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Attack Near UN Offices in Southern Afghanistan Kills 5
VOA News October 31, 2011
The United Nations' refugee agency says three of its employees are among the five people killed in a suicide bombing in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar.
United Nations chief Ban Ki-moon said those killed included three UNHCR security guards and two security contractors. Two guards were also injured in the attack early Monday.
Authorities say one attacker detonated a vehicle full of explosives near buildings used by the UNHCR and the U.S.-based International Relief and Development organization.
After the blast, three gunmen rushed into the area and seized control of an animal clinic. Afghan officials say security forces exchanged gunfire with the men for more than six hours before the attackers were killed.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack. A Taliban spokesman said a U.N. agency was the insurgent group's target.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban also said the attack “underscores the risks” that U.N. and international aid workers face in Afghanistan. He said the U.N. mission there is “purely humanitarian” and that its sole aim is to ” improve the daily lives of the country's people.”
Monday's attack comes two days after a suicide car bombing in the Afghan capital killed 17 people, including five NATO service members, eight civilian contractors, and four Afghans.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for Saturday's attack in Kabul. But a Western diplomat told news agencies that it was “very possible” that the attack on a NATO convoy was the work of the Haqqani network.
The al-Qaida-linked militant network has carried out a number of attacks on U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan. The Haqqani network is believed to be based in Pakistan's North Waziristan tribal region.
Afghanistan to Ink Strategic Agreement with France
TOLOnews.com Sunday, 30 October 2011
Afghanistan is to sign a strategic agreement with France ahead of the Istanbul conference, Afghan Ministry of Foreign Affairs says.
According to the MoFA, it has received a copy of the agreement from the French Foreign Ministry.
Based on the agreement, Paris is committed to continue supporting Afghanistan in different fields even after 2014.
While the Istanbul conference on Afghanistan is to be held in a few days, the Afghan Ministry of Foreign Affairs urges the countries in the region to honestly support Afghanistan in the fight against terrorism as well as in the peace efforts and the second phase of security transition.
The MoFA says it will submit a draft to the Istanbul conference to be officially ratified.
"We hope the Istanbul conference will be fruitful and reach practical decisions and improve mutual trust between Afghanistan and the region," MoFA spokesman, Janan Musazai, said.
According to the MoFA, the agreement between Afghanistan and France will be implemented for a period of five years after which the two countries will extend it.
Istanbul conference is scheduled to be held on November 3nd with participation of all the countries in the region.
Turkey condemns attacks in Afghanistan
ANKARA, Oct. 31 (Xinhua) -- Turkey condemned the recent attacks staged in Afghanistan, a Turkish statement said late Sunday.
"Turkey strongly condemns the terrorist attack against a convoy of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Kabul and two other separate incidents against ISAF personnel and the Afghanistan National Directorate of Security (NDS) in the southern provinces of Afghanistan on Oct. 29," said the statement issued by Turkish Foreign Ministry.
"Several Coalition and Afghan soldiers, as well as innocent civilians were killed and injured as result of these heinous attacks, according to initial reports," the statement noted.
It added, "we convey our condolences to the bereaved families of the victims of these tragic attacks and wish speedy recovery to the wounded. Turkey, as always, will continue to do her utmost to provide assistance for the assurance of peace, prosperity and security of the brotherly Afghan people."
Afghan president leaves for Istanbul conference on Afghanistan
KABUL, Oct. 31 (Xinhua) -- Afghan President Hamid Karzai, heading a high-ranking delegation, left for Turkey on Monday, a statement released by the Presidential Palace here said.
The president left for Istanbul Monday morning to attend a regional conference on Afghanistan," the statement said.
President Karzai will deliver a speech at the international conference on Afghanistan in Istanbul, to be held on Wednesday, with the aim of building a stable and independent Afghanistan and discussing regional economic cooperation.
President Karzai will meet with his Pakistani counterpart Asif Ali Zardari at a trilateral summit along with their Turkish host President Abdullah Gul on Tuesday to discuss security, development, and regional cooperation, according to the statement.
It is the sixth trilateral meeting between three countries and the agenda will include peace, stability and reconciliation in Afghanistan and economic cooperation for Afghanistan, it said.
On the sidelines of Istanbul conference on Afghanistan, Karzai will also hold meetings with Turkish President Abdullah Gul and U. S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, according to the statement.
The foreign ministers of 14 countries are expected to take part in the conference. The countries include Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, China, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Russia.
High-level representatives from the United States, the United Nations, Japan and many Western countries are expected as observers to take part in the conference.
Pakistan denies spying on German forces in Afghanistan
Reuters 31 Oct, 2011
ISLAMABAD - Pakistani officials on Monday rejected a German newspaper report that the country's secret service spied on German security forces in Afghanistan.
Without citing its sources, mass-selling weekly Bild am Sonntag reported on Sunday that Germany's BND foreign intelligence agency warned its interior ministry that Pakistan had spied on 180 German police officers deployed in Afghanistan to train locals.
A Pakistani foreign ministry official, who asked not to be identified, described the report as "ridiculous" and "useless". Pakistan military spokesman Major-General Athar Abbas said the report was not worth commenting on.
Bild am Sonntag said private telephone calls, messages to the German interior ministry, military mission orders and lists of police officer names had been intercepted, raising fears sensitive information could end up in the hands of the Taliban.
The United States has long suspected Pakistan, or elements within the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), of supporting militant groups in order to increase its influence in Afghanistan, particularly after NATO troops leave in 2014.
Islamabad has come under particularly intense pressure to fight militancy since US special forces killed Osama bin Laden in May in a Pakistani town, where he had apparently been living for years.
Admiral Mike Mullen said before retiring as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff last month that a militant group that had attacked US targets in Afghanistan was a "veritable arm" of Pakistani intelligence.
The German interior ministry told Reuters the BND suspected a German email had been intercepted but could not give confirmation. The ministry added it was not aware of any comprehensive interception of German police data.
The BND declined to comment on the report. Pakistan says it has sacrificed more than any other country that joined the US war on terror after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.
U.S. Seeks Aid From Pakistan in Peace Effort
New York Times By ERIC SCHMITT and DAVID E. SANGER October 30, 2011
WASHINGTON - Just a month after accusing Pakistan’s spy agency of secretly supporting the Haqqani terrorist network, which has mounted attacks on Americans, the Obama administration is now relying on the same intelligence service to help organize and kick-start reconciliation talks aimed at ending the war in Afghanistan.
The revamped approach, which Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called “Fight, Talk, Build” during a high-level United States delegation’s visit to Kabul and Islamabad this month, combines continued American air and ground strikes against the Haqqani network and the Taliban with an insistence that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency get them to the negotiating table.
But some elements of the ISI see little advantage in forcing those negotiations, because they see the insurgents as perhaps their best bet for maintaining influence in Afghanistan as the United States reduces its presence there.
The strategy is emerging amid an increase in the pace of attacks against Americans in Kabul, including a suicide attack on Saturday that killed as many as 10 Americans and in which the Haqqanis are suspected . It is the latest effort at brokering a deal with militants before the last of 33,000 American “surge” troops prepare to pull out of Afghanistan by September, and comes as early hopes in the White House about having the outlines of a deal in time for a multinational conference Dec. 5 in Bonn, Germany, have been all but abandoned.
But even inside the Obama administration, the new initiative has been met with deep skepticism, in part because the Pakistani government has developed its own strategy, one at odds with Mrs. Clinton’s on several key points. One senior American official summarized the Pakistani position as “Cease-fire, Talk, Wait for the Americans to Leave.”
In short, the United States is in the position of having to rely heavily on the ISI to help broker a deal with the same group of militants that leaders in Washington say the spy agency is financing and supporting.
“The Pakistanis see the contradictions in the American approach,” said Shamila N. Chaudhary, a former top Obama White House aide on Pakistan and Afghanistan. “The big question for the administration is, What can the Pakistanis actually deliver? Pakistan is holding its cards very closely.”
On Sunday, United States intelligence officials deepened an investigation into what role, if any, the Haqqani network played in the bombing in Kabul on Saturday.
Several current and former American officials say the United States has tried this bomb-them-to-the-bargaining-table approach before. In the 1990s, it helped drive Serbian leaders to peace talks in Dayton, Ohio, but it has resulted in little so far with the Afghan Taliban.
“I don’t think anyone expects Secretary Clinton’s visit to produce reconciliation,” said Bruce O. Riedel, a former C.I.A. officer and the author of “Deadly Embrace: Pakistan, America, and the Future of the Global Jihad.” Mr. Riedel, who advocates a policy of containment in Pakistan, added, “The deterioration of U.S.-Pakistan relations is likely to continue.”
Senior Pakistani officials say they are confused by a lack of clarity in the administration’s long-term goals in Afghanistan, and are working with American officials to hammer out specific plans after Mrs. Clinton’s visit. As an incentive, the United States has offered Pakistan a prominent role in reconciliation talks. But American officials have warned that they will take unilateral action if negotiations fail.
Several administration officials said they considered Mrs. Clinton’s trip to Kabul and Islamabad, from Oct. 19 to 21, a success largely because it had happened at all.
In the months after the killing of Osama bin Laden on Pakistani soil, talks were frozen, American intelligence officers were denied visas, and the administration accused the ISI of turning a blind eye to attacks on Americans launched from the country’s tribal areas.
When Adm. Mike Mullen, just days before his retirement last month as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, declared that the Haqqani network was “a veritable arm” of the Pakistani spy service, President Obama and his aides were outraged, administration officials said — not because they thought Admiral Mullen was wrong, but because his remarks further inflamed the Pakistanis.
Mrs. Clinton’s trip was intended to both re-establish ties and reiterate a strong message. She warned Pakistan that the United States would act on its own if necessary to attack extremist groups that use the country as a haven while they kill Americans.
To emphasize that point, a flurry of C.I.A. drone strikes launched on Oct. 13-14 from Afghanistan killed the third-ranking leader of the Haqqani network, near Miram Shah in North Waziristan, part of Pakistan’s tribal area.
Two other missile volleys killed two senior operatives of Al Qaeda involved in overseas planning, American officials said. On Thursday, American missile strikes killed five members of a faction of the Pakistani Taliban.
But Mrs. Clinton, joined by David H. Petraeus, the new director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, did not use her meeting to insist, as she and other officials had in the past, that the Pakistan military mount an offensive to root out the Haqqanis and other militants that operate from sanctuaries in North Waziristan.
