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Afghan Base Tests U.S. Exit Plans
Wall Street Journal By MICHAEL M. PHILLIPS NOVEMBER 8, 2011
NANGALAM, Afghanistan - It didn't take long for things to fall apart.
Weeks after the U.S. Army turned over its base here in the Pech Valley to Afghan troops in March, the Afghan commander went AWOL. His deputy, suspected of being in cahoots with the Taliban, ordered his men not to shoot passing insurgents. Soon the base was alive with rumors the deputy planned to let the Taliban inside the gates.
It didn't take long for the Americans to return, either, dragged back into a valley they once considered a trophy and now wish they were rid of. Just four months after pulling out, U.S. Army troops re-occupied the Nangalam base, where they remain to this day.
The saga of the base, nestled among forbidding eastern mountains that insurgents use as a highway to and from Pakistan, is a cautionary tale as the U.S. begins drawing down its forces to leave Afghanistan's security in Afghan hands.
President Barack Obama has ordered the 100,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan reduced by 10,000 by year's end. Another 23,000 are supposed to leave before next October. By the close of 2014, the Afghans are expected to handle their own security, with any residual U.S. forces playing a supporting—not a combat—role. The administration is even considering an accelerated transition of U.S. forces to an advisory role. To prevent a catastrophic collapse, Afghan soldiers and police, expected to number 352,000 this month, will have to hold ground the U.S. and its coalition allies had previously won.
American commanders generally praise their Afghan counterparts. They point to units, such as Afghan National Army commandos, that have proven capable of operating on their own. U.S. Marines in southern Afghanistan have already turned over the core of Marjah District, the scene of fierce fighting last year, to Afghan forces; they are preparing to hand off more turf in Helmand Province, traditionally a Taliban hotbed.
Afghan security forces have taken the lead in securing seven provinces or cities, although they tend to be areas that were already relatively peaceful, such as Panjshir and Bamyan provinces, and the cities of Mazar-e-Sharif and Herat. President Hamid Karzai is expected to announce soon a schedule for assuming security responsibilities in all or parts of 17 provinces.
With withdrawal deadlines looming, the U.S. plans to shift its focus from the South—which absorbed the bulk of the big 2009 troop surge—back to the East in an effort to shield Kabul from insurgents, such as the ones transiting the Pech Valley area. The decision draws renewed attention to the question of how fast Afghan troops will be ready to lead those fights on their own.
Afghans lack the support systems critical to a modern military, including the reliable ability to bring in food and ammunition, carry out the wounded and reinforce troops in combat with artillery or air power. That fragility, as in the case of Nangalam, has at times been aggravated by poor leadership.
"Our commandos are doing independent operations, but our infantry battalions still depend on coalition forces," especially for artillery and air support, says Gen. Zaher Azimi, spokesman for the Ministry of Defense.
Nangalam has experienced almost every strategic switch during the long U.S. involvement in Afghanistan. In the middle of the decade, the Taliban and al Qaeda used the surrounding Pech Valley and its capillaries as sanctuary in their passage to and from Pakistan. Guided at the time by a strategy that said the way to win a war is to kill the enemy, U.S. commanders sent forces into the Pech to rack up body counts.
In 2007, the Pech Valley became touted as a model for how the U.S. could win the war using a counterinsurgency strategy aimed first at protecting the locals and connecting them to government services, and only second at hunting down the enemy. U.S. soldiers and their Afghan army counterparts lived in tiny, rough outposts nestled with the villages on the valley floor. They built a paved riverside road that linked Nangalam to the outside world. When the insurgents fired on the Americans, they were also shooting at the villagers.
That approach crystallized with the 2010 troop surge and the concentration of the 33,000 new troops on 80 key districts. The Pech Valley didn't make the list. The population was small, isolated and, despite the earnest hearts-and-minds campaign, resistant to American charms.
So, in what the military called a "troop realignment" this March, the U.S. bulldozed one outpost in the valley and turned over Nangalam, its main base, to the Afghan army and police. The U.S. planned to hold the line about 20 miles away at the valley's mouth and send troops in deeper once a month to keep the Taliban off balance.
"You may not have a permanent physical presence, but you still have an operational capability to go in there and disrupt the enemy," says Lt. Col. Colin Tuley, commander of 2nd Battalion, 35th Infantry Regiment, the main U.S. force in the area.
The Nangalam base is on the edge of town, surrounded by rock walls, sandbagged guard towers and razor-wire coils. But it's exposed to gunfire from the ridgelines above, which the Taliban control.
Soon after the Americans left, the situation disintegrated. The Taliban descended into the valley and began cruising through town in pickup trucks mounted with heavy guns, according to soldiers. Local elders—respected men from the valley—had promised to use their influence to prevent attacks on the Afghan forces left behind. But the promise proved empty.
Taliban forces moved freely along the paved river road, once the pride of the U.S. counterinsurgency campaign. They called meetings with the locals, combining threats and promises in their own hearts-and-minds effort, according to Afghan intelligence reports.
Some locals overtly sympathized with the Taliban, according to U.S. and Afghan officials. The Taliban and the locals are Pashtun, while many Afghan army troops belong to the country's other ethnic groups. "There are some elders who play both sides," says Yar Pasha, head of the local youth association.
But others were just looking beyond the next few months and wondering who would be around the longest: the Taliban or the Kabul government and its international backers. "People are scared, and that's why they are silent," says Mr. Pasha.
Lt. Col. Ismatullah, the Afghan army commander at Nangalam, didn't stick around to see if the base could survive a Taliban onslaught. One day he told his men that he was going to inspect another outpost. He never returned. U.S. and Afghan officers say he deserted.
First Sgt. Rafiqullah, the senior enlisted man in the battalion's headquarters company, radioed back to brigade headquarters to report the unit had no commander. "There wasn't much fear in the hearts of our men, but we felt hopeless when we saw our commander run away," Sgt. Rafiqullah says now.
Afghan officials say Lt. Col. Ismatullah has since joined the national police; he couldn't be reached for comment.
Pakistani and other foreign jihadis joined local Taliban fighters pouring out of the notoriously hostile Korengal Valley, which intersects the Pech Valley within sight of Nangalam, according to U.S. and Afghan officers.
Deprived of U.S. logistics support, the base began to run low on supplies. The troops bought rice, flour and other food on credit from local merchants. Ammunition was diverted to those on the guard towers or going on food runs to the market.
The Afghan troops trashed much of the base, stripping wiring, plumbing and air-conditioning units. Well pumps stopped working, according to a U.S. officer. One generator turned up at Torkham Gate, the border crossing into Pakistan, but was nabbed by customs agents, according to an Afghan officer. Several rooms were littered with feces, say U.S. soldiers who saw the base later.
The Afghan soldiers explained they had been told by the battalion's executive officer they would be leaving along with the Americans, so they destroyed what they could to prevent the base falling into Taliban hands.
That wasn't the first odd command from the executive officer, or XO, Maj. Zul Faqar, and some started to assume he was in league with the enemy. Sgt. Rafiqullah recalls going into town one day to see a doctor and spotting a truck carrying Taliban fighters. He reported it to the XO, who replied, "It's none of your business," Sgt. Rafiqullah says.
Soon, Maj. Faqar ordered soldiers not to fire on insurgents at all, according to Sgt. Rafiqullah and U.S. and Afghan officers. One time the sergeant's men disobeyed orders and fired from a guard tower at a passing Taliban vehicle. The XO confined the men in a dark room as punishment, the sergeant says.
The sense of impotence sapped morale. Of the 130 soldiers in the sergeant's company, Sgt. Rafiqullah says three were killed, six were wounded and about 100 deserted, leaving just 20 to fight.
By mid-April, alarm bells were going off at the Afghan 2nd Brigade headquarters in Jalalabad, 45 miles to the southwest. At 11 p.m. on April 13, brigade commanders summoned Lt. Col. Rahmdel Haidarzai, the intelligence officer, and ordered him to travel to Nangalam and take command.
Lt. Col. Rahmdel, who grew up in the Pech Valley, says he initially demurred. "I didn't want to go and get involved in tribal politics in my home valley," he says.
His commanders insisted, and three hours later he was on a U.S. helicopter to Nangalam. When he arrived, he found the base alive with doomsday rumors. The most ominous one was that the XO planned to surrender the base to the Taliban at 8 a.m. that morning.
Lt. Col. Rahmdel had served with that same battalion years earlier, and dispatched soldiers he knew to sound out other soldiers and muster support. He began immediately, he says, to sideline the XO.
That same morning, one guard-post reported five insurgents with a machine gun riding through town in a pickup truck. Lt. Col. Rahmdel says he authorized his men to open fire, and they killed the insurgents. "That gave the troops confidence that they wouldn't be overrun or handed over to the Taliban," he recalls.
