Archive for the ‘Afghanistan’ Category

29 dead in Kabul car bomb attack claimed by Taliban – CNN

The blast happened at around 6:40 a.m. Monday (10:10 p.m. ET Sunday) when a Toyota Corolla exploded in the city's west, Afghan Interior Ministry spokesman Najib Danish told CNN.

It is the latest in a string of attacks in recent days by the Taliban, which said it had captured two districts in northern and central Afghanistan at the weekend.

In a statement released by Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid, the group said the Kabul bomb's target was a bus carrying Afghan intelligence staff, but Danish said that all the victims were civilians, including some employees of the Ministry of Mining and Petroleum. Women and children were among the dozens injured, Danish said.

Saleem Rasooli, head of Kabul hospitals, put the death toll at 29 and said at least 40 others were injured in the blast.

A witness told CNN he saw injured people in the streets and others yelling in the bombing's aftermath.

"In the morning I was sleeping when I heard a loud boom, which woke me up," said 33-year-old Safiullah, who gave only his first name.

He looked out of a window in his home and saw plumes of smoke rising from the site as people ran in a panic.

Afghanistan's Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah and President Ashraf Ghani both condemned the attack.

"I strongly condemn the terrorist attack on civil servants in Kabul today," Abdullah said in a tweet.

"Our security institutes will hold perpetrators accountable."

Ghani's office said in statement: "The enemy of Afghanistan can't face our forces in battle field so they target innocent civilians."

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres condemned the attack, saying "the deliberate targeting of civilians constitutes a grave violation of human rights and international humanitarian law and may constitute a war crime."

The uptick in violence comes as President Donald Trump mulls sending more US troops to Afghanistan, amid no signs that the Taliban is weakening.

There are about 8,400 US troops in the country at the moment. The US counterterrorism mission there, which also fights ISIS, is separate from a NATO-led effort to train, advise and assist the Afghan army and police force to fight the Taliban.

CNN's Ehsan Popalzai reported from Kabul and Chieu Luu contributed to this report.

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29 dead in Kabul car bomb attack claimed by Taliban - CNN

A Peace ‘Surge’ to End War in Afghanistan – New York Times

The Taliban has long been willing to talk to the United States, but has resisted sitting down with the Afghan government, which it regards as a puppet regime. The Afghan government has been willing to talk to the Taliban, but wants to ensure its legitimacy is not eroded. The United States has worked only in fits and starts to build a format for talks and preliminary understandings to get substantive negotiations going. Americas primary focus on the war has contributed to an inconsistent peace effort.

For all parties to the Afghan conflict, building and sustaining commitment from leaders and support from broader constituencies for pursuing peace has been much harder than continuing the war. Each side wants to negotiate from a position of strength. Skepticism about the enemys willingness to negotiate has gotten in the way of willingness to test, probe and risk looking too eager.

A surge of United States commitment to negotiating a political settlement would not remove all the obstacles, but it is a prerequisite. A first step in this direction could be for President Trump to declare publicly his intent to make a peace deal. He could show his readiness to work out the details of a military withdrawal and emphasize the protection of United States national security interests in negotiations.

A strong and seasoned diplomatic team would be needed to carry out the presidents commitment. Unless negotiating peace is someones full-time job, there cant be adequate diplomatic vigor. He could support the appointment of an experienced and respected neutral mediator neither American nor Afghan who could seek to generate and sustain momentum for a peace process that will inevitably be buffeted by spikes in violence and wavering political attention spans.

In Afghanistan, unexceptionally, there are vested interests on all sides in continuing the war because of the resources conflict attracts, antipathies toward sharing power, and the difficulty of justifying compromise with an enemy against the backdrop of human losses and entrenched narratives.

The United States can surmount these hurdles by influencing the Talibans calculations through applying military pressure and offering political opportunity, and using our leverage with the Afghan political elite to ensure their commitment to negotiating.

The Taliban is violently opposed to the United States military presence on Afghan soil but does not have aspirations beyond Afghanistan. A peace deal could allow the United States to focus its resources on threats from the region that are directed toward the homeland and core American interests.

