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17 February 2012

 

 

 

FEATURE STORY

After Scuffle at Afghan Embassy, a Spotlight on Connections

 

 

BUSINESS

No articles featured today

NATION

Afghan Allies Must Step Up Anti Drug Fight, UN's Ban Says
Special Forces in Afghanistan: not just taking out terrorists anymore
Regional Leaders Consider Paths for an Afghan Peace
Former Afghan spy chief chafes at peace talks
Afghan leader Hamid Karzai seeks Pakistan help in Taliban talks
Afghan army to cost U.S. billions of dollars after 2014 withdrawal
Moscow hopes its Afghan rebuild to usher in stability
Spinning Afghanistan, America's longest war
Will Afghanistan collapse after U.S. troops leave? Maybe, but not why you think
For Punishment of Elder’s Misdeeds, Afghan Girl Pays the Price
Fearing infiltration, Afghan army gives soldiers with ties to Pakistan an ultimatum
Afghan peace push brings rare chance, risks, for U.S.
Talking with the Taliban, making peace with the guilty
Talks with the Taliban Are Inevitable, but Who Will Be at the Table?
'Britain's war against Afghan opium production is failing'
Taliban reject Karzai claim of secret meetings
Hamid Karzai, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Pakistan for challenging summit
U.S. intelligence officials offer grim words on Afghanistan
Pentagon Provides Details of Afghan Role Shift
U.S.-Taliban talks only 'exploratory' - Afghan envoy
Envoy: Pakistan Not Taking Sides in Afghanistan Peace Efforts

PRESS RELEASES

Pakistan PM: Pakistan Supports an Afghan-led and owned Peace Process

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FEATURE STORY 

After Scuffle at Afghan Embassy, a Spotlight on Connections

New York Times
By MATTHEW ROSENBERG
February 16, 2012
WASHINGTON

If war is what happens when diplomacy fails, what results when diplomats themselves fail to be, well, diplomatic with one another? At the Afghan Embassy in Washington, the answer was a punch in the face.

Last week, after an argument over who was going to put together a filing cabinet and where it would be placed, an Afghan Embassy staff member who handles relations with Congress decked a colleague who handles the mission’s administrative affairs, current and former diplomats said.

No lasting damage was done, except maybe to the career of the aggressor. Yet even that is not a certainty — the puncher, Haroon Aloko, is the son of Afghanistan’s attorney general. The Foreign Ministry said he was called back to Kabul for “discussions,” but an embassy staff member said he was still in the United States, waiting for the incident to blow over before resuming his duties. The staff member did not want to be named for fear of damaging his career.

“This man, he assaults people. But he is not fired,” the staff member said. “This is our most important embassy in all of the world, but we are living with thugs. You see why I would want not to have my name involved?”

On its own, a single office scuffle is unlikely to change Afghanistan’s trajectory as it grapples with the United States’ slow disengagement. But the punch and the Foreign Ministry’s cautious reaction offer a reminder of a rampant problem for Afghanistan: nepotism that runs up and down the government, from teaching appointments in rural schools to posts at the country’s well-appointed embassies in Western capitals, like the Afghan mission in the Kalorama neighborhood of Washington.

The perception that the best jobs — as well as the most lucrative business deals — go to those with the best connections has sharply undermined popular support for the Afghan government.

As for the matter at the Afghan Embassy in Washington, the Foreign Ministry said it was under control. “The important thing is that this was dealt with immediately,” said Janan Mosazai, the ministry’s spokesman. He emphasized that Ambassador Eklil Hakimi was not involved — Afghan news reports initially indicated that he was the one who had been slugged — and that the envoy quickly informed Kabul about the incident.

Mr. Aloko did not respond to calls or text messages to his American cellphone seeking comment.

Alissa J. Rubin contributed reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan.

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BUSINESS

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NATION

Afghan Allies Must Step Up Anti Drug Fight, UN's Ban Says

TOLOnews.com
Thursday, 16 February 2012

Afghanistan's allies must step up the fight to combat the production and trade of drugs because the country cannot be stable while its economy depends so heavily on narcotics, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon said on Thursday in Vienna.

"We cannot speak of sustainable development when opium production is the only viable economic activity in the country," Mr Ban said at the opening of a major international conference on drugs.

"We cannot expect stability when 15 per cent of Afghanistan's gross domestic product comes from the drugs trade, the UN chief added.

More than 50 countries and international organisations attended the one-day Paris Pact Ministerial Conference, which first met in 2003.

Some experts believe that as the international community withdraws its forces from the country, a process that is scheduled for completion by the end of 2014, the Afghan government will need more help to fight poppy cultivation, which rose last year.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) recently announced that revenues from opium production increased by 133 per cent in 2011.

Afghanistan supplies 90 per cent of the world's opium despite the efforts of the government and its international allies to curb production.

The money earned from opium is reportedly used to provide weapons for insurgents.

Meanwhile, Afghanistan and seven other countries in the region recently agreed to booster regional efforts to fight drugs with the support of the UNODC.

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Special Forces in Afghanistan: not just taking out terrorists anymore

As conventional forces withdraw from Afghanistan, US Special Forces will take the lead in training Afghan soldiers and police – a task that takes Special Forces back to their roots.

Christian Science Monitor
By Anna Mulrine, Staff writer
February 16, 2012
Washington

From the rescue of hostages held by pirates to the SEAL Team 6 strike on Osama bin Laden's compound, the formerly secretive world of Special Forces is increasingly front and center in US operations throughout the globe.

Now these troops are about to take over more responsibilities in America's longest-running war, too.

With US force levels in Afghanistan scheduled to drop from some 90,000 currently to 68,000 troops by October, Special Operations Forces (SOF) will take on an increasingly pivotal role in the country, senior military officials say.

IN PICTURES: Special Forces around the world

In many ways, the transition will be a familiar one for SOF, returning it to its roots. Long before their secret raids became so public, SOF troops were primarily tasked with coordinating with indigenous forces of America's allies. They are now poised to do the same in Afghanistan, eventually taking over US operations there after conventional forces leave.

Specifically, they will likely stay on the ground in Afghanistan well into 2015, senior military officials say. Under current agreements, conventional US forces are scheduled to depart by 2014.

"I have no doubt that Special Operations will be the last to leave Afghanistan," said Adm. William McRaven, commander of US Special Operations Forces Command, during a conference in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 7.

The Pentagon's emphasis on the role of Special Operations capabilities has been growing steadily for the past decade.

The ranks of SOF troops grew from 33,000 before the 9/11 attacks to 66,000 today. Those figures are expected to increase to 70,000 in the next few years, according to the Feb. 14 Pentagon budget.

These forces currently operate in some 70 countries around the globe. Admiral McRaven is reportedly lobbying to gain greater autonomy in determining precisely where to deploy these forces, according to the New York Times. This in turn would allow SOF to react quickly and expand into new regions. Critics point out that this also has the potential to stretch these in-demand forces thin.

Indeed, in the months to come, US Special Forces will be asked to bear an increasingly heavy load, including taking the lead in training Afghan soldiers and police – widely agreed to be America's exit strategy in the country. Their goal will be to speed this process, senior military officials say – a process which is generally agreed to be lagging.

Such a boost in speed is essential, according to a January assessment by the director of national intelligence (DNI). "In terms of security, we judge that the Afghan police and Army will continue to depend on ISAF [International Security Assistance Force] support," James Clapper, the DNI, noted in testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee this month.

The effort to take off Afghan security forces' "training wheels," as US troops like to say, has been partly impeded by the capabilities of US forces themselves.

"The Afghans, if they see Americans moving forward, may have a tendency to step back," Michael Sheehan, assistant secretary of Defense for Special Operations, told a Washington audience. "In my view that's got to be the most important aspect of the transition – having US forces take a step back and the Afghan security forces take a step forward."

That's where SOF comes in.

"The Special Forces operator understands that environment – he understands that advisory role," said Mr. Sheehan. "And that SOF operator is going to have to try to push his Afghan counterpart to the front of this struggle, and it's going to be a long one that's not going to go away anytime soon."

Some critics say the Obama administration is moving too fast to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said US forces could step back to an advisory role in 2013, a year earlier than planned.

But waiting "doesn't get us anywhere," Sheehan said. "Now is as good a time as ever to push the Afghans out in front."

In the months to come, the expanded SOF role will require some reorganization of the "three tribes" of SOF operations, McRaven said.

These tribes include the forces working with NATO on provincial security-response teams, those conducting "stability operations" in Afghan villages, and those conducting strikes on terrorist cells.

In the beginning, as Special Operations troops take more responsibility, they will then "integrate" conventional forces into their operations, McRaven said.

"With each cut in the conventional forces, you're going to have to basically fold smaller and smaller conventional elements into Special Forces," says Anthony Cordesman, a defense analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

In the process, he adds, "Special Forces will gradually take over."

This will require SOF troops to "not just be able to deal with the worst parts of enemy networks," he says, but also to return to their traditional core mission of supporting foreign armies. Today, some 3,000 additional SOF troops also operate in more than 75 countries.

"It's really an incredibly demanding mission at a time when everybody else is going to be cutting down," Dr. Cordesman says. "And it's going to get more demanding as US and allied forces ramp down, and as aid groups are pulled out of the country."

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Regional Leaders Consider Paths for an Afghan Peace

New York Times
By DECLAN WALSH and ALISSA J. RUBIN
February 16, 2012
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan

The prospect of talks with the Taliban inched closer on Thursday when the leaders of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran met to explore ways of pushing the nascent peace process forward.

The two-day trilateral meeting hosted by the Pakistani president, Asif Ali Zardari, comes as his Afghan counterpart, Hamid Karzai, claims to have opened direct discussions with the Taliban for the first time in the 11-year-old insurgency.

In an interview published in The Wall Street Journal on Thursday, President Karzai said the talks had taken place over the past month thanks to an American-sponsored initiative anchored in the Persian Gulf state of Qatar.

The Taliban, who frequently deride Mr. Karzai as an “American puppet,” denied any such talks had taken place. “The Islamic Emirates have never talked with Kabul’s powerless administration,” said a Taliban spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid, in an e-mail statement.

Such conflicting statements have become common in a nervy process driven by rumors and speculation and which, at least until now, had all the clarity of a hall of mirrors.

The current talks in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, are significant because all players agree that Pakistan will play a crucial role in determining the success of any talks, largely because the Taliban leaders — and many fighters — are believed to be sheltering in Pakistan’s lawless western region.

Last month Pakistan permitting Taliban representatives, many of whom are believed to be based in or around the cities of Karachi and Quetta, to travel to Qatar to meet with American representatives.

Yet the extent and nature of any Pakistani role in peace talks remain deeply contentious, marred by deep-rooted suspicion among Afghan, Western and even Taliban officials after decades of Pakistani meddling in Afghan affairs.

In Kabul, Western and Afghan officials suggested that Pakistan was using the trilateral meetings to provide a counterweight to American efforts to open a door to negotiations with the Taliban.

