History > 2011 > USA > War > Afghanistan (IV)

Shepherd Shirwali, who lost his right leg after stepping on a land mine,

rests at the International Committee of the Red Cross orthopedic center

in Kabul on October 9, 2011.

According to the Red Cross, security and health care

are the biggest humanitarian problems facing Afghanistan.

Photograph:

Adek Berry/AFP/Getty Image

Boston Globe > Big Picture > Afghanistan, October 2011

November 9, 2011

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2011/11/afghanistan_october_2011.html

Suicide Bomber Strikes

Funeral in Northern Afghanistan

December 25, 2011
The New York Times
By MATTHEW ROSENBERG
and JAWAD SUKHANYAR

KABUL, Afghanistan — A suicide bomber attacked a funeral in northern Afghanistan on Sunday, killing at least 20 people, officials said, in what appeared to be the Taliban‘s latest strike against Afghans who have ties to the national government.

Among those killed in the bombing, in Takhar Province in northern Afghanistan, was a member of Parliament, Abdul Mutaleb Baik, who had gained prominence as a commander of forces that fought the Taliban during the civil war that gripped the country in the 1990s, according to a spokesman for the provincial government. A member of the provincial council was also killed, along with a number of Afghan intelligence agents and lower-level government officials.

The bombing took place shortly after 2 p.m. in the village of Begabad, near the town of Taloqan, the provincial capital, a once calm area that has seen a rise in insurgent violence over the past year. The attacker struck as the mourners were finishing a short funeral prayer that traditionally comes just before the body is lowered into the ground.

Instead, at Sunday’s funeral, the bomber rushed to the front of the crowd — near where Mr. Baik, the lawmaker, was standing — and detonated his explosives, said Baz Muhammad, 45, a tribal elder who was taking part in the service. Mr. Muhammad said the last thing he remembered from the funeral was hearing a loud bang and a flash. He awoke with shrapnel in his leg and back, although his wounds were not life threatening.

Later, at the hospital in Taloqan where the dead and wounded were taken, hundreds of distraught people waited outside for news of family members and friends who had been at the funeral, Mr. Muhammad said.

Both President Hamid Karzai and the American officials quickly condemned the bombing, pointing to it as more evidence of Taliban brutality. “This ruthless act of terror to target innocent people who had gathered for a religious ceremony yet again demonstrates the vile and vicious nature of the enemy who do not want to see the Muslim people of Afghanistan to perform even their Islamic rituals,” President Karzai said in a statement.

The American Embassy called the bombing “reprehensible,” and said it “further illustrates that the Taliban and other insurgents are waging a murderous campaign against innocent Afghan civilians, including women and children, and exposes as false calls by Mullah Omar during the Eid al-Adha and other insurgent leaders on their followers not to kill civilians.”

Muhammad Tauhidi, the Takhar provincial spokesman, put the death toll at 30, while the Interior Ministry said that more than 20 had been killed.

A number of officials and elders were attending the funeral, which was for the father of the chief of the provincial fire department, said Mualavi Muhammadullah Wursaji, the Takhar provincial council’s leader.

Neither the Taliban nor any of Afghanistan’s other insurgent groups immediately claimed responsibility for the bombing. But suspicion quickly fell on the Taliban and its allies, who often single out Afghan government officials and people close to them. In September, a suicide bomber who was believed to be a member of the Taliban killed Burhanuddin Rabbani, the leader of Afghanistan’s High Peace Council and a former Afghan president.

If the Taliban was behind Sunday’s attack, it would be the group’s second major suicide bombing this year in Takhar Province.

In May, a Taliban suicide bomber disguised as a police officer blew himself up during a meeting at the provincial governor’s compound. The chief police officer in northern Afghanistan, Gen. Daud Daud, and Takhar Province’s police chief, Gen. Shah Jahan Noori, were killed. Among the wounded was the top German officer in Afghanistan, Gen. Markus Kneip, the commander of NATO forces in northern Afghanistan.

But the Taliban are not the only insurgent faction operating in Takhar. Their allies in the Haqqani militant network are believed to maintain a presence in the province. A rival group, Hizb-i-Islami, is believed to be active in the region; it is run by the warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a former Afghan prime minister who played a major role in the fight against the Soviet Union’s occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. And militants from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan are also thought to be in Takhar Province.

On Saturday, an Afghan soldier — or possibly an insurgent wearing an Afghan Army uniform — opened fire on coalition forces in Farah Province in western Afghanistan, NATO and Afghan officials said on Sunday.

NATO reported only that the attacker had been killed and that the shooting was under investigation. But the provincial police chief, Said Muhammad, said two American soldiers had been killed after a gun battle between American and Afghan soldiers during a joint patrol. The shooting was believed to have been brought on by an argument, he said.

The Taliban quickly claimed responsibility for the shooting, saying it had been carried out by an insurgent infiltrator. The Taliban often overstate the effectiveness of their forces, but Afghan soldiers have repeatedly turned on coalition forces in the last few years, giving rise to fears that both the Afghan Army and the nation’s police force are being infiltrated by insurgents.

    Suicide Bomber Strikes Funeral in Northern Afghanistan, NYT, 25.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/26/world/asia/suicide-bomber-strikes-funeral-in-northern-afghanistan.html

After Charging 8,

Army Is Scrutinized on Hazing

December 22, 2011
The New York Times
By KIRK SEMPLE

Under Army rules, a superior is allowed to subject a soldier to certain kinds of “corrective measures,” including “verbal reprimands and a reasonable number of repetitions of authorized physical exercises.”

But in light of charges filed this week against eight soldiers in connection with the death of Pvt. Danny Chen, a fellow soldier in Afghanistan, the line separating acceptable activities from hazing, which is forbidden, has come under renewed scrutiny both inside and outside the military.

“It’s important to know that Army training is rigorous and demanding and it’s often associated with violent action, but we’re very careful and very attentive to crossing that line,” George Wright, an Army spokesman at the Pentagon, said Thursday. “While we want to make our soldiers tough and resilient, we want to make sure that our training is not abusive.”

To that end, officials explained, all officers, both commissioned and noncommissioned, are trained in the distinctions during basic training and during refresher courses throughout their careers.

On Thursday, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on his Facebook page that military officials were investigating several other allegations of hazing. “These appear to be isolated instances of misconduct,” he said. “We are duty bound to protect one another from hazing in any form.”

Private Chen’s body was found on Oct. 3 in a guard tower on his base in southern Afghanistan. He had suffered what the military called “an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound.” The eight service members — one officer and seven enlisted soldiers — were charged with a range of crimes, including manslaughter and negligent homicide, officials announced on Wednesday.

One suspect, Specialist Ryan J. Offutt, 32, of Greenville, Pa., was sentenced to jail in 2002 after pleading guilty to charges of simple assault and indecent assault after attacking a woman in his house in 2001, according to court records and a 2002 account in a local newspaper.

In the Chen case, Specialist Offutt was charged with multiple counts, including involuntary manslaughter, assault consummated by battery, negligent homicide and reckless endangerment.

The authorities have revealed little about the circumstances surrounding the death, which remains under investigation. But Private Chen’s parents insisted that their son displayed no suicidal or depressive tendencies. They said Army officials had told them that in the hours before his death, Private Chen was harassed by fellow soldiers, who dragged him out of bed, pelted him with rocks and made him do painful exercises when he failed to turn off a water heater after showering.

According to the family, the soldiers used ethnic slurs against Private Chen, which are also prohibited by Army rules.

Private Chen’s parents, Su Zhen Chen and Yan Tao Chen, Chinese immigrants who live in the East Village, said they did not know if their son had done anything else that the other soldiers might have taken as a provocation. But in October, military officials gave the Chens a photocopy of a page from Private Chen’s personal journal that included a list, apparently in his handwriting, describing procedural failures: “Didn’t clear weapon,” “Didn’t hydrate,” and “No attention to detail (little things).”

Army rules define hazing as conduct whereby a service member causes another service member “to suffer or be exposed to an activity that is cruel, abusive, oppressive or harmful.”

Advocates for the family, while pressing for a full investigation, have also been lobbying the Army to crack down on hazing and to improve conditions for minorities, particularly soldiers of Asian descent, who enlist at lower rates than other minorities. Military officials said members of the Army — soldiers and civilian employees alike — undergo “equal-opportunity training” annually.

    After Charging 8, Army Is Scrutinized on Hazing, NYT, 22.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/23/nyregion/army-hazing-charges-where-discipline-crosses-line.html

Army Charges 8

in Wake of Death of a Fellow G.I.

December 21, 2011
The New York Times
By KIRK SEMPLE

One night in October, an Army private named Danny Chen apparently angered his fellow soldiers by forgetting to turn off the water heater after taking a shower at his outpost in Afghanistan, his family said.

In the relatives’ account, the soldiers pulled Private Chen out of bed and dragged him across the floor; they forced him to crawl on the ground while they pelted him with rocks and taunted him with ethnic slurs. Finally, the family said, they ordered him to do pull-ups with a mouthful of water — while forbidding him from spitting it out.

It was the culmination of what the family called a campaign of hazing against Private Chen, 19, who was born in Chinatown in Manhattan, the son of Chinese immigrants. Hours later, he was found dead in a guard tower, from what a military statement on Wednesday called “an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound” to the head.

On Wednesday, the American military announced that the Army had charged eight soldiers in Private Chen’s battalion in connection with the death.

It was an extraordinary development in a case that has stirred intense reactions in the Asian population in New York and elsewhere and provoked debate over what some experts say is the somewhat ambivalent relationship between the Asian population and the United States military.

The authorities have not publicized much information about the circumstances of the death. Family members said they had gleaned bits of information about the hazing in private briefings with American military officials. But the array of charges announced — the most serious of which were manslaughter and negligent homicide — suggested that military prosecutors believed that the soldiers’ actions drove Private Chen to commit suicide.

Private Chen’s relatives and friends said they welcomed the announcement of the charges, as did Asian-American advocacy groups, which have been pressing the Army to conduct a transparent investigation into the death and to improve the treatment of Asians in the armed forces.

“It’s of some comfort and relief to learn that the Army has taken this seriously,” Private Chen’s mother, Su Zhen Chen, said through an interpreter at a news conference in Chinatown. Private Chen was her only child.

Private Chen’s parents — his father has worked as a chef in Chinese restaurants, and his mother as a seamstress — live in an East Village housing project.

Private Chen was deployed to Afghanistan in August after completing basic training in April.

In a journal he kept while in basic training and in letters, Private Chen mentioned that other soldiers teased him because of his ethnicity. “Everyone here jokingly makes fun of me for being Asian,” he said in one letter to his parents. In another letter two days later, he wrote, “People crack jokes about Chinese people all the time; I’m running out of jokes to come back at them.”

At a news conference on Wednesday, a Pentagon spokesman would not discuss details about the case, but he acknowledged that hazing, while against the rules of the military, occasionally occurred among its members. He insisted that the armed forces had a zero-tolerance policy toward it.

“We treat each other with respect and dignity, or we go home,” the spokesman, Capt. John Kirby, said. “There’s a justice system in place to deal with it. And that’s what we’re seeing here in the case of Private Chen.”

The accused soldiers, all members of a unit based in Fort Wainwright, Alaska, included an officer and seven enlisted soldiers, the military said in a statement. Lawyers for the eight could not be reached for comment on the Army’s charges.

The case is among very few from the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts in which American soldiers have been implicated in the deaths of fellow soldiers.

In October, several Marines were ordered court-martialed for their roles in the death of an Asian-American Marine, Lance Cpl. Harry Lew, from California, who killed himself in April in Afghanistan after being subjected to what military prosecutors said was hazing.

Until Wednesday, the military had said little publicly about the investigation into Private Chen’s death, and in the vacuum of information, suspicion flourished among relatives, friends and advocates in the Asian-American community over whether American military investigators were planning to whitewash the inquiry.

But military officials insisted all along that they were conducting a thorough investigation and that its integrity depended on the tight control of information.

Sgt. First Class Alan G. Davis, a spokesman for the military’s headquarters in southern Afghanistan, said Wednesday that there had been two investigations into Private Chen’s death: one conducted by the regional command, which resulted in the charges, and one by the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division, which is continuing.

The eight suspects, who have not been formally detained, are still stationed in Afghanistan, though on a different base and under increased supervision, another military spokesman, Lt. Col. Dave Connolly, said.

Private Chen’s relatives and advocates for the family said the charges caught them by surprise.

“I didn’t think the case would move this fast,” said Wellington Chen, executive director of the Chinatown Partnership Local Development Corporation. Reaching for a Chinese aphorism, he added, “You cannot wrap a fire with paper: the truth will come out.”

“We are cautiously optimistic about today’s news,” he said, adding that the authorities “have to create an atmosphere in which Asian-Americans feel safe.”

Elizabeth R. OuYang, president of the New York chapter of OCA, a civil rights group that has been working with the family, vowed to continue pressing military officials on the case. She has helped keep the matter in the public eye by organizing a prayer vigil and a march in memory of Private Chen. She has also met at the Pentagon with Army officials to emphasize the importance of the case and to demand measures to improve the treatment of Asians in the military.

The eight charged in the case are members of the 3rd Battalion, 21st Infantry, 1st Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division. Five of the soldiers — Staff Sgt. Andrew J. Van Bockel, Sgt. Adam M. Holcomb, Sgt. Jeffrey T. Hurst, Specialist Thomas P. Curtis and Specialist Ryan J. Offutt — were accused of involuntary manslaughter, negligent homicide and assault consummated by battery, among other crimes, the military said.

First Lt. Daniel J. Schwartz, the only officer among the eight defendants, was charged with dereliction of duty, the statement said.

Sgt. Travis F. Carden was charged with assault and maltreatment, and Staff Sgt. Blaine G. Dugas was charged with dereliction of duty and making a false statement, the statement said.

 

Matthew Rosenberg contributed reporting

from Kabul, Afghanistan,

and Noah Rosenberg from New York.

