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Merkel Hopes to Change Pakistan’s Mind on Afghan Conference
VOA News November 29, 2011
German Chancellor Angela Merkel says she hopes Pakistan will change its mind about boycotting the upcoming international conference in Bonn on Afghanistan's future.
Ms. Merkel said Tuesday that her government will try to persuade Pakistani officials to change their decision — taken in protest of NATO airstrikes that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers last week in a Pakistani-Afghan border region.
The Pakistani decision to boycott next week's conference was announced earlier Tuesday. U.S. and Afghan officials had urged Pakistan to attend the forum, which is aimed at developing a strategy to stabilize neighboring Afghanistan as coalition forces withdraw in the coming years.
The top U.S. military officer said Monday Pakistan is justified in being angry about the NATO airstrikes that struck several Pakistani border posts on Saturday. But he declined to apologize, citing the need for an investigation.
In an interview with British television network ITV, U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Martin Dempsey said Islamabad has a “reason to be furious” that the weapons that killed the Pakistani troops were the “ordnance of a partner.”
But he appealed for patience from Pakistan to “find out what happened.” The airstrikes hit Pakistani positions in an area of poorly-marked and disputed borders between Afghanistan's Kunar province and Pakistan's Mohmand tribal region.
The U.S. military said Monday an Air Force general will lead an investigation of the incident and compile an initial report by December 23. The military says Brigadier General Stephen Clark will work with representatives of NATO and the Afghan and Pakistani governments.
NATO and Afghan officials say their troops called in NATO airstrikes in response to incoming fire from areas near the Pakistani border posts. Pakistan denies this, accusing NATO and Afghan officials of making excuses.
In a report published Tuesday, the Associated Press quotes unnamed U.S. officials as saying military investigators believe Taliban militants attacked a U.S.-Afghan patrol in the border region to try to create confusion and draw U.S. and Pakistani forces into firing on each other.
Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani said Monday relations with the United States are no longer “business as usual.” In an interview with U.S. television network CNN, Mr. Gilani said Pakistan is not receiving “mutual respect.”
The Pakistani government also has responded to the incident by shutting down NATO's Pakistani supply routes into Afghanistan and ordering U.S. personnel to evacuate an air base in Baluchistan province within two weeks. Experts believe the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency has been using the Shamsi air base to launch drones that patrol and fire missiles on militant targets in Pakistani-Afghan border regions.
In his interview, General Dempsey said U.S.-Pakistani relations are “on about as rocky a road as I have seen.” But, he said the situation is not irretrievable and military-to-military ties remain “solid” due to common interests such as fighting terrorism.
Afghans say commando unit was attacked before airstrike was called on Pakistan
Washington Post By Karen DeYoung and Joshua Partlow Tuesday, November 29, 2011
The latest U.S.-Pakistan crisis threatened Monday to undo months of efforts to mend an increasingly frayed relationship and to undermine the Obama administration’s strategy for gradually ending the war in Afghanistan.
Administration officials did not respond to Pakistani demands for an apology for the cross-border U.S. airstrike that killed at least 24 Pakistani soldiers early Saturday. Instead, they expressed condolences for the loss of life while saying that the facts about what happened were under investigation.
Both sides said they believed they were attacking insurgents along the border. A senior Pakistani defense official acknowledged that Pakistani troops fired first, sending a flare, followed by mortar and machine-gun fire, toward what he said was “suspicious activity” in the brush-covered area below their high-altitude outpost barely 500 yards from the border.
According to Afghan security officials, their commandos were engaged with U.S. Special Operations troops in a nighttime raid against suspected Taliban insurgents when they came under cross-border fire and called in an airstrike.
Despite extensive coordination mechanisms set up to prevent such encounters, the U.S. military failed to respond to Pakistani alerts that its troops were being bombed, said the Pakistani defense official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the issue on the record.
“We told them, hold your horses, these are ours,” the official said. While repeated urgent appeals went up the coalition chain of command, he said, the airstrike continued for an hour and a half against two Pakistani border positions and a contingent of troops.
Administration and U.S. defense officials raised the possibility of a different set of circumstances but declined to elaborate. “Where we are is that we’ve regretted the loss of life and said there should be an investigation,” said a U.S. official who agreed to speak about the tense situation only on the condition of anonymity. “We've just got to put one foot in front of the other here.”
The Pentagon placed the U.S. Central Command in charge of the inquiry, and Centcom’s commander, Gen. James N. Mattis, announced Monday that a Special Operations officer would head it. Air Force Brig. Gen. Stephen Clark was directed to include representatives of NATO and the Pakistani and Afghan governments on the investigation team and to report his conclusions by Dec. 23.
The investigation, however, risked being overtaken by events in Pakistan, where the government and military commanders are under strong pressure from the increasingly anti-American Pakistani public and the ranks of the army to end counterterrorism cooperation with the United States.
“You cannot win any war without the support of the masses,” Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani told CNN. “We need the people with us.” Gilani said that “business as usual” with the United States could not continue.
Pakistan has blocked NATO supplies transiting to Afghanistan at two border crossings and threatened to withdraw from an international conference on Afghanistan next week in Germany. A small contingent of U.S. personnel at Shamsi air base in southern Pakistan was told to leave within 15 days.
Additional measures are expected to be announced after a Pakistani cabinet meeting Tuesday.
Relations were already fractured after a series of clashes this year, including the January shooting death of two Pakistanis in Lahore by a CIA contractor, the U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in May and public U.S. charges that Pakistan’s intelligence service has aided Afghan insurgent networks within its borders.
“You crawl back” from those incidents, the U.S. official said, “and then there is this. There is no question, this is the worst.”
The administration views Pakistani cooperation as crucial to its hopes of bringing Afghan insurgents to the negotiating table within the next year and developing a regional trade zone that could ultimately allow Afghanistan’s economy to prosper without massive foreign aid.
“This imperfect partnership is no longer enough to save Afghanistan,” said Moeed Yusuf, South Asia adviser at the U.S. Institute of Peace. He said President Obama’s plans to withdraw nearly 100,000 combat troops between next month and the end of 2014 require “an almost perfect coordination effort” with other elements of the administration’s strategy.
“I just don’t see how this is going to happen,” Yusuf said.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta issued a joint statement of condolence over the deaths, and CIA Director David H. Petraeus telephoned his Pakistani counterpart Sunday. “Our side says they don’t know the facts,” said a second U.S. official, who also declined to discuss the matter on the record. “The facts are undoubtedly that somebody messed up on both sides.”
A former U.S. official who closely follows events in the region said the Pakistani army’s 11th Corps command near the western border was informed that coalition operations would take place Friday night and Saturday morning in the Maya area of Afghanistan’s Konar province. Pakistan says no such notification was given.
Afghan security officials said Monday that the Special Operations mission was targeting training bases and hideouts of Taliban fighters. Insurgents there had regularly fired at a U.S. base in the area in the past, the officials said.
The Afghan officials said the coalition troops came under fire from the vicinity of the Pakistani bases, located in the Mohmand tribal areas, and they called in airstrikes in self-defense.
One senior Afghan police official said that after an initial gun battle, the insurgents retreated into a Pakistani post and began firing from there. “They started firing at the commandos, and they continued firing, so the air support had to come to their defense,” the official said.
The Pakistani defense official offered a sequence of events that differed in key aspects.
The Pakistani post, called Volcano, is clearly marked on grids shared with Afghan and coalition forces and flies the Pakistani flag. Its mission, the official said, is to prevent the return of Afghan insurgents that Pakistan has driven over the border. “We have repeatedly sensitized our friends [in Afghanistan] to this situation and asked their cooperation,” the official said.
Early Saturday, he said, Volcano “detected suspicious activity — sound and movement — in the vicinity. They are sitting there for the express purpose of stopping infiltration, so what do they do? They fire a few flares, a couple of mortar rounds and one or two bursts of heavy machine-gun fire in that direction.”
The Pakistani official added that “there was no return fire” from the ground. He dismissed suggestions by U.S. officials that the subsequent strike on Volcano and another post by U.S. attack helicopters and helicopter gunships was a case of mistaken identity provoked by Taliban forces in the area.
Even if the attack began that way, he said, “within a maximum of 10 or 15 minutes” the Americans should have known they were Pakistani military posts.
Partlow reported from Kabul. Staff writer Karin Brulliard in Islamabad, Pakistan, and special correspondents Sayed Salahuddin and Javed Hamdard in Kabul, Shaiq Hussain in Islamabad, and Haq Nawaz Khan in Peshawar contributed to this report.
How to win in Afghanistan
The Washington Post, 29/11/2011 By Ronald E. Neumann
The latest U.S.-Pakistan confrontation on the Afghanistan border underscores what could become a recurring problem if we do not learn how to manage the tension between working with Pakistan and taking stronger action against insurgent sanctuaries in that country. The U.S. effort in Afghanistan is making progress, but on the current timeline it is likely to fail if sanctuaries remain inviolable.
On my most recent trip to Afghanistan I found improvement. The Afghan army is growing and will be better by 2014. Insurgent expansion into the north has been contained. District and provincial government positions are being filled. Despite periodic high-profile attacks, the Taliban was unable to disrupt a recent three-day gathering of more than 2,000 Afghan notables in Kabul. If time and money were unlimited, this progress would be reassuring. But they are not.
The United States relied on building Afghan forces to handle remaining violence but the buildup began only in 2009. The Obama administration now has withdrawal written all over it; aid is declining and troops are leaving. We don’t even know how many troops President Obama will leave in 2013.
As time runs out, do we soldier on with little chance of success? Or do we pull out, watch a civil war destabilize South and Central Asia, and ignore the neighborhood’s further radicalization as Pakistan seeks to dominate Afghanistan? Al-Qaeda may well return, along with the Taliban.Evidence of tight links between the two is increasing. Someone with access to material from Osama bin Laden’s computers told me that even he was surprised at how tightly they were coordinating. The options — muddling along or quitting — are unpalatable.
There is, however, a third choice: becoming more confrontational toward Pakistan while understanding that destabilizing a nuclear-armed nation that is much larger than Afghanistan is absolutely not in our interest. That is why we should not use sanctions, cut off aid or designate Pakistan a terrorist state. We need to recognize that Pakistan has multiple goals, only some of which are opposed to ours. Like us, Pakistan wants to control extremism within its borders and has lost several thousand soldiers combating domestic militants without winning a decisive victory. It may not have the capacity to defeat those enemies, let alone the militants it protects in the hope of one day securing its interests in Afghanistan. This is why solely pressuring Pakistan to act in ways it neither wants nor is capable of is not likely to succeed or help our interests.
The alternative is to begin going directly after the sanctuaries — not all at once but slowly, with increasing missile and air attacks. The aim would be to degrade them, put militants on the run, disrupt the serenity of leaders who send their forces into battle while they remain safe, and make clear that Pakistan cannot safely retain the insurgent card for later use. We should press Pakistan to aid the effort while expecting an angry initial reaction. Truck convoys would get burned; the Afghan border would be closed, at least temporarily , as it is now. We would have to prepare to answer such measures with even more attacks, including hitting the sanctuaries in Baluchistan (despite Pakistan’s vehement objections) to show our resolve. Islamabad might ban the flights that bring our munitions to Afghanistan. One answer would be to fly anyway with fighter escorts.
This policy would be highly dangerous. Pakistan’s military will not bend easily. Its support for Afghan militants is as deeply embedded as the conviction that only such allies can prevent Afghanistan from becoming an existential threat. To control tension with Pakistan we would need attacks in the border areas over time — not a one-time strike or ground invasion and certainly not hitting Pakistani troops — and do it while maintaining economic assistance and other help to Pakistan. Both confrontation and assistance have to be maintained, with care on which is emphasized at any particular moment. The quiet message to the Pakistani military would be: It’s your choice — you can stay in power and we’ll help you, but if the sanctuaries aren’t brought under control we’re going to hit them harder, even if that causes you pain.
This policy would not solve the poor governance in Afghanistan, a separate, critical issue that we will not get to if we lose on the battlefield. And this approach could leave Afghanistan and Pakistan in turmoil. It is not an approach I advocated when I was in Afghanistan — when our time horizons seemed longer — or one I would choose now if Washington had the will to remain engaged. But would its risks be worse than losing after 10 years of war, being faced down by a small, vicious group of insurgents allied to al-Qaeda and watching the whole area in chaos for years? Top military and civilian officials in Afghanistan say the option is to defeat sanctuaries and succeed, or ignore them and lose. Our choices are that stark.
Ronald E. Neumann was U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan from 2005 to 2007 and is the author of “The Other War: Winning and Losing in Afghanistan.”
NATO to Retrain All Troops in Afghanistan in Protecting Civilians
VOA News November 29, 2011
NATO's top commander in Afghanistan has ordered tens of thousands of troops to be retrained in the coming days in how to avoid civilian casualties during counter-insurgency operations.
U.S. General John Allen announced the retraining program in a letter to Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who has frequently complained about deaths and injuries to Afghan civilians caught in the crossfire of NATO operations against Taliban militants. A U.S. military official confirmed the letter and its contents in an email sent to VOA on Tuesday.
In the letter, General Allen says NATO forces will aggressively pursue retraining in methods of employing force against insurgents while protecting Afghan civilians. He ordered all NATO units to complete the retraining by Monday. NATO has about 140,000 troops in Afghanistan fighting a 10-year-long Taliban insurgency, with around 100,000 of those from the United States.
Meanwhile, Afghan officials say a NATO mortar attack on Sunday killed three women and injured at least one child in the Zhari district of Afghanistan's southern province of Kandahar. Last week, an airstrike targeting insurgents killed six children and one adult in the same area.
NATO troop commanders say Taliban and other insurgents regularly use Afghan civilians as human shields while attacking coalition and Afghan security forces and officials.
Afghan security transition will succeed: NATO
KABUL, Nov. 29 (Xinhua) -- The process of security transition from NATO-led Coalition forces to Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) will be a successful process, a NATO spokesman said on Tuesday.
"NATO is confident the transition process will succeed," NATO civilian representative spokesman Dominic Medley told reporters in a joint weekly press briefing here.
"Beyond 2014 NATO aims for a strong and lasting partnership between Afghanistan and its international partners: the end of transition is a stage in a shared journey, not the end of it," Medley added.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Sunday said that the Afghan police and army will take full control of six provinces including Balkh, Takhar, Daikundi, Samangan, Kabul and Nimroz provinces in the second phase of security transition.
According to the Karzai announcement, ANSF will also take responsibility of security from NATO forces in country's seven provincial capitals and over 40 districts in different provinces in near future.
"NATO will keep the commitment to training and supporting the Afghan security forces throughout the transition process and beyond," Medley said.
In the first phase of the process, the ANSF took control of seven areas in different parts of the country in July this year.
The process of taking over security from over 130,000-strong NATO-led ISAF forces by Afghan troops would be completed by the end of 2014 when Afghanistan will take over the full leadership of its own security duties from U.S. and NATO forces.
Regarding the recent NATO cross-border attack, NATO-led ISAF spokesman Brigadier General Carsten Jacobson in the same press conference said, "Repeatedly we have seen insurgents using this situation in their favor, using the border on either side for safe haven for operation and for fire against the other side of the border."
The NATO fighter planes and helicopters had struck two Pakistani border posts in the country's tribal region on early Saturday morning which killed 24 Pakistani troops and wounded 13 others.
40,000 troops to leave Afghanistan by end of 2012
Associated Press By DEB RIECHMANN and SLOBODAN LEKIC 29/11/2011
KABUL, Afghanistan - Drawdown plans announced by the U.S. and more than a dozen other nations will shrink the foreign military footprint in Afghanistan by 40,000 troops at the close of next year, leaving Afghan forces increasingly on the frontlines of the decade-long war.
The United States is pulling out the most - 33,000 by the end of 2012. That's one-third of 101,000 American troops who were in Afghanistan in June - the peak of U.S. military presence in the war, according to figures provided by the Pentagon.
Others in the 49-nation coalition have announced withdrawal plans too, even as they insist they are not rushing to leave. Many nations have vowed to keep troops in Afghanistan to continue training the Afghan police and army in the years to come. And many have pledged to keep sending aid to the impoverished country after the international combat mission ends in 2014.
Still, the exit is making Afghans nervous.
They fear their nation could plunge into civil war once the foreign forces go home. Their confidence in the Afghan security forces has risen, but they don't share the U.S.-led coalition's stated belief that the Afghan soldiers and policemen will be ready to secure the entire nation in three years. Others worry the Afghan economy will collapse if foreigners leave and donors get stingy with aid.
Foreign forces began leaving Afghanistan this year.
About 14,000 foreign troops will withdraw by the end of December, according to an Associated Press review of more than a dozen nations' drawdown plans. The United States is pulling out 10,000 service members this year; Canada withdrew 2,850 combat forces this summer; France and Britain will each send about 400 home; Poland is recalling 200; and Denmark and Slovenia are pulling out about 120 combined.
Troop cutbacks will be deeper next year when an estimated 26,000 more will leave. That figure includes 23,000 Americans; 950 Germans; 600 more French; 500 additional Britons; 400 Poles; 290 Belgians; 156 Spaniards; and 100 Swedes.
Gen. James F. Amos, commandant of the Marine Corps, told the AP that the number of Marines in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan will drop "markedly" in 2012, and the role of those who stay will shift from countering the insurgency to training and advising Afghan security forces.
Amos declined to discuss the number of Marines expected to leave in 2012.
There are now about 19,400 Marines in Helmand, and that is scheduled to fall to about 18,500 by the end of this year.
"Am I OK with that? The answer is `yes,'" Amos said. "We can't stay in Afghanistan forever."
"Will it work? I don't know. But I know we'll do our part."
Additional troop cuts or accelerated withdrawals are possible.
Many other countries, including Hungary, Finland and Italy, are finalizing their withdrawal schedules. Presidential elections in Europe and the European debt crisis also could speed up pullout plans. Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard said this week that Australia's training mission could be completed before the 2014 target date.
Back in June, then-U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said that when the Obama administration begins pulling troops from Afghanistan, the U.S. will resist a rush to the exists, "and we expect the same from our allies." Gates said it was critically important that a plan for winding down NATO's combat role by the end of 2014 did not squander gains made against the Taliban that were won at great cost in lives and money.
"The more U.S. forces draw down, the more it gives the green light for our international partners to also head for the exits," said Jeffrey Dressler, a senior research analyst at the Institute for the Study of War in Washington. "There is a cyclical effect here that is hard to temper once it gets going."
U.S. Army Lt. Col. Jimmie Cummings Jr. said the cutbacks that have been announced will not affect the coalition's ability to fight the insurgency.
"We are getting more Afghans into the field and we are transferring more responsibility to them in many areas," Cummings said, adding that many leaders of the Taliban, al-Qaida and the Haqqani militant networks have been captured or killed.
Afghan security forces started taking the lead in seven areas in July. They soon will assume responsibility for many more regions as part of a gradual process that will put Afghans in charge of security across the nation by the end of 2014.
Some countries are lobbying to start transition as soon as possible in areas where they have their troops deployed - so they can go home, said a senior NATO official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss transition. The official insisted that those desires were not driving decisions on where Afghan troops are taking the lead. But the official said that because they want to leave, a number of troop-contributing nations faced with declining public support at home have started working harder to get their areas ready to hand off to Afghan forces.
"The big question (after 2014) is if the Afghan security forces can take on an externally based insurgency with support from the Pakistani security establishment and all that entails," Dressler said. "I think they will have a real challenge on their hands if the U.S. and NATO countries do not address Pakistani sponsorship of these groups."
