The Sandbox and Areas Reports Thread August 2009
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Articles found August 1, 2009
Small unit left to fend for itself in Afghanistan
Article Link
By HAL BERNTON and CHERYL PHILLIPS The Seattle Times
In the days before one of the fiercest battles in America's eight-year war in Afghanistan, Army Capt. Benjamin Pry argued for more surveillance flights to help his beleaguered unit of fewer than 50 soldiers.
Since moving into a new outpost on July 8, 2008, they had struggled with shortages of water, fuel, food and heavy machinery to help defend against an enemy attack that they believed would eventually come. Lacking excavating equipment, the troops dug fortifications by scraping the rocky soil with spades and bare hands.
Then on July 12, headquarters commanders diverted drones - remotely operated planes outfitted with cameras to spot enemy movements - to another area. Pry argued so hard to undo that decision that he said he breached professional etiquette. Still, he was unsuccessful.
"We had no support from brigade, division or theater level assets at the time," Pry told Army historians in a study obtained by The Seattle Times.
That study, written by historian Douglas Cubbison of the U.S. Army Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., documented missteps that preceded some of the bloodiest combat to date for American troops in the Afghanistan war.
Early in the morning of July 13, the outpost at the village of Wanat came under assault from some 200 enemy troops. The attack claimed the lives of nine Army soldiers - including Cpl. Jason Bogar, 25, of Seattle - and wounded 27 others, precipitating the withdrawal of U.S. troops from a valley in eastern Afghanistan.
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Take back KBR bonuses, senators urge Pentagon
updated 7:42 p.m. EDT, Fri July 31, 2009
Article Link
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Two Democratic senators called on the Pentagon to take back more than $83 million in bonuses paid to military contractor KBR after a Defense Department report criticized its electrical work on U.S. bases overseas.
"I want them to tell us on what basis can they possibly continue to justify having paid $83 million of the taxpayers' money for shoddy work that resulted in risk to our soldiers," Sen. Byron Dorgan of North Dakota told reporters Friday.
Dorgan said he and Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania are pressing Defense Department officials to reclaim $83.4 million in bonus payments it awarded KBR for its work in Iraq.
Based on the findings of a report issued Monday by the Defense Department's inspector general on the electrocution deaths of U.S. troops in Iraq, Casey said the Pentagon should fine KBR and "make it hurt and make it count."
"These are just absolutely stunning conclusions about failures by KBR as well as failures by our government," Casey said.
The Houston,Texas-based military contractor defended its performance, saying Friday that Dorgan and Casey "are wrong in their assertion that we have been derelict in our duties to protect the troops."
"The safety and security of all employees and those the company serves remains KBR's top priority," KBR spokeswoman Sarah Engdahl said in a statement.
More on link
Small unit left to fend for itself in Afghanistan
Article Link
By HAL BERNTON and CHERYL PHILLIPS The Seattle Times
In the days before one of the fiercest battles in America's eight-year war in Afghanistan, Army Capt. Benjamin Pry argued for more surveillance flights to help his beleaguered unit of fewer than 50 soldiers.
Since moving into a new outpost on July 8, 2008, they had struggled with shortages of water, fuel, food and heavy machinery to help defend against an enemy attack that they believed would eventually come. Lacking excavating equipment, the troops dug fortifications by scraping the rocky soil with spades and bare hands.
Then on July 12, headquarters commanders diverted drones - remotely operated planes outfitted with cameras to spot enemy movements - to another area. Pry argued so hard to undo that decision that he said he breached professional etiquette. Still, he was unsuccessful.
"We had no support from brigade, division or theater level assets at the time," Pry told Army historians in a study obtained by The Seattle Times.
That study, written by historian Douglas Cubbison of the U.S. Army Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., documented missteps that preceded some of the bloodiest combat to date for American troops in the Afghanistan war.
Early in the morning of July 13, the outpost at the village of Wanat came under assault from some 200 enemy troops. The attack claimed the lives of nine Army soldiers - including Cpl. Jason Bogar, 25, of Seattle - and wounded 27 others, precipitating the withdrawal of U.S. troops from a valley in eastern Afghanistan.
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Take back KBR bonuses, senators urge Pentagon
updated 7:42 p.m. EDT, Fri July 31, 2009
Article Link
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Two Democratic senators called on the Pentagon to take back more than $83 million in bonuses paid to military contractor KBR after a Defense Department report criticized its electrical work on U.S. bases overseas.
"I want them to tell us on what basis can they possibly continue to justify having paid $83 million of the taxpayers' money for shoddy work that resulted in risk to our soldiers," Sen. Byron Dorgan of North Dakota told reporters Friday.
Dorgan said he and Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania are pressing Defense Department officials to reclaim $83.4 million in bonus payments it awarded KBR for its work in Iraq.
Based on the findings of a report issued Monday by the Defense Department's inspector general on the electrocution deaths of U.S. troops in Iraq, Casey said the Pentagon should fine KBR and "make it hurt and make it count."
"These are just absolutely stunning conclusions about failures by KBR as well as failures by our government," Casey said.
The Houston,Texas-based military contractor defended its performance, saying Friday that Dorgan and Casey "are wrong in their assertion that we have been derelict in our duties to protect the troops."
"The safety and security of all employees and those the company serves remains KBR's top priority," KBR spokeswoman Sarah Engdahl said in a statement.
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- Reaction score
- 0
- Points
- 360
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090801/ap_on_re_as/as_afghanistan
Articles found August 2, 2009
Afghanistan Goes Digital With Link to Internet
The Link to the Internet Will Bring More Opportunities, But Security Has Slowed Its Progress
By BEN ARNOLDY KABUL, Afghanistan, August 1, 2009
Article Link
New underground wires in Afghanistan carry bits and bytes, not bomb blasts. The fiber-optic cables run to Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, linking Afghanistan by land to the global Internet for the first time.
Until last month, most Afghans could only surf the Web through satellite links to other nations. That's expensive, stunting Internet penetration to just 3 percent of the Afghan population.
Afghan officials say the country's expanding fiber-optic network will drive down prices for Internet services dramatically, extending access to ordinary Afghans and potentially expanding business and educational opportunities in a country where both are in short supply.
End
UK in Afghanistan for decades, says our man in Washington
Diplomat's warning comes as MPs say Britain has lost sight of its original security objectives
By Brian Brady and Jane Merrick Sunday, 2 August 2009
Article Link
Britain must concentrate all its efforts on the military campaign to conquer the Taliban as its attempts to achieve a wide-ranging "rescue" of Afghanistan have failed miserably, an influential committee of MPs warns today.
A report on the Afghan campaign from the Foreign Affairs Committee claims that British politicians have allowed "mission creep" to interfere with the original objectives set eight years ago, but they have still failed to pull off wider goals including stamping out the opium trade. Instead, the MPs insist, the UK should target its resources on "one priority, namely security" and allow the international community to spearhead the broader effort to rebuild Afghanistan.
The dismal verdict on the UK's all-round performance in Afghanistan came as Britain's most senior diplomat warned that Britain's involvement in the country will last for "decades". Sir Nigel Sheinwald, British ambassador to Washington, painted a bleak future for British forces in the week that the Panther's Claw operation in Helmand was declared a success. In an intervention laying out the longest official timetable yet seen for Britain's commitment to Afghanistan, he predicted that the tide would turn against the Taliban "over the next year or so" rather than in a matter of weeks.
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Dannatt called for Challenger tanks two years ago
By Andrew Johnson Sunday, 2 August 2009
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The head of the Army, General Sir Richard Dannatt, asked the Ministry of Defence to deploy Challenger Two tanks – acknowledged as one of the best weapons in Britain's armoury – in Afghanistan two years ago, military sources have claimed. Despite his request, the Government decided the terrain in Afghanistan was not suitable for the Challenger.
It has also emerged that a scheme launched in March last year to provide more helicopters to Afghanistan will result in just three being sent to help hard-pushed British troops, but not until the end of this year.
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Pashtun ethnic agenda at heart of Afghan war
By KATHY GANNON (AP) – 19 hours ago
Article Link
KABUL — In a recent debate leading up to the presidential elections here, the first question was not about terrorism, or violence, or even opium. It was about how candidates viewed a jagged line casually drawn on a map 115 years ago by British colonial rulers.
For the West, this border separates Afghanistan from Pakistan, and it is a source of great frustration that neither country seems able or even willing to enforce it. But for many Pashtuns, the most powerful ethnic tribe here, the line runs through what they call "Pashtunistan" and is no more legitimate than the border that once divided East and West Germany.
The Pashtuns and their ethnic agenda are in many ways at the center of the upcoming elections and the armed conflicts in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. Like the Pashtun-dominated Taliban, many Pashtuns who have not taken up arms still share the dream of a united Pashtunistan. This dream grows stronger as the Pashtuns on both sides of the border get more disgruntled.
If the Pashtuns vote in large numbers in the Aug. 20 election, it will help current president Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun. If their turnout is low, possibly because of violence or Taliban threats, his rival, former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah, stands a better chance. Although half-Pashtun, Abdullah is identified with the ethnic Tajiks, and some analysts are concerned that Pashtuns would not accept his victory.
More on link
Afghanistan Goes Digital With Link to Internet
The Link to the Internet Will Bring More Opportunities, But Security Has Slowed Its Progress
By BEN ARNOLDY KABUL, Afghanistan, August 1, 2009
Article Link
New underground wires in Afghanistan carry bits and bytes, not bomb blasts. The fiber-optic cables run to Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, linking Afghanistan by land to the global Internet for the first time.
Until last month, most Afghans could only surf the Web through satellite links to other nations. That's expensive, stunting Internet penetration to just 3 percent of the Afghan population.
Afghan officials say the country's expanding fiber-optic network will drive down prices for Internet services dramatically, extending access to ordinary Afghans and potentially expanding business and educational opportunities in a country where both are in short supply.
End
UK in Afghanistan for decades, says our man in Washington
Diplomat's warning comes as MPs say Britain has lost sight of its original security objectives
By Brian Brady and Jane Merrick Sunday, 2 August 2009
Article Link
Britain must concentrate all its efforts on the military campaign to conquer the Taliban as its attempts to achieve a wide-ranging "rescue" of Afghanistan have failed miserably, an influential committee of MPs warns today.
A report on the Afghan campaign from the Foreign Affairs Committee claims that British politicians have allowed "mission creep" to interfere with the original objectives set eight years ago, but they have still failed to pull off wider goals including stamping out the opium trade. Instead, the MPs insist, the UK should target its resources on "one priority, namely security" and allow the international community to spearhead the broader effort to rebuild Afghanistan.
The dismal verdict on the UK's all-round performance in Afghanistan came as Britain's most senior diplomat warned that Britain's involvement in the country will last for "decades". Sir Nigel Sheinwald, British ambassador to Washington, painted a bleak future for British forces in the week that the Panther's Claw operation in Helmand was declared a success. In an intervention laying out the longest official timetable yet seen for Britain's commitment to Afghanistan, he predicted that the tide would turn against the Taliban "over the next year or so" rather than in a matter of weeks.
More on link
Dannatt called for Challenger tanks two years ago
By Andrew Johnson Sunday, 2 August 2009
Article Link
The head of the Army, General Sir Richard Dannatt, asked the Ministry of Defence to deploy Challenger Two tanks – acknowledged as one of the best weapons in Britain's armoury – in Afghanistan two years ago, military sources have claimed. Despite his request, the Government decided the terrain in Afghanistan was not suitable for the Challenger.
It has also emerged that a scheme launched in March last year to provide more helicopters to Afghanistan will result in just three being sent to help hard-pushed British troops, but not until the end of this year.
More on link
Pashtun ethnic agenda at heart of Afghan war
By KATHY GANNON (AP) – 19 hours ago
Article Link
KABUL — In a recent debate leading up to the presidential elections here, the first question was not about terrorism, or violence, or even opium. It was about how candidates viewed a jagged line casually drawn on a map 115 years ago by British colonial rulers.
For the West, this border separates Afghanistan from Pakistan, and it is a source of great frustration that neither country seems able or even willing to enforce it. But for many Pashtuns, the most powerful ethnic tribe here, the line runs through what they call "Pashtunistan" and is no more legitimate than the border that once divided East and West Germany.
The Pashtuns and their ethnic agenda are in many ways at the center of the upcoming elections and the armed conflicts in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. Like the Pashtun-dominated Taliban, many Pashtuns who have not taken up arms still share the dream of a united Pashtunistan. This dream grows stronger as the Pashtuns on both sides of the border get more disgruntled.
If the Pashtuns vote in large numbers in the Aug. 20 election, it will help current president Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun. If their turnout is low, possibly because of violence or Taliban threats, his rival, former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah, stands a better chance. Although half-Pashtun, Abdullah is identified with the ethnic Tajiks, and some analysts are concerned that Pashtuns would not accept his victory.
More on link
- Reaction score
- 0
- Points
- 360
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/reuters/090802/world/international_us_afghanistan
Articles found August 4, 2009
Rocket attacks on Afghan capital, a red alert for NATO
www.chinaview.cn 2009-08-04 20:05:21 by Abdul Haleem
Article Link
KABUL, Aug. 4 (Xinhua) -- After years of living in peace, the residents of Afghan capital Kabul were shocked in bed as seven rockets fired by militants hit residential areas early Tuesday morning.
The rockets, which according to Interior Ministry, wounded at least two civilians and were fired from Deh Sabz area, some 15 km north of capital city, speak of influencing Taliban clouting at the gates of war-torn capital while the country is going towards elections.
This is the first time after almost one year that the fortified Afghan capital came under rocket attacks reminding the bitter factional fighting decades ago.
Situated between Kabul and Bagram, the headquarters of U.S.-led Coalition forces in Afghanistan, Deh Sabz's muddy hilltops are often frequented by U.S. military convoys.
Bagram, 50 km north of Kabul, has several times come under Taliban attacks but Tuesday morning's rocket attacks can be interpreted as a warning shoot ahead of August 20 presidential election.
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Uzbekistan Raps Plan For New Russia Military Base
By REUTERS Filed at 3:29 a.m. ET August 4, 2009
Article Link
ALMATY (Reuters) - Russia's plan to open a second military base in Kyrgyzstan would destabilise the wider Central Asian region, Uzbekistan said late on Monday, exposing fresh divisions between Moscow and its ex-Soviet allies.
Kyrgyzstan this month gave the go-ahead to Moscow's second base on its territory, close to the southern border with Uzbekistan. The country had earlier told the United States it could keep open its own military air base in the country.
"Uzbekistan sees no necessity... in implementing the plans to place an additional group of Russian military forces in Kyrgyzstan's south," Jahon news agency, run by Uzbekistan's Foreign Ministry, wrote.
It said the Russian military presence could provoke further "militarisation" and ethnic conflicts. It could also lead to a resurgence of "radical extremist" forces who may destabilise the situation in the whole region, Jahon said.
In May, Uzbekistan blamed Islamist rebels for attacks in the town of Khanabad, close to the Uzbek-Kyrgyz border, that killed one policeman. Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan -- which borders Afghanistan -- have also reported a string of gun fights with what they called militants linked to the Taliban.
More on link
Local pinup project aims to boost military morale
Photo shoots have been held in London, Chatham and Kitchener
By JOHN MINER
Article Link
The photographs of smiling women holding wrenches, rolling tires or showering with strategically located soap suds have already made it to the front lines with Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan.
Londoner Jennifer Merriam would like to send reinforcements.