The Afghans set up a checkpoint by the local government office building a few yards from the base, a tiny step that drew Taliban fire. Soon the U.S. delivered a fresh shipment of machine guns, bazookas and grenade launchers.
The Americans and Afghans disagree about how bad things got after that.
Lt. Col. Rahmdel says his men expanded their patrols around Nangalam, establishing a small bubble of security. The U.S. Army's Lt. Col. Tuley is dubious. "They barely went outside the gate," he says.
The Afghans complain they couldn't get prompt evacuation for their wounded and dead; the Americans say helicopters were always ready if needed.
Lt. Col. Rahmdel says his battalion lost 10 killed and another 45 wounded in Nangalam after he took command. Lt. Col. Tuley says his men, stationed at the far end of the valley, were rarely able, even with aircraft overflights, to confirm Afghan reports that Nangalam was under attack.
The Americans began making regular visits back to Nangalam, staying for a few days at a time to stabilize the situation. In May, Afghan commanders sent out 300 new recruits. But they were green and many deserted, Lt. Col. Rahmdel says.
Meantime, it became clear that the Afghan XO, Maj. Faqar, was secretly in contact with the Taliban, according to Afghan and U.S. officers familiar with the intelligence reporting on his activities. After one incident, in which several U.S. scouts were badly wounded, the U.S. discovered that a local Taliban commander had called the XO to tell him how well the ambush had gone, Lt. Col. Tuley says.
One day word came from headquarters that the XO's vacation request had been approved, says Sgt. Rafiqullah. A U.S. helicopter picked him up, but it was apparently a ruse. The XO was arrested and later tried by a military court, according to Col. Mohammad Numan Hatifi, spokesman for the Afghan army's 201st Corps. The XO remains imprisoned in Kabul, the spokesman said.
By July, Lt. Col. Tuley experienced what he describes as "a blinding flash of the obvious." It was: "We had to do something different."
The something different was to return to Nangalam.
Four months after the Americans left the base, the colonel assigned two platoons of American infantrymen to live there permanently, providing backbone and logistical support to the 450 Afghan soldiers and police. He sent a relatively senior officer, a major, to oversee the U.S. presence. And he hired contractors to repair the electrical system, replace the air conditioners and scrape away the feces.
In September, a new Afghan battalion replaced Lt. Col. Rahmdel's unit, which was sent to the rear to recuperate from 18 months in Nangalam. The Afghans are once again patrolling Nangalam, and the base is no longer in danger of being overrun.
The valley, however, remains dangerous and apparently unsympathetic to the Afghan government or its international backers. Lt. Col. Tuley's men get hit by rocket-propelled grenades or roadside bombs almost every time they drive the Pech River road by the mouth of the Korengal Valley, about three miles from the Nangalam base.
"We've got to find a solution," Lt. Col. Tuley warned Afghan army and police commanders over dinner in Nangalam in October. "One day I won't be here anymore." —Ziaulhaq Sultani and Habib Khan Totakhil in Kabul contributed to this article.
Roadside Bomb Kills 11 in Western Afghanistan
By ROD NORDLAND The New York Times November 8, 2011
KABUL, Afghanistan — Afghan officials said Tuesday that insurgents once again attacked during the Id al-Adha holiday, killing 11 people, most of them civilians.
The attack on Monday was the second major attack against civilians during the three-day holiday, despite a holiday message from the Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, that called on his followers to avoid civilian casualties. Eight people were killed on Sunday by a suicide bomber outside a mosque in Baghlan Province in the north.
In Monday’s attack in Badghis Province, in western Afghanistan, insurgents set off a roadside bomb targeting a police truck filled with officers and their family members, who were visiting relatives during the afternoon, said the provincial governor, Delbar Jan Arman.
Of the 11 people killed, only two were police officers; among the dead were six children, ranging in age from 2 months to 12 years, and two women, Mr. Arman said. Three people were wounded, two of them police officers and one a child.
The attack was confirmed in a statement by the Interior Ministry. Mr. Arman blamed the Taliban, which had been active in the area of the attack, Qadis District.
According to United Nations figures, 75 percent of all civilian casualties in the past year were caused by insurgents, compared with 16 percent attributed to NATO and government forces.
Mullah Omar’s unusually strong statement on Friday condemning civilian casualties caused by the insurgents called on those who did so intentionally to be punished. The attacks during the Id al-Adha holiday raised questions about whether Taliban leaders were able to control their followers in some parts of the country.
Jawad Sukhanvar contributed reporting.
Will Afghans embrace lasting peace
by Abdul Haleem
KABUL, Nov. 8 (Xinhua) -- Two consecutive suicide attacks and series of anti-government militants-related violent incidents during Eidul-Adha -- the Muslims' largest annual festival in Afghanistan have put into questions the prospect of the ongoing peace efforts in the militancy-plagued nation.
"I personally have lost my hope to see viable peace in my country. To be frank, the suicide attacks in the first and second day of Eidul Adha in Baghlan province have shuttered my hope for better future," Abdul Aziz, 53, told Xinhua.
A relatively peaceful province Baghlan, 160 km north of Afghan capital city Kabul, had experienced bloody attacks on the first and second days of Eidul Adha, since Nov. 6 this year.
In the first attack happened on Sunday when the worshipers were coming out from a mosque in Hasantal village, 20 km north of Baghlan's provincial capital Pul-e-Khumri, a suicide bomber blew himself up leaving seven people dead and injuring 17 others, mostly civilians, according to officials.
The second suicide attack took place a day later on Monday when a man strapped explosive device blew himself up in provincial capital Pul-e-Khumri killing himself and injuring six others including five police and a civilian.
According to religious leaders, Eidul Adha is the time for reconciliation, peace, unity and strengthening brotherhood among the Muslims.
"It is the time to forgive and reconcile with your brothers, visit their houses and boost brotherhood," a prayer leader Mawlawi Habibullah said in his sermon in a Kabul mosque on Sunday.
The bloody attacks in Baghlan province occurred amid government's efforts to achieve peace through dialogue with the Taliban outfit.
Taliban elusive supreme leader Mullah Mohammad Omar also in his message, released on the eve of Eidul Adha, had called upon his fighters to avoid harming civilians during military operations.
"The Mujahideen (holy warriors) have to take every step to protect the lives and wealth of ordinary people in accordance with their religious responsibility," Omar who has escaped the U.S.-led military campaign over the past decade said in the message.
Attacks in Baghlan on Eidul Adha holidays, is not alone the offensive that has claimed the lives of Afghans in the war-torn country.
Over a dozen people including six civilians, six militants and three policemen have also been killed in the violent incidents particularly in roadside bombings during Eidul Adha holidays elsewhere in Afghanistan, according to officials.
Although the officials are hopeful to achieve peace through negotiation with the Taliban, ordinary Afghans are skeptical.
"Likewise the present government, the past regimes had also strove hard to achieve peace through dialogue with the armed oppositions but all in vain and the ongoing peace efforts will be ended too in fiasco," a 58 years old retired army officer and serving taxi driver Karimullah Khan said.
Expressing his view with regard to the peace efforts, the dejected Khan said "anyone ruled Kabul over the past three decades had offered talks to the armed oppositions holding sway in the countryside but none has yielded the desired outcome. The undergoing peace efforts would bear no fruit."
The war-battered but peace-thirsty Afghans have fed up with the continued militancy. However, no sign of end in the conflict is visible in the near future as Taliban leader Mullah Omar in his message on the eve of Eidul Adha repeated his resolve for the continuation of Jihad or holy war till the pull out of NATO-led troops from Afghanistan, a condition unacceptable to both the international community and the Afghan government at the moment.
A Calm Guide to Afghan Chaos Moves On
The New York Times By ADAM B. ELLICK November 7, 2011
The New York Times lost its longest-tenured journalist in Afghanistan in October. While foreign reporters rotate in and out of the country, Waheed Abdul Wafa was a perennial mainstay, dedicating his life to telling stories about a war that the rest of the world is becoming increasingly immune to.
Waheed was an incorruptible, earnest, chain-smoking reporter — and a devout Muslim — who reported across frontlines and around landmines. His job was akin to that of an elementary school teacher, guiding the Times’s Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters through the dizzying landscape of Afghan politics, religion and tradition.
Waheed wasn’t killed on the job, unlike some of his colleagues, including his best friend, Sultan Munadi, who died while reporting a story for The Times in 2009.
Waheed, like so many Americans, simply had enough of the news from Afghanistan. At 34, he left The Times to become an executive in the nonprofit sector.
His cinematic narrative — an uneducated refugee who crossed Taliban checkpoints as the Americans started bombing in 2001 to a Times journalist and Harvard scholar when he was awarded a Neiman Foundation fellowship — often distorted the view of those of us who worked with him in Afghanistan. Waheed, a lanky and calming man with movie-star eyes, made us unrealistically optimistic about a war with no end in sight. David Rohde, a former Times correspondent who hired Waheed in 2001, called it “The Waheed Effect.”
