Mediaboss Marketing

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan -- A suicide bomber struck a NATO convoy near the southern Afghan city of Kandahar on Wednesday killing two U.S. service members, the Pentagon said.

The Taliban promptly took responsibility for the attack, and a spokesman for the insurgents said the bombing allegedly killed 15 soldiers - a claim that appeared exaggerated as many similar Taliban claims have been in the past.

Navy Capt. Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman, said two U.S. service members were killed in action in the attack and that more information would be provided when it became available.

In their claim of responsibility, the Taliban also said the attack destroyed two armored tanks. The insurgents' spokesman for southern Afghanistan, Qari Yusuf Ahmadi, said fighter Asadullah Kandahari was the "hero" who carried out the attack with a small pick-up truck, packed with explosives.

U.S. troops assess the damage to an armored NATO vehicle after a Taliban suicide attack in Kandahar province, Afghanistan, Aug. 2, 2017.

Reuters/Ahmad Nadeem

Kandahar province was the Taliban spiritual heartland and the headquarters of their leadership during the five-year rule of the Taliban, which ended with the U.S. invasion in 2001.

Eyewitness Ghulam Ali, who runs a mechanics shop near the attack site on the outskirts of the city of Kandahar, said the intensity of the blast knocked him out.

When he came to, he saw a military vehicle on fire on the road. He stepped out of his shop but a sudden burst of gunfire drove him back inside, he said. Then, helicopters arrived and he saw soldiers being taken away from the scene but could not determine the extent of their injuries.

Play Video

As part of our series, Issues That Matter, we take a look at America's longest war as we approach the 17th year of the conflict in Afghanistan. F...

Shah Agha Popal, who runs a vehicle parts shop also nearby, said he also saw soldiers being taken away by two helicopters.

"But I couldn't tell if they were wounded or if they were dead," he said.

The combined U.S. and NATO troop contingent currently in Afghanistan is about 13,500. The Trump administration is deciding whether to send about 4,000 or more U.S. soldiers to Afghanistan in an attempt to stem Taliban gains.

The attack came as Afghan authorities in western Herat province tightened security ahead of a mass funeral for the victims there of an attack the previous evening that killed 32, said provincial governor's spokesman Jilani Farhad.

Play Video

The U.S. military is investigating an airstrike that accidentally killed at least a dozen Afghan police Friday in Helmand Province. The area -- i...

Another 66 worshippers were injured in the horrific suicide assault Tuesday evening. As worshippers began their evening prayers a suicide attacker sprayed bullets at the private guards protecting the mosque before entering inside and detonating his explosives.

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, claimed responsibility for the mosque bombing saying it was carried out by two of its fighters. ISIS said in a statement that the two men, whom it identified as Amir Qassim and Tayeb al-Kharasani, also used automatic rifles in the Shiite mosque before they detonated themselves.

The statement claimed that the attack killed nearly 50 and wounded more than 80.

Witnesses said demonstrators brought 31 bodies near the provincial governor's residence in a large freezer truck. Protesters demanded the people behind the brutal assault be arrested.

Play Video

For the first time in several years, U.S. Marines are on the ground in Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan. They've returned because the Tal...

On Monday, after taking credit for an attack on the Iraq Embassy in the heart of the Afghan capital Kabul, the ISIS affiliate in Afghanistan warned it would strike Shiites. The Sunni militant group considers Shiite Muslims as apostates.

Also on Wednesday the Taliban ambushed and killed Jaghatu District Gov. Manzur Hussain and a passenger in his car, Ghazni provincial police chief Mohammad Mustafa Mayar said.

The Taliban have stepped up their attacks in recent weeks hitting district headquarters, government officials and Afghan National Security Forces with increasing frequency.

Excerpt from:
Afghanistan suicide attack kills 2 U.S. service members ...

President Trump's national security adviser H.R. McMaster onSaturday defended President Trump's strategy on winning the war in Afghanistan.

The president has not announced a comprehensive strategy on Afghanistan yet, but according to McMaster he has madea number of decisions" on the military approach there.

"The presidents already made some important decisions onAfghanistan," McMaster said inan interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt that airedSaturday.

McMaster said Trump does not necessarily want to telegraph his intentions. "Youve heard inpieces" the strategy, he said.

"And what were endeavoring to do is pull this all together in a regional strategy thatmakes sense," he continued. Trump has authorized the Pentagon to take the lead ona number of military decisions during his administration.

