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18 August 2012
FEATURE STORY
Why Afghanistan's past is being 'rewritten'
BUSINESS
No articles featured today
NATION
Afghan Policeman Kills 2 US Soldiers in Farah
End game
Iranian Currency Traders Find a Haven in Afghanistan
U.S. plans to beef up rural police forces in Afghanistan
Mullah Omar's Statement is 'Unmistakable Message of Death', Isaf Chief Says
Ramadan fasting dilemma when sun never sets
Coalition steps up fight against Afghan 'green-on-blue' attacks
Deadly insider attack that left 3 U.S. Marines dead was work of an Afghan teenager
Bomb in a bazaar in western Afghanistan kills 4 people
NORTH: Obama’s bitter harvest in Afghanistan
Coalition troops now armed at all times on Afghan bases in wake of 'insider' shootings
Infiltration or bad blood? Reasons for Afghan forces' attacks on allies offer little comfort
U.S. says infiltration not main cause of Afghan 'insider' attacks
Afghan probabilities and Pakistan
To tap its resources Afghanistan must provide security
PRESS RELEASES
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FEATURE STORY
Why Afghanistan's past is being 'rewritten'
BBC News
By Bilal Sarwary
17 August 2012
Sarubi and Charikar
Afghanistan's government is rewriting history, literally.
The education ministry has endorsed a new history curriculum for school students that deletes nearly four decades of the country's war-torn past.
The government says textbooks based on the new curriculum will help bring unity in a country traditionally polarised along ethnic and political lines.
But critics accuse ministers of trying to appease the Taliban and other powerful groups by erasing history that portrays them in a bad light. They say the government is trying to win over the Taliban before Nato and US forces leave the country.
Afghanistan is entering a hugely uncertain time post-Nato, during which tricky arrangements with the Taliban and other players are expected.
'No mention of the misery'
The past 40 years in Afghanistan have been some of the most turbulent of any country in the world.
But the bloody coups of the 1970s, the 1979 Soviet invasion, the Moscow-backed communist regimes in Kabul and countless human rights excesses committed by secret police have all been erased from the history curriculum, critics say.
Nor is there much mention of the bloody civil war between mujahideen factions that tore Kabul apart in the 1990s, leaving an estimated 70,000 people dead.
That conflict gave rise to the Taliban - but there is not much mention of them either, or the US-led forces that drove them from power and have stayed for more than a decade.
An Afghan journalist, who did not wish to be identified for security reasons, told the BBC he was surprised the civil war and the Taliban regime had been wrapped up in just a few lines.
''There is no mention of the misery [the war] brought. No mention of Kabul being the killing zone. The books say Mullah Omar was removed in 2001, without saying who Mullah Omar was.
"There is no mention of the US and Nato presence. It is as if someone is trying to hide the sun with two fingers."
The education ministry denies suggestions that foreigners had any role in devising the new curriculum, and US military officials say they had no discussions on content in the books, some of which were paid for with US money.
But a spokesman for the US military in Kabul, David Lakin, added: ''Our cultural advisers reviewed the social studies textbooks for inappropriate material, such as inciting violence or religious discrimination."
The BBC visited two schools just outside Kabul where the new books have been introduced.
At one - Sarubi High School, 75km (40 miles) from Kabul - I sat in on a class and listened as a teacher asked one of his grade six students to read from his glossy new history textbook.
The chapter was on Sardar Mohammad Daud Khan, prime minister from 1953-63 and the country's president 10 years later.
The chapter talks about Daud Khan's rise but is silent on the full details of how he overthrew the monarchy of his first cousin, Mohammed Zahir Shah.
The following chapters, too, make no mention of the numerous bloody coups that unsettled the country's political landscape, the Moscow-backed regimes including that of President Najibullah, the civil war that began after his resignation or the rise in 1996 of the Taliban and their subsequent fall.
'Children will never know'
"What happened in Sarubi during the Soviet invasion?" I asked 11-year-old Muslim, who was listening diligently to his classmate.
''The Russians wanted to remove Islam from Afghanistan. A lot of people got killed, villages were bombed. Millions were forced to take refuge in Pakistan,'' the boy says.
"How do you know? This information doesn't exist in your history book."
"My parents and teachers told me," he says innocently.
The teacher, who also requested anonymity, says the new textbooks will deprive knowledge of the past to an entire generation.
"Since internet penetration is low and contact with the outside world is limited, children in Afghanistan are more dependent on textbooks than anywhere else in the world," he said.
"But now that the government has decided to delete the past 40 turbulent years from history books, millions of children will never know why and how the Afghanistan we live in came to be."
Like Sarubi, the Shomali plains north of Kabul also suffered the excesses of the Soviet Red Army and then the Taliban.
The bustling town of Charikar, just off the main road, was until 12 years ago a picture of devastation. Accused of supporting the Northern Alliance, the town bore the brunt of Taliban violence.
"Thousands of trees were cut down, fields and vineyards burnt, houses destroyed and people killed," Abdul Qodoas, a history teacher at Mirwais High School, said.
But the Taliban's "scorched earth" policy finds no mention in the new history textbooks either.
'For students it is important to study every political regime whether its rule was good or bad," Mr Qudoas said.
"One of the primary objectives of studying history is not to repeat past mistakes. If students will not learn about past violence, how will they avoid it in future?"
'Deception'
Education Minister Farooq Wardak says the decision to delete part of history from the books is based on the larger interest of the country.
"There are hundreds and thousands of issues over which there is disagreement in the nation," he told the BBC.
"My responsibility is to bring unity not disunity in the country. I am not going to encourage a divisive education agenda.
''Now, if I am writing something over which there is no national consensus - I am taking the disagreement, even the war to the class, and school of Afghanistan. I will never do that.''
But for many others, what has been done to the curriculum is simply "deception". How can you move forward if you brush your past under the carpet and don't confront it, such critics argue.
"Kabul was destroyed during the civil war, thousands of people were killed," said a female member of parliament, also on condition of anonymity.
"During the Taliban rule atrocities were committed on females. They were prohibited from working or going to school. Hundreds of women were stoned to death for alleged adultery. None of this finds a place in textbooks. Are we not hiding the truth from the children of this country?"
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BUSINESS
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NATION
Afghan Policeman Kills 2 US Soldiers in Farah
TOLOnews.com
Saturday, 18 August 2012
An Afghan policeman on Friday shot and killed two US soldiers in western Farah province.
A member of the Afghan Local Police was responsible for the deaths, according to provincial spokesman Abdul Rahman. The attacker struck during a training exercise on an Afghan base.
Isaf confirmed in a statement that an "insider attacked" had taken place.
"Officials are investigating the incident to determine the facts and as more information becomes available it will be released as appropriate," the statement said.
This was not the only so-called "green-on-blue" attack to take place on Friday. A few hours later in Kandahar province an Afghan solider wounded two Isaf service members.
A total of nine US soldiers have been killed by their Afghan allies in the past two weeks, according to the AP.
US defence secretary Leon Panetta announced on Tuesday that the US is expanding the number of counterintelligence personnel in Afghanistan after the recent jump in insider attacks by members of the Afghan security forces.
Mr Panetta said he was deeply concerned by the killings "because of the lives lost and because of the potential damage to our partnership efforts."
General Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, added the US military is boosting counterintelligence expertise at battalion level and above in Afghanistan . Insider attacks have risen sharply this year to 29, up from 11 in 2011, according to the AP.
It is too early to tell what is behind this increase in attacks, Isaf says. However, likely explanations are Taliban infiltration of Afghan security forces, or a breakdown in relations between Afghan and US troops.
Either way, the attacks are badly damaging morale, experts say.
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End game
Western withdrawal need not mean civil war in Afghanistan. But America must talk to the Taleban
The Spectator
By Ahmed Rashid
18 August 2012
Britain has been at war in Afghanistan for over a decade. Many Britons now take it for granted that its country’s intervention in Afghanistan has failed and when Nato troops pull out in 2014 they will leave behind a volatile and unsettled state that could easily plunge into a civil war — much worse than what western forces inherited back in 2001.
No doubt the chance of Afghanistan fracturing in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent government, a well armed and motivated Taleban opposition in the south and ethnic warlordism in the north is high. Rapacious neighbours, especially Pakistan and Iran, may regenerate their proxy wars for influence, as they did in the 1990s. Al-Qa’eda is still active in many parts of the world.