The officials speculate that Pakistan may try to set up a meeting between senior Taliban commanders and Mr. Karzai in Pakistan to prove their sincerity in supporting peace and to demonstrate their influence with the Taliban.

Pakistani civilian leaders insist that they are acting in good faith and have thrown their weight behind an “Afghan-led” peace process. “We will not block any process leading towards reconciliation,” the foreign minister, Hina Rabbani Khar, told a small group of reporters late Thursday, referring to the American initiative in Qatar.

“We don’t have a formula for peace talks; in fact I don’t think anyone does yet,” a senior Foreign Ministry official added. “But one thing is clear: It will have to be the Afghans themselves who come up with it.”

Pakistani officials emphasize that they are keen to prove their good faith to their Afghan counterparts. On a recent visit to Kabul, Ms. Khar visited Afghan leaders from ethnic groups that have traditionally been hostile toward Pakistan. Her message, the official said, was the same to each: “Whatever you decide, we will be supportive of you.”

On Thursday, Mr. Zardari told Mr. Karzai that he would extend “full cooperation” to investigators looking into the death of Burhanuddin Rabbani, Mr. Karzai’s main peace negotiator, who was killed in a suicide bombing last year. At the time, many Afghan officials accused Pakistan of orchestrating the assassination.

Pakistan could also leverage its presence in the peace process through its close ally Saudi Arabia, which recently offered to host a second strand of the peace talks in its capital, Riyadh.

A former Obama administration official said the Saudis had proposed the role, expressing unhappiness that Qatar had taken the lead.

On Thursday, Mr. Zardari also held a meeting with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, during which he reiterated his commitment for the “expeditious implementation” of a long-delayed gas pipeline between the two countries, Mr. Zardari’s spokesman said.

That statement is likely to discomfit Washington, which has for years trenchantly opposed the gas project, despite energy shortages in Pakistan. Iran and Pakistan also plan to build a major cross-border electricity transmission line, and to raise the level of bilateral trade to $5 billion a year, Mr. Zardari’s spokesman added.

Officials said a summit meeting involving all three presidents, scheduled to take place on Friday, would also focus on other mutual areas of interest, like border controls, economic development and efforts to tackle drug smuggling.

Declan Walsh reported from Islamabad, and Alissa J. Rubin from Kabul, Afghanistan.

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Former Afghan spy chief chafes at peace talks

Reuters
By Rob Taylor
Thu Feb 16, 2012
KABUL

Afghanistan's government must not retreat from hard-won freedoms or return to strict religious curbs to reach a peace deal with the Taliban, the country's former spy chief said, warning Afghans were distrustful of the secrecy surrounding nascent talks.

After President Hamid Karzai said the U.S. and Afghan governments had opened three-way "contacts" with the Taliban in a bid to end the country's decade-long war, Amrullah Saleh said ethnic groups coalescing towards a more unified opposition were prepared to fight to prevent a return of Taliban militancy.

"We want the state to remain pluralistic, not bow to the barrel of a gun," Saleh, a former head of Afghanistan's intelligence service and now a political opposition activist, told Reuters at his heavily-guarded Kabul home.

"If the Taliban, like us, want to come and play according to the script, sure. But if they come with gun-mounted Hi-Lux trucks, no, that means continuation of civil war, of war, and fragmentation of Afghanistan," he said.

Saleh's message is likely to strike a chord with many Afghans who feel sidelined by U.S.-initiated negotiations, despite Karzai's belated insistence on control of the process and determination they be Afghan-led.

Since being sacked by Karzai in 2010 following disagreements over how to deal with the Taliban, Saleh has formed a political group called the National Movement, targeting mainly Afghans who do not belong to the majority Pashtun group from which the Taliban draw most support.

Other ethnic power brokers are also circling each other including Uzbek general Abdul Rashid Dostum and prominent Hazara leader Mohammad Mohaqiq, eyeing a possible common front.

Karzai told The Wall Street Journal newspaper in an interview published on Thursday that he has seen enough signs to believe the Taliban were "definitively" interested in exploratory talks, seen by some as the best chance of ending the country's costly war, now entering its 11th year.

But Saleh, a strident critic of Karzai's centralized rule and efforts to reach out to the Taliban, said he did not believe the hardline Islamists would ever accept an Afghan government they had implacably opposed as a "puppet," even if some sort of deal emerged to give them a slice of power.

"Those who are against the Taliban, they are the majority, and this majority is now neglected," he said

"On one side of the table there are some mullahs, on the other side of the table is an American. Where are the Afghans? We feel unprotected, both by Karzai and by the Americans."

THREAT OF CIVIL WAR

Saleh was a former aide to former anti-Taliban hero Ahmad Shah Massoud and his Northern Alliance, which helped U.S.-backed forces topple the Taliban in 2001, ending a five-year rule marked by medieval brutality and oppression of both women and Afghanistan's non-Pashtun minorities.

He said if war broke out again, it would be worse than the bloody civil war that engulfed the country after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, when rival warlords razed much of Kabul in a conflict that left 50,000 civilians dead.

"Fighting is not a very sophisticated path. It's easy. And (so is) recruiting people to fight in this country where unemployment is more than 50 percent. To believe that only one group can fight is naivete," he said.

"They should know that when we offer to be part of the solution, they should not underestimate us."

Karzai had been forced into dealing with the Taliban not because of a stalemate in the NATO-led war, Saleh said, but because his government's poor anti-graft record and failure to build a justice system that people had faith in, leading many Afghans to believe the Taliban could do a better job.

"If we talk to the Taliban from a position of strength, where we have bought reform, where we have restored the confidence of the people in our ability to represent Afghanistan, the Taliban become a group, not a force," he said.

(Editing by Sanjeev Miglani)

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Afghan leader Hamid Karzai seeks Pakistan help in Taliban talks

Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai meets with Pakistan's Yousuf Raza Gilani and Asif Ali Zardari to seek help with peace talks. But the Taliban denies it's negotiating with Karzai.

Los Angeles Times
By Alex Rodriguez and Laura King,
February 17, 2012
Islamabad, Pakistan, and Kabul

Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Thursday sought to secure help from Pakistani leaders in facilitating peace talks with Pakistan-based Afghan Taliban leaders, while the militant group denied any interest in negotiating with an "impotent" administration.

Karzai's visit to Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, came amid reports that he had said in an interview that the U.S. and Afghan governments had begun secret talks with the Afghan Taliban. In recent months, U.S. officials have been meeting with Taliban envoys to discuss the establishment of a Taliban office in the Persian Gulf state of Qatar.

But late Thursday, the Taliban issued a statement strongly denying the movement had taken part in secret talks with the Karzai government.

"We have not decided to negotiate with the Karzai regime," spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid said. He accused the Afghan leader of wanting "to extend his foreign-backed power for a few more days."

"This false campaign will fail," he said.

Previously, the Taliban leadership dismissed Karzai as a "puppet" and publicly indicated willingness to talk only with the Americans and the West.

However, Haji Musa Hotak, a member of the Karzai-appointed body set up in 2010 to try to negotiate with the Taliban, said the Taliban position had changed.

"The Taliban have stopped insisting on talking to the U.S. and not the Afghan government," he said. "Now the Taliban are saying they are ready to talk with the Afghan government face to face. They said they will talk to both Americans and the Afghan government."

Karzai held separate meetings with Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani and President Asif Ali Zardari. He also met with Zardari and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who also arrived in Islamabad on Thursday.

Ahmadinejad's meetings with Pakistani leaders were expected to center on plans for a pipeline that would send Iranian natural gas to Pakistan. Though Washington opposes the idea because of concern over Iran's nuclear program, Pakistan has signaled its intent to move ahead with the pipeline.

With Kabul and Washington pushing for peace talks, Pakistan is regarded by both capitals as a major obstacle in the process. Afghan and American officials maintain that Pakistan's intelligence community continues to actively support Afghan Taliban insurgents.

Washington has long alleged that top Afghan Taliban leaders remain based in the outskirts of the southern Pakistani city of Quetta, and that the biggest threat to U.S. troops in Afghanistan, the Afghan Taliban wing known as the Haqqani network, continues to operate from havens in Pakistan's volatile tribal areas along the border with Afghanistan.

Pakistan's links with the Haqqani group date to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, when Pakistan's primary spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, backed the group's founder, Jalaluddin Haqqani, and other resistance fighters.

Experts say Pakistan views the militant group as a key asset in a post-U.S. Afghanistan to prevent nuclear archrival India from extending its influence to Kabul. Pakistan's military leaders continue to regard India, and not Islamic extremists, as their main nemesis. Pakistan denies that it supports Haqqani militants or provides them sanctuary.

Afghan officials also suspect a link between Pakistani intelligence agents and the Sept. 20 assassination of former Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani, who was selected by Karzai to lead negotiation efforts with the Taliban. Rabbani was killed at his home when a man who said he was a Taliban emissary detonated a bomb hidden in his turban as the two men met.

Pakistani leaders have adamantly denied the allegation. On Thursday, Zardari said Pakistan recently sent a team to Kabul to assist Afghan officials in the investigation of Rabbani's slaying. A statement issued by Zardari's office said the president told Karzai that Rabbani "was a friend of Pakistan and an honest and serious interlocutor," and called the assassination "the work of those elements who do not want a peace and reconciliation process in Afghanistan."

While in Pakistan, Karzai was also scheduled to meet with several leaders of the country's influential religious parties, including Maulana Samiul Haq, regarded as the spiritual father of the Taliban. Haq operates an Islamic seminary in northwestern Pakistan, where several Taliban leaders once studied. Haq is thought to maintain close ties with the Taliban.

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Rodriguez reported from Islamabad and King from Kabul.

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Afghan army to cost U.S. billions of dollars after 2014 withdrawal

Washington Post
By Greg Jaffe
Friday, February 17, 2012

The U.S. military expects that sustaining the Afghan army and police forces after the planned withdrawal of American combat forces in 2014 will cost about $4 billion a year and that most of that money will have to come from the United States and other outside donors, said a senior military official Thursday.

The Obama administration plans to announce the enduring price tag for the Afghan troops at a NATO summit in May. The exact cost of paying, equipping and training the Afghan forces will depend on their size, which is the subject of debate in Kabul and Washington.

“If we are going to succeed in Afghanistan, we are going to have to make a commitment to sustaining the Afghan security forces, and my sense is that is recognized,” the senior military official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing deliberations. “That is what we are driving toward, and that is what will be announced in May at the summit.”

In recent years, the United States has spent tens of billions of dollars on Afghan forces to increase their numbers and add infrastructure. This year, the Obama administration’s budget for Afghan forces is about $11.2 billion, about twice the planned budget of $5.7 billion in 2013.

The Afghan army and police force had been expected to grow to about 350,000 troops, up from 310,000 today, but Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta suggested this month that the goal could be scaled back to save money.

