Starting Points: NATO

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Apr 4, 2010

Violence Helps Taliban Undo Afghan Gains - NYTimes.com

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By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.

MARJA, Afghanistan — Since their offensive here in February, the Marines have flooded Marja with hundreds of thousands of dollars a week. The tactic aims to win over wary residents by paying them compensation for property damage or putting to work men who would otherwise look to the Taliban for support.

The approach helped turn the tide of insurgency in Iraq. But in Marja, where the Taliban seem to know everything — and most of the time it is impossible to even tell who they are — they have already found ways to thwart the strategy in many places, including killing or beating some who take the Marines’ money, or pocketing it themselves.

Just a few weeks since the start of the operation here, the Taliban have “reseized control and the momentum in a lot of ways” in northern Marja, Maj. James Coffman, civil affairs leader for the Third Battalion, Sixth Marines, said in an interview in late March. “We have to change tactics to get the locals back on our side.”

Col. Ghulam Sakhi, an Afghan National Police commander here, says his informants have told him that at least 30 Taliban have come to one Marine outpost here to take money from the Marines as compensation for property damage or family members killed during the operation in February.

“You shake hands with them, but you don’t know they are Taliban,” Colonel Sakhi said. “They have the same clothes, and the same style. And they are using the money against the Marines. They are buying I.E.D.’s and buying ammunition, everything.”

One tribal elder from northern Marja, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of being killed, said in an interview on Saturday that the killing and intimidation continued to worsen. “Every day we are hearing that they kill people, and we are finding their dead bodies,” he said. “The Taliban are everywhere.”

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The local problem points to the larger challenges ahead as American forces expand operations in the predominantly Pashtun south, where the Taliban draw most of their support and the government is deeply unpopular.

In Marja, the Taliban are hardly a distinct militant group, and the Marines have collided with a Taliban identity so dominant that the movement appears more akin to the only political organization in a one-party town, with an influence that touches everyone. Even the Marines admit to being somewhat flummoxed.

“We’ve got to re-evaluate our definition of the word ‘enemy,’ ” said Brig. Gen. Larry Nicholson, commander of the Marine expeditionary brigade in Helmand Province. “Most people here identify themselves as Taliban.”

“We have to readjust our thinking so we’re not trying to chase the Taliban out of Marja, we’re trying to chase the enemy out,” he said. “We have to deal with these people.”

The Marines hoped the work programs would be a quick way to put to work hundreds of “military-aged males,” as they call them. In some places, that has worked. But the programs have run into jeopardy in other parts of Marja, an area of about 80 square miles that is a patchwork of lush farmland and small bazaars and villages.

In northern Marja, the biggest blow came when the local man hired to supervise the work programs was beaten by the Taliban and refused to help the Marines any more. The programs are “completely dead in the water” there, Major Coffman said.

In addition to work programs, the Marines are using compensation payments to build support for the newly appointed district governor of Marja, Hajji Abdul Zahir, telling people that to receive money they must get his approval. That effort has proved equally vulnerable.

In late March, an Afghan man was beaten by the Taliban hours after he had gone to the Marine outpost that houses Mr. Zahir’s office to collect his compensation. The Taliban took the money and stole a similar amount as punishment, said Colonel Sakhi, the police commander.

“My greatest fear right now is not knowing if I have put money into the pockets of the Taliban,” Major Coffman said.

Despite those reservations, the Marine strategy depends on sowing this community with buckets of cash. The money is a bridge to a day when, in theory, the new Marja district government will have more credibility than the Taliban.

That would be a difficult goal even if the Americans did not intend to rid the region of its lucrative poppy crop. While the United States has abandoned the policy of widespread eradication of the crop, efforts to discourage planting it will still cost farmers and power brokers huge sums.

“There are lots of people with lots of money invested here, and they are not just going to give that up,“ General Nicholson said. “Now is the heavy lifting. We have to convince a very skeptical population that we are here to help them.”

A steady flow of Taliban attacks have added to the challenge. After the February offensive, the Marines used cash payments to prod more than 20 store owners at one bazaar in northern Marja to open their doors, a key to stabilizing the area and reassuring residents.

By late March, all but five shops had closed, Major Coffman said. A prominent anti-Taliban senior elder was also gunned down in northern Marja, prompting most of the 200 people in his district to flee.

“They have completely paralyzed all the folks here,” Major Coffman said.

In another sign of how little the Marines control outside their own outposts, one week ago masked gunmen killed a 22-year-old man, Hazrat Gul, in broad daylight as he and four other Afghans built a small bridge about a third of a mile from a military base in central Marja.

Mr. Gul’s boss, an Afghan who contracted with the Marines to build the bridge, says he has been warned four times by the Taliban to stop working for the Americans.

And even as the NATO-backed Mr. Zahir struggles to gain credibility as Marja’s leader, the Taliban are working to fortify their own local administration.

According to Colonel Sakhi, the Taliban’s governor for Marja returned to the area on Monday for the first time since the February assault and held a meeting with local elders, many of whom Mr. Zahir is trying to win over. The Taliban governor warned them not to take money from the Marines or cooperate with the Afghan government, Colonel Sakhi said.

In central Marja, where the work projects have had more success, about 2,000 Afghan men are employed by programs financed by the First Battalion, Sixth Marines, said the unit’s civil affairs leader, Maj. David Fennell.

At one of the battalion’s outposts, shipments of cash arrive regularly. The last was 10 million afghanis, or $210,000, stuffed into a rucksack. The battalion doles out $150,000 a week, Major Fennell said.

On one afternoon in late March, 40 Afghans could be seen clearing away several acres of rubble remaining from a bazaar leveled during a NATO bomb strike two years ago. The $190,000 contract is expected to take a month to complete.

But intimidation is still rife — even inside the walls of the Marines’ outpost. One woman who came to the base crouched behind a Humvee and begged for help, saying that her husband had been killed during the February operation.

First Lt. Aran Walsh offered her $1,700 worth of Afghan currency. He asked her why she hid herself.

“If they see me, they’ll inform the Taliban,” she said.

