KABUL—A Taliban insurgent driving a vehicle packed with explosives slammed into a U.S. military convoy in Kabul on Saturday, killing at least 13 Americans inside an armored vehicle, according to Western officials and eyewitnesses in Afghanistan.
The midday attack, which also killed at least four Afghans, was believed to be the deadliest strike on American forces in the relatively secure Afghan capital in a decade of war.
NATO's International Security Assistance Force said that those killed were five ISAF soldiers and eight civilian employees.
U.S. Gen. John R. Allen, commander of coalition forces in Afghanistan, said he was "saddened and outraged" by Saturday's attacks. "The enemies of peace are not martyrs, but murderers," he said.
The Kabul bombing was the worst in a series of attacks across Afghanistan on Saturday, showcasing the insurgency's resilience despite recent coalition assertions of reversing the war's momentum.
In the southern Uruzgan province, an Afghan army officer opened fire on his Western comrades, killing three Australian soldiers and an Afghan interpreter, according to the U.S.-led coalition and Western officials.
The attacks came a day after a new Pentagon report hailed a summer drop in violence as a sign that the insurgency is losing steam. Top military officials in Afghanistan argued that President Barack Obama's military surge of 30,000 extra forces had reversed the Taliban momentum and given the U.S.-led coalition a new advantage.
I have to think this isn't helping at all. Considering we've had an all-but-declared assault on the Pakistan border for years now, it might be time for Sec. of State Clinton to get over to Pakistan and have a very serious discussion. If the ultimate goal--the only way to "victory" in Afghanistan--is to neutralize the Taliban entirely, this is a good indication we're never going to see victory, since the Taliban is being supported by some high ranking official Pakistani organizations:
Pakistan's main spy agency continues to arm and train the Taliban and is even represented on the group's leadership council despite U.S. pressure to sever ties and billions in aid to combat the militants, said a research report released Sunday.
The findings could heighten tension between the two countries and raise further questions about U.S. success in Afghanistan since Pakistani cooperation is seen as key to defeating the Taliban, which seized power in Kabul in the 1990s with Islamabad's support.
U.S. officials have suggested in the past that current or former members of Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, have maintained links to the Taliban despite the government's decision to denounce the group in 2001 under U.S. pressure.
But the report issued Sunday by the London School of Economics offered one of the strongest cases that assistance to the group is official ISI policy, and even extends to the highest levels of the Pakistani government.
"Pakistan's apparent involvement in a double-game of this scale could have major geopolitical implications and could even provoke U.S. countermeasures," said the report, which was based on interviews with Taliban commanders, former Taliban officials, Western diplomats and many others.
"Without a change in Pakistani behavior it will be difficult, if not impossible, for international forces and the Afghan government to make progress against the insurgency," said the report.
Frankly, I refuse to call this a "war". This is and always has been an occupation. Terminology aside, this is not exactly something worth celebrating, but I do think it's time to re-think Afghanistan:
Three months after 9/11, every major Taliban city in Afghanistan had fallen — first Mazar-i-Sharif, then Kabul, finally Kandahar. Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar were on the run. It looked as if the war was over, and the Americans and their Afghan allies had won.
Butch Ivie, then a school administrator in Winfield, Ala., remembers, "We thought we'd soon have it tied up in a neat little bag."
But bin Laden and Omar eluded capture. The Taliban regrouped. Today, Kandahar again is up for grabs. And soon, Afghanistan will pass Vietnam as America's longest war.
The Vietnam War's length can be measured in many ways. The formal beginning of U.S. involvement often is dated to Aug. 7, 1964, when Congress passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, giving the president a virtual carte blanche to wage war. By the time the last U.S. ground combat troops were withdrawn in March 1973, the war had lasted 103 months.
U.S. forces attacked Afghanistan on Oct. 7, 2001. On June 7, the war will complete its 104th month. President Obama on Thursday reaffirmed his commitment to the war, saying "it is absolutely critical that we dismantle that network of extremists that are willing to attack us."
This longest war is far from America's bloodiest. It has drifted in and out of focus and, for much of its life, been obscured by another war, in Iraq.
I guess we should be grateful for small favors in that relative to other battles, there's been less loss of life, although I'd say it's still 1,800 lives too many.
Former Bush Secretary of State Colin Powell spoke on This Week last week to say that even with the troop increase in Afghanistan, "victory" (however you define that) ultimately was in the hands of the Afghans.
If that's the case, one has to ask why the hell we need to be there for anyway.
BraveNewFilm's ReThink Afghanistan is fundraising to purchase an ad in the Politico (because you know they all read it) asking Congress and the President to pull the troops by December 2011. If you're able, please consider donating to inject some sense into this debate.
According to the official FBI complaint (PDF), accused bomb-maker Faisal Shahzad received training in a camp in Waziristan, Pakistan.
Waziristan has been a long-held target of US forces, because it is close to the Afghan-Pakistan border and within reach of Kandahar and Kabul. A Taliban stronghold, it has been a prime target for drone strikes.
Over the past 18 months, Pakistan's army has conducted major offensives in six of the seven tribal agencies that border Afghanistan. But the seventh agency -- North Waziristan -- has been left alone. In part, that is because it is home to the Afghan Taliban networks of Jalaluddin Haqqani and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who have close relations with the military and the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate (ISI). It has also been left alone for good tactical if not poor strategic reasons -- the army has struck deals with the Pakistani Taliban in North Waziristan not to attack Pakistani forces. Until recently, these deals have held.
That paragraph right there just convinced this long-time ambivalent-about-the-Afghan-war-woman that we need to yank ourselves out of there sooner, rather than later.
