The Karen DeYoung AfPak Reader

Below, you will find a year’s worth of articles by Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post centered on the AfPak conflict.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/27/AR2008082703628_pf.html
Only a Two-Page ‘Note’ Governs U.S. Military in Afghanistan

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 28, 2008; A07

For the past six years, military relations between the United States and Afghanistan have been governed by a two-page “diplomatic note” giving U.S. forces virtual carte blanche to conduct operations as they see fit.

Although President Bush pledged in a 2005 declaration signed with Afghan President Hamid Karzai to “develop appropriate arrangements and agreements” formally spelling out the terms of the U.S. troop presence and other bilateral ties, no such agreements were drawn up.

But after a U.S.-led airstrike last week that United Nations and Afghan officials have said killed up to 90 civilians — most of them children — Karzai has publicly called for a review of all foreign forces in Afghanistan and a formal “status of forces agreement,” along the lines of an accord being negotiated between the United States and Iraq.

The prospect of codifying the ad hoc rules under which U.S. forces have operated in Afghanistan since late 2001 sends shudders through the Bush administration, which has struggled to finalize its agreement with Baghdad. “It’s never been done because the issues have been too big to surmount,” said one U.S. official who was not authorized to discuss the subject on the record. “The most diplomatic way of saying it is that there are just a lot of moving parts,” the official said.

The Afghan government “is not the most streamlined and efficient system,” he said. “So you’d have a multiplicity of players on that side.” Less diplomatic U.S. officials frequently describe elements of Karzai’s government as deeply corrupt and incompetent. Although most civilian war deaths in Afghanistan are caused by Taliban forces, those resulting from the highly visible airstrikes are a particular cause of public outrage that neither Karzai nor the administration can afford to ignore.

The other side of the equation is even more complicated. Of the 33,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, 19,000 operate under U.S. Central Command, while 14,000 form the largest single component of a 40-nation force led by NATO under a U.N. resolution.

The disparate command structures have frustrated every government involved in the effort, but according to Afghan officials, they have also allowed diffused responsibility for civilian casualties, such as those of last week in the western part of the country. U.S. forces operate up to 90 percent of all strike aircraft in the country, and it is rarely clear whether an individual strike has been conducted as part of a NATO or U.S. operation.

The U.N. mandate for NATO serves as a de facto status-of-forces agreement. The protection and authority it gives, however, do not apply to the separate U.S. force, which is covered under the diplomatic note exchanged between the United States and a non-elected, interim Afghan government in the months after the Sept. 11, 2001, al-Qaeda attacks and the launch of U.S. counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan.

The note delves into arcane issues such as customs duties and driver’s licenses. It devotes only a few sentences to “the conduct of ongoing military operations,” giving U.S. troops “a status equivalent” to diplomatic immunity and exempting them from any Afghan “disciplinary authority” or legal jurisdiction.

Similar legal immunity is included in U.S. status-of-forces agreements with more than 80 countries. But it has become the biggest roadblock to the conclusion of an accord with Baghdad, and U.S. officials say Karzai has taken his cues from the Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

Civilian casualties, long a recurring problem in Afghanistan, tripled last year as thinly spread U.S. and NATO forces grew more dependent on air power against a resurgent Taliban. Although the number of civilian deaths attributed to international forces during combat on the ground has remained relatively static at fewer than 100 each year, casualties due to airstrikes have reached more than 200 through the first eight months of this year, compared with 321 in 2007 and 116 in 2006.

According to the U.S. Air Forces Central Combined Air and Space Operations Center, the number of strikes this year in which munitions were dropped totaled 2,368 as of Aug. 4. The equivalent number for the same period in Iraq was 783. The statistics for Afghanistan do not distinguish between strikes on behalf of NATO and those part of separate U.S. operations, usually air support called in by Special Operations teams during engagements with Taliban forces.

U.S. military and intelligence officials have said that the Taliban has become adept at drawing U.S. fire to civilian areas as an increasingly effective propaganda move.

Although U.S. command headquarters on the ground and the Tampa-based Central Command normally respond to Afghan charges of civilian casualties by announcing an investigation, the results of their probes are rarely made public.

Last week’s bombing, however, was the largest single incident of reported non-combatant casualties. An investigation by a U.N. human rights team found “convincing evidence” that 90 civilians, including 60 children, were killed in the Aug. 21 military operation led by U.S. Special Operations forces and the Afghan army in Herat province.

An initial U.S. military release acknowledged that five civilians and 25 militants had been killed in an operation the Pentagon later described as “a legitimate strike on a Taliban target.”

The U.N. report, released Tuesday, added pressure for a U.S. investigation, which is underway. In a media briefing at the Pentagon yesterday, Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James Conway said that, if the U.N. report is accurate, it would be a “truly unfortunate incident.”

“We need to avoid that, certainly, at every cost,” Conway said. Still, he said, air power remains a critical military tool, offering the ability to strike insurgents in hardened compounds and reducing the risk for U.S. troops. Still, he acknowledged, “you don’t always know what’s in the compound.”

Staff writer Ann Scott Tyson contributed to this report.

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/03/AR2008090300523.html?nav=emailpage
U.S. Troops Crossed Border, Pakistan Says
20 Locals Reported Killed in Assault

By Candace Rondeaux and Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, September 4, 2008; A01

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Sept. 3 — Helicopters carried U.S. and Afghan commandos many miles into Pakistan on Wednesday to stage the first U.S. ground attack against a Taliban target inside the country, Pakistani officials said. At least 20 local people died in the raid, according to the officials.

Pakistan filed a formal protest with the U.S. government, which had no comment on what appeared to be a new escalation of U.S. pressure on Taliban and al-Qaeda sanctuaries in Pakistan’s mountainous border regions.

As the Taliban insurgency escalates in Afghanistan, U.S. officials have increasingly turned their attention to those havens. Pakistan has committed to securing the borders, but has been beset with rising violence, both in the frontier region and in its cities.

In another example of eroding security, the limousine of Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani was ambushed Wednesday in the capital, Islamabad. Two bullets struck the side window of his black Mercedes-Benz as it sped toward an airport. Gillani was not in the vehicle at the time.

U.S. forces based in Afghanistan have periodically conducted air and artillery strikes against insurgents across the border in Pakistani territory, and new hot-pursuit rules provide some room for American troops to maneuver during battle. But the arrival of U.S. helicopters in the village of Musa Nika, deep in undisputed Pakistani territory, would constitute a new tactic.

Mohammed Sadiq, a spokesman for Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry, condemned a “gross violation of Pakistan’s territory” and “a grave provocation.” In a written statement, he said his office lodged a formal complaint with the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad.

“Such actions are counterproductive and certainly do not help our joint efforts to fight terrorism,” Sadiq said. “On the contrary, they undermine the very basis of cooperation and may fuel the fire of hatred and violence that we are trying to extinguish.”

U.S. military officials in Afghanistan, at the Central Command in Tampa and at the Pentagon maintained a wall of silence, saying they had no comment on the Pakistani reports. Lou Fintor, a U.S. Embassy spokesman in Islamabad, also declined to comment.

Pakistani sources gave varying accounts, including on the number of troops and helicopters involved, and on whether U.S. troops were among those who left the helicopters and conducted a ground operation in the village. There were also differing versions of how far inside Pakistan the helicopters flew, because the border’s location is disputed. By one count, the target village lay about 20 miles from the border.

According to Pakistani military sources, the raid began about 3 a.m. Wednesday when two or possibly three U.S. Army helicopters carrying American and Afghan troops landed in Musa Nika village in the Pakistani tribal area of South Waziristan.

The raid was apparently in response to a rocket that fighters fired at a convoy inside Afghanistan, according to one senior Pakistani official. “By the time they got there,” the official said, “the guy with the rocket had moved.”

According to another Pakistani official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to give out information, several of the troops left the helicopters and launched an assault on three houses.

One of the homes belonged to local tribesman Pao Jan Ahmedzai Wazir, according to Anwar Shah, a resident of a neighboring village. Several women and children who were inside Wazir’s house and two other homes nearby were killed when U.S. and Afghan troops fired on the buildings, he said. “The situation there is very terrible. People are trying to take out the dead bodies,” Shah said.

The reported attack comes at a time of debate over the rules of military operation along the 1,500-mile border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The Pakistani military appears to have acceded to U.S. pressure to step up attacks on extremists in its border areas. In the past two months, it has launched major offensives on Taliban and al-Qaeda strongholds in two of the country’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas.

Analysts in Islamabad say that the incursion into South Waziristan could augur a tactical turn aimed at cutting off an insurgency that threatens to engulf large swaths of Pakistan and reverse gains made by U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan.

The Pentagon has never acknowledged a case of hot pursuit into Pakistan. Wednesday’s incident “doesn’t fit that bill,” the senior Pakistani official said. There was no indication U.S. forces had begun a ground pursuit inside Afghanistan that led them into Pakistani territory.

A Pakistani military liaison unit at the main U.S. military base in Afghanistan, Bagram, is under military procedures to be informed of any incursion. Pakistani officials insist there was no such notification.

Last week, Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, held a meeting with the Pakistani army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Kiyani, aboard a U.S. aircraft carrier in the Indian Ocean after several serious setbacks for Western and Afghan forces in Afghanistan.

U.S. and Pakistani officials have released few details about the meeting, which was also attended by Gen. David D. McKiernan, NATO’s top commander in Afghanistan.

But a senior Pakistani military official with knowledge of the meeting said that Mullen and Kiyani focused in large part on the threat to international forces in Afghanistan emanating from insurgents operating inside Pakistan’s borders. The Pakistani military official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the meeting touched on a possible agreement to allow U.S. Special Forces to begin ground operations in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, chief spokesman for the Pakistani military, denied that there was any agreement for U.S. troops to operate on Pakistani territory.

A NATO spokesman in Afghanistan said foreign forces are generally prohibited from mounting cross-border attacks into Pakistan. The spokesman, who gave his name only as Sgt. Yates, said NATO forces occasionally use artillery or missiles to target insurgents who attack foreign troops from Pakistani territory, but the rules of engagement are very precise. “Our area of operations stops at the border. We don’t go over the border, period,” Yates said.

In Afghanistan, NATO and U.S. military operations have recently come under scrutiny because of an airstrike that Afghan and U.N. officials said killed 90 civilians two weeks ago. On Wednesday, McKiernan said that he concurred with a U.S. military investigation that found that five civilians died in the incident.

McKiernan expressed sorrow at the loss of civilian lives in the strike, which began late on Aug. 21 in the village of Azizabad and continued into the early morning of Aug. 22. He said NATO would work to better coordinate with the Afghan government and the U.N. mission in Afghanistan to respond to incidents involving civilian casualties.

DeYoung reported from Washington. Staff writer Ann Scott Tyson at the Pentagon and special correspondent Shaiq Hussain in Islamabad contributed to this report.

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/08/AR2008090800633_pf.html
U.S. Team to Reinvestigate Deadly Strike In Afghanistan

By Candace Rondeaux and Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, September 9, 2008; A01

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Sept. 8 — The U.S. Central Command will send a senior team, headed by a general and including a legal affairs officer, to reinvestigate a U.S. air attack last month that U.N. and Afghan officials say killed 90 civilians, amid mounting public outrage in Afghanistan and evidence that conflicts with the military’s initial version of events.

The U.S. decision to again probe the Aug. 21 attack in Azizabad, near the western city of Herat, came at the urging of Gen. David D. McKiernan, the top NATO commander in Afghanistan. McKiernan said he was prompted by “emerging evidence” that threw into question the finding of a U.S. investigation that five to seven civilians died. McKiernan had earlier said he concurred with that finding.

The attack and the widely divergent accounts of its toll have exposed long-standing tensions between U.S. forces in Afghanistan and other major players in the war there, including the government of President Hamid Karzai, the U.N. assistance mission and the NATO military command. Underlying the dispute over civilian casualties are a lack of communication, a diffuse command structure and differing military rules of engagement.

Military officials said the new evidence included a cellphone video showing dozens of civilian bodies, including those of numerous children, prepared for burial in Azizabad after the attack. McKiernan was shown the video Friday by Kai Eide, the chief U.N. representative in Afghanistan.

“The footage that is there on this shows horrendous pictures of these bodies and clearly identifies women and children. In some cases, the bodies are not in one piece,” a U.N. official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “Whether you say it was 76 or 82 or even 92 — it was clearly not seven who were killed there.”

Said a senior U.S. military official: “Whatever information McKiernan got that was shared by Afghan and U.N. representatives led him to believe there was good cause to want to look at all of this more deeply.”

In a statement , McKiernan said: “The people of Afghanistan have our commitment to get to the truth.”

The U.S. military official said the general in charge of the new investigation, to be named Tuesday, will come from inside the Central Command but outside Afghanistan. The team, including a military legal representative and a colonel with Afghan ground experience, will “immediately deploy” and will review the initial investigation before visiting the area of the attack. There, the official said, the team will speak with family members of victims and with others to determine “who, in fact, was there and who has died,” the official said.

In an atmosphere of local antagonism and without being able to exhume bodies, “it’s going to be pretty challenging,” he said.

Karzai visited the bomb site in Azizabad last week. He has been increasingly critical of the rising civilian death toll from aerial bombing this year, calling for a halt to aggressive raids on Afghan villages. Last month, he called for a full-scale review of the agreements that govern NATO and U.S. military operations in Afghanistan.

Witnesses and Afghan officials from the area have said that many of those killed had traveled to the town for a memorial ceremony for a local villager who was killed last year. By these accounts, most of the villagers were sleeping and were awakened by the sound of heavy gunfire about midnight. Shortly after the ground skirmish erupted, U.S. planes flew overhead, then unleashed a torrent of bombs on a compound in the village.

U.N. officials subsequently made several visits to Azizabad, traveling from Kabul and from their regional office in Herat, a 45-minute drive away. They said they found “convincing evidence” that 90 civilians had been killed.

Results of a U.S. military investigation released Sept. 2 said a ground patrol by U.S. Special Forces and Afghan army troops came under heavy fire from the village as it led a midnight raid on the compound of a suspected Taliban commander known as Mullah Siddiq. Patrol members called in an airstrike when they were unable to repulse the gunfire. The accounts said the five to seven civilians killed were believed to be related to Siddiq. The report also found that 30 to 35 Taliban militants were killed.

Investigators interviewed 30 U.S. and Afghan participants in the operation, the military said.

U.S. military officials who examined topographic photos of the village and searched the area after the attack found only a few new grave sites, according to one official interviewed a week after the incident.

A U.N. official said Eide was “very satisfied he is on solid ground” in the U.N. investigation results and believed he had “no choice” other than to go public with them.

The U.N. mission in Afghanistan has the dual job of helping to coordinate the international assistance effort there and to “be an advocate for human rights and for the Afghan people,” the official said. He added that Eide saw little point in joining a new U.S. investigation. “The discrepancies are so huge, it’s hard to believe a joint investigation would settle anything,” the official said.

Some NATO officials expressed irritation that the United Nations did not consult them before making its report public. “How we handle civilian casualties — the follow-up and investigation — is now becoming a strategic issue,” one NATO official said. Both the United Nations and non-U.S. NATO forces have complained about a lack of U.S. transparency in investigating previous incidents of civilian casualties.

The international force in Afghanistan includes troops from nearly two dozen NATO members, with 14,000 Americans as the largest contingent. The United States also fields a separate, 19,000-member force under U.S. command, leading to frequent confusion and increasing tension. Small units of U.S. Special Forces are known to operate in areas technically under NATO European command, sometimes conducting operations with Afghan army units they are training — as was the case in Azizabad.

“We find that some of these [U.S. units] are very good at coordinating with the people in whose areas they are working,” said a senior European military officer. “Others are less good. When they’re good, we have no problems and we have very little collateral in terms of civilian casualties. When they don’t coordinate, they tend to end up doing these operations with too little strength on their own, and their only alternative is to call in air power.”

The area where the Azizabad attack took place is under the command of the Italian contingent of NATO. “It’s very difficult having two organizations under two separate commands, uncoordinated, and working in the same battle space,” the European military official said. “It’s always a recipe for, at the very least, misunderstanding, and potentially worse.”

U.S. military officials have expressed their own concerns about European forces in the past, saying that they are less adept at the kind of aggressive counterinsurgency tactics necessary to defeat resurgent Taliban fighters.

According to a report on airstrikes and civilian deaths released Monday by New York-based Human Rights Watch, NATO and the United States have differing rules of engagement governing the use of airstrikes, with NATO requiring an “overwhelming” threat and the United States allowing “anticipatory self-defense.”

The vast majority of deaths caused by international troops come from airstrikes requested by Special Forces units, the report said. Using statistics provided by the U.S. Central Command Air Forces, the report noted that the number of bombing sorties has increased exponentially over the past two years, with U.S. aircraft dropping about as many tons of bombs in June and July this year as during all of 2006.

At least 1,633 Afghan civilians died in fighting last year, the report said, with about 950 killed by insurgent forces and at least 321 killed in NATO or U.S. aerial raids — triple the number in 2006. In the first seven months of this year, at least 119 Afghan civilians were killed in 12 airstrikes, according to the report, which did not include the Azizabad bombing.

Aggressive tactics employed by U.S. Special Forces last year in Taliban-dominated Helmand province in the south prompted a senior British commander of NATO forces in the region to ask U.S. Special Forces to leave his district, according to the Human Rights Watch report and the NATO official.

The tactics have resulted in several major setbacks for the Taliban, the NATO official said, but civilian deaths resulting from U.S.-led operations and airstrikes in particular have taken a toll on the overall war effort. “U.S. Special Forces are doing a brilliant job, but at the same time, most of the really controversial things seem to be happening in that area,” the official said.

DeYoung reported from Washington.

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/11/AR2008091103811.html?nav=emailpage
Pakistan Did Not Agree to New Rules, Officials Say

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, September 12, 2008; A10

New rules of engagement authorizing U.S. ground attacks inside Pakistan, signed by President Bush in July, were not agreed to by that country’s civilian government or its military, according to U.S. and Pakistani officials.

Gen. Ashfaq Kiyani, the Pakistani army’s chief of staff, was informed last month by senior U.S. defense officials that if Pakistan failed to stem the flow of Taliban and other militant fighters into Afghanistan, the United States would adopt a new strategy, one allowing ground strikes on targeted insurgent encampments. A senior Pakistani official said that Kiyani believed the strategy was still under discussion and that Pakistan’s counterinsurgency performance was improving.

News of Bush’s order, following a strike last week by helicopter-borne U.S. commandos on a village about 20 miles inside Pakistan, brought denunciation yesterday from Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani, who echoed Kiyani’s earlier charge that the attack had violated Pakistani sovereignty.

Meanwhile, Afghan President Hamid Karzai said at a news conference in Kabul that he approved of the new U.S. strategy, citing the need to “remove and destroy” insurgent sanctuaries in Pakistan. But NATO said it had no intention of sending any of the 48,000 troops under its command in Afghanistan across the border. NATO’s U.N. mandate does not include “ground or air incursions . . . into Pakistani territory,” said spokesman James Appathurai.

Nearly 31,000 U.S. troops are in Afghanistan, divided between the NATO command and a separate force under the U.S. Central Command.

A senior European official said that the NATO allies shared U.S. concern over the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan and were aware new U.S. rules were under consideration, but that they were unaware the rules had been approved. Bush’s July order, first reported yesterday by the New York Times, was confirmed by several U.S. officials.

Husain Haqqani, Pakistan’s ambassador to Washington, said U.S. officials assured him yesterday that “no such order had been given.” The United States, he said, “respects Pakistan’s sovereignty.”

The senior European official called the implementation of the new strategy “peculiar,” since its timing coincided with this week’s inauguration of Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari.

“If you’re going to invade another country . . . without their permission, after you’ve just spent eight years trying to get a democratic government in place, it strikes me as kind of confused politics,” the official said.

Zardari plans to meet with Bush this month, either in Washington or in New York at the U.N. General Assembly, U.S. officials said.

Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Wednesday that he had called for an overhaul of U.S. strategy, including greater U.S. military involvement in Pakistan’s tribal areas, but gave no indication that orders had already been given.

“I’m not convinced that we’re winning it in Afghanistan,” Mullen told the House Armed Services Committee. But, he added, “I’m convinced we can.”

“That is why I intend to commission and have looked — are looking — I’m looking at a new, more comprehensive military strategy for the region that covers both sides of that border,” Mullen said. “That is why I pressed hard on my counterparts in Pakistan to do more against extremists and to let us do more to help them.”

Mullen and other senior U.S. military officials have met repeatedly with Kiyani to urge a more robust offensive to roust Taliban, al-Qaeda and other militant fighters from safe havens in the rugged Pakistani border region.

Gillani, who heads Pakistan’s first democratic government since 1999, told Bush during a Washington visit in July that he needed more time to implement an economic development strategy to pacify the border region.

But with rising troop deaths in Afghanistan, U.S. patience has run thin. On Tuesday, Bush announced he would send an additional Army combat brigade to Afghanistan early next year.

Previous military rules of engagement, agreed to by Pakistan, allowed U.S. forces to travel up to six miles across the border if they were in “hot pursuit” of fighters chased from inside Afghanistan. The senior Pakistani official said that Kiyani was told last month that failure to increase the tempo of Pakistani military operations and provide better intelligence for American cross-border air attacks could result in new rules.

“There was a conditionality,” the Pakistani official said. “If we take care of certain things on our side, then the rules don’t change.” Improvements were “already being put into place,” he said, attributing several recent U.S. strikes with Predator unmanned aircraft to Pakistani intelligence, and citing an attack this week by Pakistani security forces in the tribal region of Bajaur that reportedly left 100 fighters dead.

But a U.S. official, one of several who discussed the sensitive situation on the condition of anonymity, said that as far as the United States was concerned, “most things have been settled in terms of how we’re going to proceed.”

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/19/AR2008091903820.html?nav=emailpage
Karzai Agrees To Meet With Palin

By Michael D. Shear and Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, September 20, 2008; A06

Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin will meet next week with Afghan President Hamid Karzai in New York, on the sidelines of the opening of the U.N. General Assembly, according to Afghan officials in Washington.

The meeting is part of a broader effort to demonstrate the Alaska governor’s ability to handle foreign policy issues, at a time when she has come under fire for a lack of experience on the international stage. The opportunity to speak before the United Nations annually draws the world’s leaders to Manhattan, and the GOP presidential nominee, Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), plans to use the occasion to introduce Palin to those officials, McCain aides have said.

“It’s a great opportunity for Governor Palin to meet and interact with some of the world leaders she will deal with as vice president,” said one McCain adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because her U.N. schedule had not been made public. “She’ll talk about the issues facing the world.”

Palin will meet with Karzai, and possibly other foreign leaders, during a midweek campaign swing through New York.

“Unfortunately, a few meetings at the U.N. won’t change the fact that John McCain is promising four more years of the same cowboy diplomacy that has shredded our alliances and set back our ability to fight international terrorism,” said Hari Sevugan, a spokesman for the Democratic nominee, Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.).

Palin, governor of Alaska for two years, has had limited experience abroad. She took one trip to Germany, Kuwait and Iraq in 2007, but barely crossed the Iraq border. She has also traveled to Canada. Democrats have mocked Palin for citing knowledge of Russia because she can see the nation from her home state.

While acknowledging her lack of a long foreign policy portfolio, McCain advisers have described Palin as a smart and decisive executive who has spent much of her time in office dealing with worldwide energy issues.

The request to Karzai for a sit-down came from Palin’s team early this week and Karzai sent his agreement yesterday, officials at the Afghan Embassy said. Karzai, who will travel to Washington later in the week for a White House meeting with President Bush, expects to have separate telephone conversations with McCain and with Obama during his U.S. stay.

Palin’s Democratic counterpart, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (Del.), who has traveled to Pakistan and Afghanistan as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, will also travel to New York for the General Assembly’s opening. He plans to meet there with new Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari.

Obama sent Zardari a message of congratulations following his election early this month but has not spoken to him directly. McCain called Zardari to offer his congratulations, as well.

Zardari will spend most of the week in New York. A source close to the Pakistani president said there is a possibility that he might see McCain, but that if Palin requests a meeting, he will see her.

 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/29/AR2008092903065.html?nav=emailpage
Pakistan Picks New Chief For Intelligence Agency

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 30, 2008; A15

The Pakistani government has selected a new chief for its powerful intelligence service, the ISI, replacing a figure the Bush administration has long suspected of ties to Taliban extremists and other militant groups in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border area.

An army statement released late yesterday announced the appointment of Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha to the ISI post, according to the Associated Press. Pasha, said to be close to army chief Gen. Ashfaq Kiyani, will replace Lt. Gen. Nadeem Taj, who was chosen for the post by retired Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the former Pakistani president.

Bush administration officials expressed cautious optimism about the appointment of Pasha, the director general of military operations for the Pakistani army since 2005. “It is a chance for the new government to work out a set of new directions for the ISI,” one official said. The administration and Congress have repeatedly expressed concern that ties between the Pakistani intelligence service and the Taliban have undermined U.S. and NATO efforts to stem cross-border attacks by Pakistan-based extremists.

U.S. Gen. David D. McKiernan, the NATO commander in Afghanistan, said last month that he was certain there was “a level of ISI complicity” with the Taliban and other extremist organizations. Afghan President Hamid Karzai has raised similar complaints. The Pakistani government acknowledged that rogue intelligence officers might be involved with extremists but denied allegations of high-level support from the ISI, which stands for Inter-Services Intelligence.

Beginning with Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani’s visit to Washington in May, the administration has pressed his government to take control of the ISI, a message also conveyed during repeated visits to Pakistan this year by high-level U.S. military and intelligence officials. Last week, President Bush met with Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari at the United Nations.

The decision to replace Taj comes as the administration is conducting a widespread review of its strategy in the faltering Afghanistan war. In July, Bush approved an order allowing U.S. commandos to conduct ground operations in Pakistan’s western tribal areas, a mountainous region where the Taliban, al-Qaeda and other extremist groups are thought to operate. The Pakistani government vigorously protested an incursion by U.S. forces this month and its forces fired last week at two U.S. helicopters in the border region.

Diplomatic and administration officials said that the opportunity to remove Taj came with a regular military rotation and that several other senior ISI officials are expected to be transferred. Taj will retain his military rank and be given another assignment, they said.

 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/09/AR2008100900019_pf.html
U.S. Urgently Reviews Policy On Afghanistan

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 9, 2008; A01

The White House has launched an urgent review of Afghanistan policy, fast-tracked for completion in the next several weeks, amid growing concern that the administration lacks a comprehensive strategy for the foundering war there and as intelligence officials warn of a rapidly worsening situation on the ground.

Underlying the deliberations is a nearly completed National Intelligence Estimate on Afghanistan and the Pakistan-based extremists fighting there. Analysts have concluded that reconstituted elements of al-Qaeda and the resurgent Taliban are collaborating with an expanding network of militant groups, making the counterinsurgency war infinitely more complicated.

As the U.S. presidential election approaches, senior officials have expressed worry that the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan is so tenuous that it may fall apart while a new set of U.S. policymakers settles in. Others believe a more comprehensive, airtight road map for the way ahead would limit the new president’s options.

Lt. Gen. Douglas E. Lute, President Bush’s senior adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan, has told Pentagon, intelligence and State Department officials to return to the basic questions: What are our objectives in Afghanistan? What can we hope to achieve? What are our resources? What is our allies’ role? What do we know about the enemy? How likely is it that weak Afghan and Pakistani governments will rise to the occasion?

Alarms were first sounded early this year, when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice returned from a trip to Afghanistan in early February — her first in two years — convinced that the war there was heading downhill. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates shared her pessimism, telling Congress that same week that Taliban insurgents had adopted more dangerous tactics, that the U.S.-led military coalition was disorganized, and that international development efforts were failing because “there is no overarching strategy.”

But seven months would pass before the administration, distracted by issues as serious as the Iraq war and as far afield as the Olympics, was seized with the urgency to put a new strategy in place. Although stopgap measures were taken during the spring and summer — the temporary deployment of 3,500 more Marines, an appeal for more NATO troops and presidential authorization for U.S. commando raids into Pakistan — the downward spiral continued.

U.S. military deaths and enemy attacks this year have risen to the highest levels of the nearly seven-year war. Hopes have faded that a new Pakistani government would seize the initiative against extremist sanctuaries, and that a new U.N. coordinator would bring order to the chaos of the multibillion-dollar Afghan reconstruction program.

Heading into the review, Gates has already determined that the United States must take a more forceful lead in strategy and combat from NATO forces in Afghanistan. Bush has pledged thousands more U.S. troops and last week the long-bifurcated command structure in Afghanistan was changed to put NATO and U.S. forces under the same American general.

But these and other initiatives still lack a broad strategic framework. Military Special Operations forces and CIA operatives, now conducting regular secret incursions into western Pakistan, need to be incorporated into the larger effort, along with new Iraq-tested intelligence and surveillance platforms. The Joint Chiefs of Staff and Gen. David H. Petraeus, incoming head of the U.S. Central Command, have undertaken their own strategy reviews.

“We’re not sure how they all interrelate,” a defense official said. The White House review, he said, “is an attempt after the fact to have them all feed into the NSC [National Security Council] product.”

Presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain are unlikely to question a major new U.S. commitment; both have called for an increase in U.S. troops. And unlike Iraq, where lawmakers have argued for years over funding and troop levels, there is bipartisan backing for doing more, and doing it quickly, in Afghanistan.

Senior officials involved in the intelligence assessment and the White House review declined to discuss the issue on the record during conversations over the past two weeks.

Officials described the Pakistan-based extremist network, which the Pentagon calls “the syndicate,” as a loose alliance of three elements. Kashmiri militants, constrained by recent agreements between Pakistan and India, have “leaned over” to assist a domestic terrorist campaign launched by homegrown extremists often referred to as the “Pakistani Taliban,” one official said. The Afghan Taliban — itself divided into several groups — is based in Pakistan but focused on Afghanistan, as are the forces led by warlords Jalauddin Haqqani and his son Siraj, and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, among others. Traditional tribal groups in Pakistan’s western, Federally Administered Tribal Areas — FATA — are a third element. Those groups are said to be focused primarily on keeping the Pakistani military and government out of their areas, and assisting the Afghan-oriented parts of the network.

Al-Qaeda, composed largely of Arabs and, increasingly, Uzbeks, Chechens and other Central Asians, is described as sitting atop the structure, providing money and training to the others in exchange for sanctuary. “They are oriented to just keeping the Pakistani military and government out of their areas,” the intelligence official said. “They help the groups who are interested in Afghanistan.”

“There is competition between and among them,” a U.S. counterterrorism official said. But their interests increasingly overlap and “they understand the need to support one another.”

Intelligence officials said that cooperation among the militant groups was bolstered by the hands-off attitude Pakistan’s new civilian coalition government initially adopted toward the FATA last spring. When urgent U.S. appeals to the military and government failed and the coalition moved to oust President Pervez Musharraf, Washington’s main Pakistani ally, those who had long advocated stronger U.S. action inside Pakistan finally prevailed with Bush.

Authorization for commando raids coincided with stepped-up attacks by unmanned Predator aircraft flown across the border from Afghanistan. The administration concluded that the ground raids were legal under the self-defense provisions of the U.N. charter, an interpretation that a U.N. official said was questionable.

“The tempo is pretty steady and they want to keep it up,” said an individual with close contacts among the U.S. Special Forces units participating in cross-border operations.

The intelligence assessment is also highly pessimistic about the prospects that Afghan President Hamid Karzai can or will move forcefully to stem corruption inside his government or that the flourishing drug trade can be significantly reversed.

Despite the commitment to increase U.S. troop levels, Gates has publicly warned that a larger foreign military “footprint” in Afghanistan may prove counterproductive. Afghanistan hopes to double the size of its army — to 134,000 — in the next two years. But maintaining such a force, Gates told Congress, would cost $2 billion to $2.5 billion a year — at least three times Afghanistan’s total revenue for 2008.

In recent months, the Pentagon has sent emissaries around the world with a proposition: If they do not want to fight in Afghanistan, they should at least be prepared to pay for those who do. “There is a real effort made to figure out which among the nations not contributing forces can pony up,” a defense official said.

Just before the recent change in government in Japan, he said by way of example, “our Asia guys went over there and said: ‘You don’t want to send forces? We understand. How about contributing $20 billion over the next five years?’ “

The Japanese, he said, “swallowed their chopsticks.”

Staff writer Walter Pincus contributed to this report.

 

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Military Justifies Attack That Killed at Least 33 Afghan Civilians

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 9, 2008; A15

A military investigation has concluded that U.S. forces acted in legitimate self-defense in launching an August air assault against Taliban militants in Afghanistan that it said left 33 civilians dead, including at least 12 children.

A summary of the classified report, released yesterday by the U.S. Central Command, said the military’s initial conclusion that only five to seven civilians died in the Aug. 21-22 raid was erroneous. The Afghan government and human rights organizations, as well as the United Nations, have said at least 90 civilians were killed by U.S. and Afghan ground forces and a U.S. AC-130H gunship in the village of Azizabad in western Afghanistan.

The discrepancy led to sharp tensions between the U.S. and Afghan governments and resulted in a decision by Central Command to send a senior officer from outside Afghanistan to reinvestigate the initial military findings.

But while the new inquiry, headed by Air Force Brig. Gen. Michael W. Callan, found a higher civilian death toll, it also concluded that “the use of force was in self-defense, necessary and proportional based on the information the On-Scene-Commander had at the time.” The report said that, “unfortunately and unknown to the U.S. and Afghan forces,” the militants who were the target of the raid “chose fighting positions in close proximity to civilians.”

Callan’s report, which said 22 “anti-coalition militants” were also killed in the attack, recommended that the military conduct more comprehensive, transparent investigations in the future and called for improved coordination with the Afghan government. Unlike the initial investigation, which relied solely on U.S. military reports, Callan’s team took testimony from village elders, U.S. and Afghan soldiers, and Afghan government, human rights and U.N. officials.

The civilian deaths in Azizabad came in a year in which enemy attacks and U.S. military casualties have reached the highest levels of the seven-year war. Gen. David D. McKiernan, who commands both NATO and U.S. troops in Afghanistan, has called for four more combat brigades to bolster more than 60,000 U.S. and NATO troops.

Government and independent reports have said that Taliban fighters and other extremists are responsible for the vast majority of civilian deaths — estimated by Human Rights Watch at more than 1,600 in 2007 — but repeated incidents of civilians killed in U.S. airstrikes have brought criticism from the government of President Hamid Karzai.

In a visit to Afghanistan last month, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates acknowledged the human and public relations damage caused by such incidents. He promised additional measures to minimize them and to conduct more transparent investigations. He also said that in the future, the United States will compensate the families of alleged victims even before completing its investigations.

The Central Command report said that “no condolence payments have been made by U.S. Forces” to Azizabad victims, although the Afghan government has paid $2,000 to “each family of the alleged 90 civilians killed, $1,000 for each person wounded, plus government sponsored trip to the Haj.”

Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell, traveling with Gates in Hungary, said in a statement last night that “the report shows that although no military in history has gone to greater lengths to avoid civilian casualties, we clearly still need to operate with more care.”

 
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In Scramble for Cash, Pakistan Turns to China’s Deep Reserves

By Anthony Faiola and Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, October 16, 2008; A01

Pakistan has reached a critical new phase in its long-deteriorating financial situation, as investor flight and bleeding of national reserves force the country to scramble for international funds to shore up its economy. With the global financial crisis draining coffers in the United States and Europe, the key U.S. ally in the war on terrorism is seeking help from an old friend newly flush with cash: China.

President Asif Ali Zardari arrived in Beijing on Tuesday for a four-day state visit as concern has surged over a possible debt default by Pakistan that could cripple its economy and spark more civil unrest. While the amount of money Pakistan needs in the short term is relatively small — $4 billion to $6 billion — analysts say the climate of crisis and public anger over domestic bailouts in the United States and Western Europe have made even a modest infusion from its Western allies politically difficult.

Pakistan’s bid for Chinese cash underscores the potential of Beijing’s $1.9 trillion in foreign reserves, the largest in the world, to boost its global influence. The government is now seeking as much as $3 billion in emergency assistance from China, as well as assistance from oil-rich Gulf countries including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, according to a senior Pakistani official. Pakistan’s central bank governor, Shashad Akhtar, is in Washington this week to review a draft plan for overhauling the country’s finances with the International Monetary Fund, potentially paving the way for future aid.

U.S. military and intelligence officials fear that Pakistan’s increasingly precarious economy will compound an already unstable political situation and undermine military cooperation. Both al-Qaeda and the Taliban leadership are located in the rugged, economically depressed region along Pakistan’s western border with Afghanistan. The Bush administration and Congress have been shaping a long-term economic and military assistance package for Pakistan, but there is no indication the United States is able to step in with a short-term financial lifeline.

Pakistan is going to the Chinese now “because you go to the guys with the money,” a senior International Monetary Fund official said. “And right now, the Chinese are the ones with the money.”

Securing as much as $6 billion would buy the government the breathing room it needs, analysts say, to begin a desperately needed overhaul of its budget to sustain Pakistan’s battered economy in the longer term.

Pakistan’s financial problems go back at least a year, with current and past administrations borrowing from the central bank to sustain generous state subsidies on gasoline and diesel. As global oil prices surged, the government of former President Pervez Musharraf curried favor with average Pakistanis by having the state absorb the shocks. Musharraf ousted a democratically elected government in 1999 and ruled until a civilian coalition was voted into office last spring, headed by Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani. The government forced Musharraf from the presidency in August, electing Zardari as his replacement in September.

Analysts and IMF officials say the current government has made notable progress in lifting those subsidies in recent weeks to ease the budget. Yet the global credit crunch and concerns over security have worsened investor flight, with as much as $1.2 billion a month fleeing Pakistan during the summer. National reserves over the past year have fallen 67 percent, to $8.3 billion, leaving the country ill-prepared to deal with financial turbulence as more investors pulled out in recent weeks as the U.S. crisis spread globally.

That has fed two major fears. First, that Pakistan may not be able to secure the funds to avoid a debt default early next year. And second, that investor concern over its potential insolvency could grow into a panic in coming weeks, leading to a far broader capital pullout that could jeopardize the country’s financial system.

Unprecedented inflation, political instability and the growing threat from Islamist insurgents have all had sharply negative effects on investor confidence, said Sakib Sherani, chief economist at ABN Amro Bank Pakistan.

“It is clear that Pakistan is facing challenges in its balance of payments. Without cash inflows we are losing about $1 billion a month, which is untenable,” Sherani said. “On the one hand, you are paying more for imports in Pakistan; on the other, you have less cash inflows.”

On Oct. 6, both Standard & Poors and Moody’s downgraded Pakistani bonds. “Only Seychelles has a lower rating, and it has already defaulted on its debt,” said John Chambers, managing director with Standard & Poors in New York.

To curb losses, Pakistan in recent weeks has set new rules on stock trading aimed at preventing even sharper sell-offs of Pakistani companies. Some analysts are concerned that the new government may resort to freezing foreign capital, a measure Pakistan took in the 1990s after being slapped with global sanctions for conducting a nuclear test.

The Pakistani government is seeking to ease those fears by bolstering its central bank reserves with funds from China and Gulf states. China and Pakistan have a long history of economic cooperation, based partly on decades of weapons sales, and a lifeline now, particularly so small a sum, would not be seen as unusual. “The Pakistanis like to call the Chinese their all-weather ally, and the U.S. their fair-weather friends,” said Daniel Markey, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “This kind of loan could be seen as self-serving by the Chinese, and continue that impression.”

A senior Pakistani official said the government requested in July that Saudi Arabia chip in with an “oil facility” — or an agreement that would grant Pakistan concessionary terms and delayed payments and on roughly half the oil it imports. One reason investors are more concerned about Pakistan now is that Saudi Arabia has not yet responded.

Analysts say the Pakistanis may have better luck at a meeting early next month in the United Arab Emirates of the “Friends of Pakistan” — a group of countries including the United States and Britain that are considered close allies. They are counting, sources close to the talks said, on countries seeing the danger of an economic collapse in Pakistan and the threat that poses to the war on terror as worth the relatively small price of financial assistance.

A last option might be seeking a lifeline from the IMF, though such an agreement is seen as politically difficult for the new government. Pakistan paid off the last of several IMF loans in 2005, with Musharraf hailing the accomplishment as a breaking of the nation’s beggar’s bowl. By seeking IMF help now, analysts say, the new government may find itself in the difficult position of explaining to the population why it needs to glue that bowl back together.

Pakistani officials, however, are meeting with IMF officials in Washington now, seeking their “seal of approval” on the plan to rein in runaway spending threatening to bankrupt the government. Although IMF officials say the Pakistanis are not seeking a loan, IMF approval of their economic plans could pave the way for other institutions, including the World Bank and Asian Development Banks, to offer lending. It could also make approval of an IMF loan at a later date happen faster.

“What they want is an endorsement in principle,” a senior IMF official said, “something that would make financial support go more smoothly if they decide they do need to ask for it.”

Correspondent Candace Rondeaux contributed to this report.

 
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Pakistan Will Give Arms to Tribal Militias
Plan Bolsters U.S. Faith In Ally’s Anti-Extremist Efforts

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 23, 2008; A01

Pakistan plans to arm tens of thousands of anti-Taliban tribal fighters in its western border region in hopes — shared by the U.S. military — that the nascent militias can replicate the tribal “Awakening” movement that proved decisive in the battle against al-Qaeda in Iraq.

The militias, called lashkars, will receive Chinese-made AK-47 assault rifles and other small arms, a purchase arranged during a visit to Beijing this month by Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, Pakistani officials said.

Many Bush administration officials remain skeptical of Pakistan’s long-term commitment to fighting the Taliban, al-Qaeda and other extremist groups ensconced in the mountains near the border with Afghanistan. But the decision to arm the lashkars, which emerged as organized fighting forces only in the past few months, is one of several recent actions that have led the Pentagon to believe that the Pakistani effort has become more aggressive.

Since early August, the Pakistani army has launched several offensives in Bajaur, one of seven regions in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), and in the nearby Swat Valley. According to Pakistani military assessments, more than 800 insurgents died during fighting in Bajaur in August and September, along with nearly 195 government soldiers and 344 civilians.

Last week, after months of Pakistani delays, about 30 U.S. military trainers were permitted to set up operations north of the region, a U.S. official said. The trainers will provide counterinsurgency instruction to Pakistani army soldiers, who in turn will train members of the Frontier Corps, the government’s paramilitary force in the FATA.

“We are very encouraged by what we’re seeing from the Pakistani military in the tribal regions,” said Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell. Pakistani offensives in the FATA over the past two months are “making a difference on the other side of the border,” where U.S. forces are fighting in Afghanistan, he said.

Pakistani officials insisted that arming the lashkars was their own idea and that they are paying for it, although the United States has provided more than $10 billion in relatively unrestrained counterterrorism funds to Pakistan’s military over the past seven years. “The Americans are not giving us a bloody cent” for the program, one Pakistani official said. “This is us, doing it ourselves.”

Zardari and the government of Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani have been at pains to balance their support of U.S. objectives with a recognition of widespread Pakistani distrust of the United States — among the population as well as the political class. In the wake of Gillani’s visit to Washington in July, and a meeting in New York last month between Zardari and President Bush, the Pakistani Parliament yesterday passed a resolution calling for the immediate development of an “independent foreign policy” and a new attempt at dialogue with Islamist insurgents.

Much distrust also remains on the U.S. side, particularly within intelligence agencies that have long been suspicious of ties between the Pakistani intelligence service and the Taliban. The CIA has increased its operations against resurgent extremist forces in the FATA, with at least 11 missile attacks launched by Predator unmanned aircraft against al-Qaeda and Taliban targets in August and September, compared with six in the previous eight months, according to knowledgeable officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence issues.

In its talks with the Bush administration, Gillani’s government maintains that its counterterrorism cooperation surpasses that of retired Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who was ousted from the presidency in August. Last month, Gillani and army chief of staff Gen. Ashfaq Kiyani replaced the head of the Interservices Intelligence (ISI) agency with an army general considered more responsive to civilian leaders and more palatable to the Americans.

New ISI chief Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha will arrive in Washington this weekend for meetings with CIA head Michael V. Hayden.

A number of U.S. officials cautioned that Pakistan has made little progress in other aspects of a wider counterinsurgency strategy needed to make long-term gains against the extremists. “There is a significant, but not a comprehensive, bump up in the security element,” one official said. While there are more soldiers on the ground, he said, the military strategy is not sustainable because Pakistan “is still doing virtually nothing about extending the government’s political authority into the tribal areas, and virtually nothing about economic development” in the region.

“The secret to success in this kind of operation is tea,” the official said, referring to the need to establish a positive presence in local villages, sit down with tribal leaders over tea and ask them what it would take to make their lives better. Unlike Pakistan’s four provinces, the FATA are only nominally controlled by the central government and are largely ruled by tribal elders.

U.S. military officials warn, however, that expanding the movement will be more difficult than it proved in Iraq, where the Awakening began in 2006 among Sunni tribes in Anbar province. Unlike the Iraqi tribes, the FATA Pakistanis are poorly armed with aging rifles and little else — although the provision of new, Chinese-made AK-47s and other small arms will increase their firepower.

