USA > History > 2010 > War > Afghanistan (I)

U.S. Marine Sgt. Shane Hanley,

a squad leader from Easy Company, 2-2 Marines,

receives treatment by U.S. Army flight medic Sgt. Michael G. Patangan (left)

while airborne in an army Task Force Pegasus medevac helicopter,

shortly after Hanley was wounded,

in Helmand province, southern Afghanistan on February 9th, 2010.

Sgt. Hanley, of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania,

who agreed to have photos of himself published,

sustained shrapnel injuries to the left side of his body, face and eye

when an improvised explosive device detonated below him

while he was on a foot patrol.

Photograph: AP Photo/Brennan Linsley

Boston Globe > Big Picture

Afghanistan, February, 2010 > February 26, 2010

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/02/afghanistan_february_2010.html

Obama Presses Karzai

for a Crackdown on Corruption

March 28, 2010
The New York Times
By HELENE COOPER

WASHINGTON — President Obama made a surprise trip to Afghanistan on Sunday, his first visit as commander in chief to the site of the war he inherited and has stamped as his own.

While there, Mr. Obama pressed President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan for a crackdown on corruption while strengthening the judicial system and promoting good governance, The Associated Press reported.

After a brief meeting with Mr. Karzai at the presidential palace in Kabul, Mr. Obama also praised steps in the military campaign against insurgents, but said Afghans needed to see conditions on the ground get better, The A.P. reported.

“Progress will continue to be made, but we also want to make progress on the civilian front,” Mr. Obama was quoted as saying, referring to anti-corruption efforts, good governance and adherence to the rule of law.

“All of these things end up resulting in an Afghanistan that is more prosperous and more secure,” Mr. Obama said, according to The A.P. He invited Karzai to visit Washington on May 12, the White House said.

For his part, Mr. Karzai promised that his country “would move forward into the future” to eventually take over its own security, and he thanked Mr. Obama for the American intervention in his country.

The president landed in Afghanistain, at Bagram Air Base, after a 13-hour nonstop flight for a visit shrouded in secrecy for security reasons and quickly boarded a helicopter for the presidential palace in Kabul. There, Mr. Obama and Mr. Karzai walked and chatted along a red carpet as they made their way to an Afghan color guard, where the national anthems of both countries were played, in a welcoming ceremony that lasted 10 minutes.

White House officials disclosed no information about the trip until Mr. Obama’s plane had landed in Afghanistan, and had even gone so far as to inform reporters that the president would be spending the weekend at Camp David with his family. In fact, Mr. Obama’s trip is occurring during the Afghan night, and he is expected to be on his way back to Washington before most Afghans wake up Monday morning.

Mr. Obama will also meet with some of the tens of thousands of American troops who have been sent to Afghanistan since he took office. His visit with the troops is particularly significant because it comes at the same time that military officials report that the number of American troops killed in Afghanistan has roughly doubled in the first three months of 2010, compared to the same period last year.

The number of soldiers wounded in combat has also spiked dramatically. Military officials have warned that casualties are likely to continue to rise sharply as the Pentagon completes the deployment of 30,000 additional soldiers, per Afghanistan strategy announced by Mr. Obama in November. The reason for the spike, military officials said, is because American forces are aggressively seeking out Taliban insurgents in the country’s population centers, and are planning a major operation in the Kandahar, the spiritual home of the Taliban, in the coming months.

Mr. Obama’s trip caps a high-profile week for the president in which he coupled a singular domestic policy victory — the signing of a health reform bill — with the foreign policy achievement: reaching an arms control agreement with Russia in which the two agreed to slash their nuclear arsenals to the lowest levels in half a century.

Coming on top of that, the Palm Sunday visit to American combat troops by their commander in chief could project the image of a president keeping on top of a number of issues at once.

At the same time, though, Mr. Obama’s visit has been a long time coming. While he visited troops at Camp Victory, Iraq, three months after he was inaugurated, the White House has held off on a presidential visit to Afghanistan as Mr. Obama went through a rigorous months-long review of Afghanistan strategy, and as that country endured the twists and turns of a disputed election.

Even after Mr. Karzai was inaugurated and Mr. Obama announced that he would send an additional 30,000 troops, Mr. Obama put off a trip as he focused on domestic priorities, including a health care bill.

In some ways, the Afghanistan visit serves as a stark reminder that even with health care done, there remain major challenges ahead.

    Obama Presses Karzai for a Crackdown on Corruption, NYT, 28.3.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/29/world/asia/29prexy.html

U.S. Is Reining In Special Forces

in Afghanistan

March 15, 2010
The New York Times
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. and ROD NORDLAND

KABUL, Afghanistan — Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top American commander in Afghanistan, has brought most American Special Operations forces under his direct control for the first time, out of concern over continued civilian casualties and disorganization among units in the field.

“What happens is, sometimes at cross-purposes, you got one hand doing one thing and one hand doing the other, both trying to do the right thing but working without a good outcome,” General McChrystal said in an interview.

Critics, including Afghan officials, human rights workers and some field commanders of conventional American forces, say that Special Operations forces have been responsible for a large number of the civilian casualties in Afghanistan and operate by their own rules.

Maj. Gen. Zahir Azimi, the chief spokesman for the Afghan Ministry of Defense, said that General McChrystal had told Afghan officials he was taking the action because of concern that some American units were not following his orders to make limiting civilian casualties a paramount objective.

“These special forces were not accountable to anyone in the country, but General McChrystal and we carried the burden of the guilt for the mistakes they committed,” he said. “Whenever there was some problem with the special forces we didn’t know who to go to, it was muddled and unclear who was in charge.”

General McChrystal has made reducing civilian casualties a cornerstone of his new counterinsurgency strategy, and his campaign has had some success: last year, civilian deaths attributed to the United States military were cut by 28 percent, although there were 596 civilian deaths attributed to coalition forces, according to United Nations figures. Afghan and United Nations officials blame Special Operations troops for most of those deaths.

“In most of the cases of civilian casualties, special forces are involved,” said Mohammed Iqbal Safi, head of the defense committee in the Afghan Parliament, who participated in joint United States-Afghan investigations of civilian casualties last year. “We’re always finding out they are not obeying the rules that other forces have to in Afghanistan.”

“These forces often operate with little or no accountability and exacerbate the anger and resentment felt by communities,” the Human Rights Office of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan wrote in its report on protection of civilians for 2009.

Rear Adm. Gregory J. Smith, General McChrystal’s deputy chief of staff for communications, cautioned against putting undue blame on Special Operations forces. Since night raids are dangerous, and most missions take place at night, most of them are carried out by the more highly trained special groups. In January, General McChrystal issued restrictions on night raids.

Admiral Smith said that General McChrystal had issued the new directive on Special Operations forces within “the last two or three weeks.” While it is being circulated for comment within the military and has not been formally announced, General McChrystal has already put it into practical effect, he said.

Only detainee operations and “very small numbers of U.S. S.O.F.,” or Special Operations forces, are exempted from the directive, Admiral Smith said. That is believed to include elite groups like the Army’s Delta Force and the Navy’s Seals.

Previously, Special Operations forces in Afghanistan often had separate chains of command to their own headquarters elsewhere. That remained true even after General McChrystal was appointed last year and consolidated the NATO and American military commands under his own control.

Three recent high profile cases of civilian casualties illustrate the concern over Special Operations forces.

On Feb. 21 in Oruzgan Province, a small Special Operations forces unit heard that a group of Taliban were heading their way and called for air support. Attack helicopters killed 27 civilians in three trucks, mistaking them for the Taliban.

Military video appeared to show the victims were civilians, and no weapons were recovered from them. “What I saw on that video would not have led me to pull the trigger,” one NATO official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity in line with his department’s rules. “It was one of the worst things I’ve seen in a while.”

General McChrystal promptly apologized for the Oruzgan episode, both directly to Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, and in a videotaped statement released to local television stations.

On Feb. 12 in a village near Gardez, in Paktia Province, Afghan police special forces paired with American Special Operations forces raided a house late at night looking for two Taliban suspects, and instead killed a local police chief and a district prosecutor when they came out, armed with Kalashnikov rifles, to investigate. Three women who came to their aid, according to interviews with family members and friends, were also killed; one was a pregnant mother of 10, the other a pregnant mother of 6.

A press release from the International Security Assistance Force, as NATO’s force here is known, said at first that the three women had been discovered bound and gagged, apparently killed execution style. NATO officials now say their bodies were wrapped in traditional manner before burial. Admiral Smith said Afghan forces fired the shots in the compound.

“The regret is that two innocent males died,” Admiral Smith said. “The women, I’m not sure anyone will ever know how they died.” He added, however, “I don’t know that there are any forensics that show bullet penetrations of the women or blood from the women.” He said they showed signs of puncture and slashing wounds from a knife, and appeared to have died several hours before the arrival of the assault force. In respect for Afghan customs, autopsies are not carried out on civilian victims, he said.

Interviews with relatives and family friends give a starkly different account and described an American cover-up. They say a large number of people had gathered for a party in honor of the birth of a grandson of the owner of the house, Hajji Sharaf Udin. After most had gone to sleep, the police commander, Mr. Udin’s son, Mohammed Daoud, went out to investigate the arrival of armed men and was shot fatally.

When a second son, Mohammed Zahir, went out to talk to the Americans because he spoke some English, he too was shot and killed. The three women — Mr. Udin’s 19-year-old granddaughter, Gulalai; his 37-year-old daughter, Saleha, the mother of 10 children; and his daughter-in-law, Shirin, the mother of six — were all gunned down when they tried to help the victims, these witnesses claimed.

All the survivors interviewed insisted that Americans, who they said were not in uniform, conducted the raid and the killings, and entered the compound before Afghan forces. Among the witnesses was Sayid Mohammed Mal, vice chancellor of Gardez University, whose son’s fiancée, Gulalai, was killed. “They were killed by the Americans,” he said. “If the government doesn’t listen to us, I have 50 family members, I’ll bring them all to Gardez roundabout and we’ll pour petrol on ourselves and burn ourselves to death.”

On Dec. 26 in Kunar Province, a night raid was launched on what authorities thought was a Taliban training facility; they later discovered that they had killed all nine religious students in a residential school. Admiral Smith said United States Special Operations forces were nearby at the time, but not directly involved in the attack, which was carried out by an Afghan unit.

Admiral Smith confirmed that all three events, which took place outside of any larger battle, involved Special Operations forces. But he said that General McChrystal’s unified command initiative was not in response to those events.

He depicted General McChrystal’s new policy as a natural outgrowth of the general’s plans all along to unify his command; when he first took charge, he brought together under his control what had been separate NATO and American command structures in Afghanistan.

The NATO official said that the unified command initiative would be obeyed, though it was not universally popular. “They may not like it, they may not want to follow it, but they are going to follow it,” the official said.

Aides to General McChrystal say he has been deeply troubled by the continuing episodes of civilian casualties, including the three major ones still under investigation. “You won’t believe how focused on these issues this command is, almost more than anything else,” the NATO official said.

Mr. Safi, the Parliament member, expressed concern that with the continued exemption of some Special Operations units from the directive, the problem of civilian casualties would continue. “If they are excluded, naturally it means the same thing will happen,” he said. “If there are individuals who do not obey McChrystal, then what are they doing in this country?”

General McChrystal addressed that concern in the interview. “There are no operators in this country that I am not absolutely comfortable do exactly what I want them to do,” he said. “So I don’t have any complaints about that, particularly after the latest change.”

Tension between Special Operations and conventional commanders has often surfaced in the American military, but General McChrystal himself has a great deal of credibility in the black operations world. Before he became the top commander in Afghanistan, he was in charge of the Joint Special Operations Command in Iraq and Afghanistan, which ran elite, secretive counterterrorism units, believed to include Delta Force and the Seals, hunting high-value targets.


Reporting was contributed by Sangar Rahimi in Kabul; Alissa J. Rubin in Kunar, Afghanistan; Thom Shanker in Washington; and an employee of The New York Times in Khost, Afghanistan.

    U.S. Is Reining In Special Forces in Afghanistan, NYT, 16.3.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/16/world/asia/16afghan.html

Contractors Tied to Effort to Track and Kill Militants

March 14, 2010
The New York Times
By DEXTER FILKINS and MARK MAZZETTI

KABUL, Afghanistan — Under the cover of a benign government information-gathering program, a Defense Department official set up a network of private contractors in Afghanistan and Pakistan to help track and kill suspected militants, according to military officials and businessmen in Afghanistan and the United States.

The official, Michael D. Furlong, hired contractors from private security companies that employed former C.I.A. and Special Forces operatives. The contractors, in turn, gathered intelligence on the whereabouts of suspected militants and the location of insurgent camps, and the information was then sent to military units and intelligence officials for possible lethal action in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the officials said.

While it has been widely reported that the C.I.A. and the military are attacking operatives of Al Qaeda and others through unmanned, remote-controlled drone strikes, some American officials say they became troubled that Mr. Furlong seemed to be running an off-the-books spy operation. The officials say they are not sure who condoned and supervised his work.

It is generally considered illegal for the military to hire contractors to act as covert spies. Officials said Mr. Furlong’s secret network might have been improperly financed by diverting money from a program designed to merely gather information about the region.

Moreover, in Pakistan, where Qaeda and Taliban leaders are believed to be hiding, the secret use of private contractors may be seen as an attempt to get around the Pakistani government’s prohibition of American military personnel’s operating in the country.

Officials say Mr. Furlong’s operation seems to have been shut down, and he is now is the subject of a criminal investigation by the Defense Department for a number of possible offenses, including contract fraud.

Even in a region of the world known for intrigue, Mr. Furlong’s story stands out. At times, his operation featured a mysterious American company run by retired Special Operations officers and an iconic C.I.A. figure who had a role in some of the agency’s most famous episodes, including the Iran-Contra affair.

The allegations that he ran this network come as the American intelligence community confronts other instances in which private contractors may have been improperly used on delicate and questionable operations, including secret raids in Iraq and an assassinations program that was halted before it got off the ground.

“While no legitimate intelligence operations got screwed up, it’s generally a bad idea to have freelancers running around a war zone pretending to be James Bond,” one American government official said. But it is still murky whether Mr. Furlong had approval from top commanders or whether he might have been running a rogue operation.

This account of his activities is based on interviews with American military and intelligence officials and businessmen in the region. They insisted on anonymity in discussing a delicate case that is under investigation.

Col. Kathleen Cook, a spokeswoman for United States Strategic Command, which oversees Mr. Furlong’s work, declined to make him available for an interview. Military officials said Mr. Furlong, a retired Air Force officer, is now a senior civilian employee in the military, a full-time Defense Department employee based at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio.

Network of Informants

Mr. Furlong has extensive experience in “psychological operations” — the military term for the use of information in warfare — and he plied his trade in a number of places, including Iraq and the Balkans. It is unclear exactly when Mr. Furlong’s operations began. But officials said they seemed to accelerate in the summer of 2009, and by the time they ended, he and his colleagues had established a network of informants in Afghanistan and Pakistan whose job it was to help locate people believed to be insurgents.

Government officials said they believed that Mr. Furlong might have channeled money away from a program intended to provide American commanders with information about Afghanistan’s social and tribal landscape, and toward secret efforts to hunt militants on both sides of the country’s porous border with Pakistan.

Some officials said it was unclear whether these operations actually resulted in the deaths of militants, though others involved in the operation said that they did.

Military officials said that Mr. Furlong would often boast about his network of informants in Afghanistan and Pakistan to senior military officers, and in one instance said a group of suspected militants carrying rockets by mule over the border had been singled out and killed as a result of his efforts.

In addition, at least one government contractor who worked with Mr. Furlong in Afghanistan last year maintains that he saw evidence that the information was used for attacking militants.

The contractor, Robert Young Pelton, an author who writes extensively about war zones, said that the government hired him to gather information about Afghanistan and that Mr. Furlong improperly used his work. “We were providing information so they could better understand the situation in Afghanistan, and it was being used to kill people,” Mr. Pelton said.

He said that he and Eason Jordan, a former television news executive, had been hired by the military to run a public Web site to help the government gain a better understanding of a region that bedeviled them. Recently, the top military intelligence official in Afghanistan publicly said that intelligence collection was skewed too heavily toward hunting terrorists, at the expense of gaining a deeper understanding of the country.

Instead, Mr. Pelton said, millions of dollars that were supposed to go to the Web site were redirected by Mr. Furlong toward intelligence gathering for the purpose of attacking militants.

In one example, Mr. Pelton said he had been told by Afghan colleagues that video images that he posted on the Web site had been used for an American strike in the South Waziristan region of Pakistan.

Among the contractors Mr. Furlong appears to have used to conduct intelligence gathering was International Media Ventures, a private “strategic communication” firm run by several former Special Operations officers. Another was American International Security Corporation, a Boston-based company run by Mike Taylor, a former Green Beret. In a phone interview, Mr. Taylor said that at one point he had employed Duane Clarridge, known as Dewey, a former top C.I.A. official who has been linked to a generation of C.I.A. adventures, including the Iran-Contra scandal.

In an interview, Mr. Clarridge denied that he had worked with Mr. Furlong in any operation in Afghanistan or Pakistan. “I don’t know anything about that,” he said.

Mr. Taylor, who is chief executive of A.I.S.C., said his company gathered information on both sides of the border to give military officials information about possible threats to American forces. He said his company was not specifically hired to provide information to kill insurgents.

Some American officials contend that Mr. Furlong’s efforts amounted to little. Nevertheless, they provoked the ire of the C.I.A.

Last fall, the spy agency’s station chief in Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, wrote a memorandum to the Defense Department’s top intelligence official detailing what officials said were serious offenses by Mr. Furlong. The officials would not specify the offenses, but the officer’s cable helped set off the Pentagon investigation.

Afghan Intelligence

In mid-2008, the military put Mr. Furlong in charge of a program to use private companies to gather information about the political and tribal culture of Afghanistan. Some of the approximately $22 million in government money allotted to this effort went to International Media Ventures, with offices in St. Petersburg, Fla., San Antonio and elsewhere. On its Web site, the company describes itself as a public relations company, “an industry leader in creating potent messaging content and interactive communications.”

The Web site also shows that several of its senior executives are former members of the military’s Special Operations forces, including former commandos from Delta Force, which has been used extensively since the Sept. 11 attacks to track and kill suspected terrorists.

Until recently, one of the members of International Media’s board of directors was Gen. Dell L. Dailey, former head of Joint Special Operations Command, which oversees the military’s covert units.

In an e-mail message, General Dailey said that he had resigned his post on the company’s board, but he did not say when. He did not give details about the company’s work with the American military, and other company executives declined to comment.

In an interview, Rear Adm. Gregory Smith, the top military spokesman in Afghanistan, said that the United States military was currently employing nine International Media Ventures civilian employees on routine jobs in guard work and information processing and analysis. Whatever else other International Media employees might be doing in Afghanistan, he said, he did not know and had no responsibility for their actions.

By Mr. Pelton’s account, Mr. Furlong, in conversations with him and his colleagues, referred to his stable of contractors as “my Jason Bournes,” a reference to the fictional American assassin created by the novelist Robert Ludlum and played in movies by Matt Damon.

Military officials said that Mr. Furlong would occasionally brag to his superiors about having Mr. Clarridge’s services at his disposal. Last summer, Mr. Furlong told colleagues that he was working with Mr. Clarridge to secure the release of Pfc. Bowe Bergdahl, a kidnapped soldier who American officials believe is being held by militants in Pakistan.

From December 2008 to mid-June 2009, both Mr. Taylor and Mr. Clarridge were hired to assist The New York Times in the case of David Rohde, the Times reporter who was kidnapped by militants in Afghanistan and held for seven months in Pakistan’s tribal areas. The reporter ultimately escaped on his own.

The idea for the government information program was thought up sometime in 2008 by Mr. Jordan, a former CNN news chief, and his partner Mr. Pelton, whose books include “The World’s Most Dangerous Places” and “Licensed to Kill: Hired Guns in the War on Terror.”

Top General Approached

They approached Gen. David D. McKiernan, soon to become the top American commander in Afghanistan. Their proposal was to set up a reporting and research network in Afghanistan and Pakistan for the American military and private clients who were trying to understand a complex region that had become vital to Western interests. They already had a similar operation in Iraq — called “Iraq Slogger,” which employed local Iraqis to report and write news stories for their Web site. Mr. Jordan proposed setting up a similar Web site in Afghanistan and Pakistan — except that the operation would be largely financed by the American military. The name of the Web site was Afpax.

Mr. Jordan said that he had gone to the United States military because the business in Iraq was not profitable relying solely on private clients. He described his proposal as essentially a news gathering operation, involving only unclassified materials gathered openly by his employees. “It was all open-source,” he said.

When Mr. Jordan made the pitch to General McKiernan, Mr. Furlong was also present, according to Mr. Jordan. General McKiernan endorsed the proposal, and Mr. Furlong said that he could find financing for Afpax, both Mr. Jordan and Mr. Pelton said. “On that day, they told us to get to work,” Mr. Pelton said.

But Mr. Jordan said that the help from Mr. Furlong ended up being extremely limited. He said he was paid twice — once to help the company with start-up costs and another time for a report his group had written. Mr. Jordan declined to talk about exact figures, but said the amount of money was a “small fraction” of what he had proposed — and what it took to run his news gathering operation.

Whenever he asked for financing, Mr. Jordan said, Mr. Furlong told him that the money was being used for other things, and that the appetite for Mr. Jordan’s services was diminishing.

“He told us that there was less and less money for what we were doing, and less of an appreciation for what we were doing,” he said.

Admiral Smith, the military’s director for strategic communications in Afghanistan, said that when he arrived in Kabul a year later, in June 2009, he opposed financing Afpax. He said that he did not need what Mr. Pelton and Mr. Jordan were offering and that the service seemed uncomfortably close to crossing into intelligence gathering — which could have meant making targets of individuals.

“I took the air out of the balloon,” he said.

Admiral Smith said that the C.I.A. was against the proposal for the same reasons. Mr. Furlong persisted in pushing the project, he said.

“I finally had to tell him, ‘Read my lips,’ we’re not interested,’ ” Admiral Smith said.

What happened next is unclear.

Admiral Smith said that when he turned down the Afpax proposal, Mr. Furlong wanted to spend the leftover money elsewhere. That is when Mr. Furlong agreed to provide some of International Media Ventures’ employees to Admiral Smith’s strategic communications office.

But that still left roughly $15 million unaccounted for, he said.

“I have no idea where the rest of the money is going,” Admiral Smith said.


Dexter Filkins reported from Kabul, and Mark Mazzetti from Washington.

    Contractors Tied to Effort to Track and Kill Militants, NYT, 15.3.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/15/world/asia/15contractors.html

Karzai Visits Former Taliban Stronghold

March 7, 2010
Filed at 1:08 p.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

MARJAH, Afghanistan (AP) -- Elders in a former Taliban stronghold berated and challenged Afghanistan's president Sunday, delivering a litany of complaints about government corruption and NATO's military operations on the Afghan leader's first visit to Marjah.

President Hamid Karzai said that's exactly what he had come to hear.

''Today, I'm here to listen to you and hear your problems,'' Karzai told about 300 men who sat shoulder to shoulder on the floor of a mosque in central Marjah.

Thousands of U.S., NATO and Afghan troops seized the town of 80,000 people from the Taliban this month in a three-week offensive seen as a major test of a new strategy to win over Afghans by routing insurgents from population centers, setting up an effective civilian government and rushing in aid.

On Sunday, many of the assembled elders said they wanted to side with the government, but that their experience so far made them skeptical.

They complained -- sometimes shouting -- about corruption among former Afghan government officials. They lamented how schools in Marjah were turned into military posts by international forces. They said shops were looted during the offensive, and alleged that innocent civilians were detained by international forces.

''Over the past seven years we have suffered problems imposed by authorities,'' said Abdullah, who only gave one name. Then, ''in the past 20 days since the international forces have come here, people have been killed and wounded, our market has been destroyed, and houses destroyed.''

Seated on a cushion in his trademark peaked hat and a black suit, Karzai nodded as men in dusty tunics and long beards stood up at a podium next to him and catalogued grievances. Sometimes he interrupted their speeches to respond, or just to agree. Elders in the crowd occasionally stood up to correct the speakers.

The government's task is to convince residents of the town in southern Helmand province that the civilian government can provide them with a better life than the Taliban. The Marjah push -- the largest offensive since the 2001 ouster of the extremist group -- was the first since President Barack Obama ordered 30,000 new American troops to try to reverse the Taliban's momentum.

Mohammad Naeem Khan, in his early 30s, said his loyalty is to whoever will provide for him.

''If the Taliban tap me on the shoulder, I will be with them, and if the government taps me on my shoulder I will be with them,'' Khan said.

In a message to The Associated Press, Taliban spokesman Qari Yousef Ahmadi said insurgents fired mortars into Marjah's main intersection, but reporters traveling with Karzai and McChrystal did not witness any attack.

Three NATO service members were killed in attacks Sunday -- one in the south and two in the east, the military alliance said in a statement. None was related to the Marjah offensive, in which 15 international forces have died.

At least 35 civilians have been killed in the operation, according to the Afghan human rights commission. Spokesman Nader Nadery said insurgent bombs killed more than 10 people, while NATO rocket fire killed at least 14.

Karzai and NATO commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal flew into Marjah aboard U.S. military helicopters, landing in a field near the town's main market. McChrystal joined Karzai on the floor of the mosque, but did not speak during the nearly two-hour meeting.

The elders expressed outrage over house searches conducted by the military, and civilian casualties that occurred during the offensive. They told Karzai they want Afghan troops -- not international forces or local policemen -- searching houses. The men -- some gesturing to express their frustration -- also said they wanted clinics and schools, and were losing patience with the central government's inability to provide services.

The president, who has been dubbed ''the mayor of Kabul'' by critics who claim his authority doesn't extend beyond the capital, said the central government intends to be more responsive to the people's needs.

''Are you against me or with me?'' Karzai asked the elders. ''Are you going to support me?''

The men all raised their hands and shouted: ''We are with you. We support you.''

Karzai promised to provide them security, open schools and start building roads and clinics.

Marjah residents have heard promises before. International and Afghan forces have taken over Marjah at least three times previously. Those local governments failed to deliver on commitments to build clinics and schools. Marjah residents told the AP last month that police sent in 2009 were so corrupt locals drove them out -- even before the Taliban returned.

While Karzai visited the south, armed clashes continued for a second day between the Taliban and another Islamist group in Baghlan province in northeastern Afghanistan. At least 50 miliants and an unknown number of civilians died in the battles between Taliban and the Hezb-e-Islami militia, loyal to regional warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, provincial Gov. Mohammad Akbar Barakzai said.

Officials said the militants apparently were fighting over control of several villages where the government has almost no presence. It was unclear whether it was a local dispute or a rift between the insurgent groups.

Provincial police Chief Kabir Andarabi said more than 100 Hezb-e-Islami fighters, under pressure from the combat, pledged Sunday to join the government forces.

The regional police commander, Gen. Ghulam Mushtaba Patang, put the number of defections at 50 but said the situation was in flux. He said police set up mobile hospitals and were offering medical care to any fighters willing to defect.

At Karzai's meeting with Marjah's elders, many of the men said they did not want local police patrolling Marjah -- they'd rather have officers from other parts of the country.

Karzai told reporters he was not surprised that the people in Marjah were angry.

''They had some very legitimate complaints -- very, very legitimate,'' he said. ''They felt as though they were abandoned, which in many cases is true.''

McChrystal told reporters later that he did not feel that the elders' complaints meant they were against international forces.

''What I heard today is frustrations,'' McChrystal told reporters afterward. ''But when you put it with what President Karzai said, I think what you find is there's actually an extraordinary amount of support for what we are doing.''

It was unclear whether Karzai or McChrystal discussed the newly disclosed criminal record of the civilian administrator of Marjah, Abdul Zahir. Newly appointed to lead the government in the former Taliban stronghold, Zahir served part of a more than four-year prison sentence in Germany for stabbing his son in 1998.

Karzai said the Marjah residents told him they want to form a local council to help make decisions. He said it is important to work with the local population and listen to them, and that is what he intended to do.

''This is a chance that we got today,'' Karzai said, adding that if the new administration in Marjah is unable to meet the people's needs this time, ''then we don't deserve to call ourselves the government of Afghanistan.''

    Karzai Visits Former Taliban Stronghold, NYT, 7.3.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/03/07/world/AP-AS-Afghanistan.html

Deadly Attacks in Kabul Strike at Foreigners in Guesthouses

February 26, 2010
The New York Times
By ALISSA J. RUBIN

KABUL, Afghanistan — At least 18 people, including French, Italian, Afghan and many Indian nationals, were killed on Friday in suicide and car bomb attacks on two guesthouses popular with foreigners in the center of Kabul, police officials said.

In a telephone interview, a Taliban spokesman claimed responsibility for the attacks, which coincided with a major offensive by American-led coalition forces against militants in the southern province of Helmand, a central element in President Obama’s strategy in rural Afghanistan.

In one attack, a car bomb exploded outside a guesthouse popular with Indians, while suicide bombers were among a team that stormed another guesthouse frequented by Westerners, starting a firefight with security forces that lasted more than 90 minutes.

In New Delhi, India’s Ministry of External Affairs, citing preliminary information from the Afghan authorities, said “up to nine Indians,” including government officials, had been killed. More than 30 people were reported to have been wounded.

The ministry called the assault a “heinous terrorist attack” following two other attacks on Indians in Kabul in the past 20 months.

