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

Bibi Aisha,

an 18-year-old woman from Oruzgan province in Afghanistan,

fled back to her family home from her husband's house,

complaining of violent treatment.

The Taliban arrived one night,

demanding Bibi be handed over to face justice.

After a Taliban commander pronounced his verdict,

Bibi's brother-in-law held her down

and her husband sliced off her ears and then cut off her nose.

Bibi was abandoned,

but later rescued by aid workers and the U.S. military.

After time in a women's refuge in Kabul, she was taken to America,

where she received counseling and reconstructive surgery.

Bibi Aisha now lives in the United States.

World Press Photo of the Year 2010,

Jodi Bieber, South Africa, Institute for Artist Management/Goodman Gallery for Time magazine.

Boston Globe > Big Picture

World Press Photo: winners        February 11, 2011

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2011/02/world_press_photo_winners.html

After Afghan Shift,

Top U.S. Civilians

Face Tricky Future

June 30, 2010
The New York Times
By MARK LANDLER

WASHINGTON — As General David H. Petraeus takes command in Afghanistan, the two top American civilian officials in the war face an uncertain and tricky future, working with a newly empowered military leader, under the gaze of an impatient president who has put them on notice that his fractious war council needs to pull together.

Richard C. Holbrooke, the Obama administration’s special representative to the region, and Karl W. Eikenberry, the ambassador to Afghanistan, both hung on to their jobs in the uproar that followed Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s career-ending quotes in Rolling Stone magazine.

But privately, at least one senior White House official suggested using General McChrystal’s exit as an excuse for a housecleaning, according to senior officials. That was rejected as too disruptive during a military campaign that relies heavily on civilian support, these people said.

In recent days, other administration officials have begun floating the idea that Ambassador Eikenberry might be replaced by Ryan C. Crocker, the highly regarded former ambassador in Iraq who forged a close partnership with General Petraeus during the successful Iraq troop increase. Such a prospect is viewed as remote, given Mr. Crocker’s prestigious new post at Texas A&M University. But the fact that his name is being invoked underlines the challenges that confront Ambassador Eikenberry, as he adapts to a new partner — one who has strong ideas about how soldiers and diplomats should work together in war.

It also illustrates the remarkably powerful role that General Petraeus will assume in the nine-year-old war, setting him up as almost a viceroy in Afghanistan and a key broker in negotiations between President Hamid Karzai and Pakistan over an eventual political settlement.

Before General Petraeus’s arrival, some critics said the White House had created a problem by recruiting several forceful, ambitious personalities and giving them jobs with overlapping responsibilities. Administration officials acknowledge that, as one said, “there are obviously a number of substantial personalities on the team.” But the White House believes that the current lineup can mesh, and that a difficult war demands this much talent.

Still, the McChrystal blow-up has reverberated through the State Department. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton instructed Ambassador Eikenberry and Mr. Holbrooke to take a hard look at the civilian team, two officials said. She is not wedded to the current lineup if it continues to bog down in internecine battles, they said.

“You can’t have a major shift in a civ-mil structure without having the civilian side take a step back and look at everything,” said a senior State Department official, using the jargon for a civilian-military campaign.

General Petraeus, whose appointment was approved 99-0 by the Senate on Wednesday, took pains at his confirmation hearing on Tuesday to back a unified civilian and military effort. He noted then that he had telephoned Mr. Holbrooke and would rendezvous with Ambassador Eikenberry in Brussels, so the two could land in Kabul together.

“Holbrooke has been my wingman, to a great degree,” General Petraeus said in an interview. “We have had, and do have, a very good relationship.” That role, he said, will now fall to Ambassador Eikenberry.

Ambassador Eikenberry was highly critical of the Pentagon’s proposal last year to send 60,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, which led to a difficult relationship with General McChrystal. But in fact General Petraeus was the true architect of the plan.

The ambassador, a retired lieutenant general and former commander in Afghanistan, graduated from West Point in 1973, a year ahead of General Petraeus, but they did not know each other at the academy. The two share a scholarly bent: General Petraeus holds a Ph.D. from Princeton, while Ambassador Eikenberry has master’s degrees from Harvard and Stanford.

While they were never assigned together, their careers intersected twice. In Iraq, General Eikenberry led an assessment of Iraqi security forces while General Petraeus was commanding the 101st Airborne Division in Mosul. When General Eikenberry was commander in Afghanistan, General Petraeus led an assessment of Afghan National Security Forces.

General Petraeus declined to discuss personnel issues, while Ambassador Eikenberry and Mr. Holbrooke turned down requests for an interview. Mr. Crocker, now the dean of the George Bush School of Government at Texas A&M, did not return a call for comment.

For Mr. Holbrooke, the new landscape is challenging in other ways. Officials said his job security was less in doubt than it was six months ago, when his ouster was the subject of Washington chatter. Yet he has arguably become a less central player: Jacob J. Lew, a deputy secretary of state, manages much of the civilian influx in Afghanistan that Mr. Holbrooke helped shape, while the embassy in Kabul is carrying it out. Mr. Holbrooke’s current portfolio has played to his weaknesses, his own allies admit. He is best as a high-level negotiator, and not as comfortable with the nitty-gritty work of helping Afghanistan build an economy.

These days, Mr. Holbrooke has become a globe-trotting diplomat, trying to retain flagging European allies while seeking to draw influential Muslim countries like Egypt into helping Afghanistan. At a recent conference of 35 countries in Madrid, Mr. Holbrooke drummed up more support from allies for the Afghan government’s campaign to reintegrate Taliban fighters into mainstream society.

Mr. Karzai’s longer-term effort to reconcile with Taliban leaders, and his negotiations with Pakistan, could propel Mr. Holbrooke back into a central role. Were these talks to become more serious, several officials said, Mr. Holbrooke’s negotiating skills could be put to use, as a broker and guardian of American interests. For now, though, as evidence of General Petraeus’s influence, he will do most of the shuttling between Kabul and Islamabad, the Pakistani capital.

On his last visit to the region, Mr. Holbrooke met with Mr. Karzai and with senior Pakistani officials, including the chief of intelligence, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha. Mr. Holbrooke’s past run-ins with Mr. Karzai, several officials said, have not hindered his ability to deal with the Afghan leader, and Pakistani officials said they trusted him. Husain Haqqani, Pakistan’s ambassador to Washington, said that Mr. Holbrooke took time to understand Pakistan’s concerns. “Ambassador Holbrooke is liked by some, admired by others and seen as effective, even by those who may not like him,” Mr. Haqqani said.

Still, General Petraeus is indisputably the key player, and he has wasted no time asserting his control. On a secure videoconference call last Saturday, a person familiar with the call said, General Petraeus threw his support behind a costly, and controversial, plan to install temporary generators to supply more electricity to Kandahar, the Taliban stronghold that is the next major American military target.

Mr. Holbrooke and Ambassador Eikenberry swiftly assented.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: July 1, 2010


A previous version of this article erroneously stated that Mr. Holbrooke met with the army chief of staff, Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, on his last visit to the region.

    After Afghan Shift, Top U.S. Civilians Face Tricky Future, NYT, 30.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/01/world/asia/01diplo.html

Afghan Lessons, Beyond McChrystal

June 28, 2010
The New York Times

To the Editor:

In “Worse Than a Nightmare” (column, June 26), Bob Herbert gets our dilemma in Afghanistan exactly right. We either fight the war aggressively, killing scores of civilians, angering Muslims throughout the Middle East and creating more terrorists; or we restrain our forces, thus appealing to Afghan hearts and minds, but risking more American lives and angering both our troops and the American public.

The only solution to this dilemma is to withdraw our troops from Afghanistan.

Peter Schanck
Santa Fe, N.M., June 26, 2010

•

To the Editor:

Bob Herbert’s column should cause moral outrage against the war in Afghanistan.

A nation that permits only a small fraction of its citizens to bear the burden of combat and drains its financial resources in a winless effort while denying unemployment benefits to its citizens is morally reprehensible.

I agree with Mr. Herbert that if a war is worth fighting, and I do not believe that this one is, then either the whole nation goes to war or nobody goes to war.

John A. Viteritti
Southold, N.Y., June 26, 2010

•

To the Editor:

Bob Herbert laments our inability to exit the “fetid quagmire of Afghanistan.” I believe that the fighting and dying would end if we were to reinstate the draft.

Byron Alpers
Shorewood, Wis., June 26, 2010

•

To the Editor:

Re “The 36 Hours That Shook Washington” (column, June 27):

Frank Rich, writing about Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s being removed from Afghanistan, observed that “the present strategy has produced no progress in this nearly nine-year-old war, even as the monthly coalition body count has just reached a new high.”

Pretty soon, we’re going to have to start comparing Vietnam to Afghanistan, instead of vice versa.

David S. Ewing
Venice, Calif., June 27, 2010

•

To the Editor:

In “The Culture of Exposure” (column, June 25), David Brooks essentially blames the 24/7 news media whose job it is to feed a scandal-hungry public for Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s fall from military grace.

No one is to blame but the general himself. It was not the media that showed a callous disrespect for the president, the vice president and the national security adviser, nor was it the media that undermined America’s mission in Afghanistan. Those words came from General McChrystal. Michael Hastings, the Rolling Stone reporter, simply did his job in reporting them.

If high-level government and military officials like General McChrystal truly wish to avoid embarrassing public relations nightmares and retain their positions, then perhaps, especially in this constant news cycle, it is incumbent on them to muzzle their public “kvetching.”

Andy Ostroy
New York, June 25, 2010

The writer is a contributor to The Huffington Post.

•

To the Editor

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal and his aides have a right to kvetch. But as our top-level tacticians in a complicated war, they also have a duty to assess every situation. Michael Hastings is not their spouse, clergyman, psychiatrist or even trusted friend; he is a journalist for a national publication. They should have known the difference.

Pauline Yoo
New York, June 25, 2010

•

To the Editor:

Even though I never liked Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal and am happy that he is gone, the fault here is with the journalist. He should never have published these private conversations between the general and his senior staff. They were not for publication.

Journalists have the obligation to be sensitive to the moment and to know what should go to print and what to leave behind.

Sonia Warriner
Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., June 25, 2010

•

To the Editor:

It seems obvious to me that an experienced general with political savvy knew exactly what he was doing when he made inappropriate comments requiring his resignation. He did not want to be remembered as the general who lost the war in Afghanistan.

Robert Himmelfarb
Gainesville, Va., June 25, 2010

    Afghan Lessons, Beyond McChrystal, NYT, 28.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/29/opinion/l29afghan.html

With Command Shift in Afghanistan, Talk Turns to Withdrawal

June 28, 2010
The New York Times
By PETER BAKER

WASHINGTON — When he ordered 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan last December, President Obama stressed that they would not stay forever. “After 18 months,” he said, “our troops will begin to come home.”

Last weekend, though, he scorned the “obsession around this whole issue of when do we leave,” saying he was focused on making sure the troops were successful. The July 2011 deadline he set was intended to “begin a process of transition,” he said, but “that doesn’t mean we suddenly turn off the lights and let the door close behind us.”

As he hands command of the war to Gen. David H. Petraeus, Mr. Obama is trying to define what his timeline means — but not too much. Even as developments in Afghanistan have made meeting the deadline all the more daunting, Mr. Obama has sent multiple signals to multiple audiences, sticking by his commitment to begin pulling out while insisting that it does not mean simply walking away.

But if he is maintaining maximum flexibility with deliberate ambiguity, the conflicting emphasis has left many wondering just what will happen next summer. The question dominated General Petraeus’s last appearance on Capitol Hill two weeks ago when he testified as head of the United States Central Command overseeing the region. And it may flavor his return on Tuesday to the Senate Armed Services Committee as it moves to confirm his new assignment as commander of coalition forces in Afghanistan.

Military officers and intelligence officials bristle at the deadline, because they said it had convinced many Afghans that Americans would not be around for the long term, making them less willing to defy the Taliban. The president’s Democratic allies in Congress, on the other hand, are pressing him to make sure that July 2011 begins a “serious drawdown,” as Representative Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, put it.

The issue has taken prominence not just because of Mr. Obama’s appointment of General Petraeus to replace Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, but because House leaders want to pass a war spending measure before leaving town for the Fourth of July break. Some liberal lawmakers hope to use the bill to force conditions for scaling back the American military commitment.

The White House said Monday that the July 2011 deadline was intentionally flexible, but had had some desired effect. “We want the Afghans to understand that we’re going to be expecting more out of them, so to the extent that it conveys a sense of urgency, that’s an important message,” said Ben Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser.

At the same time, he noted that the president had not decided how quickly the drawdown would take place. “There’s clearly going to be an enduring commitment to Afghanistan past 2011, whatever the slope,” he said.

But that part of the message has not transmitted to many in the rural reaches of Afghanistan, where American troops regularly encounter Afghans who assume they are all leaving next year.

In the village of Abdul Ghayas in Helmand Province last month, for example, a local resident exasperated two Marines when he told them that he was nervous about helping with their plans for a new school out of fear that the Taliban would retaliate after the Americans went home next year.

“That’s why they won’t work with us,” Cpl. Lisa Gardner, one of the Marines, told a reporter traveling with the unit. “They say you’ll leave in 2011 and the Taliban will chop their heads off. It’s so frustrating.”

Later in the day, Corporal Gardner and the other Marine, Cpl. Diana Amaya, reported the villager’s reaction back at the base. Lance Cpl. Caleb Quessenberry advised them on how to deal with similar comments in the future. “Roll it off as, ‘That’s what somebody’s saying,’ ” he told them. “As far as we know, we’re here.”

A senior American intelligence official said the Taliban had effectively used the deadline to their advantage. He added that the deadline had encouraged Pakistani security services to “hedge their bets” and continue supporting militant groups like the Haqqani network.

“They’ve been burned and they’ve seen this movie before,” the official said, noting the American disengagement after the Soviet war in Afghanistan in the 1990s. Should the war deteriorate, he added, Pakistani leaders are thinking, “We don’t want Haqqani turning around and coming this way.”

Such factors have animated the debate in Washington. Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, said President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan was defying Washington because of the deadline.

“A lot of the behavior that Karzai is displaying, a lot of the things that are going on right now are a direct result of the president’s commitment to beginning withdrawal,” he said on “Meet the Press” on Sunday.

On the other side of the spectrum, Ms. Pelosi told the Huffington Post that there must be a “serious drawdown” next summer and that she was not sure how many Democrats will vote for war spending without enshrining such policy into law. “I don’t know how many votes there are in the caucus, even condition-based, for the war, hands down,” she said.

The last time General Petraeus testified on Capitol Hill, he told the House Armed Services Committee that he would not “make too much out of that” deadline because the president had not decided the pace of a withdrawal. Before the Senate committee, he endorsed the deadline, but paused when Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat and the Armed Services Committee chairman, asked if it reflected his best military judgment.

“In a perfect world, Mr. Chairman, we have to be very careful with deadlines,” General Petraeus said, adding that “we are assuming” conditions will permit it. When Mr. Levin asked if that was “a qualified yes,” General Petraeus agreed.

Mr. Levin said Monday that General Petraeus would be pressed again on Tuesday: “He needs to be again on record on that issue, and to say why he agrees with the policy, because particularly on the Republican side there are people who disagree with that.”


Elisabeth Bumiller and Mark Mazzetti contributed reporting.

    With Command Shift in Afghanistan, Talk Turns to Withdrawal, NYT, 28.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/29/world/asia/29prexy.html

Worse Than a Nightmare

June 25, 2010
The New York Times
By BOB HERBERT

President Obama can be applauded for his decisiveness in dispatching the chronically insubordinate Stanley McChrystal, but we are still left with a disaster of a war in Afghanistan that cannot be won and that the country as a whole will not support.

No one in official Washington is leveling with the public about what is really going on. We hear a lot about counterinsurgency, the latest hot cocktail-hour topic among the BlackBerry-thumbing crowd. But there is no evidence at all that counterinsurgency will work in Afghanistan. It’s not working now. And even if we managed to put all the proper pieces together, the fiercest counterinsurgency advocates in the military will tell you that something on the order of 10 to 15 years of hard effort would be required for this strategy to bear significant fruit.

We’ve been in Afghanistan for nearly a decade already. It’s one of the most corrupt places on the planet and the epicenter of global opium production. Our ostensible ally, President Hamid Karzai, is convinced that the U.S. cannot prevail in the war and is in hot pursuit of his own deal with the enemy Taliban. The American public gave up on the war long ago, and it is not at all clear that President Obama’s heart is really in it.

For us to even consider several more years of fighting and dying in Afghanistan — at a cost of heaven knows how many more billions of American taxpayer dollars — is demented.

Those who are so fascinated with counterinsurgency, from its chief advocate, Gen. David Petraeus, all the way down to the cocktail-hour kibitzers inside the Beltway, seem to have lost sight of a fundamental aspect of warfare: You don’t go to war half-stepping. You go to war to crush the enemy. You do this ferociously and as quickly as possible. If you don’t want to do it, if you have qualms about it, or don’t know how to do it, don’t go to war.

The men who stormed the beaches at Normandy weren’t trying to win the hearts and minds of anyone.

In Afghanistan, we are playing a dangerous, half-hearted game in which President Obama tells the America people that this is a war of necessity and that he will do whatever is necessary to succeed. Then, with the very next breath, he soothingly assures us that the withdrawal of U.S. troops will begin on schedule, like a Greyhound leaving the terminal, a year from now.

Both cannot be true.

What is true is that we aren’t even fighting as hard as we can right now. The counterinsurgency crowd doesn’t want to whack the enemy too hard because of an understandable fear that too many civilian casualties will undermine the “hearts and minds” and nation-building components of the strategy. Among the downsides of this battlefield caution is a disturbing unwillingness to give our own combat troops the supportive airstrikes and artillery cover that they feel is needed.

In an article this week, The Times quoted a U.S. Army sergeant in southern Afghanistan who was unhappy with the real-world effects of counterinsurgency. “I wish we had generals who remembered what it was like when they were down in a platoon,” he said. “Either they never have been in real fighting, or they forgot what it’s like.”

In the Rolling Stone article that led to General McChrystal’s ouster, reporter Michael Hastings wrote about the backlash that counterinsurgency restraints had provoked among the general’s own troops. Many feel that “being told to hold their fire” increases their vulnerability. A former Special Forces operator, a veteran of both Iraq and Afghanistan, said of General McChrystal, according to Mr. Hastings, “His rules of engagement put soldiers’ lives in even greater danger. Every real soldier will tell you the same thing.”

We are sinking more and more deeply into the fetid quagmire of Afghanistan and neither the president nor General Petraeus nor anyone else has the slightest clue about how to get out. The counterinsurgency zealots in the military want more troops sent to Afghanistan, and they want the president to completely scrap his already shaky July 2011 timetable for the beginning of a withdrawal.

We’re like a compulsive gambler plunging ever more deeply into debt in order to wager on a rigged game. There is no victory to be had in Afghanistan, only grief. We’re bulldozing Detroit while at the same time trying to establish model metropolises in Kabul and Kandahar. We’re spending endless billions on this wretched war but can’t extend the unemployment benefits of Americans suffering from the wretched economy here at home.

The difference between this and a nightmare is that when you wake up from a nightmare it’s over. This is all too tragically real.

    Worse Than a Nightmare, NYT, 25.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/26/opinion/26herbert.html

One Battalion’s Wrenching Deployment to Afghanistan

June 26, 2010
The New York Times
By JAMES DAO

Pvt. Johnnie Stevenson spent his final hours at Fort Drum alone, trying to put his game face on. He played some Ludacris on his iPod, then turned it off. He unpacked his 72-hour bag, then repacked it. Did he have enough toothpaste and spare socks? Had he paid his bills? Was he ready for war? For a year?

Capt. Adrian Bonenberger took a drive through the farmland of northern New York to absorb one last view of the St. Lawrence River. To drink one last cup of coffee at the Lyric Bistro in Clayton. To savor one last moment of real peace and quiet before heading to Afghanistan. For a year.

Sgt. Tamara Sullivan pulled out her cellphone charger and braced for a night of tears. She called her children in North Carolina, ages 3 and 1, and told them she would soon be going to work in a place called Afghanistan. For a year. She reminded her husband to send her their artwork. She cried, hung up, called him back and cried some more.

“I asked for him to mail me those pictures, those little sloppy ones,” she said. “I want to see what my children’s hands touched, because I won’t be able to touch them.”

These are the faces of the new American surge in Afghanistan. For the next year, the First Battalion, 87th Infantry of the 10th Mountain Division from Fort Drum, N.Y., will be living, working and fighting in the fertile northern plains of Afghanistan, part of the additional 30,000 troops who will make up the backbone of President Obama’s plan for ending the nine-year war.

The president said last week that the strategy — which calls for securing population centers, reducing civilian casualties and strengthening the Afghan police and army — would continue despite his firing the top Afghanistan war commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal.

In the increasingly restive provinces of Kunduz and Baghlan, the 1-87 will be opening a new front and waging a different kind of war. Its job will be to train the local police, secure a vital highway to Central Asia and expand the shaky writ of President Hamid Karzai’s government in the north.

The soldiers will be living with the police in mud-walled outposts and conducting daily foot patrols alongside them into contested areas. The goal is to build public support for the police — no simple task, given its reputation for corruption and ineffectiveness.

Over the course of the next year, The New York Times will be visiting the battalion to chronicle its part in the surge and explore the strains of deployment on soldiers, many fresh out of basic training, others on their fifth combat tour in nine years.

If their mission cannot succeed in the relatively stable north, the policy seems unlikely to work anywhere in Afghanistan.

The battalion is the first large American military unit to be based in these provinces since the war began, and the troops expect to be challenged by emboldened insurgent forces that have been ambushing police checkpoints, vandalizing schools, mining roads and extorting merchants with growing regularity.

Lt. Col. Russell Lewis, the battalion commander, said that for most of the war, troops with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization had not seriously contested Taliban-controlled areas in the north. That, he said, is about to change.

The battalion, which began moving to Afghanistan in March, will be joined by late summer by an aviation brigade with transport and assault helicopters that will allow them to conduct missions deep into insurgent strongholds, which fuels talk of a possible offensive by fall.

“It will get hotter before it gets better,” Colonel Lewis said.

The deployment will also test the emotional mettle of soldiers and their families. Across eight time zones and 6,500 miles, linked by the fragile threads of the Internet and cellular technology, those soldiers will counsel children, comfort parents, manage marriages and mourn deaths back home, even as they struggle with loneliness, boredom and fear in Afghanistan.

They are almost all men, with a small attachment of women in noninfantry jobs. Many are begging to see combat. Others dread the prospect.

Specialist Samuel Michalik, a 24-year-old, single infantryman from Tennessee on his first deployment, offered one perspective.

“I think it’s safe to say that most people would want to see some action — they don’t want to be there and just be sitting around,” he said before the deployment. “If it’s my time to die or get injured, whatnot, I think then, God’s going to allow that. I’m at peace with that.”

Sgt. First Class Brian Eisch, a 35-year-old single parent of two boys from Wisconsin, also on his first deployment, voiced a different view.

“If we are here for a year and don’t fire one round, I’m happy,” the sergeant said. “I’ve got two boys waiting for me that I want to go back home and be a dad to.”

Conflicting Emotions

The days before deployment are a time for rearranging the furniture of lives. Wills must be drafted. Single parents send children to grandparents, uncles and aunts. Cars are stored, apartment keys returned, phone service canceled.

For Sergeant Sullivan, it was also a time to say goodbye, again and again, slowly.

The youngest of three sisters, Sergeant Sullivan, 31, was raised by a grandmother in Casey, S.C., after her father killed her mother and then himself. She graduated from a local college and worked for a year as a substitute teacher. But school loans weighed heavily on her, and in 2002 she enlisted.

A night-vision goggles technician, she spent five months in Kandahar in 2004, calling it “a big field trip.” She resolved to make the Army her career.

That was before she had children.

In the hours before deployment, she was feeling the conflicting emotions of a parent in the Army. She is one of only about 20 women attached to the battalion, but there are dozens of other soldiers with children back home.

She wants to serve 20 years and make retirement, with its good pension and health care benefits. But leaving her children for 12 months seems the hardest thing she has ever done.

“I know what I’m doing is important, but my children are a priority for me,” she said. “Something’s got to change.”

The farewells were very different for Captain Bonenberger, 32, single and without children. He visited old girlfriends in New York City. He saw his parents in Connecticut. He drank too much with buddies in California. He stored up memories.

“I made spending time with friends and family a huge priority in my life, because I knew that when I was over there I couldn’t be thinking about that,” he said. “I can only concentrate on the present, on what’s in front of me, or it gets me really depressed.”

Raised in Branford, Conn., the son of a poet-turned-librarian and a classical-guitarist-turned-lawyer, Captain Bonenberger developed a childhood fascination with the military from reading Homer. He considered applying to West Point, but his father, who protested the Vietnam War in college, and his grandfather, a World War II veteran, were adamantly opposed.

So he went to Yale, studied English literature and considered following his father into law. After graduation he worked for a consulting firm, tried his hand at writing and taught English in Japan. None of it spoke to him. Then came Abu Ghraib.

The reports of prisoner abuses there outraged him, but also rekindled an ambition to be an officer. He joined the Army in 2005, and a year later he was in Paktika Province along the Pakistan border.

The guy who could quote Alexander Pope learned about spitting tobacco and dodging mortar rounds, the strange allure of a hard life. “Everything is vivid, even the crappy food,” he said.

Before his flight from Fort Drum, he itched to get going, to be there. He was part of the battalion’s planning team, but he hoped to finish the tour as a front-line company commander.

“For all of us, that’s the dream,” he said. “To lead soldiers.”

Private Stevenson, 19, had his own waking dreams in the hours before he left Fort Drum. He grew up in Port Arthur, Tex., never knowing his father. His mother, a corrections officer, died of complications related to AIDS when he was 15. He became homeless, quitting school and selling crack cocaine to survive, barely avoiding arrest.

One day a woman, the mother of a girl he knew, saw him sitting by the road, his life’s belongings in a plastic bin. She offered him dinner, and he stayed for two years, agreeing to her demand that he stop selling drugs. Today he calls her his godmother because, he believes, heaven must have sent her to save him.

Joining the Army seemed the next best step in setting his life straight. His slow drawl and easygoing style mask ambitions: college, perhaps law school, a family. More immediately, he longed to become a turret gunner, the first line of defense for a truck team.

As he sat on his bunk that final night, butterflies fluttered in his stomach. Would he see combat? Would he do the right thing if he did? He needed to know.

“Once the first bullet comes at me, and I know that I’ve fired back and I wasn’t hesitant, then I won’t be worried about it anymore,” he said. “Because I’ll know I can do my job without freezing up or any of that.”

Weapons Status Red

When their bags were packed, the soldiers received the M-4 rifles that would be their constant companions in Afghanistan, then bade final goodbyes to family and friends. Inside a spare concrete building at Fort Drum, every corner seemed filled with quiet exchanges of love and grief.

Specialist Kiel Haberland, 26, hugged his wife, kissed their infant daughter and shouldered his pack. His wife, Sarah, put an arm around her mother-in-law, wiped away tears and strode away.

Then through the early morning darkness, he called: “I love you, Sarah.”

Another soldier helped: “He loves you, Sarah.”

“I love you, Kiel!” she shouted back. But he had rounded the corner.

From late March until mid-April, the battalion moved in waves through Germany, Kyrgyzstan and Kuwait to a small airstrip in Kunduz, about 150 miles north of Kabul across the rugged Hindu Kush mountain range. As their planes arrived, the soldiers received a bracing reminder that they had entered a war zone.

“The weapons status once we go outside that door will be red!” a sergeant major shouted inside the bare blue walls of the Kunduz air terminal. Then he led soldiers wearing heavy rucksacks and body armor on a brisk jog across a partly cleared minefield to their new home, Forward Operating Base Kunduz.

Just months before, the base, on a plateau overlooking the city, housed fewer than 200 National Guard soldiers. Now it was a microcosm of the surge itself, growing rapidly to accommodate nearly 800 soldiers from the 1-87. As bulldozers rumbled and Navy Seabees filled wire-mesh barriers, dozens of yellow tents rose on a gravel-paved field.

The enemy seemed to have taken notice. The day after Colonel Lewis arrived, insurgents fired a rocket at the base, the first such attack in nearly a year. The rocket missed by a long shot but sent a message.

“Let’s just be aware,” Colonel Lewis cautioned soldiers before a patrol two days later. “They’re reacting to us.”

The first weeks of a deployment are often the most dangerous, as new soldiers in unfamiliar terrain make mistakes that can turn deadly. So as the battalion prepared for its first major convoy in mid-April, Sergeant Eisch and other platoon sergeants bore down on the newest soldiers, looking for signs of slackness or inattention — and barking orders when they found it.

A former wrestler and drill sergeant with a shaved head and fire-hydrant frame, Sergeant Eisch had missed previous deployments after winning sole custody of his sons, ages 12 and 7, in a bitter divorce. But this time, his brother volunteered to care for the boys.

Finally in Afghanistan, Sergeant Eisch faced a new problem: kidney stones. He had conveniently failed to mention them to his doctor before deploying, fearing he would be held back. Now he had to make do with ibuprofen and fortitude.

“I made it this far,” he said. “I’m not going home.”

A Growing Insurgency

Below the base spreads a verdant plain of rice, wheat and cotton fields, grape arbors and almond groves. This is Afghanistan’s breadbasket, an ethnically diverse region of Tajik, Uzbek and Pashtun villages that seemed relatively stable after 2001, when Taliban fighters were ousted from Kunduz city after a 12-day siege. It was the last major city to fall to the American-led anti-Taliban forces.

But Uzbek, Pashtun and Pakistani insurgents, some of them fleeing the American offensive in Helmand Province, have filtered into havens in Kunduz, NATO officers say. In April alone, seven Germans were killed in ambushes in Kunduz and Baghlan Provinces. Intelligence officers with the alliance say that five of Kunduz’s seven districts are contested or controlled by the Taliban.

In their first weeks on the ground, the commanders from the 1-87 learned about the growing insurgent activity from the local police over tea, skewers of roasted lamb and small talk. Hundreds of fighters were massing in the Archi District about 25 miles northeast of Kunduz city, the police reported. The village of Gor Teppa, less than 10 miles to the northwest, had become the seat of a Taliban shadow government, protected by hundreds of homemade bombs buried in the area’s lone road.

And at 7 o’clock every evening, the Taliban shut down cellular telephone service across the province, punctuating their control of the night.

In early April, the commander of the battalion’s Alpha Company, Capt. Jeffrey Kornbluth, visited police headquarters in Emam Saheb, a district near the Tajikistan border. The police chief, Col. Kajum Ibrahimi, told him that Taliban forces — many of them involved in opium and weapons smuggling — had begun massing a few miles outside town.

Captain Kornbluth explained that it would be weeks before all his soldiers and trucks had arrived. Colonel Ibrahimi’s face darkened and he sighed dramatically. “We need an operation as soon as possible,” he said.

Two weeks later, a platoon from Alpha Company returned to Emam Saheb. This time, though, the Americans agreed to help Afghan police officers who were trying to clear a Taliban stronghold near town.

The platoon’s armored vehicles turned down a narrow dirt road that snaked through farm land, accompanied by Afghan police officers on motorcycles and in Ford pickup trucks. Suddenly there was a boom and a puff of smoke: the truck carrying the platoon leader, Lt. Nathaniel Bleier, had set off a mine. The truck’s front left tire landed in a rice paddy a football field away.

No soldiers were seriously hurt, beyond a separated shoulder. But a few hours later, a road-clearing team found antipersonnel mines connected to a much larger bomb buried just up the road. The injuries could have been far worse.

As April flowed into May, Private Stevenson was promoted to private first class. Sergeant Eisch readied his platoon for its first foot patrols. Captain Bonenberger prepared plans for the summer fighting season and for his own two-week leave in June. Sergeant Sullivan began work on a backlog of broken night-vision goggles.

And on a single afternoon in early May, three separate patrols were ambushed by insurgents firing rocket-propelled grenades.

There were no serious injuries, but it had become clear: the battalion could not travel more than a few miles — in some cases just a few yards — beyond police outposts in contested areas without drawing fire.

“We’ve gone to where the guns are,” an intelligence officer said.

The 1-87 had found the war. One month had passed. There were 11 to go.

    One Battalion’s Wrenching Deployment to Afghanistan, NYT, 26.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/world/27battalion.html

Mullen Visits Afghan Leaders and Allied Troops

June 26, 2010
The New York Times
By THOM SHANKER

KABUL — With the American-led military mission temporarily a ship without a captain, the nation’s top admiral spent Saturday in this land-locked war zone reassuring Afghan leaders and allied troops that Washington will not pause in pressing forward its strategy — one that will require enhanced cooperation between civilian and military officials.

“The leadership has changed, but the policy hasn’t changed,” said Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “The strategy hasn’t changed. And we are very much committed to it.”

Admiral Mullen arrived in the Afghan capital at a tumultuous moment: The allied commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, was fired by President Obama this week following publication of comments by the general and his staff that disparaged senior civilian officials. And the war effort is beset by rising violence and a frustratingly slow pace of political and economic progress required to attract a war-weary population.

Admiral Mullen’s agenda included private talks with the most senior level of the Afghan leadership, including President Hamid Karzai and Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak.

But as Mr. Obama himself acknowledged in a textured statement delivered when he relieved General McChrystal of command, the entire national security team — civilian and military — must now come together and work in greater accord.