Waheed occupied the ambiguous space of translator, reporter, interview booker, cultural interpreter, security consultant and office bookkeeper.
He persuaded the first Afghans released from Guantánamo to agree to an interview, which also meant persuading Afghan intelligence officials. He was fast and fearless to the scene of car bombings, often arriving before the police. By 2009, he covered President Hamid Karzai’s re-election campaign without a foreign reporter. “I was always scared of the responsibility I had at The New York Times,” he said recently. “That fear was in my heart.”
A Journalist Is Born
His story is a lesson in ambition and timing. In 2001, as the Americans invaded, Waheed, then 24, was working as a de-miner, a dangerous job with one big advantage: a $100 month salary that supported all nine members of his extended family. Radio rumors surfaced about some fallen buildings in New York City, and long before anyone in Afghanistan understood the meaning of Sept. 11, bombs started falling around Kabul.
Waheed’s de-mining job was promptly terminated. He was desperate for money. If things worsened, he knew it would cost a fortune to smuggle his family to safety. He decided to cross the frontline of the war, 40 miles north of Kabul. He had heard foreign journalists were there, and they badly needed translators.
October 2001 was a perilous time to travel north. Angry and edgy, the Taliban still manned most checkpoints, and they would be especially suspicious of Waheed because he was from Panjshir, a province aligned with the American-backed Northern Alliance that was stampeding toward Kabul.
Guided by his impeccable instincts, Waheed jumped in a shared taxi with a large family, which he hoped would make him seem less suspicious. They drove past Taliban fighters frantically digging trenches. This was good news, he thought. With the Northern Alliance approaching, the Taliban were no longer securing the checkpoints that tormented Waheed for years.
That afternoon, Waheed reached the district of Jabul Siraj, where he found a Newsday correspondent named Matthew McAllester, who quoted him as a Kabul refugee in one story.
Waheed became frightened as the photographer, Moises Saman, snapped a series of pictures.
“How come this guy is taking pictures?” Waheed recalled. “How can he take more than 32 shots? I didn’t know anything about digital cameras.”
He also didn’t know anything about journalism. He “hated” the only journalists he had ever met: propagandists at state radio and television stations in Kabul. Mr. McAllester knew Mr. Rohde was looking for a translator. By evening, Waheed had a job.
“For a few days, I was completely confused,” he said. “I thought the reporters were collecting information so the military could enter Kabul. I thought they were all spies.”
He would be on the other side of that thought for much of the next decade. Afghans are deeply suspicious of foreigners, after having been cheated by so many throughout their history. As a result, foreign correspondents rely on Afghans like Waheed who are deft at the intricate courtesies so vital in Afghan culture.
That fall, Waheed, Mr. Rohde and Tyler Hicks, a Times staff photographer, lived and worked on the frontlines, embedded with the Northern Alliance. One day, Mr. Rohde and Mr. Hicks asked a commander if they could accompany an armored personal carrier that was headed to attack a Taliban post. Waheed did not believe the Times journalists would actually go. The commander warned them that if they went, they would die. Waheed persuaded the commander to allow them to go, but at first, he didn’t realize he’d be going with them, too.
“I must confess, I was so scared,” he said. “But I thought if this guy from America is going to go, I thought it will be very cowardly for me not to go, too. I was more scared because I knew there were mines everywhere.”
That night, Waheed watched quietly as Mr. Rohde filed this story, and Mr. Hicks transmitted this iconic photograph to New York.
By the time the paper was printed, an Afghan journalist was born.
“I will never forget that,” Waheed said. “I didn’t know the importance of these stories, but this made me realize it.” The next morning they drove to Kabul, where Waheed would report more than 300 stories over the next decade.
Dangerous Access, Vital Stories
I recently asked Waheed to share his favorite stories, and in classic Afghan fashion, he hesitated awkwardly. “Well, I’m not personally proud of anything,” he said.
As I pressed him to reflect on his career, he shared a few stories that showed how deeply conscious he is of the plight of ordinary Afghans. He wanted to be clear, however, that he was not bragging. These were just stories he would never forget.
In 2001, he brought Mr. Rohde to a Qaeda house in Kabul, which was littered with bomb-making materials and documents.
“Waheed is responsible for every one of those documents,” Mr. Rohde said. “The house was six blocks from where he lived. He knew where all the Arabs lived, and he was fearless in taking me there.”
He also reported with Carlotta Gall about Americans torturing Afghans. It was around the time of the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal in Iraq, and no one knew if torture was also commonplace in Afghanistan. Waheed identified one case in particular and traveled to Paktika Province to investigate the details, as well as to ensure the area’s safety so that he could return with Ms. Gall.
“We always joked that Waheed would become a minister, and we’d be begging him for an interview,” Ms. Gall said.
Waheed also mentioned a story he reported with the Times’s John F. Burns about a tall Afghan man the Americans killed because they suspected he was with a group of suspected Qaeda leaders. His height incited speculation that he might be Osama bin Laden, but in fact, he was a villager collecting scrap metal, netting $2 a day. Locals saw the event as American theater.
“We saw kids crying on his grave, and we sent that image to the world,” Waheed said. “If we didn’t go there, nobody would’ve done that story.”
Trips outside of Kabul are taken with extreme caution. When foreign reporters ask Afghan fixers if a place is safe, fixers will dismissively say “yes.” It is rarely a calculated, well-informed decision. I asked Waheed, who was never kidnapped, about his perfect track record.
“Honestly, you don’t know if a place is safe,” he said. “People, not places, kill you.”
His Country’s Future
In 2009, The Times trained a handful of Afghans print reporters in video. They had never touched a video camera, and most still haven’t, except Waheed, who filed several of his own videos, including this one about Kabul’s annual Ashura festival, in which Shiite Muslims whip themselves until they bleed.
In many of my videos, he charmed Afghans into talking on camera. It was especially impressive when reporting on women, who traditionally avoid the camera. The best example is this one about widows.
In another one about skateboarding, Waheed sealed permission to film two female skaters after a quick lunch with their father.
When I reported about the spike in Afghans seeking asylum in 2009, within one day, Waheed had persuaded two smugglers to talk about their illegal livelihood. One of them provided a memorable quote:
“In this government, three things work very well: relations, money and acquaintances. When these three exist, anyone can get what they want.”
For years, Waheed believed Western leaders could teach the Afghan government a better way. Islam, he said, teaches one to be hopeful. But his time living in the United States would test those convictions.
Last year at Harvard, he met a former C.I.A. agent who looked Waheed in the eye and said, “We can’t do anything more in your country.”
“That was my biggest lesson in 10 years,” Waheed said. “No one else can give us peace. Afghans should do something.”
Waheed had a difficult adjustment during his year in the United States. He was never enamored with this country. At first, he was baffled by the concept of a babysitter: trusting a stranger with his daughter seemed odd. Also, he missed his mother, who has been fighting off blindness since 2002. She can see in one eye today only because Waheed financed 12 trips to Pakistan and India for treatments.
So I decided to invite Waheed to my family’s Thanksgiving dinner. Some of the customs, like when my mother embraced him, slightly rattled him. But he bonded with my uneducated, inquisitive 87-year-old grandfather, offering him a lesson in Afghan culture.
Waheed purposefully noted how he gave his entire salary to his father, his oldest male relative. My grandfather responded: “I don’t like nothin’ about your culture, except that you hand over your money to the oldest man in the family. You should teach my grandson that.”
After his year at Harvard, I asked Waheed what he thought of my country. He said friends and family relationships were not as tight as they were in Afghanistan, as anyone who has been to both places will concur. Then, he said: “It’s a great place for you guys. Just not for us.”
I hope that one day I can say the same thing about his homeland.
British troops plan larger role in Helmand to cover US withdrawal
UK armed forces to patrol larger area in southern Afghan province but a return to Sangin ruled out
Guardian.co.uk By Nick Hopkins Monday 7 November 2011
British forces are planning to take responsibility for a larger area of Helmand province to cover parts affected by the withdrawal of thousands of US troops from Afghanistan.
Increasing the so-called "battlespace" will not lead to more British troops being sent to the region, but it will mean the 9,000 personnel still in the province will be spread more thinly.
One area the UK is unlikely to return to is Sangin, where 99 British troops died during some of the bloodiest fighting after the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.
It is thought British officials have made clear to the top brass at US Central Command (Centcom) that this would be a PR disaster in the UK, reviving memories of the initial deployment to Afghanistan, which left a small number of troops trying to secure a vast territory overrun with Taliban insurgents.
