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The ‘Stan: An officer’s unvarnished view

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

armytimes.com - By Lance M. Bacon - Feb. 06 (Special Report) - An Army officer is fed up with “rosy official statements” that paint Afghanistan as a picture of progress, and he is demanding military leaders come clean about the “absence ofsuccess on virtually every level.”

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Afghanistan Helicopter Crash: NATO Troops Recover Copter Pieces

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Baldor, Dozier, Quinn, Faiez - Aug. 08 (News Report) - KABUL, Afghanistan -- International military forces worked on Monday to recover every last piece of a Chinook helicopter that crashed over the weekend, killing 30 American troops, seven Afghan soldiers and an Afghan interpreter, NATO said. German Brig. G

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Pakistan: Blasts kill 80 to avenge bin Laden death

Fri, 13 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

CTV - May. 13 (News) - Suicide bombers in Pakistan blew themselves up outside a military training facility Friday, killing 80 people in an attack designed to avenge the killing of Osama bin Laden.

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Discovery of Bin Laden Hideout Spotlights Concerns About Pakistan's Intelligence Service

Mon, 02 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

ProPublica - By Sebastian Rotella - May. 02 (News Analysis) - The killing of Osama bin Laden in a Pakistani city dominated by the military has spotlighted a conundrum that Western counterterror agencies have grappled with for years: Is Pakistan's powerful intelligence service an ally, an enemy or a mix of both? This time the debate is likely to take place in public, not behind the closed doors of national security outposts in Washington. In fact, White House homeland security adviser John Brennan seemed to confront the issue head-on Monday when he said that the presence of the world's most wanted man in a fortress-like compound near the homes of retired generals and a military academy raises questions that the Pakistani government must answer. The Obama administration took the extraordinary step of keeping Sunday's commando raid secret from Islamabad. Although Obama cited "counterterrorism cooperation with Pakistan" as a factor in the successful hunt for bin Laden, U.S. officials have not given details on the extent and nature of that Pakistani assistance. The ISI has been suspected of playing a double game in previous cases: the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002, the mysterious escape from Pakistani custody in 2007 of an al-Qaida operative accused in the London transport bombings and a plot to bomb U.S.-bound commercial flights, charges of ISI involvement in the 2008 Mumbai attack and recent allegations by top military brass that the ISI supports militant networks fighting U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

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Afghanistan War: Fighting ends as winter begins

Thu, 18 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0800

GlobalPost - By Ben Brody - Nov. 18 (Special Report) - American troops typically serve yearlong tours in Afghanistan, so they all must learn to operate in both the heat and the cold, even if the fighting largely subsides. The largest military bases in America are in places like Texas, California and the southeast — many soldiers garrisoned there have little experience in cold-weather soldiering.

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Afghanistan: the new strategy

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0700

GlobalPost - By Ben Gilbert - Aug. 16 (Special Report) - Kandahar is a city built mostly of mud, clay and straw — the available building materials in this harsh climate. The city’s wide avenues and narrow warrens seem to be perpetually suspended in a haze of dust from the desert that is not far in any direction.

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Judges Reject Interrogation Evidence in Gitmo Cases

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0700

ProPublica - By Chisun Lee - Aug. 13 (Special Report) - The government's case for keeping the Guantánamo Bay prisoner locked away seemed airtight. He had confessed to overseeing the distribution of supplies to al-Qaida fighters battling U.S. forces in Afghanistan, even describing the routes where pack mules hauled the packages.

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Whose Hands? Whose Blood? Killing civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Fri, 06 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Tom Engelhardt - Aug. 06 (News Analysis) - the Secretary of Defense told interviewer Christiane Amanpour that, whatever Assange's legal culpability might be, when it came to "moral culpability... that's where I think the verdict is guilty on Wikileaks." Moral culpability. From the Martian point of view, it might have been considered a curious phrase from the lips of the man responsible for the last three and a half years of two deeply destructive wars that have accomplished nothing and have been responsible for killing, wounding, or driving into exile millions of ordinary Iraqis and Afghans.

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Afghanistan: In Marjah, a cautionary tale

Tue, 03 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0700

GlobalPost - By Jean MacKenzie, Mohammad Ilyas Dayee - Aug. 03 (Special Report) - Marjah, the focus of a much-hyped battle just a few short months ago, said to herald “the turning point of the war,” is now a dangerous and volatile place.

