Warning: Undefined array key "rbname" in /data/rantburg.com/www/pgrecentorg.php on line 14
Hello !
Recent Appearances... Rantburg

Afghanistan
NATO to lead all Afghan peacekeeping from next month
2006-09-28
NATO agreed on Thursday to take command of peacekeeping across all of insurgency-hit
Afghanistan next month after the United States pledged to transfer an extra 12,000 troops to its force. Pentagon officials said the transfer of troops currently in Afghanistan's eastern region would entail the biggest deployment of U.S. forces under foreign command since World War Two.

Afghanistan is experiencing the most serious violence since hardline Taliban Islamists were ousted in 2001. Militant attacks in eastern Afghanistan, near the border with Pakistan, have tripled in some areas, the U.S. military said on Thursday, despite a peace agreement on the Pakistani side meant to end the violence.

Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf stressed his commitment to fighting the Taliban in talks with British Prime Minister Tony Blair. "President Musharraf said he was determined to deal with the Taliban and reduce the level of cross-border activity," a spokesman for the prime minister said.

The NATO accord came as European nations failed to plug all troop shortfalls identified by commanders battling the Taliban insurgency, and will mean the United States providing 14,000 of some 32,000 NATO troops that will be under British command. "I am grateful that the United States has decided to bring its forces under ISAF," Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer told reporters after a NATO meeting in Slovenia, referring to NATO's International Security Assistance Force. "It should not be used as an argument that we can now rest on our laurels," he added, urging other allies to come forward with extra troops for the more dangerous south.

U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said it was "perfectly understandable" if other NATO allies restricted where their troops could operate, but added it undermined NATO's flexibility on the ground. "The aggregation of that is the situation that's really not acceptable," he told a news conference. "I believe a little more progress was made today and we'll just have to keep working on it."

RESURGENT TALIBAN

The U.S. troop transfer had been expected later in the year, but alliance officials said battles with resurgent guerrillas in the south showed the urgent need to pool British, Dutch and Canadian troops under NATO with separate U.S. forces.

The Taliban resurgence has soured relations between Kabul and Islamabad, crucial allies in the U.S.-led war on terrorism that are both battling Islamist militants. Afghanistan and Pakistan have agreed to tighten security cooperation and to hold meetings of tribal leaders to encourage them to go after militants, Afghanistan's ambassador in Washington said on Thursday. Ambassador Said Jawad, providing details of a dinner on Wednesday at the White House attended by the U.S., Afghan and Pakistani presidents, said Pakistan had agreed to take action against militants based on Afghan intelligence. "Pakistan agreed that if it is provided with specific demands, names or lists of targets that it will comply," Jawad said in a brief interview.

Afghanistan is angry about the support a resurgent Taliban can get in Pakistan and is suspicious of a peace agreement struck in Pakistan this month. The pact is meant to end violence by pro-Taliban militants in Pakistan's North Waziristan border region. It is also meant to choke off cross-border attacks into Afghanistan. But the number of attacks on the Afghan side of the mountainous border, in the provinces of Paktika and Khost, had risen since the pact was signed, the U.S. military said. "There has been an increase in activity, certainly along the border region, especially in the southeast areas across from North Waziristan," a U.S. military spokesman, Colonel John Paradis, told a news conference. Referring to accounts from soldiers on the ground, Paradis said: "They have seen, in some cases two-fold, in some cases three-fold increases in the number of attacks."
Link


Afghanistan
Afghan ambassador to US sez Taliban have safe havens in Pakistan
2006-06-07
The Afghan ambassador to the United States, Said Jawad, was quoted here on Saturday as having stated that the Taliban have been emboldened by more advanced weaponry and greater mobility within the country and across the porous border to terrorist safe havens in Pakistan, and that "this is something even the Government of Pakistan does not dispute."

The ambassador's remarks appeared in a report relating to Afghanistan in the Washington Times. The report, quoting the BBC, said, "Pakistan-based foreign militants with links to Al Qaeda and experience in Iraq have been offering large bounties to Afghans to kill US soldiers and have encouraged the wider use of suicide bombings and kidnappings."

