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Afghan rockets damage US general's plane
By KAY JOHNSON | Associated Press
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — An insurgent rocket attack damaged the plane of the top U.S. general as it sat parked at a coalition base in Afghanistan on Tuesday, dealing another blow to the image of progress in building a stable country as foreign forces work to wind down the 10-year-old war.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the two rockets that landed near the C-17 transport plane that U.S. Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, flew into Bagram Air Field north of Kabul on a day earlier. The claim was an attempt by the insurgents to score more propaganda points in what has been a deadly few weeks for the international coalition in Afghanistan.
Jamie Graybeal, a spokesman for the U.S. military and the international coalition, said Dempsey was in his staff quarters when the two rockets landed and was unhurt in the attack. But the damage to the plane forced Dempsey to use another aircraft for his flight from Bagram to Iraq on Tuesday.
Two aircraft maintenance workers were lightly wounded by shrapnel, and a nearby helicopter was damaged, Graybeal said.
Dempsey was in Afghanistan for talks with military leaders about the war as well as a disturbing rash of killings of U.S. military trainers by their Afghan partners or militants dressed in Afghan uniform.
Such turncoat attacks — which the Taliban also said they are behind — killed 10 Americans in the last two weeks alone, threatening morale and raising questions about the strategy to train Afghan security forces so they can fight the insurgency after foreign troops end their combat role in 2014.
Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid issued a statement Tuesday claiming Dempsey's aircraft was targeted by insurgents "using exact information" about its whereabouts.
Graybeal, however, rejected the claim, saying insurgent rocket and mortar attacks are "not infrequent" at Bagram and that such fire most often comes from so far away that it's virtually impossible to hit specific targets.
Pentagon spokeswoman Maj. Cathy Wilkinson also denied the strike was aimed specifically at Dempsey's plane. "Indirect fire at Bagram is not unusual, so we don't believe his aircraft was targeted."
Bagram, a sprawling complex that covers about 21 square kilometers (8 square miles) and houses tens of thousands of troops, is about an hour's drive north of Kabul, and usually serves as the first point of entrance for U.S. officials visiting the country. It is the hub for military operations in the east of the country and the largest U.S. base in Afghanistan.
During his visit, Dempsey met with U.S. Afghan commander Gen. John Allen in Kabul and also with a number of senior Afghan and coalition leaders.
Among the topics was the escalating number of "insider attacks" in which Afghan security forces or militants dressed in Afghan uniform turn their guns on coalition military trainers. Once an anomaly, the number of such attacks has been climbing in recent months. There have been 32 of them so far this year, up from 21 for all of 2011, according to NATO.
Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammad Omar last week said the killings were the result of an insurgent campaign of infiltration, though NATO has said it's too early to tell if the attacks were related to the insurgency or caused by personal disputes turned deadly.
The Taliban also claimed to have shot down a U.S. military helicopter that crashed during a firefight with insurgents in a remote area of southern Afghanistan on Thursday, killing seven Americans and four Afghans on board.
U.S. officials, however, said initial reports were that enemy fire was not involved in the crash.
Tuesday's insurgent attack was the second this year to come uncomfortably close to a high-level U.S. official visiting Afghanistan.
In March, an attacker tried to ram a car into a delegation waiting to greet U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta at Bastion Air Field in southern Afghanistan as his C-17 taxied toward the landing ramp. U.S. defense officials said Panetta was never in any danger, but if the attacker had waited just a few more minutes, Panetta's plane would have been at the ramp.
Another attack, this time at the entrance of Bagram, struck in 2007 as then-Vice President **** Cheney visited Afghanistan. The suicide attacker did not penetrate the gates of the base but at least 23 people were killed in the blast.
Obama, Romney spar on Afghanistan
WASHINGTON, Aug. 20 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President Barack Obama and his Republican challenger Mitt Romney on Monday sparred on the war in Afghanistan, with Obama vowing to protect U.S. troops, while Romney accusing Obama of not been forthright with voters on the situation there.
In an unscheduled press conference at the White House, Obama said he has talked with top U.S. military leaders on the recent spate of insider attacks on U.S. military personnel in Afghanistan, and will talk with Afghan President Hamid Karzai on the subject as well.
Obama, who has not spoken with the White House press corps for two months, interrupted Press Secretary Jay Carney's regular news briefing to take questions. He said the U.S. side is working on the problem of insider attacks, and the military needs to strengthen their vetting process of Afghan recruits.
Insider attacks, sometimes referred to as "green on blue" attacks, have been on the rise recently. Attackers in Afghan security forces uniforms have killed dozens international troops in 32 such attacks so far this year, posing challenge to the security transition, which would see NATO forces hand over security responsibilities to Afghan forces by the end of 2014.
Earlier in the day, Romney took to the stage in New Hampshire to answer voters' questions in a town hall meeting. He scolded Obama for not being forthcoming enough with voters and veterans about the unpopular war, and said the president needs to explain what is happening in Afghanistan.
"I expect the president of the United States to address the nation on a regular basis," said Romney.
Afghans to spy on own troops to stop ‘insider’ attacks
Washington Post By Kevin Sieff Tuesday, August 21, 2012
KABUL - Afghan officials say they have launched an expanded effort to spy on their own police and army recruits, an acknowledgment that previous measures designed to reduce insurgent infiltration in the country’s security services have failed.
The steps come amid a spate of “insider” attacks that have shaken the U.S.-Afghan military partnership during a stage of the war that hinges on close partnership between the two forces.
Nine U.S. troops have been killed by their Afghan counterparts in the past 12 days. They are among 40 coalition service members who have died in insider attacks this year. President Obama, in his most extensive comments to date on the issue, said Monday that his administration is “deeply concerned about this, from top to bottom.”
The Afghan measures include the deployment of dozens of undercover intelligence officers to Afghan security units nationwide, increased surveillance of phone calls between Afghan troops and their families, and a ban on cellphone use among new recruits to give them fewer opportunities to contact members of the insurgency, Afghan officials say.
The initiatives appear aimed at addressing U.S. criticism that the Afghan security forces are not doing enough to ferret out insurgents within their ranks. The top U.S. military official, Gen. Martin Dempsey, was in Kabul on Monday for consultations on the matter, and Obama said he would soon be “reaching out” to Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
“Soldiers must feel that they are under the full surveillance of their leadership at all levels,” the Afghan army chief of staff, Gen. Sher Mohammad Karimi, said in an interview after meeting with Dempsey and other U.S. commanders. “Initially, it will have a negative impact on morale, but we have to do something. We have to look seriously at every individual.”
Coalition policy changes
NATO has taken steps in recent days to try to limit the attacks, which Taliban leader Mohammad Omar has described as an integral part of his group’s strategy.
Across Afghanistan, service members have been asked to keep their weapons loaded at all times, according to coalition officials. NATO has also activated an existing program, dubbed “Guardian Angels,” in which coalition troops whose only job is to watch their fellow troops attend meetings with Afghan officials prepared to quell an insider attack if one should occur.
Obama said U.S. forces are “seeing some success when it comes to better counterintelligence, making sure that the vetting process for Afghan troops is stronger.” But, he added, “obviously, we’re going to have to do more, because there has been an uptick over the last 12 months on this.”
Insider attacks are a relatively new aspect of the war, having emerged as a major problem for the United States and its allies only in the past several years. There have been more deaths from insider attacks in 2012 than in any other year of the war, and they have accounted for 13 percent of all NATO fatalities this year.
Tight choreography
As U.S. troops begin to withdraw, the attacks threaten to upend plans for a transition from foreign to Afghan control of security that will require tight choreography between the two forces.
But the new Afghan measures carry their own peril, with the potential to further alienate rank-and-file troops and would-be recruits at a time when the government is struggling to build loyalty.
Afghan officials say that 176 intelligence officers were assigned to army battalions last week and that most will remain undercover. They join hundreds of others who are tasked with spotting wayward troops before they carry out “green-on-blue” attacks.
Karimi said Afghanistan would also reinforce a vetting procedure that had never been properly employed, allowing cursory or no background checks for new recruits.
A number of the attacks this year were carried out by individuals who faced little scrutiny in getting access to joint U.S. and Afghan bases. This month, an unvetted 15-year-old “tea boy” who had been living on a police base in Helmand province killed three U.S. Marines while they exercised.
“We had a policy for recruiting from Day One, but it hasn’t been implemented. We needed too many people,” Karimi said. “When you need 12,000 people each month — it’s a number so high that we couldn’t implement the policy,”
Now that the security forces are approaching their targeted recruitment levels, officials said, they can concentrate on ensuring that the right soldiers and police have entered the ranks. That means paying close attention to what recruits do after enlisting.
“Whenever a new recruit goes on leave, we have reconnaissance following that person to make sure he doesn’t pose a threat,” said Maj. Gen. Abdul Hamid, the top Afghan army official in Kandahar.
The Afghan efforts represent an expansion of earlier attempts to curb insider killings. Earlier this year, for instance, soldiers were forced to move their families back from Pakistan or quit their jobs. Many infiltrators are thought to have received training from insurgent groups in Pakistan.
Karimi on Monday briefed Dempsey, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. John R. Allen, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, on Afghanistan’s plans for the expanded counterintelligence measures.
Dempsey has long complained about the flawed Afghan vetting process, telling reporters in March that the problem of insider attacks would be solved only “when they have the same vetting as we do.”
He sounded an encouraging note after his meeting Monday with Karimi. “In the past, it’s been us pushing on them to make sure they do more,” Dempsey said. “This time, without prompting, when I met General Karimi, he started with a conversation about insider attacks.”
Cultural clashes
Not all attacks have been the result of insurgent infiltration, and NATO officials have said that most stem from personal disputes. Afghan military officials say they have asked their U.S. and other NATO counterparts to better educate their troops in local traditions and culture to help reduce the potential for conflict.
“If a U.S. soldier says something against our tradition, it makes Afghan soldiers upset and could even cause an attack,” said Feda Wakil, the chief of staff for recruitment at the Afghan National Police. “We always tell NATO that the troops are not arriving with enough knowledge. They are learning from Afghans overseas who do not truly understand our culture.”
Afghan officials say they have also asked the Americans for help in tightening standards within the Afghan forces. The army says it wants polygraph machines and interceptors to monitor phone calls. Police officials have asked for more biometric equipment, which they say will help them check the criminal records of potential recruits.