“That is a mandate for the leadership,” Admiral Mullen told gatherings of military officers and American embassy personnel. “If we don’t make this happen, we are going to fail.”

And he bluntly warned, “We do not have the luxury of time.”

To aggressively press that agenda of enhanced civilian-military cooperation, Admiral Mullen met with the American ambassador in Kabul, Karl Eikenberry, a retired three-star general who had well-publicized disputes with General McChrystal, as well as with Mark Sedwell, the British diplomat who serves as NATO’s senior civilian representative here.

Mr. Sedwell offered an assessment of optimism for the effort now underway, but one tempered by an acknowledgement of past missteps in the fight against the insurgency.

“I don’t think we’ve regained the initiative yet, but we’ve arrested their initiative,” he said. “In the south, we are taking the fight to them. But that takes time to see.”

Admiral Mullen also had an encounter with another senior member of the administration’s national security team — the sort of meeting possible only in the rarified atmosphere of high-level government travel — when he crossed paths in Brussels with Richard A. Holbrooke, the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, who had been a target of negative comments from the McChrystal team.

That meeting occurred on a runway in Brussels, where Admiral Mullen’s Air Force jet stopped to refuel en route to Kabul. Mr. Holbrooke came bounding up the stairs, as his plane, too, was refueling there on its way home from Pakistan.

The two huddled at length in private.

In Kabul, Admiral Mullen delivered a special message of encouragement to military officers who had served under General McChrystal.

“They are going to be a down group,” Admiral Mullen said in an interview. “Anytime you lose a commander, particularly one you care so much about, it crushes you.”

But he told senior military officers that General McChrystal would want them focusing on the mission, not on his abrupt departure from command. And he told the officers to carry away with them the correct example from the controversy leading to General McChrystal’s ouster.

He repeated two themes: The military must remain steadfast in its respect for civilian control of the armed forces, and the military must continue to engage with news organizations.

“We need to tell our story,” Admiral Mullen said. “We must not shy from engagement. We must not overcompensate.”

Admiral Mullen told several military meetings that he had paid a private, personal visit to the Washington home of General McChrystal and his wife after the announcement of the general’s forced retirement.

Mr. Obama nominated Gen. David H. Petraeus, the former Iraq commander and now in charge of American troops in the Middle East, to take over the mission in Afghanistan. He is scheduled to appear before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday for a confirmation hearing set at an accelerated pace.

Admiral Mullen stressed that General Petraeus, who was deeply involved in developing the current counter-insurgency strategy for Afghanistan, would be able to take over command in a seamless transition.

    Mullen Visits Afghan Leaders and Allied Troops, NYT, 26.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/world/asia/27mullen.html

Pakistan Is Said to Pursue a Foothold in Afghanistan

June 24, 2010
The New York Times
By JANE PERLEZ, ERIC SCHMITT and CARLOTTA GALL.

This article is by Jane Perlez, Eric Schmitt and Carlotta Gall.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistan is exploiting the troubled United States military effort in Afghanistan to drive home a political settlement with Afghanistan that would give Pakistan important influence there but is likely to undermine United States interests, Pakistani and American officials said.

The dismissal of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal will almost certainly embolden the Pakistanis in their plan as they detect increasing American uncertainty, Pakistani officials said. The Pakistani Army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, preferred General McChrystal to his successor, Gen. David H. Petraeus, whom he considers more of a politician than a military strategist, said people who had spoken recently with General Kayani.

Pakistan is presenting itself as the new viable partner for Afghanistan to President Hamid Karzai, who has soured on the Americans. Pakistani officials say they can deliver the network of Sirajuddin Haqqani, an ally of Al Qaeda who runs a major part of the insurgency in Afghanistan, into a power-sharing arrangement.

In addition, Afghan officials say, the Pakistanis are pushing various other proxies, with General Kayani personally offering to broker a deal with the Taliban leadership.

Washington has watched with some nervousness as General Kayani and Pakistan’s spy chief, Lt. Gen. Ahmad Shuja Pasha, shuttle between Islamabad and Kabul, telling Mr. Karzai that they agree with his assessment that the United States cannot win in Afghanistan, and that a postwar Afghanistan should incorporate the Haqqani network, a longtime Pakistani asset. In a sign of the shift in momentum, the two Pakistani officials were next scheduled to visit Kabul on Monday, according to Afghan TV.

Despite General McChrystal’s 11 visits to General Kayani in Islamabad in the past year, the Pakistanis have not been altogether forthcoming on details of the conversations in the last two months, making the Pakistani moves even more worrisome for the United States, said an American official involved in the administration’s Afghanistan and Pakistan deliberations.

“They know this creates a bigger breach between us and Karzai,” the American official said.

Though encouraged by Washington, the thaw heightens the risk that the United States will find itself cut out of what amounts to a separate peace between the Afghans and Pakistanis, and one that does not necessarily guarantee Washington’s prime objective in the war: denying Al Qaeda a haven.

It also provides another indication of how Pakistan, ostensibly an American ally, has worked many opposing sides in the war to safeguard its ultimate interest in having an Afghanistan that is pliable and free of the influence of its main strategic obsession, its more powerful neighbor, India.

The Haqqani network has long been Pakistan’s crucial anti-India asset and has remained virtually untouched by Pakistani forces in their redoubt inside Pakistan, in the tribal areas on the Afghan border, even as the Americans have pressed Pakistan for an offensive against it.

General Kayani has resisted the American pleas, saying his troops are too busy fighting the Pakistani Taliban in other parts of the tribal areas.

But there have long been suspicions among Afghan, American and other Western officials that the Pakistanis were holding the Haqqanis in reserve for just such a moment, as a lever to shape the outcome of the war in its favor.

On repeated occasions, Pakistan has used the Haqqani fighters to hit Indian targets inside Afghanistan, according to American intelligence officials. The Haqqanis have also hit American ones, a possible signal from the Pakistanis to the Americans that it is in their interest, too, to embrace a deal.

General Petraeus told Congress last week that Haqqani fighters were responsible for recent major attacks in Kabul and the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, adding that he had informed General Kayani.

Some officials in the Obama administration have not ruled out incorporating the Haqqani network in an Afghan settlement, though they stress that President Obama’s policy calls for Al Qaeda to be separated from the network. American officials are skeptical that that can be accomplished.

Richard C. Holbrooke, the Obama administration’s special envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan, said on a visit to Islamabad last weekend that it was “hard to imagine” the Haqqani network in an Afghan arrangement, but added, “Who knows?”

At a briefing this week at the headquarters of Pakistan’s premier spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistani analysts laid out a view of the war that dovetailed neatly with the doubts expressed by Mr. Karzai. They depicted a stark picture of an American military campaign in Afghanistan “that will not succeed.”

They said the Taliban were gaining strength. Despite the impending arrival of new American troops, they concluded the “security situation would become more dangerous,” resulting in an erosion of the American will to fight.

“That is the reason why Karzai is trying to negotiate now,” a senior analyst said.

General Pasha, the head of the intelligence agency, dashed to Kabul on the eve of Mr. Karzai’s visit to Washington in May, an American official said. Neither Mr. Karzai nor the Pakistanis mentioned to the Americans about incorporating the Haqqanis in a postwar Afghanistan, the official said.

Pakistan has already won what it sees as an important concession in Kabul, the resignations this month of the intelligence chief, Amrullah Saleh, and the interior minister, Hanif Atmar. The two officials, favored by Washington, were viewed by Pakistan as major obstacles to its vision of hard-core Taliban fighters’ being part of an Afghanistan settlement, though the circumstances of their resignations did not suggest any connection to Pakistan.

Coupled with their strategic interests, the Pakistanis say they have chosen this juncture to open talks with Mr. Karzai because, even before the controversy over General McChrystal, they sensed uncertainty — “a lack of fire in the belly,” said one Pakistani — within the Obama administration over the Afghan fight.

“The American timetable for getting out makes it easier for Pakistan to play a more visible role,” said Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, the spokesman for the Pakistani Army. He was referring to the July 2011 date set by Mr. Obama for the start of the withdrawal of some American combat troops.

The offer by Pakistan to make the Haqqanis part of the solution in Afghanistan has now been adopted as basic Pakistani policy, said Rifaat Hussain, a professor of international relations at Islamabad University, and a confidant of top military generals.

“The establishment thinks that without getting Haqqani on board, efforts to stabilize the situation in Afghanistan will be doomed,” Mr. Hussain said. “Haqqani has a large fighting force, and by co-opting him into a power-sharing arrangement a lot of bloodshed can be avoided.”

The recent trips by General Kayani and General Pasha to Kabul were an “effort to make this happen,” he said.

Afghan officials said General Kayani had offered to broker a deal with the Afghan Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, and had sent envoys to Kabul from another insurgent leader and longtime Pakistani ally, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, with the offer of a 15-point peace plan in March.

As for the Haqqanis, whose fighters stretch across eastern Afghanistan all the way to Kabul, they are prepared to break with Al Qaeda, Pakistani intelligence and military officials said.

The Taliban, including the Haqqani group, are ready to “do a deal” over Al Qaeda, a senior Pakistani official close to the Pakistani Army said. The Haqqanis could tell Al Qaeda to move elsewhere because it had been given nine years of protection since 9/11, the official said.

But this official acknowledged that the Haqqanis and Al Qaeda were too “thick” with each other for a separation to happen. They had provided each other with fighters, money and other resources over a long period of time, he said.

Also, there appeared to be no idea where the Qaeda forces would go, and no answer to whether the Haqqanis would hand over Osama bin Laden and his second in command, Ayman al-Zawahri, the official said.

The Haqqanis may be playing their own game with their hosts, the Pakistanis, Mr. Hussain said.

“Many believe that Haqqanis’ willingness to cut its links with Al Qaeda is a tactical move which is aimed at thwarting the impending military action by the Pakistani Army in North Waziristan,” he said.

    Pakistan Is Said to Pursue a Foothold in Afghanistan, NYT, 24.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/25/world/asia/25islamabad.html

Obama Says Afghan Policy

Won’t Change After Dismissal

June 23, 2010
The New York Times
By HELENE COOPER and DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON — President Obama on Wednesday fired his top Afghanistan war commander after only a brief meeting in the Oval Office, replacing Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal with his boss and mentor, Gen. David H. Petraeus, and sending a clear signal that the current war strategy will continue despite setbacks and growing public doubts.

Two hours later, an angry Mr. Obama privately reprimanded members of his bickering national security team, adopting a “stern” tone during a meeting in the Situation Room and ordering them to put aside “pettiness,” and not to put “personalities or reputation” ahead of American troops who have been put in harm’s way, administration officials said.

Speaking in the Rose Garden to reporters, Mr. Obama said he did not fire General McChrystal for critical comments about him and his staff in Rolling Stone magazine, nor “out of any sense of personal insult.” Rather, the president cited the need for his team to unite in pressing the war effort.

“I don’t think we can sustain that unity of effort and achieve our objectives in Afghanistan without making this change,” he said.

Even by the standards of a capital that has seen impeachment and scandals in recent years, the drama surrounding the firing of a wartime commander was palpable.

Generals have come and gone in disputes over policy and execution — indeed, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates fired General McChrystal’s predecessor, Gen. David D. McKiernan, just a year ago. But the removal of General McChrystal culminated a remarkable public waiting game, with White House and top military officials trying to guess what the president would do, and Mr. Obama keeping his cards close to his vest until the very end.

While publicly rebuking him Tuesday, Mr. Obama had said he would not decide the general’s fate until they met face to face. But as early as Monday night, officials said, when Mr. Obama first learned of the Rolling Stone article in which General McChrystal and his staff criticized administration officials, the president and his advisers were discussing the likelihood that the general would have to go.

“A lot of us were arguing that the message of letting McChrystal’s comments roll off our backs would be enormously harmful,” one administration official said.

By Tuesday, when the president met with the general’s biggest supporter and a powerful one, Secretary Gates, White House and Pentagon officials were already discussing General Petraeus as the most likely replacement.

It has been nearly 60 years since President Harry S. Truman fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur in the midst of the Korean War, the last time a president directly stepped in to remove the senior commander in a war zone for disrespect toward the White House. For Mr. Obama, this was a MacArthur moment, a reassertion of civilian control.

The president also used the moment to emphasize that the policy in Afghanistan would not change, even as his own party and international allies display strong doubts about the way forward, including whether the United States can ever navigate a troubled relationship with Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai.

General Petraeus is taking a step down. As head of United States Central Command, he has oversight for Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and the entire region. He has supported General McChrystal’s point of view during internal administration strategy debates. His appointment is meant in part to calm the nerves of NATO allies and Mr. Karzai.

Mr. Obama called Mr. Karzai Wednesday to try to get the Afghan president on board — Mr. Karzai made a personal appeal to Mr. Obama on Tuesday night to keep General McChrystal — and Mr. Obama received at least an initial public statement that “President Karzai respects President Obama’s decision.”

Gen. James L. Jones, the national security adviser, whom one of General McChrystal’s aides had dismissed in the article as a “clown,” called his counterparts in Europe to assure them that Mr. Obama was not abandoning his approach. He repeated Mr. Obama’s line that this was a change in personnel, not in policy.

The president chose General Petraeus, a media-savvy, ambitious officer, instead of lesser-known figures who might have had more trouble stepping in to such a volatile situation. “The one person you could have inserted in there to calm those nerves was Dave Petraeus,” said one senior administration official.

General Petraeus will have to relinquish the top job at Central Command to assume command in Afghanistan. White House officials said no decision had been made on who would succeed him.

General Petraeus, while intimately familiar with Afghanistan and its myriad problems, is inheriting direct command at a particularly fraught moment. Seven months into President Obama’s surge of forces, there is little evidence that the addition of tens of thousands of troops has beaten back the Taliban, or that Mr. Karzai’s government will soon be able to hold and administer territory the United States helps it retake.

Mr. Obama admitted as much indirectly on Wednesday in the Rose Garden when he said: “We have a clear goal. We are going to break the Taliban’s momentum.” They were the same words he used seven months ago at West Point in announcing the surge, and as one senior official said, “The president was acknowledging that a third of the way into the surge, the momentum has not been broken.”

One senior administration official noted that General McChrystal and Mr. Karzai “just came off the most constructive week we’ve had in a while with Karzai” when the two men traveled through Kandahar, the site of the next big counterinsurgency push. General McChrystal reported back that Mr. Karzai finally seemed deeply engaged in the details of the effort to regain control over the sprawling city, one of the Taliban’s home bases, administration officials said.

General Petraeus will now be responsible for executing the Kandahar offensive into the spiritual heart of the Taliban. White House and Congressional officials say they expect he will be confirmed quickly — probably by the end of next week.

General McChrystal had already prepared his brief resignation letter when he walked into the meeting with Mr. Obama; he left quickly afterward, saying nothing to the reporters who converged near him. Relieved of his post, he did not attend a regularly scheduled National Security Council meeting that included all the same administration officials whom he or his staff disparaged in the article.

“I welcome debate, but I won’t tolerate division,” the president said afterward. He said that it was crucial for American troops and military officers to observe a “strict adherence to the military chain of command and respect for civilian control over that chain of command.”

In the Rolling Stone article, General McChrystal and his aides belittled many of their civilian counterparts on the Afghanistan strategy team.

In a typical response from other military officials, one Army officer with multiple tours in Afghanistan expressed anger at the lack of discipline displayed by General McChrystal and his inner circle. But he warned that it was symptomatic of wider problems with Mr. Obama’s strategy and among his national security advisers.

“They brought this upon themselves and embarrassed the entire military as an institution,” said the officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid any punishment for criticizing his chain of command.

“Hopefully, the president uses this as an opportunity to refine his policy and objectives, and also to shuffle the rest of his Af-Pak team, as well,” he said, using the abbreviation for the Afghanistan-Pakistan region. “McChrystal isn’t the only one who probably needs to move elsewhere.”

The major criticism of the United States strategy is that its success relies on support from an Afghan government that so far has been unwilling or unable to exert control and eliminate widespread corruption.

Lawmakers from both parties as well as senior military officers in Afghanistan and in Washington expressed regret at General McChrystal’s departure, but strongly supported Mr. Obama’s decision. And while the change in four-star commanders is unlikely to cause any change in strategy, they said General Petraeus might subtly alter the ways it is carried out.

“The overall strategy is not going to change, but like anyone, Petraeus will go back and check the assumptions, the vantage from Kabul, the personal dynamics and interpersonal relationships,” Senator Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said in a telephone interview. “There will be shifts in emphasis and tone. Petraeus’s leadership style is reaching out, going down to the troop level, reaching out to allies and to the civilian leadership.”

In Kabul, Afghanistan, senior officers spent most of Wednesday anxiously waiting for news out of Washington, watching the BBC for leaked reports about their boss’s fate. One military official in Kabul described the mood at General McChrystal’s headquarters as a “mix of despondency and anger.”

“People are shocked,” he said. “People are upset.”


Eric Schmitt, Thom Shanker and Mark Mazzetti contributed reporting.

    Obama Says Afghan Policy Won’t Change After Dismissal, NYT, 23.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/24/us/politics/24mcchrystal.html

Petraeus Is Now Taking Control of a ‘Tougher Fight’

June 23, 2010
The New York Times
By ALISSA J. RUBIN and DEXTER FILKINS

KABUL, Afghanistan — In late 2008, shortly after he had helped pull Iraq back from the brink of catastrophe, Gen. David H. Petraeus prepared to turn to that other American war.

“I’ve always said that Afghanistan would be the tougher fight,” General Petraeus said at the time.

Now the burden falls to him, at perhaps the decisive moment in President Obama’s campaign to reverse the deteriorating situation on the ground here and regain the momentum in this nine-year-old war. In many ways, General Petraeus is being summoned to Afghanistan at a moment similar to the one he faced three years ago in Iraq, when the situation seemed hopeless to a growing number of Americans and their elected representatives as well.

But there is a crucial difference: In Iraq, General Petraeus was called in to reverse a failed strategy put in place by previous commanders. In Afghanistan, General Petraeus was instrumental in developing and executing the strategy in partnership with Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who carried it out on the ground. Now General Petraeus will be directly responsible for its success or failure, risking the reputation he built in Iraq.

General Petraeus, 57, brings an extraordinary set of skills to his new job: a Boy Scout’s charm, penetrating intelligence and a ferocious will to succeed. At ease with the press and the public, and an adept negotiator, General Petraeus will probably distinguish himself from his predecessor with the political skills that carried him through the most difficult months of the counteroffensive in Iraq known as the surge.

In those months of 2007, when American casualties were the heaviest of the war, General Petraeus not only prosecuted the strategy but also reassured his superiors, including President George W. Bush, in regular videoconferences from Baghdad.

In Iraq, General Petraeus helped turn the tide not just by sending 30,000 more American troops into Baghdad, but also by fostering deals with insurgent leaders who had spent the previous four years killing Americans. As much as the surge, the movement in Iraq known as the Sunni Awakening helped set in motion the remarkable decline in violence there that has largely held to this day.

By helping to pull Iraq back from the edge, General Petraeus won a reputation as a resourceful, unorthodox commander and has since been mentioned as a candidate for president.

But Afghanistan is a very different war in a very different country. Where Iraq is an urban, oil-rich country with an educated middle class, Afghanistan is a shattered state whose social fabric and physical infrastructure has been ruined by three decades of war. In Iraq, the insurgency was in the cities; here, it is spread across the mountains and deserts of the country’s forbidding countryside.

Indeed, to prevail in Afghanistan, General Petraeus will need all of his skills — and a dose of good fortune at least as big as the one he received in Iraq. At the moment, every aspect of the war in Afghanistan is going badly: the military’s campaign in the strategic city of Kandahar has met with widespread resistance from the Afghan public; President Hamid Karzai is proving erratic and unpredictable; and the Taliban are resisting more tenaciously than ever.

To turn the tide, General Petraeus will almost certainly continue the counterinsurgency strategy he devised with General McChrystal: protecting Afghan civilians, separating them from insurgents and winning public support. But he will also have to convince his own troops, who are increasingly angry about the restrictions on using firepower imposed to protect civilians.

And General Petraeus will probably also try to employ some of the same novel tactics that worked so well in Iraq. Most notably, he will continue to coax Taliban fighters away from the insurgency with promises of jobs and security. And he may even try to strike deals with senior leaders of the Taliban as well as with the military and intelligence services in Pakistan.

A former aide to General Petraeus in Iraq who is now in Afghanistan put it this way: “The policy is to make everyone feel safer, reconcile with those who are willing and kill the people you need to.”

Perhaps General Petraeus’s toughest challenge will be to unify a fractious team of senior officials in the Obama administration who hold sharply differing views of how the war in Afghanistan should be fought. As the head of the United States Central Command, which oversees all military forces in the Middle East, General Petraeus has built a close relationship with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, as well with Richard C. Holbrooke, the special representative for the region.

While his predecessor, General McChrystal, was on icy terms with the American ambassador here, Karl W. Eikenberry, General Petraeus forged a tight bond with his civilian counterpart during the Iraqi surge, Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker. General Petraeus and Ambassador Eikenberry, a former general himself, are old Army comrades.

The one uncertain point in General Petraeus’s political constellation is the most important one, President Obama. General Petraeus had bypassed his own senior leadership to become Mr. Bush’s favorite general. Mr. Obama made it clear that General Petraeus would no longer have a direct line to the Oval Office. The general accordingly assumed a lower profile.

For all of his political shrewdness, however, General Petraeus dislikes the rough-and-tumble of Washington. His displeasure reached its peak in September 2007, when, during the Iraqi surge, he and Ambassador Crocker were called to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The violence had not yet dropped significantly, and both men were questioned mercilessly. General Petraeus, who suffers from a bad back, gulped Advil during the hearing.

“The most miserable experience of my life,” he told a reporter afterward.

General Petraeus prides himself on his athletic prowess. While in Iraq, he usually ran five miles six days a week, often besting the younger captains he took along with him. After the runs usually come a grueling regime of calisthenics; well into his 50s, General Petraeus could do 17 pull-ups. Recently, though, questions have arisen about his health. Last year, he underwent treatment for prostate cancer; he said he was now cured. Only last week, while testifying before a Senate panel, General Petraeus fainted in his chair. He said he was dehydrated.

General Petraeus will take command of the Afghanistan campaign six months into an 18-month-long strategy that will almost certainly have to show significant progress for Mr. Obama to continue. Even before then, in December, Mr. Obama and his advisers will conduct a “strategic assessment” that will serve as a major progress report.

After that, it is anyone’s guess what Mr. Obama will do.

Some members of General McChrystal’s staff were not so optimistic. When a reporter recently suggested to a senior American officer here that he might, in the end, run out of time, he did not hesitate to answer.

“I think you may be right,” the officer said.

    Petraeus Is Now Taking Control of a ‘Tougher Fight’, NYT, 23.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/24/world/asia/24petraeus.html

Short, Tense Deliberation, Then a General Is Gone

June 23, 2010
The  New York Times
By MARK LANDLER

WASHINGTON — By the time he woke up Wednesday morning, President Obama had made up his mind.

During the 36 frenetic hours since he had been handed an article from the coming issue of Rolling Stone ominously headlined “The Runaway General,” the president weighed the consequences of cashiering Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, whose contemptuous comments about senior officials had ignited a firestorm.

Mr. Obama, aides say, consulted with advisers — some, like Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, who warned of the dangers of replacing General McChrystal, others, like his political advisers, who thought he had to go. He reached out for advice to a soldier-statesman, Colin L. Powell. He identified a possible successor to lead the war in Afghanistan.

And then, finally, the president ended General McChrystal’s command in a meeting that lasted only 20 minutes. According to one aide, the general apologized, offered his resignation and did not lobby for his job.

After a seesaw debate among White House officials, “there was a basic meeting of the minds,” said Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff and a major player in the deliberations. “This was not good for the mission, the military and morale,” Mr. Emanuel said.

Mr. Obama has forced out officials before, including the director of national intelligence, Dennis C. Blair; the White House counsel, Gregory Craig; even General McChrystal’s predecessor, Gen. David D. McKiernan.

But this is the highest profile sacking of his presidency. The time between Mr. Obama’s first reading of the Rolling Stone article and his decision to accept General McChrystal’s resignation offers an insight into the president’s decision-making process under intense stress: He appears deliberative and open to debate, but in the end, is coldly decisive.

In a subsequent meeting with his Afghan war council, Mr. Obama delivered a tongue-lashing, instructing his advisers to stop bickering among themselves.

“The president said he didn’t want to see pettiness; that this was not about personalities or reputations — it’s about our men and women in uniform,” said a senior administration official, who like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity in offering an account of the last two days.

The drama began on Monday afternoon, when Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who was flying home from Illinois to Andrews Air Force Base, took an unsettling call from General McChrystal.

The phone connection was scratchy, and the conversation lasted barely two minutes. General McChrystal told the vice president there was an article coming out that he would not like. Baffled, Mr. Biden asked his staff to investigate, and when he landed, aides handed him the article.

After digesting it back at his residence in Washington, Mr. Biden put in a call to Mr. Obama at 7:30 that evening. Hours earlier, the White House had itself gotten wind of the article, and a young press aide named Tommy Vietor distributed copies to all the top officials in Mr. Obama’s national security circle.

The press secretary, Robert Gibbs, walked a copy of it to the president in the private quarters. After scanning the first few paragraphs — a sarcastic, profanity-laced description of General McChrystal’s disgust at having to dine with a French minister to brief him about the war — Mr. Obama had read enough, a senior administration official said. He ordered his political and national security aides to convene immediately in the Oval Office.

It was already clear then, this official said, that General McChrystal might not survive. Mr. Obama was leaning toward dismissing him, another administration official said, though he said the president was willing to wait until the general explained his actions, and those of his aides.

At the Oval Office meeting on Monday, Mr. Obama asked that General McChrystal be summoned home from Kabul. Before leaving Afghanistan, the general held an already scheduled meeting with Susan E. Rice, the United Nations ambassador, who was visiting with other United Nations diplomats.

In a one-on-one meeting on Tuesday, Mr. Gates, who had pushed to make General McChrystal the commander in Afghanistan, pleaded with Mr. Obama to hear him out, an official said. Mr. Gates warned that removing the commander would be hugely disruptive. He worried in particular about “continuity, momentum, and relations with allies,” said a senior official, who was involved in the meetings.

Still, even as Mr. Gates advocated for General McChrystal, the Pentagon began drawing up a list of potential replacements. Mr. Obama, this official said, was immediately drawn to the idea of turning to Gen. David H. Petraeus — an architect of the counterinsurgency strategy, a politically skilled commander and a replacement who would address Mr. Gates’s concerns.

As it happened, General Petraeus was close at hand. That day, he had traveled to a secret site in Northern Virginia to convene a meeting of the Counterterrorism Executive Council, a group of military and intelligence officials who gather regularly to discuss operations.

General Petraeus was not offered the job until he walked into the White House on Wednesday, soon after the president’s meeting with General McChrystal, a senior aide said.

On Tuesday, while General McChrystal was making the 14-hour flight to Washington, the White House was involved in a whirl of meetings about his fate. Along with Mr. Gates, aides say, four other senior officials were influential: Vice President Biden; the national security adviser, Gen. James L. Jones; the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Adm. Mike Mullen; and Mr. Emanuel.

Mr. Emanuel’s opinion and that of other advisers swung back and forth, a senior official said. Mr. Obama seemed inclined toward dismissing the general, but heard out the debate. By Tuesday night, officials said, they ended up hoping that the general would simply resign.

Meanwhile, General McChrystal was busy placing calls to apologize to people who were belittled in the article. One of those he called was Senator John Kerry, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

“He was very respectful and apologetic, and I think, obviously understood he’d made a mistake and he wasn’t making any excuses,” Mr. Kerry said in an interview, noting that General McChrystal made no case for keeping his job. “He was being pretty direct and upfront.”

The general had some high-profile defenders, including President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan. But in the end, Mr. Obama decided that he had to go.

After meeting with General McChrystal, he held a 40-minute meeting with General Petraeus and a broader session with his war council and then stepped into the Rose Garden to explain his decision to the American public.

“He likes Stan and thinks Stan is a good man, a good general and a good soldier,” Mr. Emanuel said. “But as he said in his statement, this is bigger than any one person.”


Reporting was contributed by David E. Sanger, Jackie Calmes, Thom Shanker and Helene Cooper from Washington. Alissa J. Rubin contributed reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan.

    Short, Tense Deliberation, Then a General Is Gone, NYT, 23.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/24/us/politics/24decide.html

The President and His General

June 22, 2010
The New York Times

Until this week, Gen. Stanley McChrystal had a reputation for fierce self-discipline. That makes his hugely undisciplined comments in Rolling Stone magazine — including derisive quotes from his aides about Vice President Joseph Biden and other top officials — all the more puzzling and disturbing.

After reading the article, the first question that comes to mind: What could he possibly have been thinking? Followed closely by: Can, or should, President Obama trust him after this?

The news from Afghanistan is bad and getting worse. Back in Washington, the Obama team is still battling — months after the president committed another 30,000 troops — over how deeply to invest in the war.

Mr. Obama, who summoned General McChrystal to the White House on Wednesday, must either fire his top commander or send him immediately back into the field with a clear mandate to do his job. He must order all of his top advisers to stop their sniping and maneuvering and come up with a coherent political and military plan for driving back the Taliban and building a minimally effective Afghan government.

The Rolling Stone article doesn’t suggest any serious policy disagreements between the president and General McChrystal. But the general’s quotes about others are both arrogant and indiscreet. He is depicted groaning after receiving “not another e-mail” from Richard Holbrooke, the White House’s top civilian adviser on Afghanistan. He makes clear his contempt for the American ambassador in Kabul, Karl Eikenberry, accusing the retired lieutenant general of covering “his flank for the history books” with a leaked cable questioning General McChrystal’s favored counterinsurgency strategy.

The most incendiary quotes, the ones that have drawn the White House’s fury, predictably have no names attached to them. “One aide” describes James Jones, a retired general and the president’s national security adviser, as “a clown” who remains “stuck in 1985.” A “top adviser” is even more insulting about Vice President Biden, who opposed sending more troops to Afghanistan. An unnamed “adviser” says that “the Boss” was “disappointed” with his first one-on-one meeting with President Obama, who “didn’t seem very engaged.”

General McChrystal has not tried to disavow his quotes or those by his aides. In a statement, he apologized for the profile that he said reflected “poor judgment and should never have happened.” That is true.

All of this is a huge distraction at a time when no one involved in the Afghan war can afford to be distracted.

Instead of answering questions about his media strategy, General McChrystal should be explaining what went wrong with his first major offensive in Marja and how he plans to do better in Kandahar. Instead of General McChrystal having to apologize to Mr. Holbrooke and Mr. Eikenberry, they all should be working a lot harder to come up with a plan for managing relations with Afghanistan’s deeply flawed president, Hamid Karzai.

Whatever President Obama decides to do about General McChrystal, he needs to get hold of his Afghanistan policy right now.

    The President and His General, NYT, 22.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/23/opinion/23wed1.html

In Afghanistan, as in Iraq, a New Breed of Commander Stepped In

June 22, 2010
The New York Times
By DEXTER FILKINS

KABUL, Afghanistan — Like his boss, mentor and friend, Gen. David H. Petraeus, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal modeled himself as one of a new breed of American commanders: intellectual, open with the press and as politically savvy as the elected officials he was hired to serve.

In that respect, the two four-star generals — Petraeus in Iraq, McChrystal in Afghanistan — personified the modern conviction that America’s commanders had to sell their strategies as much as prosecute them.

And so they did. General Petraeus became the public face of President George W. Bush’s counteroffensive in Iraq in 2007, while General McChrystal, in trying to salvage the war in Afghanistan, threw open his headquarters to the press and the public in a way unimaginable to a generation of generals before him.

But with a handful of intemperate remarks by him and his aides to a magazine writer, General McChrystal demonstrated the perils of letting the public see too much of its commanders at war — and of his own shortfalls as the manager of his public image.

General McChrystal, a gaunt, driven 55-year-old, seemed an unlikely candidate when President Obama appointed him the commanding general of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan almost a year ago to the day.

Although America’s post-Sept. 11 wars have created a number of famous generals, like General Petraeus, General McChrystal spent much of his career in the Army’s cloak-and-dagger special operations units.

For five years, from the early months of the Iraq war until the troop increase ended in 2008, General McChrystal ran the Joint Special Operations Command, the armed service’s most secretive branch of commandos. His job was to kill terrorists, and stay quiet about it.

On arriving in Afghanistan, General McChrystal adopted a policy of accessibility especially remarkable for a man whose career was steeped in secrecy, inviting reporters to join him in classified briefings and on trips around the country.

Like General Petraeus, who has a Ph.D. from Princeton, General McChrystal, a fellow at both Harvard University and the Council on Foreign Relations, he brought a formidable intellect to the elusive complexities of Afghan tribal and ethnic politics. And he labored to explain the rationale — through the press to a public increasingly weary of war and skeptical of the effort in Afghanistan — behind his strategy based on counterinsurgency.

He emphasized the need to win over the Afghan public and focus the fighting on the Taliban heartland in the south. He withdrew troops from peripheral areas and publicly announced military operations well before they began.

“In the Army in particular, there has developed a sophisticated understanding of civil-military relations,” said Richard H. Kohn, a history professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. “I think more and more senior officers have grown up recognizing the importance of having to communicate to the American people through the American media.”