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Lekic reported from Brussels. AP National Security Writer Robert Burns in Helmand contributed to this report.
Indian company wins Afghan iron ore deal
Financial Times By Matthew Green and James Lamont November 28, 2011
Islamabad, New Delhi - Afghanistan has awarded rights to develop a huge iron ore concession to an Indian company, in the latest in a series of deals aimed at opening up the country’s mineral resources to regional powers.
The state-run Steel Authority of India beat competition from several other Indian groups to win three blocks at the Hajigak deposit in central Afghanistan. Kilo Goldmines, a Canadian company mainly active in Africa, also won a block.
Doubts remain over whether these investors will be capable of committing the huge sums needed to start building mine and rail infrastructure from scratch, especially in the uncertain atmosphere in advance of the planned withdrawal of most Nato combat troops by late 2014.
Jalil Jumriany, director of policy in the ministry of mines, told the Financial Times the government expected to finalise negotiations with the two bidders within the next three to four months.
In the short term, the results of the latest tender may do more to cement Afghanistan’s diplomatic ties with India than kick-start large-scale mining.
New Delhi had been confident of securing the deal since Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan’s president, visited India in October to sign a strategic partnership agreement. India is the largest regional aid donor to Afghanistan, which has long been a theatre of India-Pakistan rivalry.
The award may also help the Afghan government to balance the growing commercial influence of China, which won rights to develop the Amu Darya oilfield through state-owned CNPC in September.
China had already become the first large-scale mineral investor in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban regime, when a Chinese consortium won a bid to exploit the vast Aynak copper deposit west of Kabul in 2008. So far, the development has made limited progress.
Both China and India are venturing into increasingly risky territory in search of raw materials to feed their growing economies, but there are questions over how quickly – if at all – their Afghan projects may be realised.
Any large-scale mining development in Afghanistan faces great obstacles, not least the need to invest billions of dollars in building railways to export the ore through tough terrain contested by insurgents.
Despite such challenges, India says it is proposing to build a steel mill to process some of the ore, while exporting the rest via a planned rail link to Uzbekistan or via a road it has recently built to Iran.
The Hajigak deposit contains an estimated 1.8bn tonnes of iron ore, according to the government, which bases the figure on a survey carried out in the 1960s.
Finland to reduce peacekeeping troops in Afghanistan
HELSINKI, Nov. 29 (Xinhua) -- Finland will reduce its peacekeeping troops in Afghanistan, the Finnish government said on Tuesday.
At present, Finland has 195 peacekeeping soldiers serving in the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) mission in Afghanistan.
Finland would begin to reduce its troops next year by bringing home the additional 50 soldiers deployed in 2010, according to a press release issued by the government.
Finnish President Tarja Halonen discussed the situation in Afghanistan and Finland's participation in military crisis management with the Cabinet Committee on Foreign and Security Policy on Tuesday.
The country's participation in the Afghan mission would focus more on development cooperation, civilian crisis management and training of Afghan security forces, the government said.
Meanwhile, Finland would increase its development funding to Afghanistan and raise it to 20 million euros (26.7 million U.S. dollars) in 2014.
The country would maintain its strong involvement in the European Union's Police Mission in Afghanistan, or EUPOL, the government said.
1 killed, 3 injured in bomb explosion in E. Afghanistan
MEHTARLAM, Afghanistan, Nov. 29 (Xinhua) -- An Afghan civilian was killed and three others injured when a bomb went off in Laghman province with Mehtarlam as its capital, 90 km east of capital city of Kabul, police said on Tuesday.
"A roadside bomb blasted Monday night in Baba Dashti area in vicinity of provincial capital Mehtarlam, leaving a person walking by dead and injuring three others," deputy to provincial police chief Daud Barakzai told Xinhua.
He said the victims were local Kuchi or nomad natives and the injured were shifted to a local hospital by police shortly after the blast occurred.
In a separate incident, three women were killed and two others including a child wounded when a mortar shell hit a house in Nalgham village of Zhari district in country's southern Kandahar province, a police official in the district, Abdul Rasheed told Xinhua.
The police official said the incident happened when one of several mortals, reportedly fired by NATO-led coalition forces to target the insurgents, had accidentally hit a civilian house on Sunday morning.
The Taliban-led insurgency has been rampant since the militant group announced to launch spring offensive from May 1 against Afghan and NATO-led troops stationed in Afghanistan.
A total of 1,462 Afghan civilians were killed in the first half of 2011, a 15 percent rise over the same period of 2010, according to the United Nations mid-year report released in Kabul on July.
Militants Turn to Death Squads in Afghanistan
New York Times By RAY RIVERA, SHARIFULLAH SAHAK and ERIC SCHMITT November 28, 2011
SABARI, Afghanistan - As targeted killings have risen sharply across Afghanistan, American and Afghan officials believe that many are the work of counterintelligence units of the Haqqani militant network and Al Qaeda, charged with killing suspected informants and terrorizing the populace on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
Military intelligence officials say that the units essentially act as death squads and that one of them, a large group known as the Khurasan that operates primarily in Pakistan’s tribal areas, has been responsible for at least 250 assassinations and public executions.
Another group, whose name is not known, works mainly in Afghanistan and may be responsible for at least 20 killings in Khost Province over the summer alone, including a mass beheading that came to light only after a video was found in the possession of a captured insurgent. The video shows 10 headless bodies evenly spaced along a paved road, while their heads sit nearby in a semicircle, their faces clearly visible.
It is another indication that the Haqqanis, a mostly Pakistan-based faction, remain the most dangerous part of an insurgency that makes full use of a porous and often ill-defined border, as the NATO strike that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers over the weekend showed.
Though the circumstances of that strike remain murky, it has now further upset relations between Pakistan and the United States, even as it once again demonstrated how havens inside Pakistan remained a critical part of the insurgent strategy.
The Americans have geared their offensive around bloodying the insurgents as they enter Afghanistan. But the new wave of assassinations shows that, even as NATO portrays the insurgents as a weakening force, the Haqqanis can still assert their influence, not only with headline-grabbing bombings but also through intimidation and by controlling perceptions.
One chilling case attributed to the second death squad came after American forces captured the senior Afghanistan-based leader for the Haqqanis, Hajji Mali Khan, and killed his top deputy this summer. Just days later, the bodies of two men accused of helping the Americans turned up near the village where Mr. Khan was captured. Scalding iron rods had been shoved through their legs. One victim had been disemboweled, and both had been shot through the head and crushed by boulders. Fear shot through the entire village.
“You could hardly recognize them,” said a witness who viewed the bodies.
Across Afghanistan, assassinations have jumped 61 percent, to 131 reported killings, through the first nine months of this year, compared with the same period in 2010, according to NATO statistics. United Nations officials say they began noticing a sharp increase in 2010, with 462 assassinations according to their records, double the number from the previous year. The figures may not include many killings in remote areas, like the mass beheading, because fearful villagers never reported them.
American intelligence officials say the Afghanistan-based group and the Khurasan seem to operate in much the same manner. The Khurasan is believed to have formed in early 2009 in the North Waziristan area of Pakistan, the Haqqanis’ headquarters, in response to intensified drone attacks by the United States. The group is said to wear black clothing with green armbands bearing its full name, Itihad al-Mujahedeen Khurasan, and works closely with Al Qaeda in the region. Estimates of its size range from 100 to 2,000 members.
During his interrogation, Mr. Khan suggested that other weapons were involved in the battle for influence, as well. According to four officials familiar with the questioning, the Haqqani leader told his interrogators that the Taliban had been approaching Afghan government and military officials throughout the summer, persuading them to sign a five-page document secretly pledging their loyalty to the Taliban leadership. Mr. Khan boasted that he had signed up 20 officials himself.
“They tell the officials that the Taliban is going to be back in power within 20 days of NATO leaving, so if they want to live, they’ll sign,” said one of the American officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the classified interrogations. Officials say they have found no confirmation of such oaths, however.
In places like Sabari, a rural district in Khost that sits about a dozen miles from the Pakistan border, the targeted killings are producing their intended effect. After a daylight execution of three men in a bazaar in the village of Maktab about four months ago, shop owners were so traumatized that they never reported the killings to the authorities.
Often, the victims may have had little more than passing encounters with coalition forces, or no involvement at all, according to officials, witnesses, and friends and relatives of victims.
American and Afghan officials learned about the killings only later when a video of the episode was found on a captured insurgent’s cellphone. Even then, American officials who showed the video to a New York Times reporter could cite the place where the killings had taken place but believed that they had occurred in October, about three months after witnesses say the actual episode happened.
The video showed a number of gunmen shooting to death two men as shop owners scrambled for cover. The militants then shot a third man as he sat in a white plastic chair in front of his shop. As the man fell backward, one of the gunmen shot him 10 more times in the face and chest.
“Whoever tries to help the Americans and spies for them will face this,” one of the men shouted after the killings, according to a witness, Ahmadullah, 25, a shop owner who like many Afghans goes by one name.
Ahmadullah said no one dared report it, even the men’s families, who carried the bodies away. “We just had to watch and stand quiet and watch what was happening to these poor people,” he said.
“I knew those men,” he added. “One was just a shop owner, the other two were laborers. They were innocent.”
An American military official who saw the video said he was not surprised that local villagers failed to report the episode.
“People in Sabari are living in abject terror, 24 hours a day,” he said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to publicly discuss the death squad. “When we conduct a raid on a Haqqani leader,” he said, a group of about 15 death-squad members “go in and massacre people.”
Last month, insurgents killed another man in the bazaar, about two days after a night raid in the village by Afghan and American troops. This time the victim was a visiting merchant from Khost City named Nasib, who was pulled out of his car as his 5-year-old son watched from the passenger seat. His abductors dragged him to the bazaar and killed him in broad daylight.
Yet when asked about the killings, the district governor and the local police chief in Sabari said they knew nothing about them. “I totally deny such reports,” said Dawlat Khan Qayoumi, the district governor. “I can tell you in the last five months we have not seen any such incidents.”
Questions also surround the videotaped beheadings. Muhammad Zarin, the commander of a special undercover police unit that has been investigating the death squads, would say only that the men were from Khost and were killed about three months ago in the Mangal area in the province’s mountainous Musa Khel district, where Mr. Khan was active. Neither NATO nor the United Nations, both of which track assassinations, had any record of the mass beheadings, of the Maktab Bazaar killings or of the two men killed after Mr. Khan’s capture, reflecting the intense secrecy with which villagers have guarded the deaths.
After an earlier raid that failed to capture Mr. Khan in the Musa Khel area, coalition forces got a report that three village elders had been kidnapped and three teenagers had been beheaded. “When we went up to investigate, we could never get any bodies or any proof,” said Col. Christopher R. Toner, commander of the First Infantry Division’s Third Brigade Combat Team, based in Khost and Paktia Provinces. “But there was enough going around that I suspect it was true.”
Public health officials likewise say they hear of dozens of such killings but are seldom able to confirm them. “People don’t bring the bodies in to the hospital for fear of the Taliban,” said Dr. Fazal Mohammad Mangal of the Khost provincial hospital.
Zabit Amen Jan, a former Musa Khel resident, has lost four brothers to insurgents, including two students in their 20s whose bullet-ridden bodies were found in June. A hand-scrawled letter found on one of the bodies said the men had ignored repeated warnings to stop working with the coalition forces. “There was no other way except doing this,” the letter said.
Mr. Jan said his younger brothers had no connection to the coalition and were killed only because he and another brother had been involved in politics.
“People used to come to our district for picnics because our area is full of mountains and covered with pine and walnut trees,” he said. “Now people are fleeing to Khost City or Kabul or Pakistan, because there are so many killings and they know the government can’t protect them.”
Ray Rivera reported from Sabari; Sharifullah Sahak from Kabul, Afghanistan; and Eric Schmitt from Washington.
Afghan, NATO forces capture Haqqani network local leader
KABUL, Nov. 29 (Xinhua) -- Afghan and NATO-led forces during a joint operation in Khost province 150 km southeast of Afghan capital Kabul captured a local leader of the Haqqani network on Tuesday, a statement of the alliance released here said.
"A Haqqani network leader was captured by a combined Afghan and coalition security force during an operation in Sabari district, Khost province, today," the statement asserted.
Without giving the name of the arrested man, the statement added that the facilitator distributed roadside bombs and planned attacks against Afghan forces.
Haqqani network is the military wing of Taliban outfit operating in the eastern provinces along the border with Pakistan and the capital city Kabul.
Taliban militants fighting Afghan and NATO-led troops have yet to make comment.
Australia seizes Afghan drug shipment
AFP 29/11/2011
Australian authorities said they had seized drugs worth Aus$30 million ($29.87 mln) concealed in a shipment of red raisins from Afghanistan, the second major drug bust this month.
The operation between Customs and the Australian Federal Police uncovered 97.7 kilograms (215 pounds) of heroin and 118.4 kilograms of pseudoephedrine in a consignment from Iran but believed to have originated in Afghanistan.
It follows the seizure of 300 kilograms of cocaine from a yacht in Queensland state three weeks ago.
"These are the largest seizures of both heroin and pseudoephedrine in the past 12 months," Home Affairs Minister Brendan O'Connor said in a statement on Tuesday.
"This is a significant blow to the heroin and precursor drug trade in Australia."
Police said a 34-year-old Sydney man had been charged with importing a commercial quantity of drugs and was facing a maximum penalty of life imprisonment and a hefty fine.
Customs targeted the consignment, which contained 3,105 cartons declared as "red raisins", for examination earlier this month.
After an x-ray revealed inconsistencies, a powdered substance was discovered hidden inside the linings of the cartons.
In September, agencies seized 271 kilograms of cocaine from a consignment of lawnmowers sent to Melbourne.
The Generals Have No Clothes
Islamabad's generals have been sponsoring the deaths of Americans for years, and yet Obama does nothing. Why?
BY KAPIL KOMIREDDI | NOVEMBER 29, 2011 - FP
Pakistan is indignant about the killing of 25 of its troops in a NATO air raid on Saturday. The circumstances that led to the assault are still unknown, but Washington and Europe have expressed contrition and promised an investigation. Pakistan has every reason to feel angry. But after a suitable period of mourning, shouldn't the United States, in the interests of fairness if nothing else, ask the Pakistani army if it plans ever to apologize for -- or, at bare minimum, acknowledge -- its role in the deaths of hundreds of coalition forces and many more Afghan civilians?
At the start of the 21st century, the United States offered Pakistan a very straightforward ultimatum: Join us in the war against terrorism inaugurated by al Qaeda's attacks on 9/11 -- or find yourself bombed to the Stone Age. In the decade since, Pakistan has arguably been responsible for more American deaths than any other state on earth. Yet Pakistan has not only evaded prosecution for its crimes. In a staggering turn of events, its army has found its program of sponsoring the slaughter of American troops in Afghanistan by the Taliban and al Qaeda amply subsidized by Washington.
One of the most principled voices against the Pakistani army during this time belonged, ironically, to Islamabad's ambassador to Washington. Husain Haqqani was, to repurpose Nirad Chaudhuri's phrase about Pandit Nehru, not only Pakistan's representative to the United States but also the West's ambassador to Pakistan. His resignation, offered and accepted on Tuesday, was ostensibly precipitated by an op-ed last month in the Financial Times by Mansoor Ijaz, an American businessman of Pakistani descent who claimed that an unnamed Pakistani diplomat -- whom he later identified as Haqqani -- had conscripted him in a grand scheme to curb the Pakistani military's power. Together, he alleged, they crafted a memo in which a series of dramatic offers were made to Washington -- among them, the promise to end state patronage of terrorism -- in return for the Obama administration's help in reining in the generals. (Haqqani vigorously denies involvement.)
Inexplicably, Ijaz, the courageous anti-military conspirator, transformed, without a hint of irony, into the army's canary, imperilling Pakistan's besieged civilian government by volunteering transcripts of his alleged exchanges with Haqqani. Pakistan's rightwing media served as his bullhorn, devoting their pages and program to his endless revelations. (Hardly anyone in the West accorded serious attention to Ijaz -- a clownish Croesus addicted to self-elevating fantasies. If only the Clinton administration had given attention to his "deal" with the Sudanese government to extradite Osama bin Laden to the United States, he once bragged, 9/11 would have been averted.)
The author of a devastatingly frank history of Pakistan, Haqqani has the virtue of clarity: He is known to view the army as an impediment to progress in the region. Still, it is stupefying to imagine that a diplomat and scholar of his sophistication would have recruited a pestilent popinjay like Ijaz to deliver a message that he could quite competently have communicated through other channels, or in person. The rapidity with which Ijaz has switched sides, meeting the ISI chief in London last month to handover "evidence" implicating his co-conspirator, strongly suggests that it is Haqqani who is the victim of a conspiracy.
Sherry Rehman, a formidable politician from Sindh, has now replaced Haqqani. But his forced resignation puts an end to the pretence of civilian rule in Pakistan -- and heralds the unapologetically solemn re-takeover of the country by the military-intelligence camorra that spawned the forces of destruction in Afghanistan. So it is astounding that, rather than treating Haqqani's departure as a setback, officials in the Obama administration see it as something of a boon. Haqqani's private criticisms of the Pakistani army led, according to a report in the New York Times, "to a diminishing of his influence in Washington, especially in the White House."
Why would the White House choose to belittle a man championing civilian rule in Pakistan? Isn't that also the objective of the Obama administration? The answer increasingly appears to be no.
Since the 1950s, when Gen. Ayub Khan mounted the first military coup, Pakistan's army has etiolated the country's evolution in every imaginable sense. Rooted in a culture of grievance and malevolence that is the foundational basis of Pakistan, the army has waged wars against India, suffused young minds with a fervor for jihad, sponsored terrorism, spread xenophobia and racism, carried out genocide against millions of its own citizens, stolen and smuggled nuclear secrets, foisted the vile Taliban regime upon the defenseless people of Afghanistan, and assumed complete ownership of Pakistan.
For wars and terrorist violence in South Asia to abate, Pakistan will have to resemble something approaching a normal state. The equation for that is simple: The army must return to the barracks.
Obama had an almost providential opportunity to squeeze the army in the immediate aftermath of bin Laden's discovery in May in the garrison city of Abbottabad. The khakis were at their weakest in four decades. That was the time to bolster civilian rule, to corral the army with fresh ultimatums. Instead, Obama seemed more anxious about pacifying Pakistan for having breached its sovereignty than holding its army to account for harboring bin Laden -- which explains the White House's rush to finesse Amb. Mike Mullen's candid testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee in September.
Then, in a craven abdication of American responsibility to the citizens of Afghanistan, Obama talked about the need for nation-building at home. For a man who attained the presidency by invoking Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi, Obama has rarely displayed any compunction in retreating from battle with men who, given the opportunity, would have lynched King and Gandhi -- indeed men who have presided over the slaughter and torture of too many potential Kings and Gandhis of our age. Could there be a more forceful testament to the failure of Obama's foreign policy in South Asia than the sight of terrorist leader Sirajuddin Haqqani operating with impunity in Pakistan six months after bin Laden's killing?
Rehman, the new Pakistani ambassador, is a socially liberal pro-democracy politician. But disturbingly, and unlike her predecessor, she subscribes to the Pakistani army's view of Afghanistan: Any government in Kabul must be pro-Pakistan. This should hardly seem worth worrying about -- except that "pro-Pakistan," in the context of Afghanistan, means anti-India, anti-America, and, more troublingly, anti-Afghan. Bluntly, it means a Pakistani colony of the pre-2001 variety that hosted bin Laden, not a sovereign state with independent policymaking prerogatives. This explains why an overwhelming majority of Afghans, whenever given the chance, express only the deepest contempt for Pakistan.
