How Many More US Troops Have to Die for a Broken Mission?

Afghan airport hit by suicide car bombing
BBC

At least six people have been killed in a suicide car bomb attack at Jalalabad airport in eastern Afghanistan, police say. They say several other people were injured when the bomb exploded at the gates of the airport.


The Afghan Taliban have said they carried out the attack.


Afghanistan has seen days of deadly protests following the burning of Muslim holy books at a US military base near Kabul a week ago.US officials say the books were destroyed inadvertently. All the casualties at the airport appeared to be civilians, said provincial police official Obaidullah Talwar.


The airport serves both civilian and international military aircraft. Meanwhile, Afghan authorities are still hunting a 25-year-old Afghan policeman believed to have shot dead two senior Nato officers at the interior ministry in Kabul on Saturday.


Afghan officials named the suspect as police intelligence officer Abdul Saboor from Parwan province.


The identities of the dead Nato officers have not been confirmed but they are believed to have been an American colonel and major.Reports said the gunman opened fire in a secure room in the ministry - one of the highest security buildings in the capital - at close range.


On Sunday, France and Germany followed the US and Britain in withdrawing civilian staff from Afghan government institutions in the wake of the killings.


President Hamid Karzai has appealed for calm amid anger at the burning of copies of the Koran at the Bagram air base.


In his televised address on Sunday, Mr Karzai "condemned with the strongest words" the treatment of the Korans but added: "Now that we have shown our feelings it is time to be calm and peaceful."

Afghanistan

We beat the Taliban by supporting the Northern Alliance back in 2001. We should have stopped then. We didn't and persisted to a draw in 2010, soon to be 2011. Too bad for us.

Too bad for the Afghans who supported the US in Afghanistan. Their lot will be dire, but there is no possible practical win for the US in Afghanistan. Karzai will have squirreled away enough money to escape and will probably save his life, many won't.

It is an ugly and predictable outcome, and anyone with any sense of the culture and history of Afghanistan has known this was coming.

Here is an interesting clip of French troops in Afghansitan.

NOTE: To the right are four additional videos related to the post. Check out the second video about the Taliban.
I will adjust the videos for all future posts.

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Taliban in high-level talks with Karzai government, sources say

By Karen DeYoung, Peter Finn and Craig Whitlock
Wednesday, October 6, 2010; 2:43 AM
Washington Post

Taliban representatives and the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai have begun secret, high-level talks over a negotiated end to the war, according to Afghan and Arab sources.

The talks follow inconclusive meetings, hosted by Saudi Arabia, that ended more than a year ago. While emphasizing the preliminary nature of the current discussions, the sources said that for the first time they believe that Taliban representatives are fully authorized to speak for the Quetta Shura, the Afghan Taliban organization based in Pakistan, and its leader, Mohammad Omar.

"They are very, very serious about finding a way out," one source close to the talks said of the Taliban.

Although Omar's representatives have long publicly insisted that negotiations were impossible until all foreign troops withdraw, a position seemingly buoyed by the Taliban's resilience on the battlefield, sources said the Quetta Shura has begun to talk about a comprehensive agreement that would include participation of some Taliban figures in the government and the withdrawal of U.S. and NATO troops on an agreed timeline.

The leadership knows "that they are going to be sidelined," the source said. "They know that more radical elements are being promoted within their rank and file outside their control. . . . All these things are making them absolutely sure that, regardless of [their success in] the war, they are not in a winning position."

A half-dozen sources directly involved in or on the margins of the talks agreed to discuss them on the condition of anonymity. All emphasized the preliminary nature of the talks, even as they differed on how specific they have been. All expressed concern that any public description of the meetings would undercut them.

"If you talk about it while you're doing it, it's not going to work," said one European official whose country has troops in Afghanistan.

Several sources said the discussions with the Quetta Shura do not include representatives of the Haqqani group, a separately led faction that U.S. intelligence considers particularly brutal and that has been the target of recently escalated U.S. drone attacks in northwestern Pakistan.

The Haqqani group is seen as more closely tied to the Pakistani intelligence service than the Quetta Shura, based in the southwestern Pakistani province of Baluchistan. But one Afghan source, reflecting tension between the two governments, said Pakistan's insistence on a central role in any negotiations has made talks difficult even with the Quetta group. "They try to keep very tight control," this source said of the Pakistanis.