"It is supposed to be a morale booster for them," said Merriam.
Two years ago, Merriam teamed up with Donna and Bryce Giroux to launch Pin Ups for Troops, an idea adapted from a Facebook project started by a woman in Alberta.
The trio thought many soldiers wouldn't have access to the social networking site, so they created postcard-size photos that resemble pinup pictures popular in the Second World War.
Photo shoots have been held in London, Chatham and Kitchener. The latest session in Kitchener was for male models only.
"There are ladies in the troops, so we are trying to cover all the bases. We are not trying to be biased against anybody," said Donna Giroux.
The group has shipped more than 3,000 postcards to troops in Afghanistan. They've received back photos of soldiers with the postcards on their helmets and armoured vehicles.
To raise money so they can print and send more postcard packages, the London pinup project is holding a burlesque show Aug. 15 at Call the Office. Seven performers have signed up.
"We are looking at a traditional-style burlesque rather than more modern burlesque. More modern burlesque is just glorified strip-tease," said Bryce Giroux.
More on link
Soldier court-martialled for Afghanistan refusal
(AFP) – 1 day ago
Article Link
LONDON — A soldier faced his court-martial Monday for refusing to return to Afghanistan as the armed forces minister insisted that the fight against the Taliban was improving Afghan lives.
Lance Corporal Joe Glenton, from the Royal Logistic Corps, is the first soldier to have very publicly deserted rather than take up arms again in Afghanistan.
His trial comes as the surging British death toll in Afghanistan raises questions about Britain's involvement in the conflict.
Glenton wore military fatigues for a preliminary hearing at a military court in Bulford Camp near Salisbury in southwest England. His lawyer indicated that he would plead not guilty.
Judge Advocate Alastair McGrigor adjourned the case for another preliminary hearing on September 4. Glenton faces a maximum of two years' imprisonment.
The lance corporal, who did not speak at the hearing, was to return to duties with his regiment.
The 27-year-old on Thursday handed in a letter to Prime Minister Gordon Brown's office calling for troops to be withdrawn from Afghanistan, saying Britain's mission there would fail.
More on link
Rocket attacks on Afghan capital, a red alert for NATO
www.chinaview.cn 2009-08-04 20:05:21 by Abdul Haleem
Article Link
KABUL, Aug. 4 (Xinhua) -- After years of living in peace, the residents of Afghan capital Kabul were shocked in bed as seven rockets fired by militants hit residential areas early Tuesday morning.
The rockets, which according to Interior Ministry, wounded at least two civilians and were fired from Deh Sabz area, some 15 km north of capital city, speak of influencing Taliban clouting at the gates of war-torn capital while the country is going towards elections.
This is the first time after almost one year that the fortified Afghan capital came under rocket attacks reminding the bitter factional fighting decades ago.
Situated between Kabul and Bagram, the headquarters of U.S.-led Coalition forces in Afghanistan, Deh Sabz's muddy hilltops are often frequented by U.S. military convoys.
Bagram, 50 km north of Kabul, has several times come under Taliban attacks but Tuesday morning's rocket attacks can be interpreted as a warning shoot ahead of August 20 presidential election.
More on link
Uzbekistan Raps Plan For New Russia Military Base
By REUTERS Filed at 3:29 a.m. ET August 4, 2009
Article Link
ALMATY (Reuters) - Russia's plan to open a second military base in Kyrgyzstan would destabilise the wider Central Asian region, Uzbekistan said late on Monday, exposing fresh divisions between Moscow and its ex-Soviet allies.
Kyrgyzstan this month gave the go-ahead to Moscow's second base on its territory, close to the southern border with Uzbekistan. The country had earlier told the United States it could keep open its own military air base in the country.
"Uzbekistan sees no necessity... in implementing the plans to place an additional group of Russian military forces in Kyrgyzstan's south," Jahon news agency, run by Uzbekistan's Foreign Ministry, wrote.
It said the Russian military presence could provoke further "militarisation" and ethnic conflicts. It could also lead to a resurgence of "radical extremist" forces who may destabilise the situation in the whole region, Jahon said.
In May, Uzbekistan blamed Islamist rebels for attacks in the town of Khanabad, close to the Uzbek-Kyrgyz border, that killed one policeman. Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan -- which borders Afghanistan -- have also reported a string of gun fights with what they called militants linked to the Taliban.
More on link
Local pinup project aims to boost military morale
Photo shoots have been held in London, Chatham and Kitchener
By JOHN MINER
Article Link
The photographs of smiling women holding wrenches, rolling tires or showering with strategically located soap suds have already made it to the front lines with Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan.
Londoner Jennifer Merriam would like to send reinforcements.
"It is supposed to be a morale booster for them," said Merriam.
Two years ago, Merriam teamed up with Donna and Bryce Giroux to launch Pin Ups for Troops, an idea adapted from a Facebook project started by a woman in Alberta.
The trio thought many soldiers wouldn't have access to the social networking site, so they created postcard-size photos that resemble pinup pictures popular in the Second World War.
Photo shoots have been held in London, Chatham and Kitchener. The latest session in Kitchener was for male models only.
"There are ladies in the troops, so we are trying to cover all the bases. We are not trying to be biased against anybody," said Donna Giroux.
The group has shipped more than 3,000 postcards to troops in Afghanistan. They've received back photos of soldiers with the postcards on their helmets and armoured vehicles.
To raise money so they can print and send more postcard packages, the London pinup project is holding a burlesque show Aug. 15 at Call the Office. Seven performers have signed up.
"We are looking at a traditional-style burlesque rather than more modern burlesque. More modern burlesque is just glorified strip-tease," said Bryce Giroux.
More on link
Soldier court-martialled for Afghanistan refusal
(AFP) – 1 day ago
Article Link
LONDON — A soldier faced his court-martial Monday for refusing to return to Afghanistan as the armed forces minister insisted that the fight against the Taliban was improving Afghan lives.
Lance Corporal Joe Glenton, from the Royal Logistic Corps, is the first soldier to have very publicly deserted rather than take up arms again in Afghanistan.
His trial comes as the surging British death toll in Afghanistan raises questions about Britain's involvement in the conflict.
Glenton wore military fatigues for a preliminary hearing at a military court in Bulford Camp near Salisbury in southwest England. His lawyer indicated that he would plead not guilty.
Judge Advocate Alastair McGrigor adjourned the case for another preliminary hearing on September 4. Glenton faces a maximum of two years' imprisonment.
The lance corporal, who did not speak at the hearing, was to return to duties with his regiment.
The 27-year-old on Thursday handed in a letter to Prime Minister Gordon Brown's office calling for troops to be withdrawn from Afghanistan, saying Britain's mission there would fail.
More on link
- Reaction score
- 5,945
- Points
- 1,260
Articles found August 6, 2009
From fighting, to faith in the future
Omar El Akkad Kandahar, Afghanistan Thursday, Aug. 06, 2009 12:06PM EDT
Article Link
One day recently a Canadian military convoy showed up at Kandahar's water-treatment plant. The soldiers were supposedly there to talk about fixing a couple of ancient water trucks.
But that wasn't the only problem facing the decrepit, cobweb-laced plant.
Its director, Adbul Wahab Hamaras, received the soldiers from the Civil-Military Co-operation, or CIMIC, team in his office, shaded from the sun by plywood panels because the roof had caved in after militants bombed the provincial council building next door.
Sixty-three people are supposed to work at the plant, but salaries haven't come in from the Afghan government, so the number of staff is closer to 45. The engineer who was supposed to teach the staff how to chlorinate water is dead, and attempts to hire a geologist have been stymied by the worsening violence. As Mr. Hamaras put it: “They all like to live.”
Scenes such as this are the new reality of the Canadian mission in Kandahar. As the Canadian Forces and the Taliban both opt to do less face-to-face fighting, Canada's role is shifting towards a joint civil-military effort aimed at winning the hearts and minds of Afghans through the digging of wells, building of bridges and allocation of micro-grants.
More on link
Soldier Who Didn’t Obey Is Jailed
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.Published: August 5, 2009 Associated Press
Article Link
HOUSTON — A soldier at Fort Hood who fought his deployment to Afghanistan and stopped obeying orders was sentenced to a month in jail and demoted to private in a military court on Wednesday morning.
Victor Agosto, a 24-year-old signalman with the III Corps, ripped a patch showing his specialist rank off his uniform after an emotional hearing in front of an Army captain in which he had told the court he believed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan violated international law, his lawyer, James M. Branum, said. Later, about 20 antiwar protesters cheered Private Agosto as he was taken to jail, the lawyer said.
“He’s not opposed to all wars; he is opposed to this war, because it is not a war of self-defense,” Mr. Branum said.
Under a plea agreement, Private Agosto will be discharged after he serves his time in jail in Belton, Tex., Mr. Branum said.
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Most fighting with Taliban in Afghanistan 'could change sides'
Article Link
As many as two-thirds of those fighting with the Taliban could be persuaded to change sides, Mark Sedwill, Britain's ambassador to Afghanistan, said today.
He expressed cautious optimism about the conduct of the presidential elections later this month, saying that about 70% of the eligible population, even in Helmand, the most violent province, "will be able to vote".
However, he said the turnout was likely to be lower than in the last presidential election, in 2004, and British officials conceded that one of the problems was that it was difficult to know the number of potential voters in any given area, let alone the total population of the country.
Sedwill was speaking by video link from Kabul to a Foreign Office press conference at which he was asked about recent comments by the foreign secretary, David Miliband, that reconciliation could involve speaking to the "moderate" Taliban.
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Armoured cars destined for Afghanistan held in Dubai 'due to secrecy'
• Lack of RAF transport planes kept Ridgback carriers in limbo
• MoD says delivery of new vehicles still on schedule
Richard Norton-Taylor guardian.co.uk, Thursday 6 August 2009 12.30 BST
Article Link
The Viking vehicle, currently on operations in Afghanistan, has been criticised as too ineffective against mines and roadside bombs. Photograph: Andrew Linnett/MoD/PA
The secrecy surrounding the armour of new Ridgback armoured vehicles destined for British troops in Afghanistan prevented them from being deployed, defence officials said yesterday.
Nine of the armoured vehicles, designed to withstand mines and roadside bombs, have been held back at Dubai due to a lack of RAF C-17 transport planes to deliver them. Civilian aircraft could not be contracted because the Ridgback's armour plating is classified.
Of the nine which have been in Dubai since 16 July, six were flown to Afghanistan over the past few days, two left only yesterday, with the remaining vehicle to be delivered over the weekend, defence officials said.
An MoD spokesman said: "These vehicles were never destined for use by 19 Brigade, who do not have enough trained drivers to operate them. This is because the vehicles were only delivered to the army in May – a month after the brigade deployed."
He added: "They are being shipped in time for the arrival of their successor formation, 11 Light Brigade, which has spent all summer training on the new vehicles. Training is not discretionary. These are complex pieces of equipment that will operate in an extremely demanding and dangerous environment. We will not put lives at risk by asking soldiers to drive these vehicles without the necessary training."
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From fighting, to faith in the future
Omar El Akkad Kandahar, Afghanistan Thursday, Aug. 06, 2009 12:06PM EDT
Article Link
One day recently a Canadian military convoy showed up at Kandahar's water-treatment plant. The soldiers were supposedly there to talk about fixing a couple of ancient water trucks.
But that wasn't the only problem facing the decrepit, cobweb-laced plant.
Its director, Adbul Wahab Hamaras, received the soldiers from the Civil-Military Co-operation, or CIMIC, team in his office, shaded from the sun by plywood panels because the roof had caved in after militants bombed the provincial council building next door.
Sixty-three people are supposed to work at the plant, but salaries haven't come in from the Afghan government, so the number of staff is closer to 45. The engineer who was supposed to teach the staff how to chlorinate water is dead, and attempts to hire a geologist have been stymied by the worsening violence. As Mr. Hamaras put it: “They all like to live.”
Scenes such as this are the new reality of the Canadian mission in Kandahar. As the Canadian Forces and the Taliban both opt to do less face-to-face fighting, Canada's role is shifting towards a joint civil-military effort aimed at winning the hearts and minds of Afghans through the digging of wells, building of bridges and allocation of micro-grants.
More on link
Soldier Who Didn’t Obey Is Jailed
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.Published: August 5, 2009 Associated Press
Article Link
HOUSTON — A soldier at Fort Hood who fought his deployment to Afghanistan and stopped obeying orders was sentenced to a month in jail and demoted to private in a military court on Wednesday morning.
Victor Agosto, a 24-year-old signalman with the III Corps, ripped a patch showing his specialist rank off his uniform after an emotional hearing in front of an Army captain in which he had told the court he believed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan violated international law, his lawyer, James M. Branum, said. Later, about 20 antiwar protesters cheered Private Agosto as he was taken to jail, the lawyer said.
“He’s not opposed to all wars; he is opposed to this war, because it is not a war of self-defense,” Mr. Branum said.
Under a plea agreement, Private Agosto will be discharged after he serves his time in jail in Belton, Tex., Mr. Branum said.
More on link
Most fighting with Taliban in Afghanistan 'could change sides'
Article Link
As many as two-thirds of those fighting with the Taliban could be persuaded to change sides, Mark Sedwill, Britain's ambassador to Afghanistan, said today.
He expressed cautious optimism about the conduct of the presidential elections later this month, saying that about 70% of the eligible population, even in Helmand, the most violent province, "will be able to vote".
However, he said the turnout was likely to be lower than in the last presidential election, in 2004, and British officials conceded that one of the problems was that it was difficult to know the number of potential voters in any given area, let alone the total population of the country.
Sedwill was speaking by video link from Kabul to a Foreign Office press conference at which he was asked about recent comments by the foreign secretary, David Miliband, that reconciliation could involve speaking to the "moderate" Taliban.
More on link
Armoured cars destined for Afghanistan held in Dubai 'due to secrecy'
• Lack of RAF transport planes kept Ridgback carriers in limbo
• MoD says delivery of new vehicles still on schedule
Richard Norton-Taylor guardian.co.uk, Thursday 6 August 2009 12.30 BST
Article Link
The Viking vehicle, currently on operations in Afghanistan, has been criticised as too ineffective against mines and roadside bombs. Photograph: Andrew Linnett/MoD/PA
The secrecy surrounding the armour of new Ridgback armoured vehicles destined for British troops in Afghanistan prevented them from being deployed, defence officials said yesterday.
Nine of the armoured vehicles, designed to withstand mines and roadside bombs, have been held back at Dubai due to a lack of RAF C-17 transport planes to deliver them. Civilian aircraft could not be contracted because the Ridgback's armour plating is classified.
Of the nine which have been in Dubai since 16 July, six were flown to Afghanistan over the past few days, two left only yesterday, with the remaining vehicle to be delivered over the weekend, defence officials said.
An MoD spokesman said: "These vehicles were never destined for use by 19 Brigade, who do not have enough trained drivers to operate them. This is because the vehicles were only delivered to the army in May – a month after the brigade deployed."
He added: "They are being shipped in time for the arrival of their successor formation, 11 Light Brigade, which has spent all summer training on the new vehicles. Training is not discretionary. These are complex pieces of equipment that will operate in an extremely demanding and dangerous environment. We will not put lives at risk by asking soldiers to drive these vehicles without the necessary training."
