US 'plans to oust Taliban from Kandahar'

The US has said it is planning a new offensive later this year to drive the Taliban from the southern Afghanistan city of Kandahar.

The current action against the Taliban stronghold of Marjah was a "prelude" to a bigger operation, a US official said.

The US general in charge of Nato forces in Afghanistan has said the local population in Kandahar is at risk.

Kandahar is Afghanistan's second largest city, and was once a Taliban stronghold.

'Reversing momentum'

A major offensive there would follow the current military operation in neighbouring Helmand province.

"If the goal in Afghanistan is to reverse the momentum of the Taliban... then we think we have to get to Kandahar this year," an official in the White House told reporters.

The US goal was to bring "comprehensive population security" to the city.

Suicide attacks are frequently carried out in Kandahar, with one at the beginning on February killing three people.

He described Marjah as "a tactical prelude to a comprehensive operation in Kandahar City."

The Marjah offensive by Nato forces began in mid-February, and has several more weeks to go.

It was "pretty much on track", the official said.

Kabul attack

In Kabul on Friday, explosions and shooting took place in an area of hotels and guesthouses popular with foreigners. Up to nine Indians, a Frenchman and an Italian were killed.

Three gunmen and two policemen died in a gun battle that lasted several hours. Taliban militants said they had carried it out.

President Hamid Karzai condemned the violence. India called it "barbaric".

Kabul has been relatively quiet since 18 January, when Taliban bombers and gunmen attacked government targets and shopping malls, killing 12 people.

Friday's attack is also the Taliban's first major raid since the arrest of key leader Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar in Pakistan this month.

U.S. military teams, intelligence deeply involved in aiding Yemen on strikes

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By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 27, 2010; A01

U.S. military teams and intelligence agencies are deeply involved in secret joint operations with Yemeni troops who in the past six weeks have killed scores of people, among them six of 15 top leaders of a regional al-Qaeda affiliate, according to senior administration officials.

The operations, approved by President Obama and begun six weeks ago, involve several dozen troops from the U.S. military's clandestine Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), whose main mission is tracking and killing suspected terrorists. The American advisers do not take part in raids in Yemen, but help plan missions, develop tactics and provide weapons and munitions. Highly sensitive intelligence is being shared with the Yemeni forces, including electronic and video surveillance, as well as three-dimensional terrain maps and detailed analysis of the al-Qaeda network.

As part of the operations, Obama approved a Dec. 24 strike against a compound where a U.S. citizen, Anwar al-Aulaqi, was thought to be meeting with other regional al-Qaeda leaders. Although he was not the focus of the strike and was not killed, he has since been added to a shortlist of U.S. citizens specifically targeted for killing or capture by the JSOC, military officials said. The officials, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the operations.

The broad outlines of the U.S. involvement in Yemen have come to light in the past month, but the extent and nature of the operations have not been previously reported. The far-reaching U.S. role could prove politically challenging for Yemen's president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, who must balance his desire for American support against the possibility of a backlash by tribal, political and religious groups whose members resent what they see as U.S. interference in Yemen.

The collaboration with Yemen provides the starkest illustration to date of the Obama administration's efforts to ramp up counterterrorism operations, including in areas outside the Iraq and Afghanistan war zones.

"We are very pleased with the direction this is going," a senior administration official said of the cooperation with Yemen.

Obama has ordered a dramatic increase in the pace of CIA drone-launched missile strikes into Pakistan in an effort to kill al-Qaeda and Taliban members in the ungoverned tribal areas along the Afghan border. There have been more such strikes in the first year of Obama's administration than in the last three years under President George W. Bush, according to a military officer who tracks the attacks.

Obama also has sent U.S. military forces briefly into Somalia as part of an operation to kill Saleh Ali Nabhan, a Kenyan sought in the 2002 bombing of an Israeli-owned resort in Kenya.

Republican lawmakers and former vice president Richard B. Cheney have sought to characterize the new president as soft on terrorism after he banned the harsh interrogation methods permitted under Bush and announced his intention to close the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Obama has rejected those two elements of Bush's counterterrorism program, but he has embraced the notion that the most effective way to kill or capture members of al-Qaeda and its affiliates is to work closely with foreign partners, including those that have feeble democracies, shoddy human rights records and weak accountability over the vast sums of money Washington is giving them to win their continued participation in these efforts.

In the case of Yemen, a steady stream of high-ranking officials has visited Saleh, including the rarely seen JSOC commander, Vice Adm. William H. McRaven; White House counterterrorism adviser John O. Brennan; and Gen. David H. Petraeus, head of U.S. Central Command.

A Yemeni official briefed on security matters said Tuesday that the two countries maintained a "steadfast cooperation in combating AQAP, but there are clear limits to the U.S. involvement on the ground. Information sharing has been a key in carrying out recent successful counterterrorism operations." AQAP is the abbreviation for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the affiliate operating in Yemen.

