Bharat Rakshak

The Obama administration has developed a plan to begin transferring security duties in select areas of Afghanistan to that country’s forces over the next 18 to 24 months, with an eye toward ending the American combat mission there by 2014, officials said Sunday.
The phased four-year plan to wind down American and allied fighting in Afghanistan will be presented at a NATO summit meeting in Lisbon later this week, the officials said. It will reflect the most concrete vision for transition in Afghanistan assembled by civilian and military officials since President Obama took office last year

Afghan archaeologists say they are racing against time to salvage a major 7th Century religious site unearthed along the famous Silk Road.

They have warned that the 2,600-year-old Buddhist monastery will be largely destroyed once work at a mine begins.

A Chinese company is eager to develop what they say is the world's second-biggest unexploited copper mine which lies beneath the ruins at the site.

There can't be a serious discussion of the future of Afghanistan without talking about Pakistan, the chairman said. The United States needs to engage Pakistan – a nuclear power with an economy in shambles and its own problem with terrorism. Mullen has worked to establish a relationship with Pakistani Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, the army chief of staff, meeting with him about 30 times in three years. "When I first met him, there was this enormous trust gap between us, both as individuals and as countries," Mullen said. "Both of us are working hard to fill that up as rapidly as we can."

But the break in relations from 1990 to 2002 has left a mark, and the question Mullen said he is asked most in Pakistan is, how long are you going to stay this time?
"(Kayani) trusts me to a point now where he tells me what he is going to do long before he does it," the admiral said. "We have to understand their challenges. They have to focus on India, but they have rotated some 60,000 to 70,000 troops into the fight on the border [with Afghanistan]. They have lost many soldiers and civilians to terrorism. Sometimes his timelines doesn’t match my timelines."

Americans are not a patient people and "aligning the patience indexes sometimes can be difficult," Mullen said. The Pakistani army is resource constrained, but it seems to have the will to take on the Pakistani Taliban. The Pakistani army had to change to a counterinsurgency force for the battles in the tribal areas along the Afghan border. They pulled troops from Kashmir, the volatile northern territory bordering Pakistan and India, retrained them and rotated them into the counterinsurgency fight.

During the White House review of actions in Afghanistan, Mullen said he will look closely at the growth and training of the Afghan security forces. "The whole idea of transition of putting the Afghan security forces in the lead is fundamental," he said. "That's our way home." And the process of training Afghan soldiers and police is improving. "We've put in place a structure, which means trainers, curricula, buildings where the training takes place, which didn't occur before," he said.

When historians write of Afghan
treachery and guile, it seems to have escaped their perception that
Afghan treachery was but a phase of Afghan patriotism, of an unscrupulous
character, doubtless, according to our notions, but nevertheless
practical in its methods, and not wholly unsuccessful in its results.

Airavat wrote:Mapping the insurgency: Varun Vira

While NATO secretary general, Anders Rasmussen framed 2014 as the end of NATO’s combat mission in Afghanistan, Obama made sure to refer to 2014 as a target date rather than a deadline. The withdrawal of U.S. forces would, he noted, depend on the readiness of Afghan forces to take responsibility for their country’s security.Writing for Politico, Josh Gerstein described the NATO announcement as little more than spin. It “seemed intended to generate headlines or at least a public perception of a plan for withdrawal.”
In all likelihood, that media strategy will continue well into the future, and will become especially apparent when we arrive at previously announced target dates. In July 2011, we can expect the cameras to be rolling when the official drawdown of soldiers begins. As in Iraq in 2010, in Afghanistan in 2014, we can expect the president to announce the formal end of America’s combat mission and applaud the soldiers for a job well done. As in Iraq, the official end of the combat mission in Afghanistan will not mean the removal of all troops, but rather the continued presence of thousands of soldiers serving as advisors and trainers. And as in Iraq, the line between advisor and combat soldier will continue to be murky.

WikiLeaks has revealed that India was prepared to offer light attack helicopters to the Afghan government months after its embassy in Kabul was targeted by suicide bombers.


It has also been revealed that just a month before Indian Army officers in Kabul were attacked by suicide bombers, the US had asked for a briefing on the Indian training of Afghan security personnel.

In a separate cable, it has been revealed that a month before three Indian Army officers in Kabul died in an attack by suicide bombers, India agreed to brief the US on its training of Afghan Army personnel after the matter was raised by US Special Representative Richard Holbrooke during a visit to New Delhi.

The documents reveal that the US did not talk of any expansion of Indian military role on Afghanistan but subtly encouraged India to focus on cooperation in agriculture.

The main aim of the Indian forces was to liberate Dacca and cut Pak to size-into two.A holding exercise was envisioned in the west while we went full speed to liberate E.Pak before both the US and the Chinese stirred.The "Yellowskins" could do little in winter and the Yanquis responded by sending in a posse by sea,but Gen.Sam and the Indian armed forces were too fast on the draw than Martial,sorry!...Marshal Nixon and his sidekick "Doc" Kissinger.Even though the posse to save the Pakis got to the "corral" at the fag end of the shootout,they found that the "Injuns" had already lassoed 95,000 Pakis and their friends the Cossacks had the cowboys outflanked.Thus both the Pakis and the Yanquis kissed the dust,one physically and the other diplomatically and the Yellowskins' reputation lived up to the colour of their skin!

