U.S. intelligence officials offer grim words on Afghanistan
By Richard Leiby and Karen DeYoung
February 17, 2012
The Los Angles Times
WASHINGTON - Senior U.S. intelligence officials offered a bleak view of the war in Afghanistan in testimony to Congress on Thursday, an assessment they acknowledged was more pessimistic than that of the military commanders in charge.
“I would like to begin with current military operations in Afghanistan, where we assess that endemic corruption and persistent qualitative deficiencies in the army and police forces undermine efforts to extend effective governance and security,” Lt. Gen. Ronald Burgess, head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told the Senate Armed Services Committee at its annual worldwide threat hearing.
The Afghan army remains reliant on U.S. and international forces for logistics, intelligence and transport, he said. And “despite successful coalition targeting, the Taliban remains resilient and able to replace leadership losses while also competing to provide governance at the local level. From its Pakistani safe havens, the Taliban leadership remains confident of eventual victory.”
Burgess testified alongside James Clapper, director of national intelligence, who said that the Taliban lost ground in the last year, “but that was mainly in places where the International Security Assistance Forces, or ISAF, were concentrated, and Taliban senior leaders continued to enjoy safe haven in Pakistan.” Clapper was asked by committee chairman Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) about reports in the Los Angeles Times and elsewhere describing a recent National Intelligence Estimate on Afghanistan that questioned whether the Afghan government would survive as the U.S. steadily pulls out its troops and reduces military and civilian assistance.
The gloomy findings prompted a sharp one-page dissent by Marine Corps Gen. John Allen, the commander of Western forces in the war, and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan. The comment was also signed by Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis, commander of U.S. Central Command, and Adm. James Stavridis, supreme allied commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
“Without going into the specifics of classified National Intelligence Estimates, I can certainly confirm that they took issue with the NIE on three counts, having to do with the assumptions that were made about force structure -- didn't feel that we gave sufficient weight to Pakistan and its impact as a safe haven, and generally felt that the NIE was pessimistic,” Clapper said.
Levin asked, “Pessimistic about that or about other matters as well?”
Clapper replied, “Just generally it was pessimistic” about the situation in Afghanistan and the prospects for a U.S. drawdown in 2014.
Clapper, who has served nearly half a century around U.S. intelligence, argued that it was only natural for intelligence analysts to see things differently than ground commanders in a war.
“If you'll forgive a little history, sir,” he said, “I served as an analyst briefer for Gen. [William] Westmoreland in Vietnam in 1966. I kind of lost my professional innocence a little bit then when I found out that operational commanders sometimes don't agree with their view of the success of their campaign as compared to and contrasted with that perspective displayed by intelligence.
"Fast-forward about 25 years or so and I served as the chief of Air Force intelligence during Desert Storm," he said. "Gen. Schwarzkopf protested long and loud all during the war and after the war about the accuracy of the intelligence. In fact, it didn't comport with his view.”
“Classically, intelligence is supposedly in the portion of the glass that's half empty, and operational commanders and policymakers, for that matter, are often in the portion of the glass that's half full," he said. "Probably the truth is somewhere at the water line. So I don't find it a bad thing. In fact, I think it's healthy that there is contrast between what the operational commanders believe and what the intelligence community assesses.”
Showing posts with label state of the war assessment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label state of the war assessment. Show all posts
Friday, February 17, 2012
Thursday, February 16, 2012
State of negotiations with Afghan Taliban: TIME analysis
I've omitted several passages from Tony Karon's analysis that includes data/observations that have have been treated more fully in recent news reports and other analyses; e.g., the wide divergence in current views on how well NATO kinetic operations have succeeded against the Afghan Taliban.
Also, as earlier reports I've featured on this blog underscore, there are questions about whether Karzai's recent claim that he's been involved with three-way negotiations with the Taliban is true, yet Karon accepts the claim as factual. But he also brings out some important points about NATO/US led negotiations with the Taliban -- and how many years NATO has been focusing on a negotiated settlement with the Taliban.
All this provides more insight into Hamid Karzai's many outbursts and seemingly irrational actions since the NDS caught the British regime attempting to set up secret military training camps in Afghanistan for 'good' Taliban. Years before the general public in NATO countries learned the truth, Karzai knew that NATO had been trying to restore the Taliban to power in Afghanistan in a desperate attempt to cover up the fact that the real war was always in Pakistan. That this is one of the greatest military scandals in the modern era -- shrug; move along folks, nothing to see here.
Talks with the Taliban Are Inevitable, But Who Will Be at the Table?
by Tony Karon
February 16, 2012
TIME/Global Spin blog
The fact that Afghan President Hamid Karzai has told the Wall Street Journal he’s held three-way negotiations with the U.S. and the Taliban should come as no surprise: the U.S. has said that within two years it will end its already decade-long military entanglement in Afghanistan’s civil war, and the Taliban is anything but defeated. Indeed, militarily, the U.S. has been spinning its wheels in Afghanistan for years, now, it’s a long-established conventional wisdom that Washington’s best hopes for leaving behind even a modicum of stability require a political settlement with the insurgents.
The question being fought out on the ground for the past four years has simply been on what terms a negotiated settlement would be forged, and who would be at the table.
Where once the U.S. had insisted on the Taliban laying down arms and embracing the constitution that brought Karzai to power as preconditions for talking to the insurgents, it has come around to accepting those erstwhile preconditions as the desired outcomes of such talks.
Now, with the diplomatic pace quickened by the U.S. withdrawal deadline, Karzai — who wields limited leverage of his own — is making sure he’s not sidelined by talks between Western powers and the Taliban, which had reportedly begun some time ago at an exploratory level, mediated by Qatar.
The optimistic spin on Karzai’s announcement highlights the fact that the Taliban is is now talking with Karzai, whom it had previously dismissed as a “puppet” of the U.S.
The Taliban, of course, denied talking to Karzai, though they have publicly confirmed their talks with Washington. Even if the Taliban had agreed to include Karzai in talks, though, there remains considerable grounds for skepticism that it would accept the Afghan constitution drawn up under Western tutelage after the U.S. invasion (and therefore the legitimacy of Karzai’s government).
It’s not clear just how committed the Taliban leadership is to these conversations, and there remains considerable opposition within the movement to seeking a political settlement right now — for the simple fact that many in the Taliban believe they’re actually winning the war.
And as is the case of any insurgent army facing a foreign expeditionary force, the Taliban knows time is on its side.
[...]
The U.S. invasion tipped the balance against the Taliban, but it soon bounced back, with support and sanctuary provided by Pakistan, unwilling to reconcile itself to an Indian-allied government taking root on its western flank. The hubris of the Bush Administration sustained an unfortunate illusion that Pakistan shared U.S. objectives in Afghanistan; having abandoned that illusion, the Obama Administration nonetheless faces the challenge of accommodating Pakistan’s interest in negotiating a peace agreement.
Pakistan has far more leverage over the Taliban than any other player, and it has previously made clear — by, for example, arresting Taliban leaders holding talks with Karzai and the U.S. independent of Pakistan’s okay — that it will not allow the negotiation of any agreement to which it is not (at least tacitly) a party.
In the game of musical chairs over the negotiations, Karzai has kept his options open, withdrawing from talks with the Taliban late last year and vowing to negotiate only with Pakistan.
[...]
Meanwhile, spring is just weeks away, and with it another fighting season. That’s a metaphorical table at which Karzai holds no significant cards, while the Taliban believes that as long as it enjoys Pakistan’s patronage, its hand is sufficient to prompt the U.S. to fold first.
Also, as earlier reports I've featured on this blog underscore, there are questions about whether Karzai's recent claim that he's been involved with three-way negotiations with the Taliban is true, yet Karon accepts the claim as factual. But he also brings out some important points about NATO/US led negotiations with the Taliban -- and how many years NATO has been focusing on a negotiated settlement with the Taliban.
All this provides more insight into Hamid Karzai's many outbursts and seemingly irrational actions since the NDS caught the British regime attempting to set up secret military training camps in Afghanistan for 'good' Taliban. Years before the general public in NATO countries learned the truth, Karzai knew that NATO had been trying to restore the Taliban to power in Afghanistan in a desperate attempt to cover up the fact that the real war was always in Pakistan. That this is one of the greatest military scandals in the modern era -- shrug; move along folks, nothing to see here.
Talks with the Taliban Are Inevitable, But Who Will Be at the Table?
by Tony Karon
February 16, 2012
TIME/Global Spin blog
The fact that Afghan President Hamid Karzai has told the Wall Street Journal he’s held three-way negotiations with the U.S. and the Taliban should come as no surprise: the U.S. has said that within two years it will end its already decade-long military entanglement in Afghanistan’s civil war, and the Taliban is anything but defeated. Indeed, militarily, the U.S. has been spinning its wheels in Afghanistan for years, now, it’s a long-established conventional wisdom that Washington’s best hopes for leaving behind even a modicum of stability require a political settlement with the insurgents.
The question being fought out on the ground for the past four years has simply been on what terms a negotiated settlement would be forged, and who would be at the table.
Where once the U.S. had insisted on the Taliban laying down arms and embracing the constitution that brought Karzai to power as preconditions for talking to the insurgents, it has come around to accepting those erstwhile preconditions as the desired outcomes of such talks.
Now, with the diplomatic pace quickened by the U.S. withdrawal deadline, Karzai — who wields limited leverage of his own — is making sure he’s not sidelined by talks between Western powers and the Taliban, which had reportedly begun some time ago at an exploratory level, mediated by Qatar.
The optimistic spin on Karzai’s announcement highlights the fact that the Taliban is is now talking with Karzai, whom it had previously dismissed as a “puppet” of the U.S.
