Worsening insurgent violence in many parts of the country is raising concern about Afghanistan’s ability to hold a fair parliamentary election in little more than a month, a crucial test of President Hamid Karzai’s ability to deliver security and a legitimate government.

After last year’s troubled presidential election, both the government and its foreign supporters are under intense pressure to hold a credible vote for Parliament, scheduled for Sept. 18. Last time, insecurity, inadequate monitoring and rampant fraud led to a drawn-out dispute that soured relations between Mr. Karzai and his Western backers so badly that they have yet to recover the trust lost on both sides.

As American commanders look toward a deadline to begin withdrawing troops next year, they would like the election to show that the government is capable of standing on its own. But already Western diplomats and observers are lowering expectations for the election, while Afghans are increasingly disillusioned and fatalistic about the prospects for democracy.

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As public anger rises over the government’s slow and chaotic response to Pakistan’s worst flooding in 80 years, hard-line Islamic charities have stepped into the breach with a grass-roots efficiency that is earning them new support among Pakistan’s beleaguered masses.

Victims of the floods and political observers say the disaster has provided yet another deeply painful reminder of the anemic health of the civilian government as it teeters between the ineffectual and neglectful.

The floods have opened a fresh opportunity for the Islamic charities to demonstrate that they can provide what the government cannot, much as the Islamists did during the earthquake in Kashmir in 2005, which helped them lure new recruits to banned militant groups through the charity wings that front for them.

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Obama administration officials fear that a move by Afghan President Hamid Karzai to assert control over U.S.-backed corruption investigations might provoke the biggest crisis in U.S.-Afghan relations since last year’s fraud-riddled election and could further threaten congressional approval of billions of dollars in pending aid.

The concerns were sparked by Karzai’s decision this week to order a probe of two anti-corruption units that have been involved in the recent arrest of several senior government officials on graft and bribery allegations. Karzai said the investigators, who have been aided by U.S. law enforcement advisers and wiretap technology, were acting outside the Afghan constitution.

Afghanistan’s attorney general said on Thursday that Karzai plans to issue a decree outlining new regulations for the bodies, the Major Crimes Task Force and Special Investigative Unit.

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As the war in Afghanistan enters its ninth year, the need for an exit strategy weighs on the minds of U.S. policymakers. Such an outcome, it is assumed, would involve reconciliation with the Taliban. But Afghan women fear that in the quest for a quick peace, their progress may be sidelined. “Women’s rights must not be the sacrifice by which peace is achieved,” says parliamentarian Fawzia Koofi.

Yet that may be where negotiations are heading. The Taliban will be advocating a version of an Afghan state in line with their own conservative views, particularly on the issue of women’s rights. Already there is a growing acceptance that some concessions to the Taliban are inevitable if there is to be genuine reconciliation. “You have to be realistic,” says a diplomat in Kabul. “We are not going to be sending troops and spending money forever. There will have to be a compromise, and sacrifices will have to be made.”

For Afghanistan’s women, an early withdrawal of international forces could be disastrous.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2007238,00.html#ixzz0vRrVD1LS

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Two things this week have made the hellishness of military violence painfully clear. The first, WikiLeaks’ Afghanistan war logs, describes in detail the horror of civilian casualties and “friendly fire” incidents. The second, from the same theatre, is Sean Smith’s chilling video of American marines in southern Helmand. Faced with these portraits of war, empathy for the people caught up in it has been unavoidable.

But empathy alone is not enough. If you’re not a pacifist, you accept that war is vile, but at times an inevitable part of life on Earth. The question is when and how it can be morally justified. Hence the importance of the just war tradition. Thinkers like the theologian Thomas Aquinas sought a way of containing war, by thinking through the desperate feelings that combat does and should evoke. The aim is to keep a steady view on the demands of natural justice, even when the fog of war threatens to blur everything.

The war logs in particular afford us a steady view on this current conflict, and what’s as unsettling as the tragedy they reveal is the possibility that we lost sight of those demands, at least on occasion. The crucial issue is whether that’s happened. An answer can be found by thinking about the relationship between jus ad bellum and jus in bello ”“ the justification for the war itself, and the principles that should operate during the conduct of war. Both matter.

