History > 2007 > USA > War > Afghanistan (I)

In Pashmul, southwest of Kandahar,

residents survey what had been their home.

NATO troops,

in building a new road to improve security in the area,

razed homes and plowed under orchards and melon fields.

Photograph: Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

NATO's Afghan Struggle: Build, and Fight Taliban

NYT        13.1.2007

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/13/world/asia/13afghan.html

8 suspected Taliban

slain in Afghanistan

31.3.2007
AP
USA Today

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Suspected Taliban militants attacked a checkpoint manned by Afghan troops, leaving eight militants dead and an Afghan guard wounded, a statement from the U.S.-led coalition said Saturday.

Afghan troops had been manning a checkpoint in the southern province of Uruzgan when a large group of militants attacked their compound Thursday, the statement said.

"Afghan security guards aggressively fought off the attacking Taliban force in a pitched battle, killing eight Taliban fighters during a six-hour fire fight," it said. The incident could not be independently verified, due to the area's remoteness.

Separately, on Friday coalition and Afghan troops in southern Afghanistan detained a suspected local Taliban leader who had reportedly been involved in a March 9 assassination attempt on a powerful tribal elder in Kandahar province, a coalition statement said.

The militant, who was not named, was arrested alongside two other men in the Kandahar province village of Maranjan, the statement said.

A roadside blast on March 9 wounded Mullah Naqib, the head of the influential Alakozai tribe in Kandahar province, the coalition said.

Naqib, who heads one of the biggest tribes in southern Afghanistan, was attacked in his personal armored vehicle in Kandahar's Arghandab district.

8 suspected Taliban slain in Afghanistan, UT, 31.3.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2007-03-31-afghan-violence_N.htm

12 Afghan Militants

Killed in Clash With Coalition

March 25, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:00 a.m. ET
The New York Times

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) -- U.S.-led coalition and Afghan troops repelled an attack by insurgents in eastern Afghanistan, leaving 12 militants dead, a coalition statement said Sunday.

The clash happened Saturday after militants attacked a base used by coalition and Afghan troops along the Afghan-Pakistan border in Paktika province. Two coalition and two Afghan soldiers were wounded in the clash.

Separately, suspected Taliban insurgents clashed with villagers in western Afghanistan, leaving three militants killed and one villager wounded, an official said Sunday.

The clash occurred after militants attacked a group of Afghan and Indian engineers surveying a dam in Bala Buluk area of Farah province on Saturday, said Anwar Khan, a spokesman for the province's police chief.

Some 150 villagers came out to help the engineers and exchanged fire for some 20 minutes with militants, he said. Three militants were killed and one villager was wounded in the clash, Khan said.

Western Afghanistan is spared much of the violence that plagues the country's south and east. The area lies in a major heroin transport route and recently has seen a number of attacks on Afghan and NATO-led forces.

    12 Afghan Militants Killed in Clash With Coalition, NYT, 25.3.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Afghan-Violence.html?hp

Afghan Clashes

Kill 9 Suspected Taliban

March 24, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:52 a.m. ET
The New York Times

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (AP) -- Afghan security forces battled suspected Taliban insurgents in two separate clashes in southern Afghanistan, leaving nine militants and two police dead, officials said Saturday.

Militants attacked a police checkpoint near Tirin Kot in Uruzgan province on Saturday in a clash that left two police and six militants dead, said Gen. Mohammad Qasem, the provincial police chief.

Five other officers and 10 suspected Taliban were wounded in the fight, Qasem said. Police recovered the bodies of the militants along with their weapons, he said.

In neighboring Zabul province, militants ambushed a convoy carrying Afghan soldiers on Friday, said Gen. Mohammad Asif, the commander of the Afghan army in Zabul.

In the ensuing clash, three suspected Taliban were killed and six were wounded, Asif said. There were no ANA casualties and only one vehicle was damaged, he said.

The clashes follow the biggest independent operation ever by Afghan forces in the country's volatile south, which left up to 69 militants and seven police dead. The operation was part of a major joint push by NATO and Afghan troops against a rising threat from the Taliban inspired insurgency in the country's south.

Violence in Afghanistan has spiked over the last year, with Taliban militants setting off a record number of roadside and suicide attacks. U.S. and NATO officials have said they expect violence to again increase this spring and summer.

    Afghan Clashes Kill 9 Suspected Taliban, NYT, 24.3.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Afghan-Violence.html

Pentagon investigation

into Tillman death finds missteps

USA Today
AP

WASHINGTON (AP) — A Pentagon investigation will recommend that nine officers, including up to four generals, be held accountable for missteps in the aftermath of the friendly fire death of Army Ranger Pat Tillman in Afghanistan, senior defense officials said Friday.

The Defense Department inspector general will cite a range of errors and inappropriate conduct as the military probed the former football star's death on the battlefront in 2004, said one defense official.

The official, who like the others requested anonymity because the Army has not publicly released the information, said it appears senior military leaders may not have had all the facts or worked hard enough to get the facts of what happened on April 22, 2004, when Tillman was killed by members of his own platoon.

Dozens of soldiers — those immediately around Tillman at the scene of the shooting, his immediate superiors and high-ranking officers at a command post nearby — knew within minutes or hours that his death was fratricide.

Even so, the Army persisted in telling Tillman's family he was killed in a conventional ambush, including at his nationally televised memorial service 11 days later. It was five weeks before his family was told the truth, a delay the Army has blamed on procedural mistakes.

The latest investigation has focused on how high up the chain of command it was known that Tillman's death was caused by his own comrades. Officers from the rank of colonel and up will be blamed in the report, according to one officer who has been informed of the findings.

According to the officials, the report will not make charges or suggest punishments, but it will recommend the Army look at holding the nine officers accountable.

One defense official said it appears the inspector general will not conclude there was an orchestrated cover-up in the investigation.

Tillman's father, Pat, said Friday he had no intention of commenting on the inspector general's report until he had heard an Army briefing on Monday. That day, the Army plans to release the report and a second related to the killing.

The other report is by the Army Criminal Investigation Command, which will focus on whether a crime, such as negligent homicide, was committed when Tillman's own men shot him. One defense official said it appears the investigation did not find any criminal intent in the shooting.

Tillman's case drew worldwide attention in part because he had turned down a multimillion-dollar contract to play defensive back for the Arizona Cardinals in order to join the Army Rangers after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The report's release comes with the Bush administration under fire from the public and Congress for the war in Iraq. Though the Afghanistan conflict has not drawn nearly so much criticism, the report could add to the drumbeat of negative stories the administration has had to endure over the treatment of wounded soldiers and the long deployments of U.S. troops.

To date, the Army has punished seven people for the Tillman killing, but no one was court-martialed. Four soldiers received relatively minor punishments under military law, ranging from written reprimands to expulsion from the Rangers. One had his pay reduced and was effectively forced out of the Army.

The Army, which requested the inspector general review last year, said in a statement released Friday that it "plans to take appropriate actions after receiving the inspector general's report."

The officials declined to name any of the officers the report will implicate. The commander of Tillman's 75th Ranger Regiment was Col. James C. Nixon. Last year he was named director of operations at the Center for Special Operations at MacDill Air Force Base, Fla.

Nixon knew within about two days that Tillman's death was fratricide, another officer involved in the investigations told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

Previous investigations of the case have focused on the facts of the incident and sought to answer questions of whether it was a fratricide.

The report's findings were first reported on Friday by CBS News.

Tillman died in Afghanistan's Paktia province, along the Pakistan border, after his platoon was ordered to split into two groups and one of the units began firing. Tillman and an Afghan with him were killed. A specialist at the time of his death, he was posthumously promoted to corporal.

Since the incident, the Army has moved to improve the notification procedures and now requires an officer to review initial casualty information and verify that the families have been told the best, accurate information.

    Pentagon investigation into Tillman death finds missteps, UT, 23.3.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/sports/football/nfl/2007-03-23-tillman-investigation_N.htm

Almost 100 killed in Afghanistan

as attacks mount

Fri Mar 23, 2007 12:09PM EDT
Reuters

KABUL (Reuters) - At least 89 people, including 69 Taliban rebels, were killed in two days of fighting in Afghanistan, officials said on Friday, as violence soared with the onset of spring.

The Islamist rebels were killed in fighting with Afghan forces in the south on Thursday after the troops, backed by NATO forces, launched an offensive against the rebels in two areas in Girishk district of Helmand province.

Seven policemen were also killed and 19 Afghan soldiers wounded, Defense Ministry spokesman Zahir Azimi told a news conference, adding troops had begun a "cleaning up operation" after the attacks.

"Even though our forces did not have enough equipment like tanks and armed vehicles but with the weapons that they had ... they could inflict heavy losses on the enemy in several hours of fighting," Azimi said.

He said many rebel bodies still remained on the battlefield while the Taliban had taken away 10 of their fallen comrades. Seventeen guerrillas had also been arrested, Azimi added.

Elsewhere, 12 private Afghan security guards and an Afghan driver were killed in the southern province of Kandahar on Friday when the Taliban ambushed their convoy of supplies for coalition troops, their Afghan contractor said.

Fighting has intensified across Afghanistan after winter and analysts say 2007 is a make-or-break year for the Taliban as well as their opponents.

Last year was the bloodiest since the hardline Islamists were ousted by U.S.-led forces in 2001.

NATO and the Afghan armed forces have launched their largest offensive ever in Helmand, targeting the Taliban and drug lords who are reaping record crops for the second year running.

Operation Achilles in northern Helmand involves 4,500 NATO troops and 1,000 Afghans.

A statement from the coalition said NATO troops provided flank protection, air support and medical evacuation during Thursday's offensive.

"This particular component of Operation Achilles is being conducted to put pressure on Taliban extremists, foreign terrorists and their narco-trafficking criminal associates that continue to operate within the general population," it said.

Helmand is the main drug-producing region of Afghanistan, the world's leading producer of heroin.

Separately, a suicide bomber attacked a convoy of Western troops in the eastern province of Nangarhar on Friday and at least one soldier, a woman and a child were wounded, witnesses and officials said.

    Almost 100 killed in Afghanistan as attacks mount, R, 23.3.2007, http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSSP8188020070323

U.S. Pulls Marines Out of Afghanistan

March 23, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:12 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A group of Marines accused of shooting and killing civilians after a suicide bombing in Afghanistan is under U.S. investigation and has been ordered to leave the country early, officials said Friday.

Army Maj. Gen. Francis H. Kearney III, head of Special Operations Command Central, responsible for special operations in the Middle East and Central Asia, ordered the Marines out of Afghanistan and initiated an investigation into their conduct, said Lt. Col. Lou Leto, spokesman at Kearney's command headquarters.

A spokesman for the Marine unit, Maj. Cliff Gilmore, said they are in the process of leaving Afghanistan but he declined to provide details on the timing and new location, citing a need to preserve security.

    U.S. Pulls Marines Out of Afghanistan, NYT, 23.3.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Marines-Afghanistan.html

U.S. Diplomat

‘Optimistic’ About Afghanistan

March 13, 2007
The New York Times
By CARLOTTA GALL

KABUL, Afghanistan, March 12 — The departing American ambassador to Afghanistan, Ronald E. Neumann, said Monday that he did not see the Taliban as the big threat it appeared to represent a year or two ago, and that he was leaving feeling “reasonably optimistic” about the state of the insurgency and the country’s progress.

“We spent a lot of last year worrying about this year,” he told a small group of journalists in the refurbished old embassy building, which reopened recently. “We will certainly face hard fighting in the south,” he said, “but I am going away feeling reasonably optimistic.”

More British and American troops had been supplied for the effort, he noted, providing the needed military support for the anti-insurgency effort, especially in the southern part of the country by fighters associated with the former Taliban rulers.

“We will see a hard fight,” Mr. Neumann said, but added, “We have the basics of what it takes.”

The Taliban, who were ousted in late 2001, mounted a strong comeback last year, leading to fierce fighting with American and NATO forces. The Taliban also appear to have joined forces with drug traffickers in Helmand Province in the south.

The NATO troops who took control of southern Afghanistan last year began a large offensive in the area early this month.

Mr. Neumann said he did not believe that time was on the Taliban’s side. “I don’t see where the Taliban are going to increase,” he said.

Comparing the violence to that of Iraq, where he served in 2004 and 2005, he said there were no battleground cities in Afghanistan like Falluja that would require large-scale military operations to secure. In Afghanistan, “We are talking of protecting a town with 50 police,” he said.

“This does not tell me this is a 10-foot-tall movement,” he said. “It’s tough. It’s resilient. It’s dangerous. I just don’t see it as being that strong. It is still a race, but inch by inch the government is getting a little better.”

The ambassador said that the Afghan Army, which initially had been envisioned as a light force reliant on American allies, was being strengthened, with a goal of building it to 70,000 troops, and that it was being supplied with armored vehicles, aircraft and body armor.

The program to develop a police entity was two years behind that of the army, he said, but current plans also call for more support for the police. He said he was confident that Congress would approve the extra money needed for those efforts.

Of Pakistan, which has come under persistent criticism over the past year for its failure to stem cross-border infiltration by insurgents, he said, “We are getting more cooperation, and I think we need more cooperation.”

He said the Pakistani government should impose more control on the tribal areas along the Afghan border. “It will have to be done one piece at a time, and we need to help them bring control in the tribal areas,” he said, adding that he would like to see Pakistan pursue more Taliban leaders believed to be on its side of the border.

Mr. Neumann said people in Afghanistan and abroad should understand that it would take considerable time to see results in the country. It had taken four years to set up a military justice system for the Afghan National Army — from drafting the law to training legal personnel — before the army could hold its first court-martial, he said. Plans to train a civilian judiciary are proceeding, but the effects will not be felt on the ground even in a year’s time, he said.