The Afghan government can afford to pay only about 12 percent of the expected $4 billion annual price tag of the Afghan forces beyond 2014, said the U.S. military official. The majority of the remaining costs would be borne by the U.S. government. U.S. officials also are counting on big contributions from NATO allies to fund the Afghan forces beyond 2014.

“I think that a 2-to-1 ratio is pretty reasonable in terms of financing,” the senior military official said regarding U.S. and European contributions.

The long-term plan for U.S. and NATO troops beyond the end of 2014 — the date set for the withdrawal of all combat troops — and the possibility of accelerating fragile peace talks with the Taliban also will be major parts of the May summit, U.S. officials said. The Pentagon expects that U.S. and NATO forces will remain in Afghanistan after 2014 to train Afghan forces and possibly carry out strikes against insurgent leaders.

The United States is seeking additional commitments from NATO at the same time it reduces its force of 80,000 troops in Europe by about 15 percent. The United States plans to eliminate two brigades of combat troops in Europe, totaling about 8,000 troops, as part of a cost-saving plan to shrink the Army to about 490,000 troops. The United States also plans to pull out an Air Force squadron and support troops.

To make up for the losses, the United States will designate a brigade to focus on Europe with the hope that it will send battalions to participate in joint exercises with the NATO allies. The Pentagon also plans to dispatch additional V-22 aircraft and about 500 Marines to Europe and move four Aegis destroyers into the area to help with missile defense.

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Moscow hopes its Afghan rebuild to usher in stability

Reuters
By Amie Ferris-Rotman
Thu Feb 16, 2012
KABUL

Russia hopes to embark on a series of ambitious construction projects in Afghanistan aimed at reinforcing fragile stability in the country where Soviet troops fought a disastrous, decade-long war, its envoy to Kabul said Thursday.

Though not connected by land, Moscow sees war-ravaged Afghanistan as a neighbor and is concerned by what it describes as the two-pronged threat of drugs and terrorism which reach Russia through ex-Soviet Central Asian countries.

Andrey Avetisyan said Russia had limited involvement in Afghan reconstruction over the last decade "because it was all about fighting, and since we are not fighting, we didn't see much place for our activity."

But that approach has changed. "Now, we're trying to kind of start anew," he told Reuters in the glistening rebuilt embassy, a third of its Soviet size during the war, whose end 23 years ago Wednesday was marked by Afghans and Russians.

Russia hopes to begin with reconstructing around 150 Soviet-era projects, from Afghanistan's most important stretch of highway, the congested and aging Salang tunnel, to a Kabul bread factory that once fed the entire Afghan security forces.

For these, many of which were built by Soviets before they invaded in 1979, the same technology, documentation and even the same engineers still exist, meaning the Russians are in prime position to take over the work, Avetisyan said.

Moscow then aims to delve into new ventures, involving oil extraction, hydroelectric projects, housing and possibly even build the country's first railway network.

The Asian Development Bank a year ago estimated Afghanistan's infrastructure requirements at more than $4 billion.

Avetisyan declined to put a price tag on the Russian projects, but said a meeting in two weeks in Moscow, with Afghan Finance Minister Omar Zakhilwal, should shed more light on the exact proposals and what will be agreed upon.

Russian gas export monopoly Gazprom, oil major Rosneft, state railway firm Russian Railways, second-biggest oil producer LUKOIL and state power holding company Inter RAO, as well as others, were interested in concrete projects in Afghanistan, he said.

"We're not going to tell the Afghans how to live, which life to live -- we stopped doing this 25 years ago," said Avetisyan, who worked for the Soviet government in Kabul, becoming fluent in Afghanistan's two main languages, Dari and Pashto.

"We just want to have a friendly, independent Afghanistan as our neighbor... Economic development should go first, because there cannot be security without (this). The roots of insecurity are in the problems for people to find jobs, have a home."

"PAST TEN YEARS ALMOST WASTED"

Escalating violence across Afghanistan in the 11th year of an increasingly unpopular war has sent tremors of worry across Russia, which borders mainly Muslim former Soviet republics in Central Asia, and which is battling a growing Islamist insurgency in its own volatile North Caucasus.

The flow of Afghan heroin, branded a threat to national security by the Kremlin, has also set off alarm bells in a country which health officials warn is the world's top user of heroin, spurring a crippling HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Underscoring those fears is the looming deadline of end-2014 for NATO to train a 350,000-strong force of Afghan police and soldiers who will take over all security responsibilities from foreign combat troops, who will also leave by that time.

Avetisyan said Washington was at risk of repeating the errant ways of its Cold War foe in approaching Afghanistan. "They (the U.S.) came 10 years ago, thought they could fix it very quickly, and then leave. Exactly the same mistake that the Soviet army made," he said of its dispirited 1989 exit from a war that took 15,000 Soviet lives.

After the Soviets rushed out, the Afghan communist government collapsed, leading to infighting between warlords and a vicious civil war that reduced much of Kabul to rubble and paved the way for the Taliban's rise to power in 1996.

Avetisyan lamented the slow economic development over the last decade, echoing the discontent of many ordinary Afghans who accuse the U.S. force in their country of not building enough.

"The past ten years were almost wasted in this sense," he said.

"... Why have the Americans achieved so little in terms of economic development? Because it is not in their plans and it still is not, I am afraid."

(Reporting by Amie Ferris-Rotman; Editing by Nick Macfie)

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Spinning Afghanistan, America's longest war

According to a military whistleblower, army leaders are practising a deception on the US public about this unwinnable war

Guardian.co.uk
By Amy Goodman
Thursday 16 February 2012

Eight youths, tending their flock of sheep in the snowy fields of Afghanistan, were exterminated last week by a Nato airstrike. They were in the Najrab district of Kapisa province in eastern Afghanistan. Most were reportedly between the ages of 6 and 14. They had sought shelter near a large boulder, and had built a fire to stay warm.

At first, Nato officials claimed they were armed men. The Afghan government condemned the bombing and released photos of some of the victims. By Wednesday, Nato offered, in a press release, "deep regret to the families and loved ones of several Afghan youths who died during an air engagement in Kapisa province Feb 8."

Those eight killed were not that different in age from Lance Cpl Osbrany Montes De Oca, 20, of North Arlington, New Jersey. He was killed two days later, 10 February, while on duty in Afghanistan's Helmand province. These nine young, wasted lives will be the latest footnote in the longest war in United States history, a war that is being perpetuated, according to one brave, whistleblowing US Army officer, through a "pattern of overt and substantive deception" by "many of America's most senior military leaders in Afghanistan".

Those are the words written by Lt Col Danny Davis in his 84-page report, "Dereliction of Duty II: Senior Military Leaders' Loss of Integrity Wounds Afghan War Effort" (pdf). A draft of that report, dated 27 January 2012, was obtained by Rolling Stone magazine. It has not been approved by the US Army public affairs office for release, even though Davis writes that its contents are not classified. He has submitted a classified version to members of Congress.

Davis, a 17-year army veteran with four combat tours behind him, spent a year in Afghanistan with the army's rapid equipping force, traveling more than 9,000 miles to most operational sectors of the US occupation and learning firsthand what the troops said they needed most. In a piece he wrote in Armed Forces Journal (AFJ), titled "Truth, Lies and Afghanistan", Davis wrote of his experience:

What I saw bore no resemblance to rosy official statements by US military leaders about conditions on the ground.

Speaking out is strongly discouraged in the US military, especially against one's superiors. His whistleblowing was picked up by the New York Times and Rolling Stone, whose reporter, Michael Hastings, told me:

"The fact is that you have a 17-year army veteran who's done four tours – two in Afghanistan and two in Iraq – who has decided to risk his entire career (he has two and a half more years left before he gets a pension) because he feels that he has a moral obligation to do so."

Davis interviewed more than 250 people – US military personnel and Afghan nationals – in his recent year in the war zone. He compared what he learned from them with optimistic projections from the likes of David Petraeus, former head of the military's CentCom and of the US military in Afghanistan, and now head of the CIA, who told Congress on 15 March 2011, that:

"[T]he momentum achieved by the Taliban in Afghanistan since 2005 has been arrested in much of the country, and reversed in a number of important areas."

In his AFJ piece, Davis wrote:

"Instead, I witnessed the absence of success on virtually every level … insurgents controlled virtually every piece of land beyond eyeshot of a US or International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) base."

His observations concur with the death of Osbrany Montes de Oca. His girlfriend, Maria Samaniego, told the New York Daily News, "He was walking out of the base and he was immediately shot."

The number of US military deaths in Afghanistan approaches 2,000, which is about the number of civilians killed there annually. Nic Lee, the director of the independent Afghanistan NGO Safety Office, wrote in his year-end report for 2011 (pdf):

"The year was remarkable for being the one in which the US/Nato leadership finally acknowledged the unwinnable nature of its war with the Taliban."

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta recently remarked:

"Hopefully by the mid to latter part of 2013 we'll be able to make a transition from a combat role to a training, advise and assist role."

Petraeus countered, saying the US remains committed to ending the combat mission by the end of 2014. Meanwhile, images surface of US Marines urinating on Afghan corpses, or posing with a Nazi SS flag, and the drumbeat continues, death by death. Lt Col Davis wrote:

"When having to decide whether to continue a war, alter its aims or to close off a campaign that cannot be won at an acceptable price, our senior leaders have an obligation to tell Congress and the American people the unvarnished truth."

• Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column

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Will Afghanistan collapse after U.S. troops leave? Maybe, but not why you think

Foreign Policy
By Thomas E. Ricks
Thursday, February 16, 2012

Best Defense directorate of military-economic affairs

Will Afghanistan collapse after the departure of American troops in 2013? That grim outcome appears all too likely. But the reason why Afghanistan may be heading toward anarchy is not simply due to the Afghan National Army's lack of military preparedness to fight an insurgency without foreign support. Rather, some of the most challenging problems that the government must face once the U.S. leaves will be economic.

Today, the United States and its allies provide the government of Afghanistan with the vast majority of its operating budget. American taxpayers have not only built up schools, hospitals, government ministries, and the Afghan National Army and police force; they have also paid the salaries of those who man these institutions. Further, U.S. military and foreign assistance operations in Afghanistan support many thousands of soldiers, foreign aid workers, and contractors, who pump millions of dollars into the local economy.

What will happen when the last Americans depart? If history is any guide, "foreign assistance follows the flag," meaning that aid spending will flee in the absence of a strong military presence. First, Americans will inevitably lose interest in Afghanistan and redirect spending to the next crisis zone; today, for example, the calamity in Syria is dominating the airwaves. Second, without American troops around to provide a modicum of security, foreign aid workers will have no choice but to leave the country; they won't be able to work in safety (and it shouldn't be forgotten that several hundred aid workers have already been killed during the war). As a result of the American withdrawal, both the motivation for aid spending and any possibility of monitoring aid effectiveness will quickly disappear.