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The trove of WikiLeaks about the faltering U.S. war effort in Afghanistan has provoked many reactions, but for me it contains one clear message. It’s actually an old piece of advice your parents may have given you before you went off to college: “If you are in a poker game and you don’t know who the sucker is, it’s probably you.”

In the case of the Great Game of Central Asia, that’s us.

Best I can tell from the WikiLeaks documents and other sources, we are paying Pakistan’s Army and intelligence service to be two-faced. Otherwise, they would be just one-faced and 100 percent against us. The same could probably be said of Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai. But then everyone out there is wearing a mask ”” or two.

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When President Obama announced his new war plan for Afghanistan last year, the centerpiece of the strategy ”” and a big part of the rationale for sending 30,000 additional troops ”” was to safeguard the Afghan people, provide them with a competent government and win their allegiance.

Eight months later, that counterinsurgency strategy has shown little success, as demonstrated by the flagging military and civilian operations in Marja and Kandahar and the spread of Taliban influence in other areas of the country.

Instead, what has turned out to work well is an approach American officials have talked much less about: counterterrorism, military-speak for the targeted killings of insurgents from Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

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(Please note–the above headline is from the print edition–KSH).

Melanie Poorman swiveled in her chair and punched a button on the phone. The caller, an Iraq war veteran in his 30s, had recently broken up with his girlfriend and was watching a movie, “Body of War,” that was triggering bad memories. He started to cry.

And he had a 12-gauge shotgun nearby. Could someone please come and take it away, he asked.

Ms. Poorman, 54, gently coaxed the man into unloading the weapon. As a co-worker called the police, she stayed on the line, talking to him about his girlfriend, his work, the war. Suddenly, there were sirens. “I unloaded the gun!” she heard him shout. And then he hung up. (He was taken to a hospital, she learned later.)

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President Barack Obama may have set his 30,000 Afghanistan troop surge deadline for July, but it could be September before all their necessary equipment catches up.

Case in point: Just this week a C-17 cargo plane took off from Charleston Air Force Base with nearly 100,000 pounds of ammunition stuffed inside its cavernous belly.

Stored not too far away are tons of bridging materials set to move in the coming weeks. That’s on top of the more than 1,700 heavy armored vehicles that have been loaded, chained and flown overseas by Charleston pilots since January.

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In Congress, House leaders were rushing to hold a vote on a critical war-financing bill as early as Tuesday, fearing that the disclosures could stoke Democratic opposition to the measure. A Senate panel is also set to hold a hearing on Tuesday on Mr. Obama’s choice to head the military’s Central Command, Gen. James N. Mattis, who would oversee military operations in Afghanistan.

Administration officials acknowledged that the documents, released on the Internet by an organization called WikiLeaks, will make it harder for Mr. Obama as he tries to hang on to public and Congressional support until the end of the year, when he has scheduled a review of the war effort.

“We don’t know how to react,” one frustrated administration official said on Monday. “This obviously puts Congress and the public in a bad mood.”

Mr. Obama is facing a tough choice: he must either figure out a way to convince Congress and the American people that his war strategy remains on track and is seeing fruit ”” a harder sell given that the war is lagging ”” or move more quickly to a far more limited American presence.

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Intelligence officials, past and present, are raising concerns that the WikiLeaks.org revelations could endanger U.S. counterterror networks in the Afghan region, and damage information sharing with U.S. allies.

People in Afghanistan or Pakistan who have worked with American intelligence agents or the military against the Taliban or al-Qaida may be at risk following the disclosure of thousands of once-secret U.S. military documents, former and current officials said.

Meanwhile, U.S. allies are asking whether they can trust America to keep secrets. And the Obama administration is scrambling to repair any political damage to the war effort back home.

The material could reinforce the view put forth by the war’s opponents in Congress that one of the nation’s longest conflicts is hopelessly stalemated. Congress has so far backed the war, and an early test of that continued support will come Tuesday when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, led by Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., holds a hearing on the Afghan war.

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More than 90,000 secret US military records have been leaked to the media, revealing hidden details of the war in Afghanistan, newspapers report.

The documents are said to include unreported killings of Afghan civilians as well as covert operations by US special forces against Taliban leaders.