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Articles found August 7, 2009
Canada rejects NATO call to stay in Afghanistan past 2011
(AFP) – 15 hours ago
Article Link
OTTAWA — Foreign Minister Lawrence Cannon reaffirmed Thursday Canada's 2011 exit from Afghanistan despite reported pleas from NATO's chief for an extension of Canada's deployment in the war-torn country.
"Our government is abiding by the motion passed in parliament in 2008 -- that is that our combat forces will leave by 2011," Cannon said.
Earlier, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen remarked while visiting a Canadian development project in Kandahar, in southern Afghanistan, that he would like to see Canada stay beyond 2011.
"Of course I'm not going to interfere with the domestic politics in individual allied nations, but seen from an alliance point of view, I would strongly regret if that became the final outcome of the Canadian considerations," he was quoted as saying by public broadcaster CBC.
"I would like to take this opportunity to express my strong appreciation of the significant Canadian contribution to our mission in Afghanistan," he said.
"At the end of the day, it is a question of our own security. We cannot allow Afghanistan, once again, to become a safe haven for terrorists. And I also think it is in Canada's interest to ensure a peaceful and stable Afghanistan."
More on link
FACTBOX-Facts about Pakistani Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud
Thu Aug 6, 2009 5:08pm EDT By Simon Cameron-Moore
Article Link
ISLAMABAD, Aug 7 (Reuters) - Pakistan's Interior Minister Rehman Malik says there is a strong likelihood that Pakistani Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud was killed along with his wife and bodyguards in a missile attack two days ago.
Following are some details about Mehsud.
-- In late 2007, Mehsud proclaimed himself leader of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), the Movement of Taliban of Pakistan, grouping 13 factions. Pakistani Taliban leaders have sworn allegiance to Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar.
-- Mehsud became Public Enemy Number One after launching suicide attacks in 2007 against the military and politicians.
-- The government of ex-president Pervez Musharraf and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency both saw Mehsud as chief suspect in the 2007 assassination of Benazir Bhutto. Mehsud denied it.
-- The United States had offered a reward of $5 million for information leading to Mehsud's location or arrest. The Pakistan government has put a $615,000 bounty on his head.
More on link
Challenger seen as gaining ground on Karzai as Afghan presidential election nears
JASON STRAZIUSO, Associated Press Writer 2:23 PM PDT, August 6, 2009
Article Link
AYNAK, Afghanistan (AP) — The energetic crowd roared and chanted his name as a beaming Abdullah Abdullah blamed the incumbent for Afghanistan's woes.
The former foreign minister has emerged as President Hamid Karzai's top challenger in this month's presidential election, appearing to close at least part of the gap in a race once considered to be a walkover for Karzai.
Few outside Abdullah's camp are willing to predict that the former ophthalmologist will beat Karzai in the Aug. 20 contest, though he will likely qualify for a top-two runoff if Karzai fails to win a majority of the votes. The last poll released in Afghanistan was conducted in May and showed Abdullah with only 7 percent support — a figure most observers consider outdated.
Some of Abdullah's rallies outside Kabul have attracted thousands, including one in the capital of Samangan province Wednesday during which he was repeatedly mobbed by supporters. Throngs of fans greeted him in a farmer's field where his Afghan Air Corps Mi-17 helicopter landed, along the streets of Aynak and at the site of his speech.
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Adviser: US has 2 more tough years in Afghanistan
By ANNE GEARAN (AP) – 15 hours ago
Article Link
WASHINGTON — An incoming adviser to the top U.S. general in Afghanistan predicted Thursday that the United States will see about two more years of heavy fighting and then either hand off to a much improved Afghan fighting force or "lose and go home."
David Kilcullen, a counterinsurgency expert who will assume a role as a senior adviser to Gen. Stanley McChrystal, has been highly critical of the war's management to date. He outlined a "best-case scenario" for a decade of further U.S. and NATO involvement in Afghanistan during an appearance at the U.S. Institute of Peace.
Under that timeline, the allied forces would turn the corner in those two years, followed by about three years of transition to a newly capable Afghan force and about five years of "overwatch."
"We'll fight for two years and then a successful transition, or we'll fight for two years and we'll lose and go home," Kilcullen said.
"I think we need to persist," he said, but with "some pretty significant limits on how much we're prepared to spend, how many troops we're prepared to send, how long we can do this for."
More on link
Afghans Pin Hopes on Mining As Taliban Attacks Intensify
Article Link By DEVON MAYLIE
Afghanistan's mining ministry, emboldened by its first copper tender and undeterred by escalating violence, is inviting more bids in hopes the industry can eventually drive economic growth and help bring security.
The rising number of attacks by Taliban insurgents around the country is already deterring investors with a high resistance to risk. In the latest in a series of incidents in which civilians were victims, roadside bombings in Southern and Western Afghanistan this week have killed at least 15 people. On Thursday, four U.S. service members were killed by a roadside bomb in the West, and five Afghan policemen were killed in the South.
For now, the government's focus is on the short term, and whether the country's Aug. 20 presidential election, which incumbent Hamid Karzai is expected to win, will bring about greater stability or heightened unrest. Afghanistan's economy is heavily reliant on foreign aid and, in addition to coping with violence, the country must deal with poppy cultivation and the opium trade, high unemployment, little infrastructure and corruption.
Yet it also has one of the largest untapped copper deposits in the world and substantial oil and gas deposits. "In five or six years we hope Afghanistan can stand on its own two feet through mineral reserves," said Minister of Mines and Industries Muhammad Ibrahim Adel, a Russian-educated engineer who was appointed by Mr. Karzai.
Mr. Adel's ministry has awarded one mining license so far -- in a Taliban stronghold.
More on link
Canada rejects NATO call to stay in Afghanistan past 2011
(AFP) – 15 hours ago
Article Link
OTTAWA — Foreign Minister Lawrence Cannon reaffirmed Thursday Canada's 2011 exit from Afghanistan despite reported pleas from NATO's chief for an extension of Canada's deployment in the war-torn country.
"Our government is abiding by the motion passed in parliament in 2008 -- that is that our combat forces will leave by 2011," Cannon said.
Earlier, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen remarked while visiting a Canadian development project in Kandahar, in southern Afghanistan, that he would like to see Canada stay beyond 2011.
"Of course I'm not going to interfere with the domestic politics in individual allied nations, but seen from an alliance point of view, I would strongly regret if that became the final outcome of the Canadian considerations," he was quoted as saying by public broadcaster CBC.
"I would like to take this opportunity to express my strong appreciation of the significant Canadian contribution to our mission in Afghanistan," he said.
"At the end of the day, it is a question of our own security. We cannot allow Afghanistan, once again, to become a safe haven for terrorists. And I also think it is in Canada's interest to ensure a peaceful and stable Afghanistan."
More on link
FACTBOX-Facts about Pakistani Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud
Thu Aug 6, 2009 5:08pm EDT By Simon Cameron-Moore
Article Link
ISLAMABAD, Aug 7 (Reuters) - Pakistan's Interior Minister Rehman Malik says there is a strong likelihood that Pakistani Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud was killed along with his wife and bodyguards in a missile attack two days ago.
Following are some details about Mehsud.
-- In late 2007, Mehsud proclaimed himself leader of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), the Movement of Taliban of Pakistan, grouping 13 factions. Pakistani Taliban leaders have sworn allegiance to Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar.
-- Mehsud became Public Enemy Number One after launching suicide attacks in 2007 against the military and politicians.
-- The government of ex-president Pervez Musharraf and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency both saw Mehsud as chief suspect in the 2007 assassination of Benazir Bhutto. Mehsud denied it.
-- The United States had offered a reward of $5 million for information leading to Mehsud's location or arrest. The Pakistan government has put a $615,000 bounty on his head.
More on link
Challenger seen as gaining ground on Karzai as Afghan presidential election nears
JASON STRAZIUSO, Associated Press Writer 2:23 PM PDT, August 6, 2009
Article Link
AYNAK, Afghanistan (AP) — The energetic crowd roared and chanted his name as a beaming Abdullah Abdullah blamed the incumbent for Afghanistan's woes.
The former foreign minister has emerged as President Hamid Karzai's top challenger in this month's presidential election, appearing to close at least part of the gap in a race once considered to be a walkover for Karzai.
Few outside Abdullah's camp are willing to predict that the former ophthalmologist will beat Karzai in the Aug. 20 contest, though he will likely qualify for a top-two runoff if Karzai fails to win a majority of the votes. The last poll released in Afghanistan was conducted in May and showed Abdullah with only 7 percent support — a figure most observers consider outdated.
Some of Abdullah's rallies outside Kabul have attracted thousands, including one in the capital of Samangan province Wednesday during which he was repeatedly mobbed by supporters. Throngs of fans greeted him in a farmer's field where his Afghan Air Corps Mi-17 helicopter landed, along the streets of Aynak and at the site of his speech.
More on link
Adviser: US has 2 more tough years in Afghanistan
By ANNE GEARAN (AP) – 15 hours ago
Article Link
WASHINGTON — An incoming adviser to the top U.S. general in Afghanistan predicted Thursday that the United States will see about two more years of heavy fighting and then either hand off to a much improved Afghan fighting force or "lose and go home."
David Kilcullen, a counterinsurgency expert who will assume a role as a senior adviser to Gen. Stanley McChrystal, has been highly critical of the war's management to date. He outlined a "best-case scenario" for a decade of further U.S. and NATO involvement in Afghanistan during an appearance at the U.S. Institute of Peace.
Under that timeline, the allied forces would turn the corner in those two years, followed by about three years of transition to a newly capable Afghan force and about five years of "overwatch."
"We'll fight for two years and then a successful transition, or we'll fight for two years and we'll lose and go home," Kilcullen said.
"I think we need to persist," he said, but with "some pretty significant limits on how much we're prepared to spend, how many troops we're prepared to send, how long we can do this for."
More on link
Afghans Pin Hopes on Mining As Taliban Attacks Intensify
Article Link By DEVON MAYLIE
Afghanistan's mining ministry, emboldened by its first copper tender and undeterred by escalating violence, is inviting more bids in hopes the industry can eventually drive economic growth and help bring security.
The rising number of attacks by Taliban insurgents around the country is already deterring investors with a high resistance to risk. In the latest in a series of incidents in which civilians were victims, roadside bombings in Southern and Western Afghanistan this week have killed at least 15 people. On Thursday, four U.S. service members were killed by a roadside bomb in the West, and five Afghan policemen were killed in the South.
For now, the government's focus is on the short term, and whether the country's Aug. 20 presidential election, which incumbent Hamid Karzai is expected to win, will bring about greater stability or heightened unrest. Afghanistan's economy is heavily reliant on foreign aid and, in addition to coping with violence, the country must deal with poppy cultivation and the opium trade, high unemployment, little infrastructure and corruption.
Yet it also has one of the largest untapped copper deposits in the world and substantial oil and gas deposits. "In five or six years we hope Afghanistan can stand on its own two feet through mineral reserves," said Minister of Mines and Industries Muhammad Ibrahim Adel, a Russian-educated engineer who was appointed by Mr. Karzai.
Mr. Adel's ministry has awarded one mining license so far -- in a Taliban stronghold.
More on link
Articles found August 9, 2009
British soldier killed in Afghanistan blast
(AFP) – 4 hours ago
Article Link
LONDON — A British soldier was killed by an explosion while on patrol in southern Afghanistan, defence officials in London confirmed Sunday.
The soldier died following a blast Saturday while on patrol east of Gereshk town in the restive Helmand Province.
In Kabul, the NATO alliance's International Security Assistance Force said the soldier was killed by an improvised explosive device (IED), the main weapon of the Taliban insurgents.
"Each and every loss that we sustain in Helmand sends reverberations throughout the brigade," said Task Force Helmand spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Mark Wenham.
The deaths bring to 196 the number of British troops who have died since operations against the Taliban extremists began in October 2001. Of these, at least 165 were killed as a result of hostile action.
Twenty-seven British troops have been killed since the start of July and the spike in deaths has revived debate in Britain about its involvement in Afghanistan and the standard of equipment available to protect troops.
More on link
Les Boys at `Ground Zero' of Afghanistan struggle.
By Matthew Fisher, Canwest News ServiceAugust 7, 2009
Article Link
HOWZ-E-MADAD, Afghanistan - ``Les Boys,'' who man this strongpoint in what Canadian commanders sometimes call the Wild West, have probably seen more combat in recent months than any other troops in Kandahar.
And if the eight soldiers from Quebec and New Brunswick, who mentor about 50 Afghan soldiers at Howz-E-Madad are not at the epicentre of Canada's war in Afghanistan, fellow Canadian instructors from an operational mentoring liaison team based only three kilometres away at Lakhokel can stake a strong claim.
``This is Ground Zero. We're probably No. 1 for contact with the enemy. We're exposed to everything," Cpl. Eric Poirier of Dalhousie, N.B., says of Howz-E-Madad, where the Taliban, in a tree line 600 metres away, shoot almost every day at the small walled compound the Canadians and Afghans share.
The Taliban have also lobbed more than 30 hand grenades over the compound walls, have set ambushes just to the west of where they live and spark firefights every second day or so.
Canada's Operational Mentor and Liaison Team (OMLT) and their Afghan National Army allies have also found about 30 improvised explosive devices before they could do damage to the soldiers or civilians living in Zhari District.
More on link
As vote nears, Team Karzai finally kicks into high gear
TheStar.com - August 08, 2009 Rosie DiManno
Article Link
KABUL, AFGHANISTAN—The early-morning rally for Afghan President Hamid Karzai is still going on but hundreds are already trying to leave National Stadium, streaming toward a single gate.
It's hot. They've been here for several hours. The sound system is so bad that no one can make out a word being spoken from the podium. And it's Friday, so most are anxious to attend mosque as well.
Tempers are fraying. Bottles of water that had been distributed to the crowd are now whizzing through the air, aimed at the heads of cameramen positioned in front of the stage and thus blocking the view. Some of the plastic projectiles, now empty, hit the dignitaries sitting around Karzai.
Shoving and snarling ensue and laughter, too – Afghans equally amused and agitated by gathering anarchy – as those in the rear of the stadium bowl push forward. Campaign wardens, many of them female, wield picket sticks torn off election placards to settle down the masses, flicking at ankles and shoulders.
There is something in the Afghan constitution that turns instinctively to disciplinary brutishness as remedy for disorder, escalating rather than neutralizing the situation. Perhaps that is what comes of a society drenched in violence, with little vestigial memory of peace and calm.
More on link
Opium addictions grip families in Afghanistan’s remote villages
Article Link
SARAB, Afghanistan - Open the door to Islam Beg’s house and the thick opium smoke rushes out into the cold mountain air, like steam from a bathhouse. It’s just past 8 a.m. and the family of six - including a 1-year-old baby boy - is already curled up at the lip of the opium pipe.
Beg, 65, breathes in and exhales a cloud of smoke. He passes the pipe to his wife. She passes it to their daughter. The daughter blows the opium smoke into the baby’s tiny mouth. The baby’s eyes roll back into his head.
Their faces are gaunt. Their hair is matted. They smell.
In dozens of mountain hamlets in this remote corner of Afghanistan, opium addiction has become so entrenched that whole families - from toddlers to old men - are addicts. Cut off from the rest of the world by glacial streams, the addiction moves from house to house, infecting entire communities. From just one family years ago, at least half the people of Sarab, population 1,850, are now addicts.