Instead, the administration says, it is pressing the Pakistanis to provide intelligence on the Haqqanis, arrest some of the group’s operatives and reduce ties to the terrorist group — all steps well short of military action.
In its place, an emerging American strategy aims to attack the Haqqanis on both sides of the border. An eight-day NATO offensive this month involving 11,000 allied troops and 25,000 Afghan security forces in seven provinces in eastern Afghanistan killed or captured more than 200 Haqqani fighters and commanders, allied officials said; the pressure on the Pakistani side is being generated almost entirely by the drone strikes.
“That’s going to really deter their ability to operate probably for some time, maybe into the winter period,” Lt. Gen. Curtis M. Scaparrotti, the second-ranking allied commander in Afghanistan, said Thursday.
Mrs. Clinton also used her meeting, according to officials familiar with it, to reassure the Pakistanis that they would play a central role in any reconciliation talks. “We’re at the point where Pakistanis have told us they’re going to squeeze the Haqqani network,” a senior administration official said. “They’re satisfied they’ve got a way forward on reconciliation. They’ve got a role to play.”
That means rekindling talks with the Haqqanis that started in late August. That first exploratory meeting was held secretly in the United Arab Emirates between a midlevel American diplomat and Ibrahim Haqqani, a brother of the tribal network’s patriarch. Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, the head of the ISI, brokered the meeting. American and Pakistan officials say little resulted from the session, which came just two weeks before a 20-hour attack on the United States Embassy in Kabul.
On Capitol Hill last week, some lawmakers expressed skepticism about the administration’s approach to the Haqqani network.
“So which is it, Madam Secretary? Crack down or negotiate with the Haqqani network, or a little bit of both?” asked Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the Florida Republican who heads the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
“It’s both,” Mrs. Clinton said. “We want to fight, talk and build all at the same time. Part of the reason for that is to test whether these organizations have any willingness to negotiate in good faith.”
U.S. had warning of abuse at Afghan prison
Washington Post By Joshua Partlow 30/10/2011
KABUL, Afghanistan - Across the street from U.S. military headquarters in Kabul, shrouded from view by concrete walls, the Afghan intelligence agency runs a detention facility for up to 40 terrorism suspects that is known as Department 124. So much torture took place inside, one detainee told the United Nations, that it has earned a different name: "people call it hell."
But long before the world body publicly revealed "systematic torture" in Afghan intelligence agency detention centers, top officials from the State Department, CIA and U.S. military received multiple warnings about abuses at Department 124 and other Afghan facilities, according to Afghan and Western officials with knowledge of the situation.
Despite the warnings, the United States continued to transfer detainees to Afghan intelligence service custody, the officials said. Even as other countries stopped handing over detainees to problematic facilities, the American government did not.
U.S. Special Operations troops delivered detainees to Department 124 and CIA officials regularly visited the facility, which was rebuilt last year with American money to interrogate high-level Taliban and al-Qaida suspects, according to Afghan and Western officials familiar with the site. Afghan intelligence officials said Americans never participated in the torture but should have known about it.
When the United Nations brought allegations of widespread detainee abuse on Aug. 30 to Gen. John Allen, the top U.S. military commander here, he took swift action ahead of the public release of the findings. Coalition troops stopped transferring detainees to Department 124 and 15 other police and intelligence agency prisons. They also hastily began a program to monitor those facilities and conduct human rights classes for interrogators.
But the prospect that U.S. officials failed to act on prior warnings raises questions about their compliance with a law, known as the Leahy Amendment, that prohibits the United States from funding units of foreign security forces when there is credible evidence they have committed human rights abuses. The State Department is now investigating whether the law applies and what funding might be affected, according to U.S. officials.
American officials denied that they had ignored credible warnings of detainee abuse and said that whenever such an allegation was raised, they took action. Former top commander Gen. David Petraeus, for instance, ordered a halt to detainee transfers to Afghan intelligence and police custody in Kandahar in July.
"Any place that we've had a concern in the past, we've taken the appropriate steps, I'm confident of that, and we're taking the appropriate steps now," Lt. Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti, the second-ranking U.S. commander in Afghanistan, said in an interview. "I don't see it as a systemic problem, as some have said it might be."
White House spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said the United States has a "longstanding policy against transferring individuals to torture" and that "whenever allegations of human rights violations are raised with us, we move quickly to work with the host government to investigate and resolve them."
The "CIA adheres to those same rules," said another U.S. official. "The reality is that the system in place works."
RED CROSS SOUNDED WARNINGS
Even by the standards of Afghanistan's deeply troubled justice system, Department 124 stood out. With chilling detail, the United Nations recounted detainees' stories of interrogators hanging them by their hands for hours, beating them with metal pipes, shocking them with electricity and twisting their genitals until they passed out. Of the 28 detainees interviewed who had spent time at the facility, 26 told the U.N. they had been tortured, according to a report released this month.
Before the U.N. investigation began in October 2010, the International Committee of the Red Cross told Afghan and U.S. officials about their concerns over detainee abuse at Department 124 and elsewhere, according to people briefed on the confidential discussions.
The conversations intensified earlier this year, with the ICRC warning top-level officials from the U.S. Embassy, CIA and Joint Special Operations Command, among others. One person familiar with the conversations said the concerns involved the "prevalence and pervasiveness" of detainee abuse by the National Directorate of Security, or NDS, as Afghanistan's primary intelligence service is known. When the discussions failed to produce improved treatment and conditions, the ICRC issued confidential written findings to the Afghan government outlining the extent of the problems.
One former senior U.S. embassy official disputed these characterizations of the briefings. If there had been "serious substantive allegations of systemic institutional torture of detainees, the embassy would have acted on these," the official said.
Many of the officials interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of discussing confidential matters that carry potential legal ramifications.
The ICRC declined to comment on the content of its confidential meetings. "In Afghanistan, the ICRC shared observations and recommendations with the detaining authorities and with others who were mentoring and training them," said ICRC spokesman Simon Schorno. "It did so on numerous occasions during confidential, bilateral meetings."
Schorno said the "public silence of the ICRC on its visits should never be interpreted to mean that there are no prevailing concerns to be addressed by the authorities in charge."
Department 124 was long sealed off from the outside world - the ICRC, the United Nations and other organizations concerned with human rights were all barred by Afghan officials from monitoring prison conditions there.
But American officials frequently went inside, according to Afghan officials and others familiar with the site. U.S. Special Operations troops brought detainees there and CIA officials met with Department 124's leadership on a weekly basis, reviewed their interrogation reports and used the intelligence gleaned from interrogations to inform their operations, the officials said.
The detainees were entered into an American biometric database. They wore orange jump suits - as detainees do at the U.S.-run prison at Bagram Airfield, but not at other Afghan prisons - and were sometimes hooded, according to an Afghan intelligence official. Seventeen detainees said they had been transferred to the prison by international military forces; the United Nations found "compelling evidence" that those detainees were tortured once they arrived. The detainees told U.N. officials their interrogators were Afghans.
AFGHANS DEFEND METHODS
That such harsh tactics are used to get information and extract confessions is no secret among current and former Afghan intelligence officials. One of them said their CIA partners were "totally aware" of such treatment.
"They work with us every other day, if not every day," another Afghan intelligence official said of the CIA. Because of their close collaboration, and the prevalence of beatings, "the CIA guys should have known about it," he said.
During his extensive review of the Afghan detention system in 2009, Marine Maj. Gen. Douglas Stone said he found less reason to worry about detainee abuse than the prospect that Afghan prisons bred radical Islamists. He said his team had access to all aspects of Afghan detentions except for NDS facilities, but he recalled being told that the ICRC was conducting "really rigorous reviews."
"I was told repeatedly that there was really no abuse going on, that the ICRC had pretty much free rein," said Stone, who is now retired from the military.
In an interview, the NDS deputy director for operations, Ahmed Zia, described the U.N. report as an inaccurate attack on the agency and said insurgents are trained in Pakistan to lie to human rights groups.
Zia has been described by colleagues as sometimes ruthless in his pursuit of intelligence, and one detainee who had been in Department 124 told international monitors he had been beaten by Zia.
Zia denied mistreating detainees and called Department 124 "a rising star for our country."
"There's nothing to hide from anyone," he said.
Beginning last month, U.S. troops made their first of at least three inspections of Department 124. They have given eight-hour courses to interrogators on human rights and proper procedures for handling detainees.
One NATO military official present said that on each visit the facility was about half full - approximately 20 detainees. The NDS leadership was welcoming and allowed private interviews with the prisoners, he said. But in the class on human rights, he said, Afghan interrogators offered some "push-back." They suggested that being rough with detainees was part of their job, the NATO military official said.
The official said the Afghan interrogators defended their methods, asserting that the detainees are terrorists. "They say, 'This is how we do it all the time.' "
Afghan Success Comes At High Price For Commander
NPR By Tom Bowman October 30, 2011
A year ago, nearly 1,000 U.S. Marine officers and enlisted men of the 3rd Battalion, 5th Regiment deployed to restive Helmand province in southern Afghanistan. By the time their tour ended in April 2011, the Marines of the 3/5 — known as "Darkhorse" — suffered the highest casualty rate of any Marine unit during the past 10 years of war. This week, NPR tells the story of this unit's seven long months at war — both in Afghanistan and back home.
First of seven parts
With his brown checkered sport coat, blue shirt and tie, Jason Morris could easily be mistaken for a young professor. Only the close-cropped hair and stocky build might suggest a military life.
Lt. Col. Morris served as a Marine officer during the 2003 invasion of Iraq and witnessed heavy combat in the push toward Baghdad.
But it's his experience in Afghanistan during the past year that lingers: Morris commanded the Marines of the 3rd Battalion, 5th Regiment, which lost 25 troops during its seven-month-long deployment, the highest casualty rate of any Marine unit during the Afghan war.
These days, he is studying for a master's degree at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I. Standing on a sea wall there, Morris looks at sailboats slicing through the bay.
"Narragansett Bay probably has more water in it than probably all of Afghanistan," he says. "Seeing blue and seeing green. Anything but brown."
A Difficult Mission
Morris saw a lot of shades of brown during his seven months in southern Afghanistan's Helmand province: the high beige walls of village compounds, the thick chocolate mud that passed for roads, the dung-colored fields in winter.
It was just over a year ago that Morris took nearly 1,000 Marines to a place in Helmand called Sangin. It was a haven for Taliban fighters and drug traffickers, a place where the British lost more than 100 troops in four years.
But the British failed to push out and pursue the enemy, and the Taliban continued to control much of the area. It was Morris' job to take it back.
