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Posts Tagged taliban
Time Magazine cover: Aisha
Posted by Jack Sinclair in News, Threat Watch on 29/Jul/2010 19:37
“Our cover image this week is powerful, shocking and disturbing. It is a portrait of Aisha, a shy 18-year-old Afghan woman who was sentenced by a Taliban commander to have her nose and ears cut off for fleeing her abusive in-laws.
Aisha posed for the picture and says she wants the world to see the effect a Taliban resurgence would have on the women of Afghanistan, many of whom have flourished in the past few years.
Her picture is accompanied by a powerful story by our own Aryn Baker on how Afghan women have embraced the freedoms that have come from the defeat of the Taliban — and how they fear a Taliban revival.”
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2007269,00.html
Chemical-weapon attack by the Taliban: revealed in U.S. military logs released by WikiLeaks
Posted by Jack Sinclair in News, Threat Watch on 26/Jul/2010 19:46
“Most of the reports catalog counterinsurgency’s basics — weapons caches found, gun battles fought, village elders chatted up.
But buried in the tens of thousands of U.S. military logs dropped Sunday night by WikiLeaks are incidents that are anything but routine: a suspected chemical-weapon attack by the Taliban; rumors of Al Qaeda poisoning the U.S. military food supply; a tip about Osama Bin Laden’s status.”
Pakistan Aids Insurgency in Afghanistan, Leaked Reports Assert
Posted by Jack Sinclair in News on 26/Jul/2010 00:41
Nadeem Khan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul, center, the former head of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, was arrested during a 2007 demonstration.
“Americans fighting the war in Afghanistan have long harbored strong suspicions that Pakistan’s military spy service has guided the Afghan insurgency with a hidden hand, even as Pakistan receives more than $1 billion a year from Washington for its help combating the militants, according to a trove of secret military field reports made public Sunday.
The reports suggest that the Pakistani military has acted as both ally and enemy, as its spy agency runs what American officials have long suspected is a double game — appeasing certain American demands for cooperation while angling to exert influence in Afghanistan through many of the same insurgent networks that the Americans are fighting to eliminate.
Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul ran the ISI from 1987 to 1989, a time when Pakistani spies and the C.I.A. joined forces to run guns and money to Afghan militias who were battling Soviet troops in Afghanistan. After the fighting stopped, he maintained his contacts with the former mujahedeen, who would eventually transform themselves into the Taliban.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/26/world/asia/26isi.html?_r=1
Taliban using children to plant IEDs
Posted by Jack Sinclair in News, Threat Watch on 23/Jul/2010 00:48
“In mid-May, a 9-year-old boy and his 4-year-old spotter died when an IED they were laying blew up, Kidnie said. And on June 6, two Afghan kids, aged 11 and 8, were caught in the act of planting an IED. Their hands tested positive for explosive residue, Brown added.”
“Always we women should do the sacrifice?”
Posted by Jack Sinclair in News on 23/Jul/2010 00:36
Governor of Bamyan Province, Dr Habiba Sorabi
“Habiba Sorabi, the governor of the Bamiyan province — where the Taliban terrorized Shiite members of the Hazara minority during their rule, and destroyed ancient Buddhist monuments — rejected a suggestion from a minister in the national government that women would have to “be sacrificed†in return for a deal with the fundamentalist insurgents. Speaking in English to a crew from Channel 4 News, Ms. Sorabi said:
“Why are they not doing the sacrifice? Always we women should do the sacrifice? Always women during the war and during the conflict, for a long period in Afghanistan, women sacrificed. So this is enough I think.”
Ms. Sorabi was not invited to the conference in Kabul, the Afghan capital, on Tuesday.
http://canada-afghanistan.blogspot.com/
The Canada-Afghanistan Blog: Nation-building in Afghanistan is a noble and justified cause, consistent with our broad Canadian values of democracy and human rights. We recognize the military aspect is a vital, but not sufficient, component of this mission.
Riding with Ghosts
Posted by Jack Sinclair in News on 23/Jul/2010 00:30
“Doing the Canadian thing: getting the job done without all of the fuss and fanfare.”
KANDAHAR, AFGHANISTAN—We are motoring down a bare-dirt back road in Kandahar Province, a road where NATO patrols never go. This way is better, explains the ghost behind the wheel, because roads without soldiers tend not to explode….
…Nearly every other civilian foreigner has fled Kandahar. Some have taken refuge inside nearby NATO bases, others have retreated to comparably calmer Kabul. But not Team Canada, despite the rash of bombs and targeted killings that torment this crucial southern city. They are working under the radar to rapidly turn tens of millions of international aid dollars into jobs for thousands of Afghan men.