International commitment remained high, however, and there were no signs of donor fatigue for Afghanistan, he said. Even though nations have been slow to meet their commitments to provide soldiers for the NATO peacekeeping force, none of the countries were talking of pulling out. “Inch by inch we are seeing more commitment,” Mr. Neumann said.

The Afghan government is also slowly moving in the right direction, he said. The new Parliament has been a generally positive addition, and there have been some improvement in the situation with provincial governors, some of whom were warlords who were seen as more powerful than President Hamid Karzai.

    U.S. Diplomat ‘Optimistic’ About Afghanistan, NYT, 13.3.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/13/world/asia/13afghan.html

Afghan Opium Poppy Cultivation

Could Rise

March 5, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 7:30 a.m. ET
The New York Times

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) -- Afghanistan's 2007 opium poppy cultivation could expand again after a record crop last year, the U.N. drug agency said Monday, underlining the weakness of an international-backed drive against the country's booming narcotics trade.

A report from the world body's Office on Drugs and Crime predicted a ''sharp increase'' in production in several provinces, including southern Helmand -- Afghanistan's largest poppy-growing region and an area wracked by growing Taliban attacks.

    Afghan Opium Poppy Cultivation Could Rise, NYT, 5.3.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Afghan-Drugs.html

16 Civilians Die

as U.S. Troops Fire on Afghan Road

March 5, 2007
The New York Times
By CARLOTTA GALL

KABUL, Afghanistan, March 4 — American troops opened fire on a highway filled with civilian cars and bystanders on Sunday, American and Afghan officials said, in an incident that the Americans said left 16 civilians dead and 24 wounded after a suicide car bombing in eastern Afghanistan. One American was also wounded.

The shooting sparked demonstrations, with local people blocking the highway, the main road east from the town of Jalalabad to the border with Pakistan. And there were differences in some of the accounts of the incident, with the Americans saying that the civilians were caught in cross-fire between the troops and militants, and Afghan witnesses and some authorities blaming the Americans for indiscriminately shooting at civilian vehicles in anger after the explosion.

The United States military said the unit came under fire after a suicide bomber detonated his explosive-laden car near their convoy “as part of a complex ambush involving enemy small-arms fire from several directions.”

Members of the unit, on patrol near Jalalabad airfield, returned fire, and the civilians were killed and wounded in the cross-fire during the battle, according to a statement from the military press office at Bagram Air Base, 40 miles north of Kabul.

“We regret the death of innocent Afghan citizens as a result of the Taliban extremists’ cowardly act,” Lt. Col. David Accetta, a military spokesman, said in the statement. “Once again the terrorists demonstrated their blatant disregard for human life by attacking coalition forces in a populated area, knowing full well that innocent Afghans would be killed and wounded in the attack.”

Yet some of the wounded interviewed in the hospital by news agencies said the only shooting came from the American troops. A hospital official, who asked not to be identified, said all the wounded were suffering from bullet wounds and not shrapnel from the bomb explosion.

Hundreds of Afghans blocked the road and threw rocks at police officers in protest afterward, with some demonstrators shouting “Death to America! Death to Karzai!” a reference to President Hamid Karzai, The Associated Press reported.

The shooting will be a setback for American forces in Afghanistan, who have been working to contain the continuing insurgent attacks, in particular roadside bombs and suicide attacks, and win the support of the people with reconstruction and development projects. Deadly riots shook Kabul last May after American troops were involved in a fatal car crash and then opened fire on the crowd.

Among the dead on Sunday morning were a woman and two children in their early teens, said Dr. Ajmal Pardez, the provincial director of health, speaking by telephone from the Jalalabad city hospital. He said the hospital received 10 dead and 25 wounded people from the incident, with four people in critical condition.

After the suicide attack, the Americans treated every car and person along the highway as a potential attacker, though none of the people showed hostile intent, Muhammad Khan Katawazi, the district chief of Shinwar, told The A.P.

“They were firing everywhere, and they even opened fire on 14 to 15 vehicles passing on the highway,” said Tur Gul, 38, who was standing on the roadside by a gas station and was shot twice in the right hand. “They opened fire on everybody, the ones inside the vehicles and the ones on foot.”

Some of the wounded interviewed by The A.P. said the soldiers opened fire indiscriminately on passing cars and pedestrians on the busy main road.

“When we parked our vehicle, when they passed us, they opened fire on our vehicle,” said 15-year-old Mohammad Ishaq, who was hit by two bullets, in the left arm and right ear. “It was a convoy of three American Humvees. All three Humvees were firing around.”

In other fighting, two British soldiers were killed Saturday in southern Afghanistan, the British Defense Ministry said Sunday. The men were involved in heavy fighting that has raged for three days in the town of Sangin, said Col. Tom Collins, a NATO spokesman in Kabul. Townspeople have fled the town and abandoned their shops as Taliban insurgents and British forces stationed there have been trading artillery and rocket fire, according to a resident of the area.

    16 Civilians Die as U.S. Troops Fire on Afghan Road, NYT, 5.3.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/05/world/asia/05afghan.html

Returning, Safe,

After a Year’s Service in Afghanistan

March 4, 2007
The New York Times
By KAREEM FAHIM

FORT DIX, N.J., March 2 — In person, Specialist Lourdes Siverio looked remarkably like the picture her mother painted of her while she was away.

Her mother, Gloria Muniz, held the painting above her head on Friday as Specialist Siverio’s National Guard unit marched crisply toward a reunion with loved ones. Then slowly, the painting dropped to the ground, and mother and daughter stood quietly, amid the whirl of tearful, laughing, shouting soldiers who had returned to New Jersey after more than a year in Afghanistan.

Specialist Siverio, 23, held on to Ms. Muniz with one hand. With the other, she dabbed tears from the cheek of her 13-year-old sister, Ruth Ruiz. The separation had been hard on the teenager. “It’s like I’ve been an only child,” Ruth said.

Specialist Siverio was among 80 soldiers from the 50th Personnel Services Battalion, based in Lawrenceville, who arrived at Fort Dix on Friday. Many of the returning soldiers were leaving the Guard. Others remained on active duty, and some re-enlisted.

In Afghanistan, they had mostly engaged the enemy of paperwork, functioning as a human resources and postal division for a United States contingent of more than 21,000: they delivered the mail, tracked the promotions and kept records of time spent on leave. None were killed, and none were seriously injured.

The danger they faced was mostly on the roads, although many of them were at Bagram Air Base on Tuesday when a suicide bomber blew himself up outside the base during a visit by Vice President Dick Cheney, killing at least 23 people.

They returned on the day the Army secretary, Francis J. Harvey, resigned because of revelations about inadequate treatment of wounded soldiers at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center; and a day after a panel found that members of the National Guard and Reserve did not receive enough money or equipment, though at times they have accounted for half the soldiers in Iraq.

There was little talk of those matters outside a recreation center at Fort Dix where relatives and friends held flags and balloons, and wore T-shirts that welcomed Daddy, or A. J., or someone else. The relatives smiled nervously and hid from the wind behind posters when the bus carrying the soldiers was delayed.

“I didn’t think of getting balloons,” an older woman said, until she was directed inside, where there were plenty.

Specialist Rosalie Martinsen’s mother, Tammy, had baked two apple pies, which sat waiting in a homey wicker basket. “It’s the best, flakiest crust,” said her father, Rob.

Then, with a chapel framing the background, the unit marched along a narrow road toward the whoops and hollers, and a woman screaming over and over, “That’s my baby!”

Inside the recreation center, alongside the video games and pool tables, a feast of sandwiches and pasta and mashed potatoes waited on long tables.

Sgt. Erick Rodriguez, 31, with one of his four children sitting in his lap, ate slowly from a plate piled high, as more than a dozen of his relatives watched every bite as if it were the first time they had seen him eat.

“What did you miss the most?” a woman in the group asked him. He rolled his eyes, and she changed the question. “O.K. What did you miss second?”

Unlike Sergeant Rodriguez, Sgt. Dawan Ginn, 24, had no one waiting for him; his family lives in Virginia. Returning home to uncertainty about his future, he decided to re-enlist. “I basically built my life around the military,” Sergeant Ginn said. Of Afghanistan, he said, “It’s a kind of messed up, poor country.” For half of his deployment, he had been stationed in Qatar.

Specialist Maladrique Wilson’s father was working Friday night, and Specialist Wilson, standing with other soldiers near the entrance to the recreation room, understood. He had made friends in the unit, but he had also observed the strains and the fights. He saw the letters of support from schoolchildren, and he wondered why there was not more support from adults.

“Afghanistan is a process in life you have to go through with strength,” Specialist Wilson said.

Specialist Samantha Nigro gave her family an equally grim assessment of Afghanistan, said her father, Joe. Specialist Nigro worked in the personnel department of the unit, where she processed identity cards. Others she knew handled death certificates.

Through Feb. 24, the number of United States military personnel killed in or around Afghanistan was 307, according to the Defense Department.

But Samantha was home. “Right now, we’re ecstatic,” her father said.

    Returning, Safe, After a Year’s Service in Afghanistan, NYT, 4.3.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/04/nyregion/04guard.html

Pressed by U.S.,

Pakistan Seizes a Taliban Chief

March 2, 2007
The New York Times
By CARLOTTA GALL

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, March 1 — The former Taliban defense minister was arrested in Pakistan on Monday, the day of Vice President Dick Cheney’s visit, two government officials said Thursday. He is the most important Taliban member to be captured since the American-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.

The man, Mullah Obaidullah, was a senior leader of the Afghan insurgency, which has battled American and NATO forces with increasing intensity over the last year.

He is one of the inner core around Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban leader. The leadership is believed to operate from the relative safety of Quetta, Pakistan, where Mullah Obaidullah was arrested.

It was not clear whether he was picked up before, during or after Mr. Cheney’s visit. But the timing may be significant because Mr. Cheney’s mission was intended to press Pakistan to do more to crack down on members of the Taliban and Al Qaeda who use Pakistan as a sanctuary.

Pakistan has come under rising criticism from American and NATO officials for acting against the Taliban and Al Qaeda only under pressure, conducting operations or making arrests timed for high-level official visits, then backing off.

While Mullah Obaidullah’s detention may be a sign of a new commitment by Pakistan to move against the Taliban leadership, the arrest also seemed to confirm Western and Afghan intelligence reports that the Taliban were using Pakistan, and particularly Quetta, to organize their insurgency.

Pakistani officials have strenuously denied that the Taliban leadership is based in Pakistan, and there was no official announcement of the detention. But two government officials confirmed the arrest.

A NATO spokesman in Afghanistan, Col. Tom Collins, said he was not aware of any arrest. American government officials in Washington confirmed the capture, but cautioned that the arrest was unlikely to deal a significant setback to the insurgents.

“He’s a big fish, but nobody around here thinks this will deal a permanent blow to the operations of the Taliban,” said one American government official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the arrest had not been formally announced.

Last year, NATO forces in southern Afghanistan bore the brunt of a resurgent Taliban. They have lost 85 service members since taking over command of southern Afghanistan in August, in suicide bombings, ambushes and often heavy fighting. Commanders and diplomats say it has become increasingly clear that control of the Taliban fighters traced back to Pakistan.

Over the past five months, Pakistan has come under more constant pressure for cooperation than ever, an American official in Afghanistan said recently. Democrats in Congress have raised the possibility of tying military assistance and other financial aid for Pakistan to its performance in fighting terrorism.

President Bush sent an unusually tough message to President Pervez Musharraf, timed to coincide with Mr. Cheney’s visit, senior administration officials said.

Pakistani officials answer the criticism by pointing out that their own military has suffered more than any other, losing more than 600 soldiers in fighting with the militants, before the campaigns bogged down and the government reached peace deals with some tribal leaders.

Pakistani intelligence services also assisted the United States military in tracking another top Taliban official, Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Osmani, who was killed Dec. 19 in an American airstrike in southern Afghanistan.

Mullah Osmani was the Taliban’s main financial official and was operating both in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and his death was considered an important blow to the insurgents, Colonel Collins said.

The former Taliban foreign minister, Mullah Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil, was detained by American forces in 2002 but was released in 2005 under a government reconciliation program. One of the Taliban’s top military commanders, Mullah Fazel, remains imprisoned in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, along with the former Taliban governor of Balkh Province.

Mullah Obaidullah is originally from Panjwai district of Kandahar Province in southern Afghanistan. As recently as December, he gave an interview to Reuters, boasting that the Taliban had gained in strength and could fight the world’s strongest armies, and threatening to step up suicide attacks against foreign military personnel in Afghanistan.

He was often mentioned as being among the four most senior men of what is known as the Quetta Council, the inner circle around Mullah Omar, which is thought to have based itself in or near the city, in southwestern Pakistan.

A former Taliban spokesman, Abdul Latif Hakimi, who was himself arrested in 2005 by the police in Quetta, said Mullah Obaidullah was one of only two people who had direct access to Mullah Omar. He also said that Mullah Obaidullah had personally ordered military operations, including the killing of a foreign aid official in Kabul in March 2005.

Bomb Kills 3 Near School

KABUL, Afghanistan, March 1 — A bomb exploded Thursday in a garbage bin on a crowded shopping street in Farah, in the southwest, killing three civilians and wounding more than 54, including 10 schoolchildren, said Dr. Mohammad Qasim Bayan, the director of health in Farah Province.

The bomb exploded just after 8 a.m. at a busy intersection. A police convoy was passing, and the Farah city police chief, Said Aqa Saqib, said he suspected it was a remote-controlled bomb aimed at the convoy.

