Current Hotspot : Afghanistan
Major reveals faults in Afghan missionSaturday 23 September 2006, 7:31 Makka Time, 4:31 GMT
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/rdonlyres/A37A2EBA-4DF1-48C3-B454-E3E4BE886483/139861/C382B134E6714F1199107311945E21B6.jpg
More than 5,000 British troops are serving in Afghanistan
British forces in Afghanistan are exhausted and need more helicopters to fight the Taliban, according to a leaked email from a middle-ranking officer serving in the country.
The email, from a major serving in the Sangin area of northern Helmand province in southern Afghanistan, described the Royal Air Force as "utterly, utterly useless" and underlined that more soldiers and equipment were needed "desperately," Britain's Sky News reported.
The Guardian newspaper said the email was sent by Major James Loden of 3 Para, who was awarded the Bronze Star medal in 2004 by the US military for his services in support of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan.
Major Loden heavily criticises Harrier Force, the British air force in Afghanistan, for failing to support ground troops and describes one incident where a Harrier fighter bomber dropped phosphorus rockets near British soldiers.
"A female Harrier pilot couldn't identify the target, fired two phosphorus rockets that just missed our own compound so that we thought they were incoming RPGs , and then strafed our perimeter missing the enemy by 200 metres," the email said.
Frightened
The officer also wrote of his concerns for two junior soldiers who, in a recent firefight, "looked very frightened and slow to react". He said that many of his men were exhausted and had, at times, been reduced to tears.
A British ministry of defence spokesman said that the email gave "a moving and at times humbling account of fighting in a part of Helmand province" but described the officer's comments as unfortunate.
"They do not reflect the view of the vast majority of soldiers about the Harrier Force in Afghanistan, which has consistently performed brilliantly in defending coalition forces," he said in a statement.
"It must be remembered that this is the opinion of only one man. The general view is very different."
Defence
General Sir Richard Dannatt, the chief of the general staff, issued a strong defence of the air force.
"We're not going to go and capture for everybody who gets a cut."
Ministry of defence spokesman
"The way the RAF has performed in support of our operations in Afghanistan has been exceptional. Irresponsible comments, based on a snapshot, are regrettable," Dannatt said.
"Following my recent visit, which happened after the incidentdescribed in the emails, the men of the battlegroup left me in nodoubt as to the value of the RAF's support to their operations.
Britain also denied that that casualty figures in Afghanistan are being under-reported, as claimed by a company commander in the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers.
Casualties
Major Jon Swift said "the scale of casualties has not been properly reported and shows no sign of reducing" in comments posted on a regimental website but later withdrawn. He also condemned the operation as "politically" driven.
"Political and not military imperatives are being followed in the campaign," he said.
The ministry of defence spokesman insisted that all serious casualties were recorded.
"We publish our casualty figures, and they cover all serious injuries," he said, adding: "We're not going to go and capture for everybody who gets a cut."
More than 5,000 British troops are serving in Afghanistan as part of a 20,000-strong Nato force attempting to provide security to help reconstruction and economic development efforts.
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/A37A2EBA-4DF1-48C3-B454-E3E4BE886483.htm
[ Last edited byyipun78 at 25-9-2006 05:47 PM ] Here's what is really happening. Its a lost cause for teh Taliban. They can never win the country they lost back. Its no wonder they are resorting to terrorists attacks again. Originally posted by Debmey at 23-9-2006 05:25 PM
Here's what is really happening. Its a lost cause for teh Taliban. They can never win the country they lost back. Its no wonder they are resorting to terrorists attacks again.
HEY DEBS!..Look at this!YOUR YANKEE MASTERS WANT YOU TO GO ON A CRUSADE IN AFGANISTAN! THEY ARE LOSING THE WAR THERE!...THAT IS if you are not shitting in your pants at the thought of fighting there :P
The Rise of Jihadistan
Five years after the Afghan invasion, the Taliban are fighting back hard, carving out a sanctuary where they梐nd Al Qaeda's leaders梒an operate freely.
http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/j/msnbc/Sections/Newsweek/Components/Photos/Mag/061002_Issue/060923_Afghan_wide.hlarge.jpg
'Jihadistan:' Soldiers rush to the scene where a car bomber killed three Afghan police and wounded five people in Kabul
By Ron Moreau, Sami Yousafzai and Michael Hirsh
Newsweek
Oct. 2, 2006 issue - You don't have to drive very far from Kabul these days to find the Taliban. In Ghazni province's Andar district, just over a two-hour trip from the capital on the main southern highway, a thin young man, dressed in brown and wearing a white prayer cap, stands by the roadside waiting for two NEWSWEEK correspondents. It is midday on the central Afghan plains, far from the jihadist-infested mountains to the east and west. Without speaking, the sentinel guides his visitors along a sandy horse trail toward a mud-brick village within sight of the highway. As they get closer a young Taliban fighter carrying a walkie-talkie and an AK-47 rifle pops out from behind a tree. He is manning an improvised explosive device, he explains, in case Afghan or U.S. troops try to enter the village.