“These are the handiwork of those who are desperate to undermine the friendship between India and Afghanistan and do not wish to see a strong, democratic and pluralistic Afghanistan,” the ministry said in a statement.

Some of the Indian casualties worked at the Indira Gandhi Child Health Institute. The dead also included two Afghan police officers, the police said.

Italian authorities in Rome said Pietro Antonio Colazzo, a diplomatic adviser on temporary assignment at the Italian Embassy in Kabul, was killed by gunfire after the suicide attack on one of the guesthouses, the Park Residence. Italian news reports said he had been a member of Italy’s overseas intelligence service assigned to Kabul, but there was no official confirmation of that claim.

In Paris, the authorities said a French documentary maker, Séverin Blanchet, 66, was also killed at the Park Residence.

Zabiullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesman, said the suicide bombers focused on two sites in the Shari Now district “where the foreign people are staying.”

“The actual targets are foreign people,” he added in a telephone interview.

The attacks seemed likely to reverberate in the region, coming just one day after senior Indian and Pakistani officials met in New Delhi for their first diplomatic meeting since the Mumbai attacks of 2008.

In a statement quoted by The Associated Press, President Karzai said he “strongly condemns” the violence on Friday. “Attacks on Indian citizens will not affect relations between India and Afghanistan,” he added.

The attacks spread debris and shattered windows in an adjacent shopping center and hotel. They were the fourth assault on the capital since October.

The guesthouses were located adjacent to the Safi Landmark hotel and shopping center, which the police initially said had been the target. However, the fact that the guesthouses used by foreigners were attacked seemed to confirm the Taliban’s assertion that the insurgents were aiming at outsiders

Gen. Sayed Ghafar, the chief of the Criminal Investigations Department of the Kabul police, put the death toll at 18 — a relatively high figure for attacks in central Kabul — and said the wounded included some police officers.

The assault began with a large explosion that shook the city center shortly after 6:30 a.m. That was followed by gunfire and two smaller explosions.

“I looked out at the gate, but there was no gate,” said Manuwar Shah, 20, who was standing at the reception desk of the hotel when the attack started. “It had been blown off.” Then, he said, he ran into a room before taking shelter in the hotel basement and was trapped there during the fighting.

It was the second major attack in Kabul this year. The first one took place Jan. 18, when seven gunmen attacked a popular shopping center and several surrounding buildings near the presidential palace and a hotel favored by Westerners.

The Taliban spokesman said at least five insurgents carried out the attacks, Reuters reported.

The assault reflected an accelerating trend over the past year for the Taliban to spill out of rural areas, where the vast majority of coalition troops are deployed in small outposts in the countryside. On most days, the capital is calm.

But a series of attacks has demoralized Afghans as militants seek to spread the impression that virtually no part of the country is immune from the conflict.

One year ago, militants attacked the Ministry of Justice, killing guards and stalking the halls for victims. Apart from insurgents, at least 10 people died

In October, militants wearing suicide belts attacked a United Nations guesthouse in Kabul and killed eight people, including five of the organization’s workers. In December, a suicide car bomber struck the Heetal Hotel, killing eight people and wounding 48. That was followed by the Jan. 18 attack in which seven people were killed.


Reporting was contributed by Hari Kumar in New Delhi, Alan Cowell and Maïa de la Baume in Paris, and Gaia Pianigiani in Rome.

    Deadly Attacks in Kabul Strike at Foreigners in Guesthouses, NYT, 27.2.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/27/world/asia/27kabul.html

NATO Airstrike Is Said to Have Killed Afghan Civilians

February 23, 2010
The New York Times
By ROD NORDLAND

KABUL, Afghanistan — A NATO helicopter airstrike on Sunday against what international troops believed to be a group of insurgents ended up killing as many as 27 civilians in the worst such case since at least September, Afghan officials said Monday.

“The repeated killing of civilians by NATO forces is unjustifiable,” President Hamid Karzai’s cabinet said in a statement. “We strongly condemn it.”

The attack was carried out by United States Special Forces helicopters that were patrolling the area hunting for insurgents who had escaped the NATO offensive in the Marja area, about 150 miles away, according to Gen. Abdul Hameed, an Afghan National Army commander in Dehrawood, which is part of Oruzgan Province. General Hameed, interviewed by telephone, said there had been no request from any ground forces to carry out an attack.

The airstrike took place in an area under Dutch military control, and if Dutch forces were involved in the incident it could have serious political repercussions in the Netherlands, where the government collapsed Saturday over an effort to extend the stay of 2,000 Dutch troops in Afghanistan.

But a Dutch defense ministry spokesman in The Hague said Dutch forces were not involved in calling the airstrike. The spokesman, who spoke in return for customary anonymity, did not say who had called for air support.

NATO officials did not immediately identify the nationality of the forces involved in the incident.

“Yesterday a group of suspected insurgents, believed to be en route to attack a joint Afghan-ISAF unit, was engaged by an airborne weapons team resulting in a number of individuals killed and wounded,” the American-led international force, also known as ISAF, said in a statement released Monday. “After the joint ground force arrived at the scene and found women and children, they transported the wounded to medical treatment facilities.”The phrase “airborne weapons team” apparently referred to helicopters rather than to fixed-wing aircraft.

Zemarai Bashary, the spokesman for the Interior Ministry, said the victims were all civilians who were attacked by air while traveling in two Land Cruisers and a pickup truck, which carried 42 people in all, near Khotal Chowzar, a mountain pass that connects Daikondi Province with Oruzgan Province in central Afghanistan.

Mr. Bashary said there were no Afghan forces known to be operating in the area where the airstrike took place, but an investigation was under way to determine who was involved.The cabinet statement, posted on the president’s Web site in English and Dari, said there were 27 dead, including 4 women and a child. Twelve people also were wounded. Mr. Bashary said only 21 dead had been confirmed so far, with 14 wounded and 2 missing, but he said those were preliminary figures.

The commander of the International Security Assistance Force, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, apologized to Mr. Karzai on Sunday night and ordered an investigation into what had happened, the international force said. Mr. Karzai’s office said in a statement that the president “reminded the NATO commander that the issue of civilian casualties was a major hurdle against an effective war on terror and it must stop.”

“We are extremely saddened by the tragic loss of innocent lives,” General McChrystal said. “I have made it clear to our forces that we are here to protect the Afghan people, and inadvertently killing or injuring civilians undermines their trust and confidence in our mission. We will redouble our efforts to regain that trust.”

Last June, General McChrystal announced a shift in policy greatly restricting the use of airstrikes to reduce civilian casualties. The change meant airstrikes would normally be used only to save the lives of coalition forces when under attack, and would be carefully reviewed in advance.

“If the reports are true, this is the worst case since McChrystal has announced his new strategy of reducing the use of air power,” said Nadir Nadery, commissioner of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission said Monday. “In Kunduz, the target was legitimate militarily but the bombing was disproportionate, 70-plus civilians died, but at least it was a justified military target.”

A strike requested by German forces in Kunduz on Sept. 4 struck two fuel tanker trucks that had been seized by the Taliban, and it killed more than 90 people. It later emerged that most of the victims were civilians forced by the Taliban to participate in unloading the tankers.

The chief of staff of the German armed forces resigned over accusations that the German military withheld information about civilian deaths in Kunduz and the incident provoked a parliamentary inquiry in Germany.

The latest episode was far from the scene of an ongoing offensive in Marja, in southern Helmand Province, which began Feb. 13. The international force has apologized for the deaths of at least 15 civilians during the Marja campaign, including 12 killed by a ground-to-ground rocket strike.

A news release by the coalition Monday said there continue to be “limited small-arms engagements throughout” the district of Nad Ali, which includes Marja, and in the city itself. “Determined resistance from small pockets of insurgents continues,” it said.

The release said officials were studying how to deliver aid to residents in the city “to address U.N. concerns of a lack of food and water in Marja.” However, a spokesman for the United Nations in Afghanistan, Dan McNorton, said the United Nations had not expressed such concerns.

“We are currently undergoing an assessment of needs in Marja and Nat Ali,” he said, adding that the analysis was still under way.

In Kapisa Province, north of Kabul, a firefight Monday between joint international and Afghan forces and insurgents in Tagab District resulted in insurgents firing a rocket into a civilian car, killing one passenger and wounding five others. The international force’s account of the episode, however, said that no civilians were killed but that four insurgents were.

Reporting was contributed by Sangar Rahimi, Taimoor Shah and Abdul Waheed Wafa from Kabul, an employee of The New York Times from Jalalabad, and Marlise Simons from The Hague.

    NATO Airstrike Is Said to Have Killed Afghan Civilians, NYT, 23.2.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/23/world/asia/23afghan.html

Suicide Attack Kills Warlord Accused in bin Laden’s Escape

February 23, 2010
The New York Times
By ROD NORDLAND

KABUL, Afghanistan — A suicide bomber on Monday killed 15 people, including the controversial Afghan warlord Hajji Zaman, who was widely accused of having helped Osama bin Laden and his followers escape from his Tora Bora hide-out in late 2001.

A suicide bomber wearing an explosive vest approached Hajji Zaman and a group of provincial officials at a ceremony giving land to returning refugees in the village of Dasht-e-Chamtala, about 10 miles west of Jalalabad, according to Gen. Mohammad Ayob Salangi, the police chief of Nangarhar Province. Fifteen were killed in all, and up to 20 others wounded, the Ministry of Interior said in a statement.

Hajji Zaman, a tribal leader in Nangarhar, was a former mujahedeen commander during the Soviet occupation who later fought both for and against the Taliban. After the United States invasion, he and his fighters were employed as mercenaries by the American Special Forces who were hunting Mr. bin Laden in the Tora Bora area in Nangarhar, close to the Pakistani border. After his suspected role in Mr. bin Laden’s escape became public, he fled into exile in France and later Pakistan.

During his exile, he was accused of arranging the assassination in 2002 of a rival warlord, Hajji Abdul Qadir, then the vice president in President Hamid Karzai’s government.

Hajji Zaman had returned to Afghanistan within the past year. He was apparently attending the land distribution ceremony as an influential tribal leader in the area.

There were no immediate claims of responsibility for the attack. A Taliban spokesman said he did not know whether his group had carried it out.

An Afghan employee of The New York Times contributed reporting from Jalalabad, Afghanistan.

    Suicide Attack Kills Warlord Accused in bin Laden’s Escape, NYT, 23.2.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/23/world/asia/23taliban.html

Missile Kills Militant Commander’s Brother in Pakistan

February 20, 2010
The New York Times
By PIR ZUBAIR SHAH

Islamabad, Pakistan — A missile believed to have been fired Thursday from an American drone killed the younger brother of a top militant commander in the North Waziristan tribal area, according to several Pakistani security and intelligence officials, residents in Waziristan and a friend of the commander’s family.

The apparent target of the attack was Sirajuddin Haqqani, who the Americans say operates from his base in North Waziristan. He took over major responsibilities for the family’s militant network in recent months from his father, Jalaluddin Haqqani, who has been reported to be ill. The Americans blame the Haqqani network for helping plan the suicide bombing against the C.I.A. base in Afghanistan’s Khost Province last December, in which several C.I.A. operatives and a Jordanian intelligence officer were killed.

The brother, Mohammad Haqqani, was killed along with three others when their white station wagon was hit by a missile in Dande Darpakhel village of North Waziristan bordering Afghanistan. Americans believe that the commander, Sirajuddin Haqqani, is closely affiliated with Al Qaeda and that his force is the most potent one working against international forces in eastern and central Afghanistan.

Dande Darpakhel, is about a mile north of Miranshah, the capital of North Waziristan, and is considered the main base of the Haqqani network since the war against the Soviet Union in the 1980s. It has been a repeated target in missile strikes, one of which was believed to have killed several members of the Haqqani clan last year.

According to a family friend of the Haqqanis, Mohammad, who was about 20, was on his way to see his brother, the commander, when the missile struck. The family friend in the village said Mohammad Haqqani was not an active member of the militant network and that his brother had wanted him to pursue religious studies away from the area so that he could lead a more normal life. Mohammad and Sirajuddin, the sons of a militant leader named Jalaluddin Haqqani, share an Afghan mother and have an Arab stepmother. Funeral prayers for Mohammad Haqqani were held in Miranshah Friday afternoon, said a resident of the city who was reached by phone.

Sirajuddin Haqqani has subcommanders threaded throughout eastern and southern Afghanistan. His fighters control Paktika, Paktia and Khost Provinces in Afghanistan, which lie close to North Waziristan. His men are also strong in Ghazni, Logar and Wardak Provinces, Pakistani security officials said.

The United States is pressing Pakistan to act more aggressively against the Haqqani network but Pakistan has so far resisted the pressure, as it considers the group more of an asset than a threat because his forces mostly operate primarily in Afghanistan. It considers Mr. Haqqani and his control of large areas of Afghan territory vital to Pakistan in the jostling for influence that will pit Pakistan, India, Russia, China and Iran against one another in the post-American Afghan arena, Pakistani officials said. Pakistan is particularly eager to counter the growing influence of its archenemy, India, which is pouring $1.2 billion in aid into Afghanistan.

Mr. Haqqani has anywhere from 4,000 to 12,000 Taliban fighters under his command. He is technically a member of the Afghan Taliban leadership based in Quetta, the capital of Pakistan’s Baluchistan Province.

That leadership is headed by Mullah Muhammad Omar, the former leader of the Taliban regime. But Mr. Haqqani operates somewhat independently of them inside Afghanistan.

The strike intended for Mr. Haqqani came shortly after American and Pakistani security forces arrested a Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a deputy to Mullah Omar, in a joint raid last month in the port city of Karachi. Two of the Taliban’s shadow governors were later arrested on the information provided by Mullah Baradar, Pakistani officials said.

The United States has stepped up its use of missile strikes from C.I.A.-operated drones in Pakistan’s lawless tribal area against suspected Taliban and Qaeda targets and have killed some of the top commanders in recent months. The drones are focusing on North Waziristan because of the presence of large number of local and foreign fighters allied with Al Qaeda in the area and also partly because of the reluctance of the Pakistani government to launch an operation there.

One such strike killed the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, Baitullah Mehsud, last year while another one recently was aimed at his successor, Hakimullah Mehsud. The fate of Hakimullah Mehsud, whose network is believed to have played the leading role in the attack in Khost against the C.I.A., is still shrouded in confusion, with conflicting reports about whether he is alive.

    Missile Kills Militant Commander’s Brother in Pakistan, NYT, 20.2.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/20/world/asia/20pstan.html

7 in Allied Forces Die in Afghanistan

February 20, 2010
The New York Times
By ROD NORDLAND

KABUL, Afghanistan — More than half of the 11 NATO fatalities in the Marja offensive so far occurred on Thursday, as Taliban fighters continued to put up determined resistance in some parts of the city in southern Helmand Province.

Spokesmen for the International Security Assistance Force and the British Ministry of Defense on Friday confirmed that four Americans and two British servicemen had been killed on Thursday. In all, eight Americans and three Britons have died in the first week of the offensive.

The operation will take another 25 to 30 days “to be entirely sure that we have secured that which needs to be secured,” Maj. Gen. Nick Carter, the commander of British forces in the offensive and of the NATO forces in southern Afghanistan, said in a video teleconference with reporters in Washington on Thursday.

At the same time, spokesmen for the international force said efforts had already begun to restore civic society to Marja, which with 80,000 people is the most populous Taliban stronghold in Afghanistan. “To date, two ‘schools-in-a-box’ have been opened in Nad-e-Ali,” a news release from the international force said Friday.

The expression refers to Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s strategy to have a “government in a box” ready to set up in Marja as soon as it is secure, quickly reestablishing government services to an area long without them. The two schools have a capacity of 25 students each, the international force said.

The news release said 250 “cash-for-work” employees had been hired in Nad-e-Ali, the district that includes Marja, and three employees were hired to fill 27 vacant jobs in the district government.

The same release, however, stressed that “the combined force is meeting determined pockets of resistance in both the north and east of Marja City.”

“In Marja itself, there remains stiff resistance from the insurgents,” General Carter said. “And U.S. Marines in partnership with Afghan security forces are still fighting an intense series of actions, in the process of clearing Marja as a whole.” General Carter said it would take three months to see if government efforts after the fighting ends will have won over residents.

The mixed picture from NATO officials was in contrast to statements from Afghan military and government officials suggesting it was all but over. NATO spokesmen repeatedly have emphasized that Afghan forces were taking the lead in the offensive, but there has been little evidence of that so far.

“The operation seems almost over,” said Gen. Sher Mohammed Zazai, who as commander of the Afghan National Army’s 205th Corps is the top Afghan officer involved in the offensive. “We are still facing some resistance from the enemy but it is not so heavy,” he said Friday.

On Monday, General Zazai said the only resistance was a small pocket in the south of the city; on the same day, NATO briefers said the south was under control and only the north and east were still contested.

General Zazai also was unclear about his own forces’ casualties. “If we have received casualties, it’s not enough to mention,” he said Friday.

At the Joint Media Center in Helmand, set up by Afghan military and civilian officials, the top spokesman, Col. Mohammed Zahir Murad, put the Afghan military’s casualties at three dead and three wounded as of Friday.

However, Daoud Ahmadi, a spokesman for the Helmand governor, said Friday that only one Afghan soldier had been killed, and three wounded, in the fighting so far. Mr. Ahmadi estimated that 40 to 45 Taliban fighters had been killed in Marja. The Associated Press quoted unnamed Marine officers as saying 120 Taliban fighters may have died. A spokesman for the Taliban in the area, Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, reached by telephone, denied that, saying they had lost only seven killed so far.

The United States and British military released scant detail on the six deaths of their troops Thursday.

The six men died in five separate episodes, the international force said, including an improvised explosive device that killed two, and four episodes of small-arms fire that killed one person each. It appeared, based on incomplete official reports, that those five episodes took place at scattered locations in the area of the offensive.

Taliban snipers were reported to be especially active in Marja in recent days.

The British Ministry of Defense issued statements saying its two Marja-related fatalities on Thursday, one from First Battalion Scots Guards and the other from First Battalion Coldstream Guards, were killed in the Nad-e-Ali and Babaji areas, respectively.

“I would be very cautious about any triumphalism just yet,” General Carter said, adding that he was nonetheless optimistic that the offensive was going well so far.

Civilian casualties in the offensive have been relatively light, according to the international force’s reports, which put the total number at 15. A human rights activist in Kandahar, Abdul Rahman Hotaki, claimed at a press conference in the southern city that 21 civilians have been killed in all.

By comparison, civilian deaths in the second battle of Falluja, in November 2004, were estimated by the Red Cross at 800; other estimates were in the thousands. Ninety-five American, 3 British and 11 Iraqi troops were killed, and more than 560 wounded in the nine-day-long Falluja battle, with which Marja had often been compared in the weeks before the current offensive began.

Taimoor Shah contributed reporting from Kandahar, Afghanistan.

    7 in Allied Forces Die in Afghanistan, NYT, 20.2.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/20/world/asia/20afghan.html

In Pakistan Raid, Taliban Chief Was an Extra Prize

February 19, 2010
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE and ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON — When Pakistani security officers raided a house outside Karachi in late January, they had no idea that they had just made their most important capture in years.

American intelligence agencies had intercepted communications saying militants with a possible link to the Afghan Taliban’s top military commander, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, were meeting. Tipped off by the Americans, Pakistani counterterrorist officers took several men into custody, meeting no resistance.

Only after a careful process of identification did Pakistani and American officials realize they had captured Mullah Baradar himself, the man who had long overseen the Taliban insurgency against American, NATO and Afghan troops in Afghanistan.

New details of the raid indicate that the arrest of the No. 2 Taliban leader was not necessarily the result of a new determination by Pakistan to go after the Taliban, or a bid to improve its strategic position in the region. Rather, it may be something more prosaic: “a lucky accident,” as one American official called it. “No one knew what they were getting,” he said.

Now the full impact of Mullah Baradar’s arrest will play out only in the weeks to come.

Relations between the intelligence services of the United States and Pakistan have long been marred by suspicions that Pakistan has sheltered the Afghan Taliban. The Pakistanis have long denied it.

The capture of Mullah Baradar was followed by the arrests of two Taliban “shadow governors” elsewhere in Pakistan. While the arrests showed a degree of Pakistani cooperation, they also demonstrated how the Taliban leadership has depended on Pakistan as a rear base.

Jostling over the prize began as soon as Mullah Baradar was identified. Officials with the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s military spy agency, limited American access to Mullah Baradar, not permitting direct questioning by Central Intelligence Agency officers until about two weeks after the raid, according to American officials who discussed the issue on the condition of anonymity.

“The Pakistanis are an independent partner, and sometimes they show it,” said one American official briefed on the matter. “We don’t always love what they do, but if it weren’t for them, Mullah Baradar and a lot of other terrorists would still be walking around killing people.”

Bruce Riedel, an expert on Afghanistan at the Brookings Institution, who advised the Obama administration on Afghan policy early last year, said the tensions surrounding Mullah Baradar were inevitable. “The Pakistanis have a delicate problem with Baradar,” Mr. Riedel said. “If I were in their shoes, I’d be worried that he might reveal something embarrassing about relations between the Afghan Taliban and the Pakistani government or Inter-Services Intelligence.”

A Pakistani official expressed impatience with questions about past conflicts over the Afghan Taliban, saying, “It’s high time now that we move beyond that.”

Mullah Baradar is talking a little, though he is viewed as a formidable, hard-line opponent whose interrogation will be a long-term effort, according to American and Pakistani officials.

Despite the tensions, interviews with Pakistani military and intelligence officials suggested that the Taliban leader’s capture could alter Pakistan’s calculus about the volatile region.

Taking him off the battlefield, and exploiting the information he might provide, could deal a blow to the Taliban’s military capacity. In the long run, in any discussions of the future governance of Afghanistan, Mullah Baradar could become a bargaining chip and, conceivably, a negotiator.

In interviews on Thursday, Pakistani officials said an aggressive strategy to weaken the Taliban’s leadership might cripple the movement enough to bring it to the negotiating table.

“Maybe Mullah Baradar’s capture gives us a breakthrough in terms of reconciliation,” said one Pakistani intelligence official in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, who spoke on condition that he not be named. But the official said such a strategy ran the risk of making the Taliban “more hostile” or possibly of giving a Taliban hard-liner too much influence in negotiations.

Mr. Riedel, of the Brookings Institution, said the tensions surrounding Mullah Baradar were minor compared with the value of having captured him. He said Pakistan’s cooperation could be a sign that official attitudes there, which have favored the Afghan Taliban while condemning the Pakistani Taliban, are changing.

“I believe the Pakistanis have finally concluded that the Afghan Taliban and Pakistan Taliban were cooperating against them in Waziristan and elsewhere,” Mr. Riedel said, referring to links among various militant groups in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

An Obama administration official sounded a more cautious note about the recent arrests. “All this is not necessarily related to a rational decision at the top of the Pakistani military to see things our way,” the official said. “I don’t see any big shift yet.”

The likely impact of Mullah Baradar’s detention on prospects for talks with the Taliban, which have been the subject of intense speculation in recent months, is in dispute.

Alex Strick van Linschoten, a Dutch researcher who has lived for several years in Kandahar in southern Afghanistan, said Taliban representatives reacted with fury to Mullah Baradar’s arrest and were unlikely to be amenable to political approaches any time soon.

“This ends all that,” said Mr. Strick van Linschoten, who helped a former Taliban official, Abdul Salam Zaeef, write a memoir published last month in English, “My Life With the Taliban.”

Mr. Strick van Linschoten said the killing and detention of an older generation of Taliban, including Mullah Baradar, who fought Soviet troops in the 1980s, might leave a younger, decentralized force of militants who were less interested in and less able to conduct negotiations.

“On a local level in Afghanistan, Taliban fighters operate fairly independently,” he said. “They’re self-sustaining, by taxing the drug trade or taxing construction projects, and they’ll just keep fighting.”

Mullah Baradar, who is in his early 40s and is said by most officials to belong to the same Popalzai tribe as Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, is believed to be one of a handful of Taliban leaders in periodic contact with Mullah Muhammad Omar, the reclusive, one-eyed founder of the Taliban.

Their leadership council is known as the Quetta shura, and they are believed to have operated around the Pakistani city of Quetta since the Taliban government in Kabul, the Afghan capital, fell in 2001. But Mr. Strick van Linschoten said he heard in Kandahar that Taliban leaders were feeling increasingly vulnerable in Quetta.

As a result, Afghan Taliban leaders are believed to have been spending more time in Karachi, Pakistan, a sprawling port city of more than 15 million, where they believed that they would be harder to find.

Mark Mazzetti and Jane Perlez contributed reporting from Islamabad, Pakistan, and Dexter Filkins from Kabul, Afghanistan.

    In Pakistan Raid, Taliban Chief Was an Extra Prize, NYT, 19.2.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/world/asia/19intel.html

U.N. Rejects ‘Militarization’ of Afghan Aid

February 18, 2010
The New York Times
By ROD NORDLAND

KABUL, Afghanistan — Senior United Nations officials in Afghanistan on Wednesday criticized NATO forces for what one referred to as “the militarization of humanitarian aid,” and said United Nations agencies would not participate in the military’s reconstruction strategy in Marja as part of its current offensive there.

“We are not part of that process, we do not want to be part of it,” said Robert Watkins, the deputy special representative of the secretary general, at a news conference attended by other officials to announce the United Nations’ Humanitarian Action Plan for 2010. “We will not be part of that military strategy.”

The American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, has made the rapid delivery of governmental services, including education, health care and job programs, a central part of his strategy in Marja, referring to plans to rapidly deploy what he has referred to as “a government in a box” once Marja is pacified.

Mr. Watkins did not specifically criticize the Marja offensive, saying, “It is not the military that will be delivering the services, they will be clearing the area so the government can deliver those services.”

However, the United Nations would not be participating, he said.

Wael Haj-Ibrahim, head of the United Nations’ Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs here, said the military should not be involved in providing health care or schools.

“If that aid is being delivered as part of a military strategy, the counterstrategy is to destroy that aid,” Mr. Haj-Ibrahim said. “Allowing the military to do it is not the best use of resources.” Instead, he said, the military should confine itself to clearing an area of security threats and providing security for humanitarian organizations to deliver services.

“The distribution of aid by the military gives a very difficult impression to the communities and puts the lives of humanitarian workers at risk,” Mr. Watkins said.

Last month, eight leading humanitarian organizations working in Afghanistan, including Oxfam and ActionAid, issued a joint report that was highly critical of the International Security Assistance Force, as the American-led NATO force is known, because of “the international militaries’ use of aid as a ‘nonlethal’ weapon of war.”

They maintained that this violated an agreement between international forces and the United Nations that the military’s primary role should be to provide security and, only when there is no other alternative, to provide limited developmental and humanitarian assistance. The agencies maintain they are able to work in conflict areas of Afghanistan when local residents see them as independent and not connected with the military, and this approach puts that at risk.

“Military-led humanitarian and development activities are driven by donors’ political interests and short-term security objectives and are often ineffective, wasteful and potentially harmful to Afghans,” a statement by Oxfam said.

The United Nations officials expressed the same concern, though more diplomatically, and one official, who did not want to be quoted by name because of the political sensitivity of the issue, said the United Nations had repeatedly raised those concerns with the international forces without success.

The American military refers to its strategy, first enunciated in Iraq in 2006, as “clear, hold and build.” Previously there were insufficient foreign and Afghan troops in Afghanistan to pursue that strategy systematically because they were unable to hold large areas for long periods of time. The offensive in Marja is intended as a showcase where the strategy can work, and the coalition says it has adequate forces now to do that.

“Clear, hold and build, it’s short-sighted for two reasons,” the United Nations official said. “Territory changes hands in a conflict, and if the services are associated with a particular group, it will be destroyed.” That has happened often with projects like schools and clinics around the country.

The officials were particularly critical of NATO’s planned “civilian surge,” bringing in more government-funded aid workers involved in projects like the country’s provincial reconstruction teams, which are located in each province, staffed by NATO countries and designed to provide fast-track development and aid services in their areas. “A civilian surge, if part of a military strategy, will lead to a failure,” Mr. Haj-Ibrahim said.

Many of the reconstruction teams, the official said, see their role as providing services in exchange for intelligence-gathering and political activity directed against the insurgents. He declined to identify any that operate under that premise, although he added that not all did so.

In many parts of the country, only nongovernmental organizations are able to operate safely because of the security situation, and they fill the gap in governmental services. Because the reconstruction teams are run by foreigners and are associated with their countries’ militaries, they need to go out with heavy security, and aid groups worry that locals begin to associate all aid workers with the military.

Oxfam said the military “was going way beyond its remit” in Afghanistan, citing an American Army counterinsurgency manual that defines humanitarian aid as a “nonlethal weapon.”

A statement issued Wednesday by the international forces emphasized the military’s new, population-centered approach to fighting the insurgents. “The conduct of Operation Moshtarak is visibly demonstrating that the force has changed the way it operates and that it is working with and for the people of Afghanistan,” the statement said, referring to the Marja offensive. It also suggested the military phase of the operation could be protracted.

“The insurgents are tactically adept, have resilience and are cunning, so continued tactical patience on the part of the combined force is important. Mining is significant in areas, and the combined force must be very deliberate in its movement in order to minimize local Afghan and combined force casualties.”

The United Nations’ Humanitarian Action Plan has a proposed budget of $870.5 million, a substantial increase over previous years, because the increased level of NATO military activity has led to increased needs for services in many parts of the country, according the United Nations.

