12 U.S. troops killed in Afghanistan in 2 days

The fatalities Monday and Tuesday bring the total since Saturday to 19. An Estonian soldier and three Afghan Supreme Court clerks are also killed.

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Scores of Karzai administration officials on CIA’s pay roll: US official

(Sify)   A day after it was revealed that a close aide of Afghanistan President Hamid Karzazi, Mohammed Zia Salehi, is on the pay roll of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), a US official has claimed that several members of the Karzai administration are actually being paid by the intelligence agency to maintain a source of information. Read more

Winning Hearts & Minds: NATO Leaves Hundreds of Afghan Families Homeless

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Karzai: Private contractors ‘looting and stealing,’ working with terrorists

(RAW STORY)   Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Sunday defended his decision to ban private security contractors from operating in public in Afghanistan, saying many of the organizations tasked with providing security are engaging in terrorist activities, working with “Mafia-like” organizations and “looting and stealing from the Afghan people.”

Karzai also speculated that some groups may be acting as security contractors during the day and as terrorist groups “at nighttime.”

Last week, Karzai gave security contractors working in Afghanistan four months to cease operations. In an interview with Christiane Amanpour on ABC’s This Week, the Afghan president said the move was necessary because the for-profit contractors were destabilizing the country’s fight against militants.

“We’ve decided to bring an end to the presence of these security companies who are running a parallel security structure to the Afghan government,” Karzai said, “who are not only causing corruption in this country, but who are looting and stealing from the Afghan people, who are causing a lot of harassment to our civilians, who we don’t know whether they are security companies in daytime and then some of them turn into terroristic groups at nighttime.”

Karzai argued that security contractors “are wasting billions of dollars in resources and they are definitely an obstruction, an impediment in a most serious manner, to the growth of Afghanistan’s security institutions, the police and army.”

Karzai said there are 40,000 or 50,000 Afghans working for private security contractors who are earning better pay than the Afghan government can provide. “Why would an Afghan young man come to the police when he can get a job at a security firm, have leeway, without discipline — so naturally our security forces will find it difficult to grow.”

“I’m appealing to the US taxpayer not to allow their hard earned money to be wasted on groups that are not only providing lots of inconvenience to the Afghan people but are actually, God knows, in contract with Mafia-like groups and perhaps also funding militants, and insurgents and terrorists with those funds,” he said.

Karzai’s decision comes as the US is becoming increasingly reliant on private contractors to support the fight against the Taliban. Contractor employees now outnumber US troops in Afghanistan, and are seeing record rates of casualties.

Controversy over the role of contractors in Afghanistan has raged for some time. In March, it was alleged that a US marine was killed by two contractors who were found with “copious amounts of opium.”

And Karzai is not the only one who thinks contractors are undermining the mission in Afghanistan. A report from the Army Times last year made similar assertions.

“Ill-disciplined private security guards escorting supply convoys to coalition bases are wreaking havoc as they pass through western Kandahar province … and undermining coalition efforts to bring a greater sense of security to the Afghan people, particularly because the locals associate the contractors with the coalition,” the Times reported.

lt has also emerged that some contractors have been paying off the Taliban “to the tune of tens of millions of dollars” to keep militants from attacking supply lines, in an arrangement some have described as a “protection racket.”

In April, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who would soon take over as head of US forces in Afghanistan, said the US had too many contractors in the country.

“We have created in ourselves a dependency on contractors that is greater than it ought to be,” McChrystal said.

“I think we’ve gone too far. I think that the use of contractors was done with good intentions so that we could limit the number of military. I think in some cases we thought it would save money. I think it doesn’t save money.”

The following video was broadcast on ABC’s This Week, August 22, 2010.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kmal-i2ClU4

http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0822/karzai-contractors-looting-stealing-terrorists/

U.S. Expands Its Footprint At Bagram Air Force Base

(HUFF PO)   Sometime around the spring of 2011, lawmakers will begin to ramp up a debate on whether or not the United States should begin withdrawing forces from Afghanistan according to the “conditions-based” timetable established by the announced July 2011 “deadline” — a term I am using with as much flexibility as I can muster. But over in Afghanistan, the debate may be largely settled.

Danger Room’s Spencer Ackerman is at Bagram Air Force Base today for the first time since 2008, and he sees the base expanding and hardening into something very permanent. The base is packed with planes of all stripes and the base’s main road has become a “two-lane parking lot of Humvees, flamboyant cargo big-rigs from Pakistan known as jingle trucks, yellow DHL shipping vans, contractor vehicles and mud-caked flatbeds.” There are hangars going up, cranes everywhere, and cement is “being manufactured right inside Bagram’s walls” by a Turkish contractor. Ackerman captures the change thusly:

I haven’t been able to learn yet how much it all cost, but Bagram is starting to feel like a dynamic exurb before the housing bubble burst. There was actually a traffic jam this afternoon on the southern side of the base, owing to construction-imposed bottlenecks, something I didn’t think possible in late summer 2008.

