Starting Points: Afghanistan

Showing posts with label Afghanistan. Show all posts

Jun 29, 2010

Afghanistan policy after the McChrystal scandal

by George Packer July 5, 2010

In firing General Stanley McChrystal for talking cocky mess-hall trash about his civilian superiors in the company of aides and a writer for Rolling Stone, President Obama reasserted the principle of civilian control of the military. In getting General David Petraeus, the most talented officer of his generation, to accept McChrystal’s command, the President deftly solved his crisis of generalship, which threatened to undermine the mission in Afghanistan. The three-day personnel problem ended as well as the White House could have wanted, but, because it’s a symptom of the larger problem of the war, the McChrystal uproar is going to resonate long after sniping about the old soldier—and about Vice-President “Bite Me”—has faded away.

Every aspect of the war—which is approaching its tenth year, having just superseded Vietnam as the longest in American history—is going badly. Team McChrystal’s casual insubordination reflected a war effort working against itself. McChrystal and Karl Eikenberry, the American Ambassador in Kabul, disliked each other and fought over strategy through cables and leaks. (Eikenberry didn’t think that the addition of tens of thousands of troops could succeed.) Obama allowed the division to fester, giving President Hamid Karzai an opening in which to play American officials off against one another: McChrystal was Karzai’s newest friend, Eikenberry his latest enemy. Richard Holbrooke, the Administration’s special representative for the region, lost Karzai’s confidence a while ago, and it’s not clear that he still has Obama’s. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates remain closely allied with each other, their subordinates, and the White House, but wars are won or lost in the field, not at headquarters.

Last year, in this magazine, Holbrooke described what often happens in government: “People sit in a room, they don’t air their real differences, a false and sloppy consensus papers over those underlying differences, and they go back to their offices and continue to work at cross-purposes, even actively undermining each other.” This is becoming a picture of U.S. policymaking in Afghanistan. Jonathan Alter’s new book, “The Promise,” recounts how, last fall, the military, with a series of leaks, tried to box in the President and force him to send more troops. In return, Obama summoned Petraeus and Admiral Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and, sounding like a prosecutor conducting a cross-examination, got them to sign off on a plan to start withdrawing troops in July of 2011, though their opposition to a time line was well known. Then notes from that meeting were leaked, almost certainly by the White House, to corner the military. The time line now means different things to different people, and a cloud of uncertainty hangs over the strategy’s future. The foreign-affairs analyst Leslie Gelb wrote last week that some military officers “truly don’t know where the President stands.”

After replacing McChrystal with Petraeus, Obama scolded his advisers for their bickering. But disarray among top personnel is almost always a sign of a larger incoherence. American goals in Afghanistan remain vague, the means inadequate, the timetable foreshortened. We are nation-building without admitting it, and conducting counterinsurgency on our own clock, not the Afghans’.

The Army’s field manual on counterinsurgency was co-authored by General Petraeus himself, who applied the doctrine with much success in Iraq. But counterinsurgency isn’t a static mold into which the military can pour any war and wait for it to set. When Petraeus took command of the war in Iraq, in 2007, he had already served two tours there—he knew the country as well as any American officer. Afghanistan is less familiar terrain for him; the society is less urban and more fractured than Iraq’s; and there is no sign in Afghan political dynamics of anything like the Sunni awakening that stopped the momentum of the Iraqi insurgency.

With allies like Canada and Holland heading for the exits, American troops are dying in larger numbers than at any point of the war—on bad days, ten or more. The number of Afghan civilian deaths remains high, despite the tightened constraints of McChrystal’s rules of engagement. The military key to counterinsurgency is protection of the population, but the difficulty in securing Marja and the delay of a promised campaign in Kandahar suggest that the majority of Afghan Pashtuns no longer want to be protected by foreign forces. The political goal of counterinsurgency is to strengthen the tie between civilians and their government, but the Afghan state is a shell hollowed out by corruption, and at its center is the erratic figure of President Karzai. Since last fall, when he stole reëlection, Karzai has accused Western governments and media of trying to bring him down, fired the two most competent members of his cabinet, and reportedly threatened to join the Taliban and voiced a suspicion that the Americans were behind an attack on a peace conference he recently hosted in Kabul. In the face of his wild performance, the current American approach is to tiptoe around him, as if he would start behaving better if he could just be settled down. Meanwhile, aid efforts are in a bind: working with the government nourishes corruption; circumventing it further undermines its legitimacy.

No one, however, has been able to come up with an alternative to the current strategy that doesn’t carry great risks. If there were a low-cost way to contain the interconnected groups of extremists in the Hindu Kush—with drones and Special Forces, as Vice-President Biden, among others, has urged—the President would have pursued it. If a return to power of the Taliban, which may well be the outcome of a U.S. withdrawal, did not pose a threat to international security, Obama would have already abandoned Karzai to his fate. But anyone who believes that a re-Talibanized Afghanistan would be a low priority should read the kidnapping narratives of two American journalists, Jere Van Dyk and David Rohde, who were held by the Taliban, along with the autobiography of the former Taliban official known as Mullah Zaeef. Together, these accounts show that the years since 2001 have radicalized the insurgents and imbued them with Al Qaeda’s global agenda. Tactically and ideologically, it’s more and more difficult to distinguish local insurgents from foreign jihadists.

American policy is drifting toward a review, scheduled for December, and Obama is trapped—not by his generals but by the war. It takes great political courage to face such a situation honestly, but if in a year’s time the war looks much the way it does now, or worse, Obama will have to force the public to deal with the likely reality: Americans leaving, however slowly; Afghanistan slipping into ethnic civil war, with many more Afghan deaths; Pakistan backing the Pashtun side; Al Qaeda seizing the chance to expand its safe haven. These consequences would require a dramatically different U.S. strategy, and a wise Administration would unify itself around the need to think one through before next summer.

