Tweet
10 militants killed, 2 detained in southern Afghanistan
KABUL, April 7 (Xinhua) -- Ten anti-government militants were killed and two others made captive in Helmand province, 555 km south of Afghan capital Kabul, on Friday, a press release of the provincial administration issued Saturday said.
"Ten insurgents including two commanders were killed and two others arrested in Sifoon area, Marjah district on Friday as the militants attacked poppy eradication campaign there," the press release added.
According to the press release, the commanders killed in the firefight which lasted for a while include Shir Agha and Arpan, who were involved in anti-government activities and backing poppy cultivation in Helmand province.
Another Taliban commander namely Mullah Salam sustained injuries in the conflict, it further said. The press release, did not say if there were any casualties on the security forces side.
Taliban militants fighting Afghan and NATO-led forces have yet to make comment.
Notorious for insurgency and growing poppy, Helmand has been regarded as the hotbed of Taliban militants in the southern region of Afghanistan.
Afghanistan's ragtag militia a mixed blessing of high risk
The Australian By Amanda Hodge April 07, 2012
WITH their toy Kalashnikovs and plastic sandals, the villagers being put through their paces by French army trainers look like an Afghan version of Dad's Army.
Yet the Afghan Local Police will eventually be a 30,000-strong force recruited from the remotest and most troubled regions to protect their villages, areas the army and regular police cannot reach.
NATO and the US cannot talk enthusiastically enough about the ALP, which is said to have put the wind up Taliban insurgents in districts and villages where they have previously had free run.
In the Nijrab forward operating base in Kapisa province, built in the shadow of militant-held mountains and alongside several hostile valleys, The Weekend Australian watched as village men were taught to move in defensive formation and drag mock-wounded comrades to shelter with the sort of rough love that might make a Talib wince.
Several dozen more, from grizzled mujaheddin veterans to boys with more pimples than facial hairs, stood chatting and giggling as they waited their turn.
After a few weeks of training, the men will be sent back to their villages in some of the most dangerous parts of Kapisa province with Kalashnikovs, uniforms and instructions on the areas or installations they must protect.
"This is village sons protecting villages, like a rural neighbourhood watch," Brigadier General Edmund Walker, NATO's joint chief of staff for operations, tells The Weekend Australian.
The top US and NATO commander in Afghanistan, General John Allen, says the ALP is the key to holding ground in Afghanistan.
Much is being made of intercepted Taliban chatter in which militants allegedly claimed: "If you can kill an ALP commander, it's worth 10 coalition soldiers."
The ALP may be popular with the coalition but it is intensely controversial among Afghans. Many elders refuse to support recruitment for fear it will create yet another generation of violent militia and warlords.
Less than two years old, the force already has a mixed record. Just last week, an ALP recruit drugged nine of his colleagues in a police outpost in the southeastern border province of Paktika before spraying them with bullets. Days earlier in the same province, an ALP officer shot and killed a coalition soldier. Early last month, a local policeman allowed Taliban to enter his guard post in Oruzgan, the southern province where most of Australia's 1550 troops are stationed, and kill nine of his fellow police officers.
Last year, Human Rights Watch said some members of the ALP were getting away with abuses including rape and murder.
In Kapisa, where 11 French soldiers have been killed since last July, the French are hoping the ALP will bring stability to areas such as Tagab and Uzbeen.
A French ALP training commander at Nijrab explains: "Maliks or mullahs are consulted so we know we're recruiting the right people, coming from the right area to defend the right places. So far it's OK."
Yet in parts of Kapisa and neighbouring Surobi, village elders, the police chief, even the district governor, have said no to the force. "My village has given 100 to 200 for the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police and they have got a lot of training. But if you create ALP, they are nothing. They don't know anything about training," says an elder from Kapisa's Uzbeen Valley, Haji Asallah,.
"An additional military organisation is put in place when you don't have standard security organisations. But in our villages we have our sons in the ANA and ANP, so what is the need for an additional military force?"
Surobi police chief Colonel Ahmadullah says he convened a meeting of 84 elders from across the district last year following a request from the Ministry of Interior that he organise 300 ALP recruits.
"I explained that we could provide job opportunities for 300 young men but they said no. They have seen and heard the results of ALP recruitment in Tagab where there was not a good result because local police used their posts to get personal revenge on villagers," he says.
Nijrab police chief Aktar Mohammad says he, too, has been allocated 300 ALP and 90 Afghan Nation Police but would rather an extra 100 ANP. "If an area has policemen from another area, it's more effective - they will learn more and there will be less corruption in a district," he says, referring to the ANP system of posting officers outside their areas.
Even Afghan National Army commander General Sher Mohammad Karimi admits to the risks in recruiting and arming a 30,000-strong paramilitary force.
"The ALP will be very good if - and that's a big if - they're properly managed, properly trained, if they have proper leadership and are properly contained and selected though a true, real village or district council," he says.
Afghan Analysts Network spokesman Thomas Ruttig says he has heard the same concerns in provinces across the country.
"Most ordinary Afghans see the ALP as just the latest incarnation of a long line of different quasi-militia projects," Ruttig says, pointing to the violent militia formed and backed during the Soviet occupation and whose warring for power in the 1990s heralded the Taliban regime.
In ethnically and tribally riven Afghanistan, he says the coalition risks arming and legitimising one local group over another in centuries-old conflicts, which can only create more violence.
General tips handover to Afghan forces to start soon
The Canberra Times By Dylan Welch April 7, 2012
al Minhad Air Base, UAE - THE major-general in charge of Australia's war in Afghanistan has given the strongest indication yet that Australian forces will begin to hand over security control to the Afghan army in Oruzgan later this month, and says the upcoming year will be both ''critical'' and ''challenging''.
Another Australian general, who plans all operations for the multinational coalition fighting the Taliban, says there is ''no doubt'' parts of Oruzgan will begin to be handed over to Afghan-led security this month.
