Articles found October 19, 2011
Survey in a War Zone
More than Half of Afghans See NATO as Occupiers
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10/18/2011
Fully 60 percent of Afghans fear that the country will descend into civil war once NATO forces leave, but over half see the Western alliance as occupiers. A new survey carried out be the Konrad Adenauer Foundation has found that the mood in Afghanistan is worsening.
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The troops are there, according to the mission statement, to "provide a secure environment for sustainable stability." But 10 years after NATO entered Afghanistan to drive out al-Qaida and beat back the Taliban, a majority of the local population has come to see the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) as little more than occupiers.
According to a survey published on Tuesday by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, 56 percent of Afghans now see the foreign troop contingent as an occupying force. Furthermore, only 39 percent of those surveyed said they saw ISAF as a guarantee for security, well down from the 45 percent result found in the same survey in 2010. Fully 60 percent think that the country will descend into civil war once NATO forces withdraw.
Babak Khalatbari, head of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation's Afghanistan office, said on Tuesday that the results were "a matter of concern."
The survey has been completed each year since 2008 and is carried out in conjunction with the National Centre for Policy Research at the University of Kabul. Some 5,000 Afghans were interviewed in five provinces in late September. Though the Konrad Adenauer Foundation warns that the poll is not strictly representative, the results are broadly consistent with the impression most in the West have about Afghanistan: The situation appears to be worsening.
Far from Subdued
"The survey results show that in Afghanistan, there appears to be an increasing amount of anxiety and fear rather than hope," Khalatbari said.
With a decade having elapsed since the US and NATO marched into Afghanistan in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, many in the West have begun to see the mission as a failure. Security in the country is perceived as fragile and the Taliban are far from subdued.
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Training Concerns Hover Over Delivery of Afghan Equipment
By JACK HEALY October 18, 2011,
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KABUL, Afghanistan — Can a fledgling Afghan Army plagued by corruption, illiteracy and years of atrophy maintain a $500 million fleet of sophisticated armored vehicles provided by American taxpayers?
NATO forces, who are handing over the keys, are about to find out.
The fleet of mobile strike force vehicles, burly and beige, each 19 tons with a gun turret and two layers of armor, was shown off by Afghan forces on Tuesday, part of a hugely expensive armada now being delivered here as American forces place increasing emphasis on equipping and training the growing ranks of Afghan soldiers and police officers.
The United States has provided more than $11 billion for equipment and transportation for the Afghan police and soldiers over the last five years, according to a June report to Congress by the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction. And more high-priced, high-tech hardware is on the way, arriving along with questions about whether the Afghan forces will be able to keep it up and running as American troops leave and American money dries up.
NATO forces have delivered 2,400 armored vehicles for the Afghan police, and 2,200 more are being shipped. It is supplying the Afghan National Army with 21 Mi-17 V5 helicopters at a cost of $380 million, and expects to spend another $500 million for light-attack support aircraft.
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Intelligence Sharing Has Room for Improvement
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Tue, 18 October, 2011 By Peter B. de Selding
SAN ANTONIO — Sharing of satellite and other intelligence information among coalition partners fighting in Afghanistan has improved in the past two years but still falls short of what is needed to permit them to work and fight as effectively as possible, U.S., British, Canadian and Australian military officials said Oct. 18.
The problem, they said, is not just on the U.S. side. Other coalition partners have stove-piped information flows, effectively prohibiting information from being shared among solders fighting shoulder to shoulder.
Despite a decade of fighting in Afghanistan and eight years in Iraq, coalition partners’ classification practices are still an obstacle that hobbles the effort — so much so that field commanders are sometimes forced to sidestep their military procedures in the interest of getting things done.
“Intelligence sharing is one of the top two requests all the time,” said U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, assistant director of national intelligence for partner engagement in the office of the director of national intelligence. To get approval for release of data, requests need to be made to the U.S. National Security Agency or the U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), which own the data, he said.
“We are causing people in the field to bend the laws,” Flynn said here during the Geoint 2011 symposium. “We have to make adjustments. ... We cannot win unilaterally, so just get over it.”
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Bureaucrats shoot holes in military's effectiveness
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By Barry Cooper, Calgary Herald October 19, 2011
Last Monday, the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute released a paper called Lessons Learned? What Canada Should Learn from Afghanistan. It was written by Canada's best two military historians, Jack Granatstein and David Bercuson, with the assistance of Nancy Pearson-Mackie. It is no secret that the authors are friends of mine, but that happenstance fades into irrelevance beside the significance of the content of their argument and the evidence adduced to support it.
They tell a story of a bureaucratic guerrilla war fought by the striped pants brigade in Foreign Affairs against the military. They detail how NATO is becoming as useless as the UN was a decade ago. They make it clear that no one making decisions in Ottawa had a clue what Canadian soldiers would be facing when they were sent to Kandahar. Those who had noticed, for example, that from the Taliban perspective, there was no border with Pakistan or that the Taliban and the Pakistan intelligence apparatus were intimate, were ignored.
In military terms, the tactical successes of Canadian soldiers were unguided by strategy. The real purpose of the mission was to show our allies that we were no longer free riders. But at the same time that the army was fighting set-piece battles, Canadians were told it was all about human rights and sending girls to school. This is a recipe for defeat because tactical successes without strategy are incoherent and lack political direction.
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Pakistan warns US over unilateral military action
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19 October 2011 Last updated at 06:24 ET
Pakistan's army chief Ashfaq Kayani has warned the US that it will have to think "10 times" before taking any unilateral action in North Waziristan.
He said that the US should focus on stabilising Afghanistan instead of pushing Pakistan to attack militant groups in the crucial border region.
Washington has for many years urged Islamabad to deal with militants in the area, especially the Haqqani network.
It has been blamed for a series of recent attacks in Afghanistan.
"If someone convinced me that all problems will be solved by taking action in North Waziristan, I'd do it tomorrow," a parliamentarian who attended a briefing given by Gen Kayani quoted him as saying.
"If we need to take action, we will do it on our schedule and according to our capacity."
Gen Kayani told the closed-door parliamentary defence committee meeting in Rawalpindi that any withdrawal of American assistance would not affect Pakistan's defence capabilities.
'Very focused'
The Haqqani network - believed to be linked to the Taliban and al-Qaeda - is accused of carrying out last month's 19-hour siege of the US embassy in Kabul.
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