In a parched clearing a few hundred yards on, more than 100 Taliban fighters ranging in age from teenagers to a grandfatherly 55-year-old have assembled to meet their provincial commander, Muhammad Sabir. An imposing man with a long, bushy beard, wearing a brown and green turban and a beige shawl over his shoulders, Sabir inspects his troops, all of them armed with AKs and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. He claims to have some 900 fighters, and says the military and psychological tide is turning in their favor. "One year ago we couldn't have had such a meeting at midnight," says Sabir, who is in his mid-40s and looks forward to living out his life as an anti-American jihadist. "Now we gather in broad daylight. The people know we are returning to power."
Not long after NEWSWEEK's visit, U.S. and Afghan National Army forces launched a major attack to dislodge the Taliban from Ghazni and four neighboring provinces. But when NEWSWEEK returned in mid-September, Sabir's fighters were back, performing their afternoon prayers. It is an all too familiar story. Ridge by ridge and valley by valley, the religious zealots who harbored Osama bin Laden before 9/11梐nd who suffered devastating losses in the U.S. invasion that began five years ago next week梐re surging back into the country's center. In the countryside over the past year Taliban guerrillas have filled a power vacuum that had been created by the relatively light NATO and U.S. military footprint of some 40,000 soldiers, and by the weakness of Afghan President Hamid Karzai's administration.
In Ghazni and in six provinces to the south, and in other hot spots to the east, Karzai's government barely exists outside district towns. Hard-core Taliban forces have filled the void by infiltrating from the relatively lawless tribal areas of Pakistan where they had fled at the end of 2001. Once back inside Afghanistan these committed jihadist commanders and fighters, aided by key sympathizers who had remained behind, have raised hundreds, if not thousands, of new, local recruits, many for pay. They feed on the people's disillusion with the lack of economic progress, equity and stability that Karzai's government, NATO, Washington and the international community had promised.
NATO officials say the Taliban seems to be flush with cash, thanks to the guerrillas' alliance with prosperous opium traffickers. The fighters are paid more than $5 a day梘ood money in Afghanistan, and at least twice what the new Afghan National Army's 30,000 soldiers receive. It's a bad sign, too, that a shortage of local police has led Karzai to approve a plan allowing local warlords梠ften traffickers themselves梩o rebuild their private armies. U.N. officials have spent the past three years trying to disband Afghanistan's irregular militias, which are accused of widespread human-rights abuses. Now the warlords can rearm with the government's blessing. Afghanistan is "unfortunately well on its way" to becoming a "narco-state," NATO's supreme commander, Marine Gen. Jim Jones, said before Congress last week.
http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/j/msnbc/Sections/Newsweek/Components/Photos/Mag/061002_Issue/060923_AfghanTalibanpic_hsmall.standard.jpgLost Opportunity: The U.S. military opted not to strike this formation of 100 suspected Taliban because they were likely burying their dead
Jabar Shilghari, one of Ghazni's members of Parliament, is appalled by his province's rapid reversal of fortune. Only a year ago he was freely stumping for votes throughout the province. Today it's not safe for him to return to his own village. In a recent meeting he asked Karzai for more police and soldiers; he was rebuffed by the deputy director of intelligence, who told him the Taliban threat in Ghazni is minimal. "We have patiently waited five years for change, for an end to official corruption and abuse of power and for economic development," says Shilghari, who now lives in the increasingly sequestered capital of Kabul. "But we've received nothing."
Not long ago, the Bush administration was fond of pointing to Afghanistan as a model of transformation. That mountainous landlocked country, we were told, was being converted from a "failed state"桝l Qaeda's base for the worst ever attacks on U.S. continental soil梚nto a functioning, responsible member of the international community. In speech after speech, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other senior U.S. officials ticked off the happy stats: the Taliban and Al Qaeda had been routed, democratic presidential and parliamentary elections had been held, more than 3 million refugees had returned and 1.75 million girls were attending school.