Indeed, like that of General Petraeus before him, General McChrystal’s public-friendly style was linked directly to the prospects of success in the field. In Iraq, General Petraeus saved the American project from catastrophe less by killing insurgents than by embracing and protecting the Iraqi public.

General McChrystal tried to do the same, telling his troops wherever he went that killing Taliban insurgents carried costs, often in the form of dead civilians, that seldom justified using overwhelming force.

He issued directives ordering his troops to drive their tanks and Humvees with courtesy, and he made it more difficult to call in airstrikes to kill insurgents because they risked civilian casualties. When his troops killed women and children, General McChrystal often apologized directly to President Hamid Karzai and to the Afghan people.

But in making derisive remarks about members of the Obama administration to Michael Hastings of Rolling Stone, General McChrystal went well past acceptable candor and into the realm of political hazard.

Exactly why he and his officers chose to let fly in such uncontrolled fashion in front of a reporter is hard to know. It is possible that they had become so accustomed to having reporters around that they forgot one of them was there.

And that, perhaps, is a measure of the difference between General McChrystal and his mentor. It is impossible to imagine General Petraeus uttering the same things or letting down his guard to do so. For if there is one rule by the which the new breed of generals live, it is that candor is good, but not too much.


Thom Shanker contributed reporting from Washington.

    In Afghanistan, as in Iraq, a New Breed of Commander Stepped In, NYT, 22.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/23/world/23military.html

General Faces Unease Among His Own Troops, Too

June 22, 2010
The New York Times
By C. J. CHIVERS

Riding shotgun in an armored vehicle as it passed through the heat and confusion of southern Afghanistan this month, an Army sergeant spoke into his headset, summarizing a sentiment often heard in the field this year.

“I wish we had generals who remembered what it was like when they were down in a platoon,” he said to a reporter in the back. “Either they never have been in real fighting, or they forgot what it’s like.”

The sergeant was speaking of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal and the circle of counterinsurgents who since last year have been running the Afghan war, and who have, as a matter of both policy and practice, made it much more difficult for troops to use airstrikes and artillery in the fight against the Taliban.

No matter the outcome of his meeting on Wednesday in Washington over caustic comments he and his staff made about President Obama and his national security team, the general, or his successor, faces problems from a constituency as important as his bosses and that no commander wants to lose: his own troops.

As levels of violence in Afghanistan climb, there is a palpable and building sense of unease among troops surrounding one of the most confounding questions about how to wage the war: when and how lethal force should be used.

Since last year, the counterinsurgency doctrine championed by those now leading the campaign has assumed an almost unchallenged supremacy in the ranks of the American military’s career officers. The doctrine, which has been supported by both the Bush and Obama administrations, rests on core assumptions, including that using lethal force against an insurgency intermingled with a civilian population is often counterproductive.

Since General McChrystal assumed command, he has been a central face and salesman of this idea, and he has applied it to warfare in a tangible way: by further tightening rules guiding the use of Western firepower — airstrikes and guided rocket attacks, artillery barrages and even mortar fire — to support troops on the ground.

“Winning hearts and minds in COIN is a coldblooded thing,” General McChrystal was quoted as telling an upset American soldier in the Rolling Stone profile that has landed him in trouble. “The Russians killed 1 million Afghans, and that didn’t work.” COIN is the often used abbreviation for counterinsurgency.

The rules have shifted risks from Afghan civilians to Western combatants. They have earned praise in many circles, hailed as a much needed corrective to looser practices that since 2001 killed or maimed many Afghan civilians and undermined support for the American-led war.

But the new rules have also come with costs, including a perception now frequently heard among troops that the effort to limit risks to civilians has swung too far, and endangers the lives of Afghan and Western soldiers caught in firefights with insurgents who need not observe any rules at all.

Young officers and enlisted soldiers and Marines, typically speaking on the condition of anonymity to protect their jobs, speak of “being handcuffed,” of not being trusted by their bosses and of being asked to battle a canny and vicious insurgency “in a fair fight.”

Some rules meant to enshrine counterinsurgency principles into daily practices, they say, do not merely transfer risks away from civilians. They transfer risks away from the Taliban.

Before the rules were tightened, one Army major who had commanded an infantry company said, “firefights in Afghanistan had a half-life.” By this he meant that skirmishes often were brief, lasting roughly a half-hour. The Taliban would ambush patrols and typically break contact and slip away as patrol leaders organized and escalated Western firepower in response.

Now, with fire support often restricted, or even idled, Taliban fighters seem noticeably less worried about an American response, many soldiers and Marines say. Firefights often drag on, sometimes lasting hours, and costing lives. The United States’ material advantages are not robustly applied; troops are engaged in rifle-on-rifle fights on their enemy’s turf.

One Marine infantry lieutenant, during fighting in Marja this year, said he had all but stopped seeking air support while engaged in firefights. He spent too much time on the radio trying to justify its need, he said, and the aircraft never arrived or they arrived too late or the pilots were reluctant to drop their ordnance.

“I’m better off just trying to fight my fight, and maneuver the squads, and not waste the time or focus trying to get air,” he said.

Several infantrymen have also said that the rules are so restrictive that pilots are often not allowed to attack fixed targets — say, a building or tree line from which troops are taking fire — unless they can personally see the insurgents doing the firing.

This has lead to situations many soldiers describe as absurd, including decisions by patrol leaders to have fellow soldiers move briefly out into the open to draw fire once aircraft arrive, so the pilots might be cleared to participate in the fight.

Moments like those bring into sharp relief the grand puzzle faced by any outside general trying to wage war in Afghanistan. An American counterinsurgency campaign seeks support from at least two publics — the Afghan and the American. Efforts to satisfy one can undermine support in the other.

The restrictions on using fire support are part of a larger bundle of instructions, known as rules of engagement, that guide decisions on how troops can interact with Afghans, and how they can fight. The rules have shifted frequently over the years, becoming tighter and tighter.

Each change, often at the urging of the government of President Hamid Karzai, has shown the delicacy of the balance.

NATO needs the Afghan government’s support. But restrictions that are popular in Kabul have often alienated soldiers and Marines whose lives are at stake, including rules that limit when Western troops can enter Afghan homes. Such rules, soldiers and Marines say, concede advantages to insurgents, making it easier for them to hide, to fight, to meet and to store their weapons or assemble their makeshift bombs.

It is an axiom of military service that troops gripe; venting is part of barracks and battlefield life. Troops complain about food, equipment, lack of sleep, delays in their transportation and the weather where they work.

Complaints about how they are allowed to fight are another matter and can be read as a sign of deeper disaffection and strains within the military over policy choices. One Army colonel, in a conversation this month, said the discomfort and anger about the rules had reached a high pitch.

“The troops hate it,” he said. “Right now we’re losing the tactical-level fight in the chase for a strategic victory. How long can that be sustained?”

Whatever the fate of General McChrystal, the Pentagon’s Afghan conundrum remains. No one wants to advocate loosening rules that might see more civilians killed. But no one wants to explain whether the restrictions are increasing the number of coffins arriving at Dover Air Force Base, and seeding disillusionment among those sent to fight.

    General Faces Unease Among His Own Troops, Too, NYT, 22.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/23/world/asia/23troops.html

McChrystal’s Fate in Limbo as He Prepares to Meet Obama

June 22, 2010
The New York Times
By HELENE COOPER, THOM SHANKER and DEXTER FILKINS
 

This article is by Helene Cooper, Thom Shanker and Dexter Filkins.

WASHINGTON — President Obama’s top commander in Afghanistan flew to Washington on Tuesday to find out whether he would be fired for remarks he and members of his staff made that were contemptuous of senior administration officials, laying bare the disarray and enmity in a foreign-policy team that is struggling with the war.

In an article in Rolling Stone magazine, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal and his aides spoke critically of nearly every member of the president’s national security team, saying President Obama appeared “uncomfortable and intimidated” during his first meeting with the general, and dismissing Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. as “Bite Me.”

The firestorm was fueled by increasing doubts — even in the military — that Afghanistan can be won and by crumbling public support for the nine-year war as American casualties rise.

The criticism of General McChrystal’s statements was swift, and the general had apologized and prepared a letter of resignation, though President Obama had not made up his mind whether to accept it when they meet on Wednesday morning.

“I think it’s clear that the article in which he and his team appeared showed poor judgment,” Mr. Obama said after a cabinet meeting. “But I also want to make sure I talk to him directly before I make final judgment.”

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, the general’s biggest supporter, released a statement criticizing General McChrystal for “a significant mistake” while Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was described by a senior aide as “deeply disappointed” by the comments.

Whether or not General McChrystal remains at the helm of the Afghan war effort, Mr. Obama will try to use Wednesday’s meeting to urge his fractious Afghanistan staff to pull together, said his press secretary, Robert Gibbs. The president, Mr. Gibbs said, will say that “it is time for everyone involved to put away their petty disagreements, put aside egos and get to the job at hand.”

But that may be easier said than done. At a time when violence in Afghanistan is sharply rising and several central planks of the president’s strategy to “disrupt, dismantle and defeat” the Taliban and Al Qaeda have stalled, many of the president’s top advisers have continued to criticize one another to reporters and international allies alike, usually in private conversations, and almost always off the record.

“Yes, we do hear them disparage each other,” said a senior European diplomat who works closely with the United States on Afghanistan strategy. “It’s never good to hear that.”

Bruce O. Riedel, a senior fellow at Brookings Institution who helped the administration formulate its initial Afghan policy, added, “This flap shows once again that his team is not pulling together, but is engaging in backbiting.”

The many Afghanistan team conflicts include complaints from the American ambassador, Karl W. Eikenberry, about Richard C. Holbrooke, the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, who has been portrayed by some as disruptive and whose relationship with President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan chilled last year after difficult meetings following the August election. For his part, Ambassador Eikenberry has had his own tensions with the mercurial Mr. Karzai.

In one episode that dramatized the building animosities, Gen. James L. Jones, the national security adviser, wrote to Ambassador Eikenberry in February, sympathizing with his complaints about a visit Mr. Holbrooke had recently made to Afghanistan. In the note, which went out over unsecure channels, officials said, General Jones soothed the ambassador by suggesting that Mr. Holbrooke would soon be removed from his job.

The Jones note prompted Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to complain to Mr. Obama, and her support for Mr. Holbrooke has kept him in his job. In the article, which was posted on the magazine’s Web site on Tuesday, one of General McChrystal’s aides is quoted as referring to General Jones as a “clown.”

The infighting has been made more severe by the increasingly perilous situation on the ground. Violence in Afghanistan is on the rise. The mission to pacify Marja and Kandahar is far off track. And the effort to create a viable Afghan government is increasingly in doubt because of widespread corruption. Criticism is mounting on Capitol Hill, even among the president’s backers, and many allies have announced that they are looking for the exit, with others expected to do the same in the coming months.

As the administration struggles to manage its relationship with Mr. Karzai, General McChrystal has proved to be the one American official most able to successfully deal with him on a daily basis. Beyond that, Mr. Obama’s war strategy is in many ways a McChrystal strategy. The general devised the plan, which called for thousands of extra troops to fight the insurgency and, perhaps more important, create a sense of security for the Afghan people.

There has been vigorous debate within the administration about how to proceed in Afghanistan, but General McChrystal and his aides did not overtly criticize administration policy.

Rather, the differences were personal, and publicly aired. One administration official described Mr. Obama as being particularly furious at a McChrystal aide’s characterization of him as not seeming “very engaged” during their first White House meeting.

Over all, the magazine article depicted General McChrystal at the head of a small circle of aides engaged in almost locker-room trash talk as they discussed foreign policy, the French, their allegiance to each other and their own concerns about course of the war. The civilian communications adviser who set up the interview, Duncan Boothby, has resigned.

Even though many advisers fear changing commanders at this stage of the war, there was speculation at the Pentagon and the White House about who could replace General McChrystal.

Potential successors were thought to include Lt. Gen. David M. Rodriguez, commander of the NATO military corps headquarters in Kabul, which manages the day-to-day fight in Afghanistan. General Rodriguez is a confidant of General McChrystal and previously served as a senior military assistant to Mr. Gates. Another possibility is Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, in charge of the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command, who has extensive experience in the Islamic world.

Another potential successor is Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, currently commander of the military’s Joint Forces Command. General Mattis is a respected war-fighter with experience in counterinsurgency missions. Some have even suggested Gen. David H. Petraeus, who leads the United States Central Command and General McChrystal’s boss and mentor, could take over the Afghan mission himself.

As the president considers his options, he must also face his own struggles with the military. By all accounts, he felt that his commanders tried to manipulate him into going along with their Afghan strategy, through leaks to the press and public comments.

The military leadership, meanwhile, continues to be frustrated by what it sees as an unrealistic deadline for completing the mission. Some have also complained that a president distracted by a health care overhaul, a flagging economy and an oil spill has not been a forceful advocate for rallying the public behind the war.

The author of the Rolling Stone article — Michael Hastings, a freelance journalist — appears to have been granted intimate access to General McChrystal’s inner circle. Most of the comments seem to have been uttered during unguarded moments, in places like bars and restaurants where the general and his aides gathered to unwind.

A McChrystal aide is quoted saying of Mr. Holbrooke: “The Boss says he’s like a wounded animal. Holbrooke keeps hearing rumors that he’s going to be fired, so that makes him dangerous.” On another occasion, General McChrystal is described as reacting with exasperation when he receives an e-mail message from Mr. Holbrooke. “Oh, not another e-mail from Holbrooke. I don’t even want to open it.”

The article also describes a conversation in which General McChrystal and an aide talk about Mr. Biden, who is known to have opposed the decision to escalate the war. “Are you asking about Vice President Biden?” General McChrystal jokes.

“Biden?” suggests a top adviser. “Did you say ‘Bite me?’ ”

Military officers interviewed on Tuesday noted that while the general’s statements could be viewed as inexcusable and disrespectful, he never indicated a decision not to carry out Mr. Obama’s orders or fulfill the president’s strategy.

That distinction may be too subtle in the current phase of poisoned relations between the White House and the military, but it is significant to military officers. For example, when Adm. William J. Fallon, then in charge of the Central Command, was forced into early retirement in March 2008, it was because his statements to Esquire magazine were viewed as directly at odds with White House policy on Iran.

White House officials sought to play down the infighting within the administration’s Afghanistan team, though one senior aide expressed dismay at what he described as “an undisciplined, jocular culture” that called into question whether General McChrystal and his advisers were able to execute an operation “charged with leading 150,000 in a war that is pretty serious.”

Still, said Denis McDonough, the National Security Council chief of staff and one of the president’s closest aides, “the challenge isn’t that we’re all on each other’s holiday card lists.”

“The challenge is to make sure that we’re all advancing the national interest by staying on the offense against Al Qaeda,” he said.


Helene Cooper and Thom Shanker reported from Washington, and Dexter Filkins from Kabul, Afghanistan. Mark Landler contributed reporting from Washington.

    McChrystal’s Fate in Limbo as He Prepares to Meet Obama, NYT, 22.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/23/world/asia/23mcchrystal.html

McChrystal Is Summoned to Washington Over Remarks

June 22, 2010
The New York Times
By DEXTER FILKINS

KABUL, Afghanistan — Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top commander in Afghanistan, was ordered back to Washington on Tuesday after a magazine article portrayed him and his staff as openly contemptuous of some senior members of the Obama administration, the United States ambassador to Afghanistan and senior European officials.

An administration official said Tuesday morning that General McChrystal had been summoned to Washington to meet with President Obama at the White House on Wednesday “to explain to the Pentagon and the commander in chief his quotes in the piece,” which appears in the July 8-22 edition of Rolling Stone. General McChrystal was scheduled to attend a monthly meeting on Afghanistan by teleconference, the official said, but was directed to return to Washington in light of the article.

The article shows General McChrystal or his aides talking in sharply derisive terms about Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.; Ambassador Karl Eikenberry; Richard C. Holbrooke, the special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan; and an unnamed minister in the French government. One of General McChrystal’s aides is quoted as referring to the national security adviser, James L. Jones, as a “clown.”

A senior administration official said Mr. Obama was furious about the article, particularly the suggestion that he was uninterested and unprepared to discuss the Afghanistan war after he took office. The official said that Mr. Biden, who also was criticized in the story, will attend the meeting on Wednesday with the president.

The piece, entitled “The Runaway General,” quotes aides saying General McChrystal was “pretty disappointed” by an Oval Office meeting with Mr. Obama, and that he found the president “uncomfortable and intimidated” during a Pentagon meeting with General McChrystal and several other generals.

The article does not portray any serious policy differences with Mr. Obama, who chose General McChrystal to take charge of a major escalation of American troops and materiel, in hopes of reversing the deteriorating situation here.

Still, the piece seems destined to raise questions about General McChrystal’s judgment, and to spark debate over the wisdom of Mr. Obama’s strategy, at a time when violence in Afghanistan is rising sharply and when several central planks of the strategy appear stalled. Two important American allies, the Dutch and Canadians, have announced plans to pull their combat troops from the country.

In a statement, General McChrystal apologized for his remarks.

“I extend my sincerest apology for this profile,” he said. “It was a mistake reflecting poor judgment and should never have happened. Throughout my career, I have lived by the principles of personal honor and professional integrity. What is reflected in this article falls far short of that standard.”

His statement continued: “I have enormous respect and admiration for President Obama and his national security team, and for the civilian leaders and troops fighting this war and I remain committed to ensuring its successful outcome.”

The article’s author, Michael Hastings, a freelance journalist, appears to have been granted intimate access to General McChrystal’s inner circle. Most of the comments appear to have been uttered during unguarded moments, in places like bars and restaurants where the general and his aides gathered to unwind. The piece is due out Friday.

About Mr. Holbrooke, Mr. Obama’s special envoy to the region, an aide to General McChrystal is quoted saying: “The Boss says he’s like a wounded animal. Holbrooke keeps hearing rumors that he’s going to be fired, so that makes him dangerous.”

On another occasion, General McChrystal is described as reacting with exasperation when he receives an e-mail message from Mr. Holbrooke. “Oh not another e-mail from Holbrooke. I don’t even want to open it.”

The piece describes a conversation in which General McChrystal and an aide talk about Mr. Biden. Mr. Biden is known to have opposed the decision to escalate the war, preferring instead a slimmed-down plan that focusing on containing terrorism.

“Are you asking about Vice President Biden?” General McChrystal jokes.

“Biden?” suggests a top adviser. “Did you say ‘Bite me?’ ”

General McChrystal is also quoted as uttering disdainful remarks about Mr. Eikenberry, the ambassador to Afghanistan, with whom he has had sharp disagreements over the war. Last year, Mr. Eikenberry sent confidential cables to Washington opposing Mr. Obama’s decision to send more troops.

“He’s one that covers his flanks for the history books,” General McChrystal is quoted as saying. “Now, if we fail, they can say, ’I told you so.’ ”

The piece also describes a meeting in which a soldier vents his frustration over General McChrystal’s tightening of the rules over the use of air strikes to kill insurgents. In the article, the soldier tells General McChrystal that he is endangering their lives by forcing them to be too restrained.

Pfc. Jared Pautsch is quoted as telling the general, we should just drop a bomb on the place, using an expletive. “What are we doing here?”


Jeff Zeleny contributed reporting from Washington.

    McChrystal Is Summoned to Washington Over Remarks, NYT, 22.6.2010 ,http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/23/world/asia/23mcchrystal.html

Drug Use Has Increased in Afghanistan, U.N. Report Says

June 21, 2010
The New York Timers
By ALISSA J. RUBIN

KABUL, Afghanistan — The last several years of poverty, conflict and widely available opium are taking a toll on the Afghan population, with roughly 800,000 Afghan adults now using opium, heroin and other illicit drugs, a jump from five years ago, according to a study by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

In a report released Monday, the United Nations detailed the results of a study to determine the prevalence of drug use and found a jump in the use of every type of drug, with heroin use rising the most sharply, making Afghanistan one of five countries with the highest percentage of drug users.

“Many Afghans seem to be taking drugs as a kind of self-medication against the hardships of life,” said Antonio Maria Costa, the executive director of the United Nations office on Drugs and Crime.

The study found that close to 7 percent of the adult population of 14 million were drug users, defined as someone who regularly used opium, heroin, opiate derivatives or tranquilizers both in the last year and in the past 30 days. Of those, 90 percent said they were in need of drug treatment.

The report was a collaboration of the United Nations, the Afghan Counter-Narcotics Ministry and the Public Health Ministry. It reflects more than 5,000 interviews nationwide, including in conflict areas, although the report notes that interviews were not possible in all districts of Helmand Province, which has seen particularly heavy fighting this year. The method is the same one used in other countries where the United Nations surveys drug use.

The report also found that the most commonly used drug was opium, with 80 percent of those surveyed saying they had used it in the last year and most saying they were regular users. Of all drug users, 30 percent had taken heroin in their lives and nearly all of those said they had taken the drug within a month of speaking to United Nations data collectors.

In other Afghanistan news, 14 detainees were released over the weekend, 12 of them from the Detention Facility in Parwan, which is run by the American military. The other two were released from an Interior Ministry detention facility.

The Afghan government took credit for the releases, saying they were following through on one of the promises of the national consultative peace jirga that met earlier this month, said Fazil Ahmad Faqiryar, deputy attorney general and a member of the committee reviewing detainee cases.

But the American military said that the committee did not have jurisdiction over Afghans held in American detention facilities and that the releases were part of “a structured process” of review by a military board.

President Hamid Karzai formed the committee to look into cases in which detainees were held without sufficient evidence to try them in court and those involving opponents of the government. The commission is headed by the justice minister.


Abdul Waheed Wafa contributed reporting.

    Drug Use Has Increased in Afghanistan, U.N. Report Says, NYT, 21.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/22/world/asia/22afghan.html

U.S. Said to Fund Afghan Warlords to Protect Convoys

June 21, 2010
The New York Times
By DEXTER FILKINS

KABUL, Afghanistan — American taxpayers have inadvertently created a network of warlords across Afghanistan who are making millions of dollars escorting NATO convoys and operating outside the control of either the Afghan government or the American and NATO militaries, according to the results of a Congressional investigation released Monday.

The investigation, begun last year by the House Subcommittee for National Security, found that money given to these Afghan warlords often amounts to little more than mafia-style protection payments, with some NATO convoys that refused to pay the warlords coming under attack.

The subcommittee, led by Representative John F. Tierney, Democrat of Massachusetts, also uncovered evidence suggesting that American taxpayer money is making its way to the Taliban. Several trucking company supervisors told investigators that they believed the gunmen they hired to escort their convoys bribed the Taliban not to attack.

The warlords who are paid with American money, the investigators said, are undermining the legitimate Afghan government that Americans soldiers and Marines are struggling to build, and will most likely threaten the government long after the Americans and NATO leave.

The source of the taxpayer money is a $2.1 billion contract called Host Nation Trucking, which pays for the movement of food and supplies to some 200 American bases across this arid, mountainous country, which in many places has no paved roads.

The 79-page report, entitled “Warlord Inc.,” paints an anarchic picture of contemporary Afghanistan, with the country’s major highways being controlled by groups of freelance gunmen who answer to no one — and who are being paid for by the United States.

Afghanistan, the investigation found, plays host to hundreds of unregistered private security companies employing as many as 70,000 largely unsupervised gunmen.

“The principal private security subcontractors,” the report said, “are warlords, strongmen, commanders and militia leaders who compete with the Afghan central government for power and authority.

“The warlords thrive in a vacuum of government authority, and their interests are in fundamental conflict with U.S. aims to build a strong Afghan government,” the report said.

At the heart of the problem, the investigation found, is that the American military pays trucking companies to move its supplies across Afghanistan — and leaves it up to the trucking companies to protect themselves. The trucking companies in turn pay warlords and commanders to provide security.

These subcontracts, the investigation found, are handed out without any oversight from the Department of Defense, despite clear instructions from Congress that the department provide such oversight. The report states that military officers in Kabul had little idea whom the trucking companies were paying to provide security or how much they spent for it, and had rarely if ever inspected a convoy to find out.

The report recommends that the military award the trucking contracts and security contracts separately.

It also lists a number of warlords who control stretches of road in Afghanistan: Ruhullah, who like many Afghans goes by one name, has a reputation for dealing ruthlessly with the villages along the highways he controls; Matiulllah Khan, whose 2,000-man militia controls the road between Kandahar and Tirinkot; and Abdul Razziq, the commander of the border police in Spin Boldak, one of the principal trucking routes into the country.

Mr. Ruhullah commands a force of about 600 gunmen that works for Watan Risk Management, a security firm overseen by Rashid and Rateb Popal, who are cousins of President Hamid Karzai. In an interview last month, Rashid Popal denied that his company had paid any money to Taliban insurgents.

The report said Watan Risk Management and Mr. Ruhullah have been paid “several tens of millions of dollars” to escort NATO convoys.

“Long after the United States leaves Afghanistan, and the convoy security business shuts down, these warlords will likely continue to play a major role as autonomous centers of political, economic and military power,” the report said.

The report detailed episodes when trucking companies that refused to pay warlords to escort their trucks were attacked by the same men. A trucking company executive who refused to pay Mr. Ruhullah told investigators that his trucks were attacked by Mr. Ruhullah’s fighters. Mr. Ruhullah, the executive said, “is willing to ruthlessly exploit the lack of military control along the routes on which he operates.”

    U.S. Said to Fund Afghan Warlords to Protect Convoys, NYT, 21.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/22/world/asia/22contractors.html

Working to Help a Haven for Afghan Women Blossom

June 20, 2010
The New York Times
By ROD NORDLAND

KABUL, Afghanistan — There was in the city an old garden, and in that garden there were trees, and under the trees there were women.

And there were no scarves on the heads of the women who sat under the trees in the old Kabul Women’s Garden.

That was all something remarkable once upon a time, as it is even now. Screened from male scrutiny by the leafy canopies of almond or apricot trees, women could go outside as they pleased, dare to wriggle naked toes in fountain water or just gossip without the veil.

Now this oasis of freedom for women, surrounded by the misogynist desert of the capital city, is undergoing a rebirth.

As with so much happening today in Afghanistan, the midwives are foreigners, the gestation is troubled and the parents are hopeful.

Some say this fabled eight-acre enclosure in the Shahrara neighborhood of Kabul goes back to the days of Babur the Conqueror, in the 1500s. More reliably it is dated to the 1940s or ’50s, when King Zahir Shah was said to have bequeathed it to the state.

Karima Salik tells the story of the Kabul Women’s Garden she remembers as a girl in the 1970s, a halcyon age for Afghanistan and its women, before the present 32 years of unbroken war began.

“The trees covered everything,” she recalled. “There was laughter and chatter and music.”

For the past three years, Ms. Salik has managed the garden, which is now in the midst of a $500,000 face-lift supported by the United States Agency for International Development and CARE International. Most of the money pays laborers who are landscaping, planting trees, rebuilding footpaths and raising the walls still higher. Women on construction projects are almost unheard of in Afghanistan, but the United States Agency for International Development program requires that at least 25 percent of the work force be female. Here they are 50 percent of it.

Ms. Salik’s childhood witnessed one of the most liberated periods for women in Afghan history, when the communist government took over in 1978 and enforced equality, banned the burqa and mandated education for girls.

The revolt of the mujahedeen, led by conservative, rural warlords, wiped that all out in a few years’ time.

People desperate for fuel felled the garden’s trees for firewood. Militiamen held cockfights within the walls. Women dared not go near the place.

In the Taliban era, the city was more peaceful but women were confined to their homes. The northeast end of the garden was appropriated by the mosque next door. A warlord who came over to the Taliban was rewarded with the southwest corner for a construction project. The rest, renamed the Springtime Garden, became a public dump.

When Ms. Salik and the Ministry of Women’s Affairs took over three years ago, “We hauled 45 truckloads of trash out.”

Now male police officers outside the tall steel gates open them only for women, or for male children if they are under 9. Inside the gates are those rarest of public employees: female police officers, two of them. They are reinforced by five female intelligence officers, whose main job is to look for suicide bombers who might hide explosives under the capaciousness of the burqa.

Mostly the burqas come off once inside the gate, and there are dressing rooms where many of the women change into normal clothes, putting on makeup and high heels.

Then, unheard-of things happen here. The women themselves have raised funds for a tiny mosque, with religious instruction given by a woman — one of only a handful of such places in a city where at least 1.5 million female Muslims live.

A consortium of European Union aid groups built a spacious gym, and women in tights take fitness classes there or play badminton. The Italians started the Always Spring Restaurant, featuring something else unknown in Kabul, female pizza chefs.

Between the compound’s outer and inner walls, a shopping arcade of little, female-run businesses grew up, many of them financed with microgrants: hairdressing, embroidery, children’s clothing, ladies lingerie.

There are other such businesses in Kabul, but none are run by women, to whom the busy bazaars are off limits not by law but by hard custom.

Some come here for opportunity, many for refuge of one sort or another. Fairly often, women who have run away from abusive husbands, or from fathers who threaten to commit a so-called honor killing, wind up here, and the staff members find them a place in one of the city’s secret women’s shelters.

Arezo Ghafori, 22, has a talent for hairdressing and a family of eight for whom she is the sole breadwinner, but the men in the family refused to allow her to work, even if they starved, until she started a salon inside the garden.

Leila Husseini, Afghanistan’s 25-year-old Asian tae kwon do champion in the women’s under-95-pound class, came here to train and also to lead courses for other women.

All of this did not happen without a fight. Ms. Salik called in the police over the mosque’s encroachment, and the mullah led a noisy demonstration of male neighbors in protest. “I used religious arguments against him,” she said, “and pointed out it was a sin to use stolen land for prayers.”

They compromised on a new wall, but the mullah, Abdul Rahim, is still seething. He says that a police officer was caught inside the garden in an improper assignation with a woman, but that the incident was hushed up.

“I don’t care what the hell they do,” he said. “But inside the garden they get all dressed up and do their makeup and they have other intentions.”

A politically well-connected former warlord named Amanullah Guzar had gained control of the Taliban warlord’s old building site, and a 13-story building began rising there, overlooking their walls and, worse, providing vantage points into the gym’s windows. Construction workers leered and jeered, and Ms. Salik went to court to stop the building, which she claims is actually on land belonging to the garden.

“Women need to have privacy here or it does not work,” she said.

Efforts to reach Mr. Guzar for comment were unsuccessful.

“It is women against men,” she said afterward, uncharacteristically discouraged. “Our action will never succeed.”

A few weeks later, she was hopeful again. She had found powerful allies who promised to intercede. In the meantime, work on the building was suspended and the aerobics classes resumed.

The face-lift is due to finish July 5. Every 40 days a new crew of female laborers is brought in, giving new people an opportunity to earn money and learn skills.

Some are jobless poor, like Zehia and Hassina, two 19-year-olds pushing wheelbarrows, who had baseball caps on over their headscarves and black veils across their faces — more out of shame than modesty.

“We are like men here,” Zehia said. “It is an embarrassment for educated girls like us to work like this.”

Both are English-speaking high school graduates who have rejected all offers of marriage, hoping to get into a university.

“What would I do with a husband, especially an uneducated husband?” Zehia asked. “A job is much better.”

In a broad sense, the success of the Kabul Women’s Garden is an admission of failure. Women simply cannot go to other parks in Kabul unless chaperoned by male relatives, and often not even then; most parks, like most public spaces, are overwhelmingly male.

“You can’t change people’s ideas overnight,” Ms. Salik said. “So we need to address the immediate needs.”

Ms. Salik has other projects in mind for the Kabul Women’s Garden.

There is an unused parking lot beside the garden where women could learn how to drive, something almost unheard of here — not because it is illegal, just because it is not done.

Most of all, Ms. Salik would like to see a program that would take women on brief trips to other countries, perhaps for job training, but really, she said, just to see how women live in lands where there are no women’s gardens.

    Working to Help a Haven for Afghan Women Blossom, NYT, 20.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/21/world/asia/21kabul.html

Strike in Pakistan Kills 16 Militants

June 19, 2010
The New York Times
By PIR ZUBAIR SHAH

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A missile strike in North Waziristan killed at least 16 militants on Saturday as they were making plans to go fight NATO forces in Afghanistan, residents and an intelligence official said.

They said a single missile, believed to have been fired from a drone aircraft, struck a government water-supply plant in the village of Haider Khel, near the town of Mir Ali, where the group was meeting.

Most of the concrete, government-built structures in the area, like schools, hospitals and water plants, have been occupied by militants, who use them to meet and for training.

The residents said that 11 of the dead were foreigners, mostly Arabs and some Uzbeks. An additional 19 people were wounded.

The compound is near the border of Haider Khel and Hassu Khel, two villages that are militant strongholds.

The North Waziristan tribal area borders Afghanistan and is a base of Sirajuddin Haqqani, the leader of an insurgent network blamed by the Americans for recent attacks in Kabul, the Afghan capital. North Waziristan is also the place where the American authorities say that Faisal Shahzad, who is accused of trying to bomb Times Square, was trained in explosives.

    Strike in Pakistan Kills 16 Militants, NYT, 19.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/world/asia/20pstan.html

Afghan Civilians Said to Be Killed in an Airstrike

June 19, 2010
The New York Times
By ROD NORDLAND

KABUL, Afghanistan — Ten civilians, including at least five women and children, were killed in NATO airstrikes in Khost Province, the provincial police chief said Saturday. Five other civilians were killed, as were two Afghan National Army soldiers and two police officials, in other violence around the country on Saturday.