McMaster also added that the White House wants to see a "change in behavior" from interested groups in the region, particularly Pakistan. The top aide said that while Pakistan has taken "great losses" fighting the Taliban, they have done so "selectively."

"This is Pakistan in particular that we want to really see a change in and a reduction of their support for these groups," he said. "I mean, this is of course, you know, a very paradoxical situation, right, where Pakistan is taking great losses."

"They have fought very hard against these groups," McMaster argued, "but theyve done so really only selectively."

He said that Trump is making clear that the U.S. will no longer tolerate any support for the Taliban or related groups.

"The president has also made clear that he, that we need to see a change in behavior of those in the region, which includes those who are providing safe haven and support bases for the Taliban," McMaster added.

McMaster defended the campaignin Afghanistan, arguing they had seen "tremendous" success in the country.

"Theres a tremendously successful campaign going on with Afghan forces in the lead. Its an unreported campaign in Nangarhar Province of Afghanistan," McMaster said.

"Were not gonna talk tactics anymore, right?" headded. "Everythingbefore was, you know, troop levels and very specific details announcing to theenemy years in advance exactly the number of troops youre gonna have, exactly what theyregonna do and what theyre not gonna do. And so the president has said, that 'That is not the wayto fight a war. It never has been.' This is an invention of recent years."

McMaster also said the president "absolutely" has confidencein the commander in charge of the U.S. war effort against the Taliban and ISIS in Afghanistan.

The general defended Trump's decisions in Afghanistan andthe commander in charge of the mission following reports that the president wantsto fire him.

According to reports this week of a situation room meeting in July, Trump believes Gen. John Nicholson - the commanderin charge of Afghanistan -is "losing" the war inthe country.

"Ive known him for many years," McMaster said of Nicholson. "I cant imagine a more capable commander on any mission."

He said the president "absolutely" has confidence inNicholson. McMaster also reportedly defended the generalin the situation room meeting.

McMaster himself has been the target of right-wing Trump supporters outraged at the general'sdecision to renewsecurity clearance for Susan Rice, former PresidentBarack ObamaBarack ObamaOvernight Tech: Senate panel approves FCC nominees | Dem group invests in progressive startups | Tech groups rip Trump immigration plan Russian PM: New sanctions amount to 'full-scale trade war' America's divisions: The greatest strategic vulnerability of our time MORE's national security adviser.

"General McMaster and Iare workingvery welltogether," Trump said in a statement Friday. "He is a good man and very pro-Israel. I am grateful for the work he continues to doserving our country."

McMaster in the interview with Hewitt alsoargued that Trump's loosening of restrictions on the military was beginning to see a "payoff."

"The president has said that, he does not want to place restrictions on the military that undermine our ability to win battles in combat," McMaster added. "He has lifted those restrictions, and youre beginning to see the payoff of that as well."

Link:
McMaster: Trump has made 'a number of decisions' on Afghanistan - The Hill

The Pentagon on Thursday identified the two U.S. soldiers killed Wednesday in southern Afghanistan when theirconvoy was hit by a vehicle packed with explosives. The two menwere paratroopers and on their first deployment. Four other soldiers were wounded in the attack.

Spc.Christopher M. Harris, 25, of Jackson Springs, N.C., and Sgt. Jonathon M. Hunter, 23, of Columbus, Ind., were assigned to the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 82nd Airborne Division, an Army release said. They died outside of Kandahar city and mark the eighth and ninth Americans killed by hostile fire in Afghanistan this year.

Chris and Jon lived and died as warriors, said Col. Toby Magsig, commander of the 82nd Airbornes 1st Brigade Combat Team in the release. The 82nd Airborne has troops spread across Afghanistan. The paratroopers are stationed at severalforward operating bases where U.S and NATO forces are located and are responsible for conducting security patrols in those areas.

[Two U.S. troops killed in attack on NATO convoy in Afghanistan]

Harris joined the Army in 2013 and Hunter in 2014, the release said.

Spc. Christopher Harris was an extraordinary young man and a phenomenal Paratrooper, Magsig added.Sgt. Jonathon Hunter was the leader we all want to work for strong, decisive, compassionate, and courageous. He was revered by his Paratroopers and respected throughout his unit.

On Thursday, another soldier was killed outside Kabul and six others were wounded. Their nationality was yet to be released but news reports indicated that thetroops were Americans. More than 2,000 U.S. troops have died in Afghanistan since the United States invaded the country in 2001.