“If we can’t reduce the number of these attacks to zero, we should at least minimize the number,” Karimi said.
Javed Hamdard and Sayed Salahuddin contributed to this report.
In Toll of 2,000, New Portrait of Afghan War
By JAMES DAO and ANDREW W. LEHREN The New York Times August 21, 2012
His war was almost over. Or so Marina Buckley thought when her son Lance Cpl. Gregory T. Buckley Jr. told her that he would be returning from southern Afghanistan to his Marine Corps base in Hawaii in late August, three months early.
Instead, Lance Corporal Buckley became the 1,990th American service member to die in the war when, on Aug. 10, he and two other Marines were shot inside their base in Helmand Province by a man who appears to have been a member of the Afghan forces they were training.
A week later, with the death of Specialist James A. Justice of the Army at a military hospital in Germany, the United States military reached 2,000 dead in the nearly 11-year-old conflict, based on an analysis by The New York Times of Department of Defense records. The calculation by The Times includes deaths not only in Afghanistan but also in Pakistan and other nations where American forces are directly involved in aiding the war.
Nearly nine years passed before American forces reached their first 1,000 dead in the war. The second 1,000 came just 27 months later, a testament to the intensity of fighting prompted by President Obama’s decision to send 33,000 additional troops to Afghanistan in 2010, a policy known as the surge.
In more ways than his family might have imagined, Lance Corporal Buckley, who had just turned 21 when he died, typified the troops in that second wave of 1,000. According to the Times analysis, three out of four were white, 9 out of 10 were enlisted service members, and one out of two died in either Kandahar Province or Helmand Province in Taliban-dominated southern Afghanistan. Their average age was 26.
The dead were also disproportionately Marines like Lance Corporal Buckley. Though the Army over all has suffered more dead in the war, the Marine Corps, with fewer troops, has had a higher casualty rate: At the height of fighting in late 2010, 2 out of every 1,000 Marines in Afghanistan were dying, twice the rate of the Army. Marine units accounted for three of the five units hardest hit during the surge.
Suffering the most casualties was the Third Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment out of Camp Pendleton, Calif. Twenty-five of its Marines died and more than 180 were wounded, many with multiple amputations, during a bloody seven-month deployment in Helmand that began in fall 2010.
The analysis also shows that Army casualties during the surge fell heaviest on two bases with frequently deployed units: Fort Campbell in Kentucky, home to the 101st Airborne Division, which recorded the most Army deaths in the surge, and Fort Drum in New York, home to the 10th Mountain Division.
The summer remained the peak season for fighting, with the single highest period for American deaths being July, August and September 2010, when at least 143 troops died. And as has been the case since at least 2008, improvised explosive devices, known as I.E.D.’s, remained a leading cause of death and injury, along with small-arms fire, the analysis showed.
But this year, a new threat emerged: attacks by Afghans dressed in the uniforms of Afghan security forces. In just the past two weeks, at least 9 Americans have been killed in such insider attacks, and for the year to date, at least 39 non-Afghan troops, most of them American, have been killed by men dressed as members of the Afghan security forces, the most since the war began.
Those insider attacks have increased concerns about NATO’s ability to turn security operations over to Afghan forces by 2014, the deadline set by President Obama for withdrawing the remaining American forces. For families, the deaths have raised hard questions about whether the Pentagon is doing enough to protect its troops from their own allies.
Though Afghanistan is now considered the nation’s longest war, at 128 months and counting, the number of dead is fewer than half the total in the Iraq war, where more than 4,480 died in eight years. More active-duty and reserve soldiers killed themselves last year, 278, than died in combat in Afghanistan, 247.
None of that brings solace to the families of the dead. For the Buckleys, of Oceanside, N.Y., their son’s death so near the end of his tour, so late in the long war and possibly at the hand of a purported ally, was uniquely anguishing.
As Mrs. Buckley recounted things her son loved — basketball, girls, movies, the beach — bitterness choked her words.
“Our forces shouldn’t be there,” she said. “It should be over. It’s done. No more.”
A Unit Hit Hard
The Third Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment out of Camp Pendleton, Calif., was emblematic of the surge. Sent into Sangin, Afghanistan’s opium-producing heartland, in 2010, the battalion faced a formidable enemy expert in the use of I.E.D.’s., losing 25 Marines in a seven-month tour, the second most of any American unit in the entire war, a Times analysis shows.
Mark Moyar, an independent national security analyst who has studied the battalion’s operations, said that the British who had preceded the Marines in Sangin, a district in Helmand, focused on economic development and political outreach to undermine the insurgency. But the Taliban also operated with near impunity in parts of the district, he said.
The battalion took a different approach, pushing into Taliban-dominated villages. Fighting was intense, with civilians often getting caught in the middle, and casualties piled up fast.
On Oct. 8, barely two weeks after the battalion landed, it lost its first Marine, Lance Cpl. John T. Sparks. Five days later, four Marines of the battalion died when their armored truck was destroyed by a powerful bomb. Three more died the next day when they stepped on a mine during a foot patrol.
The rapid-fire deaths prompted calls in Washington for the battalion to pull back. But senior Marine commanders — including the battalion commander, Lt. Col. Jason Morris — prevailed on Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates to leave them in place.
“Everyone was shocked, including me, that we lost that many guys that quickly,” Colonel Morris said. “But honestly, me and most of my Marines would have rather come home in body bags than let the Taliban claim a victory.”
Deanna Giles, the mother of a squad leader from the battalion, remembers those days all too well. Amid the blur of casualty reports, Ms. Giles began watching for strange cars in her neighborhood in Kankakee, Ill., fearing the next one would bear horrible news.
Anxiously seeking information or solace, she took to Internet chat rooms, forming a powerful digital bond with other families from the battalion, whom she never met in person.
“You began to care about people in a way you could not have before the Internet age,” Ms. Giles said.
Her son, Sgt. Caleb Giles, came home alive. Patty Schumacher’s son, Lance Cpl. Victor A. Dew, did not.
Ms. Schumacher had begged her son to defer enlisting until the war ended. When he refused, she urged him to take a job with a presidential security detail. He again said no, determined to be an infantryman and to go to war.
“Boy, did my heart sink,” she recalled. “But I was also proud of him for following his true desires. As a parent you just suck it up, hold your heart and take a deep breath and hope all goes well.”
In late August 2010, Lance Corporal Dew proposed to his girlfriend, then was deployed a month later. Within weeks of arriving in Helmand, he died with three other Marines in a powerful I.E.D. blast. At age 20, he became the 1,259th American to die in the war.
Inside his coffin, his fiancée placed a photograph of herself, wearing her wedding gown.
Ms. Schumacher maintains a Facebook page to keep his memory fresh, and occasionally toasts him at dinner. She still cries, too, though the tears are hard to predict, prompted by stray images and fleeting sounds that remind her of him: a smile, a song, a joke.
“When do you get better? You don’t ever get better,” she said. “You just get better in your grieving. There will always be something that triggers it. And then you are back on that emotional roller coaster.”
Attacks From Afghans
Staff Sgt. Scott E. Dickinson was coming home early. He was originally scheduled to remain in Helmand until November 2012, but the Pentagon was pulling Marines out of Afghanistan quickly, looking to get the surge forces out of the country by fall and shrink the American footprint to about 70,000 troops. He would be home in Hawaii within a week or two, he told his father early this month.
Not long after that conversation, his father, John Dickinson, saw an article about a soldier who had died just a week before he was to come home. “I thought, ‘He’s not safe until he sets foot in Hawaii,’ ” recalled Mr. Dickinson, an architect in San Diego.
He was right. Sergeant Dickinson, 29, a supply specialist who had volunteered to help train Afghan forces, died with Lance Corporal Buckley on Aug. 10. They were among six Marines killed that day in two separate attacks by men who appeared to be Afghan security force members.
The Pentagon asserts that most of those attacks have been the result of personal grudges, disputing Taliban claims to have widely infiltrated the Afghan security forces.
But the attacks have also raised anew concerns about the integrity of the Afghan forces that NATO expects to secure the entire nation after NATO troops withdraw in 2014.
More fundamentally, the continued deaths, occurring even as American forces are conducting fewer combat missions, have prompted service members and military families to wonder: has the decade-long American presence in Afghanistan made a difference?
Colonel Morris, the former commander for the Third Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment, has little doubt that it has. After months of fierce fighting, he saw clear changes when he left Sangin in early 2011. Those improvements remain, he asserts, with residents participating in elections and going to school with less fear of Taliban intimidation — though such intimidation is far from gone.
“Every single Marine in my battalion could see the impact they had,” he said. “It was a validation of everything they had sacrificed for.”
Despite his son’s death, Mr. Dickinson agrees. Marina Buckley is not so sure.
“He was the most lovable, caring human being,” she said of her son. “He wore his heart on his sleeve. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.”
He had wanted to join the Marine Corps ever since 9/11, despite her many attempts to dissuade him. By the time he was in high school a Marine Corps flag hung in his bedroom and her efforts to get him to go to college — Adelphi University accepted him his senior year — had failed.
“I’d say, ‘Why the Marines?’ ” she said, and he would reply with a joke. “I can pick up a lot of chicks with that uniform,” he would say.
But his ambition was serious: he wanted to serve, then become a Suffolk County police officer. He came to relish the brotherhood of the Marines and adored his first posting, in Hawaii. But deployment was different. The loneliness, the heat and the Meals Ready to Eat wore on him, Ms. Buckley said.
And he never felt secure living alongside Afghans, she said.
“If they want to kill themselves, let them,” she said of the Afghan people. “But they are killing people who shouldn’t be killed, who have lives here, and family here, and brothers and sisters here.”
Eddie Goldberger contributed reporting, and Jack Begg, Alain Delaquérière and Jack Styczynski contributed research.
Police chief fired over Afghan insider attack on NATO
AFP via Yahoo! News - Aug 21 10:53am
An Afghan district police chief has been fired after one of his men killed a NATO soldier, marking the start of a crackdown on the increasing number of insider attacks, officials said Tuesday.
The move came after President Barack Obama and top US military officers expressed growing concern over the so-called green-on-blue attacks in which uniformed Afghans turn their weapons against their NATO allies.
A total of 10 soldiers, mostly Americans, have lost their lives at the hands of their Afghan colleagues in the past two weeks, and the attacks have caused almost one in four coalition deaths in the war so far this month.