But the harsh truth is that five years after the U.S. invasion on Oct. 7, 2001, most of the good news is confined to Kabul, with its choking rush-hour traffic jams, a construction boom and a handful of air-conditioned shopping malls. Much of the rest of Afghanistan appears to be failing again. Most worrisome, a new failed-state sanctuary is emerging across thousands of square miles along the Afghan-Pakistan border: "Jihadistan," it could be called. It's an autonomous quasi state of religious radicals, mostly belonging to Pashtun tribes who don't recognize the Afghan-Pakistan frontier梐n arbitrary line drawn by the British colonialists in 1893. The enclave's fluid borders span a widening belt of territory from mountainous hideouts in the southernmost provinces of Afghanistan桸imruz, Helmand and Farah梪p through the agricultural middle of the country in Ghazni, Uruzgan and Zabul, and then north to Paktia and parts of Konar. It extends well across the Pakistan border where, despite close cooperation between the U.S. and Pakistani militaries, jihadist militants in Waziristan province have begun calling themselves "Pakistani Taliban." No longer worried about interference from Islamabad, they openly recruit young men to fight in Afghanistan, and they hold Islamic kangaroo courts that sometimes stage public executions.
There are not nearly enough U.S., Western or Afghan troops or resources in the field to counter them. At a time when the American president has resurrected Osama bin Laden as public enemy No. 1梒omparing him recently to Lenin and Hitler桞ush's own top commander in the field, Army Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, says not enough money is being invested in creating a new Afghanistan. Improving Afghan lives is the only way to drive a stake through the Taliban or put the elusive Qaeda leader out of action, he says. "We need more in terms of investment in Afghan infrastructure. We need more resources, for road building, counternarcotics, good governance, a justice system," Eikenberry told NEWSWEEK last week. As the general is fond of saying: "Where the roads end, the Taliban begin."
part 1 of 2
[ Last edited bymmc at 26-9-2006 09:51 AM ] part 2 of 2
Indeed, the aid numbers for the past five years are grim. In the first years of reconstruction, aid amounted to just $67 a year per Afghan, says Beth DeGrasse of the government-funded U.S. Institute of Peace. She compares that figure with other recent nation-building exercises such as Bosnia ($249) and East Timor ($256), citing figures from the International Monetary Fund. "You get what you pay for in these endeavors, and we tried to do Afghanistan on the cheap," she says. "And we are going to pay for it." International conferences since 2002 have pledged some $15 billion, but countries have ponied up less than half of that so far. And the Afghan government estimates it will need $27.5 billion through 2010 to rebuild the country and its institutions.
Some critics point to a jarring mismatch between Bush's rhetoric and the scant attention paid to Afghanistan. Jim Dobbins, Bush's former special envoy to Kabul梙e also led the Clinton administration's rebuilding efforts in Bosnia, Kosovo, Haiti and Somalia梒alls Afghanistan the "most under-resourced nation-building effort in history." Former Bush reconstruction coordinator Carlos Pascual, who retired in December 2005, does not dispute this assessment. He says the State Department has "maybe 20 to 30 percent" of the people it needs. Even Republican Sen. Richard Lugar, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, fretted last week that for five years the administration and Congress have failed to create a powerful nation-building czar, despite their enthusiasm for regime change. "We have a long way to go," he said.
The dangers of allowing Afghanistan to become a jihadist haven again are too many to count. It's not merely that bin Laden and Zawahiri may now die peacefully in their beds, safe among Pashtun tribesmen, as a senior U.S. military official conceded to NEWSWEEK last week, speaking anonymously because he was discussing classified operations. (A French intelligence report leaked over the weekend suggested bin Laden had done just that in August, dying quietly of typhus, but like many such rumors in the past it could not be confirmed.) Nor is the problem simply that the increasingly confident Taliban is launching ever more brazen attacks梚n recent weeks, bombing a convoy scarcely a block from the U.S. Embassy in Kabul and assassinating a major provincial governor.
No: it's that Al Qaeda or other terrorist groups now have a place from which to hatch the next 9/11. "This standoff could go on for 40 or 50 years," says a retired U.S. general who served in Afghanistan, speaking only on condition of anonymity. "It's not going to be a takeover by the Taliban as long as NATO is there. Instead this is going to be like the triborder region of South America, or like Kashmir, a long, drawn-out stalemate where everyone carves out spheres of influence." Eikenberry disagrees, though he refused to put a time frame on Afghanistan's recovery. "It won't be decades," he says.
The Taliban doesn't always share Al Qaeda's goals or tactics, although some units have taken up suicide bombing. But a guerrilla calling himself Commander Hemat, a former anti-Soviet mujahedin fighter who now works closely with the Taliban and Al Qaeda, says foreign Arabs are being welcomed again. "Now the money is flowing again because the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan are producing results," he told NEWSWEEK. Zabibullah, a Taliban operative who has proved reliable in the past, says the Qaeda operatives "feel more secure and can concentrate on their own business other than just surviving."