An abject lesson in how economics can shape a war zone is provided by Vietnam. During the early 1970s, there were some glimmers of hope in South Vietnam following the North's severe military defeat during the 1968 Tet offensive. The United States, however, had already grown tired of the war, and the Nixon administration embarked upon a path of Vietnamization. As America's military and economic commitment to Vietnam declined, the weak Saigon government had no choice but to raise taxes and impose austerity measures. These policies fueled popular opinion against the regime, helping smooth the way for the North's successful invasion in 1975.

In preparing for its eventual departure from Afghanistan, there is much the United States could have done on the economic front but has tragically failed to implement. Incredibly, after more than ten years of war, the U.S. has no free trade agreement with Kabul, inadvertently promoting cross-border flows with Iran and Pakistan instead. Worse, these flows consist largely of needed imports, since the U.S. has promoted a strong Afghan currency that makes it near impossible to produce goods competitively within the country. The lack of an export-oriented industry, in turn, means that Afghanistan lacks a strong and forward-looking entrepreneurial class that could have served as a foundation for an anti-Taliban society; this is an even greater shame when one recognizes the tremendous craftsmanship that Afghan society is capable of in such sectors as woodworking and glassmaking.

The U.S. has also failed after more than a decade's presence to help Afghanistan create a credible statistics agency or a system of "national accounts" that would track how the government's money is being spent. This lack of transparency, in turn, enables corrupt practices to flourish. A cynic might think that America's failure to develop more robust Afghan economic data has been one of commission rather than omission.

When the history of America's involvement in Afghanistan is written, there will be much ink spilled over military strategy and tactics. Analysts will debate whether the U.S. should have been more aggressive in Pakistan or risked higher numbers of civilian casualties when taking the fight to the Taliban. Less attention, sadly, will be paid to the economic policies made in Washington and Kabul that were also instrumental in bringing about the demise of the Afghan regime.

Ethan B. Kapstein teaches global strategy at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and is a nonresident senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. A retired naval officer, he has served as an academic advisor to the Counterinsurgency Advisory and Assistance Team in Kabul. The opinions expressed in this piece are strictly his own and do not reflect the views of any organization with which he is or has been associated.

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For Punishment of Elder’s Misdeeds, Afghan Girl Pays the Price

New York Times
By ALISSA J. RUBIN
February 16, 2012
ASADABAD, Afghanistan

Shakila, 8 at the time, was drifting off to sleep when a group of men carrying AK-47s barged in through the door. She recalls that they complained, as they dragged her off into the darkness, about how their family had been dishonored and about how they had not been paid.

It turns out that Shakila, who was abducted along with her cousin as part of a traditional Afghan form of justice known as “baad,” was the payment.

Although baad (also known as baadi) is illegal under Afghan and, most religious scholars say, Islamic law, the taking of girls as payment for misdeeds committed by their elders still appears to be flourishing. Shakila, because one of her uncles had run away with the wife of a district strongman, was taken and held for about a year. It was the district leader, furious at the dishonor that had been done to him, who sent his men to abduct her.

Shakila’s case is unusual both because she managed to escape and because she and her family agreed to share their plight with an outsider. The reaction of the girl’s father to the abduction also illustrates the difficulty in trying to change such a deeply rooted cultural practice: he expressed fury that she was abducted because, he said, he had already promised her in marriage to someone else.

“We did not know what was happening,” said Shakila, now about 10, who spoke softly as she repeated over and over her memory of being dragged from her family home. “They put us in a dark room with stone walls; it was dirty and they kept beating us with sticks and saying, ‘Your uncle ran away with our wife and dishonored us, and we will beat you in retaliation.’ ”

Despite being denounced by the United Nations as a “harmful traditional practice,” baad is pervasive in rural southern and eastern Afghanistan, areas that are heavily Pashtun, according to human rights workers, women’s advocates and aid experts. Baad involves giving away a young woman, often a child, into slavery and forced marriage. It is largely hidden because the girls are given to compensate for “shameful” crimes like murder and adultery and acts forbidden by custom, like elopement, say elders and women’s rights advocates.

The strength of the traditional justice system and the continuing use of baad is a sign both of Afghans’ lack of faith in the government’s justice system, which they say is corrupt, and their extreme sense of insecurity. Baad is most common in areas where it is dangerous for people to seek out government institutions. Instead of turning to the courts, they go to jirgas, assemblies of tribal elders, that use tribal law, which allows the exchange of women.

“There are two reasons people refuse the courts — first, the corrupt administration, which openly demands money for every single case, and second, instability,” said Hajji Mohammed Nader Khan, an elder from Helmand Province who often participates in judging cases that involve baad. “Also, in places where there are Taliban, they won’t allow people to go to courts and solve their problems.”

Advocates for women fear that progress made recently against baad will fade as NATO troops pull out and money for public awareness programs dwindles.

“Baad has decreased in Oruzgan over the last two years due to a strong public relations campaign that we conducted throughout the province,” said Marjana Kochai, the only woman on Oruzgan’s provincial council. “And we have been holding meetings with elders and strictly alerting them not to make such illegal and un-Islamic rulings.”

A Custom’s Deep Roots

The practice of trading women dates to before Islam, when nomadic tribes traveled Afghanistan’s mountains and deserts. Even today, outside Afghanistan’s few urban areas, many of these traditions have deep roots, experts on tribal justice systems said.

“For the nomads, there were no police, there was no court of law, no judge to organize the affairs of humans, so they resorted to the only things they had, which were violence and killing,” said Nasrine Gross, an Afghan-American sociologist who has studied the status of Afghan women.

“Then when a problem doesn’t get resolved,” Ms. Gross said, “you offer the only things you have: livestock is more precious than a girl because the livestock you can sell, so you give two rifles, one camel, five sheep and then the girls they can sell this way.”

The idea is that the giving of a girl to the aggrieved family as a de facto slave and having her marry a member of that family ties the two warring families together, so they are less likely to continue a blood feud. The practice also helps compensate the family for the labor of a lost relative.

And when the girl gives birth to children, the offspring are at least a symbolic replacement for the relative who has been lost.

However, that is little comfort for the girl, who symbolizes the family’s enemy and is completely unprepared both for the brutality she will encounter because of it and for the sexual relations often demanded of her at a young age.

“The problem with baad is it doesn’t normally appease the people,” Ms Gross said. “It appeases them to the extent that they don’t kill someone from the other side, but not enough to treat the girl right.”

There is no official count of the number of girls given each year in baad, but in Kunar Province, where Shakila’s case took place, the director of the women’s office and a female member of Kunar’s provincial council said that they were aware of one or two cases every month from the province and that many cases never came to light. They had not heard of Shakila’s situation.

A Heavy Toll on Women

A 2010 United Nations report on harmful traditional practices described baad as “still pervasive” in rural areas.

Interviews in nine Pashtun-majority provinces with government representatives, women on provincial councils, male elders and other prominent women produced a stream of stories of abuse, suicide and rape. They found that virtually everyone knew about the practice, many were ashamed of it and most people knew someone personally who had been affected by it. Afghanistan outlawed baad in 2009 when it enacted the Elimination of Violence Against Women Act, but enforcement has been spotty, especially in southern and eastern Afghanistan, according to the United Nations.

Shakila’s family, like many in rural Kunar Province, did not oppose baad, but objected that the jirga adjudicating her case had not yet issued its ruling and that Shakila had been betrothed as an infant to a cousin in Pakistan. Under the Pashtun code, the family said, she was not available to be given because she was the property of another man. (Such betrothals are illegal but common in rural Pashtun areas.)

“We did not mind giving girls,” said her father, Gul Zareen. “But she was not mine to give.”

Views of baad differ sharply between men and women, with more men seeing it as a way of preserving families and stopping blood feuds, and women seeing it in terms of the suffering of the young girl asked to pay for another’s wrongs.

“Giving baad has good and bad aspects,” said Fraidoon Mohmand, a member of Parliament from Nangarhar Province, who has led a number of jirgas. “The bad aspect is that you punish an innocent human for someone else’s wrongdoings, and the good aspect is that you rescue two families, two clans, from more bloodshed, death and misery.”

He also said he believed that a woman given in baad suffered only briefly.

“When you give a girl in baad, they are beaten maybe, maybe she will be in trouble for a year or two, but when she brings one or two babies into the world, everything will be forgotten and she will live as a normal member of the family,” he said.

Not so, said the Afghan women interviewed, especially if she is unlucky enough to give birth to a girl.

“The woman given to a family in baad will always be the miserable one,” said Nasima Shafiqzada, who is in charge of women’s affairs for Kunar Province. “She has to work a lot. She will be beaten. She has to listen to lots of bad language from the other females in the family.”

Shakila’s relatives were poor laborers who lived in the rural Naray district in Kunar Province near a small river not far from the border with Pakistan.

Shakila went to school and played with her brothers and was a healthy child, her relatives said. That changed after she was taken by Fazal Nabi’s family, part of the Gujar clan, a tribe in Kunar with a larger presence in Naray than the tribe Shakila was from.

‘They Tortured Us’

During her de facto imprisonment, Shakila and her cousin were allowed out of their dark room after three months and then only so that they could haul firewood from the mountains and lug pails of water from the river.

For the entire year or so that they were kept, neither girl was given a fresh set of clothes. For the first six months they were not even allowed to wash the ones they arrived in, turning the children into dirty-looking urchins who were that much easier for the family to hate. They were fed bread and water every other day.

“They tortured us in a way that no human being would treat another,” Shakila said.

She spoke softly and hid her face when a reporter asked her about the white scars on her forehead. “When they threw me against the stone wall,” she explained.

Her cousin escaped first, resulting in even more brutal treatment for Shakila, who was tethered inside again and beaten.

Allowed out only for her prayers, she managed to slip through the gate one day. To avoid detection, she made her way through underbrush to the village where her sister lived. When Shakila appeared at her sister’s door, she was so emaciated and dirty that her sister barely recognized her.

“She was almost finished,” Gul Zareen, her father, said. “She was so thin, she was like this,” he said, holding up an index finger and shaking his head. “She cried all the time, and now we are trying to feed her and she is slowly getting better.”

Within hours, the strongman and his guards began looking for Shakila. They searched her father’s compound, accused him of organizing her escape and threatened to kill every man in the family.

Terrified, Shakila’s father and the other relatives said they waited until dusk and then, taking almost nothing but the clothes on their backs, escaped over the mountains, walking by night along footpaths because the strongman’s guards were watching the only road.

Now living in Asadabad, the provincial capital, because they feel safer here, Shakila’s relatives said they were struggling. They left behind their few possessions, including their only cow and two goats.

Shakila’s father and uncle work as daily laborers, earning $4 a day when there is a job. The family’s small mud house has neither heat nor electricity, and cooking is done in a single stew pot over coals in the yard.

Longing to return to their village in Naray, the family members went to the courts to see if the prosecutor or judge could protect them from the Gujar clan if they returned. But the order they received from the police chief instructed them to turn to the local police in Naray for help.

Gul Zareen shook his head. The police chief is a kinsman of Fazal Nabi, the strongman who took Shakila, he said. “We cannot go back,” he said.