Extremist groups are widespread throughout the poverty-stricken region and are entrenched in social and economic structures; many of the tribes receive regular financial support from al-Qaeda in exchange for providing sanctuary, a senior U.S. military official said.

Most important, the extent to which the program is perceived to be coordinated with U.S. aims in western Pakistan is likely to help determine its effectiveness. In Iraq, tribal security forces readily accepted an alliance with the U.S. military as well as direct U.S. payment for their services. U.S. officials see neither as likely in the FATA.

Despite the newly aggressive U.S. military posture — reflected in the Predator attacks as well as Bush’s authorization last summer of ground commando raids on extremist targets inside Pakistani territory — U.S. officials say they are acutely aware of the need to tread carefully with Pakistan.

Early this month, U.S. Ambassador Anne Patterson and Adm. Michael LeFever, the senior U.S. military officer in Pakistan, sent a joint cable to Washington criticizing the overall U.S. effort in Pakistan as disjointed and uncoordinated. It recommended a comprehensive new strategy that would better meld the same three counterinsurgency “legs” — military, political and economic — that the United States has pushed the Pakistani government to adopt.

The proposal, one U.S. official said, offered examples of current U.S. aid programs that have little relationship to political aims, and political objectives that dismiss military concerns. “It said things like, ‘If you really want to understand Pakistan, you’ve got to understand food security as something a lot of people are worried about,’ ” especially in the tribal areas, the official said. “Where is the initiative on agriculture?”

The cable quickly circulated through the administration and caught the attention of Gen. David H. Petraeus, who next week will become head of the U.S. Central Command, or Centcom, in charge of U.S. forces in the Middle East and South and Central Asia. Petraeus, who plans to travel to Afghanistan and Pakistan two days after he takes over Centcom on Oct. 31, hopes to replicate in both countries elements of the strategies employed in his previous command in Iraq. Among them, officials said, is the close coordination he enjoyed with Ryan C. Crocker, the U.S. ambassador, and the development of local security units akin to the Awakening movement.

The emergence in Pakistan of the lashkars, headed by tribal elders who are said to resent the intrusion of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, began in earnest over the summer. So far, three lashkar militias, totaling as many as 14,000 men, have been established in Bajaur, according to Pakistani military estimates. In the FATA region of Orakzai, tribal leaders have amassed an estimated 4,000 indigenous fighters; an additional 7,000 are said to have enlisted in Dir, a tribal region just outside the FATA boundary.

The fighters have skirmished with extremists, at times in coordination with the Pakistani military. They have already begun to pay a price, with at least eight beheadings this month and a suicide bombing in Bajaur two weeks ago that killed more than 50 tribesmen gathered to enlist in a militia.

 
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Obama to Explore New Approach in Afghanistan War

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 11, 2008; A01

The incoming Obama administration plans to explore a more regional strategy to the war in Afghanistan — including possible talks with Iran — and looks favorably on the nascent dialogue between the Afghan government and “reconcilable” elements of the Taliban, according to Obama national security advisers.

President-elect Barack Obama also intends to renew the U.S. commitment to the hunt for Osama bin Laden, a priority the president-elect believes President Bush has played down after years of failing to apprehend the al-Qaeda leader. Critical of Bush during the campaign for what he said was the president’s extreme focus on Iraq at the expense of Afghanistan, Obama also intends to move ahead with a planned deployment of thousands of additional U.S. troops there.

The emerging broad strokes of Obama’s approach are likely to be welcomed by a number of senior U.S. military officials who advocate a more aggressive and creative course for the deteriorating conflict. Taliban attacks and U.S. casualties this year are the highest since the war began in 2001.

Some military leaders remain wary of Obama’s pledge to order a steady withdrawal of combat forces from Iraq, to be completed within 16 months — an order advisers say Obama is likely to give in his first weeks in office. Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has called a withdrawal timeline “dangerous.” Others are distrustful of a new administration they see as unschooled in the counterinsurgency wars that have consumed the military for the past seven years.

But conversations with several Obama advisers and a number of senior military strategists both before and since last Tuesday’s election reveal a shared sense that the Afghan effort under the Bush administration has been hampered by ideological and diplomatic constraints and an unrealistic commitment to the goal of building a modern democracy — rather than a stable nation that rejects al-Qaeda and Islamist extremism and does not threaten U.S. interests. None of those who discussed the subject would speak on the record, citing sensitivities surrounding the presidential transition and the war itself.

As Obama begins to formulate his Afghan war policy, some senior military strategists have begun to question the U.S. commitment to Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who is expected to run for reelection next year but is widely considered weak and ineffective. Some European and NATO officials have suggested that an assembly of tribal elders should select the country’s next leader, an idea the State Department has rejected.

Obama advisers have emphasized that a sharper focus on al-Qaeda does not mean pulling back on the Afghan ground war. Obama called early in the campaign for deploying two or three additional U.S. combat brigades to Afghanistan. Bush has already approved such an increase, although the timing of the deployments, likely to begin next spring, depends on the drawdown of forces from Iraq.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Mullen, frustrated by the performance of NATO allies whose troops make up more than half the total foreign force in Afghanistan, have already planned for a more overt and forceful U.S. leadership role in the war, as well as more direct involvement by U.S. forces in fighting the Taliban in southern and western Afghanistan.

Some NATO military officials said enhanced U.S. leadership would be welcome, as long as it was not seen as a “takeover bid,” said one senior European officer whose country has troops fighting as part of the NATO coalition in Afghanistan. While the U.S. military has long criticized some NATO members for lacking combat zeal and expertise in Afghanistan, many European officers resent what they see as U.S. arrogance.

The NATO officer suggested that Obama, whose election was greeted with wide approval in Europe, may have more success than Bush in persuading other alliance members to increase their fighting forces in Afghanistan. “I think you’ll find the new president would then be able to persuade a number of European nations who have not liked this administration’s way of doing business to come in behind them,” he said.

At Mullen’s direction, the map of the Afghanistan battle space is being redrawn to include the tribal regions of western Pakistan. U.S. military and intelligence leaders have delivered forceful messages to Pakistani officials on the need to step up attacks against Taliban and al-Qaeda sanctuaries in their territory.

Obama, advisers said, plans to intensify the U.S. military and intelligence focus on al-Qaeda and bin Laden. Intelligence officials say the search is already as intensive as ever, even as they emphasize that the decentralized al-Qaeda network would remain a threat without him. Bush administration officials have publicly played down the importance of a single individual in the broad sweep of their anti-terrorism offensive.

One week after the election, the Obama team is far from fleshing out how it will bring bin Laden closer to the forefront of the U.S. counterterrorism agenda, both rhetorically and substantively. Although Obama last week received his first high-level intelligence briefing as president-elect, members of his national security transition teams are still studying briefing materials the Bush administration has prepared for them. They have yet to fully examine available military and intelligence resources and how they are currently being used, and have not yet plotted their diplomatic approach to Pakistan, where U.S. intelligence officials believe bin Laden is hiding.

While emphasizing the importance of continuing U.S. operations against Pakistan-based Taliban fighters who attack U.S. forces in Afghanistan, the incoming administration intends to remind Americans how the fight against Islamist extremists began — on Sept. 11, 2001, before the Afghanistan and Iraq wars — and to underscore that al-Qaeda remains the nation’s highest priority. “This is our enemy,” one adviser said of bin Laden, “and he should be our principal target.”

Obama said during the campaign that his administration would explore talks with countries such as Iran and Syria, rejecting bedrock Bush policy and rhetoric that some U.S. military officials believe may have outlived their usefulness.

Iran, on Afghanistan’s western border, has played a mixed role over the years, at times indirectly cooperating with U.S. objectives and at times assisting the extremists. The Bush administration has kept Tehran at arm’s length, but “as we look to the future, it would be helpful to have an interlocutor” to explore shared objectives, said one senior U.S. military official. The Iranians “don’t want Sunni extremists in charge of Afghanistan any more than we do,” he said.

Advisers also said Obama is open to supporting discussions between the Afghan government and “reconcilable” elements of the Taliban, a nascent effort of which the State Department has been fairly dismissive. Although it supports the terms the Afghan government has laid down — abandoning violence and accepting the Afghan constitution — the Bush administration sees “no serious indication from anybody on the Taliban side that they’re interested,” Assistant Secretary of State Richard A. Boucher said. “They keep hijacking buses, killing people and chopping their heads off. These are not people who have shown any serious desire to negotiate.”

But the Pentagon, at least rhetorically, has left the door open wider. Senior officers describe a substantial portion of Taliban foot soldiers as more opportunistic than ideologically committed. Gates has spoken openly about the possibility of reconciliation, saying, “at the end of the day, that’s how most wars end. . . . That’s ultimately the exit strategy for all of us.” Gen. David D. McKiernan, commander of NATO and U.S. troops in Afghanistan, said during a recent visit to Washington that the idea of “reconciliation, I think, is appropriate, and we’ll be there to provide support within our mandate.”

At the White House, presidential adviser Lt. Gen. Douglas E. Lute is leading an interagency assessment of the Afghanistan war, scheduled to be finished this month, that administration officials said will focus on enhancing support for provincial and local governments and building the Afghan police. Lute plans to travel to Brussels to summarize the review for NATO.

At the Pentagon, Mullen is overseeing an Afghanistan and Pakistan transition strategy and force-structure review by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, while Gen. David H. Petraeus, the former Iraq commander sworn in last month as head of the U.S. Central Command, is drawing up plans for his wider new responsibilities, which include Iraq and Afghanistan.

Mullen and Petraeus will remain in place when the Bush administration’s civilian policymakers leave office in January. Petraeus, a senior Defense official said, has indicated he agrees with Obama’s more regional approach to Afghanistan and welcomes “a debate about goals and how much is enough” in terms of nation-building there. “We are not going to seize the flag there and go home to a victory parade,” this official said.

 

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Pakistan and U.S. Have Tacit Deal On Airstrikes

By Karen DeYoung and Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, November 16, 2008; A01

The United States and Pakistan reached tacit agreement in September on a don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy that allows unmanned Predator aircraft to attack suspected terrorist targets in rugged western Pakistan, according to senior officials in both countries. In recent months, the U.S. drones have fired missiles at Pakistani soil at an average rate of once every four or five days.

The officials described the deal as one in which the U.S. government refuses to publicly acknowledge the attacks while Pakistan’s government continues to complain noisily about the politically sensitive strikes.

The arrangement coincided with a suspension of ground assaults into Pakistan by helicopter-borne U.S. commandos. Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari said in an interview last week that he was aware of no ground attacks since one on Sept. 3 that his government vigorously protested.

Officials described the attacks, using new technology and improved intelligence, as a significant improvement in the fight against Pakistan-based al-Qaeda and Taliban forces. Officials confirmed the deaths of at least three senior al-Qaeda figures in strikes last month.

Zardari said that he receives “no prior notice” of the airstrikes and that he disapproves of them. But he said he gives the Americans “the benefit of the doubt” that their intention is to target the Afghan side of the ill-defined, mountainous border of Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), even if that is not where the missiles land.

Civilian deaths remain a problem, Zardari said. “If the damage is women and children, then the sensitivity of its effect increases,” he said. The U.S. “point of view,” he said, is that the attacks are “good for everybody. Our point of view is that it is not good for our position of winning the hearts and minds of people.”

A senior Pakistani official said that although the attacks contribute to widespread public anger in Pakistan, anti-Americanism there is closely associated with President Bush. Citing a potentially more favorable popular view of President-elect Barack Obama, he said that “maybe with a new administration, public opinion will be more pro-American and we can start acknowledging” more cooperation.

The official, one of several who discussed the sensitive military and intelligence relationship only on the condition of anonymity, said the U.S-Pakistani understanding over the airstrikes is “the smart middle way for the moment.” Contrasting Zardari with his predecessor, retired Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the official said Musharraf “gave lip service but not effective support” to the Americans. “This government is delivering but not taking the credit.”

From December to August, when Musharraf stepped down, there were six U.S. Predator attacks in Pakistan. Since then, there have been at least 19. The most recent occurred early Friday, when local officials and witnesses said at least 11 people, including six foreign fighters, were killed. The attack, in North Waziristan, one of the seven FATA regions, demolished a compound owned by Amir Gul, a Taliban commander said to have ties to al-Qaeda.

Pakistan’s self-praise is not entirely echoed by U.S. officials, who remain suspicious of ties between Pakistan’s intelligence service and FATA-based extremists. But the Bush administration has muted its criticism of Pakistan. In a speech to the Atlantic Council last week, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden effusively praised Pakistan’s recent military operations, including “tough fighting against hardened militants” in the northern FATA region of Bajaur.

“Throughout the FATA,” Hayden said, “al-Qaeda and its allies are feeling less secure today than they did two, three or six months ago. It has become difficult for them to ignore significant losses in their ranks.” Hayden acknowledged, however, that al-Qaeda remains a “determined, adaptive enemy,” operating from a “safe haven” in the tribal areas.

Along with the stepped-up Predator attacks, Bush administration strategy includes showering Pakistan’s new leaders with close, personal attention. Zardari met with Bush during the U.N. General Assembly in September, and senior military and intelligence officials have exchanged near-constant visits over the past few months.

Pakistan’s new intelligence chief, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, traveled to Washington in late October, and Gen. David H. Petraeus, installed on Oct. 31 as head of the U.S. Central Command, visited Islamabad on his third day in office. On Wednesday, Hayden flew to New York for a secret visit with Zardari, who was attending a U.N. conference.

Zardari spoke over the telephone with Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), a conversation Pakistani officials said they considered an initial contact with the incoming Obama administration. Although Kerry has been mentioned as a possible secretary of state, the officials said he indicated that he expects to continue in the Senate, where he is in line to take over Vice President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s position as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee.

Despite improved relations with the Bush administration, Zardari said, “we think we need a new dialogue, and we’re hoping that the new government will . . . understand that Pakistan has done more than they recognize” and is a victim of the same insurgency the United States is fighting. Pakistan hopes that a $7.6 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund, announced yesterday, will spark new international investment and aid.

Pakistan, whose military has received more than $10 billion in direct U.S. payments since 2001, also wants the United States to provide sophisticated weapons to its armed forces, Zardari said. Rather than using U.S. Predator-fired missiles against Pakistani territory, he asked, why not give Pakistan its own Predators? “Give them to us. . . . we are your allies,” he said.

Last month, officials confirmed, Predator strikes in the FATA killed Khalid Habib, described as al-Qaeda’s No. 4 official, and senior operatives Abu Jihad al-Masri and Abu Hassan al-Rimi. Three other senior al-Qaeda figures — explosives expert Abu Khabab al-Masri, Abu Sulayman al-Jazairi and senior commander Abu Laith al-Libi –were killed during the first nine months of the year.

Current and former U.S. counterterrorism officials said improved intelligence has been an important factor in the increased tempo and precision of the Predator strikes. Over the past year, they said, the United States has been able to improve its network of informants in the border region while also fielding new hardware that allows close tracking of the movements of suspected militants.

The missiles are fired from unmanned aircraft by the CIA. But the drones are only part of a diverse network of machines and software used by the agency to spot terrorism suspects and follow their movements, the officials said. The equipment, much of which remains highly classified, includes an array of powerful sensors mounted on satellites, airplanes, blimps and drones of every size and shape.

Before 2002, the CIA had no experience in using the Predator as a weapon. But in recent years — and especially in the past 12 months — spy agencies have honed their skills at tracking and killing single individuals using aerial vehicles operated by technicians hundreds or thousands of miles away. James R. Clapper Jr., the Pentagon’s chief intelligence officer, said the new brand of warfare has “gotten very laserlike and very precise.”

“It’s having the ability, once you know who you’re after, to study and watch very steadily and consistently — persistently,” Clapper told a recent gathering of intelligence professionals and contractors in Nashville. “And then, at the appropriate juncture, with due regard for reducing collateral casualties or damage, going after that individual.”

Two former senior intelligence officials familiar with the use of the Predator in Pakistan said the rift between Islamabad and Washington over the unilateral attacks was always less than it seemed.

“By killing al-Qaeda, you’re helping Pakistan’s military and you’re disrupting attacks that could be carried out in Karachi and elsewhere,” said one official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. Pakistan’s new acquiescence coincided with the new government there and a sharp increase in domestic terrorist attacks, including the September bombing of the Marriott hotel in Islamabad.

“The attacks inside Pakistan have changed minds,” the official said. “These guys are worried, as they should be.”

Staff writer Colum Lynch at the United Nations contributed to this report.

 
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Naming National Security Team Will Be a Priority for Obama

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 19, 2008; A08

If President-elect Barack Obama follows the pattern of most of his modern predecessors, one of the first documents to bear his signature after he takes office will be a directive laying out his administration’s national security structure. Bill Clinton signed one his first day in office; George W. Bush during his first month.

The directive traditionally sets the membership of the National Security Council, determining who has a seat at the table where the highest-level defense and foreign policy decisions are made. Most important, it determines the person who schedules meetings of the NSC principals and writes the agendas, who sits at the head of the table in the absence of the president and who has the president’s ear on national security matters on a daily basis.

For most chief executives, that person has been the White House national security adviser. Obama has announced no selection yet and, according to several sources, has made no decisions, although three names have circulated widely.

The heaviest betting is on James B. Steinberg, the former Clinton deputy national security adviser and State Department official who is currently dean of the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin.

Retired Marine Gen. James L. Jones, a former NATO commander and current executive at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, has been an informal foreign and defense policy adviser to Obama and is highly respected.

A third possibility is Susan E. Rice, a State Department veteran who signed on early with Obama as a senior foreign policy adviser. Although she has been close to Obama much longer than the others — Steinberg joined the campaign after the primaries — Rice is considered a more likely choice as deputy national security adviser.

Among Obama’s earliest decisions will be whether to retain the separate National Economic Council created by Clinton, as well as Bush’s Homeland Security Council, and whether to establish new White House-level panels on policy priorities such as energy and the environment. Sources close to the Obama team said neither will be determined until the national security team — the adviser and the secretaries of state and defense — are chosen.

Like his predecessors, Obama will have no shortage of immediate national security problems to address, not least the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or advice on how to organize his team. In addition to many upcoming think tank and university reports, Congress has funded the Project on National Security Reform, which will recommend more legislative oversight and amendments to the 1947 National Security Act.

The act set up the NSC structure: a “principals” committee including the president, the vice president, and the secretaries of state and defense, with a small White House staff. But each president since then has established his own national security apparatus, and the structures have varied as widely as the balance of power among competing national security voices in each administration.

Clinton officially added the Treasury secretary, the U.N. ambassador, his economic adviser and chief of staff to the council; Bush removed them all. Both included the CIA director and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at principals meetings but did not put them on the principals list.

Structure is inevitably overtaken by personalities, and informal processes develop as the president turns his attention to one adviser over another. Beyond Vice President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., whose strong foreign policy credentials ensured his place on the Obama ticket, possibilities mentioned for secretary of state, including Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, are far from shrinking violets. With the two wars and mushrooming resources, the Defense Department inevitably will have a large say in decision-making.

Some national security advisers such as Henry A. Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski have been more powerful than the secretaries with whom they served. In some administrations, the White House national security staff has been large — 74 people under Dwight D. Eisenhower and more than 100 during Clinton’s second term — and in others it has been small.

John F. Kennedy slashed it to 12 members and relied on his own council of “wise men.” Richard M. Nixon wanted to “run foreign policy out of the White House,” he said in his memoirs, and adviser Kissinger assembled a 50-person staff to do it. Jimmy Carter cut that number in half.

In the wake of the Iran-contra arms-for-hostages scandal, Ronald Reagan stripped his White House national security council staff of the unprecedented “operational” responsibility it had assumed.

There was nothing in Bush’s Organization of the National Security Council System directive, signed on Feb. 13, 2001, that previewed the power assumed by Vice President Cheney. Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s first national security adviser, won an early battle with Cheney when Bush rejected the vice president’s suggestion that he — not she — chair the NSC principals’ meetings in the president’s absence.

But Rice’s influence was weakened by the warring first-term troika of Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. Many analysts believe she failed at one of the national security adviser’s primary responsibilities — serving as an honest broker for the president among competing Cabinet points of view. Others, however, have argued that it is the president’s job to make sure his team acts in concert.

When the going gets tough, Lyndon B. Johnson’s national security adviser, Walt Rostow, once told the Brookings Institution, “it takes a very strong president to insist these people get along.”

 
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Characteristics of Plot Suggest Outside Help, Analysts Say
Official Says Two Attackers Were British Citizens of Pakistani Origin

By Craig Whitlock and Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, November 28, 2008; 1:06 PM

BERLIN, Nov. 28 — Counterterrorism officials and experts said the scale, sophistication and targets involved in the Mumbai attacks were markedly different from previous terrorist plots in India and suggested the gunmen had received training from outside the country. But they cautioned it was too soon to tell who may have masterminded the operation, despite an assertion from a previously unknown Islamist radical group.

Officials in India, Europe and the United States said likely culprits included Islamist networks based in Pakistan that have received support in the past from Pakistan’s intelligence agencies.

Meanwhile, British officials said they were investigating the possibility that two of its citizens were involved in the attacks.

In India, Vilasrao Deshmukh, the chief minister of the state of Maharashtra, which includes Mumbai, told reporters that two of the captured gunmen were British citizens of Pakistani origin. He gave no details.

The British government said it was investigating but unable to confirm the report.

“I would not want to be drawn into early conclusions about this,” Prime Minister Gordon Brown told reporters. “There is so much information still to be discovered and made available.”

“But obviously when you have terrorists operating in one country they may be getting support from another country or coming from another country,” Brown added. “It is very important that we strengthen the cooperation between India and Britain in dealing with these instances of terrorist attacks.”

British security officials said they were studying photographs of some attackers but were still trying to establish their nationalities. A team of counterterrorism investigators from Scotland Yard has been sent to Mumbai to assist in the investigation.

“We obviously will want to work very, very closely with the Indians on that, but it is too early to say whether or not any of them are British,” David Miliband, the British foreign secretary, said of the suspects.

British intelligence officials have warned for years that scores of Britons Muslims have gone to receive training at militant camps inside Pakistan, including at least three of the bombers in the July 7, 2005, London transit attacks.

Other officials in London, however, denied that there were any links between British citizens and the Mumbai attackers.

“The British deputy high commissioner has spoken to Indian authorities who say there is no evidence that any of the terrorists are British,” said a spokesperson for the British Foreign Office, speaking on condition of anonymity, as is customary for government spokesmen.

Analysts said this week’s attacks surpassed previous plots carried out by domestic groups in terms of complexity, the number of people involved and their success in achieving their primary goal: namely, to spread fear.

“This is a new, horrific milestone in the global jihad,” said Bruce Riedel, a former South Asia analyst for the CIA and National Security Council and author of the book “The Search for Al Qaeda.” “No indigenous Indian group has this level of capability. The goal is to damage the symbol of India’s economic renaissance, undermine investor confidence and provoke an India-Pakistani crisis.”

Several analysts and officials said the attacks bore the hallmarks of Lashkar-i-Taiba and Jaish-i-Muhammad, two networks of Muslim extremists from Pakistan that have targeted India before. Jaish-i-Muhammad was blamed for an attack on the Indian Parliament in 2001.

Both groups have carried out a long campaign of violence in the disputed territory of Kashmir, which India and Pakistan have fought over for six decades. The roots of the long-running conflict are religious: A majority of India’s population is Hindu, while most Pakistanis are Muslim.

A U.S. counterterrorism official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said Lashkar-i-Taiba, which means “Army of the Pious,” and Jaish-i-Muhammad, or “Soldiers of Muhammad,” are “the thing people are starting to look at. But I can’t caution enough to treat it as a theory, a working assumption. It’s still too early for hard and fast” conclusions.

“What the Indians have in their favor,” the official added, “is that they’ve got some of these guys. It seems logical that they can expect to work their way back reasonably quickly.” Indian officials said several gunmen were captured.

In its Friday editions, the newspaper the Hindu reported that at least three of the suspects held by police were members of Lashkar-i-Taiba and that the assailants had arrived in Mumbai on a ship from Karachi, Pakistan.

Earlier, Pakistan’s government condemned the attacks and warned India against jumping to conclusions about who was responsible. Lashkar-i-Taiba issued a statement denying involvement.

India has been plagued by a wave of terrorist attacks in recent years, many sparked by friction between Hindu nationalists and minority Muslim groups. The shootings in Mumbai were far from the worst to strike India’s financial capital; bombings in 1993 and 2006 each killed more than 180 people.

A group calling itself the Deccan Mujaheddin asserted responsibility for the attacks in e-mails sent to Indian media organizations Wednesday. Officials said they had never heard of the group.

Television footage showed the assailants carrying automatic rifles and backpacks filled with ammunition and grenades. Analysts said the fact that the gunmen quickly fanned across the city and were able to hold off Indian security forces over three days suggested that they had received training at organized camps.

“What is striking about this is a fair amount of planning had to go into this type of attack,” said Roger W. Cressey, a former White House counterterrorism official in the Clinton and Bush administrations. “This is not a seat-of-the-pants operation. This group had to receive some training or support from professionals in the terrorism business.”

Some experts said the operation bore resemblances to plots orchestrated by al-Qaeda, in that it involved multiple, simultaneous attacks targeting foreigners. In this case, according to witnesses, the gunmen sought out Americans and Britons, and also took hostages at the local headquarters of an Orthodox Jewish group.

Others said they were dubious of a connection to Osama bin Laden’s organization. They said al-Qaeda has relied on suicide bombers, not gunmen, and is not known to have cells in India.

David Miliband, Britain’s foreign secretary, told reporters that it was “premature to talk about links to al-Qaeda” and that it was still unclear who the intended targets were. “This is only the latest in a series of attacks in India over the last year or two,” he said, adding, “Terrorism is not just a war against the West.”

Peter Neumann, a terrorism analyst at King’s College in London, noted that dozens of gunmen were involved. “This doesn’t mean it’s al-Qaeda, or they take orders from bin Laden, but I’m pretty sure it’s not some leaderless, grass-roots thing.”

On Wednesday, al-Qaeda’s propaganda arm released a video on the Internet featuring an interview with Ayman al-Zawahiri, the network’s deputy leader. He made no mention of the attacks in Mumbai; it was unclear when the video was produced.

Other experts warned that there is a long list of suspects who could have played a role. For instance, Indian officials have blamed the 1993 bombings in Mumbai, which killed 257 people, on Dawood Ibrahim, an organized crime figure who remains on the run.

“Anything could be in the cards,” said Magnus Ranstorp, a terrorism analyst at the Swedish National Defense College. “With most terrorist attacks, it’s relatively clear-cut who is involved. In this case, it could be all sorts of constellations that are at work.”

DeYoung reported from Washington. Special correspondent Karla Adam in London contributed to this report.

 
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Pakistani Militants At Center Of Probe
India, Its Archrival Vow to Cooperate Amid High Tension

By Craig Whitlock and Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, November 29, 2008; A01

BERLIN, Nov. 28 — Pakistani militant groups on Friday became the focus of the investigation into the attacks in Mumbai as India and its archrival Pakistan jousted over who was responsible. Both sides pledged to cooperate in the probe, but tensions remained high amid fears the conflict could escalate.

Pakistan initially said Friday that it had agreed to send its spy chief, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, on an unprecedented visit to India to share and obtain information from investigators there. Later Friday, however, Pakistani officials changed their minds and decided to send a less senior intelligence official in Pasha’s place, according to a Pakistani source who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

It was unclear what prompted the reversal, but the Pakistani source said the Islamabad government was “already bending over backwards” to be cooperative and did not “want to create more opportunities for Pakistan-bashing.” Pakistan’s defense minister, Chaudhry Ahmed Mukhtar, told reporters in Islamabad, “I will say in very categoric terms that Pakistan is not involved in these gory incidents.”

Meanwhile, Indian authorities ramped up their accusations that the plot had Pakistani connections. “Preliminary evidence, prima facie evidence, indicates elements with links to Pakistan are involved,” Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee said at a news conference in New Delhi. Other Indian officials echoed the statement, but none provided details.

Evidence collected by police in Mumbai, along with intelligence gathered by U.S. and British officials, has led investigators to concentrate their focus on Islamist militants in Pakistan who have long sought to spark a war over the disputed province of Kashmir. India and Pakistan have already fought two wars over Kashmir, the battleground between Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan that each country claimed soon after India’s partition in 1947.

A U.S. counterterrorism official said additional evidence has emerged in the past 24 hours that points toward a Kashmiri connection. “Some of what has been learned so far does fall in that direction,” the official said, declining to offer specifics.

“We have to be careful here,” said the official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “When you posit a Kashmiri connection, that puts Pakistan on the table. That is huge, enormous, but what does it mean? It can be anything from people who were [initially] in Pakistan, to maybe people who used to be associated with someone in the Pakistani government, to any gradation you could find.”

Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, who has sought a rapprochement with New Delhi, rejected widespread suspicions in India that Pakistani intelligence services may have supported the Mumbai gunmen. “The germs of terrorist elements were not produced in security agencies’ labs in Pakistan,” he said Friday.

Analysts said Pakistan’s pledge to assist in the investigation and send its spy chief to India was a sign of the high stakes involved. When armed Kashmiri militants tried to take over the Indian Parliament in December 2001, the fallout was immediate, as both countries responded with a massive military buildup along their shared border.

“A Pakistani link here would be so utterly damaging, all the way around, to Indo-Pakistani relations,” said Shaun Gregory, a professor of international security at the University of Bradford in England and a specialist on Pakistan. The decision to dispatch Pasha to India, he said, “does signal a determination on Pakistan’s part to clarify that even if there’s a Pakistani link here, that it had nothing to do with the government.”

A senior Pakistani official said the idea for Pasha’s visit came during a telephone conversation Friday between Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani. Singh, who had previously blamed the Mumbai attacks on groups “based outside the country,” offered to provide evidence to Gillani.

“One way to ensure that” was to send Pakistan’s intelligence chief, the Pakistani official said. “If there is evidence, share it.”

Although privately angered by the implication of Singh’s public remarks that Pakistan may have been involved, Gillani’s government has emphasized that Pakistan, too, has been victimized by terrorists and that the two countries should work together against the threat.

Tensions between India and Pakistan have remained raw since July, when a suicide bomber targeted the Indian embassy in Kabul, killing 58 people, including the Indian defense attache to Afghanistan. U.S. intelligence officials later said there was evidence that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency had sponsored the attack. Pakistan’s government denied involvement.

Gregory, the British analyst, said Pakistan had a clear motive for the embassy bombing because it has grown alarmed at rising Indian influence in Afghanistan. But he said he doubted that Pakistan’s military or intelligence services would have foreseen any benefit from what has transpired in Mumbai. “I cannot see, at this point, any conceivable advantage for the Pakistani state in this attack,” he said.

U.S., British and Indian counterterrorism officials and analysts said that Lashkar-i-Taiba, an Islamist network based in Pakistan, remained a primary suspect in the Mumbai disaster. They cautioned, however, that any number of other groups, including Muslim radicals from India, could have played a role.

Shortly after the attacks began, an organization calling itself the Deccan Mujaheddin asserted responsibility in e-mails to Indian media. But authorities said they had never heard of the group and questioned whether it was a front for others.

Lashkar-i-Taiba, which means Army of the Pious, was founded as a guerrilla group to fight the Indian army in Kashmir and received support from Pakistan’s military and intelligence agencies as a proxy force. Under pressure from the United States, the Pakistani government banned the group after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, but analysts said it continues to enjoy the backing of some Pakistani politicians and security officials. It also has operated joint training camps in Pakistan with al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

The tactics involved in the Mumbai attacks have been embraced before by Lashkar-i-Taiba. The group has routinely trained gunmen — called “fedayeen,” or fighters who volunteer to sacrifice themselves in battle — to carry out operations in Kashmir and elsewhere in India.

Ashley J. Tellis, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington who formerly served at the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, said if India can prove Lashkar-i-Taiba was culpable, “then the stress on the relationship becomes really acute.”

Lashkar was one of the groups that Pakistani intelligence “favored for all its dirty work in Kashmir and elsewhere,” Tellis said. “The whole question of Pakistan’s involvement itself is difficult because there are so many ‘Pakistans.’ . . . There is the intelligence agency, the army, the civilian government. I cannot imagine that the civilian government would have anything to do with an operation like this.”

Indian officials said that at least some of the gunmen arrived in Mumbai by boat and that the group included Pakistani nationals, although they did not offer firm evidence to back up that assertion.

Other Indian officials said Friday that two of the gunmen were British citizens of Pakistani descent. British officials said they were investigating the report but had been unable to corroborate it. Meanwhile, a team of counterterrorism officials from Scotland Yard left for India to assist in the investigation.

The FBI has also sent a team of about half a dozen investigators to India, although government sources said it was not clear the extent to which the Indians would allow the U.S. agents to participate. The FBI maintains a permanent office at the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, and the agents will operate as part of the existing “country team.”

DeYoung reported from Washington.

 
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Joint Chiefs Chairman ‘Very Positive’ After Meeting With Obama
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By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 30, 2008; A01

Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, went unarmed into his first meeting with the new commander in chief — no aides, no PowerPoint presentation, no briefing books. Summoned nine days ago to President-elect Barack Obama’s Chicago transition office, Mullen showed up with just a pad, a pen and a desire to take the measure of his incoming boss.

There was little talk of exiting Iraq or beefing up the U.S. force in Afghanistan; the one-on-one, 45-minute conversation ranged from the personal to the philosophical. Mullen came away with what he wanted: a view of the next president as a non-ideological pragmatist who was willing to both listen and lead. After the meeting, the chairman “felt very good, very positive,” according to Mullen spokesman Capt. John Kirby.

As Obama prepares to announce his national security team tomorrow, he faces a military that has long mistrusted Democrats and is particularly wary of a young, intellectual leader with no experience in uniform, who once called Iraq a “dumb” war. Military leaders have all heard his pledge to withdraw most combat forces from Iraq within 16 months — sooner than commanders on the ground have recommended — and his implied criticism of the Afghanistan war effort during the Bush administration.

But so far, Obama appears to be going out of his way to reassure them that he will do nothing rash and will seek their advice, even while making clear that he may not always take it. He has demonstrated an ability to speak the lingo, talk about “mission plans” and “tasking,” and to differentiate between strategy and tactics, a distinction Republican nominee John McCain accused him of misunderstanding during the campaign.

Obama has been careful to separate his criticism of Bush policy from his praise of the military’s valor and performance, while Michelle Obama’s public expressions of concern for military families have gone over well. But most important, according to several senior officers and civilian Pentagon officials who would speak about their incoming leader only on the condition of anonymity, is the expectation of renewed respect for the chain of command and greater realism about U.S. military goals and capabilities, which many found lacking during the Bush years.

“Open and serious debate versus ideological certitude will be a great relief to the military leaders,” said retired Maj. Gen. William L. Nash of the Council on Foreign Relations. Senior officers are aware that few in their ranks voiced misgivings over the Iraq war, but they counter that they were not encouraged to do so by the Bush White House or the Pentagon under Donald H. Rumsfeld.

“The joke was that when you leave a meeting, everybody is supposed to drink the Kool-Aid,” Nash said. “In the Bush administration, you had to drink the Kool-Aid before you got to go to the meeting.”

Obama’s expected retention of Robert M. Gates as defense secretary and expected appointment of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary of state and retired Marine Gen. James L. Jones as national security adviser have been greeted with relief at the Pentagon.

Clinton is respected at the Pentagon and is considered a defense moderate, at times bordering on hawkish. Through her membership on the Senate Armed Services Committee — sought early in her congressional career to add gravitas to her presidential aspirations — she has developed close ties with senior military figures.

Some in the military are suspicious of “flagpole” officers such as Jones, whose assignments included Supreme Allied Commander at NATO, Marine commandant and other headquarters service, and who grew up in France and is a graduate of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. But Jones also saw combat in Vietnam and served in Bosnia.

“His reputation is pretty good,” one Pentagon official said. “He’s savvy about Washington, worked the Hill,” and at a lean 6-foot-4, the former Georgetown basketball player “looks great in a suit.”

Although Jones occasionally and privately briefed candidate Obama on foreign policy matters — on Afghanistan, in particular, as did current deputy NATO commander Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry — he is not considered an intimate of the president-elect.

But as Obama’s closest national security adviser, or at least the one who will spend the most time with him, Jones is expected to follow the pattern of two military predecessors in the job, Brent Scowcroft and Colin L. Powell, who injected order and discipline to a National Security Council full of strong personalities with independent power bases.

Although exit polls did not break out active-duty voters, it is virtually certain that McCain won the military vote.

In an October survey by the Military Times, nearly 70 percent of more than 4,000 officers and enlisted respondents said they favored McCain, while about 23 percent preferred Obama. Only African American service members gave Obama a majority.

In exit polls, those who said they had “ever served in the U.S. military” made up 15 percent of voters and broke 54 percent for McCain to 44 percent for Obama. “As a culture, we are more conservative and Republican,” a senior officer said.

Obama has said he will meet with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs as well as the service chiefs during his first week in office. At the top of his agenda for that meeting will be what he has called the military’s “new mission” of planning the 16-month withdrawal timeline for Iraq. Senior officers have publicly grumbled about the risk involved.

“Moving forward in a measured way, tied to conditions as they continue to evolve, over time, is important,” Mullen said at a media briefing four days before his Nov. 21 meeting with Obama. “I’m certainly aware of what has been said” prior to the election, he said.

The last Democratic president, Bill Clinton, clashed with the chiefs during his first sit-down with them when they opposed his campaign pledge to end the ban on gays in the military. The chiefs, some of whom held the commander in chief in thinly veiled contempt as a supposed Vietnam draft dodger, won the battle, and Clinton spent much of his two terms seen as an adversary.

But Mullen came away from the Chicago talk reassured that Obama will engage in a discussion with them, balancing risks and “asking tough questions . . . but not in a combative, finger-pointing way,” one official said.

The president-elect’s invitation to Mullen, whom Obama previously had met only in passing on Capitol Hill and whose first two-year term as chairman does not expire until the end of September, was seen as an attempt to establish a relationship and avoid early conflict. While some Pentagon officials believe an Iraq withdrawal order could become Obama’s equivalent of the Clinton controversy over gays, several senior Defense Department sources said that Gates, Mullen and Gen. David H. Petraeus, head of the military’s Central Command, are untroubled by the 16-month plan and feel it can be accomplished with a month or two of wiggle room.

These sources noted that Obama himself has said he would not be “careless” about withdrawal and would retain a “residual” force of unspecified size to fight terrorists and protect U.S. diplomats and civilians. The officer most concerned about untimely withdrawal, sources said, is the Iraq commander, Gen. Ray Odierno.

Even as the Iraq war continues, defense officials are far more worried about Afghanistan, where they see policy drift and an unfocused mission. With strategy reviews now being completed at the White House and by the chairman’s office, an internal Pentagon debate is well underway over whether goals should be lowered.

Although Gen. David McKiernan, the U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, has requested four more U.S. combat brigades, some Pentagon strategists believe a smaller presence of Special Forces and trainers for Afghan forces — and more attention to Pakistan — is advisable.

Bush’s ideological objective of a modern Afghan democracy, several officials said, is unattainable with current U.S. resources, and there is optimism that Obama will have a more realistic view.

A number of senior officers also look with favor on Obama’s call for talks with Iran over Iraq and Afghanistan, separating those issues from U.S. demands over Tehran’s nuclear program.

One of the biggest long-term military issues on Obama’s plate will be the defense budget, currently topping 4.3 percent of gross domestic product once war expenditures are included.

Obama has said he will increase the size of the Army and the Marine Corps, finding savings in the Iraq drawdown and in new scrutiny of spending, including on contractors, weapons programs and missile defense.

“They know the money is coming down,” a Pentagon official said of the uniformed services, and many welcome increased discipline.

But it’s neither the military’s nature nor its role to volunteer the cuts, the official said. “It’s for Congress and the administration to say ‘Stop it.’ “

Polling analyst Jennifer Agiesta and research editor Alice Crites contributed to this report.

 
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Obama Names Team to Face A Complex Security Picture

By Karen DeYoung and Michael D. Shear
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, December 2, 2008; A01

President-elect Barack Obama’s high-powered national security team, introduced yesterday at a Chicago news conference, faces the challenge of managing two wars and various ongoing foreign policy crises even as it helps the president-elect shape what he called “a new beginning, a new dawn of American leadership” in the world.

In announcing his choices of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) to be secretary of state, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates to continue in office and retired Marine Gen. James L. Jones to serve as national security adviser, Obama laid out a vision of an America whose global stature is restored and whose military, diplomatic and economic power are balanced with one another and with “the power of our moral example.”

But he acknowledged that “grave” and “urgent” national security issues, including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, potential conflict between Pakistan and India, and economic crisis at home and abroad, require immediate attention. The challenge will be balancing those immediate priorities handed over by the Bush administration — what the Obama camp calls the “inheritance issues” — with national and international expectations for the longer-term changes he pledged during the campaign.

The members of his new team, Obama said yesterday, “share my pragmatism about the use of power, and my sense of purpose.” Three other Cabinet selections announced were Eric H. Holder Jr. as attorney general, Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano as secretary of homeland security and Susan Rice as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

Obama repeatedly emphasized his intention to expand U.S. diplomacy while buttressing the size and capabilities of the military, and he stressed the interconnectedness of national security and economic issues. Rice, who served as a senior foreign policy aide to Obama during the campaign, listed an ambitious global agenda — “to prevent conflict, to promote peace, combat terrorism, prevent the spread and use of nuclear weapons, tackle climate change, end genocide, fight poverty and disease.”

But “you have to manage the legacy” of the Bush administration “while trying to move forward on priorities,” one Obama adviser said. “The balance is showing that you’re serious about what’s important — what you said during the campaign — without overloading the agenda. It’s more important to have success that shows you’re making progress than a long, uncompleted pass.”

In addition to the pressing issues in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, Obama must quickly decide whether to continue negotiations begun by President Bush on North Korea and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, how to deal with Iran, and what to do about the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Preparations must be made for three major summits — NATO, the Group of 20 and the Summit of the Americas — scheduled within three months of the inauguration.

At yesterday’s news conference, however, questions focused less on policy than on how the eclectic personalities standing behind Obama and in front of American flags — particularly Clinton, Gates and Jones — would mesh. Asked how he would avoid having a “clash of rivals” rather than the smoothly functioning team he portrayed, Obama said he expected “vigorous debate” and described himself as “a strong believer in strong personalities and strong opinions.”

“One of the dangers in the White House, based on my reading of history,” Obama continued, “is that you get wrapped up in groupthink and everybody agrees with everything and there’s no discussion and there are no dissenting views.”

Obama turned playful when a reporter reminded him of the sharp criticisms he leveled at Clinton during the campaign, including equating her travels as first lady to having tea with foreign leaders. Obama waved off the question, saying the press was merely “having fun” by stirring up quotes from the campaign.

“Differences get magnified” during campaigns, Obama said. “I did not ask for assurances from these individuals that they would agree with me at all times. I think they understood and would not be joining this team unless they understood and were prepared to carry out the decisions that have been made by me after full discussion.”

“On the broad core vision of where America needs to go,” he said, “we are in almost complete agreement. There are going to be differences in tactics and different assessments and judgments made. That’s what I expect; that’s what I welcome. That’s why I asked them to join the team.”

“But understand, I will be setting policy as president,” he added. “I will be responsible for the vision that this team carries out, and I expect them to implement that vision once decisions are made.”

The announcements confirmed weeks of speculation and secret negotiations. Gates had never closed the door on staying in office but repeatedly insisted that he wanted to retire to his home in Washington state. Discussions with Clinton were not solidified until agreement was reached over public release of the names of donors to the foundation established by her husband, the former president.

Jones was said to have resisted repeated entreaties from Obama until early last week. His concerns, according to a source who discussed the matter with the former NATO commander, centered on avoiding the problems that plagued Bush’s first term, including a weak National Security Council and end runs around national security adviser Condoleezza Rice by then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney.

Another Obama adviser said the president-elect’s team has studied Bush’s attempt to put together a first-term team of national security heavyweights, only to see discipline collapse among warring factions. With Jones, the adviser said, Obama felt he had found “a very substantial person who can make the system work.”

“Obama kept coming back,” the source said. “Everything [Jones] told him about the reasons he didn’t want the job, [Obama] said, ‘I can fix that.’ ” Jones is said to have emerged with guarantees that he would have Cabinet rank and be the main foreign policy conduit to and from the president.

Clinton stood without expression yesterday as Obama, the former rival she once called “naive” on some aspects of foreign policy, praised her “extraordinary intelligence and remarkable work ethic.” Obama continued: “She is an American of tremendous stature who will have my complete confidence, who knows many of the world’s leaders, who will command respect in every capital, and who will clearly have the ability to advance our interests around the world. Hillary’s appointment is a sign to friend and foe of the seriousness of my commitment to renew American diplomacy and restore our alliances.”

Clinton cracked a smile when Obama described her as a “tough campaign opponent.” In her own remarks, she said that “if confirmed, I will give this assignment, your administration and my country my all.”