Military planners have known since the summer that the Americans are likely to cut the number of US marines in Helmand, as part of the 27,000 personnel that Barack Obama pledged to return home by September 2012. There are 20,000 US marines in Helmand, but the US is considering slashing that to 6,000 – one Marine Air Ground Task Force (MAGTF) unit.
British troops would have to extend operations outside the central areas around the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, and move further south and north.
"No figures for the pullout of US marines have been finalised," a Whitehall source said. "Washington and Centcom are discussing this now and we are waiting to hear from them. We have a good dialogue with them.
"Some rejigging of the boundaries in Helmand is likely to happen, but it is very unlikely British troops will end up back in Sangin. The US marines are there now and it is likely they will remain there. That area is much quieter now than it was."
There will be concern within the MoD that the British do not get overstretched just as Nato forces are pulling out. The insurgents have been successfully using IEDs to target police and army commanders - on Sunday, a roadside mine in Helmand killed a district police chief and two bodyguards.
UK troops will have ended all combat operations in Afghanistan by the end of 2014. Obama has ordered a sharp reduction of US troops in Afghanistan next year, but neither the US or the British have set out their drawdown plans for 2013-14.
A small number of British personnel will be stationed in Kabul after 2014 to help the Afghans run an officers' academy based on Sandhurst.
British forces may retain no official presence beyond 2014 in Helmand – a province in which they have lost nearly 400 civilian and military personnel.
The MoD said on Monday night the UK had not been told whether British forces would have to operate "outside their present area of operations".
A spokesman added: "However, we, like our ISAF partners, keep force levels in Afghanistan under constant review. As the prime minister has stated, UK forces will reduce to 9,000 by the end of 2012 and UK troops will no longer be in a combat role by the end of 2014. Until then, UK forces, alongside our Afghan and international partners, remain committed to helping build the capacity and capability of Afghan security forces to allow them to increasingly take lead responsibility for their own security."
The total number of British soldiers killed in Afghanistan since 2001 stands at 384 – 340 died in hostile action.
As well as a military pull-out, British civilians working in the Provincial Reconstruction Team, led by Michael O'Neill, are also starting a slow withdrawal that will be complete by the end of 2014.
DEBATE PREP: Is this the only path to victory in Afghanistan?
CNN By AEI's Frederick Kagan, Special to CNN November 7th, 2011
What do we need to achieve in Afghanistan in order to protect the security of the United States and its allies?
That core question should shape any discussion of our strategy in Afghanistan or the resources we devote to executing it. But that question is too often obscured.
Many say that pursuing any kind of “success” in Afghanistan, the supposed “graveyard of empires,” is sheer folly. Others say that is has become irrelevant, and that the death of Osama bin Laden has deprived the war in Afghanistan of continued meaning.
These facile assertions produce more palatable answers, but do not answer the core question. Presidents and candidates for president owe Americans a clear and cogent answer, at least, as well as an explanation for how their proposed strategy that they lay out will accomplish the requirements for American security.
President Obama identified a number of reasons for the American presence in Afghanistan in his December 2009 speech announcing both the surge of forces there and the strategy that those forces would pursue—the strategy that continues in effect to this day. The clearest articulation of American interest in Afghanistan he offered was this one:
“This is the epicenter of violent extremism practiced by al Qaeda. It is from here that we were attacked on 9/11, and it is from here that new attacks are being plotted as I speak. This is no idle danger; no hypothetical threat. In the last few months alone, we have apprehended extremists within our borders who were sent here from the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan to commit new acts of terror. And this danger will only grow if the region slides backwards, and al Qaeda can operate with impunity. We must keep the pressure on al Qaeda, and to do that, we must increase the stability and capacity of our partners in the region.”
He added later in that speech: “We're in Afghanistan to prevent a cancer from once again spreading through that country.”
President Obama dismissed the notion that Afghanistan is simply another Vietnam.
“And most importantly, unlike Vietnam, the American people were viciously attacked from Afghanistan, and remain a target for those same extremists who are plotting along its border,” he said in that 2009 speech.
He rejected the notion that targeted strikes alone could defeat al Qaeda: “To abandon this area now - and to rely only on efforts against al Qaeda from a distance - would significantly hamper our ability to keep the pressure on al Qaeda, and create an unacceptable risk of additional attacks on our homeland and our allies.”
He thus articulated a series of objectives achievement of which, he argued, was vital to America’s national security:
“Our overarching goal remains the same: to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and to prevent its capacity to threaten America and our allies in the future. To meet that goal, we will pursue the following objectives within Afghanistan. We must deny al Qaeda a safe haven. We must reverse the Taliban's momentum and deny it the ability to overthrow the government. And we must strengthen the capacity of Afghanistan's security forces and government so that they can take lead responsibility for Afghanistan's future.”
He did announce an 18-month timeline for the start of the withdrawal of the surge forces in Afghanistan, but added, “we will execute this transition responsibly, taking into account conditions on the ground. We'll continue to advise and assist Afghanistan's security forces to ensure that they can succeed over the long haul.”
Some in the White House and outside it, nevertheless, oppose continued efforts in Afghanistan, and thus advocate abandoning the current strategy or reducing force levels below what is needed to execute the mission there. The question they must answer is: What part of the objective President Obama enunciated in December 2009 has become unnecessary? Do we not need to “disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and to prevent its capacity tothreaten America and our allies in the future?” Do we not need to prevent the Taliban from threatening the Afghan government? Do we not need to build the capacity of our partners and allies—including Afghanistan—so that they can take responsibility for Afghanistan’s future, thus preventing the “cancer” that had taken root there from returning? Do we seriously think that the killing of one man, however important, ends the threat to the United States and thus removes the entire region from the list of America’s national security interests?
Above all, if we abandon our current efforts in Afghanistan either by accepting defeat or by declaring success before actually achieving it, what will prevent al Qaeda and its affiliates from re-establishing their bases there and resuming their efforts to attack and kill Americans?
The American people deserve a serious, thoughtful, and detailed answer to those questions from anyone seeking the responsibility to keep them safe.
Kagan is the director of the AEI Critical Threats Project and a former professor of military history at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
US to halve troops in troubled Afghan province
Sydney Morning Herald By Thomas Harding November 8, 2011
THE number of US troops in Helmand is to be halved, leaving British forces to take the lead in the Afghan province, a US general has said.
It is understood that the force of 20,000 US marines in Helmand, which has done much to restore stability, could even be cut to almost a quarter of its strength by September.
But General John Toolan warned that Afghans were ''apprehensive'' after being told that the US strength could drop to below the 9000 British troops in Helmand.
''They like the situation as it is right now,'' he said.
He said that the reduction would mean there would be very few reserves left to deal with Taliban hot spots. ''As we go further down [in numbers], we have less manoeuvre elements,'' the commander of NATO troops in Helmand said.
The withdrawal is part of the reduction ordered by US President Barack Obama, who wants 30,000 out of the 100,000 US troops in Afghanistan to return home next year.
General Toolan said that with Helmand more stable, American troops could be drafted into trouble spots in eastern Afghanistan such as Ghazni province. General Toolan, 57, said he had assured the Afghans that US firepower, intelligence gathering and medical evacuation facilities would remain behind even after the 2014 deadline.
He said: ''Things have improved dramatically but the picture is not all rosy. Afghan security forces are in a good place but very few, if any, are in a position where they can operate totally independently. More time is needed to address the insurgency. We have been able to put a lid on insurgent activities but we need to have a presence so they don't come back next year.''
The general's warnings come as Helmand prepares for an announcement that Afghan security forces will be put in control in at least three of its 12 districts in the next year. The rest are expected to follow in 2013, before the end of the NATO mission a year later.
In northern Afghanistan, a suicide bomber killed eight people during celebrations for the Islamic holiday of Eid al-Adha, defying an admonition by the Taliban's leader not to attack civilians.
Afghan officials said the attack in the Baghlani Jadid district of Baghlan province, which occurred as worshippers left a mosque, was by the Taliban.
Two days earlier, the Taliban's reclusive leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, delivered his annual message for Eid al-Adha, the holiest day of the Islamic year, including a strongly worded statement calling on his followers to refrain from causing civilian casualties.
The victims in the attack on Sunday included three commanders of the militias known as arbakai who appear to have been the targets, according to the provincial governor, Munshi Abdul Majid. The other people killed, as well as the 18 wounded, were civilians, he said. One bomber detonated his explosive vest, but people in the crowd jumped on a second would-be bomber and immobilised him, Mr Abdul Majid said.
Although the Taliban have carried out numerous attacks in which civilians have been the only victims, attacking on the Eid holiday so soon after a major pronouncement by Mullah Omar would be unusual.
