Yet another one of my attempts at a thread about general issues and policy without the simplistic political dick-waiving.

Quote :

"Switch on any of the dozens of satellite news channels now available in Pakistan. You will be bombarded with talk show hosts who are mostly obsessed with demonising the elected government, trying to convince viewers of global conspiracies against Pakistan led by India and the United States or insisting that the recent campaign of suicide bomb blasts around the country is being orchestrated by foreigners rather than local militants. Viewers may well ask where is the passionate debate about the real issues that people face - the crumbling economy, joblessness, the rising cost of living, crime and the lack of investment in health and education or settling the long-running insurgency in Balochistan province. The answer is nowhere."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8369914.stm







For those of you on Twitter I highly recommend the AfPak Channel: http://twitter.com/AfPakChannel

11/23/2009 9:33:55 PM

Quote :

"Getting closer Around 20 members of U.S. President Barack Obama's national security team met for the ninth or tenth time last night to discuss the situation in Afghanistan, and rumors are coalescing around "early next week" for the president to announce his decision of a "middle-ground option that would deploy an eventual 32,000 to 35,000 U.S. forces" to the Afghan theater (AP, NPR, Reuters, AP, AFP). Politico, Reuters, NPR, and McClatchy all report the much-anticipated decision will come in a presidential television address on December 1 (Politico, Reuters, NPR, McClatchy). The top U.S. and NATO commander in the country, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, and the U.S. ambassador to Kabul, Amb. Karl Eikenberry, have both reportedly been told to prepare to testify before Congress "as early as next week," so they can offer support for the president's decision (Washington Post, NPR). Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Adm. Mike Mullen are also expected to brief Congress on the subject (Los Angeles Times). A recent idea that has reportedly not yet come up in Obama's extensive war council meetings is a potential "war tax on the wealthy" to pay for additional troops mentioned by some in the Senate, and three House Democrats -- all committee chairmen -- have proposed an increase in taxes for families to begin in 2011, the amount of which would be based on how much they earn (Politico, AP, Reuters, New York Times). The idea is considered unlikely to pass Congress but is a barometer of growing Democratic opposition to escalating the war in Afghanistan."

http://tinyurl.com/ye7ql6h

11/24/2009 8:51:18 AM

Quote :

"Turning the tribes Posted by: Economist.com | NEW YORK MCCLATCHY reports that Barack Obama will send 34,000 more troops to Afghanistan. That would fall short of General Stanley McChrystal's "low-risk option" of sending an additional 80,000 troops. And it falls in between the general's "high-risk option" (20,000 troops) and "medium-risk option" (40-45,000 troops). Some will surely accuse the president of not fully supporting the war effort. But a lot of this seems like guesswork. For example, McClatchy notes that according to Army doctrine, even General McChrystal's low-risk option comes up well short of the mark. There are 68,000 U.S. troops and 42,000 from other countries in Afghanistan. The U.S. Army's recently revised counterinsurgency manual estimates that an all-out counterinsurgency campaign in a country with Afghanistan's population would require about 600,000 troops. Good lord. The numbers, of course, only tell half the story. Just as important is the strategy, or the change in strategy, which is why I think Mr Obama's drawn-out deliberations are forgivable. According to Fred Kaplan and Dexter Filkins, one change is that American troops are increasingly teaming up with Afghan tribal militias, in hopes of replicating the Anbar Awakening that took place in Iraq. The strategy involves a bottom-up approach to national unity. Mr Kaplan explains: "An explicit and essential part of [Army Major Jim] Gant's strategy is to draw the individual tribal teams into a network of tribes—first across the province, then the region, then the nation—tied in to the Kabul government through a web of mutual defenses and the supply of basic services." After eight years of relying on Hamid Karzai and the government in Kabul, this sounds like a promising new approach. And as Kevin Drum observes, "at this point, the tribes are pretty much our only hope.""

http://ow.ly/1645jX

11/24/2009 8:59:56 PM

Quote :

"The US is seeking to extend its control over the day-to-day running of Afghanistan with the appointment of an international "high representative" in Kabul in an attempt to bypass Hamid Karzai's much-criticised government. The initiative, being pushed by the US special envoy, Richard Holbrooke, has caused a split between Washington and its closest Nato allies, who believe it could further undermine the Afghan president's legitimacy and the United Nations' role in the country. The proposal is part of a political strategy designed to accompany the dispatch of US reinforcements due to be announced tomorrow night by Barack Obama and ultimately provide an exit strategy."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/30/aghanistan-karzai-obama-united-nations


Interesting, so your attempt to stabilize the Afghani government will be to set up a parallel government which you control. It'll be interesting to see how this one plays out.