The Taliban, of course, denied talking to Karzai, though they have publicly confirmed their talks with Washington. Even if the Taliban had agreed to include Karzai in talks, though, there remains considerable grounds for skepticism that it would accept the Afghan constitution drawn up under Western tutelage after the U.S. invasion (and therefore the legitimacy of Karzai’s government).
It’s not clear just how committed the Taliban leadership is to these conversations, and there remains considerable opposition within the movement to seeking a political settlement right now — for the simple fact that many in the Taliban believe they’re actually winning the war.
And as is the case of any insurgent army facing a foreign expeditionary force, the Taliban knows time is on its side.
[...]
The U.S. invasion tipped the balance against the Taliban, but it soon bounced back, with support and sanctuary provided by Pakistan, unwilling to reconcile itself to an Indian-allied government taking root on its western flank. The hubris of the Bush Administration sustained an unfortunate illusion that Pakistan shared U.S. objectives in Afghanistan; having abandoned that illusion, the Obama Administration nonetheless faces the challenge of accommodating Pakistan’s interest in negotiating a peace agreement.
Pakistan has far more leverage over the Taliban than any other player, and it has previously made clear — by, for example, arresting Taliban leaders holding talks with Karzai and the U.S. independent of Pakistan’s okay — that it will not allow the negotiation of any agreement to which it is not (at least tacitly) a party.
In the game of musical chairs over the negotiations, Karzai has kept his options open, withdrawing from talks with the Taliban late last year and vowing to negotiate only with Pakistan.
[...]
Meanwhile, spring is just weeks away, and with it another fighting season. That’s a metaphorical table at which Karzai holds no significant cards, while the Taliban believes that as long as it enjoys Pakistan’s patronage, its hand is sufficient to prompt the U.S. to fold first.
Present state of how Obama and NATO regimes are spinning the present state of Afghan War
This Reuters report is a collector's item, so well does it convey how the Obama administration and the most influential NATO leaders want to see the war. Naturally, the report was scooped up by Pakistan's English-language Dawn newspaper.
Afghan peace push brings rare chance, risks, for U.S.Reuters
by Missy Ryan
February 16, 2012
Reuters
* Taliban to open office in Qatar where talks to start
* Plan may move senior prisoners from Guantanamo to Qatar
* Initial discussions have proceeded fitfully
WASHINGTON - If all goes as hoped, U.S. and Qatari negotiators will meet soon to nail down final details for transferring Taliban prisoners from Guantanamo prison - a momentous step for President Barack Obama, the Afghan war and perhaps U.S. foreign policy as well.
Should U.S., Afghan and Qatari officials reach agreement, the Obama administration's careful diplomatic choreography then calls for the Afghan Taliban to open an office in Qatar to conduct peace talks with the Western-backed Afghan government.
The Taliban would be expected to make a statement condemning international terrorism.
And at some point - exactly when is unclear - the United States would start sending the first of five senior Taliban members it has held for a decade to Qatar.
On the way to the first-ever peace negotiations to end the long and bloody Afghan war, much could go wrong - indeed much already has. The peace talks have been beset by fits and starts, and U-turns, and there is a good chance that even these initial good-faith measures won't ultimately come off.
But Obama's peace gambit, which he hopes to unveil at a NATO summit in May, has the potential to be a significant development for U.S. foreign policy. For the first time in a generation, diplomats will be seeking to broker a major settlement with an enemy U.S. troops are fighting on the battlefield.
The talks, with the United States playing the role of mediator, offer a hope, however slim, for Afghanistan to decide its own destiny after nearly 40 years of conflict.
Obama's turn to diplomacy was born out of necessity and the realization that the Taliban were not going to go away.
"Two years ago the hope at the Pentagon was that we were going to defeat these guys so seriously they would no longer be a military force. No one expects that to happen anymore," said Bruce Riedel, a former CIA and White House official who chaired Obama's 2009 review of Afghan policy.
U.S. officials, in preliminary internal discussions, have also been exploring what structure possible negotiations might take, what demands might be made of the Taliban and what sort of power-sharing scenarios might be considered if a real peace accord can be reached in Afghanistan.
The talks would take place at least in part in Qatar, and might include the senior Taliban prisoners whose transfer from Guantanamo Bay is a key confidence-building measure on the part of the Obama adminsitration. [ID:nL1E7NS15Z]
Facing pushback from lawmakers who fear Taliban detainees will join the insurgency, the Obama administration has stressed it has not yet made a final decision to transfer the prisoners. Officials are already bracing themselves for the torrent of bipartisan attacks sure to come from Capitol Hill if and when they begin the notification process for moving detainees.
TALIBAN'S TRUE INTENTIONS MURKY
While the Afghan peace attempt echoes similar U.S. efforts in the past, U.S. officials dislike the comparison with Vietnam, where the 1973 Paris Peace Accords that were supposed to end the war - but didn't - were seen as a cover for the U.S. departure and abandonment of an ally, South Vietnam.
Today's initiative contrasts with U.S. reluctance in more recent years to engage directly with other adversaries - Iran, the Islamist Palestinian group Hamas, or Lebanon's Hezbollah.
Michael O'Hanlon, an expert on U.S. foreign policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said a long period followed the Korean and Vietnam wars in which Washington did less direct engagement with its enemies. That reluctance became more stark after the Sept. 11 attacks, when the George W. Bush administration cast efforts to defend against security threats as a battle between good and evil.
While that period appears to be coming to an end - and the Afghan Taliban, unlike Hamas and Hezbollah, was never designated as a terrorist group - the idea remains controversial.
As a candidate, Obama was widely criticized for suggesting he would meet with leaders of rogue nations like Iran without precondition.
As president, he has shown himself to be determined to wind down the costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he is moving to withdraw most U.S. combat troops by the end of 2014.
Obama "recognizes that wars, and in particular counterinsurgencies, end when enemies talk to each other," said Caroline Wadhams, a security expert with the Center for American Progress, a think tank seen as close to the White House.
Yet critics of Obama's bid for a negotiated settlement contend the push for peace comes far too late, as a decisive troop drawdown plan dilutes remaining U.S. leverage.
READING THE TEA LEAVES
To keep their initiative on track, U.S. officials must grapple not only with hostility in Congress and what they describe as Afghan President Hamid Karzai's erratic stance toward initial U.S. efforts. They must also confront the legacy of unanswered Taliban advances in the past.
Michael Semple, a former U.N. official with over two decades of experience in Afghanistan, said that since the Taliban government was toppled in 2001, the group has approached Afghan and Western officials repeatedly to indicate an interest in surrender, negotiations or reentry into the political process.
The first meeting took place in early December 2001 just north of Kandahar, the seat of Taliban power, between senior Taliban officials and Karzai, only then emerging as Afghanistan's interim leader.
As a significant political force in Afghanistan's long civil conflict, Semple said, the Taliban leadership "expected to be insiders in the process."
That overture fell flat - as did ones by Taliban leaders who endorsed the pursuit of negotiations when they gathered in Pakistan in 2002 and again in 2004.
Western officials, seeing a marginal military threat from the Taliban, expressed little interest. Karzai allies, eager to solidify their own growing political power, discouraged the Americans from accepting Taliban suggestions.
While the Taliban slowly regained its military power over the years, various individuals affiliated with militant leadership approached Afghan or U.S. officials, including Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil, the Taliban's last foreign minister, and Tayeb Agha, a close aide to Taliban leader Mullah Omar who is now the chief interlocutor in U.S. discussions.
Some Taliban representatives were kept waiting. Some ended up in prison. Over time, militants' grew deeply suspicious of Western and Afghan government statements on the talks - a major handicap to the U.S. peace efforts today.
Veteran U.S. diplomat Ronald Neumann, who was U.S. ambassador in Kabul from 2005 to 2007, says he cannot recall a serious discussion with senior Bush administration officials during his tenure in Kabul about initiating peace negotiations.
"A harsh judgment is required for the way this was handled," said Semple, a long-time advocate of peace talks who is now a fellow at Harvard University. "When people start to add up cost of war in Afghanistan over the last decade, they will ask how on earth the new Afghan leadership and U.S. officials failed to take advantage of these early overtures by the Taliban."
Even a year after peace talks became the centerpiece of U.S. political strategy for the war, the motives of a fundamentalist group whose rule of Afghanistan was known for its brutality and repression remain uncertain.
While the Taliban has long refused to engage with the Karzai government, U.S. officials believe a set of influential Taliban 'pragmatists' is ready to make a deal. Whether they can bring more strident members along is a different question.
"The fear of civil war and the fear of losing control are two important motivations for the Taliban to now be engaging," said Alex Strick van Linschoten, a Taliban expert.
Perhaps the biggest obstacle U.S. negotiators face is timing - whether they can establish a sustainable peace process before the bulk of Western forces go home, leaving a highly vulnerable Afghan government standing largely on its own.
Even if the Obama administration manages to get political negotiations going, progress in hammering out a sustainable power-sharing arrangement is likely to be slow at best.
"As an Arab friend used to say about another topic: 'You can wait for this sitting down,'" Neumann said.
(Additional reporting by Andrew Quinn; Editing by Warren Strobel and Anthony Boadle)
Afghan peace push brings rare chance, risks, for U.S.Reuters
by Missy Ryan
February 16, 2012
Reuters
* Taliban to open office in Qatar where talks to start
* Plan may move senior prisoners from Guantanamo to Qatar
* Initial discussions have proceeded fitfully
WASHINGTON - If all goes as hoped, U.S. and Qatari negotiators will meet soon to nail down final details for transferring Taliban prisoners from Guantanamo prison - a momentous step for President Barack Obama, the Afghan war and perhaps U.S. foreign policy as well.
