PAKISTAN SAYS IT FIRMLY BACKS TALIBAN PEACE TALKS

 [At a news conference Saturday in Kabul with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, Gilani said any peace process must be fully owned by Afghanistan and that Kabul must set the limits for any talks. Gilani says imposing conditions or demands on prospective talks at this stage is not helpful.]

Associated Press   

           

Photo: Reuters 

KABUL, Afghanistan – Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Gilani says his government stands strongly behind an Afghan-led process to reconcile with the Taliban to end the war.

At a news conference Saturday in Kabul with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, Gilani said any peace process must be fully owned by Afghanistan and that Kabul must set the limits for any talks. Gilani says imposing conditions or demands on prospective talks at this stage is not helpful.

Karzai said Islamabad and Kabul have formed a commission to work out logistics for negotiations with the Taliban.

Both leaders said the U.S. has a role to play in the talks, but they both also criticized the U.S. and NATO coalition.

Gilani says U.S. drone attacks are counterproductive. Karzai lamented the deaths of Afghan civilians in coalition operations.

@ The Himalayan Times

 

BLAST KILLS 9 AT AFGHAN BASE, INCLUDING 5 FROM NATO

 [It was one of the most lethal attacks involving the penetration of a military installation by an assailant — a style of attack that appears to be increasingly favored by the Taliban. In November 2010, six American soldiers were killed by a man wearing a border police uniform at a military training area in Nangarhar, and a year earlier five British soldiers in Helmand Province were killed. There have been a number of other attacks with lower death tolls by people wearing the uniforms of the security forces. Typically, even predominantly Afghan bases and many smaller outposts have some NATO troops partnered with the Afghans.]

By ALISSA J. RUBIN

KABUL, Afghanistan — For the second time in two days, a suicide bomber used an Afghan National Security uniform to elude early detection and approach his target, killing five NATO service members attending an early Saturday meeting at the headquarters of the Afghan 201 Corps in the country’s east. The bombing was one of the worst attacks of its kind, NATO and Afghan military officials said.

The explosion at Forward Operating Base Gamberi on the border of Laghman and Nangarhar Provinces in eastern Afghanistan also appears to have killed at least four Afghan National Army soldiers, according to Baz Mohammed Sherzad, the director of the public health hospital in Nangarhar, which received the bodies of the dead. Eight other Afghans were wounded, including four Afghan soldiers and four interpreters who were accompanying the foreigners in the meeting, Afghan officials said.

It was one of the most lethal attacks involving the penetration of a military installation by an assailant — a style of attack that appears to be increasingly favored by the Taliban. In November 2010, six American soldiers were killed by a man wearing a border police uniform at a military training area in Nangarhar, and a year earlier five British soldiers in Helmand Province were killed. There have been a number of other attacks with lower death tolls by people wearing the uniforms of the security forces. Typically, even predominantly Afghan bases and many smaller outposts have some NATO troops partnered with the Afghans.

“The Afghan and foreign forces had a meeting as usual, and an explosion took place, and the area is now surrounded,” said Maj. Mohammed Osman, a spokesman for the 201 Corps. “We found one leg that we expect might be from the suicide bomber.”

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack and said it was the beginning of their spring campaign, which they said would focus on infiltration of the security forces.

“We had recruited this man one month ago, and he was serving as an Afghan soldier for the last month,” said Zabiullah Mujahid, the Taliban’s spokesman for the north and east of Afghanistan.

“Today, he got a very good chance to attack because Afghan and foreign military officials had a meeting at the base,” Mr. Mujahid said. He added that these kinds of attacks were “very useful for us — recruiting someone and working inside the Afghan forces. These attacks inflict more casualties to the enemy and do not inflict any civilians casualties.”

The attack on Saturday followed a Friday attack in which a suicide bomber wearing a police uniform killed Gen. Khan Mohammed Mujahid, the police chief of Kandahar Province, a revered figure both in Kandahar and around the country.

American officers have said privately that they are concerned with infiltration of the military and the police as they rapidly grow in numbers. In recent months, the military’s leadership has taken steps to deal with it, said Lt. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, who leads the United States and NATO training mission in Afghanistan.

In a speech last week at Chatham House, a military and strategic research institute in London, General Caldwell said that the training mission had begun to train counterintelligence agents to help find Taliban and insurgent infiltrators in the ranks of the security forces. About half of the target of 445 agents have completed the training, he said, Reuters reported.

“We’re bringing counterintelligence personnel into the lowest level of all the organizations,” General Caldwell said, adding of the new personnel that their “sole mission in life is to look for those who may be attempting to infiltrate in or turn somebody who was already in toward the Taliban.”

An earlier version of this article misstated the rank of Lt. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV.

Sharifullah Sahak contributed reporting from Kabul, and an employee of The New York Times from Nangarhar Province, Afghanistan.

@ The New York Times

NATO RUNS SHORT ON SOME MUNITIONS IN LIBYA
[Opposition spokesmen in the western Libyan city of Misurata, under steady bombardment by government shelling, said Friday that Gaddafi’s forces had used cluster bombs, and Human Rights Watch said its representatives on the ground had witnessed the explosion of cluster munitions in civilian areas there. The Libyan government denied the weapons had been used.]