12/1/2009 7:45:36 AM

I was in Boston with a friend who just got back from deployment over there a week ago. We talked about the numerous failings of other countries in Afghanistan and I told him about the Afghan Memorial Church that I'd been to in Mumbai that was erected in honor of Elphinstone's slaughtered British army during their ill fated expedition to Kabul (of 16,000+ troops only one made it back). It was a fairly standard looking British church, but the interior walls were covered in the names of their dead soldiers.

The next day we were showing his fiance around town and stopped by the Old North Church of "one if by land, two if by sea" fame. It was another small British church, and as we entered the courtyard we saw a makeshift memorial to the casualties of the Iraq and Afghan wars made up of a pair of dogtags for every fallen soldier. We agreed that it was spooky, to say the least.

12/2/2009 12:22:37 AM

http://www.defense.gov/afghanpolicy/afghanpolicy.aspx FWIW

12/2/2009 12:46:12 AM

Quote :

"President Barack Obama has pledged to send an extra 30,000 troops to Afghanistan, bringing the total of US forces there to about 100,000 within six months. The US is the largest contributing nation to the international force whose numbers will now rise to more than 130,000. Currently it has 44,000 troops deployed with the Nato force in Afghanistan and there are also some 30,000 deployed as part of the US Operation Enduring Freedom - although the exact number is not known. The UK currently contributes the second largest number of troops to the Afghan mission. Prime Minister Gordon Brown has promised to send another 500 troops, bringing the UK total to 10,000. "

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8389351.stm

12/3/2009 7:59:51 AM

12/4/2009 9:11:30 AM

Quote :

"This week the Obama Administration made an unusual admission: It doesn't have a clue as to where Osama bin Laden is. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said there hasn't been good intelligence on bin Laden for years. National Security Adviser James Jones said the best guess is that bin Laden may be moving back and forth across the Pak-Afghan, a rugged mountain range that has never been governed. (See pictures of Osama bin Laden.) I spoke to an ex-CIA colleague who has been on the bin Laden hunt since 9/11. "He's dead, of course," he said. "No wonder there's no intelligence on him." But what about the audio- and videotapes? He said they easily could have been digitally mastered from old tapes and audio recordings. He quickly admitted that the CIA has no evidence that bin Laden died. It's only a hunch — and years of experience chasing fugitive terrorists. The theory that bin Laden is dead doesn't get much currency in Washington because it veers off into the realm of conspiracies. And people who believe it are scared that the moment they air their view, bin Laden will reappear. Anyhow, it's a real possibility that bin Laden was killed at Tora Bora in late 2001 and is now buried under tons of rock, never to be found. Or that he died of ill health in the intervening years. But let's accept for the sake of argument that bin Laden is alive and well. Other than the obvious — he's living in an ungovernable part of the world — what is known is that bin Laden maintains an extraordinarily exacting standard of security. It is beyond anything that we have ever seen. He has never been on a cell or satellite phone. He doesn't use the Internet. And there is little doubt that the people around him adhere to the same strict standards. In the absence of intelligence, that's pretty much all we can say. And by this logic, bin Laden may not in fact be living in the mountains along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. For all we know, he could just as easily be in Pakistan's Baluchistan province, another piece of Pakistan outside the writ of Pakistan's government and NATO forces. Or he could be in Somalia or, who knows, some remote island off Indonesia."

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1946099,00.html#ixzz0ZF7tyjPv

12/9/2009 7:57:13 PM

http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/pakistan/provinces/12-how+teenagers+were+lured+by+taliban--bi-13

fucking scary. pisses the shit out of me and burns me up inside. these people need to eliminated.