Pursuing peace is also the most effective way of managing the regions hedgers and spoilers. There is a consensus among Iran, Russia and Pakistan, as well as the more constructively minded Chinese, for a political settlement. Views on desirable terms no doubt differ, but this consensus is an opportunity for the United States.

Pakistan is the most problematic of the regional powers as it continues offering sanctuary to the Taliban. Pakistan wants a political arrangement in Afghanistan to be hospitable to its interests and inhospitable to Indian interests. But Pakistan would be inclined to support a political settlement that takes seriously its perception of its interests in its own neighborhood.

A peace deal wont happen quickly or easily. Unless it becomes a dominant focus of United States policy, it wont happen at all. If the Trump administration neglects a push for peace, American leaders could find themselves faced with the same choices as now or worse when the next strategy review comes around.

Laurel Miller, a senior foreign policy expert at the RAND Corporation, was a senior State Department official with responsibility for Afghanistan and Pakistan from 2013 to 2017.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on July 24, 2017, in The International New York Times.

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A Peace 'Surge' to End War in Afghanistan - New York Times

Mattis: Authority delegated by Trump in Afghanistan is tactical, not strategic – ArmyTimes.com

WASHINGTON Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis clarified on Friday that while DOD is setting troop numbers for Afghanistan, President Donald Trump is still setting the strategy that will drive those numbers.

What he delegated was a tactical decision about what forces to send, Mattis said of Trump. He delegated not one bit of the strategy by the way. Not one bit. That is his and his alone.

Theres still no strategy, although both the White House and Pentagon have said one is coming soon. However the lack of an overall strategy has not keptMattis from making tactical adjustments that support a more aggressive approach.

Weve changed what were doing, Mattis said. Weve moved some [troops] out that we dont need and put different ones in. Its not like weve just been stalled out here.

For months Trumps security team has been meeting on how to change the course of the now 16-year-old war. As part of that effort, Trump, Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson have made multiple trips to NATO to solicit additional troops from member countries.

The lack of an announced strategy has had the trickle-down effect of stalling commitments from some NATO members who want to know what the plan is before they commit to it.

We know there will be some allies who are willing to send more troops but again their troops are as precious to them as ours are to us, Mattis said. Weve got to get this thing right.

In June Trump delegated the authority to Mattis to set troop levels for Afghanistan, including increasing the current cap beyond the 8,400 U.S. troops now authorized.

The Pentagon is considering sending approximately 4,000 additional forces to Afghanistan to stem the countrys deteriorating security situation.

Im going to figure it out before [making a decision] Mattis said. The last thing I want to do is send troops in there and find I just sent troops in for something I just cancelled.

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Mattis: Authority delegated by Trump in Afghanistan is tactical, not strategic - ArmyTimes.com

Marines facing ‘discouraging’ challenges in Afghanistan – CNN

Then a second rocket slammed into the tarmac just feet away from where a C130 cargo plane would imminently land to ferry us out.

The Marines with us at first appeared unfazed. Some were perhaps young and new to it all, while the older ones stood tall, not flinching. I crouched behind a wheel until those tires were used to race us back toward a shelter.

Seven years ago, it would have been mere minutes before that Taliban rocket team was bombed in retaliation by US forces protecting a thousands-strong base. But in 2017, the US Marines here -- all 300 of them -- seem oddly vulnerable.

They don't leave the wire much, mostly just to train and advise, leaving the fighting to the Afghans. Yet all the same, three separate rocket attacks hit their bases in three days -- two near us -- one injuring 10 Afghan soldiers, and another an 8-year-old boy.

This is the painful reality of Afghanistan 2017. The country is in one of the most violent periods of its recent history, and its challenges are deepening. But the sense of exhaustion, of solutions long having lost their sparkle, pervades. And as President Trump weighs his first move in America's longest war, its 15 years make it absolutely nothing new to many of the Marines currently at its sharp end.

Here's how one hardened, normally optimistic Marine commander, Col. Matthew Reid, talked about lost friends.

"I don't think I've ever bothered to count. Too many, between here and Iraq," he said. "A lot of blood in the ground."

Born on September 11, Reid is back in Afghanistan's Helmand Province for the second time. He quips that the 300 Marines he works with now are the number that "ran the chow hall" when he was last there in 2010.