A source close to the transition and familiar with discussions between Clinton and Obama described her as confident that she will have the president’s ear when she needs it, and as unconcerned about the potential for rivalry with Jones and Gates. “She knows how the White House works,” the source said of the former first lady.

Gates was brief and businesslike, declaring himself “deeply honored” to be asked to continue his service. Referring to the American troops at war, he said: “I must do my duty as they do theirs. How could I do otherwise?”

During the campaign, Gates publicly questioned Obama’s plan to set a timetable for withdrawing most U.S. combat troops from Iraq within 16 months of taking office, saying it would undermine recent security gains there. Since then, however, the Bush administration has signed a security agreement with Iraq pledging a complete withdrawal by the end of 2011, and senior U.S. military officials who have spoken with Obama have said they think they can strike a compromise on the number and timing of withdrawals. In recent months, Gates has given a series of speeches dovetailing with Obama’s emphasis on the importance of diplomacy and “soft power” along with military force.

Noting it would likely be necessary “to maintain a residual force to provide potential training, logistical support, to protect our civilians in Iraq,” Obama said yesterday that he thinks “16 months is the right time frame. But, as I’ve said consistently, I will listen to the recommendations of my commanders.”

Shear reported from Chicago. Staff writer Michael Abramowitz in Washington contributed to this report.

 

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U.S. Hopes to Quiet Indian-Pakistani Tensions

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 3, 2008; A11

Senior U.S. officials converged on South Asia yesterday, hoping to persuade India and Pakistan to lower the tensions between them after the Mumbai attacks, and to avoid an escalation that could jeopardize U.S. war efforts in neighboring Afghanistan.

Their most urgent message is directed toward India, where Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, planned to appeal to the government to accept Pakistan’s offer to jointly investigate the assault with U.S. assistance, a senior Bush administration official said.

“The goal is to say, first, this is really serious,” the official said. “It is qualitatively different for us,” because six Americans were among nearly 200 killed by terrorist gunmen believed to have traveled to the Indian seaside metropolis by boat from Pakistan. “But more important, we want to work with you and the Pakistanis. The only way we’re really going to deal with the terrorist threat is to get the Pakistanis to cooperate in the investigation.”

In Pakistan, the administration hopes to persuade the newly elected democratic government to move forcefully against domestic terrorist groups that initially were formed with the assistance of Pakistani intelligence to attack India along the two countries’ disputed border in Kashmir. India has charged — and U.S. intelligence believes — that the Mumbai attacks were carried out by one of those groups, Laskhar-i-Taiba, or Army of the Pious.

Adding his voice to the calls for calm, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates spoke yesterday of the importance of “restraint” on the part of both nations.

“But it’s also important to find out who was responsible,” Gates said at a news briefing. “I think what we would like to see is both countries work together to make sure that something like this doesn’t happen again.” Gates added that he was unaware of any request by India for U.S. training or equipment to help with its counterterrorism efforts, or any U.S. offer to provide such aid.

President-elect Barack Obama announced Monday that he would retain Gates as defense secretary. Asked twice about an Indian response to the attacks, Obama first demurred, citing “delicate diplomacy” and the reality of “only one president at a time” in the United States. Pressed on whether India has the same right as the United States to respond to terrorist threats, he said he thinks that “sovereign nations obviously have a right to protect themselves.”

Although U.S. relations with India rarely came up during the presidential campaign, Obama told Outlook India magazine in an interview in July that “we are both victims of terrorist attacks on our soil.” Among many shared interests, he said, is “our common strategic interests” that call for “strengthening U.S.-India military cooperation.”

On counterterrorism, India’s skepticism of Pakistan and the United States draws on recent history. The last threatened India-Pakistan war, following a Lashkar attack on the Indian Parliament in December 2001, was averted by strong U.S. intervention with both governments. As the two countries massed hundreds of thousands of troops at the disputed border, the administration pushed then-Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf to publicly pledge to combat militants inside Pakistan, and persuaded India to accept the promise.

Although a number of militants were arrested, most were quickly released. “What the administration is trying to do now is to influence the Pakistanis to finally bring these guys under control, while working to convince the Indians that the commitment to working with the Pakistanis is credible,” said Ashley Tellis, a South Asia expert at the Carnegie Endowment in Washington.

The United States has “made a series of such commitments to India going back to 2001, and simply could not or would not deliver,” Tellis said. “The Indians are now asking why it is they should believe the administration when it says it’s going to redouble those efforts.”

U.S. leverage with India is largely limited to goodwill and the promise of continued economic and diplomatic ties. “There is a lot of good faith from the Indians on the nuclear deal,” last year’s U.S.-Indian agreement on nuclear energy cooperation, the administration official said. “We’ve been with them on a whole lot of things recently, and I think we can be with them on terrorism, too.”

Rice and Mullen hope to convince their Indian counterparts that the difference this time is that Musharraf, an army general who seized power in Pakistan in a 1999 coup, has been replaced by a democratic government committed to moving against all extremist groups within its borders.

In recent months, the new Pakistani government had reached out to India, offering to begin discussions about resolving the Kashmir issue and cracking down on militant camps along the disputed northeastern frontier.

To the gratification of the Bush administration, Pakistan’s military had turned its attention away from India toward the western border with Afghanistan, where al-Qaeda and the Taliban are ensconced. U.S. officials have praised a Pakistani offensive in the mountainous west, and they have concluded a secret agreement with the Pakistani government allowing them to fire missiles from unmanned Predator aircraft based in Afghanistan at Taliban fighters inside Pakistan’s territory.

Gates said yesterday that he had seen no indication that Pakistan’s military was diverting its forces from the west toward the east. But U.S. officials fear that is inevitable if tensions are not quickly resolved.

Staff writer Ann Scott Tyson contributed to this report.

 

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Correction to This Article
This article incorrectly described current and former intelligence officials as believing that the CIA suffers from incompetent leadership and low morale. The sentence should have said that the officials expressed resentment about such suggestions.
Obama Is Under Fire Over Panetta Selection
Current, Ex-CIA Officials Criticize ‘Opaque’ Process

By Karen DeYoung and Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, January 7, 2009; A01

President-elect Barack Obama said yesterday that he has selected a “top-notch intelligence team” that would provide the “unvarnished” information his administration needs, rather than “what they think the president wants to hear.”

But current and former intelligence officials expressed sharp resentment over Obama’s choice of Leon E. Panetta as CIA director and suggested that the agency suffers from incompetent leadership and low morale. “People who suggest morale is low don’t have a clue about what’s going on now,” said CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield, citing recent personnel reforms under Director Michael V. Hayden.

On Capitol Hill, Democrats on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence were still stewing over Obama not consulting them on the choice before it was leaked Monday and continued to question Panetta’s intelligence experience. Vice President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. acknowledged that the transition team had made a “mistake” in not consulting or even notifying congressional leaders, and Obama telephoned committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and her predecessor, Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), yesterday to apologize.

“Obama trusts [Panetta] — that’s a huge plus,” committee member Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said, citing Panetta’s management expertise as Clinton White House chief of staff and budget director. But “after the past 24 hours, Leon Panetta is likely to get a good grilling” at his confirmation hearing, Wyden said. Several committee Democrats made clear that they expect CIA Deputy Director Stephen R. Kappes and Intelligence Director Michael Morell, the agency’s No. 3 official, to be retained for continuity and experience. An Obama transition official confirmed that both will be invited to stay.

The Panetta uproar starts Obama off on the wrong foot with the committee and intelligence professionals and was the latest glitch in what has largely been an unusually smooth and carefully choreographed transition.

“It’s always good to talk to the requisite members of Congress,” Biden said. “I think it was just a mistake.”

In a news conference at his transition headquarters, Obama defended Panetta, even as he emphasized that he has still made no formal announcement about his intelligence team. “I have the utmost respect for Leon Panetta,” he said. “I think he is one of the finest public servants that we’ve had. He brings extraordinary management skills, great political savvy, an impeccable record of integrity.” Obama is expected to publicly name Panetta, as well as retired Navy Adm. Dennis C. Blair as director of national intelligence, this week. Panetta began making introductory calls to lawmakers yesterday, Obama aides said.

Although several top CIA officials who have interacted with Obama since the election expressed admiration for his grasp of the issues, the transition process has clearly left a bad taste. One senior official said that “the process was completely opaque” and that the agency was neither consulted nor informed. The official was among several who discussed the subject on the condition of anonymity.

A second official who had worked with President Bill Clinton’s national security team while Panetta was chief of staff said he had no recollection of Panetta taking an active role in intelligence briefings or discussions of CIA policy and practice.

“He just didn’t make an impression,” said the official, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity so he could discuss the matter freely.

An official who participated in the Obama team’s deliberations dismissed concerns about Panetta’s lack of experience, saying that a number of previous directors had little or no “inside-the-intelligence-community experience. Most of them were from the outside . . . What you need is someone who can represent the agency well in the corridors of power in Washington.”

Several of Panetta’s former White House colleagues also said yesterday that he appreciated and engaged in national security issues during the Clinton years.

In a clear reference to harsh interrogation policies, including waterboarding, that were used against CIA terrorism detainees, Obama said his team would be “committed to breaking with some of the past practices and concerns that have, I think, tarnished the image of . . . the intelligence agencies as well as U.S. foreign policy.”

Almost as an afterthought at the end of his remarks, Obama noted that “there are outstanding intelligence professionals in the CIA” and other intelligence agencies, “and I have the utmost regard for the work that they’ve done.”

A widely held view among intelligence officials was that Obama’s team had decided to automatically disqualify any candidate who might have been seen as tainted by association with the controversial interrogation and detention policies of the Bush presidency — essentially anyone who held a management job in the past eight years. Former senior CIA official John O. Brennan, who headed the transition intelligence team, withdrew his name from consideration over concerns that his association with interrogation and rendition policies under President Bush and then-CIA director George J. Tenet would taint Obama.

A number of Tenet-era officials have argued that they were simply carrying out orders that the president and the attorney general, as well as Congress, had approved. Hayden, the outgoing director, defended interrogation policies, including waterboarding, that many have labeled torture, saying they were necessary to break some terrorism suspects. Although he has told Congress that waterboarding has not been used recently, Hayden publicly supported Bush’s decision to retain the option to use “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

But one former senior intelligence official noted that many of the people Panetta will be expected to lead would have participated in implementing the interrogation policy. Obama and Panetta “should think twice about pledges they make now” about the handling of terrorism detainees, another former senior official said, “because they may come back to haunt them in the future if some dire circumstances occur.”

The desire to retain Kappes and Morell, both of whom held senior positions under Tenet as well as with Hayden, however, indicated that Obama does not intend to clean house beyond the top leadership level.

Obama has said that he plans to close the detention facility at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and that he would “make sure we do not torture.” Feinstein introduced legislation yesterday to do both.

The bill provides for “a legal, effective, and humane system of gathering intelligence and holding suspected terrorists.” It would close Guantanamo Bay and require detainees either to be charged and tried in this country, transferred to an international tribunal or another country or held “in accordance with the law of armed conflict.”

It would also restrict the CIA and other intelligence agencies to 19 interrogation techniques authorized by the Army Field Manual, “creating a clear, single standard across the U.S. government.”

Staff writers Walter Pincus and Paul Kane contributed to this report.

 
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U.S. Thwarted Israeli Plan to Bomb Iranian Nuclear Facility

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 11, 2009; A10

President Bush last year rejected an Israeli request to provide sophisticated, deep-penetration bombs to attack Iran’s underground nuclear enrichment facilities, Pentagon officials said yesterday.

The administration also rebuffed Israel’s plan to fly through U.S.-controlled Iraqi airspace to reach the Iranian site, officials said. The Israelis had not proposed a specific date for an attack, and it was not clear how far along the planning was when the requests were made, officials said.

The Israeli requests were first reported on the New York Times Web site yesterday. The Times also said that President Bush, seeking to deflect the Israelis and to soften his refusal, told the government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that he had authorized a new covert action program to sabotage Iran’s uranium enrichment program. The report quoted U.S. officials as saying that some actions had been taken as part of what it described as an ongoing covert program, but that they had not seriously affected Iranian operations. Israel and the United States and principal European allies have charged that Iran has a secret nuclear weapons program, a charge Tehran has denied.

Officials with the Israeli Embassy and the CIA declined to comment last night. A White House spokesman could not be reached for comment.

Some factions within the Bush administration have long advocated a U.S. military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, but military leaders and others have argued against it on the grounds that it could endanger U.S. troops in the region and spark a broader war in the Middle East, and that it would probably only temporarily set back Iran’s efforts.

The Natanz complex in central Iran houses several underground structures containing gas centrifuges to enrich uranium. The Iranian government has said it is interested in peaceful nuclear energy only, but its failure to cooperate fully with international verification efforts has led to increasingly strict Western economic sanctions.

Israel has long considered Iran the main threat to its long-term security and has pressed a series of U.S. administrations to take stronger action against it.

The Times said its information was developed during reporting for an upcoming book by reporter David E. Sanger on global challenges awaiting the administration of President-elect Barack Obama.

Pentagon officials said that they were disturbed when Israeli air and naval exercises in the Mediterranean last summer appeared designed to test-fly distances equal to those between Israel and Iranian sites. The exercises briefly reawakened U.S. concerns that Israel was moving ahead with its attack plan. It could not be determined yesterday whether the Israeli plan had been abandoned or postponed.

Staff writer Joby Warrick contributed to this report.

 

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Afghan Conflict Will Be Reviewed
Obama Sees Troops As Buying Time, Not Turning Tide

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 13, 2009; A01

President-elect Barack Obama intends to sign off on Pentagon plans to send up to 30,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, but the incoming administration does not anticipate that the Iraq-like “surge” of forces will significantly change the direction of a conflict that has steadily deteriorated over the past seven years.

Instead, Obama’s national security team expects that the new deployments, which will nearly double the current U.S. force of 32,000 (alongside an equal number of non-U.S. NATO troops), will help buy enough time for the new administration to reappraise the entire Afghanistan war effort and develop a comprehensive new strategy for what Obama has called the “central front on terror.”

With conditions on the ground worsening by nearly every yardstick last year — including record levels of extremist attacks and U.S. casualties, and the expansion of the conflict across Pakistan and into India — Obama’s campaign pledge to “finish the job” in Afghanistan with more troops, money and diplomacy has encountered the daunting reality of a job that has barely begun.

Since the November election, Obama has been flooded with dire assessments of the war. A National Intelligence Estimate warned that a reconstituted al-Qaeda leadership, dug into the mountains along the Afghan-Pakistani border, continues to plan attacks against the United States and Europe. The Bush White House delivered a major review of Afghanistan last month that echoed that judgment, acknowledged that a modern Afghan democracy — stable and free of extremists — may be both unattainable and unaffordable, and said that the United States may have to accept trade-offs among priorities.

“We have no strategic plan. We never had one,” a senior U.S. military commander said of the Bush years. Obama’s first order of business, he said, will be to “explain to the American people what the mission is” in Afghanistan. The officer is one of a number of active-duty and retired officers, senior Obama team members and Bush administration officials interviewed for this article, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the presidential transition.

The military is as concerned about the mission of additional troops as it is about the size of the force and is looking for Obama to resolve critical internal debates, including the relative merits of conducting conventional combat vs. targeted guerrilla war. With limited resources, should the military concentrate on eliminating a Taliban presence — a task for which most think the United States and its allies will never have enough troops — or on securing large population areas?

What is the plan for training an Afghan army expected to double in size — from 84,000 troops — in the next few years, when less than half of current U.S. trainer slots are filled? How will resources be shifted to the State Department and civilian development experts Obama has said must assume more responsibility? Can the new president do what his predecessor could not and impose order and a shared strategy on the 41 nations and countless international and nongovernmental organizations operating in Afghanistan? Will he follow through on pledges for more diplomacy with Iran, to the west of Afghanistan, and a more aggressive plan for Pakistan to the east?

“This is not a Shinseki versus Rumsfeld debate between 125,000 or 500,000 U.S. troops,” a Pentagon official said, referring to the differing views of then-Army Chief of Staff Eric K. Shinseki and then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld before the Iraq invasion in 2003. “It’s a real debate about what the correct answer is.”

Obama has offered few public comments on Afghanistan since the election. “We haven’t seen the kinds of infrastructure improvements; we haven’t seen the security improvements; we haven’t seen the reduction in narco-trafficking; we haven’t seen a reliance on rule of law in Afghanistan that would make people feel confident that the central government can, in fact, deliver on its promises,” he said last month on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “We’ve got to ramp up our development approach,” he said, without providing details.

The president-elect set out a “very limited” objective of ensuring that Afghanistan “cannot be used as a base to launch attacks against the United States.” He cited the need for “more effective military action” — even as he warned of fierce Afghan resistance to the presence of foreign troops — and said the “number one goal” is to stop al-Qaeda.

In the current vacuum, the Joint Chiefs of Staff have made their own assessments and recommendations, as has Gen. David D. McKiernan, the commander of both U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the Central Command chief, who has regional responsibility for the Middle East and much of South Asia, has set up what a Pentagon official only half-jokingly described as a “shadow government,” assembling a team of more than 200 military and civilian experts to supply him with a comprehensive plan for the region by mid-February.

The Army is already spending $1.1 billion to provide facilities for additional troops in Afghanistan and plans to start an additional $1.3 billion in construction next year. But it remains unclear what kinds of forces, with what assignments, will be sent beyond the 10th Mountain Division’s 3rd Combat Brigade, departing this month. Smaller “enabler” units with helicopters and other equipment are also readying for deployment, and significant training must begin soon for other units selected to go during the spring and summer. Gen. James T. Conway, the Marine Corps commandant, has pressed for a major Marine presence in Afghanistan once the Marine force has drawn down substantially from Iraq.

On the civilian and economic development front, Obama officials have been noncommittal about a $2.5 billion supplemental spending plan for 2009 that the State Department hopes the new administration will quickly submit to Congress for approval. Although Obama co-sponsored a Senate bill to triple nonmilitary aid to Pakistan to $7.5 billion over five years, introduced last summer by his vice president-elect, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr., the proposal never left the chamber.

“At some point,” said a retired senior officer with long Afghan experience and ties to the Obama team, “this is going to have to converge into a set of options and a decision on a strategy instead of 40 different ones. . . . It’s going to require a much more complex assessment by Obama. One of the problems is you don’t really know what kind of forces, and how many, until you know what strategy you’re going to have.”

With its “Day One” plate already overflowing with the economic crisis at home, the Hamas-Israel war in the Gaza Strip and Obama’s stated goal of closing the Guantanamo Bay detention facility in Cuba, the new administration says it will not be rushed on Afghanistan. “We are taking a long, hard look at these issues now,” a transition adviser said.

The parameters of a new strategy are unlikely to emerge before early April, when Afghanistan and Pakistan will top the agenda at a NATO summit in France. By presenting its NATO allies with a comprehensive plan and demonstrating the leadership to implement it, Obama hopes to capitalize on his overwhelming popularity in Europe with requests for increased military and financial contributions.

“What they’ve got to say is ‘Okay, if you love Obama, show us how much,’ ” said another retired senior military officer.

Some senior members of the new administration are already deeply knowledgeable about Afghanistan and Pakistan, including holdover Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates. Retired Marine Gen. James L. Jones, Obama’s national security adviser, commanded NATO when it took over the coalition of international forces in Afghanistan in 2003 and last year chaired a major Atlantic Council study that concluded that “the international community is not winning in Afghanistan.”

Jones remains committed to the study’s recommendation of a complete reappraisal of the war; a campaign plan that integrates all security, reconstruction and governance efforts; and a regional approach that includes diplomatic collaboration with Iran, Pakistan, India, Russia and China.

But other designated policymakers have been less intimately involved with the issue, including Secretary of State-designee Hillary Rodham Clinton; retired Navy Adm. Dennis C. Blair, the nominee for director of national intelligence; and Leon E. Panetta, Obama’s choice to head the CIA. There is a deep-seated belief among Obama advisers that no matter how many pre-inauguration diplomatic, military and intelligence briefings they receive, they will not have a full picture of the depth of the problems in Afghanistan or the options for fixing them until Obama reaches the Oval Office.

 
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On First Full Day, Obama Will Dive Into Foreign Policy

By Michael D. Shear and Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, January 20, 2009; A12

President-elect Barack Obama will plunge into foreign policy on his first full day in office tomorrow, finally freed from the constraints of tradition that has forced him and his staff to remain muzzled about world affairs during the 78-day transition.

As one of his first actions, Obama plans to name former senator George J. Mitchell (D-Maine) as his Middle East envoy, aides said, sending a signal that the new administration intends to move quickly to engage warring Israelis and Palestinians in efforts to secure the peace.

Mitchell’s appointment will follow this afternoon’s expected Senate vote to confirm Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary of state. And tomorrow afternoon, aides said, Obama will convene a meeting of his National Security Council to launch a reassessment of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

By the end of the week, Obama plans to issue an executive order to eventually shut down the military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and to lay out a new process for dealing with about 250 detainees remaining at the prison.

The actions — to be taken before the entire White House staff has found their desks — reflect the frenetic activity among Obama’s national security advisers that has been taking place behind the scenes since Election Day.

Following his noon inauguration, Obama will spend a brief time at the White House before heading to a series of dinners and inaugural balls. Aides said the work of being president will begin in earnest tomorrow morning.

That work has already been in full view with regard to the economic crisis and other domestic issues. Obama has not been bashful, giving speeches and dispatching aides to work with Congress on an $825 billion stimulus package. He will meet with economic advisers tomorrow and is expected to quickly issue an executive order demanding a new level of transparency and ethics in government.

But the new president will for the first time assume the responsibility for an Iraq war that he opposed from its inception and a series of international crises that will quickly test his mettle as commander in chief.

Publicly, the president-elect has deferred to President Bush and has declined to comment on the recent fighting in the Gaza Strip and the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. But privately, he and his aides have been preparing to dramatically reshape the country’s foreign policy, starting with the broad conflict zone from Israel to Pakistan.

Last Thursday, in an interview with Washington Post editors and reporters, Obama criticized Bush for treating Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan as “discrete” problems. Under his watch, Obama said, policy in that region will be treated as a single, unified one.

“One of the principles that we’ll be operating under is that these things are very much related and that if we have got an integrated approach, we’re going to be more effective,” he said.

Incoming officials were still debating yesterday how involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian crisis should proceed during the first week. With a fragile Gaza cease-fire in place, the new administration plans to tread gingerly, working behind the scenes while allowing Egyptian and European initiatives to play out before taking a highly visible role.

Obama transition officials are acutely aware that the world — and especially the Israelis and Palestinians — will be watching to see what tone the new president takes. Sources said the initial emphasis will likely be on stepped-up presidential engagement rather than the specifics of a U.S. role, and empathy and aid toward humanitarian suffering.

The first concrete evidence of a new foreign policy approach will begin with the meeting tomorrow. Obama will instruct the Pentagon to prepare for a stepped-up withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq, to be completed within 16 months, and will hear proposals for turning around the deteriorating war in Afghanistan. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Michael Mullen, will attend, and Gen. David H. Petraeus, head of Central Command, and Gen. Raymond Odierno, U.S. commander in Iraq, will weigh in via live video connection.

Senior officers began late last year to prepare options for withdrawing from Iraq. Obama has said he will listen carefully to their recommendations before approving a plan that meets his specifications. He has said he expects to maintain a “residual force” in Iraq but has not indicated how many troops will remain over what period.

He has also indicated he will move ahead with existing plans for deployment of as many as 30,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan this year.

After returning to the White House following his swearing-in today, Obama is expected to visit the Oval Office, aides said.

A handful of senior staff members will ride in Obama’s motorcade to the White House today and enter their offices for the first time as they brace to confront the economy, the Middle East, overseas wars and a raft of domestic policy controversies.

Aides said only about 15 White House staffers were pre-screened to enter the West Wing today. The rest will arrive tomorrow morning, after partying at inaugural balls.

Gates will not attend inaugural festivities, having been designated to stay away from the president and other national leaders in case of a catastrophic event.

Mitchell, who led a Middle East peace commission in 2000, is highly regarded as a negotiator for his work in the successful Northern Ireland peace process. An Obama adviser said the exact timing of Mitchell’s appointment will depend on Clinton’s confirmation vote, which is scheduled to take place by “unanimous consent” and so cannot be stopped by filibuster.

But a Republican senator could demand a voice vote, thus delaying Clinton’s confirmation by another day. “If any Republican holds her over, they are stalling the entire administration from hitting this problem,” the adviser said.

The Guantanamo order is being crafted by Obama White House Counsel Gregory B. Craig. Its timing is expected to preempt a Guantanamo trial scheduled to begin Monday under the current “military commission” proceedings.

Staff writer Anne E. Kornblut contributed to this report.

 
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U.S. to Be Allowed New Routes To Supply Troops in Afghanistan

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 21, 2009; A04

Army Gen. David H. Petraeus said yesterday that the United States had reached agreements to open “additional logistical routes into Afghanistan” through its Central Asian neighbors to the north, reducing dependence on Pakistan as the main transit route for supplies to U.S. and NATO troops.

Petraeus, the head of the U.S. Central Command, spoke to reporters in Pakistan before heading to Afghanistan, his last stop on a six-nation tour of the region. He is due in Washington today to attend a national security meeting this afternoon with President Obama.

The White House meeting will mark Obama’s first formal engagement with the most immediate foreign policy issues he faces, including Afghanistan, Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Michael Mullen, are expected to attend, along with Hillary Rodham Clinton, assuming the Senate, which yesterday delayed a vote on her nomination as secretary of state, votes to confirm her today.

Petraeus, whose command stretches from the Mediterranean to Pakistan’s border with India, will provide an update on the region and his trip. Gen. Ray Odierno, the U.S. commander in Iraq, will join at least part of the meeting via live videoconference. Their participation leaves open the question of whether Obama will follow former president George W. Bush’s practice of consulting directly with military commanders in the field — Petraeus in particular — rather than following the formal chain of command through Gates, with Mullen as the president’s chief military adviser.

Obama is expected to name former senator George J. Mitchell (D-Maine) as his special envoy to the Middle East. He has promised quick and emphatic presidential involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, but advisers are hesitant to upset a fragile cease-fire begun by Israeli and Hamas forces in the Gaza Strip over the weekend, as well as delicate, ongoing initiatives by Egypt and European governments.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy, in Egypt for a summit designed to seal the Gaza cease-fire, told reporters on his way back to Paris that the truce should be used as a stepping stone to a wider Israeli-Palestinian peace deal and that he hoped to host a broad international conference in Paris “in a matter of weeks” to launch a new round of negotiations. French diplomatic sources expressed hope that the Obama administration will be willing to play a major role in that effort, once Israel selects new leaders in elections next month.

About three-quarters of “nonlethal” supplies for the 64,000-strong U.S. and NATO force in Afghanistan — food, fuel, construction materials and other goods — travel by road from the Pakistani port of Karachi and across the mountainous Afghanistan-Pakistan border through the Khyber Pass. Pakistani transit convoys have repeatedly been attacked in recent months by Taliban fighters.

During an eight-day trip, Petraeus stopped in Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgystan. “There have been agreements reached” over new transit routes, he said, although he offered no specifics. One possible route includes train and truck convoys through Russia, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.

Correspondent Edward Cody in Paris contributed to this report.

 
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As Obama Visits State Dept., Clinton Announces Two Special Envoys

By Karen DeYoung and Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, January 23, 2009; A05

President Obama traveled to the State Department yesterday afternoon for a visit that was as rich in symbolism as in substance, underscoring his pledge to give top priority to diplomacy as he outlined an activist policy in the Middle East and warned that “difficult days lie ahead” in Afghanistan.

Obama and Vice President Biden stood to one side as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced new special emissaries on the most intractable national security problems — Richard C. Holbrooke for Afghanistan-Pakistan and George J. Mitchell for the Middle East — to an invited gathering of several hundred, including State Department officials. Just hours earlier, about 1,000 cheering civil service and Foreign Service employees had packed the building’s lobby to welcome her on her first day at work.

Clinton called the appointments of Holbrooke and Mitchell “a loud and clear signal . . . that our nation is once again capable of demonstrating global leadership in pursuit of progress and peace.” Obama said the two statesmen would “convey our seriousness of purpose” in dealing with challenges he described as complex and urgent.

The new secretary, and the new president’s choice to make State his first Cabinet department stop — even before his maiden trip to the Pentagon — buoyed a workforce that often felt disdained and relegated to the back seat behind the military over the past eight years. “People were just elated that the president came here and said all the right things about strengthening diplomacy,” one official said.

“It is my privilege to come here and to pay tribute to all of you, the talented men and women of the State Department,” Obama said. “I’ve given you an early gift, Hillary Clinton,” he said, adding that she has “my full confidence.”

Both the new appointees are experienced negotiators. Holbrooke, a former Foreign Service officer who led the U.S. team that brokered the 1995 Dayton peace accords in the Balkans, was a leading supporter of Clinton’s presidential campaign. Mitchell, a former Maine senator, chaired negotiations that led to the 1998 Good Friday agreement ending decades of conflict in Northern Ireland, and a high-level commission on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in 2000-01.

Obama has criticized the Bush administration as lacking high-level involvement in the Middle East, but he broke little new policy ground in his first extensive remarks on the situation yesterday. He said he was “deeply concerned by the loss of Israeli and Palestinian life . . . and by the substantial suffering and humanitarian needs” in the Gaza Strip, where three weeks of fighting between Hamas militants and the Israeli military halted last weekend with a still-fragile cease-fire.

He called on Hamas to renounce violence, abide by past agreements and recognize Israel’s right to exist, and said Israel should open the territory’s borders. He cited “constructive elements” in an Arab peace initiative but said “now is the time for Arab states to act on the initiative’s promise” by supporting the Palestinian Authority government, ousted from Gaza by Hamas in 2007, normalizing relations with Israel and “standing up to extremism that threatens us all.”

Palestinian activists noted that Obama made no reference to the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank but said they were ecstatic over the selection of Mitchell, who is well remembered for firmly recommending an end to Israeli settlement activity in his 2001 report.

Ghaith al-Omari, a former adviser to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, said “the policies are the same” but “Obama signaled early engagement and an energetic approach.” Mitchell proved in his earlier engagement with the issue that “he is not a pushover,” Omari said. “He was tough on the Palestinians but tough on the Israelis too.”

Mitchell, who plans to travel to the region the first week of February, said he did not “underestimate the difficulty of this assignment.” But his Northern Ireland experience, he said, had convinced him that “there is no such thing as a conflict that can’t be ended.”

Clinton said Holbrooke’s broader mandate, centered on Afghanistan and Pakistan, will be to “coordinate across the entire [U.S.] government an effort to achieve United States’ strategic goals in the region.” He, too, plans to travel to his new area of responsibility early next month.

Calling it a “daunting assignment,” Holbrooke said that “nobody can say the war in Afghanistan has gone well.” Husain Haqqani, Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States, praised the appointment, saying Holbrooke “brings tremendous experience and knowledge, and proven diplomatic skills.”

Obama has said that President George W. Bush spent too much attention and resources on Iraq at the expense of the Afghan war, and yesterday he described the situation in Afghanistan as “perilous.” He said his administration has begun an overall strategic review of policy in the region and will “set clear priorities in pursuit of achievable goals.”

At a Pentagon news conference yesterday, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said the “goals we did have for Afghanistan are too broad and too far into the future. We need more concrete goals that can be achieved realistically within three to five years, in terms of reestablishing control in certain areas, providing security for the population, going after al-Qaeda, preventing the reestablishment of terrorism.”

Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who appeared with Gates, also said Obama had been provided with several options for withdrawing troops from Iraq, including implementation of a 16-month timeline for the departure of combat troops.

At Clinton’s State Department arrival ceremony early yesterday, she told cheering staffers that she was “absolutely honored and thrilled beyond words to be here.” She was flanked by Steve Kashkett, the State Department representative for the Foreign Service union, and William J. Burns, the undersecretary of state for political affairs and the highest-ranking career officer.

Kashkett did not mince words on his feelings about the previous administration, telling Clinton that “both you and the president have decried the neglect that the Foreign Service and the State Department as a whole have suffered in recent years. No one knows better than the people in this room and their colleagues posted all over the world how true that is.

“So far,” Kashkett added, “we are thrilled to have you here.”

To laughter, Clinton thanked him for his candor, adding, “This is not going to be easy.”

Staff writer Ann Scott Tyson contributed to this report.

 
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Obama Extends Hand To Arabs and Muslims
He Says U.S. Has ‘Not Been Perfect,’ Gets a Generally Positive Response

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 28, 2009; A06

President Obama has launched a determined effort to change the tone, if not yet the substance, of U.S. relations with the Arab and Muslim worlds, saying he is eager to listen to their concerns and acknowledging that Americans “have not been perfect” in their dealings with them.

The early appointments of presidential emissaries to the Middle East and to Afghanistan and Pakistan; the announced closure of the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; the choice of Arab satellite network al-Arabiya for the first formal interview of his presidency; first-week National Security Council meetings on Iraq and Afghanistan; and telephone calls to regional leaders on his first full day in office were reflections both of the seriousness of the issues and a message to governments and the public, administration officials said.

Obama’s initial conversation with one Middle Eastern leader conveyed little of substance, that country’s Washington ambassador said: “He just wanted to reach out on the first day as a sign and demonstration of his determination to engage.”

Although Obama told al-Arabiya that “we’re going to follow through on our commitment for me to address the Muslim world from a Muslim capital,” the 100-day deadline he initially set for the speech is unlikely to be kept, an official said. A venue has not been chosen, Obama’s schedule is focused on pressing domestic concerns, and a flurry of must-attend international summits are scheduled for April.

The White House is hoping that its energetic early days — and the rapid dispatch of Middle East envoy George J. Mitchell and Afghanistan-Pakistan representative Richard C. Holbrooke on their own first regional trips — will send the desired message about relations with the Muslim world at home and abroad while the new administration begins to determine what its actual policies will be on the ground.

“My job is to communicate to the American people that the Muslim world is filled with extraordinary people who simply want to live their lives and see their children live better lives,” Obama said in the interview. “My job to the Muslim world is to communicate that the Americans are not your enemy. We sometimes make mistakes. We have not been perfect.”

In a meeting with Jewish leaders early last year, candidate Obama described communications as “the battlefield we have to worry about . . . where we have been losing badly over the last seven years” of the Bush administration.

“We’re not going to wait until the end of my administration to deal with Palestinian and Israeli peace,” Obama told al-Arabiya, “We’re going to start now. It may take a long time to do, but we’re going to do it now.”

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton yesterday declined to characterize the new outreach as a complete rejection of the Bush administration’s policies. “Where continuity is appropriate, we are committed to doing that,” she told reporters. “In areas of the world that have felt either overlooked or not receiving appropriate attention for the problems that they are experiencing, there’s a welcoming of the engagement that we are promising. So it’s not any kind of repudiation or indictment of the past eight years so much as an excitement and an acceptance of how we’re going to be doing business.”

Asked for details about how the administration would simultaneously address the plight of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and Israel’s right of self-defense, Clinton said: “I think we’ve said all we’re going to say about the Israeli-Palestinian situation as we send our envoy out. . . . We’re going to wait and let him report back to us about the way forward.”

As Mitchell held his first meetings yesterday in Cairo — with E.U. foreign policy chief Javier Solana, Egyptian Foreign Minister Aboul Gheit and the head of Egypt’s intelligence service — violence erupted again in the Gaza Strip with attacks by both Hamas and Israel, the worst since an uneasy cease-fire was declared more than a week ago after 22 days of fighting. Mitchell is scheduled to meet today with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak before moving on to Israel, the West Bank, Saudi Arabia and Jordan.

Responses so far to Obama’s outreach have been largely positive, but further action is awaited. Obama’s desire for “a strong and fruitful relationship with the Arab world” was a “positive development,” Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, told Saudi-owned al-Arabiya. Obama has praised a 2002 Saudi peace plan calling for normalized Arab ties with Israel in exchange for Israeli withdrawal from territory occupied since 1967. Arab states, Saud said, are waiting to answer the administration’s questions.

Hamas, which initially dismissed Obama’s pledge of new initiatives in the region as identical to Bush administration policies, appeared to temper its verbal assault yesterday. Hamas official Ahmed Yousef said in an interview with al-Jazeera television that there had been “some positive things” in Obama’s statements, the Associated Press reported from Cairo.

In a statement posted on sympathetic Web sites yesterday, the Taliban called the Guantanamo closure a “positive step” but said it was an insufficient change in Bush’s “satanic” policies in the region and the world, according to a translation by SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors extremist sites.

Iran has made no response to Obama’s public offer of a diplomatic handshake. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said Monday that he is open to a dialogue with the Obama administration but that he would not accept any preconditions to talks.

 
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Iraq Auditor Warns of Waste, Fraud In Afghanistan

By Karen DeYoung and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, February 2, 2009; A06

After five years of investigations and 250,000 pages of audits, Stuart W. Bowen Jr. wishes he could say that the $50 billion cost of the U.S. reconstruction effort in Iraq was money accounted for and well spent.

“But that’s just not happened,” Bowen said.

Instead, the largest single-country relief and reconstruction project in U.S. history — most of it done by private U.S. contractors — was full of wasted funds, fraud and a lack of accountability under what Bowen, the congressionally mandated special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, calls an “ad hoc-racy” of lax or nonexistent government planning and supervision.

And despite the Iraq experience, he said, the United States is making many of the same mistakes again in Afghanistan, where U.S. reconstruction expenditures stand at more than $30 billion and counting.

“It’s too late to do the structural part and make it quickly applicable to Afghanistan,” Bowen said in an interview last week. None of the substantive changes in oversight, contracting and reconstruction planning or personnel assignments that Congress, auditors and outside experts proposed as the Iraq debacle unfolded has been implemented in Afghanistan.

But President Obama could take several steps to mitigate future damage, Bowen said. They include devoting more attention to military and civilian personnel and to reconstruction and relief assignments, and taking advantage of the expertise developed through hard-won experience in Iraq. Instead of the “multiple versions” of the federal acquisition regulations adopted and amended by “multiple agencies” operating in Iraq, Obama “could just issue a FAR regulation applicable to Afghanistan that everyone will follow” in issuing and supervising contracts, he said.

“To bring this all together,” Bowen said, “the president should order a Red Cell,” a high-level group drawing from the departments of State and Defense and the U.S. Agency for International Development that would turn Obama’s orders into action.

Bowen’s office, known as SIGIR, is releasing a book today that recounts the Iraq experience and suggests how to avoid future mistakes. “Hard Lessons” is being published as the bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting holds its first public hearing. Created by Congress last year, the commission will examine expenditures in Iraq and Afghanistan and propose solutions for “systemic” problems that waste taxpayer dollars.

Legislation to create the commission was introduced by Democratic Sens. James Webb (Va.) and Claire McCaskill (Mo.) and was inspired by the “Truman Committee,” which conducted hundreds of hearings and investigations into government waste during and after World War II.

“Hard Lessons,” a draft of which was leaked to the news media in December, concludes that the U.S. reconstruction effort in Iraq was a failure, largely because there was no overall strategy behind it. Goals shifted from “liberation” and an early military exit to massive, ill-conceived and expensive building projects under the Coalition Provisional Authority of 2003 and 2004. Many of those projects — over budget, poorly executed or, often, barely begun — were abandoned as security worsened.

In a preface to the 456-page book, Bowen writes that he knew the reconstruction was in trouble when he first visited Iraq in January 2004 and saw duffel bags full of cash being carried out of the Republican Palace, which housed the U.S. occupation government.

Security was a constant problem, not only for military and civilian officials serving in Iraq but also for SIGIR. Auditor Paul Converse was killed in March during a rocket attack in Baghdad, following a year in which five other SIGIR employees were wounded.

The book recounts, in colorful detail based on SIGIR interviews with nearly all the principals, the deep divisions during the same period between the Pentagon, under Donald H. Rumsfeld; the State Department under Colin L. Powell; and the White House office of national security adviser Condoleezza Rice. Former deputy secretary of state Richard L. Armitage recounts an argument between Rumsfeld and Rice in the fall of 2003 during which each said the other was in charge of supervising the Coalition Provisional Authority.

The book also includes numerous demonstrations of the Bush administration’s lack of preparation to run Iraq after the March 2003 invasion. In one previously publicized case recounted in “Hard Lessons,” Bowen’s auditors discovered a cash disbursement of $57.8 million by the CPA to the U.S. comptroller for south-central Iraq. “Pallet upon pallet of hundred-dollar bills” were removed from the CPA vault in Baghdad and driven to the regional office in two unarmored SUVs. There, the local acting comptroller, Robert J. Stein Jr., who later was convicted for money laundering and fraud, had himself photographed with mountains of cash.

Overall, SIGIR and other law enforcement agencies have obtained 35 convictions, including two major bribery schemes involving $14 million solicited by U.S. military officers who ran Kuwait-based units contracting for the billions of dollars in supplies sent to Iraq.

SIGIR also reported on the inability of Iraqi firms to compete with U.S. contractors, due in part to the complicated U.S. bidding system: “Online contracting, which frequently entailed bids of more than a hundred pages, bewildered Iraqi contractors who were used to sealing a business deal with just a handshake.”

When he took the job five years ago, Bowen said, “I didn’t know that we didn’t have a system to protect our interests abroad in post-conflict or contingency operations. . . . It would have been a much funner job to issue 250 reports on how well our rebuilding program went . . . and that the money was well accounted for and that we’re leaving Iraq a peaceful and democratic place and nonviolent country.”

Given that $4 billion in appropriated U.S. reconstruction funds remain unspent in Iraq, Bowen’s work is not likely to end anytime soon.

 
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Obama Seeks Narrower Focus in Afghan War
Situation Is Much Worse Than New Administration Realized and Will Take Time to Address

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 4, 2009; A12

As President Obama prepares to formally authorize the April deployment of two additional combat brigades to Afghanistan, perhaps as early as this week, no issue other than the U.S. economy appears as bleak to his administration as the seven-year Afghan war and the regional challenges that surround it.

A flurry of post-inauguration activity — presidential meetings with top diplomatic and military officials, the appointment of a high-level Afghanistan-Pakistan envoy and the start of a White House-led strategic review — was designed to show forward motion and resolve, senior administration officials said.

But newly installed officials describe a situation on the ground that is far more precarious than they had anticipated, along with U.S. government departments that are poorly organized to implement the strategic outline that Obama presented last week to his National Security Council and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

With a 60-day deadline, tied to an April 3 NATO summit, Obama has called for a more regional outlook and a more narrowly focused Afghanistan policy that sets priorities among counterinsurgency and development goals. “The president . . . wants to hear from the uniformed leadership and civilian advisers as to what the situation is and their thoughts as to the way forward,” a senior administration official said. “But he has also given pretty direct guidance.”

The problem confronting the administration is how to fill in Obama’s broad strokes while fighting a war that, by all accounts, is going badly. “It could take quite a long time to look at all the various aspects of this,” the senior official said. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates predicted last week that the war will be “a long slog” with an uncertain outcome. Richard C. Holbrooke, the new Afghanistan-Pakistan envoy, who left yesterday for his first visit to the region, expects to spend weeks gathering information before he has much advice to give.

Meanwhile, the senior official acknowledged, “the world moves, obviously.”

The two new U.S. brigades are set to arrive in Afghanistan in late April, with another planned to depart in August. But even with what is expected to be more than 30,000 additional U.S. troops this year — bringing the U.S.-NATO total in Afghanistan to nearly 90,000 — the international force will be insufficient to secure much of the country.

With the spring combat season near, the Taliban has rapidly increased its sophistication and reach. Neither the money nor the manpower is currently available to train and maintain an Afghan National Army that is expected to begin taking over security missions. Afghan elections are scheduled for summer, but U.S. officials see few viable alternatives to the ineffectual president, Hamid Karzai. Efforts to stem cultivation of opium poppies and the narcotics trade that lines Taliban and government pockets have made little discernible progress.

Nearly $60 billion ($32 billion of it from the United States) has already been spent on reconstruction programs in Afghanistan — more than during five years of failed reconstruction in Iraq — but such efforts remain “fragmented” and “lack coherence,” according to U.S. government auditors. “I fear there are major weaknesses in strategy,” retired Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Arnold Fields, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, said in a report released Friday.

Across the border in Pakistan, meanwhile, U.S. military officials are anxiously eyeing a map on which extremist gains are rapidly spreading eastward, toward major population centers, as the Taliban and al-Qaeda solidify their hold on the western frontier and form alliances with domestic terrorists. Islamabad’s relations with neighboring India, a fellow nuclear power, remain tense after November’s terrorist attacks in Mumbai.

Officials described Obama’s overall approach to what the administration calls “Af-Pak” as a refusal to be rushed, using words such as “rigor” and “restraint.” “We know we’re going to get [criticism] for taking our time,” said a senior official, one of several in the administration and the military who would discuss the issue only on the condition of anonymity.

While acknowledging the difficulties that the Bush administration faced, Obama officials dismiss the first seven years of Afghanistan war policy, when that conflict took a back seat to the war in Iraq, as reactive, ad hoc and without what one called “a very keen sense of what the goal was.”

