[Afghan News] March 15, 2012

[یاسمینه]

Karzai Calls on U.S. to Pull Back as Taliban Cancel Talks
By ROD NORDLAND, ELISABETH BUMILLER and MATTHEW ROSENBERG The New York Times March 15, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan — President Hamid Karzai insisted Thursday that the United States confine its troops to major bases in Afghanistan by next year as the Taliban announced that they were suspending peace talks with the Americans, both of which served to complicate the Obama administration’s plans for an orderly exit from the country.

Mr. Karzai’s abrupt planning shift was at odds with a pledge offered just hours earlier by President Obama to stick to a 2014 withdrawal schedule for troops in Afghanistan. It also ran up against the Pentagon’s stark assessment that Afghan security forces were not yet ready to take over control of the country.

Mr. Karzai’s surprise announcement, which would confine American troops to their bases a year earlier than Mr. Obama proposed, was initially made at a Thursday meeting with Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, who spent a fraught two days here apologizing in person to the Afghan president for the massacre of civilians by an American soldier last Sunday at a village in Kandahar Province. Upon Mr. Panetta’s arrival, an Afghan interpreter working for coalition forces crashed a stolen pickup truck near his plane.

Further fraying the United States’ efforts to preserve some degree of control over its exit strategy from Afghanistan, Taliban insurgents announced Thursday that they had broken off preliminary peace talks with the Americans. While the move may have been coincidental, it imperiled another crucial element of the American exit strategy in Afghanistan — brokering peace talks between insurgents and the government.

“International forces should leave the villages and move to their bases,” Mr. Karzai said, according to an account of the meeting released by his office. He also insisted that “both sides should work on a plan to complete the security transition process by 2013 instead of 2014.”

Both Afghan and American officials scrambled to put the best possible face on yet another rift between the two allies, coming at what both hope will be a final stage in negotiations between their diplomats on a long-term strategic partnership, and at a time when some White House officials have been advocating an accelerated withdrawal.

Some pointed out that Mr. Karzai was merely reacting to public anger over the massacre and the move to send the staff sergeant accused of opening fire on civilians out of Afghanistan on Wednesday. They also noted that under the timetable agreed to at a NATO summit in Lisbon in 2010, the transition of responsibility for security from the Americans and NATO partners to Afghan forces already called for foreign forces to adopt a more supportive role by 2013, although they would actively be engaged in combat until 2014, as needed.

“I don’t see how this changes the plan,” said an American official in Afghanistan, speaking on condition of anonymity because of diplomatic guidelines.

During a stop later on Thursday in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, Mr. Panetta’s press secretary, George Little, quoted his boss as having told Mr. Karzai, “We’re on the same page here.”

“This is not moving the goal posts,” Ashraf Ghani, a presidential adviser in charge of the transition from NATO to Afghan control, said in an interview. “Everybody will be happy if it can be pushed up assuming conditions are right.”

Mr. Karzai insisted that he was asking for an accelerated transfer of authority for Afghan security from the foreign forces to the Afghans. “Even right now the Afghan security forces are ready to take all security responsibilities,” he said.

His chief of staff, Abdul Karim Khurram, who was at the meeting with Mr. Panetta, said later that it was clearly a matter of asking for a one year acceleration of the transfer of authority. “This was a demand that all security transition would be started in this year and completed in 2013 instead of 2014,” he said.

But Mr. Khurram, believed to be the official closest to the president, added that it was a request that the Americans would have to study. “The Americans will make all the determinations,” he said. “It’s a professional task, and we should prepare the ground for it.”

American defense officials acknowledged there was a major divide between Mr. Karzai’s demand and American goals of training and advising Afghan security forces as well as conducting counterinsurgency operations, which require close working relationships with Afghans in the rural areas where most of them live.

Asked whether those activities could continue with American troops confined to bases, a senior American defense official who spoke on condition of anonymity replied, “It’s not clear that we would be able to.”

Although about half of Afghan territory has formally been transferred from international to Afghan authority, in most of those areas American and other coalition troops continue to operate outside of large bases, and it is unclear how soon they could be removed when Afghan forces still are largely unprepared to operate on their own. According to NATO figures last year, only one of the Afghan National Army’s 158 battalions has been rated as able to fight independently, according to figures compiled by the Brookings Institution; that was up from zero the year earlier. And a Pentagon report to Congress last October said that at least 70 percent of Afghan Army units still needed American assistance in the field as of last September.

“I don’t think they are ready, and I don’t think it would be feasible,” said Stephen Biddle, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who has studied the Afghan military. “Presidents of countries are not always military experts, and in particular presidents of host countries in a counterinsurgency where the foreign forces are not particularly popular.”

The Taliban statement, issued in English and Pashto on an insurgent Web site, said talks with an American representative had commenced over the release of some Taliban members from the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, but accused the American representative of changing the preconditions for the talks.

Zabiullah Mujahid, a spokesman for the Taliban reached by cellphone at an undisclosed location, said the statement suspending the talks was genuine but declined to discuss it further.

“We remain prepared to continue discussions,” said Gavin A. Sundwall, a spokesman for the American Embassy in Kabul. He said the American position had consistently been that the Taliban had to first “make clear statements distancing itself from international terrorism and in support of a political process among all Afghans to end the conflict.”

American officials said in recent weeks that there had been no talks of any substance since January, when Marc Grossman, the United States special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, and his team last visited the region.

The main obstacle appeared to be executing the first set of confidence-building measures: a prisoner swap that would transfer five senior Taliban leaders held at Guantánamo to house arrest in Qatar in exchange for a Westerner being held by the insurgents.

During their meeting on Thursday, Mr. Panetta and Mr. Karzai discussed the massacre and Mr. Panetta assured Mr. Karzai of a full investigation. He told reporters after the meeting that Mr. Karzai had not brought up the transfer of the American suspect to Kuwait.

Rod Nordland and Matthew Rosenberg reported from Kabul, and Elisabeth Bumiller from Kabul and Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

Vehicle rams airstrip during Panetta visit in Afghanistan
By Greg Jaffe and Ernesto Londoño, The Washington Post
KABUL — An Afghan man rammed a stolen pickup truck onto a military airfield in southern Afghanistan and ran from the vehicle in flames just as a plane carrying Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta landed Wednesday, U.S. officials said. Nobody on the plane was harmed, and Panetta went ahead with a visit marked by unprecedented tension between U.S. and Afghan authorities.

Pentagon officials said they could not immediately confirm that the bizarre incident was an attempt to attack Panetta or even that it was linked to his visit. Although many details remained unexplained, it appeared to be the most serious security breach in a visit to Afghanistan by a high-level U.S. official during the decade-long war.

Hours after the incident, officials traveling with Panetta disclosed that an Army staff sergeant who allegedly massacred 16 Afghan villagers in Kandahar province early Sunday has been moved out of Afghanistan. The late-night disclosure appeared likely to exacerbate tensions with Afghans who had demanded that the shooter be tried in an Afghan court.

In Washington, President Obama insisted that “our forces are making very real progress” in Afghanistan, and he reaffirmed a transition plan under which U.S. and NATO troops would withdraw by the end of 2014.

According to Pentagon officials, an Afghan civilian stole a pickup truck from a NATO service member, rammed through a fence and drove at high speed onto the airfield at Camp Bastion, a British installation adjoining the U.S. Marines’ Camp Leatherneck base in the southern province of Helmand. The driver, a contract interpreter on the base, crashed into a ditch near the ramp where Panetta’s plane was going to park, and then fled the vehicle in flames and jumped onto a truck before being apprehended by security guards.

Base personnel put out the fire, but the man later died of burns, said Lt. Gen. Curtis Scapparrotti, the number two American commander in Afghanistan.

Pentagon spokesman George Little said no explosives were found on the man or in the vehicle. “It is my understanding that the car itself never caught on fire and did not explode,” he said.

He said the NATO soldier was seriously injured when he was struck by the vehicle during the carjacking.

“We don’t know all the facts, but we have no indication that the secretary was ever at risk,” Little said.

“There is no evidence right now that the driver had any idea who was on that aircraft,” said Navy Capt. John Kirby, another Pentagon spokesman. “We do not have an indication it was intended as an attack.”

The incident occurred about the time of Panetta’s 11 a.m. arrival at Camp Bastion but was not disclosed by Pentagon officials until about 10 hours later, after some details of it had leaked to the British news media.

It came three days after the pre-dawn shooting rampage by a U.S. soldier — a massacre that has provoked widespread outrage across Afghanistan.

Kirby said the soldier was moved to a pretrial detention center “based on a legal recommendation,” but he declined to say where. The unidentified staff sergeant has not been charged, but U.S. officials said he surrendered after the killings and admitted his involvement. A senior U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said he was flown to Kuwait.

The soldier’s unit is from Joint Base Lewis-McChord, near Tacoma, Wash., and it is likely that he will face prosecution there if he is charged. A decision on whether to convene a court-martial would be made by an Army general in the soldier’s chain of command.

Amid continuing furor over the slayings, U.S. officials showed a base surveillance video of the staff sergeant surrendering to Afghan security guards upon his return to his combat outpost. The video, recorded from a spy balloon floating over the outpost, was released as part of an effort to knock down rumors that other U.S. troops might have been involved.

Panetta, making his third trip to Afghanistan, pledged during his visit that a recent string of setbacks would not force the United States to alter its strategy here.

Maj. Gen. Mark Gurganus, the senior Marine commander in southern Afghanistan, virtually ruled out further restrictions on night raids, which have drawn repeated criticism from Afghan President Hamid Karzai and have been a major stumbling block in talks on the framework of a long-term security relationship.

“I don’t know how much more accommodating we can be with what is a critical element of a counterinsurgency fight,” Gurganus said. All the night raids are being conducted by joint teams of U.S. and Afghan forces, he said.

Speaking to U.S. and Afghan troops at Camp Leatherneck, Panetta sought to tamp down worries about the course of the U.S. war effort after Sunday’s killings in Kandahar province, as well as the nationwide riots that followed an inadvertent burning of Korans last month by U.S. troops at a base north of Kabul.

“We have been tested time and time again over a decade of war,” Panetta told the U.S. and Afghan troops who gathered in a stuffy tent. “That is the nature of war. . . . Each of these incidents is deeply troubling, and we have to learn lessons from each of these incidents.”

In a departure from past practice, about 200 Marines at Camp Leatherneck were told to set their rifles outside before hearing Panetta speak. Gurganus said he ordered the move out of respect for the two dozen Afghan soldiers who attended the meeting without weapons. “This is not a big deal,” he said.

At the White House, Obama said in a joint news conference with visiting British Prime Minister David Cameron: “The tragic events of recent days are a reminder that this continues to be a very difficult mission.”

But he said it was “also undeniable . . . that our forces are making very real progress.”

Obama said he and Cameron “reaffirmed the transition plan” that NATO has adopted, including a shift to a support role next year ahead of a transfer to Afghans of “full responsibility for security” in 2014.

“We’re going to complete this mission, and we’re going to do it responsibly,” Obama said.

Staff writers William Branigin, Craig Whitlock and Rajiv Chandrasekaran in Washington contributed to this report.