I asked: How does it feel to have to go at it all over again?

"Discouraging," he said. "There is a definite feeling of a sense of obligation to get this right because of those who have gone before us."

How do you get it right? From the limited perspective of our three-day tour -- mostly inside bases -- it seems the Marines have made a difference here. Most importantly, they are now camped just outside the regional capital of Lashkar Gah, which a year ago was on the brink of falling to the Taliban, whose flag you could see just across its central river.

The Helmand district of Nawa was retaken last week by Afghan National Security Forces, yet at about the same time nearby Gereshk district was attacked by the Taliban, with multiple checkpoints hit, and at one point six overrun. Things are better, but not good. Helmand will probably never be good any time soon, but the Marines' presence and massive aerial firepower have arguably stopped the entire opium-rich region from being swallowed by the Taliban.

But the Marines are only one part of the picture in a country where, according to the US government's own auditors, the Taliban influence or control about half the land. ISIS too, intermittently rises, and then, after coalition airstrikes, falls -- competing to be the most extreme actor in a crowded marketplace.

And the West's ideas for stabilizing the country are running out.

So what are President Trump's options?

But really it is the mood in the capital which tells you things are still slipping, yet again. Long-term Afghan friends discussing for the first time how they might leave. A top executive saying his employees are leaving their large, high-profile Afghan company to protect themselves from possible attack at their central offices.

This is not a time for optimism. There is no sign the Taliban are weakened, even though one Afghan official told me hundreds of mid-level leaders have been taken out in raids over the past year.

Their leadership is more radical than ever, and they are likely to see handsome funds from a productive opium harvest, possibly boosted by a new poppy seed that blooms more quickly, massively increasing production. Afghanistan's bleed is slow, and perhaps hidden or ignored by much of the world, but happening all the same.

Take this final anecdote from our visit to Helmand, when the Marines took us to a remote outpost where they were advising the Afghan army. We were there to see them pull out, removing themselves from a flat stretch of what Colonel Matthew Grosz called "Taliban country" -- a main thoroughfare between insurgent strongholds. But their advisory mission seemed to have run into one issue: There weren't many Afghans to advise.

On paper there were 500 Afghan troops, and 45 US marines. But as Grosz told me: "There's 200 assigned right now." By "assigned," he meant that there were 200 who had existed, physically at the base. But even that was optimistic, as another hundred had never shown up while the Marines were there. In fact, of the hundred they had seen, some were on operations or on patrol. So really there were fifty to a hundred Afghan soldiers at the base, almost enabling one-to-one Marine mentoring sessions.

As we sat in the Helmand runway bomb shelter, waiting for the "all clear" after the rocket attack, I overheard two young Marines chatter about 9/11 as though it was a moment of historical import rather than something they had seen live on TV. That's because for them, it is something their parents mourned when they were probably five or six.

Fifteen years of war sounds exhausting until you remember that for Afghans, it is about 38 years of war -- since the Soviets invaded in 1979.

So, you may ask yourself: When does it end?

Forget emotion, or nationalism, or solutions. Just consider the war, and everyone caught up in it, through the prism of one number: 1,600.

It's become a war whose end will be defined by fatigue, acceptance of lesser evils and which of these above numbers is the hardest to tolerate.

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Marines facing 'discouraging' challenges in Afghanistan - CNN

Photos: 3rd Brigade soldiers come home from Afghanistan – Clarksville Now

FORT CAMPBELL, Ky. (CLARKSVILLENOW) Ninety soldiers of Task Force Rakkasan from the 3rd Brigade Combat Team have returned home after supporting Operation Freedoms Sentinel. The soldiers received a warm welcome home from family and friends Monday morning after a nine-month deployment to Afghanistan.

The Rakkasans main focuses were to provide support to North Atlantic Treaty Organizations Resolute Support train, advise and assist mission as part of Train, and Advise and Assist Command South headquartered in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan with forces also supporting operations out in the continuous Helmand Province in southwestern Afghanistan.

The Rakkasans focus for the train, advise and assist mission was to strengthen the Afghan Army, Police and Security Forces.

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Photos: 3rd Brigade soldiers come home from Afghanistan - Clarksville Now