along with more than a dozen other men he was traveling in March of 2006.
According to an acquaintance of Shin's who was also present at the gathering, he and his friends had arrived at the invitation of another man, Mohammed Naeem Lalai, an old friend of Shin's who was then working as an officer in the Border Police. It was Lalai who had persuaded Shin and his friends to stop in Kabul on their way to Mazar. As the group sat down to dinner, Shin's acquaintance, a fellow tribesman, watched uneasily, nervous about the company Shin was keeping. He offered to make the trip with Shin instead. "Come with me to Mazar," he said to him.
Shin replied that he was going to travel up to Mazar with Lalai. But first, he said, Lalai was taking him to another house where music and entertainment were promised. That night, as darkness fell over Kabul, Shin and his 15 companions left the house with Lalai. Their friends and families would never see them alive again.
At the second house, Shin and his friends were apparently drugged. Unconscious, they were bound and gagged, then loaded into vehicles with official plates, one of them a green Ford Ranger with the seal of the Border Police on its doors.
Driving along back roads, the cars made their way 500 kilometers south to Kandahar province, and by the next morning arrived at Spin Boldak, where Abdul Raziq, then a Border Police colonel in his mid-20s, was waiting for them.
Raziq and Lalai had together lured Shin and his associates to Kabul. The tribes to which Raziq and Shin belonged had been feuding over smuggling routes, and Raziq held Shin responsible for the 2004 killing of his brother. Shin had been a marked man ever since. His 15 companions were just going to be collateral damage.
Raziq and his men loaded their captives into a convoy of Land Cruisers and headed out to a parched, desolate stretch of the Afghan-Pakistani border. About 10 kilometers outside of town, they came to a halt. Shin and the others were hauled out of the trucks and into a dry river gully. There, at close range, Raziq's forces let loose with automatic weapons, their bullets tearing through the helpless men, smashing their faces apart and soaking their robes with blood. After finishing the job, they unbound the corpses and left them there.
Arriving back in Spin Boldak, Raziq reported to his superiors and to the press that he had intercepted "at least 15" Taliban fighters infiltrating from Pakistan, led by the "midlevel Taliban commander Mullah Shin," and had killed them in a gun battle. "We got a tip-off about them coming across the border. We went down there and fought them," Raziq told the Associated Press the next day. It was the beginning of a cover-up that would go all the way up to President Karzai in Kabul.
"Our Man in Kandahar" by Mattieu Aikens will be featured in the November issue of The Atlantic and is currently available online at TheAtlantic.com.
War-weary Afghans plead for peace amid series of deadly attacks
by Farid Behbud, Zhang Jianhua
KABUL, Sept. 26 (Xinhua) -- Series of deadly attacks, particularly a brutal suicide offensive on former Afghan president and peace body chief Burhanudin Rabbani, rocked parts of the country including the capital city of Kabul over the past couple of months and prompted the war-weary Afghans to pray for durable peace in their country.
"Yet again there was an attack in Kabul just last night, and this time also in the fortified location, we are tired of witnessing such incidents that always cause horror and dread among Kabulis," a Kabul resident Liyakat Khan told Xinhua on Monday, referring a gun battle Sunday night in Ariana Hotel near the Afghan presidential palace, NATO's headquarters and U.S. embassy in Kabul that left a U.S. citizen dead.
A security source who declined to be identified said that a U.S. -run intelligence agency located in Ariana Hotel opposite to the U. S. embassy building was the scene of gun shots Sunday night which left one person dead and injured two others.
Several Afghan cities including the capital city Kabul have experienced a string of deadly suicide attacks and gun battles since the beginning of this year, fading common citizens' hope for having viable peace.
The latest violent attack was a suicide attack against former Afghan President Burhanudin Rabbani, who also served as the Chairman of Afghan High Peace Council, a 70-member government- backed peace body which was set up by President Hamid Karzai on October 2010 to broker peace with the Taliban and other armed opposition groups.
The attack which occurred on Tuesday Sept. 20 inside Rabbani's Kabul residence also injured four people including the head of joint secretariat of the Peace Council Mohammad Masoom Stanekzai.
However, Khan, in his 50s, said that he was hopeful for the government-initiated peace process, saying "if both sides accept to end the war in a peaceful way and they had to act sincerely, of course the war will end here one day."
The Taliban insurgents, who often claim responsibility for suicide attacks and roadside bombings, for the first time rejected their involvement in killing Rabbani, although the outfit had accepted responsibility hours after Rabbani's murder.
"In fact the situation in Afghanistan is uncertain. It is critical and out of the control of the Afghan and foreign forces. They are losing the momentum despite of their claim of success," Khan went on to say.