    Army Charges 8 in Wake of Death of a Fellow G.I., NYT, 21.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/22/us/8-charged-in-death-of-fellow-soldier-us-army-says.html

Rare Attacks on Shiites

Kill Scores in Afghanistan

December 6, 2011
The New York Times
By ROD NORDLAND

KABUL, Afghanistan — A Pakistan-based extremist group claimed responsibility for a series of coordinated bombings aimed at Afghan Shiites on Tuesday, in what many feared was an attempt to further destabilize Afghanistan by adding a new dimension of strife to a country that, though battered by a decade of war, has been free of sectarian conflict.

The attacks, among the war’s deadliest, struck three Afghan cities — Kabul, Kandahar and Mazar-i-Sharif — almost simultaneously and killed at least 63 Shiite worshipers on Ashura, which marks the death of Shiite Islam’s holiest martyr.

Targeted strikes by Sunnis against the minority Shiites are alien to Afghanistan. So it was no surprise to Afghans when responsibility was claimed by a Sunni extremist group from Pakistan, where Sunnis and Shiites have been energetically killing one another for decades.

The group, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, had not previously claimed or carried out attacks in Afghanistan, however, and its emergence fueled suspicions that Al Qaeda, the Taliban or Pakistan’s spy agency — or some combination of those three — had teamed up with the group to send the message that Afghanistan’s future stability remained deeply tenuous and indeed dependent on the cooperation of outside forces.

“Never in our history have there been such cruel attacks on religious observances,” said President Hamid Karzai, in a statement released by his office. “The enemies of Afghanistan do not want us to live under one roof with peace and harmony.”

The timing of the attacks was especially pointed, coming a day after an international conference on Afghanistan in Bonn, Germany, that had been viewed as an opportunity for Afghanistan to cement long-term support from the West.

But the conference fell considerably short of the objectives that officials had envisioned because Taliban insurgents and Pakistani diplomats did not attend. Pakistan pulled out of the conference as a protest over the deaths of 24 of its soldiers in an American airstrike, carried out from Afghan territory, which American officials have depicted as the result of a misunderstanding.

Critics of Pakistan were quick to read Monday’s boycott and Tuesday’s bombings as a signal from the Pakistanis, delivered by Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, that Afghanistan could not ignore Pakistan.

“Pakistan is our historical enemy and wants us to never live in peace,” said Noor Mohammad, one of the wounded worshipers, who was covered in blood minutes after the attack in Kabul. “What should we do, where should we go? The terrorists are not even letting us carry on our religious practices.”

Abdul Qayou Sajadi, a Hazara member of Parliament, made similar assumptions, though he did not mention Pakistan by name. “As you know, the peace efforts by our government and the international community are going on, but some of our neighboring countries failed in this regard,” he said. “Now they are trying to divide our people along religious lines, and create another war among Afghans as they did in the past.”

While members of Afghanistan’s Shiite minority, mostly ethnic Hazaras, faced savage discrimination during the years of Taliban rule, they had not been singled out for attacks during the current insurgency.

The actual intentions of those behind Tuesday’s attacks remained murky, however, not least because of the tangled history of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, which once operated openly in Pakistan with the support of its spy service, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, but has since been outlawed. In recent years it has struck up alliances with Al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban, an umbrella group of Pakistani militants that has attacked Pakistan’s cities and security forces numerous times.

Lashkar-e-Jhangvi is inspired by a fundamentalist Deobandi philosophy that justifies killing Shiites because of their beliefs, and it has on several occasions attacked Americans, Christians and other Muslim minorities as well. There is no record of previous operations by the group in Afghanistan, however, so no one seriously thought Lashkar-e-Jhangvi could carry out a coordinated series of bombings in three Afghan cities without substantial support from other sources.

Tuesday’s bombings aroused fears that extremists were trying to provoke a reaction like the one after the 2006 bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra, Iraq, which ignited two years of tit-for-tat sectarian violence. That attack was carried out by militants aligned with Al Qaeda, which also has an anti-Shiite philosophy.

Shiite religious and political leaders in Afghanistan were quick to call for calm, warning that a violent response was just what the killers were trying to provoke. “Our Hazara people should be cool-headed and not react because our enemies will take advantage of that to divide our country,” said a prominent Hazara leader and Shiite cleric, Mohammad Husain Mohaqiq.

The three bombings all took place around midday as Shiite devotees marched in processions to honor the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, the holiest of specifically Shiite holidays.

In the southern city of Kandahar a bomb on a parked motorcycle exploded and narrowly missed an Ashura procession, wounding two police officers and three passers-by, said Abdul Razaq, the Kandahar police chief.

In the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif, a suicide bomber, apparently on foot, killed four worshipers and wounded more than 20, said Sirjan Durani, a police spokesman.

The deadliest attack occurred in Kabul’s crowded Murad Khani neighborhood, when a suicide bomber infiltrated a procession in front of the Abul Fazal Abbas Shrine. The powerful blast killed scores of worshipers and damaged the mosque. Many people, terrified of another attack, jumped into a nearby river, which is choked with sewage.

In the processional, men had been beating their bared chests to show their sorrow at Imam Hussein’s martyrdom; some also whipped their backs with barbed chains.

“The explosion took place inside the crowd,” said a wounded man, Said Zaki, 18, whose face and clothes were covered in blood. “We didn’t see who the bomber was, but he was definitely on foot. We saw 30 or 40 people on the ground missing arms and legs.”

Throughout the day, the official count of the dead climbed as more and more of the nearly 200 wounded people died of horrific injuries. In one hospital, 5 infants were among 14 victims declared dead on arrival. Every hospital in Kabul, the capital, took in victims.

At the Emergency Hospital, when corridors filled up with the wounded, doctors put the overflow patients in a laundry room and the dead on stretchers in the courtyard. Outside, angry and sometimes hysterical relatives tried to climb over the hospital walls, then forced their way in when doors were opened to bring in blood donors for urgently needed transfusions.

Kabul’s police chief, Gen. Mohammad Ayoub Salangi, was aware of the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi claim, which was reported by the BBC and Radio Free Europe quoting the group’s spokesman, Qari Abubakar. But he said none of the Pakistan-based extremists could carry out operations without Taliban support. “All the militant groups have very good cooperation with the Taliban in Afghanistan, so I am sure they were aware of it,” he said.

An e-mail sent to news organizations from the spokesman for the Taliban, Zabiullah Mujahid, denied responsibility. “We strongly condemn this wild and inhuman act by our enemies, who are trying to blame us and trying to divide Afghans by doing such attacks on Muslims,” the message said.

 

Reporting was contributed by Sarifullah Sahak, Luke Mogelson

and Sangar Rahimi from Kabul, and Taimoor Shah from Kandahar, Afghanistan.

    Rare Attacks on Shiites Kill Scores in Afghanistan, NYT, 6.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/07/world/asia/suicide-bombers-attack-shiite-worshipers-in-afghanistan.html

Fatal Suicide Attack

Outside U.S. Base in Afghanistan

December 2, 2011
The New York Times
By ROD NORDLAND

KABUL, Afghanistan — A suicide bomber driving a truck inflicted scores of casualties outside a small American military installation on Friday and destroyed several government buildings, but failed to enter the American base, according to witnesses and Afghan officials.

At least 84 people were wounded and one killed in the attack, which took place 25 miles from the capital, in Mohammad Agha District, Logar Province, according to Mohammad Zarif Maidkhail, the director of public health in Logar.

A spokesman for the provincial governor said that details were still incomplete.

A NATO spokesman, Lt. Col. Jimmie Cummings, confirmed there was a vehicle-borne bomb attack against Combat Outpost McClain in that district. “It was a single attack with no follow-up. There were no ISAF fatalities. We are still in the process of gathering more information to develop the situation and will release more information as appropriate,” he said.

The blast took place at 8 a.m. Friday at the base, which is near the main highway between Kabul city and southeastern Afghanistan.

Logar Province in the past two years has seen increasing infiltration from the Taliban, particularly the Haqqani group, a Taliban offshoot believed to be largely financed by Pakistan's top military intelligence service.

An Afghan contractor working nearby at the time of the explosion said the blast appeared to have destroyed several buildings. Officials later said they included a clinic and two other buildings, one of which were the former offices of the aid group CARE, which no longer operates there.

Those buildings were clustered near the gates of an American military base, but the witness was unable to see whether there was any damage inside the base because of the large concrete blast walls surrounding it. He asked that his name be withheld for fear of retribution.

He said a police investigator at the scene told him the bomb was apparently in the trailer of a tractor-trailer truck trying to enter the base. However, a spokesman for the provincial governor said the bomb was hidden in a truck hauling firewood, and a police spokesman put the quantity of explosives at 13 tons.

The Mohammad Agha district borders Kabul Province and is the site of the huge Aynak copper mine, which Chinese officials recently won a contract to develop. The district had been relatively peaceful, a factor in the Chinese interest in Aynak.

Zabiullah Mujahid, a spokesman for the Taliban, claimed the insurgents carried out the suicide attack, which he said had destroyed the American base.

Sangar Rahimi and Jawad Sukhanyar contributed reporting from Kabul,

and Taimoor Shah from Kandahar, Afghanistan.

    Fatal Suicide Attack Outside U.S. Base in Afghanistan, NYT, 2.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/03/world/asia/car-bomb-explodes-outside-us-military-base-in-afghanistan.html

For Afghan Woman,

Justice Runs

Into Unforgiving Wall of Custom

December 1, 2011
The New York Times
By ALISSA J. RUBIN

KABUL, Afghanistan — When the Afghan government announced Thursday that it would pardon a woman who had been imprisoned for adultery after she reported that she had been raped, the decision seemed a clear victory for the many women here whose lives have been ground down by the Afghan justice system.

But when the announcement also made it clear that there was an expectation that the woman, Gulnaz, would agree to marry the man who raped her, the moment instead revealed the ways in which even efforts guided by the best intentions to redress violence against women here run up against the limits of change in a society where cultural practices are so powerful that few can resist them, not even the president.

The solution holds grave risks for Gulnaz, who uses one name, since the man could be so humiliated that he might kill his accuser, despite the risk of prosecution, or abuse her again.

The decision from the government of President Hamid Karzai is all the more poignant coming as Western forces prepare to leave Afghanistan, underscoring the unfinished business of advancing women’s rights here, and raising questions of what will happen in the future to other women like Gulnaz.

Indeed, what prompted the government to act at all was a grass-roots movement that began after Gulnaz was featured in a recent documentary film commissioned by the European Union, which then blocked the film’s release.

Supporters of the filmmakers charged that European officials were shying away from exposing the sort of abuses Afghan women routinely suffer for fear of offending their host government.

While Gulnaz’s pardon is a victory for both Clementine Malpas, a filmmaker who spent nearly six months on the documentary, and for Kimberley Motley, an American lawyer here who took Gulnaz’s case on a pro bono basis, it also shows that for women in the justice system, the odds are stacked against them.

The banned film, “In-Justice: The Story of Afghan Women in Jail,” which was seen by The New York Times, profiles three Afghan women who were in prison. One was Gulnaz, then about 19, who gave birth to the child of her rapist in prison, after initially being sentenced to three years. In a second trial, her sentence was increased to 12 years, but a judge on camera offered her a way out: marry her rapist.

A second woman in the film was abused by her husband and ran away with a man she fell in love with; both are now in prison for adultery. The third woman was a child of 14, who appeared to have been kidnapped but was held as a runaway and has since been returned to her family.

After the film was completed, the European Union banned its release, effectively silencing the women who were willing to tell their stories. The reason given for the ban was that the publicity could harm the women, because an Afghan woman who has had sex out of wedlock can easily become the victim of a so-called honor killing. The women had not given their written consent to be in the film, said Vygaudas Usackas, the European Union’s ambassador to Afghanistan.

But an e-mail obtained by The Times from someone supportive of the filmmakers suggested that the European Union also had political reasons for the ban.

The e-mail addressed to the filmmakers by the European Union attaché for justice, the rule of law and human rights, Zoe Leffler, said the European Union “also has to consider its relations with the justice institutions in connection with the other work that it is doing in the sector.”

Even if the women in the film “were to give their full consent,” the European Union would not be “ willing to take responsibility for the events that could ensue and that could threaten the lives of the documentary’s subjects,” the e-mail said.

Mr. Usackas said that concern for the women was central in the European Union’s decision. “Not only does the E.U. care about women, but we have spent over 45 million euros,” about $60 million, “in support of different programs for women,” he said, adding that the European Union also finances shelters for women.

Word of the film’s suppression percolated through human rights groups here to the point that many in the nascent Afghan women’s movement were referring to the victims by name and discussing what would be best for them, given the strictures of Afghan society. Some people circulated a petition urging Gulnaz’s release and gathered more than 6,000 signatures, which were delivered to Mr. Karzai.

Although human rights advocates came down emphatically on the side of broadcasting the documentary, Afghan women’s advocates were more cautious, having been stung by previous cases.

In 2010, there was widespread publicity of the case of Bibi Aisha, a Pashtun child bride, whose nose was cut off by her Taliban husband; it backfired. Conservative Afghan leaders started a campaign against the nonprofit women’s shelters, one of which had helped Bibi Aisha. They came close to shutting down the shelters, which would have been a huge loss for abused women who have no other refuge.

“When we write or produce articles or movies on Afghan women, no matter how horrible the life of Afghan women is, and we know that is the reality of Afghan women, we want to be very careful not to make the situation worse,” said Samira Hamidi, country director of the Afghan Women’s Network.

“We don’t want to block the way for other women who have similar problems and who don’t have anyone to help them,” Ms. Hamidi said.

But to not show the plight of Afghan women is to reduce the possibility that the government and the society will ever change.

“It is our position in the human rights community that one of the best ways to highlight a human rights issue is to let the victims speak and to publicize what has happened to them to a wide audience,” said Georgette Gagnon, an official with the United Nations mission in Afghanistan.

The problem for Gulnaz and the other women in the film is the deeply held belief that women uphold their family’s honor. Thus any attempt to expose abuse is so humiliating to the family that a woman who speaks out often becomes a pariah among her relatives, ending up isolated as well as abused.