Obama has ordered up a plan for diplomatic outreach to Iran and others in the region. Afghanistan and Pakistan are to be treated as a single theater of war and diplomacy, even as stability becomes a higher priority than democracy in Afghanistan and as the U.S. relationship with Pakistan is expanded and deepened.

The administration will also seek a new compact with hesitant European and other partners in the war effort, promising new leadership and focus and expecting more resources and commitment. And Obama wants to get beyond the lip service long paid to balance and coordination between the U.S. diplomatic and military services.

Senior administration officials described their approach to Pakistan — as a major U.S. partner under serious threat of internal collapse — as fundamentally different from the Bush administration’s focus on the country as a Taliban and al-Qaeda “platform” for attacks in Afghanistan and beyond. But the officials acknowledged that a comprehensive Pakistan policy will take time and money. The administration will seek early congressional action on a “rebalanced” assistance program — introduced in the Senate last summer by then-Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. and co-sponsored by then-Sen. Obama — that will triple economic aid and condition military assistance with benchmarks for progress in combating extremists.

The president will get little pushback on his broad goals from the military or civilian leaders. A newly completed review by the Joint Chiefs of Staff echoes his call for a broader approach to the region and better-defined objectives in Afghanistan. “We need a comprehensive strategy, not just the military side,” Adm. Michael Mullen, the Joint Chiefs chairman, said in an interview Monday. “What has to be different is how we approach the future.”

Gen. David H. Petraeus, the U.S. Central Command chief whose military responsibilities stretch from the Mediterranean to Pakistan, is compiling strategic recommendations based on reports from his own team of dozens of military and civilian experts. Although less immediately concerned about the fine points of a comprehensive new strategy than the need to move quickly to secure Afghan population centers, Petraeus has already visited central Asian states bordering Afghanistan and supports more extensive diplomatic outreach. He has ordered the Afghanistan-Pakistan portion of his Centcom review to be completed by next week, when it, too, will be given to the White House.

Holbrooke, who reports directly to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, was said to be appalled not only at the walls that still separate military and civilian efforts but also at compartmentalization within the department itself, where separate task forces deal with Afghanistan and Pakistan. Provincial Reconstruction Teams that are on the front lines of U.S. assistance in Afghanistan are run and still largely staffed by the military.

Obama’s deadline for a new overall strategy, set at a Jan. 23 meeting of the National Security Council, coincides with the NATO summit at which he will “come face to face” with allies “looking at him for his perspective on where he’s taking the U.S. effort,” a senior official said.

National security adviser James L. Jones is in charge of the effort, aided by Lt. Gen. Douglas E. Lute. Lute has been retained in the post of White House coordinator for Afghanistan and Iraq that he occupied in the Bush administration, to ensure that “we were not going to drop any balls,” an official said.

“The policies will change — that’s the purpose of the reviews,” he said, “but the mechanisms had to be in place” for ongoing operations. “This wasn’t coming into office in 1993, when the world was a much calmer place. We’ve got two active wars and 200,000 people serving overseas. . . . It’s very hard in a transition from the outside to know what is moving.”

To keep the balls in play, the official said, “it makes sense to think about tranches of decisions that have to be reached” sooner rather than later on the road toward a comprehensive new strategy.

The administration has already given a green light to continuing CIA-operated attacks by unmanned Predator aircraft against “high-value” al-Qaeda and Taliban targets in western Pakistan. The Pakistani government has agreed to the strikes, despite overwhelming public disapproval. But after the first Obama-authorized Predator attack last week, Pakistani officials said, Islamabad complained in a private diplomatic note that U.S. intelligence was bad and that civilians were the primary casualties.

Officials would not comment on whether Obama has reissued a covert action “finding,” signed by President George W. Bush last summer, that authorized ground raids into Pakistan by military Special Operations units working with the CIA. There has been no known ground operation since September, however, and the advisability of such raids is a point of disagreement between Petraeus — who considers any tactical gain on the ground to be not worth the strategic risk of a massive popular backlash in Pakistan — and the U.S. Special Operations Command.

Meanwhile, the approach of the warm weather “fighting season” in Afghanistan imposes its own decision deadlines. “I worry a great deal about how much time we have,” Mullen said. Additional U.S. and NATO efforts this spring may be able to hold the line against new Taliban advancement, but “if you’re just staying flat,” he said, “the situation is getting worse.”

 
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Obama’s NSC Will Get New Power
Directive Expands Makeup and Role Of Security Body

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 8, 2009; A01

President Obama plans to order a sweeping overhaul of the National Security Council, expanding its membership and increasing its authority to set strategy across a wide spectrum of international and domestic issues.

The result will be a “dramatically different” NSC from that of the Bush administration or any of its predecessors since the forum was established after World War II to advise the president on diplomatic and military matters, according to national security adviser James L. Jones, who described the changes in an interview. “The world that we live in has changed so dramatically in this decade that organizations that were created to meet a certain set of criteria no longer are terribly useful,” he said.

Jones, a retired Marine general, made it clear that he will run the process and be the primary conduit of national security advice to Obama, eliminating the “back channels” that at times in the Bush administration allowed Cabinet secretaries and the vice president’s office to unilaterally influence and make policy out of view of the others.

“We’re not always going to agree on everything,” Jones said, and “so it’s my job to make sure that minority opinion is represented” to the president. “But if at the end of the day he turns to me and says, ‘Well, what do you think, Jones?,’ I’m going to tell him what I think.”

The new structure, to be outlined in a presidential directive and a detailed implementation document by Jones, will expand the NSC’s reach far beyond the range of traditional foreign policy issues and turn it into a much more elastic body, with Cabinet and departmental seats at the table — historically occupied only by the secretaries of defense and state — determined on an issue-by-issue basis. Jones said the directive will probably be completed this week.

“The whole concept of what constitutes the membership of the national security community — which, historically has been, let’s face it, the Defense Department, the NSC itself and a little bit of the State Department, to the exclusion perhaps of the Energy Department, Commerce Department and Treasury, all the law enforcement agencies, the Drug Enforcement Administration, all of those things — especially in the moment we’re currently in, has got to embrace a broader membership,” he said.

New NSC directorates will deal with such department-spanning 21st-century issues as cybersecurity, energy, climate change, nation-building and infrastructure. Many of the functions of the Homeland Security Council, established as a separate White House entity by President Bush after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, may be subsumed into the expanded NSC, although it is still undetermined whether elements of the HSC will remain as a separate body within the White House.

Over the next 50 days, John O. Brennan, a CIA veteran who serves as presidential adviser for counterterrorism and homeland security and is Jones’s deputy, will review options for the homeland council, including its responsibility for preparing for and responding to natural and terrorism-related domestic disasters. In a separate interview, Brennan described his task as a “systems engineering challenge” to avoid overlap with the new NSC while ensuring that “homeland security matters, broadly defined, are going to get the attention they need from the White House.”

Organizational maps within the government will be redrawn to ensure that all departments and agencies take the same regional approach to the world, Jones said. The State Department, for example, considers Afghanistan, Pakistan and India together as South Asia, while the Pentagon draws a line at the Pakistan-India border, with the former under the Central Command and the latter part of the Pacific Command. Israel is part of the military’s European Command, but the rest of the Middle East falls under Central Command; the State Department combines Israel and the Arab countries surrounding it in its Near East Bureau.

“We are going to reflect in the NSC all the regions of the world along some map line we can all agree on,” Jones said.

The national security process, he said, will also be “transparent to its clients” inside the administration, with meeting agendas and outcomes made available to “the whole community” in real time. Each department will appoint someone to monitor the NSC process, enabling senior officials across the government to be ready to jump into issues without steep learning curves.

Directorates inside Jones’s NSC staff will oversee implementation of decisions. “It doesn’t mean that we micromanage or supervise,” he said. “But you have to make sure, . . . particularly if it’s a presidential decision, that the president is kept abreast of how things are going. That it doesn’t just fall off the end of the table and disappear into outer space.”

Most modern chief executives have issued an early directive outlining a structure for making national security decisions. Although the 1947 National Security Act created the NSC and listed its membership — including the president, the vice president, and the secretaries of state and defense — each president has redefined it to fit his own needs and style. In recent administrations, the CIA director, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and at times the Treasury secretary have regularly attended principals meetings. At the same time, the role and power of the president’s national security adviser, and the size of his staff, have grown larger or smaller depending on the president’s wishes.

But initial presidential intentions have often been waylaid by personalities and events. George W. Bush criticized Bill Clinton’s NSC style as rambling and indecisive. Over the next eight years, however — as first-term Bush adviser Condoleezza Rice was outmaneuvered by Vice President Richard B. Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and as Bush’s second term became mired in an unpopular war and a failing economy — decision-making quickly became more reactive than strategic, and deliberations were opaque to all but a small inner circle.

The Obama administration — with powerful figures such as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates — appears crowded at the top of the national security pyramid and heavy with military officials, including Jones himself and retired Navy Adm. Dennis C. Blair as director of national intelligence. Special envoys to trouble spots — former diplomat Richard C. Holbrooke to Afghanistan and Pakistan, and former senator George J. Mitchell to the Middle East — have been given broad presidential authority.

Although Jones said he strongly supports increased resources for the State Department, which is increasingly dwarfed by the size and expanding missions of the Defense Department, he has long been an outspoken proponent of a “pro-active military” in noncombat regions. He has advocated military collaboration with the oil and gas industry and with nongovernmental organizations abroad.

But Jones said he sees an administration filled with colleagues rather than competitors. Since Jan. 20, “I’ve had more meetings with the secretary of state and the secretary of defense than I’ve had in my entire lifetime,” said Jones, who served as Marine Corps commandant, NATO military chief and, under Bush, a special Middle East envoy.

During a midafternoon interview last Thursday, Jones said he had already spoken face to face with Gates and had four telephone conversations with him that day. He has set up a standing Wednesday morning meeting with Gates and Clinton together in his office.

“I believe in collegiality . . . in sounding out people and getting them to participate,” Jones said. “I notice the president is very good at that.” But he made clear he plans to apply military-like discipline to the NSC. “The most important thing is that you are in fact the coordinator and you’re the guy around which the meetings occur. When we chair a principals meeting, I’m the chairman.” One of the first of many internal Bush administration clashes occurred when Cheney proposed that he, rather than Rice, chair NSC meetings.

In his initial conversations with Obama before taking the job, Jones confirmed, he insisted on being “in charge” and having open and final access to the president on all national security matters. “We engaged in about an hour-long discussion about what I was already thinking about the NSC; it happened, I think, to mesh pretty well with what his instincts were. He was clear about the role of the national security adviser,” Jones said of Obama.

The NSC will take on all national security matters that are strategic in nature and “of such importance that the president of the United States would care” about them, he said. Action groups from various departments and agencies will be formed around specific issues for as long as it takes to resolve them. “Some of these things will be very short-term. When the problem goes away, the group goes away.” Others will be ongoing. “An Afghan strategic review, that’s going to take a while,” Jones said. “The policy that is generated from that review, and the implementation, is going to take a while.”

Some principals will be regulars at the NSC “just by force of issues,” he said, and “you can’t just designate the whole government as being there.” But everyone should be kept aware of “what’s going on” and given an opportunity to say, ‘Wait a minute, I’ve got something to say here.’ “

 

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U.S. Skeptical About Pakistan’s Restrictions on Nuclear Scientist

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 9, 2009; A18

Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, who was released Friday from five years of house arrest for selling nuclear secrets, faces a new set of restrictions on his movement and contacts, according to Pakistani officials.

Under an agreement reached among Khan’s lawyers, the judge who ordered him released and the government, officials said, the Pakistani Interior Ministry will limit and monitor Khan’s telephone calls, visitors and activities. The ministry will also prohibit his travel outside the country.

U.S. officials, who last week sharply objected to Khan’s release, expressed skepticism yesterday about the new arrangement, which they said had been reported to them by the Pakistani government.

“We’re very concerned,” a U.S. official said yesterday. Pakistan has “given us some initial commitments but we’re going to be following [the situation] very closely. The important thing is that they know we are still very serious about this individual.”

Asked yesterday about Khan, Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi said that the government had decided not to appeal the court ruling on Khan’s release, but had “taken all measures” to ensure that he would be unable to resume the spread of nuclear secrets or technology. “We have broken the network and we will not let that happen again,” he said. “We simply cannot afford that.”

Qureshi, who spoke at an international security conference in Munich, did not elaborate on the “measures” taken, and the government made no public mention in Pakistan of any new restrictions.

Khan, 72, is revered in Pakistan as the father of the country’s nuclear weapons program. Although never charged, he has admitted selling nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea. His secret network collapsed in 2003, after more than a decade of investigation by the CIA and other agencies.

Then-Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, confronted with evidence of his guilt, persuaded Khan to make a public confession but then publicly pardoned the scientist and refused to allow U.S or international officials to question him.

The house arrest, imposed for the past five years by Pakistan’s Defense Ministry, was a compromise that collapsed last week when a judge ordered Khan released. Surrounded by Pakistani news media on the front lawn of his Islamabad home Friday, Khan claimed complete vindication.

The case has long been a political football in Pakistan, with opposition parties and elements of the judiciary citing Khan’s detention as evidence of President Asif Ali Zardari’s obeisance to the United States.

“The proof is in the pudding,” said the U.S. official, who added that Washington would be watching carefully to determine whether the new Interior Ministry restrictions were real.

 

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Pakistan Wants More From U.S.
During Envoy’s Visit, Islamabad Presses for Aid, Cooperation

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 11, 2009; A12

Inside the warm welcome and promises of a “new beginning” that Pakistan extended U.S. special envoy Richard C. Holbrooke yesterday was a warning that Pakistan expects more from the United States in return for its cooperation against al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

Statements issued by Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani after meeting with the envoy, who is in Islamabad on the first stop of a regional tour, emphasized the need to “expedite” a new, multi-billion dollar U.S. aid package, and “the importance of enhanced cooperation in defense and intelligence sharing.”

Holbrooke said only that he was there “to listen and learn the ground realities of this critically important country.”

The visit is the first step in what the Obama administration sees as a complex and delicate effort to stabilize Pakistan’s civilian democracy even as it strengthens the Pakistani military and brings it more in synch with U.S. counterterrorism goals in the region, including the war effort in Afghanistan. Although his writ does not officially extend beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan, Holbrooke will also visit India as the administration tries to improve Pakistan-India relations and allay the tension between the two nuclear powers.

The administration is formulating a more regional strategy it hopes will arrest the deterioration in the seven-year Afghan war and allow it to move more aggressively against al-Qaeda. But while administration officials said the strategy will acknowledge Pakistan’s crucial role, they said that developing a new relationship with Islamabad is likely to be a years-long process, with intertwined challenges making it time-consuming and costly.

“Not having patience makes all the sense in the world in terms of the Afghanistan threat,” Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Michael Mullen said in a recent interview. But in Pakistan, he said, “there is not a quick answer,” and any new U.S. strategy will have to “recognize the tension” between near- and far-term objectives.

The next step, U.S. and Pakistani officials said, will be a visit to the United States later this month by Pakistani army Chief of Staff Gen. Ashfaq Kiyani. In late 2007, Kiyani replaced Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who also served as Pakistan’s president under the military government that took over in a 1999 coup that led to congressional restrictions on U.S.-Pakistani military contacts.

Since last year, senior U.S. military officials have assiduously courted Kiyani as the key to making up lost ground in the relationship and persuading the Pakistani military to turn its attention away from the perceived threat from India and toward extremist sanctuaries on the Afghan border.

Pakistan’s weak civilian government is doing its own balancing act. The Pakistani public is increasingly anti-American and Zardari’s political opponents charge that he is too close to Washington. Increased U.S. military and civil assistance, the government has argued, will improve Pakistan’s counterterrorism performance, make it easier to cooperate with U.S. goals, and ensure the survival of the civilian government.

Kiyani will press existing requests for increased military aid in several categories, including Cobra attack helicopters, night vision equipment, and equipment to jam extremist radio transmissions, intercept satellite telephone communications, and improve communication among Pakistani military units in the extremist-ridden mountains of the western Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA. Pakistan would also like at least to “be in the room” when targeting decisions for CIA aerial drone attacks in the FATA are made, a senior Pakistani official said.

Pakistan also wants more funding stability and recognition of the leading role it plays in U.S. counterterrorism campaigns. “We are a front-ranked state,” the official said. “We want government money to come in the same way it is given to Afghanistan and Iraq.” Congressional funding for war and development costs in those countries has been approved outside of normal budgetary channels through supplemental appropriations subject to fewer restrictions.

Mullen cited a number of positive steps Kiyani has taken, including: replacing the former head of Pakistan’s intelligence service, who was widely mistrusted by the CIA, with a close army ally; appointing a new chief for the Frontier Corps, the local force in the FATA; and doubling Frontier Corps salaries.

Although more than half of the 10,000 additional troops Pakistan sent to the FATA over the past year were redeployed to the Indian border after Pakistani-based terrorists attacked the Indian city of Mumbai last fall, new Pakistani deployments to the west are planned, another senior U.S. military official said.

In a news conference following a meeting with Holbrooke, Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi said Pakistan and the United States would have “to sit together to understand the implications” of a planned doubling of U.S. troops in Afghanistan this year, and what he said would have to be an accompanying “civilian surge” in Pakistan.

“By civilian surge,” he said, “I mean greater focus on socioeconomic development and greater political engagement with the reconcilable elements” among extremists. Qureshi said the United States and Pakistan had agreed to form teams to examine all elements of their bilateral relationship, including “what went wrong in the last seven years.”

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is reformulating a massive U.S. development assistance program for Pakistan, including at least $1.5 billion annually for the next five years, most of it focused on development aid for the FATA and surrounding regions. The bill is likely to have strong support from President Obama, Vice President Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who co-sponsored it in the Senate last year before it died after committee passage.

Committee chairman Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass) said the amount of aid may be increased in legislation he said was likely to be completed “in a matter of days.” The committee, he said, is still trying to determine the relationship between military and non-military aid packages “and how does one leverage the other.”

The legislation will include benchmarks allowing Congress to judge Pakistani military and civil performance. “We have no problems with greater transparence and accountability,” the Pakistani official said. “But the funding cannot stop.”

Staff writer Joby Warrick and special correspondent Shaiq Hussain in Islamabad contributed to this report.

 
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U.S. Envoy Indicates Flexibility With Russia on Missile Defense

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, February 14, 2009; A08

A more cooperative relationship with Russia that helps reduce the nuclear threat from Iran would be “one of the factors” influencing the Obama administration’s decision on when and whether to install a missile defense system in eastern Europe, a senior U.S. diplomat said this week.

“The United States is quite open to the possibility of new forms of cooperation” on a defense shield, and is “interested in a thorough discussion of the whole range of security issues with Russia,” Undersecretary of State William Burns said on a visit to Moscow.

“If through strong diplomacy with Russia and our other partners we can reduce or eliminate that threat, it obviously shapes the way at which we look at missile defense,” Burns said.

His comments followed an offer last week by Vice President Biden to push a “reset button” on relations with Russia following a lengthy period of contention over missile defense and a range of other issues. In an interview with the Russian Interfax news agency at the end of his visit late Thursday, Burns, a former U.S. ambassador to Moscow, said the administration hopes to take advantage of “this moment of opportunity . . . to try to translate those good intentions and that positive rhetoric into practical progress.”

An administration official in Washington called Burns’s remarks, which were posted on the U.S. Embassy Web site in Moscow, “entirely consistent with the way we’ve been talking about missile defense and trying to engage the Russians. If we’re able to work with the Russians to diminish the threat from Iran, we need to consider how to proceed with potential deployment of the systems.”

Russia sharply protested agreements signed by the Bush administration to install missile defense components in Poland and the Czech Republic, charging that the program was a threat to its own security. Obama has said he is reviewing the Bush-initiated defense shield to determine if it is technologically feasible and affordable.

Burns extended the olive branch even further than Biden in the wide-ranging interview. He said President Obama is looking forward to what will be his first meeting with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev at a G-8 summit in London in early April, and that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will meet with her Russian counterpart “in the very near future,” before the London summit.

Among the range of issues on which the United States was interested in cooperating with Russia, Burns mentioned nuclear proliferation, Afghanistan, global economic issues and “ways in which we can structure our relationship in ensuring that we work together more systematically.”

 

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CIA Helped India, Pakistan Share Secrets in Probe of Mumbai Siege

By Joby Warrick and Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, February 16, 2009; A01

In the aftermath of the Mumbai terrorist attacks, the CIA orchestrated back-channel intelligence exchanges between India and Pakistan, allowing the two former enemies to quietly share highly sensitive evidence while the Americans served as neutral arbiters, according to U.S. and foreign government sources familiar with the arrangement.

The exchanges, which began days after the deadly assault in late November, gradually helped the two sides overcome mutual suspicions and paved the way for Islamabad’s announcement last week acknowledging that some of the planning for the attack had occurred on Pakistani soil, the sources said.

The intelligence went well beyond the public revelations about the 10 Mumbai terrorists, and included sophisticated communications intercepts and an array of physical evidence detailing how the gunmen and their supporters planned and executed their three-day killing spree in the Indian port city. Indian and Pakistani intelligence agencies separately shared their findings with the CIA, which relayed the details while also vetting the intelligence and filling in blanks with gleanings from its networks, the sources said. The U.S. role was described in interviews with Pakistani officials and confirmed by U.S. sources with detailed knowledge of the arrangement. The arrangement is ongoing, and it is unknown whether it will continue after the Mumbai case is settled.

Officials from both countries said the unparalleled cooperation was a factor in Pakistan’s decision to bring criminal charges against nine Pakistanis accused of involvement in the attack, a move that appeared to signal a thawing of tensions on the Indian subcontinent after weeks of rhetorical warfare.

“India shared evidence bilaterally, but that’s not what cinched it,” said a senior Pakistani official familiar with the exchanges. “It was the details, shared between intelligence agencies, with the CIA serving mainly as a bridge.” The FBI also participated in the vetting process, he said.

A U.S. government official with detailed knowledge of the sharing arrangement said the effort ultimately enabled the Pakistani side to “deal as forthrightly as possible with the fallout from Mumbai,” he said. U.S. and Pakistani officials who described the arrangement agreed to do so on the condition of anonymity, citing diplomatic and legal sensitivities. Indian officials declined to comment for this story.

“Intelligence has been a good bridge,” the U.S. official said. “Everyone on the American side went into this with their eyes open, aware of the history, the complexities, the tensions. But at least the two countries are talking, not shooting.”

The U.S. effort to foster cooperation was begun under the Bush administration and given new emphasis by an Obama White House that fears that a renewed India-Pakistan conflict could undermine progress in Afghanistan — and possibly lead to nuclear war. The new administration sees Pakistan as central to its evolving Afghan war strategy, and also recognizes that it cannot “do Pakistan without doing India,” as Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, put it in a recent interview.

“In an ideal world, the challenge associated with Mumbai — handled well, led well — would lead to the two working together,” he said.

There is little public support for rapprochement, and domestic politics in both countries often dictate hostility rather than cooperation.

Mullen said he hoped the countries could restore some of the goodwill lost in the Mumbai case.

Despite public and political criticism, the two governments had taken “significant steps” in the months preceding Mumbai to diminish the tensions between them over the long-standing Kashmir territorial dispute. But after Nov. 26, “a lot was put aside [and] suspended.”

The Mumbai attack was staged by 10 heavily armed terrorists who rampaged through the city for three days, killing more than 170 people and wounding more than 300. Nine of the terrorists were killed, but the lone survivor confessed that the assault had been planned in Pakistan by Lashkar-i-Taiba, a group that seeks independence for Indian-controlled Kashmir. India has asserted that elements of Pakistan’s government or intelligence services provided logistical support for the attack, an accusation that Islamabad flatly denies.

In recent days, Pakistan has moved aggressively against Lashkar-i-Taiba and allied groups, and has signaled its intention to work more closely with India. A Pakistani government official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, insisted that Islamabad’s commitment was genuine.

“Any Pakistanis who are shown to have been involved will be treated as the criminals they are,” he said. He predicted that the two governments would cooperate to an unprecedented degree in upcoming prosecutions and trials, which he said will occur separately in the two countries with participation from both sides. He described Pakistan’s response as decisive and “proof that we will not tolerate” groups that support terrorism.

Such policies pose clear risks for the embattled government of President Asif Ali Zardari, who faces a domestic backlash for cracking down on groups that Pakistan helped establish years ago as part of its anti-India strategy. Zardari also has come under fire for tolerating occasional U.S. missile strikes against suspected terrorists inside Pakistan’s autonomous tribal region near the Afghan border. A strike Saturday reportedly killed 27, most of them foreign fighters.

“This is a dangerous path for him,” said Shuja Nawaz, director of the South Asia Center of the Atlantic Council of the United States. A sustained clampdown would require a sustained commitment by the civilian government and the army, and far more arrests than the 124 already announced, Nawaz said.

India, meanwhile, has been eager for the United States to pressure Pakistan on terrorism in general and Mumbai in particular. But it has long rejected any attempt to interfere in Kashmir.

Early this month, a senior Indian official recalled that Barack Obama had suggested a linkage during the presidential campaign, saying in a foreign policy essay that he would “encourage dialogue” on Kashmir so that Pakistan could pay more attention to terrorists on its border with Afghanistan.

If Obama “does have any such views,” Indian National Security Adviser M.K. Narayanan told Indian television, “then he is barking up the wrong tree.” Narayanan said India had made clear to Washington when Richard C. Holbrooke was appointed the administration’s special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan that India-Pakistan relations should not be part of his portfolio.

Holbrooke, who plans a stop in New Delhi at the end of his tour of the region, appeared to agree in a report last month by the New York-based Asia Society, where he was chairman before his appointment. The report called for Obama to continue the “de-hyphenation” of U.S. foreign policy toward India and Pakistan practiced by the Bush administration.

Concerned about China and searching for a positive new foreign policy headline at a low point in the Iraq war, Bush policymakers tried to elevate India to the status of major U.S. partner. The centerpiece of the policy was a bilateral civil nuclear agreement signed by Bush last year but still awaiting final action by Obama.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, asked last week about the agreement, responded vaguely that “I don’t have the specifics of where we are on this particular day with regard to implementation, but it is certainly something that we want to see happen, and nothing more beyond that.”

 
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More Troops Headed to Afghanistan
Obama Boosting U.S. Force by Nearly 50% to Address ‘Deteriorating Situation’

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 18, 2009; A01

President Obama has ordered the first combat deployments of his presidency, saying yesterday that he had authorized an additional 17,000 U.S. troops “to stabilize a deteriorating situation” in Afghanistan.

The new deployments, to begin in May, will increase the U.S. force in Afghanistan by nearly 50 percent, bringing it to 55,000 by mid-summer, along with 32,000 non-U.S. NATO troops. In a statement issued by the White House, Obama said that “urgent attention and swift action” were required because “the Taliban is resurgent in Afghanistan, and al-Qaeda . . . threatens America from its safe-haven along the Pakistani border.”

Taliban attacks and U.S. and NATO casualties last year, including 155 U.S. deaths, reached the highest levels of the seven-year war. War-related civilian Afghan deaths — most blamed on Taliban insurgents but many on U.S. airstrikes — increased nearly 40 percent to 2,118 in 2008, according to a U.N. report released yesterday. Extremist groups have expanded their hold on western Pakistan and launched terrorist attacks in major Pakistani cities.

Months ago, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, Gen. David D. McKiernan, requested more than 30,000 additional troops this year, and an initial 6,000 arrived last month under orders signed by the Bush administration. But a senior White House official said that no other deployment decisions will be made until the Obama administration completes a strategic review of the Afghan war in late March.

Obama has said he wants to limit U.S. objectives in Afghanistan, and administration officials have spoken of a more “regional” counterinsurgency strategy, including expanded assistance to Pakistan and diplomatic outreach to India, Iran, Russia and other neighboring countries.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai was informed of the new deployments in a telephone call from Obama yesterday. Karzai, whose government Obama criticized last week as “detached” from what is going on in Afghanistan, publicly complained over the weekend that he had not yet heard from the new U.S. president.

The first additional U.S. contingent, the 8,000-strong 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade from Camp LeJeune, N.C., will arrive in late May. The Army’s 5th Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division from Fort Lewis, Wash., will arrive with 4,000 troops in late July, along with an additional 5,000 troops in still-undesignated smaller units.

The new troops will move into southern and eastern Afghanistan for combat expected to increase with the arrival of warmer weather, in addition to providing additional training for the Afghan army and security for national elections scheduled for August. Obama also plans to ask NATO to supply additional resources this year.

The administration sought yesterday to couch the orders as what the senior official called “the beginning of the drawdown of troops in Iraq,” where both units had been scheduled to deploy. While that is technically true, White House decisions on Afghanistan and Iraq are proceeding on parallel but not necessarily overlapping tracks.

During the presidential campaign, Obama pledged to drawn down the U.S. presence in Iraq — currently at 146,000 troops — at a rate of one brigade a month for what he said would be a complete combat withdrawal within 16 months, with an unspecified “residual force” remaining.

During his first week in office, he instructed military planners to present options for withdrawal under various conditions on the ground and at various speeds. Those options have not yet been presented to the White House, although the senior official said yesterday that Obama expects to receive them and make a decision on a timeline “in the near future.”

The situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan has been discussed in separate presidential meetings with top national security and military officials who are contributing to the strategic review. In the meantime, however, commanders warned that deployment decisions would have to be made now if troops were to arrive in Afghanistan in time to meet urgent security needs.

Obama recognizes that “there is a grave situation in certain parts of the country,” the White House official said. “We know . . . how negative it would be if the elections didn’t come off. It’s also well acknowledged that the effort in Afghanistan suffered [under Bush] from being under-resourced, with a lack of attention and strategic direction.”

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said yesterday that the deployment decision “does not prejudge the outcome of the review process but . . . allows us instead to meet an urgent need for more troops.”

Beginning his first week in office, Obama held a series of meetings on the subject with civilian and military officials, including McKiernan; Gen. David H. Petraeus, head of U.S. Central Command; Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates; and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

On Feb. 10, Gates recommended that Obama authorize the 17,000-troop deployment. The recommendation was discussed at a National Security Council meeting Friday, and Obama informed Gates of his decision Monday. Gates signed the deployment orders for the 12,000 troops of the two brigades yesterday, with designation of the additional 5,000 still to come.

“This administration has a different way of doing business,” said a Pentagon official who also served under Bush. “The Obama White House wants to go about this in a much more methodical way than its predecessor, with decisions about troop levels to be evaluated by more than the military chain of command.”

Obama’s deployment decision came without clear majority support from the public. While most Americans consider winning in Afghanistan essential to victory in the broader fight against terrorism, in the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll, barely more than a third, 34 percent, said the number of U.S. military forces in that country should be increased. About as many would opt for a decrease (29 percent) or no change at all (32 percent).

In Afghanistan, public opinion is even more unwelcoming. In a recent ABC-BBC-ARD poll of Afghans, just 18 percent said the United States and NATO should increase their troop levels, and more than twice that number, 44 percent, wanted fewer outside forces.

Yesterday’s U.N. report, along with a separate report on Afghanistan by the independent Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC), noted that rising civilian casualties are the source of deep resentment among the Afghan public. Although the United Nations said that “anti-government elements” were responsible for 55 percent of last year’s civilian deaths, CIVIC reported that “the international coalition in Afghanistan is losing public support, one fallen civilian at a time.”

The CIVIC report noted that the United States and NATO governments all pay compensation to some civilian victims of their actions — although there is no coordinated system, and many families receive nothing — and recommended that such efforts be improved and expanded.

Polling director Jon Cohen contributed to this report.

 
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Pakistani Accord Appears Stalled
Government, Extremists Make No Move To Formalize Their Pact on Islamic Law

By Pamela Constable, Karen DeYoung and Haq Nawaz Khan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, February 19, 2009; A09

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Feb. 18 — A controversial, closely watched peace agreement designed to end Taliban violence in the scenic Swat Valley hung in limbo Wednesday amid criticism in Pakistan and rising concern in Washington.

Neither the Pakistani government nor the Islamist extremists were willing to formalize the accord, announced by Pakistani officials Monday. The proposed pact marks an unprecedented and risky attempt to disarm about 2,000 Taliban fighters, who have invaded and terrorized a once-bucolic area of 1.5 million people in northwestern Pakistan, by offering to install a strict system of Islamic law in the surrounding district.

Supporters see the offer as an urgently needed bid for peace and a potential model for other areas ravaged by Pakistan’s growing Islamist militancy, which controls areas 80 miles from the capital of this nuclear-armed Muslim nation. Critics say it would make too many concessions to ruthless extremist forces and provide them with a launching pad to drive deeper into the settled areas of Pakistan from their safe haven in the rough tribal districts along the border with Afghanistan.

“This is a bad idea that sends a very wrong signal,” said Rifaat Hussain, a professor of defense and security studies at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, the capital. “It legitimizes the existence of violent armed groups and allows them to draw the wrong lesson: that if you are powerful enough to challenge the writ of the state, it will cave in and appease you.”

In Washington, where the Obama administration has been conspicuously silent about the agreement, officials said privately that they considered it a major setback for U.S. goals in the region. “It’s a surrender disguised as a truce,” one official said, describing it as an admission that the government lacks the capacity to defend the crucial western part of the country.

Several officials said the proposed pact was evidence that the Pakistani government has no coherent plan for combating militancy. One noted that Pakistan had offered no comprehensive package of economic aid or outlined a long-term structure for the region. “This is signing a deal and calling it done,” this official said. “What comes next?”

In December, Pakistani troops attempting to roust the Taliban from the Swat Valley were defeated by the far smaller extremist force. The military “met resistance that they and we didn’t expect,” a U.S. official said, citing sophisticated Taliban tactics, command and communications and participation by extremists from Chechnya and Afghanistan. The military, he said, “won some tactical victories; they didn’t win their strategic objectives.”

Monday’s proposed peace accord took the Obama administration by surprise, U.S. officials said. They received no advance notice of the deal and remained uncertain of what was happening on the ground. “We’re not even sure if it’s a real deal,” a senior U.S. military official said.

The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of diplomatic and military sensitivities, said they hoped for clarification by next week, when senior Pakistani and Afghan delegations are due to arrive in Washington for high-level talks that are part of the administration’s strategic review of the Afghan war effort and its policy toward Pakistan and the region.

The delegations will be headed by the foreign ministers of the two countries and will meet with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and special envoy Richard C. Holbrooke, among others.

Holbrooke, who set up the visits during a tour of the region last week, said Wednesday that the administration expected two things from the meetings. “One, a sense of both countries that they are participating actively in shaping our strategy toward their countries, that it’s not just a unilateral dictat. Secondly, ” he said, “to stimulate them to do similar strategic thinking.”

Afghan President Hamid Karzai, whose government faces an identical challenge from Taliban insurgents controlling large portions of the Afghan countryside, plans to travel to Islamabad on Thursday for talks with Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and other officials.

In the Swat Valley, a second day of confusion and uncertainty about the pact passed Wednesday, with rising hopes and a jubilant peace march among the local population, followed by the brutal killing of a Pakistani TV journalist, Musa Khan Khel. He was apparently seized and shot by fighters while covering the peace march, despite a Taliban offer of a 10-day cease-fire while elements of the accord are implemented.

Thousands of people turned out Wednesday morning in Swat to cheer and follow a delegation of religious and political leaders who entered the Taliban-controlled territory to persuade the extremists to sign the pact and put down their weapons. The Taliban has ravaged the once-pristine, affluent area for months, burning schools, killing police and ordering women to remain home. More than half the populace is believed to have fled their homes.

Leaders of Pakistan’s secular Awami National Party, which orchestrated the deal, insist that it will bring a better justice system to the region and that they can reason with the Taliban because they are from the same ethnic Pashtun tribe. But other prominent Pakistanis assert that civilian leaders underestimate the danger posed by the insurgents.

“All segments of society and the general public need to be educated that Talibanization is a real and serious threat to the country, and that if nothing is done to stop its advance, then the anarchy will spread,” Asad Munir, a retired brigadier and former intelligence chief in North-West Frontier Province, wrote in the News newspaper Tuesday. Pakistan’s intelligence service once helped create Islamist militias to fight other wars.

In Swat, where followers of a nonviolent Islamist leader named Sufi Mohammad have been demanding the enforcement of Islamic law for years, the announcement of the agreement Monday was greeted by relief and hope. Shops reopened and people flooded the streets after months of hurrying home in fear. Preparations were made to welcome Mohammad, who had offered to come to Swat and persuade the fighters to lay down their arms.

On Wednesday morning, Mohammad’s “caravan of peace” made its way into the valley, and thousands of well-wishers rallied in the central town of Mingaora. Many people seemed nervous and uncertain, however, and black-turbaned Taliban fighters were seen patrolling the outskirts of the city with weapons and walkie-talkies.

“We want peace at any cost,” Gul Bad Shah, 46, a shopkeeper in one town said as the marchers passed. “We are very happy to see the hustle and bustle in the markets after a long time.” A college student named Rehmanullah, 22, said the Taliban movement in Swat “will evaporate once the law is implemented in letter and spirit.”

All day, Mohammad and his delegation moved from town to town, chanting for peace and hearing the cheers of supporters. Senior provincial officials and legislators, who rarely dare to venture into Swat these days, accompanied them. But a negotiating committee from the Taliban met in an undisclosed location and made no public comment.

The government’s position on the deal also remained unclear, creating further anxiety. President Zardari, reportedly under pressure from the West, went a second day without signing the pact or making public the details of the law system. Several leaders in Swat told Geo television that they could co-exist with the Taliban and blamed the government for sabotaging their chance for peace.

But by late afternoon, news that Khan Khel had been slain while covering the march seemed to mock public hopes that the extremists’ word could be trusted. Videos on the evening news showed him interviewing smiling people along the route, interspersed with images of colleagues carrying his corpse.

“He was with us all day on the march, and then suddenly we heard he had been kidnapped and killed and his body dumped on the road,” said Irfan Ashraf, a reporter for Dawn television, speaking from Swat. “He was a journalist to the core, a sweet guy, and now he is no more here with us.”

DeYoung reported from Washington. Khan reported from Mingaora. Special correspondent Shaiq Hussain in Islamabad contributed to this report.

 
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Correction to This Article
This article gave an incorrect figure for U.S. legislative proposals of non- military aid to Pakistan. The correct figure is $1.5 billion annually for five years, not $1.5 million.
Drone Attacks Inside Pakistan Will Continue, CIA Chief Says
Panetta Calls Strikes ‘Successful’ at Disrupting Insurgents

By Karen DeYoung and Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, February 26, 2009; A10

CIA Director Leon Panetta said yesterday that U.S. aerial attacks against al-Qaeda and other extremist strongholds inside Pakistan would continue, despite concerns about a popular Pakistani backlash.

“Nothing has changed our efforts to go after terrorists, and nothing will change those efforts,” Panetta said in response to questions about CIA missile attacks, launched from unmanned Predator aircraft. Although he refused to discuss details of the attacks — and the CIA will not confirm publicly that it is behind the strikes — Panetta said that the efforts begun under President George W. Bush to destabilize al-Qaeda and destroy its leadership “have been successful.”

“I don’t think we can stop just at the effort to try to disrupt them. I think it has to be a continuing effort, because they aren’t going to stop,” Panetta said in his first news briefing since taking the job. The CIA has launched about three dozen Predator strikes in Pakistan since late last summer, two of them during the Obama administration.

Panetta’s comments came as senior Pakistani and Afghan leaders held lengthy talks here with each other and with their U.S. counterparts. Obama administration officials said that the unprecedented consultations were as important as any substantive agreements that may emerge from them.

The talks, quickly arranged during the first overseas trip of special U.S. envoy Richard C. Holbrooke this month, include the foreign and defense ministers of both countries, along with Afghanistan’s interior minister and Pakistan’s intelligence chief. The Pakistani army chief of staff is also here on a separate visit to his U.S. military counterparts.

In addition to bilateral sessions, the Afghan and Pakistani delegations met jointly yesterday with the National Security Council and attended a dinner hosted by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. They will hold another trilateral session today.

“We have two goals,” a senior administration official said. One is to receive their input for the Obama administration’s ongoing strategy review on Afghanistan and Pakistan, he said. “But it’s also to hear commitments — the Pakistanis on taking on terrorists themselves, and the Afghans on cleaning up their government.”

“There are not too many brand-new ideas,” the official said. “But our expectations of what they have to do are not just based on what we want them to do, but what they say they’re going to do. It gives us a different basis for going back to them in the future.”

Relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan have long been marked by mutual suspicion. Pakistan believes Afghanistan is too close to India, Islamabad’s historical adversary to the east, while Afghanistan suspects that Pakistan has continued its traditional support for the Taliban. In addition to urging a stronger counterterrorism effort from Islamabad and less governmental corruption in Kabul, the administration seeks better cooperation between the two to stop cross-border infiltration by Pakistan-based extremists fighting U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan.

The difference between the Obama and Bush administrations, Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi said, is that “the present administration is willing to listen. They are very frank. They’re saying, ‘We do not have a magic formula. . . . Let Pakistan, let the U.S., let Afghanistan — let’s all stick together and find a solution,” Qureshi told CNN.

The meetings have not been without conflict. Panetta, who has participated in the sessions, said he had voiced concerns about Pakistan’s recently announced truce with local Taliban leaders in that country’s Swat Valley region, and noted that similar agreements with militant groups in the past had allowed al-Qaeda to strengthen its base. “They assured me that this is not the same as past agreements,” Panetta said. “I remain skeptical.”

In a series of interviews yesterday, Qureshi said that Pakistan objected to the Predator strikes and that he has asked the United States to supply his country with drones to carry out its own missile attacks against extremists. Pakistan has also requested other sophisticated weaponry, including Cobra attack helicopters, communications and night-vision equipment. Although the drones are unlikely — and both U.S. and Pakistani officials say they are privately in agreement on continuation of the CIA strikes — the administration and Congress are likely to approve more military assistance along with a multibillion-dollar aid package.

Legislation introduced in the Senate last year by Vice President Biden, and soon to be sponsored by his successor as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), and Sen. Richard G. Lugar (Ind.), ranking Republican, calls for about $1.5 million a year in economic and development assistance for Pakistan over the next five years.

A report released yesterday by the Atlantic Council said that at least double that amount is needed from the United States and the international community if Pakistan is to be brought back “from the brink.” Pakistan, it said, “is on a rapid trajectory toward becoming a failing or failed state.”

In a report last year, under the leadership of James L. Jones, who is now the national security adviser, the Atlantic Council warned that the West was “not winning in Afghanistan.” Those words were repeated yesterday by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in his first major foreign policy speech since losing the presidential election to Obama in November. “Let us not shy from the truth,” McCain said in an address to the American Enterprise Institute, “but let us not be paralyzed by it either.”

McCain chastised “some [who] suggest it is time to scale back our ambitions in Afghanistan — to give up on nation-building and instead focus narrowly on our counterterrorism objectives, by simply mounting operations aimed at killing or capturing terrorist leaders and destroying their networks.”

Obama, while calling for improved governance in Afghanistan, has publicly suggested that the United States adopt the “very limited goal” of ensuring that “Afghanistan cannot be used as a base for launching terrorist attacks” against the United States.

Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

 

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National Security Structure Is Set
Under Obama, Council Will Grow

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, February 27, 2009; A03

President Obama’s first presidential directive, outlining the organization of his national security structure, adds the attorney general, the secretaries of energy and homeland security, and the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations to the formal National Security Council.

The four-page directive sketches wide input to NSC meetings, providing for “regular” inclusion of senior trade, economic and science advisers.

The document puts national security adviser James L. Jones firmly in charge of setting the NSC agenda and communicating Obama’s decisions to the others. Jones will determine when to call White House meetings of policymaking “principals” and will police implementation of assigned tasks.

All post-World War II presidents, with the exception of Ronald Reagan in his first term, have begun their administrations with similar documents. Although most have contracted or enlarged the list of senior officials included in the formal structure — usually by one or two officials either way — Obama’s is by far the most expansive, in keeping with his definition of national security to include economic, climate, energy and cyber-threats.

Few presidents have followed the letter or often even the spirit of their national security directives under the pressure of crises and internal power struggles. President George W. Bush’s six-page directive set out an orderly policymaking system that was thwarted early on by the relative weakness of his initial national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, the supremacy of Vice President Richard B. Cheney among his advisers, and clashes between Donald H. Rumsfeld and Colin L. Powell, his first secretaries of defense and state. The upheaval of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks created a more narrow structure.

Obama also has divided his national security orders into two categories: presidential policy directives, and presidential study directives, designed to initiate and direct policy reviews. A copy of Policy Directive 1, the NSC directive signed on Feb. 13, was obtained by The Washington Post.

Study Directive 1, dated Feb. 23 and made available this week by Secrecy News, orders an interagency review of the White House homeland security and counterterrorism structure. Headed by counterterrorism adviser John O. Brennan, the review will recommend whether to retain the separate the Homeland Security Council established under the Bush administration, or to incorporate some or all of its functions within the NSC.

Obama’s security directive also establishes an elaborate system of interagency policy committees to coordinate analysis and reviews of issues “for consideration by the more senior committees . . . and ensure timely responses to decisions made by the President.”