The police chief was sacked over the latest incident when a member of the Afghan national police opened fire on his foreign colleagues in the police headquarters of Spin Boldak district on Sunday, killing one and wounding another.
"The Spin Boldak district police commander has been fired for negligence in his duty and lack of control over his personnel," the chief of police for Kandahar province, General Abdul Razik, told AFP.
"If he had control on his police personnel the latest attack on NATO would not have taken place." he said.
The provincial government's media office, in a message on Twitter about the police chief's sacking, said green-on-blue attacks "will not be tolerated".
"We stand by our partners. The provincial administration of Kandahar is committed to working closely with its international counterparts and avoiding the attacks against them."
The move will be welcomed by the United States and its NATO partners in the international coalition helping the government of President Hamid Karzai fight a Taliban insurgency.
NATO and US officers have suggested the Afghan government has failed to come to grips with the problem and America's top military officer flew to Kabul for talks on the issue Monday with NATO commanders and Afghan top brass.
General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he came away "reassured" after discussions with his Afghan counterpart, General Shir Mohammad Karimi.
"I am reassured that the Afghan leaders, military and civilian, understand how important this moment is," Dempsey said before leaving Kabul on Tuesday.
The total death toll from insider attacks this year has already reached 40, which makes up 13 per cent of all international coalition deaths for 2012.
Americans tune out Afghan war as fighting rages on
By DEB RIECHMANN | Associated Press
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — It was once President Barack Obama's "war of necessity." Now, it's America's forgotten war.
The Afghan conflict generates barely a whisper on the U.S. presidential campaign trail. It's not a hot topic at the office water cooler or in the halls of Congress — even though more than 80,000 American troops are still fighting here and dying at a rate of one a day.
Americans show more interest in the economy and taxes than the latest suicide bombings in a different, distant land. They're more tuned in to the political ad war playing out on television than the deadly fight still raging against the Taliban. Earlier this month, protesters at the Iowa State Fair chanted "Stop the war!" They were referring to one purportedly being waged against the middle class.
By the time voters go to the polls Nov. 6 to choose between Obama and presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney, the war will be in its 12th year. For most Americans, that's long enough.
Public opinion remains largely negative toward the war, with 66 percent opposed to it and just 27 percent in favor in a May AP-GfK poll. More recently, a Quinnipiac University poll found that 60 percent of registered voters felt the U.S. should no longer be involved in Afghanistan. Just 31 percent said the U.S. is doing the right thing by fighting there now.
Not since the Korean War of the early 1950s — a much shorter but more intense fight — has an armed conflict involving America's sons and daughters captured so little public attention.
"We're bored with it," said Matthew Farwell, who served in the U.S. Army for five years including 16 months in eastern Afghanistan, where he sometimes received letters from grade school students addressed to the brave Marines in Iraq — the wrong war.
"We all laugh about how no one really cares," he said. "All the 'support the troops' stuff is bumper sticker deep."
Farwell, 29, who is now studying at the University of Virginia, said the war is rarely a topic of conversation on campus — and he isn't surprised that it's not discussed much on the campaign trail.
"No one understands how to extricate ourselves from the mess we have made there," he said. "So from a purely political point of view, I wouldn't be talking about it if I were Barack Obama or Mitt Romney either."
Ignoring the Afghan war, though, doesn't make it go away.
More than 1,950 Americans have died in Afghanistan and thousands more have been wounded since President George W. Bush launched attacks on Oct. 7, 2001 to rout al-Qaida after it used Afghanistan to train recruits and plot the Sept. 11 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 Americans.
The war drags on even though al-Qaida has been largely driven out of Afghanistan and its charismatic leader Osama bin Laden is dead — slain in a U.S. raid on his Pakistani hideout last year.
Strangely, Afghanistan never seemed to grab the same degree of public and media attention as the war in Iraq, which Obama opposed as a "war of choice."
Unlike Iraq, victory in Afghanistan seemed to come quickly. Kabul fell within weeks of the U.S. invasion in October 2001. The hardline Taliban regime was toppled with few U.S. casualties.
But the Bush administration's shift toward war with Iraq left the Western powers without enough resources on the ground, so by 2006 the Taliban had regrouped into a serious military threat.
Candidate Obama promised to refocus America's resources on Afghanistan. But by the time President Obama sent 33,000 more troops to Afghanistan in December 2009, years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan had drained Western resources and sapped resolve to build a viable Afghan state.
And over time, his administration has grown weary of trying to tackle Afghanistan's seemingly intractable problems of poverty and corruption. The American people have grown weary too.
While most Americans are sympathetic to the plight of the Afghan people, they have become deeply skeptical of President Hamid Karzai's willingness to tackle corruption and political patronage and the coalition's chances of "budging a medieval society" into the modern world, says Ann Marlowe, a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute, a policy research organization in Washington.
"With millions of veterans home and talking with their families and friends ... some knowledge of just how hard this is has percolated down," said Marlowe, who has traveled to Afghanistan many times.
It has also been hard to show progress on the battlefield.
World War II had its Normandy, Vietnam its Tet Offensive and Iraq its Battle of Fallujah. Afghanistan is a grinding slough in villages and remote valleys where success is measured in increments.
The Afghan war transformed into a series of small, often vicious and intense fights scattered across a country almost as large as Texas.
In July, 40 U.S. service members died in Afghanistan in the deadliest month for American troops so far this year. At least 31 have been killed this month — seven when a helicopter crashed during a firefight with insurgents in what was one of the deadliest air disasters of the war. Ten others were gunned down in attacks from members of the Afghan security forces — either disgruntled turncoats or Taliban infiltrators.
Many argue that bin Laden's death justifies a quick U.S. exit from Afghanistan. Others say it's important to stay longer to shore up the Afghan security forces and help build the government so that it can stand on its own. An unstable Afghanistan could again offer sanctuary to militants like al-Qaida who want to harm American and its allies, they say.
"Those of us who have been at this for a long time continue to think that it's important, and that we have a chance now of a path forward with a long-term perspective that will produce the results," said James Cunningham, the new U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan.
The U.S.-led coalition's combat mission will wind down in the next few years, leading up to the end of 2014 when most international troops will have left or moved into support roles.
Military analysts say the U.S. envisions a post-2014 force of perhaps 20,000 to hunt terrorists, train the Afghan forces and keep an eye on neighboring Iran and other regional powerhouse nations.
Americans aren't likely to know the number until later this year. But will anyone other than families of service personnel take note?
"I have heard others say that the danger that their spouses or children are serving in is just simply not being cared about," said Fred Wellman, a 22-year Army veteran who did three tours in Iraq. "I think a lot of veterans feel it is just forgotten."
Political satirist Garry Trudeau captured the apathy about the war in a comic strip this year showing a U.S. servicewoman stationed in Afghanistan calling her brother back home.
After he complains that his children have the flu and how he's struggling to keep up with their hectic hockey schedule, he asks her where she's calling from. She tells him she's in Afghanistan.
"Oh, right, right ..." her brother replies. "Wait, we're still there?"
___
Associated Press Writers Kristin Hall in Nashville, Tennessee and Jennifer Agiesta in Washington contributed to this report.
Most Afghan Insider Attacks Aren’t Taliban, Pentagon Says
By David Lerman and Indira A.R. Lakshmanan - Aug 20, 2012 10:05 PM GMT+0430
The “vast majority” of insider attacks by Afghan forces against U.S. and allied troops stem from “disgruntled individuals” and not Taliban insurgents, Pentagon spokesman George Little said.
While coalition forces have improved vetting procedures for admitting Afghans into the country’s growing army, “it’s not always possible to read the minds of other people,” Little told reporters at a Pentagon briefing today.
Attacks from inside the Afghan security forces against coalition troops jumped to 10 this month, up from four in July and two in June, Lieutenant Colonel Hagen Messer, a spokesman for the International Security Assistance Force Joint Command, said today in a phone interview from Kabul. There have been 32 insider attacks this year that killed 40 coalition troops, he said.
“These insider attacks are a dagger in the heart of the U.S. mission,” David Cortright, director of policy studies at the University of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, said today in a statement. “They strike at the core strategy of training Afghan forces to replace our troops. If we cannot trust the troops we are recruiting, how can the mission succeed?”
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta called Afghan President Hamid Karzai over the weekend “to share his concern about recent insider attacks” and to “explore ways to work even more closely together,” Little said. Army General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, met with allied and Afghan commanders today in Kabul to discuss the war and the attacks.
‘False Distinction’
Anthony Cordesman, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington who has advised a number of U.S. administrations, said it is misleading and irrelevant to draw a distinction between insider attacks planned by the Taliban and those undertaken by Afghans influenced by the constant barrage of jihadist propaganda from the Taliban.
“It’s a false distinction,” Cordesman said today in a phone interview. “Most of the young men in Afghanistan are caught up in a climate where inevitably they’re going to hear insurgent complaints about the U.S. presence, calls for jihad.”
The U.S. has taken new steps to guard against the increasing insider attacks, including a greater “intelligence presence” in the field to gather information on potential threats, Panetta said in an Aug. 14 Pentagon briefing.
‘Guardian Angels’
The Pentagon also created a “guardian angel” program that designates one individual “who stands to the side so that he can watch people’s backs and hopefully identify people that would be involved in those attacks,” Panetta said.
Afghan security ministries have adopted more “rigorous vetting procedures” for Afghans seeking to join the security forces, Little said.
While most of the insider attacks come from “disgruntled” soldiers, the Taliban are increasingly using the tactic as they come under “severe strain” and “severe pressure” from coalition forces, Little said.
“They are opportunistic,” he said of the Taliban. “They look for ways of infiltrating Afghan forces. They regrettably are creative to some extent.”
Said Jawad, a former longtime Afghan ambassador to Washington, said he believes the attacks are the result of Taliban infiltration.
Creating Rift
“The most effective tactic by the Taliban is to create a rift between Afghan security forces and NATO forces,” he said.
Jawad, who has been mentioned as a possible next Afghan defense minister, said the rapid pace of expansion of the Afghan police and army means “there’s limited recruitment criteria,” making it easier for anti-American insurgents to “place their agents.”
Polls of Afghan public opinion he has seen show more positive attitudes toward the U.S. than exist in other Islamic countries in the region, Jawad said.
The Afghan security forces are expected to grow to 352,000 later this year, while coalition forces plan to withdraw combat troops by 2014.