Moises Saman contributed reporting from Marja, and Taimoor Shah from Kandahar, Afghanistan.

Apr 2, 2010

Ukrainians Likely Support Move Away From NATO

Cover of Ukraine: A History

Ukrainians Likely Support Move Away From NATO

Dec 28, 2009

Attack Puts Afghan Leader and NATO at Odds

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By ALISSA J. RUBIN and ABDUL WAHEED WAFA

KABUL, Afghanistan — The killing of at least nine men in a remote valley of eastern Afghanistan by a joint operation of Afghan and American forces put President Hamid Karzai and senior NATO officials at odds on Monday over whether those killed had been civilians or Taliban insurgents.

In a statement e-mailed to the news media, Mr. Karzai condemned the weekend attack and said the dead had been civilians, eight of them schoolboys. He called for an investigation.

Local officials, including the governor and members of Parliament from Kunar Province, where the deaths occurred, confirmed the reports. But the Kunar police chief, Khalilullah Ziayee, cautioned that his office was still investigating the killings and that outstanding questions remained, including why the eight young men had been in the same house at the time.

“There are still questions to be answered, like why these students were together and what they were doing on that night,” Mr. Ziayee said.

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A senior NATO official with knowledge of the operation said that the raid had been carried out by a joint Afghan-American force and that its target was a group of men who were known Taliban members and smugglers of homemade bombs, which the American and NATO forces call improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.’s.

According to the NATO official, nine men were killed. “These were people who had a well-established network, they were I.E.D. smugglers and also were responsible for direct attacks on Afghan security and coalition forces in those area,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the issue.

“When the raid took place they were armed and had material for making I.E.D.’s,” the official added.

Senior American military officials cautioned that such episodes tended to be complex and that because of the anger about civilian casualties, Mr. Karzai was under enormous pressure to speak out quickly, sometimes before investigations were complete. NATO will investigate the killings in conjunction with Mr. Karzai’s staff, the official said.

But the conflicting accounts and Mr. Karzai’s public statements underlined the tensions over civilian casualties that have become among the most contentious between the Afghan president and his international backers, as well as one of the most politically fraught for Afghans.

Several members of Parliament from Kunar, as well as neighboring Nangahar and Laghman Provinces, walked out of a parliamentary session on Monday to show their anger over the deaths. They said that 10 people had been killed and that all were civilians.

“When this story first broke, the local officials were adamant that they were all Taliban” until several members of Parliament from the area called President Karzai, the NATO official said.

The deaths occurred in the village of Ghazi Khan, in the rugged Narang Valley, a rural area difficult to reach. The Taliban are active in much of the province, along with numerous wood and arms smugglers and gem traders.

While some conventional American forces are deployed in Kunar, in the more remote areas most operations are carried out by Special Forces.

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The governor of Kunar, Fazullah Wahidi, said that “the coalition claimed they were enemy fighters,” but that elders in the district and a delegation sent to the remote area had found that “10 people were killed and all of them were civilians.”

A NATO spokesman had no comment on the killings and said that no NATO forces were operating in the area.

Attacks using homemade bombs killed one American service member on Friday and another on Saturday in southern Afghanistan.

Nov 20, 2009

U.S. resetting its relationship with Karzai - washingtonpost.com

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USNew warmth from U.S. is acknowledgment that Afghan leader is needed as partner

By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 20, 2009

When a team of senior U.S. officials led by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton entered the presidential palace in Kabul on Wednesday for a dinner meeting, they had little indication of what Afghan President Hamid Karzai planned to discuss, or whether questions about corruption and governance would pitch their host into a foul mood.

But instead of revisiting old disputes, Karzai brought in several cabinet ministers to talk about development and security. He explained details of a new effort to address graft. And halfway through a meal of lamb stew, chicken and rice, he looked across the table and said he had decided that the United States would be a "critical partner" in his second term, according to a senior U.S. official familiar with the meeting.

The Americans also turned on the charm. Clinton, wearing an embroidered floral coat she had purchased on an earlier trip to Afghanistan, told stories of her time in Arkansas and in the Senate, and listened with interest as the Afghans detailed how they recently exported 12 tons of apples to India by air.

As President Obama nears a decision on how many more troops he will dispatch to Afghanistan, his top diplomats and generals are abandoning for now their get-tough tactics with Karzai and attempting to forge a far warmer relationship. They recognize that their initial strategy may have done more harm than good, fueling stress and anger in a beleaguered, conspiracy-minded leader whom the U.S. government needs as a partner.

"It's not sustainable to have a 'War of the Roses' relationship here, where . . . we basically throw things at each other," said another senior administration official, one of more than a dozen U.S. and Afghan government officials interviewed for this article. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal policy deliberations.

The new approach, which one official described as a "reset" of the relationship, will entail more engagement with members of Karzai's cabinet and provincial governors, officials said, because they have concluded that the Afghan president lacks the political clout in his highly decentralized nation to purge corrupt local warlords and power brokers. The CIA has sent a longtime field officer close to Karzai to be the new station chief in Kabul. And State Department envoy Richard C. Holbrooke, whose aggressive style has infuriated the Afghan leader at times, is devoting more attention to shaping policy in Washington and marshaling international support for reconstruction and development programs.

The tension in the relationship stems from the cumulative impact of several White House decisions that were intended to improve the quality of the Afghan government. When Obama became president, he discontinued his predecessor's practice of holding bimonthly videoconferences with Karzai. Obama granted wide latitude to the hard-charging Holbrooke to pressure Karzai to tackle the corruption and mismanagement that have fueled the Taliban's rise. The administration also indicated that it wanted many candidates to challenge Karzai in the August presidential election.

Although there is broad agreement among Obama's national security team that Karzai has been an ineffective leader, a growing number of top officials have begun to question in recent months whether those actions wound up goading him into doing exactly what the White House did not want: forging alliances with former warlords, letting drug traffickers out of prison and threatening to sack competent ministers. Those U.S. officials now think that Karzai, a tactically shrewd tribal chieftain who is under enormous stress as he seeks to placate and balance rival factions in his government, may operate best when he does not feel besieged.