At the time, Lt. Gen. Rich Mills was the senior Marine commander in Helmand. He says what Morris' unit went through was as brutal as anything in the history of the Marines.
"It stands alone in the Afghanistan situation as probably being one of the tougher missions ever handed to an infantry battalion," Mills says.
"It's very rare. I certainly would compare it to some of the amphibious assaults during World War II, places like Guadalcanal," he adds.
'What Were We Doing Wrong?'
By the time Morris returned home in April, his Marines suffered historic losses: 25 dead and nearly 200 more wounded, about three-dozen of whom had lost at least one limb.
For Morris, those casualties seemed to come out of nowhere. Most of his men were killed or wounded not by enemy fire, but by chance. They would go out on patrol and step on homemade bombs that seemed to be everywhere.
And even in a war in which those homemade bombs — known as improvised explosive devices, or IEDs — account for nearly three-quarters of the American deaths, the sheer number and speed of the casualties was stunning.
It started almost immediately after the unit arrived in Sangin on Sept. 27, 2010: Hostile fire killed Lance Cpl. John Sparks on Oct. 8, less than two weeks later.
More deaths followed in quick succession: The next casualties occurred back to back, on Oct. 14 and 15.
"That was what was tough. ... In two days we had lost seven Marines," Morris recalls.
Morris questioned his company commanders. Were they doing everything by the book? Were they following their training?
Back home, the families were frantic, wondering what was happening. Morris' wife, Jane Conwell, started getting a hundred emails each day. One wife was convinced she heard the doorbell ring in the middle of the night, that Marine officers were there to announce her husband's death.
"The families, especially the spouses, really almost lost their minds," Morris says.
In this age of Facebook and Twitter, what happened on the battlefield instantly affected the homefront. And what happened at home instantly reached the troops.
From Afghanistan, Morris had to reassure families back in California — he even sent a message to a town hall meeting at Camp Pendleton, where the battalion was based.
His more immediate challenge, though, was to carry out his mission — and stop the casualties.
"At the time I was wondering, what were we doing wrong?" he says.
Higher-ups were wondering the same thing. U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates asked about the growing number of dead and wounded and suggested pulling Darkhorse out for a while. The Marine leadership said no.
"I said it would be a mistake," recalls Mills, the senior Marine officer in Helmand. "That the battalion was doing fine. Morale was high. Combat effectiveness was great. That the Marines up there wanted to finish the job. The worst thing we could have done was withdraw that battalion."
A Positive Impact As Casualties Subside
But for all the debate among the generals, it fell to Morris to figure out how to finish the job.
"I was on my own for this. I mean having to figure this out? It's up to the battalion commander," he says.
Morris pressed his Marines to slow down, to carefully search for roadside bombs when on patrol. He buried mock roadside bombs at his base so his troops could practice finding them.
Eventually, Morris got more troops and equipment. That made a big difference. The casualties started to subside. By the end of their deployment, Darkhorse spent more time rebuilding villages than shooting Taliban.
But it had come at a terrible price. When he returned home in April, Morris attended a dozen memorial services, all around the country. He tried to comfort those left behind.
"There were some that were very angry, just yelling, 'Why the hell did I lose my son for this?'" Morris recalls.
"What do you say? You just try to make him understand his son died doing what he wanted to be doing. And that he had an impact — a positive impact on the people of Afghanistan, helped rebuild their country," he says.
Following A Family Tradition
Morris believes what he tells the families. Other Marines who served with Darkhorse say the same thing — that they made a difference. That's one reason Morris signed up in the first place.
After graduating from the Naval Academy in 1992, Morris wanted to lead men in combat. He wanted the mental and physical challenge. And he was following a path his father had taken: John Morris was also a Marine.
"He's very proud of me, but he said, 'You've got to want to do this, because it's a tough life,'" he says.
John Morris was also a rifle company commander — in Vietnam. His unit took 70 percent casualties, far more than Darkhorse's 20 percent.
But it was different back then. The elder Morris never got to know his Marines. Today, Marines train together, go to war together and come home together — as a unit. During Vietnam, individual replacements came, got wounded and were airlifted out.
"[My father] made a comment, 'You know, you've spent 18 months with these guys. You've met most of them. The lieutenants, you've drank beers with, you've met their spouses, you know their parents,'" he says.
An Eternal Burden
Morris still keeps in touch with the members of Darkhorse Battalion. He has visited the seriously wounded at the naval hospitals at Balboa in San Diego, Calif., and in Bethesda, Md., outside Washington, D.C.
Right now, he is on a plum assignment, studying at the Naval War College. He says it's surreal — taking classes, living by the water, trying to slow down after combat command.
"I found it difficult to get out of that battle rhythm of being constantly on guard, working 18 or 19 hours a day," Morris says.
It's not easy to shake free of Afghanistan — and the knowledge that men he led didn't make it home: "It's a burden that you bear forever."
Afghan insurgency: A lethal legion
Financial Times By Matthew Green October 30, 2011
One moonless night in September, Nato troops swooped on a mosque in Afghanistan’s Paktia province, a hotbed of insurgency that hugs the frontier with Pakistan. Soldiers spotted a man bolting from the building, accompanied by two others.
The trio made a run for a nearby treeline but soon recognised they were outgunned, according to an official of the western coalition that has spent a decade trying to stabilise the country. Haji Mali Khan, a commander of the Haqqani insurgent network and a man revered among his battle-hardened fighters, was handcuffed before he could fire a shot.
Capturing Mr Khan, along with his deputy and bodyguard, was a big victory for the US military in its campaign against the Haqqanis, a once obscure ethnic Pashtun clan that has emerged as one of the biggest threats to western hopes of a stable handover to Afghan control in 2014.
But the group has shown nothing if not resilience since it was founded 35 years ago by Jalaluddin Haqqani, a swashbuckling warrior-patriarch whose skill at bushwhacking Soviet invaders in the 1980s turned him for a time into one of Washington’s best Afghan friends. His organisation is now among America’s most formidable adversaries – blamed for a series of suicide attacks in the capital, Kabul, that have shaken Afghans’ faith in their security forces and kindled fears in Europe and the US that the war cannot be won.
In the latest bombing, a militant rammed an explosives-laden vehicle into an armoured bus on Saturday, killing 17 people, including four Afghans, nine Americans and two UK civilian contractors, in the worst assault on international forces in the city. The Taliban claimed responsibility but suspicion also fell on the Haqqanis, which western officials have blamed for many past attacks.
“The Haqqanis have succeeded in conveying the impression that the insurgency is very strong. People do not feel safe,” said Mohammad Isaqzadeh, a political science professor at the American University of Afghanistan in Kabul. “Their attacks have reinforced a fear that the very survival of the political system may somehow be in question.”
In recent weeks, a new confluence of factors has cast the network in an even more dangerous light. The fallout from last month’s assassination of a former Afghan president and an audacious Haqqani raid on the US embassy in Kabul reverberated across the region and sparked a furore in Washington over suspicions that Pakistan is supporting the group.
Any evidence that the Haqqanis were behind Saturday’s bombing could spark a new flare-up in tensions at a moment when the US wants Pakistan’s help to talk to the insurgents. During a visit to Islamabad this month, Hillary Clinton, secretary of state, compared Pakistan’s relationship to the Haqqanis to keeping “snakes in your backyard”. “We think that Pakistan, for a variety of reasons has the capacity to encourage, to push, to squeeze ... terrorists, including the Haqqanis and the Afghan Taliban, to be willing to engage on the peace process,” she said.
The seizure of Mr Khan was a notable success for Nato after a trying summer. While last year’s “surge” of an extra 30,000 US troops succeeded in pushing Taliban fighters from southern strongholds in Helmand and Kandahar, the Haqqanis encroached on provinces around Kabul. The movement has been blamed for attacks including an assault on the Intercontinental Hotel in June and the raid on the US embassy in which militants scaled a half-built high-rise block to fire rockets during a 20-hour siege; two dozen police, civilians and insurgents were killed.
Each attack boosts the Haqqanis’ stature further. Although the outfit has pledged allegiance to the mainstream Taliban movement led by Mullah Mohammed Omar, it is increasingly showing signs of independence.
Unlike the Taliban, which emerged in Kandahar in the mid-1990s, the Haqqanis have spent three decades consolidating their grip in the mountainous south-east. Jalaluddin is now too frail to lead and some believe his sons Sirajuddin and Badruddin (Mr Khan’s nephews) may want to use their mini-emirate as a launch pad for a future national role. “The Haqqanis are boosting their political influence by taking centre stage in the war,” wrote Michael Semple, an expert on Afghan militancy, in Foreign Affairs magazine last month. “In terms of impact on the public consciousness, the Haqqanis simply overshadow anything their counterparts in Kandahar have been able to pull off.”
The Haqqanis’ greatest asset is their Pakistani haven. The group has used the “tribal agency” of North Waziri-stan to build training camps with the acquiescence – and perhaps active support – of Pakistan’s army, which has rejected US pressure to launch an offensive in the area. “It’s too late for the Pakistanis to find reliable new friends in Afghanistan – they’re relying on the Haqqanis and the Taliban to protect their interests,” says Saifullah Mahsud, head of the Fata Research Centre in Islamabad, which monitors Pakistan’s federally administered tribal areas.
The Haqqanis personify US suspicions of Pakistani duplicity. Washington has long suspected elements within Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency of backing the group as part of a decades-old strategy of using Taliban factions as proxies in a cold war with India. The belief exploded into the public domain last month when Admiral Mike Mullen, then chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, branded the Haqqanis “a veritable arm” of the ISI and accused the agency of supporting the embassy raid and a truck bombing that wounded 77 US troops.
The allegations drew shocked denials from Islamabad and threw a fresh roadblock into relations with Washington – which have yet to recover from Pakistan’s humiliation from the US raid that killed Osama bin Laden on its territory in May.
Washington’s attempts to foster greater regional co-operation against the Taliban had already begun to unravel following the September 20 murder of Burhanuddin Rabbani, the former Afghan president, who had been leading the government’s attempts to achieve a reconciliation with insurgents. Afghan officials accused the ISI of playing a role in the killing, plunging relations with Pakistan into the deep freeze.
Islamabad was left looking even more isolated when Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan’s president, signed a strategic partnership agreement with New Delhi – a move likely to antagonise Pakistan’s India-obsessed generals.
As if emotions were not running high enough, Mr Karzai then declared that Afghanistan would back Pakistan if it ever went to war with the US. Afghan officials say his words – to a Pakistani interviewer – aimed to repair relations with Islamabad, but they left US diplomats once again puzzling over their ally’s state of mind.