Taleban attacks against Nato forces over the summer months have increased by 11 per cent compared to the same period last year. There are more than 100 Taleban attacks each month, and in July 46 US and Nato troops were killed. There has been no respite in the fasting month of Ramadan, when there is usually a fighting lull. Contrary to western leaders’ claims, the tide of war is not receding.
Even more dangerous and disheartening is the Taleban re-emergence in Helmand and Kandahar, the southern provinces and Taleban heartland that were supposed to have been swept clean by US and British offensives over the years and where countless British soldiers have been killed. The USled counter-insurgency war to win hearts and minds is being trumped by the Taleban’s tactic of divide and rule by terror.
The enormous sums spent on development over a decade have still not created a self-sustaining economy, which could provide jobs for an Afghan youth bulge — 70 per cent of the population is under 25. What has emerged instead is a corrupt, wasteful, inefficient aid-delivery system which only reinforces the Afghan dependency on foreign handouts.
Nato is determined to leave by 2014 and is obsessed with the so-called transition — the handing over of military duties to the fledgling, under-trained and still illiterate Afghan security forces which are already heavily penetrated by the Taleban.
Yet a meltdown into civil war is still avoidable if Nato pursues the right strategies in the next 18 months.
The key to a future peace is not the military transition — the Afghan army on its own could never sustain the present level of fighting against the Taleban — but a political transition.
The Taleban are just as fearful of a civil war as other Afghans are because they know that, unlike in the 1990s, they could not win it. Government forces would retreat into a Fortress Kabul strategy — fortifying major cities and roads while leaving the countryside in the hands of the Taleban. The northern warlords are re-arming and would halt any Taleban push north of Kabul far better than they did in the 1990s.
After seven rounds of secret US-Taleban negotiations brokered by Qatar and Germany, the Taleban suspended further talks last January. The on-off dialogue was stalled and tied in knots not so much by Taleban intransigence but by the infighting and bureaucratic turf wars between the US Departments of State, Defence and the CIA, while Nato allies have been virtually ignored.
In the past few months the Taleban has strongly signalled that they want a resumption of talks. Yet with the American elections around the corner, the Obama administration will take no mediatory step that opens it to criticism from the Republicans. This is an unfortunate obstacle, since most experts recognise that ‘Phase One’ of any dialogue must involve the establishment of sufficient trust between the US and the Taleban so that violence can be reduced, leading to an eventual ceasefire. So far the US military appears least willing to offer concessions.
The complex negotiations that will be needed for Phase Two – agreement on constitutional problems, a federal or centrally run country, the acceptance of democracy as the form of government, the role of Islam and women and continuing progress in areas such as health care and education — will involve careful preparation by the Afghan government and the West.
Moreover it is unclear how presidential elections will take place in 2014, a time when western forces will be leaving, and what guarantees President Hamid Karzai can give to ensure they are not a repeat of the farcical and heavily disputed elections of 2009.
Yet there are few signs that either the Afghan government or the US and its allies are preparing position papers for such political discussions.
Likewise, despite the US antipathy towards Pakistan and Iran, a dialogue leading to a non-interference agreement between all of Afghanistan’s neighbours will be essential to keep the regional peace. Half-hearted diplomatic efforts have been stymied by the West’s preoccupation with Iran’s nuclear weapons programme and Pakistan’s intransigence when it comes to ending the sanctuaries it gives to the Taleban and the lethal network run by Jalaluddin Haqqani.
What Afghans fear most is not a Taleban takeover, which is unlikely, but a total lack of preparation or strategy towards planning for difficult but not intractable political problems. A breakdown in discussing a political strategy among Afghans could easily lead to civil war.
Multiple political and diplomatic exercises have to be carried out simultaneously by the Afghans and Nato to ensure that they are prepared for all eventualities, including a comprehensive peace dialogue with the Taleban and Pakistan and Iran.
What is clear is that the Americans cannot do this on their own, but so far they have refused help from Nato or the United Nations and even declined help from other countries who have their own secret dialogues going on with elements of the Taleban such as Britain, Norway, Germany and Japan. The intransigence and infighting demonstrated by the Obama administration has been catastrophic in terms of wasted time and wasted opportunities. This cannot be allowed to continue after the November elections — no matter who wins the White House.
But Nato and Britain too have failed to be more publicly critical of what the US is not doing and the monopoly it exerts over the post-2014 ‘endgame’. There has been virtual silence from European governments as the US has continued to blunder.
Nato must insist that European powers, who have better records of dealing with the Taleban and Karzai, need to be involved in the peace process and the formulation of a political strategy. It is time Britain spoke out about what needs to be done.
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Iranian Currency Traders Find a Haven in Afghanistan
New York Times
By MATTHEW ROSENBERG and ANNIE LOWREY
August 17, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan
With American and European sanctions spurring a currency crisis in Iran, officials say a growing number of Iranians are packing trucks with devalued rials and heading to the freewheeling currency market next door in American-occupied Afghanistan, to trade for dollars.
The rial has lost more than half its value against the dollar, and cross-border bank transfers and currency exchanges have become difficult, as sanctions have slashed Iran’s vital oil revenue and cut the country off from international financial markets. Iranian businesses and individuals are desperate to avoid further losses, by converting their money and moving it out for safekeeping. At the same time, the government is trying to find alternate ways to bring in hard currency.
Enter Afghanistan, where dollars function as a second national currency after years of Western spending and where financial oversight is so lax that billions of dollars in cash leave the country every year. Though Afghan and Western officials say they cannot put a precise figure on the trade with Iran, they see it as a potential challenge to the sanctions, and one that the United States, as Afghanistan’s main benefactor, helped create.
The Iranians are “in essence using our own money, and they’re getting around what we’re trying to enforce,” one American official said.
It is a new iteration of an enduring problem in Afghanistan, where Western officials are already struggling to quell a storm of corruption that has undercut the war effort. In the years since the invasion, the country has become a smuggler’s dream, with a booming opium economy and pervasive government graft that is widely believed to be a factor in funneling Western aid money to the Taliban.
On its own, the rush of Iranian money to Afghanistan is unlikely to be enough to undercut the sanctions, which are the cornerstone of Western efforts to coerce Iran into abandoning its nuclear program. But it is clear that American officials are worried. In one indication, President Obama last month quietly strengthened the sanctions by giving the Treasury Department the capacity to punish any person who buys dollars or precious metals, like gold, on behalf of the Iranian government.
“We are taking steps to make it more difficult for the government of Iran to satisfy its heightened demand for dollars — and making it clear to anyone who provides dollars to the government that they face sanctions,” said David S. Cohen, the Treasury Department under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence.
Afghan money traders said they were told this month by American officials to not conduct business with Arian Bank, an Afghan bank owned by a pair of Iranian banks. The Treasury Department has maintained sanctions against the Afghan and Iranian banks in the past few years, and the traders said they had been recently told that the Afghan bank was being used by the Iranian government to move cash in and out of Afghanistan.
Western and Afghan officials, as well as traders in Afghan money markets, said that a number of Iranians had started seeking to buy dollars and euros with their rials as American and European sanctions tightened over the past year.
The purchases are part of efforts by wealthy and middle-class Iranians to protect their savings and business profits by moving them offshore. But with legitimate transfers out of Iran virtually impossible because of the sanctions, Iranians are instead converting their rials in Afghanistan, and then moving the money to banks in the Persian Gulf and beyond.
“The middle class is in a panic about what to do right now,” said Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, an economist at Virginia Tech and an expert on Iran’s economy.
More troublingly, in the eyes of Western officials, the Iranian government is seeking to bolster its reserves of dollars, euros and precious metals to stabilize its exchange rates and ensure that it can pay for imports. Iran had about $110 billion in foreign currency and precious metal reserves in 2011, and those are believed to be dwindling now.
Afghan traders have proved more than willing to trade dollars for rials, usable as a currency in many parts of western Afghanistan, at advantageous exchange rates.
Hajji Najeeb Ullah Akhtary, the president of Afghanistan’s Money Exchange Union, an association of traditional money transfer and exchange businesses that are known as hawalas, said he and his members had seen a steady increase in Iranians bringing cash into Afghanistan over the past year. That comes on top of routine transfers made by Afghans living and working in Iran, including more than one million impoverished refugees, and the regular supply of rials that circulates in Afghanistan.