UK daily The Guardian and the New York Times say the records were shown to them and to German weekly Der Spiegel by online whistle-blower Wikileaks.

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By any measure, Saturday was a very bad day in Afghanistan for U.S. forces: a convergence of two dreaded battlefield events.

Two U.S. soldiers were missing and feared captured or killed by the Taliban, military and Afghan officials said. And five other U.S. service members were killed by improvised explosive devices, which now pose a greater threat to life and limb for Western troops than at any point in the nine-year war.

Details of what exactly had befallen the two missing men were murky. The NATO force said in a statement that they had left their base Friday and had not been heard from since. A search was underway, it said.

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The projected image was of international statesmen gathering in solidarity with an Afghanistan
marching forward. But the alacrity with which they headed for their planes after spending the briefest of times in Kabul seemed to mirror the West’s haste to get on the exit route from this costly war.

There had, in the many previous conferences on Afghanistan’s future, been an air of expectation and even optimism. But the gathering for the “Kabul process” was permeated with an undercurrent of past disappointments and trepidation for the future.

The pledges made, already well-trailed, were trotted out without much conviction, the declaration of support for Hamid Karzai who had been accused by some of his Western backers of stealing last year’s election, delivered with little enthusiasm. Nine years after the fall of the Taliban, Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, talked of the road ahead “being full of challenges” and “questions by many on whether success was even possible”.

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The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

These are some of the findings of a two-year investigation by The Washington Post that discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine….

Read it carefully and read it all.

In the frantic last hours of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s command in Afghanistan, when the world wondered what was racing through the general’s mind, he reached out to an unlikely corner of his life: the author of the book “Three Cups of Tea,” Greg Mortenson.

“Will move through this and if I’m not involved in the years ahead, will take tremendous comfort in knowing people like you are helping Afghans build a future,” General McChrystal wrote to Mr. Mortenson in an e-mail message, as he traveled from Kabul to Washington. The note landed in Mr. Mortenson’s inbox shortly after 1 a.m. Eastern time on June 23. Nine hours later, the general walked into the Oval Office to be fired by President Obama.

The e-mail message was in response to a note of support from Mr. Mortenson. It reflected his broad and deepening relationship with the United States military, whose leaders have increasingly turned to Mr. Mortenson, once a shaggy mountaineer, to help translate the theory of counterinsurgency into tribal realities on the ground.

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Thirty-two soldiers took their own lives last month, the most Army suicides in a single month since the Vietnam era. Eleven of the soldiers were not on active duty. Of the 21 who were, seven were serving in Iraq or Afghanistan, the Department of Defense said.

Army officials say they don’t have any answers to why more and more soldiers are resorting to suicide.

“There were no trends to any one unit, camp, post or station,” Col. Chris Philbrick, head of the Army’s suicide prevention task force, told CNN. “I have no silver bullet to answer the question why.”

Makes the heart sad–read it all.

Update: An NBC News segment on this may be viewed here:

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In Army culture, especially in the elite unit filled with rangers and paratroopers in which I served, asking for help was showing weakness. My two Bronze Stars, my tours in Airborne and Special Operations units, none of these would matter. To ask for help would be seen as breaking.

But, finally, when in the middle of the day I was forced to hide, shaking and crying in a concrete bunker, railing against the noise and the images in my head, and when I understood that to continue was to endanger the soldiers I was sent to Afghanistan to lead, I asked for help.

Today, right now, we need to get more soldiers to ask for help. Reducing the stigma attached to mental health issues is the first step. When soldiers see their peers ridiculed, accused of malingering or cowardice, they don’t seek the help they need.

Maybe that’s why, in the first half of 2009, more American soldiers committed suicide than died in combat.

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In late 2008, shortly after he had helped pull Iraq back from the brink of catastrophe, Gen. David H. Petraeus prepared to turn to that other American war.

“I’ve always said that Afghanistan would be the tougher fight,” General Petraeus said at the time.

Now the burden falls to him, at perhaps the decisive moment in President Obama’s campaign to reverse the deteriorating situation on the ground here and regain the momentum in this nine-year-old war. In many ways, General Petraeus is being summoned to Afghanistan at a moment similar to the one he faced three years ago in Iraq, when the situation seemed hopeless to a growing number of Americans and their elected representatives as well.