Reports of the talks come amid what Afghan, Arab and European sources said they see as a distinct change of heart by the Obama administration toward full backing of negotiations. Although President Obama and his national security team have long said the war would not be won by military means alone, sources said the administration only recently appeared open to talks rather than resisting them.

"We did not have consensus, and there were some who thought they could do it militarily," said a second European official. The Europeans said the American shift began in the summer, as combat intensified with smaller-than-expected NATO gains despite the arrival of the full complement of new U.S. troops, amid rising U.S. public opposition to the war.

The United States' European partners in Afghanistan, with different histories and under far stronger domestic pressure to withdraw their troops, have always been more amenable to a negotiated settlement. "What it really boils down to is the Americans both supporting and in some cases maybe even participating in talking with the enemy," the first European official said. "If you strip everything away, that's the deal here. For so long, politically, it's been a deal breaker in the United States, and with some people it still is."

Whatever domestic political difficulties the administration may fear would result from a negotiated deal with the Taliban, this official said, would be resolved by ending the war earlier rather than later. "A successful policy solves the political problem," he said.

U.S. officials depicted a somewhat different progression leading to the same conclusion, insisting that the time for real negotiations has only now arrived. Although last fall's strategy review concluded that defeat of the Taliban was an unrealistic goal, it was followed this year by "a period of time where we've been focused on getting our inputs in place, moving resources into Afghanistan," a senior administration official said. The Afghan government has also been positioning itself for serious talks, he said, through international conferences in January and July, the convening of a "peace jirga," or council, in Kabul and last week's naming of the members of an official government reconciliation team.

"Now, yeah, there's a sense that we mean what we say" when voicing support for a political process, the official said. "The president's view is that we have to do these things at the same time. We can't take the approach that we're just going to be putting our foot on the gas on the military side of things and will get around to the political," he said.

Last month, Obama pressed his national security team to be more specific about what it meant by a political solution, and "reinforced" the need to be working simultaneously on the military and political sides of the equation, the official said.

Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, told reporters last week that high-level Taliban leaders had "sought to reach out" to the top level of the Karzai government. "This is how you end these kinds of insurgencies," he said.

The administration is under pressure to show progress in resolving the war before the deadline Obama has set of beginning a troop withdrawal next summer. "We all concur that this is a critical year in Afghanistan," Staffan de Mistura, the top U.N. representative in Afghanistan, said in remarks last week at the International Peace Institute in New York.

If the hypothetical endpoint is "that by July next year something will have to be clear," he said, the various players had to start thinking about how they were going to get there. "There is no military solution," he said. "We all know it. And by the way, the Taliban knows it too. . . . And there is only one format for the next months. . . . It is political dialogue, reconciliation, deal."

He predicted "very rough months" ahead, "when the maximum pressure is being exercised . . . by both sides at the same time in order to have a better position in terms of the so-called dialogue." Among the potential roadblocks, he cited opposition from a resurgent Northern Alliance, the non-Pashtuns who overthrew the Taliban with U.S. assistance in 2001, and division of the Taliban into "several groups."

De Mistura and the United States' European partners have urged the administration to reach out more forcefully to other countries in the region - including Russia, India and Iran - to become part of a negotiated solution in Afghanistan.

"In Iran, publicly they say the [foreign] troops have to go," said one European official who met recently with officials in Tehran. "But they know that if we leave without an arrangement, there will be trouble for them."

Sources differed on the location, content and number of the renewed discussions, with one saying a recent session had been held in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. This source said the Taliban representatives had floated some peace terms, including exile for Omar in Saudi Arabia with protection and treatment as a former head of state. Others close to the talks, however, said that while the discussions appeared genuine, they were nowhere near that level of specificity.

A senior Saudi official said there had been no meetings his government was aware of in his country since last year's talks ended.

The Saudis have the potential to play a key role in the talks, for political and religious reasons. Saudi Arabia was one of only three countries, along with the UAE and Pakistan, to give diplomatic recognition to the Taliban government in Afghanistan before 2001. As custodians of the two holiest sites in Islam, and with their Wahhabi tradition, the Saudis may have more religious credibility to shepherd negotiations with the Taliban than other Muslim countries.