Should U.S., Afghan and Qatari officials reach agreement, the Obama administration's careful diplomatic choreography then calls for the Afghan Taliban to open an office in Qatar to conduct peace talks with the Western-backed Afghan government.
The Taliban would be expected to make a statement condemning international terrorism.
And at some point - exactly when is unclear - the United States would start sending the first of five senior Taliban members it has held for a decade to Qatar.
On the way to the first-ever peace negotiations to end the long and bloody Afghan war, much could go wrong - indeed much already has. The peace talks have been beset by fits and starts, and U-turns, and there is a good chance that even these initial good-faith measures won't ultimately come off.
But Obama's peace gambit, which he hopes to unveil at a NATO summit in May, has the potential to be a significant development for U.S. foreign policy. For the first time in a generation, diplomats will be seeking to broker a major settlement with an enemy U.S. troops are fighting on the battlefield.
The talks, with the United States playing the role of mediator, offer a hope, however slim, for Afghanistan to decide its own destiny after nearly 40 years of conflict.
Obama's turn to diplomacy was born out of necessity and the realization that the Taliban were not going to go away.
"Two years ago the hope at the Pentagon was that we were going to defeat these guys so seriously they would no longer be a military force. No one expects that to happen anymore," said Bruce Riedel, a former CIA and White House official who chaired Obama's 2009 review of Afghan policy.
U.S. officials, in preliminary internal discussions, have also been exploring what structure possible negotiations might take, what demands might be made of the Taliban and what sort of power-sharing scenarios might be considered if a real peace accord can be reached in Afghanistan.
The talks would take place at least in part in Qatar, and might include the senior Taliban prisoners whose transfer from Guantanamo Bay is a key confidence-building measure on the part of the Obama adminsitration. [ID:nL1E7NS15Z]
Facing pushback from lawmakers who fear Taliban detainees will join the insurgency, the Obama administration has stressed it has not yet made a final decision to transfer the prisoners. Officials are already bracing themselves for the torrent of bipartisan attacks sure to come from Capitol Hill if and when they begin the notification process for moving detainees.
TALIBAN'S TRUE INTENTIONS MURKY
While the Afghan peace attempt echoes similar U.S. efforts in the past, U.S. officials dislike the comparison with Vietnam, where the 1973 Paris Peace Accords that were supposed to end the war - but didn't - were seen as a cover for the U.S. departure and abandonment of an ally, South Vietnam.
Today's initiative contrasts with U.S. reluctance in more recent years to engage directly with other adversaries - Iran, the Islamist Palestinian group Hamas, or Lebanon's Hezbollah.
Michael O'Hanlon, an expert on U.S. foreign policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said a long period followed the Korean and Vietnam wars in which Washington did less direct engagement with its enemies. That reluctance became more stark after the Sept. 11 attacks, when the George W. Bush administration cast efforts to defend against security threats as a battle between good and evil.
While that period appears to be coming to an end - and the Afghan Taliban, unlike Hamas and Hezbollah, was never designated as a terrorist group - the idea remains controversial.
As a candidate, Obama was widely criticized for suggesting he would meet with leaders of rogue nations like Iran without precondition.
As president, he has shown himself to be determined to wind down the costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he is moving to withdraw most U.S. combat troops by the end of 2014.
Obama "recognizes that wars, and in particular counterinsurgencies, end when enemies talk to each other," said Caroline Wadhams, a security expert with the Center for American Progress, a think tank seen as close to the White House.
Yet critics of Obama's bid for a negotiated settlement contend the push for peace comes far too late, as a decisive troop drawdown plan dilutes remaining U.S. leverage.
READING THE TEA LEAVES
To keep their initiative on track, U.S. officials must grapple not only with hostility in Congress and what they describe as Afghan President Hamid Karzai's erratic stance toward initial U.S. efforts. They must also confront the legacy of unanswered Taliban advances in the past.
Michael Semple, a former U.N. official with over two decades of experience in Afghanistan, said that since the Taliban government was toppled in 2001, the group has approached Afghan and Western officials repeatedly to indicate an interest in surrender, negotiations or reentry into the political process.
The first meeting took place in early December 2001 just north of Kandahar, the seat of Taliban power, between senior Taliban officials and Karzai, only then emerging as Afghanistan's interim leader.
As a significant political force in Afghanistan's long civil conflict, Semple said, the Taliban leadership "expected to be insiders in the process."
That overture fell flat - as did ones by Taliban leaders who endorsed the pursuit of negotiations when they gathered in Pakistan in 2002 and again in 2004.
Western officials, seeing a marginal military threat from the Taliban, expressed little interest. Karzai allies, eager to solidify their own growing political power, discouraged the Americans from accepting Taliban suggestions.
While the Taliban slowly regained its military power over the years, various individuals affiliated with militant leadership approached Afghan or U.S. officials, including Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil, the Taliban's last foreign minister, and Tayeb Agha, a close aide to Taliban leader Mullah Omar who is now the chief interlocutor in U.S. discussions.
Some Taliban representatives were kept waiting. Some ended up in prison. Over time, militants' grew deeply suspicious of Western and Afghan government statements on the talks - a major handicap to the U.S. peace efforts today.
Veteran U.S. diplomat Ronald Neumann, who was U.S. ambassador in Kabul from 2005 to 2007, says he cannot recall a serious discussion with senior Bush administration officials during his tenure in Kabul about initiating peace negotiations.
"A harsh judgment is required for the way this was handled," said Semple, a long-time advocate of peace talks who is now a fellow at Harvard University. "When people start to add up cost of war in Afghanistan over the last decade, they will ask how on earth the new Afghan leadership and U.S. officials failed to take advantage of these early overtures by the Taliban."
Even a year after peace talks became the centerpiece of U.S. political strategy for the war, the motives of a fundamentalist group whose rule of Afghanistan was known for its brutality and repression remain uncertain.
While the Taliban has long refused to engage with the Karzai government, U.S. officials believe a set of influential Taliban 'pragmatists' is ready to make a deal. Whether they can bring more strident members along is a different question.
"The fear of civil war and the fear of losing control are two important motivations for the Taliban to now be engaging," said Alex Strick van Linschoten, a Taliban expert.
Perhaps the biggest obstacle U.S. negotiators face is timing - whether they can establish a sustainable peace process before the bulk of Western forces go home, leaving a highly vulnerable Afghan government standing largely on its own.
Even if the Obama administration manages to get political negotiations going, progress in hammering out a sustainable power-sharing arrangement is likely to be slow at best.
"As an Arab friend used to say about another topic: 'You can wait for this sitting down,'" Neumann said.
(Additional reporting by Andrew Quinn; Editing by Warren Strobel and Anthony Boadle)
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
U.S. Lt. Col.: Our military leaders have let us down
See also report from (U.K.)Independent about the colonel's whisteblowing.
"A January 2011 report by the Afghan NGO Security Office noted that public statements made by U.S. and ISAF leaders at the end of 2010 were “sharply divergent from IMF, [international military forces, NGO-speak for ISAF] ‘strategic communication’ messages suggesting improvements. We encourage [nongovernment organization personnel] to recognize that no matter how authoritative the source of any such claim, messages of the nature are solely intended to influence American and European public opinion ahead of the withdrawal, and are not intended to offer an accurate portrayal of the situation for those who live and work here.”
Truth, lies and Afghanistan
By Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis
February 7, 2012
Armed Forces Journal
How military leaders have let us down
I spent last year in Afghanistan, visiting and talking with U.S. troops and their Afghan partners. My duties with the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force took me into every significant area where our soldiers engage the enemy. Over the course of 12 months, I covered more than 9,000 miles and talked, traveled and patrolled with troops in Kandahar, Kunar, Ghazni, Khost, Paktika, Kunduz, Balkh, Nangarhar and other provinces.
What I saw bore no resemblance to rosy official statements by U.S. military leaders about conditions on the ground.
Entering this deployment, I was sincerely hoping to learn that the claims were true: that conditions in Afghanistan were improving, that the local government and military were progressing toward self-sufficiency. I did not need to witness dramatic improvements to be reassured, but merely hoped to see evidence of positive trends, to see companies or battalions produce even minimal but sustainable progress.
Instead, I witnessed the absence of success on virtually every level.
My arrival in country in late 2010 marked the start of my fourth combat deployment, and my second in Afghanistan. A Regular Army officer in the Armor Branch, I served in Operation Desert Storm, in Afghanistan in 2005-06 and in Iraq in 2008-09. In the middle of my career, I spent eight years in the U.S. Army Reserve and held a number of civilian jobs — among them, legislative correspondent for defense and foreign affairs for Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas.
As a representative for the Rapid Equipping Force, I set out to talk to our troops about their needs and their circumstances. Along the way, I conducted mounted and dismounted combat patrols, spending time with conventional and Special Forces troops. I interviewed or had conversations with more than 250 soldiers in the field, from the lowest-ranking 19-year-old private to division commanders and staff members at every echelon. I spoke at length with Afghan security officials, Afghan civilians and a few village elders.
I saw the incredible difficulties any military force would have to pacify even a single area of any of those provinces; I heard many stories of how insurgents controlled virtually every piece of land beyond eyeshot of a U.S. or International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) base.
I saw little to no evidence the local governments were able to provide for the basic needs of the people. Some of the Afghan civilians I talked with said the people didn’t want to be connected to a predatory or incapable local government.
From time to time, I observed Afghan Security forces collude with the insurgency.
