Afghanistan news items - We know Afghanistan Can't hold the line as the US quits the country - but here is an article discussing same. A another day in the killing zone - death stats for November 8th.... A look at the Drone War in Afghanistan.....

http://www.juancole.com/2012/11/can-afghan-troops-hold-the-line-as-us-withdraws-and-will-us-seek-to-stay-in-central-asia.html

Can Afghan Troops Hold the Line as US Withdraws, and Will US Seek to Stay in Central Asia?

Posted on 11/09/2012 by Juan

Aljazeera English does what so few US networks are bothering to do: It sends a correspondent to cover the take-over of forward operating bases in Afghanistan by the Afghanistan National Army from US forces, who plan to leave in late 2014. The report and the Afghan commander in Helmand are frank about the challenges of taking on the Taliban there.

The imminent US and NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan is creating opportunities for neighboring Central Asian countries to offer themselves as transit routes for the thousands of departing soldiers, and perhaps to counter continued Russian influence by offering secure bases to the US.

The USG Open Source Center translates an item from a Tajikistan newspaper:

“On 18 October Imruz News reports that the United States plans to offer $500 million to Central Asian states that allow NATO troops from Afghanistan to transit their territory. The article says that Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan will offer use of their roads and railroads to transfer non-military cargo. Some experts say Uzbekistan is trying to “detach” itself completely from Russia to ensure that it remains the primary transfer route for troops from Afghanistan, an idea the article says concurs with 2009 predictions by US diplomats that came to light through Wikileaks that Uzbekistan’s president would want to use the transfer of NATO troops as an opportunity to reassert its independence from Russia. The article says the documents also show that Uzbekistani officials offered to build a US air base in Tirmiz. According to the article, corruption is one of the key concerns about the planned US funding, pointing out that Transparency International ranked Kazakhstan 120th on its 2011 Corruption Perceptions Index, Tajikistan 152nd, and Uzbekistan 177th, so there is doubt that the money will go to the population. The article questions how much money Tajikistan will receive because US officials have made it clear that more than 50% of the money will go to Uzbekistan.
(Dushanbe Imruz News in Tajik — Tajikistan’s only daily newspaper; owned by Orien-Media group; current chief editor is Isfandiyori Nazar who replaced Rajabi Mirzo in 2012) Turkmenistan.

and.....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/insurgents-kill-8-afghan-policemen-soldiers-in-separate-attacks/2012/11/08/0fa68fea-296d-11e2-aaa5-ac786110c486_print.html

Roadside blasts, suicide bomber kill 20 people in spate of attacks across Afghanistan

By Associated Press, Published: November 8

KABUL, Afghanistan — Roadside bombs and a suicide bomber killed 20 people in a spate of attacks across Afghanistan on Thursday, officials said.

The deaths came even as armed clashes between insurgents and Afghan security forces have decreased as the fighting season winds down with the advent of cooler weather in the mountainous nation.

In one of the attacks, 10 civilians, including a child and four men, died as their vehicle struck a land mine in southern Helmand province. Seven other people in the group — which was heading to a wedding — were wounded in the blast, said Ismail Khan Hotak of the provincial security coordination center.

A suicide bomber on a motorcycle blew himself up amid a police patrol in the southern city of Kandahar, killing the three policemen and wounding two, said Ahmad Jawed Faisal, a provincial governor spokesman.

And five troops died when their convoy hit a land mine in eastern Laghman province, according to Sarhadi Zewak, also a governor spokesman.

Also Thursday, two boys were killed by a roadside bomb in Zabul province in southern Afghanistan. Deputy provincial chief Ghulam Gilani Farahi said the device had probably been planted by insurgents targeting police officers patrolling the area.

Insurgents have been increasingly targeting Afghan authorities and security forces now that NATO is drawing down toward a final withdrawal of foreign combat troops in 2014.

Although the Afghan police and army have expanded rapidly to their planned strength of 352,000 members, they are plagued with low morale and a high desertion rate.

Meanwhile, the spate of so-called insider attacks by members of Afghan security forces against foreign troops and their own colleagues has undermined trust between international forces and the Afghan army and police.

Last month, the U.N. mission in Afghanistan urged the insurgents to end the use of roadside bombs, also known as improvised explosive devices or IEDs, saying they were by far the biggest killer of civilians in the conflict. The organization used the term in reference both to bombs detonated by remote control and land mines that go off when a vehicle goes over them.

But the Taliban rejected the assertion that their bombs were causing civilian casualties. Spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid later said the insurgents only use remote-controlled roadside bombs, which allow a bomber to choose the time of the blast and specifically target coalition troops and their Afghan allies — unlike devices that are planted and activated by pressure, from a car, for example.

and......