In the fall of 2008, the Saudis agreed to host a secret dialogue between Taliban and Karzai government representatives while saying they would not formally bless them unless the Taliban agreed to three conditions - a public rejection of al-Qaeda, recognition of the Afghan government and relinquishment of Taliban arms. Those remain Saudi conditions, shared by the Karzai government and the Obama administration. The Saudis sat in on the meetings and briefed interested parties, including the United States, on what was said.

Someone Did Not Pay-off Taliban Gang. Taliban Shows Who Owns the Night.

Taliban torch 50 Nato supply trucks on outskirts of Islamabad
At least seven killed in ambush near Pakistan capital on military supply convoy heading to Afghanistan

Declan Walsh in Islamabad
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 9 June 2010 09.15 BST

Suspected Taliban gunmen torched 50 Nato supply trucks on the outskirts of Islamabad last night , killing at least seven people, in the most audacious assault yet on the military supply chain in Afghanistan.

Militants have regularly ambushed western supply convoys near the Afghan border, but this was the first attack near the Pakistani capital.

Police said at least 10 gunmen struck just before midnight at a depot in Tarnol, on the Grand Trunk Road that links Rawalpindi with Peshawar. They opened fire on the trucks, killing drivers and security personnel, before setting them alight.

Police arrived, sparking an exchange of fire, and the attackers escaped to the west on motorbikes and in small pickup trucks. At first light, six hours later, flames were still licking through the hulks of charred military vehicles and fuel tankers. Plumes of thick black smoke rose into the sky near the capital.

The assault called into question security arrangements in the capital, whose streets have become clogged with police and military checkposts since the Taliban stepped up their assault last year.

Police officers combing the area said they had arrested 26 suspects. "We are still trying to find out what happened," said Shah Nawaz, the police chief at Tarnol station.

Pakistani police often indiscriminately arrest people after major incidents only to release them later. The interior minister, Rehman Malik, ordered an inquiry within three days.

The convoy originated in the port of Karachi, 700 miles to the south, and was due to climb over the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan. Over 75% of military supplies for western troops in Afghanistan and 40% of fuel needs pass through Pakistan.

The supplies include food and vehicle but not usually weapons or ammunition, which are ferried by air.

Ambushes on Nato convoys in Peshawar, the capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, have declined in recent months following concerted army operations in the nearby Khyber and Orakzai tribal areas.

The last attack was in April when militants torched a dozen trucks and killed four police in northern Punjab, between Islamabad and Peshawar.

Many of the Nato supply runs are managed by trucking families from the tribal belt, particularly Waziristan and Khyber. A police source in Karachi said they ensured safe passage by paying protection money to militant groups on the 1,200-mile route.

However, it is impossible to pay off every group along the road. "When you reach here, it's a free for all," said Rahimullah Yusufzai, a veteran journalist in Peshawar. "You can't pay everyone off; and some groups are ideologically committed and won't take money."

The attacks are a costly irritant to Nato and an embarrassment to Pakistani security forces, although they have a limited impact on western military supplies due to the high volume of traffic.

Still, the US has started to explore new trucking routes through Central Asia, although these may require compromise with Russia, the regional power.

Ugly in Afghanistan

Musharraf says Americans need to prepare for the likelihood that more U.S. troops will be needed in Afghanistan and that they will be there many years. The former president of Pakistan said so in Iowa Saturday.

Pervez Musharraf, who resigned under pressure last year, said it would be "disastrous" for the United States to pull out of Afghanistan now. If the Taliban are allowed to return to power, he said, they surely would allow al-Qaeda terrorists to rebuild strength in Afghanistan, destabilizing the region and posing a major threat to the United States.

Musharraf says we need to stay.A few days ago an Afghan soldier killed some Americans in their sleep. Today we have a bold attack where 8 Americans are killed and their Afghani police cohorts are kidnapped? Is this a new tactic? Infilltrate from within? Keep the Americans nervous, sleepin with one eye open, suspicious of their Afghani allies?

Is Musharraf right?


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Hat tip: Doug


Eight U.S. Soldiers Dead in Bold Attack in Afghanistan

By SABRINA TAVERNISE and SANGAR RAHIMI
Published: October 4, 2009 NY Times

KABUL, Afghanistan – Groups of tribal militia attacked two American outposts in eastern Afghanistan on Saturday, the American military said, killing eight American soldiers and two Afghan police officers in a bold attack that was the deadliest for American soldiers in months.