Criticism of the Obama administration's manner of dealing with Karzai has been most pronounced among senior military officials, who question why the State Department has not dispatched more civilians to help the Afghan leader fix the government or worked more intensively with him to achieve U.S. goals.

"We've been treating Karzai like [Slobodan] Milosevic," a senior Pentagon official said, referring to the former Bosnian Serb leader whom Holbrooke pressured into accepting a peace treaty in the 1990s. "That's not a model that will work in Afghanistan."

Fueling tensions

Karzai's first indication that his relationship with the United States would undergo a profound shift occurred 10 days before Obama's inauguration. Vice President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. had come to the palace for dinner, and halfway through the meal, he began taking his host to task for how he was responding to civilian casualties caused by U.S. and NATO military operations.

Biden told Karzai that he was politicizing the issue and leveling "ill-founded" allegations in public, according to a previously undisclosed account of the dinner from a person who attended. Karzai argued back, and the discussion turned tense. "Biden got a little bit passionate about it," the participant said. "Karzai was taken aback, and he got a little bit passionate, too."

Clinton further stoked tensions during her confirmation hearing three days later by calling Afghanistan a "narco-state" with a government "plagued by limited capacity and widespread corruption." When Holbrooke was appointed Obama's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan the following week, the diplomat made little secret of his desire to see others challenge Karzai in the election. In State Department meetings and Washington cocktail parties, he talked up Ashraf Ghani, a former World Bank official who speaks eloquently about the need to address corruption but has only a small political base in Afghanistan.

At the time, others in the administration were equally harsh in their assessment of Karzai. One senior official remarked that he had "plateaued as a leader," and the classified version of a White House review of Afghanistan strategy implied, according to two officials who read it, a lack of support for Karzai's reelection. Holbrooke and others openly discussed plans to send U.S. development assistance directly to provincial governors and cabinet ministers.

Back then, top administration officials thought that increasing pressure on Karzai would lead him to take meaningful steps to reduce corruption and improve governance. The officials also hoped to encourage potential rivals to run against Karzai by sending a clear signal that he was no longer Washington's man.

Neither assumption played out as planned. Karzai recoiled at the demands, his advisers said, in part because he resented being told what to do but also because he thought that Obama administration officials overestimated his control of the country. There also have been conflicting U.S. messages: While Biden and others pressed Karzai to remove his brother as the chairman of the provincial council in Kandahar because of allegations that he is connected to drug trafficking, the CIA continued to pay him for sharing intelligence and assisting with counterterrorism operations, according to a U.S. official with knowledge of intelligence operations in Afghanistan.

The U.S. approach to the election had the unintended consequence of strengthening Karzai's hand. "Nobody wanted to coalesce around a single candidate because they each thought they were America's favorite," said Ali Jalali, a former interior minister who briefly considered running.

Karzai was able to pull key opposition figures to his side by promising them positions in the new government. Fear that he no longer had U.S. support also prompted him to name Mohammed Fahim, a prominent former warlord alleged to have been involved in drug smuggling and corruption, as one of his vice presidential candidates.

"We created a political-diplomatic isometric exercise," said Ronald Neumann, a former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan. "The more we pressed him to remove people, the more he thought we were trying to undercut him, and we drove him back to the worst actors for support."

By the May 8 filing deadline, it was clear to many in Washington that Karzai would almost certainly win a second term. But there was no substantive effort to recalibrate the relationship. Although the administration maintained a neutral stance with regard to the election, Karzai saw it differently, according to his advisers.

"He was sure," one said, "that Washington wanted him to lose."

Disputed election

On Aug. 21, the day after Afghanistan's election, Holbrooke and U.S. Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry visited Karzai in a wood-paneled room in his Kabul palace to discuss the election and how Karzai would govern if he won.

Although only a small fraction of the ballots had been counted, and widespread reports of fraud were reaching the capital, Karzai told the Americans he believed he had prevailed.

"The votes haven't been counted yet," Holbrooke told Karzai, according to a U.S. official familiar with the exchange.

Karzai brushed him off. "I've won," he said.

Holbrooke moved on to other subjects, but he soon returned to the election. He asked Karzai how he would react if he did not receive a majority of votes. But one Afghan official asserted to journalists that Holbrooke pushed Karzai to agree to a second round before all of the ballots were counted. Although Holbrooke and Eikenberry stayed until dinner was finished, the meeting ended in acrimony.

Karzai later sought to call Obama to complain. But White House aides, who deemed the Afghan leader's ploy inappropriate, said he was unavailable. Karzai then tried to reach Clinton. He received the same response.

Karzai was left seething, one of his advisers said.

"Looking back on it now, I believe it was a genuine misunderstanding," Holbrooke said.

By mid-October, when it became clear that the number of votes disqualified because of suspected fraud would push him below 50 percent, the administration scrambled for a way to get Karzai to agree to a second round. Holbrooke could not go because the relationship was still too raw, and Clinton said she wanted him in Washington to participate in Afghanistan strategy meetings. The administration pressed into service Senate Foreign Relations Chairman John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), who was traveling in the region.

It took more than 20 hours of talks over four days, but Kerry persuaded Karzai to accede to the runoff. To critics of the forceful approach, the senator showed that patient diplomacy -- drinking copious cups of tea, flattering his ego and going for long walks in the palace garden -- could still get Karzai to bend.

"You have to show him respect and consideration," said Zalmay Khalilzad, a Bush administration envoy to Afghanistan who remains close to Karzai. "You cannot lecture him. You have to listen to his explanations, why he thinks something cannot be done, and then respond to that in a constructive way."

New expectations

Administration officials involved in shaping the strategy insist that it was not possible to recalibrate their approach to Karzai until the election and the ensuing disputes over ballot-box stuffing had concluded. This period "was a tremendous drain on the relationship," said the senior official familiar with Wednesday's meeting.

In the meantime, U.S. officials also have adjusted their expectations of what Karzai can accomplish.

"This top-down thing where you go to the palace and say, 'You've got to fix this, got to fix that. Please, Mr. President.' He agrees to do things almost every time and they don't get done. Then we think it's because he's being obstructionist," the senior official said. But we cannot "expect him to solve things which he can't solve."