Afghanistan supplies nearly all the world’s opium, the raw ingredient used to make heroin, and while most of the deadly crop is exported, enough is left behind to create a vicious cycle of addiction. There are at least 200,000 opium and heroin addicts in Afghanistan - 50,000 more than in the much bigger, wealthier United States, according to the US Department of Health and Human Services and a 2005 survey by the United Nations. A new survey is expected to show even higher rates of addiction, a window into the human toll of Afghanistan’s back-to-back wars and desperate poverty.
More on link
Bombs made in Afghanistan more lethal than those in Iraq
By Alexandra Zavis, Los Angeles Times
Article Link
Although the bombs manufactured by insurgents in Afghanistan tend to be more rudimentary than the ones in Iraq, they are more likely to injure and kill U.S. forces and their allies, military figures show.
This is in part because they are so easy to make and difficult to detect, senior U.S. officers say. Afghan insurgents also use the devices to stage complicated ambushes involving teams of bombers and gunmen.
A military task force dedicated to countering improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, calculates that a casualty results from more than one of every four bombs troops encounter in Afghanistan. In Iraq, where the ratio was once 1-to-1, about six bombs are detonated or cleared per casualty.
Homemade bombs traditionally have not been the weapon of choice in Afghanistan, according to members of the military's Joint IED Defeat Organization. Schooled in the Cold War-era guerrilla war against the country's former Soviet occupiers, Afghan militants typically ambushed their adversaries with rocket-propelled grenades and AK-47 fire, or fired rockets and mortar rounds from a distance.
But faced with a growing U.S. and NATO force, the militants appear to be taking a leaf from the Iraqi insurgent handbook, using bombs at least as often as any other type of attack, members say.
More on link
NATO Friendly Fire Wounds at Least 5 Afghan Police
By VOA News 08 August 2009
Article Link
NATO and Afghan officials say at least five Afghan police officers were wounded early Saturday, when NATO helicopters mistakenly fired on them.
NATO says its forces were responding to small arms fire from insurgents in Ghazni province, when two of its Apache helicopters fired on police by mistake.
The alliance says at least one Afghan police officer was in critical condition. Afghan officials confirmed the incident and said at least six police were wounded.
NATO says it is conducting an investigation.
The alliance says it is also investigating reports that two Afghan civilians were mistakenly killed in neighboring Uruzgan province Friday, while troops fired mortars at insurgents.
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Pakistan's two-faced game
National Post Published: Saturday, August 08, 2009
Article Link
If anything has been proven by the reported killing on Wednesday of Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, it is that Pakistan is fully capable of liquidating Islamist terrorists operating on its soil -- when it wants to. Unfortunately, Pakistan targets only those murderers who, like Mehsud, threaten the regime in Islamabad -- not those who seek to wage jihad in neighbouring India or Afghanistan.
The Pakistanis have long been playing a two-faced game. They pretend to be partners in the War on Terror when it suits their own purposes, then pretend not to know what is going on in their own tribal provinces when they would rather not be drawn into the war against radical Islam.
Why did they co-operate in the killing of Mehsud? Because he is believed to have been behind the 2007 bomb attack that killed former prime minister Benazir Bhutto. Bhutto's widower, Asif Ali Zardari, is now Pakistan's President. Revenge was almost certainly a motive for Islamabad's teamwork.
Pacification of the Taliban within Pakistan -- which at one point this year seemed almost poised to march on Islamabad --is another likely explanation.
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In Afghanistan, a US protection racket strategy may help
By Christopher Dickey Saturday, August 08, 2009
Article Link
Long ago and far away in the wars of Central America, I learned from a Guatemalan general (who had been trained by the French in Algeria and coached by the Israelis) that a war against guerrillas is essentially a protection racket. Civilians are helpless and indecisive, caught between the government forces and the insurgents, and thus unreliable. They might help you in the morning, then help your enemy in the evening. So the message the government has to send is as clear as it is cruel: We can protect you from the guerrillas, but the guerrillas cannot protect you from us – and you’ve got to choose.
If you listen to American generals talking about Afghanistan today, you’ll hear them emphasizing the protection part of that message, but ignoring – even denying – the punishment. Essentially they’re saying, “We can protect you civilians from the Taliban (we hope), but the Taliban don’t have to protect you from us because we are nice guys who are going to help you build your country, and in fact we’re worried about protecting you from us, too, because there’s so much ‘collateral damage’ these days.” The whole effect is almost as confusing for the troops as it is for Afghan civilians, and every effort at clarification creates more mystification.
Thus US General Stanley McChrystal, the hard-driving American commander who took over a few weeks ago, went so far as to tell his troops at Camp Leatherneck in Afghanistan on June 25 that they have to make a “cultural shift.” This war isn’t about killing the enemy and accepting collateral damage as inevitable. “When you do anything that harms the people you just have a huge chance of alienating the population,” he said. A few days after McChrystal’s remarks, in a widely reported incident, Marines trapped Taliban fighters in a residential compound, then allowed them to send out the women and children – only to discover the fighters had slipped on burqas and walked out as well.
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British soldier killed in Afghanistan blast
(AFP) – 4 hours ago
Article Link
LONDON — A British soldier was killed by an explosion while on patrol in southern Afghanistan, defence officials in London confirmed Sunday.
The soldier died following a blast Saturday while on patrol east of Gereshk town in the restive Helmand Province.
In Kabul, the NATO alliance's International Security Assistance Force said the soldier was killed by an improvised explosive device (IED), the main weapon of the Taliban insurgents.
"Each and every loss that we sustain in Helmand sends reverberations throughout the brigade," said Task Force Helmand spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Mark Wenham.
The deaths bring to 196 the number of British troops who have died since operations against the Taliban extremists began in October 2001. Of these, at least 165 were killed as a result of hostile action.
Twenty-seven British troops have been killed since the start of July and the spike in deaths has revived debate in Britain about its involvement in Afghanistan and the standard of equipment available to protect troops.
More on link
Les Boys at `Ground Zero' of Afghanistan struggle.
By Matthew Fisher, Canwest News ServiceAugust 7, 2009
Article Link
HOWZ-E-MADAD, Afghanistan - ``Les Boys,'' who man this strongpoint in what Canadian commanders sometimes call the Wild West, have probably seen more combat in recent months than any other troops in Kandahar.
And if the eight soldiers from Quebec and New Brunswick, who mentor about 50 Afghan soldiers at Howz-E-Madad are not at the epicentre of Canada's war in Afghanistan, fellow Canadian instructors from an operational mentoring liaison team based only three kilometres away at Lakhokel can stake a strong claim.
``This is Ground Zero. We're probably No. 1 for contact with the enemy. We're exposed to everything," Cpl. Eric Poirier of Dalhousie, N.B., says of Howz-E-Madad, where the Taliban, in a tree line 600 metres away, shoot almost every day at the small walled compound the Canadians and Afghans share.
The Taliban have also lobbed more than 30 hand grenades over the compound walls, have set ambushes just to the west of where they live and spark firefights every second day or so.
Canada's Operational Mentor and Liaison Team (OMLT) and their Afghan National Army allies have also found about 30 improvised explosive devices before they could do damage to the soldiers or civilians living in Zhari District.
More on link
As vote nears, Team Karzai finally kicks into high gear
TheStar.com - August 08, 2009 Rosie DiManno
Article Link
KABUL, AFGHANISTAN—The early-morning rally for Afghan President Hamid Karzai is still going on but hundreds are already trying to leave National Stadium, streaming toward a single gate.
It's hot. They've been here for several hours. The sound system is so bad that no one can make out a word being spoken from the podium. And it's Friday, so most are anxious to attend mosque as well.
Tempers are fraying. Bottles of water that had been distributed to the crowd are now whizzing through the air, aimed at the heads of cameramen positioned in front of the stage and thus blocking the view. Some of the plastic projectiles, now empty, hit the dignitaries sitting around Karzai.
Shoving and snarling ensue and laughter, too – Afghans equally amused and agitated by gathering anarchy – as those in the rear of the stadium bowl push forward. Campaign wardens, many of them female, wield picket sticks torn off election placards to settle down the masses, flicking at ankles and shoulders.
There is something in the Afghan constitution that turns instinctively to disciplinary brutishness as remedy for disorder, escalating rather than neutralizing the situation. Perhaps that is what comes of a society drenched in violence, with little vestigial memory of peace and calm.
More on link
Opium addictions grip families in Afghanistan’s remote villages
Article Link
SARAB, Afghanistan - Open the door to Islam Beg’s house and the thick opium smoke rushes out into the cold mountain air, like steam from a bathhouse. It’s just past 8 a.m. and the family of six - including a 1-year-old baby boy - is already curled up at the lip of the opium pipe.
Beg, 65, breathes in and exhales a cloud of smoke. He passes the pipe to his wife. She passes it to their daughter. The daughter blows the opium smoke into the baby’s tiny mouth. The baby’s eyes roll back into his head.
Their faces are gaunt. Their hair is matted. They smell.
In dozens of mountain hamlets in this remote corner of Afghanistan, opium addiction has become so entrenched that whole families - from toddlers to old men - are addicts. Cut off from the rest of the world by glacial streams, the addiction moves from house to house, infecting entire communities. From just one family years ago, at least half the people of Sarab, population 1,850, are now addicts.
Afghanistan supplies nearly all the world’s opium, the raw ingredient used to make heroin, and while most of the deadly crop is exported, enough is left behind to create a vicious cycle of addiction. There are at least 200,000 opium and heroin addicts in Afghanistan - 50,000 more than in the much bigger, wealthier United States, according to the US Department of Health and Human Services and a 2005 survey by the United Nations. A new survey is expected to show even higher rates of addiction, a window into the human toll of Afghanistan’s back-to-back wars and desperate poverty.
More on link
Bombs made in Afghanistan more lethal than those in Iraq
By Alexandra Zavis, Los Angeles Times
Article Link
Although the bombs manufactured by insurgents in Afghanistan tend to be more rudimentary than the ones in Iraq, they are more likely to injure and kill U.S. forces and their allies, military figures show.
This is in part because they are so easy to make and difficult to detect, senior U.S. officers say. Afghan insurgents also use the devices to stage complicated ambushes involving teams of bombers and gunmen.
A military task force dedicated to countering improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, calculates that a casualty results from more than one of every four bombs troops encounter in Afghanistan. In Iraq, where the ratio was once 1-to-1, about six bombs are detonated or cleared per casualty.
Homemade bombs traditionally have not been the weapon of choice in Afghanistan, according to members of the military's Joint IED Defeat Organization. Schooled in the Cold War-era guerrilla war against the country's former Soviet occupiers, Afghan militants typically ambushed their adversaries with rocket-propelled grenades and AK-47 fire, or fired rockets and mortar rounds from a distance.
But faced with a growing U.S. and NATO force, the militants appear to be taking a leaf from the Iraqi insurgent handbook, using bombs at least as often as any other type of attack, members say.
More on link
NATO Friendly Fire Wounds at Least 5 Afghan Police
By VOA News 08 August 2009
Article Link
NATO and Afghan officials say at least five Afghan police officers were wounded early Saturday, when NATO helicopters mistakenly fired on them.
NATO says its forces were responding to small arms fire from insurgents in Ghazni province, when two of its Apache helicopters fired on police by mistake.
The alliance says at least one Afghan police officer was in critical condition. Afghan officials confirmed the incident and said at least six police were wounded.
NATO says it is conducting an investigation.
The alliance says it is also investigating reports that two Afghan civilians were mistakenly killed in neighboring Uruzgan province Friday, while troops fired mortars at insurgents.
More on link
Pakistan's two-faced game
National Post Published: Saturday, August 08, 2009
Article Link
If anything has been proven by the reported killing on Wednesday of Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, it is that Pakistan is fully capable of liquidating Islamist terrorists operating on its soil -- when it wants to. Unfortunately, Pakistan targets only those murderers who, like Mehsud, threaten the regime in Islamabad -- not those who seek to wage jihad in neighbouring India or Afghanistan.
The Pakistanis have long been playing a two-faced game. They pretend to be partners in the War on Terror when it suits their own purposes, then pretend not to know what is going on in their own tribal provinces when they would rather not be drawn into the war against radical Islam.
Why did they co-operate in the killing of Mehsud? Because he is believed to have been behind the 2007 bomb attack that killed former prime minister Benazir Bhutto. Bhutto's widower, Asif Ali Zardari, is now Pakistan's President. Revenge was almost certainly a motive for Islamabad's teamwork.
Pacification of the Taliban within Pakistan -- which at one point this year seemed almost poised to march on Islamabad --is another likely explanation.
More on link
In Afghanistan, a US protection racket strategy may help
By Christopher Dickey Saturday, August 08, 2009
Article Link
Long ago and far away in the wars of Central America, I learned from a Guatemalan general (who had been trained by the French in Algeria and coached by the Israelis) that a war against guerrillas is essentially a protection racket. Civilians are helpless and indecisive, caught between the government forces and the insurgents, and thus unreliable. They might help you in the morning, then help your enemy in the evening. So the message the government has to send is as clear as it is cruel: We can protect you from the guerrillas, but the guerrillas cannot protect you from us – and you’ve got to choose.
If you listen to American generals talking about Afghanistan today, you’ll hear them emphasizing the protection part of that message, but ignoring – even denying – the punishment. Essentially they’re saying, “We can protect you civilians from the Taliban (we hope), but the Taliban don’t have to protect you from us because we are nice guys who are going to help you build your country, and in fact we’re worried about protecting you from us, too, because there’s so much ‘collateral damage’ these days.” The whole effect is almost as confusing for the troops as it is for Afghan civilians, and every effort at clarification creates more mystification.
Thus US General Stanley McChrystal, the hard-driving American commander who took over a few weeks ago, went so far as to tell his troops at Camp Leatherneck in Afghanistan on June 25 that they have to make a “cultural shift.” This war isn’t about killing the enemy and accepting collateral damage as inevitable. “When you do anything that harms the people you just have a huge chance of alienating the population,” he said. A few days after McChrystal’s remarks, in a widely reported incident, Marines trapped Taliban fighters in a residential compound, then allowed them to send out the women and children – only to discover the fighters had slipped on burqas and walked out as well.
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Articles found August 10, 2009
NZ to deploy SAS to Afghanistan
Article Link
New Zealand is to send a contingent of elite troops to Afghanistan, Prime Minister John Key has announced.
About 70 members of the Special Air Service (SAS) will be deployed in three rotations covering 18 months, he said.
"We're deploying our elite military there to try and stabilise the position," Mr Key said.
Meanwhile, the number of regular troops in New Zealand's 140-member provincial reconstruction team based in Bamiyan province is to be reduced.
An increased civilian effort is to be made there, with a focus on agriculture, health and education.
Mr Key said the provincial reconstruction team would also work on building up the Afghan National Police with a view to transfer control of security in Bamiyan province to them.
The government would also appoint a diplomatic representative to Afghanistan, instead of having New Zealand represented from neighbouring Iran, he said.
New Zealand's SAS has already had three tours in Afghanistan, the last in 2006, and the US had requested their return. Mr Key did not say where the SAS troops would be serving.
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Taliban kill five police in attack south of Kabul
Mon Aug 10, 2009
Article Link
LOGAR, Afghanistan (Reuters) - Taliban gunmen and suicide bombers killed five police in an attack on Afghan government buildings south of the capital on Monday, officials and residents said, the latest in a series of brazen assaults in a growing insurgency.