Under the 1947 National Security Act that created it, the National Security Council included only the president, vice president, and secretaries of state and defense. The CIA director and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have been added by most presidents.

Obama’s directive includes all of these and new members from Energy and Homeland Security, as well as the attorney general. He follows in the footsteps of President Bill Clinton by including his U.N. ambassador — although Bush did not — and mandating that his White House counsel, Gregory B. Craig, “shall be invited to attend every NSC meeting,” along with Tom Donilon, his deputy national security adviser.

International economic, homeland security, counterterrorism, science and technology advisers are to become “regular members” when their issues are “on the agenda of the NSC,” the directive says.

 
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Obama Sets Timetable for Iraq
Withdrawal Is Part of Broader Regional Strategy, President Says

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, February 28, 2009; A01

President Obama yesterday fulfilled a campaign promise by setting a date for the withdrawal of U.S. combat forces from Iraq, declaring that while the country they will leave behind will not be perfect, the United States will have reached its “achievable goals” and must move on.

By the August 2010 deadline he set, American troops will have been at war for nearly 7 1/2 years in Iraq, a duration surpassed only by that of the Vietnam War, at more than eight years, and the ongoing Afghanistan conflict, which began in 2001.

Just a day after he transformed the domestic political landscape with a breathtakingly bold budget plan, Obama chose a far more cautious approach to his administration’s most momentous foreign policy decision thus far, adopting a timetable that positioned him squarely on the side of military commanders wary of pulling out too many troops, too soon.

“There are some Americans who want to stay in Iraq longer,” Obama acknowledged in a speech to Marines at Camp Lejeune, N.C., “and some who want to leave faster.”

Those who had sought a speedier withdrawal included many in the Democratic Party and, at one time, Obama himself, who pledged during the campaign that combat troops would depart Iraq at the rate of one brigade a month and would all be home within 16 months of his inauguration.

Not only will the timetable be longer and the pace less even — with major reductions unlikely to begin until after Iraqi elections in December, according to senior military officials — but about a third of the current U.S. force of 142,000 will remain in Iraq until the end of 2011. Their new mission, Obama said, will be to train and advise Iraqi security forces, protect diplomats and civilians working in Iraq, and continue the counterterrorism fight against al-Qaeda and other insurgent groups.

The final decision rested on what senior administration officials called a military calculus of “risk management” and “mitigation,” as well as on the judgment that it would be better to be known as the president who got out of Iraq, even if it took too long, than the one who was in such a rush that he imperiled a safe and orderly exit. With so many other bold changes in motion, not every risk was seen as worth taking.

In his first speech as commander in chief to assembled U.S. troops on their home turf, Obama provided his most comprehensive description to date of what he called “a new era of American leadership” in “the broader Middle East,” including the pursuit of “principled and sustained engagement with all the nations in the region, and that will include Iran and Syria.”

He and his national security team see military withdrawal from Iraq, and Baghdad’s establishment as a sovereign regional player, as part of a broad and interconnected regional strategy being rolled out even as it is formulated. Special envoy George J. Mitchell is about to begin his second visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories, and Obama has promised direct presidential involvement in forging a lasting peace.

Last week, Obama announced the deployment of 17,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan. His budget pledged significantly more money for Pakistan, and the administration has launched a high-level review to formulate one overarching strategy toward both countries.

In Washington last week, special envoy Richard C. Holbrooke orchestrated the most sustained and substantive dialogue between top officials of the two often-estranged countries that they have ever had with each other or with the United States.

Under Obama, the CIA is serving as hopeful midwife to a new intelligence relationship between Pakistan and India, designed to end their distraction with each other and refocus Islamabad’s attention on the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

Another new envoy, Dennis Ross, has been named to explore ways to begin a dialogue with Tehran, even as Obama yesterday pledged to “use all elements of American power to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.”

But full realization of those expansive plans depends on cleaning up the Iraq problem that has drained U.S. troops, treasure and attention for so many years.

In describing the administration’s goals for Iraq, Obama touched all the bases, saying the United States will work with the United Nations to support upcoming elections, help improve local government and “serve as an honest broker in pursuit of fair and durable agreements on issues that have divided Iraq’s leaders.” U.S. troops will continue training Iraq’s security forces. Assistance will be rendered to millions of Iraqis displaced and exiled by the war.

“What we will not do,” he said, “is let the pursuit of the perfect stand in the way of achievable goals. We cannot rid Iraq of all who oppose America or sympathize with our adversaries. We cannot police Iraq’s streets until they are completely safe, nor stay until Iraq’s union is perfected. We cannot sustain indefinitely a commitment that has put a strain on our military and will cost the American people nearly a trillion dollars.”

Despite its historical and political resonance, the date for ending the U.S. combat mission was perhaps destined to fall in the relatively narrow window between Obama’s initial 16-month pledge and the December U.S.-Iraqi agreement that the last U.S. soldier would leave by Dec. 31, 2011. In selecting August 2010 — 19 months after his inauguration — Obama followed the recommendations of his senior military advisers.

A senior military official said yesterday that troops remaining after 2010, while not officially designated as “combat brigades,” would remain “in harm’s way,” embedded with Iraqi combat forces and in U.S. counterterrorism missions. The official said that U.S. commanders hope to maintain a presence in Kirkuk, the northern, oil-rich city claimed by both Iraqi Arabs and Kurds and whose status has yet to be decided, and in Mosul, where al-Qaeda forces remain active.

Under the plan, Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the U.S. commander in Iraq, will assess the overall situation every six months to allow Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to provide guidance to Obama. Although some U.S. units will leave Iraq between now and early next year, the bulk of the combat force is expected to remain, under Odierno’s recommendation, at least until national elections take place in December and their outcome is decided.

The military official recalled that the last time Iraqis went to the polls to elect a national government, in December 2005, the nation’s fractious political parties did not settle on a prime minister until the following April — a timeframe that also marked the beginning of an explosion of violence that led to the buildup of U.S. forces in early 2007.

“This is not a question of how fast you can withdraw,” the official said, but rather of how large a force is required “to do what you said you were going to do. . . . Ray Odierno is not a wild-eyed optimist. He went through the dark years. He is not going to write a report to the president of the United States that is all sun and roses.”

 
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Obama Team Seeks to Redefine Russia Ties
U.S. Aiming at Strategic Goals With Proposals on Arms Reduction, Missile Defense, Economic Support

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 4, 2009; A11

The Obama administration is preparing a wide-ranging set of initiatives designed to put shaky relations between the United States and Russia on a more solid footing, including resumption of strategic arms control talks as early as this spring, reactivation of the moribund NATO-Russia Council and possible U.S. reconsideration of plans to deploy a missile defense system in Eastern Europe, senior administration officials said.

The proposals, which President Obama plans to present to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev when they meet for the first time next month, will also offer enhanced economic cooperation.

The administration hopes that the offer of a comprehensive new strategic relationship will encourage Russia to be more helpful in achieving U.S. goals in Afghanistan and Iran. At the same time, the White House is eager to give Medvedev a chance to put his stamp on the U.S.-Russia relationship, dominated for the past decade by former president and current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

But as Obama’s national security team rushes to put the package together, officials remain unsure of the reception it will get. An exchange of public comments and private letters between Obama and Medvedev over the past five weeks has left the administration optimistic but uncertain about whether the Russian president is willing or able to deliver.

So far, both governments have spoken in generalities, each prodding the other to move toward substance. Medvedev said yesterday that a discussion of missile defense contained in a lengthy letter Obama sent him last month was “a disappointment” and that he was looking for more “specific proposals” when they sit down together at an April 2 economic summit in London.

Obama yesterday disputed news reports that his letter — a response to a missive from Medvedev — offered to abandon plans to deploy missile defense components near the Russian border in Poland and the Czech Republic in exchange for Moscow’s help in stopping the Iranian nuclear program. He said he had merely repeated a previous, public observation that removal of the Iranian threat would eliminate the need to defend against it.

His message to Medvedev, Obama said, addressed “a whole range of issues, from nuclear proliferation to how we are going to deal with a set of common security concerns along the Afghan border, and terrorism. . . . My hope is that we can have a constructive relationship where, based on common respect and mutual interest, we can move forward.”

Despite the attention paid to missile defense, the most urgent task before the administration is putting in place a negotiating team to begin work on a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty to replace the 1991 agreement with Moscow that expires at the end of this year. Although Obama has voiced strong support for additional sharp reductions, he has not specified any numbers. The Russians are likely to favor a relatively slow additional drawdown, but both sides are anxious to begin the process.

Medvedev also touched on other issues in comments made during a visit this week to Spain. “As to our cooperation on Afghanistan,” he said, “we are interested in stepping it up rather than stopping it. . . . It is my understanding that this issue is high on the foreign policy agenda of the new U.S. president. We share this approach.” Yesterday, the Russian government informed the U.S. Embassy in Moscow that the first shipment of American supplies to Afghanistan crossing Russian territory under a new agreement had reached the border of Kazakhstan.

Some experts say the administration may find itself disappointed by the intractability of the issues involved, while others are critical of what they see as Obama’s over-willingness to make concessions. Moscow “will use our desire to bring the temperature down” to its advantage, on issues such as Russia’s desire for hegemony over the former Soviet republics on its borders, said Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Russia’s response to the overall U.S. package, officials and nongovernmental experts said, will depend on several intangibles. First is the government’s calculation on whether rising public unrest over deteriorating economic conditions in Russia — including riots in the western city of Vladivostok last month that resulted in the government dispatch of special forces units — is better countered by blaming the West, or seeking its political and economic support. Putin and other senior Russian officials have drawn parallels between growing domestic opposition in Russia and Western-backed “revolutions” that led to the installation of pro-Western governments in Georgia and Ukraine.

The second consideration is the still-unclear power relationship between Putin and Medvedev, his hand-picked successor. The Obama administration thinks its chances of long-term rapprochement are better with Medvedev, viewed as a member of Russia’s new, post-communist generation, than with Putin, a former party member and KGB agent.

“It depends on their domestic political assessment,” said Klaus Scharioth, Germany’s ambassador to the United States. “I think none of us really knows.” He said Russia gave “some positive signals” last month at a security conference in Munich, where Vice President Biden said the Obama administration planned to “push the reset button” on its relations with Moscow, which had sharply deteriorated last year. “But there was no statement saying, ‘Yes, we will,’ or ‘No, we won’t,’ ” Scharioth said of Russia’s response. “Just some positive noises.”

The NATO-Russia Council, a proven avenue of cooperation between the East and the West whose operations were suspended in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Georgia last summer, is likely to be revived at a meeting of NATO foreign ministers this week. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will then hold her first meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

NATO and the Obama administration are hopeful that an active council will lessen Russia’s insistence on maintaining a regional “sphere of influence.” NATO’s major European players, including Germany, are anxious to move beyond the upheavals of last year resulting from the Georgia conflict and Russia’s protests over consideration of alliance membership for Georgia and Ukraine. They would like to make clear to Moscow that both countries are years away from NATO admission, a point the Obama administration, unlike its predecessor in the White House, quietly concedes.

The administration is also open to the possibility of considering missile defense within the council — a move that would probably be met with protests from Poland and the Czech Republic, both NATO members that view their selection as sites for system components as insurance against Russian influence.

Although looking forward yesterday to dealing with Russia on “common security concerns,” Obama was quick to note that any changes in U.S. missile defense plans would “in no way . . . diminish” American security support for Poland and the Czech Republic.

Staff writer Philip P. Pan in Moscow contributed to this report.

 
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Afghan Envoy Assails Western Allies as Halfhearted, Defeatist

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 12, 2009; A14

Afghanistan’s ambassador to the United States attacked Western governments fighting in and providing billions in aid to his country, saying that those who claim the international community is not winning the war against extremists there “should know that they never fully tried.”

“We never asked to be the 51st state,” Ambassador Said T. Jawad said, a reference to a suggestion last month by Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) that the United States should concentrate on “realistic goals” and its “original mission” of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan.

“To suggest that Afghans do not deserve peace, pluralism and human rights is wrong and racist,” Jawad said.

He said negotiations with the Taliban should be conducted by the Afghan government and should be withheld until it was in a “position of strength.” President Obama, in a New York Times interview last week, echoed numerous administration and U.S. military officials in suggesting that the United States seek negotiations with “reconcilable” Taliban elements.

Obama also said the United States and NATO were not winning the war in Afghanistan and spoke favorably of U.S. military plans to bolster Afghan tribal forces to participate in the war against extremists — a policy seen as successful in Iraq and being tried in pilot programs in Afghanistan. Jawad said yesterday that such plans “will not work” and would undermine the country’s stability.

Jawad’s remarks, in an address last night at Harvard University, were a forceful public expression of issues privately raised here last month with the Obama administration by a top-level national security delegation from President Hamid Karzai’s government.

Jawad accused those aiding Afghanistan of “total negligence” in building the Afghan police force and judicial system, “under-investment” in the national army, and providing “meager resources” devoted to helping the Afghan government deliver services and protect its citizens.

U.S. military expenditures in Afghanistan have totaled more than $173 billion since 2001, with an additional $35 billion spent in reconstruction aid. U.S. military deaths total more than 660, with 431 NATO troops killed.

Many of Jawad’s complaints echo assessments made by the Obama administration, which lays much of the blame for the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan on what it sees as its predecessor’s obsession with Iraq at Afghanistan’s expense. But the ambassador’s tone and rejection of any Afghan responsibility for the situation reflected an escalating tension between the Obama and Karzai governments as Obama’s national security team forges a new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Karzai “doesn’t seem to be ready to take any responsibility for the problems,” an administration official said.

Obama officials have made little secret of their concern that Karzai — installed as Afghanistan’s interim leader in 2001 and elected president in 2004, both times with U.S. backing — is incapable of providing the leadership needed to extend government control and services. They believe corruption is rife within his government, although they have not accused Karzai himself.

U.S. hopes of replacing him in elections this year have foundered on the lack of a viable opposition candidate. Meanwhile, the near-term future of Afghanistan’s government hangs in the balance as Karzai’s term expires in May, while the independent electoral commission has scheduled the ballot for August, a delay that administration officials hope will allow other possibilities to emerge.

Jawad’s speech came the day the administration announced its nomination of Army Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry as U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan. The selection of an active-duty officer — Eikenberry is deputy chairman of NATO’s military committee and the former commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan — appeared to be an exception to the administration’s stated goal of increasing the civilian and diplomatic profile of the military-heavy U.S. regional presence.

Afghanistan appreciates Obama’s deployment of 17,000 more American troops to the country, Jawad said. But he couched his praise in terms of casualty levels, saying increased U.S. ground operations that “will allow for surgical operations instead of relying on aerial bombings that lead to unacceptable levels of civilian deaths.”

“We welcome President Obama’s plan to unveil a new comprehensive U.S. strategy by the end of this month,” Jawad said, adding that Afghanistan was “grateful for being officially consulted” in the Washington talks last month.

Jawad also praised Pakistan’s civilian government as “sincere in fighting extremism and terrorism,” but said it “lacks the capacity to wage this fight.” The Pakistani military, “on the other hand, has the capacities to do so but not the commitment” and considers Islamist extremists “an ally” in Pakistan’s conflict with India, he said.

Although Afghanistan “welcomed President Obama’s remarks about talking with the Taliban,” Jawad said, the government would handle the negotiations. “In fact,” he said, “the process of talking with individual Taliban commanders has been going on for the past six years, and about 600 mid-level Taliban commanders have joined the peace process.”

He outlined three major Taliban groups — the “ideological” forces affiliated with Pakistan-based al-Qaeda and regional terrorism networks; the mid-level commanders who “can be reconciled through dialogue, buying off, bribery and coercion”; and the “paycheck Taliban” made up of “unemployed, uneducated and brainwashed” young foot soldiers who need “employment and education, not too much dialogue.”

Citing “defeatist and reductionist media statements and policy recommendations in the U.S. and European capitals,” Jawad noted that “NATO and U.S. forces are saying that we are not winning in Afghanistan, implying that the Taliban are not losing.

“If they are not losing,” he said, “why should they talk to us?”

 
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Clarification to This Article
This article said that a directive from Gen. Ray Odierno, the U.S. commander in Iraq, ordered all military units to cut the number of U.S. contractors by 5 percent each quarter. The Jan. 31 directive referred both to U.S. contractors and to those from foreign countries other than Iraq.
U.S. Moves to Replace Contractors in Iraq
Blackwater Losing Security Role; Other Jobs Being Converted to Public Sector

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 17, 2009; A07

The decision not to renew Blackwater Worldwide’s security contract in Iraq when it expires in early May has left the State Department scrambling to fill a protection gap for U.S. diplomats and civilian officials there.

Two other U.S. security contractors with a far smaller presence in Iraq — DynCorp International and Triple Canopy — have been asked to replace the ousted company, according to State Department and company officials. To meet time, training and security-clearance pressures, officials said, one or both of the firms are likely to undertake the task by rehiring some personnel now working for Blackwater.

The Iraqi government refused to issue Blackwater a license to perform security services after a 2007 incident in which company guards on a diplomatic protection mission shot and killed 17 civilians in Baghdad. U.S. prosecutors have indicted five of the guards on charges of manslaughter. Blackwater (which recently changed its name to Xe) still has State Department contracts for air transport in Iraq and security for U.S. diplomats in Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, fallout from the shootings — including a new U.S.-Iraq status-of-forces agreement that places contractors under Iraqi legal jurisdiction for the first time — has led both the Pentagon and the State Department to create new categories of “full-time, temporary” federal jobs to handle some tasks currently done by contractors.

The Blackwater incident helped fuel a wider debate on the overall cost and conduct of contractors. President Obama last week ordered a government-wide review of federal contracting procedures, saying that his administration “will stop outsourcing services that should be performed by the government.”

Nowhere has that outsourcing been larger or more contentious than in Iraq, where contractors have long outnumbered the U.S. military presence, even at its peak of 160,000 troops.

The days of massive U.S. reconstruction contracts in Iraq are over, with little to show for tens of billions of dollars spent, according to government auditors. While the military continues to outsource much of its supply chain, contracts for services such as transport and food will diminish as combat forces begin to draw down.

In a commandwide directive issued Jan. 31, Gen. Ray Odierno, the U.S. commander in Iraq, ordered all military units to start cutting U.S. contractors at a target rate of 5 percent each quarter and to hire more Iraqis to do their jobs. “As we transition more responsibility and control to the government of Iraq, it’s time to make this change,” he added.

However, some contracted activities, from training Iraqi forces to strategic communications, are likely to increase as troops withdraw, and certain U.S. contractors are seen as irreplaceable. “Human terrain” experts — civilian social scientists and linguists hired to help the military better understand Iraq and Iraqis — have been told that they must accept newly created government jobs, at potentially lower salaries, or leave. The highly touted human terrain program, which fields 20 teams of five to nine specialists in Iraq and six in Afghanistan, was begun by Odierno’s predecessor, Gen. David H. Petraeus.

Program head Steve Fondacaro said that when hazardous-duty, locality and other government pay benefits are added, total compensation will be competitive with the private sector at $147,000 to $236,000 a year. He estimated that at least 60 of about 100 currently contracted specialists would accept the year-long government jobs, with annual renewal options for up to four years, even though some have complained anonymously on blogs that the new arrangement constitutes an unacceptable pay cut.

Avoiding legal problems in Iraq, Fondacaro said, was more of an impetus for the move than cost-cutting. Although no U.S. contractor has been arrested under the new status-of-forces agreement, which became effective in January, he said the risks were too great in a country whose legal system is “a shambles.” He is also putting the same program in place for human terrain specialists in Afghanistan.

“I had to take action to protect our people and protect our mission,” Fondacaro said.

Fondacaro pointed to the Rockville-based contractor BAE Systems, which he said has informed employees that it would no longer accept liability for any legal problems they might have in Iraq and suggested they stay inside U.S. military installations at all times. “So here I am, paying exorbitant contractor wages for people whose company is not going to provide them any legal defense, and is recommending they don’t go outside” to make contact with Iraqis, he said. “Which is mission failure.”

By making the specialists into government employees, Fondacaro said, “this all goes away in one fell swoop. . . . They are protected under U.S. law and have the same rights and privileges as U.S. troops,” including immunity from Iraqi taxes and arrest.

Lucy Fitch, BAE Systems senior vice president for communications, said the “government has told us they wish to convert contractor positions in Iraq and Afghanistan to government positions” when the company’s contract expires in August, but she called Fondacaro’s description of company instructions “inaccurate.”

BAE employees were advised during December and January to stay inside U.S. military installations “until we could figure out . . . the legal implications and personal risk” under the new status-of-forces agreement, Fitch said. In a clarification last month, she said, employees were told that the company would “assist them in finding in-country legal representation” if they were prosecuted or sued for any reason in Iraq. If problems were related to “actions properly undertaken for BAE Systems,” she added, “we will provide them counsel at the company’s expense.”

The State Department has also created new temporary government jobs in Iraq, but for a different purpose. Following the 2007 Blackwater shooting, then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice ordered that a federal security agent ride along on each of the contractor-protected convoys that carry U.S. diplomats, aid and other civilians — including provincial reconstruction team members based in Baghdad neighborhoods and around the country — outside their official compounds.

State’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security not only handles security for embassies and other civilian outposts around the globe but also protects foreign officials visiting the United States. With only 1,600 highly trained special agents in the bureau, the Iraq mandate has severely stretched the service. “You’d need the entire [Diplomatic Security] workforce just to do Iraq,” a senior State Department official said, “leaving nothing for Afghanistan, nothing for anywhere else in the world.”

In postings on government job sites last month, State solicited “Protective Security Specialists,” a new job category offering lower pay — $52,221 with guaranteed employment for 13 months, renewable for up to five years — and requiring less training than full-fledged agents.

Riding along on convoys and making sure that security contractors follow the rules, the official said, does not require “all that training and experience. . . . We had a lot of applicants.”

Listed qualifications, seemingly designed for former security contractors, included “at least three years of specialized experience conducting overseas protective security operations within the last five years. Experience in Iraq, Afghanistan or Israel is particularly desirable.”

 
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Russia Signaling Interest in Deal on Iran, Analysts Say
Still, Obama Effort Faces Obstacles

By Philip P. Pan and Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, March 18, 2009; A10

As President Obama seeks to recast relations with Russia and persuade it to help contain Iran’s nuclear ambitions, he must win over leaders who are deeply suspicious of U.S. intentions and who have long been reluctant to damage what they consider a strategic partnership with Iran. But the Kremlin has indicated it is willing to explore a deal with Washington, and analysts say it may be more open to new sanctions against Iran than expected.

The Obama administration has all but decided not to make a new push for sanctions until after it tries engaging Iran diplomatically and improving ties with Moscow, according to administration officials and Russia analysts. If the overture to Iran fails, as many expect, administration officials believe they will be able to make a stronger case for sanctions to Russian leaders they hope will be more invested in a new relationship with the United States.

In a meeting last week with a bipartisan commission studying U.S. policy toward Russia, President Dmitry Medvedev expressed alarm in “very graphic language” over Iran’s successful test launch of a satellite last month, linking it to Tehran’s nuclear program, said Dmitri Simes, director of the commission.

“Medvedev said it demonstrated how far-reaching Iran’s nuclear ambitions are, and that he was very concerned,” said Simes, who is also president of the Nixon Center in Washington. “He felt it was a clear challenge to both Russian and American interests and said he would like both countries to work on this challenge together.”

In another sign of Russian concern, Iranian Defense Minister Mostafa Mohammad Najar traveled to Moscow last month for talks that were expected to focus on delivery of Russia’s advanced S-300 antiaircraft missile system, which Iran says it has signed a contract to buy. But Russian media reported that the Kremlin informed him it was putting the deal on hold. Both the United States and Israel have objected to the sale.

In remarks during Najar’s visit, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov denied that Russia was toughening its stand toward Iran, but called for intensification of international efforts to settle the nuclear standoff. He appeared to accept the Obama administration’s argument that progress on the Iranian issue could help remove another major problem in U.S.-Russia relations — American plans to build a missile defense shield in Eastern Europe.

Simes said Russian leaders appear to be signaling their interest in striking a strategic bargain with Washington. “They want to send a message to the Obama administration that they’re prepared to have a new relationship, but it will have to be quid pro quo,” he said. “If they have to sacrifice their special relationship with Iran, they want to see a change in their relationship with the United States.”

Russia has backed three rounds of sanctions against Iran in the U.N. Security Council but blocked a fourth set of sanctions last summer as relations between Washington and Moscow soured after the Russian-Georgian war in August. In the meeting last week, Simes said, Medvedev indicated that Russia was willing to consider “serious sanctions” against Iran but argued that sanctions alone would not be enough and should be accompanied by a new package of incentives for Iran to cooperate.

What Obama is willing to offer to either Russia or Iran is unclear. The administration is conducting separate internal reviews of U.S. policy toward Iran and Russia, and administration officials declined to discuss the strategy on the record while the reviews are ongoing.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has already said Iran will be invited to an international conference on Afghanistan in The Hague on March 31. Other moves under consideration in the policy review include low-level contacts in countries where both the United States and Iran have embassies, further discussions on cooperation in Afghanistan and a proposal for each country to open a representative office in the other’s capital.

Meanwhile, the administration has said it plans to “reset” relations with Russia and quickly engage Moscow in nuclear arms control talks. After meeting in Geneva this month, Clinton and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov agreed to make a priority of negotiating a pact to replace the landmark Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which is set to expire in December. Clinton said she wanted Obama and Medvedev to have a general plan for a new treaty before they meet for the first time at the Group of 20 summit in London on April 2.

Administration officials believe putting the arms control talks at the top of the agenda will reinforce Russia’s self-image as an equal partner that shares the same goals as the United States. At the same time, the administration appears to be playing down high-profile issues that angered Russia during the Bush administration, including the missile defense shield and the push to bring Ukraine and Georgia into NATO. Other moves under discussion include a drive to repeal the Jackson-Vanik amendment, the Cold War-era measure imposing trade sanctions on Russia and other countries because of human rights violations.

But Russian analysts said the administration’s approach faces several hurdles. Russia does not want Iran to build a nuclear weapon, but it sees the problem with less urgency than the United States and believes the prolonged standoff with Tehran gives it leverage over Washington. In addition, analysts said, Russia’s leaders will be wary because previous administrations promised better relations but then ignored Russian concerns on issues such as missile defense and NATO expansion.

Russian leaders may also prefer to continue demonizing the United States to divert public anger as Russia weathers a severe economic crisis, said Georgy Mirsky, a foreign policy scholar at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations in Moscow.

Vladimir Sotnikov, a research fellow at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, said U.S. officials overestimate Russia’s influence on Iran and underestimate the Islamic republic’s strategic value to the Kremlin. Russia sees Iran as an important partner in a volatile neighborhood, and it appreciates, and worries about, Iran’s influence on Muslim populations in southern Russia and in the neighboring countries of the Caucasus and Central Asia, he said.

At the same time, Russia can apply only limited economic pressure on Iran, he said. With less than $3 billion in bilateral trade annually, far behind Japan, China, Germany and Italy, Russia doesn’t make the list of Iran’s top 10 trading partners.

Alexander Pikayev, a top arms control scholar in Moscow, said Russian policy toward Iran will be determined by competing interest groups and political factions. Defense manufacturers and the atomic energy industry oppose tougher sanctions, for example, but the United States could win over the latter by reviving a bilateral pact on civilian nuclear cooperation that was frozen after the Georgian war, he said.

Pikayev said Medvedev may be more likely to support sanctions because a breakthrough in U.S. relations would boost his political stature at home and set him apart from his powerful predecessor, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Putin might resist, but his relationship with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is said to be strained and he surprised Russia’s foreign policy establishment by endorsing earlier U.N. sanctions, Pikayev said.

“The consensus for improved relations with the United States is wider than for any Iran policy,” Pikayev said. “That gives the U.S. some room to maneuver.”

Pan reported from Moscow, and DeYoung reported from Washington.

 
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Civilians to Join Afghan Buildup
‘Surge’ Is Part of Larger U.S. Strategy Studied by White House

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 19, 2009; A04

A civilian “surge” of hundreds of additional U.S. officials in Afghanistan would accompany the already approved increase in U.S. troop levels there under a new Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy being completed at the White House, according to administration officials.

President Obama is expected to make final decisions next week on that strategy, proposed by his top national security advisers and based on recommendations from senior military, diplomatic and intelligence officials and intensive consultations with NATO and United Nations partners.

Officials said the proposed strategy includes a more narrowly focused concentration on security, governance and local development in Afghanistan, with continued emphasis on rule-of-law issues and combating the narcotics trade. U.S. and British troops in the southern part of the country will attempt to oust entrenched Taliban forces, with an influx of reinforcements enabling them to retain control — and help protect enhanced civilian operations — until greatly expanded and sufficiently trained Afghan army and police forces are able to take their place.

In Pakistan, a senior defense official said “the jury is still out” on proposals to increase covert operations and missile strikes against insurgent sanctuaries in that country’s western tribal areas, and to expand them into the southern province of Baluchistan, where the Taliban leadership openly operates in the provincial capital of Quetta. With the Pakistani government teetering and anti-American sentiment rising, “we have to be realistic about how this could all play out,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

“You may feel good about killing more bad guys, but the costs may just be too high,” he said.

More likely in the short term, officials said, are expanded efforts to aid the Pakistani military with training, new equipment and advice to improve its counterinsurgency performance, along with a massive increase of development aid to try to stabilize the country and wean tribal leaders away from insurgent groups. One problem yet to be solved is how to supervise the distribution of aid and reconstruction funds in an environment considered unsafe for U.S. officials to work in most areas.

Some of the proposed new civilian force in Afghanistan — diplomats, specialists from federal departments such as Agriculture and Justice, and hundreds of new “full-time, temporary” hires — would work at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, officials said. Others would be assigned to U.S. provincial reconstruction teams, or PRTs, located primarily in eastern Afghanistan, and to other efforts to build Afghan civilian capacity around the country. Patterned on a program first established in Iraq, the PRTs assist and advise Afghans in economic and local governance development.

The United States currently operates 12 of the 26 PRTs in Afghanistan. But unlike the others, run by NATO partners under civilian control, the U.S. teams are led and dominated by the military: Only a few of the 1,055 U.S. staffers on the teams were civilians, according to a government audit in January. A congressional oversight investigation last year said that “finding qualified individuals with applicable skills and experience poses a significant challenge to staffing.”

The additional 17,000 U.S. troops scheduled for deployment this year — bringing the total to about 55,000 — will increase the combat imbalance between the United States and NATO, and scheduled withdrawals of Canadian and Dutch troops over the next two years will make Afghanistan even more of a U.S.-dominated war.

Obama has pledged to improve the civil-military balance in U.S. operations, and to put more of a civilian face on development and governance efforts. Although the overall civilian deployment plan for Afghanistan awaits Obama’s approval, the State Department has already solicited applications for 51 new positions it expects to fill by July. Up to 300 additional civilians are anticipated under the strategy proposals.

Many are expected to be hired under a provision established by the Bush administration for special employment in Iraq. Unlimited, year-long hires were permitted, with authority to renew them for up to four years. Bush extended the provision to Afghanistan under an executive order he signed Jan. 16.

In addition to increasing its own civilian component, the administration seeks better coordination among the many other governments and international and nongovernmental agencies operating in Afghanistan, often with different rules and objectives. The strategy proposals include a strengthening of the United Nations as a clearinghouse and overall coordinator of nonmilitary efforts, including the appointment of veteran U.S. diplomat Peter W. Galbraith as deputy to Norwegian Kai Eide, the head of the U.N. mission in Afghanistan.

“This is a big deal,” said a senior U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity before the appointment is announced. “The Bush administration undermined and ignored the U.N., and we minimized our influence. But imagine, with all the money we pay and American troops on the line, not to have a senior person” at the top level of the U.N. effort. A U.N. official said Secretary General Ban Ki-moon will announce Galbraith’s appointment in “a matter of days.”

Galbraith served in senior U.S. and U.N. positions in the Balkans, East Timor and other conflict areas. Sharply critical of Bush administration policy in Iraq, he resigned from the U.S. government in 2003 and served as an adviser to Iraq’s Kurdish regional government.

Francis J. Ricciardone, one of the State Department’s most senior Foreign Service officers and a former ambassador to Egypt and the Philippines, is expected to be named “deputy ambassador” to boost the diplomatic heft of the U.S. Embassy in Kabul. Obama last week nominated Lt. Gen. Karl W. Eikenberry, the former U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, as ambassador to Kabul.

Another diplomatic veteran, Timothy M. Carney, has begun work as head of a U.S. team assisting in preparations for national elections in Afghanistan in August. Carney, a former ambassador to Sudan and Haiti, worked on the Iraq reconstruction effort in Baghdad in 2003 but eventually became a critic of that operation. He was named Iraq coordinator for economic transition in 2007 under a vastly reduced U.S. reconstruction effort.

Staff writer Colum Lynch at the United Nations and staff researcher Julie Tate in Washington contributed to this report.

 
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Foreign Service Jobs in Afghanistan to Grow

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 24, 2009; A04

The State Department will significantly expand its presence in regional capitals in western and northern Afghanistan in coming months, part of the Obama administration’s plans for a “surge” in civilians going to the country.

“As part of our expanding efforts in Afghanistan,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in a cable sent Saturday to all Foreign Service officers, “the Department intends to create 14 additional FS positions in Herat and Mazar-e-Sharif.”

The cable called the jobs “priority” assignments and “new opportunities” for diplomats about to bid on new postings for later this year.

President Obama’s senior national security officials have proposed a new overall strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, which he is expected to approve this week. It includes sending hundreds of U.S. civilian officials to Afghanistan, increasing the size of the embassy and its outposts by about 50 percent — to about 900 personnel.

Obama has authorized the deployment of 17,000 additional troops, with most headed to southern Afghanistan, where British, Canadian and U.S. forces are battling a resurgent Taliban.

The proportion of U.S. civilian officials to military forces in the country is small, compared with the ratios for other NATO members with troops in Afghanistan. Each of the U.S.-led provincial reconstruction teams outside Kabul, the capital, includes 50 to 100 military and Defense Department contractors, but none has more than a half-dozen civilian officials, even though the teams are charged with traditionally civilian tasks in fields such as development, agriculture and education.

The U.S. civilian presence in the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif, where NATO troops are under Swedish command, has numbered one or two. The American presence in the western province of Herat, under Italian command, is similarly minuscule.

“We want to stand a little on our own” in “these critical places,” said a senior U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

An initial group of seven officials will be sent to each of the cities, including public diplomacy, security, management and administrative personnel, as well as “reporting” officials. A State Department official said that Clinton had “personally approved” establishing the offices.

Still to be determined is whether the provincial reconstruction team offices will be redesignated, either as consulates, which require congressional approval, or as regional embassy offices.

The new posts, and other expanded civilian operations, will probably require expanded security. Xe, the private security company formerly known as Blackwater, holds the State Department contract for diplomatic security in Afghanistan.

The senior U.S. official said the department does not anticipate in Afghanistan a repetition of the difficulties encountered by the Bush administration in finding volunteers to go to Iraq. In addition to Foreign Service officers, the expanded civilian presence in Afghanistan will include recruits from other government departments and “full-time, temporary” government hires for special development tasks.

 
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In Afghan War, U.S. Dominance Increasing
With More American Troops and Civilians On the Way, NATO Is Likely to Lose Clout

By Karen DeYoung and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, March 26, 2009; A16

After years of often testy cooperation with NATO and resentment over unequal burden-sharing, the United States is taking unabashed ownership of the Afghan war.

President Obama’s decision to deploy an additional 17,000 troops to Afghanistan this year will bring the number of foreign troops there to nearly 90,000, more than two-thirds of them Americans. Although many will technically report to NATO commanders, the U.S. force will increasingly be in charge.

Even as the U.S. military expands its control over the battlefield, the number of American civilian officials will also grow by at least 50 percent — to more than 900 — under the new Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy Obama will announce as early as tomorrow, according to administration officials. American diplomats and development experts plan to spread into relatively peaceful western and northern regions of Afghanistan that until now were left to other NATO governments. New U.S. resources and leadership also will be brought to bear over critical issues such as counter-narcotics efforts and strengthening local government institutions.

U.S. policy in Pakistan, a major component of the new strategy, is largely unilateral. The European Union has an aid and trade relationship with the country, but few European governments outside of Britain have strong involvement there.

In Afghanistan, the administration “will continue to characterize the effort as multinational. There will continue to be thousands of troops and people” from NATO and elsewhere, said a former senior Defense Department official with a lot of experience there. “But the center of gravity is going to shift toward the Americans.”

Obama’s national security team has taken pains to consult with allies as it has put the new strategy together. The Washington announcement, and the presentation Obama will make at an April 3-4 NATO summit in Europe, will emphasize shared threats and common purpose, officials said.

But the increasing U.S. dominance is both by default and by design. The United States has far more troops, equipment and money — and more willingness to use them — than the rest of NATO. Even before Obama took office, his holdover defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, had largely given up pressing the allies for more combat forces, with fewer restrictions on their activities.

Although European governments have been asked to send up to four additional battalions of 800 to 1,000 troops each to boost security for Afghan elections in August, they will be temporary additions. Britain, whose 8,000 combat troops make it the second-largest NATO contributor, is considering whether it can send more after its withdrawal from Iraq this year. Germany, the third largest, has authorized 4,500, although they are restricted from certain combat areas and duties; France fields nearly 3,000 unrestricted troops.

The Netherlands plans to end its 1,700-troop combat mission in Afghanistan next year; Canada will bring its 2,800 troops home in 2011. With the arrival of new forces this year, U.S. troops will number more than 55,000.

“It’s great to have our allies here,” a U.S. commander in Afghanistan said. “But we recognize that when crunchtime comes — and that’s what we’re in right now — we have to be the ones to step up and get it done.”

“Crunchtime” arrived for Obama in a series of military, diplomatic and intelligence assessments warning that no time remains for the niceties of negotiating over who will do what in Afghanistan. Taliban attacks and both U.S. and NATO casualties rose last year to their highest levels of the war, now in its eighth year, and the numbers are expected to further increase this year.

“This is the new reality,” the former Defense Department official said. “We tried the essentially decentralized approach, where every country kind of does its own area and does what it thinks is right. That has essentially fallen down. . . . We want our allies to still be there. We don’t want NATO to fail. But in order for NATO to succeed, the U.S. has got to take the lead.”

Rather than expecting more combat forces, the U.S. administration has asked the allies to tell it what more they can contribute in terms of financing, training for Afghan forces, and civilian experts in every sector, from agriculture to governance — “essentially whatever you can give us to free up an American to do something else,” the former official said.

The results of those entreaties remain to be seen. A NATO trust fund established last year to pay for equipment and transportation for Afghan security forces set a goal of about $1.5 billion; contributions to date total less than $25 million, Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Bantz J. Craddock told the Senate Armed Services Committee this week. Plans to double the size of the Afghan army to 134,000 by 2011 will require an additional 29 NATO training teams. “The U.S. provides them when NATO doesn’t,” Craddock said. American trainers outnumber their NATO counterparts three to one.

Because some NATO members restrict their troops to certain areas of the country, trainers often cannot move with redeployed Afghan forces, leaving U.S. forces to “pick up the responsibility” to transport the Afghans and their equipment from one region to another, Craddock said.

The Americanization of the war is visible in the turbulent south, where the regional NATO command, led by a Dutch general, with Dutch, British, Danish and U.S. troops, faces the primary Taliban threat. Most of the additional U.S. troops will deploy there, and dozens of C-130 transport aircraft land at the Kandahar air field every day with pallets of supplies. In a dusty parking lot not far from the main runway, more than 200 Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, or MRAPs, await the supplementary U.S. troops. When they arrive, there will be more American personnel at the Kandahar base than at the current largest U.S. facility — at Bagram, north of Kabul, the capital.

A British general will take over the southern command this fall, but U.S. and NATO military officials said they expect the No. 2 commander, U.S. Brig. Gen. John Nicholson, to be the real decision-maker.

“This will become an American headquarters,” one non-U.S. military officer in southern Afghanistan said of Kandahar. “They’re going to have almost three times as many troops as any other NATO member here. And that’s going to mean they’ll be in charge.”

 
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Obama Plans More Funding For Afghan War
4,000 Additional Troops to Deploy

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 27, 2009; A01

President Obama’s new Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy will require significantly higher levels of U.S. funding for both countries, with U.S. military expenses in Afghanistan alone, currently about $2 billion a month, increasing by about 60 percent this year.

“The president has decided he is going to resource this war properly,” said a senior administration official of the plan Obama is set to announce this morning. Along with the 17,000 additional combat troops authorized last month, he said, Obama will send 4,000 more this fall to serve as trainers and advisers to an Afghan army expected to double in size over the next two years.

In outlining his plan after a two-month review that began the week of his inauguration, Obama will describe it as a sharp break with what officials called a directionless and under-resourced conflict inherited from the Bush administration. Far from al-Qaeda being vanquished and the threat to the United States diminished, the official said, “seven and a half years after 9/11, al-Qaeda’s core leadership has moved from Kandahar, in Afghanistan, to a location unknown in Pakistan . . . where we know they’re plotting new attacks” against this country and its allies.

Obama plans to announce a “simple, clear, concise goal — to disrupt, dismantle and eventually destroy al-Qaeda in Pakistan,” said the official, one of three authorized to anonymously discuss the strategy. The president will describe his plan in a White House speech to a group of selected military, diplomatic and development officials and nongovernmental aid groups.

The officials declined to put dollar figures on aspects of the strategy other than the cost of U.S. combat forces in Afghanistan. Initial funding requests for hundreds of additional U.S. civilian officials to be sent there, as well as increased economic and development assistance to both Afghanistan and Pakistan, will come in a 2009 supplemental appropriation that the administration has not yet outlined.

The officials said the administration, working with Congress, will develop new “benchmarks and metrics to measure our performance and that of our allies,” including the Afghan and Pakistani governments. Lawmakers and the administration itself have questioned the ability and will of the Afghan government to fight corruption and the narcotics trade, and have criticized the Pakistani military’s performance against al-Qaeda and other insurgent groups. U.S. intelligence officials believe that elements of Pakistan’s intelligence service continue to actively collaborate with the Taliban.

“We are looking for performance and changes in behavior on the Pakistani side,” an official said, adding that Obama had “made very clear there are no blank checks.”

Obama will deliver the strategy to NATO allies fighting with U.S. forces in Afghanistan at an April 3-4 alliance summit. But officials made clear that the administration — with the United States bearing most of the cost of the conflict — expects to take the lead in both the civilian and military aspects.

The administration plans to expand regional diplomatic outreach to Russia, China, India and the Persian Gulf states, the officials said. Initial overtures to Iran, one said, will begin at an international meeting next week in The Hague attended by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. At the conference, the administration will seek indications that Iran “wants to be a productive player” in Afghanistan, he said.

Iran yesterday accepted an invitation to the gathering, although U.S. officials said the Iranian foreign minister is not likely to attend. The administration has not yet determined whether Clinton, or a lower-level U.S. official, would attend any talks with Iran. Special envoy Richard C. Holbrooke will also be at the conference.

Obama briefed House and Senate leaders on the strategy at the White House yesterday afternoon, while Holbrooke and other officials met with lawmakers on Capitol Hill. The president also telephoned Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his Pakistani counterpart, President Asif Ali Zardari.

“The situation in Afghanistan is increasingly difficult, and time is of the essence,” Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, Obama’s nominee as ambassador to Afghanistan, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at his confirmation hearing yesterday. “There will be no substitute for more resources and sacrifice.”

While additional U.S. combat troops will enhance the ability of the multinational coalition force to hold ground in southern Afghanistan’s Taliban strongholds, increased training and equipping of Afghan security forces is the ultimate exit strategy for the United States and NATO, administration officials said.

Afghanistan’s defense minister has said he plans to double the size of the Afghan army to 134,000 by 2011, but coalition forces until now have been unable to provide trainers and mentors, equipment and transport for the existing force.

The extra 4,000 U.S. troops, expected to deploy in early fall, are to fill that gap. In a sign of the new importance the administration is placing on the mission, a brigade of the Army’s vaunted 82nd Airborne Division is being broken up into 10-to-14-member advisory teams, a Pentagon official said. Until now, the military has relied heavily on inexperienced National Guardsmen to fill out the teams.

“The change couldn’t be more dramatic,” said retired Lt. Col. John A. Nagl, president of the Center for a New American Security, a nonpartisan defense think tank. “The 82nd Airborne Division is the nation’s shock force.”

“We want to move as aggressively and as quickly as possible to build up the Afghan national army,” one administration official said. “It’s much cheaper in the long run to train Afghans to fight” than to send U.S. forces “halfway around the world.”

The total of 21,000 new troops, added to a combat brigade authorized by the Bush administration and deployed in January, will exceed the 30,000 that Gen. David D. McKiernan, the U.S. and NATO commander, had requested for this year in Afghanistan and will bring the total U.S. force to more than 60,000. Non-U.S. NATO troops there currently total about 32,000.