The number of “green-on-blue,” or insider, attacks is still at a “relatively low level,” amounting to 40 deaths this year among about 130,000 coalition troops, Cordesman said. Still the attacks spawn fear and widespread media coverage that bolster the goal of insurgents.
“If all you have to do is create a green-on-blue incident, you achieve political impact out of any proportion,” he said.
To contact the reporters on this story: David Lerman in Washington at dlerman1@bloomberg.net; Indira A.R. Lakshmanan in Washington at ilakshmanan@bloomberg.net
What The Future Holds For The 'Kids Of Kabul'
NPR August 20, 2012
Afghanistan's decade-long insurgency has largely been fought by men. But in 2011, author Deborah Ellis went to Kabul to ask, how do Afghanistan's children see their future? She tries to answer that question in her recently released book, Kids of Kabul: Living Bravely Through a Never-Ending War. Ellis speaks with guest host Viviana Hurtado.
VIVIANA HURTADO, HOST:
This is TELL ME MORE from NPR News. I'm Viviana Hurtado. Michel Martin is away. Coming up, his musical career brought him success and celebrity in South Africa, but Sipho Hotstix Mabuse always felt something was missing. We hear more about his decision to go back to school at age 60.
But, first, Afghanistan's government marked the country's independence day this weekend, but it's the ongoing violence in the country that's dominating the news. Top U.S. military officials met in Afghanistan today to figure out how to stop so-called insider attacks where western-trained Afghan forces have been turning their guns on American troops.
Throughout the war, Afghan civilians have also been targeted. Afghan women and children have been particularly vulnerable. Writer Deborah Ellis has been speaking with Afghan women and children for decades and she chronicles their stories in the book, "Kids of Kabul: Living Bravely Through a Never-Ending War." She joins us now.
Welcome.
DEBORAH ELLIS: Hi. It's good to be here.
HURTADO: It's great to have you, Deborah. Can you tell us, what is it about Afghanistan, especially its women and children, that has caught your attention since the '90s?
ELLIS: As a woman in Canada, I get to do whatever I want to do and I'm used to that. I'm used to not having my government tell me my life is going to be restricted because I'm female. And when the news of the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan hit the papers in Toronto, I started to think about the terrible crimes that were being committed against women and how in the world would I survive under similar circumstances? So that's why I initially traveled to the refugee camps to meet with these women and, in the course of meeting with them, I learned all kinds of stories of survival and I learned, also, about the lives of children in Afghanistan.
HURTADO: Can you talk a little bit about how, in speaking with women, they were just tied together? Stories of women and stories of children.
ELLIS: When I was talking to one group, the other group would be there and, in the refugee camps, there wasn't a whole lot for children to do and I was kind of the entertainment and they would follow me around and laugh at me and it was quite lovely. But, in the midst of all that, I got to hear from them about what their life was like living under the warzone and living under the Taliban and I heard incredible stories of how these children - girls would transform themselves into boys, cutting off their hair, putting on boys' clothing and then going out into the streets of the city to earn money any way that they could because, if they didn't do this, their families were going to starve.
HURTADO: So many of these kids - they just want to study. They want to be able to study continuously, without interruption, but getting an education is something that's been really hard for girls in Afghanistan, certainly, over the years.
Can you tell us about the changes and opportunities you observed this time around for Afghan students since the fall of the Taliban?
ELLIS: There's been a lot of emphasis put on trying to rebuild or build a new education system in Afghanistan and there have been great strides that have been made toward that. Literacy levels for women - they still hover around 13 percent, so very few women still have access to being able to learn. It isn't a simple thing. You don't just build a school and provide books and then things magically work out. There's...
HURTADO: You need to have, for example, female teachers.
ELLIS: You need female teachers. A lot of parents don't want their daughters to be educated by men and women are not able to travel on their own with any degree of security. It becomes like a very difficult challenge to work out all the pieces of the puzzle.
HURTADO: Some of the larger issues, too, like the violence and the current political situation - how does that impact the students' access to education?
ELLIS: A lot of it is around corruption. Schools get built with shoddy materials. They fall apart. Another is the sheer poverty that war has contributed to, so for example, if a farmer has to borrow money to plant his crops and the crops fail and he can't repay his debt, girls end up being used as the repayment.
HURTADO: You spoke with dozens of Afghan children, but one that stood out was the story of a teenage girl who you meet in prison for running away. Can you tell us about her?
ELLIS: Yeah. The prison for girls was filled with girls who had simply run away from forced marriages and forced marriage in Afghanistan today is supposed to be against the law. There are rights under the constitution that are supposed to protect girls and this girl had learned about these rights in school. So, when her father told her, well, I've just sold you into marriage to a very old man, she was understandably upset. She even went to the local representative of the Ministry of Women's Affairs and nobody could help her.
So she was listening to the radio and there was a young man who played songs and people could call in with their favorite song and they got to talking off the radio and he said, well, I can help you. And so they met up and he took her away. They were spotted in a restaurant. The manager called the police and they were arrested and the girl is now facing seven years in prison and she told me that she didn't like being in prison, but at least she had a better life in prison because, if she had gotten married, her education would be done, and in the prison they have a teacher who comes in and gives them classes for a couple of hours a day. But the problem that she was worried about was not her life in prison, but it was what would happen to her after her sentence was over. She didn't know where she was going to go.
HURTADO: If you're just, you're listening to TELL ME MORE from NPR News. I'm Viviana Hurtado. We're speaking with journalist and author Deborah Ellis about her latest book chronicling the lives of Afghan children. It's called "Kids of Kabul."
Deborah, despite the circumstances, these kids have hope.
ELLIS: Mm-hmm.
HURTADO: And I think that's one of the things that made my heart cheer as I was reading it.
ELLIS: Yeah.
HURTADO: Another story that I just loved is Sara's. She comes from a long line of business women.
ELLIS: Mm-hmm.
HURTADO: Can you tell us about her?
ELLIS: Yeah. This is a really neat family. This is a group of women where the whole family had been involved in businesses of one kind or another. And they went through the period of the Taliban and they got exiled into Pakistan, and throughout that whole time the mother, who's a very enterprising woman, found ways to work and support her family doing all kinds of businesses. So the grandmother now works in a jewelry cooperative making jewelry with other old widows who have no other means of income. The mother works with 300 women farmers from all around Afghanistan, and the mother gathers up the crops and finds ways to market them so that these women have an independent kind of an income during. And the 17-year-old girl Sara, is already thinking of new ways that she can go into business as well so that she can have money for herself and decide her own destiny.
HURTADO: And I was going to ask if you can shed some light Deborah, how rare is the example of Sara's family, where women rule and are financially independent?
ELLIS: It's incredibly rare. And that other stories of widows who did not have any financial means whose whatever financial means they had that was taken from them by the male members of their families. So widows who were forced to live at their husband's brother's place and the kids would tell me about how awful it was there and they just wanted to be able to go to school, graduate, get a good job and get their mother out of that situation. And that was their whole hope.
HURTADO: A lot of the students you spoke to said they're just not sure if their school is going to be around tomorrow. It's just a very tenuous situation, real touch and go. So how Deborah, do these students stay motivated when there's so much uncertainty?
ELLIS: It's pretty easy for them to see the results of not getting an education, so that motivation is just a daily part of their life. Part of the obstacles so, is the ongoing violence. There have been a lot of teachers assassinated, schools are being blown up, girls are harassed and in some cases, attacked on their way to school. Even if the girls are able to get an education, they can dream big, they can think about how they want to become a member of parliament because they are now women members of parliament in Afghanistan, nobody is really sure how long everything is going to last. So, like, when girls in Canada dream about becoming members of parliament, they have a pretty good expectation that parliament is going to be around for them when they graduate. There is no such expectation in Afghanistan. It's all still hope and wanting it but not really sure if it's going to be around.
HURTADO: What do you want your readers, Deborah, to take away from this book?
ELLIS: I'd like them to think about the fact that these are great people, great, courageous, amazing kids doing really incredible things with really difficult circumstances. I want them to think about how they and we would react given the same set of circumstances, and ultimately think about how we are more alike than we are different.
HURTADO: Deborah Ellis is the author of "Kids of Kabul: Living Bravely Through a Never-Ending War." She's also the writer of the popular children's novel series "The Breadwinner." And she joined us from the CBC studios in Toronto.
Thank you, Deborah.
ELLIS: Thank you very much.
Indian consortium to bid for just a single copper mine in Afghanistan
The Hindu By Indrani Dutta August 21, 2012
KOLKATA - Shaida, located in Herat province, scored over the other areas mainly in terms of its location advantage
A consortium of Indian companies, which has joined the global race for acquiring copper deposits in Afghanistan, has decided to bid for only one area against the four that are on offer.
“During the due diligence, we found that it would be prudent to choose only one mining area, Shaida”, chief executive of one of the consortium members told The Hindu. Gold and copper deposits spread over four areas are put on the block by the Afghanistan government, and the bids for two were open last week.
Shaida, located in Herat province in West Afghanistan, scored over the other areas mainly in terms of its location advantage. This area is close to Chabahar Port of Iran, and is only 30 km off a highway.
Four other bidders are believed to be in the race for taking over these mines. The members of Indian consortium include SAIL, HCL, Nalco, Jindal Steel and Monnet Ispat. SAIL leads the consortium with a 26 per cent stake followed by Hindustan Copper. However, enquiries revealed that this holding pattern may have to be re-looked at in case the consortium wins the bid. The Ministry of Mines of Afghanistan had floated the bids for exploration and exploitation of the licence areas through four tenders seeking private participation to exploit the strife-torn country’s rich mineral reserves.
These were Badakhshan (gold), Zarkashan (copper/gold), Balkhab and Shaida (both copper). The Afghanistan Mines Ministry said on its site that the tender process for each project was expected to culminate in the granting of an exploration licence, and, subject to conditions, would lead to the granting of requisite exploration licence. Canaccord Genuity, SRK Consulting and Mayer Brown are acting as transaction advisers to the Afghan Ministry in relation to the tenders for the projects. Mineralisation was identified at the Shaida mine during exploration by the erstwhile Soviets in 1971-72.