In a newly built joint operations center, the American advisers are acting as intermediaries between the Yemeni forces and hundreds of U.S. military and intelligence officers working in Washington, Virginia and Tampa and at Fort Meade, Md., to collect, analyze and route intelligence.

The combined efforts have resulted in more than two dozen ground raids and airstrikes. Military and intelligence officials suspect there are several hundred members of AQAP, a group that has historical links to the main al-Qaeda organization but that is thought to operate independently.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, told a Navy War College class in early January that the United States had "no plans" to send ground troops to Yemen and that he had been concerned about the growing al-Qaeda presence there "for a long time now."

"We have worked hard to try to improve our relationships and training, education and war-fighting support," Mullen said. "And, yet, we still have a long way to go."

Saleh has faced pressure not only from the United States but also his country's main financial backers, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, to gain better control over its lawless northern border. In August, Saleh asked U.S. officials to begin a more in-depth conversation over how the two countries might work together, according to administration officials. The current operation evolved from those talks.

"President Saleh was serious about going after al-Qaeda and wasn't going to resist our encouragement," the senior official said.

The Obama administration's deepening of bilateral intelligence relations builds on ties forged during George J. Tenet's tenure as CIA director.

Shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Tenet coaxed Saleh into a partnership that would give the CIA and U.S. military units the means to attack terrorist training camps and al-Qaeda targets. Saleh agreed, in part, because he believed that his country, the ancestral home of Osama bin Laden, was next on the U.S. invasion list, according to an adviser to the Yemeni president.

Tenet provided Saleh's forces with helicopters, eavesdropping equipment and 100 Army Special Forces members to train an antiterrorism unit. He also won Saleh's approval to fly Predator drones armed with Hellfire missiles over the country. In November 2002, a CIA missile strike killed six al-Qaeda operatives driving through the desert. The target was Abu Ali al-Harithi, organizer of the 2000 attack on the USS Cole. Killed with him was a U.S. citizen, Kamal Derwish, who the CIA knew was in the car.

Word that the CIA had purposefully killed Derwish drew attention to the unconventional nature of the new conflict and to the secret legal deliberations over whether killing a U.S. citizen was legal and ethical.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush gave the CIA, and later the military, authority to kill U.S. citizens abroad if strong evidence existed that an American was involved in organizing or carrying out terrorist actions against the United States or U.S. interests, military and intelligence officials said. The evidence has to meet a certain, defined threshold. The person, for instance, has to pose "a continuing and imminent threat to U.S. persons and interests," said one former intelligence official.

The Obama administration has adopted the same stance. If a U.S. citizen joins al-Qaeda, "it doesn't really change anything from the standpoint of whether we can target them," a senior administration official said. "They are then part of the enemy."

Both the CIA and the JSOC maintain lists of individuals, called "High Value Targets" and "High Value Individuals," whom they seek to kill or capture. The JSOC list includes three Americans, including Aulaqi, whose name was added late last year. As of several months ago, the CIA list included three U.S. citizens, and an intelligence official said that Aulaqi's name has now been added.

Intelligence officials say the New Mexico-born imam also has been linked to the Army psychiatrist who is accused of killing 12 soldiers and a civilian at Fort Hood, Tex., although his communications with Maj. Nidal M. Hasan were largely academic in nature. Authorities say that Aulaqi is the most important native, English-speaking al-Qaeda figure and that he was in contact with the Nigerian accused of attempting to bomb a U.S. airliner on Christmas Day.

Yemeni Foreign Minister Abubaker al-Qirbi said in Washington last week that his government's present goal is to persuade Aulaqi to surrender so he can face local criminal charges stemming from his contacts with the Fort Hood suspect. Aulaqi is being tracked by the country's security forces, the minister added, and is now thought to be in the southern province of Shabwa.

Staff writer R. Jeffrey Smith and staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

Mission Impossible?

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By John Barry and Michael Hirsh | NEWSWEEK

From the magazine issue dated Dec 14, 2009

How quickly can the Afghan army stand up, so American troops can stand down? It's a question that could determine the success or failure of President Obama's "surge" in Afghanistan. The U.S. training program faces some formidable challenges in meeting Obama's 18-month timeline. Among the many issues: the problem of the "professional recruit." So ingrained is corruption and double-dealing in Afghan society that the country's meager Army finds itself sometimes recruiting the same men over and over again--scamsters who make off with guns and equipment each time.

Afghan Defense Minister Abdul ­Rahim Wardak recently described to a U.S. official how one man signed up for the Afghan Army five times. Deserting after a couple of months, he would sell his rifle for a good price, shave his beard, sign up again--and then regrow it. He was finally recognized on his sixth attempt, the official, who didn't want to be named discussing a private conversation, tells NEWSWEEK. "Everyone's heard of these professional recruits," says Chris Mason, who retired from the State Department in 2006 after working on Afghanistan for five years. "They sign up, get $120 a month and three hots [meals] and a cot. Then they desert, sell their equipment on Chicken Street in Kabul, and do it again." The stories, Mason says, illustrate how hard it is to answer even so basic a question as how big the Afghan Army really is.