NATO’s International Security Assistance Force said in a statement that it had carried out precision airstrikes against a large number of armed insurgents from the Haqqani network, Taliban allies operating in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

“We are aware of conflicting reports of civilian casualties from local officials and are therefore reviewing the operational details of the engagement,” the force said in a statement. “Our mission is to protect the population and we will accept full responsibility if civilians were unintentionally harmed in the intense fight against the insurgents.”

In Oruzgan Province in southwest Afghanistan, a remote-controlled mine exploded on a road in Dehrawot District as a police vehicle passed, killing the district police chief and one of his bodyguards, and three civilians nearby, according to Oruzgan’s provincial police chief, Juma Gul Himat.

In eastern Paktia Province, a Taliban attack on an Afghan Army checkpoint in the Zurmat District killed the two soldiers, according to Rohullah Samon, a spokesman for the governor’s office. An unknown number of Taliban were also killed in the attack, he said.

Two civilians died when a roadside bomb blew up their car in Marja, in Helmand Province, according to a statement from the Ministry of Interior.

Coalition forces claimed to have killed at least 17 Taliban insurgents in six operations throughout the country, including a Taliban subcommander, Mullah Abdul Razaq. The International Security Assistance Force said Mr. Razaq was suspected of involvement in a roadside bombing that killed two American soldiers in northern Kunduz Province on Wednesday. ISAF said Mr. Razaq and “a number of insurgents” were killed on a raid on their compound in the Chahar Darah District.

Two airstrikes in eastern Paktika Province killed 13 Taliban fighters in the Zadran Valley, according to Mukhles Afghan, the spokesman for the Paktika governor’s office. Only one was an Afghan, he said; the others were Pakistani or Arab insurgents.

In the capital of Helmand Province, Lashkar Gah, the authorities approaching a compound returned that gunfire was coming from it and shot the attacker to death. They found bomb-making equipment within the compound, ISAF said in a statement.

In Logar Province, in central Afghanistan, another insurgent was killed after he fired on troops searching for the province’s Taliban shadow governor, NATO said, while in Helmand a suspected insurgent was killed as troops chased a senior Taliban commander.

In Badghis Province in the north, a search for an insurgent commander by Afghan commandos and United States Special Operations Forces led to a firefight, with insurgents using heavy weapons from a fortified position. An airstrike called in by coalition forces killed “many” insurgents, ISAF said.


Taimoor Shah contributed reporting from Kandahar, and an Afghan employee of The New York Times from Khost.

    Afghan Civilians Said to Be Killed in an Airstrike, NYT, 19.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/world/asia/20airstrike.html

Violence Up Sharply in Afghanistan, Report Finds

June 19, 2010
The New York Times
By ROD NORDLAND
 

KABUL, Afghanistan — Violence in Afghanistan increased substantially over the past three months, most of it due to attacks by “anti-government forces,” the United Nations said in a report released here Saturday.

Especially alarming were increases in suicide bombings and assassinations, as well as a near-doubling of roadside bombings compared to the same period in 2009, according to the quarterly report of the U.N. Secretary General to the Security Council.

“The number of security incidents increased significantly, compared to previous years and contrary to seasonal trends,” the report said, adding that most of this was a consequence of military operations in the southern part of the country, particularly Helmand and Kandahar provinces where increased NATO military operations have been underway.

However, most of the victims of the increased violence continue to be civilians, and the proportion of those killed by insurgents, rather than the government or its NATO allies, rose to 70 percent from April through June 2010. In the previous three-month period, the U.N. blamed insurgents for 67 percent of civilian deaths.

The most dramatic change has been in suicide bombings, which have tripled this year compared to 2009, with such attacks now taking place an average of three times a week. In addition, two out of three suicide attacks are considered “complex suicide attacks,” in which attackers use a suicide bomb as well as other weapons.

“The shift to more complex suicide attacks demonstrates a growing capability of the local terrorist networks linked to al Qaeda,” the report said.

The report depicted a concerted effort on the part of insurgents — who it referred to simply as “anti-government forces” — to deliberately target the civilian population. “Insurgents followed up their threats against the civilian population with, on average, seven assassinations every week, the majority of which were conducted in the south and south-east regions,” the report said.

This represented a 45 percent increase in assassinations over 2009.

A third of all violent incidents resulted from improvised explosive devices or roadside bombs, which had increased 94 percent from January through April 2010 compared to the same period in 2009. “The rise in incidents involving improvised explosive devices constitutes an alarming trend,” the report said, adding that a third of all casualties resulted from the roadside bombs.

The decline in civilian casualties attributed to NATO and government forces continued the trend seen since last year, despite the increased tempo of the conflict this year, particularly in the south. The report singled out “escalation of force” incidents for casualties inflicted by the coalition. These are incidents in which civilians are killed at military checkpoints or near military convoys when they fail to heed or understand orders.

The report cited efforts to minimize such casualties by the military, including a public information campaign, non-lethal warning methods, and “a reiteration of the July 2009 tactical directive by the commander of the International Security Assistance Force limiting the use of force.” Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal has emphasized reducing civilian casualties as a key goal of the war effort.

Previously, air strikes had been the leading factor in civilian casualties caused by the NATO military, but there was no mention of such attacks in the current U.N. report. General McChrystal also has sharply limited the use of close air support where there is a risk to civilians.

The report also noted that 332 children were killed or maimed as the result of the conflict, mainly in areas where military activity had increased, including Helmand Province as well as eastern and northeastern provinces. Sixty percent of the children were killed by insurgent attacks, it said; 24 children died in crossfire between the two sides.

In addition, attacks on schools increased throughout the country, most as a result of attacks by anti-government elements, the report said, citing “intimidation of pupils and teachers; placement of improvised explosive devices in schools; abductions, beatings and killing of school staff; and arson and other violent target attacks on schools.”

The secretary general’s report also noted efforts of the Afghan government to hold a consultative peace jirga and to prepare for elections next September.

The report was presented by Secretary General Ban Ki Moon to the Security Council last week, but released publicly in Kabul on Saturday.

In an unrelated news conference in Kabul on Saturday, a NATO spokesman, Brig. Gen. Josef Blotz, gave a different set of statistics on civilian casualties. During the last three months, General Blotz said, civilian casualties caused by the coalition overall dropped by 44.4 percent compared to same period in 2009, while those caused by the insurgents increased by 36 percent.


Mujib Mashal contributed reporting.

    Violence Up Sharply in Afghanistan, Report Finds, NYT, 19.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/world/asia/20afghan.html

Setbacks Cloud U.S. Plans to Get Out of Afghanistan

June 14, 2010
The New York Times
By PETER BAKER and MARK LANDLER

WASHINGTON — Six months after President Obama decided to send more forces to Afghanistan, the halting progress in the war has crystallized longstanding tensions within the government over the viability of his plan to turn around the country and begin pulling out by July 2011.

Within the administration, the troubles in clearing out the Taliban from a second-tier region and the elusive loyalties of the Afghan president have prompted anxious discussions about whether the policy can work on the timetable the president has set. Even before the recent setbacks, the military was highly skeptical of setting a date to start withdrawing, but Mr. Obama insisted on it as a way to bring to conclusion a war now in its ninth year.

For now, the White House has decided to wait until a review, already scheduled for December, to assess whether the target date can still work. But officials are emphasizing that the July 2011 withdrawal start will be based on conditions in the country, and that the president has yet to decide how quickly troops will be pulled out.

Even if some troops do begin coming home then, the officials said that it may be a small number at first. Given that he has tripled the overall force since taking office, Mr. Obama could still end his term with more forces in Afghanistan than when he began it.

“Things are not looking good,” said Bruce O. Riedel, a regional specialist at the Brookings Institution who helped formulate the administration’s first Afghan strategy in early 2009. “There’s not much sign of the turnaround that people were hoping for.”

Persistent violence in the southern area around Marja, which was supposed to be an early showcase of the new counterinsurgency operation, has reinforced doubts in Washington about the current approach — doubts only fueled by President Hamid Karzai’s abrupt dismissal of two security officials widely trusted by the Americans.

As he manages that situation, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the commander in Afghanistan, said last week that operations in the Taliban heartland of Kandahar “will happen more slowly than we originally anticipated.”

Other military officers, were more pessimistic. “If anybody thinks Kandahar will be solved this year,” a senior military officer said, “they are kidding themselves.”

As a result, some inside the administration are already looking ahead to next year. “There are people who always want to rethink the strategy,” said a senior administration official. He, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal conversations.

The official said that skeptics like Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who opposed a new commitment of troops during last fall’s strategy review, favor rethinking the approach, while others who supported more troops, like Gen. David H. Petraeus, want to stay the course.

Other officials said there is no debate for the moment about stepping up the December review and that Mr. Biden, among others, was comfortable with waiting until then for a formal reassessment. But they acknowledged the uncertain trend lines, calling it a glass-half-full or half-empty situation, as one put it.

“There’s some evidence that reminds us that this is not going to be a straight line of progress,” said a senior official, reflecting the White House view. “It’s probably best described as zigs and zags. Some days, it’s two steps forward, one step back, or one step forward, two steps back.”

The strategy faces scrutiny in Washington in coming days. General Petraeus and Michèle Flournoy, the under secretary of defense for policy, are scheduled to testify Tuesday before the Senate Armed Services Committee and Wednesday before the House Armed Services Committee.

Mr. Obama next week will hold a regularly scheduled video conference with his senior civilian and military officials in the region, including General Petraeus and General McChrystal.

Administration officials will use the opportunities to argue that there is mixed progress and that it is too early to draw firm conclusions. They note that not all of the 30,000 additional troops sent by Mr. Obama in December have arrived yet.

Pentagon officials said Monday that there were now 93,000 American troops in Afghanistan, going up to 105,000 by the end of summer.

While acknowledging setbacks, administration officials point to positive signs, including Mr. Karzai’s recent peace conference intended to lure Taliban figures out of the war and his trip to the volatile south last weekend. They also expressed satisfaction that the Afghan military and the police have stepped up recruitment and retention to meet their 2010 goals, an achievement they attributed to the urgency produced by Mr. Obama’s July 2011 target date.

In his appearance before Congress on Tuesday, General Petraeus plans to argue that the United States has spent the last 15 to 18 months “getting the inputs right,” meaning not just tripling the number of forces but also reorganizing military and civilian efforts and installing fresh personnel, according to a senior military officer familiar with the testimony.

Now, it will be more possible to produce “outputs,” or results, he plans to say, and will remind lawmakers of his prediction that “it would get harder before it would get easier.”

At the same time, American officials shared frustration over the failure of NATO allies to produce 450 trainers sought by the administration. The dismissal of the Afghan security officials and reports that Mr. Karzai doubts the Americans can win have also soured the mood. But despite frustration with Mr. Karzai, administration officials have concluded they have no obvious alternative.

“As far as I can tell, they have no plan what to do about this,” said a senior Democratic Congressional aide, who asked not to be identified while sounding critical of the White House. “They tried tough love; that didn’t work. They tried love bombing, and that didn’t work. The thinking now is, we’ll just muddle through. But that’s not a strategy.”

On Capitol Hill, lawmakers expressed concern about Afghanistan, but diverged on whether the administration should recalibrate its policy.

“This type of warfare is difficult at best,” said Representative Ike Skelton, a Missouri Democrat and chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. “At the end of the day, it’s going to be a challenge of governance. Karzai’s a challenge. But you work with what you have.”

Representative Duncan Hunter Jr., a California Republican on the committee, just returned from a visit to Afghanistan, his second time back after serving a seven-month tour there as a Marine captain in 2007. “They are getting stuff done and weeding through Karzai’s government,” Mr. Hunter said. “It just takes time and they don’t have the time.”

Mr. Riedel, the regional specialist, said the administration had few attractive alternatives to its current course. Pouring in more troops is politically infeasible, he said, while pulling out altogether would make the United States vulnerable to a terrorist attack organized by Al Qaeda and originating in a Taliban-dominated Afghanistan.

“Staying where you are is not attractive, because sooner or later, it means you’ll lose,” Mr. Riedel said. “Obama inherited a disaster in Afghanistan and he faces the same bad options he faced in 2008.”


Eric Schmitt, Thom Shanker and Elisabeth Bumiller contributed reporting.

    Setbacks Cloud U.S. Plans to Get Out of Afghanistan, NYT, 14.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/15/world/asia/15military.html

Taking Stock in Afghanistan

June 13, 2010
The New York Times

There are not a lot of good weeks in Afghanistan. But last week was particularly bad. At least 26 American or NATO soldiers were killed in attacks by insurgents. The commanding general, Stanley McChrystal, announced that his long promised offensive in the Taliban’s home base of Kandahar would be delayed for months.

Then The Times reported that Afghan officials say President Hamid Karzai is trying to strike a secret deal with the Taliban and Pakistan and doubts that the Americans and NATO can ever defeat the insurgents.

General McChrystal’s counterinsurgency strategy still seems like the best chance to stabilize Afghanistan and get American troops home. His aim is to push militants out of key cities and towns and quickly build up effective local governments so residents have the incentive and means to help stop extremists from returning.

That theory ran into harsh reality the first time General McChrystal tried to apply it, in the city of Marja, a lesser Taliban stronghold. Four months after American troops drove fighters out of Marja’s center, there is no functioning government, international aid programs lag, and the Taliban are coming back. A surge of assassinations of local officials in Marja and Kandahar has made Afghans all the more fearful about cooperating with the Americans and their own government.

We have not seen a full assessment of the Marja operation. General McChrystal said that he now plans to spend more time in Kandahar cultivating local support, improving public services and building up local governance. Building competent Afghan army and police forces has clearly proved far harder than expected. The same is true for fostering and protecting honest and committed Afghan officials.

Western officials and experts also say that the American military found it hard to read — and in some instances they misread — the complex tribal and societal relationships in both places. Nearly nine years after the Americans arrived in Afghanistan, American intelligence agencies, civilian and military, seem to be flying blind. That is intolerable.

Then there is the fundamental question of whether President Karzai can — or is interested in — building an effective government. Mr. Karzai got what he wanted from a recent national peace conference — a mandate to appoint a government commission to begin talks with the Taliban. That makes reports that he is trying to cut a private deal especially worrying.

We are also very concerned about his decision to force the resignation of two top security officials. Both were seen as competent and honest. And we found it bizarre that Mr. Karzai is telling aides that he believed the United States, and not the Taliban, might have been responsible for a rocket attack on the conference in Kabul.

The Americans still haven’t figured out how to manage Mr. Karzai. Reviving a public fight with him isn’t going to work, but they need to make clear that there’s a limit to American patience — and that they will only support peace talks that have a specific set of red lines.

The basic civil rights of Afghans — particularly women and girls — cannot be up for negotiation. There can be no place in Afghanistan for Al Qaeda or the Taliban’s worst abusers. It is way too soon for Mr. Karzai to be pushing to remove the Taliban from the United Nations terrorist blacklist.

We don’t know if the Taliban leaders will ever compromise. But we are sure that they will consider it only under duress. General McChrystal is going to have to do a much better job in Kandahar. Mr. Karzai is going to have to drop his illusions and commit to the fight.

    Taking Stock in Afghanistan, NYT, 13.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/opinion/14mon1.html

U.S. Identifies Vast Riches of Minerals in Afghanistan

June 13, 2010
The New York Times
By JAMES RISEN

WASHINGTON — The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.

The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.

An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and BlackBerrys.

The vast scale of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth was discovered by a small team of Pentagon officials and American geologists. The Afghan government and President Hamid Karzai were recently briefed, American officials said.

While it could take many years to develop a mining industry, the potential is so great that officials and executives in the industry believe it could attract heavy investment even before mines are profitable, providing the possibility of jobs that could distract from generations of war.

“There is stunning potential here,” Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the United States Central Command, said in an interview on Saturday. “There are a lot of ifs, of course, but I think potentially it is hugely significant.”

The value of the newly discovered mineral deposits dwarfs the size of Afghanistan’s existing war-bedraggled economy, which is based largely on opium production and narcotics trafficking as well as aid from the United States and other industrialized countries. Afghanistan’s gross domestic product is only about $12 billion.

“This will become the backbone of the Afghan economy,” said Jalil Jumriany, an adviser to the Afghan minister of mines.

American and Afghan officials agreed to discuss the mineral discoveries at a difficult moment in the war in Afghanistan. The American-led offensive in Marja in southern Afghanistan has achieved only limited gains. Meanwhile, charges of corruption and favoritism continue to plague the Karzai government, and Mr. Karzai seems increasingly embittered toward the White House.

So the Obama administration is hungry for some positive news to come out of Afghanistan. Yet the American officials also recognize that the mineral discoveries will almost certainly have a double-edged impact.

Instead of bringing peace, the newfound mineral wealth could lead the Taliban to battle even more fiercely to regain control of the country.

The corruption that is already rampant in the Karzai government could also be amplified by the new wealth, particularly if a handful of well-connected oligarchs, some with personal ties to the president, gain control of the resources. Just last year, Afghanistan’s minister of mines was accused by American officials of accepting a $30 million bribe to award China the rights to develop its copper mine. The minister has since been replaced.

Endless fights could erupt between the central government in Kabul and provincial and tribal leaders in mineral-rich districts. Afghanistan has a national mining law, written with the help of advisers from the World Bank, but it has never faced a serious challenge.

“No one has tested that law; no one knows how it will stand up in a fight between the central government and the provinces,” observed Paul A. Brinkley, deputy undersecretary of defense for business and leader of the Pentagon team that discovered the deposits.

At the same time, American officials fear resource-hungry China will try to dominate the development of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth, which could upset the United States, given its heavy investment in the region. After winning the bid for its Aynak copper mine in Logar Province, China clearly wants more, American officials said.

Another complication is that because Afghanistan has never had much heavy industry before, it has little or no history of environmental protection either. “The big question is, can this be developed in a responsible way, in a way that is environmentally and socially responsible?” Mr. Brinkley said. “No one knows how this will work.”

With virtually no mining industry or infrastructure in place today, it will take decades for Afghanistan to exploit its mineral wealth fully. “This is a country that has no mining culture,” said Jack Medlin, a geologist in the United States Geological Survey’s international affairs program. “They’ve had some small artisanal mines, but now there could be some very, very large mines that will require more than just a gold pan.”

The mineral deposits are scattered throughout the country, including in the southern and eastern regions along the border with Pakistan that have had some of the most intense combat in the American-led war against the Taliban insurgency.

The Pentagon task force has already started trying to help the Afghans set up a system to deal with mineral development. International accounting firms that have expertise in mining contracts have been hired to consult with the Afghan Ministry of Mines, and technical data is being prepared to turn over to multinational mining companies and other potential foreign investors. The Pentagon is helping Afghan officials arrange to start seeking bids on mineral rights by next fall, officials said.

“The Ministry of Mines is not ready to handle this,” Mr. Brinkley said. “We are trying to help them get ready.”

Like much of the recent history of the country, the story of the discovery of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth is one of missed opportunities and the distractions of war.

In 2004, American geologists, sent to Afghanistan as part of a broader reconstruction effort, stumbled across an intriguing series of old charts and data at the library of the Afghan Geological Survey in Kabul that hinted at major mineral deposits in the country. They soon learned that the data had been collected by Soviet mining experts during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, but cast aside when the Soviets withdrew in 1989.

During the chaos of the 1990s, when Afghanistan was mired in civil war and later ruled by the Taliban, a small group of Afghan geologists protected the charts by taking them home, and returned them to the Geological Survey’s library only after the American invasion and the ouster of the Taliban in 2001.

“There were maps, but the development did not take place, because you had 30 to 35 years of war,” said Ahmad Hujabre, an Afghan engineer who worked for the Ministry of Mines in the 1970s.

Armed with the old Russian charts, the United States Geological Survey began a series of aerial surveys of Afghanistan’s mineral resources in 2006, using advanced gravity and magnetic measuring equipment attached to an old Navy Orion P-3 aircraft that flew over about 70 percent of the country.

The data from those flights was so promising that in 2007, the geologists returned for an even more sophisticated study, using an old British bomber equipped with instruments that offered a three-dimensional profile of mineral deposits below the earth’s surface. It was the most comprehensive geologic survey of Afghanistan ever conducted.

The handful of American geologists who pored over the new data said the results were astonishing.

But the results gathered dust for two more years, ignored by officials in both the American and Afghan governments. In 2009, a Pentagon task force that had created business development programs in Iraq was transferred to Afghanistan, and came upon the geological data. Until then, no one besides the geologists had bothered to look at the information — and no one had sought to translate the technical data to measure the potential economic value of the mineral deposits.

Soon, the Pentagon business development task force brought in teams of American mining experts to validate the survey’s findings, and then briefed Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Mr. Karzai.

So far, the biggest mineral deposits discovered are of iron and copper, and the quantities are large enough to make Afghanistan a major world producer of both, United States officials said. Other finds include large deposits of niobium, a soft metal used in producing superconducting steel, rare earth elements and large gold deposits in Pashtun areas of southern Afghanistan.

Just this month, American geologists working with the Pentagon team have been conducting ground surveys on dry salt lakes in western Afghanistan where they believe there are large deposits of lithium. Pentagon officials said that their initial analysis at one location in Ghazni Province showed the potential for lithium deposits as large of those of Bolivia, which now has the world’s largest known lithium reserves.

For the geologists who are now scouring some of the most remote stretches of Afghanistan to complete the technical studies necessary before the international bidding process is begun, there is a growing sense that they are in the midst of one of the great discoveries of their careers.

“On the ground, it’s very, very, promising,” Mr. Medlin said. “Actually, it’s pretty amazing.”

    U.S. Identifies Vast Riches of Minerals in Afghanistan, NYT, 13.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/world/asia/14minerals.html

As Afghan Fighting Expands, U.S. Medics Plunge In

June 12, 2010
The New York Times
By C. J. CHIVERS

MARJA, Afghanistan — The Marine had been shot in the skull. He was up ahead, at the edge of a field, where the rest of his patrol was fighting. A Black Hawk medevac helicopter flew above treetops toward him, banked and hovered dangerously before landing nearby.

Several Marines carried the man aboard. His head was bandaged, his body limp. Sgt. Ian J. Bugh, the flight medic, began the rhythms of CPR as the helicopter lifted over gunfire and zigzagged away. Could this man be saved?

Nearly nine years into the Afghan war, with the number of troops here climbing toward 100,000, the pace for air crews that retrieve the wounded has become pitched.

In each month this year, more American troops in Afghanistan have been killed than in any of the same months of any previous year. Many of those fighting on the ground, facing ambushes and powerful hidden bombs, say that as the Obama administration’s military buildup pushes more troops into Taliban strongholds, the losses could soon rival those during the worst periods in Iraq.

Under NATO guidance, all seriously wounded troops are expected to arrive at a trauma center within 60 minutes of their unit’s calling for help. In Helmand Province, Afghanistan’s most dangerous ground, most of them do.

These results can make the job seem far simpler than it is. Last week, a Black Hawk on a medevac mission in the province was shot down by a rocket-propelled grenade, and four members of its crew were killed. And the experiences in May and early June of one Army air crew, from Company C, Sixth Battalion, 101st Combat Aviation Brigade, showed the challenges of distance, sandstorms and Taliban fighters waiting near landing zones.

It also showed crews confronting sorrows as old as combat. In a guerrilla war that is turning more violent, young men in nameless places suffer wounds that, no matter a crew’s speed or skill, can quickly sap away life.

For Company C’s detachment in Helmand Province, the recent duty had been harried.

Over several days the crews had retrieved a Marine who had lost both legs and an arm to a bomb explosion; the medic had kept that man alive. They had picked up two Marines bitten by their unit’s bomb-sniffing dog. They landed for a corporal whose back had been injured in a vehicle accident.

And day after day they had scrambled to evacuate Afghans or Marines struck by bullets or blasted by bombs, including a mission that nearly took them to a landing zone where the Taliban had planted a second bomb, with hopes that an aircraft might land on it. The Marines had found the trap and directed the pilots to a safer spot.

A few days before the Marine was shot in the skull, after sandstorms had grounded aircraft, another call had come in. A bomb had exploded beside a patrol along the Helmand River. Two Marines were wounded. One was dying.

For hours the airspace had been closed; supervisors deemed the conditions too dangerous to fly. The crews wanted to evacuate the Marines. “I’ll go,” said Sgt. Jason T. Norris, a crew chief. “I’ll walk.”

A crew was given permission to try. Ordinarily, medevac flights take off with an older, experienced pilot in command and a younger aviator as co-pilot. The two take turns on the controls.

From Kandahar, the brigade commander, Col. William K. Gayler, ordered a change. This flight demanded experience. Chief Warrant Officer Joseph N. Callaway, who had nearly 3,000 flight hours, would replace a younger pilot and fly with Chief Warrant Officer Deric G. Sempsrott, who had nearly 2,000 hours.

Afghan sandstorms take many forms. Some drift by in vertical sheets of dust. Others spiral into spinning towers of grit. Many lash along the ground, obscuring vision. Powdered sand accumulates like snow.

This storm had another form: an airborne layer of dirt from 100 to 4,000 feet above the ground. It left a low-elevation slot through which the pilots might try to fly.

The Black Hawk lifted off in dimming evening light. It flew at 130 knots 30 to 40 feet above the ground, so low it created a bizarre sensation, as if the helicopter were not an aircraft, but a deafening high-speed train.

Ten minutes out, the radio updated the crew. One of the Marines had died. The crew chief, Sgt. Grayson Colby, sagged. He reached for a body bag. Then he slipped on rubber gloves and sat upright. There was still a man to save.

Just before a hill beside the river, Mr. Callaway banked the Black Hawk right, then abruptly turned left and circled. The helicopter leaned hard over. He looked down. A smoke grenade’s red plume rose, marking the patrol.

The Black Hawk landed beside dunes. Sergeant Bugh and Sergeant Colby leapt out.

A corporal, Brett Sayre, had been hit in the face by the bomb’s blast wave and debris. He staggered forward, guided by other Marines.

Sergeant Bugh examined him inside the Black Hawk. Corporal Sayre’s eyes were packed with dirt. He was large and lean, a fit young man sitting upright, trying not to choke on blood clotting and flowing from his mouth.

The sergeant asked him to lie down. The corporal waved his arm.

“You’re a Marine,” the sergeant said. “Be strong. We’ll get you out of here.”

Corporal Sayre rested stiffly on his right side.

Sergeant Colby climbed aboard. He had helped escort the dead Marine to the other aircraft. The Black Hawk took off, weaving through the air 25 feet off the ground, accelerating into haze.

The corporal was calm as Sergeant Colby cut away his uniform, looking for more wounds. Sergeant Bugh suctioned blood from his mouth. He knew this man would live. But he looked into his dirtied eyes. “Can you see?” he asked.

“No,” the corporal said.

At the trauma center later, the corporal’s eyes reacted to light.

A Race to Treatment

Now the crew was in the air again, this time with the Marine shot in the skull. Sergeant Colby performed CPR. The man had no pulse.

Kneeling beside the man, encased in the roaring whine of the Black Hawk’s dual engines, the sergeants took turns at CPR. Mr. Sempsrott flew at 150 knots — as fast as the aircraft would go.

The helicopter came to a rolling landing at Camp Dwyer. Litter bearers ran the Marine inside.

The flight’s young co-pilot, First Lt. Matthew E. Stewart, loitered in the sudden quiet. He was calmly self-critical. It had been a nerve-racking landing zone, a high-speed approach to evacuate a dying man and a descent into a firefight. He said he had made a new pilot’s mistake.

He had not rolled the aircraft into a steep enough bank as he turned. Then the helicopter’s nose had pitched up. The aircraft had risen, climbing to more than 200 feet from 70 feet and almost floating above a gunfight, exposed.

Mr. Sempsrott had taken the controls and completed the landing. “I was going way too fast for my experience level,” the lieutenant said, humbly.

No one blamed him; this, the crew said, was how young pilots learned. And everyone involved understood the need to move quickly. It was necessary to evade ground fire and to improve a dying patient’s odds.

Beside the helicopter, inside a tent, doctors kept working on the Marine.

Sergeant Colby sat, red-eyed. He had seen the man’s wound. Soon, he knew, the Marine would be moved to the morgue. Morning had not yet come to the United States. In a few hours, the news would reach home.

“A family’s life has been completely changed,” the lieutenant said. “And they don’t even know it yet.”

Barreling Into a Firefight

A few days later, the crew was barreling into Marja again. Another Marine had been shot.

The pilots passed the landing zone, banked and looked down. An Afghan in uniform crawled though dirt. Marines huddled along a ditch. A firefight raged around the green smoke grenade.

The Black Hawk completed its turn, this time low to the ground, and descended. Gunfire could be heard all around. The casualty was not in sight.

“Where is he?” Mr. Sempsrott asked over the radio.

The sergeants dashed for the trees, where a Marine, Cpl. Zachary K. Kruger, was being tended to by his squad. He had been shot in the thigh, near his groin. He could not walk. The patrol had no stretcher.

A hundred yards separated the group from the aircraft, a sprint to be made across the open, on soft soil, under Taliban fire. Sergeant Bugh ran back. Sergeant Colby began firing his M-4 carbine toward the Taliban.

Inside the shuddering aircraft, the pilots tried to radiate calm. They were motionless, vulnerable, sitting upright in plain view.

The Taliban, they knew, had offered a bounty for destroyed American aircraft. Bullets cracked past. The pilots saw their medic return, grab a stretcher, run again for the trees.

They looked this way, then that. Their escort aircraft buzzed low-elevation circles around the zone, gunners leaning out. Bullets kept coming. “Taking fire from the east,” Mr. Sempsrott said.

These are the moments when time slows.

At the airfield, the crews had talked about what propelled them. Some of them mentioned a luxury: They did not wonder, as some soldiers do, if their efforts mattered, if this patrol or that meeting with Afghans or this convoy affected anything in a lasting way.

Their work could be measured, life by life. They spoke of the infantry, living without comforts in outposts, patrolling in the sweltering heat over ground spiced with hidden bombs and watched over by Afghans preparing complex ambushes. When the Marines called, the air crews said, they needed help.

Now the bullets whipped by.

A Hot Landing Zone

Cobra attack helicopters were en route. Mr. Sempsrott and Lieutenant Stewart had the option of taking off and circling back after the gunships arrived. It would mean leaving their crew on the ground, and delaying the patient’s ride, if only for minutes.

At the tents, Mr. Sempsrott had discussed the choices in a hot landing zone. The discussion ended like this: “I don’t leave people behind.”

More rounds snapped past. “Taking fire from the southeast,” he said.

He looked out. Four minutes, headed to five.

“This is ridiculous,” he said. It was exclamation, not complaint.

His crew broke from the tree line. The Marines and Sergeant Bugh were carrying Corporal Kruger, who craned his neck as they bounced across the field. They fell, found their feet, ran again, fell and reached the Black Hawk and shoved the stretcher in.

A Marine leaned through the open cargo door. He gripped the corporal in a fierce handshake. “We love you, buddy!” he shouted, ducked, and ran back toward the firefight.

Six and a half minutes after landing, the Black Hawk lifted, tilted forward and cleared the vegetation, gaining speed.

Corporal Kruger had questions as his blood pooled beneath him.

Where are we going? Camp Dwyer. How long to get there? Ten minutes.

Can I have some water? Sergeant Colby produced a bottle.

After leaving behind Marja, the aircraft climbed to 200 feet and flew level over the open desert, where Taliban fighters cannot hide. The bullet had caromed up and inside the corporal. He needed surgery.

The crew had reached him in time. As the Black Hawk touched down, he sensed he would live.

“Thank you, guys,” he shouted.

“Thank you,” he shouted, and the litter bearers ran him to the medical tent.

The pilots shut the Black Hawk down. Another crew rinsed away the blood. Before inspecting the aircraft for bullet holes, Sergeant Bugh and Sergeant Colby removed their helmets, slipped out of their body armor and gripped each other in a brief, silent hug.

    As Afghan Fighting Expands, U.S. Medics Plunge In, NYT, 12.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/world/asia/13medevac.html

With U.S. Aid, Warlord Builds an Afghan Empire

June 5, 2010
The New York Times
By DEXTER FILKINS

TIRIN KOT, Afghanistan — The most powerful man in this arid stretch of southern Afghanistan is not the provincial governor, nor the police chief, nor even the commander of the Afghan Army.

It is Matiullah Khan, the head of a private army that earns millions of dollars guarding NATO supply convoys and fights Taliban insurgents alongside American Special Forces.

In little more than two years, Mr. Matiullah, an illiterate former highway patrol commander, has grown stronger than the government of Oruzgan Province, not only supplanting its role in providing security but usurping its other functions, his rivals say, like appointing public employees and doling out government largess. His fighters run missions with American Special Forces officers, and when Afghan officials have confronted him, he has either rebuffed them or had them removed.

“Oruzgan used to be the worst place in Afghanistan, and now it’s the safest,” Mr. Matiullah said in an interview in his compound here, where supplicants gather each day to pay homage and seek money and help. “What should we do? The officials are cowards and thieves.”

Mr. Matiullah is one of several semiofficial warlords who have emerged across Afghanistan in recent months, as American and NATO officers try to bolster — and sometimes even supplant — ineffective regular Afghan forces in their battle against the Taliban insurgency.

In some cases, these strongmen have restored order, though at the price of undermining the very institutions Americans are seeking to build: government structures like police forces and provincial administrations that one day are supposed to be strong enough to allow the Americans and other troops to leave.