Escalation of deadly attacks, especially the murdering of influential figures and high ranking officials, have brought Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his government under enormous pressure from the public and political opponents to capture those responsible for Rabbani's killing, which has been regarded a big blow to the peace process.
"I have no empathy for Mullah Omar and his Taliban fighters or to the NATO and Americans whosoever, I just want to see peace in my land," a female resident of Kabul namely Ryhana said.
"Calling for peace in Afghanistan by the government and rejected by the Taliban, in fact resembles to a one-way road which deemed to defeat," she said.
"If they (the NATO and U.S. forces) really want to stabilize Afghanistan and the region, they have to go after Mullah Omar," Ryhana said.
Taliban always put preconditions for making peace, but if the government and the world accept their conditions, the Afghans will lose all the achievements which have gained over the past decade including human rights and women rights, she said.
The Taliban also claimed responsibility for a multiple suicide and gun attacks against the U.S. embassy in Kabul and other government institutions on Sept. 13 that left 16 people including nine attackers dead.
"Our demand for the government is to arrest and award capital punishment in public to those who organize and support suicide attacks and terrorist activities in the country," said another lady Mrs. Salima in Kabul.
Hurtling down Afghanistan’s road to perdition
Financial Times By Matthew Green September 25, 2011
I was taking tea with a former Mujahideen fighter pilot in the Safi Landmark hotel in Kabul when a suicide bomber blew himself up in the lobby. My companion remained unperturbed as guests rushed for cover. When a guard said three more bombers were loose in the building, he barely blinked.
Such sangfroid is a feature of a city that has endured years of violence. But behind the brave face put on by Kabulis there is fear: fear for what the withdrawal of foreign troops might mean; fear for what the Taliban will do next; and fear that the country is headed inexorably for a new round of civil war.
The killing of Burhanuddin Rabbani, the former president, last week brought that prospect a step closer. In the best traditions of Afghan hierarchs, he was both elder statesman and warlord, a vainglorious politician and Islamic scholar. His hilltop grave now stands as a milestone on Afghanistan’s march towards the next instalment in 30 years of fratricidal bloodshed.
To understand what is happening, it is important to tune out what Nato politicians and generals are saying. Yes, US special forces are netting Taliban commanders by bursting into Afghan homes. It is true that the army and police are expanding in numbers and scope, quickly, if unevenly. Also, the US will not abandon Afghanistan again, at least not in the way it did after the departure of the Red Army – the Pentagon will have bases long beyond the withdrawal date of 2014.
None of this will stop the coming showdown. With the Obama administration’s successive troop surges already starting to recede, it is Afghan and Pakistani players who are increasingly making the key decisions. And, to be clear, there is no chance at all of a peace deal between the government of Hamid Karzai, the president, and the Taliban in the near future. The killing of Rabbani, who was in charge of putting out feelers to insurgents, destroyed once and for all the idea that reconciliation was feasible in the coming months.
The ease with which suicide bombers can infiltrate the Kabul police’s so-called ring of steel to attack hotels, lob rocket-propelled grenades at the US embassy or kill prominent Afghans intensifies the increasing impression that this is a city up for grabs. The situation is far worse in provincial towns where senior officials keep being assassinated.
Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president’s brother, who once improbably described himself to me as the “Nancy Pelosi” of Kandahar, was shot dead in July. Daoud Daoud, a wily police general who with a conspiratorial grin would share his suspicions that Ahmed Wali was involved in drug trafficking, was blown up in May. Ghulam Haider Hamidi, the mayor of Kandahar, who always cheerfully assured me that security was improving, was also killed in July.
This slow-motion implosion of administration has made the situation even more febrile. Many in Kabul will say that the Taliban is containable and that it is their own government that is out of control. Mr Karzai has presided over a system of crony capitalism symbolised by the scandal at Kabul Bank: a $1bn Ponzi scheme implicating a roster of the city’s elite.
Oligarchs who have flourished on Nato contracts careen around the city in convoys of pick-up trucks with masked gunmen clinging to the back. Even these entrepreneurs of the war economy are afraid: one told me his five-year-old son had advised him to stop working with Americans and join the Taliban.
In the vacuum, old loyalties have become primary. Rabbani was a titan of the Northern Alliance of warlords from the ethnic Tajik community. Its leaders have prospered since the ousting of the Taliban, which hails from the Pashtun south. His killing has deepened civil war fault-lines – accelerating a growing polarisation between northerners and Pashtuns.
The trend suits Pakistan’s generals, who are stoking the fire by backing the Taliban. A weak Afghanistan is more appealing to them than a pro-Indian Afghanistan. Unbowed by US pressure, Pakistan’s spies will continue to back Afghan proxies such as the Haqqani network to protect their interests.