The cash “comes across in trucks,” he said, with transfers arranged by Afghan middlemen who take a 5 to 7 percent commission.
Iranians were converting rials into dollars in Kabul, the western border city of Herat and in the southern cities of Kandahar and Ghazni, Mr. Akhtary said. The transactions were largely conducted through hawalas, which allow people to transfer large sums of money for small fees to relatives or business associates in distant locales within minutes. The dealers in various places cover one another to make the system work, and settle up after the fact.
The markets are often ramshackle affairs that give little hint of the vast sums being moved. Kabul’s hawala market, for instance, is little more than a few dingy lanes hidden away on the banks of the Kabul River, a trickle of fetid water that winds along trash-strewed banks. But it does huge business. Outside its storefronts, men sit on the pavement behind rickety tables piled high with afghanis, Pakistani rupees, American dollars and Iranian rials, among other currencies.
One hawala dealer, Hajji Ahmed Shah Hakimi, said two routes were primarily used to bring cash in from Iran: one directly across the border with Iran and another through Pakistan.
Both he and Mr. Akhtary insisted that they were not involved in smuggling cash for Iranians or anyone else, but that other hawala traders were.
Mr. Hakimi said the sanctions on Iran were seen in Afghanistan as an American issue, and that is why some Afghans had no problem smuggling money for Iranians. Some Afghan officials echoed that view, saying the Iranian money flow was not a top concern, though the broader problem of bulk cash smuggling was.
The flow of cash in and out of Afghanistan goes largely unmonitored and unimpeded, a “country-sized” money-laundering operation, said a European forensic auditor who has tracked financial crime in Afghanistan and spoke on the condition of anonymity.
In 2011, an estimated $4.6 billion, a sum equivalent to roughly a third of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product, was stuffed into suitcases, shrink-wrapped onto pallets or packed into boxes and flown out of Kabul’s airport on commercial airline flights, most of them headed for Dubai, United Arab Emirates, according to the central bank.
Though new rules and better enforcement have begun to cut into the cash flying out of Kabul, it is anyone’s guess how much moved out of Afghanistan overland on trucks or on twice-weekly flights to Dubai from Kandahar in southern Afghanistan, said an Afghan official who tracks suspicious financial transactions and spoke on the condition of anonymity.
“Kandahar?” he said. “We have no idea what is going there.”
Matthew Rosenberg reported from Kabul, and Annie Lowrey from Washington.
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U.S. plans to beef up rural police forces in Afghanistan
There is concern in the Pentagon and the Afghan government about the village self-defense units becoming predatory criminal gangs or defecting to the Taliban.
Los Angeles Times
By David S. Cloud
August 17, 2012
WASHINGTON
The Obama administration plans to double the size of a rural police force in Afghanistan and arm it with heavier weapons to fight insurgents as U.S. troops withdraw, despite Pentagon and Afghan government concern about the village self-defense units becoming predatory criminal gangs or defecting to the Taliban.
The danger was highlighted Friday when a new member of the Afghan Local Police shot and killed two U.S. special operations troops and wounded a third moments after they gave him his service weapon during a ceremony for new recruits in the western province of Farah.
The attacker, who had joined the force just five days earlier, was about to take part in his first weapons-training session on a firing range. Instead, he opened fire on the American troops and fellow police. He was killed by return fire.
It was the latest in an intensifying spate of lethal "insider" attacks on NATO troops by Afghan soldiers, police and other government forces, causing growing alarm at the Pentagon. Afghan security forces have killed 24 Americans and 15 other Western soldiers so far this year. Nine have died in the last 11 days.
A 122-page report by the Defense Department's inspector general reveals glaring problems within the rural police system, which was set up with U.S. backing two years ago and has become a pivotal part of the American strategy to safeguard territorial gains and maintain political stability as Western nations withdraw most combat forces by the end of 2014.
U.S. Marine Gen. John Allen, the commander of the NATO military force in Afghanistan, has ordered the 16,000-strong rural police force to be increased to 30,000 officers over the next two years, and then possibly expanded further.
In addition to equipping the police officers with AK-47 assault rifles, the Pentagon this year began supplying them with Russian heavy machine guns after local commanders complained that they were outgunned by Taliban insurgents.
The report, issued last month, credits the police with "significant and unexpected success" in expelling insurgent fighters from some remote villages and districts.
But many Afghan officials worry that the widely dispersed units will evolve into marauding criminal gangs or free-wheeling militias loyal to local warlords after departing U.S. forces stop paying their salaries, according to the inspector general's report.
"Why would I arm the villagers when they may use those weapons against the [government] in the future?" provincial governors and district chiefs in eastern Afghanistan asked U.S. special forces officers, according to the report.
For that reason, officials at the Afghan Ministry of Defense are opposing U.S. plans to double the size of the village guard force and increase its firepower, the report notes.
Local elders are supposed to guarantee the loyalty of police in the villages where they are recruited. But adding thousands more recruits over the next two years increases the risk that insurgents will infiltrate the force and that village units could become private armies for local leaders, the report warns.
Regular Afghan police in each province are supposed to oversee the local units. But there is "very little trust" between the two forces because provincial police are afraid that the village guards "would use their weapons against them," a senior U.S. logistics officer told investigators.
The Afghan Ministry of Interior is supposed to supply and pay the village police officers. But the system is weak, the report says, in part because the units are scattered in remote areas and because of concern about "arming future hostile ethnic militias."
Many of the village police officers are from predominantly Pashtun areas. The Taliban is heavily Pashtun.
Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, who now heads the CIA, proposed creating the Afghan Local Police in 2010 when he commanded the war in Afghanistan. President Hamid Karzai initially resisted, concerned that some Afghan officials would try to use the units as private militias.
Petraeus eventually won Karzai's support by promising that the Ministry of Interior, which the central government controls, would oversee and pay the force. He also said the program would be temporary, with the village units incorporated into the regular police or disbanded.
With the insurgency still raging, his successor, Gen. Allen, has abandoned those plans.
Allen plans to keep the local police force intact after 2014 and use it as a "strategic hold force" to help keep insurgents from returning to areas in the east and south that U.S. troops have managed to clear, the report says.
Allen has ordered the U.S. special operations command to look at expanding the local police to more than the current authorized level of 30,000, though the final size hasn't been decided.
"The long-term plan is to keep them around," said Col. Tom Collins, a spokesman for Allen. "All these things come down to funding, however."
It is cheaper and quicker to train and equip local defense units than regular army and police.
With international funding drying up, Afghan security forces are expected to shrink in size in coming years from 352,000 to 280,000 or less, creating more need for local police, U.S. officers said.
The latest "insider" attacks haven't bolstered confidence in the police, however. In addition to Friday's attack, local police have taken part in at least three recent fatal shootings.
Last week, an Afghan officer helping train local police gunned down three special operations Marines in Helmand province. In another incident, a member of a local police unit gunned down a U.S. Armysergeant at a checkpoint in Paktika province, near the Pakistan border.
In late March, a policeman in Paktika province killed nine fellow officers. He first slipped drugs into their tea, then slaughtered them after they passed out.
U.S. officials say the attackers have various motivations. Some have personal grievances, others undergo "self-radicalization" after seeing anti-Western propaganda describing Americans and allies as infidels. Still others are Taliban sympathizers who infiltrate the Afghan security forces.
Allen said this year that more than half of the attacks involved Taliban supporters.
In a statement this week, Mullah Mohammed Omar, the secretive Taliban leader believed to be living in Pakistan, praised insurgents for secretly joining the Afghan army and police to "easily carry out decisive and coordinated attacks, inflicting heavy losses on the enemy both in life and equipment." Other insurgents desert to the Taliban, he said, "carrying their heavy and light weapons and ammunition, after leaving the ranks of the enemy."
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Times staff writer Laura King in Kabul, Afghanistan, contributed to this report.
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Mullah Omar's Statement is 'Unmistakable Message of Death', Isaf Chief Says
TOLOnews.com
Saturday, 18 August 2012
Isaf's top commander in Afghanistan, General John Allen, has called a statement issued by Taliban leader Mullah Omar in advance of Sunday's Eid holiday "an unmistakable message of death."
"For normal members of the faithful, this should be a message of congratulations on the occasion of the ending of the holy period of Ramazan, but instead this message speaks to insurgent operations, revenge, death, lies and false unity among the killers," General Allen said.