The new strategy will also include efforts to draw low-level Taliban fighters — but not the insurgent leadership — into reconciliation talks with the Afghan government. “We’re not in the business of negotiating with Mullah Omar, and Mullah Omar doesn’t want to negotiate with us,” an official said. “But we think there are fractures” in the Taliban forces, he said. The goal is to “break the momentum of the Taliban in the next fighting season” that begins this spring and begin to exploit the fractures.

The administration’s director of national intelligence, Dennis C. Blair, estimated yesterday that as many as two-thirds of the Taliban groups are motivated by local concerns and might be defeated or pacified through addressing problems such as inadequate water supplies or access to education.

Staff writers Greg Jaffe and Joby Warrick contributed to this report.

 
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Obama Outlines Afghan Strategy
He Pushes Stability and Regional Partnerships

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 28, 2009

President Obama introduced his new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan yesterday with a threat assessment familiar from the Bush administration. “The terrorists who planned and supported the 9/11 attacks,” he said, are continuing to devise plots designed to “kill as many of our people as they possibly can.”

Elements of the Obama plan to “disrupt, dismantle and defeat” al-Qaeda in Pakistan and vanquish its Taliban allies in Afghanistan also struck notes from the past. More U.S. troops, civilian officials and money will be needed, he said. Allies will be asked for additional help, and local forces will be trained to eventually take over the fight. Benchmarks will be set to measure progress.

But Obama sought to separate his approach from what he has described as years of unfocused, failed policy while President George W. Bush directed his attention and U.S. resources toward Iraq. Obama pledged to tighten U.S. focus on Pakistan and build a better “partnership” with its government and military. Beyond stepping up the ground fight against the Taliban, he said, he plans to target far more resources toward a narrower set of Afghan problems: government incompetence, opium cultivation and heroin trafficking, and a poorly equipped and trained army.

Bush spoke regularly of establishing a “flourishing democracy” in Afghanistan. But Obama, flanked during a White House speech by his top national security Cabinet members and advisers, made clear that his primary objective is to create a country stable and strong enough to prevent al-Qaeda from reoccupying Afghan territory.

“To succeed, we and our friends and allies must reverse the Taliban’s gains and promote a more capable and accountable Afghan government. . . . Afghanistan has an elected government, but it is undermined by corruption and has difficulty delivering basic services to its people,” Obama said.

He indicated that the United States expects to continue to carry the bulk of the combat load and will seek other forms of assistance from allies, a departure from the Bush administration’s effort over the past two years to persuade NATO partners to send more combat troops to Afghanistan. “We seek not simply troops,” Obama said, “but rather clearly defined capabilities: supporting the Afghan elections” scheduled for August, “training Afghan security forces, and a greater civilian commitment to the Afghan people.”

Obama said that he would send 4,000 U.S. troops — beyond the additional 17,000 he authorized last month — to work as trainers and advisers to the Afghan army, and hundreds more civilian officials and diplomats to help improve governance and the country’s economy. When currently scheduled deployments are completed late this summer, U.S. troops in Afghanistan will total more than 60,000, twice as many as the non-U.S. NATO contingent.

While Bush rejected any contact with Afghan neighbor Iran, Obama said that he plans to bring together “all who should have a stake in the security of the region,” including Iran, Russia, China and India, as part of a new international contact group he said he will form with the United Nations.

Obama said events in Pakistan are “inextricably linked” to success in Afghanistan. Pakistan, he said, “needs our help in going after al-Qaeda,” whose leadership, along with a network of other insurgent groups, is located in the rugged mountains on the Afghan border. The Islamabad “government’s ability to destroy these safe havens is tied to its own strength and security,” Obama said. He pledged support for a new $7.5 billion aid package, new military equipment, and a constancy and concentration of effort.

But “after years of mixed results, we will not provide a blank check,” he said. “Pakistan must demonstrate its commitment to rooting out al-Qaeda and the violent extremists within its borders. And we will insist that action be taken — one way or the other — when we have intelligence about high-level terrorist targets.”

Although the administration has accelerated missile attacks from unmanned Predator aircraft on insurgent targets in western Pakistan, it is not believed to have resumed ground attacks by military Special Forces and CIA operatives. Bush authorized such missions last summer.

Other elements of Obama’s strategy have been tried before, but administration and intelligence officials think that the sharper U.S. focus on the region will give leaders renewed resolve as well as political cover for going after extremist groups. In the past, Pakistani leaders have been reluctant to support U.S.-backed counterterrorism efforts because of public opposition to what many Pakistanis consider Washington’s war.

Congressional reaction to the announcement was largely positive. “We’ve said for some time that we must refocus our resources on threats like al-Qaeda and the Taliban in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region,” Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) said. House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) issued a statement saying: “I support the strategy the president unveiled today because it reflects the advice of our commanders on the ground.”

Obama said of the additional resources his policy will require: “I do not ask for this support lightly. These are challenging times, and resources are stretched. But the American people must understand that this is a down payment on our own future.”

Neither Obama, nor the senior officials who fanned out yesterday to brief reporters on the plan, provided cost details.

“This strategy is not intended to be a campaign plan or a straitjacket,” said Bruce Riedel, a former CIA official who headed an intense 60-day White House policy review that led to Obama’s announcement. It was designed to be flexible, he said, and criteria outlined by Obama and others — levels of violence and casualties in Afghanistan, Pakistani attacks against insurgents and accounting for U.S. aid — would be used to determine whether course corrections were needed.

Afghanistan, Obama said, “will see no end to violence if insurgents move freely back and forth across the border” with Pakistan. But details on how the movement would be stopped, and how al-Qaeda and other groups would be rousted from their havens in Pakistan, were similarly scarce.

That is “the most daunting” problem, said Richard L. Holbrooke, the administration’s special envoy to the region, because Pakistan is “a sovereign country and there is a red line . . . unambiguous and stated publicly by the Pakistani government over and over again: no foreign troops on our soil.”

“The short answer,” Riedel said, “is that the combination of aggressive military operations on the Afghan side, and working energetically with the Pakistani government to shut down these safe havens, creates the synergy which we hope will then lead to their destruction.”

Holbrooke and Riedel sought to sell the strategy to a small group of influential South Asia scholars and analysts, among them James Dobbins of the Rand Corp. and Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, at a White House meeting yesterday. The attendees reacted favorably to the Afghanistan recommendations, but several were deeply skeptical that the United States would be able to achieve its policy goals in Pakistan, according to one person who attended the meeting.

Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) similarly praised the Afghan elements of the policy and welcomed “the new focus on Pakistan.” But he said in a statement that he is “skeptical that the Pakistanis will secure their border” and warned against tying Afghanistan’s future “too tightly to Pakistan’s governmental decisions.”

Asked about the campaign against Afghan corruption, Holbrooke said, “We’re not going to lay out how we’re going to deal with it. To some extent, we don’t know yet.”

Staff writers Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Ann Scott Tyson and Joby Warrick contributed to this report.

 
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AFGHANISTAN POLICY, PAST AND PRESENT

Saturday, March 28, 2009; A05

President Obama’s announcement yesterday of a new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan marked a distinct shift in how the war in Afghanistan is framed. In contrast to former president George W. Bush, Obama makes no mention of bringing democracy to the war-torn country and does not dwell on the Taliban’s ideology; he even suggests some Taliban members could be reconciled to the Afghan government. Obama is also much tougher on the failures of that government. Below are excerpts from Obama’s remarks yesterday and Bush’s remarks in Kabul, the Afghan capital, a month before he left office, with key phrases highlighted.

– Glenn Kessler
President Obama, March 27
“To succeed, we and our friends and allies must reverse the Taliban’s gains and promote a more capable and accountable Afghan government. . . .

“Afghanistan has an elected government, but it is undermined by corruption and has difficulty delivering basic services to its people. The economy is undercut by a booming narcotics trade that encourages criminality and funds the insurgency. The people of Afghanistan seek the promise of a better future. Yet once again, we have seen the hope of a new day darkened by violence and uncertainty. . . .

“We cannot turn a blind eye to the corruption that causes Afghans to lose faith in their own leaders. Instead, we will seek a new compact with the Afghan government that cracks down on corrupt behavior, and sets clear benchmarks for international assistance so that it is used to provide for the needs of the Afghan people. In a country with extreme poverty that has been at war for decades, there will also be no peace without reconciliation among former enemies. . . .

“There is an uncompromising core of the Taliban. They must be met with force, and they must be defeated. But there are also those who have taken up arms because of coercion, or simply for a price. These Afghans must have the option to choose a different course.”
President Bush, Dec. 15
“In 2001, the Taliban were brutally repressing the people of this country. I remember the images of women being stoned, or people being executed in the soccer stadium because of their beliefs. There was a group of killers that were hiding here and training here and plotting here to kill citizens in my country.

“The interest is to build a flourishing democracy as an alternative to a hateful ideology. . . .

“It’s difficult because extremists refuse to accept the beauty of democracy. They’ve got a different vision, and so therefore they’re willing to kill innocent people to achieve their objectives.

“There has been a lot of progress since 2001 — after all, girls are back in school. I happen to believe that’s important. As a father of twin girls, I couldn’t imagine living in a society where my little girls couldn’t have a chance to realize their God-given potential. . . .

“There’s been good progress made, but there are a lot of tough challenges. One of the great, interesting things that I’ll be watching — since I believe so strongly in democracy — are the upcoming elections. . . . It’s in our interest that Afghanistan’s democracy flourish.”

 
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3 Detained in Afghanistan Can Take Challenges to U.S. Court
Habeas Ruling Is a Blow to Administration

By Del Quentin Wilber and Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, April 3, 2009; A01

A federal judge ruled yesterday that three detainees at a U.S. military prison in Afghanistan may challenge their confinement before a U.S. court, handing the Obama administration one of its first legal defeats on a claim of executive power.

U.S. District Judge John D. Bates rejected the government’s argument, first made by the Bush administration and later adopted by the Obama Justice Department, that it could detain prisoners indefinitely in a “war zone.”

In a 53-page ruling, Bates said that the situation of the three detainees at Bagram air base — who were captured elsewhere and transported to Afghanistan by U.S. forces — is “virtually identical” to that of prisoners held by the military at Guantanamo Bay. A landmark Supreme Court ruling last year accorded habeas corpus rights to detainees at that facility in Cuba.

The ruling is likely to complicate the administration’s ongoing review of detainee policies. President Obama criticized his predecessor’s denial of rights to and treatment of alleged terrorists and during his first week in office ordered Guantanamo Bay to be closed this year. A high-level administration task force is studying what to do with detainees deemed too dangerous to release.

For the moment, the ruling lays to rest some of the concerns voiced by human rights groups that Bagram, a secretive prison that has generally escaped public scrutiny, could become a replacement destination for suspected terrorists. A Justice Department spokesman said no decision has been made on whether to appeal the decision.

The government has more than 600 prisoners at Bagram, and the military is building a new prison there designed to hold more than 1,000, four times the number held in Cuba. The ruling yesterday potentially applies to only a few dozen detainees: Afghan citizens and those captured on the Afghan battlefield are not included.

“The only reason the [prisoners] are in an active theater of war is because [the government] brought them there,” Bates wrote in denying a government motion to dismiss lawsuits brought by the detainees in D.C. federal court. He ruled that the detainees — two Yemenis and a Tunisian — have a right to habeas corpus, a centuries-old legal doctrine that permits prisoners to go to court to challenge their detention.

Human rights groups and attorneys for the detainees hailed the ruling as a major victory in their efforts to ensure judicial oversight of such prisons.

Ramzi Kassem, an attorney for one of the men, said: “This is a great day for American justice. Today, a U.S. federal judge ruled that our government cannot simply kidnap people and hold them beyond the law.”

Legal scholars said the opinion is significant because it challenges the government’s long-held position that it can detain people without cause in active combat zones.

“It raises the possibility that there can be judicial involvement elsewhere in the world,” said Robert Chesney, a professor of national security law at Wake Forest University. “Whether this is a good or bad thing it’s not entirely clear.”

Bates emphasized that his decision to grant habeas rights to those at Bagram is limited and that it applies only to prisoners captured outside Afghanistan. The detainees’ attorneys say the three men were picked up outside the country and later imprisoned at Bagram. They have been held there since at least 2003.

Most other Bagram prisoners were captured in Afghanistan during fighting, and Bates took pains to avoid addressing legal issues linked to them.

“It is one thing to detain those captured on the surrounding battlefield at a place like Bagram,” the judge wrote. “It is quite another thing to apprehend people in foreign countries — far from any Afghan battlefield — and then bring them to a theater of war, where the Constitution arguably may not reach.”

Referring to last year’s Supreme Court ruling on Guantanamo Bay, Bates wrote: “Such rendition resurrects the same specter of limitless executive power the Supreme Court sought to guard against in Boumediene — the concern that the Executive could move detainees physically beyond the reach of the Constitution and detain them indefinitely.”

The government has not disclosed how many Bagram detainees were captured outside Afghanistan, though government sources have put the number at about 20.

Bates deferred ruling on whether a fourth detainee who was part of the habeas petition can also challenge his detention. Lawyers for that prisoner said he was captured in the United Arab Emirates. But he is also an Afghan citizen. The judge said he did not think he had the authority to grant the Afghan the right to habeas corpus because it could cause “friction” with the Afghan government, which leases the base to the United States. He asked lawyers to submit further legal briefings in that case.

The question of what to do with suspected terrorists considered too dangerous to release, or too difficult to try, is a vexing one for the Obama administration. “The truth is, this is a huge challenge,” a senior defense official said.

In an interview with the New York Times last month, Obama said his administration would “have to think about” how to deal with a clearly “dangerous person” captured by U.S. forces. He said any decision would have to match international law and “my very clear edict that we don’t torture, and that we ultimately provide anybody that we’re detaining an opportunity through habeas corpus to answer charges.”

Yet when given an opportunity by Bates to change the Bush administration’s position on the then-pending Bagram case, the Obama Justice Department told the court it would “adhere” to the Bush administration’s contention that the men were not eligible for habeas review.

Staff researcher Julie Tate and staff writer Candace Rondeaux contributed to this report.

 
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Congress Moves to Set Terms for Pakistan Aid
White House Wants to Draft Its Own

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 4, 2009; A04

Just as it did with Iraq, Congress is moving toward imposing benchmarks that the Pakistani government must meet to qualify for billions of dollars of U.S. military assistance. But the proposed restrictions, introduced in House legislation Thursday, have made both the White House and the Pakistani government uneasy.

A bill sponsored by House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Howard L. Berman (D-Calif.) would authorize $3 billion in aid to train and equip the Pakistani military over the next five years, along with $7.5 billion in economic and development assistance. It would also limit the kinds of military equipment Pakistan could receive and the ways in which it could be used, and require regular audits and presidential certification of counterinsurgency progress.

A bill with similar aid amounts is being drafted in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, although Senate discussions with the White House on benchmark provisions are ongoing. Introduction of that legislation is not planned until after the two-week congressional recess.

The administration plans to ask for $500 million for the Pakistani military in a supplemental war-funding proposal next week, and to spend the same amount during each of the next four years. In a speech unveiling his Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy last month, President Obama said the United States must “demonstrate through deeds as well as words a commitment [to Pakistan] that is enduring.” He called on Congress to pass the still-unseen Senate bill.

At the same time, Obama pledged, there would be no “blank check.” Recalling “mixed results” from previous billions in aid, he said that “Pakistan must demonstrate its commitment to rooting out al-Qaeda and the violent extremists within its borders.”

But the White House and U.S. military commanders, citing Pakistani political sensitivities and the need for flexibility, would like to set their own metrics. “I would say we are still in the process of developing sort of strategic-level metrics and benchmarks” for both Pakistan and Afghanistan, Defense Undersecretary Michelle Flournoy told Congress on Thursday. Lawmakers would be consulted, Flournoy said, and the administration hoped “to be able to bring those forward to you in the not-too-distant future.”

Berman said Congress should be in on the ground floor of the benchmark determination. The administration, he said, “talks about wanting to write benchmarks, but I think we need to be involved in doing that.” The White House would make the initial determination on Pakistani performance, he said, but his bill creates “a process, as cumbersome as it is, to review the basis of that determination.”

The bill would set up a program to monitor Pakistani progress in a number of areas, including defeating extremists and protecting human rights, and require Obama to provide specifics underlying his own assessments. It would also prohibit additional U.S. spending on Pakistan’s F-16 jet fighter fleet, which the Bush administration agreed to upgrade. Lawmakers have argued that the planes are part of Pakistan’s defense strategy against neighboring India but that they have little use in counterinsurgency efforts against al-Qaeda and Taliban forces.

Legislation imposing benchmarks for political and military progress in Iraq were largely dismissed by the Bush administration and ultimately disregarded even by Congress as violence increased and then diminished following an increase in U.S. troop numbers.

In a telephone interview yesterday, Berman also questioned the administration’s plan to channel the Pakistan military assistance program — including funding for training and the purchase of U.S. helicopters and a range of counterinsurgency weaponry — through the Pentagon rather than through the traditional route of the State Department’s Foreign Military Financing program.

The direct military control has been used only in situations where U.S. troops are involved in combat, including Iraq and Afghanistan.

“This gets very bureaucratic,” Berman said, “but we think there’s an important oversight there. The military are obviously very involved in what equipment is going through, but at the end of the day it is part of a relationship with Pakistan that should be channeling . . . through the FMF program,” with “our State Department on top of it.”

Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States, Husain Haqqani, said his government welcomed Berman’s initiative “to create a framework for enhanced and long-term partnership. We look forward to engaging members of the U.S. Congress on some of the specific provisions of the proposed bill.

“At the same time,” Haqqani said, “it might be prudent not to restrict security assistance. Because Pakistan’s armed forces will be the spearhead in the actual fight with the terrorists.”

 

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Obama to Host Talks With Afghan, Pakistani Presidents

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 22, 2009

The presidents of Pakistan and Afghanistan will travel to Washington early next month for meetings with President Obama as the administration struggles against daunting hurdles to implement its new strategy for the region.

The visits, on May 6 and 7, will elevate to summit level a trilateral exchange begun by the administration with senior aides from each government in late February. Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and Afghan President Hamid Karzai will meet separately with Obama, and the three will also sit down together, officials said yesterday.

The administration considers cooperation between the two often-estranged governments crucial to the success of its Afghanistan-Pakistan policy. The Pakistani side of their shared border harbors a growing network of extremist groups, including al-Qaeda and the Taliban, providing sanctuary for fighters combating U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan and launching terrorist attacks inside Pakistan itself.

Obama has emphasized that the two countries should be considered in a single strategic framework. But administration officials have made clear that their deepest and most immediate concern is Pakistan, where the stability of the civilian government and its ability to withstand the extremist onslaught is increasingly in doubt. Worries were heightened last week when Zardari approved an agreement authorizing sharia, or Islamic law, in the Swat Valley — just 100 miles west of the capital, Islamabad — after the Pakistani military failed to rout Taliban fighters there.

With no U.S. military forces on the ground in Pakistan, the administration has fashioned a policy based on diplomatic backing for the civilian government, close mentoring and support of the Pakistani military, aerial-drone-launched missile attacks on terrorism targets, and vastly increased economic assistance focused on the western Federally Administered Tribal Areas.

At a Pakistan donors conference in Tokyo on Friday, the administration pledged $1 billion in economic aid in anticipation that Congress will approve a $7.5 billion, five-year package of assistance along with $3 billion in military equipment and training. A bill authorizing the aid has already been introduced in the House, although with conditions that the administration and the Pakistanis find too restrictive.

In what administration officials considered a bright spot at the conference, Iran also pledged $350 million. Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki told the gathering that his country was worried about the deteriorating situation in the region, echoing the Obama administration’s charge that its predecessor failed to develop a coherent strategy for the Afghan war. “We would not have been witnessing the current situation in Pakistan if appropriate policies had been pursued in Afghanistan over the last seven years,” Mottaki said.

The administration is facing the beginning of the spring fighting season against Taliban forces in Afghanistan, as well as presidential elections there in August. Obama has already authorized the deployment of 21,000 additional U.S. troops and hundreds of new diplomatic and other civilian officials.

In an effort to centralize control over uncoordinated U.S. development, counter-narcotics and governance efforts in Afghanistan, the administration also plans to appoint an overseer of all U.S. civilian assistance programs there. The choice for the post, Earl Anthony Wayne, is currently the U.S. ambassador to Argentina and previously served as assistant secretary of state for economic and business affairs.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton this week also ordered her department to review all U.S. Agency for International Development contracts in Afghanistan before they can be signed. Last week, the department opened an investigation of its largest Afghanistan contractor, Falls Church-based DynCorp International, following allegations of drug abuse among its employees.

 
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Reservists Might Be Used in Afghanistan To Fill Civilian Jobs

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, April 23, 2009

Military reservists may be asked to volunteer to fill many of the hundreds of additional U.S. civilian positions in Afghanistan called for in the Obama administration’s strategy for that nation and neighboring Pakistan, officials said yesterday.

Although the State Department is still recruiting agronomists, engineers, accountants and other experts for Afghanistan, “pressure coming from the president for action is making us consider that some of the people might come from the reserves,” one senior administration official said.

In announcing his plan last month, Obama called for a “dramatic” increase in civilian aid and development workers, and the goal is to send several hundred by the end of this fiscal year. The administration’s supplemental funding bill submitted to Congress last week requested $80 million to pay for transferring some State Department employees from other postings, recruiting volunteers from other government agencies such as the Agriculture and Justice departments, and hiring others in newly established “fulltime, temporary” government positions.

But while those efforts are proceeding, “there has been widespread, legitimate concern that AID [the U.S. Agency for International Development] and other civilian agencies would not be able to put enough people there fast enough,” said Richard C. Holbrooke, the administration’s special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton this week discussed the possibility of identifying reservists in civilian fields and inviting them to volunteer for the jobs provided certain conditions could be met.

The State Department, officials said, wants the reservists to dress in civilian clothes and to report up a civilian chain of command reaching to an overall civilian coordinator who would supervise all nonmilitary U.S. programs in Afghanistan. Clinton plans to name Foreign Service officer Earl Anthony Wayne, currently U.S. ambassador to Argentina, to the post.

State has also asked the Pentagon to consider a flexible rotation schedule that would allow for assignments longer than the several months that mark many reserve tours. Officials said that it was not yet clear whether any of the State Department’s requests were possible within military reserve rules and that Gates had assigned a study of the issue.

Afghan Finance Minister Omar Zakhilwal yesterday presented the administration and the World Bank with a 40-page plan requesting at least 700 new civilian experts from the United States and elsewhere to work on government capacity-building. “To assist the United States and other allies in deploying a ‘civilian surge,’ ” Zakhilwal wrote in a cover letter to the plan, his government had compiled its own list of needed “technical advisers,” included in the document.

Although the administration expects to increase overall investment in U.S. “capacity to deploy civilian expertise abroad . . . we’re going to be playing a game of catch-up” until that is accomplished, Michelle Flournoy, undersecretary of defense for policy, said Tuesday in a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. For now, she said, “we are going to be looking to a whole host of stopgap measures.”

 
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Taliban Advance, Pakistan’s Wavering Worry Obama Team

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 24, 2009

The Obama administration reacted with increasing alarm yesterday to ongoing Taliban advances in Pakistan, warning the Pakistani government that failure to take action against the extremists could endanger its partnership with the United States as well as American strategy in neighboring Afghanistan.

“The news over the past several days is very disturbing,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said, adding that the administration “is extremely concerned” and that the issue was taking “a lot” of President Obama’s time.

Obama held a White House meeting on the subject with Vice President Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Richard C. Holbrooke, the administration’s special representative to the region, officials said, and also brought it up in a separate session with congressional leaders. Holbrooke spoke by telephone to Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and with Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi.

Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates publicly expressed frustration with reports that Taliban forces had moved eastward into two new districts of the country this week with no apparent resistance from government forces, bringing them within 60 miles of the Pakistani capital.

While “some” Pakistani leaders recognize the threat, Gates told reporters during a visit to Camp Lejeune, N.C., “it is important that they not only recognize it, but take the appropriate actions to deal with it.” Pakistani stability is central to U.S. efforts in neighboring Afghanistan, Gates said, “and it is also central to our future partnership with the government in Islamabad.”

During a second day of congressional testimony, Clinton tried to calm anxious lawmakers while acknowledging she shares their worries. “We have made these concerns abundantly clear” to Pakistan’s civilian and military leadership, she said.

For the past several months, Zardari’s government has been enmeshed in other domestic political turmoil; his popularity has dropped to the low double digits while ratings for his principal political opponent, former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, rose to 83 percent in recent polls. The administration has urged the resolution of those problems so that more attention can be paid to the rising extremist threat.

It has called on Zardari to come up with his own strategic plan, with integrated economic and military components, to match Obama’s, and is pressing the Pakistani military to refocus the bulk of its attention away from the eastern border with India, its traditional adversary, toward the Taliban and al-Qaeda sanctuaries in the west.

But there is little direct action the administration can take beyond exhorting the Pakistanis and redoubling efforts to quickly implement key elements of the Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy Obama announced late last month.

Holbrooke and Jacob J. “Jack” Lew, deputy secretary of state for management and resources, spent much of yesterday meeting with members of Congress to build support for the plan to quickly and significantly increase development and military assistance to Pakistan, and to reassure them the administration is on top of the fast-moving situation.

The president is also “pressing” his national security team, “making sure we’re updating our policy and strategy to reflect the changing situation,” one senior administration official said.

The administration is recalibrating the schedule drawn up for a May 6 and 7 meeting here among Obama and the presidents of Pakistan and Afghanistan. The trilateral summit, Holbrooke said yesterday, “was conceived in an atmosphere that has now changed significantly, and the focus is increasingly on Pakistan.”

Another administration official acknowledged some concern over Zardari’s planned week-long absence from home for his visit here, given Pakistan’s history of military coups and government overthrows while the head of state was outside the country.

“We inquired twice” whether Zardari was concerned about leaving Pakistan, this official said. “Both times we were told no.” Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani and the army chief of staff, Gen. Ashfaq Kiyani, will remain in Pakistan during Zardari’s trip, the official said.

The Pakistan government has downplayed U.S. concerns that the situation is spinning out of control. “In any counterinsurgency effort, there are changing ground realities,” said Pakistan’s ambassador to Washington, Husain Haqqani. “The important thing is the overall picture, and in Pakistan, as a whole, the government remains firmly in control and Pakistan continues to have the military capability of dealing with the threat.”

When Zardari arrives in Washington early next month, Haqqani said, “he will share Pakistan’s national counterterrorism strategy and will also list the areas where Pakistan looks forward to American support and cooperation in implementing that strategy.” Included in the expected support is U.S. provision of helicopters, night-combat equipment and communications gear with which Pakistan says it can better fight the extremists.

In a visit to Marine units preparing to depart for Afghanistan from Camp Lejeune, Gates emphasized the urgent need for congressional support for a defense budget that shifts billions in spending toward equipment designed for counterinsurgencies. He repeated his call for cuts in weapons systems as part of the Pentagon’s proposed $534 billion 2010 defense budget.

Staff writer Ann Scott Tyson contributed to this report.

 
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Taliban Advance in Pakistan Prompts Shift by U.S.

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 29, 2009

The Pakistani government’s inability to stem Taliban advances has forced the Obama administration to recalibrate its Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy a month after unveiling it.

What was planned as a step-by-step process of greater military and economic engagement with Pakistan — as immediate attention focused on Afghanistan — has been rapidly overtaken by the worsening situation on the ground. Nearly nonstop discussions over the past two days included a White House meeting Monday between Obama and senior national security officials and a full National Security Council session on Pakistan yesterday.

A tripartite summit Obama will host here next week with Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and Afghan President Hamid Karzai will center heavily on the Pakistan problem rather than the balance originally intended, officials said.

New consideration is being given to a long-dormant proposal to allow U.S. counterinsurgency training for Pakistani troops somewhere outside the country, circumventing Pakistan’s refusal to allow American “boots on the ground” there. “The issue now is how do you do that, where do you do it, and what money do we have to do it with?” said a senior administration official who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity yesterday.

On Capitol Hill, anxious lawmakers proposed breaking $400 million out of the administration’s pending $83 billion supplemental spending request in order to fund immediate counterinsurgency and economic assistance to Pakistan. “We could pass it really quickly, in just a matter of days,” said Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), who just returned from Pakistan. Waiting for debate and approval of the entire supplemental, Kyl said, “could be too little, too late.”

“Certainly, we are discussing with the administration what is needed, and I think that all of us are very concerned about what’s happening in Pakistan,” House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) told reporters.

The administration shares that concern, even as it is struggling to retain control of its own policy and its full spending request, including money for the Iraq and Afghan wars and other issues. “Our position is that if, in fact, some money would be able to be fast-tracked so that we could get started earlier [in Pakistan], given the urgency of the situation, that’s a good idea,” the senior administration official said. “But we wouldn’t want to do anything to jeopardize” the rest of the supplemental. “We do not support anything that derails that.”

The breakout proposal, the subject of a meeting of national security deputies at the White House yesterday, appeared to have lost steam by the end of the day. But administration officials said they were hopeful that some provision could be agreed on to make funds more quickly available for Pakistan.

Meanwhile, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, returned last weekend from his 11th trip to Pakistan “more concerned than I’ve seen him after any prior visit,” a Pentagon official said, adding that at a meeting with senior aides Monday, “the word [Mullen] used was ‘alarmed.’ “

“We’re not saying the sky is falling,” the official said, “but it’s raining pretty hard in Pakistan.”

The level of concern — always high where nuclear-armed and politically tumultuous Pakistan is concerned — began to rise two weeks ago, when the Pakistani Parliament passed an agreement to authorize sharia, or Islamic law, in the Swat Valley, about 100 miles northwest of Islamabad. Taliban forces had expanded in the area, and the agreement was part of a deal in which the government said the extremists would lay down their arms.

Instead, the Taliban advanced farther east, to within 60 miles of the capital, with no apparent government resistance. On Sunday, after increasingly stern public statements from the administration and some Taliban withdrawal, the government launched a military offensive in the area, backed yesterday by helicopter gunships.

But on the eve of Obama’s first meeting with Zardari, tensions were running high between the two governments. “We see more duplicity than ambivalence” about the fight against extremists, one participant in the administration’s strategic review of the region said of Pakistani authorities.

Other officials expressed skepticism that the Pakistani offensive would continue. “The test of all these Pakistani military operations — because we’ve seen them from time to time in the past — is always their sustainability,” Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said.

Beyond this week’s combat, officials said they were still looking for Pakistan to begin moving large quantities of its half-million-strong military away from the eastern border with India, its historic adversary, and toward Taliban and al-Qaeda sanctuaries in the west.

Staff writers Scott Wilson and Rajiv Chandrasekaran contributed to this report.

 
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U.S. Options in Pakistan Limited
Nation Rife With Security Issues, Infighting, Anti-American Sentiment

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 4, 2009

As Taliban forces edged to within 60 miles of Islamabad late last month, the Obama administration urgently asked for new intelligence assessments of whether Pakistan’s government would survive. In briefings last week, senior officials said, President Obama and his National Security Council were told that neither a Taliban takeover nor a military coup was imminent and that the Pakistani nuclear arsenal was safe.

Beyond the immediate future, however, the intelligence was far from reassuring. Security was deteriorating rapidly, particularly in the mountains along the Afghan border that harbor al-Qaeda and the Taliban, intelligence chiefs reported, and there were signs that those groups were working with indigenous extremists in Pakistan’s populous Punjabi heartland.

The Pakistani government was mired in political bickering. The army, still fixated on its historical adversary India, remained ill-equipped and unwilling to throw its full weight into the counterinsurgency fight.

But despite the threat the intelligence conveyed, Obama has only limited options for dealing with it. Anti-American feeling in Pakistan is high, and a U.S. combat presence is prohibited. The United States is fighting Pakistan-based extremists by proxy, through an army over which it has little control, in alliance with a government in which it has little confidence.

The tools most readily at hand are money, weapons, and a mentoring relationship with Pakistan’s government and military that alternates between earnest advice and anxious criticism. As criticism has dominated in recent weeks — along with reports that the administration is wooing Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari’s principal political opponent, former prime minister Nawaz Sharif — the partnership has grown strained.

“What are the Americans trying to do, micromanage our politics?” a senior Pakistani official said testily. “This is not South Vietnam.”

As Zardari arrives this week for his first official visit with Obama — part of a tripartite summit with Afghan President Hamid Karzai — the administration has asked Congress to quickly approve hundreds of millions of dollars in emergency military aid for Pakistan. That money, and billions more over the next several years, is to come with new authority for the Defense Department to decide what to spend it on.

Obama has also backed a five-year $7.5 billion economic assistance package and is resisting congressional efforts to impose strict conditions on any aid to Pakistan. Last month, the administration orchestrated an international donors’ conference in Tokyo that netted $5.5 billion in pledges for Pakistan.

When he sits down with Zardari on Wednesday at the White House, Obama will urge him to put more effort into building domestic support by meeting critical public needs and to resolve his differences with Sharif and others so that he can concentrate on governing, according to officials who discussed sensitive and fluid Pakistan issues on the condition of anonymity.

Of particular concern are hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis who have been displaced by fighting in the North-West Frontier Province, U.S. officials said.

Security proposals up for discussion with Zardari and other members of his high-level delegation include counterinsurgency training for Pakistani army troops at U.S. bases in the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan, the United States or elsewhere. The administration wants to expand a small, in-country training force — now limited to about 70 Americans — that is working with the Frontier Corps, the local, poorly armed force in the border regions.

As 17,000 additional U.S. troops deploying to southern Afghanistan this spring and summer begin to push Taliban fighters toward the Pakistan border, there are hopes the extremists can be trapped in “hammer and anvil” operations with Pakistani forces in the southern province of Baluchistan. Right now, however, Pakistan fields only one army brigade and about 40,000 minimally trained and equipped Frontier Corps members in the vast region, according to U.S. officials.

In deference to Pakistani objections, the administration has not initiated covert ground attacks, approved by the Bush administration last year, in mountain villages farther to the north, in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, where it believes high-value al-Qaeda figures are located. But Obama authorized stepped-up attacks on the area by missiles launched from unmanned drone aircraft.

Although the missile attacks are privately approved by the Pakistani government, despite its public denunciations, they are highly unpopular among the public. As Zardari’s domestic problems have grown, the Obama administration last month cut the frequency of the attacks. Some senior U.S. officials think they have reached the point of diminishing returns and the administration is debating the rate at which they should continue.

Always simmering, administration concern about Pakistani governance rose sharply last month when the Parliament approved an agreement between regional authorities and the Taliban to authorize sharia, or Islamic law, in the Swat Valley, located about 100 miles northwest of Islamabad. Rather than lay down their arms in exchange, Taliban forces began moving eastward. By the third week in April, they had established a presence in Buner district, 60 miles from the capital, with no apparent government resistance.

The day after the Buner reports surfaced, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton infuriated the Pakistani government by telling Congress it was “abdicating to the Taliban and to the extremists” and that the situation posed a “mortal threat” to the world.

“Absolutely, they’re getting irritated,” a senior U.S. official said of the Pakistanis. Clinton, he said, “knows she went too far” in her unscripted testimony. “But on the other hand,” he said, “it was that kind of statement that helped wake up the Pakistanis.”

A Pakistani military offensive in the Buner region was underway Tuesday, even as Obama’s national security team met at the White House, and continued through the weekend. Administration officials said they were watching to see whether the military followed through or would simply stop without finishing the job, as it has in the past.

Meanwhile, Pakistan’s government says it is in no mood for criticism or conditions on aid. After “billions of dollars were poured into Pakistan under the dictatorship” of Gen. Pervez Musharraf by the Bush administration, Pakistani ambassador to Washington Husain Haqqani said yesterday, the Obama administration has produced little but promises and disapproval of the democratically elected government.

“It is unfair to blame the civilian leadership that is bravely mobilizing the nation against terrorism when it is our American partners who have also slowed us down in the war effort by slowing down the flow of assistance,” Haqqani said. “We trust that President Obama’s emphasis on Pakistan will also translate promises into deliverables.”

“You can’t spend more in Iraq and Afghanistan,” he said, “and then wonder why the effort in Pakistan is lagging behind.”

 
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U.S. Stresses Support For Pakistan’s Zardari

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 6, 2009

The Obama administration “unambiguously” supports Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, even as it puts “the most heavy possible pressure” on his government to fight extremists in the country, Richard C. Holbrooke, Obama’s special envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan, told Congress yesterday.

“We do not think Pakistan is a failed state,” Holbrooke testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee. But, he added, “we think it’s a state under extreme test from the enemies who are also our enemies.”

Holbrooke spoke as Zardari and Afghan President Hamid Karzai appealed publicly and privately yesterday for increased U.S. aid and understanding. The two leaders are in Washington this week for a two-day summit, during which they will meet separately and together with President Obama.

When the three sit down today, Obama will tell Zardari and Karzai that they “have to work together, despite their issues and their history. That’s just what has to be done,” said one of two senior administration officials who briefed reporters at the White House about the visits on the condition of anonymity.

The administration is anxious for Pakistan and Afghanistan, often less than friendly neighbors, to cooperate more on preventing extremists from crossing their joint border. But it has serious, separate issues with each government.

In Pakistan, Zardari and the military have balked at undertaking an all-out offensive against Taliban and al-Qaeda sanctuaries along the country’s mountainous western border, from which attacks are launched on U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. Pakistani troops and aircraft have attacked Taliban fighters occupying territory within 60 miles of Islamabad, the capital, in recent days [Story, A6], but U.S. officials have worried that the military will ultimately be unable or unwilling to hold recaptured areas and establish government control.

On CNN yesterday, Zardari dismissed the seriousness of the threat to his government. “My government is not going to fall because this one mountain is taken by one group or the other,” he said.

Holbrooke and other officials were at pains yesterday to voice strong support for Zardari as the administration sought to strike a balance between shoring up his government and pressuring it. The administration wants Zardari to stop bickering with his domestic political opponents, to pay more attention to governance and to display more counterinsurgency zeal.

“We are working very hard to help the Pakistani government in its moment of need,” the senior administration official said. “We are not abandoning it, nor are we distancing ourself from Asif Ali Zardari.”

The administration has asked Congress to quickly approve hundreds of millions of dollars for economic and military assistance for Pakistan this year.

Gen. David H. Petraeus, head of U.S. Central Command, which oversees operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, spoke at length Sunday with Pakistan’s army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Kiyani, urging him to continue the anti-Taliban offensive in the areas northwest of Islamabad.

“Their expectation is to consolidate [their gains] in the next 48 hours or so,” a second administration official said of the Pakistan military. Beyond that, the official said, “we will watch intently in the weeks ahead and months ahead” to assess whether the government is able to move into extremist-held areas.

Zardari and his government have grown irritated with U.S. criticism, and have questioned the slowness of American assistance. Asked by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer whether he was concerned about the level of U.S. support, Zardari said, “I am thankful for the support that I got and thankful to the people of America to give their tax dollars to us. But I need more support.”

Officials offered less enthusiastic backing for Karzai in Afghanistan and have left the door open for a competitor in elections scheduled for August. But they acknowledge that the emergence of new political leadership is unlikely.

 
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In Frenetic White House, A Low-Key ‘Outsider’

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 7, 2009

President Obama’s national security adviser, James L. Jones, looks for rare opportunities to ride his bike from his McLean home to work at the White House. On occasion, he has pedaled back across the Potomac River for lunch. He tries to end his workday at 7 p.m.

In recent weeks, Jones has been portrayed in foreign policy articles and blogs as too measured and low-key to keep pace with the hard chargers working late hours in the West Wing. Some senior White House officials questioned early on whether Jones, 65, a retired four-star Marine general who barely knew Obama before the election, would succeed among younger staffers whose relationships with the president were forged during the long and arduous campaign.

“He’s not very visible,” said I.M. Destler, co-author of a recent book on national security advisers. “I’m a skeptic on whether Jones has the sort of flexibility and ability” required by Obama, Destler said.

White House officials who cited early misgivings, more stylistic than substantive, insisted they have now disappeared. But Jones acknowledges that the road has not always been smooth, and he appears more comfortable than some of his administration colleagues in saying they still have some distance to travel.

It is “absolutely” fair to say that it has taken some time for him and his colleagues to get used to each other, Jones said in an interview Tuesday. “From this West Wing, in particular, because this is Obama Nation, right? True? This is where the Obama election campaign came, landed, en masse.”

Jones, reserved and ramrod straight, with a steady, blue-eyed stare, is the unquestioned odd man out at the White House in both background and personality. Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s chief of staff, is known as hyperactive and hyperbolic. On the National Security Council (NSC), chief of staff Mark Lippert and strategic communications director Denis McDonough are intense, stay-late-at-the-office foreign policy experts whose ties to Obama are long and deep. Deputy national security adviser Thomas E. Donilon has an extensive history with the Democratic Party and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

“I’m not only an outsider, but

I’m a 20-years-older-than-anybody-around outsider,” Jones said. “I’m a former general. And it took me a while to get the president to call me by my first name. Now, I’m ‘Hey, you,’ ” he said with a laugh.

“But there is a generational thing here. There is a process thing here. I’m used to staffs, and I’m used to a certain order. I’m used to people having certain roles. And so there’s a very natural adjustment period.”

“My calculus was that it would take six months,” Jones said. “We’re about halfway there, and I think every week gets a little better.”

Despite early predictions that Obama’s “team of rivals” would clash, Jones by all accounts has facilitated smooth relations among high-profile Cabinet members.

In the White House, Jones said he has had to adjust to the relatively free flow of advice that Obama encourages. “When I first went into the Oval Office, I didn’t expect six other people from the NSC to go with me,” he said. Now, he said, “I think the president and I are very comfortable with the fact that I don’t have to be the shadow. I don’t have to be there all the time. I really have great people. I want them to be trusted.”

Jones has a distinguished résumé: Marine Corps commandant, supreme allied commander in Europe and, after his military retirement, a Bush administration envoy on Israeli-Palestinian security issues.

He has appeared at Obama’s side during trips overseas — and was instrumental, according to European officials, in resolving a potential blow-up during last month’s NATO summit over appointment of the new secretary general.

He regularly chairs meetings of the national security “principals,” which include the secretaries of state and defense. Yesterday, he conducted an unusual on-camera briefing for reporters after Obama’s meetings with Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

Although the administration is barely more than 100 days old, Jones has launched an ambitious restructuring of the White House national security apparatus so it can focus on modern issues such as energy and climate change. He has emphasized the “bottom up” approach to decision-making that both he and Obama favor, Jones said, in which issues are first discussed in working groups, then brought to the “deputies committee” of representatives from Cabinet departments.

“If you want things to go beyond your tenure,” Jones said, “you’d better get a lot of buy-in into the big things.”

Jones said he feels no hesitation in differing with Cabinet members and offering both solicited and unsolicited advice, with others and privately, to the president.

As Obama was mulling his first major foreign policy decision in February — whether to increase U.S. military deployments to Afghanistan this year — Jones said he intervened with questions about the information supplied by the Pentagon.

The numbers were “out of whack,” Jones recalled. Beyond the requested 17,000-strong combat force, the military had included additional “enablers” that it said were required for logistical and other support functions. “I understand these ratios and what they ought to look like, and when they seemed a little high, I pushed back on it,” he said. The numbers were reduced.

When Obama was under pressure to review the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on gay service members, Jones said he went “to see him personally on it” and advised him not to add another controversy to his already-full plate. The president, Jones said, took his advice.

Jones “is not over-excited over sudden crises and problems; he has a sort of steady strategic perspective,” said Zbigniew Brzezinski, who served as Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser. But Brzezinski questioned whether anyone at the White House can “get the president to exploit what is unique about the presidency, which is the ability to take grand initiatives.”

Jones said he is “not used to being in the center of these things. . . . But if I’m not living up to other people’s views of what the national security adviser should look like he’s doing . . . like my hair is on fire all the time,” so be it. “I did that in my life, a couple of generations ago, I was a gung ho major, and a gung-ho lieutenant colonel, and I sacrificed my family life for my career.”

If he can reform the NSC’s structure and process, he said, “then everybody can go home and have dinner with their families. Because they’ll have enough depth and robustness so that we can tee up issues — not constantly in a crisis mode.”

Staff writers Scott Wilson and Glenn Kessler contributed to this report.

 
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Presidents of Pakistan, Afghanistan Meet With Senators Weighing Aid

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 8, 2009

Senators who will shortly be voting on massive aid packages for Afghanistan and Pakistan grilled the presidents of both countries yesterday about their dedication to the fight against extremists and the capabilities of their democratic governments.

“The focus has not been as intense as it ought to be,” said Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), the Foreign Relations Committee chairman, who co-hosted a closed-door lunch for the presidents attended by 24 of his colleagues. After listening to the two leaders, Kerry told reporters, “We’re very, very hopeful now that that is going to change.”

Others were less enthusiastic. Compared with their usual meetings with heads of state, Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) said in an interview, it was “very, very frank.” But “my guess is they left the room with a lot less support than they came into the room with,” Corker said of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari.

Both leaders, Corker said, gave “vague” answers and seemed less committed to the counterinsurgency fight against the Taliban and al-Qaeda than the United States is.