ILLUSTRATION: TOM BACHTELL

Jun 27, 2010

The Runaway General | Rolling Stone

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, commander of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force and U.S. Forces-Afghanistan, works on board a Lockheed C-130 Hercules aircraft between Battlefield Circulation missions.

U.S. Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Mark O’Donald/NATO

By Michael Hastings

Jun 22, 2010 10:00 AM EDT

This article appears in RS 1108/1109 from July 8-22, 2010, on newsstands Friday, June 25.

'How'd I get screwed into going to this dinner?" demands Gen. Stanley McChrystal. It's a Thursday night in mid-April, and the commander of all U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan is sitting in a four-star suite at the Hôtel Westminster in Paris. He's in France to sell his new war strategy to our NATO allies – to keep up the fiction, in essence, that we actually have allies. Since McChrystal took over a year ago, the Afghan war has become the exclusive property of the United States. Opposition to the war has already toppled the Dutch government, forced the resignation of Germany's president and sparked both Canada and the Netherlands to announce the withdrawal of their 4,500 troops. McChrystal is in Paris to keep the French, who have lost more than 40 soldiers in Afghanistan, from going all wobbly on him.

"The dinner comes with the position, sir," says his chief of staff, Col. Charlie Flynn.

McChrystal turns sharply in his chair.

"Hey, Charlie," he asks, "does this come with the position?"

McChrystal gives him the middle finger.

More on General McChrystal

1 ⁄ 3

Hastings on Replacing McChrystal: Can Petraeus Win the War?

Photos: On the Ground with the Runaway General

Revolt of the Troops: Hastings Reports In From Afghanistan

The general stands and looks around the suite that his traveling staff of 10 has converted into a full-scale operations center. The tables are crowded with silver Panasonic Toughbooks, and blue cables crisscross the hotel's thick carpet, hooked up to satellite dishes to provide encrypted phone and e-mail communications. Dressed in off-the-rack civilian casual – blue tie, button-down shirt, dress slacks – McChrystal is way out of his comfort zone. Paris, as one of his advisers says, is the "most anti-McChrystal city you can imagine." The general hates fancy restaurants, rejecting any place with candles on the tables as too "Gucci." He prefers Bud Light Lime (his favorite beer) to Bordeaux, Talladega Nights (his favorite movie) to Jean-Luc Godard. Besides, the public eye has never been a place where McChrystal felt comfortable: Before President Obama put him in charge of the war in Afghanistan, he spent five years running the Pentagon's most secretive black ops.

"What's the update on the Kandahar bombing?" McChrystal asks Flynn. The city has been rocked by two massive car bombs in the past day alone, calling into question the general's assurances that he can wrest it from the Taliban.

"We have two KIAs, but that hasn't been confirmed," Flynn says.

McChrystal takes a final look around the suite. At 55, he is gaunt and lean, not unlike an older version of Christian Bale in Rescue Dawn. His slate-blue eyes have the unsettling ability to drill down when they lock on you. If you've fucked up or disappointed him, they can destroy your soul without the need for him to raise his voice.

"I'd rather have my ass kicked by a roomful of people than go out to this dinner," McChrystal says.

He pauses a beat.

"Unfortunately," he adds, "no one in this room could do it."

With that, he's out the door.

"Who's he going to dinner with?" I ask one of his aides.

"Some French minister," the aide tells me. "It's fucking gay."

The next morning, McChrystal and his team gather to prepare for a speech he is giving at the École Militaire, a French military academy. The general prides himself on being sharper and ballsier than anyone else, but his brashness comes with a price: Although McChrystal has been in charge of the war for only a year, in that short time he has managed to piss off almost everyone with a stake in the conflict. Last fall, during the question-and-answer session following a speech he gave in London, McChrystal dismissed the counterterrorism strategy being advocated by Vice President Joe Biden as "shortsighted," saying it would lead to a state of "Chaos-istan." The remarks earned him a smackdown from the president himself, who summoned the general to a terse private meeting aboard Air Force One. The message to McChrystal seemed clear: Shut the fuck up, and keep a lower profile

Now, flipping through printout cards of his speech in Paris, McChrystal wonders aloud what Biden question he might get today, and how he should respond. "I never know what's going to pop out until I'm up there, that's the problem," he says. Then, unable to help themselves, he and his staff imagine the general dismissing the vice president with a good one-liner.

"Are you asking about Vice President Biden?" McChrystal says with a laugh. "Who's that?"

"Biden?" suggests a top adviser. "Did you say: Bite Me?"

When Barack Obama entered the Oval Office, he immediately set out to deliver on his most important campaign promise on foreign policy: to refocus the war in Afghanistan on what led us to invade in the first place. "I want the American people to understand," he announced in March 2009. "We have a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle and defeat Al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan." He ordered another 21,000 troops to Kabul, the largest increase since the war began in 2001. Taking the advice of both the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he also fired Gen. David McKiernan – then the U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan – and replaced him with a man he didn't know and had met only briefly: Gen. Stanley McChrystal. It was the first time a top general had been relieved from duty during wartime in more than 50 years, since Harry Truman fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur at the height of the Korean War.

Even though he had voted for Obama, McChrystal and his new commander in chief failed from the outset to connect. The general first encountered Obama a week after he took office, when the president met with a dozen senior military officials in a room at the Pentagon known as the Tank. According to sources familiar with the meeting, McChrystal thought Obama looked "uncomfortable and intimidated" by the roomful of military brass. Their first one-on-one meeting took place in the Oval Office four months later, after McChrystal got the Afghanistan job, and it didn't go much better. "It was a 10-minute photo op," says an adviser to McChrystal. "Obama clearly didn't know anything about him, who he was. Here's the guy who's going to run his fucking war, but he didn't seem very engaged. The Boss was pretty disappointed."