As Saturday’s bombing might suggest, the task of tackling the Haqqanis is becoming more urgent, but no less frustrating. Pakistan’s eagerness to accept billions of dollars of military aid while refusing to curb the group has infuriated some in Washington. Pakistan’s argument that it is too thinly stretched fighting other militants has won scant sympathy. CIA drones circling above North Waziristan have not had much luck in killing Haqqani leaders, fuelling suspicions that the ISI might have been tipping the fugitives off. The temptation for the US to hit Haqqani compounds with commando raids could become hard to resist.
“We have the right to target not only forces and artillery attacking our forces in Afghanistan from across the border in Pakistan, but to target the people controlling those forces as well,” warned Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate armed services committee.
US anger is tempered by an awareness that any attack on Pakistani soil could have disastrous consequences in the fragile nuclear-armed state. At minimum it would trigger an anti-US backlash and might even precipitate a mutiny in the half-million-man army against generals perceived as being too cosy with the Pentagon.
While the two supposed allies have been trading barbs, the Haqqanis have been expanding. The group has built on the mystique earned by Jalaluddin for his heroics in fighting the Red Army during the 1979-89 Soviet invasion, and the dread inspired by his sons, to enlarge its sphere of influence on both sides of the border.
In the weeks after the Taliban’s ouster in 2001, some US officials believed the Haqqanis – who had won lavish CIA funding to fight the Russians – might potentially have played a role in a new political order. But as Pashtuns in the south-east became more alienated from Mr Karzai’s government, the group fought back. “People see Jalaluddin as a man who retained his integrity and his honesty,” says Rustam Shah Mohmand, Pakistan’s former commissioner for Afghan refugees, who met Jalaluddin often in the 1980s. “The Haqqanis still enjoy enormous respect.”
The organisation has grown by collaborating with a range of extremist groups including al-Qaeda. Jalaluddin was close to bin Laden, who declared war on the US at a camp in Haqqani territory in Afghanistan in 1998. Slick DVDs of Haqqani attacks have generated a buzz in jihadist internet chat rooms. “These guys are seen as the real deal,” says Jeff Dressler of the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War. “The Haqqani propaganda machine is just unbelievable.”
Afghan officials say Pakistan could shut down the Haqqanis in a heartbeat, but the reality is more subtle. ISI relations with Afghan factions have often been tense. Buoyed by profits from kidnapping, extortion and trafficking semi-precious stones, as well as donations from Gulf benefactors, the Haqqanis may enjoy significant autonomy.
“Although the Pakistanis may try to keep in touch with Haqqani leaders, they actually probably don’t have very much control,” says Richard Barrett, head of a UN team that monitors the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
US raids in Afghanistan hurt. The Haqqanis’ close-knit leadership structure – comprising perhaps 60 men from a sub-clan of the Zadran tribe – makes it hard to replace commanders such as Mr Khan. But with the White House intent on withdrawing surge forces by September, troops are limited. Ultimately, the only way to neutralise the extended family may be through a peace process – as distant a prospect as that might seem. Mrs Clinton said during her Islamabad trip that the US had met Haqqani representatives this summer. As she observed to Congress last Thursday: “The answer was an attack on our embassy.”
Hope may lie in the dynasty’s reputation for pragmatism. Perhaps the Haqqanis might settle for control of their existing territory under a broader power-sharing deal between the Afghan government and the Taliban. Yet as Mr Semple has noted, peace would remove the jihadists’ reason to exist. The guerrillas of North Waziristan have a vested interest in perpetual war.
Afghanistan: easy to explain, difficult to justify
ABC Online By Scott MacInnes 31 October 2011
With the tragic death of three more Australian soldiers in Afghanistan, concerned citizens will be asking themselves whether the sacrifice of human lives (on all sides) can still be justified, despite predictable government reassurances, public indifference and the lack of proper media scrutiny.
Of the two "official" reasons put forward to justify our continuing military involvement, the first is disingenuous because it cannot operate as an independent justification. And the second now lacks all credibility.
The US alliance
Our total subservience to the US alliance remains the simplest and most credible explanation for our involvement. We are there solely because of pressure from our US allies and our belief in the need to support them in the hope that this will serve our future security and/or trade interests. All the other reasons are merely justifications after the fact.
This is a legally and morally indefensible position for any government to hold.
The US alliance may well be in our long-term security and economic interests but it cannot, of itself, justify our continuing involvement. In the absence of an imminent threat of attack, one cannot legally or morally justify killing or sacrificing other human beings. And certainly not just to please one's friends or to otherwise advance our interests.
It is worth asking whether there are any circumstances involving the sacrifice of human lives in which we would not continue to support our allies? If the answer is YES, then it is likely to be because there comes a point where we do accept limits on our freedom to sacrifice others. The implication is that we simply have not reached that threshold yet.
Many commentators believe this point will only be reached when the number of Australian casualties becomes too much for public sentiment to stomach. This is why we are never told the full physical, emotional and psychological impacts of the war on our own soldiers and their families. The equally devastating impacts on the many more Afghan combatants and others similarly affected in Afghanistan hardly rate even a mention.
Until the real impacts of our involvement in terms of human suffering become our dominant moral concern, the realpolitik of our dominant ideology of "all the way with the USA" will continue to be the political imperative. However, it is clear that the Government cannot rely on the alliance itself as a legitimate justification, unless the threat to either country's national security is sufficient to invoke the doctrine of proportional self-defence, with no other reasonable option available. This has become increasingly difficult to maintain.
National security
The other official justification argues that we need to protect our national security from the threat of Al Qaeda and global terrorism. This was originally to be achieved by defeating the Taliban. Now the goal is to inflict sufficient damage to force them into an acceptable negotiated settlement, thereby ensuring enough political stability to justify a "dignified" exit.
Whatever the original rationale, it is now accepted that the threat from Al Qaeda will not be reduced by continuing the war in Afghanistan because there are very few members left there. Al Qaeda is clearly highly mobile and widely dispersed. It is not dependent on any one safe haven. Moreover, we are told the death of Osama bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders have seriously undermined its effectiveness. At most, our goal now is to minimise the possibility of Afghanistan again becoming a safe haven for terrorism in the future.
As for global terrorism, it is difficult to see how such a generalised ever-present "threat" could ever justify military intervention. Otherwise we could justify being constantly at war with an ever-widening number of countries suspected of having terrorists in their midst. Indeed the assertion that the threat is from "global" terrorism, and not just Al Qaeda, undermines the argument that eliminating its base in Afghanistan will significantly reduce such a threat.
The defeat of the Taliban is predicated on the belief that they are either international terrorists themselves or that they are committed to the ongoing protection of Al Qaeda. There is very little evidence to support either belief. Despite sharing a common hatred of the US and allied invasion forces, the Taliban's interests are local rather than global.
The US willingness to engage in negotiations with the Taliban makes it clear that their defeat is no longer regarded as a prerequisite for political stability or a reduction in the threat of terrorism. The Taliban are simply one of many nationalist groups struggling violently for political power in Afghanistan. The reason they have been the enemy is because the US prefers to support a corrupt Karzai regime that it can control to a brutal Taliban one which it cannot. This has nothing to do with our national security.
No-one believes our involvement in Afghanistan has reduced the threat of terrorism to Australians. It is now officially accepted that the greatest threats of terrorism in future will come from home-grown terrorist groups. We should be concentrating on dealing with that domestic threat through our law enforcement agencies rather than dealing with overseas terrorism through military intervention.
Other 'justifications'
Other "unofficial" reasons given to justify our continuing military involvement include: the desire to "support the Afghan people", to build democratic institutions, to train Afghan personnel, to educate the children and improve the situation for women etc.
However noble and worthwhile, such reasons are not usually considered legally or morally sufficient justifications for military intervention. Our moral duty to help vulnerable people in other countries is constrained by international law that recognises national sovereignty and precludes military intervention for such purposes.
Until we have developed our international law to provide for law enforcement and 'global government' which transcends national boundaries, these desirable goals can only be legitimately pursued through non-violent means as part of our foreign aid development goals.
Some argue that we have a moral obligation to stay in order to avoid a bloodbath if we leave prematurely. This "justification" accepts that we are partly responsible for creating the mess we are now in and therefore have a moral obligation to mitigate the damage of our disastrous intervention.
It is interesting that the very people who support staying because of compassion for human suffering oppose any withdrawal on the same grounds.
The evidence of comparative impacts on the lives of all concerned is clearly important here and may legitimately lead reasonable people to different conclusions.
But this is really more to do with designing a proper exit strategy than justifying ongoing military involvement.
The Government also points to UN and NATO resolutions authorising "peacekeeping" operations in Afghanistan as further justifications for our involvement. But it is clear that their validity depends ultimately on whether these "operations" are themselves morally justifiable.
Legitimate concerns
People who demand that our Government justify its decisions to expose our troops to death and injury in Afghanistan should not be attacked for being disloyal. They are invariably motivated by concern for their relatives and fellow countrymen who are being asked to risk their lives on our behalf. Of course our troops should be properly resourced and given every support for as long as they are there. But they should not be required to continue to risk their lives for reasons that no longer stack up.
Likewise, the concern expressed for the many Afghan people affected by our decisions is also legitimate. Australian lives and Afghan lives should be accorded equal dignity and attract the same moral concern. The legal and moral principles we profess to live by have universal application.
The terrible truth is that what we have to be able to justify is the sacrifice and killing of other human beings. This is not generally permitted under our laws or values. There have to be very good reasons to justify what would otherwise be regarded as state-sponsored murder. The question is: are our reasons (still) good enough?
With regard to the current situation, we need once again to focus our attention on whether there is credible evidence (as distinct from generalised political assertions) of any threat of imminent attack on us or our allies sufficient to morally and legally justify the human sacrifice. And whether ongoing military intervention remains our only option.
And given a world increasingly vulnerable to threats of terrorism, we need also to ask ourselves whether we can really justify making others (whether our soldiers or Afghan civilians) pay the price in terms of their human sacrifice and suffering for what is an ultimately futile military attempt to alleviate our feelings of anxiety and insecurity.
Few of us would be willing for our most cherished loved ones to be sacrificed on the basis of any of the justifications trotted out by the proponents of our continuing involvement. We should not expect others to die on our behalf, or allow our leaders to demand such sacrifice in our name.
It is time to bring our troops home.
