Don't worry All's well in Afghanistan
DrWu
4,021 Posts
Bush's one victory in the war on terror is of course a sham. Can't wait to see how this goes down. It would have been nice if we could have finished Osama and the Taliban off before we went and sent everyone to Babylonia. What's next in the war of errors By CARLOTTA GALLPublished: May 3, 2006TIRIN KOT, Afghanistan, April 27 ??? Building on a winter campaign of suicide bombings and assassinations and the knowledge that American troops are leaving, the Taliban appear to be moving their insurgency into a new phase, flooding the rural areas of southern Afghanistan with weapons and men. Darko Zeljkovic for The New York TimesLt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, center, met on Thursday with elders of Uruzgan Province, Afghanistan, urging them to support reform efforts. Each spring with the arrival of warmer weather, the fighting season here starts up, but the scale of the militants' presence and their sheer brazenness have alarmed Afghans and foreign officials far more than in previous years. "The Taliban and Al Qaeda are everywhere," a shopkeeper, Haji Saifullah, told the commander of American forces in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, as the general strolled through the bazaar of this town to talk to people. "It is all right in the city, but if you go outside the city, they are everywhere, and the people have to support them. They have no choice." The fact that American troops are pulling out of southern Afghanistan in the coming months, and handing matters over to NATO peacekeepers, who have repeatedly stated that they are not going to fight terrorists, has given a lift to the insurgents, and increased the fears of Afghans. General Eikenberry appealed for patience and support. "There has not been enough attention paid to Uruzgan," he said in a speech to the elders of Uruzgan Province gathered at the governor's house in Tirin Kot, the provincial capital. "I think the leaders, the Afghan government and the international community recognize this. There is reform coming and this year you will see it." The arrival of large numbers of Taliban in the villages, flush with money and weapons, has dealt a blow to public confidence in the Afghan government, already undermined by lack of tangible progress and frustration with corrupt and ineffective leaders.This small one-street town is in the Taliban heartland, and the message from the townspeople was bleak.Uruzgan, the province where President Hamid Karzai first rallied support against the Taliban in the months after the Sept. 11 attacks, is now, four years later, in the thrall of the Islamic militants once more, and the provincial capital is increasingly surrounded by areas in Taliban control, local and American officials acknowledge. A recent report by a member of the United Nations mission in Afghanistan shown to The New York Times detailed similar fears.The new governor, Maulavi Abdul Hakim Munib, 35, who took up his position just a month ago, controls only a "bubble" around Tirin Kot, an American military officer said. The rest of the province is so thick with insurgents that all the districts are colored amber or red to indicate that on military maps in the nearby American base. Uruzgan has always been troublesome, yet the map marks a deterioration since last year, when at least one central district had been colored green, the officer said."The security situation is not good," Governor Munib told General Eikenberry and a group of cabinet ministers at a meeting with tribal elders. "The number of Taliban and enemy is several times more than that of the police and Afghan National Army in this province," he said.Uruzgan is not the only province teetering out of control. Helmand and Kandahar to the south have been increasingly overrun by militants this year, as large groups of Taliban are reportedly moving through the countryside, intimidating villagers, ambushing vehicles, and spoiling for a fight with coalition or Afghan forces. Insurgents also have the run of parts of Zabul, Ghazni and Paktika Provinces to the southeast, and have increased ambushes on the main Kabul-Kandahar highway. The Bush administration is alarmed, according to a Western intelligence official close to the administration. He said that while senior members of the administration consider the situation in Iraq to be not as bad as portrayed in the press, in Afghanistan the situation is worse than it has been generally portrayed. Asked about the surge in Taliban activity in southern Afghanistan, a Pentagon spokesman, Bryan Whitman, said: "We have seen Taliban activity fluctuate from time to time." The British-led NATO force taking over from the American troops in the south "has well-equipped, well-led and fully prepared forces to operate in this challenging environment and deal with any threats," he added.He noted that the United States would continue to be the largest contributor of troops to Afghanistan, and would continue to have primary responsibility for