The Pakistani army has responded to the NATO attack by blocking supply routes to the coalition forces. It has also issued a notice to close down the U.S.-run airbase in Shamsi. The proportional response to Pakistan's denial of its territory to the United States would be to limit Pakistan's role in Afghanistan. It is the United States that has secured Afghanistan; if Pakistan wants a role, it had better pay its dues. Instead, Washington grovels before Islamabad even as American soldiers die at the hands of Pakistan's clients.
Faced with a re-election campaign, Obama is seeking to obtain a cosmetic "end" to the mission in Afghanistan by cutting deals with the Pakistani army and its clients in the Taliban. This will involve a reduced presence of American troops on the ground, a heightened use of targeted drone strikes, and, to keep this arrangement, bribes to the Pakistan army in the form of vaguely conditional aid. Relations between the United States and Pakistan will return to "normal" in short order. A poltroon deal will be struck with the Taliban chieftains. As the fighters currently enjoying Pakistani hospitality in the country's northwest make their way back into Afghanistan, the gains made over the last decade will wither away. Thus will the tremendous sacrifices, of both American troops and Afghan civilians, be honored. For the citizens of Pakistan and Afghanistan, this will signal the start of yet another prolonged period of violence. President Obama will call it victory.
Russia Threatens To Cut Off NATO Afghanistan Transit
EurasiaNet By Joshua Kucera November 28, 2011
Russia has threatened to cut off NATO supply routes to Afghanistan if the alliance doesn't compromise on its missile defense plans, Moscow's NATO envoy, Dmitry Rogozin, has said. From the Wall Street Journal:
If NATO doesn't give a serious response, "we have to address matters in relations in other areas," Russian news services reported Dmitri Rogozin, ambassador to NATO, as saying. He added that Russia's cooperation on Afghanistan may be an area for review, the news services reported.
This is just the latest in several headaches that the U.S. has had to deal with over the last couple of weeks regarding its supply lines to Afghanistan. First, there was an explosion in Uzbekistan on a line used by the U.S. and NATO, then Pakistan cut off its supply lines in response to a NATO attack that killed 28 Pakistani soldiers. And the flamboyantly nationalist Rogozin rarely misses a chance to kick the U.S. when it's down. (He also gloated, via twitter, that a somewhat threatening statement by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on missile defense last week forced U.S. officers at NATO to go into work on Thanksgiving.)
An expert quoted by the Journal suggests that this new Russian threat isn't too serious:
Ivan Safranchuk, deputy director of the Moscow-based Institute of Contemporary International Studies, said Russia is unlikely to cut off the flow of NATO supplies to Afghanistan as an immediate response to missile-defense decisions. But Russia does want its objections to the missile shield to be taken more seriously, he said.
"If the U.S. is not responsive, then a cutoff could be a reality at some point," Mr. Safranchuk said. "Russia would like the U.S. to be more serious about Russian concerns."
And EurasiaNet's Deirdre Tynan reported today that Russia has quietly acceded to U.S. and NATO plans to begin using the Northern Distribution Network to take materiel out of Afghanistan, rather than just into the country as has so far been the case. So on a technical level, at least, there has been progress on U.S.-Russian cooperation on Afghan transit.
The broader question is, why is Russia all of a sudden making a big deal on missile defense again? Russia somewhat out of the blue ratcheted up the tension on missile defense with his statement last week, in which he threatened to attack NATO missile defense sites. There is a large element of posturing on both sides here. As Tomas Hirst put it on twitter: "To be clear. Medvedev is threatening to attack missiles that don't yet exist, which are supposed to intercept missiles that also don't exist."
Russians also know that the timing is terrible from a U.S. perspective: just as the U.S. presidential campaign starts to get underway, they know that President Obama can't make any concessions to Russia, because such a move would just invite Republicans to attack him for "selling out" to America's "enemies."
To come up with an explanation for all this is beyond the scope of this blog (and perhaps beyond human understanding). Fyodor Lyukanov makes a game effort in Gazeta.ru (translation by Johnson's Russia List):
Why is Moscow being so stubborn? If considerations of prestige, deep distrust of the United States, and other (although also important) factors of a psychological character are not taken into account, it in effect boils down to an unsolvable problem. Everyone, even the most obstinate hawks on both sides of the Atlantic, understands that in present conditions the likelihood of a nuclear conflict between Russia and America is insignificantly small, if it exists at all. However, the very fact of the existence of enormous nuclear potentials built up in the years of the ideological confrontation makes it impossible to brush off the concept of "strategic stability," which was and is based on guaranteed mutual destruction.
No matter what politicians and even military may say, as long as these arsenals exist, each of us has no other enemy than the arsenal of the opposite side. And hence, violation of the principle whereby there is no possibility of delivering a first strike with impunity leads to acute destabilization. Especially since America since the Cold War times has shown itself to be a country that has the overwhelming advantage over any other country or group of countries and is ready to use armed force quite readily. And the nuclear potential serves as a reliable pledge that it will not be used (see the differences in approaches to Iraq and Libya, on the one hand, and North Korea -- on the other).
It's as good an explanation as any. Will the NDN be a casualty of this "unsolvable problem?" It doesn't seem likely now -- but if Putin and a future Republican U.S. president start escalating their rhetoric, all bets are off.
Is there hope for Afghanistan?
By Linda Robinson Tuesday, November 29, 2011 - FP
After spending last month in Afghanistan on my fourth trip this year, the situation can best be described as a glass half full. A multifaceted effort in the south, led by a "surge" of U.S. and Afghan troops, has increased security in the southern Pashtun heartland this year. But a steady drumbeat of high-profile attacks, including a brazen assault on the U.S. embassy and assassinations of key Afghan officials, has had an outsized impact on the population by eroding already weak confidence in the Afghan government and the forces supporting it. As I was ending my trip with a few days in Kabul, an SUV packed with 700 kilos of explosives rammed an armored "Rhino" bus, killing a dozen Americans and inflicting horrific burns on others in a targeted, planned attack reminiscent of the worst days in Baghdad. The U.S. military has adopted the line that these "spectacular attacks" are in fact signs of the Taliban's weakness, and points instead to a notable decline in the number of enemy initiated attacks.
But numbers matter less than perception in these wars -- and shaping perception is precisely how terrorist groups fight and win. The dominant narrative in Afghanistan is: the Americans are leaving, the government is weak, the Taliban is still strong, and Pakistan is the problem. And though the details of the cross-border NATO bombardment Saturday, which killed 24 Pakistani soldiers, are still murky, it will undoubtedly send U.S.-Pakistan relations into a further downward spiral. Unless the reality underlying these perceptions about the United States in the region are addressed, sustainable momentum on the government side cannot be generated. The U.S. surge may have started to turn around the momentum that is currently favoring the Taliban, but Afghan political and military actions are required to create a perception -- and the reality -- that the Afghan government is capable of surviving and prevailing. Addressing several factors bedeviling the Afghan campaign between now and next summer, when the traditional fighting season resumes and more troops go home, might turn perception and thus momentum in the Afghan government's favor. Six are most critical:
Promptly reaching a strategic partnership agreement in which the United States pledges to continue providing security and economic assistance after 2014 could go a long way toward reducing Afghan fears of abandonment. The U.S. and Afghan governments have been negotiating such an agreement for over a year, and the general idea of a partnership (albeit with a 10-year limit on American forces in Afghanistan after 2014) was approved at President Hamid Karzai's Loya Jirga this week; both sides hope to finalize it before the Bonn summit next month. The sticking points are night raids, which Karzai would like to end, and the transfer of detainees to Afghan control, despite a recent U.N. report cataloguing abusive practices in Afghan intelligence detention centers. The first issue can be postponed or finessed, but the United States is bound by international convention not to turn over detainees if it believes they will be tortured or mistreated. In the run-up to the Bonn Conference, Karzai will hopefully stay focused
on the need to reassure Afghans of ongoing U.S. support and assistance as coalition troop levels decline over the coming years.
Forging a common front with his main backer, the United States, would help Karzai repair some of the image of weakness that plagues his government. Veteran U.S. ambassador Ryan Crocker and the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF)'s top commander Gen. John Allen have worked hard to "reset" the relationship with Karzai since they arrived this summer. One of his frequent interlocutors notes that Karzai "is exhausted, and he knows he is irritable and unpredictable." Nader Nadery, a commissioner of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, chides Karzai for his "lack of firmness. There is no clarity on where he stands." And, like many Afghans I spoke to, Nadery sees the president's tolerance of corrupt activity as a major weakness. Yet despite these failings, many Afghans I've talked to still see him as currently the only leader who can balance the myriad rivalries and swirling tensions that beset Afghan national politics, in particular the concern that Tajik leaders may be girding for an all-out civil war once the U.S. departs. The assassination of former president Burhanuddin Rabbani, the Tajik head of Karzai's High Peace Council, significantly ratcheted up those concerns.
Afghan security forces need to move demonstrably into the lead. The U.S. plans to push Afghan forces out front in more and more operations, if only to determine just how ready they are to take the lead and where the weak links are. To get them ready, U.S. forces must make partnering with and mentoring their Afghan partners its top priority, which it is not. By the military's own count in the latest DOD report mandated by Congress, 95 Afghan units in critical areas have no coalition partner whatsoever, and many others are only loosely mentored.
Afghans will have to step up if the three stated objectives of the military campaign are to be accomplished -- namely, to secure the south, the populated corridor along Highway One up to Kabul, and key areas of the east, especially the crucial provinces of Paktia, Paktika, and Khost. The south has been greatly stabilized over the past year, but the job is not yet done. I spent ten days in Kandahar province, where the longtime Taliban strongholds of Zhari, Panjwayi and Maiwand are still heavily contested. Returning from Maiwand, which is mostly still Taliban dominated, I passed through the Panjwayi district center, where a car bomb detonated a short while later. We stopped in Kandahar city for dinner -- one of the few times I have been with a U.S. military unit that felt comfortable dining at night in an Afghan city. The company commander ordered roast chickens, pilaf and delicious nan bread for all his men, and we picnicked amid the city's bustling nightlife, surrounded by curious Afghan men and children. Yet that reality coexisted with a frontal assault, hours earlier, on the Kandahar provincial reconstruction team, located just across from the provincial governor's office.
The current priority is to expand the security bubble beyond Kabul to Wardak, Logar and then Ghazni and Zabul provinces, thus securing the country's major highway all the way down to Kandahar. After that, the campaign plans to shift to the east, but it needs to tightly focus on the key population areas. There is a danger of focusing too much on sparsely populated provinces and neglecting the Khost to Gardez corridor, which has a large population and has been both an insurgent stronghold and transit route from the beginning of the war. Attempting to cut every ratline in the country is a sure fire way to fritter away forces. The only way that the campaign objectives can be achieved is if coalition forces focus on the important areas, and if Afghan security forces take more of the lead.
The expanding self-defense initiative may increase security. Security out in the countryside, where the insurgency is based, is starting to get a lift from the year-old Afghan Local Police program, but it is too early to judge the net effect of the program. It now has 8,500 recruits, mostly farmers who have volunteered and been trained to do checkpoint security and patrols in their villages. I've visited a half dozen of the 57 sites, where Special Operations Forces train and mentor the ALP and work with the district police chief, who is the Afghan official charged with their formal command and control, as well as providing them with salaries, trucks, weapons and ammunition. The program, strongly backed by ISAF, is funded and approved to grow to 30,000 in 100 districts, but the painstaking process of gaining community support and ensuring that the government exercises proper oversight means it will be another year or more before the program is fully implemented.
Thus far, RAND quarterly assessments done for the Special Operations Forces command in Afghanistan say that the program is broadly supported by local residents and that security in the sites has improved. The principal concern expressed by the program's critics is that these small groups (limited to 300 per district) will become militias, which historically have been armies of 30,000 or more under the command of a single warlord. The ALP program aims to prevent that by creating a strong link to district and provincial police chiefs from the outset. A recent Human Rights Watch Report catalogued allegations of abuse, disputes and ethnic tensions in some areas, although U.S. officials dispute some of the claims, which are under official investigation.
The ALP program features greater oversight and vetting mechanisms than earlier similar efforts, but continuing vigilance is necessary, as with all security forces. The Special Forces team in Maiwand told me about an ALP member who went AWOL, and along with his brother, started holding up cars for bribes on Highway One, the highway linking Kandahar to Kabul. The Taliban shot him dead. ALP commanders have fired numerous members they feel are not up to snuff. One of the sites, in Baghlan, is a unique case in that the Afghan government asked SOF to form a local police unit out of former insurgents from the small Hezb-e Islami faction; insurgents are not the recruiting base for ALP, unlike the Sons of Iraq program. The tensions in the area are increased by the fact that the area is a pocket of Pashtuns surrounded by a larger Tajik population. The Afghan interior ministry official who has national oversight of the program, Brig. Gen. Ali Shah Ahmadzai, told me that he has put the ALP commander, who is under investigation, on notice that he will be arrested "if he does not behave."
Promises to rural Afghans should be moderated but honored. The reality is that the dysfunctional Afghan bureaucracy cannot deliver funds to individual provinces, let alone the district level where 76 percent of the Afghan population ekes out a subsistence living. At present, most district governments are fig leafs for the distribution of international aid projects. I sat in the Khas Kunar district governor's office as he talked to the provincial governor's secretary about getting funds for a backhoe to dig out canals damaged in recent floods. A U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) official had suggested he seek to tap the $25,000 "performance based" fund that USAID provides each month to provincial governors. The district governor smiled and nodded as the conversation concluded, then turned to us and said, "It will take a year for the necessary paperwork and to get approval from Kabul." Yet there has been progress - in many areas district governors did not even visit, let alone live in, their districts last year. Many areas have now been pacified sufficiently for them to return. During the week I spent in Maiwand, I saw the governor preside over four meetings, although he still returns to Kandahar city each weekend where his family lives. Prioritizing needs is essential, since USAID funds and staff are slated to decline significantly, and the civilian state-building effort will focus on the provincial level rather than the districts. The district delivery program, for example, will end next year after reaching only 45 of the country's 398 districts. This program, which supports training and salary increases for district officials, is current under way in only 12 districts. A number of civilian officials and nongovernmental organizations believe dispute resolution, primarily through the traditional local mediation practices system, should be the highest priority in conflict-ridden areas where land and other disputes often fuel insurgent violence.
Pakistan is the glaring problem that has dramatically worsened and must be addressed. A senior U.S. official in Kabul declared flatly to me, "We will not succeed unless the Pakistan safe havens are reduced." He does not believe Pakistan will come around, despite countless U.S. pleas for more action. Pakistan balks at getting tough on the Afghan insurgent groups that are the central cards in its hedging strategy -- particularly the deadly Haqqani network, based in Pakistan's North Waziristan tribal agency. And U.S. officials recognize that an assault into the agency simply is not going to happen.
The United States and Afghanistan will have to neutralize the threat from Waziristan through their own efforts, and indeed these efforts have stepped up dramatically. Operation Knife Edge rounded up many Haqqani operatives last month. A senior Haqqani facilitator, Mali Khan, was nabbed as he crossed the border, and another, Janbaz Zadran, was killed by a suspected CIA drone attack on October 13. During the week I spent in Paktika, U.S. forces dropped 33,000 pounds of bombs on the border to close mountain passes that the insurgents use. A U.S. commander there pointed out a dozen "POOs" or points of origin, of artillery or rockets fired from Pakistan into Afghanistan. They were all within sight of Pakistani Frontier Corps outposts - leaving little doubt about active or passive support for militants among some Pakistani forces. U.S. and Afghan forces are under direct attack from Pakistani territory, and Lieutenant General Curtis Scaparrotti assured me that when they take "effective" fire, U.S. forces shoot back.
The dilemma, however, is that Pakistan holds a critical trump card, as it demonstrated this week by its ability to close major commercial crossings in retaliation for Saturday's cross-border strike. When I visited that part of the border area last month, Special Forces soldiers told me that an insurgent camp near the two border posts was a major source of attacks in the region.
If the Afghan and U.S. governments can agree on a common plan, backed by a lower but sustainable level of U.S. troops, they just might start winning the battle of perceptions. Given the insurgents' lack of popularity -- they rely on intimidation -- the Afghan government should be able to prevail in either defeating the insurgency or forcing them into a political accommodation if the United States remains willing to lend a hand. It might take five or ten years. But the alternative is not a pretty one to contemplate: the U.S. departs, Afghanistan crumbles, and the war fought to avenge the 9/11 attacks is perceived to be a failure. As I wrote in my last book on the Iraq war, Americans need to be prepared for wars to last a decade. The Afghan war, which the United States attempted to fight largely through a counterterrorism approach for the first seven years, has only begun in earnest in the last three. There is a third choice between the current large-scale U.S. counterinsurgency campaign and reverting to a counter-terrorism approach, and that is an Afghan-led counterinsurgency effort that that the United States can support in a sustainable way.
Linda Robinson is Adjunct Senior Fellow for U.S. National Security and Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. She is writing a book on the war in Afghanistan.
Postwar U.S.-Afghanistan ties are expected to remain rocky
The U.S. military wants to have the ability to carry out strikes on insurgents after 2014, but President Hamid Karzai says Afghanistan will protect its sovereignty.
Los Angeles Times By Laura King November 28, 2011
Kabul, Afghanistan - The wartime alliance between Afghanistan and the United States in the last decade has been fraught with suspicions over sharply differing goals and tactics. It is becoming clear that any postwar partnership to prevent a Taliban comeback is likely to be just as problematic.
Despite compelling common interests, stark differences already have emerged between Washington and the Afghan government about the military landscape after 2014, when most U.S. combat troops are gone and Afghan security forces are in charge of keeping the country safe.
President Hamid Karzai says Afghanistan will zealously guard its sovereignty and tightly govern the actions of any foreign troops on its soil — while continuing to expect massive infusions of U.S. and other foreign aid for training and equipping his police and army.
U.S. officials say little publicly about negotiations with Karzai's government over a future "strategic partnership," which have been going on for more than a year. But Western officials familiar with the talks say the Obama administration wants continued access to at least some military installations, even after they have reverted to Afghan command. Also considered crucial to U.S. interests is the ability to field small, elite teams of special operations troops to carry out targeted strikes on insurgents.
Afghans widely loathe those raids, especially when they involve U.S. troops entering residential compounds at night. Karzai has long accused the American-commanded NATO force of being insensitive to cultural considerations, as well as civilians' safety, during night raids.
With Iraq as a guide, U.S. officials are keenly aware that long-term issues that go unaddressed at the height of combat may become considerably harder to resolve in the war's winding-down phase.
In Iraq, the stumbling block was refusal to grant remaining U.S. troops immunity. When it became clear that Prime Minister Nouri Maliki could not gain agreement within his coalition for a deal that would shield U.S. forces from prosecution for violating Iraqi laws, President Obama announced in October that the U.S. would withdraw virtually all of its troops by the end of the year — meeting a deadline set during the Bush administration.
Afghan unhappiness with U.S. tactics resurfaced this month during a traditional grand council, or loya jirga, convened by Karzai in Kabul. The Afghan leader opened the gathering with a denunciation of U.S.-led night raids, demanding an end to them as a condition for signing a strategic partnership pact.
"We are lions!" he declared. "A lion hates a stranger entering his home. A lion dislikes a stranger trespassing in its space. A lion does not want his offspring taken away at night."