    U.N. Rejects ‘Militarization’ of Afghan Aid, NYT, 18.2.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/18/world/asia/18aid.html

Arrest of Taliban Chief May Be Crucial for Pakistanis

February 17, 2010
The New York Times
By CARLOTTA GALL and SOUAD MEKHENNET

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistan’s arrest of the top Taliban military commander may be a tactical victory for the United States, but it is also potentially a strategic coup for Pakistan, officials and analysts here and in Afghanistan said.

Pakistan has removed a key Taliban commander, enhanced cooperation with the United States and ensured a place for itself when parties explore a negotiated end to the Afghan war.

The arrest followed weeks of signals by Pakistan’s military chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani — to NATO officials, Western journalists and military analysts — that Pakistan wanted to be included in any attempts to mediate with the Taliban.

Even before the arrest of the Taliban commander, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a senior Pakistani intelligence official expressed irritation that Pakistan had been excluded from what he described as American and Afghan approaches to the Taliban.

“On the one hand, the Americans don’t want us to negotiate directly with the Taliban, but then we hear that they are doing it themselves without telling us,” the official said in an interview. “You don’t treat your partners like this.”

Mullah Baradar had been a important contact for the Afghans for years, Afghan officials said. But Obama administration officials denied that they had made any contact with him.

Whatever the case, with the arrest of Mullah Baradar, Pakistan has effectively isolated a key link to the Taliban leadership, making itself the main channel instead.

“We are after Mullah Baradar,” the Pakistani intelligence official said in an interview three weeks ago. “We strongly believe that the Americans are in touch with him, or people who are close to him.”

The official said the American action of excluding Pakistan from talks with the Afghan Taliban was making things “difficult.”

“You cannot say that we are important allies and then you are negotiating with people whom we are hunting and you don’t include us,” he said.

An American official in Washington who has been briefed on the arrest denied that there had been negotiations with the Taliban commander or that Pakistani intelligence engineered the arrest to ensure a role in negotiations. “That’s a conspiracy theory to which I give no credit, because it’s just not true,” the official said.

But whether or not that was Pakistan’s intention, it may be the effect.

The Taliban are longtime Pakistani allies in Afghanistan, and Pakistan has signaled its interest in preserving influence there.

Though the Obama administration has been divided on whether and how to deal with the Taliban, the Pakistani move could come at the expense of the Afghan government of Hamid Karzai and complicate reconciliation efforts his government has begun.

An American intelligence official in Europe conceded as much, while also acknowledging Mullah Baradar’s key role in the reconciliation process. “I know that our people had been in touch with people around him and were negotiating with him,” the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the issue.

“So it doesn’t make sense why we bite the hand that is feeding us,” the official added. “And now the Taliban will have no reason to negotiate with us; they will not believe anything we will offer or say.”

The arrest comes at a delicate time, when the Taliban are in a fierce internal debate about whether to negotiate for peace or fight on as the United States prepares to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan this year.

He is one of the most senior military figures in the Taliban leadership who is close to the overall Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, and has been one of the main Taliban conciliators, Afghan officials said.

It has been clear from interviews recently with commanders and other members of the Taliban in southern Afghanistan and in Pakistan that the notion of talks has divided the Taliban, but more and more want negotiations.

Some hard-liners are arguing to continue the fight. But in recent weeks the balance has been increasingly toward making peace, according to Hajji Muhammad Ehsan, a member of the Kandahar provincial council.

Officials in Kandahar, the former base of the Taliban government, have some of the closest links to the Taliban leadership, who are mostly from southern Afghanistan and are now living across the border in Pakistan.

“He was the only person intent on or willing for peace negotiations,” said Hajji Agha Lalai, former head of the government-led reconciliation process in the city of Kandahar, who has dealt with members of the Taliban leadership council for several years.

He and other officials in Afghanistan who are familiar with the Taliban leadership said Mullah Baradar’s arrest by Pakistani intelligence, and his interrogation by Pakistani intelligence officers and American agents, could play out in two ways. Mullah Baradar might be able to persuade other Taliban to give up the fight. Or if he is perceived to be mistreated, that could end any hopes of wooing other Taliban.

“Mullah Brother can create change in the Taliban leadership, if he is used in mediation or peace-talking efforts to convince other Taliban to come over, but if he is put in jail as a prisoner, we don’t think the peace process will be productive,” said Hajji Baridad, a tribal elder from Kandahar.

The Afghan government did not react to the news of Mullah Baradar’s arrest, an indication that it was upset at Pakistan’s action. Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the president, who has held indirect contacts with Mullah Baradar in the past, welcomed his arrest as serving a “death blow” to the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar.

“We value the help of Pakistani officials in helping to arrest Mullah Baradar. This is actually a positive step, and we hope they will continue this kind of contribution,” he said.

But the former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, who has led efforts on behalf of President Karzai to persuade the Taliban to negotiate an end to the war, attacked Pakistan’s action as destroying all chances of reconciliation with the rest of the Taliban leadership.

“If it’s really true, it could seriously affect negotiations and can gravely affect the peace process,” he said, speaking in Kabul, where he has resided since his release from the prison at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba several years ago. “It would destroy the fragile trust built between both sides and will not help with the peace process.”

Carlotta Gall reported from Islamabad, and Souad Mekhennet from Frankfurt. Taimoor Shah contributed reporting from Kandahar, Afghanistan; Sangar Rahimi from Kabul, Afghanistan; and Scott Shane from Washington.

    Arrest of Taliban Chief May Be Crucial for Pakistanis, NYT, 17.2.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/17/world/asia/17intel.html

Marines in Afghan Assault Grapple With Civilian Deaths

February 17, 2010
The New York Times
By C. J. CHIVERS and ROD NORDLAND

MARJA, Afghanistan — Twelve bodies — five children, five women and two men — were wrapped head to toe in woolen blankets, lying in a neat row on the floor of the only room remaining in a house that had been blasted to mud-brick rubble by at least one and possibly two 675-pound rockets.

A United States Marine Corps battalion commander, Lt. Col. Brian Christmas, stood in that room on Tuesday with a relative of the victims, a local elder named Hajji Mohammad Karim, and said what he could.

“I bring my deepest condolences and will provide all of my support,” the colonel told him. There was no recrimination, only sorrow.

Colonel Christmas, commander of the Third Battalion, Sixth Marines, had arrived near this place in northern Marja by helicopter just before dawn; his beleaguered Company K, after three days of heavy fighting, was finally getting resupplied. Bridges had been put over the canals nearby, so roads could reopen.

“The resistance has been a little thicker than I would have liked for the forces I have,” the colonel said, as he led a foot patrol over to the house later in the day.

On Sunday, Company K had been in its fighting positions a couple of hundred yards away from the family’s mud-walled compound when the rocket or rockets struck it. Since then, several versions of what happened have emerged.

Eager to demonstrate the coalition’s commitment to avoid civilian casualties, and to take responsibility for them when they do happen, the American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, immediately issued a statement saying that 12 civilians had been accidentally killed, that the rocket launcher had missed its target by 300 meters and would be suspended from service, and that apologies had been conveyed to President Hamid Karzai. An investigation was ordered.

The investigation found that the targeting system — the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System — had not been defective, a spokesman for the NATO-led coalition force, Lt. Col. Todd Vician of the United States Air Force, said Tuesday. He said the suspension was lifted, allowing the system to be returned to use as a defensive weapon. As to what did happen, however, he said, “We are still waiting for those results and hope to have an answer soon.”

To the Marines of Company K, and an embedded reporter accompanying them, one thing seemed clear: the company had not ordered a rocket strike on that house. At the time they were taking fire from many houses in the area.

“The original target of the two rockets was a compound where insurgents were delivering accurate, direct fire on an Afghan-ISAF joint team,” according to a Sunday news release by the NATO-led force, the International Security Assistance Force.

That team was Company K, with an Afghan Army unit attached to it. “The compound that was hit was not the one we were targeting,” the company commander said that day.

After the Marines saw children stream out of the ruined house, the company commander immediately ordered a cease-fire. With Taliban snipers still trying to pick them off, his men raced across the flat, open expanse between their positions and the house, where medics rendered what first aid they could.

They initially counted 11 dead, because one woman was still alive. Marine Corps medics worked to stabilize her condition, although she had lost three limbs. A helicopter came in to evacuate the wounded, but took so much Taliban ground fire that it had to lift off again before the wounded could be loaded on board. The woman died, making the death toll 12.

There may be a 13th, because one of the men in the family is still missing, and the Marines said Tuesday that his body might be under the mass of rubble. “You hope the individual was not in the building,” said Capt. Christopher M. Hoover, the battalion’s judge advocate. “It’s uncertain right now.”

While the American military methodically worked to figure out what happened, by the next day the Afghan authorities had announced their findings.

At a news conference on Monday, the Afghan interior minister, Muhammad Hanif Atmar, flanked by the Afghan minister of defense and the army commander for Helmand, said that only 9 of the 12 dead in the house were civilians, and that the other 3 were Taliban insurgents who had forced their way into the house and used it as a fighting position.

He said local tribal leaders were “deeply saddened,” but not angry. “I will quote one of them,” Mr. Atmar said, “ ‘We are very sad about the civilian casualties but if nine civilians have died, hundreds of thousands will get freedom.’ ” Marja has 80,000 residents.

The Afghan government’s account seemed at best debatable on Tuesday. For one thing, if there had been weapons in the house, the Marines would most likely have found them.

At this point, though, the Americans are not jumping to any conclusions.

Colonel Vician, the military spokesman, said that the tempo of the fighting had slowed in Marja by Tuesday, although two more ISAF service members, neither American, were killed on Tuesday, one by a homemade bomb, the other by small arms fire.

“There are pockets of resistance that continue to engage combined forces, but it’s sporadic, at times intensive, but sporadic,” he said.

In the mud-brick charnel house where the Afghans were killed, Hajji Karim, the local elder, took up Colonel Christmas’s offer of assistance on Tuesday.

The victims had already been dead for more than two days. Muslims believe in prompt burial, but the family had no way to carry the bodies through the battlefield to the provincial capital of Lashkar Gah, 17 miles away. Would the Americans take them?

Within hours, a Marine Corps Osprey, a transport aircraft that can take off and land like a helicopter, put down nearby, taking enemy fire as it came in, and the Marines grimly loaded the bodies aboard for the trip to the cemetery.

C. J. Chivers reported from Marja, and Rod Nordland from Kabul, Afghanistan. Taimoor Shah contributed reporting from Kandahar, and Dexter Filkins and Abdul Waheed Wafa from Kabul.

    Marines in Afghan Assault Grapple With Civilian Deaths, NYT, 17.2.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/17/world/asia/17afghan.html

Fighting Slows in Afghan Offensive, Allies Say

February 17, 2010
The New York Times
By ROD NORDLAND

KABUL, Afghanistan — Fighting has slowed in the battle for Marja, with Taliban fighters still engaging in fierce resistance but with less consistency, a spokesman for the international forces said Tuesday.

The spokesman, Lt. Col. Todd Vician, said that though international forces were meeting “pockets of resistance,” the fighting was “sporadic, at times intensive” on Tuesday, the fourth day of the offensive in central Helmand Province. Unlike early in the fight, he said, Taliban attacks were “largely uncoordinated.”

There were no confirmed reports of further civilian or military casualties on Tuesday.

The coalition death toll from the fighting remained at two, an American Marine and a British marine killed on the first day of fighting Saturday, Colonel Vician said. The commander of Afghan army troops involved in Marja, Gen. Sher Mohammed Zazai, said no Afghan soldiers had been killed in the fighting, and only four had been wounded.

“The operation is going perfectly now based on the plan we had,” he said in a telephone interview. “We still have sporadic firefights with the enemy but not major ones. The areas that we have cleared from mines and I.E.D.s,” he said, referring to improvised explosive devices. “People are already resuming their normal activities.”

General Zazai, who commands the 205th Corps, said the authorities had set up a local radio station to broadcast information on which areas had been cleared so people would know when it was safe to come out of their homes.

Also on Tuesday, a Taliban spokesman denied that the insurgents’ second-most important leader, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, had been captured in Pakistan.

“He is safe and free, and he leads the command and he is in Afghanistan,” said the spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid, who was reached by cellphone on Tuesday.

United States officials confirmed the arrest to The New York Times last Thursday but asked the newspaper to withhold the information until Monday because it would impede intelligence operations. They described him as the most significant Taliban figure yet arrested, head of their military operations and second in importance only to the Taliban “emir of Afghanistan,” Mullah Omar. Mullah Baradar was arrested in a joint raid by Pakistani intelligence agents with C.I.A. agents accompanying them, American officials said.

“This is a false rumor spread by foreigners in order to weaken the morale of the Taliban because they are facing big problems in Marja,” Mr. Mujahid said.

In Afghanistan, a local Taliban commander, Mullah Sarajuddin, was killed in Washer District, in Helmand Province, on Monday night along with four Arab fighters, said Daoud Ahmadi, the spokesman for the governor of Helmand. He was believed to be a district-level military commander for the Taliban. Mr. Ahmadi said Mullah Sarajuddin was killed by the International Security Assistance Forces, as the United States-led NATO force is known. The coalition has not confirmed the claim.

In an episode apparently unrelated to the Marja offensive, at least 10 people were killed after a vehicle chase and firefight with coalition soldiers in Washir District, just north of Marja, according to Colonel Vician, who said all the victims were combatants. Separately, the Helmand governor’s office denied what it said were charges by local residents that 15 civilians had been killed in that episode, according to his spokesman, Mr. Ahmadi.

The international forces said a joint Afghan-NATO force pursued a series of three vehicles that refused to stop and whose occupants traded gunfire with NATO troops. “As the assault force engaged the third car it received machine-gun and rocket-propelled-grenade fire from the nearby village,” the coalition said in a statement. The third car burst into flames. “As the firefight continued militants from the village tried to approach the burning vehicle several times, but were driven off as explosives and ammunition inside the vehicle continued to detonate.

“To reduce the possibility of civilian casualties in the village, the combined force then broke off the fight and returned to base,” the statement said.

The Taliban claimed Monday to be winning the fight in Marja, according to an e-mail message to journalists in Afghanistan, using an e-mail address that in the past has been associated with the insurgents. The message challenged foreign journalists to visit Marja independently to see the coalition forces’ “shameful defeat in the Marja area.”

“The invading forces have made no spectacular advancement since the beginning of the operations,” the statement said. “They have descended from helicopters in limited areas of Marja and now are under siege. The invaders are not able to come out of their ditches.”

The Taliban statement, which was also posted on a jihadi Web site associated with the group, challenged “all independent mass media outlets of the world to send their reporters to Marja and see the situation with their own eyes.” Only journalists embedded with coalition military units are allowed in the Marja area while the offensive is under way.

The international force is continuing to carry out an investigation into a rocket attack that killed 12 people in a civilian’s house in Marja on Sunday, but so far has determined that there had been no technical fault in the rocket launcher that was used, Colonel Vician said. The use of that rocket launcher had been suspended immediately after the deaths but has now been restored for defensive use, he said. Afghan authorities say three of the people in the house were Taliban militants firing on coalition troops. The coalition’s initial report said all 12 were civilians, and the American Commander, Gen. Stanley H. McChrystal, apologized for the episode.

United States Marines at the scene of the incident, however, complained to an embedded New York Times reporter that they had not ordered the rocket strike and that it hit the wrong house.

Reporting was contributed by C. J. Chivers contributed reporting from Marja, Afghanistan; Taimoor Shah from Kandahar, Afghanistan; and Dexter Filkins and Abdul Waheed Wafa from Kabul.

    Fighting Slows in Afghan Offensive, Allies Say, NYT, 17.2.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/17/world/asia/17afghan.html

Clashes Intensify as Soldiers Push to Hold Key Areas

February 16, 2010
The New York Times
By C. J. CHIVERS

MARJA, Afghanistan — Ten minutes after walking out of the small outpost on Monday morning, the Marines of Company K were ambushed again.

Taliban fighters waited until the patrol of perhaps 25 Marines had entirely entered the barren and flat open ground between two mud-walled compounds. Then they opened fire. Bullets twanged past in the air and thumped among the Marines in the dirt.

There was no cover. The Marines dropped, fired, then bounded to their feet, running through muddy gunk.

“Break to your left!” one of them shouted. “Go!”

So began the third day for a rifle company alone in northern Marja, where four platoons have been in near constant skirmishing with the Taliban since Saturday. They have faced a mix of ambushes and sustained engagements along with intermittent sniper fire. Two Marines were shot and wounded on Saturday. Two Afghan soldiers who patrol with them were gravely injured on Monday, with one shot in the face, the other through the neck.

The Afghan government on Monday tried to portray the battle for the Taliban stronghold as all but over, with the resistance light and the Taliban fleeing, a characterization that bore little resemblance to the facts on the ground here in northern Marja. The American military offered a more nuanced view of the fighting, but one that still focused on the gains.

The roads into Marja have only been partially cleared, and this company, Company K, Third Battalion, Sixth Marines, is isolated and surrounded by Taliban.

After two days of fighting, the company was running out of ammunition; the first patrol that was ambushed on Monday was moving to meet another platoon that was carrying fresh ammunition and water for Company K from a 5 a.m. helicopter drop.

The patrol members dashed out of the ambush and reloaded — stripping cartridges from their packaging and pushing them in the magazines one by one — then pushed out again. Within minutes they were under fire again, and fighting anew.

The day proved to be a long one for a company that had barely slept in 72 hours and started the morning parched for water.

Company K had been ordered to seize a bridge and a bazaar a little over a mile to the northeast of the landing zone where helicopters had inserted the Marines shortly after midnight Saturday morning. The original plan had been to take the bridge by Saturday evening.

But the fighting had been so intense by Saturday afternoon that the company consolidated on the ground that it held. On Sunday it developed into a long-running battle, with several episodes of intense exchanges of fire and aircraft and rockets firing to keep the Taliban back. The company again stopped short of the bridge, and called for resupply of water, food and ammunition.

On Monday it fought through the first ambushes and spent the day clearing buildings on the way to the bridge.

Second Platoon advanced toward the bridge, moving by bounds and using squads to watch over the Marines going forward. The Taliban let the first units get near, then began firing. Heavy shooting erupted. First Lt. Gordon W. Emmanuel, the platoon commander, radioed Capt. Joshua Biggers, the company commander, and asked for fire support. “Requesting an airstrike on that bunker,” he said.

The Marines marked their own position with yellow smoke. The Cobra helicopter gunships roared by and strafed the bunker, sending soil and debris high in the air.

The movement toward the bridge already had a toll — an Afghan soldier looking over a wall during the shooting had been shot in the cheekbone. He collapsed but was alive; apparently the bullet struck him obliquely.

A pair of Black Hawk helicopters rushed in, and one landed and evacuated him. Several hours later, he was reported to still be alive.

The platoon pushed on, into intermittent fire and the occasional single shots of a sniper, whose bullets narrowly missed the Marines, sometimes by inches.

By midafternoon the Marines were sweeping the bazaar beside the bridge and looking for land mines. They found a large makeshift bomb in the road and destroyed it. The fire became less frequent, but when the Cobra helicopters left to refuel, the Taliban fighters dashed for safety. They could be seen in the distance, running.

Cpl. Jamie Wieczorek asked a machine gunner if he could hit them. “How far can you touch?” he asked.

“Give me a distance,” said the machine gunner, Lance Cpl. Kevin Hoffman.

“A grand,” said another Marine.

Lance Corporal Hoffman adjusted the rear sight on his M240 machinegun to 1,000 meters, rested the gun atop a wall, looked down the barrel and began to fire short bursts. “Drop him to 800,” a Marine ordered. Lance Corporal Hoffman adjusted his sight and fired again.

Lieutenant Emmanuel, the platoon commander, called over the radio: “They’re running away. Keep the pressure on them.”

The Marines reached the bridge shortly after and crossed it. Then a sniper shot an Afghan soldier in the neck. His fellow soldiers dragged him off as the company arranged for another helicopter.

By nightfall, the platoon was sweeping the area on the far side of the bridge, preparing to settle in. The company command element began patrolling back to its small outpost in the dimming light, listening to an intense firefight between the Taliban and Third Platoon in the distance.

Third Platoon and the company command element — exhausted, mud-caked and parched again — arrived at the outpost at about the same time. The company had successfully seized the bridge. But it was scattered across hostile territory and in a fight almost everywhere it went.

    Clashes Intensify as Soldiers Push to Hold Key Areas, NYT, 16.2.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/16/world/asia/16marja.html

Secret Joint Raid Captures Taliban’s Top Commander

February 16, 2010
The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI and DEXTER FILKINS

WASHINGTON — The Taliban’s top military commander was captured several days ago in Karachi, Pakistan, in a secret joint operation by Pakistani and American intelligence forces, according to American government officials.

The commander, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, is an Afghan described by American officials as the most significant Taliban figure to be detained since the American-led war in Afghanistan started more than eight years ago. He ranks second in influence only to Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban’s founder and a close associate of Osama bin Laden before the Sept. 11 attacks.

Mullah Baradar has been in Pakistani custody for several days, with American and Pakistani intelligence officials both taking part in interrogations, according to the officials.

It was unclear whether he was talking, but the officials said his capture had provided a window into the Taliban and could lead to other senior officials. Most immediately, they hope he will provide the whereabouts of Mullah Omar, the one-eyed cleric who is the group’s spiritual leader.

Disclosure of Mullah Baradar’s capture came as American and Afghan forces were in the midst of a major offensive in southern Afghanistan.

His capture could cripple the Taliban’s military operations, at least in the short term, said Bruce O. Riedel, a former C.I.A. officer who last spring led the Obama administration’s Afghanistan and Pakistan policy review.

Details of the raid remain murky, but officials said that it had been carried out by Pakistan’s military spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, and that C.I.A. operatives had accompanied the Pakistanis.

The New York Times learned of the operation on Thursday, but delayed reporting it at the request of White House officials, who contended that making it public would end a hugely successful intelligence-gathering effort. The officials said that the group’s leaders had been unaware of Mullah Baradar’s capture and that if it became public they might cover their tracks and become more careful about communicating with each other.

The Times is publishing the news now because White House officials acknowledged that the capture of Mullah Baradar was becoming widely known in the region.

Several American government officials gave details about the raid on the condition that they not be named, because the operation was classified.

American officials believe that besides running the Taliban’s military operations, Mullah Baradar runs the group’s leadership council, often called the Quetta Shura because its leaders for years have been thought to be hiding near Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan Province in Pakistan.

The participation of Pakistan’s spy service could suggest a new level of cooperation from Pakistan’s leaders, who have been ambivalent about American efforts to crush the Taliban. Increasingly, the Americans say, senior leaders in Pakistan, including the chief of its army, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, have gradually come around to the view that they can no longer support the Taliban in Afghanistan — as they have quietly done for years — without endangering themselves. Indeed, American officials have speculated that Pakistani security officials could have picked up Mullah Baradar long ago.

The officials said that Pakistan was leading the interrogation of Mullah Baradar, but that Americans were also involved. The conditions of the questioning are unclear. In its first week in office, the Obama administration banned harsh interrogations like waterboarding by Americans, but the Pakistanis have long been known to subject prisoners to brutal questioning.

American intelligence officials believe that elements within Pakistan’s security services have covertly supported the Taliban with money and logistical help — largely out of a desire to retain some ally inside Afghanistan for the inevitable day when the Americans leave.

The ability of the Taliban’s top leaders to operate relatively freely inside Pakistan has for years been a source of friction between the ISI and the C.I.A. Americans have complained that they have given ISI operatives the precise locations of Taliban leaders, but that the Pakistanis usually refuse to act.

The Pakistanis have countered that the American intelligence was often outdated, or that faulty information had been fed to the United States by Afghanistan’s intelligence service.

For the moment it is unclear how the capture of Mullah Baradar will affect the overall direction of the Taliban, who have so far refused to disavow Al Qaeda and to accept the Afghan Constitution. American officials have hoped to win over some midlevel members of the group.

Mr. Riedel, the former C.I.A. official, said that he had not heard about Mullah Baradar’s capture before being contacted by The Times, but that the raid constituted a “sea change in Pakistani behavior.”

In recent weeks, American officials have said they have seen indications that the Pakistani military and spy services may finally have begun to distance themselves from the Taliban. One Obama administration official said Monday that the White House had “no reason to think that anybody was double-dealing at all” in aiding in the capture of Mullah Baradar.

A parade of American officials traveling to the Pakistani capital have made the case that the Afghan Taliban are now aligned with groups — like the Pakistani Taliban — that threaten the stability of the Pakistani government.

Mullah Baradar oversees the group’s operations across its primary area of activity in southern and western Afghanistan. While some of the insurgent groups active in Afghanistan receive only general guidance from their leaders, the Taliban are believed to be somewhat hierarchical, with lower-ranking field commanders often taking directions and orders from their leaders across the border.

In an attempt to improve the Taliban’s image both inside the country and abroad, Mullah Baradar last year helped issue a “code of conduct” for Taliban fighters. The handbook, small enough to be carried in the pocket of each Taliban foot soldier, gave specific guidance about topics including how to avoid civilian casualties, how to win the hearts and minds of villagers, and the necessity of limiting suicide attacks to avoid a backlash.

In recent months, a growing number of Taliban leaders are believed to have fled to Karachi, a sprawling, chaotic city in southern Pakistan hundreds of miles from the turbulence of the Afghan frontier. A diplomat based in Kabul, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said in an interview last month that Mullah Omar had moved to Karachi, and that several of his colleagues were there, too.

The leadership council, which includes more than a dozen of the Taliban’s best-known leaders, charts the overall direction of the war, assigns Taliban “shadow governors” to run many Afghan provinces and districts, and chooses battlefield commanders. It also oversees a number of subcommittees that direct other aspects of the war, like political, religious and military affairs.

According to Wahid Muzhda, a former Taliban official in Kabul who stays in touch with former colleagues, the council meets every three or four months to plot strategy. As recently as three years ago, he said, the council had 19 members. Since then, six have been killed or captured. Others have since filled the empty seats, he said.

Among the council members killed were Mullah Dadullah, who died during a raid by NATO and Afghan forces in 2007. Among the captured were Mullah Obaidullah, the Taliban defense minister, who reported to Mr. Baradar.

“The only man more powerful than Baradar is Omar,” Mr. Muzhda said. “He and Omar cannot meet very often because of security reasons, but they have a very good relationship.”

Western and Afghan officials familiar with the workings of the Taliban’s leadership have described Mullah Baradar as one of the Taliban’s most approachable leaders, and the one most ready to negotiate with the Afghan government.

Mediators who have worked to resolve kidnappings and other serious issues have often approached the Taliban leadership through him.

As in the case of the reclusive Mullah Omar, the public details of Mullah Baradar’s life are murky. According to an Interpol alert, he was born in 1968 in Weetmak, a village in Afghanistan’s Oruzgan Province. Terrorism experts describe him as a skilled military leader who runs many high-level meetings of the Taliban’s top commanders in Afghanistan.

In answers to questions submitted by Newsweek last summer, Mullah Baradar said that he could not maintain “continuous contacts” with Mullah Omar, but that he received advice on “important topics” from the cleric.

In the same interview, Mullah Baradar said he welcomed a large increase in American troops in Afghanistan because the Taliban “want to inflict maximum losses on the Americans, which is possible only when the Americans are present here in large numbers and come out of their fortified places.”

Shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, Mullah Baradar was assigned by Mullah Omar to assume overall command of Taliban forces in northern Afghanistan. In that role, he oversaw a large group of battle-hardened Arab and foreign fighters who were based in the northern cities of Kunduz and Mazar-i-Sharif.

In November 2001, as Taliban forces collapsed after the American invasion, Mullah Baradar and several other senior Taliban leaders were captured by Afghan militia fighters aligned with the United States. But Pakistani intelligence operatives intervened, and Mullah Baradar and the other Taliban leaders were released, according to a senior official of the Northern Alliance, the group of Afghans aligned with the United States.

Mark Mazzetti reported from Washington, and Dexter Filkins from Kabul, Afghanistan. Carlotta Gall contributed reporting from Islamabad, Pakistan.

    Secret Joint Raid Captures Taliban’s Top Commander, NYT, 16.2.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/16/world/asia/16intel.html

Half of Town’s Taliban Flee or Are Killed, Allies Say

February 16, 2010
The New York Times
By DEXTER FILKINS

NAD ALI, Afghanistan — As heavy fighting in the insurgent stronghold of Marja carried into its third day, the number of Taliban fighters in the area has dropped by about half, American and Afghan commanders said Monday.

About a quarter of the 400 Taliban fighters estimated to be in Marja when the Afghan-American operation began early Saturday have been killed, officers said. A similar number of Taliban appear to have fled the area, including most of the leaders, and local Afghans were offering help ferreting out Taliban fighters and hidden bombs, they said.

But intense fighting on the ground through much of the day indicated that there were plenty of Taliban insurgents with fight left in them. In Marja itself, a broad agricultural area crisscrossed by irrigation canals, the fighting appears to be concentrated in two areas, at the northern end of the district and at the center. There, the combat on Monday continued at a furious pace.

Among the Taliban fighters still in Marja, American and Afghan officials said, morale appears to be eroding fast, in part because the holdouts feel abandoned by their leaders and by local Afghans who are refusing to shelter them.

“They cannot feed themselves, they cannot sustain themselves — that is what we are hearing,” Col. Scott Hartsell told a group of senior officers at a briefing near Marja that included Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the commander of NATO forces; and Abdul Rahim Wardak, the Afghan minister of defense. “They are calling for help, and they are not getting any.”

“Pretty soon, they are going to run out of gas,” Colonel Hartsell said.