counterterrorism operations and for training Afghan Army units, even with NATO taking over in the south.In one of the most serious developments, some 200 Taliban have moved into the district of Panjwai, only a 20-minute drive from the capital of the south, Kandahar, Mr. Karzai's home city. The police and coalition forces clashed with them two weeks ago, yet the Taliban returned, walking in the villages openly with their weapons, and sitting under the trees eating mulberries, according to a resident of the district.The resident, who asked not to be named for fear of reprisals, said the Taliban had been demanding food, lodging and the Muslim tithing, zakat, from villagers. Their brazenness and the failure of the United States-led coalition to deter them is turning public opinion about the effectiveness of the government. For the first time the Afghan government has sent 500 men of the newly trained Afghan National Army to the neglected province. The official police force of Uruzgan is 347 strong, with 45 men deployed in each of the five districts, but far fewer actually turn up for work. American officials estimated armed Taliban in the province numbered from 300 to 1,000 men. The governor estimated there were 300 armed insurgents in each district.The Taliban are warning the people to expect more attacks, the shopkeeper, Mr. Saifullah, told General Eikenberry. "During the day the people, the police, and the army are with the government, but during the night, the people, the police, and the army are all with the Taliban and Al Qaeda," he said. Another man, Rahmatullah, told the general that his brother had been arrested by American forces and the raids and house searches had made the young men take to the hills to join the militants. "Release my brother and the tribal elders will persuade the young men to come back home and stop fighting," he said. "The unemployment rate is very high and the people of Uruzgan are very poor," said Mullah Hamdullah, the elected head of the provincial council. Unsure of the strength and commitment to fight of the incoming NATO forces ??? with British, Canadian, Dutch and Australian contingents ??? Afghan provincial officials, who stand first in the Taliban's firing line, have demanded that Mr. Karzai provide them with hundreds more police officers and weapons. The governors of Uruzgan and Kandahar both said in interviews that they have lobbied the president for a force of 200 police officers for every district ??? four times current numbers ??? and to provide more resources to equip and supply them properly.In a recent strategy review, Mr. Karzai agreed to increase the government presence in the frontline provinces, his chief of staff, Jawed Ludin, said. "We a
re increasingly hearing this, that there only 40 officers per district, and half of them are protecting the district chief as bodyguards, and the other half are on leave," he said. A deputy minister of the interior, Abdul Malik Siddiqi, told the gathering that the government had a plan to send 200 to 250 police officers to each district of Uruzgan, and to find resources to equip them and pay their salaries.General Eikenberry expressed caution about the idea, warning that there were not enough trained officers to send to the area, and more important, a lack of good leaders to control those police forces. Uruzgan has suffered from a lingering Taliban presence and its forbidding terrain, which has made security and governing extremely difficult, resulting in neglect from the central government, he said. There has been no police reform or training here, no presence of the Afghan National Army and virtually no development, he said. General Eikenberry is hoping to turn things around this year with new and better local leaders. "Now we see a lot of those conditions changing," he said, in an interview in the cockpit of the C130 military plane on the way to Uruzgan. Replacing the governor, and police and intelligence chiefs, should allow for reform and better governance, he said. Some 500 men of the national army have been deployed in the province and the police should receive better resources.Hopes are pinned on Maulavi Munib, an educated, religious man from eastern Afghanistan, who was deputy minister of tribal affairs of the Taliban government. He is starting from scratch since the former governor sold all his vehicles, including police vehicles, and all the arms and ammunition owned by the province. Governor Munib's past brings an added complication, since he remains listed by the United Nations Security Council sanctions committee as a wanted member of the Taliban leadership, which technically bars any government from providing financial, technical or military assistance to his province.The Afghan government has formally requested that he, and three other former Taliban officials, including two members of Afghanistan's new Parliament, be removed from the list, a process that demands the agreement of all Security Council members, but Afghan officials said Russia remained opposed to the proposal.