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Afghanistan: In Marjah, US forces battle for hearts and minds

Sun, 01 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0700

GlobalPost - By Ben Gilbert - Aug. 01 (Special Report) - COMBAT OUTPOST COUTU, Afghanistan — The stomach turning “thud” of an exploding homemade bomb on a recent hot July afternoon blew into the small villages and across the wheat fields that make up Lima Company’s area of operations in northern Marjah.

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Taliban Responds to WikiLeaks

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0700

The Daily Beast - By Mushtaq Yusufzai - Jul. 26 (News Report) - Responding to WikiLeaks' release of tens of thousands of pages of classified military documents about the war in Afghanistan, a high-ranking Taliban commander rejected reports that the Taliban had any links with Pakistan’s spy agency. “Look, we’re at war and would like to get aid from anyone to fight against the U.S. and its allies who invaded our homeland,” Sirajuddin Haqqani, a senior leader of the Haqqani network, told The Daily Beast on Monday, denying any existing links with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, known by its acronym ISI. According to The New York Times, the leaked military reports suggest that Pakistan—a country at least nominally a U.S. ally and the recipient of more than $1 billion a year in U.S. aid—has been collaborating indirectly or directly with the Taliban and its affiliates in Afghanistan.

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WikiLeaks 'Afghan War Diary' Provides Ground-Level Account Of Afghanistan War

Sun, 25 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - Jul. 25 (News) - Some 90,000 leaked U.S. military records posted online Sunday amount to a blow-by-blow account of six years of the Afghanistan war, including unreported incidents of Afghan civilian killings as well as covert operations against Taliban figures.

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CIA Assigned to Kill US Citizen

Sat, 10 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Consortium News - Apr. 10 (News) - The Obama administration has authorized the CIA to kill a radical Muslim cleric who was born in the USA, writes Jason Leopold. April 7, 2010

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AT WAR: Baradar's Successors

Tue, 23 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Nicholas Sabloff , Nico Pitney - Mar. 23 (News) - The story behind the story about the NATO massacre in Paktia. On March 15, Jerome Starkey reported in The London Times that he found evidence contradicting NATO's official story about what happened to a family in Afghanistan's Paktia province during a night raid. Contrary to NATO's assertions that a pro-government family was killed by Taliban militants, Starkey found that members of the family--including two pregnant women--died during NATO's night raid, and not at the hands of the Taliban, as NATO claimed.

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Marjah: Success for the military, hell for the residents

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0800

GlobalPost - By Jean MacKenzie, Mohammad Ilyas Dayee - Feb. 26 (Special Report) - Twelve days into Operation Moshtarak — pitting 15,000 U.S., British and Afghan troops against a few hundred Taliban — the message from the military and diplomatic communities is resolutely upbeat.

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Taliban Hit 5 Star Hotel, Indian Hostels in Downtown Kabul; 18 Dead, 32 Wounded; Indians Targeted

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Informed Comment - By Juan Cole - Feb. 26 (News) - The Afghan capital was struck by three suicide bombings early Friday morning, beginning at 6:30 am local time. Radio Azadi reports that there were five attackers, who struck in the area near the entrance of the Hotel Safi Landmark . The first bomb damaged the hotel. Two of these bombings, Aljazeera Arabic says, targeted guest houses for Indian expatriates in Kabul who work for companies or NGOs. The third blast was huge, and the guesthouse was left in rubble, such that there may be bodies still within. As I write, the death toll is estimated at 18, with 32 wounded, and some of the dead are Indians and many of the wounded are. The Aljazeera correspondent says that Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told him that the mission had been to hit the ...

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Afghan Senators demand Execution of Foreign Troops; Karzai Usurps Control of Election Watchdog; BlackwaterTraining Scandal

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Informed Comment - By Juan Cole - Feb. 24 (News Report) - Pajhwok News Agency reports that on Tuesday, the Afghanistan senate deplored the foreign airstrikes that killed 21 innocent civilians in the province of Daikundi on Sunday, and demanded that NATO avoid any repetition of this sort of error.