Indeed, some of the American and Afghan commanders said that they hoped to complete the combat phase of the operation within three or four days.

The details of the assessment, the most extensive made public on the Marja operation, could not be independently verified. But whatever the accuracy of the briefing, it did not lessen the ferocity of the battle at various points on the ground.

With the sort of hit-and-run tactics they were employing, small numbers of guerrillas appeared capable of holding out for long periods, and exacting the maximum effort from the NATO and Afghan forces to defeat them.

One of the most striking developments on Monday came from a group of tribal elders, who confirmed that they had begun to actively assist the American and Afghan government in the fighting. A Marja tribal elder, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that a local shura — or council — had assigned 10 local Afghans to assist American and Afghan military units.

“They are here to help us, and it’s our duty to help them,” a tribal elder said in a telephone interview, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “They might kill me for telling you this.”

Despite the encouraging reports from the field, the American military and Afghan government had to contend with plenty of difficulties, in Marja and in other locations.

There were conflicting accounts of a missile strike that killed at least 11 civilians on Sunday. American officials said they had in fact hit the target they intended, a description that did not match accounts from Marines and other witnesses on the ground.

NATO officials said Monday that eight Afghan civilians were killed and three wounded in four separate episodes, three of them inside the area where the Marja operation was unfolding. Three civilians were killed in Marja: one in cross-fire during a gun battle and two others who were shot when they did not heed warnings from NATO and Afghan forces to keep their distance.

Also Monday, five civilians were killed and two were wounded in an airstrike in Zhari, a district in neighboring Kandahar Province. A patrol of Afghan and NATO forces spotted a group of residents digging a ditch on the roadside, and they mistook them for insurgents planting a bomb. They called in an airstrike.

The heavy civilian toll highlighted the stressful and confusing nature of the fighting, especially in Marja, and of the difficulties inherent in conducting military operations in a guerrilla war, where insurgents can hide easily among the population.

Still, the deaths are troubling to the American and NATO commanders, who have made protecting civilians the overriding objective of their campaign — even when doing so comes at the expense of letting insurgents get away. The stream of news releases flowing from NATO headquarters detailing the episodes is testament to how seriously military commanders here take the problem.

The missile strike in Marja on Sunday remained shrouded in mystery, despite attempts to clarify what had happened.

An American rocket fired into a mud-walled compound during a firefight killed at least 11 people. After the strike, the American military said the rocket had struck the wrong house and apologized for the civilian loss of life.

On Monday, however, American officers said that the rocket, fired from miles away, had in fact hit the compound it was intended to hit. American Marines were taking fire from that compound, officers said, so the compound was attacked. They did not realize that there were civilians inside.

“The rocket hit the house that we wanted it to hit,” an American officer said at a briefing the briefing with General McChrystal and Mr. Wardak. “We didn’t know there were civilians there.”

But that explanation did not square with accounts from Marines on the ground. The Marine company commander said that he and his men were startled by the missile strike, of which they had no prior warning. Earlier in the day, the company commander said, he had requested a rocket to be launched at a building next to the one that was eventually hit, from which the Marines were taking small-arms fire. The permission was denied, he said.

As the day wore on, one of the biggest unknowns was the whereabouts of the fleeing Taliban fighters. Intelligence reports indicated that a group of Taliban had fled north, to the town of Sangin, while a number had fled south toward the border with Pakistan.

Some American officers said they suspected some fighters — especially the local ones — probably just decided not to fight. That is part of the nature of a war like this: if guerrillas decide to stay home, they are unlikely to be discovered. Which means, of course, that they can fight again.

As for the other fleeing insurgents, there were plenty of places for them to go. Of Helmand Province’s 13 districts, at least 3 are not under government control. And some reports had insurgents fleeing to Pakistan, where the Taliban’s top leadership resides.

“The Taliban have no specific uniform; they are like ordinary people,” said Abdul Razaq, a tribal elder from Marja. “They can go anywhere, anytime.”

C. J. Chivers contributed reporting from Marja, Afghanistan; Rod Nordland from Kabul; and an employee of The New York Times from Helmand Province.

    Half of Town’s Taliban Flee or Are Killed, Allies Say, NYT, 16.2.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/16/world/asia/16afghan.html

Afghan Suicide Bombings Less Effective as a Tactic

February 16, 2010
The New York Times
By ROD NORDLAND

KABUL, Afghanistan — The Taliban’s suicide bombers have been selling their lives cheaply of late.

From Jan. 24 to Feb. 14, a total of 17 suicide bombers took aim at one coalition member after another but failed to kill any of them, according to a compilation of reports from Afghan police and military officials, and from the American-led International Security Assistance Force.

The latest failures were three suicide bombers who attacked an Afghan headquarters outside Marja on Sunday; local people reported them to the authorities, who shot them before they could set off their explosives, according to a spokesman for the Helmand Province governor.

ISAF officials credit better training of Afghan forces, and disruption of the bomb-makers’ networks by NATO-led raids. Analysts say the Taliban no longer have foreign expertise in preparing suicide bombers, and have a hard time finding competent recruits in a society that until recent years had little history of suicide attacks.

According to a New York Times tally, at least 480 people were killed in 129 suicide bombings in Afghanistan in 2007, not counting the bombers themselves. That death toll dropped to 275 in 2009, even though the number of bombings had increased. A spokesman for ISAF, Maj. Steve Cole, said bombings in recent months have averaged 15 or 16 a month.

In three episodes during the last three weeks, the bombers killed innocent bystanders instead of their coalition targets. Six of the last 17 suicide bombers did not wound anyone beyond themselves. In all, those 17 bombers wounded 23 members of NATO or Afghan security forces, while killing 6 civilians and wounding 27 others.

A series of four episodes last Thursday, Friday and Saturday were illustrative of the recent attacks and near misses.

On Saturday, at a village in Kandahar Province, a suicide bomber on a motorcycle drove into a joint American-Afghan foot patrol and struck, wounding six American soldiers and five civilians, two of them children, but killing no one, according to the provincial governor’s spokesman. (An ISAF spokesman said earlier reports that three Americans were killed were incorrect.)

On Friday, a suicide car bomber took aim at an American convoy in Khost Province, detonating as it passed, according to a Taliban spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, who claimed that all the soldiers in two trucks were killed. A NATO spokesman, Maj. Matthew Gregory, scoffed at that, saying no coalition personnel were hurt. Also on Friday, a suicide bomber being pursued by ISAF forces blew himself up rather than surrender, according to the ISAF.

On Thursday, a man reportedly wearing a vest of explosives under an Afghan Border Police uniform penetrated a joint Afghan and American military base in Paktia Province in eastern Afghanistan, and exploded close to five American servicemen, wounding all five — but again killing none of them, according to the spokesman for the province’s governor.

Asked about the attacks, Mr. Mujahid, the Taliban spokesman, argued that ISAF forces were covering up the damage. “We fill those cars and vests using good techniques and lots of explosives but the American military will not let journalists go to the site of the incidents and make honest and real reports,” he said.

Brig. Gen. Eric Tremblay, an ISAF spokesman, called the recent phenomenon “a cumulative effect” of many factors. “The Afghan National Security Forces, in quality and quantity, are getting better and getting more experience,” he said.

“We’re also targeting their command and control nodes and degrading their capacity,” he added, “both for bomb making and supplies.”

In the Thursday episode, for example, the suicide bomber got close enough to kill the American soldiers, but his explosives were not powerful enough, General Tremblay said. “If they had the right recipe, then those soldiers could not have survived,” he said.

Where suicide bombers have succeeded in Afghanistan, they have often been imports, not local people. A Jan. 18 attack involving at least two suicide bombers and other gunmen paralyzed Kabul for a day and killed five people, two of them police officers. The bombers, it later developed, had been smuggled into Afghanistan from Pakistan, according to Afghanistan’s intelligence service.

Similarly, while the Taliban claimed responsibility for the Dec. 30 attack in which a Jordanian double agent blew himself up at a C.I.A. base, killing seven Americans and a Jordanian intelligence officer, the bomber’s family maintained that he was working for Al Qaeda. In any case, he was not an Afghan.

“The Taliban cannot reach their strategic goals, so they just go and blow themselves up on the roads,” said Brig. Gen. Nawab Khan of the Afghan National Army. “In the end, they don’t have any achievements.”

Mia Bloom, a researcher at the International Center for the Study of Terrorism at Pennsylvania State University, says their relative lack of recent success is due to a lower level of education, training and willingness among bombers here. “Many of them are coerced or duped into becoming bombers, and the bombers are generally not very excited about the prospect,” she said.

“Less-motivated, less-educated guys are more likely to make mistakes,” she added.

The Taliban’s success in their suicide campaign, particularly in 2007, was largely due to foreign fighters from Pakistan and Uzbekistan, but that has become much more difficult now because of better border enforcement, she said.

Suicide bombings are an imported tactic that took root slowly here. In the first four years of the conflict, there were only five suicide attacks, according to a United Nations report in 2007. The report also noted that 80 percent of the victims were civilians.

In 2007, the Taliban enlisted a 6-year-old boy, put a bomb vest on him and told him to go up to a group of soldiers and push a button. They told him flowers would shoot out, but the boy was not naïve enough to fall for it; instead he told authorities and they managed to get the vest off safely.

“It just shows you they’re not able to get the kind of volunteers in Afghanistan that you get in Israel, Sri Lanka or anywhere else,” Ms. Bloom said.

The Taliban’s suicide bombers should not be dismissed simply because their body count is so low, General Tremblay cautioned. “They still are projecting terror.”

Dr. Bloom of the terrorism study center said, “There’s also still a terror factor of course, but if the only person being killed is the bomber himself, it’s sort of like Darwinian selection.”

The martyrdom testament videos that are so common in other countries are unknown here. “Such individual recognition,” said the United Nations report, “is largely absent in Afghanistan.” Instead, these suicide bombers are buried secretly at a potter’s field in a wasteland at the foot of a mountain, at Kol-e-Hashmat Khan, a neighborhood of junkyards on the outskirts of Kabul. A policeman on duty there said no one ever visited. Many of the unmarked graves have been dug open by starving dogs, which feast on the remains.

Sangar Rahimi contributed reporting from Kabul, and employees of The New York Times from Khost, Kandahar and Helmand Provinces.

    Afghan Suicide Bombings Less Effective as a Tactic, NYT, 16.2.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/16/world/asia/16bomber.html

U.S. Missiles Kill 6 in Pakistan

February 15, 2010
The New York Times
By PIR ZUBAIR SHAH

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Two missiles fired from an American drone aircraft killed at least six militants in North Waziristan on Sunday, Pakistani security officials said.

American drone attacks have recently increased in the region, on the border with Afghanistan, which is the main hub of Al Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban faction led by Sirajuddin Haqqani, whose fighters are involved in attacks against NATO and American forces in Afghanistan.

The target of the attack on Sunday was a compound in the town of Mir Ali. The identity of those killed was not clear.

The Pakistani military is currently involved in an offensive in South Waziristan, the base of the Pakistani Taliban, but is under increasing pressure from the United States to expand the offensive to North Waziristan.

American officials also believe that the top leadership of the Pakistani Taliban has fled the Pakistani offensive in South Waziristan and is currently hiding in the North. The Pakistani Taliban had claimed responsibility for the suicide attack on a C.I.A. base in Khost, Afghanistan, in December, killing eight people.

The American drone attacks have increased since then, and one last month is thought to have killed the leader of Pakistani Taliban, Hakimullah Mehsud. The Taliban insists he is still alive.

Pakistan says it will take six months to a year to be able to start an operation in North Waziristan.

The attack on Sunday came after a lull of several days that residents of North Waziristan attributed to a combination of bad weather and the arrest of around a dozen people the Taliban accused of spying. The bodies of several of them have turned up in different areas of North Waziristan in the last few weeks.

    U.S. Missiles Kill 6 in Pakistan, NYT, 15.2.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/15/world/asia/15pstan.html

Taliban Fighters Said to Flee Under Coalition Pressure

February 16, 2010
The New York Times
By ROD NORDLAND and C. J. CHIVERS

KABUL, Afghanistan — A large number of Taliban fighters have fled the city of Marja, their former stronghold in Helmand Province under pressure from United States and Afghan forces and may have crossed the border into Pakistan, the Afghan interior minister said on Monday.

At a press conference that included senior Afghan officials and Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the United States commander in Afghanistan, the officials said some Taliban fighters remained in Marja, largely in the southern part of the city. “We are not facing any threat now except in South Marja, where there is a slight resistance, not enough to be an obstacle to our forces, “ Gen. Sher Mohammed Zazai, the Afghan Army commander in Helmand, said in the televised press conference there.

Afghan officials also said that a rocket attack by American forces on Sunday had killed 12 people. General McChrystal had quickly apologized for the incident to President Hamid Karzai, saying, “We deeply regret this tragic loss of life.” Mohammed Hanif Atmar, the interior minister, said nine civilians and three insurgents were killed in the strike, adding that the Taliban fighters had forced a family to give them refuge in its home.

Avoiding such civilian deaths has been a cornerstone of General McChrystal’s war strategy. Mr. Atmar said on Monday that local tribal leaders had accepted the general’s apology for the errant strike, which came on the second day of a large joint offensive against the Taliban in Marja.

The rocket attack occurred after American Marines and Afghan soldiers began taking intense small-arms fire from a mud-walled compound in the area, American officers said. The answering artillery barrage instead hit a building a few hundred yards way, striking with a roar and sending a huge cloud of dust and smoke into the air. As the wind pushed the plume away, a group of children rushed outside.

“The compound that was hit was not the one we were targeting,” said Capt. Joshua Biggers, the commander of Company K, Third Battalion, Sixth Marines, which had been engaged in a rolling gun battle with Taliban insurgents throughout the day.

It was unclear whether one or more rockets hit the building. Officers said the barrage had been fired from Camp Bastion, a large British and American base to the northeast, by a weapons system known as Himars, an acronym for High Mobility Artillery Rocket System. Its munitions are GPS-guided and advertised as being accurate enough to strike within a yard of their intended targets. General McChrystal said in a statement that he was suspending use of the weapon system “until a thorough review of this incident has been conducted.”

Sunday was a day of intense fighting around Marja, in an area of irrigated steppes and rural villages where a combined force of about 15,000 Afghan and foreign troops, led by American Marines, is now trying to break Taliban control.

General McChrystal, who spoke only briefly at Monday’s press conference, praised the performance of the Afghan soldiers. “I’m exceptionally proud of how they performed,” he said.

As more troops continued streaming into the town of Marja itself, setting up checkpoints and outposts along the way, patrols and exhaustive house-to-house searches for insurgents and weapons intensified, military officials said.

For a second day, Afghan and NATO military officers also held a series of meetings with local Afghan leaders in Marja, said Flight Lt. Wendy Wheadon, a British spokesman for the international security force.

A main thrust of the offensive has been to smooth the way for permanent government rule in the area, which has remained a durable Taliban stronghold in the years since the 2001 American invasion.

Despite the heavy fighting, reports of allied casualties have been low. The International Security Assistance Force issued a news release indicating that a non-American soldier was killed Sunday by a homemade bomb in southern Afghanistan, but did not specify whether that was a result of the Marja offensive.

General Zazai, the Afghan commander, said Sunday there had been no deaths of Afghan troops, who make up the bulk of the combined force. One American Marine and one British Marine were reported killed on the first day.

The battle started before dawn on Saturday, when about 6,000 troops began being flown into Marja itself.

Among the vanguard were Company K and an accompanying Afghan Army platoon, which remained alone in their area of the Taliban stronghold for the second day, engaged in off-and-on gun battles from 8:30 a.m. until just before sunset.

Two of the American company’s Marines were wounded by gunfire on Sunday, including one shot in an arm and another through his left shoulder shortly before the Himars rocket strike. No Afghan soldiers with the company had been wounded by nightfall.

    Taliban Fighters Said to Flee Under Coalition Pressure, NYT, 16.2.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/16/world/asia/16afghan.html

Afghan Civilians Killed in Offensive on Taliban

February 15, 2010
The New York Times
By ROD NORDLAND

KABUL, Afghanistan — The top United States commander in Afghanistan confirmed that a rocket went astray during operations in the Marja area of Helmand province, killing 12 civilians, according to a statement issued by the International Security Assistance Force and the Afghan Ministry of Defense.

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the ISAF commander, ordered the withdrawal of the type of rocket launcher used in the incident, a high-mobility artillery rocket system (HIMARS), from operations “until a thorough review of this incident has been conducted,” the statement said.

The American commander, who has made reducing civilian casualties a cornerstone of his policy in Afghanistan, apologized to President Hamid Karzai for the incident. “We deeply regret this tragic loss of life,” General McChrystal said. “The current operation in central Helmand is aimed at restoring security and stability to this vital area of Afghanistan. It’s regrettable that, in the course of our joint efforts, innocent lives were lost.”

President Karzai, who has been critical of civilian casualties in the past, warned at the start of the operation to take the city of Marja back from the Taliban that coalition forces should make “every effort” to avoid civilian casualties.

The ISAF statement said the incident took place in Nad Ali district, where Marja is located, when coalition forces were responding to an attack on them from a compound where “insurgents were delivering accurate, direct fire on an Afghan-ISAF joint team.” They responded with the HIMARS but missed their target by 300 meters, ISAF said.

A total of 15,000 Afghan and foreign forces are involved in the Marja operation, which began Saturday, about half of them in Marja itself. The foreign forces include American Marines, who are leading the offensive, along with United States Army and British, Canadian, Danish and Estonian troops.

On the second day of Operation Moshtarak, which means “joint operation” in Dari, the troops continued searches of the area using both mounted and dismounted patrols, according to British Royal Air Force Flight Lt. Wendy Wheadon, a spokeswoman for ISAF.

The troops were looking for weapons and carrying out controlled explosions of caches of ammunition, Lieutenant Wheadon said, adding that there were scattered firefights throughout the day. “There have been combined forces who suffered injuries as a result.” She declined to be more specific on casualties.

Separately, ISAF issued a press release indicating that a non-American service member was killed Sunday by an improvised explosives device in southern Afghanistan, but did not specify whether that was as a result of the Marja offensive.

Two soldiers were killed in the first day of fighting in Marja, one American and one British.

Afghan officials put the death toll in the rocket incident at 10. “We just know that a rocket hit a civilian house and 10 people were killed,” said Daoud Ahmadi, spokesman for the governor of Helmand province, by telephone. “We are investigating to find out the details of how they were killed. We don’t even know if the rocket was from our side or the enemy. It was not an air strike for sure, it was a rocket that hit a civilian house in Marja.”

ISAF said one Afghan national army soldier and one ISAF service member were injured by the insurgents in the incident leading to the rocket attack.

Although NATO officers have said they were refraining from air strikes except where necessary, residents in nearby communities said they saw numerous incidents of air raids on the first day of the action, but not on Sunday. ISAF said there has been no flight of residents from Marja as a result of the operation; previously Afghan government and ISAF officials had urged residents to remain in their homes.

So far, 25 Taliban insurgents had been killed in the fighting, according to Gen. Sher Mohammed Zazai, commander of the Afghan army’s 205th corps, which has five brigades of Afghan soldiers in the operation, with national police units attached to them. General Zazai said no Afghan soldiers or police had been killed so far. In the offensive, which began Saturday, American, Afghan and British troops seized crucial positions across the Taliban stronghold, encountering intense but sporadic fighting as they began the treacherous ordeal of house-to-house searches.

More than 6,000 American, Afghan and British troops came in fast early on Saturday, overwhelming most immediate resistance. But as the troops began to fan out on searches, fighting with Taliban insurgents grew in frequency and intensity across a wide area; the searches and fighting continued on Sunday.

The pattern suggested that the hardest fighting lay in the days to come.

American commanders said the troops had achieved every first-day objective. That included advancing into the city itself and seizing intersections, government buildings and one of the city’s main bazaars in the center of town.

Some Marines held meetings with local Afghans almost immediately to reassure them and to ask for help in finding Taliban and hidden bombs.

Mohammed Dawood Ahmadi, a spokesman for Helmand Province’s governor, said Afghan and NATO forces had set up 11 outposts across Marja and two in the neighboring town of Nad Ali. “We now occupy all the strategic points in the area,” he said on Saturday.

From those posts, Marines and soldiers began to go on patrols, searching door to door for weapons and fighters. This phase of the operation, considered the most dangerous, was expected to last at least five days. The biggest concern was bombs and booby-traps, of which there were believed to be hundreds, in roads, houses and footpaths.

The invasion of Marja is the largest military operation of its kind here since the American-backed war began eight years ago. The area, about 80 square miles of farmland, villages and irrigation canals, is believed to be the largest Taliban sanctuary inside Afghanistan. Afghan and American commanders believe there are also a number of opium factories that the insurgents control to finance their war.

On the first full day of operations, much of the expected resistance failed to materialize. Certainly there was none of the eyeball-to-eyeball fighting that typified the battle for Falluja in Iraq in 2004, to which the invasion of Marja had been compared.

“Actually, the resistance is not there,” Abdul Rahim Wardak, the Afghan defense minister, said in a news conference Saturday in Kabul. “Based on our intelligence reports, some of the Taliban have left the area. But we still expected there to be several hundred. Just yesterday, we received reports that reinforcements had arrived from neighboring provinces.”

Dozens if not hundreds of insurgents probably fled Marja in the days leading up to the assault, according to military officers and local residents. American and Afghan commanders hoped to achieve just that result when they took the unusual step of broadcasting their intention to invade Marja days ahead of time.

But it seemed likely that many Taliban were still in Marja, lying in wait. One resident interviewed by telephone said that many insurgents had stayed behind.

“I don’t have any information on the Taliban, neither where they are nor where they have gone,” said Palawan, a farmer in Marja who goes by one name. “I don’t think they have gone anywhere, because Marja has been surrounded by Afghan and foreign forces on every side.”

What has been advertised as the most important, and novel, aspect of the Marja operation got under way on Saturday. After clearing Marja, American and Afghan officials say, they intend to import an entire Afghan civil administration, along with nearly 2,000 Afghan police officers, to help keep the Taliban from coming back in. The first of those, about 1,000 Afghan paramilitary police, were scheduled to begin arriving within 24 hours.

In some parts of the town, American and Afghan troops began holding meetings with residents, trying to win the Afghans’ support. Previous operations to clear the Taliban from towns and cities have failed across Afghanistan, in large part because the Americans and Afghans have rarely left behind competent Afghan government or security forces to hold the places. That has meant that the Taliban have not stayed away for long. This time, in Marja, things are supposed to be different.

“Our main goal in this joint operation is not to kill insurgents,” Mr. Wardak said. “In fact, our primary goal is to expand the government’s influence and protect the civilian population.”

Afghans in Marja itself stayed mostly indoors in the first hours of the invasion. “Nobody can go out of his house,” said Mr. Palawan, the local farmer. “The government and the Taliban have told us to stay in our house. But there has been fighting in the area all morning.”

A local Taliban commander named Hashemi, also reached by telephone, said his men had fought through much of day, shooting at least six foreign soldiers. That claim could not be verified. Mr. Hashemi said that six of his own men had been killed. “The Taliban are still resisting,” Mr. Hashemi said. “We are strong and we won’t give up. We will fight to death.”

American soldiers said Saturday that firefights with the Taliban began sporadically but grew more frequent and more intense as the day went on. Late in the afternoon, insurgents and a company of Marines fought a two-hour gun battle at Marja’s northern edge. It ended when the Marines dropped a 500-pound bomb on the Taliban’s position.

C. J. Chivers contributed reporting from Marja, Dexter Filkins from Kabul, and an Afghan employee of The New York Times from Helmand Province.

    Afghan Civilians Killed in Offensive on Taliban, NYT, 15.2.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/15/world/asia/15afghan.html

A Test for the Meaning of Victory in Afghanistan

February 14, 2010
The New York Times
By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON — Midway through the rancorous debate inside the Obama administration last fall over how to redefine America’s goals for the war in Afghanistan, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told his colleagues that they did not need to kill off the Taliban in every city and town in the country.

“We need to eliminate Al Qaeda, but we only need to degrade the capability of the Taliban,” Mr. Gates said. He spoke with the authority of a man who had seen from the inside what happened when, by his own account, the Bush administration focused far too little thought and resources on the battle for Afghanistan.

In the end, he said, the Obama approach to Afghanistan would rise or fall on whether “the Afghans themselves can create conditions that would keep the Taliban from returning.” In other words, whether after eight years of corruption and unfulfilled promises, the Afghan military and government could provide security, turn on the lights, run the schools and pipe in the water.

Now, two and a half months after President Obama publicly embraced that strategy, it is to be tested in the previously little-known town of Marja, the heart of Taliban country. On Saturday morning the long-awaited battle for the walled town began. But as one of Mr. Obama’s own advisers conceded in December, when recounting the arguments that took place in the Situation Room last fall, “it’s not about the battle, it’s about the postlude.”

The problem is that in the long run, postlude is largely out of Mr. Obama’s hands. It depends almost entirely on the abilities of President Hamid Karzai — who was deeply reluctant to start the battle in Marja — and, at the same time, on those of tribal leaders who deeply distrust Mr. Karzai. To many in Washington, that tendentious combination is what makes Marja, and the larger strategy behind the surge of 30,000 more troops, such a huge risk.

In the Bush years, the rallying cry when operations like Marja began was “clear, build and hold.” Mr. Obama has added a fourth step, “transfer.” At the end of the three-month-long review of Afghan strategy, Mr. Obama vowed he would begin no military operation unless a plan was in place to transfer authority promptly to the Afghans.

That plan exists in Marja, at least on paper. Both the Americans and the Afghan military did everything to advertise the coming military strike short of posting billboards with the date and size of the operation. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the American commander who persuaded Mr. Gates, and ultimately Mr. Obama, to try his form of counterinsurgency, insisted last week that the “transfer” element of the strategy had been prepared and would kick in as soon as the Taliban fled or were defeated.

“We’ve got a government in a box, ready to roll in,” General McChrystal said.

The gamble here is that once Afghans see the semblance of a state taking hold in Marja, rank-and-file Taliban will begin to take more seriously the offers that Mr. Karzai and the West are dangling to buy them off. Enticed by the offer of some political role in Afghan society — and a regular paycheck — they will think twice about trying to recapture the town. “We think many of the foot soldiers are in it for the money, not the ideology,” one British official said recently. “We need to test the proposition that it’s cheaper to enrich them a little than to fight them every spring and summer.”

The problem, of course, is that governments-in-a-box that are ready to roll in can also be rolled out — or rolled over. And the most heated arguments that unfolded during the Afghanistan review pitted those who thought that Mr. Karzai’s government needed one more chance to show it could get it right against those who argued that they had been to this movie before, and it always ended the same way.

No one put the warning to Mr. Obama more succinctly — or more baldly — than Karl W. Eikenberry, the American ambassador. A scholarly former general who served twice in Afghanistan, Mr. Eikenberry was among the first to raise the alarm during the Bush years that the American approach in Afghanistan was failing. Recently he warned Mr. Obama against putting the success of American strategy in Mr. Karzai’s less-than-reliable hands.

“President Karzai is not an adequate strategic partner,” he wrote in one of several cables to the State Department that, predictably, later leaked. Counterinsurgency is a great strategy, Mr. Eikenberry argued, but only if it is executed systematically and energetically. That was what was missing, he said, from the strategic reassessment that General McChrystal submitted late last summer.

“The proposed counterinsurgency strategy assumes an Afghan political leadership that is both able to take responsibility and to exert sovereignty in the furtherance of our goal,” he wrote. “Yet Karzai continues to shun responsibility for any sovereign burden, whether defense, governance or development. He and much of his circle do not want the U.S. to leave and are only too happy to see us invest further.” He is hardly alone in that assessment. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. gave voice to similar concerns. So did the leaders of India.

Mr. Eikenberry told Congress in December that his worries have since been largely allayed, and he is now perfectly satisfied with President Obama’s strategy. But he seemed to be speaking for a wing of the Obama administration that fears the Obama counterinsurgency strategy could crumble in Mr. Karzai’s hands.

    A Test for the Meaning of Victory in Afghanistan, NYT, 13.2.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/weekinreview/14sanger.html

Attack Gives Marines a Taste of War

February 14, 2010
The New York Times
By C. J. CHIVERS

MARJA, Afghanistan — The helicopters landed at 2:40 a.m., alighting in a poppy field beside a row of mud-walled compounds. The Marines ran into the darkness and crouched through the rotor-whipped dust as their aircraft lifted away.

For the Marines of Company K, Third Battalion, Sixth Marines, the assault into the last large Taliban stronghold in Helmand Province was beginning. For almost all of them, this was to be their first taste of war. And an afternoon of small-arms combat was ahead.

But at first, as with many of the 6,000 NATO and Afghan troops streaming into the area on Saturday, they met no resistance.

Marja is a dense belt of poppy production, a center in Afghanistan’s opium trade and until Saturday morning a Taliban enclave.

On the last miles of the ride in, the Marines were silent as the aircraft flew 200 feet above freshly sprouting fields. Irrigation canals glittered beneath the portholes, rolling past fast. They did not know what to expect, beyond the fact that at least hundreds of insurgents were waiting for them, and that many would fight.

Company K is part of what many Marines call a surge battalion, one of the units assigned to Afghanistan after President Obama decided last year to increase the American troop level on the ground. It arrived in Afghanistan a month ago, and had waited for this moment. Its introduction to the war was a crash course.

Someone shouted, “One minute!” Helicopter wheels touched soil. The aircraft filled with whoops, and the Marines stood and bolted for the tail ramp.