Administration officials are also hopeful that the CIA's new station chief in Kabul will be an influential voice in encouraging Karzai to address U.S. concerns. The chief, who was most recently based in a Middle Eastern nation, led a team that supported Karzai's effort to work with tribal elders to reclaim control of his native Uruzgan province from the Taliban in November 2001, according to two people with knowledge of intelligence operations in the country. The sources said that Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, was in favor of sending the officer to Kabul. The CIA declined to comment.

Despite the changes, administration officials maintain that they are not going soft on Karzai. Clinton, they said, told the Afghan leader in a 90-minute private meeting after the dinner that future levels of development aid will be linked to improvements in governance, and she urged him to use merit, not cronyism, as a criteria for filling cabinet posts. She also indicated that the White House would seek to have the Afghan government meet as-yet-defined benchmarks of progress as a condition of U.S. security and development assistance.

"There's no diminution of concern," the senior official said. "But she did it within the context of a different tone."

In public comments after Karzai's inaugural speech, in which he pledged to address corruption by ordering government officials to disclose their assets and establishing a major-crimes tribunal, Clinton praised his specificity but noted that she wanted to see results. She said: "We're going to -- along with the people of Afghanistan -- watch very carefully as to how that's implemented."

Oct 27, 2009

German Limits on War Face Afghan Reality - NYTimes.com

By NICHOLAS KULISH

Published: October 26, 2009

KUNDUZ, Afghanistan — Forced to confront the rising insurgency in once peaceful northern Afghanistan, the German Army is engaged in sustained and bloody ground combat for the first time since World War II.

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A German soldier stands guard in a compound in Kunduz Province. Two men from his company were killed in June, among 36 German soldiers who have died in the Afghan war. More Photos »

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Soldiers near the northern city of Kunduz have had to strike back against an increasingly fierce campaign by Taliban insurgents, while carrying the burden of being among the first units to break the German taboo against military combat abroad that arose after the Nazi era.

At issue are how long opposition in Germany will allow its troops to stay and fight, and whether they will be given leeway from their strict rules of engagement to pursue the kind of counterinsurgency being advocated by American generals. The question now is whether the Americans will ultimately fight one kind of war and their allies another.

For Germans, the realization that their soldiers are now engaged in ground offensives in an open-ended and escalating war requires a fundamental reconsideration of their principles.

After World War II, German society rejected using military power for anything other than self-defense, and pacifism has been a rallying cry for generations, blocking allied requests for any military support beyond humanitarian assistance.

German leaders have chipped away at the proscriptions in recent years, in particular by participating in airstrikes in the Kosovo war. Still, the legacy of the combat ban remains in the form of strict engagement rules and an ingrained shoot-last mentality that is causing significant tensions with the United States in Afghanistan.

Driven by necessity, some of the 4,250 German soldiers here, the third-largest number of troops in the NATO contingent, have already come a long way. Last Tuesday, they handed out blankets, volleyballs and flashlights as a goodwill gesture to residents of the village of Yanghareq, about 22 miles northwest of Kunduz. Barely an hour later, insurgents with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades ambushed other members of the same company.

The Germans fought back, killing one of the attackers, before the dust and disorder made it impossible to tell fleeing Taliban from civilians.

“They shoot at us and we shoot back,” said Staff Sgt. Erik S., who, according to German military rules, could not be fully identified. “People are going to fall on both sides. It’s as simple as that. It’s war.”

The sergeant added, “The word ‘war’ is growing louder in society, and the politicians can’t keep it secret anymore.”

Indeed, German politicians have refused to utter the word, trying instead to portray the mission in Afghanistan as a mix of peacekeeping and reconstruction in support of the Afghan government. But their line has grown less tenable as the insurgency has expanded rapidly in the west and north of the country, where Germany leads the regional command and provides a majority of the troops.

The Germans may not have gone to war, but now the war has come to them.

In part, NATO and German officials say, that is evidence of the political astuteness of Taliban and Qaeda leaders, who are aware of the opposition in Germany to the war. They hope to exploit it and force the withdrawal of German soldiers — splintering the NATO alliance in the process — through attacks on German personnel in Afghanistan and through video and audio threats of terrorist attacks on the home front before the German elections last month.

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the senior American and allied commander in Afghanistan, is pressing NATO allies to contribute more troops to the war effort, even as countries like the Netherlands and Canada have begun discussing plans to pull out. Germany has held out against pleas for additional troops so far.

Ties between Germany and the United States were strained last month over a German-ordered bombing of two hijacked tanker trucks, which killed civilians as well as Taliban. Many Germans, from top politicians down to enlisted men, thought that General McChrystal was too swift to condemn the strike before a complete investigation.

Germany’s combat troops are caught in the middle. In interviews last week, soldiers from the Third Company, Mechanized Infantry Battalion 391, said they were understaffed for the increasingly complex mission here. Two men from the company were killed in June, among 36 German soldiers who have died in the Afghan war.

The soldiers expressed frustration over the second-guessing of the airstrike not only by allies, but also by their own politicians, and over the absence of support back home.

While the intensity of the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan’s south has received most attention, the situation in the Germans’ part of the north has deteriorated rapidly. Soldiers said that just a year ago they could patrol in unarmored vehicles. Now there are places where they cannot move even in armored vehicles without an entire company of soldiers.

American officials have argued that an emphasis on reconstruction, peacekeeping and the avoidance of violence may have given the Taliban a foothold to return to the north.

German officers here said they had adjusted their tactics accordingly, often engaging the Taliban in firefights for hours with close air support. In July, 300 German soldiers joined the Afghan Army and National Police in an operation in Kunduz Province that killed more than 20 Taliban fighters and led to the arrests of half a dozen more.

The German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung called the operation “a fundamental transition out of the defensive and into the offensive.”

Germany’s military actions are controlled by a parliamentary mandate, which is up for renewal in December. The German contingent has unarmed drones and Tornado fighter jets, which are restricted to reconnaissance and are not allowed to conduct offensive operations.