In other places around the country, Afghan gunmen have come to the fore as the heads of private security companies or as militia commanders, independent of any government control. In these cases, the warlords not only have risen from anarchy but have helped to spread it.

For the Americans, who are racing to secure the country against a deadline set by President Obama, the emergence of such strongmen is seen as a lesser evil, despite how compromised many of them are. In Mr. Matiullah’s case, American commanders appear to have set aside reports that he connives with both drug smugglers and Taliban insurgents.

“The institutions of the government, in security and military terms, are not yet strong enough to be able to provide security,” said Maj. Gen. Nick Carter, commander of NATO forces in southern Afghanistan. “But the situation is unsustainable and clearly needs to be resolved.”

Many Afghans say the Americans and their NATO partners are making a grave mistake by tolerating or encouraging warlords like Mr. Matiullah. These Afghans fear the Americans will leave behind an Afghan government too weak to do its work, and strongmen without any popular support.

“Matiullah is an illiterate guy using the government for his own interest,” said Mohammed Essa, a tribal leader in Tirin Kot, the Oruzgan provincial capital. “Once the Americans leave, he won’t last. And then what will we have?”

Building a Fortune

Mr. Matiullah does not look like one of the aging, pot-bellied warlords from Afghanistan’s bygone wars. Long and thin, he wears black silk turbans and extends a pinky when he gestures to make a point. Mr. Matiullah’s army is an unusual hybrid, too: a booming private business and a government-subsidized militia.

His main effort — and his biggest money maker — is securing the chaotic highway linking Kandahar to Tirin Kot for NATO convoys. One day each week, Mr. Matiullah declares the 100-mile highway open and deploys his gunmen up and down it. The highway cuts through an area thick with Taliban insurgents.

Mr. Matiullah keeps the highway safe, and he is paid well to do it. His company charges each NATO cargo truck $1,200 for safe passage, or $800 for smaller ones, his aides say. His income, according to one of his aides, is $2.5 million a month, an astronomical sum in a country as impoverished as this one.

“It’s suicide to come up this road without Matiullah’s men,” said Mohammed, a driver hauling stacks of sandbags and light fixtures to the Dutch base in Tirin Kot. The Afghan government even picks up a good chunk of Mr. Matiullah’s expenses. Under an arrangement with the Ministry of the Interior, the government pays for roughly 600 of Mr. Matiullah’s 1,500 fighters, including Mr. Matiullah himself, despite the fact that the force is not under the government’s control.

“The government tried to shut him down, and when they couldn’t, they agreed to pay for his men,” said Martine van Bijlert, a co-director of the Afghanistan Analysts Network, an independent organization here. NATO commanders say they reluctantly pay Mr. Matiullah (and others like him) for his services because they have no other way of moving their convoys across dangerous territory. Having their own men do it, they say, would take them away from other tasks.

American Support

But Mr. Matiullah’s role has grown beyond just business. His militia has been adopted by American Special Forces officers to gather intelligence and fight insurgents. Mr. Matiullah’s compound sits about 100 yards from the American Special Forces compound in Tirin Kot. A Special Forces officer, willing to speak about Mr. Matiullah only on the condition of anonymity, said his unit had an extensive relationship with Mr. Matiullah. “Matiullah is the best there is here,” the officer said.

With his NATO millions, and the American backing, Mr. Matiullah has grown into the strongest political and economic force in the region. He estimates that his salaries support 15,000 people in this impoverished province. He has built 70 mosques with his own money, endowed scholarships in Kabul and begun holding weekly meetings with area tribal leaders. His latest venture is a rock-crushing company that sells gravel to NATO bases.

This has irritated some local leaders, who say that the line between Mr. Matiullah’s business interest and the government has disappeared.

“What law says that a police officer can have a private security company?” said Juma Gul Hemat, the Oruzgan police chief, whose office is a few hundred yards from Mr. Matiullah’s.

“Many times I have confronted Matiullah over his illegal business,” Chief Hemat said. “But as long as the Americans are behind him, there is nothing I can do. They are the ones with the money.”

Both General Carter and Hanif Atmar, the Afghan interior minister, said they hoped to disband Mr. Matiullah’s militia soon — or at least to bring it under formal government control. Mr. Matiullah’s operation, the officials said, is one of at least 23 private security companies working in the area without any government license or oversight.

General Carter said that while he had no direct proof in Mr. Matiullah’s case, he harbored more general worries that the legions of unregulated Afghan security companies had a financial interest in prolonging chaos. In Mr. Matiullah’s case, he said, that would mean attacking people who refused to use his security service or enlisting the Taliban to do it. Local Afghans said that Mr. Matiullah had done both of those things, although they would not speak publicly for fear of retribution.

“Does he make deals and pay people to attack?” General Carter said. “I’m not aware of that.”

Last fall, Mr. Atmar summoned Mr. Matiullah to his office and told him he wanted to give Mr. Matiullah’s army a license and a government contract. The warlord walked out.

“I told him that it’s my men who are doing the fighting and dying,” Mr. Matiullah said. “The guys in Kabul want to steal the money.”

Mr. Matiullah is causing other problems, Mr. Atmar said, alienating members of Afghan tribes not his own. He has also begun charging Afghans to ride on the highway.

“Parallel structures of government create problems for the rule of law,” Mr. Atmar said. Along the highway linking Kandahar and Tirin Kot, many of Mr. Matiullah’s soldiers drive Afghan police trucks and wear Afghan police uniforms. Posters of Mr. Matiullah are plastered to their windshields.

“There is no doubt about it — the people of Oruzgan love Matiullah!” said Fareed Ayel, one of Mr. Matiullah’s officers on the route. “The government people are not honest.”

Like many of Mr. Matiullah’s men, Mr. Ayel quit the police to join his militia, which paid him a better salary.

Indeed, many people in Tirin Kot praise Mr. Matiullah for the toughness of his fighters and for keeping the road open. Mr. Matiullah claims to have lost more than 100 men fighting the Taliban. Recently, he and several of his fighters followed an American Special Forces unit to Geezab, where the Taliban had been expelled after six years.

Persistent Suspicions

But doubts persist about Mr. Matiullah, especially about what he does when Afghan and American officials are somewhere else. An American intelligence report prepared for senior American commanders last spring listed a number of associates of Ahmed Wali Karzai, President Hamid Karzai’s brother and the chairman of the provincial council of Kandahar Province, who were suspected of involvement in the country’s opium trade. The report listed Mr. Matiullah as one of the suspects, but provided few details.

A former senior official in the Kandahar government, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution by Mr. Matiullah and the Karzais, said he believed that Mr. Matiullah was facilitating the movement of drugs along the highway to Kandahar.

“I was never able to look inside those trucks, but if I had, I am fairly certain what I would have found,” he said.

Despite his relationship to the Special Forces, Mr. Matiullah has been suspected of playing a double game with the Taliban. Asked about Mr. Matiullah earlier this year, an American military officer in Kabul admitted that Mr. Matiullah was believed to have a relationship with insurgents. He spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was discussing intelligence matters.

Asked again recently, the same officer said that Mr. Matiullah was suspected of drug smuggling. He provided no details. The next day, after consulting intelligence officers, the officer said Mr. Matiullah was a trusted ally. “Their assessment about him has changed,” he said.

Mr. Matiullah denied any contact with either insurgents or drug smugglers. “Never,” he said.

Like many Afghan leaders close to the Americans, Mr. Matiullah got his start after the fall of the Taliban in 2001, when the Americans were in desperate need of allies. Within a few years, Mr. Matiullah was the head of the Highway Police in Oruzgan Province.

In 2006, out of concern that legions of officers were working with drug traffickers, the entire agency was abolished.

“The highway police was one huge drug smuggling operation,” said a former Western diplomat, who was based here at the time of President Karzai’s order.

Mr. Matiullah’s army is part of a constellation of militias and security companies, many of them unregistered and unregulated, that claim at least some loyalty to Ahmed Wali Karzai, who is widely acknowledged to be the most powerful man in southern Afghanistan. “Ahmed Wali is my friend, my close friend!” Mr. Matiullah said earlier this year, offering to put him on the telephone for this reporter.

In a second, more recent, interview, Mr. Matiullah said he and Mr. Karzai had no relationship at all.

Both Ahmed Wali Karzai and Mr. Matiullah are associates of Jan Mohammed Khan, a former governor of Oruzgan Province and Mr. Matiullah’s father-in-law. Mr. Khan was removed from Oruzgan Province at the insistence of the Dutch in 2006 because of concerns that he was close to the drug trade. He is now an adviser to President Karzai.

Those relationships, Mr. Matiullah’s detractors say, allow him to flourish.

“Matiullah is not part of the government, he is stronger than the government, and he can do anything he wants,” said Mr. Essa, the tribal elder in Tirin Kot. “He is like the younger brother of Ahmed Wali. He is protected in Kabul.”

At a recent meeting inside the American Special Forces compound here, Mr. Matiullah was approached by an elderly Afghan beggar who hobbled up and then stood at attention and saluted in military fashion. Without hesitating — indeed, without even looking — Mr. Matiullah pulled a wad of money out of his pocket and pressed it into the man’s withered hands.

“Long live Matiullah, you are the best,” the old man said.

“O.K., O.K.,” Mr. Matiullah said. “Now I am busy.”


Sangar Rahimi contributed reporting.

    With U.S. Aid, Warlord Builds an Afghan Empire, NYT, 5.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/world/asia/06warlords.html

Child Brides Escape Marriage, but Not Lashes

May 30, 2010
The New York Times
By ROD NORDLAND and ALISSA J. RUBIN

KABUL, Afghanistan — The two Afghan girls had every reason to expect the law would be on their side when a policeman at a checkpoint stopped the bus they were in. Disguised in boys’ clothes, the girls, ages 13 and 14, had been fleeing for two days along rutted roads and over mountain passes to escape their illegal, forced marriages to much older men, and now they had made it to relatively liberal Herat Province.

Instead, the police officer spotted them as girls, ignored their pleas and promptly sent them back to their remote village in Ghor Province. There they were publicly and viciously flogged for daring to run away from their husbands.

Their tormentors, who videotaped the abuse, were not the Taliban, but local mullahs and the former warlord, now a pro-government figure who largely rules the district where the girls live.

Neither girl flinched visibly at the beatings, and afterward both walked away with their heads unbowed. Sympathizers of the victims smuggled out two video recordings of the floggings to the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, which released them on Saturday after unsuccessfully lobbying for government action.

The ordeal of Afghanistan’s child brides illustrates an uncomfortable truth. What in most countries would be considered a criminal offense is in many parts of Afghanistan a cultural norm, one which the government has been either unable or unwilling to challenge effectively.

According to a Unicef study, from 2000 to 2008, the brides in 43 percent of Afghan marriages were under 18. Although the Afghan Constitution forbids the marriage of girls under the age of 16, tribal customs often condone marriage once puberty is reached, or even earlier.

Flogging is also illegal.

The case of Khadija Rasoul, 13, and Basgol Sakhi, 14, from the village of Gardan-i-Top, in the Dulina district of Ghor Province, central Afghanistan, was notable for the failure of the authorities to do anything to protect the girls, despite opportunities to do so.

Forced into a so-called marriage exchange, where each girl was given to an elderly man in the other’s family, Khadija and Basgol later complained that their husbands beat them when they tried to resist consummating the unions. Dressed as boys, they escaped and got as far as western Herat Province, where their bus was stopped at a checkpoint and they were arrested.

Although Herat has shelters for battered and runaway women and girls, the police instead contacted the former warlord, Fazil Ahad Khan, whom Human Rights Commission workers describe as the self-appointed commander and morals enforcer in his district in Ghor Province, and returned the girls to his custody.

After a kangaroo trial by Mr. Khan and local religious leaders, according to the commission’s report on the episode, the girls were sentenced to 40 lashes each and flogged on Jan. 12.

In the video, the mullah, under Mr. Khan’s approving eye, administers the punishment with a leather strap, which he appears to wield with as much force as possible, striking each girl in turn on her legs and buttocks with a loud crack each time. Their heavy red winter chadors are pulled over their heads so only their skirts protect them from the blows.

The spectators are mostly armed men wearing camouflage uniforms, and at least three of them openly videotape the floggings. No women are present.

The mullah, whose name is not known, strikes the girls so hard that at one point he appears to have hurt his wrist and hands the strap to another man.

“Hold still,” the mullah admonishes the victims, who stand straight throughout. One of them can be seen in tears when her face is briefly exposed to view, but they remain silent.

When the second girl is flogged, an elderly man fills in for the mullah, but his blows appear less forceful and the mullah soon takes the strap back.

The spectators count the lashes out loud but several times seem to lose count and have to start over, or possibly they cannot count very high.

“Good job, mullah sir,” one of the men says as Mr. Khan leads them in prayer afterward.

“I was shocked when I watched the video,” said Mohammed Munir Khashi, an investigator with the commission. “I thought in the 21st century such a criminal incident could not happen in our country. It’s inhuman, anti-Islam and illegal.”

Fawzia Kofi, a prominent female member of Parliament, said the case may be shocking but is far from the only one. “I’m sure there are worse cases we don’t even know about,” she said. “Early marriage and forced marriage are the two most common forms of violent behavior against women and girls.”

The Human Rights Commission took the videotapes and the results of its investigation to the governor of Ghor Province, Sayed Iqbal Munib, who formed a commission to investigate it but took no action, saying the district was too insecure to send police there. A coalition of civic groups in the province called for his dismissal over the matter.

Nor has Afghanistan’s Interior Ministry replied to demands from the commission to take action in the case, according to the commission’s chairwoman, Sima Samar. A spokesman for the ministry did not respond to requests for comment.

Forced marriage of Afghan girls is not limited to remote rural areas. In Herat city, a Unicef-financed women’s shelter run by an Afghan group, the Voice of Women Organization, shelters as many as 60 girls who have fled child marriages.

A group called Women for Afghan Women runs shelters in the capital, Kabul, as well as in nearby Kapisa Province and in the city of Mazar-i-Sharif, all relatively liberal areas as Afghanistan goes, which have taken in 108 escaped child brides just since January, according to Executive Director Manizha Naderi.

Poverty is the motivation for many child marriages, either because a wealthy husband pays a large bride-price, or just because the father of the bride then has one less child to support. “Most of the time they are sold,” Ms. Naderi said. “And most of the time it’s a case where the husband is much, much older.”

She said it was also common practice among police officers who apprehend runaway child brides to return them to their families. “Most police don’t understand what’s in the law, or they’re just against it,” she said.

On Saturday, at the Women for Afghan Women shelter, at a secret location in Kabul, there were four fugitive child brides. All had been beaten, and most wept as they recounted their experiences.

Sakhina, a 15-year-old Hazara girl from Bamian, was sold into marriage to pay off her father’s debts when she was 12 or 13.

Her husband’s family used her as a domestic servant. “Every time they could, they found an excuse to beat me,” she said. “My brother-in-law, my sister-in-law, my husband, all of them beat me.”

Sumbol, 17, a Pashtun girl, said she was kidnapped and taken to Jalalabad, then given a choice: marry her tormentor, or become a suicide bomber. “He said, ‘If you don’t marry me I will put a bomb on your body and send you to the police station,’ ” Sumbol said.

Roshana, a Tajik who is now 18, does not even know why her family gave her in marriage to an older man in Parwan when she was 14. The beatings were bad enough, but finally, she said, her husband tried to feed her rat poison.

In some ways, the two girls from Ghor were among the luckier child brides. After the floggings, the mullah declared them divorced and returned them to their own families.

Two years earlier, in nearby Murhab district, two girls who had been sold into marriage to the same family fled after being abused, according to a report by the Human Rights Commission. But they lost their way, were captured and forcibly returned. Their fathers — one the village mullah — took them up the mountain and killed them.

    Child Brides Escape Marriage, but Not Lashes, NYT, 30.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/world/asia/31flogging.html

In Camouflage or Afghan Veil, a Fragile Bond

May 29, 2010
The New York Times
By ELISABETH BUMILLER

ABDUL GHAYAS, Afghanistan — Two young female Marines trudged along with an infantry patrol in the 102-degree heat, soaked through their camouflage uniforms under 60 pounds of gear. But only when they reached this speck of a village in the Taliban heartland on a recent afternoon did their hard work begin.

For two hours inside a mud-walled compound, the Marines, Cpl. Diana Amaya, 23, and Cpl. Lisa Gardner, 28, set aside their rifles and body armor and tried to connect with four nervous Afghan women wearing veils. Over multiple cups of tea, the Americans made small talk through a military interpreter or in their own beginner’s Pashtu. Then they encouraged the Afghans, who by now had shyly uncovered their faces, to sew handicrafts that could be sold at a local bazaar.

“We just need a couple of strong women,” Corporal Amaya said, in hopes of enlisting them to bring a measure of local commerce to the perilous world outside their door.

Corporal Amaya’s words could also describe her own daunting mission, part of a program intended to help improve the prospects for the United States in Afghanistan — and also, perhaps, to redefine gender roles in combat.

Three months ago, Corporal Amaya was one of 40 female Marines training at Camp Pendleton, Calif., in an edgy experiment: sending full-time “female engagement teams” to accompany all-male foot patrols in Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan to win over the Afghan women who are culturally off limits to American men. Enthusiasm reigned. “We know we can make a difference,” Capt. Emily Naslund, 27, the team’s executive officer, said then in an interview.

Now, just weeks into a seven-month deployment that has sent them in twos and threes to 16 outposts across Helmand, including Marja and other spots where fighting continues, the women have met with inevitable hurdles — not only posed by Afghan women but also by some male Marines and American commanders skeptical about the teams’ purpose.

The women are taking it in stride. “If it were easy, it wouldn’t be interesting,” Captain Naslund said.

No one disagrees that the teams have potential and that female Marines are desperately needed, especially at medical clinics, as part of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s counterinsurgency campaign. As his officers say, you can’t swing the population to your side if you talk to only half of it. But interviews and foot patrols with Marines during two recent weeks in Helmand show that the teams, which have had gained access to some of the most isolated women in the world, remain a work in progress.

One trip in early May to offer medical care to Afghan women in the village of Lakari showed the program’s promise, problems and dangers. The trip was delayed because of reports that the Taliban had put a bomb in the intended clinic building; although nothing was found, the Marines moved to another place. Then the struggles started in earnest.

Corporal Gardner, a helicopter mechanic who was working with the female Marines from Pendleton but had not trained with them, found herself as the lone woman dealing with five ailing Afghan women. There was no female interpreter or medical officer — there are chronic shortages of both — and the Afghans refused to leave their compound or let the male interpreter and medical officer come to them. Corporal Gardner devised a cumbersome solution. “Some of these women would rather die than be touched by a male,” she said. “So we’ll diagnose by proxy.”

She took the women’s vital signs herself. Then she had an older Afghan woman come outside with her to describe the women’s symptoms, chiefly headaches and stomachaches, to the male interpreter. He translated them for the American male medical officer. (The American men were partly obscured from the older woman by a mud wall to respect her modesty.) Eventually medication — the painkiller ibuprofen — was handed over to the older woman to distribute.

By the end of the day, an Afghan woman was trusting enough to hand her baby to Corporal Gardner to take to the medical officer, who diagnosed digestive problems from a diet of sheep and goat milk.

Sgt. Gabriel Faiivae, 25, the patrol leader, who had kept watch outside the clinic, and whose ears were still ringing from a homemade bomb that had blown the doors off his armored truck the day before, acknowledged that the labyrinthine logistics had to be fixed. “But as far as building trust, it was really good,” he said.

Other trips over the two weeks were get-to-know-you sessions that showed the chasm between two cultures.

“Do you ever fast?” one Afghan woman asked Captain Naslund in the northern Helmand village of Soorkano, apparently speaking of the custom during the Muslim festival of Ramadan.

“Sometimes, when I think I’m getting fat,” Captain Naslund replied, to a curious look. “American men like skinny girls.”

Villagers are often stunned, if not disbelieving, to see women underneath the body armor. Inside compounds, the female Marines say they have been poked in intimate places by Afghan women who want to make sure they are really women.

One morning in the village of Mamor, as Corporal Amaya and Corporal Gardner asked an Afghan woman if she would be willing to teach in a new school, other women and children — who said they had never seen non-Pashtun women — repeatedly asked two American women, a photographer and a reporter, to lift their shirts and pant legs so they could see what was underneath.

Other cultural gaps exist among the Marines themselves. Along with their male counterparts, the female Marines live on rugged bases, often without showers, bathe with bottled water or baby wipes, use makeshift latrines and sleep in hot tents or outside in the dirt.

But team leaders say that some male Marine commanders have been reluctant to send the women on patrols, fearing either for their safety or that they will get in the way. (Women, who make up only 6 percent of the Marine Corps, are officially barred from combat branches like the infantry. In a bureaucratic side step commonly used in Iraq for women needed for jobs like bomb disposal or intelligence, the female engagement teams are added to the all-male infantry patrols.)

The women, who carry the same weapons and receive the same combat training as the men, cannot leave the bases unless the men escort them. Lt. Natalie Kronschnabel, one of the team leaders, said she had to push a Marine captain to let her team go on a five-hour patrol.

“It wasn’t that hard, it was only four or five clicks,” said Lieutenant Kronschnabel, 26, using slang for kilometers. “And they kept asking, ‘Are you doing O.K.? Are you breathing hard?’ ”

Like the other women, Lieutenant Kronschnabel, a high school athlete in soccer, softball and gymnastics, had to meet rigorous physical requirements in the Marines. When she got back that day, she said the captain told her, “ ‘O.K., we’ll start getting your girls scheduled for more patrols.’ ”

Other male Marines, who consider themselves the most aggressive fighters in the armed services, have been won over by the female engagement teams, referred to as fets. “I was skeptical 100 percent,” said Sgt. Jeremy Latimer, 24, a platoon leader in Company F of the Second Battalion, Second Marine Regiment, who is based at Patrol Base Amir, an outpost in central Helmand. “I didn’t like taking anybody who wasn’t infantry. Basically, I was worried about getting shot at with fet Marines. I didn’t want to leave them behind.”

But he changed his mind after he took two of the women into a village elder’s home so they could smooth the way for a male medical officer to treat the Afghan’s ailing wife and daughters — again, from the other side of a wall. Sergeant Latimer said the favor was important, because the elder had become an informant about the Taliban. The sergeant said he could hear through the wall that the female Marines and the elder’s wife and daughters, who turned out to be only moderately ill, got along.

“It was a normal, girls-just-hanging-out type of conversation, giggling and everything,” he said.

Since then, Sergeant Latimer said, Afghans have been more receptive when his patrols included the female Marines, who hand out stuffed animals to village children. When male Marines try that, he said, “It’s just a bunch of guys with rockets and machine guns trying to hand out a bear to a kid, and he starts to cry.”

But what do all the visits and talk add up to? Master Sgt. Julia Watson, who helped create an earlier version of the female engagement teams in Iraq and has been working in Helmand, said that the women had to move beyond handing out teddy bears and medicine and use what they learn from Afghan women to develop plans for income-generating projects, schools and clinics. “You have to have an end state,” she said.

Capt. Jason C. Brezler, a commander who has worked with the female Marines in the village of Now Zad, agreed. “To leverage a relationship, you have to have something of value to the Afghans,” he said. “And it has to be more than just, ‘I’m a girl.’ ”

    In Camouflage or Afghan Veil, a Fragile Bond, NYT, 29.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/world/asia/30marines.html

Operators of Drones Are Faulted in Afghan Deaths

May 29, 2010
The New York Times
By DEXTER FILKINS

KABUL, Afghanistan — The American military on Saturday released a scathing report on the deaths of 23 Afghan civilians, saying that “inaccurate and unprofessional” reporting by a team of Predator drone operators helped lead to an airstrike this year on a group of innocent men, women and children.

The report said that four American officers, including a brigade and battalion commander, had been reprimanded, and that two junior officers had also been disciplined. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who apologized to President Hamid Karzai after the attack, announced a series of training measures intended to reduce the chances of similar events.

The episode, in which three vehicles were attacked and destroyed in February, illustrated the extraordinary sensitivity to the inadvertent killing of noncombatants by NATO forces. Since taking command here last June, General McChrystal has made the protection of Afghan civilians a priority, and he has sharply restricted the use of airstrikes.

The overwhelming majority of civilian deaths in Afghanistan are caused by insurgents, but the growing intensity of the fighting, and the big push by American and NATO forces, has sent civilian casualties to their highest levels since 2001.

General McChrystal’s concern is that NATO forces, in their ninth year of operations in Afghanistan, are rapidly wearing out their welcome. Opinion polls here appear to reflect that.

“When we make a mistake, we must be forthright,” General McChrystal said in a statement. “And we must do everything in our power to correct that mistake.”

The civilian deaths highlighted the hazards in relying on remotely piloted aircraft to track suspected insurgents. In this case, as in many others where drones are employed by the military, the people steering and spotting the targets sat at a console in Creech Air Force Base, Nev.

The attack occurred on the morning of Feb. 21, near the village of Shahidi Hassas in Oruzgan Province, a Taliban-dominated area in southern Afghanistan. An American Special Operations team was tracking a group of insurgents when a pickup and two sport utility vehicles moving through the area began heading in their direction.

The Predator operator reported seeing only military-age males in the truck, the report said. The ground commander concurred, the report said, and the Special Operations team asked for an airstrike. An OH-58D Kiowa helicopter fired Hellfire missiles and rockets, destroying the vehicles and killing 23 civilians. Twelve others were wounded.

The report, signed by Maj. Gen. Timothy P. McHale, found that the Predator operators in Nevada, as well as the ground commander in the area, made several grave errors that led to the airstrikes. The “tragic loss of life,” General McHale found, was compounded by the failure of the ground commander and others to report in a timely manner that they might have killed civilians.

“The strike occurred because the ground force commander lacked a clear understanding of who was in the vehicles, the location, direction of travel, and the likely course of action of the vehicles,” General McHale wrote.

That fatal lack of understanding, General McHale wrote, stemmed from “poorly functioning command posts” in the area that failed to provide the evidence that there were civilians in the trucks. In addition, General McHale blamed the “inaccurate and unprofessional reporting of the Predator crew operating out of Creech A.F.B., Nevada, which deprived the ground force commander of vital information.”

Because of that, General McHale said, the officer on the ground believed that the vehicles, then seven miles away, contained insurgents who were trying to reinforce the fighters he and his men were tracking.

Predator drones and similar aircraft carry powerful cameras that beam real-time images to their operators, and some are armed with missiles, as well. The C.I.A. operates its own drone operation, mostly focused on Pakistan and separate from the military’s.

In this case, the military Predator operators in Nevada tracked the convoy for three and a half hours but failed to notice any of the women who were riding along, the report said. The report said that two children were spotted near the vehicles, but the drone operators reported that the convoy contained only military-age men.

“Information that the convoy was anything other than an attacking force was ignored or downplayed by the Predator crew,” General McHale wrote.

Immediately after the initial attack, the Kiowa helicopter’s crew spotted brightly colored clothing at the scene, and, suspecting that civilians might have been in the trucks, stopped firing.

After the attack, the Special Operations team turned over the bodies to local Afghans. Even so, General McHale said, officers on the ground failed to report the possibility of civilian casualties in a timely manner, despite clear evidence suggesting that something like that might have happened.

The report, which had previously been classified, contains several words, phrases and sections that are blacked out.

On receiving the results of the investigation, General McChrystal recommended a battery of additional training exercises for military personnel coming to Afghanistan, and additional training for those already here.

In addition to reprimanding the four officers and admonishing the other two, General McChrystal asked Air Force commanders to open an investigation into the Predator operators.

    Operators of Drones Are Faulted in Afghan Deaths, NYT, 29.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/world/asia/30drone.html

When Afghans Seek Medical Aid, Tough Choice for U.S.

May 28, 2010
The New York Times
By C. J. CHIVERS

KHAN NESHIN, Afghanistan — Five-year-old Sadiq was not a casualty of war. He was simply unlucky. The boy had opened a sack of grain at his home early on Wednesday morning, and a pit viper coiled inside lashed up and bit him above the lip.

His father, Kashmir, knew his son was sure to die. With no hospital anywhere nearby, he rushed the boy to an American outpost to plead for help. By midafternoon, Sadiq’s breathing was labored. Respiratory failure was not long off.

The events that followed unfolded like a tabletop counterinsurgency exercise at a military school. On one hand, the United States military’s medical capacity, implanted across Afghanistan to care for those wounded in the war, could not be used as primary care for the nation’s 29 million people. On the other hand, would the officer who upheld this policy be willing to watch a 5-year-old die?

Since last year, Helmand Province has been the scene of the most intensive combat in Afghanistan. Marine patrols and the Taliban fight daily, and helicopters are needed to evacuate the wounded.

Under NATO rules, any Afghan civilian wounded as a result of military activity is treated in the Western military’s medical system. Black Hawk helicopter crews often scramble and collect them. But each day, Afghans seek help for other injuries and ailments — for heart attacks, for trauma from vehicle and agricultural accidents, for twisted backs, cut hands, spiking fevers, infections, insect bites or dental pain.

For these ordinary medical conditions, unrelated to war but often urgent, Marines and Navy corpsmen in Helmand Province provide first aid. Getting approval for a Black Hawk is another matter.

The helicopters are few. They are spread out. Picking up Afghan civilians with routine ailments puts aircraft and crews at risk. It could also put a helicopter out of position for a gravely wounded soldier or Marine.

Often the decision is made against the patient: helicopters cannot be spared. Many aircrews, and many officers on the ground trying to forge relations with Afghan villages, do not like this. The choice is not theirs; flight approval is made by higher commands.

Maj. Jason S. Davis, a pilot and the commanding officer of Company C, Sixth Battalion, 101st Aviation Regiment, which provides a detachment of Black Hawks to fly medical missions in central and southern Helmand Province, described two conflicting truths.

“We can’t be Afghanistan’s E.M.S.,” he said. “But right now we are.”

Sadiq’s father appeared with him at a Marine outpost in southern Helmand. It was clear that local care could not save him. The Marines requested an evacuation helicopter.

At the Camp Dwyer airfield, to the north, Major Davis and a co-pilot, First Lt. Matthew E. Stewart, saw the request posted on their operation center’s electronic message board. With an escort aircraft trailing behind, they soon lifted off from Camp Dwyer and headed south, expecting that the mission would be approved.

After flying perhaps 15 minutes, they were called back. The boy was not eligible for care. Sadiq was on his own.

A few hours later, a new request for medical evacuation, or medevac, appeared on the screen, this one from another Marine outpost. A small boy, it seemed, had been bitten on the face by a viper.

Everyone knew what this meant: Sadiq’s father had brought his dying son to the next Marine position and had started over.

There were no other medevac missions under way. While the pilots stared at the message board, wondering whether this time the mission for Sadiq would be approved, an officer at the second outpost issued a blunt challenge: would whoever denied the mission, the officer wrote, acknowledge that they knew the boy would die?

The typed answer came back on the screen. The mission was approved.

The Black Hawks lifted into the air at 2:25 p.m. Soon they were flying through a dusty haze a few hundred feet up. “Ten minutes out,” Major Davis said. Halfway to the rescue, and they had not been called back.

While the desert dominates Helmand Province, the contest between the Marines and the Taliban plays out elsewhere, in belts of farmland along the river and in irrigated villages kept alive by pumps.

The military calls these areas “the green zone,” a nickname derived from how they appear from the air — pockets of vegetated terrain that end abruptly where the irrigation stops. It is in these areas where almost all the fighting takes place, and where helicopters come under fire.

Up ahead, a crosshatched pattern of pale fields appeared. “Entering the green zone,” Major Davis said. “Tell them to pop smoke.”

Beside a fortified compound, a Marine lobbed a smoke grenade.

Major Davis banked the aircraft in a wide circle and landed beside the billowing plume.

Specialist David C. Harrell, a medic, slid open the left-side door. Sadiq, on a stretcher, was placed gently inside. He was wrapped in a poncho liner. An oxygen mask covered his face. His father climbed aboard. He was in the system now.

Dust swirled as the Black Hawk lifted, and Major Davis put it through a series of maneuvers, a fast zigzagging flight low over the village and the fields, and then set a heading toward Camp Dwyer, where a second aircrew was headed with the antivenin.

Sadiq thrashed, his face severely swollen. His breathing was erratic. But he was conscious. Specialist Harrell checked the boy’s vital signs and tried to keep him awake. The boy lived through the flight. Doctors at the trauma center quickly decided to transfer him to a more advanced hospital. He was rushed to his next flight.

Back at Company C’s operations tent on Wednesday evening, a message was posted: “LOOKS LIKE THAT KID IS GOING TO MAKE IT.”

But overnight, the prognosis changed. A doctor told Specialist Harrell that Sadiq had been transferred to Kandahar, and was likely to die.

Sadiq had been given all of the antivenin on hand in Afghanistan, but he was barely alive. The venom was breaking down his blood, and his wounds — where the IV needle entered his arm — were seeping. He was on a breathing machine. The fang marks showed on his face.

Snakebite toxicology was tricky, Specialist Harrell said. The dosage was hard to calibrate, especially for a child of perhaps 40 pounds. And maybe the helicopter reached Sadiq too late.

Friday afternoon, Specialist Harrell called the military hospital at Kandahar. He listened, nodded, put down the phone and called out. “He’s off the breathing machine,” he said. “He’s still in I.C.U., but right now he’s sitting up, drinking juice and milk.”