And here’s your population-centered counterinsurgency update:

Troops here told me of shepherd boys scowling their way around Bagram’s outskirts, slingshotting off the occasional rock in hopes of braining an American. Again, something else I wouldn’t have believed two years ago.

Ackerman’s bottom line: “Anyone who thinks the United States is really going to withdraw from Afghanistan in July 2011 needs to come to this giant air base an hour away from Kabul.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/09/us-expands-its-footprint_n_675566.html

Afghan War Diary, 2004-2010

25th July 2010 5:00 PM EST WikiLeaks has released a document set called the Afghan War Diary, an extraordinary compendium of over 91,000 reports covering the war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010.

The reports, while written by soldiers and intelligence officers, and mainly describing lethal military actions involving the United States military, also include intelligence information, reports of meetings with political figures, and related details.

The document collection is available on a dedicated webpage.

The reports cover most units from the US Army with the exception of most US Special Forces’ activities. The reports do not generally cover top secret operations or European and other ISAF Forces operations.

We have delayed the release of some 15,000 reports from the total archive as part of a harm minimization process demanded by our source. After further review, these reports will be released, with occasional redactions, and eventually in full, as the security situation in Afghanistan permits.

The data is provided in HTML (web), CSV (comma-separated values) and SQL (database) formats, and was rendered into KML (Keyhole Markup Language) mapping data that can be used with Google Earth. Please note that the checksums will change.

http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Afghan_War_Diary,_2004-2010

Afghan attorney general says US envoy ‘threatened’ him

(RAW STORY)   KABUL — Afghanistan’s top prosecutor Tuesday accused US ambassador Karl Eikenberry of threatening to have him removed from his job if he did not take action against an Afghan banker allegedly involved in fraud.

Attorney general Mohammad Is’haq Alko told reporters that Eikenberry had violated “diplomatic ethics” by ordering him to have the banker arrested.

“Against all diplomatic ethics, the US ambassador tells me: ‘If you don’t jail him, you must resign’,” Alko told reporters, citing a recent conversation with Eikenberry.

“Do diplomatic ethics allow the attorney general of a country to be threatened in such a manner?” Alko said.

He said his office did not have enough evidence against the banker, Rafiullah Azimi, who was allegedly involved in a corruption case linked to a former minister now living in Britain after eluding an arrest warrant in March.

“The US embassy has a regular dialogue and a strong partnership with the attorney general and his office, including robust mentoring and training programmes,” the embassy said in response.

“The ambassador?s discussions with his counterparts are private and we?re not going to comment on them. The United States continues to respect that personnel decisions are for the Afghan Government to make.”

Alko also accused the US and Britain — the main countries providing troops for the war against the Taliban — of not cooperating with Kabul in arresting Afghan officials living abroad but wanted in Afghanistan on corruption charges.

He said that during his meeting with Eikenberry “I answered calmly: ‘If I am to resign I’ll submit my resignation to our president or our parliament”.

Afghanistan is one of the world’s most corrupt countries, according to monitoring organisation Transparency International, which rates it just above lawless Somalia.

A US media report said Monday that billions of dollars in international aid money is regularly shipped out of Kabul on scheduled commercial flights, packed into suitcases, some of it even registered with customs.

A senior US lawmaker on Monday angrily blocked billions of dollars in aid to the war-torn country, vowing not to give “one more dime” until Afghan President Hamid Karzai acts against corruption.

Representative Nita Lowey, who sits on the powerful committee in charge of the budget, said she would hold hearings into allegations that top Afghan officials flew suitcases full of cash from US aid to foreign safe havens.

Alko told reporters Tuesday that the attorney general’s office was clean.

http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0629/afghan-attorney-general-envoy-threatened/

Army plans $100M Afghanistan special ops HQ

(MILITARY TIMES)   The Army is planning to spend as much as $100 million to expand its Special Operations headquarters in northern Afghanistan, evidence of its increasing reliance on covert operations.

The project is one of many in the Obama administration, as it seeks billions in budget increases to counter expanded terror threats from abroad. It also comes as thousands of U.S. troops arrive in Afghanistan as part of President Obama’s ordered buildup.

According to a contracting notice posted on a government Web site, the compound in the northern city of Mazar-e Sharif will include housing for personnel, a training area, medical aid station and tactical operations center. News of the new center was first reported by Wired Magazine.

U.S. reliance on Special Operations forces has been steadily on the rise since the 2001 terrorist attacks, with its budget growing from $2.2 billion to $9 billion nine years later.