American officials have so far disregarded Karzai's complaints about the raids, which proceed at a pace of about a dozen a night. They are seen by U.S. commanders as one of the most effective means of combating the insurgency, leading to the killing or capturing of hundreds of Taliban field commanders.
Karzai and the Obama administration have been at pains to avoid antagonizing regional powers such as Iran, Russia, Pakistan and China with talk of a continuing American military presence, even though there could be thousands of U.S. troops staying on after 2014.
"Any post-2014 presence will be at the invitation of the Afghan government, and would ensure that the United States will be able to target terrorists and support a sovereign Afghan government so that our enemies can't outlast us," said Tommy Vietor, spokesman for the U.S. National Security Council.
The strategic partnership "is not aimed at any of Afghanistan's neighbors, and we don't seek permanent bases," Vietor said.
Outlasting the West, though, seems like an increasingly viable option for the insurgency. After 10 years of conflict, another "fighting season" or two, replete with hit-and-run guerrilla-style attacks against a more powerful foe, do not appear an insurmountable challenge for the Taliban.
Efforts to open channels of communication with the Taliban have faltered in recent months, perhaps reflecting a calculation by the insurgents that they can afford to wait.
At the grand council, delegates offered few concrete ideas for reviving a peace process thrown into disarray by the assassination in September of Burhanuddin Rabbani, who headed the commission in charge of making overtures to the Taliban.
Rabbani's killer posed as a Taliban peace envoy and had a bomb concealed in his turban.
But it also is clear that the Taliban and other insurgent groups feel threatened by the prospect of an American military presence after 2014, whatever form it may take. In recent weeks, the Taliban leadership has sought to whip up public opposition to the pact, calling it an American scheme to dominate Afghanistan indefinitely.
"The Afghan crisis will only find an end when our nation thwarts the strategic partnership of the invaders and their mercenaries," the Taliban said in a statement on the eve of the Kabul gathering.
The United States, together with most of its allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization force, hopes to focus its attention after 2014 on training and mentoring Afghan forces. But planned expenditures are being reevaluated by increasingly cash-strapped Western militaries.
The current $11 billion in annual costs for Afghan security forces, virtually entirely borne by foreigners, is expected to fall to about $4 billion by 2014. Karzai repeated a call for upgraded armaments at the loya jirga, but he is unlikely to get weapons such as Abrams battle tanks or F-16 fighter jets.
From the American vantage point, Karzai's flagging domestic popularity, and the sometimes inflammatory statements he makes to try to bolster it, must be taken into account. The Afghan leader's political foes are ready to criticize any perceived willingness to capitulate to American demands.
A day after the loya jirga endorsed Karzai's conditions for a long-term agreement, hundreds of demonstrators gathered in the eastern city of Jalalabad to shout their opposition to the security pact. "Death to America! Death to Karzai!" some yelled.
"A partnership with the United States is vital," said Robaba Parwani, a member of parliament who took part in the loya jirga. "But in the last 10 years, the international community has not delivered what it promised. So we have to make sure that what happens next doesn't cause more harm to the people of Afghanistan."
Should the US adopt a 'Colombia standard' of success in Afghanistan?
Measuring success in Afghanistan on Afghans' ability to fight their own conflicts may appeal, but a 'Plan Afghanistan' would still be far more costly – and less successful – than Colombia's, argues blogger James Bosworth.
Christian Science Monitor By James Bosworth, Guest blogger November 28, 2011
Michael O'Hanlon and Paul Wolfowitz argue that the US should strive for a "Colombia standard" of success in Afghanistan. They argue that though Colombia continues to have a conflict (in fact, a higher homicide rate than Afghanistan), its relative success in reducing the conflict, providing state presence in the population centers and having a fighting force capable of managing its own conflict should be seen as a model for "success" in Afghanistan.
They write:
While Colombians deserve most of the credit for success, they depended on a long-term U.S. commitment that was limited in scale but not in time.
I agree with that sentence, but not the rest of the paragraph.
I once wrote that Latin American analysts liked to refer to Plan Colombia not because of any specific details as much as it was "very big." That's true in terms of security assistance to the Western Hemisphere, where Plan Colombia was bigger and longer lasting than any other comparable initiative. The Merida Initiative in Mexico and the more recent CARSI and CBSI in Central America and the Caribbean are quite undersized compared to the scale of resources and commitment the US gave Colombia in the late 1990's and throughout the 00's.
That said, compared to Afghanistan or Iraq, Plan Colombia is peanuts. Over the past decade, there have been times the US has spent more in a day on its two wars than was spent in an entire year in Colombia. Additionally, Plan Colombia limited the number of troops and contractors in the country to less than 1,500 at any given time and the US was often well under the limits. Compare that to the 150,000 military personnel that were in Iraq at its peak or the about 90,000 that remain in Afghanistan today, and neither of those numbers include thousands of additional contractors.
Those limitations benefited Colombia. Having a smaller budget and a troop/contractor cap prevented the US from throwing excessive troops and resources at the problem, which often creates temporary success but also a level of dependency that make it hard to step away. The limitations on US assistance meant Colombia had to succeed on its own because the US was legislatively self-limited from imposing temporary "success" from the outside by ramping up troops or aid.
But here's the rest of the paragraph from O'Hanlon and Wolfowitz:
Afghanistan will need that even more. With a desperately poor economy (one-sixteenth the size of Colombia's), Afghanistan cannot sustain the army it needs without help. The country will need some $3 billion annually in foreign military assistance for an extended period after 2014, as well as a continuing military presence in the range of 10,000 U.S. and other NATO troops in a supporting role.
Look at those numbers. $3 billion in military assistance plus 10,000 troops (plus how many contractors?) on top of the money spent over the past decade. That's five to ten times the size of Plan Colombia in any given year. They are recommending a "post-war" spending package of more money on security aid in Afghanistan than the US spends in the entire Western Hemisphere today. They are recommending far more US troops deployed in Afghanistan than the US uses to train and support all the military and police in this hemisphere.
IN PICTURES: Far from home: US soldiers serving in Afghanistan
The military aid package suggested by O'Hanlon and Wolfowitz is only "limited" in comparison with the war-level spending in Afghanistan over the past decade. It is still far more costly than Plan Colombia, less likely to succeed, and without a plan to reduce that level to a more reasonable support package at any point in the future. In terms of Afghanistan, the right lessons from Plan Colombia are to look at the self-imposed limitations on aid, leaving the US in a supporting role while Colombia led the fight. Afghanistan is not going to lead on its own security if the US doesn't limit its own involvement.
Now go back to a fact I put in the first paragraph: Colombia still has a higher homicide rate than Afghanistan. So do the parts of Central America, the Caribbean and Mexico most heavily affected by the criminal groups.
Budgeting is about priorities. That $3 billion and 10,000 troop plan proposed by O'Hanlon and Wolfowitz can't be analyzed in a vacuum. Spending more on security in Afghanistan than we spend on all of Latin America and the Caribbean seems to me to be a poor use of limited resources moving forward. There is a need in this hemisphere, the money spent is more effective and the direct impact on US security and prosperity is likely greater. That's one more factor to consider as the US plans a more "limited scale" of aid to Afghanistan.
--- James Bosworth is a freelance writer and consultant who runs Bloggings by Boz.
Afghanistan Seeks Enduring Support
Wall Street Jounal By YAROSLAV TROFIMOV NOVEMBER 29, 2011
KABUL - Afghan officials are bringing a simple message to Western powers at an international conference on Afghanistan's future that begins this weekend in Bonn, Germany: Don't abandon us like the Russians did.
Three years after Moscow withdrew its forces from Afghanistan in 1989, a crisis-struck Russia cut off its funding for the Kabul regime. Once the Russian money ran out, the Afghan army fractured, the mujahedeen seized Kabul, and an ensuing civil war eventually brought the Taliban into power.
As the U.S.-led military coalition prepares to withdraw most combat troops by the end of 2014, Afghan officials fear that, amid world-wide economic troubles, history will repeat itself.
Afghan officials say the Bonn conference, which will be attended by nearly a hundred nations, must reaffirm the world's long-term financial commitment to their country to ensure that the fragile Afghan institutions that have been built over the past decade don't collapse.
"There is a need within Afghanistan, within the region and beyond to send a message of continuity and enduring engagement," said Deputy Foreign Minister Jawed Ludin, who is playing a key role in negotiations with the U.S. and allies. "2014 should not become 1989. That would be the strongest political message we expect to come out of Bonn."
The Afghan government, he added, is pushing the idea of a "transition dividend," under which coalition countries would reinvest into Afghanistan part of the savings that result from withdrawing their own troops.
In the years after 2014, the Afghan government would still need at least $10 billion annually from foreign donors, Mr. Ludin calculated, with some $6 billion of that going to pay for the Afghan army and police, slated to number 352,000 men by next November.
"It's huge, but given the investment that's been made here in the past 10 years, it's a fraction," Mr. Ludin said, pointing out that the U.S. is currently spending as much as ten times this amount on maintaining its own forces in Afghanistan. "It's a cost worth paying."
Afghanistan gets $15.7 billion in foreign aid a year, roughly equal to its nominal gross domestic product. Only a small share of this money is spent through the Afghan government.
A World Bank study released this month warned that Afghanistan will face an "unmanageable" fiscal gap over the next decade if it has to finance its own security forces. The study predicted that, by 2022, the country would still require $7.2 billion in foreign aid a year—and that assumes an upsurge of so-far inexistent mining-industry revenue and no dramatic deterioration of security.
The Bonn conference isn't expected to bring immediate financial commitments to Afghanistan. "It's not a pledging conference," a U.S. official said. "But it's going to be an opportunity that the Afghans are going to seize with both hands. They'll be talking about what they needfrom the international community, and for how long."
The participating nations are expected to make political promises to stand by Afghanistan, Western officials say.
American officials say the U.S. will remain committed to Afghanistan past 2014, pointing out that Washington is negotiating a long-term strategic partnership agreement with Kabul.
"The international community will assure in a credible way that it will not repeat the mistakes of the past," said Michael Steiner, Germany's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. "People don't want just words in Bonn. People have heard enough words."
Such assurances, however, will be worthless without endorsement by the U.S. Congress and other donor countries' parliaments—where plans to keep spending billions in Afghanistan for years to come aren't likely to secure easy approval, especially once the foreign forces are gone.
"You can imagine us doing it for a while, but our willingness to do it in perpetuity is zero," says Stephen Biddle, senior fellow for defense policy at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington and a former member of the Pentagon's defense-policy board. Politically speaking, he adds, a decade or more is "the first mathematical approximation of infinity."
Already, European nations are dramatically cutting spending on their own citizens in an attempt to rescue the euro, while the U.S. faces $1.2 trillion in spending cuts over the next decade as it tries to contain its debt and trim its budget deficit.
Afghan corruption makes future disbursements a particularly hard sell. According to an August report by a bipartisan U.S. congressional commission, waste and fraud accounted for as much as 29% of the $206 billion the U.S. spent on wartime contracting in Afghanistan and Iraq over the past decade.
The belt-tightening in Europe and the U.S., alongside a new focus on the spreading turmoil in the Arab world, make Afghan hopes of getting sustained financial commitments from Western nations highly unrealistic, many analysts say.
"Everyone knows—only most governments don't admit this—that the money will leave with the soldiers," says Thomas Ruttig, senior analyst at the Kabul-based Afghanistan Analysts Network. "Transition is a colossus built of clay."
The Bonn conference is gathering 10 years after another conference in the same city established Afghanistan's first post-Taliban administration, headed by President Hamid Karzai, who has been in power ever since.
The original Bonn gathering pointedly excluded Taliban representatives—a decision that helped spark the insurgency that nearly 140,000 U.S.-led troops are still trying to contain.
When the second Bonn conference was announced by Mr. Karzai last fall, Afghan and U.S. officials hoped that the tentative peace talks with the Taliban would have made tangible progress by now, possibly allowing for historic insurgent participation in the event.
These hopes, however, were dashed by the September assassination of Afghanistan's chief peace negotiator, former President Burhanuddin Rabbani, a killing that effectively ended Kabul's peace outreach to the insurgents.
American and Afghan negotiators had also been aiming to finalize before Bonn a bilateral strategic partnership declaration, a document outlining what military and political presence the U.S. will maintain in Afghanistan beyond 2014. Talks over this document, however, have since bogged down over Mr. Karzai's demands to end coalition night raids and detentions.
Afghan and American negotiators say they still hope the strategic agreement will be reached; they now seek to strike the deal in time for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit that is slated for late May in Chicago.
What's behind the furor in Pakistan?
By Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst, and Andrew Lebovich, Special to CNN November 25, 2011
Editor's note: Peter Bergen is CNN's national security analyst, a director at the New America Foundation and the author of "The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict between America and Al-Qaeda." Andrew Lebovich is a policy analyst at the New America Foundation.
(CNN) -- Pakistani-American businessman Mansoor Ijaz has set off a political firestorm in Pakistan with his claims that he was brokering an offer from Pakistan's civilian leaders to the Pentagon to unseat the leadership of the Pakistani military.
Those accusations forced the resignation on Tuesday of Pakistan's ambassador to the United States, Husain Haqqani, who Ijaz says orchestrated this proposal, which was delivered in a unsigned memo in May to Adm. Mike Mullen, then-U.S. chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
Pakistan is a nuclear-armed state that is home to a number of Taliban groups that attack U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan and also is home to what remains of al Qaeda's "core" organization.
Haqqani helped smooth over many tense moments in the important U.S.-Pakistan relationship, including the shooting in January of two Pakistanis by CIA contractor Raymond Davis and the Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad in northern Pakistan in May.
Ijaz has said that the offer to get rid of the leadership of the Pakistani Army was sanctioned by Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari. The story is an explosive one in Pakistan, where relations between the civilian government and the military leadership are often tense and the United States is deeply unpopular.
Writing in the Financial Times on October 10, Ijaz explained that, "The embarrassment of bin Laden being found on Pakistani soil had humiliated Mr. Zardari's weak civilian government to such an extent that the president feared a military takeover was imminent. He needed an American fist on his army chief's desk to end any misguided notions of a coup -- and fast."
Haqqani denies being involved in any such scheme, and Mullen says that while he did receive a memo that made this kind of offer-- delivered to him by Obama's former National Security Adviser James L. Jones -- he ignored it because it just didn't seem credible.
According to Ijaz, Lt. Gen. Ahmad Shuja Pasha, Pakistan's powerful military intelligence chief, recently traveled to London to meet with him, where he "forensically tested" Ijaz's evidence, which consists of Blackberry messages between Ijaz and Haqqani.
While the affair has already brought down Haqqani, a longtime critic of Pakistan's military establishment and a well-known figure in diplomatic and national security circles in Washington, it could also damage the country's civilian government. Haqqani's wife, Farah Ispahani, is President Zardari's spokeswoman and a prominent member of the governing Pakistan People's Party.
The man at the center of it all
Who is Mansoor Ijaz, the Pakistani-American businessman at the center of this twisted tale? Born to a family of Pakistani immigrants in Tallahassee, Florida, Ijaz grew up in rural Virginia, the son of two college teachers.
After getting an undergraduate degree in nuclear physics from the University of Virginia and an MA in engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in the early 1990s Ijaz founded Crescent Investment Management, a New York investment firm. Crescent was politically well-connected. Ijaz's partner in the firm was retired Air Force Lt. General James Alan Abrahamson, who played an instrumental role in President Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative ("Star Wars").
Another Washington heavyweight, the former CIA director R. James Woolsey, was chairman of the board of Ijaz's publicly listed company, Crescent Technology Ventures PLC, based in London.
In the mid-'90s, Ijaz gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Democratic Party, and hobnobbed with the Clintons at fund raising events.
In 2003, journalist Richard Miniter, in a book titled "Losing Bin Laden: How Bill Clinton's Failures Unleashed Global Terror", relied on Ijaz as the principal source for the key part of his thesis, which concerned the five years Osama bin Laden spent in Sudan in the early and mid- 1990s. Miniter described multiple attempts Ijaz made between August 1996 and 1998 to interest the Clinton administration in improving relations with Sudan, as well as Sudanese offers to hand over intelligence on al Qaeda.
In his account to Miniter and in later writings, Ijaz claimed to have helped draft a proposal for Sudan to provide intelligence on al Qaeda to the Clinton administration, and that Sudan had offered to arrest bin Laden. Clinton administration officials did not take Ijaz up on any of his offers to help because they viewed him as "a Walter Mitty living out a personal fantasy," according to Miniter. And the 9/11 Commission, which interviewed Ijaz, concluded that were was no "credible evidence" that the Sudanese had made any offer to hand over bin Laden.
In a 2004 interview with Fox News about Iraq, Ijaz, in his then-capacity as a foreign affairs analyst for the network, made another sensational claim: Chemical warheads were being smuggled into Iraq for a potentially catastrophic attack against American troops. And to top it off, Ijaz strongly suggested that the whole plan was given the green light by hardline Iranian mullahs. The story had everything to attract attention -- Mad mullahs! WMD on the loose in Iraq! (At last!) And the threat of thousands of potential American casualties.
Ijaz now concedes, "This was an erroneous report based on information I had received from a former intelligence official on the ground in Iraq. I did not second source this story." Ijaz also told CNN, "I have written over 170 op-ed columns, appeared over 200 times on television and have not once had a word of what I said retracted due to factual errors." (Ijaz has written one op-ed for CNN.com).
Ijaz told Fox in 2003 that "eyewitness sources" placed Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in Iran. Asked by host Brit Hume about the sourcing of the story, Ijaz responded, "I can just tell you that the source is unimpeachable. It is from inside Iran. These are eyewitness accounts."
There was, of course, nothing to this story. Ijaz now says, "At the time I made it, I believed the source who had given the data to me."
Described as a "U.S. nuclear proliferation and terrorism expert," Ijaz told the Gulf News newspaper in 2006 that Iran not only had a nuclear bomb, it was seeking to "duplicate them in large numbers before revealing their existence to the world." Five years later, Iran still does not have a nuclear weapon, but Ijaz asserted to CNN, "They had in my view then, and it remains my view now, at least one nuclear weapon stored in component parts."
In August 2003 Ijaz told the British newspaper The Guardian that he had learned that the Bush administration had brokered a deal with Pakistan's dictator, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, not to capture or kill bin Laden so as not to cause unrest in the Muslim world. Ijaz told The Guardian "There was a judgment made that it would be more destabilizing in the longer term (if bin Laden were captured or killed). There would still be the ability to get (bin Laden) at a later date when it was more appropriate."
Ijaz provided no evidence for this claim, and the idea that the Bush administration would do a deal to let bin Laden go free is ludicrous on its face. Ijaz told CNN "I stand by my comments, taken in full context, throughout that article."
Peeling back the layers of the story
Pakistan's government and Pakistani and American journalists continue to look into story behind "Memogate."
What is puzzling about all of this -- if the allegations are true that Ambassador Haqqani used Ijaz to propose a deal to remove Pakistan's military leaders to Mullen -- is: Why would Haqqani use Ijaz to do this?
After all, Haqqani has many formal and informal contacts at the Pentagon, and Ijaz has a history of making sometimes exaggerated or erroneous claims, and his record as an unsuccessful freelance diplomat with Sudan in the 1990s is a matter of public record.