Jun 16, 2010

Militant Group Expands Attacks in Afghanistan

Adam Ferguson for The New York Times

An Afghan man walked recently past the wreckage of a guesthouse in Kabul, Afghanistan. A car bomb destroyed it in February.

By ALISSA J. RUBIN

KABUL, Afghanistan — A Pakistani-based militant group identified with attacks on Indian targets has expanded its operations in Afghanistan, inflicting casualties on Afghans and Indians alike, setting up training camps, and adding new volatility to relations between India and Pakistan.

The group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, is believed to have planned or executed three major attacks against Indian government employees and private workers in Afghanistan in recent months, according to Afghan and international intelligence officers and diplomats here. It continues to track Indian development workers and others for possible attack, they said.

Lashkar was behind the synchronized attacks on several civilian targets in Mumbai, India, in 2008, in which at least 163 people were killed. Its inroads in Afghanistan provide a fresh indication of its growing ambitions to confront India even beyond the disputed territory of Kashmir, for which Pakistan’s military and intelligence services created the group as a proxy force decades ago.

Officially, Pakistan says it no longer supports or finances the group. But Lashkar’s expanded activities in Afghanistan, particularly against Indian targets, prompt suspicions that it has become one of Pakistan’s proxies to counteract India’s influence in the country.

They provide yet another indicator of the extent to which Pakistani militants are working to shape the outcome of the Afghan war as the July 2011 deadline approaches to begin withdrawing American troops.

Recently retired Pakistani military officials are known to have directed the Mumbai attacks, and some Lashkar members have said only a thin line separates the group from its longtime bosses in the Pakistan security establishment.

Some intelligence officials say it is also possible that factions of Lashkar-e-Taiba, which means “army of the pure,” have broken from their onetime handlers and are working more independently, though Indian and Afghan authorities say the focus on Indian targets is being interpreted as a direct challenge from Pakistan.

“Our concern is that there are still players involved that are trying to use Afghanistan’s ground as a place for a proxy war,” said Shaida Abdali, Afghanistan’s deputy national security adviser. “It is being carried out by certain state actors to fight their opponents.”

A number of experts now say Lashkar presents more of a threat in Afghanistan than even Al Qaeda does, because its operatives are from the region, less readily identified and less resented than the Arabs who make up Al Qaeda’s ranks. There were a few Lashkar cells in Afghanistan three or four years ago, but they were not focused on Indian targets and, until recently, their presence seemed to be diminishing.

A recent Pentagon report to Congress on Afghanistan listed Lashkar as one of the major extremist threats here. In Congressional testimony in March by Pakistan experts, the group was described as having ambitions well beyond India.

“They are active now in six or eight provinces” in Afghanistan, said a senior NATO intelligence official who, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not allowed to speak publicly on the subject.

“They are currently most interested in Indian targets here, but they can readily trade attacks on international targets for money or influence or an alliance with other groups,” he said.

Lashkar’s capabilities, terrorism experts say, have grown in recent years, since the group relocated many of its operations to Pakistan’s tribal areas, where it trades intelligence, training and expertise with other militant groups, including Al Qaeda, the Taliban and the insurgent network run by Siraj Haqqani, also a longtime asset of Pakistan.

“A lot of hard-liners have broken away from LeT and gone to North and South Waziristan,” said a Pakistani intelligence official, using an acronym for Lashkar-e-Taiba. “There are a number of splinter groups that are much more radical. The problem is not LeT per se, it’s the elements of LeT that have broken away and found their place in Waziristan.”

In that lawless expanse on the Afghan border, security officials said, Lashkar could help other militant groups plan complex attacks against Afghan and international targets, possibly in exchange for reconnaissance on Indian targets from its militant allies who have operatives in Afghanistan.

The Indian targets are easy enough to find. Since the overthrow of the Taliban government by American and international forces in 2001, India has poured about a billion dollars’ worth of development aid into Afghanistan, including the construction of the new Afghan Parliament and several major electricity and road projects.

It has also revitalized consulates in four of Afghanistan’s major cities — Herat, Jalalabad, Mazar-i-Sharif and Kandahar — fueling Pakistani fears of encirclement by hostile neighbors and suspicions that India is using Afghanistan as a listening post for intelligence gathering.

“What does an Indian consulate do in Afghanistan when there is no Indian population?” asked a Pakistani intelligence official, who also alleged that the Indians were providing funds, ammunition and explosives to the Pakistani Taliban in the tribal areas, smuggling it through Afghanistan. The Indians dismiss the allegations.

“It’s a matter of faith, that’s fixed in Pakistan’s thinking, that India will take every opportunity to put Pakistan at a disadvantage,” said Marvin Weinbaum, a senior analyst at the Middle East Institute, who testified before Congress in March about the mounting danger posed by Lashkar.

India supported an alliance of fighters in northern Afghanistan against the Taliban when the Taliban — a Pakistan ally — governed Afghanistan, and it maintains close relations with the alliance’s former commanders, Mr. Weinbaum and others noted. The relationship adds to Pakistani fears that India will turn to proxies of its own in Afghanistan once the United States leaves.

Pakistan, meanwhile, has continued to allow Afghan Taliban leaders and other fighters battling NATO forces to base themselves in Pakistan. The intent seems to be to retain ties to those who might one day return to power in Afghanistan or exercise influence there.

One indication of Lashkar’s presence in Afghanistan came on April 8, when a joint American-Afghan Special Operations force killed nine militants and captured one after a firefight in Nangarhar Province, in eastern Afghanistan. All of them were Pakistani and “a concentration of them were LeT,” according to a senior American military official.

Lashkar is believed to have orchestrated the Feb. 26 car bombing and suicide attack on two guesthouses in the heart of Kabul frequented by Indians. An attack on a shopping center and bank in downtown Kabul in January also suggested Lashkar’s influence.