'Zero Chance' That U.S. Soldier Will Be Tried In Afghanistan, Expert Says
March 15, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
There have been numerous calls in Afghanistan from both citizens and lawmakers for the U.S. soldier accused of killing 16 civilians -- including nine children and three women -- to face justice in Afghan courts. Afghan President Hamid Karzai described the shootings as the "intentional killing of innocent civilians" and said they cannot be forgiven.

The soldier in question has been flown out of the country to Kuwait, and while U.S. military officials have said that his transfer does not preclude a trial taking place on Afghan soil, the United States has a long history of trying its soldiers in its own military courts.

RFE/RL correspondent Heather Maher asked Eugene Fidell, who teaches military justice at Yale Law School and is on the board of the International Society for Military Law, to explain the U.S. military's judicial process.

RFE/RL: Afghan politicians and citizens are calling for the U.S. soldier accused of killing 16 villagers on March 11 to be prosecuted by the Afghan justice system. What are the chances of that happening?

Eugene Fidell: The chances are zero. We have an agreement with the Afghan government -- I think a prior iteration of the Afghan government -- under which military personnel are treated as administrative and technical staff of the U.S. Embassy for purposes of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. The result is that there's no Afghan government criminal jurisdiction over their conduct.

RFE/RL: The United States has military personnel stationed in some 150 countries around the world. Does it have the same kind of immunity agreements with all of them?

Fidell: They do vary to some extent from country to country as a reflection of the relative strength, for lack of a better word, between the United States and other country, and the deepness and robustness of the relationship.

For example, we have an agreement with Japan, which has figured in a number of incidents, particularly arising out of rape charges in Okinawa. And the Japanese courts have, in fact, prosecuted a number of U.S. military personnel in the Japanese courts. And indeed some of those people have served time in what I understand is a separate wing of a Japanese prison. So it really depends on the country.

The Status of Forces Agreement, as these things are called -- or SOFAs -- has some variation, but the general drift is to try to maximize the opportunity for the U.S. to be responsible for criminal punishment for those of its personnel who misbehave.

RFE/RL: Are there really that many crimes committed by U.S. military members abroad that the U.S. needs to have these agreements everywhere?

Fidell: It's not really a question of numbers. Even a single case could really be a nightmare if you had a country with an unreliable justice system. And I think it's fair to say that of Afghanistan, as much as we'd prefer it be a better system. Or if you have a country that is likely to be swept by strong emotions that might get in the way of a fair trial.

So it's not that hard to understand why the United States would be really, really concerned not to subject its military personnel to a foreign trial.

RFE/RL: Is the United States unique in asking for immunity for its military personnel serving abroad, or do other countries ask for and get the same thing for their troops?

Fidell: I think this is a common practice on the part of sending states -- that is, states whose armed forces serve elsewhere.

RFE/RL: During negotiations for a new status-of-forces agreement, Iraq refused to grant immunity to U.S. military personnel who remained in the country after the last combat troops withdrew. Washington is now negotiating a strategic partnership with Kabul that will no doubt ask for the same consideration. Is Iraq's pushback a sign that the atmosphere for these kinds of immunity deals -- either in general, or with the U.S. specifically -- has chilled?

Fidell: I think it's difficult to generalize too broadly. The relationship between the United States and each of these countries is somewhat different. It may be very different from Country A to Country B. Whether Iraq versus Afghanistan falls into the "very different" category I'm not in a position to say. But what I can say is both countries are dealing with an effort to reorganize their political life -- or organize their political life -- in a way that garners local support and makes it loud and clear that they are not a puppet of the United States.

And it's clear that the Iraqi government under [Prime Minister Nuri al-] Maliki was not going to be in a position politically to agree to the kind of terms that we would have preferred for the security of our personnel.

As far as the Karzai government in Afghanistan, it's such a complicated chess board in terms of his government's relations with [the United States], with other nations in NATO, with neighboring countries such as Iran and Pakistan, that it would be very, very surprising if he was in a position to agree to the kinds of terms that Mr. Maliki in Iraq was not in a position to agree to.

So the long and the short is, even though circumstances in the two countries may be very different, they may come out in exactly the same place in terms of resistance to U.S. aspirations for immunity for our military personnel.

RFE/RL: The alleged shooter's identity has not yet been revealed, but we do know that he did two tours of duty in Iraq before being deployed to Afghanistan, and reportedly suffered a traumatic head injury not too long ago. Do you expect his multiple deployments and injury to be presented as mitigating factors in his case?

Fidell: Yes, but there are factors, and factors. You could have, for example, a good military record that might tend to raise reasonable doubt, because we have such a doctrine in the United States -- it's called "the good soldier defense." Or it might be something that would soften the blow in terms of potential punishment. Or you might have a particularly moving story of injury sustained in battle that suggests to jurors that they shouldn't throw the book at the individual in the sense of giving the maximum punishment.

RFE/RL: In terms of compensation, what does the United States government do in these kinds of cases, when one of their own citizens has inflicted pain and suffering on foreigners?

Fidell: There is provision for making what are called "ex gratia" payments, or "solatia" payments, to salve their wounds. These are relatively modest in size; nobody's going to get rich on this. The real thing, I think, [is] what steps will the United States take to afford to those foreign victims or victim dependents the kind of participatory rights that we give to victims in the United States?

For example, military prosecutors, like other prosecutors, are supposed to keep the victims informed of the case, to facilitate their attendance at the trial if possible, to provide counseling in some circumstances. So it will be interesting to see what, if anything, we end up doing.

My suspicion is the Afghan families aren't going to want to have anything to do with us in those terms. We'll have to see how that unfolds. But you can tell that this case is going to present some real challenges, not surprisingly, given the really explosive atmosphere within which it's going to play out.

Karzai urges U.S. pullback after massacre
From Sara Sidner, CNN March 15, 2012
Kabul, Afghanistan (CNN) -- American troops should pull out of outposts in Afghan villages and return to their main bases, Afghan President Hamid Karzai told U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta on Thursday, Karzai's office said.

The statement comes days after an American soldier was accused of leaving an outpost and killing 16 Afghan men, women and children in their villages.

Karzai called the shootings in Kandahar province a cruel act against the people of Afghanistan, and told Panetta that Afghans have lost trust in international forces, the presidential palace said in a written release.

Afghans took to the streets of one city Thursday to demand that the U.S. suspect be prosecuted in Afghanistan, while an Afghan lawmaker accused the United States of showing "a fake video ... to convince the Afghan people that it was the act of only one soldier."

Muhammad Naim Lalai said he was one of several Afghan officials shown a surveillance video on the soldier's base in Kandahar province.

"We were shown a video in which a soldier climbs the wall of a military base and then goes indoors and pulls his bullet-proof jacket off and then puts his arms up to surrender himself," Lalai told CNN, expressing doubt that the video was genuine.

The United States has not confirmed it showed footage from the base to Afghans, but a U.S. official has confirmed there is a video showing the suspect lying on the ground outside the base and then attempting to "low crawl" back into the outpost.

Meanwhile, a joint intelligence bulletin was issued by the FBI and Department of Homeland Security warning that recent events in Afghanistan "could incite homegrown violent extremists in the United States." The document obtained by CNN also says "there is currently no specific, credible threat information" that extremists might strike targets in the United States.

Also Thursday, the Afghan Taliban announced they were suspending an office they opened this year in the Gulf state of Qatar, designed to enable talks with the United States.

The Taliban's e-mail blamed what the group called the Americans' "ever-changing position." The move came after the Taliban threatened to behead Americans in retaliation for Sunday's killings.

The U.S. suspect was flown out of the country Wednesday before Panetta met Karzai in Kabul on Thursday morning.

Karzai pressed Panetta for international forces to hand over security control of the country to the Afghan military by 2013 instead of 2014, his office said.

"President Karzai asked for the transition to be completed by 2013. He did not ask that all international troops leave the country by then," his spokesman, Aimal Faiz, said.

U.S. President Barack Obama said Wednesday that a summit of NATO leaders in May in Chicago will "determine the next phase of transition," including "shifting to a support role next year ... in advance of Afghans' taking full responsibility for security in 2014."

State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said that Afghan forces are already increasingly taking a lead on security but that the United States is committed to ensuring the long-term stability of Afghanistan.

"The United States has made clear, as have the rest of our ISAF partners, that ... our support for a democratic, stable Afghanistan doesn't end in 2013, doesn't end in 2014," she said.

Panetta was wrapping up a two-day trip, the first by a high-ranking American official since Sunday's killings in the Panjwai district of Afghanistan's Kandahar province. Panetta's trip was scheduled before the attacks.

In Qalat, a city near the two villages at the center of the rampage, protesters chanted anti-American slogans, called for justice and demanded the soldier be publicly prosecuted in Afghanistan.

The demonstration was organized by religious leaders, according to Muhammad Jan Rasuli, the deputy governor of the Zabul province.

The unidentified Army staff sergeant was transferred out of the country on the recommendation of advisers to Gen. John Allen, the commander of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force.

"We do not have the proper facility in Afghanistan to detain him for longer than he is being held," said Capt. John Kirby, a Pentagon spokesman.

A Defense Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the man was flown to Kuwait, which has the U.S. military legal infrastructure and personnel to deal with the suspect. The official was not authorized to release details to the media.

The soldier is accused of leaving the remote outpost of Camp Belambay on foot early Sunday and heading to neighboring villages outside the base.

In the villages, the soldier opened fire as he went house to house, killing nine children, three women and four men, witnesses and Afghan authorities said. The U.S. military has not confirmed the number of casualties.

Three military officials told CNN there is still no understanding of what made the suspect murder Afghan civilians, a potential capital crime that Panetta says the soldier has acknowledged.

"We don't know what made him snap. Did he see a buddy get killed? Did something happen out there in the days before this incident? We just don't know," said one military official familiar with initial investigation reports.

The soldier, who is based at Joint Base Lewis-McChord near Tacoma, Washington, belongs to the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division, according to a congressional source who was not authorized to speak publicly.

He was on his first tour to Afghanistan but had deployed to Iraq three times. In 2010, he suffered a traumatic brain injury in a vehicle accident. But few details have surfaced about motive or why an infantryman would turn his gun on civilians.

"I think it's of interest that we have a soldier who has an exemplary record, a decorated soldier who was injured in Iraq to his brain and to his body, and then despite that, was sent back. I think that's an issue. I think it's a concern," said Seattle attorney John Henry Browne, who told CNN Thursday that he would be representing the soldier and had spoken with him over the phone.

Military authorities have presented a determination of probable cause to allow them to keep the sergeant in detention, an International Security Assistance Force official told CNN.

Meanwhile, an Afghan man who stole a vehicle that exploded Wednesday after he crashed it near the runway at Camp Bastion about the same time as Panetta's arrival has died from his injuries, Lt. Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti told reporters.

The Afghan was wearing a "desert utility uniform," similar to the ones coalition troops give to translators and other unarmed locals working with them, a defense official said. Coalition troops searched the man after putting out the flames and apprehending him, but they did not find an explosive device on him, according to the official. No motive or the Afghan's intent was known.

Kirby said Panetta's plane had just landed when the Afghan man drove onto the runway, and, at the least, the welcoming party was targeted as he drove toward them at high speed. Panetta's plane was diverted to another area of the runway, he said.