“And he’s talking,” he added.

What this meant sank in. Stung by a venomous snake in a primitive and isolated corner of a war, helped by a persistent father and a chain of people who heard him, Sadiq had reversed Afghanistan’s cruelest math.

    When Afghans Seek Medical Aid, Tough Choice for U.S., NYT, 28.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/29/world/asia/29viper.html

Taliban Attack American Base Outside Kabul

May 18, 2010
The New York Times
By DEXTER FILKINS

KABUL, Afghanistan — Taliban insurgents launched a brazen assault on the American base at Bagram on Wednesday morning, sparking a large and confusing gun battle that left at least five American soldiers wounded and seven guerrillas dead.

Taliban leaders claimed that seven suicide bombers had blown themselves up at the gates of the base, clearing the way for more than 20 other fighters to get inside. The Taliban reports appeared exaggerated, as they often are. But American officials confirmed that the base, one of the largest in Afghanistan, had come under an ambitious and unusual assault.

An American official said that the base had come under attack by as many as many as 30 insurgents. Another American spokesman, Col. Wayne Shanks, said that no suicide bombs had exploded and that no insurgents had entered the base. “At no time were Bagram defenses breached,” he said.

American officials said that the attack had ended by midmorning Tuesday.

Still, details were sketchy. The main road leading to the base was sealed, and helicopters could be seen flying over the area. Local residents reported hearing gunfire around the base.

The Bagram base, located about 50 miles north of Kabul, the capital, is one of the main hubs of the American campaign in Afghanistan. Bagram serves as the headquarters for the military’s efforts in eastern Afghanistan. It is ringed by several layers of defenses.

The assault on Bagram comes on the heels of an attack Tuesday by a suicide bomber in Kabul, who rammed an explosives-laden bus into an American convoy, killing 18 people, including five American soldiers and a Canadian officer.

That attack — and the one on Bagram on Wednesday — appeared to be part of a larger campaign directed at the capital and its environs. In recent days, the Taliban have smuggled five suicide bombers into the area, an American military official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The back-to-back attacks came as American and Afghan leaders were preparing to launch a major offensive in the city of Kandahar to break the hold of the insurgents in southern Afghanistan.

    Taliban Attack American Base Outside Kabul, NYT, 18.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/19/world/asia/19bagram.html

Grim Milestone: 1,000 Americans Dead

May 18, 2010
The New York Times
By JAMES DAO and ANDREW W. LEHREN

He was an irreverent teenager with a pregnant girlfriend when the idea first crossed his mind: Join the Army, raise a family. She had an abortion, but the idea remained. Patrick S. Fitzgibbon, Saint Paddy to his friends, became Private Fitzgibbon. Three months out of basic training, he went to war.

From his outpost in the Kandahar province of Afghanistan, he complained to his father about shortages of cigarettes, Skittles and Mountain Dew. But he took pride in his work and volunteered for patrols. On Aug. 1, 2009, while on one of those missions, Private Fitzgibbon stepped on a metal plate wired to a bomb buried in the sun-baked earth. The blue sky turned brown with dust.

The explosion instantly killed Private Fitzgibbon, 19, of Knoxville, Tenn., and Cpl. Jonathan M. Walls, a 27-year-old father from Colorado Springs. An hour later, a third soldier who was helping secure the area, Pfc. Richard K. Jones, 21, of Roxboro, N.C., died from another hidden bomb. The two blasts wounded at least 10 other soldiers.

On Tuesday, the toll of American dead in Afghanistan passed 1,000, after a suicide bomb in Kabul killed at least five United States service members. Having taken nearly seven years to reach the first 500 dead, the war killed the second 500 in fewer than two. A resurgent Taliban active in almost every province, a weak central government incapable of protecting its people and a larger number of American troops in harms way all contributed to the accelerating pace of death.

The mayhem of last August, coming as Afghans were holding national elections, provided a wake-up call to many Americans about the deteriorating conditions in the country. Forty-seven American G.I.’s died that month, more than double the previous August, making it the deadliest month in the deadliest year of the war.

In many ways, Private Fitzgibbon typified the new wave of combat deaths. American troops are dying younger, often fresh out of boot camp, military records show. From 2002 to 2008, the average age of service members killed in action in Afghanistan was about 28; last year, it dropped to 26. This year, the more than 125 troops killed in combat were on average 25 years old.

In the last two years, the number of troops killed by homemade bombs, which the military calls improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.’s, increased significantly. Earlier in the war, rocket-propelled grenades and small arms fire took the largest number of American lives. But in 2008, for the first time, more than half of American combat deaths were the result of I.E.D.’s, which — just as they did in Iraq — have become both more powerful and more plentiful in Afghanistan.

Those I.E.D. deaths have increasingly come in batches: Last August, for instance, 17 of the 25 deaths caused by I.E.D.’s — including the one that killed Private Fitzgibbon and Corporal Walls — involved attacks in which more than one soldier or Marine died. In future histories, the summer of 2009 may stand as a turning point in the war, a moment when not only the American public began paying attention again to Afghanistan, but when the Obama administration felt compelled to review and revise its entire approach to the war.

The warm months have long been the prime fighting season in Afghanistan, when insurgents have emerged from mountain havens to plot ambushes and recruit new fighters. But in the run-up to the August presidential elections last year, the Taliban’s reach was wider and more potent than at any time since they were driven from power.

Not only did the number of I.E.D. attacks and suicide bombings jump, but the devices themselves became more powerful, capable of flipping or tearing holes into heavily armored vehicles that had once seemed impervious. A bomb estimated at 2,000 pounds killed seven American soldiers and their interpreter riding in a troop carrier last fall.

July, August, September and October went on record as the four deadliest months for American troops since the war began.

After receiving an alarming report about the war from his top commander in Afghanistan, President Obama last fall ordered 30,000 more troops into the war, most of whom will be in place by this summer.

But in calling for more troops, Mr. Obama and other supporters of the new surge warned that casualties, American and Afghan, were almost certain to rise before security improved. The fierce fighting in Helmand Province this year has proven them right, with 16 combat dead in February, compared with just 2 the previous February.

“If the Taliban has obtained political control over important parts of the country, the only way it will get better is if we introduce military forces and contest their control,” said Steven Biddle, a defense policy expert at the Council on Foreign Relations who was part of a group that reviewed American strategy last summer. “And that’s going to get people killed: their people, our people and civilians.”

Good Days and Bad

They did not know each other well. But the three soldiers from Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 12th Infantry Regiment, 4th Infantry Division out of Fort Carson, Colo., shared a few things in common. All had weathered the breakup of their parents’ marriages. None liked school much. And all viewed the Army as a path to a better life.

Pfc. Richard K. Jones had been a star high school wrestler in Person, N.C., near the Virginia border. All arms and legs at 6-foot-2 and 152 pounds, he made it to the state championships one year. The sport gave his life discipline, his mother said, and he thought the Army would be the perfect place to channel it.

His mother, Franceen Ridgeway, prevailed on him to try college instead. But after earning an associate’s degree and working as a diesel mechanic for a short time, he asked his mother to support his military ambitions. She consented, saying: “Maybe it’s what God wants you to do.”

He graduated from basic training in late January 2009 and was in Afghanistan by May. In one firefight, Private Jones fell and dislocated his shoulder. But the medics popped it back in, gave him a few days off and then returned him to duty.

“He wasn’t into death or dying,” Ms. Ridgeway said. “To him, it was an honor to be a soldier. And it was a chance to see the world, to get away from a small town. Maybe he was thinking he might never have that opportunity again.”

Cpl. Jonathan Walls was the son of a Navy man, but he played soldier from the time he could hold a toy gun, his mother, Lisa Rowe, said. In the woods outside Reading, Pa., he spent innumerable hours hunting, target shooting and playing paintball. After high school, he tried community college and worked at a Lowe’s. But only the military captured his imagination, and he enlisted in 2005. By 2007, he was in Iraq.

Roadside bombs there gave him a mild traumatic brain injury, Ms. Rowe said, and he returned home suffering migraine headaches that made it difficult to sleep. Nevertheless, he received orders to deploy to Afghanistan, arriving there last May, three months after the birth of his third child.

“I thought they might not send him so that his brain could simmer down,” Ms. Rowe said. “But we’re in a time of war. He said, ‘Ma, it’s my duty.’ ”

On the day before Charlie Company deployed last summer, Private Fitzgibbon took a bunch of soldiers to a strip club near Fort Carson, running up a $3,400 tab that his father paid off. It was typical Patrick. Charmingly roguish, he wore his hair in a brightly tinted Mohawk, drilled holes the size of nickels into his ear lobes and posted comedic homemade videos on YouTube. The military didn’t seem a natural fit.

But after his girlfriend got pregnant two years ago, he vowed to support her and the child by joining the Army. He was devastated when she had an abortion, his father said, and decided to enlist anyway. Boot camp changed him.

“He went from not caring about nothing to knowing he had responsibilities,” his father, Donald Fitzgibbon, 39, said. “All in a matter of months.”

The day the three men died began with a reconnaissance patrol along dirt paths lined by grape arbors in a place called Mushan Village. By 8:30 a.m., the temperature was already over 100 degrees. After resting in the shade of a mud-brick compound, the soldiers gave brief chase to a pair of suspicious-looking men. But their sergeant ordered them to fall back, worrying about an I.E.D. trap. A few minutes later, Private Fitzgibbon stepped on the pressure plate.

One of the first medics on the scene was Private Fitzgibbon’s best friend in the unit. For weeks afterward, the medic felt ripped by guilt because he could not save Private Fitzgibbon or Corporal Walls. Mr. Fitzgibbon tried to ease his grief, telling him: “God knows when it’s your turn.”

Now and again the private’s father consoles himself with the same thought.

“I feel he would have died whether he was here or in Afghanistan, and that gives me peace with it,” Mr. Fitzgibbon said. “But I still have my good days and bad days.”

“A Resilient Insurgency”

Just as Private Fitzgibbon’s platoon was making its first forays into Kandahar province last year, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top American commander in Afghanistan, was dispatching a team of experts to review American strategy.

As the group traveled the country last June, they were troubled by how little American intelligence officers seemed to know about local conditions, some of the members said in interviews later. The Taliban had established shadow governors in many provinces and were waging intimidation campaigns against village leaders who defied them.

Yet American commanders did not seem to have answers to some basic questions, group members said. How many district governors spend the nights in their districts? How many police checkpoints are manned on a given day? No one seemed to know.

To many on the panel, the poor intelligence was a sign that American forces could not secure their operating areas and lacked strong relationships with local leaders.

Their final report, endorsed by General McChrystal, concluded that “the situation in Afghanistan is serious” and that American forces faced “a resilient and growing insurgency.”

The solution, many panel members felt, was to increase the presence of American troops. They argued that the situation could be reversed with a new commitment to protecting population centers, a strategy known as counterinsurgency.

Not all of the members agreed. Some argued that sending more troops would simply increase civilian casualties and ultimately aid Taliban recruiting.

“McChrystal’s assessment of what went wrong is accurate but his solution is 180-degrees wrong,” said one of the dissenters, Luis Peral, a research fellow at the European Union’s Institute for Security Studies in Paris, in a recent interview.

But that view did not prevail. Under General McChrystal’s signature, the final report landed on Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates’ desk on Aug. 30.

The next day, three more American soldiers died in southern Afghanistan.

‘To Grow Me Up’

Pfc. Jordan Brochu was one of them.

An adopted child, he had lived in many places but carried himself with a confidence, some said swagger, that belied the disruptions in his life. Perhaps it was his build: 6-foot-1 and muscular, he was a natural athlete who threw the discus for the first time as a senior in high school yet still qualified for the state championships.

But he had another side as well, writing poetry, playing the violin — lovingly, if not proficiently — and cooking. He considered becoming a chef, but jobs were scarce in western Maine, where he attended high school. So upon graduating in 2008, he chose the Army, “to help make a difference and to grow me up,” he declared on his MySpace page.

Before deploying to Afghanistan last year, his culinary arts teacher asked him for a photograph to hang in the classroom as a reminder of the war. With a smile and a touch of bravado, Private Brochu declined.

“Don’t stress it Mr. B,” he told the teacher, Eric Botka. “I’ll see you when I get home.”

On Aug. 31, while Private Brochu was on foot patrol in the Arghandab River Valley of Kandahar Province, a mine detonated and killed him at the age of 20, along with another soldier, Specialist Jonathan D. Welch. Before the day was over, a third soldier from their unit, the 1st Battalion, 17th Infantry Regiment out of Fort Lewis, Wash., would be killed. By this week, the battalion had lost 21 soldiers in Afghanistan in less than a year.

Raised in Orange County, Calif., Specialist Welch, 19, was from a close-knit, deeply Christian family. But he rebelled in his freshman year of high school, drinking heavily, using methamphetamine and living on the streets for weeks before his parents sent him to a rehabilitation clinic in Mexico.

When he was 17, Specialist Welch and a good friend decided to visit a military recruiting station. His friend joined the Navy but Specialist Welch chose the Army, declaring, “I just want to shoot a gun.” His parents grudgingly consented.

“You see your child so lost with the drugs, and then you see him saying: ‘I’m passionate about this,’ ” recalled his father, Ben Storll, 47. “The only thing he was passionate about before was punk rock music.”

In Afghanistan, he became close to his fire team leader, Sgt. Drew McComber, who was badly wounded in the explosion that killed Specialist Welch. In a letter to the specialist’s parents, Sergeant McComber described the soldier as his “go-to guy for everything.”

“Thank you so much for supporting him through his wilder days when he was younger,” Sergeant McComber wrote from his hospital bed. “I’ve seen the pictures. He certainly has come a long ways in a very short time.”

    Grim Milestone: 1,000 Americans Dead, NYT, 18.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/19/us/19dead.html

Suicide Bomber Hits U.S. Convoy in Afghanistan

May 18, 2010
The New York Times
By DEXTER FILKINS

KABUL, Afghanistan — A man driving a Toyota minivan crammed with explosives steered into an American convoy Tuesday morning here, killing 18 people, including five American soldiers and one from Canada. At least 47 people were wounded, nearly all of them civilians caught in rush-hour traffic.

The blast sent a fireball billowing into the air, set cars aflame and blew bodies apart. Limbs and entrails flew hundreds of feet, littering yards and walls and streets. The survivors, many of them women and children, some of them missing limbs, lay in the road moaning and calling for help.

In a passenger bus, an Afghan woman lay dead in her seat, cut in half; with her baby still squirming in her arms. Fifty yards away, a man’s head lay on the hood of a truck.

“I just dove on the ground to try to save myself,” said Mahfouz Mahmoodi, an Afghan police officer. “And then I got up, and I saw the terrible scene.”

The assault demonstrated anew that the Taliban can still strike the capital — if not every day, then with regularity.

The Taliban took responsibility for the attack in a posting on its Web site, saying the group had dispatched a young man named Nizamuddin, a resident of Kabul. The Taliban said that Nizamuddin carried more than 1,600 pounds of explosives in his van.

It seemed likely that the driver had cruised the city for some time looking for a target, holding off on his detonator before finally finding his target. Intelligence agencies often receive word that suicide and car bombers have entered the city with plans to attack, and some of them with no particular target in mind.

While the Taliban was quick to congratulate itself for killing the American and NATO soldiers, its statement made no mention of the dead and wounded Afghan civilians. The attack was condemned by the United Nations, NATO and the American Embassy, which accused the Taliban of “callous disregard” for the lives of ordinary Afghans.

It was the worst attack in Kabul in weeks. The insurgency is a largely rural phenomenon in a largely rural country, and on most days the capital is quiet. The peace in the city, such as there is, is kept almost entirely by Afghan police and army, with the Americans and NATO standing back.

The attack came shortly before President Hamid Karzai prepared to speak to reporters at the presidential palace, having just returned from meeting President Obama in Washington. The Karzai government is preparing, with the Americans and their NATO allies, to launch a major offensive around the southern city of Kandahar, the Taliban’s spiritual home.

That offensive, aimed at breaking the Taliban’s hold on southern Afghanistan, is seen as the most crucial operation of the nine-year war. Afghan and American officials have warned recently that they expect the Taliban to try to counter the offensive in any way that they can.

The bomber struck at 8 a.m., when the streets were filled with traffic. The American convoy, which contained a number of armored S.U.V.s, was moving down Dar-ul-Aman Road in the southern edge of the city. The road leads up a hill to the Afghan Counter-Insurgency Academy, one of the principal centers for teaching tactics to Afghan officers and enlisted men.

The school, known as the COIN Academy, sits just behind the Dar-ul-Aman Palace, a grand building built by King Amonullah, an Afghan monarch, early in the 20th century. In the 1980s, the building served as the headquarters for the Soviet military. It still sits atop the barren hill, riddled with bullet and holes, a gutted husk.

The explosion sent a plume of fire into the air and ignited the cars and buses all around.

As the chaos unfolded, ambulances converged on the scene, and a pair of Blackhawk helicopters swooped in to take away the dead and wounded NATO soldiers.

“People were calling, ‘Help me, help me,’ “ said Yusuf Tahiri, an ambulance driver who carried off six dead and two wounded Afghans. “There were body parts everywhere.”

As Mr. Tahiri spoke, an Afghan soldier appeared carrying a large red trash bag. It was, he said, filled with human brains. “What do you want me to do this with this,” he asked. “Do you want me to bury it, or do you want to take it?”

The driver nodded, and the soldier walked around to the back of the ambulance and tossed the bag in the back.

“I have seen so many of these — so many,” said Mr. Tahiri, the driver, shaking his head.

The blast also flung people and wreckage over into the courtyard of a veterinary clinic of Kabul University. With the mayhem still unfolding, two Afghans, both of them guards at the clinic, sat on the curb and talked.

“I saw something just like this 10 years ago,” Mohammed Hussein said to his friend. “A rocket landed next to my house. Just like this.”

His friend, Abdul Hafiz, gave a weary nod.

“It was very dangerous, very horrible,” he said.


Sangar Rahmi and Sharifullah Sahak contributed reporting.

    Suicide Bomber Hits U.S. Convoy in Afghanistan, NYT, 18.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/19/world/asia/19afghan.html

In Afghanistan’s North, Ex-Warlord Offers Security

May 17, 2010
The New York Times
By CARLOTTA GALL

MAZAR-I-SHARIF, Afghanistan — In a country still gripped by war, the families picnicking around the azure-domed shrine in the central square here are perhaps the clearest sign that this northern provincial city has distinguished itself as one of the most secure places in the country. An estimated one million people visited Mazar-i-Sharif for Afghan New Year celebrations in March and in the weeks after without incident.

It helps, of course, that Mazar-i-Sharif and the surrounding Balkh Province lie far from the Pakistani border and the heartland of the Taliban insurgency in southern and eastern Afghanistan. But there is something else that sets Mazar-i-Sharif apart, almost everyone here agrees, and that is the leadership of the provincial governor, Atta Muhammad Noor.

Some regard Mr. Noor, 46, a former mujahedeen commander and an ethnic Tajik, as a thinly disguised warlord who still exercises an unhealthy degree of control across much of the north and who has used that influence to grow rich through business deals during his time in power since 2001.

But there is little doubt that Mr. Noor has also managed to do in his corner what President Hamid Karzai has failed to achieve in other parts of Afghanistan: bring development and security, with a good measure of public support, to regions divided by ethnic and political rivalries.

For that, Mr. Noor has slowly gained the attention and support of Western donors and become something of a study in what kind of governing, imperfect as it is, produces results in Afghanistan.

Since 2001, American and other Western officials have tried to buttress the central government under Mr. Karzai as a means of securing Afghanistan by weakening powerful regional warlords and bringing lucrative customs revenues into the state coffers. Mr. Karzai has installed political allies as governors around the country, yet many have failed to provide security or services and have indulged in corruption, alienating Afghans from the government at all levels.

Supporters of Mr. Noor say he has made the transition from bearded guerrilla fighter to business-suited manager. Though many presume he has used his position of power to make money, Mr. Noor speaks out against corruption and has apparently checked it enough to maintain public support. That support has enhanced security, and the security has allowed others to prosper, too, another important reason that he has maintained popular backing.

Such is his support that Mr. Noor is the one governor whom President Karzai has been unable to replace, or has chosen not to, even after Mr. Noor campaigned against him in the presidential election last year.

A skillful politician, Mr. Noor has also gained the upper hand over some formidable political rivals, solidifying his power in the region as they left to take up posts in Kabul, including even Mr. Karzai’s ally, the Uzbek militia leader Abdul Rashid Dostum.

In an interview in his lavish party offices, Mr. Noor denied rumors that he takes a cut of every investment that flows through the region and said he made his money legally — he has interests in oil, wood trading, fertilizer and construction, among other things. “In legal ways, I did do a lot of work,” he said. “I did my own business.”

Instead, he criticized Mr. Karzai’s management of the country and said the president never followed through on plans to regulate revenue collection, policing and relations between the central government and the provinces. He derided Mr. Karzai’s efforts to curb corruption, saying the president should not appoint corrupt people in the first place.

Mr. Karzai had also failed to act as the Taliban insurgency spread into the north in recent years, he said.

“If we don’t have the cooperation of the people, you cannot stop it,” he said of the insurgency. “There has to be a deep contact between the people and the government. If officials are not embezzling or taking bribes, then definitely the people will trust the government.”

Even for skeptics of Mr. Noor, the success of his approach in Mazar-i-Sharif is hard to ignore. While insurgents remain active in two districts of the province, this city has emerged as an investment haven and has become one of the largest sources of revenue in the country, according to the Finance Ministry.

Provincial leaders and businessmen attribute the improved security here to Mr. Noor’s skill in maintaining good community relations and to his deep knowledge of the region’s intricate patchwork of tribes and loyalties, earned during his years as a military commander in the north.

Mr. Noor joined the mujahedeen to fight the Soviet occupation at 16 and commanded hundreds of fighters against the Taliban by 2001. Today he maintains personal contacts with district, tribal and former mujahedeen leaders who cooperate on intelligence, according to an aide, Qari Qudratullah.

Mr. Noor, who is from Mazar-i-Sharif, knows everyone, including the thieves and gangsters, Nader Nadery, deputy head of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, said. While protecting some, Mr. Nadery added, Mr. Noor has gained popularity by catching thieves and returning stolen goods to their owners.

Dr. Muhammad Afzal Hadeed, a surgeon and the newly elected head of the provincial council, said: “He had good relations with the people, and the people are cooperating with him. These two factors made it work.”

In the farming district of Balkh, west of Mazar-i-Sharif, the mainly Pashtun residents said security had vastly improved in the last five years. Businessmen, some of whom have moved from the south to invest in Mazar-i-Sharif, say they can do business here without fear of the kidnapping and extortion that plagues the capital. The governor, whose father was a fur and rug trader, is pro-business, they say.

“The first thing he did was to eliminate poppy and smuggling and attract businessmen,” said Sayed Mohammad Taher Roshanzada, head of the chamber of commerce in Mazar-i-Sharif. “His slogan is, ‘Make money and spend it here.’ ”

In Hairatan, a shabby river port on the northern border with Uzbekistan, brand new fuel storage tanks and a new railway line, Afghanistan’s first, are spreading out amid the desert scrub.

The port is now the entry point for 80 percent of Afghanistan’s fuel imports, including up to half of the fuel supplies for American and NATO forces, said Muhammad Ayub Ghazanfar, an ethnic Uzbek whose family business is the region’s biggest importer of fuel and foodstuffs.

Much of that business has come north because of attacks on convoys through Pakistan, he added. “The only reason for Mazar’s progress,” he said, “is because of the security.”


Abdul Waheed Wafa contributed reporting

    In Afghanistan’s North, Ex-Warlord Offers Security, NYT, 17.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/18/world/asia/18mazar.html

Mr. Gates and the Pentagon Budget

May 16, 2010
The New York Times

There has been a feeding frenzy at the Pentagon budget trough since the 9/11 attacks. Pretty much anything the military chiefs and industry lobbyists pitched, Congress approved — no matter the cost and no matter if the weapons or programs were over budget, underperforming or no longer needed in a post-cold-war world.

Annual defense spending has nearly doubled in the last decade to $549 billion. That does not include the cost of the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, which this year will add $159 billion.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has now vowed to do things differently. In two recent speeches, he declared that the nation cannot keep spending at this rate and that the defense budget “gusher” has been “turned off and will stay off for a good period of time.” He vowed that going forward all current programs and future spending requests will receive “unsparing” scrutiny.

Mr. Gates isn’t proposing cutting his budget. He’s talking about 2 percent to 3 percent real growth after inflation, compared with 4 percent a year in 2000 to 2009. Given the nation’s dire financial state, it’s still a lot.

The Obama administration has already chopped some big-ticket, anachronistic weapons. (It stood up to the lobbyists and Congressional boosters to kill the F-22 fighter jet.) There has been more investment in needed new weapons, most notably unmanned drones. The Quadrennial Defense Review talked sternly about the need for “future trade-offs,” although it failed to start making the hard choices.

Mr. Gates said he wants to trim the bloated civilian and military bureaucracy (including excess admirals and generals) for a modest savings of $10 billion to $15 billion annually. He wants more cuts in weapons spending, and he deserves credit for naming specific systems.

Why should the Navy have 11 aircraft carriers (at $11 billion a copy) for the next 30 years when no other country has more than one, he asked at the Navy League exposition in Maryland. He questioned the need for the Marines’ beach-storming Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle (vulnerable to advances in anti-ship systems) and $7 billion ballistic missile submarines for the Navy.

We’re sure the irate calls from Capitol Hill and K Street haven’t stopped since. It must be noted that Mr. Gates didn’t say for sure whether he would slash any of these systems — or how deeply.

Perhaps the most politically volatile issue is military health care costs, which rose from $19 billion to $50 billion in a decade. Active-duty military and their families rightly do not pay for health care. But what retirees pay — $460 annually per family — has not risen in 15 years.

Mr. Gates said that many retirees earn full-time salaries on top of their military retirement pay and could get coverage through their employer. We owe our fighting forces excellent care, but this is a time when everyone must share the burden.

Even if Mr. Gates begins to get a real handle on other costs, budget experts warn that exploding personnel costs — wages, health care, housing, pensions — will increasingly crowd out financing for new weapons. Once the United States commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan wind down, Washington will have to consider trimming troop strength, beginning with the Navy and Air Force.

Mr. Gates is an old Washington hand and we’re sure he is going into this fight with his eyes wide open. Still, if there was any doubt about what he’s up against, a House Armed Services subcommittee gave him a reminder last week. It added nearly $400 million to the Pentagon’s $9.9 billion 2011 request for missile defenses. That included $50 million for an airborne laser that experts agree doesn’t work and Mr. Gates largely canceled last year.

    Mr. Gates and the Pentagon Budget, NYT, 16.5.2010? http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/17/opinion/17mon1.html

U.S. Is Still Using Private Spy Ring, Despite Doubts

May 15, 2010
The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON — Top military officials have continued to rely on a secret network of private spies who have produced hundreds of reports from deep inside Afghanistan and Pakistan, according to American officials and businessmen, despite concerns among some in the military about the legality of the operation.

Earlier this year, government officials admitted that the military had sent a group of former Central Intelligence Agency officers and retired Special Operations troops into the region to collect information — some of which was used to track and kill people suspected of being militants. Many portrayed it as a rogue operation that had been hastily shut down once an investigation began.

But interviews with more than a dozen current and former government officials and businessmen, and an examination of government documents, tell a different a story. Not only are the networks still operating, their detailed reports on subjects like the workings of the Taliban leadership in Pakistan and the movements of enemy fighters in southern Afghanistan are also submitted almost daily to top commanders and have become an important source of intelligence.

The American military is largely prohibited from operating inside Pakistan. And under Pentagon rules, the army is not allowed to hire contractors for spying.

Military officials said that when Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top commander in the region, signed off on the operation in January 2009, there were prohibitions against intelligence gathering, including hiring agents to provide information about enemy positions in Pakistan. The contractors were supposed to provide only broad information about the political and tribal dynamics in the region, and information that could be used for “force protection,” they said.

Some Pentagon officials said that over time the operation appeared to morph into traditional spying activities. And they pointed out that the supervisor who set up the contractor network, Michael D. Furlong, was now under investigation.

But a review of the program by The New York Times found that Mr. Furlong’s operatives were still providing information using the same intelligence gathering methods as before. The contractors were still being paid under a $22 million contract, the review shows, managed by Lockheed Martin and supervised by the Pentagon office in charge of special operations policy.

Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary, said that the program “remains under investigation by multiple offices within the Defense Department,” so it would be inappropriate to answer specific questions about who approved the operation or why it continues.

“I assure you we are committed to determining if any laws were broken or policies violated,” he said. Spokesmen for General Petraeus and Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top American commander in Afghanistan, declined to comment. Mr. Furlong remains at his job, working as a senior civilian Air Force official.

A senior defense official said that the Pentagon decided just recently not to renew the contract, which expires at the end of May. While the Pentagon declined to discuss the program, it appears that commanders in the field are in no rush to shut it down because some of the information has been highly valuable, particularly in protecting troops against enemy attacks.

With the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the expanded role of contractors on the battlefield — from interrogating prisoners to hunting terrorism suspects — has raised questions about whether the United States has outsourced some of its most secretive and important operations to a private army many fear is largely unaccountable. The C.I.A. has relied extensively on contractors in recent years to carry out missions in war zones.

The exposure of the spying network also reveals tensions between the Pentagon and the C.I.A., which itself is running a covert war across the border in Pakistan. In December, a cable from the C.I.A.’s station chief in Kabul, Afghanistan, to the Pentagon argued that the military’s hiring of its own spies could have disastrous consequences, with various networks possibly colliding with one another.

The memo also said that Mr. Furlong had a history of delving into outlandish intelligence schemes, including an episode in 2008, when American officials expelled him from Prague for trying to clandestinely set up computer servers for propaganda operations. Some officials say they believe that the C.I.A. is trying to scuttle the operation to protect its own turf, and that the spy agency has been embarrassed because the contractors are outperforming C.I.A. operatives.

The private contractor network was born in part out of frustration with the C.I.A. and the military intelligence apparatus. There was a belief by some officers that the C.I.A. was too risk averse, too reliant on Pakistan’s spy service and seldom able to provide the military with timely information to protect American troops. In addition, the military has complained that it is not technically allowed to operate in Pakistan, whose government is willing to look the other way and allow C.I.A. spying but not the presence of foreign troops.

Paul Gimigliano, a C.I.A. spokesman, dismissed reports of a turf war.

“There’s no daylight at all on this between C.I.A. and DoD,” he said. “It’s an issue for Defense to look into — it involves their people, after all — and that’s exactly what they’re doing.”

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the Pentagon has used broad interpretations of its authorities to expand military intelligence operations, including sending Special Operations troops on clandestine missions far from declared war zones. These missions have raised concerns in Washington that the Pentagon is running de facto covert actions without proper White House authority and with little oversight from the elaborate system of Congressional committees and internal controls intended to prevent abuses in intelligence gathering.

The officials say the contractors’ reports are delivered via an encrypted e-mail service to an “information operations fusion cell,” located at the military base at Kabul International Airport. There, they are fed into classified military computer networks, then used for future military operations or intelligence reports.

To skirt military restrictions on intelligence gathering, information the contractors gather in eastern Afghanistan and Pakistan’s tribal areas is specifically labeled “atmospheric collection”: information about the workings of militant groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan or about Afghan tribal structures. The boundaries separating “atmospherics” from what spies gather is murky. It is generally considered illegal for the military to run organized operations aimed at penetrating enemy organizations with covert agents.

But defense officials with knowledge of the program said that contractors themselves regarded the contract as permission to spy. Several weeks ago, one of the contractors reported on Taliban militants massing near American military bases east of Kandahar. Not long afterward, Apache gunships arrived at the scene to disperse and kill the militants.

The web of private businesses working under the Lockheed contract include Strategic Influence Alternatives, American International Security Corporation and International Media Ventures, a communications company based in St. Petersburg, Fla., with Czech ownership.

One of the companies employs a network of Americans, Afghans and Pakistanis run by Duane Clarridge, a C.I.A. veteran who became famous for his role in the Iran-Contra scandal. Mr. Clarridge declined to be interviewed.

The Times is withholding some information about the contractor network, including some of the names of agents working in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

A spokesman for Lockheed said that no Pentagon officials had raised any concerns about the work.

“We believe our subcontractors are effectively performing the work required of them under the terms of this task order,” said Tom Casey, the spokesman. “We’ve not received any information indicating otherwise.” Lockheed is not involved in the information gathering, but rather administers the contract.

The specifics of the investigation into Mr. Furlong are unclear. Pentagon officials have said that the Defense Department’s inspector general is examining possible contract fraud and financial mismanagement dating from last year.

In his only media interview since details of the operation were revealed, with The San Antonio Express-News, Mr. Furlong said that all of his work had been blessed by senior commanders. In that interview, he declined to provide further details.

Officials said that the tussle over the intelligence operations dated from at least 2008, when some generals in Afghanistan grew angry at what they saw as a paucity of intelligence about the militant groups in Pakistan and Afghanistan who were regularly attacking American troops.