re increasingly hearing this, that there only 40 officers per district, and half of them are protecting the district chief as bodyguards, and the other half are on leave," he said. A deputy minister of the interior, Abdul Malik Siddiqi, told the gathering that the government had a plan to send 200 to 250 police officers to each district of Uruzgan, and to find resources to equip them and pay their salaries.General Eikenberry expressed caution about the idea, warning that there were not enough trained officers to send to the area, and more important, a lack of good leaders to control those police forces. Uruzgan has suffered from a lingering Taliban presence and its forbidding terrain, which has made security and governing extremely difficult, resulting in neglect from the central government, he said. There has been no police reform or training here, no presence of the Afghan National Army and virtually no development, he said. General Eikenberry is hoping to turn things around this year with new and better local leaders. "Now we see a lot of those conditions changing," he said, in an interview in the cockpit of the C130 military plane on the way to Uruzgan. Replacing the governor, and police and intelligence chiefs, should allow for reform and better governance, he said. Some 500 men of the national army have been deployed in the province and the police should receive better resources.Hopes are pinned on Maulavi Munib, an educated, religious man from eastern Afghanistan, who was deputy minister of tribal affairs of the Taliban government. He is starting from scratch since the former governor sold all his vehicles, including police vehicles, and all the arms and ammunition owned by the province. Governor Munib's past brings an added complication, since he remains listed by the United Nations Security Council sanctions committee as a wanted member of the Taliban leadership, which technically bars any government from providing financial, technical or military assistance to his province.The Afghan government has formally requested that he, and three other former Taliban officials, including two members of Afghanistan's new Parliament, be removed from the list, a process that demands the agreement of all Security Council members, but Afghan officials said Russia remained opposed to the proposal.
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Im sorry dun but although as you point out there have been errors in afghanistan, just as there have been in ever military undertaking in the history of the earth, the likelyhood of american defeat in the region is slim to nil.
From the Toronto Star
Afghans lay down arms, slowly
May 3, 2006. 05:27 AM
It is inconceivable, to me, why any right-thinking Afghan would ever divest himself of whatever weapons are in his possession.
There is, first of all, an endemic culture of militancy and fierce, maverick independence. Arms have always been central to the man.
Further, obviously, Afghanistan today remains an extremely dangerous place, more so for Afghans than anyone else. They are at risk from warlords, meandering militias, Taliban and Al Qaeda remnants, criminals, tribal enemies and, more often than is admitted, corrupt bullies at the district and local government levels.
Yet, according to the United Nations, 62,000 "factional militiamen" have thus far availed themselves of a demobilizing program offered under the Disarmament Demobilization Reintegration Project.
A drop in the ocean, admittedly, for a country bristling with an estimated 40 million weapons, mostly the ubiquitous Kalashnikov rifle and rocket-propelled grenade launchers.
National reconciliation, however, is central to the campaign for legitimacy upon which President Hamid Karzai launched his government, reiterated when the democratically elected parliament convened last December.
And that reconciliation, borrowed from the heal-and-forgive model that proved effective in South Africa post-apartheid, acknowledges that rebels can be ??? most often were ??? patriots; that self-preservation motivated a great many "enemies of the state," particularly when there was no state to speak of; and that orthodoxy was rarely a common denominator even for those who supported the Taliban, particularly in the days when those fundamentalists offered security and sanity to a deranged nation.
But reintegrating former combatants into this new quasi-democratic society ??? one that is not safely beyond the tipping-point from which it might plunge back into anarchy ??? is a formidable undertaking.
The objective, under the Disbanding Illegal Armed Group program ??? and there are about 2,000 such groups in Afghanistan ??? is to lure back more than 100,000 key, targeted individuals, aligned with those small to vast militias.
In Kabul, there exists a central list on which the names of those individuals appear. Many of them, such as district commanders and police chiefs, have sworn allegiance to Karzai's government. A few ??? one-time powerful warlords, including Abdul Rashid Dostum, Atta Mohammad and Ismail Khan ??? have actually taken up positions in the administration, a bewildering transformation for former potentates who might very well have been prosecuted as war criminals. And quite a few were top-ranking Taliban who have reversed themselves, voluntarily and following negotiation, in order to come in out of the cold.