Both attacks bore some resemblance to those in Mumbai. They involved meticulous planning and multiple targets, and in the case of the guesthouses, Indian targets. Also, multiple attackers were coordinated by people outside the country on cellphones during the attacks.

Witnesses told investigators that the attackers at one guesthouse came in shouting, “Where is the head Indian doctor?”

Hanif Atmar, the interior minister who resigned this month, lost three police on the day of that attack. He said at least two of the attackers had been speaking Urdu, a language found in Pakistan and parts of India. “They were not Afghans,” he said.

“What we know for sure is that it was planned, financed, organized, and that people trained for it, outside Afghanistan,” he said. “Over the past six months more than four attacks in Kabul had suicide bombers with telephones that we recovered with active numbers that were from Pakistan.”

Several intelligence experts here said they doubted that Lashkar could have done the guesthouse attack alone. Lashkar operatives would have needed help to get into Afghanistan, a place to stay, weapons, explosive materials, vehicles and an opportunity to carry out reconnaissance on their targets, they noted.

The most likely partner, they said, would have been the Haqqani network, which is based in North Waziristan, has links to Al Qaeda, and is believed to have carried out a number of attacks of its own in Kabul.

Lashkar, in conjunction with Afghan extremist groups, was also believed to be involved in the Oct. 8, 2009, attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul, which killed 17 people, and the Dec. 15 attack in front of the Heetal Hotel, which killed 8. At the time of the hotel attack, nearly two dozen Indian engineers were staying either in the hotel or in a building next door.

Sabrina Tavernise contributed reporting from Islamabad, Pakistan.

Jun 6, 2010

Afghanistan War Tweets 6 June 2010

Image by The U.S. Army via Flickr

JohnAMacDougall

#Kandahar #City - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: http://bit.ly/bZz6qa via @addthis #afghanistan 1 minute ago via web
- Delete
JohnAMacDougall

#Kandahar #Province - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: http://bit.ly/994qlU via @addthis #afghanistan 2 minutes ago via web
- Delete
JohnAMacDougall

Into #Kandahar, Yesterday and Tomorrow - NYTimes.com: http://nyti.ms/cBoUKA via @addthis #afghanistan #war 5 minutes ago via web
- Delete
JohnAMacDougall

#Karzai #administration - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: http://bit.ly/btet7D via @addthis #afghanistan 14 minutes ago via web
- Delete
JohnAMacDougall

#Civilian #casualties of the #War in #Afghanistan (2001–present) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: http://bit.ly/993R5M via @addthis 17 minutes ago via web
- Delete
JohnAMacDougall

International #public #opinion on the #war in #Afghanistan - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: http://bit.ly/azvxcI via @addthis 18 minutes ago via web
- Delete
JohnAMacDougall

The #War in #Afghanistan Reaches New Milestone: #Longest War in U.S. History | Disinformation: http://bit.ly/bxETc0 via @addthis #withdraw about 1 hour ago via web
- Delete
JohnAMacDougall

Running out of options in #Afghanistan | Al Jazeera Blogs: http://bit.ly/99KvPb via @addthis #war #endless #taliban about 1 hour ago via web
- Delete
JohnAMacDougall

It’s Always a Bad Year to Get Out of #Afghanistan « SpeakEasy: http://bit.ly/cTtVxA via @addthis #obama #flawed #exit #strategy about 1 hour ago via web
- Delete
JohnAMacDougall

#US #Army Plans $100 Million #Special #Operations #HQ in #Afghanistan | Danger Room | Wired.com: http://bit.ly/bZCFP5 via @addthis about 1 hour ago via web
- Delete
JohnAMacDougall

Armed Farces - TIME: http://bit.ly/9ZDvqX via @addthis #afghanistan #army #disarray #ethnic #divisions about 1 hour ago via web
- Delete
JohnAMacDougall

Rule of the Gun - With U.S. Aid, #Warlord Builds #Afghanistan Empire - NYTimes.com: http://nyti.ms/dm6KFR via @addthis about 2 hours ago via web
- Delete
JohnAMacDougall

#Afghanistan Leader Forces Out Top 2 Security #Ministers - NYTimes.com: http://nyti.ms/aYVQY2 via @addthis #intelligence #firings about 2 hours ago via web

May 31, 2010

In Afghan region, U.S. spreads the cash to fight the Taliban

Image by isafmedia via Flickr

By Rajiv Chandrasekaran

Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 31, 2010; A01

NAWA, AFGHANISTAN -- In this patch of southern Afghanistan, the U.S. strategy to keep the Taliban at bay involves an economic stimulus.

Thousands of men, wielding hoes and standing in knee-deep muck, are getting paid to clean reed-infested irrigation canals. Farmers are receiving seeds and fertilizer for a fraction of their retail cost, and many are riding around on shiny new red tractors. Over the summer, dozens of gravel roads and grain-storage facilities will be constructed -- all of it funded by the U.S. government.

Pumping reconstruction dollars into war zones has long been part of the U.S. counterinsurgency playbook, but the carpet bombing of Nawa with cash has resulted in far more money getting into local hands, far more quickly, than in any other part of Afghanistan. The U.S. Agency for International Development's agriculture program aims to spend upward of $30 million within nine months in this rural district of mud-walled homes and small farms. Other U.S. initiatives aim to bring millions more dollars to the area over the next year.

Because aid is so plentiful in Nawa -- seemingly everyone who wants a job has one -- many young men have opted to stop serving as the Taliban's guns for hire. Unlike neighboring Marja, where insurgent attacks remain a daily occurrence, the central parts of Nawa have been largely violence-free the past six months.

But the cash surge has also unleashed unintended and potentially troubling consequences. It is sparking new tension and rivalries within the community, and it is prompting concern that the nearly free seeds and gushing canals will result in more crops than farmers will be able to sell. It is also raising public expectations for handouts that the Afghan government will not be able to sustain once U.S. contributions ebb.

