Bharat Rakshak

Raja Ram wrote: ......
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Behind the scenes the real intent is played out. In a telling series of messages in the last couple of days, the paki elite in PA and ISI have sent out the following messages:

1. Obama & Co:
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WITH three Afghan government ministries in Kabul hit by simultaneous suicide attacks this week, by a total of just eight terrorists, it seems that a new “Mumbai model” of swarming, smaller-scale terrorist violence is emerging.

Yes, the swarm will be heading our way, too. We need to get smaller, closer and quicker. The sooner the better.

John Arquilla teaches in the special operations program at the Naval Postgraduate School and is the author of “Worst Enemy: The Reluctant Transformation of the American Military.”

Rush wrote:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... Laden.html

I was just wondering if this could be the beginning of the disintegration of the Al Qaeda ideology and support. Then again, could Zawahiri and Bin laden dismiss it as something written under coercion?

I would love to see a Caliphate that counters The Caliphate - an anti-Caliphate!!

JE Menon wrote:The Al Fadl book is a beautiful move by the Egyptians, who are not by any means wanting in methods and tactics in combating the Qaida types... No doubt done with full knowledge of interested parties... This is really a kick in the nuts... The book may go a long way in bringing the rats out into the open...

Question:What is India's vision of the security situation in Afghanistan? What are the one, two, threes of it?

The 1-2-3 of it are simple and obvious. The Afghan national security forces themselves should be strengthened and empowered and equipped to handle the security of the Afghan people. That is the first thing to do.

Post-2001, for the first five years, some imagined that security could be sub-contracted to foreigners and that Afghanistan did not need a proper army.

Number two: As the Afghan government itself says, the war against terrorism in Afghanistan cannot be addressed without addressing the question of safe havens and sanctuaries and training camps that support and sustain the terrorist groups.

And number three: Don't ever compromise with terrorists and their organisations.

Question: That means India will not like a Swat-type solution. Why can't it happen in Afghanistan with a faction of the Taliban?

It could happen. But with individuals and factions that have given up the ideology of Al Qaeda and the Taliban. With those that are ready to come overground, lay down their arms and embrace the democratic system. With those that choose to be wedded to the constitution. With those who respect diversity, pluralism, women and human rights.

Gerard wrote:NATO baulks at Afghan fight

Sanjay M wrote:It's the British Invasion all over again! Ah, the memories!

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldne ... istan.html

Yes, it's those plucky young lads from Liverpool, Leicester, Yorkshire, etc with their radical dressing styles, drawing screaming crowds of fanatical youth. Her Majesty will have to knight them eventually, in recognition of their immense contribution to British vote banks.


http://www.economist.com/world/britain/ ... extfeature

KABUL, Afghanistan, Feb. 27 (UPI) -- Secret negotiations are reportedly under way to allow the head of an organization fighting alongside the Taliban to return to Afghanistan, news sources say.

Gulbaldin Hekmatyar, who has been in hiding for seven years, would be given immunity from prosecution and allowed to go back his country, al-Jazeera reported Friday.

The news organization says Hekmatyar's return is being discussed by the Afghan government, Western officials and mediators linked to the Taliban.

Mullah Mottawakil, a former Taliban foreign minister, says the talks will fail if the plan is to split the Taliban.

"It will not benefit anyone if he (Afghan President Hamid Karzai) brings one part of the Taliban into the government, and leaves the other part behind," said Mottawakil. "It will not finish the war."

Hekmatyar's organization, Hezb-i-Islami, fights alongside the Taliban. It has been designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. government.

shyamd wrote:First NATO supplies have come through Russia today.

RayC wrote: The 'Slumdog soldiers' of UK are not of the same mettle as that of the Imperial days.

At his first meeting as commander-in-chief with heads of joint chiefs of staff and military services Wednesday Jan. 28, President Barack Obama hit the nail on the head when he said: "We're going to have some difficult decisions to make surrounding Iraq and Afghanistan, most immediately."

He added: "Obviously our effort to go after extremist organizations that do harm to our homeland is uppermost in our minds."

The meeting, also attended by vice president Joseph Biden, took place in the secure Pentagon conference room called "the Tank."

Obama's sense of urgency was palpable but, interestingly, he made no mention of Pakistan, although it has become closely interwoven in the Afghanistan conflict. Last week, he and secretary of state Hillary Clinton appointed Richard Holbrooke special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan. But nothing has happened since then.