How teenagers were lured by Taliban

Quote :

"PESHAWAR: An artificial paradise (Jannat) established by terrorists for brainwashing would-be suicide bombers has been captured by security forces in South Waziristan Agency. The ‘Jannat’ in the Nawaz Kot area was shown to a visiting team of Peshawar-based journalists by ISPR authorities. The journalists, who were taken to the place in a helicopter on Friday morning, took a round of the so-called paradise and later were briefed about the modus operandi for churning out suicide bombers. The make-believe heaven consisted of four rooms. Each room contained exquisite paintings of lakes overflowing with milk and honey and scenic valleys inhabited by ‘hoors’ (beautiful women). Religious teachers in the training centre used to show would-be bombers around and dupe them into believing that after their death in suicide attacks their stature would be equal to Sahaba-i-Karaam and that they would enjoy the company of the Holy Prophet (PBUH). The term ‘Sahaba-i-Karaam’ refers to close associates of the Holy Prophet (PBUH). Boys aged between 12 and 18 were trained to become suicide bombers under the supervision of Hakimullah Mehsud. The TTP chief would keep hammering away at ‘an unending bliss awaiting you in Jannat dotted with lakes of milk and honey’, said Major Saleem in a briefing for journalists. He told journalists the building also had a ‘slaughterhouse’ for killing kidnapped security officials. A huge cache of arms and ammunition was seized from there. In reply to a question, Major Saleem said the security forces faced tough resistance before capturing the militant stronghold. Two bombers and their trainers were taken into custody. The troops came upon a significant quantity of hashish and compact discs after they set about securing the building. Books and magazines in Arabic, Pushto and Uzbek languages were strewn all over the place. Later the visiting journalists were taken to Makin and Ziarsar area of Spin Kamar. Colonel Asif Mehmud, the operation commander, told the journalists that Makin was believed to be the hub of Taliban and the forces overcame stiff resistance before its fall. Makin harboured a training centre that was run by Baitullah Mehsud when he used to live nearby in the house of his uncle. The forces had taken all hilltops and purged the area of militants, Colonel Mehmud said. Anti-tank mines, rockets, missiles and other weapons of foreign make were shown to the visiting journalists.—APP"

MAKIN (South Waziristan): A soldier guards a damaged training centre of militants in the once stronghold of the Taliban.—AFP

12/12/2009 4:00:04 PM

^ Good article.

Quote :

"Afghan promises to insurgents often empty Incentives to fighters to switch sides are key to U.S. plan By Griff Witte Monday, December 14, 2009 JALALABAD, AFGHANISTAN -- His path marked by moonlight, with a Kalashnikov strapped to his back, Feda Mohammed hiked the well-worn trail through the mountains of Pakistan and into Afghanistan. He had traveled the route dozens of times before to attack U.S. soldiers. But this time, Mohammed was on a secret mission to surrender. Lured to quit the insurgency by the government's promise of a job, land for his family and an end to the misery of fighting, Mohammed illustrated the hope of the top U.S. commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, for ultimately bringing about an end to the eight-year-old war. Programs to reintegrate former fighters into Afghan society, and perhaps even turn them against their brothers in the insurgency, are at the core of the Obama administration's new strategy. Yet Mohammed's experience offers a cautionary tale: Four months after he gave himself up, the Afghan government has reneged on all its commitments, leaving him unemployed and his family of 10 with nowhere to live. Hunted by the Taliban and fearful of the U.S. military, he spends much of his time in hiding. In a war in which everyone must pick a side, Mohammed regrets his choice."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/13/AR2009121302263_pf.html

12/14/2009 5:59:34 PM

Hazaras Hustle to Head of Class in Afghanistan

Quote :