Kirby added: "We have reason to believe he intended harm. How, exactly, we don't know. But he stole the vehicle with intent to harm."

Despite some protests and local violence, the country has not erupted the way it did last month when American troops burned copies of the Quran and other Islamic religious materials. Military officials said the materials had been seized from Afghan prisoners because they contained extremist messages.

CNN's Larry Shaughnessy, Chris Lawrence, Carol Cratty, Barbara Starr, Casey Wian and Ninette Sosa and journalist Ruhullah Khapalwak contributed to this report.

Why Taliban really decided to suspend talks with US
The White House responded to the Taliban announcement by reaffirming the US commitment to peace talks and insisting that the Afghanistan war will have to end with a political settlement.
By Howard LaFranchi, Staff writer / March 15, 2012 The Christian Science Monitor
The Taliban’s decision Thursday to suspend the sputtering talks it launched with the United States in January is not really the result of recent incidents involving US soldiers in Afghanistan, including Sunday’s massacre of 16 Afghan villagers.

Instead, the decision reflects the increasingly adept political thinking of an organization that – already frustrated with the direction of initial talks with the US – is taking advantage of a moment when its “foreign enemy” is on the ropes, some Afghanistan analysts say.

And while everything about the Taliban’s statement suggests it envisions a temporary suspension, some suggest that the Taliban will wait and watch for indications that the US will move to accelerate the drawdown of its remaining 90,000 troops in Afghanistan, in the wake of recent signs of trouble in the US mission.

Speculation over further cuts in US troops beyond the 23,000 to leave Afghanistan by the end of summer “is what explains the Taliban walking away from peace talks,” says Max Boot, a national security expert at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). “They believe they can wait and achieve what they want after 2014,” when the US and NATO combat presence is to end.

The White House responded to the Taliban announcement by reaffirming the US commitment to peace talks and insisting that the decade-old Afghanistan war will have to end with a political settlement.

“We support an Afghan-led process toward reconciliation,” White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters. “There is no likely resolution to the conflict in Afghanistan without a political resolution.”

In its statement, the Taliban accused the US of “alternating and ever-changing” positions, and it said it would sit out the talks “until the Americans clarify their stance on the issues concerned and until they show willingness in carrying out their promises instead of wasting time."

Mr. Carney denied those allegations and said the US had been consistent in its presentation of negotiation topics.

One problem that has plagued the fledgling talks is that the Taliban wants to focus on the issue of “prisoner exchange” and freeing its members held at the Guantánamo detention facility, while the US wants to emphasize Afghan reconciliation and a political settlement to the conflict.

The Taliban indicated no interest in sitting down with the Afghan government, which it referred to as the “Kabul administration.” It also suggested it believes it has the upper hand, particularly after recent events – including the village massacre and widespread outrage over the burning of Qurans by US soldiers.

The statement says the Taliban “has enduring patience and long-term jihadi strategies against the malicious plots of the enemy and enjoys the ceaseless support of its believing nation.”

While it is true that Afghans would prefer to see foreign soldiers leaving their country, Mr. Boot of CFR says, it is also just as true that they “want the foreign support to prevent a Taliban takeover.”

But others say that, despite recent setbacks and Thursday’s Taliban walkout, a negotiated settlement remains the only viable solution for ending the war.

“If we’re going to get an acceptable outcome, it’s going to be as a result of settlements talks,” says Stephen Biddle, a defense policy specialist at CFR.

The option of handing off to a capable Afghan military an “ongoing war” was based on a “very weakened Taliban,” he says, and that’s now “dead in the water.”

But this doesn’t mean the Taliban is jettisoning the talks for good with the idea it can now achieve a victory, Mr. Biddle says. The approaching spring and summer fighting season will influence the Taliban’s political moves, but at the same time the argument that the Taliban will only negotiate if it believes the US and NATO are about to win the war “is overstated,” he adds.

Instead, Biddle says he believes the Taliban will look ahead to dim prospects for overthrowing the Afghan government, along with greater chances of a “grinding civil war” stretching over the rest of the decade. He says it will ask, “Is there nothing the West could offer us that looks better than that?”

That means, he says, that while a negotiated settlement remains “far from certain,” it is also “not zero either.”

Pakistan parliament called to reevaluate U.S. relationship
by Muhammad Tahir
ISLAMABAD, March 15 (Xinhua) -- The much-awaited session of the Pakistani parliament has been called to meet on March 17 to reevaluate its relationship with the United States and set new terms of engagement with the U.S. and NATO in Afghanistan.

The parliamentary review had been decided in the wake of the deadly air strikes by the American fighter jets and helicopters on two Pakistani border posts in November, which had killed 24 soldiers.

The Parliamentary Committee on National Security had been tasked to float recommendations to reassess ties with the U.S./ NATO and ISAF. The committee has already submitted its recommendations for the parliament debate.

The parliament will also debate and decide restoration of supplies for NATO troops in Afghanistan via Pakistan, which were blocked after the U.S. strike.

A rare meeting of the country's top civilian and military leadership as well as key allies was called on Wednesday just days ahead of the joint session of the parliament that will also mark the new parliamentary year.

President Asif Ali Zardari presided over a high level meeting in Islamabad on Wednesday and discussed strategy for the parliament meeting. The meeting was attended by Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani, Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar, Chief of Army Staff General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, Air Chief Marshal Qamar Suleman and intelligence chief, Lt Gen Ahmed Shuja Pasha. Senior coalition leaders were also invited to the meeting to seek their opinion on the proposed debate.

The government spokesmen told the media that the meeting reiterated the government's earlier stance that the parliament will take decision on the NATO supply and relationship with the U. S., but sources said that the leaders agreed to restore land route for NATO supplies and revive normal ties with the United States.

Pakistan has already allowed NATO supply through its airspace, which also indicates a positive signal for restoration of land NATO supply route. The country's Defence Minister Chaudhry Ahmad Mukhtar has hinted restoration of NATO land supply route with certain conditions, including levying of tax on NATO trucks and oil tankers.

In return the U.S. will also allow the equipment delivery to Pakistan which had been blocked after Islamabad blocked NATO supply line in November, the sources said.

In the wake of deterioration in relations, Pakistan had earlier refused to welcome top U.S. military leaders and diplomats until parliamentary review is completed, but the meeting also decided to receive top U.S. visitors whenever they want to visit Pakistan and they agreed with the proposed visit of the U.S. Central Command Chief General James Mathis, who is likely to visit later this month.

General Mathis told reporters in Washington last week that he will discus, besides other important issues, the plan of using Pakistan land route for the American troops at the time of withdrawal from Afghanistan. The U.S. plans to withdraw several thousands troops this year as part of its Afghan exit strategy.

Participants of the meeting were of the view that the ruling coalition will have no problem to dominate the join session of the parliament during debate on U.S. ties as they are now in complete command of both houses of the parliament, official sources said.

Sources also said Pakistan has conveyed to the U.S. authorities the unanimity of views of the civilian and military leadership in the top level. The army chief also told the meeting that the powerful military will fully respect decision by the parliament and the civilian leadership, the sources said.

The meeting has now sent clear message for the parliament to soften stand and to favour revival of normal ties with the U.S. as both countries need each other in the on-going war on terror and their role is very important for the stability in Afghanistan.

Several Pakistani government leaders are of the view that the country has forcefully conveyed its stand to the U.S. after the November strikes and the confrontation should now be ended to ease the tension.

Russia May Let NATO Use Airfield as Afghan Hub
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN The New York Times March 14, 2012
MOSCOW — The Kremlin expressed willingness on Wednesday to allow NATO to use an airfield in the heart of European Russia, in a city best known as Lenin’s birthplace, as a transit center for moving troops and “nonlethal” cargo into Afghanistan.

The decision, which requires formal approval by the Russian government, would provide a much-needed logistics hub at a time when overland supply routes through Pakistan have been closed off. But it would also increase American and NATO dependence on Russia amid serious foreign policy disagreements between Washington and Moscow, particularly over Syria.

Use of the airfield, on the banks of the Volga River in Ulyanovsk, stands to increase Russia’s leverage at a time when the White House is thinking about speeding up its withdrawal from Afghanistan — a move Russia opposes.

Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, while voicing support for granting NATO access to the airfield, said Wednesday that the Kremlin opposed a swift exit of troops from Afghanistan because of concerns about security, including drug trafficking.

“This coalition should ensure the ability of the people of Afghanistan to defend their country and maintain an acceptable level of security before leaving there,” he told Parliament. He also called on American and NATO forces to destroy poppy crops in Afghanistan to fight the opium trafficking that has led to rising drug use and H.I.V. rates in Russia.

Pentagon officials are scrambling to reopen the overland routes through Pakistan that were shut down by the Pakistani government in November in retaliation for NATO airstrikes that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers.

Since then, NATO has relied largely on the “northern distribution network” — overland routes beginning at ports in Latvia or Georgia that require the cooperation of Russia and several Central Asian nations. With the focus at the White House and the Pentagon shifting from resupplying troops in Afghanistan to getting troops and equipment out, new efforts have been under way to turn the northern distribution network into a two-way conduit.

Gen. William M. Fraser III, the commander of the United States Transportation Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee last month that securing agreements in Central Asia to allow shipments out of Afghanistan was among his top priorities.

“We now have a two-way approval to move equipment back out of Afghanistan,” he said, “through Tajikistan, Kurdistan and Kazakhstan. Also, Russia has approved this and Uzbekistan recently approved this.” He said that the agreement covered “nonlethal” supplies and “wheeled-armor vehicles.”

The volume of cargo moving through Russia is providing Russian freight companies with more than $1 billion a year in business, according to some estimates.

But experts have long warned that Russia’s interest in cooperating with NATO is geopolitical as well as financial. “In an ideal world, I would like to be less dependent on Russia,” said Andrew C. Kuchins, a Russia expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “But what are our options with getting things into or out of Afghanistan? It’s a pretty formidable challenge.”

He said that while Russia was unlikely to be able to dictate the terms of NATO’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, it would use its position to reassert “a greater hegemonic role” in Eurasia.

President-elect Vladimir V. Putin has long indicated that he believes that Russia should have a greater role on the world stage.

Mr. Kuchins also said that Moscow was likely to continue to raise concerns about an early withdrawal given that Afghanistan had long posed risks for Russia’s security. “It is still unclear what we are going to leave behind there,” he said.

Oana Lungescu, a spokeswoman for NATO headquarters in Brussels, said the relationship with Moscow was mutually beneficial. “Russian cooperating on transiting equipment to and from Afghanistan has never been a problem, because stability in Afghanistan is in both of our interests,” Ms. Lungescu said.

In addition to the overland freight routes, Moscow now allows the United States to fly troops into Afghanistan through Russian airspace. The Kremlin offered that assistance even before Washington requested it.

But while the American military has become increasingly dependent on the northern distribution network, tensions have flared between Russia and the United States on numerous issues, particularly Syria.

Russia has blocked efforts by the United States and other nations to intervene in a way that could lead to the ouster of President Bashar al-Assad, who is an old ally and a major purchaser of Russian-manufactured weapons.

Russia also has strong objections to Washington’s plans for Europe-based missile defense system.