From Bad to Abysmal
Much of what I saw during my deployment, let alone read or wrote in official reports, I can’t talk about; the information remains classified. But I can say that such reports — mine and others’ — serve to illuminate the gulf between conditions on the ground and official statements of progress.
And I can relate a few representative experiences, of the kind that I observed all over the country.
In January 2011, I made my first trip into the mountains of Kunar province near the Pakistan border to visit the troops of 1st Squadron, 32nd Cavalry. On a patrol to the northernmost U.S. position in eastern Afghanistan, we arrived at an Afghan National Police (ANP) station that had reported being attacked by the Taliban 2½ hours earlier.
Through the interpreter, I asked the police captain where the attack had originated, and he pointed to the side of a nearby mountain.
“What are your normal procedures in situations like these?” I asked. “Do you form up a squad and go after them? Do you periodically send out harassing patrols? What do you do?”
As the interpreter conveyed my questions, the captain’s head wheeled around, looking first at the interpreter and turning to me with an incredulous expression. Then he laughed.
“No! We don’t go after them,” he said. “That would be dangerous!”
According to the cavalry troopers, the Afghan policemen rarely leave the cover of the checkpoints. In that part of the province, the Taliban literally run free.
In June, I was in the Zharay district of Kandahar province, returning to a base from a dismounted patrol. Gunshots were audible as the Taliban attacked a U.S. checkpoint about one mile away.
As I entered the unit’s command post, the commander and his staff were watching a live video feed of the battle. Two ANP vehicles were blocking the main road leading to the site of the attack. The fire was coming from behind a haystack. We watched as two Afghan men emerged, mounted a motorcycle and began moving toward the Afghan policemen in their vehicles.
The U.S. commander turned around and told the Afghan radio operator to make sure the policemen halted the men. The radio operator shouted into the radio repeatedly, but got no answer.
On the screen, we watched as the two men slowly motored past the ANP vehicles. The policemen neither got out to stop the two men nor answered the radio — until the motorcycle was out of sight.
To a man, the U.S. officers in that unit told me they had nothing but contempt for the Afghan troops in their area — and that was before the above incident occurred.
In August, I went on a dismounted patrol with troops in the Panjwai district of Kandahar province. Several troops from the unit had recently been killed in action, one of whom was a very popular and experienced soldier. One of the unit’s senior officers rhetorically asked me, “How do I look these men in the eye and ask them to go out day after day on these missions? What’s harder: How do I look [my soldier’s] wife in the eye when I get back and tell her that her husband died for something meaningful? How do I do that?”
One of the senior enlisted leaders added, “Guys are saying, ‘I hope I live so I can at least get home to R&R leave before I get it,’ or ‘I hope I only lose a foot.’ Sometimes they even say which limb it might be: ‘Maybe it’ll only be my left foot.’ They don’t have a lot of confidence that the leadership two levels up really understands what they’re living here, what the situation really is.”
On Sept. 11, the 10th anniversary of the infamous attack on the U.S., I visited another unit in Kunar province, this one near the town of Asmar. I talked with the local official who served as the cultural adviser to the U.S. commander. Here’s how the conversation went:
Davis: “Here you have many units of the Afghan National Security Forces [ANSF]. Will they be able to hold out against the Taliban when U.S. troops leave this area?”
Adviser: “No. They are definitely not capable. Already all across this region [many elements of] the security forces have made deals with the Taliban. [The ANSF] won’t shoot at the Taliban, and the Taliban won’t shoot them.
“Also, when a Taliban member is arrested, he is soon released with no action taken against him. So when the Taliban returns [when the Americans leave after 2014], so too go the jobs, especially for everyone like me who has worked with the coalition.
“Recently, I got a cellphone call from a Talib who had captured a friend of mine. While I could hear, he began to beat him, telling me I’d better quit working for the Americans. I could hear my friend crying out in pain. [The Talib] said the next time they would kidnap my sons and do the same to them. Because of the direct threats, I’ve had to take my children out of school just to keep them safe.
“And last night, right on that mountain there [he pointed to a ridge overlooking the U.S. base, about 700 meters distant], a member of the ANP was murdered. The Taliban came and called him out, kidnapped him in front of his parents, and took him away and murdered him. He was a member of the ANP from another province and had come back to visit his parents. He was only 27 years old. The people are not safe anywhere.”
That murder took place within view of the U.S. base, a post nominally responsible for the security of an area of hundreds of square kilometers. Imagine how insecure the population is beyond visual range. And yet that conversation was representative of what I saw in many regions of Afghanistan.
In all of the places I visited, the tactical situation was bad to abysmal. If the events I have described — and many, many more I could mention — had been in the first year of war, or even the third or fourth, one might be willing to believe that Afghanistan was just a hard fight, and we should stick it out. Yet these incidents all happened in the 10th year of war.
As the numbers depicting casualties and enemy violence indicate the absence of progress, so too did my observations of the tactical situation all over Afghanistan.
Credibility Gap
I’m hardly the only one who has noted the discrepancy between official statements and the truth on the ground.
A January 2011 report by the Afghan NGO Security Office noted that public statements made by U.S. and ISAF leaders at the end of 2010 were “sharply divergent from IMF, [international military forces, NGO-speak for ISAF] ‘strategic communication’ messages suggesting improvements. We encourage [nongovernment organization personnel] to recognize that no matter how authoritative the source of any such claim, messages of the nature are solely intended to influence American and European public opinion ahead of the withdrawal, and are not intended to offer an accurate portrayal of the situation for those who live and work here.”
The following month, Anthony Cordesman, on behalf of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote that ISAF and the U.S. leadership failed to report accurately on the reality of the situation in Afghanistan.
“Since June 2010, the unclassified reporting the U.S. does provide has steadily shrunk in content, effectively ‘spinning’ the road to victory by eliminating content that illustrates the full scale of the challenges ahead,” Cordesman wrote. “They also, however, were driven by political decisions to ignore or understate Taliban and insurgent gains from 2002 to 2009, to ignore the problems caused by weak and corrupt Afghan governance, to understate the risks posed by sanctuaries in Pakistan, and to ‘spin’ the value of tactical ISAF victories while ignoring the steady growth of Taliban influence and control.”
How many more men must die in support of a mission that is not succeeding and behind an array of more than seven years of optimistic statements by U.S. senior leaders in Afghanistan? No one expects our leaders to always have a successful plan. But we do expect — and the men who do the living, fighting and dying deserve — to have our leaders tell us the truth about what’s going on.
I first encountered senior-level equivocation during a 1997 division-level “experiment” that turned out to be far more setpiece than experiment. Over dinner at Fort Hood, Texas, Training and Doctrine Command leaders told me that the Advanced Warfighter Experiment (AWE) had shown that a “digital division” with fewer troops and more gear could be far more effective than current divisions. The next day, our congressional staff delegation observed the demonstration firsthand, and it didn’t take long to realize there was little substance to the claims. Virtually no legitimate experimentation was actually conducted. All parameters were carefully scripted. All events had a preordained sequence and outcome. The AWE was simply an expensive show, couched in the language of scientific experimentation and presented in glowing press releases and public statements, intended to persuade Congress to fund the Army’s preference. Citing the AWE’s “results,” Army leaders proceeded to eliminate one maneuver company per combat battalion. But the loss of fighting systems was never offset by a commensurate rise in killing capability.
A decade later, in the summer of 2007, I was assigned to the Future Combat Systems (FCS) organization at Fort Bliss, Texas. It didn’t take long to discover that the same thing the Army had done with a single division at Fort Hood in 1997 was now being done on a significantly larger scale with FCS. Year after year, the congressionally mandated reports from the Government Accountability Office revealed significant problems and warned that the system was in danger of failing. Each year, the Army’s senior leaders told members of Congress at hearings that GAO didn’t really understand the full picture and that to the contrary, the program was on schedule, on budget, and headed for success. Ultimately, of course, the program was canceled, with little but spinoffs to show for $18 billion spent.
If Americans were able to compare the public statements many of our leaders have made with classified data, this credibility gulf would be immediately observable. Naturally, I am not authorized to divulge classified material to the public. But I am legally able to share it with members of Congress. I have accordingly provided a much fuller accounting in a classified report to several members of Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, senators and House members.
A nonclassified version is available at www.afghanreport.com. [Editor’s note: At press time, Army public affairs had not yet ruled on whether Davis could post this longer version.]
Tell The Truth
When it comes to deciding what matters are worth plunging our nation into war and which are not, our senior leaders owe it to the nation and to the uniformed members to be candid — graphically, if necessary — in telling them what’s at stake and how expensive potential success is likely to be. U.S. citizens and their elected representatives can decide if the risk to blood and treasure is worth it.
Likewise when having to decide whether to continue a war, alter its aims or to close off a campaign that cannot be won at an acceptable price, our senior leaders have an obligation to tell Congress and American people the unvarnished truth and let the people decide what course of action to choose. That is the very essence of civilian control of the military. The American people deserve better than what they’ve gotten from their senior uniformed leaders over the last number of years. Simply telling the truth would be a good start. AFJ
"A January 2011 report by the Afghan NGO Security Office noted that public statements made by U.S. and ISAF leaders at the end of 2010 were “sharply divergent from IMF, [international military forces, NGO-speak for ISAF] ‘strategic communication’ messages suggesting improvements. We encourage [nongovernment organization personnel] to recognize that no matter how authoritative the source of any such claim, messages of the nature are solely intended to influence American and European public opinion ahead of the withdrawal, and are not intended to offer an accurate portrayal of the situation for those who live and work here.”