Major-General Stuart Smith took over command of Australia's forces in the Middle East - Defence includes Afghanistan in the Middle East - at the beginning of this year and in his first interview in his new job, he told The Saturday Age that ''this is a critical year''.
'This is a year that if the Afghan government asks us to, we will start the transition of handing over security responsibilities in Oruzgan to the Afghan security forces,'' he said at his headquarters at al Minhad Air Base outside of Dubai.
''That is going to be very challenging, we're going to have to be very pati
ent, we're going to need to talk consistently with the Afghan leadership in Oruzgan.''
The Afghan government of Hamid Karzai will later this month announce the third tranche of provinces to be handed over to Afghan control, and it is widely expected that Oruzgan will be included.
Such a transition would see the Australian troops mentoring the Afghan soldiers and security in the province begin to be reduced, in a process that will take from 12 to 18 months.
That could mean Australian frontline troops - aside from the SAS and commandos who will continue to pursue Taliban leaders and those considered ''terrorists'' - would finish their role in Afghanistan as early as May next year.
General Smith's view is supported by the Australian major-general running operations for the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), Stephen Day, who also spoke to The Saturday Age.
''There's no doubt in my mind that some of Oruzgan will be definitely in tranche three, the question is how much.''
General Day said much of tranche three would be decided on a district-by-district basis.
Oruzgan has six districts, and if the decision is based solely on security, it is likely the safer areas of the Chora Valley, Deh Rawud and Tarin Kowt will be the first to transition.
General Day also discussed what role international special operations forces will play in Afghanistan post 2014, the self-imposed deadline for ISAF combat operations.
Both Prime Minister Julia Gillard and US President Barack Obama have indicated that their elite military units will continue to play a role in the country after 2014.
Brazil-U.S. dispute over jets for Afghanistan likely topic of presidential talks
McClatchy Newspapers By Vinod Sreeharsha Fri, Apr. 06, 2012
SAO PAULO - When Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff meets with President Barack Obama on Monday at the White House, the two leaders are likely to publicly use phrases like "deepening friendship" and "partnership" and highlight collaborations in science and education.
They are less likely to call attention to a recent source of tension between the two countries — a dispute involving American military jet procurement.
The conflict began in December when Brazilian's top aviation company and one of the world's largest plane manufacturers, Embraer, partnered with Sierra Nevada Corp. of Sparks, Nev., to win a U.S. Air Force contract for $355 million to make 20 fighter aircraft for Afghanistan's military.
The losing bidder, Hawker-Beechcraft Defense Corp., based in Wichita, Kan., complained of unfair treatment and sued. After the Department of Justice found documentation errors, the Air Force suspended the contract and is now conducting an internal investigation.
The about-face created consternation in Brazil. The country's foreign ministry expressed surprise and cautioned that "this development is not considered conducive to strengthening relations between the two countries on defense affairs."
Embraer is not a state company. But similar to U.S. officials lobbying foreign governments on behalf of American companies, Brazilian leaders promote their own country's interests.
Brazil's minister of trade and development, Fernando Pimentel, recently told reporters that he expects President Rousseff to raise the issue with Obama.
The case is important to Brazil. At a time when the country's economy remains highly dependent on the export of commodities such as soy beans and orange juice, and its manufacturing sector is losing out to Chinese imports and an overvalued currency, Embraer is a great source of pride here, a reminder of Brazil's industrial and technical capabilities.
The company, which has had a U.S. headquarters in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., since 1979, has tried previously to crack the U.S. defense sector. It has won two prior contracts and has leased planes to the U.S. Navy, though Congress later killed the program.
The then congressman from Wichita, Republican Todd Tiahrt, played a role in killing that contract in 2010, arguing, as his office did in a news release, that "the Navy's planned Brazilian lease project ... would have cost taxpayers more than the purchase price of an American-made version." Tiahrt left office last year after he ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate.
Winning the bid to provide planes to the Afghan air force was seen finally as a success for Embraer overcoming American favoritism.
Brazilian officials say the reversal of the contract smacks of politics.
One question that has come up is whether the Air Force changed its bidding process to favor Hawker-Beechcraft's AT-6 over Embraer's A-29 SuperTucano.
According to an article in the magazine Inside the Air Force, the Air Force changed its requirements for the aircraft, calling for it to strafe an enemy target with its .50-caliber machine guns while carrying two 500-pound bombs. The previous requirement called for releasing one of the bombs before strafing.
"The change is critical because performing a strafing mission with two large bombs — which, including targeting equipment, weigh more than 1,200 pounds — puts a great amount of stress on a small airframe," the artcile noted. "Such a change would require an aircraft to have additional power to pull up while carrying both bombs during a strafing run."
Hawker-Beechcraft denies that it influenced the change.
The Wichita company has complaints of its own. For one, it argues that the entire review process lacked transparency and filed a complaint with the Government Accountability Office last year claiming it was not properly notified that it had lost the competition.
The GAO ruled against the company in December and said Hawker-Beechcraft had been excluded because "multiple deficiencies and significant weaknesses found in HBDC's proposal make it technically unacceptable and results in unacceptable mission capability risk."
Another question has arisen of Hawker-Beechcraft's current financial woes. News reports last week said the company is close to filing for bankruptcy.
Embraer, while financially healthy, is under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission for possible violations of the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The act bars payments to foreign officials by U.S.-based firms in consideration for contracts. The SEC declined to comment on the investigation.
Local politics are also at issue. One of Hawker-Beechcraft's main arguments over the contract is that 1,400 American jobs in Wichita are at risk if it does not win the contract. Embraer responds that it has partnered with a Nevada-based company and that the jets would be made in Florida.
The decision on the Afghan jet contract could also affect other American businesses' prospects. Boeing, for example, is bidding to provide fighter aircraft to Brazil's air force.