Scott MacInnes has a background in teaching, law and conflict resolution. He is now retired and lives in Tasmania.
www.afghanistannewscenter.com
VOA News October 31, 2011
The United Nations' refugee agency says three of its employees are among the five people killed in a suicide bombing in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar.
United Nations chief Ban Ki-moon said those killed included three UNHCR security guards and two security contractors. Two guards were also injured in the attack early Monday.
Authorities say one attacker detonated a vehicle full of explosives near buildings used by the UNHCR and the U.S.-based International Relief and Development organization.
After the blast, three gunmen rushed into the area and seized control of an animal clinic. Afghan officials say security forces exchanged gunfire with the men for more than six hours before the attackers were killed.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack. A Taliban spokesman said a U.N. agency was the insurgent group's target.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban also said the attack “underscores the risks” that U.N. and international aid workers face in Afghanistan. He said the U.N. mission there is “purely humanitarian” and that its sole aim is to ” improve the daily lives of the country's people.”
Monday's attack comes two days after a suicide car bombing in the Afghan capital killed 17 people, including five NATO service members, eight civilian contractors, and four Afghans.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for Saturday's attack in Kabul. But a Western diplomat told news agencies that it was “very possible” that the attack on a NATO convoy was the work of the Haqqani network.
The al-Qaida-linked militant network has carried out a number of attacks on U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan. The Haqqani network is believed to be based in Pakistan's North Waziristan tribal region.
Afghanistan to Ink Strategic Agreement with France
TOLOnews.com Sunday, 30 October 2011
Afghanistan is to sign a strategic agreement with France ahead of the Istanbul conference, Afghan Ministry of Foreign Affairs says.
According to the MoFA, it has received a copy of the agreement from the French Foreign Ministry.
Based on the agreement, Paris is committed to continue supporting Afghanistan in different fields even after 2014.
While the Istanbul conference on Afghanistan is to be held in a few days, the Afghan Ministry of Foreign Affairs urges the countries in the region to honestly support Afghanistan in the fight against terrorism as well as in the peace efforts and the second phase of security transition.
The MoFA says it will submit a draft to the Istanbul conference to be officially ratified.
"We hope the Istanbul conference will be fruitful and reach practical decisions and improve mutual trust between Afghanistan and the region," MoFA spokesman, Janan Musazai, said.
According to the MoFA, the agreement between Afghanistan and France will be implemented for a period of five years after which the two countries will extend it.
Istanbul conference is scheduled to be held on November 3nd with participation of all the countries in the region.
Turkey condemns attacks in Afghanistan
ANKARA, Oct. 31 (Xinhua) -- Turkey condemned the recent attacks staged in Afghanistan, a Turkish statement said late Sunday.
"Turkey strongly condemns the terrorist attack against a convoy of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Kabul and two other separate incidents against ISAF personnel and the Afghanistan National Directorate of Security (NDS) in the southern provinces of Afghanistan on Oct. 29," said the statement issued by Turkish Foreign Ministry.
"Several Coalition and Afghan soldiers, as well as innocent civilians were killed and injured as result of these heinous attacks, according to initial reports," the statement noted.
It added, "we convey our condolences to the bereaved families of the victims of these tragic attacks and wish speedy recovery to the wounded. Turkey, as always, will continue to do her utmost to provide assistance for the assurance of peace, prosperity and security of the brotherly Afghan people."
Afghan president leaves for Istanbul conference on Afghanistan
KABUL, Oct. 31 (Xinhua) -- Afghan President Hamid Karzai, heading a high-ranking delegation, left for Turkey on Monday, a statement released by the Presidential Palace here said.
The president left for Istanbul Monday morning to attend a regional conference on Afghanistan," the statement said.
President Karzai will deliver a speech at the international conference on Afghanistan in Istanbul, to be held on Wednesday, with the aim of building a stable and independent Afghanistan and discussing regional economic cooperation.
President Karzai will meet with his Pakistani counterpart Asif Ali Zardari at a trilateral summit along with their Turkish host President Abdullah Gul on Tuesday to discuss security, development, and regional cooperation, according to the statement.
It is the sixth trilateral meeting between three countries and the agenda will include peace, stability and reconciliation in Afghanistan and economic cooperation for Afghanistan, it said.
On the sidelines of Istanbul conference on Afghanistan, Karzai will also hold meetings with Turkish President Abdullah Gul and U. S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, according to the statement.
The foreign ministers of 14 countries are expected to take part in the conference. The countries include Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, China, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Russia.
High-level representatives from the United States, the United Nations, Japan and many Western countries are expected as observers to take part in the conference.
Pakistan denies spying on German forces in Afghanistan
Reuters 31 Oct, 2011
ISLAMABAD - Pakistani officials on Monday rejected a German newspaper report that the country's secret service spied on German security forces in Afghanistan.
Without citing its sources, mass-selling weekly Bild am Sonntag reported on Sunday that Germany's BND foreign intelligence agency warned its interior ministry that Pakistan had spied on 180 German police officers deployed in Afghanistan to train locals.
A Pakistani foreign ministry official, who asked not to be identified, described the report as "ridiculous" and "useless". Pakistan military spokesman Major-General Athar Abbas said the report was not worth commenting on.
Bild am Sonntag said private telephone calls, messages to the German interior ministry, military mission orders and lists of police officer names had been intercepted, raising fears sensitive information could end up in the hands of the Taliban.
The United States has long suspected Pakistan, or elements within the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), of supporting militant groups in order to increase its influence in Afghanistan, particularly after NATO troops leave in 2014.
Islamabad has come under particularly intense pressure to fight militancy since US special forces killed Osama bin Laden in May in a Pakistani town, where he had apparently been living for years.
Admiral Mike Mullen said before retiring as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff last month that a militant group that had attacked US targets in Afghanistan was a "veritable arm" of Pakistani intelligence.
The German interior ministry told Reuters the BND suspected a German email had been intercepted but could not give confirmation. The ministry added it was not aware of any comprehensive interception of German police data.
The BND declined to comment on the report. Pakistan says it has sacrificed more than any other country that joined the US war on terror after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.
U.S. Seeks Aid From Pakistan in Peace Effort
New York Times By ERIC SCHMITT and DAVID E. SANGER October 30, 2011
WASHINGTON - Just a month after accusing Pakistan’s spy agency of secretly supporting the Haqqani terrorist network, which has mounted attacks on Americans, the Obama administration is now relying on the same intelligence service to help organize and kick-start reconciliation talks aimed at ending the war in Afghanistan.
The revamped approach, which Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called “Fight, Talk, Build” during a high-level United States delegation’s visit to Kabul and Islamabad this month, combines continued American air and ground strikes against the Haqqani network and the Taliban with an insistence that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency get them to the negotiating table.
But some elements of the ISI see little advantage in forcing those negotiations, because they see the insurgents as perhaps their best bet for maintaining influence in Afghanistan as the United States reduces its presence there.
The strategy is emerging amid an increase in the pace of attacks against Americans in Kabul, including a suicide attack on Saturday that killed as many as 10 Americans and in which the Haqqanis are suspected . It is the latest effort at brokering a deal with militants before the last of 33,000 American “surge” troops prepare to pull out of Afghanistan by September, and comes as early hopes in the White House about having the outlines of a deal in time for a multinational conference Dec. 5 in Bonn, Germany, have been all but abandoned.
But even inside the Obama administration, the new initiative has been met with deep skepticism, in part because the Pakistani government has developed its own strategy, one at odds with Mrs. Clinton’s on several key points. One senior American official summarized the Pakistani position as “Cease-fire, Talk, Wait for the Americans to Leave.”
In short, the United States is in the position of having to rely heavily on the ISI to help broker a deal with the same group of militants that leaders in Washington say the spy agency is financing and supporting.
“The Pakistanis see the contradictions in the American approach,” said Shamila N. Chaudhary, a former top Obama White House aide on Pakistan and Afghanistan. “The big question for the administration is, What can the Pakistanis actually deliver? Pakistan is holding its cards very closely.”
On Sunday, United States intelligence officials deepened an investigation into what role, if any, the Haqqani network played in the bombing in Kabul on Saturday.
Several current and former American officials say the United States has tried this bomb-them-to-the-bargaining-table approach before. In the 1990s, it helped drive Serbian leaders to peace talks in Dayton, Ohio, but it has resulted in little so far with the Afghan Taliban.
“I don’t think anyone expects Secretary Clinton’s visit to produce reconciliation,” said Bruce O. Riedel, a former C.I.A. officer and the author of “Deadly Embrace: Pakistan, America, and the Future of the Global Jihad.” Mr. Riedel, who advocates a policy of containment in Pakistan, added, “The deterioration of U.S.-Pakistan relations is likely to continue.”
Senior Pakistani officials say they are confused by a lack of clarity in the administration’s long-term goals in Afghanistan, and are working with American officials to hammer out specific plans after Mrs. Clinton’s visit. As an incentive, the United States has offered Pakistan a prominent role in reconciliation talks. But American officials have warned that they will take unilateral action if negotiations fail.
Several administration officials said they considered Mrs. Clinton’s trip to Kabul and Islamabad, from Oct. 19 to 21, a success largely because it had happened at all.
In the months after the killing of Osama bin Laden on Pakistani soil, talks were frozen, American intelligence officers were denied visas, and the administration accused the ISI of turning a blind eye to attacks on Americans launched from the country’s tribal areas.
When Adm. Mike Mullen, just days before his retirement last month as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, declared that the Haqqani network was “a veritable arm” of the Pakistani spy service, President Obama and his aides were outraged, administration officials said — not because they thought Admiral Mullen was wrong, but because his remarks further inflamed the Pakistanis.
Mrs. Clinton’s trip was intended to both re-establish ties and reiterate a strong message. She warned Pakistan that the United States would act on its own if necessary to attack extremist groups that use the country as a haven while they kill Americans.
To emphasize that point, a flurry of C.I.A. drone strikes launched on Oct. 13-14 from Afghanistan killed the third-ranking leader of the Haqqani network, near Miram Shah in North Waziristan, part of Pakistan’s tribal area.
Two other missile volleys killed two senior operatives of Al Qaeda involved in overseas planning, American officials said. On Thursday, American missile strikes killed five members of a faction of the Pakistani Taliban.
But Mrs. Clinton, joined by David H. Petraeus, the new director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, did not use her meeting to insist, as she and other officials had in the past, that the Pakistan military mount an offensive to root out the Haqqanis and other militants that operate from sanctuaries in North Waziristan.
Instead, the administration says, it is pressing the Pakistanis to provide intelligence on the Haqqanis, arrest some of the group’s operatives and reduce ties to the terrorist group — all steps well short of military action.