Truth, lies and Afghanistan
By Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis
February 7, 2012
Armed Forces Journal
How military leaders have let us down
I spent last year in Afghanistan, visiting and talking with U.S. troops and their Afghan partners. My duties with the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force took me into every significant area where our soldiers engage the enemy. Over the course of 12 months, I covered more than 9,000 miles and talked, traveled and patrolled with troops in Kandahar, Kunar, Ghazni, Khost, Paktika, Kunduz, Balkh, Nangarhar and other provinces.
What I saw bore no resemblance to rosy official statements by U.S. military leaders about conditions on the ground.
Entering this deployment, I was sincerely hoping to learn that the claims were true: that conditions in Afghanistan were improving, that the local government and military were progressing toward self-sufficiency. I did not need to witness dramatic improvements to be reassured, but merely hoped to see evidence of positive trends, to see companies or battalions produce even minimal but sustainable progress.
Instead, I witnessed the absence of success on virtually every level.
My arrival in country in late 2010 marked the start of my fourth combat deployment, and my second in Afghanistan. A Regular Army officer in the Armor Branch, I served in Operation Desert Storm, in Afghanistan in 2005-06 and in Iraq in 2008-09. In the middle of my career, I spent eight years in the U.S. Army Reserve and held a number of civilian jobs — among them, legislative correspondent for defense and foreign affairs for Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas.
As a representative for the Rapid Equipping Force, I set out to talk to our troops about their needs and their circumstances. Along the way, I conducted mounted and dismounted combat patrols, spending time with conventional and Special Forces troops. I interviewed or had conversations with more than 250 soldiers in the field, from the lowest-ranking 19-year-old private to division commanders and staff members at every echelon. I spoke at length with Afghan security officials, Afghan civilians and a few village elders.
I saw the incredible difficulties any military force would have to pacify even a single area of any of those provinces; I heard many stories of how insurgents controlled virtually every piece of land beyond eyeshot of a U.S. or International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) base.
I saw little to no evidence the local governments were able to provide for the basic needs of the people. Some of the Afghan civilians I talked with said the people didn’t want to be connected to a predatory or incapable local government.
From time to time, I observed Afghan Security forces collude with the insurgency.
From Bad to Abysmal
Much of what I saw during my deployment, let alone read or wrote in official reports, I can’t talk about; the information remains classified. But I can say that such reports — mine and others’ — serve to illuminate the gulf between conditions on the ground and official statements of progress.
And I can relate a few representative experiences, of the kind that I observed all over the country.
In January 2011, I made my first trip into the mountains of Kunar province near the Pakistan border to visit the troops of 1st Squadron, 32nd Cavalry. On a patrol to the northernmost U.S. position in eastern Afghanistan, we arrived at an Afghan National Police (ANP) station that had reported being attacked by the Taliban 2½ hours earlier.
Through the interpreter, I asked the police captain where the attack had originated, and he pointed to the side of a nearby mountain.
“What are your normal procedures in situations like these?” I asked. “Do you form up a squad and go after them? Do you periodically send out harassing patrols? What do you do?”
As the interpreter conveyed my questions, the captain’s head wheeled around, looking first at the interpreter and turning to me with an incredulous expression. Then he laughed.
“No! We don’t go after them,” he said. “That would be dangerous!”
According to the cavalry troopers, the Afghan policemen rarely leave the cover of the checkpoints. In that part of the province, the Taliban literally run free.
In June, I was in the Zharay district of Kandahar province, returning to a base from a dismounted patrol. Gunshots were audible as the Taliban attacked a U.S. checkpoint about one mile away.
As I entered the unit’s command post, the commander and his staff were watching a live video feed of the battle. Two ANP vehicles were blocking the main road leading to the site of the attack. The fire was coming from behind a haystack. We watched as two Afghan men emerged, mounted a motorcycle and began moving toward the Afghan policemen in their vehicles.
The U.S. commander turned around and told the Afghan radio operator to make sure the policemen halted the men. The radio operator shouted into the radio repeatedly, but got no answer.
On the screen, we watched as the two men slowly motored past the ANP vehicles. The policemen neither got out to stop the two men nor answered the radio — until the motorcycle was out of sight.
To a man, the U.S. officers in that unit told me they had nothing but contempt for the Afghan troops in their area — and that was before the above incident occurred.
In August, I went on a dismounted patrol with troops in the Panjwai district of Kandahar province. Several troops from the unit had recently been killed in action, one of whom was a very popular and experienced soldier. One of the unit’s senior officers rhetorically asked me, “How do I look these men in the eye and ask them to go out day after day on these missions? What’s harder: How do I look [my soldier’s] wife in the eye when I get back and tell her that her husband died for something meaningful? How do I do that?”
One of the senior enlisted leaders added, “Guys are saying, ‘I hope I live so I can at least get home to R&R leave before I get it,’ or ‘I hope I only lose a foot.’ Sometimes they even say which limb it might be: ‘Maybe it’ll only be my left foot.’ They don’t have a lot of confidence that the leadership two levels up really understands what they’re living here, what the situation really is.”
On Sept. 11, the 10th anniversary of the infamous attack on the U.S., I visited another unit in Kunar province, this one near the town of Asmar. I talked with the local official who served as the cultural adviser to the U.S. commander. Here’s how the conversation went:
Davis: “Here you have many units of the Afghan National Security Forces [ANSF]. Will they be able to hold out against the Taliban when U.S. troops leave this area?”
Adviser: “No. They are definitely not capable. Already all across this region [many elements of] the security forces have made deals with the Taliban. [The ANSF] won’t shoot at the Taliban, and the Taliban won’t shoot them.
“Also, when a Taliban member is arrested, he is soon released with no action taken against him. So when the Taliban returns [when the Americans leave after 2014], so too go the jobs, especially for everyone like me who has worked with the coalition.
“Recently, I got a cellphone call from a Talib who had captured a friend of mine. While I could hear, he began to beat him, telling me I’d better quit working for the Americans. I could hear my friend crying out in pain. [The Talib] said the next time they would kidnap my sons and do the same to them. Because of the direct threats, I’ve had to take my children out of school just to keep them safe.
“And last night, right on that mountain there [he pointed to a ridge overlooking the U.S. base, about 700 meters distant], a member of the ANP was murdered. The Taliban came and called him out, kidnapped him in front of his parents, and took him away and murdered him. He was a member of the ANP from another province and had come back to visit his parents. He was only 27 years old. The people are not safe anywhere.”
That murder took place within view of the U.S. base, a post nominally responsible for the security of an area of hundreds of square kilometers. Imagine how insecure the population is beyond visual range. And yet that conversation was representative of what I saw in many regions of Afghanistan.
In all of the places I visited, the tactical situation was bad to abysmal. If the events I have described — and many, many more I could mention — had been in the first year of war, or even the third or fourth, one might be willing to believe that Afghanistan was just a hard fight, and we should stick it out. Yet these incidents all happened in the 10th year of war.
As the numbers depicting casualties and enemy violence indicate the absence of progress, so too did my observations of the tactical situation all over Afghanistan.
Credibility Gap
I’m hardly the only one who has noted the discrepancy between official statements and the truth on the ground.
A January 2011 report by the Afghan NGO Security Office noted that public statements made by U.S. and ISAF leaders at the end of 2010 were “sharply divergent from IMF, [international military forces, NGO-speak for ISAF] ‘strategic communication’ messages suggesting improvements. We encourage [nongovernment organization personnel] to recognize that no matter how authoritative the source of any such claim, messages of the nature are solely intended to influence American and European public opinion ahead of the withdrawal, and are not intended to offer an accurate portrayal of the situation for those who live and work here.”
The following month, Anthony Cordesman, on behalf of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote that ISAF and the U.S. leadership failed to report accurately on the reality of the situation in Afghanistan.
“Since June 2010, the unclassified reporting the U.S. does provide has steadily shrunk in content, effectively ‘spinning’ the road to victory by eliminating content that illustrates the full scale of the challenges ahead,” Cordesman wrote. “They also, however, were driven by political decisions to ignore or understate Taliban and insurgent gains from 2002 to 2009, to ignore the problems caused by weak and corrupt Afghan governance, to understate the risks posed by sanctuaries in Pakistan, and to ‘spin’ the value of tactical ISAF victories while ignoring the steady growth of Taliban influence and control.”
How many more men must die in support of a mission that is not succeeding and behind an array of more than seven years of optimistic statements by U.S. senior leaders in Afghanistan? No one expects our leaders to always have a successful plan. But we do expect — and the men who do the living, fighting and dying deserve — to have our leaders tell us the truth about what’s going on.
I first encountered senior-level equivocation during a 1997 division-level “experiment” that turned out to be far more setpiece than experiment. Over dinner at Fort Hood, Texas, Training and Doctrine Command leaders told me that the Advanced Warfighter Experiment (AWE) had shown that a “digital division” with fewer troops and more gear could be far more effective than current divisions. The next day, our congressional staff delegation observed the demonstration firsthand, and it didn’t take long to realize there was little substance to the claims. Virtually no legitimate experimentation was actually conducted. All parameters were carefully scripted. All events had a preordained sequence and outcome. The AWE was simply an expensive show, couched in the language of scientific experimentation and presented in glowing press releases and public statements, intended to persuade Congress to fund the Army’s preference. Citing the AWE’s “results,” Army leaders proceeded to eliminate one maneuver company per combat battalion. But the loss of fighting systems was never offset by a commensurate rise in killing capability.