Shakila looked out the window into the squalid yard. “I don’t know about my future,” she said. “Whether it will be good or bad.”

Taimoor Shah contributed reporting from Kandahar, Afghanistan, Farooq Jan Mangal from Khost, and an employee of The New York Times from Kunar Province.

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Fearing infiltration, Afghan army gives soldiers with ties to Pakistan an ultimatum

Washington Post
By Kevin Sieff
Friday, February 17, 2012
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan

In an effort to rid their army of Taliban infiltrators, Afghan officials have begun ordering soldiers with families in Pakistan to either move their relatives to Afghanistan or leave the military.

Afghan defense officials say the policy was crafted in response to a recent spate of incidents in which soldiers who were secretly working for the Taliban carried out attacks against NATO or Afghan troops. According to the army’s counterintelligence findings, those men often have ties to insurgent havens in Pakistan.

But the ultimatum could force painful choices for thousands of Afghan troops, and it is likely to stoke ethnic tensions just as the country’s leadership is seeking a negotiated end to the war. Purging members of the military with family in Pakistan also has the potential to aggravate long-troubled relations between Afghanistan and its eastern neighbor. Afghan President Hamid Karzai visited Islamabad on Thursday in a bid to enlist Pakistan’s help in winding down the conflict.

The policy has not yet received final approval from the Defense Ministry, and Afghan officials are still weighing whether to apply it nationwide, even as implementation begins in some areas. Mere consideration of the policy reflects the depth of anxiety in Afghanistan — both among Afghan officials and Western powers — over sleeper agents within the military.

U.S. officials have expressed concern about the Taliban’s ability to penetrate Afghan security forces but have not publicly proposed concrete remedies. Afghan commanders say that the connection between sleeper agents and time spent in Pakistan has been well documented and that there is consensus on the need to act.

“When they’re in Pakistan, they can be influenced and intimidated by the enemy,” said Lt. Gen. Sher Mohammad Karimi, the army chief of staff. “It’s a big concern, and it’s something we’re trying to change.”

Insurgent groups such as the Taliban are widely believed to operate from bases in Pakistan, and militants frequently travel back and forth across the border. Pakistan has denied long-standing allegations that it provides insurgents with support.

Afghan counterintelligence officials have already compiled lists of soldiers with ties to Pakistan. In some parts of the country, such as the battle-scarred south, soldiers on the list have been told: Move or leave the army.

“We’ve told them, ‘If you can’t move your families, you’ll be kicked out,’ ” said Col. Abdul Shokor, the top Afghan counterintelligence official in the Afghan army’s Kandahar-based 205th Corps.

On his desk, Shokor keeps a list of several hundred soldiers based in southern Afghanistan who visit Pakistan during their time off from the military. No deadline has yet been set for the families to move, he said.

If the new rule is implemented nationally, it could affect several thousand soldiers. Millions of Afghan refugees fled to Pakistan in recent decades to escape the fighting. About 1.7 million Afghans still live there, according to the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. Afghan soldiers often leave their families in Pakistan for security reasons.

The new policy would disproportionately affect Pashtuns, many of whom live in the border areas. The Taliban, which is predominantly Pashtun, has sought for years to argue that the Afghan government favors other ethnic groups, including Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras. Hostility among ethnic groups has been a key driver of war in Afghanistan for the past three decades, and it has the potential to become even more of a factor as Western forces withdraw.

Pashtuns have historically been underrepresented in the Afghan army, but Pashtun soldiers now make up 40 percent of it — roughly equal to their share of the overall population and a hard-won improvement from several years ago.

A closer look at recruits

Training the Afghan army has been a top U.S. priority, and the force stands at 170,000 troops. But after years of rapid growth, defense officials say it’s time to take a closer look at the quality and allegiance of soldiers rather than focusing on recruitment numbers.

“As we approach our ceiling, we’re able to be more selective about our soldiers,” Karimi said.

He insisted that the policy would not be meant as an affront to Pakistan, but as a means of strengthening the Afghan army.

After an infiltrator’s attack last month on French troops north of Kabul, French President Nicolas Sarkozy announced that his country’s troops would depart a year earlier than expected. The assailant had probably had contact with the Taliban in Pakistan, French Defense Minister Gerard Longuet told reporters.

Shortly after the incident, the Afghan Defense Ministry sent top Afghan military officials a memo titled “Keeping the Enemy Out of the Army.” The memo highlighted the urgency of the infiltration problem and the need to make changes.

Attacks on foreign troops have inflamed tensions between Western trainers and Afghan recruits just as NATO’s commitment to Afghanistan appears to be waning. A report commissioned by the U.S. military said at least 58 Western military personnel were killed in 26 attacks by Afghan soldiers or police between May 2007 and May 2011, when the report was finished.“Such fratricide is fast leading to a crisis of trust between the two forces, if it hasn’t reached this point already,” the report concluded.

In Kandahar alone, four rogue Afghan soldiers have killed three American and two Australian soldiers in the past year. Shokor said that in each of those cases, “upon investigation, we found a relationship with Pakistan.”

Afghan officials are quick to point out that infiltrators don’t target only Western troops. Dozens of Afghan soldiers, police officers and top military officials have been killed by Taliban infiltrators in recent years, they say. Several months ago, Brig. Gen. Abdul Hamid, the top commander in southern Afghanistan, found an unexploded bomb under his desk. Last spring, a man in an Afghan army uniform opened fire inside the fortified Defense Ministry complex, intending to kill Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak.

A senior Pentagon official played down the threat from Afghans with Pakistani relatives.

“Our strong sense is that the insider threat isn’t an organized effort. Insurgents are probably to blame in some cases, but sometimes it’s simply disaffected members of the ANSF [Afghan National Security Forces]. And it’s worth noting that instances of Afghan-on-Afghan violence inside the ANSF are more frequent than ANSF-on-NATO attacks,” said the official, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

The Afghan army has ramped up its counterintelligence operations over the past year. While its traditional vetting process required enlistees to get letters of endorsement from village elders and district governors, the army now pays increased attention to soldiers after they have been admitted into the armed forces, particularly when they are on leave and subject to Taliban threats. “We now have a special reconnaissance group to investigate what soldiers do on leave,” Hamid said.

Afghan officials have for years been weighing possible solutions to the problem of infiltration. Three years ago the country’s parliament issued a recommendation to the Defense Ministry to root out soldiers with ties to Pakistan, including those with families who own property there. The recommendation was not acted upon at the time, but it reflects the widespread sense among Afghan officials that Pakistan is at the root of their troubles.

“It’s all linked to Pakistan,” said Shukriya Barakzai, a member of the parliament’s defense subcommittee and its former chairwoman. “It’s crystal clear.”

Staff writer Karen DeYoung in Washington contributed to this report.

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Afghan peace push brings rare chance, risks, for U.S.

Reuters
By Missy Ryan
Feb 16, 2012
WASHINGTON

* Taliban to open office in Qatar where talks to start

* Plan may move senior prisoners from Guantanamo to Qatar

* Initial discussions have proceeded fitfully

If all goes as hoped, U.S. and Qatari negotiators will meet soon to nail down final details for transferring Taliban prisoners from Guantanamo prison - a momentous step for President Barack Obama, the Afghan war and perhaps U.S. foreign policy as well.

Should U.S., Afghan and Qatari officials reach agreement, the Obama administration's careful diplomatic choreography then calls for the Afghan Taliban to open an office in Qatar to conduct peace talks with the Western-backed Afghan government.

The Taliban would be expected to make a statement condemning international terrorism.

And at some point - exactly when is unclear - the United States would start sending the first of five senior Taliban members it has held for a decade to Qatar.

On the way to the first-ever peace negotiations to end the long and bloody Afghan war, much could go wrong - indeed much already has. The peace talks have been beset by fits and starts, and U-turns, and there is a good chance that even these initial good-faith measures won't ultimately come off.

But Obama's peace gambit, which he hopes to unveil at a NATO summit in May, has the potential to be a significant development for U.S. foreign policy. For the first time in a generation, diplomats will be seeking to broker a major settlement with an enemy U.S. troops are fighting on the battlefield.

The talks, with the United States playing the role of mediator, offer a hope, however slim, for Afghanistan to decide its own destiny after nearly 40 years of conflict.

Obama's turn to diplomacy was born out of necessity and the realization that the Taliban were not going to go away.

"Two years ago the hope at the Pentagon was that we were going to defeat these guys so seriously they would no longer be a military force. No one expects that to happen anymore," said Bruce Riedel, a former CIA and White House official who chaired Obama's 2009 review of Afghan policy.

U.S. officials, in preliminary internal discussions, have also been exploring what structure possible negotiations might take, what demands might be made of the Taliban and what sort of power-sharing scenarios might be considered if a real peace accord can be reached in Afghanistan.

The talks would take place at least in part in Qatar, and might include the senior Taliban prisoners whose transfer from Guantanamo Bay is a key confidence-building measure on the part of the Obama adminsitration. [ID:nL1E7NS15Z]

Facing pushback from lawmakers who fear Taliban detainees will join the insurgency, the Obama administration has stressed it has not yet made a final decision to transfer the prisoners. Officials are already bracing themselves for the torrent of bipartisan attacks sure to come from Capitol Hill if and when they begin the notification process for moving detainees.

TALIBAN'S TRUE INTENTIONS MURKY

While the Afghan peace attempt echoes similar U.S. efforts in the past, U.S. officials dislike the comparison with Vietnam, where the 1973 Paris Peace Accords that were supposed to end the war - but didn't - were seen as a cover for the U.S. departure and abandonment of an ally, South Vietnam.

Today's initiative contrasts with U.S. reluctance in more recent years to engage directly with other adversaries - Iran, the Islamist Palestinian group Hamas, or Lebanon's Hezbollah.

Michael O'Hanlon, an expert on U.S. foreign policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said a long period followed the Korean and Vietnam wars in which Washington did less direct engagement with its enemies. That reluctance became more stark after the Sept. 11 attacks, when the George W. Bush administration cast efforts to defend against security threats as a battle between good and evil.

While that period appears to be coming to an end - and the Afghan Taliban, unlike Hamas and Hezbollah, was never designated as a terrorist group - the idea remains controversial.

As a candidate, Obama was widely criticized for suggesting he would meet with leaders of rogue nations like Iran without precondition.

As president, he has shown himself to be determined to wind down the costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he is moving to withdraw most U.S. combat troops by the end of 2014.

Obama "recognizes that wars, and in particular counterinsurgencies, end when enemies talk to each other," said Caroline Wadhams, a security expert with the Center for American Progress, a think tank seen as close to the White House.

Yet critics of Obama's bid for a negotiated settlement contend the push for peace comes far too late, as a decisive troop drawdown plan dilutes remaining U.S. leverage.

READING THE TEA LEAVES

To keep their initiative on track, U.S. officials must grapple not only with hostility in Congress and what they describe as Afghan President Hamid Karzai's erratic stance toward initial U.S. efforts. They must also confront the legacy of unanswered Taliban advances in the past.