The attack may also be an indication of the weakening control of Mullah Omar and other traditional Taliban leaders as the movement fragments under a sustained campaign by US special forces to kill and capture mid-level commanders.
www.afghanistannewscenter.com
Wall Street Journal By MICHAEL M. PHILLIPS NOVEMBER 8, 2011
NANGALAM, Afghanistan - It didn't take long for things to fall apart.
Weeks after the U.S. Army turned over its base here in the Pech Valley to Afghan troops in March, the Afghan commander went AWOL. His deputy, suspected of being in cahoots with the Taliban, ordered his men not to shoot passing insurgents. Soon the base was alive with rumors the deputy planned to let the Taliban inside the gates.
It didn't take long for the Americans to return, either, dragged back into a valley they once considered a trophy and now wish they were rid of. Just four months after pulling out, U.S. Army troops re-occupied the Nangalam base, where they remain to this day.
The saga of the base, nestled among forbidding eastern mountains that insurgents use as a highway to and from Pakistan, is a cautionary tale as the U.S. begins drawing down its forces to leave Afghanistan's security in Afghan hands.
President Barack Obama has ordered the 100,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan reduced by 10,000 by year's end. Another 23,000 are supposed to leave before next October. By the close of 2014, the Afghans are expected to handle their own security, with any residual U.S. forces playing a supporting—not a combat—role. The administration is even considering an accelerated transition of U.S. forces to an advisory role. To prevent a catastrophic collapse, Afghan soldiers and police, expected to number 352,000 this month, will have to hold ground the U.S. and its coalition allies had previously won.
American commanders generally praise their Afghan counterparts. They point to units, such as Afghan National Army commandos, that have proven capable of operating on their own. U.S. Marines in southern Afghanistan have already turned over the core of Marjah District, the scene of fierce fighting last year, to Afghan forces; they are preparing to hand off more turf in Helmand Province, traditionally a Taliban hotbed.
Afghan security forces have taken the lead in securing seven provinces or cities, although they tend to be areas that were already relatively peaceful, such as Panjshir and Bamyan provinces, and the cities of Mazar-e-Sharif and Herat. President Hamid Karzai is expected to announce soon a schedule for assuming security responsibilities in all or parts of 17 provinces.
With withdrawal deadlines looming, the U.S. plans to shift its focus from the South—which absorbed the bulk of the big 2009 troop surge—back to the East in an effort to shield Kabul from insurgents, such as the ones transiting the Pech Valley area. The decision draws renewed attention to the question of how fast Afghan troops will be ready to lead those fights on their own.
Afghans lack the support systems critical to a modern military, including the reliable ability to bring in food and ammunition, carry out the wounded and reinforce troops in combat with artillery or air power. That fragility, as in the case of Nangalam, has at times been aggravated by poor leadership.
"Our commandos are doing independent operations, but our infantry battalions still depend on coalition forces," especially for artillery and air support, says Gen. Zaher Azimi, spokesman for the Ministry of Defense.
Nangalam has experienced almost every strategic switch during the long U.S. involvement in Afghanistan. In the middle of the decade, the Taliban and al Qaeda used the surrounding Pech Valley and its capillaries as sanctuary in their passage to and from Pakistan. Guided at the time by a strategy that said the way to win a war is to kill the enemy, U.S. commanders sent forces into the Pech to rack up body counts.
In 2007, the Pech Valley became touted as a model for how the U.S. could win the war using a counterinsurgency strategy aimed first at protecting the locals and connecting them to government services, and only second at hunting down the enemy. U.S. soldiers and their Afghan army counterparts lived in tiny, rough outposts nestled with the villages on the valley floor. They built a paved riverside road that linked Nangalam to the outside world. When the insurgents fired on the Americans, they were also shooting at the villagers.
That approach crystallized with the 2010 troop surge and the concentration of the 33,000 new troops on 80 key districts. The Pech Valley didn't make the list. The population was small, isolated and, despite the earnest hearts-and-minds campaign, resistant to American charms.
So, in what the military called a "troop realignment" this March, the U.S. bulldozed one outpost in the valley and turned over Nangalam, its main base, to the Afghan army and police. The U.S. planned to hold the line about 20 miles away at the valley's mouth and send troops in deeper once a month to keep the Taliban off balance.
"You may not have a permanent physical presence, but you still have an operational capability to go in there and disrupt the enemy," says Lt. Col. Colin Tuley, commander of 2nd Battalion, 35th Infantry Regiment, the main U.S. force in the area.
The Nangalam base is on the edge of town, surrounded by rock walls, sandbagged guard towers and razor-wire coils. But it's exposed to gunfire from the ridgelines above, which the Taliban control.
Soon after the Americans left, the situation disintegrated. The Taliban descended into the valley and began cruising through town in pickup trucks mounted with heavy guns, according to soldiers. Local elders—respected men from the valley—had promised to use their influence to prevent attacks on the Afghan forces left behind. But the promise proved empty.
Taliban forces moved freely along the paved river road, once the pride of the U.S. counterinsurgency campaign. They called meetings with the locals, combining threats and promises in their own hearts-and-minds effort, according to Afghan intelligence reports.
Some locals overtly sympathized with the Taliban, according to U.S. and Afghan officials. The Taliban and the locals are Pashtun, while many Afghan army troops belong to the country's other ethnic groups. "There are some elders who play both sides," says Yar Pasha, head of the local youth association.
But others were just looking beyond the next few months and wondering who would be around the longest: the Taliban or the Kabul government and its international backers. "People are scared, and that's why they are silent," says Mr. Pasha.
Lt. Col. Ismatullah, the Afghan army commander at Nangalam, didn't stick around to see if the base could survive a Taliban onslaught. One day he told his men that he was going to inspect another outpost. He never returned. U.S. and Afghan officers say he deserted.
First Sgt. Rafiqullah, the senior enlisted man in the battalion's headquarters company, radioed back to brigade headquarters to report the unit had no commander. "There wasn't much fear in the hearts of our men, but we felt hopeless when we saw our commander run away," Sgt. Rafiqullah says now.
Afghan officials say Lt. Col. Ismatullah has since joined the national police; he couldn't be reached for comment.
Pakistani and other foreign jihadis joined local Taliban fighters pouring out of the notoriously hostile Korengal Valley, which intersects the Pech Valley within sight of Nangalam, according to U.S. and Afghan officers.
Deprived of U.S. logistics support, the base began to run low on supplies. The troops bought rice, flour and other food on credit from local merchants. Ammunition was diverted to those on the guard towers or going on food runs to the market.
The Afghan troops trashed much of the base, stripping wiring, plumbing and air-conditioning units. Well pumps stopped working, according to a U.S. officer. One generator turned up at Torkham Gate, the border crossing into Pakistan, but was nabbed by customs agents, according to an Afghan officer. Several rooms were littered with feces, say U.S. soldiers who saw the base later.
The Afghan soldiers explained they had been told by the battalion's executive officer they would be leaving along with the Americans, so they destroyed what they could to prevent the base falling into Taliban hands.
That wasn't the first odd command from the executive officer, or XO, Maj. Zul Faqar, and some started to assume he was in league with the enemy. Sgt. Rafiqullah recalls going into town one day to see a doctor and spotting a truck carrying Taliban fighters. He reported it to the XO, who replied, "It's none of your business," Sgt. Rafiqullah says.
Soon, Maj. Faqar ordered soldiers not to fire on insurgents at all, according to Sgt. Rafiqullah and U.S. and Afghan officers. One time the sergeant's men disobeyed orders and fired from a guard tower at a passing Taliban vehicle. The XO confined the men in a dark room as punishment, the sergeant says.
The sense of impotence sapped morale. Of the 130 soldiers in the sergeant's company, Sgt. Rafiqullah says three were killed, six were wounded and about 100 deserted, leaving just 20 to fight.
By mid-April, alarm bells were going off at the Afghan 2nd Brigade headquarters in Jalalabad, 45 miles to the southwest. At 11 p.m. on April 13, brigade commanders summoned Lt. Col. Rahmdel Haidarzai, the intelligence officer, and ordered him to travel to Nangalam and take command.
Lt. Col. Rahmdel, who grew up in the Pech Valley, says he initially demurred. "I didn't want to go and get involved in tribal politics in my home valley," he says.
His commanders insisted, and three hours later he was on a U.S. helicopter to Nangalam. When he arrived, he found the base alive with doomsday rumors. The most ominous one was that the XO planned to surrender the base to the Taliban at 8 a.m. that morning.
Lt. Col. Rahmdel had served with that same battalion years earlier, and dispatched soldiers he knew to sound out other soldiers and muster support. He began immediately, he says, to sideline the XO.
That same morning, one guard-post reported five insurgents with a machine gun riding through town in a pickup truck. Lt. Col. Rahmdel says he authorized his men to open fire, and they killed the insurgents. "That gave the troops confidence that they wouldn't be overrun or handed over to the Taliban," he recalls.