But there is a crucial difference: In Iraq, General Petraeus was called in to reverse a failed strategy put in place by previous commanders. In Afghanistan, General Petraeus was instrumental in developing and executing the strategy in partnership with Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who carried it out on the ground. Now General Petraeus will be directly responsible for its success or failure, risking the reputation he built in Iraq.

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Ann Marlowe, a visiting fellow of the Hudson Institute who has been embedded with U.S. forces in Afghanistan six times, says there have been successes at the local and even provincial levels “but nothing that has lasted even a year.” And the election fraud last August that secured Karzai another five-year term was symptomatic: His “government has become more egregiously corrupt and incompetent in the last three or four years.” Last month Marlowe reported: “The Pentagon’s map of Afghanistan’s 80 most key districts shows only five ‘sympathetic’ to the Afghan government — and none supporting it.” She suggests that Karzai might believe that President Obama’s announced intention to begin withdrawing U.S. troops next summer “is a bluff.” Those Americans who say that Afghanistan is a test of America’s “staying power” are saying that we must stay there because we are there. This is steady work, but it treats perseverance as a virtue regardless of context or consequences and makes futility into a reason for persevering.

Obama has counted on his 2011 run-up to reelection being smoothed by three developments in 2010 — the health-care legislation becoming popular after enactment, job creation accelerating briskly and Afghanistan conditions improving significantly. The first two are not happening. He can decisively influence only the third, and only by adhering to his timetable for disentangling U.S. forces from this misadventure.

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U.S. generals planning the promised offensive against Kandahar may now argue that the scheduled July 2011 beginning of the U.S. pullout from Afghanistan encourages the Taliban to push the United States against the wall it constitutes.

At the same time, the advantages of more vigorous combat directed against the Taliban must be factored into the effort by the Hamid Karzai government to draw at least some Taliban into greater cooperation with the Afghan authorities through means such as the just-completed loya jirga, or grand council meeting of tribes and factions in Afghanistan.

All in all, the complexities of Afghan politics, plus the rising toll in U.S. lives and expenditure on this war, argue strongly for drawing it to an end.

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Caught this on the morning run–really inspiring. Watch it all-KSH.

The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan is finding himself squeezed between a ticking clock and an enemy that won’t go away.

On Thursday, during a visit to NATO headquarters here, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal admitted that preparations for perhaps the most critical operation of the war — the campaign to take control of Kandahar, the Taliban’s birthplace — weren’t going as planned. He said winning support from local leaders, some of whom see the Taliban fighters not as oppressors but as their Muslim brothers, was proving tougher than expected. The military side of the campaign, originally scheduled to surge in June and finish by August, is now likely to extend into the fall.

“I don’t intend to hurry it,” McChrystal told reporters traveling with Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates. “It will take a number of months for this to play out. But I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. It’s more important we get it right than we get it fast.”

Read the whole article from the Washington Post.

The difficulty for an embedded American trainer is trying to take away a positive lesson about Afghan leadership. Waving your gun at your troops and then firing without warning is career suicide for an American military officer. But it works in Afghanistan. Bridging this cultural gap is something we just aren’t taught in our military schools.

Given the dearth of quality Afghan commanders, how do we make progress in cultivating a leadership cadre that can carry on the fight and win in our absence? My own solution to this problem was this: I simply ignored the incompetent officers. I didn’t waste time trying to change old men who had little interest in reform. Time was short, and lives were at stake, so I devoted my time developing the junior ranking officers and NCOs with good habits of effective leadership. I didn’t include the bad leaders in planning, and I didn’t expect them to go out on missions with our troops and me. Frankly, these senior officers preferred to be ignored, as it meant more nap time and vacation time for them, and less lecturing from a young pesky American Captain.

I focused on mentoring the young junior officers and NCOs who will be the future of the Afghan army. They will eventually assume command as their seniors retire, die or are forced out. Slowly but surely, these young studs will be percolating to the top of the chain of command.

Read the whole article.

Afghanistan’s much-delayed peace jirga, or assembly, gets under way in Kabul on Wednesday. Under a large tent at Kabul Polytechnic University, 1,600 delegates ”” one-fifth of them women ”” will try to come up with ways to persuade the Taliban and other insurgents to lay down their weapons and reconcile with their countrymen.