Finally, if Haqqani was looking for a discreet back channel to the Pentagon, Ijaz turned out not to be the ideal messenger as he was the person who outed the whole affair in the pages of the Financial Times last month.
www.afghanistannewscenter.com
VOA News November 29, 2011
German Chancellor Angela Merkel says she hopes Pakistan will change its mind about boycotting the upcoming international conference in Bonn on Afghanistan's future.
Ms. Merkel said Tuesday that her government will try to persuade Pakistani officials to change their decision — taken in protest of NATO airstrikes that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers last week in a Pakistani-Afghan border region.
The Pakistani decision to boycott next week's conference was announced earlier Tuesday. U.S. and Afghan officials had urged Pakistan to attend the forum, which is aimed at developing a strategy to stabilize neighboring Afghanistan as coalition forces withdraw in the coming years.
The top U.S. military officer said Monday Pakistan is justified in being angry about the NATO airstrikes that struck several Pakistani border posts on Saturday. But he declined to apologize, citing the need for an investigation.
In an interview with British television network ITV, U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Martin Dempsey said Islamabad has a “reason to be furious” that the weapons that killed the Pakistani troops were the “ordnance of a partner.”
But he appealed for patience from Pakistan to “find out what happened.” The airstrikes hit Pakistani positions in an area of poorly-marked and disputed borders between Afghanistan's Kunar province and Pakistan's Mohmand tribal region.
The U.S. military said Monday an Air Force general will lead an investigation of the incident and compile an initial report by December 23. The military says Brigadier General Stephen Clark will work with representatives of NATO and the Afghan and Pakistani governments.
NATO and Afghan officials say their troops called in NATO airstrikes in response to incoming fire from areas near the Pakistani border posts. Pakistan denies this, accusing NATO and Afghan officials of making excuses.
In a report published Tuesday, the Associated Press quotes unnamed U.S. officials as saying military investigators believe Taliban militants attacked a U.S.-Afghan patrol in the border region to try to create confusion and draw U.S. and Pakistani forces into firing on each other.
Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani said Monday relations with the United States are no longer “business as usual.” In an interview with U.S. television network CNN, Mr. Gilani said Pakistan is not receiving “mutual respect.”
The Pakistani government also has responded to the incident by shutting down NATO's Pakistani supply routes into Afghanistan and ordering U.S. personnel to evacuate an air base in Baluchistan province within two weeks. Experts believe the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency has been using the Shamsi air base to launch drones that patrol and fire missiles on militant targets in Pakistani-Afghan border regions.
In his interview, General Dempsey said U.S.-Pakistani relations are “on about as rocky a road as I have seen.” But, he said the situation is not irretrievable and military-to-military ties remain “solid” due to common interests such as fighting terrorism.
Afghans say commando unit was attacked before airstrike was called on Pakistan
Washington Post By Karen DeYoung and Joshua Partlow Tuesday, November 29, 2011
The latest U.S.-Pakistan crisis threatened Monday to undo months of efforts to mend an increasingly frayed relationship and to undermine the Obama administration’s strategy for gradually ending the war in Afghanistan.
Administration officials did not respond to Pakistani demands for an apology for the cross-border U.S. airstrike that killed at least 24 Pakistani soldiers early Saturday. Instead, they expressed condolences for the loss of life while saying that the facts about what happened were under investigation.
Both sides said they believed they were attacking insurgents along the border. A senior Pakistani defense official acknowledged that Pakistani troops fired first, sending a flare, followed by mortar and machine-gun fire, toward what he said was “suspicious activity” in the brush-covered area below their high-altitude outpost barely 500 yards from the border.
According to Afghan security officials, their commandos were engaged with U.S. Special Operations troops in a nighttime raid against suspected Taliban insurgents when they came under cross-border fire and called in an airstrike.
Despite extensive coordination mechanisms set up to prevent such encounters, the U.S. military failed to respond to Pakistani alerts that its troops were being bombed, said the Pakistani defense official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the issue on the record.
“We told them, hold your horses, these are ours,” the official said. While repeated urgent appeals went up the coalition chain of command, he said, the airstrike continued for an hour and a half against two Pakistani border positions and a contingent of troops.
Administration and U.S. defense officials raised the possibility of a different set of circumstances but declined to elaborate. “Where we are is that we’ve regretted the loss of life and said there should be an investigation,” said a U.S. official who agreed to speak about the tense situation only on the condition of anonymity. “We've just got to put one foot in front of the other here.”
The Pentagon placed the U.S. Central Command in charge of the inquiry, and Centcom’s commander, Gen. James N. Mattis, announced Monday that a Special Operations officer would head it. Air Force Brig. Gen. Stephen Clark was directed to include representatives of NATO and the Pakistani and Afghan governments on the investigation team and to report his conclusions by Dec. 23.
The investigation, however, risked being overtaken by events in Pakistan, where the government and military commanders are under strong pressure from the increasingly anti-American Pakistani public and the ranks of the army to end counterterrorism cooperation with the United States.
“You cannot win any war without the support of the masses,” Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani told CNN. “We need the people with us.” Gilani said that “business as usual” with the United States could not continue.
Pakistan has blocked NATO supplies transiting to Afghanistan at two border crossings and threatened to withdraw from an international conference on Afghanistan next week in Germany. A small contingent of U.S. personnel at Shamsi air base in southern Pakistan was told to leave within 15 days.
Additional measures are expected to be announced after a Pakistani cabinet meeting Tuesday.
Relations were already fractured after a series of clashes this year, including the January shooting death of two Pakistanis in Lahore by a CIA contractor, the U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in May and public U.S. charges that Pakistan’s intelligence service has aided Afghan insurgent networks within its borders.
“You crawl back” from those incidents, the U.S. official said, “and then there is this. There is no question, this is the worst.”
The administration views Pakistani cooperation as crucial to its hopes of bringing Afghan insurgents to the negotiating table within the next year and developing a regional trade zone that could ultimately allow Afghanistan’s economy to prosper without massive foreign aid.
“This imperfect partnership is no longer enough to save Afghanistan,” said Moeed Yusuf, South Asia adviser at the U.S. Institute of Peace. He said President Obama’s plans to withdraw nearly 100,000 combat troops between next month and the end of 2014 require “an almost perfect coordination effort” with other elements of the administration’s strategy.
“I just don’t see how this is going to happen,” Yusuf said.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta issued a joint statement of condolence over the deaths, and CIA Director David H. Petraeus telephoned his Pakistani counterpart Sunday. “Our side says they don’t know the facts,” said a second U.S. official, who also declined to discuss the matter on the record. “The facts are undoubtedly that somebody messed up on both sides.”
A former U.S. official who closely follows events in the region said the Pakistani army’s 11th Corps command near the western border was informed that coalition operations would take place Friday night and Saturday morning in the Maya area of Afghanistan’s Konar province. Pakistan says no such notification was given.
Afghan security officials said Monday that the Special Operations mission was targeting training bases and hideouts of Taliban fighters. Insurgents there had regularly fired at a U.S. base in the area in the past, the officials said.
The Afghan officials said the coalition troops came under fire from the vicinity of the Pakistani bases, located in the Mohmand tribal areas, and they called in airstrikes in self-defense.
One senior Afghan police official said that after an initial gun battle, the insurgents retreated into a Pakistani post and began firing from there. “They started firing at the commandos, and they continued firing, so the air support had to come to their defense,” the official said.
The Pakistani defense official offered a sequence of events that differed in key aspects.
The Pakistani post, called Volcano, is clearly marked on grids shared with Afghan and coalition forces and flies the Pakistani flag. Its mission, the official said, is to prevent the return of Afghan insurgents that Pakistan has driven over the border. “We have repeatedly sensitized our friends [in Afghanistan] to this situation and asked their cooperation,” the official said.
Early Saturday, he said, Volcano “detected suspicious activity — sound and movement — in the vicinity. They are sitting there for the express purpose of stopping infiltration, so what do they do? They fire a few flares, a couple of mortar rounds and one or two bursts of heavy machine-gun fire in that direction.”
The Pakistani official added that “there was no return fire” from the ground. He dismissed suggestions by U.S. officials that the subsequent strike on Volcano and another post by U.S. attack helicopters and helicopter gunships was a case of mistaken identity provoked by Taliban forces in the area.
Even if the attack began that way, he said, “within a maximum of 10 or 15 minutes” the Americans should have known they were Pakistani military posts.
Partlow reported from Kabul. Staff writer Karin Brulliard in Islamabad, Pakistan, and special correspondents Sayed Salahuddin and Javed Hamdard in Kabul, Shaiq Hussain in Islamabad, and Haq Nawaz Khan in Peshawar contributed to this report.
How to win in Afghanistan
The Washington Post, 29/11/2011 By Ronald E. Neumann
The latest U.S.-Pakistan confrontation on the Afghanistan border underscores what could become a recurring problem if we do not learn how to manage the tension between working with Pakistan and taking stronger action against insurgent sanctuaries in that country. The U.S. effort in Afghanistan is making progress, but on the current timeline it is likely to fail if sanctuaries remain inviolable.
On my most recent trip to Afghanistan I found improvement. The Afghan army is growing and will be better by 2014. Insurgent expansion into the north has been contained. District and provincial government positions are being filled. Despite periodic high-profile attacks, the Taliban was unable to disrupt a recent three-day gathering of more than 2,000 Afghan notables in Kabul. If time and money were unlimited, this progress would be reassuring. But they are not.
The United States relied on building Afghan forces to handle remaining violence but the buildup began only in 2009. The Obama administration now has withdrawal written all over it; aid is declining and troops are leaving. We don’t even know how many troops President Obama will leave in 2013.
As time runs out, do we soldier on with little chance of success? Or do we pull out, watch a civil war destabilize South and Central Asia, and ignore the neighborhood’s further radicalization as Pakistan seeks to dominate Afghanistan? Al-Qaeda may well return, along with the Taliban.Evidence of tight links between the two is increasing. Someone with access to material from Osama bin Laden’s computers told me that even he was surprised at how tightly they were coordinating. The options — muddling along or quitting — are unpalatable.
There is, however, a third choice: becoming more confrontational toward Pakistan while understanding that destabilizing a nuclear-armed nation that is much larger than Afghanistan is absolutely not in our interest. That is why we should not use sanctions, cut off aid or designate Pakistan a terrorist state. We need to recognize that Pakistan has multiple goals, only some of which are opposed to ours. Like us, Pakistan wants to control extremism within its borders and has lost several thousand soldiers combating domestic militants without winning a decisive victory. It may not have the capacity to defeat those enemies, let alone the militants it protects in the hope of one day securing its interests in Afghanistan. This is why solely pressuring Pakistan to act in ways it neither wants nor is capable of is not likely to succeed or help our interests.
The alternative is to begin going directly after the sanctuaries — not all at once but slowly, with increasing missile and air attacks. The aim would be to degrade them, put militants on the run, disrupt the serenity of leaders who send their forces into battle while they remain safe, and make clear that Pakistan cannot safely retain the insurgent card for later use. We should press Pakistan to aid the effort while expecting an angry initial reaction. Truck convoys would get burned; the Afghan border would be closed, at least temporarily , as it is now. We would have to prepare to answer such measures with even more attacks, including hitting the sanctuaries in Baluchistan (despite Pakistan’s vehement objections) to show our resolve. Islamabad might ban the flights that bring our munitions to Afghanistan. One answer would be to fly anyway with fighter escorts.
This policy would be highly dangerous. Pakistan’s military will not bend easily. Its support for Afghan militants is as deeply embedded as the conviction that only such allies can prevent Afghanistan from becoming an existential threat. To control tension with Pakistan we would need attacks in the border areas over time — not a one-time strike or ground invasion and certainly not hitting Pakistani troops — and do it while maintaining economic assistance and other help to Pakistan. Both confrontation and assistance have to be maintained, with care on which is emphasized at any particular moment. The quiet message to the Pakistani military would be: It’s your choice — you can stay in power and we’ll help you, but if the sanctuaries aren’t brought under control we’re going to hit them harder, even if that causes you pain.
This policy would not solve the poor governance in Afghanistan, a separate, critical issue that we will not get to if we lose on the battlefield. And this approach could leave Afghanistan and Pakistan in turmoil. It is not an approach I advocated when I was in Afghanistan — when our time horizons seemed longer — or one I would choose now if Washington had the will to remain engaged. But would its risks be worse than losing after 10 years of war, being faced down by a small, vicious group of insurgents allied to al-Qaeda and watching the whole area in chaos for years? Top military and civilian officials in Afghanistan say the option is to defeat sanctuaries and succeed, or ignore them and lose. Our choices are that stark.
Ronald E. Neumann was U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan from 2005 to 2007 and is the author of “The Other War: Winning and Losing in Afghanistan.”
NATO to Retrain All Troops in Afghanistan in Protecting Civilians
VOA News November 29, 2011
NATO's top commander in Afghanistan has ordered tens of thousands of troops to be retrained in the coming days in how to avoid civilian casualties during counter-insurgency operations.
U.S. General John Allen announced the retraining program in a letter to Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who has frequently complained about deaths and injuries to Afghan civilians caught in the crossfire of NATO operations against Taliban militants. A U.S. military official confirmed the letter and its contents in an email sent to VOA on Tuesday.
In the letter, General Allen says NATO forces will aggressively pursue retraining in methods of employing force against insurgents while protecting Afghan civilians. He ordered all NATO units to complete the retraining by Monday. NATO has about 140,000 troops in Afghanistan fighting a 10-year-long Taliban insurgency, with around 100,000 of those from the United States.
Meanwhile, Afghan officials say a NATO mortar attack on Sunday killed three women and injured at least one child in the Zhari district of Afghanistan's southern province of Kandahar. Last week, an airstrike targeting insurgents killed six children and one adult in the same area.
NATO troop commanders say Taliban and other insurgents regularly use Afghan civilians as human shields while attacking coalition and Afghan security forces and officials.
Afghan security transition will succeed: NATO
KABUL, Nov. 29 (Xinhua) -- The process of security transition from NATO-led Coalition forces to Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) will be a successful process, a NATO spokesman said on Tuesday.
"NATO is confident the transition process will succeed," NATO civilian representative spokesman Dominic Medley told reporters in a joint weekly press briefing here.
"Beyond 2014 NATO aims for a strong and lasting partnership between Afghanistan and its international partners: the end of transition is a stage in a shared journey, not the end of it," Medley added.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Sunday said that the Afghan police and army will take full control of six provinces including Balkh, Takhar, Daikundi, Samangan, Kabul and Nimroz provinces in the second phase of security transition.
According to the Karzai announcement, ANSF will also take responsibility of security from NATO forces in country's seven provincial capitals and over 40 districts in different provinces in near future.
"NATO will keep the commitment to training and supporting the Afghan security forces throughout the transition process and beyond," Medley said.
In the first phase of the process, the ANSF took control of seven areas in different parts of the country in July this year.
The process of taking over security from over 130,000-strong NATO-led ISAF forces by Afghan troops would be completed by the end of 2014 when Afghanistan will take over the full leadership of its own security duties from U.S. and NATO forces.
Regarding the recent NATO cross-border attack, NATO-led ISAF spokesman Brigadier General Carsten Jacobson in the same press conference said, "Repeatedly we have seen insurgents using this situation in their favor, using the border on either side for safe haven for operation and for fire against the other side of the border."
The NATO fighter planes and helicopters had struck two Pakistani border posts in the country's tribal region on early Saturday morning which killed 24 Pakistani troops and wounded 13 others.
40,000 troops to leave Afghanistan by end of 2012
Associated Press By DEB RIECHMANN and SLOBODAN LEKIC 29/11/2011
KABUL, Afghanistan - Drawdown plans announced by the U.S. and more than a dozen other nations will shrink the foreign military footprint in Afghanistan by 40,000 troops at the close of next year, leaving Afghan forces increasingly on the frontlines of the decade-long war.
The United States is pulling out the most - 33,000 by the end of 2012. That's one-third of 101,000 American troops who were in Afghanistan in June - the peak of U.S. military presence in the war, according to figures provided by the Pentagon.
Others in the 49-nation coalition have announced withdrawal plans too, even as they insist they are not rushing to leave. Many nations have vowed to keep troops in Afghanistan to continue training the Afghan police and army in the years to come. And many have pledged to keep sending aid to the impoverished country after the international combat mission ends in 2014.
Still, the exit is making Afghans nervous.
They fear their nation could plunge into civil war once the foreign forces go home. Their confidence in the Afghan security forces has risen, but they don't share the U.S.-led coalition's stated belief that the Afghan soldiers and policemen will be ready to secure the entire nation in three years. Others worry the Afghan economy will collapse if foreigners leave and donors get stingy with aid.
Foreign forces began leaving Afghanistan this year.
About 14,000 foreign troops will withdraw by the end of December, according to an Associated Press review of more than a dozen nations' drawdown plans. The United States is pulling out 10,000 service members this year; Canada withdrew 2,850 combat forces this summer; France and Britain will each send about 400 home; Poland is recalling 200; and Denmark and Slovenia are pulling out about 120 combined.
Troop cutbacks will be deeper next year when an estimated 26,000 more will leave. That figure includes 23,000 Americans; 950 Germans; 600 more French; 500 additional Britons; 400 Poles; 290 Belgians; 156 Spaniards; and 100 Swedes.
Gen. James F. Amos, commandant of the Marine Corps, told the AP that the number of Marines in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan will drop "markedly" in 2012, and the role of those who stay will shift from countering the insurgency to training and advising Afghan security forces.
Amos declined to discuss the number of Marines expected to leave in 2012.
There are now about 19,400 Marines in Helmand, and that is scheduled to fall to about 18,500 by the end of this year.
"Am I OK with that? The answer is `yes,'" Amos said. "We can't stay in Afghanistan forever."
"Will it work? I don't know. But I know we'll do our part."
Additional troop cuts or accelerated withdrawals are possible.
Many other countries, including Hungary, Finland and Italy, are finalizing their withdrawal schedules. Presidential elections in Europe and the European debt crisis also could speed up pullout plans. Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard said this week that Australia's training mission could be completed before the 2014 target date.
Back in June, then-U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said that when the Obama administration begins pulling troops from Afghanistan, the U.S. will resist a rush to the exists, "and we expect the same from our allies." Gates said it was critically important that a plan for winding down NATO's combat role by the end of 2014 did not squander gains made against the Taliban that were won at great cost in lives and money.
"The more U.S. forces draw down, the more it gives the green light for our international partners to also head for the exits," said Jeffrey Dressler, a senior research analyst at the Institute for the Study of War in Washington. "There is a cyclical effect here that is hard to temper once it gets going."
U.S. Army Lt. Col. Jimmie Cummings Jr. said the cutbacks that have been announced will not affect the coalition's ability to fight the insurgency.
"We are getting more Afghans into the field and we are transferring more responsibility to them in many areas," Cummings said, adding that many leaders of the Taliban, al-Qaida and the Haqqani militant networks have been captured or killed.
Afghan security forces started taking the lead in seven areas in July. They soon will assume responsibility for many more regions as part of a gradual process that will put Afghans in charge of security across the nation by the end of 2014.
Some countries are lobbying to start transition as soon as possible in areas where they have their troops deployed - so they can go home, said a senior NATO official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss transition. The official insisted that those desires were not driving decisions on where Afghan troops are taking the lead. But the official said that because they want to leave, a number of troop-contributing nations faced with declining public support at home have started working harder to get their areas ready to hand off to Afghan forces.
"The big question (after 2014) is if the Afghan security forces can take on an externally based insurgency with support from the Pakistani security establishment and all that entails," Dressler said. "I think they will have a real challenge on their hands if the U.S. and NATO countries do not address Pakistani sponsorship of these groups."
