Obama Administration Presses Pakistan to Fight Taliban

[DaRk WaVe]

brother, can you support your claim that 70% of Afghanistan is under the control of the Taliban?

here you go.........

Eight years after 9/11, Taliban roils 80 percent of Afghanistan​

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Kabul, Afghanistan - A retaliatory NATO airstrike that killed scores of civilians. The kidnapping of New York Times journalist Stephen Farrell. The deadly shooting of his Afghan translator and the death of a British soldier in a violent and controversial rescue operation days later.

The events of this week have drawn attention to the unraveling security in northern Afghanistan in a way months of the creeping insurgency had not.

Long considered one of the most stable and peaceful parts of the country, the northern provinces have seen rising violence as heavy insurgent activity has spread to 80 percent of the country – up from 54 percent two years ago. (See map.) Under increasing pressure in southern Afghanistan and northern Pakistan, militants who have long sought to extend their reach have turned their attention to the north, where NATO has established a second supply route in the wake of debilitating attacks on its southern pipeline.

"[Militants] have been trying to widen the ground for the insurgency in Afghanistan and now they have got momentum," says Waliullah Rahmani, executive director of the Kabul Center for Strategic Studies. "The militants are eager to target this route to prevent a smooth supply chain from northern Afghanistan."

Last week's airstrike targeted two fuel tankers headed to supply NATO troops in Kabul that had been hijacked by the Taliban. Up to 70 civilians who had gathered to siphon fuel from the trucks, which had become mired in mud in Kunduz Province, were killed in the strike.

Kunduz has seen a particular uptick in insurgent activity, says Thomas Ruttig, founder of the Afghan Analysts Network, which he attributes to pressure on insurgents in neighboring Pakistan. On Friday, Pakistan announced it had captured a senior Taliban leader, Muslim Khan.

"The IMU [Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan] have been pushed out of Waziristan and the north has Uzbek minorities," making the area hospitable for Uzbek militants, says Mr. Ruttig. While Kunduz itself does not border Uzbekistan, the neighboring province of Balkh borders Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan and could become the main supply route for NATO supplies if security continues to worsen in Kunduz province.

The map mentioned above also shows supply routes and the incremental increase in Taliban control of the country.

Frustrated Pashtuns sympathetic to Taliban

While the upsurge in violence is relatively recent, the conditions have been festering for some time, say Mr. Rahmani and Ruttig. The violence has been directly linked to districts with large Pashtun populations, whose grievances the government has long failed to address – making them sympathetic to the Taliban, who share their ethnicity and language.

"The districts which are turning violent are those which have had a very recent history of abuses against the Pashtuns. The government has allowed these conditions to go unaddressed and this is now being addressed by the population by giving shelter to the Taliban and other insurgents," says Prakhar Sharma, the head of research at the Center for Conflict and Peace Studies, an Afghan research organization.

Humanitarian groups concerned, but still operating

The growing insecurity is of particular concern to humanitarian and aid agencies which have been working in the more stable northern areas. Aid agencies like Oxfam, Care, and Save the Children have long argued that they are better able to deliver sustainable aid in these areas than in southern Afghanistan.

In fact many organizations have stopped working in the more insecure areas, not just because of the problems of access but also because of the conditions attached by donors who would like the development aid and humanitarian agencies to be used in pursuit of military goals. Aid groups felt that doing so would compromise their independence

While aid agencies approached by the Monitor said the growing insecurity had not stopped them from working in the north, they all expressed concern over the recent developments.

Ashley Jackson of Oxfam International says staff have had to change the way they work and pull back temporarily after the Kunduz bombing.

"So far we have not seen anything impacting on our work but we are definitely concerned," says Jennifer Rowell of Care. "We would like to make sure that the civil military guidelines are respected as are humanitarian laws and that we have access."

The militarization of aid has made it difficult for organizations like Care to engage in southern Afghanistan, says Ms. Rowell, and "we will have to be extra vigilant in the North."

Eight years after 9/11, Taliban roils 80 percent of Afghanistan « RAWA News

Taliban Control 72% of Afghanistan; Surround Kabul, Group Says​

By Caroline Alexander

Dec. 8 (Bloomberg) -- Taliban fighters have a “permanent presence” in almost three quarters of Afghanistan and are tightening a noose around the capital, Kabul, according to a Paris-based research organization.