A senior NATO official said Russia had not formally approved use of the airfield and that it was too soon to say much about it. Yet there were indications that Russia’s overture was coinciding with renewed willingness by the Pakistani government to allow overland shipments — though at a much steeper financial cost than before.

In his Senate testimony, General Fraser said withdrawal from Afghanistan would be impossible without reopening the Pakistani routes, which are dangerous even under the best circumstances.

As for withdrawal in general, General Fraser said, “It’s a daunting task. I will admit that.”

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington.

Lawyer: Afghanistan suspect was loath to deploy
By GENE JOHNSON | Associated Press
SEATTLE (AP) — The U.S. soldier accused of slaughtering 16 Afghan villagers last weekend had been reluctant to leave on his fourth deployment and surprised to be deployed to Afghanistan, where soldiers at his base were shaken by the serious injury of a comrade a day before the shooting rampage, his lawyer said Thursday.

"We have been informed that at this small base that he was at, somebody was gravely injured the day before the alleged incident — gravely injured, and that affected all of the soldiers," said the lawyer, John Henry Browne.

Browne offered no other details of the incident, and it isn't clear whether it prompted the horrific middle-of-the-night attack. The soldier had been injured twice during his three previous deployments to Iraq, and he was loath to go to Afghanistan to begin with, Browne said.

Browne declined to release his client's name, citing concerns for the soldier's family, which is under protection on Joint Base Lewis-McChord, near Tacoma. But he said the soldier has two young children, ages 3 and 4.

The soldier, a 38-year-old father of two who is originally from the Midwest, deployed last December with the 3rd Stryker Brigade, and on Feb. 1 was attached to a "village stability operation." Browne described him as highly decorated and said he had once been nominated for a Bronze Star, which he did not receive.

But he did say that the soldier and his family thought he was done fighting. During tours in Iraq, the soldier suffered a concussive head injury in a car accident caused by a roadside bomb, Browne said, and he suffered a battle-related injury that resulted in surgery to remove part of his foot.

He was screened by health officials after the head injury before he redeployed, Browne said. He did not know if his client had been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, but said it could be an issue at trial if experts believe it's relevant.

He and the rest of his brigade had initially been told they wouldn't have to go to Afghanistan, Browne said.

Browne and his co-counsel, Emma Scanlan, said they had met with the soldier's wife and other family members, and Browne said he spoke briefly by phone with the soldier, whom he described as stunned and distant.

His family was shocked: "They were totally shocked," he said. "He's never said anything antagonistic about Muslims. He's in general very mild-mannered."

Browne said he knew little of the facts of the shooting, but disputed reports that a combination of alcohol, stress and domestic issues caused him to snap. He said the family said they were unaware of any drinking problem, and described the couple's marriage as "fabulous."

The soldier is suspected of going on a shooting rampage in villages near his base in southern Afghanistan early Sunday, killing nine children and seven other civilians and then burning some of their bodies. The shooting, which followed a controversial Quran-burning incident involving U.S. soldiers, has outraged Afghan officials.

The suspect was flown out of Afghanistan on Wednesday evening to what officials describe as a pretrial confinement facility in Kuwait. Officials have anonymously described him as a father of two who has been in the military for 11 years. He has served three tours in Iraq and began his first deployment to Afghanistan in December.

The soldier asked to be represented by Browne when he was taken into custody, the lawyer said.

Browne said he's spoken with the soldier, but did not discuss the substance of the allegations. He said the soldier had no prior events in his Army dossier indicating misbehavior.

Browne once defended serial killer Ted Bundy and recently represented Colton Harris-Moore, a youthful thief known as the "Barefoot Bandit."

Browne said he has only handled three or four military cases before. The soldier will also have at least one military lawyer.

Military lawyers say once attorneys involved in the initial investigation of an alleged crime involving a service member have what they believe to be a solid understanding of what happened and are satisfied with the evidence collected, they draft charges and present them to a commander.

That person then makes a judgment on whether there is probable cause to believe that an offense was committed and that the accused committed it.

That commander then "prefers" the charges to a convening authority, who typically is the commander of the brigade to which the accused is assigned but could be of higher rank.
___

Associated Press writer Robert Burns contributed from Washington.

Suspect in Afghan Deaths Flown to Kuwait as Evidence Arises That He Acted Alone
New York Times By JOHN H. CUSHMAN Jr. and GRAHAM BOWLEY March 14, 2012
WASHINGTON - The American staff sergeant suspected of killing 16 Afghan villagers was flown to Kuwait from Afghanistan on Wednesday, American officials said.

New evidence emerged to support the case that the sergeant acted alone, in the form of a surveillance video showing his return after the massacre to the remote American outpost where he surrendered. But he has not been named or formally charged, it is not clear where he will be held or tried, and nothing has been disclosed about his state of mind or any reason for his actions.

President Obama reaffirmed at the White House, where he appeared after a meeting with the British prime minister, that the shooting spree and its aftermath would not lead to a sudden acceleration of the allies’ withdrawal, and Leon E. Panetta, the secretary of defense, said much the same thing during a tense visit to troops in Afghanistan.

The question of how to proceed with the case remains extraordinarily delicate, with the Afghans seeking swift and open punishment and the military committed to its own judicial process on what could be capital charges — a trial that could take years.

Already, details of the sergeant’s identity and background as well as particulars of the judicial process he faces have been withheld longer than might be routine. Eugene R. Fidell, who teaches military justice at Yale Law School, said it was highly unusual for the sergeant’s identity to be concealed for long. Already, the deadlines for various stages of the due process that come with detention have passed or are approaching quickly, and once the formal pretrial Article 32 hearing is convened, his identity should be public.

A Pentagon spokesman, Capt. John Kirby, said in an interview that the suspect had been transferred to a United States military detention center outside Afghanistan, where he would remain in pretrial confinement while investigators from the Army Criminal Investigation Command continued their inquiry. Captain Kirby said the American military did not have a long-term detention center for service members in Afghanistan. A senior American official, confirming a report on CNN, said the sergeant had been taken to Kuwait.

Among the reasons for initially withholding the sergeant’s identity, Mr. Fidell said, may have been that the military wanted to protect his family from possible reprisal.

The Army sergeant’s surrender shortly after the killings was recorded on video taken at his military outpost in southern Afghanistan, according to an Afghan government official who saw the video. The video appears to back up American officials’ declaration that there was only one gunman.

Early Sunday morning, when military officials realized that the soldier was missing, commanders at the outpost started to scan the surrounding terrain from a surveillance balloon, a device commonly used by foreign forces in Afghanistan to monitor insurgent activity. The black-and-white video shows the soldier walking by himself back to the outpost, Camp Belambi, in the Panjwai district in Kandahar. At that point, the soldiers at the base did not know about the massacre, the Afghan official said he had been told.

The sergeant surrendered to waiting soldiers, who disarmed him and took him away, the Afghan official said.

Military officials say that the other soldiers seen by villagers followed later, when a rescue force with helicopters was sent to ferry the wounded to a nearby military hospital.

Details are still emerging about the sergeant. A 38-year-old married father of two, he served with the Third Stryker Brigade, Second Infantry Division, and was based at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, a major Army and Air Force installation near Tacoma, Wash. The Associated Press has reported that he had been trained as a sniper and suffered a head injury in a non-combat-related vehicle accident during a recent tour of duty in Iraq, his third. He was sent to Afghanistan in December.

It is far too early to say whether his mental state might be invoked in his defense; what is on the face of it the act of a madman does not necessarily satisfy the conditions for an insanity defense in a court-martial, Mr. Fidell said.

It is not clear whether the sergeant has already made an unambiguous and admissible confession. Nor is it known what kind of physical evidence has been obtained from the scene, or by whom, or whether forensic examination of the victims has been possible.

Yet another complicating factor, should the case go to trial as a capital offense, is the fact that the Uniform Code of Military Justice does not permit the prosecution to use deposition evidence in death-penalty cases. As a result, the sergeant would have a right to confront any witness against him “eyeball to eyeball,” Mr. Fidell said.

John H. Cushman Jr. reported from Washington, and Graham Bowley from Kabul, Afghanistan. Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington, and Taimoor Shah from Kandahar, Afghanistan.

Analysis: Afghanistan increasingly looks like Iraq
By ANNE GEARAN | Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — Afghanistan is not Iraq, U.S. officials have been fond of saying from the first days of Barack Obama's presidency.

The difference, they said, was that one war Obama inherited, in Afghanistan, was worth fighting while the other, in Iraq, was best ended as quickly as possible.

Now, Afghanistan has turned into Iraq: an inconclusive slog in which the United States cannot always tell enemy from friend. And like Iraq, Obama has concluded that Afghanistan is best put to rest.

Just as he patterned his troop "surge" in Afghanistan on a successful military strategy in Iraq, now Obama is patterning his withdrawal from Afghanistan on the Iraq template as well.

Obama and British Prime Minster David Cameron said Wednesday that NATO forces would hand over the lead combat role to Afghanistan forces next year as the U.S. and its allies aim to get out by the end of 2014.

It's a gradual step away from the front lines, while pushing indigenous forces to take greater and greater responsibility. It's also a gradual lowering of expectations for a country whose internal divisions and customs bewildered the Americans sent to help and where the U.S. national security goals were often poorly understood.

"Why is it that poll numbers indicate people are interested in ending the war in Afghanistan?" a contemplative Obama asked during a Rose Garden news conference Wednesday. "It's because we've been there for 10 years, and people get weary."

Obama and Cameron stressed that they will not walk out on Afghanistan, whose uneven military is not up to the task of defending the entire country. But Obama in particular seemed keen to show he does not have a tin ear.

Afghanistan is Obama's war — the one he willingly expanded and redefined as a frontal assault on al-Qaida — but like Iraq for former President George W. Bush, the Afghanistan war is becoming political baggage.

Americans have little enthusiasm for the Afghanistan mission in this election year, and a string of violent or distasteful incidents involving U.S. forces have refocused national attention on whether the war is achieving its goals.

The resentment and contempt each side feels for the other appears to have reached some breaking point in Afghanistan, with a rising number of killings of American troops by Afghan recruits this year. The relationship was far from perfect in Iraq, but fratricide was rare by comparison.

Six in 10 Americans see the war as not worth its costs, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll released Sunday but conducted before news emerged of a massacre of Afghan civilians, apparently by a U.S. soldier.

Just 35 percent said the war has been worthwhile. More Americans have opposed the war than supported it for nearly two years, but the implications are stark eight months before the presidential election.

Opposition to the war is bipartisan, and for the first time the Post-ABC poll showed more Republicans "strongly" see the war as not worth fighting than say the opposite.

"When I came into office there has been drift in the Afghanistan strategy, in part because we had spent a lot of time focusing on Iraq instead," Obama said, a bit defensively.

"Over the last three years we have refocused attention on getting Afghanistan right. Would my preference had been that we started some of that earlier? Absolutely. But that's not the cards that were dealt."

He claimed his strategy has brought the war around the corner. He was careful not to predict victory, or use any of the traditional language of war.

"We're making progress, and I believe that we're going to be able to make our — achieve our objectives in 2014," he said.

In the same poll, a majority of Americans said they think a majority of Afghans are opposed to what the NATO-led mission is trying to accomplish in their country. A majority also said the United States should withdraw troops even before the Afghan army is able to stand on its own.