Chief Saqib said violence was spilling over from Helmand Province, where the Taliban seized control of much of the north, and was aggravated by the government’s campaign to eradicate the poppy crop.

Abdul Waheed Wafa contributed reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan.

    Pressed by U.S., Pakistan Seizes a Taliban Chief, NYT, 2.3.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/02/world/asia/02taliban.html

News Analysis

Afghan Bombing

Sends a Danger Signal to U.S.

February 28, 2007
The New York Times
By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON, Feb. 27 — The audacity of a suicide-bomb attack on Tuesday at the gates of the main American base in Afghanistan during a visit by Vice President Dick Cheney underscores why President Bush sent him there — a deepening American concern that the Taliban and Al Qaeda are resurgent.

American officials insisted that the importance of the attack, by a single suicide bomber who blew himself up a mile away from where the vice president was staying, was primarily symbolic. It was more successful at grabbing headlines and filling television screens with a scene of carnage than at getting anywhere near Mr. Cheney.

But the strike nonetheless demonstrated that Al Qaeda and the Taliban appear stronger and more emboldened in the region than at any time since the American invasion of the country five years ago, and since the Bush administration claimed to have decimated much of their middle management. And it fed directly into the debate over who is to blame.

The leaders with whom Mr. Cheney met on his mission to Pakistan and Afghanistan have appeared increasingly incapable of controlling the chaos, and have pointed fingers at one another.

Mr. Cheney said the attack was a reminder that terrorists seek “to question the authority of the central government,” and argued that it underscored the need for a renewed American effort.

His critics, on the other hand, said the strike was another reminder of how Iraq had diverted the Bush administration from finishing the job in Afghanistan.

The blast Mr. Cheney said he heard from his quarters deep inside Bagram Air Base took a terrible toll. At least 23 people were killed, including an American soldier and an American contractor, along with a South Korean soldier.

About 20 Afghans died, including a 12-year-old boy. An additional two dozen or so were wounded.

By Tuesday evening, long after Mr. Cheney wrapped up his visit and headed home to the United States, it remained unclear whether the suicide bomber had known that Mr. Cheney was on the base at the time of the attack. One military official at United States Central Command, which oversees operations in Afghanistan, said he strongly believed that the bomber was unaware of Mr. Cheney’s presence.

In Washington, American officials said their intelligence had detected no specific threat against Mr. Cheney, whose entry into Afghanistan had been kept secret after an equally clandestine visit to Pakistan on Monday.

But word of his presence in Afghanistan leaked out on Monday after a snowstorm delayed his meeting with President Hamid Karzai, and Mr. Cheney decided to stay at Bagram Air Base overnight. That fact was widely reported on Internet sites and on radio programs that have significant audiences in Afghanistan. It was possible that the attack outside the gate at Bagram was arranged quickly, or redirected to the air base from another target.

The attack, which occurred between the perimeter of the base and the first American checkpoint, occurred at 10 a.m. Tuesday. An administration official said an initial American review had found that the attack “doesn’t look, at first pass, like something that was carefully planned out.”

The bomber appeared to have made his way past an Afghan-guarded gate. But American military officials in Afghanistan said the suicide bomber detonated his weapon before he got to the first United States checkpoint, at a point where fuel trucks and vehicles carrying other goods park outside the gates to await inspection before being sent in.

Master Sergeant Chris Fletcher, a spokesman for the military operation in Afghanistan, said in a telephone interview that the bomber “did not penetrate the outer ring of security.”

That account suggested that the security around the base had kept the bloodshed of an Afghanistan under attack by both Taliban and Qaeda forces outside the high walls of the base, the hub of American military activity in the country.

But it also suggested a widening spiral of insecurity in Afghanistan, which had nearly 140 suicide bombings last year, including in Kabul, making the conflict and tactics here increasingly reminiscent of the chaotic struggle in Iraq.

Critics have charged that the Iraq war has precluded the United States from sending sufficient forces to Afghanistan. Concerned about a spring Taliban offensive, the United States has increased its force in Afghanistan to about 26,000. More than 20,000 troops from other NATO nations are also deployed there.

The scenes that Mr. Cheney flew over on his way in and out of Bagram — the devastation outside the gate and the bombed-out landscape of Kabul — was a reminder of how far the reality of Afghanistan is from the goals that President Bush set just short of five years ago, in a speech at the Virginia Military Institute. At the time, Mr. Bush repeatedly invoked the memory of Gen. George C. Marshall, the man behind the reconstruction that followed World War II, in expressing confidence that a “stable government” and a “national army” would help to achieve peace in Afghanistan.

But in testimony on Tuesday in front of the Senate armed services committee, the new director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell, painted a grim picture of what he called a “pivotal year for Afghanistan,” in which the country’s leaders would have to “confront pervasive drug cultivation and trafficking, and, with NATO and the United States, arrest the resurgence of the Taliban.”

Mr. Cheney’s mission was to figure out how to bolster the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, and the NATO force, and to try to ease an openly hostile relationship between Mr. Karzai and another American ally, Gen. Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan. Mr. Karzai has argued that many of the attacks in Afghanistan have been launched from Pakistan. Mr. Musharraf has said Mr. Karzai is looking for a scapegoat.

Mr. McConnell’s assessment was grim: “Long-term prospects for eliminating the Taliban threat appear dim, so long as the sanctuary remains in Pakistan, and there are no encouraging signs that Pakistan is eliminating it. ‘’

Michael R. Gordon contributed reporting.

    Afghan Bombing Sends a Danger Signal to U.S., NYT, 28.2.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/28/washington/28security.html?hp

Bomber Kills 19

Outside U.S. Base in Afghanistan

February 27, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:37 a.m. ET
The New York Times

BAGRAM, Afghanistan (AP) -- A suicide bomber killed 19 people and wounded 11 outside the main U.S. military base in Afghanistan on Tuesday during a visit by Vice President Dick Cheney, though the vice president was apparently not in danger, U.S. and Afghan officials said.

The blast happened near the first security gate outside the base at Bagram, killing 19 people, said Khoja Mohammad Qasim Sayedi, chief of the province's public health department. Gov. Abdul Jabar Taqwa said ''18 to 20 dead bodies'' lay on the ground after the blast.

Maj. William Mitchell said it did not appear the explosion was intended as a threat to the vice president.

''He wasn't near the site of the explosion,'' Mitchell said. ''He was safely within the base at the time of the explosion.''

Mitchell said it appeared there were casualties from the blast, but he didn't immediately know how many.

Ajmall, a shopkeeper in the market outside the base, called the blast ''huge,'' and said it shook the small market area. Ajmall, who goes by one name, said those wounded in the blast were taken inside the U.S. base for treatment.

Khan Shirin, a private security guard, sobbed near the body of his relative, Farvez, a truck driver and the representative of a transport association that hauls goods for the U.S. base. Shirin said many of the people killed were truck drivers waiting to get inside the base.

Zemeri Bashary, the spokesman for the Interior Ministry, said the blast was caused by a suicide bomber, though he didn't know if it was a man on foot or a car bomb.

Cheney, who spent the night at Bagram, left the base about 90 minutes after the 10 a.m. blast. The explosion sent up a plume of smoke visible by reporters inside the base traveling with Cheney, and American military officials declared a ''red alert'' inside the base.

''The vice president is fine'' said his spokeswoman, Lea Anne McBride.

Cheney had been expected to meet with President Hamid Karzai on Tuesday in Kabul, 30 miles south of Bagram, after a planned meeting on Monday was canceled because of bad weather.

    Bomber Kills 19 Outside U.S. Base in Afghanistan, NYT, 27.2.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Afghan-Explosion.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

Hundreds of Taliban

massing to attack dam: official

Mon Feb 12, 2007 7:29AM EST
Reuters
By Saeed Ali Achakzai

SPIN BOLDAK, Afghanistan (Reuters) - At least 700 Taliban fighters have crossed from Pakistan into Afghanistan to reinforce guerrillas attacking a key dam, a major source of electricity and irrigation, a provincial governor said on Monday.

"We have got confirmed reports that they are Pakistani, Uzbek and Chechen nationals and have sneaked in," Helmand Governor Asadullah Wafa told Reuters by telephone.

The Kajaki dam has seen major fighting in recent weeks between the Taliban and NATO forces, mainly British and Dutch.

NATO-led troops have been conducting operations in the area for several months to allow reconstruction on the dam and the power transmission lines to boost output, after fighting halted refurbishment last year.

A spokesman for the NATO-led force confirmed rebel movements in the dam area, including across the border, but could not confirm the governor's numbers or any other details.

Built by the Soviets in 1953, the dam irrigates about 142,000 hectares (285,000 acres) of farmland and two hydroelectic plants built by the United States in 1975 have a capacity of 33 megawatts. A third plant is planned, which would almost double that capacity by 2009.

NATO, U.S. and Taliban commanders warn a major offensive will come in spring when the snows melt in a few months, after the bloodiest year since the hardline Islamists were ousted by a U.S.-led coalition in 2001.

PAKISTAN BACKS TALIBAN - GOVERNOR

More than 4,000 people died in fighting last year.

Wafa said the Taliban fighters were brought in by local commanders for a joint operation with al Qaeda.

"They are planning to destroy the Kajaki dam," he said, accusing Pakistan's military intelligence agency, ISI, of providing training and logistical support for the guerrillas.

"Pakistan is supporting the Taliban in order for them to keep fighting on in Afghanistan. They don't want Afghanistan's development and reconstruction," he said.

Pakistan denies continuing to support the Taliban, its former protege, but Afghan officials say it still does. The United States says the guerrillas benefit from safe havens in Pakistan and support from fellow Pashtun tribes, but also rejects charges Islamabad officially supports the resurgent rebels.

Wafa's comments came as Defense Secretary Robert Gates visited Pakistan and met President Pervez Musharraf briefly on his way home from NATO talks in Spain in which Afghanistan and calls for more foreign troops features prominently.

"We talked about the importance of seizing the offensive this spring to deal the Taliban and al Qaeda a strategic set-back," Gates told reporters afterwards.

He also said the United States would not repeat the mistake of letting extremists take control of Afghanistan.

"After the Soviets left the United States made a mistake. We neglected Afghanistan and extremism took control of that country," Gates told a news conference at the Chaklala military air base in the garrison city of Rawalpindi.

"The United States paid a price for that on Sept 11, 2001. We won't make that mistake again."

Several Taliban fighters were also killed on Monday in an attack targeting a senior guerrilla leader closely linked to the Islamist movement's fugitive leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, the U.S.-led coalition said in a statement.

It did not name the leader, nor say he was caught in the operation by U.S.-led troops.

The militants were killed near the town of Greshk in Helmand, a Taliban bastion and the main drug producing region of Afghanistan, the world's largest producer of heroin.

(Additional reporting by Kristin Roberts in Rawalpindi and Sayed Salhuddin in Kabul)

    Hundreds of Taliban massing to attack dam: official, R, 12.2.2007, http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSSP23361820070212

FACTBOX

-Afghanistan's battleground Kajaki dam

Mon Feb 12, 2007 7:01AM EST
Reuters

(Reuters) - At least 700 Taliban fighters have crossed from Pakistan into Afghanistan to attack a key dam, a major source of electricity, a provincial governor said on Monday.

Here are some key facts about the Kajaki dam, which has seen major fighting in recent weeks between the Taliban and NATO forces, mainly British and Dutch.

- Located on Helmand river in the province of the same name, the dam supplies most of the electricity to the southern cities of Kandahar, Lashkar Gah and surrounding areas, It irrigates about 142,000 hectares (285,000 acres) of farmland.

- It has been the scene of regular clashes between the Taliban and the international peacekeepers guarding it. Violence forced work on refurbishing the dam to stop in 2006.

- NATO forces have been engaging the Taliban in the last few weeks to establish a "security perimeter" around the dam site to enable repairs to commence.

- First constructed by the Soviets in 1953, the dam's hydroelectric plants, with a generating capacity of 33 megawatts, were installed by the United States in 1975.

- Part of the hydro-power system was damaged in U.S. bombing in late 2001, launched after the then ruling Taliban refused to hand over Osama bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders behind the September 11 attacks

- The United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which is funding the project, hopes to repair the two existing power generating units and add a third, almost doubling the amount of electricity generated. USAID, which is also financing the setting up of new power transmission lines, hopes that all the work will be completed in 2009.

Sources: Reuters; www.usaid.gov

    FACTBOX-Afghanistan's battleground Kajaki dam, R, 12.2.2007, http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSB75964820070212

American Takes Over

Command of NATO Force in Afghanistan

February 5, 2007
The New York Times
By CARLOTTA GALL

KABUL, Afghanistan, Feb. 4 — A senior American officer, Gen. Dan K. McNeill, took over command of the 35,000-member NATO force in Afghanistan from the departing British commander on Sunday, ahead of an expected spring offensive by a resurgent Taliban.

General McNeill inherits a force that has expanded its mission to cover all of Afghanistan and is still struggling to contain the Taliban. Although the group was largely defeated in 2002, it mounted a strong comeback last year, leading to the bloodiest fighting in the country since the beginning of the war in 2001.

The new commander will have some advantages his predecessor did not. He has been promised several thousand extra troops in the south, where much of the violence has been centered, although he will continue to have to work with some NATO countries that are restricting where their troops can be used.

The transfer of command came on a day when NATO forces sent a tough message to the Taliban, using an airstrike to kill a commander whose forces overran a town in southern Afghanistan last week.