Gulnaz’s case shows the power of cultural norms. On the one hand, the public campaign for the woman prompted the pardon, which ensures that she will be able to bring up her daughter outside prison. On the other hand, the fact that the only imaginable solution to the situation of a woman with an illegitimate child is to have her marry the father — even if he is a rapist — is testament to the rigid belief here that a woman is respectable only if she is embedded within a family.

Ms. Malpas said that Gulnaz talked to her about why she felt that she had to give in to requests that she marry the man who raped her, even though she did not want to, explaining that not only would she be an outcast if she did not, but so would her daughter, and she would bring shame on her family.

“Gulnaz said, ‘My rapist has destroyed my future,’ ” Ms. Malpas said, recounting their conversation. “ ‘No one will marry me after what he has done to me. So I must marry my rapist for my child’s sake. I don’t want people to call her a bastard and abuse my brothers. My brothers won’t have honor in our society until he marries me.’ ”

But, mindful of her safety, Gulnaz also said that if she were to marry her rapist she would demand that he make one of his sisters marry one of her brothers, Ms. Motley, the lawyer, said.

This practice, known as “baad,” is a tribal way of settling disputes. But in this case it would also be an insurance policy for Gulnaz since her rapist would hesitate to hurt her because his sister would be at the mercy of Gulnaz’s brother.

Both Ms. Malpas and Ms. Motley said that a shelter had been found for Gulnaz and that they hoped she would go there. But whether such a Western option can prevail over Afghan custom — and whether Gulnaz will choose it — is far from clear.

 

Sangar Rahimi and Rod Nordland contributed reporting.

    For Afghan Woman, Justice Runs Into Unforgiving Wall of Custom, NYT, 1.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/02/world/asia/for-afghan-woman-justice-runs-into-the-static-wall-of-custom.html

In Fog of War,

Rift Widens Between U.S. and Pakistan

November 27, 2011
The New York Times
By STEVEN LEE MYERS

WASHINGTON — The NATO air attack that killed at least two dozen Pakistani soldiers over the weekend reflected a fundamental truth about American-Pakistani relations when it comes to securing the unruly border with Afghanistan: the tactics of war can easily undercut the broader strategy that leaders of both countries say they share.

The murky details complicated matters even more, with Pakistani officials saying the attack on two Pakistani border posts was unprovoked and Afghan officials asserting that Afghan and American commandos called in airstrikes after coming under fire from Pakistani territory. NATO has promised an investigation.

The reaction inside Pakistan nonetheless followed a now-familiar pattern of anger and tit-for-tat retaliation. So did the American response of regret laced with frustration and suspicion. Each side’s actions reflected a deepening distrust that gets harder to repair with each clash.

The question now, as one senior American official put it on Sunday, is “what kind of resilience is left” in a relationship that has sunk to new lows time after time this year — with the arrest in January of a C.I.A. officer, Raymond Davis, the killing of Osama bin Laden in May and the deaths of so many Pakistani soldiers.

In each of those cases, Pakistan had reason to feel that the United States had violated its sovereignty. Even if circumstances on the ground justified the American actions, they have nonetheless made it difficult to sustain political support inside Pakistan for the strategic cooperation that both countries acknowledge is vital to winning the war in Afghanistan. “Imagine how we would feel if it had been 24 American soldiers killed by Pakistani forces at this moment,” Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat from Illinois, said on “Fox News Sunday.” The rift is one result of the United States’ two-pronged strategy in Afghanistan, which relies on both negotiating and fighting to end the war.

The latest breach in relations came only five weeks after Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton led a senior American delegation to Pakistan to deliver a blunt warning to the country’s leaders to intensify pressure on extremists carrying out attacks into Afghanistan, while at the same time urging them to help bring more moderate members of the Taliban to the negotiating table.

Mrs. Clinton called the administration’s approach “fight, talk, build,” meaning the United States and its allies would continue to attack militants in Afghanistan and beyond, seek peace talks with those willing to join a political process and build closer economic ties across the region. All are essential to any hope of peace and stability in Afghanistan, and all rely on Pakistan. That has forced the two countries into a strategic alliance whose tactics seem to strain it over and over again.

Mrs. Clinton’s diplomacy — bolstered by Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and David H. Petraeus, the director of the C.I.A. — appeared to smooth out the roughest edges in relations, according to officials from both countries.

Recognizing that heightened military activity along the mountainous border with Afghanistan increases the risks of deadly mistakes, American and Pakistani forces have in recent weeks tried to improve their coordination. That cooperation had been largely suspended after the killing of Bin Laden, which President Obama ordered without informing the Pakistani authorities.

Just last Friday, Pakistan’s military commander, Army Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, met Gen. John R. Allen, the commander of coalition forces in Afghanistan, in Rawalpindi to discuss “measures concerning coordination, communication and procedures” between the Pakistan Army, the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force and the Afghan Army, “aimed at enhancing border control on both sides,” according to a statement by the Pakistani military.

“Then you have an incident that takes us back to where we were before her visit,” said Vali Nasr, a former deputy to the administration’s regional envoy, Richard C. Holbrooke, and now a professor at Tufts University.

The problem, Mr. Nasr said, is that the United States effectively has not one but two strategies for winning the war in Afghanistan.

While the State Department and the White House believe that only a negotiated political solution will end the war, American military and intelligence commanders believe that they must maximize pressure on the Taliban before the American military withdrawal begins in earnest before 2014. The military strategy has led to the intensified fighting in eastern Afghanistan along the border with Pakistan, increasing tensions. A major offensive last month involving 11,000 NATO troops and 25,000 Afghan fighters in seven provinces of eastern Afghanistan killed or captured hundreds of extremists, many of them using Pakistan as a base.

In recent months American forces have complained that they have taken mortar and rocket fire from positions in Pakistani territory, as officials said they did early Saturday in the Mohmand region, just north of the Khyber Pass, prompting American troops to call in airstrikes. “It’s a case of the tail wagging the dog,” Mr. Nasr said. When they respond forcefully along the border, “U.S. commanders on the ground are deciding U.S.-Pakistan policy.”

As the Pakistani public and press seethed over the latest attack, the country’s leaders closed supply routes to Afghanistan that NATO relies on, as they have at least twice before, and ordered the C.I.A. to vacate a base it has used to launch drone strikes.

It is unclear how long the Pakistanis will keep the supply routes closed, and whether the promised investigation might help assuage the anger over the deaths of Pakistani soldiers.

On one level, it does not matter whether the strikes are justified as self-defense or acknowledged as a catastrophic error, though if an investigation shows that the Pakistani soldiers were complicit in attacking the NATO-Afghanistan forces across the border, the tensions could worsen further.

The damage to the American strategy has been done, and the question is how long it will take for officials from both countries to resume cooperation where it is in their interest to do so.

Asked on “Fox News Sunday” how he would respond in such a situation, Jon M. Huntsman Jr., President Obama’s former ambassador to China who is now seeking the Republican presidential nomination, said, “I would recognize exactly what the U.S.-Pakistani relationship has become, which is merely a transactional relationship.” He said that American aid to Pakistan should be contingent on keeping the supply lines to Afghanistan open and continuing counterterrorism cooperation.

“And I think our expectations have to be very, very low in terms of what we can get out of the relationship,” he said.

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.

    In Fog of War, Rift Widens Between U.S. and Pakistan, NYT, 27.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/28/world/asia/pakistan-and-united-states-bitter-allies-in-fog-of-war.html

NATO Raids Kill Pakistan Troops,

Raising Tensions

November 26, 2011
The New York Times
By SALMAN MASOOD

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistani officials said Saturday that NATO aircraft had killed at least 25 soldiers in strikes against two military posts at the northwestern border with Afghanistan, and the country’s supreme army commander called it an unprovoked act of aggression, in a new flashpoint in tensions between the United States and Pakistan.

Officials in both countries called for investigations, and the Pakistani government said it had closed the main border crossing in the region, at Torkham, blocking NATO supplies from entering Afghanistan. And Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani cut short a vacation, returning to Islamabad, the capital, and calling a meeting of his cabinet’s defense committee.

In Washington, American officials were scrambling to assess what happened and weigh the implications on a relationship that took a sharp turn for the worse after the United States military helicopter raid that killed Osama bin Laden near Islamabad in May, and have degraded since then.

“It seem quite extraordinary that we’d just nail these posts the way they say we did,” said one senior American official who was in close touch American and NATO officials in Pakistan and Afghanistan early Saturday. “Whether they were going after people or whether there was some firing from the Afghan side of the border, then the Pakistan side, we just don’t know. It’s real murky right now. Clearly, something went very wrong.”

The American ambassador in Islamabad, Cameron Munter, called an emergency meeting and expressed regret over the Pakistani casualties. And Gen. John R. Allen, the commander of NATO-led forces in Afghanistan, offered condolences to families of the dead and promised an investigation. “This incident has my highest personal attention and my commitment to thoroughly investigate it to determine the facts,” he said in a statement.

The strikes, which Pakistani officials said involved both helicopters and fighter jets, took place overnight at two military posts in Salala, a village near the border with Kunar Province in Afghanistan. At least 40 soldiers were deployed at the posts, which according to Pakistani officials were established to repulse cross-border attacks by Afghan militants and the Taliban.

Such attacks have been at the heart of an increasingly hostile relationship between Pakistani and American officials. The Americans accuse Pakistani forces of not doing enough to stop factions of the Taliban and Al Qaeda that are taking shelter in Pakistan from crossing over to attack American forces in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, repeated American drone strikes against militants in the northwester tribal regions, and the raid on Bin Laden, have enraged Pakistani officials over breaches in the country’s sovereignty.

In a statement, the Pakistani military said that its top commander, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, praised troops at the border checkpoints for responding “in self defense to NATO/ISAF’s aggression with all available weapons,” though there was no confirmation by NATO or American officials of return fire. The statement went on to say that General Kayani had “directed that all necessary steps be under taken for an effective response to this irresponsible act.”

President Asif Ali Zardari also strongly condemned the airstrikes, saying that he had lodged strong protests against NATO and the international military force in Afghanistan.

Barrister Masood Kausar, the governor of northwestern Kyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province, called the attacks “unprovoked and highly condemnable” while talking to AAJ TV, a private news network.

“This incident is highly regrettable and condemnable. We think there is no justification,” Mr. Kausar said. “This is not a small incident. It is being taken very seriously.”

Mehmood Shah, a retired brigadier and analyst based in Peshawar, said the matter should be taken to the United Nations Security Council. Mr. Shah said Americans wanted to make Pakistan a scapegoat after facing failure in Afghanistan.

The border crossing closed at Torkham runs through the Khyber Pass and is the main crossing to Afghanistan from Pakistan. It is used by NATO to ship supplies into Afghanistan.

The episode also comes just a little more than a year after coalition helicopters killed three Pakistani security guards in a series of strikes. Pakistan responded by temporarily closing the border crossing at Torkham.

A similar attack occurred in June of 2008 and killed 11 soldiers belonging to a paramilitary force called the Frontier Corps, prompting the Pakistani government to temporarily halt shipment of NATO supplies to Afghanistan.

The border episode comes a day after General Kayani met in Rawalpindi with General Allen, the NATO commander in Afghanistan. The two generals had “discussed measures concerning coordination, communication and procedures between the Pakistan Army, I.S.A.F. and Afghan Army, aimed at enhancing border control on both sides,” according to a statement by the Pakistani military.

The border strikes will further aggravate the widespread anti-American sentiment in the country, said analysts here.

“Even if the U.S. thinks Pakistan is an unreliable and undependable ally, how does it think such an incident will go down with public opinion in Pakistan?” asked Omar R. Quraishi, the opinion editor at the Karachi-based English-language daily The Express Tribune.

“U.S. is funding civil society initiatives to the tune of millions of dollars but attacks like this won’t help. The U.S. should take more care,” Mr. Quraishi said.

Imran Khan, an opposition politician who has recently seen a surge in his public support, urged the Pakistani government to break its military alliance with the United States.

“The time has come to leave America’s war,” Mr. Khan thundered while speaking at a political rally in Shujaabad in Punjab province Saturday evening.

“The attack was carried by those for whom we have destroyed our own country,” he added, referring to United States and a popular perception here that Pakistan has suffered economically and in terms of human lives because of its partnership with the United States.

 

Ismail Khan contributed reporting

from Peshawar, Pakistan;

Eric Schmitt from Washington;

and Rod Nordland from Kabul, Afghanistan.

    NATO Raids Kill Pakistan Troops, Raising Tensions, NYT, 26.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/world/asia/pakistan-says-nato-helicopters-kill-dozens-of-soldiers.html

Six Children Are Killed

by NATO Airstrike in Afghanistan

November 24, 2011
The New York Times
By TAIMOOR SHAH and ROD NORDLAND

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — Six children were among seven civilians killed in a NATO airstrike in southern Afghanistan, Afghan officials said Thursday.

The deaths occurred on Wednesday in the Zhare district of Kandahar Province, an area described by coalition forces as largely pacified in recent months, and two insurgents were also killed, the Afghan officials said.

A spokesman for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, Master Sgt. Christopher DeWitt, said the authorities were aware of the strike and had sent a team to the district to investigate. He said the assistance force had not previously issued a news release on the deaths.

Zalmai Ayoubi, a spokesman for the governor of Kandahar, said that a NATO reconnaissance aircraft spotted five militants planting mines in the village of Siacha, in the Zhare district, on Wednesday. The plane targeted the insurgents, killing two and wounding a third, and then pursued the other two suspects as they carried their wounded comrade away.

“The plane chased them, the insurgents entered a street where children were playing and, as a result of its shooting, seven people have been killed, including six children, and two girls also have been injured,” Mr. Ayoubi said. The victims were members of two families.

Abdul Samad, an uncle of four of the children who were killed, disputed the government’s version of the attack. He said his relatives were working in fields near their village when they were attacked without warning by an aircraft.

His brother-in-law, Mohammad Rahim, 50, had his two sons and three daughters with him. They were between 4 and 12 years old and all were killed, except an 8-year-old daughter who was badly wounded, Mr. Samad said.