"KABUL, Afghanistan — For much of this country’s history, the Hazara were typically servants, cleaners, porters and little else, a largely Shiite minority sidelined for generations, and in some instances massacred, by Pashtun rulers. But increasingly they are people like Mustafa, a teenager who has traveled a rough road but whose future now looks as bright as any in this war-ravaged country. His course reflects the collective effort of the Hazara, who make up 10 to 15 percent of the population, to remake their circumstances so swiftly that by some measures they are beginning to overtake other groups. Like many Hazaras of his generation, Mustafa, now 16, fled Afghanistan with his family in the mid-1990s. They settled in Quetta, Pakistan, living with other Hazara refugees outside the Taliban’s reach and getting a taste of opportunities long out of their grasp. After the 2001 American invasion, his family returned, not to their home in impoverished Daykondi Province, but to Kabul, where his uneducated parents thought Mustafa and his siblings would get better schooling. “There was no opportunity for studying in Daykondi,” he said. Mustafa is now a top student at Marefat High School in Dasht-i-Barchi, a vast, poor Shiite enclave in western Kabul of potholed dirt streets, unheated homes and tiny shops. Nearly every one of his graduating classmates will go on to college. Mustafa, an 11th grader who favors physics and mathematics, wants to study nuclear physics at a Western university. “The Pashtun had the opportunities in the past, but now the Hazaras have these opportunities,” said Mustafa, whose school director asked that his last name not be published. “We can take our rights just by education.” The Marefat school is a refuge for 2,500 Hazaras, many from families like Mustafa’s who fled their homeland in central Afghanistan for Pakistan and Iran in the 1990s and returned after the fall of the Taliban, which had massacred thousands of Hazaras, to make their lives in Kabul. Since the 2001 invasion, an influx of Hazaras has changed the composition of the capital. More than a million Hazaras now live here, making up more than a quarter of the city’s population. With a new generation of Hazaras attending school in relative security and motivated by their parents’ dispossession, their success could alter the country’s balance of ethnic power."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/04/world/asia/04hazaras.html

There is much to be liked about the Hazaras (including their opposition to an Afghani law passed last year legalizing marital rape) but also some rumblings of a desire for revenge and the inevitable upheaval which occurs when a previously subservient ethnic class achieves power.

1/4/2010 11:40:32 PM

Details on the CIA Bomber

Quote :

"The suicide bomber who killed seven CIA operatives in Afghanistan last week was a Jordanian informant who lured intelligence officers into a trap by promising new information about al-Qaeda's top leadership, former U.S. government officials said Monday. The attacker, a physician-turned-mole, had been recruited to infiltrate al-Qaeda's senior circles and had gained the trust of his CIA and Jordanian handlers with a stream of useful intelligence leads, according to two former senior officials briefed on the agency's internal investigation. His track record as an informant apparently allowed him to enter a key CIA post without a thorough search, the sources said. The bomber, identified as Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, was standing just outside an agency building on the base Wednesday when he exploded a bomb hidden under his clothes, killing the seven Americans along with a Jordanian officer who had been assigned to work with him. Six CIA operatives were wounded. The agency has declined to publicly identify the victims, a mix of career officers and contractors with backgrounds ranging from law enforcement to military Special Forces. Details about the suicide bomber's identity provided jarring insight into how a vital intelligence post in eastern Afghanistan was penetrated in the deadliest attack on the CIA in more than 25 years. Initial reports suggested that the bomber was an Afghan soldier or perhaps a local informant who had been brought onto the base for debriefing. Instead, the new evidence points to a carefully planned act of deception by a trusted operative from a country closely allied with the United States in the fight against al-Qaeda. U.S. and Jordanian officials had come to regard Balawi as trustworthy, former officials said, despite a history of support for Islamist extremism -- a point of view he appeared to endorse in an interview with an al-Qaeda-affiliated publication as recently as this past fall. "

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/04/AR2010010402150_pf.html

1/4/2010 11:54:43 PM

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8450102.stm

Quote :

"The Jordanian "double agent" who killed himself and seven American Central Intelligence Agency officials in Afghanistan's Khost province last month must have been very sure of the success of his mission. "This… attack will be the first of revenge operations against the Americans and their drone teams outside the Pakistani border, after they killed the Amir [chief] of Tehrik Taliban Pakistan (TTP), Baitullah Mehsud, may God's beneficence be upon him," he apparently said in a video broadcast released on Saturday. The video shows the purported Jordanian suicide bomber sitting next to Baitullah Mehsud's successor and the new Pakistani Taliban, or TTP, chief, Hakimullah Mehsud, and reading from written text. "

1/11/2010 12:34:34 PM

What the Taliban want
Irfan Husein

Quote :