They moved briskly. Within minutes, the first Marines of Third Platoon were entering compounds to the landing zone’s north, checking for enemy fighters and booby traps. The rest of the platoon followed through the gate.

Sergeants and corporals urged a steady pace. “Go! Go! Go!” they said, spicing instructions with foul words. By 3 a.m., Company K had its toehold.

The company’s mission was to seize the area around the major intersection in northern Marja, clear a village beside it and hold it. By drawing this assignment, the company had become its battalion’s lead unit — sent alone and out front into Taliban territory. It had been told to hold its area until other companies, driving over the ground and clearing hidden explosives from the roads, worked down from the northwest and caught up.

Second Platoon took a position to the west, to block Route 605, a main road. First Platoon was to the east, watching over another likely Taliban avenue of approach. Third Platoon gathered in the southernmost compounds, with orders to sweep north and clear the entire village.

Third Platoon’s commander, First Lt. Adam J. Franco, ordered a halt until dawn.

A canal separated the platoon from the village. The company had been warned of booby traps. Lieutenant Franco chose to cross the canal with daylight, reducing the risks of a Marine’s stepping on an unseen pressure plate that would detonate an explosive charge.

“Hold tight,” he said into his radio. The noncommissioned officers paced in the blackness, counting and recounting every man.

Being the lead company had drawbacks. The Marines had been told that ground reinforcements and fresh supplies might not reach them for three days. This meant they had to carry everything they would need during that time: water, ammunition, food, first-aid equipment, bedrolls, clothes and spare batteries for radios and night-vision devices.

As they jogged forward, the men grunted and swore under their burdens, which in many cases weighed 100 pounds or more. Some carried five-gallon jugs of water, others hauled stretchers, rockets, mortar ammunition or bundles of plastic explosives and spools of time-fuse and detonating cord.

In Third Platoon, two teams carried collapsible aluminum footbridges, each about 25 feet long when extended, which the platoon would use to cross the canal.

At daybreak, Third Platoon bounded across one of its bridges and into the village, and dropped its backpacks and extra equipment, moving forward without excess weight. The Taliban initially chose not to fight, and the company’s first sweeps were uneventful.

At 8:30 a.m., as one of the squads searched buildings, a gunshot sounded just behind the walls. The Marines rushed toward the door, guns level to their eyes, ready for their first fight.

A shout carried over the wall. “Dog!” the voice said. A Marine had fired a warning shot at an attacking dog, scaring it off. The young Marines shook their heads.

Minutes later, gunfire erupted to the south, where another unit, First Battalion, Sixth Marines, had also inserted Marines.

The firing was intense for about 10 minutes, then it subsided. It rose again a few minutes later, and subsided again. Much of the shooting carried the distinct sound of American machine guns and squad automatic weapons. Then a large explosion rumbled near the source of the noise. A small mushroom-shaped cloud rose from the spot: an airstrike.

The Marines listened to the fighting far away. They still had no contact.

Before the assault, Capt. Joshua P. Biggers, Company K’s commander, had said that as many as 90 percent of the company’s Marines had not been in combat before. A few were brand new — straight from boot camp and infantry school, men with roughly a half-year in the corps.

But the captain also said the bulk of the company had been together a year or more. These Marines knew each other well, he said, and had trained intensely for this day. “They’re ready,” he said.

Soon they were finding signs of the Taliban. A sweep of one compound turned up 12 sacks of fertilizer used to make explosives and a batch of new cooking pots, which insurgents have often used as the shells of bombs.

The compound’s only adult male resident, Abdul Ghani, said the fertilizer belonged to his son. The company detained Abdul Ghani.

At 10 a.m., the day changed. Taliban fighters probed Second Platoon, and a firefight erupted as the platoon moved toward the road. It subsided, but not before several Taliban fighters had been killed and the platoon had been fired on by small arms and rocket-propelled grenades.

At 12:40, fighting broke out for Third Platoon. For almost three hours, Second and Third Platoons took sporadic fire from insurgents in several directions. At times the fighting was intense, and the gunfire rose and roared and snapped overhead. The fight briefly quieted after a B-1 bomber dropped a 500-pound bomb on a compound near the landing zone, leveling most of the house there.

For a short while after the airstrike, the village was quiet. But by late afternoon, the company, which had established a crude outpost in a compound, was taking fire again. Between exchanges of fire, a squad-sized patrol led by Cpl. Thomas D. Drake pushed out across the fields to search the building that had been hit by the airstrike.

The Taliban let the Marines walk into an open field and approach a tall stand of dried grass. Then they opened fire in a hasty ambush. The Marines dropped. They fired back, exposed. Gunfire rose to a crescendo.

Corporal Drake shouted over the noise to the team in front, “You got everyone?” He shouted to the team behind him, which was pressed flat in the field. “Everyone O.K.?”

The Taliban firing subsided. “We’re moving!” the corporal shouted. The patrol stood and sprinted toward the withdrawing Taliban, and then ran across irrigation dikes and poppy fields and entered the compound that had been struck.

It searched the wreckage, took pictures, collected a few documents and returned to the small outpost just ahead of dark.

At night, Captain Biggers reflected on the day. An explosives ordnance disposal team with the company had found and destroyed four large bombs hidden in the roads. The platoons had seized their first objectives. In its first day of combat, Company K had been fighting for hours without a casualty, and several Taliban fighters were lying dead in one of the fields.

    Attack Gives Marines a Taste of War, NYT, 14.2.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/world/asia/14marja.html

Troops Take Positions in Taliban Haven

February 14, 2010
The New York Times
By DEXTER FILKINS

KABUL, Afghanistan — American, Afghan and British troops occupied crucial positions across the Taliban stronghold of Marja on Saturday, encountering only sporadic fighting as they began the long and possibly bloody ordeal of house-to-house searches.

American Marines exchanged gunfire with Taliban insurgents throughout the day, and discovered several homemade bombs and other weapons. One American serviceman was reported killed in Marja on Saturday, and a British servicemen as well, officials said in Kabul. Three American soldiers were killed in neighboring Kandahar Province when the vehicle they were riding in struck a large explosive buried in the road.

American commanders said Saturday that the 6,000 American, Afghan and British troops who moved into the area earlier in the day had achieved every objective they had set for themselves. That included advancing into the city itself, seizing intersections, government buildings and one of the city’s two main bazaars in the center of town.

Some military units held meetings with local Afghans, to reassure them and to ask for help in finding Taliban fighters and hidden bombs.

Mohammed Dawood Ahmadi, a spokesman for Helmand Province’s governor, said Afghan and NATO forces had set up 11 posts across Marja and two in the neighboring town of Nad Ali. “We now occupy all the strategic points in the area,” he said.

The invasion of Marja is the largest military operation of its kind since the American-backed war began eight years ago. The area, about 77 square miles of farmland, villages and irrigation canals, is believed to be the largest Taliban sanctuary inside Afghanistan.

In the prelude to the attack, Afghan and Americans commanders said that the area contained hundreds of Taliban fighters, several hundred homemade bombs and a number of opium factories that the insurgents use to finance their operations.

On the first full day of operations, much of the expected Taliban resistance failed to materialize. Afghan and NATO troops discovered some bombs, narcotics and weapons caches, but the fighting itself was relatively desultory. There was certainly none of the eyeball-to-eyeball fighting that typified the battle for Falluja in Iraq in 2004, to which the invasion of Marja had been compared.

Abdul Rahim Wardak, the Afghan defense minister, said in a news conference in Kabul that the Afghan Army had suffered no dead at all and only a handful of wounded. He seemed a little surprised at the day’s events.

“Actually, the resistance is not there,” Mr. Wardak said. “Based on our intelligence reports, some of the Taliban have left the area. But we still expected there to be several hundred in the area. Just yesterday, we received reports that reinforcements had arrived from neighboring provinces.”

It seemed possible that many insurgents had just faded away, or at least were waiting to show themselves. American and Afghan commanders took the unusual step of broadcasting their intention to clear Marja several weeks ago, in hopes that Taliban fighters would leave the city and thus make it easier to take hold of the place.

Dangerous days may yet lie ahead, though, officials said. Military officers estimate that the American, Afghan and British troops will need several days to clear most of the buildings in the area of fighters and bombs.

In addition, what has been advertised as the most important, and novel, aspect of the Marja operation has yet to begin. After clearing Marja, American and Afghan officials say, they intend to import an entire Afghan civil administration, along with nearly 2,000 Afghan police officers, to help keep the Taliban from coming back in.

Previous operations to clear the Taliban from towns and cities have failed in large part because the Americans and Afghans rarely leave a competent Afghan government or security force behind to hold the place. And so, typically, the Taliban did not stay away for long. This time, in Marja, things are supposed to be different.

“Our main goal in this joint operation is not to kill insurgents,” Mr. Wardak said. “In fact, our primary goal is to expand the government’s influence and protect the civilian population.”

Afghans in Marja itself stayed mostly indoors. “Nobody can go out of his house,” Palawan, a farmer in Marja, said in a telephone interview. “The government and the Taliban have told us to stay in our house. But there has been fighting in the area all morning.”

“I don’t have any information on the Taliban, neither where they are nor where they have gone,” Mr. Palawan said. He seemed as mystified by the day’s events as anyone. “I don’t think they have gone anywhere, because Marja has been surrounded by Afghan and foreign forces on every side.”

A local Taliban commander named Hashemi, also reached by telephone, said his men had fought through much of day, shooting at least six foreign soldiers. Mr. Hashemi said that six of his own men had been killed. “The Taliban are still resisting,” Mr. Hashemi said. “We are strong and we won’t give up. We will fight to death.”

But American soldiers said Saturday that firefights with the Taliban had been mostly sporadic; a shot here, a shot there. In the afternoon, insurgents and Marines engaged in one long gun battle, which ended when the marines dropped a 500-pound bomb on the Taliban’s position.

The Marines believed that many wounded and dead Taliban fighters lay in the field in front of them. But each time they ventured into the field, Taliban fighters opened fire. After a time, the Marines decided to leave the Taliban casualties in the field.

“Every time they try to go out,” Capt. Joshua P. Biggers said of his men, “they get hammered.”

An Afghan employee of The New York Times contributed reporting from Helmand Province.

    Troops Take Positions in Taliban Haven, NYT, 14.2.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/world/asia/14afghan.html

In the Cold of Morning, Descending Into Conflict

February 13, 2010
The New York Times
By C. J. CHIVERS

MARJA, Afghanistan — The helicopter was filled with men and dark in its cabin when a voice cut over the whir of the rotors.

“Five minutes out!”

The men of Company K, Third Battalion, Sixth Marines, shoved their clips into their rifles and pulled back their bolts. A chorus of clanks rose and fell.

The whir of the rotors filled the cabin again. The helicopter banked in the darkness.

“One minute out!”

The men of Company K hollered and whooped.

The CH-47 touched down, and the ramps came down, and the young men scampered into the cold and dark. It was 2:40 a.m.

The Marines had come to Marja’s northern edge, at the intersection of two roads, 605 and 608. There were three landing zones in all: Falcon, Hawk and Eagle. With hardly a sound, one of the platoons took over the intersection, while another set up to guard the approach to the east. The last platoon moved into a series of houses and compounds.

Rifles and bullets rattled as they ran. The night was cold and still. A dog barked nearby. No gunfire, not even in the distance, broke the quiet.

“I’m not nervous,” Capt. Joshua P. Biggers said just before liftoff. “My platoon commanders are ready. The boys are ready. They know what to do. It will become second nature.”

No one expected the calm to last through the night. The village at Marja’s northern edge is believed to hold a number of Taliban fighters, as well as a school for making bombs.

Marja is like that. In three years, this collection of farms and irrigation canals has grown to become the Taliban’s biggest sanctuary inside Afghanistan. From here, the insurgents plan and stage attacks, helping to make Helmand the most violent province.

More than that, Marja itself breaks up the string of cities that the Americans, British, and Afghan forces, over the past two years, have cleared and secured along the Helmand River.

And so, this morning, the Americans and the British and Afghans were taking Marja back.

With its 300-plus men and a platoon of Afghan soldiers, Company K was one of several units that attacked Marja by helicopter on Saturday. Simultaneously, Marines from the First Battalion, Sixth Marines were moving, too, into the southern edge of Marja to seize the main bazaar and the defunct government center.

A group of Special Forces troops had flown in the southern rim of town as well, into a place thought to hold a number of foreign fighters. There was no word from them.

After a time, a low chopping sound broke the clam. It was an Apache gunship, loaded with rockets and guns, prowling for insurgents with its thermal sights.

Whatever else they are, Taliban fighters are not known for their stupidity on the battlefield. In the quiet, one thing was clear: they were laying back.

A dog barked again, and then the night went calm.

Dexter Filkins contributed reporting from Kabul.

    In the Cold of Morning, Descending Into Conflict, NYT, 13.2.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/world/asia/13marja.html

Coalition Begins Major Afghan Offensive

February 13, 2010
The New York Times
By C. J. CHIVERS and DEXTER FILKINS

MARJA, Afghanistan — Thousands of American, Afghan and British troops attacked the watery Taliban fortress of Marja early Saturday, moving by land and through the air to destroy the insurgency’s largest haven and begin a campaign to reassert the dominance of the Afghan government across a large arc of southern Afghanistan.

The force of about 6,000 Marines and soldiers — a majority of them Afghan — began moving into the city and environs before dawn.

As Marines and soldiers marched into the area, several hundred more swooped out of the sky in helicopters into Marja itself. Marines from Company K, Third Battalion, Sixth Marines, landed near an intersection of two main roads at the northern fringes of Marja, piled out of the their helicopters and scattered into the houses and compounds around them.

In the quiet dark of 2:40 a.m., Company K met no resistance. But none of the Marines believed the peace would last the night.

“Basically, we are going into a main hornets’ nest,” said Capt. Joshua P. Biggers, Company K’s commander.

Just after midnight, aircraft bombed the southernmost portion of Marja, where officials believed foreign fighters were hiding. Later, Marines and Afghan soldiers began setting up cordons to the northeast, south and west of the city, in anticipation of a ground assault that was expected to begin within hours.

The operation, dubbed Moshtarak, which means “together” in Dari, is the largest offensive military operation since the American-led coalition invaded the country in 2001. Its aim is to flush the Taliban out of an area — about 75 square miles — where insurgents have been staging attacks, building bombs and processing the opium that pays for their war.

Outside of Pakistan, Marja, a town of about 80,000 residents, stands as the Taliban’s largest sanctuary, until now a virtual no-go zone for American, British and Afghan troops. The Taliban have been firmly entrenched there for about three years.

Moreover, the invasion of Marja is a crucial piece of a larger campaign to secure a 200-mile arc that would bisect the major cities in Helmand and Kandahar Provinces, where the Taliban are the strongest. That campaign, which is expected to last months, is designed to reverse the Taliban’s momentum, which has accelerated over the past several years.

The best measure of that momentum: The 520 American and NATO troops killed in Afghanistan in 2009 were the most since the war began.

The American, Afghan and British troops began moving into Marja before first light, making their way through a broad, flat area crisscrossed by irrigation canals and scattered with opium factories as well as, in all likelihood, several hundred hidden bombs.

The troops that came in by air carried portable foot bridges and mine detectors. The troops moving in on armored personnel carriers were being led by enormous fortified vehicles designed to clear the roads of bombs.

American and Afghan commanders said they expected the heavy fighting to be over in a number of days. At that point, the commanders say, the overriding purpose of the campaign will take shape, when they bring in a fully formed Afghan government and security force that can hold the city so that the Taliban cannot return.

For all the speed with which they are hoping to move, American and Afghan officers say they are worried that homemade bombs — hidden on roads, on footpaths and in houses — could slow them down. Those bombs, though rudimentary, are often extraordinarily powerful, and they are now the primary killer of American and NATO service members here.

Several hundred Taliban fighters are believed to be inside the city as well, which could make for a close and bloody fight. Despite that, the NATO and Afghan attackers appear to enjoy a huge numerical advantage — possibly more than 10 to 1.

The assault came as a surprise to no one. American commanders and Afghan officials have said publicly for weeks that an invasion of Marja was imminent, in an effort to chase away as many Taliban fighters as possible and keep the fighting, and civilian casualties, to a minimum. The hope is to win the support of local residents, even at the expense of letting Taliban get away.

Indeed, the American and Afghan troops moving into the city are setting for themselves a very high — and possibly difficult—standard. They have urged the Afghans to stay in their homes rather than flee the city. But that could make it difficult to avoid killing at least some noncombatants.

“The message for the Taliban is: It will be easy, or it will be hard, but we are coming,” Brig. Gen. Larry Nicholson, the commander of the United States Marines in Helmand Province, told the men of Company K before the operation began. “At the end of the day, the Afghan flag will be over Marja.”

The American and Afghan strategy of broadcasting their intentions seems to have worked so far. Hundreds of Taliban fighters are believed to have the fled Marja in recent weeks, including many commanders — a sign that the Taliban’s leaders, who are believed to be based in the sprawling Pakistani city of Quetta — have decided that Marja will be lost. “We know a bunch of them left,” a senior NATO commander said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the operation.

Last week, Afghan intelligence agents captured the Taliban’s “shadow governor” after he had fled Marja on the orders of his commanders in Pakistan, NATO officials said. The governor, whose name was not disclosed, was spotted by Afghan officials as he drove through Kandahar, probably on his way out of the country, officials said.

The capture of the local Taliban chief is the latest in a number of “shadow governors” who have been killed or captured in recent weeks by Afghan or American forces. Despite their titles, the Taliban “governors” often serve as the overall military commanders in an area, as well as taking charge of some civilian duties.

Indeed, American soldiers and, particularly, Special Operations teams have been busy for weeks, moving into and around Marja and killing and capturing Taliban leaders and soldiers.

Hundreds of Taliban fighters are believed to be hunkered down inside the city, including some Pakistani and other foreign fighters who are thought to be particularly zealous. In telephone interviews this week, Taliban commanders in Marja boasted that they had laid “thousands” of homemade bombs on the area’s roads and footpaths.

“We have laid mines all over Marja,” said a local Taliban commander named Hashimi, who spoke over the telephone this week. “We have ordered all Taliban fighters to stay and fight the Americans and the government.”

Marja’s civilian residents echoed the commander’s warning, saying that Taliban fighters had mined most of the major roads that run through Trekh Nwar, Qarsaidi and Shorshorak at the approaches to Marja. Even as the invasion approached, Taliban fighters have continued to allow at least some residents to leave through a single open road leading out of the city.

“We’ve been telling the people, if you want to leave your houses, it’s up to you, and if you want to stay here and get killed by NATO and Afghan forces, you can stay in your houses,” said Hashimi, the Taliban commander.

“Only about 5 percent of the people have left the city — but the rest, 95 percent, are still here,” one of Marja’s tribal elders said, speaking at a meeting of tribal elders in Lashkar Gah on Thursday. The elder spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear that he would be killed.

“People are really scared, especially about civilians getting killed,” the Marja elder said. “The villagers ought to stay in their homes, if only because there are so many mines buried in the roads now.”

Since taking command last spring, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal has sharply curtailed the use of firepower to kill Taliban soldiers, even in the heat of battle. For instance, he has tightly restricted the use of airstrikes in populated areas to kill insurgents — except when troops are in danger of being overrun. And in meetings with his junior officers, General McChrystal has said repeatedly that using what he calls “fires” — artillery and airstrikes — may kill Taliban fighters, but risks losing the war by killing innocents and thereby alienating Afghans.

Indeed, the Marja operation will be the first real test of General McChrystal’s strategy — that is, whether it can spare civilian lives without compromising the safety of his men.

“The first test is, can you do this without killing a lot of civilians,” the senior NATO commander said. “I would rather you take longer, I would rather you go deliberately. Whatever we do to limit that, actually, in my view, makes us look more powerful.”

The centerpiece of the Marja operation is the Afghan government-in-waiting that will move into the town the moment the shooting stops. That is an attempt to compensate for past failures, when an inadequate government was left behind.

In May 2009, British and Afghan forces conducted a large military operation in Marja itself. It was a bigger than expected fight — and the allies vowed to go back in again.

Today, they are.

C. J. Chivers reported from Marja, and Dexter Filkins from Kabul, Afghanistan.

    Coalition Begins Major Afghan Offensive, NYT, 13.2.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/world/asia/13afghan.html

News Analysis

Afghan Offensive Is New War Model

February 13, 2010
The New York Times
By DEXTER FILKINS

KABUL, Afghanistan — For all the fighting that lies ahead over the next several days, no one doubts that the American and Afghan troops swarming into the Taliban redoubt of Marja will ultimately clear it of insurgents.

And that is when the real test will begin.

For much of the past eight years, American and NATO forces have mounted other large military operations to clear towns and cities of Taliban insurgents. And then, almost invariably, they have cleared out, never leaving behind enough soldiers or police officers to hold the place on their own.

And so, almost always, the Taliban returned — and, after a time, so did the American and NATO troops, to clear the place all over again.

“Mowing the grass,” the soldiers and Marines derisively call it.

This time, in Marja, the largest Taliban stronghold, American and Afghan commanders say they will do something they have never done before: bring in an Afghan government and police force behind them. American and British troops will stay on to support them. “We’ve got a government in a box, ready to roll in,” said Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top American commander here.

Indeed, Marja is intended to serve as a prototype for a new type of military operation, based on the counterinsurgency thinking propounded by General McChrystal in the prelude to President Obama’s decision in December to increase the number of American troops here to nearly 100,000.

More than at any time since 2001, American and NATO soldiers will focus less on killing Taliban insurgents than on sparing Afghan civilians and building an Afghan state.

“The population is not the enemy,” Brig. Gen. Larry Nicholson, the commander of the Marines in southern Afghanistan, told a group of troops this week. “The population is the prize — they are why we are going in.”

To realize their goals, the Americans and their allies want to capture the area with a minimum amount of violence. American commanders say the attack on Marja is intended to be nothing like the similar size assault on the city of Falluja, Iraq, in November 2004. In that case, Falluja, under the control of hundreds of insurgents, was largely destroyed. The Americans killed plenty of guerrillas, but they did not make any friends.

“We don’t want Falluja,” General McChrystal said in an interview this week. “Falluja is not the model.”

Sparing civilian life may not be easy, especially in the close-quarters combat that lies ahead. Hundreds of Taliban fighters are believed to be in the area. And the American-led force may yet get bogged down — by the network of irrigation canals, built by the United States in the 1950s, or by the hundreds of homemade bombs that Taliban fighters have planted in the roads and trails.

The chief worry among both American and Afghan commanders is that if a large number of civilians are killed, the Afghan government — including its sometimes erratic president, Hamid Karzai — could withdraw its support.

The Americans are hoping, too, that the largely Afghan composition of the invading force — about 60 percent of the total — will give Mr. Karzai’s government sufficient cover if anything goes wrong.

But at some point the operation will end, and when it does General McChrystal has set goals for the Americans and the Afghans that are less dramatic, but far more ambitious, than fighting.

For the first time, NATO and Afghan officials have assembled a large team of Afghan administrators and an Afghan governor that will move into Marja the moment the shooting stops. More than 1,900 police are standing by.

Setting up a government in this impoverished country is no small task. Across Afghanistan, the Afghan government and its police are reviled for their inefficiency and corruption.

“We want to show people that we can deliver police, and services, and development,” said Lt. Gen. Mohammed Karimi, the deputy chief of staff of the Afghan Army. “We want to convince the Afghans that the government is for them.”

At a broader level, the attack on Marja is the first move in an ambitious effort to break the Taliban in their heartland. Over the next several months, the Americans are hoping to secure a 200-mile long horseshoe-shaped string of cities that runs along the Helmand River, through Kandahar and then on to the Pakistani border. The ribbon holds 85 percent of the population of Kandahar and Helmand Provinces, the Taliban’s base of support. In the next several months, the Americans and Afghans are planning to pour thousands of troops into that area.

“We are trying to take away any hope of victory,” General McChrystal said.

That would set the stage for a political settlement that General McChrystal believes is the only way the war will end.

The risks in the strategy are obvious enough. Eight years after being expelled from Kabul, the Taliban are fighting more vigorously, and operating in more places, than at any point since the American-led war began here in 2001. The Taliban have “shadow governors” in every province but Kabul itself. Twice the number of American soldiers were killed last year as the year before.

And there is some chance, even after the offensive, that the insurgents will simply flee to another part of the country. They have done it before; many of the fighters now inside Marja once operated in other Helmand towns.

Finally, there is only so much the Americans and their NATO partners can do. The rest is up to the Afghans themselves. Despite years of work, the Afghan Army cannot sustain itself in the field, the police are loathed in nearly every place they work, and the government of Mr. Karzai has only a few serious worldwide rivals in corruption and graft.

In a conversation this week, a senior American official in Kabul said that his greatest worry was not the Taliban, or even that the Marja operation would fail. “What do I worry about?” he said, “Dependency.” That is, the fear that Afghanistan’s leaders and people will not, in the end, stand up for themselves.

In that sense, who emerges as the victor in Marja may not be clear for many months.

 

C. J. Chivers contributed reporting from Helmand Province.

    Afghan Offensive Is New War Model, NYT, 13.2.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/world/asia/13kabul.html

5 U.S. Soldiers Injured in Afghan Suicide Attack

February 13, 2010
The New York Times
By ROD NORDLAND

KABUL, Afghanistan — A suicide bomber wearing the uniform of an Afghan border police officer, who wounded five American soldiers on Thursday, was in fact a border police officer working for the Taliban, a Taliban spokesman said Friday.

The Taliban spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, was contacted by telephone. The attack took place at a joint Afghan-United States military base in the Pathan District of Paktia Province, according to Rahoullah Samoun, the spokesman for the governor of Paktia in eastern Afghanistan. A statement from the International Security Assistance Force, the American-led NATO force in Afghanistan, said that several American soldiers had been wounded but that there were no fatalities.

On Dec. 30, in another eastern Afghan province, Khost, a Jordanian double agent attacked a C.I.A. base, killing seven Americans and a Jordanian. The Taliban claimed responsibility for that attack, too.

Elsewhere in Paktia Province, coalition officials and the Afghan police gave varying accounts of an episode in the Gardez District in which civilians were killed.

A statement from the coalition said Afghan and NATO forces had gone to a compound in the village of Khatabeh, where insurgents opened fire on them. Several insurgents were killed and a large number of men, women and children fled and were detained, the coalition said.

Inside the compound, the coalition said, soldiers “found the bodies of three women who had been tied up, gagged and killed.” The Paktia provincial police chief, Aziz Ahmad Wardak, said the bodies of two men had also been found in the house.

The three women had been killed by Taliban militants, he said.

Maj. Matthew Gregory, a United States Army spokesman, said Friday that the two men inside the house were killed by coalition forces after they opened fire on a joint patrol.

    5 U.S. Soldiers Injured in Afghan Suicide Attack, NYT, 13.2.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/world/asia/13khost.html

300 Families Flee Afghan Town Ahead of Offensive

February 10, 2010
Filed at 7:58 a.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

KABUL (AP) -- About 300 families have already fled a southern Afghan town ahead of a major U.S.-Afghan offensive planned on a key Taliban stronghold, provincial officials said Wednesday.

Meanwhile, a Taliban spokesman vowed that insurgent forces in and near Marjah in southern Helmand province are ready ''to do jihad, to sacrifice their lives'' in the upcoming battle, which will serve as a significant test of the new U.S. strategy for turning back the Taliban.

No date for the main attack has been announced, but all signs indicate it will come soon. It will be the first major military offensive since President Barack Obama announced last December that he was sending 30,000 reinforcements to Afghanistan

Daoud Ahmadi, spokesman for Helmand Gov. Gulab Mangal, said some 300 families -- an estimated 1,800 people -- have already moved out of Marjah in recent weeks and days to the capital of Lashkar Gah, about 20 miles (30 kilometers) northeast.

About 60 families are living in a school, which has been converted into a temporary shelter stocked with tents, blankets, food and other supplies, he said. The other 240 families are living with relatives in the area, he said.

Ahmadi said preparations have been made to receive more refugees if necessary. Afghan families have an average of six members, according to private relief groups.

''All these things have been prepared by the governor's office and disaster department,'' he said.

The U.S. goal is to quickly retake control of Marjah, a farming community and major opium-production center, from Taliban forces. That would enable the Afghan government to re-establish a presence, bringing security, electricity, clean water and other public services to the estimated 80,000 inhabitants.

Over time, American commanders believe such services will undermine the appeal of the Taliban among their fellow Pashtuns, the largest ethnic group in the country and the base of the insurgents' support.

Calling his hometown of Marjah a ''ghost village,'' resident Mohammad Hakim said he tried to leave with his family this week before the military offensive began but he was stopped by a group of 30 to 40 Taliban fighters who were patrolling the area.

''I already packed. My family was ready. It was difficult to find a car but I got one,'' he said in a phone interview. ''But the Taliban stopped me and told me not to come out because they had already planted mines on the road. 'It's safer for you to stay in your houses.'''

The few families remaining are very frightened, he said, with Taliban fighters patrolling the area by land while coalition helicopters fly overhead day and night.

Hundreds of U.S. troops from the Army's 5th Stryker Brigade as well as Afghan soldiers moved into positions northeast of Marjah earlier this week as U.S. Marines pushed to the outskirts of the town.

On Wednesday, Taliban spokesman Qari Yousef Ahmadi vowed that the U.S. and Afghan military forces will face a major battle to retake Marjah.

''The Taliban are ready to fight, to do jihad, to sacrifice their lives. American forces cannot scare the Taliban with big tanks and big warplanes,'' he said when reached by phone.