In the seven-page missive posted on the Taliban website, Mullah Omar said this year's summer offensive had the "unique distinction" of reaching all corners of Afghanistan.
Mullah Omar claimed victories on the battlefield over Nato-led troops in the country, saying the offensive forced Nato and Afghan troops to take on defensive positions. He claimed that a spate of attacks by Afghan forces against Nato troops was the result of Taliban infiltration.
More than 37 foreign soldiers have been killed by their supposed allies in Afghanistan this year.
Mullah Omar said the withdrawal of Isaf troops by the end of 2014 and the transfer of responsibility for providing security to Afghan forces is a sign of defeat.
There are currently 130,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan. Of those, 90,000 are from the US.
So far this year, more than 277 foreign troops have been killed in Afghanistan.
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Ramadan fasting dilemma when sun never sets
BBC News
By Mark Bosworth BBC World Service
17/08/2012
Rovaniemi, Finland
Practising Muslims across the world are observing Ramadan. For one month, they are fasting between sunrise and sunset. But what do Muslims do in a town where the sun never really goes down?
The town of Rovaniemi in Finland lies in a land of extremes.
At 66 degrees north it straddles the Arctic Circle in Finnish Lapland. During midwinter it is cloaked in total darkness. But in the summer it is bathed in daylight.
The long days pose a particular problem for fasting Muslims like Shah Jalal Miah Masud.
The 28-year-old moved to Rovaniemi - 830km (515 mile) north of the capital, Helsinki - from Bangladesh five years ago to study IT. He has not had any food or water for 21 hours. And he laughs.
"It doesn't get dark. It always looks like the same, the sun is always on the horizon and it's quite difficult to get what the time is actually right now," he says.
It is 11 o'clock in the evening and the sun has only just dipped below the horizon. The sky has turned a beautiful deep, rich blue. This is as dark as it will get, then the sun will rise again in five hours.
Masud says it is difficult to fast according to Finnish time and admits he is tired. But despite the hunger and fatigue, he says it is a pleasure to observe Ramadan during the long Finnish days.
There is another option which reduces the number of fasting hours - mark its duration by the rising and setting of the sun in countries far to the south of Finland. Dr Abdul Mannan - a local Imam and president of the Islam Society of Northern Finland - says there are two schools of thought.
"The Egyptian scholars say that if the days are long - more than 18 hours - then you can follow the Mecca time or Medina time, or the nearest Muslim country time," says Dr Mannan.
"The other (point of view) from the Saudi scholars says whatever the day is - long or short - you have to follow the local time."
Dr Mannan says the majority of Muslims in northern Finland observe either Mecca's fasting hours or Turkish time because it is the nearest Muslim country to Finland.
For Nafisa Yeasmin, a researcher at the University of Lapland, choosing when to fast has not been an easy decision. She moved from Dhaka in Bangladesh six years ago with her husband and two children.
Her spacious Scandinavian-style kitchen - full of white cupboards and wooden work surfaces - smells of frying onions, turmeric, chilli and cumin.
As she prepares her traditional iftar meal, she recalls her first Ramadan in Rovaniemi when she decided to fast according to Finnish daylight hours, going without food for up to 20 hours a day.
"It was very difficult to follow because in Bangladesh we are used to 12 hours' daytime and 12 hours' night-time," she says.
"Then I thought, not any more. I have to follow Mecca's timetable. But I'm a little bit worried whether Allah will accept it or not."
Many Muslims come to Finland as refugees from all over the world, particularly Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan. Since 2001, Finland has accepted 750 refugees a year. New arrivals are often sent to live in towns like Rovaniemi in the far north in a government resettlement programmes.
In Rovaniemi the long days are not the only obstacle that fasting Muslims face.
No shop in this town of 60,000 sells halal food, which is prepared according to Islamic law. The nearest town, Oulu, that does is 300km away. Another option is Lulea, across the border in Sweden.
Yeasmin opts for Lulea, which is a six-hour round trip journey by car, with a shopping list full of items, including black chickpeas, dates, rice crackers and lots of halal meat.
Understandably, she has stocked up for the whole month of Ramadan. To make her point, she opens her huge white fridge - covered in her children's school photos - to reveal all seven trays crammed full of frozen halal meat.
Yeasmin and Masud both enjoy life on the Arctic Circle and say local people are very welcoming and respectful of their religion. 60,000 Muslims live in Finland
1% of population is Muslim Tatar Muslims from Russia and Turkey brought Islam in the 1870s They worked as merchants in the Helsinki area, trading furs and textiles
But they say it is hard to be thousands of kilometres from home, family and friends during a major religious festival.
"We used to break the fast and share the iftar meal together. Now I do it on my own," says Miah Masud.
"It's like normal life here, no feeling of a festival. I feel like I'm missing something."
Mark Bosworth's report aired on Newshour on the BBC World Service.
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Coalition steps up fight against Afghan 'green-on-blue' attacks
CNN
By Joe Sterling
August 17, 2012
The United States and its allies are working to stop what they regard as an ominous trend: attacks against NATO-led troops by Afghan security forces or others clad in military or police uniforms.
The assaults, called green-on-blue or insider attacks, have spiked this year, causing the deaths of 39 International Security Assistance Force troops -- including two in Farah province Friday.
An estimated 101 NATO troops have been killed in green-on-blue attacks since May 2007 across Afghanistan, military analyst Bill Roggio said Friday.
Roggio, managing editor of the Long War Journal blog, which reports and analyzes terror issues, said green-on-blue attacks have caused around 13% of coalition deaths this year. Of the green-on-blue attacks since 2007, about 40% of the deaths have occurred this year and 35% occurred last year, Roggio said.
U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said he is concerned that the attacks will damage coalition and Afghan partnership efforts. Speaking at a Defense Department news conference Tuesday, he discussed measures to stop the acts by improving intelligence and vetting of security force recruits.
"Our enemies have attempted to undermine the trust between the coalition and Afghan forces, and in particular they have tried to take credit for a number of so-called green-on-blue or insider attacks that have taken place this fighting season," he said. "Make no mistake about it. I'm very concerned about these incidents."
One measure to combat the attackers is a "guardian angel program," Panetta said.
That "involves identifying one individual who stands to the side so that he can watch people's backs and hopefully identify people that would be involved in those attacks," he said.
Pentagon changing lingo to 'green-on-blue' in growing threat
Panetta cited increasing "the intelligence presence" to obtain "better information with regards to these kinds of potential attacks." He also mentioned increasing the counterintelligence presence to "identify those threats."
For example, a NATO official quoted in a column co-authored by CNN National Security Analyst Peter Bergen said that the increase of counterintelligence officers is designed to "ferret out Taliban double agents."
Panetta also said the military is using and reviewing a "thorough" and "eight-step" vetting process.
"We're doing forensics on the particular instances that occur in order to make sure, you know, how that process -- that vetting process operated and what we can do to improve it," he said.
Another measure to fight the attacks is "implementing a notification process" for alerting people to threats. And another is that all troops at NATO headquarters in Kabul now must carry loaded weapons around the clock, CNN has learned.
Panetta said Gen John Allen, the chief NATO commander in Afghanistan, is meeting with village elders to discuss the issue.
Village elders "are the people who usually vouch for individuals. They have to sign something that vouches for the character of individuals, and he's going back to them to ensure that that's being done properly."
"All of this requires action both by the United States and coalition forces and by our Afghan partners who also face this insider threat. We shouldn't forget that the Afghans themselves are targets of these kinds of attacks, as well," he said.
Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, appeared at the news conference with Panetta. Allen is convening a conference of senior coalition commanders, and Afghan security ministers are having a summit on the issue, Dempsey said.
He stressed that Afghan security forces are also suffering from the same trend and noted that President Hamid Karzai has condemned the attacks. He cited an instance where Afghan soldiers who were killed when they came to the aid of their American counterparts in one of the attacks.
"There's far more stories about the positive relationship than there is about this particular insider attack trend, but it is one that we have to remain seized with and focused on," he said.
"Unknown but important, they've discharged hundreds of soldiers who did indicate ... that some of these young men had the capability to be radicalized, either by virtue of travel back and forth to Pakistan, by literature, by language, by music."
Nevertheless, Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar has claimed that fighters are infiltrating Afghan security forces to attack NATO-led forces on their bases.
