Afghanistan - Tag Search

Multiple news outlets are reporting that a NATO airstrike killed at least 5 civilians in the Uruzgan province on Sunday.

According to the New York Times, U.S. Special Forces helicopters attacked a convoy of two Land Cruisers and a pickup truck carrying 42 people. A statement released by the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan today said that the troops believed the convoy was carrying insurgents, but that when a ground force arrived, they found women and children and took them for medical treatment.

A statement from the Afghan government said that of the 27 dead, 4 were women and one was a child. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, in keeping with NATO's rapid-response public relations policy, has promptly apologized to President Hamid Karzai and explained the strike in a video released to the public and translated into Dari and Pashto.

The coalition leadership in Afghanistan spent months publicizing the just-launched offensive to clear and hold the alleged Taliban stronghold of Marja. This intense flag-waving left us pondering the benefits of hyping such an offensive: Given the overwhelming NATO force brought to bear, wouldn't the drawbacks of a possibly prolonged, bloody fight outweigh the public-relations benefits of a victory everyone saw coming?

A British press release (flagged by the Long War Journal yesterday) offers a concise if unsurprising justification, courtesy of U.K. spokesman Major General Gordon Messenger:

There were three reasons for signalling the operation in central Helmand in advance. First, to give the Taliban a choice. Second, to make the population aware that the operation was about to unfold. Third, it allowed a much greater level of Afghan involvement and ownership, and subsequently Afghan participation.

But I think there's a fourth, unspoken reason.

Update (2/16/10 11:40 a.m.): The New York Times, quoting a NATO spokesman, says today that fighting in Marja has slowed to "sporadic" gun battles with the Taliban, and that coalition forces have not suffered any more deaths after a U.S. Marine and a British soldier were killed on Saturday, the first day of the offensive.

The Los Angeles Times' Tony Perry and Laura King, reporting from Kabul and Marja, report that Marines were "inching their way forward" on Monday, sometimes through knee-deep muck, as teams painstakingly cleared IEDs. Perry and King say that some 5,000 residents of Marja have fled town. Marja is an agricultural township with an estimated population of somewhere around 80,000.

There have been contradictory reports about the artillery fire that killed 12 civilians on Sunday in Marja. Initial accounts, including from the New York Times' C.J. Chivers, who was on the scene, said that at least one rocket fired from a base dozens of miles to the north hit a house around 300 yards away from the intended target.

But Wired's Noah Schactman says that NATO is now saying those rockets hit their intended target and that troops didn't know there were civilians inside the house.

Afghan officials said three people in the house were Taliban militants firing on American troops, but Chivers reports in today's Times story that the Marines he was with "complained to an embedded New York Times reporter that they had not ordered the rocket strike and that it hit the wrong house."

A swarm of U.S. unmanned aerial vehicles launched what may have been the heaviest single bombardment in the history of the pilotless drone program today in Pakistan's North Waziristan province.

"Up to eight US drones fired some 18 missiles at multiple militant targets in Datta Khel village," a senior security official told the AFP. The report didn't say if the official was American or Pakistani. The attack "was the heaviest ever in terms of the number of missiles fired," according to Reuters. It left at least 10 suspected militants dead, including three foreigners, though that toll could rise.

Today's attack in Datta Khel, the stronghold of Taliban commander Hafiz Gul Bahadur, is the 13th drone strike in Pakistan or Afghanistan this year and the 14th since a Dec. 30, Taliban-led suicide bombing killed seven CIA agents at a Forward Operating Base in the Afghan town of Khost. So far in 2010, the United States has launched a drone attack around once every two-and-a-half days.

As the Jan. 28 London conference on Afghanistan approaches, the government of President Hamid Karzai is playing up its ambitious new plan to lure "moderate" Taliban fighters away from the Islamist movement and toward reintegration with Afghan civil society.

But bringing the Taliban in from the cold and securing the movement's political participation is fraught with obstacles, including the potential recalcitrance of perceived hardliners such as Mullah Mohammed Omar and the need to balance the desires of various and competing power centers, including Saudi Arabia, Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency, Karzai's own government and the U.S. military.