A decade later, in the summer of 2007, I was assigned to the Future Combat Systems (FCS) organization at Fort Bliss, Texas. It didn’t take long to discover that the same thing the Army had done with a single division at Fort Hood in 1997 was now being done on a significantly larger scale with FCS. Year after year, the congressionally mandated reports from the Government Accountability Office revealed significant problems and warned that the system was in danger of failing. Each year, the Army’s senior leaders told members of Congress at hearings that GAO didn’t really understand the full picture and that to the contrary, the program was on schedule, on budget, and headed for success. Ultimately, of course, the program was canceled, with little but spinoffs to show for $18 billion spent.
If Americans were able to compare the public statements many of our leaders have made with classified data, this credibility gulf would be immediately observable. Naturally, I am not authorized to divulge classified material to the public. But I am legally able to share it with members of Congress. I have accordingly provided a much fuller accounting in a classified report to several members of Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, senators and House members.
A nonclassified version is available at www.afghanreport.com. [Editor’s note: At press time, Army public affairs had not yet ruled on whether Davis could post this longer version.]
Tell The Truth
When it comes to deciding what matters are worth plunging our nation into war and which are not, our senior leaders owe it to the nation and to the uniformed members to be candid — graphically, if necessary — in telling them what’s at stake and how expensive potential success is likely to be. U.S. citizens and their elected representatives can decide if the risk to blood and treasure is worth it.
Likewise when having to decide whether to continue a war, alter its aims or to close off a campaign that cannot be won at an acceptable price, our senior leaders have an obligation to tell Congress and American people the unvarnished truth and let the people decide what course of action to choose. That is the very essence of civilian control of the military. The American people deserve better than what they’ve gotten from their senior uniformed leaders over the last number of years. Simply telling the truth would be a good start. AFJ
Thursday, February 2, 2012
Impact of U.S. announcement of 2013 combat troop drawdown
Early End to U.S. Combat Role in Afghanistan Draws Cheers, Jeers, Confusion
by Jim Lobe
February 2, 2012
IPS News
WASHINGTON, Feb 2, 2012 (IPS) - U.S. Defence Secretary Leon Panetta's surprise announcement Wednesday that U.S. troops will phase out their combat role in Afghanistan by mid-2013 is drawing mixed reactions, as well as a fair bit of confusion, from both critics and supporters of the 11-year-old war here.
The frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, Mitt Romney, called the decision "misguided" and "naïve". Neo- conservatives and other hawks charged that it was politically motivated and would result in the return of the Taliban to Kabul little more than a decade after a U.S-coordinated military campaign chased their leadership into Pakistan.
"Only in some alternative universe is this a winning strategy," complained Max Boot, a neo-conservative military analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). "In the world we actually inhabit it is a recipe for a slow-motion – or maybe not so slow – catastrophe."
But the war's critics, many of whom were deeply disappointed by President Barack Obama's decision shortly after taking office in 2009 to send substantially more troops to Afghanistan, cheered Panetta's announcement.
"This is good news," said Matthew Hoh, a former Marine officer and State Department adviser in Afghanistan who until recently directed the Afghanistan Study Group here. "What we've needed to do for some time is to transition from a belligerent in the conflict to a mediator focused on facilitating an inclusive political settlement. This appears intended to do that."
Whether that was indeed the intention remained unclear Thursday, however, as the senior officials here insisted that Panetta's announcement did not signal a major shift in U.S. or NATO strategy which had set the deadline for all security tasks to be transferred to Afghan forces by the end of 2014.
"This was an assessment of what could happen within the context of the stated policy of NATO, which is to transfer the security lead to the Afghan security forces by 2014, and, within that …timeline, the transition will take place," White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters.
Similarly, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director, Gen. (ret.) David Petraeus, the architect of the U.S. counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan, insisted that Panetta's remarks were consistent with previous planning.
"This is exactly in line with the policy that we started back in the summer of 2011, transitioning leadership of combat operations from ISAF (the International Security Assistance Force) to Afghan forces and then progressively complete it by the end of 2014," he told congressmen on Capitol Hill.
Panetta's remarks, which clearly also took the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and U.S. allies by surprise, were made to reporters while he was en route to a NATO conference in Brussels.
Not only did he say that Washington hoped to end the U.S. combat role by mid-2013 – 18 months before the end-of-2014 deadline – but he also indicated that NATO will likely cancel plans to expand the size of Afghanistan's security forces from the current 310,000 to 350,000 soldiers and police.
His remarks came at a critical moment on a number of fronts.
With Washington's and Pakistan's apparent backing, the Taliban has established an office in Qatar where they have been engaged in talks with U.S. officials over confidence-building measures, such as the return of Taliban detainees imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, that could lead to broader peace talks.
At the same time, Karzai, who only reluctantly endorsed the Doha talks, has reportedly been pushing to open a separate negotiating channel to begin negotiations under the auspices of Saudi Arabia.
While cooperating with U.S. efforts to engage the Taliban, Islamabad has continued to reject U.S. appeals to reopen NATO supply routes through Pakistani territory that were closed in late November to protest the accidental killing by U.S. warplanes of 24 Pakistani troops at a border post.
As a result, Washington has been made to rely almost exclusively on the Northern Supply Network through Central Asia, making logistical support for the troops far more expensive. The U.S. has already budgeted more than 90 billion dollars for the war this year.
In the wake of the killing of four French Legionnaires by an Afghan soldier - the latest in a lengthy series of such incidents against NATO troops - French President Nicolas Sarkozy last week announced that he will withdraw all 3,600 French combat troops by the end 2013, a year earlier than previously scheduled.
Amidst all these developments, the leak this week of a sensitive NATO report based on the interrogation of some 4,000 Taliban detainees in Afghanistan shed new and very discouraging light on both the degree to which Pakistan's military intelligence agency (ISI) has backed - even controlled - the Taliban and the confidence of Taliban militants themselves that they are winning the war.
The report also noted that the Taliban was receiving support from Afghan government officials, including Army units in areas from which NATO forces had withdrawn. The government "continues to declare its willingness to fight, yet many of its personnel have secretly reached out to insurgents, seeking long-term options in the event of a possible Taliban victory," according to the report.
The thrust of the report - that NATO forces have failed to stop, let alone reverse, the Taliban's momentum - strongly contradicted the more-optimistic assessments by U.S. and NATO field commanders and is certain to fuel growing public sentiment in the West, including the U.S., that the war has not been worth the expense in blood and treasure.
In the last major nationwide poll conducted on Afghanistan in mid- January, 56 percent of respondents said U.S. troops should be withdrawn "as soon as possible".
Washington currently has some 90,000 troops in Afghanistan, down from a high of just over 100,000 last summer. It plans to withdraw another 22,000 by the end of this summer. In his remarks Wednesday, Panetta stressed that no decision had been made regarding the pace of the withdrawal of the remaining 68,000 troops.
According to Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, however, Panetta's remarks suggest that the administration has adopted a strategy to end "America's major military footprint in Afghanistan well before the previous December 2014 deadline," but that won't be clear until after the presidential elections here in November.
Writing for the Daily Beast website, Gelb claimed that Panetta, Vice President Joe Biden, and National Security Adviser Tom Donilon had become convinced late last year that, with the death last May of Osama bin Laden and the successful disruption of his Al-Qaeda, U.S. interests in Afghanistan "were no longer vital, and that more American deaths and billions (of dollars) in costs were no longer worthwhile."
As a result, even while continuing efforts to target senior and mid- ranking Taliban commanders, Washington is now focusing its efforts on a negotiated settlement.
But whether that will be possible, particularly given the apparent confidence of the Taliban, remains very much in doubt.
"The Taliban are a much larger organisation than they were a couple of years ago, and we've ruined our relationship with Pakistan," according to Hoh, who blames Petraeus' aggressive "surge" strategy for these setbacks.
"The policy has clearly failed, and now we're to put some kind of settlement together before we leave, and there's a real possibility that will fail."
*Jim Lobe's blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at:
http://www.lobelog.com.
by Jim Lobe
February 2, 2012
IPS News
WASHINGTON, Feb 2, 2012 (IPS) - U.S. Defence Secretary Leon Panetta's surprise announcement Wednesday that U.S. troops will phase out their combat role in Afghanistan by mid-2013 is drawing mixed reactions, as well as a fair bit of confusion, from both critics and supporters of the 11-year-old war here.
The frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, Mitt Romney, called the decision "misguided" and "naïve". Neo- conservatives and other hawks charged that it was politically motivated and would result in the return of the Taliban to Kabul little more than a decade after a U.S-coordinated military campaign chased their leadership into Pakistan.
"Only in some alternative universe is this a winning strategy," complained Max Boot, a neo-conservative military analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). "In the world we actually inhabit it is a recipe for a slow-motion – or maybe not so slow – catastrophe."
But the war's critics, many of whom were deeply disappointed by President Barack Obama's decision shortly after taking office in 2009 to send substantially more troops to Afghanistan, cheered Panetta's announcement.
"This is good news," said Matthew Hoh, a former Marine officer and State Department adviser in Afghanistan who until recently directed the Afghanistan Study Group here. "What we've needed to do for some time is to transition from a belligerent in the conflict to a mediator focused on facilitating an inclusive political settlement. This appears intended to do that."
Whether that was indeed the intention remained unclear Thursday, however, as the senior officials here insisted that Panetta's announcement did not signal a major shift in U.S. or NATO strategy which had set the deadline for all security tasks to be transferred to Afghan forces by the end of 2014.
"This was an assessment of what could happen within the context of the stated policy of NATO, which is to transfer the security lead to the Afghan security forces by 2014, and, within that …timeline, the transition will take place," White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters.
Similarly, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director, Gen. (ret.) David Petraeus, the architect of the U.S. counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan, insisted that Panetta's remarks were consistent with previous planning.
