Military Report Shows Afghan Surge Complete Failure

The Taliban insurgency is as strong as ever, Kabul is weak, and overall violence has not subsided.

Anti-War

John Glaser

The US-led NATO military command in Afghanistan has found in a new report that the surge ordered by President Barack Obama has failed to improve conditions on the ground, according to Wired‘s Danger Room.

“That conclusion doesn’t come from anti-war advocates,” Danger Room reports. “It relies on data recently released by the NATO command in Afghanistan, known as ISAF, and acquired by Danger Room. According to most of the yardsticks chosen by the military — but not all — the surge in Afghanistan fell short of its stated goal: stopping the Taliban’s momentum.”

The ISAF report primarily aggregates data on insurgent attacks, and documents that the NATO surge, training operations, and occupation of Afghanistan have not mitigated those trends.

In August 2009, as the Obama administration was preparing for the surge, insurgents attacked occupation forces approximately 2,700 times. And in August 2012, they attacked just under 3,000 times.

The more than 30,000 surge troops deployed to Afghanistan were completed their withdrawal from the country last week. But the Taliban insurgency is as strong as ever, Kabul has not been able to build up stable and independent security forces, and overall violence has not subsided.

AP’s Burns: ISAF Systematically Under-Reporting Green on Blue Attacks

Empty Wheel

For several months, I’ve been hammering on the Obama administration and the US military for describing green on blue attacks in Afghanistan, where Afghan military or police personnel attack NATO forces, as “isolated incidents“. In choosing the framing of isolated incidents, these officials are ignoring a seminal report issued just under a year ago, “A Crisis of Trust and Cultural Incompatibility” (pdf), which went into great detail in describing the cultural misunderstandings that lead Afghan forces to attack their coalition “partners”. Shortly after the report was released as unclassified, the US seemed to realize how damaging it is to the preferred narrative of isolated incidents explaining the attacks, and so it was decided that the report should be retroactively classified.

Yesterday, the AP’s Robert Burns made a major breakthrough in the story of green on blue attacks. Burns reported that the US military, in the form of ISAF, has maintained a policy of not reporting on soldiers who are wounded in green on blue attacks. As a result of reporting only fatalities, both the number of attacks and the number of coalition troops affected by them have been significantly under-reported:

The military is under-reporting the number of times that Afghan soldiers and police open fire on American and other foreign troops.

The U.S.-led coalition routinely reports each time an American or other foreign soldier is killed by an Afghan in uniform. But The Associated Press has learned it does not report insider attacks in which the Afghan wounds – or misses – his U.S. or allied target. It also doesn’t report the wounding of troops who were attacked alongside those who were killed.

/snip/

U.S. cites "heightened threat"; 9 killed in Afghan airport bomb

(Reuters) - A suicide car bomber killed nine people in an attack on a military airport in eastern Afghanistan on Monday, officials said, the latest bloodshed since copies of the Koran were burned at a NATO base last week.

There was no official indication the explosion at the gates of Jalalabad airport was linked to the deadly protests, but the Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack as "revenge" for the Koran burnings.

Nineteen Afghan civilians and law enforcement officers and four NATO soldiers were wounded in the blast, a spokesman for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Nangarhar province, of which Jalalabad is the capital, said.

Jalalabad airport is almost exclusively used by NATO and the U.S. military.

Anti-Western fury has deepened significantly since the desecration of the Muslim holy book at the main NATO Bagram air base in Afghanistan. NATO described the incident as a tragic blunder.

The U.S. Embassy warned of a "heightened" threat to American citizens in Afghanistan and many Westerners are on "lock down", meaning they are not allowed out of their fortified compounds.
Riots have raged across Afghanistan over the past week despite widespread apologies from U.S. leaders, including President Barack Obama and military commanders.

Seven U.S. military trainers were wounded on Sunday when a grenade was thrown at their base in Afghanistan's north.