He blamed U.S. forces for launching a military offensive that will only create difficulties for regular Afghans.

''American forces are here in Afghanistan just to create problems for Afghan people,'' he said. ''This operation is to create problems for the villagers in winter weather.''

----

Associated Press Writers Noor Khan in Kandahar and Rahim Faiez in Kabul contributed to this report.

    300 Families Flee Afghan Town Ahead of Offensive, NYT, 10.2.2010? http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/02/10/world/AP-AS-Afghanistan.html

U.S. Military Faults Leaders in Deadly Attack on Base

February 6, 2010
The New York Times
By ROD NORDLAND

KABUL, Afghanistan — The United States military on Friday issued a long-awaited report on how insurgents managed to overrun an American Army combat outpost and kill eight soldiers last October in one of the worst single ground attacks in recent years.

Family members of the dead were notified about the results of the investigation on Thursday. They were told that “the report also recommended administrative actions for some members of the chain of command to improve command oversight.” Citing privacy reasons, the military did not reveal what those actions were or who was penalized.

The base, Combat Outpost Keating in the Kamdesh District of Nuristan Province, was attacked by insurgent forces on Oct. 3. Because the outpost was located in a deep bowl surrounded by high ground, the attackers were able to pin down defenders and prevent them from using mortars to repel the initial attack. In addition, air support was at least 45 minutes away. A second, smaller outpost nearby was also struck by the attackers.

The insurgents quickly overran the base, entering the perimeter through a latrine area, setting fires that burned down most of the barracks, and managing to kill the 8 soldiers and wound 22. The casualties numbered half of the approximately 60 defenders from Troop B of the Third Squadron, 61st Cavalry.

“The investigation concluded that critical intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets which had been supporting C.O.P. Keating had been diverted to assist ongoing intense combat operations in other areas, that intelligence assessments had become desensitized to reports of massing enemy formations by previous reports that had proved false, and needed force protection improvements were not made because of the imminent closure of the outpost,” the report said. “These factors resulted in an attractive target for enemy fighters.”

The military’s account of the report, issued in a news release on Friday, suggested that any sanctions should be issued against higher-level officers, although it did not specify details. “Soldiers and junior leaders fought heroically in repelling an enemy force five times their size,” the statement said.

“The report also recommended administrative actions for some members of the chain of command to improve command oversight,” the statement said.

Troop B’s defenders “heroically repelled a complex attack from an enemy force of 300, killing approximately 150 enemy fighters,” according to the statement. “Members of B Troop upheld the highest standards of warrior ethics and professionalism and distinguished themselves with conspicuous gallantry, courage and bravery under the heavy enemy fire that surrounded them.”

An executive summary of the military’s report, released to The New York Times on Friday, said that Combat Outpost Keating no longer had a mission other than protecting itself from attack and the military had decided to close it in July 2009. However, the equipment needed to dismantle it was diverted elsewhere to support combat operations. Meantime, insurgent forces mounted probing attacks to determine its weaknesses.

“There were inadequate measures taken by the chain of command, resulting in an attractive target for enemy fighters,” the summary said. It also criticized the Afghan National Army soldiers who had responsibility for guarding the eastern side of the compound but failed to hold their positions. In all, the enemy forces penetrated Combat Outpost Keating at three positions. They also overran a nearby Afghan National Police post.

The situation was saved by the arrival of close air support from the United States Air Force and from Army Apache attack helicopters, the summary said, and as a result, “the junior officers and N.C.O.’s regained the initiative and fought back during the afternoon hours to regain control.”

While the report’s executive summary did not criticize the commanding officer at Combat Outpost Keating, it did not praise his actions.

A spokesman for the International Security Assistance Force, Col. Wayne A. Shanks, declined in an e-mail statement to give any details on punishments. “Any nonjudicial punishment information is not releasable under the Privacy Act,” he said.

    U.S. Military Faults Leaders in Deadly Attack on Base, NYT, 6.2.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/06/world/asia/06afghan.html

U.S. General Says Situation in Afghanistan No Longer Deteriorating

February 5, 2010
The New York Times
By THOM SHANKER

ISTANBUL — The senior commander of American and allied forces in Afghanistan offered a guarded but unexpectedly upbeat assessment of the war effort on Thursday, saying that while the situation remained dangerous it was no longer getting worse.

“I still will tell you that I believe the situation in Afghanistan is serious,” said the commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal.

“I do not say now that I think it’s deteriorating,” he added. “And I said that last summer, and I believed that that was correct. I feel differently now. I am not prepared to say that we have turned the corner. So I’m saying that the situation is serious, but I think we have made significant progress in setting the conditions in 2009, and beginning some progress and that we’ll make real progress in 2010.”

General McChrystal’s assessment of the war effort came as NATO ministers gathered here for a session in which Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates was expected to press its allies for more contributions of professional trainers to expand and improve the Afghan army and police forces.

Although United States officials have expressed broad satisfaction with the number of combat troops entering the fight — with the bulk coming from the additional troops ordered by President Obama — the mission to teach and then deploy alongside Afghan security forces is still short about 4,000 trainers.

General McChrystal said a highly anticipated offensive due to begin soon in Afghanistan’s southern Helmand Province would be a significant example of the improved partnership between foreign and Afghan security forces. Helmand is a center of insurgent activity and the narcotics trade, and is viewed as vital to stabilizing the country because of its fertile river valley and significant population centers.

Some analysts, however, have questioned the official discussion of the operation in advance, and General McChrystal acknowledged that the decision to go public with the broad outlines of the plan — but not the dates — was “unconventional.”

He said the decision to discuss the operation in advance was a way of telling the people of Afghanistan of their government’s efforts to expand security where they live — and to tell the insurgents and narcotics traffickers “that it’s about to change.”

“If they want to fight, then obviously that will have to be an outcome,” General McChrystal said. “But if they don’t want to fight, that’s fine, too, if they want to integrate into the government.”

Even so, the decision could give insurgents time to flee — and to set booby traps in advance of their departure.

“The biggest thing is in convincing the Afghan people,” General McChrystal said during a session with correspondents traveling with Mr. Gates. “This is all a war of perceptions. This is not a physical war in terms of how many people you kill or how much ground you capture, how many bridges you blow up. This is all in the minds of the participants.”

General McChrystal’s assessment of the situation on the ground today certainly stood in contrast to his own words delivered to the president in a classified review of the war effort that became public last autumn.

In that confidential review, General McChrystal wrote that he needed additional troops within the next year or else the conflict “will likely result in failure.”

“Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near term (next 12 months) — while Afghan security capacity matures — risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible,” he wrote.

    U.S. General Says Situation in Afghanistan No Longer Deteriorating, NYT, 5.2.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/05/world/asia/05gates.html

Soldier Deaths Draw Focus to U.S. in Pakistan

February 4, 2010
The New York Times
By JANE PERLEZ

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — The deaths of three American soldiers in a Taliban suicide attack on Wednesday lifted the veil on United States military assistance to Pakistan that the authorities here would like to keep quiet and the Americans, as the donors, chafe at not receiving credit for.

The soldiers were among at least 60 to 100 members of a Special Operations team that trains Pakistan’s paramilitary Frontier Corps in counterinsurgency techniques, including intelligence gathering and development assistance. The American service members are from the Special Operations Command of Adm. Eric T. Olson.

At least 12 other American service members have been killed in Pakistan since Sept. 11, 2001, in hotel bombings and a plane crash, according to the United States Central Command, but these were the first killed as part of the Special Operations training, which has been under way for 18 months.

That training has been acknowledged only gingerly by both the Americans and the Pakistanis, but has deliberately been kept low-key so as not to trespass onto Pakistani sensitivities about sovereignty, and not to further inflame high anti-American sentiment.

Even though the United States calls Pakistan an ally, the country, unlike Afghanistan and Iraq, has not allowed American combat forces to operate here, a point that is stressed by the Pentagon and the Pakistani Army, the most powerful institution in Pakistan.

Instead, the Central Intelligence Agency operates what has become the main American weapon in Pakistan, the drones armed with missiles that have struck with increasing intensity against militants with the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the lawless tribal areas.

The American soldiers were probably made targets as a result of the drone strikes, said Syed Rifaat Hussain, professor of international relations at Islamabad University. “The attack seems a payback for the mounting frequency of the drone attacks,” Professor Hussain said.

If the American soldiers were the targets, the attack raised the question of whether the Taliban had received intelligence or cooperation from within the Frontier Corps.

The three soldiers were killed, and two other service members wounded, in the region of Lower Dir, which is close to the tribal areas. According to police officials in the region, the armored vehicle in which they were traveling was hit by a suicide bomber driving a car. Earlier reports from Pakistani security officials said the soldiers had been killed by a roadside explosive device.

To disguise themselves in a way that is common for Western men in Pakistan, the American soldiers were dressed in traditional Pakistani garb of baggy trousers and long tunic, known as shalwar kameez, according to a Frontier Corps officer. They also wore local caps that helped cover their hair, he said.

Their armored vehicle was equipped with electronic jammers sufficient to block remotely controlled devices and mines, the officer said. Vehicles driven by the Frontier Corps were placed in front and behind the Americans as protection, he said.

Still, the Taliban bomber was able to penetrate their cordon. In all 131 people were wounded, most of them girls who were students at a high school adjacent to the site of the suicide attack, the Lower Dir police said.

The soldiers were en route to the opening of a girls school that had been rebuilt with American money, the United States Embassy said in a statement. The school was destroyed by the Taliban last year as they swept through Lower Dir and the nearby Swat Valley, where a battle raged for months between the Pakistani Army and the Taliban.

A spokesman for the Pakistani Taliban called reporters hours after the attack against the Americans and claimed that his group was responsible.

The Pakistani Army currently occupies Swat, and in an effort to strengthen the civilian institutions there and in Dir, some of the American service members on the Special Operations team have been quietly working on development projects, an American official said.

The presence of the American military members in an area known to be threaded with Taliban militants would also raise questions, said Khalid Aziz, a former chief secretary of the North-West Frontier Province, which includes Swat and Dir.

Mr. Aziz said it was odd that American soldiers would go to such a volatile area where Taliban militants were known to be prevalent even though the Pakistani security forces insisted that they had been flushed out.

The usual practice for development work in Dir and Swat called for Pakistani aid workers or paramilitary soldiers to visit the sites, he said.

The Americans’ involvement in training Frontier Corps recruits in development assistance was little known until Wednesday’s attack.

“People are going to be very suspicious,” said Mr. Aziz, who is now involved in American assistance projects elsewhere. “There is going to be big blowback in the media.”

An American development official said that encouraging the Frontier Corps to become expert in humanitarian aid was an important part of the trainers’ counterinsurgency curriculum.

Last summer, for example, the American military trainers helped distribute food and water in camps for the more than one million people displaced from the Swat Valley by the fighting, the official said. But that American assistance, too, was kept quiet.

The 500,000-strong Pakistani Army led by Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the standard-bearer of Pakistan’s strong sense of nationalism, is resistant to the appearance of overt military assistance, least of all from the unpopular Americans, that would make the army look less than self-reliant on the battlefield.

Over the last several years, as the Qaeda-backed insurgents increased their hold on Pakistan’s tribal areas and used their base to attack American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, the United States military asked for permission for combat soldiers to operate in the tribal zone, according to American officials. Pakistan rebuffed the requests, they said.

Whether American soldiers are based in Pakistan is often raised by Pakistani politicians, students and average Pakistanis, many of them suspicious of American motives.

The question of the presence of American soldiers in Pakistan is also prompted by the fact that the American military provides important equipment to the Pakistani Army, including F-16 fighter jets, Cobra attack helicopters and howitzers.

Capt. Jack Hanzlik, a spokesman for the United States Central Command in Tampa, Fla., said 12 other service members had been killed in Pakistan since Sept. 11, 2001. The three soldiers who died Wednesday had been assigned to a Special Operations command in Pakistan. But he said they were not commandos from the elite Delta Force or Special Forces, also known as the Green Berets. The United States has about 200 military service members in Pakistan, Captain Hanzlik said.

The three names of the soldiers killed were not released Wednesday because United States military officials were still notifying the next of kin.

 

Reporting was contributed by Ismail Khan from Peshawar, Pakistan; Pir Zubair Shah from Islamabad; and Elisabeth Bumiller and Eric Schmitt from Washington.

    Soldier Deaths Draw Focus to U.S. in Pakistan, NYT, 4.2.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/04/world/asia/04pstan.html

3 American Soldiers Die in Attack in Pakistan

February 4, 2010
The New York Times
By JANE PERLEZ

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Three American soldiers were killed in a bomb attack Wednesday morning in an area known as a Taliban stronghold but which the Pakistani military had declared cleared of the militants, two Pakistani government officials said.

Two American soldiers were also wounded in the attack, which occurred near a school in Lower Dir, a region adjacent to the troubled area of Swat, the officials said.

Maj. Gen. Althar Abbas, the spokesman for the Pakistani Army, said a Pakistani soldier and three children were also killed. The medical superintendant in Timergara, the main town in Lower Dir, said that 122 girls were injured in the attack, a far higher number than originally reported.

Officials offered conflicting accounts of how the attack had been carried out. Police in Lower Dir said a suicide bomber in a car packed with 300 pounds of explosives had attacked the American convoy, but Pakistani authorities earlier said that the blast had come from a remote-controlled device.

Hours after the attack, a spokesman for the Pakistani Taliban, Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, called reporters and said the group was responsible for the blast.

The American soldiers, who were part of a training unit, were en route to inspect a proposed site for small-scale development projects that were to be undertaken by the Frontier Corps, a paramilitary force that the American Army has been training, a senior official in the North-West Frontier Province said.

No American soldiers are formally stationed in Pakistan, as they are in Iraq and Afghanistan. The presence of American troops, mainly for intelligence and training missions, has been handled with extreme discretion because of the sensitivities of the Pakistani military and government. Sections of the Pakistani press have waged an anti-American campaign in recent months that has made the Pakistani authorities even more nervous about association with the United States and perceived infringements on the country’s sovereignty.

The United States Embassy said in a statement Wednesday afternoon that the three soldiers were military personnel “in Pakistan to conduct training at the invitation of the Pakistan Frontier Corps.” The statement added that they had been scheduled to attend the inauguration of a school that had been renovated with American assistance.

The Pentagon has acknowledged that American military advisers and technical specialists are involved in training Pakistani Army and paramilitary troops but stipulated that these advisers were not involved in combat.

Some of the advisers, according to the Pentagon, were involved in sharing intelligence with the Pakistani Army and the Frontier Corps in an effort to boost Pakistan’s efforts against the blistering Qaeda-backed Taliban insurgency that has engulfed parts of the North-West Frontier Province and much of the lawless tribal areas.

That American soldiers were involved in development assistance had not been previously known.

The area where the American troops were traveling has been a focus of American efforts to build a stronger civilian authority that could take over from the Pakistani Army, which has essentially occupied Swat since it launched an offensive last year and forced many of the Taliban out.

But the area is also known as stronghold for Taliban fighters affiliated with the militants in Swat.

More than 50 people were wounded in the blast, many of them students at the school.

“It was a huge blast,” said Haroon Rashid, a local journalist who was accompanying the convoy and was wounded.

The bomb went off on the roadside near Koto village in Hajibad, he said.

“I am here with wounds on my leg and arms and am waiting to be evacuated,” Mr. Rashid said by telephone from the scene. He said the Pakistani Army had sealed the area and forbidden any entry or exit except for the wounded.

The hospital in Lower Dir was overwhelmed with the injured. “We are still receiving the wounded,” said Dr. Wakil Muhammad, the medical superintendent, more than two hours after the blast.

The area where the convoy was hit is known as Maidan and is the ancestral home of Sufi Mohammed, the charismatic leader of the Taliban in Swat. It is a mountainous region still used by Taliban fighters, and one of their most strategic strongholds.

Sufi Mohammed is in the custody of Pakistani security forces, and the road the convoy was traveling on was believed to have been cleared of militants, police officials said.

The attack demonstrated, however, that militants were still able to strike, particularly at groups trying to help rebuild local schools that have been the militants’ targets.

Early reports of the attack on Wednesday, which later proved erroneous, had said that employees of the United States Agency for International Development had been killed.

Pir Zubair Shah contributed reporting from Islamabad, and Ismail Khan from Peshawar, Pakistan.

    3 American Soldiers Die in Attack in Pakistan, NYT, 4.2.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/04/world/asia/04pstan.html

As Marines Move In, Taliban Fight a Shadowy War

February 2, 2010
The New York Times
By C. J. CHIVERS

KARARDAR, Afghanistan — The Marine infantry company, accompanied by a squad of Afghan soldiers, set out long before dawn. It walked silently through the dark fields with plans of arriving at a group of mud-walled compounds in Helmand Province at sunrise.

The company had received intelligence reports that 40 to 50 Taliban fighters had moved into this village a few days before, and the battalion had set a cordon around it. The Marines hoped to surprise any insurgents within.

But as the company moved, shepherds whistled in the darkness, passing warning of the Americans’ approach. Dogs barked themselves hoarse. The din rose in every direction, enveloping the column in noise. And then, as the Marines became visible in the bluish twilight, a minivan rumbled out of one compound. Its driver steered ahead of the company, honking the van’s horn, spreading the alarm. Spotters appeared on roofs.

Marine operations like this one in mid-January, along with interviews with dozens of Marines, reveal the insurgents’ evolving means of waging an Afghan brand of war, even as more American troops arrive.

Mixing modern weapons with ancient signaling techniques, the Taliban have developed the habits and tactics to evade capture and to disrupt American and Afghan operations, all while containing risks to their ranks.

Seven months after the Marines began flowing forces into Helmand Province, clearing territory and trying to establish local Afghan government, such tactics have helped the Taliban transform themselves from the primary provincial power to a canny but mostly unseen force.

Until last year Helmand Province had been a zone outside of government influence, where beyond the presence of a few Western outposts the Taliban enjoyed free movement and supremacy. The province served as both a fighters’ haven and the center of Afghanistan’s poppy production, providing rich revenue streams for the war against the central government and the Western forces that protect it.

In areas where they have built bases, the Marines have undermined the Taliban’s position. But the insurgents have consolidated and adapted, and remain a persistent and cunning presence.

On the morning of the sweep, made by Weapons Company, Third Battalion, First Marines, a large communications antenna that rose from one compound vanished before the Marines could reach it. The man inside insisted that he had seen nothing. And when the Marines moved within the compounds’ walls, people in nearby houses released white pigeons, revealing the Americans’ locations to anyone watching from afar.

The Taliban and their supporters use other signals besides car horns and pigeons, including kites flown near American movements and dense puffs of smoke released from chimneys near where a unit patrols.

“You’ll go to one place, and for some reason there will be a big plume of smoke ahead of you,” said Capt. Paul D. Stubbs, the Weapons Company commander. “As you go to the next place, there will be another.”

“Our impression,” he added, “is the people are doing it because they are getting paid to do it.”

Late in the morning during the company’s sweep, the insurgents fired a few bursts of automatic rifle fire from outside the cordon. Later still, they lobbed a single mortar round toward the company. It exploded in a field without causing any harm.

No one could tell exactly where the fire came from. This showed another side of the Taliban’s local activities. Wary of engaging the Marines while they were ready and massed, fighters risked nothing more than this harassing fire.

The sweep was not entirely fruitless. In several houses, Afghan soldiers found sacks of poppy seeds, which they carried outside, slashed open with knives and set on fire. In a few houses, they found processed opium and heroin. But the Taliban’s fighters had proved elusive again.

Another example of the insurgents’ patience has been their selection of locations for hiding bombs, which the military calls I.E.D.’s, for improvised explosive devices. Many of these bombs are detonated by the weight of a person or vehicle that depresses a pressure plate.

The steppe is vast. The pressure plates are small — often covering not much more surface area than a man’s boot. To emplace the bombs where they are most likely to kill, the Taliban watch the Marines’ habits carefully, including how small units react in the first instants of a firefight.

While the Marines scatter, take cover and maneuver, using walls and small rises as firing positions to bound from, the insurgents take note. “This is what they do: Shoot, and observe where the Marines go,” said Lt. Col. Matthew Baker, the battalion’s commander. “And where the Marines go, that is where they will put an I.E.D.”

On two patrols the battalion made last month, the Taliban’s sense of their enemy’s previous movements seemed well developed.

On one, a Marine stepped on a pressure plate rigged to a bomb that did not explode. The pressure plate was located against a wall on a knoll with a commanding view of surrounding ground. The Marines said units had used the knoll as a firing position many times.

On another, an antitank land mine had been placed in the dirt on a turnaround loop beside one of the province’s main roads — exactly where an Afghan police unit often parks its cars.

Part of the Taliban’s enduring tactical position, the Marines say, is related to their control of Marja, a well-defended de facto capital just outside the Marines’ current area of operations. At least hundreds of Taliban fighters have taken refuge. The town is protected by elaborate defenses and by a network of irrigation canals built by a United States development program a half-century ago.

From within Marja, the Marines also say, the Taliban manufacture improvised explosives and send fighters and suicide bombers on attacks throughout the province, including the suicide raid last week into Lashkar Gah, the provincial capital.

When Marine units approach Marja, the dangers rise. The insurgents run an active picket network, some of the workings of which were visible late last week on a Bravo Company security patrol that left Observation Post ManBearPig at Treekha Nawa.

After picking their way westward, searching for hidden bombs as they moved, the lead Marines crept toward the top of a low, rocky bluff. They peered over the opposite side at a group of mud-walled compounds several hundred yards ahead.

This was the outer perimeter of Marja, which was about eight miles away.

The Taliban’s spotters went to work. A man on a motorcycle sped down the road and entered one of the compounds. Heads appeared over the walls, above small holes from which Taliban fighters might fire assault rifles and machine guns. (The Marines call these “murder holes.”)

The civilians who had been outside disappeared. Both sides quietly eyed each other from just outside of rifle range.

The Bravo Company commander, Capt. Thomas J. Grace, had ordered patrols not to become decisively engaged with the Taliban’s fighters in this no man’s land. The company is the forward line of Marine presence, and has limited manpower to consolidate on new ground after a fight.

“There is absolutely no reason to go out there and kick in doors and get in a big fight,” he said. “Because you can’t hold it.”

Several thousand more Marines are expected in the province later this year, Marine officers say, which will allow the Afghans and Americans to clear and hold a larger area than they control now, and ultimately to displace the Taliban from Marja.

In the interim, at the Marines’ most forward positions, the two sides probe each other with patrols. On this day, the patrol leader, First Lt. Ryan P. Richter, could see the trap.

His platoon had been in many firefights here. If the patrol continued over the bluff and into the open, it would be enveloped by fire from three sides. In the contest of Helmand Province, he said, this remained for the moment Taliban turf.

    As Marines Move In, Taliban Fight a Shadowy War, NYT, 2.2.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/02/world/asia/02taliban.html

U.S. Wrestling With Olive Branch for Taliban

January 27, 2010
The New York Times
By MARK LANDLER and HELENE COOPER

WASHINGTON — As the Obama administration pours 30,000 additional troops into Afghanistan, it has begun grappling with the next great dilemma of this long war: whether to reconcile with the men who sheltered Osama bin Laden and who still have close ties to Al Qaeda.

The Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, has said he wants to reach out to the leaders of the Taliban, and administration officials acknowledge privately that they are considering the idea. But they warn that the plan is rife with political risk at home and could jeopardize a widely backed effort to lure lower-ranking, more amenable Taliban fighters back into Afghan society.

The debate, still in its early stages, could shape the next phase of America’s engagement in Afghanistan, officials said, and is every bit as complicated as the decision on whether to commit more soldiers, not least because it rekindles memories of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

On Thursday, donor countries, led by the United States, Britain and Japan, are expected to commit $100 million a year to an Afghan fund for reintegrating the foot soldiers of the Taliban with jobs, cash and other inducements. But the allies are less sanguine about dealing with the Taliban’s high command, particularly its leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, and other “hard core” Taliban elements which, the administration bluntly declared last March, were “not reconcilable.”

One question is how likely these people are to be enticed by the inducements, given the gains the Taliban have made. Some American officials suggest the debate is premature, saying the Taliban have to be depleted through drone strikes and ground combat before they would return to the bargaining table.

The pros and cons of dealing with the Taliban will loom large at the conference in London this week, where Mr. Karzai is scheduled to present his plan for lower-level reintegration.

While Mullah Omar remains off limits for the United States, the administration’s openness to reconciling with other Taliban leaders has grown since last year, officials say, because of its recognition that the war is not going to be won purely on the battlefield.

“Today, people agree that part of the solution for Afghanistan is going to include an accommodation with the Taliban, even above low- and middle-level fighters,” said an administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was discussing internal deliberations.

Still, any grand bargain is bound to be messy, he said, with the Taliban most likely to demand government jobs or control of large areas of territory in Afghanistan’s south, where it now rules by fear. What the United States would be willing to tolerate has become a hot issue inside the administration.

Already, the Pentagon has expressed skepticism about coming to terms with high-ranking Taliban figures anytime soon.

“It’s our view that until the Taliban leadership sees a change in the momentum and begins to see that they are not going to win, the likelihood of significant reconciliation at senior levels is not terribly great,” Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said last week in India.

At the same time, the senior American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, said recently that he could eventually envision a role for some Taliban officials in Afghanistan’s political establishment.

Other senior officials, like Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., are said to be more open to reaching out, because they believe it will help shorten the military engagement in Afghanistan. The special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard C. Holbrooke, is also said by officials to be privately receptive, although he expressed doubts in an interview.

“It’s very unclear on which basis you can have reconciliation with the Taliban leadership when they are still allied with Al Qaeda and pursue policies that would create permanent instability in Afghanistan and the region,” Mr. Holbrooke said.

Part of the problem is that the process could set off unpredictable forces. Some contend it could split the leadership of the Taliban, swelling the ranks of subordinates who accept the Afghan government’s offer to lay down their arms. But skeptics argue that it could embolden the Taliban, by making their leaders think they have the upper hand against the Afghan government.

“The more there is talk of negotiation, the more the Taliban view it as a sign of weakness,” said Vanda Felbab-Brown, an expert on Afghanistan at the Brookings Institution. “How do you make sure the reconciliation process does not embolden the Taliban to go on the march?”

Reconciliation has a troubled history in Afghanistan. In December 2007, Mr. Karzai expelled two Western officials for unauthorized contacts with the Taliban. The United Nations said the talks were with tribal elders, though one of the officials, Michael Semple, an Irishman who worked for the European Union, has written extensively since then about the value of negotiating with the Taliban.

There are also inklings of a new openness on the part of Mullah Omar. Last September, he stirred some controversy in the extremist world with a public statement suggesting that he put the goal of retaking power in Afghanistan ahead of the global jihad favored by Al Qaeda.

Some analysts saw this as a sign of a rift between the two groups and a hint that Mullah Omar might be open to talks. The Taliban, he said, “want to play our role in peace and stability of the region.”

In London, Mr. Karzai is expected to provide details about reaching out to lower-level Taliban members. One question is whether he will ask the United Nations to remove Mullah Omar’s name from a “blacklist,” which freezes bank accounts and prohibits travel for those on it.

The blacklist is important because the government cannot negotiate with Taliban members whose names are on it. A United Nations Security Council committee said Tuesday that it had removed five senior Taliban from the list, Reuters reported.

For now, American military officials said, the focus will remain on lower-level street fighters.

The hope is that in the next few months, the 30,000 additional American troops will start to make a dent in the Taliban’s offensive. Even then, American officials said, any reconciliation would require the Taliban leaders to renounce violence.

“That’s a pretty high bar for the Taliban leadership to clear,” said Brian Katulis, of the Center for American Progress, a liberal advocacy group with ties to the Obama administration.

Scott Shane contributed reporting.

    U.S. Wrestling With Olive Branch for Taliban, NYT, 27.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/27/world/asia/27diplo.html

Simulators Prepare Soldiers for Explosive Attacks in War

January 23, 2010
The New York Times
By JAMES DAO

FORT EUSTIS, Va. — A Humvee bumps along a dirt road fringed by mountains, their snowy peaks glinting in the sun. Rifle shots crackle from a rocky bluff, signaling a Taliban ambush. Suddenly an explosion rocks the vehicle, tossing it from side to side before it bounces to an uneasy stop, smoke billowing into the cab.

This is a roadside bombing, Hollywood style. But this is no film set. The Humvee is part of an elaborate simulator that prepares soldiers for one of the most hazardous jobs in Afghanistan today — driving.

Training to defend against the Taliban’s most lethal weapon, the improvised explosive device, or I.E.D., can feel a bit like taking a ride at Disney World these days. Or watching a 3-D movie. Or playing an interactive computer game.

The simulator is just one example of how the Pentagon is trying to harness the high-tech wizardry of the entertainment industry to counter the low-tech bombs, which have killed more American troops in Afghanistan over the last two years than gunfire.

Known as I.E.D. Battle Drill, the system uses amusement-ride hydraulics that can make passengers feel as if they are hitting potholes or buried mines. Screens surrounding the vehicle on three sides display Afghan-like terrain in high-definition video sharp enough to discern rocks on the roadside and leaves on the scrubby bushes.

“This is better than anything I can recreate in the field,” said Maj. Michael Dolge, a Fort Eustis trainer who experienced several bombs attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan. “I think my gunner would have had some unpleasant memories if he rode in it.”

The simulator is just one of several game playing or virtual-reality devices the Defense Department has hustled into operation as I.E.D. casualties have risen.

At Fort Bragg, N.C., and Camp Pendleton, Calif., soldiers and Marines have begun training on a program created by the Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California that uses fictional video narratives and a multiplayer computer game.