The guest list for the lunch included the large delegations of cabinet ministers and other officials accompanying the presidents on their two-day summit here with President Obama and other U.S. officials, including CIA Director Leon Panetta, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and Deputy Secretary of State Jacob J. “Jack” Lew. Also attending were Gen. David H. Petraeus, head of U.S. Central Command, and Richard C. Holbrooke, the administration’s special envoy to the two countries.

Holbrooke, who has shepherded the leaders to meetings with Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, said that the summit had been a “huge step forward” and that “people are working more closely together.” Many of the ministers from neighboring Afghanistan and Pakistan “had never met each other before. Working operations are beginning.” Yesterday’s lunch, Holbrooke said, “helps increase the critical communication between President Zardari, President Karzai and members of Congress.”

Kerry and Indiana Sen. Richard G. Lugar, the ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, have co-sponsored an administration-backed bill to triple civilian U.S. aid to Pakistan to $7.5 billion over the next five years. The administration has also asked for significantly increased development assistance to Afghanistan and stepped-up military funding for both, in addition to deploying 21,000 more troops to Afghanistan this year.

Kerry described the lunch as “unprecedented” and the questions as “very pointed and very direct.” According to several participants, there was significant back and forth, although Corker said he is “going to want to know a lot more” before voting to approve the requested aid. Karzai responded flippantly to a question about women’s rights from Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), saying he had picked a running mate who would please female voters. This week, he announced that former defense minister and warlord Mohammed Fahim would be his vice presidential running mate for elections this summer.

Asked about Pakistan’s porous border with Afghanistan, which allows Taliban fighters to easily pass through, Zardari pushed back, Corker said, noting that the United States was unable to control its border with Mexico.

In response to a question about the Pakistani intelligence service’s support of the Taliban, another attendee recalled, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, Pakistan’s intelligence chief, gave an impassioned defense of the service and its history and said its only current contact with extremists was through intelligence sources.

At the news conference after the lunch of chicken, salad and raspberry tart, Karzai referred to Zardari as “my dear brother” and said of the summit that he was “very, very happy with this engagement.”

Zardari, who has pressed the Obama administration for increased aid, said: “I think the realization in the world that we have to form more cooperation, to defeat this enemy that we all jointly face, is coming home. And we are taking advantage of this position.”

 
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Pakistan Reinforcing Army in Taliban Battle

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, May 9, 2009

Pakistan has told the Obama administration that it is sending an additional six army brigades to join a major government offensive against Taliban forces in the northwestern part of the country, and it has pledged to hold territory where extremist forces are dislodged, Pakistani and U.S. officials said yesterday.

Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari said domestic support for the offensive, combined with U.S. assistance, would allow the effort to succeed where two previous military drives into the Swat Valley and surrounding territory failed.

In an interview yesterday with Washington Post reporters and editors, Zardari did not confirm the movement of the brigades, some of which were said by others, on the condition of anonymity, to be moving from Punjab province and the country’s border with India.

But the United States and Pakistan, Zardari said, had “gotten to an understanding where we will be supported in all fields.” During a White House meeting with Zardari on Wednesday, President Obama said, “I think we agreed that Pakistan needs more help.” Congress has questioned whether Pakistan will effectively use the billions in economic and military assistance Obama has requested.

To aid in the attacks, the Pentagon is speeding spare parts, ammunition and other equipment for Pakistan’s fleet of aging Cobra attack helicopters. An earlier Pakistani request for more Cobras, to add to its existing fleet of two to three dozen, has been slowed, officials said, by the fact that the helicopters are no longer in production and aircraft must be located and refurbished.

Zardari and Afghan President Hamid Karzai traveled to Washington this week for separate meetings with Obama and for a tripartite summit that the administration hoped would improve relations between the South Asian neighbors. Their mutual suspicion has undercut their overlapping fight against extremists.

Administration officials pronounced the White House meetings — and separate sessions among senior Pakistani, Afghan and U.S. intelligence, diplomatic, agriculture and other Cabinet-level officials — a success. But they cautioned that they would await follow-through on promises made by both leaders.

“The tension has gone. Reality has set in,” Karzai told reporters yesterday. Volubly upbeat during public appearances, Karzai repeatedly referred to Zardari as his “brother.”

Administration officials said the two governments agreed to strengthen cooperation on a number of fronts, including trade and transit, as well as monitoring the traffic of Taliban fighters across their joint frontier. They said they would add two border coordination centers to the one currently in existence.

U.S. military and intelligence officials worry that Taliban forces pushed out of Afghanistan by reinforced U.S. troops this summer will flow unimpeded into Pakistan, as they did during U.S. operations in Afghanistan in 2001. The Pakistanis, a senior Obama administration official said, need to “get ready for the influx . . . into western Pakistan, particularly Baluchistan” province.

In the interview, Zardari described the $15 billion sent to Pakistan over the past decade in counterterrorism reimbursements and direct assistance as only a small fraction of the funds provided recently to failing U.S. financial institutions, adding that “the situation in Pakistan is much more important.” The Pakistani economy needs to be boosted, he said, with “some form of a permanent stimulus.”

Zardari said that no one in the U.S. government had asked him for more information about the location and security of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. “By and large, we’ve always had a relationship that is quite comfortable in the sense that people who need to know, know.” Asked if any American officials knew “everything” about Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, he responded: “Every country has a right to their own sovereignty. We don’t ask you personal questions, and you don’t ask us.”

He said he continued to request that Pakistan be given its own fleet of U.S. aerial drones to attack Taliban and al-Qaeda sanctuaries.

“Maybe some people here would not like to go to that direction,” he said, “but . . . I keep asking.”

Zardari said his first meeting with Obama since the U.S. inauguration was “a very good start.”

 
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Khalilzad Said to Be in Talks With Karzai
Former U.S. Envoy Reportedly Seeking Key Advisory Role in Afghan Government

By Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Zalmay Khalilzad, an Afghan American who served as ambassador to Afghanistan in the Bush administration, has been holding discussions with Afghan President Hamid Karzai about becoming a senior adviser to his government, U.S. officials said.

If the two men were to reach agreement on such a role, it could complicate the Obama administration’s tense relationship with Karzai, injecting a savvy veteran diplomat with a deep understanding of the U.S. government into the mix on the Afghan side. At the same time, if Khalilzad were able to make Karzai’s government more effective, it would help the White House achieve its objective of increasing stability in Afghanistan.

Khalilzad and Karzai have exchanged memoranda outlining the job, according to one senior U.S. official. The official described the position as akin to a chief executive officer, who would work with Karzai to improve the management of his government, which is widely regarded as ineffective and corrupt. But Khalilzad disputed that characterization yesterday, saying in a brief telephone interview that he is “not a candidate for the CEO of Afghanistan.”

Khalilzad and Karzai held inconclusive talks about ways to improve the effectiveness of the Afghan government during Karzai’s visit to Washington this month, according to a source with knowledge of the meeting who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Describing Khalilzad’s possible role as that of a chief executive, the source said, “exaggerated what took place.”

For Karzai, bringing Khalilzad into his tent would neutralize him as a political rival. Khalilzad had considered running for Afghan president in elections scheduled for August, but he ruled out a bid, in part because he would have to renounce his U.S. citizenship. Nevertheless, he had been considering whether to work with Karzai’s political opponents before starting talks about a government position.

Karzai has struck deals with several of his rivals in recent weeks. He recently named Mohammed Fahim, a former warlord who had been a leading member of the principal opposition coalition, one of his two running mates.

The Karzai-Khalilzad discussions were first reported in yesterday’s editions of the New York Times. Khalilzad’s advisers said U.S. government officials divulged details of the talks to scuttle any deal.

Among the ideas discussed by Karzai and Khalilzad, said the source with knowledge of the meeting, was a proposal first floated by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown to create the post of an unelected chief executive officer to help Karzai run the government. The two men also discussed other options, including forming executive councils to focus on domestic issues and the delivery of basic services.

“There’s no commitment yet, only an agreement to look at all the options,” the source said. “Karzai needs to consult with his cabinet and his advisers in Kabul before making any decision.”

Khalilzad said he has not met face to face with Karzai since his trip to Washington. Although Khalilzad traveled to Afghanistan this year, he said he has not been there in the past two months.

Khalilzad has held two meetings with the U.S. government’s special envoy to Afghanistan, Richard C. Holbrooke, and Karzai raised the idea with Holbrooke and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton during his visit to Washington, according to U.S. officials.

Although Holbrooke and Clinton did not raise objections, saying the decision was Karzai’s to make, several U.S. officials involved in Afghanistan issues expressed little support yesterday for the proposal. They noted that it has received a chilly reception from Karzai’s ministers, who could see their influence attenuated under a deal with Khalilzad.

“This idea doesn’t have much enthusiasm at all within the administration,” a U.S. official said. “The administration’s approach to shoring up the Afghan government doesn’t involve Zal as the CEO.”

The U.S. officials questioned whether Khalilzad, who speaks the two principal languages in Afghanistan, possesses the management experience to restore order to Karzai’s dysfunctional government. Khalilzad, they said, was regarded as an effective ambassador to Kabul because he could sometimes solve problems by employing his direct access to President George W. Bush, an advantage he would not have under the new administration.

 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/31/AR2009053102172.html?nav=emailpage
Al-Qaeda Seen as Shaken in Pakistan
U.S. Officials Cite Drones, Offensive

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 1, 2009

Drone-launched U.S. missile attacks and Pakistan’s ongoing military offensive in and around the Swat Valley have unsettled al-Qaeda and undermined its relative invulnerability in Pakistani mountain sanctuaries, U.S. military and intelligence officials say.

The dual disruption offers potential new opportunities to ferret out and target the extremists, and it has sparked a new sense of possibility amid a generally pessimistic outlook for the conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Although al-Qaeda remains “a serious, potent threat,” a U.S. counterterrorism official said, “they’ve suffered some serious losses and seem to be feeling a heightened sense of anxiety — and that’s not a bad thing at all.”

The offensive in Swat against its Taliban allies also poses a dilemma for al-Qaeda, a senior military official said. “They’re asking themselves, ‘Are we going to contest’ ” Taliban losses, he said, predicting that al-Qaeda will “have to make a move” and undertake more open communication on cellphones and computers, even if only to gather information on the situation in the region. “Then they become more visible,” he said.

It remains unclear whether U.S. intelligence and Pakistani ground forces can capitalize on such opportunities before they vanish. Chances to intercept substantive al-Qaeda communications or to take advantage of the movement of individuals are always fleeting, according to several officials of both governments, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss counterinsurgency operations and the bilateral relationship.

Since last fall, the Predator drone attacks have eliminated about half of 20 U.S.-designated “high-value” al-Qaeda and other extremist targets along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, U.S. and Pakistani officials said. But the attacks have also killed civilians, stoking anti-American attitudes in Pakistan that inhibit cooperation between Islamabad and Washington.

“The need to establish a trusting, mutually beneficial U.S.-Pakistan partnership is pressing, yet the ability to do so is severely challenged by current events,” Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, head of U.S. Central Command, wrote in a secret assessment on May 27. Petraeus’s statement was declassified late last week so it could become part of the Obama administration’s federal court appeal to block the release of detainee photographs showing abuse. The administration argues that the images would promote attacks against the United States worldwide.

“Anti-U.S. sentiment has already been increasing in Pakistan . . . especially in regard to cross-border and reported drone strikes, which Pakistanis perceive to cause unacceptable civilian casualties,” Petraeus wrote. Nearly two-thirds of Pakistanis oppose counterterrorism cooperation with the United States, he said, and “35 percent say they do not support U.S. strikes into Pakistan, even if they are coordinated with the GOP [government of Pakistan] and the Pakistan Military ahead of time.”

Judging by reports from the region through late April, the Obama administration authorized about four or five Predator attacks a month, maintaining a pace set by the Bush administration in August. The CIA, which does not publicly acknowledge the attacks, operates the aircraft, chooses the targets — ideally with the cooperation of Pakistani intelligence on the ground — and has White House authority to fire the missiles without prior consultation outside the intelligence agency. A senior Pakistani official said the rate has not diminished in recent weeks, although “you don’t hear so much about it” because the strike areas have been more isolated.

“There are better targets and better intelligence on the ground,” the Pakistani official said. “It’s less of a crapshoot.”

A second U.S. military official agreed, saying, “We’re not getting civilians, and not getting outrage beyond the usual stuff.”

The CIA considers the Predator the most effective tool available in a conflict in which the U.S. military is barred from conducting offensive operations on land or in the air. “We’re not at the point yet where there’s a sense that there’s anything that could replace that,” the second military official said of the drone attacks.

The Bush administration last summer also authorized covert U.S. ground raids inside Pakistan, but Pakistani outrage after a single attack in September led to their suspension. Although U.S. Special Operations teams are on continuous alert on the Afghan side of the border, the Obama administration has not authorized any ground operations in Pakistan, and the military is divided over their advisability. “We ask all the time,” said a military official who favors such raids. “They say, ‘Now is not a good time.’ “

The Special Operations ground teams do, however, have what this official called “standing orders” for an attack against the “big three” extremists thought to be in Pakistan — al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri and Taliban leader Mohammad Omar — if conclusive intelligence became available and the timing was right.

The Pakistani military has its own problems maintaining the delicate balance between popular approval and public outrage over its counterinsurgency actions, even without the U.S. component. The ongoing offensive in Swat and surrounding areas has displaced more than 2 million citizens and destroyed homes and entire towns. U.S. officials have stressed that the Pakistani government must not only sustain the offensive but also win the loyalty of its people by resettling and rebuilding areas it has damaged and guaranteeing their future security.

The United States has contributed $110 million to assist Pakistanis displaced by the Swat fighting, and President Obama is dispatching special envoy Richard C. Holbrooke there this week to assess the situation. Obama “remains very concerned . . . and is pressing internally to make sure we are doing all we can, in concert with our Pakistani friends, to address this in an aggressive way,” according to a senior White House aide.

Beyond unease over public perceptions, a hesitant and often mistrustful relationship between the U.S. and Pakistani military and intelligence services continues to limit collaboration. Intelligence relations remain tense, officials from both governments said. Although the military cooperation has improved, “the Pakistan army still believes [the Americans] have ulterior motives,” the Pakistani official said, including undermining Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program.

Pakistan has accepted U.S. money, weaponry and limited training, but has rebuffed further U.S. efforts to assist its forces. Although the U.S. military flies Predators — separate from those directed by the CIA — along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, it is prohibited from overflying Pakistani territory. Thus far, the United States has turned down Pakistani requests for its own Predators.

This spring, U.S. forces offered a compromise: Pakistan could direct U.S. military Predators over areas of its choice, transmitting images directly into its own intelligence channels, according to officials from both governments. After Pakistan refused to allow a downlink to be established on its side of the border, the ground equipment was set up at a joint cooperation center on the Afghanistan side. Pakistani officials were taken to Turkey to observe a similar program.

“It was somewhere between March 10 or 15 that we flew the first ‘proof of concept’ mission for the Pakistanis and said, ‘Here’s how the system would work. Here’s how we can push data through your own networks so you would have capability available to you,’ ” said a U.S. military official familiar with the program. Although the Predators were armed, U.S. and Pakistani officials said, no offensive operations beyond intelligence-gathering were contemplated or authorized.

Twelve missions were flown over the tribal regions near the border. But in mid-April, the Pakistanis abandoned the project, the official familiar with the program said. “They just did not ask for additional flight information. Any time we have asked them if they need anything, they’ve come back and said, ‘No, thank you.’ “

The Pakistani official said that his government expected the program to continue eventually but that its attention was now focused farther east, on the ongoing Swat offensive. U.S. overflights there were not wanted, he said. “We don’t want the American UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] going so deep” into Pakistani territory, he said.

 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/01/AR2009060103732_pf.html
McChrystal to Face Questions on Plans for Afghanistan

By Karen DeYoung and Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal will appear before the Senate Armed Services Committee today to answer questions about the future — including his plans for reshaping U.S. military efforts in Afghanistan — and a past marked by both acclaim and controversy.

McChrystal’s confirmation hearing follows the abrupt dismissal three weeks ago of Gen. David D. McKiernan, the U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan. In announcing McKiernan’s replacement, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said he wanted “fresh thinking” and “fresh eyes” on a conflict that has been spiraling steadily downward with the increase of Taliban attacks and U.S. and NATO casualties.

McChrystal, who serves as director of the Pentagon’s Joint Staff, led the military’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) from 2003 until last year, overseeing the military’s elite counterinsurgency units in their search for Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders. Although most of the command’s activities remain cloaked in secrecy, JSOC forces were publicly praised by President George W. Bush in 2006 for tracking down and killing Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of the insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq.

At the time of McChrystal’s nomination for the Afghanistan command, Gates praised his “unique skill set in counterinsurgency,” and his appointment marks what Gates has outlined as a shift away from conventional military doctrine toward counterinsurgency tactics.

President Obama’s strategy, announced last month, expanded U.S. policy to treat Afghanistan and Pakistan as a single theater and enlist support from other governments in the region. It set the goals of stabilizing Afghanistan and preventing al-Qaeda from reestablishing a presence there. Filling in those broad strokes, however, has been left to McChrystal and his diplomatic partner in Kabul, new U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, a retired Army general.

Senior military officials said they expected McChrystal to make rapid changes in the way U.S. and NATO forces are deployed in Afghanistan, in the command and control structure, and in the U.S. rotational structure that for years has depended largely on what forces remained available after military needs in Iraq were accommodated.

The current campaign plan, drawn up in October, leaves in place the division of Afghanistan into separate commands in the east, south, west and north, each assigned to a NATO country. U.S. forces are in charge in the east, although the 17,000 additional combat troops Obama authorized this year will be sent primarily to the south, the area with the most Taliban members and the most fighting.

A number of NATO and other countries participating in the multinational coalition in Afghanistan have prohibited their troops from performing certain combat duties. One option before McChrystal, a military official said, “is to lay out resources by tasks” rather than geography, allowing most non-U.S. forces to concentrate on training and other tasks, while U.S. combat forces deploy wherever they are needed. “You do a function, not a territory,” the official said.

McChrystal may also try to change rotational structures to build familiarity and expertise within a force that is likely to be fighting in Afghanistan for years to come. This would involve an effort to maintain continuity by assigning regular combat units to the same regions of Afghanistan where they have previously served, a practice now common only among Army Special Forces units.

Although the committee’s concentration in questioning McChrystal will focus largely on the new Afghanistan strategy, Senate aides said members are likely to raise questions about his earlier command of JSOC in Afghanistan and Iraq.

During his confirmation hearings for his current position, lawmakers probed McChrystal’s knowledge of alleged abuse of detainees by Special Operations task force members at a secret facility in Iraq known as Camp Nama and at other locations. According to a report released this spring by Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), the Special Operations task force preparing to go to Iraq in February 2003 obtained a copy of interrogation procedures approved by then-Defense Secretary Donald M. Rumsfeld for Afghanistan — where McChrystal had served as head of military operations between 2001 and 2003 — and “adopted [the procedures] verbatim.”

The procedures included stress positions, sleep deprivation and use of dogs and were the rule until October 2003. In May 2003, CIA general counsel Scott W. Muller told Pentagon general counsel William J. Haynes II that techniques used by the Special Operations unit interrogating detainees in Iraq were “more aggressive” than those used by the CIA on the same prisoners, according to Levin.

“There were concerns,” said one former Senate staff member familiar with last year’s McChrystal confirmation, adding that the committee “looked very closely at what he might have known about abuses that were occurring.” In the end, however, investigators were unable to find anything conclusive about McChrystal’s knowledge. “There was no trail leading back to him, but you couldn’t tell whether he knew something or not,” the former staff member said.

Ultimately, such concerns were overridden because McChrystal had an outstanding military record and was viewed as highly professional. “We felt confident he was not willy-nilly running around getting caught up in advocating these tactics” as some other officers had, the staff member said.

McChrystal was also in charge of JSOC when Army Ranger Pat Tillman was accidentally killed by his fellow soldiers during an ambush in Afghanistan on April 22, 2004. That April 28, McChrystal approved the awarding of a Silver Star to Tillman. But the next day, while the U.S. public and Tillman’s family were still being told he had been shot by enemy fighters, McChrystal sent a high-level memo to his superiors to warn Bush and the Army secretary that it was “highly possible” that Tillman had in fact been killed by friendly fire.

The memo was controversial because it placed less priority on setting the record straight than on sparing the president and other officials embarrassment “if the circumstances of Cpl. Tillman’s death became public.” An investigation by the Pentagon’s inspector general blamed McChrystal for making “inaccurate and misleading assertions” in awarding the Silver Star.

The Army decided not to sanction McChrystal, although several officers were punished for their role in the incident, including Lt. Gen. Phillip R. Kensinger Jr., head of the Army’s Special Operations Command, who was later demoted in rank. Within Army Special Operations circles, some officers felt it was unfair that Kensinger took the brunt of the blame while McChrystal escaped unscathed.

Others disagreed, however, saying that McChrystal deserved credit for being one of the first to alert military and political leaders to the likely friendly fire.

Staff writers Walter Pincus and Josh White contributed to this report.

 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/03/AR2009060303762_pf.html
Obama Seeks More Aid For Displaced Pakistanis

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 4, 2009

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, June 3 — President Obama has asked Congress for an additional $200 million in emergency aid for 3 million Pakistanis displaced by their government’s ongoing military offensive against Taliban extremists, U.S. envoy Richard C. Holbrooke said Wednesday.

The new funding, to be added to Obama’s pending supplemental spending request for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, would nearly triple the amount of U.S. emergency aid for Pakistan. The administration authorized $110 million three weeks ago and is spending an additional $20 million for transportation and other purposes.

Speaking at a news conference with Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari within hours of his arrival, Holbrooke said the “dramatic increase” in aid was “symbolic of our commitment and support.”

Holbrooke emphasized that his hastily arranged three-day visit was “at the personal instruction of President Obama” and reflected White House concern about Pakistanis fleeing heavy fighting in the Swat Valley and surrounding regions northwest of Islamabad, the capital.

The trip also reflects U.S. concern that the Pakistani government is unable to reestablish control, services and security in the areas it says have been cleared of Taliban fighters during the offensive, which began early last month. Administration officials say they worry that the Pakistani military will repeat past patterns in which extremists are pushed out of an area but quickly return after government forces withdraw.

In a meeting with officials from about three dozen international and nongovernmental aid organizations following his session with Zardari, Holbrooke pointedly asked, “Does the government have its act together on this?”

While avoiding direct criticism of the government’s effort, the aid workers described towns and cities in Swat and beyond that remain without electricity and water; severe shortages of food and medicine; and shuttered police stations. They said that many local officials have fled the fighting and that destruction in some areas is heavy.

Some residents who relied on military assurances that the Taliban had been cleared from the area have returned to find continued fighting and were forced to flee again. “They have issued statements saying the militants are not a problem anymore,” a representative of Save the Children said of the military. He and others suggested that an independent verification system be established to ascertain security situations in areas the military has pronounced cleared of the Taliban.

Humanitarian workers also said that up to 40 percent of the 200,000 people who have registered for assistance in displacement camps — and the millions who have been given refuge in the homes of friends, relatives and even strangers — have signed up twice and even three times for benefits. The World Food Program has said it will suspend food distributions for at least several days this week to institute a new registration system.

Holbrooke plans to visit several camps south of the Swat Valley on Thursday, and the Mardan region to the north, where hundreds of thousands are living in often squalid conditions with overburdened “host” families.

When Holbrooke leaves Pakistan late Friday after a day of government meetings, he will travel to the Persian Gulf states to try to persuade them to contribute to the emergency. At the news conference and in remarks to reporters traveling aboard his aircraft en route to Pakistan, he was sharply critical of regional governments that have not responded to urgent appeals for assistance from the United Nations and the United States.

At the same time, Holbrooke is eager to ensure that U.S. assistance — more than half of the aid Pakistan has received in the current emergency, assuming Congress approves the new funding — contributes to lessening anti-American sentiment here.

 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/04/AR2009060404541_pf.html
Pakistan Says Tide Has Turned in Swat; Refugees Not So Sure

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 5, 2009

SWABI, Pakistan, June 4 — Pakistan’s army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Kiyani, declared Thursday that the tide had “decisively turned” in the military’s battle against Taliban extremists in the Swat Valley, but displaced Pakistanis in a sprawling tent city here said it was still unsafe for them to return home.

The Shah Mansour camp was one of two that Richard C. Holbrooke, the Obama administration’s special representative to Pakistan and Afghanistan, visited Thursday. Located south of Swat in North-West Frontier Province, its population has swelled to more than 20,000 in the three weeks since it was set up.

In a message he repeated several times, Holbrooke told the Pakistanis here that President Obama and the people of the United States cared about them and were helping their government to aid them. Even as he spoke, he said, Obama was reaching out to Pakistanis and other Muslims around the world in a major address in Cairo.

More than 3 million Pakistanis have fled their homes in fighting that began with a government offensive in the northwest early last month. Most have taken refuge with relatives, friends or strangers, but at least 200,000 are in hastily erected camps. The Obama administration is concerned that Pakistan’s leaders will risk a Taliban return by failing to permanently secure and reconstruct areas devastated by the fighting.

Holbrooke is the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit the camps, and he spent several hours meeting with aid workers and refugee representatives and walking among the rows of room-size tents baking in the 110-degree heat. When someone looked out of a tent, he asked whether he could come in, then stooped to enter amid staring children and their nervous parents.

He asked refugees where they had come from and what had happened to them. All told more or less the same story: They had fled their cool mountain towns and villages in a rush, bringing nothing but the clothes on their backs, as the army began its air and ground offensive against entrenched Taliban forces.

They had eventually arrived in this broad, arid flatland between the Indus and Kabul rivers, where Pakistani and international relief organizations established camps for them. They hated the heat and the food and had nothing to do but worry about what they had left behind.

“Are you glad the army came in, even though you were driven out of your homes?” Holbrooke asked a group of men gathered to greet him.

“We will be happy when there is peace,” one answered. A gray-bearded elder shouted from behind him, “We want this thing to end so we can go back to our own land. We are fed up with living like this.”

“America has given a lot of assistance and food,” Holbrooke said. “But it’s up to the Pakistan army to give you security. That’s not our job.”

On Wednesday, Holbrooke met with Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari on arriving in Islamabad, the capital, and announced that Obama had asked Congress for an additional $200 million in emergency aid for the crisis.

The army issued a news release Thursday quoting Kiyani as saying that “major population centers and roads leading to the valley have been largely cleared of organized resistance by the terrorists,” but that “isolated incidents of violence will continue and will have to be managed.”

But the people Holbrooke spoke to said the word from home was that the fighting was not over. There was no electricity, gas or food, they said, and they would not return until their safety was assured.

 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/08/AR2009060804267_pf.html
U.S. Troops Erred in Fight With Taliban That Killed Dozens of Civilians

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 9, 2009

U.S. military personnel on the ground in western Afghanistan and in the air failed to follow established procedures in a battle with the Taliban early last month that killed dozens of Afghan civilians, Pentagon and other Obama administration officials said yesterday.

During the battle, a Marine “quick-reaction” force came to the aid of an Afghan army unit attacking Taliban forces. Among the rules violated or poorly followed were poor initial planning for combat in a populated area and the dropping of a 2,000-pound bomb from a B-1 bomber on a building without proper visual and ground confirmation of the target, officials said.

Afghan government officials and human rights organizations have variously estimated that between 97 and 140 civilians were killed in the battle, in Farah province. Results of a major military investigation, presented yesterday to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, are to be released in summary form later this week, one Pentagon official said.

Civilian deaths from U.S. airstrikes have been a major concern of Gates and other officials and are “one of the most dangerous things we face in Afghanistan, particularly with the Afghan people,” Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal told the Senate last week in his confirmation hearing as the new commander of U.S. and NATO forces there.

“We’ve got to recognize that that is a way to lose their faith and lose their support,” McChrystal said of the Afghans, “and that would be strategically decisive against us.” McChrystal said that he would review tactics and the use of air power upon his arrival in Afghanistan and would probably change procedures.

Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said yesterday that “there were some problems with the tactics, techniques and procedures” in the battle, including “the way in which close air support was supposed to have been executed,” including the fact that the B-1 bomber “had to break away from the target at least for a period.”

But Morrell said that there was “no indication” that the targeting gap itself “resulted in civilian casualties,” adding that it was just “one of the problems associated with these events.”

The number of civilian deaths, Morrell said, was “greatly outnumbered by the Taliban killed in this incident.” That conclusion appeared to be at odds with statements from other U.S. officials, including Karl W. Eikenberry, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, who have said the number of civilian deaths may never be known. The military initially estimated Taliban deaths at 60 to 65, along with 20 to 30 civilians.

Another Pentagon official said that the targeting lapse may not technically have caused civilian deaths — noting that Taliban forces had been seen running to and from the building and on its roof — but acknowledged that there was no ground confirmation of who was inside. “What caused civilians dying,” the official said, “was dropping a 2,000-pound bomb on them.”

Several officials who were not authorized to publicly discuss the results of the investigation spoke about the matter only on the condition of anonymity.

According to accounts they provided, the battle began when Afghan army forces — accompanied by embedded U.S. Army advisers — decided to move into a group of rural villages after receiving reports that several local officials had been beheaded by Taliban fighters. Although the “quick-reaction” force in the vicinity advised against the operation, its commander, an Iraq combat veteran, agreed to provide backup if the Afghan force encountered difficulties.

“The Afghans were going to do it anyway, come hell or high water,” one U.S. military official said.

When the Marines went to assist the Afghan force and came under fire themselves, officials said, they called in air support.

As the battle continued for several hours, initial air support from F-18 Hornets was supplanted by the arrival of a B-1, armed with 2,000-pound bombs. Such ordnance is standard but is normally used against groups of insurgents located in open areas, such as hillsides and fields.

Although the principal combat had ended by that time, observers aboard the aircraft spotted what appeared to be Taliban massing at a different building some distance away for a new assault. The large plane required what Morrell called an “elongated approach,” executing a U-turn and returning to the target to drop its bomb.

Following a similar incident last fall in neighboring Herat province, Gates and the current U.S. ground commander, Gen. David D. McKiernan, put new procedures in place for the use of air power.

But in the Farah attack, “there were some procedures that weren’t necessarily completely followed or followed to the letter,” a Pentagon official said. “It was not a deliberate ignorance of existing rules but certainly a lack of knowledge of certain procedures” in planning and executing such operations. Another official said no senior-level U.S. commander was aware of the operation before it began.

Regardless of the procedures that are used, however, a senior administration official said, “if you’re in a fight in a built-up area, in a village or a populated area, you can say at that point in time, you’re not in a winning position.”

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/15/AR2009061503236_pf.html
Seeking Truth and Trust in Pakistan
Envoy Tries to Convince Refugees That U.S. Is on Their Side

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 16, 2009

SHAIKH SHAHZAID CAMP, Pakistan — U.S. envoy Richard C. Holbrooke, red-faced and sweaty, sat on the dirt floor of a stifling tent as Aslam Khan, a 38-year-old laborer, spoke haltingly of his family’s panicked flight from a Pakistani army offensive against Taliban forces in their mountain village, three hours north of here.

Holbrooke asked some questions about the Taliban but got few answers. “Are these all your children?” he asked with a smile. Yes, Khan said, he had nine.

“Your daughter is beautiful,” Holbrooke continued, nodding toward a young woman who sat quietly at the edge of the family. Her head was covered in a royal-blue scarf that revealed only her stunningly dark eyes.

“That’s not my daughter,” Khan said abruptly. After an awkward silence, the woman explained that she was a Pakistani police officer. It was unclear whether she was there to protect Holbrooke from the refugees, or to monitor what they told him.

In the conflict between Pakistan and Islamist extremists, a fight that has drawn in the United States, trust is in short supply. Holbrooke’s visit to this refugee camp and another earlier this month was an attempt to build confidence on all sides, and to seek some ground truth for the administration in a situation where it is sometimes as scarce as good faith. In the end, his presence boosted America’s image in Pakistan but brought the refugees no closer to home.

Pakistani authorities appear distrustful of the refugees, wary of their loyalties and of the possibility of Taliban infiltrators. The government and military, while ostentatiously grateful for U.S. aid and concern, continue to mistrust American motives and staying power.

The Obama administration says it is pleased with the Pakistani army’s progress but suspects that the government will not follow through on its pledges to quickly rebuild and protect the communities shattered by its six-week-old anti-Taliban offensive in the Swat Valley region. Without a plan to bring more than 2 million war-displaced Pakistanis safely home and a comprehensive strategy to push the offensive into al-Qaeda and Taliban sanctuaries near the Afghan border, administration officials openly fret that the war both here and in Afghanistan will be lost.

The refugees seem to trust no one — not their government, which had left a vacuum of security and services in the northwest mountains that the Taliban filled; not the Taliban, which brutalized them and destroyed their schools; and certainly not the United States, seen by many of them as the instigator of the war and a threat to Pakistan’s sovereignty.

As part of its new strategy for the region, the administration considers Afghanistan and Pakistan a single theater of war and diplomacy. Yet circumstances in the two countries are vastly different. In Afghanistan, tens of thousands of U.S. troops, under new commander Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, are fighting the Taliban directly, and there are hundreds of American diplomatic and aid personnel to directly deliver U.S. assistance and expertise.

But Pakistan — a nuclear power where the anti-extremist battle is far more complicated and critical — is an arms-length operation. U.S. ground troops are not allowed, and the senior American military official in Pakistan, Rear Adm. Michael A. Lefevre, is largely restricted to the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad.

Holbrooke’s foray into the camp was an attempt to convince the refugees that the United States was on their side but had no larger designs on their country.

“They do not have enough international assistance, by a long shot,” he told a local journalist trailing him through the camps. “The United States is providing more than half the aid. That’s not right. Where are the Europeans? Where is the OIC?” he said, referring to the Organization of the Islamic Conference. The United States would give all it could in monetary and material aid, he told the refugees, but would send no troops. “It’s up to the Pakistani army to give you security,” he said. “It’s not our job.”

In interviews and at news conferences with the Pakistani media, Holbrooke parried questions about U.S. Predator drone attacks — he said he would not discuss them or Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program — and Osama bin Laden’s charge of U.S. responsibility for destruction and deaths in Swat. “He’s living in a cave,” Holbrooke retorted, “so maybe he hasn’t seen the damage he’s done.”

In meetings with Pakistan’s government, military, judiciary and political opposition leaders, he pressed the message that getting the refugees back home safely was as crucial, and perhaps even more immediately important, as the ongoing military offensive. Temporary refugee camps tend quickly to become permanent, he argued. They are breeding grounds for public dissatisfaction and recruitment centers for extremists; getting people out of them is key to building confidence in the government.

“This has got to happen,” he told a senior U.S. official in an aside at a dinner for international relief workers during the trip. “Figure out whatever we need to do. Don’t worry about how much it costs.”

Holbrooke is no stranger to refugee camps. He toured them in Southeast Asia, where he began his career as a junior Foreign Service officer in South Vietnam. In the 1990s, as chief U.S. negotiator for the Dayton peace accords, he walked the camps in Bosnia. As United Nations ambassador in the Clinton administration, and an activist official and board member for nongovernmental organizations during the George W. Bush years, he saw refugee squalor across Africa.

The Pakistani refugees, from their tent cities on the hot, dry plain west of the Indus River, can see the high mountain ridge to the north, the gateway to their homes in the Swat Valley and the neighboring districts of Buner and Dir. If they are still here when the summer monsoons arrive next month, the camps will become muddy swamps.

For now, the parching heat and the absence of refugee possessions gives the canvas settlement a veneer of tidiness. There is little inside the tents, other than a bare light bulb, a plastic bucket, a few blankets and those who live there. Outside, there is no shade or vegetation; the white cloth, the hard ground and the people are all covered in the same monochromatic dust.

No one appeared to be starving or seriously ill, but no one had anything to do but wait. “I’ve seen better, I’ve seen worse,” Holbrooke said as he stalked the orderly tent rows with a bottle of water in his hand, leaving heavily armed police commandos and shouting Pakistani journalists in his wake.

Facing a group of unsmiling, tired-looking men gathered under a communal meeting tent, he prodded for information to take home to U.S. intelligence analysts and White House policymakers. “The Taliban who came to you, were they people you knew? . . . Why do people join the Taliban? . . . Who was protecting you before the Taliban came? The army? The police? The Frontier Corps? . . . Why did all of this happen, in your opinion?”

A young, cleanshaven man answered warily. Many people welcomed the Taliban “for justice, to decide the cases” that languished, ignored, in government courts, he said. It was “mostly weak people in the community” who joined the extremists. “They were unemployed, and the Taliban paid them.” The others nodded.

But the refugees had more immediate concerns. They all wanted to go home, the men agreed, but it was not safe. Crops were ready for harvest, but there were still reports of fighting; there was no electricity, no water and much destruction in their villages. Local police and officials had fled; government threats to fire anyone who did not return to work had gone unheeded.

They were given meals in a communal dining tent, but they wanted to cook their own food. They had no pots and pans. The U.N. World Food Program supplied only wheat and oil — what could they make with that? Why were some families given electric fans and others not?

“Where is our government stipend?” one man shouted, referring to the 25,000 Pakistani rupees (about $300) the government has promised each displaced family.

“Where are our leaders?” asked another man. “Why aren’t they here?”

Holbrooke, his shirt sodden and a U.S. Agency for International Development cap on his head, waited patiently. “Thank you for being so honest and open,” he said. “We come from the United States. President Obama has sent us to see how we can help you.

“The most important thing is for you to go home. . . . I talked to your president yesterday. I will see him tonight. I will tell him what you said. . . . I wish we could do more.”

 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/10/AR2009071002975_pf.html
U.S. General Sees Afghan Army, Police Insufficient
Obama Strategy May Need More Funds, U.S. Troops

By Greg Jaffe and Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, July 11, 2009

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the newly arrived top commander in Afghanistan, has concluded that the Afghan security forces will have to be far larger than currently planned if President Obama’s strategy for winning the war is to succeed, according to senior military officials.

Such an expansion would require spending billions more than the $7.5 billion the administration has budgeted annually to build up the Afghan army and police over the next several years, and the likely deployment of thousands more U.S. troops as trainers and advisers, officials said.

Obama has voiced strong commitment to the ongoing Afghan conflict but has been cautious about making any additional military resources available beyond the 17,000 combat troops and 4,000 military trainers he agreed to in February. That will bring the total U.S. force to 68,000 by fall.

Instead, Obama has emphasized the need to pay equal attention to other aspects of the U.S. effort, including bolstering Afghanistan’s economy and governance. Announcement of any additional military resources this year would raise questions from Congress and the American public about whether his overall strategy is working as intended.

McChrystal has not yet completed a 60-day assessment of the war due next month. But Defense Department officials here and in Kabul, the Afghan capital, said he has informed Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, in weekly updates, of the need to increase the Afghan force substantially, as was first reported yesterday on washingtonpost.com. Officials spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss findings that have not yet been made public.

The Afghan army is already scheduled to grow from 85,000 to 134,000, an expansion originally expected to take five years but now fast-tracked for completion by 2011. Several senior Pentagon officials indicated that an adequate size for the Afghan force may be twice the expanded number.

“There are not enough Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police for our forces to partner with in operations . . . and that gap will exist into the coming years even with the planned growth already budgeted for,” said a U.S. military official in Kabul who is familiar with McChrystal’s ongoing review.

Without significant increases, said another U.S. official involved in training Afghan forces, “we will lose the war.” Gates would have to agree to any request from McChrystal for additional funding or troops, and recommend it to Obama.

U.S. commanders in southern Afghanistan told National Security Adviser James L. Jones late last month that additional Afghan forces are needed. But Jones made clear to them that Obama wants to give the nonmilitary elements of his strategy the time and resources to progress before considering new troop requests.

In a telephone interview Thursday from Italy, where he was traveling with Obama, Jones said, “It was never my intention to stifle anybody in the future, but to remind everyone that we have a strategy. . . . And it would be good to see how we’re doing on all aspects of the strategy before we start focusing, as we always seem to do, on how more troops are going to solve the problem.”

Jones and others agreed, however, that both reconstruction and competent governance cannot be achieved until the Afghan people are secure. The strategy calls for U.S. and Afghan forces to clear areas of the Taliban and then hold them. Commanders leading a Marine operation launched last week to drive Taliban forces from Helmand province in southern Afghanistan are already asking: “Where are the Afghan troops? Where’s the economic plan? Where is the government?” Jones said.

About 4,000 Marines are involved in the current offensive, along with about 650 Afghan soldiers.

Despite concerns that too large a U.S. military presence would undermine efforts to eventually put the Afghans in charge of their own security, Jones said McChrystal is “perfectly within his mandate as a new commander to make the recommendation on the military posture as he sees it. We have to wait until he does that. There was never any intention on my visit [to Afghanistan] to say, ‘Don’t ever come in with a request or to put a cap on troops.’ “

The Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, Adm. Michael Mullen, told reporters Wednesday that the White House and the Pentagon are “committed to properly resourcing this endeavor.”

Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell declined to comment on any discussions Gates has had with McChrystal. “The secretary is waiting for General McChrystal to present his overall evaluation of the situation on the ground,” Morrell said. Gates, he said, “will review it thoroughly and consult a number of people before he goes to the president.”

The exact size of any request for additional money and troops will depend on how quickly U.S. commanders and Afghan government officials determine they can expand the Afghan forces and how much of the financial and personnel burden U.S. allies are willing to shoulder. The relatively high illiteracy rates in Afghanistan and the need for new training facilities and living quarters could also constrain efforts to accelerate the growth of the force. Another factor is the Afghan government’s limited ability to pay for the larger force over the long term.

“It would not surprise me if the ceiling for the Afghan army request was raised,” Jones said. “But what the new ceiling might be, and where the money comes from — there’s an international responsibility here, too. There are 47 countries” working in Afghanistan, he said, “and if there are additional expenses, it doesn’t mean all of it has to come from the United States.”

If Obama approves a request for more training resources, he will probably have to contend with sharp questions from Congress about whether his new strategy is working as intended. Many of his constituents on the left would like to see the Afghan war ended rather than expanded.

But McChrystal’s “argument, and ultimately the argument of the Defense Department,” will be that “if you only have one or two years to change the opinion of the people” of Afghanistan then “let’s get on with it,” one defense official said. McChrystal now has what the official called a “halo effect,” similar to that of Gen. David H. Petraeus when he arrived in Iraq in early 2007 to preside over a major troop expansion and change in strategy that ultimately succeeded in turning the tide of that war.

Petraeus now heads U.S. Central Command, which includes Afghanistan. “If you’ve got Stan’s word . . . and Petraeus standing behind him” in requesting more resources, the official said, Obama can stress the need for a “marginal adjustment” based on advice from commanders on the ground.

The 21,000 deployments already approved for this year will not be completed until fall. If new deployments are approved, “generating that force, identifying it, training and organizing it will take time,” the official said. That would probably extend their arrival into early 2010 and could mitigate any political problems the White House might foresee in authorizing additional troops.

Several officials said McChrystal’s assessment of shortfalls in Afghanistan will be outlined in broad terms, citing the need to expand and train the Afghan force along with proposed solutions to make that happen.

In addition to trainers and advisers, he is also expected to outline organizational changes for U.S. troops and the need for enhanced language, intelligence and other skills.

McChrystal, who has spent most of his career in special operations units, is backing a proposal by Adm. Eric T. Olson, head of the U.S. Special Operations Command, to replace the current Navy and Air Force commanders of at least half of the 12 U.S. provincial reconstruction teams (PRTs) in Afghanistan with Special Operations officers who served previous tours in Afghanistan and have training in at least one of its two languages, Dari and Pashto.

Olson and McChrystal believe that the Navy and Air Force officers, who typically have backgrounds as pilots, navigators or ship commanders, lack the necessary experience. “We want to have the smartest and most culturally aware officers in charge of the reconstruction teams,” said the senior military official in Kabul.

But the other services have been reluctant to give up the PRT mission, and Mullen and the four service chiefs are scheduled to meet next week to discuss the issue.

 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/17/AR2009071703634_pf.html
Iraq Restricts U.S. Forces
American Officials See Link Between Limits, Spate of Attacks

By Ernesto Londoño and Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, July 18, 2009

BAGHDAD, July 17 — The Iraqi government has moved to sharply restrict the movement and activities of U.S. forces in a new reading of a six-month-old U.S.-Iraqi security agreement that has startled American commanders and raised concerns about the safety of their troops.

In a curt missive issued by the Baghdad Operations Command on July 2 — the day after Iraqis celebrated the withdrawal of U.S. troops to bases outside city centers — Iraq’s top commanders told their U.S. counterparts to “stop all joint patrols” in Baghdad. It said U.S. resupply convoys could travel only at night and ordered the Americans to “notify us immediately of any violations of the agreement.”

The strict application of the agreement coincides with what U.S. military officials in Washington say has been an escalation of attacks against their forces by Iranian-backed Shiite extremist groups, to which they have been unable to fully respond.

If extremists realize “some of the limitations that we have, that’s a vulnerability they could use against us,” a senior U.S. military intelligence official said. “The fact is that some of these are very politically sensitive targets” thought to be close to the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

The new guidelines are a reflection of rising tensions between the two governments. Iraqi leaders increasingly see the agreement as an opportunity to show their citizens that they are now unequivocally in charge and that their dependence on the U.S. military is minimal and waning.