Ken McGraw, a spokesman for U.S. Special Operations Command, on Friday confirmed that Special Operations forces are now operating in about 73 countries — compared to 68 last year.

Special operations units are trained in specialized warfare skills, like capturing fugitives and conducting sabotage, and they work quietly with the armed forces of small countries.

Nowhere have these skills been considered more valuable than Afghanistan, where U.S. officials are looking to wipe out Taliban strongholds without using the kind of conventional weapons that destroy cities and kill civilians.

Accordingly, the Obama administration — like the Bush administration — has relied heavily on these forces and sought to expand their capacity.

In 2006, a high-level strategy document by the Pentagon called for expanding the ranks of special operations forces, including adding five Special Forces battalions and three Army Ranger companies.

Officials say the expansion was necessary to return some Special Forces units — now consumed by operations in Iraq and Afghanistan — to countries where they traditionally worked.

Obama’s 2011 budget plan calls for a 6 percent increase in the Special Operations Command’s budget, from $9 billion in 2010 to $9.8 billion in 2011.

The plan also would add 3,651 more civil affairs and psychological operations forces and 4,027 combat and combat service support troops to the special operations forces by 2015.

http://militarytimes.com/news/2010/06/ap_spec_ops_hq_060410w/

Soldiers Accused of Murder and Drug Use

New 5.56 ammo used in combat in Afghanistan

(MILITARY TIMES)   The Marine Corps has fielded its new, enhanced 5.56mm rifle round in Afghanistan, and it’s just beginning to reach thousands of grunts here.

The two North Carolina-based battalions involved in the initial assault on the Taliban stronghold of Marjah — 1st Battalion, 6th Marines, and 3rd Battalion, 6th Marines — were among the first units to receive a large shipment of Special Operations Science and Technology ammunition, said Chief Warrant Officer 2 Joshua Smith, battalion gunner for 3/6, headquartered here in Marjah. Each battalion received 75,000 rounds, but neither used it during the assault.

“As soon as I got it, I pushed it out to the companies and basically did a one-for-one swap,” Smith said.

The companies field the new SOST rounds as they see fit, Smith said, and may be using their existing supplies of standard 5.56mm ammo first. Grunts with India Company, 3/6, expected to receive large quantities of the round May 14.

First Battalion, 3rd Marines, currently deployed in the Nawa district of Helmand province, recently received its supply of SOST rounds, and other units in Afghanistan that have not received it are expected to get it soon.

The round uses an open-tip match-round design common in sniper ammunition, and is considered “barrier blind,” meaning its aim stays truer through windshields, walls and other barriers. Initially, it was considered as a way to increase the lethality of Marines carrying the M4 carbine, which has less stopping power than the M16A4 because of its shorter barrel, but was approved for use in January with both rifles.

Only one major Marine 5.56mm weapon system will not use SOST rounds, officials said: the M249 squad automatic weapon. The new ammo fits the SAW but is not currently produced in the linked fashion commonly employed with the light machine gun.

Infantrymen with 3/6 who have seen SOST ammo said they haven’t used it enough to determine whether it performs better than standard 5.56mm rounds.

“I got mine from a [military policeman] attached to the company, but I haven’t shot them yet,” said a lance corporal who serves as a fire team leader for India Company 3/6. He is one of the few Marines interviewed by Marine Corps Times in Afghanistan who was in possession of the ammunition, and he had only 20 rounds.

Initial studies conducted by 1/6’s gunner, Chief Warrant Officer 2 Matthew Harris, showed that Taliban insurgents hit by the new round suffered larger exit wounds, but information has been limited, Smith said. Attempts to reach Harris were unsuccessful.

Smith said Taliban tactics play a role in the limited amount of information the Marines have been able to collect.

“The Taliban usually doesn’t leave behind bodies or wounded,” he said.

Deadlier ammo

Three fast facts about the new Special Operations Science and Technology round being used by Marines in Afghanistan:

1. It’s “barrier blind”: That means the SOST round stays on target better than the Corps’ existing 5.56mm round after penetrating windshields, car doors and other objects.

2. It has more stopping power. The SOST round also stays on target longer in open air and has increased stopping power through “consistent, rapid fragmentation which shortens the time required to cause incapacitation of enemy combatants,” according to Navy Department documents.

3. It was designed with hunters in mind. At 62 grains, the new ammo weighs about the same as most NATO rounds. It has a typical lead core with a solid-copper shank and is considered a variation of Federal Cartridge’s Federal Trophy Bonded Bear Claw round, which was developed for big-game hunting and is touted in a company news release for its ability to crush bone.

http://militarytimes.com/news/2010/05/marine_sost_052410w/

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