Michael Semple, a former U.N. official with over two decades of experience in Afghanistan, said that since the Taliban government was toppled in 2001, the group has approached Afghan and Western officials repeatedly to indicate an interest in surrender, negotiations or reentry into the political process.

The first meeting took place in early December 2001 just north of Kandahar, the seat of Taliban power, between senior Taliban officials and Karzai, only then emerging as Afghanistan's interim leader.

As a significant political force in Afghanistan's long civil conflict, Semple said, the Taliban leadership "expected to be insiders in the process."

That overture fell flat - as did ones by Taliban leaders who endorsed the pursuit of negotiations when they gathered in Pakistan in 2002 and again in 2004.

Western officials, seeing a marginal military threat from the Taliban, expressed little interest. Karzai allies, eager to solidify their own growing political power, discouraged the Americans from accepting Taliban suggestions.

While the Taliban slowly regained its military power over the years, various individuals affiliated with militant leadership approached Afghan or U.S. officials, including Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil, the Taliban's last foreign minister, and Tayeb Agha, a close aide to Taliban leader Mullah Omar who is now the chief interlocutor in U.S. discussions.

Some Taliban representatives were kept waiting. Some ended up in prison. Over time, militants' grew deeply suspicious of Western and Afghan government statements on the talks - a major handicap to the U.S. peace efforts today.

Veteran U.S. diplomat Ronald Neumann, who was U.S. ambassador in Kabul from 2005 to 2007, says he cannot recall a serious discussion with senior Bush administration officials during his tenure in Kabul about initiating peace negotiations.

"A harsh judgment is required for the way this was handled," said Semple, a long-time advocate of peace talks who is now a fellow at Harvard University. "When people start to add up cost of war in Afghanistan over the last decade, they will ask how on earth the new Afghan leadership and U.S. officials failed to take advantage of these early overtures by the Taliban."

Even a year after peace talks became the centerpiece of U.S. political strategy for the war, the motives of a fundamentalist group whose rule of Afghanistan was known for its brutality and repression remain uncertain.

While the Taliban has long refused to engage with the Karzai government, U.S. officials believe a set of influential Taliban 'pragmatists' is ready to make a deal. Whether they can bring more strident members along is a different question.

"The fear of civil war and the fear of losing control are two important motivations for the Taliban to now be engaging," said Alex Strick van Linschoten, a Taliban expert.

Perhaps the biggest obstacle U.S. negotiators face is timing - whether they can establish a sustainable peace process before the bulk of Western forces go home, leaving a highly vulnerable Afghan government standing largely on its own.

Even if the Obama administration manages to get political negotiations going, progress in hammering out a sustainable power-sharing arrangement is likely to be slow at best.

"As an Arab friend used to say about another topic: 'You can wait for this sitting down,'" Neumann said.

(Additional reporting by Andrew Quinn; Editing by Warren Strobel and Anthony Boadle)

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Talking with the Taliban, making peace with the guilty

CNN
By Michael V. Hayden, CNN Contributor
February 16, 2012

Editor's note: Gen. Michael V. Hayden, who was appointed by President George W. Bush as CIA director in 2006 and served until February 2009, is a principal with the Chertoff Group, a security consulting firm. He serves on the boards of several defense firms and is a distinguished visiting professor at George Mason University. Hayden is an adviser to Mitt Romney's presidential campaign. He held senior staff positions at the Pentagon and, from 1999 to 2005, was director of the National Security Agency.

The recent smartphone video of Marines urinating on the bodies of slain Taliban should trouble all Americans.

It is troubling even if allowances are made for young men -- recently released from the high pressures of combat and in the euphoria of being successful and still being alive -- doing dumb things. It should trouble us even allowing for the inevitable dehumanization of the enemy that often accompanies conflict.

Keeping the human aspect of an enemy in mind is more than just a moral imperative, though. It makes good operational and strategic sense. And in this, intelligence has a special role.

One of the first briefings I gave President George W. Bush as deputy director of national intelligence was on Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the fiendishly brutal head of al Qaeda in Iraq.

I began with Zarqawi's upbringing: "Raised on the mean streets of Zarqa, jailed as a teenager, he turned to religion in prison ..." Taliban: Won't talk peace with Karzai US to end Afghan combat mission in 2013

I was less trying to humanize him than to understand him, but the effect was largely the same. And even duly "humanized," Zarqawi remained our highest priority target in Iraq until we killed him the next year.

Recognizing this human aspect of an enemy takes on even greater significance when a belligerent decides that it's time to negotiate with an adversary, when it's decided (or reluctantly accepted) that you will not be able to simply impose your will on him.

This, by the way, is different than concluding that someone with whom you are still engaged in combat is no longer your enemy, as Vice President Joe Biden recently did when describing the Taliban.

But it does mean that you are willing to recognize that he has legitimate political interests and you are willing to talk about them.

Under any circumstance, talks with the Taliban will be a difficult task. For one thing, the pressure we can bring to bear on our negotiating partner diminishes daily as American troops leave Afghanistan based on an accelerated timetable rather than on battlefield conditions. A recent survey of national security wonks like myself had a full three-quarters of respondents either opposing these talks or saying they are likely to fail.

So this is going to be tough and, as in many difficult undertakings, intelligence will be expected to play an important role.

Taliban has met with U.S. officials, won't negotiate with Karzai

At the most basic level, intelligence will be asked what are the Taliban's interests or more precisely what is it they think they are.

Intelligence will work to steal secrets: What are their demands, their going-in positions, their true red lines? In this case, negotiators will also want to know whether their Taliban interlocutors actually speak for the whole. Can they deliver on an agreement?

I recall during the Bush administration, in one of our periodic crises with Syria, being asked by the president: "What does Assad want?" It was a question that went to the nature of the man.

I responded with the often true but rarely useful, "I don't know." And I little helped the situation by meekly adding that I doubted that he did either.

We did better during later negotiations with North Korea where, despite whatever negotiating strategy was being proposed, we stuck to the line that we saw little chance that Kim Jong Il would ever give up his nuclear weapons. We'll need the intelligence agencies to be equally accurate and equally firm in their judgments when it comes to the Taliban talks.

Intelligence may be able to help in other ways since it has been routine for American intelligence officials to meet with and come to agreement with foreign counterparts, many of whom share little of our world view, our values or even our interests.

A good thing, too, since one of the continuities between Presidents Bush and Obama has been the willingness to work with some unsavory partners such as President Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen or several recent incarnations of Pakistan's ISI.

I can recall many a meeting with counterparts where the common space where we might find agreement was challengingly small.

In some of those sessions, my counterpart would depart the seemingly fact-based dialogue we had been sharing and launch into a series of conclusions based more on his culture's creation mythology than on any shared reality I could identify.

For a time, I thought it sufficient to simply avoid signaling any agreement at these moments and patiently tolerate the excursion. Only later did I begin to ask myself what of my commentary had my counterpart judged to be American mythology rather than hard realism.

Distinguishing and dealing with the differences will be important in the upcoming negotiations.

Steve Kappes, who has served as deputy director of CIA for me and Leon Panetta, had to do as much when he earlier negotiated the end of Libya's WMD program with a regime as vile and erratic as the Taliban.

This is not to suggest that intelligence officials will actually conduct negotiations in this instance. Marc Grossman, U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, brings as much talent, hard work and knowledge to the problem as anyone could.

But I am suggesting that if these talks go forward, we will need a very deep understanding of the people across the table from us, people who when last in power imposed a hellish regime on their countrymen and who today have the blood of innocents on their hands.

Much of this will be distasteful, but even if the Taliban aren't simply contemporary manifestations of J.R.R. Tolkien's darkest characters, is there enough common ground to get us to a conclusion we might not ideally desire but is at least what David Petraeus has described in other circumstances as "Afghan good enough?"

Frankly, I don't think there is, and intelligence agencies will have to have the courage to say so if this is the case.

But we have decided to try and, if we are to have any chance of success, deep understanding of the human beings across the table from us, understanding anchored on near exquisite intelligence, will be essential.

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Talks with the Taliban Are Inevitable, but Who Will Be at the Table?

TIME (blog)
By Tony Karon
February 16, 2012

The fact that Afghan President Hamid Karzai has told the Wall Street Journal he’s held three-way negotiations with the U.S. and the Taliban should come as no surprise: the U.S. has said that within two years it will end its already decadelong military entanglement in Afghanistan’s civil war, and the Taliban is anything but defeated. Indeed, militarily, the U.S. has been spinning its wheels in Afghanistan for years, now it’s a long-established conventional wisdom that Washington’s best hopes for leaving behind even a modicum of stability require a political settlement with the insurgents. The question being fought out on the ground for the past four years has simply been on what terms a negotiated settlement would be forged and who would be at the table. Where once the U.S. had insisted on the Taliban laying down arms and embracing the constitution that brought Karzai to power as preconditions for talking to the insurgents, it has come around to accepting those erstwhile preconditions as the desired outcomes of such talks.

Now, with the diplomatic pace quickened by the U.S. withdrawal deadline, Karzai — who wields limited leverage of his own — is making sure he’s not sidelined by talks between Western powers and the Taliban, which had reportedly begun some time ago at an exploratory level, mediated by Qatar.

The optimistic spin on Karzai’s announcement highlights the fact that the Taliban is now talking with Karzai, whom it had previously dismissed as a “puppet” of the U.S. The Taliban, of course, denied talking to Karzai, though they have publicly confirmed their talks with Washington. Even if the Taliban had agreed to include Karzai in talks, though, there remains considerable grounds for skepticism that it would accept the Afghan constitution drawn up under Western tutelage after the U.S. invasion (and therefore the legitimacy of Karzai’s government).

It’s not clear just how committed the Taliban leadership is to these conversations, and there remains considerable opposition within the movement to seeking a political settlement right now — for the simple fact that many in the Taliban believe they’re actually winning the war. And as is the case of any insurgent army facing a foreign expeditionary force, the Taliban knows time is on its side. The most recent U.S. National Intelligence Estimate on Afghanistan, details of which were leaked last month, revealed the consensus in Washington’s intelligence community that Karzai’s regime would not survive a NATO pullout in 2014. The insurgents are likely to concur, and Karzai’s own actions suggest that he may not disagree: the Afghan President is agitating for the Obama Administration to conclude a strategic partnership agreement with his regime that would keep a permanent U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan beyond 2014 — knowing full well that such an outcome has, until now, been a deal breaker for the Taliban.

And the Taliban is not exactly feeling the wall at its back, right now. The surge of U.S. reinforcements ordered up by President Obama at the start of his presidency has failed to turn the tide against the insurgents, and neither the U.S. nor the Karzai government is able to win the hearts and minds of enough of the population to make a go of counterinsurgency. U.S. troops are certainly able to suppress the Taliban presence in certain areas for periods of focused deployment, but the gains are unsustainable once they move on to confront Taliban concentrations elsewhere. While many U.S. military leaders still whistle a happy tune, others are willing to speak more bluntly: Lieut. Colonel Daniel L. Davis, writing in this month’s edition of Armed Forces Journal, painted a bleak picture of “the absence of success on virtually every level” of a U.S. mission he’d just spent a year assessing on the ground:

I saw the incredible difficulties any military force would have to pacify even a single area of any of those provinces. I heard many stories of how insurgents controlled virtually every piece of land beyond eyeshot of a U.S. or International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) base.