Security
The Afghanistan Government has sought to assure prospective investors about the security of their investments saying that these four areas were offered in view of their drill-ready position and ‘relative security’ of the area. It also said that a mines protection unit hads been raised to specially address the issue of safety in mines. A1,500-strong personnel was active in the Aynak Copper Mine site.
www.afghanistannewscenter.com
By KAY JOHNSON | Associated Press
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — An insurgent rocket attack damaged the plane of the top U.S. general as it sat parked at a coalition base in Afghanistan on Tuesday, dealing another blow to the image of progress in building a stable country as foreign forces work to wind down the 10-year-old war.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the two rockets that landed near the C-17 transport plane that U.S. Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, flew into Bagram Air Field north of Kabul on a day earlier. The claim was an attempt by the insurgents to score more propaganda points in what has been a deadly few weeks for the international coalition in Afghanistan.
Jamie Graybeal, a spokesman for the U.S. military and the international coalition, said Dempsey was in his staff quarters when the two rockets landed and was unhurt in the attack. But the damage to the plane forced Dempsey to use another aircraft for his flight from Bagram to Iraq on Tuesday.
Two aircraft maintenance workers were lightly wounded by shrapnel, and a nearby helicopter was damaged, Graybeal said.
Dempsey was in Afghanistan for talks with military leaders about the war as well as a disturbing rash of killings of U.S. military trainers by their Afghan partners or militants dressed in Afghan uniform.
Such turncoat attacks — which the Taliban also said they are behind — killed 10 Americans in the last two weeks alone, threatening morale and raising questions about the strategy to train Afghan security forces so they can fight the insurgency after foreign troops end their combat role in 2014.
Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid issued a statement Tuesday claiming Dempsey's aircraft was targeted by insurgents "using exact information" about its whereabouts.
Graybeal, however, rejected the claim, saying insurgent rocket and mortar attacks are "not infrequent" at Bagram and that such fire most often comes from so far away that it's virtually impossible to hit specific targets.
Pentagon spokeswoman Maj. Cathy Wilkinson also denied the strike was aimed specifically at Dempsey's plane. "Indirect fire at Bagram is not unusual, so we don't believe his aircraft was targeted."
Bagram, a sprawling complex that covers about 21 square kilometers (8 square miles) and houses tens of thousands of troops, is about an hour's drive north of Kabul, and usually serves as the first point of entrance for U.S. officials visiting the country. It is the hub for military operations in the east of the country and the largest U.S. base in Afghanistan.
During his visit, Dempsey met with U.S. Afghan commander Gen. John Allen in Kabul and also with a number of senior Afghan and coalition leaders.
Among the topics was the escalating number of "insider attacks" in which Afghan security forces or militants dressed in Afghan uniform turn their guns on coalition military trainers. Once an anomaly, the number of such attacks has been climbing in recent months. There have been 32 of them so far this year, up from 21 for all of 2011, according to NATO.
Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammad Omar last week said the killings were the result of an insurgent campaign of infiltration, though NATO has said it's too early to tell if the attacks were related to the insurgency or caused by personal disputes turned deadly.
The Taliban also claimed to have shot down a U.S. military helicopter that crashed during a firefight with insurgents in a remote area of southern Afghanistan on Thursday, killing seven Americans and four Afghans on board.
U.S. officials, however, said initial reports were that enemy fire was not involved in the crash.
Tuesday's insurgent attack was the second this year to come uncomfortably close to a high-level U.S. official visiting Afghanistan.
In March, an attacker tried to ram a car into a delegation waiting to greet U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta at Bastion Air Field in southern Afghanistan as his C-17 taxied toward the landing ramp. U.S. defense officials said Panetta was never in any danger, but if the attacker had waited just a few more minutes, Panetta's plane would have been at the ramp.
Another attack, this time at the entrance of Bagram, struck in 2007 as then-Vice President **** Cheney visited Afghanistan. The suicide attacker did not penetrate the gates of the base but at least 23 people were killed in the blast.
Obama, Romney spar on Afghanistan
WASHINGTON, Aug. 20 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President Barack Obama and his Republican challenger Mitt Romney on Monday sparred on the war in Afghanistan, with Obama vowing to protect U.S. troops, while Romney accusing Obama of not been forthright with voters on the situation there.
In an unscheduled press conference at the White House, Obama said he has talked with top U.S. military leaders on the recent spate of insider attacks on U.S. military personnel in Afghanistan, and will talk with Afghan President Hamid Karzai on the subject as well.
Obama, who has not spoken with the White House press corps for two months, interrupted Press Secretary Jay Carney's regular news briefing to take questions. He said the U.S. side is working on the problem of insider attacks, and the military needs to strengthen their vetting process of Afghan recruits.
Insider attacks, sometimes referred to as "green on blue" attacks, have been on the rise recently. Attackers in Afghan security forces uniforms have killed dozens international troops in 32 such attacks so far this year, posing challenge to the security transition, which would see NATO forces hand over security responsibilities to Afghan forces by the end of 2014.
Earlier in the day, Romney took to the stage in New Hampshire to answer voters' questions in a town hall meeting. He scolded Obama for not being forthcoming enough with voters and veterans about the unpopular war, and said the president needs to explain what is happening in Afghanistan.
"I expect the president of the United States to address the nation on a regular basis," said Romney.
Afghans to spy on own troops to stop ‘insider’ attacks
Washington Post By Kevin Sieff Tuesday, August 21, 2012
KABUL - Afghan officials say they have launched an expanded effort to spy on their own police and army recruits, an acknowledgment that previous measures designed to reduce insurgent infiltration in the country’s security services have failed.
The steps come amid a spate of “insider” attacks that have shaken the U.S.-Afghan military partnership during a stage of the war that hinges on close partnership between the two forces.
Nine U.S. troops have been killed by their Afghan counterparts in the past 12 days. They are among 40 coalition service members who have died in insider attacks this year. President Obama, in his most extensive comments to date on the issue, said Monday that his administration is “deeply concerned about this, from top to bottom.”
The Afghan measures include the deployment of dozens of undercover intelligence officers to Afghan security units nationwide, increased surveillance of phone calls between Afghan troops and their families, and a ban on cellphone use among new recruits to give them fewer opportunities to contact members of the insurgency, Afghan officials say.
The initiatives appear aimed at addressing U.S. criticism that the Afghan security forces are not doing enough to ferret out insurgents within their ranks. The top U.S. military official, Gen. Martin Dempsey, was in Kabul on Monday for consultations on the matter, and Obama said he would soon be “reaching out” to Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
“Soldiers must feel that they are under the full surveillance of their leadership at all levels,” the Afghan army chief of staff, Gen. Sher Mohammad Karimi, said in an interview after meeting with Dempsey and other U.S. commanders. “Initially, it will have a negative impact on morale, but we have to do something. We have to look seriously at every individual.”
Coalition policy changes
NATO has taken steps in recent days to try to limit the attacks, which Taliban leader Mohammad Omar has described as an integral part of his group’s strategy.
Across Afghanistan, service members have been asked to keep their weapons loaded at all times, according to coalition officials. NATO has also activated an existing program, dubbed “Guardian Angels,” in which coalition troops whose only job is to watch their fellow troops attend meetings with Afghan officials prepared to quell an insider attack if one should occur.
Obama said U.S. forces are “seeing some success when it comes to better counterintelligence, making sure that the vetting process for Afghan troops is stronger.” But, he added, “obviously, we’re going to have to do more, because there has been an uptick over the last 12 months on this.”
Insider attacks are a relatively new aspect of the war, having emerged as a major problem for the United States and its allies only in the past several years. There have been more deaths from insider attacks in 2012 than in any other year of the war, and they have accounted for 13 percent of all NATO fatalities this year.
Tight choreography
As U.S. troops begin to withdraw, the attacks threaten to upend plans for a transition from foreign to Afghan control of security that will require tight choreography between the two forces.
But the new Afghan measures carry their own peril, with the potential to further alienate rank-and-file troops and would-be recruits at a time when the government is struggling to build loyalty.
Afghan officials say that 176 intelligence officers were assigned to army battalions last week and that most will remain undercover. They join hundreds of others who are tasked with spotting wayward troops before they carry out “green-on-blue” attacks.
Karimi said Afghanistan would also reinforce a vetting procedure that had never been properly employed, allowing cursory or no background checks for new recruits.
A number of the attacks this year were carried out by individuals who faced little scrutiny in getting access to joint U.S. and Afghan bases. This month, an unvetted 15-year-old “tea boy” who had been living on a police base in Helmand province killed three U.S. Marines while they exercised.
“We had a policy for recruiting from Day One, but it hasn’t been implemented. We needed too many people,” Karimi said. “When you need 12,000 people each month — it’s a number so high that we couldn’t implement the policy,”
Now that the security forces are approaching their targeted recruitment levels, officials said, they can concentrate on ensuring that the right soldiers and police have entered the ranks. That means paying close attention to what recruits do after enlisting.
“Whenever a new recruit goes on leave, we have reconnaissance following that person to make sure he doesn’t pose a threat,” said Maj. Gen. Abdul Hamid, the top Afghan army official in Kandahar.
The Afghan efforts represent an expansion of earlier attempts to curb insider killings. Earlier this year, for instance, soldiers were forced to move their families back from Pakistan or quit their jobs. Many infiltrators are thought to have received training from insurgent groups in Pakistan.
Karimi on Monday briefed Dempsey, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. John R. Allen, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, on Afghanistan’s plans for the expanded counterintelligence measures.
Dempsey has long complained about the flawed Afghan vetting process, telling reporters in March that the problem of insider attacks would be solved only “when they have the same vetting as we do.”
He sounded an encouraging note after his meeting Monday with Karimi. “In the past, it’s been us pushing on them to make sure they do more,” Dempsey said. “This time, without prompting, when I met General Karimi, he started with a conversation about insider attacks.”
Cultural clashes
Not all attacks have been the result of insurgent infiltration, and NATO officials have said that most stem from personal disputes. Afghan military officials say they have asked their U.S. and other NATO counterparts to better educate their troops in local traditions and culture to help reduce the potential for conflict.
“If a U.S. soldier says something against our tradition, it makes Afghan soldiers upset and could even cause an attack,” said Feda Wakil, the chief of staff for recruitment at the Afghan National Police. “We always tell NATO that the troops are not arriving with enough knowledge. They are learning from Afghans overseas who do not truly understand our culture.”
Afghan officials say they have also asked the Americans for help in tightening standards within the Afghan forces. The army says it wants polygraph machines and interceptors to monitor phone calls. Police officials have asked for more biometric equipment, which they say will help them check the criminal records of potential recruits.
“If we can’t reduce the number of these attacks to zero, we should at least minimize the number,” Karimi said.