Dozens of Taliban fighters snuck into central Kabul on Monday morning and unleashed a brazen assault on government ministries and busy marketplaces, the worst attack in the city in almost a year.

Afghanistan's parliament adjourned today for the winter, leaving 10 seats in President Hamid Karzai's cabinet unfilled, according to the AP. Karzai has the authority to call parliament back, but he will likely leave the current ministers in place or select caretakers of his own to keep the government running until lawmakers return at the end of February.

Correction (1/10/09 5:54 p.m.): I originally wrote that the United States has launched three drone strikes over the weekend. In fact, there were two, making five total since Jan. 1.

Original Post: Heading into 2010, all indications pointed to an increase in the frequency of U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan's tribal border regions. President Obama and his national security team seem to favor them; there were 56 percent more drone attacks in 2009 than in 2008.

So perhaps it should come as no surprise that America is set to blow the 2009 number out of the water. Granted, it's still early, but with the two strikes since my last post on Jan. 6, we're now at five since the New Year, a pace that if kept would yield around 183 in the next 12 months.

Update: Exum responded to me by e-mail, but I don't have permission to use it yet. However, I think it is safe (and important) to tell readers this: Exum did not advise the Obama campaign on Afghan issues. That renders moot most of my concerns regarding conflicts of interest and re-judging Exum's writings in context. More to come later.

Jeremy Scahill, the bane of Blackwater's existence, has a post up noting the arrest and charging of two former Blackwater contractors for second-degree murder and other charges. The federal grand jury indictment accuses Justin Cannon, 27, and Christopher Drotleff, 29, of shooting two unarmed civilians to death in Kabul in May.

Scahill reports that Drotleff and Cannon were with a group of off-duty contractors, some of whom were drinking and carrying guns, a violation of their contract with the Department of Defense. "While stopped for the vehicle accident, the contractors were approached by a vehicle in a manner the contractors felt threatening," according to the U.S. military. They opened fire, killing two and wounding another.

A sharp critique of U.S. military intelligence efforts in Afghanistan, written by Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn, the top intelligence officer in the country, is making waves in Washington, D.C.; even, it seems, inside Flynn's own place of business -- the Pentagon -- which on Tuesday seemed a little taken aback by his decision to publish the article -- which doubles as an official directive -- through the Center for a New American Security.

"I think it struck everybody as a little bit curious, yes ... My sense is that this was an anomaly and that we probably won't see that (in the future)," Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman told Reuters. "It was an unusual and irregular way to publish a document of this nature."

I think Flynn made a bold, honest and correct decision -- he lived up to the expectation of information sharing that he has now demanded from his own officers. (Cynically speaking, he's also made himself look like a great think tank candidate, should he find that the wind leaves his sails after uncorking a grenade like this.)

Afghan President Hamid Karzai asked lawmakers on Monday to suspend their winter vacation so that they can vote on a new list of cabinet nominees, reported Alissa Rubin of the New York Times.

On Saturday, Afghanistan's 246-member Parliament approved just seven of Karzai's 24 nominees, rejecting the rest. Six of those approved were incumbents, including the ministers in charge of defense, interior, finance, education and agriculture, who are believed to have strong American report, Rubin reported over the weekend. However, seven of those rejected were also incumbents.

Observers interviewed by the Times are ambivalent about the political standoff, calling it both a positive sign of legislative independence and a potentially significant problem in a country that is struggling mightily to put together a responsive government.

Update (1/3/09 7:55 p.m.): The New York Times has rounded out the list of the 14 countries that have earned special scrutiny under the new travel rules that will be instituted at midnight tonight. All but two are in the Middle East, and all but one have a majority Muslim population.

Original post: The Obama administration is instituting new rules for the Transportation Security Administration that will require pat-downs and bag searches for every passenger flying into the United States from 14 "terrorism-prone" countries, Politico reports. The 14 countries of origin that have been singled out for extra scrutiny are: Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria - the State Department's four "state sponsors of terrorism" - as well as Nigeria, Pakistan, Yemen, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Algeria.

The man who detonated a suicide bomb in an underground gym at a U.S. Forward Operating Base in Afghanistan on Wednesday, killing seven CIA agents and wounding six others, was a Pakistani informant from the Wazir tribe who had been persuaded by the Taliban to double cross his American handlers, according to ABC News.