(Sreeharsha is a McClatchy special correspondent.)
Pakistan openly harboring another Osama bin Laden
Examiner.com By Michael Hughes Afghanistan Headlines Examiner April 6, 2012
Pakistan is protecting one of the world’s most wanted terrorists, just as they did Osama bin Laden, but this time around they aren’t even trying to hide him.
Hafiz Saeed, founder of terrorist outfit Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), is primarily responsible for the 2008 Mumbai attacks that killed 166 people, including six Americans. But he walks freely in Pakistan despite the fact the U.S. placed a $10 million bounty on his head on Tuesday.
Saeed’s bounty equals that of Taliban leader Mullah Omar and is second only to the $25 million being offered for Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Saeed enjoys armed protection, according to the Times of India, because he is reportedly helping Pakistan's government to “de-radicalize” wayward Muslims.
One of his colleagues claims Saeed promotes non-violence and was “one of the first religious leaders to denounce militancy and suicide bombings.”
Saeed denounced the U.S. while flanked by anti-American Islamists at a press conference in Rawalpindi on Wednesday. On Friday Saeed told about 1,000 worshippers in a Lahore mosque to oppose the war in Afghanistan and said: “Jihad will continue until our mission of driving the Americans out of the region is complete.”
Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani called the bounty an “unfortunate” development that would hinder efforts to normalize U.S.-Pakistani relations.
“Such negative messages will increase the trust deficit at a time when the parliament was engaged in framing new rules of engagement with the U.S.,” Gilani said.
The U.S. decision comes at a time when its relationship with Islamabad is at an all-time low. U.S. Congressman Dana Rohrabacher slammed Pakistan for being a terrorist state and recently introduced a House bill which claimed that the people of Pakistan’s Balochistan province have an inherent right to self-determination.
The New Mastermind of Jihad
A recently freed Islamist thinker has long advocated small-scale, independent acts of anti-Western terror
Wall Street Journal By DAVID SAMUELS April 6, 2012
Mohamed Merah, the 23-year-old Islamist gunman who hunted down three Jewish children and a rabbi after murdering three French paratroopers in Toulouse last month, didn't act alone. In his journey from the slums of Toulouse, to the local mosques, to the terrorist training camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan that he described to French police, to filming his murder of the terrified children in order to post video clips on the web, Mr. Merah was following a path marked out years earlier by the coldblooded jihadist theoretician Abu Musab al-Suri.
What is perhaps more disturbing, Mr. al-Suri was recently set free from prison in Damascus, Syria, and his current whereabouts are unknown. Turned over to Syria after his capture by the CIA in late 2005, Mr. al-Suri was released sometime in December (according to intelligence sources and jihadist websites) by the regime of President Bashar al-Assad—a move apparently intended to warn the West of the consequences for opposing his rule.
Barely noticed in the midst of Mr. Assad's own brutal assaults on civilians, Mr. al-Suri's release may well contribute to the emergence of more attackers like Mr. Merah in the West. "His videos are already being reuploaded. His audios, reposted," wrote Jarret Brachman, a former CIA analyst and the former director of West Point's Center for Combating Terrorism, in a blog post after the news of Mr. al-Suri's release first appeared on jihadist sites.
Once called "the most dangerous terrorist you've never heard of" by CNN, Mr. al-Suri, whose real name is Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, served in the days before 9/11 as the facilitator who took Western reporters to meet with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. Photographs of him from those trips show a well-built man with pale white skin, a red beard and blue eyes who—Afghan garb aside—would not look out of place in an Irish pub or a cafe in Brussels.
Mr. al-Suri's plans for a wave of "individual jihad" in the West are contained in "A Call to a Global Islamic Resistance," a 1,600-page book that he published on the Web in 2005, shortly before he was apprehended in Pakistan with a $5 million CIA bounty on his head. The manifesto combines strikingly clearheaded historical analysis with trenchant commentary on what he saw as two decades of strategic and operational failures by jihadists. The destruction of the World Trade Center was a short-term public-relations success for al Qaeda, Mr. al-Suri conceded, but American cruise missiles had made short work of the group's havens in Afghanistan, and Western special forces and intelligence agencies had decimated the ranks of its fighters and crippled the global jihadist movement.
What Mr. al-Suri learned from the Afghan debacle and from al Qaeda's subsequent defeat in Iraq was that jihadists were all but helpless in battle against modern Western armies. In place of old-fashioned hierarchical terror organizations, which had failed, he called for a global struggle in which shadowy motivators and facilitators would prompt jihadists to train and arm themselves in independent, self-generating terror cells that would target Western civilians. His goal: a relentless campaign of exemplary acts of violence under a single ideological banner, culminating in the use of weapons of mass destruction.
Mr. al-Suri has been credited by Western European intelligence agencies and police with drafting the blueprints for the train bombings in Madrid in 2004 and London in 2005, as well as with helping to shape Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's terror campaign in Iraq. Apprehended on Oct. 31, 2005 by the Pakistani intelligence service, he was turned over to the CIA, which sent him back to his native Syria. He was "treated well during his incarceration" of six years, according to an Islamist spokesman in London, Dr. Yasser al-Siri. Some Islamists place him now in Syria; others suggest that he was flown to Iran, where he resided along with other top figures in al Qaeda after the organization's defeat in Afghanistan, before he made his way to Pakistan.
One of the chief exponents of Mr. al-Suri's brand of jihadism was the Yemini-American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who helped to motivate Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan to kill 13 colleagues in November 2009 at the U.S. Army base in Fort Hood, Texas. Mr. Awlaki was also instrumental in producing a slick, downloadable English-language magazine called Inspire, which contained bomb-making recipes along with long excerpts from Mr. al-Suri's writings.