General McNeill served as commander of United States-led coalition forces in Afghanistan from 2002 to 2003, long before NATO began to take over operations. He is returning for a one-year tour as commander of the United Nations-mandated International Security Assistance Force, drawn from 37 contributing nations.

His primary mission will be to facilitate the reconstruction of Afghanistan, so that the “Afghan people might enjoy self-determination, education, health, and the peaceful realization of their hopes and dreams,” he told a gathering at the change-of-command ceremony at NATO headquarters in Kabul on Sunday.

“We will quit neither post nor mission until the job is done or we are properly relieved,” he said. “We will not leave a fallen comrade.”

NATO troops expanded their mission to cover all of Afghanistan in 2006, taking over military operations in the south and absorbing mainly American forces in the east.

The departing NATO commander, Gen. David Richards, said in an interview before the ceremony that he expected a surge of violence as the Taliban prepared to carry out a spring offensive. But he said the NATO force, now reinforced by the extra troops that he repeatedly requested, was well-placed to defeat the Taliban militarily.

But in his speech before several hundred soldiers, diplomats and politicians, including the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, the general warned that full victory in Afghanistan would take more than military success. What was needed beyond that, he said, was more reconstruction and development, a good system of government and improved relations with Pakistan, which Afghanistan has accused of continuing to support the Taliban.

The Taliban warned Sunday that 2007 would be the bloodiest year for foreign troops in Afghanistan, in comments to Reuters that were apparently timed to the change of command. And in what may be the opening salvo of a new campaign of violence, gunmen suspected of being Taliban fighters killed two senior Muslim clerics in the southern city of Kandahar: the deputy head of the religious council, Maulavi Sayed Amam Mutawal, and the caretaker of Afghanistan’s holiest shrine, Shafi Akhund Zada, Agence France-Presse reported.

General Richards’s parting shot was an airstrike on Sunday morning, which occurred just 90 minutes before the change of command. The strike killed a Taliban commander, Mullah Abdul Ghafoor, who seized control of the town of Musa Qala in Helmand Province on Thursday night and detained local leaders and members of the police.

The precision-guided airstrike killed the commander and 10 of his guards as he was driving in an open area called Ghundai, outside the town, according to residents. There were no other casualties, they said. A NATO spokesman, Col. Tom Collins, confirmed that the strike killed a “key Taliban leader,” but he did not provide a name.

In October, the governor of Helmand negotiated a controversial agreement under which British troops within NATO and Taliban forces withdrew from the town, leaving a council of tribal elders in charge.

The agreement, which brought a temporary peace to the town but left the Taliban at large, signaled NATO’s search for more conciliatory ways of dealing with the insurgency. The accord was criticized by American officials and members of the Afghan government for giving in to the Taliban, but General Richards and diplomats from other NATO countries defended it as an important step in driving a wedge between the local population and the Taliban and encouraging Afghans to resolve their own security issues.

On Sunday, he praised the courage of the tribal elders for standing up to the Taliban and promised NATO’s support.

Despite the Americans’ criticism of the agreement, General McNeill said he did not intend to change that strategy and would not risk shedding the blood of British, Canadian and Dutch soldiers in the area if the elders could resolve the issue of the town’s control.

General McNeill’s appointment, and his previous tour conducting combat operations in Afghanistan, has raised concerns among some NATO countries that he will conduct a more aggressive operation. President Karzai welcomed him as a friend who was “with the Afghan people from the beginning of the war on terror.” Yet he is also remembered as the general in charge when two Afghan detainees died from beatings in American custody at Bagram Air Base in December 2002.

General Richards indicated that he doubted that his successor would significantly change the way NATO forces operated. He said that General McNeill would inherit a NATO plan and operation that the 37 contributing nations had signed up for, and that he would be under their orders. “Even if he was inclined to make radical changes, he can’t do it easily,” he said. “How he implements them on the ground is up to him.”

General McNeill is the highest-ranking American to serve in Afghanistan; his previous post was commanding general of the United States Army Forces Command. His appointment is accompanied by a significant increase in troops and resources for Afghanistan.

The Bush administration is asking Congress for $10.6 billion to train and equip the Afghan Army and the police force and for reconstruction. The general will also have under his command the 3,200 American troops whose tour of duty was extended last month and an additional 800 British and 1,000 Polish soldiers, providing him with a vital reserve force for the south and southeastern regions where the insurgency is strongest.

Some 14,000 American soldiers will be under his command within the NATO force in Afghanistan. An additional 11,000 American service members, who are training the Afghan Army and the police and conducting counterterrorism operations, will remain in Afghanistan under American two-star generals.

Under Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, the departing commander of American coalition forces, the 14,000 American soldiers have focused on training and working as partners with Afghan forces. They also have taken on operations that are focused as much on reconstruction as on combat.

General Richards said American forces were uniquely capable of combining military and development operations. “They’ll have a road coming into a valley the day after they have cleared it out of Taliban,” he said.

Other NATO forces have to catch up on combining reconstruction and military operations so that one flows directly from the other and does not allow a vacuum for the Taliban to exploit, General Eikenberry said in a recent interview.

“You can launch your military operation and then look over your shoulder and find that there are going to be extraordinary delays in delivering the nonmilitary means — and you could actually make things worse,” he said.

“It’s not about thinking how we are going to fight into the area — that can be the relatively easy part of it,” he said. The real challenge is to make Afghans feel they are connected to their government, he added.

NATO needs to combine more forces with Afghan forces in strategic places and urgently move forward with reconstruction and nonmilitary assistance if it is to counter the expected Taliban spring offensive, he said.

Taimoor Shah contributed reporting from Kandahar.

    American Takes Over Command of NATO Force in Afghanistan, NYT, 5.2.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/05/world/asia/05afghan.html

An Afghan’s Path

From Ally of U.S. to Drug Suspect

February 2, 2007
The New York Times
By JAMES RISEN

WASHINGTON, Feb. 1 — In April 2005, federal law enforcement officials summoned reporters to a Manhattan news conference to announce the capture of an Afghan drug lord and Taliban ally. While boasting that he was a big catch — the Asian counterpart of the Colombian cocaine legend Pablo Escobar — the officials left out some puzzling details, including why the Afghan, Haji Bashir Noorzai, had risked arrest by coming to New York.

Now, with Mr. Noorzai’s case likely to come to trial this year, a fuller story about the American government’s dealings with him is emerging.

Soon after the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, Mr. Noorzai agreed to cooperate with American officials, who hoped he could lead them to hidden Taliban weapons and leaders, according to current and former government officials and Mr. Noorzai’s American lawyer. The relationship soured, but American officials tried to renew it in 2004. A year later, Mr. Noorzai was secretly indicted and lured to New York, where he was arrested after nearly two weeks of talks with law enforcement and counterterrorism officials in a hotel.

In fighting the war on terrorism, government officials have often accepted trade-offs in developing relationships with informants with questionable backgrounds who might prove useful. As with Mr. Noorzai, it is often not clear whether the benefits outweigh the costs.

The government’s shifting views of Mr. Noorzai — from sought-after ally to notorious global criminal — parallels its evolving perspective on Afghanistan’s heroin trade.

In the first years after the United States invasion in late 2001, military and intelligence officials mostly chose to ignore opium production and instead dealt freely with warlords, including drug traffickers who promised information about members of the Taliban and Al Qaeda or offered security in the chaotic countryside. But in more recent years, as poppy production has soared and financed a revived Taliban insurgency that is threatening the country’s stability, the Americans have begun to take some more aggressive steps.

“In Afghanistan, finding terrorists has always trumped chasing drug traffickers,” said Bobby Charles, the former top counternarcotics official at the State Department.

He and other officials acknowledge that the United States initially may have had little choice other than to turn to tribal leaders with murky motives for help in bringing order to an essentially lawless society. But Mr. Charles pushed for the Bush administration to recognize suspected drug lords like Mr. Noorzai as a long-term security issue. “If we do not now take a hard second look at counternarcotics,” he said, “we will not get a third look.”

Administration officials say that they are working to develop a more effective drug strategy in Afghanistan, which now accounts for 82 percent of the world’s opium cultivation, according to a United Nations report last September. That could include broader eradication programs, alternative crop development and cracking down on drug lords, but any such efforts are complicated by fears that they could increase instability.

Federal prosecutors in New York handling Mr. Noorzai’s case refused to comment for this article, as did spokesmen for the Drug Enforcement Administration, Central Intelligence Agency and United States Central Command.

Mr. Noorzai, who has been held in a New York jail for nearly two years, has pleaded not guilty to charges that he smuggled heroin into New York and denies any involvement in drug trafficking. His New York lawyer, Ivan Fisher, argues that the arrest hurt the government’s ability to gain information about the escalating Taliban insurgency.

“Haji Bashir has been making efforts to reach working agreements with the Americans in Afghanistan since the 1990s,” Mr. Fisher said.

Several intelligence, counterterrorism and law enforcement officials confirm that American officials met repeatedly with Mr. Noorzai over the years. Because they provided few details about the substance of the talks, it is difficult to determine how useful Mr. Noorzai’s cooperation proved to be. He was not paid for his information, and the relationship was considered more informal, the officials said.

At times, there was confusion within the government about what to do with Mr. Noorzai. In 2002, while he was talking to the American officials in Afghanistan, a team at C.I.A. headquarters assigned to identify targets to capture or kill in Afghanistan wanted to put him on its list, one former intelligence official said. Like others, he would only speak on condition of anonymity because such discussions were classified.

The C.I.A. team was blocked, the former official recalled. Although he never received an explanation, the former official said that the Defense Department officials and American military commanders viewed counternarcotics efforts in Afghanistan at the time as a form of “mission creep” that would distract from the fight against terrorism.

Mr. Noorzai, a wealthy tribal leader in his mid-40s who lived with three wives and 13 children in Quetta, Pakistan, and also owns homes in Afghanistan and the United Arab Emirates, is from the same region that helped produce the Taliban. A native of Kandahar Province, he was a mujahedeen commander fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. In 1990, according to his lawyer, he agreed to help track down Stinger missiles provided to the Afghan resistance by the C.I.A.; agency officials were worried about their possible use by terrorists.

D.E.A. officials say that at the same time, Mr. Noorzai was a major figure in the Afghan drug trade, controlling poppy fields that supplied a significant share of the world’s heroin. He was also an early financial backer of the Taliban. Agency officials say he provided demolition materials, weapons and manpower in exchange for protection for his opium crops, heroin labs, smuggling routes and followers.

Mr. Noorzai was in Quetta when the Sept. 11 attacks occurred, and he returned soon after to Afghanistan, according to his lawyer. In November 2001, he met with men he described as American military officials at Spinboldak, near the Afghan-Pakistani border, Mr. Fisher said. Small teams of United States Special Forces and intelligence officers were in Afghanistan at the time, seeking the support of tribal leaders.

Mr. Noorzai was taken to Kandahar, where he was detained and questioned for six days by the Americans about Taliban officials and operations, his lawyer said. He agreed to work with them and was freed, and in late January 2002 he handed over 15 truckloads of weapons, including about 400 antiaircraft missiles, that had been hidden by the Taliban in his tribe’s territory, Mr. Fisher said.

Mr. Noorzai also offered to act as an intermediary between Taliban leaders and the Americans, his lawyer said. Mr. Noorzai said he helped persuade the Taliban’s former foreign minister, Wakil Ahmad Mutawakil — the son of the mullah in Mr. Noorzai’s hometown — to meet with the Americans. In February 2002, the Taliban official surrendered after what press accounts described as extensive negotiations and was sent to the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. He was freed in 2005.

Mr. Noorzai also persuaded a local tribal figure, Haji Birqet, to return to Afghanistan from Pakistan, the lawyer said. But he said the Americans, falsely warned that Mr. Birqet and Mr. Noorzai were plotting to attack United States forces, killed Mr. Birqet and wounded several family members in a raid on his compound.

Saying that his credibility had been hurt by the imprisonment of Mr. Mutawakil and that he was angered by the attack on Mr. Birqet, Mr. Noorzai broke off contact with the Americans and fled to his home in Pakistan, according to Mr. Fisher.

The government officials could not confirm whether Mr. Noorzai had in fact played a role in those negotiations. There may be another explanation for his exile, however. In May 2002, one of his tribal commanders was killed in an American raid along a drug-smuggling route that the Americans suspected was used to help the Taliban, and Mr. Noorzai may have feared for his own safety.

Nearly two years later, in January 2004, Mr. Charles, the State Department official, proposed placing him on President Bush’s list of foreign narcotics kingpins, for the most wanted drug lords around the world.

At that time, Mr. Charles recalled in an interview, no Afghan heroin traffickers were on the list, which he thought was a glaring omission. He suggested three names, including Mr. Noorzai’s, but said his recommendation was met with an awkward silence during an interagency meeting. He said there was resistance to placing Afghans on the list because countering the drug trade there was not an administration priority. Mr. Charles persisted, and in June 2004, Mr. Noorzai became the first Afghan on the list.

Two months later, a team of American contractors working for the Federal Bureau of Investigation contacted Mr. Noorzai and arranged a series of meetings with him in Pakistan and Dubai, according to several government officials and Mr. Noorzai’s lawyer. They wanted to win his cooperation and learn about Al Qaeda’s financial network and perhaps the whereabouts of the former Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar. The Americans met with Mr. Noorzai, but the talks fizzled because F.B.I. agents who were supposed to join them were unable to do so, one official said.

In 2005, the contractors, by then working for the D.E.A., reconnected with Mr. Noorzai and once again met with him in Dubai.

