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Goals in Afghanistan Remain the Same, Dempsey Says

By Jim Garamone

American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, March 17, 2012 – While recent incidents have challenged U.S. operations in Afghanistan, the long-term objectives there remain the same, Army Gen. Martin E. Dempsey told Charlie Rose.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff appeared on the PBS interview show last night. He said the U.S. military is committed to conducting an investigation into the March 11 alleged murder of Afghan civilians by an American staff sergeant in Kandahar province.

Dempsey put the recent incidents in perspective. “We also have to be aware of the fact that we’ve had possibly 800,000 to 900,000 young men and women rotate through Afghanistan and they’ve served honorably, they’ve done the right thing, they’ve maintained their senses of discipline,” he said.

….NATO leaders agreed at the 2010 Lisbon summit to maintain security in Afghanistan and train Afghan forces to transition to the lead in their own security by 2014. Afghan government officials also agreed to these goals and objectives, Dempsey said.

…. Pakistan is another wild card in the hand in Central Asia, and while Dempsey believes the state is more stable, it still faces challenges that terror groups, such as the Haqqani network, exploit. The November incident where NATO forces killed Pakistani soldiers on the border still colors relations between the United States and Pakistan and Pakistan leaders closed a NATO supply route.

The United States has quietly worked with Pakistani leaders to mend relations. “I think the best thing we’ve done is we’ve not conducted our engagement with them with a megaphone,” he said. “We’ve communicated with them directly. We’ve communicated with them privately. We’re back in close contact with them along the border. We have been in conversations about our mil-to-mil relationship, about our foreign military sales, about some of the common challenges of terrorism.”

The Pakistani legislature is discussing what the new relationship with the United States might be. “I’m personally optimistic that we can reset the relationship in a way that meets both of our needs,” the chairman said.

Still, the Pakistani military lacks the capability needed to end terror groups using the country as a safe haven. The Pakistanis may have the will to do something, but not the means. “I believe they will do the best they can, but it may not be enough for us,” he said.

Dempsey used the Haqqani network as an example. He said the network has been in place for 20 years and is “intertwined” into the society of western Pakistan. It also received significant assistance from the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence organization. “I think they’re intermarried,” he said.

All this makes it difficult for his Pakistani counterpart, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, to deliver. Still the general said he believes Kayani will do everything he can against these terror groups.

Pakistan continues to have a bleak economic picture, a growing population and a policy that still regards India as the nation’s existential threat, the chairman said…..

 SOLDIER ACCUSED IN KILLING IDENTIFIED:

A senior U.S. official says the soldier accused in the killing of 16 Afghan civilians is army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the investigation into an incident that has roiled relations with Afghanistan.

American officials had said previously that the suspect was a 38-year-old staff sergeant and that he had spent 11 years in the army.

But they had refused to release his name, saying it is military policy to identify a suspect only after he has been charged with an offence.

Bales has not yet been charged. He was being flown Friday from Kuwait to a military detention centre at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

The Associated Press

 

Karzai: Soldier couldn’t have acted alone | The Chronicle Herald

KABUL

 Afghanistan — Warning he’s at the “end of the rope” over civilian casualties, Afghanistan’s president Hamid Karzai angrily accused the U.S. on Friday of not sharing information about how an American soldier allegedly shot and killed 16 Afghans in two villages.

The incident has reverberated through the already complicated relations between the U.S. and Afghanistan, endangering talks over a long-term relationship after most U.S. and NATO combat troops withdraw by the end of 2014.

In an emotional meeting with relatives of the shooting victims, Karzai said the villagers’ accounts of the massacre were widely different from the scenario depicted by U.S. military officials. The relatives and villagers insisted that it was impossible for one gunmen to kill nine children, four men and three women in three houses of two villages near a U.S. combat outpost in southern Afghanistan.

Karzai pointed to one of the villagers from Panjwai district of Kandahar province and said:

"In his family, in four rooms people were killed — children and women were killed — and then they were all brought together in one room and then set on fire. That, one man cannot do."

….. The United Nations has reported that last year was the deadliest on record for civilians in the Afghan war, with 3,021 killed as insurgents ratcheted up violence with suicide attacks and roadside bombs.

The UN attributed 77 per cent of the deaths to insurgent attacks and 14 per cent to actions by international and Afghan troops. Nine per cent of cases were classified as having an unknown cause.

On Thursday, Karzai demanded that international forces pull out of rural areas because the fight was not in the villages.

  After a Massacre, Islamic Cavalry to the Rescue?

With plans for both its options for orderly disengagement from Afghanistan upended this week by a staff sergeant’s massacre of 16 Afghan civilians, the Obama administration urgently needs to alter the equation. The expiration next week of the current U.N. mandate for Afghanistan can provide the occasion

But Washington also needs to accede to another reality it has preferred to ignore: it is unable to manage the peace negotiating process.  It cannot get the Taliban to talk to Kabul, and it is itself unable to talk to one of Afghanistan’s two largest neighbors, Iran—and is barely able to talk coherently with the other, Pakistan.

Now is the time to turn to the Organization for Islamic Cooperation, the OIC, to work in tandem with the United Nations to accelerate a settlement process. The OIC is uniquely positioned to take the lead role in convening all the Afghan parties—the elected government, the insurgency, the Kabul opposition, and grassroots civil society—in a process to re-negotiate Afghanistan’s post-war political structures

 

 

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