The flurry of attacks on Western troops comes as Washington struggles with formulatinga strategy for what has become Americas longest-running war. The Pentagon was set to send up to 4,000 additional troops to help prop up the struggling Afghan army, but President Trump has balked at investing more resourcesinto a war he said the United States was losing, according to an NBC News report. There are 8,500 U.S. and 5,000 NATO troops in Afghanistan.

[One soldier killed, several wounded in latest attack on NATO troops in Afghanistan]

Trump, according to the NBC report, also said he was considering firing the commander of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, Army Gen. John Nicholson.

Although NATO forces have been attacked in recent days, the majority of Taliban offensives have targeted Afghan forces and civilians. The Afghan security forces have suffered more than 6,000 casualties since the beginning of the year and civilians are dying in record numbers, a recent United Nations report said.

Continued here:
Pentagon identifies two US troops killed in Afghanistan - Washington Post

KABUL (Reuters) - Romanian soldiers from the NATO-led Resolute Support mission in Afghanistan killed an Afghan policeman who was trying to carry out an insider attack after a training session in the southern province of Kandahar on Saturday, officials said.

One Romanian was wounded in the attack while an Afghan policeman was wounded in the crossfire, a statement from Resolute Support headquarters in Kabul said.

"The advisers had completed a scheduled law enforcement training and were preparing to return to base when they were attacked by a member of the Afghan National Civil Order Police," the statement said.

Romanian soldiers providing security returned fire and killed the attacker, it said.

The attack, which came as the United States is considering increasing the number of troops it has in Afghanistan, was the latest in a series of so-called "green-on-blue" incidents that have complicated the training and assistance mission.

In June, three American soldiers were killed and seven wounded in two separate incidents, a week apart. In May last year, two members of the Romanian special forces were killed and a third was wounded when a local policeman opened fire on them.

Reporting by James Mackenzie; Editing by Stephen Powell

Continue reading here:
NATO soldiers suppress attempted insider attack in Afghanistan - Reuters

You want to know all Trump has to do to understand how badly weve lost in Afghanistan? Get the Air Force to carry him over there and fly along the route from Kabul to Kandahar, or Kabul to Jalalabad, and have a look at the roads.

Yep, thats all you need to know. Roads. We spent $3 billion over 15 years paving roads in Afghanistan. In 2001, they had exactly 50 miles of paved roads. By 2016, we had paved somewhere between 8,000 and 10,000 miles of them. But that same year, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction did an inspection and reported that 95 percent of those roads were either damaged or completely destroyed and 85 percent of the roads we paved were not properly maintained. Not to mention that almost every mile of those roads on which we spent $3 billion are too unsafe to travel on. According to the United States Agency for International Development, an arm of the State Department, it would cost us another $8 billion to get those godforsaken roads up and running again. With no guarantee you wouldnt get your ass blown off by an IED in the first mile.

It sounds weird, doesnt it? Saying the whole thing boils down to roads? But roads are absolutely essential to any functioning country. Youve got to be able to get from one place to another without dying . . . or at least without completely destroying your car or truck or bus or taxi in the process. Youve got to get food from the field to the store to the table. Youve got to get goods to market. Youve got to be able to transport materials into the country that arent produced there. Youve got to load huge spools of wire on trucks and drive them into the boonies to be able to string up the wire to provide electricity. Without the trucks, without the roads, without the basic texture of transportation, the whole thing falls apart.

Ive got an idea. Congress appropriates all those tax dollars of ours were wasting in Afghanistan. How about flying all 535 members of Congress and the Senate over to Kabul and giving them each a scooter and a full tank of gas and a couple of gallons of water and turn them loose to have a look at a country that really, really believes in low, low taxes and let em have a look at what those low, low taxes pay for. Let em wheel those scooters down roads pockmarked with IED craters, past the rusting hulks of trucks and buses that rolled over on a turn, and there were no tow trucks to move them out of the way. Let em have an up close look at a country that looks for mile after mile like it hasnt recovered from a nuclear holocaust, nearly all the arable land planted as far as the eye can see with poppies farmed for opium thats refined into heroin, a country filled with men with the hollowed out eyes of junkies and women whose eyes you cant fucking see at all, along with the women themselves most of the time. Let em stop and have a word or two with some locals and hear how much they love the way weve gone about solving their problems with drones, smart bombs and M240 machine gun bullets. Let em choke on the desert dust and the smoke from charcoal stoves and the pollen of a kazillion billion trillion poppies. And let em try the whole congressional mob of them let em try to find a single outlet outside of Kabul to charge their goddamn cell phones. Just one.