Can the slide to civil war be stopped? Nato has failed. There was nothing more striking about a three-week stint I spent embedded with US “surge” forces last summer than watching three men with spades, AK-47s and fertiliser calmly plant a roadside bomb while an F-18 Hornet circled overhead. Armoured vehicles were scrambled, but to no avail – the men vanished.
The insurgency cannot be beaten on the battlefield. Nor can the Taliban be forced into a deal. The only hope is that the changes in Afghan society in the past decade can provide an incentive for moderation ultimately to prevail. In Kabul at least a younger generation is long since disillusioned with the politics of the gun. But as the calls for revenge at Rabbani’s funeral showed, Afghan politics are now ruled by fear.
The writer is the FT’s Afghanistan and Pakistan correspondent
Bulgaria plans phased troops withdrawal from Afghanistan: DM
SOFIA, Sept. 26 (Xinhua) -- Bulgaria has developed a draft strategy for phased withdrawal from the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan, Defense Minister Anyu Angelov said here on Monday.
According to the strategy that would be adopted by the Bulgarian government by the end of this year, the 610-member Bulgarian contingent based in Kabul and Kandahar would be gradually pulled out in 2012, 2013 and 2014, Angelov told a press conference.
However, "probably" Bulgarian military instructors would remain in Afghanistan after 2014 because there was an agreement between NATO and Afghanistan to continue assisting the Afghan security forces in their preparation and training, Angelov said.
Angelov added that he has met with his Belgian counterpart because Belgium already declared to withdraw its contingent from Kabul in 2012.
Angelov also said he would meet informally with NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Europe Admiral James Stavridis, and with defense ministers of countries such as Afghanistan and Portugal that could potentially take on certain functions performed by the Bulgarian contingent.
US Marines find rewards in Afghanistan
By CHRISTOPHER TORCHIA - Associated Press
FORWARD OPERATING BASE JACKSON, Afghanistan (AP) — An American in uniform stands near a landing zone at about 2 a.m., moonlight framing his features, and talks about dead and maimed men he knows. His flight out isn't until next month, and he is counting the days.
Then he says he will miss Afghanistan.
"It's just life or death: the simplicity of it," said Cpl. Robert Cole of the 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, which ends a seven-month deployment in the southern region of Sangin in October. "It's also kind of nice in some ways because you don't have to worry about anything else in the world."
The dominant narrative about war in a foreign land says its practitioners yearn for home, for the families, the comforts, and the luxury of no longer worrying about imminent death or injury. It applies to young American troops in Afghan combat zones, but it's not the whole truth.
Combat can deliver a sense of urgency, meaning, order and belonging. There is the adrenaline-fueled elation of a firefight, and the horror of rescuing a comrade wounded by a bomb on patrol. It is magnified, instantaneous experience. An existence boiled down to the essentials mocks the mundane detritus, the quibbles and bill-paying and anonymity, of life back home.
Building on the costly inroads of a previous unit, the Marine battalion has seen a decline in Taliban attacks in Sangin, a southern Afghan area where the insurgency battled British forces to a stalemate for years. Now the troops have more time to build bridges and sluice gates, and sit cross-legged at meetings with Afghan elders in hopes of stripping the insurgency of popular support.
Early on, the going was hard. Cole said his platoon suffered close to 30 percent casualties, mostly from bombs hidden around its patrol base.
He described how one Marine on patrol triggered a bomb that severed his legs. Another Marine rushed forward to apply tourniquets, knowing his friend would bleed to death if he methodically checked, as training dictated, for more boobytraps in his path. The second Marine started dragging the first toward safety when he set off another bomb, severing his own legs, according to Cole. But he saved his comrade in the process.
"He didn't lose his legs for his country, he lost his legs for his brother," Cole, of Klamath Falls, Oregon, said bluntly. He gestured to another Marine in the dark at the landing zone at Forward Operating Base Jackson, the battalion's headquarters.
"The only shred of sanity that keeps us going out here is that I have to protect his ass and he has to protect my ass," said Cole, who is confined to the base after suffering concussions in two explosions.
Cole, 22, is not bitter. He treasures the fierce loyalty, born of bloodshed. Politics, the debate about the wisdom of the decade-long U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, the plan to withdraw international combat forces by the end of 2014, seem irrelevant to young Marines.
When they talk about friends with amputated limbs under treatment in the United States, they often stick to the line, "he's doing really good right now," even if they know that isn't true.
"Get some!" is a Marine slogan, reflecting the U.S. military branch's traditional taste for expeditionary action. On the night of Sept. 11, possibly to mark the 10th anniversary of the terror attacks in the United States, insurgents fired on guard posts at the Jackson camp. It was harassment, not a major attack. Marines returned fire in great volume, red tracer rounds plunging into the darkness.