"This is exactly in line with the policy that we started back in the summer of 2011, transitioning leadership of combat operations from ISAF (the International Security Assistance Force) to Afghan forces and then progressively complete it by the end of 2014," he told congressmen on Capitol Hill.
Panetta's remarks, which clearly also took the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and U.S. allies by surprise, were made to reporters while he was en route to a NATO conference in Brussels.
Not only did he say that Washington hoped to end the U.S. combat role by mid-2013 – 18 months before the end-of-2014 deadline – but he also indicated that NATO will likely cancel plans to expand the size of Afghanistan's security forces from the current 310,000 to 350,000 soldiers and police.
His remarks came at a critical moment on a number of fronts.
With Washington's and Pakistan's apparent backing, the Taliban has established an office in Qatar where they have been engaged in talks with U.S. officials over confidence-building measures, such as the return of Taliban detainees imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, that could lead to broader peace talks.
At the same time, Karzai, who only reluctantly endorsed the Doha talks, has reportedly been pushing to open a separate negotiating channel to begin negotiations under the auspices of Saudi Arabia.
While cooperating with U.S. efforts to engage the Taliban, Islamabad has continued to reject U.S. appeals to reopen NATO supply routes through Pakistani territory that were closed in late November to protest the accidental killing by U.S. warplanes of 24 Pakistani troops at a border post.
As a result, Washington has been made to rely almost exclusively on the Northern Supply Network through Central Asia, making logistical support for the troops far more expensive. The U.S. has already budgeted more than 90 billion dollars for the war this year.
In the wake of the killing of four French Legionnaires by an Afghan soldier - the latest in a lengthy series of such incidents against NATO troops - French President Nicolas Sarkozy last week announced that he will withdraw all 3,600 French combat troops by the end 2013, a year earlier than previously scheduled.
Amidst all these developments, the leak this week of a sensitive NATO report based on the interrogation of some 4,000 Taliban detainees in Afghanistan shed new and very discouraging light on both the degree to which Pakistan's military intelligence agency (ISI) has backed - even controlled - the Taliban and the confidence of Taliban militants themselves that they are winning the war.
The report also noted that the Taliban was receiving support from Afghan government officials, including Army units in areas from which NATO forces had withdrawn. The government "continues to declare its willingness to fight, yet many of its personnel have secretly reached out to insurgents, seeking long-term options in the event of a possible Taliban victory," according to the report.
The thrust of the report - that NATO forces have failed to stop, let alone reverse, the Taliban's momentum - strongly contradicted the more-optimistic assessments by U.S. and NATO field commanders and is certain to fuel growing public sentiment in the West, including the U.S., that the war has not been worth the expense in blood and treasure.
In the last major nationwide poll conducted on Afghanistan in mid- January, 56 percent of respondents said U.S. troops should be withdrawn "as soon as possible".
Washington currently has some 90,000 troops in Afghanistan, down from a high of just over 100,000 last summer. It plans to withdraw another 22,000 by the end of this summer. In his remarks Wednesday, Panetta stressed that no decision had been made regarding the pace of the withdrawal of the remaining 68,000 troops.
According to Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, however, Panetta's remarks suggest that the administration has adopted a strategy to end "America's major military footprint in Afghanistan well before the previous December 2014 deadline," but that won't be clear until after the presidential elections here in November.
Writing for the Daily Beast website, Gelb claimed that Panetta, Vice President Joe Biden, and National Security Adviser Tom Donilon had become convinced late last year that, with the death last May of Osama bin Laden and the successful disruption of his Al-Qaeda, U.S. interests in Afghanistan "were no longer vital, and that more American deaths and billions (of dollars) in costs were no longer worthwhile."
As a result, even while continuing efforts to target senior and mid- ranking Taliban commanders, Washington is now focusing its efforts on a negotiated settlement.
But whether that will be possible, particularly given the apparent confidence of the Taliban, remains very much in doubt.
"The Taliban are a much larger organisation than they were a couple of years ago, and we've ruined our relationship with Pakistan," according to Hoh, who blames Petraeus' aggressive "surge" strategy for these setbacks.
"The policy has clearly failed, and now we're to put some kind of settlement together before we leave, and there's a real possibility that will fail."
*Jim Lobe's blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at:
http://www.lobelog.com.
State of the war analysis; reaction to announcement of 2013 combat troop drawdown
Includes mention of leaked NATO report, "The State of the Taliban"
Early End to U.S. Combat Role in Afghanistan Draws Cheers, Jeers, Confusion
by Jim Lobe
February 2, 2012
IPS News
WASHINGTON, Feb 2, 2012 (IPS) - U.S. Defence Secretary Leon Panetta's surprise announcement Wednesday that U.S. troops will phase out their combat role in Afghanistan by mid-2013 is drawing mixed reactions, as well as a fair bit of confusion, from both critics and supporters of the 11-year-old war here.
The frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, Mitt Romney, called the decision "misguided" and "naïve". Neoconservatives and other hawks charged that it was politically motivated and would result in the return of the Taliban to Kabul little more than a decade after a U.S-coordinated military campaign chased their leadership into Pakistan.
"Only in some alternative universe is this a winning strategy," complained Max Boot, a neoconservative military analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). "In the world we actually inhabit it is a recipe for a slow-motion –- or maybe not so slow –- catastrophe."
But the war's critics, many of whom were deeply disappointed by President Barack Obama's decision shortly after taking office in 2009 to send substantially more troops to Afghanistan, cheered Panetta's announcement.
"This is good news," said Matthew Hoh, a former Marine officer and State Department adviser in Afghanistan who until recently directed the Afghanistan Study Group here. "What we've needed to do for some time is to transition from a belligerent in the conflict to a mediator focused on facilitating an inclusive political settlement. This appears intended to do that."
Whether that was indeed the intention remained unclear Thursday, however, as the senior officials here insisted that Panetta's announcement did not signal a major shift in U.S. or NATO strategy which had set the deadline for all security tasks to be transferred to Afghan forces by the end of 2014.
"This was an assessment of what could happen within the context of the stated policy of NATO, which is to transfer the security lead to the Afghan security forces by 2014, and, within that …timeline, the transition will take place," White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters.
Similarly, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director, Gen. (ret.) David Petraeus, the architect of the U.S. counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan, insisted that Panetta's remarks were consistent with previous planning.
"This is exactly in line with the policy that we started back in the summer of 2011, transitioning leadership of combat operations from ISAF (the International Security Assistance Force) to Afghan forces and then progressively complete it by the end of 2014," he told congressmen on Capitol Hill.
Panetta's remarks, which clearly also took the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and U.S. allies by surprise, were made to reporters while he was en route to a NATO conference in Brussels.
Not only did he say that Washington hoped to end the U.S. combat role by mid-2013 – 18 months before the end-of-2014 deadline – but he also indicated that NATO will likely cancel plans to expand the size of Afghanistan's security forces from the current 310,000 to 350,000 soldiers and police.
His remarks came at a critical moment on a number of fronts.
With Washington's and Pakistan's apparent backing, the Taliban has established an office in Qatar where they have been engaged in talks with U.S. officials over confidence-building measures, such as the return of Taliban detainees imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, that could lead to broader peace talks.
At the same time, Karzai, who only reluctantly endorsed the Doha talks, has reportedly been pushing to open a separate negotiating channel to begin negotiations under the auspices of Saudi Arabia.
While cooperating with U.S. efforts to engage the Taliban, Islamabad has continued to reject U.S. appeals to reopen NATO supply routes through Pakistani territory that were closed in late November to protest the accidental killing by U.S. warplanes of 24 Pakistani troops at a border post.
As a result, Washington has been made to rely almost exclusively on the Northern Supply Network through Central Asia, making logistical support for the troops far more expensive. The U.S. has already budgeted more than 90 billion dollars for the war this year.
In the wake of the killing of four French Legionnaires by an Afghan soldier - the latest in a lengthy series of such incidents against NATO troops - French President Nicolas Sarkozy last week announced that he will withdraw all 3,600 French combat troops by the end 2013, a year earlier than previously scheduled.
Amidst all these developments, the leak this week of a sensitive NATO report based on the interrogation of some 4,000 Taliban detainees in Afghanistan shed new and very discouraging light on both the degree to which Pakistan's military intelligence agency (ISI) has backed - even controlled - the Taliban and the confidence of Taliban militants themselves that they are winning the war.
The report also noted that the Taliban was receiving support from Afghan government officials, including Army units in areas from which NATO forces had withdrawn. The government "continues to declare its willingness to fight, yet many of its personnel have secretly reached out to insurgents, seeking long-term options in the event of a possible Taliban victory," according to the report.
The thrust of the report - that NATO forces have failed to stop, let alone reverse, the Taliban's momentum - strongly contradicted the more-optimistic assessments by U.S. and NATO field commanders and is certain to fuel growing public sentiment in the West, including the U.S., that the war has not been worth the expense in blood and treasure.
In the last major nationwide poll conducted on Afghanistan in mid- January, 56 percent of respondents said U.S. troops should be withdrawn "as soon as possible".
Washington currently has some 90,000 troops in Afghanistan, down from a high of just over 100,000 last summer. It plans to withdraw another 22,000 by the end of this summer. In his remarks Wednesday, Panetta stressed that no decision had been made regarding the pace of the withdrawal of the remaining 68,000 troops.
According to Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, however, Panetta's remarks suggest that the administration has adopted a strategy to end "America's major military footprint in Afghanistan well before the previous December 2014 deadline," but that won't be clear until after the presidential elections here in November.