Mr. al-Suri is interesting, said Gilles Kepel, the French political scientist who is widely considered the world's leading authority on Islamist radicals, "because he is part of the second generation of the jihadist movement, the ones who were concerned with the failure of mobilization after 9/11." For Mr. al-Suri, according to Prof. Kepel, the failure of the 9/11 attacks to rouse global Muslim outrage was compounded by the failure of the jihadist terror campaign in Iraq, and by subsequent Western success in reducing what was once a global movement into increasingly isolated archipelagos of local movements and causes.
Mr. al-Suri held Osama bin Laden personally responsible for sticking to outmoded methods of organization and warfare that made al Qaeda easy prey for Western armies and intelligence services. His direct communications with bin Laden, some of which were recovered from a hard drive obtained in Kabul in 2001 by Journal reporter Alan Cullison, were characteristically blunt. "We are in a ship that you are burning on false and mistaken grounds," he wrote, accusing bin Laden of having "caught the disease of screens, flashes, fans and applause."
In a meeting of the leadership of al Qaeda held in northern Iran in 2002, as reported by Brynjar Lia of the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment, Mr. al-Suri issued a strong call for the movement to abandon its hierarchical structure or face annihilation by the West—a call that other senior jihadists ignored. He repeated his message in his magnum opus, warning that "If we insist on using these methods under the current circumstances, it is—in my opinion—like committing suicide." Now that al Qaeda has been crippled and its leadership killed or jailed, Mr. al-Suri appears to have won both the ideological and the practical battle.
Born in Aleppo, Syria, Mr. al-Suri is hardly a friend of the Assad family or the Syrian regime. He joined the Muslim Brotherhood while a student and then rose to become a member of the Brotherhood's military command in 1982 during the ill-fated uprising in the city of Hama, which was brutally crushed by Hafez al-Assad, the current president's father.
Mr. al-Suri fled to France and then to Madrid, where he met and married a Spanish woman named Elena Moreno Cruz, who converted to Islam and accompanied him on his subsequent journeys. Ms. Cruz furnished him with an EU passport, and he has remained, by several accounts, deeply in love with her.
In "Architect of Global Jihad," a scholarly biography of Mr. al-Suri published in 2008, the Norwegian expert Mr. Lia portrays him as the most brilliant and dangerous ideologue of his cohort of radicals, "a dissident, a critic and an intellectual" who put "hard-nosed realism before religious wish-fulfillment and pragmatic long-term strategies before utopianism"—qualities that would be admirable if he were not a master terrorist.
The fact that Mr. al-Suri is now free is likely to make his theories more visible and popular in jihadist circles, even if he doesn't succeed in planning or inspiring another mass casualty attack like the train bombings in Madrid and London. His release also serves as a reminder that Mr. Assad's continuing hold on power in Syria is a threat not only to his own people but also to the civilian populations of the West. —Mr. Samuels is a contributing editor of Harper's Magazine.
Accused Afghan shooter's lawyer wants military counsel fired
Reuters By Peter Henderson and Bill Rigby Reuters April 6, 2012
SAN FRANCISCO - The civilian attorney representing the U.S. soldier accused of murdering 17 Afghan villagers wants to replace the military lawyer assigned to the case after disagreements over how to handle his defense.
"You are fired, sorry, but we have much more experience than you," Seattle-based John Henry Browne, the outspoken lawyer who has been the public face of the defense of Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, said in an email to military lawyer Major Thomas Hurley.
The Army assigns defense counsel such as Hurley to soldiers facing court martial but defendants also have the right to hire additional civilian counsel, in this case Browne. Any change in military counsel would have to be approved by the Army.
Browne's associate Emma Scanlan confirmed the decision, saying she and her boss looked forward to working with another lawyer. "We wish Major Hurley the best in his future endeavors," she said by email. Hurley declined to comment. Browne's team wants to work with a military attorney with death penalty case experience, the email to Hurley from Browne, part of a chain obtained by Reuters, showed. Hurley has more than 60 military cases under his belt, with three involving homicide charges, but none were capital cases.
The decision comes after friction between the civilian and military lawyers over Browne's aggressive media strategy, and each side has accused the other of not being team players.
"Major Hurley is not a team player and has no experience in murder cases, we do," Browne wrote in a separate email to Reuters. "We have gotten 17 not guilty verdicts in murder cases and have gotten life verdicts in all our death penalty cases."
For his part, Hurley said Browne was the one who was not playing his role on the team.
Last week, Browne unleashed a unilateral public attack on the way U.S. prosecutors are handling the investigation into the shooting and accused U.S. authorities of blocking access to potential witnesses.
There was also disagreement over the decision to put Bales' wife on the Today show, where she said her husband showed no signs of post-traumatic stress disorder, potentially damaging Bales' most likely defense.
Karilyn Bales also said her husband was ready to be deployed to Afghanistan, in the interview with Today's Matt Lauer, parts of which were broadcast on March 25 and 26 on NBC.
Bales said she was not sure what post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms might be, but her husband did not have nightmares, trouble concentrating or display any erratic behavior shifts.
Such interviews "limit our options at trial or expose important witnesses to effective cross-examination that they would otherwise not have to face," Hurley said in the email chain obtained by Reuters.
Browne told Reuters Karilyn's ignorance of the signs of PTSD helped the defense, showing the extent to which soldiers try to keep the "hell of war" away from their families.
Bales, 38, has been formally charged with the murders of eight adults and nine children in a pre-dawn shooting rampage in southern Afghanistan on March 11.
The incident further eroded U.S.-Afghan relations already strained by a decade of war. He is awaiting mental evaluation at a military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
Bales, whose family hired Browne's team, has the right to request new military counsel under the court martial system, so any request to replace Hurley will have to be confirmed by the accused soldier and approved by the Army.