The Afghans set up a checkpoint by the local government office building a few yards from the base, a tiny step that drew Taliban fire. Soon the U.S. delivered a fresh shipment of machine guns, bazookas and grenade launchers.
The Americans and Afghans disagree about how bad things got after that.
Lt. Col. Rahmdel says his men expanded their patrols around Nangalam, establishing a small bubble of security. The U.S. Army's Lt. Col. Tuley is dubious. "They barely went outside the gate," he says.
The Afghans complain they couldn't get prompt evacuation for their wounded and dead; the Americans say helicopters were always ready if needed.
Lt. Col. Rahmdel says his battalion lost 10 killed and another 45 wounded in Nangalam after he took command. Lt. Col. Tuley says his men, stationed at the far end of the valley, were rarely able, even with aircraft overflights, to confirm Afghan reports that Nangalam was under attack.
The Americans began making regular visits back to Nangalam, staying for a few days at a time to stabilize the situation. In May, Afghan commanders sent out 300 new recruits. But they were green and many deserted, Lt. Col. Rahmdel says.
Meantime, it became clear that the Afghan XO, Maj. Faqar, was secretly in contact with the Taliban, according to Afghan and U.S. officers familiar with the intelligence reporting on his activities. After one incident, in which several U.S. scouts were badly wounded, the U.S. discovered that a local Taliban commander had called the XO to tell him how well the ambush had gone, Lt. Col. Tuley says.
One day word came from headquarters that the XO's vacation request had been approved, says Sgt. Rafiqullah. A U.S. helicopter picked him up, but it was apparently a ruse. The XO was arrested and later tried by a military court, according to Col. Mohammad Numan Hatifi, spokesman for the Afghan army's 201st Corps. The XO remains imprisoned in Kabul, the spokesman said.
By July, Lt. Col. Tuley experienced what he describes as "a blinding flash of the obvious." It was: "We had to do something different."
The something different was to return to Nangalam.
Four months after the Americans left the base, the colonel assigned two platoons of American infantrymen to live there permanently, providing backbone and logistical support to the 450 Afghan soldiers and police. He sent a relatively senior officer, a major, to oversee the U.S. presence. And he hired contractors to repair the electrical system, replace the air conditioners and scrape away the feces.
In September, a new Afghan battalion replaced Lt. Col. Rahmdel's unit, which was sent to the rear to recuperate from 18 months in Nangalam. The Afghans are once again patrolling Nangalam, and the base is no longer in danger of being overrun.
The valley, however, remains dangerous and apparently unsympathetic to the Afghan government or its international backers. Lt. Col. Tuley's men get hit by rocket-propelled grenades or roadside bombs almost every time they drive the Pech River road by the mouth of the Korengal Valley, about three miles from the Nangalam base.
"We've got to find a solution," Lt. Col. Tuley warned Afghan army and police commanders over dinner in Nangalam in October. "One day I won't be here anymore." —Ziaulhaq Sultani and Habib Khan Totakhil in Kabul contributed to this article.
Roadside Bomb Kills 11 in Western Afghanistan
By ROD NORDLAND The New York Times November 8, 2011
KABUL, Afghanistan — Afghan officials said Tuesday that insurgents once again attacked during the Id al-Adha holiday, killing 11 people, most of them civilians.
The attack on Monday was the second major attack against civilians during the three-day holiday, despite a holiday message from the Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, that called on his followers to avoid civilian casualties. Eight people were killed on Sunday by a suicide bomber outside a mosque in Baghlan Province in the north.
In Monday’s attack in Badghis Province, in western Afghanistan, insurgents set off a roadside bomb targeting a police truck filled with officers and their family members, who were visiting relatives during the afternoon, said the provincial governor, Delbar Jan Arman.
Of the 11 people killed, only two were police officers; among the dead were six children, ranging in age from 2 months to 12 years, and two women, Mr. Arman said. Three people were wounded, two of them police officers and one a child.
The attack was confirmed in a statement by the Interior Ministry. Mr. Arman blamed the Taliban, which had been active in the area of the attack, Qadis District.
According to United Nations figures, 75 percent of all civilian casualties in the past year were caused by insurgents, compared with 16 percent attributed to NATO and government forces.
Mullah Omar’s unusually strong statement on Friday condemning civilian casualties caused by the insurgents called on those who did so intentionally to be punished. The attacks during the Id al-Adha holiday raised questions about whether Taliban leaders were able to control their followers in some parts of the country.
Jawad Sukhanvar contributed reporting.
Will Afghans embrace lasting peace
by Abdul Haleem
KABUL, Nov. 8 (Xinhua) -- Two consecutive suicide attacks and series of anti-government militants-related violent incidents during Eidul-Adha -- the Muslims' largest annual festival in Afghanistan have put into questions the prospect of the ongoing peace efforts in the militancy-plagued nation.
"I personally have lost my hope to see viable peace in my country. To be frank, the suicide attacks in the first and second day of Eidul Adha in Baghlan province have shuttered my hope for better future," Abdul Aziz, 53, told Xinhua.
A relatively peaceful province Baghlan, 160 km north of Afghan capital city Kabul, had experienced bloody attacks on the first and second days of Eidul Adha, since Nov. 6 this year.
In the first attack happened on Sunday when the worshipers were coming out from a mosque in Hasantal village, 20 km north of Baghlan's provincial capital Pul-e-Khumri, a suicide bomber blew himself up leaving seven people dead and injuring 17 others, mostly civilians, according to officials.
The second suicide attack took place a day later on Monday when a man strapped explosive device blew himself up in provincial capital Pul-e-Khumri killing himself and injuring six others including five police and a civilian.
According to religious leaders, Eidul Adha is the time for reconciliation, peace, unity and strengthening brotherhood among the Muslims.
"It is the time to forgive and reconcile with your brothers, visit their houses and boost brotherhood," a prayer leader Mawlawi Habibullah said in his sermon in a Kabul mosque on Sunday.
The bloody attacks in Baghlan province occurred amid government's efforts to achieve peace through dialogue with the Taliban outfit.
Taliban elusive supreme leader Mullah Mohammad Omar also in his message, released on the eve of Eidul Adha, had called upon his fighters to avoid harming civilians during military operations.
"The Mujahideen (holy warriors) have to take every step to protect the lives and wealth of ordinary people in accordance with their religious responsibility," Omar who has escaped the U.S.-led military campaign over the past decade said in the message.
Attacks in Baghlan on Eidul Adha holidays, is not alone the offensive that has claimed the lives of Afghans in the war-torn country.
Over a dozen people including six civilians, six militants and three policemen have also been killed in the violent incidents particularly in roadside bombings during Eidul Adha holidays elsewhere in Afghanistan, according to officials.
Although the officials are hopeful to achieve peace through negotiation with the Taliban, ordinary Afghans are skeptical.
"Likewise the present government, the past regimes had also strove hard to achieve peace through dialogue with the armed oppositions but all in vain and the ongoing peace efforts will be ended too in fiasco," a 58 years old retired army officer and serving taxi driver Karimullah Khan said.
Expressing his view with regard to the peace efforts, the dejected Khan said "anyone ruled Kabul over the past three decades had offered talks to the armed oppositions holding sway in the countryside but none has yielded the desired outcome. The undergoing peace efforts would bear no fruit."
The war-battered but peace-thirsty Afghans have fed up with the continued militancy. However, no sign of end in the conflict is visible in the near future as Taliban leader Mullah Omar in his message on the eve of Eidul Adha repeated his resolve for the continuation of Jihad or holy war till the pull out of NATO-led troops from Afghanistan, a condition unacceptable to both the international community and the Afghan government at the moment.
A Calm Guide to Afghan Chaos Moves On
The New York Times By ADAM B. ELLICK November 7, 2011
The New York Times lost its longest-tenured journalist in Afghanistan in October. While foreign reporters rotate in and out of the country, Waheed Abdul Wafa was a perennial mainstay, dedicating his life to telling stories about a war that the rest of the world is becoming increasingly immune to.
Waheed was an incorruptible, earnest, chain-smoking reporter — and a devout Muslim — who reported across frontlines and around landmines. His job was akin to that of an elementary school teacher, guiding the Times’s Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters through the dizzying landscape of Afghan politics, religion and tradition.
Waheed wasn’t killed on the job, unlike some of his colleagues, including his best friend, Sultan Munadi, who died while reporting a story for The Times in 2009.
Waheed, like so many Americans, simply had enough of the news from Afghanistan. At 34, he left The Times to become an executive in the nonprofit sector.
His cinematic narrative — an uneducated refugee who crossed Taliban checkpoints as the Americans started bombing in 2001 to a Times journalist and Harvard scholar when he was awarded a Neiman Foundation fellowship — often distorted the view of those of us who worked with him in Afghanistan. Waheed, a lanky and calming man with movie-star eyes, made us unrealistically optimistic about a war with no end in sight. David Rohde, a former Times correspondent who hired Waheed in 2001, called it “The Waheed Effect.”