By Karen DeYoung and Greg Jaffe

Less than a month into the Libyan conflict, NATO is running short of precision bombs, highlighting the limitations of Britain, France and other European countries in sustaining even a relatively small military action over an extended period of time, according to senior NATO and U.S. officials.

The shortage of European munitions, along with the limited number of aircraft available, has raised doubts among some officials about whether the United States can continue to avoid returning to the air campaign if Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi hangs on to power for several more months.

U.S. strike aircraft that participated in the early stage of the operation, before the United States relinquished command to NATO and assumed what President Obama called a “supporting” role, have remained in the theater “on 12-hour standby” with crews “constantly briefed on the current situation,” a NATO official said.

So far, the NATO commander has not requested their deployment. Several U.S. military officials said they anticipated being called back into the fight, although a senior administration official said he expected other countries to announce “in the next few days” that they would contribute aircraft equipped with the laser-guided munitions.

Opposition spokesmen in the western Libyan city of Misurata, under steady bombardment by government shelling, said Friday that Gaddafi’s forces had used cluster bombs, and Human Rights Watch said its representatives on the ground had witnessed the explosion of cluster munitions in civilian areas there. The Libyan government denied the weapons had been used.

A spokesman for the Misurata City Council appealed for NATO to send ground troops to secure the port that is the besieged city’s only remaining humanitarian lifeline.

The opposition has also repeatedly called for an increase in NATO airstrikes. The six countries conducting the air attacks, led by Britain and France, were unsuccessful at a meeting this week in Berlin in persuading more alliance members to join them.

NATO officials said that their operational tempo has not decreased since the United States relinquished command of the Libya operation and withdrew its strike aircraft at the beginning of April. More planes, they said, would not necessarily result immediately in more strike missions.

But, they said, the current bombing rate by the participating nations is not sustainable. “The reason we need more capability isn’t because we aren’t hitting what we see — it’s so that we can sustain the ability to do so. One problem is flight time, the other is munitions,” said another official, one of several who were not authorized to discuss the issue on the record.

European arsenals of laser-guided bombs, the NATO weapon of choice in the Libyan campaign, have been quickly depleted, officials said. Although the United States has significant stockpiles, its munitions do not fit on the British- and French-made planes that have flown the bulk of the missions.

Britain and France have each contributed about 20 strike aircraft to the campaign. Belgium, Norway, Denmark and Canada have each contributed six — all of them U.S.-manufactured and compatible with U.S. weaponry.

Since the end of March, more than 800 strike missions have been flown, with U.S. aircraft conducting only three, targeting static Libyan air defense installations. The United States still conducts about 25 percent of the overall sorties over Libya, largely intelligence, jamming and refueling missions.

Other NATO countries, along with the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Jordan, have contributed planes to enforcing a no-fly zone over Libya to prevent Gaddafi’s use of airpower, but so far have declined to participate in the strike missions.

After the Berlin meeting, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rassmussen said that 10 more aircraft were needed and that he was confident they would be supplied. A U.S. official said that Italy — which earlier in the week said it was not interested — may contribute planes to the ground attack mission, and that the Arab participants might also do so.

But with Gaddafi’s forces and the rebel army locked in a stalemate, Obama has resisted calls from opposition leaders, and some hardline lawmakers in this country, to move U.S. warplanes back into a leading role.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and other have called on Obama to redeploy U.S. AC-130 gunships, which are considered more effective over populated areas.

Although the gunships flew several missions early in the operation, Gen. Carter Ham, who commanded the mission before it was turned over to NATO, said last week that they were frequently grounded because of weather and other concerns.

The slow-moving aircraft, which flew as low as 4,000 feet over Libya, are also considerably more vulnerable than jet fighters to surface-to-air missiles. While much of Libya’s stationary air defenses have been destroyed, Ham said Gaddafi was believed to have about 20,000 shoulder-held SAMS at the beginning of the conflict, and “most” of them are still unaccounted for.

Concerns that supplies of jet-launched precision bombs are growing short in Europe have reignited long-standing controversies over both burden-sharing and compatibility within NATO. While allied jets have largely followed the U.S. lead and converted to precision munitions over the last decade, they have struggled to keep pace, according to senior U.S. military officials.

Libya “has not been a very big war. If [the Europeans] would run out of these munitions this early in such a small operation, you have to wonder what kind of war they were planning on fighting,” said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a defense think tank. “Maybe they were just planning on using their air force for air shows.”

Despite U.S. badgering, European allies have been slow in some cases to modify their planes and other weapons systems so they can accommodate U.S. bombs. Retooling these fighter jets so that they are compatible with U.S. systems requires money, and all European militaries have faced significant cuts in recent years.

Typically, the British and French militaries buy munitions in batches and stockpile them. When arsenals start to run low, factories must be retooled and production lines restarted to replace the diminished stock, all of which can take time and additional money, said Elizabeth Quintana, an aerospace analyst at the Royal United Service Institute in London.

Correspondent Simon Denyer in Tripoli contributed to this report.

@ The Washington Post