Javed Hamdard and Sayed Salahuddin contributed to this report.
In Toll of 2,000, New Portrait of Afghan War
By JAMES DAO and ANDREW W. LEHREN The New York Times August 21, 2012
His war was almost over. Or so Marina Buckley thought when her son Lance Cpl. Gregory T. Buckley Jr. told her that he would be returning from southern Afghanistan to his Marine Corps base in Hawaii in late August, three months early.
Instead, Lance Corporal Buckley became the 1,990th American service member to die in the war when, on Aug. 10, he and two other Marines were shot inside their base in Helmand Province by a man who appears to have been a member of the Afghan forces they were training.
A week later, with the death of Specialist James A. Justice of the Army at a military hospital in Germany, the United States military reached 2,000 dead in the nearly 11-year-old conflict, based on an analysis by The New York Times of Department of Defense records. The calculation by The Times includes deaths not only in Afghanistan but also in Pakistan and other nations where American forces are directly involved in aiding the war.
Nearly nine years passed before American forces reached their first 1,000 dead in the war. The second 1,000 came just 27 months later, a testament to the intensity of fighting prompted by President Obama’s decision to send 33,000 additional troops to Afghanistan in 2010, a policy known as the surge.
In more ways than his family might have imagined, Lance Corporal Buckley, who had just turned 21 when he died, typified the troops in that second wave of 1,000. According to the Times analysis, three out of four were white, 9 out of 10 were enlisted service members, and one out of two died in either Kandahar Province or Helmand Province in Taliban-dominated southern Afghanistan. Their average age was 26.
The dead were also disproportionately Marines like Lance Corporal Buckley. Though the Army over all has suffered more dead in the war, the Marine Corps, with fewer troops, has had a higher casualty rate: At the height of fighting in late 2010, 2 out of every 1,000 Marines in Afghanistan were dying, twice the rate of the Army. Marine units accounted for three of the five units hardest hit during the surge.
Suffering the most casualties was the Third Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment out of Camp Pendleton, Calif. Twenty-five of its Marines died and more than 180 were wounded, many with multiple amputations, during a bloody seven-month deployment in Helmand that began in fall 2010.
The analysis also shows that Army casualties during the surge fell heaviest on two bases with frequently deployed units: Fort Campbell in Kentucky, home to the 101st Airborne Division, which recorded the most Army deaths in the surge, and Fort Drum in New York, home to the 10th Mountain Division.
The summer remained the peak season for fighting, with the single highest period for American deaths being July, August and September 2010, when at least 143 troops died. And as has been the case since at least 2008, improvised explosive devices, known as I.E.D.’s, remained a leading cause of death and injury, along with small-arms fire, the analysis showed.
But this year, a new threat emerged: attacks by Afghans dressed in the uniforms of Afghan security forces. In just the past two weeks, at least 9 Americans have been killed in such insider attacks, and for the year to date, at least 39 non-Afghan troops, most of them American, have been killed by men dressed as members of the Afghan security forces, the most since the war began.
Those insider attacks have increased concerns about NATO’s ability to turn security operations over to Afghan forces by 2014, the deadline set by President Obama for withdrawing the remaining American forces. For families, the deaths have raised hard questions about whether the Pentagon is doing enough to protect its troops from their own allies.
Though Afghanistan is now considered the nation’s longest war, at 128 months and counting, the number of dead is fewer than half the total in the Iraq war, where more than 4,480 died in eight years. More active-duty and reserve soldiers killed themselves last year, 278, than died in combat in Afghanistan, 247.
None of that brings solace to the families of the dead. For the Buckleys, of Oceanside, N.Y., their son’s death so near the end of his tour, so late in the long war and possibly at the hand of a purported ally, was uniquely anguishing.
As Mrs. Buckley recounted things her son loved — basketball, girls, movies, the beach — bitterness choked her words.
“Our forces shouldn’t be there,” she said. “It should be over. It’s done. No more.”
A Unit Hit Hard
The Third Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment out of Camp Pendleton, Calif., was emblematic of the surge. Sent into Sangin, Afghanistan’s opium-producing heartland, in 2010, the battalion faced a formidable enemy expert in the use of I.E.D.’s., losing 25 Marines in a seven-month tour, the second most of any American unit in the entire war, a Times analysis shows.
Mark Moyar, an independent national security analyst who has studied the battalion’s operations, said that the British who had preceded the Marines in Sangin, a district in Helmand, focused on economic development and political outreach to undermine the insurgency. But the Taliban also operated with near impunity in parts of the district, he said.
The battalion took a different approach, pushing into Taliban-dominated villages. Fighting was intense, with civilians often getting caught in the middle, and casualties piled up fast.
On Oct. 8, barely two weeks after the battalion landed, it lost its first Marine, Lance Cpl. John T. Sparks. Five days later, four Marines of the battalion died when their armored truck was destroyed by a powerful bomb. Three more died the next day when they stepped on a mine during a foot patrol.
The rapid-fire deaths prompted calls in Washington for the battalion to pull back. But senior Marine commanders — including the battalion commander, Lt. Col. Jason Morris — prevailed on Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates to leave them in place.
“Everyone was shocked, including me, that we lost that many guys that quickly,” Colonel Morris said. “But honestly, me and most of my Marines would have rather come home in body bags than let the Taliban claim a victory.”
Deanna Giles, the mother of a squad leader from the battalion, remembers those days all too well. Amid the blur of casualty reports, Ms. Giles began watching for strange cars in her neighborhood in Kankakee, Ill., fearing the next one would bear horrible news.
Anxiously seeking information or solace, she took to Internet chat rooms, forming a powerful digital bond with other families from the battalion, whom she never met in person.
“You began to care about people in a way you could not have before the Internet age,” Ms. Giles said.
Her son, Sgt. Caleb Giles, came home alive. Patty Schumacher’s son, Lance Cpl. Victor A. Dew, did not.
Ms. Schumacher had begged her son to defer enlisting until the war ended. When he refused, she urged him to take a job with a presidential security detail. He again said no, determined to be an infantryman and to go to war.
“Boy, did my heart sink,” she recalled. “But I was also proud of him for following his true desires. As a parent you just suck it up, hold your heart and take a deep breath and hope all goes well.”
In late August 2010, Lance Corporal Dew proposed to his girlfriend, then was deployed a month later. Within weeks of arriving in Helmand, he died with three other Marines in a powerful I.E.D. blast. At age 20, he became the 1,259th American to die in the war.
Inside his coffin, his fiancée placed a photograph of herself, wearing her wedding gown.
Ms. Schumacher maintains a Facebook page to keep his memory fresh, and occasionally toasts him at dinner. She still cries, too, though the tears are hard to predict, prompted by stray images and fleeting sounds that remind her of him: a smile, a song, a joke.
“When do you get better? You don’t ever get better,” she said. “You just get better in your grieving. There will always be something that triggers it. And then you are back on that emotional roller coaster.”
Attacks From Afghans
Staff Sgt. Scott E. Dickinson was coming home early. He was originally scheduled to remain in Helmand until November 2012, but the Pentagon was pulling Marines out of Afghanistan quickly, looking to get the surge forces out of the country by fall and shrink the American footprint to about 70,000 troops. He would be home in Hawaii within a week or two, he told his father early this month.
Not long after that conversation, his father, John Dickinson, saw an article about a soldier who had died just a week before he was to come home. “I thought, ‘He’s not safe until he sets foot in Hawaii,’ ” recalled Mr. Dickinson, an architect in San Diego.
He was right. Sergeant Dickinson, 29, a supply specialist who had volunteered to help train Afghan forces, died with Lance Corporal Buckley on Aug. 10. They were among six Marines killed that day in two separate attacks by men who appeared to be Afghan security force members.
The Pentagon asserts that most of those attacks have been the result of personal grudges, disputing Taliban claims to have widely infiltrated the Afghan security forces.
But the attacks have also raised anew concerns about the integrity of the Afghan forces that NATO expects to secure the entire nation after NATO troops withdraw in 2014.
More fundamentally, the continued deaths, occurring even as American forces are conducting fewer combat missions, have prompted service members and military families to wonder: has the decade-long American presence in Afghanistan made a difference?
Colonel Morris, the former commander for the Third Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment, has little doubt that it has. After months of fierce fighting, he saw clear changes when he left Sangin in early 2011. Those improvements remain, he asserts, with residents participating in elections and going to school with less fear of Taliban intimidation — though such intimidation is far from gone.
“Every single Marine in my battalion could see the impact they had,” he said. “It was a validation of everything they had sacrificed for.”
Despite his son’s death, Mr. Dickinson agrees. Marina Buckley is not so sure.
“He was the most lovable, caring human being,” she said of her son. “He wore his heart on his sleeve. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.”
He had wanted to join the Marine Corps ever since 9/11, despite her many attempts to dissuade him. By the time he was in high school a Marine Corps flag hung in his bedroom and her efforts to get him to go to college — Adelphi University accepted him his senior year — had failed.
“I’d say, ‘Why the Marines?’ ” she said, and he would reply with a joke. “I can pick up a lot of chicks with that uniform,” he would say.
But his ambition was serious: he wanted to serve, then become a Suffolk County police officer. He came to relish the brotherhood of the Marines and adored his first posting, in Hawaii. But deployment was different. The loneliness, the heat and the Meals Ready to Eat wore on him, Ms. Buckley said.
And he never felt secure living alongside Afghans, she said.
“If they want to kill themselves, let them,” she said of the Afghan people. “But they are killing people who shouldn’t be killed, who have lives here, and family here, and brothers and sisters here.”
Eddie Goldberger contributed reporting, and Jack Begg, Alain Delaquérière and Jack Styczynski contributed research.
Police chief fired over Afghan insider attack on NATO
AFP via Yahoo! News - Aug 21 10:53am
An Afghan district police chief has been fired after one of his men killed a NATO soldier, marking the start of a crackdown on the increasing number of insider attacks, officials said Tuesday.
The move came after President Barack Obama and top US military officers expressed growing concern over the so-called green-on-blue attacks in which uniformed Afghans turn their weapons against their NATO allies.
A total of 10 soldiers, mostly Americans, have lost their lives at the hands of their Afghan colleagues in the past two weeks, and the attacks have caused almost one in four coalition deaths in the war so far this month.