Let em ride those scooters down mile after mile of dust-choked roads checking out what happens in a true Randian nirvana where you deregulate down to no regulations at all, and you lower taxes down to no taxes at all, where the opposing sides in political battles fight actual wars against each other with real bullets rather than using pitty-patty nasty rhetoric in their pitty-patty rep ties on pitty-patty cable news shows.

Folks, if we cant do something as basic as pave Afghanistans roads and convince the government to keep them safe and passable, weve lost. We have no business remaining there for one more minute. We should pack up all of our tanks and Humvees and MRAPs and Howitzers and helicopters, not to mention all of our bulldozers and earthmovers and asphalt-layers, and we should load all of our soldiers on C-130s and get the hell out of there. Russia learned this lesson. Thats why one day they packed up their war making stuff and drove north across the border with Uzbekistan and never looked back.

And what are we doing? Sitting around Pentagon war rooms and on cable news panels talking about some kind of reset, a new strategy that will take us from 16 straight years of losing and get us to winning. Four thousand more troops? Troops, schmoops. Trump is making noises about relieving H.R. McMaster of his post as National Security Adviser and pinning a fourth star on his shoulder and sending him over there with the mission of winning a war that has cost us more than 1600 American dead and countless Afghan deaths. What are they thinking in the Trump White House? What are those national security pundits on the shows in Washington thinking? Its a goddamned magical mystery tour of military madness, is what it is. And no amount of talk, no new strategy, no amount of money, no additional troops are going to change it. Ill tell you one thing theyre not doing. Even with H.R. McMaster, the author of Dereliction of Duty, in the White House running the National Security Council, the guy who wrote a book that rips actual skin from the suck-ass generals who commanded the war in Vietnam for their feckless leadership, theyre not doing much studying of military history.

Sixteen years and were still there? Its like our team lost a baseball game and just stayed on the field, standing out there on second and third base in the outfield when theyve turned out the lights and everybody else went home. Its pure folly to think that theres some answer the White House can come up with, some new commander they can insert like a new ammunition clip, and thats going to solve the problem. Trump is thinking of sending McMaster over? Why? To punish him for getting rid of little Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the snipe hunter who took Dim Bulb Nuez by the hand and led him around the White House at midnight in search of Susan Rices intercepts? Because McMaster doesnt measure up to the impossibly high standard set by Michael Flynn?

Its like changing the strategy in Vietnam from search and destroy to strategic hamlets to Vietnamization. Like replacing a strutting peacock, Westmoreland, with plain-spoken-soldiers-soldier Abrams. We never learn. There arent enough monuments to those who sacrificed in furtherance of our follies on the Mall in Washington. We need the Global War on Terror Wall to go with the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall and the Korean War Memorial. The way things are going, they should be sure to leave room for the Second Korean War memorial.

McMaster made his career by pacifying the outlaw town of Tal Afar in Iraq for exactly one year the year we put his infantry battalion in there backed up by millions of tons of artillery ordnance and several wings of Air Force fighter bombers. Then we pulled him and his battalion out and Tal Afar went back to being the outlaw smuggling town its been for the last five or six centuries. I guess if we gave McMaster eleventy-seven infantry battalions and six or eight kazillion artillery rounds and the entire United States Air Force and a couple of aircraft carriers full of Navy fighters he could pacify most of the towns in Afghanistan. At least until we pull McMaster and all of his battalions and artillery and fighter bombers out, like we did in Iraq. Around and around and around we go, and where it all stops, nobody knows!

Trump doesnt know this history, of course.Which is why he thinks generals know big secrets and have magic powers. There were a few in our past who actually knew secrets and had magic powers.My grandfather, Gen. Lucian K. Truscott Jr. was one of them.The magic he had that nobody talked about then or now because its so horrible to contemplate was black magic: he gave the commands in North Africa, Sicily, Italy and Eastern France that spent the lives of literally tens of thousands of American boys in order to kill hundreds of thousands of German boys and drive the Nazis back into their holes in Bavaria. The secret to winning was killing just enough of us in order to kill a sufficiently large number of them that they threw up their hands and cried out and promised to be good boys and not do bad stuff anymore.

The Russians tried black magicin Afghanistan and even that didnt work. Thats why theyre sitting back in Moscow grinning ear to ear, and were over there rooting around in the dust, looking for the secret to winning and repeating their mistakes. The secret is that the generals old black magic doesnt work anymore.

Read this article:
Why we lost the war in Afghanistan - Salon