"Many Afghans in the rank and files of the enemy have shown a willingness to help the (Taliban) in a shrewd manner," said a statement posted on militant websites Thursday and obtained by SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors the activities of militant groups on the Web.
"As a result, the foreign invaders and their allies at their military centers and bases are suffering crushing blows by these heroic soldiers."
Panetta said that "one of the reasons the Taliban is targeting in this manner, we believe, is the success that our Afghan partners are having on the battlefield. The reality is, the Taliban has not been able to regain any territory lost, and so they're resorting to these kinds of attacks to create havoc."
And, Panetta said, there's "no one source" for the attacks.
Some are people "who, for one reason or another, are upset and suddenly take it out. We've seen that here in the United States oftentimes." Sometimes, they are people who aren't Taliban but become radicalized, he said.
"They use cell phones to tune into various, you know, stations that provide incentives for that type of thing. And so we've seen some of that take place in some of these attacks. And then others, you know, have some Taliban ties," Panetta said.
"It's difficult to kind of draw any kind of firm conclusion as to just exactly, you know, whether this is kind of a pattern, a broad pattern. As a matter of fact, at least from everybody I've talked to at this point, you know, these seem to be incidents that are taking place and oftentimes caused by different backgrounds of the individuals involved."
Bergen, who wrote the column for CNN and the New America Foundation with Jennifer Rowland, said the "motivations of about half the attackers are difficult to classify because the perpetrator is either dead or has fled.
Citing media accounts, Bergen and Rowland say many of the "green-on-blue" attacks appear to have occurred after quarrels between Afghan and international troops, or because the Afghan soldier has "personal grievances."
They cite a Department of Defense report in April that said "investigations have determined that a large majority of green-on-blue attacks are not attributable to insurgent infiltration of the ANSF [Afghan National Security Forces,] but are due to isolated personal grievances against coalition personnel."
They said one military behavioral scientist who interviewed more than 600 Afghan soldiers and policemen last year "found they held overwhelmingly negative perceptions of Western soldiers."
"The Afghan security forces aired grievances ranging from NATO soldiers' supposedly indiscriminate fire that killed civilians to the public searching of Afghan soldiers outside NATO bases, as well as U.S. soldiers urinating in public or cursing at their Afghan counterparts," according to the authors.
Another cause of the increase in the attacks over the past two years is the growth of the Afghan army and police force, Bergen and Rowland say.
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Deadly insider attack that left 3 U.S. Marines dead was work of an Afghan teenager
Washington Post
By Kevin Sieff
Saturday, August 18, 2012
KABUL
The teenage assailant who killed three Marines last week on a U.S. military base in southern Afghanistan had easy access to the weapons arsenal of the Afghan police. He was in near-constant contact with U.S. troops, often when they were without their guns and body armor.
But although Aynoddin, 15, lived among American and Afghan security forces, he was not a soldier or a police officer. He had never been vetted. According to U.S. and Afghan officials, his role on base was hardly formal: He was the unpaid, underage personal assistant of the district police chief.
Officials would later learn that the quiet, willowy boy was also working for the insurgency.
As U.S. troops depart from Afghanistan, American military strategy increasingly hinges on small teams of advisers who live and work with Afghan soldiers and police officers. But those teams — like the one that Aynoddin attacked last week — put themselves at the mercy of often-shoddy Afghan security standards, which permit individuals to live on shared bases without proper scrutiny.
There have been 28 so-called “insider attacks” this year, resulting in the deaths of 39 coalition troops — a full 13 percent of those killed in Afghanistan in 2012. Among the dead are 23 Americans. The attacks continued Friday, when an Afghan Local Police officer shot and killed two U.S. troops during a training exercise in the western province of Farah.
NATO officials have long claimed that the majority of such attacks are the products of personal disputes. But last week’s shooting was believed to have come from a different, more troubling source: a young Taliban convert who exploited his access to carry out what insurgent leader Mohammad Omar boasted Thursday is a deliberate plan to drive a wedge between foreign and Afghan forces.
Aynoddin should never have been on the base in the first place, because Afghan and U.S. security standards would not have allowed it. But those standards are often violated — especially by the country’s nascent police force.
“We have to have better leadership out of our Afghan leaders. There are some things they need to step up to the plate and do now better than they’ve done,” said Marine Maj. Gen. Charles M. Gurganus, the top U.S. commander in southwestern Afghanistan. “They need to be looking in the eyes of their subordinate commanders and holding them accountable for these people who are in and out of police stations.”
Aynoddin, who, like many Afghans, uses only one name, was in high school when he started work for Garmsir’s police chief, Sarwar Jan, in the southern province of Helmand. He spent his days cooking for Jan and cleaning up after him. Both Afghans and Americans knew him as the boss’s “tea boy.”
At 8:30 p.m. on Aug. 10,, three weeks after he arrived at a joint U.S.-Afghan base called Delhi, the boy stole a Kalashnikov rifle that was lying in an unlocked barracks, according to police officers on the base. He walked to a gym where four unarmed Marines were exercising and held down the trigger until no bullets were left. When he was finished, three Marines were dead and one was badly injured.
Then Aynoddin walked out of the gym, rifle still in hand, and bragged of his accomplishment: “I just did jihad,” he said to nearby police officers, according to several men who were on the scene. “Don’t you want to do jihad, too? If not, I will kill you.” The officers approached him slowly and then tore the gun from his hands.
“The look in his face was angry, like if he had more bullets he would have killed us as well,” said Janan, one of the Garmsir officers.
When U.S. officials discovered that an unvetted 15-year-old had been allowed access to the base — and the weapons strewn around it — they were furious.
“These were jihad-motivated executions,” said a Western official in Afghanistan with knowledge of the incident. To suggest otherwise would be “profoundly distasteful and insulting to the Marines who died.”
Jan, the police chief, said Aynoddin was “given” to him as a personal assistant by a local elder and Afghan Local Police commander. Jan assumed the boy was a police officer, he said, even though he wasn’t wearing a uniform.
Police officers in Garmsir say Aynoddin skulked around the base, keeping to himself. Afghan and NATO officials now speculate that the boy was waiting for the right opportunity to attack foreign troops. He chose a moment when the Marines were unarmed and the Afghan police officers were gathered to break their daily Ramadan fast. A classified investigation into the incident is ongoing, but some officials with knowledge of the attack spoke to The Washington Post on the condition of anonymity.
The Marines who Aynoddin killed were part of a U.S. advisory team attached to the Afghan Uniformed Police, a branch of the national police. In Garmsir, a district once on the front lines of NATO’s surge to vanquish the Taliban from southern Afghanistan, such advisory teams now play a crucial role in the swift U.S. drawdown. The Marines in Garmsir dropped from a battalion to a company this spring, consolidating their footprint from over 60 bases to three.
With far fewer troops, the Marines shifted from a combat role to a mission devoted largely to training their Afghan counterparts — a preview of how U.S. involvement in Afghanistan will evolve over the next two years. In Garmsir, that change in mission meant getting closer to Afghan soldiers and police, trusting that physical proximity would strengthen the relationship rather than damage it.
There were 32 men on the Marines’ police training team in Garmsir. Not only did they work every day at the district police headquarters, they lived there as well, on a part of the Delhi base separated from the U.S. operations center by a small checkpoint. The Marines knew there were risks involved in that living arrangement, but they said it was crucial to building trust.
“The Afghan police and the Marines had a good relationship,” said one Marine on the team, who arrived at the grisly scene shortly after the attack. “A few of the Afghan police even broke into tears afterwards when they realized what had happened.”
Still, there had been rifts. Several Marines said they made it clear to Jan that it was not acceptable to bring underage boys onto the base. But they watched as the police chief disobeyed that rule, they said.
For years, Marines and other U.S. officials said, they had heard local residents complain about Jan’s poorly kept secret — that he invited boys to bases often shared with U.S. troops and engaged in sexual misconduct. Officials say it was the primary reason he was dismissed from a previous posting in Now Zad, another district in Helmand. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because publicly accusing the police chief could make it difficult to work in southern Afghanistan.
Jan denies that he has done anything improper. “I’m not fond of young boys,” he said after being released from Afghan custody this week. He was later detained again by Afghan intelligence agents.
In southern Afghanistan, it is not uncommon for men to sexually exploit boys. The practice, called bacha bazi, has been on the rise since the Taliban regime collapsed.