With violence surging across Afghanistan ahead of an August 20 presidential poll, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said six fighters wearing vests packed with explosives had attacked key buildings in Pule Alam, the provincial capital of Logar and an hour's drive south of Kabul.
Their targets included the governor's office, police and election offices, he told Reuters by telephone from an undisclosed location.
Unofficial police reports in Pule Alam said at least three of the suicide bombers may have been killed and two detained.
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The West's futile effort
By Kris Kotarski, For The Calgary HeraldAugust 10, 2009 6:38 AM
Article Link
Late last week, amid reports the Obama administration was having trouble coming up with appropriate markers for progress in Afghanistan, Associated Press reported five farmers were killed by an air strike while loading cucumbers into a taxi in Zhari district, near Kandahar. Lt.-Cmdr. Christine Sidenstricker said the U. S. military believes it was a group of militants loading munitions into a van. An Afghan police chief disagrees.
Coming after the bloodiest month for NATO and the U. S. during an almost eight-year war, this episode encapsulates what is wrong with the war and the mind-set of politicians who pursue it on our behalf.
Sidenstricker says the U. S. will review footage from the Apache helicopter's camera to determine what happened, just as Barack Obama, Stephen Harper and other leaders invested in Afghanistan continue to review our policy while insisting progress is being made. Yet, whether the video footage shows fleshy green fruit or cold hard lead, the futility of this exercise is difficult to miss.
On one side, there is a fighting force equipped with the best weapons and training that modern society can afford. On the other, irregular militias, local insurgents, freedom fighters, terrorists or Mujahideen, depending on the slant taken by the journalists who have covered the war. When measured in terms of firepower and fighting capabilities, it seems a terrible mismatch, but outcomes in wars are seldom measured in firepower alone. War is politics, and while one side has its goals in place and the political equation pretty well worked out, the U. S. and NATO continue to search for "appropriate markers" as pilots and drones search for the bullets amid the cucumbers.
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U.S. to Hunt Down Afghan Drug Lords Tied to Taliban
Article Link
WASHINGTON — Fifty Afghans believed to be drug traffickers with ties to the Taliban have been placed on a Pentagon target list to be captured or killed, reflecting a major shift in American counternarcotics strategy in Afghanistan, according to a Congressional study to be released this week.
United States military commanders have told Congress that they are convinced that the policy is legal under the military’s rules of engagement and international law. They also said the move is an essential part of their new plan to disrupt the flow of drug money that is helping finance the Taliban insurgency.
In interviews with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which is releasing the report, two American generals serving in Afghanistan said that major traffickers with proven links to the insurgency have been put on the “joint integrated prioritized target list.” That means they have been given the same target status as insurgent leaders, and can be captured or killed at any time.
The generals told Senate staff members that two credible sources and substantial additional evidence were required before a trafficker was placed on the list, and only those providing support to the insurgency would be made targets.
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China says plane diverted to Afghanistan by threat
By GILLIAN WONG and AMIR SHAH (AP) – 18 hours ago
Article Link
BEIJING — An Afghan plane bound for the restive western Chinese region of Xinjiang was sent back to Afghanistan after a bomb threat, Chinese media said Sunday.
Kam Air deputy chief Feda Mohammad Fedawi told The Associated Press that the plane, carrying 160 passengers, left Kabul and was crossing Kyrgyzstan on its way to the Xinjiang capital, Urumqi, when it was told to turn back.
The Xinhua News Agency said there had been a bomb threat and Urumqi airport authorities had been told not to let the plane land.
Kyrgyz authorities told the crew that Chinese authorities would not allow them into their airspace, Fedawi said. The plane could not return to the Afghan capital because of windy weather and was diverted to the southern city of Kandahar, Fedawi said.
He said there had been no bomb threat.
There was no immediate way to explain the differing accounts.
Urumqi was the scene of China's worst ethnic violence in China in decades when rioting last month killed 197 people and injured more than 1,700, according to official count.
Fedawi said the plane's passengers and crew were fine and it was expected to return to Kabul on Monday morning.
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NZ to deploy SAS to Afghanistan
Article Link
New Zealand is to send a contingent of elite troops to Afghanistan, Prime Minister John Key has announced.
About 70 members of the Special Air Service (SAS) will be deployed in three rotations covering 18 months, he said.
"We're deploying our elite military there to try and stabilise the position," Mr Key said.
Meanwhile, the number of regular troops in New Zealand's 140-member provincial reconstruction team based in Bamiyan province is to be reduced.
An increased civilian effort is to be made there, with a focus on agriculture, health and education.
Mr Key said the provincial reconstruction team would also work on building up the Afghan National Police with a view to transfer control of security in Bamiyan province to them.
The government would also appoint a diplomatic representative to Afghanistan, instead of having New Zealand represented from neighbouring Iran, he said.
New Zealand's SAS has already had three tours in Afghanistan, the last in 2006, and the US had requested their return. Mr Key did not say where the SAS troops would be serving.
More on link
Taliban kill five police in attack south of Kabul
Mon Aug 10, 2009
Article Link
LOGAR, Afghanistan (Reuters) - Taliban gunmen and suicide bombers killed five police in an attack on Afghan government buildings south of the capital on Monday, officials and residents said, the latest in a series of brazen assaults in a growing insurgency.
With violence surging across Afghanistan ahead of an August 20 presidential poll, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said six fighters wearing vests packed with explosives had attacked key buildings in Pule Alam, the provincial capital of Logar and an hour's drive south of Kabul.
Their targets included the governor's office, police and election offices, he told Reuters by telephone from an undisclosed location.
Unofficial police reports in Pule Alam said at least three of the suicide bombers may have been killed and two detained.
More on link
The West's futile effort
By Kris Kotarski, For The Calgary HeraldAugust 10, 2009 6:38 AM
Article Link
Late last week, amid reports the Obama administration was having trouble coming up with appropriate markers for progress in Afghanistan, Associated Press reported five farmers were killed by an air strike while loading cucumbers into a taxi in Zhari district, near Kandahar. Lt.-Cmdr. Christine Sidenstricker said the U. S. military believes it was a group of militants loading munitions into a van. An Afghan police chief disagrees.
Coming after the bloodiest month for NATO and the U. S. during an almost eight-year war, this episode encapsulates what is wrong with the war and the mind-set of politicians who pursue it on our behalf.
Sidenstricker says the U. S. will review footage from the Apache helicopter's camera to determine what happened, just as Barack Obama, Stephen Harper and other leaders invested in Afghanistan continue to review our policy while insisting progress is being made. Yet, whether the video footage shows fleshy green fruit or cold hard lead, the futility of this exercise is difficult to miss.
On one side, there is a fighting force equipped with the best weapons and training that modern society can afford. On the other, irregular militias, local insurgents, freedom fighters, terrorists or Mujahideen, depending on the slant taken by the journalists who have covered the war. When measured in terms of firepower and fighting capabilities, it seems a terrible mismatch, but outcomes in wars are seldom measured in firepower alone. War is politics, and while one side has its goals in place and the political equation pretty well worked out, the U. S. and NATO continue to search for "appropriate markers" as pilots and drones search for the bullets amid the cucumbers.
More on link
U.S. to Hunt Down Afghan Drug Lords Tied to Taliban
Article Link
WASHINGTON — Fifty Afghans believed to be drug traffickers with ties to the Taliban have been placed on a Pentagon target list to be captured or killed, reflecting a major shift in American counternarcotics strategy in Afghanistan, according to a Congressional study to be released this week.
United States military commanders have told Congress that they are convinced that the policy is legal under the military’s rules of engagement and international law. They also said the move is an essential part of their new plan to disrupt the flow of drug money that is helping finance the Taliban insurgency.
In interviews with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which is releasing the report, two American generals serving in Afghanistan said that major traffickers with proven links to the insurgency have been put on the “joint integrated prioritized target list.” That means they have been given the same target status as insurgent leaders, and can be captured or killed at any time.
The generals told Senate staff members that two credible sources and substantial additional evidence were required before a trafficker was placed on the list, and only those providing support to the insurgency would be made targets.
More on link
China says plane diverted to Afghanistan by threat
By GILLIAN WONG and AMIR SHAH (AP) – 18 hours ago
Article Link
BEIJING — An Afghan plane bound for the restive western Chinese region of Xinjiang was sent back to Afghanistan after a bomb threat, Chinese media said Sunday.
Kam Air deputy chief Feda Mohammad Fedawi told The Associated Press that the plane, carrying 160 passengers, left Kabul and was crossing Kyrgyzstan on its way to the Xinjiang capital, Urumqi, when it was told to turn back.
The Xinhua News Agency said there had been a bomb threat and Urumqi airport authorities had been told not to let the plane land.
Kyrgyz authorities told the crew that Chinese authorities would not allow them into their airspace, Fedawi said. The plane could not return to the Afghan capital because of windy weather and was diverted to the southern city of Kandahar, Fedawi said.
He said there had been no bomb threat.
There was no immediate way to explain the differing accounts.
Urumqi was the scene of China's worst ethnic violence in China in decades when rioting last month killed 197 people and injured more than 1,700, according to official count.
Fedawi said the plane's passengers and crew were fine and it was expected to return to Kabul on Monday morning.
More on link
Secretive Taliban Leader Mullah Omar Emerges in Power Struggle
Pakistani Taliban Faces Mafia-Like Power Struggle
By NICK SCHIFRIN ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Aug. 11, 2009 —
Article Link
The Pakistani Taliban today is like a mafia family whose don has just been whacked -- leaderless, with blood flowing in the streets between rival factions.
U.S. and Pakistani officials now predict that the consiglieres who will stabilize the region's strongest terrorist network are the very people the U.S. has been fighting since 9/11: al Qaeda and Mullah Omar, the head of the Afghan Taliban.
Pakistani Taliban commanders have been bickering since a CIA drone strike killed their charismatic leader, Baitullah Mehsud, who over the last year and a half managed to pull together at least 13 fractious Taliban factions into a network blamed for the deaths of more than 1,200 people.
Their bickering turned violent over the weekend when Mehsud's most likely successors shot at each other during a meeting to pick the next Pakistani Taliban chief.
In response, Mullah Omar and his allies in North Waziristan, according to people who have spoken with Pakistani intelligence agents there, called a meeting with leading Taliban commanders to try and stop the infighting. A successor to Mehsud could emerge from that meeting in the coming days.
For continuous and complete coverage of Afghanistan in the run-up to the presidential election next week, click here.
Mullah Omar was deposed as the leader of Afghanistan in 2001 when U.S. special forces troops invaded and helped rebel Afghan forces route the Taliban. The attack was in retaliation for Mullah Omar harboring Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda in the years before the 9/11 attacks.
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China says separatists threatened Afghan flight
(AP) – 13 hours ago
Article Link
BEIJING — China refused an Afghan airliner permission to land after intelligence indicated a possible threat from separatists seeking independence for the restive western region of Xinjiang, an official Communist Party newspaper said Tuesday.
The Global Times said authorities in Xinjiang received a report Sunday that a Kam Air flight that evening to Urumqi, the regional capital, could "possibly be threatened" by a group or groups seeking independence for the region, known as East Turkestan by the separatists.
Following takeoff, separate officials in Urumqi received further information claiming a bomb was on board, prompting them to refuse permission for it to land, the newspaper said, citing an unidentified regional official.
The flight — the private airline's first on its new route from Kabul to Urumqi — was diverted to Kandahar in southern Afghanistan. Afghanistan's counterterrorism chief, Abdul Manan Farahi, said there was no bomb on the plane.
Chinese authorities have provided no further details about the nature of the alleged threat, and civil and police authorities refused to comment on the incident.
Officials and state media routinely level accusations against purported separatists while offering little or no evidence to back them up.
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Afghanistan's presidential election campaign an exercise in peril
By Laura King August 11, 2009
Article Link
The security problems exacerbate the logistical challenges in a country where road conditions are so poor and districts so remote that a 3,000-strong donkey corps is helping deliver ballots.
Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan -- Presidential candidate Ramazan Bashardost was on a routine campaign stop in the eastern Afghan city of Khowst one day last month when he heard a thunderous explosion. Then another. And another.
"It was very loud, and pretty close, and I of course understood right away what was happening," said Bashardost, one of nearly 40 contenders in the Aug. 20 presidential vote.
On that day, insurgents had attacked Khowst's provincial police headquarters and several other sites, triggering hours of chaotic street fighting. Like most people in town, Bashardost was forced to lie low for the rest of the afternoon. He finally slipped away at nightfall.
In this wartime election season, having Taliban gunmen and suicide bombers as campaign trail companions isn't particularly unusual. Assassination fears, insurgent threats, travel dangers, intimidation of candidates, especially the female ones -- all conspire to make the vote an exercise in peril.
More on link
Potent Bombs Slow Marine Offensive
Troops in Afghanistan Must Be Cautious on Long Stretches of Road Filled With Explosives
By Ann Scott Tyson Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Article Link & Video
MIANPOSHTEH, Afghanistan -- In this harsh and unforgiving part of southern Afghanistan, where thousands of U.S. Marines are battling the Taliban this summer, the growing prevalence of roadside bombs means that even a small mishap can have deadly consequences.
More on link
Pakistani Taliban Faces Mafia-Like Power Struggle
By NICK SCHIFRIN ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Aug. 11, 2009 —
Article Link
The Pakistani Taliban today is like a mafia family whose don has just been whacked -- leaderless, with blood flowing in the streets between rival factions.
U.S. and Pakistani officials now predict that the consiglieres who will stabilize the region's strongest terrorist network are the very people the U.S. has been fighting since 9/11: al Qaeda and Mullah Omar, the head of the Afghan Taliban.
Pakistani Taliban commanders have been bickering since a CIA drone strike killed their charismatic leader, Baitullah Mehsud, who over the last year and a half managed to pull together at least 13 fractious Taliban factions into a network blamed for the deaths of more than 1,200 people.
Their bickering turned violent over the weekend when Mehsud's most likely successors shot at each other during a meeting to pick the next Pakistani Taliban chief.
In response, Mullah Omar and his allies in North Waziristan, according to people who have spoken with Pakistani intelligence agents there, called a meeting with leading Taliban commanders to try and stop the infighting. A successor to Mehsud could emerge from that meeting in the coming days.
For continuous and complete coverage of Afghanistan in the run-up to the presidential election next week, click here.
Mullah Omar was deposed as the leader of Afghanistan in 2001 when U.S. special forces troops invaded and helped rebel Afghan forces route the Taliban. The attack was in retaliation for Mullah Omar harboring Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda in the years before the 9/11 attacks.
More on link
China says separatists threatened Afghan flight
(AP) – 13 hours ago
Article Link
BEIJING — China refused an Afghan airliner permission to land after intelligence indicated a possible threat from separatists seeking independence for the restive western region of Xinjiang, an official Communist Party newspaper said Tuesday.
The Global Times said authorities in Xinjiang received a report Sunday that a Kam Air flight that evening to Urumqi, the regional capital, could "possibly be threatened" by a group or groups seeking independence for the region, known as East Turkestan by the separatists.
Following takeoff, separate officials in Urumqi received further information claiming a bomb was on board, prompting them to refuse permission for it to land, the newspaper said, citing an unidentified regional official.
The flight — the private airline's first on its new route from Kabul to Urumqi — was diverted to Kandahar in southern Afghanistan. Afghanistan's counterterrorism chief, Abdul Manan Farahi, said there was no bomb on the plane.