Obama is precise in his geographical directives and matches them to his political and military strategic viewpoints. George Mitchell's brief as Middle East envoy did not cover Iran, and the envoy for Iran (Dennis Ross?) was not assigned to deal with Hizballah and Hamas. By the same token, Holbrooke's terms of reference do not include India and Kashmir, although the problems of the entire subcontinent are inextricably intertwined in a single knot.

This precise distribution of tasks guarantees the president and secretary of state room for maneuver and ease of control over envoys who are strong characters in their own right. It also interfaces with the approach set forth by defense secretary Robert Gates Tuesday, Jan. 27, at a hearing before the Armed Forces Committee of Congress.



Time running out fast for winning the Long War

Setting forth "modest goals for Afghanistan, he defined success as an "Afghanistan that is not a safe haven for al Qaeda, whose people reject the rule of Taliban insurgents and support a legitimate government." Gates added cautiously: "…success in Afghanistan also requires security progress in neighboring Pakistan given the porous and violent frontier between the two nations."

A tall order, yet Obama and Clinton were clearly at pains this week to keep the US army's warfronts down to two - Iraq and Afghanistan – while minimizing additional arenas.

This approach contrasts sharply with that of their predecessor. George W. Bush was ready to take on al Qaeda and other extremist terror groups wherever necessary in Asia, the Middle East or Africa – except that he kept on running out of fighting manpower.

Aware of this limitation, Obama is taking the opposite tack: He aims at reducing the geographic arenas of conflict in which US forces are engaged, while also concerned to reduce the loss of life and budgetary outlay.

At his congressional hearing, Gates tried to gloss over the differences between the two administrations on both of which he served: "Obama, like President George W. Bush before him, was committed to going after al Qaeda targets, wherever al Qaeda is," he said.

But a different strategic approach to the war on terror - the "Long War" - may have been overtaken by time.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly's military and counter-terror experts argue that time is the enemy of the Obama-Clinton-Gates goal of keeping the Afghanistan War within strict geographical limits.


Taliban and al Qaeda prepare their own surge – from Pakistan


Even if the transfer of 30,000 troops from Iraq to Afghanistan takes place without a hitch – although Gates and US commanders warn against too rapid a pace – the first detachments will not be ready to go into the battlefield before late 2010, although troops from other units are due to arrive this coming fall.

Work on the new camps and logistic-operational infrastructure to absorb the new intake is only just beginning.

And once the first troops are in place and ready to engage the Taliban and al Qaeda, they will still be restricted to areas close to Kabul and their new bases and not other, more dangerous parts of Afghanistan.

This time line depends on al Qaeda and Taliban standing still, when in fact they are deep into a surge of their own which they are leveraging from strong positions in Pakistan.

Their foothold in the Pakistani districts of Mohmand and Bajaur covers a key corridor slicing through the three provinces of Kunar, Nuristan and Kapisa and reaching as far as the Afghan capital of Kabul.

In the Swat valley, once a scenic tourist area of northern Pakistan, the Pakistani army fought and quelled an insurgency - but only at the expense of alienating its people. Today, Pakistani troops fear to venture into this new hotbed of defiance. All of Swat but for the towns of Mardan, Sawabi and Charsada is now under the Taliban's thumb and a willing wellspring of fighting strength.

The strategic Khyber Pass district, long the route through which eight-tenths of NATO's supplies passed into Afghanistan, is now under constant attack, forcing its commanders to seek out alternative, uncertain supply lines through Russia and Central Asia.


Gates needs three-to-five years to achieve success


Pro-Western Pakistani, Saudi and Turkish circles in touch with al Qaeda and Taliban in Pakistan report that both are absolutely certain they will soon control every bit of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border strip including the North West Frontier Province, as well as sections of southwest Baluchistan and the city of Karachi's outlying region.

They are contemptuous of Asif Ali Zardari and his government in Islamabad and confident it will soon be swept away.

While this may be an exaggeration, even US intelligence sources admit the two violent organizations are on the ascendant in Pakistan; they are expanding their control, gobbling up territory and getting stronger militarily all the time.

Al Qaeda and Taliban are thought by broad Pakistani political, military and intelligence sources to be on the brink of launching a general offensive inside their country to gain more ground and control of more terrain abutting on Afghanistan. In the opinion of those sources, the Pakistani army is in no shape to withstand an al Qaeda-Taliban onslaught.