In its place, an emerging American strategy aims to attack the Haqqanis on both sides of the border. An eight-day NATO offensive this month involving 11,000 allied troops and 25,000 Afghan security forces in seven provinces in eastern Afghanistan killed or captured more than 200 Haqqani fighters and commanders, allied officials said; the pressure on the Pakistani side is being generated almost entirely by the drone strikes.
“That’s going to really deter their ability to operate probably for some time, maybe into the winter period,” Lt. Gen. Curtis M. Scaparrotti, the second-ranking allied commander in Afghanistan, said Thursday.
Mrs. Clinton also used her meeting, according to officials familiar with it, to reassure the Pakistanis that they would play a central role in any reconciliation talks. “We’re at the point where Pakistanis have told us they’re going to squeeze the Haqqani network,” a senior administration official said. “They’re satisfied they’ve got a way forward on reconciliation. They’ve got a role to play.”
That means rekindling talks with the Haqqanis that started in late August. That first exploratory meeting was held secretly in the United Arab Emirates between a midlevel American diplomat and Ibrahim Haqqani, a brother of the tribal network’s patriarch. Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, the head of the ISI, brokered the meeting. American and Pakistan officials say little resulted from the session, which came just two weeks before a 20-hour attack on the United States Embassy in Kabul.
On Capitol Hill last week, some lawmakers expressed skepticism about the administration’s approach to the Haqqani network.
“So which is it, Madam Secretary? Crack down or negotiate with the Haqqani network, or a little bit of both?” asked Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the Florida Republican who heads the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
“It’s both,” Mrs. Clinton said. “We want to fight, talk and build all at the same time. Part of the reason for that is to test whether these organizations have any willingness to negotiate in good faith.”
U.S. had warning of abuse at Afghan prison
Washington Post By Joshua Partlow 30/10/2011
KABUL, Afghanistan - Across the street from U.S. military headquarters in Kabul, shrouded from view by concrete walls, the Afghan intelligence agency runs a detention facility for up to 40 terrorism suspects that is known as Department 124. So much torture took place inside, one detainee told the United Nations, that it has earned a different name: "people call it hell."
But long before the world body publicly revealed "systematic torture" in Afghan intelligence agency detention centers, top officials from the State Department, CIA and U.S. military received multiple warnings about abuses at Department 124 and other Afghan facilities, according to Afghan and Western officials with knowledge of the situation.
Despite the warnings, the United States continued to transfer detainees to Afghan intelligence service custody, the officials said. Even as other countries stopped handing over detainees to problematic facilities, the American government did not.
U.S. Special Operations troops delivered detainees to Department 124 and CIA officials regularly visited the facility, which was rebuilt last year with American money to interrogate high-level Taliban and al-Qaida suspects, according to Afghan and Western officials familiar with the site. Afghan intelligence officials said Americans never participated in the torture but should have known about it.
When the United Nations brought allegations of widespread detainee abuse on Aug. 30 to Gen. John Allen, the top U.S. military commander here, he took swift action ahead of the public release of the findings. Coalition troops stopped transferring detainees to Department 124 and 15 other police and intelligence agency prisons. They also hastily began a program to monitor those facilities and conduct human rights classes for interrogators.
But the prospect that U.S. officials failed to act on prior warnings raises questions about their compliance with a law, known as the Leahy Amendment, that prohibits the United States from funding units of foreign security forces when there is credible evidence they have committed human rights abuses. The State Department is now investigating whether the law applies and what funding might be affected, according to U.S. officials.
American officials denied that they had ignored credible warnings of detainee abuse and said that whenever such an allegation was raised, they took action. Former top commander Gen. David Petraeus, for instance, ordered a halt to detainee transfers to Afghan intelligence and police custody in Kandahar in July.
"Any place that we've had a concern in the past, we've taken the appropriate steps, I'm confident of that, and we're taking the appropriate steps now," Lt. Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti, the second-ranking U.S. commander in Afghanistan, said in an interview. "I don't see it as a systemic problem, as some have said it might be."
White House spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said the United States has a "longstanding policy against transferring individuals to torture" and that "whenever allegations of human rights violations are raised with us, we move quickly to work with the host government to investigate and resolve them."
The "CIA adheres to those same rules," said another U.S. official. "The reality is that the system in place works."
RED CROSS SOUNDED WARNINGS
Even by the standards of Afghanistan's deeply troubled justice system, Department 124 stood out. With chilling detail, the United Nations recounted detainees' stories of interrogators hanging them by their hands for hours, beating them with metal pipes, shocking them with electricity and twisting their genitals until they passed out. Of the 28 detainees interviewed who had spent time at the facility, 26 told the U.N. they had been tortured, according to a report released this month.
Before the U.N. investigation began in October 2010, the International Committee of the Red Cross told Afghan and U.S. officials about their concerns over detainee abuse at Department 124 and elsewhere, according to people briefed on the confidential discussions.
The conversations intensified earlier this year, with the ICRC warning top-level officials from the U.S. Embassy, CIA and Joint Special Operations Command, among others. One person familiar with the conversations said the concerns involved the "prevalence and pervasiveness" of detainee abuse by the National Directorate of Security, or NDS, as Afghanistan's primary intelligence service is known. When the discussions failed to produce improved treatment and conditions, the ICRC issued confidential written findings to the Afghan government outlining the extent of the problems.
One former senior U.S. embassy official disputed these characterizations of the briefings. If there had been "serious substantive allegations of systemic institutional torture of detainees, the embassy would have acted on these," the official said.
Many of the officials interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of discussing confidential matters that carry potential legal ramifications.
The ICRC declined to comment on the content of its confidential meetings. "In Afghanistan, the ICRC shared observations and recommendations with the detaining authorities and with others who were mentoring and training them," said ICRC spokesman Simon Schorno. "It did so on numerous occasions during confidential, bilateral meetings."
Schorno said the "public silence of the ICRC on its visits should never be interpreted to mean that there are no prevailing concerns to be addressed by the authorities in charge."
Department 124 was long sealed off from the outside world - the ICRC, the United Nations and other organizations concerned with human rights were all barred by Afghan officials from monitoring prison conditions there.
But American officials frequently went inside, according to Afghan officials and others familiar with the site. U.S. Special Operations troops brought detainees there and CIA officials met with Department 124's leadership on a weekly basis, reviewed their interrogation reports and used the intelligence gleaned from interrogations to inform their operations, the officials said.
The detainees were entered into an American biometric database. They wore orange jump suits - as detainees do at the U.S.-run prison at Bagram Airfield, but not at other Afghan prisons - and were sometimes hooded, according to an Afghan intelligence official. Seventeen detainees said they had been transferred to the prison by international military forces; the United Nations found "compelling evidence" that those detainees were tortured once they arrived. The detainees told U.N. officials their interrogators were Afghans.
AFGHANS DEFEND METHODS
That such harsh tactics are used to get information and extract confessions is no secret among current and former Afghan intelligence officials. One of them said their CIA partners were "totally aware" of such treatment.
"They work with us every other day, if not every day," another Afghan intelligence official said of the CIA. Because of their close collaboration, and the prevalence of beatings, "the CIA guys should have known about it," he said.
During his extensive review of the Afghan detention system in 2009, Marine Maj. Gen. Douglas Stone said he found less reason to worry about detainee abuse than the prospect that Afghan prisons bred radical Islamists. He said his team had access to all aspects of Afghan detentions except for NDS facilities, but he recalled being told that the ICRC was conducting "really rigorous reviews."
"I was told repeatedly that there was really no abuse going on, that the ICRC had pretty much free rein," said Stone, who is now retired from the military.
In an interview, the NDS deputy director for operations, Ahmed Zia, described the U.N. report as an inaccurate attack on the agency and said insurgents are trained in Pakistan to lie to human rights groups.
Zia has been described by colleagues as sometimes ruthless in his pursuit of intelligence, and one detainee who had been in Department 124 told international monitors he had been beaten by Zia.
Zia denied mistreating detainees and called Department 124 "a rising star for our country."
"There's nothing to hide from anyone," he said.
Beginning last month, U.S. troops made their first of at least three inspections of Department 124. They have given eight-hour courses to interrogators on human rights and proper procedures for handling detainees.
One NATO military official present said that on each visit the facility was about half full - approximately 20 detainees. The NDS leadership was welcoming and allowed private interviews with the prisoners, he said. But in the class on human rights, he said, Afghan interrogators offered some "push-back." They suggested that being rough with detainees was part of their job, the NATO military official said.
The official said the Afghan interrogators defended their methods, asserting that the detainees are terrorists. "They say, 'This is how we do it all the time.' "
Afghan Success Comes At High Price For Commander
NPR By Tom Bowman October 30, 2011
A year ago, nearly 1,000 U.S. Marine officers and enlisted men of the 3rd Battalion, 5th Regiment deployed to restive Helmand province in southern Afghanistan. By the time their tour ended in April 2011, the Marines of the 3/5 — known as "Darkhorse" — suffered the highest casualty rate of any Marine unit during the past 10 years of war. This week, NPR tells the story of this unit's seven long months at war — both in Afghanistan and back home.
First of seven parts
With his brown checkered sport coat, blue shirt and tie, Jason Morris could easily be mistaken for a young professor. Only the close-cropped hair and stocky build might suggest a military life.
Lt. Col. Morris served as a Marine officer during the 2003 invasion of Iraq and witnessed heavy combat in the push toward Baghdad.
But it's his experience in Afghanistan during the past year that lingers: Morris commanded the Marines of the 3rd Battalion, 5th Regiment, which lost 25 troops during its seven-month-long deployment, the highest casualty rate of any Marine unit during the Afghan war.
These days, he is studying for a master's degree at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I. Standing on a sea wall there, Morris looks at sailboats slicing through the bay.
"Narragansett Bay probably has more water in it than probably all of Afghanistan," he says. "Seeing blue and seeing green. Anything but brown."
A Difficult Mission
Morris saw a lot of shades of brown during his seven months in southern Afghanistan's Helmand province: the high beige walls of village compounds, the thick chocolate mud that passed for roads, the dung-colored fields in winter.
It was just over a year ago that Morris took nearly 1,000 Marines to a place in Helmand called Sangin. It was a haven for Taliban fighters and drug traffickers, a place where the British lost more than 100 troops in four years.
But the British failed to push out and pursue the enemy, and the Taliban continued to control much of the area. It was Morris' job to take it back.