Obama and his ground commander, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, hope to create an Afghan Army of 134,000 by October 2010 (the president set aside McChrystal's further goal of 240,000 as "too large and too far out," a senior administration official told reporters at a White House briefing). But is 134,000 even attainable? Mason and Thomas Johnson, an Afghanistan expert at the Naval Postgraduate School, think not. "Projections of a 134,000-man force by 2010 or a 240,000-man [Army] in the future are absurd," they wrote in a study in Military Review, the Army's professional journal, that's caused a stir.

Refighting the Last War: Afghanistan and the Vietnam Template

But Lt. Gen. Richard Formica, who until this fall ran the program to train the Afghan Army, thinks McChrystal's goal is "going to be difficult but achievable." Retired Lt. Gen. James Dubik, who ran the program to train the new Iraqi Army and went to Afghanistan earlier this year, cautiously echoes Formica's optimism, though, he warns, "the training program was very well thought out, but now it will have to be changed." The biggest hurdles, Dubik and others say, are the shortage of bases and training schools; a lack of senior and noncommissioned officers; too little equipment; a near-total absence of support functions like logistics, communications, and medical services; and the Army's deep ethnic divisions. The bottom line, says a former U.S. general involved in many training missions who didn't want to be named casting doubt on the effort: "I can't think of anything like this that's been done in less than 10 years."

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US holds military aid due to human rights issues - Manila Times

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By Frank Lloyd Tiongson, Reporter

The United States government reportedly withheld $2-million worth of military aid to the Philippines in 2009 due to concerns raised by human rights groups and churches in the US on the human rights record of the government. Rep. Neri Colmenares of Bayan Muna said the conditional aid was not released because of the failure of the administration of President Gloria Arroyo to account for the spate of human rights violations in the country.

Colmenares said officials from the US Department of State confirmed in a meeting with him in Washington, D.C. on October 27 that the conditioned amount has in fact been withheld.

However, the State Department officials, whose responsibility includes US policy toward the Philippines, admitted they were unable to report to the US Congress that the Philippine government had met the human rights conditions required for the release of the military aid. As such, the final $2 million in military assistance appropriated by the US Congress for the Philippine Government was not released.

The conditions include the (1) implementation of the recommendations of Professor Philip Alston, (2) the investigation and prosecution of military officials credibly alleged to be responsible for human rights violations, and (3) that violence and intimidation of legal organizations should not form part of the (Philippine military’s) policy.

Consequently, the US House of Representatives approved HR 3081 withholding the same military aid for the Philippines in 2010 on the basis of the same three conditions. The US Senate has approved the House spending bill, which shall form part of the 2010 Budget.

Colmenares said members of the US Congress took the cue from the recommendations of the UN Special Rapporteur Philip Alston that “the Philippine government must address the long-standing impunity for the killings, enforced disappearances, and other forms of human rights violations, and that extra-judicial executions and other human rights abuses do not form part of the policy of the military and the government.”

In 2008, following a hearing in the United States Senate on the human rights situation in the Philippines convened by Sen. Barabara Boxer (D), the US Congress voted to release the full amount of 2009 military aid to on the condition that the Philippine government was meeting the cited human rights conditions.

“Instead of heeding the conditions,” said Colmenares, “the Philippine government merely launched high-level lobbying efforts of the US Congress, led by Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita, President Arroyo’s Special Envoy Patricia Ann Paez and the Philippine Legislative Affairs Officer Ariel Penaranda. The failure of President Arroyo to investigate and prosecute Gen. Jovito Palparan defeated all their lobbying efforts,” said Colmenares.

The Filipino-American community and the US-based National Alliance on Filipino Concerns (NAFCON), who also met with US congressional officials, have similarly expressed outrage over the spending of their taxes to arm a repressive government.

Besides the UN report, Col-menares said that members of the US Congress are aware of the Supreme Court decision in. Sec. Gilbert Teodoro vs Manalo and the Melo Commission report implicating Gen. Palparan and other military officials in various human rights violations.

Colmenares also raised concerns with US State Department officials about progress on the US-Philippines Defense Reform Program, a large US funding for the modernization and reform of the Armed Forces of the Philippines, citing the on-going impunity for human rights abuses. He called for the end to the funding considering the human rights record of the Armed Forces and its cover up of the perpetrators of human rights abuses.

The Philippines Defense Reform Program began in 2003 in cooperation with the US military and is funded, in part, by the US Congress. The State Department committed to inquire about the said funding from the Pentagon. The Pentagon has been criticized in the US for implementing aid projects, a purely civilian function.