German soldiers usually stay in Afghanistan for just four months, which can make it difficult to maintain continuity with their Afghan partners. The mandate also caps the number of troops in the country at 4,500.

A NATO official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter, called the mandate “a political straitjacket.”

A company of German paratroopers in the district of Chahar Darreh, where insurgent activity is particularly pronounced, fought off a series of attacks and stayed in the area, patrolling on foot and meeting with local elders for eight days and seven nights.

“The longer we were out there, the better the local population responded to us,” said Capt. Thomas K., the company’s commander. Another company relieved them for three days but then abandoned the position, where intelligence said that a bomb was waiting for the next group of German soldiers.

“Since we were there, no other company has been back,” the captain said.

Stefan Pauly contributed reporting from Berlin.

Oct 23, 2009

NATO Defense Ministers Endorse Wider Afghan Effort - NYTimes.com

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By THOM SHANKER

BRATISLAVA, Slovakia — NATO defense ministers gave their broad endorsement Friday to the counterinsurgency strategy for Afghanistan laid out by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, increasing pressure on the Obama administration and on their own governments to commit more military and civilian resources to the mission.

General McChrystal, the senior American and allied commander in Afghanistan, landed here early Friday to brief NATO defense ministers on his strategic review of an eight-year war in which the American-led effort has lost momentum to a tenacious insurgency. The closed-door session — which had not been disclosed in advance — added a note of drama to the sort of NATO ministerial meeting that is often mundane.

“What we did today was to discuss General McChrystal’s overall assessment, his overall approach, and I have noted a broad support from all ministers of this overall counterinsurgency approach,” said NATO’s secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen.

Although the broad acceptance by NATO defense ministers of General McChrystal’s strategic review included no decision on new troops, it was another in a series of judgments that success there cannot be achieved by a narrower effort that calls for not increasing troop levels substantially and focuses more on capturing and killing terrorists linked to Al Qaeda. That counterterrorism strategy is identified with Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

In contrast, General McChrystal’s review calls for implementing a full-scale counterinsurgency strategy that focuses on protecting population centers and accelerating the training of Afghan army and police units, both requiring significant numbers of fresh troops. NATO diplomats noted that it was difficult to see how an acceptance of this broad strategy could be viewed as anything but an endorsement of the need to increase both military and civilian contributions.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, whose views carry great weight in Mr. Obama’s war council, declined to be drawn out on his assessment. “For this meeting, I am here mainly in listening mode,” Mr. Gates said, although he noted that “many allies spoke positively about General McChrystal’s assessment.”

Mr. Gates said the administration’s decision on Afghanistan was still two or three weeks away, and he cautioned that it was “vastly premature” to draw conclusions now about whether the president would deploy more troops. He emphasized that allied defense ministers had not voiced concerns about the administration’s decision-making process.

Although NATO will not meet until next month to decide whether to commit more resources to Afghanistan, Mr. Gates did reveal that he had received indications that some allies were prepared to increase their contributions of civilian experts or troops, or both.

Separate from his strategic review, General McChrystal has submitted a request for forces, which was not under discussion Friday, but is now working its way through both the American and NATO chains of command.

The various options submitted by General McChrystal range up to a maximum of 85,000 more troops, although his leading option calls for increasing forces by about 40,000, according to officials familiar with the proposal.

Pressure for adding troops mounted throughout the day, as other senior international representatives also told NATO defense ministers of the need to increase their commitments in order to succeed in Afghanistan.

Kai Eide, the United Nations special representative for Afghanistan, flew to Slovakia to meet NATO defense chiefs, and he stressed that “additional international troops are required.” He also told the allies, “This cannot be a U.S.-only enterprise.”

Mr. Eide acknowledged that it may be difficult to rally public support for force contributions while accusations of election fraud continue to taint the government of Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president.

Senior American military officers have already endorsed General McChrystal’s overall strategy, including Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. David H. Petraeus, the American commander in the Middle East. Neither has publicly discussed what specific troop increases he might advocate.

Senior NATO officials made clear that additional commitments should go beyond combat forces to include trainers for the Afghan army and police force, as well as civilians to help rebuild the economy and restore confidence in the government.

“What we need is a much broader strategy, which stabilizes the whole of Afghan society, and this is the essence in the recommendations presented by General McChrystal,” said Mr. Rasmussen, the alliance secretary general. “This won’t happen just because of a good plan. It will also need resources — people and money.”

General McChrystal was not scheduled to make any public comments here. This reserve was not unexpected, as some administration officials have criticized his recent statements, including a speech in London, as an effort to pressure the White House.

The general and his aides have denied they were playing politics, and have expressed respect for the importance of the civilian-led policy review process now under way in Washington. General McChrystal said in a recent interview that his ability to succeed required a unified, government-wide strategy and that he welcomed a process that resulted in a consensus from his civilian bosses that would include clear instructions on the way ahead.

NATO officials assessing the potential for allied troop contributions said that delicate negotiations were under way and that NATO capitals were watching the Obama administration for signals even while they send signals of their own.

In what one NATO diplomat described as “a chicken-and-egg process,” the British government, for example, announced this month a plan still laced with conditions for sending 500 more troops to Afghanistan. Some NATO diplomats viewed that as a way to emphasize their support for a decision by the Obama administration to deploy more troops.

At the same time, though, some allies with forces in Afghanistan are cautiously discussing how and when to end their deployments there.

Sep 12, 2009

U.S., NATO to Overhaul Afghan Training Mission as Violence Spirals - washingtonpost.com

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Spiraling Violence Puts Pressure on Allies to Build Up Indigenous Forces

By Ann Scott Tyson and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, September 12, 2009

The U.S. military and NATO are launching a major overhaul of the way they recruit, train and equip Afghanistan's security forces, seeking to reverse a trend in which the alliance for years did not invest adequately in Afghan troops and police while the Taliban gained strength, senior U.S. officials said.

The reorganization comes in advance of expected recommendations by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top commander in Afghanistan, to expand Afghan forces and the capacity to train them.

The recommendations, and the additional U.S. and NATO troops they will require, are among the few aspects of President Obama's Afghan strategy likely to have broad bipartisan support in Congress. Democrats, in particular, have expressed anxiety over reports that McChrystal may request more combat troops for the increasingly unpopular war.

Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, called on Friday for the Afghan force to "increase and accelerate dramatically," with a goal of 240,000 Afghan soldiers by 2012. The current target is to increase the existing number of soldiers to 134,000 by the end of 2011. "We're going to need many more trainers, hopefully including a much larger number of NATO trainers. We're going to need a surge of equipment that is coming out of Iraq and, instead of coming home, a great deal of it should be going to Afghanistan instead," he said.

Levin spoke on Capitol Hill after returning from a visit to Afghanistan and talks with McChrystal. "As of right now, it is likely that there will be a request from him for additional combat forces," Levin said.

Levin warned that "a bigger military footprint" in Afghanistan "provides propaganda fodder for the Taliban." The steps he proposed, he said, should be implemented "on an urgent basis before we consider an increase in U.S. ground combat forces beyond what is already planned by the end of this year."

McChrystal's still-secret recommendations are being debated by Obama's national security team. Early this year, Obama approved the deployment of 21,000 additional American troops -- including 4,000 trainers -- to Afghanistan, which will bring the U.S. deployment to 68,000 by the end of 2009.

Under the reorganization, NATO this month will establish a new command led by a three-star military officer to oversee recruiting and generating Afghan forces. The goal is to "bring more coherence" to uncoordinated efforts by NATO contingents in Afghanistan while underscoring that the mission "is not just America's challenge," one senior official said. The new command will also integrate the U.S.-led training command, the Combined Security Transition Command, led by a two-star Army general, Maj. Gen. Richard Formica, while narrowing its responsibilities considerably to building the Afghan Defense and Interior ministries.

In one illustration of how much basic work lies ahead, the U.S. military is seeking 275 contractors to train Afghan Defense Ministry personnel in everything from supply and budget to "diary management, meeting preparation and travel planning" for the minister and chief of general staff, according to the 96-page contract. Contractors will work in dozens of other areas of ministry activity, including operations, intelligence, logistics, force integration, and the offices of the command surgeon and comptroller.

Afghan and U.S. sources in Kabul said boosting the number and visibility of American and NATO advisers at the Afghan Defense Ministry and elsewhere could be unwelcome -- and could play into Taliban propaganda claims that they are part of an occupation force.

In another major change, all the U.S. and allied mentoring and training teams embedded with Afghan military and police units will be placed next month under a new operational command, headed by McChrystal's deputy, Lt. Gen. David M. Rodriguez, who runs day-to-day military missions in Afghanistan.

Spiraling violence in Afghanistan has added urgency to the effort, as the United States has increased its troops in the country nearly twofold without a commensurate increase in the number of Afghan forces.

"We are building our side of this bridge. The Afghan bridge is not building," said one senior U.S. official, who like others discussed the matter on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record. "Having U.S. troops enforcing martial law where they don't understand the people or speak the language -- this is a recipe for disaster."

When about 4,500 U.S. Marines launched an operation in July to push deep into Taliban territory in the southern province of Helmand, they were accompanied by about 400 Afghan security forces. Senior Afghan officials had placed priority on using Afghan troops to secure Kabul and other population centers for the August presidential election, one senior U.S. official said.

"The coalition did a poor job of coordinating with the Afghans our vision for how we were going to employ the Marines," the official said. Dozens of Marines have died fighting in Helmand since July.

For years, the United States and other NATO countries did not provide thousands of required military trainers and mentors for the effort to build up Afghan forces, and Levin said it remains undermanned by 12 percent. The training organization itself is a confusing conglomerate of active-duty, National Guard and Reserve forces from different countries as well as contractors and Afghans.

The growth of the Afghan army has sped up since last year. Still, thousands more trainers would be needed to significantly expand the force, and where they would come from remains uncertain. The Pentagon could mobilize another brigade of about 4,000 National Guard soldiers to devote to the effort, but such a mobilization would take time, officials said. Some senior American officials advocate deploying more 12-man U.S. Special Forces teams to train regular Afghan army battalions, noting that working with indigenous forces is a core mission of the Green Berets.

Given the shortage of mentoring teams, U.S. and other NATO commanders in Afghanistan are increasingly relying on another model in which they use combat units to partner with existing Afghan forces, essentially giving combat forces the dual role of fighting and on-the-job training.

Recruiting Afghans for the army and police in far greater numbers is also likely to be difficult, officials said.

"That is going to be a huge challenge to get the numbers they need from the Afghan population," said Brig. Gen. Steven P. Huber, commander of the 7,500-strong military and civilian task force based in Kabul that is training and mentoring Afghan forces. "Building a national-level army is a hard sell" in Afghanistan's disparate tribal communities, said Huber, commander of the 33rd Infantry Brigade Combat Team of the Illinois National Guard.

Local recruits often quit upon learning they will be sent to southern Afghanistan, citing "deteriorating security," Huber said. Others are expelled because of drug use -- as many as 15 percent per class in some areas.

Given the infrastructure and manpower, time for adequate training is also a challenge because Afghan army and police forces are in such great demand to counter a growing insurgency, said Col. Bill Hix, who until recently led the training effort in the south. Building facilities and obtaining vehicles, radios and weapons can take months, sometimes even more than a year, Hix said. Training leaders for bigger units such as battalions and brigades is "a very slow process," Huber said.

Another problem is that existing Afghan units are being depleted, experts said. "We have been building an army that we are not replenishing, that we are not bringing off-line to train," said Kimberly Kagan, president of the Institute for the Study of War and a military historian who served on McChrystal's strategic review team.

"In a country that is larger than Iraq and has a much larger population . . . you are dealing with a tiny security force . . . and one that is not appropriate for the conditions on the ground," Kagan said.

Staff writer Karen DeYoung in Washington and correspondent Pamela Constable in Kabul contributed to this report.

Sep 7, 2009

Europeans Seek to Shift Security Role to Afghan Government - NYTimes.com

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

By JUDY DEMPSEY

BERLIN — The leaders of France, Germany and Britain called Sunday night for an international conference to work out a plan to shift responsibility for security in Afghanistan to the Afghan government.