Last week, the US defense secretary remarked in this regard: "The goals we did have for Afghanistan are too broad and too far in the future."

He urged a strategy for now that would define "more concrete goals that can be achieved realistically within three to five years in terms of re-establishing control in certain areas, providing security for the population, going after al Qaeda, preventing the re-establishment of terrorism, better performance in terms of delivery of services to the people – some very concrete things."

Very few military experts believe that a new US envoy, in the controversial person of Richard Holbrooke, frequent US drone strikes in the Pakistan border districts – since Obama took office, two attacks took place in South and North Waziristan killing 21 people - and even a troop surge, will grant the new US administration the three-to-five years sought by Gates.

Was that the time span the US president was thinking of when he talked about making difficult decisions "most immediately?"

If so, they will be too late. Quite soon, the Taliban and al Qaeda will be swarming over yet broader expanses of Pakistan. Whether the new White House likes it or not, the war has solidly crossed the Afghan-Pakistani border and is already burning up much of Pakistan.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly Exclusive 385 Updated by DEBKAfile

March 9, 2009, 10:42 AM (GMT+02:00)
Taliban in Afghanistan: Talking and fighting

On Feb. 20, DEBKA-Net-Weekly 385 disclosed that from late December, agents of Saudi intelligence chief Prince Muqrin Abdul Aziz paved the way for Richard Holbrooke's mission to Afghanistan and Pakistan as Barack Obama's special envoy.

This initiative also laid the groundwork for US president Barack Obama's hint at possible talks with moderate Taliban elements to The New York Times Sunday, March 8, a month after he approved another 17,000 troops for Afghanistan.

Karzai welcomed the move saying he had long supported dialogue with Taliban members who are not connected with terrorists.

The Saudis launched their mediation bid in the last week of December 2008, DEBKA-Net-Weekly first revealed, when Mullah Omar and party secretly visited Saudi Arabia in the guise of early Ramadan pilgrims. His two senior companions were Aghajan Mutasim and Abdul Hakim Mujahid.

Karzai was represented by his older brother Qayum

In two audiences, King Abdullah promised that if the Taliban pledged to stop fighting and joined the Afghan civilian government, it could count on Saudi political and financial support for its role in the Kabul administration.

That Mullah Omar was willing to travel to the kingdom while fighting US-led forces alongside Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda was taken in Washington and Riyadh as a hopeful sign that a breakthrough was possible toward a negotiated end to the conflict.

In his New York Times interview, Obama admitted that the US was not winning the war.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly's Washington sources noted that it took four weeks into his presidency for Obama to put in his first phone call to Karzai on Tuesday, Feb. 17. "It had become necessary," they said, "to pour oil on relations marred in recent weeks by leaked hints in the US media that the administration was looking for ways to remove the Afghan president."

Vice president Joe Biden and other advisers had been pressing Obama to get rid of Karzai quickly - even if this meant postponing the August presidential elections. But Holbrooke, who departed Kabul for New Delhi in the middle of the week with a comprehensive South Asia peace plan, warned the US president that ditching the Afghan president at this juncture would be unwise and could put the peace track with Taliban at risk. He urged Obama to stick with Karzai and show him a willingness to cooperate. End of quote form DEBKA-Net-Weekly.

Vice president Joe Biden will report on the Afghanistan situation with NATO allies in Brussels Monday, March 9, laying the ground for the president's discussion early next month at the G20 summit in London and the EU-US summit in Prague.

The United States has called for a high level international conference to map out a new strategy on Afghanistan to which all its neighbors would be invited, including Iran.

Gerard wrote:World must accept possible Taliban election win, says France

Suppiah wrote:How do you identify moderate Taliban? I think we have to help Obama...

1.Anyone that holds less than 3 hostages
2.Anyone that believes that beheading a hostage is ok but videotape of it should mask out the face of victim..
3. Please use stones that have no sharp edges when you kill adulterers

...

Sanjay M wrote:Will Obama hand Afghanistan back over to Pakistan?

http://www.business-standard.com/india/ ... 5C/351497/

In that case, Pakistan would resume its campaign to conquer the entire country, and India would have no choice but to resume support for the Northern Alliance. Once the standoff gets bitter enough, Taliban would once again turn to the trans-national Islamists like AlQaeda for help. Then the cycle that led to 9/11 would repeat itself again.