"Watch your sectors!" warned a company captain as some Marines, adrenaline unleashed, broadened their sweep of fire from defensive berms. After a while, the shooting subsided. One Marine was asked: Is it over?
"I have no clue," he laughed. "They can fire at us all night if they want, as long as nobody gets hurt."
At Patrol Base Fulod, about a 15-minute ride in an armored vehicle from the Jackson camp, Cpl. Ernest Tubbs is something special among his peers. He has discovered three-dozen hidden bombs on this deployment. A smooth talker who radiates confidence, he remembered the first time he uncovered an IED, or improvised explosive device, "heart racing, so many emotions at one time."
Tubbs, 22, of Parsonsburg, Maryland, leads patrols with a metal detector, potentially the most dangerous job in the lineup. In a small victory celebration, he smokes a cigarette whenever he finds an IED; he smoked two in a row after one very hazardous experience.
He is desperate to return to his wife and newborn son, and become a civilian, but he won't forget what it is like to be a kind of savior, to know men depend on him for their lives.
"The feeling of when things happen out here, it's a feeling that you'll never get rid of. But it's a feeling that will always belong to you," he said. "There's no more adrenaline rush in the world than finding an IED. I'm going to miss that a bunch."
For families in the United States, there are no such thrills, only the grind of not knowing. Tubbs' wife, Hannah, gave birth to a boy, Gabe, last month. Her husband's oldest brother cut the umbilical cord. In an e-mail to The Associated Press, she wrote:
"Even when I was still pregnant with him I would tell him that his daddy loves him and can't wait to meet him. I tell him who his daddy is and all about him. Being pregnant for most of the deployment didn't help the emotional part of it all. It was hard getting ready for the baby without him. It was even harder to hear about guys who had been hurt or even killed knowing they did the same job as my son's father."
She continued: "His best friend is a triple amp (amputee) and another lost his life, he had not even been married a year. We kept in touch with his wife and she plans on being at the homecoming. There are no words that describe what families go through during a deployment. The days drag on when there is no phone call and your heart drops when there is an unexpected knock on the door."
Various books, films and television series address the theme of troops liking aspects of war, or missing it when they get home. Many focus on the sacrifice, the brotherhood, or the bloodshed, or some combination. Norman Mailer's novel, "The Naked and the Dead," and the 1998 movie "Saving Private Ryan" are among works that explore the psychological impact of intense combat on its protagonists.
"It is well that war is so terrible — otherwise we would grow too fond of it," U.S. Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee reportedly said at the Battle of Fredericksburg on Dec. 13, 1862.
Some transitions to home are the hardest of all.
Walking past cornfields on a patrol, 1st Lt. Richard Marcantonio of Corpus Christi, Texas, talked about a Marine who lost three limbs in a bombing and was transferred to a military hospital in the United States. One day, his father walked in and handed his son's baby to him as he lay in bed.
According to Marcantonio, the father said something like: "Here's your child. I'm not going to bring her up, so you better do it."
And, this story of tough love goes, the Marine is doing just that.
Some who come from rural areas in the United States feel a curious affinity with Afghanistan and its web of sparsely populated villages and farmland. Capt. Brian Huysman of Delphos, Ohio — "Good luck finding Delphos on the map," he said — sees parallels between the "small town mentality" and rivalries back home and the jostling for advantage among local leaders in southern Afghan settlements.
"It's very eerie," said Huysman, Weapons Company commander for the battalion.
When these men are retired veterans, many will look back on Afghanistan as a place of loss, but also a place that made them better than they were, whether the U.S. military succeeds in its long-term goals or not. The cult of sacrifice finds expression in a shrine to the missing in action of past wars in the dining hall at Camp Leatherneck, the main Marine base in southern Afghanistan.
There, an empty chair sits in front of a table laid with white cloth and a place setting for one. On the bread plate, a notice says, a slice of lemon symbolizes their "bitter fate," and salt stands for families' tears. There are dog tags and an inverted drinking glass.
Cole, the corporal at the landing zone, said that in his time in Sangin, he had seen Taliban fighters only once, in a treeline hundreds of yards (meters) away, too far to fire on them accurately. Marines called for an air strike, but it was denied because there were children in the area. International forces have "rules of engagement" designed to avoid civilian casualties.
As Cole talked, the dark mass of an Osprey aircraft rumbled inward, its lights off to make it less of a target for insurgents. The back ramp was open, a tethered gunner at the edge with a mounted machine gun.
Dust and wind swirled, tossed up by churning rotors. The courteous corporal pulled a departing passenger into a half-embrace.
"Thank you for listening," he said.
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