But many war-weary Afghans aren’t optimistic the conference will produce meaningful results.

The highly touted peace jirga seems anything but organized. On Tuesday the event’s planners were still trying to come up with a schedule, and hundreds of delegates had yet to arrive.

And Afghan President Hamid Karzai has not laid out exactly how he plans to reconcile with insurgents.

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It was a common phrase uttered across the nation over the weekend: “Happy Memorial Day.” Yet it sounds odd to Cindy Wiley of Dunwoody, Ga. Her 24-year-old son, Patrick, a Marine, is on his first tour of duty in the war in Afghanistan.

“I never really know what to say when someone says ‘Happy Memorial Day,’ ” she said. “Bless their hearts, they just don’t know. I didn’t know a couple years ago. ”¦ Before he joined the Marines, I was one of those civilians who was just oblivious to what our guys go through.”

As the United States continues to fight wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Memorial Day Monday was a somber time of remembrance for many and a day to pray for troops in harm’s way. Yet some military families and veterans worry that there’s a growing cultural divide between families who sacrifice and serve and those who don’t.

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U.S. forces serving in Afghanistan and Iraq remembered friends and colleagues Monday in solemn Memorial Day ceremonies to commemorate all of their nation’s war dead.

As some soldiers paused, violence raged on in both places.

In Afghanistan, U.S.-led NATO forces launched airstrikes against Taliban insurgents who had forced government forces to abandon a district in Nuristan, a remote province on the Pakistan border. NATO also said it killed one of the Taliban’s top two commanders in the insurgent stronghold of Kandahar in a separate airstrike.

At the sprawling Bagram Air Field, the largest U.S. military base in Afghanistan, about 400 soldiers in camouflage uniforms and brown combat boots stood at attention for a moment’s silence as Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of some 94,000 U.S. troops in the country, led the ceremony.

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[LUCKY] SEVERSON: Michael Abbatello joined the Marines September 12, 2001, the day after the terrorist attack on the Twin Trade Towers. Like tens of thousands of American soldiers coming home, he has struggled with the warning signs of post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD, symptoms like nightmares, insomnia, hyper-vigilance and guilt, and for him something even deeper””a wounding of the soul.

[MICHAEL] ABBATELLO: Something is changed. You know, you feel down to your spirit. You know that you’re different now. You know, we don’t really have a consciousness of our own spirit until it’s wounded, and then it needs help.

SEVERSON: With the increase in crime and suicide among veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, the notion that war can actually damage or warp the soul has been gaining traction among experts in the field. Nancy Sherman, a professor at Georgetown University, has studied and written extensively about the hearts, minds, and souls of soldiers.

PROFESSOR NANCY SHERMAN (Georgetown University): I like to talk about the moral emotions of war, and they include wounds, but they’re the hard, bad feelings that may erode at your character. That’s the really deep ones.

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In Kandahar, the Taliban’s most powerful weapon has become the calculated assassination. The tools of this campaign are rudimentary — ropes, knives, old rifles — but the results have been devastating. By executing those who work or sympathize with the government, the Taliban has made clear that those supporting the American military effort here are risking their lives. Each new death brings more dread in a city of hunters and hunted.

“They’re watching us. We don’t know who, but they’re watching,” Ahmad said. “Nowhere is safe. We cannot escape.”

The killings take aim at the fundamental goal of the U.S. military’s planned summer offensive in Kandahar: to build a credible local government that responds to the needs of the people. In the past month, about six people have quit the already understaffed provincial government, and other federal ministry representatives in the province have taken leave. Targeted by bombs and killings of their local staff, foreigners working for U.S. government contractors and the United Nations have fled for Kabul.

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A suicide car bomb that targeted a Nato convoy in the Afghan capital, Kabul, has killed at least 19 people, including six foreign troops.

The Taliban has claimed responsibility for the rush hour attack in the west of the city, where parliament and other government buildings are located.

More than 50 people – mostly Afghan civilians – were hurt in the explosion.

It is the deadliest attack on foreign forces in the heavily-guarded capital since a Taliban assault last September.

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