I saw little to no evidence the local governments were able to provide for the basic needs of the people. Some of the Afghan civilians I talked with said the people didn’t want to be connected to a predatory or incapable local government.

From time to time, I observed Afghan Security forces collude with the insurgency.

And so on, in a blistering critique of the gulf between official pronouncements and the reality on the ground. The notion — on which the 2014 withdrawal plan is ostensibly based — that the Karzai government’s security forces will fill the gap left by the departing NATO troops two years from now is obviously a fanciful tale intended for domestic consumption in a country that may have trouble understanding just what has been achieved as it winds down the longest foreign war in its history with the designated enemy still very much in the field.

The Taliban’s resilience, of course, doesn’t necessarily put it in a position to overrun Kabul, much less conquer all of Afghanistan. Remember, even when the Pakistan-backed Islamist movement was in power, the northern third of the country remained in the hands of the Northern Alliance, the predominantly ethnic Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara coalition backed by India, Iran and Russia. The U.S. invasion tipped the balance against the Taliban, but it soon bounced back, with support and sanctuary provided by Pakistan, unwilling to reconcile itself to an Indian-allied government taking root on its western flank. The hubris of the Bush Administration sustained an unfortunate illusion that Pakistan shared U.S. objectives in Afghanistan; having abandoned that illusion, the Obama Administration nonetheless faces the challenge of accommodating Pakistan’s interest in negotiating a peace agreement.

Pakistan has far more leverage over the Taliban than any other player, and it has previously made clear — by, for example, arresting Taliban leaders holding talks with Karzai and the U.S. independent of Pakistan’s O.K. — that it will not allow the negotiation of any agreement to which it is not (at least tacitly) a party. In the game of musical chairs over the negotiations, Karzai has kept his options open, withdrawing from talks with the Taliban late last year and vowing to negotiate only with Pakistan. Karzai visited Pakistan on Thursday, following his Wall Street Journal announcement, but it remains unclear whether Pakistan has given its consent. If so, such talks could launch a process toward ending the war, long and difficult though it will be. The Taliban’s fighting men are not convinced they have any need to sue for peace; the Northern Alliance, which remains the basis of the only significant indigenous fighting capacity ranged against the Taliban, is still fiercely skeptical of any move by Karzai to treat with their old enemy; and President Obama in an election year may find it difficult even to meet such basic confidence-building steps as freeing Taliban fighters from Guantánamo.

Meanwhile, spring is just weeks away, and with it another fighting season. That’s a metaphorical table at which Karzai holds no significant cards, while the Taliban believes that as long as it enjoys Pakistan’s patronage, its hand is sufficient to prompt the U.S. to fold first.

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'Britain's war against Afghan opium production is failing'

Britain’s war against opium production in Afghanistan is being lost, according to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, with outputs of the class-A drug soaring to record levels in the past decade despite western intervention.

Telegraph.co.uk
By Amy Willis
17 Feb 2012

UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon told delegates at a conference in Vienna that “time is not on our side” as he conceded that the war against Afghan heroin production was failing. He claimed that Afghanistan's economy would never be stable unless the giovernment tackled the issue.

"Drug trafficking and transnational organised crime undermine the health of fragile states, (and) weaken the rule of law," he told delegates. "Above all, the Afghan government must prioritise the issue of narcotics."

In 2001, Tony Blair said a significant reason for the West's invasion of Afghanistan was to curtail a flourishing heroin trade, yet opium production between 2001 and 2011 increased from 185 tonnes to 5,800 tonnes, according to UN figures.

Speaking just a few weeks after the terror attack on the Twin Towers, Tony Blair said: “The arms the Taliban are buying today are paid for by the lives of young British people buying their drugs on British streets. This is another part of their regime we should seek to destroy.”

Despite the pledge by the former prime minister, last year levels increased by 61 per cent with more than 90 per cent of heroin found on British streets being traced back to opiates farmed in Afghanistan. The export of opium is now thought to make up 15 per cent of Afghanistan’s Gross National Product, with the trade having a net worth of up to £1.6 billion.

Since the conflict started in Afghanistan, the UK has pumped £18 billion into the country, losing 398 soldiers. A further £4 billion has been earmarked for this year.

The Taliban is thought to be behind a vast majority of the drugs trades, using funds from the sales to purchase artillery.

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Taliban reject Karzai claim of secret meetings

CNN
By the CNN Wire Staff
February 16, 2012
Kabul, Afghanistan

The Taliban rejected a claim Thursday by Afghan President Hamid Karzai that it was taking part in secret talks with the Afghan government.

"The Islamic Emirate strongly rejects Karzai's remarks and adds that the Islamic Emirate has never met with the representatives of the powerless Kabul administration, and has made no decision to hold talks with the Karzai government, even in the future," the Taliban said in a statement e-mailed to CNN.

The statement followed a report in the Wall Street Journal in which Karzai said, "There have been contacts between the U.S. government and the Taliban, there have been contacts between the Afghan government and the Taliban, and there have been some contacts that we have made, all of us together."

Karzai's assertion suggested a change in course for peace efforts, because the Taliban has long publicly refused to meet with Karzai's government, and Afghan officials have complained they were largely sidelined in talks taking place between the United States and the Taliban.

"The last cards are with us. So far, it has been a U.S.-Taliban business. We have not been involved in this so I cannot say what was discussed," an Afghan government official told CNN last month.

In the statement Thursday, the Taliban insisted that "the enemy has only got propaganda left to show off its power, which in reality has been given to them by someone else and only for a few more days" -- an apparent reference to Karzai's government being bolstered by the United States.

"The Islamic Emirate believes that even if somebody claiming to be from the address of the Islamic Emirate has met with Karzai administration, that person is a fake and, like many times before, once again the Karzai government has been deceived."

In a statement Tuesday, Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid called Karzai's government "a puppet and unauthorized," and said "meeting with them will not be beneficial in solving the issue."

"The issue is ... who is powerful and has got the power to make a decision, and who hasn't, and everyone around the world knows that the one who has got the authority in opposition to the Mujahideen (the Taliban) is America," he wrote.

Last June, Karzai said the United States was involved in peace talks with the Taliban, and that representatives of the government and insurgents had been in touch, but that no high-level meetings had taken place.

Karzai arrived Thursday in Pakistan for discussions with President Asif Ali Zardari on improving relations between the two countries and peace efforts in Afghanistan.

CNN's Josh Levs, Nick Paton Walsh and Masoud Popalzai contributed to this report.

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Hamid Karzai, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Pakistan for challenging summit

Washington Post
By Richard Leiby and Karen DeYoung
February 16
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan

On a day when U.S. drone-fired missiles struck twice in the militant havens of Pakistan’s tribal region, reportedly killing 14 fighters, the talk in Islamabad was all about how to produce peace in war-weary Afghanistan.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad arrived Thursday for a two-day summit with Pakistani leaders, but while the three neighboring countries share an interest in finding a political settlement to the war, their solutions have not always coincided.

The Afghan reconciliation talks have become clouded by multiple channels and competing approaches. All parties, including the Taliban, suspect the others’ motives.

“This trilateral summit is not going to achieve much,” predicted Rustam Shah Mohmand, a former Pakistani diplomat.

Just before Karzai left Kabul for the Pakistani capital, he told the Wall Street Journal that he thought the Taliban was “definitely” interested in a settlement. “People in Afghanistan want peace, including the Taliban,” he said.

But the movement is by no means monolithic: It includes al-Qaeda-aligned fighters who demand the expulsion of all foreign troops from Afghanistan, others who seek restoration of the pre-2001 Taliban government and refuse to share power with Karzai, and moderates who see the wisdom of winding down a decade-long war that has bloodied all sides.

Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar told reporters Thursday that her country is open to any suggestion from Karzai on how to move the settlement process along. That would presumably include Pakistan using its influence with the Taliban, although Khar made a point of saying she didn’t get any specifics from the Afghans.

“What we told them is that you need to clarify what it is you want,” she said. “They have been wanting us to facilitate something. . . . We want complete clarity as to what that thing is.”

Several weeks ago, U.S. officials were invited to attend a meeting that Karzai’s government set up with Taliban representatives outside Afghanistan. The meeting, which Karzai revealed in the Journal interview, opened a separate channel from the series of talks the Obama administration began in late 2010 with Mohammed Tayeb al-Agha, a representative of Taliban leader Mohammad Omar. But the Karzai channel has so far had no follow-up.

Administration officials have said their meetings with Agha are designed to establish “confidence-building measures,” including the opening of a Taliban office in Qatar where the Afghan government could be brought into the discussions.

The administration has asked the Taliban to make public statements renouncing international terrorism and supporting the Afghan constitution. For its part, the Taliban wants the transfer of five Afghan prisoners being held in the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The prisoners would be transferred to house arrest in Qatar in two tranches, with a group of three to be followed by two additional detainees within 60 days. The administration must notify Congress 30 days in advance of any transfer and certify there is no risk the prisoners could return to the battlefield.

Karzai initially rejected the tentative deal, on the grounds that he had not been sufficiently consulted, and recalled his ambassador to Qatar. The proposed arrangement was also sharply criticized by some U.S. lawmakers.

The Qatar channel — along with U.S. hopes that the Afghan government eventually will participate — has been at a standstill until Karzai resolves his strained relationship with the Qataris. Bringing the complications full circle, Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani last week made his own visit to Qatar, where he signed a major natural gas agreement.

Iran, which has trade and energy interests involving Afghanistan and Pakistan, has its own conflicted views on the war. While eager to remove the U.S. military presence on its eastern border, the Islamic republic is far closer to the former Northern Alliance of anti-Taliban tribes in Afghanistan than it is to the insurgents and shares their wariness of any settlement that grants the Taliban political power.

“It is certainly one of the greatest diplomatic challenges in recent history,” said Aftab Ahmad Khan Sherpao, a prominent Pakistani who has led peace efforts for years and is scheduled to meet here with Karzai.

Among the challenges are the relentless U.S. drone attacks: Two on Thursday targeted al-Qaeda-linked militants and Taliban leaders in North Waziristan, local security officials said. The missile strikes, which are carried out in support of NATO operations in Afghanistan, are immensely unpopular in Pakistan — and when innocent people are killed, they provoke sympathy for the militants.

Even so, some nonviolent Islamists here see progress in the overlapping talks and meetings.

“Things are moving ahead now, but it will take time,” Maulana Sami ul-Haq, a pro-Taliban cleric in Pakistan known to have influence over the Afghan Taliban, said in an interview before the summit. “Ultimately, we will talk and this thing will be overcome.”