Obama used Cameron's visit to endorse a shift toward a back-seat advisory role for U.S. forces in Afghanistan next year, although the war will go on for another year or more. That follows the model of Iraq in 2010, when U.S. forces symbolically pulled back and placed their Iraqi hosts in charge.

He said any sudden drawdown of U.S. forces is unlikely in Afghanistan. If he follows the Iraq model, the reduction will be steady and permanent, and taken with an absence of fanfare. The United States has roughly 90,000 troops in Afghanistan. Obama plans to drop that number to 68,000 by late September but has offered no specific withdrawal plan after that. Britain has the second-largest force in Afghanistan with about 9,500 troops.

Britain is pulling about 500 troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2012, leaving around 9,000 personnel, mainly based in the center of the southern Helmand province.

Officials in London have already cautioned against public hopes that large numbers of troops will be able to leave in the first half of 2013.

Cameron emphasized the scaling back of ambitions since 2001, acknowledging "we will not build a perfect Afghanistan" by the time international forces withdraw from the country. Where his predecessors hailed efforts to improve education, health care and governance, Cameron took office in 2010 saying he would accelerate the training of Afghan troops and police.

He said Britain and the U.S. were now "in the final phases of our military mission," but — like Obama — did not suggest the timetable for British troops to withdraw would be accelerated.

Like Iraq, the Afghanistan war has been given an artificial expiration date. U.S. and NATO forces will close out their current mission and leave by the end of 2014. The surge forces Obama added will be gone by the end of September.

Obama came into office with an end date in Iraq already set by his predecessor — Dec. 31, 2011. Obama stuck to that schedule but added his own "end of combat" date — Aug. 31, 2010. That gave U.S. forces the remaining months to hand off security control to the Iraqis. By the end, American casualties were rare and U.S. troops often had little to do.

The U.S. and its allies have not yet set a precise "end of combat" date in Afghanistan, although the mid-2013 target Obama articulated Wednesday looks to be the same thing. That calendar would give approximately the same amount of time — roughly 15 months — for U.S. and allied forces to complete the security handoff to Afghan forces.

Like Iraq, fighting is sure to continue in Afghanistan after the transition to an "advise and assist" role for U.S. forces and after U.S. forces quit the country altogether. The relationship between the Afghan security forces and the Afghan government is even more tenuous than it was in Iraq, making it more difficult to ensure that security will hold up after the Americans leave.

By the time the U.S. forces switched to the advisory role in Iraq, the back of the Sunni insurgency had been broken. The same cannot be said for the Taliban-led insurgency in Afghanistan, which causes most of the U.S. casualties and functions as the main enemy even if Obama's preferred opponent is the al-Qaida terror network the Taliban once harbored.
___

EDITOR'S NOTE — Anne Gearan has covered U.S. foreign policy for The Associated Press since 2004.

How will it end in Afghanistan?
Are Western troops going to leave too soon to prevent civil war?
Los Angles Times By Sandy Gall March 14, 2012
This has been one of the worst fortnights in the increasingly unhappy 10 1/2-year Afghan war for NATO and, above all, the United States and its ally, Britain.

First there was the burning of the Korans at Bagram air base, which unleashed a wave of religious fury and revenge killings of U.S. troops. Then came the deaths of six British soldiers, incinerated by a giant Taliban bomb last week, which pushed the British death toll in the war over the symbolic 400 mark. Support in Britain for an increasingly unpopular war further deteriorated. Now comes the shooting in Kandahar of 16 Afghan villagers — many of them women and children — allegedly by a rogue American soldier. All this can only have increased the determination of Prime Minister David Cameron and President Obama, his host for talks in Washington this week, to speed up their exit strategies.

But for the majority of Afghans, distressing as these events are, there are perhaps more pressing concerns. What will happen when the Americans and the rest of NATO pull out?

Afghans already feel that electoral considerations are more important to the West than the key question of whether the raw, new Afghan National Army and the Afghan National Police will be up to the task of guaranteeing the country's security, especially if Pakistan'sintelligence agency, the ISI, continues to back the Taliban.

Although the U.S.-led surge at the end of 2010 reversed the military balance in the Taliban-infested, drug-rich Kandahar and Helmand provinces, the Taliban has since retaliated by extending its grip in the previously secure north. Now, hardly a week goes by without some prominent government official, police or army chief being ambushed or blown up in Kunduz, Mazar-i-Sharif or even Kabul.

The hemorrhaging IED and suicide-bomb attacks — like the assassination in September of Karzai's top peace negotiator, former Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani, by a supposed peace envoy with a bomb hidden in his turban — has generated a climate of fear and pessimism.

The assassin is said to have been dispatched by the Taliban, who, with its backers, the ISI, are probably the only optimists in Afghanistan. The ISI sees its long-term strategy of manipulating the Taliban insurgency to install a pro-Pakistan government in Kabul as finally paying off.

For this observer, a foreign correspondent for Reuters and Independent Television News for nearly 40 years, the situation conjures up memories of the end of the Vietnam War. National security advisor (and later Secretary of State) Henry Kissinger had to negotiate with his North Vietnamese adversaries from a position of weakness that not even he could disguise. By then all American combat troops were long gone. I watched the North Vietnamese march into Saigon on April 30, 1975; they not only took over the old capital but the whole of the south as well.

Is that what will happen in Afghanistan? Will the Taliban move to fill a vacuum, with Pakistani and ISI backing? One hopes not, and of course it would not happen in one fell swoop as it did in South Vietnam. Many Afghans and non-Afghans fear a Taliban takeover could well lead to civil war. Whatever happens in the Pashtun south and its capital, Kandahar, the Tajik and Uzbek north will almost certainly fight rather than submit to another Taliban dictatorship. Memories of the massacres that accompanied Taliban rule from 1996 until 2001 are still too vivid for any northerner, and many southerners, to want to see the militants back in power.

Ahmed Shah Massoud, the Northern Alliance leader who was assassinated by Al Qaeda suicide bombers two days before9/11, managed to defy the Taliban for five long years despite receiving precious little support from the United States. He left behind plenty of disciples, and many of his old mujahedin commanders are said to be stockpiling arms. One such commander, Masoud's successor, Marshal Mohammed Qassim Fahim, is Karzai's senior vice president. Whereas Fahim, reputedly a multimillionaire, could always take refuge abroad, many ordinary former mujahedin would see little option but to stay and fight, no doubt supported by Russia and Iran, which don't want to see another Taliban government in power in Kabul. Nor do the former Soviet republics to the north.

But short of civil war, is an extremist Islamic state, jeopardizing Western-inspired achievements in education and women's rights, inevitable? Gen. David Richards, chief of the British defense staff who commanded coalition troops in Afghanistan in 2006-07, does not think so. "I don't think we are losing, by the way," he told me. "We are just not succeeding in the time frame that suits and is acceptable to Afghanistan or Afghans and is acceptable to our population and our politicians. So what can we do? Well, since we have only now got the resources to do this correctly, I think we have got to give ourselves more time. People talk about a bit more strategic patience."

He added: "I believe where we have got the balance right, we are already turning the corner in practical terms.... Which is why, I think, give us a bit longer; 2015 is probably doable, for example. We have just started to get it right, and we might yet succeed."

But will the politicians give the generals that long? In the light of recent developments, it is doubtful.

Sandy Gall is the author of "War Against the Taliban: Why It All Went Wrong in Afghanistan," which was published in Britain in January.

When US troops leave Afghanistan, an American university will remain
US military withdrawal from Afghanistan won't necessarily spell the end of US commitments to Afghanistan, says president of American University of Afghanistan.
Christian Science Monitor By Scott Baldauf, Staff writer March 14, 2012
When the US government officially withdraws its combat troops from Afghanistan and points at silver linings in those dark clouds, what will America’s legacy be in the minds of Afghans?

Will it be peace and prosperity, or drone strikes and night letters?

Will it be democratic governance or rampant corruption?

For Michael Smith, an important legacy of the decade-long engagement in Afghanistan will be the American University of Afghanistan, which opened its doors in 2006, has graduated some 42 students, and now has a fulltime student population of 900.

Like its sister organization, the American University of Beirut, the American University of Afghanistan is built to stay, says Mr. Smith, who is the American University of Afghanistan’s president.

“It’s important not to mix up the withdrawal of American troops with the withdrawal of American support for Afghanistan,” says Smith, during a meeting this week at the Monitor. “It does make sense to withdraw troops, because there are diminishing returns from their staying in the country.”

But when it comes to America’s investment in Afghan democratic institutions, infrastructure, and in education, he adds, “given the investment the US has made in Afghanistan, it doesn’t make sense to walk away from that.”

Make no mistake: The next few years are not going to be easy ones for any institution in Afghanistan that bears the name “American.”

With Afghans protesting against the “unintentional” burning of Qurans by NATO troops at Bagram Air Base north of Kabul, and more recently against the killing of 16 Afghan civilians by a US Army sergeant near Kandahar; with continued disaffection at the lengthy stay of US troops and the lack of security in the country; with growing anger at the persistence of corruption in the US-backed government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, there is very little cachet these days that comes with “the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

But Smith and other administrators at the American University are banking on Afghans being able to distinguish between the activities of the US military and the development work of other parts of the US government.

“The more we’re seen meeting the real needs of the country, that will hold the university in really good stead,” says Smith. “Hopefully, we’ll be seen as separate and different, and not a target, despite the American name.”

There are signs of hope, certainly, as 900 full time students and 800 other short-course students are now enrolled at American University of Afghanistan. The first batch of 32 students graduated last spring. Smith recently signed a 99-year lease of an 80-acre property in Kabul. Ground has already been broken for a Center for Women’s Economic Development, and ground will be broken on a new academic building at graduation this coming spring. Much of the funding for the university comes from the US government, but increasingly Afghans themselves are donating funds, buildings, and scholarships.

But there are also challenges.

Anti-American sentiment now seems to have become mainstream, and often ripples out to affect Western aid groups and the United Nations in general. Last year after an American preacher threatened to burn copies of the Quran, Islam’s sacred text, protestors in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif attacked the closest thing to an American target that they could find: a United Nations guesthouse. Seven aid workers were killed in revenge, and the guesthouse was burned.

American University is not the only foreign-funded higher education institution in Afghanistan. There are a few Iranian funded universities in the western Afghan city of Herat, and a large Iranian-funded madrassa, or theological seminary, in Kabul itself.

The United Arab Emirates is now funding a college for women in the southeastern Afghan town of Khost. India is planning to start a mining school as well. By helping members of the Afghan elite to attain higher education in Afghanistan, each of these countries is not only helping build the capacity of Afghans to run their own country. They are also exerting “soft power” that puts the donor country into a positive light, and thus serve the donor country’s national interests.

Pushing the Taliban out of power, in theory, also should have served US national interests, and in the early days of America’s military presence in Afghanistan, many Afghans were grateful to have US troops around. But with every passing year, and the occasional errant drone strike on civilian populations, America’s military presence has become a sore point for Afghans, and even for Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

President Obama last year mapped out the drawdown of US troops, toward total withdrawal in 2014. But as Rand Corporation analyst Seth Jones pointed out, in a recent discussion on National Public Radio, final withdrawal does not necessarily mean zero US troops in Afghanistan by 2014.

it's unclear what happens in 2013, 2014 and beyond.