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Lekic reported from Brussels. AP National Security Writer Robert Burns in Helmand contributed to this report.
Indian company wins Afghan iron ore deal
Financial Times By Matthew Green and James Lamont November 28, 2011
Islamabad, New Delhi - Afghanistan has awarded rights to develop a huge iron ore concession to an Indian company, in the latest in a series of deals aimed at opening up the country’s mineral resources to regional powers.
The state-run Steel Authority of India beat competition from several other Indian groups to win three blocks at the Hajigak deposit in central Afghanistan. Kilo Goldmines, a Canadian company mainly active in Africa, also won a block.
Doubts remain over whether these investors will be capable of committing the huge sums needed to start building mine and rail infrastructure from scratch, especially in the uncertain atmosphere in advance of the planned withdrawal of most Nato combat troops by late 2014.
Jalil Jumriany, director of policy in the ministry of mines, told the Financial Times the government expected to finalise negotiations with the two bidders within the next three to four months.
In the short term, the results of the latest tender may do more to cement Afghanistan’s diplomatic ties with India than kick-start large-scale mining.
New Delhi had been confident of securing the deal since Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan’s president, visited India in October to sign a strategic partnership agreement. India is the largest regional aid donor to Afghanistan, which has long been a theatre of India-Pakistan rivalry.
The award may also help the Afghan government to balance the growing commercial influence of China, which won rights to develop the Amu Darya oilfield through state-owned CNPC in September.
China had already become the first large-scale mineral investor in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban regime, when a Chinese consortium won a bid to exploit the vast Aynak copper deposit west of Kabul in 2008. So far, the development has made limited progress.
Both China and India are venturing into increasingly risky territory in search of raw materials to feed their growing economies, but there are questions over how quickly – if at all – their Afghan projects may be realised.
Any large-scale mining development in Afghanistan faces great obstacles, not least the need to invest billions of dollars in building railways to export the ore through tough terrain contested by insurgents.
Despite such challenges, India says it is proposing to build a steel mill to process some of the ore, while exporting the rest via a planned rail link to Uzbekistan or via a road it has recently built to Iran.
The Hajigak deposit contains an estimated 1.8bn tonnes of iron ore, according to the government, which bases the figure on a survey carried out in the 1960s.
Finland to reduce peacekeeping troops in Afghanistan
HELSINKI, Nov. 29 (Xinhua) -- Finland will reduce its peacekeeping troops in Afghanistan, the Finnish government said on Tuesday.
At present, Finland has 195 peacekeeping soldiers serving in the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) mission in Afghanistan.
Finland would begin to reduce its troops next year by bringing home the additional 50 soldiers deployed in 2010, according to a press release issued by the government.
Finnish President Tarja Halonen discussed the situation in Afghanistan and Finland's participation in military crisis management with the Cabinet Committee on Foreign and Security Policy on Tuesday.
The country's participation in the Afghan mission would focus more on development cooperation, civilian crisis management and training of Afghan security forces, the government said.
Meanwhile, Finland would increase its development funding to Afghanistan and raise it to 20 million euros (26.7 million U.S. dollars) in 2014.
The country would maintain its strong involvement in the European Union's Police Mission in Afghanistan, or EUPOL, the government said.
1 killed, 3 injured in bomb explosion in E. Afghanistan
MEHTARLAM, Afghanistan, Nov. 29 (Xinhua) -- An Afghan civilian was killed and three others injured when a bomb went off in Laghman province with Mehtarlam as its capital, 90 km east of capital city of Kabul, police said on Tuesday.
"A roadside bomb blasted Monday night in Baba Dashti area in vicinity of provincial capital Mehtarlam, leaving a person walking by dead and injuring three others," deputy to provincial police chief Daud Barakzai told Xinhua.
He said the victims were local Kuchi or nomad natives and the injured were shifted to a local hospital by police shortly after the blast occurred.
In a separate incident, three women were killed and two others including a child wounded when a mortar shell hit a house in Nalgham village of Zhari district in country's southern Kandahar province, a police official in the district, Abdul Rasheed told Xinhua.
The police official said the incident happened when one of several mortals, reportedly fired by NATO-led coalition forces to target the insurgents, had accidentally hit a civilian house on Sunday morning.
The Taliban-led insurgency has been rampant since the militant group announced to launch spring offensive from May 1 against Afghan and NATO-led troops stationed in Afghanistan.
A total of 1,462 Afghan civilians were killed in the first half of 2011, a 15 percent rise over the same period of 2010, according to the United Nations mid-year report released in Kabul on July.
Militants Turn to Death Squads in Afghanistan
New York Times By RAY RIVERA, SHARIFULLAH SAHAK and ERIC SCHMITT November 28, 2011
SABARI, Afghanistan - As targeted killings have risen sharply across Afghanistan, American and Afghan officials believe that many are the work of counterintelligence units of the Haqqani militant network and Al Qaeda, charged with killing suspected informants and terrorizing the populace on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
Military intelligence officials say that the units essentially act as death squads and that one of them, a large group known as the Khurasan that operates primarily in Pakistan’s tribal areas, has been responsible for at least 250 assassinations and public executions.
Another group, whose name is not known, works mainly in Afghanistan and may be responsible for at least 20 killings in Khost Province over the summer alone, including a mass beheading that came to light only after a video was found in the possession of a captured insurgent. The video shows 10 headless bodies evenly spaced along a paved road, while their heads sit nearby in a semicircle, their faces clearly visible.
It is another indication that the Haqqanis, a mostly Pakistan-based faction, remain the most dangerous part of an insurgency that makes full use of a porous and often ill-defined border, as the NATO strike that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers over the weekend showed.
Though the circumstances of that strike remain murky, it has now further upset relations between Pakistan and the United States, even as it once again demonstrated how havens inside Pakistan remained a critical part of the insurgent strategy.
The Americans have geared their offensive around bloodying the insurgents as they enter Afghanistan. But the new wave of assassinations shows that, even as NATO portrays the insurgents as a weakening force, the Haqqanis can still assert their influence, not only with headline-grabbing bombings but also through intimidation and by controlling perceptions.
One chilling case attributed to the second death squad came after American forces captured the senior Afghanistan-based leader for the Haqqanis, Hajji Mali Khan, and killed his top deputy this summer. Just days later, the bodies of two men accused of helping the Americans turned up near the village where Mr. Khan was captured. Scalding iron rods had been shoved through their legs. One victim had been disemboweled, and both had been shot through the head and crushed by boulders. Fear shot through the entire village.
“You could hardly recognize them,” said a witness who viewed the bodies.
Across Afghanistan, assassinations have jumped 61 percent, to 131 reported killings, through the first nine months of this year, compared with the same period in 2010, according to NATO statistics. United Nations officials say they began noticing a sharp increase in 2010, with 462 assassinations according to their records, double the number from the previous year. The figures may not include many killings in remote areas, like the mass beheading, because fearful villagers never reported them.
American intelligence officials say the Afghanistan-based group and the Khurasan seem to operate in much the same manner. The Khurasan is believed to have formed in early 2009 in the North Waziristan area of Pakistan, the Haqqanis’ headquarters, in response to intensified drone attacks by the United States. The group is said to wear black clothing with green armbands bearing its full name, Itihad al-Mujahedeen Khurasan, and works closely with Al Qaeda in the region. Estimates of its size range from 100 to 2,000 members.
During his interrogation, Mr. Khan suggested that other weapons were involved in the battle for influence, as well. According to four officials familiar with the questioning, the Haqqani leader told his interrogators that the Taliban had been approaching Afghan government and military officials throughout the summer, persuading them to sign a five-page document secretly pledging their loyalty to the Taliban leadership. Mr. Khan boasted that he had signed up 20 officials himself.
“They tell the officials that the Taliban is going to be back in power within 20 days of NATO leaving, so if they want to live, they’ll sign,” said one of the American officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the classified interrogations. Officials say they have found no confirmation of such oaths, however.
In places like Sabari, a rural district in Khost that sits about a dozen miles from the Pakistan border, the targeted killings are producing their intended effect. After a daylight execution of three men in a bazaar in the village of Maktab about four months ago, shop owners were so traumatized that they never reported the killings to the authorities.
Often, the victims may have had little more than passing encounters with coalition forces, or no involvement at all, according to officials, witnesses, and friends and relatives of victims.
American and Afghan officials learned about the killings only later when a video of the episode was found on a captured insurgent’s cellphone. Even then, American officials who showed the video to a New York Times reporter could cite the place where the killings had taken place but believed that they had occurred in October, about three months after witnesses say the actual episode happened.
The video showed a number of gunmen shooting to death two men as shop owners scrambled for cover. The militants then shot a third man as he sat in a white plastic chair in front of his shop. As the man fell backward, one of the gunmen shot him 10 more times in the face and chest.
“Whoever tries to help the Americans and spies for them will face this,” one of the men shouted after the killings, according to a witness, Ahmadullah, 25, a shop owner who like many Afghans goes by one name.
Ahmadullah said no one dared report it, even the men’s families, who carried the bodies away. “We just had to watch and stand quiet and watch what was happening to these poor people,” he said.
“I knew those men,” he added. “One was just a shop owner, the other two were laborers. They were innocent.”
An American military official who saw the video said he was not surprised that local villagers failed to report the episode.
“People in Sabari are living in abject terror, 24 hours a day,” he said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to publicly discuss the death squad. “When we conduct a raid on a Haqqani leader,” he said, a group of about 15 death-squad members “go in and massacre people.”
Last month, insurgents killed another man in the bazaar, about two days after a night raid in the village by Afghan and American troops. This time the victim was a visiting merchant from Khost City named Nasib, who was pulled out of his car as his 5-year-old son watched from the passenger seat. His abductors dragged him to the bazaar and killed him in broad daylight.
Yet when asked about the killings, the district governor and the local police chief in Sabari said they knew nothing about them. “I totally deny such reports,” said Dawlat Khan Qayoumi, the district governor. “I can tell you in the last five months we have not seen any such incidents.”
Questions also surround the videotaped beheadings. Muhammad Zarin, the commander of a special undercover police unit that has been investigating the death squads, would say only that the men were from Khost and were killed about three months ago in the Mangal area in the province’s mountainous Musa Khel district, where Mr. Khan was active. Neither NATO nor the United Nations, both of which track assassinations, had any record of the mass beheadings, of the Maktab Bazaar killings or of the two men killed after Mr. Khan’s capture, reflecting the intense secrecy with which villagers have guarded the deaths.
After an earlier raid that failed to capture Mr. Khan in the Musa Khel area, coalition forces got a report that three village elders had been kidnapped and three teenagers had been beheaded. “When we went up to investigate, we could never get any bodies or any proof,” said Col. Christopher R. Toner, commander of the First Infantry Division’s Third Brigade Combat Team, based in Khost and Paktia Provinces. “But there was enough going around that I suspect it was true.”
Public health officials likewise say they hear of dozens of such killings but are seldom able to confirm them. “People don’t bring the bodies in to the hospital for fear of the Taliban,” said Dr. Fazal Mohammad Mangal of the Khost provincial hospital.
Zabit Amen Jan, a former Musa Khel resident, has lost four brothers to insurgents, including two students in their 20s whose bullet-ridden bodies were found in June. A hand-scrawled letter found on one of the bodies said the men had ignored repeated warnings to stop working with the coalition forces. “There was no other way except doing this,” the letter said.
Mr. Jan said his younger brothers had no connection to the coalition and were killed only because he and another brother had been involved in politics.
“People used to come to our district for picnics because our area is full of mountains and covered with pine and walnut trees,” he said. “Now people are fleeing to Khost City or Kabul or Pakistan, because there are so many killings and they know the government can’t protect them.”
Ray Rivera reported from Sabari; Sharifullah Sahak from Kabul, Afghanistan; and Eric Schmitt from Washington.
Afghan, NATO forces capture Haqqani network local leader
KABUL, Nov. 29 (Xinhua) -- Afghan and NATO-led forces during a joint operation in Khost province 150 km southeast of Afghan capital Kabul captured a local leader of the Haqqani network on Tuesday, a statement of the alliance released here said.
"A Haqqani network leader was captured by a combined Afghan and coalition security force during an operation in Sabari district, Khost province, today," the statement asserted.
Without giving the name of the arrested man, the statement added that the facilitator distributed roadside bombs and planned attacks against Afghan forces.
Haqqani network is the military wing of Taliban outfit operating in the eastern provinces along the border with Pakistan and the capital city Kabul.
Taliban militants fighting Afghan and NATO-led troops have yet to make comment.
Australia seizes Afghan drug shipment
AFP 29/11/2011
Australian authorities said they had seized drugs worth Aus$30 million ($29.87 mln) concealed in a shipment of red raisins from Afghanistan, the second major drug bust this month.
The operation between Customs and the Australian Federal Police uncovered 97.7 kilograms (215 pounds) of heroin and 118.4 kilograms of pseudoephedrine in a consignment from Iran but believed to have originated in Afghanistan.
It follows the seizure of 300 kilograms of cocaine from a yacht in Queensland state three weeks ago.
"These are the largest seizures of both heroin and pseudoephedrine in the past 12 months," Home Affairs Minister Brendan O'Connor said in a statement on Tuesday.
"This is a significant blow to the heroin and precursor drug trade in Australia."
Police said a 34-year-old Sydney man had been charged with importing a commercial quantity of drugs and was facing a maximum penalty of life imprisonment and a hefty fine.
Customs targeted the consignment, which contained 3,105 cartons declared as "red raisins", for examination earlier this month.
After an x-ray revealed inconsistencies, a powdered substance was discovered hidden inside the linings of the cartons.
In September, agencies seized 271 kilograms of cocaine from a consignment of lawnmowers sent to Melbourne.
The Generals Have No Clothes
Islamabad's generals have been sponsoring the deaths of Americans for years, and yet Obama does nothing. Why?
BY KAPIL KOMIREDDI | NOVEMBER 29, 2011 - FP
Pakistan is indignant about the killing of 25 of its troops in a NATO air raid on Saturday. The circumstances that led to the assault are still unknown, but Washington and Europe have expressed contrition and promised an investigation. Pakistan has every reason to feel angry. But after a suitable period of mourning, shouldn't the United States, in the interests of fairness if nothing else, ask the Pakistani army if it plans ever to apologize for -- or, at bare minimum, acknowledge -- its role in the deaths of hundreds of coalition forces and many more Afghan civilians?
At the start of the 21st century, the United States offered Pakistan a very straightforward ultimatum: Join us in the war against terrorism inaugurated by al Qaeda's attacks on 9/11 -- or find yourself bombed to the Stone Age. In the decade since, Pakistan has arguably been responsible for more American deaths than any other state on earth. Yet Pakistan has not only evaded prosecution for its crimes. In a staggering turn of events, its army has found its program of sponsoring the slaughter of American troops in Afghanistan by the Taliban and al Qaeda amply subsidized by Washington.
One of the most principled voices against the Pakistani army during this time belonged, ironically, to Islamabad's ambassador to Washington. Husain Haqqani was, to repurpose Nirad Chaudhuri's phrase about Pandit Nehru, not only Pakistan's representative to the United States but also the West's ambassador to Pakistan. His resignation, offered and accepted on Tuesday, was ostensibly precipitated by an op-ed last month in the Financial Times by Mansoor Ijaz, an American businessman of Pakistani descent who claimed that an unnamed Pakistani diplomat -- whom he later identified as Haqqani -- had conscripted him in a grand scheme to curb the Pakistani military's power. Together, he alleged, they crafted a memo in which a series of dramatic offers were made to Washington -- among them, the promise to end state patronage of terrorism -- in return for the Obama administration's help in reining in the generals. (Haqqani vigorously denies involvement.)
Inexplicably, Ijaz, the courageous anti-military conspirator, transformed, without a hint of irony, into the army's canary, imperilling Pakistan's besieged civilian government by volunteering transcripts of his alleged exchanges with Haqqani. Pakistan's rightwing media served as his bullhorn, devoting their pages and program to his endless revelations. (Hardly anyone in the West accorded serious attention to Ijaz -- a clownish Croesus addicted to self-elevating fantasies. If only the Clinton administration had given attention to his "deal" with the Sudanese government to extradite Osama bin Laden to the United States, he once bragged, 9/11 would have been averted.)
The author of a devastatingly frank history of Pakistan, Haqqani has the virtue of clarity: He is known to view the army as an impediment to progress in the region. Still, it is stupefying to imagine that a diplomat and scholar of his sophistication would have recruited a pestilent popinjay like Ijaz to deliver a message that he could quite competently have communicated through other channels, or in person. The rapidity with which Ijaz has switched sides, meeting the ISI chief in London last month to handover "evidence" implicating his co-conspirator, strongly suggests that it is Haqqani who is the victim of a conspiracy.
Sherry Rehman, a formidable politician from Sindh, has now replaced Haqqani. But his forced resignation puts an end to the pretence of civilian rule in Pakistan -- and heralds the unapologetically solemn re-takeover of the country by the military-intelligence camorra that spawned the forces of destruction in Afghanistan. So it is astounding that, rather than treating Haqqani's departure as a setback, officials in the Obama administration see it as something of a boon. Haqqani's private criticisms of the Pakistani army led, according to a report in the New York Times, "to a diminishing of his influence in Washington, especially in the White House."
Why would the White House choose to belittle a man championing civilian rule in Pakistan? Isn't that also the objective of the Obama administration? The answer increasingly appears to be no.
Since the 1950s, when Gen. Ayub Khan mounted the first military coup, Pakistan's army has etiolated the country's evolution in every imaginable sense. Rooted in a culture of grievance and malevolence that is the foundational basis of Pakistan, the army has waged wars against India, suffused young minds with a fervor for jihad, sponsored terrorism, spread xenophobia and racism, carried out genocide against millions of its own citizens, stolen and smuggled nuclear secrets, foisted the vile Taliban regime upon the defenseless people of Afghanistan, and assumed complete ownership of Pakistan.
For wars and terrorist violence in South Asia to abate, Pakistan will have to resemble something approaching a normal state. The equation for that is simple: The army must return to the barracks.
Obama had an almost providential opportunity to squeeze the army in the immediate aftermath of bin Laden's discovery in May in the garrison city of Abbottabad. The khakis were at their weakest in four decades. That was the time to bolster civilian rule, to corral the army with fresh ultimatums. Instead, Obama seemed more anxious about pacifying Pakistan for having breached its sovereignty than holding its army to account for harboring bin Laden -- which explains the White House's rush to finesse Amb. Mike Mullen's candid testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee in September.
Then, in a craven abdication of American responsibility to the citizens of Afghanistan, Obama talked about the need for nation-building at home. For a man who attained the presidency by invoking Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi, Obama has rarely displayed any compunction in retreating from battle with men who, given the opportunity, would have lynched King and Gandhi -- indeed men who have presided over the slaughter and torture of too many potential Kings and Gandhis of our age. Could there be a more forceful testament to the failure of Obama's foreign policy in South Asia than the sight of terrorist leader Sirajuddin Haqqani operating with impunity in Pakistan six months after bin Laden's killing?
Rehman, the new Pakistani ambassador, is a socially liberal pro-democracy politician. But disturbingly, and unlike her predecessor, she subscribes to the Pakistani army's view of Afghanistan: Any government in Kabul must be pro-Pakistan. This should hardly seem worth worrying about -- except that "pro-Pakistan," in the context of Afghanistan, means anti-India, anti-America, and, more troublingly, anti-Afghan. Bluntly, it means a Pakistani colony of the pre-2001 variety that hosted bin Laden, not a sovereign state with independent policymaking prerogatives. This explains why an overwhelming majority of Afghans, whenever given the chance, express only the deepest contempt for Pakistan.