The police chief was sacked over the latest incident when a member of the Afghan national police opened fire on his foreign colleagues in the police headquarters of Spin Boldak district on Sunday, killing one and wounding another.
"The Spin Boldak district police commander has been fired for negligence in his duty and lack of control over his personnel," the chief of police for Kandahar province, General Abdul Razik, told AFP.
"If he had control on his police personnel the latest attack on NATO would not have taken place." he said.
The provincial government's media office, in a message on Twitter about the police chief's sacking, said green-on-blue attacks "will not be tolerated".
"We stand by our partners. The provincial administration of Kandahar is committed to working closely with its international counterparts and avoiding the attacks against them."
The move will be welcomed by the United States and its NATO partners in the international coalition helping the government of President Hamid Karzai fight a Taliban insurgency.
NATO and US officers have suggested the Afghan government has failed to come to grips with the problem and America's top military officer flew to Kabul for talks on the issue Monday with NATO commanders and Afghan top brass.
General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he came away "reassured" after discussions with his Afghan counterpart, General Shir Mohammad Karimi.
"I am reassured that the Afghan leaders, military and civilian, understand how important this moment is," Dempsey said before leaving Kabul on Tuesday.
The total death toll from insider attacks this year has already reached 40, which makes up 13 per cent of all international coalition deaths for 2012.
Americans tune out Afghan war as fighting rages on
By DEB RIECHMANN | Associated Press
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — It was once President Barack Obama's "war of necessity." Now, it's America's forgotten war.
The Afghan conflict generates barely a whisper on the U.S. presidential campaign trail. It's not a hot topic at the office water cooler or in the halls of Congress — even though more than 80,000 American troops are still fighting here and dying at a rate of one a day.
Americans show more interest in the economy and taxes than the latest suicide bombings in a different, distant land. They're more tuned in to the political ad war playing out on television than the deadly fight still raging against the Taliban. Earlier this month, protesters at the Iowa State Fair chanted "Stop the war!" They were referring to one purportedly being waged against the middle class.
By the time voters go to the polls Nov. 6 to choose between Obama and presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney, the war will be in its 12th year. For most Americans, that's long enough.
Public opinion remains largely negative toward the war, with 66 percent opposed to it and just 27 percent in favor in a May AP-GfK poll. More recently, a Quinnipiac University poll found that 60 percent of registered voters felt the U.S. should no longer be involved in Afghanistan. Just 31 percent said the U.S. is doing the right thing by fighting there now.
Not since the Korean War of the early 1950s — a much shorter but more intense fight — has an armed conflict involving America's sons and daughters captured so little public attention.
"We're bored with it," said Matthew Farwell, who served in the U.S. Army for five years including 16 months in eastern Afghanistan, where he sometimes received letters from grade school students addressed to the brave Marines in Iraq — the wrong war.
"We all laugh about how no one really cares," he said. "All the 'support the troops' stuff is bumper sticker deep."
Farwell, 29, who is now studying at the University of Virginia, said the war is rarely a topic of conversation on campus — and he isn't surprised that it's not discussed much on the campaign trail.
"No one understands how to extricate ourselves from the mess we have made there," he said. "So from a purely political point of view, I wouldn't be talking about it if I were Barack Obama or Mitt Romney either."
Ignoring the Afghan war, though, doesn't make it go away.
More than 1,950 Americans have died in Afghanistan and thousands more have been wounded since President George W. Bush launched attacks on Oct. 7, 2001 to rout al-Qaida after it used Afghanistan to train recruits and plot the Sept. 11 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 Americans.
The war drags on even though al-Qaida has been largely driven out of Afghanistan and its charismatic leader Osama bin Laden is dead — slain in a U.S. raid on his Pakistani hideout last year.
Strangely, Afghanistan never seemed to grab the same degree of public and media attention as the war in Iraq, which Obama opposed as a "war of choice."
Unlike Iraq, victory in Afghanistan seemed to come quickly. Kabul fell within weeks of the U.S. invasion in October 2001. The hardline Taliban regime was toppled with few U.S. casualties.
But the Bush administration's shift toward war with Iraq left the Western powers without enough resources on the ground, so by 2006 the Taliban had regrouped into a serious military threat.
Candidate Obama promised to refocus America's resources on Afghanistan. But by the time President Obama sent 33,000 more troops to Afghanistan in December 2009, years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan had drained Western resources and sapped resolve to build a viable Afghan state.
And over time, his administration has grown weary of trying to tackle Afghanistan's seemingly intractable problems of poverty and corruption. The American people have grown weary too.
While most Americans are sympathetic to the plight of the Afghan people, they have become deeply skeptical of President Hamid Karzai's willingness to tackle corruption and political patronage and the coalition's chances of "budging a medieval society" into the modern world, says Ann Marlowe, a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute, a policy research organization in Washington.
"With millions of veterans home and talking with their families and friends ... some knowledge of just how hard this is has percolated down," said Marlowe, who has traveled to Afghanistan many times.
It has also been hard to show progress on the battlefield.
World War II had its Normandy, Vietnam its Tet Offensive and Iraq its Battle of Fallujah. Afghanistan is a grinding slough in villages and remote valleys where success is measured in increments.
The Afghan war transformed into a series of small, often vicious and intense fights scattered across a country almost as large as Texas.
In July, 40 U.S. service members died in Afghanistan in the deadliest month for American troops so far this year. At least 31 have been killed this month — seven when a helicopter crashed during a firefight with insurgents in what was one of the deadliest air disasters of the war. Ten others were gunned down in attacks from members of the Afghan security forces — either disgruntled turncoats or Taliban infiltrators.
Many argue that bin Laden's death justifies a quick U.S. exit from Afghanistan. Others say it's important to stay longer to shore up the Afghan security forces and help build the government so that it can stand on its own. An unstable Afghanistan could again offer sanctuary to militants like al-Qaida who want to harm American and its allies, they say.
"Those of us who have been at this for a long time continue to think that it's important, and that we have a chance now of a path forward with a long-term perspective that will produce the results," said James Cunningham, the new U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan.
The U.S.-led coalition's combat mission will wind down in the next few years, leading up to the end of 2014 when most international troops will have left or moved into support roles.
Military analysts say the U.S. envisions a post-2014 force of perhaps 20,000 to hunt terrorists, train the Afghan forces and keep an eye on neighboring Iran and other regional powerhouse nations.
Americans aren't likely to know the number until later this year. But will anyone other than families of service personnel take note?
"I have heard others say that the danger that their spouses or children are serving in is just simply not being cared about," said Fred Wellman, a 22-year Army veteran who did three tours in Iraq. "I think a lot of veterans feel it is just forgotten."
Political satirist Garry Trudeau captured the apathy about the war in a comic strip this year showing a U.S. servicewoman stationed in Afghanistan calling her brother back home.
After he complains that his children have the flu and how he's struggling to keep up with their hectic hockey schedule, he asks her where she's calling from. She tells him she's in Afghanistan.
"Oh, right, right ..." her brother replies. "Wait, we're still there?"
___
Associated Press Writers Kristin Hall in Nashville, Tennessee and Jennifer Agiesta in Washington contributed to this report.
Most Afghan Insider Attacks Aren’t Taliban, Pentagon Says
By David Lerman and Indira A.R. Lakshmanan - Aug 20, 2012 10:05 PM GMT+0430
The “vast majority” of insider attacks by Afghan forces against U.S. and allied troops stem from “disgruntled individuals” and not Taliban insurgents, Pentagon spokesman George Little said.
While coalition forces have improved vetting procedures for admitting Afghans into the country’s growing army, “it’s not always possible to read the minds of other people,” Little told reporters at a Pentagon briefing today.
Attacks from inside the Afghan security forces against coalition troops jumped to 10 this month, up from four in July and two in June, Lieutenant Colonel Hagen Messer, a spokesman for the International Security Assistance Force Joint Command, said today in a phone interview from Kabul. There have been 32 insider attacks this year that killed 40 coalition troops, he said.
“These insider attacks are a dagger in the heart of the U.S. mission,” David Cortright, director of policy studies at the University of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, said today in a statement. “They strike at the core strategy of training Afghan forces to replace our troops. If we cannot trust the troops we are recruiting, how can the mission succeed?”
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta called Afghan President Hamid Karzai over the weekend “to share his concern about recent insider attacks” and to “explore ways to work even more closely together,” Little said. Army General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, met with allied and Afghan commanders today in Kabul to discuss the war and the attacks.
‘False Distinction’
Anthony Cordesman, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington who has advised a number of U.S. administrations, said it is misleading and irrelevant to draw a distinction between insider attacks planned by the Taliban and those undertaken by Afghans influenced by the constant barrage of jihadist propaganda from the Taliban.
“It’s a false distinction,” Cordesman said today in a phone interview. “Most of the young men in Afghanistan are caught up in a climate where inevitably they’re going to hear insurgent complaints about the U.S. presence, calls for jihad.”
The U.S. has taken new steps to guard against the increasing insider attacks, including a greater “intelligence presence” in the field to gather information on potential threats, Panetta said in an Aug. 14 Pentagon briefing.
‘Guardian Angels’
The Pentagon also created a “guardian angel” program that designates one individual “who stands to the side so that he can watch people’s backs and hopefully identify people that would be involved in those attacks,” Panetta said.
Afghan security ministries have adopted more “rigorous vetting procedures” for Afghans seeking to join the security forces, Little said.
While most of the insider attacks come from “disgruntled” soldiers, the Taliban are increasingly using the tactic as they come under “severe strain” and “severe pressure” from coalition forces, Little said.
“They are opportunistic,” he said of the Taliban. “They look for ways of infiltrating Afghan forces. They regrettably are creative to some extent.”
Said Jawad, a former longtime Afghan ambassador to Washington, said he believes the attacks are the result of Taliban infiltration.
Creating Rift
“The most effective tactic by the Taliban is to create a rift between Afghan security forces and NATO forces,” he said.
Jawad, who has been mentioned as a possible next Afghan defense minister, said the rapid pace of expansion of the Afghan police and army means “there’s limited recruitment criteria,” making it easier for anti-American insurgents to “place their agents.”
Polls of Afghan public opinion he has seen show more positive attitudes toward the U.S. than exist in other Islamic countries in the region, Jawad said.
The Afghan security forces are expected to grow to 352,000 later this year, while coalition forces plan to withdraw combat troops by 2014.