The Afghan envoy also said that the Taliban rely on "intimidation tactics" such as hiding in villages, burning down schools and medical clinics, and killing moderate tribal leaders and clergy to create a climate of fear. He said it was critical that the international community help reinforce the capacity of the cash-strapped Afghan government to deliver services "so the presence of the state will be felt in areas experiencing attacks."
Link


Afghanistan
Experts say Taliban making a comeback, blame Iraq war
2006-05-19
Taliban insurgents and their al-Qaeda allies, once thought defeated in Afghanistan, are regaining strength as the U.S. prepares to cede military control of the war on terror's initial battleground to NATO forces. ``We have lost a lot of the ground that we may have gained in the country, especially in the South,'' Afghanistan's ambassador to the U.S., Said Jawad, said in an interview. The fact that U.S. military resources have been ``diverted'' to the war in Iraq ``is of course hurting Afghanistan,'' he said.
Which is why the Brits and Canadians are there, since we trust them to do the same job we did.
The escalating violence is reviving questions about President George W. Bush's decision to make Iraq the central front in the war on terrorism. Instability in Afghanistan could allow Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network to regroup there, analysts said.

``Afghanistan is a wild, tribal place in which the various armed actors take advantage of any decrease in pressure,'' said W. Patrick Lang, former chief Middle East analyst at the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency. ``We pulled troops out and put them in Iraq and that took pressure off. I don't think the U.S. effort there backsliding should come as any surprise.''

Bush administration officials and military commanders say they're optimistic that conditions in Afghanistan will improve. ``We should take stock of the tremendous progress that Afghanistan and the international community have made to date and apply that same commitment to the difficulties that lie ahead,'' Army Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry, head of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, said in a May 10 Pentagon briefing.

Some experts on defense policy and the region say that confidence is misplaced. ``They absolutely miscalculated from the beginning,'' said Barney Rubin, director of New York University's Center on International Cooperation. ``We don't have enough forces where they should'' be, and ``that has absolutely led to insurgency,'' said Rubin, who visited Afghanistan last month.
The lack of forces didn't lead to insurgency, the insurgency has been there all along. We've rotated forces, and the new forces will take some time to get things back into the box.
Nazif Shahrani, a professor of Central Asian and Middle East Studies at Indiana University at Bloomington who focuses on Afghanistan, said, ``If we were serious about the war on terror we should have focused our efforts on fighting a more effective war on the Pakistani side of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.''

``Instead,'' he added, ``we focused on Iraq and that gave the Taliban and al-Qaeda time to regroup and find money and weapons.''

There have been at least five suicide bombings in Afghanistan since May 8 and more than 20 in the past two months, the U.S.-funded Voice of America reported on its Web site, citing officials it didn't identify. ``There wasn't the drop-off'' in attacks ``we normally see in the winter months,'' said Chris Riley, a NATO spokesman. ``We're not characterizing it as a resurgence, but there is a level of activity in the south and east.''

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization has begun assuming security operations in southern Afghanistan, a process due to be completed in July, Riley said. The multinational force will increase its troop strength to about 21,000 from 9,000 and will assume responsibility for the entire country, probably by the end of the year, he said. The U.S. plans to withdraw 6,500 of its 23,000 troops now in the country because NATO and Afghan security forces are assuming a bigger role. The Afghan National Army has 34,000 soldiers and the police have about 30,000 officers.

Some Afghan officials are concerned NATO forces won't be as aggressive as U.S. troops in countering insurgents. ``We are discouraged by some of the statements coming from the NATO countries that they will not engage the terrorists,'' said Jawad, the Afghan ambassador. ``If they are coming, then they should be ready to fight the terrorists.''
The Brits and Canadians will be. The rest?
NATO officials say they will operate aggressively. Britain has already sent more than 3,000 troops and eight Apache attack helicopters to Afghanistan's southern Helmand province in a show of force, Riley said. ``I am pretty sure its going to be fairly robust stuff from NATO for the first few months,'' said Riley. ``People on the ground have to know that we're not screwing around.''

Military officials trace the rising violence in Afghanistan to Pakistan's continuing failure to control its borders. Insurgents enjoy sanctuary in western Pakistan and cross over the mountainous border into Afghanistan to launch attacks. Al-Qaeda fighters ``have sanctuaries on both sides of the border,'' Lieutenant General Sher Karimi, the Afghan Army's chief of operations, said at a May 4 briefing.
They do, don't they. At some point we'll get Perv to look the other way.
Taliban and al-Qaeda are ``no doubt'' making a comeback in at least nine of Afghanistan's 30 provinces, not just the five bordering Pakistan, said Shahrani. ``There have also been incidences in urban areas in the North as well as in Kabul.''

``Troops being moved out of Iraq should be redeployed to Afghanistan,'' said Caroline Wadhams, senior national security analyst with the Center for American Progress, a Washington-based policy research group. The level of U.S. troops there ``needs to double,'' she said.
Thanks Caroline. Here. Here's a rifle. Care to join our troops?
Link



Warning: Undefined property: stdClass::$T in /data/rantburg.com/www/pgrecentorg.php on line 132
-3 More