The security director at FOB Chapman, an Afghan named Arghawan, would regularly pick up the informant at the Ghulam Khan border crossing from Pakistan to Afghanistan and drive him to Chapman. Because Arghawan accompanied the informant, he was not searched when entering the base, ABC reported.

An Afghan National Army soldier with possible mental health issues opened fire on NATO troops in western Afghanistan today, wounding two Italians and killing one American, Reuters reported.

An Afghan general said the man fired on allied soldiers when they tried to prevent him from approaching a helicopter that was landing, according to FOX News. Italian defense ministry sources said the incident occurred during a routine re-supply operation.

The location of the shooting was a military base in the Bala Murghab district of Badghis province, according to FOX, while Reuters said the Afghan soldier comes from a town north of Kabul and may have mental health problems. He was wounded by return fire and is currently in a hospital.

A couple of news items in the past two days demonstrate the ways in which technology and mathematics are increasingly playing a role in 21st century warfare and, incidentally, how some reporting might misunderstand some technical - but important - details. Today, the Wall Street Journal broke a story about how insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan have "hacked" into U.S. Predator drones using $26 off-the-shelf technology and "intercepted live video feeds" from the Predators' cameras.

Only, I don't see how that's actually possible. The three-member WSJ reporting team led by Siobhan Gorman only mentions one program, the Russian-made SkyGrabber, and although their wording suggests other software might be in play, SkyGrabber doesn't seem capable of intercepting and relaying live video feeds.

Over the past two weeks, a series of American officials have visited Pakistan to deliver a blunt message about the Taliban to that country's military and intelligence divisions: Either you help us take them down, or we'll do it ourselves.

On Monday, General David Petraeus traveled to Islamabad to meet with General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the head of Pakistan's military, and reiterate the demand. Despite the pressure, Pakistan appears resolute in its response: No.

The New York Times adds another data point to the ongoing saga of Blackwater, reporting today that the company's private mercenaries have participated in CIA "snatch and grab" raids in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater expert-in-residence at the Nation, reported last month that an ongoing Blackwater operation in Pakistan and Afghanistan is helping plan and possibly execute U.S. military operations against Taliban and Islamist insurgents in those two countries.

More recently, Vanity Fair reporter Adam Ciralsky has written that Blackwater CEO Erik Prince was actually a CIA asset - an agent on the payrolls.

Combined, the press is starting to put together a pretty frightening story - a private branch of the military and intelligence communities, available for hire but not subject to oversight or governmental regulation. What does it mean when a country outsources its lethal force, and should I, as a U.S. citizen, be troubled that this work is being carried out in my name, though I have very little power to stop it?

There's some newsworthy stuff in the just-released Vanity Fair profile of Xe Services (né Blackwater) CEO Erik Prince, but most important for readers of the Majlis is the assertion, attributed anonymously, that CIA assassination teams aided by Prince targeted Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan, among others.

The story of the Central Intelligence Agency's aborted post-9/11 plan to put together paramilitary hit squads focused on Al-Qaida leaders broke this summer. A month later, the New York Times connected Prince and Blackwater to the program.

Regarding Khan, VF writer Adam Ciralsky says:

The C.I.A. team supposedly tracked him in Dubai. In both cases, the source insists, the authorities in Washington chose not to pull the trigger. Khan's inclusion on the target list, however, would suggest that the assassination effort was broader than has previously been acknowledged.

Remember in 2003, during the invasion of Iraq, when the military released playing cards featuring Iraqi President Saddam Hussein as the ace of spades, his sons Uday and Qusay as the ace of hearts and clubs, respectively, and a host of other Baath party apparatchiks filling out the rest of the deck?

Well here's a version that the Obama administration would probably prefer not to see - a slideshow, put together by Foreign Policy, of Afghan President Hamid Karzai's cronies.

The whole gang's here, from brother Ahmed Wali Karzai, a reputed opium kingpin, to Karim Khalili, one of Hamid Karzai's two vice presidents and a former anti-Taliban militia leader whose soldiers, according to Human Rights Watch in 2003, continued to "rape, kidnap, and forcibly recruit."