“There were no Taliban in the field; this is a baseless allegation that the Taliban were planting mines,” Mr. Samad said. “I have been to the scene and haven’t found a single bit of evidence of bombs or any other weapons. The Americans did a serious crime against innocent children, they will never ever be forgiven.”

American soldiers have destroyed numerous dwellings in Zhare to deny insurgents hiding places, and they have also built new roads across farmland because existing ones were so heavily mined. Residents were quickly compensated by the military, however, and in recent months the area, one of several districts near the city of Kandahar that were once Taliban strongholds, has been relatively quiet.

The area is also known as the ancestral home of the Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar.

 

Taimoor Shah reported from Kandahar, and Rod Nordland from Kabul, Afghanistan.

    Six Children Are Killed by NATO Airstrike in Afghanistan NYT, 24.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/25/world/asia/six-afghan-children-are-killed-in-nato-airstrike.html

'Kill team' US platoon commander

guilty of Afghan murders

Calvin Gibbs, who made soldiers help him kill civilians
and take body part 'trophies', could be out in less than 10 years

Friday 11 November 2011
The Guardian
Chris McGreal in Washington
This article appeared on p31 of the Main section section of the Guardian on Friday 11 November 2011. It was published on guardian.co.uk at 03.36 GMT on Friday 11 November 2011. It was last modified at 03.55 GMT on Friday 11 November 2011.
It was first published at 00.36 GMT on Friday 11 November 2011.

A US military court has convicted an army squad commander of leading a "kill team" in Afghanistan that murdered unarmed civilians and collected body parts as war trophies.

But Staff Sergeant Calvin Gibbs, 26, could be freed in less than 10 years after receiving a life sentence with the possibility of early parole for murder, assault and conspiracy over the killings of three Afghans in separate incidents staged to look as if the victims were combatants.

In one of the most serious accusations of war crimes to emerge from the Afghan conflict, Gibbs recruited other soldiers to murder civilians he called "savages" after he took over command of a US army squad in Afghanistan's Kandahar province in November 2009. Prosecutors described Gibbs as hunting innocent Afghans "for sport", a view reinforced by the staff sergeant's statement likening the amputation of body parts as trophies to collecting antlers from a deer.

The military prosecutor, Major Rob Stelle, told the court: "Sergeant Gibbs had a charisma, he had a 'follow me' personality. But it was all a bunch of crap, he had his own mission: murder and depravity. No one died before Sergeant Gibbs showed up."

Gibbs was convicted of murder for inciting two soldiers to kill 15-year-old Gul Mudin as he worked in a field. The platoon commander gave a grenade to one of the soldiers, Jeremy Morlock, who threw it at Mudin. A second soldier, Andrew Holmes, then shot the boy. Gibbs played with the corpse of the teenager "as if it was a puppet", Morlock told the trial.

The staff sergeant was also convicted of shooting dead Marach Agha, a man sleeping by a roadside, and then planting a Kalashnikov next to the corpse to make it look as if he was a fighter. He kept part of the victim's skull as a trophy.

Gibbs was convicted on a third count of murder for killing a Muslim cleric, Mullah Adahdad, with a grenade and then shooting him. Two other soldiers, Morlock and Adam Winfield, have already pleaded guilty over their roles in the killing.

Gibbs and other soldiers collected fingers, teeth and other body parts as trophies. They also took photographs of themselves posing next to their dead victims. In one of the pictures Morlock is seen lifting Mudin's head by its hair for the camera and smiling. The soldiers also took ghoulish pictures of themselves with dead combatants.
The jury of five soldiers was shown pages of Facebook messages sent by Winfield to his parents in which he described how Gibbs led the killings. In one exchange with his father Winfield recounted Mudin's killing.

"An innocent dude. They planned and went through with it. I knew about it. Didn't believe they were going to do it. Then it happened. Pretty much the whole platoon knows about it. It's OK with all of them pretty much. Except me. I want to do something about it. The only problem is I don't feel safe here telling anyone. The guy who did it is the golden boy in the company who can never do anything wrong and it's my word against theirs," Winfield wrote.

Winfield later told investigators: "[Gibbs] likes to kill things. He is pretty much evil incarnate. I mean, I have never met a man who can go from one minute joking around, then mindless killings."

The court martial was told that Gibbs had six skull tattoos on his leg to mark up each of his "kills" from tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In his testimony Gibbs denied responsibility for the killings, saying the victims all died in legitimate combat. But he did admit slicing off body parts from Afghans, including the fingers of a man, and keeping them or giving them to other soldiers as trophies.

"In my mind I was there to take the antlers off the deer. You have to come to terms with what you're doing. Shooting people is not an easy thing to do," said Gibbs.

The prosecution witnesses against Gibbs included members of his army unit who were also involved in the atrocities. Morlock and Holmes have pleaded guilty to murder and received prison sentences of 24 years and seven years respectively. Winfield pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter for failing to prevent other soldiers from attacking Afghan civilians. He was jailed for three years.

Another soldier, Michael Wagnon, is awaiting trial over the killings and collecting human body parts.

The killings came to light in May after the army began investigating an assault on a soldier, Justin Stoner, after he reported to superiors that members of his unit were smoking hashish. Gibbs, Morlock and other members of the platoon are alleged to have beaten Stoner and told him to keep his mouth shut. Stoner reported the beating and told investigators what he knew of the "kill team".

Prosecutors called Gibbs "monstrous" and "savage" and told the military jury he should never be released from prison. But the jurors acceded to the convicted soldier's plea to have the hope of being reunited with his son and sentenced him to life with the possibility of parole after less than 10 years.

    'Kill team' US platoon commander guilty of Afghan murders, G, 11.11.2011,
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/11/kill-team-calvin-gibbs-convicted

Soldier Is Convicted

of Killing Afghan Civilians for Sport

November 10, 2011
The New York Times
By WILLIAM YARDLEY

JOINT BASE LEWIS-McCHORD, Wash. — The soldier accused of being the ringleader of a rogue Army unit that killed three Afghan civilians last year for sport, crimes that angered Afghan leaders and villagers and rattled high levels of the American military, was found guilty of all charges on Thursday.

The soldier, Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs, 26, of Billings, Mont., was found guilty of three counts of murder, of conspiring to commit murder and several other charges, including assaulting a fellow soldier and taking fingers and a tooth from the dead. He was sentenced to life in prison but could be eligible for parole in less than 10 years.

The verdict, rendered in under a day of deliberations by a five-member panel after a nine-day court-martial at this base 45 miles south of Seattle, was a decisive victory for Army prosecutors, whose case against Sergeant Gibbs was built largely on testimony from other soldiers, including many who had pleaded guilty in the crimes. Of the five soldiers accused of murder in the case, three have pleaded guilty, one of them to manslaughter.

Sergeant Gibbs’s lawyer, Phillip Stackhouse, tried to convince the panel that most of the soldiers who accused his client were doing so to get more lenient sentences, and that accounts from the soldiers differed. Army prosecutors said that because many of the soldiers had already pleaded guilty to murder and other serious charges, they had no reason to lie. “All to frame Staff Sergeant Gibbs?” Maj. Robert Stelle asked the panel during his closing arguments on Wednesday. “It’s ridiculous. It’s ridiculous.”

All told, five soldiers were charged with killing civilians in three separate episodes early last year. Soldiers repeatedly described Sergeant Gibbs as devising “scenarios” in which the unit would fake combat situations by detonating grenades or planting weapons near their victims. They said he even supplied “drop weapons” and grenades to make the victims appear armed. Some soldiers took pictures posing with the dead and took body parts as trophies. Sergeant Gibbs is accused of snipping fingers from victims and later using them to intimidate another soldier.

He also pulled a tooth from one man, saying in court that he had “disassociated” the bodies from being human, that taking the fingers and tooth was like removing antlers from a deer.

Sergeant Gibbs said he that was ashamed of taking the body parts, that he was “trying to be hard, a hard individual.” But he insisted that the people he took them from had posed genuine threats to him and his unit.

The soldiers were members of the former Fifth Stryker Brigade, Second Infantry Division, which deployed to Afghanistan from this base in 2009. They spent much of their time patrolling roads and small villages near Kandahar, and some soldiers have said the sport killings followed frustration that the unit had not seen more combat.

Sergeant Gibbs joined the unit as a squad leader in the fall of 2009, several months into the deployment, having served previously in Iraq. He was big, 6 feet 4 inches tall, and his fellow soldiers described him as charismatic and tactically smart. While many members in the unit have admitted to smoking hashish on patrol, Sergeant Gibbs was not accused of taking drugs.

By January 2010, the first killing had taken place. The next occurred in February and the last in May. Each time the deaths were cast as combat situations.

While some of accused admitted involvement and implicated Sergeant Gibbs from the moment the investigation began, in May 2010, Sergeant Gibbs consistently said he was not guilty, that all of the killings happened in what he believed were legitimate combat situations. “Keep this one word in mind: betrayal,” Mr. Stackhouse told the panel, “because what you’re seeing in this case is the ultimate betrayal of an infantryman.”

Sergeant Gibbs appeared stunned, his mouth open, when the verdict was read.

One of the principal witnesses against him, Pfc. Jeremy Morlock, pleaded guilty to all three killings in March and faces a 24-year sentence. Specialist Adam C. Winfield pleaded guilty in August to manslaughter in one of the killings and faces three years in prison. Pfc. Andrew Holmes pleaded guilty to one of the killings in September.

Many of the defendants, as well as six others charged in the unit, pleaded guilty to other charges, including smoking hashish and assaulting a soldier who eventually led Army investigators to discover the killings.

Sergeant Gibbs was the highest-ranking soldier charged in the case. The leader of the entire Stryker Brigade, Col. Harry D. Tunnell IV, was removed from his position in the summer of 2010, after the investigation into the killings began.

    Soldier Is Convicted of Killing Afghan Civilians for Sport, NYT, 10.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/11/us/calvin-gibbs-convicted-of-killing-civilians-in-afghanistan.html

Taliban Attack U.S.-Afghan Meeting

in Border District

November 10, 2011
The New York Times
By ROD NORDLAND

KABUL, Afghanistan — Taliban insurgents attacked a district government center in eastern Afghanistan Thursday while American troops were meeting with local officials inside, wounding three American soldiers and killing three Afghan police officers, according to Afghan and American officials.

The attack was carried out by a group of five to ten insurgents, some wearing suicide vests, who also took two Afghan officials hostage at the Chamkani District government building in Paktia Province, said Master Sgt. Nicholas Conner, a spokesman for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force troops in eastern Afghanistan.

The hostages included the local head of the National Directorate of Security, the Afghan intelligence service, as well as the deputy governor of the district, he said.

It was unclear whether fighting had completely ended by nightfall, with varying accounts from officials. It was also unclear what had happened to the hostages who had been taken, but Afghan officials said no one was still being held after the fighting died down Thursday night.

A spokesman for the Taliban, Zabiullah Mujahid, reached by telephone at an undisclosed location, said that “we have taken over the district center.”

Sergeant Conner said: “Technically I guess you could say they have control of the building at this time, just like a bank robber has control of the bank when he takes hostages.”

The attack came as the Taliban leadership released a statement on their website Thursday mocking claims by the secretary general of NATO, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, that Taliban attacks had been declining, and citing contrary information from “other enemy officials” that they had been increasing. The Taliban claims were reported by SITE, an organization that monitors jihadi and extremist websites.

NATO figures show that enemy attacks declined by 8 percent during the first nine months of this year compared to the year before. The United Nations, on the other hand, reported in September that insurgent attacks had increased by 39 percent in the first eight months of this year.

Referring to the gradual drawdown of military forces that has begun in Afghanistan, the Taliban statement read, “If Rasmussen and all his allies leave Afghanistan completely then the attacks on them will reach zero and he can propagate the notion even more and say that the number of Taliban attacks have fallen further.”

The attack in Paktia began about four p.m. when one of the attackers exploded his vest at the gate of the district government compound, allowing the others to enter, officials said. Inside, American and Afghan officials had been discussing ongoing talks on a future strategic partnership agreement between their two countries, local officials said.

An American Apache helicopter responded to the scene and received heavy machine gun fire from a second team of insurgents holed up in a nearby mosque, Sergeant Conner said. After seeking permission from Afghan officials, the helicopter fired missiles at the mosque and destroyed it. “They only engaged where they were taking fire from, and only after coordinating with the deputy governor of Paktia province,” he said.

The district police chief, Habib Nour, was also among the wounded, according to Ruhullah Samoun, the spokesman for the provincial governor. He also confirmed that two policemen were killed.

Chamkani District is strategically situated along the Afghan-Pakistan border, in a rugged mountainous area that has seen a great deal of Taliban activity.

Thursday’s attack was one of several in the past few months targeting heavily guarded government and military centers. In July, the insurgents struck at provincial offices in Tirin Kot, capital of Oruzgan Province, killing 21 people, mostly civilians.

In August, they struck at Charikar, capital of Parwan Province, a normally peaceful area in northern Afghanistan, killing 22 persons.

In September, it took authorities 20 hours to completely subdue a Taliban attack on the United States embassy and ISAF headquarters; more than 20 persons died in all, although there were no embassy or coalition military victims. In October, their target was an American military base in the heart of the Panshir Valley, and while the attack failed, it stunned locals in the most anti-Taliban part of the country.

American officials have said the Taliban have been seeking high-profile targets to compensate for the decline in their overall capacity to attack coalition forces in the field.

 

Sangar Rahimi and Sharifullah Sahak contributed reporting from Kabul

and Farouq Jan Mangal from Khost, Afghanistan.

    Taliban Attack U.S.-Afghan Meeting in Border District, NYT, 10.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/11/world/asia/
    taliban-attack-united-states-army-and-afghan-meeting-in-chamkani-district.html

Air Force Mortuary

Sent Troop Remains to Landfill

November 9, 2011
The New York Times
By ELISABETH BUMILLER

WASHINGTON — The mortuary at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware disposed of some body parts of the nation’s war dead from 2003 to 2008 by burning them and dumping the ashes in a Virginia landfill, an Air Force official said on Wednesday. The practice has since been stopped and the ashes are now put in urns and buried at sea.