The call by the three governments, the largest contributors of troops to the war in Afghanistan after the United States, came as mounting military casualties and doubts about the mission there have fueled growing public opposition to the war in Europe.

In Washington, a State Department spokeswoman, Megan Mattson, said the department had no immediate comment on the proposed conference.

However, the proposal could increase tension in the Obama administration’s relationship with its most important European allies in Afghanistan. The strains were palpable over the weekend as a NATO investigating team continued its inquiry into how many civilians were killed in airstrikes last week aimed at two fuel tankers that had been hijacked by the Taliban near the northern city of Kunduz.

A senior American military official said Sunday that the German commander in the north who ordered the airstrikes had relied largely on the assessment of a lone Afghan informant, who said that everyone at the scene was an insurgent. The informant’s role was reported Sunday by The Washington Post.

The tankers were hit after they became stuck trying to cross the Kunduz River before dawn on Friday. Local officials have said that 70 people or more died, but it was unclear how many were militants and how many were villagers who had dashed to siphon fuel from the trucks. Many bodies were burned beyond recognition, and villagers buried some in a mass grave before Western military investigators could examine the scene or the corpses.

The German defense minister, Franz Josef Jung, defended the call for an airstrike on Sunday. “We had clear information that the Taliban had seized the fuel trucks about six kilometers away from our base in order to launch an attack against our soldiers in Kunduz,” he told the newspaper Bild am Sonntag.

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top commander in Afghanistan, tightened rules on airstrikes in June in the face of Afghan anger over high civilian casualties in NATO military operations. Questions have been raised about whether the call for the strike complied with those rules.

The proposed international conference, with its suggestion that key allies were looking for ways to reduce the number of their troops, could also complicate relations among allies. The United States, which has 68,000 troops in Afghanistan, is currently weighing whether to send more.

The proposal was announced by Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain at a brief news conference here. A German government spokesman said that President Nicolas Sarkozy of France had also signed on to the idea.

Mrs. Merkel said the conference would try to find a way for “much more responsibility to be taken by the Afghan government” for its own security. The conference should involve the United Nations and NATO, she said, and should take place “sometime this year” and after the new Afghan government is in place.

Afghans voted for a new government last month, but the election was marred by accusations of widespread fraud. Officials said it could be months before a winner was determined.

Opinion polls show that well over two-thirds of Germans oppose the Afghan mission, while Mr. Brown is coming under increasing pressure in Britain to justify the presence of its 9,000 troops there. Britain has suffered 212 deaths in the war.

Mrs. Merkel’s government has been criticized by other NATO countries for not doing enough to help defeat the insurgency because Germany’s 4,200 troops are restricted by the German Parliament in what they can do and where they can be deployed.

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington.

Jul 27, 2009

Talk to Taliban, Miliband Urges

David Miliband has urged the Afghan government to talk to moderate members of the Taliban as part of efforts to bring stability to the country.

In a speech to Nato, the UK foreign secretary said those insurgents willing to renounce violence should be included in a broad-based political coalition.

His comments came as it was confirmed the first phase of the UK-US offensive in southern Afghanistan has now ended.

The Tories said ministers must focus on a limited number of clear objectives.

'Heavy toll'

July has been the deadliest month for the UK and Nato after they launched Operation Panther's Claw - designed to take and secure land in Helmand province ahead of next month's presidential elections.

Mr Miliband said the operation had resulted in a "heavy toll" in terms of British deaths but "significant gains" had been made.

The Ministry of Defence said the first phase of the operation - which led directly to ten British deaths - is now over and that Nato troops would now be focusing on holding onto territory gained ahead of next month's elections.

Mr Miliband said the objectives of the UK's mission were clear but accepted the public "wanted to know whether and how we can succeed" in Afghanistan.

He said a viable political solution, alongside the military offensive, was essential to securing Afghanistan's future.

As part of this, Mr Miliband said current insurgents should be reintegrated into society and, in some cases, given a role in local and central government.

In doing so, he said a distinction should be drawn between "hard-line ideologues" and Jihaddist terrorists who must be fought and defeated from those who could be "drawn into a political process".

Switching sides

Those who had either been coerced or bribed into joining the insurgency could play a constructive role if they disowned violence and respected the Afghan constitution, he said.

"These Afghans must have the option to choose a different course."

Denying the approach marked a change of strategy, he added: "That means in the long term an inclusive political settlement in Afghanistan - separating those who want Islamic rule locally from those committed to violent jihad globally - and giving them a sufficient role in local politics that they leave the path of confrontation with the government."

HAVE YOUR SAY They have goals, we have goals. If we can both respect each other it is possible but depends on who is willing to give what Wayne, Lancashire, UK

The BBC's diplomatic correspondent Bridget Kendall said the UK was clear the responsibility was on the Afghan government to show commitment to this process.

But the Conservatives said there was nothing new in Mr Miliband's speech, saying dialogue between Kabul and parts of the Taliban had taken place for years.

Shadow foreign secretary William Hague said the UK must focus on clear objectives such as building up of the Afghan army and "ensuring that the gains won by British forces on the battlefield are swiftly followed by reconstruction".

For the Lib Dems, former leader Sir Menzies Campbell said Nato's evident lack of confidence in Afghan President Hamid Karzail could be a major stumbling block to reconciliation efforts.

"President Karzai shows no inclination for the kind of engagement with the Taliban that David Miliband envisages," he said.

"If Britain and America want to promote dialogue they will have to do it by working round Karzai and presenting him with a fait accompli."

Earlier, International Development Secretary Douglas Alexander compared the move to the talks that brought an end to the conflict in Northern Ireland.

Mr Alexander, who is in Afghanistan, conceded it was a "challenging" message for politicians to suggest when British troops were being killed in action but said he had "confidence in the good judgement of the British people" that such a move would ultimately be beneficial.

'Terror chain'

British commanders say key objectives have been achieved on the ground and Prime Minister Gordon Brown has paid tribute to the professionalism and courage of British troops involved in the mission.