The International Council on Security and Development, which has fulltime offices in Afghanistan, said in a report that Taliban fighters have advanced out of their bases in the south and east and are infiltrating Kabul at will.

“The Taliban are now dictating terms in Afghanistan, both politically and militarily,” Paul Burton, ICOS Director of Policy, said. “There is a real danger the Taliban will simply overrun Afghanistan.”

Armed clashes in Afghanistan have reached the highest level since the Taliban was ousted by American-led forces in 2001, according to the United Nations. Taliban leader Mullah Omar today warned violence will rise and urged foreign forces to withdraw, Agence France-Presse reported, in his first public statement in a year. Pakistan militants torched 50 NATO trucks carrying supplies for troops in Afghanistan, the second such attack in as many days, AFP reported today, citing a police official.

“While the international community’s prospects in Afghanistan have never been bleaker, the Taliban has been experiencing a renaissance that has gained momentum since 2005,” ICOS said. The presence of the Islamist group in Afghanistan has increased from 54 to 72 percent over the past year, according to the report.

ICOS called for troop numbers to be doubled to a minimum of 80,000 and for the creation a new counter insurgency model that would accord equal importance to military and non-violent tactics such as leadership training, development and aid.

NATO Denial

NATO spokesman James Appathurai said the alliance “is on the same page” while denying that the Taliban controls as much of the country as ICOS says.

“The Taliban is present in the east and the south, which is already less than 50 percent of the country, and they don’t hold any areas where the Afghan national army or international forces are present,” Appathurai said in a telephone interview from Brussels.

NATO doesn’t want to minimize an “uptick” in Taliban activity “but the attacks are intensifying in areas they have always been in, not spreading,” he said.

ICOS, formally known as the Senlis Council, published maps of Kabul showing the area occupied by NATO headquarters, the U.S. embassy and the Afghan presidential palace as one of “high Taliban/criminal activity.”

The maps also document the advance of the Taliban on Kabul, where three out of the four main highways into Kabul are now compromised by Taliban activity.

ICOS defines “permanent presence” as the ability of the Taliban to carry out at least one attack a week and used public records to calculate its figures.

To contact the reporter on this story: Caroline Alexander in London at calexander1@bloomberg.net.

Taliban Control 72% of Afghanistan; Surround Kabul, Group Says - Bloomberg.com

 

[DaRk WaVe]

This map is not very much clear so here is this clear one...

http://www.icosfilm.net/static/video/050_map.pdf

 

[Ahmad]

This map is not very much clear so here is this clear one...

http://www.icosfilm.net/static/video/050_map.pdf

Dear emo_girl, I think I have seen this before. the report says:


Data detailing the presence of the Taliban in Afghanistan was gathered from daily insurgent activity reports between January and September 2009. ICOS believes that the level of incidents recorded by this methodology is conservative, as it is based on public third-party reports, and not all incidents are made public.

Permanent presence: defined by provinces that average one (or more) insurgent attack (lethal and non-lethal) per week.

Substantial presence: an average one or more insurgent attacks per month and include residents who believe Taliban are active locally (based on frequency of Taliban sightings).

Light presence: defined by less than one insurgent attack per month and local residents don't believe Taliban is active locally (based on frequency of Taliban sightings). To calculate percentages, the total area of Afghanistan was divided by the total area hosting a permanent/ substantial/light Taliban presence.

Nobody is denying the problem of insurgency in Afghanistan and its seriouseness, otherwise America wouldnt have sent more soldiers. But if we interpret the report as THE TALIBAN CONTROL 70% OR MORE OF AFGHANISTAN then it will be very misleading and untrue. It is all about insurgence attacks and then they disappear. If there are burglers or group of theives in a city and rob people day and night, you dont say the city is under the control of the thieves. Secondly, we have got similar if not exactly the same situation in Pakistan, the frequency of attacks in Pakistan is nowdays very high and unfortunatly alot of innocent people die, if we go according to that theory that Taliban in Afghanistan control 70% of the country, we can definately say that TTP is also controling large parts of pakistan, but i think none of these statements are true. I am surprised that some(luckily not all) of our pakistani brothers and sisters support the taliban in Afghanistan, if they didnt know how painful it is to lose a loved one and see the country destroyed before, they should know it by now because they are the victim of the same category of people just like us.