Waheed occupied the ambiguous space of translator, reporter, interview booker, cultural interpreter, security consultant and office bookkeeper.
He persuaded the first Afghans released from Guantánamo to agree to an interview, which also meant persuading Afghan intelligence officials. He was fast and fearless to the scene of car bombings, often arriving before the police. By 2009, he covered President Hamid Karzai’s re-election campaign without a foreign reporter. “I was always scared of the responsibility I had at The New York Times,” he said recently. “That fear was in my heart.”
A Journalist Is Born
His story is a lesson in ambition and timing. In 2001, as the Americans invaded, Waheed, then 24, was working as a de-miner, a dangerous job with one big advantage: a $100 month salary that supported all nine members of his extended family. Radio rumors surfaced about some fallen buildings in New York City, and long before anyone in Afghanistan understood the meaning of Sept. 11, bombs started falling around Kabul.
Waheed’s de-mining job was promptly terminated. He was desperate for money. If things worsened, he knew it would cost a fortune to smuggle his family to safety. He decided to cross the frontline of the war, 40 miles north of Kabul. He had heard foreign journalists were there, and they badly needed translators.
October 2001 was a perilous time to travel north. Angry and edgy, the Taliban still manned most checkpoints, and they would be especially suspicious of Waheed because he was from Panjshir, a province aligned with the American-backed Northern Alliance that was stampeding toward Kabul.
Guided by his impeccable instincts, Waheed jumped in a shared taxi with a large family, which he hoped would make him seem less suspicious. They drove past Taliban fighters frantically digging trenches. This was good news, he thought. With the Northern Alliance approaching, the Taliban were no longer securing the checkpoints that tormented Waheed for years.
That afternoon, Waheed reached the district of Jabul Siraj, where he found a Newsday correspondent named Matthew McAllester, who quoted him as a Kabul refugee in one story.
Waheed became frightened as the photographer, Moises Saman, snapped a series of pictures.
“How come this guy is taking pictures?” Waheed recalled. “How can he take more than 32 shots? I didn’t know anything about digital cameras.”
He also didn’t know anything about journalism. He “hated” the only journalists he had ever met: propagandists at state radio and television stations in Kabul. Mr. McAllester knew Mr. Rohde was looking for a translator. By evening, Waheed had a job.
“For a few days, I was completely confused,” he said. “I thought the reporters were collecting information so the military could enter Kabul. I thought they were all spies.”
He would be on the other side of that thought for much of the next decade. Afghans are deeply suspicious of foreigners, after having been cheated by so many throughout their history. As a result, foreign correspondents rely on Afghans like Waheed who are deft at the intricate courtesies so vital in Afghan culture.
That fall, Waheed, Mr. Rohde and Tyler Hicks, a Times staff photographer, lived and worked on the frontlines, embedded with the Northern Alliance. One day, Mr. Rohde and Mr. Hicks asked a commander if they could accompany an armored personal carrier that was headed to attack a Taliban post. Waheed did not believe the Times journalists would actually go. The commander warned them that if they went, they would die. Waheed persuaded the commander to allow them to go, but at first, he didn’t realize he’d be going with them, too.
“I must confess, I was so scared,” he said. “But I thought if this guy from America is going to go, I thought it will be very cowardly for me not to go, too. I was more scared because I knew there were mines everywhere.”
That night, Waheed watched quietly as Mr. Rohde filed this story, and Mr. Hicks transmitted this iconic photograph to New York.
By the time the paper was printed, an Afghan journalist was born.
“I will never forget that,” Waheed said. “I didn’t know the importance of these stories, but this made me realize it.” The next morning they drove to Kabul, where Waheed would report more than 300 stories over the next decade.
Dangerous Access, Vital Stories
I recently asked Waheed to share his favorite stories, and in classic Afghan fashion, he hesitated awkwardly. “Well, I’m not personally proud of anything,” he said.
As I pressed him to reflect on his career, he shared a few stories that showed how deeply conscious he is of the plight of ordinary Afghans. He wanted to be clear, however, that he was not bragging. These were just stories he would never forget.
In 2001, he brought Mr. Rohde to a Qaeda house in Kabul, which was littered with bomb-making materials and documents.
“Waheed is responsible for every one of those documents,” Mr. Rohde said. “The house was six blocks from where he lived. He knew where all the Arabs lived, and he was fearless in taking me there.”
He also reported with Carlotta Gall about Americans torturing Afghans. It was around the time of the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal in Iraq, and no one knew if torture was also commonplace in Afghanistan. Waheed identified one case in particular and traveled to Paktika Province to investigate the details, as well as to ensure the area’s safety so that he could return with Ms. Gall.
“We always joked that Waheed would become a minister, and we’d be begging him for an interview,” Ms. Gall said.
Waheed also mentioned a story he reported with the Times’s John F. Burns about a tall Afghan man the Americans killed because they suspected he was with a group of suspected Qaeda leaders. His height incited speculation that he might be Osama bin Laden, but in fact, he was a villager collecting scrap metal, netting $2 a day. Locals saw the event as American theater.
“We saw kids crying on his grave, and we sent that image to the world,” Waheed said. “If we didn’t go there, nobody would’ve done that story.”
Trips outside of Kabul are taken with extreme caution. When foreign reporters ask Afghan fixers if a place is safe, fixers will dismissively say “yes.” It is rarely a calculated, well-informed decision. I asked Waheed, who was never kidnapped, about his perfect track record.
“Honestly, you don’t know if a place is safe,” he said. “People, not places, kill you.”
His Country’s Future
In 2009, The Times trained a handful of Afghans print reporters in video. They had never touched a video camera, and most still haven’t, except Waheed, who filed several of his own videos, including this one about Kabul’s annual Ashura festival, in which Shiite Muslims whip themselves until they bleed.
In many of my videos, he charmed Afghans into talking on camera. It was especially impressive when reporting on women, who traditionally avoid the camera. The best example is this one about widows.
In another one about skateboarding, Waheed sealed permission to film two female skaters after a quick lunch with their father.
When I reported about the spike in Afghans seeking asylum in 2009, within one day, Waheed had persuaded two smugglers to talk about their illegal livelihood. One of them provided a memorable quote:
“In this government, three things work very well: relations, money and acquaintances. When these three exist, anyone can get what they want.”
For years, Waheed believed Western leaders could teach the Afghan government a better way. Islam, he said, teaches one to be hopeful. But his time living in the United States would test those convictions.
Last year at Harvard, he met a former C.I.A. agent who looked Waheed in the eye and said, “We can’t do anything more in your country.”
“That was my biggest lesson in 10 years,” Waheed said. “No one else can give us peace. Afghans should do something.”
Waheed had a difficult adjustment during his year in the United States. He was never enamored with this country. At first, he was baffled by the concept of a babysitter: trusting a stranger with his daughter seemed odd. Also, he missed his mother, who has been fighting off blindness since 2002. She can see in one eye today only because Waheed financed 12 trips to Pakistan and India for treatments.
So I decided to invite Waheed to my family’s Thanksgiving dinner. Some of the customs, like when my mother embraced him, slightly rattled him. But he bonded with my uneducated, inquisitive 87-year-old grandfather, offering him a lesson in Afghan culture.
Waheed purposefully noted how he gave his entire salary to his father, his oldest male relative. My grandfather responded: “I don’t like nothin’ about your culture, except that you hand over your money to the oldest man in the family. You should teach my grandson that.”
After his year at Harvard, I asked Waheed what he thought of my country. He said friends and family relationships were not as tight as they were in Afghanistan, as anyone who has been to both places will concur. Then, he said: “It’s a great place for you guys. Just not for us.”
I hope that one day I can say the same thing about his homeland.
British troops plan larger role in Helmand to cover US withdrawal
UK armed forces to patrol larger area in southern Afghan province but a return to Sangin ruled out
Guardian.co.uk By Nick Hopkins Monday 7 November 2011
British forces are planning to take responsibility for a larger area of Helmand province to cover parts affected by the withdrawal of thousands of US troops from Afghanistan.
Increasing the so-called "battlespace" will not lead to more British troops being sent to the region, but it will mean the 9,000 personnel still in the province will be spread more thinly.
One area the UK is unlikely to return to is Sangin, where 99 British troops died during some of the bloodiest fighting after the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.
It is thought British officials have made clear to the top brass at US Central Command (Centcom) that this would be a PR disaster in the UK, reviving memories of the initial deployment to Afghanistan, which left a small number of troops trying to secure a vast territory overrun with Taliban insurgents.