Since the Garmsir incident, top U.S. commanders in Afghanistan and defense officials in Washington have held several meetings to discuss what might be done to prevent insider attacks from occurring, according to senior defense officials. Commanders have agreed to add a counterintelligence specialist at the battalion level to help detect Taliban infiltrators. They are also considering ways to improve the Afghan vetting process.
But in the meantime, the problem continues. In addition to the two killings in western Afghanistan on Friday, an Afghan soldier wounded three NATO troops in a separate incident in southern Afghanistan.
Those attacks came a day after Omar, the Taliban leader, issued a statement lauding insurgents who “have cleverly infiltrated in the ranks of the enemy.” The infiltrators, Omar said, “are able to enter bases, offices and intelligence centers of the enemy. Then, they easily carry out decisive and coordinated attacks.”
Javed Hamdard in Kabul and Greg Jaffe in Washington contributed to this report.
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Bomb in a bazaar in western Afghanistan kills 4 people
Associated Press
Saturday, August 18, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan
An official says a bomb in a market in western Afghanistan has killed four people.
A spokesman for the Herat provincial government says the explosion on Saturday morning also wounded 12 people, including three policemen who were on patrol.
Muhiudin Noori says the bomb was planted next to a shop in the busy bazaar in Shindand district.
The blast was the latest attack targeting civilians in Afghanistan.
Earlier this week, 35 civilians died in multiple suicide bombings and a market bomb in two different cities in what was the deadliest day for civilians so far this year.
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NORTH: Obama’s bitter harvest in Afghanistan
New commander in chief needed to win
The Washington Times
By Oliver North
Friday, August 17, 2012
In December 2009, our commander in chief went to West Point and proclaimed that he would withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan by 2014. Since then, he has proudly emphasized, “We are on a course to end this war responsibly.” U.S. and NATO troops and loyal Afghan soldiers and police officers are reaping the bitter harvest of the seeds President Obama planted with those words.
Over the past 10 days, in five incidents, seven American military personnel were killed in what used to be called “green-on-blue attacks” — in which Afghan soldiers or police assaulted their U.S. and NATO counterparts. Thus far this year, 37 coalition troops and civilians have been killed in 29 incidents of what the Pentagon now calls “insider attacks.” According to figures released by the NATO command in Kabul, there were 11 such events in all of last year, resulting in 20 deaths.
Until now, the Pentagon and NATO command in Kabul maintained that those “sporadic incidents” usually were the consequence of “personal grievances” and were “related to people getting into arguments.” In March, after an insider attack that killed two British commandos, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said the assaults by persons wearing Afghan police or military uniforms weren’t part of “any kind of broad pattern of activity.” That perception has been altered by events on the ground in Afghanistan.
On Tuesday, following two attacks perpetrated by Afghan nationals that resulted in six Marines killed and two wounded, U.S. Gen. James F. Amos, the Marine Corps commandant, took the unusual step of issuing guidance to all U.S. Marine leaders. Gen. Amos, it should be recalled by my media colleagues, co-authored the “Counterinsurgency Manual” with Gen. David H. Petraeus. It was used as the guidebook for the fight in Afghanistan. In his letter Tuesday, Gen. Amos noted that the recent assaults “were carefully crafted to drive a wedge between us and our Afghan partners.” Importantly, he also warned his Marines: “More of these types of spectacular attacks can be expected.”
A day after the Amos message went out, Mr. Panetta and Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, acknowledged at least partial reality in a Pentagon news conference. They now say the Taliban is “resorting to these kinds of attacks to create havoc.” In that same news conference, Mr. Panetta, perhaps forgetting this is not a conventional war, claimed that “the Taliban has not been able to regain any territory lost.”
During the question-and-answer session with reporters, Gen. Dempsey announced new measures to ameliorate the threat: the formation of a Joint Casualty Assessment Team (JCAT) to evaluate every aspect of each attack, increased counterintelligence “expertise” and a “conference” of “one-stars and above” to develop “thoughts about what more we might do.”
Unfortunately, the Pentagon’s fixes won’t fix the problem of increasing insider attacks. We have 84,000 U.S. troops on the ground in Afghanistan. The Obama administration insists on dropping that number to 68,000 before the presidential election in November while the Afghan National Security Forces simultaneously increase from 332,000 to more than 350,000. That’s mission impossible.
The JCAT idea might have been a good one back in 2007, when NATO began to tally insider attacks. Any study the JCAT produces now will be good for the history books but unlikely to stop the carnage over the next 12 months.
Improved intelligence on those entering, and counterintelligence about those already in the Afghan police and military services, would be a great idea. Institutional arrogance in U.S. intelligence agencies mandates reliance on signals intelligence, not human intelligence that actually would be effective in screening out and detecting Taliban infiltrators.
If the Pentagon brass wants to know what needs to be done to mitigate the risk of such attacks, it ought to forget about a conference of generals and solicit ideas from the lieutenants and captains in the field who are living, fighting and dying beside loyal Afghan counterparts.
Finally, in what can only be a total lack of situational awareness, there is Mr. Panetta’s assessment that insider attacks are designed to “create havoc” and his comment that success is measured by keeping the Taliban from regaining “any territory lost.”
The radical Islamists in Afghan police and military garb who kill Americans don’t care about territory. Havoc is simply a subsidiary effect — collateral damage — of an insider attack. The perpetrators of these assaults on American and NATO personnel have but one goal: killing an infidel.
President Obama planted the seeds for all this when he publicly announced a timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops. His deadline is fertile ground for jihadis, who know that their “window of opportunity” for murder is closing. We should expect the bitter harvest of green-on-blue attacks to produce a bumper crop of American casualties unless we hire a new commander in chief who knows how to fight a war and win.
Oliver North is host of “War Stories” on Fox News Channel, founder and honorary chairman of Freedom Alliance and author of “American Heroes in Special Operations” (Fidelis, 2010).
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Coalition troops now armed at all times on Afghan bases in wake of 'insider' shootings
FoxNews.com
By Justin Fishel
August 17, 2012
U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan are being ordered to carry loaded weapons at all times while on base, in response to a rash of Afghan soldiers and policemen turning their weapons on coalition forces.
The directive, confirmed by Fox News, was issued by International Security Assistance Force Commander Gen. John Allen. It says that troops should no longer simply keep ammunition magazines close by -- instead, those magazines should be loaded in the weapons.
Depending on where troops are stationed in Afghanistan, this is not an entirely new practice. At Bagram Air Base, for example, weapons carried by NATO troops are often inspected upon entry to make sure they are loaded. But that was not the practice at ISAF headquarters in Kabul where service members have, until now, been directed to empty their ammunition upon entering the base.
The directive comes as military officials scramble to find ways to fight the so-called "green-on-blue attacks" or "insider threats," as Defense Secretary Leon Panetta characterized it this week.
"Make no mistake about it -- I've been very concerned about these incidents because of the lives lost and because of the potential damage to our partnership efforts," Panetta said at a Pentagon briefing Tuesday.
Panetta said ISAF is taking other steps, too, including increased counterintelligence efforts, a new eight-step vetting process for new recruits, and new NATO training requirements.
Two Americans were killed Friday when a local village policeman opened fire in Farah province in the west. Two more Americans were shot and wounded in a separate incident in the southern province of Kandahar.
Thirty-nine NATO service members, mostly Americans, have been killed in these types of attacks so far this year. In one horrifying scene earlier this year, an Afghan soldier shot and killed an American while he was playing volleyball on base.
The attacks are up significantly -- from 11 deaths in 2011. There were four such deaths in all of 2007 and 2008.
Panetta largely blamed the trend on Taliban influence and self-radicalization. But he conceded that the problem is not that simple.
Terry Walker, a former Marine trainer in Helmand Province, told Fox News that most of these incidents are due to personal and cultural conflicts. He said Afghans simply have a different way of dealing with their problems.
"You have a strong influence that's tribal," Walker said. "Afghans can't be insulted and they have no conflict resolution capability. The smallest thing can set them off."
Sometimes it's not so small. One military official detailed an incident where an Afghan man was being repeatedly raped by fellow Afghans in his police unit. When a British service member teased the man about the abuse, the Afghan man "snapped" and killed him.