Will that mean zero U.S. forces? I have never heard anybody privately say that means zero. The talk now is 15,000 to 20,000 or 25,000, somewhere in that category. I think the subject of discussion now is, will this be mostly a move away from a conventional counterinsurgency model to more special operations and CIA units, much like the U.S. was involved in the Philippines or Colombia or El Salvador?

War in Afghanistan: From necessity to atrocity
Incidents involving lawless US troops are hardening local attitudes against the Nato presence and making an orderly departure more difficult
Financial Times By Matthew Green March 14, 2012
First came the image of army specialist Jeremy Morlock, leering into the camera while holding up the head of a murdered Afghan teenage boy by the hair. The photograph, published on the internet a year ago, was evidence in the trial of a “kill team” of four US soldiers who were later convicted of murdering three Afghan civilians – for sport.

Then, two months ago, a video appeared on YouTube showing four US marines laughing and joking as they urinated on the dead bodies of Taliban fighters. “Have a nice day, buddy,” one said. Last month, burnt copies of the Koran were found at a rubbish tip at a US base, sparking riots in which more than 30 died.

But the worst crime was still to come. In the early hours of Sunday, a US army sniper slipped out of his base in Panjwai district, part of the southern Kandahar province. After walking a mile in darkness, he shot dead 16 Afghans, including nine children, in their homes. The slaughter was “impossible to forgive”, declared Hamid Karzai, Afghan president.

“Americans have lost this game,” says Abdul Salam Jan, a farmer who grows pomegranates in neighbouring Arghandab, where US troops pushed out Taliban fighters in fierce battles two summers ago. “The only option is for them to leave.”

None of this was part of the script in December 2009, when Barack Obama gambled that a surge of 30,000 troops could salvage a conflict that the US president’s advisers feared would be his Vietnam. A war begun in the aftermath of the 2001 terror attacks on America was by then threatening to destabilise swaths of south Asia. A worst-case scenario seemed to be building in which a resurgent Taliban were on course to dominate an arc of territory spilling from southern and eastern Afghanistan into nuclear-armed Pakistan.

US security officials obsessed over the risk that this ballooning insurgency might encourage al-Qaeda-inspired jihadists to beg, borrow or steal a Pakistani warhead, or foment an atomic exchange with India. To Mr Obama, the only way back was to send more troops into what he called a “war of necessity”.

Now, the massacre in Panjwai has not only unmasked the ugly face of the campaign but has cracked every faultline wider – the divide between Afghans and the Nato force, the divisions between Afghans and their government, and the gulf that separates leaders in Kabul and Washington. Seeking to assuage Afghan anger, Mr Obama said this week: “The United States takes this as seriously as if it was our own citizens and our own children who were murdered.”

Visiting Washington for talks with Mr Obama, David Cameron, the UK prime minister, meanwhile stressed the need to bolster Afghanistan’s ability to defend itself to allow foreign troops to withdraw. “I think people want an endgame,” he said. “They want to know that our troops are going to come home.”

Both leaders are well aware that voters are tired of body bags, a fact also not lost on Mr Obama’s opponents ahead of the November presidential election. The death of six British troops in a roadside bombing last week shocked Britons, who had been told the war was winding down. European governments would love to withdraw combat troops even before the deadline for a handover to Afghan forces in 2014.

Conscious that the allies’ patience is wearing thin, Afghans fear a repeat of the kind of civil war that erupted three years after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989. Many are trying to leave the country, investment has dried up and property prices in Kabul are falling. Rumours swirl that ethnic Tajik warlords in the north are restocking arms dumps as an insurance policy against the risk that the Taliban, who are strongest in the Pashtun south and east, will regain ground as the US scales back a force that peaked at about 100,000 troops.

In this febrile atmosphere, Afghans’ fear of abandonment might become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If Nato suffers another public relations disaster, triggering more protests and anti-western sentiment, a long-term commitment will become even harder to sell to the public in the US and Europe.

“Without the Americans, obviously things would be a lot more difficult,” says Saad Mohseni, head of Moby Group, Afghanistan’s biggest private broadcaster. “The question is, how can we get the US to stay here longer?”

Time is short. Snow blocking mountain trails is starting to melt, heralding the return of spring, when black-turbaned Taliban will stream across the Hindu Kush from havens in Pakistan to start a new fighting season. Unless Isaf, the Nato-led force, can reverse the upward trend in civilian deaths caused by insurgent suicide attacks and roadside bombings, confidence might start to crumble. As Habib Athaee, a student in Kabul, puts it: “If the current government fails to do anything, in the next two years we’ll go back to the early 1990s and civil war.”
. . .

American officials have identified the Panjwai killer as an 11-year veteran of the military who had served three tours in Iraq. The 38-year-old staff sergeant could not have chosen a more damaging location. Kandahar is the spiritual home of the Taliban and the centrepiece of Mr Obama’s surge. US troops seized Panjwai and other insurgent strongholds at a high cost: buried bombs shredded limbs and turned armoured vehicles into coffins. Since the start of 2010, 964 US troops have lost their lives in Afghanistan – more than the 947 until then killed in the war, according to iCasualties.org.

The surge succeeded in pushing back the Taliban from southern strongholds. Yet nobody can be sure whether the gains will survive as the US scales back. The strategy hinges on rallying an alienated population behind the Afghan government while rapidly building up the local army and police. But in Kandahar, Mr Karzai’s home province, a US-backed state-building effort has lagged far behind battlefield gains. Taliban death squads have been ruthlessly effective at culling government officials. In January, a suicide bomber murdered Panjwai’s district governor. In a message of defiance, insurgents opened fire at a delegation of officials, including two of Mr Karzai’s brothers, who visited Panjwai on Tuesday.

While the Nato-led force says the number of attacks on its troops has been falling in recent months, insurgents are killing civilians at a growing clip. A roadside bomb in the southern Helmand province killed eight people on Wednesday, overshadowing the start of a visit by Leon Panetta, the US defence secretary, who is trying to contain the fallout from the Panjwai shootings.

The outpouring of anger over the Koran burnings last month was a stark reminder of the disenchantment with Nato and Mr Karzai’s government lurking below the surface. After a decade of war, Afghans are frustrated that foreigners – for all their money, technology and power – have largely failed to usher in a new era of responsive government.

The trust deficit bodes ill for an exit strategy that hinges on leaving behind a cadre of advisers and special operations troops to serve as mentors for Afghanistan’s security forces, which will need a western logistical backbone to survive.

The murder of a US major and a colonel by an Afghan police intelligence officer in a supposedly secure command centre in the interior ministry in Kabul last month laid bare the gulf that can divide Afghans and foreign counterparts. The pair were among six US soldiers shot dead by Afghan forces during the riots, which sharpened the siege-like mentality afflicting diplomats in Kabul.

The sergeant’s killing spree may have even more profound implications in the west, reminding audiences of the dehumanising cost of war. Mr Obama, who faces a tough re-election race this year, has pledged there will be no change in US strategy, even as 60 per cent of Americans said the Afghan adventure had not been worth the cost in lives or money, according to a Washington Post-ABC poll.

. . .
Impatience in the west is at odds with the aspirations of young people in Kabul who remember the Taliban’s theocracy with horror and dream of a more prosperous future. “I’m so hopeful for the new generation,” says Yalda Samih, 20, a student at the American University of Afghanistan, a bastion of liberalism. “Even small groups of people can bring big changes.”

But Newt Gingrich captured a flavour of the cynicism abroad when the Republican presidential hopeful delivered a rhetorical message to Afghans last month: “You know, you’re going to have to figure out how to live your own miserable life.”

Such mood music is a sombre prelude to a Nato summit in Chicago in May, where Mr Obama wants to cement a long-term Afghan commitment from allies. His task will be harder if he is unable to agree a long-planned security pact with Mr Karzai to guarantee that US troops can stay until 2024. The talks – bogged down for a year – will be more difficult to resolve in the aftermath of the Panjwai killing, which has stirred opposition to the deal among some Afghan politicians.

The furore over the shootings has also eclipsed a significant shift in the “endgame” – the regional politicking and back-channel diplomacy accompanying the countdown to 2014. While few hold out hope that serious peace negotiations will start any time soon, Pakistan’s recent willingness to allow Taliban representatives to travel to Qatar to open an “office” to facilitate dialogue has kindled some excitement.

Afghans were heartened last month when Yusuf Raza Gilani, Pakistan’s prime minister, urged the Taliban leadership to join negotiations – remarks interpreted in Kabul as Islamabad’s first tacit admission it is sheltering the movement’s leadership. “At last they are admitting their double-game in Pakistan – that’s a change in policy,” says Gharzai Khwakhuzhi, who served as deputy intelligence chief when the Taliban held sway in Kabul. Yet hardliners among the insurgents’ leadership may yet see Nato’s latest setbacks as an incentive to exploit the talks to buy time for more fighting.

Can the US military and its allies recover? Only a clear reduction in violence in the coming months will convince Afghans that the Pentagon’s mantra of progress is more than spin. Another outrage of the kind that occurred in Panjwai will raise the risk that Mr Obama’s surge was merely the prelude to a new chapter of war.

Shape a Peaceful Afghan Exit
New York Times By ANATOL LIEVEN Op-Ed Contributor March 14, 2012
President Obama has been correct in one part of his response to the killing of 16 Afghan civilians by an American soldier on Sunday: Such disasters must not lead to a panic-stricken “rush for the exit” by America and NATO forces in Afghanistan.

If the United States is to emerge from this conflict with some honor, and if Afghanistan is to have any chance of avoiding future civil war, it is essential that Obama stick to his promise.

A flight by the United States would be seen purely as a response to Western losses, reflect callous disregard for the plight of the Afghan people, and lead to justified feelings of triumph on the part of the Taliban and their allies.

Equally important, it would undercut Washington’s ability to shape a peace settlement. The present deadline for a withdrawal of U.S. and NATO ground forces by the end of 2014 allows a reasonable time to search for such a settlement — if the United States uses that time well. On this point, unfortunately, the Obama administration’s approach is not encouraging. If it continues, the current U.S. strategy will likely bring disaster to Afghanistan after 2014.

In the first place, Western talk of success in building up the Afghan state seems little more than whistling in the dark. Not only is that state incorrigibly corrupt, in much of the country it barely exists. If the Western presence has not achieved major improvement in these areas over the last 10 years, it is hard to see what can be achieved over the next two years as the West withdraws.

The Afghan police forces, for example, are riddled with corruption and are loathed by many ordinary Afghans. Moreover, the auxiliary police forces promoted by the United States to fight the Taliban in southern Afghanistan are in many ways a throwback to the heroin-trading, grossly oppressive local militias of the early 1990s — which the Taliban came into being to crush.

More success has been achieved in building up the Afghan National Army; but the weakness of the civilian state could well make this army as much of a liability as a strength. The recent history of Pakistan, much of Africa, and Afghanistan in the 1970s shows what is likely to happen when the military is the only strong institution in a very weak state.