"We've blasted Nawa with a phenomenal amount of money in the name of counterinsurgency without fully thinking through the second- and third-order effects," said Ian Purves, a British development expert who recently completed a year-long assignment as the NATO stabilization adviser in Nawa.

U.S. officials responsible for Afghanistan policy contend that the initiative in Nawa, which is part of a $250 million effort to increase agricultural production across southern Afghanistan, was designed as a short-term jolt to resuscitate the economy and generate lasting employment. They say concerns about overspending are misplaced: After years of shortchanging Afghans on development aid, the officials maintain that they would rather do too much than too little.

"Our goal is to return Nawa to normalcy, to get folks back to their daily lives of farming, and that requires a large effort," said Rory Donohoe, USAID's agriculture program manager in Helmand province.

Of particular concern to some development specialists is USAID's decision to spend the entire $250 million over one year in parts of just two provinces, Helmand and Kandahar. In Nawa, which has a population of about 75,000, that works out to about $400 for every man, woman and child. The country's per-capita income, by comparison, is about $300 a year.

"This is a massive effort to buy people off so they won't fight us," said a U.S. development officer in southern Afghanistan.

The spending here is a preview of what the Obama administration wants to accomplish on a larger scale. USAID's "burn rate" in Afghanistan -- the amount it spends -- is about $300 million a month and will probably stay at that level for at least a year.

The White House recently asked Congress for an additional $4.4 billion for reconstruction and development programs in Afghanistan, with the aim of increasing employment and promoting economic growth in areas beset by the insurgency.

Although some of that money will be directed through Afghan government ministries and local aid organizations to fund projects designed and run by Afghans, most of it will go to large, U.S.-based development firms with the ability to hire lots of people and spend lots of money quickly.

Among the programs in the pipeline is a $600 million effort to improve municipal governments across the country and to increase the provision of basic services to urban dwellers. The program is supposed to include extensive day-labor projects to pick up trash and plant trees, and it calls for the contractor to implement "performance-based" budgeting systems within two years, something that most U.S. cities do not have.

USAID also envisions spending $140 million to help settle property disputes. One of the agency's hoped-for achievements is to train Afghans to appraise and value land.

Some development specialists question whether Afghanistan can absorb the flood of money, or whether a large portion will be lost to corruption, inefficiency and dubious ventures funded to meet Washington-imposed deadlines.

"We've turned a fire hose on these guys -- and they can't absorb it," said a development specialist who has worked as a USAID contractor in Afghanistan for three years. "We're setting ourselves up for a huge amount of waste and fraud."

Improving farming

The $250 million agriculture program is the Obama administration's principal effort to create jobs and improve livelihoods in the two provinces where U.S. troops are concentrating their counterinsurgency mission this year. It was designed to address what senior administration officials, particularly presidential envoy Richard C. Holbrooke, deemed to be scattershot and underfunded initiatives over the first eight years of the war to assist farmers, who make up most of the country's workforce.

The program aims to make farms more productive, thereby increasing employment and living standards. It would do so by cleaning canals so more water gets to crops, offering subsidized seeds so farmers would be encouraged to switch from growing opium-producing poppies, establishing cooperatives to share tractors and constructing a network of gravel roads so they can take their goods to market.

To forge links between residents and their government, a 42-member community council decides which canals to clean and which roads to improve.

USAID selected International Relief and Development (IRD), an Arlington-based nonprofit development firm, to run the program. To get the work started quickly, the agency gave the company the $250 million as a grant last summer, instead of hiring it under contract to do the work, which would have taken longer.

Grants also involve fewer auditing requirements for USAID, but once awarded they limit the government's ability to make changes.

The program has been a hit with Nawa residents since the day it began in December, largely because of the plentiful cash-for-work opportunities. Once the day labor began, unemployment disappeared almost overnight.

The initiative has put money in the pocket of almost every working-age male in the district. More than 7,000 residents have been hired for $5 a day to clean the canals, and a similar number of farmers have received vouchers for heavily discounted seeds and fertilizer. Thousands of others have benefited from additional forms of assistance through the program.

"We had nothing here before -- only bullets," said Gul Mohammed, a lanky tenant farmer, as he scooped mud from a narrow canal. He said the day labor is essential to feeding his family because he decided last fall, after a battalion of U.S. Marines arrived in Nawa, not to plant poppies on his 6.5-acre plot.

Now he is growing wheat, which fetches only about a quarter of what he would have made from poppies.

"We are so thankful for this work," he said. "Without it, we would be going hungry."

Local infighting

USAID's decision to involve the community council in the disbursement was intended to help build local governance. It has done that, but it has also generated new frictions in the district.

When the council was formed last fall, the seven principal tribal leaders in the area decided not to participate. They did not want to risk the Taliban's wrath by siding with the United States and the Afghan government. But now that the council has the ability to influence millions of dollars worth of projects, the leaders want a piece of the action.

The senior elder, Hayatullah Helmandi of the Barakzai tribe, has launched a campaign to discredit the council members, calling them opportunists and drug users. "The Marines should be working with us," he said.

The infighting has prompted concern among some U.S. officials in the area. "These tensions probably wouldn't be so severe if there wasn't as much money involved," one of them said.

Then there is the question of what to do with all the additional crops grown this year. Purves estimates that the program will increase agricultural production by tens of thousands of tons across central Helmand province.

"What on Earth will happen to that?" he said. "There's no way all of that can be gotten to market, and even if it could, there simply isn't a market for that much more food."

Holbrooke and USAID agriculture experts want to construct cold-storage facilities so the produce can be trucked to markets in other parts of Afghanistan or exported to nearby countries. But that effort will not be completed in time to help farmers with this year's crop.

The effort to spend the program funds as fast as possible has resulted in some items going to waste, according to people familiar with the effort.