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/11/drones-afghan-air-war/

Military Stats Reveal Epicenter of U.S. Drone War

• By Noah ShachtmanEmail Author
• November 9, 2012 | 
• 4:00 am | 
• Categories: Af/Pak, Drones

U.S. Reaper drones in a hangar at Kandahar Air Field in Afghanistan. Photo: Noah Shachtman 

Forget Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and all the other secret little warzones. The real center of the U.S. drone campaign is in plain sight — on the hot and open battlefield of Afghanistan.

The American military has launched 333 drone strikes this year in Afghanistan. That’s not only the highest total ever, according to U.S. Air Force statistics. It’s essentially the same number of robotic attacks in Pakistan since the CIA-led campaign there began nearly eight years ago. In the last 30 days, there have been three reported strikes in Yemen. In Afghanistan, that’s just an average day’s worth of remotely piloted attacks. And the increased strikes come as the rest of the war in Afghanistan is slowing down.

The secret drone campaigns have drawn the most scrutiny because of the legal, geopolitical, and ethical questions they raise. But it’s worth remembering that the rise of the flying robots is largely occurring in the open, on an acknowledged battlefield where the targets are largely unquestioned and the attending issues aren’t nearly as fraught.

“The difference between the Afghan operation and the ones operations in Pakistan and elsewhere come down to the fundamental differences between open military campaigns and covert campaigns run by the intelligence community. It shapes everything from the level of transparency to the command and control to the rules of engagements to the process and consequences if an air strike goes wrong,” e-mails Peter W. Singer, who runs the Brookings Institution’s 21st Century Defense Initiative. (Full disclosure: I have a non-resident fellowship there.) “This is why the military side has been far less controversial, and thus why many have pushed for it to play a greater role as the strikes slowly morphed from isolated, covert events into a regularized air war.”

The military has 61 Predator and Reaper “combat air patrols,” each with three or four robotic planes. The CIA’s inventory is believed to be just a fraction of that: 30 to 35 drones total, although there is thought to be some overlap between the military and intelligence agency fleets. The Washington Post reported last month that the CIA is looking for another 10 drones as the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) become more and more central to the agency’s worldwide counterterror campaign.

In Pakistan, those drones are flown with a wink and a nod, to avoid the perception of violating national sovereignty. In Yemen, the robots go after men just because they fit a profile of what the U.S. believes a terrorist to be. In both countries, people are considered legitimate targets if they happen to be male and young and in the wrong place at the wrong time. The White House keeps a “matrix” on who merits robotic death. Congress (outside of the intelligence committees) largely learns about the programs through the papers.

None of these statements is true about the drone war in Afghanistan, where strikes are ordered by a local commander, overseen by military lawyers, conducted with the (sometimes reluctant) blessing of the Kabul government, and used almost entirely to help troops under fire. The UAVs aren’t flown to dodge issues of sovereignty or to avoid traditional military assets. They’re used because they work better — staying in the sky longer than traditional aircraft and employing more advanced sensors to make sure the targets they hit are legit.

Figures on the air war in Afghanistan, supplied by the U.S. military.

The U.S. military is now launching more drone strikes — an average of 33 per month — than at any moment in the 11 years of the Afghan conflict. It’s a major escalation from just last year, when the monthly average was 24.5. And it’s happening while the rest of the American war effort is winding down: There are 34,000 fewer American troops than there were in early 2011; U.S. casualties are down 40 percent from 2010′s toll; militant attacks are off by about a quarter; civilian deaths have declined a bit from their awful peak.

Even the air war is shrinking. Overall surveillance sorties are down, from an average of 3,183 per month last year to 2,954 in 2012. (Drones flew 860 of those sorties in 2011, and  now fly 761 per month today.) Missions in which U.S. aircraft fire their weapons have declined, too. That used to happen 450 times per month on average in 2011. This year, the monthly total dropped to 360.

In other words, drone strikes in Afghanistan now make up about 9 percent of the overall total of aerial attacks. Last year, it was a little more than 5 percent. The UAVs are growing in importance while the rest of the military campaign is receding.

“The numbers are yet another powerful data point illustrating the fact that unmanned systems are here and they are here to stay. They show their growing use, even as overall air strikes go down,” e-mails Singer, who first noticed the drone strike increase.

When Barack Obama began his first term in the White House, many in his administration pushed for keeping the number of troops in Afghanistan relatively small while boosting the number of drone strikes. At the time, Obama decided to go in a different direction. But now, as he gets set for the start of his second term, the president appears ready to embrace his internal critics, and leave Afghanistan to the robots.