Colmenares was invited to the US to give a talk at the National Convention of the National Lawyers Guild.

He also met with representatives from the office of influential Democrats Sen. Barbara Boxer from California, Congresswoman Nita Lowey, head of the House Appropriation Sub-committee on Foreign Operations, Rep. Howard Berman, Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and other offices of the US House of Representatives and Senate to express concern over the $30-million military aid to the Philippines.

He also raised the same concerns to Sen. Harry Reid, the Majority Leader of the US Senate, through his representative during a meeting in his office in the US Capitol.

U.S. General Named to Oversee Training of Afghan Forces - washingtonpost.com

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By John Milburn
Associated Press
Saturday, October 10, 2009

TOPEKA, Kan., Oct. 9 -- President Obama has nominated the commander of Fort Leavenworth to lead U.S. and NATO efforts to train Afghan forces.

Lt. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV would join the war's top U.S. commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, if confirmed by the Senate this fall. McChrystal is pushing for more help in developing Afghanistan's fledging military.

Caldwell has led the Kansas post since July 2007, and he guided development of the U.S. Army's plans for training foreign security forces. His new position would focus on training local army and police forces in Afghanistan to fight the Taliban, al-Qaeda and other terrorists.

John Nagl, president of the Center for a New American Security in Washington, said Friday that Caldwell's nomination is a recognition by the Pentagon of the importance of the mission, elevating the command from a two-star to a three-star general. Nagl noted the deployment of a 82nd Airborne Division brigade to train Afghan forces, but he said more troops and resources will be needed.

"He's got the right skill sets to make a huge difference," Nagl, a former Army officer, said of Caldwell.

The nomination, announced late Thursday, comes as Obama reviews McChrystal's assessment of the war and the need to develop Afghanistan's military to fight a resurgent Taliban.

In his assessment, McChrystal said that Afghan forces aren't large enough to meet the demands of the war and that development is vital to the strategy for sustainable security and stability in the country. He said the progress by Afghan forces over the next 12 to 18 months is critical to preserve international support.

McChrystal advocates accelerating growth of the Afghan forces from 200,000 soldiers to 400,000. But efforts to train those units have been hindered by a lack of discipline, widespread corruption and illiteracy.

House Armed Services Chairman Ike Skelton (D-Mo.) called Caldwell "an excellent educator and trainer" while overseeing Fort Leavenworth and its Command and General Staff College, where the Army's majors receive advanced training.

"He did a great job in command of Fort Leavenworth and will do great things in his new post," Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) said Friday. "I am confident the president's new command team can develop and implement an effective strategy to regain momentum in Afghanistan."

This is the second time in three years that a president has picked Fort Leavenworth's commander for key war commands. Gen. David H. Petraeus was promoted in 2007, and he is now commander of the U.S. Central Command, which oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Caldwell and McChrystal were classmates at West Point and graduated in 1976.

CRS — Direct Overt U.S. Aid and Military Reimbursements to Pakistan, FY2002-FY2010

Direct Overt U.S. Aid and Military Reimbursements to Pakistan, FY2002-FY2010 (PDF; 51 KB)
Source: Congressional Research Service (via Secrecy News/Federation of American Scientists)

Military Analysts Expect Long-Term, Costly U.S. Effort in Afghanistan

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 9, 2009

As the Obama administration expands U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, military experts are warning that the United States is taking on security and political commitments that will last at least a decade and a cost that will probably eclipse that of the Iraq war.

Since the invasion of Afghanistan eight years ago, the United States has spent $223 billion on war-related funding for that country, according to the Congressional Research Service. Aid expenditures, excluding the cost of combat operations, have grown exponentially, from $982 million in 2003 to $9.3 billion last year.

The costs are almost certain to keep growing. The Obama administration is in the process of overhauling the U.S. approach to Afghanistan, putting its focus on long-term security, economic sustainability and development. That approach is also likely to require deployment of more American military personnel, at the very least to train additional Afghan security forces.

Later this month, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, is expected to present his analysis of the situation in the country. The analysis could prompt an increase in U.S. troop levels to help implement President Obama's new strategy.

Military experts insist that the additional resources are necessary. But many, including some advising McChrystal, say they fear the public has not been made aware of the significant commitments that come with Washington's new policies.

"We will need a large combat presence for many years to come, and we will probably need a large financial commitment longer than that," said Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow for defense policy at the Council on Foreign Relations and a member of the "strategic assessment" team advising McChrystal. The expansion of the Afghan security force that the general will recommend to secure the country "will inevitably cost much more than any imaginable Afghan government is going to be able to afford on its own," Biddle added.

"Afghan forces will need $4 billion a year for another decade, with a like sum for development," said Bing West, a former assistant secretary of defense and combat Marine who has chronicled the Iraq and Afghan wars. Bing said the danger is that Congress is "so generous in support of our own forces today, it may not support the aid needed for progress in Afghanistan tomorrow."