Plastic tunnels to allow farmers to grow crops over the winter were not distributed until February -- well after the winter planting season -- so many of them simply used the plastic as window sheeting for their mud huts. The metal rods were turned into fences.

The cash-for-work programs are so plentiful and lucrative that some teachers and policemen sought to enroll before U.S. and Afghan officials barred their participation.

Among Nawa residents, the biggest worry is what will happen when the program ends Aug. 31. U.S. officials hope this effort will result in new farm jobs, but nobody thinks it will be enough to employ all of those participating in the day-labor projects. Although USAID is considering a follow-on agriculture program, it is not clear whether the labor component will be as large as it is now.

If not, Afghan officials said their government does not have the resources to make up the difference.

"Those cash-for-work men -- half of them used to be Taliban," said the district governor, Abdul Manaf. "If the Americans stop paying for them to work, they'll go back to the Taliban."

May 17, 2010

Taliban Hold Sway in Area Taken by U.S., Farmers Say

Image via Wikipedia

By CARLOTTA GALL

LASHKAR GAH, Afghanistan — Farmers from the district of Marja, which since February has been the focus of the largest American-led military operation in Afghanistan, are fleeing the area, saying that the Taliban are terrorizing the population and that American troops cannot protect the civilians.

The departure of the farmers is one of the most telling indications that Taliban fighters have found a way to resume their insurgency, three months after thousands of troops invaded this Taliban stronghold in the opening foray of a campaign to take control of southern Afghanistan. Militants have been infiltrating back into the area and the prospect of months of more fighting is undermining public morale, residents and officials said.

As the coalition prepares for the next major offensive in the southern city of Kandahar, the uneasy standoff in Marja, where neither the American Marines nor the Taliban have gained the upper hand and clashes occur daily, provides a stark lesson in the challenges of eliminating a patient and deeply rooted insurgency.

Over 150 families have fled Marja in the last two weeks, according to the Afghan Red Crescent Society in the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah.

Marja residents arriving here last week, many looking bleak and shell-shocked, said civilians had been trapped by the fighting, running a gantlet of mines laid by insurgents and firefights around government and coalition positions. The pervasive Taliban presence forbids them from having any contact with or taking assistance from the government or coalition forces.

“People are leaving; you see 10 to 20 families each day on the road who are leaving Marja due to insecurity,” said a farmer, Abdul Rahman, 52, who was traveling on his own. “It is now hard to live there in this situation.”

One farmer who was loading his family and belongings onto a tractor-trailer on the edge of Lashkar Gah last week said he had abandoned his whole livelihood in Sistan, Marja, as soon as the harvest, a poor one this year, was done.

“Every day they were fighting and shelling,” said the farmer, Abdul Malook Aka, 55. “We do not feel secure in the village and we decided to leave. Security is getting worse day by day.”

“We thought security would be improving,” he said.

Those who remain in Marja voiced similar complaints in dozens of interviews and repeated visits to Marja over the last month.

“I am sure if I stay in Marja I will be killed one day either by Taliban or the Americans,” said Mir Hamza, 40, a farmer from Loye Charahi.

Combat operations in Marja ended at the end of February and the military declared the battle won. But much of the local Taliban, including at least four mid-level commanders, never left, stashing their rifles and adopting the quiet farm life.

A Taliban resurgence was not entirely unexpected, especially now as the poppy harvest ends, freeing men to fight, and as the weather warms up. But the military had seen Marja as a “clear and hold” operation in which the first part, clearing the district of militants, would be wrapped up fairly quickly. In fact, clearing has proved to be a more elusive goal.

By April, life had picked up. People began coming forward to receive government handouts and farmers were happily taking money in return for destroying their poppy crops, whose opium provides a main source of Taliban financing. As villagers saw their neighbors benefiting, more were encouraged to approach the district administration as well, despite Taliban threats.

The change was even more pronounced in the adjacent Nad-e-ali district, where the Taliban have been weakened and security improved thanks largely to the operation in Marja.

But the insurgents’ extensive intelligence network in Marja has remained intact, and they have been able to maintain a hold over the population through what residents have described as threats and assassinations. In April members of the Taliban visited one old man late at night and made him eat his aid registration papers, several residents said, a Mafia-style warning to others not to take government aid.

At the beginning of May, a well-liked man named Sharifullah was beaten to death, accused of supporting the district chief and not paying taxes to the Taliban. His killing froze the community and villagers stopped going to the district administration.

“The Taliban are everywhere, they are like scorpions under every stone, and they are stinging all those who get assistance or help the government and the Americans,” Mr. Rahman, the farmer, said.

The population remains divided in its support for the Taliban, with a portion providing shelter and assistance to the militants and few daring to oppose them. In some places, people are still lining up for aid, indicating a certain resistance to Taliban strictures.

But many repeat the Taliban contention that the Americans are bent on long-term occupation of Afghanistan and seek to eradicate their religion, Islam, and impose an alien, Western-style democracy.

Villagers complained of indignities imposed by the foreign forces, the arrest and killing of civilians, house searches that violate the ethnic Pashtuns’ sense of honor and the sanctity of the home, and checkpoints where they are forced to lift up their shirts, which is deeply shaming for Afghans, to show that they are not carrying explosives.

Yet they also say that the American Marines are good with the people, only shoot at those who shoot at them, and are showing greater restraint than the British forces who came before them. Farmers tell stories of how the Marines pursue Taliban fighters but leave the farm workers alone, and how in the last week four known insurgents have been killed in airstrikes as they were laying roadside bombs at night.

Nevertheless Afghans express frustration that the American military, which defeated the Taliban so resoundingly in 2001, cannot clear Marja, a district of 100 square miles, of Taliban insurgents that residents estimate number no more than 200.