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Infiltration or bad blood? Reasons for Afghan forces' attacks on allies offer little comfort
The Associated Press
By Kay Johnson
17/08/2012
KABUL
The U.S. military trainers handed the new recruit, Mohammad Ismail, his AK-47 to defend his remote Afghan village. He turned around and immediately used it, spraying the Americans with bullets and killing two — the latest of nine U.S. service personnel gunned down in two weeks by their supposed Afghan allies.
The shooting in western Farah province was not the only such attack Friday. Hours later a few provinces away in Kandahar, an Afghan soldier wounded two more coalition troopers.
One turncoat attack per month raised eyebrows last year. One per week caused concern earlier this year. But when Afghan forces turn their guns on international trainers twice in a day — as they now have two weeks in a row — it's hard to argue there's not something going on. The question is, what is it?
The U.S.-led alliance says it's too soon to tell what's behind the rash of insider attacks. The most likely explanations: Either the Taliban are increasingly infiltrating the Afghan police and army, or relations between Afghan and American forces are turning toxic — or both.
"There's no positive spin on this," said Andrew Exum, an analyst with the Washington-based Center for a New American Security who has advised the top U.S. generals in Kabul. He said the number of Afghan insider attacks has risen beyond what can be explained as isolated incidents.
That's bad news for the U.S. exit strategy for Afghanistan, which has seen Washington spend more than $20 billion on training and equipping a nearly 340,000-member Afghan security force on the assumption that it would eventually be strong enough to fight the Taliban on its own.
The coalition has downplayed the insider attacks as anomalies and mostly a result of personal grievances, even as their numbers soared from 11 last year to 29 so far in 2012. The alliance says only about 10 per cent of the attacks were related to infiltration by the Taliban insurgency. But that analysis was done before the latest furious spate of seven attacks in 11 days, a frequency that suggests some type of co-ordination.
"Whether or not these specific events turn out to be insurgent-initiated ... we're just going to have to do the investigations and figure that out," said Jamie Graybeal, a spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition.
Some historians are hard-pressed to find precedent for this in previous wars.
"I have never heard of anything in Vietnam comparable to what we have recently experienced in Afghanistan," said James McAllister, a political science professor at Williams College in Massachusetts who has written extensively about the Vietnam War. A British military expert on colonial wars, Martin Windrow, said the level of these types of attacks were "almost unheard of" in any conflict he'd studied.
Exum said the insider attacks have "tremendous strategic impact" because they damage morale among international troops and further weaken support for the war in the U.S. and other NATO nations training Afghan soldiers and police to take over security nationwide by 2014.
What's unclear, he added, is how much influence the Taliban actually have in organizing the increasing numbers of attacks.
The insurgents have been happy to take credit. The Taliban's supreme leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, boasted Thursday that the insurgents "have cleverly infiltrated into the ranks of the enemy" and were killing a rising number of U.S.-led coalition forces.
Defence Secretary Leon Panetta told The Associated Press in an interview this week that the attacks may reflect the Taliban's use of unconventional tactics against a coalition force it cannot defeat on the battlefield. He added that U.S. military commanders say such attacks still remain "sporadic" and not a long-term trend.
Friday's deadly shooting in Farah, at least by the accounts of local Afghan officials, seemed unlikely to be a personal dispute. Mohammad Ismail, a man in his 30s, had joined the Afghan Local Police just five days earlier. He opened fire during an inauguration ceremony attended by American and Afghan forces in Kinisk village, Farah provincial police chief Agha Noor Kemtoz said.
"As soon as they gave the weapon to Ismail to begin training, he took the gun and opened fire toward the U.S. soldiers," Kemtoz said. The police chief added that he had warned U.S. forces organizing and training the community not to move too fast to recruit in the village, which he said is heavily influenced by the Taliban.
Afghan military analyst Amrullah Amman has no doubt that Taliban infiltration of Afghan security forces is rising. He said that despite new methods of screening, it's simple to forge documents and invent references in Afghanistan.
"The gate is wide open. The enemy is infiltrating because they see it's very easy," Amman said.
But the turncoat attacks may also reflect growing mistrust and resentment among Afghans working with international forces.
Afghan soldiers interviewed by the AP earlier this year offered their own explanations: The Afghans feel disrespected, the soldiers said. They complained of getting inferior equipment and condescending treatment by Americans.
In May 2011, a U.S. Army team led by a behavioural scientist compiled a survey that indicated many Afghan security personnel found U.S. troops "extremely arrogant, bullying and unwilling to listen to their advice."
"I think infiltration is easier to address, actually," Exum said. "I think the worse thing is, if your entire strategy going forward from the next three or four years depends on partnering with Afghan forces, then if relations have already devolved to this degree, you're really worried."
___
Associated Press writers Amir Shah in Kabul and Slobodan Lekic in Brussels contributed to this report.
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U.S. says infiltration not main cause of Afghan 'insider' attacks
Reuters
August 17, 2012
WASHINGTON
Only about 11 percent of so-called "insider attacks" by Afghans against NATO troops are due to Taliban infiltration, the Pentagon said on Friday, as more American troops were killed at the hands of Afghans posing as allies in the 11-year-old war.
Friday's incident took place in Afghanistan's western Farah province, where a recently recruited police militia member in his late 60s killed two U.S. troops shortly after being given his weapon at an inauguration ceremony, a U.S. official said.
The motives of the killings were still unclear and an investigation was underway, NATO-led forces said.
The vast majority of insider attacks this year -- nearly 90 percent -- are due to motives unrelated to Taliban objectives, including personal grudges, Pentagon spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Steven Warren said, citing a new study by the NATO-led forces in Afghanistan.
The data challenge Taliban assertions of widespread infiltration of Afghan security forces, but also raise questions about the limits of NATO efforts to weed out insider threats as they prepare to hand over lead security control of the country to the Afghans in 2014.
The Pentagon announced earlier this week it was expanding counterintelligence staff in Afghanistan after a rise in insider attacks by Afghans, including attempts to spot signs of Afghan forces becoming radicalized without contact with insurgents.
But that would be little help in preventing grudge-related killings.
And the number of attacks has been rising.
As of Tuesday, there had been 29 attacks so far in 2012, resulting in 37 deaths among the NATO-led coalition forces, 21 of which were Americans, according to Pentagon data. For the same period last year, there were 16 attacks and 28 deaths.
In all of 2011, there were 35 coalition troops killed, 24 of whom were U.S. troops.
General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the U.S. military's Joint Chiefs of Staff, noted that Afghan forces had so far discharged hundreds of soldiers who showed a risk of radicalization -- including travel back and forth to Pakistan, where many militants enjoy safe haven.
Reclusive Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar has said insurgent fighters have successfully infiltrated the Afghan security forces. In a statement released late on Thursday, Mullah Omar urged police, soldiers and government workers to "abandon support of the invaders" and back the Taliban ahead of the departure of most Western combat troops in 2014.
(Reporting by Phil Stewart; Editing by Paul Simao)
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Afghan probabilities and Pakistan
The News International
By Saleem Safi
Opinion
Saturday, August 18, 2012
In terms of US objectives and role in this region, we can postulate three probable modules about the future of Afghanistan. Each module, having its own peculiarities, is going to impact Pakistan in a different manner. The first module is US reconciliation with the Taliban that could save the US administration’s face in public. Such reconciliation would result in an Al-Qaeda-free Afghanistan and indeed that will protect valid interests of the US in the region. If this module is realised, the US would not hesitate to withdraw all its combat forces from Afghanistan by 2014. Though the US would insist on its military bases in Afghanistan, if the governments of Afghanistan, Pakistan and other neighbouring countries play their cards skilfully, the US could agree to surrender this condition.
The second module is about the failure of all efforts in reconciliation with Taliban. In this case by 2014 the US have to face greater difficulties. If US relations remained strained with the neighbour countries of Afghanistan, they will not hesitate to facilitate the Taliban, making it even more miserable for US. In this situation the US would toe the same Afghan policy by the upcoming presidential elections. In next elections if Obama wins, two major policy shifts are very obvious. Firstly, they will convert northern Afghanistan into a strong military base and will operate drones and use other means from there to suppress Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.
Secondly, the US will encourage and manage the civil war in central and eastern Afghanistan to overturn resistance against them. If this module operated, indeed the US would use Afghans to teach a good lesson to all those neighbouring countries that, according to US view, are responsible for their failures. A possible strategy could be dividing Afghanistan against ethnic fault lines of Pakhtun and non-Pakhtuns; making the Durand Line a burning issue between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
For Pakistan this policy shift could be translated as enlargement of existing geographic circle of drone attacks, imposing financial restraints, and giving beyond merit opportunities to India in Afghanistan. Instigating the internal conflicts of Pakistan would also be another tool in their hand. But one can ask what if Obama didn’t make it. To predict the minimum, if Republicans enter the White House, US policy about this region is going to be more aggressive and foolish!