(Reporting By Peter Henderson and Bill Rigby; editing by Todd Eastham)
www.afghanistannewscente.com
KABUL, April 7 (Xinhua) -- Ten anti-government militants were killed and two others made captive in Helmand province, 555 km south of Afghan capital Kabul, on Friday, a press release of the provincial administration issued Saturday said.
"Ten insurgents including two commanders were killed and two others arrested in Sifoon area, Marjah district on Friday as the militants attacked poppy eradication campaign there," the press release added.
According to the press release, the commanders killed in the firefight which lasted for a while include Shir Agha and Arpan, who were involved in anti-government activities and backing poppy cultivation in Helmand province.
Another Taliban commander namely Mullah Salam sustained injuries in the conflict, it further said. The press release, did not say if there were any casualties on the security forces side.
Taliban militants fighting Afghan and NATO-led forces have yet to make comment.
Notorious for insurgency and growing poppy, Helmand has been regarded as the hotbed of Taliban militants in the southern region of Afghanistan.
Afghanistan's ragtag militia a mixed blessing of high risk
The Australian By Amanda Hodge April 07, 2012
WITH their toy Kalashnikovs and plastic sandals, the villagers being put through their paces by French army trainers look like an Afghan version of Dad's Army.
Yet the Afghan Local Police will eventually be a 30,000-strong force recruited from the remotest and most troubled regions to protect their villages, areas the army and regular police cannot reach.
NATO and the US cannot talk enthusiastically enough about the ALP, which is said to have put the wind up Taliban insurgents in districts and villages where they have previously had free run.
In the Nijrab forward operating base in Kapisa province, built in the shadow of militant-held mountains and alongside several hostile valleys, The Weekend Australian watched as village men were taught to move in defensive formation and drag mock-wounded comrades to shelter with the sort of rough love that might make a Talib wince.
Several dozen more, from grizzled mujaheddin veterans to boys with more pimples than facial hairs, stood chatting and giggling as they waited their turn.
After a few weeks of training, the men will be sent back to their villages in some of the most dangerous parts of Kapisa province with Kalashnikovs, uniforms and instructions on the areas or installations they must protect.
"This is village sons protecting villages, like a rural neighbourhood watch," Brigadier General Edmund Walker, NATO's joint chief of staff for operations, tells The Weekend Australian.
The top US and NATO commander in Afghanistan, General John Allen, says the ALP is the key to holding ground in Afghanistan.
Much is being made of intercepted Taliban chatter in which militants allegedly claimed: "If you can kill an ALP commander, it's worth 10 coalition soldiers."
The ALP may be popular with the coalition but it is intensely controversial among Afghans. Many elders refuse to support recruitment for fear it will create yet another generation of violent militia and warlords.
Less than two years old, the force already has a mixed record. Just last week, an ALP recruit drugged nine of his colleagues in a police outpost in the southeastern border province of Paktika before spraying them with bullets. Days earlier in the same province, an ALP officer shot and killed a coalition soldier. Early last month, a local policeman allowed Taliban to enter his guard post in Oruzgan, the southern province where most of Australia's 1550 troops are stationed, and kill nine of his fellow police officers.
Last year, Human Rights Watch said some members of the ALP were getting away with abuses including rape and murder.
In Kapisa, where 11 French soldiers have been killed since last July, the French are hoping the ALP will bring stability to areas such as Tagab and Uzbeen.
A French ALP training commander at Nijrab explains: "Maliks or mullahs are consulted so we know we're recruiting the right people, coming from the right area to defend the right places. So far it's OK."
Yet in parts of Kapisa and neighbouring Surobi, village elders, the police chief, even the district governor, have said no to the force. "My village has given 100 to 200 for the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police and they have got a lot of training. But if you create ALP, they are nothing. They don't know anything about training," says an elder from Kapisa's Uzbeen Valley, Haji Asallah,.
"An additional military organisation is put in place when you don't have standard security organisations. But in our villages we have our sons in the ANA and ANP, so what is the need for an additional military force?"
Surobi police chief Colonel Ahmadullah says he convened a meeting of 84 elders from across the district last year following a request from the Ministry of Interior that he organise 300 ALP recruits.
"I explained that we could provide job opportunities for 300 young men but they said no. They have seen and heard the results of ALP recruitment in Tagab where there was not a good result because local police used their posts to get personal revenge on villagers," he says.
Nijrab police chief Aktar Mohammad says he, too, has been allocated 300 ALP and 90 Afghan Nation Police but would rather an extra 100 ANP. "If an area has policemen from another area, it's more effective - they will learn more and there will be less corruption in a district," he says, referring to the ANP system of posting officers outside their areas.
Even Afghan National Army commander General Sher Mohammad Karimi admits to the risks in recruiting and arming a 30,000-strong paramilitary force.
"The ALP will be very good if - and that's a big if - they're properly managed, properly trained, if they have proper leadership and are properly contained and selected though a true, real village or district council," he says.
Afghan Analysts Network spokesman Thomas Ruttig says he has heard the same concerns in provinces across the country.
"Most ordinary Afghans see the ALP as just the latest incarnation of a long line of different quasi-militia projects," Ruttig says, pointing to the violent militia formed and backed during the Soviet occupation and whose warring for power in the 1990s heralded the Taliban regime.
In ethnically and tribally riven Afghanistan, he says the coalition risks arming and legitimising one local group over another in centuries-old conflicts, which can only create more violence.
General tips handover to Afghan forces to start soon
The Canberra Times By Dylan Welch April 7, 2012
al Minhad Air Base, UAE - THE major-general in charge of Australia's war in Afghanistan has given the strongest indication yet that Australian forces will begin to hand over security control to the Afghan army in Oruzgan later this month, and says the upcoming year will be both ''critical'' and ''challenging''.
Another Australian general, who plans all operations for the multinational coalition fighting the Taliban, says there is ''no doubt'' parts of Oruzgan will begin to be handed over to Afghan-led security this month.