Pakistan fostered the Taliban movement in the 1990s as a way of holding sway over Afghanistan and undercutting India's influence there. Those ties persist. Despite Bush's praise of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf How many US and coalition troops are dead compared to the Taliban killed? You kill a handful of American and Brist and you think you win? so childish its simply amazing.
why do you think Taliban is resorting to killing innocent civilians & destroying schools in afghanistan again? If they are winning, why do they need to do that? you gotta be kiddin chum. How many US and coalition troops are dead compared to the Taliban killed? You kill a handful of American and Brist and you think you win? so childish its simply amazing.
why do you think Taliban is resorting to killing innocent civilians & destroying schools in afghanistan again? If they are winning, why do they need to do that? you gotta be kiddin chum. aaah again the preoccupation with the numbers game..mr nick perelman, maybe you can explain this better to your lapdog, tks..our own Mat Toro has given up explaining to him that modern warfare does not care about the dead count anymore...:) Really? So why do the taliban bother to kill so many people?
Why bother to ask for ceasefire in Lebanon if terrorists are winning?
Reply #8 Debmey's post
well debs...please note that the above is an american respected publication views..and i'm sure they are more well-versed about these things than you are...so they said the taliban is winning, they are winning, and please note there is no mention of body count anywhere :) respected by who? The problem with you is that you worship the white man too much. Originally posted by Debmey at 26-9-2006 04:21 PMrespected by who? The problem with you is that you worship the white man too much.
what a farce...so mind you that i will return your words back to you when you start quotingthe white man as back up for your assertations, especially from your beloved wikipedia..This posting is a BIG MISTAKE for you debs.. people like you have no Asian pride, no asian culture culture. Stop worshipping the white man! Originally posted by Debmey at 26-9-2006 09:58 PM
people like you have no Asian pride, no asian culture culture. Stop worshipping the white man!
To hell with Asian pride. White man owns all!!
:nyorok:
http://img98.imageshack.us/img98/8329/whitemanoy0.jpg
Pictar of white man owning your ass.
[ Last edited byEokboy at 26-9-2006 10:08 PM ]
Reply #12 Debmey's post
bila dah tersilap tu, mulalah merapu dunia terbalik, kita pulak dikatakan menyembah mat salleh...mengong ke Debs...HEYA DEBS! DID THIS PERSONA IMPERSONATING YOU DID NOT GET THE MEMO THAT YOU WORSHIP THE WHITE MAN AND EVERY WORD THEY SAYS IS GOSPEL, ESPECIALLY WIKIPEDIA...Come on man, its getting too easy to identify your multiple users, at least make it la a worthwhile game..:P Ahaks aku rasa ini argument back-to-the-wall sang dubuk paling kelako! Ha! Ha! he's still busy telling himself his master is winning by number with body counts... who's the childish one here?? Bush said Osama perpetrated 9/11... but I wonder why is he pouring more resources in Iraq than in Afghanistan where Osama is making his stronghold??Is it because Iraq got more fuel??C'mon Debbie... defend your master... I am ridiculing your master... ha! ha! First of all, Afghanistan is not Osama's stronghold anymore, you must be sleepin again my fren.Your idol Osama is hiding in a hole somewhere in Pakistan and he dare not use the phone.
Secondly, Osama himself said Iraq is the centre of jihad now. So its a great idea to take out terrorists there than anywhere else.
Reply #17 Debmey's post
well from now you can continue to live in LA LA land..i've lost interest in engaging your fantasies.. Originally posted by Debmey at 28-9-2006 11:35 AMFirst of all, Afghanistan is not Osama's stronghold anymore, you must be sleepin again my fren.
Your idol Osama is hiding in a hole somewhere in Pakistan and he dare not use the phone.
Secondly, Osama himself said Iraq is the centre of jihad now. So its a great idea to take out terrorists there than anywhere else....
First of all Iraq is not where Osama is... you must be blind my racist neighbour.
Osama is criss crossing the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan.With so many CIA operatives in Pakistan I wonder why they still can't catch him??Oh right... the US needs a bogeyman on the loose to instill fear and justify their world wide rampage of terror.And how do you know OSama don't use the phone??He hadn't called you lately??
Secondly, to hell what Osama says... Bush promised to take out the guy who he says perpetrated 9/11... Osama ain't in Iraq... of course if the promise was meant to be broken and Iraqi oil is more important who am I to say anything... it's the American people Bush lied to... not me... I never trusted him anyway... what good is Osama when he's just hiding in a hole?
where is your proof that Osama is criss crossing the border? He's not as silly as you my fren, its too risk and he fears death just like you.
The terrorists are in Iraq so its a greta idea to draw them there and kill em.