At the time, Lt. Gen. Rich Mills was the senior Marine commander in Helmand. He says what Morris' unit went through was as brutal as anything in the history of the Marines.
"It stands alone in the Afghanistan situation as probably being one of the tougher missions ever handed to an infantry battalion," Mills says.
"It's very rare. I certainly would compare it to some of the amphibious assaults during World War II, places like Guadalcanal," he adds.
'What Were We Doing Wrong?'
By the time Morris returned home in April, his Marines suffered historic losses: 25 dead and nearly 200 more wounded, about three-dozen of whom had lost at least one limb.
For Morris, those casualties seemed to come out of nowhere. Most of his men were killed or wounded not by enemy fire, but by chance. They would go out on patrol and step on homemade bombs that seemed to be everywhere.
And even in a war in which those homemade bombs — known as improvised explosive devices, or IEDs — account for nearly three-quarters of the American deaths, the sheer number and speed of the casualties was stunning.
It started almost immediately after the unit arrived in Sangin on Sept. 27, 2010: Hostile fire killed Lance Cpl. John Sparks on Oct. 8, less than two weeks later.
More deaths followed in quick succession: The next casualties occurred back to back, on Oct. 14 and 15.
"That was what was tough. ... In two days we had lost seven Marines," Morris recalls.
Morris questioned his company commanders. Were they doing everything by the book? Were they following their training?
Back home, the families were frantic, wondering what was happening. Morris' wife, Jane Conwell, started getting a hundred emails each day. One wife was convinced she heard the doorbell ring in the middle of the night, that Marine officers were there to announce her husband's death.
"The families, especially the spouses, really almost lost their minds," Morris says.
In this age of Facebook and Twitter, what happened on the battlefield instantly affected the homefront. And what happened at home instantly reached the troops.
From Afghanistan, Morris had to reassure families back in California — he even sent a message to a town hall meeting at Camp Pendleton, where the battalion was based.
His more immediate challenge, though, was to carry out his mission — and stop the casualties.
"At the time I was wondering, what were we doing wrong?" he says.
Higher-ups were wondering the same thing. U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates asked about the growing number of dead and wounded and suggested pulling Darkhorse out for a while. The Marine leadership said no.
"I said it would be a mistake," recalls Mills, the senior Marine officer in Helmand. "That the battalion was doing fine. Morale was high. Combat effectiveness was great. That the Marines up there wanted to finish the job. The worst thing we could have done was withdraw that battalion."
A Positive Impact As Casualties Subside
But for all the debate among the generals, it fell to Morris to figure out how to finish the job.
"I was on my own for this. I mean having to figure this out? It's up to the battalion commander," he says.
Morris pressed his Marines to slow down, to carefully search for roadside bombs when on patrol. He buried mock roadside bombs at his base so his troops could practice finding them.
Eventually, Morris got more troops and equipment. That made a big difference. The casualties started to subside. By the end of their deployment, Darkhorse spent more time rebuilding villages than shooting Taliban.
But it had come at a terrible price. When he returned home in April, Morris attended a dozen memorial services, all around the country. He tried to comfort those left behind.
"There were some that were very angry, just yelling, 'Why the hell did I lose my son for this?'" Morris recalls.
"What do you say? You just try to make him understand his son died doing what he wanted to be doing. And that he had an impact — a positive impact on the people of Afghanistan, helped rebuild their country," he says.
Following A Family Tradition
Morris believes what he tells the families. Other Marines who served with Darkhorse say the same thing — that they made a difference. That's one reason Morris signed up in the first place.
After graduating from the Naval Academy in 1992, Morris wanted to lead men in combat. He wanted the mental and physical challenge. And he was following a path his father had taken: John Morris was also a Marine.
"He's very proud of me, but he said, 'You've got to want to do this, because it's a tough life,'" he says.
John Morris was also a rifle company commander — in Vietnam. His unit took 70 percent casualties, far more than Darkhorse's 20 percent.
But it was different back then. The elder Morris never got to know his Marines. Today, Marines train together, go to war together and come home together — as a unit. During Vietnam, individual replacements came, got wounded and were airlifted out.
"[My father] made a comment, 'You know, you've spent 18 months with these guys. You've met most of them. The lieutenants, you've drank beers with, you've met their spouses, you know their parents,'" he says.
An Eternal Burden
Morris still keeps in touch with the members of Darkhorse Battalion. He has visited the seriously wounded at the naval hospitals at Balboa in San Diego, Calif., and in Bethesda, Md., outside Washington, D.C.
Right now, he is on a plum assignment, studying at the Naval War College. He says it's surreal — taking classes, living by the water, trying to slow down after combat command.
"I found it difficult to get out of that battle rhythm of being constantly on guard, working 18 or 19 hours a day," Morris says.
It's not easy to shake free of Afghanistan — and the knowledge that men he led didn't make it home: "It's a burden that you bear forever."
Afghan insurgency: A lethal legion
Financial Times By Matthew Green October 30, 2011
One moonless night in September, Nato troops swooped on a mosque in Afghanistan’s Paktia province, a hotbed of insurgency that hugs the frontier with Pakistan. Soldiers spotted a man bolting from the building, accompanied by two others.
The trio made a run for a nearby treeline but soon recognised they were outgunned, according to an official of the western coalition that has spent a decade trying to stabilise the country. Haji Mali Khan, a commander of the Haqqani insurgent network and a man revered among his battle-hardened fighters, was handcuffed before he could fire a shot.
Capturing Mr Khan, along with his deputy and bodyguard, was a big victory for the US military in its campaign against the Haqqanis, a once obscure ethnic Pashtun clan that has emerged as one of the biggest threats to western hopes of a stable handover to Afghan control in 2014.
But the group has shown nothing if not resilience since it was founded 35 years ago by Jalaluddin Haqqani, a swashbuckling warrior-patriarch whose skill at bushwhacking Soviet invaders in the 1980s turned him for a time into one of Washington’s best Afghan friends. His organisation is now among America’s most formidable adversaries – blamed for a series of suicide attacks in the capital, Kabul, that have shaken Afghans’ faith in their security forces and kindled fears in Europe and the US that the war cannot be won.
In the latest bombing, a militant rammed an explosives-laden vehicle into an armoured bus on Saturday, killing 17 people, including four Afghans, nine Americans and two UK civilian contractors, in the worst assault on international forces in the city. The Taliban claimed responsibility but suspicion also fell on the Haqqanis, which western officials have blamed for many past attacks.
“The Haqqanis have succeeded in conveying the impression that the insurgency is very strong. People do not feel safe,” said Mohammad Isaqzadeh, a political science professor at the American University of Afghanistan in Kabul. “Their attacks have reinforced a fear that the very survival of the political system may somehow be in question.”
In recent weeks, a new confluence of factors has cast the network in an even more dangerous light. The fallout from last month’s assassination of a former Afghan president and an audacious Haqqani raid on the US embassy in Kabul reverberated across the region and sparked a furore in Washington over suspicions that Pakistan is supporting the group.
Any evidence that the Haqqanis were behind Saturday’s bombing could spark a new flare-up in tensions at a moment when the US wants Pakistan’s help to talk to the insurgents. During a visit to Islamabad this month, Hillary Clinton, secretary of state, compared Pakistan’s relationship to the Haqqanis to keeping “snakes in your backyard”. “We think that Pakistan, for a variety of reasons has the capacity to encourage, to push, to squeeze ... terrorists, including the Haqqanis and the Afghan Taliban, to be willing to engage on the peace process,” she said.
The seizure of Mr Khan was a notable success for Nato after a trying summer. While last year’s “surge” of an extra 30,000 US troops succeeded in pushing Taliban fighters from southern strongholds in Helmand and Kandahar, the Haqqanis encroached on provinces around Kabul. The movement has been blamed for attacks including an assault on the Intercontinental Hotel in June and the raid on the US embassy in which militants scaled a half-built high-rise block to fire rockets during a 20-hour siege; two dozen police, civilians and insurgents were killed.
Each attack boosts the Haqqanis’ stature further. Although the outfit has pledged allegiance to the mainstream Taliban movement led by Mullah Mohammed Omar, it is increasingly showing signs of independence.
Unlike the Taliban, which emerged in Kandahar in the mid-1990s, the Haqqanis have spent three decades consolidating their grip in the mountainous south-east. Jalaluddin is now too frail to lead and some believe his sons Sirajuddin and Badruddin (Mr Khan’s nephews) may want to use their mini-emirate as a launch pad for a future national role. “The Haqqanis are boosting their political influence by taking centre stage in the war,” wrote Michael Semple, an expert on Afghan militancy, in Foreign Affairs magazine last month. “In terms of impact on the public consciousness, the Haqqanis simply overshadow anything their counterparts in Kandahar have been able to pull off.”
The Haqqanis’ greatest asset is their Pakistani haven. The group has used the “tribal agency” of North Waziri-stan to build training camps with the acquiescence – and perhaps active support – of Pakistan’s army, which has rejected US pressure to launch an offensive in the area. “It’s too late for the Pakistanis to find reliable new friends in Afghanistan – they’re relying on the Haqqanis and the Taliban to protect their interests,” says Saifullah Mahsud, head of the Fata Research Centre in Islamabad, which monitors Pakistan’s federally administered tribal areas.
The Haqqanis personify US suspicions of Pakistani duplicity. Washington has long suspected elements within Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency of backing the group as part of a decades-old strategy of using Taliban factions as proxies in a cold war with India. The belief exploded into the public domain last month when Admiral Mike Mullen, then chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, branded the Haqqanis “a veritable arm” of the ISI and accused the agency of supporting the embassy raid and a truck bombing that wounded 77 US troops.
The allegations drew shocked denials from Islamabad and threw a fresh roadblock into relations with Washington – which have yet to recover from Pakistan’s humiliation from the US raid that killed Osama bin Laden on its territory in May.
Washington’s attempts to foster greater regional co-operation against the Taliban had already begun to unravel following the September 20 murder of Burhanuddin Rabbani, the former Afghan president, who had been leading the government’s attempts to achieve a reconciliation with insurgents. Afghan officials accused the ISI of playing a role in the killing, plunging relations with Pakistan into the deep freeze.
Islamabad was left looking even more isolated when Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan’s president, signed a strategic partnership agreement with New Delhi – a move likely to antagonise Pakistan’s India-obsessed generals.
As if emotions were not running high enough, Mr Karzai then declared that Afghanistan would back Pakistan if it ever went to war with the US. Afghan officials say his words – to a Pakistani interviewer – aimed to repair relations with Islamabad, but they left US diplomats once again puzzling over their ally’s state of mind.