 

[blain2]

Stretching Out an Ugly Struggle

By GRAHAM E. FULLER
Published: December 3, 2009

Many decades ago as a fledgling C.I.A. officer in the field, I was naïvely convinced that if the facts were reported back to Washington correctly, everything else would take care of itself in policymaking. The first loss of innocence comes with the harsh recognition that “all politics are local” and that overseas realities bear only a partial relationship to foreign-policy formulation back home.

So in looking at President Obama’s new policy directions for Afghanistan, what goes down in Washington politics far outweighs analyses of local conditions.

I had hoped that Obama would level with the American people that the war in Afghanistan is not being won, indeed is not winnable within any practicable framework. But such an admission — however accurate — would sign the political death warrant of a president to be portrayed as having snatched defeat out of the jaws of “victory.”

The “objective” situation in Afghanistan remains a mess. Senior commanders acknowledge that we are not now winning hearts and minds in Afghanistan; indeed, we never can, and certainly not at gunpoint. Most Pashtuns will never accept a U.S. plan for Afghanistan’s future. The non-Pashtuns — Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras, etc. — naturally welcome any outside support in what is a virtual civil war.

America has inadvertently ended up choosing sides in this war. U.S. forces are perceived by large numbers of Afghans as an occupying army inflicting large civilian casualties. The struggle has now metastasized into Pakistan — with even higher stakes.

Obama’s policies would seem an unsatisfying compromise among contending arguments. Thirty thousand more troops are less than called for and will not turn the tide; arguably they present more American targets for attack.

They will heighten traditional xenophobia against foreigners traipsing through Pashtun villages and homes. It is a fool’s errand to persuade the locals in Pashtun territory that the Taliban are the enemy and the U.S. is their friend. Whatever mixed feelings Pashtuns have toward the Taliban, they know the Taliban will be among them long after Washington tires with this mission.

The strategy of the Bush era envisioned Afghanistan as a vital imperial outpost in a post-Soviet dream world. That world vision is gone — except to a few Washington diehards who haven’t grasped the new emerging global architectures of power, economics, prestige and influence.

The Taliban will inevitably figure significantly in the governance of almost any future Afghanistan, like it or not. Future Taliban leaders, once rid of foreign occupation, will have little incentive to support global jihadi schemes — they never really have by choice. The Taliban inherited Osama bin Laden as a poison pill from the past when they came to power in 1996 and have learned a bitter lesson about what it means to lend state support to a prominent terrorist group.

The Taliban with a voice in power will have every incentive to welcome foreign money and expertise into the country, including the Pashtun regions —as long as it is not part of a Western strategic package.

An austere Islamic regime is not the ideal outcome for Afghanistan, but it is by far the most realistic. To reverse ground realities and achieve a markedly different outcome is not in the cards and will pose Obama with the same dilemma next year.

Meanwhile, Pakistan will never be willing or able to solve Washington’s Afghanistan dilemma. Pakistan’s own stability has been brought to the brink by U.S. demands that it solve America’s self-created problem in Afghanistan. Pakistan will eventually be forced to resolve Afghanistan itself — but only after the U.S. has gone, and only by making a pact with Taliban forces both inside Afghanistan and in Pakistan itself.

Washington will not accept that for now, but it will be forced to fairly soon. Maybe the Pakistanis can root out bin Laden, but meanwhile, Al Qaeda has extended its autonomous franchises around the world, and terrorists can train and plan almost anywhere in the world; they do not need Afghanistan.

By now, as in so many other elements of the Global War on Terror, the U.S. has become more part of the problem than part of the solution. We are sending troops to defend troops that themselves constitute an affront to Afghan nationalism. Only expeditious American withdrawal from Afghanistan will prevent exacerbation of the problem.