More Taliban fighters have arrived in recent weeks, slipping in with the itinerant laborers who came to work the poppy harvest and staying on to fight, villagers and officials said. Haji Gul Muhammad Khan, tribal adviser to the governor of Helmand Province, said he had reports of Taliban arriving in the area in the last three or four days.

Everyone in Marja knows the Taliban, since they are village men who never left the area although they quit fighting soon after the military operation. Gradually they found a stealthier way of operating, moving around in small groups, often by motorbike or on foot.

They fire several shots at an American patrol and then flee, or throw aside their weapons and pick up spades, posing as innocent farmers. At least three midlevel Taliban commanders were seen operating in the area in recent weeks, moving among the farms, staying in different houses every night, and asking for food and shelter from the villagers as they go.

The villagers do not dare give them away to the Americans because they are local men and can exact revenge, villagers said.

“We know who the Taliban are,” said Muhammad Ismail, 35, a farmer from Loye Charahi said. “When they attack the police or the Americans, they put down their weapons and sit down with ordinary people. We cannot say a word against them, they know us and we know them pretty well. We know Taliban are killing people and threatening people, but we cannot stand against them, or tell Americans or police about their whereabouts.”

Mr. Khan, the governor’s adviser, expects a further exodus of civilians. “People are just waiting for the harvest to be over and then they will leave,” he said.

C. J. Chivers and an Afghan employee of The New York Times contributed reporting from Marja, and Taimoor Shah from Lashkar Gah.

May 16, 2010

Rogue Private Intelligence Networks Used by US in AfPak

U.S. Is Still Using Private Spy Ring, Despite Doubts - NYTimes.com

By MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON — Top military officials have continued to rely on a secret network of private spies who have produced hundreds of reports from deep inside Afghanistan and Pakistan, according to American officials and businessmen, despite concerns among some in the military about the legality of the operation.

Earlier this year, government officials admitted that the military had sent a group of former Central Intelligence Agency officers and retired Special Operations troops into the region to collect information — some of which was used to track and kill people suspected of being militants. Many portrayed it as a rogue operation that had been hastily shut down once an investigation began.

But interviews with more than a dozen current and former government officials and businessmen, and an examination of government documents, tell a different a story. Not only are the networks still operating, their detailed reports on subjects like the workings of the Taliban leadership in Pakistan and the movements of enemy fighters in southern Afghanistan are also submitted almost daily to top commanders and have become an important source of intelligence.

The American military is largely prohibited from operating inside Pakistan. And under Pentagon rules, the army is not allowed to hire contractors for spying.

United States Air Force

Michael D. Furlong, the supervisor who set up the contractor network, is now under investigation.

Military officials said that when Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top commander in the region, signed off on the operation in January 2009, there were prohibitions against intelligence gathering, including hiring agents to provide information about enemy positions in Pakistan. The contractors were supposed to provide only broad information about the political and tribal dynamics in the region, and information that could be used for “force protection,” they said.

Some Pentagon officials said that over time the operation appeared to morph into traditional spying activities. And they pointed out that the supervisor who set up the contractor network, Michael D. Furlong, was now under investigation.

But a review of the program by The New York Times found that Mr. Furlong’s operatives were still providing information using the same intelligence gathering methods as before. The contractors were still being paid under a $22 million contract, the review shows, managed by Lockheed Martin and supervised by the Pentagon office in charge of special operations policy.

Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary, said that the program “remains under investigation by multiple offices within the Defense Department,” so it would be inappropriate to answer specific questions about who approved the operation or why it continues.

“I assure you we are committed to determining if any laws were broken or policies violated,” he said. Spokesmen for General Petraeus and Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top American commander in Afghanistan, declined to comment. Mr. Furlong remains at his job, working as a senior civilian Air Force official.

A senior defense official said that the Pentagon decided just recently not to renew the contract, which expires at the end of May. While the Pentagon declined to discuss the program, it appears that commanders in the field are in no rush to shut it down because some of the information has been highly valuable, particularly in protecting troops against enemy attacks.

With the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the expanded role of contractors on the battlefield — from interrogating prisoners to hunting terrorism suspects — has raised questions about whether the United States has outsourced some of its most secretive and important operations to a private army many fear is largely unaccountable. The C.I.A. has relied extensively on contractors in recent years to carry out missions in war zones.

The exposure of the spying network also reveals tensions between the Pentagon and the C.I.A., which itself is running a covert war across the border in Pakistan. In December, a cable from the C.I.A.’s station chief in Kabul, Afghanistan, to the Pentagon argued that the military’s hiring of its own spies could have disastrous consequences, with various networks possibly colliding with one another.

The memo also said that Mr. Furlong had a history of delving into outlandish intelligence schemes, including an episode in 2008, when American officials expelled him from Prague for trying to clandestinely set up computer servers for propaganda operations. Some officials say they believe that the C.I.A. is trying to scuttle the operation to protect its own turf, and that the spy agency has been embarrassed because the contractors are outperforming C.I.A. operatives.

The private contractor network was born in part out of frustration with the C.I.A. and the military intelligence apparatus. There was a belief by some officers that the C.I.A. was too risk averse, too reliant on Pakistan’s spy service and seldom able to provide the military with timely information to protect American troops. In addition, the military has complained that it is not technically allowed to operate in Pakistan, whose government is willing to look the other way and allow C.I.A. spying but not the presence of foreign troops.

Paul Gimigliano, a C.I.A. spokesman, dismissed reports of a turf war.

“There’s no daylight at all on this between C.I.A. and DoD,” he said. “It’s an issue for Defense to look into — it involves their people, after all — and that’s exactly what they’re doing.”

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the Pentagon has used broad interpretations of its authorities to expand military intelligence operations, including sending Special Operations troops on clandestine missions far from declared war zones. These missions have raised concerns in Washington that the Pentagon is running de facto covert actions without proper White House authority and with little oversight from the elaborate system of Congressional committees and internal controls intended to prevent abuses in intelligence gathering.