The June 30 deadline for moving U.S. troops out of Iraqi towns and cities was the first of three milestones under the agreement. The U.S. military is to decrease its troop levels from 130,000 to 50,000 by August of next year.

U.S. commanders have described the pullout from cities as a transition from combat to stability operations. But they have kept several combat battalions assigned to urban areas and hoped those troops would remain deeply engaged in training Iraqi security forces, meeting with paid informants, attending local council meetings and supervising U.S.-funded civic and reconstruction projects.

The Americans have been taken aback by the new restrictions on their activities. The Iraqi order runs “contrary to the spirit and practice of our last several months of operations,” Maj. Gen. Daniel P. Bolger, commander of the Baghdad division, wrote in an e-mail obtained by The Washington Post.

“Maybe something was ‘lost in translation,’ ” Bolger wrote. “We are not going to hide our support role in the city. I’m sorry the Iraqi politicians lied/dissembled/spun, but we are not invisible nor should we be.” He said U.S. troops intend to engage in combat operations in urban areas to avert or respond to threats, with or without help from the Iraqis.

“This is a broad right and it demands that we patrol, raid and secure routes as necessary to keep our forces safe,” he wrote. “We’ll do that, preferably partnered.”

U.S. commanders have not publicly described in detail how they interpret the agreement’s vaguely worded provision that gives them the right to self-defense. The issue has bedeviled them because commanders are concerned that responding quickly and forcefully to threats could embarrass the Iraqi government and prompt allegations of agreement violations.

A spate of high-casualty suicide bombings in Shiite neighborhoods, attributed to al-Qaeda in Iraq and related Sunni insurgent groups, has overshadowed the increase of attacks by Iran-backed Shiite extremists, U.S. official say.

Officials agreed to discuss relations with the Iraqi government and military, and Iranian support for the extremists, only on the condition of anonymity because those issues involve security, diplomacy and intelligence.

The three primary groups — Asaib al-Haq, Khataib Hezbollah and the Promised Day Brigades — emerged from the “special groups” of the Jaish al-Mahdi (JAM) militia of radical Iraqi Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, which terrorized Baghdad and southern Iraq beginning in 2006. All receive training, funding and direction from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force.

“One of the things we still have to find out, as we pull out from the cities, is how much effectiveness we’re going to have against some of these particular target sets,” the military intelligence official said. “That’s one of the very sensitive parts of this whole story.”

As U.S. forces tried to pursue the alleged leaders of the groups and planned missions against them, their efforts were hindered by the complicated warrant process and other Iraqi delays, officials said.

Last month, U.S. commanders acquiesced to an Iraqi government request to release one of their most high-profile detainees, Laith Khazali. He was arrested in March 2007 with his brother, Qais, who is thought to be the senior operational leader of Asaib al-Haq. The United States thinks they were responsible for the deaths of five American soldiers in Karbala that year.

Maliki has occasionally criticized interference by Shiite Iran’s Islamic government in Iraqi affairs. But he has also maintained close ties to Iran and has played down U.S. insistence that Iran is deeply involved, through the Quds Force, in training and controlling the Iraqi Shiite extremists.

U.S. intelligence has seen “no discernible increase in Tehran’s support to Shia extremists in recent months,” and the attack level is still low compared with previous years, U.S. counterterrorism official said. But senior military commanders maintained that Iran still supports the Shiite militias, and that their attacks now focus almost exclusively on U.S. forces.

After a brief lull, the attacks have continued this month, including a rocket strike on a U.S. base in Basra on Thursday night that killed three soldiers.

The acrimony that has marked the transition period has sowed resentment, according to several U.S. soldiers, who said the confidence expressed by Iraqi leaders does not match their competence.

“Our [Iraqi] partners burn our fuel, drive roads cleared by our Engineers, live in bases built with our money, operate vehicles fixed with our parts, eat food paid for by our contracts, watch our [surveillance] video feeds, serve citizens with our [funds], and benefit from our air cover,” Bolger noted in the e-mail.

A spokesman for Bolger would not say whether the U.S. military considers the Iraqi order on July 2 valid. Since it was issued, it has been amended to make a few exemptions. But the guidelines remain far more restrictive than the Americans had hoped, U.S. military officials said.

Brig. Gen. Heidi Brown, the commander overseeing the logistical aspects of the withdrawal, said Iraqi and U.S. commanders have had fruitful discussions in recent days about the issue.

“It’s been an interesting time, and I think we’ve sorted out any misunderstandings that were there initially,” she said in an interview Friday.

One U.S. military official here said both Iraqi and American leaders on the ground remain confused about the guidelines. The official said he worries that the lack of clarity could trigger stalemates and confrontations between Iraqis and Americans.

“We still lack a common understanding and way forward at all levels regarding those types of situations,” he said, referring to self-defense protocols and the type of missions that Americans cannot conduct unilaterally.

In recent days, he said, senior U.S. commanders have lowered their expectations.

“I think our commanders are starting to back off the notion that we will continue to execute combined operations whether the Iraqi army welcomes us with open arms or not,” the U.S. commander said. “However, we are still very interested in and concerned about our ability to quickly and effectively act in response to terrorist threats” against U.S. forces.

DeYoung reported from Washington.

 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/07/AR2009080703678_pf.html
Correction to This Article
The headline on previous versions of this article incorrectly said that farmers would be paid to not grow the crop under new programs. They will not be paid. U.S. and British government programs would provide vouchers for farmers to purchase seeds for other crops, in addition to extending loans and offering construction jobs to those who agree not to plant poppy. This version has been corrected.
U.S. and Britain Again Target Afghan Poppies
Incentives Offered to Farmers Not to Grow Crop

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 8, 2009

The U.S. and British governments plan to spend millions of dollars over the next two months to try to persuade Afghan farmers not to plant opium poppy, by far the country’s most profitable cash crop and a major source of Taliban funding and official corruption.

By selling wheat seeds and fruit saplings to farmers at token prices, offering cheap credit, and paying poppy-farm laborers to work on roads and irrigation ditches, U.S. and British officials hope to provide alternatives before the planting season begins in early October. Many poppy farmers survive Afghanistan’s harsh winters on loans advanced by drug traffickers and their associates, repaid with the spring harvest.

“We need a way to get money in [farmers'] hands right away,” said a senior U.S. military official in Afghanistan.

The program replaces the Bush administration’s focus on crop eradication, which “wasted hundreds of millions of dollars,” according to Richard C. Holbrooke, the Obama administration’s special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Destroying the crops succeeded only in “alienat[ing] poor farmers” and “driving people into the hands of the Taliban,” he told reporters last week.

But many previous U.S.-funded crop-substitution programs have failed as well, from Asia to Latin America. A similar plan in Colombia, begun in the late 1990s, has barely made a dent in the level of cocaine production, although the country began to stabilize in recent years as its U.S.-trained military adopted new strategies against armed insurgents and civil institutions were strengthened.

Officials maintain that the new Afghan plan differs from unsuccessful “alternative” plans because it is an integral part of a military-development strategy that includes tens of thousands of U.S. troops to keep the Taliban and traffickers at bay while Afghan security forces are being trained. Plans call for hundreds of U.S. and international aid experts to work directly with farmers and local officials until the Afghan government has matured.

“The way [the assistance] is offered is important,” said the senior U.S. military official, one of several who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the program on the record. “We are not providing subsidies . . . we are not just handing out cash.” Farmers will have a “stake” in the program, he said, buying vouchers for seeds and fertilizers for about 10 percent of their value. Cash will be distributed only as credit or for work performed, the official added.

The United States and its allies in Afghanistan have long debated whether they should simply pay farmers for not planting poppy, a short-term fix that experts have deemed counterproductive. Farmers probably would take the money and “grow it anyways,” said another U.S. official in Afghanistan. “We would likely drive the price up,” he added, “as there would now be competition between the narcotics trade and the government. More farmers would therefore plant more poppy next year.”

The epicenter of the overlapping wars against opium production and the Taliban is southern Afghanistan’s Helmand province, where more than two-thirds of the country’s poppy is grown. Thousands of Marines and British troops are in the midst of a major offensive there against entrenched insurgent forces and are providing security in villages as they are cleared.

“By this time next year,” the senior military official said, “what we want to see is decreased poppy harvest. For us, that will be a metric of success. If we don’t get conditions set now, in the next 60 days, we’re not going to get the results we’d like.”

The timeline is daunting. A planned “civilian surge” of hundreds of U.S. aid officials and agriculture experts has been slow to arrive. A micro-finance loan program is in the planning stages, and although $300 million in aid has been set aside for “rapid response” initiatives, including voucher programs for seeds and fertilizer, distribution has been sluggish. Mohammad Gulab Mangal, the governor of Helmand, whom U.S. officials have praised for encouraging local communities to turn away from poppy, held the first of eight scheduled outreach meetings only last week.

The plan also includes stepped-up efforts to interdict drug shipments and destroy stockpiles. The Drug Enforcement Administration expects to increase its manpower on the ground from 13 agents in 2008 to 81 by the end of this year. The Marine assault in Helmand, a DEA official in Kabul said, has “greatly enhanced” the agency’s ability to take action there, he said.

The DEA is also training Afghan police in counternarcotics investigations, and the Justice Department is developing a program for Afghan prosecutors, although those efforts are said to be moving slowly. Officials disagree over how much of the profit from Afghanistan’s opium exports goes directly into Taliban coffers. According to Holbrooke, most Taliban funding comes from wealthy individuals in the Persian Gulf region. But there is widespread agreement among U.S. officials that drug traffickers, warlords, corrupt government officials and insurgents work cooperatively to continue cultivation, processing and exports.

Some of the greatest challenges to the new strategy are at the level of farmhouse economics. More than 365,000 Afghan farm households earned about $730 million from poppy last year — a fraction of the $3.4 billion earned from opium exports, according to the United Nations, but an amount nearly equal to the national government’s $750 million in official revenue.

“The average annual cash income of opium-poppy growing households in 2007 was 53 percent higher than those of non-opium poppy growing households,” the U.N. 2008 Afghanistan Opium Survey reported, and “farmers in Helmand reported the highest cash income,” 70 percent of which came from poppy.

The average Helmand farmer cultivates less than an acre of land, with about half an acre planted in poppy yielding a gross income of about $2,000. After paying 45 percent of that in production costs, and 10 percent in local taxes, he nets about $900, more than twice what he would earn from wheat at current, albeit rising, prices.

Spring opium is harvested in May, after the plant flowers and seed capsules develop. The capsules are lanced and a latex-like opium gum oozes out and is gathered by hand. In Helmand, where production per acre is highest, capsules are lanced an average of four times in a labor-intensive process.

Extra workers travel from all over Afghanistan for the harvest, and the pay is higher than it is for virtually all other forms of unskilled labor. The average daily wage for construction work, the United Nations reported, is $3.60. Wheat harvesting earns $4.40, and opium “lancing/gum collection” pays $9.50. Wages in Helmand for lancing, $15 a day, are the highest in the country.

“What we’re looking for is a way to compete with that,” the senior military official said of the opium economy. “This is not easy. . . . There is no silver bullet.”

Correspondent Pamela Constable in Kabul and staff writer Greg Jaffe contributed to this report.

 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/11/AR2009081103341_pf.html
U.S. Ambassador Seeks More Money for Afghanistan
Funds Requested For Development

By Karen DeYoung and Greg Jaffe
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, August 12, 2009

The United States will not meet its goals in Afghanistan without a major increase in planned spending on development and civilian reconstruction next year, the U.S. ambassador in Kabul has told the State Department.

In a cable sent to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry said an additional $2.5 billion in nonmilitary spending will be needed for 2010, about 60 percent more than the amount President Obama has requested from Congress. The increase is needed “if we are to show progress in the next 14 months,” Eikenberry wrote in the cable, according to sources who have seen it.

Obama has asked for $68 billion in Defense Department spending in Afghanistan next year, an amount that for the first time would exceed U.S. military expenditures in Iraq. Spending on civilian governance and development programs has doubled under the Obama administration, to $200 million a month — equal to the monthly rate in Iraq during the zenith of spending on nonmilitary projects there.

The State Department has reacted cautiously to Eikenberry’s assessment, sent to Clinton in late June, even as senior officials say the administration is prepared to spend what is needed to succeed. The 2010 budget includes about $4.1 billion in State Department funding for nonmilitary purposes.

With massive amounts of money already flowing into Afghanistan, there are concerns about the country’s ability to absorb it and the administration’s ability to implement its programs, according to Deputy Secretary of State Jack Lew.

“Right now, there is about $6 billion in the pipeline,” including 2009 appropriations and a supplemental war-spending bill passed in June, Lew said in an interview. “We have a lot of money to spend right now. . . . We’re not running out anytime soon.”

Congress, currently on its August recess, would probably have similar concerns about whether the money could be effectively used.

“We’ve spent a lot of money there, not to great effect,” a senior Senate staffer said. “We need to have a much clearer idea of what our goals are and what we can realistically achieve. It’s premature to talk about dramatically increasing the budget.”

Eikenberry, the staffer noted, is a retired three-star Army general and a former U.S. commander in Afghanistan who is used to working with far larger sums of Pentagon money.

Since 2001, the United States has spent $38 billion on reconstruction in Afghanistan, more than half of it on training and equipping Afghan security forces.

Obama’s strategy will bring the U.S. military force in Afghanistan to 68,000 troops by the end of this year and will almost certainly include further troop increases next year. But the president has described U.S. military involvement as only one leg of a “three-legged stool” that includes development and competent governance.

Although spending on civilian programs pales beside the military budget, Obama has pledged substantial increases in U.S. civilian personnel and development funds, focusing on agricultural development and rule of law. The size of the U.S. Embassy is scheduled to grow this year to 976 U.S. government civilians in Kabul and outside the capital, from 562 at the end of 2008.

Eikenberry’s $2.5 billion request includes an additional $572 million for the expanded agriculture program. U.S. Marines, who this summer launched an offensive against the Taliban in Afghanistan’s southern Helmand province, are working with civilian officials to try to persuade farmers there not to plant opium poppy this year. The program includes the supply of seeds and fertilizers for alternative crops, loans to farmers, and payment for work on roads and irrigation ditches.

Among the other elements of the request are an additional $521 million for stabilization efforts in conflict zones; $450 million in economic assistance funneled through the United Nations in Afghanistan; $190 million for roads, schools and civil aviation; $194 million for local government development; and $106 million in economic grants.

Lew said the State Department is working closely with the embassy to parse the request. “Frankly, at the level at which a request is made,” he said, “we often go through this back-and-forth, adjusting to realities, the timing . . . in terms of absorptive capacity and all the issues around getting money out and used. Congress has to approve it.

“If the question is, did [the embassy] do a lot of good, thoughtful work, the answer is yes,” Lew said. “Do we at this point have a definitive view of what their needs are? We’re still working on it.”

 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/13/AR2009081302770_pf.html
More Pakistanis View Al-Qaeda, Taliban Negatively, Poll Finds

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 13, 2009 4:48 PM

Pakistani views of al-Qaeda and the Taliban have shifted markedly since last year, with unfavorable opinions doubling to about two-thirds of those surveyed in a new Pew Research Center poll.

Condemnation of extremists did not coincide with a more favorable view of the United States, held by only 16 percent of the Pakistanis surveyed. Only 13 percent said they had confidence in President Obama, a stark contrast to his overwhelming popularity in much of the rest of the world. A hefty 64 percent said they regard the United States as an enemy of Pakistan.

But more than half said that improved relations between Pakistan and the United States were important, and large majorities supported U.S. efforts to provide aid and intelligence to the Pakistani military. U.S. military assistance to Pakistan has totaled about $11 billion since 2001, and the Obama administration has requested an additional $2.5 billion for 2010.

Public displeasure with the United States focused on the war in Afghanistan — with seven in 10 Pakistanis calling for the withdrawal of U.S. and NATO troops — and on missile attacks by U.S. Predator drones on al-Qaeda and Taliban sanctuaries in the western Pakistani mountains near the Afghan border.

Only 22 percent said the United States takes Pakistani views into account when making foreign policy decisions, a number largely unchanged since 2007.

The face-to-face survey of about 1,200 adults, largely in urban areas, took place in late May and early June, about a month after the Pakistani army began a major offensive against entrenched Taliban forces in the Swat Valley region in northwest Pakistan. The military last month declared victory in the operation, although the return of more than 2 million people displaced by the fighting has been slowed because of ongoing security concerns.

Military operations have also produced at least a temporary lull in suicide bombings that swept Pakistan this year. More than 87 percent said such attacks are never justified, the highest percentage in the poll.

Public support for the Pakistani military remains high, with 77 percent saying it is having a good influence on their country. But President Asif Ari Zardari has dropped sharply in popularity, with 32 percent saying they had a favorable view of him, down from 64 percent in a similar survey last year. By contrast, 67 percent said they approved of Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani, and 79 percent had a favorable view of the leader of the government’s main political opposition, former prime minister Nawaz Sharif.

India remains a prime concern for most Pakistanis, with 88 percent saying they viewed it as a threat, compared with 73 percent for the Taliban and 61 percent for al Qaeda.

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/13/AR2009081303855_pf.html
With Karzai Favored to Win, U.S. Walks a Fine Line
Criticism Tempered To Avoid Hostility

By Joshua Partlow and Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, August 14, 2009

KABUL — The last time Hamid Karzai ran for president, in 2004, he was clearly America’s man in Afghanistan. U.S. military helicopters shuttled him between campaign stops. At his inauguration, Vice President Richard B. Cheney was there to hail the day as a major moment “in the history of human freedom.”

With a new round of voting one week away — and Karzai favored to win another term — a less-enamored Obama administration is looking for ways to lessen U.S. reliance on the Afghan president by working more closely with favored ministers and bolstering the authority of provincial and local leaders, according to American and Afghan officials.

The goals reflect frustration among U.S. officials over Karzai’s performance in the past five years, particularly his seeming indifference to the widespread corruption within his government. But as it increasingly appears that Karzai will be its partner over the next five years, the United States has also sought to preserve a relationship with him.

“Because they couldn’t construct a plan to replace Karzai, I think they toned down the criticism and kept the option open of working with Karzai, should he get reelected,” said Zalmay Khalilzad, a former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan. “I think some administration officials realized that by being so openly critical of Karzai, they faced the risk that they could get a Karzai who was not only reelected but was hostile to the U.S. because of how he had been treated.”

The United States is “actively impartial” in the Aug. 20 vote, said Jane Marriott, a senior adviser to U.S. special representative Richard C. Holbrooke. But according to Afghan Foreign Minister Rangin Dadfar Spanta, U.S. officials back the idea of a new chief executive position under Karzai to add coherence and competence to his struggling bureaucracy.

“I know that in Washington this idea has strong supporters,” Spanta said in an interview, adding that installing a “shadow prime-minister” would pose constitutional problems.

U.S. officials have discussed the proposal with a key Karzai challenger, the technocratic former finance minister Ashraf Ghani, though they have not endorsed him for the job.

Rather than “just pouring money into building the government,” Holbrooke adviser Barnett R. Rubin said, the administration is focused on “rebuilding the relationship between subnational authorities and local communities.” Rubin stressed that such activities were being undertaken in cooperation with the central government in Kabul.

Critical of some of Karzai’s cabinet choices, the administration has praised the competence of presidentially appointed local leaders such as the governor of Helmand province, Gulab Mangal. Plans by the U.S. Defense and State departments call for installing American “mentors” and liaisons in Afghan ministries in Kabul, a policy that was heavily used during the early years of the U.S. military occupation of Iraq.

President Obama has called the Afghan election, the second since the Taliban regime’s ouster in 2001, the most important event of the year in this country. Originally scheduled for April, the vote was postponed during what Holbrooke called a “crisis” period of Afghan constitutional and security upheaval. As a result, Holbrooke said, the Obama administration was forced to defer other priorities in Afghanistan and spend “most of the spring” sorting out the electoral crisis.

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the new U.S. military commander here, has postponed completion of his review of the security situation, originally due to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates this weekend, in part because of the upcoming presidential and provincial council elections. “This is our main effort. I don’t want anybody to think we’re not anything but completely focused on this,” McChrystal said.

“Until the election legitimizes the government, whoever wins, we have to focus on that,” Holbrooke said. Holbrooke, Marriott and Rubin spoke at a media event in Washington on Wednesday.

U.S. officials here said their primary interest now is a fair and free election campaign in which the candidates — 3,324 people have registered for 420 provincial council seats, and 41 are vying to be president — debate the issues. The officials also say they want a vote unmarred by fraud or violence, results that Afghans accept as legitimate and a government that responds to the needs of the people.

“We’re very careful not to conjecture. What we’re clear about is regardless of who comes into power, there needs to be much greater demand for accountability,” said a U.S. official involved in the election process.

Of the leading presidential candidates, Karzai remains the clear favorite. A U.S.-funded poll released this week found that 45 percent of decided voters favored him, compared with 25 percent for his closest rival, Abdullah Abdullah, an ophthalmologist and former foreign minister. The margin is significant because Karzai, who won in 2004 with 55 percent of the vote, would need to clear 50 percent to forestall a runoff.

The question of who, if anyone, the United States backs has been important from the beginning, although candidates have had to walk a fine line in simultaneously portraying themselves as acceptable to Americans and able to keep U.S. funding flowing, but distant enough not to be seen as an American puppet. Four prominent Afghan politicians, including Abdullah and Ghani, the former finance minister, attended Obama’s inauguration in January. Karzai, however, was absent, and a narrative developed early on that Obama was eager for a change at the top in Afghanistan. Ghani and Abdullah have told people privately that the United States gave them the green light to run for president, according to a former U.S. official here.

Karzai was angered when U.S. Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry appeared beside Ghani and Abdullah at news conferences in June, although Eikenberry stressed impartiality in his remarks. A week and a half after Karzai failed to show up at Afghanistan’s first televised debate, against Abdullah and Ghani, Eikenberry published an op-ed in The Washington Post calling for “serious debate among the candidates.”

Despite the administration’s denials, many in Afghanistan view these developments as a message that the Americans favored Karzai’s rivals.

“The U.S. has certainly tried to undermine Karzai’s leadership,” said Haroun Mir, director of Afghanistan’s Center for Research and Policy Studies. But the failure of rival candidates to unite on a ticket dashed what appeared to many observers to be a U.S. hope of an opposition coalition.

“I think the greatest pressure on the United States has been to convince Afghans and all the candidates that it is not interfering in the election one way or another,” Vali Nasr, a senior Holbrooke aide, said in an interview. “What the U.S. has consistently said is that it wants an election that is free and fair, and does not lead to indecision, confusion or violence, that the elections would be followed quickly by getting back to business.”

Concerns persist about Karzai’s leadership on many levels, including his ability to address corruption, to project his power nationwide, to help stem rising Taliban violence and to outline a clearer plan for a peace process. U.S. officials have been critical of his decision on the campaign trail to surround himself with infamous commanders such as his running mate, the powerful Tajik leader Mohammed Fahim, and several others Karzai has courted in an attempt to secure ethnic and regional voting blocs.

Karzai has at times been critical of the U.S. presence, especially over the issue of civilian casualties in U.S. military operations. But in a speech this week, he said that he valued American sacrifices in the war and that “we will not only keep this strategic partnership with the U.S., but we also will improve it.” At the same time, he demanded that coalition troops stop arresting Afghans and close all foreign prisons here.

Karzai’s rivals describe him as paranoid about foreign intrigue.

“He considers everybody part of that big plot,” Abdullah said. “In the meetings with elders and political leaders who have talked and spoken to me, he says this, ‘We should unite. You know, there are plots, Americans, British,’ and so on and so forth.”

“His relations with the Americans?” Abdullah said. “What do you think? Everybody is stuck with him.”

 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/13/AR2009081303763_pf.html
Gates: No Troop Request In Afghanistan Review

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 14, 2009

The U.S. commander in Afghanistan will not make a specific request for more troops when he submits a review of the situation there in the coming weeks, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said Thursday.

Instead, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal will assess conditions on the ground and make recommendations based on whether the mix and number of forces he has been allotted — 68,000 by the end of the year — is sufficient to execute U.S. strategy there, Gates told reporters at a Pentagon briefing held with Joint Chiefs of Staff Vice Chairman Gen. James Cartwright.

“We’ve made clear to General McChrystal that he is free to ask for what he needs,” Gates said. But “any future resource request will be considered separately and subsequent to his assessment of the security situation.”

At a recent meeting with McChrystal in Brussels, Gates told the commander to concentrate on tasks that needed to be performed and the type of troops necessary to accomplish them rather than specific numbers, according to senior military officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal Pentagon deliberations.

With a focus on “troops-to-task” ratios, McChrystal is expected to provide a breakdown of future strategy — including increased training requirements for Afghan forces — that officials said could require at least 15,000 additional U.S. troops next year. Obama approved the deployment of 21,000 troops this year, 6,000 of whom have not yet arrived in Afghanistan.

“What he’s assessing is, have I — have I got it laid down right?” Cartwright said of McChrystal, who took command in Afghanistan two months ago.

Cartwright indicated that there might be a need for a more immediate change in tactics or a request for additional resources because of an increase in casualties among U.S. forces in roadside bombings, including in the southern province of Helmand, where Marines have been deployed recently.

Gates said an accelerated withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq — which he has raised as a possibility — could also be a factor in making resources available for Afghanistan.

Gates previously expressed concern that the size of the international force in Afghanistan — including about 30,000 non-U.S. troops from NATO and other allied countries — could reach a “tipping point” whereby Afghans will turn against them. “I think that most Afghans see us as there to help them and see us as their partner,” Gates said Thursday. “I just worry that we don’t know what the size of the international presence, military presence, might be that would begin to change that.”

Gates said that coalition forces “have to show progress over the course of the next year.” Asked how long U.S. combat forces would be needed in Afghanistan, he said it was “unpredictable” and “perhaps a few years,” and he emphasized plans to sharply increase recruitment and training of Afghan security forces so they could take over.

Over the longer term, Gates said that even if security is achieved, progress in building Afghanistan’s economy and government institutions remains “a decades-long enterprise in a country that has been through 30 years of war and has as high an illiteracy rate as Afghanistan does and low level of economic development.” The United States and international partners, he said, “are committed to that side of the equation for an indefinite period of time.”

The administration has said that it considers Pakistan, where Taliban, al-Qaeda and other extremist groups have established sanctuaries in the border region, a joint theater of operations with Afghanistan. No U.S. troops are deployed in Pakistan, but the U.S. military provides training and supplies, and the United States has given $15 billion in military and economic aid since 2001.

Asked Thursday about a new poll of Pakistanis indicating that 64 percent view the United States as an enemy, Gates said, “The Pakistanis probably — and with some legitimacy — question . . . how long are we prepared to stay there?” He said that “we walked away from them” after the Soviet Union withdrew its forces from Afghanistan in 1989 and that assistance was restricted in the 1990s because of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program.

Although a close relationship was developed after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, “it’s going to take us some time to rebuild confidence” with the Pakistani people, he said.

The poll, released Thursday by the Pew Research Center, found that 16 percent of Pakistanis had a favorable view of the United States. Thirteen percent said they had confidence in President Obama, a stark contrast to his overwhelming popularity in much of the rest of the world. But more than half said improved relations between Pakistan and the United States were important.

The survey also found that Pakistani views of al-Qaeda and the Taliban have shifted markedly since last year, with unfavorable opinions doubling to two-thirds of about 1,200 adults questioned, largely in urban areas. The poll was conducted in late May and early June, about a month after the Pakistani army began a major offensive against Taliban forces in the Swat Valley region.

Staff writer Walter Pincus contributed to this report.

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/22/AR2009082202501_pf.html
Correction to This Article
This article and its headline incorrectly describe U.S. detention facilities in Afghanistan and Iraq as “secret.” The identity of the prisoners temporarily held at the facilities has been secret, but the existence of the facilities has not.
Red Cross to Get Data on Prisoners Held in Secret at U.S. Camps

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 23, 2009

The U.S. military has agreed for the first time to provide information to the International Committee of the Red Cross about prisoners held in secret at detention camps in Afghanistan and Iraq, but it will continue to deny the ICRC access to them, military officials said Saturday.

The facilities are “short-term places” operated by U.S. Special Forces for newly captured alleged insurgents considered to have valuable information or to be serious threats, according to an official familiar with the subject, who was not authorized to discuss it on the record. It is usually in “the early hours” of detention that interrogators “are able to gain the freshest and most valuable intelligence,” the official said.

The military’s agreement early this month to provide the ICRC with at least the names of detainees in the Iraq and Afghanistan camps was first reported Saturday on the New York Times’s Web site.

The Red Cross has long requested information about, and access to, such prisoners held at the U.S. military base at Bagram, Afghanistan, and in Balad, Iraq. Only a few dozen detainees are believed to be at each location at any time, usually for several weeks until they are transferred to longer-term prisons.

In Afghanistan, that normally means the main prison at Bagram, where the military holds about 600 detainees. Although the ICRC has access to that facility, prisoners there have protested their continuing detention by refusing since last month to see Red Cross workers or participate in videoconference visits with their families.

Unlike the large U.S. military prisons that once operated in Iraq — where military panels reviewed individual cases for release or transfer to Iraqi-run facilities — there is no review or adjudication process at Bagram. The military has delayed establishing one because Afghanistan lacks a functioning judicial system.

ICRC spokesman Bernard Barrett declined to comment Saturday.

The Defense Department has refused to make public the list of prisoners held at the main Bagram base. The Pentagon last month denied a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the American Civil Liberties Union to provide names and other information about the detainees, citing national security and privacy concerns.

Except for the Special Forces detention facility, all U.S. prisons in Iraq have been turned over to the Iraqi government.

Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

 

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/23/AR2009082300660_pf.html
Afghan War Conditions ‘Deteriorating,’ Mullen Says
Joint Chiefs Chairman Expresses Concern About Declining Support for War in U.S.

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 24, 2009

The situation in Afghanistan is “serious and deteriorating,” Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen said Sunday, as the Obama administration awaits an assessment by the new U.S. commander there and a possible request for more troops.

Mullen also expressed concern over recent opinion polls indicating that for the first time a majority of Americans do not think the war in Afghanistan is worth fighting. President Obama has described the conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan as the central front against international terrorism and has pledged to give it all necessary resources.

With violence again on the rise in Iraq, Obama faces pressure from the public and within the Democratic Party to provide a fuller explanation of his Afghanistan strategy. Support for more troops has been strongest within Republican ranks.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who just returned from Afghanistan, said the commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, is under “great pressures” from “people around” Obama to reduce his estimate of troop needs.

Mullen and retired Gen. Karl W. Eikenberry, the U.S. ambassador in Afghanistan, acknowledged widespread allegations of fraud in last week’s Afghan elections. But they described the elections as an important step toward what Eikenberry called a “renewal of trust” by the Afghan people in their government.

Eikenberry and Mullen spoke on CNN’s “State of the Union” and NBC’s “Meet the Press.” McCain appeared on ABC’s “This Week.”

With Afghan President Hamid Karzai and challenger Abdullah Abdullah both claiming victory, “we’re not really going to know for several more weeks exactly where do we stand in this process,” Eikenberry said. Official results are not due until Sept. 17; a mid-October runoff will be required if no candidate won more than half the vote.

In Iraq, where bombings last week killed at least 100 people, “the key is whether this is an indicator of future sectarian violence,” Mullen said. “And certainly, many of us believe that one way that this can come unwound is through sectarian violence.”

Future deployments to Afghanistan, where the U.S. troop presence is expected to reach 68,000 by the end of the year — including 21,000 that Obama authorized this year — depend in part on the rate of withdrawal from Iraq. Remaining troops in Iraq total 130,000 and a sharp decrease, to 50,000 or less, is due after Iraqi elections in January. Under an agreement with the Iraqi government, U.S. troops are to have departed by the end of 2011.

Since the bombings, senior military officials said, the Iraqi government has requested stepped-up U.S. intelligence, including increased overhead imaging. Many of those resources have been transferred to Afghanistan under orders of Gen. David H. Petraeus, who is in charge of both war theaters as head of the U.S. Central Command.

Overhead surveillance platforms, including aerial drones, are split between the two theaters, with 70 percent located in Afghanistan and along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, said one official who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss intelligence on the record.

McChrystal took command in Afghanistan in June and was scheduled to deliver an assessment to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates within 60 days. Mullen said the report is now due in the next two weeks.

“We’re not at a point yet where he’s made any decisions about asking for additional troops,” Mullen said, adding that McChrystal’s orders are to separately “assess where you are, and then tell us what you need.”

“My recommendation to the president will be based on getting the resource strategy matched absolutely correct,” Mullen said. “And so we’ll see where that goes once the assessment is in here. And I’ve had this conversation with the president, who understands that whatever the mission is, it needs to be resourced correctly.”

 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/29/AR2009082902402_pf.html
U.S. Sets Metrics to Assess War Success

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 30, 2009
The White House has assembled a list of about 50 measurements to gauge progress in Afghanistan and Pakistan as it tries to calm rising public and congressional anxiety about its war strategy.

Administration officials are conducting what one called a “test run” of the metrics, comparing current numbers in a range of categories — including newly trained Afghan army recruits, Pakistani counterinsurgency missions and on-time delivery of promised U.S. resources — with baselines set earlier in the year. The results will be used to fine-tune the list before it is presented to Congress by Sept. 24.

Lawmakers set that deadline in the spring as a condition for approving additional war funding, holding President Obama to his promise of “clear benchmarks” and no “blank check.”

Since then, skepticism about the war in Afghanistan has intensified along with the rising U.S. and NATO casualty rates, now at the highest level of the eight-year-old conflict. An upcoming assessment by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the new military commander in Afghanistan, is expected to lay the groundwork for requests for additional U.S. troop deployments in 2010.

The administration’s concern about waning public support and the war’s direction has been compounded by strains in the U.S. relationship with the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Facing their own public opinion problems, both appear increasingly resentful of U.S. demands for improved performance in the face of what they see as insufficient American support.

At a dinner in Kabul with Richard C. Holbrooke, the U.S. special envoy for the region, and retired Gen. Karl W. Eikenberry, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, after the Aug. 20 presidential election, President Hamid Karzai made clear his displeasure that the administration did not endorse his candidacy or his claimed victory, according to one U.S. participant.

The participant denied media reports that the dinner had erupted into a shouting match but acknowledged that Karzai “may have been unhappy with the fact that the United States did not immediately congratulate him on his victory.” Amid widespread reports of fraud, and with only a fraction of the vote tallied, Holbrooke told Karzai that the administration would wait for official results confirming that a candidate had won a majority or whether a runoff was needed before commenting.

“There is a pretty intense atmosphere in Kabul right now,” said the participant, one of several senior officials who agreed to discuss the deteriorating war situation, and the evolving administration strategy, only on the condition of anonymity.

Relations with Pakistan have grown similarly tense, with complaints from Islamabad about the pace of deliveries of U.S. military equipment and rising resentment over congressional attempts to impose restrictions on its supply and use.

“We are fighting this war today,” a senior Pakistani military official said in describing U.S. assistance as slow and stingy. “What good is it two years from now?”

That official and others said there have been long delays in the delivery of helicopters, night-vision equipment and other supplies requested for the army’s ongoing offensive against Pakistan-based insurgents.

In recent interviews, civil and military officials in Pakistan drew a sharp contrast between the billions of dollars in assistance that George W. Bush’s administration gave, with few strings attached, to then-President Pervez Musharraf — a general who came to power in a military coup — and what they see as efforts to condition assistance to the democratically elected government of President Asif Ali Zardari.

“Our soldiers wear less armor, their vehicles are less armored, and they have suffered more casualties” in the fight against the Taliban than the United States and NATO combined, the official said. Pakistani combat deaths since 2003 surpassed 2,000 this month as the military engaged Taliban forces in the Swat Valley.

“The only area where there is a tangible improvement is in training,” the Pakistani military official said. Training aid has increased from $2 million to $4 million over the past year, he said, along with a doubling to 200 of the number of Pakistani army officers brought to the United States for courses.

Several Pakistani officials cited as particularly galling Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s recent visit to neighboring India — where she reached agreement on a defense pact that will provide major quantities of sophisticated U.S. arms to Pakistan’s traditional South Asian adversary. Clinton has scheduled a visit to Pakistan in October.

U.S. defense officials, anxious to repair what they have repeatedly acknowledged is a “trust deficit” with Pakistan, bite their tongues in response to the criticism. But they insist that Pakistan is getting everything it has asked for, at unprecedented speed.

“What you have is, frankly, an effort by the Pakistanis . . . to generate all the resources, all the assistance that is possible, and we would do the same thing if we were in their shoes,” a senior U.S. defense official said. “But to make a statement that folks aren’t moving rapidly, or that they’re not getting more than they used to get, is just contrary to the facts.”

The administration has asked for $2.5 billion in direct security assistance funds for Pakistan in 2010 — 25 percent more than what has been approved for this year.

Gen. David H. Petraeus, head of U.S. Central Command, “personally gets a daily update — daily, mind you,” on supplies shipped to Pakistan, the U.S. defense official said. “That should give you some sense of how riveted we are on this.”

Although some Republican leaders in Congress have said that they would support adding troops to the 68,000 the United States will have in Afghanistan by the end of this year, many leading Democrats have questioned whether the administration’s strategy of expanded economic and military support for both countries is working, and whether the likely increased toll in U.S. lives is justified.

Opposition to congressional efforts to legislate conditions on war funding and aid to Pakistan and Afghanistan is one area of agreement among the three governments. Iraq’s failure to achieve benchmarks mandated by Congress provided an easy target for opponents of that war and contributed to the loss of public support in the United States.

Both the House and Senate versions of the pending 2010 defense spending bill include metrics and reporting requirements for the administration. Obama’s strategy is “still a work in progress,” said Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), who co-sponsored an amendment in the legislation setting conditions on aid to Pakistan.

In the absence of strict guidelines from the administration, Menendez said in an interview, “we are definitely moving to a set of metrics that can give us benchmarks as to how we are proceeding” and whether Obama’s strategy “is pursuing our national security interests.”

The White House hopes to preempt Congress with its own metrics. The document currently being fine-tuned, called the Strategic Implementation Plan, will include separate “indicators” of progress under nine broad “objectives” to be measured quarterly, according to an administration official involved in the process. Some of the about 50 indicators will apply to U.S. performance, but most will measure Afghan and Pakistani efforts.

The White House briefed staff members of key congressional committees this month on an initial draft of the plan and invited comments. The “test run” will indicate whether final “tweaks” are needed, the administration official said.

“Ideally, it’s a combination of objective and subjective” measurements, he said. “Obviously, not everything is 100 percent quantifiable, and we don’t want to just get sold on the number. If you train 100 troops, that doesn’t necessarily tell you how effective they are.”

He added: “We don’t want to hold ourselves to indicators that aren’t going to show us anything. We want to make sure this is not just a paper exercise.”

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/01/AR2009090103908_pf.html
Taliban Surprising U.S. Forces With Improved Tactics
Obama Facing Major Strategy Decisions

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 2, 2009

The Taliban has become a much more potent adversary in Afghanistan by improving its own tactics and finding gaps in the U.S. military playbook, according to senior American military officials who acknowledged that the enemy’s resurgence this year has taken them by surprise.

U.S. rules of engagement restricting the use of air power and aggressive action against civilians have also opened new space for the insurgents, officials said. Western development projects, such as new roads, schools and police stations, have provided fresh targets for Taliban roadside bombs and suicide attacks. The inability of rising numbers of American troops to protect Afghan citizens has increased resentment of the Western presence and the corrupt Afghan government that cooperates with it, the officials said.

As President Obama faces crucial decisions on his war strategy and declining public support at home, administration and defense officials are studying the reasons why the Taliban appears, for the moment at least, to be winning.

In the spring, Obama outlined a broad new direction for the war that he said his predecessor had starved of attention and resources. He changed the military leadership on the ground, asked Congress for additional money and authorized more manpower. The administration has said that it expects the strategy — still barely off the ground — to show results in a year to 18 months.

But many U.S. officials and their allies feel that they are in a race against time and the determination of a battle-hardened enemy that has learned from its own mistakes and those of U.S. and NATO forces over nearly eight years of combat. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the new U.S. commander in Afghanistan, gave Obama an assessment this week of what he described as a “serious” situation.

“The point is that the Taliban, who have had a very clear aim and means from the very beginning, have been able slowly and steadily to get better at what they’re doing,” said a European official whose country’s troops are fighting alongside U.S. forces. More U.S. and NATO troops have been killed in 2009 than in any year since the war began in late 2001; U.S. deaths in August reached an all-time monthly high of 47.

Although McChrystal’s report has not been publicly released, officials said it calls for further significant strategic revisions. In the coming weeks, Obama will weigh the merits of McChrystal’s recommendations and decide whether to provide whatever additional troops are necessary to implement them.

About a dozen military officials in Washington and at regional command headquarters here and abroad discussed Taliban capabilities and battlefield trends on the condition of anonymity. Most expressed optimism that with time the U.S. strategy could prevail, but said that the Taliban has gained psychological, as well as actual, ground.

“There are periods when an enemy does well and seems better trained and fights harder,” one senior defense official said. “The number one indicator we have out there now is that they think they’re winning. That creates an attitude, a positive outlook, and a willingness to sacrifice.”

The positive outlook has a basis in fact, the official said, as areas of Taliban influence have expanded. “They have enough of the landscape that they control to be able to train more and in closer proximity to where they’re fighting. And the people [living] there actually believe the Taliban can do something.”

U.S. military officials differ on the extent of Taliban success and the reasons for it. Senior U.S. commanders in eastern Afghanistan, where insurgent leader Jalaluddin Haqqani’s network is dominant, said that the sophistication of the insurgents’ attacks had increased markedly, beginning with bloody battles along the Pakistani border last summer. To many of the Americans, it appeared as if the insurgents had attended something akin to the U.S. Army’s Ranger school, which teaches soldiers how to fight in small groups in austere environments.

“In some cases . . . we started to see that enhanced form of attack,” said one Army general who oversaw forces in Afghanistan until earlier in the summer. As attacks in the east have increased this year, some officers have speculated that the insurgents are getting more direct help from professional fighters from Arab and Central Asian countries. These embedded trainers, the officers said, play almost the same role as U.S. military training teams that live with and mentor Afghan government forces.

In recent months, the Taliban fighters have used mortars to force U.S. troops into defensive positions, where they are then hit with rocket-propelled grenades, rifles and machine guns. Insurgent units have learned to maintain “radio silence” as they move and to wet down the ground to prevent dusty recoil that would make them targets. They have “developed the ability to do some of the things that make up what you call a disciplined force,” including treating casualties, the Army general said.

The insurgents have largely abandoned the large-unit attacks they used several years ago. “In 2005, Marines and Army units were having pretty decisive engagements” against massed Taliban fighters, another senior officer said, adding that “every time, we killed them in very large numbers.” Small bases and checkpoints manned by Afghan national security forces have become preferred targets for the Taliban, he said, because they are “isolated and easy to kill,” and the Afghan units are relatively easy to infiltrate for intelligence.

Remote areas where the Taliban has been fighting U.S. forces for years, such as the Korengal Valley near the border with Pakistan, “are a perfect lab to vet fighters and study U.S. tactics,” said a Pentagon officer. The insurgents have learned to gauge the response times for U.S. artillery cannons, as well as fighter jets and helicopters. “They know exactly how long it takes before . . . they have to break contact and pull back,” the officer said.

U.S. officers in southern Afghanistan, where thousands of Marines and British troops are fighting long-entrenched Taliban forces, attributed insurgent gains less to sophisticated tactics than to increased use of roadside bombs — improvised explosive devices, or IEDs — laid along U.S. convoy routes in the desert or roads built with foreign aid money.

“They do tend to play to the areas that they’re strongest in, the hit-and-run tactics and the employment of IEDs,” said Col. George Amland, deputy commander of the Marines in Helmand province.

The Taliban has also taken advantage of changes in U.S. air and artillery tactics, adopted to decrease civilian casualties that have alienated the population. U.S. airstrikes and culturally offensive night ground raids are authorized far more selectively than they were. The Taliban has also adjusted its own tactics, gathering in populated areas and increasing its night operations, and “the playing field is leveled,” one U.S. officer said.

A number of officials and experts, within and outside the military, said that while the Taliban was able to regroup militarily while U.S. attention was diverted to Iraq, its widening influence has as much to do with Afghan government corruption, tensions among regional ethnic groups, lack of state service and justice in rural areas, and high rates of unemployment as it does with insurgent efforts.

Military officials expressed confidence in the evolving U.S. counterinsurgency strategy, but also concern about whether there is time to make it work. “I’m not one myself to believe it’s a zero-sum game of winning and losing,” said an official with long experience in Afghanistan.

“To the Taliban, winning is, in fact, not losing,” he said. “They feel that over time, they will ultimately outlast the international community’s attempt to stabilize Afghanistan. It’s really a game of will to them.”

Correspondents Pamela Constable, Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Joshua Partlow and Greg Jaffe in Afghanistan contributed to this report.