This time, however, the objective had changed. Mr. Noorzai had secretly been indicted by a federal grand jury in New York on drug smuggling charges in January 2005. Now the contractors needed to persuade Mr. Noorzai to come to the United States.

Mr. Fisher said the Americans were particularly interested in gaining Mr. Noorzai’s help in tracking the flow of money to the Taliban and Al Qaeda. They were seeking information about Mullah Omar and other Taliban figures. The Americans asked Mr. Noorzai to come to the United States to meet with their superiors, he added.

Mr. Noorzai’s lawyer said his client agreed to make the trip only after receiving assurances that he would not be arrested. Mr. Fisher also says that he has obtained transcripts from tape recordings made by the government at the sessions.

Mr. Noorzai flew to New York in April 2005 and was taken to an Embassy Suites hotel, where he was questioned for 13 days before being arrested, his lawyer said.

Mr. Noorzai has been charged with conspiring to import more than $50 million worth of heroin from Afghanistan and Pakistan into the United States and other countries. The indictment says that he imported heroin to New York in the late 1990s and that unnamed co-conspirators also did so in 2001 and 2002.

Carlotta Gall contributed reporting from Kabul.

    An Afghan’s Path From Ally of U.S. to Drug Suspect, NYT, 2.2.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/02/world/asia/02afghan.html

Bush to Seek More Aid

for Afghanistan

as Taliban Regroups

January 26, 2007
The New York Times
By HELENE COOPER
and DAVID S. CLOUD

BRUSSELS, Jan. 25 — President Bush plans to ask Congress for $10.6 billion in aid for Afghanistan, primarily to beef up the country’s security forces, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Thursday.

The aid request would come before what is expected to be another spring offensive by resurgent forces linked to the Taliban, the former rulers of Afghanistan. In Washington, the Pentagon announced Thursday that it was delaying the departure of a 3,200-soldier combat brigade from Afghanistan for as long as three months, increasing the American force level there to around 24,000. An additional 20,000 soldiers from other NATO countries are also deployed there.

The aid request would include $8.6 billion for training and equipping Afghan security forces and would go toward increasing the size of Afghanistan’s national army by 70,000 and its local police forces by 82,000, said a senior American official familiar with the issue.

An additional $2 billion would go to reconstruction projects like building roads, laying down electric power lines, development in rural areas, and counternarcotics efforts, administration officials said. The officials said that they planned to use some of the money to help Afghanistan and Pakistan battle the Taliban and other insurgents along the Afghan-Pakistan border.

President Bush is expected to make a formal request for the funds next month, after a year in which Taliban forces have carried out fierce attacks across the country, particularly in the south.

“The challenges of the last several months have demonstrated that we want to and we should redouble our efforts,” Ms. Rice told reporters aboard her flight to Brussels for a NATO meeting on Afghanistan, coming from a donors’ conference for Lebanon that was held in Paris.

President Bush announced two weeks ago that he was sending more than 20,000 additional troops to Iraq, where the United States already has about 132,000 troops.

The troops to remain longer in Afghanistan, from the Third Brigade of the 10th Mountain Division, provide commanders with more forces before an expected spring offensive by the Taliban. The unit was supposed to return to the United States next month. But commanders asked Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates for additional forces when he visited Kabul last week and he said at the time that he was inclined to support the request.

In a statement, the Army said the additional forces were necessary to “deny the Taliban a base of operations.”

Because another battalion is scheduled to leave Afghanistan shortly, the actual increase in American troop numbers as a result of holding over the 3,500-member brigade will be about 2,500 troops, said Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman.

The increase comes at the same time that the Bush administration is renewing pressure on European allies to increase their troops in Afghanistan and is aimed at quelling European concerns that the United States may soon draw down in Afghanistan to meet its growing troop commitments in Iraq. British, Canadian and Dutch troops have at times since last summer been in intense combat in southern Afghanistan, the Taliban’s heartland.

In addition, an American general, Dan K. McNeil, is taking command of the NATO mission in Afghanistan next month, taking over from a British officer.

The NATO-led force remains about 15 percent short of the troop and equipment levels pledged by its contributing nations, a point that is bound to be of contention during Friday’s scheduled NATO meeting in Brussels to discuss Afghanistan.

Mr. Gates has been more open to adding troops to Afghanistan than his predecessor, Donald H. Rumsfeld, who argued for holding down force levels. Mr. Gates has indicated that he favors aggressive action to root out the Taliban and has said repeatedly that Afghanistan cannot be permitted to fall back into chaos.

American officials say that Taliban fighters are mounting increasingly brazen cross-border attacks from Pakistan and are preparing to resume attacks in the spring, as they have done every year since the American invasion, which toppled the Taliban in 2001.

Since 2001, the United States has provided over $14.2 billion in aid to Afghanistan.

Helene Cooper reported from Brussels, and David S. Cloud from Washington.

    Bush to Seek More Aid for Afghanistan as Taliban Regroups, NYT, 26.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/26/world/asia/26afghan.html

Pakistani Role

Seen in Taliban Surge at Border

January 21, 2007
The New York Times
By CARLOTTA GALL

QUETTA, Pakistan — The most explosive question about the Taliban resurgence here along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan is this: Have Pakistani intelligence agencies been promoting the Islamic insurgency?

The government of Pakistan vehemently rejects the allegation and insists that it is fully committed to help American and NATO forces prevail against the Taliban militants who were driven from power in Afghanistan in 2001.

Western diplomats in both countries and Pakistani opposition figures say that Pakistani intelligence agencies — in particular the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence and Military Intelligence — have been supporting a Taliban restoration, motivated not only by Islamic fervor but also by a longstanding view that the jihadist movement allows them to assert greater influence on Pakistan’s vulnerable western flank.

More than two weeks of reporting along this frontier, including dozens of interviews with residents on each side of the porous border, leaves little doubt that Quetta is an important base for the Taliban, and found many signs that Pakistani authorities are encouraging the insurgents, if not sponsoring them.

The evidence is provided in fearful whispers, and it is anecdotal.

At Jamiya Islamiya, a religious school here in Quetta, Taliban sympathies are on flagrant display, and residents say students have gone with their teachers’ blessings to die in suicide bombings in Afghanistan.

Three families whose sons had died as suicide bombers in Afghanistan said they were afraid to talk about the deaths because of pressure from Pakistani intelligence agents. Local people say dozens of families have lost sons in Afghanistan as suicide bombers and fighters.

One former Taliban commander said in an interview that he had been jailed by Pakistani intelligence officials because he would not go to Afghanistan to fight. He said that, for Western and local consumption, his arrest had been billed as part of Pakistan’s crackdown on the Taliban in Pakistan. Former Taliban members who have refused to fight in Afghanistan have been arrested — or even mysteriously killed — after resisting pressure to re-enlist in the Taliban, Pakistani and Afghan tribal elders said.

“The Pakistanis are actively supporting the Taliban,” declared a Western diplomat in an interview in Kabul. He said he had seen an intelligence report of a recent meeting on the Afghan border between a senior Taliban commander and a retired colonel of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence.

Pakistanis and Afghans interviewed on the frontier, frightened by the long reach of Pakistan’s intelligence agencies, spoke only with assurances that they would not be named. Even then, they spoke cautiously.

The Pakistani military and intelligence services have for decades used religious parties as a convenient instrument to keep domestic political opponents at bay and for foreign policy adventures, said Husain Haqqani, a former adviser to several of Pakistan’s prime ministers and the author of a book on the relationship between the Islamists and the Pakistani security forces.

The religious parties recruited for the jihad in Kashmir and Afghanistan from the 1980s, when the Pakistani intelligence agencies ran the resistance by the mujahedeen and channeled money to them from the United States and Saudi Arabia to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, Mr. Haqqani said.

In return for help in Kashmir and Afghanistan the intelligence services would rig votes for the religious parties and allow them freedom to operate, he said.

“The religious parties provide them with recruits, personnel, cover and deniability,” Mr. Haqqani said in a telephone interview from Washington, where he is now a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The Inter-Services Intelligence once had an entire wing dedicated to training jihadis, he said. Today the religious parties probably have enough of their own people to do the training, but, he added, the I.S.I. so thoroughly monitors phone calls and people’s movements that it would be almost impossible for any religious party to operate a training camp without its knowledge.

“They trained the people who are at the heart of it all, and they have done nothing to roll back their protégés,” Mr. Haqqani said.

After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, President Pervez Musharraf, under strong American pressure, pledged to help root out Islamic extremism, and, as both head of the army and president, he has more direct control of the intelligence services than past civilian prime ministers. But according to several analysts, Pakistani intelligence officials believe it is more prudent to prepare for the day when Western troops leave Afghanistan.

Pakistan has long seen jihadi movements like the Taliban as a counter to Indian and Russian influence next door in Afghanistan, the Western diplomat and other analysts said, and as a way to provide Pakistan with “strategic depth,” or a friendly buffer on its western border.

In Pashtunabad, a warren of high mud-brick walls and narrow lanes in Quetta, the links of the government, religious parties and Taliban commanders to a local madrasa are thinly hidden, said a local opposition party member who lives in the neighborhood.

Three students from the madrasa went to Afghanistan recently on suicide missions, he said. The family of one of the men admitted that he had blown himself up but denied that he had attended the school. The man’s brother suggested that he had been forced into the mission and that someone had recruited him for payment.

“Nowadays people are getting money from somewhere and they are killing other people’s children,” he said. “We are afraid of this government,” he said. His father said he feared the same people would try to take his other son and asked that no family names be used.

President Musharraf relies on the religious party Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam, or J.U.I., which dominates this province, Baluchistan, as an important partner in the provincial and national parliaments.

At a madrasa, called simply Jamiya Islamiya, on winding Hajji Ghabi Road, a board in the courtyard proudly declares “Long Live Mullah Omar,” in praise of the Taliban leader, and “Long Live Fazlur Rehman,” the leader of J.U.I.

Members of the provincial government and Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam are frequent visitors to the school, the local opposition party member said, asking that his name not be used because he feared Pakistan’s intelligence services. People on motorbikes with green government license plates visit at night, he said, as do luxurious sport utility vehicles with blackened windows, a favorite of Taliban commanders.

Maulvi Noor Muhammad, a Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam representative from Baluchistan in the National Assembly, recently received a guest barefoot while sitting on the floor of a grubby district office in Quetta, a map of the world above him painted on the wall to represent his belief in worldwide Islamic revolution.

He denied providing the militants any logistical support. “The J.U.I. is not supporting the Taliban anymore,” he said. “We are only providing moral support. We pray for their success in ousting the foreign troops from the land of Afghanistan.”

On a recent morning, the deputy director of the Jamiya Islamiya madrasa, Qari Muhammad Ibrahim, declined to meet a female reporter for The New York Times but answered a question from a local male reporter.

He did not deny that some of the madrasa’s 280 students had gone to fight in Afghanistan. “In the Koran it is written that it is every Muslim’s right to fight jihad,” he said. “All we are telling them is what is in the Koran, and then it’s up to them to go to jihad.”

NATO officials and Western diplomats in Afghanistan have grown increasingly critical of Pakistan for allowing the Taliban leaders, commanders and soldiers to operate from their country, which has given an advantage to the insurgency in southern Afghanistan. In September, Gen. James L. Jones, then NATO’s supreme commander, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Quetta remained the headquarters of the Taliban movement.

Still, Pakistan has insisted that the Taliban leadership is not based in Quetta. “If there are Taliban in Quetta, they are few,” said Pakistan’s minister for information and broadcasting, Tariq Azim Khan. “You can count them on your fingers.”

American officials and Western diplomats noted that, when put under enough pressure, Pakistan had come through with flashes of cooperation. But that only seems to reinforce the view that Pakistan’s intelligence agencies are more in touch with what is going on in the Taliban insurgency than the government lets on publicly.

For instance, a senior Taliban leader, Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Osmani, who operated on both sides of the border, was killed in an airstrike in Afghanistan on Dec. 19, after Pakistan helped track him, an American official in Afghanistan said.

At the same time, a kind of dirty war is building between Afghan and Pakistani intelligence agencies. A senior Afghan intelligence official said one of its informers in Pakistan was recently killed and dumped in pieces in Peshawar, a border town. The Afghan intelligence service has also recently arrested two Afghan generals, one retired, who have been charged with spying for Pakistan, as well as a Pakistani suspected of being an intelligence agent.

President Musharraf has acknowledged that some retired Pakistani intelligence officials may still be involved in supporting their former protégés in the Taliban.

Hamid Gul, the former director general of Pakistani intelligence, remains a public and unapologetic supporter of the Taliban, visiting madrasas and speaking in support of jihad at graduation ceremonies.

Afghan intelligence officials recently produced a captured insurgent who said Mr. Gul facilitated his training and logistics through an office in the Pakistani town of Nowshera, in the North-West Frontier Province, west of the capital, Islamabad.

NATO and American officials in Afghanistan say there is also evidence of support from current midlevel Pakistani intelligence officials. Just how far up that support reaches remains in dispute.

At least five villages in Pishin, a district northwest of Quetta that stretches toward the Afghan border, lost sons in the recent fighting in Kandahar between the Taliban and NATO forces, opposition politicians said.

One village, Karbala, is a main center of support for the jihad, local people say. Unlike the other villages, which blend into the stark desertlike landscape with their mud-brick houses and compound walls, Karbala has lavish houses, mosques and madrasas, suggesting an unusual wealth.

Farther on, in the village of Bagarzai, lies the grave of Azizullah, a religious scholar who used only one name and acquired fame as a Taliban commander.

Only 25, he was killed with a group of 15 to 20 men in an airstrike in the Afghan province of Helmand on May 22, said his father, Hajji Abdul Hai. Thousands of people attended his funeral, including senior members of the provincial government, the father said.