"Often, I am asked by readers or friends abroad what the Taliban want. Why, they ask, are they slaughtering hundreds of innocent people wherever they can? What is their purpose? What is their agenda? The short answer is power. Other excuses for their murderous excesses are a fig-leaf: demands for the Sharia and the expulsion of foreign forces from the region are no more than window-dressing. These terrorists realise that they cannot achieve power through peaceful, democratic means as they have no support. Even relatively moderate Islamic parties have been repeatedly trounced at the polls in Pakistan. So extremists reject democracy as it does not give them access to power. Established religious parties in Pakistan have exploited the repeated bouts of army rule to further their agenda. So far, they have been remarkably successful. But while jihadi groups might cut secret deals with intelligence agencies, even our army is reluctant to enter into open, formal agreements with them. This leaves only the path of terrorism open to them. Pakistani extremists watched enviously as the Afghan Taliban under Mullah Omar were propelled to power with help from our army. Seeking to replicate this success, they have mounted a sustained campaign of destabilisation against the government."

Good article by a Pakistani journalist this weekend.

http://beta.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/the-newspaper/columnists/14-what-the-taliban-want-310-zj-07

1/24/2010 1:52:56 PM

Decent 60 Minutes piece on a 7th SFG ODA in Afghanistan

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6160161n&tag=api

sure to stir some controversy.

2/1/2010 1:18:39 PM

Wow. My heart really sank over those two kids at the end.

2/1/2010 3:21:16 PM

glad they survived. i hope their ordeal doesn't lead them down the extremist's path. that was a good piece, but lara logan is a fuckin' idiot.

[Edited on February 1, 2010 at 7:44 PM. Reason : .]

2/1/2010 7:43:48 PM

Quote :

"Exclusive: Major Taliban Operative Captured February 21, 2010 - 2:09 PM | by: Justin Fishel Mulvi Kabir, the former Taliban governor in Afghanistan's Nangahar Province, and a key figure in the Taliban regime was recently captured in Pakistan, two senior US officials tell Fox News. Kabir, considered to be among the top ten most wanted Taliban leaders, was apprehended in the Naw Shera district of Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province by Pakistani police forces. A senior U.S. military official in Afghanistan called Kabir a “significant detention”. The intelligence that led to Kabir's capture was gathered from Mullah Baradar, the Taliban’s second in command, who was picked up roughly two weeks ago in Karachi, Pakistan by a joint CIA and Pakistani intelligence operation. Baradar’s capture has been followed by a series of major detentions within the Taliban’s ranks in recent days, individuals U.S. officials are describing as “shadow governors” who operate from the safety of Pakistan’s frontier and tribal regions. Aside from Kabir, Mullah Salam of Afghanistan’s Kunduz province and Mullah Mohammad, who reportedly controlled the Baghlan province, are two of the most notable captures since Baradar was detained. "

2/21/2010 2:44:36 PM

Down the AfPak Rabbit Hole

Quote :

"The release of Tim Burton's new blockbuster movie, Alice in Wonderland, is days away. The timing could not be more appropriate. Lewis Carroll's ironically opium-inspired tale of a rational person caught up inside a mad world with its own bizarre but consistent internal (il)logic has now surpassed Vietnam as the best paradigm to understand the war in Afghanistan. The war in Afghanistan, as we have written here and in Military Review (pdf), is indeed a near replication of the Vietnam War, including the assault on the strategically meaningless village of Marjah, which is itself a perfect re-enactment of Operation Meade River in 1968. But the callous cynicism of this war, which we described here in early December, and the mainstream media's brainless reporting on it, have descended past these sane parallels. We have now gone down the rabbit hole. Two months ago, the collection of mud-brick hovels known as Marjah might have been mistaken for a flyspeck on maps of Afghanistan. Today the media has nearly doubled its population from less than 50,000 to 80,000 -- the entire population of Nad Ali district, of which Nad Ali is the largest town, is approximately 99,000 -- and portrays the offensive there as the equivalent of the Normandy invasion, and the beginning of the end for the Taliban. In fact, however, the entire district of Nad Ali, which contains Marjah, represents about 2 percent of Regional Command (RC) South, the U.S. military's operational area that encompasses Helmand, Kandahar, Uruzgan, Zabul, Nimruz, and Daikundi provinces. RC South by itself is larger than all of South Vietnam, and the Taliban controls virtually all of it. This appears to have occurred to no one in the media. "

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/03/01/down_the_afpak_rabbit_hole

3/2/2010 7:00:17 PM