Military planners have known since the summer that the Americans are likely to cut the number of US marines in Helmand, as part of the 27,000 personnel that Barack Obama pledged to return home by September 2012. There are 20,000 US marines in Helmand, but the US is considering slashing that to 6,000 – one Marine Air Ground Task Force (MAGTF) unit.
British troops would have to extend operations outside the central areas around the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, and move further south and north.
"No figures for the pullout of US marines have been finalised," a Whitehall source said. "Washington and Centcom are discussing this now and we are waiting to hear from them. We have a good dialogue with them.
"Some rejigging of the boundaries in Helmand is likely to happen, but it is very unlikely British troops will end up back in Sangin. The US marines are there now and it is likely they will remain there. That area is much quieter now than it was."
There will be concern within the MoD that the British do not get overstretched just as Nato forces are pulling out. The insurgents have been successfully using IEDs to target police and army commanders - on Sunday, a roadside mine in Helmand killed a district police chief and two bodyguards.
UK troops will have ended all combat operations in Afghanistan by the end of 2014. Obama has ordered a sharp reduction of US troops in Afghanistan next year, but neither the US or the British have set out their drawdown plans for 2013-14.
A small number of British personnel will be stationed in Kabul after 2014 to help the Afghans run an officers' academy based on Sandhurst.
British forces may retain no official presence beyond 2014 in Helmand – a province in which they have lost nearly 400 civilian and military personnel.
The MoD said on Monday night the UK had not been told whether British forces would have to operate "outside their present area of operations".
A spokesman added: "However, we, like our ISAF partners, keep force levels in Afghanistan under constant review. As the prime minister has stated, UK forces will reduce to 9,000 by the end of 2012 and UK troops will no longer be in a combat role by the end of 2014. Until then, UK forces, alongside our Afghan and international partners, remain committed to helping build the capacity and capability of Afghan security forces to allow them to increasingly take lead responsibility for their own security."
The total number of British soldiers killed in Afghanistan since 2001 stands at 384 – 340 died in hostile action.
As well as a military pull-out, British civilians working in the Provincial Reconstruction Team, led by Michael O'Neill, are also starting a slow withdrawal that will be complete by the end of 2014.
DEBATE PREP: Is this the only path to victory in Afghanistan?
CNN By AEI's Frederick Kagan, Special to CNN November 7th, 2011
What do we need to achieve in Afghanistan in order to protect the security of the United States and its allies?
That core question should shape any discussion of our strategy in Afghanistan or the resources we devote to executing it. But that question is too often obscured.
Many say that pursuing any kind of “success” in Afghanistan, the supposed “graveyard of empires,” is sheer folly. Others say that is has become irrelevant, and that the death of Osama bin Laden has deprived the war in Afghanistan of continued meaning.
These facile assertions produce more palatable answers, but do not answer the core question. Presidents and candidates for president owe Americans a clear and cogent answer, at least, as well as an explanation for how their proposed strategy that they lay out will accomplish the requirements for American security.
President Obama identified a number of reasons for the American presence in Afghanistan in his December 2009 speech announcing both the surge of forces there and the strategy that those forces would pursue—the strategy that continues in effect to this day. The clearest articulation of American interest in Afghanistan he offered was this one:
“This is the epicenter of violent extremism practiced by al Qaeda. It is from here that we were attacked on 9/11, and it is from here that new attacks are being plotted as I speak. This is no idle danger; no hypothetical threat. In the last few months alone, we have apprehended extremists within our borders who were sent here from the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan to commit new acts of terror. And this danger will only grow if the region slides backwards, and al Qaeda can operate with impunity. We must keep the pressure on al Qaeda, and to do that, we must increase the stability and capacity of our partners in the region.”
He added later in that speech: “We're in Afghanistan to prevent a cancer from once again spreading through that country.”
President Obama dismissed the notion that Afghanistan is simply another Vietnam.
“And most importantly, unlike Vietnam, the American people were viciously attacked from Afghanistan, and remain a target for those same extremists who are plotting along its border,” he said in that 2009 speech.
He rejected the notion that targeted strikes alone could defeat al Qaeda: “To abandon this area now - and to rely only on efforts against al Qaeda from a distance - would significantly hamper our ability to keep the pressure on al Qaeda, and create an unacceptable risk of additional attacks on our homeland and our allies.”
He thus articulated a series of objectives achievement of which, he argued, was vital to America’s national security:
“Our overarching goal remains the same: to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and to prevent its capacity to threaten America and our allies in the future. To meet that goal, we will pursue the following objectives within Afghanistan. We must deny al Qaeda a safe haven. We must reverse the Taliban's momentum and deny it the ability to overthrow the government. And we must strengthen the capacity of Afghanistan's security forces and government so that they can take lead responsibility for Afghanistan's future.”
He did announce an 18-month timeline for the start of the withdrawal of the surge forces in Afghanistan, but added, “we will execute this transition responsibly, taking into account conditions on the ground. We'll continue to advise and assist Afghanistan's security forces to ensure that they can succeed over the long haul.”
Some in the White House and outside it, nevertheless, oppose continued efforts in Afghanistan, and thus advocate abandoning the current strategy or reducing force levels below what is needed to execute the mission there. The question they must answer is: What part of the objective President Obama enunciated in December 2009 has become unnecessary? Do we not need to “disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and to prevent its capacity tothreaten America and our allies in the future?” Do we not need to prevent the Taliban from threatening the Afghan government? Do we not need to build the capacity of our partners and allies—including Afghanistan—so that they can take responsibility for Afghanistan’s future, thus preventing the “cancer” that had taken root there from returning? Do we seriously think that the killing of one man, however important, ends the threat to the United States and thus removes the entire region from the list of America’s national security interests?
Above all, if we abandon our current efforts in Afghanistan either by accepting defeat or by declaring success before actually achieving it, what will prevent al Qaeda and its affiliates from re-establishing their bases there and resuming their efforts to attack and kill Americans?
The American people deserve a serious, thoughtful, and detailed answer to those questions from anyone seeking the responsibility to keep them safe.
Kagan is the director of the AEI Critical Threats Project and a former professor of military history at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
US to halve troops in troubled Afghan province
Sydney Morning Herald By Thomas Harding November 8, 2011
THE number of US troops in Helmand is to be halved, leaving British forces to take the lead in the Afghan province, a US general has said.
It is understood that the force of 20,000 US marines in Helmand, which has done much to restore stability, could even be cut to almost a quarter of its strength by September.
But General John Toolan warned that Afghans were ''apprehensive'' after being told that the US strength could drop to below the 9000 British troops in Helmand.
''They like the situation as it is right now,'' he said.
He said that the reduction would mean there would be very few reserves left to deal with Taliban hot spots. ''As we go further down [in numbers], we have less manoeuvre elements,'' the commander of NATO troops in Helmand said.
The withdrawal is part of the reduction ordered by US President Barack Obama, who wants 30,000 out of the 100,000 US troops in Afghanistan to return home next year.
General Toolan said that with Helmand more stable, American troops could be drafted into trouble spots in eastern Afghanistan such as Ghazni province. General Toolan, 57, said he had assured the Afghans that US firepower, intelligence gathering and medical evacuation facilities would remain behind even after the 2014 deadline.
He said: ''Things have improved dramatically but the picture is not all rosy. Afghan security forces are in a good place but very few, if any, are in a position where they can operate totally independently. More time is needed to address the insurgency. We have been able to put a lid on insurgent activities but we need to have a presence so they don't come back next year.''
The general's warnings come as Helmand prepares for an announcement that Afghan security forces will be put in control in at least three of its 12 districts in the next year. The rest are expected to follow in 2013, before the end of the NATO mission a year later.
In northern Afghanistan, a suicide bomber killed eight people during celebrations for the Islamic holiday of Eid al-Adha, defying an admonition by the Taliban's leader not to attack civilians.
Afghan officials said the attack in the Baghlani Jadid district of Baghlan province, which occurred as worshippers left a mosque, was by the Taliban.
Two days earlier, the Taliban's reclusive leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, delivered his annual message for Eid al-Adha, the holiest day of the Islamic year, including a strongly worded statement calling on his followers to refrain from causing civilian casualties.
The victims in the attack on Sunday included three commanders of the militias known as arbakai who appear to have been the targets, according to the provincial governor, Munshi Abdul Majid. The other people killed, as well as the 18 wounded, were civilians, he said. One bomber detonated his explosive vest, but people in the crowd jumped on a second would-be bomber and immobilised him, Mr Abdul Majid said.
Although the Taliban have carried out numerous attacks in which civilians have been the only victims, attacking on the Eid holiday so soon after a major pronouncement by Mullah Omar would be unusual.
The attack may also be an indication of the weakening control of Mullah Omar and other traditional Taliban leaders as the movement fragments under a sustained campaign by US special forces to kill and capture mid-level commanders.
www.afghanistannewscenter.com