Group items tagged

"The nation's top military official said Thursday that Pakistan's spy agency played a direct role in supporting the insurgents who carried out the deadly attack on the American Embassy in Kabul last week. "

"From Ghazi Air Base in Pakistan, the modified MH-60 helicopters made their way to the garrison suburb of Abbottabad, about 70 miles from the center of Islamabad. Aboard were Navy SEALs, flown across the border from Afghanistan, along with tactical signals, intelligence collectors, and navigators using highly classified hyperspectral imagers."

" United States officials modified their narrative on Osama bin Laden's killing, saying that the Pakistanis had little involvement. However, well-placed security sources maintain that the operation was without a doubt a joint Pakistan-US effort and that all logistics were arranged inside Pakistan. "

Afghan officials and the country's former central bank governor have been swapping blame for the worst financial crisis in Afghan history. Abdul Qadeer Fitrat, Afghan Central Bank head, fled to US after accusing powerful politicians of financial malfeasance at the largest Afghan bank, where over $900 million is missing. Afghan officials countered with an arrest warrant for Fitrat, charging him with fraud and saying that as the country's chief banker he failed to catch the illicit dealings. Kids, kids...

"The United States has two vital interests in that part of the world: preventing terrorist attacks on this country and its allies, and preventing nuclear weapons or materials from falling into the hands of terrorists. Protecting these interests after 2014 will require the United States to be able to launch precision military strikes from this region. But it will not require tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. "

"President Hamid Karzai leveled particularly harsh accusations against the United States on Sunday, suggesting that the Americans and the Taliban had a common goal in destabilizing his country. "

Interesting US Institute of Peace report on the feared Civil War 2.0 in Afghanistan.

"The Pentagon is pushing a plan that would keep about 8,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan once the NATO military mission there ends in 2014."

""I've often worried that the lesson from Iraq and Afghanistan - and especially Afghanistan - is that we don't know how to do foreign aid, and therefore we shouldn't continue to provide aid at the levels we have been," said Ms. Wadhams of the Center for American Progress. "

I detailed aid failure in "Funding the Enemy."

"The distinction of being a "failed state" is inarguably damning, but the 12 indicators factored into this determination highlight how complex it is to measure the weakness of states. A wide range of issues -- wars, hunger, brutal dictatorships, child mortality, economic failure, mass epidemics, political infighting, and the devastating aftermath of natural disasters -- push countries to the brink of failure, or right over the edge. "

Afghanistan is the 7th worst failed state in the world almost a dozen years after the US invasion and the American taxpayers' trillion dollar price tag.

"The Obama administration is discussing whether to reduce American forces in Afghanistan by at least an additional 20,000 troops by 2013, reflecting a growing belief within the White House that the mission there has now reached the point of diminishing returns. "

"Why Karzai is fed up with the U.S. mission in Afghanistan: For a decade, American troops have fought and died defending Afghan President Hamid Karzai's government. On Thursday, with the U.S. defense secretary looking on from Kabul, Karzai demanded that those troops stop fighting for him."

"It was just one brief exchange about Afghanistan with an aide late in 2009, but it suggests how President Obama's thinking about what he once called "a war of necessity" began to radically change less than a year after he took up residency in the White House. "

"The U.S. has been financing both sides of the war in Afghanistan since 2001 as a startling percentage of foreign aid continues to flood Taliban coffers on a daily basis, according to Douglas A. Wissing in his new book, Funding the Enemy: How U.S. Taxpayers Bankroll the Taliban."

"Another lucrative source of income has been the foreign funding of aid and development projects. Estimates of Taliban income from contracts funded by the United States and other overseas donors range from 10 to 20 per cent of the total, usually by the Taliban agreeing protection money with the contractor or demanding a cut," the report said.

"Seeking to break an impasse on a broader strategic arrangement, the United States agreed on Friday to greatly accelerate its handover of detainees to Afghan government control on but will retain a veto over which ones can be released, American officials said. "

"The day before he suffered a fatal tear in his heart last December, a frustrated Richard Holbrooke confided to a colleague: The Obama administration had tried everything to persuade Pakistan to crack down on terrorism, including threats and special-assistance packages, but none of it seemed to work. Why wasn't Pakistan getting the message?"

"After examining hundreds of combat support and reconstruction contracts in Afghanistan, the U.S military estimates $360 million in U.S. tax dollars has ended up in the hands of people the American-led coalition has spent nearly a decade battling: the Taliban, criminals, and power brokers with ties to both."