A future military takeover in Afghanistan is made more likely by the fact that Washington has no plan for who to put in place after President Hamid Karzai steps down, as he is constitutionally bound to do, in 2014. This is not the Obama administration’s fault. Even the anti-Taliban elements of Afghan society are so fractured along ethnic and political lines that it may be impossible to find a candidate who could take over as an executive president without bringing down the entire existing political order.

Some senior Western military figures say they believe a “half-way decent military dictatorship” is the best that can be hoped for. That might be true if Afghan soldiers were united. But the National Army too is deeply divided ethnically — and many Pashtun families deliberately have one son or nephew with the army and another with the Taliban to be sure of protection regardless of which side comes out on top.

If enough Pashtun soldiers are alienated by developments in Kabul, they will desert with their weapons to join either the Taliban or local warlords — and the army will collapse.

Given all these threats, it would make far more sense for the United States to seek a settlement with the Taliban while it still has cards to play. The Obama administration has opened direct talks with the Taliban, through a Taliban office being established in Qatar. Unfortunately, powerful sections of the Washington establishment wish to use these talks not to seek an agreement with the Taliban as a whole, but to try to split that organization. They are counting on divisions among the Taliban, even as they forget that the West’s side in the Afghan civil war is even more divided.

Moreover, one element of the Obama administration’s strategy would make agreement impossible. This is the insistence, deeply unpopular among many Afghans, that the United States retain bases, special forces and military advisers in Afghanistan until at least 2024.

Washington wants to keep forces on the ground that can both continue to hunt Al Qaeda and prop up an administration in Kabul. In practice, however, this plan risks landing the United States with the worst of all worlds. The continued presence of such forces will make agreement with the Taliban impossible, so the war will continue. And if the Kabul administration and army disintegrate, then U.S. advisers will be mired in the resulting disaster.

Instead, Washington should pursue a peace settlement along the following lines: the guarantee of a complete withdrawal of Western forces; the exclusion by the Taliban of all international terrorists from the areas they control; and a Taliban crackdown on heroin production in return for international development aid to those areas.

Central to such a settlement would be an Afghan national debate on a new constitution, abandoning the present highly centralized form of government in favor of decentralization and a nonexecutive presidency. That would allow the United States to escape from the trap of how to replace Karzai, and allow the Taliban and their allies to take effective control of the south and east of the country, while acknowledging the right of other groups to administer their own areas.

America and its allies should seek such a settlement because, after 2014, the attempt to suppress the Taliban in the south and east promises, at best, an unending conflict, at worst, a catastrophic collapse of the Afghan state. All the evidence of the past 10 years suggests that the Taliban simply have too much support in these areas and among the Pashtuns of Pakistan ever to be defeated.

The reason the Taliban should accept such a settlement is that taking over Pashtun areas where they have strong support is not at all the same thing as conquering non-Pashtun populations who are bitterly hostile to them. They had great difficulty doing this in the 1990s when only Iran and a weak Russia supported their opponents. This time, the anti-Taliban forces would receive aid from the United States, Russia and India.

In other words, another decade of civil war would be very likely to end with a de facto territorial settlement close to the one that I am advocating today. The difference would be that in the meantime innumerable more Afghans and Americans would have died.

Anatol Lieven is a professor in the War Studies Department of King’s College London, and a senior fellow of the New America Foundation. An updated version of his book “Pakistan: A Hard Country” appears this month in paperback.

For Afghans, Two Outrages, Two Different Reactions
NPR By Alan Greenblatt March 14, 2012
After U.S. troops inadvertently burned Qurans in Afghanistan last month, Afghans staged nationwide riots that left 40 dead and hundreds injured in unrest that lasted days.

In the days since 16 Afghan civilians were shot dead on Sunday, apparently by a lone U.S. soldier, the Afghan reaction has been relatively restrained so far.

Why such different responses? It can seem especially confounding to Americans, who consider the shooting a far graver offense than the Quran burnings.

Analysts say a number of factors could be at play — the symbolic significance of burning a holy book, Afghan numbness to death after decades of war, the way news travels in a poor, underdeveloped country where many people are illiterate.

Whatever the reasons, the shooting Sunday "is not attracting anywhere near the attention in Afghanistan, in terms of media or public response, that the Quran burnings did," says Nora Bensahel, a defense analyst at the Center for a New American Security.

There has been some fallout from the Sunday shootings in southern Afghanistan. On Tuesday, militants attacked a memorial service attended by the provincial governor and two brothers of President Hamid Karzai, firing automatic weapons and launching rocket-propelled grenades.

That same day, a public demonstration took place in the eastern city of Jalalabad, with a crowd of 1,000 blocking traffic, burning President Obama in effigy and chanting anti-American and anti-Semitic slogans.

Such reactions have been isolated so far, though it's still possible that future public gatherings, like Muslim prayer services on Friday, could lead to broader unrest.

Years Of War

Any culture can become desensitized to violence over the course of a long war. Citizens may be shocked by initial reports of a relatively small number of deaths, but over time come to take far greater numbers of deaths almost in stride.

"You can become inured to the death of people in large or small numbers," says military historian Richard Kohn.

This may have happened to many Afghans, who have had to endure more than 30 years of conflict, between civil war, the Soviet occupation and more than a decade of American troops there.

Many Americans are shocked by the reports that a U.S. soldier apparently left his base and started shooting civilians.

But some versions of the story have been presented a bit differently in Afghanistan. Some Afghans have claimed that multiple U.S. soldiers were involved. The U.S. military has emphatically denied this. But this version fits into the larger Afghan narrative that the Americans, intentionally or not, have killed many civilians over the past decade.

"Although the loss of life is a terrible and tragic thing, I'm not sure the Afghans distinguish this incident from a whole lot of military raids where civilians were killed," said Bensahel.

A Deep Offense

By contrast, the burning last month of the Quran, which American officials emphasized was inadvertent, was taken by many Afghans as a deliberate insult.

The Quran burning is "a cultural offense, the burning of the book — an insult to the entire country and culture and religion and fundamental values," says Kohn.

Last year, Terry Jones, a Florida preacher, intentionally burned a Quran, setting off riots in Afghanistan. Back in 2005, Muslims also rioted following a report in Newsweek that guards at Guantanamo had intentionally desecrated the Quran.

That report was partly retracted. Still, given that history, Americans should have known to treat the Quran with care rather than mistakenly incinerating it, Sina Samar, Afghanistan's human rights chief, said last week.

"Anyone who has a basic understanding of the Quran would understand that to Muslims, the Quran is the way God enters the world," says Omid Safi, a religious studies professor at the University of North Carolina. "If you really want to think of what the Quran means to Muslims, don't think of the Bible — think of the very person of Christ."

The fact that the recent burning took place at Bagram Air Field exacerbated the situation, Safi says. American troops have been accused of torturing and killing Afghan detainees there.

"It's that least desired combination — an attack on Islam linked to the symbols of American military might," Safi says. "For the Afghanis, it's the ultimate sense that no matter what name we put on it — nation building — that which Afghanis themselves hold most near and dear to their hearts is violated."

Image Problem For U.S.?

Visiting Camp Leatherneck during a previously scheduled trip to Afghanistan, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said Wednesday that the Quran burning and Sunday's killings were "deeply troubling," but vowed that U.S. strategy will remain on course despite them.

American officials have carefully pointed out that the killings were carried out by a rogue soldier, but some Afghans will not distinguish them from the recurring deaths of civilians in night raids and drone attacks.

Rumors that more than one soldier was involved — or even that helicopters sent to retrieve the dead and wounded were really part of the attack — can only worsen such perceptions.

"It's going to rub Americans the wrong way," says John Esposito, an Islamic studies professor at Georgetown University, "but even though there are people who appreciate at a certain level that we've kept down violence, there are also people who feel we've killed enough civilians that we see life as cheap."

As the west withdraws, Kabul’s poppy palaces lie abandoned
Financial Times By Mathew Green
The “poppy palaces” of Kabul are back on the market. Many of these gaudy mansions, nicknamed for rumours some were built to launder proceeds from the heroin industry, are adorned with “for rent” signs, writes Matthew Green.

Foreign contractors and security companies that once paid premium rates for office space in buildings with cinema-set staircases but no central heating have started to leave. The UN workers and other international employees who lived in guest houses scattered across the city have scuttled into fortified bases following a series of attacks by insurgent suicide squads.

Estate agents see the declining demand as a result of the scaling back of western engagement in the country, where the Nato-led force aims to hand its combat role to Afghan soldiers and police by the end of 2014.

The palaces, which sprang up after the US-led invasion a decade ago, symbolise the way a wartime economic boom has concentrated wealth in the hands of the few. Oversized statues of falcons and deer gaze from rooftops; unpaved roads below are reduced to swamps as snow turns to sludge.

Qadeerullah, an estate agent who began his career hawking mirrors and coat-hangers as a teenager, said a house that might once have cost $20,000 per month now goes for $12,000. “The situation in Afghanistan has turned my hair white,” he says.

“Rents have come down but there are no takers,” says Akhtar Mohammad at the Baharan estate agent. Even a plastic fruit tree adorned with winking fairy lights fails to lighten the gloom in his shop. Only one westerner has made inquiries since the start of the year. The wall clock has stopped.

Some fear a fall in foreign spending will sap an economy that has grown rapidly on the back of US military contracts, aid money and renewed trade with Afghanistan’s neighbours.

In Kabul’s Saray-e-Shahzada market, currency traders proffer brick-sized bundles of foreign notes bound with rubber bands. Dealers have little faith in the west’s promises of long-term aid to keep the government afloat. “Europe will not support us – we know their economies are going down,” says Haji Hafeezullah, a property developer who runs the Saleem Caravan foreign-exchange bureau. He forecasts that the afghani, which has held largely steady at 45-50 against the dollar in recent years, could weaken to 60 or 70 in 2014.

Mr Hafeezullah says he has invested more than $60m in Kabul property but has growing doubts about his new housing development. “Before, I was confident it would pay off,” he says. “Now I’m not so sure.”

Cameron and Obama Show Unity on Afghanistan
New York Times By MARK LANDLER March 14, 2012
WASHINGTON - Seeking to project a united front on Afghanistan after a spate of bloody setbacks on the battlefield, President Obama and Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain pledged on Wednesday that their countries would stick to the timetable for winding down the war by the end of 2014.

While acknowledging the complications posed by the recent massacre of 16 Afghans, apparently by a lone American soldier, and the loss of 6 British soldiers to a roadside bomb, Mr. Obama and Mr. Cameron insisted that the American-led coalition was making gains in preparing Afghans to take over their own security.

“There are going to be multiple challenges along the way,” Mr. Obama said, standing next to Mr. Cameron in a Rose Garden ablaze with cherry blossoms. “In terms of pace, I don’t anticipate at this stage that we’re going to be making any sudden additional changes to the plan we currently have.”

The prime minister cited the progress made by British troops in the southern province of Helmand, where he said insurgent attacks had declined and security had tightened. “If you compare where we are today with where we’ve been two, three years ago, the situation is considerably improved,” he said.

Mr. Obama welcomed Mr. Cameron with pomp, locker room camaraderie and gentle gibes about how his visit coincided with the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812, during which the British set fire to the White House. The two men addressed each other by first name and joked about a college basketball game in Dayton, Ohio, where Mr. Cameron was Mr. Obama’s agreeable, if befuddled, guest on Tuesday evening.