Chants of "Death to America!" have come to characterize the protests and some demonstrators have hoisted the white Taliban flag.

With few signs of the crisis abating, the U.S. ambassador said the United States should resist the urge to pull troops out of Afghanistan ahead of schedule.

"Tensions are running very high here. I think we need to let things calm down, return to a more normal atmosphere, and then get on with business," Ambassador Ryan Crocker told CNN.

"This is not the time to decide that we are done here. We have got to redouble our efforts. We've got to create a situation that al Qaeda is not coming back," he said.

Under an international agreement, foreign combat forces are due to leave Afghanistan by the end of 2014, a process which is already under way.

WIDESPREAD ANGER

The groundswell of anger over the burning of the Koran, which Muslims revere as the literal word of God, has highlighted the challenges ahead as Western forces try to quell violence and bring about some form of reconciliation with the Taliban.

The violence has killed more than 30 people and wounded at least 200, including two U.S. troops shot dead by an Afghan soldier who joined rallies in the east. Two U.S. officers were also shot at close range inside the Interior Ministry.

In an interview from Rabat, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the violence was "out of hand and it needs to stop".

The shooting of two U.S. officers deep inside the heavily fortified Interior Ministry on Saturday has intensified the sense of unease among Westerners and deepened the divide with their Afghan counterparts.

The attack illustrates the dilemma faced by NATO forces as they move away from a combat role to an advise-and-assist mission, which will require them to place more staff in ministries.

With the 2014 timetable unfolding, pressure is growing for an earlier pullout, especially among Washington's allies in Europe, where the bloody and expensive war is deeply unpopular.

The high-level killings prompted NATO, Britain, Germany and Canada to withdraw their staff from Afghan ministries.

The Taliban also took responsibility for the Interior Ministry attack, although the Islamist group often exaggerates claims involving attacks against Western forces.

On Sunday, the ministry said one of its employees was a suspect in the shooting of the two U.S. officers. Afghan security sources also identified a 25-year-old police intelligence officer as a suspect.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai has repeatedly urged calm and restraint, although he also maintains that those who burned the Korans must be prosecuted.

Similar desecration of the Koran in the past have also sparked violence, although not as widespread and persistent as the riots and protests over the past week.

Last April, seven foreign U.N. staff were killed when protesters overran a base in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif after an obscure pastor from a fringe church in the United States deliberately burned a copy of the Koran.

(Additional reporting by Mirwais Harooni in KABUL, Fraidoon Elhaam in KUNDUZ, Rafiq Sherzad in Jalalabad, and Jackie Frank in WASHINGTON; Editing by Michael Georgy and Nick Macfie)

Robert Fisk: From Washington this looks like Syria's 'Benghazi moment'. But not from here

The Independent
Robert Fiske

Look east and what does Bashar see? Iran standing with him and Iraq refusing to impose sanctions

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!”

The Afghan Dust is Settling

Global Research
Eric Walburg

Yes, it really is another Vietnam, and just as in 1972, presidential elections will make no difference.

Scarcely a word is heard about foreign affairs amid US election talk, despite the many fires around the world that the US military is either stoking or trying to douse -- depending on your point of view. Other than Republican contender Ron Paul -- not a serious candidate for the mainstream -- no one questions the plans for war on Iran, Israel’s continued expansion in the Occupied Territories, or US plans to end the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

The problem is that decisions about these vital American policies are not for mere presidents or presidential hopefuls to mull over. The one principled decision that US President Barack Obama made, his first upon coming to office, was to announce that he would close Guantanamo Bay prison within a year. After all, he had voted against his predecessor’s ill-fated invasion of Iraq, and it was on this basis that he was able to energise an otherwise disillusioned Democratic base and surge past the more acceptable white alternatives Hillary Clinton and John McCain.