There can be no progress in Afghanistan if the ISI are going to let the Pakistani Taliban thrive in Waziristan. The Pakistani Taliban are far more lethal than the Afghan Taliban, and are much more directly involved in the ongoing violence in that region. The only reason in my mind to even make an effort in Afghanistan was to deal with the Pakistani Taliban before they made a move to overthrow the current government and take control of Pakistan's nuclear weapons.
If the ISI is avoiding Waziristan to coddle the Pakistani Taliban, we're wasting our time and have been. If Rashid is to be believed, we're chasing after will o' the wisps there.
The area is the hub of so many terrorist groups and so much terrorist plotting and planning that neither the CIA nor the ISI seems to have much clue about what is going on there. A year ago, the Pakistan Taliban under Baitullah Mehsud ran a semi-disciplined terrorist movement from the tribal areas that bombed and killed Pakistanis with dastardly methodicalness. Mehsud was killed last year in a U.S. drone strike. What is left is anarchy, as groups and splinter groups and splinters of splinters operate from North Waziristan with no overall control by anyone, not even Jalaluddin Haqqani.
Gosh, sounds like an opportunity to capitalize on weakness. What exactly seems to be the problem here?
Punjabi extremist groups that were once trained by the military to fight Indian forces in Kashmir have splintered from their mother groups and operate out of North Waziristan in alliance with the Pashtun Pakistani Taliban and al-Qaeda. Inexplicably, one of these Punjabi groups last week executed Khalid Khawaja, a former ISI officer known for his sympathy for al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Who killed Khawaja and why is still a huge mystery. Was it a case of terror eating its own?
It looks to me like he was trying to make the effort look like home-grown terror, too. The fertilizer, gasoline, fireworks combo sounds a lot like Timothy McVeigh's flavor of destruction, doesn't it? Of course, it's easy enough to get the ingredients, too. The FBI complaint makes that chillingly clear.
The FBI complaint raises more questions for me than it answers. Did Shahzad become a US citizen in order to commit an act of terrorism? How did he present himself as a candidate for citizenship? Given that he traveled back to Pakistan after gaining citizenship for the sole purpose of training to blow the smithereens out of some US target which turned out to be Times Square, perhaps it isn't border-crossing people Arizona should fear as much as the ones who actually have their papers.
I've never seen Sen. Claire McCaskill quite so fired up about, well, anything:
A committee investigation of the company revealed that contracting personnel acquired hundreds of weapons, including more than 500 AK-47s, from a facility in Kabul that stores arms for use by the Afghan police. The contractors were not authorized to be armed.
Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill says if members of the U.S. military were involved in such actions they would face immediate and serious consequences.
"If one of the Army had gone out there with an AK-47 they were not supposed to have on top of a moving vehicle and shot a guy in the head and paralyzed him something would have happened in that chain of command," said Claire McCaskill.
"And if they had kept somebody on the force that had been using cocaine, that had been drunk, that had been charged with larceny that had done all these things these guys had done, they went out and killed Afghan people in the spring of 2009, something would have happened to them if they were in the military."
Senator McCaskill says most Afghans do not distinguish between private American contractors and members of the U.S. military.
She says reckless behavior by contractors is jeopardizing the U.S. mission in Afghanistan.
"And what is killing me about this problem with Blackwater is we have two sets of rules and one image," she said. "And as long as we have two sets of rules and one image we are in trouble on this mission."
A well-coordinated assassination attempt on President Hamid Karzai by suspected Taliban insurgents at the Afghan national day military parade in central Kabul has turned into a moment of national embarrassment for the government, which has been pressing to take over responsibility for Kabul’s security from foreign troops.
Three people were killed Sunday in the brazen assault, ruining what was supposed to have been a proud moment for Afghan security forces. The ability of the attackers to get so close to Mr. Karzai, who escaped unhurt, suggested they had inside help.
Considering President Bush recently admitted that it's "probably true" the next attack will come from Afghanistan, this really doesn't surprise me. But it does worry me.
Senior Pakistani officials are urging Nato countries to accept the Taliban and work towards a new coalition government in Kabul that might exclude the Afghan president Hamid Karzai. Pakistan's foreign minister, Khurshid Kasuri, has said in private briefings to foreign ministers of some Nato member states that the Taliban are winning the war in Afghanistan and Nato is bound to fail. He has advised against sending more troops. Western ministers have been stunned. "Kasuri is basically asking Nato to surrender and to negotiate with the Taliban," said one Western official who met the minister recently. Read on...
Seems like the people in uniform are a lot happier with Obama in the White House than the tea baggers would have us believe:
Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan, and Washington - President Obama flew to Afghanistan's capital Sunday evening and offered a tough message to President Hamid Karzai, urging that stronger action be taken to crack down on government corruption and to build respect for the rule of law.
Later in his six-hour unannounced visit, his first to the war-battered country since becoming president, Obama received a rousing welcome from American troops at the sprawling Bagram air base outside Kabul.
As midnight approached, camouflage-clad service members whooped and snapped pictures of the president, who dispensed hugs and handshakes before taking to the podium.
"I have no greater honor than serving as your commander in chief," he told his audience to cheers.
Obama also emphasized the continuing American commitment to Afghanistan, where tens of thousands of new U.S. troops are to be deployed in coming months. "The United States of America does not quit," said Obama, dressed in a leather bomber jacket. "We keep at it, we persevere and together with our partners we will prevail. I'm absolutely confident of that."
The consequences of neglecting Afghanistan and the resurgent Taliban are apparent.