In October of that year, Mr. Furlong traveled to C.I.A. headquarters with top Pentagon officials, including Brig. Gen. Robert H. Holmes, then the deputy operations officer at United States Central Command. General Holmes has since retired and is now an executive at one of the subcontractors, International Media Ventures. The meeting at the C.I.A.’s counterterrorism center was set up to inform the spy agency about the military’s plans to collect “atmospheric information” about Afghanistan and Pakistan, including information about the structure of militant networks in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

Mr. Furlong was testing the sometimes muddy laws governing traditional military activities. A former Army officer who sometimes referred to himself as “the king of the gray areas,” Mr. Furlong played a role in many of America’s recent adventures abroad. He ran psychological operations missions in the Balkans, worked at a television network in Iraq, now defunct, that was sponsored by the American government and made frequent trips to Kabul, Eastern Europe and the Middle East in recent years to help run a number of clandestine military propaganda operations.

At the C.I.A. meeting in 2008, the atmosphere quickly deteriorated, according to some in attendance, because C.I.A. officials were immediately suspicious that the plans amounted to a back-door spying operation.

In general, according to one American official, intelligence operatives are nervous about the notion of “private citizens running around a war zone, trying to collect intelligence that wasn’t properly vetted for operations that weren’t properly coordinated.”

Shortly afterward, in a legal opinion stamped “Secret,” lawyers at the military’s Centcom headquarters in Tampa, Fla., signed off on a version of Mr. Furlong’s proposed operations, adding specific language that the program should not carry out “inherent intelligence activities.” In January 2009, General Petraeus wrote a letter endorsing the proposed operations, which had been requested by Gen. David D. McKiernan, the top commander in Afghanistan at the time.

What happened after that money began flowing to Afghanistan remains a matter of dispute. General McKiernan said in an interview with The Times that he never endorsed hiring private contractors specifically for intelligence gathering.

Instead, he said, he was interested in gaining “atmospherics” from the contractors to help him and his commanders understand the complex cultural and political makeup of the region.

“It could give us a better understanding of the rural areas, of what people there saying, what they were expressing as their needs, and their concerns,” he said.

“It was not intelligence for manhunts,” he said. “That was clearly not it, and we agreed that’s not what this was about.”

To his mind, he said, intelligence is specific information that could be used for attacks on militants in Afghanistan.

General McKiernan said he had endorsed a reporting and research network in Afghanistan and Pakistan pitched to him a year earlier by Robert Young Pelton, a writer and chronicler of the world’s danger spots, and Eason Jordan, a former CNN executive. The project, called AfPax Insider, would have been used a subscription-based Web site, but also a secure information database that only the military could access.

In an interview, Mr. Pelton said that he did not gather intelligence and never worked at the direction of Mr. Furlong and that he did not have a government contract for the work.

But Mr. Pelton said that AfPax did receive reimbursement from International Media Ventures, one of the companies hired for Mr. Furlong’s operation. He said that he was never told that I.M.V. was doing clandestine work for the government.

It was several months later, during the summer of 2009, when officials said that the private contractor network using Mr. Clarridge and other former C.I.A. and Special Operations troops was established. Mr. Furlong, according to several former colleagues, believed that Mr. Pelton and Mr. Jordan had failed to deliver on their promises, and that the new team could finally carry out the program first envisioned by General McKiernan. The contractor network assumed a cloak-and-dagger air, with the information reports stripped of anything that might reveal sources’ identities, and the collectors were assigned code names and numbers.


Ginger Thompson and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting. Barclay Walsh contributed research.

    U.S. Is Still Using Private Spy Ring, Despite Doubts, NYT, 15.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/world/16contractors.html

Drone Strikes Pound West Pakistan

May 11, 2010
The New York Times
By JANE PERLEZ and PIR ZUBAIR SHAH

KARACHI, Pakistan — American drone aircraft fired 18 missiles at militants in Pakistan’s North Waziristan tribal region on Tuesday, killing at least 14 fighters and wounding four, a security official and a resident of the area said.

The missiles struck a region known as Datta Khel on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border where Taliban and Qaeda fighters prepare for operations against United States and NATO troops in Afghanistan.

The unusually intense drone attack was the third since a failed car bombing in Times Square 10 days earlier. Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani-American charged in the attempted attack, has told American investigators he visited North Waziristan to train under the auspices of the Pakistani Taliban.

There was no indication that the strikes on Tuesday were retaliation for the bombing attempt.

Rather, the attack by the American drones, which are operated by the Central Intelligence Agency, appeared to be a continuation of the air campaign to degrade the capabilities of Al Qaeda, the Pakistani Taliban and the Afghan Taliban fighters now working together in North Waziristan. There have been more than 30 drone attacks against militants in the tribal areas in 2010, almost all of them in North Waziristan.

A resident of Miranshah, the capital of North Waziristan, said in a telephone interview Tuesday he saw a truck stacked with empty coffins heading for Datta Khel after the attack.

According to this account, a missile hit a vehicle carrying four militants, and other missiles slammed into tents erected by the militants in the nearby Zair Ghundai area, close to the border with Afghanistan.

The intensity of the drone attacks in the past few months has forced militants to resort to more temporary quarters, like tents, and to keep on the move.

The resident said that six drones had been seen over Datta Khel and at least four were still hovering over the area after the attack in the early hours of Tuesday.

The militants killed in the attack belonged to the forces of Sadiq Noor, a commander who is loyal to the Haqqani network, which specializes in operations in Afghanistan, the resident said.

Militants loyal to Mr. Noor staged an ambush last month against Pakistani soldiers based in North Waziristan that killed at least seven soldiers, security officials said.

    Drone Strikes Pound West Pakistan, NYT, 11.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/12/world/asia/12pstan.html

U.S. Tries to Win Afghan Leader With Charm

May 10, 2010
The New York Times
By HELENE COOPER and MARK LANDLER

WASHINGTON — The last time Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, was in Washington — a year ago — he had to share the spotlight with his Pakistani counterpart, Asif Ali Zardari, who got the bulk of the attention from the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton even made a personal, unscheduled visit to huddle with Mr. Zardari at his hotel.

It is a far, far different visit this time around, reflecting the Obama administration’s decision to abandon the publicly tough approach it tried to use to pressure Mr. Karzai to tackle corruption and drug trafficking in his government. Administration officials concluded that the strategy had backfired, making Mr. Karzai more resentful and resistant.

This time, the Americans are pulling out all the stops for Mr. Karzai as part of a new charm offensive. Mrs. Clinton, one of the few people in the administration with a good rapport with him, has invited him for a stroll through the grounds of a private enclave in Georgetown. Richard C. Holbrooke, the special representative to the region, was dispatched to Andrews Air Force Base at 7 a.m. on Monday to personally greet Mr. Karzai. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. will be Mr. Karzai’s host for a private dinner at the vice president’s mansion.

And Lt. Gen. Karl W. Eikenberry, the ambassador to Afghanistan, who personally escorted Mr. Karzai on the flight from Kabul to Washington, was sent off to assure reporters at the White House that he now had faith in the Afghan president’s determination to succeed, a position that stands in contrast to his diplomatic cable last fall denouncing Mr. Karzai as “not an adequate strategic partner.”

The new warmth is oozing all the way to the Oval Office. President Obama, in an unusual show of hospitality and presidential attention toward a visiting foreign delegation, will be host to Mr. Karzai and others in his government for almost a full day at the White House, including a lunch on Wednesday followed by a rare joint news conference.

“Two things are happening,” said Richard Fontaine, a former foreign policy adviser to Senator John McCain. “One, there wasn’t much payoff from the earlier approach. And second, it’s sunk in, after the Afghan elections last year, that this is the guy who’s going to be here for four years and change, so we better get along with him because we don’t have an alternative.”

But the administration’s new public embrace of Mr. Karzai clearly has its own limitations, which were on display during the news briefing on Monday when General Eikenberry refused to answer repeated questions about whether his concerns about Mr. Karzai as a strategic partner had been laid to rest. “President Karzai is the elected president of Afghanistan,” General Eikenberry said. “Afghanistan is a close friend and ally, and of course I highly respect President Karzai in that capacity.”

Administration officials are also having to walk carefully around what remains one of the most contentious subjects in the relationship with Afghanistan: allegations of pervasive corruption in the Karzai government. Here the reversal in tone is most evident. Whereas it was a building crisis a few months ago, the Americans now portray it as one of several.

Though officials admit privately that corruption remains a big issue, some took pains to compliment Mr. Karzai for taking steps in this area. General Eikenberry, for instance, noted that Mr. Karzai had given new powers to a government anticorruption body, the High Office of Oversight, and added that “we’ve recently seen high-profile public corruption trials taking place in Kabul.”

These days, the administration is focusing more on the misuse of foreign assistance dollars at the provincial and district levels, said a senior administration official, who, like some of the other people in administration and diplomatic circles who were interviewed, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the relationship.

Rather than lecture Mr. Karzai, the official said, the administration will offer to work with his government to root out corruption in places like Kandahar. This too, may present a problem, given that one of Mr. Karzai’s brothers, whom some American officials suspect of links to drug dealers, insurgents, and voting fraud, is a powerful force in the region.

An early highlight in this carefully choreographed week will be a glittering reception on Tuesday, with Mrs. Clinton as the host to Mr. Karzai and his ministers, in the State Department’s ornate Benjamin Franklin Room.

The ministers will mingle with their American opposite numbers, a list that is expected to include Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates; Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner; Leon E. Panetta, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency; Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation; Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff; Gen. David H. Petraeus; and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.

The meetings’ purpose, a senior official said, is twofold: to underscore the “strategic partnership” between the United States and Afghanistan, and to underscore to the American public that the Afghan government is more than Mr. Karzai. The Afghan president has collected some worthy ministers in his cabinet, officials insist, and the State Department meeting will serve as a way to showcase them.

But foreign policy experts caution that this camaraderie does not mean all is rosy between Washington and Kabul. Far from it. While the administration “is in kiss-and-make-up mode,” said Brian Katulis, a foreign policy expert with the Center for American Progress, a liberal policy group with ties to the administration, “the fundamental issues remain the same. We have not articulated what our endgame in Afghanistan is. What exactly are we asking Karzai to do?”

Mr. Katulis said huge gaps remained between what the United States would like from the Karzai government and what the Afghan government had been able to do.

For instance, American officials coined the “government in a box” idea for an Afghan government that would be ready to roll into the former Taliban stronghold of Marja once American troops cleared out the insurgents. But once that military operation was completed, Mr. Katulis noted, “there wasn’t much inside the box,” referring to the slow pace of the civilian effort in Afghanistan.

Beyond that, Mr. Karzai, concerned about his own future, remains wary of whether the United States is in Afghanistan for the long haul. Mr. Obama’s pledge to begin pulling American troops out of Afghanistan next year has left Mr. Karzai “wondering who its protectors will be after 2011,” said one European diplomat with close ties to the international operation in Afghanistan. “Will it be the Taliban?”

Administration officials said they planned to give general support to Mr. Karzai’s effort to reach out to some leaders of the Taliban, though the administration had not yet formulated a detailed policy on so-called reconciliation. They expect Mr. Karzai to push for American backing, since, among other things, he has already met with representatives of one prominent insurgent leader, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

    U.S. Tries to Win Afghan Leader With Charm, NYT, 10.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/11/world/asia/11karzai.html

Imam’s Path From Condemning Terror to Preaching Jihad

May 8, 2010
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE and SOUAD MEKHENNET

WASHINGTON — In the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, the eloquent 30-year-old imam of a mosque outside Washington became a go-to Muslim cleric for reporters scrambling to explain Islam. He condemned the mass murder, invited television crews to follow him around and patiently explained the rituals of his religion.

“We came here to build, not to destroy,” the cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, said in a sermon. “We are the bridge between Americans and one billion Muslims worldwide.”

At first glance, it seemed plausible that this lanky, ambitious man, with the scholarly wire-rims and equal command of English and Arabic, could indeed be such a bridge. CD sets of his engaging lectures on the Prophet Muhammad were in thousands of Muslim homes. American-born, he had a sense of humor, loved deep-sea fishing, had dabbled in get-rich-quick investment schemes and dropped references to “Joe Sixpack” into his sermons. A few weeks before the attacks he had preached in the United States Capitol.

Nine years later, from his hide-out in Yemen, Mr. Awlaki has declared war on the United States.

“America as a whole has turned into a nation of evil,” he said in a statement posted on extremist Web sites in March. Though he had spent 21 of his 39 years in the United States, he added, “I eventually came to the conclusion that jihad against America is binding upon myself, just as it is binding on every other able Muslim.”

His mix of scripture and vitriol has helped lure young Muslims into a dozen plots. He cheered on the Fort Hood gunman and had a role in prompting the attempted airliner bombing on Dec. 25, intelligence officials say. And last week, Faisal Shahzad, who is charged in the attempted bombing in Times Square, told investigators that Mr. Awlaki’s prolific online lectures urging jihad as a religious duty helped inspire him to act.

At a time of new concern about the attraction of Western Muslims to violent extremism, there is no figure more central than Mr. Awlaki, who has harnessed the Internet for the goals of Al Qaeda. Counterterrorism officials are gravely concerned about his powerful appeal for many others who are following his path to radicalization.

“He’s a magnetic character,” said Philip Mudd, a veteran of the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center who just stepped down after nearly five years as a top F.B.I. intelligence adviser. “He’s a powerful orator in a revolutionary movement.”

Convinced that he is a lethal threat, the United States government has responded in kind. This year Mr. Awlaki became the first American citizen on the C.I.A.’s list of terrorists approved as a target for killing, a designation that has only enhanced his status with admirers like Shahidur Rahman, 27, a British Muslim of Bangladeshi descent who studied with Mr. Awlaki in London in 2003.

Other clerics equivocated about whether terrorist violence could be reconciled with Islam, Mr. Rahman said, but even seven years ago Mr. Awlaki made clear that he had few such qualms.

“He said suicide is not allowed in Islam,” Mr. Rahman said in an interview, “but self-sacrifice is different.”

There are two conventional narratives of Mr. Awlaki’s path to jihad. The first is his own: He was a nonviolent moderate until the United States attacked Muslims openly in Afghanistan and Iraq, covertly in Pakistan and Yemen, and even at home, by making targets of Muslims for raids and arrests. He merely followed the religious obligation to defend his faith, he said.

“What am I accused of?” he asks in a recent video bearing the imprint of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. “Of calling for the truth? Of calling for jihad for the sake of Allah? Of calling to defend the causes of the Islamic nation?”

A contrasting version of Mr. Awlaki’s story, explored though never confirmed by the national Sept. 11 commission, maintains that he was a secret agent of Al Qaeda starting well before the attacks, when three of the hijackers turned up at his mosques. By this account, all that has changed since then is that Mr. Awlaki has stopped hiding his true views.

The tale that emerges from visits to his mosques, and interviews with two dozen people who knew him, is more complex and elusive. A product both of Yemen’s deeply conservative religious culture and freewheeling American ways, he hesitated to shake hands with women but patronized prostitutes. He was first enthralled with jihad as a teenager — but the cause he embraced, the defeat of Soviet troops in Afghanistan, was then America’s cause too. After a summer visit to the land of the victorious mujahedeen, he brought back an Afghan hat and wore it proudly around the Colorado State campus in Fort Collins where he studied engineering.

Later, Mr. Awlaki seems to have tried out multiple personas: the representative of a tolerant Islam in a multicultural United States (starring in a WashingtonPost.com video explaining Ramadan); the fiery American activist talking about Muslims’ constitutional rights (and citing both Malcolm X and H. Rap Brown); the conspiracy theorist who publicly doubted the Muslim role in the Sept. 11 attacks. (The F.B.I., he wrote a few days afterward, simply blamed passengers with Muslim names.)

All along he remained a conservative, fundamentalist preacher who invariably started with a scriptural story from the seventh century and drew its personal or political lessons for today, a tradition called salafism, for the Salafs, or ancestors, the leaders of the earliest generations of Islam.

Finally, after the Yemeni authorities, under American pressure, imprisoned him in 2006 and 2007, Mr. Awlaki seems to have hardened into a fully committed ideologist of jihad, condemning non-Muslims and cheerleading for slaughter. His message has become indistinguishable from that of Osama bin Laden — except for his excellent English and his cultural familiarity with the United States and Britain. Those traits make him especially dangerous, counterterrorism officials fear, and he flaunts them.

“Jihad,” Mr. Awlaki said in a March statement, “is becoming as American as apple pie and as British as afternoon tea.”

‘Skinny Teenager With Brains’

Twenty years ago, long before the Sept. 11 attacks and the wars that followed, a shy freshman named Anwar turned up at the little mosque in a converted church a short walk from the Colorado State campus. His American accent was misleading: born in New Mexico in 1971, when his father was studying agriculture there, he had lived in the United States until the age of 7.

But he had spent his adolescence in Yemen, where memorizing the Koran was a matter of course for an educated young man, and women were largely excluded from public life.

His father, Nasser, was a prominent figure who would serve as agriculture minister and chancellor of two universities and who was close to President Ali Abdullah Saleh, the country’s authoritarian leader. Anwar was sent to Azal Modern School, among the country’s most prestigious private schools.

“I recall Anwar as a skinny teenager with brains,” said Walid al-Saqaf, a neighbor in the 1980s in Sana, the Yemeni capital. For boys of their generation, Afghanistan and its fight to oust the godless Soviet Army was the greatest cause.

“There was constant talk of the heroes who were leaving Yemen to join the fight and become martyrs and go to paradise,” recalled Mr. Saqaf, now a doctoral student in Sweden. In the Awlakis’ neighborhood, families would gather to watch the latest videotapes of the mujahedeen, he said.

But Nasser al-Awlaki had other ideas for his son, who studied civil engineering in Colorado in preparation for the kind of technocratic career his father had pursued. There was one odd note, given the family’s relative wealth: just after arriving, Anwar applied for a Social Security number and claimed falsely he had been born in Yemen, evidently to qualify for scholarship money reserved for foreign citizens.

Yusuf Siddiqui, a fellow student who was active with Mr. Awlaki in the mosque and the Muslim Student Association, said there were regular reminders of his Yemeni upbringing.

“If you made some pop culture reference, he might not recognize it,” Mr. Siddiqui said. Once, Anwar astonished his Americanized friends by climbing a nearby mountain barefoot. “He just said, ‘That’s how we do it in Yemen,’” Mr. Siddiqui recalled.

Accustomed to Yemeni mores, he was not comfortable interacting with women. Once, when a female American student stopped by the Muslim Student Association to ask for help with math homework, “He said to me in a low tone of voice, ‘Why don’t you do it?’” Mr. Siddiqui said.

Still, Mr. Awlaki was neither among the most conservative Muslim students nor among the libertines who tossed aside religious restrictions on drinking and sex. He ran successfully for president of the Muslim Student Association against a Saudi student who was far stricter.

“I remember Anwar saying, ‘He would want your mom to cover her face. I’m not like that,’” Mr. Siddiqui said.

His vacation trip to Afghanistan, around the time the Soviet-backed Communist government fell from power, appears to have brought a new interest in the nexus of politics and religion. He wore an Eritrean T-shirt and the Afghan hat and quoted Abdullah Azzam, a prominent Palestinian scholar who provided theological justification for the Afghan jihad and was later known as a mentor to Osama bin Laden.

Meanwhile, at the Islamic Center of Fort Collins, the little mosque where volunteers took turns giving the Friday sermon, Mr. Awlaki discovered a knack for preaching. If he could boast of no deep scholarship, he knew the Koran and the sayings of the prophet, spoke fluent English and had a light touch.

“He was very knowledgeable,” said Mumtaz Hussain, 71, a Pakistani immigrant active in the mosque for two decades. “He was an excellent person — very nice, dedicated to religion.”

He expressed no anti-American sentiments, said Mr. Hussain, whose son served in the National Guard. “This is our motherland now. People would not tolerate sermons of that kind,” he said.

Years later, on his blog, Mr. Awlaki would compare Thomas Gradgrind, Charles Dickens’s notoriously utilitarian headmaster in “Hard Times,” “to some Muslim parents who are programmed to think that only medicine or engineering are worthy professions for their children.”

It sounds like a hint at his own experience, and some family acquaintances say there was tension between Anwar and his father over career choices. But in 1994, Mr. Awlaki married a cousin from Yemen — whom by custom he did not introduce to his male friends — left behind engineering, and took a part-time job as imam at the Denver Islamic Society.

‘He Had a Beautiful Tongue’

Like many an evangelical Christian pastor, Mr. Awlaki preached against vice and sin, lauded family values and parsed the scripture, winning fans and rising to successively larger mosques.

In Denver, however, there was an episode that might have been an omen. A Saudi student at the University of Denver told an elder that he had decided, with Mr. Awlaki’s encouragement, to travel to Chechnya to join the jihad against the Russians. The elder, a Palestinian American in his 60s, thought it ill advised and confronted Mr. Awlaki in a loud argument.

“He had a beautiful tongue,” recalled the elder, who asked not to be named. “But I told him: ‘Don’t talk to my people about jihad.’ He left two weeks later.”

At 25, he landed for five years at Arribat al-Islami, a stucco building with blue-green tile under a towering palm tree at the edge of San Diego. “He lit up when he was with the youth,” said Jamal Ali, 40, an airport driver. He played soccer with younger children and took teenagers paintballing. “I saw him evolving in trying to understand where he fit into Islam,” Mr. Ali said.

Lincoln W. Higgie III, 71, an art dealer who lived across quiet Saranac Street from the mosque and the small adjoining house where Mr. Awlaki lived with his wife and two toddlers, recalls an engaging neighbor who apologized about parking problems that came with the flood of Friday worshipers.

On Thursdays, Mr. Higgie remembered, Mr. Awlaki liked to go fishing for albacore, and he would often bring over a sample of the catch, deliciously prepared by his wife. The Awlakis’ son and daughter would play on Mr. Higgie’s floor, chasing his pet macaw, while the men compared notes on their travels.

“I remember he was very partial to the Blue Mosque in Istanbul,” Mr. Higgie said. He detected no hostility to non-Muslims, no simmering resentment against America.

In his private life, he was not always puritanical. Even as he preached about the sanctity of marriage amid the temptations of American life (“especially in Western societies, every haram is available,” he said, using the Arabic word for the forbidden), he was picked up twice by the San Diego police for soliciting prostitutes; he was given probation.

He displayed a very American entrepreneurial streak, exploring a possible business importing Yemeni honey and attending seminars in Las Vegas focused on investing in gold and minerals (and once losing $20,000 lent by relatives). Eventually a regular at the mosque proposed a venture that would prove hugely successful: recording Mr. Awlaki’s lectures on CD.

Starting in 2000, Mr. Awlaki would record a series of highly popular boxed sets — three, totaling 53 CDs, devoted to the “Life of Muhammad” alone; others covering the lesser prophets of Islam (including Moses and Jesus), the companions of the prophet and an account of the hereafter.

The recordings appear free of obvious radicalism. (IslamicBookstore.com has added a notice to its Web listings of Mr. Awlaki’s work, saying the recording “has been reviewed and does not contain any extremist statements.”)

Shakir Muhammad, a Fort Collins engineer who is active in the mosque there, said he became a fan of the CD sets, finding them enthralling even on repeated listening. Only once did a passage give him pause; Mr. Awlaki discussed suicidal violence and did not quite condemn it.

“I thought, ‘This guy may be for it,’” Mr. Muhammad said. “It bothered me.”

A Mysterious Goodbye

One day in August 2001, Mr. Awlaki knocked at the door of Mr. Higgie, his neighbor, to say goodbye. He had moved the previous year to Virginia, becoming imam at the far bigger Dar al-Hijrah mosque, and he had returned to pick up a few things he had left behind.

As Mr. Higgie tells it, he told the imam to stop by if he was ever in the area — and got a strange response. “He said, ‘I don’t think you’ll be seeing me. I won’t be coming back to San Diego again. Later on you’ll find out why,’” Mr. Higgie said.

The next month, when Al Qaeda attacked New York and Washington, Mr. Higgie remembered the exchange and was shaken, convinced that his friendly neighbor had some advance warning of the Sept. 11 attacks.

In fact, the F.B.I. had first taken an interest in Mr. Awlaki in 1999, concerned about brushes with militants that to this day remain difficult to interpret. In 1998 and 1999, he was a vice president of a small Islamic charity that an F.B.I. agent later testified was “a front organization to funnel money to terrorists.” He had been visited by Ziyad Khaleel, a Qaeda operative who purchased a battery for Osama bin Laden’s satellite phone, as well as by an associate of Omar Abdel Rahman, the so-called Blind Sheik, who was serving a life sentence for plotting to blow up New York landmarks.

Still more disturbing was Mr. Awlaki’s links to two future Sept. 11 hijackers, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaq Alhazmi. They prayed at his San Diego mosque and were seen in long conferences with the cleric. Mr. Alhazmi would follow the imam to his new mosque in Virginia, and 9/11 investigators would call Mr. Awlaki Mr. Alhazmi’s “spiritual adviser.”

The F.B.I., whose agents interviewed Mr. Awlaki four times in the days after the Sept. 11 attacks, concluded that his contacts with the hijackers and other radicals were random, the inevitable consequence of living in the small world of Islam in America. But records of the 9/11 commission at the National Archives make clear that not all investigators agreed.

One detective, whose name has been redacted, told the commission he believed Mr. Awlaki “was at the center of the 9/11 story.” An F.B.I. agent, also unidentified, said that “if anyone had knowledge of the plot, it would have been” the cleric, since “someone had to be in the U.S. and keep the hijackers spiritually focused.”

The 9/11 commission staff members themselves had sharp arguments about him. “Do I think he played a role in helping the hijackers here, knowing they were up to something?” said one staff member, who would speak only on condition of anonymity. “Yes. Do I think he was sent here for that purpose? I have no evidence for it.”

The separate Congressional Joint Inquiry into the attacks suspected that Mr. Awlaki might have been part of a support network for the hijackers, said Eleanor Hill, its director. “There’s no smoking gun. But we thought somebody ought to investigate him,” Ms. Hill said.

Alarmed about Mr. Awlaki’s possible Sept. 11 connections, a State Department investigator, Raymond Fournier, found a circuitous way to charge Mr. Awlaki with passport fraud, based on his false claim after entering the United States in 1990 that he had been born in Yemen.

A warrant was issued, but prosecutors in Colorado rescinded it, concluding that no criminal case could be made. Mr. Awlaki returned from a trip abroad in October 2002 — an act some colleagues say was evidence for his innocence of any 9/11 role — for what would prove to be his last stay in the United States.

During that trip, he visited Ali al-Timimi, a Virginia cleric later convicted for encouraging Muslims to join the fight against American troops in Afghanistan. Mr. Awlaki “attempted to get al-Timimi to discuss issues related to the recruitment of young Muslims,” according to a motion filed in his criminal case. Mr. Timimi wondered if Mr. Awlaki might be trying to entrap him at the F.B.I.’s instigation, his friends say.

But if Mr. Awlaki was cooperating with the government, it would have astonished his associates. As the American authorities rounded up Muslim men after 9/11, he had grown furious.

After raids in March 2002 on Muslim institutions and community leaders in Virginia, Mr. Awlaki led a chorus of outrage, noting that some of the targets were widely viewed as moderates.

“So this is not now a war on terrorism, we need to all be clear about this, this is a war on Muslims!” Mr. Awlaki declared, his voice shaking with anger. “Not only is it happening worldwide, but it’s happening right here in America that is claiming to be fighting this war for the sake of freedom.”

Around that time, Johari Abdul-Malik, a former Howard University chaplain who was joining the staff at Mr. Awlaki’s Virginia mosque, met him at a cafe. Mr. Awlaki said he planned to leave the United States.

“I tried to convince him that the atmosphere was not as bad as he thought, that it was a positive time for outreach,” Mr. Abdul-Malik recalled. But Mr. Awlaki was shaken by what he saw as an anti-Muslim backlash. And always fond of the limelight, Mr. Abdul-Malik said, Mr. Awlaki was looking for a bigger platform.

“He said he might have a TV show for the gulf,” Mr. Abdul-Malik said. “He might run for Parliament in Yemen. Or he might teach.”

‘Never Trust a Kuffar’

In a bare lecture room in London, where Mr. Awlaki moved after leaving the United States, he addressed his rapt, young followers, urging them never to believe a non-Muslim, or kuffar in Arabic.

“The important lesson to learn here is never, ever trust a kuffar,” he said, chopping the air, his lecture caught on video. “Do not trust them!”

The unbelievers are “plotting to kill this religion,” he declared. “They’re plotting night and day.”

If he had the same knowing tone and touches of humor as in earlier sermons, his message was more conspiratorial. You can’t believe CNN, the United Nations, or Amnesty International, he told his students, because they, too, were part of the war on Islam.

“We need to wisen up and not be duped,” Mr. Awlaki said. “Malcolm X said, ‘We’ve been bamboozled.’”

Many of his young British Muslim listeners, accustomed to preachers with heavy accents and an otherworldly focus, were entranced by his mix of the ancient and the contemporary, his seamless transition from the 29 battles of the Prophet Muhammad to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. “He was the main man who translated the jihad into English,” said Abu Yahiya, 27, a Bangladeshi-British student of Mr. Awlaki’s lectures in 2003.

At a personal level, said Mr. Rahman, one of the students who studied with Mr. Awlaki in 2003, Mr. Awlaki made it clear that they could no longer pretend to be Muslims while going clubbing at night.

“I could not be Mohammed in the morning and ‘Mo’ in the evening,” he said.

Mr. Awlaki’s demand that they make a choice, devoting themselves to a harsh, fundamentalist strain of Islam, offered clarity, he said.

“It would hit the audience automatically in their hearts and minds,” Mr. Rahman said. When others claimed the popular cleric was brainwashing them, Mr. Rahman said, “When you got a lot of dirt in your brain, you need a washing. I believe he did brainwash me.”

Mr. Awlaki’s fame grew, his CDs kept selling, and he traveled around Britain lecturing. But he had a hard time supporting himself, according to people who knew him, and in 2004 he had moved to Yemen to preach and study.

In mid-2006, after he intervened in a tribal dispute, Mr. Awlaki was imprisoned for 18 months by the Yemeni authorities. By his later account on his blog, he was in solitary confinement nearly the entire time and used it to study the Koran, to read literature (he enjoyed Dickens but disliked Shakespeare) and eventually, when it was permitted, to study Islamic scholarship.

Notably, he was enraptured by the works of Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian whose time in the United States helped make him the father of the modern anti-Western jihadist movement in Islam.

“Because of the flowing style of Sayyid I would read between 100 and 150 pages a day,” Mr. Awlaki wrote. “I would be so immersed with the author I would feel Sayyid was with me in my cell speaking to me directly.”

Two F.B.I. agents questioned him in the Yemeni prison, and Mr. Awlaki blamed the United States for his prolonged incarceration. He was right; John D. Negroponte, then the director of national intelligence, told Yemeni officials that the United States did not object to his detention, according to American and Yemeni sources.

But by the end of 2007, American officials, some of whom were disturbed at the imprisonment without charges of a United States citizen, signaled that they no longer insisted on Mr. Awlaki’s incarceration, and he was released.

“He was different after that — harder,” said a Yemeni man who knows Mr. Awlaki well.

Mr. Awlaki started his own Web site, reaching a larger audience than ever. But finding that he was constantly followed by Yemeni security in Sana, the capital, he moved to the house of an uncle in Shabwa, the rugged southern province and his tribe’s traditional turf.

Last October, friends said, he heard the distant whine of a drone aircraft circling overhead. Worried that he was endangering his relatives, he fled to the mountains. While his role is unclear in Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the terrorist network’s Yemeni affiliate, American officials believe he has become “operational,” plotting, not just inspiring, terrorism against the West.

From his hide-out, Mr. Awlaki sends out the occasional video message. But his reported influence on the Times Square bombing suspect, Mr. Shahzad, suggests that no matter what happens to him, his electronic legacy is secure. His message will endure in hundreds of audio and video clips that his followers have posted to the Web, a mix of religious stories and incitement, awaiting the curious and the troubled.

Mr. Awlaki’s transformation has left a trail of bewilderment, apprehension and fury among many people who knew and worshiped with him in the United States. Mr. Siddiqui, his college friend, said he was “surprised and disappointed.”

“He’s turning his back not only on the country where he was born but on his Muslim brothers and sisters in this country,” he said.

Mr. Abdul-Malik said that his former fellow imam at the Virginia mosque “is a terrorist, in my book” and that Mr. Awlaki and his like-thinkers were trying to reduce Islam to a “medieval narrative. It’s the Hatfields and the McCoys: you hit me, I hit you.”

Some Muslim families have asked whether they should keep Mr. Awlaki’s scriptural CDs, Mr. Abdul-Malik said. He tells them it is their decision, but he has advised shops not to carry even the earlier, benign Awlaki material.


Scott Shane reported from Washington, and Souad Mekhennet from London. Robert F. Worth contributed reporting from Sana, Yemen.

    Imam’s Path From Condemning Terror to Preaching Jihad, NYT, 8.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/world/09awlaki.html

In Times Square, Deciding When to Suspend Fear

May 7, 2010
The New York Times
By DAVID CARR

Last Tuesday night, I had a date with my 13-year-old daughter to see the Imax version of “Iron Man 2” at a theater on 42nd Street. In a first for us, she would take the bus in by herself from our suburban New Jersey home to the Port Authority Bus Terminal. There would be a phone call before she got on, a text or two on the way in, and then a call when she arrived and walked across the street to my office. She is mature, quietly confident and careful, and had taken the trip with others many times before, so it seemed pretty straightforward.