Chinese authorities have provided no further details about the nature of the alleged threat, and civil and police authorities refused to comment on the incident.
Officials and state media routinely level accusations against purported separatists while offering little or no evidence to back them up.
More on link
Afghanistan's presidential election campaign an exercise in peril
By Laura King August 11, 2009
Article Link
The security problems exacerbate the logistical challenges in a country where road conditions are so poor and districts so remote that a 3,000-strong donkey corps is helping deliver ballots.
Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan -- Presidential candidate Ramazan Bashardost was on a routine campaign stop in the eastern Afghan city of Khowst one day last month when he heard a thunderous explosion. Then another. And another.
"It was very loud, and pretty close, and I of course understood right away what was happening," said Bashardost, one of nearly 40 contenders in the Aug. 20 presidential vote.
On that day, insurgents had attacked Khowst's provincial police headquarters and several other sites, triggering hours of chaotic street fighting. Like most people in town, Bashardost was forced to lie low for the rest of the afternoon. He finally slipped away at nightfall.
In this wartime election season, having Taliban gunmen and suicide bombers as campaign trail companions isn't particularly unusual. Assassination fears, insurgent threats, travel dangers, intimidation of candidates, especially the female ones -- all conspire to make the vote an exercise in peril.
More on link
Potent Bombs Slow Marine Offensive
Troops in Afghanistan Must Be Cautious on Long Stretches of Road Filled With Explosives
By Ann Scott Tyson Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Article Link & Video
MIANPOSHTEH, Afghanistan -- In this harsh and unforgiving part of southern Afghanistan, where thousands of U.S. Marines are battling the Taliban this summer, the growing prevalence of roadside bombs means that even a small mishap can have deadly consequences.
More on link
Articles found August 12, 2009
Canadian Troops Wrap Up Operation in Afghanistan
Josh Pringle Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Article Link
Canadian soldiers have wrapped up a four-day operation aimed at harassing the Taliban out of a key area of southern Afghanistan.
"Operation Constrictor" netted a cache of weapons and bomb-making materials in the Panjwaii district.
Chief Operations Officer for Canada's Task Force Kandahar, Lt.-Col. Mike Patrick called the operation a milestone for the Afghan National Army.
Patrick added "there is a substantial Taliban influence in this area that hasn't been touched in a focused manner for a number of years."
The Canadian Military says the area is along the "rat line" used by insurgents to travel from Taliban strongholds into Kandahar City.
end
Marines assault Taliban-held town in Afghanistan
Updated Wed. Aug. 12 2009 7:33 AM ET The Associated Press
Article Link
DAHANEH, Afghanistan -- Helicopter-borne U.S. Marines backed by Harrier jets stormed a Taliban-held town in southern Afghanistan before dawn Wednesday in an operation to secure the country ahead of presidential elections.
The troops exchanged heavy fire with insurgents, killing at least seven. Associated Press journalists travelling with the first wave said militants fired small arms, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades after helicopters dropped the troops over Taliban lines. Fighting lasted more than eight hours, as Harrier jets streaked overhead and dropped flares in a show of force.
The Taliban put up such fierce resistance that Marines said they suspected the militants knew the assault was coming.
Other Marines met heavy resistance as they fought to seize control of the mountains surrounding Dahaneh in the southern province of Helmand. Another convoy of Marines rolled into the town despite roadside bomb attacks and gunfire.
It was the first time NATO troops had entered Dahaneh, which has been under Taliban control for years.
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Court upholds CIA contractor's detainee abuse conviction
(AFP) – 14 hours ago
Article Link
WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court has upheld the conviction of David Passaro, the first US civilian found guilty of abusing a detainee in Afghanistan, according to a copy of the ruling obtained by AFP Tuesday.
A three-judge panel from the Fourth US Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia on Monday found that, contrary to Passaro's argument, federal courts have jurisdiction over assaults committed by US citizens abroad in countries where the United States conducts military missions.
The panel also ordered a new sentencing due to "sentencing errors" that landed Passaro a prison term of eight years and four months, longer than suggested by federal guidelines.
A CIA civilian contractor, Passaro was convicted in the southeastern state of North Carolina in 2006 for having hit Afghan detainee Abdul Wali with a flashlight and kicked him in the groin during a marathon 48-hour "interrogation." Wali died from his injuries.
The interrogation, the court recalled, "involved Passaro's brutal attacks on Wali, which included repeatedly throwing Wali to the ground, striking him open handed, hitting him on the arms and on the legs with a heavy Maglite-type flashlight measuring over a foot long, and while wearing combat boots, kicking Wali in the groin with enough force to lift him off the ground."
During eight days of trial in 2006, Passaro, now 43, claimed he was not guilty and instead had followed the orders of his superiors, a charge the commanders denied.
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Afghanistan hires 10,000 tribesmen to secure polls
By RAHIM FAIEZ (AP) – 23 hours ago
Article Link
KABUL — Authorities have hired some 10,000 Afghan tribesmen to protect this month's presidential election, an Afghan official said Tuesday, raising the possibility that village militias could be enlisted to fight against the Taliban.
The hired guns highlight attempts by authorities to bolster security in Afghanistan's insurgency-hit provinces but also underscore a renewed focus on raising tribal militias to deal with the growing Taliban threat just as Sunni Arab militias were engaged to help reduce violence in Iraq.
The new force will initially help secure polling centers in 21 of Afghanistan's 34 provinces during the Aug. 20 election, said Arif Noorzai, the head of the Independent Directorate for the Protection of Public Properties and Highways by Tribal Support.
"We are trying to provide security for the polling centers and pave the way for the people to participate in the elections," Noorzai said. "They are filling the places where there are no police or the government has a shortage of security forces."
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Taliban kill police chief in northern Afghanistan
Reuters Wednesday, August 12, 2009 1:18 AM
Article Link
KUNDUZ, Afghanistan (Reuters) - Taliban fighters stormed a district police headquarters in once-quiet northern Afghanistan overnight, killing the police chief and two of his men, an official said, as violence spreads into once safe areas.
The attack, which led to a four-hour gunbattle into the early hours of Wednesday in Kunduz, is the latest in a wave of rising violence a week before an August 20 election which militants have vowed to disrupt.
The attackers struck with small arms fire and rocket propelled grenades under cover of darkness, said Sheikh Saduddin, administrator of the Dasht-e-Archi district of Kunduz province.
The province, north of the Hindu Kush mountains and far from the southern war zone, has been largely quiet since Taliban militants were driven from power in 2001, but has seen escalating attacks in recent months.
This week the overall commander of NATO and U.S. troops in Afghanistan said militants were advancing from their traditional bastions in the south and east into previously quieter areas in the north and west.
After several hours of fighting, the militants abandoned the building following police reinforcement, Saduddin said.
"They (Taliban) killed the police chief and two other officers. Three more police were wounded," he said, giving no information about Taliban casualties.
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Two AP journalists wounded in Afghanistan bombing
(AP) – 6 hours ago
Article Link
KABUL — A roadside bombing has wounded two Associated Press journalists embedded with the U.S. military in southern Afghanistan.
Photographer Emilio Morenatti and AP Television News videographer Andi Jatmiko were traveling with the military when their vehicle was struck by the bomb Tuesday.
Both were immediately taken to a military hospital in Kandahar. Jatmiko suffered leg injuries and two broken ribs. Morenatti, badly wounded in the leg, underwent an operation that resulted in the loss of his foot.
Morenatti, 40, a Spaniard, is an award-winning photographer based in Islamabad who has worked for the AP in Afghanistan, Israel and the Palestinian territories. He was named Newspaper Photographer of the Year in 2009 by Pictures of the Year International.
Jatmiko, 44, of Indonesia, has reported for the AP from throughout Asia for more than 10 years.
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Canadian presence aids Afghans
Published: August 11, 2009 11:00 PM
Article Link
NOW BACK home after one year of working with Afghan police officers, a local RCMP officer says he’s seen progress there.
Corpl. Lothar Bretfeld spent his time mentoring Afghan police officers at the Canadian Forces Forward Operating Base Wilson in Kandahar Province, Zhari District Afghanistan along with officers from around Canada.
Afghanistan is about the size of Alberta but has seven to eight million people living there, with one million people in Kandahar, he said.
Kandahar is 28 km from the Pakistan border where most “bad guys” come across into Afghanistan, said Bretfeld.
Bretfeld noticed that the Afghan police work very differently from Canadians, adding that Afghan officers would work for two to three hours and take constant breaks and then would peter out.
“Our concept of an eight hour day, they never do that,” he said.
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Afghan police find weapons cache
Sonia Verma Kandahar — From Wednesday's Globe and Mail Wednesday, Aug. 12, 2009 03:26AM EDT
Article Link
There was nothing especially remarkable about the weapons cache – a suicide vest, some walkie-talkies, medical kits and the makings of explosives. What was extraordinary, at least to Canadian Forces Captain Alain Aubé, who was speaking to reporters during a briefing here, was who found it: The Afghan National Police.
“This is very significant for them,” Capt. Aubé said Tuesday, referring to the discovery by Afghan officers during Operation Constrictor, a four-day sweep of a violent cluster of villages in the Panjwai district, just west of Kandahar City.
As Afghanistan girds for elections on Aug. 20, the briefing underscored broader efforts to bolster confidence in the Afghan forces, notoriously corrupt and ineffective, that are responsible for securing polling stations across the country.
In some ways, the Afghan Police have come to represent NATO's greatest ambitions and frustrations in Afghanistan, particularly in the south, where the insurgency rages.
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Canadian Troops Wrap Up Operation in Afghanistan
Josh Pringle Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Article Link
Canadian soldiers have wrapped up a four-day operation aimed at harassing the Taliban out of a key area of southern Afghanistan.
"Operation Constrictor" netted a cache of weapons and bomb-making materials in the Panjwaii district.
Chief Operations Officer for Canada's Task Force Kandahar, Lt.-Col. Mike Patrick called the operation a milestone for the Afghan National Army.
Patrick added "there is a substantial Taliban influence in this area that hasn't been touched in a focused manner for a number of years."
The Canadian Military says the area is along the "rat line" used by insurgents to travel from Taliban strongholds into Kandahar City.
end
Marines assault Taliban-held town in Afghanistan
Updated Wed. Aug. 12 2009 7:33 AM ET The Associated Press
Article Link
DAHANEH, Afghanistan -- Helicopter-borne U.S. Marines backed by Harrier jets stormed a Taliban-held town in southern Afghanistan before dawn Wednesday in an operation to secure the country ahead of presidential elections.
The troops exchanged heavy fire with insurgents, killing at least seven. Associated Press journalists travelling with the first wave said militants fired small arms, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades after helicopters dropped the troops over Taliban lines. Fighting lasted more than eight hours, as Harrier jets streaked overhead and dropped flares in a show of force.
The Taliban put up such fierce resistance that Marines said they suspected the militants knew the assault was coming.
Other Marines met heavy resistance as they fought to seize control of the mountains surrounding Dahaneh in the southern province of Helmand. Another convoy of Marines rolled into the town despite roadside bomb attacks and gunfire.
It was the first time NATO troops had entered Dahaneh, which has been under Taliban control for years.
More on link
Court upholds CIA contractor's detainee abuse conviction
(AFP) – 14 hours ago
Article Link
WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court has upheld the conviction of David Passaro, the first US civilian found guilty of abusing a detainee in Afghanistan, according to a copy of the ruling obtained by AFP Tuesday.
A three-judge panel from the Fourth US Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia on Monday found that, contrary to Passaro's argument, federal courts have jurisdiction over assaults committed by US citizens abroad in countries where the United States conducts military missions.
The panel also ordered a new sentencing due to "sentencing errors" that landed Passaro a prison term of eight years and four months, longer than suggested by federal guidelines.
A CIA civilian contractor, Passaro was convicted in the southeastern state of North Carolina in 2006 for having hit Afghan detainee Abdul Wali with a flashlight and kicked him in the groin during a marathon 48-hour "interrogation." Wali died from his injuries.
The interrogation, the court recalled, "involved Passaro's brutal attacks on Wali, which included repeatedly throwing Wali to the ground, striking him open handed, hitting him on the arms and on the legs with a heavy Maglite-type flashlight measuring over a foot long, and while wearing combat boots, kicking Wali in the groin with enough force to lift him off the ground."
During eight days of trial in 2006, Passaro, now 43, claimed he was not guilty and instead had followed the orders of his superiors, a charge the commanders denied.
More on link
Afghanistan hires 10,000 tribesmen to secure polls
By RAHIM FAIEZ (AP) – 23 hours ago
Article Link
KABUL — Authorities have hired some 10,000 Afghan tribesmen to protect this month's presidential election, an Afghan official said Tuesday, raising the possibility that village militias could be enlisted to fight against the Taliban.
The hired guns highlight attempts by authorities to bolster security in Afghanistan's insurgency-hit provinces but also underscore a renewed focus on raising tribal militias to deal with the growing Taliban threat just as Sunni Arab militias were engaged to help reduce violence in Iraq.
The new force will initially help secure polling centers in 21 of Afghanistan's 34 provinces during the Aug. 20 election, said Arif Noorzai, the head of the Independent Directorate for the Protection of Public Properties and Highways by Tribal Support.
"We are trying to provide security for the polling centers and pave the way for the people to participate in the elections," Noorzai said. "They are filling the places where there are no police or the government has a shortage of security forces."
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Taliban kill police chief in northern Afghanistan
Reuters Wednesday, August 12, 2009 1:18 AM
Article Link
KUNDUZ, Afghanistan (Reuters) - Taliban fighters stormed a district police headquarters in once-quiet northern Afghanistan overnight, killing the police chief and two of his men, an official said, as violence spreads into once safe areas.
The attack, which led to a four-hour gunbattle into the early hours of Wednesday in Kunduz, is the latest in a wave of rising violence a week before an August 20 election which militants have vowed to disrupt.
The attackers struck with small arms fire and rocket propelled grenades under cover of darkness, said Sheikh Saduddin, administrator of the Dasht-e-Archi district of Kunduz province.
The province, north of the Hindu Kush mountains and far from the southern war zone, has been largely quiet since Taliban militants were driven from power in 2001, but has seen escalating attacks in recent months.
This week the overall commander of NATO and U.S. troops in Afghanistan said militants were advancing from their traditional bastions in the south and east into previously quieter areas in the north and west.
After several hours of fighting, the militants abandoned the building following police reinforcement, Saduddin said.
"They (Taliban) killed the police chief and two other officers. Three more police were wounded," he said, giving no information about Taliban casualties.
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Two AP journalists wounded in Afghanistan bombing
(AP) – 6 hours ago
Article Link
KABUL — A roadside bombing has wounded two Associated Press journalists embedded with the U.S. military in southern Afghanistan.
Photographer Emilio Morenatti and AP Television News videographer Andi Jatmiko were traveling with the military when their vehicle was struck by the bomb Tuesday.
Both were immediately taken to a military hospital in Kandahar. Jatmiko suffered leg injuries and two broken ribs. Morenatti, badly wounded in the leg, underwent an operation that resulted in the loss of his foot.
Morenatti, 40, a Spaniard, is an award-winning photographer based in Islamabad who has worked for the AP in Afghanistan, Israel and the Palestinian territories. He was named Newspaper Photographer of the Year in 2009 by Pictures of the Year International.
Jatmiko, 44, of Indonesia, has reported for the AP from throughout Asia for more than 10 years.