The attack took place on Saturday night in the Nuristan province, a remote area that shares a border with Pakistan.

Tribal fighters staged the attacks from a mosque and from a village close to the outposts, small bases shared by American and Afghan forces, the military said in a statement on Sunday. The military did not say whether the outposts had been overrun.

The commander of the American unit, Col. Randy George, called the strike "a complex attack in a difficult area."

U.S. troops have had trouble there before: nine American soldiers were killed when 200 insurgents stormed their small outpost in the village of Wanat in 2008.

The governor of Nuristan province, Jamaluddin Badar, reached by telephone on Sunday, said that 11 Afghan police officers, including the district police chief, had been kidnapped in the strike. He described one of the outposts as a district police station, and identified the attackers as Taliban fighters, not tribal militia.

The attack took place in the Kamdish district in the eastern part of the province, he said. The American military statement said American forces had "effectively repelled the attack and inflicted heavy enemy casualties," but did not give the location of the attack.

Mr. Badar said the fighting left at least five dead insurgents in the area. He believed the insurgents had come from Pakistan after military operations pushed them out of bases in the area, and that the operation was led by a Taliban commander in the area named Dost Muhammed.

A Taliban spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahed, claimed that Taliban fighters overrran the outposts. He said Taliban fighters were holding the district police chief, and an intelligence chief hostage. He said seven Taliban fighters had been killed, and that the fighters eventually withdrew because the area came under bombardment.

The area had suffered civilian casualties in the past, and villagers there are extremely wary of American forces.

American forces had planned to pull out of the sparsely populated area, as part of a stragetic shift to place more troops in heavily populated centers. The American military statement said that plan "remained unchanged."

The battle of Wanat in 2008 is being described as the ''Black Hawk Down'' of Afghanistan, with the 48 American soldiers and 24 Afghan soldiers outnumbered three to one in a four-hour firefight that left nine Americans dead and 27 wounded in one of the bloodiest days of the eight-year war.

Is it all about , dare I say, oil and gas?

Not enough troops in Afghanistan; Now what?

Keeping it real. The more the Taliban kill, the more encouraged they will become to kill more Americans. That is how they roll.

The Afghans will play a war of attrition longer than the US public will tolerate and the US military can afford. The Afghans have outlasted every adversary that has tried to beat them at that game on their turf. Afghanistan is a land locked tribal theme park that does not function as a country. It is a medieval narco-religious insane asylum where some good unfortunate people are trapped.

That is their misfortune. It is not our mission to help them. Theirs is a Darwinian fate. It is not our problem.

It is best to leave them alone.

If the Taliban make the mistake of allowing AQ to regroup in Afghanistan, we can respond in a way that the Taliban will regret.

In the not too distant past, the US military could have destroyed AQ camps at will, with weapons of our choice and killed them and their supporters on the cheap. That did not happen. Ask why not.

Who stopped the US from doing so? Americans stopped them. Government lawyers stopped them. American politicians stopped the US military from killing AQ in situ. If you choose not to kill your enemy and they escape and come back to kill you, you lose. You deserve to lose.

We spend hundreds of billions on weapon systems that can slaughter enemies wholesale. Use them. If we do not have the national stones to use those weapons, don't kid yourselves and think a GI knocking on an Afghan door is an acceptable alternative.

Go big or stay home.

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U.S. Military Says Its Force in Afghanistan Is Insufficient

By HELENE COOPER NY Times
Published: August 23, 2009

BAGRAM, Afghanistan — American military commanders with the NATO mission in Afghanistan told President Obama’s chief envoy to the region this weekend that they did not have enough troops to do their job, pushed past their limit by Taliban rebels who operate across borders.

The commanders emphasized problems in southern Afghanistan, where Taliban insurgents continue to bombard towns and villages with rockets despite a new influx of American troops, and in eastern Afghanistan, where the father-and-son-led Haqqani network of militants has become the main source of attacks against American troops and their Afghan allies.

The possibility that more troops will be needed in Afghanistan presents the Obama administration with another problem in dealing with a nearly eight-year war that has lost popularity at home, compounded by new questions over the credibility of the Afghan government, which has just held an as-yet inconclusive presidential election beset by complaints of fraud.