Mr. Hai, 50, who is a Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam member, denied that his son had been persuaded to fight by anyone. “From the start it was his spirit to take part in jihad,” his father said. “It’s all to do with personal will. If someone agrees, then he goes. Even if someone wishes to, no one can stop him.”

It is an argument that supporters of the jihad use frequently. But for some of the families mourning their sons, there is no doubt that the madrasas and the religious parties are the first point of contact.

That was the conclusion reached by the family of Muhammad Daoud, a 22-year-old man from Pishin who disappeared more than a year ago.

“In our search we went to many places and everyone said different things,” said his father, Hajji Noora Gul. “We went to the madrasa in Pashtunabad, but no one was ready to tell us his whereabouts.”

“Even the madrasa people did not know,” he added. “Behind the curtain of the madrasa, maybe there are other people who do this. Maybe there are some businessmen who take them.”

Then, he said, a Taliban propaganda CD came out showing his son with a group of others taking an oath before the Taliban commander, Mullah Dadullah.

“He had a shawl over his head and was preparing for a suicide bombing,” Mr. Gul said. “He said, ‘I am fighting for God, and I am ready for this.’ ”

His eldest son, Allah Dad, 33, blamed the jihadi groups and the Inter-Services Intelligence. “We don’t know how he made contact with those jihadi groups,” he said. “There are some groups active in taking people to Afghanistan and they are active in Quetta.

“All Taliban are I.S.I. Taliban,” he added. “It is not possible to go to Afghanistan without the help of the I.S.I. Everyone says this.”

David Rohde contributed reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan.

    Pakistani Role Seen in Taliban Surge at Border, NYT, 21.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/21/world/asia/21quetta.html?hp&ex=1169442000&en=671457afad271bb2&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Commanders in Afghanistan Request More Troops

January 17, 2007
The New York Times
By DAVID S. CLOUD

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia, Jan. 16 — American and NATO military commanders in Afghanistan are worried about the resurgent Taliban insurgency and have asked for additional troops, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said today, adding that he was “sympathetic” to the request.

Mr. Gates said that the commanders had “indicated what they could do with different force levels,” but he would not say how many additional troops the commanders had asked for. He spoke to reporters at the end of a two-day visit to Afghanistan, before flying here for meetings with Saudi officials.

Mr. Gates said the troop request would be studied by Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who will consult with the chiefs of the other services and then make a recommendation.

The appeal for reinforcements comes a week after the Bush administration announced that it was sending more than 21,000 additional troops to Iraq, where the United States already has about 132,000 soldiers.

By contrast, the United States has about 21,000 troops in Afghanistan, working alongside 20,000 from other NATO nations.

Any significant increase in American force levels in Afghanistan could create severe manpower shortages in the Army, which is already under strain from five years of continuous deployments and is struggling to find the additional troops for Iraq.

Mr. Gates’s openness to the idea of sending more troops to both Afghanistan and Iraq is a sharp contrast with his predecessor, Donald H. Rumsfeld, who argued that withholding additional troops would speed the day when each country’s own army would take the lead in military and security operations.

But Mr. Gates has quickly shifted the boundaries of debate. He indicated during his visit to Kabul that he favored aggressive action to root out the Taliban, which American officials have said in recent days is mounting increasingly brazen cross-border attacks from Pakistan and is preparing to intensify its attacks in the spring, especially in the south.

“There’s no reason to sit back and let the Taliban regroup,” Mr. Gates said. “I think it’s very important that we not let this success in Afghanistan slip away from us.”

General Pace, who accompanied Mr. Gates to Afghanistan, has seemed open to the new thinking on the value of troop increases, even arguing it could help reduce strain on ground forces. “Clearly any kind of deployment of force is going to add to the short-term strain,” he said. But it was possible additional troops for Afghanistan would produce “a success, so you have to have less stress on the force for a longer period of time,” General Pace said.

Mr. Gates said that military planners needed to examine “what role additional forces might play and where they would be assigned” in Afghanistan. Pentagon officials would have to look at whether more forces were available, he added.

Lt. Gen Karl Eikenberry, the top American commander in Afghanistan, told reporters earlier this week that he wanted a 1,200-soldier battalion now midway through a four-month deployment to remain in Afghanistan beyond its planned departure date. Officials would not say how many more American troops General Eikenberry was seeking.

Mr. Gates met with Gen. David Richards, the British officer commanding NATO forces in Afghanistan, who has complained repeatedly that unmet pledges of troops and equipment from NATO countries have left him 10 to 15 percent short of the forces he requires.

“Clearly, there is a need to fulfill those commitments, and I’ll be asking them to do that” at a meeting of NATO defense ministers later this month in Spain. General Richards said.

NATO’s Afghanistan force is especially short of helicopters and airplanes for evacuating wounded and moving supplies. In addition, General Richards said he still has not received 1,200 promised troops to serve as a reserve force that he can deploy around Afghanistan on short notice.

A Polish battalion that is expected to arrive in March was originally meant to be that reserve force, but officials said it would instead be sent to eastern Afghanistan.

    Commanders in Afghanistan Request More Troops, NYT, 17.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/17/world/middleeast/17cnd-gates.html?hp&ex=1169096400&en=3338637b53675821&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Gates to consider more troops for Afghanistan

Wed Jan 17, 2007 7:27 AM ET
By Andrew Gray
The New York Times

BAGRAM, Afghanistan (Reuters) - Defense Secretary Robert Gates said on Wednesday he would consider sending more troops to Afghanistan where U.S. commanders say they expect the Taliban to step up attacks from Pakistani sanctuaries.

Gates, in Afghanistan to ensure commanders have the resources to counter an expected Taliban offensive in the spring, said it was very important the United States and its allies did not let the success achieved in Afghanistan slip away.

Violence in Afghanistan intensified last year to its bloodiest since U.S.-led forces overthrew the Taliban in 2001.

U.S. military commanders said attacks from Pakistan into Afghanistan had surged, several-fold in some areas, and the violence was expected to increase in the spring and summer.

Gates said he had discussed the situation with the commander of Afghanistan's NATO force, General David Richards, and others.

Asked if the commanders had made a case for more troops, he said: "Yes".

"They've indicated what they can do with different force levels," Gates told reporters at the main U.S. base in Afghanistan, at Bagram, north of Kabul, adding he would take the those ideas back to the U.S. joint chiefs of staff for study.

"At that point I'll make a recommendation to the president."

Asked how many more troops might be sent, he said: "It depends on different scenarios and those are the kinds of decisions that we're going to have to look at."

There are more than 40,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan, the highest level since 2001, about 22,000 of them American.

Gates arrived in Afghanistan late on Monday on his first trip to the country since taking over as defense secretary.

PAKISTANI SANCTUARIES

The surge of violence last year and fears of more when the weather gets warmer this year have thrown the spotlight on infiltration from Pakistan and Pakistan's efforts to stop it.

Gates said on Tuesday cross-border attacks from Pakistan were increasing.

U.S. military officials in Kabul told reporters command and control of the Afghan insurgency came from the Pakistani side of the border, where Pakistani forces have also been battling militants.

Training, financing, recruitment, indoctrination, regeneration and other support activities were also taking place in Pakistan, a U.S. military intelligence official said.

U.S. intelligence chief John Negroponte said last week it would be necessary to eliminate the Taliban safe havens in Pakistan's tribal areas to end the Afghan insurgency.

Pakistan was the main backer of the Taliban during the 1990s but officially stopped helping the hardline Islamists after the September 11 attacks, when it joined the U.S.-led war on terrorism.

But while Pakistan has arrested or killed hundreds of al Qaeda members, including several major figures, Afghanistan and some of its allies say it has failed to take effective action against Taliban leaders, their networks and sanctuaries.

Despite such doubts about Pakistani efforts, a NATO spokesman said on Wednesday efforts were being made to coordinate operations with Pakistan and the killing of a top Taliban commander in a U.S. air strike last month was an example of that.

The Taliban commander killed in the December 19 air strike in the southern Afghan province of Helmand, Akhtar Mohammad Osmani, was the most senior Taliban leader killed by U.S. forces since 2001. "The Pakistanis shared intelligence with us that led to the successful attack on Osmani," NATO spokesman Brigadier Richard Nugee told a news conference in Kabul.

He did not elaborate but also cited a Pakistani attack on a militant camp in its South Waziristan tribal region on Tuesday as an example of efforts to coordinate with Pakistan.

Gates said Pakistan was "an extraordinarily strong ally" of the United States in the war on terrorism but militancy on the Pakistani side of the border would have to be dealt with.

    Gates to consider more troops for Afghanistan, NYT, 17.1.2007, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=newsOne&storyID=2007-01-17T122717Z_01_ISL241073_RTRUKOC_0_US-AFGHAN-USA.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C1-TopStories-newsOne-2

U.S. Says Attacks

Are Surging in Afghanistan

January 16, 2007
The New York Times
By DAVID S. CLOUD

KABUL, Afghanistan, Jan. 15 — Senior American officials said Tuesday that they had seen a threefold surge in insurgent attacks in Afghanistan in recent months, caused by militants coming across the border with Pakistan, and they vowed to hold new talks with Pakistani officials on curbing the influx.

Of particular concern, the officials said, has been rise in attacks by Taliban and other militants launched from remote and largely ungoverned remote tribal areas in Pakistan into eastern Afghanistan, where most American combat forces are based.

“The border area is a problem,” said Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, who is making his first visit to Afghanistan since taking office. He told reporters after meeting with the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, that more attacks were “coming across the border,” including some from Al Qaeda networks.

Mr. Gates flew by helicopter on Tuesday to a small joint American-Afghan base in Khost province, less than a mile from the border.

In that part of the border region, there has been a threefold increase in cross-border attacks since September, according to a senior American intelligence officer.

Fighters “cross the border on a regular basis,” said Staff Sgt. Ronald Locklear, one of the 120 America soldiers at the base, which he said was being hit by rocket and mortar fire at least once a week. Other officials said they had evidence that Pakistani border guards ignored they infiltration of Taliban fighters.

Officials also said the Bush administration was planning to double its aid to Afghanistan for training security forces and reconstruction this year in an effort to quell an insurgency that military officials here said Tuesday showed few signs of abating.

The senior American commander, Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, told reporters after a meeting with Mr. Gates that he was “hopeful” that the Bush administration would back a much larger aid package for training Afghanistan security forces and for reconstruction projects.

Other officials said that the increased aid package would likely be at least twice last year’s level of nearly $3 billion, but that Bush administration still had to total up the final number.

The request for a substantial increase in aid, which would still have to be approved by Congress, is an indication of the growing American concern about the resurgence in attacks by Taliban fighters and other militants that began last summer. In the eastern part of Afghanistan, the attacks have continued at high levels even this winter, when fighting normally subsides, officials said.

On Jan. 10, in neighboring Paktika province, an estimated 130 fighters were killed by American airstrikes and artillery fire after crossing over the border in two large groups, officials said.

While praising Pakistan as a “strong ally,” Mr. Gates said the problem of Taliban and other fighters operating from Pakistan “clearly has to be pursued with the Pakistani government.”

General Eikenberry said that the “enemy is using both sides of the border” and that even after five years of pressing the Pakistani government to shut down Taliban infiltration, “there is no easy solution to the problem.”

The request for a substantial increase in Afghan aid is expected to be a part of a supplemental budget request for fiscal year 2007 for Iraq and Afghanistan and other military operations, which will likely exceed $100 billion, according to a summary of the Pentagon’s forthcoming request. comes at a time when the Bush administration is also sending more than 20,000 additional troops to Iraq.

American commanders say the surge in cross-border attacks has coincided with an agreement reached in September in which the Pakistani government pulled back its soldiers in North Waziristan in return for pledge from tribal elders not to shelter militants or allow them to engage in illegal behavior.

“We’re seeing evidence that the enemy is taking advantage of that agreement to launch attacks inside Afghanistan,” said Col. Thomas Collins, the chief spokesmen for American forces in Afghanistan.

In the 60 days before the September agreement, the American intelligence official said there were 40 cross-border attacks in Khost and Paktika, but in the two months after the agreement there were 140 attacks.

Shortly before Mr. Gates arrived along the border, the Pakistani Army announced that it had launched an airstrike on a suspected militant camp in South Waziristan, killing 25 to 30 militants that it said were Al Qaeda members, according to The Associated Press, which quoted a Pakistani Army spokesman.

General Eikenberry who is leaving his post as the senior American commander in Afghanistan this month, said American and NATO troops along with Afghan Army units had inflicted heavy casualties on the Taliban, which he said remained too weak to undertake anything other than hit-and-run attacks or suicide bombings.

The American military intelligence officer disclosed for the first time the statistics on the rise in insurgent attacks last year. There were 139 suicide attacks, up from 27 in 2005, and use of roadside bombs more than doubled to 1,677 last year from 783 in 2005. The number of what the military calls “direct attacks,” meaning attacks by insurgents using small arms, grenades and other weapons, increased to 4,542 last year from 1,558 in 2005.

But even with 21,000 American troops and another 20,000 soldiers from other NATO countries, military officials are pushing for more forces before spring, when the Taliban is widely expected to intensify its attacks.

General Eikenberry is seeking to extend the deployment of a 1,200-soldier American battalion, which is halfway through a four-month deployment. The unit, part of the 10th Mountain Division, based in Fort Drum, N.Y., is scheduled to go to Iraq in eight months, but General Eikenberry has argued he needs the additional forces to remain in Afghanistan.