Obama’s record on foreign policy has been shocking in retrospect. His call from Cairo for a new dispensation in the Middle East soon after his vow to close Guantanamo, along with this vow, are now in history’s dustbin. His enthusiastic embrace of the worst of Bush’s policies, from drones, assassinations and mercenaries to Orwellian police-state security are frightening proof of the helplessness of US politicians these days.

No better evidence that this paralysis will make the next four years the most perilous in US history is found in the bloody news dripping out of Afghanistan. NATO soldiers, Afghan soldiers and police, resistance fighters, and, of course, women and children continue to be killed at alarming rates, even as the Taliban open an office in Qatar (originally denied by all parties). Peace negotiations came to a standstill last year after the assassination of High Peace Council chief Burhanudin Rabbani (Afghan president 1992-96) by a visitor posing as a peace messenger from the Taliban.

A total of 560 NATO soldiers, most of them Americans, were killed in Afghanistan in 2011, the second highest number in the 10-year war, down from a high of 711 in 2010 after the start of Obama’s surge, still higher than the 521 in 2009.

But according to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, “security-related events” were up by 21 per cent in 2011 compared to 2010. By this he meant attacks such as the car bombing of an International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) convoy in Kabul last October which killed 17, the shooting down of a helicopter in Wardak south of the capital last August in which 30 US troops perished, and the explosion that killed at least 80 people in a shrine in Kabul on the Shia holy day of Ashura in early December. Many ISAF deaths are at the hands of Afghan soldiers. The recent Abu Ghraib-type scandal of US soldiers defiling Afghan dead merely ups this perverse ante.

Pakistan diplomat rages on "how we have been treated"

CBS News
Pamela Falk



As Americans mark the 10th anniversary of the Afghanistan conflict, relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan and the U.S. and Pakistan are increasingly strained because of the violent attacks that the Haqqani network, a fierce militant group tied to al Qaeda and based in Pakistan, have brought to the Afghan insurgency, particularly attacks on U.S. troops.

American officials have asserted that Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) has ties to the Taliban and to the Haqqani network, although U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta this week said Pakistan has been asked to take action against the Haqqani network where, he said, they take safe haven.

Several reports with dueling statistics reflect the challenges facing the Afghan government of President Hamid Karzai and the difficulties with the tiered handover of security from the NATO-led coalition to the Afghan police and army. The U.N. Secretary-General's recent report, "The situation in Afghanistan and its implications for international peace and security," says incidents involving armed clashes and improvised explosive devices were up 39 percent compared to the same time last year.
The NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) cited a decrease of 2 percent, using different data, an estimated 25 percent fewer incidents than those recorded by the U.N. But both reports attributed around four-fifths of civilian casualties to insurgent attacks - by any accounts, a troubling trend.

U.S.-Pakistan relations are at an all-time low. Pakistan's U.N. Ambassador Abdullah Hussein Haroon, speaking to CBS News about the allegations of Pakistani-ISI links to insurgents, said that Pakistan wants to end terrorism in his country and that Washington and Afghanistan are blaming Pakistan, making it the scapegoat for a conflict which victimizes Pakistan more than it hurts the U.S. or Afghanistan.

"For the past few months it's been the U.S. who keeps trying to put pressure by saying Pakistan this or Pakistan that," Haroon said. "That policy needs reappraisal. You need to talk as allies, don't talk down to us. This is not going to succeed. Politics should be transactional, not coercive. We want success. We don't want this mess on our doorstep for the next 100 years. It's not of our making, not of our choosing, not of our doing. We've paid the highest price for this war."

As the U.S. assesses the projected dates for the drawdown of U.S. troops and the recent spike in some types of violent incidents, a CBS News poll found that, although most Americans support the military, the American public thinks the United States should not be fighting in Afghanistan and the war has not been worth it.

Video: Afghan war takes 2 steps forward, 1 step back

Video: U.S. counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan

Special report: Afghanistan, Ten years later

Pakistan's U.N. Ambassador, who has been in his country's foreign service all his adult life, said bluntly that the U.S. had ignored the lessons of history in deciding to, and how to, invade Afghanistan.