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Five Questions for the Afghan Surge; Or, Getting Past the Hype

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Informed Comment - By Juan Cole - Feb. 22 (News Analysis) - There was never any doubt that the US and NATO would win militarily, fairly easily occupying Marjah and nearby Nad Ali. Marjah at 85,000 or so is a city smaller than Ann Arbor, Michigan. The campaign is only significant in a larger social and political context. The questions are:

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Afghanistan's hurt locker: Defeat the device

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0800

GlobalPost - By Ben Gilbert - Feb. 10 (News Report) - The 25 soldiers in Task Force Thor have one of the most dangerous — and boring — jobs in southern Afghanistan: looking for improvised explosive devices on the roads. The troops in the unit are a tight bunch. They are like the military’s gypsy caravan, constantly roaming the highways, driving at 7 miles per hour for 10 to 14 hours at a time in an effort to find IEDs.

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The Good and Bad News about Afghan Opium

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Council on Foreign Relations - By George Gavrillis - Feb. 10 (News Analysis) - Some rare good news is coming out of Afghanistan these days. Internationally led counternarcotics efforts have gained momentum, opium cultivation is decreasing, and more provinces have gone "poppy free," a term developed by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) that indicates provinces where opium growing has ceased or reached negligible levels. But the bad news is that many of Afghanistan's poppy-free provinces remain critical enablers of Afghanistan's opium economy. Though poppy growing may be eliminated, criminal networks in a number of provinces now focus on refining, stockpiling, and transporting opium. A broad range of authoritative international sources indicates these networks are at times aided by Afghan government officials who are little bothered by the Western-led counternarcotics efforts that seek to eradicate opium crops and chase down Taliban smugglers.

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Mediators' Plan a Road Map to Afghanistan Peace?

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0800

TruthOut - By Gareth Porter - Feb. 05 (News) - If peace talks do ultimately begin between Afghan President Hamid Karzai and the Taliban leadership, they may well follow a "road map" to a political settlement drawn up by a group of ex-Taliban officials who have been serving as intermediaries between the two sides. read more

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America's Secret Afghan Prisons

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0800

The Nation - By Anand Gopal - Feb. 02 (Special Report) - In the past few years Pashtun villagers in Afghanistan's rugged heartland have begun to lose faith in the American project. Many of them can point to the precise moment of this transformation, and it usually took place in the dead of night, when most of the country was fast asleep. In its attempt to stamp out the growing Taliban insurgency and Al Qaeda, the US military has been arresting suspects and sending them to one of a number of secret detention areas on military bases, often on the slightest suspicion and without the knowledge of their families. These night raids have become even more feared and hated in Afghanistan than coalition airstrikes. The raids and detentions, little known or understood outside the Pashtun villages, have been turning Afghans against the very forces many of them greeted as liberators just a few years ago.

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The Battle For Tora Bora

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 00:00:00 -0800

New Republic - By Peter Bergen - Dec. 22 (Special Report) - Four days before the fall of Kabul in November 2001, Osama bin Laden was still in town. The Al Qaeda leader’s movements before and after September 11 are difficult to trace precisely, but, just prior to the attacks, we know that he appeared in Kandahar and urged his followers to evacuate to safer locations in anticipation of U.S. retaliation. Then, on November 8, he was in Kabul, despite the fact that U.S. forces and their Afghan allies were closing in on the city. That morning, while eating a meal of meat and olives, he gave an interview to Hamid Mir, a Pakistani journalist who was writing his biography. He defended the attacks on New York and Washington, saying, “America and its allies are massacring us in Palestine, Chechnya, Kashmir, and Iraq. The Muslims have the right to attack America in reprisal.” Six months later, when I met Mir in Pakistan, he told me that the Al Qaeda leader had, on that day, appeared to be in remarkably good spirits.

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Letter From Kabul

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Foreign Affairs - By Kim Barker - Dec. 04 (Special Report) - As the Obama administration prepares to send more troops to Afghanistan, what are the problems U.S. forces will face, and what, if anything, can they do to overcome them?

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Zardari Turns Nuclear Arsenal over to PM Gilani

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Informed Comment - By Juan Cole - Nov. 29 (News Analysis) - By far the most important news coming out of Pakistan has nothing to do with al-Qaeda or the Taliban. It is a tale of the maneuvering of a wounded, corrupt presidency to avoid snap parliamentary elections, and to avoid renewed scrutiny by a newly feisty Supreme Court. And,I would argue that it is about poor economic management of the country, which is weakening the present government.

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