Some members of Congress are worried. The House Appropriations Committee said in its report on the fiscal 2010 defense appropriations bill that its members are "concerned about the prospects for an open-ended U.S. commitment to bring stability to a country that has a decades-long history of successfully rebuffing foreign military intervention and attempts to influence internal politics."

The Afghan government has made some political and military progress since 2001, but the Taliban insurgency has been reinvigorated.

Anthony H. Cordesman, another member of McChrystal's advisory group and a national security expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told reporters recently that even with military gains in the next 12 to 18 months, it would take years to reduce sharply the threat from the Taliban and other insurgent forces.

The task that the United States has taken on in Afghanistan is in many ways more difficult than the one it has encountered in Iraq, where the U.S. government has spent $684 billion in war-related funding.

In a 2008 study that ranked the weakest states in the developing world, the Brookings Institution rated Afghanistan second only to Somalia. Afghanistan's gross domestic product in 2008 was $23 billion, with about $3 billion coming from opium production, according to the CIA's World Factbook. Oil-producing Iraq had a GDP of $113 billion.

Afghanistan's central government takes in roughly $890 million in annual revenue, according to the World Factbook. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has pointed out that Afghanistan's national budget cannot support the $2 billion needed today for the country's army and police force.

Dutch Army Brig. Gen. Tom Middendorp, commander of the coalition task force in Afghanistan's southern Uruzgan province, described the region as virtually prehistoric.

"It's the poorest province of one of the poorest countries in the world. And if you walk through that province, it's like walking through the Old Testament," Middendorp told reporters recently. "There is enormous illiteracy in the province. More than 90 percent cannot write or read. So it's very basic, what you do there. And they have had 30 years of conflict."

Unlike in Iraq, where Obama has established a timeline for U.S. involvement, the president has not said when he would like to see troops withdrawn from Afghanistan.

White House officials emphasize that the burden is not that of the United States alone. The NATO-led force in the country has 61,000 troops from 42 countries; about 29,000 of those troops are American.

Still, military experts say the United States will not be able to shed its commitment easily.

The government has issued billions of dollars in contracts in recent years, underscoring the vast extent of work that U.S. officials are commissioning.

Among other purposes, contractors have been sought this summer to build a $25 million provincial Afghan National Police headquarters; maintain anti-personnel mine systems; design and build multimillion-dollar sections of roads; deliver by sea and air billions of dollars worth of military bulk cargo; and supervise a drug-eradication program.

One solicitation, issued by the Army Corps of Engineers, is aimed at finding a contractor to bring together Afghan economic, social, legal and political groups to help build the country's infrastructure. The contractor would work with Afghan government officials as well as representatives from private and nongovernmental organizations to establish a way to allocate resources for new projects.

"We are looking at two decades of supplying a few billion a year to Afghanistan," said Michael E. O'Hanlon, a senior fellow and military expert at the Brookings Institution, adding: "It's a reasonable guess that for 20 years, we essentially will have to fund half the Afghan budget." He described the price as reasonable, given that it may cost the United States $100 billion this year to continue fighting.

"We are creating a [long-term military aid] situation similar to the ones we have with Israel, Egypt and Jordan," he said.

U.S. and Britain Again Target Afghan Poppies

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 8, 2009

The U.S. and British governments plan to spend millions of dollars over the next two months to try to persuade Afghan farmers not to plant opium poppy, by far the country's most profitable cash crop and a major source of Taliban funding and official corruption.

By selling wheat seeds and fruit saplings to farmers at token prices, offering cheap credit, and paying poppy-farm laborers to work on roads and irrigation ditches, U.S. and British officials hope to provide alternatives before the planting season begins in early October. Many poppy farmers survive Afghanistan's harsh winters on loans advanced by drug traffickers and their associates, repaid with the spring harvest.

"We need a way to get money in [farmers'] hands right away," said a senior U.S. military official in Afghanistan.

The program replaces the Bush administration's focus on crop eradication, which "wasted hundreds of millions of dollars," according to Richard C. Holbrooke, the Obama administration's special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Destroying the crops succeeded only in "alienat[ing] poor farmers" and "driving people into the hands of the Taliban," he told reporters last week.

But many previous U.S.-funded crop-substitution programs have failed as well, from Asia to Latin America. A similar plan in Colombia, begun in the late 1990s, has barely made a dent in the level of cocaine production, although the country began to stabilize in recent years as its U.S.-trained military adopted new strategies against armed insurgents and civil institutions were strengthened.

Officials maintain that the new Afghan plan differs from unsuccessful "alternative" plans because it is an integral part of a military-development strategy that includes tens of thousands of U.S. troops to keep the Taliban and traffickers at bay while Afghan security forces are being trained. Plans call for hundreds of U.S. and international aid experts to work directly with farmers and local officials until the Afghan government has matured.