"What we have done is make the land secure for about 100,000 people, push back the Taliban and start to break the chain of terror linking the mountains of Pakistan and Afghanistan to the streets of Britain," he said.

Although troops from other Nato members have been drawn into offensive action, Mr Miliband has called for other countries to contribute more.

He said the policy of burden-sharing must work in "practice" not just in theory.

So far in July, 67 international troops have been killed, bringing the number of coalition deaths in 2009 to 223.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/politics/8169789.stm

Published: 2009/07/27

Jul 22, 2009

Pakistan Objects to U.S. Plan for Afghan War

By ERIC SCHMITT and JANE PERLEZ

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistan is objecting to expanded American combat operations in neighboring Afghanistan, creating new fissures in the alliance with Washington at a critical juncture when thousands of new American forces are arriving in the region.

Pakistani officials have told the Obama administration that the Marines fighting the Taliban in southern Afghanistan will force militants across the border into Pakistan, with the potential to further inflame the troubled province of Baluchistan, according to Pakistani intelligence officials.

Pakistan does not have enough troops to deploy to Baluchistan to take on the Taliban without denuding its border with its archenemy, India, the officials said. Dialogue with the Taliban, not more fighting, is in Pakistan’s national interest, they said.

The Pakistani account made clear that even as the United States recommits troops and other resources to take on a growing Taliban threat, Pakistani officials still consider India their top priority and the Taliban militants a problem that can be negotiated. In the long term, the Taliban in Afghanistan may even remain potential allies for Pakistan, as they were in the past, once the United States leaves.

The Pakistani officials gave views starkly different from those of American officials regarding the threat presented by top Taliban commanders, some of whom the Americans say have long taken refuge on the Pakistani side of the border.

Recent Pakistani military operations against Taliban in the Swat Valley and parts of the tribal areas have done little to close the gap in perceptions.

Even as Obama administration officials praise the operations, they express frustration that Pakistan is failing to act against the full array of Islamic militants using the country as a base.

Instead, they say, Pakistani authorities have chosen to fight Pakistani Taliban who threaten their government, while ignoring Taliban and other militants fighting Americans in Afghanistan or terrorizing India.

Such tensions have mounted despite a steady rotation of American officials through the region. They were on display last weekend when, during a visit to India, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said those who had planned the Sept. 11 attacks were now sheltering in Pakistan. The Pakistani Foreign Ministry issued an immediate rebuttal.

Pakistan’s critical assessment was provided as the Obama administration’s special envoy for the region, Richard C. Holbrooke, arrived in Pakistan on Tuesday night.

The country’s perspective was given in a nearly two-hour briefing on Friday for The New York Times by senior analysts and officials of Pakistan’s main spy service, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence. They spoke on the condition of anonymity in keeping with the agency’s policy. The main themes of the briefing were echoed in conversations with several military officers over the past few days.

One of the first briefing slides read, in part: “The surge in Afghanistan will further reinforce the perception of a foreign occupation of Afghanistan. It will result in more civilian casualties; further alienate local population. Thus more local resistance to foreign troops.”

A major concern is that the American offensive may push Taliban militants over the border into Baluchistan, a province that borders Waziristan in the tribal areas. The Pakistani Army is already fighting a longstanding insurgency of Baluch separatists in the province.

A Taliban spillover would require Pakistan to put more troops there, a Pakistani intelligence official said, troops the country does not have now. Diverting troops from the border with India is out of the question, the official said.

A spokesman for the American and NATO commands in Afghanistan, Rear Adm. Gregory J. Smith, said in an e-mail message on Monday that there was no significant movement of insurgents out of Afghanistan, and no indication of foreign fighters moving into Afghanistan through Baluchistan or Iran, another concern of the Pakistanis.

Pakistani and American officials also cited some positive signs for the alliance. Increased sharing of information has sharpened the accuracy of strikes against militant hide-outs by Pakistani F-16 warplanes and drones operated by the Central Intelligence Agency. And Pakistani and American intelligence operatives are fighting together in dangerous missions to hunt down fighters from the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the tribal areas and in the North-West Frontier Province.

But the intelligence briefing clearly illuminated the differences between the two countries over how, in the American view, Pakistan was still picking proxies and choosing enemies among various Islamic militant groups in Pakistan.

The United States maintains that the Afghan Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, leads an inner circle of commanders who guide the war in southern Afghanistan from their base in Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan.

American officials say this Taliban council, known as the Quetta shura, is sheltered by Pakistani authorities, who may yet want to employ the Taliban as future allies in Afghanistan.

In an interview last week, the new leader of American and NATO combat operations in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, paused when asked whether he was getting the cooperation he wanted from Pakistani forces in combating the Quetta shura. “What I would love is for the government of Pakistan to have the ability to completely eliminate the safe havens that the Afghan Taliban enjoy,” he said.

The Pakistani intelligence officials denied that Mullah Omar was even in Pakistan, insisting that he was in Afghanistan.

The United States asked Pakistan in recent years to round up 10 Taliban leaders in Quetta, the Pakistani officials said. Of those 10, 6 were killed by the Pakistanis, 2 were probably in Afghanistan, and the remaining 2 presented no threat to the Marines in Afghanistan, the officials said.

They also said no threat was posed by Sirajuddin Haqqani, an Afghan Taliban leader who American military commanders say operates with Pakistani protection out of North Waziristan and equips and trains Taliban fighters for Afghanistan.

Last year, Washington presented evidence to Pakistani leaders that Mr. Haqqani, working with Inter-Services Intelligence, was responsible for the bombing last summer of the Indian Embassy in Kabul that killed 54 people.

Pakistani officials insisted that Mr. Haqqani spent most of his time in Afghanistan, suggesting that the American complaints about him being provided sanctuary were invalid.

Another militant group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, is also a source of deep disagreement.

India and the United States have criticized Pakistan for allowing Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, the founder of Lashkar-e-Taiba, to be freed from jail last month.

The Pakistani officials said Mr. Saeed deserved to be freed because the government had failed to convince the courts that he should be kept in custody. There would be no effort to imprison Mr. Saeed again, in part because he was just an ideologue who did not have an anti-Pakistan agenda, the officials said.