The Pakistani army has responded to the NATO attack by blocking supply routes to the coalition forces. It has also issued a notice to close down the U.S.-run airbase in Shamsi. The proportional response to Pakistan's denial of its territory to the United States would be to limit Pakistan's role in Afghanistan. It is the United States that has secured Afghanistan; if Pakistan wants a role, it had better pay its dues. Instead, Washington grovels before Islamabad even as American soldiers die at the hands of Pakistan's clients.
Faced with a re-election campaign, Obama is seeking to obtain a cosmetic "end" to the mission in Afghanistan by cutting deals with the Pakistani army and its clients in the Taliban. This will involve a reduced presence of American troops on the ground, a heightened use of targeted drone strikes, and, to keep this arrangement, bribes to the Pakistan army in the form of vaguely conditional aid. Relations between the United States and Pakistan will return to "normal" in short order. A poltroon deal will be struck with the Taliban chieftains. As the fighters currently enjoying Pakistani hospitality in the country's northwest make their way back into Afghanistan, the gains made over the last decade will wither away. Thus will the tremendous sacrifices, of both American troops and Afghan civilians, be honored. For the citizens of Pakistan and Afghanistan, this will signal the start of yet another prolonged period of violence. President Obama will call it victory.
Russia Threatens To Cut Off NATO Afghanistan Transit
EurasiaNet By Joshua Kucera November 28, 2011
Russia has threatened to cut off NATO supply routes to Afghanistan if the alliance doesn't compromise on its missile defense plans, Moscow's NATO envoy, Dmitry Rogozin, has said. From the Wall Street Journal:
If NATO doesn't give a serious response, "we have to address matters in relations in other areas," Russian news services reported Dmitri Rogozin, ambassador to NATO, as saying. He added that Russia's cooperation on Afghanistan may be an area for review, the news services reported.
This is just the latest in several headaches that the U.S. has had to deal with over the last couple of weeks regarding its supply lines to Afghanistan. First, there was an explosion in Uzbekistan on a line used by the U.S. and NATO, then Pakistan cut off its supply lines in response to a NATO attack that killed 28 Pakistani soldiers. And the flamboyantly nationalist Rogozin rarely misses a chance to kick the U.S. when it's down. (He also gloated, via twitter, that a somewhat threatening statement by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on missile defense last week forced U.S. officers at NATO to go into work on Thanksgiving.)
An expert quoted by the Journal suggests that this new Russian threat isn't too serious:
Ivan Safranchuk, deputy director of the Moscow-based Institute of Contemporary International Studies, said Russia is unlikely to cut off the flow of NATO supplies to Afghanistan as an immediate response to missile-defense decisions. But Russia does want its objections to the missile shield to be taken more seriously, he said.
"If the U.S. is not responsive, then a cutoff could be a reality at some point," Mr. Safranchuk said. "Russia would like the U.S. to be more serious about Russian concerns."
And EurasiaNet's Deirdre Tynan reported today that Russia has quietly acceded to U.S. and NATO plans to begin using the Northern Distribution Network to take materiel out of Afghanistan, rather than just into the country as has so far been the case. So on a technical level, at least, there has been progress on U.S.-Russian cooperation on Afghan transit.
The broader question is, why is Russia all of a sudden making a big deal on missile defense again? Russia somewhat out of the blue ratcheted up the tension on missile defense with his statement last week, in which he threatened to attack NATO missile defense sites. There is a large element of posturing on both sides here. As Tomas Hirst put it on twitter: "To be clear. Medvedev is threatening to attack missiles that don't yet exist, which are supposed to intercept missiles that also don't exist."
Russians also know that the timing is terrible from a U.S. perspective: just as the U.S. presidential campaign starts to get underway, they know that President Obama can't make any concessions to Russia, because such a move would just invite Republicans to attack him for "selling out" to America's "enemies."
To come up with an explanation for all this is beyond the scope of this blog (and perhaps beyond human understanding). Fyodor Lyukanov makes a game effort in Gazeta.ru (translation by Johnson's Russia List):
Why is Moscow being so stubborn? If considerations of prestige, deep distrust of the United States, and other (although also important) factors of a psychological character are not taken into account, it in effect boils down to an unsolvable problem. Everyone, even the most obstinate hawks on both sides of the Atlantic, understands that in present conditions the likelihood of a nuclear conflict between Russia and America is insignificantly small, if it exists at all. However, the very fact of the existence of enormous nuclear potentials built up in the years of the ideological confrontation makes it impossible to brush off the concept of "strategic stability," which was and is based on guaranteed mutual destruction.
No matter what politicians and even military may say, as long as these arsenals exist, each of us has no other enemy than the arsenal of the opposite side. And hence, violation of the principle whereby there is no possibility of delivering a first strike with impunity leads to acute destabilization. Especially since America since the Cold War times has shown itself to be a country that has the overwhelming advantage over any other country or group of countries and is ready to use armed force quite readily. And the nuclear potential serves as a reliable pledge that it will not be used (see the differences in approaches to Iraq and Libya, on the one hand, and North Korea -- on the other).
It's as good an explanation as any. Will the NDN be a casualty of this "unsolvable problem?" It doesn't seem likely now -- but if Putin and a future Republican U.S. president start escalating their rhetoric, all bets are off.
Is there hope for Afghanistan?
By Linda Robinson Tuesday, November 29, 2011 - FP
After spending last month in Afghanistan on my fourth trip this year, the situation can best be described as a glass half full. A multifaceted effort in the south, led by a "surge" of U.S. and Afghan troops, has increased security in the southern Pashtun heartland this year. But a steady drumbeat of high-profile attacks, including a brazen assault on the U.S. embassy and assassinations of key Afghan officials, has had an outsized impact on the population by eroding already weak confidence in the Afghan government and the forces supporting it. As I was ending my trip with a few days in Kabul, an SUV packed with 700 kilos of explosives rammed an armored "Rhino" bus, killing a dozen Americans and inflicting horrific burns on others in a targeted, planned attack reminiscent of the worst days in Baghdad. The U.S. military has adopted the line that these "spectacular attacks" are in fact signs of the Taliban's weakness, and points instead to a notable decline in the number of enemy initiated attacks.
But numbers matter less than perception in these wars -- and shaping perception is precisely how terrorist groups fight and win. The dominant narrative in Afghanistan is: the Americans are leaving, the government is weak, the Taliban is still strong, and Pakistan is the problem. And though the details of the cross-border NATO bombardment Saturday, which killed 24 Pakistani soldiers, are still murky, it will undoubtedly send U.S.-Pakistan relations into a further downward spiral. Unless the reality underlying these perceptions about the United States in the region are addressed, sustainable momentum on the government side cannot be generated. The U.S. surge may have started to turn around the momentum that is currently favoring the Taliban, but Afghan political and military actions are required to create a perception -- and the reality -- that the Afghan government is capable of surviving and prevailing. Addressing several factors bedeviling the Afghan campaign between now and next summer, when the traditional fighting season resumes and more troops go home, might turn perception and thus momentum in the Afghan government's favor. Six are most critical:
Promptly reaching a strategic partnership agreement in which the United States pledges to continue providing security and economic assistance after 2014 could go a long way toward reducing Afghan fears of abandonment. The U.S. and Afghan governments have been negotiating such an agreement for over a year, and the general idea of a partnership (albeit with a 10-year limit on American forces in Afghanistan after 2014) was approved at President Hamid Karzai's Loya Jirga this week; both sides hope to finalize it before the Bonn summit next month. The sticking points are night raids, which Karzai would like to end, and the transfer of detainees to Afghan control, despite a recent U.N. report cataloguing abusive practices in Afghan intelligence detention centers. The first issue can be postponed or finessed, but the United States is bound by international convention not to turn over detainees if it believes they will be tortured or mistreated. In the run-up to the Bonn Conference, Karzai will hopefully stay focused
on the need to reassure Afghans of ongoing U.S. support and assistance as coalition troop levels decline over the coming years.
Forging a common front with his main backer, the United States, would help Karzai repair some of the image of weakness that plagues his government. Veteran U.S. ambassador Ryan Crocker and the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF)'s top commander Gen. John Allen have worked hard to "reset" the relationship with Karzai since they arrived this summer. One of his frequent interlocutors notes that Karzai "is exhausted, and he knows he is irritable and unpredictable." Nader Nadery, a commissioner of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, chides Karzai for his "lack of firmness. There is no clarity on where he stands." And, like many Afghans I spoke to, Nadery sees the president's tolerance of corrupt activity as a major weakness. Yet despite these failings, many Afghans I've talked to still see him as currently the only leader who can balance the myriad rivalries and swirling tensions that beset Afghan national politics, in particular the concern that Tajik leaders may be girding for an all-out civil war once the U.S. departs. The assassination of former president Burhanuddin Rabbani, the Tajik head of Karzai's High Peace Council, significantly ratcheted up those concerns.
Afghan security forces need to move demonstrably into the lead. The U.S. plans to push Afghan forces out front in more and more operations, if only to determine just how ready they are to take the lead and where the weak links are. To get them ready, U.S. forces must make partnering with and mentoring their Afghan partners its top priority, which it is not. By the military's own count in the latest DOD report mandated by Congress, 95 Afghan units in critical areas have no coalition partner whatsoever, and many others are only loosely mentored.
Afghans will have to step up if the three stated objectives of the military campaign are to be accomplished -- namely, to secure the south, the populated corridor along Highway One up to Kabul, and key areas of the east, especially the crucial provinces of Paktia, Paktika, and Khost. The south has been greatly stabilized over the past year, but the job is not yet done. I spent ten days in Kandahar province, where the longtime Taliban strongholds of Zhari, Panjwayi and Maiwand are still heavily contested. Returning from Maiwand, which is mostly still Taliban dominated, I passed through the Panjwayi district center, where a car bomb detonated a short while later. We stopped in Kandahar city for dinner -- one of the few times I have been with a U.S. military unit that felt comfortable dining at night in an Afghan city. The company commander ordered roast chickens, pilaf and delicious nan bread for all his men, and we picnicked amid the city's bustling nightlife, surrounded by curious Afghan men and children. Yet that reality coexisted with a frontal assault, hours earlier, on the Kandahar provincial reconstruction team, located just across from the provincial governor's office.
The current priority is to expand the security bubble beyond Kabul to Wardak, Logar and then Ghazni and Zabul provinces, thus securing the country's major highway all the way down to Kandahar. After that, the campaign plans to shift to the east, but it needs to tightly focus on the key population areas. There is a danger of focusing too much on sparsely populated provinces and neglecting the Khost to Gardez corridor, which has a large population and has been both an insurgent stronghold and transit route from the beginning of the war. Attempting to cut every ratline in the country is a sure fire way to fritter away forces. The only way that the campaign objectives can be achieved is if coalition forces focus on the important areas, and if Afghan security forces take more of the lead.
The expanding self-defense initiative may increase security. Security out in the countryside, where the insurgency is based, is starting to get a lift from the year-old Afghan Local Police program, but it is too early to judge the net effect of the program. It now has 8,500 recruits, mostly farmers who have volunteered and been trained to do checkpoint security and patrols in their villages. I've visited a half dozen of the 57 sites, where Special Operations Forces train and mentor the ALP and work with the district police chief, who is the Afghan official charged with their formal command and control, as well as providing them with salaries, trucks, weapons and ammunition. The program, strongly backed by ISAF, is funded and approved to grow to 30,000 in 100 districts, but the painstaking process of gaining community support and ensuring that the government exercises proper oversight means it will be another year or more before the program is fully implemented.
Thus far, RAND quarterly assessments done for the Special Operations Forces command in Afghanistan say that the program is broadly supported by local residents and that security in the sites has improved. The principal concern expressed by the program's critics is that these small groups (limited to 300 per district) will become militias, which historically have been armies of 30,000 or more under the command of a single warlord. The ALP program aims to prevent that by creating a strong link to district and provincial police chiefs from the outset. A recent Human Rights Watch Report catalogued allegations of abuse, disputes and ethnic tensions in some areas, although U.S. officials dispute some of the claims, which are under official investigation.
The ALP program features greater oversight and vetting mechanisms than earlier similar efforts, but continuing vigilance is necessary, as with all security forces. The Special Forces team in Maiwand told me about an ALP member who went AWOL, and along with his brother, started holding up cars for bribes on Highway One, the highway linking Kandahar to Kabul. The Taliban shot him dead. ALP commanders have fired numerous members they feel are not up to snuff. One of the sites, in Baghlan, is a unique case in that the Afghan government asked SOF to form a local police unit out of former insurgents from the small Hezb-e Islami faction; insurgents are not the recruiting base for ALP, unlike the Sons of Iraq program. The tensions in the area are increased by the fact that the area is a pocket of Pashtuns surrounded by a larger Tajik population. The Afghan interior ministry official who has national oversight of the program, Brig. Gen. Ali Shah Ahmadzai, told me that he has put the ALP commander, who is under investigation, on notice that he will be arrested "if he does not behave."
Promises to rural Afghans should be moderated but honored. The reality is that the dysfunctional Afghan bureaucracy cannot deliver funds to individual provinces, let alone the district level where 76 percent of the Afghan population ekes out a subsistence living. At present, most district governments are fig leafs for the distribution of international aid projects. I sat in the Khas Kunar district governor's office as he talked to the provincial governor's secretary about getting funds for a backhoe to dig out canals damaged in recent floods. A U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) official had suggested he seek to tap the $25,000 "performance based" fund that USAID provides each month to provincial governors. The district governor smiled and nodded as the conversation concluded, then turned to us and said, "It will take a year for the necessary paperwork and to get approval from Kabul." Yet there has been progress - in many areas district governors did not even visit, let alone live in, their districts last year. Many areas have now been pacified sufficiently for them to return. During the week I spent in Maiwand, I saw the governor preside over four meetings, although he still returns to Kandahar city each weekend where his family lives. Prioritizing needs is essential, since USAID funds and staff are slated to decline significantly, and the civilian state-building effort will focus on the provincial level rather than the districts. The district delivery program, for example, will end next year after reaching only 45 of the country's 398 districts. This program, which supports training and salary increases for district officials, is current under way in only 12 districts. A number of civilian officials and nongovernmental organizations believe dispute resolution, primarily through the traditional local mediation practices system, should be the highest priority in conflict-ridden areas where land and other disputes often fuel insurgent violence.
Pakistan is the glaring problem that has dramatically worsened and must be addressed. A senior U.S. official in Kabul declared flatly to me, "We will not succeed unless the Pakistan safe havens are reduced." He does not believe Pakistan will come around, despite countless U.S. pleas for more action. Pakistan balks at getting tough on the Afghan insurgent groups that are the central cards in its hedging strategy -- particularly the deadly Haqqani network, based in Pakistan's North Waziristan tribal agency. And U.S. officials recognize that an assault into the agency simply is not going to happen.
The United States and Afghanistan will have to neutralize the threat from Waziristan through their own efforts, and indeed these efforts have stepped up dramatically. Operation Knife Edge rounded up many Haqqani operatives last month. A senior Haqqani facilitator, Mali Khan, was nabbed as he crossed the border, and another, Janbaz Zadran, was killed by a suspected CIA drone attack on October 13. During the week I spent in Paktika, U.S. forces dropped 33,000 pounds of bombs on the border to close mountain passes that the insurgents use. A U.S. commander there pointed out a dozen "POOs" or points of origin, of artillery or rockets fired from Pakistan into Afghanistan. They were all within sight of Pakistani Frontier Corps outposts - leaving little doubt about active or passive support for militants among some Pakistani forces. U.S. and Afghan forces are under direct attack from Pakistani territory, and Lieutenant General Curtis Scaparrotti assured me that when they take "effective" fire, U.S. forces shoot back.
The dilemma, however, is that Pakistan holds a critical trump card, as it demonstrated this week by its ability to close major commercial crossings in retaliation for Saturday's cross-border strike. When I visited that part of the border area last month, Special Forces soldiers told me that an insurgent camp near the two border posts was a major source of attacks in the region.
If the Afghan and U.S. governments can agree on a common plan, backed by a lower but sustainable level of U.S. troops, they just might start winning the battle of perceptions. Given the insurgents' lack of popularity -- they rely on intimidation -- the Afghan government should be able to prevail in either defeating the insurgency or forcing them into a political accommodation if the United States remains willing to lend a hand. It might take five or ten years. But the alternative is not a pretty one to contemplate: the U.S. departs, Afghanistan crumbles, and the war fought to avenge the 9/11 attacks is perceived to be a failure. As I wrote in my last book on the Iraq war, Americans need to be prepared for wars to last a decade. The Afghan war, which the United States attempted to fight largely through a counterterrorism approach for the first seven years, has only begun in earnest in the last three. There is a third choice between the current large-scale U.S. counterinsurgency campaign and reverting to a counter-terrorism approach, and that is an Afghan-led counterinsurgency effort that that the United States can support in a sustainable way.
Linda Robinson is Adjunct Senior Fellow for U.S. National Security and Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. She is writing a book on the war in Afghanistan.
Postwar U.S.-Afghanistan ties are expected to remain rocky
The U.S. military wants to have the ability to carry out strikes on insurgents after 2014, but President Hamid Karzai says Afghanistan will protect its sovereignty.
Los Angeles Times By Laura King November 28, 2011
Kabul, Afghanistan - The wartime alliance between Afghanistan and the United States in the last decade has been fraught with suspicions over sharply differing goals and tactics. It is becoming clear that any postwar partnership to prevent a Taliban comeback is likely to be just as problematic.
Despite compelling common interests, stark differences already have emerged between Washington and the Afghan government about the military landscape after 2014, when most U.S. combat troops are gone and Afghan security forces are in charge of keeping the country safe.
President Hamid Karzai says Afghanistan will zealously guard its sovereignty and tightly govern the actions of any foreign troops on its soil — while continuing to expect massive infusions of U.S. and other foreign aid for training and equipping his police and army.
U.S. officials say little publicly about negotiations with Karzai's government over a future "strategic partnership," which have been going on for more than a year. But Western officials familiar with the talks say the Obama administration wants continued access to at least some military installations, even after they have reverted to Afghan command. Also considered crucial to U.S. interests is the ability to field small, elite teams of special operations troops to carry out targeted strikes on insurgents.
Afghans widely loathe those raids, especially when they involve U.S. troops entering residential compounds at night. Karzai has long accused the American-commanded NATO force of being insensitive to cultural considerations, as well as civilians' safety, during night raids.
With Iraq as a guide, U.S. officials are keenly aware that long-term issues that go unaddressed at the height of combat may become considerably harder to resolve in the war's winding-down phase.
In Iraq, the stumbling block was refusal to grant remaining U.S. troops immunity. When it became clear that Prime Minister Nouri Maliki could not gain agreement within his coalition for a deal that would shield U.S. forces from prosecution for violating Iraqi laws, President Obama announced in October that the U.S. would withdraw virtually all of its troops by the end of the year — meeting a deadline set during the Bush administration.
Afghan unhappiness with U.S. tactics resurfaced this month during a traditional grand council, or loya jirga, convened by Karzai in Kabul. The Afghan leader opened the gathering with a denunciation of U.S.-led night raids, demanding an end to them as a condition for signing a strategic partnership pact.
"We are lions!" he declared. "A lion hates a stranger entering his home. A lion dislikes a stranger trespassing in its space. A lion does not want his offspring taken away at night."