"The way [the assistance] is offered is important," said the senior U.S. military official, one of several who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the program on the record. "We are not providing subsidies . . . we are not just handing out cash." Farmers will have a "stake" in the program, he said, buying vouchers for seeds and fertilizers for about 10 percent of their value. Cash will be distributed only as credit or for work performed, the official added.

The United States and its allies in Afghanistan have long debated whether they should simply pay farmers for not planting poppy, a short-term fix that experts have deemed counterproductive. Farmers probably would take the money and "grow it anyways," said another U.S. official in Afghanistan. "We would likely drive the price up," he added, "as there would now be competition between the narcotics trade and the government. More farmers would therefore plant more poppy next year."

The epicenter of the overlapping wars against opium production and the Taliban is southern Afghanistan's Helmand province, where more than two-thirds of the country's poppy is grown. Thousands of Marines and British troops are in the midst of a major offensive there against entrenched insurgent forces and are providing security in villages as they are cleared.

"By this time next year," the senior military official said, "what we want to see is decreased poppy harvest. For us, that will be a metric of success. If we don't get conditions set now, in the next 60 days, we're not going to get the results we'd like."

The timeline is daunting. A planned "civilian surge" of hundreds of U.S. aid officials and agriculture experts has been slow to arrive. A micro-finance loan program is in the planning stages, and although $300 million in aid has been set aside for "rapid response" initiatives, including voucher programs for seeds and fertilizer, distribution has been sluggish. Mohammad Gulab Mangal, the governor of Helmand, whom U.S. officials have praised for encouraging local communities to turn away from poppy, held the first of eight scheduled outreach meetings only last week.

The plan also includes stepped-up efforts to interdict drug shipments and destroy stockpiles. The Drug Enforcement Administration expects to increase its manpower on the ground from 13 agents in 2008 to 81 by the end of this year. The Marine assault in Helmand, a DEA official in Kabul said, has "greatly enhanced" the agency's ability to take action there, he said.

The DEA is also training Afghan police in counternarcotics investigations, and the Justice Department is developing a program for Afghan prosecutors, although those efforts are said to be moving slowly. Officials disagree over how much of the profit from Afghanistan's opium exports goes directly into Taliban coffers. According to Holbrooke, most Taliban funding comes from wealthy individuals in the Persian Gulf region. But there is widespread agreement among U.S. officials that drug traffickers, warlords, corrupt government officials and insurgents work cooperatively to continue cultivation, processing and exports.

Some of the greatest challenges to the new strategy are at the level of farmhouse economics. More than 365,000 Afghan farm households earned about $730 million from poppy last year -- a fraction of the $3.4 billion earned from opium exports, according to the United Nations, but an amount nearly equal to the national government's $750 million in official revenue.

"The average annual cash income of opium-poppy growing households in 2007 was 53 percent higher than those of non-opium poppy growing households," the U.N. 2008 Afghanistan Opium Survey reported, and "farmers in Helmand reported the highest cash income," 70 percent of which came from poppy.

The average Helmand farmer cultivates less than an acre of land, with about half an acre planted in poppy yielding a gross income of about $2,000. After paying 45 percent of that in production costs, and 10 percent in local taxes, he nets about $900, more than twice what he would earn from wheat at current, albeit rising, prices.

Spring opium is harvested in May, after the plant flowers and seed capsules develop. The capsules are lanced and a latex-like opium gum oozes out and is gathered by hand. In Helmand, where production per acre is highest, capsules are lanced an average of four times in a labor-intensive process.

Extra workers travel from all over Afghanistan for the harvest, and the pay is higher than it is for virtually all other forms of unskilled labor. The average daily wage for construction work, the United Nations reported, is $3.60. Wheat harvesting earns $4.40, and opium "lancing/gum collection" pays $9.50. Wages in Helmand for lancing, $15 a day, are the highest in the country.

"What we're looking for is a way to compete with that," the senior military official said of the opium economy. "This is not easy. . . . There is no silver bullet."

Correspondent Pamela Constable in Kabul and staff writer Greg Jaffe contributed to this report.

Anti-Drug Aid Delayed as Leahy Blocks Positive Report on Mexico's Rights Record

By William Booth and Steve Fainaru
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, August 5, 2009

MEXICO CITY, Aug. 4 -- A key senator rejected a State Department plan to issue a report this week affirming that Mexico is respecting human rights in its war against drug traffickers, delaying the release of millions of dollars in U.S. anti-narcotics assistance, according to U.S. officials and congressional sources.

The State Department intended to send the favorable report on Mexico's human rights record to Congress in advance of President Obama's visit to Guadalajara for a summit of North American leaders this weekend, U.S. officials familiar with the report said.

That plan was scrapped after aides to Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Senate Appropriations foreign operations subcommittee, told State Department officials that the findings contradicted reports of human rights violations in Mexico, including torture and forced disappearances, in connection with the drug war.