In one video, an insurgent played by an actor demonstrates how I.E.D.’s are built, planted and detonated; in another, an American soldier describes how his team responded to a bomb attack. The session finishes with a 15-minute interactive computer game in which one team tries to avoid getting blown up by the other.

In another application of gaming technology, Defense Department programmers working in a strip mall near Fort Monroe, Va., have taken daily intelligence reports, surveillance data and satellite images from Iraq and Afghanistan to produce computer-generated simulations of the latest I.E.D. tactics and technology.

The high-quality graphics, which can depict Blackhawk helicopters or sandal-shod insurgents, are generated by a commercially available war-gaming software called Virtual Battle Space 2. Completed simulations are then e-mailed to commanders and intelligence officers around the world.

Mark Covey, who oversees the simulations unit, said many officers were initially skeptical about his simulations until someone compared an insurgent video posted on the Internet to one of his productions depicting the same attack. They were virtually identical.

The counter-I.E.D. systems are just one part of a broader trend by the military to use virtual reality, 3-D technology and computer game software to train deploying troops and treat combat-scarred veterans.

The firm that helped convert an actor into the creature Gollum in the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, Motion Reality, has created a 3-D virtual reality training program that simulates small-unit combat missions.

Therapists at several military and veterans hospitals are also using a system known as Virtual Iraq to treat post-traumatic stress disorder. The system, based on a computer game called Full Spectrum Warrior, helps patients to re-imagine, with the help of virtual reality goggles and headphones, the sights and sounds of combat experiences as a way of grappling with trauma.

The effectiveness of the new technology is still being studied. But some critics warn that computer games and virtual reality systems used for training are only as effective as their software, meaning that programs that underestimate the creativity of the enemy may leave even the best-trained troops with a false sense of mastery.

But advocates say the new training systems can be easily updated to reflect changing realities on the ground. And they point to other advantages, including that most systems can be transported to the war front.

Trainers say that the I.E.D. Battle Drill’s greatest benefit may be in teaching soldiers to stay alert for unusual details in the landscape that might signal buried bombs or impending ambushes. Those clues could be as obvious as a speeding truck or as subtle as a pile of rocks. Crews that spot those clues and respond are rewarded by moving onto more complex scenarios. Those who do not get blown up.

“The best way to defeat an I.E.D is to find it,” said Master Sgt. David Richardson, a veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq who now trains soldiers at Fort Eustis.

Getting blown up is also instructive, trainers say, because it gives soldiers a taste of disorientation that might help them recover faster from a real attack.

“The first reaction is to freeze,” said Gary Carlberg, training chief for the Joint IED Defeat Organization, or Jieddo, a Pentagon agency. “But if I can build up your threshold through one or two explosions, you won’t freeze and become a target.”

The simulator grew out of the kind of alliance between the military and the entertainment industry that has become more common since 9/11.

At the behest of Jieddo, Richard Lindheim, a former film studio executive and past director of the Institute for Creative Technologies, recruited a team of experts. Cinematographers invented a high-definition camera capable of seamless 360-degree shots. A veteran sitcom writer plotted the training scenarios. Gaming programmers built those scenarios into videos. And a company that has created rides for Universal Studios and Disney manufactured the equipment.

Mr. Carlberg said: “We’re not going to armor ourselves out of this problem. But if we can, we take the most valuable, flexible resource we have, the human being, and maximize it, that will make a significant difference.”

Andrew W. Lehren contributed reporting from New York.

    Simulators Prepare Soldiers for Explosive Attacks in War, NYT, 23.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/23/us/23simulator.html

C.I.A. Deaths Prompt Surge in U.S. Drone Strikes

January 23, 2010
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE and ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON — Since the suicide bombing that took the lives of seven Americans in Afghanistan on Dec. 30, the Central Intelligence Agency has struck back against militants in Pakistan with the most intensive series of missile strikes from drone aircraft since the covert program began.

Beginning the day after the attack on a C.I.A. base in Khost, Afghanistan, the agency has carried out 11 strikes that have killed about 90 people suspected of being militants, according to Pakistani news reports, which make almost no mention of civilian casualties. The assault has included strikes on a mud fortress in North Waziristan on Jan. 6 that killed 17 people and a volley of missiles on a compound in South Waziristan last Sunday that killed at least 20.

“For the C.I.A., there is certainly an element of wanting to show that they can hit back,” said Bill Roggio, editor of The Long War Journal, an online publication that tracks the C.I.A.’s drone campaign. Mr. Roggio, as well as Pakistani and American intelligence officials, said many of the recent strikes had focused on the Pakistani Taliban and its leader, Hakimullah Mehsud, who claimed responsibility for the Khost bombing.

The Khost attack cost the agency dearly, taking the lives of the most experienced analysts of Al Qaeda whose intelligence helped guide the drone attacks. Yet the agency has responded by redoubling its assault. Drone strikes have come roughly every other day this month, up from about once a week last year and the most furious pace since the drone campaign began in earnest in the summer of 2008.

Pakistan’s announcement on Thursday that its army would delay any new offensives against militants in North Waziristan for 6 to 12 months is likely to increase American reliance on the drone strikes, administration and counterterrorism officials said. By next year, the C.I.A. is expected to more than double its fleet of the latest Reaper aircraft — bigger, faster and more heavily armed than the older Predators — to 14 from 6, an Obama administration official said.

Even before the Khost attack, White House officials had made it clear to Dennis C. Blair, the director of national intelligence, and Leon E. Panetta, the C.I.A. director, that they expected significant results from the drone strikes in reducing the threat from Al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban, according to an administration official and a former senior C.I.A. official with close ties to the White House.

These concerns only heightened after the attempted Dec. 25 bombing of a Detroit-bound airliner. While that plot involved a Nigerian man sent by a Qaeda offshoot in Yemen, intelligence officials say they believe that Al Qaeda’s top leaders in Pakistan have called on affiliates to carry out attacks against the West. “There’s huge pressure from the White House on Blair and Panetta,” said the former C.I.A. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity out of concern about angering the White House. “The feeling is, the clock is ticking.”

After the Khost bombing, intelligence officials vowed that they would retaliate. One angry senior American intelligence official said the C.I.A. would “avenge” the Khost attack. “Some very bad people will eventually have a very bad day,” the official said at the time, speaking on the condition he not be identified describing a classified program.

Today, officials deny that vengeance is driving the increased attacks, though one called the drone strikes “the purest form of self-defense.”

Officials point to other factors. For one, Pakistan recently dropped restrictions on the drone program it had requested last fall to accompany a ground offensive against militants in South Waziristan. And tips on the whereabouts of extremists ebb and flow unpredictably.

A C.I.A. spokesman, Paul Gimigliano, declined to comment on the drone strikes. But he said, “The agency’s counterterrorism operations — lawful, aggressive, precise and effective — continue without pause.”

The strikes, carried out from a secret base in Pakistan and controlled by satellite link from C.I.A. headquarters in Virginia, have been expanded by President Obama and praised by both parties in Congress as a potent weapon against terrorism that puts no American lives at risk. That calculation must be revised in light of the Khost bombing, which revealed the critical presence of C.I.A. officers in dangerous territory to direct the strikes.

Some legal scholars have questioned the legitimacy under international law of killings by a civilian agency in a country where the United States is not officially at war. This month, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act for government documents revealing procedures for approving targets and legal justifications for the killings.

Critics have contended that collateral civilian deaths are too high a price to pay. Pakistani officials have periodically denounced the strikes as a violation of their nation’s sovereignty, even as they have provided a launching base for the drones.

The increase in drone attacks has caused panic among rank-and-file militants, particularly in North Waziristan, where some now avoid using private vehicles, according to Pakistani intelligence and security officials. Fewer foreign extremists are now in Miram Shah, North Waziristan’s capital, which was previously awash with them, said local tribesmen and security officials.

Despite the consensus in Washington behind the drone program, some experts are dissenters. John Arquilla, a professor of defense analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School who frequently advises the military, said, “The more the drone campaign works, the more it fails — as increased attacks only make the Pakistanis angrier at the collateral damage and sustained violation of their sovereignty.”

If the United States expands the drone strikes beyond the lawless tribal areas to neighboring Baluchistan, as is under discussion, the backlash “might even spark a social revolution in Pakistan,” Mr. Arquilla said.

So far the reaction in Pakistan to the increased drone strikes has been muted. Last week, Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani of Pakistan told Richard C. Holbrooke, the administration’s senior diplomat for Afghanistan and Pakistan, that the drones undermined the larger war effort. But the issue was not at the top of the agenda as it was a year ago.

Hasan Askari Rizvi, a military analyst in Lahore, said public opposition had been declining because the campaign was viewed as a success. Yet one Pakistani general, who supports the drone strikes as a tactic for keeping militants off balance, questioned the long-term impact.

“Has the situation stabilized in the past two years?” asked the general, speaking on condition of anonymity. “Are the tribal areas more stable?” Yes, he said, Baitullah Mehsud, founder of the Pakistani Taliban, was killed by a missile last August. “But he’s been replaced and the number of fighters is increasing,” the general said.

Sabrina Tavernise contributed reporting from Islamabad, Pakistan, and Ismail Khan from Peshawar.

    C.I.A. Deaths Prompt Surge in U.S. Drone Strikes, NYT, 23.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/23/world/asia/23drone.html

Pakistan Resists Call by U.S. to Root Out Militants

January 22, 2010
The New York Times
By ELISABETH BUMILLER

RAWALPINDI, Pakistan — The Pakistani Army indicated Thursday that it would not launch any new offensives against extremists in the mountainous region of North Waziristan for at least six months, pushing back against calls by the United States to root out militants staging attacks along the Afghan border.

An Army spokesman described Pakistan’s position as the United States secretary of defense, Robert M. Gates, arrived here for an unannounced two-day visit. Mr. Gates said that he planned to urge top Pakistani military officials to pursue extremist groups along their border, and that ignoring “one part of this cancer” would threaten the entire country’s stability.

But the Army spokesman, Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, told American reporters at the headquarters of the Pakistani Army in the garrison city of Rawalpindi that Pakistan had to contain some of the extremist groups in the wake of offensives against Taliban fighters last year. General Abbas said it would be six months to a year before any new operation began, and said the situation was not as “black and white” as Mr. Gates described.

Mr. Gates, who is on his first trip to Pakistan in three years, was to meet on Thursday with the Pakistani Army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, as well as the director of the country’s spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, Lt. Gen. Ahmad Shuja Pasha.

He is also to attend a dinner in his honor given by the Pakistani president, Asif Ali Zardari, and deliver a speech on American policy before a military audience.

In an opinion article published on Thursday in The News, Pakistan’s largest English-language daily newspaper, Mr. Gates sounded a theme similar to his remarks to reporters, saying that Pakistan had to do more to fight the multiple extremist groups on its Afghan border.

Implicitly he pressed Pakistan to root out the Afghan Taliban leadership, the Quetta Shura, which has found refuge in Pakistan’s Baluchistan province outside the tribal areas. American officials are increasingly frustrated that while the Pakistanis have launched offensives against the Pakistani Taliban and Al Qaeda, they have so far not pursued the Afghan Taliban and another extremist group on their border, the Haqqani network, whose fighters pose a threat to American forces.

“Maintaining a distinction between some violent extremist groups and others is counterproductive,” Mr. Gates wrote. “Only by pressuring all of these groups on both sides of the border will Afghanistan and Pakistan be able to rid themselves of this scourge for good.”

American officials privately say that the Pakistanis are reluctant to go after the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani network because they see them as a future proxy against Indian interests in Afghanistan when the Americans leave. India is Pakistan’s archrival in the region; under President Obama’s Afghan strategy, announced last month, the United States is to begin withdrawing its forces from Afghanistan by July 2011.

In the same article, Mr. Gates sought to reassure Pakistanis that Americans were interested in a long-term interest in their country, not just in short-term strategic gain across the border in Afghanistan. Mr. Gates said he regretted past injustices in the American-Pakistan relationship that he himself has been part of since the late 1980s, when as No. 2 at the C.I.A. he helped funnel covert Reagan administration aid and weapons through Pakistan’s spy agency to the Islamic fundamentalists who ousted the Russians from Afghanistan. Some of those fundamentalists are now part of the Taliban and fighting against the United States.

Mr. Gates said that the United States largely abandoned Afghanistan and cut military ties with Pakistan once the Russians left Kabul, which he called “a grave mistake driven by some well-intentioned but short-sighted U.S. legislative and policy decisions.”

He said on this visit “I will emphasize that the United States wishes to relinquish the grievances of the past.”

    Pakistan Resists Call by U.S. to Root Out Militants, NYT, 22.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/22/world/asia/22pstan.html

A Team of Militants Launches a Bold Attack in Kabul

January 19, 2010
The New York Times
By DEXTER FILKINS

KABUL, Afghanistan — A team of militants launched a spectacular assault at the heart of the Afghan government Monday, with two men detonating suicide bombs and the rest fighting to the death only 50 yards from the gates of the presidential palace.

The attacks, the latest in a series targeting the Afghan capital, paralyzed the city for hours, as hundreds of Afghan commandos converged and opened fire. The battle unfolded in the middle of Pashtunistan Square, a traffic circle that holds the palace of President Hamid Karzai, the Ministry of Justice and the Central Bank, the target of the attack.

As the gun battle raged, another suicide bomber — this one driving an ambulance — struck a traffic circle a half-mile away, sending a second mass of bystanders fleeing in terror.

Five hours after the attack began, gunfire was still echoing through the downtown, as commandos searched for holdouts in a nearby office building. Afghan officials said that three soldiers and two civilians — including one child — were killed, and at least 71 people were wounded. The Faroshga market, one of the city’s most popular shopping malls, lay in ruins, shattered and burning and belching black smoke.

All seven militants died in the attack; five were gunned down and two killed themselves. The corpses of two of the militants lay splayed under blankets, their heads and bodies riddled and smashed.

The effect of the attack seemed primarily psychological, designed to strike fear into the usually quiet precincts of downtown Kabul — and to drive home the ease with which insurgents could strike the American-backed government here.

In that way the assault succeeded without question: The streets of Kabul emptied, merchants shuttered their shops and Afghans ran from their offices. Even guards assigned to Mr. Karzai himself came to join the fighting; it was that close.

“All of a sudden three men came in wrapped in shawls—and then they pulled them off and we could see their guns and grenades,” said an Afghan man who witnessed the attack. “They told us to get out, and then they went to the roof and started firing.”

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack. Reached by telephone, a spokesman said the group had sent 20 suicide bombers for the operation. This was an exaggeration.

“Some of our suicide bombers have blown themselves up, bringing heavy casualties to government officials,” said Zabihullah Mujahid, a spokesman for the Taliban.

And civilians, too. At the height of the battle, women and men, some of them clutching babies, ran down the streets, some bleeding, some sobbing. Even a stray dog, frightened by one of the blasts, dashed wildly down a street.

A second Taliban representative, also reached by phone, said the attack was intended to answer American and Afghan proposals to “reconcile” with and “reintegrate” Taliban fighters into mainstream society. The plan is a central part of the American-backed campaign to turn the tide of the war, and will be showcased later this month at an international conference in London.

“We are ready to fight, and we have the strength to fight, and nobody from the Taliban side is ready to make any kind of deal,” Mr. Mujahid, the Taliban spokesman, said. “The world community and the international forces are trying to buy the Taliban, and that is why we are showing that we are not for sale.”

The assault was the latest in a series of audacious operations meant to shatter the calm of the Afghan capital. The Taliban is a mostly rural phenomenon in a mostly rural country; the overwhelming majority of American troops are deployed in small outposts in the countryside. On most days, the war does not reach the urban centers.

But increasingly the Taliban are bringing the fight into the cities. In October, militants wearing suicide belts attacked a United Nations guest house in Kabul and killed eight people, including five of the organization’s workers. In December, a suicide car bomber struck the Heetal Hotel, killing eight people and wounding 48.

The prototype of Monday’s operation was the assault on the Ministry of Justice, which a team of guerrillas, including suicide bombers, stormed last February. The militants killed the guards, got inside and stalked the halls for victims. At least 10 people died, not including the militants, whose bodies the police dumped unceremoniously in the streets.

That is what the militants clearly intended on Monday. The attack began at 9:30 a.m., when the streets of downtown Kabul were jammed with traffic. A man wearing a suicide belt approached the gates of the Central Bank of Afghanistan, which regulates the flow of currency in the country, and tried to push past the guards. The guards shot him, but not before the bomber managed to detonate his payload. He exploded in the street.

The other militants, who were apparently intending to follow the suicide bomber into the bank, took cover in the Faroshga market, a five-story shopping mall next door. They expelled the shoppers and shopkeepers and ran to the higher floors and began shooting. Other fighters slipped into the Ministry of Justice and the Ariana cinema house, the police said, but a survey of both sites revealed no evidence of that.

Within minutes, hundreds of Afghan commandos, soldiers and police surrounded Pashtunistan Square and attacked. Some of the Afghan fighters were part of specially formed antiterrorism squads. Monday’s gun battle was notable for the absence of American soldiers: a small group of commandos from New Zealand were the only Western soldiers on the scene.

One group of Afghan commandos said they had come straight from a training class.

“We were going through drills when we got the word,” said Bawahuddin, a young member of an antiterrorism squad, standing behind a wall as he prepared to join the fight. Bawahuddin flashed a thumbs up sign. “We’re ready — we’re ready.”

And then his unit got the word — “Go now, go now!” — and the men began to run. And Bawahuddin’s eyes flashed with fear.

“Either we are going to kill them, or they are going to kill us,” said Saifullah Sarhadi, a commando on the edge of the fight.

Bullets flew in every direction, thousands of them. The militants, holed up on the upper floors of the market, fired and fought as their building exploded and burned. A blast sounded, and then another — the sounds of heavy guns firing inside.

With the battle raging, a shock wave rippled from another part of town — a suicide car bomber. His van, complete with a siren and light, was marked “Maiwand Hospital” on its sides and front, so the police let it through. It exploded in Malik Asghar Square, blasting a crater in the street and shaking the ground for a mile.

Afterward, the remains of the ambulance lay in the road, its twisted shards still smoking. Police pulled out the pieces of a man— dark skinned and heavy set. An Arab, they said. But no one seemed to know for sure.

Sangar Rahimi, Alissa J. Rubin, Abdul Waheed Wafa and Rod Nordland contributed reporting from Kabul, and Taimoor Shah from Kandahar, Afghanistan.

    A Team of Militants Launches a Bold Attack in Kabul, NYT, 19.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/19/world/asia/19afghan.html

Bagram Detainees Named by U.S.

January 17, 2010
The New York Times
By ALISSA J. RUBIN and SANGAR RAHIMI

KABUL, Afghanistan — The American military released the names of 645 detainees held at the main detention center at Bagram Air Base, modifying its long-held position against publicizing detention information and taking a step toward making the system more open.

The announcement came as political wrestling over the leadership of the government continued, with the Afghan Parliament again turning down many of President Hamid Karzai’s nominees for cabinet ministers.

The release of the detainee list was prompted by a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed in September by the American Civil Liberties Union, whose lawyers had also demanded detailed information about conditions, rules and regulations at the prison.

“Releasing the names of those held at Bagram is an important step toward transparency and accountability at the secretive Bagram prison, but it is just a first step,” Melissa Goodman, a lawyer for the A.C.L.U., said in a statement.

“Full transparency and accountability about Bagram requires disclosing how long these people have been imprisoned, where they are from and whether they were captured far from any battlefield or in other countries far from Afghanistan,” she said.

The move toward more openness — though limited — is in keeping with the Obama administration’s stated policy of making public more information about the detention system in Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay.

Although the released information will be helpful to human rights advocates in tracking who is detained at Bagram, it is of little use to lawyers attempting to represent Bagram detainees, said Tina Foster, a lawyer for the International Justice Network.

“While it’s very important in terms of U.S. government transparency, it means very little to the individuals named because the U.S. government still maintains that everybody whose name appears on that list is not entitled to any human rights under U.S. law,” Ms. Foster said.

Lawyers need more than detainees’ names to find their families and see if they want legal representation, Ms. Foster said

Former detainees have described abusive treatment at the base, especially in the first two or three years it was in existence. In 2002, two detainees died after being beaten. In the last several years, detainees who have been released described improved living conditions but have criticized the detention system for having held them for long periods without charges or trial.

A new prison opened in November for detainees, with more space, light and vocational and educational programs. And in the last week, a new administrative review process has begun, which should allow detainees, especially those who were picked up erroneously, to be released more rapidly, according to American military detention officials.

While the majority of the detainees at Bagram are Afghan, a small number are foreigners who are accused of fighting with the Taliban. Also held there are a handful of detainees captured in other countries, according to human rights lawyers and military detention officials.

The current detainee population stands at about 750, according to military detention officials, but in September, when the information request was made, there were about 100 fewer detainees. The numbers have grown over the past few months because of the increased military operations by American forces.

It was not clear whether the names of those released included those held in field detention sites around the country or at a similar prisons at Bagram where some detainees are taken initially before being placed in the general detainee population. When detainees are held initially, they generally have no access to the International Committee of the Red Cross or to their families. But within two weeks, their names must be released to the Red Cross.

The political news, meanwhile, underlines the difficulties that the United States faces in trying to encourage the growth of Afghan government services, a key ingredient in bringing stability.

The Afghan Parliament turned down more than half of Mr. Karzai’s second list of potential cabinet ministers on Saturday, prolonging the period in which some ministries will be hobbled by a lack of leadership.

Nominees were rejected for a variety of reasons, including objections to their lack of knowledge about the subject area of their ministries, criticism of their political connections and as an expression of frustration with the executive branch.

Of the 17 nominees considered by Parliament on Saturday, seven ministers were approved; one was a woman. Two other female nominees were rejected and representatives of members of minorities complained that nominees from their ethnic groups were not accepted.

Those approved on Saturday will join seven other ministers already approved by Parliament. The earlier batch included most of the nominees favored by American and foreign diplomats.

“As a member of the Parliament, I think the decision made today by the Parliament is a rightful and just decision, but unfortunately this is the second time that none of the Hazara and Uzbek nominees got a vote of confidence,” said Mohammed Noor Akbari, a Parliament member from Day Kundi Province and a Hazara. “This is a point of concern to us,” he said.

Western diplomats said that with an international conference on Afghanistan just two weeks away, it was unlikely that Mr. Karzai would submit a third list of nominees right away, even though the top jobs at some critical ministries remain unfilled. His nominees for the ministries of health, transportation and telecommunications, among others, failed Saturday.

One position that was filled was that of the minister for counternarcotics — a powerful post given the importance of Afghanistan in the global drug trade. The new minister is Zarar Ahmad Moqbel, a former interior minister who was forced out of office in 2008 amid allegations of corruption.

Two British soldiers were killed Friday by an improvised explosive device while on a foot patrol in Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan, according to Britain’s Defense Ministry.

A NATO serviceman also died Saturday from an improvised explosive device that detonated in southern Afghanistan.

    Bagram Detainees Named by U.S., NYT, 17.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/world/asia/17afghan.html

Officials: Alleged US Missiles Kill 10 in Pakistan

January 14, 2010
Filed at 1:02 a.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

ISLAMABAD (AP) -- A suspected U.S. missile strike killed at least 10 alleged militants Thursday at a compound formerly used as a religious school in Pakistan's North Waziristan tribal region, officials said, the eighth such attack in two weeks.

The strike illustrated the Obama administration's unwillingness to abandon its missile campaign aimed at Pakistan's northwest territories bordering Afghanistan. Despite longstanding Pakistani protest, the missile attacks have surged in number in recent days.

Nearly all the attacks in recent months have focused on North Waziristan, a segment of Pakistan's semi-autonomous tribal belt where some militant networks focused on battling the U.S. and NATO in Afghanistan are based. Some of those militants are believed to have been involved in a late December attack that killed seven CIA employees in eastern Afghanistan.

It's a region that the Pakistani military has been wary of treading, partly because the groups have not directly threatened the Pakistani state. The army has struck truces with some of the groups to keep them out of its battle against the Pakistani Taliban -- who have attacked Pakistan in numerous ways -- in nearby South Waziristan.

The latest missiles hit the Pasalkot area of North Waziristan around 7 a.m., landing in a sprawling compound that has been used as a religious school in the past. The identities of the dead were not immediately known, an army official and an intelligence official said.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to media on the record.

The strike came as Richard Holbrooke, a U.S. special envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan, was visiting parts of Pakistan.

    Officials: Alleged US Missiles Kill 10 in Pakistan, NYT, 14.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/01/14/world/AP-AS-Pakistan.html

U.N. Blames Taliban for Afghan Toll

January 14, 2010
The New York Times
By DEXTER FILKINS

KABUL, Afghanistan — Last year was the most lethal for Afghan civilians since the American-led war began here in late 2001, with the Taliban and other insurgent groups causing the vast majority of noncombatant deaths, according to a United Nations survey released Wednesday.

The United Nations report said that 2,412 civilians were killed in 2009, a jump of 14 percent over the previous year. Another 3,566 Afghan civilians were wounded, the report found.

The growing number of civilian deaths reflects the intensification of the Afghan war over the same period: American and NATO combat deaths jumped to 520 over the past year, from 295, and the Taliban are more active than at any point in the past eight years.

But the most striking aspect of the report was the shift in responsibility for the deaths of Afghan civilians. The survey found that the Taliban and other insurgents killed more than twice the number of civilians as the American-led coalition and Afghan government forces last year, mostly by suicide bombings, homemade bombs and executions.

The 1,630 civilians killed by insurgents — two-thirds of the total — represented a 40 percent increase over the previous year. .

By contrast, the number of civilians killed by the NATO- and American-led coalition and Afghan government forces in 2009 fell 28 percent, to 596, about a quarter of the total number. The cause of the other deaths could not be determined.

The report attributed the drop to measures taken by the American-led coalition to reduce the danger to civilians. Since taking over in June, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal has issued several directives aimed at winning over the Afghan population, sometimes at the expense of forgoing attacks on Taliban fighters.

Principal among these directives was the tightening of the rules governing airstrikes, which have been the main cause of civilian fatalities caused by the American and other NATO forces.

Under the new rules, coalition forces caught in a firefight with insurgents may not order an airstrike on a house in a residential area unless they are in danger of being overrun. In the past, airstrikes carried out in the heat of battle in residential areas have accounted for several widely publicized incidents of civilian deaths.

Indeed, airstrikes make up the largest cause of civilian deaths by the coalition. Even with the new guidelines, which took effect in the middle of last year, 359 Afghans were killed in airstrikes in 2009, the United Nations survey found.

General McChrystal, who is in command of roughly 110,000 American and other NATO troops — and will soon be getting 30,000 more American troops — has issued several similar directives intended to reduce the harm to ordinary Afghans.

“We will not win based on the number of Taliban we kill, but instead on our ability to separate the insurgents from the center of gravity — the people,” he wrote in a guidance to officers last July. “That means we must respect and protect the population from coercion and violence — and operate in a manner which will win their support.”

For its own part, even the Taliban have implored their fighters to minimize the harm to Afghan civilians.

Last summer, the Taliban’s leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, put out his own directive to his troops, which also implored his men to try to win over Afghan civilians. Called “A Book of Rules,” it had a slightly different character than the American directives.

This is what the Taliban manual had to say about “martyrdom operations,” the jihadist term for suicide bombings: “The utmost steps must be taken to avoid civilian human loss in martyrdom operations.”

On the same issue, American commanders said this week that they would tighten the rules governing night raids, one of the touchiest subjects among ordinary Afghans.

American and NATO troops often move into villages at night because of advantages like surprise and because they typically have equipment, like night-vision goggles, that allows them see with very little light when the insurgents cannot.

But some night operations have gone awry, resulted in the deaths of civilians. On some occasions, Afghan civilians alarmed by the presence of gun-toting men in their villages have grabbed their own guns, only to be shot by American or NATO forces, who took the villagers for insurgents.

And even raids that went relatively smoothly have caused ill will among ordinary Afghans, who are often offended by foreign soldiers moving through their villages — or into their homes — after dark.

“Nighttime is a good time to operate, said Col. Rich Gross, the chief legal counsel to American and NATO forces. “We control the environment, and the people are in bed.

“But the Afghans don’t like night raids. They bring them up all the time. It’s about perception.”

According to the new directive, American and other NATO forces should explore other alternatives to night raids, such as cordoning villages at night and then moving in at sunrise.

“In the Afghan culture, a man’s home is more than just his residence,” a draft of the new guidance said. “It represents his family, and protecting it is closely intertwined with his honor. He has been conditioned to respond aggressively whenever he perceives his home or honor is threatened.

“We should not be surprised that night operations elicit such a response,” the guidance said, “which we then often interpret as the act of an insurgent.”

    U.N. Blames Taliban for Afghan Toll, NYT, 14.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/14/world/asia/14kabul.html

Deadly Protest in Afghanistan Highlights Tensions

January 13, 2010
The New York Times
By DEXTER FILKINS

KABUL, Afghanistan— At least eight Afghan civilians were killed and a dozen wounded Tuesday during a street protest in a volatile town along the Helmand River, after a raid on an Afghan home Sunday by American and Afghan forces. The raid was seized on by Taliban provocateurs who organized the protesters and pushed them toward violence, local officials said.

The incident, which American officers said they were investigating, highlighted the extreme volatility of the situation in southern Afghanistan and, in particular, in Helmand Province. Thousands of American Marines are moving into areas there that had previously stood as uncontested Taliban strongholds.