The assessments come as the top American commander in the country, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, has been working to complete a major war strategy review, and as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, described a worsening situation in Afghanistan despite the recent addition of 17,000 American troops ordered by the Obama administration and the extra security efforts surrounding the presidential election.

“I think it is serious and it is deteriorating,” Admiral Mullen said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” program. “The Taliban insurgency has gotten better, more sophisticated, in their tactics.” He added that General McChrystal was still completing his review and had not yet requested additional troops on top of the those added by Mr. Obama.

The American commanders in Afghanistan spoke this weekend with Richard C. Holbrooke, Mr. Obama’s special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Over the past two days, Mr. Holbrooke visited all four regional command centers in Afghanistan, and the message from all four followed similar lines: while the additional American troops, along with smaller increases from other NATO members, have had some benefit in the south, the numbers remain below what commanders need. The total number of American soldiers and Marines in Afghanistan is now about 57,000. It was unclear whether the commanders told Mr. Holbrooke exactly how many additional troops might be required.

Eastern Afghanistan, in particular, has been a trouble spot. On Sunday, during Mr. Holbrooke’s stop at the Bagram military base, Maj. Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti, commander of the United States and NATO forces in eastern Afghanistan, told him and visiting reporters that the Haqqani network was expanding its reach. “We’ve seen that expansion, and that’s part of what we’re fighting,” he said. American commanders believe that the network, whose leaders Jalaluddin Haqqani and his son Sirajuddin have been linked to Al Qaeda, are using sanctuaries in Pakistan to launch attacks against American and Afghan forces.

The problems in Afghanistan have been aggravated by what the American commanders call the Pakistani military’s limited response to the threat of militants based there. Although General Scaparrotti said that cooperation by Pakistan and the United States against the militants had improved recently, he stressed that it was important for the Pakistanis to keep up the pressure, particularly after the reported killing of the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, Baitullah Mehsud.

That echoed concerns from Obama administration officials who worry that with the absence of Mr. Mehsud, who was the Pakistani government’s enemy No. 1, the military would shift its emphasis away from the tribal areas where the Taliban and Al Qaeda operate. “They think it’s ‘game over,’ ” one senior administration official said. “It’s more like, ‘game over, next level.’ ”

The White House has been concerned about declining support for the war among the American public. After recent polls illustrating the decline, Admiral Mullen and Karl W. Eikenberry, a retired general who is the ambassador to Afghanistan, went on Sunday talk shows to discuss the direction of the mission.

“I’m certainly aware of the criticality of support of the American people for this war and in fact, any war,” Admiral Mullen said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “And so certainly the numbers are of concern. That said, the president’s given me and the American military a mission, and that focuses on a new strategy, new leadership, and we’re moving very much in that direction.”

He said, “I believe we’ve got to start to turn this thing around from a security standpoint in the next 12 to 18 months.”

Mr. Holbrooke visited regional command centers in Kandahar, Herat, Mazar-i-Sharif and Bagram on Saturday and Sunday. Speaking to Afghan reporters at the NATO base in Mazar-i-Sharif, Mr. Holbrooke said that part of the new strategy would include reaching out to members of the Taliban who show a willingness to lay down their arms. Many Taliban fighters, Mr. Holbrooke said, “fight because they’re misguided, or because they want a job.”

“Anyone who renounces Al Qaeda and comes back to work peacefully in the Afghan system,” he continued, “will be welcome.”

American lawmakers intensified their criticism of President Hamid Karzai, saying his government had not done enough to crack down on corruption and the drug trade that fuels the insurgency. Senator Robert P. Casey Jr., Democrat of Pennsylvania, told reporters at a dinner on Sunday at the American Embassy in Kabul that he had told Mr. Karzai, “There’s going to come a time when the patience of Americans will run out.” Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio, who was also at the dinner, said: “Time is not running out next week, but they have to show results. It’s the last chance.”

Concerns about fraud in the election have brought more complaints to Afghan officials. Mr. Karzai’s main challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, told a news conference in Kabul on Sunday that the number of suspected irregularities had been “alarming.”

Afghanistan’s Election Complaints Commission said Sunday that it had made a priority of investigating 35 complaints, including allegations of ballot stuffing, voter intimidation and violence. The commission, jointly led by Western and Afghan officials, said it had received 225 complaints of irregularities.

Carlotta Gall contributed reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan, and Eric Schmitt and Brian Knowlton from Washington.