Asked about increasing American troops levels in Afghanistan, where the Taliban resistance has been growing, Mr. Gates said that if military commanders sought more, “I would be strongly inclined to recommend that to the president.”

On Tuesday, he also urged other NATO counties to follow through on pledges to send more troops and equipment to Afghanistan. NATO governments still have not sent the additional 1,200 troops that Gen. David Richards, the British commander of NATO forces here, has requested to serve as reserve force that he can send wherever violence flares up around Afghanistan, according a NATO spokesman, Mark Laity.

    U.S. Says Attacks Are Surging in Afghanistan, NYT, 16.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/16/world/asia/16cnd-gates.html?hp&ex=1169010000&en=8a932d6274d79f47&ei=5094&partner=homepage

NATO's Afghan Struggle:

Build, and Fight Taliban

January 13, 2007
The New York Times
By CARLOTTA GALL

SPERWAN GHAR, Afghanistan — The road that cuts through the heart of Panjwai district here tells all that is going wrong with NATO’s war in Afghanistan.

To fight their way into this area and clear it of Taliban insurgents, NATO troops bulldozed through orchards, smashed down walls and even houses, and churned vineyards and melon fields to dust.

Reconstruction projects were planned, but never materialized. Now NATO countries are championing the thoroughfare as a $5 million gift to local people.

Displaced and buffeted by fighting since May, the Afghans are homeless, fearful and far from being won over. They say the road was built for the troops’ benefit and forced on them, at the cost of their land and livelihoods.

“We are compelled to be happy about the road,” said Hajji Baran, 48, a farmer from Panjwai. “They are building the road and they are not going to stop, but in fact we are not happy about it. We have been displaced for nine months and no one has asked us how are we managing. This is a kind of cruelty.

“In fact, we are selling our wives’ jewelry to support our families.”

The conflict over the road is just the most apparent of the many things that Afghans, diplomats and aid workers cite in explaining why NATO’s war looks uncertain in southern Afghanistan. Others include what local people see as the indiscriminate killing of civilians by NATO forces, and corruption and incompetence among local officials.

Panjwai and an adjoining district, Zhare, just west of Kandahar, the provincial capital, are considered vital because the Taliban presence there has directly threatened Kandahar, and thus all of southern Afghanistan.

Yet so far not much has gone according to plan.

There has been little coordination between the military operations and reconstruction projects, which has frustrated aid workers and diplomats almost as much as local people.

After NATO troops and United States Special Forces mounted their operation to clear the area of insurgents in September, the assistance programs were not ready. Then the troops pulled back, and the Taliban were active again within days.

“We are all scratching our heads as to why the aid has not rolled out faster,” said a Western diplomat familiar with Panjwai. “It’s not for a lack of resources. We are meeting basic needs, but when it comes to sustainable livelihoods and jobs, it’s not happening.”

NATO’s struggle to secure the area inevitably hampered reconstruction and deterred the thousands of displaced villagers from returning home. Aid workers who started to venture into the area to kick-start assistance programs complained of continued insecurity and even of coming under fire from NATO forces. The result was that very little assistance arrived.

“There was a lull, and for three weeks they did nothing,” said Andrew Douglas, operations manager of an agricultural development group in Afghanistan. “They were going round talking and handing out candy.” He did not want his organization named because his comments were personal remarks.

It took a second military operation at the end of the year finally to expel the Taliban. Already on everyone’s mind — in the government, the military, the police and among villagers — is how to stop the Taliban from infiltrating back for a new offensive in the spring, which in this southern region will come in February.

Without the support of the local people, that task will be virtually impossible, military and government officials and local elders said.

Now finally villagers are trickling home. Yet the mood is at best resigned.

“They bombed our orchards and fields and we have nothing now,” said Hajji Abdul Wahab Kutaisi, 65, a farmer from Pashmul. “They made a road through my land.”

His house was destroyed in the fighting and he and his extended family now live in two rented rooms in Kandahar. He said he had not received any compensation.

He was sitting with several other men on the stony ground in the Panjwai district police station waiting for permission from the military to work in his fields, close to a Canadian military checkpoint. “When we don’t inform them, they shoot at us,” he said. Minutes after he spoke a Canadian tank fired a round from the nearby base, shattering the calm, sunny morning.

“They did not come to bring peace for us, they came to destroy us,” said Hajji Abdul Ghafar, 60, an elder on the Sperwan village council, who was waiting for permission to pass through a checkpoint to reach his house. “There are 3,000 families hoping to go back to their houses. If they lose hope, this would be very bad for the government,” he warned.

“We are angry with both sides, the foreigners and the Taliban,” he added. “It is impossible to talk to the Taliban,” he said, shaking his head. “And the foreigners don’t listen to anyone.”

Sperwan Ghar, the district center of Panjwai, is a quiet, country one-street town, with small shops, two schools and a police station. For the NATO forces here, which are led by Canada, the town, at least, is a success story. By December it was peaceful, commerce had returned, the school was repaired and children were back in class.

Yet the place looks like a fortified camp, with soldiers and sandbags blocking the street, an armored vehicle parked outside the school, and guard posts on all the hills looking down into everyone’s yard. The local police admit the guard posts are not popular because they violate one of the most important codes of behavior for the Pashtun: privacy and respect for their women.

Maj. Stephen Murray, the acting military commander of the Provincial Reconstruction Team, a NATO unit, defended its efforts, saying the team had spent $100,000 in just a few weeks providing jobs for people in the cleanup.

The team members were assessing the battle damage and compensation claims with government officials, and consulting with village councils, he said. Rushing things would leave people out and only aggravate local tensions, he said.

“There are lots of challenges,” Major Murray said. “We have to go step by step.”

As for the new road, he said the military needed a straight road that was more easily secured. Over the past few months, Canadian troops were repeatedly ambushed on the old road, which twisted and turned through the hamlets and walled farmsteads. He is having intensive discussions with the local people to work out a fair deal for those whose land it crosses, he said.

Yet Pashmul, the village most affected by the road, remains one of the most unsettled areas of the two districts, partly because the population remains divided over whom to support, the Taliban or the foreigners.

The Afghan people will withhold their support until they can see some material assistance, said the development manager, Mr. Douglas. “The Afghans don’t trust anyone,” he added. “They have seen military coming in all colors before.”

Corrupt and ineffective local leaders have done as much to turn people against the government and its foreign backers as have any failings in reconstruction, said Joanna Nathan of the International Crisis Group, a research group.

At the same time it is becoming clear that development assistance to an area does not lead to security in a community or district, she said. NATO has mapped where the international assistance has gone, and found that there is little connection between the amount of aid spent on an area and the level of security, she said.

Regarding the Taliban, “they are not very popular, even in the south, but they have spread,” said Tom Koenigs, the head of the United Nations assistance mission in Afghanistan. “We have to be prepared to have these levels of conflict for some time.”

But that conflict increasingly threatens to alienate NATO’s local supporters. As suicide bombings have taken their toll on the troops, who took over command in southern Afghanistan from the Americans last year, the soldiers have frequently resorted to lethal force, calling in airstrikes and firing on approaching cars, often killing and wounding civilians and further worsening the public mood.

“They said we came to bring peace to this country,” said Abdur Rahim, 35, an auto mechanic, as he lay in a hospital bed. He was shot in the back by British soldiers after their convoy had been hit by a suicide bomber. The soldiers shot at least eight civilians as they drove through the town.

“Why are they shooting the people?” he asked. “Is this peace?”

After suffering 13 suicide bombings in 14 days in Kandahar, some Canadian soldiers had to be repatriated because they were reacting badly to the stress, according to one diplomat in Kabul.

“The people are saying, ‘If the British are scared, why did they come to our country?’ ” said Mullah Naqibullah, leader of one of Kandahar’s largest tribes. “They should not view the people as the same as the Taliban.”

Then there is the nagging feeling behind every conversation in southern Afghanistan that the Taliban cannot be beaten and that the government will have to find a way to accommodate them.

Several important elders like Mullah Naqibullah and a former Taliban commander, Mullah Abdul Salam Rocketi, advocate talking to the Taliban.

At the very least, there should be stronger protection for those Taliban commanders who want to come over to the government, said Mullah Rocketi, a member of Parliament, because at the moment few trust the government and the foreign forces not to imprison them.

The biggest test for NATO forces, together with their Afghan military and police counterparts, is to prevent the Taliban from returning. With the ordinary people still ambivalent, that job is going to be much harder.

“We need a huge effort,” said the United Nations official, Mr. Koenigs. “We cannot believe it will resolve itself at the pace we have now.”

    NATO's Afghan Struggle: Build, and Fight Taliban, NYT, 13.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/13/world/asia/13afghan.html

Pentagon chief

plans Afghan visit to boost Karzai

Fri Jan 12, 2007 1:46 PM ET
Reuters



WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Defense Secretary Robert Gates on Friday said he would visit Afghanistan in the next few days, seeking ways to boost President Hamid Karzai's government and stop resurgent Taliban militants.

The Taliban re-emerged as a serious threat in Afghanistan last year, with its hardline Islamist militants fighting deadly battles with NATO-led forces in the south of the country.

"I'm going back out to the region myself in a few days and I'm starting in Afghanistan," Gates told the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee, responding to a question about the U.S. military's ability to meet its global commitments.

The visit will be Gates' first trip to Afghanistan since taking over from Donald Rumsfeld last month as Pentagon chief.

"One of the things I'm focused on is what will it take to reverse the trendline in Afghanistan and to strengthen the Karzai government," Gates said.

More than 4,000 people were killed in violence in Afghanistan last year. It was the bloodiest year since 2001 when U.S.-led forces overthrew the Taliban government, which they accused of harboring September 11 mastermind Osama bin Laden.

"We mustn't let this one slip out of our attention and, where we have had a victory, put it at risk," Gates said.

    Pentagon chief plans Afghan visit to boost Karzai, R, 12.1.2007, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=politicsNews&storyID=2007-01-12T184552Z_01_N12275315_RTRUKOC_0_US-USA-GATES-AFGHANISTAN.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C5-politicsNews-2

Afghan warlord

says he helped bin Laden escape

Thu Jan 11, 2007 10:08 AM ET
Reuters



ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - An Afghan rebel leader wanted by the United States claimed credit for helping Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahri escape a massive U.S.-led hunt in eastern Afghanistan just over five years ago.

Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a former Afghan prime minister in early 1990s, said in an interview aired on Pakistan's private Geo television channel on Thursday that he met bin Laden and Zawahri after fighters loyal to his Hizb-e-Islami group helped the two al Qaeda leaders escape from the Tora Bora region in late 2001.

"After the American attack on Afghanistan, I directed my people to evacuate our guest brothers to safer places," said Hekmatyar,

"Some valiant and honest mujahideen of Hizb-e-Islami evacuated Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri along with some other comrades and transferred them to a safer place," he said.

"I met with them there."

The authenticity of the interview could not be independently confirmed, but interviewer Saleem Safi told Reuters that it was conducted inside Afghanistan nearly three weeks ago.

Though the whereabouts of both al Qaeda leaders has remained a mystery since the September 11 attacks, the U.S. forces are believed to have come closest to trapping bin Laden when he retreated to a complex of caves in mountainous Tora Bora region near the Pakistan border .

The best guess about bin Laden's whereabouts remains somewhere on the rugged border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Zawahri is believed to be hiding in the same region, but analysts say it is unlikely the two men are together.

Hekmatyar's whereabouts have also remained unknown, though he is believed to be hiding in eastern Afghanistan.

Wearing a black turban and sporting a gray beard, the bespectacled militant blamed for much of the destruction of the Kabul in the 1990s civil war in Afghanistan, said his Hizb-e-Islami group had no organisational link with al Qaeda or Taliban though he had tried to ally with the Taliban.

"The process of negotiation with the Taliban has been disconnected, but if they feel the need then we are ready."

Hekmatyar shot to prominence during the guerrilla war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, when U.S. and Saudi money covertly bankrolled leaders of the mujahideen.

    Afghan warlord says he helped bin Laden escape, R, 11.1.2007, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=worldNews&storyid=2007-01-11T150806Z_01_ISL338699_RTRUKOT_0_TEXT0.xml&WTmodLoc=NewsArt-L1-RelatedNews-1

NATO

says kills 150 insurgents in Afghanistan

Thu Jan 11, 2007 10:08 AM ET
The New York Times
By Sayed Salahuddin

KABUL (Reuters) - NATO and Afghan troops killed up to 150 insurgents in a ground and air attack in southeastern Afghanistan after the insurgents infiltrated from neighboring Pakistan, the alliance said on Thursday.

Afghan anger over the infiltration of Taliban militants from Pakistan has soured relations between the neighbors, both important U.S. allies in the war on terrorism.

The latest fighting, which appeared to be the biggest clash in Afghanistan in months, occurred on Wednesday night in the mountainous Bermal district of Paktika province, NATO said.

NATO and Afghan forces observed two large groups of insurgents gathering on the Pakistani side of the border, said a spokesman.

"They spotted them, they tracked them, then, when they entered Afghanistan and were a threat to ISAF and Afghan forces nearby, they were engaged with air power and artillery," said Mark Laity, spokesman for NATO's International Security Assistance Force.

"The result was, in a running series of engagements, about 150 killed."

The casualty estimate was based on initial battle damage reports, NATO said. The Pakistani military had been kept fully informed during the operation, it said.

The Afghan Defense Ministry said the insurgents were bringing in a shipment of ammunition. It estimated 80 of them had been killed. Eleven bodies had been recovered.

The Taliban rejected the NATO report as "baseless and false" and said no fighters had been killed. "Only civilians were targeted," a Taliban spokesman, Mohammad Hanif, said by telephone.