The protest began when several hundred Afghans gathered Tuesday in the central bazaar in the town of Garmsir, having heard reports that the American and Afghan forces had abused local Afghan women and desecrated a Koran in a nearby village two nights before. Local officials said the protest, which involved several thousand local Afghans, was organized by the Taliban’s “shadow” governor for Garmsir, Mullah Mohammed Naim.

“The Taliban were provoking the people,” Kamal Khan, Garmsir’s deputy provincial police chief said in a telephone interview. “They were telling the people that the Americans and their Afghan partners are killing innocent people, bombing their homes and destroying their mosques and also blaspheming their religion and culture.

“The Taliban were telling the people, ‘This is jihad; you should sacrifice yourselves.’ ”

No eyewitnesses to the disputed raid could be located; it took place Sunday night in the nearby village of Darwashan. American officers in Kabul denied that their soldiers had abused any Afghan women or desecrated a Koran.

But, true or false, the word spread quickly that they had.

The protesters in Garmsir began shouting, “Death to America” and “Death to Kamal Khan,” and overturned several cars. They set a school on fire. Then they stormed the local office of the National Security Directorate, the Afghan domestic intelligence service.

The security directorate is sometimes blamed for providing faulty intelligence to the Americans, who then detain the wrong people. As the crowd moved in, agents opened fire, Mr. Khan said.

In addition to the eight protesters killed and 13 wounded, an Afghan intelligence agent and two police were killed.

As the chaos unfolded, American officials said, a Taliban sniper began firing into the nearby American base, known as Forward Operating Base Delhi, a few hundred yards away. American officers said they killed the sniper, but no one else. In a statement, the Americans denied that they had fired on any protesters.

Mr. Kamal, Garmser’s deputy police chief, seconded that.

“There were no Americans there,” he said.

Still, the incident appeared to have soured relations between the Americans and at least some Afghans.

“The American are blaspheming the holy Koran and violating and disrespecting our culture,” said Jan Gul, a farmer whose son was killed in the protest. “We cannot tolerate such behavior. We will defend our religion.”

Indeed, some Afghans maintained that the American forces were present with the Afghan agents and fired on the crowd. But Mr. Khan and American officers in Kabul denied that. The Americans denied the charges of desecration and sexual abuse but said they would investigate.

“While denying these allegations, we take them very seriously and support a combined investigation with local Afghan authorities,” said Maj. Gen. Michael Regner in Kabul. “ISAF is an international force that includes Muslim soldiers, and we deplore such an action under any circumstances.”

The episode Tuesday—and the raid Sunday— showed just how easily suspicions and resentments can turn into full-throated anger in an area as contested as the Helmand River Valley.

At least 363 American and other NATO service members have been killed in Helmand, more than any other Afghan province. Helmand received the bulk of the 17,000 additional soldiers President Obama sent to the region after arriving in office last January, and it will get at least some of the 30,000 reinforcements that he ordered up last month.

Garmsir is an especially difficult area. Until May 2008, it was under Taliban control when a force of American Marines swept in and cleared the town. Since then, the Marines have been trying to secure the area and establish a government. In fact, they have brought a measure of calm to Garmsir and its environs — an area six miles long and six miles wide. But outside of Garmsir—and sometimes inside it—the Taliban are still operating.

Also Tuesday, 14 suspected insurgents were killed in a pair of Hellfire missile strikes launched by “unmanned aerial vehicles,” otherwise known as drones.

It was not immediately clear whether the use of drones signaled a significant shift in the campaign against the Taliban.

Drone strikes are relatively frequent in Pakistan, where a program run by the Central Intelligence Agency uses remotely-piloted Predators to strike at insurgents in the remote tribal areas along the border with Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, by contrast, a program run by the United States Air Force uses Predator and the larger Reaper drones, but they less frequently fire missiles.

In 2002, officials with the CIA used a drone to fire a missile at Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a longtime warlord, outside of Kabul. They missed. Until Monday, there had been very few publicized drone strikes on the Afghan side of the border.

In a statement, the American command in Kabul said the most lethal of the two drone strikes took place in Now Zad, where the missile was fired at a group of men moving military equipment. The attack killed 13 suspected, the statement said. An Afghan in the area interviewed by telephone said those killed had in fact been insurgents, and that no civilians had been harmed.

A second missile was fired in the Nad Ali district, killing three insurgents, the command said.

Taimoor Shah contributed reporting from Kandahar, Afghanistan.

    Deadly Protest in Afghanistan Highlights Tensions, NYT, 13.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/13/world/asia/13afghan.html

Drone Flights Leave Military Awash in Data

January 11, 2010
The New York Times
By CHRISTOPHER DREW

HAMPTON, Va. — As the military rushes to place more spy drones over Afghanistan, the remote-controlled planes are producing so much video intelligence that analysts are finding it more and more difficult to keep up.

Air Force drones collected nearly three times as much video over Afghanistan and Iraq last year as in 2007 — about 24 years’ worth if watched continuously. That volume is expected to multiply in the coming years as drones are added to the fleet and as some start using multiple cameras to shoot in many directions.

A group of young analysts already watches every second of the footage live as it is streamed to Langley Air Force Base here and to other intelligence centers, and they quickly pass warnings about insurgents and roadside bombs to troops in the field.

But military officials also see much potential in using the archives of video collected by the drones for later analysis, like searching for patterns of insurgent activity over time. To date, only a small fraction of the stored video has been retrieved for such intelligence purposes.

Government agencies are still having trouble making sense of the flood of data they collect for intelligence purposes, a point underscored by the 9/11 Commission and, more recently, by President Obama after the attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound passenger flight on Christmas Day.

Mindful of those lapses, the Air Force and other military units are trying to prevent an overload of video collected by the drones, and they are turning to the television industry to learn how to quickly share video clips and display a mix of data in ways that make analysis faster and easier.

They are even testing some of the splashier techniques used by broadcasters, like the telestrator that John Madden popularized for scrawling football plays. It could be used to warn troops about a threatening vehicle or to circle a compound that a drone should attack.

“Imagine you are tuning in to a football game without all the graphics,” said Lucius Stone, an executive at Harris Broadcast Communications, a provider of commercial technology that is working with the military. “You don’t know what the score is. You don’t know what the down is. It’s just raw video. And that’s how the guys in the military have been using it.”

The demand for the Predator and Reaper drones has surged since the terror attacks in 2001, and they have become among the most critical weapons for hunting insurgent leaders and protecting allied forces.

The military relies on the video feeds to catch insurgents burying roadside bombs and to find their houses or weapons caches. Most commanders are now reluctant to send a convoy down a road without an armed drone watching over it.

The Army, the Marines and the special forces are also deploying hundreds of smaller surveillance drones. And the C.I.A. uses drones to mount missile strikes against Al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan.

Air Force officials, who take the lead in analyzing the video from Iraq and Afghanistan, say they have managed to keep up with the most urgent assignments. And it was clear, on a visit to the analysis center in an old hangar here, that they were often able to correlate the video data with clues in still images and intercepted phone conversations to build a fuller picture of the biggest threats.

But as the Obama administration sends more troops to Afghanistan, the task of monitoring the video will become more challenging.

Instead of carrying just one camera, the Reaper drones, which are newer and larger than the Predators, will soon be able to record video in 10 directions at once. By 2011, that will increase to 30 directions with plans for as many as 65 after that. Even the Air Force’s top intelligence official, Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, says it could soon be “swimming in sensors and drowning in data.”

He said the Air Force would have to funnel many of those feeds directly to ground troops to keep from overwhelming its intelligence centers. He said the Air Force was working more closely with field commanders to identify the most important targets, and it was adding 2,500 analysts to help handle the growing volume of data.

With a new $500 million computer system that is being installed now, the Air Force will be able to start using some of the television techniques and to send out automatic alerts when important information comes in, complete with highlight clips and even text and graphics.

“If automation can provide a cue for our people that would make better use of their time, that would help us significantly,” said Gen. Norton A. Schwartz, the Air Force’s chief of staff.

Officials acknowledge that in many ways, the military is just catching up to features that have long been familiar to users of YouTube and Google.

John R. Peele, a chief in the counterterrorism office at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which helps the Air Force analyze videos, said the drones “proliferated so quickly, and we didn’t have very much experience using them.

“So we’re kind of learning as we go along which tools would be helpful,” he said.

But Mark A. Bigham, an executive at Raytheon, which designed the new computer system, said the Air Force had actually moved more quickly than most intelligence agencies to create Weblike networks where data could be shared easily among analysts.

In fact, it has relayed drone video to the United States and Europe for analysis for more than a decade. The operations, which now include 4,000 airmen, are headquartered at the base here, where three analysts watch the live feed from a drone.

One never takes his eyes off the monitor, calling out possible threats to his partners, who immediately pass alerts to the field via computer chat rooms and snap screenshots of the most valuable images.

“It’s mostly through the chat rooms — that’s how we’re fighting these days,” said Col. Daniel R. Johnson, who runs the intelligence centers.

He said other analysts, mostly enlisted men and women in their early 20s, studied the hundreds of still images and phone calls captured each day by U-2s and other planes and sent out follow-up reports melding all the data.

Mr. Bigham, the Raytheon executive, said the new system would help speed that process. He said it would also tag basic data, like the geographic coordinates and the chat room discussions, and alert officials throughout the military who might want to call up the videos for further study.

But while the biggest timesaver would be to automatically scan the video for trucks and armed men, that software is not yet reliable. And the military has run into the same problem that the broadcast industry has in trying to pick out football players swarming on a tackle.

So Cmdr. Joseph A. Smith, a Navy officer assigned to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which sets standards for video intelligence, said he and other officials had climbed into broadcast trucks outside football stadiums to learn how the networks tagged and retrieved highlight film.

“There are these three guys who sit in the back of an ESPN or Fox Sports van, and every time Tom Brady comes on the screen, they tap a button so that Tom Brady is marked,” Commander Smith said, referring to the New England Patriots quarterback. Then, to call up the highlights later, he said, “they just type in: ‘Tom Brady, touchdown pass.’ ”

Lt. Col. Brendan M. Harris, who is in charge of an intelligence squadron here, said his analysts could do that. He said the Air Force had just installed telestrators on its latest hand-held video receiver, and harried officers in the field would soon be able to simply circle the images of trucks or individuals they wanted the drones to follow.

But Colonel Harris also said that the drones often shot gray-toned video with infrared cameras that was harder to decipher than color shots. And when force is potentially involved, he said, there will be limits on what automated systems are allowed to do.

“You need somebody who’s trained and is accountable in recognizing that that is a woman, that is a child and that is someone who’s carrying a weapon,” he said. “And the best tools for that are still the eyeball and the human brain.”

    Drone Flights Leave Military Awash in Data, NYT, 11.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/11/business/11drone.html

Bomber Who Killed C.I.A. Officers Appears in Video

January 10, 2010
The New York Times
By STEPHEN FARRELL

AMMAN, Jordan — The Jordanian suicide bomber who killed seven Central Intelligence Agency operatives in Afghanistan last month appeared in a video early Saturday, saying the attack was carried out in revenge for the 2009 killing of the Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud.

Humam Khalil Abu Mulal al-Balawi, wearing green camouflage fatigues and carrying a weapon in his lap, appeared in a video on Al Jazeera satellite television denouncing his “enemies,” Jordan and America. Mr. Balawi's father, Khaled, confirmed that the man in the video was his son.

“This is a letter to the enemies of the nation,” the heavily-bearded Mr. Balawi said, referring to the Islamic nation, or ummah. “To the Jordanian intelligence and the American Central Intelligence Agency.” He sat alongside another man in front of a black banner bearing the Islamic credo: “There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his Prophet.”

Mr. Balawi, a doctor who worked in a Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan, blew himself up on Dec. 30 at a C.I.A. base in Khost, in eastern Afghanistan. He was a double agent who was taken onto the base in Afghanistan because the C.I.A. hoped he might be able to deliver top members of Al Qaeda’s network, according to Western government officials.

Al Jazeera’s Web site said that the video was released to the news organization on Saturday, and that it showed Mr. Balawi “shooting a gun as he describes how the attack would target U.S. and Jordanian intelligence agents.”

In the video, Mr. Balawi said, “We will never forget the blood of our Emir Baitullah Mehsud, God’s mercy upon him.”

The Pakistani television channel Aaj also broadcast a video, and identified the second man seen in it as Hakimullah Mehsud, the new leader of the Taliban in Pakistan.

An eighth person killed in Mr. Balawi’s attack was a Jordanian intelligence officer and distant relative of King Abdullah II of Jordan named Capt. Sharif Ali bin Zeid. He is thought to have been Mr. Balawi’s Jordanian handler who was bringing Mr. Balawi to a meeting of American intelligence officials at the base, Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khost, near the Pakistani border.

Before he blew himself up, the bomber had been a popular jihadi writer on Internet Web sites and forums, under the pen name Abu Dujana al-Khorasani. In a statement consistent with comments by Mr. Balawi’s widow, Defne Bayrak, a Turkish journalist living in Istanbul, the man on the video said he would never work for the United States.

“The jihadist who follows God’s way does not put his religion up for auction. And the Jihadist who follows God does not sell his religion, even if they put the sun to his right side and the moon to his left side,” he said.

Of Baitullah Mehsud, who was killed in August 2009 by a C.I.A. drone airstrike, he said, “We shall take revenge for him in America and outside America. He is a trust on behalf of all refugees, who were sheltered by him.

“We will not forget how Emir Baitullah Mehsud used to kiss the hands of the refugees, he used to kiss the hands of the refugees, and this shows how much love he had in his heart for them.”

 

Reem Makhoul contributed reporting from Amman and Salman Masood from Islamabad, Pakistan.

    Bomber Who Killed C.I.A. Officers Appears in Video, NYT, 10.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/world/middleeast/10balawi.html

U.S. Drone Strikes Reported in Pakistan

January 7, 2010
The New York Times
By ISMAIL KHAN and SALMAN MASOOD

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — American missiles, presumably fired by remotely piloted drones, struck twice Wednesday in North Waziristan, the tribal region that is a stronghold of Qaeda and Taliban militants.

The drone strikes were the first reported since Dec. 30, when a double agent detonated a suicide vest packed with explosives and killed eight people at a C.I.A. base in southeastern Afghanistan. The C.I.A. base served as an important part of the American effort to target Al Qaeda’s top leadership in the region, including with drone strikes.

The missiles hit along the border with Afghanistan’s Paktika Province, in an area that has been a repeated target of drone strikes as the United States seeks to halt the flow of fighters from Pakistan.

Details of the drones strikes in the remote area remained sketchy and the death tolls varied, but a government official said as many as 20 or 25 people may have been killed.

A resident of Miramshah, the capital of North Waziristan, said by telephone that the initial strike occurred in the village of Sanzalai, in a mountainous region about 22 miles west.

“Just when militants people gathered at the scene to retrieve the bodies and pull out the wounded, another missile struck an hour later,” he said. The second strike left five dead and wounded another three, he said.

He said that the area was under the control of local militants and those killed in the first strike appeared to “guests,” a term used for foreign militants, or Al Qaeda.

A senior government official in Peshawar, the capital of neighboring North West Frontier Province, said that 17 people were killed but acknowledged that details remained unclear.

The official who gave the higher death toll said that the target of the attack was a base of Pakistani militants frequented by foreign fighters, and that some two dozen people were killed.

Both officials said foreign militants were among the dead. They spoke on condition of anonymity while discussing security matters.

The United States has stepped up the pace and intensity of its drone attacks in Pakistan, launching more than 40 last year in a C.I.A. program that is ostensibly covert, but is in fact widely known.

The area struck on Wednesday is a headquarters for the Taliban network group run by Sirajuddin Haqqani, which works closely with Al Qaeda and using North Waziristan to stage its insurgency against American and NATO forces in Afghanistan.

Ismail Khan reported from Peshawar and Salman Masood from Islamabad.

    U.S. Drone Strikes Reported in Pakistan, NYT, 7.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/07/world/asia/07drones.html

Suicide Bombing Puts a Rare Face on C.I.A.’s Work

January 7, 2010
The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON — In the fall of 2001, as an anguished nation came to grips with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a slender, soft-spoken economics major named Elizabeth Hanson set out to write her senior thesis at Colby College in Maine. Her question was a timely one: How do the world’s three major faith traditions apply economic principles?

Ms. Hanson’s report, “Faithless Heathens: Scriptural Economics of Judaism, Christianity and Islam,” carried a title far more provocative than its contents, said the professor who advised her. But it may have given a hint of her career to come, as an officer for the Central Intelligence Agency specializing in hunting down Islamic extremists.

That career was cut short last week: Ms. Hanson was one of seven Americans killed in a suicide bombing at a C.I.A. base in the remote mountains of Afghanistan.

In the days since the attack, details of the lives of the victims — five men and two women, including two C.I.A. contractors from the firm formerly known as Blackwater — have begun to trickle out, despite the secretive nature of their work. What emerges is a rare public glimpse of a closed society, a peek into one sliver of the spy agency as it operates more than eight years after the C.I.A. was pushed to the front lines of war.

Their deaths were a significant blow to the agency, crippling a team responsible for collecting information about militant networks in Afghanistan and Pakistan and plotting missions to kill the networks’ top leaders. And in one sign of how the once male-dominated bastion of the C.I.A. has changed in recent years, the suicide bombing revealed that a woman had been in charge of the base that was attacked, Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khost Province.

On Wednesday, the operational leader of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan issued a statement praising the work of the suicide bomber, Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, and said that the Khost bombing, which also killed a Jordanian intelligence operative, was revenge for the killings of a number of top militant leaders in C.I.A. drone attacks.

“He detonated his fine, astonishing and well-designed explosive device, which was unseen by the eyes of those who do not believe in the hereafter,” said the statement from the Qaeda leader, Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, which was translated by the SITE Intelligence Group.

Those who died came from all corners of the United States but were thrown together in one of the most dangerous parts of the world. Several had military backgrounds. One of the fallen C.I.A. employees, a security officer named Scott Roberson, had worked undercover as a narcotics detective in the Atlanta Police Department, according to an obituary, and spent time in Kosovo for the United Nations. Postings on an online memorial site describe a hard-charging motorcyclist with a remarkable recall of episodes of “The Benny Hill Show.”

Another, Harold Brown Jr., was a former Army reservist and father of three who had traveled home from Afghanistan briefly in July to help his family move into a new home in the Northern Virginia suburbs.

Mr. Brown’s mother, Barbara, said in an interview that her son — she had believed he worked for the State Department — had intended to spend a year in Afghanistan, returning home in April. He did not relish the work, she said, and talked little about it.

“The people there just want to live their lives. They’re normal people,” she recalled him saying, adding that he had told her parts of Afghanistan were “just like back in biblical times.”

The base chief, an agency veteran, had traveled to Afghanistan last year as part of the C.I.A.’s effort to augment its ranks in the war zone. After consulting with the C.I.A., The New York Times is withholding some identifying information about the woman. The agency declined to comment about the identities of any of the employees. Some of the names were disclosed by family members. Ms. Hanson’s name was first reported in The Daily Beast, an online magazine.

In a telephone interview, her father, Duane Hanson Jr., said an agency official called several days ago to let him know that his daughter, who he said would have turned 31 next month, had been killed. He knew little of her work, other than that she had been in Afghanistan. “I begged her not to go,” he recalled. “I said, ‘Do you know how dangerous that is? That’s for soldiers.’ ”

The other woman killed, the chief of the Khost base, was, before the Sept. 11 attacks, part of a small cadre of counterterrorism officers focused on the growth of Al Qaeda and charged with finding Osama bin Laden.

Working from a small office near C.I.A. headquarters, the group, known inside the agency as Alec Station, became increasingly alarmed in the summer of 2001 that a major strike was coming. One former officer recalls that the woman had a seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of Al Qaeda’s top leadership and was so familiar with the different permutations of the leaders’ names that she could take fragments of intelligence and build them into a mosaic of Al Qaeda’s operations.

“She was one of the first people in the agency to tackle Al Qaeda in a serious way,” said the former officer, who, like some others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity because the victims’ identities remain classified.

Two of the dead, Jeremy Wise, 35, a former member of the Navy Seals from Virginia Beach, Va., and Dane Clark Paresi, 46, of Dupont, Wash., were security officers for Xe Services, the firm formerly known as Blackwater.

The company did not respond to a request for comment about the deaths, but they have been widely reported in local newspapers. The Jeremy Wise Memorial on Facebook had 3,189 fans on Tuesday, filled with recollections of Mr. Wise’s childhood as the son of a doctor in Arkansas; his parents currently live in Hope, Bill Clinton’s hometown.

“RIP, Jeremy Wise, American hero,” one wrote.

The suicide bomber has been identified as a Jordanian double agent who was taken onto the base to meet with American officials who thought he was an informant.

In a message to the C.I.A. work force after the attack, President Obama told agency employees that “your triumphs and even your names may be unknown to your fellow Americans.” And indeed, some relatives and friends of the dead did not seem to know of their agency connections.

Ms. Hanson’s economics professor, Michael Donihue, said he was shocked to discover her career path. At Colby, from which she graduated in 2002, she paired her economics major with a minor in Russian language and literature.

“She was a thoughtful person; she had an intellectual curiosity that I really liked,” Professor Donihue said.

Officials in Afghanistan and Washington said the C.I.A. group in Khost had been particularly aggressive in recent months against the Haqqani network, a militant group that has claimed responsibility for dozens of American deaths in Afghanistan. One NATO official in Afghanistan spoke in stark terms about the attack, saying it had “effectively shut down a key station.”

“These were not people who wrote things down in the computer or in notebooks. It was all in their heads,” he said. The C.I.A. is “pulling in new people from all over the world, but how long will it take to rebuild the networks, to get up to speed? Lots of it is irrecoverable. Lots of it.”

James Risen and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington, and Alissa J. Rubin from Kabul, Afghanistan. Kitty Bennett contributed research.

    Suicide Bombing Puts a Rare Face on C.I.A.’s Work, NYT, 7.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/07/world/asia/07intel.html

4 Afghan War Veterans Look Back, and Ahead

January 4, 2010
The New York Times
By ELISABETH BUMILLER

WASHINGTON — One of them, an Army Ranger who served three tours in Afghanistan, led a team into a treacherous mountain ravine to recover the remains of 16 American commandos shot down in a helicopter crash. He still remembers how only their boots had been taken off their bodies by the Taliban.

Another, a captain in the Oregon National Guard, held a town in the southern Afghan province of Helmand with a ragtag Afghan Army unit for three chaotic weeks in 2006, only to see the Taliban sweep back in after he got orders to move on.

A third, a supply sergeant with the 10th Mountain Division, spent more time than she ever expected saluting coffins as they left Bagram Air Base near the Afghan capital, Kabul, for the last trip home.

Such are the experiences of some of the soldiers who have lived through the American policy permutations of an Afghan war now entering its ninth year, from the deployment of the 2,000-strong force that helped oust the Taliban from power in 2001 to President Obama’s decision to escalate a stagnating conflict to 100,000 American troops in 2010.

As the first of Mr. Obama’s 30,000 reinforcements arrive in Afghanistan, four men and women, whose lives have been shaped by the war — grass-roots experts as opposed to big-picture policy makers — expressed mixed feelings in recent interviews about the president’s new strategy. They said that they supported sending additional troops, that time had been wasted and the buildup was overdue. But some were skeptical, particularly about the value of training the Afghan security forces.

Even the most optimistic said there was no guarantee that Mr. Obama’s plan would work.

Maj. Kevin Remus, 33, arrived in Helmand in the summer of 2006 when the southern Afghan province was, in his words, “no man’s land” — a Taliban stronghold where British and Canadian troops were stretched thin. A 1998 West Point graduate, Major Remus had left active duty and joined the Army Reserve in 2004. He was called back two years later to lead an 11-man Oregon National Guard training team responsible for fighting alongside a 35-man unit of the Afghan Army.

There were 20,000 American troops in Afghanistan at the time and almost none in Helmand. “We didn’t know what we were up against,” said Major Remus, then a captain in the Guard.

He spent part of that July and August with his unit, holding as best it could the town of Garmsir, on the Helmand River. The Taliban had captured it when the local Afghan police fled. The Canadians had just retaken it, and Major Remus was left with confusing orders from the top. “Somebody in our chain of command said, ‘You guys stay and work with the Afghan police,’ but they had just run away,” Major Remus said. “That’s the reason the Taliban had the town to begin with.”

Major Remus and his small band of Americans and Afghans made a circle of Humvees in a walled area near the town’s government center, which consisted of a few partly burned buildings. They stayed there for three weeks, aware that the Taliban had retreated only about 500 feet to the other side of a nearby canal. Once Major Remus was ordered to leave, fighting over the area resumed. It was not until United States Marines swept through in May 2008 that Garmsir was out of Taliban hands. Today, a fragile calm has taken hold.

Major Remus, now a student at the William S. Boyd School of Law at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said that he did not consider his effort in Garmsir futile — “we did a good job on a tough mission” — and that the bigger frustration of his yearlong deployment was getting members of his Afghan unit to show up and fight. Mr. Obama’s focus on building up the Afghan Army and police is misguided, he said.

“When they talk about the Afghan security forces, they make it sound so easy,” Major Remus said. “I don’t think people understand the difficulty. You don’t trust them like you would another American soldier.”

 

Feeling Forgotten

First Lt. Kristen L. Rouse, 36, of Brooklyn, was at Bagram Air Base in the spring of 2006 keeping track of equipment and supplying body armor to troops when Iraq was grabbing all the headlines.

“To tell you the truth, we felt really forgotten,” said Lieutenant Rouse, who was a supply sergeant in the 10th Mountain Division at the time.

That June, a soldier in her unit was killed in a convoy, “which really stopped all of us in our tracks,” she said. It turned out to be the worst month in 2006 for American casualties in Afghanistan: 18 Americans killed, according to icasualties.org, which tracks military deaths. Lieutenant Rouse knew firsthand because as the coffins arrived at Bagram en route to the United States, announcements would come over the loudspeakers for anyone available to line the main drive and salute.

“It was a regular feature of our lives,” she said. “It didn’t happen every day, thank God, but I can’t tell you how many fallen comrade ceremonies I stood there and saluted at. And all of that is going on, and you see nothing of the reality we lived reflected in the news.” At the time, she said, “the U.S. really had a very cheap commitment to Afghanistan.”

Now, she said, “for people to wake up and say, ‘Hey, we haven’t accomplished anything in Afghanistan, let’s pull out,’ my gut response is, ‘Are you kidding me?’ ”

Lieutenant Rouse is now training with a unit of the Vermont National Guard at Camp Atterbury in Indiana and will be heading back to Afghanistan sometime in the coming months to provide support for an infantry battalion. She said she believed the president’s plan was “very doable,” but “had we done it right the first time, we wouldn’t have had to do it a second time.”

 

‘No Guarantees’

Maj. Pat Work, 36, a member of the elite Army Rangers, helped build a remote base on the Afghan border with Pakistan in early 2002, moved on foot in the bitter cold of the northeastern mountains trying to gather intelligence about insurgents in late 2004 and was part of the recovery team for a failed mission to capture or kill a Taliban leader in the summer of 2005.

Three of four members of the Navy Seals died in that mission, a story told in a best-selling book by the lone survivor, Marcus Luttrell. Eight more members of the Seals and eight other Special Operations personnel who were trying to rescue the original four were killed when their helicopter was shot down. When Major Work and his team found the bodies of the 16 after searching a heavily forested mountainside, he had a grim insight into the resourcefulness of the Taliban.

“What I learned that day was that the Taliban took nothing off of our deceased other than their boots,” he said. “Boots was something very practical they could use at 10,000 feet in August.”

Throughout his three tours, he came to see the Taliban as “a violent extremist movement that provides jobs.” He also learned how hard it was to get villagers to divulge information about insurgents to American troops. “There’s very little incentive for a local who knows you’re going to leave to talk,” he said.

Major Work, who also served in Iraq in 2003 and 2004, is now working full time on a graduate thesis at Georgetown. He wants to go back to Afghanistan, and said that the president’s new plan finally linked the kind of small-unit commando operations in which he took part to a larger strategy of intelligence-gathering and protecting the Afghan population. But will it succeed? “There are no guarantees,” Major Work said.

 

A Soldier’s Journal

Sgt. First Class Jeff Courter, 52, spent much of 2007 on a remote base in Paktika Province, hard on the edge of Pakistan, where he was the chief officer of a small Illinois National Guard unit charged with training the Afghan border police, or A.B.P. At the time, he called the conflict the “Kmart War” because he felt the United States was fighting it at a discount.

He taught the border police how to use weapons, went on joint patrols, held meetings with Afghan elders and gave away hundreds of pounds of food to villagers. But as he wrote in a journal he self-published on his return, “We didn’t get rid of the Taliban; we didn’t elevate the A.B.P. to a much higher level than they were before we arrived; we didn’t get schools or clinics built.”

Sergeant Courter concluded that his progress had been in “baby steps,” and did some soul-searching as he left for home. “I am still trying to figure out what we are trying to do here, what we have accomplished, what is or should be our goal and whether or not we can succeed,” he wrote in his journal on Jan. 17, 2008.

Sergeant Courter, now a National Guard recruiter in Kankakee, Ill., said that Mr. Obama had finally given American commanders in Afghanistan the tools to do their jobs, although he predicted no quick victory.

“I believe that progress is inevitable and the Taliban are doomed because they’re on the wrong side of history,” he said. “The question is, how long will that take?”

    4 Afghan War Veterans Look Back, and Ahead, NYT, 4.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/04/world/asia/04soldiers.html