Except this was just three nights after the failed bombing attempt in Times Square. And on Monday, as if to punctuate the mood, there were some fairly loud booms on 40th Street right next to the New York Times building on Eighth Avenue, where I work. Some people fled while others gawked until a firefighter barked: “It’s not Disneyland, people. Get the hell out of the way.” As it turned out, the explosions came from some blown transformers beneath the street, a quotidian event in urban life, but in the context of the scare Saturday night, taking on deeper portent.

As a parent, I confronted a new calculation. Asymmetric warfare had advanced from downtown to Midtown, from 2001 to the present moment.

As a reporter I had covered the aftermath of 9/11 and now found myself revisiting long-buried worries. I decided not to share any of those dark thoughts with my daughter. We hadn’t discussed the failed bomb, and besides, how do you explain that some people a long way away may wish her dead even though they don’t know her? In the end, we stuck to the plan, lining up with many others at the AMC Empire 25 near Times Square, having a moment, together, in one of the gaudiest, grandest places on earth.

Sticking to the plan is a very American response these days. It is said that if people retreat into fear, “the terrorists have won,” but it’s actually just practical. Life goes on in far more dangerous places, and so it will here. Even though at least one terrorist signaled that he believed that Times Square was a soft, ripe target, the place normalized in a matter of days. We were now using cognitive dissonance to keep fear in a corner, putting our fingers in our ears and humming a happy song against the cold fact that the threat of 9/11 never went away and appears to be on the move.

Again and again, we are told, “If you see something, say something,” but there is an unspoken corollary: “And if you don’t, just go about your business.”

In its vastness, Times Square offers at least the illusion that we could outrun danger. It beats being trapped in a subway, or more to the historical point, a tall office building engulfed in flames.

It is not exactly a neighborhood, but more of a throbbing village common. As a public space, it is a little fraught, serving as a pedestrian grid for all kinds of visitors from near and far who come to gawk, and another group, which I belong to, who work in and around it. More than a few times, I have been impossibly late for some appointment and been confronted by a group of seven or eight people gathered on a corner — on a corner! — around a map, an ice cream cone or a souvenir from the M & M store. Confronted by the possibility of losing several precious seconds off my plan to take over the world, I become one of those crazy people the city is known for, muttering oaths sotto voce as I storm around them.

Still, I don’t share a lot of the locals’ reflexive revulsion to Times Square just because it hosts a horde of out-of-towners. I grew up in the Midwest, can appreciate the frozen marvel of a tall building and am happy to pause to listen with some amusement to the Naked Cowboy, the buff guy who plays guitar in his underwear on 43rd or so. While it’s no picnic during the day — sorry Mr. Mayor, but those forlorn tables on bare concrete just aren’t getting it — at night I sometimes bend my commute so I can walk through a canyon of neon. There’s a specific kind of majesty to it.

It does feel a little different now. The botched bombing reminded us why we would be in a terrorist’s cross hairs. With its mix of retail and commerce, media and entertainment, Times Square is a very American piece of real estate, a nexus of streets that bustle with all of the ills and even some of the achievements of Western culture. The carnival of activity it hosts is now accompanied by the low thrum of mayhem in abeyance.

My own adjustments were minor, but telling. When I got to work on Monday, I slid open a little-used drawer to see if the work-issued “escape hood” was still there, although it would probably be a meager defense in a chemical or gas attack. And before I made my way across the square, I made sure I had a notebook and a pen jammed in my pockets. Of course, those accessories help with the illusion that I may be covering a potential story rather than living inside one.

Throughout the week, the place scanned as very much the same, with groups of tourists speaking a polyglot of languages as they snapped photos and pointed out that yes, the ball drops from that building right there. But the news crawl on Thursday above the ABC studio on 43rd reminded us that just days before, people here had been fleeing a smoking car in panic as fire and police vehicles surrounded it. “Video: Inside Faisal Shahzad’s Hideout.” And in the most recent example of the ambient twitchiness, on Friday afternoon Times Square was evacuated because of a suspicious package that turned out to be just a cooler with water bottles and a shopping bag.

After watching Iron Man defeat a terrorist in the nick of time, my daughter and I took the short walk to Times Square. The increased police presence, which included one officer leaning on a squad car parked dead center on the broad median between 42nd and 43rd Streets, should have been a source of comfort but seemed more a reminder that this playground can become a cauldron in a heartbeat. I thought about what this remarkable evening tableau would look like if another terrible shoe dropped here, and then shook it off as prurient and unproductive.

We started making our way toward dinner farther west but found that our path was all but blocked by a huge group of visitors on a corner staring deep into a shopping bag from the Hard Rock Cafe. Rather than a rising impatience, I felt a kind of solidarity. These visitors could be anywhere in this city and the country beyond, but they chose to come here, to this particular place at this particular moment, three days after a bombing attempt. As far as I was concerned, they were free to walk at a pace of their own choosing and congregate on any corner as long as they wished. This is America, after all.

    In Times Square, Deciding When to Suspend Fear, NYT, 7.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/weekinreview/09carr.html

U.S. Pressure Helps Militants Overseas Focus Efforts

May 7, 2010
The New York Times
By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON — When President Obama decided last year to narrow the scope of the nine-year war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, he and his aides settled on a formulation that sounded simple: Eviscerate Al Qaeda, but just “degrade” the Taliban, reversing that movement’s momentum.

Now, after the bungled car-bombing attempt in Times Square with suspected links to the Pakistani Taliban, a new, and disturbing, question is being raised in Washington: Have the stepped-up attacks in Pakistan — notably the Predator drone strikes — actually made Americans less safe? Have they had the perverse consequence of driving lesser insurgencies to think of targeting Times Square and American airliners, not just Kabul and Islamabad? In short, are they inspiring more attacks on America than they prevent?

It is a hard question.

At the time of Mr. Obama’s strategy review, the logic seemed straightforward. Only Al Qaeda had the ambitions and reach to leap the ocean and take the war to America’s skies and streets. In contrast, most of the Taliban and other militant groups were regarded as fragmented, regional insurgencies whose goals stuck close to the territory their tribal ancestors have fought over for centuries.

Six months and a few attempted bombings later, including the near-miss in New York last weekend, nothing looks quite that simple. As commanders remind each other, in all wars the enemy gets a vote, too. Increasingly, it looks like these enemies have voted to combine talents, if not forces. Last week, a senior American intelligence official was saying that the many varieties of insurgents now make up a “witches’ brew” of forces, sharing money handlers, communications experts and, most important in recent times, bomb makers.

Yes, each group still has a separate identity and goal, but those fine distinctions seem less relevant than ever.

The notion that the various groups are at least thinking alike worries Bruce Riedel, who a year ago was a co-author of President Obama’s first review of strategy in the region. “There are two separate movements converging here,” said Mr. Riedel, a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. “The ideology of global jihad has been bought into by more and more militants, even guys who never thought much about the broader world. And that is disturbing, because it is a force multiplier for Al Qaeda.”

Mr. Riedel also notes, “The pressure we’ve put on them in the past year has also drawn them together, meaning that the network of alliances is getting stronger, not weaker.” So what seemed like a mission being narrowed by Mr. Obama, focusing on Al Qaeda and its closest associates (which included the Pakistani Taliban), “now seems like a lot broader mission than it did a year ago.”

Figuring out cause-and-effect when it comes to the motivations of Islamic militants is always tricky. Whenever he was asked whether America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were goading Islamic militants into new attacks, President Bush used to shoot back that neither war was under way on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. When President Obama came into office, the conventional wisdom held that the mere arrival of a black president with some Muslim relatives and an eagerness to engage the Islamic world would be bad news for Al Qaeda and Taliban recruiters. One rarely hears that argument now.

A year after Mr. Obama’s now-famous speech to the Muslim world from Cairo, Pakistanis talk less about outreach than Predator strikes. And White House officials say they suspect that their strategy of raising pressure may explain the amateurish nature of the recent bombing attempts.

The militants, they argue, no longer enjoy the luxury of time to train their bombers. To linger at training camps is to invite being spotted by a Predator. The tale told to interrogators by Faisal Shahzad, the suspect in the Times Square case, suggests that he hooked up with one set of militants and was passed off to another, and given only cursory bomb-making training. “He wasn’t the greatest student, but they weren’t stellar teachers, either,” a senior administration official said last week, after reviewing the interrogation record. What Mr. Shahzad had was the one thing the insurgents most covet: easy, question-free ability to leave and enter the United States on a valid passport.

Of course, the United States might more effectively identify citizens who pose a threat. But, similarly, terrorist groups could find ways to more effectively train recruits. As Mr. Riedel notes: “You don’t need a Ph.D. in electrical engineering to build a car bomb. You don’t even need to be literate.”

Indeed, the Pakistani Taliban have set off plenty of car bombs that worked well against the Pakistani military and intelligence agencies. It was those bombings that finally convinced the Pakistani government to go after the group. In Washington, officials differentiate between the relatively young Pakistani Taliban and the Afghan Taliban, which have deep political roots in its country. “The Pakistani Taliban gets treated like Al Qaeda,” one senior official said. “We aim to destroy it. The Afghan Taliban is different.”

In fact, one Pakistani Taliban leader, Baitullah Mehsud, was killed in a C.I.A. drone attack last summer while receiving a massage on the roof of an apartment building. His successor was believed killed in a similar attack until he showed up on a recent video. As one American intelligence official said, “Those attacks have made it personal for the Pakistani Taliban — so it’s no wonder they are beginning to think about how they can strike back at targets here.”

To the disappointment of many liberals who thought they were electing an antiwar president, Mr. Obama clearly rejects the argument that if he doesn’t stir the hornets’ nest, American cities will not get stung. His first year in office he authorized more Predator strikes — more than 50 — than President Bush did in his last four years in office. In December, accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, Mr. Obama stated that sometimes peace requires war.

“I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people,” he said. Negotiations “could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince Al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms.”

In fact, recent history and the politics of a polarized Washington are pushing Mr. Obama to step up the pressure. The civil war that paved the way for the Afghan Taliban began when President George H. W. Bush pulled out of Afghanistan once the Soviets left. The Taliban took power and began sheltering Osama bin Laden on Bill Clinton’s watch; as vice president, Dick Cheney often criticized Mr. Clinton’s approach to terrorism, saying he dealt with it as a criminal justice issue, not an act of war. The second Bush administration drove the Taliban from power, but the early histories of the Bush years largely agree that the Taliban saw their opportunity to return when the American war on terror refocused on Iraq. Even the United States, they concluded, could not give its all to two wars at once.

That narrative helped form Mr. Obama’s argument, throughout his presidential campaign, that the Afghan-Pakistan border, not the Sunni triangle in Iraq, was the center of global terrorism. That, he said, was where all attacks on the United States and its allies had emanated.

Now, six months after setting his course, Mr. Obama is discovering, on the streets of New York, the deeper meaning of his own words.

    U.S. Pressure Helps Militants Overseas Focus Efforts, NYT, 7.5.2010http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/weekinreview/09sanger.html

Editorial

The Way Out

May 4, 2010
The New York Times

President Obama made a convincing case last December for sending an additional 30,000 American troops to Afghanistan. Most of those new forces, plus 58,000 already in country, would fight the Taliban. A smaller number would mold Afghan recruits into an indigenous Army and National Police force that could in time assume responsibility for protecting their country so the Americans and NATO allies could go home.

That handoff, so central to Mr. Obama’s strategy, has little chance of succeeding unless NATO gets more military trainers on the ground. Of the 5,200 trainers the United States and its NATO allies in January agreed were needed, about only 2,700 are there. All but 300 or so are Americans.

Illiteracy, corruption and other problems are not unexpected in a country as poor and undeveloped as Afghanistan. But a disturbing Pentagon report to Congress last week acknowledged that one of the “most significant challenges” to fielding qualified Afghan security forces is a shortage of “institutional trainers.”

The training effort — like everything else about Afghanistan — was shortchanged for years under President George W. Bush. It has received more attention and resources under President Obama. In November, the United States and NATO opened a new integrated training mission. Its leader, Lt. Gen. William Caldwell IV, who previously led leadership schools and training programs at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., was a West Point classmate of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top American and allied commander in Afghanistan.

General Caldwell has brought a new coherence and purpose to the mission by revamping the Afghan Army leadership program and standardizing police instruction, among other innovations. And he has managed to double his number of trainers from 1,300 when he started to roughly 2,700 today. But he — more to the point, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and General McChrystal — is having a very hard time getting the rest of NATO to deliver on commitments.

NATO agreed that non-American members would provide half of the 5,200 trainers. Since December, those capitals have pledged to send only 1,000 trainers, and they have been very slow to deliver. Mr. Gates is now expected to send Americans to cover 600 of these slots for 90 days.

While the Americans are close to complement, General Caldwell also had to fight hard to secure enough troops to fill the American slots as well as management positions on his staff. For all of the talk about new missions and new thinking, there are still a lot of brass — and those who want to become brass — who don’t consider training a warrior’s job or a path to promotion. That culture needs to change.

American and NATO officials also need to look seriously at creating a standing corps of combat advisers who are trained and equipped to develop indigenous national security forces in overseas conflict zones.

The hurdles in training even a minimally effective Afghan force are daunting. There has been some progress. New initiatives like pay raises and mandatory literacy training should begin to improve professionalism and competency. None of these efforts have a chance if there are not enough NATO trainers to teach the Afghans how to defend their country.

    The Way Out, NYT, 4.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/04/opinion/04tue1.html

Editorial

Mr. Karzai Might Even Agree

April 23, 2010
The New York Times

Hamid Karzai is frustrating, difficult and — as his recent anti-American rants make especially clear — not a reliable partner. He is also the president of Afghanistan. If there is any hope of defeating the Taliban, Washington is going to have to find a way to work with him.

President Obama must use Mr. Karzai’s planned visit to Washington next month to try to do that.

That is not an invitation to let Mr. Karzai off the hook. Mr. Obama needs to keep pressing him to fire the corrupt officials and cronies who have soured millions of Afghans on their own government. The Afghan leader is expert at ignoring such wise counsel, but he does so at his own peril.

We wonder if he even knows how close to the edge he is living — maybe fewer public lectures and more pointed intelligence briefings that show the alienation of Afghan citizens and the strength of the Taliban might help wake him up.

While that’s going on, Mr. Obama also needs to open a second, less sensitive front in the anticorruption campaign. He should urge Mr. Karzai to ask the United Nations (which Mr. Karzai now implausibly blames for last year’s presidential election fraud) to hand responsibility for overseeing Afghanistan’s economic development to others more proficient in handling money.

The United Nations has enough to do to help strengthen Afghanistan’s political institutions, oversee elections (a new Parliament will be chosen in September) and ensure that humanitarian relief gets where it is needed.

The International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank could all do a better job of monitoring, auditing and coordinating the billions of dollars of international aid flowing into Afghanistan.

These institutions performed that role, with considerable success until 2005, when the United Nations unwisely shoved them aside. A succession of critical reports since then from the United States Agency for International Development, Government Accountability Office and Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction describe shockingly weak United Nations oversight of aid-financed projects in Afghanistan, telling of defective work and unexplained transfers of funds.

There are other challenges that other organizations are clearly better prepared to address. Taxes and revenues that could help pay for Afghan government services now go uncollected or are diverted into the pockets of corrupt officials. The International Monetary Fund can help determine realistic targets for these revenues and help develop a system for accountability.

The World Bank, which has worked with the Karzai government on development projects, can better monitor public spending, payment of government salaries and procurement spending. It has a strong interest in encouraging the development of Afghan businesses. The Asian Development Bank specializes in regional projects and can help link landlocked Afghanistan to neighboring road, rail and power systems.

Multilateral institutions can also bring in additional donors and more fairly apportion the costs of Afghan development. They can provide Afghanistan with the technical expertise it needs to manage its own resources.

Afghanistan is one of the world’s poorest countries, but it is not without prospects. It is believed to have huge mineral wealth, including copper, iron ore and rare earth minerals like lithium, used in making electric cars. Its agricultural areas can be more than self-sufficient if irrigation canals are rebuilt and access provided. Its carpets and textiles have a worldwide market.

With less corruption, better economic management and more focused international effort, it does not have to remain poor. It could begin financing its government and its further development from its own resources.

The Obama administration has revamped its military strategy in Afghanistan. It has grasped the importance of competent local governance, even if it has a long way to go to putting that in place. There is no chance of succeeding without better economic governance.

    Mr. Karzai Might Even Agree, NYT, 23.4.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/23/opinion/23fri1.html

U.S. Troops Fire on Afghan Bus, Killing Civilians

April 12, 2010
The New York Times
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. and TAIMOOR SHAH

KABUL, Afghanistan — American troops raked a large passenger bus with gunfire near the southern city of Kandahar on Monday morning, killing as many as five civilians and wounding 18, Afghan authorities and survivors said.

The attack infuriated Kandahar leaders and could harm public opinion before perhaps the most important offensive of the war, a campaign that is intended to take control of the Kandahar region from the Taliban this summer.

Hundreds of demonstrators gathered around a bus station on the western outskirts of Kandahar, shouting anti-American chants and blocking the road for an hour, according to people in the area.

The American military confirmed the shooting, but there were disputes over details, including whether the troops who fired on the bus had first shot flares and warned the driver to stay back.

One of the bus passengers and a man who identified himself as the driver said that an American convoy about 70 yards ahead of the bus opened fire as the bus began to pull to the side of the road to allow another military convoy traveling behind to pass.

The two convoys and the bus were on the main highway in Sanzari, about 15 miles, or 24 kilometers, west of Kandahar city. All of the windows on one side of the bus were shot out.

Troops opened fire on the bus just after daybreak as it was taking dozens of passengers to Nimroz Province, said Zalmy Ayoubi, a spokesman for the Kandahar provincial governor.

Some of the wounded were in critical condition, and the death toll could rise, local officials said.

Mr. Ayoubi said five civilians had been killed, including one woman.

The Interior Ministry in Kabul issued a statement saying four civilians had been killed and 18 wounded, blaming “NATO forces” traveling in front of the bus for the shooting.

An American military spokeswoman put the toll at four dead — including one woman — and said five people had been wounded.

The military spokeswoman confirmed that a convoy traveling west, in front of the bus, had opened fire, but said the second convoy was traveling eastbound toward the bus.

She also said that immediately before the shooting the troops fired three flares toward the bus to warn the driver he was following too closely, and that one soldier raised his fist in the air as another warning. She also said the driver of the bus was killed.

However, the man who identified himself as the driver said the bus did not violate any signal from the troops.

“I was going to take the bus off the road,” said the man, Mohammed Nabi. Then the convoy ahead opened fire from a distance of 60 to 70 yards.

“It is a huge bus full of passengers, and if they think we were a suicide bomber, we are sad that the Americans have killed innocent people,” he said. “We don’t feel safe while traveling on the main highways anymore because of NATO convoys.”

Mr. Ayoubi, the provincial spokesman, said, “We strongly condemn this action carried out by NATO forces, and we want a thorough investigation of the incident, to find out why they targeted the civilian bus.”

If the Afghan government’s casualty toll is correct, it would suggest that troops fired scores or even hundreds of rounds. It was not clear why such a large fusillade would have been directed at a passenger bus.

“An American convoy was ahead of us and another convoy was following us, and we were going to pull off of the road, and suddenly the Americans opened fire,” said one passenger, Nida Mohammed, who suffered a shoulder injury.

“We were not close to them, maybe 60 yards away from their convoy,” Mr. Mohammed said.

A helicopter evacuated some of the wounded, he said.

“This bus wasn’t like an a suicide bomber, and we did not touch or come close to the convoy,” Mr. Mohammed said. “It seems they are opening fire on civilians intentionally.”


Richard A. Oppel Jr. reported from Kabul, Afghanistan, and Taimoor Shah from Kandahar, Afghanistan. Sangar Rahimi contributed reporting from Kabul.

    U.S. Troops Fire on Afghan Bus, Killing Civilians, NYT, 12.4.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/13/world/asia/13afghan.html

U.S. Admits Role in Killing of Afghan Women

April 5, 2010
The New York Times
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.

KABUL, Afghanistan — After initially denying involvement or any cover-up in the deaths of three Afghan women during a badly bungled American Special Operations assault in February, the American-led military command in Kabul admitted late on Sunday that its forces had, in fact, killed the women during the nighttime raid.

The admission immediately raised questions about what really happened during the Feb. 12 operation — and what falsehoods followed — including a new report that Special Operations forces dug bullets out of the bodies of the women to hide the nature of their deaths.

A NATO official also said Sunday that an Afghan-led team of investigators had found signs of evidence tampering at the scene, including the removal of bullets from walls near where the women were killed. On Monday, however, a senior NATO official denied that any tampering had occurred.

The disclosure could not come at a worse moment for the American military: NATO officials are struggling to contain fallout from a series of tirades against the foreign military presence by the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, who has also railed against the killing of civilians by Western forces.

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the American and NATO commander in Afghanistan, has tried hard, and with some success, to reduce civilian casualties through new rules that include restricting night raids and also bringing Special Operations forces under tighter control. But botched Special Operations attacks — which are blamed for a large proportion of the civilian deaths caused by NATO forces — continue to infuriate Afghans and create support for the Taliban.

NATO military officials had already admitted killing two innocent civilians — a district prosecutor and a local police chief — during the raid, on a home near Gardez in southeastern Afghanistan. The two men were shot to death when they came out of their home, armed with Kalashnikov rifles, to investigate.

Three women also died that night at the same home: One was a pregnant mother of 10 and another was a pregnant mother of six. NATO military officials had suggested that the women were actually stabbed to death — or had died by some other means — hours before the raid, an explanation that implied that family members or others at the home might have killed them.

Survivors of the raid called that explanation a cover-up and insisted that American forces killed the women. Relatives and family friends said the bloody raid followed a party in honor of the birth of a grandson of the owner of the house.

On Sunday night the American-led military command in Kabul issued a statement admitting that “international forces” were responsible for the deaths of the women. Officials have previously stated that American Special Operations forces and Afghan forces conducted the operation.

The statement said that “investigators could not conclusively determine how or when the women died, due to lack of forensic evidence” but that they had nonetheless “concluded that the women were accidentally killed as a result of the joint force firing at the men.”

“We deeply regret the outcome of this operation, accept responsibility for our actions that night, and know that this loss will be felt forever by the families,” said Brig. Gen. Eric Tremblay, a spokesman for the NATO command in Kabul.

The admission was an abrupt about-face. In a statement soon after the raid, NATO had claimed that its raiding party had stumbled upon the “bodies of three women who had been tied up, gagged and killed” and hidden in a room in the house. Military officials had also said later that the bodies showed signs of puncture and slashing wounds from a knife, and that the women appeared to have been killed several hours before the raid.

And in what could be a scandalous turn to the investigation, The Times of London reported Sunday night that Afghan investigators also determined that American forces not only killed the women but had also “dug bullets out of their victims’ bodies in the bloody aftermath” and then “washed the wounds with alcohol before lying to their superiors about what happened.”

A spokesman for the Afghan Interior Ministry, Zemary Bashary, said that he did not have any information about the Afghan investigation, which he said remained unfinished.

In an interview, a NATO official said the Afghan-led investigation team alerted American and NATO commanders that the inquiry had found signs of evidence tampering. A briefing was given by investigators to General McChrystal and other military officials in late March.

“There was evidence of tampering at the scene, walls being washed, bullets dug out of holes in the wall,” the NATO official said, adding that investigators “couldn’t find bullets from the wounds in the body.”

The investigators, the official said, “alluded to the fact that bullets were missing but did not discuss anything specific to that. Nothing pointed conclusively to the fact that our guys were the ones who tampered with the scene.”

A senior NATO official denied Monday there was any effort to tamper with evidence.

“We have discovered no evidence in our investigation that any of our forces did anything to manipulate the evidence at the scene or the bodies,” said Rear Adm. Gregory J. Smith, the deputy chief of staff for communications for General McChrystal.

Several bullets that were fired but had not struck either of the two men were removed from the walls, Admiral Smith said. But he said that was done “to make sure what kinds of rounds they were.”

NATO officials have also rejected allegations that the killings were covered up. But it was not immediately clear on Sunday night how troops who shot the women and later examined their bodies would not have recognized that it was their bullets that killed them.


Abdul Waheed Wafa contributed reporting.

    U.S. Admits Role in Killing of Afghan Women, NYT, 5.4.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/06/world/asia/06afghan.html

U.S. Consulate in Pakistan Is Attacked by Militants

April 5, 2010
The New York Times
By ISMAIL KHAN and SABRINA TAVERNISE

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Militants mounted an assault against the United States Consulate in this northern Pakistani city on Monday, using a powerful bomb and rocket launchers in a multipronged attack, said a senior Pakistani intelligence officer.

Six people were killed outside the consulate and at least 20 were wounded, according to a senior government official. None of those killed were Americans.

The United States Embassy in Islamabad said that at least two Pakistani security guards employed by the consulate were killed in the attack, and that a number of others were seriously wounded. The embassy confirmed that the attack was coordinated, and said it involved “a vehicle suicide bomb and terrorists who were attempting to enter building using grenades and weapons fire.”

Employees of the consulate were evacuated after the attack, according to the Pakistani official. Pakistani television reported that the consulate would be closed on Tuesday, but a United States Embassy spokeswoman could not immediately confirm that.

Militants managed to damage barracks that formed part of the outer layer of security for the heavily fortified consulate area, but did not penetrate inside, the Pakistani intelligence officer said.

Pakistani television networks showed a giant cloud of dust and debris rising from the Saddar area, where the consulate is located, shortly after 1 p.m. Local media reported that there had been three blasts. Authorities cordoned off the area and gunfire was heard long after the explosions.

A spokesman for the Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, and warned that “we plan more such attacks,” Reuters reported.

The assault was a chilling reminder of just how close the militants are still able get to their targets in Pakistan, where months of operations by the Pakistani military in Taliban-controlled northern areas have dramatically reduced violence.

On March 31, a militant who identified himself as Qari Hussein, the head of suicide bomber training for the Taliban, spoke to a Pakistani reporter for Dawn, an English-language daily, saying that the Taliban would soon begin attacks on important and sensitive targets in order “to refresh memories of the attack on the Khost base.” That attack, on an American military base in Afghanistan, killed eight Americans, seven of them Central Intelligence Agency officers.

A short time before the blasts in Peshawar, a bomb exploded at a ceremony in Dir Province, killing more than 40 people, according to the provincial information minister, Iftikhar Hussein, and media reports.

The strike, which came after several months of calm, was an attempt on the part of the militants to show they still have power, said Hasan Askari Rizvi, a defense analyst. It was also a message to the United States, which has been conducting operations against Taliban militants in neighboring Afghanistan, that the Taliban can assault American interests in other places.

“They were lying low for the last three months, but they are trying to demonstrate that they are still alive and kicking,” Mr. Rizvi said. He added that Peshawar, which had been tormented by almost daily bomb strikes last fall, remains the easiest target for militants to strike.

“It is very easily accessible,” he said. “From tribal area you can walk right into Peshawar.”

The senior Pakistani intelligence officer said that the consulate attack had been well-coordinated. It involved several militants, all with suicide vests and some firing rocket launchers, as well as a large bomb.

Media reports quoted witnesses as saying the attackers were wearing uniforms of the Pakistani security services but officials did not immediately verify this.

The ceremony in Dir was to celebrate the renaming of North-West Frontier Province, and was held by a Pashtun political party, the Awami National Party. Fifty people were injured.

“They want to give us a message not to hold activities like this,” Mr. Hussein said.

The bombing took place in the same area where several American military personnel were killed earlier this year, in a bomb attack at the opening of a girls’ school.


Ismail Khan reported from Peshawar, Pakistan, and Sabrina Tavernise from Islamabad. Pir Zubair Shah contributed reporting from Islamabad.

    U.S. Consulate in Pakistan Is Attacked by Militants, NYT, 5.4.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/06/world/asia/06pstan.html

Drones Batter Al Qaeda and Its Allies Within Pakistan

April 4, 2010
The New York Times
By JANE PERLEZ and PIR ZUBAIR SHAH

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — A stepped-up campaign of American drone strikes over the past three months has battered Al Qaeda and its Pakistani and Afghan brethren in the tribal area of North Waziristan, according to a mid-ranking militant and supporters of the government there.

The strikes have cast a pall of fear over an area that was once a free zone for Al Qaeda and the Taliban, forcing militants to abandon satellite phones and large gatherings in favor of communicating by courier and moving stealthily in small groups, they said.

The drones, operated by the C.I.A., fly overhead sometimes four at a time, emitting a beelike hum virtually 24 hours a day, observing and tracking targets, then unleashing missiles on their quarry, they said.

The strikes have sharpened tensions between the local tribesmen and the militants, who have dumped bodies with signs accusing the victims of being American spies in Miram Shah, the main town in North Waziristan, they said.

The impact of the drone strikes on the militants’ operations — on freedom of movement, ability to communicate and the ease of importing new recruits to replace those who have been killed — has been difficult to divine because North Waziristan, at the nether reaches of the tribal area, is virtually sealed from the outside world.

None of those interviewed would allow their names to be used for fear for their safety, and all were interviewed separately in a city outside the tribal areas. The supporters of the government worked in positions where they had access to information about the effects of the drone campaign.

Along with that of the militant, the accounts provided a rare window on how the drones have transformed life for all in the region.

By all reports, the bombardment of North Waziristan, and to a lesser extent South Waziristan, has become fast and furious since a combined Taliban and Qaeda suicide attack on a C.I.A. base in Khost, in southern Afghanistan, in late December.

In the first six weeks of this year, more than a dozen strikes killed up to 90 people suspected of being militants, according to Pakistani and American accounts. There are now multiple strikes on some days, and in some weeks the strikes occur every other day, the people from North Waziristan said.

The strikes have become so ferocious, “It seems they really want to kill everyone, not just the leaders,” said the militant, who is a mid-ranking fighter associated with the insurgent network headed by Jalaluddin and Sirajuddin Haqqani. By “everyone” he meant rank-and-file fighters, though civilians are being killed, too.

Tactics used just a year ago to avoid the drones could not be relied on, he said. It is, for instance, no longer feasible to sleep under the trees as a way of avoiding the drones. “We can’t lead a jungle existence for 24 hours every day,” he said.

Militants now sneak into villages two at a time to sleep, he said. Some homeowners were refusing to rent space to Arabs, who are associated with Al Qaeda, for fear of their families’ being killed by the drones, he said.

The militants have abandoned all-terrain vehicles in favor of humdrum public transportation, one of the government supporters said.

The Arabs, who have always preferred to keep at a distance from the locals, have now gone further underground, resorting to hide-outs in tunnels dug into the mountainside in the Datta Khel area adjacent to Miram Shah, he said.

“Definitely Haqqani is under a lot of pressure,” the militant said. “He has lost commanders, a brother and other family members.”

While unpopular among the Pakistani public, the drone strikes have become a weapon of choice for the Obama administration after the Pakistani Army rebuffed pleas to mount a ground offensive in North Waziristan to take on the militants who use the area to strike at American and NATO forces in Afghanistan.

The Pakistani military says it is already overstretched fighting militants on other fronts. But the militants in North Waziristan — the Haqqani network backed by Al Qaeda — are also longtime allies of Pakistan’s military and intelligence services. The group may yet prove useful for Pakistan to exert influence in postwar Afghanistan.

The army maintains a division of soldiers in North Waziristan, but, the militant said, the Pakistani soldiers do little to hinder militant operations, which, though under greater pressure from the drones, have by no means stopped.

Training sessions on how to make improvised explosive devices for use against American and NATO soldiers in Afghanistan continue, the militant said.

At one eight-day “crash course” in March, the militant said he learned how to mix explosive chemicals and how to load a car with explosives that would be used in suicide bombings.

In public, the Pakistani government opposes the drones, citing a violation of sovereignty.

Under American pressure, however, the Pakistani intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, has provided important intelligence for targets, American and Pakistani officials have said.

But increasingly the Americans appear to have developed their own sources, the militant said.

An influx of young Arabs turned up in North Waziristan recently, presumably to replace some of the older Arabs who had been killed by the drones. But many militants assumed that some of these Arabs were actually American agents, he said.

“Al Qaeda is very careful who they take among the new Arab recruits because they are informants for America,” the militant said.

Perhaps the most disturbing strike for the Haqqanis was the killing of Sirajuddin Haqqani’s younger brother, Mohammad, on Feb. 16.

One government supporter in the area said he witnessed the attack. “I was walking when I saw two drones, one going in one direction, one in another direction. I had a feeling they were preparing,” he said.

There were “two blasts” when a car was hit about 1,200 feet in front of him, he said.

“There was total dust, everything was hazy,” he said. Suddenly, Haqqani fighters appeared out of nowhere. “All these vehicles rushed up, cordoned the site so no outsider could come. They took away the dead bodies.”

The question of civilian deaths is an almost daily worry, all four men said. “Civilians are worried because there is hardly a house without a fighter,” the militant said.

Two of the government supporters said they knew of civilians, including friends, who had been killed by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But, they said, they are prepared to sacrifice the civilians if it means North Waziristan will be rid of the militants, in particular the Arabs.

“On balance, the drones may have killed 100, 200, 500 civilians,” said one of the men. “If you look at the other guys, the Arabs and the kidnappings and the targeted killings, I would go for the drones.”

Drones Batter Al Qaeda and Its Allies Within Pakistan, NYT, 4.4.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/05/world/asia/05drones.html