Writing for the Daily Beast website, Gelb claimed that Panetta, Vice President Joe Biden, and National Security Adviser Tom Donilon had become convinced late last year that, with the death last May of Osama bin Laden and the successful disruption of his Al-Qaeda, U.S. interests in Afghanistan "were no longer vital, and that more American deaths and billions (of dollars) in costs were no longer worthwhile."
As a result, even while continuing efforts to target senior and mid- ranking Taliban commanders, Washington is now focusing its efforts on a negotiated settlement.
But whether that will be possible, particularly given the apparent confidence of the Taliban, remains very much in doubt.
"The Taliban are a much larger organisation than they were a couple of years ago, and we've ruined our relationship with Pakistan," according to Hoh, who blames Petraeus' aggressive "surge" strategy for these setbacks.
"The policy has clearly failed, and now we're to put some kind of settlement together before we leave, and there's a real possibility that will fail."
*Jim Lobe's blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at:
http://www.lobelog.com.
Early End to U.S. Combat Role in Afghanistan Draws Cheers, Jeers, Confusion
by Jim Lobe
February 2, 2012
IPS News
WASHINGTON, Feb 2, 2012 (IPS) - U.S. Defence Secretary Leon Panetta's surprise announcement Wednesday that U.S. troops will phase out their combat role in Afghanistan by mid-2013 is drawing mixed reactions, as well as a fair bit of confusion, from both critics and supporters of the 11-year-old war here.
The frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, Mitt Romney, called the decision "misguided" and "naïve". Neoconservatives and other hawks charged that it was politically motivated and would result in the return of the Taliban to Kabul little more than a decade after a U.S-coordinated military campaign chased their leadership into Pakistan.
"Only in some alternative universe is this a winning strategy," complained Max Boot, a neoconservative military analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). "In the world we actually inhabit it is a recipe for a slow-motion –- or maybe not so slow –- catastrophe."
But the war's critics, many of whom were deeply disappointed by President Barack Obama's decision shortly after taking office in 2009 to send substantially more troops to Afghanistan, cheered Panetta's announcement.
"This is good news," said Matthew Hoh, a former Marine officer and State Department adviser in Afghanistan who until recently directed the Afghanistan Study Group here. "What we've needed to do for some time is to transition from a belligerent in the conflict to a mediator focused on facilitating an inclusive political settlement. This appears intended to do that."
Whether that was indeed the intention remained unclear Thursday, however, as the senior officials here insisted that Panetta's announcement did not signal a major shift in U.S. or NATO strategy which had set the deadline for all security tasks to be transferred to Afghan forces by the end of 2014.
"This was an assessment of what could happen within the context of the stated policy of NATO, which is to transfer the security lead to the Afghan security forces by 2014, and, within that …timeline, the transition will take place," White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters.
Similarly, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director, Gen. (ret.) David Petraeus, the architect of the U.S. counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan, insisted that Panetta's remarks were consistent with previous planning.
"This is exactly in line with the policy that we started back in the summer of 2011, transitioning leadership of combat operations from ISAF (the International Security Assistance Force) to Afghan forces and then progressively complete it by the end of 2014," he told congressmen on Capitol Hill.
Panetta's remarks, which clearly also took the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and U.S. allies by surprise, were made to reporters while he was en route to a NATO conference in Brussels.
Not only did he say that Washington hoped to end the U.S. combat role by mid-2013 – 18 months before the end-of-2014 deadline – but he also indicated that NATO will likely cancel plans to expand the size of Afghanistan's security forces from the current 310,000 to 350,000 soldiers and police.
His remarks came at a critical moment on a number of fronts.
With Washington's and Pakistan's apparent backing, the Taliban has established an office in Qatar where they have been engaged in talks with U.S. officials over confidence-building measures, such as the return of Taliban detainees imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, that could lead to broader peace talks.
At the same time, Karzai, who only reluctantly endorsed the Doha talks, has reportedly been pushing to open a separate negotiating channel to begin negotiations under the auspices of Saudi Arabia.
While cooperating with U.S. efforts to engage the Taliban, Islamabad has continued to reject U.S. appeals to reopen NATO supply routes through Pakistani territory that were closed in late November to protest the accidental killing by U.S. warplanes of 24 Pakistani troops at a border post.
As a result, Washington has been made to rely almost exclusively on the Northern Supply Network through Central Asia, making logistical support for the troops far more expensive. The U.S. has already budgeted more than 90 billion dollars for the war this year.
In the wake of the killing of four French Legionnaires by an Afghan soldier - the latest in a lengthy series of such incidents against NATO troops - French President Nicolas Sarkozy last week announced that he will withdraw all 3,600 French combat troops by the end 2013, a year earlier than previously scheduled.
Amidst all these developments, the leak this week of a sensitive NATO report based on the interrogation of some 4,000 Taliban detainees in Afghanistan shed new and very discouraging light on both the degree to which Pakistan's military intelligence agency (ISI) has backed - even controlled - the Taliban and the confidence of Taliban militants themselves that they are winning the war.
The report also noted that the Taliban was receiving support from Afghan government officials, including Army units in areas from which NATO forces had withdrawn. The government "continues to declare its willingness to fight, yet many of its personnel have secretly reached out to insurgents, seeking long-term options in the event of a possible Taliban victory," according to the report.
The thrust of the report - that NATO forces have failed to stop, let alone reverse, the Taliban's momentum - strongly contradicted the more-optimistic assessments by U.S. and NATO field commanders and is certain to fuel growing public sentiment in the West, including the U.S., that the war has not been worth the expense in blood and treasure.
In the last major nationwide poll conducted on Afghanistan in mid- January, 56 percent of respondents said U.S. troops should be withdrawn "as soon as possible".
Washington currently has some 90,000 troops in Afghanistan, down from a high of just over 100,000 last summer. It plans to withdraw another 22,000 by the end of this summer. In his remarks Wednesday, Panetta stressed that no decision had been made regarding the pace of the withdrawal of the remaining 68,000 troops.
According to Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, however, Panetta's remarks suggest that the administration has adopted a strategy to end "America's major military footprint in Afghanistan well before the previous December 2014 deadline," but that won't be clear until after the presidential elections here in November.
Writing for the Daily Beast website, Gelb claimed that Panetta, Vice President Joe Biden, and National Security Adviser Tom Donilon had become convinced late last year that, with the death last May of Osama bin Laden and the successful disruption of his Al-Qaeda, U.S. interests in Afghanistan "were no longer vital, and that more American deaths and billions (of dollars) in costs were no longer worthwhile."
As a result, even while continuing efforts to target senior and mid- ranking Taliban commanders, Washington is now focusing its efforts on a negotiated settlement.
But whether that will be possible, particularly given the apparent confidence of the Taliban, remains very much in doubt.
"The Taliban are a much larger organisation than they were a couple of years ago, and we've ruined our relationship with Pakistan," according to Hoh, who blames Petraeus' aggressive "surge" strategy for these setbacks.
"The policy has clearly failed, and now we're to put some kind of settlement together before we leave, and there's a real possibility that will fail."
*Jim Lobe's blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at:
http://www.lobelog.com.
Nothing to see here, folks, move along: Official response to leaked NATO report,"The State of the Taliban"
Tejinder Singh – AHN News Correspondent
via Gant News Daily
February 2, 2012
Washington, DC, United States (AHN) – The United States’ top diplomat on Wednesday tiptoed around a controversial NATO report on the Taliban, leaked portions of which accuse Islamabad of having links with the organization harboring Al Qaeda.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told journalists there is nothing new in the new classified report by NATO which was earlier dumped by Pakistan Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar as “old wine in even older bottles.”
Appearing at a press conference with visiting Singapore Foreign Affairs Minister K. Shanmugam, Clinton said, “I think that there have already been comments that there’s nothing new in what has been released, but I’m not going to go into it in any depth.”
Earlier in the day, Pentagon spokesman Navy Capt. John Kirby also avoided delving into the details of the classified report, saying there is nothing new about information concerning links between some elements of the Pakistani government’s intelligence agency ISI and the Taliban.
Asked to comment on details about what elements of the ISI have links with the Taliban, Kirby sidestepped the question, saying, “We have made it clear already that Pakistan needs to act against safe havens. We would like ties between some elements of ISI and Taliban to be cut off.”
Kirby stressed that the classified NATO report is a classified report done inside ISAF, based on thousands of interviews with detainees and is not an analysis but a mere informational document.
It is important to understand that detainees have several motivations for what they do or do not say, Kirby commented.
via Gant News Daily
February 2, 2012
Washington, DC, United States (AHN) – The United States’ top diplomat on Wednesday tiptoed around a controversial NATO report on the Taliban, leaked portions of which accuse Islamabad of having links with the organization harboring Al Qaeda.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told journalists there is nothing new in the new classified report by NATO which was earlier dumped by Pakistan Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar as “old wine in even older bottles.”
Appearing at a press conference with visiting Singapore Foreign Affairs Minister K. Shanmugam, Clinton said, “I think that there have already been comments that there’s nothing new in what has been released, but I’m not going to go into it in any depth.”
Earlier in the day, Pentagon spokesman Navy Capt. John Kirby also avoided delving into the details of the classified report, saying there is nothing new about information concerning links between some elements of the Pakistani government’s intelligence agency ISI and the Taliban.
Asked to comment on details about what elements of the ISI have links with the Taliban, Kirby sidestepped the question, saying, “We have made it clear already that Pakistan needs to act against safe havens. We would like ties between some elements of ISI and Taliban to be cut off.”
Kirby stressed that the classified NATO report is a classified report done inside ISAF, based on thousands of interviews with detainees and is not an analysis but a mere informational document.
It is important to understand that detainees have several motivations for what they do or do not say, Kirby commented.
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