Afghans must themselves face the complex mechanics of internal struggle and reconciliation. They have done so over long periods of their history. The ultimate outcome is of greater strategic consequence to Pakistan, Russia, China, Iran, India and others in the region than to the United States.

Europe and Canada have lost all stomach for this mission that is now promoted primarily in terms of “saving NATO” for future (and obsolescent) “out of area” struggles in a world in which Western strategic preferences can no longer predominate.

In a counterbalance to the mini-surge, Obama wisely establishes a date for genuine withdrawal in 2011. The surge may just be worth it if it enables Obama to put the U.S. military and Kabul on notice that time is quickly running out to demonstrate genuine political and military progress.

So the ugly struggle continues with little prospect for genuine improvement. There are no good choices. Obama has only kicked the can down the road.

Only with immense luck will his real goal — creation of the minimally acceptable terms for an American withdrawal — come into sight, providing a tiny fig leaf to mask what will essentially constitute a strategic American failure that was inherent nearly from the beginning in America’s global military response to the challenge of 9/11.

Graham E. Fuller is a former C.I.A. station chief in Kabul and a former vice-chairman of the C.I.A.’s National Intelligence Council. He is author of numerous books on the Middle East, including “The Future of Political Islam.”
Tribune Media Services

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/04/o...html?_r=2&scp=3&sq=graham%20fuller&st=cse

 

[AgNoStiC MuSliM]

The Taliban with a voice in power will have every incentive to welcome foreign money and expertise into the country, including the Pashtun regions —as long as it is not part of a Western strategic package.

Water under the bridge, but this dynamic was very real in 2001 as well, when the Taliban regime had indicated it would be open to a trial of OBL in Afghanistan or a mutually acceptable third country.

Even then a package of support for the Taliban in exchange for cooperation against AQ and other terrorists and as a tool for realistic policy modifications on the part of the Taliban was a good idea that was not explored in the rush to war.

 

[Solomon2]

Pakistan’s own stability has been brought to the brink by U.S. demands that it solve America’s self-created problem in Afghanistan. Pakistan will eventually be forced to resolve Afghanistan itself — but only after the U.S. has gone, and only by making a pact with Taliban forces both inside Afghanistan and in Pakistan itself.

I wonder if Mr. Fuller has fallen into the fantasy that if only the U.S. would change or withdraw then Pakistani officials would somehow be able to control things. I suppose when he was CIA station chief his Pakistani counterparts told him exactly that. Thing is, if the GoP can't control the Taliban in a Pakistan where no U.S. combat troops are based, why would the GoP suddenly become more capable if the U.S. soon withdraws from Afghanistan?

It seems more likely that Pakistan would be under attack even more while its reassuring officials cap their corruption by slushing U.S. aid into their foreign bank accounts and villas while their putative country falls to pieces, while lesser officials will switch sides to aid the Taliban entirely, in the hope that they can keep a remnant of their authority and wealth.

 

[deathfromabove]

Water under the bridge, but this dynamic was very real in 2001 as well, when the Taliban regime had indicated it would be open to a trial of OBL in Afghanistan or a mutually acceptable third country.

Even then a package of support for the Taliban in exchange for cooperation against AQ and other terrorists and as a tool for realistic policy modifications on the part of the Taliban was a good idea that was not explored in the rush to war.

Revisiting the past to cement the truth discarded by many as a myth:

Obama Lied: Taliban Did Not Refuse to Hand Over Bin Laden

December 05, 2009 -- Obama slipped past a real doozy Tuesday night when he said the Taliban refused to hand over bin Laden. It just ain't so. They tried three times to open negotiations for this, but Bush refused each time. He wanted to bomb people so bad it hurt.

UK Guardian:

A senior Taliban minister has offered a last-minute deal to hand over Osama bin Laden during a secret visit to Islamabad, senior sources in Pakistan told the Guardian last night...

For the first time, the Taliban offered to hand over Bin Laden for trial in a country other than the US without asking to see evidence first in return for a halt to the bombing, a source close to Pakistan's military leadership said.

