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Busy in Iraq, US Also Faces Surging Violence in Afghanistan
By Jonathan S. Landay
McClatchy Newspapers
Tuesday 15 April 2008
Washington - While America's attention remains focused on Iraq ,violence
is escalating in Afghanistan, worrying senior U.S. defense officials and commanders
who're struggling to find some 7,000 more American and European troops to combat
resurgent Taliban and al Qaida forces.
There are indications that Islamic militants may have adopted a new strategy
of avoiding U.S and NATO forces and staging attacks in provinces that haven't
seen major unrest and on easy targets such as aid organizations and poorly trained
Afghan police.
A roadside bomb reportedly killed two policemen and injured three Tuesday in
southern Afghanistan, a day after insurgents killed 11 police officers.
A majority of America's NATO allies continue to balk at U.S. requests to send
thousands more of their troops to Afghanistan. At the same time, the renewed
violence in Iraq and the White House decision to suspend further American troop
withdrawals from Iraq this summer will make it harder for the Pentagon to send
more American forces to Afghanistan next year as President Bush has promised.
"I'm deeply concerned," Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Senate Armed Services Committee last Thursday.
"In this economy of force operation, we do what we can. Requirements exist
that we simply cannot fill and won't likely be able to fill until conditions
improve in Iraq."
Some 3,500 additional U.S. Marines arrived in southern Afghanistan recently,
but they're due to leave at the end of the year and no replacements have been
identified.
Last year saw the worst bloodshed in Afghanistan since the 2001 U.S.-led intervention
that overthrew the Taliban regime and drove Osama bin Laden and his core supporters
into Pakistan's remote tribal region, where they've re-established bases for
training terrorists and plotting new attacks, according to U.S. intelligence
officials.
With Afghanistan due to hold a presidential election next year, pressure is
growing on the United States and NATO to contain the insurgency so the U.S.-backed
government of Prime Minister Hamid Karzai and the United Nations can proceed
with the complex balloting preparations.
Several new reports by nongovernmental groups have found that insurgent violence
has surged in the first months of this year to a level as high as or higher
than it was during the same period last year.
"The data demonstrates a solid escalation of conflict within the first
three months of the year as well as a substantial growth over the same period
last year," says a study by the Afghanistan NGO Safety Office, a group
funded by the European Commission that charts security trends for nongovernmental
organizations, such as aid organizations.
There were 704 insurgent attacks from January through March this year, compared
with 424 during the first three months of 2007, the report says. At least 463
civilians have been killed in the first quarter of this year, according to the
report, compared with 264 in the first quarter of last year.
Several U.S. officials, who requested anonymity because they weren't authorized
to speak publicly, said that classified U.S. data corroborate the Afghanistan
NGO Safety Office analysis.
The 16 attacks on aid organizations in the first quarter of 2008 that the report
attributes to insurgents is double the number in the same period in 2007. There
also have been increases over last year in the numbers of aid workers killed,
wounded and abducted, the report says.
It says that while the five suicide bombings so far this year are a 15-month
low, the bombs have become more powerful and are causing more casualties.
The report agrees with several other new studies that have found that insurgent
attacks have been rising outside southern and eastern Afghanistan, where the
vast majority of the 47,000 U.S. and NATO -led troops are deployed.
"Operationally, the Taliban appear to be putting more resources into attacking
in provinces where allied forces are weaker and which are less accustomed to
clashes," says an April 6 analysis written by John McCreary, a former
senior intelligence analyst for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for dNovus RDI, a
Texas-based contracting firm.
"They are starting to show the manifestations of a strategy" of keeping
under-strength U.S. and NATO forces tied down in the south and east while stoking
instability elsewhere, McCreary said in an interview.
David Lamm, a retired Army colonel who served as chief of staff with the multinational
forces command in Afghanistan, said the Taliban wanted to prevent next year's
elections by avoiding confrontations with superior international forces and
hitting "soft targets" such as Afghan police, government and U.N.
officials and aid organizations.
The insurgents want to make "many places in Afghanistan untenable enough
to make the U.N. security folks say they are not sure they can run the elections,"
said Lamm, now at the National Defense University in Washington.
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The Afghanistan NGO Safety Office report: http://media.mcclatchydc.com/smedia/2008/04/15/17/Landay-ANSO.source.prod_affiliate.91.pdf
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