The practice, which was limited to body parts that families of the war dead did not want to receive, was first reported by The Washington Post. The Air Force official said that body parts sometimes would come into the mortuary after families had already buried the remains of their loved ones and had instructed the military to dispose of the additional parts. But the families were not informed of the way the military was disposing of them.

The Air Force official said that the body parts were first cremated and then given to a private contractor, who incinerated them before putting them in the landfill. The Air Force official said he did not know why it was necessary to first cremate the parts and then incinerate them.

The disclosure follows an Air Force announcement on Tuesday that three top officials at the Dover Port Mortuary, the largest in the nation and the main entry point for the nation’s war dead, knew about lost body parts at the mortuary but did nothing to fix a sloppy system. The three officials were responsible for “gross mismanagement” at the facility, the Air Force said, and were disciplined but not fired.

Also Wednesday, a Pentagon official said that Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta was holding out the possibility of further action against the officials if an outside review found more problems at the mortuary, which has been a hectic place as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have sent the bodies of thousands of American men and women to Dover.

“The door is open, depending on what’s found,” a Defense official said.

Col. Robert H. Edmondson, the former commander of the Air Force Mortuary Affairs Operations Center, who left his position as part of a regular rotation last year, received a letter of reprimand, effectively ending any further promotions. Trevor Dean, Colonel Edmondson’s former deputy, and Quinton R. Keel, the former mortuary director, both civilians, were demoted within the last two months and moved to lesser jobs at Dover, although not in the mortuary.

A separate investigation by the Office of Special Counsel, an agency that handles whistle-blower complaints within the government, said that Mr. Dean and Mr. Keel should have been fired.

However, the Air Force official said on Wednesday that Mr. Dean was one of those responsible for changing the mortuary’s practice of dumping the ashes of body parts in the landfill and instead moved to have them buried in urns at sea.

The Air Force said that Colonel Edmondson, Mr. Dean and Mr. Keel were unavailable for comment.

    Air Force Mortuary Sent Troop Remains to Landfill, NYT, 9.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/10/us/dover-mortuary-burned-and-dumped-troop-remains-in-landfill.html

On War and Redemption

November 8, 2011
7:45 pm
The New York Times
By TIMOTHY KUDO

Home Fires features the writing of men and women
who have returned from wartime service in the United States military.

When I returned from Afghanistan this past spring, a civilian friend asked, “Is it good to be back?” It was the first time someone had asked, and I answered honestly. But I won’t do that again. We weren’t ready for that conversation. Instead, when people ask, I make it easy for everyone by responding, “It’s fine.” That’s a lie, though. It’s not fine.

It’s not the sights, sounds, adrenaline and carnage of war that linger. It’s the morality. We did evil things, maybe necessary evil, but evil nonetheless. It’s not the Taliban we killed that bother me. They knew as well as I did what can happen when you pick up a gun and try to kill your enemies. But the enemy isn’t the only one who dies in war.

I joined the military when we were already long into this conflict. Aside from driving to San Francisco to protest the Iraq invasion, I quickly embraced the inevitability of these wars and relinquished their execution to the government. That was a terrible mistake. In 2006, as both wars raged and the Iraq conflict seemed doomed, I felt obligated to do something. I had no idea what I was committing to when I raised my right hand and took the oath. I realize that my decision was extreme, but it’s one I felt bound to. Only now do I understand the responsibility that military members bear, not only for the lives of others, but also for the consequences of their actions.

It was on a patrol early in our deployment in September of 2010 when the Afghan farmer dropped his shovel and ran for his life. Our squad of 10 dove for the ground. We looked toward the staccato crack of machine gun fire but saw nothing. A few anxious Marines fired anyway. We moved. Someone observed Taliban in a small building just ahead. We fired. It was the first time in an hour anyone had a clue where the enemy was. I saw two Afghans calmly building a wall despite the war erupting around them. Nothing made sense.

We cleared the building. As one team assaulted it, a Marine holding security spotted two armed men driving toward us on a motorcycle. Gunfire rang out from multiple directions. “Are you sure they have guns?” I asked. Nobody knew. We shot a smoke grenade as warning in case they were civilians. They paused, then resumed course. We yelled and waved for them to stop. They persisted. I thought: they might kill my Marines but if we kill them, we might be wrong. Cracks and flashes erupted from the motorcycle. The only hard fact about the rules of engagement is that you have the right to defend yourself. You decide for yourself to pull the trigger. The Marines returned fire for 10 long seconds. The motorcycle sparked where the rounds slapped the metal and drove into the bodies. The bike stopped. The men fell.

The building was empty. No bodies, no blood, no bullet casings. The fog of war lifted. I had been certain what was happening and I was wrong. The combination of confusion, chaos and adrenaline can’t be explained unless you’ve also experienced it. We ran to the motorcycle. One Marine made a quiet plea, “Please let them have weapons. Something. Anything.” They were dead. Their weapons were sticks and bindles. The muzzle flash was light glaring off the motorcycle’s chrome. One man was no older than 16. It was late afternoon then and, in the Muslim tradition, their family quickly arrived to bury them in the last hour of sunlight.

Even now, I don’t know what led them to drive toward a group of Marines firing machine guns, despite warnings, yells and waving. I know that our decision was right and, given the outcome, that it was also wrong. We trained to kill for years and given the opportunity, part of us jumped at the chance to finally be Marines. Despite the school construction and shuras, that’s what it meant to make a difference in uniform; it meant killing our enemies. But these men weren’t enemies. They were just trying to get to a home so close that their family was able to watch them die. After the shooting, the families encircled us in hysterics as they collected the bodies. It was the first and only time I saw an Afghan adult woman’s face. The wailing continued in the distance as we continued on our mission.

The insanity of war means that incidents like this are accepted. By the standards of those who fight wars we actually did the right thing. The catastrophe is that these incidents occur on an industrial scale. Throughout Afghanistan, there are accidental civilian killings; it is war’s nature. When we choose war, we are unleashing a force, much like a natural disaster, that can literally destroy everything and from which there’s no going back. As 10 years of conflict have shown us, nobody knows how wars end.

With six months left on our deployment I had no choice but to move on. I told myself we did what we were trained to do and that it just ended badly. I stuck with that reasoning despite feeling terrible and soon, my emotions caught up to my logic. People say they can remember a traumatic incident like it was yesterday. I can’t. Since my return, Afghanistan has melted into a feeling more than a memory. But I do remember the widows and orphans and wailing families and the faces of two men on a motorcycle. They understood they were being killed as it happened, yet they couldn’t accept their fate. They died painfully. Their teeth clenched and grimacing.Their eyes open. Those eyes gave them a final pleading expression. Why did you kill us?

Back in the United States, I look at people and think: “You have no idea what right and wrong are.” Much that I once held as matters of conscience is now just custom or culture. The challenging thing about ethics is you have to figure them out for yourself. What the war taught me is first: you should always strive to do the right thing even though you can’t control the outcome. Second, wrong decisions have tragic, irreversible consequences. There is no return. Nothing changes it and no lesson justifies it.

I never pulled the trigger on my rifle but I ordered other men to kill. For an officer, there is little difference. In all militaries, individuals don’t kill, groups do. We are each assigned small tasks in the orchestrated murder of our enemies and oftentimes, this decentralization creates its own momentum. We became excellent at engineering the enemy’s death. After one incident, my commanding officer told me that he was ultimately responsible. Yes, by the letter of the law, that is true. But everything we did over there we did together. We’re all responsible. I feel it, and I know that the other officers and N.C.O.’s share the same moments of pride and shame. I also know that that this sense of responsibility is shared all the way to the presidents I’ve served under who saw the consequences of our actions at the hospitals at Bethesda, Walter Reed and Dover Air Force Base.

Only the dead have seen the end of war. This is a maxim that has been used to illuminate humanity’s propensity for war, but it is also an accurate reflection of many veterans’ experiences. The war not only came back with us, it was here the entire time, experienced by orphans and widows. It was experienced by the widows from my unit who were unable to cook a single meal for their kids since their husband’s death. During a memorial a few weeks after our return, families of the dead collapsed grief-stricken in front of their loved ones’ pictures as a thousand Marines solemnly bore witness. When an officer went to the house to check on one family, the littlest one told him matter-of-factly, “My daddy is dead.”

Civilians can’t shoulder the responsibility for killing, but the social contract demands they care for those who do. And this is the great disconnect in our society right now, because that feeling of responsibility is still locked behind the fences of our military bases. My friends killed and died over there for America. And while many of my peers view that as sentimental, jingoistic, naive, or (behind closed doors) stupid, those men believed so deeply in something they were willing to give everything for it. When we wage war to defend the American way of life, there’s an obligation to uphold that ideal. Can we honestly say we’ve done that?

The Marine Hymn states that we are “first to fight for right and freedom and to keep our honor clean.” Since the shooting, I’ve thought about what that means and decided that it was beyond good and evil. It was an accident. War doesn’t distinguish between innocence or guilt, skill or incompetence, intelligence or idiocy. But we do. We see injustice in the deaths and can’t accept their inevitability. But it was fated when we decided to go to war. In that sense, we’re all responsible.

After coming home, our commanders told us we earned glory for our unit, but I know it’s more complicated than that. War has little to do with glory and everything to do with hard work and survival. It’s about keeping your goodness amid the evil. But no matter what happens, you never work hard enough, people die and evil touches everyone. Our lives will go on but the war will never go away. That’s why it’s not simply good to be back. I thought my war was over, but it followed me. It followed all of us. We returned only to find that it was waiting here the entire time and will always be with us.

Captain Timothy Kudo deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan between 2009 and 2011 with Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 8th Marines. He’s currently a Senior Membership Associate with Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. Before joining the military he taught middle school math in the Bronx with Teach For America. He is a native of Santa Monica, Calif.

    On War and Redemption, NYT, 8.11.2011,
    http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/08/on-war-and-redemption/

Air Force Officials Disciplined

Over Handling of Human Remains

November 8, 2011
The New York Times
By ELISABETH BUMILLER and JAMES DAO

WASHINGTON — Three senior officials at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, sacred ground for the military and the main entry point for the nation’s war dead, knew they had lost body parts of two service members killed in Afghanistan but did nothing to correct sloppy practices at the base mortuary, the Air Force said Tuesday.

An 18-month Air Force investigation said the officials had displayed “gross mismanagement” at the mortuary, the largest in the nation and an increasingly hectic place as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan sent the remains of thousands of American men and women to Dover.

In its own report on Tuesday, the Office of Special Counsel, the agency that handles whistle-blower complaints within the federal government, offered scathing criticism of the Air Force’s handling of the affair and raised questions about the thoroughness of its investigation. Both inquiries were the result of complaints last year from three civilian employees of the Dover Port Mortuary, either embalmers or technicians, who alleged that there had been 14 sometimes gruesome failures at the facility, including one instance when mortuary employees sawed off a dead Marine’s arm without consulting his family.

The three senior officials were disciplined but not fired. Col. Robert H. Edmondson, the former commander of the Air Force Mortuary Affairs Operations Center, who left his position as part of a regular rotation last year, received a letter of reprimand, effectively ending any further promotions. Trevor Dean, Colonel Edmondson’s former deputy, and Quinton R. Keel, the former mortuary director, both civilians, were demoted within the last two months and moved to lesser jobs at Dover, although not in the mortuary.

The chief of staff of the Air Force, Gen. Norton A. Schwartz, called the lapses “systemic issues.” He said that they had since been corrected but that he could not say for sure that other mistakes had not been made. He acknowledged one notable statement in the Air Force investigation from an unnamed mortuary employee — that the mortuary lost body parts “every two years” — and said the Pentagon had named a panel to further review procedures at Dover.

“We and every employee of the Dover Port Mortuary understand the obligations of this work, the sanctity of this work, the necessity, the need for reverence, the need for dignity and respect for our fallen, just as if these were our sons and our daughters,” General Schwartz said Monday, a day before the investigation’s findings were released.

In a cover letter accompanying the special counsel’s report, Carolyn N. Lerner, the head of the office, said that although the Air Force had taken many important steps to correct problems, Mr. Keel and Mr. Dean should have been fired. “I am concerned that the retention of these individuals sends an inappropriate message to the work force,” Ms. Lerner wrote.

In particular, the special counsel’s report asserts that Mr. Keel repeatedly tried to cover up mistakes in the handling of remains and misrepresented his role in several important decisions. He also tried to fire two of the whistle-blowers after becoming aware of the investigation, but superiors overruled him, officials in the Office of Special Counsel said.

The disposition of war dead is a deeply emotional issue for the American military, which has sought in recent years to handle the remains of those killed on the battlefield with painstaking care. Dover in particular has projected an image of a hallowed place as presidents, hundreds of government officials and thousands of grieving families have met the flag-covered cases of loved ones that come out of the bellies of transport planes for solemn ceremonies on the tarmac. Since 2009 the Pentagon has allowed those ceremonies to be photographed for the nation to see.

But the Air Force investigation offers a graphic and disturbing account of what can occur when the cases move out of public view to the mortuary, at least in the instances of the lost body parts — a fragmented ankle from a soldier killed by a bomb in Afghanistan in April 2009, and a 1 ½-by-3 ½-inch piece of flesh from an airman who died in a fighter jet crash in Afghanistan in July 2009.

Although the investigation said the loss of the two body parts “equates to an aggregate success rate slightly greater than 99.9 percent” when based on the thousands of remains and body parts received at the mortuary, “the success rate for families of the deceased in the two individual cases is zero percent.” The investigation termed the lost body parts “mission failure.”

The investigation did not uncover what happened to the body parts, but held out the possibility that they fell out of plastic Ziploc bags while stored in a large refrigerator in the mortuary and ended up in tubs with the remains of another service member or perhaps cremated. A number of mortuary employees were quoted in the investigation as saying that medical examiners frequently sliced into the bags to conduct DNA analysis on the body parts. However, three medical examiners interviewed in the investigation said they did not slice into the bags.