The number of “green-on-blue,” or insider, attacks is still at a “relatively low level,” amounting to 40 deaths this year among about 130,000 coalition troops, Cordesman said. Still the attacks spawn fear and widespread media coverage that bolster the goal of insurgents.
“If all you have to do is create a green-on-blue incident, you achieve political impact out of any proportion,” he said.
To contact the reporters on this story: David Lerman in Washington at dlerman1@bloomberg.net; Indira A.R. Lakshmanan in Washington at ilakshmanan@bloomberg.net
What The Future Holds For The 'Kids Of Kabul'
NPR August 20, 2012
Afghanistan's decade-long insurgency has largely been fought by men. But in 2011, author Deborah Ellis went to Kabul to ask, how do Afghanistan's children see their future? She tries to answer that question in her recently released book, Kids of Kabul: Living Bravely Through a Never-Ending War. Ellis speaks with guest host Viviana Hurtado.
VIVIANA HURTADO, HOST:
This is TELL ME MORE from NPR News. I'm Viviana Hurtado. Michel Martin is away. Coming up, his musical career brought him success and celebrity in South Africa, but Sipho Hotstix Mabuse always felt something was missing. We hear more about his decision to go back to school at age 60.
But, first, Afghanistan's government marked the country's independence day this weekend, but it's the ongoing violence in the country that's dominating the news. Top U.S. military officials met in Afghanistan today to figure out how to stop so-called insider attacks where western-trained Afghan forces have been turning their guns on American troops.
Throughout the war, Afghan civilians have also been targeted. Afghan women and children have been particularly vulnerable. Writer Deborah Ellis has been speaking with Afghan women and children for decades and she chronicles their stories in the book, "Kids of Kabul: Living Bravely Through a Never-Ending War." She joins us now.
Welcome.
DEBORAH ELLIS: Hi. It's good to be here.
HURTADO: It's great to have you, Deborah. Can you tell us, what is it about Afghanistan, especially its women and children, that has caught your attention since the '90s?
ELLIS: As a woman in Canada, I get to do whatever I want to do and I'm used to that. I'm used to not having my government tell me my life is going to be restricted because I'm female. And when the news of the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan hit the papers in Toronto, I started to think about the terrible crimes that were being committed against women and how in the world would I survive under similar circumstances? So that's why I initially traveled to the refugee camps to meet with these women and, in the course of meeting with them, I learned all kinds of stories of survival and I learned, also, about the lives of children in Afghanistan.
HURTADO: Can you talk a little bit about how, in speaking with women, they were just tied together? Stories of women and stories of children.
ELLIS: When I was talking to one group, the other group would be there and, in the refugee camps, there wasn't a whole lot for children to do and I was kind of the entertainment and they would follow me around and laugh at me and it was quite lovely. But, in the midst of all that, I got to hear from them about what their life was like living under the warzone and living under the Taliban and I heard incredible stories of how these children - girls would transform themselves into boys, cutting off their hair, putting on boys' clothing and then going out into the streets of the city to earn money any way that they could because, if they didn't do this, their families were going to starve.
HURTADO: So many of these kids - they just want to study. They want to be able to study continuously, without interruption, but getting an education is something that's been really hard for girls in Afghanistan, certainly, over the years.
Can you tell us about the changes and opportunities you observed this time around for Afghan students since the fall of the Taliban?
ELLIS: There's been a lot of emphasis put on trying to rebuild or build a new education system in Afghanistan and there have been great strides that have been made toward that. Literacy levels for women - they still hover around 13 percent, so very few women still have access to being able to learn. It isn't a simple thing. You don't just build a school and provide books and then things magically work out. There's...
HURTADO: You need to have, for example, female teachers.
ELLIS: You need female teachers. A lot of parents don't want their daughters to be educated by men and women are not able to travel on their own with any degree of security. It becomes like a very difficult challenge to work out all the pieces of the puzzle.
HURTADO: Some of the larger issues, too, like the violence and the current political situation - how does that impact the students' access to education?
ELLIS: A lot of it is around corruption. Schools get built with shoddy materials. They fall apart. Another is the sheer poverty that war has contributed to, so for example, if a farmer has to borrow money to plant his crops and the crops fail and he can't repay his debt, girls end up being used as the repayment.
HURTADO: You spoke with dozens of Afghan children, but one that stood out was the story of a teenage girl who you meet in prison for running away. Can you tell us about her?
ELLIS: Yeah. The prison for girls was filled with girls who had simply run away from forced marriages and forced marriage in Afghanistan today is supposed to be against the law. There are rights under the constitution that are supposed to protect girls and this girl had learned about these rights in school. So, when her father told her, well, I've just sold you into marriage to a very old man, she was understandably upset. She even went to the local representative of the Ministry of Women's Affairs and nobody could help her.
So she was listening to the radio and there was a young man who played songs and people could call in with their favorite song and they got to talking off the radio and he said, well, I can help you. And so they met up and he took her away. They were spotted in a restaurant. The manager called the police and they were arrested and the girl is now facing seven years in prison and she told me that she didn't like being in prison, but at least she had a better life in prison because, if she had gotten married, her education would be done, and in the prison they have a teacher who comes in and gives them classes for a couple of hours a day. But the problem that she was worried about was not her life in prison, but it was what would happen to her after her sentence was over. She didn't know where she was going to go.
HURTADO: If you're just, you're listening to TELL ME MORE from NPR News. I'm Viviana Hurtado. We're speaking with journalist and author Deborah Ellis about her latest book chronicling the lives of Afghan children. It's called "Kids of Kabul."
Deborah, despite the circumstances, these kids have hope.
ELLIS: Mm-hmm.
HURTADO: And I think that's one of the things that made my heart cheer as I was reading it.
ELLIS: Yeah.
HURTADO: Another story that I just loved is Sara's. She comes from a long line of business women.
ELLIS: Mm-hmm.
HURTADO: Can you tell us about her?
ELLIS: Yeah. This is a really neat family. This is a group of women where the whole family had been involved in businesses of one kind or another. And they went through the period of the Taliban and they got exiled into Pakistan, and throughout that whole time the mother, who's a very enterprising woman, found ways to work and support her family doing all kinds of businesses. So the grandmother now works in a jewelry cooperative making jewelry with other old widows who have no other means of income. The mother works with 300 women farmers from all around Afghanistan, and the mother gathers up the crops and finds ways to market them so that these women have an independent kind of an income during. And the 17-year-old girl Sara, is already thinking of new ways that she can go into business as well so that she can have money for herself and decide her own destiny.
HURTADO: And I was going to ask if you can shed some light Deborah, how rare is the example of Sara's family, where women rule and are financially independent?
ELLIS: It's incredibly rare. And that other stories of widows who did not have any financial means whose whatever financial means they had that was taken from them by the male members of their families. So widows who were forced to live at their husband's brother's place and the kids would tell me about how awful it was there and they just wanted to be able to go to school, graduate, get a good job and get their mother out of that situation. And that was their whole hope.
HURTADO: A lot of the students you spoke to said they're just not sure if their school is going to be around tomorrow. It's just a very tenuous situation, real touch and go. So how Deborah, do these students stay motivated when there's so much uncertainty?
ELLIS: It's pretty easy for them to see the results of not getting an education, so that motivation is just a daily part of their life. Part of the obstacles so, is the ongoing violence. There have been a lot of teachers assassinated, schools are being blown up, girls are harassed and in some cases, attacked on their way to school. Even if the girls are able to get an education, they can dream big, they can think about how they want to become a member of parliament because they are now women members of parliament in Afghanistan, nobody is really sure how long everything is going to last. So, like, when girls in Canada dream about becoming members of parliament, they have a pretty good expectation that parliament is going to be around for them when they graduate. There is no such expectation in Afghanistan. It's all still hope and wanting it but not really sure if it's going to be around.
HURTADO: What do you want your readers, Deborah, to take away from this book?
ELLIS: I'd like them to think about the fact that these are great people, great, courageous, amazing kids doing really incredible things with really difficult circumstances. I want them to think about how they and we would react given the same set of circumstances, and ultimately think about how we are more alike than we are different.
HURTADO: Deborah Ellis is the author of "Kids of Kabul: Living Bravely Through a Never-Ending War." She's also the writer of the popular children's novel series "The Breadwinner." And she joined us from the CBC studios in Toronto.
Thank you, Deborah.
ELLIS: Thank you very much.
Indian consortium to bid for just a single copper mine in Afghanistan
The Hindu By Indrani Dutta August 21, 2012
KOLKATA - Shaida, located in Herat province, scored over the other areas mainly in terms of its location advantage
A consortium of Indian companies, which has joined the global race for acquiring copper deposits in Afghanistan, has decided to bid for only one area against the four that are on offer.
“During the due diligence, we found that it would be prudent to choose only one mining area, Shaida”, chief executive of one of the consortium members told The Hindu. Gold and copper deposits spread over four areas are put on the block by the Afghanistan government, and the bids for two were open last week.
Shaida, located in Herat province in West Afghanistan, scored over the other areas mainly in terms of its location advantage. This area is close to Chabahar Port of Iran, and is only 30 km off a highway.
Four other bidders are believed to be in the race for taking over these mines. The members of Indian consortium include SAIL, HCL, Nalco, Jindal Steel and Monnet Ispat. SAIL leads the consortium with a 26 per cent stake followed by Hindustan Copper. However, enquiries revealed that this holding pattern may have to be re-looked at in case the consortium wins the bid. The Ministry of Mines of Afghanistan had floated the bids for exploration and exploitation of the licence areas through four tenders seeking private participation to exploit the strife-torn country’s rich mineral reserves.
These were Badakhshan (gold), Zarkashan (copper/gold), Balkhab and Shaida (both copper). The Afghanistan Mines Ministry said on its site that the tender process for each project was expected to culminate in the granting of an exploration licence, and, subject to conditions, would lead to the granting of requisite exploration licence. Canaccord Genuity, SRK Consulting and Mayer Brown are acting as transaction advisers to the Afghan Ministry in relation to the tenders for the projects. Mineralisation was identified at the Shaida mine during exploration by the erstwhile Soviets in 1971-72.
Security
The Afghanistan Government has sought to assure prospective investors about the security of their investments saying that these four areas were offered in view of their drill-ready position and ‘relative security’ of the area. It also said that a mines protection unit hads been raised to specially address the issue of safety in mines. A1,500-strong personnel was active in the Aynak Copper Mine site.
www.afghanistannewscenter.com