The vast majority, however, were anonymous Taliban foot soldiers ??? their names appear on no formal list ??? who've had a bellyful of fighting and who just want to get on with their lives, free of fear and hounding. It is largely from them that 36,000 small arms and heavy combat weapons have been collected in the past three years, under a program administered, in its first phase, by the Japanese.
In its second phase, the goal is to demobilize a further 100,000 Afghans within the next two years.
What those Afghans get out of it is $200 (U.S.) in exchange for their weapons and, if the ambitious program works ??? a big if ??? some kind of job training, as available, for those who were previously full-time fighters. (Under a UN-sponsored program announced just last week, the government will offer teacher training to the wives of former militia commanders. That five-month course has been accepted already by 563 women.)
It is also hoped ??? a big hope ??? that former militia commanders, including ex-Taliban, can be attracted to Afghanistan's legitimate security forces. (The Afghan National Army has grown to 27,000, with a target of 70,000 by 2008. An American-supported training program estimates another 62,000 Afghan National Police will be on the streets ??? they're the front-line troops against insurgents ??? within two years.)
Mullah Hajji Noor Agha won't be one of them. He no longer wishes to fight anybody, including his former Taliban colleagues. But he is an ex-Taliban fighter who did turn in his weapons last year, allegedly everything he had.
"I had, personally, two AK, three Russian Makarovs and about 2,000 rounds of ammo," he told the Toronto Star in a recent interview.
With a sly smile, he added: "At the moment, all I have left is a small scissors that I use to trim my beard and moustache."
This must all be taken with several grains of salt. But at age 41, with six children, Noor Agha insists all his fighting days are behind him.
"I had been with the Taliban for five and a half years," he says. "In the beginning, we fought mostly against those people who had supported the Russians and then the government of President (Burhanuddin) Rabbani. In the last two years, I was fighting against coalition forces.
"But then I lost my younger brother in a battle in Zabul province. He was only 28 years old. And I hadn't seen my family in almost two years."
That's when he decided enough was enough. "I accepted the disarmament offer from the government."
Noor Agha became a "Taleb," in the beginning, because they seemed the best antidote for a reviled and corrupt regime. Only they appeared capable of making Afghanistan whole again.
"Everyone wanted to join back then because we were all fed up with the Rabbani regime," he says. "They were kidnapping boys, firing at innocent people on the road, looting the houses, taking women by force, raping young girls.
"So, everybody was keen to join the Taliban. You must understand, at the beginning, they seemed like very good people. But as they got more power, with the passage of time, they changed all the rules.
"And some bad people had joined the Taliban by then. They spoiled the name and the regime of the Taliban. These were people from Pakistan, they weren't even Afghans, and they were sent here by the (Pakistani intelligence agency) ISI."
They were, says Noor Agha, alien to Afghanistan, even in formidably conservative Kandahar. Yet he grants that many Taliban have support in the southern provinces, particularly in rural areas.
"They still enjoy respect, honour, in the outlying areas and the small villages and along the border. There, the people believe that the coalition forces are infidels, that they don't have the right to come into Muslim countries by force, like they did in Iraq and Afghanistan."
It will take a long time, and quantifiable evidence, before these Afghans will be convinced that foreign soldiers mean them no harm; that they're here to help reconstruct a country rather than occupy and impose foreign concepts.
Noor Agha warns: "I would like to advise the Western countries not to interfere in Islam and between Muslims. If they want to build schools for girls, they should build madrassas for the boys as well. There are many things that go against Islam and they should learn to respect, more, our traditions. This is what will make us happy and then they will be happy, too."
However the future unfolds, Noor Agha doubts he will ever take up arms against anybody again. Unless ??? because there's always an unless ??? Afghanistan collapses entirely and his family is threatened.
"I don't want to be called a terrorist any more. I don't want to be part of any group. I just want to serve my family."
I can't believe your such a stupid alias that you would support totally incompentent and corrupt leaders who are dragging us into a mire that will take decades to recover from. But then again your fake. So I should probably use this space to talk about how poorly the one war on terror that almost all Americans supported has been executed. My God what's next from these clowns?