Major-General Stuart Smith took over command of Australia's forces in the Middle East - Defence includes Afghanistan in the Middle East - at the beginning of this year and in his first interview in his new job, he told The Saturday Age that ''this is a critical year''.
'This is a year that if the Afghan government asks us to, we will start the transition of handing over security responsibilities in Oruzgan to the Afghan security forces,'' he said at his headquarters at al Minhad Air Base outside of Dubai.
''That is going to be very challenging, we're going to have to be very pati
ent, we're going to need to talk consistently with the Afghan leadership in Oruzgan.''
The Afghan government of Hamid Karzai will later this month announce the third tranche of provinces to be handed over to Afghan control, and it is widely expected that Oruzgan will be included.
Such a transition would see the Australian troops mentoring the Afghan soldiers and security in the province begin to be reduced, in a process that will take from 12 to 18 months.
That could mean Australian frontline troops - aside from the SAS and commandos who will continue to pursue Taliban leaders and those considered ''terrorists'' - would finish their role in Afghanistan as early as May next year.
General Smith's view is supported by the Australian major-general running operations for the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), Stephen Day, who also spoke to The Saturday Age.
''There's no doubt in my mind that some of Oruzgan will be definitely in tranche three, the question is how much.''
General Day said much of tranche three would be decided on a district-by-district basis.
Oruzgan has six districts, and if the decision is based solely on security, it is likely the safer areas of the Chora Valley, Deh Rawud and Tarin Kowt will be the first to transition.
General Day also discussed what role international special operations forces will play in Afghanistan post 2014, the self-imposed deadline for ISAF combat operations.
Both Prime Minister Julia Gillard and US President Barack Obama have indicated that their elite military units will continue to play a role in the country after 2014.
Brazil-U.S. dispute over jets for Afghanistan likely topic of presidential talks
McClatchy Newspapers By Vinod Sreeharsha Fri, Apr. 06, 2012
SAO PAULO - When Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff meets with President Barack Obama on Monday at the White House, the two leaders are likely to publicly use phrases like "deepening friendship" and "partnership" and highlight collaborations in science and education.
They are less likely to call attention to a recent source of tension between the two countries — a dispute involving American military jet procurement.
The conflict began in December when Brazilian's top aviation company and one of the world's largest plane manufacturers, Embraer, partnered with Sierra Nevada Corp. of Sparks, Nev., to win a U.S. Air Force contract for $355 million to make 20 fighter aircraft for Afghanistan's military.
The losing bidder, Hawker-Beechcraft Defense Corp., based in Wichita, Kan., complained of unfair treatment and sued. After the Department of Justice found documentation errors, the Air Force suspended the contract and is now conducting an internal investigation.
The about-face created consternation in Brazil. The country's foreign ministry expressed surprise and cautioned that "this development is not considered conducive to strengthening relations between the two countries on defense affairs."
Embraer is not a state company. But similar to U.S. officials lobbying foreign governments on behalf of American companies, Brazilian leaders promote their own country's interests.
Brazil's minister of trade and development, Fernando Pimentel, recently told reporters that he expects President Rousseff to raise the issue with Obama.
The case is important to Brazil. At a time when the country's economy remains highly dependent on the export of commodities such as soy beans and orange juice, and its manufacturing sector is losing out to Chinese imports and an overvalued currency, Embraer is a great source of pride here, a reminder of Brazil's industrial and technical capabilities.
The company, which has had a U.S. headquarters in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., since 1979, has tried previously to crack the U.S. defense sector. It has won two prior contracts and has leased planes to the U.S. Navy, though Congress later killed the program.
The then congressman from Wichita, Republican Todd Tiahrt, played a role in killing that contract in 2010, arguing, as his office did in a news release, that "the Navy's planned Brazilian lease project ... would have cost taxpayers more than the purchase price of an American-made version." Tiahrt left office last year after he ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate.
Winning the bid to provide planes to the Afghan air force was seen finally as a success for Embraer overcoming American favoritism.
Brazilian officials say the reversal of the contract smacks of politics.
One question that has come up is whether the Air Force changed its bidding process to favor Hawker-Beechcraft's AT-6 over Embraer's A-29 SuperTucano.
According to an article in the magazine Inside the Air Force, the Air Force changed its requirements for the aircraft, calling for it to strafe an enemy target with its .50-caliber machine guns while carrying two 500-pound bombs. The previous requirement called for releasing one of the bombs before strafing.
"The change is critical because performing a strafing mission with two large bombs — which, including targeting equipment, weigh more than 1,200 pounds — puts a great amount of stress on a small airframe," the artcile noted. "Such a change would require an aircraft to have additional power to pull up while carrying both bombs during a strafing run."
Hawker-Beechcraft denies that it influenced the change.
The Wichita company has complaints of its own. For one, it argues that the entire review process lacked transparency and filed a complaint with the Government Accountability Office last year claiming it was not properly notified that it had lost the competition.
The GAO ruled against the company in December and said Hawker-Beechcraft had been excluded because "multiple deficiencies and significant weaknesses found in HBDC's proposal make it technically unacceptable and results in unacceptable mission capability risk."
Another question has arisen of Hawker-Beechcraft's current financial woes. News reports last week said the company is close to filing for bankruptcy.
Embraer, while financially healthy, is under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission for possible violations of the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The act bars payments to foreign officials by U.S.-based firms in consideration for contracts. The SEC declined to comment on the investigation.
Local politics are also at issue. One of Hawker-Beechcraft's main arguments over the contract is that 1,400 American jobs in Wichita are at risk if it does not win the contract. Embraer responds that it has partnered with a Nevada-based company and that the jets would be made in Florida.
The decision on the Afghan jet contract could also affect other American businesses' prospects. Boeing, for example, is bidding to provide fighter aircraft to Brazil's air force.