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Canadian presence aids Afghans
Published: August 11, 2009 11:00 PM
Article Link
NOW BACK home after one year of working with Afghan police officers, a local RCMP officer says he’s seen progress there.
Corpl. Lothar Bretfeld spent his time mentoring Afghan police officers at the Canadian Forces Forward Operating Base Wilson in Kandahar Province, Zhari District Afghanistan along with officers from around Canada.
Afghanistan is about the size of Alberta but has seven to eight million people living there, with one million people in Kandahar, he said.
Kandahar is 28 km from the Pakistan border where most “bad guys” come across into Afghanistan, said Bretfeld.
Bretfeld noticed that the Afghan police work very differently from Canadians, adding that Afghan officers would work for two to three hours and take constant breaks and then would peter out.
“Our concept of an eight hour day, they never do that,” he said.
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Afghan police find weapons cache
Sonia Verma Kandahar — From Wednesday's Globe and Mail Wednesday, Aug. 12, 2009 03:26AM EDT
Article Link
There was nothing especially remarkable about the weapons cache – a suicide vest, some walkie-talkies, medical kits and the makings of explosives. What was extraordinary, at least to Canadian Forces Captain Alain Aubé, who was speaking to reporters during a briefing here, was who found it: The Afghan National Police.
“This is very significant for them,” Capt. Aubé said Tuesday, referring to the discovery by Afghan officers during Operation Constrictor, a four-day sweep of a violent cluster of villages in the Panjwai district, just west of Kandahar City.
As Afghanistan girds for elections on Aug. 20, the briefing underscored broader efforts to bolster confidence in the Afghan forces, notoriously corrupt and ineffective, that are responsible for securing polling stations across the country.
In some ways, the Afghan Police have come to represent NATO's greatest ambitions and frustrations in Afghanistan, particularly in the south, where the insurgency rages.
More on link
- Reaction score
- 147
- Points
- 710
Canadians pick up pace to keep Taliban off-stride
Canwest News, Aug. 11, by Matthew Fisher
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Somnia/1882118/story.html
US Army brigade retools for new Afghan mission
AP, Aug. 11
http://www3.signonsandiego.com/stories/2009/aug/11/retooling-afghanistan-081109/?military&zIndex=147515
U.S. Ambassador Seeks More Money for Afghanistan
Funds Requested For Development
Washington Post, Aug. 12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/11/AR2009081103341.html
Mark
Ottawa
Canwest News, Aug. 11, by Matthew Fisher
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Somnia/1882118/story.html
US Army brigade retools for new Afghan mission
AP, Aug. 11
http://www3.signonsandiego.com/stories/2009/aug/11/retooling-afghanistan-081109/?military&zIndex=147515
U.S. Ambassador Seeks More Money for Afghanistan
Funds Requested For Development
Washington Post, Aug. 12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/11/AR2009081103341.html
Mark
Ottawa
- Reaction score
- 147
- Points
- 710
In Afghanistan, A Test of Tactics
Under Strict Rules to Protect Civilians, Marines Face More Complex Missions
Washington Post, Aug. 13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/12/AR2009081203198.html?sid=ST2009081203205
Video:
Firefights Erupt as Troops Flush Out Taliban Fighters
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/video/2009/08/06/VI2009080602763.html
New Army Handbook Teaches Afghanistan Lessons
NY Times, Aug. 12
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/13/world/asia/13military.html?_r=1
Send more troops 'to remain key US ally'
New Zealand Herald, Aug. 13
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=10590432
Mark
Ottawa
Under Strict Rules to Protect Civilians, Marines Face More Complex Missions
Washington Post, Aug. 13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/12/AR2009081203198.html?sid=ST2009081203205
Video:
Firefights Erupt as Troops Flush Out Taliban Fighters
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/video/2009/08/06/VI2009080602763.html
New Army Handbook Teaches Afghanistan Lessons
NY Times, Aug. 12
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/13/world/asia/13military.html?_r=1
Send more troops 'to remain key US ally'
New Zealand Herald, Aug. 13
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=10590432
Mark
Ottawa
Articles found August 13, 2009
Canada's expanded aid to Pakistan to help fight terrorism
Campbell Clark Ottawa Globe and Mail Thursday, Aug. 13, 2009 10:10AM EDT
Article Link
Canada will expand aid to Pakistan, notably to bolster the weak public school system that has left a void to be filled by fundamentalist madrassas, as Ottawa increasingly views the country's stability as key to success in Afghanistan.
In Pakistan Wednesday, International Co-operation Minister Bev Oda pledged $25-million for food, water and emergency shelter for refugees who fled a Pakistani military offensive against Taliban insurgents four months ago.
Many of the more than 2 million people who left their homes in the Swat Valley in April are returning. But the huge numbers of refugees have placed a strain on local resources, and reconstruction efforts will be costly.
“They're rebuilding police stations, judiciary, making sure that power is available, water is available, gas is available,” said Ms. Oda, who visited the Jalozai Internally Displaced Persons camp Tuesday.
More on link
Marines battle for control of strategic town in Afghanistan
BY ALFRED de MONTESQUIOU ASSOCIATED PRESS Aug. 13, 2009
Article Link
DAHANEH, Afghanistan -- U.S. Marines battled Taliban fighters Wednesday for control of a strategic southern town in an operation to cut militant supply lines and allow Afghan residents to vote in next week's presidential election.
The Taliban fired rocket-propelled grenades, mortar rounds and missiles from the back of a truck at the Marines. Officers predicted a couple of days of intense combat before Dahaneh could be secured.
"Based on the violence with which they've been fighting back against us, I think it indicates the Taliban are trying to make a stand here," said Capt. Zachary Martin, commander of Golf Company, 2nd Battalion, 3rd Marines.
The operation was launched Wednesday with 400 Marines and 100 Afghan troops.
It was the third major push by U.S. and British forces this summer into Taliban-controlled areas of Helmand province, center of Afghanistan's lucrative opium business and scene of some of the heaviest fighting of the Afghan war.
The Marines are part of the 21,000 additional forces President Barack Obama deployed to Afghanistan to stop the Taliban's violent momentum.
U.S. and British troops hope to break the Taliban's grip on the province, sever smuggling routes and protect the civilian population from Taliban reprisals so Afghans can vote during the Aug. 20 election. The Taliban has threatened to ruin the election.
It was the first time in years that U.S. or NATO troops had entered Dahaneh, a squalid town of about 2,000 people. Marines say the town is key to controlling the area -- a major Taliban staging area and site of a large opium market.
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Karzai Offers Gov't Jobs to Presidential Rivals
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS August 13, 2009
Article Link
KABUL (AP) -- Afghan President Hamid Karzai said Thursday he will win next week's presidential election and will offer government positions to his top two challengers.
Karzai's announcement seemed designed to offer a pre-election deal to his main rivals and head off any tension after the vote at a time when large parts of Afghanistan are embroiled in an insurgency.
Afghans vote next Thursday for president, their second-ever direct presidential election. More than 100,000 international troops and 175,000 Afghan forces are deployed to provide security.
Karzai is the leading candidate in a crowded field of three dozen contenders hoping to win a five-year term. He is trailed by his former foreign and finance ministers, Abdullah Abdullah and Ashraf Ghani.
Karzai said that if he wins, ''I will invite Dr. Abdullah, I will invite Ashraf Ghani, give them food and tea and give them jobs, as I did last time.''
A spokesman for Abdullah's campaign said the people, not Karzai, will decide who wins and forms the government.
More on link
Pakistan Helicopter Gunships Kill 11 Taliban
By REUTERS August 13, 2009
Article Link
Skip to next paragraph WANA, Pakistan (Reuters) - Pakistani gunship helicopters attacked Taliban bases on Thursday, killing 11 militants and keeping up pressure after the reported death of the Pakistani Taliban leader in a U.S. missile strike last week.
The U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, said on Wednesday said there were signs of disarray within the group following the apparent death of Baitullah Mehsud.
Nuclear-armed Pakistan's efforts to suppress Islamist militants on its side of the border are vital for a U.S.-led bid to stabilise neighbouring Afghanistan, where Taliban have threatened to disrupt the August 20 presidential election.
Pakistani and U.S. officials are almost certain that Mehsud was killed along with his second wife and some bodyguards in a strike on his father-in-law's house in South Waziristan near the Afghan border on August 5.
But Mehsud's aides insist he is alive.
More on link
Best Afghanistan defense: MRAPs + locals
By Tom Vanden Brook, USA TODAY
Article Link
SURKHROOD, Afghanistan — As roadside bombs go, it was a medium-size one: 30 pounds of homemade explosives, stuffed into a culvert on a busy road across a barren plain of rocks and dirt in far eastern Afghanistan.
Army Capt. Aaron Poe, whose team of experts was working to defuse the bomb, said Americans weren't the likely target. He and other U.S. servicemembers traveling along this road tend to do so in the giant, armored fortress-like vehicles known as Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles (MRAPs).
"A bomb like that wouldn't do anything to us in an MRAP," said Poe, 27. He said the intended target was probably Afghan police, who travel in unarmored, forest green Ford Ranger pickups that can be shredded in a blast. "It (would) kill all of them," Poe said.
At a time when U.S. troops are dying at a record pace in Afghanistan, military commanders are trying to balance the security the MRAP provides servicemembers such as Poe with the vehicle's shortcomings. The MRAP has protected its occupants better than any other vehicle in Afghanistan, but its imposing size and tiny windows make it relatively difficult for troops traveling inside to interact with Afghan locals and win their trust — which Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the new U.S. commander here, has defined as the top priority.
The MRAPs are "dramatically safer" than other, more accessible vehicles such as the Humvee, McChrystal said in a recent interview with USA TODAY. But he added that MRAPs are "somewhat ponderous vehicles, and they can't get everywhere they need to go."
McChrystal said that protective items — "whether they be ... vehicles or even things like body armor or sunglasses" — tend to create additional barriers between U.S. troops and locals. That, in turn, makes Afghans less likely to report intelligence tips and turn their back on the Taliban insurgency, which McChrystal says is necessary to turn the tide of an increasingly difficult war.
More on link
Canada's expanded aid to Pakistan to help fight terrorism
Campbell Clark Ottawa Globe and Mail Thursday, Aug. 13, 2009 10:10AM EDT
Article Link
Canada will expand aid to Pakistan, notably to bolster the weak public school system that has left a void to be filled by fundamentalist madrassas, as Ottawa increasingly views the country's stability as key to success in Afghanistan.
In Pakistan Wednesday, International Co-operation Minister Bev Oda pledged $25-million for food, water and emergency shelter for refugees who fled a Pakistani military offensive against Taliban insurgents four months ago.
Many of the more than 2 million people who left their homes in the Swat Valley in April are returning. But the huge numbers of refugees have placed a strain on local resources, and reconstruction efforts will be costly.
“They're rebuilding police stations, judiciary, making sure that power is available, water is available, gas is available,” said Ms. Oda, who visited the Jalozai Internally Displaced Persons camp Tuesday.
More on link
Marines battle for control of strategic town in Afghanistan
BY ALFRED de MONTESQUIOU ASSOCIATED PRESS Aug. 13, 2009
Article Link
DAHANEH, Afghanistan -- U.S. Marines battled Taliban fighters Wednesday for control of a strategic southern town in an operation to cut militant supply lines and allow Afghan residents to vote in next week's presidential election.
The Taliban fired rocket-propelled grenades, mortar rounds and missiles from the back of a truck at the Marines. Officers predicted a couple of days of intense combat before Dahaneh could be secured.
"Based on the violence with which they've been fighting back against us, I think it indicates the Taliban are trying to make a stand here," said Capt. Zachary Martin, commander of Golf Company, 2nd Battalion, 3rd Marines.
The operation was launched Wednesday with 400 Marines and 100 Afghan troops.
It was the third major push by U.S. and British forces this summer into Taliban-controlled areas of Helmand province, center of Afghanistan's lucrative opium business and scene of some of the heaviest fighting of the Afghan war.
The Marines are part of the 21,000 additional forces President Barack Obama deployed to Afghanistan to stop the Taliban's violent momentum.
U.S. and British troops hope to break the Taliban's grip on the province, sever smuggling routes and protect the civilian population from Taliban reprisals so Afghans can vote during the Aug. 20 election. The Taliban has threatened to ruin the election.
It was the first time in years that U.S. or NATO troops had entered Dahaneh, a squalid town of about 2,000 people. Marines say the town is key to controlling the area -- a major Taliban staging area and site of a large opium market.
More on link
Karzai Offers Gov't Jobs to Presidential Rivals
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS August 13, 2009
Article Link
KABUL (AP) -- Afghan President Hamid Karzai said Thursday he will win next week's presidential election and will offer government positions to his top two challengers.
Karzai's announcement seemed designed to offer a pre-election deal to his main rivals and head off any tension after the vote at a time when large parts of Afghanistan are embroiled in an insurgency.
Afghans vote next Thursday for president, their second-ever direct presidential election. More than 100,000 international troops and 175,000 Afghan forces are deployed to provide security.
Karzai is the leading candidate in a crowded field of three dozen contenders hoping to win a five-year term. He is trailed by his former foreign and finance ministers, Abdullah Abdullah and Ashraf Ghani.
Karzai said that if he wins, ''I will invite Dr. Abdullah, I will invite Ashraf Ghani, give them food and tea and give them jobs, as I did last time.''
A spokesman for Abdullah's campaign said the people, not Karzai, will decide who wins and forms the government.
More on link
Pakistan Helicopter Gunships Kill 11 Taliban
By REUTERS August 13, 2009
Article Link
Skip to next paragraph WANA, Pakistan (Reuters) - Pakistani gunship helicopters attacked Taliban bases on Thursday, killing 11 militants and keeping up pressure after the reported death of the Pakistani Taliban leader in a U.S. missile strike last week.
The U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, said on Wednesday said there were signs of disarray within the group following the apparent death of Baitullah Mehsud.
Nuclear-armed Pakistan's efforts to suppress Islamist militants on its side of the border are vital for a U.S.-led bid to stabilise neighbouring Afghanistan, where Taliban have threatened to disrupt the August 20 presidential election.
Pakistani and U.S. officials are almost certain that Mehsud was killed along with his second wife and some bodyguards in a strike on his father-in-law's house in South Waziristan near the Afghan border on August 5.
But Mehsud's aides insist he is alive.
More on link
Best Afghanistan defense: MRAPs + locals
By Tom Vanden Brook, USA TODAY
Article Link
SURKHROOD, Afghanistan — As roadside bombs go, it was a medium-size one: 30 pounds of homemade explosives, stuffed into a culvert on a busy road across a barren plain of rocks and dirt in far eastern Afghanistan.
Army Capt. Aaron Poe, whose team of experts was working to defuse the bomb, said Americans weren't the likely target. He and other U.S. servicemembers traveling along this road tend to do so in the giant, armored fortress-like vehicles known as Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles (MRAPs).
"A bomb like that wouldn't do anything to us in an MRAP," said Poe, 27. He said the intended target was probably Afghan police, who travel in unarmored, forest green Ford Ranger pickups that can be shredded in a blast. "It (would) kill all of them," Poe said.
At a time when U.S. troops are dying at a record pace in Afghanistan, military commanders are trying to balance the security the MRAP provides servicemembers such as Poe with the vehicle's shortcomings. The MRAP has protected its occupants better than any other vehicle in Afghanistan, but its imposing size and tiny windows make it relatively difficult for troops traveling inside to interact with Afghan locals and win their trust — which Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the new U.S. commander here, has defined as the top priority.