American officials have so far disregarded Karzai's complaints about the raids, which proceed at a pace of about a dozen a night. They are seen by U.S. commanders as one of the most effective means of combating the insurgency, leading to the killing or capturing of hundreds of Taliban field commanders.
Karzai and the Obama administration have been at pains to avoid antagonizing regional powers such as Iran, Russia, Pakistan and China with talk of a continuing American military presence, even though there could be thousands of U.S. troops staying on after 2014.
"Any post-2014 presence will be at the invitation of the Afghan government, and would ensure that the United States will be able to target terrorists and support a sovereign Afghan government so that our enemies can't outlast us," said Tommy Vietor, spokesman for the U.S. National Security Council.
The strategic partnership "is not aimed at any of Afghanistan's neighbors, and we don't seek permanent bases," Vietor said.
Outlasting the West, though, seems like an increasingly viable option for the insurgency. After 10 years of conflict, another "fighting season" or two, replete with hit-and-run guerrilla-style attacks against a more powerful foe, do not appear an insurmountable challenge for the Taliban.
Efforts to open channels of communication with the Taliban have faltered in recent months, perhaps reflecting a calculation by the insurgents that they can afford to wait.
At the grand council, delegates offered few concrete ideas for reviving a peace process thrown into disarray by the assassination in September of Burhanuddin Rabbani, who headed the commission in charge of making overtures to the Taliban.
Rabbani's killer posed as a Taliban peace envoy and had a bomb concealed in his turban.
But it also is clear that the Taliban and other insurgent groups feel threatened by the prospect of an American military presence after 2014, whatever form it may take. In recent weeks, the Taliban leadership has sought to whip up public opposition to the pact, calling it an American scheme to dominate Afghanistan indefinitely.
"The Afghan crisis will only find an end when our nation thwarts the strategic partnership of the invaders and their mercenaries," the Taliban said in a statement on the eve of the Kabul gathering.
The United States, together with most of its allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization force, hopes to focus its attention after 2014 on training and mentoring Afghan forces. But planned expenditures are being reevaluated by increasingly cash-strapped Western militaries.
The current $11 billion in annual costs for Afghan security forces, virtually entirely borne by foreigners, is expected to fall to about $4 billion by 2014. Karzai repeated a call for upgraded armaments at the loya jirga, but he is unlikely to get weapons such as Abrams battle tanks or F-16 fighter jets.
From the American vantage point, Karzai's flagging domestic popularity, and the sometimes inflammatory statements he makes to try to bolster it, must be taken into account. The Afghan leader's political foes are ready to criticize any perceived willingness to capitulate to American demands.
A day after the loya jirga endorsed Karzai's conditions for a long-term agreement, hundreds of demonstrators gathered in the eastern city of Jalalabad to shout their opposition to the security pact. "Death to America! Death to Karzai!" some yelled.
"A partnership with the United States is vital," said Robaba Parwani, a member of parliament who took part in the loya jirga. "But in the last 10 years, the international community has not delivered what it promised. So we have to make sure that what happens next doesn't cause more harm to the people of Afghanistan."
Should the US adopt a 'Colombia standard' of success in Afghanistan?
Measuring success in Afghanistan on Afghans' ability to fight their own conflicts may appeal, but a 'Plan Afghanistan' would still be far more costly – and less successful – than Colombia's, argues blogger James Bosworth.
Christian Science Monitor By James Bosworth, Guest blogger November 28, 2011
Michael O'Hanlon and Paul Wolfowitz argue that the US should strive for a "Colombia standard" of success in Afghanistan. They argue that though Colombia continues to have a conflict (in fact, a higher homicide rate than Afghanistan), its relative success in reducing the conflict, providing state presence in the population centers and having a fighting force capable of managing its own conflict should be seen as a model for "success" in Afghanistan.
They write:
While Colombians deserve most of the credit for success, they depended on a long-term U.S. commitment that was limited in scale but not in time.
I agree with that sentence, but not the rest of the paragraph.
I once wrote that Latin American analysts liked to refer to Plan Colombia not because of any specific details as much as it was "very big." That's true in terms of security assistance to the Western Hemisphere, where Plan Colombia was bigger and longer lasting than any other comparable initiative. The Merida Initiative in Mexico and the more recent CARSI and CBSI in Central America and the Caribbean are quite undersized compared to the scale of resources and commitment the US gave Colombia in the late 1990's and throughout the 00's.
That said, compared to Afghanistan or Iraq, Plan Colombia is peanuts. Over the past decade, there have been times the US has spent more in a day on its two wars than was spent in an entire year in Colombia. Additionally, Plan Colombia limited the number of troops and contractors in the country to less than 1,500 at any given time and the US was often well under the limits. Compare that to the 150,000 military personnel that were in Iraq at its peak or the about 90,000 that remain in Afghanistan today, and neither of those numbers include thousands of additional contractors.
Those limitations benefited Colombia. Having a smaller budget and a troop/contractor cap prevented the US from throwing excessive troops and resources at the problem, which often creates temporary success but also a level of dependency that make it hard to step away. The limitations on US assistance meant Colombia had to succeed on its own because the US was legislatively self-limited from imposing temporary "success" from the outside by ramping up troops or aid.
But here's the rest of the paragraph from O'Hanlon and Wolfowitz:
Afghanistan will need that even more. With a desperately poor economy (one-sixteenth the size of Colombia's), Afghanistan cannot sustain the army it needs without help. The country will need some $3 billion annually in foreign military assistance for an extended period after 2014, as well as a continuing military presence in the range of 10,000 U.S. and other NATO troops in a supporting role.
Look at those numbers. $3 billion in military assistance plus 10,000 troops (plus how many contractors?) on top of the money spent over the past decade. That's five to ten times the size of Plan Colombia in any given year. They are recommending a "post-war" spending package of more money on security aid in Afghanistan than the US spends in the entire Western Hemisphere today. They are recommending far more US troops deployed in Afghanistan than the US uses to train and support all the military and police in this hemisphere.
IN PICTURES: Far from home: US soldiers serving in Afghanistan
The military aid package suggested by O'Hanlon and Wolfowitz is only "limited" in comparison with the war-level spending in Afghanistan over the past decade. It is still far more costly than Plan Colombia, less likely to succeed, and without a plan to reduce that level to a more reasonable support package at any point in the future. In terms of Afghanistan, the right lessons from Plan Colombia are to look at the self-imposed limitations on aid, leaving the US in a supporting role while Colombia led the fight. Afghanistan is not going to lead on its own security if the US doesn't limit its own involvement.
Now go back to a fact I put in the first paragraph: Colombia still has a higher homicide rate than Afghanistan. So do the parts of Central America, the Caribbean and Mexico most heavily affected by the criminal groups.
Budgeting is about priorities. That $3 billion and 10,000 troop plan proposed by O'Hanlon and Wolfowitz can't be analyzed in a vacuum. Spending more on security in Afghanistan than we spend on all of Latin America and the Caribbean seems to me to be a poor use of limited resources moving forward. There is a need in this hemisphere, the money spent is more effective and the direct impact on US security and prosperity is likely greater. That's one more factor to consider as the US plans a more "limited scale" of aid to Afghanistan.
--- James Bosworth is a freelance writer and consultant who runs Bloggings by Boz.
Afghanistan Seeks Enduring Support
Wall Street Jounal By YAROSLAV TROFIMOV NOVEMBER 29, 2011
KABUL - Afghan officials are bringing a simple message to Western powers at an international conference on Afghanistan's future that begins this weekend in Bonn, Germany: Don't abandon us like the Russians did.
Three years after Moscow withdrew its forces from Afghanistan in 1989, a crisis-struck Russia cut off its funding for the Kabul regime. Once the Russian money ran out, the Afghan army fractured, the mujahedeen seized Kabul, and an ensuing civil war eventually brought the Taliban into power.
As the U.S.-led military coalition prepares to withdraw most combat troops by the end of 2014, Afghan officials fear that, amid world-wide economic troubles, history will repeat itself.
Afghan officials say the Bonn conference, which will be attended by nearly a hundred nations, must reaffirm the world's long-term financial commitment to their country to ensure that the fragile Afghan institutions that have been built over the past decade don't collapse.
"There is a need within Afghanistan, within the region and beyond to send a message of continuity and enduring engagement," said Deputy Foreign Minister Jawed Ludin, who is playing a key role in negotiations with the U.S. and allies. "2014 should not become 1989. That would be the strongest political message we expect to come out of Bonn."
The Afghan government, he added, is pushing the idea of a "transition dividend," under which coalition countries would reinvest into Afghanistan part of the savings that result from withdrawing their own troops.
In the years after 2014, the Afghan government would still need at least $10 billion annually from foreign donors, Mr. Ludin calculated, with some $6 billion of that going to pay for the Afghan army and police, slated to number 352,000 men by next November.
"It's huge, but given the investment that's been made here in the past 10 years, it's a fraction," Mr. Ludin said, pointing out that the U.S. is currently spending as much as ten times this amount on maintaining its own forces in Afghanistan. "It's a cost worth paying."
Afghanistan gets $15.7 billion in foreign aid a year, roughly equal to its nominal gross domestic product. Only a small share of this money is spent through the Afghan government.
A World Bank study released this month warned that Afghanistan will face an "unmanageable" fiscal gap over the next decade if it has to finance its own security forces. The study predicted that, by 2022, the country would still require $7.2 billion in foreign aid a year—and that assumes an upsurge of so-far inexistent mining-industry revenue and no dramatic deterioration of security.
The Bonn conference isn't expected to bring immediate financial commitments to Afghanistan. "It's not a pledging conference," a U.S. official said. "But it's going to be an opportunity that the Afghans are going to seize with both hands. They'll be talking about what they needfrom the international community, and for how long."
The participating nations are expected to make political promises to stand by Afghanistan, Western officials say.
American officials say the U.S. will remain committed to Afghanistan past 2014, pointing out that Washington is negotiating a long-term strategic partnership agreement with Kabul.
"The international community will assure in a credible way that it will not repeat the mistakes of the past," said Michael Steiner, Germany's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. "People don't want just words in Bonn. People have heard enough words."
Such assurances, however, will be worthless without endorsement by the U.S. Congress and other donor countries' parliaments—where plans to keep spending billions in Afghanistan for years to come aren't likely to secure easy approval, especially once the foreign forces are gone.
"You can imagine us doing it for a while, but our willingness to do it in perpetuity is zero," says Stephen Biddle, senior fellow for defense policy at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington and a former member of the Pentagon's defense-policy board. Politically speaking, he adds, a decade or more is "the first mathematical approximation of infinity."
Already, European nations are dramatically cutting spending on their own citizens in an attempt to rescue the euro, while the U.S. faces $1.2 trillion in spending cuts over the next decade as it tries to contain its debt and trim its budget deficit.
Afghan corruption makes future disbursements a particularly hard sell. According to an August report by a bipartisan U.S. congressional commission, waste and fraud accounted for as much as 29% of the $206 billion the U.S. spent on wartime contracting in Afghanistan and Iraq over the past decade.
The belt-tightening in Europe and the U.S., alongside a new focus on the spreading turmoil in the Arab world, make Afghan hopes of getting sustained financial commitments from Western nations highly unrealistic, many analysts say.
"Everyone knows—only most governments don't admit this—that the money will leave with the soldiers," says Thomas Ruttig, senior analyst at the Kabul-based Afghanistan Analysts Network. "Transition is a colossus built of clay."
The Bonn conference is gathering 10 years after another conference in the same city established Afghanistan's first post-Taliban administration, headed by President Hamid Karzai, who has been in power ever since.
The original Bonn gathering pointedly excluded Taliban representatives—a decision that helped spark the insurgency that nearly 140,000 U.S.-led troops are still trying to contain.
When the second Bonn conference was announced by Mr. Karzai last fall, Afghan and U.S. officials hoped that the tentative peace talks with the Taliban would have made tangible progress by now, possibly allowing for historic insurgent participation in the event.
These hopes, however, were dashed by the September assassination of Afghanistan's chief peace negotiator, former President Burhanuddin Rabbani, a killing that effectively ended Kabul's peace outreach to the insurgents.
American and Afghan negotiators had also been aiming to finalize before Bonn a bilateral strategic partnership declaration, a document outlining what military and political presence the U.S. will maintain in Afghanistan beyond 2014. Talks over this document, however, have since bogged down over Mr. Karzai's demands to end coalition night raids and detentions.
Afghan and American negotiators say they still hope the strategic agreement will be reached; they now seek to strike the deal in time for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit that is slated for late May in Chicago.
What's behind the furor in Pakistan?
By Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst, and Andrew Lebovich, Special to CNN November 25, 2011
Editor's note: Peter Bergen is CNN's national security analyst, a director at the New America Foundation and the author of "The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict between America and Al-Qaeda." Andrew Lebovich is a policy analyst at the New America Foundation.
(CNN) -- Pakistani-American businessman Mansoor Ijaz has set off a political firestorm in Pakistan with his claims that he was brokering an offer from Pakistan's civilian leaders to the Pentagon to unseat the leadership of the Pakistani military.
Those accusations forced the resignation on Tuesday of Pakistan's ambassador to the United States, Husain Haqqani, who Ijaz says orchestrated this proposal, which was delivered in a unsigned memo in May to Adm. Mike Mullen, then-U.S. chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
Pakistan is a nuclear-armed state that is home to a number of Taliban groups that attack U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan and also is home to what remains of al Qaeda's "core" organization.
Haqqani helped smooth over many tense moments in the important U.S.-Pakistan relationship, including the shooting in January of two Pakistanis by CIA contractor Raymond Davis and the Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad in northern Pakistan in May.
Ijaz has said that the offer to get rid of the leadership of the Pakistani Army was sanctioned by Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari. The story is an explosive one in Pakistan, where relations between the civilian government and the military leadership are often tense and the United States is deeply unpopular.
Writing in the Financial Times on October 10, Ijaz explained that, "The embarrassment of bin Laden being found on Pakistani soil had humiliated Mr. Zardari's weak civilian government to such an extent that the president feared a military takeover was imminent. He needed an American fist on his army chief's desk to end any misguided notions of a coup -- and fast."
Haqqani denies being involved in any such scheme, and Mullen says that while he did receive a memo that made this kind of offer-- delivered to him by Obama's former National Security Adviser James L. Jones -- he ignored it because it just didn't seem credible.
According to Ijaz, Lt. Gen. Ahmad Shuja Pasha, Pakistan's powerful military intelligence chief, recently traveled to London to meet with him, where he "forensically tested" Ijaz's evidence, which consists of Blackberry messages between Ijaz and Haqqani.
While the affair has already brought down Haqqani, a longtime critic of Pakistan's military establishment and a well-known figure in diplomatic and national security circles in Washington, it could also damage the country's civilian government. Haqqani's wife, Farah Ispahani, is President Zardari's spokeswoman and a prominent member of the governing Pakistan People's Party.
The man at the center of it all
Who is Mansoor Ijaz, the Pakistani-American businessman at the center of this twisted tale? Born to a family of Pakistani immigrants in Tallahassee, Florida, Ijaz grew up in rural Virginia, the son of two college teachers.
After getting an undergraduate degree in nuclear physics from the University of Virginia and an MA in engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in the early 1990s Ijaz founded Crescent Investment Management, a New York investment firm. Crescent was politically well-connected. Ijaz's partner in the firm was retired Air Force Lt. General James Alan Abrahamson, who played an instrumental role in President Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative ("Star Wars").
Another Washington heavyweight, the former CIA director R. James Woolsey, was chairman of the board of Ijaz's publicly listed company, Crescent Technology Ventures PLC, based in London.
In the mid-'90s, Ijaz gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Democratic Party, and hobnobbed with the Clintons at fund raising events.
In 2003, journalist Richard Miniter, in a book titled "Losing Bin Laden: How Bill Clinton's Failures Unleashed Global Terror", relied on Ijaz as the principal source for the key part of his thesis, which concerned the five years Osama bin Laden spent in Sudan in the early and mid- 1990s. Miniter described multiple attempts Ijaz made between August 1996 and 1998 to interest the Clinton administration in improving relations with Sudan, as well as Sudanese offers to hand over intelligence on al Qaeda.
In his account to Miniter and in later writings, Ijaz claimed to have helped draft a proposal for Sudan to provide intelligence on al Qaeda to the Clinton administration, and that Sudan had offered to arrest bin Laden. Clinton administration officials did not take Ijaz up on any of his offers to help because they viewed him as "a Walter Mitty living out a personal fantasy," according to Miniter. And the 9/11 Commission, which interviewed Ijaz, concluded that were was no "credible evidence" that the Sudanese had made any offer to hand over bin Laden.
In a 2004 interview with Fox News about Iraq, Ijaz, in his then-capacity as a foreign affairs analyst for the network, made another sensational claim: Chemical warheads were being smuggled into Iraq for a potentially catastrophic attack against American troops. And to top it off, Ijaz strongly suggested that the whole plan was given the green light by hardline Iranian mullahs. The story had everything to attract attention -- Mad mullahs! WMD on the loose in Iraq! (At last!) And the threat of thousands of potential American casualties.
Ijaz now concedes, "This was an erroneous report based on information I had received from a former intelligence official on the ground in Iraq. I did not second source this story." Ijaz also told CNN, "I have written over 170 op-ed columns, appeared over 200 times on television and have not once had a word of what I said retracted due to factual errors." (Ijaz has written one op-ed for CNN.com).
Ijaz told Fox in 2003 that "eyewitness sources" placed Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in Iran. Asked by host Brit Hume about the sourcing of the story, Ijaz responded, "I can just tell you that the source is unimpeachable. It is from inside Iran. These are eyewitness accounts."
There was, of course, nothing to this story. Ijaz now says, "At the time I made it, I believed the source who had given the data to me."
Described as a "U.S. nuclear proliferation and terrorism expert," Ijaz told the Gulf News newspaper in 2006 that Iran not only had a nuclear bomb, it was seeking to "duplicate them in large numbers before revealing their existence to the world." Five years later, Iran still does not have a nuclear weapon, but Ijaz asserted to CNN, "They had in my view then, and it remains my view now, at least one nuclear weapon stored in component parts."
In August 2003 Ijaz told the British newspaper The Guardian that he had learned that the Bush administration had brokered a deal with Pakistan's dictator, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, not to capture or kill bin Laden so as not to cause unrest in the Muslim world. Ijaz told The Guardian "There was a judgment made that it would be more destabilizing in the longer term (if bin Laden were captured or killed). There would still be the ability to get (bin Laden) at a later date when it was more appropriate."
Ijaz provided no evidence for this claim, and the idea that the Bush administration would do a deal to let bin Laden go free is ludicrous on its face. Ijaz told CNN "I stand by my comments, taken in full context, throughout that article."
Peeling back the layers of the story
Pakistan's government and Pakistani and American journalists continue to look into story behind "Memogate."
What is puzzling about all of this -- if the allegations are true that Ambassador Haqqani used Ijaz to propose a deal to remove Pakistan's military leaders to Mullen -- is: Why would Haqqani use Ijaz to do this?
After all, Haqqani has many formal and informal contacts at the Pentagon, and Ijaz has a history of making sometimes exaggerated or erroneous claims, and his record as an unsuccessful freelance diplomat with Sudan in the 1990s is a matter of public record.
Finally, if Haqqani was looking for a discreet back channel to the Pentagon, Ijaz turned out not to be the ideal messenger as he was the person who outed the whole affair in the pages of the Financial Times last month.
www.afghanistannewscenter.com