Whatever occurred, the investigation describes a mortuary that had to manage the devastating effects of homemade bomb attacks, the No. 1 cause of military deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as frequent calls to handle mass casualties. One unnamed mortuary employee told investigators about a particularly busy day in July 2009 when the remains arrived of two airmen killed in a fighter jet crash in Afghanistan.

The employee described the medical examiners as taking body parts out of the Ziploc bags for DNA analysis and said, “It was kind of hard to keep track of everything.” The employee said the examiners “were kind of messing with the bags a lot, and then they would walk to the back, and then they’d come back and — it was — it was a really hectic day.”

The Office of Special Counsel report also took issue with the Air Force on the mortuary’s handling of the remains of a Marine killed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan in January 2010.

The Marine’s family had asked that they see their son one last time in uniform, but the heat from the bomb had apparently fused a 12- to 15-inch portion of his left arm bone to his body and it was sticking out, unmovable, perpendicular to his torso.

Mortuary employees could not fit the Marine in either his uniform or his coffin, and so without consulting the family Mr. Keen ordered the employees to saw off the bone. They did so, and put it in the uniform’s pants. Although the Air Force said that mortuary officials should have told senior Air Force leadership what had happened, they did not have to get permission from the family. The special counsel found that conclusion “not reasonable.”

 

Elisabeth Bumiller reported from Washington, and James Dao from New York.

    Air Force Officials Disciplined Over Handling of Human Remains, NYT, 8.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/09/us/senior-air-force-officials-disciplined-over-handling-of-human-remains.html

U.S. General Fired

Over Remarks About Karzai

November 5, 2011
The New York Times
By ROD NORDLAND

KABUL, Afghanistan — A senior American general stationed in Afghanistan has been fired for criticizing President Hamid Karzai in a published interview.

The NATO and American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. John R. Allen, announced in a press release on Saturday that he was dismissing Maj. Gen. Peter Fuller, the deputy commander for programs at the NATO training mission in Afghanistan, effective immediately. “The decision follows recent inappropriate public comments made by Maj. Gen. Fuller,” General Allen said.

The statement was issued early Saturday morning in Kabul, which was still Friday in the United States, where General Fuller had been on a speaking tour. It came shortly after a Thursday interview with the two-star United States Army general was published by the news Web site Politico.

General Fuller was responding to remarks made by President Karzai a week earlier in which he told a Pakistani interviewer that Afghanistan would come to Pakistan’s aid if attacked by the United States.

“Why don’t you just poke me in the eye with a needle! You’ve got to be kidding me,” General Fuller said. “I’m sorry, we just gave you $11.6 billion and now you’re telling me, ‘I don’t really care?’ ”

General Fuller also described President Karzai as erratic and inarticulate.

It was the second time in the last year and a half that a senior American general lost his job over remarks made to a journalist. In June 2010, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal was forced to resign by President Obama for remarks the general and his staff purportedly made that were critical of the White House, and which were quoted in a Rolling Stone magazine article. Aides to General McChrystal maintained the remarks were intended to be off the record.

That was not an issue in the Politico article, and no one argued that General Fuller was misquoted. “As far as we know that was the statement he made, the inappropriate comments he made that were published,” said Lt. Col. Jimmie E. Cummings Jr., a spokesman for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force here. “As far as we know it was on the record.”

Added General Allen, in the statement, “These unfortunate comments are neither indicative of our current solid relationship with the government of Afghanistan, its leadership, or our joint commitment to prevail here in Afghanistan.”

Colonel Cummings said General Allen made the decision to relieve General Fuller on his own, and not in response to any reaction or pressure from President Karzai or the Afghan government.

A spokesman for President Karzai was not immediately available for comment.

General Fuller’s other speaking engagements apparently focused on his view that the NATO training mission was successful in Afghanistan and generally reflected the NATO position that its training effort was making it increasingly possible for Afghan forces to stand on their own.

In the Politico interview, however, he was caustic in his criticism of Afghan leaders, and particularly President Karzai.

In that criticism, he was merely repeating what many American and NATO officials have said privately, particularly since August of 2009, when President Karzai won re-election in a poll regarded by American and international officials as fraudulent.

President Karzai’s remarks in Pakistan hit a raw nerve, however, especially coming when American officials have been making a concerted effort to pressure Pakistan into ending sanctuary for the Taliban.

“So much for Shona Ba Shona,” one Western official said afterward, referring to the slogan of NATO forces here, which means “Shoulder to shoulder.”

President Karzai has angered American officials on other occasions, as well, threatening to join the Taliban if they kept pressuring him, labeling NATO forces “occupiers,” and even once demanding publicly that NATO leave Afghanistan immediately. He has also wept while making speeches — most recently when he held a toddler wounded in an airstrike, and thrust him toward Lt. Gen. David M. Rodriguez, then the top American operational commander.

On such occasions, his spokesmen have taken pains to claim that his remarks have been distorted or misquoted.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told Congress that was the case with the Pakistani invasion remark. “It was both taken out of context and misunderstood,” she said.

    U.S. General Fired Over Remarks About Karzai, NYT, 5.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/world/asia/us-general-fired-over-remarks-about-karzai.html

U.S. and Afghan Troops

Battle to Control Key Route

October 19, 2011
The New York Times
By ALISSA J. RUBIN
and SHARIFULLAH SAHAK

ASADABAD, Afghanistan — American and Afghan troops have killed at least 115 insurgents as part of a tough fight to gain control of a critical corridor and resupply route to a key American base in northeastern Afghanistan, according to Afghan and American military officers.

Civilians in the area, as well as American and Afghan soldiers, described an exceptionally intense fight, which was still going on, in which long-range bombers have flown in from as far away as the Persian Gulf emirate of Qatar, the southern Afghan province of Kandahar and Bagram Air Base outside Kabul, the Afghan capital.

The Americans have also fired long-range rockets from more than 100 miles away as the troops have struggled to oust large numbers of insurgents who month after month have attacked convoys on the road and dominated much of this corner of Kunar Province.

“We had too many F16s and F15s to count, almost continuous coverage,” said Capt. Ron Hopkins, 27, the fire support officer of the Second Battalion, 27th Infantry Regiment, who was in the command center for the fight.

As parts of the operation were still winding up, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton arrived in Kabul to meet with President Hamid Karzai and other senior figures in the Afghan government to discuss long-term American-Afghan relations and reconciliation with the Taliban, among other subjects.

Kunar, perhaps more than any other area of the country’s northeast, has posed serious problems for American troops, just as it did for the Russians when they occupied the country.

More Americans have died in Kunar than anywhere else in the country outside of southern Afghanistan.

The terrain is made up of tall, arid mountains that rise in successive folds, dropping down into narrow, heavily wooded valleys that provide cover for insurgents. Those valleys have been the site of some of the most iconic fighting of the war, including a series of deadly encounters in the Korangal Valley, where more than 40 Americans lost their lives in the five years that the Americans had an outpost there. It was closed in April 2010. Now in Kunar and elsewhere across the country, NATO troops are making an intense effort to weaken insurgents as much as possible before they withdraw and hand over combat outposts and forward operating bases to the Afghan Army.

The majority of the fighting took place in Ghaziabad and Asmar, two of several districts in Kunar that have become something of a gathering point for large numbers of fighters crossing the border from Pakistan, according to Afghan Army officers.

“Our greatest concentration has been on Ghaziabad District, where we believe the Taliban have built their bases and strongholds,” said Col. Mohammed Numan Atifi, a spokesman for the Afghan National Army’s 201st Corps.

“Our aim is to destroy their bases and their stations in these areas,” he said.

Master Sgt. Nicholas Conner, a spokesman with Regional Command East, said the recent fight was a joint operation with the Afghan National Security Forces.

“The A.N.S.F. was definitely in the lead on this, and the coalition was in a supporting role,” he said.

The enormous air power, however, was provided by the Americans. In addition to the bombers and long-range rockets, they employed a heavily armed plane, the AC-130, which the insurgents have described as “the death plane,” Captain Hopkins said.

As the fighting raged, four children under the age of 6, all from one family, were killed when their rural compound came under fire, said their aunt and grandmother, who were caring for the family’s survivors at the public hospital here in Asadabad, the provincial capital.

Two of the survivors, Nadia, 5, and her brother, Matay, 8, had burns over 35 percent of their bodies and were bandaged from head to toe.

Shrapnel badly cut the feet and ankles of an aunt, Zakira, 22, who lived with them in the compound. As she lay stiffly in her hospital bed, Zakira described days of fighting in which the sound of fire reverberated off the mountains.

“The first day, the noise was very loud and we were afraid, but thought it would be over soon,” she said. “But it kept on, and then five days ago, it was just before lunch, there was so much firing and a round landed in our compound and exploded.”

NATO is investigating the deaths, Sergeant Conner said. Before the assault on the compound, Afghan and American soldiers saw women and children leaving the town, Shal, soldiers involved in the fight said.

“Coalition troops engaged insurgent firing from a house,” Sergeant Conner said. “At the time, they assessed no civilians in the area. The insurgents, especially in the Kunar area, have developed the tactic of attacking coalition troops, then producing ‘civilian’ casualties later with the claim that we did it.”

The United Nations office here said its initial inquiry showed that civilians had died.

“Our preliminary investigation indicates that four children were killed and six others injured,” said Georgette Gagnon, the director of human rights for the United Nations’ Afghanistan office. She welcomed the NATO investigation.

 

Mimi Wells contributed reporting

from Forward Operating Base Bostick

in Kunar Province, Afghanistan,

and Ray Rivera from Kabul.

    U.S. and Afghan Troops Battle to Control Key Route, NYT, 19.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/20/world/asia/united-states-army-troops-battle-to-control-key-afghan-route.html

U.N. Finds ‘Systematic’ Torture

in Afghanistan

October 10, 2011
The New York Times
By ALISSA J. RUBIN

KABUL, Afghanistan — Suspects are hung by their hands, beaten with cables, and in some cases their genitals are twisted until they lose consciousness in detention facilities run by the Afghan intelligence service and the Afghan national police, according to a study released Monday by the United Nations here.

The report provides a devastating picture of the abuses committed by arms of the Afghanistan government as the American-led foreign forces here are moving to wind down their presence after a decade of war. The abuses were uncovered even as American and other Western trainers and mentors had been working closely with the ministries overseeing the detention facilities and funded their operations.

Acting on early draft of the report seen last month, NATO stopped handing over detainees to the Afghans in several areas of the country.

The report found evidence of “a compelling pattern and practice of systematic torture and ill-treatment” during interrogation in the accounts of nearly half of the detainees of the intelligence service, known as the National Directorate of Intelligence, who were interviewed by United Nations researchers. The national police treatment of detainees was somewhat less severe and widespread, the report found. Its research covered 47 facilities sites in 22 provinces.

“Use of interrogation methods, including suspension, beatings, electric shock, stress positions and threatened sexual assault is unacceptable by any standard of international human rights law,” the report said.

One detainee described being brought in for interrogation in Kandahar and having the interrogator ask if he knew the name of the office and then, after the man answered, “You should confess what you have done in the past as Taliban, even stones confess here.”

The man was beaten for several days for hours at a time with electric wire and then signed a confession, the report said.

The report pointed out that even though the abusive practices are endemic, the Afghan government does not condone torture and has explicitly said the abuses found by the United Nations are not government policy.

“Reform is both possible and desired,” said Staffan de Mistura, the United Nations special representative for Afghanistan, noting that the government had cooperated with the report’s researchers and has begun to take remedial action.

“We take this report very seriously,” said Shaida Abdali, the deputy director of Afghanistan’s National Security Council.

“Our government, especially the president, has taken a very strong stand on the protection of everyone’s human rights, their humanity, everywhere and especially in prisons and in detention,” he said, adding since he had not yet read the full document.

The government issued a lengthy response to the report in which the intelligence service denied using electric shock, threat of rape and the twisting of sexual organs, but allowed that there were “deficiencies” in a war-torn country that routinely faced suicide bombings and other forms of terrorism. It also said it had set up an assessment unit to look in to the problem, and had dismissed several employees at a unit known as Department 124, where the United Nations said the torture appeared to have been the most endemic. The intelligence service is now admonishing newly assigned interrogators to observe human rights, the government said in its response.

Ultimately the prosecution of the torturers is required, said Georgette Gagnon, the director of the human rights for the United Nations here, in order to “prevent and end such acts in the future.”

In the absence of remedial changes by the Afghans, the information could trigger a provision under American law, known as the Leahy amendment, that would stop some financing for the Afghan security forces, according to human rights experts.

The report overall raises broad ethical questions about the American funding of foreign security forces whose military and law enforcement officials routinely use torture. There have been a number of instances that raise similar questions including in Uzbekistan, Pakistan, and El Salvador, according to a RAND report in 2006. Aid to Colombia in fighting its drug cartels and insurgents also has raised some of these issues.

In the case of Afghanistan, there appears to have been little effort made to scrutinize the country’s security practices, especially for detainees, perhaps in part because of political pressure to move as much responsibility as possible to the Afghans and to reduce American involvement here.

Of the 324 conflict-related detainees interviewed, 89 had been handed over to the Afghan intelligence service or the police by international military forces and in 19 cases, the men were tortured once they were in Afghan custody. The United Nations Convention Against Torture prohibits the transfer of a detained person to the custody of another state where there are substantial grounds for believing they are at risk of torture.

With that in mind as well as the military’s institutional view that torture is not a reliable way to obtain usable intelligence, NATO Commander Gen. John Allen, after seeing a draft of the report in early September, halted transfers of suspected insurgents to 16 of the facilities identified as sites where torture or abuse routinely takes place.

Earlier in the summer, NATO already had halted detainee transfers to intelligence and police authorities in four provinces based on other reports of torture and mistreatment. General Allen has now initiated a plan to investigate the facilities, help in training in modern interrogation techniques and then monitor the Afghan government’s practices. The American Embassy is heavily involved now in working on a long-term monitoring program for detention facilities and is working with NATO to put that in place.