“One of these days I’ll get my own back by getting you to a cricket match and explaining the rules to you and some of the terminology that you’ll have to try and get straight, as I tried last night,” the prime minister said as Mr. Obama grinned.

Although the queen is Britain’s head of state, Mr. Cameron was honored with a state dinner at the White House. He and his wife, Samantha, were treated to crisped halibut in a potato crust and bison Wellington, the English staple made with buffalo tenderloin.

The fuss was meant to celebrate the “special relationship” between durable allies, but the two hours of talks in the Oval Office underscored the intractable problems that yoke Britain and the United States.

On Iran, for example, both reaffirmed the need to allow economic sanctions to take their toll before considering military action. The president, noting Iran’s history of stringing along the West in negotiations over its nuclear program, warned that “the window for solving this issue diplomatically is shrinking.”

Mr. Obama’s remarks were perceptibly tougher than those he made at a White House news conference last week in the wake of a visit by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. There, the president reproached his Republican opponents for beating the war drums about Iran. Allies of Israel complained that Mr. Obama had rolled back expressions of support he had made to Mr. Netanyahu.

Like Mr. Obama, Mr. Cameron said he would not tolerate Iran acquiring nuclear weapons — rejecting a policy of containment — though he has also expressed doubts about an Israeli military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. “We believe there is still time and space to pursue a diplomatic solution,” he said.

The two leaders appeared united on Syria as well, but their solid front is born of frustration and an inability by the West to stop the government of President Bashar al-Assad from killing thousands of civilians in Homs and other Syrian cities.

Mr. Obama noted that the Pentagon had studied military options for Syria in the same way it planned for military contingencies around the world. But he cautioned, as he has before, that Syria was a different case than Libya, where the United States backed a military air campaign led by Britain and France.

“When we see what’s happening on television, our natural instinct is to act,” Mr. Obama said. But he added, “It’s very important for us to make sure we have thought through all of our actions before we take those steps.”

Britain holds the rotating chairmanship of the United Nations Security Council, and Mr. Cameron said a major focus would be to persuade Russia, which has opposed efforts to press Mr. Assad to step down, to work toward a transition in Syria.

“It’s not in their interest to have this bloodied, broken, brutal regime butchering people nightly on the television screens,” he said.

The War of 1812, it turns out, is not the only baggage in the “special relationship.” During the meeting, the British delegation brought up tensions between Britain and Argentina over the Falkland Islands. Britain recently deployed a destroyer to nearby waters, as well as Prince William, prompting the Argentines to complain that Britain was behaving like a “conquistador.”

The State Department urged the two sides to resolve their differences through “dialogue.” That statement rankled British officials, who were reminded of the American ambivalence in 1982, when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher went to war with Argentina to retake the islands.

On Wednesday, Mr. Obama offered Mr. Cameron some comfort. The United States, he said, would stop prodding Britain and Argentina to talk to each other, but stick to its historic position of neutrality.

Afghanistan, Germany to Sign Strategic Agreement
TOLOnews.com Wednesday, 14 March 2012
Afghanistan's Minister of Defence Abdul Rahim Wardak said Germany has pledged to support Afghanistan beyond its withdrawal of troops in 2014 with a strategic partnership agreement.

Germany's Defence Minister Thomas de Maiziere met with Wardak in Kabul on Wednesday, following his visit to Pakistan on Tuesday.

"The international community and Germany has promised that they will not allow Afghanistan to become a haven for terrorists," Wardak said at a press conference after the meeting with de Maiziere.

"[Germany] supports Afghanistan's security process - Afghanistan is playing a major role in stability and security of the region."

He did not give a date for the agreement, but the understanding was it would be soon.

De Maiziere said that German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who made a one-day visit to Afghanistan on Monday, has discussed the long-term agreement with Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

De Maiziere also met with Karzai and reassured him the 2014 deadline for withdrawing troops from Afghanistan is on target, but that Germany would continue to support the development of the country and its security forces.

"I stressed that we would not leave Afghanistan after 2014," he said.

The meeting between the two defence ministers included discussions about handing over security responsibility for Mazar-e-Sharif and the Samangan province in the north to the Afghan forces soon, Wardak said.

Germany is the third biggest supplier of troops to the 130,000-strong Nato-led forces after the US and Britain.

It has around 4,900 troops in Afghanistan, most are based in Kunduz province. Fifty-three German soldiers have died in Afghanistan since the start of 2001.

Interpreters, the Hidden Heroes of the Afghan War
New York Times By ANDREW SAND March 14, 2012
In March 2010, a United States Army platoon was on patrol in Paktika Province in eastern Afghanistan when it encountered a large improvised explosive device, or I.E.D. The platoon had spent the day near Mullayan, a hostile area where several Afghan soldiers had recently been killed. As evening approached, one of the platoon members suddenly called for a halt. He had noticed some black rubber on the road. It was a buried I.E.D. Typically, if a bomb is located, United States forces must wait for an explosive-ordnance disposal team to disarm the device. But the sun was setting and the platoon would most likely be attacked at night. Faced with this predicament, the man who had found the I.E.D. calmly pulled out his knife, dug out the device and dismantled it. Thanks to him, every member of the platoon returned safely.

The man who neutralized the threat and saved American lives that day was not an American or even a soldier. He was an Afghan interpreter. His name is Abdullah, and this is his story.

Born in 1986, Abdullah grew up in Kabul, amid the turmoil of civil war and oppression of Taliban rule. When Abdullah was 13, he and his family, who belong to the Hazara minority, fled to Pakistan to escape ethnic persecution by the Taliban. Following the United States-led campaign to remove the Taliban regime, Abdullah returned to Kabul and resumed his education, including basic English classes. In 2006, to support his family, he dropped out of high school to begin working as an interpreter for the American military. In his six years as an interpreter, Abdullah has participated in combat patrols, survived insurgent attacks and even translated for Adm. Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Today, Abdullah is 25 and works with me at one of the Afghan military training centers. He is an eloquent interpreter, capable of using English to instruct a formal class or joke among friends. He remains completely dedicated to his family, commuting four hours a day between his parents’ home and work.

For American military members deployed to Afghanistan, our interpreters are not only a means of communicating with the Afghans, but are also the Afghans we interact with the most. In the case of Abdullah, I regard him as both a co-worker and a friend. Through Abdullah and his colleagues, I have learned firsthand about life in Afghanistan, often sharing their triumphs and tragedies. Their experiences have shown me the stakes of our efforts here, with one especially poignant moment occurring late last year.

On Dec. 6, Afghanistan commemorated Ashura, a Shiite Muslim holiday. On that day, there were several bombings, including a suicide attack on a crowded Kabul mosque that killed more than 50 people. Among those killed was Maher, a cousin of Abdullah. The two were more like brothers than cousins. Maher, 16, bled to death after being struck by shrapnel in his right side. That day Abdullah helped dig Maher’s grave, and today he helps to support Maher’s mother and five younger siblings.

In response to this tragedy, there was a huge outpouring of support for Abdullah at the training center where we work. Most of the other Afghan interpreters took a day off to attend Maher’s memorial service. Many of the United States military advisers called Abdullah to express their condolences. On the day of Abdullah’s return, I quietly watched as several Afghan instructors, students and interpreters held a moment of silence and prayer in memory of Maher. It was a sacred moment in the face of tragedy.

Since the war began in Afghanistan, thousands of Afghan interpreters have played a critical role in countless American military missions, and many have died. Often these interpreters must overcome the distrust of the Americans they serve with, even though they frequently put their families at risk by affiliating with the United States military. In light of this, we must ask, how will we treat the Afghan interpreters who have worked with us?

For a majority of interpreters, including Abdullah, their ultimate goal is to come to the United States and make a better life. The State Department does have a citizenship program for foreign interpreters, called the Special Immigrant Visa. But obtaining these visas is difficult, and cases of successful immigration are rare.

In the end, how we view the service of these Afghan interpreters will ultimately determine our policies toward them. According to one perspective, they are contractors who have been sufficiently compensated for their services. According to another perspective, they are veterans who have risked their lives for American interests. After serving with Abdullah and his colleagues, I regard many of them as brothers-in-arms. To me, their lives and actions reflect an astonishing degree of dedication, courage and sacrifice. They deserve the same respect and gratitude as those Americans who have served. In my eyes, they are unrecognized heroes.

Lt. Andrew Sand of the Navy is currently deployed to Kabul, where he helps train the Afghan National Army. The views expressed in this post are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Navy, Department of Defense, or the United States government.

Kidnapped Swiss couple escapes from Pakistan Taliban
By msnbc.com news services
A Swiss couple kidnapped by the Pakistani Taliban last July has escaped and will return home soon, the Swiss foreign ministry said on Thursday after the two reached a military checkpoint near Pakistan's border with Afghanistan.

Olivier David Och, 31, and Daniela Widmer, 29, were kidnapped in Pakistan's southwestern province of Baluchistan and had been held by the Taliban in the North Waziristan region.

"A few minutes ago I was able to speak to Daniela and David, and yes, they are free. They are in a safe place," Swiss Foreign Minister Didier Burkhalter told a news conference. "Daniela and David said they managed to escape this morning."

He denied Switzerland had paid to secure the couple's freedom: "Switzerland does not pay ransoms, and Switzerland did not pay a ransom."

According to Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung (link in German), a Pakistani intelligence official who wished to remain anonymous said the Swiss government did in fact pay a ransom. He told the paper the Pakistani government had also released prisoners in the exchange, but it was not clear how many.

A spokesman for the Pakistan Taliban, Ihsanullah Ihsan, said the group released the couple after a council of elders was convened, CNN reported.

Swiss authorities declined to give the full names of the pair, who were named by Pakistani media.

Pakistan Army spokesman Major-General Athar Abbas told Reuters the pair had reported to a checkpoint and were then questioned in Peshawar. Abbas refused to refused to say whether a ransom was paid for the couple's release, or if other demands kidnappers were met, NZZ reported.

According to intelligence sources in North Waziristan, the two were found at a military checkpoint on a main road in Miranshah, the region's main town, at about 5:30 a.m. and were then sent to the city of Peshawar by helicopter.

The Swiss foreign ministry said in a statement the couple would return to Switzerland as soon as possible.

Targets
Pakistan's Taliban had claimed responsibility for kidnapping the couple, who were seized in the Loralai district of Baluchistan on July 1. The two were traveling in their Volkswagen bus from India to Iran.

The pair pleaded for their lives in two videos released in October. In one video, Och addressed the Pakistani, Swiss and American governments in English, asking them to release Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani neuroscientist imprisoned in the United States, and Taliban fighters in Pakistan's custody. The Taliban also demanded millions of dollars in ransom from the Swiss government.

Kidnapping for ransom is relatively common in Pakistan, and although foreigners are not often targets, militants occasionally take foreigners hostage.

Two Western aid workers were kidnapped by gunmen in the central Pakistani city of Multan on Jan. 19. A British doctor working with the International Committee of the Red Cross was kidnapped in the southwestern city of Quetta on Jan. 5.

Warren Weinstein, an American aid worker, was kidnapped in the central Pakistani city of Lahore in August last year. Al-Qaida claimed responsibility for Weinstein's abduction in December.

Reuters contributed to this report.


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