The Taliban have offered to hand over Bin Laden before but only if sufficient evidence was presented. Bin Laden is wanted both for the September 11 attacks and for masterminding the bombings of two US embassies in East Africa in 1998 in which 224 people were killed. He is also suspected of involvement in other terrorist attacks, including the suicide bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen last year.

But until now the Taliban regime has consistently said it has not seen any convincing evidence to implicate the Saudi dissident in any crime.

"Now they have agreed to hand him over to a third country without the evidence being presented in advance," the source close to the military said."

Combined with so unhesitatingly waving the Al Qaeda boogey-man to make his case, in a fashion Bush would have been proud of, (Al Qaeda isn't in Afghanistan) it all makes me mighty suspicious. The Taliban wasn't declared an enemy until after 9/11, even as we had evidence that bin Laden was behind the bombing of the USS Cole. That's because Bush's buddies were still hoping to get the contract for the oil pipeline, which the Taliban government was refusing to give them. These are just facts, I'm not even trying to make an argument here. But someone has to call them on these things.

The history is at the classic essay by Richard Behan which went viral on the internet soon after it was published (re-printed at Afterdowningstreet.org):

From its first days in office in January of 2001 the Administration of George W. Bush meant to launch military attacks against both Afghanistan and Iraq. The reasons had nothing to do with terrorism.

This is beyond dispute. The mainstream press has either ignored the story or missed it completely, but the Administration's congenital belligerence is fully documented elsewhere.

Attacking a sovereign nation unprovoked, however, directly violates the charter of the United Nations. It is an international crime. The Bush Administration would need credible justification to proceed with its plans.

The terrorist violence of September 11, 2001 provided a spectacular opportunity. In the cacophony of outrage and confusion, the Administration could conceal its intentions, disguise the true nature of its premeditated wars, and launch them. The opportunity was exploited in a heartbeat.

Within hours of the attacks, President Bush declared the U.S. "...would take the fight directly to the terrorists," and "...he announced to the world the United States would make no distinction between the terrorists and the states that harbor them." [1] Thus the "War on Terror" was born.

The "War on Terror" is patently fraudulent, but the essence of successful propaganda is repetition, and the Bush Administration has repeated its mantra endlessly:

The War on Terror was launched in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. It is intended to enhance our national security at home, and to spread democracy in the Middle East.

This is the struggle of our lifetime; we are defending our way of life from an enemy intent on destroying our freedoms. We must fight the enemy in the Middle East, or we will fight him in our cities.

The Administration's campaign of propaganda has been a notable success. The characterization of today's war as a "fight against terrorists and states that support them" is generally accepted, rarely scrutinized, and virtually unchallenged, even by opponents of the war.

The fraudulence of the "War on Terror," however, is clearly revealed in the pattern of subsequent facts:

1. In Afghanistan the state was overthrown instead of apprehending the terrorist: Osama bin Laden remains at large.

2. In Iraq, when the U.S. invaded, there were no terrorists at all.

3. Both states have been supplied with puppet governments, and both are dotted with permanent U.S. military bases in strategic proximity to their hydrocarbon assets.

4. The U.S. embassy nearing completion in Baghdad is comprised of 21 multistory buildings on 104 acres of land. It will house 5,500 diplomats, staff, and families. It is ten times larger than any other U.S. embassy in the world, but we have yet to be told why.

5. A 2006 National Intelligence Estimate shows the war in Iraq has exacerbated, not diminished, the threat of terrorism since 9/11.[2] If the "War on Terror" is not a deception, it is a disastrously counterproductive failure.

6. Today two American and two British oil companies are poised to claim immense profits from 81% of Iraq's undeveloped crude oil reserves.[3] They cannot proceed, however, until the Iraqi Parliament enacts a statute known as the "hydrocarbon law."

7. The features of postwar oil policy so heavily favoring the oil companies were crafted by the Bush Administration State Department in 2002, a year before the invasion.[4]

8. Drafting of the law itself was begun during Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority, with the invited participation of the oil companies.[5] The law was written in English and translated into Arabic only when it was due for Iraqi approval.

9. President Bush made passage of the hydrocarbon law a mandatory "benchmark" when he announced the troop surge in January of 2007...

Obama Lied: Taliban Did Not Refuse to Hand Over Bin Laden