(Sreeharsha is a McClatchy special correspondent.)
Pakistan openly harboring another Osama bin Laden
Examiner.com By Michael Hughes Afghanistan Headlines Examiner April 6, 2012
Pakistan is protecting one of the world’s most wanted terrorists, just as they did Osama bin Laden, but this time around they aren’t even trying to hide him.
Hafiz Saeed, founder of terrorist outfit Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), is primarily responsible for the 2008 Mumbai attacks that killed 166 people, including six Americans. But he walks freely in Pakistan despite the fact the U.S. placed a $10 million bounty on his head on Tuesday.
Saeed’s bounty equals that of Taliban leader Mullah Omar and is second only to the $25 million being offered for Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Saeed enjoys armed protection, according to the Times of India, because he is reportedly helping Pakistan's government to “de-radicalize” wayward Muslims.
One of his colleagues claims Saeed promotes non-violence and was “one of the first religious leaders to denounce militancy and suicide bombings.”
Saeed denounced the U.S. while flanked by anti-American Islamists at a press conference in Rawalpindi on Wednesday. On Friday Saeed told about 1,000 worshippers in a Lahore mosque to oppose the war in Afghanistan and said: “Jihad will continue until our mission of driving the Americans out of the region is complete.”
Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani called the bounty an “unfortunate” development that would hinder efforts to normalize U.S.-Pakistani relations.
“Such negative messages will increase the trust deficit at a time when the parliament was engaged in framing new rules of engagement with the U.S.,” Gilani said.
The U.S. decision comes at a time when its relationship with Islamabad is at an all-time low. U.S. Congressman Dana Rohrabacher slammed Pakistan for being a terrorist state and recently introduced a House bill which claimed that the people of Pakistan’s Balochistan province have an inherent right to self-determination.
The New Mastermind of Jihad
A recently freed Islamist thinker has long advocated small-scale, independent acts of anti-Western terror
Wall Street Journal By DAVID SAMUELS April 6, 2012
Mohamed Merah, the 23-year-old Islamist gunman who hunted down three Jewish children and a rabbi after murdering three French paratroopers in Toulouse last month, didn't act alone. In his journey from the slums of Toulouse, to the local mosques, to the terrorist training camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan that he described to French police, to filming his murder of the terrified children in order to post video clips on the web, Mr. Merah was following a path marked out years earlier by the coldblooded jihadist theoretician Abu Musab al-Suri.
What is perhaps more disturbing, Mr. al-Suri was recently set free from prison in Damascus, Syria, and his current whereabouts are unknown. Turned over to Syria after his capture by the CIA in late 2005, Mr. al-Suri was released sometime in December (according to intelligence sources and jihadist websites) by the regime of President Bashar al-Assad—a move apparently intended to warn the West of the consequences for opposing his rule.
Barely noticed in the midst of Mr. Assad's own brutal assaults on civilians, Mr. al-Suri's release may well contribute to the emergence of more attackers like Mr. Merah in the West. "His videos are already being reuploaded. His audios, reposted," wrote Jarret Brachman, a former CIA analyst and the former director of West Point's Center for Combating Terrorism, in a blog post after the news of Mr. al-Suri's release first appeared on jihadist sites.
Once called "the most dangerous terrorist you've never heard of" by CNN, Mr. al-Suri, whose real name is Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, served in the days before 9/11 as the facilitator who took Western reporters to meet with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. Photographs of him from those trips show a well-built man with pale white skin, a red beard and blue eyes who—Afghan garb aside—would not look out of place in an Irish pub or a cafe in Brussels.
Mr. al-Suri's plans for a wave of "individual jihad" in the West are contained in "A Call to a Global Islamic Resistance," a 1,600-page book that he published on the Web in 2005, shortly before he was apprehended in Pakistan with a $5 million CIA bounty on his head. The manifesto combines strikingly clearheaded historical analysis with trenchant commentary on what he saw as two decades of strategic and operational failures by jihadists. The destruction of the World Trade Center was a short-term public-relations success for al Qaeda, Mr. al-Suri conceded, but American cruise missiles had made short work of the group's havens in Afghanistan, and Western special forces and intelligence agencies had decimated the ranks of its fighters and crippled the global jihadist movement.
What Mr. al-Suri learned from the Afghan debacle and from al Qaeda's subsequent defeat in Iraq was that jihadists were all but helpless in battle against modern Western armies. In place of old-fashioned hierarchical terror organizations, which had failed, he called for a global struggle in which shadowy motivators and facilitators would prompt jihadists to train and arm themselves in independent, self-generating terror cells that would target Western civilians. His goal: a relentless campaign of exemplary acts of violence under a single ideological banner, culminating in the use of weapons of mass destruction.
Mr. al-Suri has been credited by Western European intelligence agencies and police with drafting the blueprints for the train bombings in Madrid in 2004 and London in 2005, as well as with helping to shape Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's terror campaign in Iraq. Apprehended on Oct. 31, 2005 by the Pakistani intelligence service, he was turned over to the CIA, which sent him back to his native Syria. He was "treated well during his incarceration" of six years, according to an Islamist spokesman in London, Dr. Yasser al-Siri. Some Islamists place him now in Syria; others suggest that he was flown to Iran, where he resided along with other top figures in al Qaeda after the organization's defeat in Afghanistan, before he made his way to Pakistan.
One of the chief exponents of Mr. al-Suri's brand of jihadism was the Yemini-American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who helped to motivate Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan to kill 13 colleagues in November 2009 at the U.S. Army base in Fort Hood, Texas. Mr. Awlaki was also instrumental in producing a slick, downloadable English-language magazine called Inspire, which contained bomb-making recipes along with long excerpts from Mr. al-Suri's writings.