The third module, having least possibility, and vigorously predicted and desperately desired by hawkish leaders, some ex general and rightwing analysts in Pakistan, is that the US leave Afghanistan and never care to look back as the USSR did in the past.
In terms of the impact of each module it is obvious that excluding the first, the remaining two modules are simply disastrous for both Afghanistan and Pakistan. Impacts of the second module are already enumerated in its details above, while the third module could push back Afghanistan to a situation when the USSR left Afghanistan in the 90s. However, this time the magnitude as well as catastrophe of a civil war would be far greater. In the past only few Mujahedeen groups were at war for the single objective of power. But now the civil war would get its fuel from mutual disagreements over languages, regions, religions and sects. This civil war would be more disastrous as Afghanistan is now bursting with the latest arms and destruction technologies. Suicide bombing and killing opponent by entering in their strongholds are just new trends that could claim thousands of lives.
Besides internal dimension, the last two modules will also facilitate regional and international actors to invest for their interests. The US and its allies would initiate such conditions for revenge, but such dispute would be an ideal site for proxy wars to Pakistan and India, Iran and Saudi Arabia, China and the US, and other regional actors. Those who dream about Taliban rule in future Afghanistan are not realising the difference. In the 90s both superpowers left Afghanistan and in regional contest among Iran, Pakistan, India and Tajikistan indeed Pakistan had the upper hand. Today, the US having its bases in northern Afghanistan or even in Central Asia could not allow sustaining any such government through their Drones and B-52 raids. In guerrilla war, indeed the Taliban are victors, but by every rational analysis, it is not equal to the Taliban’s capacity to rule.
Thus, it is in the greater and supreme interests of Afghanistan and Pakistan that they effort to realise module one. Instead of wasting their energies in complete surrender of the US, they must work along with the US and other regional actors that result in a representative setup in Afghanistan. All valid concerns of the US and its allies, but not at the cost of the interests of China, Iran and Pakistan, must be addressed and protected. Reciprocally, the US has to cancel its wicked projects about the region.
It is fact that the US is neither focused nor sincere. It is extremely confused and extremely annoyed with Pakistan. The US has halted but not ended its wicked projects for Pakistan, Iran, China and Central Asia. And to this end Pakistani policymakers’ stance seems logical that no one can help or play comfortably with the US until they clearly set their objectives and priorities. However, the sad fact is if Pakistan waits for that ideal time while US policymakers resolve their confusion, irreversible damage is waiting for us. Realism demands that Pakistani policy makers fully analysed current situation and set its strategy accordingly. And to this end there is lot to do at Pakistani end.
First and foremost Pakistan requires its own focus, between civil and military leadership over Afghanistan. Secondly, Pakistan has to use its full potentials to materialise reconciliation among Taliban, Kabul and the leadership of northern Afghanistan. Once they are on the same page, it is an easy but equally important task to convince through diplomatic means the US and its allies, China, Russia, Iran, India, and Saudi Arabia to buy that policy. Instead of the futile exercise to surrendering the US in Afghanistan it is far better to convince the US that its efforts to surrender Pakistan and other in Afghanistan are equally counterproductive.
The regional and international competition through arms and proxy wars in Afghanistan and adjacent Pakistani areas needs transformation. If this competition is turned to economic field this win-win formula is a guarantee of prosperity for all participants. The war among the US, China and Russia, results in thousands of casualties in Afghanistan and Pakistan. If they convert Pakistan and Afghanistan in their competition arena for trade the success and benefits of this are guaranteed. Presently as a result of proxy war between India and Pakistan, the Pakhtun belt in Afghanistan and Pakistan is an inferno.
If they chose to compete for Central Asian opportunities, the same belt only through transit income could be paradise. Iran and Saudi Arabia invest heavily in instigating hate between different groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but if this competition shifted to trade and investment, people of both countries will develop.
The writer works for Geo TV.
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To tap its resources Afghanistan must provide security
DW
17/08/2012
Away from its political disputes and war trauma, in corners of the country not visited by combat reporters and diplomats, lie Afghanistan’s vast lakes, mountain ranges, floral valleys – and natural energy reserves.
Politicians and experts say the potential to harvest hydropower and gas – and its location at the crossroads of Central Asia, ideal for a trade hub – could be the ticket to making the country self-sufficient and re-building its post-war economy.
Some estimates put its mineral and energy potential in the trillions of dollars.
"Afghanistan's relative needs and expectations are so modest that even a few hundred thousand barrels per year would be an accomplishment and more than the country needs," says Michael O'Hanlon, a specialist in national security at the Brookings Institution in Washington and a member of General David Petraeus's External Advisory Board at the Central Intelligence Agency.
Afghanistan is currently dependent on pricey foreign energy imports.
The bulk is brought in from Uzbekistan and to an extent from Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Iran.
From importer to exporter
Mahmoud Saikal thinks it's possible for Afghanistan's energy industry to become self-reliant and eventually begin exporting to the same countries on which it currently relies.
The country's former deputy foreign minister and Ambassador to Australia, he is the champion of its fledgling energy industry.
At home in Kabul this spring, he took a visitor through a presentation he was planning on giving the next week in Dushanbe, which he hoped would be one of his country's biggest energy trading partners.
But raw potential isn't everything.
Afghanistan's tumultuous recent history and dearth of foreign investment means it has a mountain to climb as it works to attract investors from India, China, and other investment-savvy nations.
"It has the potential to produce between 25 and 30 megawatts of electricity per year if it could exploit its full potential," Saikal said. "The bulk of that will come from water. It [also] appears Afghanistan has the potential to produce oil and gas."
Violence scares off investors
Still, there's skepticism, namely from the foreign investors who would be looking to set up production plants and pipelines on the country's rugged terrain.
Investment markets are based on prevailing wisdom, "and right now," O'Hanlon says, "Afghanistan's security future is not seen as promising. People are really worried about the potential to fall back into warfare. There's enough violence going on now that it's bad enough to limit a lot of foreign investment."
A spate of attacks by extremist fighters – including one in Kabul in April, in which a hotel was taken over and shots fired on the US military compound – have done little to quell fears.
"Afghanistan is still at war and not that many parts are immune to potential dangers of the war," he adds. "Investors could be scared off by having their pipelines and transit routes attacked."
Despite heavy foreign defense investment, conditions "are still worse than they were five years ago," notes Hanlon:
"Energy investments have to have [foresight], and most people are not bullish about Afghanistan post-2015" – once the US withdraws its forces from the country.
Last year, the China National Petroleum Company became the first major investor, signing a 25-year deal with Afghanistan's Watan Oil and Gas that will, according to the UK's Daily Telegraph newspaper, give it access to approximately 160 million barrels of oil from fields in Northern Afghanistan.
Murky deals
(Shining light on the hurdles foreign businessmen could encounter, Watan won the contract despite being under the stewardship of infamous Karzai cousins Rashid and Rateb Popal, recently accused of paying off Taliban leaders with American money.)
The deal has also created conflict with local tribes in the north, where the bulk of exploration is taking place.
"The internal capacity and capability of Afghanistan must be good enough to manage the mining and energy production of Afghanistan," Saikal says.
"But in the past few years we are seeing a dramatic weakening of the rule of law and governance. Karzai has been promoting traditionalism and tribalism, which could help him continue his rule but doesn't help Afghanistan manage its resources."
International models
Other traditionally unstable countries – namely Iraq, Angola and Nigeria – have flourishing energy markets.
Similarly war-torn Iraq has managed to get its energy production back to pre-war levels, nine years later. But Iraq is located close to the oil-rich Arabian Gulf trade mecca.
Angola's boom began largely after peace had returned following the 2002 end of its 27-year civil war.
And Nigeria, though violent and politically unstable, has a long-established oil-drilling infrastructure and decades of foreign energy investment.
Creating that same infrastructure in Afghanistan will be expensive.
At the end of the day, "to think this is a worthwhile investment, you need 10 years' stability predicted," O'Hanlon says. "And who will predict that in Afghanistan?"
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