    U.N. Finds ‘Systematic’ Torture in Afghanistan, NYT, 10.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/11/world/asia/un-report-finds-routine-abuse-of-afghan-detainees.html

The Other War Haunting Obama

October 8, 2011
The New York Times
By MARVIN KALB

Marvin Kalb is a former network correspondent and is an emeritus professor at Harvard and a co-author of “Haunting Legacy: Vietnam and the American Presidency from Ford to Obama.”

TEN years after the start of the war in Afghanistan, an odd specter haunts the Obama White House — the specter of Vietnam, a war lost decades before. Like Banquo’s ghost, it hovers over the White House still, an unwelcome memory of where America went wrong, a warning of what may yet go wrong.

When the United States loses to a “raggedy-ass, little fourth-rate country,” as Lyndon B. Johnson described his North Vietnamese foe, the loss leaves an unshakable legacy. There is no escape from history. Every president since Gerald R. Ford has had to weigh the consequences of the Vietnam defeat when he considers committing troops to war.

Ford, for example, was concerned that the United States might be seen as a “paper tiger” after the Communist victory in Vietnam on April 30, 1975. And so, two weeks later, he decided to use overwhelming military force against a handful of Cambodian boats that had seized an American merchant ship, the Mayaguez, in an act that Ford denounced as “piracy.” In 1979, when Soviet troops swept into Afghanistan, an angry Jimmy Carter organized an unofficial alliance to give the Soviets “their Vietnam” (which Afghanistan became).

In 1984, when Ronald Reagan withdrew from Lebanon after 241 American servicemen were murdered in their Beirut barracks by Islamic fanatics, he told a friend that the American people had been “spooked” by Vietnam and that he didn’t want a similar experience in the Middle East. By 1990, President George Bush was willing to send a half-million-strong army to drive Iraq out of Kuwait, but he did so under the Powell Doctrine, drawn from the Vietnam experience: get Congress to approve; use huge firepower; get in and out on a timetable of your choosing.

Of all the presidents since Vietnam, Mr. Obama may be the most fascinating, because — unlike Bill Clinton and George W. Bush — he was too young to have fought in Vietnam or to have gamed the system and avoided service in it (as both Mr. Clinton and Mr. Bush did).

Barack Obama was 3 when Johnson escalated the war, and 13 when Ford ordered Americans to leave Saigon. As David Axelrod, one of Mr. Obama’s political advisers, explained, “the whole debate about Vietnam — that was not part of his life experience.” Nevertheless, time and again, he has found himself entangled in its complexities.

During his presidential campaign, he visited Iraq and Afghanistan accompanied by two senators. What did they discuss on the long flights to and from the war zones? Mr. Obama kept asking: What could we learn about Vietnam that should now be applied in Afghanistan?

At his first National Security Council meeting, in January 2009, he stressed that “Afghanistan is not Vietnam.” Nevertheless, it echoed. Recent intelligence had suggested that only an increase in American military aid could eliminate the chance of a Taliban triumph. Mr. Obama, a Democrat who had never served in the military, did not want to be saddled with a defeat. He ramped up American troop strength, linked the problems in Afghanistan to those in Pakistan and ordered a total review of America’s war strategy. Bruce O. Riedel, a former C.I.A. officer who wrote the review, kept running into the Vietnam legacy wherever he turned. “Vietnam,” he recalled, “walked the halls of the White House.” And none of the president’s close advisers saw Vietnam more as a cautionary tale than the late Richard C. Holbrooke, a diplomat who had gripping memories of Saigon in the early 1960s, when he worked there as a young Foreign Service officer.

In the summer of 2009, when the president ordered another review of his war strategy, it was marked by bitter leaks and obvious distrust between the White House and the Pentagon. At the heart of the disagreement was an old argument about Vietnam, emerging from two radically different books. “Lessons in Disaster,” by Gordon Goldstein, served as a lesson for the White House: America blundered and lost because the president and his advisers knew nothing about Vietnam. At the Pentagon, the best seller was Lewis Sorley’s “A Better War,” which argued that Vietnam could have been won — if only the White House had not lost heart and Congress had not cut funding.

As President Obama was considering a deeper American commitment to Afghanistan, he would occasionally slip into an aide’s office, lean on his desk and wonder aloud whether he was making the same mistakes Johnson had made. Finally, under enormous pressure, he decided to send more than 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan while also announcing a July 2011 date to begin a withdrawal from Afghanistan. In, but at the same time out.

Vietnam was like a terrier snapping at his heels. In his televised speech announcing his decision, he made the point three times that any comparison between Vietnam and Afghanistan was a “false reading of history,” and yet he was the one raising the comparison.

That changed a bit as he began his re-election bid last spring: he dropped explicit references to Vietnam, but it made little difference in his message. He and his senior advisers still had Vietnam in the bloodstream of their calculations, as they showed with code words or phrases.

When Mr. Obama announced that American troops now had a “clear mission,” he evoked a time nearly 40 years ago when they didn’t. When he stressed the need for an “exit strategy” in Afghanistan, he knew there had been none in Vietnam. When he promised Americans that their nation’s military action against Muammar el-Qaddafi’s Libya would be measured “in days, not weeks,” he signaled that he knew the dangers of “mission creep.” And, when, months later, with the United States still militarily engaged in Libya, Congress raised the question of whether he was in violation of the 1973 War Powers Act, the real issue was unchecked presidential power during wartime. Nixon had gotten away with it in Vietnam. Now Mr. Obama was in Libya.

Journalists also used code words, like “quagmire” or “over-committed.” The resonance was plain.

Up to Vietnam, the United States had never lost a war. The defeat was a humiliation, and it stripped the country of its illusions of omnipotence. From boundless self-confidence, Americans descended into self-doubt. Though politicians still talk of American “exceptionalism” and “uniqueness,” and although the United States remains a great power with enviable resources and talents, it lives in a post-Vietnam world — grappling with the uncomfortable but undeniable fact that L.B.J.’s “fourth-rate country” had routed it from Saigon in unquestioned defeat.

Vietnam took a high toll, but perhaps, as the current anguished calculations about Afghanistan indicate, it left the United States a more mature, sensible and smarter country. Perhaps.

    The Other War Haunting Obama, NYT, 8.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/opinion/sunday/the-vietnam-war-still-haunting-obama.html

Harvesting Cease-Fire

Offers Respite in Afghanistan

October 6, 2011
The New York Times
By C. J. CHIVERS

OBSERVATION POST TWINS, Afghanistan — When an 82-millimeter mortar round slammed onto a bunker at this mountaintop post last week, its explosion signaled more than the start of another attack on an American position overlooking an arc of hostile Afghan villages. It marked the end of a particular harvest.

In eastern Paktika Province, near the border with Pakistan, September and early October are pine-nut season. Much of the able-bodied population in rural villages is busy gathering cones from forests on mountain slopes.

But several slopes that yield rich harvests face American military positions, which presents an annual problem: pine-cone pickers risk being caught between two warring sides. This year, as villagers worked the slopes in front of this new American-Afghan outpost, the risks to civilians were reduced in a starkly practical way — the Taliban and Haqqani fighters declared a unilateral cease-fire, American officers say.

Guerrilla war can have its own rhythms and take ever-shifting patterns and forms. The “pine-nut truce,” as it became known among soldiers who found an unexpected respite from the exhausting grind of daily contact, underscored a pair of simple facts: Waging war requires labor, and when local labor is busy with other work, fighting can subside. In sections of Paktika Province, the decline in violence was clear and steep. Throughout the summer, Taliban and Haqqani fighters fired on this observation post regularly, hitting it with 82-millimeter mortars and 107-millimeter rockets, and sometimes with machine-gun or rifle fire, too.

“For two months we basically received contact daily or twice daily,” said Capt. Craig A. Halstead, who commands B Company, 2nd Battalion, 28th Infantry Regiment, which rotates platoons through the post.

In the month of August, the company’s data shows, there were only two days when the outpost was not under fire. The fighting continued through Sept 8.

On Sept 9, the hills were quiet. The company took no fire.

On Sept. 10, the soldiers intercepted radio chatter, including the voice of one of the fighters talking to others about the harvest. “We will not shoot for 15 days so the people can collect pine cones,” the voice said, according to the translated transcript.

By then, Afghan villagers were visible on the slopes that surround the post.

For three weeks, using long poles that end in hooks to pluck each cone, local men filled sacks with their harvest and brought them down the hills for sale in Orgun, the nearest city, or to Afghan buyers who canvass the harvesters in their villages.

Throughout this time, not a single shot was fired at Observation Post Twins.

Why the Taliban and Haqqani fighters decided to hold their fire is not fully understood.

There are two theories, which are not mutually exclusive.

Captain Halstead said one assumption was that the fighters did not want to start firefights or indirect-fire duels, drawing mortar and artillery barrages, endangering the pine-cone pickers.

The observation post, built late this spring, overlooks the so-called Naka bowl, a small and low-lying agricultural area where several Taliban and Haqqani commanders were born. The insurgent commanders, Captain Halstead said, appeared to be concerned about alienating their neighbors, who did not want to be caught in the daily crossfire while busy harvesting.

“Our reporting indicates that they are losing the bowl as a safe haven,” he said. “So what do they need? Civilian protection. They don’t want to risk losing it.”

This analysis, and the underlying assumption that Taliban and Haqqani commanders had met with villagers to coordinate the fighting and harvesting schedules, found currency among many of the soldiers.

“They didn’t want anyone to get hit while they were in the mountains, and didn’t want an open war,” said Specialist Elijah D. Nott, a medic. “That was actually really interesting. They were showing some concern.”

Another factor behind the cease-fire, the soldiers said, was rooted in temporary manpower shortages.

Many of the fighters are local men, the soldiers said, as are many of those who support them. With the harvest demanding as many hands as possible, fewer men were available to plan attacks, to fight, to carry ammunition, or to serve as spotters to watch the Americans’ movements and protect the fighting cells.

The labor demands of the pine-cone harvest were evident in late September in another insurgent-controlled area, the Charbaran Valley, where another infantry company landed by helicopter and swept the valley and some of its slopes. In tents throughout the forests, entire families were encamped with saws and picking poles.

The men’s hands were blackened with dirt and pine sap, and the soldier’s traffic stops often found tractors stacked high with sacks of cones. The infantry company, as it moved, was fired on only once in two days.

A similar pattern has been visible in Afghanistan’s poppy-growing provinces.

Fighting in and near the poppy fields is often intensive in mid-spring, as vegetation grows thick and temperatures climb. In late spring, in these same places, local men and migrant laborers crowd the fields for the poppy harvest. Fighting can all but stop.

A few weeks later, the poppy harvest is over, the migrant workers are gone, and fighting often erupts.

The labor demands for the pine-nut harvest are similarly high.

Mir Jhan, an elder in nearby Zerok, beside a larger American post, said that that the three villages that make up Zerok have 5,000 people each and “all of our people are involved in pine nuts.”

The mountain forests, he said, are divided by local agreements and tradition into separate tracts, where each village and each family has plots to harvest.

The nuts, once removed from the cones, fetch 1,500 Pakistani rupees per kilogram, he said, or roughly $17. (In much of eastern Paktika Province, people use the currency of Pakistan, not Afghanistan.)

Mr. Jhan was guarded about discussing why the fighting had abruptly stopped.

“It’s a good question,” he said. “But the civilian people, especially me, we don’t know about the fighters.”

But he also suggested that the fighting could soon resume. “Right now, the pine-nut season is ended. It had its one-month time, when everyone was in the mountains, and now it is over.”

Up on the observation post, for several days, the slopes no longer were crowded with pickers. Captain Halstead said that soon he expected the old patterns would return

The observation post is kept alive by helicopters, which bring the soldiers’ supplies. When one of the helicopters arrives in the days ahead, he said, the insurgents’ mortar and rocket crews would likely fire again, trying to time the impact of their munitions with the aircraft’s landing.

“When they hear the next bird coming,” Captain Halstead said, “it will probably entice them back into fighting.”

    Harvesting Cease-Fire Offers Respite in Afghanistan, NYT, 6.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/07/world/asia/harvesting-cease-fire-offers-respite-in-afghanistan.html

Taliban Using Modern Means

to Add to Sway

October 4, 2011
The New York Times
By ALISSA J. RUBIN

LASHKAR GAH, Afghanistan — Punctually, at 8 o’clock every evening, the cellphone signals disappear in this provincial capital. Under pressure from the Taliban, the major carriers turn off their signal towers, effectively severing most of the connections to the rest of the world.

This now occurs in some portion of more than half the provinces in Afghanistan, and exemplifies the Taliban’s new and more subtle ways of asserting themselves, even as NATO generals portray the insurgents as a diminished force less able to hold ground. The question is whether the Taliban need to hold territory as they once did in order to influence the population. Increasingly, it seems, the answer is no.

Tactics like the cellphone offensive have allowed the Taliban to project their presence in far more insidious and sophisticated ways, using the instruments of modernity that they once shunned. The shutoff sends a daily reminder to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Afghans that the Taliban still hold substantial sway over their future.

It is just one part of a broader shift in Taliban strategy that has focused on intimidation, carefully chosen assassinations and limited but spectacular assaults. While often avoiding large-scale combat with NATO forces, the Taliban and their allies in the Haqqani network have effectively undermined peace talks with the Afghan government of President Hamid Karzai and sought to pave the way for a gradual return to power as the American-led forces begin scaling back military operations in the country.

Assaults like the rocket attack on the American Embassy in Kabul on Sept. 13, for which American officials blamed the Haqqanis, effectively shift the fight to cities, where it is harder for NATO to respond with air power for fear of harming civilians. They also allow the Taliban to capture the airwaves for hours, especially in media-saturated cities, and fuel an aura of crisis.

Likewise, the assassination on Sept. 20 in Kabul of Burhanuddin Rabbani, the head of Afghanistan’s peace council, dominated the news and reopened dangerous fissures between the country’s Dari-speaking north and the Pashtun south, in a single calculated blow. The new Taliban do not aspire to kill a lot of people, it seems, just a few in the right places and in positions of power.