As Saturday’s bombing might suggest, the task of tackling the Haqqanis is becoming more urgent, but no less frustrating. Pakistan’s eagerness to accept billions of dollars of military aid while refusing to curb the group has infuriated some in Washington. Pakistan’s argument that it is too thinly stretched fighting other militants has won scant sympathy. CIA drones circling above North Waziristan have not had much luck in killing Haqqani leaders, fuelling suspicions that the ISI might have been tipping the fugitives off. The temptation for the US to hit Haqqani compounds with commando raids could become hard to resist.
“We have the right to target not only forces and artillery attacking our forces in Afghanistan from across the border in Pakistan, but to target the people controlling those forces as well,” warned Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate armed services committee.
US anger is tempered by an awareness that any attack on Pakistani soil could have disastrous consequences in the fragile nuclear-armed state. At minimum it would trigger an anti-US backlash and might even precipitate a mutiny in the half-million-man army against generals perceived as being too cosy with the Pentagon.
While the two supposed allies have been trading barbs, the Haqqanis have been expanding. The group has built on the mystique earned by Jalaluddin for his heroics in fighting the Red Army during the 1979-89 Soviet invasion, and the dread inspired by his sons, to enlarge its sphere of influence on both sides of the border.
In the weeks after the Taliban’s ouster in 2001, some US officials believed the Haqqanis – who had won lavish CIA funding to fight the Russians – might potentially have played a role in a new political order. But as Pashtuns in the south-east became more alienated from Mr Karzai’s government, the group fought back. “People see Jalaluddin as a man who retained his integrity and his honesty,” says Rustam Shah Mohmand, Pakistan’s former commissioner for Afghan refugees, who met Jalaluddin often in the 1980s. “The Haqqanis still enjoy enormous respect.”
The organisation has grown by collaborating with a range of extremist groups including al-Qaeda. Jalaluddin was close to bin Laden, who declared war on the US at a camp in Haqqani territory in Afghanistan in 1998. Slick DVDs of Haqqani attacks have generated a buzz in jihadist internet chat rooms. “These guys are seen as the real deal,” says Jeff Dressler of the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War. “The Haqqani propaganda machine is just unbelievable.”
Afghan officials say Pakistan could shut down the Haqqanis in a heartbeat, but the reality is more subtle. ISI relations with Afghan factions have often been tense. Buoyed by profits from kidnapping, extortion and trafficking semi-precious stones, as well as donations from Gulf benefactors, the Haqqanis may enjoy significant autonomy.
“Although the Pakistanis may try to keep in touch with Haqqani leaders, they actually probably don’t have very much control,” says Richard Barrett, head of a UN team that monitors the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
US raids in Afghanistan hurt. The Haqqanis’ close-knit leadership structure – comprising perhaps 60 men from a sub-clan of the Zadran tribe – makes it hard to replace commanders such as Mr Khan. But with the White House intent on withdrawing surge forces by September, troops are limited. Ultimately, the only way to neutralise the extended family may be through a peace process – as distant a prospect as that might seem. Mrs Clinton said during her Islamabad trip that the US had met Haqqani representatives this summer. As she observed to Congress last Thursday: “The answer was an attack on our embassy.”
Hope may lie in the dynasty’s reputation for pragmatism. Perhaps the Haqqanis might settle for control of their existing territory under a broader power-sharing deal between the Afghan government and the Taliban. Yet as Mr Semple has noted, peace would remove the jihadists’ reason to exist. The guerrillas of North Waziristan have a vested interest in perpetual war.
Afghanistan: easy to explain, difficult to justify
ABC Online By Scott MacInnes 31 October 2011
With the tragic death of three more Australian soldiers in Afghanistan, concerned citizens will be asking themselves whether the sacrifice of human lives (on all sides) can still be justified, despite predictable government reassurances, public indifference and the lack of proper media scrutiny.
Of the two "official" reasons put forward to justify our continuing military involvement, the first is disingenuous because it cannot operate as an independent justification. And the second now lacks all credibility.
The US alliance
Our total subservience to the US alliance remains the simplest and most credible explanation for our involvement. We are there solely because of pressure from our US allies and our belief in the need to support them in the hope that this will serve our future security and/or trade interests. All the other reasons are merely justifications after the fact.
This is a legally and morally indefensible position for any government to hold.
The US alliance may well be in our long-term security and economic interests but it cannot, of itself, justify our continuing involvement. In the absence of an imminent threat of attack, one cannot legally or morally justify killing or sacrificing other human beings. And certainly not just to please one's friends or to otherwise advance our interests.
It is worth asking whether there are any circumstances involving the sacrifice of human lives in which we would not continue to support our allies? If the answer is YES, then it is likely to be because there comes a point where we do accept limits on our freedom to sacrifice others. The implication is that we simply have not reached that threshold yet.
Many commentators believe this point will only be reached when the number of Australian casualties becomes too much for public sentiment to stomach. This is why we are never told the full physical, emotional and psychological impacts of the war on our own soldiers and their families. The equally devastating impacts on the many more Afghan combatants and others similarly affected in Afghanistan hardly rate even a mention.
Until the real impacts of our involvement in terms of human suffering become our dominant moral concern, the realpolitik of our dominant ideology of "all the way with the USA" will continue to be the political imperative. However, it is clear that the Government cannot rely on the alliance itself as a legitimate justification, unless the threat to either country's national security is sufficient to invoke the doctrine of proportional self-defence, with no other reasonable option available. This has become increasingly difficult to maintain.
National security
The other official justification argues that we need to protect our national security from the threat of Al Qaeda and global terrorism. This was originally to be achieved by defeating the Taliban. Now the goal is to inflict sufficient damage to force them into an acceptable negotiated settlement, thereby ensuring enough political stability to justify a "dignified" exit.
Whatever the original rationale, it is now accepted that the threat from Al Qaeda will not be reduced by continuing the war in Afghanistan because there are very few members left there. Al Qaeda is clearly highly mobile and widely dispersed. It is not dependent on any one safe haven. Moreover, we are told the death of Osama bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders have seriously undermined its effectiveness. At most, our goal now is to minimise the possibility of Afghanistan again becoming a safe haven for terrorism in the future.
As for global terrorism, it is difficult to see how such a generalised ever-present "threat" could ever justify military intervention. Otherwise we could justify being constantly at war with an ever-widening number of countries suspected of having terrorists in their midst. Indeed the assertion that the threat is from "global" terrorism, and not just Al Qaeda, undermines the argument that eliminating its base in Afghanistan will significantly reduce such a threat.
The defeat of the Taliban is predicated on the belief that they are either international terrorists themselves or that they are committed to the ongoing protection of Al Qaeda. There is very little evidence to support either belief. Despite sharing a common hatred of the US and allied invasion forces, the Taliban's interests are local rather than global.
The US willingness to engage in negotiations with the Taliban makes it clear that their defeat is no longer regarded as a prerequisite for political stability or a reduction in the threat of terrorism. The Taliban are simply one of many nationalist groups struggling violently for political power in Afghanistan. The reason they have been the enemy is because the US prefers to support a corrupt Karzai regime that it can control to a brutal Taliban one which it cannot. This has nothing to do with our national security.
No-one believes our involvement in Afghanistan has reduced the threat of terrorism to Australians. It is now officially accepted that the greatest threats of terrorism in future will come from home-grown terrorist groups. We should be concentrating on dealing with that domestic threat through our law enforcement agencies rather than dealing with overseas terrorism through military intervention.
Other 'justifications'
Other "unofficial" reasons given to justify our continuing military involvement include: the desire to "support the Afghan people", to build democratic institutions, to train Afghan personnel, to educate the children and improve the situation for women etc.
However noble and worthwhile, such reasons are not usually considered legally or morally sufficient justifications for military intervention. Our moral duty to help vulnerable people in other countries is constrained by international law that recognises national sovereignty and precludes military intervention for such purposes.
Until we have developed our international law to provide for law enforcement and 'global government' which transcends national boundaries, these desirable goals can only be legitimately pursued through non-violent means as part of our foreign aid development goals.
Some argue that we have a moral obligation to stay in order to avoid a bloodbath if we leave prematurely. This "justification" accepts that we are partly responsible for creating the mess we are now in and therefore have a moral obligation to mitigate the damage of our disastrous intervention.
It is interesting that the very people who support staying because of compassion for human suffering oppose any withdrawal on the same grounds.
The evidence of comparative impacts on the lives of all concerned is clearly important here and may legitimately lead reasonable people to different conclusions.
But this is really more to do with designing a proper exit strategy than justifying ongoing military involvement.
The Government also points to UN and NATO resolutions authorising "peacekeeping" operations in Afghanistan as further justifications for our involvement. But it is clear that their validity depends ultimately on whether these "operations" are themselves morally justifiable.
Legitimate concerns
People who demand that our Government justify its decisions to expose our troops to death and injury in Afghanistan should not be attacked for being disloyal. They are invariably motivated by concern for their relatives and fellow countrymen who are being asked to risk their lives on our behalf. Of course our troops should be properly resourced and given every support for as long as they are there. But they should not be required to continue to risk their lives for reasons that no longer stack up.
Likewise, the concern expressed for the many Afghan people affected by our decisions is also legitimate. Australian lives and Afghan lives should be accorded equal dignity and attract the same moral concern. The legal and moral principles we profess to live by have universal application.
The terrible truth is that what we have to be able to justify is the sacrifice and killing of other human beings. This is not generally permitted under our laws or values. There have to be very good reasons to justify what would otherwise be regarded as state-sponsored murder. The question is: are our reasons (still) good enough?
With regard to the current situation, we need once again to focus our attention on whether there is credible evidence (as distinct from generalised political assertions) of any threat of imminent attack on us or our allies sufficient to morally and legally justify the human sacrifice. And whether ongoing military intervention remains our only option.
And given a world increasingly vulnerable to threats of terrorism, we need also to ask ourselves whether we can really justify making others (whether our soldiers or Afghan civilians) pay the price in terms of their human sacrifice and suffering for what is an ultimately futile military attempt to alleviate our feelings of anxiety and insecurity.
Few of us would be willing for our most cherished loved ones to be sacrificed on the basis of any of the justifications trotted out by the proponents of our continuing involvement. We should not expect others to die on our behalf, or allow our leaders to demand such sacrifice in our name.
It is time to bring our troops home.
Scott MacInnes has a background in teaching, law and conflict resolution. He is now retired and lives in Tasmania.
www.afghanistannewscenter.com