Almost 40 years on,the Yanquis have learnt nothing from their humiliation of '71 and along with their posse pals the Brittanic Barbarians and their Paki "halfcastes",being cut down to half their former size,are embroiled in a poker fight with the Afghanis,the Asian version of the afeared Apaches.While the duplicitous bloody Great Game being played by the Yanquis,Pakis and Afghanis,"the Good,the Bad and the Ugly",each trying to get one to slit the others' throat for a "Fistfull of Dollars", the Injuns sit on the borders a-waiting-a-watching-and-a-laughing at their mortal enemy and its bum-chum savage each other and waste the blood of their palefaces and braves.The Yanquis have not been able to win because their rent-boy the Pakis keep on asking "For a few Dollars More"!

Ultimately,it is going to be "Obama's Last Stand" and this is what the Pakis will get,"A present for you Amigo,a coffin from (the Great) Satan".

C. Christine Fair, an assistant professor at Georgetown University's Peace and Security Studies Program, says none of these criticisms will be new to Karzai.

"It's easy to point the finger at Karzai because he is so deeply culpable of so many problems," she said. "But it really has to be remembered that this is a synergistic relationship, and the way in which we have dealt with Karzai — to serve the purposes of our counterinsurgency — is, quite frankly, hypocritical at best."

For example, Fair says, look at the way the U.S. treats Karzai's brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, who is head of the provincial council in Kandahar. Several cables focus on his alleged ties to Afghanistan's opium trade.

"It's one thing to be very clear that he is a part of an enormous drug-trafficking network that nets all sorts of proceeds that go into various pockets," she said. "But how about the reality that he's been on the CIA payroll?"

And as for Indian involvement in Afghanistan, it has every right to be there, just as it has every right to be in Burma and Thailand and Kampuchea. The connections are as ancient, familiar and popular.

Plan B In Afghanistan

Given the alternatives, accepting a de facto partition of the country makes sense
Robert D Blackwill


US policy toward Afghanistan involves spending scores of billions of dollars and suffering several hundred allied deaths annually largely to prevent the Afghan Taliban from controlling the Afghan Pashtun homeland.

But the United States and its allies will not defeat the Taliban militarily. President Hamid Karzai’s corrupt government will not significantly improve. The Afghan National Army cannot take over combat missions from ISAF in southern and eastern Afghanistan in any realistic time frame. And on December 15, the New York Times assessed that “two new classified intelligence reports offer a more negative assessment and say there is a limited chance of success unless Pakistan hunts down insurgents operating from havens on its Afghan border”. That won’t happen.

With these individual elements of US Afghanistan policy in serious trouble, optimism about the current strategy’s ability to meet its objectives reminds one of the White Queen’s comment in Through the Looking Glass: “Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

De facto partition offers the Obama administration the best available alternative to strategic defeat. The administration should stop setting deadlines for withdrawal and instead commit the United States to a long-term combat role in Afghanistan of 35,000-50,000 troops for the next 7-10 years.

Concurrently, Washington should accept that the Taliban will inevitably control most of the Pashtun south and east and that the price of forestalling that outcome is far too high for Americans to continue paying. The United States and its partners should stop fighting and dying in the Pashtun homeland and let the local correlation of forces take its course – while deploying US air power and Special Forces to ensure that the north and west of Afghanistan do not succumb to the Taliban. The United States would make clear that it would strike al-Qaida targets anywhere, Taliban encroachments across the de facto partition line, and sanctuaries along the Pakistani border using weapons systems that were unavailable before 9/11.

Accepting a de facto partition of Afghanistan makes sense only if the other options available are worse. They are One alternative is to stay the current course in Afghanistan. The United States deploys about 1,00,000 troops in Afghanistan, yet there are now only 50-100 al-Qaida fighters there. That is 1,000-2,000 soldiers per al-Qaida terrorist at $100 billion a year – far beyond any reasonable expenditure of American resources given the stakes involved. And even if many of the roughly 300 al-Qaida fighters now in Pakistan did move a few score miles north across the border, it would not make much of a practical difference – surely not enough to justify an indefinite major ground war.

Another alternative is for the United States to withdraw all its military forces from Afghanistan over the next few years. But this would lead to a probable conquest of the entire country by the Taliban. It would draw Afghanistan’s neighbours into the fighting. It would raise the odds of the Islamic radicalisation of Pakistan, which would in turn call into question the safety and security of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. It would weaken the budding US-India strategic partnership, undermine Nato’s future, and trigger a global outpouring of support for Islamic extremist ideology and increased terrorism against liberal societies. And it would be seen around the world by friends and adversaries alike as a failure of international leadership and strategic resolve by an ever weaker America.