The MRAPs are "dramatically safer" than other, more accessible vehicles such as the Humvee, McChrystal said in a recent interview with USA TODAY. But he added that MRAPs are "somewhat ponderous vehicles, and they can't get everywhere they need to go."
McChrystal said that protective items — "whether they be ... vehicles or even things like body armor or sunglasses" — tend to create additional barriers between U.S. troops and locals. That, in turn, makes Afghans less likely to report intelligence tips and turn their back on the Taliban insurgency, which McChrystal says is necessary to turn the tide of an increasingly difficult war.
More on link
- Reaction score
- 147
- Points
- 710
Afghanistan: Canada's post-2011 commitment?
Conference of Defence Associations' media round-up, Aug. 13
http://www.cdaforumcad.ca/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1250192048
Mark
Ottawa
Conference of Defence Associations' media round-up, Aug. 13
http://www.cdaforumcad.ca/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1250192048
Mark
Ottawa
Taking the fight back to Kandahar city
TheStar.com - Canada - Taking the fight back to Kandahar city
Rosie Dimanno COLUMNIST
Article Link
KABUL—This time, they think they've got it, they've really got it: A plan, a strategy, a clear objective, a hope in hell.
And they're no longer alone, essentially on their own to pacify the great swath of insurgency that is Kandahar province, spiritual home of the Taliban.
The Americans have come, 4,000 Stryker Brigade troops, nearly double the Canadian component that has been stretched so pitifully, if valiantly, thin these past five years.
With that incoming surge, halving the battle space, the Canadian contingent can set tangible goals and dramatically shift the thrust of operations to a combination of offence and defence: Attack and protect.
That it took the lives of 127 Canadian soldiers to get here – a tipping point perchance leaning in their favour – is for others to debate and retroactively analyze.
For soldiers and their commanders on the ground, there is at least now, with this rotation, some clarity and well-defined goals, more narrowly but also more sensibly drawn on the mission map: To secure Kandahar city and the radiating communities of that heavily populated area; to move into a satellite of outskirt villages, basically living among the citizenry; and to plant themselves in the heart of the Taliban insurgency rather than chase inconsequential fighter cells hither and yon across complicated terrain that favours the opposition.
"The Americans are taking over what is a large but sparsely populated area of the province in the west and northern regions," Brig.-Gen. Jon Vance, commander of Task Force Afghanistan, explained to the Star in an interview from Kandahar Airfield last night.
More on link
TheStar.com - Canada - Taking the fight back to Kandahar city
Rosie Dimanno COLUMNIST
Article Link
KABUL—This time, they think they've got it, they've really got it: A plan, a strategy, a clear objective, a hope in hell.
And they're no longer alone, essentially on their own to pacify the great swath of insurgency that is Kandahar province, spiritual home of the Taliban.
The Americans have come, 4,000 Stryker Brigade troops, nearly double the Canadian component that has been stretched so pitifully, if valiantly, thin these past five years.
With that incoming surge, halving the battle space, the Canadian contingent can set tangible goals and dramatically shift the thrust of operations to a combination of offence and defence: Attack and protect.
That it took the lives of 127 Canadian soldiers to get here – a tipping point perchance leaning in their favour – is for others to debate and retroactively analyze.
For soldiers and their commanders on the ground, there is at least now, with this rotation, some clarity and well-defined goals, more narrowly but also more sensibly drawn on the mission map: To secure Kandahar city and the radiating communities of that heavily populated area; to move into a satellite of outskirt villages, basically living among the citizenry; and to plant themselves in the heart of the Taliban insurgency rather than chase inconsequential fighter cells hither and yon across complicated terrain that favours the opposition.
"The Americans are taking over what is a large but sparsely populated area of the province in the west and northern regions," Brig.-Gen. Jon Vance, commander of Task Force Afghanistan, explained to the Star in an interview from Kandahar Airfield last night.
More on link
- Reaction score
- 147
- Points
- 710
ARTICLES FOUND AUG. 14
Taliban mortar team cut down by Canadians (with slideshow, usual copyright disclaimer)
Stars and Stripes, Aug. 13
http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=64141
Gates: No Troop Request In Afghanistan Review
Washington Post, Aug. 14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/13/AR2009081303763.html
Mark
Ottawa
Taliban mortar team cut down by Canadians (with slideshow, usual copyright disclaimer)
Stars and Stripes, Aug. 13
http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=64141
Gates: No Troop Request In Afghanistan Review
Washington Post, Aug. 14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/13/AR2009081303763.html
Mark
Ottawa
Articles found August 15, 2009
Taking on Afghanistan's patriarchy
TheStar.com August 15, 2009 Rosie DiManno
Article Link
One is rumoured to have murdered her husband and daughter, a juicy bit of slanderous scuttlebutt that's all the rage hereabouts.
The other is the widow of a politician who was beaten, stabbed and then thrown out of a plane – an ironic dénouement for the minister of aviation, in a country which has no air force to speak of.
Shahla Ata and Frozan Fana are sorority oddballs and an ill fit within Afghanistan's patriarchal establishment, a brace of women who are running for the presidency in next week's national elections. Neither has a remote chance of winning more than a single-digit percentage of the vote. Both insist that's not the point. And each, it is assumed, has a distinct agenda.
For Ata, a trained psychologist who spent 18 years living in the United States, working as a registered nurse, the prize would be appointment as women's minister in the next government.
It's the only cabinet position currently held by a female, and on her "watch'' President Hamid Karzai almost rammed through legislation that would have legalized rape against minority Shiite women and condemned them to their homes unless accompanied by a male family member – Taliban redux.
Fana is a physician, born into a politically active family from Herat, and potentially a minister of health – especially if main challenger Abdullah Abdullah manages to defeat Karzai. The way Fana has been loudly accusing a government cabal of murdering her husband seven years ago, she's unlikely to have much of a fan in the incumbent. That was his team, even if Fana carefully excuses Karzai from the plot. "I've never said him. But some people from his government who were afraid my husband might be a future president of Afghanistan.''
Afghan politics are byzantine at the best of times and these exemplify that, a mosh-pit of nearly 40 candidates vying for top job against the backdrop of a broadening insurgency and slapstick corruption. It's all gossip and smear tactics, with no slack cut the two ladies on account of their gender. Indeed, they've been particularly and exceptionally targeted for slime tactics because of their sex, hence the hysterical rumour-mill.
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Vote leaders take campaigns across Afghanistan
By Bronwen Roberts (AFP) – 21 hours ago
Article Link
KABUL — The top candidates in the Afghan presidential race jetted across the nation Friday to win support for next week's polls as an official claimed some Taliban commanders would allow voting in their areas.
An eager crowd of around 10,000 welcomed President Hamid Karzai, frontrunner in the August 20 elections, after he flew into Herat for his first rally in the western city in a nearly two-month campaign, an AFP reporter said.
In an address, Karzai repeated a pledge to draw the Taliban into talks to end their insurgency and presented his inclusion of former warlords in his election bid as proof that he brought unity to ethnically diverse Afghanistan.
"We're working for peace across the country, it's a matter of pride for us that national unity is established in Afghanistan," he said, standing alongside Herat strongman and powerful Soviet resistance commander Ismail Khan.
Karzai said his country was growing in stature and would be able to prevent "foreigners" from jailing Afghans, an apparent reference to US forces who have arrested locals in counter-terrorism sweeps.
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Canada's Afghan tactics lay ground for stability, top soldier says
Article Link
Sonia Verma
Kandahar — From Saturday's Globe and Mail
Last updated on Saturday, Aug. 15, 2009 04:09AM EDT
Brigadier-General Jonathan Vance, the country's top commander in Afghanistan, says Canada's combat mission here will end just as crucial momentum is building toward a lasting victory against the Taliban.
New Canadian efforts, which echo counterinsurgency tactics used in Iraq, are laying the groundwork for lasting stability. Canadian combat troops, however, won't be around to see it with Ottawa's current exit strategy for 2011, he said.
“By 2011, there will still be insurgency in Kandahar province. For sure,” Brig.-Gen. Vance said Friday in a frank, hour-long interview with The Globe and Mail in his office at Kandahar Air Field.
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US Marines to help train Georgian troops
(AP) – 19 hours ago
Article Link
TBILISI, Georgia — A group of U.S. Marines will arrive in Georgia to help train its troops for a mission alongside coalition forces in Afghanistan, the U.S. Embassy said Friday.
The move is likely to vex neighboring Russia, which has strongly spoken out against U.S. military assistance to Georgia.
The U.S. Embassy said in a statement that the training will focus on skills necessary for the troops to operate in Afghanistan. It said that a Georgian battalion is set to deploy to Afghanistan next spring.
The Embassy described Georgia's offer to send troops to Afghanistan as "a vital contribution to the mission of bringing stability and security to Afghanistan."
The training program will start Sept. 1 and no weapons will be provided to the Georgians as part of the training, it said.
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Pakistan's tribal areas to get parliamentary reps
By CHRIS BRUMMITT (AP) – 1 day ago
Article Link
ISLAMABAD — Pakistan lifted a ban on political activities in its tribal regions on Friday, granting the areas close to Afghan border parliamentary representation for the first time in the hopes it would reduce the grip of the Taliban there.
Pakistan's seven semiautonomous agencies have never been politically and administratively integrated into the rest of the country — a vacuum that observers say has allowed lawlessness and an al-Qaida- and Taliban-led militancy to thrive there.
"This breaks the monopoly of clerics to play politics from the pulpit of the mosque to the exclusion of major secular political parties," said Farhatullah Babar, a spokesman for President Asif Ali Zardari "It empowers the locals and weakens the extremists."
Since the days of British colonial rule, the region's 4 million people have been ruled by government-appointed agents in concert with tribal leaders. They are subject to tribal laws that allow for detention without trial and communal punishment among other unpopular measures.
Babar said Friday's announcement did not reduce the powers of the political agent or modify the laws, but would mean that political parties could campaign there and represent the region in the national parliament after the next elections in 2013.
More on link
Taking on Afghanistan's patriarchy
TheStar.com August 15, 2009 Rosie DiManno
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One is rumoured to have murdered her husband and daughter, a juicy bit of slanderous scuttlebutt that's all the rage hereabouts.
The other is the widow of a politician who was beaten, stabbed and then thrown out of a plane – an ironic dénouement for the minister of aviation, in a country which has no air force to speak of.
Shahla Ata and Frozan Fana are sorority oddballs and an ill fit within Afghanistan's patriarchal establishment, a brace of women who are running for the presidency in next week's national elections. Neither has a remote chance of winning more than a single-digit percentage of the vote. Both insist that's not the point. And each, it is assumed, has a distinct agenda.
For Ata, a trained psychologist who spent 18 years living in the United States, working as a registered nurse, the prize would be appointment as women's minister in the next government.
It's the only cabinet position currently held by a female, and on her "watch'' President Hamid Karzai almost rammed through legislation that would have legalized rape against minority Shiite women and condemned them to their homes unless accompanied by a male family member – Taliban redux.
Fana is a physician, born into a politically active family from Herat, and potentially a minister of health – especially if main challenger Abdullah Abdullah manages to defeat Karzai. The way Fana has been loudly accusing a government cabal of murdering her husband seven years ago, she's unlikely to have much of a fan in the incumbent. That was his team, even if Fana carefully excuses Karzai from the plot. "I've never said him. But some people from his government who were afraid my husband might be a future president of Afghanistan.''
Afghan politics are byzantine at the best of times and these exemplify that, a mosh-pit of nearly 40 candidates vying for top job against the backdrop of a broadening insurgency and slapstick corruption. It's all gossip and smear tactics, with no slack cut the two ladies on account of their gender. Indeed, they've been particularly and exceptionally targeted for slime tactics because of their sex, hence the hysterical rumour-mill.
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Vote leaders take campaigns across Afghanistan
By Bronwen Roberts (AFP) – 21 hours ago
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KABUL — The top candidates in the Afghan presidential race jetted across the nation Friday to win support for next week's polls as an official claimed some Taliban commanders would allow voting in their areas.
An eager crowd of around 10,000 welcomed President Hamid Karzai, frontrunner in the August 20 elections, after he flew into Herat for his first rally in the western city in a nearly two-month campaign, an AFP reporter said.
In an address, Karzai repeated a pledge to draw the Taliban into talks to end their insurgency and presented his inclusion of former warlords in his election bid as proof that he brought unity to ethnically diverse Afghanistan.
"We're working for peace across the country, it's a matter of pride for us that national unity is established in Afghanistan," he said, standing alongside Herat strongman and powerful Soviet resistance commander Ismail Khan.
Karzai said his country was growing in stature and would be able to prevent "foreigners" from jailing Afghans, an apparent reference to US forces who have arrested locals in counter-terrorism sweeps.
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Canada's Afghan tactics lay ground for stability, top soldier says
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Sonia Verma
Kandahar — From Saturday's Globe and Mail
Last updated on Saturday, Aug. 15, 2009 04:09AM EDT
Brigadier-General Jonathan Vance, the country's top commander in Afghanistan, says Canada's combat mission here will end just as crucial momentum is building toward a lasting victory against the Taliban.
New Canadian efforts, which echo counterinsurgency tactics used in Iraq, are laying the groundwork for lasting stability. Canadian combat troops, however, won't be around to see it with Ottawa's current exit strategy for 2011, he said.
“By 2011, there will still be insurgency in Kandahar province. For sure,” Brig.-Gen. Vance said Friday in a frank, hour-long interview with The Globe and Mail in his office at Kandahar Air Field.
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US Marines to help train Georgian troops
(AP) – 19 hours ago
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TBILISI, Georgia — A group of U.S. Marines will arrive in Georgia to help train its troops for a mission alongside coalition forces in Afghanistan, the U.S. Embassy said Friday.
The move is likely to vex neighboring Russia, which has strongly spoken out against U.S. military assistance to Georgia.
The U.S. Embassy said in a statement that the training will focus on skills necessary for the troops to operate in Afghanistan. It said that a Georgian battalion is set to deploy to Afghanistan next spring.
The Embassy described Georgia's offer to send troops to Afghanistan as "a vital contribution to the mission of bringing stability and security to Afghanistan."
The training program will start Sept. 1 and no weapons will be provided to the Georgians as part of the training, it said.
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Pakistan's tribal areas to get parliamentary reps
By CHRIS BRUMMITT (AP) – 1 day ago
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ISLAMABAD — Pakistan lifted a ban on political activities in its tribal regions on Friday, granting the areas close to Afghan border parliamentary representation for the first time in the hopes it would reduce the grip of the Taliban there.
Pakistan's seven semiautonomous agencies have never been politically and administratively integrated into the rest of the country — a vacuum that observers say has allowed lawlessness and an al-Qaida- and Taliban-led militancy to thrive there.
"This breaks the monopoly of clerics to play politics from the pulpit of the mosque to the exclusion of major secular political parties," said Farhatullah Babar, a spokesman for President Asif Ali Zardari "It empowers the locals and weakens the extremists."
Since the days of British colonial rule, the region's 4 million people have been ruled by government-appointed agents in concert with tribal leaders. They are subject to tribal laws that allow for detention without trial and communal punishment among other unpopular measures.
Babar said Friday's announcement did not reduce the powers of the political agent or modify the laws, but would mean that political parties could campaign there and represent the region in the national parliament after the next elections in 2013.
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