Mr. al-Suri is interesting, said Gilles Kepel, the French political scientist who is widely considered the world's leading authority on Islamist radicals, "because he is part of the second generation of the jihadist movement, the ones who were concerned with the failure of mobilization after 9/11." For Mr. al-Suri, according to Prof. Kepel, the failure of the 9/11 attacks to rouse global Muslim outrage was compounded by the failure of the jihadist terror campaign in Iraq, and by subsequent Western success in reducing what was once a global movement into increasingly isolated archipelagos of local movements and causes.
Mr. al-Suri held Osama bin Laden personally responsible for sticking to outmoded methods of organization and warfare that made al Qaeda easy prey for Western armies and intelligence services. His direct communications with bin Laden, some of which were recovered from a hard drive obtained in Kabul in 2001 by Journal reporter Alan Cullison, were characteristically blunt. "We are in a ship that you are burning on false and mistaken grounds," he wrote, accusing bin Laden of having "caught the disease of screens, flashes, fans and applause."
In a meeting of the leadership of al Qaeda held in northern Iran in 2002, as reported by Brynjar Lia of the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment, Mr. al-Suri issued a strong call for the movement to abandon its hierarchical structure or face annihilation by the West—a call that other senior jihadists ignored. He repeated his message in his magnum opus, warning that "If we insist on using these methods under the current circumstances, it is—in my opinion—like committing suicide." Now that al Qaeda has been crippled and its leadership killed or jailed, Mr. al-Suri appears to have won both the ideological and the practical battle.
Born in Aleppo, Syria, Mr. al-Suri is hardly a friend of the Assad family or the Syrian regime. He joined the Muslim Brotherhood while a student and then rose to become a member of the Brotherhood's military command in 1982 during the ill-fated uprising in the city of Hama, which was brutally crushed by Hafez al-Assad, the current president's father.
Mr. al-Suri fled to France and then to Madrid, where he met and married a Spanish woman named Elena Moreno Cruz, who converted to Islam and accompanied him on his subsequent journeys. Ms. Cruz furnished him with an EU passport, and he has remained, by several accounts, deeply in love with her.
In "Architect of Global Jihad," a scholarly biography of Mr. al-Suri published in 2008, the Norwegian expert Mr. Lia portrays him as the most brilliant and dangerous ideologue of his cohort of radicals, "a dissident, a critic and an intellectual" who put "hard-nosed realism before religious wish-fulfillment and pragmatic long-term strategies before utopianism"—qualities that would be admirable if he were not a master terrorist.
The fact that Mr. al-Suri is now free is likely to make his theories more visible and popular in jihadist circles, even if he doesn't succeed in planning or inspiring another mass casualty attack like the train bombings in Madrid and London. His release also serves as a reminder that Mr. Assad's continuing hold on power in Syria is a threat not only to his own people but also to the civilian populations of the West. —Mr. Samuels is a contributing editor of Harper's Magazine.
Accused Afghan shooter's lawyer wants military counsel fired
Reuters By Peter Henderson and Bill Rigby Reuters April 6, 2012
SAN FRANCISCO - The civilian attorney representing the U.S. soldier accused of murdering 17 Afghan villagers wants to replace the military lawyer assigned to the case after disagreements over how to handle his defense.
"You are fired, sorry, but we have much more experience than you," Seattle-based John Henry Browne, the outspoken lawyer who has been the public face of the defense of Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, said in an email to military lawyer Major Thomas Hurley.
The Army assigns defense counsel such as Hurley to soldiers facing court martial but defendants also have the right to hire additional civilian counsel, in this case Browne. Any change in military counsel would have to be approved by the Army.
Browne's associate Emma Scanlan confirmed the decision, saying she and her boss looked forward to working with another lawyer. "We wish Major Hurley the best in his future endeavors," she said by email. Hurley declined to comment. Browne's team wants to work with a military attorney with death penalty case experience, the email to Hurley from Browne, part of a chain obtained by Reuters, showed. Hurley has more than 60 military cases under his belt, with three involving homicide charges, but none were capital cases.
The decision comes after friction between the civilian and military lawyers over Browne's aggressive media strategy, and each side has accused the other of not being team players.
"Major Hurley is not a team player and has no experience in murder cases, we do," Browne wrote in a separate email to Reuters. "We have gotten 17 not guilty verdicts in murder cases and have gotten life verdicts in all our death penalty cases."
For his part, Hurley said Browne was the one who was not playing his role on the team.
Last week, Browne unleashed a unilateral public attack on the way U.S. prosecutors are handling the investigation into the shooting and accused U.S. authorities of blocking access to potential witnesses.
There was also disagreement over the decision to put Bales' wife on the Today show, where she said her husband showed no signs of post-traumatic stress disorder, potentially damaging Bales' most likely defense.
Karilyn Bales also said her husband was ready to be deployed to Afghanistan, in the interview with Today's Matt Lauer, parts of which were broadcast on March 25 and 26 on NBC.
Bales said she was not sure what post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms might be, but her husband did not have nightmares, trouble concentrating or display any erratic behavior shifts.
Such interviews "limit our options at trial or expose important witnesses to effective cross-examination that they would otherwise not have to face," Hurley said in the email chain obtained by Reuters.
Browne told Reuters Karilyn's ignorance of the signs of PTSD helped the defense, showing the extent to which soldiers try to keep the "hell of war" away from their families.
Bales, 38, has been formally charged with the murders of eight adults and nine children in a pre-dawn shooting rampage in southern Afghanistan on March 11.
The incident further eroded U.S.-Afghan relations already strained by a decade of war. He is awaiting mental evaluation at a military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
Bales, whose family hired Browne's team, has the right to request new military counsel under the court martial system, so any request to replace Hurley will have to be confirmed by the accused soldier and approved by the Army.
(Reporting By Peter Henderson and Bill Rigby; editing by Todd Eastham)
www.afghanistannewscente.com