DeYoung reported from Washington.

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U.S. intelligence officials offer grim words on Afghanistan

Los Angles Times
February 16, 2012
WASHINGTON

Senior U.S. intelligence officials offered a bleak view of the war in Afghanistan in testimony to Congress on Thursday, an assessment they acknowledged was more pessimistic than that of the military commanders in charge.

“I would like to begin with current military operations in Afghanistan, where we assess that endemic corruption and persistent qualitative deficiencies in the army and police forces undermine efforts to extend effective governance and security,” Lt. Gen. Ronald Burgess, head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told the Senate Armed Services Committee at its annual worldwide threat hearing.

The Afghan army remains reliant on U.S. and international forces for logistics, intelligence and transport, he said. And “despite successful coalition targeting, the Taliban remains resilient and able to replace leadership losses while also competing to provide governance at the local level. From its Pakistani safe havens, the Taliban leadership remains confident of eventual victory.”

Burgess testified alongside James Clapper, director of national intelligence, who said that the Taliban lost ground in the last year, “but that was mainly in places where the International Security Assistance Forces, or ISAF, were concentrated, and Taliban senior leaders continued to enjoy safe haven in Pakistan.” Clapper was asked by committee chairman Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) about reports in the Los Angeles Times and elsewhere describing a recent National Intelligence Estimate on Afghanistan that questioned whether the Afghan government would survive as the U.S. steadily pulls out its troops and reduces military and civilian assistance.

The gloomy findings prompted a sharp one-page dissent by Marine Corps Gen. John Allen, the commander of Western forces in the war, and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan. The comment was also signed by Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis, commander of U.S. Central Command, and Adm. James Stavridis, supreme allied commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

“Without going into the specifics of classified National Intelligence Estimates, I can certainly confirm that they took issue with the NIE on three counts, having to do with the assumptions that were made about force structure -- didn't feel that we gave sufficient weight to Pakistan and its impact as a safe haven, and generally felt that the NIE was pessimistic,” Clapper said.

Levin asked, “Pessimistic about that or about other matters as well?”

Clapper replied, “Just generally it was pessimistic” about the situation in Afghanistan and the prospects for a U.S. drawdown in 2014.

Clapper, who has served nearly half a century around U.S. intelligence, argued that it was only natural for intelligence analysts to see things differently than ground commanders in a war.

“If you'll forgive a little history, sir,” he said, “I served as an analyst briefer for Gen. [William] Westmoreland in Vietnam in 1966. I kind of lost my professional innocence a little bit then when I found out that operational commanders sometimes don't agree with their view of the success of their campaign as compared to and contrasted with that perspective displayed by intelligence.

"Fast-forward about 25 years or so and I served as the chief of Air Force intelligence during Desert Storm," he said. "Gen. Schwarzkopf protested long and loud all during the war and after the war about the accuracy of the intelligence. In fact, it didn't comport with his view.”

“Classically, intelligence is supposedly in the portion of the glass that's half empty, and operational commanders and policymakers, for that matter, are often in the portion of the glass that's half full," he said. "Probably the truth is somewhere at the water line. So I don't find it a bad thing. In fact, I think it's healthy that there is contrast between what the operational commanders believe and what the intelligence community assesses.”

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Pentagon Provides Details of Afghan Role Shift

TOLOnews.com
Thursday, 16 February 2012

The Pentagon on Wednesday provided details of its plan for shifting to a training role from a combat role in Afghanistan, the Associated Press reported.

Five brigades will deploy to Afghanistan each between April and August to train and advise the Afghan National Security Forces. Each brigade will have fewer than half the usual number of soldiers, comprised of officers and senior non-commissioned officers along with defense department civilians. They will operate in 18-person teams.

The plan is similar to the one the US used in Iraq during the last 15 months of its presence there.

As the first of the new teams arrive, 23,000 US combat troops are scheduled to leave Afghanistan. The total number of US forces in Afghanistan will decrease to 68,000 by the end of September.

The switch in emphasis to training is part of the process of handing over responsibility for providing security from foreign to Afghan forces. US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said the transition process may be completed by mid 2013.

US military officials recently announced that some special operations forces will be deployed to Afghanistan to protect the government in Kabul and follow insurgent leaders.

Currently there are around 90,000 troops in Afghanistan fight insurgents.

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U.S.-Taliban talks only 'exploratory' - Afghan envoy

Reuters
By Serena Chaudhry
Fri Feb 17, 2012
ISLAMABAD

The Afghan Taliban and the United States have made only "exploratory" contacts for possible reconciliation which do not involve the Kabul government, the Afghan ambassador to Pakistan said on Thursday.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday the U.S. and Afghan governments had begun secret three-way talks with the Taliban, based on an interview it conducted with Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

"I must emphasise that word 'exploratory'. They are not talks," Afghan ambassador to Pakistan Umar Daudzai told Reuters.

"When there's talks, it's supposed to be between the Afghan government and the Taliban. We have not reached to that stage although we wish to reach to that stage."

The Wall Street Journal quoted Karzai as saying the Taliban were "definitively" interested in a peace settlement to end the 10-year war in Afghanistan, and that all three sides were now involved in discussions.

It said Karzai had declined to specify the location of the talks or go into further detail, saying he feared this could damage the process.

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid also said the group had not held talks with the Karzai government.

The Afghan Taliban announced last month it would open a political office in Qatar, suggesting the group may be willing to engage in negotiations that could give it government positions or official control over much of its historical southern heartland.

"At a high level, (there are) secret talks and American-Taliban talks. I'm not aware of any other than the Qatar process," said Daudzai.

"The Qatar process is exploratory contacts between Taliban and the United States."

The Afghan ambassador said the Kabul government's contacts with the Taliban were limited to communications between low-level officials and local insurgent commanders.

In Washington, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said Karzai's comments showed Afghanistan was involved in reconciliation discussions.

"What President Karzai's statement confirmed is that Afghanistan is now very much involved in the process of reconciliation," Panetta told reporters at the Pentagon.

"That's extremely helpful and important to determining whether or not we are ultimately going to be able to succeed with reconciliation or not," he said.

Washington wants to accelerate contacts with the Taliban so it can announce serious peace negotiations at a NATO summit in May, officials say, in what would be a welcome bright spot in Western efforts to end the war in Afghanistan.

The United States hopes it can declare a start to authentic political negotiations between the Afghan government and the Taliban at the May 20-21 summit in Chicago, after a year of initial, uncertain contacts with militant representatives.

It would be a needed victory for the White House and its NATO partners in Afghanistan as they struggle to contain a resilient insurgency and train a local army while moving to bring their troops home over the next three years.

(Additional reporting by Chris Allbritton in ISLAMABAD, Rob Taylor in KABUL and Phil Stewart in Washington; Editing by Michael Georgy and Todd Eastham)

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Envoy: Pakistan Not Taking Sides in Afghanistan Peace Efforts

VOA News
February 16, 2012

Pakistan's new ambassador to the United States, Sherry Rehman, says Islamabad will support Afghan-led peace initiatives, but will not align itself with any particular side in the conflict.

During a conference in Washington on Wednesday at the U.S. Institute of Peace, Rehman said Pakistan is "not seeking to support, bolster or play strategic games with any group in Afghanistan."

She said that during Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar's last visit to Afghanistan, equal time was given to all ethnic and insurgent groups, including the Northern Alliance.

"It's import for Afghanistan to lead this the way they want, because otherwise peace will not be sustainable, not durable, and, as I said, Pakistan can’t afford another civil war in Afghanistan," said Khar.

Rehman's comments come as leaders from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran gather in Islamabad for a summit aimed at facilitating peace talks with the Taliban.

Meanwhile, on the topic of U.S. aid to Pakistan, Rehman said civilian and military aid to Islamabad has faced a series of delays and blockades. The envoy said a "long conversation" is needed on how aid is delivered as well as "the metrics of its success." Rehman added that Islamabad is looking for preferential trade rather than aid right now.

"I would like to point out that the EU, with its far more complex architecture of bylaws, fine print, and coordination challenges, has come through with preferential trade alignments for Pakistan, as we speak," Rehman added. "So the question is asked, what is our biggest ally doing for us while we stand on the front line? Ouch. Ouch."

The United States has provided Pakistan with about $20 billion in military and civilian aid over the past 10 years, making it the third-largest recipient of U.S. security aid and reimbursements after Afghanistan and Israel.

Some information for this report was provided by AP, AFP and Reuters.

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PRESS RELEASE

Pakistan PM: Pakistan Supports an Afghan-led and owned Peace Process

February 16, 2012

After landing on Thursday in Islamabad for a trilateral summit scheduled to be held on Friday between the Presidents of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran, President Hamid Karzai met with Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani.

In a meeting held at the Prime Minister House, the two leaders discussed a range of issues of mutual concern and focused on diverse avenues of expanded bilateral cooperation particularly in the anti-terror war and enhanced trade and commerce.

Pakistan’s PM welcomed President Karzai and said stability in Afghanistan meant stability in Pakistan and that Pakistan respects President Karzai’s leadership.

The Prime Minister said that Pakistan would continue to extend full cooperation to Afghan Government in the investigation of the assassination of Professor Buhanuddin Rabbani. Prime Minister Gilani called for Afghanistan’s cooperation with Pakistan needed for the implementation of the TAPI gas pipeline project and vowed his country was prepared to do all it can in resolving the transit related issues.

The Prime Minister said that Pakistan supported any pace process in Afghanistan which was Afghan led and Afghan owned and called for the resumption of operation by the joint peace commission between the two countries.

President Karzai hailed his trip to Pakistan as one of the most important ones in the past ten years and thanked Pakistan for the cooperation in the investigation of assassination of Professor Rabbani in which two suspects have been arrested. The President hoped that efforts continue so that all perpetrators of the crime are brought to table. The President reaffirmed Afghanistan’s position in regards to peace talks with the armed opposition and said respect to the Afghan Constitution and women’s rights remain as crucial conditions for any talks.

President Karzai also asked Pakistan to allow entry to Afghanistan for the truck consignments of text books for Afghan schools that are stranded for months in Karachi port city.

Calling terrorism a common enemy that threatened people on both sides of the Durand Line, the President termed it imperative for both the countries to continue to maintain deep and sincere bilateral relations.

The Afghan delegation included Foreign Minister Dr. Zalmai Rassoul, National Security Advisor Dr. Spanta, Chief of Staff to the President Abdul Karim Khurram and Afghan Ambassador to Pakistan, Muhammad Umar Daudzai.

The Pakistan delegation included Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar, Defense Minister Ahmed Mukhtar, Interior Minister Rehman Malik, Minister for Information and Broadcasting Dr. Firdous and Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ashfaq Kayani.

-- News Unit,

Office of the Spokesperson to the President of Afghanistan,

Presidential Palace (Arg), Kabul

Ph: +93 (20) 210 2853 +93 (20) 210 3705

www.president.gov.af

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