The officials say the contractors’ reports are delivered via an encrypted e-mail service to a “fusion cell,” located at the military base at Kabul International Airport. There, they are fed into classified military computer networks, then used for future military operations or intelligence reports.

To skirt military restrictions on intelligence gathering, information the contractors gather in eastern Afghanistan and Pakistan’s tribal areas is specifically labeled “atmospheric collection”: information about the workings of militant groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan or about Afghan tribal structures. The boundaries separating “atmospherics” from what spies gather is murky. It is generally considered illegal for the military to run organized operations aimed at penetrating enemy organizations with covert agents.

But defense officials with knowledge of the program said that contractors themselves regarded the contract as permission to spy. Several weeks ago, one of the contractors reported on Taliban militants massing near American military bases east of Kandahar. Not long afterward, Apache gunships arrived at the scene to disperse and kill the militants.

The web of private businesses working under the Lockheed contract include Strategic Influence Alternatives, American International Security Corporation and International Media Ventures, a communications company based in St. Petersburg, Fla., with Czech ownership.

One of the companies employs a network of Americans, Afghans and Pakistanis run by Duane Clarridge, a C.I.A. veteran who became famous for his role in the Iran-Contra scandal. Mr. Clarridge declined to be interviewed.

The Times is withholding some information about the contractor network, including some of the names of agents working in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

A spokesman for Lockheed said that no Pentagon officials had raised any concerns about the work.

“We believe our subcontractors are effectively performing the work required of them under the terms of this task order,” said Tom Casey, the spokesman. “We’ve not received any information indicating otherwise.” Lockheed is not involved in the information gathering, but rather administers the contract.

The specifics of the investigation into Mr. Furlong are unclear. Pentagon officials have said that the Defense Department’s inspector general is examining possible contract fraud and financial mismanagement dating from last year.

In his only media interview since details of the operation were revealed, with The San Antonio Express-News, Mr. Furlong said that all of his work had been blessed by senior commanders. In that interview, he declined to provide further details.

Officials said that the tussle over the intelligence operations dated from at least 2008, when some generals in Afghanistan grew angry at what they saw as a paucity of intelligence about the militant groups in Pakistan and Afghanistan who were regularly attacking American troops.

In October of that year, Mr. Furlong traveled to C.I.A. headquarters with top Pentagon officials, including Brig. Gen. Robert H. Holmes, then the deputy operations officer at United States Central Command. General Holmes has since retired and is now an executive at one of the subcontractors, International Media Ventures. The meeting at the C.I.A.’s counterterrorism center was set up to inform the spy agency about the military’s plans to collect “atmospheric information” about Afghanistan and Pakistan, including information about the structure of militant networks in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

Mr. Furlong was testing the sometimes muddy laws governing traditional military activities. A former Army officer who sometimes referred to himself as “the king of the gray areas,” Mr. Furlong played a role in many of America’s recent adventures abroad. He ran psychological operations missions in the Balkans, worked at a television network in Iraq, now defunct, that was sponsored by the American government and made frequent trips to Kabul, Eastern Europe and the Middle East in recent years to help run a number of clandestine military propaganda operations.

At the C.I.A. meeting in 2008, the atmosphere quickly deteriorated, according to some in attendance, because C.I.A. officials were immediately suspicious that the plans amounted to a back-door spying operation.

In general, according to one American official, intelligence operatives are nervous about the notion of “private citizens running around a war zone, trying to collect intelligence that wasn’t properly vetted for operations that weren’t properly coordinated.”

Shortly afterward, in a legal opinion stamped “Secret,” lawyers at the military’s Centcom headquarters in Tampa, Fla., signed off on a version of Mr. Furlong’s proposed operations, adding specific language that the program should not carry out “inherent intelligence activities.” In January 2009, General Petraeus wrote a letter endorsing the proposed operations, which had been requested by Gen. David D. McKiernan, the top commander in Afghanistan at the time.

What happened after that money began flowing to Afghanistan remains a matter of dispute. General McKiernan said in an interview with The Times that he never endorsed hiring private contractors specifically for intelligence gathering.

Instead, he said, he was interested in gaining “atmospherics” from the contractors to help him and his commanders understand the complex cultural and political makeup of the region.

“It could give us a better understanding of the rural areas, of what people there saying, what they were expressing as their needs, and their concerns,” he said.

“It was not intelligence for manhunts,” he said. “That was clearly not it, and we agreed that’s not what this was about.”

To his mind, he said, intelligence is specific information that could be used for attacks on militants in Afghanistan.

General McKiernan said he had endorsed a reporting and research network in Afghanistan and Pakistan pitched to him a year earlier by Robert Young Pelton, a writer and chronicler of the world’s danger spots, and Eason Jordan, a former CNN executive. The project, called AfPax Insider, would have been used a subscription-based Web site, but also a secure information database that only the military could access.

In an interview, Mr. Pelton said that he did not gather intelligence and never worked at the direction of Mr. Furlong and that he did not have a government contract for the work.

But Mr. Pelton said that AfPax did receive reimbursement from International Media Ventures, one of the companies hired for Mr. Furlong’s operation. He said that he was never told that I.M.V. was doing clandestine work for the government.

It was several months later, during the summer of 2009, when officials said that the private contractor network using Mr. Clarridge and other former C.I.A. and Special Operations troops was established. Mr. Furlong, according to several former colleagues, believed that Mr. Pelton and Mr. Jordan had failed to deliver on their promises, and that the new team could finally carry out the program first envisioned by General McKiernan. The contractor network assumed a cloak-and-dagger air, with the information reports stripped of anything that might reveal sources’ identities, and the collectors were assigned code names and numbers.

Ginger Thompson and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting. Barclay Walsh contributed research.