At stake is more than $100 million in U.S. aid under the Merida Initiative, a three-year, $1.4 billion counternarcotics package begun by President George W. Bush in 2007. The law requires Congress to withhold 15 percent of most of the funds until the secretary of state reports that Mexico has made progress on human rights.

"Those requirements have not been met, so it is premature to send the report to Congress," Leahy said in a statement. "We had good faith discussions with Mexican and U.S. officials in reaching these requirements in the law, and I hope we can continue in that spirit."

Soaring Violence

The State Department's failure to push through the report is a setback for the U.S. and Mexican governments at a time when drug violence in Mexico continues to soar and President Felipe Calderón has come under growing pressure to revise his U.S.-backed anti-narcotics strategy, which relies heavily on the military to fight the cartels.

State Department officials said they are considering whether to rewrite the report before submitting it to Congress, probably after it reconvenes Sept. 7.

Mexico is likely to lose some of the money if it is not released by Sept. 30, U.S. officials said. U.S. aid under the Merida Initiative is used to buy helicopters and surveillance aircraft, train police, and improve intelligence-gathering in the fight against the drug cartels.

But congressional aides and human rights experts expressed doubt that the State Department would be able to make a compelling case that Mexico has made sufficient progress.

"In the area of prosecuting human rights abuses and ending the impunity, I don't believe we have seen any real progress," said Maureen Meyer, who oversees Mexico for the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights group that opposes release of the funds. "There is no sign that people are being held accountable. Every major human rights group has opposed releasing the money."

Push for Transparency

Mexican officials acknowledge that human rights violations have occurred in the fight against traffickers but say the cases are isolated.

The Mexican government is sensitive to U.S. criticism about rights violations because the military is a respected institution -- and many Mexican leaders say the U.S. government has not done enough to reduce consumption of illegal drugs in the United States or stem the flow of weapons and cash heading south.

In recent weeks, frustrated U.S. officials have pressed the Mexican government, including Defense Secretary Guillermo Galván Galván, to provide additional information, according to three officials involved in the campaign.

Late last week, after the report was completed, Mexican officials disclosed details of a number of cases in which they said soldiers had been tried on charges of human rights violations, according to a U.S. official. He said the State Department is trying to verify whether the soldiers were prosecuted and has not decided whether to include the new information.

"We are looking for the Mexicans to be as transparent as possible," said a U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the discussions. "We are pushing them to be more transparent than they think they can be. What happens when complaints are lodged? What do they do with them? What processes do they go through? What happens to individuals accused of abuses?"

A spokesman for the Mexican military said it would be unable to comment. Arturo Sarukhan, Mexico's ambassador to Washington, said Tuesday: "Mexico is unequivocally committed to ensuring the protection of human rights in the fight against drug-trafficking organizations." He added, "We are confident that this will be recognized by Congress."

140 Complaints a Month

Since Calderón launched his war against the cartels after taking office in December 2006, human rights complaints against the military have soared 600 percent, rising to 140 a month this year, according to government statistics. The National Human Rights Commission has issued reports on 26 cases involving the military since the beginning of Calderón's term, and it found evidence of torture in 17 of the cases.

In April, Human Rights Watch issued a report highlighting 17 cases, including several from 2007 and 2008, involving what it said were military abuses of more than 70 victims. The alleged abuses include killings, torture, rapes and arbitrary detentions. According to that report, "not one of the military investigations into these crimes has led to a conviction for even a single soldier on human rights violations."

On July 9, The Washington Post reported that the Mexican army had carried out numerous acts of torture, forced disappearances and illegal raids in pursuit of traffickers, according to court documents, political leaders and human rights monitors in Mexico's most conflicted regions.

With the State Department report imminent, many prominent human rights organizations in the United States and Mexico released advance statements saying that Mexico had failed to meet the Merida Initiative requirements and urging the U.S. government to withhold the money.

"Why is this so important? Because Mexico cannot win this fight against drug cartels without human rights protections. Human rights provisions are not a headache. They are absolutely critical to the success of the whole initiative," said José Miguel Vivanco, director of the Americas program at Human Rights Watch.

Carlos Cepeda, of the Miguel Agustín Pro Juarez Human Rights Center, said: "Mexico is not fulfilling the human rights requirements of the initiative and the government does not seem close to fulfilling them, and so of course it is a bad idea to release the funds. It would be a green light for further human rights abuses and for continued impunity for the military."

A Case Not Yet Made

Under Merida, the State Department is required to report to Congress on Mexico's progress in four areas: improving transparency and accountability; establishing regular consultations with civil institutions; ensuring that civilian and judicial authorities are prosecuting police and military officers credibly accused of violations; and prohibiting the use of testimony obtained through torture.