The Rabbani assassination not only demonstrated the insurgents’ rejection of the peace process, but it also reminded people of their ability to shape the next chapter in the country’s history as the Americans prepare to leave. Similarly, the Taliban have sought to remake their image this year as a way of positioning themselves to play a prominent role in Afghanistan’s future. It is a two-track strategy.

Interviews with dozens of Afghans suggest that throughout the country the Taliban have married locally tailored terrorist campaigns with new flexibility on issues like education and business development.

The combination plays on the uncertainty gnawing at Afghans about the looming American withdrawal, while making the most of the insurgency’s limited resources. The aim is to undermine the Afghan government by making people question whether it can protect them, while trying to project the image of a group that is more open to the world than when the Taliban ruled the country in the 1990s.

For now, especially in ethnic Pashtun areas of the country, the Taliban, who are also ethnic Pashtuns, appear to be achieving their goal of making the future seems up for grabs.

“The morale in Kandahar, in Oruzgan, in Helmand and in Kabul of the ordinary civilian was at the lowest level we’ve seen throughout July,” said Ahmad Nader Nadery, the deputy director of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission. “I’ve never seen that much anxiety, fear and concern in ordinary Afghans and in some of the government officials.

“People say, first, the ability of the Afghan government to reach out and to build on the already existing security arrangements is minimal, and they point to the bigger crisis the government is in, and in addition they see that the international community withdrawal has started,” he said.

Certainly, while NATO troops are in Afghanistan the Taliban cannot enforce their ideas — but with the transition under way, no one doubts that the Western forces are leaving. So while NATO insists that the Taliban are losing physical ground, insurgents may be gaining psychological space.

“Their 2011 spring-summer military campaign has not materialized the way they predicted, because they are under unprecedented pressure,” said Lt. Col. Jimmie E. Cummings Jr., a spokesman for the NATO headquarters. The Taliban have been “prevented from regaining the momentum” they had before the troop increase, he said.

NATO also sees less support from the civilian population for the Taliban. “We saw that after the fighters had left for their sanctuaries in the winter, they returned back to communities who no longer supported them,” Colonel Cummings said. “They lost their safe houses, I.E.D. factories, weapons caches and freedom of movement.” I.E.D. stands for improvised explosive device, usually a roadside bomb.

NATO commanders concede that spectacular attacks, like the one on the American Embassy, are “I.O. victories” — meaning information operation — said Gen. John R. Allen, commanding general for NATO forces in Afghanistan. They resist equating that with any larger gains, though privately some officers concede that the Taliban’s ability to switch cellphones off and on is another such victory.

Diplomats are hoping that the Taliban’s turn to more psychological methods could be a precursor to peace talks, but they also admit it could be a clever strategy to conserve their forces until the West withdraws more troops.

“We have hurt them, but I am not sure how much we’ve hurt them,” Ryan C. Crocker, the United States ambassador to Afghanistan, said in August. “And I’m not sure we’re going to know for a while how much we’ve hurt them.” This could “ultimately be positive,” Mr. Crocker said, citing the reasoning of Mr. Karzai. “This is what Karzai would describe as the Afghan Taliban: recognizing that their previous form of government did not win hearts and minds and they are shifting to deal with the population again, and actually that would bring them closer to a dialogue with the government.”

Others view it more as the Taliban’s positioning themselves to become the chief power in a number of areas of the country, once the bulk of NATO forces leave. A longtime Western observer of Taliban tactics said the insurgents “are moving into their own hold-and-build phase; they are prepositioning for 2014.”

Just about all NATO combat forces are scheduled for withdrawal by the end of 2014, leaving Afghan security forces in control. So far, the Afghans have demonstrated a limited ability to fight on their own. With that in mind, many Afghans are hedging their bets and keeping avenues open to the Taliban because they believe that the government may not protect them once NATO leaves.

Wardak Province, which borders Kabul, is one place that seems up for grabs. It is also where in much of the province the cellphones go down for 13 hours daily. The Taliban view the cutoffs as a line of defense, according to Taliban commanders and spokesmen. When the phones are off, informants cannot call in Taliban locations to American forces who might carry out raids, and the Americans cannot use listening devices to track the location of insurgents.

“Our main goal is to degrade the enemy’s capability in tracking down our mujahedeen,” said Zabiullah Mujahid, the Taliban’s spokesman for eastern and northern Afghanistan.

But a broader effect is to remind the population that the Taliban, not the government, are in control.

Hajji Mohammad Hazrat Janan, head of the provincial council in Wardak, summed up the situation: “In those areas where Taliban have their direct or indirect control, they demand that the telephone towers be turned off at night from 5 p.m. to 8 a.m. So we know they are here.

“There are several reasons for attacking the cellphone towers, but here the locals are hopeless,” he said. “Where should they go and complain? Who should they go to and complain? The government? Innocent people get arrested and get killed by the government, and no one cares about them, so the cellphone towers are very small problems here.”

The Taliban turn off the phones by threatening to bomb or burn down the towers. It costs the phone companies $200,000 to $250,000 to repair a tower. The Taliban often threaten any workman who comes to restore one.

In some cases, most of a province’s phones may be turned off from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m.; in others, the signal may be off 20 hours a day. In some provinces, like Zabul, there is no phone service outside the provincial capital, Qalat, and there it is limited to five hours a day. A handful of provinces, generally those that are more stable, may have only one or two districts where the phones are off in the evening, and the rest have 24-hour service.

NATO has been helping in the construction of cell towers by the Afghan wireless network, on military bases where they would be protected ultimately by the Afghan security forces. So far the number of these towers that are working is relatively small.

“In the last 12 months we had some incidents such as destruction of telephone towers by bombing them,” said Asadullah Hamidi, the governor’s spokesman in Kapisa Province, northeast of Kabul, where he said three cell towers were destroyed in the two districts where the Taliban were active.

“The government is trying to resolve this issue, but still we have many problems that we cannot overcome very quickly,” he said, adding that it was not safe for repair teams to enter the areas to rebuild the towers.

A manager for Etisalat, one of the four major cellphone providers in Afghanistan, who asked that his name not be used because he feared retribution, said the company was under pressure from the Taliban to turn off the signal in Kandahar, one of the three largest urban areas of the country.

“The Taliban strongly threaten us if we don’t turn off signal in Kandahar city,” the manager said. “They said: ‘You are equal to the Americans. The actions we take against Americans, we will take against you. Your employees will be abducted, killed, and the towers will be burned.’ ”

“Meanwhile, the government says you should not turn off the signal in Kandahar city,” he added. “They said, ‘We can protect the sites in the city,’ but we don’t believe the government will protect the towers.”

Another benefit of the cellphone campaign for the Taliban is that it does not risk civilians’ lives, which fits with the Taliban’s new push to recast their image.

Apparently in an effort to appear more open, Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban leader, promised in a message in August, at the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, that when the Taliban regained power they would be inclusive to Afghans of all ethnicities, friendly to all countries and eager to develop the economy.

Afghanistan has “rich mines and high potential for energy resources,” he said. Then he added in an faintly utopian vein, “We can make investments in these sectors in conditions of peace and stability and wrangle ourselves from the tentacles of poverty, unemployment and ignorance.”

Professionals and businessmen will be “encouraged,” Mullah Omar said. There was no mention of women in the lengthy message, which was translated by the Maryland-based SITE monitoring service, which tracks jihadist communications.

Mr. Mujahid, the Taliban spokesman, said education should be opened to both boys and girls, as long as it is imbued with Islamic values, reversing the Taliban’s pre-2001 policies that barred girls from school and encouraged boys to study only the Koran.

The newfound support for education is hardly uniform. In a number of areas the Taliban still intimidate teachers and even execute them, but elsewhere they seem to be trying to find a curriculum they can support.

A prominent former Taliban leader who lives in Kabul, Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, who has maintained contact with the Taliban, has, along with several other former Taliban members and others, started a school in Kabul for boys and girls — in separate buildings — that teaches the basics: reading, math, English, computer science and religion.

Mullah Zaeef describes it as an “Islamic education” with Islamic values and modern knowledge. “The Taliban now are more interested in Islamic education; they are using technology,” he said, alluding to the movement’s adept use of the Internet, including Web sites, Twitter accounts and Facebook.

“We want to provide a symbol of Islamic education,” he said. “But modern — but totally, 100 percent Islamic.”

    Taliban Using Modern Means to Add to Sway, NYT, 4.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/05/world/asia/taliban-using-modern-means-to-add-to-sway.html

A Leader’s Death Exposes Disarray

in the Afghan Peace Process

October 3, 2011
The New York Times
By ALISSA J. RUBIN

KABUL, Afghanistan — In the two weeks since the leader of Afghanistan’s peace process was assassinated, an intense power struggle has opened among the nation’s ethnic groups — and within them — as well as among other powerful factions here, laying bare a crisis that is buffeting President Hamid Karzai from every side.

Though the peace process had made little headway, the figure at the head of the High Council for Peace, Burhanuddin Rabbani, a former president, had given the body stature. He had also protected Mr. Karzai from the rival camps within his government.

But with Mr. Rabbani’s assassination on Sept. 20, the lack of a national consensus on how to make peace has become increasingly apparent. In successive statements over the last two weeks, Mr. Karzai’s government appears to be scrambling to appease various domestic factions. But it has done little to assure Afghans that despite the serious breaches of security evidenced in the number of high-level assassinations this year, the government is able to control the country and has a plan for how to end the fighting.

In a speech to the nation on Monday evening, Mr. Karzai tried to modulate the different messages, giving a little bit to all sides but hardly laying out a vision for the road ahead, other than to say that he planned to hold a traditional jirga, or tribal assembly, to discuss the Strategic Partnership with the United States, the peace process and relations with Pakistan.

A traditional jirga, compared with a constitutional loya jirga, has no legal standing and will probably be viewed as an effort by Mr. Karzai to give a populist stamp to policies he has already decided on.

In the context of the last two weeks, amid a series of inconsistent statements from Mr. Karzai’s government about the peace process and Pakistan, a jirga offers scant hope of bringing clarity. The apparent receding of peace efforts at a time of persistent violence and a steadily diminishing American role is a bleak prospect for all Afghans and the Westerners who support them.

“The message from the Taliban couldn’t be bolder. What else needs to happen for the president to understand it?” said Abdullah Abdullah, who ran against Mr. Karzai in the 2009 election.

“Where is it that he is leading?”

Not unlike the chaotic streets of Kabul, it looks increasingly as if each faction is pursuing its own agenda with little sense of the national interest, said Mahmoud Saikal, a former deputy foreign minister under Mr. Karzai.

“If you take away the traffic lights, you have a lot of accidents, you can’t guarantee the security of people on the roads, so they take their own initiative,” said Mr. Saikal, who is a proponent of a tough-minded approach to reaching out to the Taliban that would require them to renounce their past.

The problem, according to several Afghans and Westerners, is that the government allowed a free-flowing reconciliation process, which was ill defined from the start, and operated outside government institutions through the High Peace Council, which was itself something of an ad hoc creation.

Not least, some of those joining the process were not vetted by either the intelligence service or the Interior Ministry, according to officials at each department.

As a result, many Afghans were left uncertain about what kind of deal might be made and uneasy about whether Mr. Karzai would decide to bring back the Taliban and give them power.

The opaqueness of the peace process — only a handful of people, including Mr. Rabbani, appear to have known who was being talked to — is now being amplified as the different circles around Mr. Karzai all push different messages into the public debate, but with little explanation of their intentions

“The confusion is within the president’s team,” said an Afghan who is close to the presidential palace. “Some have been lobbying for a change in the policy towards Pakistan, some have been trying to downplay it, but there is no one policy in the president’s team.”

The former members of the Northern Alliance, most of whom are ethnic Tajiks and Hazaras and distrust the Taliban and hate Pakistan, include the first vice president, Marshal Muhammad Qasim Fahim, and the interior minister, Gen. Bismullah Khan Mohammadi. They appear to be pushing for a tough stance toward Pakistan, accusing the country of direct involvement in the assassination of Mr. Rabbani, who was also a former member of the Northern Alliance.

The Pakistanis vehemently denied the charge that their spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, was linked to the killing. “Pakistan strongly rejects the baseless allegations of the Afghan interior minister of ISI’s involvement in the assassination of Professor Burhanuddin Rabbani Shaheed,” read a statement from Pakistan’s foreign ministry.

The statement went on to say that Mr. Rabbani had been a great friend of Pakistan and that the “so-called evidence” of Pakistan’s involvement is based on the confession of an Afghan national who is suspected of being the mastermind of the plot.

The Haqqani clan — a faction of the insurgency that operates in southeastern Afghanistan, has been accused of several deadly attacks and took credit recently for the attack on the American Embassy in Kabul — denied any involvement in Mr. Rabbani’s assassination in an audio message sent to the British Broadcasting Corporation.

Even as some officials lashed out at Pakistan, some of Mr. Karzai’s fellow ethnic Pashtuns in the government tried to soften the language toward Pakistan. They included his chief of staff, Abdul Karim Khurram, and his education minister, Farouk Wardak, who both have links to the insurgent leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who is believed to move between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Though they may not trust the Pakistanis, they are more inclined to reach out to them.

For now it seems from Mr. Karzai’s speech that the status quo will rule, with an asterisk: Pakistan is being portrayed more negatively in public than before, but other than that, little has changed.

The Pakistanis are playing a “double game and using terrorism as a tool against Afghanistan,” Mr. Karzai said in his speech on Monday.

“The Islamic Republic of Pakistan has not cooperated with us to bring peace, which is a matter of regret to us,” he added. “We hope that the Pakistani government realizes its people’s interest and helps us bring peace to both countries.”

 

Sangar Rahimi and Sharifullah Sahak

contributed reporting from Kabul,

and Salman Masood from Pakistan.

    A Leader’s Death Exposes Disarray in the Afghan Peace Process, NYT, 3.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/04/world/asia/afghan-leaders-death-exposes-peace-process-in-disarray.html