If confirmed, the toll would be the highest since September when NATO troops forced the Taliban out of a district near the southern city of Kandahar in a two-week offensive that NATO said killed at least 500 insurgents.

MILITARY TALKS

The attack came as U.S. and NATO commanders were meeting Pakistani commanders in Islamabad for regular talks on the insurgency.

Last year was the bloodiest in Afghanistan since U.S.-led forces overthrew the Taliban in 2001. More than 4,000 people were killed.

Afghanistan says the militants have sanctuaries in Pakistan from where they plot and launch attacks.

Pakistan was the main supporter of the Taliban until the September 11 attacks. It denies helping them but says some militants are crossing into Afghanistan from Pakistani tribal lands where Pakistani forces have been battling militants.

An increasingly frustrated Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, leveled his strongest ever criticism at Pakistan last month, openly accusing state elements of supporting the insurgents.

The commander of the NATO force, General David Richards, told reporters at the military talks in Islamabad Afghan violence had fallen off toward the end of the year largely because of operations on both sides of the border.

He said Pakistani forces were doing a huge amount but a problem remained. He did not elaborate. Nor did he refer to the latest fighting.

Assistant U.S. Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs Richard Boucher told reporters in Kabul Pakistan was committed to battling militancy.

Boucher was due to travel to Pakistan for talks that would include a Pakistani plan to build fences and lay mines to stop infiltration.

Afghanistan opposes the plan to fortify a colonial-era border it doesn't recognize and says Pakistan should instead crack down on Taliban there.

(Additional reporting by Robert Birsel in KABUL, Saeed Ali Achakzai in SPIN BOLDAK, Zeeshan Haider in ISLAMABAD)

    NATO says kills 150 insurgents in Afghanistan, R, 11.1.2007, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=worldNews&storyID=2007-01-11T150825Z_01_SP220667_RTRUKOC_0_US-AFGHAN-VIOLENCE.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C5-worldNews-7

9 Suspected Taliban Killed in Clash

January 11, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:21 a.m. ET
The New York Times

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (AP) -- NATO and Afghan troops clashed with suspected Taliban guerrillas in southern Afghanistan, killing nine militants and recovering their weapons, officials said Thursday.

The coalition forces also called in airstrikes on Taliban positions during the clash in the village of Gereshk in the southern Helmand province on Wednesday, said Ghulam Nabi Mulahkhail, a local police chief.

Among those killed was a local Taliban group commander identified as Mullah Faqir Mohammad, the police official said.

One Afghan soldier was wounded during the clash. He was evacuated to a NATO medical facility, the alliance said in a statement.

The troops recovered weapons and ammunition in the compound used by the militants following the clash, the statement said.

    9 Suspected Taliban Killed in Clash, NYT, 11.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Afghan-Violence.html

Fifteen Taliban killed in Afghan clash:

police

Fri Jan 5, 2007
8:12 AM ET
Reuters



KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (Reuters) - NATO and Afghan government troops killed 15 Taliban fighters in a clash in a restive southern province, police said on Friday.

Last year was the bloodiest Afghanistan has seen since the Taliban were ousted in 2001. The level of violence has eased in recent weeks since winter set in but intermittent attacks are taking place in the south and east.

The chief of police of Helmand province, Mohammad Nabi Mullahkhail, said 15 Taliban, including a district commander, had been killed in the battle on Thursday evening. No NATO or Afghan troops were hurt, he said.

A spokesman for Afghanistan's 32,000-strong NATO force confirmed that there had been a clash but said no casualty estimate was available.

In a separate incident in Helmand, three Taliban were killed when explosives they were planting went off accidentally, Mullahkhail said.

More than 4,000 people died in Afghan violence in 2006 including nearly 170 foreign troops killed in attacks and accidents while on patrol.

The worst violence was in southern provinces, including Helmand.

The Taliban, fighting to expel foreign troops, have vowed to mount a fresh offensive in the spring.

    Fifteen Taliban killed in Afghan clash: police, R, 5.1.2007, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=worldNews&storyID=2007-01-05T131159Z_01_SP149508_RTRUKOC_0_US-AFGHAN-VIOLENCE.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C5-worldNews-6

Pakistan Premier

Wants Afghan Refugees

to Return Home

January 5, 2007
The New York Times
By CARLOTTA GALL

KABUL, Afghanistan, Jan. 4 — Pakistan’s prime minister, Shaukat Aziz, said Thursday that he wanted the three million Afghan refugees still living in Pakistan to go home as one way to end the problem of insurgents using the country as a haven.

It is the first time Pakistan has been so blunt in demanding that the Afghans, to whom it has served as host for more than 20 years since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, leave.

Mr. Aziz arrived here for talks with the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, in an effort to smooth tensions between the neighbors, but after more than two hours Mr. Karzai acknowledged that relations were only growing worse.

“Unfortunately, the gulf in relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan is getting wider, and it is not getting narrower,” Mr. Karzai said after their meeting.

The two leaders emerged with no agreement on the main areas of contention, namely Pakistan’s plan to fence and mine the border, and Afghanistan’s project to convene two tribal gatherings, or jirgas, of national representatives from both countries, to try to foster peace between the countries.

Shortly before the meeting, Pakistan announced that it was going ahead with a plan to fence and mine the long mountainous border. Afghanistan has repeatedly condemned the project as a diversion from the real problem of terrorism, which it says is being incubated in Pakistan. Pakistan has also dragged its feet on organizing the tribal gatherings, promising only to form a commission to work on the idea.

“The Afghan people want to remove all those obstacles which create the divide in our relations,” Mr. Karzai said. “Those obstacles are created by terrorist activities which are hindering Afghanistan’s reconstruction and making our schools burn.

“Security will not come to Afghanistan unless together we and Pakistan, with good and friendly relations, become tough in the fight against terrorism,” he added. He said he wanted to hold the tribal jirgas so people could speak their minds.

Without offering specifics, Mr. Aziz said the two leaders agreed to work on resettling three million Afghan refugees back in Afghanistan and removing the sanctuary that refugee camps provide to insurgents.

“Refugee camps on our side of the border sometimes are safe havens for elements who are from Afghanistan and take safe haven there after conducting activities,” he said.

He also defended Pakistan’s plan to fence and mine the border as one way to restrict the movement of people who represent a threat to security. “We believe that selective fencing and mining can help achieve the objective,” he said, adding that the fence and mines would not prevent the ordinary crossing of local tribes.

Pakistan Premier Wants Afghan Refugees to Return Home, NYT, 5.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/05/world/asia/05afghan.html

Taliban Leader

Promises More Afghan War

January 5, 2007
The New York Times
By ISMAIL KHAN and CARLOTTA GALL

PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Jan. 4 — In what appears to be the first exchange with a journalist since going into hiding five years ago, the Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, said that he had not seen Al Qaeda’s chief, Osama bin Laden, in five years and that he would never negotiate with the United States-backed government of Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan. He also threatened to continue the war until foreign troops withdraw from Afghanistan.

The statements were made in written response to questions sent by e-mail to the Taliban spokesman, Muhammad Hanif, who often speaks to journalists by telephone from an undisclosed location. Mr. Hanif said that Mullah Omar had written the replies himself and that a courier had returned the answers on a USB computer drive.

Though it was impossible to verify those claims, the statements, if authentic, would be Mullah Omar’s first exchange with a journalist since he was driven from power in 2001 by the American-led invasion of Afghanistan. The fugitive Taliban leader, who claims to be at large in Afghanistan, is widely thought to have taken up sanctuary in Pakistan.

Since fleeing his last stronghold in the southern city of Kandahar in December 2001, Mullah Omar said that he had not seen or tried to contact Mr. bin Laden, and that although his movement did not have a specific alliance with Al Qaeda, they were fighting for the same goals.

“I have neither seen him nor have made any effort to do so, but I pray for his health and safety,” he said of Mr. bin Laden. “We have never felt the need for a permanent relationship in the present circumstances. But they have set jihad as their goal, whereas we have set the expulsion of American troops from Afghanistan as our target. This is the common goal of all the Muslims.”

Asked about the suicide bombers who have carried out over 100 attacks in Afghanistan in the last year, he said they were acting on religious orders from the Taliban. “The mujahedeen do not take any action without a fatwa,” he said, meaning an Islamic edict. “They seek fatwas before they take any action in their self-defense.”

He denied receiving any outside assistance, and dismissed as Western propaganda that Pakistan was providing assistance and a safe haven to his movement. “We have not received any assistance so far, nor can anybody prove that,” he said. “The leadership, resistance and shura are all based here in Afghanistan.”

He dismissed Mr. Karzai’s effort to convene a grand assembly between Afghan and Pakistani elders and leading representatives to try to forge peace between the nations as a conspiracy by American intelligence agencies. “Only those people who have sold out to foreign forces will participate,” he said. “Our participation is absolutely out of question.”

“First of all, foreign troops should leave Afghanistan and then the institutions they have created should be dismantled,” he said. “Unless that happens, the war will heat up further. It will not decrease.”

“The people themselves have risen up to fight the Americans,” the statement continued. “Nobody can tolerate this kind of subjugation and sacrilege of their culture and religion. It would be humiliating for anybody to think that the nation does not want to evict American forces. No nation can accept the dictates of a handful of dollar-greedy and treacherous people.”

In his replies, he showed himself unrepentant for his refusal to give up Mr. bin Laden to the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and for blowing up the giant Buddhas of Bamiyan in March 2001.

“Our stand to grant refuge to Osama bin Laden was based on principles,” he said. “If there were people who were opposed to us giving refuge to him, they should have done so with logic and reason, and not using bullying or threats,” he said. The council of clerics, which was the highest authority of the Taliban government, asked Mr. bin Laden to leave, but never had any intention to force him out, he said. “The clerics had declared jihad against the United States in total opposition to his surrender to the Americans,” he said.

Asked if the Buddhas’ destruction was a mistake in retrospect, he said: “Shariah is Shariah. There is no distinction on whether a certain thing is difficult or easy. A certain number of Muslims have been influenced by other civilizations, and that’s why they seem to find Islamic injunctions too difficult.” Shariah is the legal code of Islam based on the Koran.

He repeated the same justification that his government had used previously for its harsh strictures that closed girls’ schools and forbade women to work, namely that his government was still fighting a war and could not do everything at once.

“Girls’ schools were either too few or were nonexistent before we took over,” he said. “We were preparing a strategy for girls’ education in accordance with the Shariah.”

He blamed the anti-Taliban forces of the Northern Alliance and international sanctions for preventing his government from achieving its aims.

“We could have formed a real government had we achieved full and total control over the whole country, and we did manage to run the government in an organized manner with the blessing of Shariah and divine laws,” he said. “But if there were problems, those were largely because of the conspiracies of the infidels and foreign enemies, for instance, the impositions of sanctions on Taliban, organizing anti-Taliban forces and preparing them to fight the mujahedeen.”

Ismail Khan reported from Peshawar, Pakistan, and Carlotta Gall from Kabul, Afghanistan.

    Taliban Leader Promises More Afghan War, NYT, 5.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/05/world/asia/05taliban.html

Taliban commander

vows bloody 2007 in Afghanistan

Tue Jan 2, 2007 6:15 AM ET
Reuters
By Saeed Ali Achakzai

SPIN BOLDAK, Afghanistan (Reuters) - The Taliban will step up attacks on foreign troops in Afghanistan this year and kill anyone who negotiates with the government, a top rebel commander said on Tuesday.

Taliban fighters staged a surprise comeback last year with the bloodiest violence since U.S.-led troops forced them from power in 2001. More than 4,000 people were killed on both sides in 2006 including nearly 170 foreign troops.

Taliban commander Mullah Dadullah said the new year would see more attacks on NATO and U.S. forces.

"Suicide and guerrilla attacks on NATO, American and coalition forces will continue and increase this year. The Taliban will inflict heavy casualties on them," Dadullah told Reuters by satellite telephone from an undisclosed location.

Dadullah did not refer to the death last month of Akhtar Mohammad Osmani, the most senior Taliban commander to be killed by U.S. forces since 2001.

Osmani was killed in a U.S. air strike in the south, and another rebel commander, who declined to be identified, said earlier his death would be a blow to the Taliban.

About 40,000 foreign troops are in Afghanistan, some 32,000 of them under NATO command. They are trying to ensure enough security to enable development projects to get started.

Dadullah said the Taliban had used a winter lull in fighting to draw up new war plans to inflict maximum damage on foreign forces. Afghan fighting traditionally falls off during the bitter winter when snow blocks mountain passes.

"They will soon come to know about the Taliban's strength and war strategy. We will attack with such a force they will have no time to settle," Dadullah said.

The rebel commander ruled out any negotiations while foreign troops were in the country and threatened dire consequences for anyone who did so.

"Those who negotiate in the name of the Taliban will be killed," he said. He did not elaborate.

The government has a reconciliation program aimed at persuading Taliban members to give up their fight and rejoin society but few insurgents have taken up the offer.

Some Afghan politicians have said peace will be impossible unless elements of the Taliban are included in talks.

A Taliban spokesman said last month the rebels might take part in planned tribal councils that Pakistan and Afghanistan aim to hold on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani border.

But other Taliban members quickly denied there was any chance of the insurgents attending the councils. Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar was reported to have denounced the proposed meetings as an American trick in a message last week.

Taliban commander vows bloody 2007 in Afghanistan, R, 2.1.2007, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=worldNews&storyID=2007-01-02T111523Z_01_ISL148796_RTRUKOC_0_US-AFGHAN-TALIBAN.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C5-worldNews-5