"The Soviets lost Afghanistan by not learning the lessons of history... History is again repeating itself because the Americans have repeated the mistakes made by the Soviets and everyone else."
Haroon said U.S. leaders "overestimated their own capabilities and underestimated those of the Afghan guerillas."

The ambassador accuses the U.S. of underestimating the Taliban.

"I believe this needs to be reassessed because misappreciation of the enemy has always led to military setbacks."

Adding to his list of alleged U.S. failures, Haroon said American military commanders failed to assess the physical terrain on which they were planning to fight.

All the errors, he said, "contributed to the impasse which has resulted in Afghanistan."

As U.S.-Pakistan relations sour and anti-U.S. troop sentiment in Pakistan rises, Haroon offered some advice: "You cannot solve Afghanistan without Pakistan and Pakistan cannot be free of its own troubles without Afghanistan first being free of all its troubles. That is the conundrum."

NATO air strike kills 12 children, two women

Ugly Truth

An air strike called in by NATO-led troops in southern Afghanistan killed 12 children and two women, Afghan officials said on Sunday, one of the worst civilian death tolls by foreign forces in months.

A U.S. Marine base came under fire from insurgents in Taliban stronghold of Helmand on Saturday, the Helmand governor said in a statement, leading the base to call for help from the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).

 ”ISAF’s air strike took place on two civilian houses. Unfortunately 14 innocent civilians were killed and six civilians wounded,” the Helmand governor’s statement said.
 It said seven boys, five girls and two women were among the dead. Three children were among the six wounded, it said.

 An ISAF spokesman in Kabul said: “We are aware of the reports that alleged civilians were killed yesterday in Helmand.” He said an assessment team had been sent to the area and would issue its findings shortly.

 The mistaken killing of civilians by foreign troops, usually during air strikes or “night raids,” is a major source of friction between Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his Western backers, and complicates efforts to win support from ordinary Afghans for an increasingly unpopular war.

 On Saturday, Karzai ordered the Defense Ministry to take control of so-called “night raids,” saying Afghan troops should be carrying out the sensitive operations themselves.
 Afghans say the raids, carried out in darkness on houses suspected of harboring insurgents, often lead to civilian casualties.

 Residents and local officials from Helmand’s Nawzad district, where the air strike took place, said the attack began at around 11 p.m. local time (0630 GMT) on Friday night.

 Bereaved male relatives cradled the bodies of several young children on Sunday, who were wrapped in bloody sheets and placed side to side, and brought them in the back of a truck to the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, Reuters pictures showed.

 ”My house was bombarded in the middle of the night and my children were killed … the Taliban were far away from my home, why was my house bombed?” relative Noor Agha told Reuters.

 The NATO air strike comes at a time of high anti-Western sentiment in Afghanistan and days after deadly protests by thousands of people against a night raid by NATO troops in which four people, including two women, were killed.

 Twelve people were killed during those violent protests and clashes with police in usually peaceful northern Takhar province and more 80 were wounded.

 In February, four days of joint operations by Afghan and foreign troops killed 64 civilians in the eastern Kunar province, including many women and children.

 That assault followed a NATO rocket attack last July which killed 39 civilians, almost all women or children, in Helmand.

 Under a plan agreed by NATO leaders in Lisbon last year, foreign troops will begin handing over security responsibilities to Afghan troops from July, with a plan to withdraw all combat troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2014.

 Despite the presence of some 150,000 foreign troops, violence in Afghanistan last year reached its deadliest phase since U.S.-backed Afghan forces toppled the Taliban in 2001, with record casualties on all sides. This year is following a similar trend.

 The Taliban this month announced the start of a long-awaited “spring offensive” vowing to carry out attacks, including suicide assaults, on foreign and Afghan troops and government officials.