The most controversial of the provisions is determining whether the Mexican government is prosecuting human rights offenders. To date, the military has handled all allegations of crimes under its own justice system. U.S. officials and Mexican and international human rights groups say the Mexican military is secretive and hostile to scrutiny by outsiders.

Last month, amid growing allegations of abuses, Gen. Jaime Antonio López Portillo, head of the military's human rights office, held a news conference and announced that the military had prosecuted seven human rights cases dating to 1996, in which 12 members of the armed forces were found guilty of crimes, including homicide and kidnapping.

Only one of the completed cases appeared to date from the Calderón term. An additional 14 cases involving 53 troops were working their way through the military's judicial process, according to López Portillo.

The State Department had still intended to argue for the release of the Merida funds this week, U.S. officials said. But officials with the department's bureau of Western Hemisphere affairs got a chilly reception from Leahy's foreign policy expert, Tim Rieser, at a meeting last week. According to people familiar with the meeting, Rieser told officials that they had not made the case on any of the four areas required under Merida.

After receiving the additional information from Mexico, State Department officials went back to Rieser over the weekend to find out whether Leahy would support the report. He said he would not.

Next week Mexico's Supreme Court will address whether it is unconstitutional to try cases of human rights violations in military courts. The legal challenge, brought by the Miguel Agustín center, involves four civilians who were shot dead in Sinaloa state last year, allegedly by Mexican soldiers. Mexico's attorney general declined to take the case, and the military investigated the deaths instead.

No Limit in Place for Pending Request on Troops in Afghanistan

By Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 2, 2009

The nation's top military officer said yesterday that no limits have been placed on the number or types of troops the new U.S. commander in Afghanistan can request as he seeks to carry out a counterinsurgency strategy there.

Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in an interview that Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal is conducting a 60-day assessment of the Afghanistan campaign and has been advised to tell Mullen, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and President Obama, "Here's what I need."

"There are no preconditions associated with that," Mullen said. "He's . . . been told, 'In this assessment, you come back and ask for what you need.' There are certainly no intended limits with respect to that kind of request."

McChrystal's predecessor, Gen. David D. McKiernan, had an unmet request for an additional 10,000 U.S. troops to deploy next year. But McChrystal is not bound by that or any prior assessment, Mullen said. "General McChrystal gets to take a fresh view and a fresh look, and he will do that."

Mullen made the remarks on the same day The Washington Post reported that national security adviser James L. Jones had recently told U.S. military commanders in Afghanistan that the Obama administration seeks to hold troop levels steady and shift the focus to the country's economic development and governance. Mullen was not asked directly about the article, but his statements suggest that the military seeks to defend McChrystal's latitude to make the case for more troops if he sees the need. Mullen voiced a high level of confidence in the ability of McChrystal, who until recently worked for Mullen as the director of the Pentagon's Joint Staff, to carry out the new strategy.

Mullen said that he, Gates and McChrystal think that military force alone cannot win the war in Afghanistan and that if the foreign troop contingent in the country grows too big, it could create the impression that it is an occupation force. However, Mullen emphasized that he does not know where that threshold lies and that the level of forces in Afghanistan has long been too low to secure the population -- the main thrust of the counterinsurgency campaign.

"We have been under-resourced in Afghanistan almost from the beginning, certainly for the last several years," Mullen said. There are currently 57,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan and 34,000 non-U.S. allied troops. An increase of 21,000 U.S. troops ordered by President Obama is underway and will raise the overall total of American troops there to 68,000 this year.

One consequence of the limited numbers of troops has been a heavier reliance on airstrikes, resulting in Afghan civilian casualties. McChrystal has ordered allied troops to adopt measures to diminish civilian casualties -- breaking away from fighting in villages, for example, and risking civilian casualties only where necessary to save the lives of U.S. troops. Asked whether such restrictions could increase the danger for American forces or offer an advantage to insurgents who take shelter with civilians, Mullen said that was not the intention.

"We don't want them to feel as though they're restrained and have a hand tied behind their back at all," or to cause delay or hesitation, Mullen said of the troops. He stressed that taking action was "never a question when it's a matter of saving and protecting U.S. forces' lives." Still, he said, the goal is to "to make sure they think through three or four steps ahead in an operation . . . to do all they can to minimize civilian casualties."

The shortage of troops has been particularly acute in southern Afghanistan, where thousands of Marines launched a major operation today in the restive province of Helmand.

"I expect it to be a pretty tough fight in Helmand this year. . . . We haven't had significant numbers of forces there in the past, but on the upside of that, we have enough forces now to hold, not just to win, the fight," Mullen said. Taliban insurgents had effectively created a stalemate with U.S., other NATO and Afghan forces in Helmand and other parts of the south, commanders have said in recent months.

Mullen said he is "extremely concerned" about the paucity of Afghan National Army and Afghan police forces in the south and elsewhere and about the long-standing deficit in the number of foreign military trainers needed to expand their ranks.