Fighting-age Afghan men, you understand, some of whom, in their desperation for income, would join the only other gainful employers in town — the cash-paying Taliban, or, more likely, one of the corrupt private armies that Panjwaii Tim assesses bluntly as “akin to the Sicilian mafia.â€
Never mind hearts and minds, Team Canada is about hands and bellies — a largely invisible aid network on the front line, offering stay-alive sustenance to Afghans who might otherwise plant roadside bombs aimed at sending more Canadian bodies home down the Highway of Heroes…
…“They are the best crew in the country,†the blogger, Tim Lynch, an American contractor who does work similar to Team Canada in safer Nangahar Province, wrote in an email to the Star. “They have balls the size of grapefruit.â€
http://freerangeinternational.com/blog/?p=3357
Afghans soldiers during a patrol near Kandahar.
Taliban Attacks Kill 11 Afghan Policemen
Posted by Jack Sinclair in News on 11/Jul/2010 15:31
Kochis (Afghan nomads) on their way from their winter settlement in Kunduz province to the Shiva pastures in Badakshan.
The Kunduz Valley, Kunduz Province, Afghanistan, 1975 © Luke Powell
“KABUL, Afghanistan — Eleven police officers and a district governor were killed in three separate attacks by the Taliban in northeast Afghanistan, NATO and local officials said on Sunday.
Two took place in Kunduz Province, and the third was just outside the province. Throughout the early years of the Afghan war, most insurgent activity was focused in the south, with the north remaining relatively calm. But in the past two years, violence in the north has grown dramatically, especially in Kunduz Province.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/12/world/asia/12afghan.html?_r=1
The 30-Year War in Afghanistan
Posted by Brian in Opinion, Threat Watch on 1/Jul/2010 15:24
This report is republished with permission of STRATFOR
By George Friedman
The Afghan War is the longest war in U.S. history. It began in 1980 and continues to rage. It began under Democrats but has been fought under both Republican and Democratic administrations, making it truly a bipartisan war. The conflict is an odd obsession of U.S. foreign policy, one that never goes away and never seems to end. As the resignation of Gen. Stanley McChrystal reminds us, the Afghan War is now in its fourth phase.
The Afghan War’s First Three Phases
The first phase of the Afghan War began with the Soviet invasion in December 1979, when the United States, along with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, organized and sustained Afghan resistance to the Soviets. This resistance was built around mujahideen, fighters motivated by Islam. Washington’s purpose had little to do with Afghanistan and everything to do with U.S.-Soviet competition. The United States wanted to block the Soviets from using Afghanistan as a base for further expansion and wanted to bog the Soviets down in a debilitating guerrilla war. The United States did not so much fight the war as facilitate it. The strategy worked. The Soviets were blocked and bogged down. This phase lasted until 1989, when Soviet troops were withdrawn. Read the rest of this entry »
CIA Chief: Iran will have nuclear weapons, Taliban not interested in reconciliation
Posted by Jack Sinclair in News, Threat Watch on 28/Jun/2010 23:12
CIA Director Leon Panetta
“We think [the Iranians] have enough low-enriched uranium right now for two weapons. They do have to enrich it, fully, in order to get there. And we would estimate that if they made that decision, it would probably take a year to get there, probably another year to develop the kind of weapon delivery system in order to make that viable.â€
A peace deal in Afghanistan? “The bottom line is that we really have not seen any firm intelligence that there’s a real interest among the Taliban, the militant allies of Al Qaeda, Al Qaeda itself, the Haqqanis, TTP, other militant groups. We have seen no evidence that they are truly interested in reconciliation.â€
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/06/cia-chief-irans-bomb-two-years-away-sanctions-wont-work/
The Meaning of Marjah
Posted by Brian in News, Threat Watch on 22/Feb/2010 18:01
“This report is republished with permission of STRATFOR”
By Kamran Bokhari, Peter Zeihan and Nathan Hughes
On Feb. 13, some 6,000 U.S. Marines, soldiers and Afghan National Army (ANA) troops launched a sustained assault on the town of Marjah in Helmand province. Until this latest offensive, the U.S. and NATO effort in Afghanistan had been constrained by other considerations, most notably Iraq. Western forces viewed the Afghan conflict as a matter of holding the line or pursuing targets of opportunity. But now, armed with larger forces and a new strategy, the war — the real war — has begun. The most recent offensive — dubbed Operation Moshtarak (“Moshtarak†is Dari for “togetherâ€) — is the largest joint U.S.-NATO-Afghan operation in history. It also is the first major offensive conducted by the first units deployed as part of the surge of 30,000 troops promised by U.S. President Barack Obama.
The United States originally entered Afghanistan in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. In those days of fear and fury, American goals could be simply stated: A non-state actor — al Qaeda — had attacked the American homeland and needed to be destroyed. Al Qaeda was based in Afghanistan at the invitation of a near-state actor — the Taliban, which at the time were Afghanistan’s de facto governing force. Since the Taliban were unwilling to hand al Qaeda over, the United States attacked. By the end of the year, al Qaeda had relocated to neighboring Pakistan and the Taliban retreated into the arid, mountainous countryside in their southern heartland and began waging a guerrilla conflict. In time, American attention became split between searching for al Qaeda and clashing with the Taliban over control of Afghanistan. Read the rest of this entry »