A third alternative is to achieve stability in Afghanistan through successful negotiations with the Taliban. As CIA director Leon Panetta has said, however, so long as the Taliban think they are winning, they will remain intransigent. Despite the major intensification of drone attacks, the US cannot kill the Taliban into meaningful political compromise.

The analogy most cited to justify the current Afghanistan policy is the 2007 “surge” in Iraq. Yet as former US envoy to Afghanistan James Dobbins has pointed out, by 2007, the Sunni Arab minority in Iraq had been decisively beaten by majority Shia militias, and it was only after this defeat that the Sunni Arabs turned to American forces for protection. The Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan, in contrast, is rooted in that country’s largest ethnic group, not its smallest.

These Pashtun insurgents have been winning their civil war for the last several years, not losing it. In Iraq, by 2007 al-Qaida had made itself unwelcome among its Sunni Arab allies. In Afghanistan, al-Qaida is hardly present, and presents no comparable threat to the Afghan Taliban leadership. Pashtun elders are less influential than the Iraqi sheiks that brought their adherents over with them when they decided to switch sides. In short, the Iraq surge has little application to Afghanistan.

Historians may puzzle over why the president, despite his deep agonising as described in Bob Woodward’s book on the war, deployed 1,00,000 troops into Afghanistan nearly 10 years after 9/11, why US policy makers spoke as if the fate of the civilised world depended on the pacification of Marja and Kandahar. Accepting the de facto partition of Afghanistan is hardly an ideal outcome in Afghanistan. But it is better than the alternatives.
The writer is a senior fellow at the US Council on Foreign Relations and former US ambassador to India.

In late 2009, U.S. and British forces ordered a study of Pashtun male sexuality. They were worried that homosexuality and pedophilia among Afghan security forces and tribes could create cultural misunderstanding with allied troops, according to a copy of the report obtained by The Washington Examiner.

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What he left unsaid was that the situation in Afghanistan was set to become more difficult for India with US-led international forces scheduled to start withdrawal from mid 2011. The Taliban still control large swathes of Afghanistan.
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New Delhi has even shifted its stance on the “good Taliban” — former Taliban members now willing to sever ties with terrorist groups. Krishna today said those willing to disassociate with terror must be encouraged to participate in the peace initiative.
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But India is faced with growing isolation in Afghanistan because regional players like Iran, Tajikistan, Russia as well as China disagree with its stand that Pakistan should be kept out of the Afghan peace process. These countries believe that while Pakistan is part of the problem in Afghanistan, it is also part of the solution.
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But India’s increasing irrelevance in Afghanistan means it will be a bystander after the scheduled withdrawal of US-led forces starts in July. South Block sources concede it is a difficult situation in Afghanistan.
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Government sources say the Prime Minister has conveyed to all Western leaders that they would be committing a “historic blunder that we will be ruing for generations” by leaving Afghanistan without securing the social, economic and political gains achieved in the last decade.
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Kunduz (Afghanistan), Feb 21 (DPA) A suicide bomber in the northern province of Kunduz killed at least 26 people and injured 37 inside a government building, an official said Monday.
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The incident is third suicide attack in three days. On Sunday, a suicide bombing targeting a branch of Kabul Bank in the city of Jalalabad killed at least 42 people, most of them Afghan security forces.

Afghanistan has seen a sudden surge in violent attacks with high civilian casualties in recent weeks.

IT is hard to tell when momentum shifts in a counterinsurgency campaign, but there is increasing evidence that Afghanistan is moving in a more positive direction than many analysts think. It now seems more likely than not that the country can achieve the modest level of stability and self-reliance necessary to allow the United States to responsibly draw down its forces from 100,000 to 25,000 troops over the next four years.

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Half of the violence in Afghanistan takes place in only 9 of its nearly 400 districts, with Sangin ranking among the very worst. Slowly but surely, even in Sangin, the Taliban are being driven from their sanctuaries as the coalition focuses on protecting the Afghan people in key population centers and hubs of economic activity, and along the roads that connect them.
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Afghan Army troop strength has increased remarkably. The sheer scale of the effort at the Kabul Military Training Center has to be seen to be appreciated.
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These changes on the ground have been reinforced by progress on three strategic and political problems that have long stymied our plans. {staying power, Afghan corruption and Pakistan}

...President Obama and the NATO secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, have effectively moved the planned troop withdrawal date from July 2011 to at least 2014, with surprisingly little objection....NATO is not collapsing because of Afghanistan.....

...the coalition’s military and civilian leaders are taking a new approach to the Afghan and Pakistani governments.

UNITED NATIONS, April 1 (Reuters) - The United Nations death toll in an attack on the U.N. compound in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif could be as high as 20, U.N. officials told Reuters on Friday.

That figure, which is likely to change, includes international and local staff, U.N. guards and Nepalese Gurkha soldiers hired to protect the compound, U.N. officials said on condition of anonymity.

Two of the dead were beheaded by attackers who also burned parts of the compound and climbed up blast walls to topple a guard tower, said Lal Mohammad Ahmadzai, a police spokesman for the northern region.

If confirmed, it would be the highest ever loss of life in an attack on the United Nations in Afghanistan